Anatomy of A Panel: Sandman #16 by Neil Gaiman & Mike Dringenberg - page 1

in the quest to know what a comic page looks like, it used to be that one had only to refer to How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way. Fortunately, there were other approaches to be had, and certainly DC and Karen Berger exploited in the '80's, establishing an entirely new version of art for sequential comics.

It was an interesting time to be alive.

Here is the first page to the classic conclusion of The Doll's House storyline which, when collected, would be the trade to launch a hundred thousand fangirls into loving comics, when the industry, in every possible way, had ignored them for more than two generations.

It was an interesting time to be alive.

Mike Dringenberg was a classically trained artist who had no business putting his admirable skills into a monthly book, but he did anyway. His work, seen especially in the pencils, shows just how experimental and innovative he was off of Neil's scripts. Gaiman was not writing classic comic scripts, and the art had to reflect that. So, for likely the first time anywhere outside of the late Malcolm Jones' art table, here are the pencils to Sandman #16, as well as the recolored version printing in the Absolute Sandman #1.

As for me, I'm working away at The Carnival #2 for APE 2014 and looking forward to talking comics with everyone there. I'll have a new printing of  Carnival #1, as well as some prints of the Dick Sprang/yoakum collaboration of the 1950's Batman!

Sketch A Day #1 - The Sandman

Getting back to it, and going to try to do the sketch a day thing... we'll see how long a slow artist like myself can keep this up.

This Sandman is india ink on bristol, a little PH Martin's white on top, and zip-a-tone via photoshop. Enjoy!

This is an inking of a sketch started a while ago, and inspired by my visit to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco to see The Sandman retrospective, and hear Mike Dringenberg talk about the work. I've not seen Mike in about 15  years, so it was nice to go and see him.

More on that later!

The Return of the Sandman: Revising the Revisions

As difficult as it may be to do so, try to return to the halycon days of 1989, when the Rob Liefields and Jim Lees of the world were starting to push superhero comics into a new artistic paradigm, and when how novel the concept of finding anyone to actually follow up Alan Moore on Saga of the Swamp Thing would be. And a sweet little goth book showed up on the stands with some very interesting covers. And it was really anything but sweet.

Years later, and one great revolution of Vertigo later, with millions of copies in print in tons of different permutations, Sandman started to actually look quaint. And a bit coy in places. At least to some. While I'm unable to find the link now, somewhere around 2007, a comics roundtable came together, of reviewers that i generally respected even if I didn't always agree with, to reassess Gaiman's Sandman. The result was a beatdown that made Liefield's New Mutants look fairly good by comparison. I thought that they were spectacularly wrong. While not faultless, Sandman was brave and bold and interesting and managed to pull off way more than it didn't, and slagging off the series showed more than a little of the biases of the reviewers more so than it did the faults of the series. One quote I remember was, "With some distance, the whole series is looking slightly embarassing."

In 1990 I moved in with a girl who had never read comics before, so i gave her a stack of material that she promised to read. A mix of stuff i personally enjoyed, including the just published Doll's House collection. The rest of the comics she could have cared less about. the Doll's House? She came back demanding more. The collection she'd already loaned out to a girlfriend, who would loan it out to more friends. It was the perfect collection of horror and drama and fantasy and sex and otherworldliness to hit a whole chunk of females directly in the head. She didn't become a comic fan, but she did become a Sandman fan.

I hated to tell her that there wasn't, right then, a whole lot more.

The guardian has a nice write up, with spoilers for the just released Sandman Overture, as well, and it always sounds like those music beat writers who can tell you exactly where and when they first heard Hendrix/Sex Pistols/Nirvana. It was profoundly different, it was moving, and it changed everything.

So for all the reviewers who look back, and with the somewhat brilliant and snarky hindsight of 2007 or 2013, and find the adventures of Rose Walker, or the giddy introduction of Death (holding an infant who died in its crib slightly plaintifly asking, "Is that all there is?"), or the brilliant little bits of the city who slept and dreamed away its citizens, slightly cloying. Please note that there are far more of us who were moved and touched by the beauty of the series than will ever be embarassed by it. And while none of us were clamoring for the prequel, the fact that it exists as drawn by the very best artist working in comics in the last couple of years, is a testament to the fact that neil must have a story that wanted to be told, as opposed to a check that he wanted to cash.

And I can't wait to read it.

Quick Sketch: Manhunter ala Walt Simonson

Finished my warm up sketch on my board, and i blame the subject matter all on Alex Sheikman, who is quite the Simonson devotee.

So, when last we hung out, Alex handed over a couple great Walt Simonson issues for me to read/study. Those, of course, got me to realize that it had been a number of years since i'd perused the astonishing Manhunter series that Archie Goodwin had written with Walt on art chores back in the 1970's Detective Comics.

Well, one cheap special edition later, and a number of hours poring over the amazing "Cathedral Perilous" chapter, I decided that i had to try my hand at their version of Paul Kirk.

Incidentally, I had started the initial layout on Jack Kirby's 96th birthday, and toyed with making this a 1940's Paul Kirk ala Simon/Kirby, but the modern era won out. Perhaps next time.

Who is DC making comics for? I don't think that they know

Lets get right to it and say, "No, you don't." Which is kind of like saying, "The answer is 42." and, of course, not knowing what the question is.

Well the answer is in response to this:

“Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth], this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch … and he said, ‘You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year-olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo. And I thought, ‘I guess we just broke up.’”– Paul Pope, relating his attempt to pitch an all-ages (or perhaps young-adult) title to DC Comics, during his Comic-Con International conversation with Gene Luen Yang.

Now, it would be one thing if DC had a focus and Paul, who has a distinct creative voice, was not going to be part of that, but, and we can put this right on the table, DC is NOT making comics for 45 year old men. 45 year olds were brought up on Frank McLaughlin and Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella and Cary Bates and the Flash, and the classic JLA and Superman coming from Kansas and this new 52 is not their DC at all. 

Perhaps DC thinks that the hypersexualized fanboy driven new versions of the characters, and the darker Green Lantern will appeal to the adults in the audience who haven't really grown up, but its clearly not happening. None of the these versions of the characters are recognizable to anyone in their 40's. Those of us in our 40's had to deal with the reordering of the DC universes when Crisis first threw a big blanket over continuity back in '85, but it was a fairly loving blanket, inclusive for the most part. But now they've rebooted so many times that all they have done is made a point of pushing away older fans to an extent that we've never seen before. Welcome to the NEW DC!

Now, combine that with Karen Berger's exit interview in the New York Times and you have the other interesting side to this:

Dan DiDio, the co-publisher of DC Comics, said there was “some truth” to these feelings of a shifting landscape, which he said were industrywide. For comics published by Vertigo and by DC, he said: “There’s not a challenge to be more profitable out of the gate. But there is a challenge to be more accepted out of the gate.”Mr. DiDio said it would be “myopic” to believe “that servicing a very small slice of our audience is the way to go ahead.”“That’s not what we’re in the business for,” he added. “We have to shoot for the stars with whatever we’re doing. Because what we’re trying to do is reach the biggest audience and be as successful as possible.”

So lets parse this: Vertigo, the line that primarily would bring in female readers, is being cancelled because "servicing a very small slice of our audience is [not] the way to go ahead.” How is it possible to go service a wider part of your audience when you've just cut out 50% of the population? 

So, really, who is DC producing comics for? Do they know?

I going to go with: catering to the needs of 25-year old fanboys who don't need a lot of old continuity to deal with, like the Reis/Lee art style, don't have wives bothering them over blatantly sexist comics coming into the house, and don't want any of that DC produced "alternative shit" messing up their comic lines. Now, is this any different than the individuals who were going to enjoy Dr. Light raping Sue Dibney? Not really, but i do think that its already a different generation of young men pushing what meager sales are out there, young men who don't have daughters that they don't want to sexualize, young men who believe that they have a slightly nihilistic attitude towards life because they've played too much "Tour of Duty". Not the sort readers that  might wander by the Top Shelf table at a con. 

Will DC succeed with this audience? Perhaps, but i'm thinking no, and it will be just a matter of time before they retrench. Again. And its not going to be pretty. Again.

Can Mort Weisinger Be Redeemed asks Arlen Schumer

I have an answer for Arlen.

No.

Weisinger and those early folks at DC Comics were evil and deserved to die long before they did. It still wouldn't have made a difference to the nearly blind and destitute Siegel, but it might have made him feel better.

"They kept sucking him in with stock options?" For all the horrible things that this man did to the poor creative individuals that had to work under him? Don't tell me, "Well, that's just how the business was back then." Bull. You can still make some money and you don't have to destroy the lives of the people under you just because you can. I don't care how unhappy this man was, He took it out on everyone around him and made their lives hell.

Forget about all the little contributions that he might ahve made to our favorite little nostalgic power fantasies. Simply look at how far from being any sort of good person Weisinger was. Viscious, belittling, emasculating, career destroying, eviscerating. Think, instead of this: without him ruining all the good stories and art that could have been done for Superman, think of how much better those comics could have been.

Read Men of Tomorrow, read what the artists and writers under him had to suffer through. And you'll never feel sorry again for him dying at a mere 63. All that evil, rolled into one insufferable man. and all because those poor people had the dream to work on a four color fantasy. And there was nowhere for them to go. Pay attention artistic folk, this is what happens: they die rich and you don't. And they hardly ever get their comeuppance.

Before Watchmen: Are we trolling or what?

Dollar Bill?!? We're going to get a comic on Dollar Bill?

If you don't remember him, you're not alone. If you do remember him, its because you've read Watchmen a million times and you remember that he was the laughing stock, the one panel joke about how not to dress for the part of being a superhero.

And now, as a late addition to the Before Watchmen line, we get Wein and Rude's Dollar Bill.

Sadly, reading this while reading "Marvel Comics: the Untold Story" dovetails with Heidi McDonald's older post about DC's treatment of Moore, and how utterly distasteful the fans are towards the greatest writing genius that comics has ever had.

I really hate to see all the top notch talent that has been working on the Before line. I don't even have to name the names, you all know exactly who is doing those books. I would just have killed to have had them all working on new, amazing projects rather than desperately trying to fill in the gaps on a comics that was systematically designed to have gaps in just the right places to make the meat of the story work along the way. Its sad. And as they have said, "Hate the game, not the playa."

Well, there has never been a bigger gap in the Game and Playas than there is right now. Comics are more name driven now than since the first wave of "big names" changed the how the marketing worked in the mid-80's. And never has the potential for new properties and publishers existed alongside Marvel and DC trying desperately to hold on to the properties they have, and to squeeze every ounce out of them.

It would be interesting if, when we looked back, this was one of the final straws that might have broken the back of creators being willing to have their work published under the old paradigm. Such superior "name' creators such as Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Grey are off doing their Creator Owned Heroes book, and are clearly busy creating more characters and ideas than just about anyone else right now. More innovation from that writing team alone than anything that we're seeing at Marvel and DC currently.

I like Len Wein, and I love Rude's artwork, just as i love Hughes and Jones, but i don't think that i need a Dollar Bill comic. I hope that the royalties are enough to help Steve out from his financial difficulties when they collect all this. But i wish that this industry was so... so different.

DC and the Format Wars: Giving up before the first shot is fired

I was fascinated by th3e idea that DC would be doing original graphic novels next year on superman and batman as a way to introduce new readers to the continuity without having them struggle with just where to begin. Overall, i was willing to wait for what i was sure was going to be a spectacular failure.

As Johanna Draper Carlson points out, DC is already backing away from the original version of the OGNs, which brings us right back to a subject that i feel i've covered ad nauseaum over the last few years: the format wars.

How to present the material hat you have to a diverse clientele is a tricky one, especially since you have such different markets with Borders and Barnes and Noble in competition with the Local Comic Shop.

But how many cross over customers are there? The large bookstores that are in my area essentially eschew the weekly pamphlet format in favor of TPBs, while the LCS tends to carry a mix of both. How many people are really shopping both at this point?

DC has become, with the cancellation of essentially every experimental line that they have, from Minx to their manga line, relentlessly conservative. They have retrenched physically and mentally, deleting the new versions of their heroes in favor of the silver age versions, why should it surprise anyone that they've also deleted all the different formats that they've experimented with?

DC Comics has returned to the Silver Age. Unfortunately, their audience is living in 2010.

Doing manga? nope. Digest books? nope. Diversity in heroes? nope. Comics for girls? nope. Keeping Vertigo running? barely. Original Graphic Novels? nope. Monthly pamphlets about white males? Yup.

How's Milestone doing these days?

What's fascinating is that pretty much everyone else is able to make interesting things happen with the OGN market except a company with the greatest outreach and resources to do it. If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps corporate resources are the father of conservatism here.

The JLA by Bruce Timm & Yoakum

The second Bruce Timm commission inks, following the Batgirl of two days ago. you know what i learned from inking this one?

Hawkgirl is bad ass. She's fun to draw. Why don't we have a monthly Hawkgirl comic?

Cross-Over Craziness vs Single Issue Fun

Todd Allen at Publisher's Weekly does a good job of summing up the recent Cross-Over Craziness that is happening at Marvel and DC, and pointing out just how difficult it is to actually find something that isn't part of being tied in to 7 other titles.

This is exactly how I, as the doting father of two girls, who has spent a great deal of time and money over the last 6 years trying to get my children addicted to comics, see the market place. And it sucks.

i hate the idea that my 9 year old will say to me, "What is actually happening in Wonder Woman?" because she can't just pick it up and read a single great storyline. I've started to not pick up the books if they're so convoluted that i can't understand them. And if I can't, there's no way that she can.

Sadly, the Green Lantern series has long since descended into zombie nihilism and i'm not going to subject my kids to the over the top nastiness of Blackest Night. Is it any wonder that they've moved into reading Simpsons Comics over DC in the last 7 months? I was actually buying Superman for a while, enjoying Robinson's run onthe series with Guedes' art. I dropped that when the cross destroyed whatever interest i had in the storyline.

And that sucks again. I would like to love comics again on a regular basis, but almost none of the series will give me a fun reason to show up in the store month after month. As my hands stay covered with small black ink stains as i finish up the Gulacy pencilled pages for TIMEBOMB, I would love to relax with a small stack of enjoyable comics.

And they keep letting me down. And they're letting my kids down. And its pissing me off.

Earth One Initiative Launched: Earth Prime Yawns

Superman and Batman make new inroads to the book stores with the DC Comics EarthOne Graphic Novels, modern retellings of the origins and yet again, we say, so? Joanna over at Comics Worth Reading makes her comments known here. Lets, once again, talk formats and what they want to put into that format. DC continues, yet again, to try different things, although it will likely come to no avail. Kudos to them them, they keep trying to do something, anything different, and it always seems to come just a little wide of the mark.

Oh you can see the marketing meeting: "Lets do something that will cost some money and maybe soemthing brand new for the book stores. Lets play it safe and use our most popular characters and we've got a better chance for sales." And yet, doing Batman's origin AGAIN or Superman's origin AGAIN is precisely the wrong tact to take. Anyone who cares about the characters knows the origins and doesn't need to buy the book. You new superhero reader, someone younger perhaps, isn't going to go for that price tag. Their parents will likely buy them a regular $3 comic. You average bookstore buyer is far more likely to walk buy and pick up the new Fables book or Sandman trade than grab the long underwear hero. Its DC going the safe route and coming out with, yet again, that wide of the mark product.

Try Minx, for instance. Once you get past the name, there was the lack of fantasy in the line up, a mysterious omission given that the manga market had long since given you all the demographic and story data that you needed. And yet, based in NYC, and looking over at the Tomine graphic novels and the Spiegelmans, they decided to go with urban books, and ones that were'nt all that good to begin with. You know what graphic novel i see in every book store i go into? the new Rapunzel one. Smart use of the name, a good story, some fantasy and a great heroine and the kids will have no problem devouring the story again and again, and convincing the parents to buy them the damn thing.

The best thing that DC did was the wednesday comics format from this summer, but unfortunately it didn't get into enough hands, into prime space in the stores. Once again a promising format change that got stuck into the Direct Market ghetto.

It should be noted that my Borders shelves their graphic novel area into: Cool stuff alphabetical, then DC alphabetical and then Marvel alphabetical. Tell you truth, its realllllllly easy to stay in that first section.

Irene Vartanoff and Romance Comics

Over at Sequential Crush Jacque Nodell has posted a wonderful interview with Irene Vartanoff who had worked at both Marvel and DC back in the early '70's. It covers a variety of topics and is just great reading both from the sociological aspect as well as the comic aspect!

DC Comics made a heroic effort to produce modern, relevant romance comics. But they never dared cross the line into the sexual revolution (or even the social revolution) that was the key to reaching the mass of women. All the comic book heroines were still crying over men and living soap opera lives and hanging out at the country club.

and Irene goes on to make her case as to why the romance comics died in a very conclusive manner. Comics could not approach sex, premarital sex, whatsoever, and so lost the little relevance that they had.

What I have always rather discounted was the effectiveness of the Gothic Romance culture from the 1960's, something that Irene brings up:

A strong line of female-oriented Gothic romances might have worked a few years earlier to transition the romance comic audience, but the Gothic comics eventually produced were mostly male-oriented weird mystery tales. And they were all started too late, after the subgenre had peaked, and after the romance comic audience had wandered away.... This would be like doing vampire love stories à la Twilight (but from a male point of view) five years from now. Too late.

Ah yes, this is comics all over. Late to the party and poorly done even when they finally show up.

The discussion in the comments section then veers off of this question from Pat:

One question I would have asked her is whether she feels that the reason comics are so male-dominated is that men are much more visually oriented.

And that is an interesting question. My personal take, without having the time to go research things on line and see what studies might or might not have been done: men are more visual when it comes to sexually oriented material, but certainly not more visual over all. Far from it. I think that women are extremely visually oriented, and that there is a likelihood that they will process visuals differently, taking different cues from them.

I believe that romance comics suffered from being stuck in a male oriented industry: male writers, writing from a male point of view, with male artists doing their level headed best to do comics that they might want to look at (and thus with a male-centric point of view when it comes to storytelling as well as character design). Certainly 40 years ago you wouldn't have had a huge stable of female artists with the chops and skills to draw from when putting together your gothic romance comics, even if you could have found a distributor. You only have to go find a collection of female written porn edited by Suzy Bright to see that there while there are certainly similarities to porn written by men, there are clearly differences as well.

The reality is that, had you founded a magazine (so as to get around the comics code) in 1972, and found someone to print it and distribute it, you'd have had a tough sell to put enough sex into the romance to have found an audience.

I also think that very few artists in comics excel at the smaller moments which are easy to describe as a writer, but harder, much harder, to pull off in a comic format. Anyone who has read Love and Rockets thinks it looks easy because Los Bros. pull it off so easily... and pretty much everyone else fails miserably. Since comics oriented towards women wouldn't be about people punching each other through walls, you really would have to find artists who could communicate on a more sophisticated level as well as making art stylish enough to intrigue the readers. Some of the Filipino artists in the 1970's that DC employed certainly had enough style to do that (although everyone looks a bit swarthy, but the women were always very sexy.).

Manga sales demographics have shown us that the old chestnut that women don't buy comics, don't like comics or aren't visually oriented is just that: an old cart before the horse myth brought to you by the old men of comics who couldn't figure out how to sell comics to girls. Way to go guys, way to go.

Stalking the 70's Artists

Steven Grant writes today one of the finest overviews of the 1970's comics art scene that I've ever run across, and its worth your time to read it both if you were there, and if you came along later and want a little history behind the 1980's. A couple of thoughts on his post:

Steven posits that its an oddity that the early 1970's rush of talent resulted in such a meager showing of great comic art from those involved, even though they laid the groundwork for the 1980's. I think that while he talks later in the article about how this is partly because it is easier to make a living in comics by imitating another's style, it also misses the point about those involved being either driven out by the deadlines, or the editorial style or simply having already given their world the initial gift of their art.

I've made the case in an earlier post that without the '70's groundwork, there would be no '80's comics. There would be no "All New, All Different X-Men" by Cockrum to make a Billion dollars at the box office, no Englehart/Rogers Batman to rip off, without Starlin, there would be no Marvel Sci-Fi comic universe to surf outside of the one that Kirby invented. Many of the creators that Grant talks about had no other choice, business-wise, but to conform to what was being offered to them. Either make those deadlines and conform or leave. Steranko left, Gulacy stayed, Starlin kept trying to leave and coming back, Adams left and found more money in advertising while keeping a toe in comics, Weiss stayed but turned in relatively small amounts of art. Smith left, Kaluta kinda left but only somewhat.

And yet this storied group left a great mass of artwork out there. It may not seem like it given the amount of dross that those pages are surrounded by, but that doesn't take into account the selective memory of their work. I've long since forgotten the other comics that I bought the same day as the Kaluta Shadow, perhaps an Ernie Chan Batman, perhaps something by Irv Novick, but I remember almost every panel in the Shadow book. God knows what other issues I bought the day that I picked up Captain Marvel #30, but I can quote almost every panel by heart from that Starlin comic. As Lou Reed once said, only 1,000 people ever listened to the Velvet Underground, but all 1,000 of them started bands. You didn't need to have Kaluta or Smith or Steranko produce like Kirby and Kane for them to galvanize another generation of comic artists to get drawing. Those pages have been burned into the memory of every reader of that time period.

And it set the stage for Chaykin to move on and produce American Flagg! later on for First. I wouldn't have wanted to see him try that series any earlier. He wasn't ready for it, and neither was the market. Steranko had to go out and produce "Red Tide" for Preiss and fail miserably to put a crack or two in the wall. Eventually the wall would fall, but it would take repeated efforts to bring it down, and, as usual, the pioneers are the ones that suffer.

Peaks? You could argue that Adams was never better after 1971, or Starlin after 1975, but Chaykin was at his best in 1982, and Gulacy in 1976 or 1980 depending. Different artists peak at different times. And their influence will extend differently because of that. There mass of Americans in the 1970's did produce fascinating work, and did so under the guise of mainstream comics, which, in itself, is a trick.

And, since I don't believe that the decades meet perfectly on the calendar either, I say that the 1980's comics started with the first issue of John Byrne on the X-Men: #108.

I agree with Grant on the Filipino artists, whose work, while many times technically more accomplished than the Americans was also claustrophobic when printed, and more "illustrat-y" and inhibited the readability of the comic story.

Levitz's Leaving: What Does The Future Hold?

While all the Marvel/Disney news has been dominating the news early in the week, the DC?Warner restructuring has been having a far bigger impact to the comics community, specifically the resignation of Paul Levitz from the Publisher's post at DC Comics.

As far back as 2006 I was discussing Levitz's role in the development of the graphic novel, and not in the most favorable terms. (While I don't know Levitz personally, I've been following comics since the days that he decided to not keep Marshall Rogers on Detective Comics with the line: "Believe it or not, a Marshall Rogers Batman does not sell better than an Irv Novick Batman.") It seems that Levitz leaving is one of those things that will upset some of the old guard who knew him, but I also finally see a chance to get DC to get things a lot more right. They have made multiple mistakes over the last 20 years, mistakes that have clearly shown a "don't change too much" mentality which has hamstrung them horribly for two decades.

In the prior post back in 2006, i referenced an interview with Levitz where he talks about the reprints that DC put out (and I'm making the assumption, which could easily be wrong, that the movement to try these other formats was with Levitz and then-publisher Jeanette Kahn) and how they failed. What was so obvious to everyone else, which is why they didn't sell, is that none of the reprints with the crappy flexo coloring passed the smell test to anyone except those so intrenched in the halls at DC.

While it may be true that Levitz lobbied hard for creator rights on the back end, which is admirable, he also has to be considered behind the disaster that has been the recent DC initiaitives such as Minx. Basically, almost anything that would have stretched beyond the normal bounds of comics "as we knew them" has been scuttled behind the scenes. And it didn't have to be. Perhaps trying to keep DC from being sucked into the Time/Warner monolith was a noble but misguided intention. Perhaps trying to keep their little small world small wasn't a good idea. In fact, I'm sure it wasn't.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the new DC will accomplish. Because the last time we had a new DC, when Kahn had taken over, we saw actual growth and ingenuity. And that was 20 years ago.

Time Warner Comics and the Mighty Disney Avengers

I was asked about the Warner/DC moves in conjunction with the Disney/Marvel purchase and how it might affect artists working for the companies. Here is my answer:

I believe that Warner has long treated DC as the bastard stepchild that they inherited, and did not appear too eager to actually plumb the creative resources that they had at their disposal. They followed the old adage, "Well, Batman is popular, but now we'll do it RIGHT!" conveniently ignoring all the great stories that had been done in the comics because, to them, comics were crap.

Marvel hired people who took a chance and used the properties to make movies that took directly from the best elements of the comics themselves and thus used their acquisitions to their best advantage. X-Men 2 is Chris Claremont's X-Men and no one elses... and its by far the best comic book movie ever made in my opinion.

Time Warner is just making adjustments that will allow them to use their properties as best as they can, something that they should have been doing 20 years ago. Neither corporate move would stop me from doing work from either company, they may actually become more professional in their dealings with artists as time goes on. We writers and artists can get screwed by a much better class of people.

As our little niche media is recognized by the rest of the general public for what we comic fans had always known- i.e. that we're a media with a lot of entertainment to give - we should expect that with greater dollars comes greater responsibility, and greater corporate overseeing.

DC and Kirby: dialogue to die for...

If there was anything that stood out in the DC comics of the early 1970's, it was, perhaps, that their idea of "hip" dialogue was so far off the mark as to send up an ugly flag saying "we're old white men who don't understand you hippies! Buy our comics anyway!" A quick read of the Jimmy Olsens from Kirby's New Gods Omnibus should give you a pretty good idea of what we're talking about.

So I was a little shocked to see this example show up of the cover from the revived Sandman by Simon and Kirby from 1974. Clearly the final cover was taken from this art and simply manipulated by enlarging and cropping the stats to make the final image (with perhaps a little reinking by the DC bullpen, i can't tell exactly from the small image), and the dreamer at the base has been changed, but take a look at the word balloon to see the dialogue change. Jack or Joe's original dialogue is a fairly straightforward "Come see what I've dreamed up for YOU!" while the printed version contains an entirely new noun brought to earth from Apokolips: "Come see what weirdies I've dreamed up for YOU!"

I've always blamed material like that on Jack's notoriously tin ear when it comes to dialogue, but I have to say that there is a likelyhood that this is editorial sticking its head in and taking what is a fairly straightforward and simple piece of text (while not the most exciting) and making it about 10 times worse. No wonder people headed for the exits in droves, whether to the Avengers and the FF or just away from comics in particular, but still to the exits.

What is most interesting is, given all the Kirby material that we've been exposed to in fandom, especially through TwoMorrows Kirby Magazine, is just how bizarrely he was edited. Yes, he had a tendency to compose word jazz, not dialogue that anyone would actually say, and introduce characters and ideas willy-nilly as they occured to him rather than by any defined structure, but the heavy handed nature of the later Marvel editing and the later DC editing certainly was no better than the hands off approach that was tried as well. It is clear that Jack's idea for the Surfer would have yeilded a more satisfying character arc than Stan's exceptionally over-wrought one, but it is also clear that the 4th World series needed guidance to have achieved more than what we got. Sadly, the industry nor the personalities involved seemed to find a happy medium. Alas.

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.

After Watchmen: the DC marketing blitz

There is no question that DC Comics and Marvel Comics have finally broken a lot of the stigma of the "comics are crap" tag that was stapled to the American public's mind for so long. Not only are the books in more book stores than they ever used to be, but we have a number of very successful movies that have faithfully adapted the stories that we loved into all ages entertainment. So wither the comics? What did Marvel do the capitalized on the success of 3, count 'em, 3 successful Spidermen films? Or Iron Man? How could Marvel have let the Iron Man collections not be in the warehouse to ship out when the film broke (because they didn't!). There have been any number of us comic bloggers that were ready to rake them over the coals for not having a single marketing initiative in place when those films opened.

Now DC has finally put together a 32 pamphlet, that takes me longer to read than your average comic book by the way, directing people to other books that they may want to read. To which I say:

Duh.

It is marketing 101. And while it may be a small campaign (as I've not been privvy to whole scale of where they're putting it out there, although I'm damn curious), at least they're doing something. And, for some reason, Tucker Stone has a problem with that. Perhaps we're just looking at it from different angles.

Every comment section I've ever seen that follows the question "What should I recommend to my friend who just read ____ for the first time?" detoriates into the same thing: the answer is nothing, because the answer is everything.... That's not really the way you want a recommendation to work. It's the equivalent of going to a music store and saying "I really liked John Coltrane's Giant Steps. Where should I go next?", only for the clerk to smile and say "Buy anything in the store! They're all awesome and spectacular in their own way!"

And that is completely opposite to everything that I've seen in the last 25 years, and certainly now more than ever. First off, I love the music analogy, which is a perfect example. If someone I know admires Giant Steps in my CD collection, then I'm loaning them A Love Supreme and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and some Brubeck and sending them on their way. For the rest of the decade of the '80's the answer to Watchmen was Dark Knight and then... nothing. Believe me the answer was not Camelot 3000 or Justice League Europe. Perhaps Ronin, but Ronin was a bit more genre soaked. Now? The answer, if you're forming one to stock up for party talk in the future should be fairly short (just like my jazz recommendations) so that they don't get overwhelmed. Here's mine: Sandman: Doll's House, Why I Hate Saturn, Blue Pills, Signal to Noise or Violent Cases. I'll pick 3 and put them out there. You may have your own choices, but the answer is not "everything". The answer is be selective and don't limit them to superheroes. I've blogged before about the number of Doll's House trades that I lost in the 80's and 90's to women who would never have read comics and who fell in love with Sandman.

It's unlikely that anybody at DC took the time to ask any decent swath of retailers what they thought about After Watchmen in the first place.

And that, sadly is probably quite true. DC and by extension, Time Warner, have their own little feifdoms of marketing that i doubt talk to each other that often since that is so very corporate. Bringing in new readers to direct market shops that are damn near impossible to find is going to be very hard, although i have no doubt that Watchmen will certainly result in at least some new lookers at comics, if not new readers. Thats good, we'll take them. But lets put Tucker's comment in a spin: specialty comic shops, used to doing their way of business for last 30 years, may be the last place you want ideas on where to get new readers. You may want to go as far away from them as possible so that you really do get to a new audience. After all, if they're going to the comic shop to begin with, aren't they already coverted?

Post Post-Superheroes: Where do we go?

Steven Grant, under the influence of the flu a week or so ago, dragged out an older Master of the Obvious column, which I'm excerpting two paragraphs out of here:

A few years back, I coined the term "post-superhero" to represent a sea change in American superhero comics underway at the time, mostly at the hands of British writers. It was the first real shift in paradigm since Stan Lee introduced the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man – then commonly labeled "anti-heroes" – forty years ago.

These were superhero comics stripped of many familiar trappings, from costumes and unexamined kneejerk morality to subplots, though few stripped out everything at once. They often focused more on mood and character than action. (It's likely no coincidence that many who produced "post-superhero" comics cut their teeth on Britain's 2000 AD and short-form strips like "Judge Dredd.") Some (Warren Ellis on THE AUTHORITY; Joe Casey on WILDCATS 3.0) operated out of boredom with the superhero concept, some (Alan Moore on the ABC books, Grant Morrison on JLA and NEW X-MEN) were genuinely fond of superheroes but wanted to restore a sense of wonder to the genre and make it speak better to modern audiences.

And, without going down the same road as Steven, it dovetailed with my going to Wondercon this last weekend (just going on friday, and not even getting the chance to sit at my spot in artist's alley, which is just sad, but real life intruded upon my con plans. Not the first time....) and wondering just what the role of the hero is these days. I was struck, also, to see the marketing, logistical and organizational nightmare that is your 21st Century Con through the eyes of my 8 year old daughter.

Now, this is no neophyte to the world of fantasy and fiction. She is on the 5th Harry Potter book, regularly reads Wonder Woman, Justice League, New Frontier, Loony Tunes and the Simpsons comics, and has seen 5 of the 10 Doctor Whos and can answer questions about the Cybermen and Daleks quite well. Navigating the aisles of the convention, in search of some new action figures and the rest... well, that's a different story.

I was watching to see what she gravitated to as well: Struzman posters, McQuarrie production art for the original three Star Wars movies, Nightmare Before Christmas peppermints, DC and Doctor Who action figures to compliment the ones that she already has. What she had a perverse reaction to: the "Hot Zombie Chicks" booth. Zombie chicks in bikinis on T-shirts made her wrinkle up her nose as say, "That stuff is weird, I don't like it."

She straddles the two worlds: those of us who were raised reading the old guard comics of straight edge morality, and those who came along in the post-Dark Knight world of grim and gritty superheroes. She comes in reading things like Cooke's New Frontier, which present moral heroes that face a grittier world than Julie Schwartz ever dreamed of. She still sees heroes that make the right choices, but faces a more complex world to make those choices in. For her, Wonder Woman is a heroic figure fighting for the greater good against evils, but they are evils that are harder to understand (many times because of the cross-over and tie-ins, the current storyline for instance), and so Diana's heroic stance is lessened since the choices that she has to make are a little less comprehensible. My daughter has little need to delve into the psycho-sexual context of Wonder Woman; what she needs is a consistant character with stories that you can follow from issue to issue.

There will be time enough for grim and gritty, although I'm sure that what will follow instead will be things like Twilight, or Buffy-style material. And, getting back to Grant's comments on the post-superhero material, whatever it is will be more intense, since the better authors have spent a great deal more time throwing away many of strictures that kept our fiction relatively safe along the way. After all, until Moore, Gaiman and Morrison came along, we thought that we knew where the walls were in the DC Universe, and we knew that we were safe behind the fourth one. But Swamp Thing taught us that everything we knew was wrong, Animal Man taught us that there was human longing and lonliness behind the goggles and behind the typewriter, and the Sandman taught us that there were a lot of soft edges to our world in every place and time.

Conversely, as well, Moore taught us the interspecies love and sex was possible, Morrison taught us that believing in the Kingdom of Keys as real was a good thing, and Gaiman gave us a death we could live with meeting. In a way.

The better creators have restored a sense of wonder in their series, and it really doesn't matter where. My daughter and I thrill every time the doors of the Tardis open on a new time or new world, we enjoy when Diana conquers a new challenge that isn't part of a damn crossover, and we laugh everytime that we get a Scooby Doo that manages to subvert the standard formula cleverly. That sense of wonder can be revisionist superheros, fantasy or cartoony, it really doesn't matter. The world building in Harry Potter has captivated her, as has the Justice League, as has Star Wars. Post post-superhero to me means finally having deconstructed many of the convention that we can move on to telling more stories, without the sacred cows, whatever they may be. What do you all think?

Heath Ledger: The Joker

Just finished watching the Oscars, one of the most boring in recent memory, but the one endearing memory that i will remember (given that this is a comic book blog) is Heath winning for his portrayal of The Joker. It was a devastatingly dead-on accurate job of acting in front of a director who completely, utterly got the character.

That sort of thing is rare, far rarer than we would suspect in the movie world, but even more so when a beloved character is taken from other fiction and brought into the movie world. Harry Potter has been aptly served by some very competent directors and the excellent casting of Daniel Radcliffe. The Joker has been tortured by any number of directors and actors who never quite got the essence, only skimming the surface with the white face and leering laugh.

Even Bob Kane didn't get what he was creating back in Batman #1. The Joker is an insanely clever jewel thief with a creepy gimmick, but he is not a howling force of nature, given to utter unpredictability in his actions. If the essence of acting is not to simply mirror surface mannerisms but to understand why your character acts the way he/she does, then playing a tabla rasa murderer can be both freeing and maddening. As Michael Caine's Alfred makes the point in the movie, men like that can't be bargained with, or reasoned with, they are simply something that can't be understood in any logical context. You have to deal with them as they are. In our modern day they can be a metaphor for the unreasoning terror the urban dwellers can feel over the possiblity of another terrorist attack, another missing child, another chemical spill, another tsunami.

If the essence of The Batman is to impose order on the orderless world, a way to revenge/prevent the killing of his parents again by another criminal, then The Joker is the giggling essence of disorder and chaos. It delights in its ability to simply do things, whether small or large. The tidal wave has no morality, can't be bargained with, is disconcertingly random in its choices. Nolan gets both The Batman's and The Joker's premises, which is why he's been able to put together not flawless films, but films that engage the hearts of those of us with four colors under our fingernails.

Not too long ago, Heath would have been relegated to having lowered himself to act is a stupid genre picture, and even as recently as a few years ago, I was certain that the Academy would not give the best picture Oscar to Peter Jackson for Return of the King because I was sure that they didn't "get it". That a science fiction picture, fantasy picture, genre picture of any kind would never be given its due. I was wrong, happily, that night, and I'm even more overjoyed to see that the voters do "get it". Ledger's Joker is as much the Oscar worthy villian as Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. It is vindication for the characters of DC Comics, and, since we'll never have definitive answers as to who did what, vindication to Kane, Finger and Robinson as makers of an enduring American mythos.

Heath, an extremely talented actor, will always remain for me any number of people: the Aussie protagonist of 10 Things I Hate About You, the cowboy of Brokeback Mountain, The Joker. Its a shame that he's gone, but we're left with a wonderful, albiet small, body of work to remember him by.