Bundled, Tossed, Untied and Stacked
* I don't fully understand a lot of the new sites about comics that pop up, and I don't understand this one beyond the fact that seems like it would be an expensive URL. I did get the usual e-mail from someone at the site talking about how I should be assisting them to do whatever, and how it will benefit me to do so.
* the latest iteration of the Legion of Superheroeswill end at issue #50. That's the cover image from #49, by the way. Anyway, not that DC canceling stuff or a Legion title biting the dust is ever news, but I had to wonder: how many times out in official fashion is that for this series? Six? Seven? Eight?
* the publisher Del Rey has announced two manga series from a newly-formed partnership with Cartoon Network: Bakugan Battle Brawlers and Ben 10 Alien Force. The first book will be December's Bakugan Battle Brawlers: The Battle Begins, and will employ stills from the animated shows. The Ben 10 Alien Force series will begin in April. Original works in both series will start the next season: Summer 2009 (BBB) and Fall 2009 (B10AF).
* this seems like a pretty ambitious on-line endeavor man-hours wise for a promotional thing. Hadn't heard of the book before now, so I guess the announcement part worked.
Two More Staff Cartoonists Let Go
News has hit various newspaper industry news sources about two more editorial cartoon positions lost. Richard Crowson of the Wichita Eagle was laid off, according to a note at Editor & Publisher, having held that position for slightly more than two decades. Peter Dunlap-Shohl accepted a buy-out from the Anchorage Daily News rather than let one of the other two people in his department take the hit. He had also been at his position for more than 20 years. E&P estimates that there are about 80 staffed editorial cartoonist positions still out there.
Your 2008 Harvey Awards Winners
The 2008 Harvey Awards winners were announced during a ceremony on Saturday, September 27, at the Marriott Inner Harbor Hotel in Baltimore. The awards are named after the legendary cartoonist and comics editor Harvey Kurtzman. I believe they are the only North American major comics awards focused primarily on comic books in which the general voting pool generates both nominees and winners. This year's winners are in bold.
*****
BEST WRITER
* Ed Brubaker, Captain America, Marvel Comics
* Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
* Grant Morrison, All Star Superman, DC Comics
* William Van Horn, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Gemstone * Brian K. Vaughan, Y: The Last Man, Vertigo/DC Comics
*****
BEST ARTIST
* Gabriel Ba, Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Comics
* John Cassaday, Astonishing X-Men, Marvel Comics
* Guy Davis, BPRD, Dark Horse Comics * Frank Quitely, All Star Superman, DC Comics
* William Van Horn, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Gemstone
*****
BEST CARTOONIST * Darwyn Cooke, The Spirit, DC Comics
* Matt Kindt, Super Spy, Top Shelf
* Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
* Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, Oni Press
* Vasilis Lolos, Last Call, Oni Press
* William Van Horn, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Gemstone
*****
BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM - ORIGINAL
* The Arrival, Scholastic Books
* Donald Duck: The Case of the Missing Mummy, Gemstone
* Exit Wounds, Drawn & Quarterly
* Laika, First Second * Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, Oni Press
*****
BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED
* The Annotated Northwest Passage, Oni Press
* Antiques, Vol. 1, Gemstone * Captain America Omnibus, Vol. 1, Marvel Comics
* Damned, Vol. 1, Oni Press
* Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, Marvel Comics
*****
BEST DOMESTIC REPRINT PROJECT * Complete Peanuts, Fantagraphics Books
* Complete Terry and the Pirates, IDW
* EC Archives, Gemstone
* Popeye, Fantagraphics Books
* Walt and Skeezix, Drawn & Quarterly
*****
BEST AMERICAN EDITION OF FOREIGN MATERIAL * Eduardo Risso's Tales of Terror, Dynamite Entertainment
* Exit Wounds, Drawn & Quarterly
* Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Abrams
* Moomin, Vol. 2, Drawn & Quarterly
* Witchblade Manga, Top Cow/Image
*****
SPECIAL AWARD FOR HUMOR
* Chris Eliopoulos, Franklin Richards, Marvel Comics * Nicholas Gurewitch, Perry Bible Fellowship, www.pbfcomics.com
* Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
* Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, Oni Press
* William Van Horn, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Gemstone
*****
BEST ON-LINE COMIC
* Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney, Self-Published.
* EZ Street, Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley, Comic Mix
* Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, Self-Published. * Perry Bible Fellowship, Nicholas Gurewitch, Self-Published
* Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo, Dwight L. Macpherson, Thomas Boatwright and Thomas Mauer, Drunk Duck
*****
SPECIAL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN PRESENTATION
* The Annotated Northwest Passage, Scott Chantler, Oni Press
* Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney, Amulet Books * EC Archives, Various, edited by Russ Cochran, Gemstone
* Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez, Villard
* Super Spy, Matt Kindt, Top Shelf
*****
BEST SINGLE ISSUE OR STORY
* Alice in Sunderland, Dark Horse Comics * All Star Superman # 8, DC Comics
* Captain America # 25, Marvel Comics
* Donald Duck: The Case of the Missing Mummy, Gemstone
* I Killed Adolf Hitler, Fantagraphics Books
* Immortal Iron Fist #7, Marvel Comics
* Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen # 1, Oni Press
*****
BEST BIOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL OR JOURNALISTIC PRESENTATION
* Blah Blah Blog, Tom Brevoort, Marvel.com
* The Comics Journal, edited by Gary Groth and Michael Dean, Fantagraphics Books
* Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff, R.C. Harvey, Fantagraphics Books
* The Naked Artist: Comic Book Legends, Bryan Talbot and Hunt Emerson, Moonstone Books
* Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, edited by J.C. Vaughn, Gemstone * Reading Comics: How Graphic Albums Work and What They Mean, Douglas Wolk, Da Capo Press
*****
BEST COVER ARTIST
* John Cassaday, Astonishing X-Men, Marvel Comics
* Marko Djurdjevic, Daredevil, Marvel Comics
* James Jean, Fables, Vertigo/DC Comics * Mike Mignola, Hellboy, Dark Horse Comics
* William Van Horn, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Gemstone
*****
BEST LETTERER * Chris Eliopoulos, Daredevil, Marvel Comics
* Jared K. Fletcher, The Spirit, DC Comics
* Willie Schubert, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Gemstone
* Douglas E. Sherwood, Local, Oni Books
* Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library, Acme Novelty
*****
BEST COLORIST
* Susan Daigle-Leach, Uncle Scrooge, Gemstone
* Jamie Grant, All Star Superman, DC Comics
* Matt Hollingsworth, Daredevil, Marvel Comics
* Matt Kindt, Super Spy, Top Shelf * Laura Martin, Thor, Marvel Comics
*****
BEST INKER
* Stefano Gaudiano, Daredevil, Marvel Comics
* Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
* Steve Leialoha, Fables, DC Comics
* Mark Morales, Thor, Marvel Comics * Kevin Nowlan, Witchblade, Top Cow/Image
*****
BEST SYNDICATED STRIP OR PANEL * Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, Universal Press Syndicate
* Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley, United Feature Syndicate
* The K Chronicles, Keith Knight, Self-Syndicated
* The Mighty Motor-Sapiens, Mark Wheatley, Daniel Krall, Robert Tinnell, MJ Butler, Craig Taillerfer, Matthew Plog, and Jerry Carr, Self-Syndicated
* Mutts, Patrick McDonnell, King Features Syndicate
*****
BEST CONTINUING OR LIMITED SERIES * All Star Superman, DC Comics
* Captain America, Marvel Comics
* Damned, Oni Press
* Daredevil, Marvel Comics
* Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Comics
* Uncle Scrooge, Gemstone Comics
*****
BEST NEW SERIES
* Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
* The Order, Marvel Comics
* Resurrection, Oni Press
* Thor, Marvel Comics * Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Comics
*****
BEST NEW TALENT
* Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amulet Books
* Jeff Lemire, Essex County, Top Shelf * Vasilis Lolos, Last Call, Oni Press
* Robbi Rodriguez, Maintenance, Oni Press
* Christian Slade, Korgi #1: Sprouting Wings, Top Shelf
*****
BEST ANTHOLOGY
* Flight Vol. 4, edited by Kazu Kibuishi, Ballantine Books
* Mome Vol. 8, edited by Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics Books * Popgun Vol. 1, edited by Joe Keatinge and Mark Andrew Smith, Image Books
* Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriquez, Villard
* Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, edited by John Clark, Gemstone
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* officials expect a resolution soon in a dispute between Geppi's Entertainment Museum and the state agency that rents space to it. Depending on how you look at the world, you may be more shocked by the rent figures being thrown around or by the fact that Geppi's museum isn't a non-profit.
* if I'm reading this correctly, the Seattle Times is in the midst of a massive changeover to emphasize on-line content, which should include the liberal use of editorial cartoons. In fact, this makes me think that editorial cartoons may not even be in the print edition anymore -- or appear much less frequently than they used to. The Times is a real meat-and-potatoes newspaper in a lot of ways, so I'll be interested to see how this goes over.
* the interesting thing to me about the forthcoming Windy City Comicon on October 25 is that it's being held in within Chicago proper, at the Center on Halsted, which is basically three blocks towards the lake from the Waveland side of Wrigley. Being inside of a city like Chicago means you might be slightly less accessible to people in the suburbs and in, say, Milwaukee, but you're a lot closer to a lot of city folk that don't want to go all the way out by O'Hare. I think a number of people will be checking in on this to see how they did.
* the writer Paul Gravett offers up a 2001 article about comics reading habits around the world -- I had not seen those figures for Mexico before. Judging from what I saw in Rome's airport last month, you're much more likely to find manga there today than you are a copy of a Joe Kubert album.
* building on this theme, Matt Thorn takes a two-part look at the latest Mainichi newspaper manga reading survey compiled in 2007 and published earlier this year.
* those of you with a fondness for goofy superhero comic books that prefer the days when there wasn't a super-obsessive, moralistic fan community digging into plot points according to some precious conception of a favorite character and thus ruining the simple joys of junk-culture might join me in making a yuck face whenever today's fans decide to go over some narrative from 30 years ago in that same, relentless, bordering-on-miserable fashion.
* this DC panel report by Tucker Stone from last weekend's Baltimore Comic-Con captures the essential strangeness experienced any not-diehard fan that rolls into one of these presentations, although I'm happy to hear that the Green Lantern milieu has been thematically re-worked to better correspond to Jimi Hendrix's "Axis, Bold as Love." I've long wondered if you could have an entire panel made up of presentations from old panels without anyone knowing the difference.
* site note: I should be caught up with 50 Things A Comics Collection Should Have additions by the time this rolls out; thank you to all that participated so far and please keep them coming if it interests you.
* finally, I love the suggestion made here, perhaps unintentionally, that a reason why webcomics cartoonists do their originals on paper is to facilitate original art sales.
* not comics: I'm not sure why I remember this, but the late Paul Newman was once the next-door neighbor of the late comic book artist Gil Kane; the Kanes named their son, Scott, after Newman's son. From Kane's 1996 Comics Journal interview with Gary Groth: "We used to call him Brando because he was blonde-haired and looked just like Marlon Brando. The turned-up upper lip. At that time we found out he was in Picnic [on Broadway]. He was the understudy. He finally left the community when he went to make a movie called The Silver Chalice. He moved from where we were to a better community near us called Fresh Meadows." It is widely believed that Kane's version of Hal Jordan, Green Lantern's secret identity, was physically based on a young Newman, although I have no idea how true that is or who has claimed it and I'm not certain it's worth tracking down.
On The Passing Of Raymond Macherot By Kim Thompson
My reaction upon learning of the death of Raymond Macherot was an emphatic "merde." He was the last surviving member of the seven Grand Old Belgians who so far as I am concerned were responsible for the glory of French comics post-war -- Franquin, Morris, Peyo, Roba, Will, and Tillieux being the others -- and the only one who did most of his best work for Tintin magazine rather than Spirou (although his undisputed masterpiece, Chaminou et le Khrompire, was the first thing he did for Spirou).
Even though his predilection for funny-animals and simple drawing style made his work seem to be the most childish of the lot (which is why I didn't pay particular attention to him when I was an adolescent -- dumb kid!), he had a dark wit that, years later, makes his work as fresh as ever even as his other cohorts look dated. And of course that simple drawing was exquisite. On to of which he was, of his peer group, the most willing to mix it up and try out new series concepts even if his publishers tended to squash them and push him back into the box of his two bucolic series, Chlorophylle and Sybilline.
He hasn't been particularly well served in terms of reprints, either -- much of his later (admittedly weaker) Sibylline work was not even collected into albums, and Chaminou remains, insanely, out of print -- and he would be on the very bottom of my list of European cartoonists likely to ever make it into English. One hopes that his death might spur either the mainstream publishers who released the work, or energetic smaller publishers, to get more of it back into print. I'll have my Euros ready!
I have many regrets, but not slipping some Macherot into Critters when I had the chance is near the top of the list today.
*****
Kim Thompson, Fantagraphics co-publisher, editor of the 1980s funny animal anthology Critters and longtime champion of European comics in North America, was nice enough to send us this letter on Friday evening. I liked it enough I wanted to spotlight it here for a day before moving it over into the letters section. Thanks, Kim.
FFF Results Post #135 -- Powers
On Friday afternoon, participating CR readers were asked "What Four Superpowers Do You Have (1-4), and What One Superpower Do You Want (5)?" The subject was suggested by Richard Pachter. Here are the results.
1. Ordering Chinese food for takeout or large gatherings
2. Making mixtapes (or CDs)
3. Keeping strolling musicians away from my table at restaurants
4. Knowing if my friend Ron Farber is on the phone when it rings
5. Flying
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. Waking up whenever I tell myself I'm going to wake up.
2. Packing a suitcase for a long trip so that it weighs between 49.2 and 49.8 pounds without my having to weigh it to check.
3. Convincing large groups of people to skinny dip.
4. Being my own second worst enemy.
5. Eating planets.
1. Singlehandedly carrying an inordinate number of boxes
2. Finding vintage clothing on the racks at Goodwill
3. Parallel parking
4. Quickly opening any sealed packaging
5. Invisibility
*****
Danny Fingeroth
Superpowers I have:
1. Parallel parking
2. Ignoring clutter
3. Calming agitated people
4. Agitating calm people
Superpower I want:
5. Time travel
*****
James C. Langdell
1. Causing computer equipment to break down just by being there
2. Conducting music at sight
3. Reaching into piles of paper on my cluttered desk to grab what I need
4. Driving smoothly
5. Disintegration beams
*****
Dave Knott
1. Procrastination
2. Remaining "just friends" with every acquaintance of the opposite sex
3. Eating any kind of food with no sign of disgust
4. Riding a bicycle for thousands of miles to get to a comics convention
5. Immortality
*****
Scott Dunbier
1) Can catch 40 quarters off my elbow.
2) Can predict to the minute how long a car trip will take.
3) My gravy at Thanksgiving.
4) Remembering phone numbers as well as all issue numbers from comics with art by Neal Adams.
5) To stop time.
*****
Roger Langridge
Gots:
1. That thing where you double your forefinger over and pretend the thumb of your other hand is the tip, then pretend to pull off the end of your own finger (preferably in front of small children)
2. Trumpetting like an elephant (again, to delight two-year-olds)
3. Typing with one finger at super-speed, assuming I haven't pulled the end off
4. Being able to hand-letter my comics without a computer (it feels more and more like a super-power every day)
Wants:
5. The ability to freeze time for everyone but me
*****
Gabriel Roth
1. reading in the car without getting carsick (when I was a kid my parents were so impressed by this that I actually imagined it might get me into the Legion of Super-Heroes).
2. speaking extemporaneously.
3. doing repetitive tasks efficiently on Mac OSX.
4. picking the right size Tupperware container to accomodate a plate of leftovers.
5. earning a living.
1. Ordering the best meal off any given menu
2. Unlimited stomach capacity for carbonated beverages
3. Razor-sharp toenails
4. Ambidextrous thumb-twiddling
5. Always picking the fastest check-out line at the grocery store
*****
Uriel A. Duran
1) Catching roaches alive
2) A very good memory for trivia and useless facts
3) Walking silently and unnoticed (handy for spooking people simply by suddenly speaking from behind them)
4) Meeting deadlines on time
5) Flight
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. High tolerance for pain (a doctor actually told me this; you don't want to know why)
2. Power walking
3. I am apparently a pretty good cook, at least according to the surprised reactions of my wife and parents
4. Super-editing (probably another surprise)
5. Super-speed (Flash-style, with the protective aura and everything)
1. Whenever the phone rings, I know who is calling.
2. I can make any Internet argument immeasurably worse.
3. I can find a better shortcut to any location in North Georgia via surface streets.
4. Those "Billy" bookshelves from IKEA? I can assemble those suckers blindfolded.
5. I would like the power of Garbage Clairvoyance Nudity Teleportation. That means that whenever I notice trash on the side of the road, then the jerk who tossed it there is immediately transported back to it without any clothing.
*****
Vito Delsante
1. The ability to worry without cause or reason
2. The ability to make my wife laugh
3. The ability to rub my dog's back leg and make it stretch out. It's much cooler than it sounds
4. The ability to hit 9 out of 10 deadlines (only ever missed one)
5. Some kind of healing factor. My back is killing me.
1. Turning traffic lights red the moment I reach them.
2. Thinking about a particular episode of a TV show, and then it airs the next day.
3. Super mumbling.
4. Can change shoes quickly.
5. Time travel.
*****
Jamie S. Rich
1. The power to cloud women's minds so they don't see my obvious attractiveness.
2. The ability to recall what obscure B-sides by British bands came out with what A-side and in what order.
3. I can turn just about anything into an innuendo or match it to a song reference.
4. By that token, I can meet someone and within five minutes make an innocent joke that turns out to hit their most vulnerable point without even knowing it.
5. How to disappear completely.
1. Hypnophobic Superconductivity of the Brain.
2. The pent-up rage of a Coke machine on a rollercoaster.
3. A beard.
4. A tongue like an alligator's life-partner.
5. An Infectious Dance.
*****
Christopher Duffy
1. Ability to hypnotize dogs.
2. Ability to find worst morning radio show.
3. Can find up to three dollars in change in pockets at any given time.
4. As child could mock adults with no resultant punishment. (This ability has mutated into power to attract and breed wiseguy kids.)
5. Either time manipulation (slowing it down, time-travel) or bee eating.
1. Ability to find change between sofa cushions
2. Ability to metabolize Colt .45 (but not Crazy Horse)
3. Ability to find appropriate quotes from Judd Apatow movies
4. Galactus Grip
5. Buddhist Palm
1. Spontaneous dinner party generation
2. Booming voice
3. Super-movie-dialog-recollection
4. Touching greeting card personal note writing
5. Invulnerability
*****
Aaron White
1. Finding just enough money at the absolute last minute.
2. X Ray Spex Vision, aka ability to imagine what people look like naked.
3. Deafening Inner Monologue.
4. Ability to transmute aesthetic opinions into moral judgements.
5. Ability to go to heaven and take all my friends, loved ones and pets with me.
*****
Sean T. Collins
1. Buns of steel
2. Able to alphabetize CDs with deadly accuracy
3. Google-fu
4. Sean is the snuggliest one there is!
5. Teleportation, with BAMF! sound effect but without smell of sulfur
*****
Lee Hester
I believe that everybody has super powers. It's just a matter of finding them. Here's the ones I have, plus the one I want:
1. The ability to sing any popular song from the last 100 years, instantly, from memory.
2. Incredible luck. No other explanation for staying in business for over a quarter of a century.
3. Bring me any comic book, turn it to any page, and I will tell you who drew it, and usually who inked it.
4. I can collect without using a want list, and never buy a double.
5. I keep hoping that I will be able to jump in the air and freeze like they do in the Matrix, but I have fallen short in every attempt.
PS. In my experience, the most super powered of all comics folk are the following:
* David Mack (He can do just about everything that Daredevil can do.)
* Steranko (A real life Doc Savage)
* Chuck Rosanski (Incredible mojo, including finding the Mile High collection-the best EVER! )
* Peter David (Has the most amazing hidden talents this side of Leonardo)
First Thought Of The Day
I figured out about a year ago that I'm a great audience for comic book movies because if they're awesome that's great because I like awesome and if they're totally tear-your-hair out horrible that's great because I think that's awesome, too.
1. Ordering Chinese food for takeout or large gatherings
2. Making mixtapes (or CDs)
3. Keeping strolling musicians away from my table at restaurants
4. Knowing if my friend Ron Farber is on the phone when it rings
5. Flying
*****
This Subject Is Now Closed. Thanks To All That Participated.
The highly-regarded Belgian cartoonist Raymond Macherot, a major contributor to that comics industry's golden age of anthology magazines and the creator of several successful series, died early this morning. Among his creations were Chlorophylle, Clifton, and Sibylline. He was 74 years old.
Macherot was born in Verviers. Although he trained to be a painter and also at one time wanted to become a journalist, he eventually became an illustrator and cartoonist. His biography at Lambiek.net notes that his first foray into cartooning were gags in an approximation of Virgil Partch's popular style that he submitted to the comedic magazine Pan under a pseudonym.
Macherot joined Tintin in 1953, serving as both writer on Fred Funcken's Le chevalier blanc and as an illustrator/cover artist. His first series came a year later with Chlorophylle. Chlorophylle was a funny animal feature that helped establish Macherot's reputation as one of the more skilled cartoonists to ever work in that area of comics. He would continue exploring that creative terrain with his Croquefredouille stories, which shifted the setting from the country to the city. In 1959 he created another of his signature works, the detective series Clifton. Both Chlorophylle and Clifton would be continued by other authors with varying degree of success.
In 1964, Macherot left Tintin for Spirou, where at first he worked on the abortive Chaminou series. It lasted for only one story, Chaminou et le Khrompire, but was eventually revived by several artists in the 1990s including Macherot himself. Its reputation exceeds the series' publishing success. Macherot's next project, Sibylline, better resembled his previous work and was more of a hit for the publisher and cartoonist. That series would end in 1990 when the cartoonist initially retired, and in 2006 be revived -- under Macherot's watchful eye -- by Andre Taymans.
Among those with whom Macherot collaborated were Paul Deliege (as writer on Sibylline), Olivier Saive, Rene Goscinny, Raoul Cauvin, Yvan Delporte, Berck and Will. The last two did gag panel work with characters spun off of Macherot's series.
There Are Officially Way Too Many Awesome Comics Published Right Now
Not that I'm complaining, but this terrific anthology showed up on my desk yesterday and maybe I just wasn't paying attention or more likely I'd just forgotten, but having it on my lap was the first time it really registered with me. If I had known an anthology this good was coming out I wouldn't have let the package sit there unopened for a couple of days, if you know what I mean. There are some all-time comics short stories and several forgotten gems here, like Jessica Abel's "Jack London," Phoebe Gloeckner's jaw-dropping "Minnie's 3rd Love," Jaime Hernandez's vastly underrated "Jerusalem Crickets" with those great single panels of the band playing, Robert Crumb's Charley Patton biography, Carol Tyler's beautiful "Country Music," Chester Brown's "My Mom Was A Schizophrenic," Kevin Huizenga's "The Curse," that David Mazzucchelli one with the lady with the trilobite outlined in her belly, and Jim Woodring's "Particular Mind." And that's like a quarter of the book. It's ridiculous.
I know this post must read like something Larry King would write, but I always remember how in 1999 I had a hard time finding five comics to put on a Best of the Year list.
Another Day, Fewer People at Wizard
I'm told without being able to 100 percent confirm that long-time employee Cheryl Padilla, the human resources manager for editorial at Wizard, is now longer at the company, along with Basi Rhodes, who was I believe in some sort of support position like a receptionist. Major magazine-about-comics publisher and convention organizer Wizard has either let go or fired or had quit a staggering number of employees, many from editorial, over the last 20-24 months.
If someone can follow the links and find the footage in question and e-mail me as to where it is, I'd appreciate it. Judging by the overall visual quality of the above, my theory right now is that the video segment doesn't exist and we're looking at a still from Chris Oliveros' appearance on Streets of San Francisco.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* according to the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com, the cartoonist Jeff Smith will make one story appearance in 2008-2009, and ComicsPro member stores will bid for it. The auction and Smith's participation in the signing will benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Smith did an similarly exclusive event for charity deal with a launch party for RASL earlier this year at the New York Comic-Con.
* good = long podcast interviews with Don Rosa, better = long podcast interviews with Don Rosa including talk of Rosa's obscure pop-culture projects, best = long podcast interviews with Don Rosa including talk of Rosa's obscure pop-culture projects and photographs.
Don Wilder, the writer of the syndicated comics strip Crock, died yesterday morning according to Mike Rhode. He passed away in his home. Wilder co-created the Foreign Legion-based gag strip in 1975 with artist Bill Rechin and the late Brant Parker of Wizard of Id fame. According to Editor & Publisher, the feature still boasts 200 clients. It is carried by King Features.
Rechin and Wilder also launched a sport-related panel strip called Out Of Bounds after Crock was up in running. It did not last. There have been multiple Crock-related books including 1979's Crock (Ballantine) and several titles published with Hodder & Stoughton and Coronet in the UK.
Wilder was an artist in addition to being a writer. He earned a degree from East Tennessee State and took courses at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was during a long and varied career a technical illustrator and a visual-information specialist at the CIA. His newspaper obituary states that he lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, having moved there from Knoxville in the mid-1960s to take the CIA position.
He was a member of the National Cartoonist Society and the National Press Club.
Don Wilder was 74 years old. He is preceded in death by his wife of 37 and is survived by two sons, their children and a companion. A memorial service will be held tomorrow.
Original Management Team For Virgin Acquires Those Properties For Itself
There's a press release out there that indicates the original Virgin Comics management team of Gotham Chopra, Sharad Devarajan and Suresh Seetharaman has purchased the Virgin Comics asset and placed them under a new company called Liquid Comics. This make sense and seems to me a pretty clearly self-evident story: these are the people that really believed in the potential for what Virgin was doing as a way to develop a ton of distinct properties, and now they're set up to do that kind of development without the corporate expectations that would come partnering with Virgin. For one thing, they can put some comics on-line or skip that step altogether instead of trying to gain a foothold in the largely hostile-to-outsiders Direct Market. That has to be a relief.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* here's a really long story on lesbian manga, upon which I have a hard time commenting due to an empty mental crater where my knowledge of lesbian manga might otherwise be resting. I might suggest that Speed Racer's box office shudder and collapse was probably not all that great for manga's reputation as a source of films, but the rest of it could be totally made up for all I know.
* the comics writer and columnist Steven Grant has a nice column up. It's strongest up top on the issues of interchangeability and why work for hire going away really wouldn't solve anything. It's a bit more scattered further down on the idea of making the industry better. I don't agree with Grant that a lack of consensus makes industry improvement more difficult -- at least not exactly the same way he does. I believe that a lack of consensus is likely to be impossible even on broad issues, let alone specific conceptions of what improving the industry means. Still, if enough people were to adopt values of ethics in business, excellence in art and sustainable growth, I think the industry improves over time. I think it has in the past despite not everyone being on board. I don't think of a better industry as a robot you build but as a room to clean. Hopefully if you pick up a broom others over time will follow your lead and there will be a tipping point. If they don't, you still did the right thing.
* not comics: I have to admit, I saw the photo accompanying this article and my first thought was, "Has it really come to someone out there doing Brother From Another Planet comics?" He's a young-looking 61, that Joe Morton.
* finally, do you know what I always forget? To love myself. Do you know what else I forget? That Drawn and Quarterly has an entire separate blog devoted to their bookstore. It's worth it for the photos alone, or for the twin posts where someone mixes up the Oliveros Family with the Brown Family, which funny on more than one level.
And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #1
"FYI, everyone, our region is out of gas. I hear there won't be a regular supply for a week or more, so Mal and I may not make it to SPX." -- Hope Larson, via Twitter, about an hour ago.
If you haven't heard, no, you haven't woken up to the movie Road Warrior -- well, not yet -- but the already strained gas delivery system snapped in several places by Hurricane Ike for the next fortnight or so has cast some doubt about drive-ins from below the Mason-Dixon line attending not just SPX but I have to imagine this week's Baltimore Con. Something to watch for and something to consider as a dry run for a less dramatic but still very likely outcome we should start to see in the future as early as 2009's cycle of shows. A lot of conventions have for the past decade or so depended on a lot of cheap and easily available gas being consumed in order to get people there, especially the professionals in attendance that are part of the attraction for local and regional fans and who tend to pick up that bill themselves because they can make the weekend cost-effective by selling stuff and conducting other business. In other words, although I doubt we're quite at the time where no one will go to any conventions we're also ten years or so past the era when I could fly from Seattle to SPX for $140 round trip, or could drive there from Chicago for about $80.
I apologize if I'm not supposed to quote that kind of thing; a few readers e-mailed it to me.
Michael George Will Not Be Freed In Anticipation Of His December Trial
Michael George was denied bond yesterday, apparently because he represents a flight risk. Earlier this year, the prominent Pennsylvania retailer and convention organizer was tried and convicted and sentenced to life in prison related to crimes including the murder of his then-wife in their Michigan comics store in 1990. That decision was recently overturned based in part on the judge's estimate of potential prosecutorial misconduct. George will start a new trial in December.
Another Week, Another Change In Status For An Editorial Cartoonist
This time it's Dwane Powell, who will go from full-time to part-time at the News & Observer in Raleigh. This follows a round of buy-outs, that followed a round of layoffs. Powell has worked at the paper since 1975.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* here's a nice summary of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard's apology for his speech to the conference of the Danish People's Party and some of the concerns that journalists had about the appearances.
* missed it: Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders agrees to pay Westergaard approximately $11,000 (USD) compensation for Wilders' use of Westergaard's Muhammed cartoon in his documentary.
Publisher: "On ne peut pas vendre des journaux imprimes avec de l'info BD"
I can't tell from this article if after 11 years on the stands the French magazine about comics BoDoi is moving into an on-line iteration, or will move into an on-line version and then try and facilitate a no-cost print publication, but hearing someone say you can't charge anyone for a magazine about comics as I think he does here seems pretty astonishing to me.
* the politician Hillary Clinton didn't get the Democratic presidential nomination, but she will get her own comic book, complete with art direction eerily reminiscent of the new Barack Obama/John McCain funnybooks from IDW.
* it's going to take a more knowledgeable writer about manga than I am -- that would be all the writers about manga -- to figure out if there's anything new of substance in the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com's four-partmajorinterview with Viz executive Gonzalo Ferreyra. It seems to me a lot if not all of what's discussed, like their publishing some of Oshinbo, has already been put out there. It's always useful to have someone take the temperature of a company like that, though, and at the very least the piece provides a useful summary of various initiatives.
* newspaper industry bible E&Ptakes note of Daryl Cagle on the future of editorial cartooning. It's not animation, suggests Cagle.
* the publishing industry newsletter PWCWinterviews the actress Mia Kirshner on her forthcoming I Live Here, which will include greatly anticipated work from Joe Sacco and Phoebe Gloeckner. As I recall, Kirshner attended McGill University at either roughly or exactly the same time as mainstream comics writer and playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, which is the very definition of useless trivia but this site bows to no other in comics news relating to the Harvard of the North.
* the prominent comics reviewer Paul O'Brien may be shifting to doing reviews bloggystyle. That'd be too bad; I like the site.
* basically not comics: I probably shouldn't be as amazed as I am, but I find it sublimely odd that there's still so much passion by nerds that movie and television shows not make fun of their favorite comics/tv/radio characters, or do them "properly," and yet there's so little sympathy for the upset feelings of the actual creators who have legitimate claims to feelings of ownership over those characters.
* finally, the writer Tom Crippen disagrees with my view on recent work done by Pat Oliphant. Okay. First, I really don't presume to know if Oliphant is connecting with people or not; I would guess that he's alienating as many people as he's delighting. Probably more. Probably many, many more. However, I'd disagree with Crippen on whether an editorial cartoonist or any cartoonist needs to connect in order to be good, let alone admirable. Their effectiveness might be in question, and I make that clear from the start of the post in question, but sometimes good work or work that we admire doesn't connect with as many people as another approach might. People becoming disenchanted with Bill Mauldin was practically the overriding theme of that cartoonist's later career. I admire a lot of Oliphant's recent work in large part because it's angry and blunt and risks alienating people.
Second, I would disagree that Oliphant's attack on Sarah Palin speaking in tongues is just "making fun of people" let alone doing so "for being different," and I say this as someone with plenty of pew time in charismatic churches where a lot of speaking in tongues is done. That's the first image of the cartoon, not the whole cartoon. The bigger argument, it seems clear to me looking at the cartoon, is that Oliphant is savaging the presumption of a political candidate having a direct line to God because they speak in tongues. There is plenty of that criticism in evangelical churches I've attended. As I thought I made clear, I don't expect most people to get past the gleeful meanness of the initial salvo, but I have to admit I didn't expect one of those people to be a Comics Journal critic. I do admire the point Crippen makes about the random, scattered quality of Oliphant's work, which isn't something I addressed.
Bundled, Tossed, Untied and Stacked
* a couple of you sent me this link (thank you!) that lets us know they're publishing adaptations of Diana Gabaldon's prose work and/or works in comics form related to that prose work.
* the charity group The Hero Initiative will publish its Marvel-allowed book of Hulk illustrations this December. Monies earned will go to the group's charitable work with older and in-need comic book creators.
* here's some good news if like me you're an Evan Dorkin fan: he's completed 16 pages of comics for a version of Larry Doyle's prose novel I Love You, Beth Cooper to be released next year in conjunction with the film version. Dorkin did the cover illustration for the well-received book.
* the venerable alt-comics publisher Fantagraphics announces a 2009 book from Jason collecting the hilarious New York Times comic serial Low Moon.
* here are some of the covers on those mini-comics I noticed in one of the recent shipping lists. They're meant to be Halloween giveaways. Halloween is weird. I think there needs to be a Halloween czar just to set a baseline standard in terms of candy-bar size, and what you can give out and things like that.
* finally, a few of you wrote in to inquire after the status of the Joost Swarte book at Fantagraphics, Modern Swarte, after Amazon.com canceled pre-orders. Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics says that the book will be out in 2009. They canceled orders because they can't say exactly when in 2009: they want to give Swarte all the time he needs to do as much work as he wants on the book before starting the release cycle. The publisher remains confident the book will be released next year, though, and they'll re-solicit when they know exactly when it will ship.
Greg Goldstein Named COO At IDW
I don't know a thing about Greg Goldstein beyond the resume that's reprinted in the press release announcing his being brought in at IDW and the occasional on-line thing I've like this reminiscence of going to the Phil Seuling cons in New York. But IDW leaping into fourth place and near that same time bringing on a long-time industry and related-industries veteran to help operations, that makes this a significant hire. It also indicates that IDW is doing its best to recognize that there are different issues involved facing companies at different stages of growth, which isn't a lesson that publishers always learn in time to help things along.
Go, Read: New Chapter In Jay Allen Sanford's San Diego Comics History
I'm a little lost as to what's covered in what chapters in the series, but the story of Todd Loren that seems to be presented for the first time today is one of the more compelling ones in modern comics and these reports are stuff with art and photos. Click through the image above.
Zapiro Now Receiving Death Threats
The Zapiro vs. Zuma story of South Africa's greatest cartoonist taking on its ascendant politician has to be one of the most fascinating stories in years. The publication of Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro's cartoon depicting the ANC leader as a rapist about to do horrible things to the justice system hit right before a number of big wins for Zuma politically: namely, he came out on top in the court case threatening him, and he began to consolidate power as his political party recalled its current leader. This and the unusually strong visual language deployed by Zapiro has led to a sort of backlash I'm not sure the internationally well-regarded cartoonist has ever experienced before. Anyway, this article provides a nice summary and notes the latest: death threats against the cartoonist, the newspaper and its star refuse to apologize, and implied threats that sort of prove the cartoonist's point.
Missed It: Fearful Chinese Cartoonist Leaves Homeland For New York City
There's not much more I can say about this profile of cartoonist Haibo Wang and his journey from China to America other than 1) I don't know how the hell they came up with that 42 million people figure, 2) I'm therefore looking at that figure with the stink eye, 3) I thought the piece was otherwise clearly written and 4) my general impression is that it's just sort of a nice story, although it might have been nicer were he able to stay in China and do what he does. I hope he finds work in New York.
Lion In Winter Watch: Pat Oliphant If you're one to see things in terms of causes and fighting effectively or not on their behalf, you may be worried or delighted that cartoons like this Pat Oliphant piece on Gov. Sarah Palin are being used to recast the upcoming presidential election as a culture war instead of a referendum on policy, philosophy and national direction. Neither those concerns nor our political views should dim our appreciation for what a total ass-kicker Oliphant remains this relatively late into his career. He and Tom Toles may be the only political cartoonists left that go knives out after what they're criticizing and manage to do it without giving off a strong second impression of "hey, look at me going after this person." Plus in Oliphant's case you get classically beautiful editorial cartoon art -- his caricatures of the Republican candidates in the linked-to cartoon are idiosyncratic, recognizable and highly amusing.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* this is as thorough a local cartoonist profile article as I've ever seen. In this case, the featured city is Fort Wayne. So if you ever wondered if there were cartoonists in the northern Indiana city and original home of the Detroit Pistons beyond the late Grass Green, now's your chance.
* you can now affix an official Eisner Award seal to your nominated or winning comics object. I just sat here for five minutes staring at the screen trying to come up with a decent joke about a third seal for rejected books that had a picture of Will Eisner giving the finger, which is probably why I'll never qualify for the gold seal and may stop any year now qualifying for silvers.
* people keep sending me this article by Chuck Rozakis, I guess the first in a series, on webcomics. There's too much here that's asserted that I think is vitally important for me to really like the piece, although I agree with roughly half of the assertions. I've always had a difficult time arguing these issues with anyone because deep down I believe the core value is control and it seems to me that everyone else sees the core value as profit -- I don't mean that in a snotty way, or even as a judgment of those values. It's more that everyone I talk to seems to be coming at it from a different point of view, both in what they choose to argue and how they argue it.
* it seems to me that Johanna Draper Carlson missed one in her list of ways to break into mainstream comics writing, and it's not "be really good." It seems to me that befriending a working writer and then writing a comic with them is a way a lot of writers are getting into that field.
* now that is some major-league shelf porn: Charles Schulz.
* finally, the cartoonist Scott Adams explains how he can write the same joke twice. One of the weird things about comic strips is they're often criticized for repeating jokes or having a joke that's roughly like another joke out there. As much as each and every one of us occasionally tells a funny story only to have someone say, "You told me that one before" I always thought we should be a bit more understanding concerning those that have to write 365 jokes a year for years on end.
Kurt Westergaard Speaks Before The Danish People's Party, Then Regrets It
The cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, the artist behind the most infamous of the controversial 2005 Muhammed caricatures that ran in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten and caused the infamous Danish Cartoons Controversy rioting and political turmoil in 2006, and a target for potential assassins who has been officially hiding from same since earlier this year, spoke before the right-wing Danish People's Party at their annual convention. He later stated in an interview he regretted doing so, although he castigated some for making really basic correlations between his appearance and an inferred endorsement of all the party's beliefs.
It's fascinating to me how the Danish Cartoons controversy has bounced back and forth from issue of journalistic principle to an issue of politics, and this is the most extreme example for a while. I linked to T. Thorhauge's commentary at Metabunker instead of the actual news stories because I thought he was succinct and to the point.
Lynn Johnston On Being The Boss, Financial Crash Courses and Sink Dinners The Peterborough Examiner has a pretty remarkable article up that I don't think has been published yet -- it claims to have been based in part on some work done as long ago as May -- on the last two years or so in Lynn Johnston's life. The cartoonist, whose For Better Or For Worse made the transition earlier this month from ongoing storylines to a mix (I think) of reworked earlier strips and new strips set in that period, talks about her husband leaving their marriage in 2007, the financial situation in which she found herself immediately following the break-up, having to pare down her studio and, prompting one strongly affecting image, eating dinner over her sink. One interesting piece of news is that she'll be doing some charity work in South America as a interpreter. Looking around a bit, it seem like Alan Gardner and Dave Astor also did a Little Rascals take at this piece.
Brad Mackay draws my attention to this interview from late last month, which is also very good.
Go, Read: The Case For A Re-Trial
Brian Dickers on the Detroit Free Press looks at the recent judgment in favor of a second trial for convicted comic book retailer and convention organizer Michael George and decides that it's a good thing.
Tokyopop Revamps Pilots Program...
... just maybe not the way you're thinking. While writer Brigid Alverson notes the discussion about the nature of that program's contracts and doesn't report any movement there, the majority of the piece covers structural changes and web site alterations that needed to happen before the resulting work could be showcased in the first place.
Brian Hibbs Pushes For Street Dates
The outspoken direct market retailer and columnist Brian Hibbs makes the case for street dates. I'm for street dates -- which means that instead of comic books arriving on Wednesday to be sold that very day they would be shipped an earlier date and then put out for sale on the date they're supposed to go on sale. It's an interesting issue for the direct market of hobby and comics shops because comics shops are notorious for pressing any advantage they can and a significant number of retailers believe that if someone out there has a greatly anticipated comic book, they are simply not waiting until the street date to provide them to their best customers.
What makes Hibbs' argument interesting to me is that he's really not arguing for street dates as most of understand it, he's arguing that all books should be shipped one day earlier. This creates many of the advantages of street dates -- like better set-up time for retailers, more time to prepare if something's gone wrong, and it puts everyone on the same playing field with retailers who already get their stuff one day earlier -- but doesn't achieve some of the things that many of us think of as systematic improvements, primarily the ability for the industry to rally around the fact that exact issue of X book is available on exact Y date and thus build anticipation for that book, or have better general planning within months so that 18 of 24 books staring teenage mutants or whatever no longer come out on one day. A couple of the advantages to simply advocating that everyone get the comics a day earlier is that it eliminates many of the more legit concerns of a more comprehensive street dates system, like all of the sudden requiring stores be able to store books that haven't hit their street date. It can also be sold as leveling the playing field as opposed to frightening change in the status quo. The obvious punishment of violating the street date -- having your books held until day-of -- would be severe but wouldn't put anyone out of business.
I would imagine that the there would still be widespread cheating and widespread accusations of cheating and protestations of innocence and demands for punishment and some folks declaring they were morally obligated to cheat and other folks extolling the virtues of playing it smart in a system that demands cheating and maybe an inability by Diamond to remember to ship one package in 17 a day later, mostly because everyone is crazy now. But it might be worth seeing if this could get done.
The writer about Jacques Fierain died on Wednesday, September 17 according to a notice at Le Graphivore noticed by Gianfranco Goria at afNews. He was I believe a primary school educator and then a librarian in addition to being a writer. A passionate comics fans since his youth, Fierain contributed to several publications and wrote a series of four books about BD in various provinces, becoming a common figure in the festival circuit.
He is survived by a sister and three children. Services will be held tomorrow.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* our most sincere condolences to CR contributor David P. Welsh on his loss, and a late wish for the same to Brigid Alverson, a much linked-to writer here.
* one wonders if this humorous graphic novel were more about the financial system in general rather than its specific subject matter as claimed for itbefore the world's headlines turned to the financial system in general. Either way, it's refreshing to read someone talk so bluntly about publishing costs and finances in an article.
* the way superhero comics constantly talk up some weird aspect of their existence bugs me, too.
* the perennial story on the depiction of American politicians as pawns of Israel is broken out of its glass case in time for the 2008 election.
* it's not comics, but I'd love to see this Babar exhibit. That site provides this New Yorker article as a link because of its discussion on whether or not Babar paints a much too rosy picture of the effects of French colonialism, but it also makes several nice if brief observations about the art.
* it seems to me that if American prizes other than the Maisie Kukoc gave out money, more people would pay attention to awards.
* finally, I totally missed this: Dreamhaven Books, a popular small bookstore that carried graphic novels as part of its overall product line including a lot of prose in genres that tend to favor comics as well, moved last month into a one-person set-up. What effect if any that will have on their Neil Gaiman specialty-shop business has yet to be determined.
T. Alixopulos has long been on the radar of small-press comics fans but his more recent books have placed him in that more general category of cartoonists to watch. After completing two lengthy, ambitious comics in Dread and Mine Tonight, earlier this year Alixopulos released Hot Breath of War into the market through Sparkplug. Hot Breath of War filtered the cartoonist's romantic, restless nature and growing political consciousness through a style reminiscent of the magazine cartoon essay of decades past. The work admirably eschews direct confrontation and sweeping generalization for a cascade of narratives that at times are more obtuse than they are strident. Together, they paint as effective a portrait of the nation's mind-set, at least from one artist's view, as any comic currently out there. I owe the cartoonist a personal thank you for how quickly this interview came together, and I urge you to check out some of his work either on-line or the next time you find yourself at a major alt/indy show.
*****
TOM SPURGEON: I know almost nothing about your background. The name is memorable enough I'm thinking that I remember it on-line and then started seeing you at shows like San Diego and maybe SPX. How did you start doing mini-comics?
TREVOR ALIXOPULOS: I was born in Hawai'i and grew up in California, in the outer rural fringes of the Bay Area. I'd always read comics, superhero comics, RAW, Tintin comics, whatever, growing up, and had ideas of being a cartoonist. But back in the early-90s superhero comics reached such an absolute nadir of quality that they bludgeoned away all my remaining adolescent interest in being a penciller. I could relate more to comics like Love & Rockets, and 'zines were still kind of on the upswing, it seemed like you could make minis and people somewhere out there would read them. I went to San Francisco's Alternative Press Expo for the first time in 1994, but really began doing comics in earnest around 2000.
SPURGEON: What do you think kept you at it when a number of your peers stopped?
ALIXOPULOS: I came to mini-comics toward the end of the '90s zine-explosion, just as the internet was sort of subsuming and supplanting it. But paradoxically, the new ease of communication and networking gave small-pressers a new lease on life. I might have quit anyways if I had been more isolated, but I was fairly close to a comics hotbed. Around 2001 I started coming into San Francisco regularly and meeting people like Dan Zettwoch, who was my own age and doing mini-comics too, or Jesse Reklaw and Andrice Arp, who were a bit older and seemed more established, and that gave me a lot of encouragement. More to the point, though I'm self-effacing I have a lot of pride and quitting comics was never really an option because it would have felt like a personal failure on my part.
SPURGEON: I remember liking your appearance in the Chris Brandt film Independents. Where was your segment filmed? It looked like you were on a loading dock somewhere. That film was about the creative impulse; is that something you've ever thought about, why you do this?
ALIXOPULOS: That sequence was actually filmed in the loading docks in the back of the APE convention hall, in San Francisco. I was trepidatious about the project originally, but was really pleasantly surprised at how that interview turned out, given that Chris threw it at me in the closing minutes of the convention and I may or may not have had something to drink just prior. It was perhaps appropriate that Chris interviewed me at a Con, because that's usually when I wonder "Why am I doing this?" When I'm alone with pen and ink it rarely occurs to me because it's so enjoyable.
SPURGEON: How do you look back on your early mini-comics at this point? They seem very different than your last two or three books. They also seemed about ten years out of their time, more like bursts of energy than something was formally ambitious or controlled and literary-minded. What do you like about that work and is there anything about that work to which you feel little or no connection now?
ALIXOPULOS: What I like about my older mini-comics are some of the things that I feel a bit disconnected from today, and that is their spontaniety. They have mysterious completeness that comes from doing them only when I felt inspired, they emerged from the wealth of time at a twenty year old's disposal. It's like they arrive fully-formed.
The graphic novels feel more messy and sprawling than my mini-comics, but at the same time weightier, more exploratory. My old minis were in this smart-assed underground comix mode. Some of that was my age and some of that was the times, the sort of sheltered sarcastic doldrums at the turn of the century. As much as they might seem out of time then, they're doubly so now. I feel like the world around me changed to such a degree that my brand of satire was inappropriate and reductive. The times had become more charged and cinematic and they didn't seem to fit into gag strips anymore.
SPURGEON: Do you agree that Dread was an important book for you in terms of your development? It seemed more ambitious than some of the earlier work, more of a type in some ways visually with what you're doing now. What do you remember about doing that book?
ALIXOPULOS:Dread was the first comic I did that I felt didn't fit easily into a mini-comic format, it's longer and weirdly paced, and was dismayingly difficult to physically assemble. I remember Dread coinciding with a weekly comics workshop/critique night that some of the Bay Area cartoonists (Lark Pien, Andrice Arp, Jesse Reklaw) were organizing. We'd meet in an apartment or a warehouse space and sort of methodically go over what we were working on. I'd never really planned a book out like that before and I'd certainly never been forced to lay out all the pages on the floor in front of my peers and read it aloud. It was a good experience, it probably made something that easily could have been far more shrill somewhat more palatable. The book grew out of a scared, hopeless feeling about the way the world seemed to be going, but it ended up being far more formal and cool in tone than I expected.
SPURGEON: I went searching for Dread on the Internet and one page on which it's mentioned says that it's debuting at SPX. Can you talk a little bit about having those kind of comics shows available to you as a cartoonist? Is it important to have something like that to focus your publishing plans or are they incidental to what you'd be doing?
ALIXOPULOS: The shows did provide a rational structure to an endeavor that in my darker moments could seem like some dadaist thought experiment. I remember Vanessa Davis told me something that Tom Hart told her, "Don't get flustered about doing your comics, nobody's watching and nobody cares." My problem was I was certain that that was actually the case. By going to shows I could make-believe that people out there care that I "debut" something even if I knew rationally that they probably didn't. There are endless possibilities for procrastination with minis, so it helps to work toward a real event.
SPURGEON: For that matter, I think of you as part of a larger group of cartoonists, mostly on the West Coast. Do you feel like you're part of a community in that sense? Has it been important to you to have friend in the cartooning field in terms of feedback or your overall development?
ALIXOPULOS: Santa Rosa's a smallish city, so it was just a welcome experience to be able to drive an hour to the Bay and be able to meet up with three, six, eight cartoonists at a time. There was a certain esprit d'corps initially where I was just happy to meet any cartoonist, but over time things settled out into community that I felt a kinship with creatively and personally, which I think is still there but a bit scattered geographically now. Dan moved back to the Midwest, Jesse and Andrice moved to Portland, as did about a million other cartoonists. I think the artists on the Global Hobo site were kind of a pure representation of that particular community.
SPURGEON:Mine Tonight is an extremely ambitious work. It switches storytelling styles mid-stream, thwarts a lot of easy narrative expectations, and even has you in it as a character. How was that book written? What kind of process led your from concept to getting it on the page?
ALIXOPULOS: I'm glad you think it was ambitious! I guess it's probably not even as complicated as some superhero story arcs but it felt overwhelmingly complex at the time. Sparkplug approached me about doing a 70-100 page graphic novel, and I had no novel. I had just a few fragments of ideas; a secret agent during the 2004 elections, a hillbilly frog, a trip to the island of Nauru. I filled a notebook with diagrams and thumbnails, basically jamming all the ideas together and then boiling off the excess. Eventually a very personal story of redemption seemed to emerge from it. Once I had a general idea of it, I would thumbnail out a chapter at a time in the notebook, and then switch to my sketchbook and draw the final product. Working on a long, dense book had its challenges, I'd feel like I was making progress and then realize "Oh wait these two characters have to meet at some point but I forgot to figure out how."
SPURGEON: I don't know if you'd want to talk about which parts of Mine Tonight were based on your experiences, but I was wondering if you could talk in general about doing a book that seems a snapshot, or maybe better an exploration of a state of mind at a certain time in one's life. Was it difficult to work with material that seems while reading it to be very close to you, or did that book make it to the page easily?
ALIXOPULOS: Both Mine Tonight and THBOW are definitely definitely explorations of a certain time one's life, so I guess it's an open question at this point if I can work any other way. I needed to invest a lot of myself in Lukas, the main character, so I could see him through to the end. I guess what worries me about pulling so much from my life would be to somehow cheapen my memories, that someone from my past might read it, recognize a few things and then assume that the whole book was a stripmine job. But it's much more about who I was while I was writing it, and because it was in the end a hopeful book, I felt good while I was writing it and it felt good to write.
I appear as a character in the Mine Tonight, but "my" role in it is almost as a feint, to de-emphasize in the reader's mind any distracting autobio suspicions they might harbor toward Lukas. I did get involved in activism in the late '90s, and mined some specific instances for the book. But beyond those specifically I wanted to apply my experiences in a more universal way to Lukas, about how you find that real life doesn't neatly fit into ideological and moral constructs, but that doesn't exempt you from trying to do the right thing.
SPURGEON: How did you start work with Dylan [Williams, Sparkplug's publisher]? I don't know that I've talked to too many people that have worked with Sparkplug, can you talk a bit about the process of doing a book with them? Do you get any feedback editorially or design wise? How closely does Sparkplug adhere to your wishes on the books you do through them. I'd be interested in hearing about your overall experience, or if there's anything that really sticks out about it.
ALIXOPULOS: I was aware of Dylan from some years back, he'd been in the Bay Area before moving to Portland. He came along offering to print a graphic novel at a time when I was felt creatively hemmed in by the restrictions of minis and financially busted from jet-setting small presserdom. I'd run up my credit card on mini-comics and comics shows, and the returns are so slow and small for even a wildly successful mini that it's like you never get them, they get reverse-amortized or something. So I was just grateful. Sparkplug starts from the premise that the artist calls the shots creatively, because their vision is Sparkplug's whole reason for publishing the book.
SPURGEON: Was I onto something when I suggested that the visual style of Hot Breath of War was drawing on the visual essay style from cartoonists and almost-cartoonists of the 1950s and 1960s? Do you consciously develop style?
ALIXOPULOS: I can't pin down one specific iconic work but I do really enjoy that essay style that Jules Feiffer and those old New Yorker cartoonists pioneered, I like the measured pace of it, how it feels both gestural and considered. And even today it feels modern, engaged, which was an effect I wanted for THBOW. Another thing about that style that I like is how it has no firm distinction made between words and pictures. That's real cartooning to me, when the art is direct, like handwriting. Within the bounds of my own overall style I think I'm a bit of a chameleon, I try to tailor-fit each strip to the subject. This gets me into trouble though, because there are a couple of characters in THBOW who are in more than one story, but I think the variation in style obscures that fact.
SPURGEON: I don't remember where the title "Hot Breath of War" comes from, although the phrase isn't totally unfamiliar. Is that a specific quote?
ALIXOPULOS: Not really, it was just one of those stock phrases, i.e. "Like a velvet glove cast in iron" that seem to float around. I heard it somewhere and liked the sound of it and filed it away. Then one night while tending bar at this local pub/bookstore a country song came on that had a lyric about "the hot breath of this monkey on my back," which reminded me of it. The themes that all that suggested, war as an addiction or obsession, with these sexual overtones, seemed rich to me. I started thinking about what kind of book would have that title and those themes and went on from there.
SPURGEON: Speaking of which, if I remember correctly, you open the book with a vicious quote from Thomas Paine that indicts war as a business of nations. Is Paine part of your reading? Are you well read historically, politically? What kind of reading informs your work, do you think?
ALIXOPULOS: I'm fairly well-read historically, but I'm strictly under-grad literarily, because I'm a lazy fiction-reader. I've only read bits of Thomas Paine, but his biography has always seemed fascinating to me. I'm almost more interested in learning how people lived their lives than what they have to say about them. My dad is a history professor and I read a lot of nonfiction and academic stuff. I suppose I'm more likely to pick up a book of letters average people wrote to FDR than John Steinbeck, say. I draw some from history, philosophy, mythology, the Bible, essayists like George Saunders, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Edward Abbey, Alain de Botton, and a tiny bit of poetry.
SPURGEON: There's a great deal of sprawl to Hot Breath of War, both in terms of it being a number of short stories and those stories varying greatly in terms of subject matter and tone. Did the book come together in one sustained burst, or is it constructed from a number of independent, component works? How did you feel about putting together such different stories under one cover, how those shifts in mood and story type might be interpreted by the reader?
ALIXOPULOS: The other day I came across some early thumbnails for it and surprised myself by how planned out it was. I knew which stories would make up the book well before I wrote any of them, it was like I drew up a Cliff's Notes version of the book before I began. In some strips I had the whole narrative pretty much in mind at the start and in others just an image, "Little boy, lost in the woods," say. After drawing them it was a matter of arranging the stories in a way that read best, which ended up being close to how I'd originally sketched it out. By grouping such different stories together, without comment or explicit explanation, it was my hope that the connections the reader would draw would feel more charged and vital than if I had spelled them out for them. I wanted to do a comic that had jarring transitions, but ones that took place within a realm that the reader would want to revisit.
SPURGEON:Hot Breath of War seems to grapple with the mood of the entire nation, the way that war and certain politics have changed our way of thinking, altered reality as it were. How careful are you when dealing with these big issues in terms of presenting your narratives when it comes to becoming overly didactic or shifting from parable to polemic? Or is that even a concern?
ALIXOPULOS: It was definitely a concern with both books. It would have been more of a concern if I had been pushing for some specific solution, but I don't think THBOW does that. The book struggles with its observations and tries to give them the weight they merit, but much of those observations are made in the telling, in the way the stories unfold. As an example, the opening story of THBOW is this sort of broad slapstick cartoon battle, but the story's punchline is not the point, it's in the way the characters talk past one another and speak without communicating that works to the books themes. One thing I've noticed with political art is that it's very easy for the artist to lose their unique voice, and in so doing lose control of the work. It seems like when we speak about our private lives we use our own language, but when we talk politics we tend to use the same old cliches. I tried to instead use my own symbols, as well as taking classic but disused cartoony themes, from things like Popeye or Betty Boop, and applying them to modern concerns.
SPURGEON: You mentioned in an e-mail to me that you were at the point in the book's cycle where you were able to think about it differently, maybe even talk about it in a way you weren't prepared to when it came out. Can you talk about that a bit? How has your ability to talk about the book changed? How might you think about the differently now?
ALIXOPULOS: It is much different now, a completed book is a whole different animal. I think that the creative process is like many endeavors in life, from business to romance, where you must steadily work towards a goal without looking too directly at it, and without appearing to pursue it overly much. Gilbert Hernandez said something about how when Tonantzin died it surprised him, even though he knew it, on some level, and I kind of get that. You hide the things you do when you're doing them but then that's a problem when you're done and you're expected to explain it! So going back to my original explicit plans for the book has actually helped me talk about it, as did reading reviews of it. When I'm working I have to think in comics, but translating it into words can be awkward. Like, in my mind at the time, the narrative leaps the book makes related conceptually to the logical leaps people make when we go to war, but when I say that out loud it sounds kind of funny.
SPURGEON: Was there anything you felt people simply didn't get out of that work that you knew was there?
ALIXOPULOS: There aren't that many outlets for in-depth criticism in comics, so I've been generally satisfied with attention it has received. Sometimes people get distracted by the structure of the book without particularly paying much attention to the formal nature of it. I felt like the book's arrangement is necessary; it deals with such big themes that I had to address them with a light touch, in an impressionist manner. I'm a young guy, and there's only so far beyond my field of experience that I can speak authoritatively about. But at the same time, I do want to speak to these themes, so I leave the reader a lot of discretion and I hope that we can meet in the middle.
SPURGEON: I've really liked the little bit of sketchbook work of yours I've seen over the years. Are you still devoted to working in a sketchbook? How important has that been to your growth as a cartoonist?
ALIXOPULOS: Keeping a sketchbook began as a grudging concession to artistic practice and became an integral part of my creative process. I was frustrated because my comics seemed stiff and graceless compared to my sketchbook drawings. My work-around for this performance anxiety was to dump my Bristol board and do everything in my sketchbook. Ever since Mine Tonight, all my comics have been ripped out of the sketchbook. I probably couldn't have gotten away with this pre-photoshop, but now your originals can be as ragged and messy as you like.
SPURGEON: How have people reacted to your last two books, given this year's long domestic political process? Is there anything about the way this year's presidential election has gone so far, or anything about the last days of the present administration, that interests you as an author having just completed two long works about politics and culture?
ALIXOPULOS: I was wrapping up THBOW as the election was just ramping up, and some of my early reactions made it into the book. One of those was the use of language and how it has evolved in politics, from its former purpose as an Orwellian gloss to just plain white noise. It's become common to see talking heads on cable news create a sort of surreal situation where no one can understand what they are saying, but that being OK because it drowns out their opposition as well. Sort of a murder-suicide of rhetoric. I have a few ideas bouncing around, but I think that, for myself, and probably many other people as well, at this point I'm just sort of holding my breath until we find out what kind of country we'll all be living in.
SPURGEON: You turn 30 this year -- or turned 30. Has hitting that milestone had any effect at all on your orientation towards your comics, your art? Have you given any thought where you'd like to be when you're 40?
ALIXOPULOS: I think turning 30 actually looms over much of The Hot Breath of War, despite the sort of worldly and historical elements to it. The two longer stories in the book are rooted in a mid-'20s lifestyle that I was looking back on, of going out at night and trying to make some desperate connection against a backdrop of what to me seemed like desperate times. There is something simultaneously nihilistic and hopeful about those stories that I felt would relate to the broader world that we live in. Back when I was 20 there was no way I would have predicted that I would have done a book like this, it was the furthest thing from my interest at the time. So I guess I hope that when I'm 40 I'll create something that's equally unexpected.
*****
* cover to The Hot Breath of War
* photo from Stumptown 2008
* part of a page from The Hot Breath of War
* cover to an Alixopulos mini
* from Dread
* another mini-comics image
* from The Hot Breath of War
* cover to Mine Tonight
* page from Mine Tonight
* from The Hot Breath of War
* from The Hot Breath of War
* from The Hot Breath of War
* from The Hot Breath of War
* from The Hot Breath of War
* from on-line sketchbook
* from The Hot Breath of War
* from The Hot Breath of War
FFF Results Post #134 -- Female Leads
On Friday afternoon, participating CR readers were asked to "Name Five Comics You Like Where -- Clearly, So That A Fifth Grader Could See It -- The Lead Character Is Female. And Name the Comic, Not The Character!" The subject was suggested by John Vest. Here are the results.
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. Little Orphan Annie
2. Persepolis
3. Elfen Lied
4. Cold Heat
5. Little Lulu
*****
Peggy Burns
* Little Lulu
* Ghost World
* Ernie Pook
* Dirty Plotte
* Nowhere
* Love & Rockets
Editor's Note: Peggy Burns gets to name as many as she wants.
*****
Eric Reynolds
1. Love & Rockets
2. Little Orphan Annie
3. Ghost World
4. Little Lulu
5. Daddy's Girl/Summer of Love
This was a tough one, because if I go with what resonated with me at my most influential age, #1 might be the New Mutants circa mid-to-late-80s (I was in love with Kittty Pryde and to a lesser extent, the irish werewolf girl whose name I can't remember), but the above are my favorites as an adult, off the top of my head. But I could have just as easily chosen anything by Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Julie Doucet, Phoebe Gloeckner, or Lynda Barry. I feel weird choosing 4 works out of 5 by men (when I think Little Lulu, I think John Stanley, not Marge, for better or for worse), but hey, I'm a guy.
*****
Nat Gertler
1. Jane's World
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight
3. Leave It to Chance
4. Why I Hate Saturn
5. Halo Jones
1) Krazy Kat
2) Nancy
3) Little Lulu
4) Rick Geary's Blanche series
5) Palomar
*****
Elijah Brubaker
* one hundred demons
* How to understand Israel in 60 days or less
* lucky
* Ivy
* Laika
*****
Randall Ragsdale
1. Tank Girl
2. Wonder Woman
3. Lost Girls
4. Promethea
5. Lost At Sea
*****
Jamie S. Rich
1. Blue Monday by Chynna Clugston
2. Nana by Ai Yazawa
3. Pastil/Pastille by Francesca Ghermandi
4. Grendel: Devil's Legacy (#s 1-12, the Christine Spar year) by Matt Wagner & the Pander Bros.
5. Rare Creature by Kelley Seda
*****
Douglas Wolk
1. Alias
2. Perla La Loca
3. The Ballad of Halo Jones
4. Dykes to Watch Out For
5. Cat and Girl
*****
Jones
5. Octopus Girl
4. Uzumaki
3. Love and Rockets
2. Beecomix
1. The Marston/Peters Wonder Woman
*****
Dave Knott
* Why I Hate Saturn, by Kyle Baker
* On Stage, by Leonard Starr
* Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio
* Indian Summer, by Hugo Pratt and Milo Manara
* Ernie Pook's Comeek, by Lynda Barry
*****
Joe Schwind
Little Iodine
Motor City Comics
The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist
The Tinder Box (Classics Illustrated Jr 540)
Ghost World
*****
Ryan Kirk
1. Yotsuba&
2. Blecky Yuckarella
3. Miss Fury
4. Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane
5. Promethea
*****
Booksteve
* On Stage
* Strangers In Paradise
* Kelly Green
* She-Hulk
* The Ballad Of Halo Jones
1. On Stage
2. Naughty Bits
3. Love and Rockets
4. Thirteen
5. Little Lulu
*****
William Burns
1. Promethea
2. Dykes to Watch out For
3. Meat Cake
4. Why I hate Saturn
5. She-Hulk
*****
John McCorkle
* Patty's World, by Phillip Douglas and Purita Campos
* Mary Perkins On Stage, by Leonard Starr
* Jessica Blandy, by Jean Dufaux & Renaud Denauw
* Julia: Le avventure di una criminologa, by Giancarlo Berardi
* Angeline, by Adeline Blondieu, Éric Summer and Serge Fino
*****
Tucker Stone
1. Queen & Country
2. Nana
3. 2 Sisters
4. The Pro
5. Selina's Big Score
*****
Mark Coale
1. Veronica
2. Night Nurse
3. Wendy, the Good Little Witch
4. Whoa Nellie
5. Lady Cop
Thanks to all that participated. I did bounce a few to the letters column that didn't pass the clarity test or had to be qualified in order to pass. Sorry about that. I hated doing it, but I hate getting the e-mails from other participants complaining about it more than just about anything in my professional life.
First Thought Of The Day
All of my dreams lately involve some sort of dire violence or attending comic book conventions in strange locations, but never the two at the same time.
Winners Of The Week
Your 2008 Ignatz Award nominees!
Loser Of The Week
Anyone out there if they were still waiting to hear on the CBLDF thing.
Quote Of The Week
"The professional political cartoonist -- the man or woman who spends their life living and breathing politics, history and sociology and devotes their career to distilling new ways of thinking about the world with a drawing, could become extinct." -- Ted Rall
this week's imagery comes from a comic book written by the late Steve Gerber, as I believe he would have been 61 today
Five For Friday #134 -- Name Five Comics You Like Where -- Clearly, So That A Fifth Grader Could See It -- The Lead Character Is Female. And Name the Comic, Not The Character!
*****
1. Little Orphan Annie
2. Persepolis
3. Elfen Lied
4. Cold Heat
5. Little Lulu
suggested by John Vest
This Subject Is Now Closed. Thanks To All That Participated.
*****
Five For Friday is a reader response feature. To play, send a response while it's still Friday. Play fair. Responses up Sunday morning.
Michael George Bond Hearing Set For Tuesday By Presiding Judge
The prominent Pennsylvania retailer and convention organizer Michael George, whose conviction on various crimes surrounding the slaying of his then-wife Barbara in Michigan in 1990 at their comic book store was overturned in a surprise decision one week ago, will learn Tuesday if he will be allowed to go free pending his new trial, starting in December. George was convicted in March and sentenced to life in prison in June, but the presiding Judge set aside the decision due to his appraisal that evidence the prosecution new about that was not presented would have had an impact on him had he been deciding rather than a jury.
All These Good Times Are Killing Us
The blogger and retailer Chris Butcher provides the most high-profile of a number of rumblings out there about the staggering number of quality publication being released every week in comics right now, which when combined with increasingly dire news about the US economy is making many people ask the question of whether or not something has to give. I would imagine in a lot of cases something has already given: certainly in mainstream comics and in manga we see evidence that there are limits to the depth and breadth of those particular markets -- people are no longer buying everything. One advantage that the smaller art comics market has over its bigger brethren is that its primary corporate entities are a) established, disciplined comics publishers that managed to survive when there was no money in what they did and aren't likely to go crazy now that there's a tiny little bit of money in it, b) major publishing houses that have the resources to adapt by, say, changing the size of advances or simply getting out.
That doesn't really help matters if you're a comics consumer whose eyes are bigger than your wallet. I'm an atypical consumer of comics in that I get a lot of stuff for review purposes. However, one thing that helped me when I was a broke grad student and an even broker recession-suffering twentysomething was to change my orientation towards comics. I stopped thinking New Comics Day and started thinking about building a library -- to have a comics collection I would never resent taking with me. The way I did this was roughly 1) figured out what I was spending, 2) quit going to the shop for six weeks, 3) started depositing a percentage of my weekly purchase amount -- whatever I wanted it reduced to -- into a fee-free checking account starting that first break week and making that a weekly habit (or doing so virtually in terms of my existing account; if a dedicated account or category sounds insane to you, you don't buy enough comics for buying comics to be a problem), 4) vowed to end the practice of double-dipping, which didn't always mean trades over comics but certainly meant one or the other, 5) when I started to buy again not buying anything the week it came out for six months, 6) never buying from the same place three times in a row. At least that's how I remember that transition this week; my memory's not great there. But the rough idea of it is solid.
Although if everyone were to do what I did it might mean the death of the Direct Market, I'm much happier now with the way I purchase comics than I was as a teen and as a young man. Waiting just a tiny bit of time before purchase makes me reconsider how much I really want something apart from the desire to consume it immediately, and allows me access to things like the first wave of Amazon.com used book sales of that item. Making myself buy from different locations helped improve the variety of my purchases -- when you're buying from Abebooks.com instead of Roger's Comics Hut you're more likely to buy an Abner Dean book as opposed to a third comic series starring a team of young runaways. Making a decision to buy something based on how much money you have in your comics account is a much less stressful process than deciding if you want to take extra money out of the same account that facilitates car repairs and the purchase of medicine. Moreover, once you restore some sanity week-in and week-out, and establish a habit of buying only the books you're really going to enjoy instead of buying a bunch of comics to have a comics-reading experience or some other, strange reason, you'll find that the occasional impulse buy of a big, expensive hardcover or picking up a random pile of comic books is a fun thing to do a few times a year.
If you're still overwhelmed by a desire to read certain books, try inter-library loans to facilitate freeing up cash for those comics that aren't available that way. I'm not certain most folks really need to own a copy of Terry Gilliam's Animations of Mortality, but it's a book just about any comics fan will enjoy reading. If you orient yourself to Wednesdays-only and can remember a time when you could buy everything you wanted that was out that day, it's bound to be frustrating to grapple with a present reality where you can't. If you orient yourself to 114 years of an art form it's obvious you'll never own it all; you can relax and take more pleasure in everything you can own. It's a fact of life that in comics as with all things wonderful in this world you're probably going to want more than you can afford. It doesn't have to get you down. Buy to read. Collect to re-read. And most of all: enjoy.
Comics Retailer Sentenced To Home Confinement On DVD Piracy Charge
Robert Miller of Sarge's Comic Store in New London, Connecticut was sentenced to six months home confinement, a financial penalty and two years probation for making and selling pirated DVDs, TheDay.com reports. Miller's store, which will remain open, has four full-time and three part-time employees and has been in operation since 1999.
That headline is a quote from Alan Moore on the forthcoming Watchmen movie. It kills because it's so funny as a stand-alone, but the article is actually quite interesting the way most Alan Moore articles can be compelling. In case you missed it, the famed comics writer in no way supports the Hollywood treatments of his work, or, to be honest, much in the way of modern, blockbuster film.
Although it's never going to be a popular stance, I think something Moore's strong views provide is an opportunity for self-examination when it comes to comics' self-image as a business and comics' ability to build its own ethical, workable industry away from Hollywood profits and, to a much lesser extent, away from strategies that depend on, rather than make use of, book publishing avenues. I think this is really important, because I firmly believe the trend over the years is for fewer people to make decent money in traditional comics than used to, even though in some ways there's more money than ever. By concentrating on ethical growth within the comics industry, including an equitable return to creators and a fair chance at all marketplaces, you can also help deter potential exploitation that may come when someone from another medium walks in the room carrying one of those Beagle Boys-style bags of money. Although I severely distrust the hype and boosterism and mix of projection and reality that frequently comes with the discussion that's been engendered in that part of comics, I sometimes wonder if our collective inability to discuss, say, webcomics models in a rational way is because it's potentially upsetting to practices that might take it right in the kidneys from the possibilities those avenues may provide some creators.
God bless Alan Moore for taking an unpopular stand that depends on an ethical position regarding certain deals and types of art. Let us all fight for an industry where more people are encouraged when they take similar stands, and have the standing and position to do so without feeling like they're risking house and home.
* we're reminded by J. Caleb Mozzocco that recalled comic DC: Decisions #1 is on the stupid clock in terms of our finding out what was so wrong with it it couldn't be released to market. We now know, much to our collective industry shame, that a Batman comic was recalled because DC felt the insane need to print curse words under the suddenly not-so-black blocks covering them, and that a Superman comic was recalled because Superman must share drinking habits with Radar O'Reilly instead of, I don't know, a guy. I hope we never find out what doomed the initial printing of DC's opposite-of-greatly-anticipated (I'm guessing) exploration of superhero political views, because that means we can dream up much more amusing horrors than almost certainly exist, say a Krassneresque flashback that features Hourman having sex with the hole in Jack Kennedy's skull, or a brand new scene showing off Green Arrow's Muhammed Cartoons arrow.
* the publisher and creator Nat Gertler writes in to tell me what those mini-comics being offered on the Diamond shipping list were: "You're not supposed to be able to pick those comics up at the store today. Rather, they're for stores to give out on Halloween." Thanks, Nat. The attentive reader will note the exclusion of "JUL0800666 NAKED PICASSO'S PENIS MINI COMIC PI."
* you know, I'm all for boutique publishing models and have celebrated them in comics since Chris Oliveros came along with his consistently excellent Drawn and Quarterly. That said, I find this article that suggests a specific "Mom and Pop" prose publisher is impressive because it managed to throw a halfway decent party to be so depressing I wanted to stab myself in the face. Now and forever, book publishing is gross.
* finally, the writer Hervé St-Louis dissects the latest Marvel Comics television commercial, because a few years ago we apparently slipped into some bizarre pocket universe where Marvel Comics has television commercials.
Jurors Object To George Re-Trial
Macomb County Circuit Court James Biernat will wait until tomorrow before releasing his written decision on whether or not prominent Pennsylvania retailer and convention organizer Michael George will be freed on bond to await a second trial for crimes related to the 1990 slaying of his then-wife Barbara in their comic book shop. The judge set aside the original murder conviction last Friday, shocking both sides of a well-publicized case that ended with a life-in-prison verdict earlier this year.
As you can imagine, at least some of the jurors aren't happy, and the majority of the story in the link above details some of their reactions. The victim's family's reaction can be found here. It is extremely rare for a judge to set a case aside after a decision has been reached, and I imagine it's even rarer when the judge declines to do so during the trial.
It's not fair to the photographers for me to re-run any of the photos employed to illustrate those articles, but there are a couple of photos and even some video, all interesting, through the links. You'll probably want to see them if you've been following the case.
CBLDF Adds Two New Staffers The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) has added two new staffers to its New York office. Mike Scigliano will be Deputy Director, while Jill Friedman has come on board as the group's Fundraising Manager. I was aware that the first position had been advertised; not aware at all about the second position. Scigliano comes to the group after previous positions at DC Comics and Wizard Conventions; Friedman has held a variety of jobs, at least some of which seem comics-related.
* does anyone else find it somewhat amazing that the last comic standing of the mid-1990s Fantagraphics publishing expansion (Dave Cooper, Renee French, Jeff Johnson, etc.) turned out to be Meat Cake?
* more musing on the long-term, deleterious effects of having a work-for-hire system dominate so much of the comics industry landscape. Here's Noah Berlatsky. Here's Steven Grant on the subject. I think there's some sloppy argumentation going on here in general about the difference between a practice being widespread and it being dominant, and whether or not comics should be compared to popular art forms or secondary ones.
* I think even if you accept all the necessary caveats about Alexa as an imprecise measuring tool, and you should, this can't be good news. I'm not sure you can go to hatred as opposed to apathy, either.
* finally, I enjoyed reading some of the latest round of sweeping generalization and incisive commentary about the book business. It mostly starts with this article, and the responses collected here. Jessa Crispin holds forth on the subject of the death of book review sections. I think I would disagree with the New York article critics that just because you can tweak the severity of the scenario being argued that it doesn't mean there isn't a real cogent critical viewpoint there. I think I would also massively disagree with Crispin that the loss of authority is an issue. Authority went away in 1978; what's been lost since is exposure. Plus, as an aside, I'm always confused when people cite the New York Times review section as this kind of authority over New York Review of Books -- I always thought everyone read NYROB and no one really gave a crap about the NYT section, but enough people who know better say it's so so I'm obviously wrong. Also, unless you've forgotten, book publishing is gross.
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 as a result, my retailer and I might not befriend each other on our various social networking sites.
*****
JUL080011 ARCHIE HALLOWEEN MINI COMIC PI
JUL080012 BONE HALLOWEEN MINI COMIC PI
JUL080015 COWA HALLOWEEN MINI COMIC PI
JUL080014 DONALD DUCK HALLOWEEN MINI COMIC PI
JUL080013 PEANUTS HALLOWEEN MINI COMIC PI
What are these? These sound cool.
JUL083946 BURMA CHRONICLES HC (MR) $19.95
I greatly enjoyed this book, the third of Guy Delisle's estimable different-culture profiles. In fact, I think I enjoyed it the best of all three books.
MAY080069 ASTRO BOY TP VOL 1 & 2 $14.95
I'm looking forward to trying this.
JUL080206 AIR #2 (MR) $2.99
I so, so, so wanted to like this, because a comic book set in airports and around air travel sounds potentially fascinating. Air travel is an interesting, otherworldly experience and seems perfectly suited to being captured by the comics medium. I don't think I'll be buying a second issue, though, as the execution felt hamfisted.
JUN080288 JANES IN LOVE $9.99
Ditto this, except maybe without the "sounds potentially fascinating" part.
JUN084143 LOCAL HC $29.99
Huge collection of the series by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly; I'd like to see it, and see how big it is.
JUL084147 LOOK OUT MONSTERS (MR) $9.95
This is an oversized Xeric winner I remember being kind of cool if a little slight. I'd refresh my memory if I were near a comic book shop by checking it out.
JUN080209 ALL STAR SUPERMAN #12 $2.99
The book of the week not by Guy Delisle, and I believe the conclusion to a very good cycle of Superman stories by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.
MAY080213 SUPERMAN KRYPTONITE HC $24.99
This would probably be the Darwyn Cooke/Tim Sale story that ran not all the way consecutively in Superman Confidential.
MAY082203 GODLAND #25 $2.99 JUL082210 SWORD #11 (MR) $2.99 APR082208 WALKING DEAD #52 (MR) $2.99
I read all of these Image serial comics when I see them. Sword is the latest Luna Brothers series and their comics are kind of nuts. Speaking of which...
JUN082243 ULTRA TP VOL 01 SEVEN DAYS (NEW PTG) $17.99
This is the first one of the Luna Brothers' big series, and was nearly a television show, I think, with that grim-looking lady from the boring Terminator TV show. I never understand TV shows with robots. I would think that the Terminator show would be all about the teenage boy constantly having sex with the pretty robot, like all the time, but it's not for some reason. This denies reality, even a reality with robots. Robots confuse me. I used to watch that Star Trek show with the robot in the crew, and I never understood why they didn't keep him on "low," so that when he was controlled by aliens or super-computers or whatever and tried to hurt the other crew members you could just slap him to the floor. Anyway, Ultra doesn't have robots. It's about superheroes if they were celebrities of the kind that would appear on TMZ. It's nowhere near as good as the Luna Brothers comic with the cannibal naked women and giant space sperm, but a lot of folks seemed to like Ultra when it first came out. Their women have attractive shoulders.
JUL082344 AGE OF SENTRY #1 (OF 6) $2.99
Comic books with Sentry in them are like TV shows with Simon Baker in them. No one's interested, but it seems like it should work so they keep trying.
JUL082419 GENE COLAN TRIBUTE BOOK DRACULA COVER $9.99
JUL082418 GENE COLAN TRIBUTE BOOK IRON MAN COVER $9.99
JUL082420 GENE COLAN TRIBUTE BOOK MARVEL MONSTERS COVER $9.99
I think I may have written something for this. I'll check and write it up again tomorrow if I did. Who doesn't like the Colans? Gene Colan at 1960s Marvel was like the guy for whom they rewrite a major part in a TV show even though he's severely off-type. His style was that powerful. Adam Austin 4-Ever.
MAY084041 KOLCHAK TALES NIGHT STALKER O/T LIVING DEAD #3 (OF 3) $3.99
I watched that TV show with Stuart Townsend hoping that Bruce Campbell would show up in a seersucker suit driving an old car, beat the crap out of the pretty Kolchak, and take over the program. Never happened. I always liked the original Kolchak because he wore the same clothes all the time and he was always killing people and then telling the police it was a monster. That never works for anyone except Kolchak.
JUN084477 ROUGH GUIDE TO GRAPHIC NOVELS LTD HC $35.00
JUN084476 ROUGH GUIDE TO GRAPHIC NOVELS SC $18.99
This is Danny Fingerorth's guide to the graphic novel movement.
*****
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 a bit high, 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, I blame a politics of personality over substance.
Go, Read: Matthias Wivel at Metabunker on the Zapiro/Zuma Controversy This is as solid a thinkpiece as I've read on the controversy surrounding an extremely strong cartoon created by Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro about ANC leader Jacob Zuma. He even manages to explain why Zapiro always draws Zuma with a shower head attached to his skull, which I always forget to do.
Clear Blue Water Ends Its Print Syndication Run; Will Resurface On-Line
Dave Astor at E&Pnotes that Karen Montague-Reyes' Clear Blue Water will end its print syndication relationship with Universal on September 28 and that the cartoonist will continue the feature as a webcomic.
While there are a few webcomics that have gone into print and then back into being a webcomic, I think this is the first to go from print into an on-line iteration since Michael Jantze moved The Norm on-line in 2005. Montague-Reyes' multi-ethnic strip has been syndicated since 2004. The decision to end the relationship was the syndicate's, which nearly always indicates low sales.
More On August 2008 DM Figures
* a few of this site's readers and now the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com point out something I should have caught initially: that IDW moved past Image into the #4 market share slot. That's fascinating if you're a longtime industry watcher, as Image isn't exactly a weak sister right now. IDW is poised to have a good Fall as well with those presidential comic books coming out extremely soon.
* the writer Sean T. Collins wrote in to object -- slightly -- to my noting that the DC event tie-ins to Final Crisis could be said to have performed better than Marvel's Secret Invasion tie-ins by noting that the company's approach tie-ins different:
I was struck by this claim in ICv2's analysis/overview (I can never remember which is which), but it really depends on what you're classifying as tie-ins. The primary Secret Invasion tie-ins, in terms of telling the most important related stories, are the ongoing Mighty Avengers and New Avengers series, both of which outperformed any of DC's Final Crisis-related titles. While DC's "colon" tie-ins (as you so memorably dubbed them) did in fact out-perform Marvel's, this isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. In recent years, the most consequential tie-ins for Marvel events have been in the relevant characters' main, ongoing series (a la the two Avengers books), while the colon-titled miniseries created specifically for the event tend to be inconsequential cash-grabs and are generally recognized as such (the idea being that if it really mattered, it'd happen within Uncanny X-Men or Thor themselves). DC's colon titles, on the other hand, are supposed to be where it's at -- particularly for Final Crisis, whose colon tie-ins are almost all status-quo-altering books by the company's biggest writers (Morrison, Johns, Rucka, Meltzer). Seen in that light, it's not surprising that Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds outsold Secret Invasion: X-Men -- indeed, I'd imagine both companies expected it to shake down that way.
That all sounds sensible to me. When it comes to figuring out how mainstream comics work, I'm more of a guy walking through the desert with a stick in the shape of a "Y" than a prophet leading anyone to truth.
More On Recent AAEC Elections
In addition to the new board taking over at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the group has released the members of the new leadership in their entirety. The AAEC keeps its immediate past president on the board and has its president-elect assume a leadership position before moving into the presidency, which seems to me an eminently sensible idea.
Here are the people to blame for everything good and bad that happens to editorial cartoonists for the next 12 months:
President: Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate President-Elect: Rex Babin, Sacramento Bee Vice President: Steve Kelley, Times-Picayune Secretary-Treasuer: V. Cullum Rogers, The Independent Weekly
Directors: John Branch, San Antonio Express-News; Jeff Parker, Florida Today; Mikhaela Reid, Metro Times.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* did you see the 2008 Ignatz nominees that were released mid-afternoon yesterday?
* the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com writes a bit more about Marvel's plan to do on-line titles featuring some of its more popular, film-friendly characters. It's one of those stories that could come and go without causing a ripple, but it's also something that if it hits or if it leads to an effort that hits could be important in terms of the move publishers will likely have to make in terms of on-line content over the next half-decade.
* go here for a longish essay by DD Guttenplan -- whom I think may have been Luke Cage's film-making buddy in the 1970s Hero For Hire series -- about the comics medium in general and the work of David Hajdu and Douglas Wolk on comics in particular. Guttenplan makes a funny joke about Wolk's apparent (to him) desire to be comics' Pauline Kael, although when people always look for precursors to today's critical writers about comics I always wonder if they pass over people like Carter Scholz, R. Fiore and Donald Phelps because of the relative obscurity of their platforms rather than the content and character of their writing. (thanks, James Langdell)
* especially as the book's been out for a while, I like the fact that a major mainstream-comics site will suddenly do an interview on something like Hope Larson's Chiggers. Too much comics coverage is focused on this week's new books. Chiggers was a book that I liked just fine but wasn't necessarily aimed at me that burrowed into my brain a bit more than I expected; more to the point, I bought a copy for a young person that really, really liked it, and that's not to be taken for granted. I think there have been about three or four random books for younger readers this year that are kind of interesting in the same way Chiggers is. Anyway, I guess the news here is that Larson's about 70 pages into her next project, which at this rate and a projected size of 240 pages might put it into the first half of 2010 or so.
* hey, this is nice. I think the thing a lot of people appreciate about Nickelodeon's comics efforts is that they don't automatically equate doing comics for kids with trendy approaches and styles as much as funny, effective ones.
* not comics: more Spider-Man movies. I would imagine that the problem with Spider-Man movies is that as the series of films progresses you have to build the second half of a character arc where the comics haven't because comics always need to retain that classic formula. So you have nothing to guide you and the audience conditioned to see the character as open-ended will resist whatever it is you do. Or maybe not. More likely it's just really hard to hit that sweet spot that gives you an entertaining, widely appealing Spider-Man movie rather than a tired, goofy one and that this becomes more difficult with every film.
* finally, the publisher and occasional cartoonist Chris Oliveros weighs in with a photo-driven post on Drawn and Quarterly's presence at the Brooklyn Book Festival and a visit to RO Blechman's studio. I think I would have been totally floored and freaked out by Moomin when I was a single-digit aged youngster, too.
Terry & Robyn Moore, Safe In Houston
From Charles Brownstein:
Dear Blog Friend,
The Moores asked me to help them out by spreading a message, so hopefully you can help disseminate:
As you may be aware, the Abstract Studios team, Terry & Robyn Moore, live in Houston where they are set back slightly by Hurricane Ike. They personally are fine, but don't have any utilities, including electricity and other business necessities. They're only able to be online for about 10 minutes a day because of very nice neighbors. They want people to know that they're going to be out of touch for about a week, and ask that you please be patient while they get back up to speed. Please join me in keeping them in your thoughts.
Charles Brownstein is the Executive Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Bundled, Tossed, Untied and Stacked
* a new magazine, SuccoAcido, launches promising articles in a variety of languages and from a variety of countries.
* the much-lauded writer/artist team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips will debut their creator-owned Incognito in December, from Marvel's Icon imprint. Called "a twisted mash-up of noir and super-heroics" in the solicitation copy, Incognito likely recalls the Brubaker/Phillips team name-making effort Sleeper more than it does the straight-up crime book Criminal, although the book looks to be in the same, extras-stuffed format of the latter title.
* finally, Tom Crippen has joined Noah Berlatsky at the blog Hooded Utilitarian. A long-time writer about comics, Crippen is probably best known as the author of the Comics Journal's current superhero column. As for Berlatsky, the writer debuts a new column here.
Outstanding Artist
* Warren Craghead, How to Be Everywhere (self-published)
* Lat, Town Boy (First Second Books)
* Jillian Tamaki, Skim (Groundwood Books)
* Laura Park, Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream (self-published)
* Michel Rabagliati, Paul Goes Fishing (Drawn & Quarterly)
*****
Outstanding Anthology or Collection
* Inkweed, Chris Wright (Sparkplug Comic Books)
* Little Lulu Vol. 18, John Stanley (Dark Horse)
* Papercutter #7, edited by Greg Means (Tugboat Press)
* Pond Life, John Broadley (PictureBox)
* Windy Corner #2, edited by Austin English (Sparkplug Comic Books)
*****
Outstanding Graphic Novel
* The Hot Breath of War, Trevor Alixopulos (Sparkplug Comic Books)
* Notes for a War Story, Gipi (First Second Books)
* Paul Goes Fishing, Michel Rabagliati (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood Books)
* Spent, Joe Matt (Drawn & Quarterly)
*****
Outstanding Story
* "Americus", MK Reed and Jonathan Hill, Papercutter #7 (Tugboat Press)
* "The Candy Rod", Onsmith, Hotwire Comics #2 (Fantagraphics Books)
* "The Galactic Funnels", Dash Shaw, Mome #11 (Fantagraphics Books)
* The Thing About Madeleine, Lilli Carre (self-published)
* "The Urn", Chris Wright, Inkweed (Sparkplug Comic Books)
*****
Promising New Talent
* Oliver East, Trains Are... Mint (Blank Slate)
* Austin English, Windy Corner #2 (Sparkplug Comic Books)
* Chuck Forsman, Snake Oil #1 (self-published)
* Sarah Glidden, How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (self-published)
* Lars Martinson, Tonoharu (Pliant Press/Top Shelf Productions)
*****
Outstanding Series
* Eye of the Magnetic Creature, Leslie Stein (self-published)
* Injury, Ted May, Jason Robards, and Jeff Wilson (Buenaventura Press)
* Paul series, Michel Rabagliati (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Reich, Elijah Brubaker (Sparkplug Comic Books)
* Snake Oil, Chuck Forsman (self-published)
*****
Outstanding Comic
* Cryptic Wit #2, Gerald Jablonski (self-published)
* Department of Art, Dunya Jankovic (self-published)
* Lucky Vol. 2 #2, Gabrielle Bell (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Palooka-ville #19, Seth (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Snake Oil #1, Chuck Forsman (self-published)
*****
Outstanding Mini-Comic
* Bluefuzz, Jesse Reklaw
* Dorado Park, Lilli Carre
* How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, Sarah Glidden
* Ochre Eclipse #2, Jonas Madden-Connor
* Swell, Juliacks
More on Zapiro/Zuma Cartoon Battle
More on the Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro "rape of justice" cartoon, its target Jacob Zuma and the controversy surrounding both:
* the latest Zapiro cartoon criticizing the judicial treatment of Jacob Zuma is explained here.
Peter Birkemoe sent this note as an update: "Our original mailing contained an error. He is running for Member of Parliament, not Member of Provincial Parliament. MP, not MPP. There is an upcoming Federal Election, but there is no upcoming Provincial Election." Man, politics is confusing.
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 August 2008.
Dominating all talk about this month's sales now and in the future will likely be the performance of the Watchmen trade in the full flush of interest generated by its movie trailer. If memory serves, the ICv2.com estimates for the two-decade-old graphic novel -- 43,393 -- are about four to five times what a top-selling trade might sell in a typical month through those channels. Stunning.
However, the seven months of declining sales figures noted by the site may be a bigger story just in terms of its implications. Month seven is a bit more alarming than month one in that you can't really compare August 2007 favorably to August 2008 in terms of what event comics were out the way you can the two earlier sales months this year and last. In other words, you can't immediately eyeball the cause for the decline. Periodical sales are a unique offering of the Direct Market of comics and hobby shops, so any decline in those figures over time would be of great concern. In terms of the ongoing story of Marvel dominance over DC in periodical sales, it seems like the two top DC books had a good month, the top 20 stayed about the same, the DC event tie-ins may have performed proportionally better than Marvel's and the weekly Trinity continues its rubber toy thrown against the wall slow tumble.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* media giant Gannett reports newspaper ad avenue was off 16.8 percent in August with what looks like further degradation of classifieds revenue. Craigslist may destroy comics!
* this may be slightly older or brand new, I can't tell. It sure is good-looking: Farel Dalrymple's Percevil.
* love/hate 02: I liked this editorial by Brian Hibbs pointing out that the way retailers have exploited the situation surrounding a recent Batman naughty word recall pretty much screams "You can't trust me with street dates, ever!" as much as I disliked this Joe Quesada mini-speech in the middle of a social interaction site interview about Robert Kirkman's exhortation for creators to make creator-owned comic books. I'm not sure I'd want to go to nerd court and defend every word of Kirkman's speech, but the general point that comics could and should be a friendlier, more profitable place for creators to create isn't a threat to mainstream comics but merely a challenge to the worst excesses of the industry that's been shaped around it.
Merrill Lynch Selling to Bank of America
All eyes are on the New York financial market as major players Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch undergo company-altering upheaval. Merrill Lynch is worth mentioning here because of their role in financing the new Marvel Entertainment movies. At least I swear they're with Merrill Lynch. I don't know that there's anything to say about that at this point that isn't gassy and speculative, but it probably should be noted.
You can see related, short, not-comics, historical films here and here.
Zapiro Vs. Zuma Controversy Throws Spotlight On Speech Legislation
The political and journalistic reaction to a cartoon by Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro depicting various South African political entities holding down the justice system to be raped by ANC political leader Jacob Zuma -- an earlier strip with the same visuals as the one shown above -- has reached the opinion-article stage in most cases, particularly in light of Zuma's very good week politically in having groups rally to his support, the fact that some have criticized Zapiro's use of rape as a political metaphor, and Zuma being absolved of his latest round of legal troubles. However, some issues are just now being brought to light. An article by Frans Conje suggests that legislation designed to combat child pornography could actually have a huge impact on the type of free expression used by Zapiro in having work like his Zuma cartoon published. It's a story worth watching for its effect on the prominent international cartoonist and for its mirror in various attempts in the United States to pass anti-child porn legislation with a chilling or outright harmful effect on political speech.
Also, it's hard to track, but it looks like Zapiro has been having a creative field day with the original image and the resulting furor, including the strip above riffing on the original and this cartoon more explicitly and obviously engaging the issue. Considering the heat accompanying the way this has been made a political issue and what I would agree really does look like manufactured outrage on the part of those originally tagged by Zapiro, it's awesome to see an artist hold his ground with equally adamant fury. One thing that always kills me about media criticism of this kind is that the issues become equivalent when, to take this case as the example, if one side is right the judicial system has been assaulted, and if the other side is right somebody may have made a bad cartoon.
In Case You Missed It: New Michael George Trial To Start December 2
In a late Friday decision that was surprising to many even with the families of both convicted and murdered assembling in a Michigan courtroom, the prominent retailer and convention organzier Michael George had his March conviction on various charges including murder and June sentencing of life in prison set aside in favor of a new trial by the man presiding over the first, highly-publicized court proceedings, Macomb County Circuit Court Judge James Biernat. George was convicted for crimes surrounding the 1990 killing of his then-wife Barbara in their comic book store in Michigan. The decision to re-try George is based on the judge's appraisal of prosecutorial conduct during the case, and whether or not this would have affected his own decision had this been a bench rather than a jury trial. It seems from a distance to this observer as much an indictment of prosecutorial actions such as a lost file that may have indicated a criminal suspect in the area at the same time as it is an appraisal of the circumstantial case made against George in the first trial.
The Michael George case was watched closely in the comics community because of George's role as a successful retailer and organizer for a once-popular Pittsburgh show. It was also bad publicity for a profession that had recently suffered another, similar conviction in the UK when former retailer and on-line comics broker Ronald Castree was tried and found guilty in the 1975 Lesley Molseed murder. It was also watched closely for the cold case nature of the trial, and it's safe to say certain lurid or outsized aspects of the murder such as the comic shop setting, the to-the-head gunshot cause of death, a financial motivation and reported affairs by George also drew interest.
* major line-up changes have been announced at the San Francisco Chronicle, which to my memory has a very positive pro-comics reputation. The state of newspapers being what it is, they've previously made public that they're moving to four pages from six pages on their Sunday line-up. Gone: Mister Boffo, The Fusco Brothers, Brevity, Tokyopop's revolving offering and Sherman's Lagoon. Dilbert moves to the business section. The paper will add Candorville.
* there haven't been a lot of Kevin Huizenga interviews yet, so this one at du9 seems worth noting.
* if your Internet-Fu is such you can avoid the teeth-grinding inconvenience of having a radio program pop up and start talking if you want it to or not, you might want to get a reminder for Clay Bennett's Mr. Media interview. That should be a good one.
* finally, the official word is that there is no official word about Berkeley Breathed ending his Opus. The content of recent strips and some circumstantial evidence have led some to believe this may be coming to pass. Personally, I like the fact that the strip is around, although I know some readers are down on it and a few editors may even bear a grudge against the Sunday-only feature based on I think it initially being presented as a savior for the Sunday funnies due to Breathed's considerable and well-earned 1980s-era popularity. Any talented cartoonist willing to do new work for the comics page should be welcome no matter how the result matches expectations. Besides, 200 or so clients in this market (I think that's the number) is nothing to sneeze at. I think it speaks well of Breathed's creative integrity that Opus seems to have worked with audiences at times and not worked at all other times, as opposed to his providing something middle-of-the-road and assured that might please the broadest audience in the most general ways on more days of the year. In other words, I hope Opus sticks around as long as he wants to do it, and not a second less or more. Dave Astor engages the subject here.
I read the comics that make up the new collection Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 when I was a college student, much older than the 'tween and early teen that seems perfectly suited to the manga-influenced tale of Jenny Weaver and her superhero friend from another Earth. Instead, I was a terribly confused young man, who, like many others at that age, wanted to regress to my own 13-year-old days and those concerns and all the feelings rampant in those first, true, out-of-family friendships. I probably fell a little bit harder for the title than I should have, and when I talk below about fans that seem to like Zot! more than creator Scott McCloud seems to, I'm to be counted among their number.
Given the major crush of news that came with McCloud's recent making of a comic to introduce Google's Chrome browser, a Scott McCloud interview devoted to the new Zot! book and general industry talk is a bit like an interview with Sarah Palin limited to the summer of 2008 in Alaskan politics. I hope you'll indulge me as much as Scott does in our conversation below.
Zot! remains interesting to me now that I'm no longer a young man and only a little bit confused because I think it may be one of best works out there in any medium when it comes to capturing the quality of lives lived by bored 1970/1980s suburban teens and exploring the way those kids turned to fantasy as a coping mechanism. It is also of great interest as an historical document within comics: McCloud's use of manga storytelling tropes, for example, feels prescient considering their present-day ubiquity; similarly, the medium now sports an entire library shelf of work aimed at a young audience in a way that makes McCloud's first series less of the total odd man out it once was when it comes to finding readers able to process all that it's trying to do.
I always enjoy talking to Scott, and I laughed several times during the interview below.
*****
TOM SPURGEON: You just got back from the East Coast, right? You did some appearances on behalf of the book.
SCOTT McCLOUD:Harper had me doing three events in New York and, of course, I'm always promoting at talks and whatnot around the country.
SPURGEON: Was being out for this book any different than being out for the kinds of books you've been doing more recently?
McCLOUD: [laughs] It was different than Making Comics... I didn't have to do it for an entire year! [laughter]
SPURGEON: Do people make that connection between the kind of work that you do now and the older work, or did you see people that have only kind of latched onto this work?
McCLOUD: It's very unpredictable. Most of my fans are pretty eclectic: they have a broad understanding of the many things I've done. But then you have these little pockets of people who only know me for Zot! and are dimly aware that I've gone on to do some kind of book afterwards.
SPURGEON: [laughs] Right.
McCLOUD: And then there are others who are surprised that I had ever done any kind of fiction. Then there are those that know me only for the web stuff. It's interesting seeing that Balkanization.
I remember a talk we did during the tour at Auburn University in this well-appointed room at their big library. It felt as if every single person in this room knew me as a different person. It was like all the McCloud tribes had converged into some great summit.
SPURGEON: Were there any technical difficulties in getting this work together? Or were all of those problems overcome with the Kitchen Sink editions?
McCLOUD: There was a gargantuan technical challenge for me, in that I only had Photostats of some pages, originals of some pages and neither of some pages, which meant I had to resort to the printed copies.
SPURGEON: Wow.
McCLOUD: First of all, the challenge was scanning them in and making sure they were all the same size. Then, because I'm picky, I also had to equalize the line weights in Photoshop. I would make a pretty complex series of adjustments and often hand-tooled fixes to make sure that the pages looked more or less that they came from the same source. This involved sometimes applying filters to the lettering separately from the lines. It was a pretty gargantuan job.
SPURGEON: How long a job was it?
McCLOUD: That part of it took up a good six weeks of continuous work.
SPURGEON: Oh my goodness.
McCLOUD: But it was worth it. It looks pretty. And now when I look at it I don't want to throw it against the wall like I do with some of my books.
SPURGEON: Is it nice in general just to have this work in one place, to be able to point at a book and say, "That's where it is"?
McCLOUD: I love it. I think I'm just obsessive-compulsive enough that having things in scattered places eats away at me. Having it in this one singular package is very gratifying both to my practical side and to my psychoses.
SPURGEON: [laughs]
McCLOUD: The fact that it's a very attractive package helps. I like the size of it. Like Frank Miller, I think that comics are too damn skinny. The trim size that became the standard in the industry, it's just a little too narrow. It doesn't feel right. So I had the opportunity to make it a bit squarer and slightly smaller, because I think it handles better at that size.
I was particularly fond of the cover we ended up with. I had a more conventional cover that had that same illustration, but it was in the middle and the logo was at the top and I had this more muddled green and gold scheme. My editor at Harper, Hope Innelli, very late in the process asked if she could just take one last crack at this vague idea she had in her head. She came up with a black, white and silver design with the logo and illustration switched. I knew almost instantly that it was infinitely superior to what I had come up with. [laughs] I said, "Yes, let's go with it."
I was really grateful to them, because it was clear that if I had said no that would have been the end of it. It was just so beautiful. Every time I look at it, it just makes me smile.
SPURGEON: The thing that pops out at me about that cover is the dates: 1987 to 1991. [McCloud laughs] Understanding Comics came out two years later, in '93, right?
McCLOUD: Exactly.
SPURGEON: You were a machine, Scott! From like '87 to '93 you were a page-producing machine! [McCloud laughs]
McCLOUD: Maybe on some levels, but really I had a lot of deadline troubles during that time.
SPURGEON: I guess when I see all that work in one place it looks like a lot of comics but according to the standards of the time, you were one of the irregular guys.
McCLOUD: Exactly. The ultimate example being the infamous Zot! Month when Eclipse had planned several things around Zot! and none of them came out during Zot! month. [Spurgeon laughs] It was the most terrifyingly embarrassing thing that ever happened to me as a pro.
SPURGEON: Is there anything to be said for working in that fashion even though you felt behind most of the time?
McCLOUD: I think the biggest difference was that there was this disjuncture between my potential and my delivery. There was this scraping, this friction, and you could see it in the panels where it looked like I was asleep at the wheel. You could see that parabola of panic that I think most cartoonists are familiar with, where you begin at a pace where you have to do a page every two days, and then gradually it becomes a page a day, then two pages a day then three pages a day.
As a result, it was just uneven. Some of the worst, most offensively incompetent faces and figures came out of those panic periods. When I began Understanding Comics, and especially in my later projects like Making Comics, I became much better at estimating how much time it would take. It helped that the advances I was getting were enough to cover our living expenses while I was working. I became pretty punctual. Understanding I think I went slightly over. But with projects like Making Comics, I was delivering on time.
The amazing part is, through careful management of caffeine, and incredibly long work hours, my productivity curve was almost flat. I would begin with a little more than a day per page, and I would end with a little more than a page per day. That to me was extraordinary. And I was getting enough sleep every night. And my productivity didn't dip at 3:00 pm because that's when I would have a Dr. Pepper. I had figured it out. I'm much more efficient these days.
SPURGEON: I wonder if anyone's ever looked at the dysfunctional nature of deadlines and the nature of productivity and what that's done to artists over the years. You get the sense even with some mainstream artists that there are talented people that kind of rattled and fell out of the industry because they couldn't ride that wave for more than a couple of years.
McCLOUD: Many relish the late-night, 3:00 AM panic, because that can produce a feeling of near-euphoria. What I found seemed to work much better was marathon-and-rest, basically. Take a year of seven days a week, 11 hours a day, but then rest for a time. It's tough on the family, but then when I'm done, there's some relief. Then, when I go back into marathon mode, I go back with a great deal of energy and even a certain degree of joy. I find myself loving to sit down at 8:00 AM each day. To sit down in front of that screen and work. I love the process, and I don't feel tired.
SPURGEON: I recently wrote a short essay about this book where I talked about how I saw an emotional underpinning to Zot! and I was confused because the introductory material in this volume didn't unpack or explain this, I guess according to my demands as a reader this be done. [McCloud laughs] I think you nailed a kind of longing and boredom that kids have, and you've said since that perhaps this was something that you drew on from friends and their situations. It wasn't something from your own personal experiences, necessarily.
McCLOUD: In your review the overarching question is how much of this was scooped right out of my own emotional experience and how much did I have to extrapolate? If you think about it, we're in grade school, most of us, for about 12 years. And over the course of 12 years, virtually anybody is probably going to accumulate enough genuine anguish. If you had one really bad day, you can probably do a reasonably good job -- provided you can remember the texture of that day -- of extrapolating to someone else's really bad childhood.
I would have to rate my childhood as maybe a 7. It was reasonably happy. In elementary school I belonged to an advanced program so in class, I was surrounded by kids that if anything were smarter than me. On the playground, though, I did get bullied. I guess we all did. [laughs] All the kids in the AP program probably got bullied. So I knew what it was like to really, genuinely have my ass kicked. I was kicked in the balls at one point by this kid that was supposed to be some kind of hall monitor. I was kind of terrorized here and there. For the most part, though, it wasn't too bad.
In Junior high, I was still being a nerd with my pals like Kurt Busiek, but I also learned to disappear. I learned the art of gaming the system so as to seem ordinary. In high school, because we lived in a really smart town, I wound up falling in with the nerd core, which was kind of huge. There were enough children of engineers and scientists and newscaster and politicians and journalists and professors that we had an entire cafeteria filled with nerds. So that was really liberating. I kind of portray that a little in Zot! also.
Of all of the things that I portray, all of the real serious problems that people have, the only one that I didn't experience first hand at all was the pain of parental discord. My parents got along pretty well. If they fought, they were good at hiding it. So the potential divorce that's sort of at the center of Jenny's world, and the real dysfunctional parents that a few of my characters have, those I did have to look to my friends for.
SPURGEON: Was there any desire on your part to deal with the question of how kids escape, how kids negotiate those harsh times through the kinds of fantasies represented by Zot and his world?
McCLOUD: I think on one level I was a bit cold in my approach to that theme. I was working on a detached level of thinking. "Well, this is what the story demands. These are my themes. Let's see if I can work with various themes and variations on that." I was trying to conceive of these things as a writer. "What would a writer do here?" [laughter] So I wasn't as emotionally invested in it.
I've always been fairly agnostic on the question of escapism. I saw escapism as a valid option. At the same time I was wrestling with the validity of escapism in my own writing. I saw all these non-genre comics outside my window and wondered if I was on the wrong train. [laughs] As a kid who early in college was reading RAW, I secretly feared that by its nature my mission was doomed to be a little bit more trivial.
It's helped, as a parent, to be in a family of nerds. My wife and my two girls are total fangirls. I've seen what a great experience it is to just bask in the warm glow of escapist entertainment. Buffy and whatnot. So I've sort of forgiven my previous self. But I think I do still want to try and play in that other arena. Does that make sense?
SPURGEON: Sure. To poke you a little further, it's clear there are people with a great deal of affection for this series. It's not just about escapism; it functions as escapist literature for some of those people. There are fans of this work that are more into it than you are.
McCLOUD: [laughs] Yeah, you were very astute in making that observation a while back.
SPURGEON: Did you mean for the work to be taken that way? You have these mixed feelings towards escapism, but you created this work that's a very powerful piece of escapism.
McCLOUD: I wanted it to be. But it's an escapism comic by the guy who was going to write Understanding Comics. I was trying to figure out what kind of rocket fuel would drive this thing. I wanted it to be a very effective form of escapism. But I was doing it through the manipulation of certain archetypes, storytelling tropes, and the effect of certain drawing styles. I was a scientist. The scientist in me had this storyteller chained up in the basement. [laughs] I was making what use I could of my intuitive storytelling persona to harness that stuff. That was the real fuel: the less scientific more emotional side of myself -- but the formalist was still driving the bus in a lot of ways.
SPURGEON: Now, certainly the experience your kids are having is very different than the one you and Kurt lived through when you were kids.
McCLOUD: Yeah.
SPURGEON: Did you get any sense when working with this material again how much of it was of a time? For instance, you also mentioned that there was some nuclear dread informing parts of it. That might not be as much of a factor now.
McCLOUD: I don't think that the nuclear dread part necessarily dates it. Now that we have the book all in one place and I can look at it from enough emotional altitude, I have to say I feel as if it's less dated than other things of the era. I think I tried very hard at the time to create work that would last. I think I was maybe aware more than my peers as to aspects of what we were doing that were tied to our time. I was trying to steer clear of those.
SPURGEON: Is there an example of that that pops into your head? Especially if it ends up with you insulting someone else's work. [McCloud laughs] I'd like that a lot.
McCLOUD: I wish I could do you that favor. [Spurgeon laughs] If you look at the other titles that could be most closely associated with me of that era, the ground-level middlebrow alternative superhero variant type titles, many of them were about genre. If there's one through-line in what I've been doing all along it is I actually don't give a fuck about genre. I can enjoy something that plays with genre, but almost everything I've ever really valued stands outside of any given genre. I look at my favorite movies, like Run Lola Run or Princess Mononoke or Fight Club, and I realize they're very hard to shelve. I think Zot! at the end of the day is kind of hard to shelve. That makes me happy.
SPURGEON: Was that just you being contrary?
McCLOUD: No, it was my trying to find something earnest, something without the irony of the moment, without the winks and the nudges and the affiliations: the different ways that works of narrative call out their origins, or play on them. The way that they require that you already be in this moss patch of pre-existing genre trappings so that you can appreciate "Ooh, they went that way instead of this way."
That's such a muddled answer. I tried to create characters that were basic archetypes, or basic human thoughts. I tried to create villains that were based on ideas about the future that were fundamental, like the idea that our machines would become us or that we would become our machines. All of those things were really an attempt to create something that wouldn't be washed away when fashion changed.
SPURGEON: Two contexts that have changed for the book is that there was almost no young-adult aimed material at the time. That is a huge category now. Another difference then and now is that some of the storytelling techniques you used common to manga were not part of the visual vocabulary when Zot! was coming out but may be more prevalent now. Do you think either one of those factors changes the reading experience?
McCLOUD: History in some ways has caught up to the book. The manga techniques I was using were at the time pretty rare in American comics. Now they're more mainstream, although I'm still frustrated in that people seemed to have picked up on just the surface stuff. In terms of the young readers aspect, it's nice to think that Zot! might be a bridge book for kids that read Bone, or Baby-Sitters Club or whatever. I imagine that the superhero trappings might stop a lot of them. There are a lot of readers that never read superheroes. That go straight from Fruits Basket to... I don't know what.
SPURGEON: One reason I wonder about the work being perceived differently than it might have been then is that back then it was processed in large part in terms of how it broke with standard superhero tropes. It was a subset of superhero readers because that was almost the entire audience back then.
McCLOUD: Here I'll actually name names: if you compare it to Don Simpson's Megaton Man or Jim Valentino's normalman, both of those really worked in a way that referenced where they existed vis-a-vis what had come before. Sure you can look after the fact and say, "Okay, Zot!existed to the left of this and to the right of that, above this, below that, comparing it to Marvel or DC or American Flagg! or Nexus or whatever. But I really wasn't thinking about that. I was just cracking open Osamu Tezuka. I was trying to channel my childhood. Where it stood in relation to the other comics on the shelves at the time was more of an accident than for others working in a similar vein.
SPURGEON: Have you heard from anyone who's picked this book up brand new and read it?
McCLOUD: Random people: reviewers, people that saw me talk and bought it and wrote me a couple of days later. One of my missions with this book was to erase some of the embarrassment I felt about this material. I could go back and fix the worst parts of it. When I hear back from people, people don't just see it for its problems; they have a very balanced view of it. I haven't yet heard the complaints I thought I would. "Oh yeah, Mr. Making Comics [laughs] you can't do, so you teach." I haven't heard that.
SPURGEON: That's good.
McCLOUD: Yeah, it made me feel good. Oh, and by the way, the reason that the dates are on the cover? It's kind of ungainly, having the dates there. It's because I was terrified that somebody would think it was the thing I did right after Making Comics.
SPURGEON: [laughs] That's horrible. And it's horrible that I laughed. [McCloud laughs] Hey, I wanted to ask you a nerdy question that came to me while re-reading Zot! I thought that the character designs held up pretty well. That's not something you have occasion to do -- other than your narrator stand-in I don't think of your work in terms of its character design.
McCLOUD: Yeah, I haven't gotten to do that in a long time.
SPURGEON: Are you happy with the way the designs look?
McCLOUD: If you asked me in 1988 about my strengths and weaknesses, I would have said figure drawing was a weakness and character design and layout were strengths. I felt good about that stuff then. Still do. Little things like making sure the eyes are all different. I'm a big crusader against the cookie-cutter approach. Even very talented cartoonists have templates for their characters. I hated that. I wanted every character to carry their own stories on their back and be their own universes. Ensuring those differences was very important. It'd be hard to find two characters that have exactly the same eyes. With the broad characters, the villains, I was going for something where every part reflected the whole, so that they have this instant impression -- just looking at them I wanted them to have a particular effect, like they stepped out of a dream.
I have to give props to Paul Rivoche. When I was working on the proposal for Zot!, he was putting up those posters of Mister X. I thought Mister X looked like it was going to be an amazing book. I knew it would be out well before Zot!, so it would be okay that I was pilfering some of the design aesthetic. [laughs] I think 9-Jack-9 was partially inspired by that poster he did of Mister X, where he's sort of in the background and the glasses are reflecting the light or whatever. I actually felt bad when Mister X didn't come out until after Zot! Rivoche never even drew it.
SPURGEON: Those posters were something, though.
McCLOUD: They were. I created color posters for the proposal; I'm not sure anybody saw them. It was partially in response to that, the idea that a character's image could be just as iconic as a movie poster or a trading card.
SPURGEON: I want to shift gears a bit for the last few questions. You did some work on creators rights issues once upon a time, and were part of the original crew putting together the Creator's Bill of Rights. The golden goose of media rights seems to have put a lot of those issues back into play. As a result we're seeing a lot of cartoonists that don't seem to understand those concepts in a way that your generation did, or not caring, or even asserting it's no one's business if they want to sign a horrible contract. That it's their god-given right.
McCLOUD: Well, it is. I'm not sure that that part is all that different.
SPURGEON: Okay. [laughs] Do you follow these newer conversations?
McCLOUD: I'm keeping an eye as to what's going on, particularly the web ventures. Things like the Platinum deal, and what Tokyopop has done. We're obviously heading down the same road. It might be helpful to have a set of rights circulate among the communities. My feeling was that the rights in the Creator's Bill of Rights were fundamental and that each of us could choose as individuals and say, "These are the things I shouldn't be signing away at all." But it was always an opt-in thing. I didn't see anyone having the responsibility to sign onto this for the good of the community. It was a very libertarian impulse. It was waking up to this enormous amount of power in your hands, and just exercising it.
SPURGEON: Are you surprised these issues have to be re-argued? I think there was a sense 20 years ago that once these issues were brought to light they would serve as a bedrock for future discussions to build from there. They would endure.
McCLOUD: Things were actually quite stable for a while. In many respects throughout the late '90s creators rights were used as a matter of course. People expected to get their originals back. They expected to be able to use a lawyer for negotiation. They expected to have the rights of ownership and control.
You have to remember there are two crosscurrents and they go to extremes on both sides. On the one side, you have people trying to snatch up rights in the old-fashioned way. Like Tokyopop. And then you have webcomics artists making literally 40,000 comics -- and I'm not throwing this figure out to impress anyone, it's apparently true -- that are acting like 40,000 little Dave Sims. They have absolute control. They have no strings on them at all. They can put whatever they want out there. They have control over their distribution. We sure didn't. It's a lot like the evolution of Fair Use, which has become more restrictive in some corners and evaporated in others.
The conversation is far more vigorous and omnipresent than it used to be. When we did the Bill of Rights, we got the cover to the Comics Buyer's Guide the next day, and eight months later The Comics Journal wrote about it. [laughter] Compare that to something like the Platinum deal, where you had something like 700 zillion words posted on message boards and forums and sent out in e-mail in the space of a few weeks. People like Scott Kurtz were weighing in. If someone like DJ Coffman wants to take the plunge, he's doing so in an atmosphere of full disclosure.
SPURGEON: Is there a chance that the democratization of the dialogue harms the quality of that dialogue? There was something impressive about getting those issues of CBG and TCJ -- a kind of "You should pay attention to this" that doesn't exist when the argument is being shaped on a message board.
McCLOUD: The equivalent gesture in the current climate would be if three or four of the majors got together and released something together. If you, Heidi and Dirk all agreed on something, we would notice.
SPURGEON: Because the world would end. [laughter]
McCLOUD: But you know what I mean? We still have vetted sources, respected sources. The process just goes faster. The discussions devolve almost immediately into that mulch of he said/she said, endless debates that always end with someone being compared to a Nazi, but you still have ideas that remain and make a difference.
SPURGEON: I saw you at San Diego this year; you didn't see me. You were going from one segment of the floor to another. You were in a hurry. It occurred to me you're someone that is insulated from a lot of the heave and fall of daily business in the current comics climate. You're not creating comics in a way that you want to be a writer on a TV show or expect to have three movies picked up suddenly.
McCLOUD: Probably not.
SPURGEON: Given where things seem to stand, is there anything to be said about the state of your creative profession right now? From your perspective, do you still work in a good place? Is it crass, over-commercialized, not as wide open...?
McCLOUD: I think it's a good climate with one huge exception. That sector that could previously make a living: that's beginning to erode for some creator-types. It's easy to see that this economy could slide, and that part of the industry could dry up.
SPURGEON: Wait, which market are you talking about?
McCLOUD: All of them, that's the point. [laughter]
I like that we have an economy of free and DIY and a growing market for graphic novels and an all-ages movement. Although the manga scene doesn't have an effect on too many creators here, there's that, and there's the traditional superhero realm. Diversity is healthy. When you have more diversity in the marketplace, it's healthier. When you don't, you have crossbreeding and degradation. It's hard to find another period of history in comics in North America where you've had this much diversity, maybe by a factor of three or four over the last few years. It's pretty astonishing.
The problem is that in a few years this may result in a diversity of ways to make no money. [Spurgeon laughs] To me, that's the sole danger. I have a problem seeing any other downside.
SPURGEON: It may be less diverse than the market we had in our heads.
McCLOUD: I don't know about you, Tom, but it's pretty close to the market I was dreaming about in 1988.
SPURGEON: I guess what I saw when looking from my outsider's perspective at my comics and cartooning friends at various shows this year is that we've progressed past the point where we're no longer inhaling the fumes of the promise of big-time publishers' interest, the promise of Hollywood, the promise of monetized web publishing. Instead, it's the reality of those things.
McCLOUD: Okay, I'll grant you that. I do think there's a sense of slowed momentum.
SPURGEON: I'd suggest it's maybe a "I don't have a place here" feeling. That although things are better overall, that not everyone gets to be on board. Now if this were my interview and not yours, I could go on in fascinating detail at this point.
McCLOUD: [laughs] I think this might be the first San Diego in a little while where people could look at the situation and see that some of these trends have peaked. That wasn't true last year or the year before.
SPURGEON: And if you haven't gotten on the other side yet, that could be worrisome.
McCLOUD: The tide is going back out. That can be a very frightening thing. I saw a furtive look here and there.
SPURGEON: Another thing: I spoke to Daniel Merlin Goodbrey a while back, and I remember him as a person you were high about during your advocacy for early webcomics. It occurs to me that that realm has severely changed since then, that the dialogue back then was about the possibilities of the form, or just wrapping your mind around these new comics. Now when I talk to people, it seems the dialogue is dominated by the idea of monetization.
McCLOUD: There were a lot of creative possibilities for experimentation early on. There still are. The difference is that in 2008 no one is proposing ways for the experimental weirdos to make money. I was back then, and it failed. Right now almost all of the successful business models are built on daily or thrice-weekly gag strips. Short attention spans. Those include some extremely talented people and some great comics. The point is to have a lot of chatter around the comic. The comic as social space. It's this little centerpiece on this potpourri of appetizers and party favors that make the money: advertising, merchandising, sponsorships, t-shirt, mugs, that kind of thing. If you wanted to do the equivalent of Jimmy Corrigan on-line, or RAW... it doesn't really lend itself to that model yet.
The alternative models like subscriptions and micros were a non-starter. Guys like me failed to come up with something for long-form comics. But guys like the Penny Arcade guys or Scott Kurtz have done really well by the short form comics.
SPURGEON: You say "yet," but isn't it hard to break out of this kind of reward pattern?
McCLOUD: We may get locked into certain models on mobile devices, but in terms of the overall web an alternate system or revenue model can still present itself. Nobody's fighting over one finite patch of ground: the ground is essentially limitless. So that doesn't worry me so much. The fact is, I don't have the answers now, so I'm going to go off and draw a graphic novel. I'll see how things look when I get back.
SPURGEON: Does having a new book out put you in a different place to create?
McCLOUD: Psychologically, it was healthy for me before I came back to fiction in a big way to get a handle on what I thought about my first attempt. I have some really mixed emotions about my work from 20 years ago and its relative worth in the scheme of things.
Having fought through those feelings and getting some perspective on them, I'm better able to move ahead, not look in the rear view mirror, not have those doubts that come with new enterprises. I can return to fiction knowing that I've learned a lot in 20 years.
*****
* cover to new collection
* McCloud-drawn McCloud icon
* Jenny Weaver as designed by McCloud
* the covers to the last black and white sequence in the Zot! comic book series
* key two-page sequence from book
* Zot! as designed by McCloud
* 9-Jack-9 as designed by McCloud
* Creator's Bill of Rights TCJ issue cover
* the interface to an on-line Zot! comic
* Uncle Max as designed by McCloud
* photo of McCloud at 2003 San Diego convention
*****
* Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991, Scott McCloud, HarperCollins, 576 pages, 9780061537271 (ISBN13); 0061537276 (ISBN10), July 2008, $24.95
First Thought Of The Day
Do you ever get sad when you sense something you liked once upon a time making the shift from current passion to rediscovered passion to period piece?
The top comics-related news stories from September 6 to September 12, 2008:
1. Convicted retailer and convention organizer Michael George will get a new trial concerning the murder of his then-wife in their Michigan comic book store.
2. Zapiro under fire for strong cartoon featuring the ANC's Jacob Zuma.
3. Maurice "Sine" Sinet has an initial hearing on anti-Semitism charges regarding an essay that led him to getting fired from Charlie Hebdo; blows it off to work on his new magazine but presents witness list and gets second hearing date in January.
Quote Of The Week
"He took control of his life with help from an equal-rights-oriented Milford point guard named Hadley V. Baxendale" -- Gil Thorp plotline summary in a Chicago Tribune article about the strip's 50th anniversary. It's not the greatest quote, but I love the name Hadley V. Baxendale.
this week's imagery comes from pioneering comic book house Quality
* the latest iteration of the Legion of Superheroes 
* the interesting thing to me about 
By Kim Thompson
He hasn't been particularly well served in terms of reprints, either -- much of his later (admittedly weaker) Sibylline work was not even collected into albums, and Chaminou remains, insanely, out of print -- and he would be on the very bottom of my list of European cartoonists likely to ever make it into English. One hopes that his death might spur either the mainstream publishers who released the work, or energetic smaller publishers, to get more of it back into print. I'll have my Euros ready!
Macherot was born in Verviers. Although he trained to be a painter and also at one time wanted to become a journalist, he eventually became an illustrator and cartoonist. His biography at Lambiek.net notes that his first foray into cartooning were gags in an approximation of Virgil Partch's popular style that he submitted to the comedic magazine Pan under a pseudonym.
In 1964, Macherot left Tintin for Spirou, where at first he worked on the abortive Chaminou series. It lasted for only one story, Chaminou et le Khrompire, but was eventually revived by several artists in the 1990s including Macherot himself. Its reputation exceeds the series' publishing success. Macherot's next project, Sibylline, better resembled his previous work and was more of a hit for the publisher and cartoonist. That series would end in 1990 when the cartoonist initially retired, and in 2006 be revived -- under Macherot's watchful eye -- by Andre Taymans. 
* a 1982 fan-directed 
* the writer Mark Evanier notes that the San Diego Convention Center has announced some 
* it's going to take a more knowledgeable writer about manga than I am -- that would be all the writers about manga -- to figure out if there's anything new of substance in the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com's 
* the charity group The Hero Initiative will publish its Marvel-allowed book of Hulk illustrations this December. Monies earned will go to the group's charitable work with older and in-need comic book creators.
* finally, a few of you wrote in to inquire after the status of the Joost Swarte book at Fantagraphics, Modern Swarte, after Amazon.com canceled pre-orders. Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics says that the book will be out in 2009. They canceled orders because they can't say exactly when in 2009: they want to give Swarte all the time he needs to do as much work as he wants on the book before starting the release cycle. The publisher remains confident the book will be released next year, though, and they'll re-solicit when they know exactly when it will ship.
If you're one to see things in terms of causes and fighting effectively or not on their behalf, you may be worried or delighted that cartoons like 
* you can now affix 
The Peterborough Examiner has 
* one wonders if this humorous graphic novel were more about the financial system in general rather than its specific subject matter 
SPURGEON: What do you think kept you at it when a number of your peers stopped?
SPURGEON: How do you look back on your early mini-comics at this point? They seem very different than your last two or three books. They also seemed about ten years out of their time, more like bursts of energy than something was formally ambitious or controlled and literary-minded. What do you like about that work and is there anything about that work to which you feel little or no connection now?
SPURGEON: For that matter, I think of you as part of a larger group of cartoonists, mostly on the West Coast. Do you feel like you're part of a community in that sense? Has it been important to you to have friend in the cartooning field in terms of feedback or your overall development?
SPURGEON: Mine Tonight is an extremely ambitious work. It switches storytelling styles mid-stream, thwarts a lot of easy narrative expectations, and even has you in it as a character. How was that book written? What kind of process led your from concept to getting it on the page?
That doesn't really help matters if you're a comics consumer whose eyes are bigger than your wallet. I'm an atypical consumer of comics in that I get a lot of stuff for review purposes. However, one thing that helped me when I was a broke grad student and an even broker recession-suffering twentysomething was to change my orientation towards comics. I stopped thinking New Comics Day and started thinking about building a library -- to have a comics collection I would never resent taking with me. The way I did this was roughly 1) figured out what I was spending, 2) quit going to the shop for six weeks, 3) started depositing a percentage of my weekly purchase amount -- whatever I wanted it reduced to -- into a fee-free checking account starting that first break week and making that a weekly habit (or doing so virtually in terms of my existing account; if a dedicated account or category sounds insane to you, you don't buy enough comics for buying comics to be a problem), 4) vowed to end the practice of double-dipping, which didn't always mean trades over comics but certainly meant one or the other, 5) when I started to buy again not buying anything the week it came out for six months, 6) never buying from the same place three times in a row. At least that's how I remember that transition this week; my memory's not great there. But the rough idea of it is solid.
* we're reminded by J. Caleb Mozzocco that recalled comic DC: Decisions #1 is on the stupid clock in terms of our finding out what was so wrong with it it couldn't be released to market. We now know, much to our collective industry shame, that a Batman comic was recalled because DC felt the insane need to print curse words under the suddenly not-so-black blocks covering them, and that a Superman comic was recalled because Superman must share drinking habits with Radar O'Reilly instead of, I don't know, a guy. I hope we never find out what doomed the initial printing of DC's opposite-of-greatly-anticipated (I'm guessing) exploration of superhero political views, because that means we can dream up much more amusing horrors than almost certainly exist, say a Krassneresque flashback that features Hourman having sex with the hole in Jack Kennedy's skull, or a brand new scene showing off Green Arrow's Muhammed Cartoons arrow.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) 
* does anyone else find it somewhat amazing that the last comic standing of the mid-1990s Fantagraphics publishing expansion (Dave Cooper, Renee French, Jeff Johnson, etc.) turned out to be 
Here are the people to blame for everything good and bad that happens to editorial cartoonists for the next 12 months:
* especially as the book's been out for a while, I like the fact that a major mainstream-comics site 
* the much-lauded writer/artist team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips will debut their creator-owned Incognito in December, from Marvel's Icon imprint. Called "a twisted mash-up of noir and super-heroics" in 
* this may be slightly older or brand new, I can't tell. It sure is good-looking: 
* 
Given the major crush of news that came with McCloud's 
SPURGEON: Was being out for this book any different than being out for the kinds of books you've been doing more recently? 
SPURGEON: The thing that pops out at me about that cover is the dates: 1987 to 1991. [McCloud laughs] 
SPURGEON: [laughs] That's horrible. And it's horrible that I laughed. [McCloud laughs] Hey, I wanted to ask you a nerdy question that came to me while re-reading Zot! I thought that the character designs held up pretty well. That's not something you have occasion to do -- other than your narrator stand-in I don't think of your work in terms of its character design.
I have to give props to 
SPURGEON: I want to shift gears a bit for the last few questions. You did some work on creators rights issues once upon a time, and were part of the original crew putting together the 
McCLOUD: We may get locked into certain models on mobile devices, but in terms of the overall web an alternate system or revenue model can still present itself. Nobody's fighting over one finite patch of ground: the ground is essentially limitless. So that doesn't worry me so much. The fact is, I don't have the answers now, so I'm going to go off and draw a graphic novel. I'll see how things look when I get back.
