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

ADAMS: I think in the last ten to 15 years that's turned around. I think there was a period of time when people didn't care about the fans. When I worked at WildStorm we did comic books based off of the Resident Evil videogames. I actually wrote a fair number of those books, so I was a big Resident Evil fan at the time. The Resident Evil movie came out -- this is going on more than ten years now! The movie was okay, but it didn't have anything to do with the Resident Evil videogame. It shared a name with it, and it shared the absolute biggest high concept with it. [laughs] I could never figure out why that was. Why create a movie that just takes the name and very little else?
I think that that way of looking at IP has changed over the last ten to 15 years. If you look at the movies that have been successful, maybe starting with the Spider-Man movies and even the X-Men movies to a certain extent, they really started looking at the underlying IP as the source material and being respectful towards that and the fan base that built it in the first place.
SPURGEON: Another thing you discuss in the Weiland interview is using guerilla marketing strategies on behalf of 30 Days Of Night, which was certainly a key title in IDW's development. Can you talk about what "guerilla marketing" meant in that case, and how your outlook on PR and marketing might be different now?
ADAMS: Back in those days, with 30 Days Of Night, we were a brand-new publisher and it was much easier to do guerilla-style marketing for me personally back then, and I think for the market back then. What I mean specifically by guerilla marketing for 30 Days Of Night is that I used my relationships to sell that book. Beau Smith, who was working for IDW in those days, and I called the retailers we were friendly with. I called in favors with Wizard. I called in favors with Diamond. People I'd done business with for 10-15 years, I essentially cashed in those chips and asked them to take a look at 30 Days Of Night. I basically said, "Hey, I think this is important. Please pay attention to it." Ultimately, if the book had been lousy, that wouldn't have worked. But I think the combination of me cashing in those chips and presenting them with what was a cool story and at the time revolutionary art -- because nobody had seen what Ben [Templesmith] was doing at the time -- I think it worked because the book itself stood on its own two feet. So it was me leveraging my personal relationships to get people to pay attention to the book.
And frankly, when the comic came out, it didn't work all that well. [laughter] The comic didn't sell. It's not like we're talking about a book that set the sales charts on fire from a comic book standpoint. What it did do is that I was able to get people talking about it, and get the buzz going, so when Sam Raimi bought the movie rights that really ratcheted up the buzz about the book. In large measure, I think it was Wizard Magazine, which was really influential back in those days, they were covering the book on a monthly basis. They have their list of hot ten comics and we were number one on that list for five or six months in a row. We were the number one story of that year. They were talking about 30 Days Of Night on a regular basis in that magazine.
All of that buzz -- my guerilla marketing, the Sam Raimi deal, the Wizard Magazine coverage -- led to the trade paperback being the number one trade paperback of the month. We beat out everybody. At that point, we had maybe published six things. We had the number one trade paperback. It was unheard of for that sort of thing to happen.
Fast-forwarding ten years later, to today: I can't do that kind of guerilla-style marketing anymore. As much as I would love to go out and deal with each book on an individual basis, it's just not practical.
SPURGEON: Do you have a sense whether your company and/or comics in general is transitioning towards more traditional PR and marketing? There's a common context to guerilla marketing -- new company, new work, limited resources -- that's very different than the position you, for example, find yourself in now.
ADAMS: For us, it's the thing we struggle with the most. I think it's a combination of that we publish a lot of books. We're doing 40 books a month, a combination of comics and trades, we're really publishing this large volume of books, so for us it becomes a matter of resources: how can we get out the marketing message for all of those books.
As you get beyond IDW's output and you look at the market in total, the number of books that are released through Previews on a monthly basis is a big number. How do we break through our own clutter, and then in a more macro way how do we break through the industry's clutter and have people pay attention to any particular book in any particular given month? It's something we struggle with all the time. It's absolutely our number one challenge. How do we let consumers and retailers know about books that we're publishing? How do we get that information to them in a way that's digestible so that they can make the decision as to whether or not this is something they want to buy or they don't want to buy? It's the key challenge for us and probably for any publisher.
SPURGEON: Is there any recent IDW comic or project where you think you did a really good job getting the word out in this fashion?
ADAMS: I think there are a couple. I think Locke and Key, which is a book we do with Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, I think we did a good job with that. That was a book where I did go back to my 30 Days Of Night marketing. I did make a lot of personal calls on that, sent out a lot of books. The book itself is terrific, so once you get people to read it, they like it. We were also able to ride the crest of Joe Hill's literary success. Around the time we were releasing Locke and Key, his first novel came out and hit the New York Times bestseller list. That was certainly helpful for us. That was one of the unusual books where when you look at that initial mini-series that we did, the fifth issue sold more than the first. That's almost unheard of in comics these days.
Two other ones I think we did a particularly good job with this year. One is the Parker book we did with Darwyn Cooke. We really went out of our way to make sure people knew how important that book was. We printed advance copies that we gave out for review, and that we gave away at BEA last year. We did every piece of promotional marketing collateral we could think of. We bought advertising in ways that we just normally don't do. We were trying to get out there and make sure people knew about that book in every way we could think of. I think that book has been successful for us. As always, the main reason the book is successful is because of the brilliant job that Darwyn did in creating it. But I think our marketing and promotions effort supported his effort.
The other one is our Bloom County release at the end of last year. We did a good job of getting the word out about that. Berkeley [Breathed] was very gracious with this time and set aside time to do interviews with places like USA Today, any mainstream media interested in that book. Those were some of our successes in the last year. We've been lucky. We brought on a PR and marketing person last year that's done a terrific job for us. She's overworked because of the volume of titles we do, but I think she's doing a really nice job for us.
SPURGEON: Let's talk about IDW's volume issues for a second. A friend of mine said that IDW may be the only comics company about which you don't talk about projects they have yet to publish. That's because IDW announces a book and then, wham, it's out. Your company has a very production-oriented ethos, in other words. Does that come from you?
ADAMS: It does. It's a bit of my manic nature, to a certain extent. I like to make decisions quickly and do things quickly. We move a lot faster than other companies. We're not a company where we're all sitting around agonizing over decisions and having meetings to figure this or that out. We decide we're going to do it, and we go and do it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. But it is one of the things that makes us unique.
We're really production-focused. That comes from my having worked at a variety of comics publishers. I was able to see what worked and didn't work. I tried to learn from a production and editorial standpoint what causes books to be late, what causes things to not work. I took all of those things that I've learned and have tried to apply them to IDW. Every morning we start the day with a very quick production meeting. It's a ten- to 15-minute meeting. We bring in Chris Ryall, our publisher and editor-in-chief. We bring in the head of our production department and a couple of other key employees and we set the direction of the day. We say, "Okay, these are the three books we're going to get to the printer today." And that really sets the direction for the whole company from a production standpoint.
While that may sound like common sense, in my experience that's pretty unique for a comics publishers, to start your day every morning with a production focus on "here is what we're going to accomplish today" specifically, and "these are the books that we're going to get out of the door today" specifically. It sets the direction for the company. One of the things we're proud of is not only do we publish a large number of books on a monthly basis, our on-time percentage, if anybody were to take a look at it, is pretty extraordinary. If we say a book will come out in February, it will almost always come out in February.
Even more than that, what we work really hard to do is not drop our entire line all in one week. If we have 40 books, our goal is to spread out those books 10 per week. We spend a lot of time making that happen. We also spend a lot of time making sure we don't drop three Transformers books in one week. So if, say, in the month of February we have four Transformers books, our goal is to have one per week. Same with GI Joe or Star Trek: if we've got two or three books, we don't want to drop all of those in the same week. We try to have a release schedule that a consumer and a retailer can live with.
We've run into some hitches, frankly, over the last couple of months, with our release schedule. Diamond does a terrific job, and we wouldn't have the success we've had without them. But we've run into some weather related hitches where they've had some problems with their trucks and various other things. That's caused our books to be released in a way that's very frustrating to us. We've worked hard to ensure that we'll have 10 books one week and eight books the next week and the Diamond truck breaks down or there's a weather related problem and all of the sudden we have zero books one week and 18 books the next week. That's really frustrating to all of us because we work really hard to make sure that doesn't happen.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what a consumer can live with and what a retailer can live with from out big release schedule. From a pure pocketbook standpoint, if you're a Transformers fan, it's better for you if we can sell you a Transformers book once per week instead of four Transformers books all in one week.
SPURGEON: Has IDW ever had trouble reconciling the different kinds of discipline necessary to serve the bookstore market and the comic shop market?
ADAMS: The biggest challenge there is that with the book market, when you're talking movie releases, they want that product on an accelerated schedule. In their perfect world, a trade paperback that ties into a movie would come out six weeks before a movie release. We accomplished that with all four of our major properties last year, but that was a real challenge to have the books done that far ahead of time. We print our books in Korea, including all of our comics, so you're talking really long lead times to accomplish that goal. They tell us it's important to them.
SPURGEON: You get a lot of credit as being hands-off with your editors. Do you feel you deserve the praise you get in that area?
ADAMS: From my perspective we have the best editorial team in comics. It's a small team. If you look at our team, it starts with Chris Ryall, who's the editor in chief. Then you start looking at some of the editors that work with him: Scott Dunbier, Bob Schreck, Andy Schmidt being some of the primary ones, these are A+ editors. These guys are as good as it gets. We have Mariah [Huehner] who works on the Angel line, she's a terrific editor. We have Denton [J. Tipton] who is doing our Dr. Who books; he's newer to the industry but doing a good job. We have guys that are behind the scenes running our trade paperbacks and collected lines, we have a guy named Justin [Eisinger] who works on those books and he produces an amazing number of books and does it with a smile.
It took me a while to get all of these pieces into place, but I have an editorial team that I trust implicitly. I try not to micro-manage them in any way. If Bob Schreck comes to me and says, "I have an idea for this." I just say, "Okay, let's do it. What can I do to help you accomplish that goal without getting in your way."
I think Scott Dunbier joining us a couple of years ago is probably the best example of that. He came to us with a bunch of ideas already in mind, and I literally tried to do everything I could to support him but also to get out of his way and let him do what he was good at. He had come from an environment that was set up differently, so I think for him it was very freeing to say, "I can come to work every day, and I don't have to have meetings and I don't have to be micro-managed."
SPURGEON: I would guess the production emphasis would also instill discipline up and down the line that might not have to be enforced otherwise.
ADAMS: That's the only place where I do get involved. If we say we're going to do a book, I try not to get involved in the details of that particular book. But once we say it's going to come out in October, it's going to come out in October. I'm not pushing people to get it out in October. If you need a couple of extra months to get it done, so be it. But once we say it's going to come out in October, it's going to come out in October.
SPURGEON: One big news item that I think may have confused people more than any other over the last five years is the purchase of IDW by IDT.
ADAMS: Okay, sure.
SPURGEON: What's the current status of that relationship? I think it's slightly changed from what it was initially. Am I right?
ADAMS: Not really. It's changed a little bit. IDT has a division called IMG. IMG is the company that made the investment in IDW. All of these companies that start with "I" is a little confusing. They own a majority interest in IDW. Robbie Robbins and myself are minority owners. Robbie and I are two of the company's founders. So it hasn't changed all that much. They've been a good partner. We've been very successful in just about any way you can measure it financially, so they're happy with the job we're doing.
SPURGEON: Why was that investment important at that time?
ADAMS: Well, it wasn't. It's interesting to me that people were interested in that transaction. Because at the time -- it's going on three years that we did the deal -- if you'd asked anybody who owns IDW, first of all most people would say I have no idea. Ninety percent of those that did answer would have said, "Ted owns IDW." That was the perception. The reality is that four of us owned IDW, and we had a couple of minor investors. Nobody cared. [laughs] It wasn't all that interesting who owned IDW before this transaction, so it was always a little confusing why anybody cared that people they didn't know in the form of Alex [Garner]and Kris [Oprisko] and Robbie were replaced by another group they didn't know.
SPURGEON: I think the curiosity was that IDW was obviously enjoying a certain level of success when this ownership deal took place, and this forced a lot of people to ask the question why IDW would seek a partner. Had the company overreached? Did the company want to expand? And so on.
ADAMS: It wasn't the kind of transaction where we were looking for a capital investment where we could go out and invest in things. It was much more the kind of transaction where as you said we'd been successful, we'd been in business for seven years, we had owners that were looking to move on and do other things, and they were looking to cash out their investment in large measure. It was a way to get some money for the work they'd done for the last seven years and bring in some people that wanted to be in the publishing business. It wasn't "Oh, we need money because we're in trouble," or "Oh, we need money to make a capital investment." We had owners who wanted to make their assets more liquid.
SPURGEON: You mentioned some snafus with Diamond earlier. How worried are you moving forward about the health of the comics infrastructure? Are you confident you'll be able to always get your product into the hands of the people who want it?
ADAMS: Absolutely.
After I said that about Diamond I kind of felt bad about it because I am a giant supporter of Diamond.
SPURGEON: We'll note your concern by including this exchange, although I don't think what you said sounded bad at all.
ADAMS: I'm glad to hear that. I think Diamond does an incredible job, and the amount of product they process in any given week and the efficiency with which they do it is unbelievable. They are in my opinion a tremendous organization and they take more heat than they should. We've had a couple of hiccups here and there, but I couldn't be happier with the service they provide.
And I'm not just trying to kiss ass with Diamond because they're our #1 customer! [laughs] I think they do an extraordinary job and the folks over there take their job unbelievably seriously. I have a lot of respect for them. Because of that respect I don't have a lot of concern for the health of the Direct Market, other than the concern that most people have for brick and mortar in this day and age. I think we should have a general concern about how print products are sold.
Comics are in a tough spot. I understand why they buy the books that they buy, but I do feel that in large measure the Direct Market does have this sort of diminishing return in these endless crossovers and events, these superhero events, and having that be the only focus of the industry. I think that's not good for any of us from a long-term perspective. There's nothing new here, we've all been talking about this as long as I've been in the business. [Spurgeon laughs] But we do in large measure sell to a smaller audience year after year after year, because we lose people but don't replace them.
I have a seven-year-old son, and my house is filled with comics and I've been reading to him since he was a baby, but as an industry we really don't make much product for him. There's Tiny Titans, which is a terrific book. A lot of the other DC kids book. Bone is certainly amazing as a gateway book for kids and other people. But as an industry we don't do a good job of bringing in newpeople. I'm not saying IDW does that, either. I'm not holding us up as a savior. But if you ask me if I have a concern for the Direct Market, that would be my only concern.
SPURGEON: Some of these concerns aren't wholly Direct Market concerns. Border's isn't exactly doing really well right now, either.
ADAMS: Right.
SPURGEON: It makes me think... like most companies, IDW has a foot in the digital world with much, much more likely to come. In terms of your digital media initiatives, when you personally conceive of that in terms of your overall publishing efforts, is there a defensive element to that part of your company? Is there an element to it of hedging your bets about print publishing?
ADAMS: My belief is that when we sell an iTunes app, the person buying that is not person who was going to buy a print version. He just simply wasn't going to go to a comic store or bookstore. There are many more people that don't read print -- comic books or books -- than do. And so our aggressive nature in digital distribution certainly lies in a bit of a defensive standpoint, but more from the standpoint of wanting to reach the biggest audience I can.
My goal as a publisher is to bring as many people to a title as I possibly can. If the person reads it on paper, that's my preferred method, because that's what I like. I will always choose paper over digital. But I don't want to be dismissive to the person who wants to read it on their iPhone or who wants to read it on their PSP. If I can reach people through those platforms I'm going to do it and I'm going to be as aggressive as I possibly can in doing it.
I don't see a lot of talk about the PSP from the comics press, but the PSP launched their comics reader in the middle of December and we've started to get some preliminary sales information from them, sales rankings. IDW is disproportionately represented in their top 10 of sales. Certainly disproportionately represented as compared to where we would be in a Diamond Top 300 chart. We can have what looks like tremendous success via that platform with comics that I can't sell as well in comics stores. We're talking about creator-driven books performing better than our licensed books. I've never seen that. We're talking very early days, the thing's not even a month old. [laughter] I'm not going to proclaim that we have a new way to sell creator-driven comics.
SPURGEON: "Shut down the presses!" [laughter]
ADAMS: The Direct Market is our #1 market, and I don't see any reason it won't always be our #1 market. But if I can reach another 100, 000 people through the PSP and another 100,000 through iTunes, I'm going to do that. If I can bring more people to these ideas and these concepts, from our perspective we want our content to reach as many people as possible. There is a large number of people who would prefer to read them on the iPhone versus paper. I'm not one of them. I prefer to read them on paper.
SPURGEON: You've ramped up the comic strip portion of your line in incredibly rapid fashion: multiple titles, several books in some of the series, both modern and classic comics. Was there any feeling of risk very early on, that no matter how lovely they might be, you were committing to these massive books? I remember sitting down with you at San Diego in 2008 and looking at Dean's copy of... oh, man...
SPURGEON: ... right, the Scorchy Smith/Noel Sickles book. On the one hand I was thinking, "This is a gorgeous book." And on the other hand I was thinking, "This is a gorgeous book that features, you know, Scorchy Smith."
ADAMS: [laughs]
SPURGEON: How much risk does this kind of commitment entail?
ADAMS: There's always some financial risk with any individual project, particularly when you're talking about something that's expensive to print. There's no risk to IDW in total. We're big enough we can survive the failure of any individual project and, in this case, the Scorchy Smith book was profitable for IDW. My perspective on these things is that IDW from the get-go from a publishing standpoint is that we're always going to publish things that are important to us. We certainly never go out of our way to say we want to lose money on any particular project. But if we think something's important, or if it's important to any particular employee of IDW, those are projects we are going to pursue.
Dean Mullaney, who has done an unbelievable job with the Library of American Comics, the volume of books he's produced over the last couple of years, each more beautiful than the last, when Dean came to me and proposed this book, it's similar to what we talked about before: "Sounds good. What do you need from me to make this happen?"
I believe that's really one of the beautiful things about the Direct Market. A book like that isn't going to set sales records. We're not going to sell 10,000 copies. But we can count on the Direct Market to buy 1000-1500 copies of a book like that. And that gives us the security to know that's a book we can pursue. I can't stress enough that there are so many great things about the Direct Market, and that's one of them. Almost everyone who works here has been working in the Direct Market for 20 years, we know what will work and what won't work there. A book like that: nobody thinks they're going to get rich from a book like that. But if it's a book that we feel is important and that we're passionate about, we're going to do it.
I just saw the advance copy yesterday of a strip called King Aroo, which is a book Dean has been really passionate about. I grew up studying comic strips and comic strip artists. That said, King Aroo isn't one I was familiar with. But Dean said, "This stuff is amazing. We've got to bring this back out." So we did it. We got the advance copy in yesterday and this book is beautiful. The art is unbelievable. A really, really beautiful strip. Are we going to make money on that book? Probably not a lot. But this is a book that needs to be out there. The people who like it are going to be blown away by it, and for people like me who love comic strips but aren't familiar with this one, it's going to be eye-opening.
SPURGEON: I'm trying to think of a way to end this, Ted, a way that's clever and satisfying. [Adams laughs] One person asked me to ask you when IDW is going to lower the Bob Schreck boom -- that you're due for some terrifyingly huge announcement of a Schreck-led project.
ADAMS: [laughs] Well, stay tuned. [laughter] I worked with Bob at Dark Horse and at the time he was the marketing director and I was one of his assistants. I've known him forever. Then he moved to editorial and he's had this incredible career. When I saw he and DC had gone their separate ways, I knew there was no way I was not going to have him work at IDW.
SPURGEON: A thing that's interesting to me about your company looking at it from the outside-in is that a lot of what you're doing right now is still in the early stages. There's plenty of room for you to build onto some of your more recent big projects. Dean gives you access to classic strips, Bloom Countyputs you in play for any modern strip projects, the Parker book indicates you're an option for a lot of books people tend to think of going to book publishers and art-comics houses, and the addition of Bob Schreck opens up everything in mainstream American comic books that doesn't involve a licensed character. You're building a series of powerful Rolodexes.
ADAMS: I want everybody to think of us as a home for their project. I want Paramount to come to us with their next big movie release, and I want creators to know that IDW can be a good home for their projects as well. We've worked hard to improve that over the last few years. When we started it was my Rolodex, with Ashley Wood, Steve Niles, and people that I knew. As we've grown, that Rolodex has gotten bigger and bigger.
If somebody has got something they're thinking of doing, I want them to think of IDW.
*****
ADDENDUM: JOHN JACKSON MILLER ON IDW's MARKET SHARE
I asked comics numbers guru John Jackson Milelr to comment as Ted Adams suggested on IDW's move past certain premier publishers on the marketshare charts. John responded as follows:
"I would not have been able to answer this last week, but I've just had all the Diamond end-of-year figures keyed in from the last decade. (Finally got some help!)
Crossgen topped out at 3.24% in annual dollar share in 2003, behind fourth-place Dark Horse, at 5.53%.
Dreamwave topped out at 2.49% in 2003, for sixth place that year.
Viz gets up to 3.01% in Pokemon-mad 1999, but Dark Horse was at 8.29% that year.
So his theory is correct.
We might also get into quibbles over whether or not Acclaim or Wizard are premier publishers -- they did get the front of the book treatment and were announced in that initial wave, but they weren't brokerage deals with their own discount rates. But I can't remember offhand whether there was a separate term for them, or how they were referred to in the listings. I'd need to check my orderbooks from way back when.
Thanks, John.
If you have as few as five comics sites bookmarked, you should make one of them The Comics Chronicles.
FFF Results Post #193—Alliter-Nation
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Comics People Whose First And Last Names All Start With The Same Letter -- Yes, All Five Of Them." Here is how they responded.
Jeet Heer
* Bob Bolling -- Little Archie's cartoonist
* Bart Beaty -- European comics expert
* Bill Blackbeard -- collector and editor extraordinaire
* Blake Bell -- Ditko biographer
* Bob Bindig -- comics historian
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Arthur Adams
Alfredo Alcalá
Alex Alonso
Al Avison
Alfonso Azpiri
(Honorary mention: Adam Austin)
******
Rodrigo Baeza
Dame Darcy
Dan DeCarlo Dan Davis
Dan Day
Dave Darrigo
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Jack Jackson
James Jean
Jess Jodloman
Joe Jusko
Jeff Jones
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Ron Randall
Ralph Reese
Robin Riggs
Robert Rodi Richard Rockwell
*****
Rodrigo Baeza
Stan Sakai
Steven Seagle
Scott Shaw!
Steve Skeates
Syd Shores
Marc-Antoine Mathieu
Mark Martin
Matt Madden
Mike Mignola
Milo Manara
bonus: Max
*****
Sam Humphries
Jack Jackson -- underground pioneer and artist
Janet Jackson -- artist and colorist
J. Jonah Jameson -- publisher
James (Lucas) Jones -- editor in chief
Joe Jusko -- artist
*****
Bill Matheny
Bud Blake -- Tiger
Brian Michael Bendis
Brett Breeding
Brian Bolland
Bob Burden
*****
Andrei Molotiu
Matt Madden
Mort Meskin
Mark Marek
Mike Mignola
Massimo Mattioli
1. Milo Manara
2. Mark Millar
3. Mike Mignola
4. Mark McKenna
5. Mike McKone
*****
Eric Reynolds
Gary Groth
Gary Gianni
Grass Green
Geo. Gately
Glenn Ganges
*****
Dave Knott
* Milo Manara
* Matt Madden
* Mark Marek
* Marc-Antoine Mathieu
* Mike Mignola
*****
Dave Knott
* Brian Michael Bendis
* Berke Breathed
* Bob Burden
* Box Brown
* Brian Bolland
*****
John Kovaleski
* Bruce Beattie -- editorial cartoonist
* Bo Brown -- magazine cartoonist
* Bob Barnes -- "The Better Half"
* Bill Brewer -- greeting cards
* Bud Blake -- "Tiger"
*****
John Vest
1. Tom Toles
2. Tom Tomorrow
3. Tim Truman
4. The Tribe
5. Ty Templeton
*****
Evan Dorkin
1. Mike Mignola - Hellboy guy
2. Mike McMahon - 2000 AD artist
3. Mort Meskin - Golden age cartoonist
4. Matt Madden - cartoonist/editor/etc
5. Mike Manley - cartoonist/Draw! editor
6. Michael Martens - VP Business Development Dark Horse Comics
7. Mike Millar - typist
*****
Evan Dorkin
1. Gary Gianni - Prince Valiant/Monstermen guy
2. Gary Groth - your former boss
3. George Gladir - Archie writer
4. Grass Green - cartoonist
5. Gregory Gallant - portrays the cartoonist "Seth" at appearances,
6. George Gately - Heathcliff cartoonist
*****
Evan Dorkin
1. Scott Saavedra
2. Si Spencer
3. Si Spurrier
4. Stan Sakai
5. Steve Saffel
*****
Chris Duffy
* Tom Toles, cartoonist
* Tom Tomorrow, cartoonist
* Tony Tallarico, Golden Age comic book artist
* Tim Truman, comic book artist
* Terry Thompson, comics educator-type
*****
Douglas Wolk
* Mike McMahon -- Judge Dredd artist
* Mike Mignola -- Hellboy creator
* Mike McKone -- Exiles artist
* Mike Manley -- Draw! magazine editor
* Mike Mayhew -- superhero artist
* Gabriella Giandelli -- creator of Ignatz series "Interioriae"
* Gary Groth -- Fantagraphics publisher
* Gregory Gallant -- AKA Seth
* Grant Goggans -- online reviewer
* Geoff Grogan -- cartoonist, Xeric-winner for "Look Out! Monsters"
*****
Nat Gertler
* Dan Decarlo - Josie creator, wonderful toonist
* Dan DiDio - high mucky-muck at DC
* Dan Day - comics artist
* Dave Dorman - has done some fine covers
* Dick DeBartolo - one of the Usual Gang of Idiots
* Ty Templeton -- Creator of Stig's Inferno
* Tim Truman -- Comic book artist
* Tom Tomorrow -- Political cartoonist
* Tsutomu Takahashi -- Manga artist
* Tommy Thompson -- 1940's comic strip artist
1. Kazuo Koike -- writer, Lone Wolf and Cub
2. Karl Kesel -- writer, inker Fantastic Four
3. Kazuo Kamimura -- artist, Lady Snowblood
4. Karl Kershel -- artist, Teen Titans: Year One
5. Kō Kojima -- creator, Sennin Buraku
*****
Sean T. Collins
Tim Truman
Tom Toles
Tony Tallarico
Ty Templeton
Tom Tomorrow
*****
John Platt
1. Mike Mignola
2. Mark Martin!
3. Mark Millar
4. Matt Madden
5. Mort Meskin
6. Milo Minara -- Ha! I did six!
*****
Kiel Phegley
* Joelle Jones - artist of You Have Killed Me & various others
* J.G. Jones - DC Comics artist
* James Lucas Jones - Oni Press Editor-in-Chief
* Jeffrey Jones - Creepie & Eeerie artist I was unfamiliar with but found through Google: http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/jonesjf.htm
* Jack Jackson - legendary underground cartoonist
*****
Okay, obviously I thought that was going to be a lot harder than it was. I tip my hat to, and refused to ever turn my back on, your collective scary-ass list-making abilities. I tossed the ones that didn't follow the same letter and kept the ones with fictional characters standing in for real people, since that's what comics is all about. -- Tom Spurgeon
The top comics-related news stories from January 9 to January 15, 2010:
1. DCC Indictment Party: Tahawwur Rana indicated on charges related to Mumbai attacks; two Pakistani men indicted in US court for planning to attack Jyllands-Posten office and employees.
Dan Clowes To Headline TCAF 2010; Supporting Wilson At Show; Festival Releases Clowes-Drawn Poster
The Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) 2010 has announced that the cartoonist Daniel Clowes will be the show's headlining guest, a rare convention appearance of any kind for Clowes. In anticipation of that appearance, Clowes has provided the art to be used in this year's festival poster, seen above. The popular festival is scheduled for May 8 (9 AM to 5 PM) and May 9 (Noon to 5 PM) and is to be held in the venue enjoyed by the show in 2009: the Toronto Reference Library at 789 Yonge Street. Admission is free.
Clowes is releasing Wilson through Drawn and Quarterly this spring, his first new comics work in several years. Peggy Burns at D+Q will coordinate access to Clowes; all other media inquiries including general accreditation questions should go .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
The festival also announced that the 2010 TCAF web site will go live on Tuesday at this url. A fully updated guest list of over 200 exhibitors will be available at that time. My mother and I will be there as well.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* as expected, Mickey Mouse plot co-conspirator Tahawwur Hussain Rana was yesterday also indicted on charges related to supporting the terrorist group Lashka-e-Tayyiba in attacks on Mumbai in 2008. He had previously been indicted for a plot to attack targets related to the Danish Cartoons controversy: the Jyllands-Posten publication offices, editor Flemming Rose and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. This is additionally interesting in that Rana's lawyer and his family have attempted to portray Rana as largely duped into participating in various activities by more active co-conspirator David Coleman Headley.
* in another interesting development, Ilyas Kashmiri and Abdur Rehman were also indicted Thursday on charges related to doing harm to the Danish Cartoons publisher and some of its key agents and employees. Both are believed to be residing in Pakistan and have not yet been arrested.
* the implement of destruction to be visited on the newspaper was going to be what sounds like an Oklahoma City-style truck bomb. That same article indicates that the paper has since the initial arrests and uncovering of this plot hired a director of security to better protect its employees and other holdings.
* it looks like Kurt Westergaard's attacker may have a name and the bare bones of a personal profile. I'm a little worried about this article because in the first graph it had Westergaard in the panic room with his granddaughter, which was the initial report but has since been reversed.
New And Wholly Familiar-Looking Zapiro Cartoon Discussed, Criticized, Defended The very popular and fearlessly aggressive South African cartoonist Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro has a new cartoon out. It criticizes the consideration of a pardon by President Jacob Zuma that would balance political concerns over a previous pardon, basically putting political expediency above multiple declarations of justice made in the sentencing of certain apartheid and post-apartheid officials. The interesting thing about it is that in making these accusations Zapiro is reworking the imagery of past cartoons that showed South Africa's President about to rape Justice while other officials held her down. Not surprisingly, the strength of such imagery has drawn criticism, and Zapiro's effort to put these actions in a continuity with past ones through visual means has drawn attention from international press.
Editor & Publisher Renews Publication
The 126-year-old newspaper industry bible Editor & Publisheris back in business. The venerable operation was purchased from Nielsen by boating magazine and newspaper operator Duncan McIntosh Co. Charles McKeown will continue as E&P's publisher. Mark Fitzgerald, a recent former Editor-At-Large with the publication, is E&P's new editor. The web site started putting articles up when the deal closed Thursday, and a February print issue is planned.
Although I found the article at E&P's own site linked-to above fairly self-congratulatory and largely devoid of practical detail, I'm happy to have any magazine back with its particular focus and E&P has long been an industry lion. E&P was covering the syndicated comics business in a modern, thorough, publication-of-record way back when the bulk of the comics press was trying to figure out up from down -- and covered it long before that generally besides. One of the alarming things about Nielsen's decision to close E&P was the thought that there was still interest in the publication from both readers and advertisers in the publication; another was that there was really nothing ready resources-wise to take its place.
* the best-sellers from 2009 at Jim Hanley's Universe have been posted: Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, Secret Invasion, Batman: The Killing Joke Special Edition HC, Civil War, Batman: Joker HC, Batman: RIP HC, World War Hulk, Batman: The Long Halloween, Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, Final Crisis HC, JLA/Avengers, Asterios Polyp, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III: Century -- 1910, Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader HC, Thor: J Michael Straczynski Premier Volume 2 HC, Superman: Red Son, Green Lantern: Sinestro Corp War Volume 1 HC, Walking Dead Volume 9: Here We Remain, Y -- The Last Man Volume 1: Unmanned.
* finally, I tend to enjoy it when Johanna Draper Carlson picks on some random comics event and starts cuffing it about the head and shoulders, but sometimes she picks one where I'm more creeped out by the existence of the thing she's criticizing than delighting in her crushing it.
If Sean Delonas’ NY Post Chimp Cartoon Is Evidence We’re Post-Racial, Somebody Throw Out The Case
There's a slightly bizarre editorial here that seeks to use the Sean Delonas chimp cartoon from February 2009 to make the point that we're a post-racial country now. I'm never quite certain what that means, but as someone who wrote about the cartoon at the time, a few things strike me as intellectually dishonest about the use of that incident in this piece.
One is that the author tries to indict both the outrage some felt at the time and the fact that this outrage didn't survive absolutely intact for months and months as separate instances of distorted behavior instead of as a reasonable continuity. The second is that the cartoon remains the subject of a lawsuit about the corporate culture at the institution that published it and the ability to express concerns about such issues, which is both a direct refutation that this matter has gone away and a suggestion that runs counter to the assertion that objections to the cartoons were somehow solely about whether or not it would lead to monkey-inspired assassination attempts on the president. The third is that as someone who wrote about the cartoon at the time, I'd reject out of hand the suggestion that people objected to the cartoon because it represented some sort of literal danger to the sitting president. I think some people saw it as an offensive comparison first, right on the face of it, and as an ugly image. But many folks also saw it as part of a wider tendency among those participating in the country's crippled political process and national dialogue to tease, flatter and encourage a general ressentiment nurtured by large swathes of Americans who hold the perceived otherness of their president against him.
So no, that cartoon hasn't gone away except in the way that the flash of initial offense goes away, and I'm at least one person that still worries about it and didn't consider it silly at all.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* it is expected that accused Mickey Mouse plot co-conspirator Tahawwur Hussain Rana will be charged with complicity in other plots including information about the 2008 assault on Mumbai by multiple gunmen. It sounds like a deadline is coming into play more than evidence is really driving the prosecution towards certain indictments, but that's potentially a vastly unfair appraisal on my part and it does seem to me that the attempt to portray Rana as more of an innocent dupe may have been misguided. We'll see what happens.
* Matthias Wivel writes a nice summary piece on the Metropolitan Museum of Art potentially eliminating from its collection representations of Muhammad and why this is a bad thing.
* it could cost the Danish government millions in wages alone to extend around-the-clock protection to recently-assaulted cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.
* this isn't directly related at all, but my friends outside of funnybooks are all trying to talk to me about this article on the risks of terrorism by the Wolverine of numbers crunching, Nate Silver.
* I have no idea if the wire services just re-spit this one up or if there was a Danish newspaper that republished the Danish cartoons and is now being censured by the Pakistani government. Iran's foreign ministry going after a Norwegian newspaper, that one's new.
If DC Had A Goat, Marvel’d Kidnap It
There were a few articles of the "press release that foments commentary" variety foisted on the comics world over the last day or so. Two of them worthy of note -- Wizard and Diamond proclaiming they still like and respect one another and that this will result in some sort of trade show presence at June's Wizard-related Philadelphia convention, and Random House becoming exclusive worldwide bookstore distributor for an Archie not yet known for making stuff that goes into book stores -- came and went without much incident. A third was clever enough to at least temporarily capture the imagination of several comics fans and press outlets, at least according to my not very focused initial survey. That was Marvel's announcement of an incentive plan whereby they will send retailers an alternate cover version of their new Siege effort in return for what they suspect were over-ordered copies of books related to DC's Blackest Night event.
That sounds amusing and provocative, and it is, and they'll get a certain amount of (particularly new media) press from it. However, with levels set as high as initially announced (50 to 1) it's doubtful how much actual churn they'll experience. And once you realize the whole thing comes down to the retailing community maybe -- maybe -- having been stuck with thousands of unsaleable comics in order to secure plastic rings for a subset of their customers, you may join me in an urge to climb back into bed for a couple of hours. The comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com has the best explanation of what's at stake. You could also see this as further evidence that the two mainstream companies are slowly retrenching into past behavior -- exclusives, event comics, tweaking the direct competition -- despite new ownership and/or management teams.
Patricia Highsmith, Funnybook Writer? I'm always the last one to pick up on these kinds of historical footnotes, but I guess the latest biography of the writer Patricia Highsmith talks about her writing comics both on salary and on a freelance basis, including work on such characters as Marvel's notorious "Jap-Buster Johnson," kind of a xenophobic Punisher with access to tools of war. She also apparently worked for the various Nedor Comics imprints. I know that folks sometimes strain for writers that wrote for comic books that went on to actual writing careers of note -- there's a famous quote from one of those mean DC editors about how comics were a black hole from which no real writer escaped -- so it surprises me that I hadn't heard this one before. It sounds true: I would assume the biography was properly vetted, and the only part that reads as odd to me is that the job enabled her to travel, which is more of a modern construction than one of funnybook writers in the '40s. I can't find a specific credit for Highsmith, but that's Jap-Buster Johnson
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the Best Comics Of 2009 Meta-List is in, and David Mazzucchelli is apparently poised to hear the lamentation of the women. The top ten, in order: Asterios Polyp, Parker: The Hunter, George Sprott: 1894-1975, Pluto, A Drifting Life, Monsters, Detective Comics, Stitches, Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe and The Book of Genesis Illustrated.
* the retailer and industry pundit Brian Hibbs makes a great point here that the Diamond warehouse moving and subsequent dysfunction should be taken into account when trying to figure out why there were fewer comics sold in 2009. I'm slightly conflicted in that Diamond having problems seems to me more a problem of the system than a special circumstance, but it should be noted one way or the other.
* not comics: there's an article in the Times about Gilberto Sanchez, the man who uploaded the copy of the movie Wolverine that led to the studios proclaiming it could harm the movie's box office success. It's an interesting piece in that Sanchez never denies wrongdoing, despite the fact that some have done so on his behalf, and that he clearly knew what he was doing was wrong on some level just not the kind of wrong you end up having to fight legally. Also, the notion that was thrown out there initially that Sanchez was being crucified in place of whomever initially stole the print is apparently wrong, that investigation continues, and the notion that his not profiting by the upload would be an automatically strong defense to the point of trumping the charges is also fairly dismantled. The charges could still be dropped, but not for that reason.
* another year, another selection of GLAAD Media Award comics division nominees about as wide-ranging as the distance between the Amazing Adventures and the Amazing Spider-Man parts of a single longbox. Those books are doing a fine thing, though, so good luck all around.
* not comics: I've received a lot of odd e-mail over theyears but the subject header on a recent e-mail -- "Love Boat's Ted Lange Unlocks Magic Basketball in Who Shot Mamba?" -- may be an all-timer. I have no idea what they're trying to sell, but I nearly lost my mind just staring at that one.
* the cartoonist Gerry Alanguilan tweets that his Elmer will be published in a French-language edition.
* DC has 2010 plans for its 1978 Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali book, which is one hell of a cultural document and a not-bad 1970s Superman adventure besides. I always liked the way Neal Adams drew Muhammad Ali making his knockout prediction; my memory is that that was as effective a sequence as Adams ever designed, although I could be overstating things in my head. I've also always been convinced there's money to be had in a poster of Ali beating the pee out of Kal-El there.
* DC's big news of the last few weeks is that they'll be doing a Green Lantern-centered event series called Brightest Day to follow up its current, successful, Green Lantern-centered event series Blackest Night. There's always talk from devoted fans about "event fatigue," but if such fatigue exists it certainly hasn't shown up in the sales figures where it would have to: in comparison to a strategy focusing on regular series without an "event" to unite them. I guess there's an interesting sidenote or two to be had here that such a decision was made without a formal publisher at the company, and that this seems to be more of the same kind of thing despite the recent changes up top, which some thought/hoped/wished might bring a flurry of new publishing strategies not retrenchment into same-old, same-old.
* our own Bart Beaty was apparently one of those responsible for bringing a new English translation of Jean-Paul Gabilliet's Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Booksinto being.
* I was happy to hear from Oliver East that Darryl Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales, soon to be released in the UK by Blank Slate, has been purchased for publication in 2011 in North America by Bloomsbury. I like that work and Cunningham's work generally, so that's great news. I would also imagine it's good news for other smaller-press projects in the UK in that it might make it more possible to be considered for publication elsewhere in a similar fashion.
* finally, I am likely the last to tell you that work has begun on a third volume of Casanova. I have a hunch based on past statements that the anticipated continuation of the series may be in something other than the slimline format of fewer pages/reduced cost that the first two did, but there's plenty of time between now and when the book comes out to confirm.
For some reason I've completely spaced on posting a link to this article: comics numbers guru John Jackson Miller's attempt to take on the year 2009 in comics sales in one shot. He has since re-contextualized that article in terms of Diamond releasing more information, but I think that first link will do for most folks. I hope you'll read it in full and my reprinting his information instead of just talking about it would be unfair.
Basically, though, Miller sees an overall market drop of about two percent, which translates into approximately $10 million dollar lost. This would make the first drop since 2000 when the comics market began to rally after a long period of distributor wars, shop contraction from unreasonable highs, bankruptcy and general shooting of feet. But given the recession, it's not a bad drop at all.
Miller points out that the adjusted for inflation in median price the news is slightly worse. The flirtation with $4 comic meant prices went up and the market probably hasn't seen the fall out and order adjustments resulting from that price increase so they could be in a grace period right now regarding that move. I would suggest that a continuation of dismal unemployment figures and the exact nature of any economic upswing to be enjoyed in 2010, if one is to be enjoyed, will also likely have a significant impact on sales trends. One thing to remember is that on a region-to-region basis the DM is fragile in ways that other markets may not be. If a store is shuttered, it may be the only store in the region serving comics fans. This can make for a greater overall loss than, say, the shuttering of a local fast-food joint where the market has 17 such restaurants ready to pick up the remainder of that business, or even a bookstore or video store where a great percentage of fans served by such places have begun to opt for -- and become comfortable with -- on-line delivery options.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* the recent attack on cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in his home throws a new spotlight on Denmark's already-restrictive restrictive immigration policies. Switch some of the proper nouns around to USA-centered ones and you can maybe better see the kind of tough decision-making being bandied about. I disagree with the opening statement that the attack seemed inevitable; even Westergaard thought we were past that exact kind of thing.
* I know that some bloggers including Andrew Sullivan reprinted the cartoons right after the attack; I guess only high-profile European paper had the same kind of response, which was criticized in the expected corners.
* I don't agree at all with this article's thesis of increased militarism as some sort of dire, conspiracy-led goal here -- I think political operatives supporting an upswing in militarism are fairly open about it -- but the comparison between the failures in intelligence with the Westergaard attacker and the underpants bomber are kind of interesting.
* this polling data contains information on the too close to call, forthcoming elections in Denmark. You can guess what massive series of issues gets a personal call-out.
Analysts: December 2009 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 December 2009.
Although the articles at ICv2.com focus on the overall 14 percent drop in comics' and graphic novels' combined sales over December 2008, it seems to me there are plenty of reasons for this. The two big ones would seem to be 1) conservative ordering around the late-December skip week even if there were slightly more comics available the week before, and 2) the fact that December 2008 was a kind of a big month and November 2008 a kind of not-great month due to how certain high-profile comics were shipped right around then. Looking at the lists, retailers are still supporting the "Blackest Night" event series and graphic novel sales are still more diverse than serial comic book sales.
I personally think it worrisome that there's a drift downwards in books that sell over 50,000 copies, which would seem to support a theory -- or late-night, drunken blurting-out, as you will -- that a lot of effort is necessary to push certain comics into respectable sales territory and that maybe nothing is being done or can be done for the bulk of them. The comic book middle class is rotting away, in other words. One might suggest that the more poignant outcome of "event fatigue" isn't that people are going to get tired of events eventually (even though they likely will), but that people are only excited by events now and fatigued by everything else as a result.
Given how much of the audience is an audience that's been there for decades, this would make some logical sense, too. If you've been reading Green Lantern comics since 1978, you've likely never seen a major comics events with lots of dead bodies and different color rings flying around. But if your other comic over that same time period was, I don't know, X-Men, you've probably seen the Beast leave the team a few times even if this current time it was done really well. Will you be less interested in Green Lantern if Green Lantern were to go back to scooping up bank robbers with a giant green glove and more interested in X-Men if the Beast and his teammates become key players in stopping Thanos ending humanity through the employment of Kree-influenced Nazi Sleeper technology? I don't know, but it doesn't seem crazy to suggest you might. Telling someone that something's really, really important implies that some group of other things may be less important, and the typical mitigating factors -- new audiences being brought in, the ability of fans to stretch their wallet for a few months and do both their regular comics and these special ones -- are under assault as well. There are smarter people on this subject with different outlooks, though.
* a consortium (gaggle? murder? pride?) of critics nominate and name the best critical pieces about comics on-line, 2009. Among the critics cited are Robert Alter, Dirk Deppey, Jog, Tom Crippen and Andrew Rilestone. Bookmarkable links to actual pieces abound. Johanna Draper Carlson wonders after that list's lack of regional and gender diversity.
* that's a great photo of Dan Clowes, Rick Altergott and I assume Mort Todd. But the idea of a German TV pilot starring Dan Clowes as a teenage rock and roll superhero, alluded to in the comments section, well, that's too good to be true.
* Brian Fies reports on his cartoonist-in-residence gig at the Schulz museum.
* I tend not to track publishing rumors at the mainstream comic book houses, but Grant Morrison on Wonder Woman probably has to be tried sooner or later, no matter the artist involved. Morrison's more of a takes-his-toys-home-with-him playdate kid, but it's still worth a shot.
* I enjoyed this post from Marc Sobel on old comics he read in 2009. I never think about it this way, but certainly my reading certain runs of old comic books in any calendar year is as big an influence on my overall comics thinking as the way I encounter the new stuff.
1. Pluto, Naoki Urasawa
2. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli
3. Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke
4. Gogo Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto
5. Batman and Robin, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
6. Johnny Hiro, Fred Chao
7. Ganges #3, Kevin Huizenga
8. Driven by Lemons, Joshua Cotter
9. Stitches, David Small
10. Britten and Brülightly, Hannah Berry
The list includes explanations for each choice and links to reviews of some of the material, so I hope you'll check it out through that first link.
* finally, J. Caleb Mozzocco analyzes the recent wave of PR on behalf of the forthcoming Brightest Day event series, focusing on what he's able to extract about the rest of Blackest Night and wondering why this doesn't seem to matter to more people.
This Isn’t A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. But were I in a comic book shop tomorrow I would catch up with a month's worth of comic books.
*****
NOV090474 INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #22 $2.99 OCT090804 MUPPET SHOW #1 $2.99 SEP090682 DIE HARD YEAR ONE #4 $3.99 NOV083806 ALAN MOORE NEONOMICON HORNBOOK (MR) $1.99 NOV090225 DAYTRIPPER #2 (OF 10) (MR) $2.99
This is the bunch of comic books I'd want to hold in my hands if I were in a comic book shop this week, everything from a well-regarded superhero series to Howard Chaykin cop comics to something from Alan Moore I have no idea what it is.
NOV090159 MAGOG #5 $2.99
This, on the other hand, I have little to no desire to pick up. I've always had a hard time even wrapping my mind around a comic book called "Magog."
OCT090372 ELEPHANTMEN TP VOL 02 FATAL DISEASES $24.99
This is a pretty brick of sci-fi anthropomorphic comics, told in this kind of grinding, arch way that's appealing to me and maybe no one else I know.
JUL090950 TORPEDO HC VOL 01 $24.99
This is the likely book of the week, a new and pretty-looking series of books collecting one of the more stylish European comics genre efforts.
OCT090995 COMPLETE CHESTER GOULDS DICK TRACY HC VOL 09 $39.99
The other book of the week, I'm behind on the Dick Tracy books but they have to be in the series' sweet spot right now.
JUN090055 CREEPY ARCHIVES HC VOL 05 $49.95
I have no idea what's in this one, but if I were in a comic shop I'd take a second to find out.
*****
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, it's probably because I was tired from thanking the heavens my comic shop still exists.
The third Prix Artemisia has gone to Laureline Mattiussi for authorship of the book Ile au poulailler, a pirate story. The Prix Artemisia goes to a female creator from the women-in-comics advocacy group l'Association Artemisia. Past winners were Johanna Schipper and Lisa Mandel. Ile au poulailler is only the second published comic by Mattiussi. The prize is one of many either directly aligned with the forthcoming Angouleme Festival or that schedule themselves to benefit from the increased press focus on comics between mid-December and the festival itself, which traditionally runs at the end of January.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* the Danish-Somali man who broke into Danish Cartoons Controversy artist Kurt Westergaard with an axe, a knife, a series of shouted prayers and bad intentions was recently recruiting Swedes to join the radical group al-Shabaab, according to various reports to hit the wires this morning.
* it looks like the conservative opinion portion of the modern press -- at least I'm guessing that bow tie is not being worn with irony -- may pick up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's decision to quietly pull some Muhammad imagery from its personal collection. The initial articles on the matter have portrayed it a capitulation to fears regarding folks' reaction to such art, "jihad jitters," and I suspect the argument will eventually develop into accusations of protecting funding over values of free expression.
Your 2009 Gem Awards Nominees
Diamond Comics Distributors has opened up voting for the eligible comic shop owners on its Gem Awards, about as hardcore a Direct Market industry award as exists -- one of the values of the awards is that the winners and nominees enjoy an impact on the marketplace that includes moving some books/merchandise. The nominees are named by the company's categorical experts. I like these awards because a) I don't have to vote for them and b) some of the category names make me laugh. The winners will be named early next month.
Colin Upton Versus The Olympics The Vancouver-based cartoonist Colin Upton is doing a series of panels on his feelings towards the forthcoming Winter Olympics to be held in and around the city in February. Mr. Upton is not pleased by the city's single-minded focus, the expenditures on sports infrastructure, and the subtle shifting of priorities to reflect the huge money drain that can come with a modern Olympics. The panels start here and continue here. In part because of a down economy that won't allow for a ridiculous surge of last-minute ads even if a superstar performer were to emerge (NBC sold $100 million more ads during Michael Phelps mania at the last summer event to put those games in the black for the network), and in part because the numbers have gotten so huge as to not make sense anymore, several participants including the television networks are expected to lose money on next month's broadcasts.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the National Cartoonists Society has put out the call for divisional awards entries, which are given out at the NCS national meeting in May.
* not comics: that fine R. Fiore essay on The Simpsons from a couple of years back is up on their site now.
* there's a great photo here of Charles Schulz receiving an honorary doctorate.
* not comics: so I guess they're going to reboot the Spider-Man movie franchise, ending the number of Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire movies at three. I can't imagine this will end with their making a movie I'd be particularly excited to see in the theater, but I'm over 40 now which is only "Spider-Man age" in the funnybook store. I'm not sure I saw Spider-Man 2 or 3 in the theater, either, come to think of it. Also, with Mary Jane Watson in the overarching plot from the beginning there wasn't much of a satisfying ending I could foresee in continuing the first three movies. For me, there's about three-quarters of a good movie in the three Raimi efforts if you cut and splice, about 12-15 memorable scenes total. Two or three of those scenes approach the furious intensity of the Lee/Ditko version; one or two of those scenes approximate the warmer romance of Lee/Romita. I'm glad I got to see them. Still, I don't stop to watch any of the films for a few minutes when I see them on cable the way I will something like Speed Racer, Dark Knight or the LOTR movies. In my circle of friends the Spider-Man movies come up mostly when we have to remind one another James Franco was in them.
* not comics: by the way, Zac Efron should be remaking this movie, not those. With this actress in the Annette O'Toole role.
* there's something very sweet about this announcement that the webcomics creators are uniting to end human trafficking rather than doing their part by simply fighting it.
* every so often the writer Warren Ellis will ask creators to burrow into a comfortable position on his Whitechapel message board and take questions for a few days, a maneuver that seems both old-fashioned and forward-thinking. Plus you get to say "currently appearing" like they're working the lounge at the Flamingo. Currently appearing: Paul Duffield and Brandon Graham.
Your 2009 Prix ActuaBD/Conseil General des Jeunes de Charente Nominees
The French-language publishing news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com has announced the nominees for the Prix ActuaBD/Conseil General des Jeunes de Charente award to be given out during the Saturday of the Angouleme Festival. I believe this is the latest young persons' prize, for younger teens, nominated by jury of same. This year's nominees are:
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* the Somali man who went a-callin' on Danish Cartoons cartoonist Kurt Westergaard with an axe, a knife and a strong desire to introduce himself has had a terrorism charge added to the regular charges that come with attempting to hack someone to death in their home.
* Michael Cavna has the most succinct summation of events that led to Mark Fiore receiving death threats for a cartoon about the Tea Bag movement, I guess drawing on the historical example of Samuel Adams and the Whigs threatening to terrorize any pamphleteers on Governor Hutchinson's side back in December 1773. Oh wait, they didn't do that. I thought about making an eye for an eye joke about editorial cartoonists and Fox News anchors, but there's really nothing funny about scaring some poor guy trying to do his job because you've convinced yourself that not liking his job justifies bullying him. Any attempt to ameliorate the toxicity of such an action by debating, say, whether Fiore's cartoon was offensive or not, seems to me to run dangerously close to providing backhanded justification to the douchebags who pranced across what should be a hard line concerning American discourse.
* Tahawwur Rana's bail request is on hold again, as the case may switch judges. Rana is one of two men accused of plotting to kill Kurt Westergaard, Flemming Rose and any random employees of Jyllands-Posten that may get in the way of goals one or two. Attempts to portray Rana as more of an innocent dupe have been countered by FBI evidence that suggest he knew about this plot and others to be perpetrated by David Coleman Headley.
* the Metropolitan Museum of Art is getting rid of three early images of Muhammad in its collection. This is potentially a move along the same lines of Yale University Press' decision not to publish the Danish Cartoons in a book about the Danish Cartoons: sort of about an odd, delayed reaction to the violence caused by those cartoons; more about the need to fund the institution.
Archie, MoCCA and Credit: Dan Nadel Is One Hundred Percent Absolutely Correct Dan Nadel of PictureBox Inc. and Comics Comicswrote what seemed to be the most polite and generous negative post in history on the subject of chiding the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) for not following a bare minimum standard when it comes to providing credit on artworks featured at their new Archie show. Nadel is 100 percent right that a museum should embrace a standard of properly crediting work, that this is even more true in comics given the industry's history, that this is even more true for Archie Comics given their pathetic history regarding these issues, and that this is important despite the fact that everything about it puts a hand on our shoulder and giggles and declares it's not important.
Unfortunately, there's so much noise out there right now in comics land that this is exactly the kind of straightforward analysis that gets brushed past and nudged out of the picture. Additionally, some folks -- either for sport or for real, I can't tell -- took Nadel's admission of being conflicted as some sort of demented invitation to unleash the hounds of goofball Internet argumentation, circa 1995: Nadel is jealous, he's a hypocrite, he sucks worse, no one cares about the creators as much as they care about Archie and the other characters and to suggest otherwise is elitist posturing, and so on.
I would suggest that none of this changes the fact that Nadel's 100 percent right here. Credits are important and proper ones should be an expectation of any museum with an education mission. Nadel didn't say this to be mean, and I don't repeat it to pile on. There are different expectations for comics now than back when the big issues were things like whether or not this distributor said something rude to that company executive, or whether or not a 48-page story about She-Hulk was really a graphic novel. I think we're all going to fall short in some areas -- this site is daily testimony to that principle. Instead of justifying our screw-ups, or having others do it for us, it behooves us to simply correct them and move on. Nadel was nice enough to provide this opportunity to MoCCA, and I hope that the people with influence there will do a better job of taking him up on it, even if they don't say so in public.
CR Holiday Interview Series Wrap-Up
It was my great pleasure the last three weeks to interview some but certainly not all of my most valued writing-about-comics colleagues about some but certainly not all of the great books, series and single issues of the last 10 years. After a decade-long period where it seemed like discussing comics meant talking about everything but the work, I wanted to spend a few weeks of calendar changeover time focused in on the books themselves. I know I enjoyed myself, and I hope you did, too. I am grateful to all that drove traffic to this site during the series, and want to wish a special thank you to the interview participants. I hope that some of you out there found new writers to follow along with some comics to think about buying, or at least discovered a different way to look at some comics you own and some writers you thought you knew. -- Tom Spurgeon
* CR Holiday Interview One: Blankets
"It'd been years since I'd last read the book before I re-read it to prep for this conversation, and the thing that struck me immediately was just how openly, nakedly, ecstatically emotional it is! Right from the get-go, from the first scene with Craig and his little brother in bed, they horse around like cartoon animals, then their Dad shows up all angry and he's drawn as a hulking shadowed ogre, then little Phil gets locked in the cubbyhole and it's full of monsters and demons and spiders, it's like Hell, and he screams and cries and pleads and panics and ultimately despairs, and Craig is just devastated. That's the first scene! It's all peaks and valleys. Then it happens again, right away, with Craig getting bullied at school. And so on for 600 pages. In this re-read, it became obvious to me that what many people write off as cloying or melodramatic or emo was a conscious and utterly in-control choice on Thompson's part to pitch everything to the balcony, because that's reflective of how it felt in the moment." -- Sean T. Collins
* CR Holiday Interview Two: Multiforce
"Brinkman's skill lies in his phrasing style. He constructs pages out of connecting routines. So the narrative itself is built into the segments. The routines, like a giant head rolling down a hill, aren't front and center like in most comics. They're like backdrops for the gag cartoons that float around. There's a tension between the elements. It's an expansion on his earlier style which was much more about following a main character through a landscape. In contrast, the phrasing style of Multiforce is more like a diagram. It grows and grows and builds upon itself like a city; like a shattered mirror. That's the architecture as I see it. It 's the drawing. It's the scaling of panels in an organic manner that is pleasing to look at. There's evident vibrancy in the lines and forms. Those all build together in ways that I rarely see. Figures, landscapes, psychic space. Brinkman's offering a glimpse into a real world. A wide world." -- Frank Santoro
* CR Holiday Interview Three: Persepolis
"I also think that Satrapi's decision to stay with L'Asso is enormous. After Persepolis she could have published anywhere, and probably for a huge advance. I know what the advances are for some artists who have sold 1/20th what she sells, so I can imagine some people offered her dumptrucks filled with Euros. And she turned them down. She said, essentially, 'L'Asso believed in me when none of the rest of you would give me a look; that's why I believe in L'Asso.' That's really amazing when you think of it, that kind of loyalty. There are a lot of American cartoonists who have abandoned the publishers that gave them a break for a lot less." -- Bart Beaty
* CR Holiday Interview Four: So Many Splendid Sundays
"When I saw Little Nemo at this size, with such rich color work, it simply blew my mind. I got it: it was a revelation, a perfect marriage. I'd read that McCay was a magnificent artist, but Maresca's project was the first time I was able to actually see it. I could read the words: I could get lost in the drawings. I'm no art expert, but I think So Many Splendid Sundays does what art does. It doesn't just please the eye: it makes you look at it again and again, think about it, study it from other angles and approach it from different critical perspectives." -- Kristy Valenti
* CR Holiday Interview Five: Achewood
"It's elusive, isn't it? A lot of it is in the dialogue, in the characters having funny and distinctive voices, but it's more than that. I can't pin it down. The Wikipedia entry cracks me up with its efforts to explain the strips: 'Mr. Bear and Téodor are discussing Téodor's confusion over a drum machine. Mr. Bear informs Téodor that there is an instruction manual. However, Philippe is standing on it.' Oh, yeah, I see how that's funny. Thanks, Wikipedia! But why is it so funny? I don't really know. All I can offer is that it's funnier when characters talk without punctuation, and Onstad gets a lot of mileage out of that." -- Shaenon Garrity
* CR Holiday Interview Six: Powers
"I don't know that Bendis' strengths are best utilized in superhero team books, or orchestrating events, but I guess I'd prefer he do them than lots of other superhero comics writers. It's important that he keep doing Powers, or another creator-owned book where he can explore whatever he wants, pretty much unfiltered. If all he did was write Marvel Universe stuff, it's not that his impact isn't felt, but it's easier for those impacts to be minimized, certainly from the standpoint of new creators wiping away what you did, but also because I think you have readers of those books more interested in the characters than the creators or their styles. You know, those people who think it's important that at some point, Iron Man and Captain America have to be buddies again, on the same team of Avengers." -- Chris Allen
* CR Holiday Interview Seven: MW
"While MW has the same structure -- greedy men leave a boy profoundly damaged, and he seeks justice -- there are more layers to the people who created the problem in MW. They aren't innately horrible people so much as average men who made bad decisions out of self-interest. They deserve punishment for that initial act, but they aren't entirely defined by vice or cruelty. They're more rounded, and I think that's a presentation that adults would embrace. It's a more complex argument that normal people can make terrible choices in a moment of pressure or opportunity and that there can be devastating consequences that they couldn't foresee." -- David P. Welsh
* CR Holiday Interview Eight: ACME Novelty Library #19
"With Ware, the process always feels organic. The way he draws comics is simply his delivery system for expressing emotion. It really seems to be the only way he knows how to do it at this point, and it seems largely intuitive. It requires a leap from the reader to understand and appreciate his comics language, unlike the way in which Mazzucchelli made it simple for the ideal reader to get what he was doing right away. Ware's ability to express emotion on the page in such a way as to let the event reveal itself to the reader is one of the things that makes him, in my opinion, our greatest living cartoonist." -- Rob Clough
* CR Holiday Interview Nine: Louis Riel
"Aside from the sparseness I mentioned, I think Brown's great strength is in his character design: his people look like their personalities. John A. Macdonald's slyness and prevarications are embodied in his long Pinocchio nose, Riel's passionate individuality in his wild hair. Brown is also a master of understatement. One of the big problems with comics is that they are too blunt: melodrama is the default mode of comics. Brown consistently avoids the sort of ham-fisted emotionalism that comics are prone to. Brown's staging is also expert: there is a real clarity to how his people are placed, with the background furnishings also serving a narrative purpose." -- Jeet Heer
* CR Holiday Interview Ten: The Scott Pilgrim Series
"In many ways I see Scott Pilgrim as the dividing line between the new and upcoming generation of cartoonists and the established folks. It's a demarcation point, a push pin in the time line, same as Zap Comix was in the '60s and Love and Rockets was in the '80s. I'm not making an aesthetic comparison here, I'm saying in terms of a historical shift, Scott Pilgrim is something you can point to and say 'Here is when a new generation of cartoonists started drawing on influences outside of the traditional comics sphere of influence (EC, the undergrounds, Marvel/DC) and looking to other works, most notably manga.'" -- Chris Mautner
* CR Holiday Interview Eleven: In The Shadow Of No Towers
"In his introduction, he calls it 'a slow-motion diary of what I experienced while seeking provisional equanimity,' and that strikes me as accurate. More than any of his other comics, with the possible exception of 'Prisoner On The Hell Planet,' No Towers reads something like art-as-therapy. Much of it appears haphazardly put together, sloppily argued -- often crudely drawn -- and straining for a significance it's unable to articulate for readers. And yet, at least to someone who lived in New York in that era, it definitely evokes the emotional state of those years -- which were often enormously frustrating and confusing and panic-strewn. It doesn't appear to me he was able to shape a lot of the raw emotional subject matter into a cohesive whole, but the parts are there. Or at least some of them are." -- Tim Hodler
* CR Holiday Interview Twelve: The Elephant And Piggie Series
"You hardly see that kind of expressive, expansive physical humor in contemporary comic strips, it seems to me, because, among other reasons, there's just not room. Part of the effectiveness of Willems' humor and movement is that it occurs on a full page. Reduce it down to strip size and some of those motion lines would pretty much completely disappear. I could be wrong here I suppose; I don't read a ton of strip comics these days -- I guess the one's I'm most familiar with are Get Fuzzy and Dilbert. And I actually think both those strips are funny -- though Dilbert is remarkably ugly. But I certainly don't see much use of this kind of physical humor in either of them, nor in other strips I've occasionally glanced at. As another example, if Chris Onstad was a third of the cartoonist Mo Willems is, I might actually find Achewood tolerable." -- Noah Berlatksy
* CR Holiday Interview Thirteen: Ganges
"That's the thing about Ganges #3 that makes it a unique comic -- it cannot be told in another medium and work. How are you going to write that down, that aspect of Glenn chasing his own thoughts and memories about completely personal, mundane life aspects, without drawing the character swimming around in his own head? How are you going to find an actor that can deliver the dialog and voice over without layering in a personality that the audience has to come to either negative/positive terms with? That's a big part of why Glenn works so well for me as a protagonist -- he's not someone that I have bad or good feelings for, he's someone I just want to watch, to comprehend." -- Tucker Stone
* CR Holiday Interview Fourteen: The Invincible Iron Man: World's Most Wanted
"One aspect of superhero comics' right-now-ness is that anything that gets in the way of or even defers their readers' enjoyment can be dangerous (missed ship dates, splotchy coloring, difficult storytelling techniques...). If stories for 13-year-old boys don't involve particularly well-realized women characters, those 13-year-old boys may not notice or mind. But I'm not a 13-year-old boy any more -- the superhero comics reader of right now, I feel safe in saying, is generally not 13 any more and/or not a boy -- and if the superhero stories I get don't have greater-than-one-dimensional women in them, that's going to get in the way of my enjoying them, too. I like some dude-centric comics a lot (the buddy-road-trip series The Incredible Hercules, the father-and-son series Batman and Robin), but I'd get burned out by a steady diet of nothing else." -- Douglas Wolk
* CR Holiday Interview Fifteen: Death Note
"Death Note, you see, is a plot machine. If, as the old saying goes, manga is different from Western pop comics in that it's more about going somewhere than getting there, Death Note splits the difference by making virtually every chapter a small destination. It's a suspense comic that's just diabolically focused on plot points, dozens and dozens of them, everything swirling around Light the ambitious kid's efforts to evade capture while killing the shit out of criminals so as to reform the world, initially powered by new 'rules' regarding how to use the deadly notebook, every one of them providing fresh fodder for cat 'n mouse contortions, but later just sprawling all of this accumulated background over expanded scenarios. What if Light loses his memory for a while? What if other Shinigami show up with extra Death Notes? What if we fucking kill the series' most popular character right here and replace him with two characters representing (a) emotion and (b) full Vulcan? Oooh, how do we get out of this, dear readers??" -- Jog
* CR Holiday Interview Sixteen: BPRD
"There's lots BPRD does better than most genre comics. Stories are lean, the characters are always present. They build on a continuity that doesn't require you to buy 20 titles. Like the best horror, you're creeped out by atmosphere and the pathetic dehumanizing of life -- then the monster shows up. Davis has a subtle gift for pausing on faces, revealing characters in silent reflection and with perfect mood. Arcudi and Mignola load these characters with plenty of mystery and avenues for self-discovery, like Liz Sherman's future in the Black Goddess cycle or Hellboy's fragmentary knowledge of his future or Abe's of his past. Johann's existence, and the amoral territory in which his desire to feel again leads him, is funny and sad." -- Ben Schwartz
* CR Holiday Interview Seventeen: 2000 AD
"I think that when you're a teenager, you hit the point, for at least a few years, where you want to put away the superhero fight club comics. You start to see through them at the same time you discover kissing and your own music, not your parents'. I'm not suggesting 2000 AD is all that mature -- it can be shamelessly, stupidly, lovably adolescent -- but, as far as the North American comic experience goes, it doesn't really fit anywhere other than where it did in the '80s, when you could grow up from superhero fights to Zot! and Flaming Carrot and maybe Cerebus or Love & Rockets or Neat Stuff. I don't think that 'step-up' exists today. My son loves Shaman King, Naruto and all the other Shonen Jump titles, and when he steps back from comics in a few years, as he invariably will, I wonder whether anything will be around to captivate him as an older teenager." -- Grant Goggans
* CR Holiday Interview Eighteen: Boys
"To my mind, Boys remains one of the most perfect comic books ever published. It is a single object that encapsulates an entire sensibility in 24 pages. The front cover -- hand drawn but consciously designed; looking less like a comic and more like a zine of my dreams -- opens to a scrappy title page and Regé and Reidy's yearbook photos are printed on the inside covers. Twenty comic strips later and we're done. And then there is the advertisement in the back for other Highwater projects and a slew of Providence-based minis that people are only just catching up to. Circa 2000 was a good time for good times. It functions as a comic book should: an intimate shapshot of a time, place and sensibility." -- Dan Nadel
* CR Holiday Interview Nineteen: Fun Home
"I do think that the formalism of Fun Home was probably beneficial to the artist in allowing her to separate the life from the work. You have to disconnect from yourself when analyzing, to some degree. (As I'm doing in this interview. Postmodern!) The person that readers think they know is not the same as the actual person -- I can only imagine how an artist deals with literary criticism of an autobiography. It's hard enough seeing people criticize your work when it's not also your life. I should have mentioned above that as another benefit to being long-lived as a critic. You quit caring what people think of you after the second death threat. At least I did." -- Johanna Draper Carlson
* CR Holiday Interview Twenty: Kramers Ergot Vol. 4
"I was definitely looking for deeper and more challenging comics experiences at the time, and was perhaps confusing art that was giving me that kind of experience with art that intended to give me that kind of experience, if that makes any sense. I came around pretty quickly, though. Even Arcade and RAW included single images and illustrated prose as part of the mix. I can appreciate that approach more now than I did in 2003, and KE4 probably nudged me along somewhat. I think in the end I just had a positive response to the way the book was sequenced, as we discussed earlier: the way that single images and other 'breaks' made the thing read like a finely crafted mix-tape. I think that's a big reason why this book is built to last as a readable anthology, even if many of the artists have gone on to do other kinds of work." -- Bill Kartalopulous
The next CR Holiday Interview series begins December 12.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* whoa, awesome: Roger Sabin talks to Joe Sacco. (via)
* congratulations to Steven Grant on his long run of Permanent Damage columns at CBR, now coming to an end. I may not have always agreed with Steven, but I never failed to appreciate his unique perspective and hard-won insight on any number of industry issues. His was a very admirable run of columns across five or six "ages" of Internet publishing. I'll miss reading him regularly and wish him all the luck on future projects. Marc-Oliver Frisch ruminates.
* Richard Thompson has inaugurated a series of his illustrations at his Cul De Sac blog. One great thing about Thompson's blog is that he consistently remembers to include links to giant versions of the art so that you can check out the details of his drawings.
* the reviewer David Uzumeri makes note of some later-than-everyone-would-like announcements of creative team switches on DC books. I think this kind of thing is sort of a big issue when you take the long view, although right up close it doesn't look like a big deal. I hope I can write more about this at a future date, but I think the mainstream companies continue to do needless harm to themselves by surprisingly sloppy publishing habits, habits enabled by their control of the Direct Market.
* here's a list of 10 female characters from the comics that the author thinks are worth noting. The qualifiers kind of make me laugh. Saying you don't read enough manga to make a stab at processing those comics like the other comics doesn't seem polite at this late date as much as it seems like it should either disqualify you or compel you to re-name your list. Also, despite what the list implies, there are alt-comics characters that are female that aren't autobiographical figures: Viv and Angel from Love and Rockets are two great ones that come immediately to mind. (She does give Asterios Polyp's Ursula an honorable mention, so maybe she just doesn't like that many female characters from that corner of comics.) Anyway, I don't mean to grouse. Those features are supposed to be fun. I just don't understand why you can't name them what they are instead of naming them what they aren't and then explaining why you shouldn't have to. There's nothing wrong with a list of great female comics characters in mainstream comics, or mainstream and indies, or whatever reflects your reading interests.
* boy, the site of the currently-defunct Editor & Publisherlooks super-creepy as the article links time out and fall away.
* not comics: I think the best thing about using my morning time differently for a couple of weeks is that I got to see that hilarious Domino's Pizza commercial a bunch of times. It's like an ad campaign from a made-for-TV movie starring Jenna Elfman as a iconoclastic but adorable ad-maker who wants to find love. "Sorry for all the evenings over the last 30 years we screwed you over and took your money in return for something less than our best effort; we promise to make edible stuff from now on." I haven't had a slice of Domino's pizza in eight years, and now I'm mad at them. And why do they keep running commercials for that horrible-looking Harrison Ford disease movie during football games? What about that movie could possibly say "football" other than "I'd like to hit some of those actors in the head with a football?" As with all things unsatisfying in life, I blame the Fox Football Robot.
CR Holiday Interview #20—Bill Kartalopoulos On Kramers Ergot Vol. 4
It seems fitting to end this Holiday Interview Series with Bill Kartalopoulos. As a decade comes to a close where comics has brought on-line its most lively discussions about and general information in support of the art form and industry, it's worth noting that Kartalopoulos engineered both this decade's best on-line, magazine-style effort about comics (Indy Magazine), and its most useful support web site (EGON). Kartalopoulos has kept his hand in ever since, in a way that I think reflects a range of opportunities for those intrigued by comics, options that maybe weren't all the way there a decade ago. His number one choice for discussion was the fourth volume of Sammy Harkham's anthology Kramers Ergot. Harkham's series was perhaps the anthology most of its time during a decade filled to the brim with challenging, interesting and excellent anthologies, and is a fitting choice for final book profiled. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: Tell me what you've been up to comics-wise, Bill. Where can we find you right now? How engaged do you remain by the form?
BILL KARTALOPOULOS: I've been up to a lot. My major work activity is teaching at Parsons, where I teach a class called "Reading Graphic Novels" as well as "History of Illustration" and, beginning next semester, a new "Comics History" class. I review comics for Publishers Weekly and I periodically write about comics for Print Magazine, where I'm a contributing editor. The Print pieces tend to be 101-style articles on major subjects, based on book projects like the big Töpffer book, the Panter monograph, or this year's Kurtzman books.
Beyond that, though, I've recently been putting a lot of energy into a variety of public events about comics, functioning as a public speaker, moderator and organizer. I've been the programming coordinator for SPX since 2006, which is always a big project. I also planned the programming for -- and moderated panels at -- the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, which was amazing. This year I also organized the Comic Strip Serenade musical event with Mark Newgarden, presented a paper at ICAF, spoke and moderated panels at Fordham, Parsons, TCAF and the New York Center for Independent Publishing, and organized and moderated a three-panel speaker series for the CBLDF. I'm probably forgetting something.
Thinking about the work I've been doing lately, it seems like I'm constantly engaged with the form, but maybe in a different way than most of the critics you're talking to for this series. For the most part, with my teaching, the public events and the type of writing I often do, it seems that, to one extent or another, I'm engaging this work at a high level and then trying to effectively communicate about it to an audience that isn't necessarily as immersed in the subject. This has been really interesting for me, but is a little different than participating in a full-on critical discourse with fellow experts.
I should also add that in the past I've done some work for Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and I still get tagged in occasionally to lend a hand here and there, which is a privilege and a continuing education all by itself.
Plus I live in a crazy apartment with several cartoonists. Running into Austin English in the kitchen at 1:00 am and talking about comics keeps me pretty engaged. I actually maybe need to engage a little less.
SPURGEON: Can you describe how you encountered Kramers Ergot 4? What were your initial impressions? I remember people being surprised and excited about it, and my memory is that earlier issues of KE didn't really promise something like that issue.
KARTALOPOULOS: My context may have been a bit different than yours in that I hadn't read any previous issues of the anthology. I don't think I'd even heard of Kramers Ergot until one of the KE4 contributors began dropping some teasers on the Comics Journal's message board. I didn't immediately recognize the names of all of the contributors, so I was a little suspicious, to be honest (especially since the title of the book made no sense). I'm sure I was initially put off by the notion that I was maybe out of the loop on some of this stuff.
I really encountered the book, like many people did, at MoCCA 2003. The book changed the visual syntax of comics anthologies enough that it might be hard to imagine how different it looked at the time: the chunky, full-color, phone book-sized thing with the rainbow-colored crayon wrap-around cover, no title or issue number on the cover, multiple title pages -- and a cryptic table of contents without page numbers. All of this would just be provocative design by itself, but the book was clearly packed with a range of comics and art that included things I was comfortable with, things I was uncomfortable with, and things that I didn't really know how to categorize. I bought it, without much equivocation. It seemed like I had to if I really wanted to know what was going on in comics. (This motivation didn't necessarily make me Sammy's ideal reader.)
It's interesting that earlier in this series Sean T. Collins talked about Blankets as the obvious "book of the show" at that year's MoCCA festival and mentions Kramers as an important but secondary event. To me, it felt like they were two equivalent, parallel events. Top Shelf's bar at the front of the room took up more space than Sammy Harkham's table in the back corner, and they probably sold more books, too. But it was the difference between a long line of people waiting to pick up a much-anticipated, highly-touted book from an established publisher, and a small mob trying to get their hands on a lesser-known, mysterious item that seemed to promise light and heat. It's a difference of sensibility, and if one "event" was technically bigger, I think the quality of the enthusiasm over Kramers more than matched the quantity of enthusiasm over Blankets.
Having said all that, I should also note that I had already read Blankets, which I'd received as a review copy some months prior to the book's publication date. I had been looking forward to Blankets but was disappointed by the book and eventually wrote a negative review. Maybe if I hadn't gotten that review copy I would have spent my money on Blankets instead. But the way things worked out, it may be that I was absolutely ready for something else to grab me that summer.
SPURGEON: Am I right in remembering KE4 as a continuation in a sense of some of the things Jordan Crane had been doing with NON? How do you find a context for KE4, where do you place it in terms of what was swirling around the art form at the time?
KARTALOPOULOS: It's true in retrospect that Non #5 was a direct, immediate precedent both in terms of the avant-garde comics anthology-as-art-object and in terms of overlapping aesthetics, but I hadn't seen Non #5 at the time so I wasn't thinking about it at all if I was trying to contextualize KE4 in 2003. My perspective is that of someone who hadn't been following most of the artists in KE4 very closely up to that point.
From my position, KE4's biggest impact in comics may have been in successfully asserting the value of comics and artwork that either came from or had stylistic sympathy with the work produced by artists associated with Fort Thunder and Paper Rodeo. I suspect this is an association that probably gets laid at Sammy's feet too much, as if Kramers is a high-gloss extension of Paper Rodeo or Monster, and it's definitely not that. But I don't think you can undersell that component of KE4's impact in 2003.
At the time the Fort Thunder/Paper Rodeo artists and their peers really seemed like the most aggressively different group of artists in comics, representing a real break from the kind of traditional craft values and methods of production that still held sway in alternative comics. It seemed like everyone knew about this stuff, but it wasn't widely embraced. Tom Devlin's Highwater Books seemed to be the primary exponent for this kind of work up to that point (although that's not all that Tom was doing). Many of the artists I'm thinking about had probably been most widely seen in the two issues of the SPX anthology that Tom co-edited in 2000 and 2001. That was a hugely important thing that Tom did, and KE4 seemed to take everything a crucial step further by presenting this work in a more optimal format and within a more congenial context.
To be fair, Tom was up to more or less the same thing himself, but he was sporadically publishing well-conceived individual books in a relatively low-key way. Teratoid Heights came out around the same time as KE4, and I think KE4 did benefit from previous efforts to get some of this work out there. A major difference is that KE4, as an anthology, positioned these particular artists as pillars of an expanding landscape that also included many other very different younger artists like John Hankiewicz or Dave Kiersh who may have been -- up until then -- generally regarded as somehow marginal or aspiring, but who actually already deserved attention on their own terms. KE4 was a bit less connected than Non was to the pool of artists who had already made inroads among the SPX crowd, but at the same time very few of the artists in Kramers were totally unknown to someone (not me) who was paying close attention to mini-comics. So, depending on one's prior reading, KE4 may have ultimately been more shocking in its valuations and presentation than its "discoveries," and the book's overall statement may have actually been more generational than aesthetic. But the total effect was such a revelation for so many readers at the time that Kramers definitively broadened the range of "acceptable" aesthetics within comics while endorsing a rising generation of artists.
SPURGEON: I wanted to ask you about a couple of obvious surface elements that I nonetheless thought important to how KE4 was received. One was its size -- there's an argument to be made that it gained attention by sheer volume -- and the other is the beautiful cover by Mat Brinkman. What does it say about either one that they had a significant impact on how the book was received, the degree to which some folks paid serious attention. It seems like several times during the decade there have been significant, serious works of art that have led their PR with a page count or a size in terms of overall dimensions. Why does comics process works in that way?
KARTALOPOULOS: Why does comics process works in that way? I think for a lot of different reasons, including the collector mentality, a history of Western narratives about artists and masterpieces, a marketplace that rewards novelty, and good old fashioned Freudian psychology, to name a few. Obviously we're also living in a time that's been both privileged and deformed by the rise of the graphic novel format. It's great that you can find this stuff in bookstores, but the book trade and associated publicity and media networks (not to mention many readers) have swallowed this teleological fallacy that long = serious, so I guess in some cases it's presumed that longer = seriouser.
As for Kramers, sure, the size made a statement. A huge anthology of work by relatively lesser-known artists is asking for serious engagement. It's kind of hard to separate size from production values, though. If the book had been that many pages but black and white, in standard comic book dimensions, and on newsprint, it wouldn't have been the same thing exactly. This book has heavy, uncoated paper stock, generous dimensions, and full color throughout. The lush format makes an implicit statement about the quality of the artists' work. Many of those artists hadn't been able to publish in color before, and they all showed that they were up to it. Today, the book still looks great and has a nice tactile quality. As an object, this may still be the best looking volume in the series. And the cover is, to me, iconic of the final and total emergence of a certain aesthetic "school" within comics (even if it had already gained traction in other fields).
SPURGEON: I have questions about some of the comics included, but I also wanted to give you the chance to talk about whatever offerings you think particularly striking or significant or important. What works stand out for you know some six years later? Why?
KARTALOPOULOS: In general, what stands out to me now is how little of the Fort Thunder/Paper Rodeo/low-fi-gestural-maximalist kind of work is actually present in this volume. I don't think this undercuts what I was saying earlier about this book's position as a breakthrough presentation of that kind of material, but there's quite a range of work in here.
In 2003 my #1 clip-and-save piece was C.F.'s story. That, to me, seemed like the piece most emblematic of what this anthology uniquely brought to the fore. At the time it seemed like something from another planet. Now that I've become more habituated to Christopher's work it simply strikes me as a very strong, self-contained, more superficially gag-oriented short piece from an artist whose work I usually look forward to. It's nice to re-encounter pieces by artists whose work I've become more familiar with in the intervening years, like John Hankiewicz and Anders Nilsen. It's nice to see artists whose work we haven't seen much of lately, including Tobias Schalken and Geneviève Castrée. It's also nice to see artists like Renée French and Dave Kiersh in the mix, who are still making art but seem to be working at a slight remove these days. Sammy's "Poor Sailor" is very straightforward but still affecting. In short, stripped of the expectation of having to be "the most cutting edge comics on the planet, ca. 2003" and featuring work by many artists who have gone on to produce a lot more work, I'm pleased to say that KE4 still stands as a collection of totally readable, enjoyable, artful comics.
SPURGEON: The one thing I actually remember more about any individual works in there is that it was a very satisfying read overall, it's not a book I dive into for specific gems but one I have re-read like I re-read a lot of single-author graphic novels. Do you agree with that assessment of its general readability? Is there a skill to that, is there something an anthology editor has to do?
KARTALOPOULOS: I understand what you're saying in that there might not necessarily be many individual pieces in this volume that one might single out as all-time-favorites, although there are plenty of perfectly good, representative pieces by great artists in here. I agree that it's quite readable. The work is consistently strong, it's quite diverse, but it somehow seems to belong together. I know that any good anthology editor spends a lot of time sequencing work, and this book is well paced throughout. If Sammy didn't pioneer the use of colored pages and single images as sequencing devices within comics anthologies, he certainly entered these techniques into the current design lexicon through their effective use here.
SPURGEON: The germ of Dave Lasky and Frank Young's forthcoming Carter Family project was in those pages… what did you think of that work, which doesn't seem to have a lot of similar work beside it in that anthology? How important is it that anthologies provide a home for cartoonists like Dave Lasky that seem to have only a minimal amount of publishing momentum on their own?
KARTALOPOULOS: I thought that piece was strong, and I think it holds up. I'm looking forward to seeing the forthcoming graphic novel. Certainly for me, browsing the book at MoCCA, Lasky's piece probably functioned in a way that it probably functioned for many people: it gave me some confidence that there'd be some accessibly attractive, narratively-driven work that I could spend some time with even if the more graphics-heavy pages didn't end up winning me over. I don't think this was calculated; I think Sammy was articulating his own range of interests as an editor and cartoonist ("Poor Sailor" may be the most "similar" work in the book). His range of interests created a range of access points for different readers.
SPURGEON: Another one I wanted to ask about is Souther Salazar's piece, "Please Don't Give Up." I was very much a proponent of Salazar's comics pieces -- it looks like he's gone in a different direction to significant return and satisfaction and god bless him -- and I wondered how you felt about that piece and Salazar's comics stuff generally.
KARTALOPOULOS: At the time this hit my "not comics" button a bit, but I was also undeniably moved by this piece. The facsimile reproduction of Souther's hand-made book seemed highly unusual at the time, and now just seems like part of the vocabulary in constructing books like this.
SPURGEON: One thing I remember about how this book was received is that some people perturbed at the number of works that were just series of visuals, not strictly comics as much as art work, flat out. It's something I've heard again with KE7. Does the number of pieces of visual art included in an anthology like this one change the way you feel about it as comics, or is this just comics' very conservative side being brought to bear?
KARTALOPOULOS: I'll admit to having had some of that response. I was definitely looking for deeper and more challenging comics experiences at the time, and was perhaps confusing art that was giving me that kind of experience with art that intended to give me that kind of experience, if that makes any sense. I came around pretty quickly, though. Even Arcade and RAW included single images and illustrated prose as part of the mix. I can appreciate that approach more now than I did in 2003, and KE4 probably nudged me along somewhat. I think in the end I just had a positive response to the way the book was sequenced, as we discussed earlier: the way that single images and other "breaks" made the thing read like a finely crafted mix-tape. I think that's a big reason why this book is built to last as a readable anthology, even if many of the artists have gone on to do other kinds of work.
Beyond that, though, I think Sammy was clearly far-sighted in seeing connections between newer comics and an alternative gallery world that has embraced narrative art and other work on paper in a big way. It's telling that Kramers did attract criticism at the time for including other kinds of art (although I think The Ganzfeld and Blab were already mixing comics and graphics). It seems so normal now.
SPURGEON: As you and I are having this conversation, Jeet Heer just posted a piece at Comics Comics on anthology as autobiography. What does KE4 -- Kramers Ergot generally, even -- say about Sammy Harkham other than the fact that he knows a lot of good cartoonists?
KARTALOPOULOS: Most immediately, KE4 reveals Sammy to have been very perceptive about other people's work. In 2003, many of those artists were self-publishing. Today, most of them have books with publishers. I think Sammy observed that these artists were operating at a level of fluency that demanded attention, he recognized that this work was being neglected by publishers, and he wanted to present this work in the best possible way, both in terms of production values and in terms of a coherent shared context. Sammy is an ambitious young cartoonist who is also passionate about the work of his peers.
SPURGEON: You called this an obvious important book of the decade in an e-mail. How and where do you feel KE4 had an influence on comics?
KARTALOPOULOS: I think it had a variety of influences. I think it helped open up existing publishers to the possibility that there was a generation (or two) of artists younger than Dan Clowes and Ivan Brunetti who were making valid work, even if that work didn't necessarily adhere to the same kinds of craft values or stylistic conventions as the previous couple of generations of independent comics. I recall thinking that Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly both started publishing more work by younger artists after Kramers made a sensation.
I think Kramers was also a strong contributing factor, as I mentioned before, in cementing the legitimacy of a post-Panter/Providence-influenced style of art-making within comics. Although there were other precedents, including Tom and Jordan's publishing efforts, I think the success of Kramers helped create a context for some of the projects PictureBox and Buenaventura Press eventually took on (not to detract at all from the vision, hard work, risk, and creativity Dan and Alvin bring to bear in order to conceive and execute these projects).
In 2003 it would have been impossible to predict that the editor-publisher of Highwater Books would become the creative director of Drawn and Quarterly. I think Tom inspired Sammy to some extent, and I think Sammy's success helped inspire publishers like Drawn and Quarterly to reconsider their aesthetic range, so that's potentially an interesting cycle to consider. I know Kramers as a series has inspired many young artists individually. And, as I mentioned previously, I think it's affected the way this generation of artists and publishers think about the possibilities of format and design in comics. That's a lot of influence.
SPURGEON: Will there continue to be anthologies in the kind of central role they played in this decade and in past decades? Will on-line publishing have a similar interest in publishing. Will there be anthologies on this interview series if we do one ten years from now?
KARTALOPOULOS: I'm sure online publishing will continue to assume many traditional functions across the board. I think anthologies like Kramers will continue to exist for at least the next ten years, as long as there are artists who are interested in producing short form comics and who are simultaneously interested in the particular aesthetic qualities of work printed on paper. The only question is whether or not the marketplace will allow this material to get printed and distributed in sufficient quantity that it might find a broader audience, or if these kinds of books will be constrained to essentially boutique publishing that serves a rather narrow, rarified audience. It's just a question of how many people will continue to care about these distinctions and what kind of system they can support.
The other thing anthologies have going for them is editorial integrity. This is something magazines are rapidly abdicating. There's something to be said for the thought-through qualities of an "issue" (whether it's periodical or book-length) as a coherent editorial unit that's been purposefully composed by a smart editor. Magazines lose this entirely when they become magically updating newspaper pages on a computer screen. Kramers Ergot 4 definitely had that kind of unity. It's hard to point to many stories in that issue as being emblematic of KE4 in particular or the ideas that Kramers seems to represent for people, but this issue as a whole, appearing when and how it did, radiated a new kind of integrity. Sammy prodded a bunch of scattered artists to produce work that, assembled together, seemed to signal some new movement in comics. These artists were all putting out work before Kramers Ergot 4 was published, but they were under-recognized. A good editor concentrated their energies between two covers and changed contemporary comics.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
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CR Holiday Interview #19—Johanna Draper Carlson On Fun Home
Johanna Draper Carlson has been reviewing comics on-line through a devoted web site (and a billion other places) for a little more than ten years now, and was on Usenet reviewing comics for seven years before that. If 80 percent of any life's endeavor is showing up, Johanna was pulling high marks in comics reviewing long before anyone else in this series, myself included, thought about joining class. One thing I find fascinating about Johanna's outlook on comics is she maintains a strong sense of comics as objects of consumption. After she's rapped some company in the nose with a rolled-up product representing a less than stellar effort, it's hard not to refer to her as the North American comic book industry's leading consumer's advocate as well as one of its more popular reviewers. One book on her list was Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: Johanna, you and I were recently cited in someone's web post as examples of reviewers who have been around for years and years. I think it was meant in complimentary fashion. Do you feel like you've become a better writer over the last 10 years; do you feel your perspective is an advantage?
JOHANNA DRAPER CARLSON: That mention, of being part of the "old school," did give me a moment or two of wondering if my time had passed and I should find something else to do. I had a similar moment at SPX earlier this year, when I was meeting cartoonists who weren't alive when I was in high school (and who'd never heard of Dorothy Parker). But I decided to make a virtue of it. I've been reviewing online for 17 years now, and yes, that gives me perspective that I, at least, think is valuable. If nothing else, I recognize when the hot new thing is really just like last decade's hot new thing. Memory is often lacking in comics. Comes from being a young person's game, and they tend to look forward, not back.
My writing... I'm the wrong person to ask about that. I started out as a math geek, and I've never known as much about writing as a skill as I would have liked. I couldn't tell you what my style was, for example (unless "brusque" counts). The most formative influence on my writing was surviving the Usenet crucible as a female superhero fan, back in the day. It eventually made me fearless. I learned how to back up my opinions and be confident in what I was saying; if I'm going to take a stand, I'm going to try and make it bulletproof. (However, it also taught me a lot of nasty rhetorical tricks.)
What, was I supposed to say "nah, all this time writing about comics makes me a jaded burnout who should give it all up"? Seriously, I have tried to keep my interest fresh and enthusiasm high by focusing on what entertains me. If I hadn't started reading manga five years ago, I might have given up by now, for instance. But it's still amazing to me that I'm living in the future we only dreamed of back in early '90s fandom: thick comics in bookstores, material for more than one gender, diversity of subject matter. Comics are finally a medium, not just a genre.
SPURGEON: How familiar were you with Alison Bechdel before you read Fun Home? Were you a reader of Dykes To Watch Out For? That's a work that's run for a very long time just a slight bit under the mainstream radar. What was -- what is -- your general appraisal of Dykes?
DRAPER CARLSON: I started following Dykes in book format, I dunno, five or six books into the series, maybe? I never saw it as a strip, but as a longer-form soap opera. I only knew that world observationally, so part of the appeal might have been that it felt like an entertaining anthropological study. I would have been reading it after grad school, so Mo's philosophical drive to be ethically pure and endlessly debate the questions of the day reminded me of some of my fellow students. Like the one whose goal was to have more letters after her name than were in it.
I loved the way that the series is such an effective popular history, read over the decades. Bechdel structured the work so she could capture current hot-button issues -- some of which were precognitive, some of which, read now, are just big question marks -- but also how women change and grow as they form families and age. The characters really do feel like old friends after a while.
Plus, it was neat for me to read a comic book with so many women in it. I grew up firmly in the superhero tradition, and although one of my reading phases coincided with the mid-80s DC diversity push (my favorites were Atari Force, Blue Devil and Captain Carrot), I basically had a choice of Wonder Woman, Lois Lane or Supergirl, and only one of them was human. (Oh, and the original Huntress, Batman's daughter. Who was cool and all, but she was still defined by her relationship to a male hero and ran around in thigh-high spike-heel boots.) With all the various Dykes, none of them had to be The Woman. Or more often, The Girl.
I have a feeling I should be talking more about the work than me here, but I don't remember many specifics about reading the Dykes books, just enjoying them enough to keep seeking out additional books.
SPURGEON:Fun Home is memoir, and it's been a huge decade for memoirs and memoir-informed fiction, both in comics (Persepolis, The Quitter) and in prose fiction (Running With Scissors, The Year Of Magical Thinking). What is your general attitude towards memoir? What do you think accounts for its roar of popularity through the decade? Is it just a voyeuristic impulse? Does comics have any particular advantages do you think when it comes to being a home for memoir?
DRAPER CARLSON: Taking these together: in comics, I find memoir overplayed. Everyone thinks that their life is interesting, but a lot of autobiography winds up very similar, especially if we're talking "Portrait of the Comic Artist as a Young Man." I had a rule there for a while that I wouldn't discuss comics about making comics, because everyone eventually falls back to doing that when they can't think of anything better, and few people had anything new to say on the subject.
I just reread Lucy Knisley and Erika Moen's Drawn to You, where they discuss how autobio is easy, and writing fiction is harder. I think that tends to be correct, because fiction has to make sense, be believable and yet not too good to be true. Even doing memoir, few people have the perspective to know how to shape incidents from their lives. If a story's too familiar, than what's the point of my reading it? If it's too outre, it tends to descend to shock value. Maybe, though, others enjoy reading about people just like them. That leads me to speculation on how many comic fans love discovering that there are lots of people like them out there, and how I never had that validation, because even when I joined fandom, there weren't a lot of other people like me. But that conversation rarely turns out well. It sounds like I'm blaming others for fitting in. I'm not. I got plenty of benefit from being unique.
Memoir can also make me uncomfortable. I read Ariel Schrag's books, but when we were both at the same convention, I didn't want to meet her, because I felt like I knew much too much about her and yet I didn't know her at all. It's misleading. It also risks being egotistical, or a way to settle scores. I suppose it's perfectly suited to the conflict of the writer, though -- many of them crave validation, which is why they write, yet they're full of themselves enough to think that their words and thoughts deserve to be read by thousands.
Getting back to the cultural question, people want to be famous. And they think that nowadays, you don't have to do anything or work hard to be famous -- you just have to be lucky and want it bad enough. Maybe readers think that memoir is the one story everyone can tell. That drive, though, has turned our culture into one driven by tabloid stories and reality TV shows, many of which are repulsive in concept, let alone in execution. We're gorging ourselves on "true" stories that tell us nothing. We crave the real, as though knowing that a story is "true" makes it more important. We've been lied to enough by so many organizations that should be trustworthy that we distrust everything.
Now I'm rambling. Memoir: can be good, but like anything else, much of it can be crap. Comics tends to attract the subject because an artist has to be comfortable being alone with a blank page for an awful lot of time and thus better be comfortable with themselves.
SPURGEON: Do you have any sense why Bechdel moved to straight-up autobiography for Fun Home? Certainly a storyline like that one could have been folded into Dykes, or into another autobiographically-informed story. Would it have been as effective a work that way? Could it have been anywhere close to the same work?
DRAPER CARLSON: I would hesitate to guess at why she made the decisions she did. I don't think the story would have worked in the Dykes format, first for the obvious reason that it required more depth and space than you get in one-page weekly strips, but more significantly because Dykes looked forward, not back. It was about who the characters were and who they wanted to be -- often defined by relationships and connections -- not how they came to be that way.
It requires a mature mind to think of your parents as adults in their own right.
SPURGEON: In your review of Fun Home, you make this really interesting point about the character's use of classical allusions and constructions and posit they suggest that on a certain level Bechdel was masking the reality of her relationship with her father. Is that something that you still feel was driving that part of the book. That seems like a very delicate tension, this impulse to dive into that relationship via an autobiography but at the same time these attempts to hinder the discovery -- is that something you still feel strongly about with that book?
DRAPER CARLSON: I said that? I should probably reread that review. Thank you for the compliment, by the way.
I do think that the formalism of Fun Home was probably beneficial to the artist in allowing her to separate the life from the work. You have to disconnect from yourself when analyzing, to some degree. (As I'm doing in this interview. Postmodern!) The person that readers think they know is not the same as the actual person -- I can only imagine how an artist deals with literary criticism of an autobiography. It's hard enough seeing people criticize your work when it's not also your life.
I should have mentioned above that as another benefit to being long-lived as a critic. You quit caring what people think of you after the second death threat. At least I did.
SPURGEON: When I talk to people who thought a great deal of Fun Home, one thing they praise is its measured precision, that it was an extremely thought-out, well-planned, meticulously executed book. Bechdel is well-known for her research and obtaining photo reference even when she has to do it herself: did you react to the level of craft involved? Do you think that kind of attention shaped the book in a certain way?
DRAPER CARLSON: Most definitely. I was thrilled by Fun Home receiving the praise it did, and I think the formalism made it possible. When it was named a Time book of the year -- not comic book, not graphic novel, just book -- it was such a breakthrough. (That it was a woman's work that achieved that pinnacle made me even happier.) Its quality was unassailable. It was clearly a comic, clearly something that had to be told that way, but the precise execution and non-stylized art also made it approachable by readers unfamiliar with the format.
SPURGEON: One thing I wanted to press you on also from your original review is that you didn't quite get into what you found specifically, personally affecting in the work. What hit you about Fun Home, Johanna? Where did you connect to it?
DRAPER CARLSON: You're assuming that personal connection is necessary or desirable, aren't you? I don't look for books that emotionally wallop me. You know, you hear people say sometimes, "why can't you just stop thinking and enjoy it?" I enjoy the thinking. I like works that give me something to analyze, that work on multiple levels. Plus, as I get older and have a harder time remembering things -- along the lines of "When did I have that job? Wow, it was 10 years ago, not 6. Where does the time go?" -- I envy someone who can capture their history in such detail.
SPURGEON:Fun Home came out from Houghton Mifflin, and thus it falls into one of the decade's great trends: the publication of graphic novels by major prose publishing houses. As someone who sees a lot of these works, do you feel it's been an overall artistic good? Has the involvement of the big houses lived up to the promise of the same that existed maybe post-Maus?
DRAPER CARLSON: Mmm... for critics, it's been a plus, since "real" publishers know how to handle review copies and tend not to play stupid, petty games about getting coverage. I have sometimes wondered what criteria they're using for selection of material, though. And I fear that big houses will treat this as a trend. I hear rumors that some of their praised, well-respected publications don't sell, and I wonder how 2012 is going to look, because at that point, they'll have worked through their early plans and need to make decisions.
But that's my cynical side, which I exercise too often. Artistically, yes, it's wonderful to see more diverse material being selected and available. And I appreciate the formats, too. Although small art comic publishers have the most beautiful books as objects, overall, the quality is so nice from the "real" publishers.
Speaking "post-Maus" ... you're referring to the problem we had back in the 80s, right, when people found Maus and then had nothing to read next that was of that high quality? Yes, that's been solved, thankfully. If you like X, try Y next is much easier to play these days.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
The top comics-related news stories from December 19 to January 8, 2009:
1. Danish cartoons cartoonist Kurt Westergaard attacked in his home while babysitting. He survives the attack in a panic room. The suspect, a 28-year-old Somali man, pleads not guilty.
2. As expected, Marvel files to invalidate the Kirby Family filings for ownership rights.
Quote Of The Last Three Weeks
"Gary's Boudoir of course needs no explanation; Kim's office is called the kennel because he shares his office with Ludwig, the Fanta dachshund." -- Eric Reynolds
*****
today's cover is from the 1940s-1950s mainstream comics publisher Avon
Are You On CR’s Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
Dan Nadel is the driving force behind Picturebox, Inc. and the author of several significant pieces of writing about comics including but not limited to Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, whose sequel is set to appear this year. He agreed to discuss a comics work in this series after I did a lot of begging. One of his choices was the Ron Regé Jr/Joan Reidy effort Boys, a straight-up single-issue comic book that came out from the now-defunct and much-missed Highwater Books at the beginning of the most recent ten-year period. Boys featured a series of single-page stories about Reidy's teenage encounters with sex and lust, as told in straightforward fashion by Regé. It's a great comic book, one burned into my memory, and I couldn't resist making that one the choice for our discussion. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON:Boys came out in 2000. How did you encounter the comic? Were you aware of Ron Regé before that book came out, had you picked up Dum Dum Posse Reader or any of the minis?
DAN NADEL: I think I first saw Boys at Jim Hanley's Universe in New York. I remembered Ron's work from a mini comic I'd ordered from Spit and a Half -- I think -- called Andy Remembers. But Boys was something else entirely. You couldn't really miss it when browsing the racks.
SPURGEON: For that matter, I guess we should talk about why you chose Boys rather than Against Pain, where -- I believe -- the former work was later collected, along with a lot of other very good comics. Is there something about how Boys functioned as a comic book that's specifically appealing to you?
NADEL: To my mind, Boys remains one of the most perfect comic books ever published. It is a single object that encapsulates an entire sensibility in 24 pages. The front cover -- hand drawn but consciously designed; looking less like a comic and more like a zine of my dreams -- opens to a scrappy title page and Regé and Reidy's yearbook photos are printed on the inside covers. Twenty comic strips later and we're done. And then there is the advertisement in the back for other Highwater projects and a slew of Providence-based minis that people are only just catching up to. Circa 2000 was a good time for good times. It functions as a comic book should: an intimate shapshot of a time, place and sensibility.
SPURGEON: Building on that a bit, I can't imagine a comic book like this coming out now, at least not as a comic book.
NADEL: Me neither. It's impossible to imagine, actually.
SPURGEON: That's one of the great trends of comics over the last ten years, really, this snuffing out one by one of the traditional comic book as a place to find this kind of work. Beyond the nostalgia involved, do you have regrets that this has happened? Do you think that's a format with inherent appeal, or a specific way of functioning in a market, or is it more of an accident we shouldn't worry after?
NADEL: Comic books force brevity. 100 of these strips would have killed it. 50 of these strips would have killed it. Twenty was the perfect amount -- each is potent, each builds on the other. And the singularity of it -- the fact that this was all there was to read of this body of work -- all contained in this object gave it an incredible power. Every last bit of the comic works towards the reader focusing on these few comic pages. It doesn't work as well in Against Pain simply because it becomes one body of work among many. As a comic book it is all you can focus on, and lends it an intimacy that no other format is capable of.
SPURGEON: Regé's art in Boys is crisp to the point of giving the reader paper cuts. How do you feel about this work in the context of his entire career? My flash reaction is that the art was more appealing than it was wholly satisfying in terms of the skill displayed, and that he's done better work before and since even if I can understand why some people might prefer the work here. But that's memory, and not exactly well-informed memory, either. What's your sense of the art in Boys? Is Regé generally under=appreciated?
NADEL: I'll just go in for hyperbole here: Ron's work was a revelation for me. His web of lines, his flatness, his use of the comics page as a place for raw emotion without "realist" hysteria remains important. It seemed to me very skillful cartooning and while, yes, not as polished as his later work, it was very immediate. There's a kind of vibration in those lines -- an artist finding his distinct voice for the first time. Ron might be a bit under-appreciated, but, then, it can be difficult work, and while you and I might align it with "classic" cartooning, most people can't see the through-line to Schulz. So... yes, in the sense that I think Ron is one of our real contemporary greats, yes, I suppose he is under-appreciated.
SPURGEON: There's something very satisfying about Boys for the fact that it's multiple, interconnected pieces. All of the beginning and ends seem to give it a heft that I'm not sure would exist in a 20-page narrative. Do you feel the work comes together, coheres? How do you think it works as a single work as opposed to a series of works?
NADEL: I think it works best as compilation of one-page comics, yes. The individual pages work on their own in anthologies, but really it's the feeling of reading a series of discreet moments in time that really gives it its power. After each page you understand a bit more about Joan's life and a bit more about Ron's visual language, so by the end these insights have accumulated into a complete worldview.
SPURGEON:Frank Santoro wrote a blog post in 2008 about the comic. He notes an underlying darkness, and I wondered if that was your impression as well. Are there other tensions you see in the comic?
NADEL: The tension between the "cuteness" of Ron's drawing and the melancholy of Reidy's prose is the primary tension for me. I don't know if I'd call it dark, but it's certainly not "happy." But here's the thing about Boys: It's sexy. Here were these explicit stories being told by a woman in the way that you imagine -- or fear -- a woman recounting your sexual experience, and drawn in this counter-intuitive way.
SPURGEON: Whatever happened to Joan Reidy? What did you think of her contribution?
NADEL: I don't know what happened to her. I assume she's out there somewhere. Her contribution and Ron's are kind of seamless. I can't imagine one working without the other, really. Her frank prose gives the comics a hard edge, anchoring an abstract cartoon style to fleshy physicality.
SPURGEON:Boys was a Highwater comic. I think one of the noteworthy trends of the 2000s is this interesting work coming from tiny, tiny publishers and the occasional cold splash of reality that comes as they're forced to close down. Luckily for us as comics readers, Tom Devlin found like the greatest lifeboat ever with D&Q. Working on your PictureBox line, were you inspired at all by what companies like Highwater did? Do you draw additional inspiration or encouragement from contemporary companies like Bodega or Secret Acres or Blank Slate?
NADEL: Highwater was certainly an inspiration on a few fronts: For one thing, my first exposure to Leif Goldberg, Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale was via Tom's table at SPX 2000. That was where I met Ben Jones for the first time. Anyhow, just that Tom was distributing that stuff was/is hugely important. Then there was the aesthetic, which looks so prescient now: handmade-feeling, personal, and not "comics-y". And of course there was Tom's championing of a certain group of cartoonists; projecting the idea of a "gang" (real or imagined) that would/could kill you and take all your comic books. But that was the last time I was excited about a comic book company, to be honest. I respect those other companies, but I don't draw inspiration from them. Small publishing is tough, and I tend to look towards other media for inspiration.
SPURGEON: What about Boys lingers for you? Why that book of all the books you thought of when I asked you to select a work to discuss?
NADEL:Boys has stayed with me because it was the first time in my adult life -- I was 23 when it came out -- that I picked up a comic book and felt like it was speaking directly to me. I had that experience the first time I listened to Let it Be by The Replacements when I was 16. I felt like I knew these people -- shit, I felt like I knew Ron. The prose, the drawings -- it all seemed as though I'd been waiting for it my whole life, and there it was. It also seems to me like the first published salvo in a generational shift that occurred this decade -- running parallel to the brilliant "literary fiction" successes in graphic novels -- as the rise of the Providence aesthetic became so important for comics and visual culture.
[the first title, a comic book, is out of print; the second title, a hardcover collection that contains the "Boys" effort, is in print]
*****
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* I have no idea what this financing announcement really means and I suspect I'm not going to make a judgment on how it works through the information provided as I don't do very well processing the abstract into the real with new consumer technology. But it sounds like what usually happens with new, competing technology -- there will be a lot of money spent.
* R. Fiore says several smart things in a to-the-point review of the new Rip Kirby collection.
* Pierre Couperie, RIP. I will try to have an obituary up either January 11 or sometime shortly after. When I say that I just mean I want to write a proper obituary when the format here changes back to normal, not that it will be a major exposé or anything. Also, Lamar Sparkman, RIP.
* does anyone out there know anything about Charles Allen? I haven't gone looking yet, but nothing occurred to me off the top of my head.
* Sean T. Collins makes the case through Shannon O'Leary that the biggest story of last year was Diamond raising its sales minimums. I'm not sure I totally stand with O'Leary's specific assertions -- the situation was already so bad regarding the carrying and sales of those comics that I have a hard time believing that they stopped being carried just as a surge for demand began to flower -- but that such restrictions calcified an already cancerous mindset regarding the values of diversity and authority which in many ways distinguished the comic shop at its inception, of this I have little doubt.
* finally, this review of the seventh volume of Yotsuba&! has the advantage of offering up several panels and pages from the series. I think if you look at the pages, it should give you at least some idea of the title's appeal -- that's a really fun character.
Are You On CR’s Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
Grant Goggans is the Hipster Dad. Although he's the newest person participating in this series in terms of my reading his work regularly, Goggans has already impressed me with the certainty of the relatively straight-forward approach he employs. Grant Goggans does the heavy-lifting required to make himself a stopping point on-line without anyone in particular calling attention to what he does. He grabs comics with both hands. Goggans has a particular passion for the comics spinning out of the UK's long-running 2000 AD. I'm fascinated by a lot of those comics myself, their constant cycle of not quite ever getting over with US audiences, so it seemed a perfect topic for discussion. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Grant, you're an Internet discovery for me, and I know absolutely nothing about you. Could you talk a bit about how you went from reading comics to writing about them, your basic comics resume? Are you a dad? Are you a hipster?
GRANT GOGGANS: I was probably never really a hipster, although I have read all the required music magazines, own lots of vinyl, lived for years in a college town (the best one, Athens) and spend most of my music money at independent record stores. Yet I never really went out enough to develop a really refined sense of scene snobbery. I missed almost all the early days of the Elephant 6 collective, and Cat Power's booze-ups, because I was happier staying in and watching Homicide: Life on the Street, really.
I am certainly a dad, and from 2003 to 2008, I was raising my two wonderful children by myself. One Saturday in 2004, we made the usual trek from suburban Marietta, where we live, down to Decatur to buy PJ Harvey's album Uh Huh Her from Wuxtry Records. A girl who worked there for a time teased me about my situation, handing the album across the counter while my daughter bawled for Jake's Ice Cream, and gave me the nickname "Hipster Dad." I'd like to think she was just being playful, although the name "hipster" has certainly taken on a pretty awful reputation. I love it, though I think it made several of my friends cringe when I adopted it.
I started blogging in December 2000 to promote my own comic. From 1998-2003, I wrote and drew The GMS Legion, an office-photocopier book which was inspired by classic LSH fandom and a desire to do a 1980s period piece set in high school. It was an update of notebook paper comics I did when I was 12. I was never at all successful, nor particularly good, but I did 13 issues, each 80-100 pages long, and did a couple of short strips for the first few Fluke anthologies before the reality and demands of single fatherhood and full time work got pretty heavy and I packed it up.
I joined LiveJournal in June 2001 and immediately cajoled everybody I knew to get one as well. Very few of them still use it regularly. In the fall of 2004, I started doing the features which became my old "Weekly Comics Hype," trying to push DC's short-lived line of 2000 AD reprints whenever there was a new one out, or some other easily-purchased comic or collection whenever there wasn't. I've had a lot of luck with that, and several friends and readers who haven't read comics since they were kids have told me they've enjoyed trying the books I recommend.
A couple of years ago, during some incident when LJ was sold to the Russians or something, there was talk that it might shut down. LJ was my only real web presence or social media, so I decided to branch off into separate sites on blogspot.
I have The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf for all my book and comic reviews and try to update it at least twice a week. Reprint This! is updated twice a month and it rotates between a celebration of an out-of-print property and a follow-up article, usually with a review of an archival reprint and a bit of news about forthcoming collections. Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly 2000 AD blog, but I'm actually taking a break from that for a couple of months while I work on a guide to the library of Doonesbury books, and reread as much of that as I can. I hope to have this new blog at least started before the end of January.
SPURGEON: Your most appealing choice to me was 2000 AD. That's not only an enormous work covering thousands of pages this decade, it's a series in which you seem to have a phenomenal and fervent interest . So I guess my first question would be how did you start to build your current level of interest in the magazine, have you personally been reading it for a very long time?
GOGGANS: I have been a loyal squaxx dek Thargo since 1986, actually. I was very lucky to have a best friend, Dave Merrill, who now lives in Toronto, during that awful period when you're 15 and realizing that Marvel Comics aren't fun anymore. He had already graduated to books like Zot! and Flaming Carrot and the Eagle Judge Dredd reprints, books I'd never have considered reading as my superhero fandom ebbed. If he hadn't been around to say "No, you don't need to read Secret Wars II, you can read this instead," I'd have probably dropped comics entirely.
I liked those Eagle Dredd reprints a lot, even if those great covers by Brian Bolland looked so much better than the poorly-colored, re-sized artwork inside. Eventually I found proper thrillpower in its raw, original form, and it blew my mind. Lots of the Atlanta-area comic shops carried back issues of 2000 AD then, even if none of those stores -- Oxford, Dr. No's, Titan -- seemed to have a consistent run of them. I think every time I went to any of them, I'd find a new back prog that I needed. Of course, I was pretty broke all the time even by the standards of a teenager in the 1980s, so I could only afford to build my collection very, very slowly.
(You know, it's just occurred to me that all of those stores I mentioned are still around after more than a quarter of a century! Oxford's not as fun as it once was, while Titan Games & Comics has really become a very good chain, but still, 25 years in this market, they must all be doing something right, huh?)
There's something about 2000 AD's classic format, the "bog roll" newsprint as it's called, that was so appealing to me. I guess it seemed so esoteric, having all of these wonderful worlds and all that terrific artwork in such a fragile delivery system. Even the advertisements for these odd foreign products like Weetabix, Spectrum computers and records by Alien Sex Fiend kept me captivated. I also fell in love with the silly affectation of a "Command Module" of Betelgeusians in boiler suits and creator droids assembling the comic, so even as the quality of the content dipped for a few years in the early '90s, I kept reading because it was so different and so much fun.
SPURGEON: How have the years 2000-2009 treated 2000 AD? Are there two or three efforts within its pages you can point to as personal highlights? Do you have a take on how this era of the magazine is different than previous ones?
GOGGANS: I think it's been an excellent decade for the comic. There were lots of ownership and editorial upheavals through the 1990s, but 2000 AD has been owned by Rebellion for a decade, and has had a single editor, Matt Smith, since 2002. Maybe the late '90s were a little wilder, when David Bishop was editor and throwing something new and weird at the wall every third week to see what would stick, but Smith's been a spectacular Tharg and really brought strong consistency to the comic. You just get some exceptionally high-quality SF every week.
Smith's really worked at developing talent, which is one of 2000 AD's most important missions, and giving them room to create series and serials which can interlink and form intricate little comic universes. Ian Edginton gradually let us see that the worlds of his pirate adventure The Red Seas (drawn by Steve Yeowell) and the Victorian crime drama Stickleback (drawn by D'Israeli) are the same, and Si Spurrier did something similar with a wild, downbeat future war serial called The Vort (also drawn by D'Israeli), surprising us with the revelation that it's set in the universe of his cranky, robot-shagging, torturer-for-hire Lobster Random, which is drawn by Carl Critchlow. The most recent run of Robo-Hunter, which is a firm favorite, features the granddaughter of the original character.
Another really nice benefit to the comic affording so much freedom to its creators is that they can take breaks and come back fully charged. Robbie Morrison took a very long time off from Nikolai Dante while he wrote The Authority for Wildstorm, and it came back better than ever. In a perfect world, Nikolai Dante would get deserved accolades from everybody as the best comic of the decade. When Simon Fraser returned as the artist, I punched the air and was accosting strangers in the street to tell them the good news.
The other thing that really defines 2000 AD in the decade, to me, is the resurgence of Pat Mills. His work in the 1990s just didn't appeal to me, for a number of reasons. I'm just getting into his return in my Thrillpowered Thursday blog, but basically what happened is that he had some disagreements with Smith's predecessor as editor, Andy Diggle, and left the comic in 2001, focusing on publishing in France.
Smith lured Mills back, and unfortunately he brought Slaine with him. (That and Dan Abnett's Sinister Dexter, both of which I once enjoyed, are the two strips which 2000 AD could cancel forever and I wouldn't lose a minute of sleep.) But Mills also created several new series, Black Siddha, Defoe and Greyshirt, all of which are completely terrific, and he's resurrected some of his classic characters, The ABC Warriors and Savage, for really wonderful new stories. I enjoy many of the newer writers a great deal, but when Pat Mills is in the prog, everybody's got to take it up a notch.
SPURGEON: The people I know into Dredd and the other 2000 AD serials are fiercely devoted, and yet there never seem to be enough people like them to make the magazine even a modest hit in North America. I want to talk about the structural issues in the next question, but are there artistic reasons this material in general may not find a significant number of fans?
GOGGANS: That's a tricky question I've considered for years, and I've never quite found the answer. It's clear that 2000 AD's format of wild, over-the-top SF melodrama is one that just never found a broad market in this country. People do find it, but they didn't find it in the big numbers that were needed 20 years ago to make it a long-running, known hit property.
I think that when you're a teenager, you hit the point, for at least a few years, where you want to put away the superhero fight club comics. You start to see through them at the same time you discover kissing and your own music, not your parents'. I'm not suggesting 2000 AD is all that mature -- it can be shamelessly, stupidly, lovably adolescent -- but, as far as the North American comic experience goes, it doesn't really fit anywhere other than where it did in the '80s, when you could grow up from superhero fights to Zot! and Flaming Carrot and maybe Cerebus or Love & Rockets or Neat Stuff. I don't think that "step-up" exists today. My son loves Shaman King, Naruto and all the other Shonen Jump titles, and when he steps back from comics in a few years, as he invariably will, I wonder whether anything will be around to captivate him as an older teenager.
Maybe if the delivery system in the '80s had been better, or Titan Books' old line of reprints more attractive to this market, you'd see many more fans today. Many of the same late teen boys who fell in love with Hopey and Maggie could have fallen in love with Halo Jones and Judge Anderson and there could be a much larger fanbase today.
SPURGEON: How hard has Rebellion -- in addition to fans like yourself -- been hit by the current, half-cracked state of comics shop distribution? If I remember correctly, despite an aggressive trades program not all of the books they've done have even been offered here through Direct Market channels in the first place, let alone supported in a way that might allow them to build.
GOGGANS: It's been a disaster, Tom. I think a percentage of the blame is certainly Rebellion's, but the overwhelming bulk of the problem, lately, is Diamond. I talk to shop owners all the time, and I really cannot understand how it's possible to screw up anything as simple as accepting deliveries and shipping them to stores. Diamond has really hurt small publishers like Rebellion and Yen Press. Their announcement about new minimums making life easier for retailers might as well have been made on an aircraft carrier with a "mission accomplished" banner.
It would be churlish to blame everybody else for 2000 AD's problems, so yes, the failure starts at home. Rebellion reminds me of Bryan Ferry in 1972. He said that Roxy Music was off to conquer America, and they spent four weeks opening for Jethro Tull and Ten Years After in towns like Augusta, Chattanooga and Fayetteville, then came home and complained that America didn't get it. You can't effectively promote your product, whatever your product, without spending money and grabbing every potential customer by the shirt collar and screaming at them, basically. Rebellion's never done anything so loudly, never signed on for Free Comic Book Day or big ads in Previews or any kind of retailer-focused initiative, and they've devoted their North American promotion squarely on San Diego. I know Comic-Con is huge, but that's just a polite murmur if that's all you're going to do.
But really, it's Diamond where the current problem lies. Now, maybe if Rebellion had been buying full-page ads and making Diamond happy with ad revenue for the last few years it wouldn't have been a candidate for this year's purge, but who knows? It's still Rebellion's job to make people interested in their product, and they didn't do it. Yet for ages, buying 2000 AD, the Judge Dredd Megazine and all the books was simple: Diamond shipped two issues of 2000 AD every other week. About once a year, they'd hiccup, skip a shipment and ship four the next time. Everybody was happy.
At some point last fall, the wheels went off. There'd be a six-week gap between issues and then four would show up. Six weeks later, the missing two would show up, along with two of the next four. It wasn't just my shop; I speak with fans all over the country and employees of several stores in this area. As far as 2000 AD is concerned, that ship list you see at Diamond's site does not reflect reality, and depending on which warehouse ships product, your store could be weeks ahead of or behind the listing. My wife and I took a honeymoon road trip up to Montreal and back this summer, just before the "prog packs" began, stopping in all sorts of comic shops, and there were issues available in Boston shops we never saw in any Atlanta store, and we got issues here that stores in other cities apparently didn't. In September '09, my shop received an issue from November '08 which I had picked up at Boston's Million Year Picnic in July. This wasn't a reorder; Diamond just finally found a copy. Maybe I'll get the seven mid-2009 issues that I am still missing by next Halloween.
So to combat this problem -- a recent problem of their own bungling creation -- Diamond decided to start soliciting the prog in a monthly polybagged package of four-five issues. They don't ship them. Atlanta stores -- three of them anyway -- got the July-offered "September pack" the day before Thanksgiving. That's the day that Diamond's public ship list claimed we'd be receiving the "October pack," which did arrive in Chicago stores. Here, it actually arrived the week before Christmas, when nothing was showing on the ship list.
The issue of missing books is another story. Diamond canceled orders for about a half-dozen trade paperback editions because those orders were low. That's unfortunate, but also, disagreeably, understandable. Even if they run a lousy business, Diamond still has a bottom line, and Rebellion didn't create any excitement or demand for those books.
There are several other titles, however -- Rebellion releases about two a month -- which Diamond never offered at all. I have also heard several complaints that Diamond doesn't keep enough stock of the books, forcing customers who do hear Rebellion's polite murmurs and want to try them out to wait for very long backorders.
All of the books -- and they're terrific books, beautifully designed and printed -- are available from British bookstores or Amazon UK, but I don't want to spend money there, I want to spend it at my "local" shop in Athens, Bizarro Wuxtry, and give them my money. It's the best comic shop I've ever visited; only about two others come close. I could talk for hours about how wonderful Bizarro Wuxtry is, and how they deserve as much of my funnybook money -- and everybody else's -- as is feasible. But if Diamond won't give them the comics that I want to buy, I have no choice but to use the Internet to shop. It's ridiculous!
SPURGEON: It was once suggested to me that John Wagner is the most under-appreciated mainstream comics writer of all time. Can you talk about some of his work in the magazine this decade? I'm thinking particularly of Origins, although if you have other works in mind, please expound.
GOGGANS: He's more than the most under-appreciated, I think he's just about the best, full stop. He may not always be my favorite -- he doesn't blow my mind or break my heart as often as Grant Morrison or Gilbert Hernandez -- but nobody's as consistent as John Wagner in bringing the quality. It's not only on Judge Dredd, although he's been comparatively quiet this past decade, mainly working just on Dredd and Strontium Dog, which is also excellent. He's nowhere as proficient as he was in the '80s, when he and Alan Grant were co-writing about twelve scripts a week for four different weekly anthologies.
Origins is a really good place to start for modern Wagner, although I think it's less friendly to new readers than would be ideal. This was a lengthy epic which ran from the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007, and finally explored the huge global wars that gave rise to the current "Dreddworld," with the Mega-Cities and the judging system, in the 2070s, several years before the beginning of the comic. This story is told in fragments by various characters while Dredd and some associates carry out an important mission in the Cursed Earth. While they're out in the desert, Dredd learns that he has a number of natural-born clone relatives, but they're all mutants and, consequently, it's illegal for them to enter his city, or anybody else's city for that matter. None of the Mega-Cities allow "genetic abnormalities."
By the end of the story, Dredd has realized that his world got pretty far away from Chief Judge Fargo's hopes and dreams, and that the mutant laws are long overdue to be retired. So throughout 2007 and 2008, Wagner and the other Dredd writers, most notably Al Ewing, started exploring life in the city where mutants could finally live legally. Unfortunately, it's a powder keg of 400 million mostly unemployed, undereducated, lunatic bigots who've been told all their lives that muties are those terrible people who have to live in the desert, suddenly forced to share space with them. In a city where race, gender and sexual orientation stopped really mattering long ago, nobody ever really had to deal with hate crimes before, and Dredd chose to exhaust all his stock of goodwill and respect among the people and his fellow judges fighting for mutant rights.
The real heartbreak finally came this year: Dredd lost. He and Chief Judge Hershey's regime are seen as failures and political embarrassments. So Hershey has been sent packing to a desk job on a frontier outpost on another planet and Dredd's been kicked into the desert to oversee some Mega-City-constructed townships for mutants, along with some failing, mediocre judges as his ineffective support staff. In other words, if the old man likes mutants so damn much, he can go live with them. They've even kicked out his protege to live and work there, to shove his legacy under the rug. Every bit of it, from the allegory of gay marriage being overturned by voters in Maine and California, to the effect it's had on characters we've grown to love, is heartbreaking and powerful stuff. I can't think of any other comic which has allowed a hero to lose so stunningly...
Well, it's not all heartbreaking. Mega-City One's mayor is really a serial killer who Judge Dredd believes has been dead for years. That's pretty funny!
SPURGEON: It seems astonishing to me to be talking about 2000 AD, with its particular publishing schedule and devotion to serial storytelling, when it seems like that was an outdated mode a couple of generations back. With trades collecting a lot of material, do you still think of 2000 AD as the primary delivery method for these stories? Are there specific pleasures in that format you think other comics efforts could exploit on their own behalf?
GOGGANS: Andy Diggle famously described 2000 AD, at its best, as delivering you shot glasses of rocket fuel. You may not like every episode of every tale, but all five episodes each week should try and knock you on your backside with excellent characters in fast-moving, over-the-top stories. Nothing else in comics can give you that thrill, and it's the highwire, anything-goes weekly nature that makes reading 2000 AD so fun.
Actually, something that came pretty close, to me, was Kyle Baker's lovely, ridiculous Hawkman story in Wednesday Comics, where the stakes and the scenario kept getting higher, dementedly so, every week. If DC would commit to publishing something like that every week, with a rotating, flexible lineup of stories and creators, not tied to continuity, I would consider buying it. That and the Supergirl story by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner were just hugely entertaining.
Really, with 2000 AD, the format is a big part of the fun. Nikolai Dante, Stickleback and Savage would be among my favorite comics this decade regardless of how they're approached, but watching them unfold in cliffhanger fashion week-to-week is what keeps readers hooked. You can tell that some stories are "written for the trade" -- Pat Mills seems to design his storylines in 60-page chunks, rather than ten six-page episodes -- but there's a real sense of excitement to having stories come and go, with new talent trying out a Future Shock in between larger epics.
And once you buy into the business of the comic being edited by a space alien who talks in far-out intergalactic slang, with druids sneaking office gossip into the copyright information each issue, you're in for a whole new layer of fun. I suppose Mad is the only other comic that would promise readers that certain, unpopular writers won't be back because they've been fed to a maniacal garbage grinder.
SPURGEON: Is 2000 AD still published ten years from now? Will it ever be a hit in North America?
GOGGANS: Hopefully, and probably not.
Rebellion, sensibly, keeps quiet about the business end of things, but the feeling is that any international sales are just gravy to an operation that needs to perform strongly in Britain, on the newsstand and through subscriptions, which it seems to have done well for more than 30 years. Obviously an increased American presence could help their bottom line, but I wonder just how much is possible. It isn't very "hipster" of me, but I quite like minor league sports, and if you ever want a sobering reality check of how small and insular our hobby really is, try comparing those ICv2 sales estimates to the reported paid attendance of even small market teams. On Thanksgiving night, I watched a AA ECHL team in Duluth host a team from Charlotte with a crowd about the same size as Savage Dragon's nationwide audience. In the direct market, 2000 AD apparently doesn't even sell the 3000 copies it seems to take to reach the bottom of that chart.
I think that it's certainly possible for 2000 AD to grow, but it will take a lot of work from Rebellion to finally capitalize on Judge Dredd's name recognition. However, with the Diamond situation as awful as it is, broader success probably won't come in the direct market, and so the public won't easily see, on a chart, whether they're successful at it. You can actually download the comic every week at Clickwheel for less than Diamond charges for a physical copy, and get the full line of books from British sellers who keep it in stock, bypassing Diamond entirely. Unless, like me, you have tremendous loyalty to a much-loved comic store, there's no need to leave the house to get these comics at all.
Clickwheel is a very good delivery system. I've begun using it to read the prog week-by-week while hoping for the hard copies to show up for my library, and I like that they have many titles from several British small-press companies available. Rebellion was very forward-thinking in getting this system ready for digital delivery, but I fear it will be quickly swamped by Longbox, should that get up and running, with its planned lower prices and broader selection. I hope that Rebellion is looking forward to the next platform after this. I wonder whether the next generation of Kindle or Nook will be set up for comics, and if so, 2000 AD should be ready for that.
There are probably other things that Rebellion could be doing to increase their characters' visibility. I suppose my opinion's not worth as much as a highly-paid marketing consultant, but maybe reaching around the direct market with lots more convention appearances is the right way to go. Finding some common ground with Grant Morrison to reprint Zenith and even present new stories would be an enormous selling point. Announcing that, or similar projects, from panels at big American shows where there's lots of blogger media would be a great idea, rather than letting rumors slip out via Amazon advance listings, which seems to be how it goes today. Getting review copies of books to that same blogger media, to everybody with an audience, is another. Bringing back Samantha Slade for a 26-week residency is another. Well, possibly not that last one, but it would make me very happy, anyway!
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* if the main outcome publishing-wise with the new ownership/management teams at the Big Mainstream Companies is a bunch of exclusivity signings, I'm going to be super-disappointed. They make for nice press releases, though.
* kidding aside, and concerning these year-end lists more generally: did Larry Gonick pull a Tiger Woods in 2007 and I just missed it or something? When did people stop loving that guy? Seriously, Gonick used to be the free square on the "Enthusiasm For Cartoonists" bingo card. Now he can't slip into a top 60?
* the retailer and industry advocate Brian Hibbs speaks the truth about many of all the short-term, sideways or otherwise detrimental moves taken by publishers in the Direct Market: they're supported by the retailers that have the power to stop them.
* as I understand it, casual comics fan Curt Purcell attempted to follow one of the mainstream company mini-series from first page to last and it nearly drove him mad. Or, looking at it another way, buying over $100 of tangential tie-ins and spending $4 a pop throughout may have nudged him into more rational behavior from now on.
* not comics: goodbye, Standee's. You were a horrible-looking, throwback diner with a killer sign out front, and your low, low prices supported my getting out of the apartment to eat breakfast in public once a week during graduate school, a time in my life when I needed the company.
* not exactly comics: the Gareb Shamus folks have announced one of their comics and pop culture conventions for Austin, Texas. Austin's a great town, and Texas at one point in time was a top five enclave for active, intelligent comics fandom. I have no idea if that means anything, and it's not as if you'll be able to stumble across Ken Smith and Pat Boyette holding court next to Ernie Hudson's booth or whatever, but I figure there's no harm tipping one's hat in the direction of funnybook history.
* this is another one of those publishing flourishes I don't understand: a $4 comic with the abysmally unappealing word "Uranian" in the title spun off of a series that doesn't sell very well even though it should. It's one of those things that if it does sell well, it's probably not for a good reason, it's probably because of some strange hiccup that protects #1 and early-numbered issues. It's like they're aiming books at the market's broken parts now. Maybe I'm completely wrong about that kind of stuff, I don't know.
* finally, the writer and critic Douglas Wolk lists the books he's looking forward to seeing in 2010. Looks like a solid year. Off the top of my head I would add Jack Kent's King Aroo (IDW) and Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy (Fantagraphics), both of which will see major reprint projects at least begin this calendar year.
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Ben Schwartz and I used to write for the same on-line magazine. He has since put together an awesome resume in terms of writing about comics, a list of dream gigs that I coaxed out of him early in the interview below. I chose the BPRD books from the short list of comics Schwartz provided. Mike Mignola's Hellboy was one of the signature comics creations of the 1990s, but the spin-off series featuring various supporting characters from the original title is very much a creature of this decade: influenced by the movies, working both serial book and classic comics-format markets, split between various genres, beholden to one creator's work while allowing several hands in on the process. I couldn't wait to hear what Schwartz had to say. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Ben, I think you're probably a pretty unfamiliar figure to readers of this site. How did you end up writing about comics? What are some of the better-known pieces of the last five years or so? What's the basis of your specific interest in comics?
BEN SCHWARTZ: Hi Tom -- well, I guess the pieces I've done that got the most notice would include the comics reprints Sunday feature I did for the NY Times. I interviewed Joe Matt and several publishers, editors, and collectors about how fan collections (like Joe's amazing Gasoline Alley set) and digital media make the current strip reprint renaissance possible. Literally, a combination of paste and scissors technology and Photoshop scanning is preserving whole bodies of work -- pretty amazing. Besides the cranky letters I write you, your readers might know me from Comic Art where I've written about Charles Schulz' return home from WW II and the beginnings of Peanuts, as well as profiling Kaz and Drew Friedman at length. I write reviews of comics and other books for Bookforum, the LA Times, Washington Post, the Chicago Reader. I wrote about them for Suck.com as Bertolt Blecht. I've sold screenplays to filmmakers James Cameron and Arnold Kopelson (which remain unproduced, goddammit), and written a Captain America special with Howard Chaykin ("Blood Truce"), gone to the Indy 500 with Peter Bagge for Suck.com, and wrote a biographical piece on James Thurber with Ivan Brunetti, "The Thurber Carnivore."
Why do I write about comics? Well, I've been staring at comics since before I could read. I was three when my mom gave me a Gold Key Disney digest (the one with Carl Barks' "Trick or Treat" in it). So, I have a lot emotionally invested in them. In recent years, literary comics and the interest in them mean it's a way into mainstream newspapers and magazines. I've finished a profile for Vanity Fair on a cartoonist (who I can't name, as the piece hasn't run yet). I don't know any other way for me into Vanity Fair. I know what to ask an art spiegelman, but not Gisele. There's 1000 writers on movies and books and whatever else I write about, but comics is a smaller field.
SPURGEON: There's two things that you mentioned in an e-mail to me that I was wondering if you'd repeat and unpack a bit in terms of your general outlook on titles such as BPRD. The first is that you'd been enjoying superheroes anywhere but comics for a while now. The second was that you'd be rediscovering the appeal of such characters through the eyes of your son, who also was coming at them with almost no comic book knowledge.
SCHWARTZ: Since college, I pretty much wrote off the superhero as a concept. That happened right after Dark Knight and Watchmen came out, and I didn't love those books. While I saw their quality upgrade over most hero comics, I felt they were a swan song for the era I grew up reading, from the '70s thru the mid-'80s. Whereas today, many many readers see Watchmen as an entry point. Different perspective. Both books are compelling arguments about the futility of superheroes. Although, I have to say, punching reality holes in the teenage fantasies of Bob Kane, Siegel and Shuster, or the Ditko/Kirby Marvel Age isn't exactly going ten rounds with Tolstoy.
I always thought the weak point of both were their political and governmental view of America. Not for my own particular left-right partisan ideas, but say, the idea that Nixon would still be in office in 1985, that superheroes are outlawed... I mean, this country won't even outlaw masked criminals like the KKK, eco-terrorists, or organized criminals like LA gangs and the mafia. If they can't catch bin Laden and took decades to catch the Unabomber (and only when his brother turned him in), what's the government going to do about Spider-Man? This is a country that threw a fit over Caller ID -- until they were guaranteed their privacy. Also, the whole nuclear clock thing was specifically a Reagan issue, not a Nixon issue -- Nixon was actually disliked by the far-right for détente and going to China. Maybe Time-Warner vetoed using Reagan, I don't know. When Watchmen and Dark Knight came out, I was in college, reading more about politics and government. Let's just say, I find Alan Moore's Dr. Manhattan more believable than his Nixon. Then again, I'm perhaps the only pre-2009 reader of Watchmen who actually likes the Watchmen movie as much as or more than the comic. Anyway, except for Moore's career on Supreme or League of Extraordinary Gentelmen, I skipped most superhero books after that. For all my Watchmen complaints, I still think Moore's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is his greatest superhero story, and may be the greatest story DC ever published.
Anyway, two things happened that made superheroes interesting again. First, the movies: I've seen very few Spider-Man, X-Men, or Batman comics that compare to the great movie adaptations of the last ten years. Is there a better superhero story than The Incredibles? The people who make the movies do an amazing job of relating superheroes to a non-direct sales comics audience. Until the movie, for example, I never found Iron Man that entertaining in my life: a secondary character, a good Avenger with a boring series and the worst villains ever (Whiplash? The Unicorn? The Melter?). I like how the movie uses a pulp hero to ask questions about America's current wars. It reminds me of how John Ford approached the Western or Kurosawa the samurai film. Most superhero movies feel like high-tech westerns to me. Marvel and DC tend to use super heroes to ask more questions about superheroes. I once wrote in to CR with a joke about Frank Miller saying he wanted to do a Batman v al-Qaedah comic. After seeing Iron Man, which dealt with who we arm and why, I take it back. I'd like to see what Miller does.
The second way superheroes came back into my life is my son Archer (now 3) through toys and cartoons he likes. He loves The Incredibles and Fleischer Brothers Superman shorts (I always jump to the fast forward when "Japoteurs" comes on), Speed Racer, Astro Boy -- as well as Yo Gabba Gabba, The Backyardigans, and Li'l Bill. I got Archer some action figures to play with and he loves superheroes that way or watching shorts on Youtube. The Fleischer Superman is great example of what happens quality-wise when you wrest these things from the hands of the fanboys. It's hard to look at Joe Shuster's mediocre art after the Fleischers' perfected his Golden Age Superman. Obviously, it's all about execution, whether to a three-year-old or me and the Nolan Batman movies. Archer has a Fisher-Price Imaginext Batman and Joker, and they're totally kid friendly in design. Archer dismissed the Brave and The Bold show as "too fighty." I agree, it was very much a grim, violent cartoon, done in a cartoony style to sell toys, I guess (uh, we have the Blue Beetle and vehicle). His Fisher-Price Joker drives a purple motorcycle with a clown's hammer on it that bops good guys. A Galactus I owned from the 90s currently towers over the Yo Gabba Gabba gang on his play table. Marvel does Superhero Squad for kids, too. Disney's buyout of Marvel makes me hopeful a Floyd Gottfredson or Carl Barks will emerge one day in superhero comics. I'd like to think it's why Otto Binder and CC Beck's Captain Marvel reportedly outsold Superman -- because it had a hipper view of the Marvel Family than DC's dullard Superman. I look at them now and get the ironic, absurdist gestures the way I do the lit references in Chuck Jones cartoons. It's probably why I find that Binder and Siegel wrote my favorite DC comics of the '50s and '60s (the Jimmy Olsen, Legion stories) because they're knowingly absurd (and Binder, much more than Siegel).
SPURGEON: While the BPRD books are a creature of the last ten years in comics publishing, Hellboy seems to me one of the key books of the decade before that. How familiar were you with that book and its core characters coming into the BPRD books? When did you discover Mike Mignola and what were your initial impressions of his work?
SCHWARTZ: Not familiar with BPRD at all and I wasn't familiar with Hellboy outside of knowing that it existed. I remember its debut, which I did not read, as I thought it looked Kirby-derivative and the name struck me as skateboarder cool. Like skate kids who say "bad boy" a lot. You know, "Check this bad boy out," as the kid does a leap off a handicapped ramp at school and lands back on his board. Also the Ben-Grimm-in-a-trenchcoat look and the big gun, I thought, "Is he supposed to be a badass Cain and Abel or Cryptkeeper? I never read it. Honestly, I was struck by a Kevin Nowlan cover for the BPRD "Black Goddess" cycle. I immediately liked that BPRD is a kick-ass action comic, which is rare in mystic-themed comics. The Phantom Stranger, Dr. Strange, Dr. Fate -- they stand around reciting spells and lighting incense. Strange wears a leotard, for God's sake. Gaiman's Sandman made the fey stuff work. Ditko's Strange at least has physically intimidating villains and magic bolts that can knock Strange on his butt. Mignola's is a Kirby-inspired magical world, so it's magic with some muscle. I read back thru all the collections of BPRD and really got into it. I looked at the early Hellboys on up, and I still wasn't into him alone as much as BPRD. Then again, BPRD stories take advantage of everything Mignola and his collaborators built up previously in Hellboy (the frog plagues, all that history). It's like comparing Steamboat Willie to Fantasia.
As for Mignola himself, his career really took off when I had no interest in genre comics, so I missed out. A friend (collector Glenn Bray) showed me some Mignola stuff he liked. Glenn, btw, is also the executor of sculptor and painter Stanislav Szukalski's estate. As a total coincidence, unknown to Glenn until recently, Guy Davis used some Szukalski inspired designs for his ancient world technology in BPRD. But, really, the black goddess covers sold me. Jack Kirby once told me he used to draw covers so you could see them a block away, and that's how Nowlan hooked me.
SPURGEON: I think most people enjoy BPRD as straight-ahead entertainment; is there any argument to be made for anything else they do well? Is there anything formally ambitious in any of the series that struck you as interesting, or is there a metaphorical thread or two that gets revealed at any point? Are they ever entertainment-plus?
SCHWARTZ: As far as the hero genre goes in comics, yes. Setting superheroes in this world rather than the usual mystery man world we've seen since the 1930s is innovative. (More about this later.) BPRD is a great repository as well for so many modern and ancient horror myths, religious, cultural, or purely fictional. It's like Aliens set in a supernatural world, too, with this special forces team versus the paranormal mentality. BPRD has that Gen X thing that Tarantino and great hip-hop like the Beastie Boys do, of synthesizing and sampling a whole genre and then handing it back to you. In this case, a demon hero, Hellboy, and Liz Sherman, a Stephen King firestarter, battling Lovecraftian cult frogmen and their gods. That is, theological demons v. Lovecraft, classical Old World horror v. modernist horror -- a great clash of genre and ideology, and that's the jumping off point.
There's lots BPRD does better than most genre comics. Stories are lean, the characters are always present. They build on a continuity that doesn't require you to buy 20 titles. Like the best horror, you're creeped out by atmosphere and the pathetic dehumanizing of life -- then the monster shows up. Davis has a subtle gift for pausing on faces, revealing characters in silent reflection and with perfect mood. Arcudi and Mignola load these characters with plenty of mystery and avenues for self-discovery, like Liz Sherman's future in the Black Goddess cycle or Hellboy's fragmentary knowledge of his future or Abe's of his past. Johann's existence, and the amoral territory in which his desire to feel again leads him, is funny and sad.
Still, there's definitely a ceiling to the ambition. As far as genre goes, this isn't Cormac McCarthy restating the Western in Blood Meridian or James Ellroy's radically rewriting noir as historical fiction in American Tabloid. The advantage of a self-contained literary model is that you can do that in one great work. A soap opera continuity dilutes that. If the frog plague is meant as some metaphor for AIDS or conformity or the dumbing down of America or something, I don't get it. Hellboy and BPRD strip a lot of the serious theological stuff off these characters. I mean, Hellboy's a demon with a heart right? Is he going to team-up with St. Paul anytime soon? I'm Jewish, so if there's a deeply Christian thing going on, feel free to point it out. A lot of these creatures -- Hellboy, Hecate, the frogs, the mummy in the bed, the leprechauns, the Lovecraftian space horrors -- theologically, how do they all exist together? That's a question Alan Moore would want to answer. Mignola, I'm guessing, isn't going to explain such things.
The creative team behind all this is clearly serious about their characters and the world they inhabit. If they think seriously in BPRD about ours, I don't know. And I'm OK with that, it's not what I want from it. Now that the "graphic novel" era is upon us, superhero books aren't the sole representative of the medium in the public's mind. Who needs such statements on modern America from BPRD when Ware, Clowes, Tomine and LosBros are on job?
SPURGEON: Do these books ever work as satire at all? Certainly the basic Hellboy formula of these awesome horror images and this wisecracking character at the center of it all called attention to the excesses of the genre. I'm thinking of a character like Memnan Saa in The Black Goddess, which seems to be a noir/pulp character brought to life. Is there an attitude toward the source material that you can get out of the various book series?
SCHWARTZ: Saa is a particularly effective "villain," if he is that, in his assessment that only part of the world can be saved from the frogs and their gods. There's something about his resignation to this that is so anti-heroic... I love it. Saa is a great example of what they do. He's a Fu Manchu "type," but the back story they give him is human, from discarded mystic wanna-be in Victorian England thru so much degradation to what he is now.
Yes, it's satirical, and in the best way. What you described in Hellboy, the wisecracking, is funny -- I especially liked that iron keys "tale" with the asshole leprechaun. But there's a bigger sense of fun to BPRD. Lots of comics back to Action #1 feature a wisecracking hero laughing at enemies the rest of us need to fear -- BPRD is different. BPRD: 1946, the story of Hitler's Operation Vampir Sturm, is a great example. There's no terrible reverence for the Nazis. I don't need to hear about Auschwitz in a monster comic. Leave that to Maus. Here, Nazis are bad guys injecting lunatics with vampire blood to unleash them on the allies -- in experiments conducted by a bald decapitated Nazi scientist using a robot spider body and giant brain controlled gorillas as his musclemen. Plus, there's that Soviet BPRD counterpart, a Lord of Hell in the shape of a little girl in a white dress holding a dolly. There's a hilarious over the top-ness to it that never loses the story -- not easy to do. I mean, the Nazi scientist's name is "Von Klempt," I assume, from "verklempt," and it still works! It's a version of Binder absurdity aimed only at adult readers. I wasn't kidding when I said I loved Siegel and Binder's writing (they had Jimmy Olsen time traveling back to Nazi Germany as Field Marshall Olsen, for God's sake) and BPRD has that quality in a far weirder, compelling story style. The BPRD team obviously love comics and their cliches and are quite aware of how absurd it is.
One of my favorite movies as a kid and now is Abbott and Costello Meet The Invisible Man (1951), from a story by two of Jack Benny's writers, Wedlock and Snyder. In it, Bud and Lou are private detectives (always a great start) who get involved with a boxer on the lam from gangsters -- for not throwing a fight -- and the cops (as a falsely accused murderer). He takes Claude Rains' invisibility serum (some character in the movie is Raines' great granddaughter or something, and they have Raines' 8x10 on the wall, to tie the franchise in). Then Lou has to get in the ring and box with the invisible boxer next to him, who then has to leave the ring for a while, so Lou gets pounded. Ok, four genres: boxing, gangsters, Invisible Man sequel and simultaneous Abbott and Costello comedy. Top that! Absurdity is not something DC or Marvel can traffic in much. I mean, they're already teetering on "Superduperman" everyday as it is. Otto Binder and CC Beck produced a great comic at their Captain Marvel peak, with hilariously snide comments about how dumb Marvel is and the total evil that is the Sivana family. Like the one where the Sivanas rob the Marvels of their powers and chase them on horses in a foxhunt with Dr. Sivana shouting, "The sport of kings!" It worked for me as a little kid and as an adult, but not in-between. Binder and Siegel gave us the Bizarros and Superpets and Mr. Tawny and Mr. Mind. It's lighter in tone than BPRD, but no less hip.
SPURGEON: What is the nature of the enjoyment you derive from the series? Can you provide a general critical overview? Which ones have work better for you than the others? When these books are working, what are they doing for you that other comics don't?
SCHWARTZ: I'm the wrong guy to ask about what other books are doing out there re superheroes. BPRD is an unfolding serial, so an overview is hard when the story could be half over or 9/10 done for all I know. Overall, BPRD manages with deceptive ease an epic storyline with human, driven characters at its center. It's as much about Liz and her gradual acceptance of what she is and what her abilities cost her (from her family as child to her unwanted role at the center of Memnan Saa's vision) to our apocalyptic frog future. Abe's broken heart and Johann's isolation fit perfectly into this cosmic/mystic epic. They can tell a multi-part story that's really one "chapter" in the overall story (like 1946), jump to Nebraska "now" in The Black Flame, or visit Abe Sapien's Civil War past. A great example in 1946 is the German mom hiding her loony vampir son in the barn, not wanting more soldiers to take him, despite what he is. Heartbreaking, weird, a mother grasping at whatever she can of prewar life -- despite how warped and lost her son is.
I actually get creeped out reading BPRD. I get emotionally involved in the characters. BPRD combines a number of horror and superhero elements I love, from Lovecraft to Cameron's Aliens to Kirby Nazis to ghosts and mummies, yet in a truly effective, dramatic, and disturbing way. Like the kicker of The Black Flame, when the industrialist who thought he controlled the frogs, his former lab experiments, gets dragged underground to burn forever as a beacon to attract their Lovecraftian space lord -- and Liz lets it happen because he killed her friend. It's one of the creepiest moments for me ever in comics. Going back to Jack Kirby for a minute: I told him, in a way I thought was flattering, that his Thor meets Pluto issue so scared me as a 7-year-old that I had to put the comic down and wait a day to finish it. He got quiet, contrite, and said, "I'm sorry." The BPRD crew owes me several of those Kirby-sized apologies.
Design comes to mind, too. Mignola says in one of the introductions that Guy Davis is one of the best "creature guys in the business." So true. BPRD feels so unique from the creators previous work that you can't do a fan's Who Did What analyses of it, but Davis' creatures, the crazy looks of the technologies, and the dense but not detailed look of his stuff -- not sure if that's the best way to put it -– is a great look. Davis' Jules Verne containment suits for the Oannes Society in Garden of Souls and how he composes panels in The Black Flame. He does grimy well, too. Paul Azaceta did an amazing job with the Vampir Sturm technology, the gestation tubes, period Berlin, the creepiness of the Soviet demon, and even made photo reference art work for me.
SPURGEON: Is there something to be said for the serial aspects of the experience of reading BPRD? Has it been fun to move from book to book? Is that an experience we've seen less of in a decade that emphasizes the complete novel held in one's hands? Is comics giving up something important if they move even further away from serial entertainment?
SCHWARTZ: Well, I've noticed that in the weaker storylines (and none are that bad), it's better to buy it monthly so that what works holds you in suspense for months before it comes crashing down. I tend to reread good issues while waiting for the next issue, whereas I read collections once and move on. Otherwise, no, either way is fine, although I prefer to have a bound story on my shelf than five loose comics to store.
SPURGEON: They've had a remarkably consistent run with the creators on those books. Guy Davis is a very stylish artist in his own right: what is your estimation of his work on this series? What does he do that Mignola doesn't when working this approximate style?
SCHWARTZ: Yeah, if they quit today the Hellboy through BPRD years can match any great run at Marvel, Fawcett, anywhere. Every issue is gravy from here on, I guess. As I mentioned above, Davis is a great designer of creatures and stuff for comics. He appears to be a researcher who adapts styles and periods into his own. Davis' work has a proximity to Mignola's core look without being derivative in any way: blocky, inky, dense and cartoony. He can choreograph action sequences or conversations equally well, and has a gift for the disgusting (bones from rotted flesh, the giant tadpoles). Davis gets story down. He doesn't appear challenged by simple character moments anymore than conceiving of antebellum fishman romances. A rare talent.
SPURGEON: I take it from what you wrote me that you consider these more or less superhero books, but do they have other genre elements? Do they continue the Hellboy tradition of horror and horror imagery? What is it about the superhero model that makes it so easy to graft on these various out-of-genre elements?
SCHWARTZ: As far as extending the original series' interest in horror -- both series actually do it simultaneously. So yes. The addition of Richard Corben to the Hellboy books is a good one, and it's all expanding one large canvas. Actually, I'd say they're better at reinventing horror's character and spirit. Lots of people draw horrific stuff, but this creative team does it through the writing, too, which is rare in comics. Given that, I'm guessing it gives Mignola, Davis, Azaceta, Nowlan, and Corben's work that much more impact.
But yeah, it's essentially a superhero book: the characters have superpowers, there's super-villains, a super-cool HQ, plus, in BPRD, the characters ride in helicopters (or other cool vehicles) to fights. So, yes, it's a superhero book. BPRD has the classic line-up: strong guy, smart guy, alien guy, and underestimated but super-powerful girl (like Sue Storm, Jean Gray/Phoenix). Also, there's only one woman, so you know it's a superhero team.
BPRD is a superhero book for me like Moore and Nowlan's League Of Extraordinary Gentleman is a superhero book. What's cool about BRPD and LOEG is applying one genre's conventions in new contexts outside the Golden Age masked mystery man model. It's fun because they aren't constrained by either genre they use. In Moore's case, his "grand unification theory of fiction" idea is a little distracting, like his attempts at politics in Watchmen. I liked it when it was Victorian England, where Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and Stevenson all made sense together. Mignola does that a bit by allowing BPRD to explore any supernatural world, from Lovecraft to Stoker to Rohmer to the Bible, and then mix in historical figures like Rasputin and Hitler. In pulling Brecht and Woolf into LOEG, Moore dumbs down some great stuff if you've read it or seen it performed well. On the other hand, he elevates the pulp stuff he touches. I mean, while the rest of the literate comics world turns to the self-contained "novel" model, Moore moves in the opposite direction, obliterating distinct literary works into one Stan Lee-like Mighty Moore "universe." The current "1910" has characters like Mack the Knife and Jenny Diver from Three Penny Opera, but singing lyrics in comics; that's pretty much the province of MAD magazine. Then again, if you haven't read Brecht and Woolf, who cares? The LOEGAndy Capp cameo, however, is great. I hope we'll see Andy meet Orlando in a pub soon. Andy can sing the Kinks' Lola.
SPURGEON: Do you think they'll still be doing this series this way in five years' time? Ten? Would you follow it if they went to serializing the work on-line? As someone who's done so much work in several media, what do you think about the death of print vis-a-vis the fate of comics?
SCHWARTZ: I don't know. Mignola's already moved into film, animation, and novels, and none of that has taken the creative lead from his comics the way movies did Iron Man and Batman. I'll go where the best story is, I guess.
Honestly, I don't read that many comics on-line. I'm at Meltdown every Wednesday with Brian Doherty and Joe Matt. However, I can easily see the Internet as animation or film platform for comics. Do superheroes even need comics anymore? I like the superhero movies, cartoons, and toys better than the comics. Most kids will discover Superman as my son has, not in a comic book. The comics form might be too limiting for the superhero of the future and what new audiences out there want from them. If it wasn't for BPRD and LOEG, I'd say that was true for me.
SPURGEON: Finally, you edited a forthcoming anthology of critical writing about comics for Fantagraphics. Can you talk about that process a bit? Was it easier or more difficult than you thought to find pieces good enough to go into such a collection? How much of the work came from on-line sources? Do you have favorite writers about comics on-line?
SCHWARTZ: You know, when I first pitched the book to Gary Groth, he sent me back an e-mail asking me if I really felt I could fill a whole book with good comics criticism and attached his essay, "The Death of Criticism." I have the advantage of selecting criticism from 2000-2008. In that period The New York Times, Bookforum, Comic Art, The Comics Journal, and newspapers and magazines around the country were all running comics reviews, interviews, and feature pieces. There were also groundbreaking histories of comics published, as well as some cartooning that was critical in nature. So, no, I did not have a big problem finding stuff. My main consideration in choosing pieces was: does the writer's piece fit the book's main editorial guideline, that it somehow is about the literary comics movement or somehow influencing that movement? That alone cuts out a lot of good writing simply by subject, like almost all superhero stuff (except for an awesome Ditko section). The second issue was the time frame. I specifically set the date of September 12, 2000 as the start point, which is the day both Jimmy Corrigan and David Boring were released by Pantheon, the date Rick Moody (one of our contributors) describes as when comics were "unavoidable" in literary conversation. That's a tipping point moment for comics, and I wanted the anthology to cover that moment onward.
My only real headache was finding enough stuff not yet published on-line so that readers wouldn't look at our table of contents and ask, "Why buy this when I can google it all at home?" As for on-line favorites, if you mean writers who write exclusively on-line about comics, well, not many are exclusive. Several writers from Comics Comics are in the book, a piece from The Two-Fisted Man, and Paul Gravett, all come to mind. Several pieces, say by Chris Ware or Ken Parille or Sarah Boxer, have been updated and revised from their on-line presences. Through our different contributors, the book is meant (as best I could) to sketch out the major developments and artists of the period. A couple of writers I did not get into the book would be Jog the Blog or Tim Hodler. Todd Hignite is planning a Comic Art anthology at some point, so I was limited in pieces from his great magazine. Also, there's going to be some major works skipped over because they did not get a great piece written about them no matter how good the book is, so I admit the editing is imperfect in that sense. The pieces had to be really good and about a specific comics area, the lit comics or "graphic novel" area.
That's why BPRD is such a big deal for me (personally, anyway). That after 20 years or so, I'm finally totally into a genre book that doesn't need any apologies.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* it appears as if this year's Angouleme Festival will be graced with the presences of Jean-Jacques Sempé and Robert Crumb.
* longtime writer about comics Charles Hatfield reviews Asterios Polyp for The Comics Journal #300. I'm not exactly sure how that fits into a special issue like that, but maybe there was a regular array of features in that one in addition to the younger/older interviews featured on the cover.
* Ted Rall is trying to raise money via Kickstarter to go back to Afghanistan and I guess do some reporting. This request has the added advantage of being appealing to both Rall's fans and his enemies.
* over at Comics Comics, Frank Santoro remembers the devoted Charlton artist, television announcer and z-movie film director Pat Boyette with a great quote from an era in which fan groups apparently had distinctive regional personalities.
* the strip-focused blogger Alan Gardner caught this so I don't have to: webcomics.com has begun charging for subscriptions.
* even the great Drew Friedman can't avoid running afoul of the occasionally stupid editorial overstep. That's a lovely illustration that got rejected, that's for sure.
* finally, New Jersey retailer Ilan Strasser says the comic book part of the Direct Market is in its death throes. I thought sales were pretty good on the charts, actually, but okay.
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Joe McCulloch, better known as Jog, is a one-person argument for the value of writing about comics on-line. His body of critical work that isn't ink on paper is, I think, better than anyone else's out there by a significant amount. He continues to find new ways to engage comics and I admire him for that. Jog was the first person I asked to be involved with this series, and he just as quickly responded with an offer to talk about Death Note, by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. I was thrilled, and immediately curious. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Jog, according to the time stamps on the e-mails it took you about 11 seconds to suggest Death Note as an emblematic work of the decade. I know this is going to keep me from about five questions of my own generation, at least on the initial burst, but can you describe in broad terms why Death Note so quickly sprung to mind?
JOG: Well, I was gonna do the Punisher at first, but then I decided to keep the season classy by going with a teenager that discovers a Shinigami death spirit's notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it and thereafter decides to crush human society into a malleable shape with an iron fist of justice -- much to the amusement of the aforementioned Shinigami -- thus kicking off a 2000+ page game of wits with a trio of eccentric boy detectives and a big, sexy supporting cast, probably sexier than that of the Punisher. A whole bunch of people die and we applaud, but maybe we feel bad, too!
But to get a little broader, when I think of comics this decade, I think of rapid expansion and fragmentation. Like, I don't know about you, but when I go back and look to the turn of the last decade, the millennial conversation, which I wasn't following comics to have experienced first-hand although I've tried to go back and study it, I get the feeling that people were hoping for a more unified comics in the future, as in a Direct Market-dominant culture where maybe pamphlet-type comic books weren't necessarily the dominant format and the internet played more of a role and certainly where superhero comics weren't quite still so dominant, but fundamentally a similar place pushed a bit closer to where the mainstream of entertainment culture happened to be. From there came the search for the real/new mainstream of comics.
That didn't quite happen. What did was that webcomics inevitably expanded in one direction -- tied pretty strongly to gaming culture in its most lucrative, influential examples -- while bookstores opened up not so much as an adjunct to the options allowed English-dominant North American cartoonists but as an alternative distribution venue, geared in large part now toward a Young Adult-ish audience interested primarily in manga, although obviously it's not just teenagers reading the stuff. And there's a decent amount of literary-minded comics prone to attracting coverage from adult venues for prose literature coverage in there too, along with a bunch of superhero collections and bookshelf-aimed projects as well, but manga or manga-ish projects wound up becoming the dominant, public face of "bookstore comics," establishing essentially an alternate world of popular comics, as opposed to a popular world for alternative comics, if you get my drift.
Now, manga has a lot of blatant differentiating characteristics, particularly given that the bookstore boom was accompanied by the genius marketing scheme of not flipping the artwork to go left-to-right and then calling it "authentic," but even among as vaporous and form-defined a thing as webcomics you've probably noticed a certain lack of rhetoric spillover from dedicated webcomics readers to, say, superhero comics readers, or even avowedly comics-omnivorous outlets that mostly actually talk about print comics. In the same way, as a glance at the recent Top 10 of the Year or Decade lists will reveal, Western comics-focused or even miscellaneous geek or nerd culture-type forums tend to ignore manga, sometimes specifically begging off the topic for lack of expertise -- and it's a big area, no doubt.
The thing I'm getting at is, "comics" has gotten a lot bigger over the last decade, but it got big in a way that further exploded the notion of what "comics" were in North America, as per the subcultures devoted to comics reading. In fact, manga seems to be the new, popular place for casual comics consumption too, the supermarket checkout rack stocked with Archie digests -- still here, motherfuckers -- mirrored funhouse-style as kids sitting around the shelves at Borders where they don't tell you this ain't a goddamned library, and yeah some stuff gets bought.
And hey, now that Archie is getting hitched to Veronica and Betty, and Moose I think, like Riverdale's now a polyamorous love dream city-state -- it's doing okay in comic book stores! Like, Diamond Top 100, 25,000+ copies okay! There should be a Blackest Night tie-in where the Green Lanterns get married to other color lanterns to make a really pretty color, although I guess they're doing that with Guy Gardner? I hope he marries Midge next. But what I'm getting at is that the spillover between reading groups is limited, or it sure seems so based on our always-limited grasp of sales numbers, anecdotes - I'm very much aware that folks prone to writing about comics or running comics-friendly websites tend to be devoted to their favorite kinds of comics, so maybe a bit less prone to going on about a really wide swathe of the form. They stick to specialties, and in 2009 I think we're at the point where what's dominant in comics is well and truly tied to various workable -- if not lucrative -- distribution formats, so specialization doesn't denote an interest in niche-of-the-niche comics.
So, to answer your question, which I think was about Dennis Eichhorn, but I'm just gonna answer the question in my head right now: Death Note was the last comic I encountered that for a few bright, blazing moments seemed to bring all the tribes together. This is a personal thing, based on observation, but I think I observe a lot, and I damn well remember just about everyone nodding in Death Note's direction, from the lowliest junior high Narutard to dedicated art comics scribblers to random LiveJournal personages to gentlemen prone to detailing the meta-fictional aspects of Infinite Crisis. I'm not saying everyone read all 12 books and the Official Guide, but an extremely broad selection of broken bigger comics read some of it, and even that, today, is amazing. To me, that makes it the emblematic mainstream comic of the decade.
SPURGEON: I agree with you that Death Note kind of crossed all of comics' inner borders for a time there. Do you think there's a notion that a popular series like this one also gets some power, some of its appeal, out of not quite breaking wide? Does that allow for easier ownership of something, that it's apparently not for everyone? Even within manga, is there anything equivalent to liking this book or set of books over that book or set of books as a personal signifier?
JOG: Hmm... well, Death Note didn't break quite as wide as something like Dragon Ball did; it broke wide in comics, not necessarily in the wider U.S. culture, as perfect an original cable series the comic would make. Yeah, I think maybe some fans feel a bit more attached to it because not everyone knows -- I mean, lots of comics folks know about it, so you can converse and argue, but it isn't so spread out to defeat the precious nature of it.
My impression within manga is that Death Note admirers tend to like how dark and cruel it is in addition to the funny parts, the suspense mechanisms; the gloss of moral complexity (ex: "Is Light justified in his mission?!?!") is appealing, though I personally don't think it's very substantive. Still, it gives it a leg up on other manga in its class -- Viz had it under their Shonen Jump Advanced label, which works for me.
With manga, fan "ownership" goes different ways, though, sometimes going beyond the text or referring to the basic communicative aspects of the text itself. There's a big aspect of authenticity zeal to some hardcore fans -- Shaenon Garrity made a reference on TCJ.com the other day to flamewars erupting over Viz's decision to translate Light's name as "Light" when some fan translators had it down as "Raito" because there's no 'L' sound in Japanese -- although a character named L is okay, since it's an in-story Roman letter -- which gives you an idea of how these things sometimes go.
And then there's "character" fans, which is how a finished series like Death Note can survive -- frankly, the fact that not all of the story's plot maneuvers work for every reader encourages fans to ignore the stuff they don't like and imagine their own adventures for their favorite characters. Not that any of that stuff is unique to manga, but Death Note got the effect off the ground very fast, with dead-basic but appealing characters to obsess over and a big toolkit of ideas (some of them pretty lightly used in the series proper) to fool around with.
Popular manga tends to be very adept at encouraging this kind of fandom quickly out of the gate, where appreciation of the work doesn't necessarily relate to what the work actually says, or how it functions in a literary sense; put simply, they're big stories, but then they stop. Then everyone becomes a little like superhero writers or legacy artists on a newspaper strip, only without much pay or anything, not too big an audience, but shit -- how big an audience does comics get? This is the makeup of Comiket in Japan, unoffocial spin-off stuff like that, lots of fucking, fan service -- original comics are famously harder to sell. You're better off making a porno computer game. Would you like to hear my pitch, Tom? It's about comics critics!
SPURGEON: I'll pass. [laughs] Now, I take it when you call it a finished series that Death Note is done?
JOG: You are right. The main Death Note series was serialized from 2004 to 2006 in Japan, with a somewhat different pilot episode in 2003 and a jokey "sequel" episode in 2008, so it's purely of this decade. The 12 Viz collections were released between 2005 and 2007, so it came out in English extremely quickly, if not quite as quickly as it did in, like, Taiwan. I think around the time Viz's English editions were just getting started the series was banned in several Chinese cities, having drifted in via piracy and Chinese-language imports. It appears to have been successful almost wherever it goes; Anime News Network tells me it just wrapped its Polish translation, with the Hungarian edition about halfway through. I mean, this is the kind of comic where you've gotta be careful to specify English-dominant North America when you're talking, because it's also been released in Mexico.
For what it's worth, it's also one of the few U.S. releases of its age where I still routinely see full runs stocked in bookstores, just loose copies, not the box set -- 'cause there's a box set, too. Granted, for as popular a work as it was in Japan, selling tens of millions of comics and spawning a 37-episode television anime adaptation, two anime television specials, three live-action movies, two prose books, video games, etc., the creators pulled the plug fairly early. The writer, Tsugumi Ohba, notes that the series ends on Chapter 108, to symbolize the 108 Earthly desires in Buddhism.
SPURGEON: A lot of criticism on manga is done when series are in progress and I wondered if being able to look at the complete work here has an effect on how you're able to grapple with it as a reader and as a critic?
JOG: Oh sure. I mean, I initially read Death Note while Viz was still releasing it, because I'd heard a lot about it, and at that time it was still an ongoing series in Japan. It's funny, because there's different tiers of popular manga readers, so that while casual readers or good consumer readers are dutifully following the official English releases you've got a different bunch of folks following scans of the Japanese releases, sometimes right off the pages of the serializing anthologies, with English text Photoshopped in by Japanese-equipped readers. That meant that you'd be following the series, and if you'd look around online you'd get people going "Aaah, they fuck it all up when L dies in vol. 7," or griping about how they hate the ending and stuff.
So, despite being a bit like reading this week's Marvel comics while consulting the webcam bug you've planted on Matt Fraction at a contemporaneous story retreat, it wasn't that different from reading any serialized comic as it happened and later going back and looking it over as a whole.
I'm glad you brought this up, because I think the initial wide appeal of Death Note -- among sects of comics readers, not society at large, let's make no mistake, even though a couple high schools got mad over kids making their own kill notebooks, and, y'know, there's not too many things I take for granted in this world, but if schools are banning your comic you're probably on the right track as far as I'm concerned -- came from the process of reading it as a serial, even if it's a serial that's actually batches of serialized chapters collected into a dozen books. That's still a serial.
Death Note, you see, is a plot machine. If, as the old saying goes, manga is different from Western pop comics in that it's more about going somewhere than getting there, Death Note splits the difference by making virtually every chapter a small destination. It's a suspense comic that's just diabolically focused on plot points, dozens and dozens of them, everything swirling around Light the ambitious kid's efforts to evade capture while killing the shit out of criminals so as to reform the world, initially powered by new "rules" regarding how to use the deadly notebook, every one of them providing fresh fodder for cat 'n mouse contortions, but later just sprawling all of this accumulated background over expanded scenarios. What if Light loses his memory for a while? What if other Shinigami show up with extra Death Notes? What if we fucking kill the series' most popular character right here and replace him with two characters representing (a) emotion and (b) full Vulcan? Oooh, how do we get out of this, dear readers??
In this way, the suspense becomes almost as much about wondering how the plot isn't going to collapse into a heap than which of the characters are going to survive. And to be frank, the characters in Death Note exist pretty much to drive the plot anyway; they're really catchy character types, and the artist, Takeshi Obata, does a decent job of giving them striking looks, but they never, ever, ever develop at all, in any but the most superficial ways! When someone enters the Death Note stage, you can bank on them playing out that role, as you know it right there, for the whole series, which effectively short circuits your typical boys' manga focus on the development of a large cast of characters in a loose -- if ideally propulsive -- story.
Death Note is anti-decompression; it's dense, dialogue-heavy and all but soaked in ideas, all of which feed the roaring engine of who-knows-what-now, does-he-know-that-I-know-that-he-knows, et al. At risk of dealing in stereotypes, this plot point mania is fairly Western in style compared to your Naruto or your One Piece.
Even among series today, the closest artist I can think of working in this vein is Naoki Urasawa of Monster, 20th Century Boys and Pluto, although he's a writer/artist that weaves a lot more in the way of theme and color and complexity into his stories, despite their being longform suspense pieces. He's been picking up some of readers outside the "expected" manga readership -- Pluto is really the key here, as it's almost eerily similar in basic outlook to Marvel's early Ultimate superhero books in redoing a classic action fantasy character (Astro Boy) in a modern, nominally sophisticated setting. I actually wonder how well he does with that typical manga reader, since he's writing for an older audience, and his sedate, not-so-"manga" looking art is more common to seinen manga of that type; most of the visual tropes that maybe freak people out in manga are really heavy in shonen (boy) and shojo (girl) comics.
And do not forget: Death Note, as much as this can boggle the mind, is a kids comic. Not a little kids comic, like in CoroCoro or something, but it's shonen manga, it ran in Shonen Jump. Ostensibly it's aimed at 12-year old boys, which brings to my mind Grant Morrison's old line that New X-Men was aimed at intelligent 12-year-olds, even though I'm sure he fucking well knew the real audience is 20, 30 and up. This isn't unique to American superhero comics.
Take the term "boy." That denotes both age and gender. There's a good quote from Obata in the Death Note official guide, How To Read -- this is where I'm getting all my Death Note factoids, by the way -- where he attributes the series' wide appeal to the fact that it didn't seem like a typical Shonen Jump manga, "although it actually was, really." But what Death Note really does with shonen manga is that it takes the classical shonen elements, defined by Jason Thompson as friendship, perseverance and victory, and subverts and mocks them with this story of your typical dedicated manga boy hero who perseveres in not getting locked up for all the criminals he's killed with the Magic Item he's come into, and strives with clenched fists to reform the world under his moral authority. To be the best, like it's a sports manga!
All his friends he just uses; it's all fake and shit, because everyone's using each other, especially in the bit where L, the favorite detective kid, calls him his first friend. L doesn't give a shit! He's out to beat Light, to win the game of Death Note -- the chase after the value of victory destroys friendship, and turns struggle into amoral destruction. Nobody fucking "wins" in Death Note, by the way -- the detectives go in neat alphabetical order: L, M(ello) and N(ear), and Near's the one that defeats Light, who dies, and then the world just goes back to how it was before, and I for one was left with no doubt that Near would just eventually be killed by someone else anyway, not that he seems to care; it's telling that he's the least human-like of the eccentric boys.
It's shonen, but it's like old, angry gekiga: it has an old soul, that of adult manga aimed at kicking the snot out of Japanese optimism, correcting society. When you back away from Death Note, the fun of serialization, when you look at it as a whole, it's an awful thing. It's sheer nihilism. As a whole, it's all about how stupid, useless people are pushed around by powerful boys and men with the balls to command the brainless sheep of society, even though their efforts are inevitably immoral and any attempt at substantive change is doomed to failure. There is no God, there is no life after death, we all just trudge through the slime of corruption and literally the best we can hope for is to curtail the worst abuses so as to maintain the crummy status quo. Fuck you, and good night.
It's not necessarily there to make you sad, more to urge you to live life and give it your all because that's all you can ever do -- a man without hope is a man without fear, as Jesus said. And there's a place for that! Ohba has said that part of the reason Death Note was pitched to a shonen magazine was because they're be less focus on theme, more on action -- as a result, intentional or not, it's like a perfect, horrible machine of scattershot acid commentary, delivered like thrilling entertainment! For a while, anyway; part of Death Note's monomaniacal focus on plotting is that once the plot gets shitty for readers, they jump off. It's somewhat hard to find many Death Note fans that actually liked the whole series.
Which naturally leads to the boy-as-gender part of the equation. Death Note may be nominally aimed at males, but it's part of something some American readers have dubbed "neo shonen" -- comics for boys that take great pains to attract girls, often through attractive male character designs and appealing relationships, maybe with the added zing of yaoi appeal, though not generally actual homosexuality. If I was gonna be a huge boy about it, I'd say that Death Note has a lot of ugly sentiments toward women in it, based on the fact that virtually every female character in the series is either a helpful idiot, blithely exploited or quickly killed.
That's not giving the series' female fans -- and there's plenty of them -- enough credit. Part of the fun of Death Note, and I haven't talked nearly enough about fun here, is how the characters are all so wicked, yet latched onto this steaming plot engine and all sorts of novel bang-pow concept twists. I was rooting for L to, say, crack down on freedom of the press or subject Light to tortuous interrogation (often above the futile objections of some silly, minor moral voice, swiftly brushed aside) to see if he'd "win" the series. I think for women and girls the fact that all these handsome, get-things-done guys use all these mostly awful women is a similar part of the enjoyment, although certainly all women aren't the same!
Ha, this is a good topic, because you're right now you're probably going "infant Christ in the cradle, Jog, do you even likeDeath Note?!" And the answer is: sorta! What I'm getting at is -- Death Note was a weird, curious series for Japan, for its manga demographic, and what made it odd is probably what helped its popularity here, and it finished smashingly well there and here, at a time where here became increasingly affected by there. In this way, as a finished unit, it straddles the line of what's expected of manga both in the manga-fied U.S. and in Japan, while representing a possible, now even likely future. I can't think of another comic this decade with such unique qualities, and it's got a visceral, immediate appeal that, for however brief it lasts, can't be denied.
SPURGEON:Death Note was originally "sold" to me by a Viz editor on the floor of Comic-Con not on the main, conceptual hook but on Takeshi Obata's involvement. Even today, he seems an odd choice to me, and I don't know if there's a story there or not. Anyway, can you talk specifically a bit about his work as a designer and artist on the series, whatever your feelings are about his contribution?
JOG: Well that makes sense, because they had to sell the comic somehow when it was really fresh and unknown. When you see how odd it is, Death Note is really kind of a risk despite its huge popularity in Japan; there's always a chance the aspects of it I'm deeming "Western" won't actually appeal to North American English readers at all. So I presume they looked for some tie-in, something familiar. Back in the '90s you'd always want to latch on to an anime tie-in when releasing manga, despite the fact that the manga would almost always have reached a bigger audience than anime adaptations in Japan. This tail-wagging-the-dog effect led to some odd stuff, like Viz putting out some old Galaxy Express 999 movies and relatedly releasing a bunch of Leiji Matsumoto manga that remains the most of the guy's work ever seen in English on this continent.
Even today, manga remains somewhat closely tied to the wider anime culture in English-dominant North America, which isn't to say that anime is a thriving business -- it's pretty much in the shitter at this point -- but that pirated and fansubbed and out-of-context anime on the Internet is so common that it's an engine. Death Note's anime didn't start up until 2006, so that wouldn't work -- I presume Viz went for Obata-as-sales-point since Hikaru no Go, one of his prior projects as artist, had already been out in English for a couple years.
All this anime talk is funny, since I see Obata as exemplary in the youth manga effort to adapt a very slick, stylized-realism "anime" approach to manga -- glossy character designs that look like they stepped off of model sheets planted into detailed settings like old-timey cells on buffed backgrounds. It's a very lush approach, with fewer speed lines or iconographic details that'd denote the doodling of capricious pictures; I find it very chilly myself, machine-like and still, in the way that a lot of television anime these days doesn't even move very much.
But, y'know, that approach is fitting as a system of delivery for chit-chat and plot information. The writer Ohba is supposedly an artist, too; he scripted Death Note via dialogued thumbnails, which I think is how Mike Mignola does some of his Hellboy-related comics, keeping a grip on the base look, the storytelling. Calling Obata a "designer" is maybe most accurate, given that he also works pretty heavily with studio assistants -- those 2000+ pages didn't get seralized over two years two-handed! -- and he is a damn appealing character draftsman, and adept at shadowy mood or the occasional good facial expression, and I wonder if looking like anime but not necessarily so much "manga" helped bridge the gap of appeal between the manga audience and other comics readers.
SPURGEON: You mentioned earlier about the various spin-offs and presentations in other media, and how they were releatively restrained. Still, I think of Death Note as this group of material rather than a couple of films over here and a manga series over there, and I'm not sure why that is. Is it wrong to suggest that the manga has a closer than usual relationship to the other forms in which Death Note works have appeared? How closely interrelated are they for fans, do you think? Did the films or any of the other material change the way you look at the manga at all? Does that happen to you generally?
JOG: I'll say again, it's a pretty short series as far as shonen megahits go, and it's complicated enough in terms of basic concept -- to say nothing of its focus on plotting, which naturally endears those specific plot points to readers, as opposed to the general idea of Monkey D. Luffy and his seafaring world of rib-tickling hijinx -- that the various spin-offs tend to hew close to the original. Even the farther-off stuff like the L-focused material tend to be oddly similar; the L: Change the World movie and the Death Note Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases prose novel have almost exactly the same basic concept -- L vs. another eccentric kid from eccentric detective breeding ground Wammy's House that's gone bad, although they both take it in different and twisty directions.
The thing is, the Death Note manga is such a unique thing as a whole, this anti-theme shonen semi-parody that gains in bleak, awful impact from its dutiful, probably kinda thoughtless accumulation of plot baggage, the semi-faithful stuff is especially responsive to small changes.
Part of this is the issue of fandom: Death Note is over. Done. Yet the fans keep it going -- more and more of them seem to be female, which maybe justifies the decision to appeal not just to guys, and perhaps plays into a certain stereotype of girl fans as especially glommy with their favorites -- which is fine for sparking interest in remakes and new properties. I'm convinced the sheer flatness and lack of development of the series' characters helps it in this way -- it's easier to hook onto really catchy "types" and read your own nuance into them than deal with preexisting complexity. Really, Death Note almost seemed to cry for a fandom, and it got it -- in a world of closed-period stories like manga offers, this isn't a bad model for creators looking for nice money from finished work.
But fandom creates its own baggage. The first two Death Note movies were a two-part adaptation of the "main" work, which actually only covers the bits with L and then skips to the very end -- as you've definitely figured out by now, L is the really popular character. Plus, L beats Light in the movie, and dies a peaceful, heroic death.
For me, this actually causes kind of a huge problem, introducing heroism into Death Note! Because L is an awful mother fucker. He tortures, he suppresses freedoms, he clearly doesn't give two shits about anything in comparison to the thrill of figuring out a good puzzle -- and, you know, in the comic he dies like a dog, like Light eventually dies like a dog, and Near survives but he'll probably die like a dog eventually -- the 2008 manga postscript actually deals with another guy finding a Death Note and just getting destroyed in one episode, mind you, but that's more a joke about how hard it is to repeat a big success; I think the story was released in anticipation of Ohba's & Obata's current series, Bakuman, which is about high schoolers that want to be manga artists.
Getting back on topic though, Death Note the manga has that cruel elegance to it, in that everyone is doomed, and that temporary success may be the realm of the immoral, but it's all hubris in the end. Yet popular L gets his day to win in Death Note the movie, and suddenly -- he's a beloved character, so he's the hero. All the awful shit -- faithfully reproduced from the source material! -- is A-OK. It's necessary to stop the real evil! That's fucking repulsive!! It's way worse than the manga! But that's what happens when you put popular character A (er, L) in a seemingly stronger place. I don't know if the filmmakers were mindful of L's fandom or anything, but it still says something.
Then you get the L movie, which seems hellbent on undoing the mess of the proper Death Note movies, which gets me thinking the implications didn't go unnoticed (ooh, maybe that's my hubris!) -- like, it's a pretty campy, light adventure L goes on to solve one last case after beating Light but before dying, and he spends the whole movie learning the value of life and repudiating his old ends-justify-the-means attitude, and all the death scenes are pretty disquietingly oozy and overlong, as if mocking the quick, pretty deaths of kids' comic Death Note -- it makes me feel like I'm in the story, Tom. Did the director know that the other director knew that Tsugumi Ohba knows that... that...
SPURGEON: Why didn't we have a major Death Note-related controversy in some school somewhere? For that matter, why haven't we had a big manga-related controversy of any kind? I guess there was a Dragon Ball thing with the wee-wees somewhere I can't even remember now, but I thought at one point that we were going to either have 50 of those or the one we'd have would be super-dire seeming.
JOG: I have no idea. Man, I remember the time a bunch of old copies of Urotsukidoji somehow slithered out of the CPM archives and showed up at Borders -- some of 'em weren't even shrink wrapped! The secret ingredient is: it looked old, so none of the kids probably even opened it. Burden of pop, Tom.
Anyway, with Death Note, it's good to remember that there's a lot of dying, but it's all very clean. Most of it's quick heart attacks -- that's the default mode of notebook killing -- and any of the nastier, specific deaths you can write in are depicted with restraint, especially considering the likes of Fist of the North Star of shonen series' past. I don't think it'd necessarily fly by the Comics Code Authority in 1957, but it is mostly a violent series about wishing people were dead really really really hard, which tends to go on in high school anyway, so finding a few kids scribbling "Bobby Pinkerton -- hit by his dumb fukking car" isn't going to cause too much of an uproar. The basic deadly item that kills via your desires concept isn't new, or new to manga -- there's a similar idea in Hideshi Hino's Panorama of Hell, and that wasn't even the first time he used it.
But yeah, I guess I'm a little puzzled at how some of the precocious girls jonesing for yaoi haven't caused an uproar, given the general outlook of society in re: non-male and/or non-hetero sexuality. If I had to lay money down, I'd say that most parents don't particularly understand these wacky backwards books to start with, and they maybe don't have much of a concept of cartoony-looking comics having a lot of squicky content. Thanks, Dr. Wertham!
SPURGEON: How much is the worldview put forward in Death Note a serious, considered one and how much of it is undercutting that which gets asserted in other manga? Or is that just a pathetically false dichotomy? How do readers engage with the series on that level, do you think?
JOG: I don't think a lot of readers engage on that level at all, because they're not supposed to. [Spurgeon laughs] That's why it's a shonen manga, because there's less burden of questioning on it -- I think only lit majors, sociologists and huge nerds like me think of it that way, but that stuff is an element of it. If you read interviews with Ohba, he tends to be very evasive about deeper meanings in Death Note, like: "We never put much thought into it. We just wanted it to be entertaining." That's from How To Read.
It mirrors some sentiments you get from pro mangaka, like when Kiyohiko Azuma won the a Japan Media Arts Festival prize for Yotsuba&! in 2006 and he emphasized in his interview that he doesn't consider his work "art," and that he doesn't even want to be an artist, he wants to be an artisan. And I suspect this is an odd and maybe troubling thing to hear in the comics scene around here, where we like to imagine sometimes that everyone is struggling to do traditionally deeper things, "elevating" genre pieces, while manga has the benefit of actually having been a mass medium, steadily for decades now, with economic structures in place to support craftsmen and a wide variety of works coming out, and I expect that's fostered less anxiety over literary fiber in individual works -- in some cases, entertainment craftsmanship is essentially the goal. Well-done plot points could be their own reward, even in the abstract.
You see? I think we're nearing the reluctance right up proper critics have in dealing with manga, popular manga. Relaxed. I can sense Gary Groth writing my name in his Death Note right now; that's why I use a nickname. You think Gary has Shinigami eyes?
But anyway, here were are in the 21st century, the end of the first decade of that, and it's clear by now that we all can process works apart from authorial intent, so Death Note is what Death Note is. I'd say a good half to three-quarters is probably a product of its plot mechanisms clanking around to eliminate obstacles, keeping readers on their toes, which on the level of truly devious plot craft perhaps encourages the overall tone of the work. It may not be timed to the last word -- like, I'm not even convinced its response to shonen tropes was meant to be more than a hooky means of getting the series picked up a huge, big money magazine -- but it's a serious result nonetheless.
SPURGEON: It's weird, I'm usually a themes and moments guy, and I'm usually focused on the original works, but I think my lingering memory of this series is going to be watching one of the live action films and being struck by how awesome the design was for Ryuk.
JOG: Hell yeah, Obata knows his design. And it's especially important that Ryuk look cool because --
Well, think about it. What does Ryuk, the main Shinigami even do in the story? He provides a helpful way to break up the monotony of talking heads, yes - when in doubt, cut to Ryuk. But he just hangs around. Observes. He started the story, dropping off the Death Note, and he ends it, writing in Light's name. Sometimes he participates in the action, but only to facilitate his own delight at what's happening.
The characters in Death Note are flat. Types, like I've said. So specific-yet-vaguely-defined it's hard to even locate a reader identification figure, and they're mostly monsters anyway.
Except Ryuk, a literal monster. A death spirit. He's the reader identification figure, because he floats above everything, unconcerned. The official guide calls him lazy, but he's really just relaxed, like reading a comic on the train. It all means nothing to him -- these people are like fictions he can watch smash into one another, just like we're watching the Death Note passion play of silly fucking futility, of dumb fucking society going nowhere in high style, "reality" made sick for thrills, just like Ryuk did. A whole bunch of people die and we applaud, and maybe we don't feel so bad at all. We've got our own Shinigami death realm to sit in, boring before distraction.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the writer Paul Di Flilippo tells me that the radio episode uploaded halfway down this page as "The Author Meets The Critics 481010 29m59s The Schmo.mp3" features all-time blustery crank and all-around cartooning genius Al Capp debating comics' once and forever bogeyman Dr. Frederic Wertham about The Shmoo. This would no doubt be one damn amazing thing to download and give a listen. Unfortunately, the computer I'm using right now was built the same year as this ostensible clash of the titans: 1948. That doesn't mean you should deny yourselves, only that I can't tell you anything more from first-hand experience.
* the prominent 1980s independent cartoonist Barry Blair apparently died Sunday, from complications due to a brain aneurysm that had gone without immediate diagnosis. A full obituary will appear on this site on or after January 10.
* Devlin Thompson was nice enough to send in a link to this article on Syd Hoff's stint (under a pseudonym) as the cartoonist at the Daily Worker.
* the analysis articles on Kurt Westergaard's attack last Friday have begun: Foreign Policy wants to know why the attacker was let into Denmark in the first place; Financial Times wants to know the same thing and provides some of the political reaction to the attack; The Guardian sees lone wolf extremists everywhere you want to look.
* new years, new projects: the veteran cartoonist and comics educator Steven Bissette has begun a webcomic called King Of Monster Isle. I think this would be his first, although I'm happy to be corrected on that. Graham Nolan has launched a strip called Sunshine State. Editorial cartooning veterans Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker launch Dustin through King Features.
1. Batman and Robin
2. Chew
3. Detective Comics' Batwoman serial
4. Incognito
5. The Middleman Season 1 DVD
6. Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter
7. Sugarshock
8. Wednesday Comics
9. The Invincible Super-Blog
10. Midnight Fiction
There is an extensive honorable mention section and write-ups of each effort if you follow that initial link.
* blogger-prime NeilAlien analyzes the recent failed Dr. Strange-related comics effort, this one a book by writer Rick Remender putting Brother Voodoo into the Sorcerer Supreme role. There are lots of ways to analyze that one, but the basic quandary seems to be that Marvel's current editorial culture seems generally uninterested in a "classic Dr. Strange" approach, while market factors make a non-roots approach like this latest one dicier than ever.
* finally, Deathreats, a collection of the late Drew Hayes' on the comics industry and his life within it, won the 2009 New England Book Festival's Biography/Autobiography category. In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the introduction to that book.
Are You On CR’s Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
CR Holiday Interview #14—Douglas Wolk On The Invincible Iron Man: World’s Most Wanted
Douglas Wolkwritesforclients the rest of us can only dream about. He even published a book of comics criticism called Reading Comics (De Capo, 2007). His critical outlook may be most noteworthy for the genuine enthusiasm Wolk shows for mainstream North American superhero books and the sophistication of thought and process and result he consistently ascribes to their creation. Wolk was one of only three writers of the twenty interviewed for this series that chose a book for how well it embodied a certain kind of comics experience as opposed to how it achieved greatness or how important it was as a publishing effort. I very much enjoyed the following discussion. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: There's one thing I wanted to ask you if we ever talked again on the record: can you talk a little bit about the experience of getting Reading Comics out there and into people's hands? Was there any single instance of feedback that's stuck with you? Has it changed the way you write?
DOUGLAS WOLK: I don't know that there's an individual piece of feedback that's been particularly important, although it was really gratifying to see people responding to it in general. One thing the book's reception has nudged me toward, though, is thinking more carefully about who's going to be reading what I write, and what I can do for those readers specifically. I've certainly been trying to change the way I write, but that also has a lot to do with trying to step my game up in general.
SPURGEON: This may be totally unfair, but since I have the attention of one of the best writers on superhero comic books and we're discussing a superhero comic book, I'll take the risk. Can you characterize in broad strokes the decade in superhero comics now just passing? It seems to me that a lot of what was interesting was less the stuff found in the nooks and crannies as in years past, or in the independents part of Previews, but the bigger titles from the bigger names -- or, in the case of someone like Brian Bendis, the titles that made his name on his way to doing such comics. How would you describe the last decade in the broadest terms?
WOLK: I'd say the biggest change in superhero comics this decade is one that began in the previous decade: the shift from books keeping particularly well-regarded serial comics in print to serial comics acting as an installment plan for stories that are ultimately meant to be experienced in books, which means that the basic unit of storytelling is less firmly 22 pages and more like roughly six times that. The way superhero comics are regarded by their audience also seems to be even more focused on writers now than it's been in the past. (There are a lot of nearly interchangeable artists working in something like house styles on big titles right now -- I read a couple of recent issues of Superman this morning and I couldn't tell you who drew them without looking it up.)
SPURGEON: You chose a book -- you chose a few and then I picked one -- that was maybe less a major milestone than one that was more representative of a certain kind of comics making. Is that a fair way to describe your thinking?
WOLK: I think so -- I appreciated that you didn't ask me to select what I thought was the best comic of the decade, but something I'd liked a lot and thought might be fruitful to discuss. I like your description of superheroes, which I hope you don't mind my quoting, as "comics' special genre" and "the right-now part of the comics medium." I don't think "World's Most Wanted" is visionary work, but I thought it was a terrific piece of serial entertainment -- I got a jolt of pleasure from every installment and looked forward to finding out what happened next, and I enjoyed rereading the whole thing. I also suggested the Fraction/LarrocaIron Man because it's coming out right now -- superhero comics are a vein of the medium that's perpetually evolving (which means that there's often something that looks a little old-fashioned about even five- or ten-year-old superhero books).
SPURGEON: Is the fact that you can pick a series and kind work at it to get the key to a lot of other works an indictment of corporate creativity all by itself? You've written so well about 1970s mainstream comics, a time at which I think folks were largely left alone -- past certain boundaries of good taste and propriety -- and now it seems much more tightly controlled. What is the state of writers and artists being able to express themselves through these comics? What is the difference between a comic book that reflects the skill and concerns of its creators and one that's more of a cog in the machine? What kinds of creators seem to do best in this current system?
WOLK: I don't know that there's necessarily a contradiction between expressiveness and cog-building; I get the sense that superhero-comics audiences and publishers are all in favor of expressiveness, as long as it takes a form that's more or less consistent with the current norms of the genre. (J.H. Williams III, Alex Maleev, Doug Mahnke...) I've probably given a dozen friends copies of the Brendan McCarthy issue of Solo, but I bet if he wanted to draw a monthly Flash series it would be a very hard sell (although, hey, I'd buy it). And I liked JK Niimura's work on I Kill Giants, but for some reason that Spider-Man story he drew a few weeks ago didn't sit right with me -- it's hard to square his basic approach to drawing with the general look of all the other comics that involve those characters.
I also suspect that we now take some of the innovations of the '70s for granted, and that the territory covered by "consistent with current norms" has widened. In the context of the '70s, Gail Simone's writing on Secret Six would probably have blown minds at least as much as what Steve Gerber was up to; now it's just a solid, slightly eccentric superhero comic. Scott Kolins' artwork on Rogues' Revenge would have seemed exceptionally "expressive" back then, too.
The big change in recent years as far as superhero comics writing goes is that the large-scale shared narratives have become much more important -- an ongoing state of affairs rather than a once-a-year crossover -- and the writers who thrive in the current climate are the ones who are good at navigating that: Bendis and Johns, most obviously, but also developing writers like Fred Van Lente and Jonathan Hickman who can grab onto whatever line-wide premise is being thrown at them and come up with some fun angle on it.
Only-a-cog-in-the-machine comics very often seem to have been commissioned rather than pitched -- the impulse behind them appears to be "we can profitably publish something that has these words on the cover, on the strength of this other project that will make it marketable" or "we need something to fill this ongoing series' pages for a while," rather than "here's a potentially awesome approach to Hellcat." They're not always terrible, but they mostly are, and it's usually easy to tell which ones they are: the grudging "I suppose it's a gig" attitude comes through.
SPURGEON: If I can describe this series' place in the overarching Marvel narrative, which has encompassed much of the decade, this is Tony Stark's confrontation with/flight from government forces led by Norman Osborn, the Spider-Man villain. Osborn found himself in this advantageous position after seizing a "kill Osama Bin Laden live on TV"-type opportunity during a war between earth and the shape-changing Skrulls. The war with the Skrulls was fought by a superhero community still divided and slightly damaged by the Civil War. On one side of that Civil War -- by nearly all hints within the comics the wrong side -- Tony Stark was the leader. And that's maybe it. I'm probably missing steps. So my question is this: obviously a story like "World's Most Wanted" has to function as both stand-alone serial and as a multi-issue cog in this greater narrative. How well does this story do that? What are winning strategies for straddling that fence, do you think?
WOLK: One big problem anyone writing Iron Man in the last few years would have faced is that Tony Stark had been written into a corner. The way the "Civil War"/"World War Hulk"/"Secret Invasion" sequence played out turned him into a seriously unsympathetic character: not just a charmingly arrogant playboy but the personification of the military-industrial complex, the guy who consolidates his power by suppressing liberty in the name of public security and gets (Captain) America killed in the process. (I like Sean T. Collins' phrase: "a walking warrantless wiretap.") So this story essentially had to punish him so severely that he could be redeemed as a protagonist.
On its own, "World's Most Wanted" is about its central character methodically destroying the most important part of himself to achieve victory, which is a compelling story -- I believe Matt Fraction has described it as a standard "Hero's Journey" plot run backwards, and I like that idea even though I'm not sure it makes sense. (And giving Tony Stark the Flowers for Algernon treatment was an incredibly clever idea: it goes straight to what's interesting about the character, and it might wipe a lot of the reprehensible stuff he's done over the last few years off his record in a way that doesn't quite feel like a cheat.)
I found the overall "Dark Reign" premise more interesting than I think you did: it provided a climate for Marvel titles to explore public morality in the context of a state run by murderous creeps who care about nothing but power, but who basically control the public narrative. This story happens in that world, and suggests that Tony was partly responsible for it -- it treats "Dark Reign" as Tony's story, which I think helps it work in both contexts.
SPURGEON: How does the success of the Iron Man movie play into how this story was received, or perhaps even how it was created? If I remember writer Matt Fraction's statements on that subject, there was an effort on his part for the series in general to kind of get a grasp on what they were doing with the movie version even if it wasn't something he could directly access until it came out. Is this clearly marked in some way as a comic series that might not have existed before the movie?
WOLK: It's absolutely a post-movie Iron Man book, even beyond a few visual details (the way that chest circle glows!). I don't know that a story written before the movie would have set the Tony/Pepper power-and-attraction dynamic right out front the way Fraction did; in general, I think what we're seeing here dovetails with the movie in a way that a five- or ten-year-old comic book wouldn't, and it's designed so that someone whose first exposure to the character was seeing and liking the movie can pick up the trade and think "yes, this is like that." But the movie was also the most entertaining Iron Man story I'd ever seen, so, you know, bring it on. It's what brought me back to Iron Man, which I hadn't been reading regularly in something like 20 years.
SPURGEON: For that matter, we're a full decade into these movies now. Have they changed the comic books in any ways that are obvious or maybe less so?
WOLK: We're more than a decade into them -- the '00s instance that seemed oddest to me was Geoff Johns, with and without Richard Donner, trying to square up the Superman titles with the first two Superman movies. I suppose Amazing Spider-Man is now closer to the movie version than it was ten years ago, and a lot of the Ultimate line, especially Ultimate X-Men, reflects the movies to one extent or another. (There's also been an impulse I've noticed toward action-movie-style "cinematic" storytelling: the current incarnation of Iron Man flows a bit like a movie in a way that most comics of ten years ago didn't.) On the other hand, the Batman line made the slightest of nods toward The Dark Knight (Lee Bermejo's Joker didn't look entirely unlike Heath Ledger's), then proceeded to zoom off in a totally different direction, which seems to have worked out fine both creatively and commercially.
SPURGEON: I thought this was the best work I'd seen from Salvador Larroca, and in particular it seemed much less heavily photo referenced than some of his work in recent years. How should he be looked at in the context of some of the more widely recognized strong superhero artists of the day: Quitely, and Romita Jr. and Williams, say? What are his strengths as put on display in this book?
WOLK: John Romita Jr. has near-Kirby-class brute force and that wonderful splintery line of his (especially when he works with Klaus Janson), J.H. Williams III devises compositions (and sometimes drawing styles) on both the page and panel levels that underscore the psychological dynamics of the stories he draws, Frank Quitely can stage and frame action like nobody's business and has a beautiful buoyant wit in the way he draws characters. Larroca shows his hand in his drawing a lot less than any of them -- his style actually seems to have a lot to do with contemporary video games: it works to make the characters look "real" without doing much that declares "SALVADOR LARROCA MADE ME." I'm still not fully reconciled to his photo-referencing, and I wonder what it would look like if he were a little more expressive with his line, but the post-PS3 look of his artwork -- even when it draws close to the uncanny valley -- is at least formally appropriate for a series about technology (in a way that I suspect would be less appropriate for a series like Thor, say).
I think Larroca's real strength is character acting -- letting body language and facial expressions carry the story along. That doesn't do much good in a fight scene involving people in full-body armor, and actually I think the big fights are some of the less effective parts of his artwork here, but the sequence with Tony, Whitney and Pepper in the cave, for instance, shows off what he can do much more dramatically.
SPURGEON: While we're looking at individual efforts, what is your general take on Matt Fraction's work, on Iron Man and on other series like The Order and Uncanny X-Men? What are his particular virtues, and how are they put on display here?
WOLK: I haven't read most of Fraction's X-Men yet, but from what I've seen of his work, he's a pretty versatile writer -- his Iron Man doesn't read like his Iron Fist or The Order or Casanova, and each of those projects is written in a voice that suits them. The things that appeal to me most about his work are in the broad construction of his stories -- there usually seems to be a smart idea or theme driving them, which most of their details serve -- and in his character writing, as well as the little flourishes of cleverness he sprinkles around his stories (the "calicomom" routine, the business with the impaired Tony listening to his book-on-tape in flight). I hope at some point he writes a superhero title with a tone as idiomatic as Casanova, which didn't connect with me as much as his Iron Man has but seemed fresher and riskier than his Marvel projects have been so far. You've probably read more of his work than I have; what's your take on it?
SPURGEON: I think he's the real deal. Kind of a throwback. It was smart of the Journalto pair him up with Denny O'Neil; he reminds me of those guys a lot. A thing I think interesting about Fraction in relation to his general peer group is that I'm not sure we know what he wants to write about yet, the way it was obvious what was close to, say, Ed Brubaker's heart pretty early on. I think he's been extraordinarily disciplined that way, with Casanova having a confessional aspect, which is a slightly different thing. I don't have a firm grasp as to what Fraction thinks is exciting or interesting or worth exploring through art.
That might be unfair, too. There's such a grinding aspect to writing mainstream comic books that a lot of self-reflection and focused consideration we expect from writers in other media might be impossible. I used to wonder why Stan Lee seemed particularly fond of Iron Man, but I grew to feel he might not be able to fully articulate it even if given that opportunity. My theory was that Tony Stark's story represents a certain kind of relatively late in life turnaround based on achievement and choice rather than potential and position, which would obviously appeal to Lee. But who knows if that's true? Chances are it's all projection. Although flipping that back to "World's Most Wanted," do you believe readers react to a character like Iron Man on that level, or is the main response more on the level or "billionaire in a metal suit"? Or both? Or neither?
WOLK: I like your theory about Tony Stark and Stan Lee; I think any aspect that's cool in one way or another is probably part of the draw. ("Billionaire in a metal suit" has to be part of it too, and so does the Tom Swift whiz-bang factor.) I also suspect that if the first movie had been terrible, we would still be thinking of him as a B-lister. One thing I like about Fraction's take on Iron Man is that, for a hero, his Tony is not particularly a good person: he believes he's in the right and has done a lot of good, but he's also been responsible for creating an enormous amount of unhappiness (in his personal life) and suffering (in his role as an arms merchant and quasi-political figure), and all of Fraction's Invincible Iron Man so far has been about those chickens coming home to roost.
SPURGEON: Another thing about the modern Iron Man character is that Marvel seems to have going for a new way to recast him as a pop-culture sci-fi figure. Do they finally have that with this iteration? Does this version have legs?
WOLK: It's only got legs as long as Marvel's got creators who've got something interesting to say with that angle. I'm curious to know what you think, actually, especially since there are large chunks of Iron Man I haven't read -- I think between the mid-to-late '80s and the Fraction/Larroca run, the only sustained series of issues I paid attention to was the Warren Ellis "Extremis" sequence. Iron Man's a useful construct for playing with ideas about technology, obviously, and one of the most obvious visual hooks of this story was seeing each successive suit of armor as they got more and more primitive; the last decade's technological advances seem to be mostly about communication, though, and I'm not sure if there's a good way to turn semi-realistic near-future technology into a compelling action comic book. It'd be cool if someone could pull it off.
SPURGEON: If I were a better man, I could make a killer Doug Ramsey joke here. I'm even less well-read in post-Bob LaytonIron Man than you are, Douglas, although my sense of it is unfortunate haircuts and plumbing the melodrama of the character, tweaking these facile corporate/technological/concept aspects over anything touching rich metaphorical potential of a guy putting on a second skin and becoming a better man for it, let alone doing so with a set of sophisticated futurist principles in play. I think maybe The Ultimates' take could have nudged the character in that direction more effectively than we realize, that clever superhero-as-missile visual. I'm sure there were pockets of exploration that have escaped both of us, though, throughout.
Is there anything to say about the treatment of women in mainstream superhero comics that we can see in this particular series? On the one hand you have these strong, smart, sympathetic female characters like Pepper Potts and Maria Hill and the Black Widow; on the other, a friend mentioned you could read that part of the comic as these strong female characters running around at the beck and call of this billionaire alpha male. How important are strong female characters in mainstream comics like this one? How are the mainstream comics companies doing in this area?
WOLK: Yeah, it's no secret that superhero comics taken as a whole are still not great on representations of women, but I do think this series is pulling in a good direction. (Well, a direction vis-a-vis women characters I can read without wincing, anyway.) I was happy to see that the secondary plots are almost entirely concerned with Pepper and with Maria and Natasha's interactions, and I like how Natasha spends her entire sequence bored and annoyed by the "adventure" she's been roped into. I don't know whether or not "World's Most Wanted" passes the "Bechdel test" -- as I recall, the Iron Man movie failed that test outright. (I think there are only two significant female characters in the movie, they have one brief scene together, and they talk about Tony.) On the other hand, this series is called Iron Man; it's understandable that he's the center of attention, and Pepper's big speech in the most recent issue kind of hangs a lantern on that particular problem.
One aspect of superhero comics' right-now-ness is that anything that gets in the way of or even defers their readers' enjoyment can be dangerous (missed ship dates, splotchy coloring, difficult storytelling techniques...). If stories for 13-year-old boys don't involve particularly well-realized women characters, those 13-year-old boys may not notice or mind. But I'm not a 13-year-old boy any more -- the superhero comics reader of right now, I feel safe in saying, is generally not 13 any more and/or not a boy -- and if the superhero stories I get don't have greater-than-one-dimensional women in them, that's going to get in the way of my enjoying them, too. I like some dude-centric comics a lot (the buddy-road-trip series The Incredible Hercules, the father-and-son series Batman and Robin), but I'd get burned out by a steady diet of nothing else.
(Another angle on this: one of the peculiar pleasures of reading superhero comics is forming attachments to characters over time, and then getting to enjoy seeing them whenever they turn up and particularly whenever they get to do something interesting or "characteristic." I felt distinctly more interested in Pepper, Natasha and Maria at the end of this story than I did at the beginning. That's something, anyway.)
SPURGEON: Can you talk a bit more about that particular reader's thrill that comes with finding a new way to use an older character, as has been done here with Pepper Potts? How are you engaged by moves that reach back and use established characters like that one? Did you laugh at the book's final one-liner?
WOLK: I did laugh at that line; I think I laughed aloud at least once each issue, either at Oh Yeah It's On Now moments or at in-jokes of one kind or another -- probably my biggest spit-take came from Whitney Frost quoting the Mountain Goats' "No Children." As a reader, I get a kick out of superhero comics drawing on older characters or scenarios in ways that deepen the story -- when the "oh, I recognize that" moment is followed by a little rush of seeing what's been done with the old idea to make it meaningful in, or add meaning to, the new context. That's a lot of the fun of this sort of massive-scale continuity, I think. (My favorite recent example of that is the image near the end of Final Crisis that alludes to Krona's vision of the beginning of time in a 45-year-old issue of Green Lantern: if you don't recognize it, you'd never even think it was significant, but I think I actually jumped back in my seat when I realized what I was looking at and what it meant to the story.) I was unfamiliar enough with a few references in "World's Most Wanted" that I had to look them up ("huh, I guess we haven't seen Happy in here, I wonder what happened to him?"), but Wikipedia filled in the blanks.
SPURGEON: I was going to ask you a print vs. on-line question, but then I remembered I don't care, so I thought maybe I'd ask you this: will there be new Iron Man comics ten years from now, and if so, will they be the same as today's aimed-at-trade, big-event driven, consistent yet not rigid in terms of continuity comics? Is the pleasure that you derived from this series going to be something of the past? I have this sense that mainstream comics are attuned to a very particular customer and I wonder if that customer is going to be around into their 50s.
WOLK: I have absolutely no idea; I no longer assume that anything in particular is going to be around ten years from now. If something unexpected goes horribly wrong at Diamond, the whole industry is basically screwed, right?
SPURGEON: If something hasn't gone horribly wrong already.
WOLK: I suspect, but have no proof, that the health of the superhero-periodical market in general trickles down from how many consistently terrific superhero periodicals there are at any given time. If there were ten pamphlets a week as good as Iron Man, the Morrison/Quitely Batman and Robin and the Rucka/Williams Detective Comics, I'd probably find a way to afford 15 a week. If there are only one or two titles that pique my interest in a given week, I may not make it to the comic book store at all.
SPURGEON: That's sort of the old alt-comics threshold argument -- that there simply stopped being enough alt-comics of a certain quality to keep that fan coming into the stores -- applied to superhero comics, which I've never heard before.
WOLK: I will say that "aimed-at-trade" seems like it can be a slow poison for serial comics. Comics that are enjoyable as serials have to be satisfying as individual issues (Heidi MacDonald's "satisfying chunk" principle), whether or not they're part of an extended story. I gave up on following the Ellis/BianchiAstonishing X-Men as a serial after one issue, when I realized that it was just going to be 22-page slices hacked off the side of the eventual book, but I can tell you what happened in any one issue of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and I haven't read some of them in 20 years.
I have no idea what the demographics of superhero comic books and trades are right now -- especially the question of who's coming into the audience and who's leaving -- and I would love to know more. A few years ago, I saw Paul Levitz talk a bit about what DC had learned about its demographics; I'm paraphrasing from memory, and I apologize (and hope I'll be corrected) about the parts I'm getting wrong. But the gist, as I remember, was that for a long time the standard model of a DC customer was somebody who bought $20 worth of comic books every week, and that this was now gradually fading but overlapping with a second, growing model: customers who spend $100 at a time, five or six times a year, and generally prefer books to pamphlets.
I get the sense that Marvel and DC are trying hard to hold on to that $20-a-week segment of their audience. One part of their strategy is "just wait until you see what happens next Wednesday!" (DC's weeklies, Marvel's effectively-weekly Spider-Man, tightly coordinated linewide continuity in general.) The other part, which I find a lot less effective at holding my attention in the long term, is "this is what you used to like, right? Here it is again." (Actually, All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder was more like "You like this, don't you! -- this is what you like, isn't it!")
Following an enormous, multi-threaded action-adventure narrative can be a real pleasure; there's nothing else much like it. But the barriers to entering those fictional environments are relatively high, and staying with them can be time-consuming, expensive, and boring. Every comic is somebody's last; habitual serial readers drop out of the habit when the rewards of following the story, at least on a weekly or monthly basis, are no longer worth the effort and expense to us. $4 for 22 pages of story that I might or might not like is, in general, my personal line-in-the-sand right now. I've read a ton of 2009 Marvels in the last few weeks, but that's because I went to a con and bought them for between 10 cents and a dollar apiece.
SPURGEON: Finally, even though we went in that different direction, do you have a short list of the great superhero comics of this decade you could share with us?
WOLK: Your list of 83 covered a lot of my favorites. Superhero-wise, this was Grant Morrison's decade, as far as I'm concerned -- more than anyone else, he's been writing stories that give me deeper pleasure with time and re-reading. Seven Soldiers was my favorite superhero project of the last ten years or more, I thought All Star Superman was beautifully executed, Final Crisis had a power and depth no other event comic has matched, and the two Seaguy miniseries to date still reverberate in my head.
Otherwise, the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple Omega the Unknown was a treat and a trip, and in a different way so was Promethea. Bendis's best comics, especially Alias, have a combination of psychological subtlety and crazy momentum that I like a lot. And I think people are going to be talking about Rucka and Williams' Batwoman serial in Detective for a long time -- it's gorgeous, and it rewards slow reading and observation.
The only other one you didn't name that I particularly enjoy is John Wagner's Judge Dredd stories (and I still haven't read enough of them from this decade to be able to firmly endorse the lot, but "Cadet" impressed me when I read it a few months ago in the context of his first two America stories) -- I really like the way he's playing a long game with the series, setting up plot points that unfold very slowly across years or decades as the cast ages and their society changes.
*****
* Invincible Iron Man, Vol. 2: World's Most Wanted, Book 1, Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca, Marvel, softcover, 152 pages, 9780785134138, November 2009, $14.99
* Invincible Iron Man, Vol. 3: World's Most Wanted, Book 2, Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca, Marvel, softcover, 160 pages, 9780785139355, April 2010, $19.99
[the two books collect a serial that ran entirely within the date parameters]
*****
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* I'm not seeing much that's new about this weekend's shocking story that a Somali man hacked his way into Kurt Westergaard's house with an axe, forcing the cartoonist and his granddaughter into a panic room, bringing police that shot the 28-year-old upon his departure from the house following his alleged failure to murder Westergaard for the Danish Cartoons Controversy of 2005-2006. Still, that's a hell of a sentence to write. The Times took the chance Sunday to spin around and kick Yale University Press in the nuts; like many in Europe when Westergaard was initially targeted, popular political blogger Andrew Sullivan re-posted the Danish Cartoons in support of the besieged cartoonist.
* the French-language comics news gathering site ActuaBD.com has reported the passing of Gilbert Gascard, who under the pseudonym Tibet became one of the artistic mainstays at Tintin Magazine. He was 78 years old. A proper obituary will appear on this site on or after January 10.
* not comics: here's a nice piece comparing the films of Hayao Miyazaki to this decade's output from Pixar. It's also reasonably "on-line brave" in that it's trying to make a more nuanced point than "this one = great"/"that one = sucks" on an Internet that doesn't do nuance very well and which is teeming with oversensitive Pixar fans. I had a similar feeling of being grateful for Miyazaki while watching Avatar, remembering how Princess Mononoke covered a lot of the same adventure story ground in weirder, more unsettling, less morally certain and more idiosyncratically beautiful ways.
* the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com offers their take on the finalization of the Disney/Marvel deal that took place just before the New Year. They also report that Disney has taken this opportunity to clean up some of the Stan Lee contractual stuff in the way a skilled doctor might clean a knee of painful, debilitating cartilage. I think that's very encouraging that they'd do that. I have to wonder if we might hear something about the Kirby family.
* I read and then forgot to blog about this recent, big Alan Moore interview here. I had mixed feelings. I still look forward to reading Dodgem Logic, although the content as described in that interview interests me not at all. I am all for people plowing money back into their communities, so that's nice, and I admire Moore's passion for new and interesting projects. I'm happy not to be reading the comics Moore's apparently reading, and would dispute there being some now-past time when comics was stuffed with original ideas.
1. GoGo Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto (Viz)
2. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
3. Driven by Lemons, Josh Cotter (AdHouse)
4. Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)
5. Prison Pit Book One, Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics)
6. Cold Heat #5/6, Ben Jones and Frank Santoro (PictureBox)
7. Treehouse of Horror #15, Various (Bongo)
8. West Coast Blues, Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics)
9. Cockbone, Josh Simmons (Self-Published)
10. The Color of Earth, Kim Dong Hwa (First Second)
The notes on each book and the process in putting together such a list are very entertaining, so I hope you'll look at Jog's entire post through that first link.
* finally, these are some of the things that certain people are excited to experience in 2010. Since I shared a work-related resolution on January 1, I'll share a personal one here. I pledge to eat between three and four pork tenderloin sandwiches sometime between now and December 31. I have seriously thought about finding some way to justify attending the last three GenCons in order to access some of the better versions out there.
Are You On CR’s Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
Tucker Stone may be best known as the comics critic with his own video series, which is sort of appropriate in that he's probably the most entertaining of the newer writers about comics in text, too. I constantly feel like I'm one step behind where he's going, which is a thrill, and in fact he takes one of the questions I asked him here and beats me about the head and body with it -- can't say I was expecting that! One of Stone's choices was Kevin Huizenga's work generally, which I asked him to focus into a discussion of the Ignatz book Ganges. Ganges #1 was the first book I asked CR readers to buy solely on my say-so, back when the thought of doing that and maybe a dozen or so people saying "what the heck?" was a total thrill. I stand by the recommendation, and that book's creator has since cinched his place among the handful of the world's most important cartoonists younger than 40. I loved the Ignatz format, too, which I suspect will seem very much of this time years and years from now. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Tucker, can you contextualize your encounter with the Ganges series? Was that your first encounter, had you been reading the mini-comics? Had you read about him before you read him? What then was your initial impression of Kevin Huizenga's work?
TUCKER STONE: I didn't know anything about who Kevin Huizenga was, nothing about his work, I just found a copy of Or Else # 1, I think that was in 2004 or 2005. The cover is what drew it to me -- I don't know the history of its publication, but when I saw it, it jumped out from the Wall of Minis due to the way he drew Glenn's baseball t-shirt. I liked what I read, and when I eventually started reading comics blogs on the internet, his name would come up. I think he also showed up in a Comics Journal best-of-year list, and up until 2006-7, I was using those lists pretty frequently to supplement my own ability to track stuff down. I don't remember when Curses came out, but I remember being excited to see a larger piece of work from him. From what I've read, he seems to have been pretty active with Supermonster, but I've never had the chance to see what those looked like.
My initial impression was that I liked his art, and I felt like the stories in Or Else had a different perspective to them -- the small town quality, the riding bikes stuff. Part of it was personal identification. There's a story in Or Else built around those languid conversations one can have with strangers in a Waffle House, and that's exactly what I did in college. But mostly, I just felt like he captured feelings really well. The dragging of feet through the leaves, the way the comic could turn to information dumps regarding what was obviously personal interest material -- I just found that Or Else read like an overstuffed comic, a cheap delivery system for massive amounts of "stuff." That's how I felt at first. It was pretty, clean. It reminded me of Frank King's work, although I don't know how to explain that. I actually pulled out my Gasoline Alley collections to see if I could nail why I feel that way, but it's not apparent to me. Maybe it's just that sense I get when I read them of where I grew up. My wife has pointed out to me that I have a tendency towards homesickness, romanticizing the area I grew up in... I don't know. Or Else and Ganges remind me a lot of college. Gasoline Alley reminds me of my dad. I would hope that I have a better reason besides that, but I imagine it's quite likely that I don't.
SPURGEON: The first issue of Ganges was one of the first works in the Ignatz series I'd seen. Have you enjoyed that series of books? Are there any specific offerings in addition to Ganges that you feel have really worked? How do you feel about them as a publishing project?
STONE: I think that the Ignatz series is really remarkable in that it doesn't have a lot of dead spots -- I haven't kept up with the series completely, but I'm pretty sure I've at least tried at least one issue of the various titles. Grotesque was one of the more recent ones I've really liked, but the Gipi books, New Tales of Old Palomar -- I think those are all really great comics, and while I'm probably in agreement with anybody who has ever thought too long about how to store them, I think they have a really nice physical quality to them. One of the things I find myself continuously disgusted by is the overwrought and over-designed nature of the comics that one sees from almost every single company right now, the way that absolutely everybody pumps out an overpriced hardcover of something that doesn't deserve it, but I don't harbor those feelings towards the Ignatz series. The size, the price point -- they completely appeal to me, I only wish they could be just a few centimeters taller, so they could fit perfectly alongside my copies of Rubber Blanket. I do wonder whether a larger range of color might help the series in the long run, but for now, I've been pretty happy with what I've seen of the line. There's a lot of really great comics in there, and the hit-to-shit ratio is higher than most. My favorite of the series is Ganges, but those Gipi ones are excellent as well. If they stopped doing them, I'd miss them.
I don't have a publishing perspective on them -- well, what I mean is that I don't have any grand, backseat driver's outlook on them. It's Fantagraphics, so I guess one could probably get an answer of how they sell from Eric Reynolds if one tried, but I've never thought about it too much. It does seem that the Hernandez/Gipi/Huizenga/Sala ones have a bit more prominence than the others. I think it's kind of cynically amusing that they're designed in a fashion that makes them useless to a Barnes & Noble as well as making them hard to rack in a direct market store. I guess they're intended for people who order their comics online, which is too bad, because I've had a lot of problems ordering stuff from Fantagraphics directly. Oh well! It wouldn't be comics without difficulty.
SPURGEON: Do you think Ganges takes advantage of the formatting available through the Ignatz project? Can you describe something in one of the Ganges books that you think works differently because of the size, the paper, whatever, that might have worked different in his series or in a mini?
STONE: Oh, absolutely. The first thing that comes to mind is the portion of Ganges #3 where Glenn is crawling around inside his brain, being swarmed by the dialog balloons -- having the scale is what makes that work. If that had been delivered in the smaller Or Else format -- well, first off, it wouldn't have been possible. There's just not enough physical room on the page to make it work. The other thing that I think is interesting is that the scale of the comics doesn't really affect the size that Kevin draws Glenn -- look at Or Else, look at Ganges, you're dealing with a comic that physically dwarfs the other one -- but the figures roughly approximate the other, they aren't scaled down to any major degree. That's what limits the size of Or Else's ability to delve into the way the character thinks, because he isn't filling up the page with the amount of panels that Ganges has. There's plenty of times in the Glenn stories where the beat, the joke, is on Glenn's daydreaming or burst of memory, but there isn't enough size on the page to actually draw it out, so it's delivered in punchline panels. Ganges is big enough to let the visuals tell the story -- he's fighting with his own thoughts in #3, he's shooting them with a gun. His head has filled up with coffee.
The size also allows for a bigger jump when the story goes from paneled pages to full page drawings -- the impact in Or Else is muted, it can't go from nine panels to one, it can really only do two to one, or four to one. It lessens the range of volume, lessens the shift. In the case of #2, which featured ornate avatars similar to the ones from Fight or Run, he was able to achieve a better sense of the space they're in because he's got more of it within which the characters can play. From your basic plot standpoint, Or Else and the minis -- they aren't doing the sort of long narratives that Ganges is doing. When I look at the blown-up Or Else pages in Curses, they aren't mistakable as Ganges pages. He's doing that thing Frank Santoro preaches about, drawing pages that fit with the format.
It's a stretch, but have you seen how they reduce those Boom kids comics or the Marvel Noir series down even further for the digest reprints? The Boom comics have space in them, when they go smaller, it's not as noticeable. But those Marvel Noir digest books -- that doesn't serve them well at all. The art gets way too noisy, the dialog gets sandwiched too closely. Although the Or Else/Curses material went in the other direction, it's the same sensation to me -- a feeling that the size just doesn't work for the art. The Or Else stuff goes big, and it looks off, it slows me down when I'm reading it. Which... not everybody has that problem, it's a good problem to have, I think. If you're looking at a comic, and it can work at any size, reduced or enlarged, that seems to me that you might not have something very special. It should make a difference how big or small a work is going to end up being, it should be something that the artist is aware of, they should know how they work well enough to know that. Hell, look at those Little Nemo reprints -- if you've seen the Splendid Sundays books, the miniature reprints are intolerable. Same with
So count me among those who say yes, this was a best ever kind of Festival.
* Prix essential jeunesse (best children's album): Lou Vol. 5 by Julien Neel (Glénat)
Took in the 
Very quick note. My iPhone died today for several hours but was revived when I squeezed it really very hard. Hmm.
He would go in the 1950s and 1960s to become one of the primary cartoonists for the DC Thomson publications. He most famously drew Baby Crockett for The Beezer starting in 1956, later also drawing a version of that feature for younger readers that was published in Bimbo. Another popular title for The Beezer was Smiffy. His art for The Moonsters distinguished the 1960s publication Sparky, as did his Barney. Ritchie would go on to draw several covers for the publication as well. His time at DC Thomson would span nearly 40 years, during which he built a concurrent, successful illustration career through several magazine gigs in England and abroad. 
Alan Gardner at 
* the Spring's C2E2 comics convention 
The FIBD opened today with grey skies and a light drizzle, which dampened the mood somewhat. The setup is remarkably similar to last year, which made finding things easy. Thursday is the slowest day in the tents, ideal for browsing. I took photos of the books I want to buy, stopping at 50. This will be a costly trip.
"He is the same person, a fellow twenty-six years of age, no spring chicken to be sure, who said to Buddy in the midst of a throng of strangers: 'I thought you were supposed to be such a witty kid.' Is that a conscientious remark to make to a little fellow of five? Thank God for the avoidance of shame and embarrassment to the whole family, I had no decent weapon on my person when this revolting, crappy remark was made; however, quite afterwards, I embraced an opportunity to tell Roger Pittman, the full name his hapless parents gave him, that I would kill him or myself, possibly before nightfall, if he spoke to this chap again in that manner, or any other five-year-old chap, in my presence." -- 
* the Pulse reminds us that the cartoonist Pat Boyette -- who spent the comics portion of his career working almost solely for Charlton and the rest of his career doing things like working in radio, television and film -- died ten years ago January 15.
* have you ever wondered about Aleksandr Zograf's current output, where the books are coming from and where they're being serialized? 
The news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com takes a look 
* the retailer Mike Sterling 
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Ask yourself this. What other comics could you have purchased in 1975 for your $125? If you went city limit to city limit in 95 percent of Gerald Ford's North America, determined to spend every last dime, what could you put on the backseat of your car? You could likely track down an issue or two of 
In 2010, you can be separated from your cash allotment much more easily and with much less effort. You can also spend to greater reward. Take the smaller amount, not adjusted for inflation. With $125, you could buy those big company comics mentioned above, or you could snag 
Heck, you can access for free -- or for a nominal price right up next to free -- more comics and cartoons than most people could have conceived of being able to get at for any price 35 years ago. Library collections have gone from having one or two 
The comics art form has blossomed from one that even its most devoted fans left behind at age 14 to one that could conceivably stop producing art today and the heartbroken reader present at its funeral couldn't get to all of the corners and travel down all of the side roads already brought to life before she joined comics on the other side. We're still discovering for basically the first time quality comics they made 50, 60, 70 years ago, from 
Sometimes I think that a lot of comics readers, particularly lifelong comics readers, including industry folk and creators and those of us lucky enough to have some platform with which to grapple with the art form on a regular basis, have yet to come to terms with the enormity of what has sprung up around us. You don't even have to go back 35 years to get a sense of how everything's changed. In two weeks late last month I received in the mail two books -- 
"Someone posted that Martin was the very last of the great Golden Age Franco-Belgian cartoonists and I probably wouldn't dispute that," longtime European comics reader, translator and editor Kim Thompson told CR. "I haven't read one of his books in years, but I collected all the Alixes as a kid and while even then I thought he was the weakest wheel of the clear-line Herge/Jacobs/Martin tricycle, he sure could draw, and his depiction of Rome was surprisingly raw at times for a kids' comic. I suspect one day I'll dig those books out and get a kick out of them all over again, passing as I have from bright-eyed kid ingenuousness through too-cool-for-school adult snark to middle-aged nostalgic sentimentality."
* Jeet Heer 
At first glance, 
I'll recommend 
* the cartoonist Evan Dorkin 
* I hadn't noticed this the first time around, but the front page to the Sammy Harkham/Jordan Crane/Ted May/Steve Weissman web site 
* congratulations to Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester for their A Comics Studies Reader 
This totally passed under my radar or was blocked by my spam settings, I couldn't tell you, but apparently Gareb Shamus and whatever combination of his name and the words "comic con" and the designation Wizard he's utilizing right now 
* the retailer and blogger Mike Sterling 
I'm always a little bit slow catching up to these things and I'm more of a personal mind to just give money directly to the charity of your choice (mine was 
* Abhay Khosla 
* Dan Nadel 
Ted Adams is the CEO of 
TOM SPURGEON: This plateau that you've reached, where you're in with the bigger publishers rather than the smaller publishers... you've spent some of this year thinking about your company, with the commemorative book and your anniversary and everything. What does this specific plateau mean to you and IDW?
SPURGEON: Do you have a sense in terms of your company's make-up of what pushed you to this level at this time?
SPURGEON: Is there a group of books that stands out performance-wise over the last 18 months?
ADAMS: I think from their perspective, just in general terms, the more stories and the more marketing and the more PR that's out there, the better it is for them. God knows how much money was spent to promote 
ADDENDUM: JOHN JACKSON MILLER ON IDW's MARKET SHARE
The very popular and fearlessly aggressive South African cartoonist Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro has a new cartoon out. It criticizes the consideration of a pardon by President Jacob Zuma that would balance political concerns over a previous pardon, basically putting political expediency above multiple declarations of justice made in the sentencing of certain apartheid and post-apartheid officials. The interesting thing about it is that in making these accusations Zapiro is reworking the imagery of past cartoons that showed South Africa's President about to rape Justice while other officials held her down. Not surprisingly, 
* there are a couple of fine comics-related items 
One is that the author tries to indict both the outrage some felt at the time and the fact that this outrage didn't survive absolutely intact for months and months as separate instances of distorted behavior instead of as a reasonable continuity. The second is that the cartoon remains the subject of a lawsuit about the corporate culture at the institution that published it and the ability to express concerns about such issues, which is both a direct refutation that this matter has gone away and a suggestion that runs counter to the assertion that objections to the cartoons were somehow solely about whether or not it would lead to monkey-inspired assassination attempts on the president. The third is that as someone who wrote about the cartoon at the time, I'd reject out of hand the suggestion that people objected to the cartoon because it represented some sort of literal danger to the sitting president. I think some people saw it as an offensive comparison first, right on the face of it, and as an ugly image. But many folks also saw it as part of a wider tendency among those participating in the country's crippled political process and national dialogue to tease, flatter and encourage a general ressentiment nurtured by large swathes of Americans who hold the perceived otherness of their president against him.
I'm always the last one to pick up on these kinds of historical footnotes, but I guess 
* Mike Sterling finds another book I've never heard of before, 
* the great Edward Sorel 
* DC 
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* Mike Lynch 
* I enjoyed 
The Vancouver-based cartoonist Colin Upton is doing a series of panels on his feelings towards the forthcoming Winter Olympics to be held in and around the city in February. Mr. Upton is not pleased by the city's single-minded focus, the expenditures on sports infrastructure, and the subtle shifting of priorities to reflect the huge money drain that can come with a modern Olympics. 
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Dan Nadel of PictureBox Inc. and Comics Comics 
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* Richard Thompson has inaugurated 
In 2003 my #1 clip-and-save piece was 
SPURGEON: One thing I remember about how this book was received is that some people perturbed at the number of works that were just series of visuals, not strictly comics as much as art work, flat out. It's something I've heard again with KE7. Does the number of pieces of visual art included in an anthology like this one change the way you feel about it as comics, or is this just comics' very conservative side being brought to bear?
SPURGEON: You called this an obvious important book of the decade in an e-mail. How and where do you feel KE4 had an influence on comics?
SPURGEON: In 
SPURGEON: When I talk to people who thought a great deal of Fun Home, one thing they praise is its measured precision, that it was an extremely thought-out, well-planned, meticulously executed book. Bechdel is well-known for her research and obtaining photo reference even when she has to do it herself: did you react to the level of craft involved? Do you think that kind of attention shaped the book in a certain way?
* R. Fiore says several smart things in a to-the-point review of the new Rip Kirby collection.
I joined LiveJournal in June 2001 and immediately cajoled everybody I knew to get one as well. Very few of them still use it regularly. In the fall of 2004, I started doing the features which became my old "Weekly Comics Hype," trying to push DC's short-lived line of 2000 AD reprints whenever there was a new one out, or some other easily-purchased comic or collection whenever there wasn't. I've had a lot of luck with that, and several friends and readers who haven't read comics since they were kids have told me they've enjoyed trying the books I recommend.
I liked those Eagle Dredd reprints a lot, even if those great covers by 
There are probably other things that Rebellion could be doing to increase their characters' visibility. I suppose my opinion's not worth as much as a highly-paid marketing consultant, but maybe reaching around the direct market with lots more convention appearances is the right way to go. Finding some common ground with Grant Morrison to reprint Zenith and even present new stories would be an enormous selling point. Announcing that, or similar projects, from panels at big American shows where there's lots of blogger media would be a great idea, rather than letting rumors slip out via Amazon advance listings, which seems to be how it goes today. Getting review copies of books to that same blogger media, to everybody with an audience, is another. Bringing back 
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Anyway, two things happened that made superheroes interesting again. First, the movies: I've seen very few 
SCHWARTZ: Not familiar with BPRD at all and I wasn't familiar with Hellboy outside of knowing that it existed. I remember its debut, which I did not read, as I thought it looked Kirby-derivative and the name struck me as skateboarder cool. Like skate kids who say "bad boy" a lot. You know, "Check this bad boy out," as the kid does a leap off a handicapped ramp at school and lands back on his board. Also the 
SPURGEON: Do you think they'll still be doing this series this way in five years' time? Ten? Would you follow it if they went to serializing the work on-line? As someone who's done so much work in several media, what do you think about the death of print vis-a-vis the fate of comics?
SPURGEON: Finally, you edited 
* longtime writer about comics Charles Hatfield 
* over at Comics Comics, Frank Santoro 
But to get a little broader, when I think of comics this decade, I think of rapid expansion and fragmentation. Like, I don't know about you, but when I go back and look to the turn of the last decade, the millennial conversation, which I wasn't following comics to have experienced first-hand although I've tried to go back and study it, I get the feeling that people were hoping for a more unified comics in the future, as in a 
The thing I'm getting at is, "comics" has gotten a lot bigger over the last decade, but it got big in a way that further exploded the notion of what "comics" were in North America, as per the subcultures devoted to comics reading. In fact, manga seems to be the new, popular place for casual comics consumption too, the supermarket checkout rack stocked with 
My impression within manga is that Death Note admirers tend to like how dark and cruel it is in addition to the funny parts, the suspense mechanisms; the gloss of moral complexity (ex: "Is Light justified in his mission?!?!") is appealing, though I personally don't think it's very substantive. Still, it gives it a leg up on other manga in its class -- 
Death Note, you see, is a plot machine. If, as the old saying goes, manga is different from Western pop comics in that it's more about going somewhere than getting there, Death Note splits the difference by making virtually every chapter a small destination. It's a suspense comic that's just diabolically focused on plot points, dozens and dozens of them, everything swirling around Light the ambitious kid's efforts to evade capture while killing the shit out of criminals so as to reform the world, initially powered by new "rules" regarding how to use the deadly notebook, every one of them providing fresh fodder for cat 'n mouse contortions, but later just sprawling all of this accumulated background over expanded scenarios. What if Light loses his memory for a while? What if other Shinigami show up with extra Death Notes? What if we fucking kill the series' most popular character right here and replace him with two characters representing (a) emotion and (b) full 
It's not necessarily there to make you sad, more to urge you to live life and give it your all because that's all you can ever do -- a man without hope is a man without fear, as Jesus said. And there's a place for that! Ohba has said that part of the reason Death Note was pitched to a shonen magazine was because they're be less focus on theme, more on action -- as a result, intentional or not, it's like a perfect, horrible machine of scattershot acid commentary, delivered like thrilling entertainment! For a while, anyway; part of Death Note's monomaniacal focus on plotting is that once the plot gets shitty for readers, they jump off. It's somewhat hard to find many Death Note fans that actually liked the whole series. 
* Devlin Thompson was nice enough to send in a link to 
* new years, new projects: the veteran cartoonist and comics educator Steven Bissette 
TOM SPURGEON: There's one thing I wanted to ask you if we ever talked again on the record: can you talk a little bit about the experience of getting Reading Comics out there and into people's hands? Was there any single instance of feedback that's stuck with you? Has it changed the way you write?
I also suspect that we now take some of the innovations of the '70s for granted, and that the territory covered by "consistent with current norms" has widened. In the context of the '70s, 
WOLK: Your 
Otherwise, the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple 
The only other one you didn't name that I particularly enjoy is 
* the French-language comics news gathering site ActuaBD.com 
* well-regarded comics critic Jog of Jog Likes Comics 
