Comics Distribution To Be 37 Percent Less Randomly Goofy Starting In 2011: Day-Early Shipping
I guess I'm not on the Diamond press release address list, but the best, most succinct write-up including the announcement I've seen is here.
I want to hold off a bit and survey the reaction before I talk about it a bit more, but it sure sounds like a positive to me. For the uninitiated, this means that all comics stores (as opposed to a select group of qualifying larger stores) will have the option of getting the comics intended for Wednesday sale on Tuesday, which should better facilitate the turnaround of comics to stands, improve familiarity with product, and allow stores to better deal with problems in a shipment. Recent trial balloons in terms of individual comics being held -- such as one for the "dead week" late in 2009 -- have assuaged long-standing fears of dozens of retailers pushing for an advantage by releasing the books to select customers a day early. The aging of the retail base -- and the corresponding ability to see long-term benefits over short-term ones -- and fewer shops crowding urban centers (I don't have the science on this, but there sure aren't five comic stores in Seattle's university district any longer) may have once been the case probably contributed as well.
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 no-doubt 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 if I were anywhere near a comic shop, I would sweep into the store, cloak in hand, take off my mask and declare, "I have arrived."
*****
JUL100069 AMAZING SCREW ON HEAD & OTHER CURIOUS OBJECTS HC $17.99
JUL100073 BALTIMORE PLAGUE SHIPS #2 $3.50
JUL100072 HELLBOY THE STORM #3 (OF 3) $2.99
That is a lot of Mike Mignola-related material. He's become sort of a mini-publishing mogul, at least as far as comics lets you do that before you start breaking out the sweatshop floorplans.
MAR100143 UMBRELLA ACADEMY POCKET WATCH & STATUE SET $129.99
If I were going to be beat up for owning one nerdly object, I would hope it was a pocket watch. A fez wouldn't be bad, either.
JUL100110 BRIGHTEST DAY #9 $2.99
Do do sales relative to the last event series prove once and for all that comics fans would rather see characters die than brought back to life?
APR100462 KING CITY #11 (MR) $2.99
People are going to be digging into back-issue bins after this one for a while to come.
JUL100598 TASKMASTER #1 (OF 4) $3.99
I like a villain where the secret to defeating him is to not let him take video of you on his camera phone.
JUL100615 THOR FOR ASGARD #1 (OF 6) $3.99
It feels like there's something wrong with the market where folding extra series into the publishing mix makes sense give the relatively modest numbers these series are selling. It's like if TV somehow made it worth one's time to do multiple series spin-offs of shows like According To Jim. Wouldn't we think it strange if there were four According To Jim series and one-offs going at the same time? I think we would.
JUL101038 AMULET SC VOL 03 CLOUD SEARCHERS $10.99
More people may read this book than any three other books on the list combined.
JUL100741 ANTHOLOGY PROJECT HC VOL 01 (MR) $24.99
Humorous description of comic.
JUN100998 DRUNKEN DREAM & OTHER STORIES HC $24.99
The class of this week's offering, an engaging selection of stories from a very talented creator. The history, but the stories just work as weird, little stories.
JUL100890 LIFE & TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK HC VOL 01 (AUG090745) $24.99
I don't understand what permutation of this work is being published and at what point and where it all fits in with past publication efforts on this material, but it's really good stuff. If I were in a comic shop, I'd totally be checking this one out.
JUL101162 STITCHES GN $15.95
I had no idea that a paperback version of last year's well-liked and well-regarded book was due. Well, here it is. I like this cover better.
*****
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, that's because I'm busy being fearful of the new realities of comics publishing.
Go, Look: Val Mayerik's Tribute Painting Of His Friend, The Late Steve Gerber Gerber's actually on the right; I just thought that was a splendid-looking Howard. Click through for the full image.
Darryl Cagle reports that cartoonist RP Overmyer has passed away due to complications from diabetes.
Overmyer was a longtime LA-based cartoonist and designer. His newspaper clients included LA Weekly and the San Jose Metro Weekly; his animation employers included Fox and Universal Studios.
He may be best known for his Hollywood Dog feature, which was nationally syndicated in its current, political-cartoon form since I believe January 2006 and included the Los Angeles Times among its clients. The feature was originally a comic strip for the Los Angeles Reader, was trademarked for t-shirt production in 1989, and was briefly the basis for a television show in the post-Simpsons 1990s. That show appeared in 1993 and feature Simpsons utility performer Hank Azaria as the voice of the title character.
A large gallery of Hollywood Dog movie-still parodies can also be found on the Hollywood Dog site. Another panel strip by Overmyer called The Gray Area, copyrighted for 2000, can be found here in animated form. A large commercial art gallery indicates the breadth of Overmyer's career as a designer and illustrator; I think this may be a poster/print of Overmyer's.
Overmyer's last cartoon appeared through syndication partner Cagle on August 10.
The Swedish cartoonist and illustrator Oksar Forsgren has died, according to word passed along by Joakim Gunnarsson and confirmed in the comments thread by someone speaking to a family member.
A young cartoonist who was beginning to score professional opportunities in illustration and in comics, Forsgren placed work long-running and now defunct children's publication Bamse. He won the professional class cartooning contest held by the magazine Herman Hedning for two comedy series entries, Hundliv and Ledans Lustgard. He placed illustrations and comics in the Vasterbotten Courier and provided advertising-related drawings to a company called Stockholm Design.
In his blog, Forsgren talked about a variety of projects both picture-books and comics amid a torrent of posts detailing anecdotes from his personal life, analyzing other cartoonists, and even describing a rejection or two. He cited Blankets as a favorite comics memoir.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Gary Tyrrell picks up on some good news -- the Ted Rall/Matt Bors/Steven Cloud cartooning team is out of war-torn Afghanistan and into politically torn but decidedly much safer Iran. That's nice to hear.
* as if solely to please me, TCJoffers up a short talk between Anne Ishii and Johnny Ryan on Detroit Metal City.
* even better than a conference in conjunction with NYCC would be to announce such a thing in a timely enough fashion that the folks who don't live in New York City who have to make their travel arrangements more than five weeks in advance could have attended -- doing so automatically just in case there's a conference could put you in town a day early with nothing to do (as was the case with the conference-less CCI this year). Luckily, no one covering comics lives outside of New York.
* I kind of enjoyed this look at the Harvey Awards' best new talent winners. Not a Starland Vocal Band, Christopher Cross or Milli Vanilli in the bunch.
* this is really cute if the reference comes easily to you, and still pretty cute if you have to have it explained to you.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
A Massive Essay On The Concept Of Free Just kidding! It's still summer. I'm not going to bore anyone with a long essay on the pay-model vs. free-model debate and all its various business and cultural permutations, even though the massive set of cascading issues flared up over the weekend via comments by Mark Waid at the Harveys and a privately-directed rebuttal by Sergio Aragones. Not while there are matinee movies to see and rivers to tumble down in one's inner tube. If you want to read around on the matter, though, let me suggest a few things.
* first of all, to my reading Sergio's criticism wasn't as much an indictment of the various give-it-away-for-free models in and of themselves but a warning as to the ramifications of such models for the wider industry in which they continue to take hold. You can't just point at a list of people making money that way and saying, "See? It works! Sit down, you appealing yet clearly fearful-of-the-future giant of our industry!" It's a different argument. To pretend there are no ramifications to the introduction of a new set of reward models seems to me as dubious as pretending that there aren't people seeing varying levels of success with said models.
* second, we're working from a lot of incomplete information. The things we don't know about these new models -- how many people can sustain themselves that way, how much they're dependent on pushing against pay-for models, what the expectations are for top earners over time -- may outweigh what we do know. This uncertainty provides rhetorical benefits to both sides, incidentally. There's also a lack of information about where the money goes in a lot of the long-existing models.
* third, I think it's perfectly reasonable to decide that the extremists on both ends of protection/free arguments are douchebags, that Superman and Mickey Mouse should have fallen back into the public domain around noon yesterday but that those people that scan entire comics and put them up on-line should be discouraged and dissuaded. Beware anyone who brings 2002 Internet argumentation confidence to these issues on one side or the other.
* fourth, beware overvaluing the inevitability argument. Some things are inevitable, other aren't, and most things develop from a combination of the actual inevitable things about them and the choices made by people one way or the other. If what seemed inevitable were always so, comic books would have ceased to exist three times between 1958 and now.
* fifth, please keep in mind creators rights elements to this discussion. If you believe that creators have the ultimate right to decide how to conduct business on their own behalf, and this right to self-direction should be honored, you get rid of a lot of the dorm-room presumption that comes from what I consider a warped view of the primacy of consumerism.
I love it when people examine a comics convention in terms of the books and comics purchased there. It's not only visually interesting, but it reminds us what was once the primary reason a lot of folks visited such shows, and perhaps even in this age of on-line back-issue ordering and Amazon.com still do: to find comics they can't find in their local shops. Anyway, the belle of the ball of the images posted is a Bob Haney/Alex Toth story, but it's so short I didn't want to draw any attention away from it by re-posting a significant percentage of it here.
Go, Read: George Herriman LAT Profile CR used to spend a considerable amount of time draw attention to the "local cartoonist profile" -- you don't usually get them from the major papers, though, and they tend not to be done about those long gone
The Continuing Potency Of Naji al-Ali
What's striking about this long article discussing various accusations against political authorities on the general issue of suppressing Palestinian demonstrations is that one of the events that led to the protests being staged was apparently something in memory of the cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who was assassinated in 1987 in London. I'm probably being hyper-sensitive, but it's weird to me that al-Ali would be the subject of such a memorial about a month after the anniversary of his death. This leads me to think it's a pretty potent symbol that can be used as the reason for a demonstration in a floating, capricious way like that. I'm likely wrong.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* Carsten Juste, Kurt Westergaard and Flemming Rose are still on the official al Qaeda death list, the Copenhagen Post reports. It's done so casually it's easy to ignore, but this kind of thing proves that it's arbitrary, grinding politics as usual. On a list made up because of rigid, principled religion objection, Westergaard wouldn't be singled out of all the cartoonists.
* posters seeking to get their viewers to "lighten up" have been ripped down from some of the places they were hung around Auckland. Included among the equal-opportunity offerings are posters featuring the Pope as a pedophile and Muhammad as a suicide bomber.
Your 2009 Harvey Award Winners
This year's Harvey Awards, honoring work completed and published during the calendar year 2010, were given out this weekend in conjunction with Baltimore Comic-Con.
A humanitarian award named after the late Dick Giordano and a lifetime achievement award bearing the name of the Hero Initiative charity were also given out at the ceremony, hosted by the cartoonist Scott Kurtz.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* if I'm reading this correctly, the Leclerc family has started a foundation devoted to modern art and comics, which may involve the employment of the family's massive collection of original art and a building/some property they're currently not using.
* the artist -- and comics author -- James Romberger has written a long post about the failure to properly credit comics illustrators as authors of the work they're helping create.
* every year when CR's randomly selected Jack Kirby art tribute goes up on the King's birthday, there's one panel or one sequence that ends up blowing me away. As I recall, last year it was this weird three-panel sequence of people leaving Darkseid behind done in a way that made Darkseid look like a divorced dad watching a station wagon full of kids heading back to their mother. This year it's a single panel from I believe the first Hulk adventure where Kirby has the monster lurching off into the distance at story's end. The choice to have the Hulk pitch forward in the second panel instead of continuing to rumble square-shouldered and Tor Johnson-style towards the horizon is inspired. You get this sense of the monster hurt, suffering: he looks like Lawrence Tierney leaving the scene of a horrifying car accident, not some super-powered body-builder raging off into the night. But the anger is there, too, a fury that makes arms and legs work when they maybe shouldn't. It's easy to understand why Rick Jones would want to follow him: the Hulk looks totally jacked up. Hell, I want to follow him. Kirby communicates most of this with a choice or two of what he's going to show and then a few lines on that left leg to really plant it in the ground. Compare that to the end of the last Hulk movie where with all of this history available to them and tens of millions of dollars we get a CGI cartoon doing parkour through the rubble, and if you're like me you'll shake your head in amazement at the unmatched original. Long live the King of Comics.
* the artist Frank Santoro writes eloquently about the value of naturalism in comics art.
* not comics: Stephen Frears' adaptation of Tamara Dreweis opening up in theaters sooner rather than later this Fall. Advance word is that it's an art-house crowd-pleaser; I hope this means that the book will be a presence in shops through the Fall shopping season.
* finally, the critic Richard Bruton talks enthusiastically about the late Mike Parobeck, a very talented early practitioner of the "cartoony" style of mainstream adventure comics making and someone worth seeking out in quarter bins and back-issue sales if you like that kind of art and that kind of story.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
FFF Results Post #224 -- WACs
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Writers About Comics You Like That Aren't On CR's Home Team Of Tom Spurgeon And Bart Beaty." This is how they responded.
1. Heidi McDonald
2. Frank Santoro
3. Jeet Heer
4. Alan David Doane
5. Chris Butcher
*****
Thanks to everyone that participated. Judging from the quality of these photos, I subconsciously hate everyone in my peer group. Sorry, peer group! Please imagine everyone 150 percent more attractive.
Jack Kirby, The King of Comics, Would Have Been 93 Years Old Today
Jack Kirby, the mighty heart of the American comic book industry, would have been 93 years old today. Below is a tiny, even insignificant sample of his awesome image-making power, many of which were culled from around the Internet, for your ruminative and reflective pleasure. Long live the King.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
Go, Read: Molly Norris Interview
There's a dollop of boring political talk buoying this interview about Molly Norris, the cartoonist whose reference to a "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" idea in a cartoon she made became a cause against her will and put her on a death list. I can't imagine anything in the world I care less about than whether or not this poor woman's plight reflects poorly on Seattle-area liberal politicians -- I think that what has happened to Norris should be of equal concern to all Americans regardless of political perspective. (The writer also suggests a reasonable alternative theory than one breaking across political lines, that Seattle is a city where no one deals with anyone else's problems, almost as a point of pride.) Still, shame on any politician that hasn't reached out to her, no matter how they lean. There's also a little bit of silliness where instead of saying they met at a coffeehouse that won't be named for her safety the writer puts it as "a secret, undisclosed coffeehouse" which sounds like they're meeting in a Starbucks in the nuclear fallout shelter underneath the Greenbriar in 1962.
And yet, all my bitching and moaning aside, I'm grateful Norris was willing to talk to someone, and I'm grateful that it was published so that maybe she can get help and support beyond the FBI protection she's received. The fact that an army of gleeful dumbasses had their little free speech stunt and this woman suffers for it the rest of her life is a painful reminder that Jyllands-Posten had their free speech stunt that started a chain of events they couldn't control and people died because of it. How about no more stunts for a while?
Shueisha: Year-End Losses For First Time According to a post at Anime News Network, major Japanese publisher Shueisha reported that it lost $49 million USD during its most recent fiscal year, ending May 31, 2010. It was the first time the publisher had ever announced year-end losses, and the fourth year in a row it had announced declining revenues.
Culprits were believed to be a decline in real-estate holdings and a singificant drop in advertising revenue. Magazine and book volume sales rose.
Shueisha joins Kodansha (November 2009) and Shogakukan (February 2010) as publishers showing a loss in recent fiscal years.
My Cage Fails To Sustain Syndication
In apair of interviews following announcing the news via I believe social networking tools, My Cage co-creator Ed Power talks about the details of his strip's failure to find enough syndication partners to make it viable for King Features to continue on with it. Power says that the feature suffered the modest drop a lot of comics saw during the worst days of the still-ongoing newspaper industry crisis, but that in the case of My Cage, this pushed them from the holding-steady-and-gaining-momentum ranks and into the now-on-life-support level (mid-forties to mid-teens). I think that particular development makes the story more than another strip failing to catch on -- the cost to many newspaper strips right now from everything going on in the economy generally and newspaper industry specifically seems to be either a small bump downward or an inability to take that next, logical client-generating step.
The last syndicated episode of My Cage runs October 31.
Not Comics: USA Today Starts Reorganization Towards Mobile Content
It's hard to judge which news story concerning re-organization type initiatives are actual news and which ones received too much emphasis due to the current financial difficulties facing that industry. Reading this one felt like being punched in the comic by a pre-teen, as opposed to being punched by an adult or a robot from the future, so I'm going to mention it here. Apparently, USA Today is in the first stages of a massive reorganization that will orient what it does away from a print paper -- or even its equivalency on-line -- and towards the production of news content for mobile device. This will institute not just layoffs but a restructuring of how they do things editorially, moving away from the current sectioned-paper approach. I lack any perspective on where USA Today stands in the overall landscape of things -- I can remember a survey from 1985, but I hope to God those truths no longer apply -- to the extent I'd feel comfortable making a broader statement, an industry statement, but as far as the history of that publication, it sounds potentially huge. I'm also a fan of the Life section editor heading up the new editorial operation, because it's hilariously what every grumpy old man and newspaper lover would predict.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Image joins the customized downloadable application for various digital platforms crowd.
* some mainstream comics talk worth noting: Jonathan Hickman and Tom Brevoort talk about killing one of the Fantastic Four; a person with the semi-terrifying name of Gavok writes about that thing that writers sometimes do where they'll tease future stories in a single panel that either don't take place or seem odd when the book is canceled and/or moves in another direction.
* not comics: Blockbuster files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I only lived one place where Blockbuster was more viable option than laughable one, and my memory of that particular location is that it was a big pain in the ass that paid its lousy employees nothing. I would also suggest that those weird vending machine rental dealios were probably as big if not bigger a deal for Blockbuster and its multiple copies of current hits strategy as any of the on-line options were.
* the Small Press Expo (SPX) has announced its programming slate, which I believe is assembled wholly and not just in part by Bill Kartalopoulos. I think it's important for show of this size to have a rigorous programming dimension, because the room itself is pretty small compared to big comics shows -- if you want to spend a day at an SPX or MoCCA Festival rather than a couple of hours, programming needs to be a part of it. It looks like a good slate of stuff, with a bunch of quality spotlights.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: News On Cons, Shows & Major Events By Tom Spurgeon
* this weekend it's Baltimore, a well-regarded regional con with I believe pretty much a strict comics focus. As you can tell by following that link, the Harveys will be named as well during a ceremony in which emcee Scott Kurt is expected to kill as much as he did last year.
* Ford is making a donation to the Hero Initiative through its participation at the Baltimore Con.
* an interview by Matthew Brady with Wizard Entertainment head honcho Gareb Shamus has people like Heidi MacDonald and Laura Hudson actively commenting on some of the ideas engaged. I'm a comic culture nerd and can babble about this stuff for hours, but let me try to boil it down to a couple of points.
First, yes, Wizard is being slightly gross in appropriating the name "comic-con," or one of its near-equivalents, and in doing so it is certainly drafting behind the highly-publicized Comic-Con International in providing a very minor-league version of the Hollywood portion of that show to regional audiences. That they're doing this and see nothing even potentially wrong with it because maximizing one's financial success trumps all such considerations should surprise no one, and is so unsurprising it's barely worth noting. It's Wizard, for pity's sake.
Second, whether or not there's an opportunity at such shows for comics companies, I think it's one of those things that's probably technically true in some arguable sense but is so problematic in the real world it's not worth considering like it's a real issue. Sure, someone who is local to one of Wizard's shows might benefit greatly from coming out and setting up in artist's alley -- that seems like a no-brainer. A commitment from an actual comics company is a much different beast. That kind of commitment involves time and planning (and thus resources diverted in-house) and money spent to hopefully make back money or provide some other kind of measurable positive. An ongoing commitment involves that level of management and financial attention every year, and if you're lucky you become more efficient and better at doing so and maybe win back some time and money that way. In other words, it's not the kind of thing anyone decides upon because a group of on-line folks apply winning Internet argument logic to the abstract positives of some imaginary new audience.
Wizard had a decade-plus to build relationships with comics companies. Right now, those relationships have deteriorated to the point where companies won't even head to their biggest show. When it once again becomes practical to attend those shows, and the negatives outweigh the positives, companies will likely start going back. If there's anything weird going on, it's that the Kings Of The Comics Bottom Line are insinuating that a different standard should be applied. Me, I'm extremely disinterested in that kind of show, and the less relevant it is to comics the less I'll feel compelled to write about it and the happier I'll be. I genuinely wish everyone in comics luck who finds such shows useful, and I'll continue to pay attention to see if anything happening at them is worth noting, but for now I'm going to treat those for what they are: largely irrelevant to the industry and beyond so to the art form.
* not comics: sometimes when you're frustrated with the comics industry, it's good to reach out and see what's going on in other industries, even if it's just to affirm that people write self-congratulatory gibberish about issues for those media as well. One topic that seems to bring out the worst in writers of and about prose is the ongoing perceived literary novel crisis.
This post is pretty typical of the species, assigning solely to literary novels the virtue of making people feel connected to other people, blaming the lack of a critical support structure for the fact that literary novels don't move the way they did in 1965 according to the anecdotal evidence of one person's grandmother, blaming 9/11 for somehow diverting coverage away from books (I don't remember this), and assigning the longtime Upper East Side literary fixture Paris Review the role of populist groundswell-maker.
Here's the question I always have. If people have been kept from literary novels of tremendous virtue, should one's response be to paint a picture of how this is so through a gossamer-thin web of self-flattering, vaguely asserted reasons, or could that time be better spent simply naming five such masterpieces that this amazing set of coincidences kept from us, and then allowing us to see through their specific example a) that they were worthy of being put into that class, b) that what they assert happened is exactly what was done to them? I don't feel connected to modern literary novels at all right now, but I suspect it's less that 9/11 diverted me from certain ingrained shopping behaviors than it is that the one to three I try to read each year have just not been very good.
* Joe Matt explains the history behind the Peanuts parody book he did with Chester Brown and Seth.
* Shaenon Garrity offers up an intriguing reading of Cathy. I should mention that while I did speculate that many of Guisewite's fans may have found her public persona confusing -- Garrity suggests it was refreshing -- I was speculating on the number of people that might have had this reaction, not the existence of that reaction. That's something other folks communicated to me through the years and is also something I believe I read at least once. It's not something that would have occurred to me on my own.
* finally, Borders lost its CFO. I like to imagine a boardroom in panic and someone says "what does our CFO suggest we do" and then the camera pans over to an empty, spinning, leather chair.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
* ICv2.com is one of many sites to pick up on D+Q's formal declaration to distribute Chris Ware's 20th anniversary issue of ACME Novelty Library, one of the greatest comics series in history.
* D+Q will be publishing Adrian Tomine's Scenes From An Impending Marriage in early Spring 2011. That should be a treat.
* retailer Mike Sterling talks about an interesting piece of recent Marvel advertising that foreshadows a plotline in a forthcoming issue of Fantastic Four (I swear those "for" words weren't on purpose). One thing Sterling almost mentions but really doesn't is that the "oh, they're doing that again" effect is balanced against a "oh, Jonathan Hickman's doing his version of that" effect.
* despite the fact that few folks wanted to see the movie in theaters, a lot of the Scott Pilgrim books have been sold, and I imagine this boxed set will do well.
* the cartoonist Nate Neal has launched a web site in support of his new book from Fantagraphics, The Sanctuary.
* it looks like young European indie cartoonist Bastien Vives share with some of his same-age North American cartooning peers the desire to make straight-up fantasy genre comics part of his overall output.
* this interview with cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley suggests that he doesn't quite know what his next project will be, he already has a few concepts to choose from if he goes in that direction, and that it probably won't be something related to Street Stupid.
* finally, two solidly-established webcomics bid their readers farewell: Ellerbyisms and The Everyday. Congratulations to both cartoonists on lengthy, honorable runs and best of luck in all future endeavors.
Satoshi Kon, the Japanese animation director best known for the wildly idiosyncratic visual style on display in films like Paprika, died early in the morning on August 24 from complications due to pancreatic cancer. A burial service has been performed for the family only.
Kon was born in Kushiro in the Hokkaido district. He attended Musashino College Of The Arts, for painting initially and then for illustration, graduating in 1987. He began his career as a cartoonist while still in college, placing his first work in Young Magazine in 1985 and seeing his first book published by Kodansha in 1990. After school Kon also performed some editing work for Young Magazine, during the midst of the initial serialization for the legendary Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo. This brought him into Otomo's radius, and he went on to work on World Apartment Horror (he's credited with the live-action movie's story and with the adaptive manga). According to a 2008 interview with Anime News Network, working on the Otomo-written Roujin Z was Kon's foundational work in animation, providing for his subsequent career both in terms of an initial workplace experience and in meeting people with whom he would later collaborate.
Kon moved more fully into filmmaking through screenwriting, debuting on screen with the "Magnetic Rose" section of the anthology Memories (1994). He made his directorial debut in 1997 with the well-received Perfect Blue. Settling into home at Studio Madhouse, for whom he served as a staff director, he would go to make a series of critically well-regarded movies: Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003), and what will likely be considered his masterpiece, Paprika (2007). He also created the television show Paranoia Agent (2004).
Less is known about Kon's career as a manga creator, but he authored and/or worked on multiple series. His English-language wikipedia entry lists: TorikoKaikisen (1990), World Apartment Horror, Seraphim and Paprika, Dream Children. According to manga-knowledgeable retailer Chris Butcher, none of Kon's manga have been licensed for translation into English.
Kon was working on his fifth film, tentatively titled either The Dream Machine or The Dreaming Machine.
According to a post by Ryan Sands, Kon was diagnosed as terminal in May. He wrote a short farewell message soon after, which he translates as ending as follows: "With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen. Goodbye now."
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* this Walker Bean-related window display looks tremendous.
* there's a short piece up at the French-language comics clearinghouse ActuaBD.com about the difficult position that comics aimed at kids may be put into trying to balance hitting with their appropriate age group and a few larger marketing issues that may keep them from doing so.
* how can this not be everyone's favorite, short news item of the day?
* Kiel Phegley talks about the recent Chicago Wizard show from a super-appropriate point of view: the comics he bought there. That used to be why people went to conventions, to buy all the comics they had no chance of getting at home. He sidesteps any serious commentary about the state of the show but as his post starts funny and finished funny, he should be forgiven everything except maybe that tepid endorsement of Ganges #2.
* people are going to link the crap out of this if they haven't already, but Bully shows us what you do if the news cycle is slow: you double-down on the length of time spent on features, like this one about the period of time between fads arriving on the scene and when they make their way to Archie and the Riverdale gang.
* finally, is it my imagination, or does this cover make the Mark Millar's forthcoming publication look like a lost issue of Comic Foundry?
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
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 no-doubt 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 if I were anywhere near a comic shop, I would grab basket and red cloak and skip my way to four-color heaven.
*****
APR100040 LITTLE LULU TP VOL 24 SPACE DOLLY & OTHER STORIES $14.99
But after "Space Dolly," will any other story really satisfy?
FEB101008 DANGER GIRL DLX ED HC $50.00
This is like seeing a once-powerful baseball player advertised for the local card show. A ballplayer you never, ever liked, not even for a second, but still.
JUN100391 GUARDING THE GLOBE #1 (OF 6) $3.50 JUN100572 CAPTAIN AMERICA #609 $3.99 APR100461 INVINCIBLE #74 (MR) $2.99 JUN100872 MUPPET SHOW #9 $2.99
A little parcel of mainstream comic book in familiar genres from the usual group of well-admired creators. There's also a Muppet Show trade out this week.
APR100966 NORMAN PETTINGHILL BACKWOODS HUMORIST HC $39.99
The strangest and perhaps greatest book I saw at last month's Comic-Con International. It's like it was art designed by a tree full of elves that don't quite get human publications.
JUN101076 A D NEW ORLEANS AFTER DELUGE SC $16.95
I wonder why this is coming out now? Oh, yeah.
JUN100707 CEREBUS HC VOL 02 ALTA SOCIEDAD SPANISH ED $40.00
I had no idea these existed. Or if it's just this volume, "this existed."
APR100396 ARCHIE CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMICS HC VOL 01 $39.99
Bob Montana! Comics I've never seen before! Comics I've never seen before by Bob Montana!
JUN101147 CHI SWEET HOME GN VOL 02 $13.95
I'm not sure about the price point, but I enjoyed the first volume in that way you could see people that aren't you liking it, if that makes any sense.
MAY101019 COMPLETE PEANUTS BOX SET 1975-1978 $49.99
MAY101018 COMPLETE PEANUTS HC VOL 14 1977-1978 $28.99
I thought the latest volume was really strong, full of odd Peppermint Patty stories and a lot more bold and confident than I remember the strip at the time. Plus the Alec Baldwin intro was pretty good, too.
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, that's because I'm more interested in CR as another vehicle for people to interact with corporate properties than I am in actually doing anything with comics.
My Hometown Has 3 Comics Shops
Here's something I just realized the other day. Barring recent closures my hometown of Muncie, Indiana -- the fabled "Middletown, USA" of sociological studies, Tom Slick cartoons and Steven Spielberg movies -- has three comic stores within city limits: Bob's Comic Castle, Alter Ego Comics and a store called Heroes For Sale. That has to count for something, although exactly what I'm not quite sure. Certainly the symbolic aspect of the country's representative small-city hanging in there with multiple stores seems like a good thing. I'm going to take it as a positive, anyway.
Muncie's a typical modest-sized former Midwestern industrial city that's hanging in there economically on the employment capabilities of its school system, its university and its hospital. It's not Detroit, but there are neighborhoods where you could take a photograph that might fool someone into thinking it is. In terms of comics, Muncie didn't really develop a shop of its own until the mid-1980s, and even then it was buying its comics from an Indianapolis shop rather than with a distributor account of its own. Until about five years ago Muncie tended to support one-and-a-half stores: one that functioned and then one in decline or down to a spinner rack or two. Three shops -- if they're all functioning at any level whatsoever -- seems worth noting.
I think if an industry aspect to comics is going to continue to be a part of those things that service the art form as opposed to letting emerge a kind of post-industry that subsists on nothing but movie development deals and kickstarter-funded pass-alongs, multiple Direct Market store openings needs to be a huge part of that. And maybe in places that don't get a lot of attention paid to them, this is already happening. Maybe.
Go, Read: ICv2.com's Annual Interview With DC Head Editorial Honchos
The hobby business news and analysis site ICv2.com has a three-partinterview (why it's three parts, I have no idea) up with Dan DiDio and Jim Lee. It's a pleasant interview, but the two guys are almost willfully obtuse, so I'm not sure there's a whole lot in takeaways.
A quartet of things struck me, nothing major. Dan DiDio states that only 25 percent of their comics are over $2.99. I can't tell if this is true, at least at an initial glance. For one thing, if you count their publishing lines generally certainly the vast majority of what they publish is over $2.99, which is part of but not all of that particular criticism. But even in the more generally understood "these are $2.99; these are $3.99" straight-up comic book count my look at five or six weeks sees it more in the 40-45 percent range. Maybe I just picked non-representative weeks. At any rate, the logic there is wrongheaded. If moving only part of your line to $3.99 has a proposed effect, that makes it a more potent result than if it's the whole line driving it.
Two: both men offer up a feeling of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" satisfaction with the state of the publishing line, which seems odd to me. I'm not the biggest mainstream comics expert out there, but I can't imagine not having a single title over 100K in a summer month isn't extremely worrisome, I can't imagine that the performance of recent content-driven initiatives isn't a further worry, and I don't think of them as having a particularly strong roster of creators right now so I'd be flabbergasted if they didn't think talent development a concern.
Three: it's sort of odd that editors working at this level of power and influence in comics publishing would find it surprising that a concept like The Losers -- a creator-driven, single-plotline effort -- would do better at the bookstore with a movie coming up than a more general license like Jonah Hex. That's been the rule all along, hasn't it? That's their own rule in part with Watchmen, right?
Four: I think it's great that DC is going to have a big, massive on-line role-playing game starting this Fall; that could be a whole lot of fun for a lot of people. I don't understand how that drives readers to the comics except in the broadest terms, and it's a bit of a downer to hear that plans seem to consist of little more than a tie-in comic book. I swear I'm not one of those marketing back-seat drivers, but it seems to me the last six or seven years of DC hires and maneuvers were made in part to best capitalize on an opportunity like this new game may be. Then again, if I had the answer to how best to do that, I would have been one of the people hired.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Daryl Cagle rightfully blasts a Lt. General for appropriating a piece of his art for work purposes and then changing it to suit his needs. I'm not sure I see it automatically as an indictment of the entire administration or even as a thoughtcrime (in that I imagine most people watching it were likely to see it as an altered cartoon more than as Cagle's endorsement, if they thought about it all), but it's still not right. If nothing else, someone should cut him a check.
* I enjoyed speaking to Dick Giordano very much over the years, enjoyed his art work, and I never heard anyone speak poorly of him during his long and distinguished career. Still, I'm a little baffled that he would have a humanitarian award named after him, and nothing in the promotional materials I've seen gives me a sense as to why that's a match.
* the writer Kristy Valenti takes in ladies' night at the fine Seattle neighborhood comics store Comics Dungeon. Sounds like a good idea to me.
* finally, a bit of potential good news of the not comics variety: newspaper industry bible Editor & Publisher asks if the bloodbath experienced by free weeklies over the last few years has become more of a blood spongebath. The dire news facing media publications of all kinds has been reported in an almost intoxicating swirl of portent, madness and doom that it's been easy to miss that it may just be a matter of a lot of these publications finding a level that works, and that part of the problem this time around is that these businesses are run with a sometimes-constricting expectation of a certain kind of profit.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
King-Cat Comics & Stories #71 Creator: John Porcellino Publishing Information: Spit And A Half, mini-comic, 28 pages, 2010, $3. Ordering Numbers:
On the cover of the new King-Cat, a cartoon version of Noah Van Sciver admonishes the more familiar depiction of mini-comics legend and tour-mate John Porcellino for his recent choice of covers. "It doesn't matter, man," Cartoon Van Sciver says when asked what should go on the cover, "Just, please -- no more buildings or plants." The great thing about the cover as executed is that Porcellino is both following Van Sciver's advice (the two of them are front and center) and not following it at all (there are both buildings and plants in view). It's a lively cover, however, much different in tone than the recent pieces Van Sciver criticizes.
The reason for the energy in that cover and throughout the mini entire may be that Porcellino, famously having split time in his adult life between suburban Chicago and Denver, has relocated to Gainesville, Florida, the one-man advance squad for Tom Hart's forthcoming comics school. He talks in plain language about the move, and even draws the new critters he comes across. This newfound enthusiasm balances nicely against a few ruminative, sad and slightly obtuse one-pagers as well as a pair of very funny stories about Porcellino coming to terms with putting in evidence the fruits of his class. You know it's a brand new day\when John P. starts making the equivalent of white trash jokes – class doesn't seem to come up a whole lot in King-Cat and even a written essay about Denver then and now fails to address why someone in the arts might not wish to see a city gentrify. It becomes more expensive to live there.
My initial reaction to the issue was as all over the place as the mini itself. I enjoyed the variety of material, and I thought it looked lovely, like it was even printed with more care. And yet by concentrating on the here and now, and letting the past seep in around the edges, Porcellino has created a comic I could see him doing 20 years from now. In the parlance of mainstream comics, King-Cat #71 is a good jumping-on point: most of what Porcellino does well is in evidence, and you can share with him any comics coming out of this new experience just as readers in the past have explored Denver and Hoffman Estates through his eyes.
Tom Hart Announces Gainesville, Florida Cartooning School Set To Open In 2011 The cartoonist and comics educator Tom Hart sent out an informal e-mail over the weekend thanking fellow educators and one assumes other comics-involved people here and there about the launch of his planned Sequential Artists Workshop. The educational institution is set to open in Gainesville, Florida some time in 2011. "The SAW is certainly starting from James Sturm's CCS model but I don't expect it to mirror that for too long. I don't know what to expect but beginning this project has been on my mind for years and [Hart's wife, the cartoonist] Leela [Corman] and I looked at each other (and our new daughter) during this most recent winter and agreed: what are we waiting for?" Hart wrote. A first hint at faculty was also in the note. Noting that the couple and their daughter plan to move to Gainesville by Fall 2011, Hart mentioned, "John Porcellino is already there and will be easing in the programming while I'll be doing some administrative stuff up here."
Furor Over Danish Manga Exhibit Related To Images Of Children Depicted In A Sexual Fashion The Anime News Network post has pretty well captured for comics-savvy folk all the information the local media coverage has to offer on an exhibit at a media museum in the reasonably sizable town of Odense that features erotic manga that includes fictional children -- or fictional creatures that may look like children -- being depicted in a sexual manner. Titles include Swing Out Sisters, Bondage Fairies and Juicy Fruits.
Two things worth nothing. One is that no explicit sexual acts are being shown, and the other is that such depictions are apparently permissible -- at least for now -- under Danish law. This hasn't stopped both psychologists and politician expressing their objections, and for the exhibit curators to stress that the images are presented for discussion about the power of media, the kind of tack that while genuine and just tends to infuriate the other side of such discussions.
that's a Bondage Fairies example, not necessarily anything that's in the show
Profiles In Comics: Beaton, Callahan
* I like this Kate Beaton profile by Whitney Matheson because it's little more than "Kate Beaton is awesome! Read Kate Beaton's comics!" Then again, what else do you need? I have to imagine a lot of Matheson's readers would very much like Beaton's work.
* there are many things to say about the late John Callahan. Here are two. First, I don't think I've seen a lot of cartoonists who generated as many tribute posts and articles at such a sustained pace for weeks after passing away. I think part of it is that people wanted to think about Callahan a bit before writing about him. Second I don't think I've ever seen an odder bunch of generated "related articles" as the ones I've seen for Callahan in posts like this one.
* as a bonus profile -- meaning I don't want to rewrite my post title -- I present to you Sajjive Balakrishnan, who has maybe underlined the difference between cartoonists in North America and places like India for all time by mentioning that the tax agent/artist actually goes by the name "the fat cartoonist."
* not comics: I broke my remaining comic books down into 18 boxes, which I'm distributing to random people who wrote in. Thank you everyone for so many nice e-mails. I hope to be back in touch with everyone, but there were a couple hundred of you, so it may take a while. If you wrote me a note that said something like "Hey, I'd like some free comics... but the real reason I wrote is that I built a robotic Captain Easy and we're performing I'm Not Rappaport at the state fair" maybe send me that part of the note again?
* this post of new, cartoonist-drawn Penguin Classics covers is nice because you get the central image and the entire design.
* finally, are you having a nice Monday? Colleen Doran will rectify that with word about local municipalities taxing and or charging fees for on-line, comics-related ventures.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
25 Emblematic Comics Of The '70s -- A Lengthy First Draft In Partnership With CR's Readers By Tom Spurgeon
A discussion of the 1970s Marvel superhero saga "Panther's Rage" between Tucker Stone and David Brothers launched ten days ago led me to ask the CR readership in this space last Sunday about emblematic comics of the 1970s, works that are deeply and wholly of that time -- not just as a novelty items or fannish milestones but in terms of how we understand the form. This is the list that was developed from their suggestions.
It's not a list of the best comics of that decade or even the most influential. There are omissions that would likely drive a number of comics fans nuts. I did include one novelty comic book on the list, but I did so because I thought it was the one that did the best job of all those books of telling a memorable story. Otherwise, for the sake of this list there's a line in the sand for a lot of those works that ends up being pretty hard to cross. For me, comics like Star Wars #1 or the Death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man have come to mean more as ideas or concepts or covers or editorial moves or shared fan history than they represent memorable contributions to the form.
A lot of people suggested a lot of superhero comics. Heck, a lot of you suggested nothing but superhero comics. I only ended up with a few on the list. I've read every comic suggested. I nearly always discounted superhero comics that I've read that I couldn't remember now, that haven't stuck with me as a reader. I like a quality run of adventure comics as much of the next guy, and it was a mainstream comics decade, but I don't think that automatically makes many of those runs noteworthy. A comic that may seem special from the context of works almost exactly like it may simply seem less so if all genres and all different kinds of books are included in that examination. In the end, I just had to make some calls, and I'll include two or three of the more compelling cases at the end of the list that didn't make it in.
So to answer my own question, were I a future librarian approached by a sequential arts student with a term paper to do on the 1970s, I would point to the following pile of publications and tell them "This is what comics looked like then; this is what comics were like." -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
* A Contract With God, Will Eisner, A Stand-Alone Book Publication Comprised Of Four Stories
Will Eisner created the graphic novel the same way Christopher Columbus discovered America -- by which I mean in no way except one that granted commercial continuity between what he did and everything yet to come. That's more than enough. The sentimentality of the four short stories presented -- all of which take place in a special world of Eisner's creation where it rains with overwrought emotion -- is sometimes hard for a reader not accustomed to it to swallow. There's no denying the urgency and seriousness with which the stories are presented, though, an in making the intent of the author a significant part of what defined the graphic novel, Eisner did the art form a massive favor.
*****
* American Splendor #1-4, Harvey Pekar and Various, Issues Of A Comic Book Series Self-Published By Pekar
American Splendor would continue in one form or another for three full decades after the 1976-1980 period, and you might be able to argue that Pekar went most of that first period without even basic recognition from a natural, initial audience that would come to him slowly in the 1980s. Still there's no denying the quality of the best pieces in the very first few issues, particularly those with Robert Crumb, and the autobiographical elements made these comics about the '70s in a very revealing way. During a period in comics history soaked in the fantastic and almost wholly given over to characters with corporate sponsorship, Pekar planted a flag deep in a territory some fans didn't even know existed.
*****
* Arcade, Various, An Anthology Series From The Print Mint
A repositioning of the anthology away from a market-driven need or even an auteur editor's efforts into more of a group statement by a bunch of artists with a shared sensibility, something every major book of its type would evince at least in part from this moment. Plus there are any number of fine artists here; the book managed to get all of its generation's lifers into one place.
*****
* The Early Chapters Of Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa, A Serialized Comic From I Believe More Than One Publisher
One of the first manga to penetrate into the consciousness of international audiences, the nature of the direct, cartoon-reminiscent art style took some people by surprise, and the constant negotiation of styles that would dominate the early years of Eastern comics in the West had begun. There's no denying the kick in the stomach that was the story, in any style or language, perhaps best realized in a scene when our protagonist carries his family members remains from one place to another in a bucket.
*****
* Cat, B. Kliban, A Stand-Alone Book From Workman
It's baffling that one fine Tim Kreider essay is all the laudatory writing from modern sources that seems to exist on the great B. Kliban. Kliban was the funniest cartoonist of the decade, edging out Shelton and Trudeau. His cartooning was rich and beautiful. He also put into constant play a kind of muffled rage at the world's absurdities that punches you right in the heart 40 years later. He was equally great encountered one cartoon amongst many or in his powerful book collections. Those books were absurdly popular outside the realm of hardcore comics fans, and influenced everyone from a range of political cartoonists to some of the best newspaper strip cartoonists 1980s-on.
*****
* Breakdowns, Art Spiegelman, A Collection Of Comics From Belier Press
Art Spiegelman's early career effort has become synonymous with formal play, but squint just a tiny bit and you can easily see Breakdowns as the first of the one-man anthologies that came to challenge the one-cartoonist/one-series model by which the North American comics reading world began to make room for something other than licensed character kicking at or joking with one another.
*****
* Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt, A Variety Of Comics Featuring The Same Character And Setting Corto Maltese began in the 1960s and stretched into the 1980s, but Hugo Pratt's great achievement seemed most at home in the 1970s when even the republication of earlier work could win major awards. Pratt built the series the old-fashioned way, through a variety of different-sized stories drawing out different aspects of the lead character and different permutations of his own cartooning skill. It was the decade's fondest, finest look back.
*****
* Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, A Newspaper Comic Strip And Collection Series
It's hard to remember this now, but the popularity of Doonesbury in its early years, when its cancellation could lead to hundreds of upset people actively mad at the local newspaper, will likely never be seen again. Trudeau's great strength in his later years was the size and versatility of his cast. Here he's still building the repertory company, but nearly half the core players are inspired and his ongoing, subtle suggestion that everyone is connected to every issue if only by seeing the grotesqueries involved on a television screen got the audience involved as well.
*****
* Elfquest #1-5, Wendy and Richard Pini, A Self-Published Comic Book Series
Only five issues of the self-published pioneer came out in the 1970s, but it's still the property's best story, or at least is most raw, and that people responded to those elements so strongly is what I think makes it an emblematic comic of that time. The story of a people driven from one home to another is stuffed with sex and death and second-guessing and loads of regret, none of which really smooth out as gracefully as Wendy Pini's art would have you belief. Pini examines sexual desire as it relates to personal merit and the ability to choose one's own mate, which if not a comfortable line of inquiry -- there are some outright creepy elements involved, especially when you learn more about the elves later on in the series -- it is at least all Elfquest's at that point in comics history, and the kind of personalized take on genre that only became possible for comics in that decade.
*****
* "Panther's Rage" In Jungle Action, Don MacGregor and Various, Storyline In A Marvel Comics Series
I said all I wanted to say about this one last time out, but it's essentially the kind of character resuscitation through the prism of comic book realism that provides a model for a significant portion of comics done today.
*****
* Heavy Metal, Various, An Anthology Comics Magazine
I'll defer to Joe "Jog" McCulloch here: "Not to be confused with Star*Reach before it or Sabre after -- i.e., comics that put themselves out as bridging the gap between underground freedom of aesthetics and mainsteam popular appeal (or, whatever was left of it by that time). No, Heavy Metal effectively slashed out a third path via its ad hoc, often mind-boggling array of European serials, presented so as to afford the reader no comfort whatsoever.
"It lightened up later on, but whole issues of the '70s Heavy Metal would be nothing but random extracts from the middle of stories, many of which probably weren't all that straightforward to begin with. There would typically be no context, no Last Issue..., no particularly substantive information about the artists - hell, most of them were credited by their last names only, like you ought to know already. That was the key. It could be a baffling, off-putting magazine, but every issue screamed out that there's a whole world of comics out there you've never heard of, weird and awesome comics they've kept from you, shit you've never seen - we're just here, on your newsstand, so you can learn it for yourself. And a lot of people did."
*****
* Howard The Duck, Steve Gerber and Various, A Marvel Comic Book Series
Steve Gerber's disheveled masterpiece of a mainstream comic book series came out at time in the country's and its industry's history that its singular status was magnified almost 1000 times. Thus it was -- maybe still is -- given credit for inventing things in comics that it only did very well.
HTD triggered the most heartfelt reaction from you guys. Critic Rob Clough: "Gerber may be the emblematic 70s writer: acidic and bleak in outlook, he was of the generation directly influenced by superhero comics. Even though his ambitions seemed larger than that particular stage, he always seemed limited to working in genre comics, even as he twisted and warped the readers' conception of what that meant… Being paired with a ridiculously versatile and quirky craftsman as Gene Colan made these books especially memorable."
Will Pfeifer: "It's tough to top Howard the Duck for sheer 1970s-ness. Not only did Gerber and company touch on many of the trends of the era, but the whole comic had a certain downtrodden scruffiness that somehow still feels like that decade -- specifically the Ford/Carter years."
*****
* Ici Meme, Jean-Claude Forest and Jacques Tardi, A Serialized Story Then Collected Into Album Form From Casterman
This grand effort by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest may seem like an extravagant oddity now, but it gets credit from some for igniting a wave of alternative voices in a French-language comics industry whose mainstream had the added appeal of actually making its creators popular and wealthy successes. Even if you don't like the tune -- and while it's a song I could personally listen to every day, I know many people couldn't -- at the time I have to imagine that many comics readers weren't even aware that the medium could play some of these notes.
*****
* Jack Kirby's Fourth World Saga, A Cycle Of Various Comic Book Series With Overriding Themes And Plotlines From DC Comics
Still the grandest of all the post-Marvel superhero comics, despite some beautiful efforts in the last 30 years by some of the smartest and most talented creators out there. Writers and artists still make Fourth World stories, too, latching onto the bombast and the (mostly) killer character concepts and designs. If you read the original comics now, what comes through much more than the sum total of Kirby's masterful and shameless mythological appropriations is a sly, somber, and thorough dissection of the superhero concept. It is the only superhero book ever that fundamentally distrusts fight scenes, that offers up multiple characters whose values comes from avoiding fights. As one may suspect, it's a cycle of comic books about war, particularly the winning and the losing of them.
*****
* Jim Starlin's Warlock Comics, Strange Tales and Warlock, Issues Of Comic Book Series From Marvel
"I'm sure you've already gotten this a dozen or more times, but Starlin's Warlock stuff is more 70s than Hotel California, even." -- Sandy Yeah, that about sums it up. Jim Starlin's superhero space odyssey practically sweats its decade of origin from every pore; it's like being stuck in a room with a Black Oak Arkansas album playing as you sit in a barcalounger, surrounded walls, floor and ceiling by 350 fuzzy carnival posters of Shaft shaking hands with Richard Nixon. I'm pretty sure that if you ate pop rocks and chugged a coke your skin turned the exact shade of green as Gamora's and that if you wore your mood ring for 180 days in a row Pip The Troll's face appeared on it and asked you for a beer.
In a way, Starlin's work was a continuation of the pop culture conscious work of Marvel's previous decade, only this time the culture being folded into the punching and hitting and displays of power was broken, weird and untrustworthy. You can spend hours puzzling through the comics playing "Was this Jim Starlin's version of that?" and enjoying yourself the entire time.
*****
* Lone Wolf And Cub, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, A Serialized Story Also Collected Into Serial Book Form From Futabasha
Super-rewarding adventure comics with a killer hook and an accessible yet uniquely different way of depicting power action on the comics page. It influenced everyone important to that area of comics from the early 1980s-on. It was also one of the first comics were its cross-media efforts were as important in the discovery of its value for many fans as the original comics were. As Bart Beaty reminded me recently, Lone Wolf And Cub also boasts one of the medium's best series endings.
*****
* Slow Death #1-10, Various, Issues Of A Comic Book Series
I'm not sure I'm the person to make the case for the significance of Slow Death, but when I think of the change in underground comix in the 1970s and the greater reliance on genre transformation and taboo approaches to subject matter, it's the series I always think of. I'm sure I'm not the first one to point out the irony of the name given where undergrounds went this decade. There are some astounding artists in here.
*****
* Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali, Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams, An Over-Sized One-Shot Comic Book Story
As mentioned in the opening, the 1970s were a decade of format tweaks and novelty comics, a mad scramble to replace the audiences shedding the traditional comic book and weekly spinner rack visit. The historical importance of these strategies can't be overstated. The big companies' commitment to the Direct Market was inspired by years of frustration doing anything and everything but making such a commitment. Marvel was apparently saved outright by the Stars Wars license. And so on. The vast majority of the efforts inside those books, however, ran the gamut from grimly competent to weakly discouraging.
This over-sized book sporting Neal Adams art, greeted with some contempt at the time of its publication, may in retrospect be the best book of its class. Not just the cover, not just the concept, a surprising amount of this one's actual narrative sticks in the memory: Superman's hilarious umbrage out of Ali suggesting he's earth's champion, the training sequence between the two heroes under a red-sun light in a kind of folded-time training space, the capture of Muhammad Ali's boastful rhyme-making in panel-to-panel progressions, that shot of Superman being led off on a stretcher, the Man of Steel using Ali's rope-a-dope to fight an alien armada… it's an unabashed kids' comic, operating out of a little kid's "What If?" logic, and because of it the comic serves both icons well. These days, with a corporate license to protect and the fragile egos of tens of thousands way-too-invested fans to assuage, Ali would likely take it on the chops at least once just to show the rest of the world who's boss.
*****
* The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #1-5, Gilbert Shelton, Issues Of A Comic Book Series From Rip-Off Press
For most of the country, the 1960s didn't hit until a few years into the 1970s, and even then what was going on in places like San Francisco and New York in sharply contrasting, staggered waves of social development were fairly grandfathered in as a soft veneer of broad counter-cultural expression. The Freak Brothers survived their own adventures and the disintegration of the Underground Comix market with equal aplomb.
Or, as XXXX xXXX put it. "The counterculture/mainstream issue again, but this time from the counterculture side. Q. What do we do now that the 60s are over? A. Get high and read comic books!" Indeed.
*****
* The Man, Vaughn Bode, A Stand-Alone Comic From Print Mint
I wanted to include Vaughn Bode somewhere on this list, whose entire style may actually trump that of every single other cartoonist when it comes to a look that screams 1970s! 1970s! 1970s! The all-too-infrequent critic Matt Seneca suggested this stand-alone story, and that's fine with me.
*****
* The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, Edited By Bill Blackbeard And Martin Williams, A Stand-Alone Book Collection
Definitely the greatest and most influential reprint work in comics history -- Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic-Book Heroes comes in a distant second although that's really all about the essay -- the Smithsonian book reunited tens of thousands of readers with great work they had either never seen before or had viewed only in terms of second- or third-generation copies being squeezed out on the current comics page. It was for comics as if in film TV had come along and had somehow never shown an old movie until doing so all at once via a dedicated channel that fired up in 1978. The table of contents is basically the classic comics reprints section of your full-service major bookstore, and that's not an accident.
*****
* Tomb Of Dracula, Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, A Comic Book Series From Marvel Comics
The most entertaining of the the horror-tinged adventure comics folks put out in the 1970s despite being the heaviest downer of a story ever put on a spinner rack. It gets the nod over the well-crafted Swamp Thing because I could remember a couple dozen Tomb moments and not a single story from the swamp monster series. As suggested, Tomb of Dracula captured not just a few classic horror archetypes in '70s clothing, not only added a few restless and vocationally-challenged opponents to the mix, it somehow captured the bleak outlook of a generation coming of age under the threat of a massive nuclear exchange as life's final chapter.
*****
* Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken, A Strip Appearing In National Lampoon Magazine
Great comics in weird places was a hallmark of the 1970s, as the industry's decay was in evidence even more than it is now, and the massively uneven National Lampoon's hosting of Trots and Bonnie feature made for probably the oddest marriage of great comics work to publication out there that decade. Idiosyncratic, fearless and attractive, it may be the same of our current industry that no one's done a super-fancy big reprinting of one of the few works that offers nearly every reader out there some element of discovery.
*****
* X-Men #94-128, Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum And John Byrne, Issues Of A Marvel Comic Book Series
This was the first hit in comics fandom (its sales success until the mid-1980s is debatable) after the nadir of 1970s newsstand sales troubles and its concurrent adherence to old ways of publishing nearly brought to an end the mainstream comic book as we know it. Just being the first hit of modern superhero comics fandom might be enough to recommend it, as would being the most successful re-launch of an old concept with new characters. X-Men crystallized a lot of what was entertaining about 1970s superhero comics into portable formula: the plunge into outright soap opera, the slow-burning subplots where it didn't matter if they were resolved or not, the mysterious characters whose backstory was doled out Lost-style in inconceivably tiny, logic-defying increments, the way that the superhero's mission was recast for all time as one of noble struggle as opposed to good winning the day over evil. It also introduced us to the soon-to-upstage-everyone Wolverine, as inexplicable a character to comics as the Fonz was to television sitcoms. Danny DeVito's star-turn on Taxi a possible exception, never have more young people enjoyed someone with that much back hair.
*****
*****
A few of my own that I left out after further consideration:
* Reg Smythe's Andy Capp ran years before and years after but was inexplicably popular during the 1970s, to the point that an American television network was for a time considering a recurring animated short feature to run on their evening news. In the end, it didn't seem to represent anything about the time but that people in that moment in time seemed to love drunk mean people.
* counter to its reputation, Peanuts had a glorious 1970s, bold and confident, and was deservedly the world's most popular newspaper strip. Yet its 1960s were slightly better and significant parts of other decades were just as good. The best way I can put it is that Peanuts transcended the 1970s.
* I thought about finding an editorial cartoonist that really nailed the Nixon years, but doing so would have violated my own rule that a run of cartoons had to be good enough that it made an impression before I asked myself the library question. I would have started with Pat Oliphant.
* While I'm pretty certain I'm leaving those three off the list, I'm also struggling with the Green Arrow/Green Lantern "realism" stuff, competing shojo manga series (I heard back from absolutely no one on manga), and Les Frustres, all of which I'll either add to the archived draft or explain in detail why I didn't.
*****
*****
A lot of good cases were made for various comic books from you guys that in the end I didn't use.
* Joey Manley suggested the Death Of Gwen Stacy issue of Amazing Spider-Man as something prefigured the "Women In Refrigerators" trend. I had a hard time discounting this one because it was a pretty good comic book story -- Spider-Man lets Green Goblin die -- in a pretty good run of comic book stories (there's more than one comics critic out there that thinks the original clone saga that this issue made possible is among the best superhero comics of all time). I hate to say it, I've always thought the reaction of fans to Stacy's death was a fan's reaction rather than a reader's reaction; she just wasn't that memorable or interesting a character, although the visual was superb. I think a lot of fans deep down would admit that as readers they felt more mid-story when Captain Stacy died than when Gwen did, although maybe not until they stopped being mad at being asked. Manley also suggested more of the black and white newsstand magazines, just kind of that whole group of comics generally.
* Kim Munson suggested Star Wars #1 and the series that followed. That's an important industry milestone but I can't muster any argument for the stories themselves, although I'm sure someone out there loves them to death and thinks them profound.
* Steven Solomon pointed out that the heady stew of 1970s superhero comics were exposed as being of their time by the Hernandez Brothers, whom he says " cracked open the way that we all accepted the superhero genre so completely that in Gerber's words, our minds were approved by The Comics Code."
* Alistair Robb wrote that as a Brit Mighty World Of Marvel was right up there with 2000 AD in terms of defining that decade from his point of view.
* Gabe Carras suggested the Secret Empire/Nomad stories in Captain Americaby Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema and the Silver St. Cloud stories in Batman (or another of the Batman comics, I can't recall) by Englehart, Rogers and Austin. Those are both entertaining superhero storylines, but they're not transcendent or noteworthy in any way to me except being better than most of what was out there.
Those Captain America stories have this interesting thing going where the troubles of the world are subsumed into standard superhero tropes "Oh, no! Henry Kissinger is a secret super-villain! Quick! What does this mean to me and my costume-wearing ways!" And that's been done a lot since and is kind of smart besides in that it keeps the story on message. I hate to say it, but the work doesn't really speak to me past that. Although, you know, big Roscoe fan.
* John Vest suggested Star*Reach, as did a number of other folks. I understand the title's importance and it was certainly of its time, but it's hard for me to figure out anything in there that kind of breaks out. I know Star*Reach; I can't feelStar*Reach.
* Kenny Penman suggest the work with which I'm least familiar in the whole bunch, although I pulled it for this article. Marvel Premiere 9-14, Dr. Strange 1-5 (or 1-14).
"This Englehart run again takes a relatively minor character and takes him away from the way he was being used in things like Defenders and returns him to the worlds within worlds of the Ditko comics and adds a little real magic along the way. These comics got me back into comics as an 18 year old (was actually issue 12 by which time Colan was doing the art) as they seemed to open up a philosophical debates that were very pertinent to the times and seemed like nothing that had gone before. I think you could fairly argue that these comics had a huge influence on the material that would later be produced by UK writers such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison."
I'm not that big a fan, although they're solid comics.
* Jeff Matthews says that the Archie Goodwin/Walt Simonson effort Manhunter "took sequential art to a different level." I'm not sure I'd agree, although I like the way it folded over martial arts movies into comic books, a 1970s contribution to that genre if there ever was one.
* Bob Greenberger suggested Conan the Barbarian #1-24 "Watching Barry's art grow in style and sophistication while Roy grew more comfortable with Robert E. Howard's character and gave us the first new genre in comics in years." I think those comics have a greater reputation than they deserve because they were on such a lonely island, surrounded by superheroes. The work itself has its imaginative flashes, but seems to me more rough than inspirational.
* Grant Goggans suggested Battle Picture Weekly. He's probably right.
* Jay Willson suggested a number of superhero comics and other mainstream comics efforts that I thought were good but not necessarily emblematic: the Daughter of the Demon run in Batman, the Spider-Man and Superman team-ups, Wally Wood's JSA work, Comic Book, Deadly Hands Of Kung Fu, Killraven, and Englehart's Avengers/Defenders saga. I think these are all of the time, and if the list were expanded many of these would make it. The Avengers/Defenders crossover has certain ramifications for the way comics are done now, although as a little-boy collector at the time the overwhelming experience my comics-reading acquaintances and I had about those book is panic at being able to find them in the spotty distribution channels of the time.
* Matt Seneca suggested Chandler: Red Tide. I think if I expanded the list so that it room for interesting failures, this one might find companionship with some of the comics already on the list.
* the comics writer Joe Casey came up with an interesting one: Avengers #105-150, Steve Englehart, Bob Brown, Sal Buscema, Don Heck, George Tuska, George Perez, "Here's what Englehart in particular did: He set a template for superhero team book storytelling that's still be followed to this day. It was decidedly different than the relentless, pile-it-on storytelling that Kirby mastered in the 60's. The template is as follows: start small, slowly build through various action plots and multiple character subplots that lead to a grand finale, then start all over again small and build it all up again. Englehart did it at least three times during his run, and he did it first."
* Kevin Church suggested Omega The Unknown, which is very '70s although it's an incomplete work to my mind and I think this allows people to maybe read more into it than actually would have been there had it been finished. Big Numbers works like that, too.
Thanks to all that participated! No fair complaining if you didn't participate, but I can't imagine that will stop you. I will mull over this piece for a week or so before sticking a final version into the archives.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
FFF Results Post #223 -- Copies
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Characters You Like That Were Created In Large Part To Reflect Back On Some Other Character." This is how they responded.
Tom Spurgeon
1. Bat-Mite
2. War Machine
3. Beppo The Super-Monkey
4. Lieutenant Marvels
5. Sand Superman
1. The Midnighter (The Batman)
2. Greyshirt (The Spirit)
3. "Ultimate" Spider-Man (The Amazing Spider-Man)
4. Crafty Coyote (Wile E. Coyote)
5. King Mob (Grant Morrison)
1. Gnat Rat - Batman
2. Groo The Wanderer - Conan The Barbarian
3. Enid Coleslaw - Hopey Glass
4. Miriam Capaldi - Maggie Chascarrillo
5. Bat Bat - Batman
*****
J.E. Cole
* The Metabaron
* Prophet
* Miracle/Marvelman
* Fighting American
* The Midnighter
*****
Jude Killory
1. Chris Ware's Superman
2. Spike, (snoopy's cousin) Peanuts Schultz
3. J.H. Williams Batwoman
4. Death-Sandman
5. Kramer from Kramers Ergot 6-Paper Rad
*****
Michael Grabowski
1. Moon Roach
2. Marvelman/Miracleman (as used by Moore)
3. Kid Miracleman (ditto)
4. Jimmy Corrigan's father
5. the Superman figure in Ware's Jimmy Corrigan comics
*****
J. Colussy-Estes
1. She-Hulk
2. Bizarro Superman
3. The Squadron Supreme
4. The Mockingbird/Hawkeye relationship (which wouldn't exist without Green Arrow/Black Canary)
5. The last is a toss up between Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) and Batwoman (the newest incarnation)
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: News On Cons, Shows & Major Events By Tom Spurgeon
* Wizard's Chicago show is going on as this post rolls out. August in Chicago is a great time for a comics convention. It's removed enough from San Diego that pros who might attend both aren't exhausted. There's almost nothing to do in the Midwest events wise right before school starts again, so moving a Chicago show from the over-programmed July 4 to mid- to late-August should work. Chicago's a great comics-reading town and a great mainstream comics-reading town, so you can sort of tailor a show that way. The whole region is under-served with comics shows to the point you might be able to entice people to drive in for one or two days out in the Chicagoland suburbs. A lot of people in Chicago prefer to go out to the suburbs than head downtown, which is an advantage it might have over the Reed-run C2E2.
The problem I'm guessing is that Wizard has seemingly infuriated or frustrated so many comics people that what you're left with is a pop-culture show with comics elements -- while the comics folks in attendance might do very well, there's no institutional oomph to the convention: it will always have a hard time shifting out of first gear until the industry part of the comics industry comes back.
At any rate, I fully expect this to be a well-attended show, with reports all over the place in terms of how exhibitors have done, and reported attendance figures that have little to do with reality. Just like most years.
* the Minneapolis Indie Xpo, a one-day show featuring stalwarts of the small-press comic scene like John Porcellino, kicks off tomorrow. That sounds like a fun show, and one perfectly appropriate to that enjoyable city during one of its non-horrifying weather months.
* next week is the well-liked Baltimore Comic-Con. Comic Book Binhas the panel schedule.
* finally, one of my few comics- and sports-minded friends noted to me via e-mail that now with Brett Favre back in Vikings camp, Comic-Con International choosing between various post-2012 host cities is now the entertainment world's biggest decision-based soap opera. As it's already been a month since the decision-making process was tabled for the 2010 Comic-Con, I wouldn't be surprised if the announcement came next week. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised for it to go another six months. Nothing would surprised me at this point.
Yemen Cartoonist Kamal Sharef Detained?
I'm not seeing a whole lot of confirmation on this post by someone monitoring Yemen News named Jane Novak, and it's far outside of my comfort zone in being able to tell you what's legitimate and not, but the article itself is ominous. It claims that progressive-issues cartoonist and organizer Kamal Sharef was taken from his home, along with work product and tools, because of his stands on political issues in the country such as women's rights. Apparently this came in conjunction with a more publicized incident whereby a journalist critical of certain political outcomes was arrested.
The prolific novelist Claude Klotz, better known by his pen name Patrick Cauvin, died on August 13 from complications due to cancer. He was 77 years old.
Born in Marseilles, Klotz earned a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne and for several years as a young men taught French in secondary schools in and around Paris. In the 1970s, burning with frustration of France's role in Algeria, Klotz began a series of violent thrillers under his own name. A few years later, he adopted Patrick Cauvin in order to writer romantic novels, such as his best-known work E=MC2, mon amour. He continued on this bifurcated career path for as long as he would put words on paper, shocking fans from both worlds by the occasional work that might seem more at home in the other tradition.
The French-language comics and news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com notes that Klotz worked on several comics projects in his career. As was the case with his prose career, he worked with collaborators on his first comics effort, scripts for Morris and Lucky Luke. He worked with Enki Bilal in the late 1980s on de Hors Jeu, a futurist sports book, and using his real name wrote two books for Max Cabanes in the 2000s in the Bellagamba series. The last two books were described as perhaps more lighthearted than some of the author's other comics works. The comics works were considered part of his branching out into other media from the more strict one-a-year novel-writing days of the 1970s, and the work with Bilal is considered by fans of the author a labor of love.
His prose work -- over 30 novels thus far -- will continue to be published for one or two volumes posthumously.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* according to wire reports from late Thursday, a Dutch appeals court fined the Arab European League approximately $3200 USD for publishing a cartoon that denied the Holocaust. The group had published the cartoon for just this purpose, saying at the time that it would expose double standards in society in terms of who was offended. A court had exonerated the group in April; this was part of the appeals process.
* that region of Nigeria where over 100 people died in riots related to the original publication of the Danish Cartoons? Violence continues there almost unabated, and authorities this week may have put a stop to some of the worst yet.
* a survey in Denmark shows just how deeply the 2005 publication of the Danish Cartoons and its extended aftermath has changed life and outlooks in that country.
* the political furor surrounding former wannabe Jyllands-Posten blower-upper David Coleman Headley and his testimony about the 2008 Mumbai incident grow murkier by the day.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Tim Hodler leads a discussion on the auteur theory in comics.
* the writer and reviewer David Brothers talks about writing black characters in mainstream superhero comics and provides a sample that breaks one of his rules but does so in such stylish fashion that he doesn't care.
* seriously, this new trend of sending me personal messages on Facebook about your Event listing in addition to your Event listing? All it gets you is blackballed. Tagging me with pictures or with comments that don't exist except to get me to read something that hypes your Event? Same thing. Contact information is on the site, and nothing there suggests you press me via social networking tools. I greatly, greatly, greatly appreciate being informed as to what's going on, but I only need it once, and I appreciate the respect inherent in your letting me decide what I can use and what I can't.
* Gary Tyrrell muses on the Ignatz webcomics category nominees in terms of when they were made/published.
* did I see a review of the new Superman original graphic novel effort by Brian Hibbs that's no longer up at Savage Critics, or am I slowly going crazy? He didn't seem to like it very much.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
Why Is MoCCA's Forthcoming Al Jaffee Exhibit Being Funded Via Kickstarter?
It was one of the more curious announcements to stroll down the comics news highway in quite some time. That the Museum Of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) was doing an exhibition featuring the work of Al Jaffee shouldn't surprise: Jaffee's a much-beloved, well-regarded, recent Reuben winner with a dollop of name cachet due to his years of work for MAD Magazine. His more general and traditionally little-discussed wider comics industry background has increasingly come to light with the growing attention paid to Jaffee during these lion-in-winter years. An exhibit at the museum's New York City-based space would be right in line with a rediscovery and appreciation of all things Jaffee. It would fit the museum's mission statement and tendency to do well with cartoonists featuring a New York creative and/or publishing hook.
What seemed strange is that a museum that's been around since 2001 would choose to employ a Kickstarter page on the exhibit's behalf. Launched to come to an end on September 15, the page has of this writing raised 445 of 3000 hoped-for dollars, to be employed in a variety of ways on the show's behalf. While it's not unheard-of for a mature organization to use the fundraising mechanism, and a search for museums making use of the site yields a healthy number of similar projects, Kickstarter tends to be used in comics by smaller organizations such as self-publishers. As the Museum was recently criticized by con organizer Dustin Harbin for the high table costs at its fundraiser comics show the MoCCA Festival, the appearance of the Kickstarter page for the Jaffee show brought to the forefront questions as to why the museum felt it necessary, and what that choice might mean as to the group's overall financial profile.
According to current MoCCA chairman Ellen Abramowitz, a variety of factors came to bear on their decision to use the fundraising site. "The opportunity to do this show with Al Jaffee was brought to us with an abbreviated time frame," she explained to CR. According to Abramowitz, this made traditional fund-raising options such as soliciting from members and grant applications less attractive than working what she termed "the very exciting, very populist Kickstarter fundraising platform." Clearing up some potential confusion regarding the dollar amount and the Museum overall role in organizing the Jaffee show, the Chairman said that the Kickstarter page was not the entirety of their efforts on behalf of that particular show, and that if the goal isn't met they plan on doing the exhibition, only perhaps in an abbreviated form and perhaps even at a later date.
Asked about the potentially troubling spin that a Kickstarter page could put on the museum's overall financial picture, Abramowitz again cited the short turnaround between pitch and opening night on the planned exhibit and the site's ability to fulfill that need. "As mentioned above, each exhibition has its own fundraising plan. This show was presented to us on relatively short notice and Kickstarter is an ideal vehicle for raising funds for small, popular projects in a brief time frame," Abramowitz said. She then went on to cite the museum range of programming options including a long list of offerings in the museum's recent past, including the organization's Master Classes, and several events such as Keith Mayerson's NeoIntegrity: Comics Edition show.
Future uses of the Kickstarter mechanism by MoCCA will depend on how this one succeeds or doesn't, and the circumstances regarding its potential employment down the line. "Potentially, if the opportunity presents itself," said Abramowitz of the possibility. One area where the on-line funding tool could be used without the museum having to make a decision first is if a curator were to include the site in plans to launch a show as a way of convincing the museum to get on board. Abramowitz admits this possibility, but characterizes it as not likely. "We are alway interested in hearing new ideas for exhibitions projects and events," she told CR. If they already have funding attached to them, that is very helpful, though it is the overall quality of the proposal that matters most. Many exhibits do not have any funding."
* here's some really good news. Well, maybe not news as much as I wondered about it and e-mailed a few people and only afterwards realized it's probably in a catalog somewhere. Anyway, from what I understand the talented Wilfred Santiago has turned in the pages for his biography of Roberto Clemente, 21, and the book will be published to coincide with Opening Day 2011. I've been looking forward to that one for a while -- from the date on the above image, maybe five years?
* continuing today's theme of idle thinking, here's something I either didn't know or forgot: Jesse Reklaw has apparently collected his mini-comics seriesTen Thousand Things To Do into a 384-page book, going at the cheap price of $20. This is not only cheap for 384 pages, but these are densely-packed pages, and at one point Reklaw even has a code going that gives you more information. If you're only going to buy one old-school, look at what's around me, life-documenting, autobiographical comics work this year or next, make it this one.
* so I guess Marvel is ending its current Daredevil comic book. I have no idea if that means anything or if it's business as usual. I can't imagine they're done with the character, although I guess it would be nice if someone out there could go in a different direction than the "Varying Shades Of Miller" approach they've been exploring -- with success -- the last dozen years. I wouldn't expect another Karl Kesel-style take on the character, but even an Ann Nocenti spin on things might let that character breathe a bit.
* did I fail to mention that Richard Thompson has altered the direction of his well-received comics blog to more directly comment on ongoing strips? If I didn't, I should have.
The 2010 Ignatz Awards ballot has been released by the good folks of Small Press Expo. The awards program is held during SPX weekend, which this year means a September 11 ceremony in North Bethesda. This is the fourteenth presentation of the awards.
This year's panel of nominating judges were Anders Nilsen, David Kelly, Rob G, Josh Cotter and Trevor Alixopulos. The awards are voted on by attendees of Small Press Expo.
Bors And Rall Start Afghan Cartooning
Michael Cavna at Comic Riffshas a nice profile up about Matt Bors and Ted Rall beginning their cartooning from Afghanistan, in a much talked about, Kickstarter-funded trip. I mention it here in the hopes that you'll join me in bookmarking where appropriate as opposed to waiting on sites like this one to mirror developments in what they're doing. I'm not sure that's a news function, although the trip itself certainly is. From my vantage point, I'm hoping there will be no news concerning the trip until I can mention that it's completed.
* just to show it's a generally slow month for comics news around the world, an advertisement featuring the Asterix characters celebrating at a McDonald's is causing cultural critics to gasp and writers to knock out what is a pretty standard, easy article. This is one of those stories where the issues get argued as absolutes when they're really fluid: it's a bad advertisement not because you shouldn't do such things but because it generates upset feelings from a segment of the audience that might like to eat a hamburger without being reminded of the cultural invasion aspects, or to flip the emphasis is being asked to help decide the legacy of the later Asterix efforts without having to puzzle through the corporation's intentions. The other thing that's weird is that I expected Tintin to appear in something like this first, what with the Jackson/Spielberg movie and all.
* Mike Lynch draws attention to JD Crowe's post about the economic misfortune inflicted upon those in the path of BP's oil spill.
* I'm not a fan of quick and easy plugs, but I think this may contain the best story Jaime Hernandez is ever done.
* not comics: Leonard Riggio has increased his holdings in Barnes and Noble in anticipation of an ugly fight over the value of the stock.
* finally, Evan Dorkin talks The Beetle. I liked him, too, for mostly the same reasons. Also, it's my memory that for a while early on they deferred to him a bit in the comics as if he were a particularly tough and nettlesome opponent, which I can't imagine happening now.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
Analysts: July 2010 DM Estimates
The comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com offers their usual array of lists, estimates and analysis regarding the performance of comic books and graphic novels in the Direct Market of comic and hobby shops, this time for July 2010.
There are a couple of reasonably sizable news stories here. First, while Marvel was able to massage a hit out of its X-Men re-launch with a new numbering, a ton of promotion and a slew of variant covers, not much else seems to be hitting with stores in the big way you come to think of comics hitting in the middle of a summer season. This includes DC's current event series, Brightest Day, which failed to crack 100,000 sold. This brought about a reverse of a recently-noticed ongoing trend where comics were outpacing graphic novels in terms of month to month vitality: in July, comics were down overall compared to 2009, while graphic novels were slightly up. I still ask: where are the publishing-line innovations that should have been spurred on by new ownership and, in one case, management?
Second, all of the Scott Pilgrim books did very, very well -- no doubt feeling the impact of interest as the last book in the series came out and to coincide with anticipation for the movie version. I hope that there isn't the typical drop that comes after a movie is released, successful or not, in that I would like to see comics have as many hits not directly connected into a film version as possible.
CBLDF Names New Legal Counsel
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) has announced its new legal counsel, Robert Corn-Revere, a First Amendment expert with both publication and litigation experience. Corn-Revere replaces long-time counsel Burton Joseph, who passed away on March 31 of this year. Corn-Revere is a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. His clients past and present include CBS, the MPAA, the National Association of Broadcasters, Viacom, A&E Television Network and Playboy.
Go, Read: Greg Cook On William Steig My first recommendation to combat any case of the late-summer too-close-to-comics blues is to take a vacation. If that's not possible and you're still feeling more irritated than invigorated by the art form my second recommendation is to pick one of the past or even modern giants of comics and cartooning and look at as much of their stuff as you have in your library or as you can find on-line. There are opportunities for this practically everywhere you look. Drawn and Quarterly has for sale their collection of Joe Sacco's non-Safe Area Gorazde Bosnian comics out that's been my companion for a week now, Heidi MacDonald reminds us that Jordan Crane is posting Abner Dean, and the Boston Phoenix has a lovely article up on the late William Steig by the talented cartoonist and arts writer Greg Cook. It's amazing to me how reluctant comics and cartooning fans are to claim Steig despite decades of laudatory work in a variety of different expressions.
Go, Read: Rina Piccolo On The Traditional Newspaper Strip Business The cartoonist Rina Piccolo has listed multiple reasons why "Newspaper Comic Strips Are Not Dying." It's actually a better piece than that more provocative and slightly misleading title promises, in that it's really just a point-by-point case as to where newspaper comic strips are right now from Piccolo's perspective: still hugely profitable for some, a living or part of a living for many others, a harder place than ever to break in, and only one component among many in approaching comics as a career. It's about a billion times better than the pathological shrieking that usually tends to pass for discussion on the various issues involved, and I recommend it even if you strongly believe in one or the other side of the viewpoint that tends to see this issue in dueling opposites. (via a bunch of you)
* the writer Graeme McMillan has a longish post up about how the reputation of certain comics can keep people from reading them, both out of intimidation and from the fear that you won't like it and thus the people who do will look down on you. Even if you don't agree with his theories, his description of kind of poking around Love & Rockets and then having it click for him after a certain length of exposure to the material will be familiar to a lot of fans of that work.
* speaking of Love & Rockets, everyone is ogling this fun Jaime Hernandez cover for the second go-around of the Marvel alt-comics creators doing versions of their characters series Strange Tales.
* cartoonist and blogger Mike Lynch tells a story about a form of presentation that was all but lost to the popularity of a digital form, but then made a comeback: the record album. Before he's swarmed with nerd lawyers, Lynch isn't trying to make a strident point but just suggesting "you never know."
* finally, the great Bob Levin sent along this link to a psychological examination of conventions, specifically Comic-Con. I sympathize with the power that finding yourself in a community that actually gets your jokes can have; that was my experience going to work at Fantagraphics. However, I think the biggest shift isn't from isolation with an on-line component that just doesn't have the same effect to a convention experience that provides community, but a two-pronged effect where the convention experience consummates the on-line friendships and relationships already established.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
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 no-doubt 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 if I were anywhere near a comic shop, nothing would stop me from picking these up and rubbing their covers all over my face.
*****
JUN100011 1 FOR DOLLAR HELLBOY SEED OF DESTRUCTION $1.00
JUN100012 1 FOR DOLLAR USAGI YOJIMBO $1.00
I'd want to check these out as potential giveaways, but I have to imagine most fans have seen this material and either already embraced it or walked away.
MAY100040 LITTLE LULU PAL TUBBY VOL 01 CASTAWAY OTHER STORIES $15.99
If they didn't have you at "Tubby," I'll never get you at all.
MAY100222 EX MACHINA #50 $4.99
That is a very fine anniversary for this title to reach, and I think it's one that fans of adventure comics will go back to for a while.
JUN100270 FABLES #97 (MR) $2.99
This one is about to hit one of those grand anniversaries. Wow. I think if I had had to guess I would have said it was only about 70 issues in.
JUN100453 BULLETPROOF COFFIN #3 (OF 6) (MR) $3.99 JUN100472 TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD #13 $3.50 FEB100404 WEIRD WORLD OF JACK STAFF #4 $3.50
Three from the "genre comics with a number of fans" pile. The Paul Grist stuff is funny if you think of him doing these re-launches to capture a bigger audience and then him doing comics that are quickly just as inscrutable as last time out. I sure enjoy them, though.
MAY100193 SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE DOOM PATROL TP VOL 02 $19.99
This practically has to be good, right?
MAR100952 GROTESQUE #4 $7.95
MAR100953 INTERIORAE #4 $7.95
MAR100954 NIGER #3 $7.95
APR100967 SAMMY THE MOUSE #3 $7.95
This summer's four new Ignatz releases from Coconino/Fantagraphics, and examples of one of the great comics formats of the last 15 years. I liked the Sammy The Mouse book the best, but they're all beautiful.
JUL101060 SAN FRANCISCO PANORAMA COMICS SECTION TABLOID FORMAT $10.00
This is the comics section from the McSweeney's effort to put out a local newspaper, which initially wasn't being sold separately. A bunch of art-comics regulars on point.
MAY101031 UNSINKABLE WALKER BEAN GN $13.99
A quick and fun little kids' story set in a fantastic world, with real-world elements creeping in on every side -- as opposed to the other way around.
*****
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, that's because someone put up a mosque near the ground zero of my heart.
Anjali Singh To Simon and Schuster
Anjali Singh will join Simon & Schuster as a senior editor next month, according to variousreports in the book trade. Singh is best known in comics circles for her acquisition of runaway comics and literary hit Persepolis in 2003, for Pantheon. She also edited Epileptic, The Rabbi's Cat and La Perdida for the imprint.
Singh moved to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in I believe late 2006 in what was a very high-profile hire. She edited the 2008 Frederik Peeters book Blue Pills, which was not a hit. although the short version of her resume included in this week's article notes that she has always worked on literary fiction as well as comics and that comics was never the entirety of her editorial purview. In addition to prose, Singh also had at least one hybrid comics/prose work planned while at the company. She was let go from HMH in late 2008 when the publisher made cutbacks. A statement in the hiring stories notes that graphic works will be among those areas in which she's looking to acquire for Simon & Schuster.
So What Are Editorial Cartoonists Doing With The Ground Zero Mosque Story? As always, Daryl Cagle provides the wonderful service of allowing cartooning and comics fans a chance to look at a single issue through a number of cartoonists' perspectives and also maybe glean some information about the state of that particular expression of cartoon art. It's a fascinating bunch of cartoons, and although I'll leave the bulk of the interpretation up to the individual reader, a few things leaped out at me: 1) relatively few cartoonists seem to be engaging the subject, which makes perfect sense -- if I could avoid doing one I would; 2) the only cartoonists with multiple takes on the subject were Jimmy Margulies, whose regional proximity makes that make sense, and Mike Lester, whose transformation over the last few years into maybe the most dependably strident conservative cartoonist in print would explain his attention to the subject; 3) no one's nailed the issue yet with that kind of alternative-perspective cartoon that is the medium's greatest strength, although Mike Luckovich's effort is admirable in that respect.
Do We Need More Cartoons On Media?
The thought that any more analysis need be given to the media as an agent within politics is fairly remarkable given that issues like media bias, how something plays and even process fairly dominates any television news story that makes it out of the first hour of who, what, when and where. Still, it's hard not to see something in a Guardian letter-writer's plea for blunt cartoonists like Steve Bell to re-arrange their opportunities to "shout back" at insulting politics so that the other half of that question and answer equation is included in the blame. I'm just not sure how it can be done without the kind of self-regard loop that such coverage creates.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* there's been a bunch of scorecard-keeping, not crucially important to my eye back-and-forths in the Siegel Family/DC case. The hobby business news and analysis site has the most terse and time-saving round-up.
* this post about the early business cards and promotional materials being put out there by 1980s comics company Comico is a lot of fun.
* Comics Comicslets us know about the on-line publication of Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay on the movie Crumb, now part of its Criterion packaging. There was a time when Jonathan Rosenbaum was very important to the writer of this blog, I think more for the way he perceived the world of film rather than for the content of his reviews.
* I believe it's Trina Robbins' birthday today. She's opted out of the single-post birthday wishes here at CR, but that doesn't mean if you know her you shouldn't double-check to see if I'm right and maybe drop her a line.
* Brigid Alverson points out that Ben Bova isn't doing anyone a favor by advocating for literacy and then trashing an entire form of expression within a medium based on conjecture and limited examples. My counter-examples wouldn't be the same as Alverson's, but no one should have to argue that there are comics with levels of characterization much deeper and more profound than those in Valley Of The Dolls. That's just stupid. Also, I think 1968 Dick Cavett wants his humorous bad book example back.
* I haven't been following this story, but the headline is a best-of-year candidate for sure.
* finally, I always enjoy the "Nobody Favorite" posts at Armagideon Time; this latest is a bit off the beaten path, and I enjoy its discussion of the ongoing youth's quests of trying to marry superhero comics to role-playing games.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
In Case You Like Me Were Wondering About One Piece Sales Vs. Asterix This article at the French-language comics news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com suggests that the performance of current world comics sales champion One Piece does indeed surpass the initial sales and initial printing figures enjoyed by the highest-selling Asterix albums. I'm not sure that it answers total sales over years and years and years -- but the initial rush to sales seems to clearly fall to the manga. If I'm reading the figures correctly, the latest volume in the Eiichiro Oda pirate series sold 1.8 million copies of its 3 million-plus print run in a single week just past. I'm not sure what to make of these huge-sellers, although if either of these were a North American phenomenon we'd be flipping out about them.
SLG Sets Up Fund To Defray Costs Already Spent On Costly Legal Matter
In a remarkable letter penned by SLG's Dan Vado, the company is asking its fans to help defray costs incurred during a recent series of legal back-and-forths over "a certain gun heiress," which I and I guess everyone else out there is taking as a reference to their 2009 comic about the Winchester Mansion, called Winchester. That's an active museum with an active Winchester family member in charge, so it sort of makes sense.
One thing that's different about Vado's plea is that he promises they won't be fighting an extended battle on this one -- he says the company can't -- but that they want money to pay for legal communications made thus far, costs that already number in the five figures. The reason why, Vado suggests, is that they will run into operational difficulties if the bills remain the way they are right now, or if they grow. Vado's an honorable publisher from everything I know and has always been honest about his company's super-thin margins.
* David Brothers takes up where Tucker Stone left off in a roundtable devoted to the "Panther's Rage" storyline in the 1970s Jungle Action comic book.
* Scott Cederlund compares and contrasts the Scott Pilgrim series with Love and Rockets.
* not comics: the box office news on the first weekend of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Worldis in. I don't know anything about Hollywood box office returns and I no longer have the energy like so many seem to have to pretend that I do. It seems safe to say that the movie didn't hit the way its makers and studio had hoped right out of the gate, and that no one really knows the reason why or this kind of thing wouldn't happen. I had a brief discussion about SP with a couple of more Hollywood-oriented people when I was in Southern California. As it turned out they had just seen the move. One of them liked the film but thought that it might have some trouble scoring decent box office because it was aimed at a young adult audience that had yet to embrace a film and make it their own in that way. "This summer?" I asked. "Ever," said my pal.
* not comics: I do always get a little sad with how much more invested comics fans are with the box office of movies based on comics than they are with invigorating a system that might sell more comics. I'm additionally depressed by the entire industry's nerd-pressed-against-the-glass fixation with movie success over publishing success. Anyone who has anything invested beyond curiosity in the box-office success of a film that doesn't feature a family member, a friend, or themselves needs to take a long walk around the block; those that like to crow about someone other persons' perceived setbacks can keep walking. I felt the strutting after Dark Knight came out to boffo box office equally silly and largely irrelevant to comics in the long run, too.
* writer Mark Evanier's serious, somber, sober advice on issues concerning freelance work for comics, with the added bonus that they've already been used as direct pieces of one-to-one advice.
CR Is Moving Its Studio Space, And Won't Get Mail Sent To The Old One
Starting right now, The Comics Reporteris changing its phone number and moving its studio to a new address. My experience having lived in this part of the country for a few years now is that only about 25 percent of anything sent to the old address after September 1 is going to reach me, so please change that contact information and please consider forwarding a link to anyone in your office that might need to change theirs as well. Thank you.
Panthers, Rages, & Emblematic Series: What Were THE Comics Of The '70s?
A mention of the "Panther's Rage" storyline in Jungle Action this week at CR as one of the emblematic works in comics in the 1970s brought with it some e-mail. Most of the correspondence engaged what that designation meant in terms of an overall endorsement of the Black Panther-starring comic book. The answer is it really doesn't. I think it's entirely possible for a comic to be of a time or a place or an era in a way that derives from a judgment or series of judgments distinct from a more ruthless, straight-up appraisal of that work's quality. It's the way with film and music and prose, too. I think more of Ry Cooder's Boomer's Story than I do The Eagles' Hotel California, but the latter is one of the first albums I think of when I think of 1970s pop music and the former is not. Evincing positive qualities will help any work remain relevant long enough for people to consider and re-consider its place in various made-up critical firmaments, but it's not a sole requirement, and the formula does not necessarily apply in reverse: being important to a time, a place or a movement likely won't impart quality that's not already there.
I think the "Panther's Rage" storyline in Jungle Action is a key or emblematic work of its decade because it has all of the qualities that came to define a major form of expression within mainstream comics, and it came out during a decade when multiple works began to lean in that direction. As described, "Panther's Rage" sounds like a book that could be solicited today. It's driven by prose. The art is allowed a level of freedom of design and depiction because of the presence of that prose. Its storyline is the result of sitting down and thinking through the logical, "real world" implications of past narratives (an African king teaching in Harlem is a king that has abandoned his subjects). There is a shift in tone to the more serious and somber. It borrows elements from outside genres (horror, mostly) to thwart expectations inherent to the main genre (the superhero story). The plot's progression is both a play against outside forces and a reconsideration of the protagonist's basic character concept, so that when the former ends the latter is in a different place. It is also essentially a graphic novel -- a long story with a beginning and an end -- and it targets a little-used character with perceived grander qualities in an attempt to rehabilitate them for future stories. My personal reaction to "Panther's Rage" is that it's a sweetly ambitious, clunkily-told superhero saga where the cape-and-costume confuse the stabs at more serious, more directly relevant plot points. Answers to question of royal obligation and nation building are never likely to be found in a march of dinosaurs or a spiked-belt fight near a waterfall. Its potential influence or at least its presentation in almost full flower of a powerful formula that would dominate the field for decades makes it a hard story to dismiss, though. If it's not a road map, it's a sign of things to come. "Panther's Rage" is either vastly influential or terrifyingly precocious, or both. Either one would be enough to put it on the decade's must-considers.
So what are some other works like that? If you were a librarian in 2612 working at the Grand Library Of Comics located on a floating platform above the city of Des Moines, and a student from Neil Gaiman Academy came to you wanting to know what comics in the 1970s were like, what works would be on the shelf you walked them over to see?
Let's build such a list. Send me one selection. Send me two. Send me three. (But don't send me more than three.) Make them comics that are remembered for being read rather than simply as novelty publishing events or collectors' events (we'll save the number ones and first appearances for another post).
I'll add your selections to this post with your name on it, whether or not I agree or disagree, and call attention to the final result when we're done. So what specific publications or specific series are the emblematic 1970s comics? And if you have time to write or sentnence or two, why? Here are three from me.
1. "Panther's Rage," Jungle Action #6-18, Don McGregor, Gil Kane, Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, et al; 1973-1975.
"Panther's Rage" prefigured nearly every element of the modern superhero comic book, from its focus on a "secondary" character to its shift in tone to making a part of its plot a reconsideration of the character itself and its place in the wider Marvel Comics world.
2. Arcade, Edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, 1975-1976
The first modern anthology, bridging the underground and alternative generation with a shared sensibility rather than an editorial imperative. It featured nearly every major young talent of the time that would become a comics-lifer.
3. The Holt, Rinehart and Winston Doonesbury paperbacks, Garry Trudeau
This was the best presentation of the decade's finest newspaper comic strip. In a pre-Internet age getting the paperbacks was just about the only way for most folks to see all of Trudeau's comics in a way that allowed one to follow the longer narratives or just keep track of Trudeau's already exponentially expanding cast. They are near-perfect little books, especially when the main storyline contained therein crackled.
Not Comics: My Brother Whit Interviews Voice Actor Kevin Michael Richardson III Kevin Michael Richardson III and my brother Whit Spurgeon -- this site's primary photographer -- were college classmates at Syracuse University that headed to Los Angeles to make their fortune 20 years apart. A mini-reunion was too much for them to pass up, especially on their representative companies' dimes, so they got together at the W San Diego where Richardson, a mega-successful voice actor, had been set up to do a number of interviews in support of projects like The Cleveland Show. My knowledge of Richardson's career in voice-over acting was very limited but I do remember his live-acting participation in maybe the finest television show of the last quarter century, and so I gladly sent my ace reporter/older brother on a fact-finding mission. It sounds like they had fun catching up. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
WHIT SPURGEON: My editor wanted me to ask you up front, Kevin, if we can expect a Homeboys In Outer Space reunion?
KEVIN MICHAEL RICHARDSON: [laughter] Tell him I don't think so! [laughter] You know what, I might do it! [laughter and coughing] I might do it if it was a... [laughter]. It all depends. James Doohan has passed away, so... Oh God, and Flex [Alexander], I bumped into him. Who knows, man? You know what? If somebody approached me about it and said they want to do it, and the money was good, that's a very strong possibility.
WHIT SPURGEON: Hey, made for TV movie!
RICHARDSON: That's brilliant, that's brilliant. Just when you thought you forgot, they pull you back in! Oh, that's funny.
WHIT SPURGEON: I was stunned that there were 21 episodes of Homeboys.
RICHARDSON: Yeah, you know what, you're right, I can't believe that, I didn't know that they'd made a whole season. A couple of them are out there, and I have no idea where they are.
WHIT SPURGEON: I was checking you out on IMDB today. Reading your IMDB profile is exhausting. You've got more credits than Wallace Beery.
RICHARDSON: I don't know who puts it up there. I think there might be a few of them that are inaccurate. There's another Kevin Richardson in the union. But I did oversee it at one time a little while ago, because I really don't look at it often, and yes, most of them are me. Yes. Absolutely. There's about two or three where I go, "Well, I never did a Living Single," or something like that. "That wasn't me." But, yes, 99.9% of them? Definitely. I do get around.
WHIT SPURGEON: You've had a hell of a voiceover career in particular.
RICHARDSON: It's good, it's been good. It's Tourette's and schizophrenia, really. You're just going "BLBLBLBLBLBLBL!" behind the microphone. It's basically left-brain. It's just rambling.
WHIT SPURGEON: I read something about you getting Cleveland Jr. [on The Cleveland Show] because you were doing another voice for the show and they said, "Kevin, can you come in here and give us your take on this?"
RICHARDSON: Right, right -- they'd cast me as Lester first.
WHIT SPURGEON: And which one's Lester?
RICHARDSON: Lester Krinklesack [Spurgeon laughs] is the redneck neighbor that lives across the street.
WHIT SPURGEON: With the 500-pound wife.
RICHARDSON: Yeah, Kendra. [In Lester's voice] "Yep, that's me! And this is my wife." [resumes normal speaking voice] They didn't even think about me for Junior. But they said they weren't having too much luck, so they called me in. We were in there in the booth.
Seth [McFarlane] and Mike [Henry] and Rich were in the room, and they said, "Kevin, what would Cleveland Senior sound like as a 12- or 14-year-old boy?" So I incorporated that with the voice I did for ER when I played Patrick -- he had the football helmet, was mentally challenged?
WHIT SPURGEON: Sure.
RICHARDSON: So I used that voice with him, and that's how we got [in Cleveland Jr. voice] "Daddy, will you wipe me?" [resumes normal speaking voice] You know, that kind of voice.
WHIT SPURGEON: I feel like some childhood memories may have also been involved in that.
RICHARDSON: Yeah, yeah. Yeah! (Laughs) Ay-yi-yi!
WHIT SPURGEON: How did you break into voiceover?
RICHARDSON: I had a commercial agency, CESD, a talent agency out of LA. I was with them in New York, so I became an affiliate when I moved out here -- to LA in '91, not San Diego; LA. I found out they had a voiceover department. This was when it was reel-to-reel, and not digital like now. They were like editing the voiceover auditions, and I heard this character.
I stopped and said, "What is that?" And they, at the time, Donna Davies, God Bless her, she's passed on, said, "Oh, this is our Voiceover Client Demo." I go, "What?" "You know, our demo." I said, "You mean like animation and voices and stuff like that?" She goes, "Yeah." I said, "People get paid for this? There's a market for this?" They're like, "Yeah." I said, "Well, I can do this!"
I kept telling them, "I can do this." And they were like, "Well, it's very hard to get in, you have to study, and it's this very tight circle of people who do it." And I basically said, "Look, guys, just send me out." And I literally did this for about a year. I guess to shut me up, they sent me out. One of the first things they sent me out, I got -- and it just snowballed from there.
WHIT SPURGEON: Did you read comics as a kid?
RICHARDSON: Oh Yeah! Heck, yeah!
WHIT SPURGEON: Do you still read them?
RICHARDSON: Only if I'm at a buddy's house who has them.
WHIT SPURGEON: What were your favorites?
RICHARDSON: Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, and I kind of was getting into the Uncanny X-Men a little bit. But the Hulk and Spider-Man were definitely my favorites. Fantastic Four was kind of cool. But... Spidey, Hulk.
WHIT SPURGEON: In a ballroom dancing contest, who would win? The Hulk or Superman?
RICHARDSON: Superman! [Laughter].
WHIT SPURGEON: Defend your answer! Because you know, I've heard that the madder Hulk gets, the more graceful Hulk gets. [laughter]
RICHARDSON: I don't think there would be much of a ballroom dance floor after he stopped! [laughter] Superman's lighter on his feet.
WHIT SPURGEON: In a contest of eating canned hams, who would win?
RICHARDSON: Hulk! Without taking them out of the cans! "Hulk need iron!" [laughter]
WHIT SPURGEON: I'm looking at the breadth of your credits. You played Nick Fury.
RICHARDSON: I think I did, you're right, Young Nick Fury.
WHIT SPURGEON: You have been on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. God bless you for being on Flapjack, I think it's the weirdest childrens' cartoon ever.
RICHARDSON: No comment.
WHIT SPURGEON: You played Barney Rubble on Harvey Birdman. You've played the Joker, Darkseid.
RICHARDSON: Ah, I loved it.
WHIT SPURGEON: You're perfect for Darkseid.
RICHARDSON: Yeah, you're right. It was like a little short stint, a good friend did it before me. But I do remember that, yes. The Joker, I loved playing the Joker.
WHIT SPURGEON: Here's one that jumped out at me. Porco Rosso. You did some of the American voiceover work for that?
RICHARDSON: Yes. You know, I still haven't seen it.
WHIT SPURGEON: You've still never seen it? You've done a Miyazaki film! That's like the crowning achievement in the world of animation.
A young cartoonist who was beginning to score professional opportunities in illustration and in comics, Forsgren placed work long-running and now defunct children's publication Bamse. He won the professional class cartooning contest held by the magazine Herman Hedning for two comedy series entries, Hundliv and Ledans Lustgard. He placed illustrations and comics in the Vasterbotten Courier and provided advertising-related drawings to a company called Stockholm Design.
* as if solely to please me, TCJ 
Just kidding! It's still summer. I'm not going to bore anyone with a long essay on the pay-model vs. free-model debate and all its various business and cultural permutations, even though the massive set of cascading issues flared up over the weekend 
* every year when 
* some mainstream comics talk worth noting: Jonathan Hickman and Tom Brevoort 
By Tom Spurgeon
* 
* this announcement has been everywhere, but in case you haven't seen it: 
Kon was born in Kushiro in the Hokkaido district. He attended Musashino College Of The Arts, for painting initially and then for illustration, graduating in 1987. He began his career as a cartoonist while still in college, placing his first work in Young Magazine in 1985 and seeing his first book published by Kodansha in 1990. After school Kon also performed some editing work for Young Magazine, during the midst of the initial serialization for the legendary Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo. This brought him into Otomo's radius, and he went on to work on World Apartment Horror (he's credited with the live-action movie's story and with the adaptive manga). According to a 2008 interview with Anime News Network, working on the Otomo-written Roujin Z was Kon's foundational work in animation, providing for his subsequent career both in terms of an initial workplace experience and in meeting people with whom he would later collaborate.
* 
A quartet of things struck me, nothing major. Dan DiDio states that only 25 percent of their comics are over $2.99. I can't tell if this is true, at least at an initial glance. For one thing, if you count their publishing lines generally certainly the vast majority of what they publish is over $2.99, which is part of but not all of that particular criticism. But even in the more generally understood "these are $2.99; these are $3.99" straight-up comic book count my look at five or six weeks sees it more in the 40-45 percent range. Maybe I just picked non-representative weeks. At any rate, the logic there is wrongheaded. If moving only part of your line to $3.99 has a proposed effect, that makes it a more potent result than if it's the whole line driving it.
* Alec Longstreth 
Creator: John Porcellino
The cartoonist and comics educator Tom Hart sent out an informal e-mail over the weekend thanking fellow educators and one assumes other comics-involved people here and there about the launch of his planned Sequential Artists Workshop. The educational institution is set to open in Gainesville, Florida some time in 2011. "The SAW is certainly starting from James Sturm's CCS model but I don't expect it to mirror that for too long. I don't know what to expect but beginning this project has been on my mind for years and [Hart's wife, the cartoonist] Leela [Corman] and I looked at each other (and our new daughter) during this most recent winter and agreed: what are we waiting for?" Hart wrote. A first hint at faculty was also in the note. Noting that the couple and their daughter plan to move to Gainesville by Fall 2011, Hart mentioned, "John Porcellino is already there and will be easing in the programming while I'll be doing some administrative stuff up here."
The Anime News Network post 
* missed it: 
A discussion of the 1970s Marvel superhero saga "Panther's Rage" between Tucker Stone and David Brothers launched ten days ago led me to ask the CR readership in this space last Sunday about emblematic comics of the 1970s, works that are deeply and wholly of that time -- not just as a novelty items or fannish milestones but in terms of how we understand the form. This is the list that was developed from their suggestions. 
* the writer and reviewer David Brothers 
What seemed strange is that a museum that's been around since 2001 would choose to employ 
* continuing today's theme of idle thinking, here's something I either didn't know or forgot: Jesse Reklaw 
* just to show it's a generally slow month for comics news around the world, an advertisement featuring the Asterix characters celebrating at a McDonald's is causing cultural critics to gasp and writers to knock out what is a pretty standard, easy article. This is one of those stories where the issues get argued as absolutes when they're really fluid: it's a bad advertisement not because you shouldn't do such things but because it generates upset feelings from a segment of the audience that might like to eat a hamburger without being reminded of the cultural invasion aspects, or to flip the emphasis is being asked to help decide the legacy of the later Asterix efforts without having to puzzle through the corporation's intentions. The other thing that's weird is that I expected Tintin to appear in something like this first, what with the Jackson/Spielberg movie and all.
* 
My first recommendation to combat any case of the late-summer too-close-to-comics blues is to take a vacation. If that's not possible and you're still feeling more irritated than invigorated by the art form my second recommendation is to pick one of the past or even modern giants of comics and cartooning and look at as much of their stuff as you have in your library or as you can find on-line. There are opportunities for this practically everywhere you look. Drawn and Quarterly 
The cartoonist Rina Piccolo 
* speaking of Love & Rockets, everyone is ogling 
As always, Daryl Cagle 
* 
* David Brothers 
Kevin Michael Richardson III and my brother Whit Spurgeon -- this site's primary photographer -- were college classmates at Syracuse University that headed to Los Angeles to make their fortune 20 years apart. A mini-reunion was too much for them to pass up, especially on their representative companies' dimes, so they got together at the W San Diego where Richardson, a mega-successful voice actor, had been set up to do a number of interviews in support of projects like The Cleveland Show. My knowledge of Richardson's career in voice-over acting was very limited but I do remember his live-acting participation in maybe the finest television show of the last quarter century, and so I gladly sent my ace reporter/older brother on a fact-finding mission. It sounds like they had fun catching up. -- Tom Spurgeon
RICHARDSON: So I used that voice with him, and that's how we got [in Cleveland Jr. voice] "Daddy, will you wipe me?" [resumes normal speaking voice] You know, that kind of voice.
WHIT SPURGEON: I'm looking at the breadth of your credits. You played Nick Fury.
