In Which I Describe the Comics Business

I had to try to describe the comics business to someone today, to someone who was a fan, but was not an artist, who had no inclinations to be an artist, and would likely never have to work with an editor. And it was difficult. Not because he wasn’t an intelligent individual, but because almost didn’t want to disabuse him of the notion of how comics were created.

I almost wanted to enable him to live in the fantasy.

After all that’s why we read comics, right? To be able to live in the fantasy world for a while, to imagine that we’re Iron Man or Captain Marvel or Thor or whoever, and try to make the same good choices that they’ve made.

In the end, however, I asked him what he did for a living. He was a chemist he said. I asked him if, once he got in the job, it was filled with the same stupid office politics that all jobs had. He shook his head yes. And I replied, yeah, comics are like that too.

And it makes me sad, to see how many people of my generation have been hurt by comics, by a business that spits people out like a meat grinder on “high”. I’m thinking of multiple suicides over the last decade, so many lost along the highway, and all for a four color printed fantasy that seems to take over our minds somehow when we’re young and won’t release us as we get older.            

I used to feel sad when I realized that the vast majority of the people around me didn’t know what they wanted to do when they “grew up”. How could they not have the interest, the passion in something? How could the not be consumed by the overwhelming love of something, that something that they could carry forward into the world, into their life in a way? Do what you love the money will come is the bumper stick philosophy, but sometimes trite becomes true.

Now I wonder if I had it backwards. If that passion is an addiction or an obsession that rules us, making us make choices against our best judgment. After all, no one would trust a drug addict to make that best choices in their own lives, perhaps its time to admit that we dreamers (as Will Eisner called us) live for too long with our head in the clouds, and that we’re not always the best advocates for being released on our own recognizance.

I’ve been reading  “Woodwork”, the hardcover Wally Wood exhibition book that does such a brilliant job of showcasing the work of one of the most brilliant shooting stars in American illustration of the last century, and making the case that we simply don’t, in any way, value the work, dedication, vision that it takes to produce work of that quality. And so, it asks us, in its own between the lines kind of way, why would any of us want to dedicate ourselves to that sort of life? To learning that kind of skill and spending the hours that it would take to perfect that level of craft? Because it seems, when all is said and done (and there has been a lot of ink spilled over the rise and fall of comics prodigal son, a man of such skill in every area that he, like Jack Cole, could excel in literally every arena in which he was asked to work) that there is little or no reward until you’re over the rainbow. Woody would never see it in his lifetime. And yet, the work endures. People who see it full size continue to be blown away by what Wally did with a brush and some duo-tone board.

Is the work enough?

For the vast majority of us, yes, the work has to be enough. 

A Must Read: How Working In Comics Is Like Dating by Valerie Gallaher

This post by Valerie Gallaher is one of the funniest and most dead-on things that I've read in a long time. I'm so sorry to be so late to the game to have missed linking to it when she first posted it. Valerie is smart, courageous and damn funny. And yes, I recognize myself in some of this. It was why i created my "What do comics owe you? Anything? Nothing?" post, just to have a little public therapy.

"How working on comics is like dating" should be required reading for just about everyone who buys a badge for Comicon. You know, just to warn them.

New Work: The Human Hourglass Page 8

If you head on over to www.yocomics.net, you'll find that I've got a new page up. Now, mind you, its been a bit since I've updated, but i've been trying to get a head on my own internal deadline and at the same time provide you with the best work that i can produce.

Its all a learning experience. This whole writing, pencilling, drawing and toning thing. yeah, one big hairy learning experience. Slowly but surely, I'm digging it.

If you've not clicked over to the yocomics site, take a look and let me know what you think of the story so far. I promise to keep a regular flow of pages for a while. As well, soon I should have some new commission pieces with Red Sonja inks as well as some Bruce Timm inks. I'll post those soon!

Sex In The Comics

Why is sex in comics so hard to get right? Or to do at all? The folks over at The Hooded Utilitarian are having a bit of a go in the post Just because men are dead doesn't mean cheesecake needs to be, taking Y the Last Man to task over the lack of sex in the book among other things. Actually, they spend more time taking Brian Vaughn to task over not really providing more story, as opposed to simply rolling out the episodes along with each "what if" implicit in the context.

But lets get back to sex. In a world full of nothing but women, it does seem oddly purient that more sexuality isn't implicit or explicit in the series. Just as in a reverse secenario, where male readers wouldn't want to imagine that they would go gay in a world without women, perhaps Vaughn and the editors were unlikely to go the route of suggesting that more women would turn towards lesbianism than they might think, but its as valid a concept as any. Vaughn hints at it, with the suggestion of female prostitutes posing as men with fake beards, and one can only imagine the stock of vibrator making companies in that world.

What is mostly odd is the lack of female libido in the series. And this isn't 60 years ago when Kinsey was busy trying to quantify female sexuality. Just about every woman that i've ever known will admit to being horny at some point, and it seem almost neutering to have the women of Y cut off from their own sexuality as much as Lucy Ricardo and Laura Petrie were. Pia's art is, as Berlatsky puts it,

Guerra couldn't draw sexy to save her life.

And its true. Somewhere in Yorick's world there must have been some sexy women. Not overly glossy, pushed up fake boobs, and so skinny that there is no room for their internal organs, but sexy as in Luba or Maggie sexy. It is such a tragedy the Guerra pushes the camera back away from the action, whether physical or emotional, and uses that 15 feet of space to keep us from what heat that the few characters with their libidos intact generate.

Sex in comics has been notoriously hard to do correctly, and part of whether you like the sex or not has to depend on how you view the characters. If you see them as three dimensional, then adding the sexual component makes sense. Gilbert Hernandez has done a better job of that than anyone in modern comics. For two dimensional archetypes, it tends to be overly problematic to add a sexual dimension, since we're simply not used to thinking of them that way. Superman, Archie and Veronica, i'm looking at you. The residents of Palomar boink all the time, just off of my memory of reading 20 years worth of Love and Rockets. I just think that you get the idea from Pia's characters that they are like women in 1950's movies with boobs that don't actually move. Ever. Not a single jiggle. They are just perfectly conical and firm. Poor things.

Perhaps, in all fairness, Vaughn went the opposite direction with the series. "hmm, last man on earth, one would think that it would be easy to get him laid. OK then, pretty much no sex just to be contrary." In many ways this pitch turns from your average male teenager's perfect fantasy into their worst nightmare. Perhaps it was the editorial direction at DC, which would be odd since even King Mob in the Invisibles got to have fairly graphic sex in that series.

More on this later, although the Legion of Super Girlfriends may want to make all of the DC males in the 1960's celibate or gay.

Staking Our Claim: Comics and their Legacy

If we harken back to the 1980's, we can start to see the moment what comics would begin to tread the path to cool, the moment when Dark Knight and Watchmen gained a foot hold in the national consciousness as in, "not afraid to hand to adults". The only problem, well documented of course, is that once you'd handed those to someone, there was no follow up. "What is next?" we collectively asked, and only the void answered back.

And we all know what you don't do to the void.

Frank Miller was memorably quoted in the Comics Journal at the time, as saying, "people talk as if we have this great history behind us, when what we have are 50 years of shit." And, collectively, many of us agreed with him and hoped to see a whole bunch of new work, better work, adult work.

I think that its time to reassess that quote and see if its true. And how we answer it may depend on your definition of success.

Very clearly, no one in their right mind in the mid-80s would ahve ever predicted the phenominal success of the X-Men and Spider-Man movies. Conditioned to the lackluster or just plain horrible 1970's films or TV movies, Dr. Strange and Daredevil included, and the Bill Bixby Hulk series, there simply is no way to have foreseen that you could bring Wolverine to life on the big screen and not make him a laughing stock, much less Colossus or Doctor Octopus or The Sandman. We had no way of knowing that effects would simply become this good. Nor that the comic geeks would take over Hollywood 20 years later.

So, on one hand, we have a checkered literary past with a lot of work that, lets face it, simply doesn't stand up to the level of complexity that we've seen in the last 16 years. I don't have to go through the litany of names, I'm sure, to make this argument. Nor do I doubt that the stellar lights from comics past, Bernie Kreigston I'm looking at you, could have done work this adult, this real had they been given the opportunity. Clearly they were never going to be given that opportunity, nor would the readers have been there anyway.

But the films have exposed comics as being something taht we fans always said they were: great breeding grounds for the fantastic, fertile earth for creating interesting characters. Our little 4 color fantasies ahve given life to some amazing characters, characters that have now tickled the funny bone of the great unwashed pop culture masses in ways that only your die hard comic fan used to know. We weren't wrong, it seems. We knew how good the Clarement/Byrne X-Men were, and now so does the rest of the world. We knew how good the O'Neil/Adams and Englehart/Rogers Batman was, and now t he rest of the world knows as well. We were willing to look past shoddy printing and dodgy art occasionally to get our fix of these characters.

Do I really need the thick phone books reprinting every single issue of Iron Man? No, not really. And I love Iron Man. Your average sane individual doesn't need that much George Tuska art in his life. We do have a rather dodgy legacy, and right now much of that legacy is being put back into print, and I'm not sure that much of it holds up under anything other than through the lens of nostalgia. But it proves that the individuals who worked in this formerly reviled industry were, under tight deadline and often bizarre editorial direction, relentless in using the dark corners of their imaginations to provide us with some brilliant and memorable ideas.

Diamonds among the dross. We comic fans have always found them. And slowly the rest of America is as well.

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.

Romance Panel Cavalcade & Astro City

That's My Skull has one of those posts that made me laugh so hard that I almost blew beer out of my nose. Yes, the dreaded comic romance panel cavalcade. Its that damn funny. You owe it to yourself to go over and appreciate the time that it took to find all those.

And no Civil War posts out of me today. This latest issue is such a mess that I'm finding my brain doesn't want to think about it.

Did pick up Astro City: The Dark Age and I realize that while I like Astro City a lot, none of the issues over that last year or two have grabbed me as much as the first couple storylines, such as the kree/skrull... er, Confessor and Astro Boy series, or even the short "The Nearness of You" which is one of the best short stories that I've run across in the last several years.

Did Astro City jump the shark for me? I'd like to think that it didn't. Kurt is just off telling a number of different stories, and the overly long one with robert Mitchum as the alloyed criminal simply went on too long, but that doesn't mean that I don't have some affinity with the characters. I think that his attention is a bit diverted, that's all.