"I was hoping you could help me with some information. I am trying to find the name of a comic book character from the 1970's. He had longish dark hair, a moustache and wore bell-bottom pants. He also had a pet penguin."
Well, it's stumped me. I'm thinking some wacky character that was introduced into a Marvel Comic for a few issues, not long enough to make an Internet impression. But it could be anything.
A Dozen Things I'd Do Were I Able To Attend This Weekend's WonderCon
1. I think I'd pay attention to the crowd and the mood and what's selling and who's doing that selling pretty closely at this one. WonderCon isn't a newer show like the New York convention and it's not the crown jewel in the one of the three big companies' array of convention offerings like NYCC, San Diego or Wizard's Chicago show. Rather, it's a solid, enjoyable, not as much in the way of bells and whistles comics-oriented convention in a city that offers all sorts of entertainment dollar competition. I think it's a good one by which to take the temperature of convention-going generally.
2. I'd try to visit as many hometown exhibitors as a I could. Because it's San Francisco, there are some awesome companies for whom WonderCon is their hometown con, and they should be there in full force or at least with buoyant spirits. This included but is certainly not limited to must-visits-at-any-show SLG (707), Last Gasp (625, 627), Lee's Comics (1007) and Comic Relief (807). One of the great things about a show like this one is that it's graspable, you can almost certainly walk the floor and see most if not all of the exhibitors. It makes take a considerable investment of time, but it's not one of those shows where you talk to people after it's over and are frequently, completely baffled about where stuff was. You might miss something, but not wide swaths of stuff.
3. I'd go to a party. People in the Bay Area are cool, and the San Francisco shows have a great reputation for late-night hanging out and drinking in odd and wonderful spaces.
4. I'd hit Artist's Alley. There are old favorites here, like the always-awesome Sergio Aragones and the equally great-to-meet Stan Sakai. I always enjoy seeing Keith Knight. There are some big names, like Roy Thomas and Jim Lee and Mike Mignola. There are also some people I'd like to meet, like Steve Englehart, Ernie Chan and Tony Dezuniga. Solid.
5. I'd eat out. C'mon, it's San Francisco. I don't really know anything about that neighborhood, but I'm sure I'd find something. In general, I always encourage people attending a convention to do something other than simply go to the show. If you don't have time to do something more elaborate in that great city, making sure you exit convention-world and sit down for a proper meal is a great way to cheat and get that experience without maybe deserving it. I think it makes for a richer overall convention-going experience.
6. I'd attend a metric ton of programming. It starts here. They've put together a solid line-up of spotlight panels alone -- you could do nothing but attend those and have a pretty good time. A couple of things that aren't quite spotlights that jump out at me are a Michael Chabon/Matt Fraction panel on Saturday, Fraction again with Ed Brubaker on Sunday, and a Stan Sakai/Mark Evanier/Sergio Aragones panel on Saturday. If you only have time for one panel at a convention, go to one with Sergio Aragones on it.
8. I'd take advantage of any sales and/or discount comics. I suspect that this will be a big year generally for exhibitors taking stuff to shows that they think will move. Ironically, this will likely include both high-end stuff that seems impervious to any downturn in the market and the discounted stuff where there's a high occasion for day to day churn. I'd be looking for the second, and I'd be armed with enough packing material on my person to send this stuff back to my home without having to carry all of it on the airplane.
9. I'd keep an eye out for Bob Levin. I don't know if Bob will come to this event, but he attends a number of area comics shows for a brief time. You should buy his book Most Outrageous -- just a stunningly great book about comics, although not always an upbeat one. Here's what he looks like.
10. I'd buy something I'd never seen from someone I'd never heard of before at a price I couldn't fathom generally paying and then store it away to read at home, later, when I wanted to remember the show just past. Because in a lot of ways, that's what these shows are about.
11. I'd seriously consider going to the masquerade. If I could get in. I don't understand the costume impulse at all, but I do understand arbitrary competitions that make little to no sense and the people at these events seem to have more fun in that couple of hours than I had in the entirety of my twenties.
12. Finally, I'd keep a special eye out for anything and everything to do with S. Clay Wilson this weekend, including any way I could help out with a purchase or donation. It looks like the CBLDF party will have a Wilson component -- a raffle. I'd also try to seek out any floor presence for the people giving Mr. Wilson a hand. S. Clay Wilson is an important figure in comics history through the taboo-shattering nature of his work and how it inspired many other cartoonists to be more fearless in how they pursue their art. If this year's WonderCon turned out to be the WonderCon where Wilson received a lot of help, it would be a very memorable show indeed.
One of the more fascinating recent developments in Canadian cartooning history is how the country has come to host a number of cartoonists doing work that either led to them being driven from their home country or would definitely do so now. One such is Somali cartoonist Amin Amir, who lives in Edmonton. I don't really have anything to add to the profile, but I wanted as many people as possible to make note of it and the general trend it might represent.
David Chelsea To Raise Money For S. Clay Wilson Through 24-Hour Comic
David Chelsea, who's been producing a series of skillful 24-Hour comics the last few years, will devote the work on one of them to underground great S. Clay Wilson. Wilson is still in the midst of long-term recovery from medical issues. What's interesting about this to me is he's basically accepting donations for money per page completed -- a typical fund-raising model -- rather than simply selling the book and donating monies earned to Wilson's outstanding bills and living expenses.
By the way, if any of you are going to WonderCon, please consider tracking down any and all efforts to help Bay Area favorite son Wilson at the event. I'm not sure that the people involved with helping Wilson have known exactly where they might be and what they might be doing at the show, at least not in a way that they've been able to communicate it through press with any advance time.
I don't think he's done ridding it of all the bugs just yet, but Dylan Horrocks' paper publisher Drawn & Quarterlymakes note of an ambitious on-line undertaking by one of my favorite cartoonists that will include serialized comics out the wazoo, so I guess I can, too. Dylan discusses it here. I'll run a graphic link to the site itself when it goes live, mostly because the color is lovely and I want to have some of it on this site.
In the meantime, you should enjoy this one-page cartoon spurred on by recent changes in New Zealand copyright law.
And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #24
* my Wizard-related source maintains their batting average as more details become available confirming early word of major cuts yesterday at the comics-related publishing and convention company. This here is the article where you get the corporate face on the moves.
* a lot of fallout from yesterday's sudden-seeming announcement that today's Rocky Mountain News will be its last. Daryl Cagle has Ed Stein's statement and last cartoon here. 9News.com profiles Stein. E&Pnotes how the paper covered itself after the announcement. Mediabistro.com reminds that the publication had a books editor, and describes her farewell -- I can't imagine a lot of newspapers will have a books editor by the time they go if they close in the next 24 months.
* a few of you have been nice enough to e-mail me this basic primer on the free content/paid items model of Internet publishing. I would imagine some of the worries here is whether or not this is a sustainable model in tough times, what it means if sites are favored that are better at selling ancillary items, and whether or not offering stuff in this matter weakens the market long-term in a way that has an impact on what people are able to sell through that site. I'm not new media pundit, though.
* I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing when Immigration Services makes staff cuts for you.
* finally, I greatly enjoyed this article from The Stranger about the possibility that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer could continue as a on-line operation. I'd never thought about this kind of thing as a situation where Hearst is basically pumping terrified people almost all the way out of work for ideas it can implement without employing them. There's a bunch of good perspective-finding in the article like that.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* so did E&P fire the person who used to write their Pulitzer predictions? Because this one seemed really lame to me, at least in the editorial cartoonist category. "Here are a bunch of ex-winners and a few other prominent people" is the kind of predicting I can do and be just as not-entertaining.
* the retailer and pundit Brian Hibbs takes one more shot at those Bookscan figures and why he argues what he argues.
* I'm not sure we're at the point where this kind of thing needs to be proposed as a brand-new idea, because the natural progression of the market has made this a reality for a lot of people. I'm also of the mind that there's something to the idea that you make something really cheap and some people stop valuing it. Still, I've always bemoaned 1) the general lack of cheap entry point comics for casual readers and 2) cheap used comics to help sustain a new reader coming to comics with their whole being the way that matinees, papering the house and discount tickets satiate new theater fans, or the way that used books make up the bulk of many passionate young readers' reading pile when they're in that crazy, consume-everything phase. A more reasonable general attitude towards all those older, not-very-collectible comics would be a place to start.
* it's not exactly a new idea that a generation of people that came up with those comics and a subsequent generation coming at them as object will value and find use for the energy and confidence of some very bad Rob Liefeld comics. I promise you that this occurred to a lot of people in comics in the 1990s, too.
* finally, I was disappointed to find this feature article hanging solely on a quote that wasn't solicited for that article. General publishing issues surrounding the Kindle are fairly interesting, and while it doesn't hurt to think about the comics application of same right now -- I think, for example, the ability of the Kindle to download books as they become available could actually replicate New Comics Day in a way that's fun for its user -- I don't think that particular piece of technology gets to walk up the driveway and knock on the door until it's in color. Maybe the next iteration? Anyway, here's a nice round-up of general links regarding issues surrounding the device. I look forward to reading comics this way, and my primary concern is a pricing set-up that rewards creators, not one that protects the profit margins of the owners at the expense of creators or one that supports a specific industry infrastructure, which is what I suspect is going on whenever I hear prose people talk about devices like this one.
Rocky Mountain News Shutting Down
There's so much trauma in the newspaper industry I'm frankly unaware if this is already common knowledge or not, but here's an official press on Scripps shutting down Colorado's oldest newspaper. I remember it was offered for sale late last year; I guess that didn't happen. I'm not up enough to know with 100 percent certainty, but I think the editorial cartoonist there is Ed Stein. Well, if he's still the editorial cartoonist there he will be for the next day and a half, anyway.
Ms. Carolyn Washburn
Vice President and Editor
The Des Moines Register
P.O. Box 957
Des Moines IA 50306-0957
Dear Ms. Washburn:
As President of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), I am writing to express the collective dismay of our membership at reports that you plan to dispose of Brian Duffy's original political cartoons without his consent.
While your newspaper may claim ownership of Brian's thousands of original cartoons he drew during 25 years as The Register's staff editorial cartoonist, there remain compelling questions of what is customary and what is right.
Although it used to be common for newspapers to keep their cartoonists' original artwork, that practice changed decades ago, and almost universally cartoonists now leave their newspapers with their artwork. These original drawings represent an artist's life work, and while newspapers pay for the its production, they do so in order to publish the work on its editorial page -- not to possess each piece as artwork.
Mr. Duffy is understandably attached to his quarter-century's worth of drawings, and may wish to archive some of them for his children. Others he may want to donate to charities or sell at galleries. Regardless, they offer him a potential source of revenue after retirement, and reasonable people would assume that he should have them.
Although your reported plan to donate Brian's cartoons to the University of Iowa is commendable, cynics may charge that your purpose is to cash in on Brian's firing by taking a tax write-off for a sizable donation.
By your own admission, Brian produced "very excellent work" for your organization. On behalf of his professional organization, I encourage you to reconsider your plans and return his artwork to him.
Very truly yours,
Ted Rall
President
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists
The site joins the AAEC in advocating for a solution to the impasse that satisfies Brian Duffy's concerns.
More Major Firings At Wizard Today?
I've heard from a source who's batted 1.000 on these stories in the past that there may have been another round of firings at Wizard today. According to the source, current staff writers Rachel Molino, Kevin Mahadeo, David Paggi and Steve Sunu were let go. Also departing according to the source are Senior Vice President/Operations Joe Yanarella, Art Director Eric Goodman, and Operations Manager Jodie Westhoff.
If this turns out to be true, this would be the single-day biggest purge yet, hitting both the writing part of the magazine staff, paring it down to just a few editors now, and convention organizers (I think) Yanarella and Westhoff. If confirmed or denied, I'll report back here.
Wizard has purged a tremendous number of staff people over the last several months, reorganizing some departments and eliminating some positions outright. Their convention business has received increased competition from Reed Exhibitions -- they recently halved those offerings -- and magazines generally have suffered from a move of eyeballs to the Internet and a loss of advertising revenue.
Go, Read: Big Bunch of Kramers Ergot Vol. 7 Interviews At Vice Magazine
There are a bunch of good short interviews with Kramers Ergot Vol. 7 contributors over at Vice. I'm a little confused by the layout, or if there are more coming, but part one provides chats with Sammy Harkham, Rick Altergott, Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez. Part two gives us Johnny Ryan, Matt Furie and Matthew Thurber. If you can't read them all for some strange reason: settle in on Clowes. It helps to read his KE7 contribution with the information he imparts here in mind, and we learn he's 60 pages into a graphic novel project for whom he doesn't have a publisher.
Sine Acquitted On Hebdo Charges
The cartoonist and satirist Maurice "Sine" Sinet was acquitted Tuesday on charges that an article published Charlie Hebdo that targeted the son of the French president was anti-Semitic. The charges had been brought by that country's International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. The controversy about the original public accusations and the item itself led to a split between Sinet and the magazine, with editor Philippe Val firing him from his column. The story raged through that country's media during the summer, drawing comparisons to the Dreyfus affair and seeing the magazine draw some criticism for not supporting Sinet having just been acquitted of a similar charge for imagery related to the Danish Cartoons Controversy.
Alex Toth DoodleBook Not Worth $150 I don't think he intended to do so, and please realize this is me talking and not him, but the cartoonist and comics writer Jeff Parker provides a sterling example of how the policies of Diamond Comics Distributor, Inc. regarding moderate-selling books and comics seem to do harm to the industry entire. Parker's boutique publishing effort Dear John: The Alex Toth DoodleBook is a good book, in print, a perfect fit for comics shops that value carrying unique items that have perennial appeal that have an audience just not a mass mainstream audience, and it has enough readers to generate orders when Parker reaches out to retailers directly. However, it doesn't meet the minimums when placed in the Diamond catalog, with one end result being that people are paying exorbitant amounts on eBay thinking with some reason that the work is out of print. I don't understand how a system of minimums and levels and arena-combat fairness is better than a system that finds a way to value and support quality work like this over the long-term.
A Completely Superflous Final Reaction To The Use Of Bookscan Numbers
Because of Peggy Burns' mighty performance yesterday top of blog, I'm off the hook in terms of providing a resounding post on the matter of Brian Hibbs and his yearly analysis of the Bookscan numbers. Part of me is glad. I have to admit, I didn't understand half of what was argued in places like this long thread at The Beat. For some reason the arguments were funneled into a structure over how well the works of Los Bros Hernandez sell or whether or not the sales success of Identity Crisis is occasion for high-fives or uncomfortable shifting in our collective shoes. Or something. I'm not quite sure.
Several folks including Hibbs were nice enough to endorse my qualification that the Bookscan numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to join me in the rest of that qualification. There are grains of salt and there are times when grains won't do. I'd suggest that just as important as blanket skepticism regarding such numbers is that we realize the more specific the uses we find for such numbers, the more we need to regard them with suspicion. Inaccuracy compounds inaccuracy. Those numbers may taste a bit dodgy a la carte, but toss a bunch of them as a salad and someone's going to the hospital.
The fact that Bookscan reports 719 sell-through from its accounts on Love and Rockets New Stories Vol. 1 while Fantagraphics put 5500 into the total market is something I find interesting not as a measure of sell-through, or L&R's general appeal or the wisdom of the recent format switch. We'll get a much better number for that eventually. I see 719 not so much as a low number -- and it is -- but as a bad number. Non-returnability and the emphasis on initial orders makes Direct Market estimation a much, much firmer and more useful number. Even it's not a perfect one: a lot of royalty statements don't line up with the order numbers in that realm, too. But in contrast to the DM's sometimes suspicious figures, the relative labyrinth of bookstores sales -- the combination of buy-ins and non-returnables and returnables and a longer sales window and warehousing and library sales and stores that don't report -- means that the Bookscan figures should be trusted to carry much, much less.
What do we know for sure? Next to nothing. Heck, maybe Fantagraphics is going to see 80 percent returns on L&RNS Vol. 1. I guess that could happen. My hunch, and you don't have to agree with me, is that when all is said and done and the sales cycle themselves out it's way more likely they'll end up with a figure closer to the 3850 -- a figure they've projected from the vantage point of seven years' experience doing this now with almost no margin for serious error -- than they will to 719. These additional sales will come from a combination of continued Bookscan-reporting bookstore sales, library sales, sales through the non-reporters, sales in the form of non-returnable purchases apparently made by Amazon.com that they'll warehouse while reporting sell-through to Bookscan, sales when volume two comes out, and so on. If I'm wrong, I'll get to write that story, I guess. But I don't think I will be.
Here's the thing, though: even if they don't get near 3850, anywhere they end up between 719 and 3850 remains an indictment of the Bookscan number's utility as a measurable, manipulable statistic. I don't care if a number is 75 percent off or 519 percent off. I don't want to play with it, and neither should you.
Further, let's get one thing clear: there's no continuity and no proportionality between the various Bookscan numbers. This should be obvious in that it's a number we can't predict and a number that is bound to change over time. Just the fact that a number for a book that came out in January is going to be different than for the same book had it come out in November should discredit these numbers' use. It is also to my information-gathering capability the experience of multiple publishers offering multiple titles over multiple years that the Bookscan numbers are all over the place in terms of their ability to predict the final sales figure. Some Bookscan numbers are close to the final result, many aren't, and some are very far away.
So: if such numbers are to be used for rough approximates -- say, "Random House seems to be doing well by DC" -- that doesn't mean they should be manipulated against one another. If someone insists they be manipulated against one another, that's your choice, I guess, but manipulating them against a set of numbers from the DM derived in a completely different manner with different methods, that would seem to be really, really wrong. Toss in the utilization of colloquial constructions -- all the stuff about "one store of this type sold the same as seven percent of all the bookstores in North America" and I simply don't know how anyone can argue that's useful or fair or, really, not outright laughable.
The funny/sad thing about this I'm not sure why anyone wants to argue DMs vs. Bookstores at all. Not right now. It would be awesome if the Direct Market were still moving art and indy-comics the way it did when you could push 9000 copies of Dog Boy through a nation of carry-everything stores. That Direct Market is gone. Recent news seems to indicate a harsher market right now for anything not a Brian Bendis-written team book or without Batman kicking the bucket or lacking the President on the cover than that which existed just six months ago. Twenty years ago is a different world.
Right here, right now, additional markets aren't just desirable, they're necessary. For many people the ability to operate in multiple markets is the difference between publishing and not publishing, and has been for several years now. For some folks, every single market of any value is the difference between making a modest living and making no living at all. For certain companies and titles it's the difference between existence and extinction.
I suppose it could be upsetting if you were a comic shop owner to hear some goofy blogger or a dozen of 'em declare Khrushchev-style that any money spent on promoting to comics shops is money down the toilet or simply trumpeting that the bookstore is clearly the future. I'm not sure people do that all too frequently anymore, but the memory of such proclamations might linger. At the same time, you don't re-assert the truth by bending it. Advocacy shouldn't have to rely on running something else down. The bottom line here is no one in a position of any importance at any company has to my knowledge ever seriously dismissed the still-crucial Direct Market as a place to sell comics. Those same people, these very good people, they also don't get to decide how easy it is to participate in the additional markets they need to pursue to stay alive. I suspect a long and detailed argument over who places what emphasis on what market and who feels bullish about what avenue for sales and who can score points on whom on a comments thread is a luxury that slipped out the side door months ago. We need all the markets right now. We need all our attention facing forward.
I realize that I'm writing for myself at this point, and thank you for indulging me to any extent you have
not only is this is this a repeat posting at the ASIFA-Hollywood site, but I think I ran a link to it the first time it appeared with exactly this daily. they remain ridiculously handsome-looking
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com has a story up that there will only be one Alliance-Diamond Summit this year, the one held in conjunction with Baltimore Comic-Con October 11-13. There had traditionally been a summit in Fort Wayne, near the Alliance Game Distributors warehouse there. I'm very fond of Fort Wayne, but it's one of those towns that has to be the there in that area of the country because there's nothing else there, if you know what I mean. Grass Green lived there, I remember that.
* the always-excellent Jog goes story-by-story on the new Greg Sadowski-edited Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941. That's a fascinating book. I'm already annoying people by repeating the crazier bit of dialogue in the panel reproduced here, but really something must be done.
* this video of cartoonists and cartoon-related stuff on an episode of Murder, She Wrote made me laugh.
* Michael Cavna calls out Sean Delonas, and good for him in doing so.
* the well-known science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer passed away recently. He gets credit not just for a raft-load of entertaining books with reach into general retail but one of the first major pieces of retroactive world-building, a template placed upon the great pulp literature offerings of the 20th Century that makes all the big characters related. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to mention that, but every so often you run across one of these ideas in fiction that shaped the way people look at the big comics companies' mega-storylines, such as the worlds within worlds idea and this one.
* here's a story explaining the amount of time people spend at the top 30 newspaper web sites. Not only am I not certain what this mean, it seems as if the people that put together the information aren't quite sure what it means. It does seem to generally suggest that getting people to spend the amount of time on a web site where they'd be paying for content is going to be quite the struggle -- you don't really think of spending money on a site when you spend two minutes a day there.
* finally, people keep e-mailing me links to this post that apparently offers details on the personnel side of the recent Viz Media restructuring.
Guest Editorial: Peggy Burns On Those Bookscan Numbers; What They're Good For And What They're Not
I have yet responded to the extended conversation surrounding the year-end Bookscan sales figures because I've been gathering information and refining my arguments. It's also been extremely difficult for me to figure out just what the hell people are saying. Anyway, one of the persons from whom I've gathered information is Drawn and Quarterly's Peggy Burns, who went above and beyond any call of duty to turn in a full-bore article on the matter that I'm honored to present here. I'll be back tomorrow with some words of my own. -- Tom Spurgeon
On Bookscan By Peggy Burns
Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, but when I read Brian Hibb's annual Bookscan editorials, there always seems to be a desperate need to point out how "art comics" do not sell (Dirk Deppey did a a good job of pointing this out on Monday.) Last year, Brian said he was shocked to see that Shortcomings only sold 5000, which is downright laughable from a publisher's point of view, going so far as to say he though this was a "poor" performance. Mind you, this was 5000 in three months (release date: October 2007), a number any publisher of books or comics would be happy with. This year, he points out that Shortcomings sold another 4000 in 2008, but is quick to point out that Tomine's other books did not rank (the short story collections that are five years and older), a critique he does not bestow upon Bechdel, Spiegelman, Satrapi or anyone else. Basically if you publish single-authored comics -- and especially if you are Adrian Tomine -- you don't sell according to Brian, not even with your hometown retailer. How's that for team comics? How's that for supporting a local artist? Why does Brian think this? I don't know. I am guessing that Brian assumes -- incorrectly -- that comics publishers such as D+Q and Fantagraphics have dismissed the comic market, which couldn't be further from the truth. We have never dismissed the direct market. I will, however, dismiss people who repeatedly go out of their way to try and say our books do not sell.
High and low Bookscan numbers are hard to dispute -- 13,000 copies in Bookscan means that a book was certainly a strong seller and 164 means it was a poor seller. Bookscan does point out when a book has done well. Very low Bookscan numbers also point out if a book didn't penetrate. Of course, we're very pleased with the relatively high Bookscan numbers for Lynda Barry and Adrian Tomine. But everything in between high and low is a very large, grey area. Take for instance one of our bestselling titles: Moomin The Complete Tove Jansson Book One. Since its publication almost two and a half years ago (release date: November 2006), it has sold through approximately 6700 copies according to Bookscan, but our distributor FSG has shipped over 20,000; we have shipped over 4000 in the comic market; and our Canadian and UK distributors shipped 13,000 -- approximate total 38,000. Trust me when I say we are happy with every single copy sold in any and every market. And we do not care if Bookscan does not come close to indicating the grand total.
Bookscan doesn't provide an accurate report, but it can be helpful in gauging where our sales lie in relation to other publishers. I use it the same way I use an Amazon ranking -- very loosely. I admit to logging in every Wednesday to see our previous week's numbers. I don't look to see how our books are performing against Naruto or Wimpy Kid, I look to see how our books perform among our distributor FSG's titles, and I look to see how our books perform compared to our closest publishing peer, McSweeneys, and to make sure our books perform as well as the majority of Pantheon's graphic novels (Maus and Persepolis are in their own league, of course.) When I see that Bookscan says that Lynda Barry's What It Is has comparable numbers to Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends for McSweeneys, I am happy. When I do look to see how D+Q titles are performing in the context of comics, I only view the hardcover graphic novel charts (front list -- all from the past 12 months) or back list (everything before the past 12 months), as these are the comics with which we have most in common, not manga mass market paperbacks (with all due respect to the numbers that mass market manga sells.) This is also similar to how the NY Times sorts their list, which is why you don't see The Bible at the top of every chart. Since June 2008, What It Is has been on Bookscan's bestselling frontlist graphic novel in hardcover (meaning a ranking of all hardcovers released in 2008) in Bookscan every week since its release.
Unfortunately for Brian, the truth is that he will never be able to get the full picture of how and where books sell just from Bookscan. Likewise, when I look at Bookscan and see that Hibbs' own book, 2003's Tilting at the Windmills: A Guide Towards Ethical and Successful Comics Retailing (Release Date April 2003) only sold 164 copies, I'm not sitting here wondering how many shipped through Diamond and how am I going write a manifesto to declare this. I'll never know. I do hope, however, that volume two of Tilting at the Windmills: A Guide Towards Ethical and Successful Comics Retailing (Release Date March 2009) has a chapter on public relations and etiquette.
In short, Brian stop hatin' on "art comics!" And stop using Bookscan as some sort of blind for this hatred. It's petty and takes away from any overall usefulness of your report.
*****
* from What It Is
* Peggy Burns illustration by Adrian Tomine
* Moomin Volume One
* Shortcomings
Hearst Threatens Second Newspaper: 144-Year-Old San Francisco Chronicle
One of the nation's dozen signature newspapers and a friend to the comics art form the San Francisco Chroniclemay be closed down if short-term cuts don't bring the publication's losses under greater control. If someone would like to recommend a second sentence that somehow mitigates the blunt depression caused by the first, I'd be happy to hear it.
The cartoonist Scott McCloud has re-launched his web site, one of the foundational stops for on-line exploration of comics on the Internet. It includes his on-line comics effort in addition to what he promises will be more blogging. The comics corner of Internet is better when McCloud is tooling around under its hood, so this is good to here.
Seven Reasons Marvel Should Make A Dr. Strange Movie Sooner Rather Than Later By Tom Spurgeon
For Comics Blogger Prime NeilAlien On The Occasion Of What I Think Is His 9th Blogiversary
1. He's a little bit older.
Unless you are dim, unimaginative or somehow obsessed with youth over all reason, Dr. Strange not only can be played by someone aged 35 up to about his early 50s, he should be played by someone in that age range. As was the case with Iron Man, this is an advantage rather than a detriment because most of the really effective leading men are in this age range rather than the 24 to 35 grouping. These actors hold the screen more effectively. A reason I think Iron Man worked well is that Robert Downey Jr. was familiar to audiences but not overly so, and had a well-cultivated persona that he knew how to utilize to best effect. Good actor, too. I think I know who they should pick -- there's an A-list actor that if not this age is getting near it that is a solid actor and would be believable playing someone that enjoyed a glamorous early life and has now struggled to a position of stature and responsibility. But I'm reluctant to play fantasy casting agent. The fact is a lot of actors could dig into this part.
2. He has a top five comic book origin.
I think Dr. Strange's comic book origin is one of the great ones, and there aren't a lot of great ones. I mean the original origin, of course. The recent reboot is, frankly, shit-stupid. Dr. Strange's story provides a striking contrast to many comic book origins in that as the tale of a successful surgeon that loses the use of his hands, it's about an adult man struggling to find redemption rather than a young man discovering his place in the world or making good on the opportunities provided him. Stephen Strange isn't pre-ordained, he's not The One, he's not even embraced as a worthy or likely candidate when he first approaches the Ancient One. It's only through a virtuous choice that he gains the right to earn the mantle he now holds. That's a nice message. It's not "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" but "Assuming Responsibility May Bring The Opportunity For Great Power."
3. He offers a romantic view of New York City.
An element that connects Dr. Strange to Superman and Spider-Man that rarely gets explored in his comic book is the fact that the protector of the universe chooses to live in a bad-ass looking brownstone in the middle of New York City. His home is what little kids between the coasts imagine amazing-looking city buildings to be: impressive, old, stuffed with secrets. You'd want to see Dr. Strange's reality show. You know he has deeply fascinating lunches in mens' clubs you've never even heard of. You know he goes to the theater -- he was probably drawn by Hirschfeld. You know he knows the name of his grocers and spice procurers and the people that make his coffee. You know he throws amazing parties, and is invited to same -- when the superheroes have parties you know everyone's way more psyched about them than Dr. Strange is. How is this not totally appealing?
4. He offers the opportunity for amazing, jaw-dropping special effects.
A spirit form, the Mindless Ones, the levitating cloak, the all-seeing eye and orb of Agamatto, those thick and wonderful ribbons of power: this stuff would look amazing on a motion picture screen.
5. He has a small but visually interesting rogue's gallery.
Dormmamu, Baron Mordo and Nightmare all have great looks to them. I think Baron Mordo is the most underrated villain in the Marvel stable. Who can't relate to the absolute stomach-churn that would be the guy who was better than you at everything in school and could have had your job and your life coming back to screw with you at every opportunity? He's Draco Malfoy played by Daniel Craig. Mordo's an interesting guy character-wise, too, the Sonny Liston of the Marvel Universe: a flawed man with elements of greatness forced into becoming a supporting player in the story of a great man with flaws. Plus the magic makes him a monster heel. Great character.
6. He has cool friends.
Although they've been hit and miss as portrayed in the comics themselves, stripped to their core ideas The Ancient One, Clea and Wong are the kinds of characters that a movie would very much serve. Clea has that weird hair thing going on which a film could safely lose, but who doesn't like the Princess From Another World concept? The sudden intimacy caused by someone sweeping into your life from another place and stopping you dead in your tracks would be particularly devastating for someone like Dr. Strange the way it is for many successful men who build their life around their vocational success. There's a great piece of potential tension between the Ancient One and Dr. Strange that comics' rigid obsession with hyper-competent heroes can't really broach: that the Sorcerer Supreme is a relative latecomer to the process of succession, the symbol of the Ancient One's period of decline rather than a favorite son of the great man's prime, and what that means in terms of his readiness and training and the confidence his allies place in him. Wong could be that plot element's living symbol -- an element of continuity, someone on whom Strange is expected to lean. There are all sorts of nice little corners to explore here that a film's relative fresh start and visual shorthand could enable.
7. He's a king, not a warrior.
I like the idea of a hero that protects things, protects us, safeguards our universe, as opposed to one that fights people with whom he's personally involved out of some shared psychoses or even one that saves us when we manage to get into trouble. Dr. Strange represents a different dynamic than the usual superhero noise and nonsense and one that I think it's a profile folks might find appealing as a change of pace from a hero that fights his best friend's dad or his business partner or whatever. It's a very adult model of being a hero, and while it never seems to work out in the comics, over the shorter narrative arc provided by a film or series of films I think it could be quite affecting.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* I greatly enjoyed this Alan Moore interview at Wired that's been posted everywhere by now. Moore sounds like a cranky, opinionated, working artist in the afternoon of his career, which is exactly how he should sound. Sean T. Collins didn't like the film stuff.
* the Oregonian is apparently revamping its comics page. What I like about it is that the editor reserves the right to make some decisions about the comics page his own self. I hope that either the editor or the good readers of that fine publication consider Cul De Sac as one of the keepers.
* the writer Kevin Church asks if even the successful media reach-out events really make a major difference to the retailer's bottom line, or if they're limited to the purchase itself. Kevin makes it sound much less snotty and more open-minded than I just did.
* I'm not sure if I know everything Daryl Cagle is getting at here, but I really like the phrase "Since this toilet looks like such an obvious spot for Obama..."
I'm trying to figure out a proper comparison to having this giant, lovely, complete Humbug drop and I'm coming up short. It's sort of like when Orchises Press was going to publish Hapworth 16, 1924 in that you could read the work if you wanted but it was slightly difficult, but sort of not in that the quality of the printing matters more with comics than prose. I don't know... getting Masters of Atlantis back in print? Having the original Smile come out? I'm stumped, but it's a very happy stumped.
Rupert Murdoch Apologizes For Sean Delonas' NY Post Chimp Cartoon
Said apology apparently took place in the Post, and saw the Media Overlord both apologize for the offense and assure people that there was no intention to cause that offense. The same media analysis also reports Delonas' own reaction to CNN.
All along I've just thought it's a bad cartoon. Given Delonas' antagonistic history with GLAAD, I think it's understandable that people questioned whether he was tweaking people to get some extra juice from the piece -- but in the end, you can't see into someone's motivations and you have to accept the word of the Post people that this was an honest attempt to say that the Stimulus Bill was so bad chimps wrote it. That doesn't mean the decision to run it speaks well of the collective news judgment of those involved. I mean, 14-year-old me would have seen this and gone "holy crap" so it's hard to imagine a bunch of adults working within the context of a specific community not seeing it.
And you know, once this kind of thing happens, I have little patience for those who fume that their work is interpreted a certain way -- seriously, boo hoo. You don't have to give up any rhetorical device you want to use, you can have the President or something related in some tangential fashion to the president be a monkey-tailed rapper criminal in a slave collar and Westergaardian bomb-turban and be perfectly within your rights to do so, but some folks aren't going to like it, and it's on anyone working right now to assume ownership over their visual vocabulary. On those occasions something slips away from you or you're simply unaware of a certain metaphor and a misunderstanding or bad cartoon or just unfortunate visual metaphor results, an honest apology doesn't seem to me the worst thing to have to offer up, or at least the refusal of an apology if you think you'd do it again and have no regrets. A tiny bit of blowback from years of horrifying racism in art and opinion-making doesn't seem like the worst thing to have to endure -- better that than to have been on the other end of it.
I have to imagine most outcomes are better than having Rupert Murdoch say sorry for you.
Brian Duffy To Fight Des Moines Register Over His Editorial Cartoons
I liked the Editor & Publisher write-up the best of what I've read about fired editorial cartoonist Brian Duffy preparing to go to battle with former employer the Des Moines Register over his body of work while at the paper. Duffy believes he holds a joint copyright; the Register seems to feel it owns staff work it paid for. Apparently, the paper wants to donate Duffy's originals to the University of Iowa, and it seems like Duffy has less a problem with the destination than the mechanism by which they arrive there.
Viz Media Joins Other, Similar Companies In Early Recession Restructuring
This is fairly straightforward: Viz Media will lay some people off to better meet the expectations of the financial forecasts as North America and, well, the world moves deeper into the current recession. This makes them I think the third top ten comics company to formally announce such moves. VP and Shonen Jump Editor-In-Chief Marc Weidenbaum's departure has been confirmed but it's unclear if it's part of this initiative or something instigated by Weidenbaum or neither or both. Given the variety of revenue streams available to the company, the always-changing likelihood which streams will become a priority and the relative age of many of its best licenses in terms of being introduced to the market, these kind of moves actually make more sense to me than they do at some major corporations, where cutting payroll seems to be more of a book-balancing move. Not that my opinion on such matters holds all that much weight, really.
Kodansha Reports Largest Annual Loss
News that Kodansha has posted record-level losses would be noteworthy just on their own given the number of comics the world publishing giant produces. It's also pay attention to how the recession has not only had an effect on sales but on advertising, the same as with North American publications, and that this could be why there's been no further news of the Kodansha USA initiative.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the numbers guru and industry analyst John Jackson Miller notes that the effects of readership migration on-line are mitigated in part by the fact that the suppliers have a chance to control some of that migration. In other words, losing 10 percent of your readership to bootlegs isn't the same as losing 10 percent of your readership to a program you've cobbled together with Amazon.com's Kindle reader.
* missed it: the New York Timescensors a cartoon. It seems to me like something that was done in the editorial process, because otherwise it's hard to believe that someone would buy a cartoon with the idea of changing it like was done with this one. Additionally, something seems odd and not quite right about this story.
* not comics: this is intensely stupid. Not everything is snark and it won't go away just because you fume and stamp your feet.
* this is the most forthright discussion I've seen yet from one of the major mainstream comics heavies on the subject of comics pricing. It's not very convincing. Pricing strategies are pricing strategies, not declarations of the creators' value. Joe Quesada hints that the money will be shared rather than simply going into Marvel's pockets. I guess that would be true of the people that get paid according to percentage, but if there really ends up being more money going to creators out of this, I hope someone will let me know as that happens. I'm skeptical that a steep increase is little more than a money grab, and that its success will depend on the hardcore fan continuing to buy the same number of comics and/or the companies that do it being able to hide any bleed on sales that results. Why companies insist on putting pressure on the system during a time of economic hardship is anyone's guess, but the hardcore fan is one sturdy customer, that's for sure.
Any Hardcore Marvelites Out There?
I'd love to run a couple of things past a hardcore Marvelite out there -- I haven't gone swimming in the choppy waters of Marvel history since 2003, and if I can exchange e-mails with someone, say someone who knows who Al Landau is, that would be fantastic.
Pat Bagley will receive a $15,000 after-taxes prize and a silver trophy as the 2009 Herblock Prize winner for editorial cartooning. The prize will be given to Bagley at a ceremony at the Library of Congress on April 2. Bagley has been cartooning since 1977 and has been at the Salt Lake Tribune since the mid-1980s. He is syndicated worldwide.
Frank Santoro provides details: "Issues 1-4 now online. Issue 5 will be online in March. Issue 6 in April, etc, etc. Doing print on demand double issues of 5 and 6 together and then 7 and 8 together and then 9 and 10. Those will be available to buy on the site."
Upate On The Delonas Chimp Cartoon
* the NAACP has called on the dismissal of Sean Delonas and his editor from the pages of the New York Post for the publication of a cartoon many believed either directly compared or riffed on the likelihood of comparison between President Obama and a chimpanzee killed in a hail of gunfire. Al Sharpton has called for a city council review.
* I'm not sure I understand the tone of Daryl Cagle's post about a cartoon over which he was castigated on racial grounds a while back. I'm detecting an undercurrent of resentment -- although granted, I could be wrong. While the people that throw stuff like that into people's faces as grist for whatever manufactured political controversy of the day or as absolute proof of the state of someone's heart are annoying as all crap and even potentially dangerous, I would also imagine that finding out about obscure racist comparisons is a good thing so that you can avoid them in the future or at least head into the next cartoon with greater ownership over what you're saying. I don't think anyone on planet Earth has conflated this cartoon or the blue-lips cartoons with what they feel Sean Delonas may have been doing with the chimp cartoon. I was accused by readers of being racist, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic in the course of doing a daily comic strip, and while the certainty that I was doing something awful like that on purpose was kind of distressing, it was on balance good to hear from some of those people so I could refine what I was saying away from an unconscious slip into insult.
* wait, this article actually does make a comparison between the obscurities and Delonas, if only by proximity. I think that's unfortunate. They should remain separate, because I think they're processed in separate ways. I would also reject the notion floated there that no one can criticize the president without being accused of depicting him in a racist fashion -- I suppose a certain hardcore constituency is going to suggest that any criticism is based on racism the same way that hardcore people on the other side of the political spectrum suggested that criticism was un-American, but that seems a completely different issue than the trickiness of visual iconography. Anyone that thought Mike Lester's Jonestown cartoon was racist I'd greatly suspect of being an idiot, although I didn't like that cartoon.
And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #23
* two article linked-to elsewhere that would seem to fall under this heading as well: Paul Levitz on the economy's effect on comics, a comics shop closes in Chillicothe.
* an article in Crain's Cleveland Business notes that the metropolitan daily Cleveland Plain-Dealer, while still operating in the black, is shifting emphasis towards local news in response to the ongoing financial crunch hitting that business.
* over at Reason, Matt Welch continues to beat on many newspaper folks' take on the cause of the current crisis, and the increasing call for some sort of public solution to the private quandary.
* the writer Chris Mautner talks about the previously announced cancellation of his videogames/comics column in the Patriot-News in terms of general and largely indirect economic pressures.
* this Kate Dacey post at Precocious Curmudgeonsuggests that Viz might be encouraged to bundle together more titles into one-volume formats, as comics stores and bookstores move away from being able to rack entire series.
* Steve Greenberg makes the case for editorial cartoonists as a method for offering unique content in very strong words.
* this article in the Fresno Bee talks about some of the pressures facing the comic market, with a focus on Top Cow's efforts to reach out to stores this year, including a pledge to keep their books under $3.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* another round of comics are being sold from the late Dave Cockrum's private collection to benefit the family.
* Jevon Sawyer, the third of three men accused of wrongdoing in the shooting of retailer David Pirkola, has been arraigned on formal charges and is headed towards a formal trial. Marvin Jones is expected to go to trial next month. The first suspect entered into a plea agreement in exchange for testimony. Pirkola was shot last April. Sawyer avoided arrest longer than the other two suspects.
* the retailer and prominent blogger Mike Sterling notes the third annual Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk day, designed to bring attention to a notoriously unfinished mini-series with writing from one of the folks behind Lost. It looks like there will be an attempt made to get that particular series done. It's really hard to measure just what it is companies lose when they publish in an irresponsible way -- like I'm pretty sure you can conclude was going on here. The new books should sell just fine, but it's hard to measure the kind of unpleasant experiences that cause people to lose passion for a certain way of buying comics, and fans not getting the comics they feel they've been told they get would seem to be something that would diminish folks' passion.
* the prolific webcomics commentator Gary Tyrrell notes a new webcomics revenue model that may not be so new after all.
* this two-part interview (Watchmen, Economy) with DC's Paul Levitz is all over the place but not in the pejorative sense one usually describes someone whose opinion are scattered about. Levitz just seems to have opinions that come at various issues of the day from some very different places than a lot of people. There are some unanswered questions that weigh heavily on the rest of it, particularly when it comes to Diamond.
* finally, I can't decide if I like or hate this animated comic. Although I was impressed when I went to the site through the link that it was an animated comic, not simply a piece of animation. You'll see what I mean.
Reading The Watchmen: 10+ Entrance Points Into The Esteemed Graphic Novel
By Tom Spurgeon
I have almost no interest in the Watchmen movie coming out a couple of weekends from now. I'm not flush with anticipation for it, nor am I red-faced in my adamant refusal to have anything to do with it. It feels like another movie to me. I hope it's good, because it's better for there to be good movies than bad movies and I like the source material. But if it's bad, I hope that it's at least bad in an interesting fashion because I prefer that to boring-bad. I have no personal stake in its success or failure, and barring your taking a stand on objections to the movie made public by writer Alan Moore, you probably shouldn't, either.
Strangely, Watchmen is the book that taught me as a teenager not to get wrapped up in the success or failure of someone else's work. By far the most of any work in any form I've ever recommended to other people, Watchmen is the book that's come back to me with a "this was really, really stupid" or some curse-filled approximation thereof. As a 17-year-old with insecurities big enough to keep at least two local psychologists in steak and sports cars, this reaction initially took me back. However, I was also smart enough to know Watchmen had value according to how I decided things had value, and it only took a few seconds to realize that whether or not someone else appreciated something I did wasn't a vote on its overall worth, let alone mine.
So the movie? I don't know. What I do know is that Watchmen is a fine, fine comics work and that a lot of people have been or are going to be reading it or re-reading it, and that's a great thing. I think everyone should discover what a great book means for themselves, and I won't bore you with one of my old reviews of the work in terms of giving you my own adaptation. What I'd like to do instead is briefly mention some of the ways I've entered into the work and the way some people have told me they've engaged Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic book novel, in the hopes that this might spur you to some discovery of your own. I welcome anyone who has a similar pathway into Watchmen to write in so I can include that strategy below these.
1. As A Murder Mystery
This may sound silly to those of you who've read the work before, because at a point far before its end Watchmen very much stops being a murder mystery. It ends those elements of the overall plot in a way that doesn't leave you with a lot of pleasant memories for the way those elements came together, either -- it's cast aside, rather than subsumed into the larger plot. However, I still think this may be the most effective way to describe the work to people coming into it, though, because it allows a blank slate and an open mind upon which Moore and Gibbons can imprint their larger world and cast of characters. Also, as usual, Moore is clever enough that just about any idea or framework introduced is going to have resonance, even one that's largely abandoned like this one. By the end of Watchmen, we've switched one mystery for another. In the realm of the policemen that might be asked to look into such things, "What is being done to the masked people?" stands a great chance of becoming, through Ozymandias' machinations and Rorshach's devotion to the truth, "What have the masked people done to us?"
2. As An Adventure Story
Now this is more like it. Moore and Gibbons are talented comic book people that came into Watchmen as young industry veterans rather than comics outsiders working their way into the medium. The fear that the Watchmen movie may simply encompass a surface reading of the book's many fine qualities has some weight because those surface qualities are solid to the point that one can imagine someone reacting to the book in that way and only that way. There are several thrilling set pieces for those that want them, such as Rorschach's prison cell face-off, the assault on Ozymandias' fortress, watching Rorschach shake various toughs down for information. There are at least three fine origin sequences for those that value them, solid and portentous and revelatory of the characters that are created through them. There are cool devices displayed and great-looking costumes and even a funny line or two. The ending my have its hard to believe elements, but as drama it comes together in a satisfying way that allows the characters to be true to themselves while either growing or withering away in the face of that growth. I think a reading of this story as high adventure may miss many of its finer points, but I can't say it's wrong.
3. As A Symphony Of Meticulous Applications Of Craft
Alan Moore made his reputation through this work in large part because the story is so intricately told. It's a masterful performance to the point that Dave Gibbons made his own reputation by basically being up to the task of matching it -- that's not in any way disrespectful of Gibbons or his contributions, but rather an indication of Moore's powerful personal stamp on the project. There are many well-known noticeable craft elements to the work, and I personally have a good time noting one or two to which I'll pay attention on a specific reading. A famous one is to follow sugar cubes; another is to note the mirroring that surrounds Rorschach generally and his spotlight issue specifically. A favorite of mine is to note how Moore uses the facial close-up as a way to communicate certain emotional high points. You could read and re-read Watchmen the way my film-fanatic friends dig into Sam Fuller and Alfred Hitchcock movies. The fact that the elaborate construction of the book is part of the overall effect -- it's called Watchmen for that reason, too -- makes it even that much more fun to follow what's being done and to what or whom and when.
4. As A Love Story
It might be a bit top easy to focus on the romance the story contains between Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk as a main avenue through to drive yourself through the book entire, but like with many things Alan Moore there are layers there that make it a lot more fun than simply noting a plotline. They're both second-generation heroes and the children (literally or figuratively) or previous-generation heroes that were unlucky in their relationships and/or professional partnerships. There's a bit of kink and dysfunction to each person's overall psychological and sexual make-up (meaning they're a lot like most of us) and both of them find happiness that doesn't flee from those elements of their characters. Theirs is the most traditionally satisfying and sunniest plotline, at least in terms of how things work themselves out, which suggest it holds some significant weight to balance itself against that which did not turn out satisfactorily. As I grow older, it looms larger as a primary takeaway.
5. As Commentary On The 1980s
It's hard not to see the book as an extended commentary on Cold War paranoia and American attitudes towards their role in world affairs, from the obvious second identity of Dr. Manhattan as a living nuclear bomb to the extension of Richard Nixon's presidential reign due to events in the now-altered world to the notion that a more fundamentally powerful America would have made the world either just as likely to face nuclear annihilation to perhaps even more likely to face something like that. Even the monster-oriented ending is ripped from the notion that the Reagan-era US and the Gorbachev-led USSR would have found common ground if forced to face an alien invasion. The heavy mood of the comic I think reflects an annihilation-cognizant mindset that's hard to remember now, the thought that any second you could look up and see a flash and it'd be over not just for you but for everybody, a hopeless outcome that even made those rebelling against it sicker rather than more whole. There's also an underlying message that supports that primary take that I think rarely gets mentioned, in how little the powerful Dr. Manhattan changes world events but how much someone less powerful but more willing to put those skills into the service of power, The Comedian, changes the course of history.
6. As A Liminal Experience
I have a friend whose favorite parts of Peter Jackson's boys-adventure take on Lord of the Rings were the parts that all my other friends hated the most: the scene in Fellowship of the Ring where Bilbo Baggins bugs out and his face contorts as he leaps for Frodo's ring, and the scene later on in the same film where Galadriel is temporarily transformed into a One Ring-bearing Witch-Queen. That kind of thing: there were a few more scenes like that one. For him a big appeal of Tolkien's writing and therefore any adaptation of it are those moments where the world goes a little bit bonkers and our perception of it careens into the surreal, the scary and the just plain odd-looking. One thing the film trailers have reminded us is how gob-smackingly weird and lurid and intense Dave Gibbons' visual interpretation of Moore's script was in the original graphic novel. All those oranges and browns and yellows set against mostly somber grays and blues. And then the squid shows up. The design work is also pretty stellar here: that lovely shifting mask but also the ugly pants, the top knots... I think it's entirely possible to dive into Watchmen just for the strangeness of the visual experience. It's a world of unsettling texture.
7. As World Building
Speaking of texture and JRR Tolkien, it's entirely possible to read Watchmen not as narrative at all but as a general exercise in world-building -- one of comics' best and certainly one of the most efficient examples of this kind of thing in all of fiction. Moore and Gibbons manage to communicate, say, the effects of Dr. Manhattan's improvements to world technology and the shifts in immigration into the US due to different geopolitical results in ways that fold the changes into the narrative. Other notes worm their way into back material -- an innovative, stand-alone use of supplementary material like that. This more with less approach has been copied to death in superhero comics since Watchmen hit, but I don't think anyone's ever done it as well.
8. As Commentary On Personal Histories
One of my favorite things to keep in mind as I've grown older is to see how the novel deals with personal histories. Moore is careful to suggest a center that never quite held -- the Watchmen as a team don't exist, the "Crimebusters" idea ended with a burnt map and feelings of slight embarrassment. They're life events without superhero-comic weight. Even the glimpses we see of more standard comic-book "adventures" look kind of sad and silly, and voice of reason The Comedian spells out their underlying silliness in his best speech in the book. At the same time, they're still elements of the personal histories of those involved, and I think Moore deftly handles what it's like to have a past that kind of hounds and frustrates you when you're trying to figure out how to act in the here and now. In fact, you can see each and every character as acting in a way that makes better some sort of past event that still holds power over them -- except maybe Rorschach, who with the event that comes closest really only plays on elements of his one-time partnership with Nite Owl II.
9. As Commentary On Super-Heroes
There are any number of obvious elements whereby the idea of superheroes are discussed. The characters frequently look ridiculous or out of place in their costumes. There are story elements that are straight-up corrective satire, like the story of a character dying after having a costume malfunction, or the hero the goes in and out of the mental institution. The violence in Watchmen is much more real and abrupt and awful than in most superhero comics (the movie should underline this at least). Even the overall level of craft feels like a rebuttal to the crudeness brought to those stories in the bulk of material that settles into that genre. You can also go into specific commentary, where Dr. Manhattan basically acts as Superman, while elements of Batman are spread across Rorschach (fanaticism/morality), Ozymandias (self-improvement/planning) and Nite Owl II (gadgets/neighborhood protection). That in and of itself suggests that there's something purer about Superman and something perhaps more complicated about Batman, well before you get into how those elements play out across the plot. Another way to go at this way of reading the work is to see Ozymandias as a near-superhuman (he becomes one in the story by catching a bullet) and how that puts him into a course of conflict with the only other super-powered person, Dr. Manhattan. There's a lot here to dream on and think over, and I'm not sure how many comics creators since have really tried.
10. As A Tribute To The Genre's Ability To Hold Several Meanings At Once
Superhero comics are the ultimate empty suit, their specifics so much less meaningful and so much more arbitrary than other genres' tropes. That Watchmen holds up to multiple interpretations in the first place, entirely distinct ways of reading the book that might not show up on the same continent in the world ideas, I think says something about the nature of it chosen story type. It's a grand pageant; you tell us what it all means.
So that's me.
*****
J. Caleb Mozzocco On Reading Watchmen As Comics Canon:
I didn't start reading comic books until the early '90s, and by the time I did, Alan Moore was already somewhat revered as, in many folks' opinions, the greatest comic book writer, and Watchmen already enjoyed a rep for being one of the classic, you-have-to-read-this comics series. I don't remember exactly which order I read them in, but I remember when I first sat down with Watchmen--as with Dark Knight Returns and Maus -- it was with the knowledge that I was about to read one of those comics that was always being cited as one that changed the field forever and lead to all those "Bam! Pow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!" type of articles. In that respect, it was a little like reading Catcher in the Rye or Lolita or Heart of Darkness or Adventures of Huck Finn or Shakespeare for the first time. It certainly colored my experience a bit, as I found myself actively looking for the things I had heard over and over were there, the things that made this a comic that you could find in a trade paperback in a library or bookstore, back when that was still pretty unusual (I think the copy I read may have even said "Warner Books" rather than "DC Comics" on it...same with "Dark Knight"). Anyway, I wonder how many people read this because it was suggested to them that they had to, or that it was the greatest comic ever, or the greatest superhero comic ever or because they read an article about it in a mainstream magazine like Time or Newsweek.
Michael Grabowski On Watchmen As A Serial Comics Reading Experience:
Never having bought any of the trade editions of Watchmen, I still re-read the original comics. So an additional entry into the story for me is as a serial comic reading experience. Appreciating each comic as its own unit, from cover image that amplifies a key detail of the first page, through that particular story unit, through the additional text, and even the slowly progressing letters of the inside covers and the advancing clock on the back. (The complete absence of ads shouldn't be forgotten either.) Each issue feels like a full comic reading experience at a time when most mainstream 80s comics offered diminishing rewards compared to what 35 cents bought you in the late 70s. To my teenage self, Alan Moore was using Watchmen to communicate to Chris Claremont, "Here, let me show you how to write an extended story arc with myriad characters, numerous subplots, and glacial pacing while still providing a unified chapter with a satisfying rather than frustrating amount of development and content in each issue." Because by that point in mainstream comics, for whatever reason, you knew you weren't getting a satisfying amount of story in any given book that month unless it was a double-sized (and double-priced) issue. It's even worse these days, even for alt-comics, so re-reading these comics has been a special pleasure. It helps to remember that there was a time when the only way to re-read a favorite comics story was... to re-read the actual comic books. Moore & Gibbons designed their comic series to repay such re-reading in a way particular to that sort of experience. Had it been designed to be re-read as a book -- something that seemed unlikely at the time and would certainly have been improbable but for The Dark Knight Returns and Maus -- I bet the serial results would have been a little different.
Cole Moore Odell On Reading Watchmen As A Feminist Text:
As with Swamp Thing, From Hell, Promethea, Lost Girls and elements of many other Moore works, gender politics are close to the center of Watchmen. The book presents superheroes as a proxy for late 20th-century America's cartoonish attitudes toward gender. The men engage in routine, horrific violence against women (Sally's rape, the Comedian's murder of his own pregnant girlfriend, the pirate's eventual murder of his wife and family, the way real-life victim Kitty Genovese's death hangs over the story) as distractions from their overt interest -- pointing giant phallic missles at each other. The women are either crushed underfoot or convinced to embrace their own objectification as a source of "power." Finally, Ozymandias attempts to shock the boys out of their mutually assured destruction with The Giant Vagina That Killed New York. Not only does this vagina dentata made real give all the men, from Nixon on down, something they can really fear together, but it serves as a sly commentary on the one thing with power enough to utterly defeat superheroes for young male readers -- the discovery of girls.
Charles Yoakum On Watchmen As A Reputation Builder
Reputation building can be a theme here as well. Moore and Gibbons put on a high wire act, and while Alan came in under the radar with The Anatomy Lesson, here he and Dave decided to the "big project," announced that they were going to do it, and then had the pressure to pull it all off. That's not easy. In Gibbon's book, you can see him submerging himself in the process to just get the damn thing done. What they were doing was going to be game changing and they knew it. The only other thing that was close was the freedom that DC gave Miller to do Ronin. Remember, with the same freedom, Barr and Bolland's Camelot 3000 turned into forgettable, off schedule garbage. For those of us back then, any change to the business-as-usual DC and Marvel was completely unexpected, and DC's making the accommodations to their superior creators was novel and highly unique. I didn't mind waiting for that last issue of Watchmen because I knew that there would be no compromises artistically to the dreaded deadline doom. Thank god for that.
Aaron White On Watchmen As A Personality Test
This may be the dopiest entry-point into Watchmen you'll ever receive, but my college friends and I used it as a cheap personality test. We firmly believed that one's answer to the question "Who's your favorite Watchman?" would speak volumes about your outlook on life. We were deeply disappointed in our friend Colleen, who insisted her favorite was Daniel the younger Night Owl on the grounds that her boyfriend was named Daniel.
Jason Michelitch On Watchmen As Humanist Literature
What initially dazzled me in Watchmen was the craft and the genre commentary, but what has kept me coming back to it is the fullness of Moore's characters and the attitude of the book towards humanity as a whole. I don't think that Watchmen is Moore's best work, but I can't think of any other book of his where there was as much of an ensemble at work, where one central character or smaller group of characters didn't dominate the stage. In Watchmen, there are at least seven main characters whose desires and inner persons are delved into with relish, not to mention the legions of minor characters that Moore bothers to imbue with full-fledged person status. One of the reasons why the monstrous climax of Ozymandias' plot shocks us so is that over the course of the book we've come to view to "little people" of the book as persons as real and as vivid as the ones dressed in costumes. Even the missing artists, who are discussed almost solely as a plot point for most of the book, are given two panels or so in which they are unrelentingly human. Moore is a master of using one or two lines of dialogue and carefully considered staging (interpreted perfectly by Gibbons, I should add) to suggest a whole character. On the more direct notion of humanism, the scene on Mars was really important to me as a 15 year-old trying to muddle through all sorts of Big Important Thoughts about the world and humans. There's obviously so much more to think through philosophically than Watchmen provides, but I never saw it as an end point, even when I first read it. Jon's revelation about the statistical importance of any given human being was a revelatory thought to me at that time, and I took it as a starting point for further thought and appreciation of our fucked-up species. It's still one of my favorite scenes in any work of fiction in any medium.
Chris Mautner On Watchmen As An Indictment Of Baby Boomer Hubris
I've always seen Watchmen in a large part as being a treatise on the danger of assuming you know what's best for people and a condemnation of the baby boom generation to an extent. It's not for nothing that Ozymandius draws allusions to JFK and the "best and brightest" generation. The thing I remember that struck me upon first read is how absolutely convinced Veidt (and everyone else) was that we were headed for WWIII, when, of course, in the real world, such a thing thankfully never occurred. I think Watchmen dovetails neatly with a lot of the ideas Moore expresses in V for Vendetta, about giving the power to the people themselves and the danger of assuming -- as a lot of people in power do -- that you know what's best for everybody.
FFF Results Post #152 -- Pagi-Nation
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Describe Five Specific Pages Or Two-Page Sequences You Like." Here are their responses.
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. A grief-stricken Sock Monkey runs away from the dead bird
2. That page in Murmur where the lead is spying on his mother
3. Speedy Ortiz visits his various loved ones
4. Bat creatures break in, Kamandi #10
5. David B. changes his first name
*****
Andrew Mansell
1. The triumphant moment from Amazing Spider-man #33
2. The arrival of the Celestial's ship from Eternals #2
3. The final page of League of Extra-Ordinary Gentlemen Vol 1, #6
4. The Spirit-- First two page of Beagle's Second Chance-- Perfection
5. Green Lantern tripping his brains out by Neal Adams
*****
Kiel Phegley
1. The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine #3, pages 10 - 11, the knife-throwing sequence featuring "Her name was Ruby. She'd been giving me the eye..." At the same time the sexiest and one of the saddest little scenes in comics.
2. Grickle, the two silent pages in "photo opportunity" where the Poloroid-taking "hero" turns from gentle lecturer on anti-smoking to a cigarette-slapping madman. Probably the funniest comic I've ever read.
3. Amazing Screw-On Head #1, the bit that goes like this:
"But what sort of punishment? Poison Frogs? Plague rats? Giant Fire-breathing robot?"
"Why not all three?"
"Marry me."
Probably the second funniest comic I've ever read.
4. Any Kirby photo-collage spread. The most recent one I've bought is in Thor #162, a two-pager featuring the Thunder God, the Recorder, planets, some wild satellites and what I think is a disco ball.
5. JLA #7, Electric Blue Superman wrestles and angel
*****
Scott Dunbier
* GL/GA 87
From the Green Arrow solo story, by Elliot S! Maggin and Neal Adams (much of the story was shot from Adams' beautiful pencils). The sequence where Green Arrow lands in the middle of a riot in an inner city neighborhood. A little boy is shot in the back, and GA tries to save his life. Incredibly powerful, and the first time I ever read anything remotely like it in a comic book.
* Manhunter
Tough choice--I was going to go with Chapter 6, page 6 from Detective 442, Where Manhunter fights his teacher, Asano Nitobe. Now this was dynamic storytelling at its best, what a great team Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson were. But I had to go with the last two pages from the final story, in Detective 443. Paul Kirk making the ultimate sacrifice--God I loved this series.
* Detective #439
My favorite Batman story, written by Steve Englehart, and drawn by Sal Amendola (Did Dick Giordano ink it? Think so). The last two pages. After Batman ruthlessly tracks down the bank robbers who left a little boy orphaned on the street, he comes to terms with his own overwhelming grief. Could have been maudlin, instead it was beautifully handled and poignant. God, did Archie Goodwin edit the Hell out of his brief run on those Detective Comics issues or what?
* The Spirit in Outer-space, chapter 1, pages 4 & 5, by Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood.
My all-time favorite two page sequence. The Spirit is asked to lead a mission to the moon and gives every reason why he isn't the man to do it, but he finally relents. The Spirit's speech about settling down and raising a family, with Ellen looking on, and the strobe effect Wood used to convey her sorrow as she buries her face in her father's chest is heartbreaking.
* Swamp Thing Special #2, by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben.
The last two pages--Swamp Thing goes to the depths of Hell for his true love, Abbey -- and brings her back. The best moment in Moore's groundbreaking series.
1. The last page of Krigstein's story "Key Chain" with all those damn keys.
2. The Last page of Mazzuchelli's Discovering America where the guy starts working on the damn globe again
3. A couple pages before the last of Paul Pope's Escapo where dude just escaped and is on his hands and knees all wet
4. The last page of Kirby's Glory Boat (New Gods 6) where guy is stuck on the damn raft
5. The last 2 page spread of Jimbo Adventures in Paradise where Jimbo is all melty after the nuclear blast with the damn dead horse
*****
Douglas Wolk
1. Zatanna reaches out to the Seven Unknown Men.
2. The assassin in "I Killed Adolf Hitler" enters the time machine.
3. The two-page establishing shot of Funniopolis near the end of "Fox Bunny Funny."
4. Swifty Frisko reports the news as we see the Clara Pandy and the Hoop for the first time.
5. The final page of Chester Brown's "The Eyelid Burial" (in Yummy Fur #2): "a way out of the blood and sand."
*****
Ramon De Veyra
* Buddy Baker looking at the reader exclaiming "I Can SEE YOU!" that nearly made me drop the book. (Animal Man)
* William Gull seeing Jah-bul-on on the hill from From Hell.
* The final fate of Ampersand from Y The Last Man # 60 (I don't want to describe it for fear of spoiling.)
* That two-page spread in the prison riot from All-Star Superman.
* That page in Swamp Thing where his face is the background, the landscape the characters were walking through.
*****
Gary Usher
1. "Tear It Up, Terry Downe" page 3 (Love and Rockets V9, 1988) Jaime Hernandez's evolution of Hopey in one page, still amazing!
2. "Ninety-three Million Miles From the Sun...and Counting" page 3 (Love and Rockets V9, 1988) Maggie wanders by burned down Mad Dogs
3. "Penny is Found" page 91 (Love and Rockets: New Stores 1, 2008) great supergal action scene by Jaime, also
4. "The Return of Ray D." page 4 (Love and Rockets 20?, 1986) page 1 first page of first L&R I bought, Jaime at one of his peaks
5. "Rocky's Birthday Suprise" page 14 (Love and Rockets V4, 1985) Rocky and Fumble in a very poignant ending to one of Jaime's other series
*****
Mark Coale
1. Animal Man -- "I can see you"
2. American Flagg -- Schieskopf strapped to the rocket
3. Sasndman -- When the Faeries come through to Earth in issue 19
4. Starman -- jack seeing him mom on the shore in the pirate issue
5. Spider-Man -- the "lifting the machinery" page
*****
John Vest
1. Howard The Duck's car ride with Dreyfus Gulch and Beverly in Howard The Duck #7
2. The quiet beginning of "Red Nails" in Savage Tales #2 with Valeria walking around by herself
3. Reuben Flagg in bed with Titania Weis in American Flagg #7 pages 22-23
4. Thor talking to the hippies in Thor #154
5. The wordless sequence with Nick Fury and Val on page 5 of Nick Fury #2
*****
Michael Aushenker
1. Taking care of office paperwork, patronizing personal secretaries in the opening of "T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents" # 2
2. Porpoise-hater Phillips hunting dolphins in "Ghost Rider" # 16, the most savage shocker of all!
3. Not one...not two....but THREE Don Perlin lycanthropes running around in a spread in "Werewolf By Night" # 21
4. Lee Elias splash page in "Human Fly" # 11 where he's playing rock star, strumming a guitar and crooning
5. David Chelsea in love sex montage
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. Orion and Lightray ride the "Life Cube" into battle, page 25 of "The Glory Boat!" from New Gods #6 (December 1971). Written and penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Vince Colletta.
2. Letitia tries to get baby Clark off the roof, page 7 of "Letitia Lerner, Superman's Babysitter!" reprinted in the Bizarro Comics collection. Written by Kyle Baker and Elizabeth Glass, drawn by Baker.
3. Batman pays Silver St. Cloud a subtext-rich visit, page 2 of "The Laughing Fish!" from Detective Comics #475 (February 1978). Written by Steve Englehart, penciled by Marshall Rogers, inked by Terry Austin.
4. Reed Richards enters a photo-collaged Negative Zone, page 14 of "This Man ... This Monster!" from Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966). By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, inked by Joe Sinnott.
5. Machine Man laments that "even an android can cry," but Arishem the Celestial still flashes the "loser" sign at him, page 9 of the untitled Nextwave #5 (July 2006). Written by Warren Ellis, penciled by Stuart Immonen, inked by Wade von Grawbadger.
*****
Michael Grabowski
1. Curtains, then the legs of slaughtered bodies of what turn out to be Errata Stigmata's parents, then the infant Errata herself, wide-eyed in the crib, as reprised in the middle of Human Diastrophism.
2. Everybody takes a turn slapping Maggie in the face.
3. The Big Tex page where the story progresses backwards in time as the reader's eye climbs down the tree. Best seen at the ACME Novelty Library #7 size.
4. "Later , out on bail, Al [Ledicker Jr.] lights up one of his father's Pinky Perfectos" and fantasizes about the theme park of Rana Poona.
5. Shep-Shep's vision of himself becoming a sphinx, "worshiped as a god."
1. Alec Longstreth explains to his psychiatrist why his comic book is stressing him out. Phase 7 #10, page 2.
2. Tales of Suspense 84 by Jack Kirby. Captain America kicks Batrocs butt with nary a word said by either of them. http://i25.tinypic.com/vy60ep.jpg
3. Catfoot Crogan swordfights on the stairs. Crogan's Vengeance p. 172
4. The possum babies give Fone Bone a run for his money. Bone Book 1, p. 31.
5. Lynda Barry explains why everybody doodles. What it Is, page 103.
*****
Andrei Molotiu
* Silent page where the grandfather buries the demonic doll, Kirby & Simon's Sandman no. 1
* Uncle Gabby goes nuts, breaks the window of the store where they sell Sock Monkey merchandise and sets the merchandise on fire
* Jimbo sees the Smoggmonsters play at the club, in "Jimbo's House is Gigantic but Condemned"
* Dr. Strange enters some weird dimension in search of Eternity, second page of Dr. Strange story in Strange Tales no. 138
* Warren Craghead's take on Charlie Brown trying to fly his kite, in Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions
*****
Russell Lissau
1. Batman cradles Tim Drake over the body of Tim's dad (Identity Crisis)
2. The Crow kills his first victim, then ties a spent shell casing into his hair (The Crow)
3. Alan Scott/Green Lantern cries after murdering millions in a dream (All-Star Squadron)
4. Meredith Van Zeyl makes her debut (Batman Allies Secret Files and Origins 2005)
5. The first iconic page of Superman For All Seasons
*****
Ali T. Kokmen
* Jack Knight eulogizes his father in a beautiful nine-panel grid in Starman #73 ("I miss him. That's all.")
* King Arthur confronts Morded in the final issue of Camelot 3000, in a powerful Brian Bolland layout where Arthur straddles the lower panels. ("Aye...'tis fitting you would be here, too, Morded.")
* Dr. Manhattan explains his realization about thermodynamic miracles as the "camera" angle pulls further back with each panel in the final pages of Watchmen #9. ("You are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg...")
* Off-panel, Superman punches a shape-shifting alien so hard that it reverts to its original form while Green Lantern watches in amazement in DC Comics Presents #26 ("You're that strong?")
* Superman (super-intelligent but sometimes not too bright) finally figures out where Batman has been buried alive, races to the site, unearths the coffin,and rips into it to save his friend...only to find the coffin empty because Batman has escaped and is standing right behind him, in World's Finest #269.
*****
Michael Dooley
1. The final page of the "3-dimensions!" Mad comic story by Kurtzman/Wood, after the pursuit of material things has led to disaster.
2. The last page of Spiegelman's "As the Mind Reels," which doesn't quite make it to the bottom but which nevertheless advises us to stand by.
3. The page toward the beginning of chapter two of Sienkiewicz's "Stray Toasters," in which "the electric kid" realizes, but only for a brief moment before his brain short-circuits, how and why his cat swallowed a light bulb.
4. The black and white page toward the end of Mack's "Kabuki/Metamorphosis," in which Buddha and Akemi share their thoughts on creation, all the way down one side of the page and up the other side.
5. The Ware fold-out spread that serves as the outside dust jacket of the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern hardcover book, which includes many strips about God and creation.
*****
Danny Ceballos
* OSAMU TEZUKA'S "PHOENIX": VOLUME 4 -- Page 320 -- Two rival artists have been ordered to create gargoyles to adorn the temple. The gargoyles are revealed and there is one clear winner. You can almost hear the clay scream.
* JOHN PORCELLINO'S "PERFECT EXAMPLE" -- FRONTISPIECE -- Husker Du or Venom? Satan will decide who is the better band.
* MILT GROSS' "HE DONE HER WRONG" -- PAGE 4 -- She sings her little ditty about hearts and flowers so sweetly that a roomful of smelly, bearded 49ers burst into tears.
* BOB KANE AND JERRY ROBINSON'S BATMAN #1 -- PAGE 2 -- The best page of the best origin story EVER. The vivid horror captured in young Bruce's eyes says it all. Who wouldn't become a bat to avenge their parents murder?
* LYNDA BARRY'S "ONE HUNDRED DEMONS" -- LOST AND FOUND -- PAGE 211 -- The girl who lives to read the classified ads is killed by a sneaky vampire. No one believed her and now she is dead. They will cover her coffin with fill dirt, very clean. The party pianist can't hold back his tears as he sings at her funeral "Cherish is the word I use to dis-cri-ibe..."
1. Opening page of Flies on the Ceiling
2. Opening page of Watchmen #1
3. Opening page of The Spirit -- "Bring in Sand Saref"
4. Dust jacket for McSweeney's #13
5. Inside cover illustration for Abandoned Cars
*****
Lane Milburn
1. Tetsuo frees Akira from cryo-chamber
2. Arzach snares man with lasso (pterodactyl in center of page)
3. "The Hairstyle Report" from Julius Knipl
4. Mine cart rides through giant skull in Multiforce
5. World's Fair spread from Jimmy Corrigan
*****
Adam Casey
1. Superman dressing Perry White in various humiliating outfits and taking pictures of him from Superman #135
2. The "seduction" page featuring the former opera singer in Will Eisner's "The Street Singer".
3. The detonation of the nuclear bombs in Captain Marvel Adventures #66.
4. The two-page spread right before Caprice and Sherman kiss in "Box Office Poison".
5. The ghost of Wagner playing music in Sohei's dream in the first volume of Tezuka's "Adolf".
*****
Dave Knott
* Matt Murdock descends the stairs through multiple levels of his brownstone in Elektra Lives Again
* The final page of Lewis Trondheim's Mister O, wherein the protagonist finally crosses the gap, with decidedly mixed results
* DOOM!!! Beyond the fields we know... a mysterious entity (Surtur) begins forging a sword in Thor #337
* Carl Reissman boards the subway in "Master Race"
* Pope Cerebus blesses a woman's baby in his own inimitable manner
*****
William Burns
1. The struggle between Christian Promethea and Muslim Promethea, intercut with the struggle between two modern Prometheas
2. "Ladies, Gentlemen, you have eaten well" from Batman: Year One
3. The last page of the "Derrida" sequence from Action Philosophers
4. The Chorus girl, lampshade, ostrich and duck spread from Howard the Duck # 16
5. Kyle Baker's Plastic Man gets caught in the gears of the haunted house
1. Final page of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel" (Part one)
2. Death of Guardian in Alpha Flight 12
3. "Breaking through" sequence in Amazing Spider-Man 33 (pp. 4&5?)
4. The conclusion of Lee and Ditko's "Worm Man" in Strange Tales 78
5. Final Crisis 7 p. 37
1. "Lisa Leavenworth - Crazy and PROUD of it!" I don't know where this one-page gag strip originally appeared, but it's reprinted in Buddy Does Seattle and it's my favorite moment of the whole series.
2. That wonderful two-page spread in Scott Pilgrim 4 after a streetcar passes in front of the fellow with the samurai sword.
3. The page in Robo-Hunter where Sam's slowly sinking into the polluted East River. He's gagged and trying to shout for help, while his idiot assistants debate what he might be trying to say.
4. There's a Steve Yeowell page in the last Invisibles arc where Gideon's in a phone booth talking to his ex-girlfriend and he start babbling about an old kid's show as we realize he's delirious from blood loss.
5. About nine months into Charley's War, the page where Charley is forced by an officer to reveal that the bag he's dragging contains the remains of his mate, Ginger.
1. Two-pager: Maxim Glory gets out of Mr. Fix-It's cab, and Fix-It picks up a doomed android lady, as the El thunders by overhead
2. Batman and Two-Face fight as the helicopter dwindles in the distance
3. Hunter Rose takes his mask off to relax with a snifter of brandy in his Art Deco penthouse
4. No. 26 tries to drop a water tower on Kaneda and his buddies
5. Eddie Campbell serves up a Viennese street scene, with Chatting Clerics, Minding the Store, Mozart and Schobert
*****
Sean T. Collins
1. Keith meets Eliza (Black Hole)
2. "If we must die, let New Genesis live!" (New Gods)
3. The giant hot dog (Boy's Club)
4. Mister Miracle lives again (Seven Soldiers of Victory)
5. That fascist death squad assaults Ophelia and her friends (Poison River)
*****
thanks to all that participated. a particular thank you to all that participated but provided additional answers or riffed on the questions rather than answering them. I enjoyed your e-mail, but I can't run items obviously out of the box here, as experience tells me that soon leads to other people demanding "the right" to do the same thing and eventually I take a baseball bat to my computer. Also, anyone that expected me to find this much specific interior art and makes a complaint on that basis will be banned for life. Also, I haven't checked all my e-mail accounts this morning, so if you didn't use the main one (the one provided in the original post) and sent it some personal e-mail account of mine, a) sorry, and b) stop that.
The top comics-related news stories from February 7 to February 13, 2009:
1. Sean Delonas draws criticism for a cartoon that many think was referencing either overtly or in wink-wink provocative fashion President Obama being a chimp.
Loser Of The Week
Between Sargent, Delonas and Mike Lester engaging with fans in impolite fashion about one of his cartoons, it seemed like a bad week for editorial cartooning generally.
Quote Of The Week
"Man, I wish they taught your dad how to put a condom on a cucumber, so a bitter fuck like you would of never had the chance to shit out hate from your all consuming black hole of an ass." -- A Mike Lester fan.
this week's imagery comes from one of the great underground comix
I guess it's the official poster for this year's TCAF? I want to go to this, but I don't know if I can talk myself into spending that much money right now. Anyway, I don't really run posters, but I was so amused by organizer Chris Butcher telling me not to run it and then telling me I could run it I figure I'd go ahead and do it. It looks nice.
You Should Really Go Read Brian Hibbs' Analysis Of 2008 Bookscan Numbers
Simply by diving into the yearly Bookscan results of sales information compiled from bookstores, as in his latest Tilting At The Windmills, the retailer Brian Hibbs does comics a huge favor. There are a number of takeaway gems in the details, such as the numbers reported for Persepolis and the general success of the book implied.
I do advise, however, that anyone diving in take all of the numbers with a huge grain of salt, take the analysis with a shaker's worth of the stuff, and the advocacy for a salt-lick sized deposit. Brian posts his own disclaimer, and that's nice of him, but I want you to conceive of a bigger and more assertive one.
Most importantly, I think the numbers have been shown not only to be wrong, but to be wildly and erratically wrong. This interferes with any specific lessons we might take away from individual examples and should compounds our suspicion of any analysis involving more than one number. For instance, Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds tell me that rather than the 719 copies Bookscan reports that Love and Rockets: New Stories Vol. 1 sold through the book trade, they've sold just over 4000 copies. That's an astounding difference, not just in terms of the math but how those numbers span the chasm that exists between "uh-oh" and "all right!" "We're thrilled," he wrote back to me. I guess Reynolds could be lying, as I'm sure a lot of publishers and creators have and continue to do. But I don't think he is, and he has a sterling reputation for not doing that. I know from my own past experience comparing royalty statements to Bookscan numbers that they can be way, way, way wrong, and not in any clearly discernible way.
That should be enough right there, but I also think Brian's fighting a phantom argument against members of the 2003 blogosphere when he stresses the importance of the DM in terms of the overall sales landscape. New markets are additional markets, not replacement markets. Reynolds says that L&RNS sold just about as many copies in the DM as it did when in comics form -- so the bookstore sales are new. They're not happier about one over the other, they're happy that the new one leads to a greater, more significant total. Everyone not just spouting off on the Internet or drunk in a convention hotel bar at 12:45 AM knows the importance of the DM, just as they have a keen sense of its limitations and frustrations. Other than a vague sense that comics shops no longer enjoy things like being stops on book tours, there's never been a convincing argument made that the DM has been neglected by certain publishers for the sake of the bookstores. Believe me, I've asked after this for years. In fact, I strongly believe the investment that companies not Marvel and DC have in the DM has traditionally far outstripped the investment shown by the DM in total in return.
Comics publishers need the DM, which is one of the reasons why Diamond turtling up for the remainder of the recession is a lousy thing. Many also need the bookstores, and every other sale they can get their hands on. It's a sign of comics' fundamental weirdness that one of the best people when it comes to selling comics feels compelled to argue once year for what should be the largely self-apparent effectiveness of the specialist. So enjoy the article, but leave at least that underlying argument where you find it.
Furor Over Sean Delonas' Stupid-Ass Chimp Cartoon Grows A Bit, I Guess
* I guess according to the video posted at Mike Lynch's place there was some sort of protest at the New York Post yesterday over Sean Delonas' Wednesday editorial cartoon mash-up of the killer chimpanzee news and the stimulus package story, a mixing of elements that led some believe that Delonas was archly portraying our new President as a chimpanzee that was shot a bunch of times by cops. I'm not sure there's much movement in the actual story: the editors continue claim that it was a straight-up "those guys what wrote the stimulus package are about as smart as chimps" joke, other people continue to be very upset and doubt that's all that was going on. I guess some employees are upset, so that's news. Peter David says it caused him to reconsider his longstanding strategy of betting the pass line when Al Sharpton is up to roll. The Daily Cartoonist provides an idea of how widespread the discussion of the cartoon, such as it is, now stands. Daryl Cagle has the best headline and probably the best advice: just being cognizant that people are going to see certain things as alarming, and folding that consciousness into how you approach your work.
* speaking of Cagle, he hosts Mike Lester's response to criticism of his cartoon that compare "drinking the kool-aid" provided by the President via oratory on the stimulus bill to the "drinking the kool-aid" that killed almost a thousand people in Jim Jones' compound in Guyana. How to describe it... have you ever sat around with a bunch of old friends and cut each other up a bit and then one quiet guy at the table gets to speak and completely freaks out about what's been said and goes off on how you're all immoral, evil morons and he hates you? It's kind of like that, just on-line instead of at the corner bar during reunion weekend or at the Harrah's buffet in Las Vegas. Also, judging by the tone of the comments, instead of saying "Hey man, calm down" or sending someone after him as he walks back to the rooms, you and your friends in the above example gang up on your hot-headed pal and beat him to death.
Lester's a good cartoonist, but I believe his Jamestown cartoon a bad cartoon and I'll reiterate my initial criticism. As much as he may feel contempt for the political rhetoric utilized by President Obama, it's hard to believe that Lester really thinks the people that do embrace it are going to die like so many poisoned people, and the dangers of using a specific, real-world mass suicide as a metaphorical example is that there's not much room to go beyond that initial, blunt comparison. If he really does think that belief in this rhetoric will kill people, 1) wow, and 2) it's unclear why when pressed he would unpack his case in terms of how much Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher annoy him.
* Heavy Liquid, Paul Pope
* Army@Love, Rick Veitch
* Next-Door Neighbor and Edited, Dean Haspiel
* Testament, Doug Rushkoff and Liam Sharp
* The Naked Artist, Brian Talbot
The Doug Wright Awards has announced its fifth awards show will take place at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival on May 9th and the Art Gallery of Ontario's Jackman Hall. This year's ceremony will featuring the launch of The Collected Doug Wright, with the release of the first that series two books from Drawn and Quarterly. A discussion about Wright will take place on stage featuring Brad Mackay, Seth and Chris Oliversos.
The Awards also announced their jury: Andrew Coyne, Martin Levin, Joe Ollmann, Bob Rae and Diana Tamblyn.
1. Bottomless Bellybutton, Dash Shaw
2. Kramer's Ergot 7 and Edited, Sammy Harkam
3. Mini-comics Tie: Ochre Ellipse, Jonas Madden Connor; Swell #2, Juliacks
4. Capacity, Theo Ellsworth
5. What It Is, Lynda Barry
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* it's difficult to cover publishing announcement like IDW's digital partnership with a company called Eagle One Media, but I'm encouraged with more companies finding on-line strategies and putting them into play. It's no longer the time by which we dream about ideal models, I think, but put into practice the best ones for each company that they can be find.
* the first group of Naruto books to appear in Viz's second effort to publish a lot of Naruto volumes at once have slipped slightly in their second week on the USA Today chart. Then again, Naruto volumes slip in that fashion when on the charts by themselves, too. Jason Green explains that a motivation for Viz in doing this stunt again is to catch the English-language books up to their Japanese counterparts in a way that may discourage scanlations.
* it's always fun when a cartoonist is willing to post early, amateurish work, like Evan Dorkin with these blasts from I guess a quarter-century ago.
* one of the the big problems with comics' long-term continental ice-shelf style move from selling a few comics to lots of people to lots of comics to few people is that you need to find a balance between offering material again at a price that seems like worth a double-dip but at the same time doesn't make you feel stupid for the first purchase. For at least one consumer, it seems, a recent DC project hasn't negotiated that very well.
* you should read Gary Tyrrell's call for a way by which webcomics people could secure micro-loans so as to introduce new projects or make other career moves without having to interrupt what they're doing and whatever revenue stream they provide. I really like that post, because it brings up something I find frustrating about comics: that 90 percent of the people with a little bit of money seem to want to enter the industry as publishers of the same kind of stuff three or four people are already doing. It's the way that theater companies always start out wanting to be the next Steppenwolf and 90 percent of those that survive are the ones that completely turn that original impulse on its head and find some niche or way of doing things that fits their skill set and provides something new. That's the long way around of saying I wish more people with a love of comics with money to invest would consider other possibilities, like the one Tyrrell seems to have in mind.
In the spirit of their well-received 2007 show Spaceknight, where comics artists from all walks of the industry drew portraits of Rom: Spaceknight to benefit Bill Mantlo, Floating World Comics in Portland will be doing a Kitty Pryde show starting May 7. All benefits to the hemophilia department at OHSU.
Artists already on board include Brandon Graham, Ross Campbell, Zachary Baldus (that's his work above), Zack Soto, Corey Lewis, Vasilis Lolos, Becky Cloonan, Bryan O'Malley, Hope Larson, Farel Dalrymple, and Tom Neely. For more information, contact
* Matt Baker
* Bill Blackbeard
* Alberto Breccia
* Reed Crandall
* Rudolph Dirks
* Russ Heath
* Jerry Iger
* Jack Jackson
* Paul S. Newman
* Bob Oksner
* Antonio Prohias
Solid, succint biographies are available through the above link. Industry professionals are eligible to vote here.
I hope that people will consider showing love for the late, great Jack Jackson. Jackson was a pioneer of both underground comics and the sustained, adult literary expression in comics form that grew out of that tradition and several others. His work remains powerful and unforgettably idiosyncratic.
This time it's the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ben Sargent, who has been at the Austin-American Statesman for 35 years this calendar year. I guess the positive is that Sargent accepting a buyout seems like it'd be the kind of veteran fairly near standard retirement age you'd want to see accepting such a package, and that makes it a better outcome than some 32-year-old get unceremoniously dumped.
The alternate view, of course, is that it's Ben-Freakin'-Sargent we're talking about, one of the nation's super-solid practitioners of a profession now in a state of near-collapse. Sargent has one of those direct and measured voices that's allowed him to do the humorous stuff and the occasional step-back-and-think cartoon with equal aplomb. He'll continue to bring his skills to work with various syndication and freelance clients, clients that may soon include his former employer on some sort of contract basis.
I always liked the way Sargent would subtly change his approach to the art depending on the cartoon. It always looked different than what I remembered, until I'd cast around and see a cartoon that was more like the mind's eye Sargent. That's a rare gift. At any rate, I would imagine he'll certainly be missed in all the ways he ends up not being involved or published the same way he is right now.
* The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
* The Great Outdoor Fight, Chris Onstad
* MySpace: Dark Horse Presents, Various
* Abe Sapien Volume 1: The Drowning, Mike Mignola and Jason Sean Alexander
* Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and Last Hope for the Galaxy, Various
And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #22
* it's so bad for newspapers right now that even a mostly positive article about unique visitors to major newspaper sites gets kicked off with bad news about advertising. The thing that may jump out for a lot of folks is a decline in readers visiting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's site, not exactly the momentum you want to be building if you're considering what is already a Jumping Snake Canyon-level feat of going from print to on-line only.
* there's a ton of general economic talk in this twopart interview with Tokyopop CEO Stuart Levy. It used to be encouraging to see company head honchos like this talk in general but positive terms about new opportunities on-line. Now the vagueness of it seems slightly scary.
In general, I'm hesitant to write about those debts except in the very limited parameter that a combination of
1. A measured appraisal of Diamond's industry-altering changes.
2. An acknowledgment of how quickly they're being made.
3. The overly facile and I think hard to believe reasons for these changes being made the way they're being made.
4. This week's acknowledgment by Viz that the moves that have an effect on their books are totally Diamond-driven.
5. The debts themselves.
6. Examples of other businesses in the wider economic world making changes that seem to come not from weaknesses in their business model but from the financial profile enjoyed by that entity or its backers.
makes me consider the possibility of outside pressures driving some of the moves. I can't endorse that theory, though; I can only ask the question and suggest that the more information we have, the better. There are alternative explanations for some of the circumstances involved. I think we have to be cognizant of those, too. There are as many printer/publisher debt situations as there are Smurfs, and most of them sound terrifying for the publisher when you catch them at a specific time. The Geppi Entertainment Museum woes didn't scan for my own earlier writing as a potential contributing factor or danger sign because a) they developed a while ago and probably couldn't be a part of any sudden scramble for financial correction and b) I found it convincing that at least some of the motivation in the museum not paying the bills was a game of hardball with the museum's partners/sponsors/enablers to get a better deal.
As someone who runs a site in large part driven by opinion and analysis, I probably don't do a very good job of making clear the difference between where I feel a lack of compelling information calls into question a wider selection of possibilities and endorsing one of those pathways as likely or even prominent. It's not as fun as declaring that I know the absolute truth about everything, but I hope it's in keeping with an open-minded way of engaging comics and its actors and agents that I think best reflects the panoply of moves always being made and the various motivations for doing so. I honestly don't know if Diamond is teetering in a way they could crumble later today or if Steve Geppi just built a life-sized replica of Uncle Scrooge's money bin to which he helicopters with Michael Phelps at 4 PM everyday for private swimming lessons. I do know I think the minimum and de-listing decisions are bad ones and close doors that shouldn't have been closed and are vastly disappointing in terms of how I'd hope a major industry player would approach this period of economic hazard. I'm simply not convinced by the explanations of same I've seen thus far, and I'm looking for others.
* Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody, Mike Dawson
* Too Cool to be Forgotten, Alex Robinson
* The Alcoholic, Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel
* Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, Art Spiegelman
* Billy Dogma: Fear My Dear, Dean Haspiel
Follow-Up On Delonas Chimp Cartoon
Since posting yesterday on Sean Delonas' chimp/stimulus mash-up, news and opinion articles have swollen from four to over a thousand, most of which are nearly as depressing as the cartoon itself. I'm not even sure what to do with responses like this article at Editor & Publisher, which notes that Delonas was accused of plagiarizing a cartoon last year, which has about as much to do with this cartoon as reporting he has bad breath or kicked his dog once. Pretty typical was this Newsday blog posting that called the whole affair a sad joke, and invoked Al Sharpton's involvement as a sign this was a media ploy on the part of the complainers.
If you just have a minute or so, Poynter Onlinehas an effective wrap-up. I agree with Ted Rall's general opinion as expressed in that article. Delonas' cartoon is not to my mind overtly racist in a way that it allows us to see into the cartoonist's heart and state with conviction what's there. His history of making cartoons seemingly designed to upset gay people might influence you to lean one way over another when ascribing motivations to this one, but nothing's certain. I think with a lot more clarity you can see this effort as a cartoon of dubious value that allows us to question the cartoonist's decision-making process. The decision to publish it enables us to ask additional questions, this time of Delonas' employers, who seemed to think entirely in terms of "those guys that wrote the stimulus bill must be chimps" and never in terms of "whoa, did he just compare the first black president to a chimpanzee?" This fairly boggles the mind, and I don't understand why the first response when people complained isn't "Really? Yikes. Yeah, I probably should have seen that."
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the webcomics cartoonist Scott Kurtz will host the Harvey Awards, and if you're an industry professional in some way, you can fill out a nomination ballot. I encourage everyone to do so because it's a chore and as a chore those awards are more open to a few people influencing the voting for nominees.
* although I'm not the biggest superhero guy, I admire the great runs and stand-alone stories of years past in that genre. I think Marvel's best serial comics were Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man as they arrived right out of the gate. While Fantastic Four peaked with that amazing run that included Galactus and the Inhumans and the Black Panther, Amazing Spider-Man never really hit the same kind of peak (although some people view the final Ditko issues that way). Rather Spider-Man enjoyed the longest quality run out of the gate of maybe any serial comic ever, combining a terrific concept and the most effective employment of Marvel's in-house attention to continuity in style and tone. The series may be a bit spotty issue to issue, but the best single comics are quite well-crafted (check out Peter's awesome head!) and the general arc works much better than you'd think as long-form soap opera. Valerie D'Orazio speaks fondly about the blend of romance and superhero action when that title was cooking.
* the compiler of Best-Ofs Dick Hyacinth goes to the bookstore to check out some comics that people say are the best of 2008 that he hasn't yet read, and comes away basically declaring that many of you are completely nuts.
The only publishing news item that made it across my desk that I haven't handled elsewhere is James Owen's reminder earlier today that Scholastic/Grafix has made formal its announcement that they're putting together a book of Jeff Smith's and Charles Vess' Bone prequel Rose for publication this year. I guess that could have been announced earlier and I just forgot or missed it, but it's news to me. That should be lovely and sell like the dickens.
Webcomics Cartoonist Karen Ellis Loses Everything In Weekend Building Fire Via Lea Hernandez, Gary Tyrrell and a host of others comes word that Karen Ellis, the cartoonist behind the on-line Planet Karen, was apparently forced from her home and lost everything in a fire that killed an upstairs neighbor. This apparently happened over the weekend. Those first two links have information on how to help through some sort of small financial donation to keep Ellis afloat while she adjusts to her new circumstance; the third link will take you to one of Ellis' pages where a donation button usually used for supporting her comics work can now be employed in a different manner. I ask that you consider joining me in making a small contribution. An auction on her behalf is in the planning stages.
if someone has a link to an outside news article on the fire itself,
Darryl Cagle couches his conversation of the cheery Mike Lester cartoon shown above in terms of whether or not young people will understand the reference, which is an interesting way to go. For me, this underlines the more general struggles that cartoonists have in staking out strong positions. It's entirely possible that Mike Lester thinks that the fervent belief many have in the current president will kill them dead the same way belief in Jim Jones meant the death of 918 in the rogue religious leader's Guyana compound. That's hardcore, but okay. Yet if he means anything else I'm not sure it even begins to get communicated through this kind of upsetting imagery. Ironically, like many things related to Jim Jones, it's hard to muster any criticism of this based on race.
And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #21
* Tim Gagne was nice enough to pass along to a few comics bloggers this record of a case filed against Diamond Comics Distributor, Inc.et al seeking payment of lost monies. If you combine this with, say, Rich Johnston's reports of recent judgments against the company, and news that a move like the de-listing of Viz graphic novels was directed by Diamond rather than a mutual decision, and I think there may be more questions than answers for the comics distributing giant right now in terms of general strategic choices.
* speaking of Rich Johnston, he wrote a nice note to me yesterday clarifying a recent article section about my writing on Diamond and their new minimums. He said that he believed I was right about the fact that there other issues potentially in play, but wrong about Diamond in general. I thought he was saying that I was wrong about the other issues in play and therefore wrong about Diamond in general. Thanks, Rich.
* this PWCW article that provides results and anecdotes based on an informal survey of retailers as to the state of sales right now and their opinions of and attitudes towards the current economy may be less valuable as a comprehensive survey and more valuable for the individual snapshots. In this case, I think the article works best if you focus in on statements by Eric Thornton, owner of one of the country's five best comics stores of the last 25 years. Chicago is a great comics town for the same reason it's a great town for the arts in general: there's a sizable audience for art that's distinct from the makers and close followers of that art. I think that makes Chicago-related industry news that much more worth paying attention to.
* finally, Shannon Smith wrote in to agree with me about one facet of comics culture that could have been reformed and why that might have been a good idea once upon a time.
"This is the one exact thing that Borders and B&N got right when they were doing good business. Now, not to say anyone should be looking at them as a model for success but they did get that right and it is what kept the customers coming back. (Back when people had discretionary income.) The simple notion that the customer could depend on the store to either have or get what they wanted. It is this exact quality that has kept me loyal to my favorite stores from music to auto parts or even groceries. In my life I've only ever expected one or two comic shops to have what I want and I've never expected any comic shop to be able to order what I want if it was out of stock. Which probably is a big part of why almost all the graphic novels I've bought in the last 10 years were purchased at Borders, B&N or online. When I worked at Borders it was our philosophy that we would do anything to get the book the customer wanted. Special order, store transfer, buy out of print and even call the competition if necessary. Whatever we could do we would do. I've never once in my life had a comic shop try and track down anything that was not on their shelves. I don't think this was because the clerk did not care. On the contrary, some of these clerks were my friends. I just don't think they ever had the tools to make the effort even seem like a good idea. At Borders we had a few options and we exhausted all of them. The comic shops only have one option and it was exhausted before the clerk could even make the effort."
Again, I think this could have been a first step towards reform, and is notable right now not because it will ever happen but because this kind of industry standard seems totally irrelevant to the general direction comics shops may now be taking.
1. Inkweed, Chris Wright
2. Capacity, Theo Ellsworth
3. Danny Dutch, David King
4. Sammy the Mouse, Zak Sally
5. Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody, Mike Dawson
I couldn't tell if you this is a stupid cartoon, a purposefully racist one, a cynically racist one aimed to attract the attention of blogs like this one and newspaper articles like this one, a means of cultural provocation or what. Hell, I guess it could be as innocent as all get out. Who knows? I don't know. I do know it's a bad cartoon, it should have occurred to someone through whom this cartoon passed that the visual might have implications that would thwart its meaning, and that the only classy thing to do is go, "Oh my God! I'm so sorry!" As a fan of the form and a one-time newspaperman I deeply resent the collective, passive manipulation or shudder-inducing ignorance of the historical echos involved.
in case this cartoon makes your nerves as raw as mine, please know that the headline is a joke in that Delonas is known -- perhaps only known -- for cartoons that routinely draw the ire of GLAAD; the headline is NOT a suggestion that members of GLAAD or the organization itself are all like high-fiving about this cartoon or would be inclined to
* Skim, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki
* I Kill Giants, Joe Kelly
* Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Josh Cotter
* Swallow Me Whole, Nate Powell
* Fluffy, Simone Lia
right up there with the Sea Monkeys, Robert Bell's psuedo-Thor ad, the Look Who's Smiling Now guy and the two tiny men advertisement that ran on the back of The Comics Journal
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the cartoonist Jeff Smith explains why the folks at Cartoon Books are glad that ICv2.com re-examined the way they were reporting a specific Bookscan list so that it included comics material for young people. The reconstituted list featured Bone prominently.
Something that should make a lot of folks sit up is that Smith states they're still selling 1500 to 2000 copies of the one-volume Bone each month and have sold 140,000 total. Given the size of the book and its availability in other formats, those numbers dropped my jaw for sure. Also, I think I can answer Smith's question as to why the 140k number shows up as 50k on those charts. Jeff, the reason those numbers show up in bizarre, haphazard fashion as it relates to the actual numbers is that those charts seem to do a routinely bizarre and haphazard job when it comes to measuring comics sales numbers. I don't know why that is, so I guess that's not much of an answer, but I can assure you this isn't an isolated phenomenon and it isn't something you're doing.
* another massive and long-anticipated book drops, joining Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life: this time it's Humbug.
* the comics business news and analysis site has a succinct post up describing the deal by which Marvel has re-upped with Hasbro. In terms of the company's overall post-'90s bankruptcy success, Marvel's ability to forge amenable licensing deals with various category leaders and near-leaders has been the Dave Prater to the Sam Moore that is their success in movies.
* here's a nice report on Art Spiegelman's keynote address at the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference some days ago now.
* I hadn't read anyone laying the blame for MAD's recent cutbacks as squarely at the feet of DC Comics as Glenn Hauman has here. I'm not sure if it's fair or not; I know very little about that specific situation. One thing struck me: I'm probably in a tiny minority on this, but one of the underlying issues in these MAD articles seems to be its value as a "brand." I'm not a surly teenager. I'm fine with the fact that these things have a kind of detachable, transferable value. However, what I personally find worthwhile about MAD is the magazine, not its brand. Does that make sense? Like if MAD were still going quarterly but they had a rockin' web site, or that TV show of theirs were still going and this time around was a humongous ratings hit instead of a solid performer, I would still feel the exact same sadness about the magazine going quarterly. I mean, I don't look at National Lampoon Presents Dorm Daze at the video store and think "All right! An opportunity for further engagement with the magazine that brought me Shary Flenniken and Michael O'Donoghue!" Then again, maybe I'm just old.
* this article suggests that there may be issues with new terms being discussed for implementation by Facebook, basically as they extend to Facebook's potential ownership of original content.
* finally, Steve Duin's post about missing Eddie Campbell's blog posts made me laugh, because I also get sad and slightly worried when a cartoonist stops posting regularly, if only for a while, even though I should know better.
Michael Atchison, the long-time editorial cartoonist for the Adelaide Advertiser and the Sydney Daily-Mirror, died on Monday from complications due to cancer. Atchison passed away at the Mary Potter Hospice in Wellington. He was 75 years old.
Atchison was born in Victoria, Australia in 1933. He studied at King's College (1946-1950) and Adelaide University Teachers' College (1952-1954), and later received training at the South Australia School of Art. Atchison spent most of the 1950s as a teacher, concentrating on high school-aged art students. He also taught English and French.
Like many artists, Atchison found his first audience overseas. He moved to England in 1960 and spent the majority of that decade freelancing for publications such as the humor magazine Punch (where he also contributed covers) and the literary and political publication Time and Tide.
In 1967, Atchison returned to Australia and became a political cartoonist at the Sydney Daily Mirror. In 1968 he also began providing cartoons to the Adelaide Advertiser. A dog that he included in a 1974 cartoon to pee on a Jackson Pollock painting became his signature creation. The nameless creature frequently appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of Atchison's cartoons getting the last word. In the 1980s, Atchison co-organized an exhibition of modern cartoonist and held a convention in their honor. At the end of the decade, Atchison began a syndicated daily called Word For Word on English usage, which was syndicated internationally.
He also found work as a book illustrator, including the lovely Songs For My Dog and Other Wry Rhymes for the poet Max Fatchen.
In 2007, Atchison was inducted into the Order of Australia for his decades of service to that country's media. "I've never been in favor of awards for just doing your job and I was in two minds about accepting this gong -- but the dog kicked up so much fuss that I thought I'd better say 'okay' just to keep him quiet," he told the Advertiser in their article on the honor. That same year, he won the Jim Russell Award from the Australian Cartoonists Association.
Atchison entered into semi-retirement in the mid-1990s after being initially diagnosed with cancer. He moved into full retirement in early 2008 and declared that it was time for him to find a proper job. Word For Word will run until early May.
He is survived by a wife, two daughters and three grandchildren.
Once More Around The Mulberry Bush
Two responses -- one direct, one not -- to issues of Diamond's shift in emphasis in 2009.
* the gossip columnist and creator Rich Johnston puts on display the strangest definition of "wrong" ever, when he agrees with my assumption that there could be other issues at work driving these moves beyond a four percent decline in business by providing examples of exactly what I'm suggesting.
Johnston further asks if I think it's important that Diamond survive. Of course I do. Diamond collapsing would be disastrous, both for the decimation to comics' infrastructure and the way it would lock up money in a system that's under-capitalized to begin with. But if that's what at issue, let's have that discussion, then, and not this low-key barrage of vaguely portentous press releases, deck-chair rearrangement and obfuscation. For a start, let's have some reconciliation on the idea that the elimination of items in which we're told relatively no one has any interest significantly helps solve problems hitting the part of the business that doesn't traffic in them. I don't get that. If Diamond and the DM is as sick as Johnston suggests, or is even at risk to the extent many people watching the general worldwide economy might guess, refining a system so that it excludes Crickets seems to me like the 49th of 50 moves you'd want to make. Where are the reforms that hit comics that people actually buy? If DC or Marvel or Diamond itself has wet the bed, why should Rick Veitch sleep on the floor? Who does that help?
In my original piece I expressed sympathy with Diamond. I want them to be a better business, too. I'm in no way a Diamond basher: I think in their period of dominance they've done many things surprisingly well, some things they've done well according to any standard. I just don't get these decisions. All I'm suggesting is that 1) strict minimums may not be the smartest way to engage in reform, but is in fact an easy way to do that and one that keeps with comics' archaic standard of "fairness" and perhaps even Diamond's lingering self-conception as one comics distributor among many. 2) These changes could have a drastic long-term effect much bigger than the immediate impact and in effect close a lot of doors and options forever. Forever. 3) They are taking place in a way that suggests either no Big Picture for the Direct Market or one that emphasizes a Big Picture that the Direct Market is in many ways ill-suited to fulfill. 4) The moves have been made too quickly. 5) Other options are available to them that accomplish many of the same goals.
* the retailer and industry advocate Brian Hibbs looks at the Chris Butcher's post on Viz having a huge swathe of their back catalog de-listed as less of a big deal, because those books don't sell. I don't think anyone who's pointed this out hasn't freely admitted that the books feeling the impact are marginally successful at best, irrelevant at worst. Butcher's post in particular is much less alarmist than even my own.
What I believe Butcher's argued and the point on which I think we find agreement is that it's yet another example of Diamond quickly and perhaps irrevocably shifting away from one model -- the traditional comic shop model, no less -- to another, vaguely defined one. It's weight loss with a chain saw. It's a winnowing of options with a risk of permanency. With the rise of other options for buying comics, I'm uncertain whether these are the wisest decisions, particularly long-term. Just because it's unlikely that a majority of comics stores would ever have become like The Beguiling or Comix Experience doesn't decrease my sorrow when that likelihood gains structural force to bolster its cultural and economic momentum. Just because the markets have been largely unable to support certain books doesn't mean I didn't hold out hope that it one day would, and that the DM could lead.
You know, I used to argue that if the Direct Market system would embrace reform, a first step could be to make it an industry-wide value whereby anyone could walk into any comics store and be able to receive accurate information about any comic and, if they wanted, order any comic still in print with a reasonable expectation to receive that book. Not only does this seem less likely than ever to happen, it appears increasingly beside the point of what the DM insists on becoming. Comics history is full of stories of late-comers and second chances. It breaks my heart to see comics shutting doors instead of keeping them slightly ajar.
Story of the Year
* Bayou, Jeremy Love
* Incognegro, Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece
* Justice League of America: The Second Coming, Dwayne McDuffie and Ed Benes
* Pilot Season: Genius, Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman and Afua Richardson
* Presidential Material: Barack Obama, Jeff Mariotte and Tom Morgan
Best Writer
* Marc Bernardin & Adam Freeman, Pilot Season: Genius
* Mat Johnson, Incognegro
* Jeremy Love, Bayou
* Jeff Mariotte, Presidential Material: Barack Obama
* Dwayne McDuffie, Justice League of America
Best Artist
* Jamal Igle, Supergirl
* Jeremy Love, Bayou
* Warren Pleece, Incognegro
* Afua Richardson, Pilot Season: Genius
* Larry Stroman, Black Panther Annual #1
Best Male Character
* Black Lightning, Final Crisis: Submit (Grant Morrison and Matthew Clark and Norm Rapmund and Rob Hunter and Don Ho; created by Tony Isabella and Trevor von Eeden)
* Black Panther, Black Panther Annual #1 (Reginald Hudlin and Larry Stroman and Ken Lashley; created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
* Lwanga Moses, Unknown Soldier (Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli; inspired by the character created by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert)
* The Spectre, Final Crisis: Revelations (Greg Rucka and Philip Tan and Jeff de los Santos and Jonathan Glapion; inspired by the character created by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Bailey)
* Zane Pinchback, Incognegro (Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece)
Best Female Character
* Destiny Ajaye, Pilot Season: Genius (Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman and Afua Richardson)
* Lee Wagstaff, Bayou (Jeremy Love)
* Storm, X-Men: Worlds Apart (Christopher Yost and Diogenes Neves; created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum)
* Vielle, Fungus Grotto (Shatia Hamilton)
* Vixen, Vixen: Return of the Lion (G. Willow Wilson and Cafu; created by Gerry Conway and Bob Oksner)
Rising Star Award
* Jennifer Crute, Jennifer's Journal
* Damian Duffy and John Jennings, The Hole: Consumer Culture
* Charlie Goubile, Blackbird
* Starline X. Hodge, Candi
* Ashley Woods, Millennia War
Best Reprint Collection
* Aya of Yop City, Drawn & Quarterly
* Me and the Devil Blues V1, Del Rey
* Nat Turner HC, Abrams
Best Cover
* Final Crisis: Submit, Matthew Clark and Norm Rapmund and Richard Horie and Tonya Horie
* The Hole: Consumer Culture, John Jennings
* Pilot Season: Genius, Afua Richardson
* Unknown Soldier #1, Igor Kordey
* Vixen: Return of the Lion #1, Josh Middleton
Best Comic Strip
* Bayou, Jeremy Love
* Cafe con Leche, Charlos Gary
* Fungus Grotto, Shatia Hamilton
* "Jefferson Jacks" from Crankshaft, Tom Batiuk and Tony Isabella and Chuck Ayers
* The K Chronicles, Keith Knight
Fan Award for Best Comic
* Iron Man: Director of SHIELD #33-35, Christos Gage and Sean Chen and Sandu Florea
* Pilot Season: Genius, Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman and Afua Richardson
* Presidential Material: Barack Obama, Jeff Mariotte and Tom Morgan
* Vixen: Return of the Lion, G. Willow Wilson and Cafu
* Young Avengers Presents #1, Ed Brubaker and Paco Medina
* The Bottomless Bellybutton, Dash Shaw
* The Wuvable Oaf, Ed Luce
* Jin & Jam # 1, Hellen Jo
* PS Comics 4, Minty Lewis
* Lulu & Mitzy Best Laid Plans, S. Eddy Bell
Watching The Watchmen Watchers 05: Regional Screenings Should Begin Today
I'm probably not going to run many article on the Watchmen movie, but it occurs to me that the first I've heard about screenings indicated they'd start today and/or tonight, so informed advance word should start in tomorrow morning.
I know that's not comics, and weak not comics at that. But I thought I might give those of you given over to googling around for things like that a heads up.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* I keep on forgetting to post this: Marc Weidenbaum has parted ways with Viz, and with him goes their plans for an original content line, at least for the time being. Weidenbaum has always struck me as a smart guy with a strong sense of what's excellent in comics and why, so no matter what happened that led to the departure I would consider this an overall loss for comics.
* great news: D&Q has copies of almost-certain book of the year candidate A Drifting Life, and it looks pretty darn gorgeous.
* also really good news: details via interview on Yen Press' acquisition of Yotsuba&!. They'll do the remaining volumes (which I believe to be #s 6-8) and may look into re-doing the earlier volumes either by acquiring the existing English translations from ADV or, if I'm reading the interview correctly, doing another one of their own.
* David Brothers talks about Jack Kirby's use of diverse characters, and how the Captain America/Falcon friendship in the sometimes-maligned "Mad Bomb"-era Captain America felt like an actual friendship between peers instead of a superhero/sidekick situation or an icon/acolyte deal.
* not comics: it's like this blog post on the peak aesthetic eras for all the major sports was written for me. Or by me. I try to explain to people that the NFL in the 1960s and the NBA in the 1970s were absolutely superior in terms of the experience involved and the level of game play as you got to see it unfold in front of you, and it's nice to read someone agree with me. I'd probably disagree most extensively with his college basketball analysis, because I think the Golden Age is actually 1976-1985, with the Big Ten anchoring the first part of that run and the Big East anchoring the second part. Just look at some of those Final Four teams from the early '80s sometime. It's ridiculous.
* finally, although I understand the inherent difficulty of linking sales, there are a number of works being offered through Fantagraphics at discounted prices that you'll likely never see again. The two that jump out at me are Paul Ollswang's Doofer: Pathway to McEarth and Gerald Jablonski's Empty Skull Comics Volume One, two of my favorite comics publications ever and almost ruthlessly unmarketable in a modern sense.
Francisco Flores "Corky" Trinidad Jr., the long-time Honolulu Star-Bulletin editorial cartoonist widely believe to be the first Asian editorial cartoonist working on a North American publication, died on Friday morning from complications due to pancreatic cancer. He was 69.
Trinidad was born in Manila in 1939, and earned a degree in Journalism from the University of Ateneo de Manila in 1960. His popularity at the Philippines Herald starting in 1961 attracted the attention of the comics syndicates. He began work at the Star-Bulletin in 1969, coming to that paper's attention through his Herald work and from a strip for Pacific Stars and Stripes called Nguyen Charlie. Beginning to feel the heat from Ferdinand Marcos because of critical cartoons, which may have eventually led to the cartoonist's imprisonment, Trinidad was grateful to relocate. (He would later publish a book about Marcos in 1986, Marcos: The Rise and Fall of a Regime.)
The move to Hawaii began a nearly four-decade relationship that only recently ended when the ailing cartoonist went on leave due to the cancer. Trinidad was popularly locally and also became the first widely-syndicated Asian editorial cartoonist in North America, his work showing up in publications such as Newsweek, USA Today, and the New York Times. His work also appeared in publications in the Philippines and throughout Europe.
Trinidad became a popular, ingrained aspect of the Star-Bulletin, and was called its public face upon his passing. His cartoons regularly appeared in the news section as opposed to the editorial page, making him perhaps the last North American editorial cartoonist that enjoyed this distinction. In fact, he did a color one for the news section and a black and white one for the editorial pages, putting him a rare group of prolific cartoonists able to handle more than offering on a publication day. He also taught, and for a time took on strip work in addition to his panels.
Trinidad would go on to win a number of regional awards for this work in the Star-Bulletin, and was put into the Hawaii Journalism Hall of Fame in 2005. He also syndicated two strips while in Honalulu, Zeus! and Aloha Eden, drawing on a love for mythology. He became a towering figure in Hawaii cartooning circles, both for his work and for teaching at the University of Hawaii.
He is survived by his wife, Hana, five children, two grandchildren, two brothers and a sister.
An official web site can be found here, with a cartoon on its front page that Trinidad complete a while ago in anticipation of his own passing.
On Not Seeing The Spinner Rack For The Individual Comic Book Issues
Chris Butcher brings to the front burner that in addition to its recent more celebrated moves such as raising item minimums and moving its adult catalog into an on-line iteration, Diamond Comics Distributor Inc. is dropping their enormous Viz backlist from the catalog altogether. I think if you combine this with their recent change in policy about reorder and offered/agains, Matt High has it right in the comments: this is less a single move (raising minimums) to better deal with outside economic pressure and more a series of strategic shifts to push the company's identity now and perhaps forever towards servicing new product.
I still find this troubling for all the reason I explained here, although the emphasis of that article might have changed if I had been smarter about how I processed the company's recent moves. I think this makes the speed of the moves that much more alarming. I don't understand what's driving the company to move this quickly unless it's fear, there are some outside financial factors involved, or they know about a game-changing move in the works at one of their suppliers. While this does push Diamond more towards a clear Big Picture identity along the lines of "we provide the newest comic books," I'm unconvinced that's the best one available to them and confused they felt they had to make such a choice right now. Emphasizing newer comics is a model with obvious limitations. You're emphasizing the comics delivery system that's the least profitable, the most poorly priced, and the most limited. It seems like the solution for the shopping habits of 20 years ago as opposed to the one developing as more and more people streamline the Internet into how they consume on all levels, all the primary buyers get another decade older and less likely to jump through hoops so they can acquiesce to weekly exploitation, and buyers in general pull away from certain kinds of consumption generally. I'm baffled.
I know that one can argue that all these moves do is better lock into place the general direction of that market for the last 10 or 20 years, that this simply makes more official an unofficial retail experience that's dominated that Market for years. But you know what? You can also argue that that's been an abusive relationship, that the historical decline is more important than the ups and downs and occasionally pumping for cash that takes place, and that continuing the strategy of maximizing profit by moving the most comics to the fewer buyers runs the greatest risk of those buyers finally abandoning you, if they haven't been already. It's as if Diamond is finally admitting that offering the widest variety of comics via an array of ordering options was a marginal game all along. Yet instead of coming to their senses and working to make those books less marginal to the underlying mission, treating a sudden interest in, say, Scott Pilgrim as an opportunity to give their clients another sales anchor as opposed to treating it like some unwelcome party crasher, they're moving to cut them off entirely. It reminds me of a Marvel sales presentation 14 years ago where the guys in charge in their crazy buying Fleer/Heroes World days talked with a straight face about how carrying comics other than those by Marvel made it too difficult for people to find their Marvels. In actuality, carrying things other than Marvel and DC is the only thing that kept me going to the comics shop, where I dropped thousands of dollars and where I also bought some Marvel Comics. I have almost no reason to go to a comics shop now. I may not have been the best customer, but I was an amenable one, happy to shop in someone else's clubhouse. I can't imagine there are a lot of stores out there that would directly choose to turn down my $2000 a year right now. Why is this decision being made for them? Is my place in the comics shop really being taken up by some guy who's buying more superhero comics now that I'm gone?
PS -- Someone just sent me this essay. I don't agree with all of the logic or assumptions on display, nor would I conclude the same thing. I am sympathetic to the general thrust.
* Local, Brian Wood & Ryan Kelley
* Skim, Mariko & Jillian Tamaki
* Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds
* Token, Alisa Kwitney & Joelle Jones
* The Umbrella Academy: The Apocalypse Suite, Gerard Way & Gabriel Ba
Rob Tornoe catches the story, which slipped by a few weeks ago with almost no media source taking notice. That may be due in some ways to the process involved. Apparently the entire editorial staff was fired and then reapplied for jobs, some moving into new positions. His last cartoon was January 20. Ironically, Tornoe's article noted that the Times had backed original content generation as a way to survive the economic maelstrom that is newspaper publishing right now. His work is still up here. Garner made headlines in 2005 for a cartoon depicting Pakistan as a dog.
1. Far Arden, Kevin Cannon
2. Only Skin #3 (continuing series), Sean Ford
3. Children and God #2 (continuing series), Kelly Clancy
4. Lutefisk Sushi Volume C, Various Minnesota Cartoonists
5. Nurse Nurse #2 (continuing series), Katie Skelly
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com returns to its look at 2008 book sales figures and folds in numbers for kids and young adult titles.
* Jesse Hamm has a nice, short review up regarding the quality of the expensive Jesse Marsh Tarzan volumes. It's the first review I can remember seeing. I always liked the way Marsh's stuff looked.
* jack-of-all-trades and master of several Tom Devlin over at Drawn and Quarterly draws attention to Ron Rege's writings on his latest work.
* the prominent blogger and cartoonist Mike Lynch writes about not letting people use his work without paying him first. A lot of people feel the way Lynch does, they just don't say so out loud for fear of looking ungrateful or out of touch. I think it's totally up to the cartoonist how they approach what they charge and for which pieces and in what context, and no one gets to decide for them.
* finally, I'm not sure how this hero history of Dr. Strange's masked superhero period got into my bookmarks, but it's a cute article. I remember when I was a kid being struck by how horrible it seemed to be to go from not having to wear a mask to wearing one that fits tight over your head. I always hated wearing hats when it was cold out, so I'm sure that played into it.
FFF Results Post #151 -- High Bidder
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Items Not Primarily Weapons That Only Exist In Comics You'd Bid For Were They To Magically Appear On eBay." Here are their responses.
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. Twitch City on Vinyl
2. Mr. Mind's Radio
3. The Wilber Webb collection
4. Legion Flight Ring
5. Harmonica Played By Rick Jones On Gamma Bomb Testing Site
*****
Evan Dorkin
1. The championship belt from whatever fed it is Rena Titanon wrestled for. I don't think she owns her belt, otherwise I'd just say Rena's belt.
2. The Complete "Dangers of Ivan/Horrors of Ivan" T.V. series on DVD
3. A year's subscription to the Daily Bugle
4. One of the Puppet Master's Thing marionettes
5. Reed and Sue's wedding album
*****
Uriel A. Duran
1) Joker fish taxidermy mount
2) Clothes made of unstable molecules
3) Full set of Hoi Poi Capsules
4) Signed copy of 'My Little Chickadee' novel
5) Old Daily Planet newspapers featuring Superman in the front page
1. Slice of preserved birthday cake from Superboy's Smallville farewell party.
2. Mxyzptlk's derby
3. Giant key to Fortress of Solitude
4. Peter Parker's test tubes and chemistry set.
5. Flash's ring (with costume, natch).
1) Spider-Man's web shooters
2) The Thing's module of the Fantastic Four's Fantasti-car
3) Barry Allen's Flash ring
4) Scott Pilgrim's bass guitar
5) Jack Knight's goggles
*****
John Vest
1. Doctor Strange's Eye of Agamotto
2. A Fantastic Four belt buckle that opened the elevator door
3. Dick Tracy's wrist TV
4. Mr. Natural's beany cap that he wore in Hup
5. Thor's norn stones from The Trial Of The Gods
1. A copy of The Daily Bugle that ran the very first (but certainly not the last) anti-Spider-Man editorial by J. Jonah Jameson.
2. A preserved, under class, piece of cake doled out to all town-members by Superboy on his final day in Smallville.
3. The glass doorknob Tubby Tompkins repeatedly --and unsuccessfully--tried to pawn off as a crystal ball to Lulu Moppet.
4. The Beatles wig The Yancy Street Gang bestowed upon The Thing.
5. The outfit Chuck wore as The Listener during "The NEW Blackhawk Era" (I need some new pajamas, y'see...).
1. The Fantasticar (This should be on EVERYONE's list!)
2. Mr. O'Malley's Magic Havana Cigar
3. Happy Hooligan's tin can hat
4. A tadpole in a pickle jar of water in a tiny perambulator (ala Pogo, natch!)
5. One of those "flying trashcans" from Dick Tracy
*****
Ben Towle
* Buddy Bradley's Kaz-designed truck (AKA: "The Polio-Mobile")
* The Sea Hag's magical flute
* The "Frost Axe" LP from "Black Metal"
* The Rocketeer's jet pack
* A Dagwood sandwich actually assembled by Dagwood
*****
David Jones
1. The debut album by the First Million Megaton Explosion (Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #11)
2. The debut album by the Soular System (Bunny #7)
3. Madame Xanadu's tarot deck
4. The Shadow's girasol ring
5. The Phantom Stranger's groovy medallion
*****
James C. Langdell
1. A Shmoo or two
2. Junior Woodchucks Handbook
3. Shoes worn by Don Martin characters
4. A saxophone-like instrument from Ylum
5. A square yard of blue outing flannel guaranteed to be as comforting as Linus's
*****
Shannon Smith
1. A Mother Box.
2. Kevin Matchstick's green card for infinite atm machine cash.
3. THB
4. King Mob's crazy ass mask head dress thing.
5. One of Superman's robots. Ya know. Just to keep the fortress tidy.
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. Barry Allen's Flash ring (with costume)
2. Case of Gingold soft drink
3. Kryptonian baby blankets (set of three)
4. Reflections: A Collection of Essays and Speeches, by Princess Diana of Themyscira [the book Wonder Woman wrote near the beginning of Greg Rucka's tenure]
5. A Hicycle
*****
Adam Mix
1. Jimmy Corrigan's Superman Sweater
2. Aunt May's Wheat Cake Spatula
3. Jimmy Olsen's Bowtie Collection
4. Krypto's Dog Collar
5. Reed Richards' Pipe
*****
Dave Knott
* Arumbaya fetish
* Scarface ventriloquist's dummy
* Click! remote control
* Daigoro's baby cart
* A Rube Goldberg device
*****
Adam Casey
1. The "Bizarro No. 1" medallion
2. The Death Note
3. Tony Stark's liquor cabinet
4. The Bottle City of Kandor
5. Tick's Viewmaster.
*****
Vito Delsante
1. Gingold (the Elongated Man's stretchy formula)
2. Any article of clothing made with Unstable Molecules
3. Pseudoderm and a belt that has binary gas
4. A carton of milk with Hopey Glass' picture on it
5. the boxing gloves Ted Grant wore when he won the world heavyweight championship (but not the ones that were doctored to kill his mentor)
*****
Gerry Alanguilan
1. The Arumbaya Fetish
2. Kurt Wagner's Image Inducer
3. Any painting by Peter Rasputin
4. A piece of shredded purple Hulk pants.
5. Kryptonite
1.) An Ape Sex recording.
2.) Kaneda's bike.
3.) Calvin's transmogrifier.
4.) An actual "Fight or Run" video game (ideally for the Wii).
5.) One of those hallucinogenic tubers that grew on Swamp Thing's back. (Probably need a creative description to sneak this one past eBay's T.O.S.)
*****
Chris Duffy
1. Ape Sex T-Shirt
2. Gyro Gearloose's Helper
3. Ma Hunkle's Helmet
4. Woodstock's hockey stick
5. Cosmic Cube -- I'd choose "buy it now"
*****
Danny Ceballos
* The Sandman's bag of sand
* Errata Stigmata's scarf
* Ed The Happy Clown's false nose
* Dr. Millmoss' fedora
* Marlys' eyeglasses (so I could return them to her)
1. WEBS: Peter Parker's coffee table book of Spider-Man photographs (signed by the author).
2. A page of original art from Steve Rogers' run on CAPTAIN AMERICA. A vivacious line, coupled with an almost forensic eye for detail lifts this work above the sub-Kubert journeymanism of HOWARD THE HUMAN.
3. Bumblebee.
4. A 2001-vintage leather jacket as worn by staff and students at Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters.
5. A homemade handbound edition of the complete TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER.
*****
Russell Lissau
1 Vigilante's goggles
2 The Crow's boots
3 The Authority's Carrier
4 Grave's case (from 100 Bullets -- not the gun/bullets inside, but the case itself)
5 An Umbrella Academy logo jersey
*****
Andrew Mansell
1. Orion's Flying Harness
2. Jimmy Olsen's Elasti-Serum
3. The Giant Penny from the Batcave
4. The Wildwood Cemetery window treatments
5. The Minstrel's lute from Groo
*****
Jean-Paul Jennequin
1. Hollis Mason's book "Under The Hood"
2. Robby Reed's H Dial
3. The Cosmic Cube
4. Dr Doom's Time Travel machine (or any Time Travel machine out of comics as long as it works)
5. A batch of Super-Goof's peanuts
*****
thanks to all that participated. My apologies to those who riffed on the question or provided extra/unclear answers; I love to read them, but if I post them people will use them as "legal" arguments the next time they want to post something I don't like as much. Those kinds of arguments ruin this for me, so whatever I can do to avoid them, I will.
Quote Of The Week
"This game of ours always began the same. Dad would draw a picture of Ziggy happily strolling along, unaware of some horrible misfortune about to befall him. Ziggy might be zooming off a cliff, walking unknowingly into an open manhole, or oblivious to a meteor plummeting head-on his way. After Ziggy had been drawn into one of these dire circumstances, Dad would flip the placemat around, hand me his pen, and say, 'Tommy, it's time for you to SAVE ZIGGY!" -- Tom Wilson, Jr.
this week's imagery comes from one of the great underground comix
I don't remember all of the publishing aims involved with Round Two of Viz's "Let's stuff the shelves with groups of Naruto books at a time for few months" move. I'm guessing that while Round One was about moving the magazine and volume-by-volume serialization to a more popular point in the series Round Two is about catching the series with the Japanese release, but I honestly don't know. Still, I have to imagine that new that the series volumes 34-37 all ended up on the USA Today chart reasonably clustered together has to be good news for that company.
Newspaper industry bible Editor & Publisherreports that Nate Beeler was honored for winning the 2008 Clifford K. Berryman and James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning, as announced last Fall. This is notable in that a) it's a significant honor, and b) I believe Beeler is younger than 30 years old, with what seems like a bright future ahead of him.
A few folks wrote in to ask if there were any other photo sets out there as fun to look at as Alvin Buenaventura's. There's not one that I've seen in terms of exactly what might specifically interest a North American fan -- and Alvin had a monopoly on Crumb -- but I greatly enjoyed this one by the Metabunker folks, too.
President Obama Is The New Wolverine
So apparently the President Obama/Spider-Man team-up sold over 300,000 copies and, conceivably, may have sold tens of thousands of copies more outside of Direct Market channels. I just wanted to make note of this with its own post. If you consider the fact that many fans and some stores felt the issue was underordered in the places they chose to shop for it, that's an astonishing successful stunt offering. It's good to have stunt offerings hit right when the economy starts running around and punching small businesses in the kidneys with greater than ever intensity.
Also, I think if he turns out to be a resilient commander-in-chief, President Obama should be discussed in terms of having a healing factor.
* Klassic Komix Klub, Johnny Ryan
* Comics Are For Idiots, Johnny Ryan
* Angry Youth Comics #14, Johnny Ryan
* The New Character Parade, Johnny Ryan
* Misery Loves Comedy [2nd Edition], Ivan Brunetti
You need to read the actual entry for the joke, however.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* this article in the Chicago Reader refers to articles and opinions that have been heavily linked-to here in the past few weeks, and the upshot that alt-weekly comics are doomed should also be familiar. A point I hadn't seen made elsewhere is that papers are saving so little money by doing this that it's amazing they've bothered making the cuts.
* I knew I liked that David Welsh guy. He agrees with me that Steve Gerber is the best candidate for the Mad Ideas School of Comics Writing progenitor.
* finally, one of Walter Isaacson's friends needs to tackle him and sit on him until the publicity cycle passes for his new, awful article on how to save newspapers. As Bill Randall suggests, Isaacson's gut-wrenchingly horrible as an advocate for newspapers, the kind of person that through a general disconnect with the specifics of his subject matter makes the situation he describes seem 10 billion times more concretely damning than if he'd never entered the discussion. Not only are micropayment plans not really on any serious person's table as a mechanism that would save newspapers, the vague suggestion of the same was kicked to the curb a decade ago. It makes Isaacson sound desperate in exactly the way that Randall says he does, and makes the print magazine that bought the article seem like it's an out of touch dinosaur, too. I do think we may see some creative re-examination of old models in the next half-decade, but that specific one is not up to the task of saving the newspapers. Not at all. And we are so far beyond noodling around vague solutions at this point it's not funny.
Not Comics: There Was No Greater American Than Henry Highland Garnet
"It is in your power so to torment the God cursed slaveholders that they will be glad to let you go free. If the scale was turned, and black men were the masters and white men the slaves, every destructive agent and element would be employed to lay the oppressor low. Danger and death would hang over their heads day and night. Yes, the tyrants would meet with plagues more terrible than those of Pharaoh. But you are a patient people. You act as though you were made for the special use of these devils. You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely submit while your lords tear your wives from your embraces and defile them before your eyes. In the name of God, we ask, are you men? Where is the blood of your fathers? Has it all run out of your veins? Awake, awake; millions of voices are calling you! Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves. Heaven, as with a voice of thunder, calls on you to arise from the dust." -- An Address To The Slaves Of The United States, 1843
* Carol Tyler is one of the world's greatest cartoonists and 
I don't think he intended to do so, and please realize this is me talking and not him, but the cartoonist and comics writer Jeff Parker 
The fact that Bookscan reports 719 sell-through from its accounts on Love and Rockets New Stories Vol. 1 while Fantagraphics put 5500 into the total market is something I find interesting not as a measure of sell-through, or L&R's general appeal or the wisdom of the recent format switch. We'll get a much better number for that eventually. I see 719 not so much as a low number -- and it is -- but as a bad number. Non-returnability and the emphasis on initial orders makes Direct Market estimation a much, much firmer and more useful number. Even it's not a perfect one: a lot of royalty statements don't line up with the order numbers in that realm, too. But in contrast to the DM's sometimes suspicious figures, the relative labyrinth of bookstores sales -- the combination of buy-ins and non-returnables and returnables and a longer sales window and warehousing and library sales and stores that don't report -- means that the Bookscan figures should be trusted to carry much, much less.
* the always-excellent Jog 
Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, but when I read Brian Hibb's annual Bookscan editorials, there always seems to be a desperate need to point out how "art comics" do not sell (Dirk Deppey did a a good job of pointing this out on Monday.) Last year, Brian said he was shocked to see that Shortcomings only sold 5000, which is downright laughable from a publisher's point of view, going so far as to say he though this was a "poor" performance. Mind you, this was 5000 in three months (release date: October 2007), a number any publisher of books or comics would be happy with. This year, he points out that Shortcomings sold another 4000 in 2008, but is quick to point out that Tomine's other books did not rank (the short story collections that are five years and older), a critique he does not bestow upon Bechdel, Spiegelman, Satrapi or anyone else. Basically if you publish single-authored comics -- and especially if you are Adrian Tomine -- you don't sell according to Brian, not even with your hometown retailer. How's that for team comics? How's that for supporting a local artist? Why does Brian think this? I don't know. I am guessing that Brian assumes -- incorrectly -- that comics publishers such as D+Q and Fantagraphics have dismissed the comic market, which couldn't be further from the truth. We have never dismissed the direct market. I will, however, dismiss people who repeatedly go out of their way to try and say our books do not sell.
High and low Bookscan numbers are hard to dispute -- 13,000 copies in Bookscan means that a book was certainly a strong seller and 164 means it was a poor seller. Bookscan does point out when a book has done well. Very low Bookscan numbers also point out if a book didn't penetrate. Of course, we're very pleased with the relatively high Bookscan numbers for Lynda Barry and Adrian Tomine. But everything in between high and low is a very large, grey area. Take for instance one of our bestselling titles: Moomin The Complete Tove Jansson Book One. Since its publication almost two and a half years ago (release date: November 2006), it has sold through approximately 6700 copies according to Bookscan, but our distributor FSG has shipped over 20,000; we have shipped over 4000 in the comic market; and our Canadian and UK distributors shipped 13,000 -- approximate total 38,000. Trust me when I say we are happy with every single copy sold in any and every market. And we do not care if Bookscan does not come close to indicating the grand total.
Bookscan doesn't provide an accurate report, but it can be helpful in gauging where our sales lie in relation to other publishers. I use it the same way I use an Amazon ranking -- very loosely. I admit to logging in every Wednesday to see our previous week's numbers. I don't look to see how our books are performing against Naruto or Wimpy Kid, I look to see how our books perform among our distributor FSG's titles, and I look to see how our books perform compared to our closest publishing peer, McSweeneys, and to make sure our books perform as well as the majority of Pantheon's graphic novels (Maus and Persepolis are in their own league, of course.) When I see that Bookscan says that Lynda Barry's What It Is has comparable numbers to Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends for McSweeneys, I am happy. When I do look to see how D+Q titles are performing in the context of comics, I only view the hardcover graphic novel charts (front list -- all from the past 12 months) or back list (everything before the past 12 months), as these are the comics with which we have most in common, not manga mass market paperbacks (with all due respect to the numbers that mass market manga sells.) This is also similar to how the NY Times sorts their list, which is why you don't see The Bible at the top of every chart. Since June 2008, What It Is has been on Bookscan's bestselling frontlist graphic novel in hardcover (meaning a ranking of all hardcovers released in 2008) in Bookscan every week since its release.
1. He's a little bit older.
5. He has a small but visually interesting rogue's gallery.
* the Oregonian is 
* missed it: the New York Times 
* the retailer and prominent blogger Mike Sterling notes 
Most importantly, I think the numbers have been shown not only to be wrong, but to be wildly and erratically wrong. This interferes with any specific lessons we might take away from individual examples and should compounds our suspicion of any analysis involving more than one number. For instance, Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds tell me that rather than the 719 copies Bookscan reports that Love and Rockets: New Stories Vol. 1 sold through the book trade, they've sold just over 4000 copies. That's an astounding difference, not just in terms of the math but how those numbers span the chasm that exists between "uh-oh" and "all right!" "We're thrilled," he wrote back to me. I guess Reynolds could be lying, as I'm sure a lot of publishers and creators have and continue to do. But I don't think he is, and he has a sterling reputation for not doing that. I know from my own past experience comparing royalty statements to Bookscan numbers that they can be way, way, way wrong, and not in any clearly discernible way.
* it's always fun when a cartoonist is willing to post early, amateurish work, like Evan Dorkin with 
* although I'm not the biggest superhero guy, I admire the great runs and stand-alone stories of years past in that genre. I think Marvel's best serial comics were Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man as they arrived right out of the gate. While Fantastic Four peaked with that amazing run that included Galactus and the Inhumans and the Black Panther, Amazing Spider-Man never really hit the same kind of peak (although some people view the final Ditko issues that way). Rather Spider-Man enjoyed the longest quality run out of the gate of maybe any serial comic ever, combining a terrific concept and the most effective employment of Marvel's in-house attention to continuity in style and tone. The series may be a bit spotty issue to issue, but the best single comics are quite well-crafted (check out Peter's awesome head!) and the general arc works much better than you'd think as long-form soap opera. Valerie D'Orazio 
Via 
* another massive and long-anticipated book drops, joining Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life: 
* also really good news: 
* Jesse Hamm 
* I'm enjoying 
