I've said this so many times it's part of the interview that follows: Batton Lash is one of my favorite people to see at comics conventions, when he's nearly always in the company of publishing and life partner Jackie Estrada. Lash is funny, he's full of stories and he's really, really nice. I'm never sure how these things get counted, but 2009 appears to be the 30th anniversary of his Wolff & Byrd feature, which started as Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre and is now running on-line and in print under the appellation Supernatural Law.
Lash has more than proven his devotion to his strip over the years: following it into different formats, re-working old material whenever he gets the chance, hand-selling it after reaching the limits of what the direct market has to offer him. In addition to affording me the opportunity to learn more about his unique story -- which includes being born in Brooklyn, being taught at SVA during one of that school's heydays, and currently freelancing with both Archie and Bongo in addition to be one of the last standing traditional self-publishers -- I thought he'd have a measured perspective on the modern comics industry. I was happy he agreed to talk to me, and enjoyed our conversation. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: We're talking close to Christmas... Do you have any holiday traditions? Do you keep cartooning through the holidays?
BATTON LASH: The cartooning goes on all the time. I have pads all over the house. I'm always jotting down ideas. I don't know if you're aware, I'm also doing stuff for Archie and Bongo. Whenever something hits me I have to make sure I write it down right away or else I forget it. It's a 24/7 operation.
As far as holiday traditions, it's interesting that this interview is today, because it's the day we're getting our Christmas tree. We always look forward to that, because Steve Darnall -- I'm sure you know who that is -- he had his wife Meg always put together a beautiful CD of obscure novelty Christmas tunes. Jackie and I have been fortunate to be on their mailing list each year. We always trim the tree to Steve and Meg's CD. That's as close to a tried and true, ironclad tradition that we adhere to.
SPURGEON: I wondered, because I know you're a Brooklyn boy, and you're in San Diego now. That's about as far away from Brooklyn as you can get. I wondered if the holidays were different than what you had grown used to.
LASH: I'll be honest, it took a long time to adjust. This particular December has been very chilly, so it at least felt seasonal. That puts me very much in the holiday spirit. Being in San Diego doesn't bother me as much as it used to. But I never, ever get used to waking up Christmas morning and seeing guys walking their dogs wearing only shorts and no shirts.
SPURGEON: You're a School of Visual Arts grad. Are you still close to your schooling? Do you still reference back to your training, or is it one of those arrangements where you had the education once upon a time but you've since put together your own set of skills?
LASH: Funny that you should bring up SVA. I was just in New York several weeks ago. Their cartooning society was nice enough to ask me to give a lecture. I talked about my experiences of being a student there and trying to break into the industry. It didn't seem so long ago that I was in their spot, but I guess it was! By the way, the "Cartoon Allies" (that's the name of the society) were terrific. A lot of talent there. I think I got more out of talking to them than they got listening to me!
As far as what you're asking me, for the first few years after graduating SVA, I had mixed feelings. I looked back, and thought, "Did I just waste five years of my life? What's going on?" [Spurgeon laughs] But as time went on, the information I got from school, whether from class or just by osmosis, sort of settled in. Stuff that I didn't quite understand at the time, I began to "get it" by having my own experiences in the freelance world.
The thing about Visual Arts is that they've always promoted that the people in the business are your instructors. So you had freelancers teaching students. I graduated in '77, and maybe in 1984 I'm sitting in my studio and going, "Oh, I get it now. Right, right, right, right, right." I look back now and I'm very happy that I did attend the school. Plus I'm stunned by the instant bonding with the people who went to Visual Arts. It's like being in the War or something. "Visual Arts?" "Yeah, Fine Arts, one year."
SPURGEON: When I hear SVA grads talk it almost reminds me of the guys I know that graduated from military academies, as silly as that may sound. I think there's a special bond between cartoonists who share that kind of very specific academic experience.
LASH: That's a byproduct I didn't even consider when I graduated. It was nice. When I met Jackie, she knew a lot of people in the comics industry. I knew a few -- mainly from SVA. She would ask, "How do you know Kyle Baker? How do you know this person? How do you know that person?" My answer was always, "We went to Visual Arts." After a while, she says, "Let me get this straight. Did everyone in comics go to this school??" It seemed to be my reference point for a lot of people.
SPURGEON: How long have you been on-line with Supernatural Law to the extent you are now?
LASH: Three years. We started in 2005.
SPURGEON: Has the move been beneficial for you?
LASH: I'm still in print, too.
SPURGEON: Of course. I guess what I'm getting at is that you have a substantial amount of work on-line. It is full-bore on-line publishing, not a web site with sample strips. You're still publishing in print, but you're publishing on-line, too.
LASH: It's ongoing. I put stuff up on Mondays and Thursdays. Something is up there twice a week. I'm currently doing a new story, but I went into reprint mode for a while when I was doing Archie: Freshman Year. I also had some family things to take care of on the East Coast, so that took up a lot of my time. But even with the reprints, it's new to new readers. And it's in color. I can't help but redraw certain things. Everything is a work in progress, as far as I'm concerned.
To answer your question, I think being online has been a tremendous boost. We know the situation with indies and comics stores. I think I've gone as far as I can go in the direct market. Even if Supernatural Law were the #1 TV show coast to coast, and President Obama said Wolff and Byrd are his favorite comic book characters, stores who have never carried my books still wouldn't carry them. I will never win them over. I'm grateful for my supporters and I appreciate all the retailers who do carry and promote my books, but I'm not going to get any new stores. The Web has introduced Wolff and Byrd to people who have never seen the comic because either their neighborhood stores don't carry it or they've been out of the loop or, best of all, they just pick it up from a link. Then they order the books from us. Or Jackie and I direct them to a store that does support us in their area. "This place carries Supernatural Law and they're well-stocked, so check them out."
My mantra has always been "one reader at a time." That's the way it goes. I'm very happy to do that, too. I'm still here, able to do the next installment, the next issue, the next collection. I've always been here for the long haul.
SPURGEON: Unlike a lot of creators for whom taking it on-line is the first major change they've embraced, Wolff & Byrd have been fairly mutable over the years. It's on-line now, I think of it as a comic book, and it also had a long run as a magazine strip.
LASH: Newspaper.
SPURGEON: Excuse me.
LASH:Wolff & Byrd started in a local weekly called The Brooklyn Paper, and was picked up by The National Law Journal. The Law Journal strips are what CBG reprinted. I have to say, you could have knocked me over with a feather when Don and Maggie Thompson told me, "Hey, we want to run this." I really appreciated the platform Don and Maggie gave me; that was a great opportunity to get my name and characters in front of the comics industry every week. Meanwhile, the Law Journal was giving me a good rate and I was getting my chops along the way. Learning on the job!
SPURGEON: You've always pursued the market that's presented itself to you. You haven't been dependent on a specific format. If there's another market tomorrow, I have a feeling you'd pursue that. You're very devoted to your strip in a consistent way.
LASH: Thank you, I appreciate that. You go where the markets are. Also, I'm from the Old School. For better or worse, people like Chester Gould and Leonard Starr and Milton Caniff, were on their strips for years and years and years, and I always liked that. They created a familiar atmosphere that gave the reader a feeling of "Welcome to the family."
I always liked my characters. I enjoy working on them. I told you about the pads around the house. All of the characters have little backstories that maybe only I would ever know, but it's fun doing that. I was chastised by someone in the industry who said I should give up Supernatural Law [Spurgeon laughs], and that everyone's tired of it. Well, everyone hasn't seen it yet. Do something new? I enjoy doing this and there's people who enjoy reading it. I don't understand the attitude of "if it isn't a blockbuster the first weekend, it sucks." It kind of irks me.
You see a lot of problems in mainstream comics where people keep jumping from project to project. So you've got 20 different versions of Batman or Spider-Man. Or whatever character. There is no one vision. Like I said, there was a time, better or for worse, you'd have Stan and Jack on a long run. At least you had some traction. Sure, I have some other concepts, but everything takes so long, and as I get older it takes me even longer to do things. For now, I'm happy to concentrate on Wolff & Byrd... Mavis, too!
I'm getting to be more of a perfectionist. You mentioned the strip. I am grateful for anyone that stuck with me since the strip days, because I look at those strips now and go, "Oy vey!" I'm glad people gave me a chance! The old work makes me cringe sometimes. Now I try to take a lot more care with my artwork. Back in those days it was, "I gotta get it out, get it off my desk, there's no fooling around with the Law Journal's deadline -- get it there, end of story."
SPURGEON: You talked about something in Chris Brandt's film Independents that I thought was pretty great in that you looked at the grief that some of your fellow professionals that are more freelance-oriented go through to get assignments, keep assignments, dealing with the politics of it.
LASH: You mean the work for hire stuff.
SPURGEON: Yeah. And while you have that aspect to your career, you seemed in that footage to take some satisfaction out of being the captain of your own ship. Is that fair?
LASH: Yeah. Well, I don't know about satisfaction. No, you're right. You're right about that. I'm very fortunate I draw just well enough I can illustrate my own stories. My heart goes out to a lot of writers who can't draw. They're very frustrated. You can tell they want to do their own thing and not be beholden to work for hire stuff. If they could do their own webcomic or, back when it was really viable, their own self-published comic, they would; but they're stuck being dependent on another artist.
If I had to make a living by soliciting scripts from Marvel or DC, I would not be in the comics business. I just don't have the head for that sort of... struggle. Or office politics. I was very fortunate that with my two work-for-hire gigs, Archie and Bongo, they both approached me. Now, having said that, last year, since I know Mike Carlin very well -- SVA alumni, by the way [Spurgeon laughs] -- I approached him with two pitches. Actually, two artists told that if I ever pitched something to DC, I could attach their names to the projects because they wanted to work with me. Isn't that nice? Anyway, I thought if DC accepted the pitches, it would be a lark to work on some of their old characters. But DC passed. It wasn't a biggie. I certainly never have a yearning to get a Wolverine mini-series going or else. That's just not my thing.
SPURGEON: I liked what I read of your Archie mini-series, Freshman Year.
LASH: Oh, thanks.
SPURGEON: How do you find a place for yourself creatively in an assignment like that? Those characters are as well worn as any characters out there... how was that experience generally?
LASH: It's fun. I always liked the Archie characters. The first time I worked with them was on the Archie/Punisher one-shot. And Victor Gorelick, the editor-in-chief, always liked my writing. He always wanted me to do more. But there was never enough time, and like I just told you, I don't really pursue the freelance thing as much as I should. Even when it lands in my lap.
When they came to me with the Freshman Year concept, I just took what they already had established with the Archie characters and kind of dug into my memory of what I was like as a teenager. I've totally romanticized my teenage years out of proportion. We all had miserable times, but I concentrated on the lighthearted incidents and the fun times. And I put that into Freshman Year.
I'm not sure that answers your question!
SPURGEON: I just wondered if you're writing Archie -- or by extension a lot of these kinds of characters and concepts -- where does the satisfaction come from? Do you have a vision of Archie in your head? Is it a standard of craft you want to achieve? Is it simply about trying to find that connection?
LASH: I have no pretension that I'm going to give the world the Archie they've always been waiting for. [Spurgeon laughs] It's nothing like that. Even when I do Wolff & Byrd, I think, "What's the kind of thing that I liked to read when I was a fan and went to the newsstand every Tuesday?" The mandate was Archie and the gang in their freshman year. What would I have liked to have read? So I apply that. I threw in a few autobiographical elements that made it fun for me, that after all these many years to see it in cold print, things that happened to me in high school, it's a kick to me. I'm sure if it happened to me, it happened to other people and it's happening to kids today. It's always great when someone comes up to you and says, "That thing you wrote; I felt exactly that same way." It's nice.
SPURGEON: Do you purposefully try to keep the Wolff & Byrd stuff frozen in time? Is it a balancing act? There's character progression, but you're not focused on character progression. Does that go back to a personal preference, writing something you want to read?
LASH: What keeps me there is economics, so that when I reprint the material I don't have to worry about it being too dated. Except for a couple of details, the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Spider-Mans could be taking place today. They kind of have a timeless quality about them. So do classic comic strips if you disregard references to Tojo or whatever. People are people. Fashion changes, but human nature remains constant.
I've always tried to keep it timeless. There's never been a saga. Cerebus was a 300-issue story. Supernatural Law is not like that at all. There's no timeline. I'm from the Old School in that rule #1 is that every issue is someone's first issue. I don't want them to be turned off by an ongoing saga that they feel they can't catch up on. I want newbies to feel they can jump right into it.
SPURGEON: You placed the original strip on Court Street in Brooklyn. It was surprising to me to hear of there being a real place that it was based on, because of the overwhelmingly iconic sense of settings I get from your work. It seems very organic that way.
LASH: That's good...
SPURGEON: Oh, it's all good. One thing I thought might help you keep the strip timeless is your strong focus on the foregrounded plot as opposed to an accretion of character detail. With that tight a focus on plot, how do you guard against repetition?
LASH: I don't know. [Spurgeon laughs] I like to think I'm learning all the time. I appreciate you pointing out the thing about plot. I think the most important thing is story structure. That's what I concentrate on the most. I'm fascinated by the rhythms of a story.
SPURGEON: Is that something that comes naturally to you?
LASH: I know it sounds like bragging, so trust me when I say was a terrible student, but when I took my report card home my parents would say, "You did lousy in everything, but why did you get an A in English?" It's because I always had the best compositions in class. The teacher would tell us to write about something, and I would construct my stories as much as a sixth grader could. I was always interested in story. I'm always trying to entertain. You're doing good when a reader identifies with a character, so I work on characterization. But I put that in the back seat to make sure that the story goes from A to Z without any problems. The story structure is the most important thing.
LASH: No. It started as a lark. I guess I was so chagrined over Obama's policies and the shameless fawning he as getting from the press that I had a need to get a dig in. A blogger that I follow, a very funny and witty observer of politics and pop culture, Jim Treacher, got me going. I forget how I originally got a hold of him. I think I commented on one of his (non-political) postings a few months ago, and he replied to me and he said he knew who I was and knew my comics. That surprised me.
So I had this cartoon and I didn't know what to do with it. I wrote to Treacher. I knew he was throwing some darts at Obama and the media's love affair with him. I e-mailed him if he wanted to put my cartoon on his site. He was only too happy to do that. He wrote back a couple of weeks later and said, "I can't draw to save my life. But I have ideas. What if I wrote them up and you drew them." It sounded like fun. I had never worked that way before. We did a few strips, and it was a blast. I like Treacher. I've only communicated with him by e-mail, though.
SPURGEON: I remember the cartooning itself as lively.
LASH: Thanks. I did it for free, and I also had a ton of deadlines at the same time. I was forced to economize the drawing, so I really just banged it out. I tried to make the color work with it. I'm glad you liked it.
SPURGEON: You talked earlier about looking back at your old strips... do you feel you're a better artist now? How might you be a better artist?
LASH: I'm probably the least objective when it comes to looking at the artwork. Jackie will tell you that we'll go to press with something, I'll say, "Let's hurry up and get the next issue out as quickly as possible so people will forget the current one." And she'll go, "What are you talking about? It looks fine." After I sleep on it and don't look at the issue until the proofs come in, I'll say, "This doesn't look as bad as I thought!"
When you're younger, you fantasize about being Barry Windsor-Smith or John Buscema -- and I know I'm dating myself by those names here. At a certain point, you know you're never going to be those people. You won't match their draftsmanship. So you just work with what you have. I remember in SVA, when I had Will Eisner as a teacher. He was always telling me, "Pull back. You're trying to be something you're not." He said, "Look at animation. Look how open that is. Learn to economize." I've always tried to do that. If anything, I've stopped putting in useless detail. I've looked at some of my recent stuff, the web stuff. It's very open and clean looking. I think I got cleaner, let's say that. I'm still working at cleaning up.
SPURGEON: Have you enjoyed the opportunity to work in color on a regular basis?
LASH: Oh, yeah. In fact, I'm scheming to do a color print issue. I'm still 20th Century enough that I have to have a color comic book in my hands. Just what you can do with light and shadow and not rely on black is fascinating to me. Look at some of the old comics, stuff during the '50s when the printing was terrible and the separations were done by old ladies in printing shops. Even then, the way they would use color, sometimes just two colors to suggest a mood, it works beautifully. More so than today.
SPURGEON: I noticed that some of your color has the same simplicity of many of those classic horror comics, the old Atlas comics and the like...
LASH: I look at that stuff, and it's all good. But my real bible has been those 1970s DC -- I can't call them horror comics -- mystery comics like Witching Hour and House of Mystery. I think it was Tatjana Wood. The coloring of those stories was beautiful, very moody and simple. I draw on that a lot.
SPURGEON: Is there a difference doing color for the screen and doing it for the printed page?
LASH: I haven't done it in print yet! The one story that went from web to print, I changed it to gray tones (Mavis #5). Which was another job onto itself. I haven't had a chance to bring the color to print yet. I'm working on it. Printing is getting very cheap. You have to find it. I've seen some people at conventions, self-publishers. I'd say, "Boy, you published this yourself?" It's a 32-page color comic. They say, "Yeah, we got printed in Hong Kong." It was like under two grand or something. The coloring was just fine for their purposes.
That's another thing, if I can digress, as to what I'm saying where I think the self-publishing movement -- for lack of a better term -- is going. I've noticed a lot of these younger self-publishers aren't relying on Diamond. They know they're not going to get anywhere there. They've got a whole grass-roots thing going at conventions. They go city to city. They do just fine in their region, too.
SPURGEON: Do you think that's had an effect on your art and outlook, doing so much hand-selling of your title?
LASH: Yes. And that's a double-edged sword, too. Some of the people I see at the shows I only see once a year. They buy everything that's come out since the last time they saw me. They'll go, "Okay, see you next year, and we'll get whatever you have out." I say, "You gotta support the stores!" [laughs] "The stores drop me when people don't buy the book. Please buy it at the store." And they say, "We'd rather buy it from you."
It's nice to have that connection. I've noticed that people who never bought the book that once they meet me and my effervescent personality [Spurgeon laughs], then they're willing to try Supernatural Law and purchase a copy. And I have to thank you, Tom, because you say I'm the nicest guy anyone should meet at Comic-Con. People come to my booth saying, "Tom Spurgeon says you're a nice guy. Show me how nice you are." And I give them a comic.
SPURGEON: Wow. My readers are jerks! [laughter]
LASH: Nah, they are always pleasant.
SPURGEON: That's a relief.
LASH: I wish I could do more shows. It's always nice to meet the readers. It's good to meet other cartoonists, too. When you have that personal contact, you connect. I was kidding when I said "effervescent personality," but when new readers meet me and see how sincere I am, they're willing to give the book a try. And more often than not, they like it!
SPURGEON: It's hard to get that first bit of attention from people.
LASH: I know Supernatural Law isn't to everyone's tastes. However, I think if they tried it, they might be pleasantly surprised.
SPURGEON: Are you worried at all about the economy? Have you done anything to help weather the storm?
LASH: Maybe on a personal, household level. But as far as the comics industry goes? No. Not at all. Comics have always done well in a bad economy. I was at SPX recently, right around the time everything was hitting the fan. Everyone was concerned the economy was going to hurt the show. The house was packed. Everyone did well. It occurred to me that comics and entertainment in general always does well in bad times. You know how comics fans are. I was like this, too. I can skip that, but I want this. I won't have dessert tonight as long as I can get my new copy of that. We'll get through it. I think people are hungry to get away and escape, to spend a whole day at a convention getting comics. Comics are what the bad times need.
SPURGEON: Is there anything special we should mention, or should people just continue to pay attention to the site and the print releases?
LASH: We have a brand new trade out. The Soddyssey and other Tales of Supernatural Law. That is the missing volume in our trade paperback series of five books -- volume two: Wolff & Byrd issues #9-12. Of course I've gone back and drawn many things. [Spurgeon laughs] Talk about being timeless: certain things have been updated.
SPURGEON: You mean there are no more mentions of the Kaiser?
LASH: [laughs] No, things like "I have to find a phone booth" is changed to "I have to use my cell." Libraries have become very important for Exhibit A Press and their target audience is teen readers. I have to make sure everything in the stories happened within the last few years. Not "back in the day"!
SPURGEON: What do you think appeals to the librarians about your work?
LASH: A couple of librarians who don't know each other each told me they thought Supernatural Law has a good story and a lot to the story that could keep a reader hooked into the series. A lot of things go on. It is not a quick read. They said that people who were checking it out were able to get engrossed in it. They also liked that it was reader friendly: you could get up to speed pretty quick as far as who the characters are and their back story and stuff.
SPURGEON: It's an easy series to pick up on; the concept seems very clear.
LASH: Good art is important, don't get me wrong. Good art and comics go hand in hand. But -- and this may be blasphemous -- it's not as important as a good story. I've noticed that for people in the outside world, people not into comics the way we are, they are pretty indifferent to the art. Their real interest is in a story they can get engrossed in. That's what I would stress. Story over art.
*****
* Lash's long-time leads, I believe taken from a cover
* photo of Lash, such as it is, by Tom Spurgeon
* one of the many monsters around which a serial gets focused
* another one
* cover to the Mavis series
* cover to Freshman Year
* I just sort of like this panel
* Li'l Obama
* a limited-color panel
* that line from the client makes me laugh
* the latest trade
* [below] a classic monster
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
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I'd seen Matthew Forsysthe's Ojingogo comics linked to here and there, but I didn't start paying attention to them until I got to see a whole bunch at once in the print collection of the same name, just released from Drawn and Quarterly. It's a fun book. The leads and the creatures they run into are imaginatively designed, the encounters offer a level of complexity when viewed as a series that distinguishes the overall work, and a lot of it is very funny. Forsythe is also a contributor at Drawn, the illustration and cartooning blog that I won't let myself read regularly for fear of merely replicating the consistently excellent way they draw attention to deserving and interesting artists all over the world. He was nice enough to take a few questions. I enjoyed his answers. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Matthew, I'm not familiar with you at all beyond seeing your name up for a few awards, which is absolutely terrifying to me considering the accomplishment on display in Ojingogo. I liked your biographical cartoon [see bottom of post]. What about your life story do you think might distinguish you from most of your artist peers?
MATTHEW FORSYTHE: I guess the main thing is that I don't draw full time. Editorial illustration doesn't really get me excited -- though I do take the occasional job if it's interesting. And I don't draw comics full-time. I have a day-job that I love and I'm happy coming home in the evenings and weekends and drawing whatever and whenever I can.
SPURGEON: You mention a few places that Ojingogo is derived in part from influences that you picked up while teaching in South Korea. Can you talk about those influences a bit? Am I right to think that you also mean influences beyond comics and cartooning?
FORSYTHE: Yes, definitely. I was teaching a group of kindergarten kids and we would make up stories and tell them to each other every morning -- and they really changed the way I saw the world. I was enamored with their dream-like logic and I found it echoed in a lot of Asian pop-art. Western narratives suddenly seemed so oppressively literal. I was also learning to read Korean, too,. and I found the language to be very inspiring and very rich visually. I hope that comes across in the comic.
SPURGEON: Although I'm certain you must have talked about this elsewhere, can you clue me in about how Ojingogo developed? In hurling myself towards the Internet to find out more about you, what I came away with is that it was an on-line project -- perhaps even a flickr-based one -- that developed into the print one. Can you talk about how you ended up in print?
FORSYTHE: I started posting the comic on my site way back in 2004 and the feedback was immediately very positive. I was working a lot and traveling around Asia and posting about one strip a month -- which I'm told is a very poor schedule for a webcomic. But I was never trying to make a living off of it -- so it was fine for me. I self-published a couple mini-comics and did a few shows. The comic started getting noticed a bit -- award nominations and that sort of thing -- and Chris [Oliveros] from D+Q got in touch and told me he liked the comic.
I also loved designing the book for print. I'm such a big fan of Chris and Tom [Devlin]'s production work with D+Q and Tom's earlier work with Highwater Books. It was really exciting to actually make a book with these people.
SPURGEON: Talk to me a bit about character design. I love the girl, especially the tiny feet. Is there difficulty involved in making a character that is both distinct but has cipher-like, every-person qualities like that character design has?
FORSYTHE: Most of the characters in the book came from dreams or floated up from the subconscious. But the girl is a very direct manhwa interpretation of a good friend of mine and drawn in a style that's fairly common in Korean newspaper strips and cartoon culture. I don't feel like I could draw a bunch of cute human characters like her without completely changing the tone of the comic. So basically it's her tangling with a bunch of my nightmares.
SPURGEON: It's hard for me to think of a question to ask about the creatures... the shaggy man and the dragonfly remind me of something one might see in a Miyazaki film, but I'm woefully unfamiliar with Asian fantasy and myth in a broader sense, let alone within the various, individual cultures, to know the basic sources that might be involved. Let me ask you this: Is there an attempt to have the creatures together represent a larger design? Do they fit together? Are they partial aspects of a larger whole? Or is it more directly in line with your intention that they represent individual ideas and the world you've created is generous enough to contain them all?
FORSYTHE: Miyazaki's films were a huge influence. Another common thread its that they're iconic animals in Korean folk-history. Dragonflies, fish, squid, rice, ginseng -- these things all pop up in folk tales all the time. At one point I was thinking of making comics of Korean folk tales that I was reading. These things are also symbolic in Korean life. Ginseng (Insam in Korean) is endowed with almost magical qualities in Korea, so I knew I had to have a ginseng root being consumed somewhere in the strip.
Also there's a lot of playing with scale in the book. Things get big. They get small. People often ask me about this. But this is also a common theme in Asian pop art. Godzilla, The Host -- we've seen it a thousand times and even more in Asian comics. There's a history in Asian pop-storytelling of horrific monsters growing out of innocent and natural origins; almost certainly a psychological vestige of the nuclear attacks on Japan and Korea's tragic history in the 20th century.
SPURGEON: I do have to specifically ask after that one creature with the raincloud over its head. That's just odd and lovely-looking and I'd love to know where he came from.
FORSYTHE: I honestly don't know.
SPURGEON: One thing I find fascinating about your work is that on the one hand I get this real sense of exploring a world, but in exploring that world you use foregrounded figures and limited or dropped backgrounds over 90 percent of the time. What led you to that approach? Because certainly from your sketchbook work and a few of the panels that are used in that fashion it's clear you could create a lush, atmospheric world in every drawing. Is it the nature of the project? Is it a desire on your project to emphasize the relationships?
FORSYTHE: That's definitely part of it. It's something I picked up from manga -- which moves a lot quicker and has panels and pages that breathe a lot more than North American comics.
Also, I'm a big fan of the stuff by Blutch or Jean Jacques Sempe -- who use the negative space on the page so liberally but elegantly. David Lynch says we fill negative space with our imagination -- and I think that happens a bit with Ojingogo.
SPURGEON: Do you believe your chapter to be purposeful as narratives or it more about exploration and interrelationships over story? I know that with Jim Woodring, say, I get a sense of parable and an undercurrent of meaning being expressed. Can we look at this work that same way? Is there a way you'd prefer people read it?
FORSYTHE: The comic was completely unscripted. The chapters were inserted more as beats than any sort of marker within the narrative. I definitely read heavily into some of the stuff going on in the comic -- probably the same way Woodring does. Personally I find it more satisfying to read it in pieces -- strip by strip -- the way it was created- - but obviously people can read it however they like.
SPURGEON: Am I right in thinking there's intentional sense of optimism that courses through the work? There are these encounters depicted which tend at first to be scary or problematic but are eventually rectified in a way that not only keeps people mostly from harm but seems to fit a higher purpose, some sort of goal.
FORSYTHE: The comic is definitely meant to be fun. Fun for me to create and fun to read. I was looking at my friends making mainstream North American comics -- and as you're probably aware a lot of them aren't having a lot of fun doing it. They don't always buy into the stories, so they kind of resent the work and the constant deadlines. I was working my ass off in Korea -- teaching 10 class-hours a day most of the time -- and when I got home I didn't have any energy for anything that wasn't fun.
SPURGEON: You also contribute to Drawn, the mighty web site for illustration and cartooning. Does looking at art in the way I imagine you must to be a contributor there have an effect on your work, do you think? Would your work be different if you didn't have that specific relationship to art and artists?
FORSYTHE: It's a daily dose of humility. There are so many great artists seeing the world in radically different ways. The most important thing I've learned through Drawn is that great art is not just about craft and practice -- though those things are very important. It's really just about trusting the way you see the world.
One of my favourite artists this year, Alberto Vasquez, has a very simple and restricted style. But everything he does blows my mind.
SPURGEON: I hope you'll indulge me a question about another cartoonist. I was intrigued by the fact that you were so complimentary of Richard Thompson's Cul De Sac in your year-end list despite the fact that your work as I'm familiar with it seems more fantasy-based and his is a fairly grounded and only occasional whimsical in that way family strip. As a cartoonist and as someone who interacts with cartoon art through Drawn, what is it that you think makes a great comic? What makes that one a great one?
FORSYTHE: I think the thing that gets me about Cul de Sac is its honesty. You can just feel Thompson is channeling his own experiences in an honest way through this wonderful family. I'm not saying necessarily that it's his family -- just that these characters are alive. We all know these people. I can only hope Ojingogo resonates a little bit in the same way.
SPURGEON: What are your plans for 2009? What's the next book?
FORSYTHE: I've started working on a more traditional narrative. It's inspired by my trip home from Korea through China, Mongolia, and Russia via the trans-Siberian railway. Right now I'm researching images and re-reading my old journals and starting to put stuff together. I'm also working on more Ojingogo comics.
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* all imagery from Ojingogo; that's the cover of the book up top
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Kurt Busiek's Marvels was the big comic at the time I went to work in comics. Launching the career of artist Alex Ross and instigating any number of still-ongoing trends, many have forgotten that Marvels came out just as Marvel Comics careened into a rough period marked by bankruptcy, overreaching business acquisitions and market setbacks. I have no idea if Marvel's current place in the entertainment firmament owes anything to the ability to look upon a Marvels as a testament to their characters' power and appeal during the tough times. I bet it didn't hurt. Kurt Busiek has since built an admirable mainstream comics-oriented writing career centered around his own creations (most memorably Astro City) and various high-profile runs and mainstream gigs that call on his particular set of talents (including Secret Identity and Avengers/JLA). He'll start 2009 with a big project at each major: a Marvels sequel called Eye of the Camera -- the reason I'm allowed to start this introduction with a decade-plus old comic and not have anyone mad at me -- and the current DC weekly series, a Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman adventure called Trinity. I'm told Kurt Busiek always wins arguments on the comics-related Internet, so I tried not to get him mad at me. I'm grateful to Kurt for taking this many questions and turning them around in interesting fashion in such a short time. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: Kurt, one thing I always wanted to ask you about the project that put on the map: do you think that people always gave Marvels a fair reading? For example, I know that it's frequently cited as a book that has a worshipful view of superheroes, which I don't think affords it credit for the ambiguities of the relationship Phil Sheldon has with what he's seeing and experiencing. Are you happy with that book's legacy?
KURT BUSIEK: I'm pretty happy with it, yes. I don't think there's any one "fair reading," or that people are reading it wrong unless they get out of it what I intended to put into it. People bring their own perspectives and baggage and attitudes and tastes to fiction, and that's going to affect anyone's reading of anything. What you get out of a work and what I get may be different things, but that doesn't mean either one of us is wrong.
I don't particularly agree with the idea that Phil is "worshipful" of superheroes, though there's a part of the story where that's likely true. But it's simply part of what he goes through -- from being scared to being overawed and feeling like ordinary men don't matter, to finding his footing in a world with marvels in it, to excited to saddened to bitter to awestruck to angrily supportive to disappointed and saddened to philosophical. But a lot of what we were working with was about trying to explore what it would feel like, emotionally, to be in that world with that kind of thing happening around you -- and the perspectives we'd usually seen, at least at Marvel, were either the heroes' perspective, right up in their heads and making them seem like normal guys with feet of clay, or the idea that superheroes are scary and dangerous. So we wanted to do more than repeat that -- we did include it, but we learned more toward "super-people are impressive and awe-inspiring," because that's an idea that had been kind of lost, and it's the kind of thing I'd think about, when I was a kid walking to school and wondering, "What would it be like if Iron Man came rocketing down Massachusetts Avenue? Would the windows rattle? Would there be a backwash? What would it be like to see someone man-sized, going by fast and low, like a human missile?"
Getting that sense of wonder onto the page was a big part of Marvels. Also, of course, as a photographer Phil's looking for the memorable, the impressive, the affecting -- and he's also likely putting it all in context, thinking about the bigger picture, unlike the guy who's crabby about mutants without thinking it through, or upset that a superhero fight made him late for work, so he blames the heroes rather than thinking about where he'd be if the villains had been unopposed. Marvel has gotten a lot of mileage over the years from those crabby New Yorkers reacting in surly fashion to the superhumans among them, just as they have from the feet-of-clay approach -- but we wanted to step back and look at it from a different angle. And it's not surprising that some people read that as "Oh gee gosh they're all wonderful and we should be grateful to live in a world with the violent and destructive Hulk in it!" Which isn't Phil's attitude, but it's a cartoon of it.
Still, I like the idea that storytelling is a kind of two-part telepathy. The writing is an act of translation, of putting on paper an imperfect version of what's in the writer's brain, but that's between the writer and the page. The story happens between the page and the reader, and it's the translation that happens as what's on paper enters the reader's mind. To a lot of readers, Marvels is all about the details and history of the Marvel Universe, and they don't think anyone else can appreciate it unless they already have all that context -- and they're right that no one who doesn't already know what they do will get out of it exactly what they do. But to my mother, who knows very little about the Marvel Universe, #3 is all about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because she remembers what it was like to wonder if forces beyond her control were going to make the world end. So she doesn't see the continuity details, she sees the metaphors. And in some ways, I think readers who approach it that way may get something stronger out of it than people who catch all the references. But the continuity buff and my mother, neither of them are reading it "wrong."
In the end, I think the lasting legacy of Marvels is that it's good and interesting work, both on my part and on Alex's, so I can't complain, even about the people who hate it. We reached a lot of people that liked it and were affected by it, and are still reaching more. That's more than I ever expected, so I'm not going to crab that not everyone got it the way I wish they would. That'd be an unrealistic expectation.
I mean, seriously, Marvels won five Harvey Awards and three Eisner Awards. It would seem crass to complain about anything. Aside from, say, getting foreign royalties on time, or something like that.
SPURGEON: Artistic people that manage to be prolific over a span of several years fascinate me. How has your process changed in the years you've been writing? Is there anything different about the way you engage the screen at the start of your day now than the way you might have 15 years ago? Do you find that there are things you do better now -- or have a harder time doing -- that change the way you're able to allocate time?
BUSIEK: I think there's a lot that's different, but it's not always that easy to figure out why. During those 15 years, I got hammered pretty badly by mercury poisoning, and for a few years had a very, very hard time writing deeper, more resonant story structures -- and even straight adventure was harder than it should have been. I'd spend days at a time unable to concentrate enough to write, and when it cleared a little bit, I'd have to get as much done as quickly as possible in order to stay on schedule. I'm still recovering from that, and I still have periods where I just can't think straight, though they're less frequent and don't last as long. I'm very much looking forward to when they go away completely.
So that's a pretty big gulf to navigate. There's more, of course. 15 years ago, I'd just started to figure out how to work with something that for lack of a better term, we may as well call "theme" -- but it isn't theme, it's what Thomas McCormack talks about in his book The Fiction Editor, an overarching intent of what the writer wants to get across to the reader in a non-literal way, but his term for it is "master pre-libation," which sounds a bit porny -- and that's something I'm more comfortable with now, because I've had a lot more practice at it. And my outlines are looser, because I'm more skilled at breaking down a story visually, and don't have to do as much prep work on paper before I start typing.
That's the sort of thing that comes with experience. When I started out as a professional writer, over 25 years ago now, I had to outline everything down to the panel level, roughing out every page and knowing what dialogue beats were in every panel before I could start typing, or I wouldn't have the confidence that it all worked. And that made for kind of constrained work, since there wasn't much room in it for improvisation or discovery while doing the actual writing -- it was a very formal process. By the time I did Marvels, I was loosening up, but I was still very careful in outlining out the emotional arc of a scene or story, because that's what I was least comfortable with. During the worst of the mercury poisoning, my outlines tightened up again, though not to the same level -- because I simply couldn't keep a whole story structure in my head at any one time, and I'd lose the nuances if I didn't plan it all out. Today, I tend to break stuff down page by page, because I know how to flesh out a page, I'm confident in it. I know even at a loose stage where I'm going to need room for text and where the art's going to be carrying things and the story will be moving faster. At some points, I've simply roughed in a scene that I budget three pages for, and flesh it out while writing, because I've got the confidence to write it while it's still alive in my head. That's just what comes of practice.
But just last week, for a new project, I tightened up again, not because I didn't know what to do, but because the format I'm working in is so tightly structured that the only way to deal with it was to know ahead of time, panel by panel and beat by beat, what was going on before I sat down at the keyboard. So my outline looks a lot like it would have in 1982 -- but it's got richer thematic and emotional content.
I don't know if that answers the question. Do anything for 25 years, and you'll exercise those particular muscles a lot. You'll be able to do reflexively what you used to have to gut through, and you'll be able to take that time you've saved and use it to sweat over other aspects. I'm sure someone like Joss Whedon can break down a story into TV acts pretty easily, structuring it out so the right beats happen at the commercial breaks, and a lot of it is reflex for him because he's used to it. If I were to try that, I'd be sweating and cursing and going through multiple legal pads full of frustrated scrawls as I figured it out.
Again, I'm not sure that's an answer to the question -- you seem to be asking for examples, and I'm giving theory. But to pick a concrete example, I used to rough stories out by assuming six panels to the page unless something needed more space, and over the years I've kind of slid toward five panels per page. This is partially a reaction to the artists I work with, and getting better results when I break down a page into the same amount of story, but told through slightly larger images, and it's partly the experience of writing things like Marvels, where we did so much with visual pacing that I got very aware of what you can do with changing panel size. By the end of Marvels, I was specifying in the script whether a set of panels were all on one tier or stacked, and coding each panel [S], [H] or [V] for square, horizontal or vertical. I didn't do that with anyone but Alex, but it did make me approach writing for other artists differently.
I also worked with George Perez and Mark Bagley, who tend to break a story down into more panels than I plotted out, and with Pat Olliffe, who would break it down into fewer, without sacrificing content. From Mark and George I learned a lot about how much stuff can fit on a still-exciting page, but I'm wary of expecting others to be able to do it. From Pat, I learned a lot about how to do just as much storytelling with larger, more impactful panels.
And writing Conan was an education in making setting and atmosphere a big part of visual storytelling, and on and on. I've gotten a lot more comfortable with different narrative viewpoints, I'm better at setting a tone. Everything gives you new tools and new ideas, and makes you more assured about something or other, and it all gets added to what you can do and what comes easily and what you work hard at.
SPURGEON:Aaron Sorkin -- at least I think it was Sorkin -- once said something to the effect that the last decade had made it much more difficult to have a discussion through art about heroism. As someone for whom heroism is an obvious subject but also something you explore in a deeper, more focused way in Astro City, have you felt the influence from outside events that have challenged your treatment of that subject and those kinds of stories? Will we see any of that in this new Marvels series, or does its time period-focus sidestep that?
BUSIEK: I'd be interested to know where he said that and in what context -- in part because I'm a big Sorkin fan, and I'd like to read whatever it was, and in part because I think the post 9-11 world has been one that brings up more interesting contexts for a discussion of heroism, and I think Sorkin explored that territory pretty well in Charlie Wilson's War, which is set pre-9/11, but done post-9/11, and it has heroic things being accomplished by some seemingly unheroic people, and then having that heroic stuff sandbagged and ultimately backfiring, as the triumph isn't matched by the follow-through. So if it's more difficult, I think Sorkin was doing a pretty good job anyway.
But maybe he was saying it's harder to sell that kind of thing to skittish producers or network executives, and there are other projects that foundered because of it. Or that he had more to say with Charlie Wilson's War, but what we got was watered down. Or heck, maybe he was griping that when you have characters who are supposed to be TV comedians and they spend all their time obsessing vocally about moral and ethical and political issues, the public doesn't want to watch. I don't know. But I think that Charlie Wilson's War had more nuance to its heroics than A Few Good Men (much though I like what he did with heroism issues in that), and I'm expecting he'll have some interesting stuff to chew on in the upcoming Trial of the Chicago Seven.
And I think Bill Willingham's saying some interesting things in Fables, these days, showing a devastating victory and the aftermath that comes beyond the triumph -- that feels inspired by current events, though I'm sure Bill will have his own spin on things, making it involving fiction and not mere editorializing.
I'd assume my own writing has been affected in some way, but probably subconsciously, for the most part. And I won't be able to articulate it, whatever it is, until I can look back with greater perspective. I did address 9/11 in an Astro City short that was in DC's 9/11 benefit book, though I didn't refer to those events directly -- just a story about heroism and sacrifice. The only clear and direct effect it had on something I was writing was that at the time we were in the middle of the Kang War story in Avengers, and had it all set up for Kang to kill almost everyone in Washington DC in a brutal act that brought the world to the point of surrender. And of course we immediately thought, "Urk! Can we do that? Will that be seen as a reference, even though we had it planned earlier?" And after a bit of dithering, we decided to go ahead with it, but the one change we made was to have Kang want the Avengers to sign the surrender, because they're the ones he feels are his true foes. We just didn't want to show the President of the United States surrendering to an enemy who attacked a major US city, not at that point in time. And later in the story, we had President Bush around, and he was kind of stirring and patriotic and brave. And I've got very little use for Bush, not then and not now, but I wasn't going to make the President look like a clown at that point in our history, regardless of whether I liked him or not.
A little while later, in The Order, Jo Duffy wrote Bush as kind of a clown, with some satirical dialogue, and I was co-writing with her. I didn't rework her jabs because I thought that I shouldn't overrule her on it, even if I wouldn't have done it myself. And we were a bit more removed from the event, so it felt more permissible.
But aside from a greater sensitivity to the effects of demolishing buildings with people in them, something I don't often do anyway -- I usually go smaller or much bigger -- and having a greater awareness of what a big showy violent act means to the people around it, I'm not sure my work has been all that consciously affected. I rarely write overtly political fiction, and even when I do use political stuff, it's generally to see what it makes the characters do rather than to serve as a statement. I did pitch an idea for a Sub-Mariner series, about factions within the government and big oil companies making out Namor to be a terrorist who has to be ousted from the throne of Atlantis so they could conquer it themselves and get at the oil underneath it and turn the whole place into a third-world sweatshop for high-pressure factory work -- but that wasn't because I wanted to make a point about Iraq, it was because I think it would make for a fascinating crucible for fictional adventures and drama, whether it bears resemblance to anything in the real world or not. Conspiracy theories can be cool building blocks for stories even if they have little basis in fact, just like the Bermuda Triangle and vampires and Madame Blavatsky can be fun to play with whether you believe in them or not.
But that's not what you were asking about. If any of this works its way into Eye of the Camera, it was likely on an unconscious level.
SPURGEON: Kurt, you co-created Thunderbolts, which I believe is one of the longest-running comics at Marvel that didn't come straight from the 1960s Marvel glory days. What do you think about that project has made it so sturdy? Is it just conceptually solid? Is it particularly mutable? Has it just been lucky with creators? Marvel's track record in that area is dismal.
BUSIEK: I guess it counts as long-running if you skip over the fact that it was canceled at #75, then brought back in a mini-series and then relaunched. But heck, I'll take it. Other than X-spinoffs and The Punisher, I think we've outlasted everything else that isn't a Silver Age book, though I may be forgetting something.
Anyway, I think all of your suggestions are correct, to one degree or another. It is a pretty solid concept -- back when I was first starting out on the series, Mark Gruenwald made a point of telling me he thought it was a terrific idea, because it built something new that wasn't an imitation of something else but was still rooted in Marvel history and Marvel concepts. It's an idea that works well in the Marvel Universe, and adds something new to it.
That said, it's also very mutable -- when we started, what I thought was its greatest strength was that the reader didn't know what would happen next, because the characters didn't fall into a traditional heroic pattern. So they were villains in disguise, and then villains trying to redeem themselves -- except Moonstone was clearly not reformed, she was still keeping up the pose, and Atlas was trying to be a hero just because his friends were and he's a follower, and Zemo was still out there, and -- you simply couldn't predict which way they were going to jump next, they didn't have a well-worn rut. They were able to do the unexpected, when more conventional heroes can't, because the heroes have a pattern, an expectation of how heroes act, and the T-Bolts all had different drives and motivations that were more about their inner conflicts than about a devotion to doing good deeds. And I have to say, I loved having Moonstone in there. Where Zemo was an outright villain, and Abe and Melissa were dawningly heroic, she was a manipulative snake, messing with everything to get an advantage. It was like having Loki on the Avengers, or a classic soap opera "bitch" in the middle of things, scheming and out for herself. In any other team, the audience wold be itching to see her exposed and kicked out, but in the T-Bolts, she fit just fine, as just one of the factors pulling things in odd directions.
So we went through several different directions for the team, when Mark and I were doing it, with what felt like a major change every year. And Fabian took it off in new directions, and Warren Ellis reworked it into something else, but it's still playing with the idea of villains-as-heroes, which means it's still not going to be fully predictable.
And when you look at the creators -- or at least, the writers -- it's been me, and then Fabian Nicieza, John Arcudi, me and Fabian again, Fabian solo again, Warren Ellis and now Andy Diggle. That's five guys, and a pretty strong set of writers. And there's been fill-in stuff by Joe Casey, Roger Stern and Christos Gage, which is a pretty strong list, too. So I definitely think the book's been fortunate in its writers, and in having Tom Brevoort as editor for so long.
The series was canceled at a time when they threw out the core concept and made it into something completely different, back when John Arcudi was writing it. I think what he did was pretty good, but it wasn't the Thunderbolts, so the existing audience bailed because it wasn't what they wanted and new people didn't pick it up because they didn't know it was a new thing. But when we brought the team back back, it did well enough to relaunch an ongoing series and has been around ever since. It feels good to see that happening -- particularly since at the start of the series, there were people saying it wouldn't last eight issues. Then that it wouldn't last 12. Then 25. Then 50. And in the end, what killed it was abandoning the series concept, and what brought it back was reverting to the concept. So there's vindication in that. The concept's been proven pretty solid.
I haven't been paying attention to it lately -- I find it hard to read any series I wrote for a long period, because I think like the puppeteer, not like the audience -- but I was delighted to notice that Andy Diggle's put the Headsman on the team. I used enough ill-explored second-tier villains in the book that I think it's only fitting that he's now using an ill-explored second (or lower!) tier guy that I made up...
SPURGEON: I wondered out loud on the site the other week about why people didn't discuss KBAC with the same fervor they did eight to ten years ago. The work seems the same to me. I had one letter writer that suggested that maybe it doesn't come out with the same consistency and marketplace force that is used to. That's the book with your name on it; is it still the same priority that it was at one time? How does it currently fit into your overall career?
BUSIEK:Astro City is still very much a priority, but after years of driving ourselves bananas trying and failing to make it come out on schedule, we finally relaxed and said, "We'll just keep doing it, and bring it out whenever there's enough to bring out." So I make sure Brent [Anderson] always has stuff to draw, and he draws at his most comfortable speed, doing side projects when he needs a break, and when an arc or special is complete, it'll be scheduled and come out. We could theoretically have new issues out now -- Brent will finish The Dark Age Book Three next week, I think -- but it wasn't until the book was ready to be scheduled that anyone talked to Alex about doing the covers, and he was booked up far enough so that he couldn't do them 'til January at the earliest. And we don't want to solicit the book without Alex's covers -- they're Alex Ross covers, for Pete's sake. So we'd rather accommodate everyone's schedules than rush and squeeze.
Next time, Scott Peterson will doubtless get the covers into Alex's queue earlier in the process, but for the moment, we'll deal with everyone's schedule with the idea that we want everyone to be comfortable and happy, and do the book on the schedule it can be done best on.
But you're right that it doesn't have the buzz it used to, and I think the schedule is part of that. I also think part of it is that the book's been around for over ten years now, and it's not seen as something fresh and new, like it was in the early days. That's both because (a) people have gotten used to it, and so it's "here's Astro City again," more than "Hey! New hot thing!" and (b), it turns out that Marvels and Astro City were pretty influential, and over the last decade-plus, that influence has spread. When we started out, the kind of story we did was one you saw in Astro City and that's it. Now there's Powers and there was Gotham Central, and Sleeper and there's Incognito and Welcome to Tranquility and Noble Causes and more.
And I'm not saying that Brian or Ed or Gail or Jay or the others are doing what they do because they're imitating what we did -- Ed, in particular, is bringing a noir-pulp sensibility to superheroes, and he came by that all on his own -- but it may be that we made the market more welcoming of stories set in a superhero milieu that aren't about the heroes, or perhaps aren't about the adventures. There's a lot out there that's exploring similar territory to what Astro City explores, and that makes us less unique, too. That's something I think about from time to time -- I started Astro City in part because it was different, and there wasn't any other place I could do that kind of story. If what we do has become more commonplace, is it time to find a new approach? Or to pack it in, job well done? Or if we did find a new approach, would it be Astro City any more, or would it be better off in a different setting, a different context?
At least so far, I've got a batch more stories to tell, so even if we're not generating huge buzz with each new issue, I'm happy to be continuing. The book collections still sell steadily, so people are still discovering the series. So as long as we have stories to tell and like the experience, why stop?
Come to think of it, the books are probably another factor. As we pick up new readers via the book collections, many of them probably wait for the book collections to buy it, so they're not following the comics. And others may have switched over to trades due to the schedule.
Another factor to consider is, maybe the stories aren't as good as they used to be, or the audience has had their fill of it. Or they like the impact of the single-issue stories better, and we've been in the middle of a long epic -- we got great reactions to the Samaritan special and the Beautie special.
So I don't know what it is, but I'm not all that interested in trying to puff things up and make everything a big hot project -- they're great when they come along, but I'd rather do what I'm most interested in, as long as there's an audience to support it. Astro City fits both of those just fine, so it'll stay part of my career even as other projects come and go. As Joe Field has said, it's better to be cool than hot, it's more comfortable and it lasts longer.
SPURGEON: I was surprised to see the announcement for Marvels: Eye of the Camera in that what I thought was going to be the basic structure of a Marvels sequel you used in a KBAC series. At the same time, you seem to be very excited in press talking about how this new Marvels work has allowed you to return to the Phil Sheldon character. What is it about that character that you find compelling or useful or truthful in terms of what you want to convey? His vocation? His identity as a World War II-era adult?
BUSIEK: What I originally planned for a Marvels sequel did get turned into Astro City: The Dark Age, yes. I had two more series at least loosely planned -- one would have starred Charles and Royal Williams (you can even see "Charles" on line to get Phil's autograph in Marvels #4), and been about people who aren't marvels but who do get involved in what they do, rather than just being observers. And the third one would have had Marcia Hardesty, Phil's former assistant, as the viewpoint character, interviewing people who were or used to be personally involved with the marvels -- from Dorrie Evans to Jeryn Hogarth -- but we'd also be seeing someone actually progress from the world of normal people into the world of the marvels, and exploring how that changing perspective would affect them.
When things fell apart, I took Charles and Royal and their story, reworked it a lot, and turned it into an Astro City piece. Part of the Marcia Hardesty one (but not the Marcia part) just resurfaced as part of a project I may be talking to DC about after Trinity, but maybe not. It'll keep.
So the Marvels sequels weren't going to be starring Phil Sheldon. I did have an idea, that I'd discussed with Alex, for a sort of "epilogue" story about Phil, where we could see him after retirement, and find out what became of his life. It was partly because we didn't want someone to bring Phil back as a crusading reporter for the Bugle, all buff and brawny and then have him get bit by a radioactive owl or something, but part of it was that I thought it was a good idea for a nice, touching, bittersweet story. So I hung onto it as a maybe-someday kind of thing.
And then Tom Brevoort called me up and suggested we do something for the tenth anniversary of Marvels, because the business people at Marvel had noticed that while there might be other books that had bigger sales at any one point, Marvels just kept selling steadily, outselling a lot of other trade paperbacks by sheer longevity. Like Watchmen -- but on a rather lower level! -- it just keeps selling, and they thought the tenth anniversary made a nice excuse to do another one and maybe have two books that sell steadily like that.
I wasn't artistically ruffled or anything -- it's not as if I hadn't been open to sequels before, and I did have this idea for a one-shot about Phil. So I described it to Tom, and we talked about it, and it kind of started growing. Not so much the original story idea getting longer -- that part's still about 30 pages long, and provides the final act of Eye of the Camera -- but it got a lead-in story, to set things up, explore Phil's attitude toward later developments at Marvel, and make it so the story stood on its own as a complete work, not just as a coda to Marvels.
So it was an idea I already had, that took a different form. As for what I like about Phil -- he's a little old one-eyed Jewish guy who wanders around the Marvel Universe going, "Say! Look at that!" and thinking a lot. I think he's a great viewpoint character -- he's so thoroughly not a superhero, but an ordinary, everyday guy, that he makes a great lens to see extraordinary events through. Phil's at least a little bit inspired by the main character in Nevil Shute's Trustee From The Toolroom, and he's also -- well, he's a little old Jewish guy who's been around the superheroes since they first showed up, which makes me think of Stan and Jack and Julie Schwartz and others. He feels like a link to the beginnings, a guy who's making a living, feeding his family, by showing us wonders and marvels, but in the midst of it all, his own tale is very human. He's not a kid, he's an older guy who's seen a lot and done a lot and he's reflective. I like that. I like working with that perspective, that sense of experience.
So the story wouldn't work with a hard-charging young twenty-something (although that's what Phil starts out as), but it works great with a guy who's old enough to have distance and perspective on what he's thinking about.
It's not so much that I find Phil inherently compelling or truthful, but that if I tell Phil's story in a truthful, honest manner, showing you what he'd feel, what he'd think, how he'd react, then the results will feel true, and make for a compelling story.
SPURGEON: Some of your bigger projects over the last few years have been done with a co-writer. You describe the experience of working with Roger Stern as very organic, to the point in one conversation that was published where neither of you were aware which one of you wrote a specific joke. Your work with Geoff Johns seemed nearly seamless, too. I'm not used to people taking on partnerships later in the writing careers -- how have these relationships had an impact on the way you write?
BUSIEK: I'm not sure I've ever taken on a co-writing job for any reason other than time pressure. No, wait -- I co-wrote a bunch of Elvira stories with Richard Howell, for Claypool Comics, and we did them that way just because it was fun to hash out a story over the phone, and I like talking about demented whirlpools of pop-culture references with Richard. And I did a collaborative Spider-Man novel with Nathan Archer, where I did most of the plotting and he did most of the writing, but that's the gig Byron Preiss offered in the first place.
But everything else -- Avengers Forever and Iron Man with Roger, Defenders with Erik Larsen, Trinity and the Superman stuff Fabian and I have done -- it's all come about because I was too overbooked or sick or whatever, and needed help. Even Superman: Up, Up And Away -- if I remember correctly, the first idea was to have one of us write it, and I didn't have the time and neither did Geoff, and Matt Idelson suggested we co-write it. And with Trinity we knew going in that there was no way I could write 22 pages a week for a whole year, plus Astro City, so we designed the project to have Fabian co-write the back chapters.
So co-writing isn't something I've actively sought out -- it's something that's happened a bunch out of necessity, and I've been lucky enough to wind up working with really good guys. I have enough of a shared sensibility with Roger, Geoff, Fabian and Erik that we can work from a position of common ground -- we're pulling in the same direction, not working at cross-purposes.
And I like working with other people, talking ideas back and forth, but usually I wind up doing that with an editor or an artist. I've had some of the best writing experiences I've ever had, working with Tom Brevoort and Scott Allie as editors, or Alex, Brent and Stuart Immonen as artists. So I like that, and I value it, but I usually prefer to be the sole "writer" on the project. Maybe because that gives me final authority over the writing, and I'm control-freak enough to want that final result to be mine.
I did do Iron Man with Roger for a year, where he got final say -- we co-plotted and he scripted it -- but I don't feel as much like those issues are "mine" as I do with Avengers Forever, where we co-plotted and I scripted. I think they're good comics, but I'm not sunk into them as deeply, I'm more distanced from them. As for Up, Up and Away, it was a wonderful experience that mutated over the course of the project. The way we planned it, Geoff and I were going to hash the story out together, then he'd plot and I'd tweak the plot, and I'd script and he'd tweak the script. And it did begin that way. Geoff flew up to my area and stayed in my guest room for three days, as we worked out the story together, and we had a great time doing it. On that third day, he wrote up the overall outline with me looking over his shoulder and making suggestions. Then, once it was okayed, we started out on the series, and pretty quickly he got swamped with Infinite Crisis, which had its own schedule headaches. So I started doing the first-draft plots, too, with him tweaking them, and I was doing the scripts as well, and by the end he was so busy he wasn't tweaking very much. So it's very much our story, but as it goes on it's more and more my voice, doing the job of fleshing out and realizing what we'd outlined together.
The storytelling part was very much the two of us, a lot of give and take, and it was a blast. By the end of it all, I was the dominant voice by happenstance, not by design.
On some of the writing collaborations I've done, it's worked that way by design -- on Avengers Forever, Roger was a huge help, but I scripted the result, so it came out very much in my voice. Fabian and I worked that way on the Superman stuff we did together, too -- and I expect I run roughshod over him on Trinity, probably more than I should. But as long as those are the parameters going in, nobody gets bent out of shape, and I hope I'm not too much of a jerk about it. It may be that I co-write well as long as I get to be the big dog, and I wouldn't like it if it was the other way. I'm not in any real hurry to find out, I guess.
Still, it's been great hashing out stories with Roger, or with Fabian -- having another voice in the mix, another perspective, to get you to think about things you might not have considered otherwise, is very useful, whether that guy's an editor, an artist or a writer. I can definitely say that while Fabian and I have been co-writing the back half of Trinity, he's made suggestions or challenged my assumptions in ways that have made the lead half of the story better.
So I think the co-writing has made me more aware of the need for a good, sympathetic voice in some role, but my preference is still to write stuff solo. Even though working with Roger and Fabian of late has been extremely rewarding. Go figure. I might have less resistance to the idea if I was writing a screenplay or a novel, since there it feels like the give and take of collaboration would be analogous to the kind of collaboration I do with an artist on comics.
Then again, I do have a comics project in mind where another writer would be a regular part of the mix, and another idea where I've been planning to write it solo, but I keep thinking that it'd be fun to work with Fabian on it. So maybe the fact that I keep co-writing stuff and enjoying doing it is having an effect -- it's lowering my resistance to the whole idea!
SPURGEON: I told my friend Sean I'd ask you about the scene in Superman Up, Up and Away which he calls:
"one of my all-time favorite superhero moments: Superman's powers are running on fumes due to Kryptonite exposure, and he's launched himself into the air with Lex in tow. At the very moment he runs out of juice and momentum and sort of stalls in midair for a second before they start falling back to the ground, Lex takes advantage of the moment to tell Superman 'I hate you.' I thought it was a lovely, visually poetic sequence that really nailed the relationship between the two characters."
Is it possible you could talk about how such a scene comes about? How much time do you spend on crafting moments like that one?
BUSIEK: That one was serendipity, I think. It was in the story from the outline stage. When Geoff and I were coming up with the story, we got to the moment where Superman bullets through the Kryptonian craft, yanking Luthor out of it but losing his powers along the way due to the Kryptonite. So they're arrowing through the air, and they could have just fallen into the bay and on we go with the story, but that didn't feel right. It felt like there needed to be a moment there -- they're together, practically in each other's arms, hanging there in mid-air, about to slow down and fall, and neither of them have enough juice to stop them from falling. They're isolated, removed from everything else, and the main conflict's over and even if he dies here, Superman's won. Again.
I could see that moment, very cinematically, and it needed something very personal, a confession, an intimate moment between the two. What's the last thing Luthor would say to Superman as they're both about to die? What does it all come down to?
"I hate you. I really hate you." If we were going for comedy, he'd add, "I just wanted you to know that."
But that would have been too much.
So I told Geoff that, and he laughed and said that's great, so we stuck it in the outline and it made it into the final story. That's what Luthor's feeling, then and there. He's said it before, but it has more power at a point like that, when they may be about to die. He's not caught up in the moment, he's not fired up about something else. There's nothing else to do but say how he really feels. There is no deathbed rapprochement, no realization that he's been wrong. He just plain hates that Kryptonian fucker. So he says it, and it feels human and true. It's not a complicated moment, just an honest one.
So I'm glad Sean liked it. I was very happy with it myself.
But it was just a moment that happened during the plotting, and we were smart enough to hang onto it. In other stories, I can spend a ton of effort structuring things out around a particular moment -- the cliffhanger ending of the BACK IN ACTION arc, where a powerless Superman leaps into a chasm toward a power core that'll fry him in an instant unless the other heroes shut something down in seconds, and he just tells them, "I trust you to handle it" and jumps, giving them the motivation to succeed and casually putting his life in their hands -- that was what Fabian and I built the entire arc around, setting that up and making it work.
But the Luthor bit just kind of presented itself.
SPURGEON: On the Trinity project, one of the things I hear is that this is an old-fashioned comics project, that it represents a kind of storytelling and approach that doesn't resonate as much with readers now as it did 20 years ago. Do you agree that such a project skews to older fans? Do you care? Do you have a sense of an audience that's aging along with you, or one that replenishes itself?
BUSIEK: The bigger a project gets -- a company-owned project, at least -- the less control you have over who it's aimed at. Trinity was something very, very different when I first pitched it, and it changed and grew and got reworked and all kinds of stuff, and much of what we're doing now got worked out in a conference room in New York with me, Fabian, Dan Didio, Mike Carlin, Liz Gehrlein, Ian Sattler and I think one or two other people in the room. It wasn't a matter of DC dictating to us what the story should be -- the story is very much the work of me and Fabes -- but they were all in the room reacting, as we worked things out. The disappearance of the Trinity came up because Mike was pushing me to think through the repercussions of what I'd set up, to pay it off right rather than backing away from it. Other things got added or subtracted because we had Dan and Ian right in the room, giving us instant feedback. So it starts to take on a life of its own.
I don't know that I'd say it skews to older fans. If so, it's probably because it sprawls all over the DCU, using characters and settings and history from many sources, and readers with more experience with the DCU are going to find more that's familiar in that. But I think the storytelling is pretty straightforward in a way that maybe old-school fans will like, but I think a 13-year-old would have a fine time with it too. It may be that Trinity is the choice of 40-year-old fans and 12-year-olds, and Final Crisis is what the 30-year-olds go nuts over, so we're skewing older than some but they're skewing older than what big mainstream events could be reaching. I have a hard time imagining newcomers could make heads or tails of Final Crisis -- as wild and exciting as it is, it feels like it's for people who know a lot about the characters and who they are.
Of course, people say that about Marvels, too, and I think they're wrong about that, so I could be wrong just as easily.
As to the question about whether I think the audience is aging along with us or renewing itself, I hope the answer is "Both." Comics have gotten pretty good at hanging on to readers, but it often feels like they've done so at the expense of reaching out to younger readers and bringing them in effectively. But I don't write every project for the same audience -- I didn't write Conan for the readers I'm writing Trinity for, and didn't write Shockrockets for the same people as Avengers Forever.
Some projects, I write for the insider -- JLA/Avengers was a project that core superhero fans had been waiting for for 20 years. It was going to be a celebration for them, for people who already like the JLA and the Avengers enough to get jazzed about the idea of them meeting. It's not intended as a starting point -- if you don't already know the books, why would you want to see them team up? It's for the guys who are already there. But Shockrockets was hopefully something that could attract newer or younger readers, at the same time as people who like good action-adventure comics could get a kick out of it. I was aware with it that it needed to be more welcoming.
Trinity's somewhere in between -- I want to make it accessible to newer readers, but also have lots going on that the older readers who know the DCU inside and out will get a kick out of. So it's aimed at longtime readers and newcomers. But I have no idea who's actually reading it, beyond what I see online. DC's certainly happy with it -- it's apparently very profitable, and selling the kind of numbers they projected it to sell, or so I'm regularly told by DC execs. And as a bonus, unlike many other DC projects, it's not a schedule nightmare -- except for those of us on the creative team, since we're killing ourselves getting it out on time. But unlike many books, we're actually making it. We just got over the holiday hump, when printing schedules get advanced a week or two to accommodate holidays, and we hit all our marks. So now we're in the final race to May and the finale.
It's exhausting, but it's a lot of fun to have this big a canvas to work with, and this many characters.
SPURGEON: Finally, I know you as someone who always seems to have a smart, general take on the history of comics as a business. Are you worried about the state of the economy? How worried should comics be, do you think? You popularized the theory over comics pricing themselves underneath the newsstands, is there a similar economic effect you see that might come into play in the months ahead?
BUSIEK: I'm worried about the economy in general terms, but I don't really know what it means for comics. I keep hearing people talk about how in troubled time, comics do great, but I don't know why they're saying that. The "troubled times" that comics have been through include the Great Depression, during which comics flourished and grew, but grew from nothing, and the recession of the 1970s, during which sales dropped and dropped and dropped, and comics lost thousands of retail outlets, and freelancers were talking about how there'd be no comics industry at all in a few years and everyone should find something else to do. And newsstand sales never recovered from that -- what saved the industry was the Direct Market, and the ability to sell more efficiently and profitably to a dedicated fan base.
So which of those scenarios are we looking at? Or is it either of them? The comics-do-great-in-troubled times mantra seems to be borrowed wholesale from the movies-do-great-in-troubled-times mantra, about how people flock to cheap entertainment when they don't have money. But I'm not even sure that holds true for movies any more. And I don't know if it was ever true for comics. Was the boom in the Thirties and Forties comics being resilient in troubled times, or simply growing in the environment they were born in? And even if the mantra was true back then, so much has changed -- in the Thirties, comics were the same price as other magazines, for 64 pages or so. In the Seventies, they were cheap by comparison to other magazines, but much shorter. Today, they're still short, but a lot more expensive. But we have new revenue streams from the book market, and maybe-kinda-sorta-someday the internet.
The big chain bookstores seem to be in trouble, and that's a big part of comics' added revenues -- but graphic novels have been growing, so do bookstores cling to that as a growth area or turn away it to concentrate on older patterns? The internet's a great way to reach potential customers, but it doesn't seem to be making comics publishers big money yet. And the Direct Market is shaky, as the big publishers compete for attention by being louder and more interconnected, something that excites a lot of existing readers but can be forbidding to newcomers. And to some existing readers, as well.
I've beaten the drum a lot about what went wrong for comics in the wake of World War II, but I have the advantage of decades of hindsight there. I'm not an economist and I don't think my analysis of the present market trends would be particularly credible. I can say I was beating the drum for trade paperback collections long before they were commonplace, and while I don't think publishers did them because they were listening to me, I was at least right about it being an effective plan. And I pushed for Tomb of Dracula and Godzilla and Conan to be collected, because I thought they'd do really well in bookstores, where those logos mean a lot, and that seems to have been right, too. So maybe I'm not a complete idiot.
What I see, in a hazy way, is comics going through the kind of transition science fiction did over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, as the pulp era ended (or slowed down a lot, at least -- Analog is still with us), and SF migrated from a short-stories-in-magazines form to a form where original novels were the vanguard. Comics have been following a roughly similar pattern, as first the most popular stuff is collected in paperback editions, and then more and more, until book editions are considered a normal part of the process, not an extra. And now we're seeing hardcovers as a growth area too. The rest of the pattern would be the magazines sales dwindling (check), people starting to wait for the book editions (check) and original book-format work becoming the primary form of release, with magazines fading to secondary. That last one hasn't really taken off for the commercial genre stuff in a big way yet, though there's been some movement in that direction, at least -- I'm happily getting books like Amulet and The Good Neighbors and Grease Monkey and such. And of course, original publication in book form is more and more the norm for indy material. The trouble there is that comics are editorially more expensive than prose, both to create and to print, which creates an economic speed-bump -- it was easy for book publishers to start doing paperback SF decades ago, because they were already doing prose fiction in book form; this was another genre, not another medium. Comics are more complicated, but we're going down that road.
That's not to say Superman is going to stop being a monthly anytime soon, or that if the comics industry becomes a books-first form, it'll even be publishing the same kind of thing as it does today -- SF certainly went through big changes over the years. But books like Good Neighbors and Amulet seem to be in a good place to create a "new mainstream," or at least to build on the success of Bone and lead to more stuff that captures the attention of young readers who don't have an interest in learning the tangled history of mainstream superheroes. I would bet that we'll see more, not less, of that kind of thing over the coming years, as we have been already. Things build to critical mass and then make big steps -- comics TPBs used to get racked in "Humor," after all. We griped about it, but eventually there were enough to have their own shelf. And then their own rack. And then their own section, which has already split into two genre classifications, Manga and Not-Manga. More critical mass will mean more divisions, since when there's enough of one kind of thing to get a sales advantage by racking it all together, it'll get its own shelf, then its own rack, then its own section...
The big question is whether the economic crisis will speed that up, as publishers grab for any advantage they can, or slow it down, as they become more conservative. If I was on top of all the latest news, I might have some guess as to which way things might jump -- Heidi MacDonald probably has thoughts on the matter -- but I've had my head down for the last year, scrambling to keep a weekly book going, so I'm not even aware enough of what's going on to do end-of-year best lists. Too much stuff is still sitting on the bookshelf in my bedroom waiting for me to get to it.
So I expect the comics business should be pretty worried, and should be prepared to react, swiftly, to whatever comes, because if it's good you want to take full advantage and if it's bad you need to be able to refocus on whatever else might be working better. I'm concerned myself, for utterly selfish reasons -- not just because I want audiences with pockets stuffed with disposable cash, but because of my own future plans. I'm deep in the trenches of Trinity, and outside of that my main projects are Astro City and Marvels, so it's almost all superhero stuff, and the bulk of it is very mainstream, sprawling, shared-universe big-icon superhero stuff. When I get out the end of Trinity, I'm pretty sure I'm going to want a change. I like variety, and when I get to be doing too much of the same stuff, I get itchy to do fantasy, horror, SF, romance, mystery, anything and everything else. So I've got a lot of stuff in mind to do after Trinity, but an awful lot of it represents a step away from the superhero mainstream, and toward creator-owned stuff, or Vertigo stuff, or ambitious projects that don't fit a category the comics industry is used to. So it would be very very nice if we were in boom times by, say, June, thank you very much.
Not that I'm expecting it, mind you. But going out into a shaky industry with unusual material -- first I've got to find editors who'd welcome it, and then I've got to find an audience to support it. The editors I'm talking to, at least so far, aren't a problem, but if things get worse, who knows? If I want to do a project that's as much Jack Vance as Jack Kirby -- and I do -- then I hope I can make it happen. If I want to do a long-form fantasy project that'd run 50 or 60 issues, or an open-ended horror-adventure series that spans four centuries of secret European history -- and again, I do -- it'd be nice to have an industry that can support it.
But hey, I live in hope. I was dumb enough to move 3000 miles away from New York without having any ongoing assignments at all. Dumb enough to do a series about second-tier villains, or a story about Marvel history at a time when conventional wisdom said nobody cared about anything more than ten years old. I did a Conan revival at Dark Horse instead of signing on to a Hawkeye series for Marvel, and a Spider-Man-in-high-school project years before anyone thought of using the word "Ultimate" as a brand name. And it seems to have worked out okay, so I'll probably keep making dumb, risky decisions and hope they work out, too.
This is kind of a downer place to end the interview, but you asked an economy question last, so I guess you've got no one to blame but yourself for a gloomy-doomy wrap-up.
*****
* imagery from Marvels: Eye of the Camera
* page from Marvels
* panel from Conan
* the Thunderbolts reveal
* a recent Astro City cover
* from a recent Astro City special starring the character Beauty
* more Phil Sheldon, from a publicity pre-release of art on Marvels: Eye of the Camera
* a cover to Avengers Forever one of the many titles Busiek has co-written
* the two-page sequence discussed
* a panel from Trinity
* a cover from Busiek's Shockrockets series
* Busiek told them to get Godzilla back in print
* [below] a recent Astro City cover
A Short Note From The Publishers
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I love talking to Eddie Campbell, one of the great cartoonists. I was particularly glad to talk to him in this brief space between 2008 and 2009. In 2008, First Second published the last of three Eddie Campbell books that anchored the first few seasons of their line. The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard is a sweetly and gracefully told meditation on life as story, loaded with some of the most exquisite imagery of Campbell's long and distinguished career. In 2009, Top Shelf plans to release the massive Alec omnibus depicted above, placing in chronological order all of the cartoonist's wonderful autobiographical and autobiographically informed work into one place with several pages of new comics and another, smaller selection of never-printed ones. It will surely become one of the most borrowed works in many a considerable comics library. If you weren't aware, Campbell is also one of comics most interesting thinkers, and I'm happy to nudge him into some talk of formal aspects and publishing tends in the conversation that unfolds below. I enjoyed this back and forth very much, and I'm appreciative of how quickly Campbell turned the whole thing around. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: I don't think it fully registered with me before, but you have a massive collection of your autobiographical work coming out in 2009. I always thought that this was a natural for a book at some point and I look forward to it with a not insignificant smile on my face. Is there a reason this seemed attractive to you right now?
EDDIE CAMPBELL: The evolution of our medium has made this the right time. If you think back, at first we'd publish serial comics because that was what the economics permitted (all those "mini" and "maxi" series). Then we would gather the material into a book. The medium developed to the stage where a publisher could pay an author an advance to take himself away and make the whole book before showing any of it. We now find ourselves at an even more advanced stage, where several of a veteran author's books are gathered into a huge compendium. Thus Will Eisner's Life in Pictures, which collected his various books that had an autobiographical element, Gaiman's Absolute Sandman, Gilbert Hernandez' Palomar, etc.
SPURGEON: How did plans for this particular format come together?
SPURGEON: When did new comics become a part of those plans?
CAMPBELL: The funny thing is that the way I started putting it all together isn't quite the way it's ended up. I had the six books (the King Canute Crowd, Graffiti Kitchen, How to Be an Artist, Little Italy, The Dance of Lifey Death, and After the Snooter,) arranged in a chronology that follows actual time rather than the order in which the books were drawn, and then I had a large 80-page section at the end which rounded up a lot of short pieces and some unfinished works which are still worth reading as they stand. But the more I looked at the pages I started seeing an epic sweep in which characters grow older, with a real sense of time passing. It's ironic that in the comic book medium terminality has come to be seen as a holy grail, the notion of a thing being complete in itself (as in a "novel"), when the true essence of the comic strip is the very opposite, the concept of the eternal present. The greatest daily comic strips had no end. Conceptually, allowing for no interference by extramural forces, a strip may run forever (Like Gasoline Alley). Of course nowadays that quality has been usurped by the television soap opera. Given the dumbassed nature of comic books, the highest measure of commitment to quality, or terminality, that a writer can have is the determination to show characters being killed.
But I've wandered off the point. I saw this shape within the book and I shifted a few of the essential short things into their chronological positions and threw the rest out, then I saw the chance to complete the implied sequence by adding another book that brings things up to date. So we now have an all-new 35-page book at the end titled "The Years Have Pants", which has also become the title for the whole compendium, since it fits so well. But the new book is in no way a conclusion, for it introduces a bunch of new developments that point to resolution outside of the text. I'll also mention that there are half a dozen other unpublished pages included in the compendium.
SPURGEON: When we talked in 2006, you compared standard comics pages to a straitjacket, which I think as a value is an undercurrent to a lot of your formally audacious work of the last few years. What was it like, then, preparing new work for the Alec omnibus using a more standard grid?
CAMPBELL: I certainly wasn't thinking of the "nine-panel grid" as a straitjacket, because an artist worth his salt can compose with infinite variety in a given space. Rather I was referring almost to the opposite result, to the way the American comic book idiom creates its own limitations while appearing to be freewheeling. I was looking at a portfolio piece recently by a young artist, and fastened upon an oddly shaped picture. It was rectangular, but the dimensions of the frame had no meaningful relation to the content, with misshapen blank areas around the figures. I asked why it was thus shaped and the reason was that this was the space left on the page after the other panels had been decided, which of course I had already judged to be the case before I started in, and I probably had to put the words in the head of this poor artist. 'Why should this image receive less consideration than the ones before it?' I demanded relentlessly. In fact, every stage of comic book composition is hampered by that same absence of thinking. Characters stand in limited ways in relation to the frame around them and in relation to other characters. There is a complicated pictorial syntax that seals everything in a rigid holding pattern, including the ways that balloons must be placed and the way pages end and begin. The box of space that each panel represents is governed by gravitational laws that only exist in comic books, and in no other idiom of art let alone real life. I'm referring specifically to the American idiom here, which is why I have no hesitation in regarding comic books as a genre of popular fiction. If you look at the old newspaper adventure strips you can see they are governed by a different set of laws.
Returning to your question, the inventive elements in my new pages have got more to do with leitmotifs and narrative patterns spread over three dozen pages. The construction is quite intricate.
SPURGEON: Was it pleasurable making those comics? Was it different than it used to be?
CAMPBELL: It was a great pleasure to draw in that style again after a layoff for a few years. I'm sure you can tell from looking at the pages that I was enjoying spending a lot of time on them. I even got the old zip-a-tones out of the mothballs and went to town with them like in the old days.
SPURGEON: In one of the new comics -- and I swear I won't ask too many questions about them -- you end on a hysterically funny down note about how you're glad that you got a certain kind of going out and carousing out of your system as a young man. Another one consists of a verbal beat down your wife provides you one morning about things she finds aggravating about you. These seem to me significant departures in terms of tone, the way you approach similar one-pagers in the past. Was that on purpose? Was there anything different about the way you approached these comics knowing they'd be published not alone, but with all of that early work?
CAMPBELL: The first page you mention was certainly designed to act as a balance to the activities at the beginning of the compendium, all that sleeping-bag and sofa-surfing that I once found so exciting a way to live. And the wife of my bosom has a moment that, while we're not permitted to blame all angry outbursts on "the black and white menstrual show" (as Hayley Campbell's boyfriend calls it), sometimes such outbursts are too absurd to be explained any other way. And in case it all sounds a bit middle aged, there is a grand five-page adventure with my son Callum, then nine ('Their father-son day out'), which ends with us getting arrested and then judiciously deciding to keep it a secret from his beloved mother. Every phase of life reveals its engaging peculiarities. But It is probably true that a note of frustration has crept into the work that wasn't there at the end of After the Snooter, when I was traveling the world at the time the From Hell movie came out. That was a hell of a year. I turned down invites to Portugal and Berlin and canceled one to Brazil at a very late hour. I'll probably never be invited anywhere again.
SPURGEON: When I saw you this summer when you were a guest of Comic-Con International, you seemed to be enjoying yourself -- you smiled a lot -- but you also seemed to be working through some serious questions on vocational issues. Is it fair to suggest that you were in a reflective mood earlier this year? How did that period resolve itself?
CAMPBELL: Reflective? I think it would be more correct to say that I waver between frustration and despair, with an occasional daytrip into elation. You must have caught me on a good day. It hasn't resolved itself yet. I'm hoping the possibility of our TV show getting actually produced will refresh my brain.
SPURGEON: You mention the TV project... I think the last time you wrote about it on your site was about a month ago from the time we're having this exchange of e-mails. Am I to take you're now at a wait and see point? When should we know one way or the other if the project is going to progress further?
CAMPBELL: Waiting is what I have been doing since June 2007, with a promising event happening every couple of months. In fact I only started blogging about the subject once we had made an advance significant enough that even if the whole adventure should come to nothing, I would still have something to show for it. That is a little two and a half minute demonstration movie in which I play myself, with a computer animated Snooter bug and a guy in a specially made costume for the humanoid version. It's even got its own music. It's a well-made little piece of film, which I needed at that stage because the producers have seen what I do but up till then I had not really seen what it is that they do. We had videotaped an earlier rough version back in March which is probably the first time I had acted in front of a camera, at least since I was about ten with my dad's super-8. In fact it was a completely different set-up from the finished short movie as we rejected it and wrote a new one except for a short dream segment in the middle in which I stand in a big blank white space and briefly talk to God, represented by a big child's crayon drawing, a scene which you may recall from The Fate of the Artist. So the show as you can tell from that is going to be a mix of live action and different sorts of animation. I'm hoping we should know something within the next couple of months.
SPURGEON: On your blog, you've labeled your posts on the project "Our TV Adventure" and you're written about the experience in an admirably open and engaging way, it seems to me. Has it been a creative boon as well? Does going over some of this material for a new medium make you reconsider your work on any level?
CAMPBELL: It's adding a new level to the work rather than simply being an adaptation of what already exists. I was getting into that anyway with Fate as you may recall, in which I was missing from my own story and my part was played by a fictitious actor named Richard Siegrist. It's almost like I was already striving to re-imagine my core work into film, going so far as to set up a whole seven page sequence in Fate in photographs ("fumetti" style as we call it in English, or "fotonovelas" as they call them where "fumetti" just means comics) which is the interview scene in which Hayley Campbell plays herself. So if our most ambitious version of the TV show gets to be made, there would be some of that complexity. Campbell would be played by an actor, but real Campbell would also be in it. I've written synopses for several episodes and I'm happy with them. So let's see how far it gets before we have to change it all. You have to deal with so many other people in the TV game.
SPURGEON: You're not someone whose work of this type might spring to mind as a natural for adaptation into another medium. How much of your work has developed out of an understanding of film techniques or approaches?
CAMPBELL: Probably none at all. I have always consciously rejected filmic analogues in comics. Indeed, I would say that composing comics in the same way as film often results in faulty technique. There's an interview with Krigstein from way back (in Squa Tront or somewhere like that) where he explained how he felt that there had been a development in comic books, and I think he blamed it on Eisner, that resulted in a corruption of the integrity of the picture. By this he meant that breaking up of images into fragments, as film editors routinely do, does not have the same legibility on a printed page. In a blog post I used the finale to Krigstein's "Master Race" as an example of his solution to the problem of creating a kinetic effect without fragmenting images. All 12 or 13 of the panels of the sequence contain both the pursuer and the pursued and the relationship between them is readable in all panels. In contrast to this I remember reading the old Batman Adventures comic books to my very young son, and those books were supposed to be aimed at the youngsters. The lad had difficulty in making sense of some of the images because of the ways in which people and objects were truncated by panel borders. The artists in there really needed some lessons in clarity, and the problem most of the time was that they were thinking in filmic terms. The best comics draw their magic from other wells.
SPURGEON: I love the double-page spreads and bigger, splashier, single-page images in Monsieur Leotard. I thought they were some of the most beautiful instances of art you've ever made. What was it about that story that led to these more transcendent moments within the wider narrative, as opposed to merely streamlining those plot points into a panel or a single page?
CAMPBELL: I wanted to recreate the nineteenth century through its particular typography. In a good cartoon strip the optical perception of the real is supplanted by an array of graphic devices (as opposed to the regular comic book style, whose currency is visceral simulation.) If you just glance at the thing you may fail to connect with it; you have to give yourself up to it. I experienced this when I came to first revise the Alec material. At first I thought, aw this all looks like just a bunch of old ink lines and half-there drawings, but once I entered into an exchange in the graphic currency, or started reading the work in other words, I found myself receiving the communicated experience afresh, without really thinking that it was my own experience. With Leotard there was a huge swathe of time and event to be covered and the big circus posters and old news banners were made to carry a lot of that responsibility. I don't think a panel or page could have performed the function. There's a lot of condensation in one of those poster-spreads.
SPURGEON: I was intrigued by the chapter where Etienne sleeps, pushing him through much of his own life story and between that and things like the way that he's a diarist and the episodes are described as such I wonder if you intended a criticism of using one's life as the fodder for art? I apologize if that sounds overly facile; I mostly wondered if you could talk about the diary-making element to the narrative and that remarkable sleeping chapter.
CAMPBELL: I've been thinking more and more about the idea of seeing your life as a story. Once you accept the challenge you must then ask whether you are writing a good story or a bad one, or whether it started well and then you lost interest and let it ramble, or whether you gave up on it altogether. It's a matter of giving your life a shape, a journey toward a goal, and adhering to that and not wasting time. Etienne did in fact lose track of the plot of his story. Some ten years passed before he regained it. I may have been influenced a little in this sequence by Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs is just about to arrive in the baseball world and take it by storm, or so the narrative style suggests, when he is suddenly shot by a lunatic. The story then jumps ahead 15 years. It was made into a great movie starring Robert Redford and directed by Barry Levinson.
SPURGEON: It's hard not to see the circus and traveling show as precursors to modern show business or even artistic endeavor generally, the way that Arthur Kopit used the Buffalo Bill show in Indians and Robert Altman did again when filming that play. You also seem attracted in your work to first things, antecedents to things that exist in modern culture. Why the circus this time out? What is it that you saw there, that you wanted to make use of as a storyteller?
CAMPBELL: I wasn't interested in the circus for itself, which is probably obvious. The book is short on the kind of details that would suggest I'm in love with the milieu. So certainly it was all metaphorical, though there are some daffy aspects of it that appealed to me, like the wording of circus posters and some of the characters in the freak shows. Not the icky weirdness of it, mind you, more the comical aspects of it all. I saw a poster of "Pallenberg's Wonder Bears: Bruins that dance, skate, walk tight ropes and ride bicycles like humans" so naturally I had to have one of those in the book, and I called him Pallenberg. I also picked up the way that a kind of noble class in the circus realm attracts strings of adjectives to their names, so all the significant players have bi-adjectival pre-names just like the Amazing Remarkable Leotard, and in this way they are marked as superior individuals.
SPURGEON: I'm always fascinated in how you approach your different projects visually, Eddie. Monsieur Leotard is very complex that way: there's a grid on some pages, but the margins are frequently filled, and there are sometimes up to four competing visual throughlines on a single page. What interested you about all of the marginalia and shifts in storytelling strategies on this project? Are you cognizant of these choices going in, or do they just grow organically out of doing the work?
CAMPBELL: There was a chapter in my History of Humour in my defunct Egomania magazine (a selection from this will be in the Alec Omnibus by the way) in which I examined the old marginalia in gothic illuminated manuscripts and talked about the late Michael Camille's theories about them. I came away with the idea that there are potent regions on "the page," that things tend to happen in specific quadrants of it. Camille's main idea, with regard to the old fourteenth century psalters and bibles was that God lived at the center and evil and folly was pushed to the outer edges, which is why the modern browser may be astonished to see obscenities in holy books. The page is symbolic of the universe, with everything in its place. It struck me that a page in our own time is lacking in any kind of magic or meaning as a thing in itself. So for a couple of years there I was on the lookout for a project where I could put some of my thoughts into play. Leotard came up in my discussions with my co-author Dan Best (we've done two or three other things together) and I saw that book as the one. So right from the start it has a big generous margin in which a life outside of the physical everyday one is taking place. Characters have a life-after-death there. The authors can turn up there, as well as the more prosaic kind of footnotes that normally appear in such an environment. Once I got going it became deliciously complicated.
SPURGEON: A lot of your recent work seems to be done in collaboration -- you worked with Hayley's photography in Fate of the Artist, you worked with an existing script to make The Black Diamond Detective Agency and you worked with Dan Best on this latest. Even the work you showed me that's forthcoming it's almost like you're working in collaboration with your older work. You have such an obviously strong voice and so much of your early work was done without anyone else contributing I wondered if you could talk to what you've gotten out of those recent collaborations, and why, if you seek them out, you seek them out.
CAMPBELL: I may have mislead you in Fate, in that my daughter posed for the seven page "fumetti" sequence but she only took the one author photo at the end. Any other photos in there are mine, though I can only think of the letter initials off the bat, and some of those were done on the scanner, including the edible cracker (what do you call them in the US?). With Black Diamond I was offered enough cash to make the job an attractive proposition, and the fact that I was given a free hand in the adaptation sweetened it. In some ways my book was a story about the story since I didn't think it was an entirely credible one. All of these projects are ones that I'm happy about and I think I was able to express my view of the world through them even if they weren't completely my own invention. Now and then I do spend time on stuff that I really shouldn't have done, but you have to get through your life as best you can and pay all the bills. On the whole though, I don't go seeking work. It all falls in my lap, but I have been saying no more often than I used to.
SPURGEON: One reason I wanted to talk to you so badly this year, Eddie, is that I think you have a very interesting take on the New York publishing world, and how they may be slowly revamping the comics industry into an adjunct of the children's book publishing business. Can you talk a bit about what's led you to think this? What can be done?
CAMPBELL: This is something that has been bugging me for some time. The latest news to come down is that First Second Books, the publisher of my last three books, are now under the umbrella of Macmillan's Children's Group. I'm not surprised, because the book world, by which I mean the mainstream book publishers as well as the libraries and the Library Association, has been viewing "the graphic novel" as a young reader's genre for quite some time. In part I think it's because the part of a publishing house that is likely to be interested in bright illustrated narratives is the children's books department, and in part also because those publishers, and America's libraries, see the "graphic novel" as a way of grabbing a part of the literate populace that has hitherto proved elusive. Now, I have no objection to young folks having their own literature specially designed for them, though when I was a young 'un myself I would have been highly suspicious of anything that the adult world thought I should read because it was supposed to be good for me. Let's not forget that this is one of the things that drew us to comics in the first place, the very fact that they were not approved by our adults; they were our visual rock'n'roll, the things we knew that they didn't. However, let's not get bogged down on that point. The problem with this development is that comics were supposed to have grown up and become the "graphic novel," but now we are apt to find articles telling us that the "graphic novel has grown up." In other words we're back where we started. Furthermore, as an author of work that is likely to be classified as "mature" I have been finding it more and more difficult to find a publisher for a couple of projects I have been offering recently. I might have taken the hint that I have gone out of fashion except that the same publishers who rejected these proposed books were eager to secure me as the illustrator of texts by "one of our young reader's authors" (this has happened twice, which tends to suggest a pattern… and I declined both.) The upshot of it all is that I am back in an earlier position, working with Top Shelf on the Alec Omnibus and both Top Shelf and Knockabout on a book that is now finished and should be out at the end of 2009 titled The Playwright. As to what can be done about the larger shift in the business of comics, I really wouldn't care to guess. The reorientation to a younger audience is probably apt. I find that I can read fewer and fewer comics these days. They're like celery in that the effort it takes me to read them is way out of proportion to the information they can give. In my pessimistic moments I think the idea of complicated and challenging comics will recede and become commercially problematic. The market seems to want the "young readers" stuff. Was the idea of mature comics nothing but folly all along?
[Updated a couple of days later:] Tom, when I wrote the above I hadn't noticed that you'd already commented insightfully on the MacMillan news. A relevant blog post has also just come up:
Two highly compelling book-length comics that I found in the Young Adult Graphic Novels section of my local library, though I'm still not convinced they belong anywhere near there. Clyde Fans, by Seth, because there's nothing teenagers like to read more than delicately paced studies of two brothers who tried to sell electric fans to Canadian retailers midway through the last century. From Hell, because...
The post is followed by a revealing comment from a youth services librarian.
The whole issue is particularly frustrating because we had always hoped that success in the wider universe of books (i.e. outside of the comics specialty shops) would level out the playing field and give mature comics a bigger audience. This is not happening.
SPURGEON: Finally, we were on a panel this summer where you spoke eloquently about learning to write characters in a way that they may demand to be written differently once you've been around them a while. Knowing the characters helps inform you as to how they should be written. Is that true in autobiography or autobiographically-informed comics as well?
CAMPBELL: Yes, my ability to draw a character appreciates the further I get into a project. This means that the version away back at the beginning is always annoyingly unrealized and I always have to do some reworking on the early pages when I come to gather it together. With a real life representation it would be because I recall more details from the original model as I get further along. The same thing happens in movies, except the early work is never at the start of the movie. I watched Fellini's Casanova recently after first seeing it way back in the '70s. There's a point about twenty minutes to half an hour in when Donald Sutherland suddenly seems to be playing a different version of the character and it always looked odd to me (it's on the foggy bridge in what is supposed to be London, just before he meets the circus giantess). It was revealing in Sutherland's commentary that this was the first scene they shot and they hadn't quite figured out all the aspects of the character.
In conclusion, it's no big revelation to say that Ben Grimm looked much different in Fantastic Four#20 than he did in #1. Nobody gave a thought to the possibility that many of the kids would have the whole pile on view at the same time. It's a different kind of problem when you put out a 250-page book designed to weave a singular spell upon the reader. You probably want them to see contrasts between one character and another, not between one character and himself on an earlier page.
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Editor's Note: I have a note from Mark Siegel about the issue of First Second moving away from non-children's book more into children's books that I'll run and discuss when daily news returns to this stite January 5. He vociferously denies this will happen.
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* the cover from the new Alec omnibus, due 2009
* three random panels from the new Alec omnibus
* sample from one of the many memorable visual sequences in Monsieur Leotard
* one of the full-page images I liked in Monsieur Leotard
* great circus sequence within a static image from Monsieur Leotard
* a visual complex page from Monsieur Leotard
* close-up of a tiny image of partnership from Monsieur Leotard
* Campbell's recent First Second Book
* a page I very much liked from Monsieur Leotard
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
We want your links. Are you a cartoonist, comics industry person or have a connection to an on-line expression of something related to comics? Do you know of any? If we don't have the site you're thinking of linked to here, or linked to correctly, we'd love to include it.
We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
We want to know where you are (but only generally). Are you willing to share with the world of comics where you live in order that people potentially contact you, hire you, perhaps invite you to social gatherings? We'd love to include you or the people in comics you know on the Comics By Local Scene List.
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Thank you for your help, and thank you so much for your patronage. We hope you're having an excellent holiday season and we look forward to serving you throughout and into the New Year.
PictureBox Inc. Publisher Dan Nadel helped provide me with some of my best comics memories of 2008, among them the wonderful Gary Panter art book bearing the name of its creator, the first Goddess of War volume, a new Powr Mastrs, the always contentious Comics Comics site, Yuichi Yokoyama's Travel, and a series of pleasant convention encounters sometimes with and sometimes without Tim Hodler and Frank Santoro. With a recession expected to run all the way through 2009 and beyond, I wanted to talk to at least one boutique-sized arts comics publisher about the days ahead, and I was happy Dan agreed to talk about his consistently excellent company. There are a pair of direction-of-company announcements in the conversation presented below. I had fun doing it. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: I wanted to ask you a question about your book Art Out Of Time... how did you feel about how the book was received? Do you think people read it in the spirit you wrote it? Was there any reaction to an individual or a general take on the book that surprised you?
DAN NADEL: I feel good about how it was received. I'm flattered that so many books have sprung out of it and pleased that it gives context to projects that were gestating long before AOT was released, like the Fletcher Hanks book. That said, I think the main thrust of it -- that these comics are not "weird" or "wacky" but, rather, just really great examples of comics that utilize the medium in a different way than the initial historians of comics were used to seeing, was overlooked. Paul Karasik has made a similar point: These are just plain good comics.
It's been suggested that I tried to set up a counter-canon, which is not true. I just wanted to broaden our collective vision of what comics are and can be. And I'm also not sure I fully understand what a canon is in the context of comics, or perhaps even in general right now. Regardless, I think it's far too early in the practice of the history of comics to establish a canon. There's just too much out there that hasn't been explored, and by and large the history as written has been rather conservative in aesthetic terms. I'm grateful for all the work that's been done already, though -- don't get me wrong. There is so much fertile ground thanks to a few generations of historians. But I'm looking for another, broader vision of the history, and of the relationships between artists and their larger visual context.
SPURGEON: How are plans coming together for a second volume? What's different about doing this one?
NADEL: Oh... plans are fine. Me and volume two sit on the beach and chat. This second one is focused on genre comic books, and is more about a specific kind of comics drawing and rendering based in adventure comics, Caniff, Crane, and heavy ink on the page. I'm following my interests again, and right now they are mixed up in certain kind of drawing and staging that I want to write about and showcase. Beyond that... I shouldn't say too much.
SPURGEON: You traveled a lot this year, and did a lot of shows -- or at least more than I've ever seen you attend. How was that experience? Would you repeat it? What do you think the difference was between your having a good show and a bad show? Is there a memory of one of the shows that sticks out to you that's worth sharing?
NADEL: It was OK. For me, frankly, it's all business-based. The fun I had at HeroesCon was great, but it doesn't offset the fact that it was a financial loss. And it was a lot of fun. But still. I don't enjoy shows, really. I mean, it's fun to see people and it's nice when a customer is enthusiastic, but... it's a business and that takes a toll on me. It's not an "oh I can't take it" kinda thing. It's just that all I can see is dollars and cents. The difference between a good and bad show is money. Simple as that. One could argue that the good will and visibility of a show is worth quite a bit -- but I don't think I can reach anyone new at the non-indie cons or anything other than an art book or art fair. So right now (and that could change) that bit of publicity doesn't pay for itself. This was my last year of Comic-Con for now -- it's just not worth it, financially. Memories don't really stick out, I have to say. Maybe the Chaykin panel at Comic-Con? Ha. No, I don't know. I always like traveling with Frank, I'll say that much. Anytime Frank is there, it's at least interesting.
SPURGEON: Are you ever resentful of Comics Comics in that it seems to take up a greater proportion of time than its importance to your overall publishing efforts? Does it ever feel like a time-waster?
NADEL: No more than this interview. Just kidding. Well, Tim and Frank really do the lion's share of work on Comics Comics, so, no, it doesn't bother me. I wish I had more time for it, really. I like comics. A lot. It's a subject I feel fluent in and enjoy writing about when I have time. I don't often have the time, though.
SPURGEON: Are you planning to continue Comics Comics in much the same vein in 2009 or beyond? I seem to remember an announcement that you either were or you were considering making a move to a more standard format or away from print altogether. Where would you like to see that part of your efforts in three years, say?
NADEL: We're trying to figure out what to do with it now. The blog is popular, but no one seems to want to buy the issues. This presents a problem, huh? So, we're figuring it out. I don't think "the industry" as it were has taken the slightest notice, which makes sense, since it's a retarded format and we champion artists like Justin Green and Shaky Kane. Nevertheless, I feel like it's an important voice in the wilderness, and we'll figure out something or other. As for three years from now: I'd like to see a line of books written by me, Frank and Tim on different subjects in comics. I unabashedly want to take a bite out of the critical landscape and reshape it in our grotesque image. I want to burn down other institutions and institute a stringent rules! I want to help write the history of my generation of cartoonists. Also, I hope Tom Devlin is still annoyed by our love of Moebius in 2012. If I can achieve a certain amount of Devlin-annoyance, I'll be happy while waiting in the breadline.
SPURGEON: What's the general state of PictureBox right now? I've heard rumors that every company other than Marvel is going under... is everything healthy, ready for 2009? Will the proportion of comics and comics art books remain the same in the seasons ahead?
NADEL: It's been a crazy year, with a ton of books in a variety of categories, and we'll see how it all pans out. It's certainly not easy street. As for comics, PictureBox won't be putting out any comics until at least the Fall. It's all art and design for the next six months. Then perhaps some comics. We're still working out the Fall. None of "my" cartoonists have any work ready to publish in book form at the moment, though I certainly hope to have a couple graphic novels out next Fall. We'll see. There might be some little zines along the way, but right now everyone is working, but have a ways to go before finishing their books. And, I really want to focus on just a handful of cartoonists.
I also need to be careful financially, in terms of over-committing. Right now I happen to have gallery and museum based books coming out in the Spring instead. And you know, PictureBox has always supposed to have been a general visual book publisher, so now things are balancing out better. These last few months have had an equal amount of general titles and comics. I'm always hoping that the comics people will follow PictureBox into the art/design stuff and, vice versa, since it's all (to my mind) the same sensibility. But I want to control everything, so that's my own little neurosis.
SPURGEON: How worried are you about a recession hitting your publishing business? What kind of decisions are you considering or perhaps have already made in light of these hard times and their potential continuation for months and even years?
NADEL: Well, I've cut costs considerably, including moving offices and, you heard it here first, closing the store. The store was always just the front of the office, and more a lark than a real earner, so with the office move, so goes the store into oblivion. It was fun! I, like many other publishers am just playing it close to the vest right now and waiting to see how the holiday sales are.
SPURGEON: What one comic have you read and enjoyed in the last few months that might not match up with your image as a hardcore art comics publisher? What book or other piece of art outside of comics have you recently enjoyed that would fit your stereotype perfectly?
NADEL: Non-stereotypical: I really enjoyed Punisher War Journal by Fraction and Chaykin. I think Chaykin is using Photoshop as a tool in an awesome, inspiring way. I even went to the Chaykin panel at San Diego. Then I went to his table and tried to give him some PictureBox books. He declined to take them. That was awesome. First time I felt like a loser fanboy in about 20 years. Felt good, actually. In fact, I'm trying to get Fraction to interview Chaykin for Comics Comics. So, Matt, get on it!
Stereotypical: Ummmmm, I drove to Philadelphia to see the Peter Saul retrospective and it blew my mind. He is one of our greatest living painters.
SPURGEON: How did the Gary Panter book do? I know that your distributor had some questions about how cheaply you offered it, but that it was still a risk for your company. Did it meet expectations in terms of the sales and critical reaction?
NADEL: Hah, my distributor actually wanted it that cheap -- it's the opposite -- I wanted it to be more expensive. It's done fine. It's not a blockbuster, but it's fine. As for critical response... well, I was hoping for more thoughtful essay-type reviews on it. I don't think anyone reckoned with the expansiveness of Gary's vision, or with the text in the books themselves. Here's the thing: Gary is perhaps the broadest, most diverse and most natural artist to have passed through comics. Period. I'm not sure anyone else has mastered as many visual mediums as he has. And more to the point, he's done so by explicitly making work about (a) being a man in these times, (b) America as a culture, and (c) his own (and our collective) visual history. I'm eager to see someone really dig into his work. I think I provided enough of a road map. I hope I did. So... I'm still waiting for a broader response. It might be a long wait.
SPURGEON: Without turning it into a laundry list of forthcoming projects, is there one or two that you particularly hope people don't miss? Is there one that you haven't talked about yet that you're particularly enthused to be publishing?
NADEL: Well, I'm very excited to be curating a series of exhibitions at Benjamin Trigano Gallery in L.A., including a solo show by Yuichi Yokoyama. I'm also finishing a book on and for the painter Donald Baechler and starting something for a massive group show of contemporary art at an Italian museum. And there's a Syd Mead book that I'm very excited about, and a retrospective book with John Kricfalusi. There are some other little gems as well, but you said no laundry list, so there it is
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* photo of Dan Nadel by Whit Spurgeon, from HeroesCon 2008
* Dick Briefer panel from Art Out Of Time
* Comics Comics #4
* spread from Powr Mastrs Vol. 4
* from Goddess of War Vol. 1
* from Gary Panter
* a Cold Heat poster
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
We want your links. Are you a cartoonist, comics industry person or have a connection to an on-line expression of something related to comics? Do you know of any? If we don't have the site you're thinking of linked to here, or linked to correctly, we'd love to include it.
We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
We want to know where you are (but only generally). Are you willing to share with the world of comics where you live in order that people potentially contact you, hire you, perhaps invite you to social gatherings? We'd love to include you or the people in comics you know on the Comics By Local Scene List.
Most of all, we want to know what we can do better. Anything that this site can do to better serve your needs, we want to try and make happen.
Thank you for your help, and thank you so much for your patronage. We hope you're having an excellent holiday season and we look forward to serving you throughout and into the New Year.
CR Holiday Interview #4: Sean T. Collins On The Year In Alternative/Arts Comics
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I've had Sean T. Collins penciled in for one of the 2008 critic's mini-dialogues for a long while. I ended up drafting him into the 2007 holiday interview series when I had a cancellation, and so re-scheduled him for a repeat appearance 2009. However, when Sean mentioned he'd probably be reading fewer comics in 2009, I wanted to make sure I talked to him again sooner rather than later.
I find Collins' viewpoint valuable because of our differences. He's younger than I am, which places him on a different track in terms of what he was reading and when. He also doesn't have associations with comics stretching back into childhood, which I think gives him a view of comics much less burdened by nostalgia.
The following too-brief back and forth took place last week. I hope you'll forgive me its resemblance to a survey. I'm sure Sean and I could have gone on for 15 more questions on Alan's War or Lynda Barry's work, two things about which we seem to strongly disagree, but for this piece it seemed appropriate to hit quickly and move on. I'm also more interested in getting Sean's view than defending my own. Hopefully, a compelling picture of 2008 can be had from the breadth and variety of comics involved in our chat. For more from Collins, you can read his reviews and link-blogging at his own site, other bits of his writing on comics in occasional appearances in places like this site and Comic Book Resources, and you can check out some of his comics here.
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TOM SPURGEON: Sean, this year you reviewed three comics a week on your site, in addition to some of the other comics writing work that you do. How does processing that many comics in that relentless fashion change the way you read them? Are you more observant, more attuned to certain aspects in the art form? Is there any danger that you won't stay sharp and might become too absorbed into comics approaches to make clear distinctions?
SEAN T. COLLINS: Before I answer that, I want to paraphrase Aragorn: When it comes to relentless reviewing, Tom, you bow to no one.
SPURGEON: Well, I had to look it up, but le hannon. What about it, though? Do you read differently now?
COLLINS: I've never really thought about my thrice-weekly reviewing in terms of how it changes how I read the comics, just how I write about them. I definitely feel like writing this many reviews has made me a better critic, better at expressing my thoughts about comics -- better at cross-referencing them too, I think, so that what I'm seeing and thinking and learning in one comic proves useful when dealing with another.
I think you might be on to something by suggesting I might be more observant. The thing about doing these reviews the way I did them is that I don't really have time to kick back and read a chapter of a comic here and there over the span of a couple weeks, then sort of mush it around in my brain for a while afterwards. Though backlogging reviews did give me a little more leeway now and then, for the most part it was read it, review it, post it. From the springtime onward, in fact, most of the reviews were written on the Long Island Rail Road the day I finished that particular book. So I was really forcing myself to intensely engage with the book as I read it -- not necessarily with the goal of doing anything differently as a reader or a thinker, but with an eye towards the eventual review -- and making sure to collect my thoughts and keep them as focused as possible.
That immediacy could be a curse as well as a blessing, I suppose. Now, my whole life as a writer I've been a first-draft guy. My attitude is that if I didn't want to write exactly what I just wrote, I wouldn't have written it in the first place. But there are first-and-only drafts that you thoughtfully commit to TextEdit after mulling them over for a while, and there are first-and-only drafts that you pound out between the Jamaica and Bethpage stops on the Ronkonkoma line. Every once in a while I'll realize I left out something I really wanted to say, or could have said something better if I'd just taken a little more time to get it right. But that kind of thing is small potatoes; the biggest structural pitfall is that my initial take on comics tends to be more positive than what I might think a couple weeks down the line, so there might be a slight bias toward giving stuff a good review that could be mitigated if I were looking at things with more temporal distance and was able to judge whether or not it stuck with me.
SPURGEON: I wanted to speak to some general issues first. We both wrote critically of twoessays by the writer Steven Grant where he spoke to his futility in placing more than two reprints on a Best-Of list. I don't necessarily want you to re-argue your rejection of his essay, but what do you think leads people to make such severe statements about the state of the art form?
COLLINS: Well, I chalked it up then to either not reading enough comics or simple bad taste, which I could more charitably refer to as a difference of opinion about the quality of the books that came out this year. Beyond that? I think comics punditry has a weakness for bomb-throwing, which has almost always been terrible for the credibility and quality of comics punditry. But it works! I mean, a lot of people paid attention to that column. So people are going to keep saying Hip Hop Is Dead. As for me, I'm perfectly happy to reiterate that saying there were only two best-of-worthy comics to come out this year is an unsupportable position based on what I'm seeing when I look at my bookshelf. Also, defending that position by saying 2008 wasn't as good as some other years -- agreed -- isn't any kind of defense at all.
SPURGEON: Similarly, I think we both objected to some of the more severe criticism of the $125 price tag on Kramers Ergot Vol. 7. Do you have any sympathy at all for the opposite side of that argument? I couldn't quite ever tell what they were getting at; since it was a view shared by several people, what do you think is a source of strength in their criticism?
COLLINS: I think there were a bunch of different factors at play here. Resenting the idea of a luxury comic book. Not being able to afford it. Not liking alt-comix people like Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. Not liking post-Fort Thunder art comics. Simple ignorance as to the parameters of the project or the logistics of publishing. Good old-fashioned comics-fan reverse snobbery. Internet trollishness. A belief that the goal of all comics should be outreach to non-comics readers. Just not being much interested in this particular collection. Defining one's choices as a consumer of art in terms of good and evil. Combinations of some or all of those. I don't have much sympathy for any of them, no, at least not in terms of building them into that weird crusade against the book that developed. If you don't like it or can't afford it, don't buy it! I have no idea how that argument built up the strength it did in the face of what seems to me like basic common sense.
That said, once upon a time I complained upon Bjork's post-Matthew Barney deluge of expensive box sets and dozens of live albums and so on as a release pattern targeted to rich art gallery owners, and friends of mine had to say the exact same thing to me -- if you don't like it or can't afford it, don't buy it! It's not like Bjork won't still make plain-old albums you can buy at the regular price. So I guess we can all get in that mindset from time to time.
SPURGEON: What do you think of the criticism that popped up in Grant's pair of essays and I believe has been more strongly presented by I think Eddie Campbell that the New York publishing world isn't necessarily a friend to literary comics and that its influence could yield a pernicious outcome? Do you notice a difference in quality or approach in comics that are coming from the big publishing houses? Are you fearful that book publishers may end up with an inordinate amount of influence on future comics of this type?
COLLINS: The New York publishing world isn't a monolith, so first of all it depends on which New York publishing house you're talking about. In 2005, Pantheon published Black Hole, Epileptic and Ice Haven. The only pernicious outcome a publishing program like that could have is crushing my soul with its awesomeness. Obviously they can't all be winners. I suppose I've seen some books that privilege slick art over story or hot-button story over art. I'd guess that if things keep up you'll see a lot more memoirs; that's certainly the case with prose, and memoir comics are an easy sell in that regard and a likely default mode for these publishers. For now, I've gotten a few review copies from big publishers where I thought that the work just didn't merit this kind of platform, but that has as much to do with the comic-fan sense that the book publishers somehow confer legitimacy in a way that Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly or Top Shelf doesn't, which is probably my fault and not anyone else's. Inferior work is inferior work no matter who puts it out. Meanwhile, I personally find First Second a totally baffling line, but not in any sort of pernicious way -- it's just that usually with one exception per release cycle, my tastes don't dovetail with theirs. I really do like the format they use, though.
There's always a risk that when "major labels" get involved and start throwing money at artists without a whole lot under their belt, they can shape or stunt their growth in unproductive ways. I would have preferred David Heatley finish Overpeck than do "Race History" with his book advance, you know? But again, the vagaries and vicissitudes of publishing can steer people in funky directions no matter who's publishing them. And as I sorta alluded to just now, that's true in any medium. Sticking MGMT on a major and on the cover of Spin when they have a grand total of one album with one good song on it to their name is probably a pretty bad thing for MGMT in the long run.
Maybe you can already gather this, but I don't see this as a huge structural problem facing comics right now. "Please, whatever you do, New York publishers, don't pay living wages to aspiring makers of literary comics!" If only we always had such problems! If good comics can somehow survive nearly 70 years of the North American industry's domination by one genre of comic book, they can survive having to put up with American Widow in exchange for Notes for a War Story. Economically, it's not as though the book publishers are making such a huge investment in comics that if they pull back the whole thing will collapse. Artistically, as for the notion that literary comics are now more proscribed than they were before these companies got involved, when I look around MoCCA or SPX or the alt-comix area of San Diego everything is still as vibrant and wild and wide-ranging, perhaps even more than it used to be. The existence of PictureBox alone is a rejoinder to the notion that Random House is somehow crushing the life out of alternative comics.
SPURGEON: I'd like you to discuss some of the more prominent books of the year, briefly, what your general take on them might be. First up: Bottomless Belly-Button.
COLLINS: This seemed like a really good year for Dash Shaw to me. Prior to BBB I'd only ever read his earliest stuff, like Love Eats Brains and Goddess Head -- this is leaps and bounds ahead of that, in the space of a few short years. It's much more focused, restrained, adult. The familiar canvas of the literary-novel-style family in entropy provides a solid base upon which he can play with form and symbolism all he wants without it seeming sloppy, or just like a purge of ideas. It's very sophisticated, as are the science fiction things he's done for MOME. I deal with webcomics the way substitute teachers deal with VCRs so I haven't read Body World yet, but I've only heard good things. So like I said, a good year, and who knows where he's headed from here? It's exciting. I should add that Bottomless Belly Button is a crazy ambitious book, too. Don't take Fantagraphics publishing a doorstop-sized original graphic novel by a largely unproven talent for granted. I've compared it to Blankets, but Shaw didn't have a Goodbye, Chunky Rice under his belt beforehand.
I feel like I need to read this book again to find out how much it ultimately means to me. Based on my initial read, I liked it.
SPURGEON: Burma Chronicles?
COLLINS: [Guy] Delisle's totalitarian travelogues are right in my wheelhouse, and this is no exception, though I thought it got off to a shaky start with all that cutesy baby business.
SPURGEON:: Why wasn't that working for you?
COLLINS: I've seen a lot of "cool dad with a baby" comics already, you know? I'm not so interested in funny baby comics, at least not as much as I'm interested in comics about what life is like under a dictatorial regime. And whereas the animation material in Pyongyang and Shenzhen spoke to the peculiarities of the industry in North Korea and China, the baby material in Burma Chronicles could have just as easily taken place in Montreal.
SPURGEON: What It Is?
COLLINS: I have eclectic taste in comics and I read a lot of them, but to prevent myself from going crazy I do have one cut-off I can comfortably apply: I won't force myself to read a book whose art I find unappealing on a surface, cursory flip-through level. That would be the case here. This looks like scrapbooking to me or something, like an arts and crafts project. I have no "in" to it. I'm not crazy about Barry's cartooning either -- her characters look annoying -- so it's not like I have a lot of incentive to dig in to the collage work.
SPURGEON: Can you clarify? Because I find her work attractive, her characters mostly endearing rather than annoying and it never occurred to me not to scan as comics this latest artistic direction. Is there someone who you feel makes better art and creates less-annoying characters that works in her same general style so that we could draw a sharper distinction, maybe?
COLLINS: It's not that I'm not scanning it as comics -- I just don't like the look of this comic. It looks like a comic made from a gingerbread house or something. Wait, no, that's probably not a good way to describe it, because a comic made from a gingerbread house would be awesome. I guess I think it's busy and cutesy and... kitschy's not the right word... I don't know. Her particular application of collage does nothing for me. That's what I meant by saying I don't have an in -- not that it's not comics, but that nothing about the aesthetic appeals to me at all. To be fair, I think I'm pretty particular about collage and what works for me and doesn't with that technique. I don't get a lot out of Souther Salazar, either, for example.
As for her characters, I'm not saying they're annoying, I'm saying they look annoying. Actually what I'm saying is that I'm annoyed by their design. I don't like their macaroni-shaped arms or their sorta curved-triangle bodies. This is weird, and I'm sort of stunned that I have this specific an opinion on something like this, but as I think about this it becomes apparent to me that I don't like shapes that involved gently curved lines meeting at a point. You know Marlys's glasses? The whole comic looks like that to me and I don't like that.
What can I say? Certain artists I just can't get into because of basic character design. Pete Bagge's characters look like boogers with limbs to me. I can't get past it.
SPURGEON: "Chechen War, Chechen Women"?
COLLINS: I think I'd prefer you to have asked about I Live Here, which I thought was a real achievement and included notable work from a lot of people, including this from Sacco. But this was very, very intense material, even just visually -- I think it's his most "high-volume" work, just in times of how the characters are drawn and placed in the frame. It's like El Greco or something.
I've gone back and forth regarding Sacco's approach to reporting, how he tends to offer only one side of the story, usually the side with the higher casualty rate. My conclusion at the moment is that suffering is suffering, and it should be exposed regardless of context. We're all capable of looking these things up online now, we can provide whatever context we feel we need to provide; the point is this person, at this moment, is suffering because of things other people chose to do at other moments. Such stories deserve an airing.
SPURGEON: You can talk about I Live Here if you want. What other work do you feel strongly about from that book?
COLLINS: I'm sure this will come as a huge surprise to you, Tom, but I was pretty floored by Phoebe Gloeckner's work there. I know I've got a Friends Of Old Phoebe membership card in my wallet and everything, but this shift to digital manipulation and dioramas and dolls -- it seems like a perfectly logical visual extension of her themes regarding childhood and abuse, but it's also really radical, and it's shocking to see it work so well.
Overall I think the book was really successful in terms of coming up with novel ways to juxtapose words and images. Mia Kirshner's collaboration with sign maker Edward Kasinje was like Sacco being covered by Ray Fenwick, for example. Using photography in a sequentially informed way... just a lot of stuff you don't see very often in comics circles, all in service of stories that need to be told, as they say. And in a grim tone that really hit me in the gut because of thoughts about the world and how it works that I'd already been having. And for what it's worth, as far as collage goes, this is much more to my taste than the Barry book.
SPURGEON: Travel?
COLLINS: This could be my favorite book of the year, the thing I thought was really magical and connected with me on some weird, ineffable level. Masterful, utterly confident cartooning. You can describe the basic idea -- "a train ride depicted in the most dramatic way possible" -- in two seconds and everyone can get it, but to pull it off over the course of a novel-length comic? I really don't think there are many artists who could do it without it starting to seem silly or boring, but Travel is beautiful and thrilling all the way to the end. And I think it says something about our tendency to self-mythologize, which resonated with me. I loved it. It's interesting how much more it's connected with people than New Engineering did, isn't it? I bet you if they'd broken that book into two separate books focusing on the Engineering strips and the Battle strips respectively, they'd have taken off, too.
SPURGEON: What about the various Hernandez Brothers books? What was your reaction to The Education of Hopey Glass, Speak Of The Devil and Love and Rockets: New Stories?
COLLINS: I'm not even close to caught up with the post-Vol. 1 Jaime L&R stuff so I'm not going to read Hopey until I am. Speak of the Devil I never got a copy of, and here's where I admit the effect that being sent review copies by publishers can have on what I end up reading if a given book is sort of on the bubble for me or if I'm waiting to see if I get it for my birthday/Christmas before purchasing it myself. New Stories -- I love the format, Jaime's stuff is gorgeous, and Gilbert is a killer. I think Gilbert is at least as taken for granted as Chris Ware. If he were a younger artist just starting out -- a MOME person or someone making minicomics -- but the material is exactly the same as what appeared in this book, I really believe he'd be the toast of the town.
I've said that the death of the funnybook-format L&R feels like the end of an era, but this format really flatters the material, so I don't miss that old era at all.
SPURGEON:: Nail that down a bit more for me, if you would. What about it did you think was good beyond its visual appeal and narrative uncertainties?
COLLINS: Well, I think the visual appeal and narrative uncertainties were what was good about it. I wouldn't wanna go beyond that! Like, take something like Pan's Labyrinth, which was an egregiously overrated, pat depiction of the hackneyed concept of "lost innocence" and how cruel the world can be to children. I think Three Shadows kept things strange and added stuff that was unnecessary for the purposes of getting across its central idea. Oddly, despite experiencing something similar in my real life, I didn't find I connected with that aspect of the book any way but intellectually -- it's the extraneous stuff that grabbed me. What did the bit with the giant or all that stuff with the witch doctor at the end have to do with the basic idea about the kid and death? Not a whole lot. But besides being interesting in and of themselves, I think they subtly conveyed the idea that life is going to twist and turn and move on around whatever tragedy it is you're facing. Those narrative filigrees and digressions were what made the book.
SPURGEON: Boy's Club?
COLLINS: Goddammit, this comic book is so funny. It's the only time I've ever wanted to do fan art for a comic, or do a Cold Heat Special homage to it. I guess that's because it's not just hilarious, it also really nails these characters and that world of collegiate male sloth, gluttony, and stupidity. I am proud beyond measure to have two results on the first page of "Boy's Club Matt Furie" google search results.
SPURGEON: Powr Mastrs?
COLLINS: There's a degree to which I'm a little sore about C.F. drawing a swastika in my Bowie sketchbook, and then later giggling about it when I gave the book to Lauren Weinstein to draw in. (I see you, C.F.!) But I think that tinge of unpleasantness really works for the material, which is what fantasy would be like if whimsy were replaced by seediness. It strikes me as angry and dangerous work. Doing a plot-based genre comic, however altcomix it may be, but pushing the violence and sex as far as he has? I think he's doing something important and lasting -- I imagine the eventual collection will be a landmark. I'm consistently delighted by his imagery, too, from the costumes to the splash pages. That $18 price point per volume until then has got to be a deal breaker for a lot of people, though, no? I think PictureBox's dual role as comics publisher and art book publisher jiggers with the price points in ways I don't understand, to be fair.
SPURGEON: Little Nothings?
COLLINS: Like the Lynda Barry stuff, this will come across more negatively than I actually feel, but while I have nothing against him, [Lewis] Trondheim doesn't do anything for me. A lot of these respectable French cartoonists don't rev my engine. I almost wonder if what I see in a lot of the big French literary comics guys is what people are worried about happening if the book publishers take over literary comics in this country -- a lot of polite comics about grown-ups.
SPURGEON:: That's an opinion I've come to understand is commonly leveled at many of the French-language books of that type, but do you make any distinction between books from earlier in the careers of an artist like Trondheim and the work he's doing now?
COLLINS: I've never been grabbed enough by Trondheim to make me want to follow his career to the point where I could draw those kinds of distinctions, so I can't really say. I guess I appreciate that these cats are so prolific and do all these different kinds of books -- children's adventures, revisionist fantasy, funny animals, autobio, etc. I just can't say that the art is enough to draw me in, and for the most part neither is the subject matter. I think that duck design is bland, and I wouldn't be all that interested in watching him storm Omaha Beach or have sex with the duck equivalent of a young Monica Vitti, let alone sit under a tree and think or talk to his cartoonist friends about their crises of confidence.
SPURGEON: Is there any book or short story that you feel was vastly misunderstood, or not even talked about to the extent it should have been? What about overpraised?
COLLINS:Ross Campbell, of Water Baby and Wet Moon, is a major talent doing bizarre and idiosyncratic work, but I'm not sure anyone outside goth circles gives him the time of day. His art style virtually guarantees that people who would get a lot out of both the laconic way he tells a story and the down-and-out characters he's chronicling aren't paying attention, but they really should.
There were two new books from Jason this year, and a new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle from Michael Kupperman. Look Out!! Monsters was a visually arresting and emotionally political comic that almost no one talked about. Big Questions #11 was the best one yet. All of those books were slept on to one extent or the other, at least relative to how big a deal people should have made out of them.
If I ruled the comics blogosphere I'd insist that people who know better spend less time kicking superhero books they know they're not gonna like in the teeth and more time writing reviews of books they and their readers will get something more out of than schadenfreude.
Overrated? I don't think Alan's War is best of the year material. It's a perfectly good book, but the art strikes me as stiff at times, like a particularly nuanced photoshop filter, and the aimlessness of the story doesn't quite get it over.
You know what, though? I think I got pretty lucky this year and mostly read stuff I ended up enjoying. There was the occasional let down, but one of the luxuries of writing this stuff for my personal blog is that I didn't have to read anything I didn't want to, so books I had a hunch I wasn't going to enjoy to begin with rarely if ever made the cut. Now that I mention it, that's an important thing to note: I'm primarily reviewing comics for my own enjoyment. That could be a flaw, depending on how you look at it.
SPURGEON: Sean, how much work are you seeing on-line? What do you think of the books that Dark Horse has been releasing featuring popular on-line features? Are you still reading Achewood?
COLLINS: I don't read any comics online now that The Perry Bible Fellowship is over. I'm not a big comic strip person I guess -- it's not like I read the funnies, either. I know that this makes me a bad person, and I accept that. For serious, I'm aware that I'm missing out on a metric ton of worthwhile comics, but sometimes you just max out on stuff you have the mental energy to pursue at a given time. It's sort of like how I don't play video games, not because I don't enjoy them or because I have some sort of philosophical problem with them, but just because I have enough hobbies right now.
I was an early Achewood adopter from back when it was the toast of the Comics Journal message board, and I'm proud to say I'm responsible for its first mention in a national print publication (the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly, LOL), but I pooped out on it years ago. Before the advent of RSS, going to the site on a daily basis was just too much for me. I keep meaning to spend a while maybe reading a month's worth of strips every day until I'm caught up, because it's not like I ever didn't love it. Webcomics are just not a format I ever cottoned to, is all.
I have the PBF book and the Achewood book that Dark Horse put out and they're both lovely objects. I'm irritated that the PBF material is going to be re-collected in a more complete volume soon, though. And they should have started collecting Achewood from the beginning for pete's sake. A crazy person like me is never just going to jump in and read a storyline from the middle of the strip.
SPURGEON: One of the more interesting publishing news stories was the conclusion of Y the Last Man, a period of appreciation and demand which we may see replicated in the soon-to-finish 100 Bullets. Most retailers to whom I've spoken tell me that Fables is the easiest Vertigo book to sell, and all I can think is that's the only comic they do that really seems to me like a Vertigo series. Are we seeing the last Sandman-model high concept series? Are Northlanders and Scalped different kinds of books, or just different books?
COLLINS: What's the high concept of Sandman?* I never looked at that book that way, but I'm probably missing something. It doesn't seem like one of those other one-sentence wonders you mentioned. Anyway, Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges's series aside, the basic Vertigo template is much less "grown-up fantasy/fairy-tale" than it used to be -- now it's series with cursing and titties and murder and the color brown, some set in a stylish milieu, some set in a squalid milieu, and some set in a combination of the two. In that sense, I'd say Preacher and to a certain extent 100 Bullets are the most influential series at the imprint -- more of the current Vertigo line owes itself to them than to Sandman. Personally I thought the best of this sort of series was The Exterminators.
Sometimes I wish they'd stop going for that R-rating, HBO Original Series vibe, because when you look at their successful flagship titles over the years, yeah they've always been a mature-readers, but there's usually more to it than that. 100 Bullets has that beautiful art, Y was downright sweet a lot of the time, and Sandman even did whimsy, all of which are about as far away from Scalped as you can get. It's tough to imagine a character shaped by the persona of Tori Amos in a Vertigo book today, you know? I've read some entertaining Hellblazer comics lately, though. I guess mostly I'm curious to see where their OGN line goes. Pride of Baghdad, Incongnegro, The Quitter, The Alcoholic -- these are all pretty far away from both the Sandman and Preacher Vertigo strains. I wonder if they'll give ongoing series in that kind of vein a try, or perhaps if some of the Minx titles that didn't make it out will migrate over here.
SPURGEON: Why do you think so relatively few people paid attention to Chris Ware over the last few years?
COLLINS: He's been at an intimidating level of quality for a decade, his comics come out late in the year when people are in the throes of listmaking or afterwards when it's too late to get traction, there's inevitably some "emperor has no clothes" backlash about him that reduces the pool of people willing to give his new stuff a review, and this is just my experience talking but I think review copies might be hard to come by. Finally, this isn't a problem for me, but his comics really are about how life can defeat you, and that's not always a theme that people feel up to engaging.
As soon as I get my hands on the new Acme you can bet I'll pay him some attention, though! God, Chris Ware. This guy did the Quimby stuff for his school paper. Doesn't that make you want to kill yourself?
SPURGEON: Everything makes me want to kill myself. Speaking of which, how scared do you think arts and alternatives comics makers should be about the shape of the economy? You're demographically desirable: a young married, educated, willing to spend part of your budget on comics. Do you hear anything from anyone that suggests specific weaknesses with how companies making art or alternative comics reach customers like you?
COLLINS: I think everyone should be terrified. I mean, the next time me or my friends have to look for a job in entertainment journalism and publishing in New York, we'll be up against people with Entertainment Weekly and Time on their resumes. It's awesome that with the exception of a few companies with their own unique problems, comics have thus far dodged the purges that have plagued the newspaper, magazine, and book publishing industries, but surely that can't last forever, and eventually someone with a metal hockey mask and a loincloth will encircle the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly with his minions and tell Chris Oliveros that he will be given safe passage in the Wasteland if he just walks away.
That said, if they keep publishing good comics, I'll keep getting them. I don't know what else to say beyond that. From my outsider, layman, economically ignorant vantage point, the important artcomics publishers all seem to be on pretty stable ground in terms of how they work with the bookstore market, their relationships with their communities both in the real world and online, the type of work they're interested in publishing and their ability to do so, and so forth. While we're on the subject, I'd imagine Top Shelf, who I might otherwise be more concerned about just because you don't see them in the position to purchase and open retail locations like D&Q and Fanta and PictureBox have recently, is in store for a monster sales year courtesy of their Alan "Watchmen" Moore catalog, which will soon be larger thanks to the next League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book.
A while back, James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem described Nine Inch Nails as "lifeline music." One of the benefits of being an industry for dedicated enthusiasts is that comics is virtually a lifeline medium. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than with alternative comics. I think that will help us weather the storm if nothing else does.
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* that's the cover to Boys Club #2 altered so that Matt Furie's characters are watching Sean T. Collins on TV. Hey, it gets boring late at night.
* cover to KE7
* cover to Black Hole
* interior art from David Heatley "Overpeck" serial
* cover to Notes For A War Story
* cover to Bottomless Belly Button
* cover to Burma Chronicles
* page from What It Is
* cover to Travel
* interior page from Three Shadows
* cover to Powr Mastrs Vol. 2
* interior page from Little Nothings
* interior page from Waterbaby
* a PBF, randomly selected
* cover art to last Y The Last Man comic book
* cover to 2008 issue of The Exterminators
* cover to The Alcoholic
* cover to ACME Novelty Library #19
* art by Matt Wiegle from one of Sean T. Collins' fine short stories in comics form
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* Editor's Note: In case anyone wondered, I always figured that the high concept of Sandman was one of the oldest ones, that we were basically getting Gaiman's first crack at "The Gods Walk Amongst Us."
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
We want your links. Are you a cartoonist, comics industry person or have a connection to an on-line expression of something related to comics? Do you know of any? If we don't have the site you're thinking of linked to here, or linked to correctly, we'd love to include it.
We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
We want to know where you are (but only generally). Are you willing to share with the world of comics where you live in order that people potentially contact you, hire you, perhaps invite you to social gatherings? We'd love to include you or the people in comics you know on the Comics By Local Scene List.
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Thank you for your help, and thank you so much for your patronage. We hope you're having an excellent holiday season and we look forward to serving you throughout and into the New Year.
CR Holiday Interview #3: Tucker Stone On The Year In Mainstream Comics
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Tucker Stone came to my attention and that of many other comics fans through his weekly comics reviews at his site The Factual Opinion, particularly his regular Comics Of The Weak feature. A lit cigarette ground into the fatty neck folds holding up the swelled head of American comic books, Stone's primary goal with Comics Of The Weak seems to be to get people to laugh. A more thoughtful side to the writer begins to emerge once you read enough of his work to become inured to the nastier rattle of some of his jokes, or take in his column at the comiXology site. What I like best about Stone's work is that it seems to follow his having intensely read and confronted the work in question; he doesn't seem to be returning to set pieces in terms of the humor or the analysis. I thought it might be good to hear about the year in American mainstream comics from his point of view. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: I know I say this in a lot of interviews, but Tucker, I know very little about you. Can you give me the over-a-friendly-lunch version of your life with a an odd-in-every-other-context emphasis on how you've interacted with comics over the years? Did you read them as a kid?
TUCKER STONE: I lived in a lot of different places, the most interesting one being West Berlin, before my family settled in a suburb of Atlanta. That was where we moved after my dad finished his time in the military. Nobody in my family ever expressed any interest in comics beyond what was in the newspaper, and it was actually pointed out to me by my mother -- when I interviewed her for the blog -- that I didn't read comics at all when I was a little kid. I don't remember liking or watching the Batman television show, I know I hated Star Trek. I did play with Star Wars toys when I was a kid, though. My parents are heavy book nerds -- my father especially, they just inhale stuff, and they didn't ever care what I read. They just pushed me to read, and that's what we did.
Actually, that's kind of funny -- my parents wouldn't let me see the first Robocop -- they'd seen it opening weekend, decided it was too violent, but my dad bought me the "novelization" of the movie, which was just as violent and hardcore. Cocaine use, strippers and prostitutes, torture. I was nine or ten? That's pretty much the only thing I read, anyway. I'd read the crap they make you read in school, then I'd sit around reading Stephen King, anything that was really violent, that kind of stuff. I think I still think about sex in terms of the sequence in The Stand where the girl with the white streak in her hair seduces the nerdy guy. "Coffee, tea...or me?"
Anyway, my mom would always go to this one used bookstore, this really awful place run by this belligerent little idiot woman, and for some reason they had a bunch of comic books up front. In retrospect, I think they may have carried new titles, but I can't imagine why. My memory of that place isn't so good though, because in my head the store is the size of a Wal-Mart. There's no way it was that big, it was a family run place. For no reason whatsoever, I bought -- well, my mother bought -- an issue of Detective Comics drawn by Norm Breyfogle as well as two issues of the Detroit Justice League. I've tried to figure out when that could have been -- the Detroit League started in 1984, but that Detective issue was in 1988, and both of the comics were already back issues by then. My best guess is that I was 13? It was before high school, but not too long before high school. Why I tried them out, I don't know -- I think I'd read all the Stephen King available at that point, and I'd tried some other pop horror writers and hated them -- maybe I was just bored. I got bored a lot. It wasn't until a few years ago that a friend of mine told me that if you're always getting bored, that's because you're a boring person, and it's your own fault. That was pretty much my sole motivation for almost every decision I made until I was a lot older, so that's probably why. But I don't know.
From there, I pretty much just bought random issues of those comics for a while, and then -- for the hell of it, and because I was a piece of shit, I stole comics. I would wander over to this gas station store and steal stacks of comics off the spinner rack -- Marvel Comics Presents, a whole bunch of crap. I barely remember what they were, but you can tell if it's one of those if you look at the collection now -- they all have these marks in the middle from where I had sweat all over them from having them shoved down my pants.
I really liked reading them, but I'm at a loss to tell you why. I just liked Batman, and I liked the people in the Justice League. I don't know why. I know I already thought Superman was a prick, but I don't know why. I just thought he was a boring jerk. I liked when Wolverine would kill people, but I always wanted him to go farther.
Anyway, I got more out there with them -- read stuff like Doom Patrol, Animal Man -- I remember really getting into stupid crap though, like buying all the Impact Comics, or multiple issues of Lobo # 1. The thing was -- I never knew anybody else that read comics. I'd meet these people at comic stores, but I seemed to have a knack for going to comic stores that only stayed open for six months or so before going out of business. I didn't like the people who went there, I didn't like the people that worked there -- it was just these angry role-playing game people, or these misfits who were always talking about Star Wars. I had a pretty good going at the time with acting -- I'd made a lot of friends, we'd listen to Dr. Dre and the Subhumans, try to get laid...but that social aspect of comics, that was never there. I wasn't embarrassed by them -- it was just that no one ever mentioned them. Not even when the Batman movie came out. Nothing. It's like they didn't exist. All my conversations with my friends revolved around music and girls. I don't remember us caring about anything else, except for getting wasted.
Eventually, comics and all that went with it just became a distraction from driving around and being a screw up. At a certain point -- my senior year in high school, it was comics/girls/music or drugs, and I picked drugs. Then I went off to college to be a lawyer, got arrested twice, kicked out of college, and then I got arrested again. That time my parents didn't bail me out. After that, I was pretty much done -- I had to live in a halfway house in the northeast GA mountains for two years or I was going to have to go back to jail. I went to college again, but this time I just took random classes, and I ended up triple majoring in three useless fields -- religion, philosophy and theater. At some point, I had a disposable income again, and then I read in the newspaper that Dark Knight Strikes Again was coming out. I'd always liked the first one, so I went to a comic store, which was two hours away, and picked it up. Then I figured I'd catch up on Batman, then I bought some Acme Novelty Library, and boom -- I was back on board.
When I graduated in 2002, I moved to New York, and comics pretty much opened themselves up to me -- there were only two or three great comic stores in Atlanta, and I had to drive two hours to go to them unless I was visiting my parents -- whereas even the most run-down NYC store has stuff like Epileptic. I built up a pretty good relationship with this one hole-in-the-wall place because I'd show up once or twice a month and buy the old expensive comics, and I guess it was in 2003 or so that I started going each week again, got a pull list. I'd like to lie and say I had wider taste before New York, but it's not really true -- the only places I went to for comics when I was younger were straight Marvel/DC stores, so it wasn't until NYC that I got the chance to read stuff like Lynda Barry, [Osamu] Tezuka -- hell, I think I was 25 the first time I saw a Carl Barks story, and now I've got those black and white Another Rainbow hardcovers of Donald Duck.
Now I pretty much buy everything, and I experiment a lot more. I spent a lot of time and money buying all kinds of stuff off that Comics Journal "best of" list they came out with years ago. I still don't have any non-online friends that care that much about comics, but that's just the circle I roll in, I guess.
SPURGEON: How and why did you start reviewing comics? If it's not exactly the same thing, how did you end up on-line?
STONE: It's not the same thing -- the desire to write this stuff down came from constant arguments about movies and music with a cantankerous roommate with whom I shared very little of the same tastes. The writing started out in that environment, because both he and I had gotten on Myspace pretty soon after it started and I would just write up whatever comic I had liked most that week. I had been putting a comic up every week in the kitchen in this little plastic frame just to irritate him, and I started writing these little "review/reaction" pieces to supplement that. Each week I'd put a new comic in the frame and write down why I thought it was better then the other ones. People who I didn't know started reading the Myspace stuff, and I hated the way I couldn't save the document and work on it later -- it had to be written all in one go, that's the way the interface worked -- so I started using Typepad and bought the domain name because I hated that the web address said "Typepad" at the end of it.
SPURGEON: Do I remember right in that you and your wife approach writing about comics as a kind of bizarre and very specific hobby as opposed to a professional entry point into comics or a way to satisfy some obsessive compulsion? How do you think this has an effect on how you approach the works, how you write about them?
STONE: It's a bizarre and specific hobby, yes. I wasn't aware until recently that blogging about comics was something people did because they wanted to work in comics in some fashion. I find that... well, some people I like do that, so I'm not going to say something nasty about it, but it's an odd way to want to get a job, isn't it? I don't understand how it's helpful. I can understand blogging about comics so that you can get paid to write about comics, but...how it translates to working on comics, I'm a bit confused by. It seems like wanting to work on cars but choosing to stand outside a cafeteria frequented by mechanics and holding up a sign instead of... I don't know, applying or going to school for it. Or just doing it.
I have no interest in working in comics in any capacity, I never have. I'd be more likely to join the Marines or get a sex change. It started as a hobby, and then -- after my relationship with Nina got more serious -- it took the place as creative output for me that acting had always been. I'd had a good bit of success with acting before I moved to New York -- I'd done crap work that paid really well, and I'd done great work for free. Then I moved to New York, and spent all my time doing terrible plays for either nothing or almost nothing -- at one point, I was the go-to "white guy" for this Hispanic theater company, and all my parts consisted of playing guys who walked on stage and said really patronizing racist nonsense in this ridiculous fashion. After I quit working with them, I did a couple of really stupid things, like promos for the first Saw movie and this "art" play where I wandered around pretending to be a drug-addicted French dinosaur while some girl stood in the spotlight and talked about being raped. I'd already gotten tired of the scene, and I wanted to be more available to spend time with Nina. So I stopped auditioning totally -- I still took on a few more parts here and there, one was an independent film that really took off -- and then I found myself wanting to work harder at the writing stuff. It took the place of that part of my life. Getting paid for it, or -- ha -- getting interviewed, none of that stuff was ever something I expected to happen.
I don't know how that affects my writing about them. That thing that people like Tim Hodler talked about earlier this year -- worrying about people caring what you say? I don't do that. I don't have any ambition to make friends, get free comics, get a job, "fix comics" -- I don't care to do anything with it other then get better at what I'm doing, which is trying to come up with new ways to make Nina laugh. I just want to be able to look back on what I did six months ago and think it's better then it was. I think I'd like it if I was able to do nothing but this kind of stuff all day, but it couldn't be about comics only. It would have to be about film or books. But I don't try to get any jobs, so I can't see that happening. I sometimes wonder if I'm screwing up future opportunities with the language, the fact that I'm so bad about misinterpreting stuff, my stupidity when it comes to explaining why I like or don't like the art, but honestly -- what would those opportunities be? If someone was going to magically pluck superhero comic bloggers out of thin air and pay them to write full-time, it would be either Abhay and Jog. Who doesn't know that? Jesus, Douglas Wolk won a Harvey Award and he probably knows that.
SPURGEON: Do you have a background in critical writing at all? Do you have influences or anything that you try to emulate in those pieces? Am I right in thinking that you've written about other industries, or that maybe Nina has a background in writing about theatre?
STONE: No, the only writing I've done in other industries has been since I started the blog, and that's been stuff that few people have probably seen -- introductions and copy for some photography books, monographs, as well as advertising copy at work. I've worked on various aspects of a lot of campaigns, but it's not the sort of thing anyone would know unless I handed it to them, or if they had some interest in reading the tiny credit sections of photography books.
I did find out about six months ago that I had been writing what people call "scorched earth" criticism since I was little -- my sister sent me some "book report journal" that I had to keep in sixth grade, and I'm writing how the book version of The Dark Crystal "completely sucks" and picking at the behavior of specific characters in The Stand. My sister wrote a little note that said "something is wrong with a sixth grader doing this."
Nina has a masters degree in educational theater, and she had to write theater reviews for class, but that's it. Neither of us have any education or training in the field. We're the worst kind of bloggers -- arrogant and uneducated.
Influences -- well, that pretty much changes all the time. I'd say my biggest current influence is that guy Yahtzee Croshaw or Anthony Lane's reviews of the first and thirdStar Wars prequels, as well as just about every single comic blogger. Some influence me in that I never want to write like them, ever, and if I do, I hope I kill myself that night, and some I wish I could take over the life and intelligence of. When I first got started, it was all the guys and gals that write the short reviews for that avant-garde music magazine Wire as well as all the people who showed up in The Comics Journal -- Jog, Mautner, Noah, O'Neil -- you -- Dirk. I don't write like them at all, but they were what gave me the desire to work harder at it.
I know some people don't like the guy, but Gary Groth did an interview with Donald Phelps a few years ago, and that interview meant a lot to me. I wish I could explain why in a way that would lead more people to read it -- I talked to Gary about it at Mocca, and he said I was the first person to mention it to him -- but I can't. It just struck such a strong chord with me when I read it -- it wasn't the subject matter that Phelps was talking about, he and I share pretty much nothing when it comes to what we like -- but the way he described the act of writing made me really want to try figuring out why I was doing what I was doing, why I felt like it should be in a public forum, whether it had any value to it being a completely personal form of entertainment for Nina and I. I'm pretty content with what I do -- my limitations and lack of experience are obvious to anyone, but I hope it's clear that I do care about what I put out there. Sincerity and motive are terrible things to build a foundation on -- talent and intelligence would be far more valuable -- but I make do with the cards I've been dealt. At the core though, it's just another blog. There's some stuff on it that is pretty good, and there's stuff that isn't.
SPURGEON: Since we're going to be talk about mainstream comics, I wondered if you could, for the ease of comparison, talk briefly about four or five books or series that you think constitute good work within that genre. If together they provide a snapshot of your critical outlook on such books, even better. The more recent the better, too. For that matter, what's the last great work you read that could be said to come from the American mainstream?
STONE: I'm a big believer in All Star Superman. I didn't love this year's issues as much as I did the first one and the Lex Luthor Goes To Jail one, but I still thought it was just flat out great, and I'm really glad that DC was smart enough not to keep the title running with a different creative team. Those are comics I enjoy re-reading, and they're comics I'd "give to people" if I was the type of person who did that. It's a comic that best encompasses both the stand-alone super-hero book -- in that I think it could appeal to a wide, non-comic fan audience who might try it out, and yet it's full of all these little embellishments that can appeal to the hardcore wikipedia-brained fans who like to analyze what they read. It's artistically consistent, in that Frank sticks to the same design and drawing style from beginning to end -- which is something that bothers me a lot more then it seems to bother others, and Grant's authorial voice stays at the same tempo throughout. Although the two-part stories are best read together, I think each issue can work on it's own as well as in the collected format. I try, because I know it helps, not to look at a comic book as a stand-alone piece of entertainment when it isn't designed that way, but I can't help it. I never used to be able to get things in order -- I was, and still am, a terrible back issue hunter -- so I got used to reading Batman #346 over and over and not reading Batman #345 until two years later. That satisfied me, but those issues seemed....you know, they were fuller stories. I don't mind deconstruction in theory, I think the Bendis take on Daredevil really worked, but most of the time I just get incredibly disappointed when a comic can't stand on it's own as a piece of reading material. When it's just one-note, constructed to be combined with others.
Getting back to All-Star -- I'd never cared for the Superman character, he just seemed to empty to me, a trite stand-in for the type of Judeo-Christian/Benetton mentality that super-hero comics hold as their loftiest ideals -- but Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely succeeded in making me really care about him. A lot of the criticism I see about the comic -- that it's a remix of Silver Age tropes, that it's overwrought -- seem to miss what I thought was it's basic premise. It wasn't about a mystery, it wasn't about who Lex was, or even the idea of Superman as God. It was a love letter to a character who has transcended just about every single possible barrier put in his place to stand in as what the entire world thinks of when you say the words "super-hero." They took Superman and made it really simple and they did it in a way that was, for me, fresh and exciting. I was glad to get the opportunity to read those comics when they came out.
On the flip-side, there's Ultimate Spider-Man. It's an appealing, fun comic that doesn't require or demand outside reading, that's consistent in scheduling and tone. It's rarely some magic feat of art, but most super-hero comics aren't anyway, and I don't think they're really supposed to be. In a lot of ways, Ultimate Spider-Man reads like a long-running afterschool television show, in that it deals with adult themes, speaks in a consistently youthful language, gauges it's emotions and action in big, soap opera delivery -- it just happens to tell simple, comprehensible Spider-Man stories. Other than that, it's not that far removed from that old Nickelodeon show Fifteen. I think some of it's stories have been fantastic, and while it sort of tread water a bit this year, it continues to be one of the simplest form of pleasure that Marvel publishes.
It's also a regular dose of solid super-hero art -- Bagley could be a little generic at times, but I think he gets ignored because his work is so inherently similar to those comics they try to sell to small children. He's a good cartoonist, and just because he can meet a deadline, that doesn't make him somehow less of a cartoonist. Stuart Immonen -- who I think is pretty great -- has really taken to the job well.
Ultimate Spidey also strikes me, more then a lot of super-hero titles, even ones I think have better technical stuff going on, as a pretty seamless throwback to old school comic books while still maintaining a sort of current connection to the forms of entertainment that currently make up most of what people crave about television. It's a "fun" book that isn't done with a bunch of irony and satire -- two things I actually really like -- and it's a book that seems to be saying that sticking to a formula, having consistent dialog and art -- that these things can still work. I think it's fine that more people -- adults, critics, etc -- don't seem to care about the book, or don't like it -- but I like it fine, and I appreciate it for being such a simple thing. I'd never pick it as "a best of year." But part of what I try to do with other forms of art -- like music and film -- is try to pay attention to what is going on right now, what's currently being produced. For the most part, if you just want to read "great super-hero comics," then you can automatically write off about 80% of what's being published and just stick to all the available reprints and hardcovers. Same thing if you're a jazz fan, which I am. It's a struggle to listen to the jazz that came out this year when something like Ascensions is so easily available. When I can just settle in with my Albert Ayler box set, which I still haven't gotten the chance to listen to as much as I'd like. I know that the majority of people don't do that -- Nina for one isn't at all obsessive about finding out what's new -- but I am. I like to keep moving, and when I have the time, I like to go back to stuff.
With Ultimate Spider-Man, I appreciate it for being one of the few books that tries to do something that's 2008 in the delivery of content that's almost purely 1960. I think that if you really care about comics -- super-hero ones especially -- then you've sort of got a responsibility to keep an eye on what is coming out on Wednesday, and then holding it up to the same standard that let's you hold the older works in such high regard. That means that a lot of the stuff is going to be disappointing, but it also means that when you find something that's been running for over 100 issues and has been consistent in tone, type of story, delivery, theme, art -- that you recognize that for the rare accomplishment that it is. Ultimate Spider-Man is a comic that hits all those marks in terms of delivery, and it can be an enjoyable book on top of that when it does it well. It's rarely late -- I actually don't know that it ever has been late -- and even when it's not very good, it's not very good on the terms of still hitting all the technical marks it always hits. People who don't care for it would do well to try and find any current Marvel & DC title that can say that for the last 100 issues of a series. I don't believe there is one.
I do have to go back a little bit -- when I finally got the chance as a kid to read all of the Giffen/Dematteis Justice League, I thought that was the best handled version of a team-up book in the world. Although my comparison at the time was one or two issues of X-Men, the crap that Impact was publishing and the super-bland HardC.O.R.P.S. from Valiant, I still have some of those feelings. I sort of think that books like New Avengers have tried to do a steroid-driven version of that same book -- standard super-heroics crossed with quirky banter, but it doesn't click with me that well. That's not all on Bendis, though -- he tries, but there's a lot more freedom when you're writing Blue Beetle, Guy Gardner and Fire then there is when you're using all the big heroes. I don't think those ground-level "realistic conversation" comics really work out when you're dealing with these huge characters. To make it work, you kind of need the characters to be sequestered somewhere, where you aren't seeing them every week in other books -- like if Blue Beetle and Booster Gold were showing up and trying to catch a child-murdering Toyman during the weeks in between that Justice League story where they built a resort on a live volcano.
I think Arnold Drake's Doom Patrol -- especially the long-running stuff, where Negative Man and Robotman were clearly jealous and protective of Elasti-Girl when Mento starts trying to marry her -- I think those are probably the strongest, and most well-done, versions of the "let's give super-heroes real emotions" kind of stuff. I imagine the reason nobody else ever says that about Drake is because I'm wrong, but I can't get behind most of the stuff people push as doing that sort of "look, they talk like you and me" content. Giffen and Dematteis took that same sort of thing -- the angst and failure of being a dorky C-grade hero -- and used humor to make characters with zero personality and zero interest into something that's really fun to experience. I wish Kevin Maguire was still working too -- few cartoonists could do emotional expression the way he could. It's too bad that he's not around, or that when he is, he's drawing a pointless nude fight scene with Barbara Gordon. It's interesting to me that when they did that retread of the Giffen League a few years ago, that it was such a miserable failure. The point of that comic wasn't that these guys were just tragic losers, it was that together a bunch of tragic losers could still save the world when they got down to business.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool fan of the Punisher: Max series as well. I thought that comic -- which was, along with Godland, the first comic that I read only in the trade format -- was a tremendously exciting piece of work. The ongoing ideas, the barely concealed rage of it's author, the unflinching portrayal of the sex trade in Slavers -- that was a damn good comic. When people talk about making movies out of comics, it's like -- god, just film Mother Russia. That's a brilliant piece of action, it puts every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (except for Predator) to shame. Jesus, that was a great comic series. I've read that one all the way through a couple of times now, and I'm still not sick of it. Goran Parlov, Braithwaite -- all these artists who just tear shit apart, really make you feel the violence and raw, seething hate...at the same time, it's such a depressing portrayal of emptiness, of this guy whose just thrown his entire life away. I spent a good portion of reading that series wanting Frank to just take his own life -- there's just no reason for him to go on.
Garth Ennis is a guy I spent a huge amount of time with this year, and I've been on and off working on a longer piece of actual "criticism" about his Punisher work for the last few months, and I'll probably still be dealing with it next year -- I was just knocked out by what he was able to do with that series. I'd never paid attention to the character before -- I didn't hate him, I just had no opinion about him -- and reading Garth's work on the book was a revelation for me. I really didn't think there was anything you could do with a super-hero comic that could go to such incredibly dark places, to deal with such awful stuff in a way that really shook me up. I think Slavers is one of the most frightening and upsetting comics I've ever read, even more so because it has the potential to lead you onto the Internet, hoping that Garth was exaggerating what those people -- eastern European pimps and gangsters -- do to women. And if you end up doing that -- if you spend any time at all reading about the worst parts of the sex trade -- you realize that Garth was just playing nice. He could've taken that stuff a lot farther.
I know you want to stick to current stuff, but I gotta throw out something classic, and that'll have to be Kirby's Fourth World saga -- this year has been like heaven for a guy like me, with all these reprints of his DC stuff, Marvel showing up and getting The Eternals out there, Devil Dinosaur still available -- I think that if you're looking for something epic, then you can't do better then Fourth World. They're just great sturm und drang comics. I think it's funny, in a sarcastic way, that people seem to have totally missed what Kirby was all about, which was that Kirby was all about creating new characters, new worlds, trying to tell new kinds of stories. A lot of his work can end up only being a "god this art is awesome" kind of thing -- but man, he just never stopped trying to do something fresh and different with comics. Nowadays, all kinds of comics creators talk about how inspired they were by him, and what they mean (and I gauge "what you mean" by "what you do") is that they want to tell another 4th World story. They want to do another Eternals. If that's what you think Kirby would've wanted, and you work in comics, then you're a complete and utter fool. And I know that because I'm just some guy who hasn't even tried to find out what Kirby would've wanted and I've still read a zillion interviews with him where that's exactly what he said he didn't want: he wanted people to go and create, to make something fresh, to try something different, not to just tell another Fantastic Four story, or another version of the Eternals. He wanted people to have courage, and doing another Blue Beetle revamp -- man, that shit ain't courageous. It's lazy, and it's cheap.
SPURGEON: I want to ask about your process in putting together your reviews. Do you just buy a whole lot of comics? Give me a snapshot of the kind of reader you are right now and how much that's dictated by the needs of your writing. One thing that stood out for me is that you seem to buy Kevin Huizenga's comics despite having little to no use for Kevin Huizenga's work.
STONE: Wow, that's totally not true. Damn, and I know why you think that. In fact, the only time I've ever seen somebody use something from "Comics of the Weak" for a "blurb" is the one I wrote about Ganges #2 being a definite contender for best of year. Fantagraphics put that up on their website at one point, it was up there for a while. I understand where you're coming from -- the Fight or Run review, right? There's also the Or Else review, but I thought that one was sort of obvious -- I just copied exactly what David Heatley said about his own work in his response to Comics Comics and put it up there as a way to point out how incredibly pointless his description was, because it can pretty much fit absolutely any comic book, regardless of quality, genre, intent. I think Kevin Huizenga is great, I seek out everything he's done, even those "Sermons" journals, which are sort of boring. Fight Or Run was just a trifle for me, though, I tried to keep up with Wolk and Jog on that one, but really, what is there to say? It was the beginning of Ganges #2, stretched out and less interesting. (It should be noted again that I am the dumb guy in the equation of Jog/Wolk/me.)
I just go to this hole-in-the-wall place and buy whatever comics I keep up with, at least one first issue of something -- anything, whatever looks interesting, even if it's "how interesting that something so stupid exists" -- and usually I buy one or two of the "big important super-hero" comic, like Secret Invasion, or whatever. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I make more specific trips on weeks when there's manga I'm interested in, or new work from companies like Picturebox, Fantagraphics, D&Q, Top Shelf, so on. The hole-in-the-wall's clientele is superhero driven, but it's convenient to my work -- I don't have a lot of free time during the day -- and I like the kids that work there. They used to have this one guy who hated comics who worked there, and I fell in love with him -- god, I don't know why he worked there. He was this crazy guy from Queens or something, hated comics and hated most of the fans. He got to like me, I guess, and he'd tell me all kinds of nasty shit about the people that shopped there. Dude was a freak, but in that awesome way you'll always remember. I wish I'd had a cameraphone back when he worked there, because the faces of hate and loathing he'd make when he was ringing me up were the stuff of legend.
Now it's just these kids and the owner, and I have a lot of affection for them. None of us like the same stuff, but they're really great people, and they argue the way I do, where you say "Hey, I really dig Ultimate Spidey" and they just look at me like I admitted to cannibalism. "That shit is for babies, you need to read some Uncanny. Greg Land is a genius." And then we're off barking at each other. I'll probably hate myself when I move away from New York and realize I should've been going to Rocketship or Desert Island all along, but those guys have been really good to me, and the time that Nina went and picked up the books -- man, I'd take a bullet for those kids just for that day. She was so nervous, and I kept telling her "look it doesn't matter, you can't screw this up" but she was really anxious that she'd disappoint me or something ridiculous like that. I'm sure a lot of comics shop people would have done the same, treated her really nice, not be condescending, but these were the guys who did. They'll have my business as long as I'm around.
Sometimes I get these scans of comics e-mailed to me by strangers, illegal as hell, but I usually figure if I'm going to talk shit I should go ahead and buy it. Every once in a while, somebody e-mails me and tells me I have to review something for the Weak, I've just got too, it's "so bad." I pretty much always do those, unless it's something that's totally wonky and hard-to-find. I think it's kind of cool that people do that, so if I can, I always throw it in there.
The only character I pretty much "follow" is Batman, otherwise, it's just specific creators or titles that I stick with. I always try whatever is new from Vertigo and Marvel's Icon imprint, but Image became so hit or miss for me that they got cut out of the "give 'em a shot" club. I'll probably always buy the new Grant Morrison, and the only Brubaker stuff I don't read is the X-Men. Chris Ware, Huizenga, Campbell, Peter Bagge, Garth Ennis. If they have something, I'll buy it. I have become a regular B.P.R.D. guy, although I don't care much about Hellboy except for the art. I imagine I'm like most comics buyers? Except for what you, Jog and Matthew Brady talk about it those "coming out today" columns, I never have any idea what's coming out. I just go there and try to surprise myself.
I don't think the needs of the column dictate the comics, although I did try for a while to keep up with all of the Secret Invasion tie-ins just for the sake of the Weak, but it was just making me miserable to read that awful shit, so I gave up pretty quick. I've randomly bought crap that I though would be fun to make fun of, but it never is. There are times when I know I'm going to hate something and buy it anyway though, like Batman & The Outsiders. If it's something that's fun to hate, and that comic certainly is, then I'll buy it. For awhile I felt like Tony Bedard was writing comics just to irritate me, like the scripts were designed solely to make me want to throw myself off a bridge, and I was buying everything he wrote just to get irritated. Then he made the shift from "hilariously terrible" to "boring and trite" and I bailed out. Ninety percent of the time though, if I'm writing about it, I did have some hope that I'd like it.
SPURGEON: How did you settle into the format used for Comics of the Weak? It's very confrontational, very cross-referential, very blunt and amusing... are there antecedents anywhere, anyone doing similar work that you admire or appreciate in comics or out?
STONE: Well, somebody said I was copying some other blogger once, so I looked at his stuff -- but I didn't really see it. For one, that guy was one of those paste up people, the ones who post old panels that are funny? I don't do that. I don't have a scanner at home, and I don't really like doing that sort of stuff at work -- the scanners at my job work really hard at a boring, terrible job, and I feel like such a prick when I go and ask them if I can "borrow" the machine so that my blog can be funnier or more interesting.
There must be somebody who does this same thing though, and I just haven't seen it. I didn't really have a plan for it at first -- I just got sick of picking a comic every week, writing about it on the blog, and struggling to find the words to praise something when i didn't really care for it that much. But I'd locked myself into this schedule (a schedule only I cared about, since the blog got something like 50 hits a day) of picking a comic out of the ones I read and writing it up. On top of that, I wasn't any good at it. I read some of that stuff now and just cringe -- there's all this obvious shit I didn't catch, praise that's so over the top, no mention of things I didn't like -- ugh. It's crap, and I wasn't getting any better at it, and I wasn't having any fun.
I'd started thinking "hey, I should just write a week about how much I don't like something, Nina and my brother will think that's funny." I was reading this Bedard issue of Legion of Super-Heroes where they featured Matter-Eater Lad, and he's wandering around wearing Oakley sunglasses and saying "Tenzil Kim, for the defense" because he's a lawyer, and the whole time I just kept thinking -- "Well, it's Matter-Eater Lad, so even though this comic sucks, and the art is terrible, and I wish I hadn't paid for it, eventually he will eat some matter, because that's what he does." But he didn't eat anything! The idea that you can use that character -- that specific, stupid character -- and not have him eat matter? Who in the hell do you think you are? You think you're a good enough writer to make Matter-Eater Lad interesting without having him do the sole reason he's interesting? That's when I wrote "this comic can suck cock in hell." I'd done a sort of trial run the week before that, where I figured I'd review all the comics, but it was after I wrote that sentence when I figured out what I wanted to do with the weekly comics column.
When I read it to Nina, she laughed at it a lot, and man...when Nina laughs at something you did, it's just about the best thing in the world. I don't mean that to sound cheesy, and I know it does, but for me, there's nothing in my life that tops making that girl laugh. I started pushing them to later in the week, and eventually they ended up going on Sunday nights -- in part because some people I didn't know were on some message board and they linked to it and said "Yeah, I don't know the guy, but this shit is funny. I always read it at work on Monday morning, I think he puts it up on Sunday night." Dirk started linking to it all the time, and then you, the people from Blog@Newsarama -- so I figured I better do it every week on time, and I've pretty much stuck to that. There's been a lot of times when I'd felt like it wasn't very funny, but I figured that was the way it goes for people who write all the time -- that you just have to do it on deadline and walk away.
As time went on, it developed it's own personality -- I mean, I do have a foul mouth, but I don't talk that way all the time. It's become more reactionary at times, but I try to keep it as a general humor piece in response to the comics. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The main thing that it's supposed to be really extreme and blunt, but not a straight up lie. If I didn't like something, then I do sometimes go overboard into saying that I hated it, when the truth is that the only thing I really hate is Robert Mugabe, but never to just pretend that something I enjoyed was actually terrible. It's got to be honest, or there's no fun in doing it.
I don't know. It's just a thing that I do, and I work on it. I just write a bunch down after I read the comics and then play with it a bit, and then I cut most of it out, and then I read them to Nina. If she's good with them, then I publish them. I've been made to understand -- since my email is on the site -- that some people really hate it, really think it's terrible that somebody does something like what I'm doing. But if you're going to dish out bile, it's not cool to get upset about that. Still, I wish some of those people would just shut the fuck up and write two weekly columns about mainstream super-hero comics. Let's see how long they last before they stop being all high and mighty super positive freaks.
Well, I should probably be a little upfront about something else, just to be clear: I don't like the fact that people act like being positive about pop cultural ephemera is somehow a trait in relation to their own joy or moral fiber. That mentality -- that "if you can't be nice..." attitude makes abundant sense to me when it's in correlation to actual human life, but towards a corporate product? Towards any piece of art? I can't take it seriously. I find that sort of talk ridiculous. There's nothing inherently "good" or "bad" about being positive or negative towards super-hero comics. I do the Weak from the standpoint that comics have to prove themselves to me, the reader. They don't get a headstart because I like to read about Batman, or because I like Grant Morrison, or because they're a tiny niche industry that no one cares about. Besides, if you like everything...I mean, if you're one of those people who have a super-hero pull-list of 30 or 40 titles, and you're a grown-up, and you're excited all the time -- god. Do I even need to say it? Of course you're not going to agree with me, and of course you're going to find it obnoxious. We have nothing in common. I don't care, and you're a moron.
SPURGEON: How do you make distinctions between what you'll be writing about through Factual Opinion and what will make a good column for comiXology?
STONE: Well, comiXology allows me to be a bit more honest, a bit more of a real person, so if something is going to involve a lot of "me" and "I" type language, and it has something to do with superhero comics, then it goes to them. Besides that, I try to do stuff that I think would be interesting about super-hero comics, something that I think I would find interesting. Part of the deal with the Factual is that I think it should be interesting to people who don't have any interest in the things that I'm writing about -- like, you should be able to read a TFO piece and not have any idea what the material is and still find it....entertaining? Interesting? Comprehensible. comiXology is a focused, specific site, and it's geared towards a certain group of people who have already said "I read comics," and so the stuff there can be a little more specific. That's pretty much it, really. I try to keep it close to what's going on right now, I avoid blog-fights. I've asked the editors there whether they want anything specific, and sometimes they ask me to go to stuff, like the Baltimore convention, but they pretty much stay out of it. Peter Jaffe, who edits the column, he's very helpful in helping me get to the point, which is my biggest problem with what I do for them. Real bright guy, and he's responsible for all the art that goes up. I bet everybody else does their own art. I'm useless for that.
SPURGEON: Let's talk 2008's comics. I wanted to ask you your general impressions on several bigger projects at various mainstream or mainstream-oriented companies. First, what is it about the Batman: RIP storyline that led you to call it a miserable failure?
STONE: Look, I'm not capable of reading Batman RIP the way some people who like it seem to be. I'm not a toy buyer, and I don't wear super-hero t-shirts, but my collection of Batman goes back almost all the way through the '50s. I've read more Batman comics then I've read of anything else, and i don't say that as a point of pride, I say it because I was a shitty little asshole who blew his liberal whiteboy money on Batman comics when I should have been saving to buy a house. When I read a Batman comic, it's with that kind of brain, where I sit there and go "What's the difference between this and Knightfall?" Well, the art wasn't as good as Knightfall, and it's patently bullshit and rose-colored glasses to pretend otherwise.
Tony Daniel draws a sort of interesting Joker -- I mean, he can only draw that Joker from one or two camera angles, but sure, it's "interesting." But he can't handle the most basic, simple stuff like "Batman punches thug in face." He draws a fight sequence -- really simple ones, like Batman running across a room and punching two guys while he does it and it looks like something that a 14-year-old would put on an envelope to send to Wizard. Beyond the art -- which for me, killed it right there. Killed it. That art could've ruined anything. The idea that it can't -- that you can somehow read magic into art that generic -- is just insane. What if Tony Daniel drew Ghost World? Or Big Questions? The comic wouldn't work at all, and it would be terrible. Art has to work in tandem with language for comics, it has to, it's a requirement. When it doesn't -- and it can still be ugly or unrealistic, there's a ton of good comics with ugly, unrealistic art -- the comic is just an automatic failure for me. I didn't have any trouble making sense of the plot of Batman RIP. But I couldn't make sense of why Tony Daniel was hired to draw it, except for his ability to meet a deadline.
Beyond that though, I just wasn't that impressed with the story -- I mean, seriously -- a group of people show up with a plan to make Batman crazy and then break him. That's it? That's what all those great Grant Morrison issues, like the Black Casebook or Bethlehem -- was leading up to? Dude, that's fucking Knightfall. That's Bane and his little friend the Birdman of Alcatraz letting everybody out of Arkham Asylum while Bruce Wayne grows facial hair and acts so weird that all his friends start telling him to take a nap.
The thing about Grant for me is that I don't buy into the idea that Grant works from the weird down. I think that "weird" is the end goal. In other words, all these little homages and references and what not, that's all layered onto the work, not into the work, and it reads exactly like that -- it reads like a standard Batman versus a bunch of bad guys, and then it's got a bunch of transparencies laid on top of it -- transparencies that say "1950's story arc" and "funny Batman paraphernalia." I'm certain that I'm probably wrong, but the idea that Grant is some kind of alchemical comic magician, the idea that Grant Morrison is anything like a Grant Morrison fan -- I just don't buy it. I think he's a talented, smart writer who has some pretty out-there tastes, and that he likes to play with the idea of what a super-hero comic is supposed to be. He played this time, and it didn't work.
The other thing -- and this is where I kind of think people read too much Roger Ebert without understanding Roger Ebert -- is that Grant Morrison can do better super-hero comic books then he did in Batman RIP. He's done better then this far more often then he's missed the mark. And yes, when it's Grant Morrison on a heavily-marketed Batman event comic, on the most successful superhero character of the year, it has to be better then this. For it not to be -- for it to be a niche comic that appeals to a specific type of Grant Morrison fan -- that's what I'd call a miserable failure. When it comes to Grant Morrison, I go in with expectations, because he's written some of my favorite comics of recent memory. And when I find the work disappointing, which I did, then I don't see any reason to temper that disappointment any more then I would when I read something like Superman and Batman Fight Aliens And Predators Plus A Vampire. Does that put me in the same group of people who just don't like the guys work across the board? No, no it doesn't. It just means that he didn't do it for me this time. I'm not going to lie and work at coming up with ways to praise something just because the writer is a personal favorite.
Also -- and I realize that people don't like this point of view, but the sooner they accept it, the sooner they'll get to be a grown-up -- is that when you're working on the biggest super-hero character of the year, and your job is to do that characters big bestseller of the year, then that isn't the time for you to put out something that any Batman fan, even the dumbest one, calls "confusing." While I didn't come away with that response -- hell, I just thought it was a bad story -- a lot of people did, and that makes the book a failure. It's Batman. It's not Kramers Ergot, it's not Jim Woodring, it's not The Invisibles. It's a comic that an entire company and a whole lot of people depend upon for their job security. Making something that appeals to the kind of people that like to debate terms like "fictionsuit" and annotate their comics isn't, and it shouldn't, be what DC Comics is publishing the same year Christopher Nolan is showing a bunch of people a Batman they really like. Not because "it's wrong." But because it's a stupid, obvious mistake. It couldn't work, and it didn't.
SPURGEON: I had a much harder figuring out what you thought about All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. What do you think of that comic?
STONE: Hell, I have a much harder time figuring out what I think of it. If it's for real serious, then Frank Miller has lost his mind and he's far more immature and dumb then I've been led to believe. If it's a satirical, funny comic designed to say "go to hell nerds" that Frank is doing because he's irritated that nobody wants him to do anything but publish more wank-y Sin City material alongside Dark Knight Returns outtakes for the rest of his life, then it's genius.
The thing is... man, I like Frank Miller just fine. He's done some good comics. But I never really thought they were clever, you know? He just never grabbed me as someone who liked to play with subtlety. Almost everything he's done since Daredevil -- and even to some extent, Daredevil -- reads to me like a blunt object. "This is the operating table." "Sometimes being a friend means killing a whole lot of people." I can't see that guy being a guy who is doing All Star Batman and not doing it as a serious thing. I want it to be a joke, a big screw-you to the kind of people whose favorite author is Chuck Palahniuk. But I have a hard time convincing myself that's the case. He had that statement he made once about Batman when Dark Knight Strikes Again came out, where he said "Batman is like a terrorist" -- I don't really know that you can hang a lot of intelligent work on that kind of premise.
All that aside, that comic gave the world an Alfred with rippling abdominal muscles and a Joker that has a Yakuza back tattoo. It deserves credit for that, because that's pretty fantastic.
SPURGEON: Anything more to say on All-Star Superman?
STONE: I kind of already said anything that I could say about this one, so I'll just say that I thought the ending was exactly what it had to be, exactly what the comic was leading to, and I both loved and hated it for that reason. The thing that always wowed me about that comic is that I never knew what I was going to be reading when I first got an issue -- I knew I was probably going to enjoy it, and that's it. We all knew that Superman was going to go down and leave us all behind at the close of that comic, and that's exactly what happened. It was still gorgeous though. I can see myself reading those comics for the rest of my life. I really liked them.
SPURGEON:Secret Invasion?
STONE:Secret Invasion was probably the best comic to happen to the internet this year, because it gave us Abhay [Khosla]'s reviews of Secret Invasion. I'm still waiting to read what he has to say about the final issue, and I know I'm not the only person who is more excited about that then I have been about any issue of the comic.
Besides Abhay, Secret Invasion led me to one of the most interesting ideas in super-hero comics criticism that I've seen, which is this guy Todd Murray who showed up on Dick Hyacinth's blog and talked about something called "gaming criticism" in correlation to the construction of these stories. I don't know if that guy actually ended up writing that stuff up in more detail, but he explained how everything that's interesting about Secret Invasion wasn't published, because everything that's interesting about Secret Invasion came about when Brian Michael Bendis sat around with all the other Marvel writers to come up with the various ways in which the series would affect the Marvel universe of characters. That the attraction of something like Secret Invasion was that the comics themselves would deliver pieces of information, and then comics fans -- the ones who can immediately look at the possible return of Hawkeye's wife, or the revelation that Spider-Woman is the Queen of the Skrulls and then recognize the importance of that development, what it means for that characters past appearances -- created the interesting stuff themselves. That the comic itself doesn't do anything but serve as a delivery of said "information" for the reader to then uses to create conversation -- whether an interactive one or not -- that would interesting in and of itself. The comparison he made was that Secret Invasion was more like a role-playing module, one of those pre-made things that D&D people buy, where they participate in the story as an actor, but the various rules and non-player characters already exist. After reading that, I spent a little while reading more of what people had to say about Secret Invasion -- not reviews, because those were uniformly negative, excepting that lunatic they have who reviewed it for Comic Book Resources.
And you could see that happening -- these people on message boards, the ones who are really committed to the Marvel Universe in total, there was obvious attraction to the series that only dwindled as more and more doors to possible stories were closed. I mean, Secret Invasion opened with this massive environment -- what if all of these Marvel characters have been Skrull sleeper agents since the 1970s? What if all of their adventures were just what a bunch of Skrulls did before somebody woke them up? The potential for crazy there was so extreme that there was absolutely no way that Marvel could back it up with anything. So you read the series, and that door is closed almost immediately. If you read the last issue, the one where they finally bring back all the characters the Skrulls had actually taken the place of, what do you see? Besides the ones who were taken over in the first issues, you see absolutely no A or even B-level characters. There's nobody in the ship that "matters" to the Marvel universe. It's people like Jarvis, Dum Dum Dugan, Spider-Woman and Hank Pym. That's it.
It's interesting to me that you compare that to something like Civil War, where you had, for better or worse, an actual major shift in the Marvel status quo. You knew it wouldn't last -- but it did something you hadn't seen on the Event Comics level since Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was the sight of a big comics company doing something drastic and different with A-list characters. Secret Invasion ended almost immediately after it started, when it decided that there would be no change whatsoever, and that it was just going to be a "superhero fight off aliens" comic. On top of that, the damn thing was so miserably boring to read, it cost too much, and it didn't seem like something that Bendis enjoyed writing -- I mean, you can tell the guy is having fun when you read New Avengers, when you read Powers, you can tell he actually cares about Peter Parker and Matt Murdock. Then you read Secret Invasion, and it's got zero charm, it's not funny, it's just this thing that has fighting and emoting, and -- after the second issue -- has no hook to it whatsoever.
SPURGEON:Final Crisis thus far?
STONE:Final Crisis works for me. It's an intelligent, nuanced way to do a traditional event comic. It's almost courageous that they'd publish something like this -- something that actually hits the necessary beats, like the over-the-top emotion, the shocking reveal, the degradation of the hero -- while focusing on all those individual obsessions of Grant Morrison about what a super-hero "means," what it does to the world of the people they inhabit, his taste for the off-brand stuff, like Kamandi, the Fourth World characters. The problem is that all my appreciation stems from having to take it as a totally individual entity, while at the same time only really being able to fully enjoy it by having the sort of mind that knows who the characters are and what it's referencing. If you don't have some recall for these characters names, what they can do, that sort of basic thing -- it's a miserable slog, and completely repellent. I don't think of it that way, but my wife did, and there was something there.
At the same time, I think almost all event comics -- with the exception of Civil War, which I think could "make sense" to just about anyone -- are like that. I don't buy that people with no comics background and love would care for something like Secret Wars, or Crisis on Infinite Earths, etc. They're just too insular. Here's the thing about that though: that's totally fine. Enough people do fall in love with comics because they want to know more, they want to seek out why there are multiple Flashes that it's obvious that's my personal complaint. I don't think event comics are, or should, be filed alongside Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, or Maus, or whatever is the current "give this to someone who doesn't care in hopes of making them care" type comics.
These comics are for fans -- but the thing is that Final Crisis isn't working the way it's supposed to. While Secret Invasion was pretty dumb, and hella boring, and it's tie-ins were for the most part god-awful, it did exactly what the most basic event comic was supposed to do. It told a main story, it involved everybody's favorite toys, and the tie-ins played out like the deleted scenes and webisodes that come with a DVD. Final Crisis -- they weren't even sure when the story took place at first, none of the tie-ins have any major connection, and some of the major players are people like Black Lightning and the Tattooed Man. You can't do a DC Event Comic and take Batman and Superman off the table and expect it to skyrocket up the charts. That's such basic math that I don't know why people don't mention it more often. I thought Jog made a great point when he said this was one of the first times he'd felt like somebody was making an event comic that catered to his specific taste -- I felt the same way, but in the back of my head, I can't escape the fact that I think this thing is going to end up being something that doesn't click with the people who DC Comics is counting on it clicking with. It's the same "I don't find this to be an intelligent business decision" thing that I feel with Batman RIP... the difference is that I like reading this one, and I don't think the art sucks. I thought your review of it was pretty funny.
SPURGEON: Thanks. Why do you think Secret Invasion seemed to connect with its intended audience while Final Crisis fell so short of what people perceived as the number it should be hitting that most fans briefly assumed Dan DiDio would be fired?
STONE: Okay, I know you want to focus on the comics, but real quick -- I really think that "people thought Didio would be fired" thing was insane. I seriously doubt that any decent number of the people in the group calling for Didio's head have any understanding of what his or any of the editorial jobs at DC Comics entails. People on the internet act like "get rid of Didio" is the equivalent of a football fan saying "fire the coach" -- but the difference is that a football fan knows what a coach does. Comics fans, by and large, don't know a fucking thing about making comics beyond the most basic "draw and write them" type information. That's not all on them -- DC and Marvel keep a pretty closed house -- but that nonsense was played out about 15 minutes after the first comment was posted. I don't blame the people who initially stoked the fire, I know you were sort of involved, Heidi MacDonald, and I thought it was pretty clear why and how you two got hosed into some bullshit.
[Editor's Note: To be fair to Heidi MacDonald, my memory is that her entire role in that matter was to jump on it pretty quickly to call it bullshit. Tucker is correct that I ran a piece about the rumor.]
It reminds me of when that Minx shit came out, and everybody all of a sudden became a marketing expert -- man, I work in advertising. I'll listen to what a comic shop owner has to say, I'll listen to some serious reporters, but by and large, I'm not going to listen to some fucking baggage handler tell me how a comic company should handle their marketing. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. People want to yap about the quality of a comic, that's one thing -- that's opinion, that's something everybody can have. But if you've never worked on a global ad campaign, if you've never taken a book from brainstorm all the way through to a consumer, if you've never been involved in how you convince book chains to carry the stuff -- then seriously, shut the fuck up. You have nothing to add. That applies to most of the creative types, too. At my office, we keep the creative and the business types physically away from each other. Their jobs intersect at the client, and nowhere else.
I'm buddies with a lot of the creative types, I love them to pieces, but I wouldn't trust them with anything regarding product placement, marketing and advertising strategy, brand management, the potential audience, desired consumer base -- that isn't their job, and it isn't their job because they aren't good at it. And if the guy who came up with an ad that some corporation was willing to pay thousands to create, and millions to display around the world -- if that creative guy doesn't have anything to add, then nobody needs to hear from somebody who has nothing but a Newsarama username, a copy of The Tipping Point, and a paycheck from Blockbuster Video. They might be a brilliant comics critic, but it doesn't make them a fount of business information.
Anyway, the actual question: Here's two things about the comics from a non-quality related standpoint. First up, Final Crisis may not have beat Secret Invasion in sales figures, but the idea that it would seems kind of ignorant to me -- after all, DC Comics never beat Marvel in sales figures for anything other than a fluke. That's a standard thing, it applies pretty much across the board. They randomly show them up with something really special, but every time I read those online sales figures -- which, again, is the only place people like me get the information -- Marvel is kicking the shit out of DC. Why would a big Marvel book be any different? Because it's Grant Morrison? So what? Marvel had Bendis, he's a big deal too. It wasn't a surprise to me when that happened, not in the least. Actually, the only thing that surprised be was that -- and I wrote about it some for comiXology -- was the idea that cracking 200,000 copies of a comic book was somehow worth building a statue over. I felt like that just meant that somebody had taken an official poll, and 200,000 was the amount of people who bought comic books. 200,000 sales? That's pathetic. It costs four dollars. It costs more to get that Southern Chicken sandwich meal at McDonald's, and yet only 200,000 people could be bothered to care.
The second thing, and this is really simple, is that Secret Invasion kept coming out, and it came out pretty much on time. While I think you can get away with being late as hell when you're doing something like All Star Batman, because it's going to sell anyway and it doesn't make any difference to any other comics, then no big deal. Hell, if they put out another issue of WildC.A.T.S. with Jim Lee and Grant Morrison next week, it would do pretty well. People complain, but I don't think they care that much -- after all, they still buy them. But with something like this, something like an Event Comic? That's pretty much the main reason for having a shared universe of super-heroes. That's how you introduce the guys like me who chase the idiotic compulsion to keep up with Batman to other characters. It's a big deal to people who read a lot of company-specific titles, because the Event Comic is going to take that stunt team-up and bring it into every single title, and it's going to lift the sales of all kinds of miserable garbage that nobody pays attention to. But if you don't get it out there, if you don't push the product on a regular basis, then you give people the time to get some sense and realize -- "hey, it's just another Event Comic, and it's taking too long, and you know what? I don't really like these tie-ins that much, and I skipped Final Night and House of M, and I don't think I care that much, because nothing is really going to change anyway."
There's a side thing too, which is that the main lead-up to Final Crisis was Countdown, and if there's some huge Countdown fan out there, I've never met or heard of them. I don't know anybody who liked that comic. I couldn't stick it out, and I read the Nuklon Justice League. Meanwhile, Marvel is leading up to Secret Invasion with stuff that people actually liked, comics like New Avengers and Civil War that do well on their own. There's no contest there -- here's a comic with Wolverine & Spider-man teaming up to kill ninjas, it's leading up to something big, and DC is teaming up Jason Todd with Donna Troy, and they're going to alternate universes? That's like a television station trying to compete with the World Series by running re-runs of Sliders.
Before I gave up on Countdown, I could see where it was going. It was a crappy comic book about the C-list trying to play against one of Marvel's most successful writers using Marvel's most successful characters. That's insane. On top of that -- and this goes back to what I was saying about timing -- they were able to keep Countdown on schedule for 52 weeks. That's impressive, and it only makes the horrible delays and deadline problems on Final Crisis that much more absurd. The idea that you'd follow up two years of weekly titles with an event book that had skip months already planned -- I mean, it's like DC spun a wheel where the only options were stupid ones.
SPURGEON: How do you regard Ed Brubaker's Captain America, particularly now that it seems to have wrapped up that lengthy, initial storyline? How do you view Brubaker's collaborations with Matt Fraction on the X-Men and Iron Fist characters?
STONE:Ed Brubaker's Captain America is my only experience with the character, except for Kyle Baker's The Truth mini-series. I bought the first issue on a whim, and then the second, and then the third, and the next thing I knew, I was looking forward to every issue. I'd never, not once, been interested to know anything about the character. I didn't know anything about him -- who his supporting cast was, who his major enemies were besides the Red Skull -- nothing.
I went in to that book because I thought Ed Brubaker's Catwoman and Gotham Central were two of the best comics DC had going for a while. When Catwoman went all tits and ass, and he bailed out, I couldn't believe it. They'd taken this character, this character that had never had a good series, given her one, given her people like Mike Allred, Darwyn Cooke & Cameron Stewart -- and then they chucked it into the toilet and called up Adam Hughes to make it as trashy as possible. Gotham Central was one of those books that I really enjoyed while knowing full well that it didn't have a prayer of lasting very long -- it wasn't a book that the comics buying audience was going to enjoy, and the art snobs weren't going to give a chance, no matter who told them too. I was sad to see the guy leave DC, but that sadness has given way to sheer contempt for DC, because here he is, doing exactly what he was doing for them over at Marvel, and Marvel is willing to sit back and let him do it.
I don't see people talk about Captain America that much anymore -- it was a pretty popular title at first, but that seems to have quieted down now -- but honestly, that's one of the few comics I can think of that deserves that insane hardcover presentation. If you start reading that series at issue one, and then you plow on through, you'll make it all the way to issue #42 and still be reading the same story. It's brilliant long-range plotting, and it's just about incomparable in super-hero comics to play it out that long. I don't know if you read it, but what it most reminded me of was something like Dickens, where you've got this inventive cast of characters, this serial format that delivers heavy meaty chunks of stuff with every issue while still having enough balls in the air that you can't really gauge where it is it plans to go.
At the same time -- and this was prior to the factual, so nobody ever read it -- one of the first times I tried doing a longer piece about a comic was about one of the earlier issues, where the whole story was pretty much that Steve [Rogers] really was a guy who had nothing happening for him -- that he lived in this empty gymnasium in NY, that he worked out and stared at his past. That was one of the loneliest depictions of a superhero I've ever read. It was being used to lay more of the groundwork for Bucky's eventual return, but god, it was still really something all on it's own. Brubaker throws that stuff in there so cleanly, it's like nothing. But for the most part, what Brubaker is doing is something similar to what I find entertaining about Ultimate Spider-Man, is that he's taking the standard superhero fights his mortal enemy story and he's doing it in a way that's really well constructed. He hits the right beats, he maintains tension, he writes each issue in a way that builds the story on what came before while circling around to close specific chapters -- and he's got an art team that seems to have all gotten together and said "we're going to make this book look the same all the way through."
One thing that fascinates me about Captain America is that the artists aren't the same all the time, yet the art has no noticeable bumps along the way. You look at something like Final Crisis, the various Avengers books, and when that art changes on you -- whoa, it just stops you in your tracks. It's like no thought was given to who they put on the book. Then you look at Captain America, and the damn thing is just so clearly well thought-out, it's so clearly "planned ahead." On top of that, it's actually fun to read!
I was a big fan of the Iron Fist books -- it's the only super-hero comic that I've actually pushed a non-comics reader to read this entire year if you ignore those interview things I put up. I remember somebody telling me on the blog what an idiot I was for liking the book, and how I'd clearly never watched great kung-fu movies or I'd know what a rip-off it was -- and that just cracked me up, because that was the whole point, wasn't it? Iron Fist and that Kung-Fu Fighter guy are the only characters Marvel has who could do an Enter the Dragon style story, and Fraction and Brubaker convinced Marvel to let them try, and then they made them turn it into an ongoing series because the damn thing was exactly what a whole bunch of people were craving.
It's like -- what the hell else are you going to do with Iron Fist? Is he going to run a successful company and fight crime in New York? No, of course not, that's what all those other more popular characters are going to do. So why not do the one thing none of those characters can, which is chuck him into a big bad ass kung-fu tournament, let Matt Fraction come up with all kinds of absurd characters like "Fat Cobra" and "Dog Brother Number 1" and mix in a bit of the old "this guy is the latest in a long line, here's some flashbacks" stuff. Marvel seems to kind of grasp a little better then DC does that if you're going to try a revamp, you should provide something along with that revamp that people can't get anywhere else already, and that's exactly what Brubaker and Fraction did. There wasn't a Marvel or DC book like Iron Fist, so they put one out. It worked for the same reason that Blue Beetle didn't -- because you could already get Blue Beetle in a mainstream super-hero comic, it was either called Ultimate Spider-Man or Invincible. Iron Fist also had some really iconic cover design -- I spent a few months earlier in the year trying to push a client to hire David Aja for some advertisements, I thought his work was really strong.
I can't do the X-Men books. I make myself read a couple now and then, but except for the solo Wolverine book, I can't handle that team. I read the Morrison issues, hung out for a couple more months and then bailed out. I tried an issue or two of the "Hunt Down That Baby" crossover arc and wanted to pay Chris Bachalo myself just to turn the work down, so he would stop degrading himself drawing that shit. I read and was bored by just about every single issue of that Joss Whedon book. I just can't deal with them. I've looked at the Brubaker trades in the store so many times, and I've come close once or twice, but I always just stop myself, read the back cover description and try not to start crying. They aren't for me. The Milligan X-Statix is great, but everything else -- I just don't care for them. They moved to San Francisco, I've been told. Maybe they'll all drown in the bay.
SPURGEON: How do you view the big 2008 award-winner Umbrella Academy? If I remember right, you're a fan of Doom Patrol, of which UA is extremely reminiscent. What do you think is the nature of its high regard?
STONE: I don't know. When it came out, I think I was as surprised as the next guy that the dude from that band was making a comic and people were digging it. I've tried it, because some people I like enjoyed it a lot, but it just seemed like a sanitized version of Doom Patrol mixed with The Royal Tenenbaums. And you know, Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol isn't that far removed from Drake's Doom Patrol -- this past couple of years, I've finally hunkered down with that comic, and it's really fantastic stuff. And Royal Tenenbaums is just the unpublished Glass novel that Salinger has sitting in a filing cabinet in whatever bunker he lives in. If I came at Umbrella without all that in the background, I'd probably find it to be a quirky version of a super-power comic book. They aren't really heroes, they aren't much of a team, but they still fight to save the world.
The thing is that remakes and derivative work aren't always bad. It's always going to be somebodies first time with something, and all the people that dig on Umbrella and haven't read the other stuff, that's not a dereliction of duty on their part, it doesn't make them dumb. It's not much of a statement on Gerard Way that his work is so clearly derivative, nor is it much of a statement on Grant Morrison that he wrote such a hand-job of an introduction for the trade. But it's not a statement on the fans.
Art wise, it's a pretty comic book. I don't think that art does a very good job of handling anything complex from an emotional standpoint -- like, I don't know how well you remember Doom Patrol, but Richard Case could tear your heart out with the way he'd depict Cliff Steele. When I was a kid and I read that first conversation he has, where he talks about "seeing a woman" -- man, that got to me. It still kind of does. "Let's get out of the rain." Richard Case took that script and went miles with it. I don't know that Gabriel Ba has that in him. Of course, it's not like the script for Umbrella provided him the opportunity to try.
With the awards -- well, that's just star-fucking for you. I don't know if that's a problem with comics retailers, but the insanity of comics professionals to freak out over each and every part of pop culture that makes more money then they do -- it's pathetic. That book wasn't bad, it was just a decently constructed derivation. Comics professionals know that. They freaked out over it anyway. I don't really lay that on Dark Horse though -- I mean, Dark Horse has published some really great comics, and I think they have a nose for quality, Comics Greatest World notwithstanding. Any company would've jumped at the chance to put that out there. Marvel would've created a made-up place for it, DC would've slapped a Vertigo label on it. It's their chance to put themselves in league with somebody who more then 200,000 people have heard of.
SPURGEON: What did you think of Mark Millar's year? He has this movie stuff going on, but in comics his 1985 project seemed to die on the vine while his Wolverine work did not seem to capture the same level of interest that people had in his earlier run.
STONE: Well, the "future of the superhero" thing pretty much ate its own tail, didn't it? Besides stuff like Spider-Man: Reign, you've got all those "The End" stories that Marvel put out, DC can't get their dick out of the Kingdom Come pie -- hell, Rick Remender is doing that End League comic that actually starts in a post-apocalyptic "The Villains Won" world. You can repeat some ideas a million times in comics, but the whole "here's a dystopian future where your super-heroes have gray hair and alcohol problems" apparently isn't one of them. None of those comics are wildly successful on the level that The Dark Knight Returns or Days of Future Past were. Millar is clearly banking on that -- he's banking that Old Man Logan will be some kind of long-term trade sale alongside Civil War, and I guess that's possible...but nobody seems to really like it. If it had sales that were really crazy good, that would be one thing, but it doesn't have that, and nobody seems to mention it. I could go buy any issue of it right now. It's not moving.
Millar clearly has an agenda though, and it's one that comics have been slower to appreciate then every other form of culture, which is that making yourself into a celebrity, becoming your own brand, that can be a quicker route to financial success then actually making art. I'm not a big Tori Amos fan, but I do think she's more talented then Britney Spears -- but Britney Spears just gets out there. She has a publicist who lets people know what Starbucks she'll be at, she makes sure the major moments of her life occur on camera, and she makes more money then Tori. Tori just makes albums and does charity work. That won't get you on the cover of grocery store magazines, and a whole hell of a lot of people buy grocery store magazines. Millar is just following the Britney Spears pattern -- he does interviews, says all kinds of nonsensical quotable bullshit, he hangs around as many Hollywood types as can stand his presence, he does a comic like Wanted where all the characters have immediately identifiable celebrity appearances for no reason having to do with the story, and now he's more well known for that then he is for his comics. I don't have any opinion about him doing that -- I don't care what he does, it's not like his starfucking behavior will result in someone removing my copy of Cages from my house. Is it good for comics? I don't know if it has an impact. Not enough people in comics are trying to do that right now to tell. Him and Frank Miller, that's pretty much it. They're just canaries in the coal mine.
I think it impacts his comics in the sense that Millar has never had that much success when he's not involved in something that wasn't going to be a big deal without him anyway. Warren Ellis handed him a golden nugget with The Authority, it was his job not to screw it up. Ultimates, Civil War, Wolverine: Enemy of the State -- those comics were going to do well with or without Millar on board. The guy can do some good action heavy comics, his dialog has a simple "I'm a bad-ass" quality to it that appeals to a large audience, again -- all he had to do was not screw up what was already going to be a success. The problem with that for me is Wanted, which was damn successful and had none of those things going for it. With that, I don't know. I thought Wanted was pretty dumb, but a whole lot of people disagreed with that.
I will say that his current year in comics is pretty horrible. 1985 was such a blatant "look at all of these things that you remember, don't you remember these things" comic that it blew my mind that it sold at all, I can't tolerate the ridiculous homophobia in Kick-Ass, no matter how well John Romita Jr. draws violence, and War Heroes was just unreadable trash. He's trying to create stuff that he can own, that belongs to him, and good on him for doing that. But he clearly doesn't have a lot of original ideas -- I can't think of one thing he's done that's been remotely "innovative" -- and he spent a year doing comics about new characters. Of course he's going to fail. New characters rarely work for anybody, it doesn't matter how much cursing you throw in there.
I will say that it makes me want to puke that Kick-Ass outsells Criminal. That's depressing.
SPURGEON: Do you have a favorite artist or number of artists you think make consistently evocative work within the US mainstream? Are you ever able to enjoy the art as an element in and of itself?
STONE: Darwyn Cooke, Marcelo Frusin, Guy Davis -- I don't think they've ever done something I've disliked. It helps that they've worked on relatively strong books, but even when they haven't been backed up by great writing, I still think there work is great. I love Guy's work on both Sandman Mystery Theatre and the B.P.R.D. comics series. He's a really talented guy, and he's one of those artists were you could imagine all the dialog going awol and still enjoying a comic he's involved with. (Well, probably not Mystery Theatre.) Darwyn -- well, what do you want? He can do just about anything. Frusin -- he's from that hard line school, the spawn of those South American cartoonists mixed with that Frank Miller/Bolland ink line -- I wish there was more from him available. If you haven't seen that dog versus warthog sequence in Hellblazer: Good Intentions, you should check it out. There's a two page spread in there that's brilliant. His work on Loveless was nice too, but I found myself having a hard time keeping up with that story. A big part of Frusin is how well his stuff works when it has no dialog or sound effects at all -- his work on Hellblazer had more of that then most people recognize, and I think that's a big part of how you know you're dealing with a great artist, when they tell something that doesn't rely on words. Matt Wagner is another guy who does really strong work, but I find his recent work to be far too repetitive for my tastes.
I like that you're limiting me to super-hero guys. That's funny.
SPURGEON: It's the year in mainstream comics interview, Tucker! Are there any others?
STONE: For the most part, I'll pretty much keep up with Chris Bachalo, John Romita Jr. and Joe Kubert, no matter what they're working on. Which is usually shit.
I have a hard time talking about art -- part of it is my job, in that I look at so much all the time, and I have to move really quickly through it, and if you've ever seen been on the receiving end of submissions, then you know that you have to be very, very fast in dealing with it, otherwise you'll get nothing done. Also, if you've ever been on that receiving end, the part of you that's willing to delve into stuff you don't like will get completely exterminated. Anybody who says "hey, there's so much great art out there" has clearly never had to look through the stuff photographers and freelance graphic designers send out. At least 90% of what I see is horrible, horrible shit, and my boss probably puts that number closer to 99 percent. That kind of thing makes it very hard to interpret anything that doesn't appeal to my personal taste, because I spend so much time relying on my personal taste to help me get home on time. It also hurts me that I don't have anyone I talk to about art with -- I talk about story with people, so it's easier for me to do that when I write about comics. But discussing art and vocalizing my feelings about it -- that's just not something I have a lot of experience with. Getting to know Frank Santoro has helped, but I try to limit the amount of other people's time I'm willing to waste when I'm basically saying "I'm dumb, can you teach me how to talk."
SPURGEON: You recently compared the caretaker responsibility that many feel falls to comic book editors to the more active showrunner role that creators and producers may have on a television show. Why do you think that editors and comic book companies don't have that level of firm hand on their properties? Is it incompetence? Inexperience? Is it a simple acquiescence to a value of creators being the ultimate arbiter? Competing influences? Why is it the way it is rather than the way you'd have it be?
STONE: Well, that's a tough one, but I'd bet it's because the only people who work in comics are people who like comics, and you can't build a national business that deals with millions of consumers the way television and film does just on a staff of people who like comics. That's never worked, for any industry. You need smart, bloodthirsty business people to pull off wide-ranging sales to a large audience, and you need those people to be telling the artists what to do, and you need enough talented artists that you can tell the big-name people "no" when they come up with something that isn't going to work. You need people who work in comics and view them as a product that has to be sold to people despite them not needing it, the same way they don't "need" pretty much anything but house, transpo or food. I think a lot of people don't understand that -- I didn't until the last few years -- but that's the main way consumer-based business works.
In the past year, I've worked on some campaigns for companies that are selling clothing at a price far beyond what most people are capable of paying without using credit. Clothing made for the same prices, in the same factories, that make Wal-mart clothes. People joke about that stuff: "oh, you're paying for a label, or you're paying for status" and that's absolutely true, it's a shell game, the same way a Toyoto Camry costs more when you call it a Lexus. You can't have people in the room selling that stuff who care about the consumer, who care about "fans", who care about creators. That's the depressing truth of selling something to a large consumer base. I think DC and Marvel don't have those type of people working for them -- people who can sell -- and I think they don't because there's no money in working for DC or Marvel in those positions. Time Warner sure as hell has people doing that kind of stuff. But they don't do it at DC. And the only reason why would have to be the money that's available, because when there's money to be made, people choose to work in that industry. It's the same reason why people are willing to use their intelligence and life to sell something like cigarettes, even when they know what they're doing is killing people everyday. Because of money. Comics wants the end result, but they don't want to sacrifice themselves to being a real business.
In the last ten years in Britain, you could watch how the smartest people in the math field went straight into banking, because there wasn't a field that was going to pay them as well for the skills they had developed -- skills that are in short supply. Now that the banking field is experiencing a toxic level of hiring, the best math people are doing more constructive based work in education. I'd love it if I could view that in a positive light -- that that group was pursuing education out of an overall positive ulterior motive, but the evidence seems pretty simple to me: schools just got to the point where they could compete as a possible job because the banking industry wasn't hiring them.
Most of the time -- and this might be one of the major places where I differ with you -- I think a lot of the problems in any industry come down from a lack of finance to hire the best people involved, because a lot of the best people are mercenaries who don't care where they work, they just care about making money. But that's because I view the term "best" in this sort of conversation without acknowledging the major ethical concerns, the major artistic concerns -- not because I don't think they matter, or because I don't care, but because I don't really buy the concept of million-selling super-hero comics as something that can happen without some kind of major shift towards behaving more like other commercial consumer based businesses. I don't see superhero comics -- specifically, DC and Marvel comics -- as something that will reach that level of sales until they're run in a colder, more profit based fashion. Japanese manga doesn't seem to have those problems, but I think that's something that too often gets supplanted as an argument that ignores that the Japanese -- actually, the entire Asian region -- respond with a quite different cultural stance towards their comics. The widespread self-loathing that comics fans have, the ridiculous and immature attitude of constant "defense" that comics creators embrace like it's some kind of moral stance -- manga is just viewed as another form of entertainment, it's that simple.
Comic books -- and this can be somewhat true for all of them, not just DC & Marvel -- have chosen to go the niche route in America, and they get viewed in a niche light because of that. There's some integrity in that attitude, though -- it shouldn't be interpreted that I think when people like Paul Levitz were working to get DC employees better access to royalties, that he and DC were somehow beginning a spiral that would eventually kill their business. But I think it's clear to anyone that when you don't have your product prepared and planned out for a length that goes beyond "what you're doing next summer", when you can't determine with any honesty how long a certain writer or artist is going to work on a specific successful title, when you can't get popular comic books to the consumer and the sellers who want them, then there's clearly something that's massively wrong with the way you're doing business.
Earlier this year, Comics Foundry ran this quote from Mark Waid where he said something to the effect that "If somebody tells me comics should be in spinner racks again, they should be shot in the head. It doesn't work." Brian Wood responded to that Minx thing by saying something like "Anything that people recommend we should have done to make Minx a success is something that we already tried." I'm sorry -- I've liked some of what those guys have created, and I agree with some of what they've said, but that attitude is a popular one in comics, and it's completely and utterly wrong.
If you're out there working in any consumer-dependent field and you're saying "We did everything we could, and this still didn't work," then you clearly need to be replaced. Whomever it is people like Waid and Wood were defending -- whomever it is who sits there at the corporate level and says "Minx isn't going to work, we did the best we could" or "comics can only be sold in the trade format at book chains and the issue format at comic stores" -- they aren't the person who should have that job, because they aren't capable of doing the job they were hired to do, which is take the product and sell it to people. The revolving door that sends so many artists and writers out the door has to hit just as hard on the people in those fields that are failing to do what they are supposed to do, which is market and sell the product they create. If they fail -- and any interpretation of the sales charts, of the uncapitalized upon exposure that super-hero comics received for free from those successful movies -- they shouldn't be working in the capacity they're in. As soon as somebody says something like "we tried everything, everything didn't work, clearly the stars were aligned against us," it's time to find somebody who has more, better ideas.
That's a really great question that I wish I had a more positive answer for. I really think the easy answer is money. You want things to be run more like a successful business, you need successful business people to run it. People who go and play on charity softball teams aren't going to cut it. At the same time -- I don't think that I personally would be very happy if things went in that direction. The showrunner idea could work though, they don't need money to do that. If Grant Morrison had done for Batman what he did for 52? Worked out an overall story that was big, one that could've been picked up on by all of the various titles, one where the art team was people who can meet deadlines like Dustin Nguyen, Doug Mahnke, etc? Then hire people like Peter Milligan and Greg Rucka to trick out the dialog and the various bridging sequences? You get those guys to come up with a full year of interconnected Batman titles -- I mean, come on. If DC can do a book about the Elongated Man, Booster Gold and a cancer-stricken Question and have it do well and make sense, then why the hell wouldn't they do the exact same thing with a book that's about one of their most successful characters?
Instead, they're doing Trinity -- which I understand isn't as bad as I may have originally thought -- but it's an independent book that stands all by itself. If you've got somebody like Kurt Buisek and Mark Bagley working on Batman, Superman & Wonder Woman, why not have that book stand as one of those baby event comics, like the crazy successful Sinestro Corps was, and have it be the spine for those titles? Hell, Grant Morrison is barely using them in Final Crisis. Do something. If you aren't going to do something from a marketing and business standpoint to help these comics, then you have to do something from a quality maintenance standpoint.
SPURGEON: Can you compare and contrast your experience going to the Harveys with your more recent attendance at a European Comics symposium? When we spoke earlier this year, you seemed fairly fascinated by the experience without finding the experience fascinating, if that makes any sense. As an outsider stepping into that world, what do you think comics doesn't know about itself that's fairly obvious to a visitor? How much of an influence on the final product is the culture that surrounds comics?
STONE: Well, the experience at the Harveys was probably most shaped by my wife's response to it, as well as the two guests we had at our table who had been given free tickets to the event by comiXology. I sat there knowing who many of the people attending were -- Heidi MacDonald, Scott Kurtz, the Dark Horse crew, Nick Cardy -- whereas Nina knew maybe one person, Kyle Baker, and that was just because she and I had spent a good portion of time talking to him earlier in the day when everybody was having a brain embolism trying to get Jim Lee to sign their nipples.
Her response, and I think this sort of completely covers it, was that it felt like a weird private club that was pretty off-putting. Except for Nick Cardy, that felt pretty accurate. There was passion on the part of some of the presenters and recipients -- Johanna Draper Carlson, Kyle Baker, the main Dark Horse guy and whoever that crazy guy is from Dynamite -- but the entire thing felt like I wasn't supposed to be there. Like I had been invited to some kind of end-of-summer party for a bunch of camp counselors, and they were speaking about a bunch of stuff I didn't care about, because I hadn't been there all summer. It didn't seem to have much to do with comics. It seemed to be a private party that let other people attend. Half our table -- the guests, this guy who had been paid to shmooze for another convention -- just got sick of it and bailed out.
It was just kind of sad and uncomfortable to be at, because it just felt like a school cafeteria, with silliness going on, in-jokes, cliques, all that. It was also abysmally attended -- they had about 20 or 30 seats in the back that nobody sat in, and I don't think -- I didn't write about this when I wrote up the awards because I'm still not sure it's true -- that Brian Michael Bendis actaully stuck around after he gave this foul-mouthed speech about getting lawyers and not "getting fucked." It's like -- man, have you never done any public speaking? Some woman had brought her kid, maybe she shouldn't have, but god, come on. Grow up. They left almost immediately, and when Bendis was done he just cruised out of the main door. Maybe he stuck around, I didn't see him, but seriously -- your "keynote speaker" bails out? How does that happen?
I got the sense that was more in line with what it's supposed to be though -- that it was supposed to be a private club meeting, but that it let non-club members attend. The thing is, if you're going to do that, you should probably make sure that, by the end of the evening, people want to hook up and join your club. I didn't. I just wanted it to end. The comics fans I sat with didn't want to. The shmoozers didn't see this helping them make inroads for their business. And the back of the room was all empty seats. It was sad, because they really awarded some great comics that night. Of course, very few of the people showed up to receive that award, whereas quite a few of the runner-ups sat at quiet tables and never moved. Somebody told me, and I don't know if this is true, that Jeff Kinney had his family there. Most of the people who won the awards that Kinney was nominated for weren't. I hope that's not true, because if it is...well, that's just awful.
The Graphic Novels from Europe thing -- well, that was completely different, from the ground-up. All the people, except for David B, had these planned and prepared presentations, almost of all which were far longer because they were doing a road show to various embassies and cultural centers, and the place was packed. It was that kind of packed where you look over and realize that people have fully accepted that they'll have to stand and watch for the full length, that they aren't going anywhere, because this is their chance to see Igort and listen to him talk. You got the sense that everybody was in there because they were hungry, you know? There was a lively sense of "comics" about the whole thing.
The last time I was in that room was when I'd seen Frank Santoro talk about the golden mean, and it really cemented the sense that these Mocca people really care about comics, they really give a shit about the audience, about the creators, about everything. It's a welcoming environment, one that's something else to be in. It's funny too, because Igort and Bendis pretty much made the exact same statement at both events -- that comics are in a new "golden age." I don't think you could have said why after you walked out of the Harveys. But you couldn't run out of reasons when you were done listening to Igort and Max talk. I think, like the Harveys, that you might have needed some kind of initial love for the comics on display to get as much of what I got out of the Europe event -- I think Nina would have probably been bored, I certainly was at first -- but the comparison between the two is completely one-sided. The audience at the Harvey Awards cared about the audience at the Harvey Awards. The people at the Graphic Novels from Europe event cared about comics. I know that sounds like old school Fantagraphics/Top Shelf/D&Q snobbery, but I've yet to attend a major super-hero event that had something going for it besides a "we aren't nerds anymore!" attitude. I mean -- come on. Do you think that Max and Igort don't know they're nerds? That I don't know what I am? Grow up. You want to be cool, get out of comics. Start playing the trumpet, start shooting up heroin, and start being a terrible husband. That's how you get cool, if that's so important to you. Or you know, you could just grow the fuck up.
I think the only problem with the "culture surrounding comics" is that, for now, that culture pretty much encompasses the entire audience. It's like a Bergman flick -- are the only people who watch Bergman flicks obsessive film junkies? No. Are the only people who liked The Dark Knight stereotypical comic nerds? No. But who makes up the majority of the audience for Ultimates 3 and Kramer's Ergot? The majority of your audience can't just be the extremes. Otherwise you're going to get labeled by your extremes. Anybody can go to a comic store -- even a really bad one -- and see that the audience for comics isn't overweight sociopathic Chris Ware characters. But the audience is too small and too cloistered, it gets labeled by those extremes, and then you have the people who don't make up that part of the culture obsessed with proving that the stereotypes aren't accurate. The flipside to that is that I don't think anything helpful comes out of a bunch of people worrying about being associated with the worst parts of your fandom. The super-hero comics fans that aren't socially inept freaks should quit trying to fight to prove they aren't geeks too, and the art comics fans that aren't useless fucking snobs that talk about French literary criticism need to stop trying to prove they aren't assholes. The reason why football freaks don't defend their obsession isn't just because watching football is really popular, it's because most of them don't give a shit what people who don't like football say about them. I read comics, all of them, love doing it. I don't need to defend comics or defend the fans, or defend myself. Because -- and seriously, wake the fuck up, I can't stress this part of my opinion more clearly -- who. cares. what. people. think. If you're upset because somebody called a fat guy "fat" and said he should wash his Flash t-shirt, then you clearly need to spend more time finding things worth getting upset about.
SPURGEON: How do you feel the formatting and business-end developments that seem to be coming to a head will play themselves out, and what do you think would be ideal for the medium, the art form, in terms of something that could happen in terms of making for better works?
STONE: I'm a bit confused by this question, mostly because I think you're referring to the point at which a trade paperback becomes far more profitable then the single issue, and I wasn't aware there was a way to gauge that yet with any serious analysis. That's on me, and you should definitely talk more about that on your site if you've got some serious information. As far as I've read -- beyond what the Hernandez brothers did with Love & Rockets, which I thought was a pretty big deal -- is a whole lot of people guessing that trades are profitable, a whole lot of creators arguing that nobody has any idea how profitable they are, and no real information beyond Bookscan figures. I'm probably missing something, but it's hard to grab the facts out of the punditry and PR when it comes to comic news.
I think that when you're able to make your work more available to the public outside of the direct market, there's no way not to view that as a good thing for the overall business. At the same time, the trade section at most book stores is an intimidating beast, because it seems to always break down as super-heros, manga, everything else. How is anybody going to know that they can read The Dark Knight Returns and like it when it's sitting next to Batman: Watch Him Team Up With Superman And Be Confused, a book they're sure to hate? Of course, that's all bookstores -- Proust sits alongside Judy Blume's Summer Sisters -- but with comics it's a bit more aggravated, since nobody knows who any of these writers are. Manga seems to do fine, again, I don't really know why. But still, trades in bookstores, Watchmen doing well on Amazon -- I don't know anybody who thinks that's a bad thing except for a guy who just had to shut down his comic store.
I think that the opportunities that the increased sales of graphic novels offer non-super-hero comics is probably the best end of the deal -- it's great that something like Kramer's Ergot is in Barnes & Noble, that MOME is, Love & Rockets -- I mean, that's a big, great deal. I didn't like American Widow, but I liked that a graphic novel by someone you'd never heard of, drawn by someone nobody knew, was sitting on an endcap of a huge bookstore, getting the same level of push and exposure that something like Twilight gets. That's a good thing, and hopefully it'll be extended to works of better quality (or at least to works I like). It's pretty obvious that Marvel & DC haven't figured out yet how to deal with that part of the business -- they collect everything right now, and then they collect it a couple of more times in different formats, and I can't see why that's a good idea. Look at something like Fantastic Four -- there's black and white reprints, there's short hardcovers, there's short trades that are out of print, there's a hundred dollar hardcover -- they're flooding the market with all these different versions when they clearly don't have anything set up to push one specific version. DC did that Archives series of books, which they now seem to have killed, and that was another one that didn't seem that well thought out -- $50 hardcovers? Why was that what they decided to roll with? Why do they take the time to redress the entire Sandman library every six months? God, who else does that? I don't buy the new trade edition of The Road everytime it comes out with another cover. Then you've got these "Absolute" hardcovers, and those are obviously not created to sell in the big-box stores. Some of that works for me -- I read Walking Dead in trades only, and I like that I can get the cheap paperback on a regular schedule. The other thing about DC & Marvel is that they have such a schizophrenic out-of-print problem -- I mean, why is Hellblazer: Rake at the Gates of Hell still out of print when all the other ones are so readily available? Why did that happen to James Robinson's Starman series? The Marvel Knights version of Punisher -- why did the last few trades drop off the face of the planet? None of that makes any sense to me. If it was a specific title that wasn't selling, why are some available and some not? Again, this comes under my personal beef with DC & Marvel, which is that if they want to be the big boy in town, then they have to act like it, and when Dynamite and Jeff Smith are so easily displaying a perfect record when it comes to available trade publication, then you're doing something wrong. Dynamite is what, like three people?
SPURGEON: If I were a blank slate beyond having enough of an affection for superhero comics I'd be as happy to read as anything else, where would you guide me to spend $100 on non arts-comics? Make it at least three different titles.
STONE: Well, if it's new ones only, you're screwed. Do you have Watchmen? Oh, you should definitely get that. You don't need to read it, but it's the Nirvana's Nevermind of superhero comics -- you'll be asked what you thought about it eventually. Hey, while you're at it, buy yourself a stack of random Brave & The Bolds from the early '70s -- pick beater copies, ones that you won't be tempted to fetishize into wall-hangings. You'll need to re-read those motherfuckers. Get the first issue of All-Star Superman, just for the taste.
You'll also need some Marvel -- I'd push you to pick up the first Essential Spider-Man collection, for some of that Ditko/Lee goodness, and i think those comics actually work in black and white. I don't know that you'll be able to find some copies of Fantastic Four that are Kirby, readable, and cheap, but you need some Kirby. Don't waste your time with those black and white reprints-they're cheap, but you need Kirby in color. Luckily, DC published enough copies of Mister Miracle. Pick up some random issues, make sure at least one has Shilo Stormin' Norman featured somewhere within. If you can't find an issue of Mister Miracle for almost nothing in a comics store, then you aren't going to enough comics stores. They're out there. You should have some kind of crazy, way too much information superhero comic, something where you've got like 900 characters, and when you're talking 900 characters, you probably should go with Crisis on Infinite Earths. But instead of going the trade route, just do what a young Tucker Stone did, which is get the last issue and the Supergirl dies issue. Wait about ten years, and if you still want to know why a guy with the name "Anti-Monitor" was such a big deal, the trade will still be available.
Damn it, you should probably get some X-Men too. Ehh. Go with Days of Future Past trade -- oh that's right, it's not easily available. Just so you know, I'm adding these up on mycomicshop.com, we just broke fifty bucks, and your life just got more awesome.
We need some ladies up in here, and that's slim pickings, because most of the female driven comics I've read are just dude comics with large breasts. Try Catwoman: Disguises, again, in issue form, so you can look at those Paul Pope covers in all their glory. We're past sixty bucks now.
Oh, yeah, Frank Miller, another one people will assume you have an opinion about. Go with Year One, just to be quirky, and also because any and everything by David Mazzuchelli is a must-own for any comics collection.
Off brand super-heroes, ah, off-brand. Go with Wildcats 3.0, Brand Building, despite it being a comic that only snobs and jerks like. It'll be the thing you argue about the most. Because it's awesome.
Not a lot of classic stuff so far, so maybe there should be some more. Hmmm. Only about $20 to go, and the best possible way to drop twenty bucks is like this when it comes to super-hero comics: turn off the computer, throw your Comics Journals and Wizards in a corner, and go the nearest comic store you can find that has a bunch of yellowing long-boxes and says something like "5 for a dollar" and start grabbing stuff where the cover screams at you. Do it as soon as you can, because you'll only get to be somebody who doesn't know who Magnus: Robot Fighter is once, you'll only not have an idea of a Jeph Loeb comic before you read him, and when it comes to superhero comics, you'll have only one point in your life, a point you'll never be able to recreate, where none of your ideas or opinions of them are shaped by what you've already experienced. In all honesty, the best way somebody spending a magic hundred dollars would be to do exactly that with every dime. To get as many superhero comics as they can out of a beater bin, to save as many as possible for the dumpster out back. You'll end up with a ton of awful shit, a ton of comics where guys don't draw feet and women and minorities are depicted in the most ignorant fashion possible. But if you're open to it, you'll definitely find at least one thing that you'll hold on to forever, one thing that will stay stuck in your brain for the rest of your life. And that will be pretty awesome.
SPURGEON: Is comics a good place in which to pursue the kind of writing you're pursuing? What would make it better?
STONE: Last part first: the only thing that would make my writing better would be if I was smarter and had more time to devote to it. The first won't happen, and I don't think it would be fair to Nina to make too many promises on the second. But I'll try. I should also buy a scanner. And the only thing that would make the comics environment a better one to write in would be if there were better comics, and more people liked reading them. That would help.
On the "good place" thing? -- You know, I've sent e-mails like this to some of the people involved, but I'll say it again so that it's out there in a more public forum. The more I got involved in the comics part of the internet, the more I read of other people doing it, the more impressed I got. I'm excited to keep up with what Dirk Deppey, you, Noah Berlatsky,Jog, Matthew Brady, Chris Mautner, Sean Witzke, Dick Hyacinth, David Brothers, all of the Mindless Ones, Tom Bondurant, Caleb Mozzocco and all the rest have to say about comics. If I had wildest dreams about the blog -- which I didn't, and still don't -- it would have been to have any one of those people tell me that I wrote something that made them laugh.
I would've been fine with an email.
Instead, this group of people -- people who I don't agree with on all kinds of stuff -- have linked to me, or said really nice things about me, or emailed me, or -- in a few cases -- actually met me and hung out for a bit. comiXology liked it enough that they offered me a chance to do some more for them and give me money for it -- so yeah, it's a great place to pursue whatever kind of writing I'm pursuing. I come at this with no ambition or desires, just because I think it's fun. The opportunity to have something I started as a hobby turn into something where people I like and respect want to critique it? Think it's worth sharing with their own readers and friends? That's amazing. I had no idea that would happen. I don't operate under any delusion that it's going to become a full-time career for a guy like me, but goddamn if there aren't some really great, smart people involved in it who will definitely be able to pull that off. I'm proud as hell to get a chance to share some space with them.
*****
* picture of Iron Fist with all the cleverly-named supporting characters Stone talks about
* picture of Stone provided by Nina Stone
* Star Trek
* the Detroit-era Justice League
* Lobo #1
* The Stand
* a panel from All-Star Superman #10
* art from Ultimate Spider-Man
* the Giffen/Dematteis Justice League
* art for one of the Punisher: MAX book covers
* some Jack Kirby Fourth World
* the artist Greg Land draws some Uncanny
* Tenzil Kem in those shades
* from the Batman RIP storyline (I think)
* from All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder
* a cover to an issue of Secret Invasion
* panel from Final Crisis
* one of the Minx books
* art to a Captain America cover, Ed Brubaker era
* page from Umbrella Academy
* some Old Man Wolverine
* some art from Marcelo Frusin
* the artist Chris Bachalo draws Spider-Man
* from Trinity
* from Igort
* cover to Love and Rockets: New Stories Vol. 1
* cover to an old, beat-up Brave and the Bold
* Paul Pope cover to Catwoman during the "Disguises" run
* another All Star Superman image
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
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We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
We want to know where you are (but only generally). Are you willing to share with the world of comics where you live in order that people potentially contact you, hire you, perhaps invite you to social gatherings? We'd love to include you or the people in comics you know on the Comics By Local Scene List.
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Thank you for your help, and thank you so much for your patronage. We hope you're having an excellent holiday season and we look forward to serving you throughout and into the New Year.
CR Holiday Interview #2: Jeet Heer On Little Orphan Annie
*****
One of the best pieces of writing about comics I read this year was Jeet Heer's introduction to the first of IDW's Little Orphan Annie collections. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone familiar with Heer's writing about comics, in particular his well-received pieces opening the Walt & Skeezix volumes from Drawn & Quarterly. I enjoyed Heer's lively dissection of factors leading into the first few years of Harold Gray's great, long-running strip so much that I thought it would be fun to ask him some questions about it. Happily, he agreed. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Jeet, as I recall you did your dissertation on Harold Gray and Little Orphan Annie. Am I to take it that this focused on Gray as a conservative figure? Did any of that material make it into your introduction?
JEET HEER: The biographical information on Gray and his relationship to Midwestern cartooning draws on my thesis research. But Gray wasn't really a conservative in the 1920s: he was more of an general populist, hostile to loan sharks and speculators while celebrating hard working ordinary people whether their successful ("Daddy" Warbucks) or not (the poor struggling farmers, the Silos). In the 1920s, Gray even defended labour unions, having Annie launch a successful one-girl strike against a boss who mistreats her. Gray's political opinions would take on a more partisan salience in the 1930s when the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt polarized American politics into those who saw the New Deal as the salvation for the working class and those who saw it as the end of American liberty. Gray fell into the anti-FDR camp and Annie became much more explicitly right-wing. That's a big part of the thesis and won't be in the Annie books till we hit the New Deal period.
SPURGEON: One thing I don't know is how you started reading Annie. That's a tough one for a lot of people to get into because of the musical, and its general identity as a girl's strip from the Great Depression. What led to your initial reading and what piqued your interest to the point you made it an object of study?
HEER: The first time I read Annie was the Leonard Starr version, which ran in the Toronto Star in the late 1970s and early 1980s, although I didn't particularly care for that incarnation. I saw Gray's Annie in bits in pieces in books like The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics and elsewhere but didn't read it in bulk till issue #8 of Nemo, Richard Marschall's magazine about comics. That issue had several in-depth articles on Annie and reprints a long 1920s adventure, which impressed me for its grittiness and heart. Then the Fantagraphics collections came along, which were even more impressive in that they feature year-long stories that read like novels. So I knew Annie was worth writing about, but what convinced me that it would be worth a whole thesis was looking through the Gray archives at Boston University. Unlike most cartoonists of his generation, Gray kept most of his original art and a ton of other material (letters, diaries, etc.). So here was a chance to write about an early 20th century cartoonist in a way that really looks at his life and work, without relying on the usual recycled press clippings.
SPURGEON: How did you get the gig writing the introduction to this volume? I know you have a relationship with Canadian comics creators, but this is from IDW.
HEER: I got the gig thanks to Dean Mullaney, who admired the Walt & Skeezix books I'm doing with Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros. Dean was in the early stages of planning out the ambitious Library of American Comics series, which will include Annie, Terry and the Pirates, and many other strips. I was happy to work with Dean because, like Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics, he takes book design and production seriously and works hard to create the most attractive platform for presenting old comic strips. (Back in the old Eclipse days, Dean had published the first incarnation of Krazy and Ignatz, which was a formative influence on me).
SPURGEON: I know almost nothing about Dean's set up with IDW. What was it like working with them?
HEER: Well, like "Daddy" Warbucks Dean has a lot of drive and entrepreneurial energy and he's built quite a "wrecking crew" around him including Bruce Canwell (who has done great research for the Terry books and the Noel Sickles book), and Randy Scott (who does the indexing for several series). Dean does the design work himself (he's been running a design firm during his long absence from comics) and hands over each volume to IDW and the printers. The books have been selling well, so IDW has been giving Dean lots of leeway. One thing I admire about Dean is that he's put in lots of time and money on production: in the Annie books, for example, the vast majority of the strips are shot from original art, which is a rare luxury and allows us to see Gray's work as never before. I think Dean's masterpiece so far has been the Noel Sickles book, which really gives us for the first time a sense of this important artist's career.
SPURGEON: You do a wonderful job in the essay tracking how the values of Little Orphan Annie are frequently seen in values and experiences Gray had in the 30 years before he started the strip. I have two questions. Is there any personal experience that you feel Gray might have kept from informing the strip for some reason? And since he was so conscious of crafting Annie, did that include utilizing these values or did those just kind of naturally seep into the work the way they do with most cartoonists who work on something every day like that.
HEER: There might be aspects of Gray's life that didn't make it into his strip. There are rumours that he was a skirt-chaser and that's something that doesn't show up much in Annie, although you can catch hints of it here and there.
Charles Schulz once said that everything you could want to know about him could be found in Peanuts, and the characters were all reflections of his personality. I think that's true of all the great cartoonists, not just Schulz but also Frank King, George Herriman and Harold Gray (or Crumb or Ware or Seth...). Newspaper cartooning is like keeping a daily diary: even if you're writing only about the weather and shopping, bits of your personality will seep into the work.
In Gray's case, the strip reflected his flinty world view, his love of hard work, his populist spirit, and also his fear of those he thought were undermining society by their laziness and meanness. You get a very strong sense of the man in his work, which is one reason it's one of the major comic strips.
SPURGEON: I was fascinated by your contention that John T. McCutcheon may have been the first ruminative cartoonist. Can you talk a little bit about him and that and how that might have had an impact on Annie and other strips?
HEER: McCutcheon was the leading political cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune in the first half of the 20th century, a hugely influential figure now largely forgotten. When not commenting on politics, McCutcheon did nostalgic, Mark Twain-inspired strips about being a small town boy, hanging out at the old swimming hole, etc. Many of his best strips don't really have punch-lines or gags but rather work as tone-poems, filled with yearning and sadness -- in a famous page that Gray referred to, McCutcheon paid tribute to the particular colors of an Indian summer night in the Midwest. McCutcheon pioneered a genre of cartooning that was later taken up by Clare Briggs, Frank King, Milton Caniff, Harold Gray and many others.
SPURGEON: You also spend time tracking how The Gumps influenced Gray and Little Orphan Annie. First, I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit, too, just how dominant an influence that way. Second, since it was strong an influence, and very popular, why does Annie stand out as a something that was influenced by it? Was Gray just cagier than some of his contemporaries? Did something about the strip strike a chord with Gray that he was maybe more apt to draw from it?
HEER: Well, like McCutcheon, Sidney Smith (creator of The Gumps) was a giant of his day whose place in history has largely been forgotten. Throughout the 1920s and later, The Gumps was one of the top strips in America , loved by millions. What set The Gumps apart from earlier strips was that, although it had a comic element, Smith also often embraced wholehearted melodrama. It was the first real soap opera strip, with the fate of characters unfolding in month long narratives. That's the primary lesson Gray took from Annie.
It's an interesting question why Gray's work continues to be remembered and indeed loved while Smith has been forgotten. I suspect the answer to the question has something to do with Gray's skill at characterization. Like Charles Dickens, Gray had a natural gift for creating characters that are vivid and lifelike. Annie and Warbucks are the best example of this: both of them are so strong and forceful and memorable. Once you read their adventures, it's hard to forget them as people. Smith had all sorts of talents, particularly in spinning out long yarns in small installments, but his characters lack some special spark. It's much harder to relate to Andy Gump than to Annie.
SPURGEON: I noticed you mostly avoided Dean's line of thought in his own, much shorter essay about Annie being a creature of its times -- the fact that many in the country were suffering and had lost faith. Do you not feel that's as strong as the personal stamp Gray placed on the strip? How do you see the way people responded to the work, and since it's an obvious comparison, do you think the time are similar right now and that Annie might hit the people that read it the same way?
HEER: Well, there are lots of books in this series so I don't want touch on every topic right away. In future volumes I will talk about Annie as a product of its time. Having said that, I do think there are ways that Annie transcends its period, as the best strips do. The type of values that Gray brought into the strip -- a sort of two-fisted conservatism -- still has an enormous resonance in American life. By volume three, Annie and Warbucks will be dealing with the Great Depression, trying to survive amid a collapsing economy. I hope that won't be too close to the bone of today's reality!
SPURGEON: I was surprised by how much like prime-time 1930s Little Orphan Annie the strip was at its beginning. What do you think was the most important element that Gray worked in as the strip developed, or maybe the last thing he brought into it?
HEER: I think Gray hit on the main component of the strip -- the relationship between Annie and Warbucks -- in the very first episode. What will develop in time is his story telling skills. In the early strips, Gray was pretty lackadaisical, with one adventure seeping into another. Often Annie would just wander about for weeks without direction until Gray hit on another idea. By the early 1930s, Gray's plotting was much tighter, with each story reading like a self-contained novel with a proper beginning and end. The last major component that entered the strip was fantasy, which came in 1935 with the introduction of Punjab. Prior to that Annie as a pretty realistic strip. With Punjab, an extra dimension of magic was added to the recipe.
SPURGEON: Have you been successful in writing "half about comics, half about life" as you stated in our previous interview? What's next comics-wise?
HEER: As readers of my blog Sans Everything will know, I continue to write about politics, culture at large, and comics. Right now, I'm working on long essays about Gustave Verbeek, Roy Crane, and Herriman's Stumble Inn. With Kent Worcester, I've just edited a collection of essays titled A Comics Studies Reader, which tries to show how the study of comics has coalesced into a coherent field of studies. And of course Walt & Skeezix continues as does Krazy & Ignatz. So lots of books on comics in the future.
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* the first volume of the Little Orphan Annie series, where Jeet Heer's essay awaits you
* from one of the early Sundays: the irrepressible Annie
* Harold Gary and Annie issue of Nemo
* John McCutcheon's contemplative "Injun Summer"
* a quotidian moment in an early Little Orphan Annie
* Gray never shied away from the harsh realities facing many of the people he portrayed
* the Annie/Daddy Warbucks relationship is the cornerstone of the strip; Gray discovered this fairly early on
* [bottom] won't you buy this young girl's book?
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
We want your links. Are you a cartoonist, comics industry person or have a connection to an on-line expression of something related to comics? Do you know of any? If we don't have the site you're thinking of linked to here, or linked to correctly, we'd love to include it.
We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
We want to know where you are (but only generally). Are you willing to share with the world of comics where you live in order that people potentially contact you, hire you, perhaps invite you to social gatherings? We'd love to include you or the people in comics you know on the Comics By Local Scene List.
Most of all, we want to know what we can do better. Anything that this site can do to better serve your needs, we want to try and make happen.
Thank you for your help, and thank you so much for your patronage. We hope you're having an excellent holiday season and we look forward to serving you throughout and into the New Year.
I've known Kim Thompson since 1994, when I went to work for him at Fantagraphics Books. He's among the smartest people I've ever met, and is one of the kindest. Together with his longtime publishing partner Gary Groth, Thompson has worked the last several years transforming the longtime alternative comics company he co-owns into a small but potent comics, art book and graphic novel publishing house. Having spent much of his youth in Europe, he has been one of North America's most effective advocates for translated books from the rich French-language tradition. He is also a talented editor, a fine interviewer with whom I worked at The Comics Journal and generally informed and involved when it comes to all aspects of how that company functions. If Fantagraphics were a car, Kim would be the guy in the jumpsuit and dirty fingernails constantly poking around under its hood. He was nice enough to talk to me about his company's future and recent past. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: After 30-plus years in the comics industry, how do you keep motivated? What do you find exciting about your job right now?
KIM THOMPSON: There is always some new cartoonist, or some new work by an cartoonist, on the horizon to snap me out of my depressed torpor. And we've got such a great bunch of people working for us now here in the office... that's energizing. That said, I wish I didn't have to answer this on a goddamn Monday morning.
SPURGEON: As a long-time champion of European comics, how satisfying is it for you to see this second great wave of translated European works hitting the American market?
THOMPSON: It's pretty exciting, although of course we don't know yet whether this wave will prove more durable than the last one. We've got three major, major European cartoonists planned to launch in 2009-2010 ourselves. Even if the wave crashes, at least we'll have gotten out another batch of great books that will survive on Amazon.com as used books for a few years.
SPURGEON: Does Fantagraphics have a specific strategy for approaching European cartoonists, or does a Jason, say, just kind of move into your orbit organically the same way that any other artists does? Are there any artists or kinds of work from Europe you're interested in publishing in the future?
THOMPSON: There is still a bewilderingly huge amount of great European work that hasn't been released in English (or was released in English back during the first Eurocomics boom and has since fallen out of print). I don't know if there is a "kind" per se, but I think we need to catch back up with the masters who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, your [Jacques] Tardis and [Lorenzo] Mattottis and Loustals and Munozes and so on. NBM, First Second and Drawn & Quarterly seem to be doing a good job with the 1990s/millennial generation.
I'd still love to publish my favorite European kids' comics guys like [Andre] Franquin and [Maurice] Tillieux, of course, but I've long since given up on this idea as being totally unworkable in the American market. If I win the lotto and can throw $100K down the toilet just for fun, look for an announcement.
SPURGEON: Comics seem poised to take an even bigger leap into various on-line formats over the next 24 months. Is Fantagraphics interested in further working with their artists to publish them on-line in a more significant way? What kind of discussions have you had in-house about this?
THOMPSON: Man, I'm not the one to ask about on-line comics. It's low on my list of priorities, possibly foolishly so.
SPURGEON: Have you had any talks internally about the possibility of a sustained economic downturn? Have you made any moves or do you plan any moves to meet the possible challenges of rough times? Are you worried about the months ahead?
THOMPSON: Of course we're worried, but it's such terra incognita, no one knows where this is going and no one knows how specifically this might affect the comic book field. Maybe comic books will be the only entertainment people can afford and sales will surge. (Although probably not.) We're probably going to be more conservative in terms of new projects and print runs. I just turned down a project that a year or two ago we might've said yes to.
SPURGEON: Considering that there are two of you as publisher, how do you Gary and decide what to publish? Is it true there are Gary books and there are Kim books? Do you ever publish books that one or the other of you isn't enthused about?
THOMPSON: Sure. We're two different people with different tastes, and we're also self-aware enough to know that there are cartoonists one of us doesn't like that are objectively speaking fine cartoonists worthy of being published. The percentage of books that both of us aren't totally enthusiastic about is pretty small, in any event, so in most cases we're on the same page. There has never been a project one of us hated so much he tried to talk the other one out of publishing, maybe a few cases of "Jeez, really? OK, whatever."
SPURGEON: Are there any publishing initiatives from the last 15 years that you wish could have succeeded that maybe didn't to the extent you felt they might? For instance, I thought Lewis Trondheim's The Nimrod was a near-perfect alternative comic.
THOMPSON: Yeah, although we were running out of Trondheim material that fit that format, so it likely would've ended after we finished the Approximativement serialization. In general, I'm really sorry that the alternative pamphlet format has crashed and burned, it's now basically impossible to launch a new cartoonist in that format, and a number of more established cartoonists aren't pulling in sufficient numbers to justify it. The Raisin Pie and Fuzz and Pluck numbers were unbelievably bad, for instance, and even "successes" like Uptight and Tales Designed To Thrizzle are at best marginal. And every time we think the numbers have bottomed out we find a new bottom.
The Ignatz books are barely break even but then I expected that, so I'm not exactly disappointed.
There are individual cartoonists whose books failed I'm bummed about, of course.
SPURGEON: I think your books have looked consistently great over the last five years. You've had some great designers in the past, but it seems like you now have a really solid, consistent art department in the way that Eric Reynolds had given you guys a an anchor in marketing/PR. How important is good design to what you guys have been able to achieve in recent years? What are your own tastes when it comes to design?
THOMPSON: Nothing more sophisticated than I know what I like, and I agree that Adam Grano and Jacob Covey are doing a bang-up job. Frankly -- and our designers hate it when I say this -- I think a lot of books are sort of design-proof in terms of sales, although some benefit significantly from superior design, and some are totally saved by design. Clearly Chris Ware's design of the Krazy and Ignatz books gave those a boost, and Jacob Covey's Popeye surely moved some extra units.
That said, the standard of design for graphic novels has really peaked in the last decade, and you sort of have to have at least decent design if you want to be taken seriously. We couldn't get away with the crappy Fantagraphics/Eclipse/NBM/Last Gasp designs of the 1980s any more, that's for sure. So I'd say decent design is a necessity and great design is a bonus.
SPURGEON: I think you're an under-appreciated editor, particularly your anthologies. Titles like Critters and Zero Zero look better in retrospect with each passing year. Why so few? Do you have another magazine in you somewhere? Do you enjoy that kind of hands-on curating process? How do you look back on each of those anthologies now?
THOMPSON: Thank you for that. I thought Critters was great for its time, although that kind of "indy" material (with the exception of Usagi Yojimbo) seems to have fallen through the cracks and no longer has any audience at all -- and it's looked askance at by "alternative" loyalists. Are any of the Critters guys other than [Stan] Sakai still actively publishing comics? I mean, what kind of a stupid industry lets a guy like Mike Kazaleh slip away into self-publishing and, basically, retirement from comics?
Anthologies are a lot of fun to do, and I enjoyed doing both of those, and I agree that Zero Zero was undervalued at the time, but with so many cartoonists either wanting their own comics or being graphic novel oriented there is a real dearth of high-end anthology-worthy comics: Finding cartoonists of the caliber of Max Andersson, David Cooper, Richard Sala, or Kim Deitch, to name four main Zero Zero guys, able and willing to crank out comics for an anthology is increasingly difficult. Eric and Gary do a great job with Mome, but I know they're having trouble filling it up...
I think Glenn Head is doing a great job on Hotwire, but it's a tough, tough sell. The big, fun, Weirdo-style "comics-y" anthology seems like a dinosaur somehow.
I doubt I would ever edit another anthology: I don't see any niche that needs to be filled, and the energy I used to devote to the anthologies has been diverted to other pursuits (because we're doing more international books I'm doing a lot more translating, for instance).
SPURGEON: I seem to remember you guys published a couple of incendiary political books in 2004 that were fairly ahead of the curve about the Bush Administration, and unless I missed it you didn't have something like that on your calendar this year. Was there any reason for that? Was that just coincidence? Do you consider Fantagraphics to be a political publisher and do you want to publish more work like that in the future?
THOMPSON: Oh, I don't know that they were ahead of the curve, except within the comics industry. By 2004 you had rackfuls of anti-Bush and anti-Republican prose books, your Ivinses and Moores and Frankens, didn't you? The primary motivation of the Steve Brodner book Freedom Fries which I edited was actually more esthetic than political: when we started it was going to be a Brodner career retrospective that would also include his celebrity caricatures, but it morphed into a political book midway through.
I consider Fantagraphics to be a publisher of good comics and if the comics that are submitted to us are good political comics then great, but I'm not inclined to pursue them. To be frank, I find most of the World War 3 Illustrated type agenda comics tedious (although I thought The Bush Junta had real energy).
I think you may need nation-wide disgust with a government to see a lot of this kind of material, and we're in the Obama honeymoon stage anyway.
SPURGEON: I consider your generation of comics people comics' greatest generation in that the industry will likely have changed more from when you began to when you conclude your run than for any other group. In broad terms, is this the industry you imagined when you started out? Is there anything better about now than you imagined? What would you still like to see happen?
THOMPSON: The industry has changed far more radically, and for the better, than I ever could have imagined, in terms of the respect accorded to comics, the level of work being produced, comics' place in the market, the whole ball of wax. (You have to bear in mind that when we started cartoonists were literally wondering whether Americans would ever be willing to read comic books that ran beyond the length of an issue of Giant-Size Fantastic Four.)
The weird thing is that the idea of "graphic novels" and comics for adults has had so very little penetration into the general literate populace. Most regular people are, in my experience, still utterly stunned and confused at the very idea, New York Times Book Review reviews notwithstanding. There is a weird disconnect between the press's enthusiastic embrace and promotion of the medium and its effect on actual "mainstream" readers. You have millions of New York Times subscribers reading and presumably mostly enjoying the Jason serial, but how many of them would even think "Hey, I should go buy a book by this guy"? .001 percent?
It remains an uphill battle, and if I'd known how much of an uphill battle it would continue to be, even with all of these victories, I might have become an advertising copywriter circa 1979.
*****
* photo by Tom Spurgeon
* a Jason book with Fantagraphics
* Franquin
* The Nimrod, Lewis Trondheim's comic book
* a Krazy & Ignatz book designed by Chris Ware
* a Critters cover by Mike Kazaleh
* a Zero Zero cover
* Freedom Fries, edited by Thompson
* The Bush Junta, another political book from Fantagraphics
A Short Note From The Publishers
This post is designed in the hopes that either the overwhelming ennui or the rousing can-do spirit of this holiday season will catch you in the mood to briefly help us with the site by writing in.
We want your links. Are you a cartoonist, comics industry person or have a connection to an on-line expression of something related to comics? Do you know of any? If we don't have the site you're thinking of linked to here, or linked to correctly, we'd love to include it.
We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
We want to know where you are (but only generally). Are you willing to share with the world of comics where you live in order that people potentially contact you, hire you, perhaps invite you to social gatherings? We'd love to include you or the people in comics you know on the Comics By Local Scene List.
Most of all, we want to know what we can do better. Anything that this site can do to better serve your needs, we want to try and make happen.
Thank you for your help, and thank you so much for your patronage. We hope you're having an excellent holiday season and we look forward to serving you throughout and into the New Year.
Please Don't Forget The Various Comics Charities And Organizations This Year
If in the next ten days or so you're looking for a tax-deductible avenue through to which spend some money, please don't forget the various comics-related charities and those organizations related to comics that are set up to take contributions. A school like The Center For Cartoon Studies lives and dies according to its ability to elicit support from a wide variety of patrons. Click through the image for a comic about the place and how you can help. I hope that you'll join me in opening up your final year's paycheck to possible divvying up amongst some of comics' most important entities.
Help CR Inform The World About Comics: Check Out Our General Links
We're going to be working on our general links section for the next couple of weeks. If you have a spare moment this holiday season, please check out the following and let us know of any links or information you have that might be added to what we already have, or any correction we might want to make.
We'll also be working on our birthdays section, so if you or anyone you know related to comics in some way has a birthday you think we should know about, please drop us a note. We need a birth date -- as much as it's nice to wish people a happy birthday, our primary motivation for having the birthday posts up is historical value.
The top comics-related news stories from December 13 to December 20, 2008:
1. The conviction of Dwight Whorley was upheld by a circuit court of appeals. Whorley was convicted of having child pornography in part due to owning cartoon imagery of children in sexual situations.
2. Word seeps out that in addition to dropping its posters/prints category, Diamond will also not list as many O/A entries up front in the catalog with the new stuff, a possible big blow to publishers large and small who depend on such listings.
3. Twomore North American cartoonists lose their full-time positions.
Quote Of The Week
"I had voluntarily left the employment of Fantagraphics Books in late September 1985 to work for Dominos Pizza. I left for financial reasons." -- Dave Olbrich. This is the first time I've ever had multiple e-mails from people demanding something be the quote of the week. It is funny, although in defense of comics generally and my former employers specifically it was a whole different comics world 25 years ago.
this week's imagery comes from pioneering comic book house Hillman Publications
FFF Results Post #145 -- Remembering 2008
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Memorable Comics-Related Things About 2008 (A Book You Read, An Experience You Had, An Event That Made You Take Notice -- Anything That Would Help You In The Future Recall This Year." This was how they responded.
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Tom Spurgeon
1. The Kurt Westergaard Assassination Plot
2. Richard Thompson's First Cul De Sac Collection Came Out
3. Jim Borgman Leaves Cincinnati Enquirer
4. Steve Gerber Passes Away
5. Marvel's Secret Invasion vs. DC's Final Crisis
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Gerry Alanguilan
1. The release of two important Philippine graphic novels: Martial Law Babies by Arnold Arre, and Trese by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo.
2. The flurry that resulted from the appearance of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on the pages of Secret Invasion and the cries of "GMA is a Skrull!" that followed. The news even reached Malacanang (our local White House) but issued no comment. Leinil Francis Yu clarified GMA's appearance by saying in no way was GMA portrayed as a Skrull.
3. Komikon 2008: The 4th Philippine Comics Convention as finally grown too big for it's venue.
4. The opening of at least three Philippine comics specialty shops and the closing of none.
5. The collapse of Sterling Paper's comic book line under comics veteran Carlo J. Caparas after a much touted, much publicized launch in 2007 that saw the "Return of Komiks" to the newsstand. Five titles ran for at the very least eight issues each, distributed nationwide, before disappearing without fanfare.
* discovered the work of Brendan McCarthy
* first issue of RASL come out
* I added a few webcomics to my RSS reader
* the first issue of my own comic, Dead Man Holiday came out
* some brushes with superhero comics (not very important to me, but culturally they make very effective time markers): People wouldn't shut up about Iron Man and then got even louder when Dark Knight came out, I bought and pretty much enjoyed two issues of Uncanny X-Men in December
1) Neil Gaiman announces Gordon Lee win at NYCC, mere hours after the judge's order came through.
2) CBLDF signs on as special consultant for the defense of manga collector Christopher Handley six months later.
3) Rory Root dies. At the memorial, more people are standing on the sidewalk outside Comic Relief talking one fashion of business or another than are inside the sweltering heat of the store listening to tribute speeches. I think he'd have approved.
4) Clearing the bookshelf to make way for the embarrassment of riches that have recently come out. RASL, DC's Jack Kirby program, Beanworld, Creepy Archives, Echo, Berlin, and Bottomless Belly Button are just a few of the books that made me really excited about comics this year. 2008 had more stuff I wanted to read than any other year in recent memory.
5) Coming back from SPX with a big hardcover collection of Ron Rege's collected mini-comics and a new hardcover from Nate Powell sure seemed like the end of one small press era and the opening of the next one. Jeff Mason's recent Facebook photos from SPXs when we all looked so much younger sure seemed to underscore that point.
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Aaron White
1. Meeting Jaime Hernandez. My fiance's old roommate always tried to copy Maggie's hairstyle, so Jaime drew me a sketch of Maggie brushing her hair.
2. Meeting Kevin Huizenga.
3. Meeting Sammy Harkham.
4. Meeting Rick Trembles.
5. Meeting Tom Spurgeon.
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Justin Colussy-Estes
1) Publishing contraction (Random House's shakeup alone affects Del Ray Manga and Pantheon, Tokyopop crashes, and layoffs at several smaller comics publishers -- all of which pales compared to the devastation felt in editorial cartooning)
2) Yen publishes Yen+, giving the Viz manga anthologies a run for their money.
3) Comic strip collections explode beyond all output in the previous decade (I bought The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and the Gary Gianni/Mark Schultz Prince Valiant volume on the same day, and those weren't even the most notable strip collections released that month!), while the comics pages shrink a little more (when did For Better or For Worse finally peter out? And Opus, just to name two huge strips...)
4) That Emmanuel Guibert YouTube video demonstrating how he drew Alan's War. I could (and did) send that link to anybody I knew and they thought it was cool.
5) This is more local, but it ties into a national story: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution decides not to run Doonesbury's post-election Obama strips (and, to bring this full circle: they may have changed their minds, but I wouldn't know because my wife finally gave up on her newspaper subscription).
1. I stopped buying Marvel comics entirely for the first time in 25 years. (March)
2. I inherited my father's comic book collection when he cleaned out his basement. (April)
3. Jack Kirby Collector #50 (April)
4. I switched to reading legal online comics exclusively and stopped buying printed comics altogether. (June)
5. Wowio got bought by Platinum and went immediately to pot. (July)
1. Jim Borgman leaves the Cincinnati Enquirer. (I grew up seven miles from Cincinnati in Northern Kentucky and Jim Borgman was the only political cartoonist I really knew until I moved out of the region when I was 22. I didn't realize how good I had it political cartoonist wise and that not every newspaper had such a great cartoonist.)
2. $125 for a comic? Kramer's Ergot 7.
3. Dark Knight grosses a kajillion dollars.
4. Iron Man was a much more entertaining, but not necessarily better, movie.
5. Presidential comics
1. Meeting Jules Feiffer for the first time at a Children's Book Expo held at a local school my daughter once attended, and having him sign my nearly 40-year-old copy of The Great Comic Book Heroes while I stammered out a few heartfelt compliments.
2. Actually finding myself looking forward to a movie based on a comic book character -- Iron Man -- and then actually liking it. A lot. (Of films released on July 18th, 2008, I'm always gonna prefer Mamma Mia to The Dark Knight -- guess that's just the kinda guy I am these days...)
3. After being aware of him since about 1967 -- and he of me since around 1977 -- I finally met Mark Evanier face to face not once, but twice, at a pair of NYC comicons where he was promoting his fine Kirby book.
4. Got to read Blake Bell's fascinating book about my favorite cartoonist, Steve Ditko, Strange and Stranger.
5. And speaking of books -- Not a dream!! Not a hoax!! Not an imaginary story!! -- MY very own book, "The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus" was published!! (And if I was allowed a sixth entry, howsabout being interviewed--twice, thanks to a mysterious recording malfunction--regarding said volume by noted journalist, Tom Spurgeon? But I only get five, right? So let's just forget I mentioned it...)
*****
Russ Maheras
1.) This summer I met Krista Hanley, daughter of the late, great fan artist (and friend) Alan "Jim" Hanley, who died in a motor vehicle accident on Christmas Eve in 1980. Krista was only an infant the last time I saw her 30 years ago, just before I shipped off to Air Force basic training.
2.) The nice folks at IDW asked me to write the introduction to Volume 5 of the Eisner Award-winning reprint book series, Terry and the Pirates. It features Milton Caniff's 1943-1944 Terry strips, and was just published a couple of weeks ago.
3.) In another long-awaited Caniff-related event, Volume 1 of the Steve Canyon television show DVD was just released, featuring the first 12 episodes of the rare, long-lost (and top-notch) 1958-1959 series.
4.) Blake Bell's long-awaited book about Steve Ditko, Strange and Stranger, was published.
5.) Dave Stevens passed away.
1. Returning to the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, where I had worked nine years, for a book event for American Widow, by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi. As I approached Mrs. Torres, she recognized me. She reminded me that when she first started thinking about writing a book about her experiences, she had come to my store, asked for advice, and I had recommended to her the best books to use.
2. Leaving the hustle and bustle of one of the busiest Barnes & Noble stores for a job at the home office helping maintain the product database. Just as I had godfathered the Graphic Novel section at the store, making it one of the best in the country, so do I now godfather the graphic novel bibliographic data which feeds BN.com and store systems.
3. Understanding why the sub-prime bubble burst, having learned about speculation from various comics implosions and Neil Gaiman's essay on Tulipomania.
4. Volunteering at the NYC HQ of the Obama campaign, enjoying the various tie-in comics, freebasing the zeitgeist of the Election, and realizing that a comicbook fan will soon be President.
5. Attending my first Anime convention (New York Anime Festival), enjoying the sheer joy and wonderment of the other attendees, and realizing that anime and manga subculture is more similar to the science fiction and fantasy subcultures than it is to comics subculture.
I've said this so many times it's part of the interview that follows: 
SPURGEON: Unlike a lot of creators for whom taking it on-line is the first major change they've embraced, Wolff & Byrd have been fairly mutable over the years. It's on-line now, I think of it as a comic book, and it also had a long run as a magazine strip.
You see a lot of problems in mainstream comics where people keep jumping from project to project. So you've got 20 different versions of Batman or Spider-Man. Or whatever character. There is no one vision. Like I said, there was a time, better or for worse, you'd have 
SPURGEON: Is there anything special we should mention, or should people just continue to pay attention to the site and the print releases?
We want to wish you a happy birthday. Are you a prominent or semi-prominent comics person who would be willing to help me recognize comics history by wishing you a happy birthday? Stipulations: 1) Tom has to have heard of you, but he's heard of most people. 2) We need a birth date.
TOM SPURGEON: Matthew, I'm not familiar with you at all beyond seeing your name up for a few awards, which is absolutely terrifying to me considering the accomplishment on display in Ojingogo. I liked your biographical cartoon [see bottom of post]. What about your life story do you think might distinguish you from most of your artist peers?
SPURGEON: Although I'm certain you must have talked about this elsewhere, can you clue me in about how Ojingogo developed? In hurling myself towards the Internet to find out more about you, what I came away with is that it was an on-line project -- perhaps even a flickr-based one -- that developed into the print one. Can you talk about how you ended up in print?
I don't particularly agree with the idea that Phil is "worshipful" of superheroes, though there's a part of the story where that's likely true. But it's simply part of what he goes through -- from being scared to being overawed and feeling like ordinary men don't matter, to finding his footing in a world with marvels in it, to excited to saddened to bitter to awestruck to angrily supportive to disappointed and saddened to philosophical. But a lot of what we were working with was about trying to explore what it would feel like, emotionally, to be in that world with that kind of thing happening around you -- and the perspectives we'd usually seen, at least at Marvel, were either the heroes' perspective, right up in their heads and making them seem like normal guys with feet of clay, or the idea that superheroes are scary and dangerous. So we wanted to do more than repeat that -- we did include it, but we learned more toward "super-people are impressive and awe-inspiring," because that's an idea that had been kind of lost, and it's the kind of thing I'd think about, when I was a kid walking to school and wondering, "What would it be like if 
Another factor to consider is, maybe the stories aren't as good as they used to be, or the audience has had their fill of it. Or they like the impact of the single-issue stories better, and we've been in the middle of a long epic -- we got great reactions to 
So the Marvels sequels weren't going to be starring Phil Sheldon. I did have an idea, that I'd discussed with Alex, for a sort of "epilogue" story about Phil, where we could see him after retirement, and find out what became of his life. It was partly because we didn't want someone to bring Phil back as a crusading reporter for 
I did do Iron Man with Roger for a year, where he got final say -- we co-plotted and he scripted it -- but I don't feel as much like those issues are "mine" as I do with Avengers Forever, where we co-plotted and I scripted. I think they're good comics, but I'm not sunk into them as deeply, I'm more distanced from them. As for Up, Up and Away, it was a wonderful experience that mutated over the course of the project. The way we planned it, Geoff and I were going to hash the story out together, then he'd plot and I'd tweak the plot, and I'd script and he'd tweak the script. And it did begin that way. Geoff flew up to my area and stayed in my guest room for three days, as we worked out the story together, and we had a great time doing it. On that third day, he wrote up the overall outline with me looking over his shoulder and making suggestions. Then, once it was okayed, we started out on the series, and pretty quickly he got swamped with Infinite Crisis, which had its own schedule headaches. So I started doing the first-draft plots, too, with him tweaking them, and I was doing the scripts as well, and by the end he was so busy he wasn't tweaking very much. So it's very much our story, but as it goes on it's more and more my voice, doing the job of fleshing out and realizing what we'd outlined together.
Some projects, I write for the insider -- JLA/Avengers was a project that core superhero fans had been waiting for for 20 years. It was going to be a celebration for them, for people who already like the JLA and the Avengers enough to get jazzed about the idea of them meeting. It's not intended as a starting point -- if you don't already know the books, why would you want to see them team up? It's for the guys who are already there. But Shockrockets was hopefully something that could attract newer or younger readers, at the same time as people who like good action-adventure comics could get a kick out of it. I was aware with it that it needed to be more welcoming.
I've beaten the drum a lot about what went wrong for comics in the wake of World War II, but I have the advantage of decades of hindsight there. I'm not an economist and I don't think my analysis of the present market trends would be particularly credible. I can say I was beating the drum for trade paperback collections long before they were commonplace, and while I don't think publishers did them because they were listening to me, I was at least right about it being an effective plan. And I pushed for 
I love talking to 
SPURGEON: When did new comics become a part of those plans?
SPURGEON: When 
SPURGEON: In one of the new comics -- and I swear I won't ask too many questions about them -- you end on a hysterically funny down note about how you're glad that you got a certain kind of going out and carousing out of your system as a young man. Another one consists of a verbal beat down your wife provides you one morning about things she finds aggravating about you. These seem to me significant departures in terms of tone, the way you approach similar one-pagers in the past. Was that on purpose? Was there anything different about the way you approached these comics knowing they'd be published not alone, but with all of that early work?
SPURGEON: A lot of your recent work seems to be done in collaboration -- you worked with Hayley's photography in 
CAMPBELL: This is something that has been bugging me for some time. 
TOM SPURGEON: I wanted to ask you a question about your book 
COLLINS: The New York publishing world isn't a monolith, so first of all it depends on which New York publishing house you're talking about. In 2005, 
There's always a risk that when "major labels" get involved and start throwing money at artists without a whole lot under their belt, they can shape or stunt their growth in unproductive ways. I would have preferred 
Maybe you can already gather this, but I don't see this as a huge structural problem facing comics right now. "Please, whatever you do, New York publishers, don't pay living wages to aspiring makers of literary comics!" If only we always had such problems! If good comics can somehow survive nearly 70 years of the North American industry's domination by one genre of comic book, they can survive having to put up with American Widow in exchange for Notes for a War Story. Economically, it's not as though the book publishers are making such a huge investment in comics that if they pull back the whole thing will collapse. Artistically, as for the notion that literary comics are now more proscribed than they were before these companies got involved, when I look around 
COLLINS: What's the high concept of Sandman?* I never looked at that book that way, but I'm probably missing something. It doesn't seem like one of those other one-sentence wonders you mentioned. Anyway, 
Sometimes I wish they'd stop going for that R-rating, HBO Original Series vibe, because when you look at their successful flagship titles over the years, yeah they've always been a mature-readers, but there's usually more to it than that. 100 Bullets has that beautiful art, Y was downright sweet a lot of the time, and Sandman even did whimsy, all of which are about as far away from Scalped as you can get. It's tough to imagine a character 
As soon as I get my hands on the new Acme you can bet I'll pay him some attention, though! God, Chris Ware. This guy did the Quimby stuff for his school paper. Doesn't that make you want to kill yourself?
TUCKER STONE: I lived in a lot of different places, the most interesting one being West Berlin, before my family settled in a suburb of Atlanta. That was where we moved after my dad finished his time in the military. Nobody in my family ever expressed any interest in comics beyond what was in the newspaper, and it was actually pointed out to me by my mother -- when I interviewed her for the blog -- that I didn't read comics at all when I was a little kid. I don't remember liking or watching 
Anyway, my mom would always go to this one used bookstore, this really awful place run by this belligerent little idiot woman, and for some reason they had a bunch of comic books up front. In retrospect, I think they may have carried new titles, but I can't imagine why. My memory of that place isn't so good though, because in my head the store is the size of a Wal-Mart. There's no way it was that big, it was a family run place. For no reason whatsoever, I bought -- well, my mother bought -- an issue of Detective Comics drawn by 
Anyway, I got more out there with them -- read stuff like Doom Patrol, Animal Man -- I remember really getting into stupid crap though, like buying all the Impact Comics, or multiple issues of Lobo # 1. The thing was -- I never knew anybody else that read comics. I'd meet these people at comic stores, but I seemed to have a knack for going to comic stores that only stayed open for six months or so before going out of business. I didn't like the people who went there, I didn't like the people that worked there -- it was just these angry role-playing game people, or these misfits who were always talking about Star Wars. I had a pretty good going at the time with acting -- I'd made a lot of friends, we'd listen to Dr. Dre and the Subhumans, try to get laid...but that social aspect of comics, that was never there. I wasn't embarrassed by them -- it was just that no one ever mentioned them. Not even when the Batman movie came out. Nothing. It's like they didn't exist. All my conversations with my friends revolved around music and girls. I don't remember us caring about anything else, except for getting wasted.
I did find out about six months ago that I had been writing what people call "scorched earth" criticism since I was little -- my sister sent me some "book report journal" that I had to keep in sixth grade, and I'm writing how the book version of 
On the flip-side, there's 
I know you want to stick to current stuff, but I gotta throw out something classic, and that'll have to be 
Now it's just these kids and the owner, and I have a lot of affection for them. None of us like the same stuff, but they're really great people, and they argue the way I do, where you say "Hey, I really dig Ultimate Spidey" and they just look at me like I admitted to cannibalism. "That shit is for babies, you need to read some Uncanny. 
I'd started thinking "hey, I should just write a week about how much I don't like something, Nina and my brother will think that's funny." I was reading this Bedard issue of 
It reminds me of when that 
It's like -- what the hell else are you going to do with Iron Fist? Is he going to run a successful company and fight crime in New York? No, of course not, that's what all those other more popular characters are going to do. So why not do the one thing none of those characters can, which is chuck him into a big bad ass kung-fu tournament, let 
We need some ladies up in here, and that's slim pickings, because most of the female driven comics I've read are just dude comics with large breasts. Try Catwoman: Disguises, again, in issue form, so you can look at those Paul Pope covers in all their glory. We're past sixty bucks now.
One of the best pieces of writing about comics I read this year was 
HEER: The first time I read Annie was the 
SPURGEON: I noticed you mostly avoided Dean's line of thought in his own, much shorter essay about Annie being a creature of its times -- the fact that many in the country were suffering and had lost faith. Do you not feel that's as strong as the personal stamp Gray placed on the strip? How do you see the way people responded to the work, and since it's an obvious comparison, do you think the time are similar right now and that Annie might hit the people that read it the same way?
I'd still love to publish my favorite European kids' comics guys like 
THOMPSON: Nothing more sophisticated than I know what I like, and I agree that 
Anthologies are a lot of fun to do, and I enjoyed doing both of those, and I agree that Zero Zero was undervalued at the time, but with so many cartoonists either wanting their own comics or being graphic novel oriented there is a real dearth of high-end anthology-worthy comics: Finding cartoonists of the caliber of 
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