The argument that I was having at 5:00 AM in the bar at the Hotel Mercure was: Was this the best Angouleme of recent memory?
Here are the arguments of the "No" side: First, it snowed, and when it didn't snow it rained. Second, there was no single book that everyone agreed was the first must-have of 2010. Third, there was no exhibition so astonishingly awesome that people saw it multiple times.
Here are the arguments of the "Yes" side: First, to put a festival on the last weekend of January is to defy the gods of weather -- you should expect a little snow, and, besides, it always cleared up in the afternoon. Second, there were so many excellent books on display it is crazy to criticize the Festival on these grounds. Put it this way: Robert Crumb and Joe Sacco were here promoting two of the best books of recent memory and their offerings simply blended in. Comics are raising the bar so high that we risk becoming jaded to the presence of exceptional works in our midst. Third, it is true that none of the shows will be rhapsodized about at future events with a "you shoulda been here when..." tone, but the great exhibitions were thick on the ground: Neaud, Gerner, FRMK, Lecroart (comics made out of wood!), Fabio, did we mention Blutch? If you didn't like this show, you were blind.
So count me among those who say yes, this was a best ever kind of Festival.
What would've put it over the edge for even the harshest detractors (and there were very few of those) was the Cent Pour Cent exhibition at the brand new museum. This show, in which 100 cartoonists redrew or reworked a page by the masters of the form from the museum's collection, was overlong and inconsistent. By my count, about 15 of the pairings were mind-blowingly awesome (hello, Edmond Baudoin), about 30 were failures (if you want to adapt Frank King, Herge, Will Eisner, Charles Schulz, or Moebius you'd better bring your "A" game), and the rest were varying shades of pretty good. Still, it is hard to fault a show where you see original pages by Jack Davis, Loustal, Alberto Breccia and Mattotti as soon as you walk in the door.
As for the new museum itself, the building is quite nice. The bookstore, everyone agrees, should become the model for all comic book stores everywhere -- it is the Platonic ideal. The permanent collection, housed in the large central space, was spectacular and informative. Snaking around the room are a series of glass cases holding original art, and examples of significant works. Unlike the old CNBDI, I could reasonably see a visitor spending an entire afternoon here. What happens to the old building I have no idea. Most people voted for turning it into a hotel or bar.
The other knock on this year's festival would be that it was a tad sedate. Maybe I'm not invited to the good parties (most likely...), but there was a very laid back energy this year.
The choice of Baru as president for next year is, of course, an overdue one. Baru is one of the grand masters whose career began in the 1970s and who has worked continuously at a high level. I believe that he is the only person to have won the prize for best book at Angouleme twice. About five years late, but still so well deserved.
So, 12 hours after my argument I am convinced more than ever that I will look back on this Angouleme as one of the great ones. Moreover, I have already reserved my room for 2011.
First tweet I've seen from Angouleme about the Grand Prix winner -- the person who becomes the festival's president next year -- is that this honor has gone to Baru, occasionally translated for North American audiences but perhaps still best known for his not-translated "euro-manga" L'Autoroute Du Soleil. That book was a 1990s milestone for its overt manga influences, its then-stunning size (430 pages under one cover) and as a key publication in the then-surging renaissance in the French-language art comics market, winning the 1996 best book honors at the festival.
Baru's real name is Hervé Baruléa and he will be 63 years old later this year.
Angouleme 2010 Winding Down As We Speak; Awards Recpients Thus Far
In years past I always spent a significant portion of Sunday morning compiling awards from Angouleme and then a few minutes on Sunday afternoon posting the name of next year's president, pretty much the greatest and coolest honor in comics. My head could be full of wood but I'm thinking some of the awards were pushed back this year. There are awards that go out throughout the weekend and this site seems to provide a list.
* Prix essential jeunesse (best children's album): Lou Vol. 5 by Julien Neel (Glénat)
* Prix Jeunes Talents: Guillaume Cauchat for Le bleu du mysterieus etui a la guitare
* Prix d'Angouleme de la BD scolaire: Leopold Bensaid
* Prix du meilleur graphisme: Cecile Bidault
* Prix du meilleur scenario: Timothee Bart
* Prix humour: Pauline Hebert
* Prix du Strip: Loic Chevallier, Benjamin Gerard
* Prix des ecoles d'Angouleme: Franky Snow, Eric Buche (Glénat)
* Prix BD des collegiens de Poitou-Charentes: Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, Alexis Nesme (Delcourt)
An award for promoting civil service was also announced, with a first one to have been awarded over the weekend.
The rest of the awards should be posted sometime today, along with the big prize of next year's presidency. I'll have it up somewhat promptly but certainly not first. For places to spot such announcements in English before I get to it, try Bart Beaty's twitter feed and Metabunker. Most people out there blogging today should have it up, too.
It sounds like a super-nice show with really strong exhibits and not a ton of news -- certainly not any of the hand-wringing crises over new comics versus old comics that was common as few as five years ago.
FFF Results Post #195 -- Musicals
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Musical Acts Whose Songs You'd Like To See Made Into A Comics Anthology, as Tori Amos' Work Was The Basis of 2008's Comic Book Tattoo." This is how they responded.
1. R.E.M.
2. Lou Reed
3. Nick Drake
4. Suzanne Vega
5. Iggy Pop
*****
Abud
1 - The B-52s
2 - The Pixies
3 - The Ramones
4 - Robert Johnson
5 - Merciful Fate (no anthology here, please; get all stories drawn by Bernie Wrightson)
1. Aqua
2. Mr. Oizo (Flat Eric)
3. Meatloaf
4. Burl Ives
5. Conway Twitty
*****
Ben Ostrander
1. Tom Waits
2. Randy Newman
3. Frank Zappa
4. Jimi Hendrix
5. Captain Beefheart
*****
Will Pfeifer
1. The Kinks
2. The New York Dolls
3. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys
4. David Bowie
5. The Ramones (though they already got his treatment in the "Weird Tales of the Ramones" insert comic book.)
*****
Johnny Bacardi
1. XTC
2. The Flaming Lips
3. Los Lobos (by Los. Bros.)
4. David Bowie
5. Todd Rundgren/Utopia (featuring Paul Pope illustrating "Singring and the Glass Guitar")
*****
Frank Juliano
1) Elvis Costello
2) The Stooges
3) The Kinks
4) Echo & The Bunnymen
5) XTC
*****
James Langdell
1. The Kinks
2. Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
3. Tom Lehrer
4. They Might Be Giants
5. Harry Nillsson
1. Bruce Springsteen, stories full of melancholy and energy and fire and despair.
2. Joni Mitchell -- specifically, I want to write an anthology of stories inspired-by-though-not-literally-based-on the songs on COURT AND SPARK, enough so that I've brought it up with at least one editor but never done anything more with the idea
3. John Hiatt -- hmm, wouldn't mind writing a bunch of those, either.
4. Genesis circa WIND & WUTHERING/TRICK OF THE TAIL -- Scott McCloud did a comics version of "Robbery, Assault and Battery" in high school (or was it early on in college?), and it was good. Those songs would lend well to comics.
5. Blue Öyster Cult. It was hard not to make the last choice Woody Guthrie, but there are so many artists these days who'd have a blast bringing BOC's songs to life that I'd love to see it.
*****
Justin J. Major
1. The Bottle Rockets
2. The Flaming Lips
3. The Mekons
4. Public Enemy
5. The Waco Brothers
*****
Fred Hembeck
1. 10cc
2. The Who
3. Nellie McKay
4. Neil Young
5. The Beatles
1. Yes -- Moebius
2. Zappa -- Crumb/Spain/Shelton
3. Tom Waits -- Paul Pope/Max Andersson
4. Cab Calloway -- Charles Burns/Thomas Ott
5. Lightnin' Hopkins -- Mary Fleener/Frank Miller
*****
Richard Melendez
1. Led Zeppelin
2. Ben Folds Five
3. Parliament Funkadelic
4. Bauhaus
5. Tie: The Ramones / The Beta Band
*****
Sean T. Collins
David Bowie
King Crimson
Underworld
The Wu-Tang Clan
The Knife
*****
Daniel Mata
1. Parliament Funkadelic
2. Slim Cessna's Auto Club
3. Borah Bergman
4. The Fall
5. Andre Williams
*****
Lou Wysocki
Elton John
Joni Mitchell
James Taylor
Carly Simon
Pink Floyd
*****
Aaron White
1. Yes
2. Beat Happening
3. The Runaways
4. Frank Zappa
5. Vestal Goodman
Saturday opened grimly with snow falling on the ground. Huge, immense, wet flakes. No permanent damage and it cleared up at noon. My shoes have been annoyingly damp all day.
Went to see the Crumb talk at the museum and was just about the last person allowed in, with hundreds turned away. Started slow but picked up at the end. Robert and Aline then bolted town, spurning requests for signings, interviews and general blessings.
Took in the Fabrice Neaud exhibition at the Saint Simon, which was fantastic with lots of unpublished material. At the Theatre, FRMK has literally enlisted visitors to make lithographs. A fascinating and overwhelming group show.
Very little news but a great, great show for quality exhibitions and some great books -- I've bought about 40 in all.
Book of the day: Judith Forest's 1h25 (cinquieme couche) is a real discovery: a lengthy, introspective marvel.
Dinner beckons, then a long night of drink. Tomorrow the trains.
Quote Of The Week
"He continues to hate my work as though it had been continuously shooting poison darts into his brain since 2004." -- Bryan Lee O'Malley
*****
today's cover is from the 1940s-1950s mainstream comics publisher Avon
Very quick note. My iPhone died today for several hours but was revived when I squeezed it really very hard. Hmm.
Spent much of the day at the amazing new Museum of Comics, which makes the old museum look pale in comparison. Since the old museum was awesome, you can imagine how phenomenal this one is. Budget hours to take it all in, or multiple trips.
Book of the day was Sabato Tregua by Italy's Andrea Bruno (canicola), an oversized gem filled with inky greatness.
Officially opening the latest edition of the festival -- by far the most important for the French-language comics industry one of the worlds two or three most vital and representative shows -- this year's president Blutch presented a Fauve d'or to longtime New Yorker cartoonist and Le Petit Nicolas illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé at the Théatre d'Angouleme. Julien Neel received the Fauve Jeunesse award for his album Lou; while Eric Buche was given the prix des écoles d'Angouleme for his Franky Snow.
we hope to have another formal report from Bart Beaty this afternoon and each afternoon for the next few days; I've warned him that if he's not able to get to a place where he can send news I may scoop up a bunch of his twitter posts to tide us over
Ritchie was born in Glasgow in 1931. News reports mention that he was a top cycle speedway rider as a teenager (placing second overall at an international competition in 1948). He was trained at the Glasgow School of Art. Both art training and cycle riding to a book seat to national service when Ritchie served as a military policeman during the Korean War.
He would go in the 1950s and 1960s to become one of the primary cartoonists for the DC Thomson publications. He most famously drew Baby Crockett for The Beezer starting in 1956, later also drawing a version of that feature for younger readers that was published in Bimbo. Another popular title for The Beezer was Smiffy. His art for The Moonsters distinguished the 1960s publication Sparky, as did his Barney. Ritchie would go on to draw several covers for the publication as well. His time at DC Thomson would span nearly 40 years, during which he built a concurrent, successful illustration career through several magazine gigs in England and abroad.
He had continued working long past retirement until just a few years ago, both in cartoons and children's books. The Ritchies moved to Friockheim in 2001. Like many other artists in the English cartooning tradition, Ritchie pursued other arts hobbies -- his included photography and sculpting.
He is survived by a wife of over 50 years, Anne, three children, four granddaughters and a great-grandson. Bill Ritchie's funeral was scheduled for one week after his passing.
a special thanks to the usual suspects on UK comics: Lew Stringer, Peter Gray, Steve Holland; I bring almost nothing to this particular table
Student Newspaper Apologizes For Haiti-Related Sex And Text Cartoon Alan Gardner at Daily Cartoonist caught another minor student newspaper-related cartoon controversy that had completely snuck by me. This time it's a Florida newspaper called The Independent Florida Alligator serving the University of Florida, that published the cartoon at right. This led to complaints the blend of sex and texting and charity was disrespectful of the situation in Haiti, complaints that engineered a subsequent apology from those involved. College Media Mattersalso reported on the incident. While the fact that these are independent newspaper links this incident to one a couple of weeks ago on the Notre Dame campus, the Notre Dame cartoon seemed to jump Carl Lewis-style over the line of bad taste and into dangerous ground while this one seems more goofily disconnected from a real-world consequence. No word on any additional apology for the cartoon just not being very good.
Australian Convicted For Cartoon Porn
A 28-year-old Australian man named Kurt James Milner pleaded guilty Tuesday to "charges of possessing child exploitation material and using a carriage service to access child exploitation material" according to a widely-disseminated report by reporter Felicity Caldwell. The man was sentenced to 12 months in jail, but that sentence was suspended. A conviction was recorded on his record and he is now a registered sex offender.
Milner was convicted for the discovery in 2008 of imagery on his computer where characters including underage ones from The Simpson, The Powerpuff Girls and The Incredibles were engaging in sexual activity. Milner claimed throughout that the images were not there for sexual satisfaction but for amusement. The content of Milner's computer were reported to the police by an anonymous source.
The conviction provided the classic over-coffee debate set-up of a someone with a previous conviction for possessing child exploitation material having this material and the community asserting an interest in his looking at such material against the idea that these are cartoon characters, after all, and that this establishes a precedent through which owning a copy of Robert Crumb's "Joe Blow" could lead to being nailed as a sex offender.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* I know that some people bemoan the attention paid to conventions, but they're a bigger than ever part of the overall comics business landscape. CBR has an informative interview up with the always-helpful David Glanzer on the goings-on with Comic-Con International and the forthcoming WonderCon.
* the Spring's C2E2 comics convention has added Chris Ware and a bunch of other comics dignitaries to its guest list for its inaugural show. Ware rarely does conventions and is a staggering talent and mighty cartooning icon besides, so that's a great get on the part of Reed.
* not comics: I quite like the portrait of President Obama by Steve Brodner accompanying this article. Brodner seems to be having more fun with fundamental shape of the President's head than most artists have. Brodner has a fine blog, if you've never been.
* this post at Kelly Sue DeConnick's Whitechapel forum residency -- basically a sustained opportunity to answer questions from people that post to Warren Elllis' current message board -- gave me a much clearer picture than I've ever had of exactly what the dialogue editors do on manga translations.
* the writer Matt Fraction expresses admiration for Jonathan Hickman's work on Fantastic Four. I think the thing I liked most about the few issues of those superhero comics I read is that they seemed to be less about the original 101-issue Lee/Kirby run than they were reminiscent of a demented run of comics from about five years later by Roy Thomas that recast all of the Marvel planet-to-planet mythologies established to date in these crazed, fever-dream terms through which the team fairly ripped issue to issue.
The FIBD opened today with grey skies and a light drizzle, which dampened the mood somewhat. The setup is remarkably similar to last year, which made finding things easy. Thursday is the slowest day in the tents, ideal for browsing. I took photos of the books I want to buy, stopping at 50. This will be a costly trip.
Took in four shows:
Blutch. This is, as his note says, not a retrospective. The show had (almost) no comics, as he is opposed to displaying comics on museum walls. Beautiful color drawings for the most part, many with darkly violent sexual overtones. The space is far too small to handle the crowds.
Fabio Viscogliosi: More drawings, no comics. I loved this. Beautiful works, some I'd like to buy. Two wonderful sculptures. This was great.
Humor comics. This was not much of anything.
Louvre: An expansion of the show from Paris last year, and better here than there. Nicolas de Crecy originals are just stunning.
Things are definitely quiet at the moment. Like the red yoga balls above every street, an aura that something is bound to fall.
Best book bought on day one: Das Anatomische Theater by Milorad Krstic (cover image via photo above). A cultural history of the twentieth century in a few hundred pages of illustrations. More an art catalogue than a comic proper, and priced accordingly. I've been waiting for a book like this from Krstic for what seems like a decade.
Conversational Euro-Comics: Bart Beaty On The Launch Of The Angouleme Festival 2010 By Bart Beaty
After a great deal of posturing between the festival and the city, the 2010 edition of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinee opens today in Angouleme, France. While there has been a lot of talk that this year will feature a stripped-down approach due to the effects of the global economic meltdown, you sure wouldn't be able to tell that from looking at the program or the scope of the spectacles and exhibitions. Even more than the San Diego Comic Con, Angouleme is an event at which you need to carefully ration your time and simply accept the fact that you can't do everything that you want -- there is simply too much going on.
With that in mind, if you're planning on being at the center of the comics universe over the next four days, here are some suggestions.
Visit Le Monde des Bulles. These are the two enormous tents set up this year on the Champ de Mars housing the biggest of the Franco-Belgian publishers like Casterman, Dargaud, Delcourt, Dupuis and Glenat. This is the crazy beating heart of commerce at FIBD. It will start packed and get more so, peaking on Saturday afternoon when it is often impossible to walk through the space. Aside from the piles and piles of books for sale, the main attraction is the artists who come to do signings ("dedicaces"). Your best bet is to sprint through these tents on Thursday morning, note the times when your favorite artists will be signing and then plan on camping in line at the appropriate moment. There are people whose entire experience of FIBD is sitting in long lines for free sketches, but I'm not one of them. That said, I do usually camp for at least one signature per year, often as a break to rest my tired feet and when there is an artist present too good to pass up. Lots of potential for that again this year.
Browse the nominees at the Espace FNAC-SNCF. Angouleme nominates a ridiculously large number of books for its Fauve d'Or and the one place that you'll find them all is in the tent erected by the festival's two main sponsors, FNAC (a media chain) and SNCF (the national railway). This is a spot that's rarely that crowded, and a good place to just take in the diversity of what the jury thinks is the best work of the past twelve months.
Head to the Manga Building at the Espace Franquin, which this year is hosting a major exhibition about One Piece as well as an exhibition of the work of Makoto Yukimura, who will be attending the festival as a guest.
Check out a Concert des Dessins. This is one of my favorite things about Angouleme. Cartoonists draw live on stage, with their images projected onto giant screens behind them, all to live musical accompaniment, creating a story by Zep. Go to a later version rather than earlier -- these things take some time to jell.
Shop at the Nouveau Monde. This is the other large tent over by City Hall, this time housing the smaller publishers (essentially those L'Association-sized or smaller), many of whom have the most interesting books. If you're looking for an SPX-like experience you could literally hide yourself out in this tent for four days and you'd certainly have it. It's a less crowded space than that for the big publishers, but still crazy by the weekend. This is where I will spend the bulk of my money.
Go to the Rencontres Dessinees at the Conservatory. The Rencontre Dessinee, basically a chalk talk, has been an Angouleme staple for years, but this time has a new home. Frederik Peeters and Nix are among the artists featured this year. The same space will also convene two discussions of Hergé's work, featuring speakers like Benoit Peeters, Joost Swarte and Charles Berberian.
Visit the Fabrice Neaud exhibition at the Hotel Saint Simon. I can't even begin to tell you how much I am looking forward to this exhibition of work by the man I consider to be the world's premiere autobiographical cartoonist.
The Maison d'Auteurs is a space on the way down the hill from the old town towards the museum that annually hosts a number of artists doing interesting work. Their exhibitions are always interesting and sometimes the best of the year. This will probably be no exception. A great place to see works in progress by some of the best young talent in the field. Right across the road is the Young Talent Pavillion this year, which features comics by kids and teens. Always worth a look.
The legendary Enki Bilal will be present this year with a one-night only showing of Cinemonstre, a cut-up deconstruction/reconstruction of his work in film. This will be a tough ticket to get for Friday night at the theatre.
Saturday night, Festival president Blutch will present a show in which he draws live on stage at the theatre, accompanied by the music of Irene and Francis Jacob. The chance to watch Blutch draw for a couple of hours is surely worth the price of a ticket. If you can't make it, there is also the Blutch retrospective at the Place Henri Durnant to check out. In the same location Fabio Viscogliosi will be showing his unique and idiosyncratic work. Oh, and did I mention the exhibitions by Etienne Lecroart and Jochen Gerner? What a year this will be for looking at art in Angouleme -- maybe the best ever.
The Rencontres Internationales will be held in the Salle Nemo at the CIBDI this year. These are conversations with the Festival's invited international guests. Get there early to hear interviews with Jean-Jacques Sempé, Fred, Enki Bilal, Floc'h and Riviere, Joe Sacco, David Heatley, Dash Shaw, Ivan Brunetti and, making his return to the festival, Robert Crumb. Seriously, wow, what an outstanding line-up of cartoonists.
The CIBDI, formerly the CNBDI, is hosting a family-friendly, and ecologically themed, exhibition dedicated to Turk and De Groot's Leonard this year. In a similar vein, Les Tuniques Bleues by Lambil and Cauvin will be feted at the City Hall.
The Musee de Beaux-Arts, in conjunction with the Louvre, will be showing work from the books in the Futuropolis/Louvre collection that is being translated by NBM. I saw this at the Louvre last year, and you need to take any opportunity that life gives you to see Nicolas de Crecy's originals. Trust me.
The Musee du Papier (Paper-making Museum) often has an international flair, and this year is no different as they host an exhibition of Russian comics. This is a topic that I know very little about, and I am thrilled to be having the opportunity to learn. This is one that I think could be a surprise hit of the entire event.
Finally, the Musee de la BD, built across the river from the older CIBDI, makes its FIBD debut this year, and there will be tons of interest in it. It hosts what promises to be the show-stopping exhibition: 100 for 100, in which a century of artists have selected works from the museum's collection and then reinterpreted them, with past and present colliding. The possibilities are simply mind-boggling: Edmond Baudoin doing Guido Buzzelli, Florence Cestac drawing E.C. Segar's Popeye, Lorenzo Mattotti interpreting Alberto Breccia, Scott McCloud deconstructing Ernie Bushmiller... For those who can't make it, there is a very nice catalogue available. We promise to tell you that it is almost as good as seeing it all in person.
That's a lot of ground to cover and we still haven't even mentioned the outstanding cuisine of the region or the wines and cognacs. If I have the chance I'll try to post the breaking news. If I don't, blame the wines and cognacs…
*****
Those interested in buying comics talked about in Bart Beaty's articles might try here or here.
Not Comics: JD Salinger, RIP "He is the same person, a fellow twenty-six years of age, no spring chicken to be sure, who said to Buddy in the midst of a throng of strangers: 'I thought you were supposed to be such a witty kid.' Is that a conscientious remark to make to a little fellow of five? Thank God for the avoidance of shame and embarrassment to the whole family, I had no decent weapon on my person when this revolting, crappy remark was made; however, quite afterwards, I embraced an opportunity to tell Roger Pittman, the full name his hapless parents gave him, that I would kill him or myself, possibly before nightfall, if he spoke to this chap again in that manner, or any other five-year-old chap, in my presence." -- Hapworth 16, 1924
Ghana Defamatory Suit Dismissed When Court Can't Suss Out The Drawing
Wire services report that a defamatory suit against cartoonist Akosua by a political official named ET Mensah has been tossed by a court in that nation's capital. At the heart of the complaint was a caricature published in Daily Guide, which the politician believed compared him to a sheep. The news article is sort of interesting in that it doesn't uphold any right to compare politicians to anything, but denies that you can tell the cartoonist meant the man bringing the suit. Another victory for inexact cartooning, I guess.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* as expected, David Coleman Headley pleaded not guilty to charges related to 1) a plot to harm Kurt Westergaard, Flemming Rose and the Jyllands-Posten offices; 2) doing scout work that led to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.
* even as a one-time subscriber to National Review at 13 years old, NRO On-Line mostly makes my stomach hurt, but here's a short piece from Mark Steyn linking various free speech issues into some massive Islamization danger theory. Or something.
Chicago Area "Comics Investment" Ponzi Scheme Comes To Light, Charges Made
A bunch of the Chicago area news sources are running a story about a Chicago-area Ponzi scheme run by two ex-cons that, in the kind of "sign of the times" that all news sources love -- involved as one of its schemes the supposed sale of comics-related properties into film. So basically they were getting investors with a bunch of promises including this notion of comics-as-films and using their money to pay previous investors and themselves rather than investing that money in actual projects. It apparently went bad in September when these charges were filed (that's a PDF), and it sounds like we've since moved into the show-up-in-court phase.
If The iPad Is A Wake-Up Call, There's A Lot Of Bed Head Out There Comic Book Resourcesdid the smart thing and interviewed a bunch of current comics players in various companies' digital departments and in punditry positions about the iPad announcement yesterday. That said, I don't think anyone acquitted themselves particularly well in that article, at least to my novice's eye. I don't think most people covering such technical news expected the announcement yesterday to have a bolt from the blue quality that if it were a TV show would lead to a fade out, a "two weeks later" across a black screen, and then a picture of a subway car slammed wall to wall with people reading the New York Times on these devices. I don't. I think there's a certain level where this possibility was teased to give some urgency to what is a PR presentation at its heart, and a lot of breathless blogging was done in supplication to that bit of PR salesmanship, but for the most part the people one reads when exploring the topic seem to be treating this as less the arrival of the future but another announcement -- an important one -- that gets us closer to what the future will look like, the way pieces of the board on the old game show Concentration would be removed to show more of the rebus underneath.
What I got from the comics people, though, is that there's a ton more stuff to be decided, kind of a big, general, "we'll see." So while it's now easier to conceive of a time when I might upload 50 issues of Love and Rockets from my own collection to read on my way to San Diego Con, it seems like comics is facing the same issues of commitment and pricing and overall strategy between now and that scenario. If anything, I think yesterday was a good day for those comics makers and publishers who haven't really invested as much as some companies have, in that there seems to be very little of a tactile advantage to having thought out your game strategy when they're still making the playing board. I'm sure many will disagree, but that was my take away. So it's a wake-up call in that respect -- the pricing was a surprise, and practically screamed "closer than you think!" -- but I wonder if only a few folks were still asleep in a way that needed to hear that.
* the Pulse reminds us that the cartoonist Pat Boyette -- who spent the comics portion of his career working almost solely for Charlton and the rest of his career doing things like working in radio, television and film -- died ten years ago January 15.
+ The Book of Genesis, Illustrated, R. Crumb (Norton)
+ Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou and Alecos Papadatos (Bloomsbury)
+ Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert (DC)
+ Sandman: The Dream Hunters, Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell (DC)
+ The Photographer, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier and Emmanuel Guibert (First Second)
+ Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
+ Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Vol. 1, Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka and Takashi Nagasaki (Viz)
+ Ooku: The Inner Chambers Vol. 1, Fumi Yoshinaga (Viz Media)
The selections are explained and a few supplementary selections are provided through that above link.
* here are my Muppet Lantern picks:
+ Red = Animal
+ Orange = Miss Piggy
+ Yellow = Sam The Eagle
+ Green = Kermit
+ Blue = Fozzie Bear
+ Indigo = Big Bird
+ Violet = Elmo
+ Black Lantern Avatar = Oscar The Grouch
+ Black Lantern Guardian = Charles Grodin
They're all pretty self-explanatory except maybe Sam the Eagle and Fozzie Bear. My other choice for yellow was Sweetums, because I found him scary as a child, but as an adult I'm much more frightened of censorship and misplaced patriotism. As for Fozzie taking the mantle of Blue Lantern, well, I can't think of anything more hopeful than hitting the stage for that many years with that act and thinking people are going to laugh.
* finally, it's taken me so long to remember to post this bookmarked link of Kirby portraits of God that I don't remember where I got them. Sorry, person I can't remember. Probably Robot 6.
* the designer and author Chip Kidd reveals in this interview two forthcoming comics-related projects, one a bit more definite than the other: an art book for Abrams drawing on classic Captain Marvel imagery; a follow-up to his Bat Manga! book.
* have you ever wondered about Aleksandr Zograf's current output, where the books are coming from and where they're being serialized? Let Vanja Miskovic walk you through it.
* IDW's Library of American Comics sent out its official press release yesterday afternoon talking about their doing Li'l Abner in chronological order. This is more details than formal announcement -- I think it's been known since mid '09 at least that IDW would be doing the 20th Century newspaper mega-hit. Al Capp's strip was one of the most popular strips of the 20th Century and one of the most universally admired, although I always got the sense that with Caniff Capp is perhaps the least loved of the collected, acknowledged masters by fans working their way into that material for the first time.
* the other publisher-directed, pr-announced move of the week was BOOM! announcing BOOM! Town, a "literary imprint," and announcing projects from Shannon Wheeler and from the Denis Kitchen-controlled Crumb stuff as initial projects. If nothing else, their slush pile just became a lot crazier.
* a recent -- I think it's recent -- Russ Cochran newsletter notes that "the license for reprinting the EC Archives series is still 'up in the air', with several publishers competing for it." That could obviously be a huge get for the right publisher.
* finally, it's surprising to me how few creators bother to keep a blog or site anymore -- there are lot of abandoned ones out there, many dropped in the summer of 2009, some but not all of whose owners are active on twitter -- and even more surprising how few of the creators with a site do the occasional "coming soon" post. Here's a good example of that kind of post from Colleen Coover. Hope Larson's new site is oriented that way, too, I think to fine effect.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* the man who entered the home of Danish Cartoons cartoonist Kurt Westergaard bearing an axe and a knife has had his custody extended for another four weeks. The Somali man is still injured, and faces charges related to the confrontation with police that occurred when he exited the house not being able to get at the cartoonist, who fled to a panic room.
* there's a minor flush of articles today about the son of an Indian director that knew David Coleman Headley when Headley is accused of being in India to scout locations for the eventual terrorist assault on Mumbai, saying that he always thought Headley was an FBI agent charged with infiltrating the terrorist group granted broader responsibility for those attacks.
Comics Infrastructure News Updates
* the comics business news and analysis site Quad Graphics has become the second biggest printing concern in North America after purchasing the company formerly known as Quebecor. That deal should close this summer. Quebecor was basically too big to fail, and doubly so in the context of it being a core, successful Canadian company, so I think most people thought this kind of outcome was inevitable.
* Heidi MacDonald caught that Diamond will now fulfill orders that don't meet sales minimums and then will enforce their policies by canceling orders on subsequent, related items. This make sense, I guess. If some of your customers want that material it doesn't seem right to deny it to them, although I suppose there will have to be some sort of communication regarding whether or not the shops will still want a #1 issue in a series that Diamond has decided once orders are in not to carry past that issue #1. My guess is that this will be seen as a small victory on the side of small press publishers that want greater access to that marketplace -- it is indeed more access to that marketplace, you could argue that a sell-out of those copies could be fuel to take back to Diamond to get them to reinstate you, and in many cases it's stand-alone material that's being offered. Mostly, though, it just seems like something they're doing for retailers rather than publishers.
Second French Market Study Positive The news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com takes a look at a second study of the French-language comics market for 2009 by research company GfK, a study that indicates slight growth rather than a slight turndown in troubled economic times, with classic series performing extremely well, new graphic novels performing better than some expected and a slight dip in manga series sales. The latest Asterix and Blake and Mortimer books were 1-2 with Zep's Happy Sex coming in third. The best-selling series was Naruto. It's funny to me that the report directly cites the changing mall footprint in France and the resulting diminished exposure kids have to manga compared to years past, when that question went unanswered when ICv2.com put it to an American manga company executive.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* that would be me, Alex. I do like how angry and certain the commentators are here. Dueling marketing moves is almost never a story, although part of me wishes I was so plugged into this plastic ring nonsense I could assign nuanced measures of maturity to elements of each back and forth. I do wonder if the new management teams are looking at this and wondering what the hell they got into.
* the retailer Mike Sterling points out in hilarious fashion that fans of the relaunched Marvelman had to wait six years before they learned what happened when Kid Marvelman showed up.
* I guess comics-maker Dylan Meconis could use some cash right now, but all I have in my bookmarks is a direct link to Meconis' Etsy store. Either that, or I'm just waking up in the middle of the night and bookmarking Etsy stores.
* not comics: there's something about both the revelation in this article about the number of the subscribers and that the writer feels it's necessary to bury the information that the owners mean for the site to be added value to existing pay packages that makes me double-queasy.
* not comics: this kind of article would be more worrisome if it weren't specialty bookstores less than ten years old closing. The weird thing is that Indiana's next rung of cities have had a horrible time keeping new-book focused bookstores of any kind, which to me seems a bigger issue than whether or not someone can make a go of a themed store in the biggest metropolitan area.
* finally, here's a bit of commentary from David Brothers on why colorblind movie casting of superheroes may be a bad thing. I guess there's been some of that on some of the blogs in corners of the Internet I do not tread. It's interesting in that the only time I've ever seen colorblind casting done before is with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, and it seems kind of appropriate there the way envisioning an Inuit Jamie Madrox the Multiple Man or a Jared Allen-style Luke Cage seems dumb.
This Isn't A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. But were I in a comic book shop tomorrow I would look at them, ponder them, take out their corks and breathe in the life of them.
*****
NOV090208 ASTRO CITY THE DARK AGE BOOK FOUR #1 (OF 4) $3.99 NOV090845 WIZARDS TALE HC VOL 01 $24.99
A double-dose of writer Kurt Busiek, one a new comic book in cycle of like comic books, the other a stand-alone graphic novel reprint.
NOV090125 BATMAN AND ROBIN #7 $2.99
This is Grant Morrison with his Seaguy partner-in-sublime Cameron Stewart. It's weird to think that this series is already at a point where there are qualifications in terms of this run of issues and that run of issues, but welcome to modern comic book making 2010.
NOV090374 CHEW #8 (MR) $2.99 JUL090406 SWORD #21 (MR) $2.99 NOV090390 WALKING DEAD #69 (MR) $2.99 NOV090429 CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #6 (OF 6) $3.99 OCT090773 DIE HARD YEAR ONE #5 $3.99
These are some of the well-liked (by which I mean it's my impression they're well-liked after reading like 10,000 blogs and sites every week) serial comic books out there for sale. I don't exactly get why Chew is a hit, but it's a hit all right.
NOV090567 ALIAS ULTIMATE COLLECTION TP BOOK 02 $34.99
Solid Brian Bendis-written series from the earlier half of the '00s.
OCT090658 AFRODISIAC HC (MR) $14.95
Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca made something artful and interesting out of what could have been a chance to indulge less nuanced artistic impulses. It's an oblique treatment of a comic that never was.
DEC090839 DIRTY DISHES GN (MR) $14.95
This is another one of those petits livres mini art books that D&Q has been doing, this one from Amy Lockhart.
NOV090782 HOTWIRE GN VOL 03 $22.99
I had no idea this was coming out until two days ago. A boon for fans of a certain kind of energetic, restless, profane comic book making -- for the rest ofus it's an exquisitely curated, controlled visit to that particular comics world.
DEC091126 VERMONT MONSTER GUIDE $18.95
I think this is a Stephen Bissette-illustrated book that's already been released through other outlets last Fall but is now getting a chance to crack the comics market.
AUG090985 BAREFOOT GEN TP VOL 09 $14.95 AUG090986 BAREFOOT GEN TP VOL 10 $14.95
Together these make up the last 500 pages of Keiji Nakazawa's internationally popular tale of life as a boy during Hiroshima and its long, horrifying aftermath. A must for nearly every conception of a comics library.
*****
The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.
To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.
The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.
If I didn't list your comic here, well I am just so sorry about that.
The Xeric Fund Announces Winners
The Xeric Foundation, an organization founded by Peter Laird to benefit western Massachusetts and, more to this site's interest, encourage self-publishing by comics creators, has made official its latest group of comics-related grant recipients. They and their projects are:
A Happy Trip To All Angouleme-Goers
A small percentage of people are en route or perhaps stopped over on their way to this year's Angouleme Festival in France, the most important convention in the French-language comics tradition and one of the world's two or three most important shows, period. We wish them a safe trip and a fun, arts-oriented weekend. It sounds like a great show and we'll have an article from Bart Beaty Thursday and as much coverage as he's able to provide after that.
Go, Look: Richmond, Virginia D&Q caught that Gabrielle Bell quietly concluded this fine short story. It's well worth jumping back on the calendar and sorting out the order.
Special Police Team To Investigate Missing Sri Lankan Cartoonist-Journalist
According to a quick note in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lankan police officials have given into public entreaties and have assigned a special team to investigate the disappearance last week of political cartoonist and journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda. The team's first step will be to look at the private cell phone numbers utilized by the missing man. Eknaligoda was kidnapped for several hours in August of last year, a move that once released the victim couldn't say if it was an attempt to intimidate him or a case of mistaken identity. That Eknaligoda went missing right before today's elections was both a sign of special concern for international journalism groups and an initial excuse by local official not to have the manpower to devote to the case.
Where there's room for commentary is that the company official basically indicates in their defense that the contracts are of a specific, terrible kind. Such contracts tend to have two features: they hinge on a book becoming "profitable" before payment, and they're apparently work for hire. These kinds of contracts not only allow the company to define profitability in favorable terms (exactly what profitable means tends not to be revealed), but also, and this is important, affords the company the advantages of any non-directly quantifiable profit without recompense, including but not limited to the intellectual property involved. (It's sort of like if a company you and I might work for only paid the people that directly led to people writing checks to the company and everyone else worked for free.) I would warn anyone away from such contracts: you're not getting the money you deserve but the money it's decided you deserve, you may not be getting any money at all, there are multiple options now that tend not to be as demeaning, no creators of note and few of any kind have ever launched a career in this kind of "hey, we're be honest; we're giving you a foot in the door of the industry" deal although a handful have recovered from such circumstances, those kind of contracts make the industry less worthy of having a foot in its door even as you're doing it, and even though this matters to absolutely no one anymore, you're making things worse for the next guy.
At least that's my impression from the statement. I'd welcome the ability to look at a contract directly. I've reached out, but I haven't found one yet.
ICv2.com Catches Both Sides Of Handley Possibly Working On Sentencing
The comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com has caught word that a delay in a sentencing report from United States Probation may have delayed until February 11 the final sentence of Christopher Handley, who pleaded guilty to one count each of Possession of Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children, and of Mailing Obscene Matter, in a case connected to his ownership of manga. Actually, let me rephrase that since I can't write today: the sentencing is delayed; perhaps for that reason. The CBLDF acted as special consultant to Handley's legal team until they decided to plead guilty. You should read their story: to be honest, I'm just parroting their points instead of coming up with any of my own. It's pretty straight-forward at this point, and kind of ruthlessly awful. A joint sentencing recommendation of even the lightest kind to which a judge then paid attention would be the best outcome, but still a crappy one.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the Wizard/Shamus/comic con/whatever entity has a three-day show planned for Fall 2010 in New Jersey. While at first glance this would seem to fall into the group's current strategy of scheduling more modest shows sprinkled throughout the convention calendar, a three-day show following the Big Apple/NYCC two-fer seems insane to most of the people to whom I've spoken, and myself as well. The numbers involved in doing a show of this size must be better than we thought.
* speaking of Heer, he's re-done that excellent post about Samuel Delany visiting an early-'80s comics convention and moderating a Stan Lee v. Harlan Ellison panel to make it text rather than scans.
* the cartoonist Shaenon Garrity wants to lighten her load original art-wise before a big move and you can be the beneficiary.
Flipped!: David Welsh On Kaoru Tada's Itazura Na Kiss
By David P. Welsh
It's always a joy to read Shaenon K. Garrity's incisive and idiosyncratic take on just about any subject, like this piece at the weblog of The Comics Journal on the transformation of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight novel into a manga-influenced comic by Yen Press. Among her sharp insights on the topic is this:
"Their relationship consists mostly of the hero bossing the heroine around, insulting her, and periodically protecting her from other hot assholes, just like in every shojo manga published in the latter half of the 1990s. Seriously, something happened to teen-oriented shojo manga around that time. Shojo manga in the 1970s was feminist and transgressive, in the 1980s it got kind of apolitical but at least had spunky heroines, and then all of a sudden you had stuff like [Miki Aihara's] Hot Gimmick [Viz Media], about a girl who falls in love with a sleazy nerd who blackmails her into being his sex slave."
What exactly that something was that transformed a lot of comics for girls is probably impossible to pinpoint with any precision, but I suspect that Kaoru Tada's Itazura Na Kiss (Digital Manga Publishing) played a part. It was originally serialized in Shueisha's Margaret magazine, and it quickly became hugely popular, and you can see its fingerprints on all kinds of comics that came after it.
It's about an average girl, Kotoko Aihara, who falls in love with someone well out of her metaphorical weight class. She confesses her love to the smartest boy in school only to receive a mercilessly blunt refusal. He doesn't even bother to muster an "I'm flattered, but..." The boy, Naoki Irie, adds insult to injury later when driven to explain his indifference: "I... don't like stupid women."
In the real world, Kotoko would spend a reasonable period nursing her damaged self-esteem, buoyed by loyal friends heaping abuse on Naoki. In Itazura Na Kiss, circumstances conspire to keep Kotoko's wounds open. Her home collapses thanks to her dad's cheapskate tendencies, and father and daughter are forced to move in with the Irie family. (Kotoko and Naoki's respective fathers were childhood friends.)
Another complicating factor in this uncomfortable romantic dynamic is that Naoki is accurate in his cruel assessment of Kotoko. She's sweet and enthusiastic, but she is stupid. There's really no other way to put it. She's in her school's lowest academic tier ("Class F"), and it's not just because she doesn't do well on standardized tests. Kotoko just isn't that bright. This quality is actually useful in that it helps make her insistent attraction to Naoki more plausible.
Stripped down to its bones, Itazura Na Kiss doesn't sound particularly pleasant, and you might conclude that I disliked it. That conclusion would be incorrect. I did like it very much and look forward to future volumes. It's not because I'm invested in the outcome of the romance, that I want Naoki to come around to Kotoko's charms (which are average) or that I want Kotoko to earn Naoki's approval (as she's stupid, but she's a fine person in generally and doesn't need to change). The fact that I like it owes more to the general charm and appealing tone of Tada's storytelling. In other words, it's not about the couple; it's about the contexts in which they function.
First of all, there's the Irie family. Naoki's mom, who always wanted a daughter, is delighted at Kotoko's inclusion in the household and is determined to keep her there. Naoki's brainy, bratty little brother Yuuki idolizes his older sibling and is quick to heap abuse on the interloper. The dads just want to keep the peace, provide for the future happiness of their children (with our without the input of those children), and secure their own comfort. They're an engaging group, and it's fun to watch their assumptions and schemes get overturned.
Then there's Class F, Kotoko's Greek chorus of dimwitted classmates. Tada gives them a rueful quality that makes them much more likeable than they would be if they were just idiots. At the school's sports festival, the group's only opportunity to shine, one student notes that "the over-the-top enthusiasm in these banners just makes it that much sadder." They aren't entirely resigned, though, and they can muster ambition and indignation, as when low-end employers only post their job notices on Class F's bulletin board. ("It's a snide little jab, isn't it?" one wonders.)
And Tada does make efforts to take the sting off of Kotoko's unrequited affection for Naoki. Kotoko has got her own idiot admirer, a classmate named Kin-chan who's even stupider than Kotoko and whose devoted affection for her is even less reciprocated than Kotoko's for Naoki. Perhaps the suggestion is that Naoki's disinterest doesn't make him a horrible person, since we're certainly not supposed to think less of Kotoko for her frank disinterest in Kin-chan. Plus, Tada likes to abuse Naoki, at least in terms that the character would view as abuse. He's dragged into Kotoko's schemes and pushed into an undesirable spotlight as their living arrangement becomes grist for the school's gossip mill.
There are so many comics in this category that hinge on the notion of an everygirl pursuing the equivalent of a prince. Hot Gimmick is the bleakest manifestation of this construct, and, even more than in Itazura Na Kiss, no one can reasonably support its central couple. Put-upon Hatsumi isn't just dumb; she's utterly spineless. Ryoki isn't just cold; he's sadistically abusive. But the audacity of Aihara's storytelling and the disparities of class and power that she evokes make it addictive reading, even if you rightly feel awful for enjoying it.
But the peasant-prince dynamic also shows up in warmer presentations, as in Kazune Kawahara's High School Debut or Karuho Shiina's Kimi ni Todoke (both from Viz Media). And at times, a heroine's innate simplicity can actually represent power. In Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), orphan Tohru Honda triumphs over a snake pit of interpersonal dysfunction and navigates a horde of princely suitors simply through the force of her uncomplicated earnestness, and the heart she wears on her sleeve is like a suit of armor.
It's easy to suspect that Itazura Na Kiss is that first vein of ore that many creators have used to construct their own frameworks. Some, like Aihara, have taken it to an ugly extreme, and others have softened it with a screwball spirit, like Kawahara. And Tada's work stands up, even two decades later, whether you want Kotoko to melt Naoki's cold heart or not.
*****
* Itazura Na Kiss, written and illustrated by Kaoru Tada, Digital Manga Publishing, 330 pages, 11/4/2009, ISBN: 1569701318, $16.95.
*****
David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.
He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.
He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.
You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns
RSF: Reporter, Cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda Goes Missing On Election Eve
The human rights and free speech organization Reporters Sans Frontieres is urging officials in Sri Lanka to spend more manpower tracking down reporter, cartoonist and political analyst Prageeth Eknaligoda. Eknaligoda went missing on Sunday evening in that he did not return home and did not make contact with either his workplace or any family member. He had been previously kidnapped for a few hours in August, and told co-workers he thought he might be followed. Police officials' first response was to say that this couldn't be done because of security being prepared for the election; RSF's stance is that a reporter going missing before an election is a bigger deal than usual.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* through a lawyer, Chicago businessman Tahawwur Rana officially pleads not guilty to charges related to international terrorism, including participation in a plot to inflict harm on major players in 2005's Danish Cartoons publication: the newspaper building (and its inhabitants), the most visible of the 12 cartoonists Kurt Westergaard, and editor Flemming Rose.
* in case you missed them, and to put everything in one place so I can to find them later if I need to:
the first one is the video made by a school in lighthearted support of beleaguered Danish Cartoons cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, to the point of receiving death threats for it because humanity sucks. The second one is an animation-enhanced news scenario that came out right after the New Year's Day attack on Westergaard. The animation was obviously made before it was learned that Westergaard hit the panic room by himself.
Asterix To Keep Publishing New Adventures After Uderzo's Passing
I don't think this announcement was unexpected, but Albert Uderzo makes official the fact the Asterix series will continue on without him in this interview with Le Figaro. The interview takes an interesting angle by pointing out that Uderzo has been working with other artists on the recent, best-selling Asterix books due to a malady touching his drawing hand, and that he considers this to be the right thing to do on behalf of a character bigger than himself -- a recent realization, the artist says. I think there are all sorts of arguments for and against such a decision, primarily that one suspects the quality of the books will not match the original Goscinny/Uderzo run, just as many think the Uderzo solo (or semi-solo, as the article makes the case) books aren't a wash on the original team's run. I do think one argument for those books is that the various comics industries do a better job now than they used to of recognizing classic runs or seminal periods in a work's creation. Still, despite Uderzo's seeming ebullience in the interview I found the story slightly sad.
The retailer group ComicsPro has announced the initial slate of nominees for its first-ever Industry Appreciation Awards. The award is designed to honor those who "smooth that process" of getting comics from creator to fan, thus opening up for nominees virtually anyone involved in an even tangential sense with comics production. The award will have two categories: still active professionals, and professionals who have passed away. The nominees in the still-living category are:
* Neil Gaiman
* Neil Gaiman
* Steve Geppi
* Paul Levitz
* Dave Sim
* Bob Wayne
while nominees in the posthumous category are:
* Will Eisner
* Carol Kalish
* Phil Seuling
* Julius Schwartz
Members of the organization will vote on winner in each category, and the highest vote recipients will be announced that organization's annual meeting in Memphis, March 25-27.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Johnny Bacardi has a new comics reviewing gig. If you're a fan, you should bookmark.
* these pages look attractive, and a quick peek at the CR archives shows that at some point I knew they were re-telling Superman's origin. Again. Still, that can't be the reaction they're looking for: "Hey, look at that attractive comic in a series I've completely forgotten about." Not the target audience, I know.
* not comics: those are some fine-looking covers for the next issue of Dodgem Logic, although I feel like the only human being that's appreciative of but sort of bored by modern burlesque. I know, I suck. A big part of it is I knew a lady who recently passed away who worked the clubs in the old days, and I never got a chance to ask her how she felt about it, and was always dying to, so I've always felt like I was holding off on having a full opinion on that world and still feel like I only have a half-opinion on it.
* finally, birthday boy Alan David Doane is selling off some graphic novels and comic books to meet a dentistry bill. I've bought from Alan in the past and will take a longer look at his list sometime today. But I can vouch as far as past experience will take you that you'll get the books with some amount of care in their packaging. Also, Alan tends to offer pretty good deals.
If you had $125 to spend on comics in 1975, I think it's safe to say you could buy every new comic book on the best newsstand going and have a substantial amount of money left over. If you had $125 to spend on comics right now, you could spend that entire amount and not get one week's worth of Marvel and DC comic books -- two companies not even operating at maximum per-item output right now. That's simple inflation, of course, the generational kind, although I bet it wouldn't be very hard to spend that inflated $500, either. Because what's also at work is a change in comics. A magnificent change, and one that we rarely question or consider.
Ask yourself this. What other comics could you have purchased in 1975 for your $125? If you went city limit to city limit in 95 percent of Gerald Ford's North America, determined to spend every last dime, what could you put on the backseat of your car? You could likely track down an issue or two of MAD in its near-sales prime -- if you considered that comics, which you might not. Ditto a spare Warren magazine or something like CARToons. You might be able to find an Archie or two up by the cash register. You could hit a bookstore and put together enough $1.10 digests from various comic strips until another $20 was gone. If your town had one of the early comics shops or a used bookstore of a certain kind, you might be able to find older copies of the same comic books you bought at that first spinner rack, maybe even enough to spend the rest of your money. If you were in the upper, most educated half of one percent of all devoted comics fans in the world, you might have access to and knowledge of various permutations of the underground/alternative comics world and might be able to spend some money there. It would be a challenge, an all-day affair and in the end a potentially dubious haul.
In 2010, you can be separated from your cash allotment much more easily and with much less effort. You can also spend to greater reward. Take the smaller amount, not adjusted for inflation. With $125, you could buy those big company comics mentioned above, or you could snag enough comic books from companies not Marvel or DC and spend your pockets empty in no time at all. Or you could buy a couple thousand pages of manga, and give half to a friend. Or you could buy the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes with money to spare. You could buy Love and Rockets Volume One, a modern comics game-changer and its two finest serial soap operas. You could buy two years' access to several thousand Marvel Comics on-line, or fourbookscomprisingall of Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics for DC. You could buy a black and white version of every story Marvel released in its two groundbreaking comics series Spider-Man and Fantastic Four when they were breaking ground, or the entire run of Tezuka's Buddha, or a few decades in the cartooning life of Jean-Jacques Sempé. It's an astonishingly different exercise than 35 years ago. Entire worlds have opened up. Even the footnotes have been collected. You no longer have to accept the word of historians that tell you Nell Brinkley's work is astonishing or that Humbug was a lost comedy classic; you can read these things for yourself. It's now possible to go from finding out that certain comics exist to wondering how we ever lived without them in the space of six months.
Heck, you can access for free -- or for a nominal price right up next to free -- more comics and cartoons than most people could have conceived of being able to get at for any price 35 years ago. Library collections have gone from having one or two Doonesbury books and a copy of Feiffer's Great Comic Book Heroes and maybe, oh maybe, the Blackbeard strips book to championing work that those of us with full-time jobs reading comics have never heard of when they get nominated for awards. Comics on-line is its own world so big that you can tell mathematically-based jokes about reading a certain number of web comics a day and how far into your dotage you'd be before you saw them all. If you saw them all.
The comics art form has blossomed from one that even its most devoted fans left behind at age 14 to one that could conceivably stop producing art today and the heartbroken reader present at its funeral couldn't get to all of the corners and travel down all of the side roads already brought to life before she joined comics on the other side. We're still discovering for basically the first time quality comics they made 50, 60, 70 years ago, from Fletcher Hanks to Herbert Crowley to Chon Day to a seemingly endless march of nearly forgotten work from known quantities with names like Cole and Stanley and Maneely.
My brothers and I learned to read comic books at a spinner rack at the Marsh Supermarket on Tillotson and Jackson. We would put aside the ones we were to have purchased for us during checkout for our "help" with the shopping, and then take any others we still wanted to read and placed them for a few moments on the second shelf of the soda rack. We would then move the bottles on the bottom shelf around until enough space was carved out for each of us to have a little cubby hole, after which we would dig in and read second-rate comic books until the manager or, more likely, our mother, turned the corner and yelled at us to put everything back. I think I still read superhero comic books at the same brisk pace necessary to devour the contents of two or three before Mom made it to the fourth row past the bakery. More to the point: between that little spinner rack and a shelf of books in the humor section of Helen Tirey's Book End, my brothers and I at an early age towered over the entirety of comics. One shove, one arm sweep, and we could push everything we knew about the medium to the floor. Even our collections were little.
Sometimes I think that a lot of comics readers, particularly lifelong comics readers, including industry folk and creators and those of us lucky enough to have some platform with which to grapple with the art form on a regular basis, have yet to come to terms with the enormity of what has sprung up around us. You don't even have to go back 35 years to get a sense of how everything's changed. In two weeks late last month I received in the mail two books -- Footnotes In Gaza, Alec: The Years Have Pants -- each of which was better than anything I read the entire year of 1999. Seriously. That's one hell of a fortnight. That kind of thing didn't happen in comics a decade earlier. There simply wasn't enough of substance to distract us from something that might surprise or that we might simply forget about until it was in your lap. You engaged with the really good books from the point they were dots on the horizon and then right through their release and for six months after they were published across each and every format. Today we're lucky if the conversation on any one work extends past its listed publishing date. The docket is that full.
I think the last step a lot of us have to take when engaging comics is that the field, the entire field, is far, far bigger than we are. It is definitely than any one relationship for it; it's likely bigger than any one imagination for it. It's okay to have an interest in only part of something like that; in fact, that's the far more understandable stance, and perhaps the only rational one. But we all have to do a better job when it comes to thinking that comics is solely or even largely defined by our personal interactions with the medium. You can apologize for not being well-versed in manga, or comic strips, or on-line comics; you don't get to go ahead and assert yours is a list of all the comics. Not anymore. You can pretend there's a cultural anointing that justifies a marketplace bully or two, but you'll have to get used to people who believe just as strongly on what they take to cash register. Close yourself off at your own risk. If you insist on seeing comics as a delivery system for a specific iteration of one genre on a weekly basis, delivering a distinct flavor or thrill, comics will likely disappoint in stunning fashion. If you see them as a single genre, one day that genre will edge its way into a direction not to your liking. If the comics you feel are comics the comics you enjoyed at a certain age, their makers and that era will pass away long before you will and you'll be left among their ghosts hoping for their impossible return.
If, instead, you think of comics as a 110-year-old, sprawling array of work in a variety of forms from multiple world traditions all of which is yours to access and enjoy and learn from, well, comics will probably still break your heart, but it might take a bit longer and you'll look slightly less provincial and small-minded when you finally throw your hands up in the air. And it won't be comics' fault when you go. As a bonus, you'll be closer to the truth of things. You'll be able take the Bif Bam Pow out of your own ear before you criticize it in another's. You'll learn new ways to appreciate old, precious objects. You might even stop applying medicine to one part of this particular blind man's elephant under the illusion you're healing the whole. And if you stop for a moment, and blink, and listen closely, you'll discover it's been a herd of elephants all along.
FFF Results Post #194 -- Confessional
On Friday, CR readers were asked to, "Make Five Confessions Related To Comics That Don't Necessarily Portray You In A Flattering Light." This is how they responded.
Tom Spurgeon
1. I remember my credit card and debit card security numbers according to what comic book issue each represents (I had a card with "137" for years).
2. I prefer my comic books bagged and boarded.
3. I frequently think of throwing all my comics away.
4. I have gone several years at a time between CBLDF memberships.
5. I know exactly what the last post on this blog will be.
*****
Mark Coale
1. People who read only superhero comics or only read alt/indy books are foolish.
2. Blackest night and rainbow lantern corps feel like warmed over fan fiction.
3. I don't get the cult of warren ellis.
4. I completely understand why some people call Lost Girls pornographic.
5. Going to a comic-con and seeing all the fat social rejects cripples my self esteem for days if not weeks.
*****
Matthew Maxwell
1. I enjoy The Micronauts more than I enjoy Love and Rockets.
2. I was confused by Watchmen #1 the first time I read it.
3. I can't be bothered to pre-order anything, much less titles that could benefit from it.
4. I would rather read a good story than great art.
5. Sometimes I let the crap side of this medium and business get the better of me.
*****
David Welsh
1. I couldn't make myself finish reading Blankets.
2. I could make myself finish reading Ultimo.
3. I'm still mad about the Scarlet Witch.
4. I don't think I own any comics created by Daniel Clowes.
5. My "to read" pile is completely out of hand.
*****
Frank Santoro
5. I don't care about Schulz
4. Was never a "Caniffer"
3. Never read Feiffer
2. I hoard really bad comics that are only meaningful to me and basically have no value whatsoever.
1. I cut the tops off of the plastic bags for my comics so I don't have to mess around with tape.
1) I can name the location (store, convention, trade, etc.) where every comic I have ever owned was purchased from.
2) At one point in my life, I had memorized all the dialogue to Comico's Sam and Max: Freelance Police.
3) I once violently threw a cat down a flight of stairs for taking a dump on a copy of Justice League America #26.
4) My LCS is a flea market stand.
5) I used my knowledge of X-men comics to lose my virginity to a Marvel girl, but because I was a DC boy, I knew it wouldn't last.
1. I own complete runs of both Team America and US1.
2. My first experiences with Kirby's art were in his Captain America run, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why anybody worshipped the man.
3. My best friend and I went to see Superman IV on the day it opened, and we went over an hour early, expecting a huge line. Oops.
4. I stopped bagging and boarding my comics almost a decade ago.
5. I no longer purchase a single pamphlet comic from Marvel or DC, which probably sounds weird coming from someone that runs a comics website.
*****
Russell Lissau
1. As a teen, I had my comics catalogued on index cards -- and cross-referenced.
2. Because I write comics and am a newspaper reporter, an uncle occasionally refers to me as Clark Kent or Jimmy Olsen.
3. I can't wrap my mind around reading manga "backwards." I really have trouble with it.
4. I know more about Batman than most people probably should.
5. Somewhere, there are family photos of preschool-aged me running around the house in a red cape and a blue shirt with a red S on it.
*****
Daniel Trogdon
1) I think the non-superhero comics I read are always better than the superhero ones, but for the most part I end up rereading the superhero ones more.
2) I download comics but I honestly try to keep it to things that unavailable in collections (and, no, being in a B&W collection doesn't count).
3) I've thrown comics away. Good ones, even.
4) The vast majority of non-Crumb, non-Shelton undergrounds bore me to tears.
5) Here's the biggie: I do not see the appeal of Carl Barks.
1) I have an entire room that's overrun by comics and graphic -- in boxes, stacked loose, everywhere. I don't have enough room to organize them.
2) I've come to view comp copies of comics and GNs for review as something of a curse (see #1)
3) I have a full set of Blackest Night promotional rings sitting on my computer desk.
4) There have been occasions on which I've bought multiple copies of the same comic book.
5) I used to own (and play) the original DC Role-Playing Game by Mayfair Games and a slew of game modules.
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. During a Legion of Super-Heroes panel at one of the late '90s Chicago conventions, I started to argue with Mark Waid about who was smarter, Reed Richards or Brainiac 5.
2. For most of my childhood, Jack Kirby artwork creeped me out.
3. I am woefully uneducated about manga.
4. Christopher Reeve's performances convinced me that the Clark Kent disguise could totally work.
5. Before this weekend is out, I will have re-read "The Fiend With Five Faces!" from JLA #156 (July 1978), and probably a few other Gerry Conway/Dick Dillin JLA issues. In fact, I'll do that right now....
*****
Richard Melendez
1. I own most, if not all, of Image Comics' debut issues from the early '90s, along with a decent amount of their output from their first year or two of existence.
2. Despite finding myself perpetually defending the medium as being "more than just super heroes," I still purchase more super hero comics than indy/alt comics (though that's slowly shifting).
3. I have gone several years at a time between Comics Journal subscriptions.
4. When I was a starving young man in my early 20's, I canceled my sizable pull list at a small, struggling, yet incredibly friendly and customer-oriented, comic shop because I was broke, yet I told them it was because I was moving. They virtually begged me to stay, even offering to deliver the comics to me. I stuck by my story, embarrassed by my lack of funds. They closed within the year, though I can't say either way how the loss of my business affected them.
5. When I was a younger man, I dated women for months without mentioning once my love of comics nor my large collection. Again, due to embarrassment.
*****
Bill Matheny
1) I went through a period as a kid where I ironed the covers of my comics in order to remove any possible wrinkles and to keep them flat.
2) Back in junior high I tried to steal a piece of candy when I went to pick out some comics at the newsstand. The owner caught me and gave me hell... in a nice way.
3) I see more interesting comics than ever before. At the same time I see more over-hyped crap than ever before. It's a puzzling conundrum for me.
4) I can easily rationalize spending the money necessary for one of the many classic comic strip or comic book reprint volumes, but I have a difficult time justifying the three to six dollars needed to purchase the majority of mainstream comic books.
5) Thanks to my oafish finesse I have, at one time or the other in the past, dropped a large pile of comic books on my foot. It hurts like hell!
*****
Andrew Mansell
1. I secretly wish every girl in real life looked as though they were drawn by Darwyn Cooke
2. I wish the original Earth 2 would come back as it was in 1986 and it continued to be ruled-over by Roy Thomas
3. I think that Persepolis (as a comic) is a very poor quality rip-off of David B.
4. Whenever I read an article by Gary Groth, I have to look up at least a dozen words in the dictionary
5. There are moments when the details of every day life get complicated and I wish I had Spurgeon or Fiore around to explain things to me clearly.
*****
Michael Grabowski
1. When I needed the cash, I sold for an absurdly low amount the collection of about half the Ditko-era Dr. Strange/Strange Tales that I had purchased at once for $2-4 each at a convention some years before. My longing for those books now exponentially outweighs whatever long-forgotten relief that cash bought me at the time.
2. In another really bad deal, I ignorantly traded dozens of Post baseball cards -- the valuable ones from the 60s--for a 2/3 complete set of Tomb of Dracula.
3. In a speculative frenzy, I purchased 20 copies of each of the first seven issues of New Mutants.
4. I have not kept a single one of the 5000 comics I accumulated from 5-15 years old except for the Charlton Yogi Bear comic that was my first one.
5. I am completely incapable of destroying a comic book, no matter how awful the book or how much I don't want it. I can't trash it, I can't even recycle it. I can only give it away and leave it for someone else to destroy.
1. These days I buy WAAAY more entertaining/mainstream than fine art/indie comics.
2. I sometimes lie to my girlfriend, friends, and family about how much I spend on comics.
3. I go to the comics shop almost everyday and purchase something almost every time I'm there.
4. I've tried (and mostly failed) to use my comics-industry personality to impress women when dating.
5. REPRESENTATIONAL ART: I prefer Steve Rude to Jaime Hernandez.
1. The older brother of a good friend of mine committed a fairly violent suicide when we were in high school. About a week after the funeral, my friend gave me his entire collection of comics saying that he didn't want them any more. It didn't occur to me until years later that I should have seen that as a potential warning sign that he might commit suicide himself. Fortunately, he didn't, but I still find it a great failing on my part for not having thought it at the time.
2. Shortly after we began dating, I took my girlfriend to Wizard World Chicago. She was more curious to see me "in my element" than having any interest in comics themselves. She was pretty well done by 2:00 and began dropping not-so-subtle clues that she was ready to leave. I remained totally oblivious for at least another hour before she finally said, "I'm tired and my feet hurt. I'm done. We need to leave. Now."
3. Back when I was moderating an online comic message board, a flame war once erupted when one person posted suggestive (but not explicit) original drawings of a comic character that another poster took offense to. Once the flame war died down, the artist in question emailed me another sketch he had done of the comic character beating the offended poster to a pulp. Though I officially sanctioned the artist for violating the rules of the message board, I really liked that last drawing.
4. I once had the opportunity to buy a complete run of Tim Truman's Scout fairly cheaply. I ultimately declined, though, because I figured that sooner or later I'd inherit my dad's copies anyway.
5. Several years ago, I purchased $12.47 worth of comics at an out-of-town comic shop. I gave the clerk a ten and a five. He handed me a twenty, three quarters and a penny as change. I didn't correct him and simply walked out of the store. (I might note, interestingly, that there is no combination of two bills I could've given him that could possibly have led to that change, regardless of what denominations he thought the bill and coins he handed me might have been.)
*****
Shannon Smith
1) I've never owned or read the collected (graphic novel) versions of Watchmen or Jimmy Corrigan.
2) I once had my wife stand in line to get a sketch from Paul Pope. Of course, once she saw Pope, I’m sure she was much happier to stand in line to see him than to sit at my table with me.
3) I never bought a Pez dispenser until I read The Maxx.
4) I wore the blank badge. Actually, I’m not at all ashamed of that.
5) I saw Howard the Duck in the theater. And I liked it.
1. I often think about burning all my comics in a monstrous funeral pyre and dedicating my life to something more worthwhile.
2. My possession complex is so great when it comes to comics that, even though I tried and failed twice to sell Codename: Knockout #2 on eBay for one dollar, I can't just throw it away.
3. Even though I think the whole speculator-driven, comics-as-financial-investment thing is a shameful obscenity, I still wish my collection was worth more than it is.
4. I own hundreds of comics (maybe more) that I've never bothered to open and read.
5. In the '80s, I used to buy comics exclusively at one newsagent (with trembling hands) because the woman behind the counter had fabulous boobs.
*****
Justin J. Major
1. I preferred the DC Adventure line for children to the adult DC Comics line of titles.
2. I hate John Byrne for killing Jean Grey, James McDonald Hudson and the Richards baby.
3. I carry a copy of Ivan Brunetti's "Hee" with me at all times.
4. I don't "get" Krazy Kat. Or Bean World. Or Bone. Meh.
5. I've owned the Love & Rockets "Palomar" collection for years, but I have never read it.
*****
Tom Mason
1. I think Thor is stronger than the Hulk but I root for the Hulk because I hate Thor.
2. My favorite comic book has nothing to do with super-heroes (it's classic Bat Lash).
3. I was a co-conspirator to a prank phone call to Ernie Bushmiller.
4. I love Terry And The Pirates. Steve Canyon? Not so much.
5. Even though I did it for a while and thoroughly enjoyed it, I have a hard time explaining to non-comics people how a comic book is put together.
*****
James C. Langdell
1. Most of my comics are in a storage space in boxes I haven't peeked into for over 20 years.
2. At a rather tender age, rarely seen examples of Rupert The Bear stories looked scary weird to me.
3. It offended my 10-year-old sense of fairness that Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen had their own comic books, but their boss Perry White didn't.
4. In past years, I've made the mistake of buying the same issue three times while waiting to read the whole arc at once eventually. These days I don't even bother trying.
5. I'm afraid I still really don't get Krazy Kat.
*****
Aaron White
1. In first grade I swiped another kid's Superman LP out of her backpack. A year or two later I threw it out in a mix of remorse and fear of getting caught.
2. In middle school I "borrowed" my brother's copy of Howard the Duck magazine (the one with the topless Beverly) and took it to school. Someone swiped it, and I never 'fessed up to my brother.
3. After a particularly inspiring church camp, I threw a comic with more topless women into the trash and commanded the comic, in the name of Jesus, to burn. But Jesus wasn't dispensing cheap miracles for confused boys that day.
4. All my letters to The Comics Journal and half my posts on Comicon.com and TCJ.com message boards are well worth being ashamed of.
5. Speaking of which, during my six years of desk jobbing I spent half my work time on comics websites.
*****
Danny Ceballos
1. My wife caught me laughing hysterically while reading Little Lulu #94
2. I consider Grant Morrison a genius
3. I own a Sandman sculpture
4. I've never read a single issue of Spider-Man comic book
5. I think Kramers Ergot 7 is stoopid
1. I have dreams in comics form
2. I can tell who wrote a Comics Comics post from just the first ten words with 94% accuracy
3. Your knowing the last post for this blog instantly reminded me of Syzygy Darklock knowing the future place of his death in Jim Starlin's Dreadstar
4. I once spent a night in figuring out Agata Morio's Red-Colored Elegy song on guitar
5. And I'm spending tonight in answering this question
The top comics-related news stories from January 16 to January 22, 2010:
1. Jacques Martin dies; last of the surviving initial masters of the ligne claire school of comics-making.
2. Notre Dame independent newspaper editor resigns after cartoon seeming to endorse or at least make light of violence against gay people ends up in last week's edition.
3. TOON books receive honors from ALA, which made for a fine time to reflect how the line was initially turned down by major publishers.
Losers Of The Week No matter the relative class of the apology, whatever was going on at the Notre Dame-area independent student newspaper The Observer that allowed them to loft a goofy and hateful cartoon on their community.
Quote Of The Week
"The phallic shaped book represents the male's totemic power; he uses his superior access to wealth (his 'inheritance' as a male) as a form of seduction. The male occupies the literal 'seat of power,' sitting in a purple chair, the color of royalty, which in the US means Rich People, and he is positioned in a Masonic mystic triangle formed by three gems. And the female is off to the side, looking on excitedly and admiring his 'account.' His masculinity is a form of exaggeration and ornamentation (gems with their own tassles), like a male bird's mating dance. Gloria's face and hand gestures communicate her surprise at, and her appreciation of, the phallus/book's ostentatious size and shape, saying, 'I'll bet I know what kind of book that is.' She is responsive to the ritual display he enacts for her benefit -- and for us, as he looks at the viewers, for we are the third party in this love triangle. Had she placed a 'bet' as she suggests, she would have won. She certainly knows what kind of book it is in a literal sense: a book that records and displays the Rich family's riches. But does she know what kind of book it is in a symbolic sense? Like the superhero comic, the children's humor comic can often explore an erotic power fantasy, playing out a cultural script about gender, money, and desire -- a sexual economy that the child (Richie, Gloria, the reader) intuits yet cannot articulate." -- Ken Parille
*****
today's cover is from the 1940s-1950s mainstream comics publisher Avon
Please Stop Sending Five For Fridays On Saturday Mornings; I Just Delete Them
I know that more and more people read sites like CR on a feed basis rather than at the site itself, but the Five For Fridays scroll off the site at midnight Friday night for a reason. I compile the results when I first get up in the morning or, if I'm up to it and around, before I go to bed, and I don't revisit anything on the site on the weekends barring breaking news. Some weekends that's going to mean I'm done with FFF before anything sent on Saturday morning reaches my inbox; some weekends it might not.
I'll try to put something in the actual text to better reflect this, but until then: thank you, but no thank you.
Seriously, I just deleted like ten of these things that have shown up in the last hour. The results post was put up to scroll out two hours ago.
Jacques Martin, one of the great artists of the classic mid-20th Century French-language comics magazine Tintin, the creator of Alix and a collaborator on a selection of the Tintin books, died in Switzerland on January 21. He was 88 years old.
Martin was born in the northeastern border town of Strasbourg in 1921. He went to school for engineering before breaking out of that career path to take up cartooning in his early 20s. His first work was "Les Aventures du Jeune Toddy," a story that ran in Je Maintiendray in 1942. Martin spent the war doing factory work. In 1946, Martin took advantage of travel opportunities in the post-War era to head to Belgium, where he met Hergé. He would go on to collaborate with Hergé on several albums in the Tintin series, perhaps most notably Tintin in Tibet, while building his own career through covers for Tintin Magazine and work on his own series.
In 1948 Martin created the series Alix, the adventures of a young Gallo-Roman man set in the late Roman Republic era. The adventures featured attention to the details of that period with a sprinkling of purposefully anachronistic background elements and narrative situations. Because of the background of its lead, Alix also had an element of representing French national identity that became wildly successful embodied in the much looser and ultimately much more popular Asterix series. It is largely through his work on Alix that Martin became recognized as one of the great practitioners of the ligne claire style, along with Herge, Edgar P. Jacobs, Bob de Moor and Willy Vandersteen, all of whom preceded Martin in death.
"Someone posted that Martin was the very last of the great Golden Age Franco-Belgian cartoonists and I probably wouldn't dispute that," longtime European comics reader, translator and editor Kim Thompson told CR. "I haven't read one of his books in years, but I collected all the Alixes as a kid and while even then I thought he was the weakest wheel of the clear-line Herge/Jacobs/Martin tricycle, he sure could draw, and his depiction of Rome was surprisingly raw at times for a kids' comic. I suspect one day I'll dig those books out and get a kick out of them all over again, passing as I have from bright-eyed kid ingenuousness through too-cool-for-school adult snark to middle-aged nostalgic sentimentality."
Alix became one of the more successful series of its type in comics history. Martin wrote and provided art for the first 20 Alix adventures. The first 15 of those 20 were serialized in Tintin Magazine in the '50s, '60s and '70s. The first five adventures were collected first by Lombard and then later reissued by Casterman. Casterman would eventually become the work's sole, primary publisher. Martin would later write four books for the art team of Rafael Morales and Marc Henniquiau starting in 1998 when his eyesight kept him from more pages of comics art. Four more books with various creators starring Martin's characters have appeared since 2006. Also, there were concurrent series of Alix books focusing on cultural and historical exploration supplemented with artwork featuring the series' characters. The series' 13th book, Le spectre de Carthage won an award as the French-language industry's best realistic comic book at the 1978 Angouleme Festival.
Martin created a litany of other character-driven series. One of the most famous was Lefranc, a journalist whose same-name adventures were set in modern times (1952 being the year of his creation). That was his second most well-known feature. Others included Jhen (1978) and Arno (1984); the Arno books featured art by André Juilliard. Martin created new characters and series around them until a few years preceding his death. As a survivor of the industry's Golden Era, an acknowledged master of its most popular contribution to cartooning and as a creator who worked with any number of younger artists and writers from the late 1970s on, Martin enjoyed several years as an acknowledged and respected presiding presence within the field. At the end of his career, it is estimated that Jacques Martin sold more than 15 million books in 10 countries.
Zapiro Makes Case For Latest Cartoon
The South Africa-based cartoonist Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro makes the case on video for the latest of his implied-rape cartoons and then his work generally, and relationship to President Jacob Zuma specifically. I'm not certain how to take his defense against critics that the imagery used is too strong and upsetting, which is basically to point out that since Justice isn't a real lady it's symbolic, not literal. I don't think the cartoon needs defending along those lines, but if it did that's not the defense I'd make -- he's clearly generating a lot of oomph in those cartoons out of teasing that symbolism towards the literal.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* here are details on accused Mickey Mouse plot co-conspirator Tahawwur Rana's renewed attempt Wednesday to receive bail.
* the battlefield for free expression regarding the Danish Cartoons and practitioner Kurt Westergaaard has spread to a video by a high school student and her effort to twist a Lady Gaga song into a statement of support for the artist. Some days you hate an ongoing story; some days that ongoing story hates you.
* that same article notes that a sympathetic gallery owner has accepted Westergaard's rejected piece of art donated to benefit victims of Haiti's earthquake and is auctioning it off as originally intended. So that's nice.
* here is a long profile -- including a photo -- of accused Mickey Mouse plot co-conspirator and Mumbai shootings advance scout David Coleman Headley. The photo's important because Headley even changed his name to appear more western during his travel on behalf of various potential unfortunate enterprises.
Worst Student Strip Controversy Ever Through Alan Gardner comes word of this local news report where students at Delta College in Saginaw, Michigan are asked to react to a student newspaper cartoon making fun of the city's reputation for violence and the availability of drugs. It looks like a pretty good little strip, actually, certainly web-ready. It seems odd that a student strip sliding into potentially mild bad taste regarding civic pride -- with some reason, apparently -- is worth noting for any reason at all. Someone needs to jump in a time machine and have a long talk with the person who decided that cartoons need to be amenable to every proportional or non-proportional sense of everything at all times. It's amazing they exist at all under such bizarre restrictions.
* Jeet Heer pulls a great excerpt out of the book 1984 with Sam Delany talking about moderating an early 1980s comics convention panel with Stan Lee and Harlan Ellison. Delany nails before anyone else even thought about it what one of the great appeals of conventions was to creators like Delany and his more devoted-to-comics writing brethren. I read that book -- it's really good -- and never thought about pulling that section out.
* the rash of post-New Year eBay sales from prominent collectors continues. This time it's Mike Lynch and Steven Thompson. I sympathize; I'm overloaded with stuff right now, too.
* this list of potential DC publishers is exactly like my own minus Sam The Eagle, a Wonder Woman robot controlled by rotating Comics Journal messageboard posters, and a newly-constituted Master Blaster consisting of Bill Jemas riding on Jim Shooter's shoulders.
* not comics: more details on the NYT firewall announcement.
* not comics: Warren Ellis provides figures on his latest on-line sales initiative, this time with a book of columns.
* this post reminds me that Grant Morrison's Crazy Jane was one of the great characters of the last 25 years in mainstream comics and was problematic in like 10,000 ways.
Julie Larson Turns To Self-Syndication At first glance, this article in the Peoria Journal-Star is a better-than-average survey piece on the state of the comics art forms mid-recession. But Julie Larson of The Dinette Set is essentially local to that paper (45 minutes away), and I believe that her decision to change her relationship with Creators and self-sell her work (Creators will continue to host her archives) is worth noting. Larson's right at that client level where depending on the make-up of her sell-sheet she's likely not making enough money from syndication for anyone other than maybe an immediate post-graduate to live on; she would feel every cancellation or client move as a major blow, such as the conversion of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer into an on-line only publication. I like the fact the fact that she's digging in, I like the fact that the article is honest about the inability of many webcomics creators to make more than a pittance from what they do, and I always appreciate eloquent word-bombs like Larson's "The Internet is the monster that ate reason, a thief in the night that turned loyalty to a 150-year profession into a homeless shadow of itself" whether or not I full agree with them.
The Michael George Comic Shop Murder Case Is Set To Resume On February 9
Amber Hunt of the Detroit Free Press, with the Michael George comic shop murder case either almost since or since its inception as a rare, bolt-from-the-blue prosecution based on a review of old cases, notes that oral arguments in the matter are due to begin February 9. George was convicted in March 2008 of the 1990 execution-style slaying of his then-wife, Barbara George, in the back room of the shop they owned together, Comics World.
That conviction was set aside in September 2008 due to prosecutorial misconduct: the linked-to article talks about photos shown to jurors of George in custody, while I seem to remember the prosecutors failing to inform the defense about information in their records concerning a possible second suspect.
Hunt says that the higher could render a ruling based on the oral arguments several months after the oral arguments, and this could be to reinstate the verdict or uphold the set-aside. The latter decision would result in a second trial.
The original case was a high-profile criminal prosecution for the lurid nature of the crime and its status as prosecution developing from review more than 15 years after the incident. It was a big deal in comics circles for that reason and also because George had re-married, moved to Pennsylvania and had become a prominent retailer and convention organizer in the western part of that state. George has retained the support of his children with his first wife throughout the process.
Promotions And Title Changes At Marvel For Editors Brevoort, Wacker, Alonso
Congratulations to the uncommonly frank and absolute industry survivor and thriver Tom Brevoort on becoming a Vice-President at Marvel. Congratulations as well to Axel Alonso and Steve Wacker on their changes of title. It'd probably be criminal not to mention that this is the first major personnel-related news I can think of from the company since Disney became their official owner at the end of the year. That said, there's also no reason to automatically suspect any sort of broader context to a series of moves regarding individuals as highly thought-of as these.
Go, Read: Gonzalo Ferreyra Interview I'll recommend thisthreepart interview with Viz Media Vice President of Sales and Marketing Gonzalo Ferreyra at the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com. There aren't enough interviews with high-ranking officers at that very important company not to. That said, I lack the perspective to get a lot out of it. Measurements like "a bright spot" and analysis along the lines of "I see us continuing to assess this" fail to communicate all that much to me the way they might to a devoted observer of the manga portion of the overall comics market. A Hulu-partnered streaming site for their anime sounds like a a cool thing, but that's anime. The interviewer's best question, about the changing landscape of mall retail and its effect on a certain age group of manga readers, pretty much went without a solid answer. I did find it interesting that they're doing this ramp-up with One Piece but that wasn't a title that was mentioned as selling particularly well right now -- a completely different context than the previous accelerated publishing schedule applied not once but twice to sales dynamo Naruto.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* in comics' big and generous heart news, members of the National Cartoonists Society are among those assembling art and other items for an auction on behalf of young coma victim Matthew Hodge. One hundred and fifty items are expected to be put up on eBay between now and Valentine's Day.
* the cartoonist Evan Dorkin has posted his finished Marvel Villains art, headed for a charity auction. It's really cute. Marvel should commission a poster for charity or something. Man, how great and forward-thinking was Kirby's design for Klaw? Look at that guy! He could have been created last week.
* not comics: AMC has approved a pilot based on Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead comic book series. The comic series was the mainstream comic book of the past decade in most of the ways that count, and a reasonably high-quality version on TV could be interesting.
* there's something old-fashioned and appealing about an article basically designed to say how they're going use Thor to get Taskmaster over as a potential A-list villain.
* finally, Bully's attention to the Marvel character The Beast this year is having the opposite effect of last year's run of posts spotlighting different panels featuring The Thing: it makes me think the Beast has had a mostly awful time of it over Marvel's publishing history.
Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked
* Image Comics is releasing a set of #1 issues at $1 each, ostensibly to give Direct Market retailers the ability to have cheap or even comics on-hand to entice new customers into trying what Image perceives as the best of their line.
* I hadn't noticed this the first time around, but the front page to the Sammy Harkham/Jordan Crane/Ted May/Steve Weissman web site What Things Do promises that work will be added in 2010 from cartoonists John Porcellino, John Pham, Gabrielle Bell and Ben Jones. That is one heck of a line-up.
* Kevin Melrose caught mention that Bryan Fuller is writing a comic book continuation of his Pushing Daisies television show, to be released by DC/Wildstorm. The TV show version was so self-consciously cute I immediately watched 20 hours of Fall Guy re-runs to regain my sanity, but Fuller has a lot of fans and I don't begrudge him a single one.
* the next big, weird, Osamu Tezuka omnibus from Vertical will be Ayako, out in October. That one was from Tezuka's creatively fertile early 1970s period.
* Drew Friedman provides a sneak peak at April's Best American Comics Criticism cover. Click through the image for a better look.
* Mark Siegel, perhaps best known for his editorial work at First Second but a well-regarded cartoonist and illustrator on his own, is self-publishing a serialized webcomic. The book will then be collected and published by First Second.
* Publishers Weeklyis running a list of forthcoming graphic novels of note. A few of these I have to admit I may not notice the week they come out, let alone think they're worth trumpeting months ahead of time, but your mileage may vary. I'm also surprised that Dan Nadel's Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980 didn't make the list, as I'd probably want to have that Abrams release more than any of the others on the list. Ditto the latest Little Nothings from NBM.
* the cartoonist Benjamin Marra sent out an e-mail last night that Night Business #3 is for sale through his site.
* finally, it's one of those projects that when it was announced made you wonder what exactly was bet at the last round of summer 2009 convention poker games, but a Brendan McCarthy Spider-Man mini-series is awesome any way it happens.
Honors! Awards! Everywhere You Look There Are Honors And Awards!
* I had a really hard time understanding the press release, but if I have it correctly TOON's Benny and Penny in The Big No-No! (by Geoffrey Hayes) won the American Library Association's Theodor Seuss Geisel Award and their Little Mouse Gets Ready (by Jeff Smith) was an "honor book" for the Geisel. This would be a big deal just on the face of it, but given that the major book publishers to whom the line was taken turned down TOON, there's likely some crowing involved. The publisher will re-release both books and move up the next Benny and Penny book, subtitled The Toy Breaker to early April.
* congratulations to Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester for their A Comics Studies Readerwinning the 2009 Peter C. Rollins Book Award. According to the book's publisher, the award goes to the "best book in popular culture studies and/or American culture studies."
* this site's esteemed contributor David Welsh assures us that this list of the ALA's 2010 Great Graphic Novels for Teens is the last one that group will release and that this top 10 list taken from the earlier list involves some sort of summary, final statement as well. That top ten is: A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Josh Neufeld (Pantheon Books, 2009); Bayou Vol. 1, Jeremy Love (DC Comics/Zuda, 2009); Children of the Sea Vol. 1, Daisuke Igarashi (VIZ Media, 2009); Gunnerkrigg Court Vol. 1, Tom Siddell (Archaia Studios Press, 2009); I Kill Giants, Joe Kelly and JM Ken Nimura (Image, 2009); Omega the Unknown (Marvel, 2008); Ooku: The Inner Chambers Vol. 1, Fumi Yoshinaga (VIZ Media, 2009); Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, Dusty Higgins and Van Jensen (SLG Publishing, 2009); Pluto, Takashi Nagasaki and Naoki Urasawa (VIZ Media, 2009); The Helm, Jim Hardison and Bart Sears (Dark Horse, 2009).
Missed It: Shamus Buys Atlanta Show This totally passed under my radar or was blocked by my spam settings, I couldn't tell you, but apparently Gareb Shamus and whatever combination of his name and the words "comic con" and the designation Wizard he's utilizing right now have purchased one of the single-day shows run in Atlanta by a local retailer with the thought of turning it into one of an increasing number of newer Wizard-style shows. This new Atlanta show is as of yet unscheduled. The group now has shows planned for Anaheim, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadephia and Toronto. The Atlanta show's original owner plans to continue with his remaining one-day shows.
Although the tendency might be to see this Shamus-driven run of shows -- up to eight, with more perhaps still to be added-- as some sort of grand, monstrous scheme that may by its very scale be doomed to fail, there are actually a lot of elements to this new strategy that are about downsizing and reducing expectations. Think Pee-Wee Herman coming back with a stage show rather than trying to do a new movie. Rational thinking would seem to indicate that eight to ten shows a year of this new type -- piggybacking publicity-wise on the convention phenomenon generally and Comic-Con/New York Con specifically, designed to appeal to someone who wouldn't travel to one of the bigger shows or who wouldn't mind supplementing that trip with a day doing whatever it is Wizard provides -- could be done much more modestly than directly challenging the big-name conventions or having a three or four shows you've asserted will be on standing with your biggest show. Not that rational thinking really dominates things in the Wizard camp, mind you, but something about a series of Diminished Expectations cons seems doable to me.
Your 2010 Prix France Info de la BD d'actualite et de reportage Winner
A panel of nine journalists gave L'Affaire des affaires by Yann Lindingre, Denis Robert and Laurent Astier, this year's Prix France Info de la Bande Dessinee d'actualite et de reportage. The first volume in the series was released late last January by Dargaud. As I recall, the prize goes to a work that exemplifies the confluence of reportage and comics-making. In this case it looks like the book is being cited for its portrayal of a reporter in a thriller setting. The prize is one of many given out during the lead up to the Angouleme Festival, which traditionally begins at the end of January. Prizes announced during that time benefit from the focus on comics during the build to that event.
Not Comics: Articles Worth Reading
Here are a few random not-comics features currently out there that a comics fan may find worth reading, about any one of which I can't pull together enough coherent thought to make for its own post.
* this New Yorker profile of Neil Gaiman is a lot of fun although I went squinty at one or two details -- it could be the magazine no longer employs rigorous fact-checkers, or that geek ephemera is beyond the reach of such a person. What it reminded me of was seeing the X-Men movie a hundred years ago and thinking. "Hey, there's Wolverine. In a movie." It's Neil Gaiman. In a New Yorker profile.
* I'm certain there are many folks out there ready to read leaked reviews from Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World test market screenings. I hope it's a good movie; those are fine comics and Edgar Wright is a fun director.
* while I doubt it was the intention of its author, this article on the New York Times proclaiming in vague terms they're going to be probably maybe sort of kind of taking the Financial Times pay system and applying it to its own site unless something else possibly occurs to them couldn't have been more effective in making the Times look panicked and clueless about that part of their business. Still. Years in. The biggest disconnect for me is when they extol the virtues of the Times as authoritative reporting. One, that's a hell of a claim, given their recent past; two, declaring that you do a certain thing of value is not the same as showing that's why people come to your site. I predict they'll have a rocky road, although they're far more cushioned than most entities engaging with these sorts of issues.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Paul Karasik is among the many comics creators having an auction with the proceeds to go to Haiti relief efforts.
* the retailer and blogger Mike Sterling unearths his copy of Rudy In Hollywood, the collection of William Overgard's short-running, deeply weird and occasionally wonderful comic strip Rudy. Rudy was a joke in my family growing up because it was the third of three strips that we kids strongly recommended to our newspaperman father, along with Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. Rudy failed to find the same audience, to say the least. Whenever my dad brought home new strip packets that the salespeople were flogging, he'd proclaim "Find me another Rudy" just to get our goats.
* Keil Phegley looks at the ins and outs of the recent Marvel offer to give any retailer that over-ordered various DC Blackest Night books in search of a plastic ring premium to turn in unsold copies for a variant issue of a forthcoming Marvel event comic. My hunch is that people are over-thinking this one, but Phegley is a welcome guide to the intricacies of the move, such as they are.
* the TCAF site is a go. I'm looking forward to the show, and so should you if you're anywhere you're able to get there.
* this is like one of those Brian Bendis comics where Mephisto, Loki, Doctor Doom, Magneto, the Leader and the Green Goblin all get together to have coffees and beignets and with their collective evilness force current Marvel artists to re-draw classic panels with 20 percent more evil in them, right?
* I quite liked this review of Footnotes In Gaza by Matthew Brady. It's a massive, troubling, and at-times awesome book, with several moments that just laid me out while reading it, like the person talking about a child trying to pull up their pants without the use of a second hand.
* Don MacPherson talks about one of those baffling mainstream company announcements where they seem to be plowing ahead on a book with absolutely no support and no chance for developing any. It's funny in that 20 years ago you talked about a mainstream doing something like that because of a nefarious goal, like increasing market share with book that were individually unprofitable, or holding talent in place: now it just like another bizarre circumstance in an increasingly parched market.
* a lot has changed in comics over the last 15 years. One thing that hasn't? Everyone still loves Schoolly D. (thanks, Chris)
* finally, Johanna Draper Carlson takes a look at something I burned right past, which was Jellaby selling out of a first print right when the second volume of the serial is coming out. That's a bad thing to hear if you're an author, because you want the audience that picks up #2 and then seek out #1, and you want the audience that makes sure #1 is there before they buy #2. One great thing about comics publishers of varying size and scale that rarely gets mentioned is how many of them do a wonderful job of keeping a lot of material in print for years and years that a book publisher would let fade.
This Isn't A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. But were I in a comic book shop tomorrow I would look at all I could survey and let out a mighty yell.
*****
SEP090018 BARRY WINDSOR SMITH CONAN ARCHIVES HC VOL 01 $49.99
I'm not sure if this is a brand new series of collections or what exact market they're targeting, but I like the comics inside.
NOV090226 AIR #17 (MR) $2.99
Every time this goes another six issues, I owe a friend of mine $5. I'm happy to pay it, though. Good for the creators here.
NOV090224 JOE THE BARBARIAN #1 (OF 8) (MR) $1.00
I take it this is Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy's take on the old saw of the fantasy world constructed with portions of the protagonist's real-world surroundings. It's not been done in home-run fashion since the movie version of Wizard Of Oz, and not been done in comics at all since D'Israeli drew a series along the same lines some 10-15 years ago, so it's a good choice for someone like writer Morrison. Priced to move.
JUL090367 JACK STAFF TP VOL 02 SOLDIERS (NEW PTG) $15.99
I'm a great fan of Paul Grist's oblique storytelling within his "mainstream genre" books, so I'd look at this one to see if I already had it.
NOV090576 GLAMOURPUSS #11 $3.00
I hadn't realized Dave Sim had pushed back the single digits on this one, and never would have bet on him doing so after reading the first couple of issues.
OCT090876 JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY THIRTEEN GOING ON EIGHTEEN HC $39.95
Big book of the week for sure, the long-awaited D&Q collection of one of John Stanley's greater sustained efforts.
AUG090763 RASL #6 (MR) $3.50
I might buy a whole lot of expensive stuff today, but when I got home I'd read the latest Jeff Smith comic book first.
OCT091122 ALL MY DARLING DAUGHTERS GN $12.99 OCT091120 NOT SIMPLE GN $14.99 OCT091121OISHINBO VOL 07 IZAKAYA PUB FOOD $12.99 OCT091123 PLUTO URASAWA X TEZUKA GN VOL 07 $12.99 OCT091157 REAL GN VOL 07 $12.99 NOV090938 TEZUKAS BLACK JACK TP VOL 09 $16.95
Great week for quality manga series and intriguing stand-alones. If I had to buy just one it would probably be the much-heralded Not Simple.
*****
The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.
To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.
The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.
If I didn't list your comic here, I likely feel horrible about it.
Student Newspaper Editor Resigns After Anti-Gay Comics Runs; Pens Letter Of Apology To Community
Kara King, the assistant managing editor of the Notre Dame/St. Mary's independent, student-focused paper The Observer, has resigned her position in the wake of last week's running of a cartoon with a punchline that rested somewhere between making light of and celebrating the specter of violence hanging over the heads of gay people. King took full responsibility for what she seems to be describing as an editorial oversight issue in letting the cartoon run, and expressed hope that the issue might spur conversation about the concerns felt by gay and lesbian members of the student community regarding violence. All in all, what's described seems like an admirable move on King's part.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* here's an interesting report about the state of certain Islamic youth-focused groups targeted by UK authorities in the wake of the Danish Cartoons Controversy. As you may recall, unlike in some other western countries, various younger activists in the UK that participated in protests were arrested and tried on charges such as incitement of murder. The thought at the time was that officials in that country were using the opportunity provided by those protests to remove from the public a certain group of leaders. If this article is any indication, the jailing of those key figures doesn't seem to have mortally wounded those organizations.
* I haven't been able to find the time to listen to this episode of Thinking Allowed devoted to the Danish Cartoons, but that doesn't mean you should have to wait for me. (thanks, Andi Watson)
* speaking of which, here's what looks like the BBC's news division with an interview featuring the recently assaulted in his home Kurt Westergaard.
Missed It: Koterba Cartoon Pulled Alan Gardner caught this and I sure didn't, so I'm grateful: apparently the Omaha World-Herald ran the Harry Reid-related cartoon depicted at left in their out-of-state edition before killing it and not letting it run in its in-state and web site editions. The cartoonist told Neal Obermeyer that his editors felt it could be misunderstood. Obermeyer also tracked the strip's coloring and whether that was intentional as a callback to Reid's statements or not (it was not). You can see the cartoon at a much more readable size by clicking through the image.
Comics Community Organizes On Behalf Of Haiti Through Charity Web Site I'm always a little bit slow catching up to these things and I'm more of a personal mind to just give money directly to the charity of your choice (mine was this one) but every little bit helps, so I'm happy to point you in the direction of this Heroes For Haiti site. From all appearances, it seems to be a comics-related clearinghouse of auctions and resources designed to make sure some of your money goes from your bank account down to the horribly ravaged Haitian earthquake sites. Please consider helping.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* wow, this comics-focused residency program at the Atlantic Center of the Arts announced by Craig Thompson could be a dream come true if you have a project you're working and maybe just a dream generally.
* Dwayne Booth/Mr. Fish has been laid off from his position at Village Voice/LA Weekly, he says as a cost-cutting maneuver. His full reaction and Daryl Cagle's complimentary re-introduction of the cartoonist can be found here. As Cagle points out, Booth survived a severe purge at the publication just last year.
* Heidi MacDonald caught that CCI single-day passes for Friday have sold out. The convention, which has seen an enormous surge in popularity of the last five years, has already sold out of four-day passes both with and without preview night access, as well as Saturday-only passes. Passes for Thursday and Sunday remain available. Just astonishing.
* it's been way too long since I've made anything substantial, but I still love to read finished-with-project announcements from other folks.
I've given up on prognostication. Experience has demonstrated that I'm usually too optimistic, and looking back at my predictions makes me realize that they're more in the line of affirmations than realistic expectations. I will indulge in one, though: by the end of 2010, a lot more people will be aware of the work of Natsume Ono than they were when the year began.
To be honest, I'd never heard her name at the beginning of 2009. My first glimpse of her work came through a random copy of Kodansha's Morning 2MM, which is serializing Ono's Coppers. I remember thinking that those pages didn't look much like anything else in the magazine. It took me a while to connect the creator of Coppers with my next encounter with Ono.
That happened at Viz Media's online IKKI anthology, which serializes chapters of Ono's House of Five Leaves. It's one of those series that on first glance leave you not quite sure what you just read, though in a very pleasant way. The opening chapters leave the doors of possibility wide open, and subsequent installments don't so much shut them as fill in the details of those possibilities.
It's about an out-of-work samurai, Akitsu, who becomes entangled with a gang of kidnappers. Akitsu doesn't resemble the standard manga samurai in physicality or disposition, lithe and diffident instead of sturdy and aggressive. It's easy to see why he's unemployed, but it's enticingly unclear why gangster Yaichi lures Akitsu into his circle. It could be that Akitsu is easy to manipulate and the last person you'd expect of ulterior motives, or it could be simple, unexpected fondness. Yaichi might merely like to have Akitsu around.
Ono seems entirely comfortable with leaving readers to guess where things might be headed in terms of event and even intent, though I always have the sense that things are moving in interesting directions. Her work seems both confident and restrained. It also seems just slightly askew of what one might expect when one considers demographics like seinen (comics for adult men), josei (for adult women) or yaoi (male-male romance, which Ono has created under the name "Basso"). So it makes sense that the magazines that have featured her work -- Morning 2, Shogakukan's IKKI, the late Penguin Shobou's Comic SEED! -- seem less designed to cater to a specific demographic than to simply publish an interesting variety of comics by accomplished creators.
The first Ono title to see print in translation, not simple from Viz, arrives this week, and the publisher has posted the first chapter online. Comics creator, editor and critic Shaenon K. Garrity has described the book as "scary good," and I'm in complete agreement. I think it compares favorably to one of the most acclaimed books of 2009, David Small's Stitches: A Memoir (W.W. Norton). Like Small's autobiography, not simple explores the hideous consequences of parental cowardice and cruelty, and, like Stitches, it's constructed and paced with admirable precision and craft. As was the case in Stitches, I'm reluctant to describe the plot in too much detail, as a great deal of pleasure is derived in the timing with which Ono reveals the underlying facts of her characters' lives.
The book follows a young Australian man named Ian, barely more than a boy, really, as he searches for his older sister, the only bright point in his grim experience with family life. Along the way, he meets a writer, Jim, who's taken with Ian's story both for its inherent pathos and for its narrative possibilities -- he wants to know how Ian's story comes out at least partly because he wants to tell it. Ian's life and Jim's novel intersect and overlap, and the story-within-a-story elements aren't always entirely successful, but Jim's mixture of sympathy and self-interest give Ian's tragedies a needed edge and the possibility of at least a little remove on the part of the reader. One of the recurring criticisms I saw for Stitches was that it was just so depressing, a quality compounded by the fact that the events it portrayed actually happened. In not simple, Ono is playing with the idea of tragedy as an entertainment beyond merely presenting a tragic series of events. It's an intriguing extra element, even if it isn't seamlessly applied.
Ono doesn't engage in the kind of experimental illustration that's sprinkled throughout Small's work, but her drawings are striking, characterized with a kind of crude fragility that supports the tone and content of her story. Like everything else about not simple, its look is deceptively... well... simple. Fans of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Lost at Sea (Oni Press) would feel very much at ease with a cartoonish style invested with emotional depth and urgency.
People who have sampled House of Five Leaves, which is scheduled for print release in April of this year, might be surprised that not simple was drawn by the same creator. The former has a lean elegance that's really in contrast to the more stylized look of the latter. I'm fond of both styles for their individual virtues and for the fact that they both come from the same pen. It's exciting to see that Ono's versatility in terms of content and tone extends to her work as an illustrator.
There's just so much to admire about Ono's work -- its variety, its uniqueness, the level of talent it suggests. I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that she becomes one of those creators whose popularity transcends the audience specifically interested in comics from Japan and those who are interested in well-made comics in general. Her work seems to have transcended any specific demographic in Japan, and I believe it will here.
*****
* not simple, written and illustrated by Natsume Ono, Viz Media, 320 pages, ISBN:1-4215-3220-4, Jan. 19, 2010, $14.95.
*****
David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.
He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.
He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.
You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns
A Short History Of The Zapiro Assault Motif And Its Application To South African Politics, 2008-2010
Verashni Pillay of the Mail & Guardianhas commentary up about Zapiro's treatment of South African politics through variation on his rape of justice cartoon. The great thing about it is that there are half-dozen variation that incredibly strong and obviously loaded visual up for you to see. I'm still processing his use of that myself -- I'm not sure I was aware he had done variations beyond this most recent one.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* the bail request by accused Mickey Mouse plot co-conspirator Tahawwur Hussein Rana continues to wind its way through court, despite additional charges against Rana related to the 2008 Mumbai shootings that were brought to bear last week. Rana is expected in court Wednesday to respond to the latest prosecutor team objections to having him released on some sort of bail. Those objections are focused on the severity of that accusations, evidence that runs contrary to the assertions from friends and family that Rana was more of a dupe in a relationship with fellow accused David Coleman Headley, and the fact that Rana ran a travel agency for several years and with family in Canada and close connections in the local community would have multiple avenues to flee.
Notre Dame Indy Newspaper Staff Apologizes For Loathesome Cartoon
Staffers for The Observer, an independent newspaper covering the Notre Dame and St. Mary's campuses in South Bend, Indiana, has apologized for a cartoon that made light of violence against gay and lesbians. That cartoon ran last Wednesday, and featured the following joke made by a cartoon saw talking to a young person holding what looks like alcohol:
Saw: "What's the easiest way to turn a fruit into a vegetable?"
Young Person: "No idea."
Saw: "A baseball bat."
The strip was titled "The Mobile Party," although it's unclear whether that is this individual strip or a more general strip title (it seems likely it's a recurring feature). The cartoon in question sports a byline from Colin Hofman, Jay Wade and Lauren Rosemeyer. Those three penned an apology that ran with the editorial apology in Friday's edition, and there are intimations in some of the press coverage that it was intended as a satire on such attitudes rather than an express love letter, although that line of think isn't developed anywhere I can find and doesn't seem very convincing. Or excusable.
The newspapers's Editor-in-Chief has since claimed she was not in the office when the decision to run the cartoon was made, and that the editorial staff reaction was immediate and internal rather than instigated by outside complaints. An internal review of the situation is underway. It's also been revealed since the initial publication that the original punchline was "AIDS." Notre Dame President John Jenkins condemned the cartoon in a statement last week. I take it from the description of the newspaper as independent that it's not under either university's direct control, although it might be interesting to see if any funding is made available to them and if this is targeted by groups that might be unsatisfied with the apology and assurances of last week.
Not Comics: Remember The Day "Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That's the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It's not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system." -- Martin Luther King Jr., 1957
* Abhay Khosla writes about how many web comics there are out there, and what that could mean in terms of comics' future. I personally don't think it's that a big deal that there are a lot of webcomics right now, just as I don't think it was a big deal there were thousands of print comics in existence in 1980 when the alt-comics movement hit. I read comics with a great interest in their quality for 20 years before I knew of certain John Stanley series runs that I love now, or Chon Day, or Rowland Emmet, and I'm sure there's a chance I'll miss plenty of great webcomics just as I've missed and will likely continue to miss good print comics.
1. The Photographer, Emmanuel Guibert (First Second)
2. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
3. Footnotes In Gaza, Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)
4. Stitches, David Small (WW Norton)
5. George Sprott, Seth (D&Q)
6. Years Of The Elephant, Willy Linthout (Ponent Mon)
7. Logicomix, Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou & Alecos Papadatos (Bloomsbury USA)
8. The Illustrated Book Of Genesis, Robert Crumb (WW Norton)
9. Giraffes In My Hair, Carol Swain & Bruce Paley (Fantagraphics)
10. Salem Brownstone: All Along The Watchtowers, John Harris Dunning & Nikhil Singh (Walker Books)
11. Bayou, Jeremy Love (DC/Zuda)
12. Talking Lines, R.O. Blechman (D&Q)
13. Pim and Francie, Al Columbia (Fantagraphics)
14. You'll Never Know, Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)
15. Grandville, Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
16. A.D.: After The Deluge, Josh Neufeld (Pantheon)
17. Essex County Trilogy, Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
18. Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak (D&Q)
19. The Complete Jack Survives, Jerry Moriarty (Buenaventura Press)
20. Spleenal, Nigel Auchterlounie (Blank Slate)
21. Ball Peen Hammer, Adam Rapp & George O'Connor (First Second)
Gravett's writing about individual comics is always worth taking in, so I'll hope you'll follow the above provided link.
* I'm always a little confused about these efforts to keep marginal-selling mainstream comic book titles alive. It's nice that people become find of comics with this kind of fervor, and I guess I can imagine scenarios where this works and a title is brought back or considered for a future shot at being published. For the most part, however, these series are set up to fail from the get-go: every increment of five they stay out is a victory for that particular title, not a short-sighted decision on the part of the publisher to cut bait and run. It's like complaining that they cancel TV shows after six episodes now because they used to burn through an entire year before giving something the boot.
* finally, the good news is that the always-interesting Brian Hibbs has written about our digital future. The bad news is that it's not in the upper half of Brian's best pieces, on the one hand taking the worst excesses of incidental rhetoric surrounding electronic reading devices to task as if those excesses should be taken as serious strategic initiatives and on the other substituting a kind of slippery, grumpy-man, skeptic's logic for new insight to decimate those straw legions. What's fine about the article, the general plea for caution, could have been written five years ago.
CR Sunday Interview: Ted Adams Ted Adams is the CEO of IDW Publishing, the multifaceted comics company that in 2009 celebrated its tenth year with a massive anniversary book, a tasteful smattering of celebratory moments in the comics press and at conventions, and by continuing to do what the production-oriented company has come to do very, very well: putting out a massive number of comic books in a variety of genres and formats. IDW's recent offerings have included but have certainly not been limited to several volumes from the Dean Mullaney-spearheaded Library of American Comics, a slew of successful licensed comics from last summer's blockbuster-heavy film calendar, Darwyn Cooke's formidable and beautiful Parker: The Hunter, and a lovingly-presented Rocketeer collection that felt like a sweet, mournful goodbye to an entire school of comic book making. They plan more of the same in 2010, and their imminent King Aroo collection should be an early candidate for book of the year.
IDW was recently recognized by Diamond as one of the select number of publishers with more than four percent market share. This makes them the first publisher to my knowledge to break into the ranks of the recognized premiere publishers in such a fashion. It seemed like a good idea to sit down and talk to Adams -- a company co-founder, a part-owner, its beating heart and albeit a bit reluctantly its public face -- about his company's rise and about moving from one Gem Awards publisher's category to a bigger Gem Awards publisher's category. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: This plateau that you've reached, where you're in with the bigger publishers rather than the smaller publishers... you've spent some of this year thinking about your company, with the commemorative book and your anniversary and everything. What does this specific plateau mean to you and IDW?
TED ADAMS: For me personally, it's something that I'm proud of because I don't think it's been accomplished before. I'm curious to see if some of the people who do a good job of paying attention to these kinds of things -- like John Jackson Miller [see addendum below] or yourself or some of the other folks -- can identify this for certain, but I think it's the first time that a non-premier publisher has passed a premier publisher in annual market share. The only company that I can think of that might have done it would have been CrossGen, but I don't think they ever did.
So I'm proud of it because I think it's the first time that it's been done. I think this is a real testament to the hard work of everybody at IDW. It starts with our editorial team and all the creators, all the writers, artists and colorists and letterers that we work with, our production folks, our internal kinds of people like the accounting department, the shipping department... it's a full team effort and an amazing testament to the hard work that everyone does at IDW. .
I generally don't do a lot of interviews, and I don't spend a lot of time talking about the company, but this is one instance where I'm particularly proud of the accomplishment.
SPURGEON: Do you have a sense in terms of your company's make-up of what pushed you to this level at this time?
ADAMS: I think it's a reflection of the diversity of our publishing line. I think if you look at what we publish in any given month, there's just no question that we're the most diverse comic publisher out there. We certainly do a lot of licensed books, things like Angel and Star Trek and Transformers. We do a lot of creator-driven books. We have some key creators we work with, guys like Steve Niles and Ashley Wood. But we also work these days with folks like Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez on Locke & Key and Darwyn Cooke on the Parker series. We have The Library of American Comics, which is run by Dean Mullaney. I think he's doing some amazing things. We have the books we're doing with Craig Yoe. We're the print publisher for Mike Gold's ComicMix line. We have our children's book line. I think we're a really diverse publisher and that that, more than anything, has helped us succeed over the last couple of years. We aren't completely reliant on one kind of product. That's been a strategy for us from the get-go.
SPURGEON: Is there a group of books that stands out performance-wise over the last 18 months?
ADAMS: Certainly the licensed books over the last 18 months have done extraordinary business for us. We had a unique situation last year where we had product that was associated with four giant movie releases. Starting with Star Trek, which did huge business. Our book that was a tie-in to that, Star Trek: Countdown, sold unbelievably well for us. Then we rolled into Terminator, which we also did well with. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the Transformers franchise has always been really solid for us and when they have a movie come out it's that much more so. And then finally GI Joe. So we had this four- or five-month period where these four giant movies came out and we were able to sell a lot of books.
The interesting thing is that most -- not most, but a lot -- of that success comes outside of the Direct Market. Many of those trades are sold through mass channels -- places like Borders, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Diamond's market share is only reflective of Direct Market sales. If there were a way to have a market share analysis of the total business including the mass market, I suspect we would probably be even higher. We sold a lot of books outside of the Direct Market last year. And that's certainly not to diminish the Direct Market, because that's without any question our key marketplace, but we had an unusually good year outside of the Direct Market last year.
SPURGEON: Let me ask you about the licensed books. I watched an interview you did with Jonah Weiland last summer. A couple of things you said were interesting when I put them together. One is that you pursue your licensed properties rather than the other way around. The other is that you rode the PR wave that comes with each major movie. I don't expect you to give away that part of your pitch, but what is the nature of the interest in these books from the studios? How do you sell them on that. We can see these books work for you, but what about having a comic book out there works for them?
ADAMS: I think from their perspective, just in general terms, the more stories and the more marketing and the more PR that's out there, the better it is for them. God knows how much money was spent to promote Transformers: The Revenge Of the Fallen. Literally upwards of $100 million was spent to promote that movie, right? As proud as I am of what we did with our comic books, in the scheme of that kind of money we're kind of inconsequential. What's important to them is that we help them tell their stories, and we tell the parts of their stories they can't address in the movies. If you look at Transformers as an example, we were doing comic books that bridged the two movies, we were telling stories that happened in between the two movies and helping them flesh out those storylines.
My perception is that most of the studios and the big licensors, they recognize that they need to be respectful of that hardcore fan base. It's important to them that they have investment from the people who've grown up loving Transformers and the people who read our Transformers comics on a monthly basis and that are really invested in these comics. They want to make sure those people also love their movies. I think it really stems from that. They don't want to alienate the fanbase, and we can help them reach that goal.
SPURGEON: Do you think that's a newer development?
ADAMS: I think in the last ten to 15 years that's turned around. I think there was a period of time when people didn't care about the fans. When I worked at WildStorm we did comic books based off of the Resident Evil videogames. I actually wrote a fair number of those books, so I was a big Resident Evil fan at the time. The Resident Evil movie came out -- this is going on more than ten years now! The movie was okay, but it didn't have anything to do with the Resident Evil videogame. It shared a name with it, and it shared the absolute biggest high concept with it. [laughs] I could never figure out why that was. Why create a movie that just takes the name and very little else?
I think that that way of looking at IP has changed over the last ten to 15 years. If you look at the movies that have been successful, maybe starting with the Spider-Man movies and even the X-Men movies to a certain extent, they really started looking at the underlying IP as the source material and being respectful towards that and the fan base that built it in the first place.
SPURGEON: Another thing you discuss in the Weiland interview is using guerilla marketing strategies on behalf of 30 Days Of Night, which was certainly a key title in IDW's development. Can you talk about what "guerilla marketing" meant in that case, and how your outlook on PR and marketing might be different now?
ADAMS: Back in those days, with 30 Days Of Night, we were a brand-new publisher and it was much easier to do guerilla-style marketing for me personally back then, and I think for the market back then. What I mean specifically by guerilla marketing for 30 Days Of Night is that I used my relationships to sell that book. Beau Smith, who was working for IDW in those days, and I called the retailers we were friendly with. I called in favors with Wizard. I called in favors with Diamond. People I'd done business with for 10-15 years, I essentially cashed in those chips and asked them to take a look at 30 Days Of Night. I basically said, "Hey, I think this is important. Please pay attention to it." Ultimately, if the book had been lousy, that wouldn't have worked. But I think the combination of me cashing in those chips and presenting them with what was a cool story and at the time revolutionary art -- because nobody had seen what Ben [Templesmith] was doing at the time -- I think it worked because the book itself stood on its own two feet. So it was me leveraging my personal relationships to get people to pay attention to the book.
And frankly, when the comic came out, it didn't work all that well. [laughter] The comic didn't sell. It's not like we're talking about a book that set the sales charts on fire from a comic book standpoint. What it did do is that I was able to get people talking about it, and get the buzz going, so when Sam Raimi bought the movie rights that really ratcheted up the buzz about the book. In large measure, I think it was Wizard Magazine, which was really influential back in those days, they were covering the book on a monthly basis. They have their list of hot ten comics and we were number one on that list for five or six months in a row. We were the number one story of that year. They were talking about 30 Days Of Night on a regular basis in that magazine.
All of that buzz -- my guerilla marketing, the Sam Raimi deal, the Wizard Magazine coverage -- led to the trade paperback being the number one trade paperback of the month. We beat out everybody. At that point, we had maybe published six things. We had the number one trade paperback. It was unheard of for that sort of thing to happen.
Fast-forwarding ten years later, to today: I can't do that kind of guerilla-style marketing anymore. As much as I would love to go out and deal with each book on an individual basis, it's just not practical.
SPURGEON: Do you have a sense whether your company and/or comics in general is transitioning towards more traditional PR and marketing? There's a common context to guerilla marketing -- new company, new work, limited resources -- that's very different than the position you, for example, find yourself in now.
ADAMS: For us, it's the thing we struggle with the most. I think it's a combination of that we publish a lot of books. We're doing 40 books a month, a combination of comics and trades, we're really publishing this large volume of books, so for us it becomes a matter of resources: how can we get out the marketing message for all of those books.
As you get beyond IDW's output and you look at the market in total, the number of books that are released through Previews on a monthly basis is a big number. How do we break through our own clutter, and then in a more macro way how do we break through the industry's clutter and have people pay attention to any particular book in any particular given month? It's something we struggle with all the time. It's absolutely our number one challenge. How do we let consumers and retailers know about books that we're publishing? How do we get that information to them in a way that's digestible so that they can make the decision as to whether or not this is something they want to buy or they don't want to buy? It's the key challenge for us and probably for any publisher.
SPURGEON: Is there any recent IDW comic or project where you think you did a really good job getting the word out in this fashion?
ADAMS: I think there are a couple. I think Locke and Key, which is a book we do with Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, I think we did a good job with that. That was a book where I did go back to my 30 Days Of Night marketing. I did make a lot of personal calls on that, sent out a lot of books. The book itself is terrific, so once you get people to read it, they like it. We were also able to ride the crest of Joe Hill's literary success. Around the time we were releasing Locke and Key, his first novel came out and hit the New York Times bestseller list. That was certainly helpful for us. That was one of the unusual books where when you look at that initial mini-series that we did, the fifth issue sold more than the first. That's almost unheard of in comics these days.
Two other ones I think we did a particularly good job with this year. One is the Parker book we did with Darwyn Cooke. We really went out of our way to make sure people knew how important that book was. We printed advance copies that we gave out for review, and that we gave away at BEA last year. We did every piece of promotional marketing collateral we could think of. We bought advertising in ways that we just normally don't do. We were trying to get out there and make sure people knew about that book in every way we could think of. I think that book has been successful for us. As always, the main reason the book is successful is because of the brilliant job that Darwyn did in creating it. But I think our marketing and promotions effort supported his effort.
The other one is our Bloom County release at the end of last year. We did a good job of getting the word out about that. Berkeley [Breathed] was very gracious with this time and set aside time to do interviews with places like USA Today, any mainstream media interested in that book. Those were some of our successes in the last year. We've been lucky. We brought on a PR and marketing person last year that's done a terrific job for us. She's overworked because of the volume of titles we do, but I think she's doing a really nice job for us.
SPURGEON: Let's talk about IDW's volume issues for a second. A friend of mine said that IDW may be the only comics company about which you don't talk about projects they have yet to publish. That's because IDW announces a book and then, wham, it's out. Your company has a very production-oriented ethos, in other words. Does that come from you?
ADAMS: It does. It's a bit of my manic nature, to a certain extent. I like to make decisions quickly and do things quickly. We move a lot faster than other companies. We're not a company where we're all sitting around agonizing over decisions and having meetings to figure this or that out. We decide we're going to do it, and we go and do it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. But it is one of the things that makes us unique.
We're really production-focused. That comes from my having worked at a variety of comics publishers. I was able to see what worked and didn't work. I tried to learn from a production and editorial standpoint what causes books to be late, what causes things to not work. I took all of those things that I've learned and have tried to apply them to IDW. Every morning we start the day with a very quick production meeting. It's a ten- to 15-minute meeting. We bring in Chris Ryall, our publisher and editor-in-chief. We bring in the head of our production department and a couple of other key employees and we set the direction of the day. We say, "Okay, these are the three books we're going to get to the printer today." And that really sets the direction for the whole company from a production standpoint.
While that may sound like common sense, in my experience that's pretty unique for a comics publishers, to start your day every morning with a production focus on "here is what we're going to accomplish today" specifically, and "these are the books that we're going to get out of the door today" specifically. It sets the direction for the company. One of the things we're proud of is not only do we publish a large number of books on a monthly basis, our on-time percentage, if anybody were to take a look at it, is pretty extraordinary. If we say a book will come out in February, it will almost always come out in February.
Even more than that, what we work really hard to do is not drop our entire line all in one week. If we have 40 books, our goal is to spread out those books 10 per week. We spend a lot of time making that happen. We also spend a lot of time making sure we don't drop three Transformers books in one week. So if, say, in the month of February we have four Transformers books, our goal is to have one per week. Same with GI Joe or Star Trek: if we've got two or three books, we don't want to drop all of those in the same week. We try to have a release schedule that a consumer and a retailer can live with.
We've run into some hitches, frankly, over the last couple of months, with our release schedule. Diamond does a terrific job, and we wouldn't have the success we've had without them. But we've run into some weather related hitches where they've had some problems with their trucks and various other things. That's caused our books to be released in a way that's very frustrating to us. We've worked hard to ensure that we'll have 10 books one week and eight books the next week and the Diamond truck breaks down or there's a weather related problem and all of the sudden we have zero books one week and 18 books the next week. That's really frustrating to all of us because we work really hard to make sure that doesn't happen.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what a consumer can live with and what a retailer can live with from out big release schedule. From a pure pocketbook standpoint, if you're a Transformers fan, it's better for you if we can sell you a Transformers book once per week instead of four Transformers books all in one week.
SPURGEON: Has IDW ever had trouble reconciling the different kinds of discipline necessary to serve the bookstore market and the comic shop market?
ADAMS: The biggest challenge there is that with the book market, when you're talking movie releases, they want that product on an accelerated schedule. In their perfect world, a trade paperback that ties into a movie would come out six weeks before a movie release. We accomplished that with all four of our major properties last year, but that was a real challenge to have the books done that far ahead of time. We print our books in Korea, including all of our comics, so you're talking really long lead times to accomplish that goal. They tell us it's important to them.
SPURGEON: You get a lot of credit as being hands-off with your editors. Do you feel you deserve the praise you get in that area?
ADAMS: From my perspective we have the best editorial team in comics. It's a small team. If you look at our team, it starts with Chris Ryall, who's the editor in chief. Then you start looking at some of the editors that work with him: Scott Dunbier, Bob Schreck, Andy Schmidt being some of the primary ones, these are A+ editors. These guys are as good as it gets. We have Mariah [Huehner] who works on the Angel line, she's a terrific editor. We have Denton [J. Tipton] who is doing our Dr. Who books; he's newer to the industry but doing a good job. We have guys that are behind the scenes running our trade paperbacks and collected lines, we have a guy named Justin [Eisinger] who works on those books and he produces an amazing number of books and does it with a smile.
It took me a while to get all of these pieces into place, but I have an editorial team that I trust implicitly. I try not to micro-manage them in any way. If Bob Schreck comes to me and says, "I have an idea for this." I just say, "Okay, let's do it. What can I do to help you accomplish that goal without getting in your way."
I think Scott Dunbier joining us a couple of years ago is probably the best example of that. He came to us with a bunch of ideas already in mind, and I literally tried to do everything I could to support him but also to get out of his way and let him do what he was good at. He had come from an environment that was set up differently, so I think for him it was very freeing to say, "I can come to work every day, and I don't have to have meetings and I don't have to be micro-managed."
SPURGEON: I would guess the production emphasis would also instill discipline up and down the line that might not have to be enforced otherwise.
ADAMS: That's the only place where I do get involved. If we say we're going to do a book, I try not to get involved in the details of that particular book. But once we say it's going to come out in October, it's going to come out in October. I'm not pushing people to get it out in October. If you need a couple of extra months to get it done, so be it. But once we say it's going to come out in October, it's going to come out in October.
SPURGEON: One big news item that I think may have confused people more than any other over the last five years is the purchase of IDW by IDT.
ADAMS: Okay, sure.
SPURGEON: What's the current status of that relationship? I think it's slightly changed from what it was initially. Am I right?
ADAMS: Not really. It's changed a little bit. IDT has a division called IMG. IMG is the company that made the investment in IDW. All of these companies that start with "I" is a little confusing. They own a majority interest in IDW. Robbie Robbins and myself are minority owners. Robbie and I are two of the company's founders. So it hasn't changed all that much. They've been a good partner. We've been very successful in just about any way you can measure it financially, so they're happy with the job we're doing.
SPURGEON: Why was that investment important at that time?
ADAMS: Well, it wasn't. It's interesting to me that people were interested in that transaction. Because at the time -- it's going on three years that we did the deal -- if you'd asked anybody who owns IDW, first of all most people would say I have no idea. Ninety percent of those that did answer would have said, "Ted owns IDW." That was the perception. The reality is that four of us owned IDW, and we had a couple of minor investors. Nobody cared. [laughs] It wasn't all that interesting who owned IDW before this transaction, so it was always a little confusing why anybody cared that people they didn't know in the form of Alex [Garner]and Kris [Oprisko] and Robbie were replaced by another group they didn't know.
SPURGEON: I think the curiosity was that IDW was obviously enjoying a certain level of success when this ownership deal took place, and this forced a lot of people to ask the question why IDW would seek a partner. Had the company overreached? Did the company want to expand? And so on.
ADAMS: It wasn't the kind of transaction where we were looking for a capital investment where we could go out and invest in things. It was much more the kind of transaction where as you said we'd been successful, we'd been in business for seven years, we had owners that were looking to move on and do other things, and they were looking to cash out their investment in large measure. It was a way to get some money for the work they'd done for the last seven years and bring in some people that wanted to be in the publishing business. It wasn't "Oh, we need money because we're in trouble," or "Oh, we need money to make a capital investment." We had owners who wanted to make their assets more liquid.
SPURGEON: You mentioned some snafus with Diamond earlier. How worried are you moving forward about the health of the comics infrastructure? Are you confident you'll be able to always get your product into the hands of the people who want it?
ADAMS: Absolutely.
After I said that about Diamond I kind of felt bad about it because I am a giant supporter of Diamond.
SPURGEON: We'll note your concern by including this exchange, although I don't think what you said sounded bad at all.
ADAMS: I'm glad to hear that. I think Diamond does an incredible job, and the amount of product they process in any given week and the efficiency with which they do it is unbelievable. They are in my opinion a tremendous organization and they take more heat than they should. We've had a couple of hiccups here and there, but I couldn't be happier with the service they provide.
And I'm not just trying to kiss ass with Diamond because they're our #1 customer! [laughs] I think they do an extraordinary job and the folks over there take their job unbelievably seriously. I have a lot of respect for them. Because of that respect I don't have a lot of concern for the health of the Direct Market, other than the concern that most people have for brick and mortar in this day and age. I think we should have a general concern about how print products are sold.
Comics are in a tough spot. I understand why they buy the books that they buy, but I do feel that in large measure the Direct Market does have this sort of diminishing return in these endless crossovers and events, these superhero events, and having that be the only focus of the industry. I think that's not good for any of us from a long-term perspective. There's nothing new here, we've all been talking about this as long as I've been in the business. [Spurgeon laughs] But we do in large measure sell to a smaller audience year after year after year, because we lose people but don't replace them.
I have a seven-year-old son, and my house is filled with comics and I've been reading to him since he was a baby, but as an industry we really don't make much product for him. There's Tiny Titans, which is a terrific book. A lot of the other DC kids book. Bone is certainly amazing as a gateway book for kids and other people. But as an industry we don't do a good job of bringing in newpeople. I'm not saying IDW does that, either. I'm not holding us up as a savior. But if you ask me if I have a concern for the Direct Market, that would be my only concern.
SPURGEON: Some of these concerns aren't wholly Direct Market concerns. Border's isn't exactly doing really well right now, either.
ADAMS: Right.
SPURGEON: It makes me think... like most companies, IDW has a foot in the digital world with much, much more likely to come. In terms of your digital media initiatives, when you personally conceive of that in terms of your overall publishing efforts, is there a defensive element to that part of your company? Is there an element to it of hedging your bets about print publishing?
ADAMS: My belief is that when we sell an iTunes app, the person buying that is not person who was going to buy a print version. He just simply wasn't going to go to a comic store or bookstore. There are many more people that don't read print -- comic books or books -- than do. And so our aggressive nature in digital distribution certainly lies in a bit of a defensive standpoint, but more from the standpoint of wanting to reach the biggest audience I can.
My goal as a publisher is to bring as many people to a title as I possibly can. If the person reads it on paper, that's my preferred method, because that's what I like. I will always choose paper over digital. But I don't want to be dismissive to the person who wants to read it on their iPhone or who wants to read it on their PSP. If I can reach people through those platforms I'm going to do it and I'm going to be as aggressive as I possibly can in doing it.
I don't see a lot of talk about the PSP from the comics press, but the PSP launched their comics reader in the middle of December and we've started to get some preliminary sales information from them, sales rankings. IDW is disproportionately represented in their top 10 of sales. Certainly disproportionately represented as compared to where we would be in a Diamond Top 300 chart. We can have what looks like tremendous success via that platform with comics that I can't sell as well in comics stores. We're talking about creator-driven books performing better than our licensed books. I've never seen that. We're talking very early days, the thing's not even a month old. [laughter] I'm not going to proclaim that we have a new way to sell creator-driven comics.
SPURGEON: "Shut down the presses!" [laughter]
ADAMS: The Direct Market is our #1 market, and I don't see any reason it won't always be our #1 market. But if I can reach another 100, 000 people through the PSP and another 100,000 through iTunes, I'm going to do that. If I can bring more people to these ideas and these concepts, from our perspective we want our content to reach as many people as possible. There is a large number of people who would prefer to read them on the iPhone versus paper. I'm not one of them. I prefer to read them on paper.
SPURGEON: You've ramped up the comic strip portion of your line in incredibly rapid fashion: multiple titles, several books in some of the series, both modern and classic comics. Was there any feeling of risk very early on, that no matter how lovely they might be, you were committing to these massive books? I remember sitting down with you at San Diego in 2008 and looking at Dean's copy of... oh, man...
SPURGEON: ... right, the Scorchy Smith/Noel Sickles book. On the one hand I was thinking, "This is a gorgeous book." And on the other hand I was thinking, "This is a gorgeous book that features, you know, Scorchy Smith."
ADAMS: [laughs]
SPURGEON: How much risk does this kind of commitment entail?
ADAMS: There's always some financial risk with any individual project, particularly when you're talking about something that's expensive to print. There's no risk to IDW in total. We're big enough we can survive the failure of any individual project and, in this case, the Scorchy Smith book was profitable for IDW. My perspective on these things is that IDW from the get-go from a publishing standpoint is that we're always going to publish things that are important to us. We certainly never go out of our way to say we want to lose money on any particular project. But if we think something's important, or if it's important to any particular employee of IDW, those are projects we are going to pursue.
Dean Mullaney, who has done an unbelievable job with the Library of American Comics, the volume of books he's produced over the last couple of years, each more beautiful than the last, when Dean came to me and proposed this book, it's similar to what we talked about before: "Sounds good. What do you need from me to make this happen?"
I believe that's really one of the beautiful things about the Direct Market. A book like that isn't going to set sales records. We're not going to sell 10,000 copies. But we can count on the Direct Market to buy 1000-1500 copies of a book like that. And that gives us the security to know that's a book we can pursue. I can't stress enough that there are so many great things about the Direct Market, and that's one of them. Almost everyone who works here has been working in the Direct Market for 20 years, we know what will work and what won't work there. A book like that: nobody thinks they're going to get rich from a book like that. But if it's a book that we feel is important and that we're passionate about, we're going to do it.
I just saw the advance copy yesterday of a strip called King Aroo, which is a book Dean has been really passionate about. I grew up studying comic strips and comic strip artists. That said, King Aroo isn't one I was familiar with. But Dean said, "This stuff is amazing. We've got to bring this back out." So we did it. We got the advance copy in yesterday and this book is beautiful. The art is unbelievable. A really, really beautiful strip. Are we going to make money on that book? Probably not a lot. But this is a book that needs to be out there. The people who like it are going to be blown away by it, and for people like me who love comic strips but aren't familiar with this one, it's going to be eye-opening.
SPURGEON: I'm trying to think of a way to end this, Ted, a way that's clever and satisfying. [Adams laughs] One person asked me to ask you when IDW is going to lower the Bob Schreck boom -- that you're due for some terrifyingly huge announcement of a Schreck-led project.
ADAMS: [laughs] Well, stay tuned. [laughter] I worked with Bob at Dark Horse and at the time he was the marketing director and I was one of his assistants. I've known him forever. Then he moved to editorial and he's had this incredible career. When I saw he and DC had gone their separate ways, I knew there was no way I was not going to have him work at IDW.
SPURGEON: A thing that's interesting to me about your company looking at it from the outside-in is that a lot of what you're doing right now is still in the early stages. There's plenty of room for you to build onto some of your more recent big projects. Dean gives you access to classic strips, Bloom Countyputs you in play for any modern strip projects, the Parker book indicates you're an option for a lot of books people tend to think of going to book publishers and art-comics houses, and the addition of Bob Schreck opens up everything in mainstream American comic books that doesn't involve a licensed character. You're building a series of powerful Rolodexes.
ADAMS: I want everybody to think of us as a home for their project. I want Paramount to come to us with their next big movie release, and I want creators to know that IDW can be a good home for their projects as well. We've worked hard to improve that over the last few years. When we started it was my Rolodex, with Ashley Wood, Steve Niles, and people that I knew. As we've grown, that Rolodex has gotten bigger and bigger.
If somebody has got something they're thinking of doing, I want them to think of IDW.
*****
ADDENDUM: JOHN JACKSON MILLER ON IDW's MARKET SHARE
I asked comics numbers guru John Jackson Milelr to comment as Ted Adams suggested on IDW's move past certain premier publishers on the marketshare charts. John responded as follows:
"I would not have been able to answer this last week, but I've just had all the Diamond end-of-year figures keyed in from the last decade. (Finally got some help!)
Crossgen topped out at 3.24% in annual dollar share in 2003, behind fourth-place Dark Horse, at 5.53%.
Dreamwave topped out at 2.49% in 2003, for sixth place that year.
Viz gets up to 3.01% in Pokemon-mad 1999, but Dark Horse was at 8.29% that year.
So his theory is correct.
We might also get into quibbles over whether or not Acclaim or Wizard are premier publishers -- they did get the front of the book treatment and were announced in that initial wave, but they weren't brokerage deals with their own discount rates. But I can't remember offhand whether there was a separate term for them, or how they were referred to in the listings. I'd need to check my orderbooks from way back when.
Thanks, John.
If you have as few as five comics sites bookmarked, you should make one of them The Comics Chronicles.
FFF Results Post #193 -- Alliter-Nation
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Comics People Whose First And Last Names All Start With The Same Letter -- Yes, All Five Of Them." Here is how they responded.
Jeet Heer
* Bob Bolling -- Little Archie's cartoonist
* Bart Beaty -- European comics expert
* Bill Blackbeard -- collector and editor extraordinaire
* Blake Bell -- Ditko biographer
* Bob Bindig -- comics historian
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Arthur Adams
Alfredo Alcalá
Alex Alonso
Al Avison
Alfonso Azpiri
(Honorary mention: Adam Austin)
******
Rodrigo Baeza
Dame Darcy
Dan DeCarlo Dan Davis
Dan Day
Dave Darrigo
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Jack Jackson
James Jean
Jess Jodloman
Joe Jusko
Jeff Jones
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Ron Randall
Ralph Reese
Robin Riggs
Robert Rodi Richard Rockwell
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Stan Sakai
Steven Seagle
Scott Shaw!
Steve Skeates
Syd Shores
Marc-Antoine Mathieu
Mark Martin
Matt Madden
Mike Mignola
Milo Manara
bonus: Max
*****
Sam Humphries
Jack Jackson -- underground pioneer and artist
Janet Jackson -- artist and colorist
J. Jonah Jameson -- publisher
James (Lucas) Jones -- editor in chief
Joe Jusko -- artist
*****
Bill Matheny
Bud Blake -- Tiger
Brian Michael Bendis
Brett Breeding
Brian Bolland
Bob Burden
*****
Andrei Molotiu
Matt Madden
Mort Meskin
Mark Marek
Mike Mignola
Massimo Mattioli
1. Milo Manara
2. Mark Millar
3. Mike Mignola
4. Mark McKenna
5. Mike McKone
*****
Eric Reynolds
Gary Groth
Gary Gianni
Grass Green
Geo. Gately
Glenn Ganges
*****
Dave Knott
* Milo Manara
* Matt Madden
* Mark Marek
* Marc-Antoine Mathieu
* Mike Mignola
*****
Dave Knott
* Brian Michael Bendis
* Berke Breathed
* Bob Burden
* Box Brown
* Brian Bolland
*****
John Kovaleski
* Bruce Beattie -- editorial cartoonist
* Bo Brown -- magazine cartoonist
* Bob Barnes -- "The Better Half"
* Bill Brewer -- greeting cards
* Bud Blake -- "Tiger"
*****
John Vest
1. Tom Toles
2. Tom Tomorrow
3. Tim Truman
4. The Tribe
5. Ty Templeton
So count me among those who say yes, this was a best ever kind of Festival.
* Prix essential jeunesse (best children's album): Lou Vol. 5 by Julien Neel (Glénat)
Took in the 
Very quick note. My iPhone died today for several hours but was revived when I squeezed it really very hard. Hmm.
He would go in the 1950s and 1960s to become one of the primary cartoonists for the DC Thomson publications. He most famously drew Baby Crockett for The Beezer starting in 1956, later also drawing a version of that feature for younger readers that was published in Bimbo. Another popular title for The Beezer was Smiffy. His art for The Moonsters distinguished the 1960s publication Sparky, as did his Barney. Ritchie would go on to draw several covers for the publication as well. His time at DC Thomson would span nearly 40 years, during which he built a concurrent, successful illustration career through several magazine gigs in England and abroad. 
Alan Gardner at 
* the Spring's C2E2 comics convention 
The FIBD opened today with grey skies and a light drizzle, which dampened the mood somewhat. The setup is remarkably similar to last year, which made finding things easy. Thursday is the slowest day in the tents, ideal for browsing. I took photos of the books I want to buy, stopping at 50. This will be a costly trip.
By Bart Beaty
"He is the same person, a fellow twenty-six years of age, no spring chicken to be sure, who said to Buddy in the midst of a throng of strangers: 'I thought you were supposed to be such a witty kid.' Is that a conscientious remark to make to a little fellow of five? Thank God for the avoidance of shame and embarrassment to the whole family, I had no decent weapon on my person when this revolting, crappy remark was made; however, quite afterwards, I embraced an opportunity to tell Roger Pittman, the full name his hapless parents gave him, that I would kill him or myself, possibly before nightfall, if he spoke to this chap again in that manner, or any other five-year-old chap, in my presence." -- 
* the Pulse reminds us that the cartoonist Pat Boyette -- who spent the comics portion of his career working almost solely for Charlton and the rest of his career doing things like working in radio, television and film -- died ten years ago January 15.
* have you ever wondered about Aleksandr Zograf's current output, where the books are coming from and where they're being serialized? 
The news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com takes a look 
* the retailer Mike Sterling 
* 
It's about an average girl, Kotoko Aihara, who falls in love with someone well out of her metaphorical weight class. She confesses her love to the smartest boy in school only to receive a mercilessly blunt refusal. He doesn't even bother to muster an "I'm flattered, but..." The boy, Naoki Irie, adds insult to injury later when driven to explain his indifference: "I... don't like stupid women."
Stripped down to its bones, Itazura Na Kiss doesn't sound particularly pleasant, and you might conclude that I disliked it. That conclusion would be incorrect. I did like it very much and look forward to future volumes. It's not because I'm invested in the outcome of the romance, that I want Naoki to come around to Kotoko's charms (which are average) or that I want Kotoko to earn Naoki's approval (as she's stupid, but she's a fine person in generally and doesn't need to change). The fact that I like it owes more to the general charm and appealing tone of Tada's storytelling. In other words, it's not about the couple; it's about the contexts in which they function.
And Tada does make efforts to take the sting off of Kotoko's unrequited affection for Naoki. Kotoko has got her own idiot admirer, a classmate named Kin-chan who's even stupider than Kotoko and whose devoted affection for her is even less reciprocated than Kotoko's for Naoki. Perhaps the suggestion is that Naoki's disinterest doesn't make him a horrible person, since we're certainly not supposed to think less of Kotoko for her frank disinterest in Kin-chan. Plus, Tada likes to abuse Naoki, at least in terms that the character would view as abuse. He's dragged into Kotoko's schemes and pushed into an undesirable spotlight as their living arrangement becomes grist for the school's gossip mill. 
* 
Ask yourself this. What other comics could you have purchased in 1975 for your $125? If you went city limit to city limit in 95 percent of Gerald Ford's North America, determined to spend every last dime, what could you put on the backseat of your car? You could likely track down an issue or two of 
In 2010, you can be separated from your cash allotment much more easily and with much less effort. You can also spend to greater reward. Take the smaller amount, not adjusted for inflation. With $125, you could buy those big company comics mentioned above, or you could snag 
Heck, you can access for free -- or for a nominal price right up next to free -- more comics and cartoons than most people could have conceived of being able to get at for any price 35 years ago. Library collections have gone from having one or two 
The comics art form has blossomed from one that even its most devoted fans left behind at age 14 to one that could conceivably stop producing art today and the heartbroken reader present at its funeral couldn't get to all of the corners and travel down all of the side roads already brought to life before she joined comics on the other side. We're still discovering for basically the first time quality comics they made 50, 60, 70 years ago, from 
Sometimes I think that a lot of comics readers, particularly lifelong comics readers, including industry folk and creators and those of us lucky enough to have some platform with which to grapple with the art form on a regular basis, have yet to come to terms with the enormity of what has sprung up around us. You don't even have to go back 35 years to get a sense of how everything's changed. In two weeks late last month I received in the mail two books -- 
"Someone posted that Martin was the very last of the great Golden Age Franco-Belgian cartoonists and I probably wouldn't dispute that," longtime European comics reader, translator and editor Kim Thompson told CR. "I haven't read one of his books in years, but I collected all the Alixes as a kid and while even then I thought he was the weakest wheel of the clear-line Herge/Jacobs/Martin tricycle, he sure could draw, and his depiction of Rome was surprisingly raw at times for a kids' comic. I suspect one day I'll dig those books out and get a kick out of them all over again, passing as I have from bright-eyed kid ingenuousness through too-cool-for-school adult snark to middle-aged nostalgic sentimentality."
* Jeet Heer 
At first glance, 
I'll recommend 
* the cartoonist Evan Dorkin 
* I hadn't noticed this the first time around, but the front page to the Sammy Harkham/Jordan Crane/Ted May/Steve Weissman web site 
* congratulations to Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester for their A Comics Studies Reader 
This totally passed under my radar or was blocked by my spam settings, I couldn't tell you, but apparently Gareb Shamus and whatever combination of his name and the words "comic con" and the designation Wizard he's utilizing right now 
* the retailer and blogger Mike Sterling 
I'm always a little bit slow catching up to these things and I'm more of a personal mind to just give money directly to the charity of your choice (mine was 
That happened at Viz Media's 
The first Ono title to see print in translation, 
* Abhay Khosla 
* Dan Nadel 
Ted Adams is the CEO of 
TOM SPURGEON: This plateau that you've reached, where you're in with the bigger publishers rather than the smaller publishers... you've spent some of this year thinking about your company, with the commemorative book and your anniversary and everything. What does this specific plateau mean to you and IDW?
SPURGEON: Do you have a sense in terms of your company's make-up of what pushed you to this level at this time?
SPURGEON: Is there a group of books that stands out performance-wise over the last 18 months?
ADAMS: I think from their perspective, just in general terms, the more stories and the more marketing and the more PR that's out there, the better it is for them. God knows how much money was spent to promote 
ADDENDUM: JOHN JACKSON MILLER ON IDW's MARKET SHARE
