Missed It: Joe Sacco's 2003 Story The Underground War In Gaza
So I went looking this morning for a cover image for Joe Sacco's 400-page Fall release Footnotes In Gaza, which has to be one of the three or four most anticipated books for the rest of the year and is a likely book of the year candidate. I didn't find one that wasn't tiny. I did, however, run back across this PDF of a four-page Gaza story at the New York Times from 2003, and realized I have never run a link to it. So there you go.
Random Comics New Story Round-Up
* when I first did this blog I liked to link to a kind of article called the "Local Cartoonist Profile." The Wenatchee World's profile of Clint Hollingsworth is a near-perfect example of the form.
* a half-dozen of you e-mailed me this flattering but odd article on Love and Rockets. As has probably been pointed out to death by now, it's odd in that 1) the book is now a yearly and has never been a monthly even at its most frequent, and 2) I can't imagine a better gateway than the paperback books that Fantagraphics has released the last few years. They're cheap, there's a lot of material even in the early books, and they're gorgeous-looking. (If someone just wants a sampler, issue #26 of the first series features Gilbert's Frida story and Jaime working four stories in four slightly different styles. It's a great loaner.)
* here's a nice piece on Mark Alan Stamaty's now nearly all-the-way-forgotten MacDoodle Street.
* Chris Butcher's twoposts about CCI are fun, too, but they're a little misguided from my perspective and in a couple of ways touched on in the comments threads I think they launch from faulty presumptions. In general, I feel there's nothing stopping comics as a collective whole from making a better comics con experience out of San Diego right now, utilizing a lot of tools just sitting there, so of course spending imaginary money is going to yield some pretty amazing imaginary results. I'd also rather see companies and individuals focus on the other 51 weeks of the year with more ferocity and creativity and devotion towards sustainable growth as opposed to spending too much more energy and time on the peak experience that is CCI.
* finally, I'm quite fond of this idea for TCJ #300. With perhaps one exception on the list of interviews in the linked-to post, I'm looking forward to reading the final result.
FFF Results Post CCI '09 -- Reprints
A week ago, CR readers were asked to name what comic strip projects they'd like to see reprinted. Here's how they responded.
Tom Spurgeon
1. Barnaby
2. Rudy
3. Trots and Bonnie
4. The Bungle Family
5. L'Autoroute Du Soleil
1. Grimly Feendish
I've only seen a handful of strips starring this character, who was created by Leo Baxendale as the villain in "Eagle Eye, Junior Spy" before getting his own macabre little comedy strip. Baxendale is really badly represented in collected form, but I think the time's right for audiences to get a look at his work, which is full of energy and very funny.
2. Zenith
Grant Morrison was just telling the Onion AV Club last week that he wants Zenith to be available again. Well, sit down with Rebellion and work something out, for pete's sake!
3. Doonesbury
This is long overdue for a proper archival reprinting, ideally with annotations.
4. Urusei Yatsura
Maybe Viz can see their way clear to finally getting this back out there? They never finished the series (or, depending who you ask, even got to the really good stuff) the last time they tried reprinting it in those $15 odd-sized paperbacks they used to do, but all of Rumiko Takahashi's major series are otherwise available in the US.
5. Sugar and Spike
This has got to be the biggest no-brainer that DC has ever sat on. Just starting some Showcases for it would be perfectly satisfactory.
*****
Gary Usher
1. Bobby London's Popeye
2. Smokey Stover
3. Bungle Family (with that awesome Donald Phelps essay as an introduction)
4. The Squirrel Cage by Gene Ahern
5. Leonard Starr's LOA (which I fondly remember reading every day as a kid)
*****
Bart Bush
1. Katzenjammer Kids
2. Smokey Stover
3. Felix the Cat
4. Tiny Tim
5. Kerry Drake
* Conchy by James Childress
* Skippy by Percy Crosby
* The Smith Family by Virginia and George Smith
* The Complete Sam Gross - I would love a huge all-encompassing collection of his cartoons, from The New Yorker to National Lampoon and all things in between.
* The Complete B. Kliban - The early master of the weird cartoon.
*****
Jeff Levine
1. Complete Weirdo
2. Sugar and Spike by Sheldon Mayer
3. Complete Billy De Beck's Barney Google
4. Complete Milt Gross Newspaper Strips
5. Yoshiharu Tsuge complete works
1. "The Katzenjammer Kids" and /or "The Captain and the Kids" by Rudy Dirks, Harold Knerr, there hasn't been a decent collection of any of these two. Not only is it histotic but very funny when Dirks became a master.
2. "The Fox and the Crow" I read them years ago as a kid, and I remember them being very popular among the Comics reading kids.I still have a collection published in Spain in the 70's. I'd like to see a DC Showcase or a Best of softcover in COLOR.
*****
Booksteve
1. Barnaby -- A favorite ever since the aborted eighties reprint series (that were sooooo tiny!) from the late Judy Lynn Del Rey. When she died, they died.
2. Trots And Bonnie -- Believe it or not, I would have picked this even if Tom hadn't reminded me. Was just saying that Shary Flenniken's old-fashioned, classic art-style worked so well with the bizarre, often adult humor. The strips that deal with youthful sexuality would likely keep the strip from being reprinted in the current climate.
3. Batman and Robin -- the 1966 strip with its TV series ties that eventually led to the Dynamic Duo being replaced in their own strip by superhero, Galexo. These little-seen strips would undobtedly have quite a market!
4. Barney Google -- The reprint volume from a decade or so back just whetted my appetite for more of this once hugely popular strip!
5. Ambler -- Probably not as good as I recall but this short-lived Doug Wildey strip from the early seventies has always stuck in my memory.
*****
Chris Scales
1. Barney Google by Billy De Beck
2. The Bungle Family by Harry J. Tuthill
3. more (I could almost say any) English reprints of Suiho Tagawa's Norakuro
4. A Boody Rogers 'library' reprinting at least The Complete Sparky Watts and The Complete Babe, Darling of the Hills
5. A Basil Wolverton 'library' starting with good color reprints of his non-comedic science fiction and horror shorts, including Spacehawk
*****
Louis Wysocki
1. The Gumps
2. Our Boarding House
3. Smokey Stover
4. Early Blondie (the stories with continuity, before the daily gag strip)
5. Brenda Starr
*****
Mike Lynch
* Skippy by Percy Crosby
* Otto Soglow's strips & gag cartoon panels
* A large "Best of" coffee-table book of Don Orehek's work
* Nuts by Gahan Wilson
* White Boy by Garrett Price
1. Urusei Yatsura, Rumiko Takahashi, VIZ Media -- In recent years, VIZ reprinted the rest of Takahashi's not-quite-blockbuster works (Maison Ikkoku, the Mermaid Saga, One Pound Gospel) in the now standard $10 trade format. But this, her first hit, is nowhere to be seen. Less than a third of it has been translated so far... I'd love to see $10 trades of the existing material, plus the other 30 or so volumes we've been missing out on.
2. Sailor Moon, Naoko Takeuchi, Tokyopop -- The rights on this property are a nightmare, and Tokyopop's trades are both poorly made and impossible to find. It'd be great to see a complete reprint of the property done in the style of VIZ's recent Dragon Ball collections.
3. Savage Dragon/Freak Force, Erik Larsen and co., Image Comics -- Savage Dragon has long been my favorite superhero property, but turning new fans onto the series is a bear when so much of the old material isn't available. The newest trade available features stories that are almost 10 years old at this point! The recent Essentials-esque "Savage Dragon Archives" volumes are a nice start, but a complete reprint project of the entire series is long overdue. Mixed up in all that is the SD spinoff Freak Force, a fantastic cult favorite that's vital to the SD story. A collected volume was solicited but never released; if it was, I'd buy it in a second.
4. Buster the Amazing Bear, Tommy Yune, Ursus Studios -- Probably nobody remembers this little miniseries that Tommy Yune self-published back in the early 90s. I loved it to pieces but only ever found 2 issues of it, and I've been waiting 15 years to read the rest.
5. Quantum & Woody, Christopher Priest and MD Bright, Acclaim Comics -- As 90s nostalgia kicks in, hopefully this series will finally get the large audience it always deserved.
*****
Andrew Mansell
1. Complete Gordo
2. Alley Oop Sundays in Color
3. Prince Valiant--The Murphy Years
4. The Complete VIP (including Big George)
5. Jack Cole's Midnight
*****
John Vest
1. Alley Oop
2. Trots and Bonnie
3. Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy
4. Dick Moores' Gasoline Alley
5. The Howard the Duck newspaper comic strips written by Steve Gerber
* Gil Thorpe
* Tank McNamara
* Mandrake the Magician
* Andy Capp
* The World's Greatest Superheroes
*****
Ray Cornwall
1. Armageddonquest by Ronald Raymond Roach. First printed in the mid-90s by Sirius, a completely overlooked trilogy of graphic novels about the Antichrist. Drawn by Roach over a 20-year period on anything from typing paper to napkins to worse, from what I understand, it's brilliant. Printed before its time; the right publisher could make a nice killing on its quirkiness. (While Googling, I found it's now a webcomic over here: http://www.armageddonquest.com/ Still needs a reprinting, though)
2. Very Vicky -- one of those mid-90s self-published books that never came back when the market imploded. More info here: http://www.zompist.com/bob9.html
3. Not Brand Ecch- did you know Marvel's reprinted every superhero Silver Age comic in Masterworks form EXCEPT for these? (OK, granted, they may not be superhero per se, but this is still unreprinted Kirby and Severin work...)
4. Cerebus- ok, yes, Cerebus has been reprinted, sure, fine, phone books. But what about a NICE reprinting? Something Absolute-sized, on nice paper, with all of the backpage matter, so we can see the evolution of Sim, the comics industry and culture in general, and maybe even those one-page Backpages from artists like Jeff Smith, Steve Bissette, et al (assuming everyone would agree to it). At the very least, the columns and interviews could be reprinted, unless there's rights issues.
5. Wandering Star by Teri S. Wood- another 90s book that needs a good home. There's got to be a book publisher out there that would swoop this up.
*****
J Schwind
* Bob Armstrong's Cavalcade of Comics
* The Collected T.S. Sullivant
* John Carter of Mars by Jesse Marsh, Dell Four Color Comics 375, 437, 488
* Yellow Dog #1-12, Print Mint
* Gothic Blimp Works 1-8, EVO
1. Ron Cobb's entire comic output
2. All of Don Martin's Captain Klutz stories
3. John Tenniel's editorial cartoons
4. The Golden Age Simon/Kirby Sandman stories
5. John Severin's work for Cracked magazine
*****
J Bartoletti
The DC Comics of Alex Toth
DC Romance Comics of John Romita
DC Funny Human Comics by Owen Fitzgerald, Mort Drucker and Bob Oksner
Complete Mort Ducker Mad
*****
Matthew Wave
1. The Complete Jingle-Jangle Tales/Pie-Faced Prince of Pretzelberg (and any other children's comic book stories?), by George Carlson.
2. The Complete Scribbly/Red Tornado/reltated titles and features and appearances (including the early, proto comic strip), by Sheldon Mayer.
3. The Complete Neil the Horse (including the comic strip and unpublished color graphic novel), by Katherine Collins (formerly Arn Saba).
4. White Boy/White Boy in Skull Valley/Skull Valley, by Garrett Price
5. The Complete Frankenstein (all incarnations, including unpublished-'til-AlterEgo comic strip), by Dick Briefer
1. Corto Maltese - Hugo Pratt
2. Sam Pezzo, Private Eye - Vittorio Giardino
3. Sinner - Munoz and Sampayo
4. The Tick - Ben Edlund
5. Anything from Moebius
*****
Sean T. Collins
1. Soldier X by Darco Macan and Igor Kordey
2. Rubber Blanket by David Mazzucchelli
3. Miracleman by Alan Moore et al
4. Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
5. I would like to see a more comprehensive run of reprinted Little Golden Books.
*****
Buzz Dixon
1: Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle (not just caveman vs. dinosaurs, but caveman packing an M-60 machine gun vs. international criminals with mutant dinosaurs)
2: Trots and Bonnie (considering how the risque has become legally risky, even an abridged reprint would be better than nothing)
3: Tucker (Joe "Mr. Boffo" Martin's first comic strip)
4: Gorgo (the complete Steve Ditko/Charlton run)
5: Bobby Sox/Emmy Lou (Marty Link's timeless teen comic from the mid-40s to late-70s)
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. Doonesbury, year-by-year a la Complete Peanuts (albeit sized appropriately for the Sunday strips), starting with the "Bull Tales" strips, and either annotated or with a nominal introduction regarding then-current events
2. The Max Collins/Marshall Rogers/Carmine Infantino Batman newspaper strip from the early '90s
3. Thriller, possibly as part of a "let's finish it right" project by Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor von Eeden
4. 'Mazing Man -- I think I'm justified in being surprised that DC hasn't reprinted this yet, considering that many of its current fans probably remember it (even if they didn't read it)
5. Cancelled Comics Cavalcade
*****
Stergio Botzakis
1. Trots and Bonnie
2. Miracleman
3. Urusei Yatsura (aka Lum)
4. Mike W. Barr and Alan Davis's (short) run on Detective Comics
5. Bill Willingham's Elementals
*****
Steven Stwalley
1) The Complete Steven by Doug Allen
2) The Complete Barney Google by Billy DeBeck
3) The Complete Odd Bodkins by Dan O'Neill
4) The Complete Polly and Her Pals by Cliff Sterrett
5) The Complete Sunday Comics of The New York World (hey, if I'm dreaming, I'll dream big)
*****
Robert Boyd
* Wash Tubbs & Capt. Easy -- NBM did the whole run years ago, but those volumes are nearly impossible to find now.
* Bringing Up Father -- some reprints have been done, but rather spottily. I don't know that this deserves a complete reprinting (which is sometimes the lazy editor's approach--it can always be justified for historical reasons, but not always for artistic reasons).
* Eyebeam -- Always loved these strips. The old Texas Monthly editions are not super hard to find here in Texas, though, if you haunt used book stores the way I do.
* King Aroo -- I've only seen intriguing bits and pieces of this, and want to see more.
* The Gumps -- As with Bringing Up Father, I'd like to see a good "best of" collection.
Even more than books, though, I'd like to see all old comic strips that are in the public domain online in some kind of searchable database. I'd even pay for the privilege.
*****
El Robert Boyd
* The classic Jose Munoz and Carlos Sampayo titles like Joe's bar, Sophie Goin' South, Sudor Sudaca, etc.
* El Suenero by Enrique Breccia
* Che by Enrique and Alberto Breccia and Hector Oesterheld
* El Eternauta and Mort Cinder by Hector Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia
* Various books (including Malfalda) by Quino (easy to find in most Spanish language bookstores in my experience)
Tundra: Passed 300 Paper Mark
According to a newly-dropped press release, the comic strip Tundra has passed the 300 client mark. This would be news just because of the rough market out there -- Tundra only started adding papers three years ago -- but is worth noting here because the strip is self-syndicated and thus avoids the 50/50 split with syndicates. Although outside observers have no idea what the Tundra folks are charging and thus can't really speculate on cartoonist Chad Carpenter's income even given what he would gain by not having a distributor to cut in, that's still a major accomplishment. I can't imagine it's a replicable one unless there's a hook like a very low price, but I also imagine a lot of people would pay to hear from Carpenter about this strategy.
ICv2.com: GN Sales Dip In 2009 A short article at ICv2.com suggest that graphic novel sales are down in both DM outlets and bookstores. This is even more worrisome in that sales were buoyed in the first quarter by a crush of books featuring the world's most popular book-format comics work, Naruto, and movie-driven interest from tried and true bestseller turned book-selling sensation Watchmen. This is sort of like your basketball team having a losing record despite suddenly having Kobe Bryant and a time-traveling Michael Jordan in the line-up. It's difficult to imagine the Watchmen surge ever repeating itself, and I'm doubtful the Naruto stunt can be done again, either, although I suspect they'll try.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* Anders Fogh Rasmussen becomes NATO's new secretary-general on Monday. That move had been in doubt at one time, and a very modest contributing reason among many more important ones was the perception of Rasmussen's actions during the Danish Cartoons Controversy.
* this article places new violence in Nigeria in a context that includes over 100 DCC-related deaths back in 2006.
* finally, it seems the Danish Cartoons are a major subject in Bruce Bawer's new book about appeasing radical Islam, reviewed here in the Times. If the characterization of Bawer's argument is accurate, I'd like to reiterate my longstanding take that one may criticize the publication of the original cartoons and not back down one bit from a defense of free speech.
I continue to feel that the original publication of the cartoons was a stunt designed to press an issue rather than a natural outcome of journalistic enterprise. At best -- at best -- this was intended to instigate a dialogue that then got away from the Jyllands-Posten editors in the worst way possible, somehow allowing a handful of agitators to vastly outstrip and outperform a group of media professionals in shaping public opinion on a specific action instigated by those media professionals. They should have the right to publish whatever they want without fear of violent reprisal, but that doesn't make that particular move smart, meaningful, insightful, to the point or any positive value ascribed to it as it has become smaller and smaller in the rear view window. Nor does it necessarily become a more honorable or necessary act as several of those criticizing it have been revealed to be manipulative, free-speech hating, murderous douchebags.
Further, I feel no compunction to provide whatever it is writers mean when they say "support" for the original stunt or its instigators beyond reiterating their absolute right to have done this without that fear of reprisal. It's not in failing to somehow vaguely reach out to the original journalists that the world press failed but in the staggering number of cases where publication after publication lacked the will to provide readers and watchers with crucial information that could only be had by reprinting the cartoons, no matter how personally distasteful or scary. I am sick to the bottom of my balls that every issue with political ramifications these days seems to end up debated in terms of one being a good teammate with the rest of your fellows on the right side of things as opposed to the value of adhering to the principles at stake no matter where your feet may fall.
Three Late Cartoonists I Wish Had Been Honored At The Eisner Awards Ahead Of David Carradine
The talented and well-liked Dave Simons
The brave and generous B.N. Duncan
The multi-talented Gerard Lauzier
those remembered were Majel Barret Roddenberry, Mark Christopher Buck, John Carbonaro, Carradine, Ric Estrada, Rod Gilchrist, Jack Kamen, Michael Silberkleit, Frank Springer, and Forrest Ackerman. Jack and Roz Kirby are also apparently still dead.
(and yes, I know the idea is that the memorial part of the Eisners is for the "comic-con community" and not for comics, but that doesn't mean I have to like it)
* the publisher Kim Thompson has a fascinating post up about how Fantagraphics using a different archival resource for their new Prince Valiant book has led to them publishing an instance of violence that was originally toned down for newspaper publication.
* finally, I very much liked this article, although I'm not sure I can describe it.
Here's what I have from recently that wasn't announced at CCI 2009:
* after seeing Bart Beaty's review of the French-language edition of Randall C's Slaapkoppen, Kenny Penman of Blank Slate wrote in to say that they'll be doing an English-language version of the book (see above) to be out well before Christmas.
* I saw John Pham briefly at his studio on Monday. He's a little bit late -- although nowhere near comics-late -- with the second issue of his Sublife series from Fantagraphics, and the original art he showed me was really, really pretty. He's thinking November or early December for a release date.
* the creator of the great Cromartie High School, Eiji Nonaka, is apparently going to write a new series called Daburu Jei that started a week ago in Weekly Shonen Magazine. It will be drawn by Maru Asakura. Speaking of Nonaka, it's just plain mean that no one has stepped up to publish the last five volumes of Cromartie, one of the half-dozen best comedic comics of the decade.
* I missed this statement from Viz about a One Piece sales effort to mirror the Naruto one from years past. "Beginning in January 2010 and continuing through June 2010, five new One Piece manga volumes will be published each month, for a total of 30 new volumes. The new schedule will launch with volumes 24-28." Does One Piece sell well enough that anyone outside of the Viz offices think this does more good than potential harm? I don't get any sense of this army of One Piece fans out there wanting to drop $300 on a bunch in six months during a recession in addition to anything else they might want to do, but I could be wrong. It's a reasonably popular title. I'm confused.
* finally, the long-awaited Planetary #27 will be published this Fall. Click through the partial image below for a look at the full cover image. It's pretty.
Francisco Hidalgo, a prominent cartoonist in the 1940s and 1950s who worked under the pseudonym Yves Roy and later became a world-class photographer, recently died in Paris. He was 80 years old. Word of his passing came from an announcement by Hidalgo's family.
Hidalgo was born in the Andalusia region of Spain in 1929, and grew up to study art in the European cultural centers of Barcelonia, Madrid and Paris. He initially worked in the Spanish comics industry in the 1940s on such series as Doctor Niebla, Dick Tober and Angel Audaz. He moved to France in the mid-1950s and adopting his surname began a second cycle of comics. He worked for Chouchou, Pilote, Record, Spirou and Vaillant, creating such series as Blason d'Argent with writer Guy Hempay. His most famous gigs in the French-language industry were the series Bob Mallard and the first three episodes of Teddy Ted with Roger Lecureux.
By the late 1960s, Hidalgo had moved full-time into photography. He is best known for a series of colorful city images he began in 1963 and continued well into the 1970s. He was widely exhibited and frequently employed by top of the line photo agencies.
Comic-Con 2009 Notes Wind-Down
* Brian Heater has a fine report up here, doubly so considering he was there in primary fashion for his day job at PC Magazine. He has plenty of terrific photos, including a great one of the Lewis Trondheim burned Marvin sketch page.
* by the way, I'm told that Trondheim has done the burned sketch thing before, and in fact have seen photo evidence. He only does it once a show for obvious reasons -- he has to be asked for a Marvin, and you just don't set things on fire in a crowded place in blithe fashion. Man, what a great gimmick.
* Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics has notes up which are interesting in and of themselves and a huge red flag for the future of comics at the convention in that he openly floats the idea that the alt-comics mainstay may reduce their floor presence in future years. Eric sees the down Saturday as a big sign that the sell-out status of the show directly cuts into the kind of comics fan that publishers like Fantagraphics have traditionally served by coming to San Diego: adults that are oriented towards life and job in a way that doesn't make it easy to plan months in advance for an extended pop culture wallow, the kind that think, "it'd be cool to go look at some comics and maybe buy some Dan Clowes art" the Tuesday before the show. The reason why this could be extra-worrisome is that Fantagraphics is something of an anchor presence for about 10-15 other booths. On the other hand, it should also be noted they made a major shift a few years back from having an entire island with a walk-in dirty comics bazaar to their current set-up without any end-of-comics-at-con talk.
* one solution from where I sit is that alt-comics would soon have a presence off the floor, say at a hotel in a slamdance's-relationship-to-sundance type festival fashion that allowed people free and easy access to a number of comics and cartoonists in a more casual setting, but I suspect there's not enough money in comics for anyone to see this kind of thing through.
* by the way, here are my general and extremely selfish suggestions for the show: 1) no one enters any panel after the halfway point, period, except press. The last 20 minutes of the Richard Thompson panel was ruined for a lot of people by people walking in late to listen to how to pitch Hollywood, and I can't think of a single reason why letting people in so late is a good idea. The exception is the press, who can conceivably actually benefit by seeing as many pieces of as many panels as possible. 2) Somehow restore the lost continent of ArtistAlley to the rest of the comics part of the show. I couldn't in good faith suggest people even visit the many awesome cartoonists over there because it's so far away and so hard to get there. I realize that many people may think there are benefits to having this stuff where it is. 3) Encourage even more aggressive, sophisticated programming, particularly the how-tos, building on a strength of this year. For example, the CBLDF Masters track or something exactly like it should be locked in as a part of every Comic-Con to come. 4) Consider limited-access memberships (floor-only), adjustable memberships (moving from four-day to one- or two-day once programming tracks are announced, perhaps by allowing people to sublet memberships through a dedicated, mini, CCI Stubhub) and a massive culling of the professional and press ranks. 5) Make a con priority of freezing the decline of comics retailer presence at its current level and developing an informal festival track spotlighting no-expenditure con enjoyment. I know that's moving in two different directions. 6) Make a clear declaration of support for any ostensible off-site programming sponsors and consider a "Comic-Con Citywide" initiative with aggressive off-site and free-to-attend events. 7) Consider a deposit system with Travel Planners to reduce the worst excesses of room hoarding and reservation dumping. There were clearly enough rooms available April-on that this should not have been a source of stress for anyone. 8) tape everything in the three big halls and make them available to anyone that registers through information on their badge/con membership. Don't worry about this leaking, leaking is good. But if I were blocked from seeing everything but the last 15 minutes of, I don't know, Joss Whedon, I would want to see the rest of it in something made just for me. 9) Develop a more sophisticated comics press track so that I get more press releases and updates from Archaia and Top Shelf and fewer from the producers of an Adrienne Barbeau movie.
* most of those are probably ridiculous, and not only just because the con is super-successful already. I'm just thinking out loud. I could use fewer Ted Raimi-oriented press releases, though.
* it's also a fact that a great deal of benefit can simply come by covering the show in rigorous fashion and emphasizing the items of importance -- there's no reason CR shouldn't have had a daily book spotlight, for example, and god only knows why I didn't think of this before the show. It's an uphill battle even in the best of times with all cylinders firing. The reason why even the comics press is more likely to talk about some idiotic and I suspect largely imaginary fan culture battle or the series of costumes a television personality wears over something like Johnny Ryan's sell-out debut of his awesome Prison Pit is because that's obviously the way the press and our culture is oriented to a very significant degree now and the numbers bear that out. By all the measures that matter to most people, CCI was not just a success but an almost unassailable one. I thought there might be a larger feedback from pissed-off line-waiters, but it looks like the overwhelmingly positive public conception of that element of the show will continue at least one more year.
* finally, I'm going to try and walk through my own con notes and tighten them up a bit for final publication, and if I do so I'll announce it in random comics round-up tomorrow. I will also launch a Collective Memory by tomorrow AM, I promise.
* first of all, were you aware that Lewis Trondheim did a signing where he set one of his sketches on fire? I heard about this and CR reader Jeremy Stone confirmed:
I was standing in line behind a woman who got a copy of Dungeon signed and she asked for a sketch of Marvin breathing fire in it. Trondheim drew Marvin in the corner of the first page with the fire line spreading out, then lit the corner on fire, let it burn to his inkline, and threw it on the floor, closing it to put out the flames. I wish that I had my camera ready, because it was awesome, and it turned out great. I should have at least taken a picture of the finished product, but I was too awestruck.
I mean, if nothing else happened this year, Trondheim using fire as an impromptu illustrative tool happened. Isn't that cool?
* Okay. The con overall? I thought it was a good show.
* when I say it's a good show, I don't really have a grasp of the entire show and I would look at anyone who would care to make that claim with one of my eyebrows raised and both of my arms crossed. I don't know what it's like to attend the television and film programming even though I could list a bunch of announcement related to such events, or links to such coverage, or a list of the cool parties. To be honest, I don't know what it's like to be more than half-way interested in any non-comics related booth. That's a whole different world.
* but you know, Comic-Con has always been about these different worlds. It's just that it used to be Klingon Ascension Rituals and people playing Magic: The Gathering furiously in a room somewhere (maybe it's still about these things, too), and now it's about people standing in line to watch commercials and maybe establish some sort of connection to celebrities and pop culture makers and the next round of movies and TV shows.
* so what I mean when I think CCI 2009 was a good show is that I think it was a good comics show.
* I will say that I thought you could sense all that other stuff this year more than in years past if you were a comics-interested person. It wasn't just the occasional squeal of a Twilight fan or the Twilight playing cards line that occasionally formed in the more comics-focused area of the exhibition floor or the fact that everyone you know back home wanted to hear about your celebrity sightings when you got there and you might have been able to provide two or three. It may have been a hangover of all the hype and television coverage that wasn't about comics but that you paid attention to anyway. It might have been that comics programming sneaked into more rooms with numbers like 30 and 31 putting you in visual contact with one of those tremendously sad-looking lines. For me, the convention simply felt a bit crazier, an ounce or two more focused and furtive and strained, and I'm not sure I can state it with any more clarity or any more convincingly than that.
* there was also a sense that many people reported to me of the show having settled in, not so much an infusion of new blood but old blood asked to do new things, fans resentful at these other fans for whatever goofy reasons, writers straining for ways to describe the action that were hackneyed in 1995, old-timers seeing a bunch of teenagers and mostly happy kids as some sort of malevolent force because it makes for good copy and a simplistic way to understand what's going on in the comics field and general economy.
* and there was also a sense from some folks that all of this threatened comics, an ironic twist on the days when people wished for mainstream attention like so many Price Is Right contestants wishing to be called on down.
* the mega-retailer Chuck Rozanski lost no time in getting this year's version of his "nobody pays attention to Neal Adams" hue and cry up for folks to see. He has a point in that comics retail may be threatened by a combination of disinterest and the pressure to put on the floor any number of wider media-related booths only too happy to hit the con floor without a figure in their head necessary to make the trip a positive one. I hope that the CCI organizers will treat comics sellers as a unique class and one of value and work with them in a way they can keep a significant presence, as being a place for the purchase of old comic books and original art is a strength of CCI that shouldn't be abandoned easily.
* I don't want to be a hater, but watching Tyrese Gibson in action for a few minutes on I think Thursday made me uncomfortable, mostly because it felt like he was operating as the most effective male booth babe ever seen rather than as a proud creator with a comic of import and impact. I'm uncomfortable with a lot of the hard selling that goes on at the show, so maybe I'm just old, though.
* on the flip side, I don't think that it's the fault of emphasis or the strength of other types of media showings that's putting a cap on comics sales and comics interest. It's the economy generally and the comics economy specifically that's keeping people from buying huge runs of Master Of Kung Fu right now. Many people don't have money right now for more comics than they might otherwise buy. The fact that you can buy comics at a discount through the mail at any time you want from Rozanski's own company kind of puts the damper on hitting the cons looking for anything but the most aggressive bargains. I myself have in recent years have not bought comics at the show -- I did this year -- and instead dropped money on Rozanski's site with its related bargain password. My own reaction is that comics sales were all over the place depending on the individual booth and individual exhibitor, and what might sell varied greatly. The convention and the industry are in flux, so it makes sense that convention sales would be in flux, too.
* I never once had a desire to tweet.
* that said, I would argue that the convention was more comics-interested than ever in an absolute sense. There were 75 people or so at a Richard Thompson panel, 150 very engaged and smart people at a graphic novels panel and maybe 250 or so at Seth's spotlight panel. Ten years ago, numbers for similar panels would have been 25, 40 and 75, respectively. Saturday was dead for a lot of sellers as compared to years past, but I heard that Wednesday and Thursday were better than average and Sunday was competitive. A bigger change mentioned here for many publishers is the lack of wholesale purchasing that used to provide fans with the ability to watch a Bud Plant shop for comics in the manner of someone on a grocery shopping spree, sweeping piles of books at a time into his shopping cart. It's way more complicated than some sort of pressure being felt on comics from the cast of Fringe and the voice actors from The Cleveland Show.
* I really liked Gary Gianni the one time I met him and enjoy his work, but not enough has been made of his method acting at the Eisners. That was really, really odd. Of course, I don't know what to say about it more than note it happened, and to hope that one day I can win one and that Gary will accept it for me as me.
* where CCI really excelled this year comics-wise was in a mostly-strong programming track. I greatly enjoyed the 150 minutes of CBLDF-related "Masters" classes I saw, artists like Mike Mignola drawing for an audience, many with pens and paper of their own. The art made went to the CBLDF auction -- which I'm told hit expected levels generally -- but the pleasure of watching really good cartoonists make comics art and the sight of a bunch of teenagers eating lunch with Jeff Smith while he talked about panel design hit me as an overall positive. On one day, I went from watching Mike Mignola draw to seeing Pat Oliphant sketch in charcoal with a terrifying facility to meeting Leonard Starr on the comic strip reprints panel in the space of about 70 minutes. Starr even told a story about debating the future of comics with Gil Kane, saying he told him that if there were ever a Fyodor Dostoyevsky of the comics, that artist would starve to death. Seth's apparently much-traveled lecture went over extremely well (Seth was a personal tonic for many frantic cartoonists at the show). There were glitches -- I hated the fact you couldn't hear Richard Thompson after the security began to let people into the "Hollywood pitch" panel early -- but for the most part there was a lot of solid talk about comics, and how to make comics, and the value and joy of comics. Darwyn Cooke spent five minutes of his panel talking about David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, which isn't exactly shooting free t-shirts into the crowd. Lewis Trondheim extolled the virtues of a smaller comics industry and the freedom it inspires as well as an international understanding of comics according to the ambition of cartoonists to make long-form work of value and meaning and personal significance. When Stan Sakai finished talking, the audience stood up, bowed, and thanked him for 25 years of comics they enjoyed. Even the mainstream announcements of this creator and that hero and this project seems slightly subdued in favor of an appreciation of this effort over that one. There was a comic-con out there to be had and it was a really good one.
* there was a whole bunch of small stuff that I'll remember from this show. I have a lot of questions, too. Was it my imagination, or does the Elite security team use color-coded shirts now like they're the people from Star Trek? I found the idea of an elite within Elite slightly terrifying. What would cause a teenager to stand in a crowded hallway holding up a sign about the state and nature of Comic-Con for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon? What was Herbert Jefferson reading every time I walked by? Where does a line wrangler employ their skills the rest of the year, and do they use them at places like the grocery store or the DMV? Is it bad that I think I preferred the people that used to be grumpy at CCI than all the questions about how the con was going from hotel staff and servers and cab drivers (although I actually heard plenty of grousing, too, particularly about tipping). Why were there fewer costumes? Where was Warren Ellis? How could I not see Ted Stearn when I was there all four days? Where are my pants? What is my name? How much money was it for one of those con badges that guy was selling?
* finally, I bet someone writes an article about how comics needs to make better use of the hype machine that attaches itself to Comic-Con's film and television and games and related media portions, that the publishers need to do a better job of making talent available and making a bigger deal of its publishing news. Ironically, this may even come from a site or two that spent more of the show noting the presence of such media and furrowing its brow over what it all meant more than it did making a big deal of, say, Fantagraphics announcing The Complete Nancy. I think it's actually to comics credit that it hasn't made a bigger deal of maximizing hype. There was a lot of news at this show. Off the top of my head, Jeff Smith announced a further partnership with Scholastic on Bone material, Darwyn Cooke and IDW announced the content of the next Parker adaptation and the expected due date, longtime absolute anchor of the alternative comics world Eric Reynolds was announced as being promoted to associate publisher at Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly will be publishing the next Dan Clowes work, AdHouse will take its winning approach to art books that served it on projects with Paul Pope and James Jean to relative newcomer Rafael Grampa (who will also do two projects with Dark Horse in the interim), Boom! is going to be doing an edition of Don Rosa's The Life And Times Of Scrooge McDuck and taking its muppet comics back to an ongoing series format, books from vastly under-appreciated artists like Johnny Ryan and Bob Sikoryak sold out, Marvel will throw its hat into the Marvelman ring... a lot of that news was reported here during the show in timely fashion but more importantly news of these projects need to shape our expectations and anticipation and our ongoing attention moving forward. Like the fire set by Lewis Trondheim, a lot of what passes for news in San Diego quickly burns out. I don't want to think about Megan Fox anymore, and I'm not sure why we had to. We have an industry to sustain, full of great projects and talented artists. This week is more exciting than last week because while there's no convention to cover or attend there's also nothing getting between the cartoonists in attendance and making the work which is the medium's lifeblood. Hooray for CCI 2009. Now the real fun begins.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up * I was able to find a nice home for the Peanuts art I had. A sincere thank you to all of you that inquired, and to everyone that helped. I feel as positive about that art getting to move on as I'm grateful for the period of time in which I was able to have temporary custody of it. Keep watching this site for further chapters of my mid-life crisis comics and comics-related item dispersion.
The Comics Reporter Twitter Update
The funny thing is that I knew going in this was going to be the Twitter Comic-Con, but I had no intention of adding my voice to the chorus of what was a weekend reported in mostly real-time.
I'm going to have a problem with using Twitter generally in that I'm not on-line a lot of the time. I don't even take a computer to conventions. I no longer own a mobile communications device. At the office, I try to turn the computer off for four to six hours of my workday. This disqualifies me from maximizing the obvious opportunity represented by the popularity of this platform: constant attention to all things comics, reported in something akin to real time. I can only hope there will remain a place for not real-time commentary and analysis, and that you'll continue to read this site for that kind of material.
Further, I'm not inclined to build whatever brand I'm supposed to be building -- I guess CR -- through personal confession. I'm boring, and I can't imagine anyone on earth not in my immediate circle cares when I get on a plane or what I ate for breakfast or that my football team is winning or that I'm re-reading Jernigan. A lot of people can pull that off, and I enjoy reading about them, but I'm not one of those people.
All that babbling is to say I'm working with three accounts right now, one or more of which you might find useful.
@comicsreporter, where I sift through comics people's stuff, post breaking news if I happen to be on-line (don't count on this) and draw attention to new things on the site. @tomspurgeon, my personal feed, where I moan and gripe about movies and books and the rest of my work and life as it occurs to me to do so. Because I'm a hypocrite. I can't imagine anyone being interested in this but I'm sure a few of my friends out there might want to know about it. @crreviewfeed, where I'll soon be providing short reviews of material that doesn't lend itself to long reviews.
I'm sure splitting stuff up is a completely stupid and backwards way to do this, in part because it fails to build followers through the most posts possible in one place. This is what feels good to me, though. Besides, I can't imagine adding two or three feeds in which you might be interested when you're following a 100 or whatever is really that much more of a hassle over adding one. At least I hope not. I'd love who would like to suggest anything at all regarding how my use of this stuff might be more useful to you, and I thank you for the charity of reading this entire TL/DNR and self-indulgent post.
The following are notes and observations gathered on the floor of Comic-Con International 2009 in San Diego, California. For immediate reactions to what's going on from hundreds of people, I recommend an appropriate search or multiple such searches on Twitter. For mainstream comics and panel coverage I recommend Comic Book Resources and then Newsarama. -- Tom Spurgeon
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* it used to be that Sunday was about discounts and, for comics publishers, about sub-distributors and big stores and catalog people coming to buy in bulk and at a discount. I'm told the latter happens a lot less than it used to, if it happens at all. I did see a number of happy shoppers licking their lips to descend upon the first 11 to 12 aisles of the convention floor and buy stuff. This was also the first day I saw people lined up at the ATMs.
* again, I heard any number of things about sales from various sources. I heard from about a half-dozen folks that sell books on the floor that Saturday was lighter than Saturdays in the past, and that this was the first time that a Saturday was lighter than a Friday. For whatever that's worth. It's obvious that with the heavy emphasis on television and film and related panels for many folks there was bound to be some fallout for how the exhibition floor behaved.
* here is news of a publishing deal that brings the Gold Key characters to Dark Horse with Jim Shooter in charge of them. You don't string together that many well-known names without it resulting in a news story, but I couldn't find anyone on the floor with a lot of enthusiasm for what seems likely to result comics-wise. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around any such excitement now, frankly. Shooter will be writing as many as he can handle, it seems.
* not comics: I talked to an extremely attractive woman waiting for the always-slow Westin elevator and then through the elevator ride and a lobby walk about the convention. She informed me her entire show was sitting in Hall H for three days in a row. She measured her ups and downs on the quality of what she saw placed in front of her and was most excited about getting to see multiple minutes of the forthcoming Avatar -- maybe as much for the idea of getting to see that much footage as for the footage itself. I asked her how she dealt with the line and she gave me a silent response to the effect of "are you aware of how incredibly attractive I am?" which makes me imagine some sort of special pneumatic tube system for beautiful people popping them straight from their hotel lobbies into the center of Hall H. The only other person I spoke to about the movie previews, Douglas Wolk, who was covering them for Rolling Stone, said that District 9 looked like a winner. So there you go.
* I had a nice, short conversation with Scott McCloud, who said that Wolk's recent piece on Asterios Polyp (that book being an item of discussion that weekend in my circle of acquaintances) in the Times may be both the best thing on that work so far and the best thing Wolk's ever written.
* Gilbert Hernandez had an amazing-looking pen and ink drawing of the Captain Marvel whose arms and legs shoot off. And a Golden Age-ish Batman.
* a want-to-see book from the future that came up twice in separate conversations is the Frank Young and David Lasky collaboration on the Carter Family. That could be a really, really good book.
* Stevie Weissman told me a horror story about he and Jordan Crane trying to drive over from the Embassy Suites (about three blocks away) to the other side of the convention center for ease in loading their prints and the like back up and then being redirected through traffic for about an hour before parking back at the Embassy Suites and walking over like usual.
* not comics: it may have been my imagination combined with the imagination of others, but I spoke to a lot of people that agreed with me the sheer number of costumes seemed to be down slightly, although there were still a ton and many were more elaborate than ever. I saw a number of costumes that changed the height of the wearer, mostly with gigantic boots of some sort. There also seemed to be more high-concept costumes, many of which made me laugh. I was hoping for more of a Klingon comeback given the recent Star Trek movie, but I didn't see as many as I thought I might.
* for the record, I will never, even given the opportunity to lead 10,000 lifetimes, truly understand the costume impulse.
* had a dream last night I was at the con doing PR for the Don Johnson/Heather Locklear remake of Sapphire and Steel. This is extra sad in that this is a recurring dream.
* a lot of people for whatever reasons were holding up crude cardboard signs, like one kid near the lecture halls holding up a sign asking people to scream if "Twilight ruined Comic-Con." I'm not exactly sure how Twilight could ruin Comic-Con, but I guess if one is really caught up in the various kinds of fandom and how each one jostles for cultural space at such a show this could be energizing and fascinating. Except for seeing a bunch of that book's fans camping out very early in the week and briefly thinking this is somehow not a good trend, I didn't think of Twilight fans at all, and I think you'd have to be pretty churlish to let someone else's experience color your own. It's not like while I'm sitting watching Mike Mignola draw I was about to become enraged at the idea of some teenage vampire fans off in the distance somewhere.
* men were selling badges in the ad hoc promotional area just across the railroad tracks. It was exactly like seeing people selling tickets to a sporting event or a concert. I have no idea what that means but I'm guessing maybe they were getting people leaving the show to give them badges and/or buying them for a small price, maybe? It was fairly odd.
* I saw David Glanzer of CCI being interviewed, and thought it interesting he was in a coat and tie and the interviewer was in a t-shirt and jeans. Your mileage may vary.
* there has to be some difference made between booths that are so awesome they make people stop and stare and booths that are designed to attract a crowd to stop and stare at them, blocking the movement between rows.
* I'm afraid I never got my planned "Dharma and Greg" theme sketchbook going. Maybe next year.
* I saw Jackie Estrada briefly, who pointed out that George Herriman as per popular speculation may have been the first partly African-American comics creator in the Eisner Hall of Fame after I asked if I was correct in asserting that Matt Baker was the first to get in as he did last Friday night. Estrada works very hard on the awards, and I suspect feels every negative word about them as a body blow, although I think they've clearly settled in as comic book awards #1 in no small part due to her consistent and hard work.
* the writer Matt Maxwell showed me a really neat Ramona Fradon drawing he picked up during the show and we talked briefly about the nature of comics hype and news and what's important to talk about and what isn't. I tried to browbeat him into writing something on the con for his blog because his con reports crack me up. I saw Maxwell a bunch over the weekend, and realized why I took pleasure in his company was that he was representing a lot of bloggers and writers who made up a significant presence during my recent con visits. He was really the only one from that crowd I saw over the weekend.
* it's my understanding there may be a reconsideration of the direct market status of Tripwire magazine based in part on its performance in bookstore channels. I hope it gets another shot. Although I think I was correct in pointing out that Tripwire has been around for enough years to make a DM go of it, they've only in the past few years settled in on a format by which they might make a longtime stand. I can't imagine at its current price point and with the level of production that they can't eventually be a good DM citizen and pull their own weight.
* food report for the weekend: I got to enjoy meals at Cafe Chloe, the Red Pearl Kitchen chain location right next to Oceanaire and a couple of the big-hotel breakfast buffets. I also got to hit longtime favorite Las Cuatros Milpas right before the show Thursday, but it seemed only okay this time around rather than as good as I remember from past visits (still a line out the door, though, and I still recommend it). The bar food at J-Six looked great but I couldn't stay long enough to have any and it would have been wrong besides as I was only tangentially invited to the event there. Looking back, I ended up skipping a lot of meals just for time's sake, which I don't recommend unless you also weigh 1473 pounds.
* I attended the Stan Sakai spotlight, figuring that would put me in a good mood as I headed out the door. It did. It was a nice, very old-fashioned panel, Sakai taking questions about various characters and on matters such if Usagi would ever get the girl while drawing roughs of his principals in marker on the giant notebook placed next to him. His fans clearly adored him, and the majority stood up and bowed respectfully to the cartoonist after his presentation when directed to do so by hardcore fans in attendance. There was even a birthday cake. That stand-alone graphic novella Dark Horse is doing sounds like it will be fun.
* I saw newly-minted Eisner Award winner Jonah Weiland talking to super-retailer Chuck Rozanski, which was interesting to me in that it was my understanding that Jonah stays off of the convention floor for the most part.
* the last comics professional I saw on the floor was the first comics professional I saw on Wednesday: Milton Griepp. I think I may have also seen John Davis about 30 seconds before that. I had a capital time.
Why The Success Of Comics Conventions Isn't Always A Good Thing For Comics
Yesterday Comic-Con International ended. I'm guessing this year's CCI is shaping up to be a pretty successful show: that was my impression, anyway. 2009 has been a good year for comics shows. Except in the case of the Wizard conventions, where one might allow that the company simply lacks the basic resources to run those shows as they've been run in past years, comics conventions seem to have done pretty well. I'm a big fan of comic conventions, and I've been to all of the majors. This is my 15th year at Comic-Con International.
A successful convention is a good thing in and of itself. I very much believe that. Yet I also think there's an argument that can be made -- and should be made for the purpose of further dialogue -- that comics conventions doing well is not necessarily a good sign for comics. There are, I think, four reasons.
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1. A successful convention rarely leads to increased industry success because the infrastructure is damaged in fundamental ways -- or has a hitch step -- that keeps this from happening
You can have the best convention in the world, and we're getting closer and closer to having some of the best conventions ever, and that convention ends on Sunday afternoon at 5 PM -- no matter if you want it to or not. Some of that is unavoidable; conventions offer peak experiences. The best article from an on-line source like Comic Book Resources isn't going to match being told that news by Joe Quesada sitting 15 feet away from you. Unless you live in New York and LA, you're not likely to see a whole lot of signings and appearances and presentations. Listening to an interview with Hope Larson on Inkstuds isn't quite the same as getting to ask her a few questions at her booth on the con floor. And so on.
Still, the drop-off from major comics convention to the routine provided by many local comics shops is much, much steeper in most cases than anyone cares to admit. It may be steeper today in more places than it was a quarter-century ago. When I was a teen, my friends and I used to head to Chicago's big convention to buy all the weird stuff on the Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink tables our stores didn't carry. Today, the stuff my store won't carry includes a significant percentage of Marvel and DC comic books. It carries nothing published by Fantagraphics, nothing by Drawn and Quarterly, one book from Archaia, nothing from Oni, one book from Top Shelf. Plus, my store is three hours away. As books and music and movies have all become easier to casually access, you can argue that entire classes of comics are harder to find than ever before outside the floor of a convention. This can't be healthy.
The film and television industries use San Diego to draw attention to works that will soon be available in millions of homes across America or in every town with a movie screen. The comics industry uses that same weekend to celebrate works that may only be available in a few dozen places scattered across the country or on-line by sifting through hundreds of similar projects. I would trade giving an award to the best retail outlet for a concentrated effort on making the top 200 of them looks less like places where one goes to pick up methadone and more like the vibrant stores many of them tend to be on the inside. I would trade a Johnny Ryan OGN sell-out or a mini-comic breakout success story that consists of being talked about for a day for 50 more stores that carried such work with devotion. I would trade the half-off Marvel trade paperback sale for a presence by that company at my local big box bookstore that represented their best work and deep bench. The lifeblood of an art form can't be something that meets its best audience six or seven times a year; the industry could use greater attention to follow-through.
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2. Conventions are growing in popularity not because of their subject matter but because of the intensified nature of social interaction with the advent of on-line communication
There was a time when people thought that on-line message boards and chat rooms and blogging would fill the hole that comics fans and industry employees used to stuff with five days and four nights of carousing and laughter and booze on the site of a major convention. What it's done instead is allowed more people to have more relationships with more people that are then consummated -- not always literally! -- at the convention. Instead of going to a show to be amongst your people for a weekend, many are attending the big conventions to solidify friendships they carry with them all year long. Look at a lot of internet postings about a comics convention, and it sounds like a social event to the extent that it's sometimes difficult to find exactly what's binding these people together. There are more posts about the good times had than the great works bought.
The danger is that deep down and in more and more overt ways, more energy will be expended and more joy will be had getting to X, Y, or Z bar on a Thursday night than coming to a greater understanding of a prickly medium or simply encountering for the first time some of the great art that the North American comics industry has to offer. It's not ridiculous to suggest that a greater amount of thought was given this past weekend towards what people were going to wear to the Eisner Awards than to, say, Gilbert Hernandez's astonishing Luba Conquers The World. Even when a book does make an impact at a show, the vast majority of discussion is about its status as a "buzz book" -- great art as a talking point, as fuel for social interaction, as a signifier for this group of collective experiences over that one. There needs to be at least some room for exploring great art and questioning industry practices in addition to making money and enjoying one's friends; the industry suffers without those things. Cons can continue to be wonderful experiences, but they should be able to encompass functions that work on behalf of industry and art form.
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3. The more successful a convention becomes, the more it may preach to the choir
Some folks believe that comics culture ignores the casual fan to favor the hardcore fan while others believe that comics doesn't value the faithful reader who really pays the bill as much as it does new ones who might read a magazine article or hold up a comic book on a TV show. What's clear is that conventions are the kind of experience that increasingly favors the hardcore fan over the casual one. Not only is there potentially some cost involved with attending any show, shows like Comic-Con are becoming the purview of those who plan months ahead with a huge investment involved over those that might casually decide to go the Wednesday before in a car with friends and be home by 9:00 PM. This skews the convention away from the likely readers of several kinds of comics.
I'm also not sure that comics conventions are as friendly as they used to be even 10 years ago, and it's not like they were the greatest places on earth back then. My own experience is that walking with someone who doesn't have a passionate interest in comics through a convention in 1997 is a very different experience than walking someone through in 2009. If nothing else, there are more costumes now than ever -- still a general trend if in slight decline this year -- more aggressive salesmanship, more elaborate props, more bodies, more strollers, more families.... all of this can be confusing to just about anyone unless you're used to it. To many folks, the swelled crowds and increased business that have been a beneficial result of an increased pop culture emphasis at Comic-Con International have come with a price of increased frustration in terms of getting around, getting a room, getting to the show. The end result is making comics look and feel like something in which it's necessary to be very involved, and certainly making many cons seem that way. I don't think that's always the best lesson to have. I wish more attention were paid to this in the future, that festival aspect of comics that's not a part of most North American comics shows. Until then, I'm going to think that too many kinds of comics readers are frozen out of the typical convention experience for us to evaluate that experience on positive terms.
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4. A flea market is still an odd way to meet the world
I've met many of my non-comics art heroes in a variety of ways: at parties to which we were both invited, through a mutual friend, in the lobby of a local Equity playhouse, at an art gallery or two, even a couple of times as I was having a book signed at a bookstore. In contrast, I've met maybe more than a quarter of my comics-making heroes in the course of some kind of commercial exchange. The latter seems more and more odd to me the more I think of it. I can see in my mind's eye some of the greatest artists in the world impatiently looking around their table stock, asking me outright if I'm interested in buying anything, acting in an understandably impatient fashion to the point of actually breaking off contact when I'm not a good customer. Meeting someone as they stand over their wares hoping to make some cash is different even than receiving a book through a signing or any of the other ways we might make a great artist. As I've been doing it so long that I can call up from memory the sense of it, I have to imagine similar feelings are being felt at least subconsciously by folks who do less aisle-wandering than I do.
I'm not sure how this could ever change, or even if it should. A lot of programming is by nature commercial, too, and some of the most traditional and popular are outright marketing presentations. There's also an argument that having artists represent themselves like this humanizes artists in a way, and I guess that might be true for some people. But I've never quite gotten over it, and with conventions more popular than ever, the salesmanship aspects start to dominate my memories. The only thing I might suggest is that the wider culture and industry entire make it a goal at their major shows that the experience be worth having if not a single dime is spent on purchasing anything once within the walls -- paying close attention to programming, bringing in more festival aspects, having focused signings that aren't in a commercial context and may even feature giveaways. I think there's a reason why the people that frequently come off best at the show have the least to do with their core function.
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Just as there was a lot of ramp-up to Comic-Con International talking about all this work there was to do to get ready for it, I expect there to be as much talk about exhaustion and let-downs and recovery. And while there of course should be a bit of that, the rest of the year should be about building on whatever we saw and learned at the big shows. We need to stop acting as if the reward of 361 days of hard work as a long, crazy weekend in the California sun and more in the idea that four days off wandering the streets of San Diego is temporary time away from getting to work in an honorable, healthy, exciting industry serving the best of all the art forms.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* with San Diego officially over for the year, eyes turn to Chicago and Wizard's show in Rosemont rapidly approaching on the horizon. The best place to wrap your brain around what's happened with the Wizard shows generally and what may be happening with Chicago in particular is Todd Allen's much-discussed piece comparing past exhibitor lists to this one. What's revealed is brutal, and there's only so much spin you can put on it. In fact, what the 2009 exhibitor list most resembles is the last convention before Wizard took over.
The following are notes and observations gathered on the floor of Comic-Con International 2009 in San Diego, California. For immediate reactions to what's going on from hundreds of people, I recommend an appropriate search or multiple such searches on Twitter. For mainstream comics and panel coverage I recommend Comic Book Resources and then Newsarama. -- Tom Spurgeon
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* it's easy to take all this con stuff way too easier, and then you read a quote as goofy as this one from Lev Grossman. The second graph. I'm not one to stand in lines, and those people can look sort of sad sometimes, but no one's been beaten to death and there's little that's ugly about the scene beyond the faint state of not-meeting-expectations that usually comes with focused fan activities. From my perspective, for every bombed-out looking fan there's five little girls psyched to get a drawing ofthe Neopets. Lighten up, Lev. Sheesh.
* big news of the day is actually old news that just wasn't announced via formal press release: Eric Reynolds was named associate publisher at Fantagraphics. Reynolds is the best person I know in comics, and I'm both happy for him and pleased that the company has paid attention to that crucially valuable resource.
* second big news of the day that I heard at least is that Lewis Trondheim will be doing a six-panel color comic for the iPhone that will be available in 18 languages. "Not English," joked Trondheim at his morning panel.
* a third story is that AdHouse Books will be doing an art book with Rafael Grampa, although Grampa's schedule is such that it may be more than a year before it's formally scheduled.
* I hope no one feels I'm doing a disservice by posting these stories in here. They're all good enough to deserve their own headline, and they'll hopefully be archived here that way. I consider such stories every bit as significant as the bulk of the ones more formally announced, and it has me thinking about the state of hype in comics that I'll talk about here Tuesday.
* I'm hearing sales stories all over the place, from apocalyptically low sales at some publishers and some comics retailers to really high sales on unexpected things, like Buenaventura Press doing well with the non North American books they're carrying. One typical sign in the retail section -- which seems about two rows shorter, by the way -- "It's Like It's Sunday Already."
* I think everyone realizes that most people are on hand for something other than the kind of book sales that come from simply not being able to find the books locally.
* folks are still bantering about Asterios Polyp.
* everyone in the indy-alt section of the floor was being very nice to Nate Powell all day for his big win at the Eisners, and feeling good both about Powell's enthusiasm for the win and his parents being on hand.
* you can see a copy of the cover to the re-release of the Bone material here.
* I got to meet Pat Oliphant, who did a sparsely-attended signing at Comic Relief and then hung out for a while afterwards. He seemed like a very nice man and said he was enjoying the experience. It's still very odd to m to see Pat Oliphant in his vest standing next to a group of teenaged goth girls with butterfly wings or whatever.
* someone pointed out to me that it was funny that in the fan-club mezzanine the Battlestar Galactica booth went mostly unmanned, like even they didn't like the finale.
* Calvin Reid of PW suggested Neil Kleid's new book as one that should come out of CCI with more buzz than it might actually be able to generate in these star-driven times.
* Lewis Trondheim was very good, very funny, very thoughtful at his morning panel. At one point he mentioned that he hopes money doesn't flood into comics, because he thought that would mean compromise and difficulty. He also spoke repeatedly about the challenge of a project being exciting to him, trying something different. Also, apparently, he has had very little work published in Japan. I hope Mark Siegel won't mind if I bring this up, but there was a funny moment when he talked about the strip that MOME did of Trondheim's about growing old and French cartoonists, and simply didn't know it had been published in the US, saying it was probably untranslatable because of all the references. Luckily, Kim Thompson was on hand to mention that copies of that work were available -- heavily footnoted, of course -- across those three issues of their anthology.
* I finally saw Mark Siegel frown as he stomped his way outside the convention on his way to another meeting. He told me that Lewis Trondheim set something on fire at their booth to replicate Marvin's fire-breathing abilities, but I don't have confirmation on that or really know how big that fire was. Apparently Brian Heater may have pictures.
* One great image I saw about noon was slipping into the back of the Jeff Smith panel in the CBLDF's masters series -- artists drawing and talking about drawing and then giving that drawing to the CBLDF auction -- ands seeing a bunch of teenagers with lunch and bento boxes eating at the back of the room watching Smith draw. The programming in general has been really strong this year from my perspective, and has been a great balm for the craziness of the show business track and resulting crowds.
* although Brian Doherty of Reason was quick to point out that that the crowds not only didn't seem bigger on the floor they couldn't seem bigger because the attendance was capped at the same number. Good point. As for why Wednesday was the biggest day on the floor, isn't it obvious? It's the only day without an aggressive programming track. Batton Lash told me they killed Wednesday evening sales-wise, and good for them.
* Seth's panel was really cool -- a series of 12 mostly unrelated stories about comic books and his aesthetic development separated by a tiny bell ring. This was accompanied by a slideshow that one person on my way out described as stunning. I guess this is a standard way of him to deal with signings, but it was still nice to see something prepared as opposed to someone plopping into their chair to take questions.
* both Seth and Chris Oliveros received Inkpots before that panel, which was nice. Seth pointed out it was a pretty cool-looking inkpots. I like the Inkpots. They remind me of this thing we had in Indiana called I think "Sagamore of the Wabash" which was basically the government sending you a document telling you you're awesome.
* I nearly killed Leonard Nimoy whipping around a post near one of his signings, but caught myself in time. It's a weird celebrity show, mostly on the floor people you're used to seeing rather than people that are brand new to the show and wander over. I get the sense most of the actors and stars are sticking to that end of the show and then slipping off to the James Cameron party or whatever. Paul Pope was supposed to DJ at that thing last night.
* OTBP: Abrams has their Kurtzman and Brian Fies book here, but I somehow missed they have a new George Booth collection with an introduction by Bill Cosby.
* the one signing that seemed to do really well at the Comic Relief booth that I saw was Stephan Pastis with Richard Thompson -- Richard later told me it was mostly Pastis and that he drew really slowly to look busy, which cracked me up. I saw their panel with Keith Knight that afternoon, and it was slightly scary in that they had really no answers for the ongoing cartoonapocalypse other than maybe more fully embrace diy practices. This wouldn't normally be scary, but the panel's title kind of suggested there might be more ideas generated. All those guys are classy and smart and answered a bunch of questions for wannabe cartoonists in the crowd, though, and I always enjoy hearing Keith Knight talk. Lee Salem and Oliphant sat in the middle of the room, and I kind of wondered what they might have to say on the proposed subject.
* I'm not sure what mainstream news there is out there. Bill Willingham is going to write some stuff for IDW, but isn't everybody?
Your 2009 Eisner Award Winners
The Eisner Awards named its 2009 winners last night in San Diego during a lavish ceremony with over 40 percent of the attendees dressed so that Bunk Moreland would approve. Winners in bold, once I get to a computer.
The Hall of Fame awards winners were Harold Gray (judges), Graham Ingels (judges), Matt Baker (voters), Russ Heath (voters), Reed Crandall (voters) and almost certainly someone I'm not remembering until I go back to my room and get my sheet. I apologize for this.
Frank Jacobs and John Broome won the Bill Finger Awards.
A very surprised Denis Kitchen received the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.
*****
NOTES
* it was a shorter than usual ceremony; Jackie Estrada said it ran twenty minutes earlier than last year's. I think there were fewer categories, so that was probably it. It didn't feel like it was any shorter.
* although it usually wasn't something too fancy, it seems like more people than usual dressed up. Blair Butler made the point that she felt underdressed. Those that didn't dress up a little bit got made fun of by people at one of my tables.
* Russ Heath endeared himself for an acceptance speech that was simply a declaration that he was glad to still be alive to receive the honor. Standing ovation.
* the awards were mostly typical according to usual Eisner voting behavior, which given the unchanging nature of the comics industry makes a lot of sense. If there was a particularly advantageous title in terms of having that kind of comic all to itself, that seemed to have a chance of winning. And so on. I didn't think the results were ever alarming except maybe the short story category. I really, really like Ian Boothby and think he's funny and like the Simpsons comics generally, but I didn't even remember the story in question having read the comic. It seemed obvious it would win, though.
* that doesn't mean I agreed with choices as a critic and a comics fans. The archival choices I think favored great material over great material + great treatment of material, for instance. But awards don't exist to replicate my choices. I'm not sure why Jerry Iger gets to go in the Hall of Fame before Antonio Prohias, either.
* Patton Oswalt was funny. Jill Thompson was funny. The bitty Reno 911 guys were funny. A bunch of people held their breath when Jane Wiedlin was announced as a presenter, but there was no five-minute delay and no Snakes On A Plane jokes or anything.
* speaking of which, the Planetary lateness joke came at 9:51 PM, for anyone keeping track.
* it was nice to see Matt Fraction share in a series award, and nicer still that he was there to pick it up and give a gracious speech.
* I believe the story of the day at the event -- and someone correct me if I'm wrong -- is Matt Baker being the first African-American in the Eisner Hall of Fame. That guy has been nominated like a billion times.
* Fantagraphics avoided a shut-out that seemed like it could happen with a win by Jason.
* the memorial section seemed shorter than usual, which is nice given last year's assault of young-people gut punches.
* the other story of the night was a second straight year surprise win with Graphic Novel of the year. This year instead of Rutu Modan it was Nate Powell. Powell's parents were there from Arkansas, and he was genuinely surrpised and touched. It was a nice end to the evening.
The following are notes and observations gathered on the floor of Comic-Con International 2009 in San Diego, California. For immediate reactions to what's going on from hundreds of people, I recommend an appropriate search or multiple such searches on Twitter. For mainstream comics and panel coverage I recommend Comic Book Resources and then Newsarama. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
* the big publishing news of the day for most folks was Marvel acquiring the rights to publish Marvelman. This is one of those things that's going to bear some analysis rather than is all that well-served by a single announcement of the "hey, look" kind, especially since a few years ago a big announcement had me thinking Stephen King was going to be writing scripts for the company Stan Lee style while sitting in Marvel's bullpen. Still, that's all the big names lined up in a row to make for an interesting story. As one CR reader put it, it could be that Marvel is just throwing its hat into a really crowded ring. We'll see. I'm also not certain the time hasn't passed on this one in terms of it being super-exciting news. I don't really have a Marvelman hole in my heart anymore, and I read the Alan Moore revival about 50 times.
* the big publishing news for me was that Fantagraphics will do the complete Ernie Bushmiller Nancy, which is awesome. One of the prominent alternative cartoonists apparently has a complete collection from which they'll be working.
* in related news, Fantagraphics' second and more complete shot at Pogo finally starts next Spring. The delay with Pogo was purely archival; it's quite difficult to find good Pogo copies, and it took them longer than they expected to find copies with which they were willing to move forward.
* a close second in the news department (third if you count Walt Kelly, I guess) is that Darwyn Cooke will follow up his The Hunter with a book that will adapt part of the The Man With The Getaway Face and huge chunks if not all of The Outfit. That will be out in 2010. The Outfit is one of Donald Westlake's best books, so this should be a lot of fun. IDW had sold almost 350 of the current Parker book by 5:30 Friday afternoon, which is great in these times of being able to get such work anywhere. Cooke was signing and completing a frontpiece with some drawing.
* as much as I complain about the show and what it could be, I have to say Friday afternoon was a pleasure for me and I'm sure a lot of other comics fans with similar A-B-C stories. Mine was that I realized I got to spend Thursday afternoon listening to my current favorite strip cartoonist Richard Thompson talk about his work, and a chunk of Friday watching Pat Oliphant draw with terrifying facility in charcoal while he was interviewed on stage. Then I got to go meet Leonard Starr.
* one thing that cracked me up is that Dylan Williams has been encouraging the people working the Sparkplug table to take a full day off so as not to be burnt out. He told me he went to the zoo.
* there are no lines at the ATMs. Spooky and disheartening.
* I am greatly appreciative to Seth, Jason Lutes, Gene Yang, Lewis Trondheim, Bryan Lee O'Malley and Derek Kirk Kim for their participation in a well-attended "graphic novels" panel on Friday. The panel got wonky -- Lutes and Seth went back and forth on editing, for instance -- but the audience was there to hang and asked a lot of great questions. Everyone was funny. I was pleased and people seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Those panels are tough because you get a lot of people up on the panel and a lot of people in the audience that may have vastly different takes on what a panel on the broad subject matter so named should encompass. But this one worked.
* I hardly know Bryan Lee O'Malley, but he looked slightly stunned and maybe just finding his sea legs at what has to be a crazy convention for him. He seemed pleased, though. I'm happy for him.
* Judith Hansen told me that the various editions of Crumb's Genesis will have different covers according to the country of their publication, and she looks forward to seeing the reaction. The covers are selected by Crumb.
Five Still-Anticipated Reprints
Today in San Diego, all things going as they should, I will be moderating a panel on comic strip reprint projects. This is a great panel to moderate because the audience is really into it and there's really only time to say what each panelist is up to and then throw the focus out to the audience for questions. This year Leonard Starr is participating, so I'll get to ask him a question or two as well. What a fun opportunity.
It is a magnificent time for reprints and collections on just about every level and entry point. There are thriving lines at D&Q, Dark Horse, Andrews McMeel, Norton, Fantagraphics, NBM and IDW, and a strong presence of one or two books at a lot of smaller publishers. Still, as comics fans, it is our sacred duty to want more than what we're given. Here are five projects of the top of my head I'd like to see join the ranks of recent reprints -- mostly comic strips, but I'll include other types of comics as well. Hopefully, by the end of today's panel I'll have news about one or more of the following.
In lieu of a Five For Friday, , I'll run them next Thursday. Just mark it "five for friday."
*****
1. Barnaby, Crockett Johnson, Field Enterprises Syndicate, 1942-1952.
It's amazing that Barnaby hasn't yet been the subject of some deal somewhere. It was on the wish list of every publisher of significance going into this new Age of Reprints, and remains near the top of many such lists even now. My guess is that as Johnson enjoyed a lucrative career as an illustrator of childrens books, those in charge of the character and his strip are waiting for some sort of similar deal regarding this older material. Comics deals can be different than book deals, in that while they can be lucrative over time that's nearly always because of an accumulation of sales, not because of a hefty advance. This is all speculation on my part, however.
The work in Crockett Johnson's masterpiece is likely more familiar to hardcore comics fans than a lot of material in active reprints: it's a funny strip, affectionately told, and features Johnson's lovely art. I want this to be someone's project soon just so I can watch art directors throw themselves at that publisher for a crack at designing the books. But mostly I want these books.
*****
2. Rudy, William Overgaard, United Features Syndicate, 1983-1985
I'd love to see someone at least pick up rights to reprint Rudy In Hollywood, this strip's sole and hard-to-find collection, although a complete volume would be ideal. Rudy was a beautifully drawn strip about a former Hollywood entertainer of the simian variety who tries to make his way in the world as it becomes more and more of a place where older celebrities and their ascots are no longer welcome. In fact, I think someone should do a series of one-shots featuring interesting failed strips -- I can't imagine it would cost much, and done right I think they could even sell. Who wouldn't want a book of the best Franklin Fibbs stuff?
*****
3. Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken, National Lampoon, 1972-1990.
This is the kind of strip that actually could have a deal -- Abrams Comic Art would seem a perfect home -- and I just wouldn't know about it. It's lovely work, and one of a kind, and has a significant fanbase I think shrinks with every passing year. Getting this out sooner rather than later might be a very good idea. I'm sure Flenniken's been asked, and I couldn't tell you why it hasn't happened to date.
*****
4. The Bungle Family, Harry J. Tuthill, New York Evening Mail, 1918-1945
Art Spiegelman threw down the gauntlet on this one when he declared it the most underrated comics work of all time (or something equally dramatic) for an issue of (I think) Smithsonian. Blondie was the overrated pick, and it's hard to argue with that one, so it makes you wonder about Harry Tuthill's life work. I like The Bungle Family more and more every time I look at it: it has a generally restrained feel but it still moves very well when it has to. The humor seems grounded in the worst expectations of mankind, like so many of my favorite family comedies. I suspect that this would sell terribly, but it would be nice if someone could come out with a solid chunk all in one book just so we could finally know if Spiegelman was right or wrong.
*****
5. L'Autoroute Du Soleil, Baru, Casterman, 1995.
This seems to me like the perfect book for someone to collect to catch the forthcoming second dip into early 1990s nostalgia ready to hit in 2010-2012 or so. I believe this was a result of that effort to do European works with a manga flavor to them in order to sell in both markets, but I could be totally wrong about that. What I do know is that it's cool-looking, and reminiscent of the Alain Delon-interested part of the Clinton Decade, and it's one of the few books that I get asked about three to five times a year without fail.
The following are notes and observations gathered on the floor of Comic-Con International 2009 in San Diego, California. For immediate reactions to what's going on from hundreds of people, I recommend an appropriate search or multiple such searches on Twitter. For mainstream comics and panel coverage I recommend Comic Book Resources and then Newsarama. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
* unsurprisingly, the general topic of conversation on Thursday from those to whom I spoke was the unruly nature of the stuffed-to-the-max convention. At least from an eyewitness standpoint, the conversation seemed justified. I saw at least a half-dozen lines to a few random panels that ten years ago would have had a hard time putting together 40 people that were dauntingly long this time out. One story that three people told me was that one mainstream comic book writer had a signing so stuffed that security was involved in processing the line. Twilight fans began the day camped out for entry into the hall where their dedicated panel was to take place, which, like most things with Twilight fandom, was either awesome or slightly disturbing depending on to whom you spoke. I'm still not understanding the fake outrage on behalf of defending those fans. They seem to be doing fine without anyone's scorn or anyone's thumbs up.
* in one of those coordinated announcements that always confuses me a bit, kids book giant Scholastic announced mid-afternoon yesterday that they'll be doing more Bone books to be supervised by Jeff Smith, written by Tom Sniegoski and drawn by Smith. I saw Smith like three times in the last 24 hours; he was carrying Moomin books and thinking about buying a Moby Dick print from Tom Neely. That print was indeed gorgeous.
* top three North American comics publisher IDW announced the hiring of Bob Schreck as Senior Editor. Not only does this seem a natural fit, but I don't know a single person who didn't think this would happen. When Bob Schreck was laid off by DC Comics, someone in my circle joked that they thought IDW had been created solely to provide Bob Schreck with his next job.
* Richard Thompson had a crowd of about 60-75 folks, which was terrific because he's a great, great cartoonist. He took the show on himself, no moderator, and presented a slide-show walk-through a lot of his work.
* not so great was that they started letting people into the panel for the next panel at about half-past the hour. Thompson is enormously soft-spoken and the folks on hand to learn how to pitch to Hollywood or whatever made the last 20 minutes of Thompson's panel really, really hard to hear. I have no idea why this is a policy.
* Thompson has a new book coming out this Fall, as previously mentioned on this site. It will start with the strip from the day after the previous book ends, and contain no more archived sort-of Cul De Sac material. The only reason that material was in the first volume is because they wanted a book out before the current strip was ready to provide enough material for a standard book. Still, it's awesome to have that material.
* someone really needs to do a Thompson art book, focused primarily on his New Yorker, Washington Post and USN&WR work.
* I saw Charlie Kochman from Abrams walking down the aisle. I guess they moved back the Jaime Hernandez art book, although they remain excited about the book that I think may be a bit difficult to nail in terms of finding the right kind of publicity. I stand second to no one as a Jaime fan, but I get the sense that some people confuse his ubiquity with overexposure and you won't get the kind of anticipatory buzz on that project. I saw Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett at Abrams cocktail gathering later on, and they seem fully stoked about the ramp-up to Boilerplate, which had a long and somewhat chaotic publishing history conception to final copy (maybe eight years if I remember what they were saying). They told me they were among the first if not the first Portland comics transplants.
* the Man of Action guys are doing well enough in their television endeavors to afford suits now.
* I asked Peter Birkemoe of The Beguiling ownership fame about their original art business in the down world economy and he said that there was almost no way to tell: a new batch of art from one of their popular artists results in just as many sales as it might have two, three years ago. In general, questions about the down economy are dealt with in terms of some delicacy -- most of the publishers have adjusted, so it's not like there's a gap between a set of plan meant for a different economy and this one. Most of the concern expressed by cartoonists on the floor was for either the state of newspaper cartooning, which remains a subject of some mystery to people both in and not in that specific line of work, and the more quotidian difficulties of trying to get a specific work noticed in a huge wave of new releases. One publisher referred to a long list of books and let slip at the end, "and there's another XXXX XXXX book." This made us both laugh as that book is really quite formidable, and would have made us freak out with joy 10 years ago, but as a soldier in an army of new releases circa 2009 it kind of get lost even when your intentions are the opposite.
* I saw and enjoyed a crime comics panel with Max Allan Collins, Darwyn Cooke, Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber -- Rucka told those assembled that if they went to the Whiteout movie expecting the graphic novel "they deserved to be disappointed" and pointed out that at mystery conventions the average age of the audience was 30 years older than that in comics, which is something I hadn't considered but of course he's right. It was a very old-school panel.
* I knew not a single person at the Hyatt at 1:40 AM, and have never been happier just to go to bed.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* this nearly gave me an aneurysm trying to figure it out, and I'm not sure it isn't already out of date, but maybe you'll have better luck or it will put you on the look-out for something in the future. The prize sounds awesome.
* as one of those firmly behind the comics shelf-porn movement, where photos of shelves stuffed with comics by various collectors and professionals are shown to the world in order to impress and amaze and even amuse, I'd like to point out this rare instance of poster-porn from I think an ex-Wizard staffer's office as it's getting cleared out. This is going to potentially sound very Mike Sterling of me, but I would probably decorate my office in nothing but framed, early-1980s comics promotional posters if I had a dozen of them as opposed to two or three.
* here's a piece I nearly missed entirely that asserts that the primary reaction of the Arab media to the recent political unrest in Iran can be found in their cartoons.
* finally, a bit of summer-shopping not comics: did you know you could buy Arthur Rackham-illustrated shoes? Because I sure didn't.
CR has learned that Drawn & Quarterly has acquired the various publishing rights to the great cartoonist Daniel Clowes' next big work, the graphic novel Wilson. This would I believe be the first cohesive comics work by Clowes not initially serialized in the long-running Fantagraphics title Eightball, and would also represent a move from his most recent long-form comics publishing home, Pantheon. The book will be published in May 2010. As might be familiar with those tracking D&Q, alternative comics publishing in general and comics working with book distributors even more generally, Wilson will be distributed in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and in Canada by Raincoat. Samantha Haywood will represent the book to potential international rights buyers.
D&Q provided a statement from its publisher and editor-in-chief, Chris Oliveros: "As a long-time fan of Eightball, it is thrilling to be able to publish Dan," "Wilson is signature Clowes as the cartooning is seamless. It is funny, poignant and leaves an indelible impression on the reader." D&Q representatives described the book as the "portrait of a modern egotist," presented in a spectrum of styles with a focus on single-page gags as a structural motif.
Notes From The ICv2 Comics And Media Conference On CCI '09 Eve
What follows are notes and observations derived from my attendance at yesterday's Comics and Media Conference, organized by the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com. The presentations were held from 1-5 PM at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina. -- Tom Spurgeon
* the conference took place in one of the Marriott's ballrooms, with doors located right off of an elevator bank. It looked to be about 55-65 percent full for the bulk of it, with a number of badges still available generally even near conference's end (indicating people that RSVP'ed or even registered that didn't show). I sat in front of the Tripwire guys, in front of the Top Shelf crew, and next to a late-arriving Shad Petosky, who look harried and wondered out loud during a break when the heart attack is going to come.
* the writer Jeph Loeb gave the keynote speech, an old-school walk through his personal relationship to comics emphasizing key issues that he encountered along the way and a cultural mechanism or two at work behind each one (a Superman comic as a serial adventure; the pre-Superman movie hype as providing a rooting interest in the movie's success). Because this was the media and comics panel, there were a lot of TV shows and movies talked in, but the high points were fairly recognizable. Loeb, for instance, looks at the wish-fulfillment provided by Marvel comic books as a way he processed the helplessness he felt in the face of his parents' divorce.
* some of Loeb's choices were interesting. He selected the X-Men movie as more important than the earlier Blade, for instance, oddly citing both its ability to put a number of superheroes on the screen at once and the star-making performance of actor Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. He also cited its ability to make a cohesive movie from elements of a comic book that weren't a part of wider culture like the Superman movie was. I wonder about this to a certain extent, in that I wonder if 25 years of X-Men comics and cartoons hadn't penetrated into the subconscious mass culture to the point that a Superman had a decade earlier to the extent that our culture currently processes things, but that's a conversation better left to being stoned and sitting in one's dormitory hallway.
* although Loeb's speech was traditional in a way with its emphasis on "modern mythology," there were some interesting notions curling at the edges. For instance, he talked about the face that everyone knows the story of Cinderella and suggests that a similar cultural consciousness exists around Superman, even pointing out what people knew about that character (came from outer space, could fly, vague notions of Lex Luthor and Lois Lane) going into the TV show Smallville. I wish he had looked at this in terms of hit movies like Iron Man, which seem to me depend less on mythological resonance or their having permeated the culture than an easy to understand concept that sounds appealing. I think "Iron Man" is fairly easy to understand, all things told.
* Heidi MacDonald interviewed the net two subjects, both "test cases" for a comics work's journey into Hollywood development. Top Shelf Publisher Chris Staros and writer Robert Venditti of the forthcoming The Surrogates went first, and I wasn't aware of the lovely backstory there: Venditti came to work for Top Shelf as a warehouse employee during their big money plea from several years ago, and both actively sought the advice and patronage of his employers while also believing that his work wasn't exactly suited for their line.
* the main things that Staros and Venditti stressed were the vast chasm between verbal interest and actually getting a film made, the ability to assemble a team of people to make the development process easier rather than relying on the strength of a pitch all by itself, the measured quality of that process and how to keep an even emotional keel during its ups and downs, researching what is easy for the entertainment companies to give up and what is not traditional they change so as to focus one's energies during the long negotiation process and winnable battles, and Venditti's feelings of gratitude upon seeing so many talented people working to make his creation come alive on screen.
* one element that I thought was interesting is how Staros and Top Shelf seemed well-prepared to move into this kind of venture. When Staros and Venditti talked about their personal friendship allowing them a sort of common cause and platform from which to negotiate, it struck me that that could cover a multiple of i-dotting and t-crossing sins. But when I asked if the venture had changed anything about Top Shelf's standard contract, Staros insisted it hadn't in any way, which impressed me. He also pointed out that the reason "Productions" was in the company title was because they wanted to move into wider entertainment areas almost from the start, which I hadn't known.
* Jeff Smith's interview with MacDonald was memorably for the most part in that it was frequently funny, with several stories of Hollywood overtures regarding the Bone property, most of which failed because of inflexibility regarding elements of control over which Smith had no intention of letting go: the fact that the didn't want a musical number of the kind that were popular in animated films, and the core emphasis on the story on Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone as opposed to the more traditional elements like Thorn and Gran'ma Ben.
* one thing Smith said struck me -- that he carried core principles of the self-publishing movement into these negotiations and that many of those came from the Creator's Bill of Rights, which is over 20 years old now. I'm not sure why that hits me as noteworthy, but it does. Seriously, if you extend back 21 years from that document, you're talking the height of the Lee/Kirby era at Marvel.
* a fascinating part of Smith's interview is that they had planned at one point to pursue a Bone film by replicating what big-studios do in farming out scenes to smaller animation studios, basically a farm system without a big-league club but funding mechanisms to include the government of France kicking in some money if a French company or two were among the hired. Smith referred to it as a "virtual animation studio."
* Smith repeated something Venditti said in that it was easier to negotiate with film companies when Bone was completed, both in terms of what they had to present to such interested parties and emotionally so due to the fact that even if a film went sour the book existed on its own merits.
* Smith noted that the Bone film is currently back in development, and that while their deal was made in part after bringing an agent aboard he wasn't certain having an agent earlier would have changed the tenor of any previous negotiation. He also said that it could always go south, because, "we're talking about me." He noted that his past flirtations with Hollywood had left enough of a sour impression that he was brought up as a bad example to other comics creators and that people had frequently told stories back to him about some of the negotiations that went badly. He mentioned with a laugh that one of the things folks didn't seem to like is that he talked about the bad experiences so openly.
* Smith said that there had been on average weekly calls of interest in movies rights to the work over a 14-year period.
* he was much more tight-lipped about movie possibilities for the ongoing RASL, although Smith did mention in passing that the agent that helped put together the Bone deal was originally contacted in order to represent RASL.
* the crowd was mostly invested and involved for the duration of the conference. There was talking between the final two panels mentioned below, and a break extended into the regular San Diego meet and chatter a bit longer than I suspect host Milton Griepp would have ideally liked, but mostly it moved along. It was odd to me to see a room mostly media professionals texting openly during other people's presentations -- as no one in the room was a high-ranking military official or a doctor, I can't imagine anything was so important you'd need to do that right out where someone could watch you do it. But that's probably schoolmarmish of me.
* a panel on transmedia storytelling followed, with participants Nick Barrucci, Robin Brenner, Greg Goldstein, Jeff Gomez, Jim Killen and with Milton Griepp moderating. This basically broke down into a few panels, some of which overlapped and some of which didn't.
* Brenner (a librarian) and Killen (buyer for Barnes and Noble) talked a lot about what they were seeing from their customers, what was popular and what was keeping people coming back in terms of franchises that were popular elsewhere and franchises that might not have so much juice right now. Killen noted, for instance, that Joss Whedon's decision to make his comics-only Buffy Season 8 venture canonical had not only attracted readers to those book but also to omnibus material put together by Dark Horse from earlier material that may or may not -- and mostly is not -- considered part of the "official" Buffy story. Brenner had a great point when she talked about franchises have a longer life than they used to, both from the need for repeats on cable television but also because of DVD set sales -- she gets teen customers for the Whedon material that could not possibly have fully understood the series if they watched them while they were on.
* Barrucci and Greg Goldstein provided a great deal of insight into their publishing companies' forays into licensing character. Both emphasized putting together the comics aspect of it as vitally important -- few if any licenses are strong enough to carry weak execution -- and how each company (Dynamite with Lone Ranger; IDW with Star Trek) benefited by becoming a licensing partner with an entertainment property on a down cycle in terms of overall impact. Each man poo-poohed the idea that an actor or writer attached to a project was a good idea, Barrucci saying it was usually a detriment to comics overall and Goldstein pointing out it was unfair to be biased to actors that might be able to contribute to an effective comic simply because they were actors.
* Jeff Gomez was on the panel, I think, mostly to scare the crap out of me. He was by far the person most invested in the idea of storytelling on a number of levels, including original contributions from licensing partners, such as how the Star Wars comics have told stories that have become part of that franchise's overall official story and so on. He presented a personal history of cross-platform storytelling whose first two steps were Japanese post-War economic recovery and the Blair Witch project and rhapsodized about things like "transmedia stringers" and the fact that his company was moving from the marketing end of things to being involved from the very beginning in terms of shaping different projects.
* a theme at the end that fans decide on when something is official and something isn't rung hollow to me -- Barrucci was the only one who provided examples, and they seemed kind of distant and obscure compared to other processes by which something receives the "canonical" tag. A more interesting notion I think came from Brenner in that fan fiction had created an expectation of extended interaction with a property that these efforts were able to fulfill. A kind of "if you don't give them more, they will make their own" construction.
* a final panel on "Comics After Hollywood" consisted of Matt Hawkins, Rick Jacobs, Jeff Katz, Mike Mignola and Joe Nozemack with Tom McLean moderating. This was mostly about the state of deal-making and related successes that could be had now that media companies had become more interested in comics, and issues like whether or not that was sustainable or something that was simply peaking now or both.
* I had to leave about 20 minutes in, but two things struck me: one is that Jeff Katz of American Original has the gift of gab, and should be able to rely on that alone for a place at the comics table for as long as he has one. He looks like a cross between Guillermo Del Toro and Ivan Brunetti, and spent the first ten minutes of the panel reminding those in attendance that media company interest was solely financial and had a desperate air in part because the entertainment industry may be due a massive contraction in size over the next several months.
* the other noteworthy element of the final panel as far as I got into it before having to catch a train was that Mike Mignola provided a sharp contrast to Jeff Smith's experience -- he made his movie deal in large part on faith, and without a director interested in his involvement and a confluence of other factors could have been a much less rewarding experience. He also spoke directly to the universes of difference in public perception that comes with a movie that opens on 2500+ screens, noted that his movie actually sold books where some others hadn't (Matt Hawkins from Top Cow said that his company sold more Wanted trades over the last several months than everything else they offer combined), and said that his books exist in the shadown of that enterprise to a certain extent.
* Mignola also said that the day he signed the movie deal he went home and created another character in case he had just ruined the first one. I wonder if after I left someone from the audience asked if that character might be available for license.
* that was it for me; I'll try to go back over my notes and rewrite this at some point, but that was the gist of the day. I enjoyed it. Also in attendance were folks like Kiel Phegley (a little rubber-legged from a night sleeping on CBR's boat, but sporting a fine-looking tie), Calvin Reid (who told me it's the "best time of the year -- San Diego time"), the always-enjoyable Joe Rybandt (who decided not to punch me in the jaw as he had every right to do), Arie Kaplan and Douglas Wolk. Wolk at one point caught me eye because I swear he had taken out the entire contents of his swag bag and placed it in front of him (Douglas, tell me if I'm wrong; I thought it was great). For the record, mine was a pen, a notepad, a 2008 Tripwire annual, a coffee tumbler with the named BuchalterNemer on it, an ICv2 Insider's Guide, and two hardcover books: Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 and Gunnerkrigg Court Vol. 1.
Ten Comics-Related Projects I'd Develop In Other Media, Or Hurry Along By Tom Spurgeon
Comic-Con International in San Diego formally gets underway today, after last evening's Preview Night. A big part of Comic-Con International over the last dozen years is the pursuit, purchase and the public development of comics-related material into lucrative cross-platform media properties. That was basically the subject of yesterday's ICv2.com conference. Although comics-related media projects is hardly my purview, I'm all for the world making things for my benefit and entertainment, in comics and out of them. With that in mind, here are ten comics-related projects I'd like to see become film and television projects over the next few years. If they don't have deals, deals should be signed. If they do have deals, the development should be accelerated. Studio folk, lawyers and licensing agents: hop to it.
*****
1. Dr. Strange, created by Steve Ditko with Stan Lee
I went on about this one ad nauseam to honor the great NeilAlien's latest blogday. It still makes sense for there to be a Dr. Strange movie sooner rather than later, for all the reasons I stated then: great origin (Marvel's second best), potential fascinating visual texture to the movie, fine supporting characters, a compelling princess from another world romantic subplot, and the sweet spot of several of the most popular major motion picture actors being just about the right age to play the title character.
While some folks reading that original post thought I was hinting at Johnny Depp being best suited for the role, the actor I was thinking of was actually Leonardo DiCaprio. A number of you probably just vomited, but DiCaprio is already 34, he can act, he's as believable as Downey Jr. -- albeit in a different way -- as someone who once had a glamorous career, lost it and has seen tough times since, he's a major motion picture star, he has considerable onscreen charisma it's fun to see him embrace rather than flee and he's adept at playing romance. But so many actors would do.
*****
2. Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, created by David Boswell
Hello, Zack Galifinakis star vehicle. Okay, maybe not, but you know what I mean. It would have worked for Jack Black and Danny McBride once upon a time, too, and still might for McBride. The nice thing about a Reid Fleming movie is that there's already a script. We used to have a copy in The Comics Journal's library. My understanding -- and this could be total rumor -- is that a lot of folks thought well of the project but the guy who was really into it was Jon Lovitz, and no one was going to fund this movie with Jon Lovitz as its lead. (I also heard a rumor once that there was a reading of the script to drum up interest with Lisa Kudrow as Fleming's paramour and Ed Asner as Mr. O'Clock, but I have no idea if that's true, either). At any rate, a strongly stylized, visually stupefying movie about insane strongman in a pedestrian job Reid Fleming is definitely the kind of thing that would get me into a theater between the months of January and May. The games would be fun, too.
*****
3. Zot!, created by Scott McCloud
Three of the many things that would work about Scott McCloud's meditation on superheroes Zot! in another medium are 1) the comic works in visual broad strokes that would work well onscreen, 2) the characters I think are sturdily designed, and 3) there's an appealing and structurally sound undercurrent to Zot! regarding the role that fantasy plays in kids' lives. I think #3 in particular would work over the course of a longer effort -- a series -- and lend the entire project rare resonance for this kind of thing.
*****
4. Scene of The Crime, created by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark
The best thing about this early Ed Brubaker effort is that it suggests members of Generation Younger-Than-X would go about the act of being a detective more like Jim Rockford than David Addison, which who knows if it's true but sure feels right. If the mysteries were half as intricately plotted as the one in the original comic book series, Scene Of The Crime could be like one of those cute USA Network shows but also, you know, actually good.
*****
5. Anne Freaks, created by Yua Kotegawa
A lot of manga obviously qualifies as material that would translate into other media, as much of it already does, and successfully. It seems to me there aren't as many transportable ideas as one might think, however. The strength and weaknesses of so many manga series are in the details that might not necessarily work on screen in anything other than a lengthy, literal translation. Mess with that, and you risk ending up with this year's Dragonball movie, which was rightly treated by fans of the comic like the kid who walks into the high school cafeteria on Monday wearing an "I called the cops on your party" t-shirt.
I think there are a few manga series that would be better off mined than adapted, and one of them is ADV's aborted Anne Freaks translation. It featured a killer movie hook: the travails of kids who were adopted at an early age from a failed apocalypse cult who now find themselves acting out on deeply ingrained habits and behaviors instilled during their time there. My memory is the book doesn't do much with this idea: it starts far away from it, and even after it's brought up, Anne Freaks quickly moves into specifics that don't flatter that plot point. But the idea is a nice one for a movie. Deciding which manga might work because of the central idea and which ones might work because of specific execution of those ideas would be a tough, tough game. Until then, I'd like to see more of a based-on approach, like filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's take on an Ed McBain story in High And Low.
*****
6. The Badger, created by Mike Baron
Someone out there will eventually do the regional superhero movie, so it might as well be one of comics' finest existing costumed crime-fighters linked to a non-big city setting. A Badger project would likely have to be pared to make movie sense. I love the inexplicable '80sness of dark ages transplant Ham the Weather Wizard, but I don't think I could explain it five graphs of script or in 30 minutes of screen time to the point where most people I know would see it as something other than ridiculous. (I also think a standard investment banker from the modern era that practices animal sacrifice for stock tips might be funnier than a medieval transplant.) But the core idea of a superhero choosing to fight crime in Wisconsin (as opposed to New York City) and his persona coming out of some sort of stress-related mental disorder sounds to me like it could work pretty well, and the fighting could be fun to watch.
And let's face it: Seann William Scott and Bob Hoskins could use the work.
*****
7. Mr. X, created by Dean Motter
This sometimes almost-forgotten but never completely made obscure 1980s indy-comics icon is one of those concepts that at its core has become much more appealing than the way it played out in the comics. "Architect returns to super-city he built to try and fix its psychologically damaging aspects despite being very disturbed himself" works for me, not just as an item of interest, but as a unique hook around which to build action and drama.
*****
8. Thriller, created by Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eeden
This book, currently receiving a second look from a lot of people due to a recent Trevor Von Eeden interview in The Comics Journal, already plays like the best Sam Raimi-produced television show that comes on at 5 PM on Saturdays ever. Why not make one? The only change I might make is to the central character. I always thought the central character was Gary Sandy weak compared to the eccentrics which surrounded him, and not in an interesting, straight-man way, either.
******
9. Gorgo, created by Gilbert Hernandez
There have been hints about Los Bros Hernandez having a movie made from their works or even doing one themselves, but in most cases with their comics I can't imagine a better version in film form -- I guess the model would be Persepolis, a straight-up and attractive adaptation that calls attention to the original. There are elements of work that's appeared in Love & Rockets I think might make better movies than the main storylines. Chief among them is Gilbert's Gorgo character, a slow-to-rise, hyper-violent and largely indestructible crime figure with a family weakness towards women clients. As much as cartoon fans seem blown away by a lot of stylized action I find super-boring, the stark episodes of violence that would punctuate an animated Gorgo film might be a revelation.
*****
10. Grimwood's Daughter, created by Jan Strnad and Kevin Nowlan
Soon to be re-released thanks to the good folks at IDW, this is Kevin Nowlan's first stop-and-stare work but may be better-served for adaptation purposes by its stark script from Jan Strnad. It's coming out so soon I don't want to talk about plot details, but Grimwood's Daughter is a sturdy take on the general fantasy idea that the lack of magic and magical people around us right now indicates that something perhaps not pleasant happened to rid our world of these things.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* if you're not in San Diego this morning and find yourself wanting the experience of learning something about an aspect of comics to which you've had very little exposure, most of you out there could learn something from these posts from Matt Blind about starting up a graphic novel bookstore.
* missed it: there is an excellent short interview with the great Rick Altergott here. It's funny: I've always liked Rick's work but when he came to the attention of alt-comics fans in the late 1990s a significant number of them hated him. During a time when there were so few rewards in cartooning simply being published by Fantagraphics for whatever pennies they could heroically squeeze from a self-immolating market seemed like a Nobel Prize in and of itself, I grew used to savage commentary regarding Altergott whenever I spent time in the company of comics fans. This happens every so often, actually -- Johnny Ryan went through the same cycle -- but I've never seen it stronger than it was with Altergott. Super-nice guy as well as being obviously talented, too. I still can't figure out what they were talking about.
* not comics: I'm not sure why I was up at 3:07 AM looking at pictures of bento boxes on images.google.com, but if I hadn't been doing that I wouldn't have come across this piece of adorableness.
* the designer Khoi Vinh looks at the over-sized tabloid projectsThe Big Funny and Wednesday Comics, probably not the last time those two will be placed in the same sentence.
* a belated happy fifth blogday to Matt Maxwell, joining Jog (and lots of others, of course) in the half-decade club.
* Steven Gettis wrote in to say he's recently linked to a whole bunch of Alex Toth-related material through his Twitter feed.
* the artist Frank Santoro describes a recent trip to New York to learn and to teach, noting that no one he knows is going to Comic-Con or even talking about it.
It's not so much the fact that the French-language industry colorists have an organization now -- I can't tell if it's brand new according to this announcement or a few months old according to the dates on this message board or maybe even older and it's just come up now -- but that these artists are banding together because they think there are issues worth pursuing. I'd love to see more of this kind of matter-of-fact advocacy among American professionals.
Barnes & Noble Makes Their E-Book Presence Known With Open Platform Store This announcement at PW is very press release-y but it occurs to me with B&N weighing in, and with their choice to work with the sub-$10 price point, it really begins to look like that may be the initial industry standard as these things lumber forward in the next 9-15 months. A lot of traditional book publishers have outright declared that they can't make a go of it at such a price point, which sounds insane to me, but there you go.
The 2009 iteration of Comic-Con International starts tomorrow in San Diego, at that city's convention center. Thousands of press people and professionals are in San Diego as you're most likely to be reading this, ready to serve both a public and each other with focused coverage of new product and new publishing strategies. A preview night starting about nine hours from this article's posting will give thousands of people a sneak peek as to what's on the convention floor and, I think in a case or two, some of what's coming from the big TV/Film heavy-hitters. The formal programming, however, begins Thursday morning with the proper and traditional start of the show.
What follows is a list of stuff I'm going to try to attend or have attended for me. I'm a comics guy, so the following reflects my interest in comics-related programming. I may find a television and film panel I want to see, I don't know, or I could get dragged to one, but as you can see here there's more than enough great comics stuff to fill one's time. In fact, I cut my initial list in half -- goodbye, Tripwire panel -- and it's still over 50 entries long. Do I expect any big news from these offerings? No, probably not. Not a lot, anyway. Other than rudimentary publishing news -- what's coming out -- and one or two panels that sort of accidentally stumble into announcing news, there's not a lot of news in that way most reporting mechanisms classically define it. It's been 15 years or so since Larry Marder was called on to explain a major publishing decision at a convention panel, and even longer since comics folk used the public opportunity to press Marvel on an issue like Jack Kirby's art, and I can't think of too many panels even remotely like those in recent years. There are definitely a bunch of things to learn about comics, though, and I hope to wake up Monday morning smarter and more knowledgeable about the form than than I was this AM. Plus, it should be fun.
Here's what I'll be attending or have people attending or attending myself were I able to split in two or three like a Legion of Super-Heroes character. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
THURSDAY, JULY 23
10:00-11:00 LongBox Digital Comics
This is Rantz Hoseley's iTunes for comics effort. There are a lot of general panels at the show about digital comics, but this seems to me more promising than perhaps some of those will be, because of that focus. Room 32AB
10:30-11:30 Comics Arts Conference Session #1: Comics, Courts, and Controversy
The vast majority of the academic-type programming doesn't interest me at all, but this is a look at multiple cases defended by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and an examination of the Siegels vs. DC/Warner Brothers case. Room 30AB
11:00-12:00 IDW Publishing: The Evolution of Comics
There is no more important company to be tracking right now. Room 10
12:00-1:00 Spotlight on Bryan Lee O'Malley
One of the two or three most interesting cartoonists receiving a spotlight panel at this show, as he enters into a potential high moment of what should be a long career. He's to be interviewed by Scott McCloud. Room 5AB
12:00-1:00 Bongo Comics Sneak Peek
I'd like to see this one for Sammy Harkham and Ben Jones talking about their forthcoming, Kramer's Ergot-reminiscent issue of Bongo's yearly Treehouse of Horror effort. Room 10
1:30-2:30 Spotlight on Jerry Robinson
It seems like cartoonist, historian and longtime artists' advocate Jerry Robinson has been doing spotlight panels at CCI for five years in a row now, but I'm not going to complain and neither should you. Room 4
2:00-3:00 A Darker Shade of Ink: Crime and Noir in Comics
This appeals because of a strong panel (Cooke, Rucka, Lieber, Collins) and a compelling subject about which we could probably use some straight talk: how much a revival in crime comics is going to take with comics fans. Room 5AB
2:30-3:30 Sergio and Mark
These are always-entertaining, old-school panels. Room 8
3:30-4:30 Digital Comics Now!
I'm not sure this won't devolve into a bunch of proclamations and PR-style announcements, but it's certainly a subject of interest. Room 4
3:30-5:00 Golden and Silver Age of Comics
This is usually entertaining on some level and at least heartwarming/encouraging. This year looks like a fine round-up of such creators: Murphy Anderson, Gene Colan, Ramona Fradon, Russ Heath, Jack Katz, Jerry Robinson and Leonard Starr. Katz and Starr generally don't do these kinds of shows, so they may bring fresh insight. Room 8
4:00-5:00 PM Spotlight on Richard Thompson
A spotlight panel featuring maybe the best cartoonist working the strips page right now. This has to be more fully attended than the last time I saw Thompson, but I really loved that panel so I'm not sure I care. Thompson seem to something of a shy speaker, but he's very funny once he's going. Room 2
4:00-5:00 Top Shelf in 2009
They are great friends to this site and their survival story will one day be the stuff of comics industry legend. Room 10
4:30-5:30 The Best and Worst Manga of 2008–2009
I was supposed to be on this, but I ended up begging my way out when I realized how hardcore they were going to be in comparison to my own meager manga-critic skills. Still, I want to hear this one. Room 3
5:00-6:00 Spotlight on Lew Sayre Schwartz
Eddie Campbell's favorite Batman artist, right? Room 8
5:30-6:30 Cartoon Books & Abstract Studios Happy Hour with Jeff Smith and Terry Moore
I want to see at least one thing Jeff Smith does at the show -- he's great with crowds, and this might be the one with the most bang for my buck. I don't know Terry Moore at all. Room 7AB
*****
FRIDAY, JULY 24
10:00-11:00 Spotlight on Charles Vess
I want to do at least one Charles Vess panel, I'm just not sure if it's likely to be this one or the more craft-focused one that I'm going to be able to do. Probably the other one. They'll both be good. Room 2
11:00-12:00 Spotlight on Gene Colan
A nice man and formidable artist, it's nice to have him back in San Diego. Room 8
11:30-12:30 Image Comics Show
Image always has funny panels, because they usually stuffed with guys that graduated with honors from The School Of I Don't Give A Shit. 5AB
12:00-1:00 CBLDF Master Sessions: Expressionistic Atmosphere with Mike Mignola
Well, he's certainly qualified. Room 30CDE
1:30-2:30 Comic Strip Reprints Revolution
This is moderated by me, which means I'm blowing off all the company reps to ask 20 questions of Leonard Starr. Seriously, this is a hardcore information panel, and I invite you to swing by. Did I mention Leonard Starr will be there? Room 3
2:00-3:00 IDW: Darwyn Cooke
Cooke's always funny. He certainly has a fine, fine book out on which to focus this time out. Room 4
2:00-3:00 A Chalk Talk with Jack Katz
I loved the four or five phone conversations I've had with old-time mainstream artist turned indy-comics maverick Jack Katz, and I have to imagine this will be good, too. Room 30CDE
4:00-5:00 Kirkamania! The Robert Kirkman Panel
Note to panel description writer -- it's not a surprise guest appearance if it's announced in the program. Room 7AB
4:00-5:00 Graphic Novels
I'm the Snapper Carr here moderating a superheroes of comics line-up that includes Lewis Trondheim, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Seth, Gene Yang , Jason Lutes, and Derek Kirk Kim. It's like my rotisserie comics-making team, come to life! Please come, and I'll give you something free. Room 8
4:30-5:30 Underground Comix
I think it's important to pay attention to all the UG comix presentations at panels from now on, because we're clearly in that time period where some final arguments as to historical legacy are going to be made. Room 10
7:30-9:30 The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone and the Changing Face of Comics
I'll be over at the Eisners congratulating Jonah Weiland during this film, but I'm dying to see it. Room 5AB
*****
SATURDAY, JULY 25
10:00-11:00 Spotlight on Lewis Trondheim
A great, thoughtful, funny and forthright cartoonist. I can't believe they're going to make me get up early to see this panel, but five minutes in I won't care. Room 8
11:15-12:30 Quick Draw!
Probably the MVP panel presentation in the con's long history, a true crowd-pleaser. Room 6BCF
11:30-12:30 Spotlight on Sheldon Moldoff
Never seen Moldoff speak, and am looking forward to it. Room 10
12:00-1:00 Comic Strip Syndication Is Dead: Long Live Syndication!
Richard Thompson and Keith Knight are very thoughtful and forthright. I don't know Stephan Pastis. One of my five or six must-sees of the entire show.
1:00-2:00 Comics Arts Conference Session #11: The (Strange) State of Siegel and Shuster Scholarship
This panel's description talks about the participants sharing letters with us that will shatter myths, which sounds fascinating and a little naughty.
1:00-2:00 CBLDF Master Sessions: The Art of the Panel with Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith is not only one of the best cartoonists with a crow, he's one of the more thoughtful ones when it comes to the practical application of comics craft. This sounds like a fine marriage of the two.
2:00-3:00 Spotlight on Denis Kitchen
One of the more interesting careers in comics history.
3:00-4:00 Spotlight on Seth
A cartoonist and designer who has really raised his game the last few years, as a pal of mine I think accurately put it. Always a fun interviewee. Room 8
3:30-4:30 SLG Publishing
Dan Vado's a straight-talker, and his company has been taking some hits recently, so this could be a bit more interesting than the usual Coming Attractions panel. Room 10
4:00-5:00 Spotlight on Leonard Starr
Starr is one of those special guests where you realize that it's just a total treat that he's there and you'll get a chance to listen to him talk about his work. Room 2
4:00-5:00 Spotlight on Hope Larson
One of the more interesting young cartoonists out there, and one of the few cartoonists of that age given a rare solo spotlight session. Room 3
4:30-5:30 Mike Mignola: Hellboy
I want to do at least one Mignola panel over the weekend. I've never seen him speak about his work. Room 4
5:00-6:00 Comic-Con: El Cortez Memories
I love these nostalgic panels. Room 2
5:00-6:00 Graphic Novels: Sense of History Room
Enough fine cartoonists on this one -- Shanower, Lutes, Schweizer, Petersen, Sakai -- that I don't really care what they're talking about. Room 8
5:30-6:30 American Original: Birth of an Original
I don't really have much interest in the kind of books that will likely result from this Hollywoodcentric media property, but I'm interested enough in how it's set up that I'll think about attending their panel. Room 7AB
6:00-7:00 Harvey Kurtzman/MAD
C'mon, who doesn't love Kurtzman and MAD? Room 3
*****
SUNDAY, JULY 26
10:00-11:00 Comic-Con in the 2000s
While the earlier periods may provide more nostalgic interest, this panel on Comi-Con's most recent ten years has the potential to fascinate mostly because it won't have that nostalgic background on which to rest. Room 2
10:00-11:00 Kids' Graphic Novels
There are a couple of similar panels, but the line-up of Trondheim, Yang, Kim, Wight, Holm, Schweizer and Krosoczka have me favoring this one. Room 3
10:00-11:00 The Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel
One of the classic Comic-Con panels, now celebrating the 15th year of the great cartoonist's passing.
11:00-12:00 How-To Session: Charles Vess
I want to do at least one of the Vess panels this weekend, and this may be the winner schedule-wise. Room 18
11:30-12:30 Newspaper Editorial Cartoonists
This would be a nice line-up if it were only Daryl Cagle and Steven Breen; with Koterba, Ramirez, Moyer and McCoy, I think you're likely to have a quality conversation that covers all bases. It helps that there's plenty to talk about. Room 5AB
11:30-12:30 Spotlight on David Petersen
I know almost nothing about David Petersen, and couldn't pick him out in a line-up if my life depended on it. I do know that almost everyone that sees it tends to enjoy his work. Already successful, I think the potential upside with his stuff is huge and hope he gets every chance to win those audiences over. Room 8
12:30-1:30 25 Years of Usagi Yojimbo: Spotlight on Stan Sakai
God bless Stan Sakai, an American treature. Room 8
3:00-4:00 Comic-Con Talkback
I love this panel and try to attend every year, although it's super-nerdy. It's people so angry that they're spending their last few moments at the con yelling at some of the organizers. Room 5AB
Call For Cartoons In Support Of Honduran Cartoonists Including Allan McDonald
I was a little put off by the headline of this post, as I can't imagine that there are too many cartoonists out there saying "yes" to some of the things that have gone on in Honduras over the past six weeks, but a full read reveals that this is a way for cartoonists to support once-detained cartoonist Allan McDonald and, more generally, the practice of political repression against artists and intellectuals.
* here's a short list of fine, practicing journalists in comic books. I think most comics fans are snobbish enough they look for Ben Urich, and my favorite comics journalist and the spiritual forefather of this site is the very not-comics Jack McGee, whose mid-career reassignment to "Hulk beat" most closely mirrors moving from any other field to cover comics. But it's a short list, and journalists should forgive other journalists. I'm also quite fond of Rick Redfern, but he exists well outside the parameters established in this list.
* not comics: I think I remember seeing these on one of the big-boy boards a few months ago, but someone just e-mailed me the link again -- they're kind of cute, I guess.
* here's a roundtable on women comics readers and the respect they're afforded at conventions and generally. That's almost always a worthy subject, although I'm a little lost in this recent spate of such discussion why some offhand messageboard commentary from a few powerless dorks on a couple of superhero sites castigating the Twilight fans has so many people thinking there's some sort of mass shunning of Twilight fans on deck at CCI. That place has been stuffed with female fans for a half-dozen years now, and I can't imagine a bit flailing about by a certain group of nerds changes anything. There's almost something to the thought that such fans need protecting or even special advocacy that strikes me as wrong, too, but I'm not sure I know why. Female comics fans are just comics fans, I'd say, and should be afforded all due respect to pursue their individual enthusiasms.
* Heidi MacDonald asks after the comics industry approach to press at Comic-Con. I have some thoughts on this I'll hopefully share by next week. In short, I think the access issues are way, way different.
So About That Green Lantern Movie Hoax Article From The Mid-1990s
Thanks to the power of the Internet, the author of a hoax article on a Green Lantern movie sent me e-mail late yesterday morning, as per my wondering-out-loud request. I had this memory of sitting in Gary Groth's office waiting for him to get back for lunch and reading one of the newspaper he had lying around, with an article that claimed a Green Lantern blockbuster movie was being made on the sly in Texas to be sprung upon unsuspecting theater-goers later that year.
I don't think I finished the article, I certainly never saw it again, and I knew even at the moment of reading it that the whole scenario was unlikely to a powerful degree. But I remember enjoying the notion that a blockbuster would be kept secret so as to get a publicity boost out of suddenly appearing from nowhere.
With a new Green Lantern movie on the horizon, this time being hyped from before final casting of its lead, I thought of the article again.
The article was written by a Paul T. Riddell, who actually found a copy of it on-line here. He gave me an explanation as to how it came about, and its context in terms of things like local Dallas-area film industry desires and gossip. He also let me know that it's a part of the book pictured above, Greasing the Pan: The "Best" of Paul T. Riddell, published three months ago by Fantastic Books. I'm going to buy one, and I hope you'll consider it.
Here's Paul in his own words:
Apologies for the intrusion, but Scott Edelman of Sci-Fi Wire just let me know about your request, and thought I might be able to help. I have a lot of information on the article, as I was the guy who wrote it. For the record, it was for the April Fool's Day issue of "The Met", a long-dead Dallas weekly (best known as "The Paper By SMU Brats For SMU Brats") that ran from 1994 to 2000. Just before its first anniversary in 1995, "The Met" decided to try running a hoax story that gave no hint that it was a hoax until the last paragraph. In 1996, since the editor was at a loss for a similar article, I talked to him and suggested the GL piece.
The funny thing about the article wasn't just how it coalesced: I was working as a film critic at the time, and was constantly inundated with queries about this or that film that was nothing but blue-sky rumor but that the fan knew was coming out that summer. The summer of 1993, I had one Cat Piss Man running a local comic shop so certain that a GL movie was coming out the next year that I finally told him "Yeah, and it's starring Lyle Waggoner as Hal Jordan, Damon Wayans as John Stewart, and Vanilla Ice as Guy Gardner" just to make his head explode. That's when I learned that no matter how outrageous the casting, you'll have at least one fan who'll believe the whole thing. Combine this with Dallas's insecurity about its place as "the third coast" of the film industry (at the time, the Dallas Film Commission was still throwing fits about how letting Oliver Stone bend over the entire city for the filming of "JFK" was going to bring in all sorts of productions), and we had an article.
The article itself brought a lot of interest, as the circulation manager let me know that more copies moved of that issue than any other issue of "The Met" to that date. That weekend, my now-ex-wife had a poetry reading at a local bookstore, and all anyone wanted to talk about was that article. (I spent my time trying to explain "It's all a hoax," and I was still asked "I know, but when's the movie coming out?") My best friend posed in a horrible fright wig as director Edgar Harris for the photo shoot, and he actually got a date out of it. The resident "humor" columnist lost his shit over the mail, seeing as how it wasn't about his column. I went to a job interview in San Jose a month later and was told that apparently "Entertainment Weekly" found the article and reported on it as a real event. (I have yet to track down that article, and I suspect that it doesn't exist, but you don't accuse a potential boss of making things up during an interview.) Two years later, when I was working as a columnist at Sovereign Media's "Sci-Fi Universe", I had a very old friend, whom I hadn't seen in nearly a decade, come up to me and ask me breathlessly "So have you heard about the Green Lantern movie?" Best of all, the article joked about Denis Leary playing Guy Gardner, and he's apparently still nagged about it.
Well, I hope that helps. In the meantime, I came to my senses and quit writing at the beginning of the decade, but it's really good to know that some of the gibberish I put together still has some staying power. If you need any further information, please let me know.
I'm not sure that I wouldn't want to see the film Paul described more than the one we're going to get. Although I think what we're going to get will be preferable to the one that might have been actually in the works at time of Riddell's article. My thanks to Scott Edelman for putting Paul in touch with CR.
Jamba Juice: Bunch Of Balloon-Biters
I was e-mailed several times this morning about word out there in various places that David Rees was calling for a boycott of Jamba Juice after their use of his signature Get Your War On style in one of their advertisements. Those mentions didn't really prepare me for the actual Rees posting, which is funny and not as dramatic as I thought it would be. It's basically just five or six graphs of Rees saying that Jamba Juice sucks, and it's very amusing.
* in what is likely to be the biggest news of the week, as if in answer to a bunch of folks sitting at their computers wondering, "Shouldn't someone have announced a Twilight adaptation by now?" Yen Press has announced an adaptation of the series.
* Bongo Comics announced in the middle of last week that the great Sergio Aragones will become a regular contributor to its line, primarily on the Bart Simpson title beginning with issue #50. One of his many assignments will be a recurring pantomime feature called "Maggie's Crib." His work will debut in late October.
* because of Comic-Con, I'm going to suddenly discover books that I either didn't hear about when they were announced or forgot hearing about because I'm stupid. You may see a number of those next week. But for now I'm scanning the CCI announcements and learning about material that fits those guidelines, like two from Fantagraphics: the great Joe Daly's appealingly-titled The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book (seen above) and the Carol Swain-drawn Giraffes In My Hair. Carol Swain comics! It's not like there aren't a bunch of other great comics they have coming out for the show, I just wasn't keenly aware of these two.
* finally, here's the kind of book that the rush to find material to put on bookshelves shakes loose from the collections tree in a way that makes me smile: nearly 700 pages of early Captain Britain adventures by a bunch of talented mainstream comics creators including but not limited to Alan Moore, Chris Claremont and Alan Davis. That's not a stack of comics I'd track down on my own, and there are a lot of entertaining comics in there, so it could be something I'll get at a future date. I also want a chance to steal FPI's cool-looking scan of a book wrapped in plastic.
A Few Late, Last CCI 2009 Notes
* the cartoonist Stephan Pastis writes about fellow ink-slinger Richard Thompson's recent announcement he's been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and how that's changed his outlook on attending this year's show.
* the Comics Journal has another one of its odd, severely-truncated previews of the show up here. Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has a superior set of listings if you're looking for that kind of thing, just by virtue of papering the virtual walls of her site with press releases and announcements and word from her huge rolodex of industry pals.
* for those of you keeping track, this year's feature-story subjects that have only a tangential relationship to Comic-Con but are still written about and linked to a lot are squids and pedi-cabs.
* I'm pretty certain none of these work. Nice photo, though. I'm trying to remember what has worked in my wider circle of friends and acquaintances and two words that repeat themselves maybe a half dozen times are "beach party." So go to a beach party.
* I'm going to guess renewed attention to Disney's efforts in comics is one of the three big general publishing stories to come out of the show. If it's not, it's going to be a fun show with a lot going on.
Go, Read: 21 Artists Who Changed Mainstream Comics; Seth On Cartoonists There's a strange but fun-to-read list at AV Club of 21 artists who changed mainstream comics. The choice of language gives the writers a great deal of leeway in what to discuss. It's not like Bill Sienkiewicz's move into greater fits of abstraction, say, led to an army of people drawing comics all of which looked like Bill Sienkiwiecz, but his odd presence by itself changed the feel of the entirety of what was on the stands. So I get it. And it's not like it's really historically focused, so I didn't expect to see Dan Barry or Joe Maneely or Mac Raboy or even Alex Toth. Still, I would have liked to have seen, for instance, the late Mike Parobeck mentioned, as he fits their historical window and he was to my understanding basically the first cartoonist to hit with comic book audiences doing that cleaner animated-looking style that quickly became an almost secondary mainstream art standard. In fact, his work was of such a high quality it rallied several writers-about-comics around it, too, which I can't recall happening in the last 20 years with anyone else, certainly not Alex Ross. Probably someone from that school of comics should have been mentioned, or maybe someone who brought in overt Asian action comics influence and blended it with American mainstream comics art, as much as so many of those comics have been awful. I'm not sure if it could have included some straight-up manga or not.
For even more fun, check out this interview with Seth that received only a brief mention on this site earlier, where the cartoonist and designer marches through a lot of the great figures of cartooning and offers opinion. He feels a disconnect from several of the great ones, which is interesting to me. He also has nice words to say about Richard Thompson and Cul De Sac. One thing that's always fun reading cartoonists dig into art is that they're much more open about criticizing that for which they don't have a particular empathy, as it seems is the case with Seth and his analysis of Barks vs. Gottfredson.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* I'm not sure why I hadn't seen this group of massive Internet postings from someone putting in their bid to write Dr. Strange, but it's terrifically amusing throughout. I'm also not sure why Marvel doesn't just roll the dice on a direction like the one proposed here. What do they have to lose?
* keeping with the Marvel theme of today's round-up, here's a post on the Kree/Skrull war as seen through modern, used-to-a-different-kind-of-mini-series eyes. It's interesting for me to read older comics because I see how much projection there was on my part in terms of having these stories make sense. Also, the power levels involved tend to be way down from what I see when I read a comic now, which I swear makes them more appealing.
* missed it: two vocational notes from inside the halls of Marvel: 1) Jeanine Schaefer goes from associate editor to editor and from Tom Brevoort's office into the X-Men office, and 2) Lauren Sonkovitch goes from assistant editor to associate editor and moves into Tom Brevoort's office.
Just read it: it's a fun article. If you follow the links provided or hinted at, it seems likely that what's going on is more of an organized effort by a fan or other person driving people to fan sites as opposed to anything corporate. The person in question would seem to love Chick comics tracts and Jesus and registering domain names and may not care so much for gay people or spelling. It doesn't seem like something instigated by the ministry proper. That said, it's refreshing in a way to see the Chick tracts taken seriously for some of their messages as opposed to automatically being reduced to kitsch.
One Overly-Dramatic Way To Look At A Series Of Convention Listings
It may be the lack of coffee, but checking out the ambitious schedule that the CBLDF is pursuing at this week's Comic-Con International -- and I support it all, particularly the boss-looking Masters series panels -- I'm reminded of something little-discussed and I think undervalued in comics. The fact that the CBLDF can pull off so many events in so many venues says less about the ideas inhabiting either the con or the Fund than it, I think, comes about because both entities have experienced a degree of institutional maturity. Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, as comics has seemed inclined to do in so many ways perhaps most famously in the 1970s collective, self-inflicted mind wipe that reinterpreted all of comics history through the perception of 1960s hardcore superhero fans, people and practices at both CCI and the CBLDF have stayed in place long enough to be improved upon. The CBLDF is ready to run a bunch of events at the show; the con is ready to host them or facilitate them. It's something you don't often hear about in comics, with its endless theorizing about cultural forces and central ideas or its adoration for folks that swoop in and change every deck chair in sight: sometimes people just get more effective at doing their jobs.
One thing in which I take a bit of solace as comics staggers forward full of opportunity but lacking any sense of a moral position on just about anything and with the bulk of additional money being made almost structurally locked into pipelines that move up and away and out of the core industry and its artists (breathe), is this: there are many highly-skilled people in many key positions reaching a place of maturity and influence within comics. These people are devoted to putting on better shows, making better comics, creating firmer financial backing, fighting grander fights. If they don't always have a strong sense of ethics in the theoretical sense, their interests are focused in a way that keeps them from being exploitative. I have hope that some things within comics can be improved merely by virtue of having smart people stare certain problems in the face long enough to figure out how they can at least be negotiated, if not knocked down.
Go, Look: Zapiro On Mandela
The Mail & Guardian has posted some of the cartoons Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro has done for that publication featuring Nelson Mandela. Part of me hopes that the bulk of Zapiro's treatment of Mandela wasn't quite this laudatory. In fighting claims that he's overly biased against current ANC President Jacob Zuma -- claims with legal bearing because of lawsuits -- the assertion that Mandela had a sense of humor and Zuma doesn't has been floated in the press. I would imagine it's a lot easier to have a sense of humor when someone is putting you on statues and talking of your moral leadership as opposed to putting a shower on one's head to remind folks of your rape trial. That's not to criticize either treatment individually. I like these cartoons, and I admire how Zapiro has gone after Zuma. I just think any normal person would be grumpier about being savaged, and if this treatment of Mandela holds true, it's not really all that interesting that the former president has a better sense of humor about being portrayed than this one does.
Union-Tribune Profiles CCI Volunteers
I'm a sucker for fandom-related histories, at least when modestly told, and this article in the San Diego Union-Tribune about how young fans helped midwife the first few years of what is now Comic-Con International certainly fits the bill. One thing I always liked about comic books when I was a kid is that you basically had this still-living kids: a lot of the founders and original talents were still around. I think that stems from learning about sports history, I'm not sure. At any rate, it's fascinating to me how much of today's industries was shaped by a generation of kids that fairly imagined a lot of this stuff into being.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* many people wrote in with news that the government had a job posting for a kind of public speaker/cartoonist; here's the story about that position being killed before it's filled. It has proper nouns like it's a real news story, but I'm not so sure about the verbs.
* oh, Mike. Mike, Mike, Mike.... 1) That thing looks like it should cost $14. 2) $250 would get you The Complete Humbug, the four Moomin volumes, Kramers Ergot Vol. 7, Asterios Polyp, The Hunter and Robert Crumb's Book Of Genesis.
* finally, the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com has more from Wizard Entertainment's Gareb Shamus on trying to take on Reed's debut Chicago Con by reviving a con in an area they were all too happy to leave in suspended animation earlier this year. I don't have any idea what Shamus is talking about when he talks about Wizard taking on well-funded companies in direct competition before now. Mostly Wizard has just left the field when challenged (abandoning Atlanta; never aggressively going after San Diego's date or region + dates).
I don't know Gary Spencer Millidge beyond his entertaining series of graphic novels Strangehaven and as a friendly presence with whom I shake hands and exchange pleasantries at the occasional comics convention. Receiving his new book Comic Book Design was a double-surprise, then, because I had no idea he was working on it and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading it.
Millidge uses a broad definition of the word "design" to tackle just about every aspect of comics making in one way or another. He employs an aggressive number of examples to make sure that you get exposed to a wide variety of comics, particularly those from 1980-on. Some people may pay lip service to knowing and appreciating a wide variety of English-language comics; Millidge has put his catholic taste in such comics right on the page. Half the fun of Comic Book Design is art directing the book in your head, figuring out which examples you'd use or emphasize and whether or not you agree with the choices made by Millidge and the Ilex Press team. If I had this book to check out and read during high school study hall, I'd be on my 21st year working in comics rather than my 15th. I was grateful to read Comic Book Design and to be afforded this chance to get to know Millidge better. For one thing, I wanted to ask when we were going to see Strangehaven again. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: I was surprised to get your book, Comic Book Design. I hadn't heard a lick about it. Can you talk as explicitly as possible as to how the deal came together?
GARY SPENCER MILLIDGE: I was a little surprised to get offered it, too, to be honest. Essentially, I had already written a couple of all-ages how-to-draw type books for a London publisher called New Holland, and Tim Pilcher the commissioning editor at Ilex Press (who I knew from his Vertigo UK days) asked me to write a "blad" for a book on self-publishing comics.
As it turned out, that book didn't get picked up, but Tim asked me to write Comic Book Design, which was an existing proposal at Ilex. So I had a meeting with them and agreed to do it.
SPURGEON: Does the book accurately reflect how you think about comics? Was there an element of this being your statement on comics? Have you always thought in terms of design with comics this way?
MILLIDGE: No, I haven't always thought about comics in terms of design, but gradually over the past few years I have begun to realize that my own creative process consists greatly of a methodical, design-like process, rather than a purely instinctive one.
Having said that, I think there's always more than one way to look at anything, and sometimes that just depends on what you mood is on any given day. Perhaps by analyzing the creative process of comics from a strictly design oriented viewpoint you might bring a fresh perspective to the subject.
So although it's not exactly my "statement" on comics, the book has given me plenty of scope to discuss every part of the comics creation process by analysing the very best examples of comic art that have been produced over the last hundred years or more.
SPURGEON: I think one thing that will really strike people about this book is the range of material and samples you reprint. Your copyrights page is this scary two-page spread of tiny type. What was the process like of getting all of these people to agree to let you discuss their work in this book. Were there any hassles along the way? Were there rights to anything that you wanted to run that you couldn't get?
MILLIDGE: Well I think in a book of this kind which includes commentary and analysis of generally a positive nature, it's fairly safe to work under the assumption that you'll get a positive response to any requests for permission. The exception to that I found was DC Comics who for a number of reasons apparently guard their rights rather jealously.
I worked under the assumption that I wouldn't be able to use any DC stuff, which to be honest was a total pain in the ass. As it turned out, a tip from Joel Meadows suggested that we might be able to obtain permission to reproduce a small number of DC-owned properties in the book, and that turned out to be the case. Unfortunately as I couldn't be sure the selected DC pieces weren't going to get pulled at the last moment, there were very many examples and creators that I simply had to leave out.
There were also one or two creators that had personal issues -- either with me or people at the publishers, not sure which -- who didn't want their work featured in the book. We couldn't get permission for some Frank Miller images as we simply couldn't contact him before the presses rolled. And only about a third of all the images I initially selected actually made it into the book, purely for space reasons.
SPURGEON: Does the range of material reflect your own conception of the comics art form and what's vital, or was there some plotting out in terms of "I should make sure this camp is reflected, and that this doesn't overpower this" and so on?
MILLIDGE: There were some suggestions from both Ilex Press and the US publishers of the book, Watson-Guptill, as well as the editorial team, that certain creators should be included. There was also an understandable desire that certain names should be incorporated from a marketing point of view. We compiled a fair-sized list in the end. But of course I wanted to reflect my own broad taste in the comic book field anyway, so it wasn't so much a matter of making sure that certain 'camps' were reflected, but making the most of the opportunity to demonstrate the huge variety of styles of comics that exist.
I think pretty much all the images were taken from my own personal collection and therefore the choices reflect my tastes and interests pretty accurately. If I made any concessions to include creators who may not have been on my own personal shortlist, then I think the book has turned out better for that.
SPURGEON: One thing that hit me when I was reading the book is how thoroughly you apply principles of design to aspects of the comic book. It's not just that there's a section on spine design -- although I'd love to hear you talk about how that came about -- but that you seem to see design issues in every single aspect of comics. Is that a fair assessment of where you're coming from? Are there are elements of making comics where you feel design plays almost no role?
MILLIDGE: I think design is a loose enough term that it can be applied in all kinds of ways, not just in the sense of "graphic design." The opening chapter on "character design" might have been stretching a point -- apart from the visual design of a character -- but I think it makes sense in the context of the book as a whole.
Likewise, there's a substantial section about storytelling in the book which might not immediately seem to be related to design. But in terms of laying out a page, so that each element is contributing to progressing the story in some way, by leading the eye, or by creating harmony and balance, ideally should essentially be about storytelling.
The actual packaging of the book and its covers is what most people would probably think of as it's "design" -- and that is something that has always interested me. And in a book store environment, where most books are displayed spine out, the design of the spine itself may the only aspect of the book that can attract a potential purchaser, so its design is a very important aspect, no?
I think that applying graphic design principles to other aspects like lettering and coloring is also valid in the context of the book as a whole. It helps make the book more of a comprehensive reference for the student of the medium, or for the budding creator.
SPURGEON: Who did you perceive reading the book? Comics enthusiasts? General audiences? Burgeoning creators? I can see a case for multiple audiences including those three but I wonder if you had someone specific in mind, if only as the primary reader.
MILLIDGE: I don't think it's wise to try to second-guess your audience, and I think most writers would say that they're primarily writing for themselves. But I admit I do find it easier if I have one or two profiles of potential readers of the book in my head when writing. Particularly, my brother and his three sons are all very arty, and his eldest is a very successful animator (he was lead animator on the Oscar-nominated "This Way Up"), but he's not particularly into comics per se; I'm hoping he's the sort of person with a passing interest in comics that would pick up the book in a store and be intrigued by the possibilities of our humble art form.
I like to imagine that this book could cross over the commercial art and comic markets; designers with some interest in comics; comics readers who want to know more about the processes behind the creation of a book, with the intention of broadening the knowledge of the reader. Introducing Seth to a Spider-Man fan or pointing out the innovations of Jim Steranko to a reader of Persepolis. The juxtaposition of placing artists like Bill Sienkiewicz and James Kochalka together in this book is the sort of thing that made it such a fun thing to do.
SPURGEON: While your book is festooned with positive example of great designs, and it's easy to understand why that strategy is employed, I was wondering: do you seem comics in a critical fashion, perhaps some where they've failed to employ excellent design? And if so, in terms of books out there right now, what do you see as the primary area where bad design happens?
MILLIDGE: As a creator myself, I don't like to criticize fellow creators too much, especially not in print. I like to believe that by pointing out examples of good design makes good design self-evident, despite the fact that my experience tells me otherwise. There are lots of things I could point to and say how badly they're designed, but sometimes there are mitigating circumstances, so I don't like to be too harsh. Heaven knows that there are plenty of things of my own I could point to that are terrible in every way.
Compared to creating a new work of art, I think criticism is pretty easy. Criticism has its place of course, but good criticism is far rarer than good art; it's so liable to be skewed by personal tastes and prejudices.
I think also there are different ways in which you can judge good design. Is a good cover design one that sells the most copies? Or one that adheres to design rules and standards the most closely? Or perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing from a design point of view? Is a great design on a cover still a great design if no one can tell it's a comic?
It is interesting to analyze design in anything, trying to figure out why the designer made specific choices; whether they were intuitive or concious choices; or whether the design was undermined by a last minute editorial change or whatever.
At the very least, I hope it's just a visually spectacular, interesting book to have lying around on the proverbial coffee table.
SPURGEON: An idea you bring up a couple of times in your book is that many cartoonists will apply a principle you're discussing without thinking about it in quite that way, as just a natural extension of what they do. How much does this apply to yourself as a cartoonist. Looking at your past work, should we see this as a collection of rational choices to bring about a certain effect, or have you winged it at times, made choices out of an artistic impulse without giving these matters as much thought as one might think reading you hold forth in this book?
MILLIDGE: Well that's the luxury of being given the opportunity to write a book like this -- analyzing why great comics work and consciously applying that to your own work. Like most other things, the best way to learn is by doing it yourself. Reading this book won't make you a great cartoonist, but it might help analyze where you're going wrong, suggest areas of improvement and, most specifically, to inspire new ways of working.
Some of the opinions in the book were formulated while reading comics, some during the years I've spent creating comics, and more still while studying and researching for the book itself. Some of the principles discussed in the book are really for analysis only, and are universally self-apparent to any artist worth his salt. Perhaps other ideas are more obscure and open to discussion.
Applying the principles that I discuss in the book retroactively to my own work would help show up many of my own faults as a creator, I'm sure. I think sometimes you realize that you've not really ironed out all the problems with your layout, even as you're still working on it, but you have to just move onto the next page at some point.
My own art style is very specifically photo referenced, which brings its own set of advantages and limitations. Although I've said I work very methodically, I do design my pages intuitively rather than mathematically. I think many of the principles I discuss are best internalized rather than applied analytically. I do feel sure that my future work will be hugely improved by having written this book, and hopefully it will also benefit other creators.
SPURGEON: How much did you enjoy kind of putting into words not just ways to look at material, but certain working tools that cartoonists bring to work like this: the idea of spotting blacks, say, or the golden section or page mark-up. It seems like there's a pride you have in bringing this kind of material forward, this sense of how elegant and thoughtful making comics can be. How did you feel about those kinds of sections as you were doing them?
MILLIDGE: Proud isn't a word I would have used myself, it makes me sound a bit smug and that's not my intention; I'm not claiming credit for any of these techniques and principles, but I am hugely enthused about the vast creative possibilities that comics can offer, and if some of that enthusiasm and love I have for the medium has come across in my text, then I'm happy.
One thing I was proud of was spotting the Golden Section in a Gilbert Hernandez panel. I was so proud that I told Gilbert all about my book and that panel from Palomar at San Diego last year. He told me he had never heard of the Golden Section, which popped my bubble pretty quickly. He may very well have been pulling my leg about that, but on the other hand it might also show how great artists create intuitively.
I did learn about the Golden Section at Art School many moons ago, but it was Bryan Talbot who pointed out its relevance to comic design to me. I think that there are more artists that adjust their layouts until they "look right" rather than meticulously measuring out the dimension of the Golden Ratio, but it's still a helpful and useful thing to be aware of.
SPURGEON: If it's not too much trouble, I was wondering if you could talk about your spotlight choices: Seth, Chip Kidd, Chris Ware, Brian Wood and Matt Kindt. Why those designers? Was there anyone you would have liked to have spoken to that just wasn't available in the way you would have needed to do a full spotlight?
MILLIDGE: For those sections, I definitely wanted to stress the "graphic design" aspect of the book, so selection was heavily skewed to artist/designers rather than pure artists. There were a few other creators on my shortlist that I didn't eventually include due to a variety of reasons, like reproduction rights issues and suchlike. I think the choices represent an interesting cross-section from the pure design of Chip Kidd to the cartoonist-turned book designers Seth and Chris Ware. Matt Kindt was initially a graphic designer which is in stark contrast to his organic, fluid comic artwork. It's interesting to me that Kidd and Brian Wood are both writers and designers/illustrators rather than cartoonists as such, which underlines the point that design is all about visual communication and that the best comics can be such a beautiful blend of all the visual and verbal arts.
I only wish there more space available in the book to include more images per designer.
SPURGEON: This may be the dumbest question ever, but how much did you contribute to the design of this book, how closely did you work with the art director and the designer? How important was it to you that the book itself be designed a certain way?
MILLIDGE: It's not a dumb question, as I didn't actually have very much input to the design of the book itself at all, and I didn't have any direct contact with either Julie Weir the art director or Jon Allen the designer. There were a few things that I would have done differently, but on the whole I think they both did a terrific job, along with Nick Jones and Isheeta Mustafi, my editors. I ended up turning in about twice as many images as I probably should have, expecting many of them to be dropped at the layout stage; almost all of them were squeezed in somehow, making the book a very rich visual treat in itself. On the whole, I think it might have helped give the book an added dimension by having others to actually edit and design it.
It's ironic that it's a book about design that I didn't design, but then, I had originally been asked to write a book about self-publishing that I wasn't going to be self-publishing.
SPURGEON: Is there anyone when you were making the book that kind of caught your attention in a renewed or more focused way that you maybe hadn't appreciated as fully as you had before?
MILLIDGE: Almost everyone I would say. The very best comics are a storytelling experience; you don't want to be analyzing how well the panels fit together or how appropriate the choice of font is, you should be just carried along by the story.
By analyzing many of the works in the book, I have gained an increased appreciation for a great number of the creators -- off the top of my head I must mention Jim Steranko and Frank Miller, both of which I sort of took for granted in the past. Steranko incorporated much of the design of period, but revolutionized page layout in the process, specifically his last few Captain America issues. Miller took Eisner's techniques to a new level. I don't particularly care for Miller's hard-boiled stories, but in terms of comic book design he has few peers.
A less obvious one would be Paul Grist who effortlessly incorporates every trick in the book without being overly showy, and fellow Brit D'Israeli displays an extraordinary range of skill.
But in terms of innovation and experimentation, you have just got to hand it to Dave Sim, no matter what you think of his political views. Apart from the chapter on color, I could have quite easily filled the book with examples from Cerebus, and that's no exaggeration.
SPURGEON: Is there a reason you didn't use a lot of older work? Because there's not a lot of classic comics in your book. Is it just to give your book some currency, or this is the material you read, or is it by personal choice, do you perhaps not see some of the older books as strong in terms of the designs principles you extol.
MILLIDGE: Not sure what you mean by "older work" as I think '60s Marvels are pretty well represented. As I mentioned earlier, we had a rights issue with DC-owned material which knocked a lot of potential examples out. Newspaper strips (along with Manga and Euro comics) were deemed out of the scope of the book, apart from a handful of essential Sunday page strips.
Also, I wanted to concentrate on works that were generally available and in print so that the reader could go and pick up anything that tickled their fancy from Amazon rather than trawling the back issue bins. Part of my intention was to encourage readers to seek out new works.
A lot of the older material was also very poorly printed due to the limitations of the printing techniques at the time, so perhaps wouldn't have reproduced very well in the book.
Having said that, there's no doubt many worthy examples were excluded due to my own ignorance or bad taste and for that I apologize wholeheartedly.
SPURGEON: Are you a different designer having completed the project than you were before?
MILLIDGE: Like I suggested earlier, merely researching the subject make you a wiser man. I bought a number of reference books on graphic design as well as comics during the writing of Comic Book Design, in order to get a consensus about the things I was writing about, to make sure I wasn't writing total nonsense. I think in the process you can't help but learn and be changed in ways you didn't expect.
I think the biggest change in me as a designer is now I'm a lot more confident in my abilities, knowing that what I've always felt is right is actually right, and why it's right. Plus filling in a few gaps in my own knowledge and realizing that design is as much about aesthetics as art is.
SPURGEON: Gary, I was thinking about doing the research that would enable me to fake that I know the answers, but I thought it might be more honest if I just brought it up and admitted my ignorance. Where do things stand with Strangehaven? And am I right in thinking that we just kind of lost track with you as the market shifted or things went on in your own life... ?
MILLIDGE:Strangehaven has been on an indefinite hiatus since I put out issues 17 and 18 and the collected third paperback Conspiracies during a spurt of activity in 2005. It's not that I burned out as such, but although the self-publishing of Strangehaven was always profitable, it never really brought in enough to live on comfortably. I have always been trying to top up my bank account with other jobs, whether they're comic related or not.
2006 and 2007 saw a lot of European editions of Strangehaven being published, and in between freelance work and being invited to all-expenses paid exotic foreign comic festivals, I didn't really have any time to start work on the next book. I had hoped to do some freelance comics writing, but after spending a lot of unpaid time working on aborted proposals for companies like Vertigo and Desperado, I found myself at a point where I really needed to start earning some money. The past couple of years have been a bit of a disaster both financially and personally, so freelance gigs like Comic Book Design have become critically important to me.
I do want to stress that Strangehaven is still an ongoing project; it's never far from my mind and it's always on my drawing board, albeit gathering dust. Of course, over the past couple of years, the landscape of the direct market has changed somewhat and now it's debatable whether I'll be putting Strangehaven out as a periodical (when eventually I have completed the next issue) through Diamond. Perhaps it'll have to be continued via a POD or online solution, at least until the fourth and final trade paperback is completed. We'll see, they may be other solutions.
SPURGEON: What's next?
MILLIDGE: There are a few personal projects that I would like to started on once Strangehaven (which is my main priority) is complete, including a couple of self-contained graphic novels, an art book, a novel and a solo album.
In the meantime, I'll be continuing to work my day job as a graphic designer and website designer and perhaps some sort of sequel to Comic Book Design which I've been discussing with Ilex Press. Fingers crossed!
* cover to the new book, UK
* cover to the new book, USA
* photo by Tom Spurgeon
* example of Matt Kindt's work
* the always-revelatory craft touches to be found in Cerebus
* page from Master Race included in book
* the last Strangehaven trade; there are more to come
* short panel sequence from Strangehaven (below)
FFF Results Post #173 -- Modern Heroes
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Superhero Comic Book Characters You Like Published For The First Time After 1980." Here are their responses.
*****
Tom Spurgeon
1. Nexus
2. The Badger
3. Crazy Jane
4. Flex Mentallo
5. Zot!
1. Madman -- probably the best superhero character design since the 1960s
2. Jack Krak (from James Kochalka's Superfuckers)
3. Chronos (Walker Gabriel) -- this '90s series by John Francis Moore and Paul Guinan died after 10 issues, but had the potential to be another Starman
4. Holden Carver -- the main character of Brubaker and Philips' Sleeper
5. Gates -- Tom Peyer's radically left-wing, teleporting insectoid from the '90s Legion of Super-Heroes was one of the most entertaining mainstream characters of that decade
*****
Grant Goggans
1. Zenith
2. Hellboy
3. Smax
4. Jack Knight
5. Beta Ray Bill
*****
Jason Michelitch
1. Impulse
2. The Tick
3. Madman
4. Jessica Jones (Alias)
5. Grendel
1. Street Angel (Rugg/Maruca)
2. The Manhattan Guardian (Morrison/Stewart)
3. Jeff Smax (Moore/Ha/Cannon)
4. The Midnighter (Ellis/Hitch)
5. Jack Staff (Paul Grist)
*****
Michael Grabowski
* The Cockroach (all iterations)
* Flaming Carrot
* Miracleman
* Nite Owl/Dan Dreiberg
* Robin/Carrie Kelly
*****
Dean Milburn
1. Jack Knight
2. Hellboy
3. Crazy Jane
4. Supreme
5. Laurel Gand
1. Deadpool
2. Irredeemable Ant Man
3. Death's Head
4. The Tick
5. She-Hulk
*****
I quickly deleted some entries that I thought had characters listed that really aren't superheroes by any stretch of the imagination; I also deleted three with six responses instead of five. I apologize, but I have to play it pretty strictly or we end up with half the responses trying to push the limits for humor's sake and then argue their way into the results post, at which point I get tired of arguing and kill the feature.
Loser Of The Week
What passes for rational commentary on comics-related issues, including me.
Quote Of The Week
"I still had doubts about the actual content that he was promoting, because I'm a cynical bitch after 20 years in comics, but I kept them to myself because, frankly, Gibson was talking a better game than people who have been in comics for decades, and this has always been a field where entrepreneurial Go-Get-It-ness has always had an impact." -- Brian Hibbs
*****
today's cover is from one of the great publications of the underground comix era
Our Best Wishes To Matt Brady On Leaving The Comics Site Newsarama
Matt Brady, a co-founder of and the editorial through-line on the popular Internet-based comics site Newsarama, has announced his departure from that endeavor. The site, which made big news when it was picked up by big-time sites purchaser Imaginova in late 2007, will continue under co-founder Michael Doran and contributor Lucas Siegel. I've only ever had brief professional encounters with Brady, but they were always cordial, and his site has been extremely successful. I wish him luck in any future endeavor and hope we'll get to hear what that is.
I don't have any solid word on what Brady might do next, but the old joke is that anyone who works in comics should go teach because of all the experience working with children... plus some kids read comics, too.
Eleanor "Ellie" Frazetta, RIP A note at Ben Samuels Classic Golden Age Comic Cover Gallery site and elsewhere, posted and distributed by some combination of Arnie Fenner, Rob Pistella and Stephen Ferzoco, indicates that Eleanor "Ellie" Frazetta passed away earlier today. The Frazettas were married for over 50 years, and Ellie became well known as her husband's business partner. Her work was essential in building prices for Frazetta's original art and along with it their reputation. She was deeply involved in the building of a museum focused on the artist and in most major projects undertaken by or on behalf of the fantasy artist. She is survived by her husband, four children and numerous grandchildren.
Retailer Receives Voyeurism And Assault Charges From Customer Encounter
The owner of a comic book store north of Toronto in Vaughan was charged with two counts of assault and one of voyeurism after a pair of customers found a hidden camera in his bathroom. Apparently, it was discovered by the boyfriend of a 21-year-old customer when she excused herself to the washroom and the owner entered a room nearby that bathroom. Domenic Giorgio, a comics shop veteran who has run this current location with his two sons for about a year, has since been released on custody and will appear in court August 19. The store quickly re-opened.
Gareb Shamus' Anaheim Convention To Go Head To Head With Reed's Chicago
In a curious move, Wizard founder and CEO Gareb Shamus announced the creation of Anaheim Comic-Con to debut in mid-April next year. Among the many things that are sort of strange about this are: 1) the article's suggestion this is a Wizard show rather than one of Shamus' new shows that aren't exactly Wizard shows, 2) that this has any chance to succeed given the fact that Wizard proper slowly moved away from a Los Angeles show despite being a much stronger company in a much stronger economy at that time, 3) they're going to launch in absolutely hostile waters by going up directly against Reed's Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, a show with which the exhibitions company is determined to succeed and a has a recent history of destroying Wizard when it comes to competition over comics names, and 4) they're going to launch despite a Long Beach event that seems to be organized by ex-Wizard convention people and would seem to serve the same audience. The only thing I can figure out is that Shamus sees some sort of long-term value in running a series of conventions that are smaller than the ones his company used to run, and that the way to get these events established is by acting as a wedge against its significant competitors.
Worst New Batman Villain Since Orca
I'm not sure there's anything to add to this story of a Florida man being sued by DC for making statues of superhero characters that wouldn't just be additional melancholy squeezed out of it using a special "sadness press." One wonders if the man in question really does have the agreements claimed or if it would mean anything even if he did; it's hard to figure out if DC originally asked for a cease and desist and moved on to a lawsuit when it didn't get one; you have to squint a lot to figure out why the man would defend the right to continue this enterprise if it's as non-profitable as he claims; and so on. It's sort of like one of those Batman punches a junkie in the throat scenes that you don't think about much as a kid but still kind of enjoy and then feel bad for enjoying once you see it again as an adult, only without the kind of enjoy part as a reference.
Why Are You Such A Hater, Brian Hibbs?
Prominent San Francisco-area comics retailer, industry activist and frequent DM policy commentator Brian Hibbs runs into actor/musician/aspiring comic book industry mogul Tyrese Gibson's use of social media-based publicity and describes in graphic detail the splattering noise that results.
* Mark Coale reads EW so you don't have to! Getting too upset about what Coale reports is an almost 100 absence of comics content in the entertainment magazine's CCI preview invests that kind of endorsement with way more power than it should have, i.e. any. But it's certainly worth nothing and laughing about.
* there are very few cartoonists making work as consistently amusing as Vanessa Davis is right now; here's a short interview with her at largehearted boy. Anytime when more than three people e-mail me an interview or other comics-related link I know someone big had it first, so my apologies to that person.
Sometimes A Sock Is Just A Sock
When I was a kid, my friend Jeff was in a play at the local Civic Theatre where he and some other kids had to improvise dialogue about playing outside during the holiday season. On opening night, Jeff made up some dialogue about looking at all the houses for red lights. After the performance, he was given a stern talking-to about the rain of parental complaints that had come down certain he was making jokes not about red lights but about a red light district. Jeff had no idea what a red light district was, said so, apologized, and stayed away from making reference to red lights during the rest of the show's run. Local civilization survived.
I think of Jeff and the red lights when someone freaks out over a cartoon like this one that ran in the NY Daily News. No matter what the person's intentions are, that could be definitely be seen by a rational person as a cartoon motivated by paternalism and festooned with phallic symbols. At the very least such a result should be accepted as an unintended consequence hopefully not to be repeated, at which point barring a history of this kind of thing we can all move on.
Although I have to say, between this and the Sean Delonas dead dog cartoon I do wonder if any editors at the New York newspapers are looking at their damn cartoons.
McSweeney's Working On Newspaper Prototype; May Showcase Cartoons
A new interview with Dave Eggers at Salon not only has the author name-dropping Josh Neufeld's A.D. but mentioning that his publishing house, the very comics-friendly McSweeney's is working on a newspaper prototype and comics are to be involved.
"We [i.e., McSweeney's] have been working every day on a prototype for a new newspaper, and a lot of what we're doing is resurrecting old things, like things from the last century that newspapers used to do, in terms of really using the full luxury of the broadsheet newspaper, with full color and all that space.
"I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper. You know, including a full-color comic section, for example, which of course was standard in newspapers years ago, when you'd have a full broadsheet Winsor McCay comic. So we'll have a big, full-color comic section, and we're also trying to emphasize what younger readers are looking for, what directly appeals to them."
So that could be great news for any number of cartoonists that get involved, and is generally hopeful news no matter what happens. I want my gourmet newspaper now.
Your 2009 Maya Kamath Winners Sandeep Adhwarya of Outlook won this year's best work award at the Maya Kamath Memorial Awards For Excellence, marked by an exhibit organized by the Indian Institute of Cartoonists in Bangalore. Mohammad Zahoor from the Daily Times in Pakistan won a special award. I wanted to mention these awards because Kamath was an interesting cartoonist -- she was a rare female Indian cartoonist, but also one of a few that created works about family life (she was inspired by Lynn Johnston) instead of the more common gag and editorially driven works. Also it struck me when looking at the awards that unlike most international cartooning awards they didn't seem to be featuring work that only seem to exist in some sort of alternative cartoon-competition universe.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* great catch: Sean Kleefeld notes that on Wednesday as he wrote this post Marvel stock had reached an all-time high.
* I missed posting in advance of the party but I sure like the poster.
* James Sime has a few photos up here where you can see the new The Hunter final copy versus the handsome ARC that's been out for a while now. It looks like a really nice book.
* finally, BOOM! Studios has announced the hiring of Diamond brand manager Jenny Christopher as its new sales director. This hire makes sense both in that BOOM! likely needs someone with Christopher's experience to manage its various sales relationships, and in a lot of industries people like Christopher get hired to do these kinds of related jobs all the time, as opposed to seeing these jobs go to someone's family member or pal.
* Scott Ian from Anthrax will be writing a Lobo book for DC. I like Ian; don't know about Lobo. This second wave of '90s mainstream comics nostalgia is going to be weird.
* the big news of the past week is that Viz is launching a new imprint, Shonen Sunday, which will apparently gather unto itself the titles translated from the Japanese magazine of the same name and will new-material launch with Rin-ne.
* in NBM news that piqued my interest, Jesse Lonergan has a new book coming out, and they're translating Guido Crepax's Story Of O. There are about 200 great cartoonist names, but I'm not sure any beats out Guido Crepax. When I'm in his hands I feel I'm either going to get some remarkably-drawn comics or be able to trade for warp drive parts at the spaceport.
* so I take it that Matt Fraction talking with Denny O'Neil is part of The Comics Journal #300's younger person/older person interview mix. That sounds like a good one.
* Jason Miner sent out e-mail this week indicating that the hiatus he took from Comic Book Talk Radio upon the birth of his first daughter has now become a retirement. I enjoyed appearing on that show, and wish Miner the luck in any and all future efforts -- including that daughter.
* hearing that Marvel is going to add another Spider-Man title to its line-up is the kind of news that should arrive with analysis as to why this is possible so that it can fixed, not exploited.
* the cartoonist Chris Eliopoulos celebrates 400 installments of his webcomic Misery Loves Sherman.
* finally, the great Jordan Crane has made a couple of prints of the cover to Uptight #3 (featuring the art shown below, but beautifully realized instead of an online scan). One is 26 inches by 40 inches. Another is 13 by I'm guessing 20, even though the press release says 13 by 40.
Missed It: The CBLDF's ALA Panel Here's a long post at an insider's web site describing a panel of heavy-hitters from the comics world speaking at the just-past ALA annual conference. The most compelling material to me is the discussion by Neil Gaiman that the embrace of graphic novels by librarians was a key factor in their current legitimacy, which is something that doesn't get considered as much as it should and is an interesting mechanism besides, once you sit and think about it. The one potentially troublesome thing that jumps out at me is in the description of the Gordon Lee case, which becomes in its article cameo a battle on behalf of a retailer making a mistake when I think the key factor and maybe the only important factor wasn't the retailer's behavior but the crappy law involved in shaping the direction of his prosecution. Even though librarians might see Lee's mistake as perfectly understandable and the kind of mistake they might make as opposed to many of the retailers who seemed to see it as proof Lee should have been stuffed in a rocket and shot straight to hell for a mistake they'd never in 100 million years make, I hope the discussion in whatever context stays on the point of law.
Creators Syndicate Fighting Los Angeles Tax Classification; Considering Move
Alan Gardner at Daily Cartoonistpicks up on a WSJ editorial by Creators Syndicate's Rick Newcombe, who has apparently filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles over a tax classification issue that may force the business to leave Los Angeles. Despite the fact that this is a 2007 decision and is about a local mechanism besides, this somehow becomes in Gardner's comments thread maybe the most achingly stupid anti-recent government rant you'll ever read in relation to a comics issue. Only Daryl Cagle and Wiley Miller seem to be speaking from a platform on planet earth, and I extend an invitation from business-friendly, democrat-leaning and projected-to-do-just-fine New Mexico if Creators were to move out of state, which, of course, there's no reason to think it would because it's a municipality problem. The WSJ discussion seems slightly more on target, although it's always a little terrifying when grown-ups cite a scenario from one of Ayn Rand's fantasy books as a potential real-world outcome. That may just be me that becomes uncomfortable, though.
Anyway, what's interesting about Newcombe's editorial is that it seems to be almost solely about how unfair this decision reversal is (and it is), and how much it may lead him to move his business (and it should), and not about how deserving Creators is for one classification over another. I'd love to read someone informed but maybe not involved write about this, because as much as I hate high taxes, hate even more high taxes against small businesses and hate maybe most of all high taxes capriciously applied, part of my initial, gut reaction was to wonder if Creators really isn't the other kind of business in the first place.
Go, Read: Todd Allen On Library Sales
Todd Allen takes a look at the sale of graphic novels into library systems in a manner that's refreshing for its lack of instant sales-level judgment on behalf of the analyst. This allows Allen to look at the numbers as they're presented to him rather than as he'd wish them to be -- I have to imagine there are factors involved that make such numbers something short of the entire story even the within the context of this ordering mechanism -- and the result is a kind of easygoing candor about how such books might penetrate certain systems. Anyway, it's one of those pieces that sounds like the beginning of a discussion rather than the end of one, but it's genially presented and worth your time if think sort of thing interests you at all.
Go, Read: Tim Kreider On Outrage
I've never grown comfortable with the fact that the talented cartoonist Tim Kreider is also so, so much a better prose writer than I'll ever be, but here's more proof: a crackling essay on the Bush Years and how he's adjusted to their departure. "If you’re anything like me, you spend about 87 percent of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place." Too good.
Also, this article blasting CCI's bad side as seen by the writer is pretty funny and probably necessary relief in the long ramp-up to this year's show.
* Warren Ellis provides the text of a speech he recently gave on comics: I like its matter-of-fact, straight-forward description of all that comics does well.
* you know, Gil Thorp is much calmer about these kinds of things than my football coach was when we threw stuff through his window.
* not comics: the increasingly indispensible culture blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates writes on the great comedy movie Live On The Sunset Strip. There may be something in there applicable to comics about how people pick up on surface elements of great art, but mostly I just want to remind people how great a movie that is. As Coates says, Richard Pryor told millions of strangers how he ended up lighting himself on fire.
* this is interesting, I guess, in a "well, you don't see that kind of thing every day" way: new Wizard Managing Editor Mike Cotton takes issue with those on the Wizard message board that say they no longer like the magazine. "Spider-Man's still here and so am I."
* Jog of Jog The Blog muses over the role having a comics review blog these last five years has had in his development as a writer and what's happened to the comics blogosphere between now and then.
* there's some stuff out there regarding an anticipated negative reaction to Twilight fans at Comic-Con International that's sparked some commentary. I don't know, I never notice anything that's outside of the stuff I'm interested in, although I guess the panel scheduling could be interesting given the fact that people tend to sit in one panel to get to the next one.
* finally, every so often people ask me what the artist Dan Wright is up to. Dan owned, drew and wrote for the newspaper strip on which I worked as well, Wildwood, and drew the cover to The Comics Journal #211. Well, it's not comics, but he's making some commercials now. I've liked the ones I've seen.
* a half-dozen of you e-mailed me 
* the writer Craig Fischer reviews inaugural titles form DC's crime comics line: 
* I saw John Pham briefly at his studio on Monday. He's a little bit late -- although nowhere near comics-late -- with the second issue of his Sublife series from Fantagraphics, and the original art he showed me was really, really pretty. He's thinking November or early December for a release date.
* Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics 
* I was able to find a nice home for the Peanuts art I had. A sincere thank you to all of you that inquired, and to everyone that helped. I feel as positive about that art getting to move on as I'm grateful for the period of time in which I was able to have temporary custody of it. Keep watching this site for further chapters of my mid-life crisis comics and comics-related item dispersion.
* as one of those firmly behind the comics shelf-porn movement, where photos of shelves stuffed with comics by various collectors and professionals are shown to the world in order to impress and amaze and even amuse, I'd like to point out 
* Heidi MacDonald interviewed the net two subjects, both "test cases" for a comics work's journey into Hollywood development. Top Shelf Publisher Chris Staros and writer Robert Venditti of the forthcoming The Surrogates went first, and I wasn't aware of the lovely backstory there: Venditti came to work for Top Shelf as a warehouse employee during their big money plea from several years ago, and both actively sought the advice and patronage of his employers while also believing that his work wasn't exactly suited for their line.
* one thing Smith said struck me -- that he carried core principles of the self-publishing movement into these negotiations and that many of those came from the Creator's Bill of Rights, which is over 20 years old now. I'm not sure why that hits me as noteworthy, but it does. Seriously, if you extend back 21 years from that document, you're talking the height of the Lee/Kirby era at Marvel.
* a final panel on "Comics After Hollywood" consisted of Matt Hawkins, Rick Jacobs, Jeff Katz, Mike Mignola and Joe Nozemack with Tom McLean moderating. This was mostly about the state of deal-making and related successes that could be had now that media companies had become more interested in comics, and issues like whether or not that was sustainable or something that was simply peaking now or both.
* missed it: there is an excellent short interview with the great Rick Altergott 
* here's 
I don't think I finished the article, I certainly never saw it again, and I knew even at the moment of reading it that the whole scenario was unlikely to a powerful degree. But I remember enjoying the notion that a blockbuster would be kept secret so as to get a publicity boost out of suddenly appearing from nowhere.
* Bongo Comics announced in the middle of last week that the great Sergio Aragones 
There's 
* keeping with the Marvel theme of today's round-up, 
* 
I don't know 
* 
Sandeep Adhwarya of Outlook won this year's best work award at the Maya Kamath Memorial Awards For Excellence, marked by an exhibit organized by the Indian Institute of Cartoonists in Bangalore. Mohammad Zahoor from the Daily Times in Pakistan won a special award. I wanted to mention these awards because Kamath 
* the columnist Steven Grant 
* 
* you know, Gil Thorp is much calmer 
