In Review Of: Wednesday Comics and Who's Your Whiny Bitch?

Picked up the first two Wednesday comics and absolutely loved the format. The size and spectacle is just great and it makes the whole thing fun to look at. I love the experiment and while I'm not sure that each and every strip will be a gem, god bless 'em for trying something, ANYTHING new.

I've always found that people who have nothing to do with comics, no background in them at all, are much more impressed by the original art when they see it. I really believe that the size and spectacle of it make the achievement of producing a good piece of art much more noticeable to the average viewer. They "get" the amount of work that goes into it. That same reduction in size that the artist likes to have "tighten" up the final print version also makes it less... well, just less.

As for the stories, they will likely suffer from the compression and the need to really cliffhanger out of every tabloid page, but what the hell. Sook is doing his best Hal Foster, and Pope is just doing drugs and it looks great. My only quibble is that while I love Sean "Cheeks" Galloway and his art, the layout isn't doing him any favors.

Now for the whiny post of the week -

“Wednesday Comics is sort of becoming a bummer though. It’s just a gloomy thing to look at. Not the art — the colors are just very dark for me. The comics, some are good, some have the Teen Titans in them (!), but it’s just — I don’t know. It’s the dark thing. I guess they had no way of doing test-prints or…? It’s such a neat project, and I do like some of the strips, Azzarello and Risso working together or Joe Kubert or whoever, but: I hope they can fix that and adjust in time to save things... I do wish more people had taken a look at the classic Sunday strips, or strips at all, but that’s a pretty nerdy and cliche complaint that I feel kind of lame for even typing. “ - Abhay Kholsa

you're kidding right? Have you not looked at some of the awful, overdone, too bright coloring that we've been subjected to over the last 20 years? Do I need to harm you with the word "flexographics"? So the reproduction isn't perfect, it doesn't need to be. I have been so bombarded with such a ridiculous amount of over done coloring, where each and every abdominal muscle is given its own reflective shine that to have a flatter and frankly less blinding coloring job is just fine with me. Read the damn thing and quit griping. Especially about the Superman/Batman stuff. yeesh.

Ben Grimm: Blackbeard

Pope never ceases to amaze me, and this illustration that I culled from his blog is great. Understated as hell, and a great nod to the early Lee/Kirby days when the Marvel Universe wasn't so ordered or so crowded that the amazing couldn't happen every issue.

And in the FF, it usually did.

Paul Pope and the imagination of Jack Kirby

Paul Pope, over at PulpHope, has a great little story about a conversation that he had about Jack Kirby. Takes two minutes to read, and I love it.

"Sometimes I feel like all science is doing now is reverse-engeneering Jack Kirby," I say.

.. is just one great line. I'll let you savor the rest yourself and then you can come back here.

Great. All done?

What I'll bring up is a subpoint in the discussion, the vitality of comics. Elsewhere in the world, with comics hidden into the small stores sucking on the teat of the direct market, run by dedicated comic lovers who can barely afford the rent on their stores, comics aren't anywhere you can see them, and, as objects, lose their relevance to today.

New York is different, perhaps because its been the home of comic book publishers and many of the artists, perhaps because of the sheer density of people and, therefore, density of retailers to serve the population, perhaps because people there still read because they have time, time on the subway platform, on the train, on the bus, as opposed to sitting in a car driving and not being able to take their eyes off of the road, the nature of transportation demands a way to escape from yet another long hot wait on for the N and R at Union Square.

Whatever reason, or combination of reasons, comics there do maintain a certain relevance to populace, and, as an artist, there is such a joy in that that it is truly hard to express. After all, there was a time, 10 years ago, when you could have likened the comic artist to the horse and buggy salesman: they had their heyday, and would likely have been sure that their market position would be secure; after all, people had been using the trusted horse as transportation for hundreds of years now. Surely this new horseless carriage would never really replace the equine animal.

Now, with success of manga and the cartoon channel and 300 and Spiderman and Hellboy and X-Men and, god help us, the FF2 movie, we can continue to see the ideas generated by comics, and that energy, brought out to the masses...

...and we're relevant again. groping blindly most of the time, but relevant.

i'll take that.