Kleefeld on Comics

Cut Me Some Slack! It's Friday!

2012-03-09T23:33:00.000-05:00

And now, for everybody's least favorite gimmick: today's Garfield's dialogue dropped into some of today's webcomics...

The Princess

Devil's Panties

(I'd like to say I couldn't originate any fantastic ideas that compared with some of my posts earlier this week but, really, I just wasted most of the night playing Avengers Alliance.)

Andy Capp Joining Alcoholics Anonymous?

2012-03-08T13:00:00.000-05:00

Reg Smyth's Andy Capp debuted in 1957. The title character was a working class man who didn't actually work. He smoked and drank and gambled, and was quick with a backhand to his wife if she screwed up. In the 1980s, Smythe quietly stopped drawing the cigarettes that often dangled from Andy's mouth and the wife beating jokes dropped off in favor of marriage counseling jokes. Smythe died in 1998 but the strip continued on under the auspicies of Roger Mahoney and Roger Kettle with Andy still out of work, and throwing away his gambling earnings on beer and pool. In April of last year, Kettle was replaced by "Goldsmith and Garnett" with Mahoney still handling the art chores. (I believe it's Lawrence Goldsmith, but I can't find a first name credit for Garnett.)

This strip from February 13 is pretty typical for what Mahoney, Goldsmith and Garnett were coming up with...

And here's the next day's...

And the rest of the week...

Well, it's not unusual for cartoonists to do a week's strips all around a central theme. But the theme continued with almost every weekday having a joke centered around Andy eating healthier, working out or trying not drink...

February 23...

March 1...

Today...

And here's what struck me: they didn't just have him quit cold turkey. It's actually been shown (comically) to be a bit of a struggle...

It's certainly not without precedent that modern comic strips makes significant character changes. In 1992, Tom Batiuk changed Funky Winkerbean from a gag strip in a perennial high school setting to an aging-in-real-time dramedy. More recently, Jim Davis gave long-standing loser and perpetual bachelor Jon Arbuckle a girlfriend. And, of course, Smythe himself dropped smoking and wife beating from Andy's repertoire, as noted above.

I asked Batiuk once, several years ago, how he was able to make such radical changes to his strip, given syndicates' penchant for maintaining the status quo. He whole-heartedly agreed with my assessment of their willingness to change, but noted that he was able to push that through because he tied that change to his contract negotiations he was going through at the time. Davis, I expect, has enough clout that he can pretty much do what he wants.

So I'm curious about the change here. Is this something the creators are trying to slide in on their own? Something mandated by their syndicate acting on comments from a health agency? Just an attempt to change things up because newspapers are flailing and willing to try anything different at this point? I just doubt that the current Andy Capp crew has leverage that someone like Davis has.

If you liked Andy Capp as a lout, though, I don't think you'll have much to worry about in the near future, based on this March 2 strip...

Links On Wednesday? Again?

2012-03-07T16:30:00.000-05:00

Letterheady has two old Bob Kane letterheads online, one with a simple Batman logo and another with headshots of Batman, Robin and the Joker.
Al Bigley shares some nice scans from True: The Man's Magazine circa 1967. The article he actually posted shines the spotlight on Jay Emmettt and Allan Stone, who were the licensing agents for a certain caped crusader who was taking pop culture by storm at the time.
In another edition of Webcomic Overlook's "Know The History", they take a look at Percy Crosby's Skippy for which the peanut butter was named. None of this was information I knew.
Neil Cohn posts his first brainwave study on comics. You know, it wasn't that long ago that studies like this would've been openly laughed at. That this is real and legit and people are taking it seriously is just plain awesome!
Apparently, I'm now immune. I totally missed the "Holy leaky roof, Batman!!!" sub-headline on my initial reading.

A Harsh Reality for Newspapers... & Comics?

2012-03-06T20:56:00.002-05:00

The Project for Excellence in Journalism just published this report on the status of the newspaper industry. It's about what you'd expect in the broader sense: most newspapers are doing poorly, yadda yadda yadda... But I came to the report via this article in the The New York Times. In light of my blog post yesterday, I'd like to represent the Times piece here, but with perhaps a few creative edits on my part...

Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded... companies... to share private data about the financial performance of many of their ~~papers~~ comics. And the findings were grim.

On average, for every new dollar... in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. The ~~papers~~ comics seemed not to be diversifying their revenue streams or coming up with innovative products at a fast enough clip.

“Some of those we talked to seem frustrated and even uncertain about how to proceed,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the project, which is part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center. “But we also found signs that, if you can break out of old cultural patterns, there is another way.”

...

Mr. Rosenstiel said he and the researchers came away thinking that the future of ~~newspapers~~ comics could be affected quite a bit by business culture.

“The ~~papers~~ comics that are succeeding,” he said in an e-mail, “are those that... have pushed digital even at the risk of putting less effort into the old categories that pay the bills, have taken more risks — have fought against the deep ‘inertia’ that many of the executives describe.”

...

Hmmm. Didn't take much editing to make this sound very poignant for the comics industry, did it?

It's really those quotes from Rosenstiel that stand out to me. Even if you business model was sound a decade ago, the rest of the world continues to change and evolve; you need to be able to recognize those changes and adapt to them. Granted, that kind of adapting is not easy! But haven't we exhausted all of the superficial nonsense in comics (variant covers, new #1s, mega-crossovers, new costumes, etc.) several times over by now? Yes, those things provide a minor blip on the radar, but it's always temporary and only for one title.

You can't really blame the creators, and even the editors have fairly narrow confines to work within. There needs to be a person at the top setting a stronger direction instead of demanding rehashing the same tricks over and over. I think Mike Richardson has the right idea; I don't know that they've pushed far enough yet, but offhand I think, of the traditional comic publishers, they're in the best strategic position going forward. Marvel and DC will be alright by the virtue of having large enough companies behind them to throw piles of money at the situation late in the game. But that shift will be jolting for Diamond and all the local comic shops across the U.S. as it's going to come in late and come down fast.

I have a ton of respect for folks who own/operate comic shops. I know that is NOT an easy job. And I don't envy the day when Marvel and DC suddenly change their game plan because they no longer have any choice not to. That day is going to be a very painful one for a lot of people.

Shazam, A Publishing Misstep?

2012-03-05T21:08:00.001-05:00

DC announced today, via The New York Post, that the new revamp of Captain Marvel will A) officially change the character's name to Shazam, B) "be far more rooted in fantasy and magic than it ever was before", and C) apparently be a darker character. Though this last point hasn't be explicated stated anywhere I can see, the promotional image and the tone of Geoff Johns' and Brian Cunningham's comments suggest it.

I haven't read any comments/reaction to the news, but I can almost hear the cry of fandom now. "NOOOOOO!!!! You're going to ruin him!"

I don't want to get into a character discussion, though.

But character issues aside, this really makes me wonder if the folks at DC really know what they're doing. My initial thoughts ran along the lines of, "Well, of course they're pushing the character deeper into the DC mythos; that's all their audience buys through Diamond. A book too far flung outside Marvel or DC continuity doesn't stand much of a chance."

I was going to throw Jeff Smith's Shazam: Monster Society of Evil out as proof. The story was not in continuity and took its cues from the original 1940s stories more than contemporary ones. Even with Smith's name on it, I didn't figure it sold very well. But a quick check on The Comics Chronicles says otherwise. In fact, the final issue sold almost 29,000 copies. Not exactly setting sales records, sure, but it still outsold several debut issues from both Marvel and DC. The only two non-Marvel/non-DC books that did better than it were Buffy and Star Wars.

Ah, but the trade paperback of the book sold pretty poorly. Less than 3,000 copies for all of 2009, the year it was published.

In theory, MSoE should be a great perennial seller. It's a self-contained story. It's fun. It's very kid-friendly. It's by the same guy who put his self-published, independent, nine-volume magnum opus Bone in every half-decent bookstore and library across America. The very same series, I might add, that continues to show up in librarians' Top 10 Most Checked Out Books For Kids almost a decade after it ended! So why DC hasn't pushed MSoE more, I don't know. I mean, in an era when trade paperback collections are solicited before the final pamphlet issues hit the stands, it took DC almost two years to get a TPB version of MSoE out.

I'm a bit torn on the issue. On one hand, DC is essentially giving fans what they want. What they're willing to pay for. There was a great deal interest, as I recall, when they turned Mary Marvel evil. You can't really blame DC if they focus on the iterations of the characters that sell. On the other hand, I don't think anyone at DC can really see any difference between Superman and Captain Marvel. To be fair, there is a bit of nuance there and it's not helped by the fact that Captain Marvel was a very direct response to Superman's initial success. I feel like that both DC and fans are responsible for this new Shazam.

BUT!

People are almost certainly claiming (again, I haven't actually read any comments but I know this is what they're saying) that DC doesn't know the character. But if you look closely at Johns' and Cunningham's comments, I don't think they know ANY of their characters. We're talking about a company who has a lead character that is most readily defined as "space cop with a magic ring." We're talking about a company whose cache of villains includes talking gorillas and magic imps. We're talking about a company who has among their top tier characters a woman who was sculpted out of clay and given life by a goddess. We're talking about a company who's primary character who is indestructible and can fly anywhere in the world with no means of propulsion. And you're going to tell me that Captain Marvel is based more on magic than anyone else?

Really, I have no skin in this game. I'm not really a Captain Marvel fan; I'm not even much of a DC fan. They can do whatever they want with the character. Whether they call him Shazam or Captain Marvel or whatever, I'm not going to buy it. I only bought MSoE because of Smith; I'd have been just as happy if he worked on Brother Power the Geek. But I can't help but see either an inability or unwillingness for DC to look beyond the direct market here. They have a family of characters specifically made to appeal to a broad younger audience, and an easy avenue to get them interested in superhero comics before "graduating" to more adult titles like Batman or Justice League but instead, they seem to be at a complete loss. All of this effort that they're putting into "New 52" and they're still mostly just selling to the same audience they had before.

Many years ago, I read an interview with a comic book writer (Kurt Busiek maybe?) who said that reading was a key element for writers. But more importantly, reading a wide variety of things. If you wanted to be a comic book writer and read nothing but comic books, you would just wind up regurgitating what was already in the comics. I think the same is true for publishing. If you do nothing but look at how comic books are published, you're not going to bring any new ideas to the table. You need to look outside your immediate industry, even outside your not-so-immediate industry, in order to break a perpetual downward spiral of sales numbers.

DC is making Shazam into a character they think people want. Whether or not the people they're looking at want this new Shazam misses the point, though. DC is just looking at their existing audience and not their potential audience. And given these types of decisions, I'm beginning to doubt they even know what a potential audience is.

Who's Signature Is This?

2012-03-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

I received a copy of Comics Between the Panels for Christmas. It was a used copy my mom found online, and she pointed out that it was even signed on the title page...

The problem is, though, I have no idea whose signature that might be. It's clearly not one of the authors, but the book is basically an encyclopedia of comics people, so it could very well be someone listed in the book. The two initials look pretty clearly like "BW" to me, but the rest is just squiggles as far as I can tell. The last name seems to be only a few letters. I thought it might have been "Ward" but Bill Ward died in 1998 and this is dated 2004.

Anyone out there able to read/decipher who this might be? It's been bugging me for months now.

The Ever-Growing Library

2012-03-03T22:44:00.001-05:00

When I first started really getting interested in comics, I went about trying to read as many stories as I could that involved my favorite characters. At the time, reprints were generally limited to the best/most popular stories and, even then, they tended to get reprinted in a scattershot fashion. There were occasional reprint titles like Marvel's Greatest Comics Starring the Fantastic Four and Marvel Tales Starring Spider-Man plus DC usually filled most of their 80-page giants with old material. But if you were trying to track down a specific issue, it was often easier (and sometimes even cheaper!) to get the original rather than the reprint.

Part of the problem was that information in those pre-internet days was harder to come by. You might find a listing of Marvel Greatest Comics issues that were printed and you could count forward or back from an issue you actually had, but they didn't always print each and every issue, so there was no guarantees that issue #42 was in fact the one you wanted.

I recall in my early days on the internet, I was thrilled to find a RACMU post on Usenet that listed all the old Strange Tales issues and where the stories were reprinted. That title had been especially problematic since each issue featured two stories which frequently were NOT reprinted together. Which meant that you might find an reprint book that allegedly reprinted something from Strange Tales #122 but you didn't know if that was the Human Torch story or the Dr. Strange story.

All of this led to something of a collector mentality. Even if you were more interested in the story that the actual first printing of the issue, you often had no choice but to track down and collect that specific issue in order to read the story.

I've always been very deliberate in my collection. I was more concerned getting books that served a specific purpose, rather than simply every issue of a title. That specific purpose might be getting as much information as I could in order to write an article about the Negative Zone or one about the events prior to Fantastic Four #1. What my collection essentially became was a large, ongoing research project with an ever-changing focus.

I've seen and heard repeatedly over the years about people trying to clear out the collection. In fact, I've picked up many comics for little more than the cost of postage from people who were simply thinning their libraries. While I certainly understand people that some people live in areas where living space is at a premium, I think some of those folks clearing out their long boxes don't really have that concern. So it seems strange to me to willingly relinquish a chunk of what could be used as future research. I know I went digging through my existing collection repeatedly while I was working on my book, and I came up with many fine examples that I ended up using that were only available precisely because I've never trimmed my collection.

I know that it would be much more efficient if I simply got digital copies of everything, but that's not entirely practical since so much of what I have isn't currently available digitally already. I'd have to scan every page myself.

But in any event, I want to make sure I keep as much of my research around as possible since I'm always coming up with new ideas and angles to think about surrounding comics. So I guess my solution for now is to just keep buying long boxes and book cases. (Although I could swear that I just bought bookcases a couple months ago; I really don't know how they're already full!)

On Comics Research

2012-03-02T22:35:00.003-05:00

When is it relevant to dig deeper into comics history? At what point are we able to take accepted wisdom as fact? When is it pertinent to scrounge up original sources?

One of the goals of comics historians is to set the record straight. To quote Indiana Jones, they're on "the search for fact... not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall." The study of comics is an interesting one for a few reasons. One, it's about things that were published and distributed en masse. Unlike traditional history or archaeology where you're looking at individually produced items. Two, it largely came into existence late enough in human history that there was at least some prescient notion that comics would be interesting and valuable to someone, whether that was intended for government use (in the way of financial records) or personal use. Third, it was also late enough in human history that a sufficient number of people had sufficient free time to be able to study comics while earning a living doing something else.

Compared to many other aspects of history, comics has an incredible stockpile of original source information. We have original production artwork from Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo." We have the original check National paid Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for their first Superman story. We have Harry Peter's original design sketch for Wonder Woman with hand-written notes from William Marston. We have recorded testimony of Will Eisner from the copyright lawsuit against Victor Fox.

But most of that has only come back into the light only recently after having been presumed lost for decades. People hunting through old file folders and cabinets and trunks and such.

But, to my original question, though, at what point do you stop digging? How much Siegel and Shuster got paid for Superman has long been known to comic fans, but we only had their word on the matter. Does having the actual check make a difference? It adds credence to their story, of course, but otherwise, no.

The Eisner testimony, when read in its complete form, paints a slightly different picture of Eisner than the story he'd always told. He didn't lie, to my knowledge, but his after-the-fact version makes him out to be more virtuous and noble than what his actual testimony suggests. It's probably indeed how he remembered the event and, while the two versions don't line up perfectly, they're close enough than here too the overall story doesn't really change.

So should we just accept what we've "known" when it comes to comics history?

The obvious answer is "no". If it weren't for people NOT accepting "known" comics history, we likely wouldn't know who Bill Finger was at all. We might still believe Jack Liebowitz was playing golf with Martin Goodman when he let slip how well Justice League was selling.

But at some point, though, you experience diminishing returns. You can do more and more and more research, and only come across smaller and smaller tidbits of information. For example, if you read a biography of Stan Lee, you'll learn a lot about him. If you read another biography about Lee, much of the same material will be repeated. You'd spend as much time reading the second biography as the first, but learn fewer things. A third biography would yield even less. So at what point do you stop reading because you're not learning anything new?

When is it okay to stop looking for primary source material? If ever? How much effort is enough and how much is too much?

Questions I don't have answers for, but something to keep in mind as you're reading people (including myself!) who talk about comics history. How much of what they say is something they actually researched and how much is something they heard from some guy at a comic shop once?

Kickstart The Only Living Boy

2012-03-01T23:09:00.000-05:00

One of the benefits of having my own forum here is that I get to help promote projects that I think are cool. I try not to do that TOO much because you'd get sick of that pretty quickly, and wouldn't bother reading at all. So I try to reserve plugs for the really best stuff.

David Gallaher and Steve Ellis have just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help publish a book called The Only Living Boy. It's about... well, I'll let the two of them explain...You can't see it, but there's an iframe here of their video. You can link over here to see it.Gallaher and Ellis have proven to me many times over that they know how to tell a good story. Not only are their both pretty talented, but they put a lot of thought into the story flow and presentation. They really know how comics work, and how to best utilize the medium to tell their stories. They make a fantastic creative team, and I don't doubt for a second that The Only Living Boy will be every bit as good as High Moon, Deadlands: The Devil's Six Gun or any of their other collaborations. They've got some nice pledge packages available to boot!

I put my pledge in as soon as I heard about it and I see several comic professionals have already lent their support too. Jimmy Palmiotti, Jamal Igle, and Kevin Colden to name just a few. So, if you can, take a look at their Kickstarter page and see if it doesn't look like a project you'd like to help support.

Leap Year Links!

2012-02-29T17:43:00.001-05:00

(Yes, I know you don't really, but bear with me; it's a feature.)

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University has started a blog.
While we're on the subject of higher learning, OnlineUniversities.com has posted a listing of a dozen colleges that have courses that are using comic books in the course structure. What strikes me is that the list does NOT include any of the schools that I previously knew were using comics in the classroom, like MIT, the University of Southern California, the University of Minnesota and the University of Mississippi. Meanwhile on Google+, Scott McCloud asks about those not on the list.
Comic Book Bin is doing a series on the Thailand comic scene. Their first installment focuses on the Ramayana Mural, the world's longest painting (and, by extension, the world's longest comic). The second piece looks at a graphic novel biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

I Made It Into The Avengers!

2012-02-29T13:03:00.003-05:00

So the Avengers trailer that was released today? I'm in it. (Click to zoom in.)

OK, yeah, I'm blurry and WAAAAAY in the back for this particular shot, but I made it in! FOR THE TRAILER! Wohoo!

Hardware Review

2012-02-28T21:24:00.003-05:00

Let's wrap up Black History Month with a look at the debut title from Milestone Comics, Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan's Hardware. (Yes, I realize February has another day tacked on this year, but that's my usual Wednesday Links day, so this is my last chance this month to do a review.) I'm actually going to just look at the trade paperback which collects the first eight issues of the 50-issue series. Sadly, it remains the ONLY collected edition of the title.

The basic premise is that Curtis Metcalf is a genius employed by Edwin Alva, a very wealthy man who owns Alva Technologies. Metcalf uncovers Alva's illegal activities and, when the police and media ignore his evidence, he takes justice into his own hands by secretly building a high-tech super suit to take down Alva personally. Despite Alva having tons of money to hire all manner of bodyguards, Metcalf is fueled by something much deeper. I'll get to what that is in a moment.

I've generally liked McDuffie's work over the years -- I think the first work of his I read was Damage Control -- but I have to admit to some trepidation upon opening Hardware and seeing the first story title as "Angry Black Man." I hadn't read any Milestone books before, so my familiarity with them was largely the general notion of a group of black creators making comics about black heroes. I wasn't expecting to see any reactionary or stereotypical type material that you might expect with, say, blacksploitation movies, but when "Angry Black Man" is thrown down in bold type on the title page as the grim, titular hero comes bursting through a skylight... well, I was a bit nervous about turning the page. Justifiably so, it turns out, as Hardware proceeds to blow up two manned helicopters and then forcibly pulls a pilot of a third through the cockpit window and throws him to the street from hundreds of feet above the skyscrapers.

We then get the obligatory origin, establishing Alva both as Metcalf's savior/mentor and as his jailor. Metcalf is then fueled to go after Alva by a somewhat two-dimensional sense of vengeance, with a tinge of righteous indignation. He goes around saying that killing Alva will solve his problems and make things right, and proceeds to kill anyone who gets in the way of his mission. I was actually quite struck by how flat the character was, since I knew McDuffie was easily capable of much more.

But then it got interesting.

Although McDuffie set up the first few issues with this rather cold, shallow character and a pretty straight-forward plot, he also began developing his protagonist. The story, then, slips from being about Metcalf versus Alva into being about Metcalf versus himself. The hero's journey goes from being an external, physical one to an internal, mental/emotional one. Rather than trying to start the series with Metcalf as a fully rounded character, McDuffie threw his hero down as a blank slate and let the character grow organically as the story evolved. What appears superficially to be a tale about overcoming the yoke of "The Man" in fact turns out to be a fable about overcoming the yokes we place on ourselves!

As I said, I'm reading this via the trade paperback so it came bundled in a nice chunk. I don't know if it would work as well in the individual issues on a month to month basis. That said, Milestone was providing a product that NO ONE else had, so I suspect their audience was willing to wait for the monthly installments. It seems very much like McDuffie would have liked to have released this as a series of graphic novels, but had to go the pamphlet route in order to make it financially viable. It makes me wonder if he was just a tad too early. It had a respectable run, sure, but what if it were introduced today as a webcomic with POD graphic novels every 120 pages? For as well as Milestone did in the 1990s, I bet they would really shot through the roof in the 21st century. Makes me wonder if someone should try to convince Christoper Priest and Olivier Coipel to try something online today.

Here's the thing, though. Milestone was a group of black creators. Their characters were mostly black as well. But in both cases, that was only the color of their skin. Hardware isn't a "black comic". Curtis Metcalf is just a guy who put on a suit of high-tech armor. What McDuffie was, I think, trying to do was show people that what color the characters' skin was didn't matter; it could still be a good story that's approachable by anyone.

A year ago, when McDuffie died, someone said the comics industry failed him. I took that to mean that he was always given the short shrift by publishers. That was certainly true, but the fans failed him as well. Hardware is a book that should have continued publication at least until his death. But fans said they didn't want "black comics" and didn't buy it, never bothering to see that it wasn't a "black comic"; it was a good comic.

Indies: The Natural Food Of Comics

2012-02-27T21:14:00.001-05:00

A couple years ago, I was trying to track down a really good pizza sauce. I love pizza, and I spent a while honing a pretty good recipe for the dough. But then I needed a really good sauce for it. I tried any number of different brands and finally stumbled on one that just tasted far an away better than everything else. It wasn't even a contest at that point! So I looked at the ingredients to see if that might give a clue as to why it tasted so much better... tomatoes, canola oil, olive oil, Romano cheese, onion, garlic, oregano. That's it! Every item in the list was something I recognized, and you could really taste the difference. (It's from Rossi Pasta if you're interested.)

I visited my folks around Christmas. Mom had stocked the fridge with plenty of beverages (I tend to drink a lot) and I pulled down the jug of orange juice. Some local brand I'd never heard of. But I was surprised at how good it was. When I went to look at the label, it was actually difficult to find the ingredient listing. Not because it was small or hidden, but because it was on the front next to the logo: "100% orange juice".

Since then, I've taken to hunting down more natural foods. There's a health benefit, I'm sure, to not ingesting calcium propionates and sodium nitrites and whatever. But more to my purpose, those natural foods just taste better! I've found fantastic tasting foods and drinks in recent weeks because I've been selecting options without any extra chemicals added.

See, back in the 1940s the U.S. government wanted to make sure that A) all soldiers had plenty to eat and B) soldiers' food could get safely stored and shipped anywhere in the world. So they started putting a lot of additives and preservatives in everything so it wouldn't rot en route from New York to Normandy. The food didn't taste quite as good, but it stayed fresher for a lot longer. Then, after the War, food companies were encouraged to use the same additives so that everyone would have something familiar when they came back. Food companies saw a financial benefit to it as well, and they've had chemists working since then to improve their ability to make food cheaper and more profitable. Now, over a half century later, many Americans have never even tasted an apple that wasn't covered/doused in chemicals; people assume that's how they're supposed to taste.

You may have noticed an increasing backlash from that in recent years though. The natural/health food sections of many grocery stores has grown remarkably. Whole Foods is making a killing in that market sector, with effectively zero competition and plans on some natural growth in the next year or two. Yeah, Barbara's Whole Wheat Fig Bars are a bit pricier than Nabisco's Fig Newtons, but they're a hell of a lot tastier! There's a relatively small, but growing, group of people like myself who are willing to pay a little more for a better product.

You're wondering, of course, what any of this has to do with comics.

In a strange way, this natural foods movement is similar to independent comics. This natural foods thing isn't new; it's an extension of the reactions people had in the 1960s when there was a generation of kids who grew up on chemicals and wanted to go back to something less manufactured. They were called hippies. It wasn't a huge movement that got into grocery stores and fast food chains, but it was there.

Along with underground comix.

In one sense, the hippies of the 1960s lost to big agribusiness. You can't find an aisle in the supermarket that doesn't have something from Kraft in it. Or Procter & Gamble. A few huge companies essentially took over the entire retail food industry.

Not unlike how Marvel and DC took over the comics industry.

The costs of production, though, have dropped in recent years thanks to technological advances. It's more reasonable now to start your own micro-brewery or local cannery. The technology is fairly cheap and still produces a professional looking product. Distribution can be a bit difficult, but not insurmountable as long as you keep things local. Alternatively, you can sell your goods online to virtually anywhere.

Kind of like how print-on-demand works for self-publishers.

Tom McLean just posted about his leaving the mainstream comics arena in favor of higher quality stories. That's not all that different from my reasons for dropping out of the Wednesday crowd (though McLean articulated himself much better). Here, much like the natural food trend, there's a relatively small, but growing, group of people like myself who are willing to pay a little more for a better product.

I'm sure the analogy isn't perfect; I've only given it as much thought as it took to write this post. But, offhand at least, it seems like there are some interesting parallels there. I wonder if there's some lessons that independent comic creators can learn from their brothers-in-spirit of the food world.

History Over Nostalgia

2012-02-26T19:23:00.001-05:00

Like a lot of kids growing up in the 1970s and '80s, Saturday mornings for me meant cartoons. We had three broadcast networks, one UHF station and one PBS affiliate. And on Saturday mornings, those three networks filled their airwaves with cartoons. I recall that, at the beginning of each new season, I would take the TV listings from the local paper and spend far too much time plotting out which channels I would watch at which times. Super Friends was on one network, The Batman/Tarzan Hour on another, and Flash Gordon on the third.

Superheroes figured prominently in my selections, even if they were characters I'd never heard about. (How many of you remember "Hero High"?) And when there weren't any superheroes or decidedly-boy-targeted-action-shows on, I'd still have made selections about what to watch as I waited for the next show. Often my channel decision was based on the show AFTER so I wouldn't miss anything.

I don't recall when exactly, but I woke up unusually early one morning and turned on the TV before anything I knew about had started. The TV listings began, I think, at 6:00, so I must've been in the family room around 5:45 or 5:50. It had never really occurred to me previously that anything was on before 6:00 -- if there were, the newspaper would've listed it, right? So imagine my surprise when I caught the last few minutes of Battle of the Planets. I had no clue what it was, but it was radically different than anything else I'd seen on Saturday mornings! It was like Star Wars but with superheroes!

Well, getting up at 5:30 to watch this was quite a bear for a non-morning person like myself, so I missed it at least as often as not. And what I did catch was often only the last half of an episode. But one day, I recall, I forced myself to get up EVEN EARLIER to make sure I saw the whole thing. And I caught the ending credits for Star Blazers before BotP started.

I had even less idea what this was, but they had a huge space ship that was essentially a BIG FRICKIN' GUN! That looked even more awesome!

Except, I could never get out of bed any earlier to see anything more than the end credits.

I was far too young to understand either of the shows anyway, and barely retained enough memory of them to warrant even trying to hunt them down prior to the internet. I did eventually buy some of the Battle of the Planet DVDs, largely to wax nostalgic a bit and see if they really were as good as I remembered. They hold up reasonably well, although the original Japanese versions (also included on the discs) are much better.

Even more recently, I discovered that Star Blazers is available on Hulu. Thirty-some years later, it's high time I see what I missed.

The show is actually pretty dull from the first dozen or so episodes I've seen so far. A combination of inadequate animation, poor voice acting, and too many talking heads explaining the action instead of actually showing it. That said, I can still see how it would have been unlike anything on American television back then.

I plan to continue watching it, as it's one of the first real breakthroughs in bringing anime and manga over to a mainstream U.S. audience. I was hoping to relive some childhood nostalgia for a show I'd never seen, but it turns out that I'm getting a history lesson instead. And I can't say that I'm disappointed in that regard.

National Pretty Brown Girl Day

2012-02-25T10:12:00.000-05:00

Today is the first National Pretty Brown Girl Day. According to the website, it's a call "for all girls and women across the globe to celebrate themselves, families and friends" and "is a great way for brown girls of all ages, cultures and ethnicities to empower themselves and boost their self-confidence."

Now, if you happen to be of the mindset that says, "Why do they get a special day?" I'll point to this piece I heard on NPR yesterday citing that African Americans account for 13% of the entire U.S. population, but 40% of missing persons! You wouldn't know that judging by the attention media at large gives missing children; if you're not a cute blonde, you won't get any attention at all. If we live in a society that flatly dismisses nearly half of the missing children in America because they're the "wrong" skin color, then we absolutely need to recognize that disparity and do something to counter it. Which is why it's perfectly valid to have Black History Month and Nation Pretty Brown Girl Day.

Now, since this is a comic related blog, I had thought about doing a piece just showcasing photos of black female comic creators. All I could come up with on my own was Charlie Trotman and Ashley Woods. Jackie Ormes if I didn't limit myself to those that are still alive. I thought there's no way that could be it, so I did some searching online.

I quickly found The Ormes Society, "an organization dedicated to supporting black female comic creators and promoting the inclusion of black women in the comics industry as creators, characters, and consumers." Lo and behold, they've already compiled a list black female comic creators! With links to their websites and/or Wikipedia entries to boot!

But, wow, their complete list has only 37 names on it. This is a group specifically organized around supporting black female comic creators, and they only know of 37 people to cite. And some of those names are folks like Rashida Jones (an actress who thought of an idea for a comic book story but didn't actually write it) and Jada Pinkett Smith (an actress who wrote one very badly-received comic back in 1998). This is precisely why we need a National Pretty Brown Girl Day!

Look, it's a Saturday. Football season is over. March Madness hasn't started yet. Take some time to check out those 37 women creators. Read their Wikipedia entries if they have them, check out their sites to see examples of their work. There's only 37 names, and some of them don't even have links associated with them; it's not going to take you that long.

Now, you might look at their work and say, "No, this isn't for me." That's okay! Not every comic is meant for every person. But maybe one or two of them will stand out and you'll say, "Hey, this is interesting. I might need to check out some more of this person's work." And you know what you'd be doing then? You'd be supporting that individual, and you'd be celebrating National Pretty Brown Girl Day.

Tip Of The Day

2012-02-24T22:03:00.000-05:00

Never let a man who usually runs around in nothing but his underwear provide you with fashion advice.

From Avengers #161 by Jim Shooter and George Pérez.

Better Man Review

2012-02-23T21:17:00.003-05:00

I honestly have no recollection of discovering Bob the Squirrel for the first time. I'm guessing mid- to late-2007 as that was when I really started getting into webcomics in earnest. At any rate, I know I was reading it when creator Frank Page started showcasing his divorce in the strip, and I know that because I was going through mine about the same time. The comic because infinitely more relevant for me because, not only was I able to see my emotional self in the comic, but I knew that it was more-or-less contemporaneous. I had several Bob strip tacked up around my cubicle at work to help get through some of those darker days. (I still have several strips up, but more recent ones.)

I paid a little closer attention to Bob after that, and I saw a lot of myself in Frank. He was like the me I would have become if I really tried to be a cartoonist instead of a graphic designer.

A little over a year ago, out of the blue, I got a message from Frank just saying that he was a fan of my blog. A very nice gesture, and one that I deeply appreciated since I don't tend to get a lot of feedback. But since then, we've chatted on a number of topics and gotten to know one another a bit better outside of what everyone else sees on the internet. I even enlisted his help in obtaining a really cool Christmas present for my S.O. this last season.

Now, with that background in mind, I finally got myself a copy of his self-published graphic novel better man. He'd mentioned it from time to time on his site over the years, but it's not something he's really plugged much. (For that matter, he does little self-promotion compared to... well, just about every other webcartoonist out there, I think!) I knew it was an autobiographical piece, not really related to Bob but that was about it.

The story mostly covers Frank's life from about ages 13 to 17. Possibly the worst years of everyone's life. In Page's case, it involved being on the receiving end of a lot of spit balls, locker slams, gut punches and a host of other physical assaults that prompted him to spend as little time as possible in the school hallways. It also involved living with his mother and her parents, his father having split shortly after Page was born. The crux of the story then revolves around Frank learning from and bonding with his grandpa as a surrogate father, and the challenges a man in his 60s faces after having worked himself almost to death just trying to keep his family afloat.

One of the dangers with autobiographical comics is that they can be too self-absorbed. As the reader, it can come across as just a self-indulgent ego-trip. What makes this creator think s/he's so interesting that I'd want to read about it? Worse, why should I even care about this person/character? But in the case of better man, Page displays an excellent ability to draw the reader in and really convey the emotions at a fairly raw level. It's an amazing contrast to Bob in that, while Page wears his emotions on his sleeve in the daily strip, he rips them out of his chest, throws them down in front of you and you can't help but look at them here. It's much more raw and powerful.

And while you might suggest that I was predisposed to feel something because we'd already established a rapport, I discovered in reading it that I don't know jack. Yeah, I got bullied and pushed around in school, but not like that. Not to mention that my home life was much more stable; hell, my folks are both still alive and still married to each other! The teenage Frank Page bears zero resemblance to the teenage Sean Kleefeld.

And now, having Page's "origin" story, that puts Bob in a different context. There've been more than a few instances when, upon reading about a personal challenge Page was facing, I'd say to myself, "Sure, I've been there; you just need to..." (Though I never actually told Frank any of that since I knew it'd be too late, as he draws the strip several weeks ahead of time.) But in the context of better man, I can't say that. Because even if his challenges and mine are superficially the same, the unspoken psychological ones running in our heads are different. Maybe just different by degrees, but different nonetheless.

I'd also like to take a moment to compliment Page's design skills here. Bob is mostly a short-form gag strip, so we don't see a lot in the way of storytelling. In better man, though, Page largely retains his illustration style, but takes full advantage of the graphic novel format. Throughout the book, he does an excellent job drawing readers' attention around the page using a variety of different layouts and visual narrative devices that serve the story well. He doesn't quite in getting in those wild Neal Adams or Jim Steranko layouts, but there are plenty of unconventional ones that are well executed here.

This is an excellent work. For autobiographic comics, I'd easily put this in the same league as Blankets and Pedro and Me. It's possible I'm showing some bias here, although, I don't think much. For fans of Page's online work, better man is not Bob. Very different tone and feel. But I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

Happy Valerie Day!

2012-02-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

I hereby declare today Valerie Day! All those people who are named Valerie get to celebrate as if they're awesome! Any Valeries that I personally know can skip the "as if" portion and just celebrate because they are actually awesome!

(Happy birthday, Val!)

Here, There Be Wednesday Links

2012-02-22T17:21:00.000-05:00

Sarah McIntyre relays her adventures at the recent IMAGINE Children's Festival. There were lots of kids, lots of pirate drawings and, it looks like, lots of fun.
It would seem that Mark Waid is going digital. Will he be breaking new ground? Maybe, maybe not. But that it's Mark Waid will almost certainly draw in some of his fans from the print-only side of comics.
The Pasadina Star-News has a piece focused on illustrator David Russell who helped storyboard movies from Return of the Jedi to Red Tails. Of possible interest to comic fans is that it's noted that Russell, beginning at the age of 13, met and was mentored by Jack Kirby.
Mark D. White points to a free online samplings of the upcoming book, The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers. You can pre-order the book here.
I had to check the date on this article several times because it's one that seems like it should've been written at least a decade ago. There's absolutely nothing note-worthy in the piece other than that the author seems phenomenally naive about and/or out of touch with pop culture trends.

Green Dragon Interview

2012-02-21T20:44:00.000-05:00

Last year, I posited the idea that Ithaca, NY is the next notable comic community. Turns out that I was more right than I knew. A few months after that post, Michael Doll opened the Green Dragon Comic Shop, only a few blocks down the road from the long-established Comics for Collectors. That someone's opening a brand new comic shop in this economy is noteworthy in and of itself, but in an city of 30,000 that already has a comic shop? Well, my interest was piqued!

I caught up with Doll and he was kind enough to answer some of my questions...

Kleefeld: I'd like to start with just some of your personal background. What got you interested in comics originally? You're a long-time fan, right?

Doll: I started reading comics at a young age. My first comic that I remember reading was Uncanny X-Men 122. My brother, who is 5 years older, was a Hulk fan. But I was always drawn to the X-Men for some reason. I didn't pick up more comics until I was a couple years older and picked up Uncanny X-Men 165. This was during the Brood Saga. I stepped away from comics for many years (I was a GI Joe, He-Man, and Transformers fan) until one day my family and I were shopping and I saw a rack of comics. I was bored shopping so I went over to the racks and saw another Uncanny X-Men (issue 232 with the Brood). I remembered this from my childhood, and picked up the comic and been a fan ever since. I've been reading and collecting comics for almost 25 years now.

Kleefeld: Did your fandom lapse as you grew older? I can't help but imagine some teenage ribbing around DC's "Doll Man" or in reference to the old "they're not dolls, they're action figures" trope. Were you able to make it through school unscathed in that regard?

Doll: I pretty much had a very close knit group of friends in high school and they were all very accepting of me reading comics. In high school I was still a fan of X-Men, but branched out into other genres. I was an avid Sandman fan and also of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol (I still have nightmares about that book!).

Kleefeld: Prior to opening Green Dragon, what kind of experience did you have in with comics retailing? Had you worked at other comic shops before, or perhaps seen the retailing industry from the publishing or distribution sides?

Doll: I had no prior experience in the comic retailing, but had always wanted to open my own shop. I thought that it would be cool to sell comics and talk to people about them and really just show the passion that I have for them. Then of course came the comic boom/bust and that dashed all hopes of that. So I ventured to college and got "a real job". I was then laid off from my "real job" and needed work so I got a job in retail management. I really enjoyed that and was in retail management for nearly 11 years. So I have an extensive background in customer service and I wanted to take that knowledge and open my own shop.

Kleefeld: It sounds like, then, like you had some basic business experience going in. I've seen many folks over the years dive into retailing only because of their love of comics, and get burned because they don't have business skills. I'm guessing in your case, "on the job training" mostly revolved around the specifics of dealing with Diamond and such?

Doll: That's correct. OTJ training really consisted of the best hours to be open and still have a semblance of a life outside of the store as I'm the only one working here. But also another thing was ordering correct quantities. My first month's ordering was way over what I should've been ordering. So I have that under control now.

Kleefeld: So, what ultimately prompted the plunge? I've seen you reference "an opportunity" but what was that exactly? I'm guessing you came across a large collection to use for as your initial stock?

Doll: What really drove me into opening my own comic store was a "nudge" from a friend who is also a comic fan. He said that I should open my own shop since I have the comic knowledge and the customer service skills to really make a great shop. I was in a position with a company that I wasn't going anywhere unless I relocated to the Midwest and I didn't want to do that. So I did some research on opening up a store and decided, "What the hell have I got to lose?". Well, I mean a lot beside my house, any assets I have and such, but I knew that if I didn't do this now, I would kick myself in the ass for not doing it later in life. I used the majority of my collection to open the store and set up with the distributor to get new comics.

Kleefeld: Even coming across such an opportunity, what were your thoughts/concerns around the launching a new shop in this environment? While Ithaca does have a strong comics community, they also already had a long-standing comic shop plus some hobbyist and gaming stores, I believe, that overlap a typical comic shop's bailiwick. Not to mention the overall economic climate. Opening a new store of any kind certainly isn't easy, but it looks to me like you had some additional challenges to face from the start. So, at the risk of coming across as offensive, what the heck were you thinking?!?

Doll: I was nervous about opening a shop in several ways: cash flow, bills, getting my name out there, start up costs, learning curves, you name it, I went through the entire gambit. Luckily I have a great family and set of friends to help me out with the store and provide those shoulders to cry on when needed. I've worked in the Ithaca area for nearly 10 years and I knew that the area could support a second comic shop. Going up against an established competitor in any market is risky, but if you don't take risks in life, where would you be? I told myself that if the shop doesn't work out, that at least I gave it my all. I was going to do right by myself and the customers and put my love for comics out there for everyone to see. I asked around to see what the pulse of the comic industry in Ithaca was and really thought that I could make a name for myself here.

Kleefeld: Speaking of making a name for yourself, your shop's opening pretty closely coincided with DC's "new 52." Was that something you were able to take advantage of from a marketing perspective, perhaps getting in lapsed comic fans or garnering some additional news attention from local media? One of the photos I did see looks like you commissioned a Superman logo ice sculpture?

Doll: The new 52 launch really did help me and the store out. I was open on the second month of the launch and that really did continue to draw people in to the store. I also got in touch with the Downtown Ithaca Alliance to have them help spread the word that there's a new place in town. They really do a great job in helping a new business get their name out there. The REALTOR I used to secure the place (I'm also a licensed NYS real estate sales person) helps spread word with new business too and had me do a new business profile that was distributed to over 25 different media outlets. I've had about 7 interviews so far for the store and a couple more on the way.

The ice sculpture was the result of placing an ad in the Downtown Ithaca Winter Guide. The Commons host "Ice Wars" where ice sculpture artists compete in a nationally sanctioned ice carving competition. The first 50 business to secure an ad received an ice sculpture. I had no idea what my sculpture would be until that morning when the artist told me what he was doing. As you can imagine, I was completely in awe of what was done.

Kleefeld: Once you made the decision to open Green Dragon, what was your thinking about the nature of the shop itself? What were/are some of the ideas that you wanted to bring to the store from other shops you've seen, and what were some you wanted to avoid?

Doll: What I wanted to do with the store is have a completely different feel from the competition. My store is in the basement of a building so it has a kind of "underground" feel. I really wanted this to be at the risk of sounding dorky "your store". So I wanted to start out with just comics and see what my customers wanted in the store. So after a couple months, with getting the pulse of the customers and what they really wanted I expanded some with action figures and busts/statues. Like I said, I want this to be my customers store. I've taken a lot of constructive criticism from customers and used many of their ideas to really turn the store into something that everyone would like. I think as a retailer that you need to have an open mind, learn from your mistakes and grow as a business. If you're staunch in your pursuit, you'll never get anywhere. I also wanted to create a fun environment for everyone from kids to seniors. I have a great area for kids to look at books and relax. Getting kids to read has always been a passion of mine and how I really got into reading was in comics. I feel that comics are a great way for kids to start reading and have fun at the same time.

Kleefeld: What's your clientele been like so far? It's clear you're trying to make it as friendly and open as possible, but it's also an industry that's been fairly insular for some time now. Have you been able to draw in a good crowd of children as well as established comic fans?

Doll: My clientele is just like Ithaca. Very unique. I have established creators coming in each week, I have dedicated families that come in each week, and I have the typical comic book readers. A thing that is very odd (at least I thought so) is that about 40% of my customers are female. I knew that there were female readers out there, but being a comic fan for years it was primarily a male base. When I first opened at the end of October there was a haunted house in an empty space next to me, so I cross promoted with them. After the haunted house, stop in to the store for a free comic. I handed out over 100 comics and got many a kid to come back into the store over the next couple of weeks.

Kleefeld: It's been a couple years since I visited Ithaca and I can't seem to find many photos of Green Dragon's interior. Can you provide folks with a sense of the layout and structure of the shop? What have you tried to do with the space itself?

Doll: The layout of the store is unique. Like I stated above, my store is in the basement of a building. I do have a display window and a sandwich board to let people know where I'm located. You enter the store to a foyer and a large staircase. Above the staircase is a ledge and a huge wall where I have a banner of the store logo and name. As you come down the steps you see posters of comic characters. At the base of the stairs is a double set of doors that are always opened and I have current comics posters posted there. You'll walk down about 8 feet from the base of the stairs and you'll see my store to the right. There are other store fronts that are currently unrented so you could call me the anchor for the basement. There is a yoga studio that is expanding to the space behind me in the next few months. My store has no windows so I opted for a very bright color scheme. Walls are currently white and the floor is a basic grey. The previous tenant was a clothing store and their color scheme was chocolate brown and cobalt blue. That needed to be changed immediately! It made the space seem very dark and off-putting. I changed all of the light bulbs to a "daylight" design to really give the space some much needed light. With being in the basement, the store has an "underground" feel with pipe work above. I have the store set up in a couple different areas: New Comic wall, which is the first thing you see when you walk in besides my smiling face, then previous weeks comics, the kids comics section, back issues/action figures/busts/statues, then a "set" wall (these are collected single issue comics like a mini series, all packaged together, then the trade section. I'm also currently working on having an artist exhibition at the beginning of March with the Downtown Ithaca Alliance group that sponsors First Friday Art Crawl. This is where artists display their works for everyone and brings in a lot of people to the places that hold the event. With Ithaca having such a great comic and art crowd, I really wanted to reach out to both groups since they are both lovers of art (be it in a different medium).

Kleefeld: I think that's a fantastic idea! So you'd have essentially a small art exhibition in your store, presumably of comic art? Do you have any specific artists lined up yet?

Doll: These are actually many different artists. Photographers, painters, etc. I have one lined up for March already.

Kleefeld: You've been open less than a year so far, but it sounds like things are going pretty well. What's been the most surprising challenge that you've had; what were you really not expecting to have to deal with in opening and runnning a new comic shop?

Doll: I guess what I really had the hardest time with was knowing what to order for people. I know what titles nationally sell well, but was unsure of what my customers were really looking for. So I had no problem asking them what they were looking for or having them suggest titles to carry in the store.

Kleefeld: What about the broad shift from customers purchasing individual issues to waiting for collections? Again, coming to this discussion as a new retailer, what has that meant for your in terms of setting up your store and what stock you carry? I would guess you'd be at an advantage in that sense since you wouldn't have years of back issues taking up real estate. Or have your customers been more traditional in that regard, on the hunt for elusive older issues?

Doll: I have my customers that are looking for current books, and then I have the trades people. It's about a 60/40 mix (issues/trades).I knew that the trades would be a learning curve for me, but I really didn't realize how many people would wait for trades. Even with the new 52, I have customers that are waiting for the trades to come out instead of buying the single issues.

Kleefeld: You're also stepping into a market that's had a lot of discussion recently about competition from both pirates and publishers themselves who publish digitally. As someone who's coming to the situation without a long history of comic retailing, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Doll: As for the market going into same day digital, I feel that digital is helping the comic industry. It's getting more people to read comics. If you think of it, there really aren't that many comic stores around anymore. That can be attributed to many things: comic store owners retiring, readers being slighted at the stores (in many different fashions), and old fashioned economics. There are many books being published now that have a digital code that you can enter in the respective company's database and boom, your comic is there on your computer. It's the same way with DVD's. You buy the DVD, and you get a code for a digital copy. I really feel that the digital era is only going to help comics, not hinder it. When you think of it this way: What would you pay for a digital copy of Action Comics #1? Now what would you pay for a near mint/mint condition Action Comics #1?

Thanks very much, Mike! I know opening a new shop of any kind is difficult, so I wish him all the best. I'll also mention that he's trying to finalize details about hosting some "draw-ins" on Free Comic Book Day in May. Details about Green Dragon can be found on their website and Facebook page.

Celebrating Six Years Of Blogging

2012-02-21T10:54:00.000-05:00

Six years ago today, I began blogging here at Kleefeld on Comics. Quite a bit has changed in my life since then, and it's strange to think this blog has been one of the constants. Who's game for another six years?

Tale Of Sand Review

2012-02-20T22:48:00.000-05:00

Jim Henson is, of course, most well known for his creation of the Muppets. Whether you know them through Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock or any of the other TV shows and movies, his work with creating fantasy worlds of whimsy is fondly remembered.

Less well-known are his non-Muppet works. From the obscure short film Time Piece to the more well-known, but not-as-well-associated-with-the-Henson-name pieces like Dark Crystal. The Muppets' popularity does a fair job of subsuming the Henson name, as it indeed subsumed much of Jim Henson's life. I don't mean that in a negative way. He seemed to truly enjoy working on Muppet projects. But it meant that he wasn't able to focus his attentions as much on other types of work.

Enter Tale of Sand. It was a screenplay he and Jerry Juhl first wrote in the late 1960s prior to Sesame Street. It largely sat unused for decades. Although the pair did try a couple of re-writes, no one was willing to help produce it. The scripts came to light again recently, and Archaia enlisted Ramón Pérez to illustrate it as a graphic novel.

The story starts in a small south western town. Everyone is partying and having a great time. A stranger, Mac, gets dragged into the celebrations unknowingly and is taken to the sheriff, who hands him a few supplies and says he has a ten minute head start. Confused, Mac is pushed to the edge of town and finds himself running for his life from an assassin. Mac races through the desert on a somewhat surreal adventure encountering lions, sharks, tanks, Arabs, linebackers, and used car salesmen among others. All the while being pursued by the assassin.

I won't spoil how it ends, since that's a key component to the whole story, but let's just say that it's unconventional.

Pérez uses a variety of styles throughout the book. Much of it is an illustration style that is similar to, but less cartoony than, his online comics like kukuburi and butternut squash. Other portions are done in more of a wash technique, sometimes within the same panel. Also, scattered throughout the book and integrated into the art are typewritten pages from the original script. (Or, at least, what appear to be the original script.) Even more interestingly, Pérez changes up his storytelling throughout the piece. While he follows a straight grid panel structure, it gets more compressed and (deliberately) harder to follow around sequences that are more chaotic, like the opening party scene or the bar brawl later. I don't know how Henson and Juhl envisioned any of this playing out on camera, or what sort of directions might have been included in the screenplay, but I'm certain that these page and panel layouts would not have been delineated. So kudos to Pérez for executing so well on a script that was intended for an entirely different format.

It's a very good story, but one that I think must be a hard sell. It has a very different flavor than what Henson is known for, so it would be more for die-hard Henson fans and not necessarily Muppet fans. It's not even really similar to The Storyteller or Labyrinth. Stylistically, it's probably most similar to Time Piece if you're at all familiar with that. It's also not something that could be easily categorized and explained with a quick elevator speech. That synopsis I gave above is woefully inadequate to explain what happens; it's like summarizing the entire body of Salvador Dali's work by saying "melting clocks."

Honestly, I don't have a good way to tell you it's a story worth getting. If you've read my blog for any length of time, you're maybe at least kind of familiar with my tastes and style. I thought Tale of Sand was cool. Take that for whatever you think a recommendation from me is worth.

Your "Oh, Crap! I'm Old!" Moment For The Day

2012-02-19T20:18:00.004-05:00

I referenced last month the notion of Marvel using a sliding ten year timescale. It's the notion that all of the continuity stories that occurred in Marvel's comics since Fantastic Four #1 have taken place in a ten year timeframe, and will always take place in a ten year timeframe, regardless of how much time has passed in real life. It's basically a way to keep the characters frozen in time, so they don't age themselves out of being viable characters.

Now maybe this hit everyone else a few months ago and I just wasn't paying attention, but it hit me tonight that that means that the FF's first rocket flight, the death of Uncle Ben, the formation of the Avengers, the Galactus Trilogy, the Kree-Skrull War... all the great stories from the early days of Marvel? They now all happen after September 11, 2001.

Johnny Storm and Peter Parker were still in high school when the World Trade Center collapsed. The Power Pack kids have no memory of taking commercial flights that didn't involve removing their shows and receiving full body scans. Captain America was thawed out of a block of ice in a post-9/11 America. All depictions of the WTC in the comics are now chalked up to "artistic license." This issue...

... can't have happened.

Marvel has a long history of referencing real events in their stories, and it makes sense to do that. Most of the events they reference, though, were either well into history by the time I learned about them or were superficial and largely irrelevant. Broad references like "dirty Commies" would transfer to other countries easily enough. I have no memory of Vietnam, nor did I read those issues when Flash Thompson served until decades after the fact. The changing face of the President is fairly inconsequential in the comics; it's just a means to show "hey, this must be big; the President is involved!" And, of course, fashion trends change so quickly and tended to be out of date by the time an issue hit the stands anyway.

9/11 is the first significant event in my recollection had an impact on the comic stories I read as I was reading them. And while I'm not reading Marvel comics these days, it's a curious notion to try to put every story I've ever read from them in the context of a post-9/11 mindset.

Guess I need to add some grey hairs to that drawing of me that I use all over the web.

Unlearn Joseph Campbell

2012-02-18T09:46:00.001-05:00

I first watched Star Wars when it came out in the 70s. I was six. Everything about the movie was absolutely new to me. I had no conception of what old serials Lucas was alluding to, or who Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing were, or the cultural impact of naming them "Stormtroopers"... I didn't question what a womp rat was because, by the time they got to that reference in the movie, my head so over-flowing with other new ideas that I didn't even have room for anything else.

Star Wars then became a cultural education of sorts for me. I thought it was a fun movie, of course, but my interest spread out into seeing where Lucas' ideas came from. From Buster Crabbe to World War I. Not surprisingly, the works of Joseph Campbell came to my attention since Lucas specifically cited his works as a model/template for his basic story structure.

Campbell, if you don't know, studied and wrote about mythology. Rather than just relay old myths or study their origins, he focused on broad themes and ideas that were common among many cultures. His research led him to what he called the "monomyth". In The Hero with a Thousand Faces he outlined the basic plot structure of many major myths, pointing out not just the story beats but how they work and why they're important. It's become more commonly known as "the hero's journey." You see it in stories from Gilgamesh to King Arthur to Beowulf.

What's happened, though, is that modern writers have been formally taught to this. They're told to study Campbell and learn how to write stories that follow the hero's journey because it's effective storytelling. Which it is.

Until it isn't.

See, the problem is that EVERY fiction writer has studied Campbell at this point and, while they often try to still write their own unique stories, they often resort to pat rehashes of Campbell's structure. While you can deviate from Campbell's work (indeed, Campbell himself notes that there are many potential deviations in the monomyth) many who work in overly commercial ventures like comic books and movies stick to the same patterns, most likely because of external pressures like deadlines.

One of the reasons I stopped going to movies was because I kept seeing Campbell being used over and over again. The films became exceedingly predictable and, therefore, boring. You can frequently pick out the archetypes Campbell identified within seconds of the actor stepping in front of the camera.

The longer form works that I've been enjoying lately are the ones that bear the least resemblance to the monomyth. While there are still elements of the hero's journey in play, and I can spot those pretty readily, they're changed pretty significantly in some way so they don't feel hackneyed. In One Piece for example, the wizened old teacher that takes the hero under his wing doesn't really show up until nearly 600 chapters into the story! At which point, the story jumps to two years later after the training is complete. In Bakuman, the same archetype is embodied in 28-year-old Hattori who, instead of teaching the protagonists, maneuvers people and situations around them so they educate themselves. Compare this against the more obvious Merlin/Yoda style versions that show up everywhere.

I was reading the latest installment of Bakuman last night and found myself laughing out loud. The story wasn't particularly funny but it was just so different and unexpected that I was just happy and entertained. I do that frequently with One Piece as well. Sure, I know that the hero will ultimately win in the end, but their hero's journey doesn't HAVE to follow Campbell's outline verbatim each and every time. In fact, it's the further afield you can go with it, the more enjoyable the result can be!

Millenia War Review

2012-02-17T19:55:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, after deciding to go to a comic convention (Wizard World Chicago maybe?), I was browsing the list of attendees and guests, making notes on who I wanted to speak to. One of the names was Ashley Wood, whose work I had just seen on Tank Girl. I got to the convention and was going through the artists' alley, talking with this person and that. I finally got to the area where Wood's table was supposed to be. Except he wasn't there. The table wasn't empty, mind you, with a simple "Back in 5 minutes" note or anything, though; there was a woman standing there with a small crowd of folks pushing her to sign their books. I did not recognize her, but was pretty confident that she wasn't the decidedly male artist I was looking for.

I went about the show some more, talking with other creators, picking up a few new books. I eventually sat down to rest in one of the rooms with a panel discussion. Waiting for things to get rolling, I pulled out my convention guide and looked up to make sure I wasn't looking for Wood at the wrong place or something. To my surprise, Ashley Wood was not at the convention at all! But there was a young woman by the name of Ashley Woods who had apparently just self-published a book called Millenia War.

I finally got around to reading Millenia War. The story starts 1000 years ago when a group of obnoxious teens accidentally kill an elven princess. That, in turn, leads to a war between humans and elves, and the humans use their superior technology to all but eliminate the entire elven population.

A century later, a group of human soldiers get ambushed by elves. All but one of the humans are killed, and she winds up being captured. The girl's sister, then, makes it her mission to find her and so, with the help of her friends, sets out to see what happened. They're given some assistance by the fairies but over the years, the elves have taken precautions to plant moles into human society...

For some reason, this book just didn't click for me. Which strikes me as odd. I could point out a few technical bits here and there that could use a little improvement/clarification, but it wasn't a bad book by any means. The plot was interesting, a bit different (in a good way). The characters didn't come across as flat. The illustrations were good. But it just didn't grab me. I thought the font size was a tad large, but that wasn't a big deal. A couple of the fight scenes did get a bit difficult to follow, but the specifics weren't really critical to understanding the story.

After first learning who Woods was, I do recall hearing generally good things about Millenia War. (Though at this point, I couldn't tell you anything in particular.) It was a book I certainly wanted to like; after all, I just dropped $25 for my own copy. But I'm at something of a loss to say why it didn't really do anything for me.

I suspect it has a lot to do with the characters. Again, they're not flat, but I don't think I really recognized any of them. They didn't remind of anyone I'd ever met nor did they remind me of any other characters, or even broad archetypes I'm familiar with. And while I've certainly read books with less relatable characters, that's typically only for books that really, really wow me with the art. Here again, it's not bad by any means, but I didn't see enough contrasts (line weight, color, etc.) to stand out for me.

I'm glad to have read it, and it looks like Woods has promise, but I'm not yearning for more. I gather she's worked on a few other projects since this was first published, and I hope they do (have done?) well.

Millenia War volume 1 is available through IndyPlanet.

Measure Against Your True Competitor

2012-02-16T22:43:00.000-05:00

About a year and a half ago, I decided I wanted to run a marathon. I was interested in getting more fit anyway, and that seemed like it'd be kind of cool to be able to put one of those "26.2" stickers on my car. Except I'd never run before. So I did some reading and most people seemed to say that before you start training for a marathon, you should be able to run about three miles non-stop. My first day on the treadmill was not nearly that; I think I did maybe one slow mile and had to slow down even further to a walk for a bit in the middle.

But I improved over time and eventually got myself to where I got run four miles non-stop. It wound up being a little late for me to sign up for that year's marathons -- the ones I could reasonably get to sold out MUCH earlier than I would've guessed -- but I went ahead with training anyway, just to see what I could do. Last summer, I was able to regularly put in runs over 15 miles. But since I wasn't actually signed up for a marathon and my runs were starting to get well past three hours each, I opted to cut back to a reasonable holding pattern of 6-7 mile runs until I could sign up for the next marathon I could get to.

All of which is a preface to say that six and a half miles on the treadmill at the gym is no big deal for me.

Late last year, I had a really bad day at work. Lots of stress from a major project that wasn't going well, plus an unusual number of annoyances. I went to the gym mad and ready to burn off some adrenalin. On the treadmill. Go!

I'd been on the treadmill maybe 5-10 minutes, and I see a guy start up on the one next to me. Mid-20s, looked to be in reasonably good health. He warmed up walking for a minute or two before cranking the speed up to a run. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him glance over in my direction several times, but I assumed he was looking past me at some woman working out on the level below or something. After he ran for about 15 minutes, he slowed down to a walk again. Another minute later, he's back to running. That lasted maybe 6-7 minutes.

I'm actually starting to notice him now because he's still glancing over at me. I finally realized that he was looking at the readout on my treadmill. He was trying to see how fast and how far I was going. At this point, I'd been running just shy of 7 miles an hour for nearly 30 minutes. I was sweaty, sure, but not out of breath.

Unlike my friend who, by now, has planted his feet on the unmoving sides of the treadmill, squatted down while holding the hand rails, and begun heaving trying to catch his breath. He eventually stood back up, walked for a bit longer and finally turned the treadmill off, looking over at me one more time while he wiped the machine down.

Now, I'm relaying this story not as a way to try to brag about my running ability. Really, I've got nothing compared any number of folks at my gym alone. I'm relaying the story to highlight where your competition really is.

See, this guy next to me? He was trying to compete with me. He didn't know that I can easily outlast any of the treadmills at our gym (which all cut out after an hour). He didn't know that I'm aiming to run a marathon and have been specifically training myself to run long distances. He didn't know that I'd had a crappy day and had more adrenaline flowing than usual.

By the same token, I don't know the stories of anyone else at the gym either. I don't know how much of their lives have been in training, or whether they're recovering from some injury or illness, or how much sleep they got the night before, or what their diet is, or anything. There's no reason for me to try to compete with them on any level, because I frankly don't know what level they're at!

My competition, really, is myself. I need to run farther this week than I did last week. I need to run farther still next week. But those benchmarks are against my own record, not anybody else's. I don't care how fast the guy next to me runs, or how long, or what his heart rate is. The only thing that matters is how I do compared to myself.

That holds for all other aspects of life, as well. Don't compare your comic book sales against the Action Comics. Don't compare your web stats against Penny Arcade's. Don't compare your place against Joe Quesada's. Just do better than you did before.

After all, isn't that something you learned from the comics themselves anyway? Onward and upward to greater glory? Excelsior!

It's Link Wednesday

2012-02-15T17:57:00.000-05:00

Robert Beerbohm provides a somewhat lengthy piece on the work-for-hire situation between Marvel and Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko. There's a few tangents in there, as well, but some good nuggets and personal interactions he talks about as well.
If you haven't seen/heard Mike Richardson's keynote address at the recent ComicsPRO meeting, it's worth a read. Nice reminder that Richardson is more than Dark Horse's publisher.
The Times of India has another report on the increasing popularity of comic books India. I've seen enough reports on this over the past few months to confidently say that there is something big going on there. I'm hoping it's big enough that some of it starts getting exported to the U.S. soon.
Here's a short piece on the old Alley Award -- the physical statue itself -- including a photo of one awarded to Julius Schwartz.
Lastly, we have this promo video for Patrick Redford's Pentagon, the fourth graphic novel in his Shape series. It teaches five mentalist type magic tricks with art by Jesse Rubenfeld.

An Inadequate John Severin Appreciation

2012-02-14T15:40:00.003-05:00

I first saw John Severin's work in the pages of Cracked. I want to say it was a parody of one of the Planet of the Apes movies (maybe even the original?) which I had heard about but, at the time, had never actually seen. I wasn't an avid buyer of Cracked or its rival Mad but, based on the handful of issues of each that I had, I actually preferred Cracked. Largely because of Severin's artwork. The lines didn't seem as smooth as what was over in Mad (who's primary parody artist at the time was Mort Drucker) and the text was much more mechanical, but I thought Severin did a better job of consistently capturing actors' likenesses. It was especially evident when I managed to get the issues of both Mad and Cracked that both ran their own parodies of The Empire Strikes Back. I knew these actors, and Severin's just looked better! More like the actors, and not cartoonish approximations of them.

Several years later, I was hunting down obscure early appearances of the Fantastic Four. I managed to learn of a brief cameo of Reed Richards in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #3, and it had been reprinted (and was therefore cheaper!) in Special Marvel Edition #5. Though the original was by Jack Kirby, this reprint featured a new cover by Severin. I thought it was incredibly well done and spoke well to the grittiness of a war story. Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me that this was the same guy who had done those humor stories I had enjoyed years earlier!

I tracked down some of his other 1960s work for Marvel. Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders. The Nick Fury stories in Strange Tales. And I went back a little earlier. Two-Gun Kid, Gunsmoke Western and the like. Severin did a phenomenal job on war stories and Westerns. His style seem rough and gritty in a way that really suited the genres.

Off and on throughout all this, I wondered about his relationship with this "Marie Severin" whose name kept popping up. Were they siblings? Husband and wife? Totally unrelated, and just happened to share a last name? A minor concern, certainly, but one that seemed to elude my cursory research. (Keep in mind, kids, this is in the days before the internet!) Clearly, though, they were both very talented.

For a combination of reasons, John largely feel off my comic radar for years until he came back for a new take on the Rawhide Kid in 2003. I thought the story was crap -- it didn't even sound remotely appealing from the solicits and writer Ron Zimmerman already proved to be... not ideally suited to comics -- but I bought it exclusively for Severin's art. At 82 years old, he was still absolutely kicking artistic ass!

I can't explain, or even excuse, why I didn't spend more time supporting Severin's art. I saw it rarely, but it always impressed me, even as a kid. The man leaves behind a huge body of fantastic work. And that he was able to bounce between, not only genres, but entire tonal styles, handling everything from slapstick gag comedy to war stories with equal aplomb speaks mightily to his ability. I suppose that I haven't spent more time studying him because I spent so many years with my eyes glued to the superhero sector, and he just tended to work for companies whose product I didn't normally delve into. That's a poor excuse, at best, though.

You'll undoubtedly see various obituaries and remembrances of him in the next day or three. They'll almost certainly do a better job summarizing his career. But that he remained active and showed no appreciable loss of talent well into his 80s is phenomenal. I know a stroke has largely removed his sister from continuing to do any work, but I hope people take this opportunity to not only remember all the great works that John Severin produced, but also take a few moments to thank Marie Severin for hers as well.

State Of The Comics Blogosphere, Ethnic Edition

2012-02-13T17:11:00.001-05:00

I got a nice response to yesterday's post over in Google+ but the commenter finished by reflecting on my notes about my race: "...what's interesting that we're seeing in the reviewer/columnist world online is that almsot none of them are black, because of several factors related to how blacks access the internet."

He later followed up with some more details about how blacks tend to access the internet via mobile devices and not via desktops and laptops. That, in turn, limits their ability to create content online. Phones, after all, were not designed for content creation. While you certainly CAN do things like take pictures and videos, and many have a keyboard of some sort (real or virtual) that allows for text input, the ability to pull all those elements together to create a blog post or website is difficult at best. I've made a few posts here via my phone, but they were short, difficult to create, and only worked at all because I had already used a desktop to set up my blog to handle phone inputs.

What this means is that, regardless of how ethnically diverse comics fandom is as a collective group (from what I can tell, ethnicity was not asked in the recent Nielsen study on DC's "52") the voice of comics fandom online is skewed away from blacks. It's not absent entirely, of course, but if you look around the blogosphere, especially if you remove creators from the equation, it is overwhelmingly white. Quick, name a black comics blogger/journalist that isn't David Brothers...

...

Let that sink in for a bit.

Comic editors have long understood that vocal fans aren't necessarily representative of fans on the whole. It was almost a stock answer that just because a bunch of fans sent in letters about something didn't mean that all of a book's readers felt the same way.

That said, I can't imagine that a lack of dialogue online coming specifically from an ethnically diverse group of fans has no impact. Generally speaking, the best you're going to find are white guys like me saying, "Hey, shouldn't we take into consideration some non-white points of view?" That's almost surely just going to reinforce an already heavily padded echo chamber that says the industry is doing just fine on that front, thankyouverymuch. But how many of us are really bringing the point up in the first place? And when we do, does that lead to any substantive thinking, or just more tokenism?

I don't have an answer here. If a group of people are accessing the internet via phones more than desktops, the likelihood of them contributing to the online conversation in a large, substantive way is minimal. Phones just aren't a good device for that. But getting those same people devices which ARE good for content development is not cheap. And not easy. Having internet access is one thing; having internet access that's a viable platform for anything longer than 140 characters is something else. But it's still an issue that should be discussed, instead of being ignored.

African-American Classics Review

2012-02-12T23:07:00.000-05:00

I reviewed an old Classics Illustrated last week, and Eureka's Graphic Classics line follows the same basic idea of adapting older works into a comic format. The idea is again to entice readers to pick up the originals based on what they enjoyed in the comic version. Eureka, though, has a slightly different model than Classics Illustrated by A) doing full-on graphic novels with 140-ish pages and B) getting some name talent like Roger Langridge, Rick Geary and Richard Corben to work on their books. Their latest volume, African-American Classics, includes works by Kyle Baker, Christopher Priest and Trevor von Eeden.

The book adapts over twenty short stories and poems "by America's earliest black authors" like Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois. The amount of adaptation varies from piece to piece; the poems are largely just presented in their original form with an accompanying illustration while the short stories are formatted to a more typical comic narrative. Before reading, I was vaguely aware of about half of the original authors, but the only piece I was at all familiar with was Dunbar's Sympathy, known for the "I know why the caged bird sings" line that inspired Maya Angelou's book of that title. So I can't really comment (yet) on how well or poorly the adaptations did at capturing the originals.

That said, I thought all the contributors did good jobs overall. The artistic styles seem to match well with the intent and themes of the various stories, and definitely helped smooth some of the instances where 100-year-old phonetically-written slang didn't immediately make sense to me. I was more partial to the longer stories in the collection, I suspect, primarily because I'm not a big fan of poetry in the first place. Though the art accompanying the poems was excellent.

Most of the source material here was written in the first two decades of the 20th century. So it shouldn't be surprising that several of the works address inequality between races. This was still a time, recall, when some of the older people could still remember slavery and had experienced it first-hand. But they don't all try to address the topic; the last several stories in fact don't look at it at all, and the couple before that only touch on the subject obliquely. So, speaking as a white guy who never had to personally deal with racism or bigotry growing up, the book as a whole didn't come across as preachy or evangelistic.

I think this is a really good book for people to look at. I know my formal education largely went from the Civil War and Reconstruction pretty directly to World War I, and then skipped over to the Great Depression and World War II pretty quickly. I suspect a lot of American school kids got (are still getting?) a similar education, and know very little about American culture and society in the early 1900s. That these stories come from an area of American culture that's acknowledged even less is a bonus.

I don't pretend to really understand what it means to be black in America. I never will. Nor will anybody who isn't black and living in America. But works like these do help to make me appreciate, at least at some level, what it might be like. And that kind of understanding, I think, makes for a better planet.

"Are You Reading... Backwards?"

2012-02-11T22:04:00.000-05:00

I went to Chipotle for lunch today and sat down with a copy of Bakuman. I found it was a bit difficult to juggle the manga and the burrito simultaneously, so I opted for a leisurely read after I'd finished eating.

I wasn't timing myself, but I'm sure I was sitting there for over an hour. Mostly engrossed in the story. I got up periodically to refill my drink, and I'd occasionally catch some movement out of the corner of my eye, but for the most part, I just sat there with my nose in the book.

At one point, I did see that a guy at the next table was looking over my way. I didn't think much of it, though. Then I got up for another soda, and noticed he was family man with his wife and young kid. On my way back, he was looking in the direction of my table again. All that was on the table at this point was my book and a closed Chipotle bag with my leftovers. My coat was draped over one of the seats, but he pretty clearly wasn't looking at that. So, given that the Chipotle bag is pretty generic in the first place and pretty common in a Choptle in the second place, I'm left to assume he was trying to see what I was reading. The book was facing cover up but, as you know, manga reads "backwards" so the cover image he was seeing was on the "wrong" side of the book.

I noticed him glancing over my way a few more times before they left. I have to wonder what he was thinking. If he were already interested in manga and just wanted to know what I was reading, he could've easily seen that while I was getting my drink. Given the area I live in, I'm more inclined to think he's never seen manga before, possibly never even heard of it. If he had seen me turning pages "backwards" while I was reading -- not at all improbable since my seat was essentially right next to the cash register -- that might have looked very strange if he had never seen that before.

I wonder, then, how many people that confuses. If you're sitting in a public space reading manga for a while, and someone who's never looked at the medium sees you, what goes through their heads when they notice you reading "backwards"? Is it an idle curiosity that slips their mind as soon as you're out of sight? Do they assume you're some weird performance artist? Do they think you're actually reading Japanese?

Anyone have an experience where someone's actually asked you about manga while you were reading it?

Classics Illustrated, Uncle Tom's Cabin Review

2012-02-10T21:01:00.000-05:00

The Classics Illustrated line of comics started in 1941 under the Classic Comics title. Each issue retold a piece of prose literature that was considered a "classic" in a comic book format, the idea being that if you liked the comic, you'd find the original at least as engaging.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was #15 in the series. While I was initially surprised that such a direct look at slavery in the U.S. would've been promoted in the early 1940s, I did discover that Harriet Beecher Stowe's original book was in fact THE most widely sold novel of the 19th century. It stands to reason that it was most assuredly very well-known and well-read even as late as the 1940s, thus making it an early candidate for the Classics Illustrated treatment.

The story is mostly about the titular "Uncle Tom" who we first meet as a slave in the mid-1800s. Readers follow his life as he's sold repeatedly, eventually dying after a severe beating from his owner. Tom is shown to be fairly accepting of the status quo, and resigns himself to a life of slavery. He's largely driven by a desire to not rock the boat, and just deal with the short term issues at hand. Here in the 21st century, it's not difficult to see how the book helped to really push the abolitionist movement at the time it was first published, but also how the depictions of the characters are fairly shallow and led to broad negative stereotypes.

This comic adaptation, not surprisingly, skips over bits of the original. Largely for space reasons, I should think. There's no compunction about depicting Topsy as a pickaninny, for example, despite her not being germane to the main plot. There's no hesitation in the language either, as dialects are written phonetically and the N-bomb is dropped a couple times. So they clearly weren't concerned about editing for cultural reasons. Still, the story mostly flows pretty well; although the ultimate fates of Eliza and her son, and Cassy and Emmeline are left unresolved in the comic. It's implied they completed their escapes as planned, but that leaves a lot to the reader's assumptions.

The art here is credited to Rolland H. Livingstone. His name does show up a few times in early comics, but little is known about him. His illustrations are serviceable, but very stiff. I don't think there's a single character here that actually bends their back in any way. People bend over at the hips and knees, but praying, falling, sitting, getting beaten... everyone has perfect posture all the time. Additionally, the text is all typeset, which adds to the book's overall stiffness. Everything in the comic feels very static, so there's no real sense of danger or excitement when, for example, Eliza is leaping across the Ohio river on chunks of floating ice.

Further, Livingstone seems to have trouble drawing black people, sometimes inking their faces so heavily that they almost become silhouettes. The coloring is also awkward in places. Credit to the unnamed colorist for providing the various characters with a fairly wide variety of skin tones (which is, in fact, a plot point) but it's very inconsistent with individual characters' skin colors lightening and darkening throughout the book. Understandable, to a degree, given the printing technology of the time but, again, specific skin tones are a plot point so it's more noticeable when it gets garfed up.

Overall, I think this adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin is a reasonable, but definitely not great, one. If your sole interest is getting across the basic story and maybe suggesting a read of the original, this would probably suffice. It does suffer some of the same problems as the original, but it includes them deliberately, I think, so as to honor Stowe's work. Consequently, if you're offended by the story, you'll be offended by Classics Illustrated #15. If you can keep a sense of perspective about the contexts of both the original and this adaptation, I think you'll find that it served it's intended purpose.

Old Characters: Do They Still Hold Value?

2012-02-09T21:34:00.001-05:00

The question was posed on Facebook whether or not a character retains any literary weight after being written by so many different authors in so many different ways as to retain almost none of their original meaning. To my point the other day, Captain America played by Chris Evans is a far different character than the one Jack Kirby was drawing in the 1960s, who was already a far different character than the one Joe Simon created in the 1940s. Then you throw in Ultimate Captain America and Cap-Wolf and (the original) Nomad and the Heroes Reborn Captain America and the over-armored/over-pouched 1990s Cap and Captain America For President and the Captain America Hotline and Reb Brown and Captain America: The Musical and... (Am I showing off enough geek cred here?) At this point, the character of Captain America represents so many different things that the character, as a whole, is essentially meaningless.

Same thing goes for Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Dick Tracy, the Phantom... These guys have all been around so long and re-written in so many different ways that they're primarily just ciphers for whatever any given writer wants to do with them. So, the question is: do they retain any literary value they may have once had?

I say yes. But just not in the aggregate.

Batman's a good example. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight remains one of the seminal Batman stories. Indeed, it's not hard to argue it's importance in the history of American comic books. But that's clearly a very different Batman presented there than what Bill Finger and Bob Kane created. It's a very different Batman that what Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams produced. It's a very different Batman than the one portrayed by Adam West. The gestalt Batman -- the Batman you might come up with if you mashed all the different interpretations together -- would be pretty banal, as many of the individual bits that stand out on one end of the spectrum would be canceled out by the stand-out bits from the other end.

But The Dark Knight remains a story with significant literary value. Precisely because it's an interpretation of Batman that was very well done. It does NOT match the Batmen that came before, or the Batmen that came after. But it's a valuable interpretation. And, therefore, a valuable character of literary merit.

Regardless of what happens to your favorite characters -- if they're sanitized for big budget movies or "reinterpreted" or "rebooted" or whatever -- that doesn't diminish the great works that came before. Regardless of how many Watchmen prequels we get or their relative quality, that doesn't detract from what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons did originally. The overall brand might get diluted, but the best material does not.

Link Day, International Edition

2012-02-08T17:28:00.000-05:00

FocusTaiwan has this piece on several Asian artists who are headed up to the Planete Manga festival in France later this month. Guy Delisle and Christophe Blain are also referenced.
David Whitley takes a Tintin-focused tour of Beligum for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Derik Badman points us to the 28th issue of the Canadian (to keep the international theme) "hybrid literary and arts" magazine Carousel, which features a number of four-panel comics by folks like Mark Laliberte, Andrei Molotiu, Ethan Rilly, Michael DeForge, and Badman himself.
On the U.S. front, Action Figure Insider has a look back at the first Batman action figure from Toy Biz, who held the license ever-so-briefly before DC gave it back to Kenner.

Boycotts & Moving On

2012-02-07T21:43:00.000-05:00

James Sturm is boycotting the upcoming Avengers movie. Steve Bissette goes a step further and suggests boycotting anything bearing a Marvel character created or co-created by Jack. It's a little unclear to me, though, if they've got a result thier looking for: whether he wants Kirby's heirs to receive some compensation, or Jack to get a creator credit, or if nothing will satisfy them. Regardless, I'm not going to pass judgement on him.

I'd offer to do the same, but I largely stopped buying Marvel products several years ago. A boycott by me means little since I don't really give money to Marvel anyway. I've run into this before with other companies. I stopped going to BP stations years before their disastrous oil spill in 2010 (largely because their stations tended to be more expensive and decidedly inconvenient to get into and out of) and I stopped going to Chic-Fil-A because they used styrofoam containers, only finding out later their discriminatory practices against gays.

True, I did just purchase these decals a couple weeks ago, but I think my previous contribution to Marvel's coffers was when my folks took me to see the Captain America movie last summer. I did see Thor as well, but that was actually on Marvel's dime.

I'm not one to throw cold water on either Bissette or Sturm, and I'm a big fan of Jack Kirby's work (I'm a regular contributor to The Jack Kirby Collector after all) but here's my thinking...

Marvel has made a shit-ton of money off Jack's work. Jack got screwed out of a LOT of money that he (ethically) should have received. But, in the first place, both he and his wife are dead and will never see any more benefits beyond what they saw while they were still alive. In the second place, the stuff that Marvel is producing, whether you're talking comics or movies or action figures or whatever, is not what Jack created anyway.

Yeah, there's still an orange rock-guy called the Thing and a long-haired muscle dude with a big hammer and cape called Thor, but they bear little resemblance to the characters Jack created. That is why I stopped buying Marvel comics several years ago -- the characters were no longer ones that I recognized. It may have been the house that Jack built, but it had been repainted, gutted, restructured, added on to, renovated, re-sided, re-decorated, sold, re-sold, foreclosed on, sold yet again, rented out, repainted again, added on to some more, thrown through a worm hole, and repainted again to the point that it's barely recognizable as the original house. Legally, of course, Marvel has every right do all that just as I have every right to muck around with a historical home if I bought one for myself. But just as I don't want to live in a 75-year-old house that's been re-worked so often, I don't want to play in a 75-year-old playground that's been re-worked as often as it has.

See, whatever the origins of the movie, this...

... is not this...

I'm not going to boycott the Avengers movie because a boycott from me would only make sense if I gave Marvel some reasonable portion of my income in the first place. Twenty bucks in a year or more, I don't think, qualifies. Do I begrudge anyone who does opt to boycott the movie? Not at all. I hope your message gets through in fact. But I'm going to focus my energies trying to help the folks who are still with us and would personally benefit from the help:

Diversity = Interest

2012-02-06T21:40:00.001-05:00

Well, I missed a blog post yesterday. First one in quite a while, I think. But considering all the travel I was doing the past week, I'm going to give myself a pass this time.

Unlike most of the United States, I was actually doing nothing Super Bowl related yesterday. My travelling had me up in Chicago this past weekend and, as luck would have it, it was a friend's birthday and several of us got together for some celebrations. (It was actually Mom's birthday, too, but she wasn't in Chicago.) I was struck by the mix of folks who we dined with, even moreso later when I realized that we were in Black History Month. My friend's beau is originally from Zimbabwe. My S.O.'s parents were both born in Jamaica. The gent sitting across from me was Korean-American. Throw in a couple African-Americans and a few of us Caucasian folks, and there was an unintentionally diverse cultural group. (Well, diverse given that it was unintentional and there were only eight of us.)

And you know, it looked better to me. I was in some similarly-sized groups earlier in the week and, even though none of them were completely homogeneous, they all seemed like "a bunch of white folks with one person for token ethnicity." I happen to know that those groups were selected entirely at random, so that wasn't deliberate at that level, but the pool to choose from was a lot more limited with regards to diversity, so there was a built-in favoritism of sorts. That pool was so predominantly Caucasian in the first place that it'd be impossible not to have smaller groups also reflect that.

I don't want to get into the causes of that (as I'm sure there are a myriad of reasons, both overt and subtle, if not entirely subconscious) but I want to make a plea for comic artists who draw crowd scenes and groups of people. If you walk down the streets of an urban center -- New York, Chicago, London, Paris, etc. -- you're going to see a wide array of people. And those people are going to represent a wide range of cultural backgrounds, likely several in a single individual! And unless you're specifically trying to depict a fairly homogeneous group like some the Aryan Brotherhood or... well, I was about to suggest the Board of the NAACP, but they're a surprisingly diverse group, given the organization... unless you're trying to depict a fairly homogeneous group, it'd serve you well to draw a culturally diverse group of people.

The reason why I'm suggesting it isn't so high-minded -- it does, I think, deal with larger issues of cultural awareness and all but really, it just looks better! It just looks more interesting to see a bunch of different types of people. It looks like an image readers will want to spend more time studying. It looks like there's something going on in the background beyond the visual static that a sea of white faces would become. And it's got to be more interesting to draw, too! Even if you're a culturally insensitive lout, change things up a bit just to make yourself look like a better artist! Your faces will automatically look more varied, and you'll have more people talk about the nuances of your work instead of glossing over large portions of your art because they're so internally repetitive.

Want to keep people's eyeballs on your work? Give them something interesting to look at and not just another generic white guy in the background!

Children Of The Yellow Kid Review

2012-02-04T13:57:00.000-05:00

I came across a copy of R.C. Harvey's Children of the Yellow Kid, I think, about five years ago in a Half Price Books. It'd been marked down to $3.00, so I couldn't pass up that deal. However, it's managed to sit unread on my shelf until recently.

The short description of this book is that it's a history of newspaper comic strips in America. Which is precisely why I didn't dive into reading it right away; it didn't seem to be an overly detailed synopsis, so I assumed I already knew the bulk of what was covered. Hogan's Alley, Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, Prince Valiant, Peanuts... Yup, got it, know all that. And while Harvey's book doesn't delve too deeply into any one artist or strip, it covers a surprising amount of territory and exposed a great many holes in my personal comic strip knowledge.

Most of the art that is presented in the book are of the original art, several pieces in fact are printed at or near full-size. Interestingly, and much to Harvey's credit, he lets the artwork stand on its own for the most part and writes about the strips more from an anthropological perspective. What was going on in the country at the time? Why was there a broad change in practices across so many strips nearly simultaneously? What events/people were creators responding to? I think this is what really struck me about the book; that it was able to put so many movements in comics into perspective. Having been born well past the heyday of many older strips, my familiarity with, say, Little Orphan Annie or Mary Worth comes from the daily strips that were contemporary for me. Which is to say, continued on by someone other than the original creator in a very different climate than when they were first developed. The histories I'd read previously were either exceptionally focused on a single creator or work, or they were presented in the broader context of comic books and not treated as a unique medium. I don't know how common that type of historical, societal perspective is in strip histories, but much of the information and context presented in Harvey's book was certainly new to me.

My one real complaint with the book deals with the art. The images themselves were wonderful, and I particularly enjoyed examining some of the larger pieces. But their placement throughout the book was somewhat vexing, in that they were rarely placed anywhere near the text that referenced that strip or artist. When I got to the portion of the book talking about Milton Caniff, I had to turn back a dozen pages to look at the referenced artwork. I understand that not every image could be placed precisely next to the text that refers to it, but there were very few instances where I didn't have to turn at least four or five pages one direction or another to see which specific strip was being referred to.

I did learn a great deal here, and in fact just ordered Harvey's biography of an artist I had never even heard of before, Gus Arriola, in part because I realized just how little about newspaper strip history I know. But Children of the Yellow Kid was a very insightful read, and I'm just sorry I let it sit on my shelf for so long before cracking it open.

What I'm Working On

2012-02-03T16:14:00.000-05:00

Alright, it's time for an update on what I'm doing, and where you can find more of my work!

Last weekend, I was interviewed on the Webcomic Beacon podcast. It was originally broadcast live, but they've got it available for download here if you missed it or want to save a copy for posterity. I had a great time chatting with hosts Fes and Mark, and we wound up going a bit over the usual hour for the show.
Back in January, Comic Book Bin published a piece of mine on the state of digital comics. I also wrote a state of webcomics, as well, but that's not up quite yet. Theoretically, you'd be able to find that through here if/when it does go live.
Coming in March is the debut of a new comics magazine called The Drawn Word. I've got a column on European creators; my first one looks at Enki Bilal and his famous Nikopol Trilogy. (Fantastic stuff if you haven't read it!) It will be available via Graphicly; my publisher there has hinted at other venues as well, but I don't know if those have been finalized yet.
Later in March (I think) should be the next issue of The Jack Kirby Collector with my latest "Incidental Iconography" column. (Note to self: write your latest "Incidental Iconography" column.)
Kleefeld on Webcomics is still going strong over at MTV Geek. It's still just me writing, but it seems to be kind of popular. (At least, relative to my other work!) Recently, I've looked at Krishna Sadasivam's mentoring program, the fragmentation of webcomics, and Ryan Estrada's finances.
I've still got plans for my book on Harry Blackstone comics, but I've been kind of busy lately and it's gotten relegated to the back burner repeatedly. (Definite paying gigs win out over I might break even on this projects.) I'm still working on it, but it's going to be a while before it's complete. Since there's not exactly a vocal clamoring for it, I'm pretty sure this won't be a problem for anyone!
Oh, and of course, I still continue to blog here at Kleefeld on Comics every day!

Full Engagement

2012-02-02T17:19:00.000-05:00

Our office had a multi-day, off-site meeting earlier this week. 350 or so people with talks about specifics of our business as well as broader ones on more general subjects. One of the speakers was Raquel Malo, who was talking about how your physical health can/does impact your mental and professional health. She managed to get all 350 in the conference room doing some resistance training with some heavy elastic bands that were passed out, so she was definitely an engaging speaker even if most of the people promptly forgot or dismissed everything she said.

But she, at one point, referenced the work of Jim Loehr. By a complete coincidence I had a copy of the very book she was ultimately referring to in my bag, The Power of Full Engagement. It had been sitting on my shelf for months and I grabbed for something to read on the plane ride. I didn't even realize it until the trip home when I started reading through some of the exact same material she was talking about.

What the book goes into, moreso than Malo did, is the notion of being actively engaged with your life. About how the vast majority of our lives are dictated not by any real choice, but out of habit. The example the book starts with is brushing your teeth. You've probably done it so often that you don't think about it any more, it's just part of your morning ritual.

There's nothing wrong with doing things out of habit, of course, provided that they're helping to lead you to whatever your larger goals are. If, for example, you come home after a day of work and plop on the couch for several hours to watch television, you're not really engaging in behavior that's going to further almost any other goal other than becoming permanently sedentary! If you want to become a better artist, or a well-known writer, or have some kind of impact on the comic book industry, you need to take steps to actively change your habits into ones that will further your own ends.

Starting a new habit is not easy, by any means. I started this blog, for example, in 2006 with the intent of posting every day. It took me about eight months before I got into the routine of blogging every single day! But having done that and gotten myself to that point, I've become very much in the habit of writing daily. And that has helped me both by landing paying gigs with the likes of MTV (more on some of those gigs tomorrow!) but it has also helped me hone my process enough so that I can write faster and more efficiently to meet the writing deadlines I run up against. (Well... usually meet the deadlines.) It still eats up a chunk of time, certainly, that I could spend doing something else, but it's time that I've carved out for myself to achieve my larger goals.

I don't like to get all preachy on you (who am I to tell anyone what they're doing right or wrong with their life?) but if you want to really become engaged with creating comics or writing about comics or whatever, you really need to sincerely commit to it. And, just like going to the gym, getting off your butt to get started is the hardest part. If you happen to miss a day for whatever reason, you have get back into the game before the new good habits you've started become even newer, less productive habits.

Besides, what are you waiting for?

All Wednesday! All Links!

2012-02-01T17:09:00.000-05:00

Chain Letters for Disturbed Children continues its image gallery of fanzines that contain contributions from George R.R. Martin.
Webcomic Overlook has another installment of "Know Thy History", this time focusing on Prince Valiant. I'm a big proponent of knowing the history of your favorite subject (whatever that subject may be) so I highly recommend this series if you're not already reading it.
The Californian has a nice, non-judgmental profile of the folks working at Current Comics.

The Questions Have Been Terrific!

2012-01-31T19:42:00.000-05:00

Now I didn't resolve the questions; I'm a guy who lives with a lot of questions. I say, 'What's out there?' and I try to resolve that. And I never can. I don't think anybody can. Who's got the answers? I sure would like to hear the ultimate one, but I haven't yet. And so I live with a lot of questions, and I find that entertaining. I find that entertaining. And if my life were to end tomorrow, it would be fulfilled in that manner. I would say, 'The questions have been terrific!'

-- Jack Kirby, from the 1987 documentary The Masters of Comic Book Art

So Many Bandwagons, So Little Time

2012-01-30T17:19:00.000-05:00

"Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage."
-- Charlie Chaplin

It's fairly easy to find quotes and predictions about various inventions or methodologies that were seen as passing fads of no real importance or significance. The ones, of course, that most memorable are those that got it completely wrong. It's all but impossible to predict what catches on and what doesn't so, while it's easy to get a quick smile from Chaplin's comment, it's not really held against him in any way. If anyone were able to know the secret to taking something from a fad to an institution, I daresay there'd be a lot more people with a lot more money. But it winds up being a matter of timing, marketing, particulars of execution, championing and leadership, and a host of externalities that no one really has control of.

Think of it in relation to the comic industry's history. Martin Goodman was (in)famous for jumping on every trend he could. As funny animal comics became popular, he flooded the market with funny animal books. After romance comics started to catch, he threw out a slew of romance comics. Westerns rose in popularity, Goodman was right there feeding into it. And he kept doing that year after year, fad after fad, until the superhero genre happened to stick. And even now, half a century later, there's no way we can concretely pin down WHY superhero comics stuck fast. Had Flash been reintroduced in 1955, maybe things would have been radically different. What if Joe Maneely didn't die in 1958 and had drawn Fantastic Four #1 instead of Jack Kirby? There are a million variables that could have been different, and any one of them might have resulted in superhero comics just being the next fad on the list.

Ah, but as Alvin Toffler has taught us, things are moving considerably faster than in Chaplin's day. New technologies are emerging with such frequency now that we don't have time to sit back and really analyze them before the next one is upon us. So how do we know what's going to take off and what's going to fall flat? How do we know whether to put our efforts to A, B and C or X, Y and Z? Never mind that we haven't even heard of L, M, N, O or P!

The truth is we don't know. No one does. Stuff keeps getting thrown up against the wall; some of it sticks, some of it doesn't. I've learned from decades of experience that I am one of the worst judges of what has any sort of staying power. I have always been, it seems, running perpendicular to whatever the cultural zeitgeist du jour was. I was late to MySpace, late to Facebook, late to Twitter...

Why this is problematic for you, the comic creator (or commentator or whatever) is that a lot of these technologies are where your audience is! That's how you communicate with them. That's how you market to them. That's how you tell them how to buy your stuff. It's all well and good if you're on Twitter, but if none of your audience -- or your potential audience -- is, then it's mostly just wasted effort.

Now, some of this can be automated to make your life easier. You can have your Flickr account populate your blog which then feeds into Facebook and Twitter which gets copied over to LinkedIn... Or whatever. But the point is that if you're playing in that space, you need to keep abreast of trends. Otherwise you're sitting there like a dork wondering why no one is visiting your MySpace page.

As of now, I don't have an easy answer for you. The best I'm able to do is just keep tabs on my friends and see what they're using. Maybe it'll catch on, maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be ideal for my purposes, maybe not. But you can't sit back and assume what you heard works last week will work this week. You need to dive in and get some details as quickly as you reasonably can, get the general feel for how it works, then see if you can use that to your advantage.

Decals & Vinyl Figures

2012-01-29T17:07:00.001-05:00

A lot of folks from my office at work are going on a business trip this week. I've done business trips before, but this will be the first time with my current employer. Most all of us will be on the same plane, and most all of us have the same model of laptop, so I figured I ought to ensure that mine doesn't get mixed up with anyone else's. I thought a Spider-Man sticker or something would be kind of amusing because most of what I do is web work. (It amuses me at any rate.) So I swang by the local Target yesterday to see if they had anything. The only one I could find larger than an inch or so was part of one of those wall-decorating kits from RoomMates.

For ten bucks? Sure, I'll splurge. I figure I can use some of the other characters to spruce up my comic room a bit as well.

First off, I have to say that I'm impressed. The art is surprisingly (to me) consistent in quality and the figures are all pretty close to being in scale with each other. The clear edges mean that you don't get an extra white border around the figures, and the printed areas are fairly opaque, so you can still see them clearly over visual textures and relatively dark surfaces. They also have sets for Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well as movie versions of Captain America and Thor.

They also have larger single figures available for twenty-ish dollars. (The price varies a bit depending on the figure.) These are presented in several parts that have to be assembled on the wall, but the result is a 4-5 foot tall character. Most of the same characters are available that way.

And for thirty-issue dollars, you can get a 3' x 2' classic comic book cover. Looks like they have just over a dozen currently. Fantastic Four #1, Detective Comics #27, Hulk #181... covers that you've likely seen a few thousand times before.

Now, Fathead seems to do something similar using many of the same images. The figures are larger -- more in the six foot range -- and appear to be single sheet of vinyl. Probably a bit sturdier and they don't need to be assembled. They also have the bonus of some classic style images by the likes of Jack Kirby, John Buscema and John Romita Sr. But, they also cost about $90-$100 each, so it's going to make a bigger dent in your budget.

What I'm curious about, though, is why haven't more comic book shops utilized these in their own stores. I'm aware of one that put up a commercially available Marvel border, but that's it. I should think a five foot Superman would be a bit of a draw if you could position it so it was visible from the front window. You could create a display that looked like this...

... which would be a little shy of two-feet square. It'd cost you around $50 and you'd have enough decals left to easily create another five or six similar displays. Seems to me that it'd be an easy and cheap way to get some nice looking art on the walls. A 6'5" Wonder Woman would be cool, too, if you wanted to spend a little more.

I just think it would look a LOT better than so many of the other options I've seen... thumbtacked posters that are curled and/or ripping, hand-painted murals by the owner who can kind of draw a bit, original art that's badly framed. I get that running a comic shop isn't exactly like printing money and things can get pretty tight sometimes but, in running a business, especially one that's so dependent on people being in a specific physical location, it seems that you need to spend a little extra to make the place look nice.

Spotlight On A Kirby Design Sequence

2012-01-28T16:36:00.000-05:00

A little earlier today, Tom Brevoort posted the following Sgt. Fury page over on his Marvel Age of Comics tumblr. (You are following that, aren't you?)

The bottom three panels leapt out at me for the brilliant way they draw the reader's eye across the page. That explosion almost forces your eye into the last panel, doesn't it?

And then, the billowing smoke pulling the through-lines of the plane wing...? Love it!

I want to point out the more subtle things, too, though. Like how that middle panel isn't a duplicate of the previous one. There's a slight change in the angle (very evident where the crosshairs' frame is broken by the gutter) and the image is slightly larger. Not only are you given the perspective of the gunner, but you get the sense that you're following his eyesight specifically as he leans in and his body picks up the vibrations of the firing machine gun.

But then you also have this nice bit where the large black blob creeps up the three panels, starting in the lowest left corner, then enlarging a bit, before finally fully breaking into the panel untethered, mimicking the flow of the explosion to the clouds and simultaneously helping lead the eye to it.

It's just a really gorgeous piece of design work, I think, and I just wanted to take a few moments to highlight it.

Three Weeks Since A Mash-up!

2012-01-27T23:37:00.002-05:00

It's been nearly three weeks since I've done a mash-up, so I'm allowed one tonight, right? How about if I make one a little extra interesting? Text from today's Garfield, art from today's...

Bad Machinery

Sci-ence

Cool Jerk

Your "little extra" can be that I did three instead of my usual two, or that I made a couple of slight alterations to Paul Horn's art so that Paul Stanley makes an appearance. (I told you it was only a little extra.)

Actually, I did the art tweaks mainly because the lack of any real dialogue in Garfield today meant that these make almost no sense. By adding "The Starchild" makeup and the sign of the horns, the dialogue makes at least vaguely a kind of sense. I considered also doing a version with today's Garfield Minus Garfield but that seemed a little too self-referential.

Selling The Comics Lifestyle

2012-01-26T22:07:00.002-05:00

I first started going to a gym regularly in my early 30s. It was mostly an effort not to lose weight, but to avoid putting any more on and maybe get a bit of muscle strength as well. And while I was going to that gym, my weight remained pretty steady and I got a little stronger in my upper body. (But not much.) I did about an hour's workout pretty consistently every other day for maybe four years. I stopped going in 2007 largely because of finances.

In mid-2010, I learned that a friend was going to run a marathon. I said to myself, "Well, hell, if Chris can run a marathon, why can't I?" It wasn't exactly a bucket list item for me, but I thought it would be a neat accomplishment. So I tried repairing the decomposing treadmill in the basement and started running for the first time. The treadmill lasted only a few months before it died beyond my capacity to fix it. At which point I joined another gym, my finances having at least stabilized.

Since my goal was to complete a marathon, and having absolutely zero experience in running, I started reading up on it. And health in general. I read a lot, and was able to pick a great deal of information about fitness and nutrition. But to do any good, I had to start acting on it. I started eating breakfast again. I changed my lunches to primarily salads. I recently had the epiphany that I had unintentionally almost entirely eliminated red meat from my diet. And the marathon training itself is a regular schedule of running, of course, but also weights and swimming.

Not surprisingly, the gym has been pretty packed lately with a bunch of people trying to make good on New Year's resolutions. But I look around while I'm working out and I can pick out the folks who are most likely not going to continue showing up all year. In fact, I've already seen more than a few people who showed up every day for the first week or two now coming in more sporadically. You see, what these people don't get -- and what I didn't get until I really found myself embedded in it -- is that fitness is a lifestyle choice. You can show up at the gym and take the zumba class for a couple months and lose 10 pounds or whatever. But if you want to see a "permanent" change, and not just a short-term fix, it requires a mental adjustment as well. You need to incorporate a new exercise regimen and a new diet into your lifestyle. Diet, as they say, is a not a verb.

What does this have to do with comics, you ask? Well, comics is a lifestyle choice, too, isn't it? You're not JUST reading Spider-Man; you're going to the comic shop every week and chatting with the other folks there, you're online reading about upcoming storylines, you're creating fan art, you're hunting down back issues, you're analyzing plot points to see if you can figure out what comes next or whether or not they've screwed up the continuity... That's why "comic" conventions frequently also have actors, wrestlers and models as guests -- the "comic" of their title refers to the lifestyle, not the specific medium.

Gyms periodically offer discounts and use advertising that can go along the lines of, "Lose that belly fat so you look great on the beach this summer!" But the people those attract are mostly short-term customers. The long-term ones, the ones who act as an ongoing revenue stream, are the ones who have made a lifestyle choice, and they have a very different message sold to them. It's not four walls with some weights and treadmills; it's a club where friends hang out and bond.

I think more comic shops could stand to take this approach. Don't sell the customers/readers on the physical comic books themselves, sell them on the lifestyle of hanging out with cool people who lead interesting lives and have imaginative ideas. Comics is very much a lifestyle choice that goes beyond just reading the stories. Why are you here reading this, after all? There are some shops out that are doing this already, and some of those are doing it better than others. But I don't think you can grab new readers on the draw of a single character or book alone. At least, not for very long. I think the lifers that stay with comics are the ones who not only say that this is a cool medium, but the ones who say it's a cool medium with lots of cool people I want to hang out with.

Wednsday Link-o-rama

2012-01-25T18:59:00.000-05:00

Matt Kuhns examines the new DC logo. Unlike many folks who have criticized it, Kuhns is a bona fide graphic designer and looks at it specifically in that context.
PRI's The World has a piece on the "Hero, Villain, Yeti” exhibit about Tibet's depictions in comics at the Rubin Museum of Art.
I did not know this previously, but apparently the last Saturday of every August (the 25th this year) is International Cosplay Day. "It is to have fun and be able to cosplay for a day even when there is no convention in your area."
Krazy Kat animated in stop motion? Yes, please!

Breaking The Filter Bubble

2012-01-24T23:42:00.001-05:00

One of the complaints I've heard rendered against some comic fans and professionals over the years is that they can be too insular in their reading. I've heard some really talented pros before specifically cite that part of what makes them talented is that they don't limit the type of material they take in. More to the point, if they write or draw superhero comics all day for a living, they read not just other types of comics, but other types of material altogether. Novels and poems and song lyrics and non-fiction and just about anything else.

If all you ever take in is a certain type of story, that's all you're going to produce yourself. You'll basically wind up rehashing the same old stuff over and over. At best, you'll wind up being a hack. The basic way creativity works is when your brain puts together two (or more) ideas that previously weren't put together by anyone else. That's why mash-up artwork online can be popular -- combining two ideas that wouldn't normally be put together is new and different.

Beyond just characters, though, a broader base of information better informs what you produce. A lot of the sexism that shows up in mainstream comics, I think, stems from the fact that there are so few women in the industry. Male writers are just writing what they know: men. So female characters come off as shallow or two-dimensional; there's no real reference outside of all the other shallow and two-dimensional female comic characters.

I bring this up, to some degree, in response to Google's changes in their search results, which are now incorporating social media aspects to the top results. Basically, if you haven't seen/experienced this already, the upshot is that anything you search on, the first results are, whenever possible, going to be pulled from your and your friends'/acquaintances' sources. Their Picasa albums, their blogs, their Google+ posts, etc. The potential issue there is that your searches are more narrowly focused on what you and your friends already know. Eli Pariser calls this a "filter bubble."
Personally, I try to actively combat that filter bubble. I still read an inordinate amount of material relating to comics, of course, but I do try to counter that with some other things as well. Right now, I'm reading a biography of Cleopatra for example. I also specifically went in to TURN OFF those personalized search results. I found having those only really distracting because I don't want to search on what I already read through a link on someone else's profile; I want something new!

You can walk around in circles if you like, I suppose, and stay within your comfort zone all the time, but I'd rather see/hear a wider variety of voices than just reflections of my own. I might disagree with many of them or find them wholly irrelevant, but at least I saw that my thinking wasn't the only option out there.

The Wrong Restroom!

2012-01-23T16:24:00.000-05:00

I was traveling a couple weeks ago, and pulled off the road to a truck stop for a bio break. The men's room was full, so I stood inside the door by the sinks and waited my turn. While I was waiting, a 40-ish year old woman walked in and stopped dead as soon as she saw me, a look of complete bewilderment on her face. I said, simply, "Men's room," to which she immediately blurted out an "Oh, God, I'm sorry" and darted back out into the hall wearing a rather embarrassed look.

It reminded me of an incident from college. Most of my classes were in the "design, art, architecture and planning" (DAAP) building, which was set a bit apart from the rest of campus. It had kind of an odd layout, which befit the art students that generally populated its halls. One of the unusual "features" was that the men's and women's restrooms were located at opposite ends of the building on each floor. But instead of all the men's rooms being on the east end and all the women's on the west, they alternated poles depending on which floor you were on. The women's rooms were on the east end on floors 1 and 3, but on the west end on floors 2 and 4 with the reverse being true for the men's. So you had to be very conscious of which classroom you were in when you decided to take a break.

One night, I was in the studios working. It must have been close to the end of the semester, as there were several of us there. I got to a point where I needed some more supplies, and was going to make a run up to the local Walgreens. (Not the best choice for art supplies, certainly, but there aren't generally too many options at 3:00 in the morning.) I went around asking if anybody else needed anything and, not having any takers, made a quick stop to the restroom before I left.

As I'm sure you've guessed, it was the wrong one. I wasn't thinking about which floor I was on, and simply went to the nearest. It took me a couple seconds to register the discrepancy. "Wait, something doesn't look right here. Oh, hey! There's no urinals!" But, I figured, it was 3 AM and the whole building was almost empty so I might as well make use of the facilities. So I'm standing in one of the stalls when I hear the door open. Some footsteps were shortly followed by a pair of sneakers I could see in the stall next to me. Clearly pointing in the "correct" direction. Whoever she was, I'm sure she saw my shoes were going the "wrong" way, but she didn't seem to care enough to say anything. I finished up, washed my hands and left, catching one of my peers on the way out who was only just registering what had happened and trying to stifle a laugh. I shrugged and went off to Walgreens.

The memory sticks out for me because it was one of the first real first-hand experiences I had in a progressive culture. For that minute or two, it was a unisex bathroom. (This was several years prior to Ally McBeal giving that notion any widespread exposure.) That there were two of us, of different genders, sharing the facilities highlighted to me that, hey, we're just all people and any labels you may ascribe to or have applied to you don't really mean anything. I had no idea who she was and (I don't think) she had any idea who I was. We were just two people doing something that ALL people have to do.

I don't think I've ever told that story before. Not because I was embarrassed or anything like that, but simply because it was essentially a non-event. It was memorable to me precisely because of how much of a non-event it was. Maybe the girl in the stall next to me was simply terrified speechless, or was in some altered state of mind where she didn't even notice me. Hell, maybe it was another guy! Like I said, I never saw anything but sneakers. I prefer to take an Occam's razor approach and think she just didn't care that a guy was in the stall next to her, and it was largely unremarkable for her as well. Two people just going about their business.

Shouldn't that be how comic shops operate? Where anyone can walk in and not really care that there are other people milling about? They could be male, female, black, white, heterosexual, homosexual... Comic shops have been around considerably less time than public restrooms, yet they still continue to evoke reactions not dissimilar to the first woman I mentioned above. "Oh, God! This is a comic shop?!? I'm sorry!" Wouldn't the second scenario, where a female's presence in a comic shop is a non-event, be preferable?

I mean, really, if gender parity can be a non-issue in a restroom, why is it so hard in comic shops?

Fantasy To Reality

2012-01-22T22:47:00.000-05:00

I used to draw a lot more than I do now. Twelve, thirteen, somewhere in there... I had aspirations of becoming a comic book artist. I dutifully carried around an over-sized art pad, and tried copying my favorite heroes into it. Certainly by age fifteen, if not a little sooner, I had realized that I didn't have nearly the talent to draw comics for a living (I had one drawing that was supposed to be the Black Panther, but I screwed up the proportions really badly and I had to change his costume to make him Beast in his original appearance) but I still continued doodling in my notes and homework assignments and such.

One thing I started doing was cartooning myself to provide commentary on homework and tests. Rather than simply write a note in the margins for the teacher, I'd do a cartoon of myself with a speech bubble saying something (hopefully) clever. It wasn't a particularly good likeness, I don't think, and was a bit overly influenced by the likes of Jim Davis and Bill Amend. Over the next few years, I made it a little more representative of me and what I was drawing by seventeen hasn't changed much stylistically through today. (I just pulled out cartoon of myself I did in 1990, and the biggest difference between that and how I draw myself today is my hair.)

I also used my "self-portraits" as a means of expressing what I was thinking about. I'd draw myself in a Buck Rogers style space suit, and imagine exploring other worlds. Or in leather jacket and a fedora, swinging by a bullwhip over a river of crocodiles, on the hunt for lost treasure. Or in a Fantastic Four jumpsuit, flying as backup behind the original team. They were daydreams, mostly, of me being bigger/better/more than who I was.

As I said, I don't draw as much as I used to, but I found myself doodling a week or so ago. It was me, in my usual jeans and a t-shirt, defiantly defending my home from unseen attackers. And I recalled another doodle I had done at the end of 2009: me, in a very tattered version of my usual jeans and t-shirt, bruised and bloodied, looking like I'm about ready to collapse, in front of the broken numbers "2009." They were still not depicting reality, but they were very much less aspirational and very much more metaphoric.

I don't know when I stopped drawing myself as a superhero. The last distinct recollection I have was in college, shortly after I was introduced to Photoshop. (Wherein I promptly inserted myself into a few pages of The Infinity War.) But I'm left to wonder if that's because I stopped looking to comics as engines of wish fulfillment, or did I simply stop looking for those escapist ideas which then led to my not looking for them in comics?

In Case Of Loki, Break Glass

2012-01-21T15:43:00.000-05:00

Marvel: The Lost Generation

2012-01-20T23:16:00.003-05:00

I was mentally sifting through my superhero comics from the 1990s and early 2000s for Tom Spurgeon's latest "Five for Friday" and I recalled a mini-series from 2000 called Marvel: The Lost Generation by Roger Stern and John Byrne. The basic premise is that it fills in the gaps between the end of World War II and the introduction of the Fantastic Four. When the FF first debuted, that was only a period of about 15 years. But sometime in the 1970s or '80s, it kind of came to be understood that the Fantastic Four had only been around for ten years as they were on a different time-scale than the real world. And then sometime, I think, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, that got changed to that the FF have ALWAYS been around for about ten years and WILL CONTINUE to always have been around about ten years. More of a sliding time-scale. So now, in 2012, the team would have debuted almost 60 years after WWII ended! So what happened in those six decades?

Enter Marvel: The Lost Generation. The series was designed specifically around the idea of addressing not only those "missing" (at the time) five decades, but also any more time that might occur in the future. Each of the twelve issues hinted at what had been going on, but was left vague in terms of dates relative to just about everything else. A character who was a sidekick in one issue might be a grown hero in his own right in the next with no explicit explanation of what happened in between. Some characters would just stop appearing, and others would make obtuse allusions to their death/disappearance. There were a few characters who were effectively immortal that kept popping up, as did a time-travelling historian.

I thought it was a great solution to a very strange problem, and it was very well-executed as well. It was also one of the last really fun stories I read from Marvel. That's not to say the last one I enjoyed -- I enjoyed many stories after that, but there weren't many others that were fun. (The only other ones that spring to mind after that are the Waid/Wieringo run on Fantastic Four and Dan Slott's She-Hulk.)

The Lost Generation issues were numbered backwards. It debuted with #12 and counted down to #1. The stories, while all connected, are independent by design so the series can read either direction just as well. I talked to Stern shortly before the series came out, and he had argued to some of the folks at Marvel that it would be a benefit to do it that way, since they could theoretically produced two trade paperbacks from the series, one running in each direction. However, we're over a decade out now and it's never been reprinted in any form. I don't believe any of the characters that were introduced have been used since then either. Thematically, it seems to go very much against the grain of what Marvel is trying to do with their IPs now so I wouldn't expect to see a collected edition any time soon.

I'm sure one of the reasons I liked the book was because it felt very much like the type of comics I grew up on in the late '70s and early '80s. Not surprising given the creators involved. But since it was almost entirely new characters in a very different type of story than what I grew up with, I'm sure my appreciation for it isn't strictly nostalgic. I may just have to dig that series out again to re-read it. In both directions!

Curious FF Reprint Mystery

2012-01-19T09:57:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across a minor, but curious, mystery this morning. Here are the covers for Fantastic Four #135, 136 and 137...

And here are the covers for some French-language Canadian reprints that came out about two months after the originals...

Most of the covers of the reprint series are lifted from the original comics, with just the English translated into French. But for some reason, the issue reprinting Fantastic Four #136 doesn't have use the original cover art, but a panel of interior art.

Now it's certainly possible the original cover art was lost or destroyed. But here's the cover to a British reprint of the same story from about four years later...

It's been modified a bit to accomodate a slightly wider format, but there was clearly some form of reproducible art still around.

The best I can guess is that the cover art for the Canadian reprint might have been sent up north separately. The issues were in black and white, so they would've only needed the black line art (probably stats) for the interiors, but the covers used color and it seems probable that Marvel sent the color separations for the covers up to Canada. Those could have been handled differently, or from a different department, so I can see a situation where the Canadian printers simply didn't receive the cover art in time to hit their production deadlines. In such a case, utilizing interior art like a splash page makes sense.

But, then, why the strange treatment? Why the odd angle? Why the red border? Why color some of the figures, but not the Human Torch? And why color the figures with the least intense color of the three chosen? Questions I do not have even speculative answers for.

UPDATE: On further study, I think that The Complete Fantastic Four cover is in fact an entirely new piece of art, recreated based on the original. The more I look at the two, the more discrepancies I see: Medusa's left boot, the Torch's flame aura, the placement of Thing's left hand, the number of steps on that statue, the placement of the upper bike rider... There are more issues there than would be touched up for the size difference. Which leads me to think that the actual cover art for FF #136 was lost in the mail, and John Buscema recreated it based on a printed version. Whether he did so specifically for the British reprint, I can't say, however.

It's Wednesday! It's Links!

2012-01-18T21:23:00.000-05:00

Harris O'Malley has a good piece on Nerds and Male Privilege. Judging by the comments, some of you may be sick of seeing these types of articles but, frankly, until things actually get better, we continue to need precisely these types of articles so the issue doesn't get swept under the rug. Also, don't read the comments.
Noturno Sukhoi has put together a downloadable pattern to make your own Weapon-X Wolverine.
Daily News & Analysis has this short article on the increasing popularity of old Indian comic book characters.
So, Google Correlate. Kind of difficult to figure out what the hell it is/does. Fortunately, they've provide a short webcomic by Manu Cornet to explain it.

A Cynical Comment On SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T09:38:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling a bit of pressure to talk about SOPA and PIPA here, but I don't have much I feel I can add to the conversation. Everyone, to a person, whose opinion I respect that I've heard weigh in on the subject has said some variation of "these are horrible, horrible bills and should be killed." I agree. Completely. Nothing new for me to add there.

You'll note, though, I'm not taking the symbolic step of blacking out my site. Why? Because I rarely get more than 200 visitors a day, and I'm pretty confident that my regular readers probably share my opinions on SOPA and PIPA already. Blacking my site won't raise even a modicum of awareness.

I'm very, very cynical about the US government. What you or I say and do doesn't matter on this. Yes, I've written my politicians to let them know I'm against SOPA and PIPA, but it won't do any good. Because they're only listening to people who give them lots of money. Congress only started wavering on SOPA/PIPA after several major companies started taking action against it. The hearings on the matter where almost all the technical and legal experts said this was a bad move? Didn't sway Congress a bit. It's only when large sums of money started getting involved from groups opposing SOPA/PIPA did they care.

My opinion isn't worth shit in Washington. My opinion coupled with the opinions of every other person with a blog isn't worth shit. The only thing that matters is where the money is coming from. That's why these bills were introduced in the first place and why they're being contested now. Whether or not these pass in their current, or even modified form, has nothing to do with what's right or just or fair or what impact that has on you or me; it has everything to do with who lines politicians' pockets with the most money.

I think these are bad bills and should be stopped. I've written letters to Google, Facebook, etc. to take action. But that letter-writing is just to keep my conscious clear. The blackouts today are symbolic; the only thing that really matters is who ponies up the most cash. The rest of us can't really do anything of any consequence except try to work with/around/through the results. That's why I haven't said anything publicly on the subject before, and why I'm not going dark today.

Support The Underpug -- Er... Underdog!

2012-01-17T22:00:00.001-05:00

If I'm being honest with myself (which is what I usually strive for) I'm just a putz with a blog that gets read by maybe a handful of people. That this gets read at all never ceases to amaze me. Despite that, however, I'm going to make a blatant plug here to you handful of people to see if I can help someone else out a bit.

Ethan Young has been working on his Tails webcomic since 2009. It's a vaguely autobiographical comic which Young has characterized as "equal parts slice-of-life romance, comedy, drama, and epic fantasy." Last year, Hermes Press announced that they'll be publishing printed versions of the story with some updates as well as new features. I interviewed Young about it for MTV Geek at the time.

So, for those of you reading, take a moment to check out Tails online. If you like it, ask your Local Comic Shop to order a copy for you (Order #STK457317 in the Diamond catalog) or place an advance order on Amazon. I'm sure Ethan will appreciate the support!

(Also, if you're interested, I talked with Ethan back in 2010 about how race influenced him in creating his story. I really like his approach in the comic, and his rationale behind how he depicts race is pragmatically mature.)

The Biggest Superhero You Don't Know

2012-01-16T23:29:00.001-05:00

The S.O. and I were walking through a section of town called "Little India" and came across the movie poster you see here. The movie is called Ra.One and came out late in 2011. It's about a dad who's trying to connect with his son and develops an incredible video game based on his son's ideas, but the video game characters break into the real world. (At least, that's what I can tell from the somewhat enigmatic trailers and descriptions I've found so far.) The protagonist is played by Shah Rukh Khan, sometimes called the "King of Bollywood."

The movie was allegedly the most expensive Bollywood film ever with a budget of $23.75 million US. While apparently not a complete critical success, it grossed $45.6 million worldwide. It was initially released in 3,100 screens in India and another 904 around the world, and had the biggest ever opening weekend in India. The marketing campaign last nine months. Related toy products included character sculptures, action figures, video games, and a wearable "H.A.R.T." (not dissimilar to the arc reactor from the Iron Man movies). The official website includes an online comic prequel to the movie. All in all, a pretty similar treatment to, say, any of the recent spate of superhero movies that have come out of Hollywood the past several years.

And yet, here in the States? Almost nothing about it.

Granted, Ra.One was originally in Hindi and was only dubbed into Tamil and Telugu, but how many Japanese movies came over to the US with only subtitles to enjoy some reknown? And wasn't The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a decent hit in the original Swedish before it got remade here?

I'm left wondering why IPs like Ra.One get so little attention? There are a lot of Bollywood movies, certainly, that don't get attention because they don't have any marketing budget. But this had a huge campaign behind it.

I have to assume that Hollywood distributors didn't feel they could market it to Americans. And I have to assume that's in large part because the people who are Hollywood distributors are white men. They didn't recognize themselves anywhere in Ra.One so why would anyone else be interested?

Today in the US, we celebrate the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to gain equal freedoms for everybody. Legally, that's largely in place, but we still have a LOOOOONG way to go before there's any real parity. As long as rich, white men control the messages, they'll keep making sure that their view is what's presented as "normal" and everything else is an aberration. Even if that aberration is only in the hero's skin color...

A Note On Handwriting Fonts

2012-01-15T11:10:00.000-05:00

The idea behind handwriting style fonts is to provide text with a more naturealistic, less machined feel. Helvetica, while an elegant font, tends to look a bit stiff and awkward when it's completed surrounded by and embedded in a full page of hand-drawn illustration. So handwriting fonts provide a nice middle ground, where they're still clean and recognizable letterforms, but their more organic design blends better with comic book style illustration.

There are, of course, any number of handwriting fonts out there, which can provide different nuanced voices and add to the flavor of a comic. Some creators make their own based on their personal lettering styles. On the whole, these work well. Easy reading and comprehension, but not as static as your typical serif or san serif. Here's a quick sample using Nate Piekos' Letter-o-matic...

Looks pretty good, right? That's in part because of the wording in that sentence. There's a good mix of letters there, with no double vowels or consonants. Now take a look at my name typed out in the same font...

Doesn't look quite as good. It doesn't feel like handwritten text any more. In large part because of the character redundancy. I've got three "E"s there, two right next to one another. The "E" form is very obviously identical across all three figures, making it come across as more planned, less spontaneous. And you notice this more because it's the only word you're looking at. You're not reading a full sentence and trying to process the meaning; you just need to understand the short blurb, so you can afford to spend more time looking at the individual letters. Because of that, the natural quirks that come with doing things by hand are more evident by their absence.

What if you made some substitutions, though?

The first "L" is an upside-down "7", the second "E" is flipped upside-down, and the third "E" is a backwards "3". All of the figures are now unique. A couple of problems remain, though. The "3" looks stylistically different than the other two "E"s, and the upside-down "E" doesn't feel quite right either.

What about actually modifying the letters, once they're put down?

Here, I've actually gone in and tried tweaking the characters more subtly. Changing the angle on crossbars by a degree, or shortening them a few pixels. It's not perfect by any means (I spent all of 90 seconds on it) but each character now has a unique form, but they still all look good as a whole. And the subtle changes prevent it from looking as machined as the first example above.

Obviously, doing this could be a tedious process, depending on how much you get into it. But for headlines and short exclamations, especially those with double letters, it makes a world of difference.

Graphitti As Comics?

2012-01-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

Graphitti as comics? Has anyone seen this?

I saw a documentary on graphitti and graphitti artists back in high school and I was inordinately impressed with the skill some of the artists had. Where I grew up, though, we had no such cool art. In fact, the only graphitti of any sort I recall seeing in person was on a nearby underpass where the word "pharoahs" (yes, it was spelled incorrectly) was crudely scrawled out over the eight support pylons.

Now, I know there are plenty of examples of comic style illustrations in graphitti. A quick Google search will turn up images like these...

But these aren't really comics, are they? There's no story, certainly, but nothing to that even suggests sequential art. They're still images, and they speak more to the symbology represented by the characters than telling a story.

And then you've got projects like this...
... which is very cool and impressive AND tell a story of sorts but, again, it's not comics.

Now, admittedly, I've never really lived in an area where graphitti was really raised to an art form and most of what I do see is painted over very quickly anyway. So my question goes out to the folks who live in closer proximity to good graphitti: have you seen examples of graphitti being used as the medium for a comic story or sequential art? Where there are a series of still pictures conveying a deliberate sequence? (Wow. Sounds a little like I'm channelling Scott McCloud there. Not intentional, I assure you.) Are there good examples out there for comics created as graphitti?

My Intro To Fumetti

2012-01-13T17:17:00.000-05:00

Fumetti, if you're unfamiliar with the term, is a form of comics where the images used are photographs instead of drawings. It's never been a particularly popular style here in the United States. I suspect this is largely because that the mass printing technology available didn't work on photos very well until the 1960s and, by then, the superhero genre was already doing a good job of crowding out other possibilities.

My introduction to it was in National Lampoon where the used to run short "Foto-Funnies." They usually seemed to center around the double entendre inherent in the word "strip" although I don't recall that reference ever being made explicit. The humor was generally pretty juvenile, and the comics seemed largely like an excuse for the magazine's producers to stare at naked women. Here's an example of the type of comic they often went with...

Really? Even when I was 13, I knew that didn't make sense and was an excuse to get a woman to undress in front of a camera. (Of course, I was 13 and didn't care because, well, I was 13 and looking at a naked woman!)

I don't remember seeing any that were actually sexy at all. There were some, in fact, that it was completely irrelevant who the people were -- there just needed to be two talking heads -- but they'd still have the woman topless for no reason. Still photos of boobs were pretty much the extent of the rationale behind the comics.

In that sense, I understood the benefit of fumetti (a term I wouldn't learn until years later) over illustration: you could get a greater sense of realism in depicting the human figure. If that was all you were really trying to show. It was easy to see you couldn't easily replicate, say, Spider-Man swinging through the New York skyline or an alien invasion that didn't look like guys in rubber suits. But if you just needed to have a couple people standing around talking, and you wanted them to look better than you could draw them, fumetti was the way to go.

This, of course, gave me a somewhat distorted picture of the style. It would be YEARS before I saw any real reason for fumetti besides the realistic depiction of naked people.

The Flame #1

2012-01-12T23:06:00.004-05:00

I just found that Farrell produced a comic called The Flame in 1954-55. This seems to be wholly unrelated to the more famous version published by Fox in the early 1940s. Not only are his costume and secret identity different, but this Flame does not need a flame gun, but can shoot blasts directly from his fingertips. Although in the one issue I've read, the only time he even does that is on the initial splash page which doesn't really take place in the story. He certainly doesn't have the panache of the Will Eisner/Lou Fine version that was more recently used in Project: Superpowers!

Technically, as noted in the indicia, it picked up the numbering from Lone Eagle so the first issue is actually listed as #5. But the second and third issues are simply called #2 and #3 (though none have issue numbers on the cover anyway). Also, interestingly, #3 was the first to sport the then-new Comic Code Authority seal, but it was also the last issue of the series.

Here's issue five/one, so you can check it out for yourself...

Links For Wednesday

2012-01-11T17:57:00.000-05:00

Peter Sanderson directs us to this notice that about the Metropolitan Museum hiring Sheena Wagstaff as its new curator of contemporary art. It's relevant for comics fans because Wagstaff also curated a show for the Whitney Museum about comics' influence on fine art. If her interest hasn't subsided, it could suggest that comics might make an appearance at the Met in the near/semi-near future.
The mystery behind why Justice Traps the Guilty #60A was numbered "60A" is solved!
Seth Godin has some high-level thoughts/reminders about "fair use."
Over at Anime Diet, M. Olivarez responds to Charlie Maib's "questionable statements" about the anime/manga industry that are "lacking in any grounded fact."
Girl-Wonder.org is holding elections for the Board of Directors.
Al Bigley digs out some old John Romita Sr. art for a never-produced Fantastic Four medalion.

Lessons From Genesis

2012-01-10T22:09:00.000-05:00

There have been a great many creative team-ups in comics over the years. Stan Lee & Jack Kirby spring immediately to mind, but there's also Marv Wolfman & George Perez, Denny O'Neil & Neal Adams, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo... Regardless of how well the folks meshed and how good of friends they are, it would seem that their work is inevitably broken up. In mainstream comics, of course, the creators themselves historically don't have much say in who they get to work with and there are often outside factors preventing further collaborations. In the worst cases, though, there's a falling out and one of the partners walks away with extra baggage that keeps them from ever even considering teaming up with their former partner again.

I'm a fan of prog rock. Especially old school stuff like King Crimson, Nektar and Pink Floyd. My favorite band, though, was Genesis. Forget about Invisible Touch (with maybe the exception of "Domino" and "The Brazilian"), go back to A Trick of the Tail, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or earlier for their really good stuff. Basically anything from before Steve Hackett left. (Though, since this is a comics related blog, I feel the need to point out that the first album after Hackett departed included "Scenes from a Night's Dream" which was about Winsor McCay's famous Little Nemo.)

In any event, I've read and heard more than my fair share of interviews with the band members from Genesis. One of the later ones that struck me was when Mike Rutherford was talking about that period I just mentioned. Peter Gabriel had left to do his own thing. Steve Hackett had just done the same. Phil Collins was having marital troubles. The band ended up putting itself on hiatus in 1979 after recording their first album without Hackett. Rutherford and Tony Banks did some solo work, Collins went on tour with Brand X and started playing around with some solo material himself (which would ultimately become Face Value in 1981). What Rutherford said in that later interview was that, in retrospect, that hiatus was crucial for them because it gave them all a chance to explore other avenues. So when Collins, Banks and Rutherford came back together in 1980, they had already worked on all their independent pet ideas and there was no jockeying to get this idea or that idea into the Genesis effort. They could focus on collaborating together and not vying to get their own musical ideas onto the album.

Now, arguably, their albums after that weren't as good creatively (though I do like the "hidden suite" on Duke and handful of their lesser known songs from subsequent albums) there's no question that they became more well-known and financially successful after that. And, individually, they all created a lot more. Mike + The Mechanics have ten albums, Rutherford has two solo albums, Banks has eight solo albums, Collins has eight solo albums and two soundtracks, plus they collectively have twelve more albums as Genesis since 1980. Not to mention an assortment of singles and Collins had a brief acting career in there as well. I'd call that a pretty impressive output, especially there's very little, if anything, there that's outright bad. Some not as good as others, obviously, but nothing you're going to stop mid-song.

Where I'm going with this is that, if an individual has a need to be creative, as many musicians and artists do, then their creative desires need to be given room to flourish. And that may not be on the project they're working on! Getting work done and creative expression are not necessarily overlapping goals. Creative folks need to express themselves, and a group setting isn't usually perfectly conducive to that. They might be able to get some of their ideas out, but probably not all of them. They can't not scratch that itch indefinitely, so they need some space to go off and do whatever it is they need to do -- write, draw, play music, sculpt... Hopefully, they'll be able to satisfy their creative urges before they become resentful of their partner inadvertently stifling them.

Remembering Wormy

2012-01-09T20:08:00.003-05:00

Back in the day, I played Dungeons & Dragons. I had a good pile of the books, and a stack of maybe 50-75 issues of Dragon magazine, the official mag for the game. I didn't have every consecutive issue, in part because distribution in my area was spotty and in part because, well, I didn't always find enough in every issue to warrant the cover price. In fact, with some of the issues I had, the only part I wanted to read was the comic section in the back, only a handful of pages in each issue. Early on especially, they consisted largely of spot gag cartoons with a sword-and-sorcery theme. But through a good chunk of the 1980s, they had three ongoing comics with regular characters and a consistent plot (sort of).

I probably enjoyed Phil Foglio's "What's New?" the most in part because there was very little in the way of continuity. So with my sporadic collection, I could pick up any random issue, read "What's New?" and be totally versed in what was going on. Not to mention that Foglio had an energetic drawing style and a clever, if occasionally juvenile, sense of humor. ("Next Month: Sex and D&D!") You may have seen Foglio's more recent work online. A comic called Girl Genius, which he works on with his wife Kaja. If you check out their online store, you can buy collected editions of "What's New?"

Larry Elmore's SnarfQuest was also a favorite. There was an overarching storyline, but it progressed pretty smoothly with a series of not-always-related mini-adventures. I think I also had the first couple of installments, so I understood the set-up from the start. But overall, it wasn't difficult to follow, even skipping the occasional chapter. I reviewed the collected edition here but I believe it's out of print.

Lastly was David A. Trampier's Wormy. It was a story about... I'm not sure exactly. Wormy was this dragon that lived by himself. He was pretty laid back and seemed to always be setting up some kind of huge role-playing game that he was maybe going to play against the dwarves. (I think?) His game "board" was so huge he had to hire out trolls to assemble all of it. The strip had a kind of meandering quality to it, with lots of tangents on side characters that at least didn't superficially seem to be related to the main plot. Here's a couple of sample pages...

It proved to be a rather difficult extended read, especially if you didn't get each and every issue. But the characters were so colorful and well-defined that even reading quick, unrelated snippets was deeply enjoyable. Imagine trying to read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy with every third or fourth chapter taken out. You could tell that what you were reading was wonderful, but you knew you were getting just how wonderful the complete version must be.

I stopped getting Dragon towards the end of high school, and apparently Trampier departed the strip quite suddenly and unexpectedly right around that same time. Wormy was left incomplete. No one seems to know his whereabouts. Dragon editor Kim Mohan said his checks came back uncashed. Trampier's brother-in-law said he thought he was in Illinois back in 2004, but he hadn't actually talked to him since 1982. I don't want to get into the mystery of what happened to him, but it's worth mentioning as why the story was never finished and why you're unlikely to ever see it in collected form.

Wormy was very much a character-driven comic. There weren't splashy layouts and the plot was, at best, obtuse because of the format. But the cartoons were very clean and stylish, the dialogue was usually exceptionally clever and the characters were ones that you could understand and appreciate. They were trolls and ogres and imps and demons and everything, but you could still recognize them as your friends, relatives, people down the street, etc. It really was a wonderfully engaging strip, even if you could never see the whole thing.

Several years ago, Haroog got copies of all the Dragon issues and posted scans of all the strips here. (It's where I got the above samples from.) The site doesn't seem to have been updated in a decade, and it looks like all the image links after the 1984 material are broken, but you can get a sense of the strip from pages prior to that.

In doing a little research for this post to get my facts straight, I came across plenty of stories of old gamers talking about Wormy and what may have happened to Trampier. While there's always questions surrounding his disappearance, everyone always talks about how they loved Wormy and were sad to see it go. Testament to the talent Trampier had, and the engagement readers felt with his characters.

Motivation

2012-01-08T23:39:00.000-05:00

Whether we consciously recognize it or not, every decision we make has a motivation of some kind behind it. When I first started writing for The Jack Kirby Collector back in 2003, my aim was primarily one of remembrance. In fact, I believe my first published article there actually mentions this in passing. That I wanted to there to be a record of my having contributed something to comicdom. I wasn't expecting to be another Will Eisner or Alex Raymond. I wasn't even shooting for the level of Bill Blackbeard or Shel Dorf. Just a small footnote in a short chapter would be sufficient.

I'd like to think that I've managed that much by now. I'd like to think that a comic historian several decades from now, if they're researching some topic I wrote about, would come across my name at least once. Of course, the more I continue to write, the more chance I'll have of that happening.

The reason motivation is interesting is because you can have several people doing the same thing, but because they have different reasons for doing it, they come at it differently. You can see this quite plainly at a gym. Especially in January.

Some folks are clearly there to get stronger and build muscle. Some folks are clearly there to lose weight. Some folks are clearly there as a social activity. Some folks are clearly there as some form of physical therapy. There's no right reason for going to the gym, of course, but some people you look at and wonder what prompted them to come. I don't mean that as an insult; it's just that they don't seem to have a big motivation to be there. Those people tend to stop showing up in February. They're not strongly motivated to continue.

It's a little less externally obvious, but it's evident in comic readers too. Some folks read for the escapism. Some folks read for the entertainment. Some folks read to study the craft. Some folks read as part of a social activity.

And that's significant because, as someone creating a comic that's intended to be read by these people, it would behoove you to have at least a basic understanding of why potential readers might read your comic. Beyond the "it's really cool because it's got a ninja" or whatever your superficial rationale for it is. That it has a ninja might be a selling point, but it won't be the underlying reason it's being read. Do readers find some emotional attachment to ninjas? Are they looking for examples of societal mores in feudal Japan?

That's not to say that every reader has the same motivation, of course. But my point is that if you, as a comic creator, begin straying away from the fundamental elements that the bulk of your readers are looking for, you'll likely start to lose them EVEN IF you keep the same basic characters and plot.

Of course, if you don't care about that, or find it irrelevant next to your desires as a creator, that's another issue. But if you're looking to become the next Bill Watterson or Milt Caniff, you should probably at least keep it in mind.

First 2012 Mash-Up

2012-01-07T23:04:00.000-05:00

I am just not feeling the whole writing thing today for some reason. Text is from today's Garfield, art from today's...

Bob the Squirrel

Artifice

I'm amused by the role-reversal in Bob while the version in Artifice takes a decidedly darker turn.

Thoughts For Aspiring Writers

2012-01-06T23:58:00.000-05:00

It's a bit strange to think of myself as a writer. I was just another blogger when I started Kleefeld on Comics, but now I've got ongoing columns for The Jack Kirby Collector, MTV Geek and Drawn Word (coming soon). I've contributed short pieces to a few different books now, and wrote an entire one myself, with another (slowly) in the works. So it kind of looks like I'm a writer of sorts now. Kind of makes me wish I took more classes on it in school.

When I was in, I believe, third grade, the teacher gave us a story assignment. I think it was a simple one-page story about whatever we wanted, but it was supposed to be fiction. I wrote about a battle between a barbarian and a wizard, and I liberally plagiarized the one Conan comic I had at the time. But, in that plagiarization, I lifted some dialogue. I recall the teacher being impressed and calling it out as a good example because I was the only one to use dialogue at all. No one else's story had anyone saying anything, and she pointed out how much more engaging and exciting my story was because of it. (I believe one line was something like, "Surrender, dog! Or I'll slit your throat from ear to ear!" Why that didn't seem to concern her, I don't know.)

English was, of course, a mandatory subject throughout grade school. I had pretty much all the same lessons as everyone else. I was more interested in art, though, so the "College for Kids" classes I would take up at the local community college on weekends were mostly centered around drawing. Those of us in the school's gifted & talented program did take a journalism course for one quarter in eighth grade, but it was as much about printing and production processes as it was about writing.

In high school, I somehow wound up working a bit on the school newspaper. I honestly don't know how that started because it wasn't something I actively pursued, and I never went to any meetings about it. I don't remember writing or turning anything in, but I can distinctly recall seeing my articles in the finished papers. My mom thought my report on the band's activities in one issue really stood out, and I got more than a few congratulations from other students for a particularly derisive op ed piece I wrote about the school administration. But I was more interested in the cartoons that I drew for the back of the paper.

Freshman English was mandatory in college, but I was in a graphic design program so nearly all of my projects were art related. I didn't even have many term papers to write. I did take a fiction writing class as an elective my senior year, but my pieces came across as horrendous compared to the other students in that class. My girlfriend at the time noted at one point that she thought I wrote very well. I don't know what work of mine she'd read, but she was minoring in English, so it didn't come across as completely idle praise.

But now, here I am writing every day. I'm still making my living doing design work, but there are people out there willing to pay for me to write, too! With little formal education or training beyond what most high school students get.

But, looking hindsight, one thing I can see that I've done is read. A lot of comics, to be sure, but a lot in general. And I often did more than just read; I took mental notes while I was reading. I wasn't thinking specifically in terms of formal writing conventions, obviously, but I could see, "Oh, the writer is dropping some heavy foreshadowing here; that's clumsy" or "Wow! That came out of left field! That doesn't make any sense!" Mostly a list of what not to do. But I still mentally absorbed things like narrative structure and character arcs and word choice.

For anyone out there who might want to be a writer -- of comics or non-fiction or whatever -- you will be told repeatedly to read a lot. Which you do need to do. But don't just; think about what you're reading. Is the author just following a standard Joseph Campbell narrative? Is the work driven by plot or characterization? What sort of tone do the specific words being used convey?

Reading is great.

Reading and thinking is even better!

Inability To See

2012-01-05T21:29:00.002-05:00

I sent the S.O. a link to an article this morning. Just a "Hey, this is interesting" thing. And I added, "Bonus points for using a mixed race couple in the photo, too!" To which she responded that it didn't really count because it was a black guy and a white woman. "Tired" is the word she used because it's the default for showing a mixed race couple. It's easy for me to point to examples where that doesn't happen -- there's another white guy here in the office who's married to a black woman, and there's the perennial geek fictional favorite of Zoe and Wash -- but the examples are ones that rather prominent in my field of vision. The co-worker is someone I have to work with almost daily and Firefly is one of the great sci-fi shows of television, so of course I see those. But in terms of the stuff that acts as something closer to white noise -- the flyers in my mailbox, ads running in the background while I'm waiting for a Hulu video to play, catalogs that usually get thrown in the trash with an at most casual glance, etc. -- that stuff rarely shows mixed race couples and, when they do, it's a black guy and a white woman.

But I'm a white guy who grew up in a white suburb and went into a field that's predominantly populated with white men. Which means that "white male" is what I think of by default. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Archie, Malcolm Reynolds, Han Solo, Harry Potter, Aragorn, Captain Kirk, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, James Bond, Indiana Jones, John McClane... These guys are "normal" in that they represent my default hero. Which is to say me, only handsome, clever and powerful. Anything 'not that' seems different or unusual.

I just started reading Mike Madrid's The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines which looks at superheroines throughout the history of comics. I'm only one chapter in, and it's amazing to see how much I just don't know about many of these characters. Some of it are characters I know but just never thought about in gender-specific terms. For example, the first female superhero, the Red Tornado, was essentially cross-dressing as a male. Or just how many of those old heroes had the dismissive "-girl" suffix instead of "-woman" that would have been more equitable to their male counterparts. Hawkgirl, Bulletgirl, Flame Girl, Doll Girl, Rocketgirl...

The reason, of course, those things never occurred to me is because I've looked at them from my default perspective. "Of course they're called 'girls'! They're weaker than men!" Never really questioning that they didn't have to be. I didn't need to look up to these characters and see them in the shadow of others because I always could look up to the characters casting those very shadows. I could easily look past Supergirl to see Superman. "Of course She-Hulk's name is derivative of the Hulk's! She came after him!" Did the Hulk have to be a male in the first place, though? Did she need to have a name derivative off his?

When I was a kid, I watched Dukes of Hazzard pretty regularly. Again, two guys like me only handsome, clever and powerful. Also they drove a cool car. The General Lee was an icon for the show, and the Confederate Flag on the roof became a shorthand icon for that. Except I heard it called the "rebel flag." And rebelling against corrupt government officials like Boss Hogg was the theme of the show. Freedom and justice were mete out by the Duke boys, not the inept and ineffectual law of Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane. I took it that this "rebel" flag represented personal freedom and justice against oppressive governments. (Well, I was seven -- it was probably more like: "Rebelling against big ol' meanies.") The point is that this iconic flag was one with an excessively positive connotation for me. It wouldn't be until years later, probably sometime in college, that I began to realize that that image didn't hold the same meaning for everyone. That, for a lot of people, it meant slavery and lynchings and Jim Crow and exactly the opposite of what I had been told. Needless to say, I lowered the flag from my mental flagpole.

But while I know that flag's meaning intellectually, and while I've even removed my old emotional attachments to the image, I can only empathize with those who lived under it. I can only empathize with those who maybe didn't live through it themselves, but had relatives who did. I can only empathize with those people whose choices have been limited because their parents or grandparents were artificially prevented from moving forward. I can't sympathize with any of them, though, because I can't have had those experiences myself.

Try as I might, I can never fully appreciate what anyone's experiences are outside my own. Whether they're as huge as slavery or as insignificant as a hangover.

BUT!

I try. I make an active choice to try not judge people or their situation on my terms. I make an active choice to try to look outside my bubble and see what other people are seeing. Sometimes, that's seeking out comics whose lead characters are a mixed race couple like in Cafe con Leche. Maybe that's buying indie graphic novels with a strong, empowered female lead from a female creator like Alex Heberling. Maybe that's staying away from creators produce culturally insensitive work. (I'll let you fill in your own examples on that one!) Maybe that's all of the above.

I'll admit that it's often difficult to see outside my own biases. It often takes someone else to actively point out that, "You know, you're not really thinking about that from the perspective of someone who might actually have to deal with those issues." But even if you actively try to look at those issues, like praising that a mixed race couple is used at all, and find yourself hearing a "Yeah, but..." take it as a learning opportunity. Maybe the person you're hearing the "Yeah, but" from has a valid point because they've lived with it. Maybe the new Starfire is too trampy. Maybe Power Girl should grow up to become Power Woman. Maybe the name Black Lightning is pretty condescending.

Maybe... just maybe... your opinion only reflects your own personal preferences, and aren't indicative of anybody else's. Maybe... just maybe... they have a point, if you'd just look beyond your own bubble.

First Links Post Of 2012

2012-01-04T17:02:00.000-05:00

Here's a short interview with Matt Campbell over at Examiner.com. It's a pretty basic interview as far as the depth of the questions, but I'm struck that it's essentially a mainstream site talking about a webcomic without any of the usual tropes of "gosh, these webcomics are wildly new and different from most printed comics."
Apparently, George R.R. Martin has put up a list of fanzines he contributed to on his site; however, Chain Letters for Disturbed Children notes that there isn't much in the way of visuals, so he's begun posting scans of said fanzines.
The Webcomic Overlook has a nice write-up on the Phantom Lady.
I expect you've already heard that Karl Kesel has brought back Section Zero as a webcomic, right? Not true. Total myth. There's nothing to see here. Move along.

One Piece Social Commentary

2012-01-03T15:23:00.001-05:00

According to Wikipedia, One Piece is "the most popular manga series of all time in Japan and one of the most popular manga series worldwide. It is the highest-selling manga of all time in the history of Weekly Shōnen Jump, as well as currently being its most acclaimed manga. In 2010... volume 61 set a new record for the highest initial print run of any book in Japan in history... One Piece is currently ranked as the best-selling series of all time in manga history. It enjoys a very high readership, with more than 250 million volumes of the series sold by 2011." And that doesn't even talk to how many people enjoy the anime. So, pretty popular, right?

The series was created by Eiichiro Oda in 1996, and first saw regular serialization the following year. The basic story, if you're unfamiliar with it, follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his small band as he seeks to find the fabled One Piece treasure and become the King of the Pirates. The protagonists are all clearly labeled as pirates very early on, and they spend more than a fair amount of time fighting or evading the Marines. Naturally, over the course of the story, we're seen how the heroes are sympathetic characters and all of their illegal activities are easily justifiable and justified.

I only started getting into the series last year, but I'm up to the point in the story where Luffy is attempting to free his brother out of prison. (Which is to say that I've plowed through over ten years' worth of material in about 6-7 months!) But in the process of battling his way through the prison -- allegedly the strongest of it's kind, housing the most dangerous criminals on the planet -- every prisoner that isn't killed/wounded in the ensuing mayhem is released. Some are specific characters that have shown up in the past, and are now helping Luffy in order to win their own freedom back, but many are nameless background characters in black and white striped prison uniforms. Hundreds of prisoners now running free. The Vice Warden of the prison notes at one point that he has to ensure that no one escapes because that would cause a danger to the rest of the world. That the general population would be sent into a state of terror, knowing that so many hardened criminals were now free.

Except...

Once their escape looks like it will finally be a success, they start making comments about making sure they never get sent to prison again. And when they realize that one of their own willingly sacrificed himself to keep the gate open for them, they all go into weeping hysterics. So, perhaps not quite as hardened criminals as they've been made out by the Marines.

This is not far off the heels, too, of a story in which one of Luffy's crew is captured and sentenced to execution because she knew how to read some ancient history texts. They make it very clear in the story that she is being executed because she might read something the government doesn't want her to read. In this particular story, though, there's a clear intent that the Marines were after her, as a single individual, because they feared what she and she alone could do. And it was also suggested that she was, in part, being targeted by a personal grudge of a single official.

But in light of the more recent story, it got me thinking. Throughout the entire series, the World Government in One Piece is consistently shown in a negative light. Not only are the lower level Marines continually being trounced by the story's heroes, but the machinations of higher government officials is frequently shown as suspect, if not outright corrupt. Now, clearly, if the protagonists are going to be pirates, they have to be shown in a more positive light compared to their antagonists and it will of course default to showing the Marines poorly. But there are any number of ways that could be handled which would simply show the heroes as simply being misunderstood. Given the pervasive and continual nature of how not just the Marines, but very nearly everyone associated with the government is depicted, it can't help but lead to one inescapable message...

Governments are run by power-hungry elitists whose only interest is in keeping themselves in power, regardless of what it means to anybody else. Criminals are simply those who threaten that by daring to think differently. (Many of those in the prison were apparently only there because they raised transgender awareness.) That's not a new message, certainly, but it's a fairly consistent one throughout One Piece's decade and a half of publication.

Think about that for a second. A decade and a half. That's about the same amount of time that Harry Potter has been around. You've heard those stories about how many of the kids who started reading the Harry Potter books back in the day have grown up with the characters and are now adults themselves? As in, adults who vote. As in, adults who can't get a job and go to Occupy Wall Street protests.

Some of my political beliefs were influenced by pop culture. Everyone from Batman to Frank Zappa. I don't think I lifted any of those ideas wholesale, but they informed my thinking as much as family, friends, my own experiences, etc. I think everybody has some ideas they picked up from comics and movies and TV.

With that in mind, recall those two-hundred fifty million volumes of One Piece? Not including the individual chapters read via Shōnen Jump. Not including the anime.

I'm left wondering how many of those people at the Occupy protests know Luffy and the Straw Hats, and how much of an influence Oda may have had on them.

Fire & Water Review

2012-01-02T15:25:00.001-05:00

One of the reasons I don't do more reviews is that I can't seem to get the books and read them in enough time to be of any real use. But sometimes a book is worth highlighting even if it's a couple years old. Such is the case with Blake Bell's Fire and Water: Bill Everett, The Sub-Mariner, and the Birth of Marvel Comics.

It should come as no surprise that it's mostly a biography of Everett with some related info on the early days of what would later become known as Marvel Comics. I've had it sitting on my bookshelf for a little while now; it's large and inconvenient enough that I can't really carry it around to read on my lunch hour at work or anything. But it's a surprisingly fast read. I have to admit that I haven't studied Everett's work in great detail, nor much about the man himself, outside of his creation of the Sub-Mariner and his return to that character towards the end of his life. Consequently, much of this book was welcome information, from mundane issues about his childhood to a deeper look at his overall career in comics to some of the problems he fought to overcome. Much of the information comes from rare source material, many personal papers and notebooks as well as interviews with various family members, so it's good to see it all sorted through and recorded before it might get lost or destroyed.

The book looks like a coffee table style book and, to that end, it includes a lot of Everett artwork. Some original production art, some published material, many sketches and prelims. All of it looks fantastic. Worth browsing through just to see some of the detail he included on his pieces. The early pieces he did for NBC Radio are incredible, especially when you consider he was still in his teens when he did them!

There are two things I would've liked to have seen added to the book, though. First, I would have appreciated having notations in the text on where certain art pieces might be found. Some pieces are more-or-less where the explanatory text is, but many pieces are placed between chapters and there's an extra long art section in the back. Just a simple "see page 42" would have helped more than a few times where I was hoping to see what the text was referring to.

Second, I would have liked to have seen his dealings with alcoholism more evenly paced throughout the book. That he had lifelong problems with substance abuse beginning when he was 12 is mentioned early on, but then mostly dropped until his late 40s/early 50s. Granted, you don't want to focus his whole biography towards that one element of his life, especially since it's a negative one, but if it WAS a constant issue, as the book asserts, then I should think it would be more of a running theme. How did he deal with it while he was enlisted, for example? Were his various job losses due, in part, to alcoholism or was he just being stubborn as part of a basic personality make-up? There's a clear acknowledgement of the issue, but it's largely not referenced AS an issue except almost in retrospect.

That said, though, it is a beautiful book and has a lot of great information about Everett that I am glad to have learned. Worth keeping an eye out for this, if you can still find it!

Happy New Year, Sir, Yes. And Many Of Them!

2012-01-01T00:39:00.000-05:00

It Was Only A Dream by Winsor McCay circa 1903-05.

The Phantom: The Gold Key Years Review

2011-12-31T18:07:00.000-05:00

I've noted before that I've never really been able to "get" The Phantom. It always struck me as a brilliant concept, but I just couldn't find the right stories that really clicked with me. So I was really happy to get a review copy of The Phantom: The Gold Key Years from Hermes Press. Not that I necessarily knew it had especially great stories in it or anything, but it would be the largest chunk of Phantom stories that I've been able to read in essentially one sitting.

The book contains, to no surprise, reprints of the first eight issues of the Phantom comic book from Gold Key. The original comics went generally uncredited but, for the record, they're largely written by Bill Harris and drawn by Bill Lignante with painted covers by George Wilson. If I'm to understand things correctly, the stories represented in this volume were based on storylines from the comic strip, but re-worked to fit the comic book format. So, while everything was entirely redrawn, the pacing seems a little odd in places. But this also means that readers aren't bogged down with tedious and unnecessary fight scenes. I definitely have a better appreciation of the Phantom now that I've been able to read a good chunk of stories in one go, including adventures of both the 20th and 21st Phantoms.

But that's all in the original comics themselves. What about this collected edition?

The book itself is gorgeous. The Wilson covers look pretty spectacular throughout the book, and the Hermes Press art folks did an impressive job on recoloring everything. The recoloring is actually striking for what I think they did. They clearly had at least some of the original art, as evidenced by the reproduction of a couple of pieces. But the colors look to be taken from the original production, like they had all the color printing plates as well. BUT! It also looks like they went back and recolored all the figures and large blocks of background color so that they're more internally consistent. The resulting effect you get really clean, sharp colors where you tend to focus, but there's still some graininess here in just enough places to suggest that these are a half century old comics. There's no mis-registrations, but some occasionally lazy plate making from back in the day. It's a very interesting approach to recoloring old comics that I don't think I've seen before, and one that works surprisingly well, I think.

There's also a three page introduction by Ed Rhoades, who's a huge Phantom fan and president of the US Phantom fan club. (I think. The club doesn't seem to be active any more, as far as I can tell.) It's obviously there to put the comics in context, and it does indeed supply some interesting background information, but it's a bit of a harsh read. It's a bit disjointed, and there's some awkward phrasing that left me unclear about several points. I can see why Rhoades was asked to write an introduction and it does have some information there, but I think it detracts a bit from the quality of the production.

Aside from that, though, it is, as I said, a handsome book and certainly helped me to get a better handle on The Phantom. Of course, now I'll have to try to get my hands on all the other Phantom books Hermes is putting out!

Proto-Watchmen

2011-12-30T16:49:00.000-05:00

Watchmen has become one the seminal comic book stories of the past several decades. It's probably been read and discussed and poured over more than just about any other single work that's come out, certainly since 1970. So it's also fairly common knowledge that Alan Moore's original idea pitch was largely based around the Charlton characters that DC had then-recently acquired, but wasn't doing anything with. DC editor Dick Giordano liked the general story, but didn't want to use the Charlton heroes. Allegedly because it killed them many of them off, preventing their future use. But since everybody knew, even back in the 1980s, that death wasn't permanent in comic books, I suspect Giordano's decision also had something to do with the fact that he helped create many of those very same characters when he was an editor at Charlton.

"Helped create" is probably a bit strong. I gather that he said something more like, "We need some superheroes like Marvel, but only with less powers to make them more mortal." And Steve Ditko came back with a de-powered Captain Atom, a new Blue Beetle and the Question. But since Giordano was heralding this new "Action Heroes" line, it's hard to imagine that he didn't hold some emotional ties to the characters.

In any event, I've been reading the copy of Action Heroes Archives volume 2 that I received for Christmas. It reprints a lot of those old Charlton stories. And you know what? It's all there.

Everything that Moore did in Watchmen? All the elements for it were there in those Charlton books. I mean, obviously, there's no rape scene with Peacemaker and Nightshade, and the Question isn't shown watching his mother whore herself out on a nightly basis, but drawing those types of elements out of what Charlton did publish is not that much of a stretch. There's a seemingly congenial relationship between Captain Atom and Nightshade, but he's still a very cold character. They're also the only government-sanctioned heroes of the bunch. Blue Beetle shows a fair amount of insecurity and isn't actually all that effective as a hero. There's even an insult hurled towards the Question about how he doesn't "smell so pure."

I say that intending absolutely no disservice to Moore; what he wrote with Watchmen is exceptionally well-done on all counts. He doesn't steal or swipe from Charlton; it's just a larger springboard than I assumed. I had always figured that Moore was largely working with character archetypes and could have just as easily been referring to Superman, Batman, etc. No, he was clearly and definitively starting from the Charlton pool.

I'd always heard of the Charlton basis for Watchmen, but never really understood just how deep that connection was, and just how much of Ditko's work consequently shows up in Moore's. I wanted to see the Action Heroes Archives just to see what Ditko did, but it's making for a surprisingly much deeper understanding of what Moore did as well.

The Book Report

2011-12-29T14:12:00.000-05:00

I'm a pretty avid reader. I wouldn't say voracious, but I'm sure I read more than most people. Most of what I read anymore, though, is digital. Whether it's comics or articles or novels, I read more off a screen than I do off a dead tree. And what I do read off paper is almost always procured through an online source: Amazon, Lulu, Indy Planet, etc. All of which is to say that I don't actually make it inside bookstores very often any more. I think the last time I set foot in one was maybe early August, when Dad was in town and looking for something. The last time I actually bought something from a brick and mortar bookstore, I think, was October 2010.

Yesterday, I stopped in a local Books-A-Million, mostly to see what's changed. I've never thought of it as a good store, but it's still open and Borders isn't, so they're doing something right, I suppose.

The shelves were the usual disorganized mess that I expect from BAM. Nothing new there. But I did note that they had a lot fewer comics than they used to. Their manga section had decreased by two bookshelf sections, and a LOT of books were front-facing -- meaning they take up more shelf space. I've seen some bookstores still make their front-facing books at least two or three volumes deep, but that was not the case in what I saw here. Everything -- or very nearly everything -- was only only one book deep. So the fewer shelves devoted to manga were also less full.

The superhero section didn't seem obviously or overtly impacted, but I seem to recall the "adult" graphic novel section over by the harlequin romances seemed almost non-existent, with only a dozen or so titles. The YA section still had one copy of each Bone volume, and I came across an Amelia Rules! on the discount pile for a dollar. The art section still had several different books on how to draw manga/comics/superheroes.

Given that I'm looking just days after Christmas, it's entirely possible that the decreased number of books overall was due entirely to post-holiday shoppers. But that whole sections seemed to be given less space than before suggests there's more going on than just that. The question is: is this just a natural downward correction from over-estimation of the manga market (as the largest declines I saw were in the manga section) or is it a significant indicator of declining interest? Or, potentially, is this simply a bad decision BAM's part, forgetting that Japan suffered a massive earthquake earlier this year and would naturally have less product coming out? Given how quickly manga exploded in the bookstore market a few years ago, I'm inclined to think it's mostly a natural correction. But that's just a gut-level guess on my part. It'll be interesting to check back in 5-6 months to see what, if anything, has changed.

Last Link Day Of 2011

2011-12-28T13:32:00.000-05:00

Here's a Flickr set of comics produced by GE in 1953, trying to get more kids interested and involved with science and math. Titles included Adventures In Jet Power, Adventures Inside the Atom and Land of Plenty, A Story of Freedom and Power.
Basil Wolverton's most famous illustration animated in clay...

Chic Stone Self-Portrait

2011-12-27T23:04:00.003-05:00

I recently discovered this Chic Stone self-portrait squirreled away on an old CD-ROM...

Stone is probably best known for inking a number of Marvel comics in the 1960s, but he was an old hat by that point, having first worked in the Eisner-Iger Studios beginning in 1939. He wound up doing work for Fawcett, Lev Gleason, Timely and DC, sometimes ghosting for Bob Kane on Batman. He also went on to work for Dell and Skywald before a long stint with Archie Comics.

The piece above was obviously in deference to his inking work on over Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four, though this particular piece features his pencils. You can see that it's dated 1994, when Stone would have been 71. He died in July 2000.

Christmas Goodies

2011-12-26T21:35:00.001-05:00

I'm not in it for the presents, of course, but it's always cool when relatives get you gifts that speak to your interests. Here's a photo of the comics-related gifts I received this year....

The Classics Illustrated and Mad weren't Christmas gifts per se, but my great aunt apparently found them buried in the attic somewhere and passed them along. They're in pretty poor condition, but appear to still be complete, so they'll make some good reading copies.

Comics Between the Panels appears to be autographed. I can't quite make out the signature, though. It looks kind of like "BW Ward" but Bill Ward had been dead for six years based on the date with the inscription, and it doesn't look much like his signature anyway. I'll need to do some more investigating on that.

The monster art in the background is the original splash page artwork from Ravage 2099 #28. It's framed with a copy of the issue and a small plaque. The matte has a little water damage, so I'll have to replace that; hopefully, it hasn't gotten to the art itself.

The series of keychains depict a dozen Tintin covers, with one more based off the new movie. There's also a few collected editions, and a number of Marvel Minimates.

It was good to see the family over the past couple of days, and I got a chance to meet up with an old friend of mine for lunch today. That was really the best part of my holiday, but the gifts are pretty cool, too.

Joyeux Noël

2011-12-25T09:59:00.000-05:00

Journal de Tintin #61, December 1949

Larry The Duck: Future Comic Book Star?

2011-12-24T20:06:00.001-05:00

A friend of my dad's does magic shows in South Carolina. Mostly kids shows, I believe. One of his ideas was to bring a duck puppet (named Larry) to each of his shows, and use the character as memorable hook. Kids remember the silly duck moreso than the magician himself. What he's also done is made a website specifically for Larry, so kids can go an have a larger experience with him. And, not coincidentally, the moms and dads who see the site can slide over the magician's site and maybe hire him for a birthday party or school program or whatever.

But he's taken it a step further by having Larry the Duck write a couple of books. So the kids can take further interest in Larry's adventures. And, oh, hey, cool, the magician gets a few extra bucks on the side.

His latest book project is a comic book. It's still in the works, so I don't know that I can say much about it, but it sounds like he has a clever idea that utilizes the comic format pretty well. I think it's really cool that someone who has no direct relation to comics is using it a very real promotional item. What's more, that despite not overtly being a big comic fan himself (at least so far as I can tell) he's still taking advantage of the format, and doing things you can't really do in a storybook or prose format.

I don't know when the comic might be available, but it's something you might want keep an eye/ear out for.

This Is For Real?

2011-12-24T19:08:00.000-05:00

Even if I were deliberately looking for something like this (which I wasn't) I should never EVER have to stumble across anything like this...

I mean, what graphic designer in this day and age thinks it's appropriate to use Comic Sans for anything? Come on, people! It doesn't matter how rooted in comic book tropes your project is, there are always, always, ALWAYS better fonts to use than Comic Sans, and many of them are just as free!

Teetotaler Hulk

2011-12-23T23:46:00.000-05:00

I don't know that I've ever mentioned this on my blog, but I don't drink. Never have. The amount of alcohol I've imbibed in my entire lifetime couldn't fill a shot glass. To the best of my knowledge, there were no teetotalers in my family to follow in the footsteps of, nor were there any drunkards that I was making sure I didn't become. It's just something that I came to of my own volition many years ago. And surprisingly (to me, at least) it's never been an issue. Even through college, when I was offered a drink, I just said, "No, thanks. I don't drink," and that was the end of it. I never felt any real pressure, from friends or strangers, to drink; everyone just seemed to respect my decision. (Though I suspect that it caught many people off-guard enough to not know how to respond.)

Every now and then, I get asked why I don't drink. Not accusingly, just out of curiosity. I've never had a good answer. There are two things that seem to stand out as originating factors. First is the notion that alcohol kills brain cells. I believe this has largely been debunked, but when I was in school and the only real asset I had working for me was my brain, and the alcohol-killing-brain-cells idea was still accepted wisdom, that was influential.

The second concern I had was one of self-control. I have a strong sense of personal responsibility and free will, and the idea that I might do something when I wasn't in complete control of my own faculties scares the hell out of me. I like to think of myself as an intelligent, rational person who puts careful consideration into his decisions. But I also feel like that there are always wild and potentially destructive imaginings burbling just below the surface, ones that could be let loose if I didn't have some significant mental safeguards in place.

Between that and this memorable comic book ad from the 1990s visualizing that basic idea, it probably sounds overly dramatic. (Memorable, by the way, because of the poorly drawn illustration, not the concept. I mean, how does the bottom half of that pant leg not fall down around Hulk's ankle?) I never quite felt like I was staving off a Hulk-like transformation, but rather something more like a Human Torch accidentally cutting loose situation.

Still overly dramatic, given that I can't shoot fireballs from my hands, but the basic concern was there. If I didn't keep things in check at all times, something really ugly could happen and I might hurt someone. Hence, no alcohol. The handful of times that I have let my emotions get the better of me, even in a restrained fashion, it didn't end well. Nothing disastrous but, as I said, I was still able to mostly restrain myself. Had I not, well... I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be working at the level I'm at today.

It's curious to think that was something I picked up from comic books. Many of the same stories that featured the Human Torch also featured the Thing, who had no problems smoking and drinking. (At least, back in the day.) And yet, despite there never really being an overt message of teetotaling, it's something I picked up on and embraced as part of my personality. Even knowing those origins, it's hard for me to see why that was something I took from the stories versus the hundreds of other subtle, social messages. The combination of that message with my belief in free will? Maybe with my parents' teaching me about responsibility? Maybe a strong desire to be something of a non-conformist? What about completely independent, external factors I can't even recall -- movie characters getting drunk-people-drunk? I know that I still have no desire to drink, and it's still largely based on a heightened sense of personal responsibility, but it still seems like a strange message to pull out of Hulk and Fantastic Four comic books.

The More Things Change...

2011-12-22T18:30:00.000-05:00

"Knowledge and Amusement" by Winsor McCay, June 1920.

'Twas The Links Before Christmas

2011-12-21T17:23:00.000-05:00

That should probably be 'Twere, but it doesn't recall Clement Clarke Moore's very directly then. Also, if you're keeping score, I do celebrate Christmas despite being an atheist; it's a secular holiday with traditions based on a variety of pagan winter festivals. You mean to tell me that you seriously think those consumerist assholes yelling at you because you took "their" parking spot in front of Target are celebrating the birth of Jesus? People don't get depressed in the winter because of the darkness, people get depressed because everyone else starts act like total dickheads and it's evident that the "goodwill towards men" stuff is a bunch of bullshit. But I digress...

Will Brooker points me to Anita Sarkeesian's YouTube channel in which she discusses various facets of feminism in popular culture. She does a good job of pointing out issues of gender inequality in a simple and straight-forward manner. Some of those issues are obvious, some not so much. Though she covers all forms of media, she includes comics fairly regularly as well.
Matt Kuhns wonders why Jim Davis evidently wants to keep Garfield firmly rooted in 1986. I noticed the curious anachronism myself, but I chalked it up to the autopilot Matt dismisses.
Over at The Japan Times, they note the publication of Aftershock and Spirit of Hope both of whose proceeds going towards relief efforts for the disasters in Tohoku and Christchurch earlier this year.
Stuart Immonen alerts us to this video interview with Stan Lee from around 1970. (His wife Joan is the one hanging around in the background.) It's in Italian so I can't understand a word of it, but it sure looks and sounds like a hoot!

The Yellow Kid: The Latest & The Greatest

2011-12-20T09:46:00.000-05:00

So you're familiar with Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid as one of the original newspaper comic strip characters, right? He debuted in a Hogan's Alley strip in 1895, published in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Outcault was hired away by William Randolph Hearst a year later, but Pulitzer retained the rights to Hogan's Alley. Outcault continued drawing the Yellow Kid, though, in comics of various names for Heart's New York Journal American.

The Yellow Kid became immensely popular very quickly, and many people tried to capitalize on that with their own marketing efforts. Mary Wood cites the character appearing on "pins, cigar boxes, sheet music, dolls, cap bombs, postcards, and a number of spin-off variety skits and theater productions." Some of these were officially licensed, some not.

One of those pieces I stumbled upon recently was a scan of sheet music. A piece called "The Yellow Kid: The Latest and the Greatest." It's adorned with Outcault drawings of the Yellow Kid, evidently done expressly for sheet music, if not this sheet music specifically. The Kid is dancing and singing around the margins, very visibly holding sheet music himself.

It strikes me as kind of an odd concept, since the Yellow Kid famously never actually spoke. Anything the character "said" was displayed on his dressing gown. So to provide music to a deliberately mute comic strip comes across as a curious pairing. But I supposed that people have always liked music, and since recordings were unavailable in the 1890s, sheet music was the way to go. Paper was relatively cheap, too, so if you already had a printing press, throwing together something like this would have been an easy way to make a buck, I suppose.

The music was written (and published) by Homer Tourjee with words by William Friday, Jr. There's a 1895 copyright on the page, but the lyrical reference to The Journal suggests it was actually 1896. Interestingly, I found another piece of sheet music dated 1896 called "The Dugan Kid Who Lives in Hogan's Alley." It's the exact same music, with slightly altered lyrics.

But what does it sound like?

So what I've done is taken the sheet music and transcribed it, note for note, into Garage Band. As I was going through, there were several things that struck me about the piece. It's written pretty simply; almost the entire song is in quarter notes and it's got what I would consider a slow pace. With that, though, there's a time change for the chorus, going from 4/4 to 3/4 and the transition between the two might be described, at best, as awkward. There were also several instances where the notation doesn't make sense -- notes that don't really make chords, rhythms that don't really fit in place, lyrics that don't line up with the music. If you take the piece as it's written, it's not all that good. I eventually found a version of this online where someone had actually arranged it so it sounds half-decent, but that's not what was written. The link below is what I put together, picking up a strictly literal interpretation of what was on the sheet music.

Play The Yellow Kid: The Latest & The Greatest

Let me reiterate: this is NOT somebody playing the music badly; this is how it was written! The chorus is meant to be played twice through each time, but it was honestly getting hard for me to keep listening to it, so I opted for just once each. The full lyrics are at the end of the post if you want to try follow along. (Like I said, though, they don't always line up with the music, so it can be a bit difficult in places.)

I would chalk the poor quality of this song up to the commercialism that allegedly drove Outcault from continuing with the character a couple years later. Recall that this was licensed, composed, written and published within a year of Yellow Kid's debut. It was most likely scribbled down hastily by Tourjee, typeset by someone else who probably had no real musical knowledge and edited quickly, if at all. Any "quirks" you might hear from someone playing would probably be attributed to the pianist and dismissed.

The song sounds very much in the style of the late 1800s, but it's almost refreshing to know that the crass commercialism we see in America today isn't entirely new.

LYRICS
Who doesn't know the "Dugan Kid"
He is the very latest
You'll find his pictures in the Journal every Sunday morn
He wears a mellow yellow dress
Of kids he is the greatest
Because he is the "slickest kid" that ever yet was born

Although but three or four years old
He's quite well known to fame
E'en though he has a homely face
Likewise a homely name
But he takes in all the picnics
Doesn't miss a baseball game
The "Dugan Kid" the latest up-to-datest

CHORUS
He's a plain little chap
From the heart of New York
Is the gay little Dugan boy
With smiles so sunny and ears so funny
He's New York's joy
When the band starts to play, is he in it?
"Well Say," Dugan's out of sight
For he's a corker a born New Yorker
And he's all right.

Some of his slang expressions
Have completely caught the city
You can hear them if you listen on the street most ev'ry day
Now though young Dugan's but a kid
His talk is often witty
And no matter where this urchin goes he's sure to have his say
When ever he gets rattled
He will holler "Hully Gee
Dere isn't any duck in town can get away wid me
For I'm a holy terror
When my fur is ruffled, see"
Says the "Dugan Kid" the latest up-to-datest

CHORUS
He's a plain little chap
From the heart of New York
Is the gay little Dugan boy
With smiles so sunny and easy so funny
He's New York's joy
When the band starts to play, is he in it?
"Well Say," Dugan's out of sight
For he's a corker a born New Yorker
And he's all right.

Fa-La-La-Lah-Mashup

2011-12-19T23:27:00.003-05:00

OK, the really cool/different post I wanted to do today is taking longer than I anticipated, so it'll have to go up tomorrow. In lieu of something else equally cool/different (which I don't have time for at this point) I'm going to throw up an inane/repetitive mashup. I did try something a little different with one of them, though -- I ran the dialogue backwards. Text from today's Garfield, art from today's...
Blue Milk Special

Bob the Squirrel

I'm kind of amused with the absurdity of the backwards strip. But despite being backwards, it still kind of makes sense. I'm not sure what that says about either Jim Davis or Frank Page, though.

When World-Building Fails

2011-12-18T18:32:00.000-05:00

One of the current trends in media is the paired notions of world-building and transmedia. You don't just tell a story; you tell a story in the scope of a broader world that can then be expanded upon in multiple outlets. Star Wars is a classic example. There's a Star Wars universe that was initially developed over the course of three movies. But George Lucas had other notions going on in his head that didn't make it to the screen. As did other people who worked on those movies. As did people who just saw them. Those ideas got expanded upon in other outlets like comic books, novels and bad made-for-TV holiday specials. Though most of the infamous 1978 Star Wars holiday special comes across as a cheap attempt to rake in some extra bucks on what may have been just a fad, it is notable for debuting Boba Fett two years prior to his "introduction" in Empire Strikes Back. Which suggests that Lucas was thinking about expanding the Star Wars concept beyond the movies pretty early on.

In any event, world-building and transmedia are considered the "now" approach to story-telling. If you're making a movie, you need to make sure the accompanying video game ties in with it as seamlessly as possible. If you're making a TV show, you need to make an accompanying comic book. An so on. Like anything else, it can be executed well or poorly. There's nothing wrong with the concept per se and, although it can be viewed cynically, whether or not it works largely depends on how good you are at actually telling all these stories in these different formats.

I recently came across a comic book series from mid-2010. It's a science fiction story, a little vague on the central concept but well-drawn with good dialogue. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's well written, though. See, it has this problem of providing too much world-building. The story starts in 1947 Roswell, and goes on at length (fully 1/3 of the first two -- and, to date, only -- issues) explaining how aliens came down and, wanting to the help the human race, did some time travel business to change the course of human history. Which is nice and all, but the main story occurs in this new, alternate timeline where there's spaceships and lasers and all sorts of fun, science fiction-y stuff. That has nothing to do with the backstory. They could easily have dropped the backstory parts and there would have been absolutely zero loss in comprehending the main story.

Go watch Star Wars: A New Hope. If you didn't see it when it first came out, try to forget everything you know about that universe. The movie starts with Darth Vader pursuing Princess Leia, and you pick up in the first few minutes the basic stolen-plans-for-the-Death-Star plot. Does it go into a long, in-depth discussion about how the Emperor tracked down and killed all the Jedi? How that was preceded by the Clone Wars and what that was all about? No. We get a couple of off-hand lines of dialogue about a quarter of the way into the movie. Twenty seconds out of a two hour movie.

And that's part of what people liked about the original movie back in the day. "Clone Wars? What the hell are those?" It wasn't germane to the story but it let the audience know there was a world out there beyond what we were seeing on the screen. Lucas' world-building was somewhat unintentional (he had simply written a story far too long to capture in a two-hour movie) but that still informed his story-telling in A New Hope. The audience picked up on and responded to that.

But if you spend your time trying to tell all your backstory along side your lead, you're going to lose your audience from a lack of focus. "Why am I learning about this guy, who's dead and buried by the time the protagonist is born?" The story is about Han and Luke, not Qui-Gon and Padme. It's about Frodo and Samwise, not Beren and Lúthien. It's about Superman and Batman, not Jor-El and Thomas Wayne.

As a creator, it does help to put some serious thought and consideration into how your worlds work. But it doesn't necessarily all need to be spelled out for your audience. Certainly not at the same time you're trying to tell your central story.

The Red Queen's Race

2011-12-17T23:35:00.000-05:00

We're at the tail end of 2011 and I am utterly astounded at how fast that went. I was just scanning through my timeline on Facebook, and I kept seeing notes about things that happened AGES ago! They seemed like ages, at any rate.

It used to be, even as late as a couple years ago, I would get to Friday and think, "Hey, cool. I can start the weekend now." It was certainly good break from the daily grind, but it didn't seem like that huge of a deal. These days, I feel like I'm running full speed all week and when I get home at the end of Thursday is when I collapse. But then I still have to drag myself through Friday, and I don't have all that much time to relax on the weekends.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

That's from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. I suspect a number of people feel kind of like that these days.

But one thing we do here at Castle Kleefeld is keep our eyes forward! "Face front" as Stan Lee used to say! So I'm looking ahead to 2012 as much as possible. I've got some things I'm trying to get in motion to keep me pretty busy throughout the year. Several months back, I talked about how we should try to follow a webcomic-type model of generating long-tail incomes. I'll be trying to more of that as time moves on.

Not to mention just working more, in general. Jack Kirby was often credited with being a fast artist, but a lot of it was that he would regularly sit down at the drawing board for insanely long stretches at a time. He was quick, sure, but he would also put in 10, 12 and 14 hour days with a pencil in his hand. I'll be using a keyboard and mouse instead of a pencil, but there's a similar gist there.

So, as you start planning for 2012, might I suggest a new pair of really good, high quality running shoes? Because if you want to make it anywhere, you're going to have to run twice as fast as you have been!

Thanks, Carl & Mike!

2011-12-16T17:36:00.000-05:00

I just received a couple of neat additions to my collection that I wanted to share. Two autographed pictures of Carl Ciarfalio as the Thing from the never-released Fantastic Four movie from 1994, and a DVD he's made called "The Making of the Thing" which features recently uncovered behind-the-scenes footage from the movie.
If you're a regular reader, you'll know I was big-time Fantastic Four fan for decades. Though the FF movie was never released, I got a decent copy on VHS years ago. Despite some obvious production flaws and several plot holes in the script, I always liked the movie and thought it did a better job capturing the spirit of the FF than either the 2005 or 2007 movies. So getting Ciarfalio's autograph signed to me is kind of special.

I wanted to take a moment to publicly thank Michael D. Hamersky for setting up a contest in which I could win these (check out his blog for thoughts and discussion about the comic industry) and Ciarfalio himself for helping out with the contest and sending over these personalized gifts (check out his site for upcoming appearances at both conventions and on TV). Thanks, guys!

Simon & Barreto

2011-12-15T23:22:00.000-05:00

The big news today, of course, has been the deaths of Joe Simon and Eduardo Barreto. I didn't really want to post anything about them since others are certainly going to do a much better job, but with both of them passing today, I didn't feel justified in ignoring both of them in favor of something suggesting that everything's hunky dory without them.

The loss of Simon is certainly unfortunate, but he was 98 years old and had already made a great many contributions to the field of comics. Everyone tends to focus on his creating Captain America -- which was/is certainly a huge deal -- but I think his bigger contribution was simply working and steering Jack Kirby in the early days of their respective careers. Kirby has noted before, I believe, that Simon was a fairly astute businessman, certainly moreso than Kirby himself, and that much of the success of "Simon & Kirby" came from Simon's selling the team to various publishers. Remember that Simon and Kirby didn't publish anything themselves; they essentially freelanced for Timely, National, Fawcett and others. Simon would often go to publishers with stories they had done and sell the publisher a "comic book package." If the publisher handled the printing and distribution, Simon & Kirby would handle the ideation and production and everything else, and everybody split the profits. That cemented Simon's and Kirby's names in people's minds, so when they parted ways in 1955, everyone wanted to get Kirby on their books. Had Simon not been such a good business partner, Kirby might not have wound up with the opportunity to create the Marvel Universe and the Fourth World and everything else he did from the late 1950s onward. I haven't read his more recent book, but his The Comic Book Makers from 2003 was very insightful in highlighting all the different parts of comics he touched beyond just Captain America.

Barreto is, in my mind, the more tragic of the two deaths. He was only 57 and still making noticeable contributions to comics. Personally, I first saw (and was impressed by) his work in Lex Luthor, the Unauthorized Biography. In particular, his scene-to-scene transitions struck me as well thought-out and executed. It's an element that not many artist seem to consider. Certainly not at the level Barreto did there. The most recent work of his that I've read is The Long Haul from 2005. I didn't realize until today that he's been largely working on comic strips since then, and I find it disappointing that so few people were seeing his work. I'm certainly glad he had regular work, but how many people actually read Judge Parker? Baretto certainly had plenty of talent, and he showed a lot of ability to work in different styles and genres with seeming ease. It's a shame that he couldn't have spent more time doing quality work, and that much of what he was doing was being vastly under-appreciated. Perhaps he didn't do as much for comics as Simon did even though he was older than when Simon had accomplished most of what he's known for. But that doesn't change that he was still contributing and looked to have many more years that he could continue doing so.

Though I haven't seen any new work from either for a few years now, both Simon and Barreto will be missed.

It's Monkey Day Links!

2011-12-14T09:32:00.001-05:00

December 14 is Monkey Day! Please celebrate responsibly.
Here's a cool-looking Gundam that's seven feet tall. Now, be amazed when I tell you that Taras Lesko designed and constructed it himself out of 720 sheets of paper! PAPER!!!
Columbia Journalism Review just republished this piece from 1965 which looked had how "consistently propagandistic" comics of the Cold War and how they may have actually influenced popular opinion. I love pieces like this, as they provide a closer-to-first-hand view of what are now historical comics.
Did I mention that Gundam is made out of paper?!?
Salon has some coverage of Hero, Villain, Yeti, the Rubin Museum's exhibit on Tibet's portrayal in comics over the years. It's supposedly a pretty extensive collection on display, though I saw no mention of the Inhuman's "Hidden Land."
Chip Kidd presented earlier this year at the AIGA Design Conference. Here's video of his talk on getting tapped to write an original Batman graphic novel.
I know this has circulated a bit already, but Doc V's look at Timely's Best Western is really impressive and worth a read.
Lastly, I'm not quite sure how I would categorize this or whether it's really worth mentioning on a comics blog, but Joe Bonomo recently interviewed Jim Linderman. Linderman collects... stuff. He's not a hoarder and regularly dumps his collection of whatever-it-was-that-he-was-collecting. He has some interesting thoughts on why he collects what he does, and what he gets out of collecting. It's not really comics related per se (though he does mention Robert Crumb once) but it's a curious aside to fandoms more generally.

Castle Kleefeld

2011-12-13T23:13:00.001-05:00

When I was growing up, I live with my parents, not surprisingly. For most of my childhood, I had my own room where I could close the door and totally lose myself in a comic book world. Resting on the floor of my closet, under my good shirts and pants that were hanging up, was my meager comic book collection. I would pull it out to read and re-read on my bed. The rest of the house was sort of like public property for the family so, while I could go into the living room or the kitchen or the basement to read, my room was were I could close the door.

Throughout college, I moved through a series of dwellings, thanks in no small part to the internship program which had all the students in my program on an alternating school/work schedule. We'd take classes for three months, and then work for three months, and then take classes for three months, and then work for three months. (And so on.) Because I ended up moving relatively frequently, I tried to keep things pretty light (at one point, I literally had everything I was going to live with for the next three months, including furniture, packed into a Ford Escort) so I left most of my comics at my folks' house.

Once I graduated and got a permanent job, I moved into an apartment that was intended to be more permanent. I made a point of removing ALL of my stuff out of my parents' place as quickly as I could, I think, largely to prove some semblance of independence to myself. My first apartment was decidedly my place (my girlfriend at the time was still finishing school and lived a few hours away) and I was able to designate a section towards my comic books. More significantly, the entire apartment was mine, so I could sit at the kitchen table, or in front of the TV, or on my bed and read my comics without fear of being distracted or interrupted.

Not quite 20 years later, I have a house of my own. I have an entire "room" for my comic book collection. My home office is a little larger than the bedroom I had as a kid, and there's currently a stack of 30-40 comics sitting here that I need to catalog before I file them away. I've got a couple graphic novels sitting on the nightstand next to my bed in the other room, one recently finished, one partially so. In the living room downstairs, I've got a stack of Tom Strong I'm working my way through sitting on the coffee table. On another end table is Habibi, still daring me to start it. The kitchen table has a small stack of books that I'm using as research.

I've been thinking about homes lately for some reason. I catch myself, on occasion, lying in bed listening to the rain pounding on the roof, or the wind howling past the windows; I think about what a fantastic thing a home is. There's the basic notion of shelter, obviously, but my home means I can keep stuff that's mine. I can set down a comic book, and it will still be there tomorrow in exactly the same state that I left it. No one is going to find it and run off with it, and there won't be any natural elements trying to inflict their entropy on it. My home not only protects me, but also my stuff. Which means, in turn, I can accumulate wealth. I can obtain items of value and ensure that they remain in my possession; my copy of Fantastic Four #1 is going to remain my copy until I decide that I want to be rid of it.

George Carlin used to do a great routine about stuff, largely playing American consumerism for laughs. I heartily agree that we shouldn't collectively buy as much stuff as we do, and far too much of what we do buy gets discarded carelessly. But I'm not about to suggest we get all back-to-nature/live-in-a-commune-and-only-eat-what-you-grow. But for the stuff we do get, whether its a necessity like food or a luxury like comics, I think being able to keep it intact and usable just by way of leaving it in your home is remarkable.

I could try to put in some message about helping the homeless this holiday season and, while that's a laudable cause, that's honestly not where my head was. I don't really have any particular suggestions for that, if it's something you'd like to pursue. I guess I'm just thinking about how lucky I am to have my own home, where I can shelter myself from the elements and store food and bathe and not have to worry about personally holding every item in possession, lest someone take it from me. I'm thinking out loud here about just how much I appreciate the walls that encircle my stuff and protect it while I'm at work or out of town. I'm thinking how much I really understand and appreciate the old "a man's home is his castle" adage right now.

Maybe my comics room isn't the super-comfortable, but still stylish library/sanctuary I'd like it to be. Maybe I don't have an ideal space for reading or researching comics. Maybe my workspace isn't particularly well-suited having a lot of research material at the ready while I'm writing. But, you know, it's still my home, and that's pretty darned awesome all by itself.

Experience Experiment

2011-12-12T21:14:00.000-05:00

Abigail Halpin has been doing a webcomic experiment called A Thousand Cups of Coffee throughout 2011; she's trying to post one new webcomic a week for the entire year. Which might not sound like a big deal when weighed against the folks who do it daily, but she's an illustrator by trade and I don't know what else she's got going on in her life. It was her challenge to herself, so I'll take her word that it is indeed something of a challenge for her.

In any event, here's what she posted today...

As you might guess, hers is a diary comic. Just little slices out of her life that she's captured in comic form. They're generally pleasant, fairly quiet pieces. Well done, but not really innovative. (That's not meant as a complaint, just an observation!)

But look again at today's strip. The yarn she's knitting winds its way out of the panel and down to the ball in the next. But then Halpin also morphs the yarn into the song lyrics she's listening to. It's not necessary to the structure of the comic, but provides a nice extra beat to it.

It's a nice, clever piece of sequential art that I don't think she would've thought of 11 months ago. I think it's the type of solution that comes from practicing the same thing over a long period of time. I think it's the main reason why, when asked how start a webcomic, many creators will just tell you to just do it.

There's a lot to be said for education and training and mentors and all of the formalized processes that can help people learn, but there's also a lot to be said for learning by doing. Experience is, after all, one of the best teachers.

Avast Review

2011-12-11T22:38:00.001-05:00

I picked up Avast! while purchasing some other comic-related goodies to give relatives for Christmas. There wasn't much of a description on the site, but it wasn't expensive, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

The story follows Cate O'Malley, a pirate under Captain Freeman. They ransack a ship and obtain the legendary Sea Hag's Pearl, which allegedly brings immortality to anyone who holds it. O'Malley takes over as captain once Freeman is killed (having dropped the Pearl) and soon finds herself under attack from the Armada. She also drops the Pearl as her ship is bombarded, but sees it roll overboard. She dives into the deep after it, and she's last seen under the water swimming ever deeper to catch the sink Pearl.

The book was a group effort from Amelia Onorato, Donna Almendrala, Bill Bedard, Andy Warner, Nate Wootters and Sean Knickerbocker. They're all credited as writers and colorists, and they all contributed to either the penciling or inking. For as collaborative an effort as it was, it holds together quite well. The art changes between sections isn't invisible, but it's not terribly noticeable either; some of the characters just look slightly off-model from the previous section.

The story holds together fairly well. I didn't find the characters terribly engaging, but they weren't exactly wooden either. I was struck, though, by a lot of the details about pirate life that were included. The type of stuff most folks aren't aware of -- like that a cannonball isn't so dangerous in and of itself, but it's the wood splinters that spray everywhere after it hits the ship that are more likely to kill you. There's also some nice continuity touches, like O'Malley eventually wearing a coat much like Freeman's or that she loses her eye shortly before going overboard.

The book is treated presented like a Golden Age comic from EC. It's got a message from the "Admiral Inky Solomon", fake ads, Ben-Day coloring effects, and even a February 1941 cover date. It feels a little off, though, but not having the quality level of illustration that was found at EC. You won't be mistaking any of this for Johnny Craig. It's not bad here, but it's a different style altogether. I think that probably hampers the book's impact more than anything; it just doesn't have the visual style of a Reed Crandall or a Wally Wood.

All in all, it's not a bad book. I suspect that it was a very educational experience for the creators (who, I think, worked on it as part of a Center for Cartoon Studies class) and it's interesting to see how that turned out. Especially as a collaborative effort. The book is available for $5.00 from Storenvy.

Stan Lee Universe Review

2011-12-10T22:28:00.001-05:00

I first started paying attention to what Stan Lee was saying outside the comic books in the early-to-mid 1980s. I was starting to read up on and study the history of comics, particularly the Fantastic Four and Marvel. Lee had long been THE go-to comic book celebrity, so it wasn't all that difficult to find interviews and articles about him. With my initial focus on and interest in the FF, though, I paid a little more attention to Lee even as I began broadening my scope. Jack Kirby, too, of course, but Lee tended to be more out-spoken.

One thing I've found fascinating is watching Lee over the past quarter century. He's frequently asked the same questions over and over again, and he has a pile of stock come-backs and anecdotes. But what's struck me as how they've morphed over the years. I recall when he first started trotting the notion that he'd told these anecdotes too many times; he said something to the effect of, "I've been telling these stories for so many years now, but I don't know if they're really true. I figure there must be some aspect of them that is, though, otherwise they wouldn't be good stories for me to tell." That's gotten truncated over the years and these days he spits out something more like, "I've told these stories so many times, they're true." You can see how he got from one to the other, but if you only heard the recent version, you'd wind up with a substantially different interpretation.

So here come Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas with The Stan Lee Universe. Although it's very much about Lee, it's not a biography like Tom Spurgeon's book. It's a collection of articles, interviews, remembrances and ephemera that are collectively used to build a portrait of Lee. Much of it comes from Lee's personal archives, so it's in his own words, but unlike his autobiography, there isn't several decades of poor memory and self-aggrandizing hyperbole getting in the way. This is Lee telling his story as it happened.

I have to admit that I had some concern when I first came to the book. I'm pretty familiar with Lee's life and career, having read quite a bit about him over the years, and I thought that another book on the man might just wind up being a somewhat repetitive fanfare for him. I think he's contributed quite a lot to the comic industry, to be sure, but I also tend to think the credit he's given, while not wholly unjustified, does something of a disservice to many of the other great comic creators who did so much for the industry. While there is some unabashed gushing about Lee in the book -- primarily in the new interviews with Lee's old colleagues -- there's much more focus on presenting things in fairly straight-forward manner.

The book is organized in a more-or-less chronological fashion, starting with a 1957 interview and running through to Who Wants to be a Superhero? and The Traveler. Many of the archive pieces are rare, some of which I had never been aware of, much less seen. All of which paints a picture of not only who Stan Lee is, but how he got to be who he is over the past 50 years. You can follow some of the subtle changes in his demeanor and attitude from one interview to the next, where he attributes credit and when. If you're one of those folks trying to piece together just what the hell was going on at Marvel in the early 1960s, this goes a long way to detailing that.

Honestly, this is a book I wish I had twenty-five years ago. There's a lot about Lee in here, naturally, and by extension there's a lot about the early days of Marvel Comics. I'm sure that most comic fans will find something decidedly new and interesting in it; I've been reading about Lee for decades and got some new insights out of it. It's really well put-together and organized, with lots of rarities that I would've assumed were long since lost to time. Definitely worth picking up if you have any interest in Marvel or comics history in general!

Warrior/Peacemaker

2011-12-09T23:40:00.001-05:00

The S.O. passed along this link to an article about a work-in-progress graphic novel by Julian Voloj about Benjamin Melendez, who was instrumental in the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting which brought about a much-needed truce among the rival gangs of the South Bronx in the 1970s.

There's an excerpt of the work at the link. It looks as if Voloj, while a talented artist, isn't well-versed in comics. There look to be some minor issues with story flow, balloon placement and the like. But that said, I think it's a great sounded project and one worth keeping an eye on because it tells a story that no one else is telling. And I don't mean that in the cliched, "do you even know what unique means" kind of way. Voloj's story is picking up an obscure piece of history that I can guarantee will never be in any history book and, at most, maybe get only a passing mention in books about gang culture or hip-hop. He does note there's a condensed version of Melendez's importance in another article, but I don't think that has nearly the impact compared to what I'm seeing in the graphic version. I think that change of media will make the story significantly more accessible, more potent and, ultimately, more useful. In any event, it will certainly be something I think worth keeping an eye out for in the future.

An exhibit at the Bronx River Arts Center will begin this weekend, showcasing some of Voloj's work so far. And on Sunday, from 3:00 until 6:00, Melendez himself will be there as part of a panel discussion on "Activists and Artists Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting." If you're in the area, it sounds like it's worth checking out.

Character Affinity

2011-12-08T21:39:00.001-05:00

What makes readers connect with a comic? Well, it's obviously different for every individual and there are a number of factors involved, but one of the biggies is character affinity. How much the reader personally identifies with the main character(s).

When I was a kid, Batman was my favorite character. He was confident and powerful (in a human capacity -- none of this lifting-cars-over-your-head garbage), he was smart and he didn't have any pesky girls bothering him. (This was obviously at a time when I still thought girls were "icky.") I wasn't any of those things myself, but they were all traits I aspired to at some level. I wasn't reading much, if anything, in terms of characterization so even the flat presentation of him in those Filmation cartoons was acceptable. While I like other superheroes, Batman (and, to a lesser extent, Green Arrow) stood out because he was a regular guy. No power ring, no super speed, no talking to fish... just a dude and whatever he had tucked in his belt. I related to that self-reliance and ingenuity and not-feeling-inferior-next-to-the-most-powerful-heroes-on-the-planet thing. That's what I wanted to be.

When I started getting old enough to look for more three-dimensional characters, I found the Fantastic Four. They were a little more rounded than Batman -- at least the Batman I was exposed to at the time. Plus, they weren't fighting crime (which I had no real interest in) so much as exploring the universe. Or, sometimes, other universes! I saw bits of myself particularly in Mr. Fantastic and the Human Torch -- I aspired to be like Reed, but I was probably closer to Johnny in terms of temperament and intelligence. Also, the camaraderie the team displayed was something I wanted for myself. I kept seeing people making allusions in the comic press to the Fantastic Four as a family, but I was thought that seemed a bit of a stretch. (Ben and Johnny as children to Reed and Sue as parents? Really?) No, they were four people who CHOSE to be with one another because they liked each other. Four people who were CLOSER than family because they WANTED to be with one another; there was no "well, you're related so you have to make nice to him during Christmas dinner, even if you think he's an ass" or anything along those lines. To have a group of friends as close as the Fantastic Four clearly were, that was something special.

But the aspirational angle is only a part of it. Direct identification is a pretty heavy influencer as well. Think about why Spider-Man was became so popular so quickly... Peter Parker was a dorky teenager who was riddled with self-doubt, and wasn't sure where he'd get enough money to buy Aunt May's medicine. A lot of people saw themselves in very much that role. Awkward and broke. They (inwardly) lacked confidence like Peter and struck out with girls like Peter and weren't sure if they had enough money to buy a slice of pizza like Peter. "Yeah! That's exactly what I'm going through! I'm not the only one! Somebody else gets it!" Plus, with Spider-Man, they still get the aspirational side of being a powerful hero that no one really knows about.

But there's also the more realistic affinity as well. The slice of life comics wherein a creator throws him/herself on the page and the reader not only says, "Yeah! That's exactly what I'm going through!" but also "And this isn't fiction! This creator REALLY is experiencing the same things I am!"

When I got divorced, it was (not surprisingly) very difficult emotionally for me. It was made more difficult because, despite the 50% divorce rate, I personally knew almost no one who had gotten a divorce. At least no one who ever admitted it to me. So when I discovered that cartoonist Frank Page was going through the same situation at the same time I was, AND putting it all in his comic strip Bob the Squirrel... well, it's hard to imagine me not feeling a sense of kinship with the man. Or at least his cartoon avatar. The strip is funny, and I'd still be reading today based on that alone, but feeling like I fought the same battles alongside Frank, each strip resounds with me a little more deeply.

Where I'm going with this is: if you really want to reach your audience in any sort of meaningful way, your characters need some degree of authenticity. You're not going to replicate each and every experience they've had, and you're not going to hit each and every member of your audience. But the more you give your readers an opportunity to feel an affinity to your characters -- because I'm not just talking about your lead protagonist here, but ALL of your characters -- the more likely they'll respond emotionally. And the more likely they are to respond emotionally, the more likely they'll stick around and, in a best case scenario, even advocate your strip. Like I just did for Bob.

Wednesday-ish Links

2011-12-07T17:25:00.000-05:00

Though he posted this a few months ago, I just came across this check (at right) that Tom Orzechowski was issued from Marvel back in 1990. Note the amount the check is made out for. He relays the story behind this odd check over on Facebook.
Neil Cohn points to several studies that track eye movements as people read comics. The various findings seem fairly obvious upon reflection, but it's great to see science backing this up.
Bobby Timony presents his pitch for a proposed Wonder Twins project. I believe he has the permissions set to "Public" but it might still require you to log in to Google.
I'm not sure if this circulated around before when it was first uploaded, but here's Wally Wood's "22 Frames That Always Work" as a live action video...

Last Minute Tuesday Mash-Up!

2011-12-06T23:52:00.001-05:00

Mainly just so I can have a post for today, here's the text from today's Garfield with art from today's...

Superhero Girl

PhD