Emptying The Big Basket 05 CR receives two to three comics a day. That adds up. It's more than we can handle in our 200-plus regular reviews a year.
Some comics are reviewed right away. Some comics are never going to be reviewed. The remainder go into a giant basket. When the basket is full and must be emptied, it's time to run whatever commentary we can muster. It may not be a full review -- and even that ain't much -- but least it's something.
We greatly appreciate you sending in your material for review. Thank you. It helps us track what you're doing, and what's going on in the field. All of it gets read. If it doesn't end up reviewed that's my fault for not coming up with a proper idea. I hope you'll forgive me.
Below please find today's skeleton of reviews, a skeleton that will be filled with words throughout the day.
*****
Title: Lost Colony Vol. 3: Last Rights Creator: Grady Klein Publishing Information: First Second, softcover, 152 pages, October 2008, $18.95 Ordering Numbers: 9781596430990 (ISBN13)
First Second's bravest experiment continues by splitting into two different directions. Grady Klein ramps up the story elements in this the third volume in his classic small-community children's story; with the characters given a more compelling schedule of things to do, there's less shtick and performance and a cleaner through-line when it comes to Klein's daring page design choices. At the same time, this is the first story that feels to be continued. In other words, Klein has both made his narrative leaner and made more complex the general story. Klein's other virtues remain. As the kids' comic market gets crashed by more and more pre-packaged junk done in the crudest and most pandering wasy possible, one hopes that Klein's series survives if only because it dares to be difficult and odd.
*****
Title: Water Baby Creator: Ross Campbell Publishing Information: Minx, softcover, 176 pages, July 2008, $9.95 Ordering Numbers: 140121147X (ISBN10), 9781401211479 (ISBN13)
I don't read enough books aimed at teenage girls to know if the sensuality of Ross Campbell's art on display in Water Baby is ahead of or behind the curve. Campbell's characters are all sexually attractive, and with the exception of a few walk-ons including Mario Van Peebles, I believe they're all minors. Since my days as a minor with two digits in my age were mostly about sexual attraction and compulsion on some level or another, and because Oprah Winfrey tells me that today's kids are even more active than we were, I have to imagine that this isn't a big thing at all except for older people reading these books and feeling slightly queasy as they begin to put two and two together. The story is a kind of hard to categorize meditation on friendship and romance. I like how the lead character has her youtful potency reduced in overt fashion (her leg is chomped off by a shark), which kind of underlines the limited choices facing the characters as they struggle to go from one place to another and deal with each other with as much kindness as they're able to sustain. It's a weird damn book, that's for sure, and one can easily imagine some severely negative reactions. I had a hard time getting on board, although I appreciate that unlike a couple of the other Minx books I've read it doesn't seem like a TV show pilot. I also have to admit that reading the back cover describe it as a punk rock romance only made me never want to open it.
*****
Title: Milla and the Prince of Space Creator: Evan G. Palmer Publishing Information: Self-Published, softcover, 64 pages, Spring 2008, $35 Ordering Numbers:www.evanpalmercomics.com
This limited edition book is stuffed to the gills with promising page design and already-lovely visuals. Any of you editors out there curating a line of comics aimed at young people should stop reading right now, click on the artist's site link and sign him up before someone else gets to him. In fact, this book by itself wouldn't be out of place in one of those lines. The narrative is paper thin and doesn't work according to the broad rules established for this kind of literature. The ending is way too pat and the meaningfulness of the initial encounter that allows cartoonist Evan Palmer to build the rest of the story is implied rather than shown. It feels like a story that happens because the story needs things to happen. I should also mention that the story is enormously sweet, like eat the frosting right off those cheap Wal-mart cookies sweet; the most delicate page from Blankets would beat up the toughest page from Mila and the Prince of Space and steal its lunch money, if it wanted to. Still, there's a definite talent here, one that might develop into something that a lot of people will greatly enjoy. Editors! Go recruit!
*****
Title: Comic Foundry #3 Creators: Tim Leong, Laura Hudson and a Bunch of Freelancers Publishing Information: Magazine, 64 pages, Summer 2008, $5.98 Ordering Numbers:
The central irony of Comic Foundry magazine is that despite the many ways in which the magazine and editors define what they do in opposition to fanboy bible Wizard, their approach can perhaps be summarized as an extension of that magazine's two most popular features: their top ten writers and top ten artists lists. As is the case with those lists, the funny profiles and photo essays and tongue-in-cheek articles in CF's pages tend to appeal to the creators they're covering by making them look good. Who wouldn't want to appear on the cover of a cool-looking magazine in a glamorous-looking photo or two? Who wouldn't want to be one of the "cutest creator couples in comics"? Who would be opposed to seeing elements of their comics reincorporated into a clever, modern-looking page design? I'm a big supporter of the magazine, honestly, so I'm glad that I finally have an answer to the question of who would want to read a magazine like this with comics at their core: anyone who wants to eventually appear in its pages. I'm more confident than ever it will be around for a while.
Content-wise I thought #3 was a step back from the previous issue. There's nothing wrong with interviewing a television personality that covers comics, and one of the great thing magazines can do is introduce or re-introduce you to a person in a way that makes you consider them in a fresh or compelling way. That said, I found the Blair Butler interview to be dull as dirt, and I wish it had been shortened by half just so it could have been over sooner. I feel like part of me is off somewhere still reading it. The shorter articles are better than the longer ones, although there's very little in the magazine longer than a page or two. I still had a feeling that more could have been done with what was presented. A cover-blurbed piece on a recession's potential effect on comics might have made a fine blog posting, but a print magazine article should probably do better than having the idea of peak oil introduced into its midst by Heidi MacDonald and its general economic forecast made by Michael Martens. There was also no firm conclusion to that article, nor was a compelling case made that such a conclusion was impossible, and as a result you don't know much more than when you started. These are growing pains, I think, and I look forward to how they next flatter their industry of choice and how quickly the industry responds with a run of its awards hardware. It's coming.
*****
Title: The Rough Guide To Graphic Novels Creators: Danny Fingeroth, Roger Langridge Publishing Information: Rough Guides, softcover, 320 pages, $18.99 Ordering Numbers: 9781843539933 (ISBN13)
I'm the worst person in the world to review something like this, one of two major books this summer that doubles as a guide and a shot at a graphic novel canon. My main hang-up is that I hate shoving comics' beautiful array of approaches and story lengths into a commercial designation like the GN. I also don't think that you can use a definition that deals with content and intent -- which you have to do to include A Contract With God -- while ignoring all the long-form serial stories of the strips' distant past. In other words, I have a nerd's reaction to efforts like the one being made here.
With that understood, this is an attractive volume and Fingeroth is allowed to shoehorn in a lot of works that don't make his canonical list through a discussion of various forms and history and creators and the like. So I can imagine it being a useful book. I don't have much use for his canon. There are two books in his top ten that didn't make my top 40 list for the year in which they were released, and in general I think the lists are safe and conventional rather than daring and forward. Given a chance to bring a work back into the graphic novels discussion, Fingeroth favors a work like Brooklyn Dreams over something like Maggots. That's just not where I am right now. Comics seems to me to encompass a lot more in terms of artistic expression than a replication of the values of literary work in the format that's the most commercially viable for it to be purchased. Comics is bigger than graphic novels, or at least it should be. If all of that sounds snotty and you need to hear it in the form of a tagline: it's hard for me to imagine returning to a book that values Larry Young's fun but lightweight and always-in-print Astronauts in Trouble over Eddie Campbell's ambitious, unforgettable and hard to track down in all of its messy glory Alec.
*****
Title: New Character Parade Creator: Johnny Ryan Publishing Information: Buenaventura, handmade comic, 28 page, 300 printed in total, $10 Ordering Numbers:go here
Johnny Ryan's work makes me laugh, and I think it's very well-crafted. I can't really go much deeper than that, and part of me would feel stupid for doing so. I mean, of course you want this new limited edition comic book, or, I suppose, of course you don't. If there are people on the fence I will say that this has a lot more humor that doesn't fall comet-like into a litany of crudities -- I mean, I like those, too, but it's fun to see things like Ryan riffing on old All in the Family dynamics and cockpunching the sacred cow of 9/11 humor by showing a dad spanking a child by crashing an airplane into his butt at which point the panel becomes, simply, "Ass 9-11." If you just groaned in horror or dismay, well, this comic really isn't for you. I laughed. I just hope we don't all one day wake up and realize we wasted Johnny Ryan by not buying enough of his books. Please help me in keeping this from happening.
*****
Title: Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire, Vol. 1 Creator: William Messner-Loebs Publishing Information: IDW, softcover, 600+ pages, July 2008, $19.99 Ordering Numbers: 9781600101915 (ISBN13)
The thing I like most about IDW's reprinting of the Journey is that it runs over 600 pages at $19.99. Not that I'm cheap -- well, I am -- but this mean the reprint is clearly meant to be read rather than collected or even offered up for purchase by charitable-minded buyers. As to that last point, a once-prolific mainstream comics writer after his run as a independent comics mainstay, Messner-Loebs' financial plight has been a part of comics lore for about a half-decade now. While that's a reason I imagine this book has seen the light of day, whatever the reason is you should be happy to get this many solid, idiosyncratically created comics at this price in a sturdy format (the reproduction is about as good as can be hoped, although some of the more delicate linework is lost after this many years) clearly intended to give it a shot at a wider readership.
As for the content, I hadn't remembered the comic being this loopy. While it didn't work for me as well as a historical novel this time out -- in fact, a lot of the book's more ambitious elements feel forced to me -- I quite enjoyed it on as a humorous adventure story, and found Messner-Loebs artwork to be exactly as evocative and moody as I recalled. I love the fact that this book exists if only that it reminds me that a comic book like this once existed, and that such a comic can retain its unique voice some 20-25 years after its brief, initial, flickering lifetime.
*****
Title: MOME Vol. 12 -- Fall 2008 Creators: Olivier Schrauwen, David B., Killoffer, Nate Neal, Dash Shaw, Tom Kaczynski, Jon Vermilyea, Ray Fenwick, Sophie Crumb, Al Columbia, Derek Van Gieson, Sara Edward-Corbett, Paul Hornschemeier Publishing Information: Fantagraphics, softcover, 120 pages, Fall 2008, $14.99 Ordering Numbers: 9781560979302 (ISBN13)
The only thing you have to say about the 12th volume of MOME is that the first time co-editors Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds ran a story by David B. it fairly overwhelmed the entire magazine and this time it fits right. Part of that has to be the fact that their steady hand with the anthology has encouraged more cartoonists to come forward. Unless I'm missing something, there are exactly two of the original contributors in this issue. Also, I've gone three sentences without mentioning Olivier Schrauwen or Al Columbia, and both of their contributions are as good as their reputations. A must-have issue from a should-have anthology.
*****
Title: Flight, Vol. 5 Creators: JP Ahonen, Graham Annable, Chris Appelhans, Bannister, Matthew Bernier, Scott Campbell, Svetlana Chmakova, Tony Cliff, Phil Craven
Michel Gagne, Kazu Kibuishi, Kness, Sonny Liew, Reagan Lodge, Made, John Martz, Sarah Mensinga, Ryan North, Richard Pose, Paul Rivoche, Dave Roman, Kean Soo, Joey Weiser Publishing Information: Random House, softcover, 352 pages, July 2008, $25 Ordering Numbers: 9780345505897 (ISBN13)
We'll all be firing up our decade-in-review article next year about this time, and Flight will have to receive a lot of consideration as an influential anthology, injecting into comics at about as art comics fussy as it will ever get (I'd say not very) an assault of pretty, impressively-crafted short stories that can be read and enjoyed by a wide audience. I don't think by volume 5 you get the same sense of discovery, but there are certainly still a lot of nice-looking comics in there: my favorites were by Graham Annable and Kazu Kibuishi; I also liked the look of a couple of them, primarily a polar bear-starring short by a pair called "Kness and Made." The drawbacks seem more pronounced here than they did on earlier books. My main objection is that some of the stories are choking on sentiment to an almost ridiculous degree. There's a baseball story by Richard Pose that almost seems like a parody of heartwarming baseball stories, it lays the wide-eye emoting on so thick. I can't imagine its target audience will mind, and while there's practically nothing here I'd care to read again, I like the idea of this book hiding away in middle school libraries, holding the hands of its uniformed readership and potentially leading them someplace swell.
*****
I enjoyed the enthusiasm the creators bring to this work, essentially a cross between hardboiled crime fantasy of the Mickey Spillane/Frank Miller school re-tooled to add a lot of monsters to the cast. However, to work with ideas this cliched and in the visual language of another artist (Sin City-era Miller) you really have to have major chops to execute matters so that by itself you've added something to the mix that the reader can't get by simply re-reading the source material. Ben Fisher and Mike Henderson aren't quite there yet, although one can imagine one or both continuing to work in comic books. If this were a movie, it'd be one you'd find on pay cable at 2 AM where you couldn't figure out if it was made two or twenty years ago. It'd pass the time, but you wouldn't hesitate to go to bed once you got tired. For this to be your cup of tea, you'd have to really want some tea.
*****
Title: Gimoles: Secrets of the Seasons Creators: Mike Bullock, Theo Bain, Michael Metcalf, Bob Pedroza Publishing Information: Image Comics, softcover, 128 pages, June 2008, Ordering Numbers: 1582409552 (ISBN10), 9781582409559 (ISBN13)
This is the product description for this book from Amazon.com:
"Follow Limmy and Ohgi Gimole on their quest to shut down the machines of winter when Ichabod Cornelius Frost, the nefarious Czar of Winter, refuses to let loose his icy grip in this all-ages adventure from the creator of the critically acclaimed Lions, Tigers, and Bears!"
If that sounds like a generic romp of the kind that appear on cable in animated form by the dozens during the holiday seasons, that's because that's exactly what this is. The art here is accomplished, particularly the execution of the various character designs. However, the designs themselves prove completely uninspired, a selection of generic looks and signifiers of the kind a harried costume designer might throw together working the racks at the local civic theater's wardrobe closet. The storytelling is muddied, the narrative meanders wildly and is outright dull in several stretches, and the message ends up being banal. Unless you're such a fan of holiday material of this type that you can look on this work in a way that an outsider like me simply can't, I suspect that you, like me, won't remember a single moment when you're done.
*****
Title: The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics Creators: Paul Gravett, Peter Stanbury, an army of creators Publishing Information: Running Press, softcover, 480 pages, $17.95 Ordering Numbers: 9781845297107
This is a pretty solid anthology of its kind, a massively-stuffed anthology from a person with good taste, well-selected, at a terrific price. The only hall of fame works here are an Alack Sinner story and a Spirit strip from the immediate post-War era, but Gravett comes through with an eclectic group of top-rank cartoonists and comics creators working in a minor key, folks like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Jack Kirby and Charles Burns. In fact, the Charles Burns inclusion is the kind of thing that really distinguishes a book like this one amid so many older works that may work better as attractive, sturdy filler than a source for re-discovery. Additionally, it's always nice to see selections from Torpedo and Kane. One wonders if the editors couldn't get their hands on certain works, or if the designation "crime comics" leaves off the table radical departures on detective books like the Karasik/Mazzucchelli City of Glass adaptation. It would have been nice to see something by Ed Brubaker in here as well, perhaps at the expense of Ms. Tree, which pains me to say as nice as its creators were to my father once upon a time. I just don't get that appeal of that one, and certainly believe that Brubaker's work with Jason Lutes, Eric Shanower, Sean Phillips and Michael Lark wee much, much stronger. Still, a pleasant surprise and great beach reading. Seriously.
*****
Title: Method Man Creators: Method Man, Sanford Greene, David Atchison Publishing Information: Hachette, softcover, 96 pages, July 2008, $13.99 Ordering Numbers: 0446699721 (ISBN10), 9780446699723 (ISBN13)
I wanted to like this book because I like the idea of someone enjoying comics so much they have to put themselves into one. Sadly, this is a pretty pedestrian effort all around. A PI teams up with an ancient order to fight a great, world-threatening evil, tapping into his own resources as a once-promising member of that order to help thwart the bad person's plans. The execution would have to be off the charts to overcome that kind of straight to video plot, and it doesn't come close. Moreover, I wonder after its effectiveness in the marketplace due to a manga price point plus half again that amount for what feeles like much less than its 96 or so pages. Since some money apparently went into this project at some point, it's disappointing how much this feels like three or four dozen other comics that I've seen in my lifetime. Sorry, Method Man.
*****
Title: National Waste #7 Creator: Leif Goldberg Publishing Information: Self-Published, handmade, 38 pages, Spring 2008, $8 Ordering Numbers:
Available through PictureBox Inc., the latest in Leif Goldberg's mostly-good, sometimes-great mini-comics series is a pretty standard effort of its type: a few short stories, a lot of silk-screened imagery, some wonderful visuals, and more than a few abstract moments. In fact, the whole thing proves to be pretty first class for just about all the reasons you go to mini-comics -- well-crafted, idiosyncratic work that doesn't really stand a chance in the current marketplaces. If I told you it was a perfect mini-comic for everything except narrative coherence I'd be close to getting at the truth, but that sounds mean instead of the way I'd intend for it to be taken. It's more like I don't have any avenue to express a negative opinion about art like this, because it's so closely tied into a set of desires concerning personal expression that are impenetrable and have very little to do with the alchemical reaction that takes place when those ideas meet a readership. I can I don't think this is the best issue of the series, but at this point in the history of mini-comics there's so little continuity out there that simply having another one of these feels like a greater victory than it did with the release of past issues.
*****
Title: Ralph Snart Adventures #1 Creator: Marc Hansen Publishing Information: Self-Published, comic book, 24 pages, July 2008, $2.95 Ordering Numbers: MAY084037 (Diamond)
I used to buy Ralph Snart at my local drugstore, the first and possibly last time I could buy a straight-up comic book with this kind of weird, ugly art and featuring a character not Alfred E. Neuman. Marc Hansen's vibrant inks and his "hello, I don't give a shit" storylines are as admirable as ever. In this issue alone, Snart becomes world famous, goes to prison, loses his memory and murders a bunch of people, in approximately that order; it's the kind of done-in-one that used to happen on TV when they figured the appeal of the character wouldn't lead to a series. I think you could buy this comic and get 80 percent of what Hansen does about 15 or 16 pages in. Making a case for his own special uniqueness wasn't ever Hansen's deal; making loud and dumb comics where his lead runs around harming people while surfing a wave of mostly dumbassed behavior is. It may not feel necessary, but it's hard to imagine Hansen making a comic like that and staying true to his disposable, loud, and ultimately goofy roots.
*****
Title: Tales From Greenfuzz #2 Creator: Will Sweeney Publishing Information: Amos Novelties Ltd, comic book, 24 pages, 2006, Ordering Numbers:
I'm not going to pretend I know what the hell is going on here. In what looks like a full-color cross between the demented world-creation efforts of an inebriated shut-in and educational film strip about nutrition, a sandwich is trying to rescue his girlfriend while an army of french fries sacks a town full of vegetables. Dan Nadel at Picturebox shoved one of these into my hands against my desires, and although I like the fact that it marches to beat of its own drummer -- I mean, forget marching: it fairly skips and jumps and rolls around in an irregular rhythm to its own drummer -- I can't say I enjoyed the book or was so taken with its displayed craft elements that I stopped to pay attention. It's bright and pretty, though, and it will make you glad we live in a world where this kind of dementia still exists. Of course, having said that, I'm going to find out this is the most popular children's book in Ireland or something.
I heard a rumor that Comics Comics is going to settle into a more standard book project that may even come out quarterly from now on. I sort of hope not, because even thought there are several areas where the PictureBox-published celebration of comics and comics culture could improve, the irregular publishing schedule and demented format so perfectly match the content that I'd hate to see them go away. A sideways and passionate attack on a lot of comics' sacred cows -- imagine them as the much more fun DIY festival set up outside of museum-like official selections on the comics chatter map like Comic Art, TCJ and this site -- Comics Comics works better the further its writers reach past the accepted pantheon into a primordial stew of fevered creation to make the case for things like chalk talks, Shaky Kane, and the comic book format not as a publishing strategy but as a way of organizing art that's deep and mysterious and satisfying. The living embodiment of a way too drunk thinker about or maker of comics grabbing your arm in a bar at 2:30 in the morning, I'll miss it if it puts on a tie and goes to work.
*****
Title: Webcomics 2.0 Creators: Steve Horton and Sam Romero Publishing Information: Course Technology, softcover, 240 pages, 2008, $29.99 Ordering Numbers: 9781598634624 (ISBN13)
Title: How to Make Webcomics Creators: Brad Guigar, Dave Kellett, Kris Straub and Scott Kurtz Publishing Information: Image Comics, 200 pages, 2008, $12.99 Ordering Numbers: 9781582408705 (ISBN13)
I can't read either one of these books as they deserve to be read -- with the eyes of a wannabe cartoonist hungry to make work of their own. I can still say with great certainty that the latter book, How to Make Webcomics, seems to me and my jaundiced eye about 25 times more useful and more of a quality effort than Webcomics 2.0. There's much more content in the Images Comics book, it's better presented, it's from cartoonists I've actually heard of in a webcomics environment, it's less than half the price, and like most of the best on-line comics it's essentially self-published.
The primary thing that may be missing from How to Make Webcomics from my outsider's perspective is that despite having four authors and despite the fact its text hashes out any number of differences in philosophy and divergent strategies in practical matters, it doesn't seem to represente a wide array of authorial voices and variety in kinds of webcomics. All four authors seem to do pretty standard transposed strips, and they're all guys of what seems to be roughly the same age (I'm going by the photos). I also suspect they may all like each other and each others' work too much for there to be compelling clashes when it comes to discussing that work. (There was one mini-roundtable of criticism in particular where I just kind of wished someone had it in them to challenge the quality of the gag as opposed to how the cartoonist got to the gag.) The continuity between the authors probably sharpens the focus in that there's enough agreement between them for that they can get to specific matters pretty early on, but I'm not sure if it ends up being for everyone as opposed to people that want to do comics like the authors' efforts. (Johanna Draper Carlson had many of the same objections I did to Webcomics 2.0, although she's much nicer about it than I would have been had I gone into detail.)
*****
Title: Delphine #3 Creator: Richard Sala Publishing Information: Fantagraphics/Coconino, Ignatz, 32 pages, $7.95 Ordering Numbers: 9781560979357 (ISBN13)
Another ridiculous good-looking comic book from Richard Sala who's been on quite the run for about a half-decade now and with this project is working in a format that's particularly flattering to where's he has taken his art. I mention it here not because I have much of anything to say about it -- although I did find it interesting how much of the book is in a rigid grid -- but because I want to point out that the werewolf sequence reveals that Sala may be one of the few people that agrees with me that the horror isn't a man that turns into a wolf, but some freaky-ass four-legged animal turning into a man!
*****
Title: Charlton Spotlight #6 Creator: Various Publishing Information: Argo Press, magazine, 68 pages, Spring 2008, $7.95 Ordering Numbers: 9781560979357 (ISBN13)
I don't have much to say about this latest issue of the magazine which, as should be obvious from the title, is devoted to the Charlton Comics company, a stalwart of 20th Century mainstream funnybooks. This issues features two pleasant but extremely slight Nic Cuti/Joe Staton efforts, an early 1990s E-Man effort that was never published and a 1970s Michael Mauser story that met a similar fate. It's buttressed by a number of pages of art and ephemera from the company's history including a nice promotional image from Steve Ditko, and the magazine's usual features providing obituaries for Charlton creators and letters from fans. I'm glad this material is out there, and I think future histories if they're written will be better for having this kind of first-draft material at their disposal. My own appetite for this kind of material is severely limited.
This is the third in I believe a three-issue series, concluding a storyline carried over from the first two issues. There used to be a lot of comics like this on the stands: genre-corrective or myth-blending efforts that march a bunch of different visual and prose icons through a different but still-familiar set-up. The execution outstrips the basic idea -- the dialogue snaps and some of the individual panels show off a nice, fiercely controlled line; I accepted the big moments as big moments rather than attempts to portray big moments, if that makes any sense. That said, it's hard remembering a whole lot of what happened even five minutes after I've put the comic done, even when the work is much better than I'm used to seeing in similar efforts. One thing that lingers is that I wonder after an audience. I don't get a sense in 2008 the way I did in 1978 that comics is the place where a lot of people are going with an equal passion for all these different corners of junk and fantastic culture. Still, I'd be interested in seeing the next work from both participants.
*****
*****
Title: The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 1 Creators: Jason McNamara, Paige Braddock Publishing Information: Girl Twirl Comics, 140 pages, August 2008, $15 Ordering Numbers: MAY083907 (Diamond), 9780979420719 (ISBN13)
I have no idea what to say about this comic, no firm conclusion, which is why it goes here instead of into its own review. It's pleasant enough company -- a kind of modern western/crime caper set in a far future Mars where an information-wipe and the evolution of animal-men has changed mankind's attitude towards history and civilization -- and the cartooning is breezy and flows well, even if it's not as atmospheric as the work from the sort of artist that usually gets this kind of gig. Much of the script is either amusing or close enough to it you recognize it as such and keep going. At the same time, it never really transcends its genre-blend roots, it never makes so much of an impression that I can imagine people flipping out over it and tracking it down. In a different world, there would be so much material in all genres that an audience could be had simply by creating work that was better than the average. Because there's almost no work like this, it has to compete not against mediocre but against the much more daunting barrier of people getting out of their comfort zone and trying something new. Works like Bone and Persepolis hit enough high points to draw that initial attention that led to a rush of readers. I'm not sure this work has it in it. I love the fact that there's a big ol' rambling science fiction western crime story out there, in this style, but I also don't think liking the idea of something is enough.
*****
Title: The Shortpants Observer #1 Creators: Sarah Becan, Anya Davidson, Corinne Mucha, Becca Taylor, Jeremy Tinder Publishing Information: Shortpants Press, comic book, 72 pages, 2008, $8.00 Ordering Numbers: 9780981846705 (ISBN13)
Shortpants Press is the Chicago-based mini-comics house whose various efforts I've enjoyed in the way one tends to think well of an effort to put young, developing cartoonists into print with their own, albeit essentially handmade books. I'm not sure that that goodwill follows into the first issue of their anthology, a definite step-up in ambition from the earlier publications. It's... well, it's okay. The most interesting work in the book (Becca Taylor's) is also the most aggravating in its execution; it just doesn't come together in a way that matches the ambition of the concept involved. Jeremy Tinder is the work's most fully-realized talent, but his contribution is slighter than slight, and ends in a way that feels more like a narrative twist or even cheat than a resolution. I like the idea of another anthology for cartoonists, particularly one that's regional in nature, so I hope this does well enough for there to be more. For one thing, it may be a few issues before I can recommend it.
*****
Title: Dead Man Holiday #-3 Creator: Colin Panetta Publishing Information: Self-Published, comic book, 32 pages, 2008, $3.99 Ordering Numbers: www.deadmanholiday.com
I was really charmed by this "haunted science fiction" comic. The artist shows some promise in terms of his laconic pacing and the way he provides some of his duller scenes with a bit of visual interest by moving the reader's point of view to different places (without calling attention to his doing so). The craft chops just aren't quite there for this to be the kind of comic book that demands $4 in today's marketplace, except by people that are strongly inclined to supporting this kind of work in the first place. There could be leaps and bounds to come -- it's certainly no less professional than the first Comico books from 25 or so years ago, for example. But right now this is more of an idea of a comic book than a fully executed comic book, and as a reader there's just too much for me to process and forgive to even begin reading it. Given the kind of genre-mixing involved, it's not as if I would be willing to give the cartoonist a lot of leeway of any kind when it came to presenting the story. But I wanted to let y'all know about it, because I love the fact that people are still making comics for other people to enjoy; it beats most of what I've done in with my free time the last couple of years.
This is a book collecting those Mutts strips of Patrick McDonnell's where he urges his readership to consider adopting a pet from the local animal shelter. Sometimes he does this directly, but mostly he does so by showing some of the animals in the shelters as they experience this themselves or as they wait for it to happen. The strips -- which are enormously sweet even when charted against McDonnell's genial baseline -- are interspersed with photos of animals and testimonies from their owners. In other words, this book is completely un-reviewable! I like McDonnell's work quite a bit, and at 14 years he's entered that phase of his run with Mutts where he's going to be ignored and even criticized for a while. It's almost an historical imperative at work. He's always an effective cartoonist, though, and even when he's working in an extremely strong set of emotional clues and icons and imperatives in a way that might not be to your taste as much as it is mine there's no getting around that basic fact. I like that he does these strips and hope they'll follow him until the end of his time in newspaper. Plus, he's undeniably right in this case: adopting an animal from a shelter can be a wonderful thing.
FFF Results Post #133 -- Moneybags
On Friday afternoon, participating CR readers were asked to "Name Five Of Your Favorite Comics Rich People." Here are the results.
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. Uncle Scrooge
2. Kyle Richmond
3. Hyacinthe de Cavallere
4. Reginald Van Dough
5. Hanazawa Rui
1) Kirby's Green Team -- back when "green" meant money.
2) Richie Rich and his crew: Mayda Money, Reggie Van Dough, Jr., and Aunt Noovo Rich
3) Donald Trump when drawn by Drew Friedman
4) Scrooge McDuck or his arch-rivals John D. Rockerduck and Flintheart Glomgold
5) Odin -- Asgard's gotta be worth zillions, and it's all HIS.
*****
Uriel A. Duran
1) Scrooge McDuck
2) Gomez Addams
3) Herv R. Costigan
4) Veronica Lodge
5) Doctor Doom
*****
Mark Coale
Bruce Wayne
Lex Luthor
Daddy Warbucks
Britt Reid
Richie Rich
1. Thomas Wayne -- who, given his son's spending habits, must've been even richer than Bruce Wayne
2. Steve Dayton, aka Mento from The Doom Patrol
3. H.R. Costigan
4. Mr. Big, the villain in OMAC #2 who was so rich he could "RENT A CITY -- FOR ASSASSINATION!"
5. Bob Hope
1) Uncle $crooge
2) Bruce Wayne
3) Richie Rich
4) Janet Van Dyne
5) Barry Ween, Boy Genius (I'm sure in least one of the issues it mentioned his dummy corporations, money laundering, etc. Even mentioned he did a documentary film about migrant workers. And in the words of Jack Napier "Where does he get those wonderful toys?")
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. R.J. Brande
2. Myndi Mayer
3. Lacey Davenport
4. J. Jonah Jameson
5. Bruce Wayne
* Veronica Lodge
* Bruce Wayne
* Wally West (didn't he win the lottery once?)
* Charles Xavier
* Reed Richards (although, in recent years, he lost money and Ben became the rich one)
*****
Sean T. Collins
Bruce Wayne
H.R. Costigan
Adrian Veidt
Lex Luthor
Emma Frost
First Thought Of The Day
I know I shouldn't do this to myself, but I'm pretty sure it's been more years since Appetite for Destruction came out than between Appetite for Destruction and Sgt. Pepper's.
The top comics-related news stories from August 23 to August 29, 2008:
1. Lynn Johnston wraps up her forward storyline phase on For Better Or For Worse, and is moving into new strips that work in that series' narrative past.
FBOFW Wraps Up Last Week In Current Incarnation; Heads Into New Waters
Lynn Johnston's mega-popular For Better Or For Worse will reportedly make its shift over the holiday weekend from its current "new storylines interrupted at times by older storylines that may or may have not been tweaked a bit" version to its new incarnation as new but using older storylines. (I think.) It's been about two full years since the strip's ultimate fate has been a part of almost monthly tweaking and constant speculation, and the final fate of the strip was actually kept under wraps until I think the cartoonist's appearance at the Doug Wright Awards and a subsequent scramble by the syndicate to disseminate information as to exactly what was going to happen starting next week. I think it's been handled kind of poorly, to be honest, which is a shame because it was a really good strip for a really long time, Johnston's been a class act since basically forever, and newspapers don't really need to have such odd and frequently incomplete information out there on a tent-pole attraction. I'm sure there will be some tough decisions regarding the strip over the next few weeks.
For today, though, and through the weekend, I'd suggest we put aside thing like our feelings on the way various storylines turned out (although this nearly-perfect on-line rant is always worth a re-read, even more so given how things developed) and appreciate the cartoonist's achievement. I can't think of too many North American art form where for even a brief period of time its generally most successful and well-liked practitioner was a woman, and I think the obvious affection with which people regard her strip -- enough to kvetch about it -- is to her work's credit. Our congratulations to Lynn Johnston on finishing one part of her life and moving into another.
Go, Read: Morrison on Saving Comics
Grant Morrison has one of his typically entertaining interviews up at IGN and on the last page he's asked about Robert Kirkman's recent video exhorting creators to make their own comic books. I'd quote extensively, but I always groan when people do that because the idea is for you to go to the article rather than for me to re-present their material here. But I think it's worth reading.
In general, I think comics just experienced a long August of defensive recriminations after a particularly weird summer and a "Is that all there is?" San Diego Con where the promise of comics' recent trends is beginning to be supplanted by the reality of those trends' unfolding, including the notion of who is likely benefit and who isn't. The result seems to have been a greater than usual number of people telling other people how they should do things that I suspect comes as much from 1) a desire to be taken seriously as a person who gets to say things like that and/or 2) an attempt to make the case for how the prescriber does things by asserting its specialness, at least more than it is an engagement with some actual issue or even an overwhelming desire to see that specific reform take hold. I think if you see Kirkman's tape as some sort of assault on or indictment of certain ways of doing things you're likely to have a negative reaction; if you tend to see this kind of thing as a the kind of friendly advocacy that naturally comes from someone doing successful work, you probably won't get worked up at all. Morrison doesn't seem agitated in the slightest.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* although I'm not certain why this hasn't occurred to me before, you know, the way the Kindle works does seem pretty perfect as a way to do New Comics Day on-line.
* there needs to be more people doing interviews with Chester Brown. He feels under-interviewed to me in a way most cartoonists do not.
* I'm having a hard time seeing Apple taking a pass on a slightly bawdy comic as part of its offerings for some service as censorship, or, really, much of a story.
* in a letter to The Beat, Wowio client T Campbell notes that one of the reasons he would like to see his 2Q earnings is that his 3Q earnings have fallen 97 percent under the new ownership plan.
* I visited the Art Institute of Chicago yesterday: they have a couple of Crumbs up, a huge Jim Nutt painting in I guess the modern art section, a Lyonel Feininger to look at if you can't get a good place to stand and gaze upon their famous Suerat, and a small, under-glass thing on the Hairy Who in the library. Me, I was there for some alone time with the Winslow Homers.
* also, Chicago Comics' Eric Kirsammer says they're still selling a couple of Watchmen every day.
* the writer Steven Grant has been on a really nice run recently, and I enjoyed this piece on Steve Ditko. I would suggest, however, that Dan Nadel's Art of Time provides us with the names of any number of artists that were using the comic book medium for personal expression in the way I think Grant means it long before Steve Ditko was doing so. By the way -- Sean T. Collins noted to me in conversation that Art Out of Time has led to something like a half-dozen books or future book projects, which will likely add to its reputation over the years as an important book.
Jack Kirby, The King of Comics, Would Have Been 91 Years Old Today
Jack Kirby, the mighty heart of the American comic book industry, would have been 91 years old today. Below is a tiny, even insignificant sample of his awesome image-making power, culled from around the Internet, for your ruminative and reflective pleasure. Long live the King.
Wowio Contributors: Late 2Q Payments Twelve days and counting as of last night. As you recall, this is a story of interest because the company, which reportedly helped provide several creators with a substantial revenue stream at one point, was sold to Platinum, a company that has a lot of properties and doesn't have much of a track record when it comes to print publishing. There was at the time some concern about a money flow situation or something similar developing. Sean Kleefeld is also tracking this story.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* here's another interview with DC's Paul Levitz, this time on digital comics. It's a fine interview and everything, but the one thing that really jumps out at me is that there's very little conceptualization of content except as something to be leveraged effectively or not. I'd that that's partly unavoidable, reall, but it still sort of freaked me out.
* the writer Marc Sobel continues with one of my favorite critical projects, examining " title="the 35th issue">the 35th issue of greatest comic book series of all time: Love and Rockets Vol. 1.
* the prominent comics blogger Sean Kleefeld talks about his continuing attempts to find an on-line comics reader interface that suits his needs.
* the writer and blogger Kevin Church disagrees with my commentary on his commentary about that retailer that writes negative reviews of comics he carries.
* finally, a bit more on the Virgin Comics closing: this PW article notes that eight people were in the New York office, and that there might be a chance this is a re-structuring move and the company could end up in LA in some form. If you want to look around, there are some assertions in various high-profile blogs about what doomed the company: bad business practices and strategy, an inflexible Direct Market denying purchase to their seed, a model that simply doesn't work. I don't have enough information to make a more informed opinion than the hunch I shared yesterday that the books were generally unappealing to the extent that they failed to meet sales levels in any market to the extent required to sustain its particular infrastructure and specific cost outlays. However, I'm really, really hesitant to take my shoe off and bang away at the podium about the implications of this failure for all enterprises of its various asserted types. I feel most strategies can work if the model and expectations are adjusted to meet them.
CR Newsmaker: Sammy Harkham There's no publishing project this Fall as talked-about as Sammy Harkham's Kramers Ergot Vol. 7. The well-regarded anthology series has been one of the more restless titles of this decade in terms of its-always ambitious presentation and an expanding contributors list that strikes a body between older, sometimes-neglected masters and younger talent. Its growth has mirrored the career path of Editor Sammy Harkham, a talented cartoonist and bookstore retailer based in Los Angeles recently termed a genius by scholar Paul Buhle in Jewcy.
The latest volume of Kramers, due in November, is an over-sized edition with deluxe printing that will cost $125 retail. That price point apparently set off alarms for a lot of people, as much more virtual ink than usual was spilled in discussing its cost and aims, not all of it flattering to Harkham or publisher Alvin Buenaventura. As the anthology heads into its pre-publicity phase, I wanted to talk to Harkham about the project and get him on the record about the contributor list and its price point and the impetus for the book. Happily, he agreed, and a flurry of e-mails became the conversation piece printed below. My thanks to Buenaventura for his help in putting us together.
*****
Note About The Art: Okay, what I did was use imagery from a PDF; credited below. The PDF isn't the final product. Also I had to use bits of imagery or shrink things down, so that can have an effect on quality, too. At least click through Sammy's cover to see how changing the size on imagery can have an effect on the images being manipulated even at a low-rez level. The PDF of this thing is certainly stunning -- the Kevin Huizenga panel is like one panel one-third width on the page. Anyway, I wanted to give you a sense of how a couple of the artists were going off on their pages, and a sense of some of the art inside, and I hope this does it with the huge caveat that the final product is likely to be 100 times as attractive.
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Now, am I to understand that some of the information that's out there on Kramers Ergot Vol. 7, including the Amazon.com information, is incorrect?
SAMMY HARKHAM: Besides the cover on Amazon, the contributor list there is not correct. That is due to having to give our book distributor the contributor list and cover image before it was ready, and of course since then people are out of the book for various reasons. They are working it to update the Amazon listing and contributor list.
SPURGEON: So with that in mind, let me ask you a bunch of questions about the project to get you on the record. First, we know that the book is big; exactly how big is it?
SPURGEON: At one point I heard everyone was going to be doing the same length strip, but there's actually a lot of variety in storylength in the PDF you sent me. No one has a ton of pages, but some definitely have more than others.
HARKHAM: Most strips are between one to thee pages, though there are a couple instances of four-pagers.
SPURGEON: Where did the inspiration for this book come from?
What was interesting about the incredibly large format was that it was a lovely size for really immersing yourself in a strip, regardless of how dense the comics are, the size really affects the reading in a nice way. It was a new experience for me. I thought it would be amazing to see modern comics at that size, that it would be like nothing we had ever read before. a very special, exciting book. I also liked the idea of connecting the lineage from Winsor McCay to artists like Leif Goldberg. That's also why its an "all-comics" issue, to make that connection more obvious.
When pulling together a contributor list, I realized I could ask a wider spectrum of artists than in the past, because every cartoonist becomes a new reading experience at that size. So I could ask someone like Jaime Hernandez, an artist I have respected and liked a long time but had no reason to get them in anthology what with his own regular comic book and everything else. There were many artists like that I could finally include in the overall mix. Which is nice -- I like a book where Blex Bolex is in the same book with Matt Groening.
SPURGEON: The Groening inclusion made my eyes pop a bit. How did you get Matt Groening?
HARKHAM: Matt is known as a huge alt comics fan, totally still engaging with new work coming out, and he is someone who I have seen around at different conventions and local places a lot. I knew he would like the ideas behind the book. I found it out odd that despite doing a great weekly strip for years and years, he never comes up much in alt comics conversation, and never seems to be asked to be in anthologies much. I told him about the book, and he happened to have an idea for a very dense single panel cartoon that he was unsure how he was going to run in the paper at the usual space they give him. So it was perfect timing.
SPURGEON: It's my understanding you'll be doing a tour in support of the book?
HARKHAM: When I finished Kramers Ergot Vol. 4 it seemed like a good idea to do a tour, because, mainly, it forced forced people to see it, which they may not have otherwise. So we are going to do that again, and hopefully help retailers who have supported us in the past sell some of these. That will happen throughout November.
SPURGEON: When will you have the details ironed out?
HARKHAM: In about a month we should have it worked out.
SPURGEON: Approximately how many shops and how much of North America will this encompass? Will there be different artists at different stops according to where they live or will some of you travel with this book?
HARKHAM: I am thinking about eight to ten stores on either coast and in Canada. I am approaching the comic stores that have done well by us in the past, and have reputations as good stores for the kind of books I make. And if other stores contact us and want to do something, we will try to make it happen. Some cartoonists will show up at events in their cities, others will travel and do multiple events.
SPURGEON: Will future issues of Kramers be the same size? Are there going to be more issues like this?
HARKHAM: It's a one-off. Even if the book is a huge success and sells out quickly, the amount of work involved, the logistics of the project are way beyond a workload we can handle. So there wont be another issue of Kramers like this probably ever.
Dealing with 60 cartoonists at one time is incredibly hard. The demands a book like this present are hard on every level: for the cartoonist working in a specific format, for the editor who is trying to get specific things from each person, for the production staff who need to prepare everything to be super immaculate for press on a level they are not used to, to the printer who doesn't have a binder big enough, to shipping when only three books fit in a box, to stocking on a shelf that doesn't fit-on every level its a whole new set of problems.
SPURGEON: Will you be able to move copies overseas?
HARKHAM: Yes. Kramers Ergot has always sold pretty well overseas.
SPURGEON: Did all artists work at size?
HARKHAM: No, some worked larger. Nothing has been blown up to fit the format (as far as I know!).
SPURGEON: What have you heard back from the artists while they were working on their pages? How has that been different than the experience of working with artists on past issues?
HARKHAM: From those I spoke to about it, many found it liberating, having always wanted to work in this format, others took it as an interesting challenge. It seemed like many of the artists spent a lot of time trying to make the most of their contributions. For previous issues, I gave rough page counts to different people depending on what I was envisioning. For this, I kept harping on the same things. Usually when you talk about one to three pagers, you think of simple throwaway gags or non-sequiturs. I didn't want strips where it's 11 panels of set up, and the last panel is the punchline. On the other end of the spectrum, I didn't think it necessary for each strip to be jammed with a million panels or be insanely inventive with page design. I think there is just as much beauty in reading a wordless 12-panel-gridded comic at this size as there is in reading a super dense epic. It's more of trying to get work that merits revisiting for the reader.
So ideally there is a range of stuff that runs the gamut in approach, but all really satisfying. I can say without a doubt, I have never been more severe as an editor in only including stuff I really could stand behind. A lot of artists redid their strips, or completely started over from scratch. There could be no "filler." Each page had to really count. I didn't have a set page count to fill, so that could have meant publishing a 40-page book or if everyone I approached came through, a 120-pager.
SPURGEON: Have you heard anything in advance from your retailing contacts as to how they're going to sell it -- has anyone been working with you in advance of sales, say asking about shelving or trying to arrange a tour stop? Or is that something you look forward to doing?
HARKHAM: I have not heard from any retailers yet. I hope to. I want the book to do well by the retailers who have supported us in the past.
SPURGEON: What percentage of copies do you think will be put into the comics system vs. the bookstore distribution system vs. left to you to hand-sell? Do you expect difficulties in warehousing the book?
HARKHAM: I think the ratio of comic shops vs. bookstore vs hand-selling will probably be the same as last issue: 30-40 percent through comic shops, 40-50 percent through bookstores, and the rest direct. Maybe the huge Amazon discount will make it sell better through the book trade, but I am hoping the tour will balance things out.
And if I understand correctly, Buenaventura Press has organized a whole warehouse space for storage!
SPURGEON: To be clear, you won't be doing an issue like this again, but will you be able to reprint this issue?
HARKHAM: I guess so, but its such a risk doing a book like this.
SPURGEON: Did you enjoy doing the cover? How did you approach that kind of a canvas for the cover?
HARKHAM: Ha! It was a nightmare. Seriously, I don't feel very confident in my skills as a cover artist, but two other people fell through late in production. Because of the size, I didn't do the usual thing of pencil first and then inking the whole thing. For me, inking is drawing and I couldn't stand to pencil for a week when that is such a hazy way of seeing how things are looking. I worked out the composition on a couple small sketches, and then on the final piece of paper would pencil and ink parts, working all over the page, and ideas would be added and changed throughout the whole process, with the hardest parts being held out till the end. It took two solid weeks to get the line art done.
I had no idea how to color it without ruining it. Usually, I like to color by hand. and to get your line art printed in 1200 dpi, you need to color on a separate piece of paper and layer them when printed. But I could never figure out a way of printing it out large enough. So I colored on the computer, which I am not adept at at all, and with scanned-in black overlays. It was daunting; I didn't even know where to start. That took about two to three solid weeks working full days on it. I can't even look at it anymore. I hope it works and doesn't ruin the book.
SPURGEON: Sammy, I know that you're aware of some complaints about the price here and there. While I don't want to turn this into a platform for those complaints, mostly because I don't understand them, I don't want to ignore the issue, either. So I was wondering if you could maybe simply list some of the factors that led to your pricing the book at $125, the way you might explain it to someone that's interested in the price but not accusatory.
HARKHAM: Scanning. We paid for many artists to get their work professionally scanned, since the fidelity of cheap scanners doesn't hold up when you look at the pages at print size.
* A low print run. If this was a book that had a larger print run, our price per copy would have gone down, but our readership is not big enough to warrant that. If Chris Ware ever decides to do a solo book in this format, with a print run similar to the Pantheon ACME book, I would think the cover price would be close to half of ours.
* We are using a very expensive paper, this stuff called NEW AGE. I am excited about it because it gives you the vibrancy of color you find on glossy paper, but doesn't "feel" like magazine stock. It should make everything look really, really fantastic. We also have foil stamping on the cover, a sticker with quotes and bar code, and the books are shrink-wrapped to guard them from shipping damage. Those are not mega costs, but they add up.
* The book has to be bound by hand, since no binder at that size exists.
* Since only three books will be in a box when shipped from the printer, it's a lot of boxes and it's a larger shipping bill.
* The process of looking over proofs were extremely expensive due to a) the size, and b) we needed to see more proofs than usual because we couldn't let any pages we had any doubts about -- usually those pages colored by hand, where matching color can be tricky -- possibly getting printed wrong. Let's say on average you see 10 pages of proofs, with this we had to see over half the book in proof form.
* Due to the nature of this book -- the size of reproduction, the unlikelihood of a reprint -- it was essential we go over to Singapore for a press check, and flying is expensive.
* Storage has to be rented specifically for this book.
* Shipping direct orders requires Buenaventura Press to special order custom size boxes.
* Paying all 60 artists.
* There's probably more, but those come to mind first.
SPURGEON: What's the print run?
HARKHAM: I knew the book was obviously going to be more expensive than past issues, and we would lose the more casual buyers -- this one is for the real comics nerds who love the same stuff I love. So the print run is half of the last issue's. 3500.
SPURGEON: That all I have... it's going to debut at APE, right? How many of the artists will be there? Will there be any sort of special event to go along with the release?
HARKHAM: We are hoping to debut the book at APE. It may not happen. If it does, we will have over 15 contributors on hand for a signing at the show, among them: Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Huizenga, John Pham, Ted May, Dan Zettwoch, Dan Clowes, Souther Salazar, and myself.
*****
* Kramers Ergot Vol. 7, edited by Sammy Harkham, Buenaventura Press, hardcover, 96 pages, 9780980003956, November 2008, $125
*****
* photo of Harkham from HeroesCon 2008 by Whit Spurgeon
* "tiny" panel from Adrian Tomine's story plucked and run here, looking humongous
* a Dan Clowes page; it will look like this if you open it on the ground and stand on a rooftop
* a tiny snippet from a Matt Groening page
* Kim Deitch's explosion of color and go-for-it design as if seen from across a football field
* a random panel from Kevin Huizenga's contribution
* cover of Kramers Ergot Vol. 7 by Sammy Harkham. On this one, PLEASE click through the image for a sharper-resolution look
* image plucked from a beautiful Shary Boyle page
* photo of Alvin Buenaventura and Sammy Harkham at HeroesCon 2008 by Whit Spurgeon
This Isn't A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that jump out at me from this week's probably mostly accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here -- I might not buy any -- but were I in a comic book shop I would likely pick up the following and look them over, and this might be not a good thing as far as my retailer is concerned.
*****
MAY080062 ACHEWOOD THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT HC $14.95
The first print collection of the first great comic of the second major wave of comics published on-line.
JUN080203 CATWOMAN #82 $2.99
Wasn't this canceled?
JUN080182 FINAL CRISIS SUPERMAN BEYOND #1 (OF 2) $4.50
The two great uses I've been able to find from making these lists is reminding me of stuff like this and finding out about stuff like the Al Jaffee collection talked about below. I think this is like a fancy 3-D thingee, a comic in the spirit of All Star Superman done in conjunction with the latest mega-crossover. It's definitely something I'd pick up in a store and pore over, despite my rigorous disinterest in all things Final and Crisis-Like.
MAR082251 DAREDEVIL BY BENDIS OMNIBUS HC VOL 1 $99.99
I think I bought all of these comics for about $75 a couple of years ago. It's a good superhero series.
JUL083597 AL JAFFE TALL TALES HC $14.95
See, I didn't even know this existed. This is a late 1950s/early 1960s syndicated strip done in a vertical strip by the great Al Jaffee. This collection even features an introduction by Stephen Colbert. I would totally check this book out in a comic shop. In fact, I will check this book out in a comic shop tomorrow.
JUL083935 TYPHON GN VOL 01 (A) $24.95
Danny Hellman's big, frequently beautiful, brightly-colored comics anthology of what turns out, basically, to be another glimpse down the comics road mostly not taken -- a kind of third generation underground anthology, if that makes any sense.
JUL084326 UZUMAKI GN VOL 01 2ND ED (MR) $9.99
A re-release of 2007's re-release, I think, and the only manga to jump out at me on the to-be-shipped list. Granted, I'm kind of manga-deficient.
*****
The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry.
To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back and probably drunk, try this.
The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock.
If I didn't list your new comic, it was on purpose. How do you like it, chump?
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* this is for the pair of you that keep e-mailing to ask if I think this material about a retailer that suggests people don't buy certain comics is an example of backseat driving someone's business: I suspect it is. I understand why folks might think that kind of thing worth commentary as an example of comics' twisted values. I'm sure someone has posted "Never tell your customers not to buy something!" somewhere, and I bet someone has brought up some horror stories about being made fun of at the cash register. At the same I also think it's pretty common in retail on a lot of levels. I've even had the owner of a restaurant tell me he didn't particularly like the white fish he had in the house at the moment and I should stick to the crab cakes. It was an owner of a restaurant where my father and I ate -- you guessed it -- every Wednesday night. I have no idea how this retailer conducts business from day to day so I can't testify as to how his telling people not to buy something fits within the overall tone of his establishment. To be honest, I'd rather have the retailer that told the truth about some comic he didn't like as opposed to all the retailers I've had that failed to tell the truth about the availability of books I wanted.
* I'm sure there's an explanation for this picture of Richie Rich with Elvis Costello somewhere on Fred Hembeck's non-permalink having 1996-looking site, but who wants one? Besides, ask too many questions and Fred's incredibly skeevy-looking Master Rich may pay for something horrible to be done to you.
* some not comics, publishing division: hearing about a half dozen people I know that work in publishing and a couple that don't suggests that people in that industry are either praising this article on how to use social media as a promotional tool, or, if you prefer, how to employ social media as a model for transforming the publishing businessness, or ripping into it. I'm in the latter camp: I thought the article was a prime example of someone taking their own very positive experience and spinning it into a manifesto for everyone without providing any salient details or making a strong case beyond several "wouldn't that be nice?" assertions. Articles like that never consider that one reason these things may work right now is because the industry hasn't changed around them. (I bet the book industry had a much different view of the success rate of book signings when only a few authors, such as Julia Child, were doing them.) The $50,000 as a crummy advance figure isn't a slip-up; it's the unrealistic heart of the article. Still, I have a suspicion that the up-from-the-bootstraps comics crowd will like a lot of what she says.
* finally, some not comics, movies division: Kyle Garret wrote in to make the following point:
Hey, Tom, just something that stuck out to me -- and something I was going to mention way back when the Incredible Hulk numbers started rolling in.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the new version makes more money than the Ang Lee version. All that matters is public opinion, which is high, high enough to, say, garner a sequel. Once the movie is chugging along, how many people see the movie isn't so much the issue is how many of those people would see another movie in the franchise. The Norton version lends itself to franchising; the Lee version not so much.
That's the core of what Marvel's doing. They didn't need to make a lot of money on the Incredible Hulk, they just needed people to like it enough to come back for more. Given the reviews from both moviegoers and critics, it seems like they did that.
I think I'd agree with the general sentiment that perception means more than the bottom-line numbers. After all, Garfield made more money than Sin City, but you'd never know that by how each one is perceived. While I'm not sure they'll do more movies based on lower numbers they got with this last Hulk, I could see DVD sequels and the character's inclusion in other movies. Most importantly, Marvel protected its general momentum, although if one or two of the next few movies performs poorly, someone will likely try to reclaim Incredible Hulk as a mediocre performer.
Bundled, Tossed, Untied and Stacked
* the Hansen Literary Agency announced two new book deals last week. The first was a two-book deal for the cartoonist Jake Parker's Missle Mouse character at Graphix, the Scholastic imprint. The first of the two, Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher is due in Srping 2010. I'm working from a press release but I'm sure the same information is on-line; here's a mention.
The second deal was a two-book deal for Ben Hatke at First Second Books for a character called Zita the Spacegirl. The first book will be called Zita the Spacegirl: The Longest Day, and is near completion.
Parker and Hatke are alumni of the Flight/Flight Explorer anthologies.
* the mighty Al Columbia would like to let you know that his work will not appear in the forthcoming giant-sized Kramers Ergot Vol. 7. The story he was working on expanded into a 48-page work to be called Belladonna and to be published by KE's Buenaventura Press.
* covered earlier this week: a proper sequel to '90s superhero cornerstone Marvels: Kurt Busiek, but no Alex Ross.
* Pantheon has acquired rights to Dash Shaw's on-line Body World. I don't understand the rest of the article that PW runs. Why does it matter if his book at Fantagraphics has Hollywood interest at all? Is the interest really "unprecedented"? Given how many books have been sold to Hollywood over the decades for how much money under how many terrifically odd circumstances, that would have to be a pretty astounding process for it to be unprecedented. Well, no matter weird the article is, Shaw's a super-talented cartoonist and I'm glad he's being rewarded for his ambition, skill and hard work. I greatly look forward to the book.
* the new Fall/Winter catalog from the University Press of Mississippi features three books of comics-related interest. The first is Harvey Pekar: Conversations, edited by Michael G. Rhode; the second is A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester and featuring an army of academics and writers about comics; the third is Bruce Campbell's ¡Viva la historieta!: Mexican Comics, NAFTA and the Politics of Globalization. The first two are exactly what they sound like: a book of interviews and an anthology of new comics scholarship; the third is Campbell's look at changing Mexican national identity through its various comics.
* finally, Charlie Hebdointroduces its own line of books. I wonder if it's good or bad to be in the midst of an internationally-covered, controversial news story when you launch a book line. I guess we'll find out.
Comics companies tend to open with an endless barrage of convention appearances, interviews and press releases; they tend to close with whispers, disconnected phone lines and message board threads. And so it looks like Virgin Comics has gone the way of so many ambitious start-ups before it: almost certainly dead, certainly altered if any future salvaging is done (it looks like the Southeast Asian comics efforts may have a second life). Virgin Comics started in 2006 with a burst of big-name and semi-big-name signings, a rolling series of partnerships with Hollywood types that seemed to want to use the comics form to develop a property or two, and the unique promise that their books might gain entry into an Indian market that has a rich tradition of editorial cartooning and a recent past of English-language graphic novel sales, but didn't offer a pulp-fantasy tradition in the way that Virgin might be able to provide.
As it moved forward, Virgin began to look less like the shiny new car it was in those first few weeks and more like a lot of other comics companies of its type: nothing really had a market impact, despite the names involved; comics and books came out in a haphazard way when one noticed them coming out at all; and rumors of frustration and inside-company pressures became more prevalent than public excitement over the actual publishing efforts -- although a lot of people seemed to like the recent Garth Ennis-written Dan Dare series and I would imagine that many of their individual offerings had their fans throughout their short run.
I would be hesitant to put all of the blame for Virgin's predicament or even a significant amount of blame on the Direct Market of comic book and specialty shops. I would point to a broader reason: they didn't make comics that a lot of people wanted. Certainly the DM is calcified to an unbelievable degree. Not only is it absolutely conditioned to sell American mainstream superhero comic books, it's at the point where it's becoming more and more defined by its ability to sell certain books of that type rather than all of them. You can count the successful crasher to that particular party on one hand.
At the same time, Virgin certainly seemed to offer bookstore-ready books in addition to comics. Since I don't recall the books setting the world on fire any more than the comic books, and without some inside knowledge of the company that tells me they were banking on serial comics sales to the exclusion of any other revenue stream, it's hard for me to say that it's the market rather than the works themselves that were at fault.
My gut feeling is that this is more of a case where results didn't match a) expectations, b) investment, and finally, c) bottom-line projections. Dirk Deppey's use of CrossGen as an example sort of makes my point. That company was extremely forward in its book publishing efforts, and it was much more aggressive than a lot of successful companies in that specific arena by a wide, wide margin. In the end those efforts weren't enough to make a success of CrossGen given the framework of talent and support infrastructure they were being asked to sustain, and the world was not as hot and heavy for the creative output CrossGen was able to offer as a best-case scenario might suggest. I don't think there's a Sigil-shaped hole in anybody's heart, or at least not in the hearts of a significant cross-section of the American comics-reading public. It's an amazing enough feat to create a single property that reaches a significant audience like Jeff Smith and Neil Gaiman have; creating a whole line of them like CrossGen and Tekno and now Virgin wanted to, that seems to be almost impossible. The irony of this being announced two days before Jack Kirby's 91st birthday shouldn't be lost on anyone.
I would bet that everything that Virgin was selling in multiple areas -- including film and television development rights that would likely have delighted a smaller publisher -- wasn't enough to sustain big contracts, full-color production, multiple involved executives, probably a few consultants and an infrastructure that had offices at least in New York and maybe somewhere else as well. They came in big and went out big, signing writers and hinting at major announcements as recently as last month's CCI 2008. I have a sneaking suspicion Virgin could have met 80 percent of their goals with a single LA-based office put together on the cheap, modest contracts aimed at workhorses rather than stars and a staff of smart multi-taskers you could count on one hand even if that hand were Thomas Covenant's, but maybe I'm wrong about that, too. We'll likely never know.
My best wishes to all staffers and freelancers that feel the impact of this development.
(my apologies for any inexactness or offense in the headline: I was looking for the Hindu equivalent of Armageddon)
OTBP: Will Eisner's Expressive Anatomy For Comics And Narrative
It seems kind of amazing to me that Will Eisner's last book, a release from a major publisher, can slip out with nary a whisper, but I'll be darned if I've seen one press release, one mention of it in other press, or the book itself as a review copy. Such is comics at the moment, I guess. James Vance has a nice post about this book's publication and on editing Norton's Eisner Library.
Go, Read: 20 French Cartoonists Who Dragged Eurocomics into Adulthood
Here is the list of 20 cartoonists that helped bring about adult comics expression in Europe that Kim Thompson -- one of the great and largely unsung champions of European comics in North America -- presented to a crowd of interested listeners during Seattle's recent week of celebrating French comics.
You need to go to the original post to get Thompson's notes about what's available in English translations -- not as much as you'd think, even if you're being a pessimist. It seems like there should be a giant Bretecher book out there, doesn't it?
* wait, hasn't superhero comics been bringing the semi-illicit sexy in subliminal fashion since early Wonder Woman and overtly since the "Hellfire Club" Uncanny X-Men sequence in 1979 or whatever? I suppose the traffic that will likely hit a post like this one is its own justification.
* The only thing that struck me as odd about that sex post is that evil Mary Marvel apparently grew bigger boobs -- I'm guessing, because I've hardly made a study of it, but the Mary Marvel I remember even from the recent past looked like a girl. I can't figure out if this is some admirable effort not to sexualize a child's body or an inability on the part of male superhero comic book fans to find anything other than giant boobs attractive. I'm also not sure of the precedents involved. While my own boobs have certainly grown bigger the more evil I've become, I'll note this was not the case for evil Mia Sara, which is the generationally appropriate place my mind went when I first heard they'd be making Mary Marvel a bad girl.
* so why not one more? The writer Mark Evanier has another post up about sexual harassment at CCI. It features a letter sent to him by someone involved in the effort to get CCI to make an official policy against such behavior. Once you get past the bizarre open groping story and the revelation that fandom proper is apparently driven by the appetites of sexual libertines -- who knew? -- it's a heartfelt letter, I think. It's funny that such a loathsome set of behaviors that everyone that shouldn't be smothered with a pillow agrees is wrong doesn't come with an appropriate, obvious response. I have no idea if an official sexual harassment policy will do any good or even if it's desirable. I agree with Mark that some of what gets called sexual harassment is simply assault, although I think there is harassment that depends on imbalance between genders that isn't a boss stroking his secretary's hair and that all of it is awful. Where to go next is problematic, and not in a "I'm afraid what to say" way but in a "I'm not sure what isn't stupid" way. I'm not even certain what role calling in security plays, let alone "calling in security." (I'm still 12 years old, so I'm tempted to think of the latter before the former, which isn't helpful at all.) So I guess it's good to talk about this stuff until the maturation-challenged among us on both sides of the issue find a way to process it in a way that serves the greater good. For now, I think, a baseline of non-tolerance of such stupidity will be a first, not a last, step. I hope you'll join me in blasting asinine, horrible behavior wherever you see it, and in trying to be more sensitive to it perhaps happening nearby.
Marvels Sequel Starts In December Comic Book Resourceshas an article up on Marvel announcing they've scheduled Marvels: Eye of the Camera, a sequel to the 1990s best-seller Marvels to begin publication starting this December. The original series' writer, Kurt Busiek, returns, this time working with painter Jay Anacleto as opposed to original series painter Alex Ross.
Marvels was a big, obvious success for the company in a post-Image era where the company was being squeezed for every last bit of leverage and value it was worth. The publishing side of things really needed a defining hit, and Marvels was it for a really, really long time in publishing and public identity terms. Marvels was also kind of an odd book in that -- as more than a few critics have noted -- it's best remembered for a kind of wistful re-imagining of superheroes from the vantage point of people on the ground when both the witness-to-history metaphor that it represented, as well as the criticism of loving superheroes too much that was obvious on a close reading, are now almost completely forgotten.
My interest in this as a publishing news story is that I think it will underline how much the mainstream comic book business has changed in the last 12-15 years: the big publishers cultivate and manage premeditated blockbusters based on plot progressions and positioning now, they tend not to wake up and realize they have hits in their midst based on folks' reaction to a creative approach.
(I imagine there's also something to be said in a non-comics fashion that this was announced at Fan Expo Canada, and is a bigger announcement than any I can remember from any of the Wizard shows; it was only a short while ago that just about all major announcements were held for a Wizard show.)
Go, Read: Dallas Middaugh Interview
"The important thing to understand is that really manga is now just very much like any other category in the bookstore."
The comics business news and analysis site continues its back-to-school period interviews in a threepartdiscussion with Dallas Middaugh, Associate Publisher of Del Rey Manga and a trusted, veteran industry voice. It's a lot of business positioning and general strategy stuff, but that can be compelling in a way if you're interested in the publishing area. One thing that he notes is that Del Rey is starting to see major bookstore clients decline to participate in later volumes on some series although all new series get a chance to establish themselves in that market. (photo by me)
Missed It: SLG Expands Its Webcomics Offerings Over The Summer
My chronic inability to notice proper webcomics news and my unfortunate superpower that makes me black out whenever SLG tries anything have apparently teamed up to keep me from noticing that the comics publisher has moved into the free webcomics-sponsering business with a portion of the site devoted to three offerings: Java Town, Serenity Rose and Sparko. SLG had earlier made a move into digitally downloaded comics with their Eyemelt initiative. The more companies that try such initiatives, the closer we get to all publishers trying it; I think a massive changeover in this area in terms of what's expected and what's encouraged and what's viable is inevitable.
Granted, this could actually be a post about how my aphasia when it comes to interpreting time stamps has just led me to write about "news" that's three years old or something like that. Hopefully I got it sort of right.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* industry veteran Bob Greenberger assumes the position of News Editor at ComicMix beginning today.
* someone tell the New York Times that the Berenstain Bears was an illustrated series; Watchmen is a comic book.
* there aren't a whole lot of blindly e-mailed items that I end up including in the non-Quick Hits portion of the site, but I don't think R. Crumb does a whole lot of podcasts. As one might expect, much of it is apparently about music.
* Brad Mackay of the Doug Wright Awards and a recent interviewer of Lynn Johnston writes in about the accusation that syndicate sales reps are misrepresenting the forthcoming format change on For Better Or For Worse in order to press a competitive advantage:
Read your post and thought I'd chime in. Johnston herself said (both in person, and later on stage at the DWAs) that other syndicates have been eying her "real estate" for a while now and spreading disinformation about her plans; i.e., that the strip was just going to be straight re-runs. While she definitely seemed annoyed by this, she didn't appear to think that the tactic was wrong necessarily -- my sense was that she thought it was a sign of the times in an increasingly shrinking and therefore competitive marketplace.
I still think it's wrong, but I don't have the serenity that must come from a hugely successful cartooning career and a still-thriving 2000-paper client list. By the way, FBOFWis in its final week in this incarnation. Spoiler: Anthony wins.
* one retailer mulls over the question of what to do with selling a creator's work when you can't stand the political view held by that creator.
* I forgot to hit the right tab on this on the day it happened, so a belated happy 5th birthday to Mr. Eli Kochalka.
* one of the few cartoonists in the alternative/arts corner of the medium still making a serial comic book, Ted May talks about recent writings wistfully hoping for more of those publications. Dash Shaw wrote this site a strongly-worded letter that's now posted here. You should read both. I have to admit, I'm unfamiliar with the work that Shaw mentions, so I have some reading to do before I can respond.
* the PW comics blogger Heidi MacDonald is tracking rumors about downsizing at Virgin Comics. That line's almost non-existent impact on the American comics industry on any level is likely the cause of whatever might develop and also the reason why such changes won't have much of an overall impact.
* finally, some not comics news: in case you missed it, this is the article that most people read late last week regarding the direction of the Time Warner movie business and DC Comics' role within it. No one would pay me 25 cents for my opinion about the movie industry, but it seems to me that billions of dollars are being staked on the results of 1) one mega-hit movie with a unique pedigree and 2) swiping as theirs a Marvel strategy that is exactly one successful film and one not-as-successful film into its slow build, minus that company's partnership tracks on the X-Men (a Wolverine movie and perhaps a prequel) and Spider-Man (I have to imagine one more movie) franchises. In a way it's kind of interesting that Time Warner is going to be mirroring DC Comics' big event strategies, as those haven't exactly been setting the serial comics world on fire, at least judging from their thorough and consistent beatings at the hands of Marvel's books on the Diamond charts this year. Also, I would have guessed that Speed Racer's performance was a vote against a limited-release, go-for-the-fences movie strategy as much as The Dark Knight was a vote for one. One positive is that with Time Warner publicly castigating their 2006 Superman film (starring the Superman that lifted a lot of things and the second most evil real estate plan in a Superman movie... ever!) maybe a certain subset of Superman fans will stop insisting that it performed to expectations.
You'll get a pretty thorough biography of the illustrator and cartoonist Danny Hellman in the body of the following interview. I've known of Danny for about 15 years now, and his consistently funny work on the cover of SCREW was one of the more distinctive discoveries I made sorting books in the Comics Journal library for a half-hour every day my first year in the Fantagraphics office. He's done a number of comics but is perhaps best known for being the subject of a lawsuit tossed his way by the cartoonist Ted Rall based on an Internet prank. That lawsuit resulted in two charity anthologies designed to raise funds; what was to be a third issue became the summer anthology TYPHON. In a way, TYPHON is to a certain kind of black and white 1980s and 1990s comic book what MOME has become to the black and white alt-comic: a shelf-ready collection of a certain creative impulse recognized and appreciated by the publisher -- in this case, Hellman. I was surprised by how much I liked it, particularly some of the work from cartoonists with whom I was completely unfamiliar. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Danny, I was checking your biography and it says you graduated from high school in 1982 and started on your illustration career in 1988. What took up your time right out of high school? How did your career then start?
DANNY HELLMAN: I graduated from Manhattan's High School of Art & Design in June of 1982. Around that time, an upstairs neighbor of mine introduced me to his friend, Marvel writer Bill Mantlo. Mantlo was writing various licensed books, (Micronauts, Rom, etc), and after checking out my drawings, he thought I might be a good choice to work with him on test pages for Robotron 3000, an arcade game-based book he was planning to pitch to Marvel. We worked on those test pages for weeks, but when we finally presented them to editor Tom DeFalco, he dismissed them as "fan art." I'd dreamed of drawing for Marvel since childhood, and this rejection bummed me out bigtime.
At about this same time, I started at the School of Visual Arts. I found my first few weeks at SVA to be a nearly identical rerun of my time at Art & Design, with many of the same classmates, and the same sort of rotational courses that are designed to introduce students to all aspects of art-making, from photography to sculpture. I'd done all of this before, but now my Dad was insisting that I get a job to pay my tuition. It was at this point that I entered my "fuck the world" phase. I dropped out of SVA, sold much of my comic collection, got a job as a bike messenger, and started smoking pot with a vengeance.
I spent the next five or six years daydreaming, getting high, and taking life drawing classes at the Art Students' League in Manhattan. I worked on various comic strips during these years, but I was struggling with an insane, crippling perfectionism, and little publishable work resulted. I managed to complete a handful of strips, and sent them to Aline Crumb at Weirdo, who politely rejected them.
By the late 80's, recreational drugs and the bike messenger grind were turning me into a basket case. I was determined to clean up my act; to quit the stoner lifestyle, stop eating dead animals, and to somehow make money from my drawings. In the Summer of 1989, I was living in my grandparents' filthy attic in Queens, and I was broke. Friends of mine were selling drawings to Kevin Hein, art director of NYC's infamous weekly porn tabloid SCREW. Any distaste for pornography that had been drilled into me by my feminist Mom went out the window. I visited Kevin Hein at SCREW's legendary 14th Street offices, and showed him some gig posters I'd drawn for the band Floor Kiss. Hein thought one of the posters could easily be tweaked into a SCREW cover, and I was happy to comply. I was soon working regularly for SCREW, and continued to do so until the paper folded in 2006. I believe I hold the honor of having drawn more SCREW covers than any other human being.
Working for SCREW and meeting tight deadlines helped me work through my problems with perfectionism. From SCREW, I went to the New York Press, where former Hustler art director Michael Gentile was running the art department. I quickly became one of the paper's hardest-working illustrators. New York Press had a big readership in those days, and with the visibility I got from that paper, I was able to branch out in all directions. In a period of about six years, 1990 to 1995, I went from being a clueless stoner to a fairly widely-published illustrator.
SPURGEON: I think most people think of you as an illustrator first, but I've seen enough of your pages to wonder just exactly how many comics you've done at this point. Is there a book's worth of stuff at this point? I think of your work in terms of some anthologies that may not be around any longer. Can you track in brief, summary fashion the comics portion of your career?
HELLMAN: In the early to mid 1990s, I self-published a handful of mini comics, which included Coffee Drinkin' Man, (written by my late friend Geoff Gilmore), the original version of Legal Action Comics, (which reprinted strips of mine from SCREW parodying Superman, The Simpsons, and The Cosby Show), and Peaceful Atom and the Mystery Mice.
In the mid-1990s, Andy Helfer at DC's Paradox Press spotted my illustrations in New York Press, and hired me to do strips for their Big Books series. I appeared in the following Big Book titles: Conspiracies, Urban Legends, Weirdos, Scandals, Bad, Vice, Death and The Seventies.
Also in the mid-1990s, Noah Mass asked me to contribute to the anthology series he edited, Last Gasp Comix & Stories. I appeared in four or five issues of that title.
SCREW and Fantagraphics briefly joined forces in the mid-1990s for SCREW Comics, to which I contributed a cover and a strip. I also contributed short strips to the following Fantagraphics titles: 2 Live Crew, Real Schmuck, Spice Capades, a Hate Annual, and more recently, Glenn Head's Hotwire books.
In 2003, Joey Cavalieri asked me to contribute to DC's Bizarro World. I drew an 11-page strip about Aquaman, from a wonderful script written by Soul Coughing front man Mike Doughty.
In 2001 and 2003, I published the anthologies Legal Action Comics volumes one and two, both of which featured strips of mine. 2008's TYPHON Vol. 1 also features a new five-pager by me.
Much of the material I've just listed was work for hire, and as such, can't be easily reprinted. If the strips for which I hold the copyright were collected, they might amount to a 50- or 60-page book.
SPURGEON:Typhon grew out of Legal Action Comics, which was your fundraising mechanism to allay some of the costs of defending yourself against a $1.5 million lawsuit brought against you by Ted Rall. I'll ask you about the other circumstances that changed the project in a bit, but am I to understand that the status of that case is in limbo because Rall's lawyer passed away? Can you explain what happened?
HELLMAN: Rall's lawyer died of brain cancer a few years ago, and that brought Rall's lawsuit to a halt. Rall had a contingency agreement with that lawyer. In order to move forward with his lawsuit today, Rall would first need to hire a new lawyer, and I suspect he would have a very hard time finding another lawyer willing to take his case on contingency. Without a contingency agreement, Rall would need to pay a new lawyer boatloads of cash, and I doubt that he's willing to do that.
SPURGEON: How do you expect things to progress from here, or do you?
HELLMAN: I believe that Rall v. Hellman is over. Rall would never have had an easy time proving to a jury that my Rall's Balls email prank harmed his livelihood, but as the months and years pass, it becomes increasingly hard. My feeling about Rall v. Hellman is that Rall and his lawyer never intended to take the case to trial; rather, they were hoping for a quick cash settlement from me. Once it became clear that I wasn't going to hand them a check right away, I think that Rall and his lawyer soldiered on for another five or six years in the hope that I would eventually break down and settle.
In my opinion, the lawsuit was never an especially bright idea, but to resume it at this late date would be completely nuts.
SPURGEON: You've mentioned in a couple of interviews that the birth of your daughter was a contributing factor to your doing the anthology. How so? Was it just the delay that getting through that first year caused?
HELLMAN: I think I started collecting work for a third volume of Legal Action Comics late in 2004. At that point, I was mulling over the idea of doing some color pages in that book, but in emails to my contributors, I only hinted at that possibility. Our daughter Alice was born in May of 2006, and my wife Linda and I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn in November of 2006. Between the baby and the move, our lives became extremely busy. I did my best to stay on top of my illustration assignments, but I couldn't even think about the book project for that first year.
Once our lives became more manageable, I revisited the book project. With a fresh perspective, I realized two things: that I wanted to do a full-color book, and that I was completely disinterested in Rall v. Hellman. One more factor that contributed to the book's evolution; during that year's hiatus, I met a lot of talented folks on the Internet, many of whom ended up in the pages of TYPHON.
SPURGEON: Even untethered from the need to raise money for the case, I'm still a bit unclear as to how you look at the Legal Action work and thinks, "Okay, I think instead I'm going to do an oversized full-color book anthology?" What was your thinking behind the shape and form of the final project?
HELLMAN: When I announced in 2000 that I was doing a "benefit anthology book," several smart people pointed out right away that this kind of book was unlikely to raise much money. This was something that I already suspected, and it didn't change my mind about the book project. Rather than providing my lawyers with one more revenue stream, the intention of the Legal Action books was to get the word out about Rall v. Hellman. Beyond that, the books were really just a good excuse for me to edit anthology comics, which is something I'd been wanting to do for years.
Truth be told, one of the things that motivated me to do LAC #1 was the thought that I'd be placing a portion of my savings beyond my lawyers' reach. In 1999/2000, my lawyers were quickly burning through my savings, and I was determined that before they completely cleaned me out, I would carve out a chunk of my savings and spend it on something good.
All you really need to understand about the shift from LAC to TYPHON is that lawsuit or no lawsuit, I enjoy making a book now and then. I think it's a natural tendency that we set out to do something better and more ambitious than what we did before. The Legal Action concept had run out of gas, but my urge to make books was alive and well, and the result is TYPHON.
SPURGEON: Was it difficult finding people to want to do the anthology? Did you get everyone you wanted? Since there are so many avenues open to people these days, what do you think attracted these artists to your project?
HELLMAN: I think there are many more talented people in the world than there are outlets for their work. When it came time to solicit contributions, I cast my net widely, and while I didn't get everyone I wanted, I'm very happy with everything I got.
SPURGEON: A lot of the comics in TYPHON seem connected by a few factors, but one of them is definitely that nearly everyone you use has chops. Your comics are well-regarded for their craft qualities; was that an important factor in assembling this work? Do you feel that being able to draw well sometimes doesn't get enough play in terms what's being published?
HELLMAN: I think we're in a time right now when a lot of people who don't have drawing chops are feeling empowered to do comics, and I think that's great for readers who don't place a high value on drawing chops. However, I'm someone who has spent my entire life learning how to draw, and I would much rather look at good drawing than shitty drawing.
That said, it can be tough to pin down precisely what "good drawing" is. Ultimately, beautiful art is a matter of taste. Drawing chops, anatomical knowledge, the ability to recreate the natural world in two dimensions and have it be both accurate and pleasing to the eye; these are important. But what's really vital is that we connect with the art on an emotional, perhaps spiritual level.
Simply put, the art that's in TYPHON is art that I enjoy looking at.
SPURGEON: There are a number of very good cartoonists in your book, but I was wondering if you could talk about what you like about a few of them that maybe haven't yet become as well-known as the others, even where you found them. Maybe we could start with a strip called "Summer of 7-11" by someone named Hawk Krall?
HELLMAN: I'm not sure where I first came across Hawk Krall's work. I don't think we've met in person yet, but I've been seeing Hawk's stuff for a few years, and I've always enjoyed it.
SPURGEON: I'm not familiar with Hugo, who did "Virgil at the Video Store." Is Virgil a recurring character?
HELLMAN: "Hugo" is the pen name of a cartoonist I've known for nearly a decade. I think we met years ago when we were both contributing drawings to Dominic Salemi's long-running 'zine Brutarian. "Hugo" had strips in both Legal Action books, but they appeared under his real name. For whatever reason, "Hugo's" chosen to go the pseudonymous route, and I'm not about to argue with him about it, as long as I get to keep publishing his work. I think "Hugo" is one of those rare cartoonists whose writing is every bit as enjoyable as his drawing.
SPURGEON: Oliver Schulze?
HELLMAN: I met Oliver Schulze via MySpace, most likely in the wee hours between diaper changes. I think he's in Koln, Germany, and he's a perfect example of my point that there's a seemingly bottomless ocean of talented folks out there whose work we haven't yet seen.
HELLMAN: I met Nicholas Gazin at one of the SPX shows where he was making the rounds dressed as Robin, The Boy Wonder, asking the exhibitors to draw him in his costume. I originally thought of Nick as that young fellow with the odd moustache, but when I saw his drawings, I started to think of him as tremendously talented.
SPURGEON: You also work with a handful of emerging stars, people that are well-regarded if not quite widely known yet. What is it that you like about Hans Rickheit? Why do you think he remains kind of an elusive figure, even in the small world of alternative comics?
HELLMAN: I like Beckett. I like Balthus. I like Bellmer. I like Burroughs. I like Survival Research Laboratories. I like the Quay Brothers. I think Hans Rickheit is leading us on a tour of that same disturbing, fascinating terrain. I think his stuff is as good as it gets. I'm not sure why you describe him as "elusive." I've met him a bunch of times.
SPURGEON: Maybe I mean in terms of attention that seems to elude him. I don't know. So why did you have Tim Lane's piece colored, given how good he is as a black and white artist? What can you tell me about Lane, who just dropped his own book with Fantagraphics into the marketplace?
HELLMAN: Tim Lane's work is great in color as well as black and white. Once I'd decided that TYPHON would be a full color book, I resolved to keep the book's black and white contents to a minimum. Time constraints kept Tim from coloring his strip, but Gregory [Benton] volunteered to do the work, and Tim and I agree that Greg did a fantastic job with Tim's strip -- just as he did with his own strips in TYPHON.
Tim Lane started illustrating for the New York Press during the last couple of years before the paper went down the toilet. He provided surreal illos for Michelangelo Signorile's weekly column, and I thought they were beyond brilliant, like some dazzling combination of Goya and Bosch. I emailed Tim and asked if he drew comics strips, and I think his reply was that he did do "a sort of graphic narrative thing." He sent me a few strips, and I realized that not only did he do some sort of graphic narrative thing, but that he was one of the most talented cartoonists I'd ever seen. Tim Lane is the next big thing, for whatever that's worth in this cruelly unrewarding world of alt/indie/underground/whatever we're calling it today.
SPURGEON: Was there anything that you wanted from the stories that you solicited in terms of theme or meaning? Because the stories you ended up with seem to have a fascination with the darker sides of human nature -- there are more than a few actual devils or demons overtly portrayed. What is it about this project or your editorship that you think gave voice to this kind of story, mostly?
HELLMAN: Again, TYPHON's contents reflect my tastes. I don't do themed anthologies. I solicit contributions from artists whose work I admire, and I tend to enjoy comics that are funny, scary, sexy, offbeat, or some combination thereof.
SPURGEON: Between this book, and the second HOTWIRE, Lane's book and now TYPHON it seems to me like a mini-renaissance in a kind of underground-reminiscent cartooning that may have taken a backseat to more standard literary or formalist comics the last few years. Would you agree with that assessment -- I mean, are there are a lot of comics on the stands that you think make for sensible fellow travelers with TYPHON? Would you personally like to see more comics like this?
HELLMAN: I haven't seen Tim's book yet, but I'm sure it's amazing. I'm a big fan of HOTWIRE, and of Glenn's work overall.
I see two things going on in alt/indie/whatever comics right now. You've got this grasping for a literary dryness that screams "please take me seriously." Meanwhile there's an influx of all these fresh-faced art students who are doing comics that make the Zap guys seem conservative. These aren't necessarily bad things, but generally speaking, these movements aren't really giving me the kind of work that I enjoy. If I had to land on either side, I'd go with the art kids, because I do see visually exciting stuff coming from those folks. I really hate the literary thing, because it's so fucking boring, and ultimately it's just the latest manifestation of comics' eternal self-esteem problem.
SPURGEON:TYPHON's been out for a while now, and I'm sure you've done some hand selling as well as moved some copies through retailers. How has the book been received as far as you can tell? Are stores carrying it?
HELLMAN: I got my TYPHON shipment from Regent in Hong Kong in mid-June. Last Gasp placed an order right away, while Diamond only just placed their order this week. [we're presently in mid August] Meanwhile, Tony Shenton has been plugging away for me with his set of retailers, and I've sold a few dozen TYPHONs via the web. I suppose TYPHON is beginning to show up in comic shops, but I think availability is still limited. I've sold approximately 450 books to date, and I'll need to sell twice that amount again to hit break-even.
Everyone who's seen TYPHON seems to like it. The only thing resembling a negative comment that I've heard is a couple of folks who've observed that TYPHON's cover looks a lot more impressive in person than it does on the web. I think R. Sikoryak's cover drawing for TYPHON is a real stunner; a spectacular drawing that only the web's crappy, low-res RGB presentation could diminish.
SPURGEON: How much did you like the editing and publishing process with this big of a project? Is this something you'd like to do in the future?
HELLMAN: At the risk of repeating myself, I'll repeat myself: I enjoy making books. I doubt that I'll ever be more than a very small publisher, one who does a book every couple of years, but who knows. I'd like to think that there'll be a second volume of TYPHON, and maybe some different books, but that's really up to the marketplace. Publishing these books is expensive, and contrary to popular rumor, I'm not the heir to a vast mayonnaise fortune.
SPURGEON: What does the future look like generally, Danny? Last time we exchanged e-mails about anything, I think it was about the shrinking illustration marketŠ how do you see your professional future the next five years or ten?
HELLMAN: I'm not a big long-range planner, and I cringe at those "where do you see yourself in five years?" questions. I think we can get distracted by dwelling on the future, when what's most important is to do the right thing in the present moment. We can all agree that Hitler was largely an asshole, but he has that one good quote: "I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker." I'd like to think that in five or ten years, my family will be alive and healthy, that I'll be doing work that I enjoy and getting well-paid for it, and who knows, maybe I'll be done (or nearly done) with the graphic novel I've been daydreaming about for over a decade -- God knows how or if I'll find the time to get that project done)
My attitude about the illustration market is thermostatically controlled by the amount of work I'm getting at any given time. I've been oddly busy with illo assignments these past few weeks, so my outlook today is a little rosier than it was in Late Spring.
If you step back and look at the big picture from an illustrator's perspective, it's clear that in general, Bush has trashed the US economy, and in particular, the Internet is sucking up all the advertising money, leading to the widely-proclaimed "death of print" -- widely-proclaimed on the Internet, mostly. While it's undeniable that print is hurting, I tend to doubt that print will die any time soon. After all, plenty of "old" media have survived in spite of new distractions coming along. My main beef with the Internet is that it wants to swallow Publishing whole, yet it has made no place for illustration, which has always been part of print. I'm not sure why that is, but hopefully this will change as consumers of the web begin to demand greater visual sophistication.
*****
* TYPHON cover by R. Sikoryak
* commercial illustration by Danny Hellman
* SCREW birthday party illustration by Hellman
* Legal Action Comics #1 cover
* panel from Gregory Benton effort in TYPHON
* panel from Hawk Krall effort in TYPHON
* panel from Hans Rickheit effort in TYPHON
* panel from Rich Tommaso effort in TYPHON
* panel from Rupert Bottenberg effort in TYPHON
* page from Patrick Dean effort in TYPHON
*****
TYPHON, edited by Danny Hellman, Dirty Danny Press, softcover, 192 pages, 9780970936332, July 2008, $24.95
FFF Results Post #132 -- Fifty-Plus
On Friday afternoon, participating CR readers were asked to "Name Five Of Your Favorite Comics That Came Out Before 1958, No Matter Whether You Read Them In Original Or Reprinted Form." Here are the results.
1. Peanuts (debuted October 2, 1950)
2. "The Joker," from Batman #1 (Spring 1940)
3. "Rat Tat, The Toy Submachine Gun," a Spirit story originally published September 4, 1949
4. "Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt," from Showcase #4 (September-October 1956)
5. "Superduperman," from Mad #4 (April-May 1953)
*****
Nat Gertler
1. Peanuts
2. James Thurber's The Last Flower
3. King Aroo
4. Scribbly
5. Pogo
* Thimble Theater by Segar
* Krazy Kat by Herriman
* Spacehawk by Basil Wolverton
* Captain Marvel stories by Otto Binder & C. C. Beck
* The Four Immigrants Manga by Henry Kiyama
*****
Mark Coale
* All-Star Comics
* Captain America (1950s Commie Smasher version)
* Terry and the Pirates
* Peanuts
* The Mask of Dr. Fu Manchu
*****
Chris Mautner
Thimble Theater
Little Nemo in Slumberland
Gasoline Alley
The Juggler of Our Lady
"Master Race"
*****
Stergios Botzakis
Sparky Watts
The Spirit
Sally the Sleuth
Airboy
MAD
*****
Jean-Paul Jennequin
1. Peanuts
2. Tintin in L'Affaire Tournesol (The Calculus Affair)
3. Blake and Mortimer in Le Mystere de la Grande Pyramide
4. Pogo
5. Astro Boy
*****
Mark Brodersen
Plastic Man
Little Nemo in Slumberland
Dick Tracy
Uncle Scrooge
The Katzenjammer Kids
*****
I apologize for any and all I shunted to the letters section. Please try not to be vague, load your answers, or otherwise be cute, and please have a sense of humor about this. I'm not editing your copy on Sunday morning before I go to the gym, I'm not an open mic and a brick wall, and since people complain when they perceive other people get to do things they don't get to do, I have to drop some answers or I receive complaints and even demands from people wanting to change their own responses. I figure it's either be a hard ass or ban the complainers, and the former doesn't involve keeping a list. Remember when the feature disappeared for a year? That was why. No biggie, and I hope you'll still contribute. If you ever have questions, use the example five as a guide.
First Thought Of The Day
One thing that's strange about comics right now is that the proliferation of films based on comics has weakened if not derailed the assumption that certain comics are unfilmable. Like it occurred to me getting up just now that you could actually quite easily make a film straight out of Cerebus: High Society by establishing Jaka early on and changing the line about the Hsiffies to something like "They're on our side" and turning Moon Roach back into the Roach and as a result have a completely normal, funny film (as normal as a Charlie Kaufman movie, say) which you could animate in the Persepolis style.
I'm probably not communicating that very well, because I don't care about movies based on comics as much I like reading the comics and I have no interest in seeing a Cerebus movie of any kind let alone backseat driving one. It just seems to me our perception of film has changed somehow. Fifteen years ago I would have assumed just about any film closely informed by a comic book would be visually atrocious, impenetrable nonsense, while these days I could see just about anything having a legitimate shot at being either good or bad based completely on traditional merits. Heck, just five years ago the thought of Steve Rude and Mike Baron doing a Nexus movie seemed like insanity because the good guy might kill people and the concept might be difficult, while today's pop culture has shifted just enough where Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' sometimes horrifically nasty take on superheroes built on bits and pieces of squirelly-ass WildStorm Universe side story seems like a perfectly reasonable vehicle for Tom Cruise. Part of this may be that the Lord of the Rings films made a virtue of reduced expectations when it comes to adaptations -- that series wears its "boys' adventure version" label as a badge of honor -- part of it may be the proliferation of comics-influenced visual stylists finally having as much of an influence as they've had for as long of a time as they've had it, and part of it could even be an increased tolerance for unexplained, accrued detail in pop culture efforts. Whatever it is, it's totally weird.
The top comics-related news stories from August 16 to August 22, 2008:
1. One of the two Tunisian men in custody facing expulsion from Denmark among other penalties for what authorities believe is their role in a plot to assassinate the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and his wife has left the country of his own volition.
2. A newspaper editor accuses syndicate sales reps of misrepresenting the fate of For Better or For Worse for gain.
Quote Of The Week
"We may not share a philosophy or world-view, and only one of us apparently knows who Dorothy Parker is, but I really genuinely think it's wonderful how the magic of the Internet and blogs and comics, how they let us both have a little moment of smug superiority that we didn't deserve today." -- Abhay Khosla
this week's imagery comes from pioneering comic book house Hillman Publications
* reading this idiotic screed that uses the tragedy of people dying protesting the Danish Cartoons as some sort of triumphant warning not to mess with downtrodden people makes me want to change this blog to nothing but a constant roll-out of Muhammed caricatures.
Watching the Watchmen Watchers 04: How Do You Answer This Question?
Nathan Rabin's review, the latest and maybe in comics terms the most high-profile of a burst of reviews of the decades-old Watchmen series following its movie trailer debut last month, made me wonder something. When someone asks you, "So what is Watchmen about?" What do you tell them? Because I'm not sure I know what the book is about, let alone how to politely communicate it in a sentence or three to a friend or family member. What would you say to someone that asked you this question?
joke answers, while appreciated in this cold and angry world, will not be included below
*****
Domingos Isabelinho:
It's very simple, really. Watchmen is about three things:
1) Like Stanley Kubrick, Alan Moore wants to infuse new blood into old, formulaic, genres. In this case the superhero genre.
2) He does this asking himself: what if superheroes were real, living in the real world (by "real" we must understand a fictional future here: Watchmen is also political fiction).
3) As usual with Alan Moore, Watchmen is all about experimenting with the form. This is underlined in the symmetry chapter.
*****
Jon Hastings:
I think Watchmen is about gravity. That is, the traditional superhero comics show us beings who are able to defy gravity -- who exist in an idealized state, not subject to the laws of nature -- but Watchmen gives us characters who are bound by the laws of gravity. The superheroes in Watchmen (with one exception) look like normal people and have realistic, non-idealized bodies. They're flabby and sagging and scared and wrinkled. They don't strike poses: they just kind of stand around like normal people.
*****
Rick Marshall:
I was asked that very same question yesterday, and answered it as follows:
Watchmen examines the relationship between superheroes and society and the ways in which this relationship changes over time given a variety of real-world factors. What would happen when the shine wears off and things like politics, economics, racism and the knowledge of one's own abilities far and beyond that of everyone else come to the surface? The story examines all of this by way of a noir-style murder mystery in which one of the former "superheroes" investigates the mysterious death of a former member of the superteam "The Watchmen."
That was my three-sentence answer that skips over so much of what makes Watchmen great to comics fans, but is most likely to hook newcomers to the comics scene. In this case, it seemed to work, as the person I told this to called me up an hour later to say he'd watched the trailer again and now definitely wants to see the film.
*****
Andrew Mansell: Watchmen is about the survival of costumed heroes in comic books. No matter what happens -- politically (Wertham) or financially (the '50s) as long as Superman exists, superhero comics will go on...
*****
Vernon Jones:
I tell people that it's about how it would be if superheroes actually existed in the real world. I know it's the obvious answer but in a nutshell, that's it.
*****
Colin Panetta:
For me, Watchmen is a thoughtful, reality-based rumination on how America would have developed if superheroes had been a part of its history. The world turns into a darker, even more dangerous place than it did in reality. This warning against giving people the autonomous power that superheros need to operate gives the book a strong anti-authoritarian theme (i.e. "Who watches the watchmen?") It's very symbolically dense and thematically intricate, but is also a very entertaining adventure story full of fascinating characters.
*****
Dustin Harbin:
I actually just finished a short article on how to use Watchmen as a "gateway" comic for Newsarama, so this is on my mind. I generally tell customers: "Watchmen starts out as a superhero murder mystery and turns into a really dense rumination on the motivations behind might and right." Then when their eyes start rolling back in their heads, I backpedal and say, "Seriously, it's awesome. If you don't like it I’ll totally give you your money back." That usually gets them.
*****
Matt Silvie: Watchmen is a meticulously-plotted and beautifully-drawn story about some superheroes who get old and caught up in a murder mystery, with some very clever, "meta" subtext on the history and the nature of comics as an art form.
*****
Cole Moore Odell: Watchmen is about power: its trappings, its limits, and the consequences of its use. We see the USA and Russia as global superpowers; Dr. Manhattan with the literal power of a god; the power that normal people have to affect both individual lives and the course of history, and the power of writing to shape thinking. It is also about powerlessness -- as embodied by the child who would become Rorschach, or the inexorable slide toward war -- and the self-deception practiced by people (Ozymandias in particular, but all of them) struggling against that helplessness. It's only about superheroes to the extent that the genre allows Moore and Gibbons a multitude of ways to explore the theme.
*****
Matthew Craig:
1. Watchmen is the ultimate mid-life crisis
2. Watchmen is the ultimate mid-life crisis, only instead of a Ferrari, you buy Armageddon.
3. Watchmen is the ultimate mid-life crisis, a counterpoint to the coming-of-age story, in which the characters ask what kind of man they have become, and where -- if anywhere -- they go from here.
4. Watchmen is the ultimate mid-life crisis: like Fight Club, but with giant blue balls.
*****
Matthias Wivel: Watchmen is about a lot of things, many of which have been brought up in your round-up, but fundamentally it is about what all Alan Moore's comics are about: Order. The sense that there is a structure to the universe, and to existence, and how this structure starts in ourselves and determines our perception of the world. Moore exemplifies this in the meticulous structure of the comic itself, but also in the character of Dr. Manhattan who perceives the order we can only intuit.
The conflict of the story arises from the way the individual deals with it, and the main characters each make their own choices: The Comedian absolves himself and becomes amoral, Ozymandias wants to control it, Rorschach has lost faith in it, Dan and Julie chose to make their way within it, and Dr. Manhattan stands back. The play's the thing.
*****
Sean T. Collins:
"It's a very realistic take on superheroes -- like, what would the world be like if they really existed, how would society be different. And then what happens if some of them go bad."
*****
Patrick O. Watson: Watchmen asks the reader the age-old question, "Does the end justify the means?" The novelty of it comes from using a world impacted by superheroes and a tightly-choreographed narrative.
*****
Leland Purvis: Watchmen is an expression of the dilema that arises when Truth is pitted against the Greater Good.
*****
Johnny Bacardi:
When people ask me "What's Watchmen about?" (happens all the time, really) I tell them "It's about twenty bucks from Amazon, eleven if you catch it on sale."
But seriously, folks --
I tell them that it was British writer Alan Moore's update of several old comics characters that DC obtained from another publisher, and since they weren't SUPERMAN and BATMAN and WONDER WOMAN, etcetera, he was given carte blanche to redo them in a near-future world of his own imagining where superheroing has been outlawed, and portray them more-or-less realistically, like in the case of the Nite Owl, a Batman-like character (they won't know who the hell Blue Beetle is) who has settled down into a midlife sort of mediocrity, getting fat and complacent. Another refuses to stop hunting crooks, and is borderline nuts. It's also a murder mystery; when one of the group is killed, another takes it upon himself to find out who did it, eventually recruiting the other former members of the team -- and the answer lies in a direction that none of them expects. Then I just say, there's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.
Don't know if that will convert any of the great unwashed out there, but that's what I'd tell them.
*****
Ben Schwartz:
As to explaining Watchmen... Since Nathan Rabin thinks that Frank Miller and Alan Moore are the modern architects of pop culture and that comics have somehow gone beyond Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge, I think you're going to have a tough time of it. I guess Rabin hasn't seen the Spider-Man, X-Men, or Iron Man films, not to mention any of George Lucases Barks/Kirby influenced and reportedly profitable film output.
My neighbor, not a comics fan, read Watchmen and came away loving the symmetrical chapter, the time and space perspective of Dr. Manhattan, and hated the ending -- so I'd say he got it. Since most people about to read it are movie fans who happen to be into superheroes, or people who actually read novels -- why not just tell them it's a superhero book? It's a fun read, and not that complicated, until you try to make sense of that ending.
*****
Eric Millikin:
I usually describe Watchmen as "Using super heroes to explore what can happen when people have too much power." It's a classic piece of Cold War justified paranoia.
*****
Randall Ragsdale:
I tell interested readers that Watchmen is like that old story about the Emperor's new clothes, you know, the one where a child points out the Emperor's nudity. Got it? Now imagine that same story but flash forward a decade and a half. Where's that kid? How does society feel about the Emperor? What became of the Emperor? That's Watchmen.
*****
Don MacPherson: Watchmen is about the eradication and sacrifice of individual rights to further the agendas of the establishment. Ozymandias, as a corporate powerhouse, is the establishment in this case. It's about using fear to control the masses, and it's about lying about potential threats so everyone can get with the program. It's all that, with superheroes.
Sounds just as relevant today as it was two decades ago, don't it?
*****
Douglas Wolk Watchmen is about the way the world works: the fantastically complicated clockwork of human existence, as well as the aspects of humanity that can't be reduced to determinism. It's also about the superhero genre and the bizarre conventions it's accrued over time -- the denials of realism that make it enduring and powerful, and its peculiar attachment to the comics medium.
*****
Patrick Dean:
You've got some pretty great answers on the site already, but I'd thought I'd share with you one I read about after the Dark Knight movie opened with the Watchmen trailer attached.
Someone on a movie message board (I think it was at CHUD) mentioned his friend whispered to him what Watchmen was about at the end of the trailer; "They're like the X-Men, but stronger. I think at some point they wanted more power, so they try to take over the world. The blue guy is their leader."
Having read the book, if my friend told me that, I wouldn't have the heart to correct him.
*****
Gil Roth
I usually just tell people, "It's a murder mystery/thriller about superheroes." Once they start reading it, the formal elements are strangeness of it reveal themselves. Sometimes I add, "It's from 1985-6, so there's also a heavy cold war undertone."
I would find it a lot easier to introduce Watchmen in a sentence than I would Cerebus.
Above is an image from Parade of Comics, a 1966 coloring book by the Newspaper Comics Council to which many cartoonists contributed original work. For more: One, Two, Three. Is it my imagination, or does that look like a Jaime Hernandez drawing?
* this seems to me a reasonable summary of the big American mainstream comic book comapanies' effort to diddle around with a few on-line initiatives. It doesn't really look impressive when it's all gathered into one place, at least not to me. Anyway, it's nice to have the James Sime stuff in there about how he welcomes comics moving on-line, even monthly serial pamphlets, because it's a refreshing break with conventional wisdom that retailers see a 10 to 30 percent of migration to on-line material as a meteor-slamming-into-planet event.
* the cartoonist Rutu Modan and the Eisners boiled down in Haaretz.
* is it the drugs talking if I suggested one of these companies just do a top-creator, formatted-for-screens webcomic starring some of their best-known characters? DC should do its next weekly this way, or Marvel could do its next off-beat event support comic like that weird Civl War one that was about reporters browbeating Iron Man. It's weird this hasn't been done yet.
* finally, it's more not comics of the "holy crap, what's going on with newspapers" variety, but it definitely has an impact on one of the major comics industries: Editor & Publisherprovides a nice summary article on the cavalcade of strategies under consideration by papers dealing with the changing nature of that industry.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update This article appeared on international wires this morning, talking of an imminent terror threat in Denmark stemming in part from the 2005 publication of caricatures of Muhammed in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. I wanted to mention it because I'm not sure why on earth any government would issue such a dire, general warning, and also I'm pretty certain that something like this came out the week before three men were detained for plotting to kill cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and his wife.
Not Comics: Editor & Publisher On Reports About Time Spent Site Figures
This isn't comics in any way, shape or form, but I think it's worth paying attention to studies about newspaper site time-spent figures. The ability of newspaper to retain eyeballs is going to be a huge factor in deciding whether or not they make the transition into on-line media in a way that's able to sustain itself, and will definitely have an effect on how they might use licensed material like comics.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Justin Bilicki has won this year's Science Idol contest. Its apparent full name is the Science Idol: Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest. The winner, a Livonia, Michigan native now in Brooklyn, New York, has been put up for auction to benefit the contest's sponsor, the Union of Concerned Scientists. Over 20,000 people voted. The winner gets a cash prize, a trip to Washington, DC, and their cartoon will grace a calendar feature the 12 finalists.
* this interview with Scott Mitchell Rosenberg of the not really a comics company comics company Platinum is completely terrifying, and, I think, very much not good history. Speaking of which, does anyone out there have any idea what he's talking about in terms of a company that supposedly switched distributors on him in his distribution business days?
* I had a dream last night and in part of it I was reading a huge, over-sized issue of Legion of Super-Heroes featuring Jaime Hernandez on the art in a retro-'50s style. I don't want Jaime doing anything other than his own stories, but that would be sort of freakishly adorable, don't you think? Also: I need better dreams.
* the yearly ICv2.com interview with Paul Levitz is a must-read, if only to take the temperature of one of comics' more influential executives: part one, part two, part three. A lot of it is broad strategy-speak, but one thing worth noting is the undercurrent of praise for the Random House distribution deal and the offhand revelation that it has apparently had a noticeable effect on a trade series as far along in its volume numbers as Fables. That distribution switchover isn't yet six months old, I don't think. A few other things stand out for me. First, like I wrote earlier this summer, I don't think comics have always done well in a recession -- not even the cheap comics. Second, I've seriously never heard of Watchmen being touted as a gateway comic, let alone am willing to join Levitz and acknowledge that fact as widespread industry conventional wisdom. I've heard more people mention GI Joe than Watchmen as a book that got them from not reading comics to reading comics. Third, someone out there is likely to interpret Levitz suggesting that it's not editorial policy or general direction but execution that has put Marvel's series ahead of DC's this summer as Levitz blaming the talent. That's not what he's doing, but I'm certain someone will see it that way.
* finally, here's a fascinating essay by Steven Grant that uses as a jumping-off point the recent Robert Kirkman video exhorting folks to readjust their careers with self-directed creation at its core. I don't agree with a lot of it, but it's well-stated. The only thing I'd really object to outright is his assertion that smaller companies don't have effective promotional arms. I think some of them do. I actually think folks like Peggy Burns and Eric Reynolds are more effective than big company PR people in most cases. Their creators get just as much press as many big companies get for their creators, and in many cases these creators enjoy a just-as-high profile despite not moving nearly as many copies in the overall scheme of things. Part of this is that they're good (especially in relation to functionaries in your average big-book publisher PR departments, who can be nightmarish), part of it is that they're allowed to be good and don't have to function as a cog in various inter-company political games, and part of it is that they aren't also being asked to promote some goofy fictional character and/or the company as much as they are allowed to focus on creators.
This Isn't A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that jump out at me from this week's probably mostly accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here -- I might not buy any -- but were I in a comic book shop I would likely pick up the following and look them over, and this might be not a good thing as far as my retailer is concerned.
*****
HERBIE ARCHIVES HC VOL 01 $49.95
I think the whole comics-in-trade-form revolution has been leading up to this moment: Hardcover Herbie.
JUN080180 FINAL CRISIS LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #1 (OF 5) $3.99
I'm not much of a follower of big superhero events, and haven't been following this latest one, but a bunch of the Legion reboots fighting in a casualty-producing style with an evil Superboy might be fun. Huh. That's interesting. Suddenly I have a hankering for Mountain Dew and Cheetos.
MAY080258 SANDMAN PRESENTS DEAD BOY DETECTIVES TP (MR) $12.99 JUN082319 CAPTAIN AMERICA #41 $2.99
Your week in Ed Brubaker.
JUN082361 INCREDIBLE HERCULES #120 SI $2.99
Your week in well-liked second-tier Marvel books.
JUN082327 MARVEL 1985 #4 (OF 6) $3.99
This is still coming out? I wish it had photos, although I'm told the art is very nice.
JUN083955 ABANDONED CARS HC $22.99
Tim Lane's powerful debut book, sporty a lovely design and several muscular stories.
JUN083973 AMAZING REMARKABLE MONSIEUR LEOTARD SC $16.95
New Eddie Campbell! In my world, people greet the new Eddie Campbell by holding it at arm's length and dancing round and round in circles.
APR083839 DELPHINE #3 $7.95 APR083845 GROTESQUE #2 $7.95
Your Ignatz offerings of the week, both of them beautiful installments in attractive series.
MAY083867 MOME VOL 12 GN $14.99
Maybe the best issue of the anthology yet, with compelling work by five or six cartoonists and not an outright dud from anyone.
MAY084228 NAOKI URASAWAS MONSTER TP VOL 16 $9.99
The only manga that leapt out at me this week. That sounds kind of spooky, but I really just meant the idea of it leapt out at me not that the book launched itself off the shelf in my direction.
APR083922 SCORCHY SMITH AND THE ART OF NOEL SICKLES HC $49.99
The size and scope of this book would be incredible if it featured a really bad artist instead of a frequently thrilling one. A really nice book.
MAR083709 WHERE DEMENTED WENTED THE ART AND COMICS OF RORY HAYES $22.99
A great artist, a great comic book artist and a great American artist gets a little bit of his due.
JUN084472 JEWS & AMERICAN COMICS ILLUS HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART FORM $29.95
This is the latest from Paul Buhle, I think.
MAY084264 TRIPWIRE 2008 ANNUAL $14.95
As this magazine's 25th most powerful person in comics and by my count therefore the most powerful person per-dollar-earned in entertainment history, I command you to consider buying this resurgent publication about comics and pop culture.
MAY080061 MYSPACE DARK HORSE PRESENTS TP VOL 01
Is it weird to anyone else that DHC would want to replicate the anthology feel of its MySpace.com comics offerings with a print anthology? I think for most people the on-line anthology means those works get to print that step going to print.
MAY083868 TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE #4 (MR) $4.50
The best comic book of the week. I don't know, Frank, I think I could walk out of the store this week having thrown a $20 bill at the Sala, this book, the Captain America maybe and I guess the one where I might get to see Brainiac 5's arms pulled off and I'd be a satisified serial comics customer.
JUN080289 AIR #1 (MR) $2.99
This seems to me an interesting concept executed poorly. Kind of like the Bill Richardson presidential campaign.
*****
The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry.
To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back and probably drunk, try this.
The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock.
If I didn't list your new comic, it was on purpose. How do you like it, chump?
Are Syndicate Reps Misrepresenting For Better or For Worse Changes for Gain?
Editor & Publisher's Dave Astor talks about the changeover coming for Lynn Johnston's juggernaut For Better or For Worse as it shifts from its current state into a new strips/old strip mix centered on storylines marked from the strip's beginnings to the August 31 end point. I think. Astor astutely captures this blog mention that suggests that sales representatives from other syndicates may be misrepresenting the upcoming changeover in order to convince people to drop FBOFW, and, one supposes pick up one of their strips as a replacement.
This is a really bad thing if it's happening as claimed. Lying about another syndicate's offering is an awful sales tactic, and it's doubly so in this case if it's being used against a generally thought-of class act and hugely successful member of her profession like Lynn Johnston. In fact, I'm not sure how even mentioning another syndicate's offering can work as a sales technique; that just seems way too skeevy and pushy for that relationship as I've seen it exist in newsrooms past. But if it does, there's a huge danger with declining papers and slots that things could get ugly quickly despite the overwhelming number of honorable people working as syndicate sales staff.
On the other hand, I'm not even 100 percent sure what the hell is going on with For Better Or For Worse and part of my job is to know stuff like this. I haven't heard how long Universal Press Syndicate salespeople have been going out on this changeover and what they're saying to editors, but the "New Run" strategy wasn't made public knowledge until recently, well after the syndicate had to have known about it if deadlines provide reasonable parameters by which to measure the timing. So while lying is wrong and Lynn Johnston should be celebrated (and not second-guessed, you bozos) for doing whatever the heck she wants to do, I'm sympathetic to the idea that misinformation out there about FBOFW may exist or persist because the actual information has been so fluid and the last burst of it seems to me was delivered in ham-handed fashion.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* Danish Cartoons Controversy, the TV show.
* here's an article about the Human Rights Commission taking a pass on Ezra Lavant's republication of the Danish cartoons that suggests that the article passing muster isn't the issue; that fact that it's asked to is.
* Westergaard is also doing about being subpoenaed by Jordanian authorities to appear at trial in that country; he's sort of worried that such a trial might not be fair.
You Asked, They Answered: Tim Lane on Plans For Happy Hour In America Sammy Harkham: "Is 'Belligerent Piano' going to continue as a comic book? It sounded like that's what [cartoonist Tim Lane] wants to do, but I was unsure if that's what's going to happen."
Tim Lane: "Yeah, hopefully as installments in Happy Hour in America. Of course, affording print costs and everything else is another matter. Diamond pulled out as a distributor for Happy Hour after the second issue because sales were lower than they were for the first issue. I really haven't known what to do about it since then. I have no head for business or salesmanship or any of that. But I hate having it end there -- I just haven't figured out how to solve that riddle yet.
"Belligerent Piano is the complete opposite of the short stories making up Abandoned Cars, and the next two books of short stories. It's a vehicle for opposite interests -- a very, very long story as opposed to collected shorts. I'm trying to make a decision about how to continue producing Belligerent Piano, and Happy Hour in America, the comic in which Belligerent Piano would continue as installments. Belligerent Piano is going to continue one way or another, in some form. Right now it is taking the form of a serialized strip on my weblog.
I'm producing it that way for two reasons: One is because I really want to do a serialized strip, in the tradition of Dick Tracy, etc...I love that part of the tradition of comics; the other is because I want to keep the story going. The story itself is very long -- I always imagined it to be this huge, textured story that meanders and indulges in digressions and substories...on and on like that. But you have to take one step at a time, one panel at a time. I don't mind publishing it only on my weblog, but I'd love to have some alternative weekly papers want to publish it. I'd love to see it as a traditional strip -- among the clutter of news and ads surrounding it...just in print, in general. My tastes are too old fashioned to be completely satisfied with the internet. Again, like comic books, it's a shame that serialized comic dailies or weeklies are dying out. Not just one-time gag dailies or weeklies, but extended stories. I think Belligerent Piano works well as a strip, partly because it takes place in my surreal, absurd version of late 1940s America -- a time when serialized dailies were prevelant. There's that connection or link. There's also something great about having a deadline.
"The way I imagine it, the Belligerent Piano strips would be collected into stories that'd run in larger installments of Happy Hour, along with other stuff -- pieces from Folktales, for example, or experimental work. I really don't know what to do about Happy Hour. I want to keep it going because there's something personally very satisfying about fitting into that tradition of comics, however minimally.
"But the story of Belligerent Piano has developed over the years. I just need to figure out how to keep it alive, and right now it's kept alive on the weblog. There are also several short stories based on the characters of Belligerent Piano -- I don't know what to do about those."
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the cartoonist and prominent blogger Gerry Alanguilan alerts his readership to an anti-obscenity law being debated in the Philippines that if passed could have dreadful consequences.
* I totally missed this John K post on composition in the work of Harvey Kurtzman, Howie Post and Milt Gross.
* this analysis of the decline of the traditional comic book format is pretty much all supposition, no analysis, and it doesn't get into how important serial comic book sales are to the big American mainstream companies, which gives them a vested interest in seeing they continue above and beyond their general market prospects. Still, it's worth reading if you're interested in an outlook shared by a lot of comics readers.
* various comics professionals respond to Robert Kirkman's video from earlier this week that painted a vision of the American comic book industry he'd like to see.
* finally, that list of quality 1990s superhero comics has been supplemented with your suggestions, at least where I could through a dim memory of my own or through knowledge of the suggesting party's taste have at least a tiny bit of assurance that the suggested work was arguably good. It's funny, I'm not sure you'd come up with such a wide list of non-superhero works were you to ask about another grouping of comics.
* the Hero Initiative charitable group will publish a collection of Stan Lee's "Stan's Soapbox" editorials in November. I'm betting half of you just thought, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard" and half of you just thought, "Oh yeah, I'm totally getting that."
* starting with the fifth volume, publisher IDW is revamping its approach to their Dick Tracy reprint series to better accommodate the Sunday reprints. Considering how gorgeous those Sundays are, anything that shows them off more effectively is great news.
* the cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks does the full preview thing for December's The War At Ellsmere, coming from SLG.
* finally, Derek Kirk Kim is working on the follow-up to his forthcoming collaboration with Gene Yang, The Eternal Smile, to be published by First Second in 2009 (art sample below). The one he's working on now is a solo effort, also coming from First Second. I had barely heard of the collaboration, and hadn't heard at all about the solo work, so: fantastic.
Summons And Venue At Issue In Sine Case Going Before LICRA Next Month
The French comics news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com has an update on the status of the case against the cartoonist Maurice "Sine" Sinet, fired from Charlie Hebdo after a comment about the son of French President Nicholas Sarkozy was charged with anti-Semitism. This is some of interest not just because of the profession of the person making the comment and the job from which he was fired, but because Charlie Hebdo won a significant case brought against it by Muslim groups that objected to their coverage of the Danish Cartoons Controversy and is generally a beneficiary of free expression. Obviously, these developments could be interpreted as working against that general spirit.
A couple of the more interesting pieces of analysis mentioned in that article, if I'm getting it correctly, notes that Sine's September hearing before a committee designed to hear cases like this (LICRE) will take place in Lyons, not France and that a reading of the summons shows more at issue than the Sarkozy commentary. What I think is a much less interesting line of reasoning seems to be suggesting that the committee's decision will justify or fail to justify the reasons given for the firing by Sine's employer.
The comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com offers their usual array of lists, estimates and analysis regarding the performance of comic books and graphic novels in the Direct Market of comic and hobby shops, this time for July 2008.
The big news would have to be the performance of the Watchmen trade following the release of a trailer for its movie version that preceded the popular Dark Knight. The co-big news would be a decline in comic dollars spent extending to a half year now, making it a significant trend and not one that I think can be explained away via historical circumstance.
Among other stories worth noting is that the #2 and #3 issues on the serial comic book top 10 are from the X-Men franchise. Now, there's every reason to note that the issues in question are special issues that likely drove those books' sales pop, but right now the health of comics franchises in the Direct Market lies in their ability to drive top-of-chart numbers when it's possible for them to do so. Given Marvel's success reviving the non-mutant part of their publishing line-up, an increasingly heated performance from the X-Men books could sustain their relative juggernaut status for a while. No surprise that the Joker-driven Killing Joke edition led the various Batman franchise books getting a movie bump; little surprise that Trinity has yet to find its bottom.
Go, Read: Publishers Continue To Mull Over, Dabble In On-Line Options
Okay, I know that's a loaded headline, but I've never quite understood why a practical but all-in approach hasn't dominated comics publishers' strategies regarding the Internet rather than the excruciatingly slow toe in the pool approach we have now. This is a survey of where things stand at present. You likely won't be impressed.
Dick Hyacinth Asks: What Were The Good Superhero Comics Of The 1990s?
Here. While I'm not so interested in hashing out various opinions regarding the works, the fact I couldn't easily find a list of half-way decent or well-regarded superhero comics from the decade of Image and Marvels struck me as kind of odd, so I thought I'd make one of my own here for future reference.
Please note that I said "half-way decent or well-regarded," and didn't say "books I'd endorse as the best books ever and defend against all comers." In fact, some of these I personally don't like at all, and maybe one (not the one you think) would make a personal top 100 comics of the decade list. But I'm sure there were a lot of pretty good superhero comics that decade. Weren't there? Here's what I could come up with:
* 1963, Alan Moore and Various
* Ambush Bug Nothing Special, Robert Loren Fleming and Keith Giffen
* Animal Man, Peter Milligan
* Astro City, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
* Aztek the Ultimate Man, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar and N. Steven Harris
* Avengers, Kurt Busiek and George Perez
* Batman: Blades, James Robinson and Tim Sale
* Batman: Faces, Matt Wagner
* Batman: Gothic, Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson
* Batman/Grendel, Matt Wagner
* Batman: Mad Love, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm
* Batman: The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
* Black Panther, Christopher Priest and Mark Texeira
* Cable, Joe Casey and Jose Ladronn
* Captain America, Mark Wait and Ron Garney (their first run)
* Chase, D. Curtis Johnson and JH Williams
* Daredevil, Karl Kesel and Cary Nord
* Daredevil, Karl Kesel/Joe Kelly and Gene Colan
* Daredevil: Man Without Fear, Frank Miller and John Romita Jr.
* Deadpool, Joe Kelly and Various
* Dr. Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You Stephen? Marc Andreyko and P. Craig Russell
* final run of comics in Animal Man and Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison and Various
* final run of comics in Legion of Super-Heroes by Keith Giffen and Tom Bierbaum and Mary Bierbaum
* final run of comics in Suicide Squad, John Ostrander
* final run of comics in Zot!, Scott McCloud
* Elektra Lives Again, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
* Enigma, Duncan Fegredo and Peter Milligan
* Excalibur, Alan Davis' run
* Firearm, James Robinson and Various
* Flaming Carrot, Bob Burden
* Flash, Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo
* Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
* Foolkiller, Steve Gerber
* Grendel Tales, Various
* Hitman, Garth Ennis and John McCrea
* Incredible Hulk, Peter David and Variouis Including Dale Keown and Gary Frank
* Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect, Peter David and George Perez
* Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman, Roger Stern and Steve Rude
* JLA, Grant Morrison and Howard Porter
* John Byrne's Next Men, John Byrne
* Judge Dredd, John Wagner
* Kingdom Come, Mark Waid and Alex Ross
* Madman by Mike Allred
* Marvels, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross
* MAXX, Sam Kieth
* Miracleman, Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham
* New Warriors #1-25, Fabian Niceza and Mark Bagley
* Nexus: Alien Justice, Mike Baron and Steve Rude
* Nexus: Executioner's Song, Mike Baron and Steve Rude
* Nexus: Nightmare in Blue, Mike Baron and Steve Rude
* Nexus: The Origin, Mike Baron and Steve Rude
* Nexus: The Wages of Sin, Mike Baron and Steve Rude
* Power & Glory, Howard Chaykin
* Quantum and Woody, Christopher Priest and M.D. Bright
* Sandman Mystery Theatre, Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle and Guy Davis
* Savage Dragon, Erik Larsen
* Spectacular Spider-Man, JM Dematteis and Sal Buscema
* Starman, James Robinson and Tony Harris
* Stormwatch (final issues)/The Authority, Warren Ellis and Various Including Bryan Hitch
* Superman Adventures Scott McCloud/Mark Millar Issues
* Superman For All Seasons, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
* Supreme, Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse
* "The American Evolution," Legends of the DC Universe #14, Mark Evanier and Steve Rude
* The Batman Adventures, Kelley Puckett and Mike Parobeck
* The Demon Garth Ennis and John McCrea
* The Golden Age, James Robinson and Paul Smith
* The Invisbles, Grant Morrison and Various
* The Jam, Bernie Mireault
* Untold Tales of Spider-Man, Kurt Buisek and Pat Oliffe
* Vigilante: City Lights, Prarie Justice, James Robinson and Tony Salmons
* WildCATS Vol. 2, Various
* World's Finest, Dave Gibbons and Steve Rude
* Youngblood, Alan Moore and Steve Skroce
Others written in that I've either 1) never seen or heard of, 2) seen but thought they were so terrible I can't even begin to see someone else's view that they're good, or 3) haven't seen or barely seen and just don't know the person recommending them to me so I can't speak for their taste, include: Impulse, Nightwing, Robin, Young Justice, Chronos, DC One Million, Tangent Comics, Batman: No Man's Land, Hourman, Resurrection Man, JLA: The Nail, Spider-Man 2099, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Justice League Europe, Avengers #314-318, Thunderbolts, New Warriors, JLA Year One, Supergirl, Aquaman, Static, Catalysts: Agents of Change, Barb Wire, Swamp Thing (Morrison and Millar), Ghost, Prime, Violator, Will to Power, Thor (DeFalco and Frenz), Thunderstrike, Maximum Carnage, The Clone Saga.
The most depressing letters were those that 1) thought I was speaking about all comics not just superheroes, 2) subsequently upbraided me for Hellboy and Sandman not being on the list rather than noting the absence of ACME Novelty Library and Palestine.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* it's refreshing to hear about a cartoonist resigning instead of being fired, and the reason being a change in owners as opposed to a massive drop in circulation and ad revenues. One has to go to Nepal for such an article, but still.
* not comics: I suppose this is a big story based on the fact that it hints at possibly denying people some future movie-watching pleasures and it may unleash a blogosphere's worth of self-appointed legal experts and alarmed headline writers. It's not something about which I can generate a lot of passion until it has an impact on graphic novel sales, which is a long way and two or three maneuvers that may never happen off.
* not comics: it's also hard for me to get worked up about prospective movie deals as news, but I'd certainly go see a decent movie based on the Brubaker/Phillips comic book Sleeper. There might be something to the fact that the article mentions the rights situation as complicated; that could mean a lot of things, though.
* I greatly enjoyed this broad survey article about the value of editorial cartoonists to the history of the newspaper in Australia. Even the opening lines are funny.
* there's a really long and for-mainstream-audience-as-well interview with Jeff Smith up at the PBS NewsHour site.
* finally, Franklin Harris provides Reason with a short history of EC Comics; I'm not skilled enough with the history of this period to be able to double-check it as history just by looking at it, though.
Watching the Watchmen Watchers 02 It may just be me, but I'm dubious of a line of reasoning that seems to be developing around Alan Moore and his disinterest in the forthcoming movie adaptation of the Watchmen series he wrote and co-created with artist Dave Gibbons. It feels to me that what I'm reading about Moore's lack of interest tends to brush past the writer's well-documented tussles with the Time Warner-owned DC Comics publishing arm if favor of an interpretation that Moore's something of a grumpy gus that didn't like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie and thought 300 was kind of stupid.
I'm a grumpy gus that didn't like LOEG and thought 300 was kind of stupid.
Alan Moore, on the other hand, is a renowned comics author that has objected to his treatment at DC Comics, the company whose corporate logo will precede this film. Some of those incidents of dissatisfaction specifically touch on Watchmen. Evidence suggests Moore would not have worked with the company in recent memory were it not for finding himself in a very specific quandary about where his then-publisher ended up and at what time in those projects' development they ended up there -- in spirit, at least, this is a close to two decades break with the publisher. According to public statements, Moore has made the decision to publish future work through Top Shelf, not DC, based in great part on his appraisal of how each entity has treated him.
You can debate the reasonableness of Moore's objections and the wisdom of his resulting choices. You can talk of his specific unwillingness to grant that the Watchmen movie could be of any interest at all in terms of his limited but negative past experiences with film based on his work. You can even mention his take on 300, a criticism he made.
But I think you're only telling part of the story. The easy part.
The talented Argentinian illustrator Carlos Meglia passed away early Friday from aortic complications that put him in the hospital on the 12th and were perhaps related to ongoing heart problems including a previous surgery. He was 50 years old.
Meglia was born in 1957 in Quilmes, about 10 miles outside of Buenos Aires. He entered into the school of Fine Arts because of a proclivity for drawing. He began work at an early age as well, assisting the artist Oswal beginning in 1974. In 1976 his own byline was established on illustrations for the magazine El Pendulo and some book cover work. He pursued book illustration work in the remainder of that decade, expanding to magazine illustration in the '80s from a variety of platforms. According to an interview he gave in 1994, he also taught at the school where he himself was trained.
His comics work began in 1983 when he contributed a few short stories to an already existing client, the publisher Record. He moved into animation in the middle part of that decade, working on properties such as The Smurfs, Super-Friends, The Jetsons and Scooby Doo.
In 1987 he teamed with Carlos Trillo on the series Irish Coffee. The pair launched the wild fantasy series Cybersix four years later; that series may have been Meglia's best-known and most highly-regarded work. In that 1994 interview he described his relationship with Trillo as a special one. The interview also suggests that Meglia may have been producing somewhere between 100 and 250 pages per month with a team of eight on Cybersix, which would be astonishing. By the mid-'90s, that work found purchase in the European market.
Also in the 1990s, Meglia moved to Spain and began to work for the North American comics market, primarily for Dark Horse and DC. He worked on the Star Wars, Elektra, Spyboy and Superman franchises, and worked on the DC/Dark Horse crossover Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle. He received an award described as the Caran D'Ache in 1995 in Rome. He was an influence on several illustrators working in a comics style reminiscent of animation, including Humberto Ramos, who remembers his friend in this blog posting.
In recent years his work had been published through Soleil, including the series Canari with collaborator Crisse. His last published work was a first issue of Red Song with Trillo. Upon his passing, friends and collaborators mentioned his lively personality and sense of humor, the palpable life force they were astonished to discover had been extinguished. Testimonials have flooded the the blog kept in his name. It is believed he is survived by a wife and at least one child, a son.
please note: a few sources, including Ramos, have Meglia passing away on August 14 rather than August 15
Missed It: Magazine Express Offering Comics Subs Through Amazon.com
I had three e-mails this morning asking after the fact that Amazon.com vendor Magazine Express, Inc. is apparently offering comics subscriptions through Amazon.com. This mean that someone out there almost certainly posted something about it, and I apologize to that person. On the flip side, I have no idea if this service has been available five days or five years.
It looks like this is just a discount service that hooks you up with a traditional from-the-company mail-order subscription, the kind they used to offer through those ads that had the Hulk dressed up as Santa or whatever and that came in that brown paper sleeve that everyone of a certain age has registered as a sense memory. As I don't think the Marvel buttons even work, and The Comics Journal and Comics Revue are near the top of the bestseller list, I can't imagine this program is moving a ton of copies, just as from-the-company subs aren't really a super-popular option in most cases for most fans, particularly fans with options elsewhere.
I guess it bears watching. The ability to cancel your subscription and get money back through Amazon.com's mechanisms (I think that's how it would work) seems pretty appealing. Subscriptions and fealty to certain titles is a good way for kids to enjoy comics, so it could have an effect on that segment of the market. If it works, I suppose more could be done in terms of someone trying to replicate a comic shop experience through Amazon.com, although the non-returnability of items pretty much keeps that from happening unless some major deal were reached.
Our Condolences to the Greenbergers
Longtime comics industry veteran and author Bob Greenberger and the Greenberger family lost son Robbie, 20 years old, to cancer, it was announced late last week. Many comics fans and comics industry members had become aware of Robbie Greenberger's situation through on-line updates and through comics/science fiction convention circles. Greenberger spoke of how proud he was of what his son had endured to date in a June interview on this site. The Greenbergers and Robbie's extensive mosaic of friends and acquaintances have our deepest sympathy. A burial is planned for early this afternoon.
Donations can be made to the charities indicated here.
Rene Clemente was apparently a veteran Filipino comics artist with a productive career perhaps focused on romance comics or that industry's equivalent, partnering with the writers Georgina De Guzman and Elena M. Patron, among others. He worked as RB Clemente. No date of birth was given. The exact date of Mr. Clemente's death wasn't provided either, although it looks like the postings about it occurred late last week. Click through the image above to go Gerry Alanguilan's write-up on the artist's passing and a better look at his art.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* here's the awe-inspiring shot of the line for the weekend just past's Comiket you've been looking for. Holy Guacamole. There's a nice bloggish report in English accompanying that photo and many others like it: Day One, Day Two, Day Three.
* there is a long post and longer comments thread here about the $125 price tag borne by the forthcoming Kramers Ergot Vol. 7. Participants include me and -- much more importantly -- KE publisher Alvin Buenaventura. It may be of some interest to a few of you. I'll warn you that a couple of friends that went there when I sent them the link in an e-mail wrote back to call me names. I don't think the issue is of such a compelling, intricate nature that it necessarily flatters 100-post comments threads, and in fact the lengthy nature of the response thread may distort more than it enlightens. I remain fairly baffled by the reactions, period, and I particularly don't get the basis of responses beyond the gut consumer impulse yay or nay. It sure gets a thorough workout, though, and I know that for some folks a long, semi-dysfunctional industry issues thread is frosting straight from the can.
* the retailer Brian Hibbs continues his series on changes at his store brought about by the use of a POS system and what it's told him about what sells.
* the writer Matt Maxwell points out that the X-Men moving in storyline to San Francisco in part to draw out its persecuted minority metaphor isn't exactly a groundbreaking move considering the title's always been about its persecuted minority metaphor. Sean Collins argues that a storyline elimination a few years back of all mutants not the elite fighting mutants that might end up on cartoons and the baddies who occasionally throw down with them kind of dilutes the metaphor no matter where they live.
* Mark Evanier writes about John DiBello's multi-venue post on sexual harassment at the San Diego Con. He also urges folks to stop complaining -- the more general complaints, not the serious ones like DiBello's -- and find the con they want to attend in the middle of the con that makes them grumpy.
* speaking of cons in a way that embraces a not-comics posting, the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com looks at the just-concluded gaming show Gen Con for clues that weaknesses in the economy or changes resulting from a Chapter 11 filing might have a drastic effect on the show. The first of those two factors is something in which comics-related shows might evince a particular interest.
* finally, some dog days of summer not comics action: many people are enjoying this pleasant, not really essential, deleted scene from the pleasant, not really essential Iron Man movie that will end this summer as the #2 movie even though it seems like it opened three years ago. Seriously, dude: Iron Man will beat Indiana Jones, at least here in the US. Comics nerds everywhere are starting to feel bad for not wishing for world peace back in 1982. Or you can make yourself a t-shirt.
Abandoned Cars came out of nowhere for me. I has seen Tim Lane's work here and there, things like the attractive cover he did for the latest Hotwire anthology. Nothing about those projects had prepared me to process what was between the covers of this new, handsome hardcover volume. Lane's work reminds me a lot of the post-underground generation that kind of fell to the wayside in the mid-1990s in favor of the humorists, fantasists and more strictly literary-minded and formalist crowd. If this were 1993, we'd be getting Lane's comics in a $2.95 black and white comic book four times a year and Denny Eichhorn would be banging down his door for a chance to work with him in Real Stuff. Lane's best comics are chilling, deeply melancholy character studies told with straight-forward prose and considerable visual panache. His web site shows that he's a talented illustrator and restlessly creative cartoonist. I hope Abandoned Cars isn't the last volume we see from Lane; indeed, he has two more volumes planned in the same vein. I enjoyed my brief contact with him in the course of preparing this interview, and thank him for his time.
*****
TOM SPURGEON: When I was researching for this interview I looked at your web site and unless I'm mistaken, most of what you've put up you've put up in the last several weeks. What caused you to go on-line in such a big way so recently?
SPURGEON: I am. Sorry. Is there another web presence somewhere?
LANE: My website, jackienoname.com, has been up for a long time -- so long, in fact, that it hasn't been updated for a couple of years. My website guy moved to Thailand, and since I don't know anything about website construction, the jackienoname.com site came to a halt after that. I recently put up the weblog in order to display some of my "non-commercial art" related work, such as Abandoned Cars. The jackienoname.com site is pretty much dedicated to illustration work I've done for clients.
SPURGEON: Your book reminds me a lot of a certain kind of post-underground comic that you really don't see right now. Can you talk about your comics and illustration influences, who you find interesting and who might directly inform you work as it exists today?
LANE: I think the biggest, earliest, and most sustaining influence on my work, in terms of comics, is Will Eisner -- specifically The Spirit. When I was growing up, during the mid to late 1980s, Kitchen Sink Press was reprinting all of those great Spirit comics from the 1940s, and I couldn't get enough of them. I'm a fan of his graphic novels, too, but, for me, it was The Spirit that really resonated, got me interested in comics. I still refer to them, especially the ones created during the late 1940s, where the dynamic contrasts of black & white in his ink work, the shifting perspectives, make it very evident that Eisner was influenced by film noir. Eisner's collected Spirit material offers some of the greatest examples of everything from story pacing, page design and panel arrangement, etc, that I can think of -- everything about that period of his work seems innovative. And very fun. His splash pages from that era are incredible, too -- they just suck you right into the story.
Also reprinted in the '80s were the old pre-comics code ECSuspenstories. That material really had an impact on me, too. The work of Johnny Craig was, and still is, a big influence on me. But also Al Feldstein, Jack Cole, Jack Kamen, Wally Wood. Those Crime/Shock Suspenstories have the same kind of charm and appeal that old radio dramas from the '40s and '50s have -- radio dramas like Suspense, Inner Sanctum, Escape. And I think some of those pre-comics code tales are gruesome, even by today's standards.
I really love those old Dick Tracy newspaper dailies. I love the surreal meandering nature those stories can sometimes have about them. The oddness of the stories. In certain cases, you get the sense that Chester Gould wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen in the next episode, and I really love that about them. I might be wrong about that -- perhaps he had the structure of each story nailed down long before he put pencil to the page. But there's a real lively fluidity to those stories, filled with the absurd. Those characters: The Brow, Pruneface, Shakey... every time I look at Shakey, for instance, I'm amazed by the simplicity and originality of Gould's artistic choices, the way he chose to depict a human face.
The underground comics of the '60s have had less of an impact on me, although I really appreciate the work of Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez. I've had a harder time tracking down compilations of Spain's work, and that's been very frustrating -- if you know of any, please let me know. I'd love to get my hands on them.
I've learned a great deal about overall page design and unique panel arrangements by looking at the comics of Glenn Head, especially his recent work. You can look at some of those pages for hours; they're really dazzling and absurd, but beneath the apparent craziness are some incredibly disciplined choices.
Recently I've gotten to be a big fan of Kim Deitch. I love his writing style, especially Alias, the Cat. I love how he plays the reader -- balances between believability and hogwash. He tells a yarn in what I think of as the old fashion Irish way. My Irish grandmother used to tell stories like that, a talent passed down to my father. The kind of story that leaves you wondering if the story is true or not, then reveals itself in the end. That's skill, and it takes real talent to keep your audience guessing -- "paddling in the water," so to speak. Deitch does that, and he's extremely good at it -- I'm thinking particularly of chapter two of Alias. I love the multi-layered aspect of his stories, too: their depth and texture. Like with the first chapter of Alias: a guy is telling a story about guy telling a story about a guy who told a story.
Charles Burns has been very influential, even pivotal. I'm constantly impressed with the precision of his imagery, his line work. It almost doesn't look like it was drawn by a human being, but a machine instead. It's incredible. That style works for him so well, but for myself, I'm glad I couldn't do that; I like there to be evidence of the human hand, the person who rendered the drawing. It's important -- even integral -- to the kind of stories I'm interested in writing.
Geof Darrow left a big impression on me, too... but I think I'm getting a little too long-winded here.
SPURGEON: To shift gears a bit, am I to understand that you went through a period of wandering around and living in different places in America, maybe even having some of the experiences that later worked their way into this collection? What caused you to set out to these different places? What put you finally in St Louis?
LANE: Yes. Before I moved to St Louis a couple of years ago, I moved around a lot. Throughout my twenties, especially. And I traveled by land as much as possible -- buses, trains, cars. The landscape is an important element to the character of every part of the world, I suppose, but I think it's especially true in America. It's been important for me to see the way the landscape changes as you move from one part of the country to another. On a plane, you don't get that -- the dramatic changes in the land, the distances between places. Also, you meet people on trains and buses. You're with them for a long time. People start talking. Particularly on trains.
My experience has been that people who take Amtrak are mostly travelers who want to see the country, want to talk to people -- that's why they're doing it. Or maybe I just keep running into the people who are like that. I once spent a couple of days traveling from Oakland to Minneapolis with a guy who'd written a country song that sold to a well-known musician. He was living on the money he made, traveling around the country. I never saw him again, but for a couple days, we were traveling friends. Those are the kind of people you meet, and you learn a lot from them. Most of the characters in Abandoned Cars are directly related to people I've known -- some combination between real and imagined people. The accuracy to their depictions varies somewhat. I've always been a collector of conversations. Living in different places is helpful in collecting a huge arsenal of potential material. But it isolates you, too. You're always on the outside looking in.
One of the main reasons I moved to St Louis was to work on comics more seriously. Before that, I was living in New York City, and was constantly working freelance illustration jobs just in order to keep my head above water. I really loved all that -- the illustration business -- but illustration has always been for me a means to an end. I knew if I wanted to get anything else done, I'd have to go somewhere else. I had lived briefly in St Louis once before, and knew of this neighborhood called Soulard. It seemed the perfect place for me to live while I worked on comics -- at only a quarter the price I was paying in rent at my last apartment in New York, which was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn -- not so great a neighborhood, at the time.
SPURGEON: I hear different things about St Louis as a city for artists. There are certainly some talented younger cartoonists that live there, and I hear that it's one of those towns that offers some of the amenities of a city without some of the over-gentrified high rents and insular scenes that other cities may have. What is it like for you to live there as an artist?
LANE: St Louis is a great old American city. You still have in St Louis great, gritty vestiges of the American past. It's also a city deeply rooted in American mythology. Stagger Lee shot Billy Lyons here. Frankie shot Johnny here. And you can see Chuck Berry perform nearly every month at a bar/restaurant called Blueberry Hill. To me, that's an incredible thing to experience hearing live, at a small venue, that unique guitar sound, which is practically as familiar as your own mother's voice. If you're into the blues, rhythm & blues, soul, etc, St Louis is a great city to live in. There's a stretch on Broadway -- downtown St Louis -- where, at night, out on the street, you can hear the best lives blues or rhythm & blues coming from three different bars simultaneously, while freight trains roll toward the Mississippi on the railroad bridges overhead. Not everybody would think of that as attractive, but I do. The only bad thing about St Louis is the summer's stifling heat and humidity. I grew up in Minnesota; the heat is brutal if you're from the north.
SPURGEON: You mention that you went through a period where you were very serious about your art and then that you wanted to get back into comics as a reaction to what was perhaps a specific kind of young man's feelings toward making art. Is that fair? What finally set you on the path to doing comics?
LANE: I think everyone with a creative inclination goes through a period, usually just after college, of discerning -- or having to discern -- the nature and uniqueness of their creative voice. It's one thing to exercise that inclination in the relatively safe environment of a college campus, but very much another thing when you're out their on your own, facing the pressures of daily life. And it's at this point when your idealism has to stand up to practical realities, as well. Paul Auster writes well of this in his book Hand to Mouth. He writes about how -- and I'm paraphrasing -- between his late twenties and early thirties, everything he touched turned to ruin. I love the way he phrases that. He goes on to talk about the anxieties of trying to reconcile wanting to communicate as an artist against the enormous pressures of practical living. For myself, that process involved coming back to comics -- or coming back to the things that first inspired me to communicate creatively. The important intuitive things that existed before pretensions had the chance to develop.
SPURGEON: Your work will no doubt remind people of a lot of mid-century authors: John Fante perhaps, and maybe some pulp writers -- your back cover text mentions Jim Thompson. Are there writers that you feel are an influence on your work? Are there specific difficulties in working a prose influence into comics?
LANE: The pulp writers comparison in the PR material for Abandoned Cars wasn't made by me. I've read Jim Thompson, but haven't read David Goodis. I've only read one book by John Fante, and I don't remember much of it. A long time ago, I went through a phase of reading that kind of fiction: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain. I think it's great, but I wouldn't say it's had a huge influence on me, in terms of writing style. That comparison surprises me; I don't really see it. Writers, though, have made more of an impression on my life than anything else. I mention that -- perhaps too much -- in the first part of "Spirit." Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller... those guys really helped shaped my life in every way -- and it was largely because of them that I began traveling and, of course, writing.
Jack Kerouac stands out as the biggest influence when I was in and just out of college. His writing doesn't affect me like it once did. He's definitely a very young man's writer. But whatever one thinks of his writing, in terms of technique and style, he created a world so vivid you can touch it. I could go on forever about that stuff -- with all of the writers I mentioned. I won't bore you with it too much more. But the older I get, the more surprising it is to me that a guy like Kerouac ever even existed. He really represents to me the ideal of an artist -- his dedication to his craft, his ability to so clearly describe his vision, his experimentation, on and on.
In terms of the writers most influential to the writing in Abandoned Cars, I'd include Raymond Carver, the short stories of Denis Johnson, Hemingway, Nelson Algren. I'm really into learning how to craft beautiful, tight graphic short stories. Adrian Tomine is excellent at the graphic short story, in my opinion. I really admire his work. I've got a lot to learn, but am very excited about that process.
Which leads to your question about the difficulties in working a prose influence into comics. All of the stories in Abandoned Cars began as literary short stories -- written out in prose form. I always planned on them being comics, but it was more natural for me to write them out in prose form first. It's taken a lot of pages to realize that that doesn't always work. Most of these stories were also very loosely constructed -- in some cases, I wasn't sure how they would end, but I'd be working on inking the first pages already anyway. The balance of text and image needs to be equal, overall, in comics. The work in Abandoned Cars doesn't always express that. Those are some of the things I'm trying to learn how to do better.
SPURGEON: A few of your more effective works in Abandoned Cars are essentially character studies as much as they are narratives that detail an incident. What draws you to using comics in that way, what do you hope to achieve in taking that kind of a snapshot of someone, as in "To Be Happy" or "The Drive Home"?
LANE: That question relates to another influence on Abandoned Cars: an album by Bruce Springsteen called Nebraska. It's a very stripped-down acoustic album -- he apparently recorded it on an 8-track in his living room -- filled with, in essence, short stories that, when strung together, make up a bigger story -- or suggest a theme about American life. Each one of the songs speaks in the language of the characters. Springsteen is a great storyteller, and he paints with a broad brush.
In the two stories you mentioned -- those stories about John -- as in many of the stories, I wanted to capture the language of the character and let them tell their own stories. With John, I wanted him to seem like he really didn't know what went wrong, why his marriage ended, but in his narration he inadvertently tells us what went wrong. We know why things didn't work out (or at least we have a pretty good idea), even though he -- at this point in his life -- doesn't. That's one of the things about just talking to people that's interesting: How much they reveal about themselves without intending to. Another thing about a character snapshot is that it allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. In a sense, I, as the writer, am not there. It's just John talking. But he's describing in his casual way incidents in his life that were critical.
SPURGEON: Some of your most compelling pages bring the reader's eye back away from the character to capture an element of their surroundings; is that just a matter of varying the visual in order to keep a page interesting, or are there thematic concern in how you frame an individual panel.
LANE: It's both. In the more recently done stories, my intention was to create a sense of hugeness to the landscape -- or, to a greater extent, the "Great American Mythological Drama," which is the theme binding all of these stories together -- by juxtaposing these smaller, more individual, ordinary narratives against the bigger things surrounding them. My hope is that it gives the sense that these characters are lost in a kind of enormous landscape – both a figurative and literal landscape... that the angles create a sense of tension and anxiety, like in film noir movies.
I've read that early American pioneers spoke of the "sublime" when they spoke of the American wilderness. By that, they meant they were struck by its awesome beauty, but they were terrified, as well. Try to imagine how frightening the Alleghenies must've been, if you had no frame of reference. What lay beyond was a complete mystery. I'd be terrified, too. I think that awesomeness still exists today, only in different ways. In an American story, I believe Nature is a character.
SPURGEON: You wrote a fascinating essay about your Stagger Lee strip in which you talk about other cartoonists' attempts to work with that legend and suggest that you're all part of the rich tapestry of interpretation and meaning that surrounds that particularly folk story. One thing I found interesting was that you talked that at first you were going to work with the legend in terms of an old-time newspaper format, but the resulting work didn't have very much of that flavor at all. How in this case did subject matter dictate what you did with the material?
LANE: I guess I meant the old newspaper daily concept in very general terms. You're right, though: Now that you mention it, those Stagger Lee episodes don't look much like old Dick Tracy strips, in terms of format. But the Stagger Lee story ran as a serial at first: It has that in common with the newspaper dailies, if nothing else. The weekly You Are Here column had to work within a pre-established format -- you have to take what you can get, right? Old newspaper dailies were the idea behind the conceptual approach to the Stagger Lee story. Maybe that's where the similarity ends.
SPURGEON: Did you design the book? That has to be one of the more handsome debut works I've seen.
LANE: Thank you! I really appreciate that. Or are you making fun of me?
SPURGEON: No! [laughs].
LANE: Yes, I designed Abandoned Cars -- Fantagraphics was great about letting me do what I wanted. They were great about everything. I had very specific ideas about how the book should look, and how it should be paced -- they really seemed to appreciate that. The main "fictional" portion of the book is sandwiched by the young and old portraits of Marlon Brando. They are the book ends. I just wish I could draw portraits better; I don't know if people are recognizing Brando. It's an important element to the book, that recognition.
SPURGEON: Did you assemble the work that appeared in Abandoned Cars? Was there anything to going back over so much work and putting it together in book form? How did you feel about the finished product?
LANE: That's a tough question to answer because there are so many elements to consider, and I've only had my own final copy for a short time. I'm happy with the finished product overall. And, yes, I assembled all of the work. Those stories were always meant to be together.
I think the quality of the work, from story to story, definitely indic ates the passage of time -- or more appropriately, the development of skill over the passage of time. These stories span about six years. The earliest story is "Ghost Road," the last was "Spirit, Part 3." The story of "Ghost Road" makes me wince a little. But thematically it fits in very significantly. So, although I'm not thrilled with its writing, I believe it serves its purpose well in the greater context of the book, however cumbersomely -- and I'm very glad I could include a fabrication of Art Bell's Coast to Coast coming from the radio.
Overall, I think Abandoned Cars is a fairly good start. For all of its faults, I can look at it as an accurate representation of myself, artistically and as a human being, and that means a great deal to me. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with it. But I'm still a long ways from being as good as I want to be.
SPURGEON: What's next for you, Tim?
LANE:Abandoned Cars is the first book of graphic short stories in a series of three -- the next two are tentatively titled Folktales and The Believers. There were lots of stories in varying stages of development that didn't get into Abandoned Cars, which are all connected by the same umbrella theme. Mostly these will all be stories about new characters, but ones already introduced in Abandoned Cars -- such as John and the Manic Depressive from Another Planet -- will return, sometimes as background characters, sometimes as central characters, at various stages in their lives -- and not necessarily chronologically ordered. Also, a few who were background characters in Abandoned Cars will appear as central characters in the next books. I'm working on those stories now.
I've been working on the story for a separate graphic novel, as well -- unrelated to the three books of short stories. Beyond that, I'm trying to work out a story called Belligerent Piano -- a story I've been working on, on and off, for a long time -- as a weekly strip, in the style of Dick Tracy or Steve Canyon. Dan Nadel recently put out a book called Art Out of Time. In it are some incredible and weird old daily strips. My favorite is Dauntless Durham of the USA. Even it's title makes you smile and wonder "who the hell is that?!" Although you need a magnifying glass to read it -- sort of fun in itself! That stuff sort of inspired me to try a weekly strip. I'm publishing that on my weblog. But it takes a back seat to these other projects.
I'd really like to keep producing material for these next books, and other material that isn't meant to go anywhere else, in a regular pamphlet -- or what used to be called a comic book (to me, it doesn't feel comfortable calling them "pamphlets"). That's what my comic book Happy Hour in America was supposed to be about. Happy Hour was self-published, and distributed by a few distributors (Diamond, FM International, Last Gasp, and Cold Cut -- if I remember right -- but nobody seems to have ever heard of it. I really suck at self-promotion, so I'm not a good candidate for publishing my own stuff. But it would be great to have that regular outlet. I myself love that stuff. With Daniel Clowes' Eightball, although he might be working on installments of a graphic novel -- things that will eventually be published as a graphic novel -- you still get things in it that are unique to that particular issue of Eightball. Also, it seems to me that comic books are an important part of the tradition of comics. I guess people aren't buying comic book pamphlets anymore. It would be a shame to watch that die because they don't sell as well as they used to. Some things should be kept alive, just because.
*****
Abandoned Cars, Tim Lane, Fantagraphics Books, Hardcover, 128 pages, 1560979186 (ISBN10), 9781560979180 (ISBN13), September 2008, $22.95.
FFF Results Post #131 -- Armed, Dangerous
On Friday afternoon, participating CR readers were asked to "Name Five Weapons From Comics You Wouldn't Mind Using In An Emergency, Or Just Otherwise Think Are Cool" Here are the results.
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. Gigantor
2. Mjolnir
3. The Black Knight's Ebony Blade
4. Jon Sable's broom-handle Mauser
5. Green Arrow's Boxing Glove Arrow
*****
Gil Roth
1. Daredevil's billyclub
2. Ultimate Nullifier
Well, that pretty much runs the gamut, sad to say.
1. The Green Goblin's Pumpkin Bombs
2. Hellboy's Right Hand of Doom (Someone else had it first, so I think it qualifies as a kind of sort of weapon. I think.)
3. Ronan the Accuser's hammer-thing
4. The Trapster's paste guns (god help me)
5. Herbie Popnecker's lollipops
*****
Nat Gertler
1. This here lollipop
2. Wolverine, as occasionally used ballistically by Colossus (yes, of course I could throw him. He's short. And Canadian.)
3. Fleegle's Evil Eye
4. The ass-kicking boot of a Rube Goldberg machine
5. The Phantom's ring - the one he punches the jaw of bad people with to leave them with a mark that gets them shunned by everyone (not the one he punches the jaw of good people with to get them treated kindly.)
1. Johnny Alpha's variable cartridge Westinghouse blaster
2. The Space-Boomerang Trap from The Flash # 124
3. Charles Fort's cricket bat from Necronauts
4. The Painting That Ate Paris
5. Mjolnir
*****
Wirt "Erik" Salthouse
1 Calvin's transmorgofier gun
2 Motherbox
3 Green Lantern's Power Ring
4 Ignatz's Brick
5 Schmoos
*****
Buzz Dixon
1. The Arcadia
2. The Cosmic Cube
3. The Batarang
4. Ultra-rare Cinnanom Flavored Lollipop
5. Kona's M-60 machine gun
*****
Jason Michelitch
1. Madman's Yo-Yo
2. Batarang
3. Any one of the Mandarin's rings
4. The Ultimate Nullifier
5. Any one of Herbie Popnecker's lollipops
1. The Batarang
2. Spider-Man's Web-shooter
3. Pinky Pinkerton's Umbrella
4. Lulu Moppet's Water Pistol filled with purple-staining Beebleberry juice ... and when all else fails,
5. The Cosmic Cube
*****
Tom Bondurant
Three from American Flagg!:
1. BuzzKnucks (TM) -- brass knuckles with built-in electro-shock
2. The Snowball 99 (a/k/a Caligari's Equalizer) -- fires frozen globes of industrial-strength Somnambutol (TM) and puts miscreants to sleep to the distinctive sounds of PAPAPAOOOO MOW MOW
3. The .666 Magrum Automatic ("The Mark Of The Beast")
And, what the heck, I'll be unoriginal:
4. Captain America's shield
5. A Green Lantern power ring
*****
Jacob Goddard
1. Linus' blanket
2. Prince Valiant's Singing Sword
3. Dennis the Menace's slingshot
4. Batarangs (mainly because they're fun to say)
5. Iron Man's armor
*****
Vito Delsante
1. Captain America's shield (the real one, not the energy one...in fact, I'd rather have the WW2 one over the round one)
2. Batarangs (hell, I'll take the entire utility belt)
3. The Ultimate Nullifier (I'm sure everyone picked this one)
4. Daredevil's billy club(s)
5. A Green Lantern power ring
*****
Matthew Maxwell
1. The Ultimate Nullifier - Sometimes the job just needs to be done.
2. Batarangs - Oh come on, like you wouldn't.
3. Dr. Doom's Mauser - WHO DARES MANHANDLE THE SIDEARM OF DOOM?
4. The Painting That Ate Paris - The colors the colors the colors!
5. Dr. Bong's bell - Bong, just bong.
*****
James Langdell
1. Orb of Agamotto
2. Cat juice
3. Max the Bunny (used as a projectile)
4. The (banana-enabled) Sun Gun
5. This here lollipop
*****
complaining about the art is fine; I only have time to delete the entry, though
First Thought Of The Day
The weird part to me about sports' current obsession with steroid and other body-altering drugs and their application to athletic competition is that it involves revisiting contests that have been completed. This means that every result in sports is open to interpretation forever, which I think weakens the finality of these contests -- events are never over now. It's strange to me that a competing idea hasn't developed further: that if you cheat in sports and don't get caught, you didn't cheat. This seems to me to make a lot more sense than it does to keep all sporting contests forever open to re-examination, only closing those that seem to have some general public agreement that they're closed. It would also provide greater consistency between cheating that has news currency and cheating that doesn't.
Quote Of The Week
"... I gotta say the thought of doing an interview with someone who launched a thread titled "Stupid Publisher Tricks: Excessive Pricing" aimed at this project and us as publishers isn't so appealing for obvious reasons." -- Alvin Buenaventura
this week's imagery comes from pioneering comic book house Hillman Publications
Five For Friday #131 -- Armed, Dangerous Five For Friday #131 -- Name Five Weapons From Comics You Wouldn't Mind Using In An Emergency, Or Just Otherwise Think Are Cool
*****
1. Gigantor
2. Mjolnir
3. The Black Knight's Ebony Blade
4. Jon Sable's broom-handle Mauser
5. Green Arrow's Boxing Glove Arrow
This Subject Is Now Closed.
*****
Five For Friday is a reader response feature. To play, send a response while it's still Friday. Play fair. Responses up Sunday morning.
Kurt Westergaard Ready To Stand Trial In Jordan; Not Actually Going, Though
This article notes that a major interview with Danish cartoonist and original Muhammed caricaturist Kurt Westergaard has appeared in Jordanian press, on efforts by a prosecutor in that government's court system to indict and try in Jordan a number of those people responsible for the publication of the Muhammed cartoons. It's interesting to note that neither Westergaard nor the publication editor that says much the same thing as Westergaard actually received the subpoena in question, but have heard about it through press reports.
A number of industry sources are noting a story about DC reprinting 900,000 copies of Watchmen to meet perceived, trailer-instigated and hype-driven demand for the book leading up to its movie version's March 2009 release. It's pretty much a "there it is" story, and while I'm not always willing to grant DC the full extent of its claims given they don't release sales figures but insist on making claims on those figures' behalf, I more than believe them here, and it's pretty clear that this is a staggering, historically significant number of books no matter how one may sometimes wonder after the asserted profitability of a few of their unrelated serial comics. In fact, this is way closer to "all-time book publishing phenomenon" than a comics sales story. In other words, I'm not sure we shouldn't report it without temporarily breaking down and shouting "Holy Freaking Crap! One million copies of a 22-year-old comic book series! Holy Freaking Crap!"
Ironically, I wonder if the ability to sell so many books will keep the Watchmen movie in March despite both the Star Trek and Harry Potter franchises abandoning Christmas 2008 in a way that would seem to leave wide-open a place for a fantasy franchise not aimed at teenage girls.
Another Note Or Two On Brian Cunningham Being Let Go From Wizard
* I think it's pretty safe to say that Brian Cunningham being let go from Wizard, where he currently served as Executive Editor, apparently had primary editor duties on the magazine, and where he had been since the early days of the company, has been generally confirmed by insiders and widespread agreement if not specifically confirmed by the company, or to my awareness yet by Mr. Cunningham. There's even a thread about it on the Wizard boards.
* I'm also told that Alex Kropinak and Jordan Hammill, two more recent hires, were recently let go -- this had been reported, actually, just not by me. ToyFare Price Guid Editor Jon Guttierez may have given notice yesterday, too. Other employees that may no longer be with the company were described to me as "Regan M., Matt C., and Carolyn F."
* I've also been told that Cunningham being let go was a surprise to the entire staff and several ex-staffers, and there was a rumor among the ex-staffers that the current staff was given the rest of the day off.
A Few Quick Notes On Serial Alt-Comics
There's a fine comments thread over at Comics Comics on the issue of serial comics and the alternative comics fan that's worth your time if you, like me, have some affinity for the topic. A few notes:
* one thing I haven't seen anyone talk about it yet is how difficult it is to process whether or not those new comics that happen to be out there are desirable. In other words, the sheer number of comics means that making a decision on a graphic novel or trade format collection for occasional purchase is easier than tracking them in a way you can make weekly decisions. I tend to like comic books more than I like comics with a spine, but when I buy new comics they tend to be six to 12 months old because I can't get a grasp on whether or not I want it until it's like five or six issues in. Sometimes this is great, because you can get an entire series for $1 a comic; sometimes this is a pain, like when my brother decided he really liked the Brian Bendis Daredevil and wanted it in comic book form when Bendis was about three issues away from leaving the title. I think the last alternative comic book series with significant back issue retention -- older comic book offered as new -- in stores was Hate, although maybe I'm wrong. Do comic shops carry back issues of Optic Nerve along with newer issues? That's by far the most popular of the really good alt-comics right now, I think.
* in my own personal version of events, I think the big turning point with alt-comics series was The Nimrod. That was a rewarding, pleasurable and entertaining read from a fine talent, work that didn't serve some eventual collection and was well worth the cover price. Still, no one bought the thing. That was the one that at the very least opened my eyes to the growing difficulties of getting work over in that format.
* sometimes I wonder if what's alarming isn't the overall lack of titles available in serial form but the amount of work out there that could be published in serial form and simply isn't. Because I seem to remember buying a lot of books like Sandman Mystery Theatre on weeks at the comic book shop in the early '90s, too, to have something to take home. I liked SMT, don't get me wrong, but at that point in my life I was going to the shop looking for new Chester Brown.
* similarly, I'm not sure I buy the argument that a lot of those works are on-line. Are there really a bunch of ongoing comics on-line that would fit on the stands next to Or Else, Crickets, Uptight, and Injury? I'm sure there are a few, but it seems to me there's still more material in comic book form of that type than books not in that form.
* I still don't think that enough people have stopped to consider what a massive vote of non-confidence in traditional comic books, serial comics, took place when the Hernandez Brothers moved Love and Rockets to a book with a spine. It doesn't really matter in terms of the art, because Los Bros would demand tracking down if they were publishing in the back of Parade Magazine or if they were mimeographing their comics and leaving them at truck stops. But I do think it says something about the state of the format. Another one you have to rope in is the new Gilbert Shelton apparently isn't going to have a comic book serialization, either. Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like it will appear in English in the anthology MOME and then go to an album/GN. That's a pretty remarkable one-two punch from the best-known serial comics makers of two generations.
In the end, I'm not sure any of this matters, but it's sure fun to noodle around talking about it.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the critic and writer Francis Lacassin, an important figure in the acceptance of comics as an art form capable of sophisticated expression, died on Tuesday. He was 76 years old. His stand-alone essay Tarzan: Tarzan ou le Chevalier crispe featured a preface by Burne Hogarth.
* there's likely something profound to say about the popular exercise of mixing two pop culture creations together into one thing, but I can't get much deeper on this blend of Calvin and Hobbes and V For Vendetta than I think it's amusing.
* one long-time CCI goer declares in a San Diego Reader article he won't be going back and why. "Each year it becomes an increasingly voyeuristic affair where you leave with nothing other than the experience itself."
* the book industry veteran John DiBello takes on a more serious topic, sexual harassment
* there needs to be more people doing 
* the writer Marc Sobel continues with one of my favorite critical projects, examining 
There's no publishing project this Fall as talked-about as 
SPURGEON: Where did the inspiration for this book come from?
SPURGEON: What have you heard back from the artists while they were working on their pages? How has that been different than the experience of working with artists on past issues?
* I'm sure there's an explanation for this picture of Richie Rich with Elvis Costello 
* the mighty Al Columbia would like to let you know that his work 
* the new Fall/Winter catalog from the 
At the same time, Virgin certainly seemed to offer 
* wait, hasn't superhero comics been bringing the semi-illicit sexy in subliminal fashion 
Marvels was a big, obvious success for the company in a post-Image era where the company was being squeezed for every last bit of leverage and value it was worth. The publishing side of things really needed a defining hit, and Marvels was it for a really, really long time in publishing and public identity terms. Marvels was also kind of an odd book in that -- as more than a few critics have noted -- it's best remembered for a kind of wistful re-imagining of superheroes from the vantage point of people on the ground when both the witness-to-history metaphor that it represented, as well as the criticism of loving superheroes too much that was obvious on a close reading, are now almost completely forgotten. 
The comics business news and analysis site continues its back-to-school period interviews in a 
SPURGEON: I think most people think of you as an illustrator first, but I've seen enough of your pages to wonder just exactly how many comics you've done at this point. Is there a book's worth of stuff at this point? I think of your work in terms of some anthologies that may not be around any longer. Can you track in brief, summary fashion the comics portion of your career?
SPURGEON: Typhon grew out of Legal Action Comics, which was your fundraising mechanism to allay some of the costs of defending yourself against a $1.5 million lawsuit brought against you by Ted Rall. I'll ask you about the other circumstances that changed the project in a bit, but am I to understand that the status of that case is in limbo because Rall's lawyer passed away? Can you explain what happened?
SPURGEON: Was there anything that you wanted from the stories that you solicited in terms of theme or meaning? Because the stories you ended up with seem to have a fascination with the darker sides of human nature -- there are more than a few actual devils or demons overtly portrayed. What is it about this project or your editorship that you think gave voice to this kind of story, mostly?
SPURGEON: How much did you like the editing and publishing process with this big of a project? Is this something you'd like to do in the future?
* firebrand cartoonist Frank Santoro's sweet 
* the yearly ICv2.com interview with Paul Levitz is a must-read, if only to take the temperature of one of comics' more influential executives: 
"Belligerent Piano is the complete opposite of the short stories making up Abandoned Cars, and the next two books of short stories. It's a vehicle for opposite interests -- a very, very long story as opposed to collected shorts. I'm trying to make a decision about how to continue producing Belligerent Piano, and Happy Hour in America, the comic in which Belligerent Piano would continue as installments. Belligerent Piano is going to continue one way or another, in some form. Right now it is taking the form of a serialized strip on my weblog. 
Here's something I wish I'd thought of: 
* the Hero Initiative charitable group will publish a collection of Stan Lee's "Stan's Soapbox" editorials in November. I'm betting half of you just thought, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard" and half of you just thought, "Oh yeah, I'm totally getting that."
* the essential dickishness of Sub-Mariner survives across the years and two very different cartooning styles in
It may just be me, but I'm dubious of a line of reasoning that seems to be developing around Alan Moore and his disinterest in the forthcoming movie adaptation of the Watchmen series he wrote and co-created with artist Dave Gibbons. It feels to me that what I'm reading about Moore's lack of interest tends to brush past the writer's well-documented tussles with the Time Warner-owned DC Comics publishing arm if favor of an interpretation that Moore's something of a grumpy gus that didn't like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie and thought 300 was kind of stupid.
In 1987 he teamed with 
It looks like this is just a discount service that hooks you up with a traditional from-the-company mail-order subscription, the kind they used to offer through those ads that had the Hulk dressed up as Santa or whatever and that came in that brown paper sleeve that everyone of a certain age has registered as a sense memory. As I don't think the Marvel buttons even work, and The Comics Journal and Comics Revue are near the top 
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* in my own personal version of events, I think the big turning point with alt-comics series was The Nimrod. That was a rewarding, pleasurable and entertaining read from a fine talent, work that didn't serve some eventual collection and was well worth the cover price. Still, no one bought the thing. That was the one that at the very least opened my eyes to the growing difficulties of getting work over in that format.
* there's likely something profound to say about the popular exercise of mixing two pop culture creations together into one thing, but I can't get much deeper on 
