In Praise of: Rocketo by Frank Espinosa

I have to admit, I have been fully sucked into the mind of Frank Espinosa. His Rocketo charms, cajoles, tugs, pushes and pulls you into a wholly fascinating world: a world of far future, with different races, different continents, different lingo and a different back story that I’m sure reads better in the trade than in stand-alone issues.

I slowly became aware of Rocketo the way that one hears about a great band still doing the club circuit: a word here, a small review there, a graphic purloined here… the same way that I found myself at an Earl Greyhound show months ago. I finally stumbled onto the first Rocketo trade at a convention and snapped it up. (I had yet to run into any of the single issues whatsoever, so I'm not aware of how the format is effecting the artwork in the least, but it makes me wonder a little bit why I've never seen any of the singles.)

Espinosa takes us so deep into his own mythology thats its a wonder we ever climb out at all. Journey to the Hidden Sea is the title of the first collection, and what a journey it is. Where as there are many Tolkien scholars that will tell you Lord of the Rings is really about language, I would venture to say that Rocketo, the story, is really about Rocketo, the man, and the voyage of discovery, in just about every meaningful way, micro and macro.

I wouldn't wonder that Espinosa knows Darwyn Cooke, since both are certainly comfortable with the bold, thick line style that takes us, as comic historians, all the way back to Scorchy Smith. Perhaps it is Espinosa's use of color that separates him from the pack, as well his apparent desire to reduce entire panels to only the relevant shadows (perhaps his only storytelling flaw in the first collection). The book, as these two pieces illustrate, have a bravura quality with the color that is fascinating to watch, and when the group finally hits the Hidden Sea, extremely effective in conveying just what a bizarre world we're journeying into.

If there is subtext, we might be reminded of those "that would rip the heart out of mystery, hold it up to the light for all to see." If there is anything that is happening here, it is the desire for a complete immersion into an unfamiliar world, something that reignites our child-like sense of wonder, before we saw other survivors of Kryton, before we knew where the Joker came from, before we saw what other Time Lords looked like, in short, before we had all our questions answered. Here, we have almost none answered, and thats the very best part.

Elric and Disney: a perfect Memorial Day pair

Just got back from a few days down in southern California, taking the kids to Disneyland, enjoying the minor upgrades to the Pirates ride.

Also had time in the evenings to finish this sketch in my good friend Steven Wyatt's Elric Sketchbook, which already contains good pieces from Bo Hampton, Dan Brereton, JG Jones, Tom Yeates and others. Steve, by the way, has his Super Con on this weekend, so if you're anywhere near the San Jose area, go there this weekend for some great guests.

While its not the greates scan, here is the finshed piece with a couple of tweaks to do to it. Now you can see where the skull study was going.

If there is anything that you can say about Disneyland, its that they have perfected the art of vacuuming out your wallet, all the time making you pretty much enjoy it. I noticed any number of details on the Haunted House ride that I did with my oldest daughter 3 times, and I still like the London flyover in the Peter Pan ride.

Perhaps the other thing to note is just how good they are about making characters that seem born out of whole cloth right there, with all the details in perfect position. It is, lets face it, a testament to the great artists that they've screwed over the across the years. They have certainly had some of the best of the best to bleed dry, and we, as the audience, have let them feed us Mulan and Ariel and even a revisionist Cinderella (which has got to be the biggest nod modern plot conventions than they have allowed in twenty years) complete with alternate character arcs and a more proactive main character.

And i still had a good time, despite all that I know about the company. Becasue they are just that damn good at what they do.

Art Studies: the skull

A cool skull from studies for my new Elric commission. I like this one....

Quick one: Red Nails

Pulled out my ragged copy of Savage Tales #2 yesterday for some cool skull reference, and got caught up in looking at the classic marvel Black and White from the venerable 1970's.

The issue itself is an odd mixed bag of text pieces, comic stories from Barry Smith, Gray Morrow, Joe Maneely and Berni Wrightson, and Roy Thomas really digging into the bad repros from the original REH pulp stories.

Scanned here is a detail of a panel from Smith's greatly celebrated, and rightly so, two part adaption of "Red Nails". While this has been reprinted many times (I believe that I already own two or three other versions), it says something that the metal plates that were in use on the printing process at the time are actually able to capture and convey, in a first printing only, the beauty of Smith's line work.

And here is the odd thought: Red Nails really has celebrated and revered many times over as perhaps Smith's finest Conan work (compared against Song of Red Sonja for instance), and I almost have a little trepidation about labeling the work as such. you almost want to go against the tide and prove someone or something wrong concerning the work... and yet the critic in me looks at the story and just wants to nod its head and go, "yup, that really is amazing work". Sorry, you'll get no dispute from me on this one.

The rest of the book, however, is scary funny. This is 1973 after all, and we're treated to the odd paste up ad for Satana, the Devil's Daughter, an old John Romita stat surrounded by about 5 different fonts on five other stats. I can imagine the original art work being one that you had to be careful not to flex for fear of everything flying off the board.

The Berni Wrightson story is the worst thing in the book. Its Berni at his earliest and it shows. There really is nothing here to suggest the work that would come along in Swamp Thing. This smells of simple inventory burn off... I wonder how long it had been sitting in the drawer?

Rather interesting is the Joe Maneely story, an artist that i've become more familiar with over the years. This work, which I doubt was ever meant to be published in B & W, conveys a lot of the Don Heck to the faces, which makes me wonder if Heck followed him or if it was the other way round. While the style is not my favorite, and as a young man would have very quickly dismissed as hack, nowadays, in my ripe old age, I see the skill beneath the work, and it is considerable. Some excellent draghtmanship and storytelling.

My favorite part of the entire magazine? The little icon of Conan reading in the upper left corner of the cover. Heh heh.

In Praise Of: Batman Spectacular (DC Special Series #15)

Ahh, the dollar comic, the mistaken idea that we bought comics as if they were baseball cards: the more the merrier. No, we thought and bought like candy: we didn't look to see that the Snickers weighed more that the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup, we bought which one was tastier.

And there was nothing tastier than this dollar comic. Three Batman Stories by Nasser, Golden and Rogers, an artistic collection that would be hard to match until the Batman Black and White series well over 20 years later.

Nasser and Rubenstein open with a Dave V. Reed story "Hang the Batman", that, for once, made excellent use of Reed's propensity for gimic driven maguffins, and deliver a great Detective story along the way. Very few writers have the wits to actually write a story with Detection along the way, and this has both solid plot and excellent, witty lines along the way. Nasser is controlled and Rubenstein givens him a great polish.

Next up, a young Michael Golden and Dick Giordano deliver a solid Ra's Al Ghul story with Talia and the Batman "...I Now Pronounce you Batman and Wife".

Golden is still a few year away from the height of his powers, but his innate sense of storytelling made for a single disturbing moment as Batman has to strike and knock out a naked Talia on board Ra's ship. i another artists hands, the scene would be one of simple plot mechanism, but golden render's Talia with such sexiness, that when we see her deliciously '70's dress flat on the bed, we don't need to see her naked to fill the panel out in our head. I doubt taht the image of Batman knocking out a naked woman with a single blow would have made Jeanette Kahn's day back then.

Finally, the semi legendary O'Neil and Rogers text/illustration piece, "Death Strikes at Midnight and Three".

My pages have been yellowing for years on this copy, and it only adds to the flavor that O'Neil is channeling Walter Gibson with the perfect compatriot of an artist in Marshall. Characters are a lead in to the plot as the late February chill hovers over Gotham. Within a page the Gotham prosecutor is dead, telling Wayne to "...meet the blind man at midnight and three..."

ONeil's introduction to the Batman brings us the genius of a writer who has thought through his protagonist:

His upper face was concealed by a cowl that subtly altered the coutrours of his head and a voluminous cape billowed behind hime. Against the gloom of the alleyway, he was nearly invisible.

I always wished the DC would have reprinted this as part of the Black and White series. Roger's linework and design would have been striking and introduced a whole new generation of readers to his brilliance. I'm sure that the art is long gone and scattered to the four winds, glued down text yellowed brittle, if not already fallen off, but the sheer magic of the design at full size would be mesmerizing to see.

I wonder if Denny or Marshall kept any of that art.

In Review Of: Avengers #3 by Bendis and Cho

I know what you're thinking, "Why does he keep going on about this book if he doesn't like Marvel's offerings?" And the oddity is that I do want to like this book, despite all the odds. I loved the Avengers, and the little kid in me really wants to see a kick ass Avengers book on the stands to buy.

Unfortunately, we're so deep into post modern deconstructionalism, that I doubt that anyone can come along and do a straight forward "Marvel-style" team book for the next year or two. (When it finally does get done, it will be hailed as "a refreshingly modern twist on old skool team books"). All that aside, I keep wanting to see this team do some interesting things. I like Carol Danvers, always did, and seeing her get front and center is fun. The Widow actually acts like the Natasha that we know and love, and Ares is just a genius stroke of fun. I hope that Bendis gets all Englehart on his ass.

Two great moments this issue: Carol telling Ares that he's the God of War, to back off and make a plan to win the war, and the moment that Ultron takes over the Helicarrier's computers, and projects his old, original, evil ultron face, a moment that I want to believe shows us that no matter how he may be reforming himself into a facsimile of Janet Van Dyke, he is a robot who knows who he really is. Interestingly, the skitzo Ultron makes complete sense in the Jocasta context. Genuine Fanboy Chill.TM

Unfortunately, hate dealing with the negatives as well: the terrible cover, the over-reliance on the ass shots (tigra especially), the strangely tepid action shots that Cho doesn't do so well, the knowledge that this book has been so reviled for the idiocy of Ultron being made into a nude, metallic version of the Wasp, that I doubt I could ever even make a public admission of "Heck, its a guilty pleasure". the pacing isn't exactly what I would wish for: it takes a little too long for things to happen. Powers can continue to decompress all it wishes to, but the Avengers needs to have stuff happen and happen now. What, hasn't anyone see Pirates 2?

And, yes, the little kid in me loves the appearance of the original grey iron man on the last page. Its a cliffhanger that only a member of the MMMS or FOOM could love.

OK, you got my money. For now. And you haven't had that in a long time.

in Review of: Genshiken #8 by Kio Shimoku

i've praised the Genshiken series before for the accuracy of its portrayal of comic and anime geeks in a college setting, as well as for Kio's wonderful sense of comic timing and inventive structure, and the newest volume, Genshiken #8 here in the States, is no exception. Cool.

Interesting how the series has moved from the broad comedy of the group from the earlier issues to finally devoting an entire book to the dreaded "relationship" issue. How many series simply drop dead at this point, their plotlines slowing down into a morass of drippy sentimentality? Fortunately Kio's sense of pacing doesn't fail him here, as the resolution scenes take the right amount of time, stretching the moments that would appropriately gut wrenching to a potential young couple to a suitable length, before moving forward again. Finally we see some resolution to the tease of Sasahara and Ogiue.

Ogiue, as a character, has been relatively undefined for a while, and, like Kuchiki, used for comic relief relatively early, but has been stealing the show with Ono for some time now. The comic, while still centered on Sasha as the main character, has really been female driven for some time now, changing the balance from the early issues that teetered back and forth from Sasha, Madrame, and Kousaka vs. Saki and Ono. We're finally given the chance to see what makes Ogiue tick, and its certainly a time bomb in terms of her personal relationships.
So what are we left with? some wonderful scenes of fumbling college age relationships between the geek and the uber-geek, and a growing sense of where Sasha, the manga editor, might be going as a man. Kio wouldn't throw his characters under a bus for a cheap laugh, thank god, and we end up with no easy resolutions, but natural ones. Far more so than most romantic comedies, which, oddly enough, is what the Genshiken series has become.

I salute kio, whose work I find amazing and so effortless that it must take a hell of a lot of work to produce. Thanks. I have no idea if there are volumes to follow, but what we have now is one great read.

In Review of: Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!

In the growing number of volumes that exist on my bookshelf about comics, about the history of comics, and the importance that they play or don't play in our lives, I have an odd place in my heart for some of the essays gathered in the rather unwieldily titled Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!

One in particular that I wanted to discuss is the essay Oui, Je Regrette Presque Tout by Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil. A personal experience of longing and occasional self loathing, of missing the chance to acquire some original art, wrapped up in a quick overview of Starlin's Warlock takes less than 20 pages, but what a great 18 pages it is.

"You have the fever," a friend once told him, as he once again mentally cataloged his own art collection, as well as that of his friends. And you know what? I know that fever, I haven't had a day without it for a couple decades. I just hope that I'm past the self loathing.

While Starlin's run ended with issue #15 in print, the real ending of the story takes place issues earlier, as the current, in time, Adam Warlock goes ahead in time to his future self and sees what a disaster his life has become. "My life has been a failure, I welcome its end," opines the future Adam, and the current steals his soul, setting up a circular loop of causality that will boggle the mind as many of Starlin's metaphysical questions tend to do.

As a teenager, filled with the hormonal angst, that a nameless longing that can only strike those who have finally glimpsed a bigger world, only to be denied it by dint of age or ability, I read those panels and felt each and every word that came from Adam's gritted teeth. At some point or another, most teens have probably felt that, have thought of death and all its drama... and either decide to do something about it or not. The adult Starlin adroitly found the drama of Warlock's life and reduced it, no matter what, to an unhappy ending that anyone who has felt the sting of failure can respond to, something rather unheard of in comics at the time. While most people point to The Death of Captain Marvel graphic novel as sticking in their minds, Adam Warlock's death is far better realized.

The highlight of Gold's essay is his own story of collecting fever, and the role that it plays it played in his (and oh so many of ours) life. A chance encounter with a closed shop and a treasure trove of original art and a reclusive owner... its practically an origin story in and of itself.

He finishes with a thought:

there is a strange twilight awaiting collectors. Your moment passes and what you are left with is stacks of whatever monstroous accumulations you so desired. And you fade by some mechanical, spiritless process, like that little blue dot at the center of a screen in the days of solid state television.

Does that fate await us all, surriounded by endless "kipple" (to quote Phil Dick) that we once were sure that we needed? I ask myself that with each piece that I pick up, that little internal question that can start to discern, "why am I buying this piece of art?" there has to be a good answer along the way or the art goes back to the pile. And yet, it took dedicating a room of the house to show off the pages, making a wall and a half of the TV room the gallery to finally cement the fact that I was collecting this stuff because I liked to look at it. Just buying them and keeping them in a portfolio was an idiotic exercise. I didn't want to have them to have them, I wanted to look at them.

I have settled enough in middle age to deal with my failures and my successes, in my own sense, enough that I can function as a human being. I still recall Warlock's despair, honestly, but its a bit more at an arm's length these days. I still have the fever, but can take pills for that. And I'm glad that I have Gold's essay as a reminder that, when things could get bad, that there are brother's under the skin out there, who know it and felt it just like I did/do.

More thoughts on the essays in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! later.

In Review Of: Vinne Colletta

20th Century Danny Boy offers up a fascinating post two days ago, which, if you go back to '80's Marvel and the Jim Shooter reign, dredges up a ton of dirt and manure and doesn't even attempt to bulldoze it back into a recognizable form when all is done. Danny gives us a scan of Colletta's "exit interview", a scathing letter written to other Marvel editors, and a long, anonymous interview/discussion with Vinnie about Shooter's firing. It's behind the scenes more than you ever wanted to do, and its fascinating as all hell. Once and for all it should dispel any rumours that all was well and good at the House of Secret Wars, and it should also dispel the idea that editors pick artists for a book solely on their brush lines.

He also indeed did take a lot of shortcuts in his work, in some cases he erased the pencils so he'd not have to ink them. Jack Kirby would draw detailed backgrounds only to see them simplified by Colletta. Yet there were other sides to Vinnie.

Eddie Campbell joins in with a very on target appraisal of Colletta's strengths,

his finishing style was distant from the superhero house styles at both DC (Murphy/Giella) and Marvel (Sinnott/Giacoia). But he was fast and dependable. Ah Fate! An artist's strength becomes his undoing.

as well as noting something that I noticed years ago: you can't judge by reprints, which most folks have to do. This directly effects those who use small lines, whether by brush to feather out (and the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby/Syd Shores '40's Captain Americas suffer greatly in this regard) or using a crow-quill pen, which Vinnie used a lot of in Thor and elsewhere.

So how to appraise Colletta without damning him or covering over his faults? If you liked his talents, and clearly he knew his way around a pen nib, then enjoy the original printings of his Thor. If you didn't like his work, and I thought that most everything he did was crap, even if he did get it in on time, then forget it and move on.

But... as Eddie brings up, there is the notion that artist can get trapped in his own reputation. I got caught in the same trap that Colletta did: I made a point of making myself as someone that never missed a deadline, and in making myself valuable by getting work out, I compromised the work, thinking that the editors would finally reward me with the good job on a regular deadline... and instead they start to look at you as a hack. (Nice. Nice way to get people to work hard for you.)

The question here is: why would Thor or the FF ever be late? We know the speed that Jack could produce pages, its documented fact. There is no reason that Thor should ever be late. Or FF #40 for that matter. Two of the fastest guys in the business and they can't keep up on the regular deadlines for the book? Doesn't jibe for me. Occasional rush issue fine, but month after month?

Any answers?

edited to add: Mark Evanier brings up the same point about Thor not being late in his column here that I did. And doesn't mince words on how bad Vinnie's work was. Good for him.

Kirbyfied and Ditkoized: When to Reboot

Our friends over at Trout in the Milk have some interesting comments on the Eternals comic, some of which got me thinking in a slightly different direction (since I've not been reading Eternals)

The Marvel Universe has grown incredibly boring as time’s gone on, because after it stopped its imaginative expansions it had nothing else to do but consume its own heart…but these Eternals, Deviants, and Celestials are different from what they were before, now. They’re potentially interesting. You could do things with them, now. The way Jack left them they were far too radioactively Kirbyfied for anyone else to risk touching them, but so was everything at Marvel, once upon a time…and what wasn’t Kirbyfied was Ditkoized, which can be even more dangerous.

and I started to question just how much time goes by before we will allow radical reimagining of beloved characters. Certainly we all want to avoid the "trapped in amber" version of a character that never develops, but how, really, did it take before we were able to move on from the Wein/Wrightson version of Swamp Thing? The character had to fall into development limbo/hell (except for a cool brave and bold drawn with panache by Aparo) and near cancellation before Moore got his hands on Alec Holland. Has anyone really been able to re-write swampy since then?

It used to be that if you wanted to work in mainstream comics on, say, Iron Man, you had to accept that Tony Stark was who he was and you had to accept all the background with Stark Industries and Whitney Frost and Happy Hogan et al. Since the Image Comics era, it has become far too easy to simply reimagine and reboot the character and not have any parameters to work within, whereas before, you were given too many restrictions. Neither is entirely the best place to work.

Just the semantics of "being radioactively Kirbyfied" killed me, but it certainly makes me try to imagine: who else Could have picked up the baton in Marvel in the 1970's and run with Machine Man or Devil Dinosaur? 2001 the series? It took DC poaching Starlin to make a run at the New Gods (which Jim did beautifully in Cosmic Odyssey), or Gerber and Rogers on Mister Miracle (which, to this day, I still think of as a bizarre pairing) Lets face it, hiring a Herb Trimpe or Sal Buscema to continue Devil Dinosaur is simply unthinkable, so its good that they didn't do it.

The real trick: when will someone turn Nick Fury: Agent of Shield into a viable series? After Steranko's turn, you have to go to Chichester and Guice's version for anything that isn't worth recycling.

New Buying Habits: David Lapham's Silverfish

Newsarama has an interview with David Lapham, one of my favorite creators, and a fun guy to work with, and I can't help but plug that he has a new project out, a 155 page graphic novel called Silverfish.

I knew David from the days back at Defiant Comics, and was psyched to see him move on to doing El Capitan and Stray Bullets when Defiant closed its doors. Inking Plasm #7 over his pencils was incredibly cool and I wish that I had see it get better coloring and printing than it eventually got.

Stray Bullets was a great kick in the head and deserved all the praise that it got. David and Maria got it right first time out of the door.

I've not run into David in a couple years now, but he's a great guy who deserves all the success in the world. Go pick up his book, vote with your dollars on buying the good stuff and supporting creators who deliver the goods on both story and art.
This would be a great month to not buy that Marvel or DC book that you've been buying out of habit.

In Defense of: Tom Brevoort and Manga

i'm seeing a lot of posts around the blogoverse regarding Tom Brevoort's column/blog on Manga and, for the most part, people are really having a go at Tom for his remarks. While normally taking pot shots at Marvel is pretty easy these days, I wanted to get the context of what he's saying. Here are the quotes that seem to be getting everyone's panties in a bunch:

I see the rise and spread of manga in this country as additive to the comic book market, rather than directly competing with what we do.... What manga has done is to get a lot more people reading comics. And while they may really only like that one type of comic, at least at the moment, that does open the door to the potential that we could lure some of those readers into checking out what we're doing.

And with that, I completely agree. There is nothing factually wrong with what he's saying, but what is going unsaid is how Marvel and DC will be bending to that Manga reading crowd over the next 20-30 years. Think about the work that was being published coming out of the late 60's: you had a generation fueled by Neal Adams and Jim Steranko that sparked Paul Gulacy and Bill Sienkiewicz and a whole host of others that dominated the direction of art for the next decade.

For the kids now entranced by Manga we'll see the continuation of Manga-fied Spidey as a way to keep the character relevant. Does anyone think that anyone would have published Humberto Ramos 20 years ago? He'd have been relegated to the "never use" slush pile that every editor has sitting in a corner of their crowded office. Things clearly have changed. The kids who did Teen Titans Go! will be looking for that for the next 10 to 20 years.

So, yes Tom, they will become graphically literate and may start to check out what Marvel and DC are doing, but chances are that the "big 2" will have to adapt more than they want to admit to survive and capitalized on those kids.

I think that Tom is getting piled on because he's a Marvel Editor, and he's speaking from that viewpoint. Nothing wrong with that at all, and it should mean something that he's openly speaking about Manga at all, since Marvel and DC had been pointedly ignoring Manga (TokyoPop and the rest) for a number of years. So whatever other stuff you have against Marvel, this acknowledgement shouldn't be one of them.

Tom concludes:

So there's a definite crossover of ideas and approaches going on.

Cool. Good summation. If there is anything that I love, it's that 2007 has more good ideas and more good stuff than we saw 10 years by far. Viva La Good Ideas!

Old Iron Man vs. New Iron Man

While I would have had fun scanning the cover of Iron Man #18 (which is still one of the best Iron Man covers of all time), instead I had fun finding this image:

That's just great.

Will the real Tony Stark please show up?

In Review Of: The Mighty Avengers by Bendis & Cho

Haven't we moved beyond this?

I just read the first two pages of the new Avengers series so I'm reacting on instinct here, not on a reasoned and long thought out review of the two issue old series.

But, you're rebooting the Avengers, and you're picking and choosing which toys you want to play with like a kid drunk on children's sudafed running loose thru Toys-R-Us.

And you pick the Ultron doll.

I love Ultron, who has been a neurotic butt-kicking adamatium robot and supplied plenty of thrills, whether done by Roy Thomas and a young Barry Smith or Jim Shooter and George Perez, and I want to see him done right.

What I got, however, is an arbitrary decision to make Ultron a nude human female for the sake of cheesecake. And, in this day and age, to have to resort to the stupid little wisps of smoke over the nipples seems silly. If you want to make him a nude female, do it in a book that can have nudity, if not, then design a different female Ultron body, one with seams and lines, and keep the coloring consistent from page to page, so that you don't have to do the coy Gypsy Rose Lee cover-up.

I hope that this is going somewhere new, because we've seen Jocasta and we've done this story. And I have to say that while I dislike some of what Bendis is doing with the book, overall I enjoyed the set up of the new team, and think that putting Ares on the team is a hoot. Sentry, on the other hand, is annoying, and had better be leading to something or it will be a huge waste of time.

Can you believe it, I'm actually commenting on a mainstream Marvel book. Didn't think that that would happen.

Alex Ross: The Bulge That Ate Chicago

C'mon, do we really need to get riled up over this?

And by this I mean the argument over whether Steel has a hard on or not.

Its clear that he has something going on down there, but I've seen waaaaaay too many homophobic blogs from men who would have no problem with prepetually erect nipples on Wanda and She-Hulk and labia hugging thongs on Fairchild of Gen 13 or the current Star Sapphire cringing over the moderate bulge presented here. Brian Cronin's description of the image as "creepy" is just bizarre. Don MacPherson even goes over the top with this line: And if one looks closely, it’s not just his fists and flesh that are hard as a rock.

As for those arguing that he has an erection, I have one thing to say: If you think that that is an erect penis, I feel very sorry for your significant others. Really.

With Ross here, we live and die by the International Male Photo Reference. Personally, I'm way more jealous of his abs. You know how hard it is to get that six pack?

I'm cool with it. Why's it buggin' you so much?

Evanier's New Book: Kirby: King of Comics

Mark Evanier, who has done such a great job of actually not just keeping Jack's legacy alive, but expanding on it (a tricky task in itself) with mis-appropriating it, is finally going to release his book: Kirby: King of Comics this fall in 2007. The Amazon description is as follows:

Jack Kirby created or co-created some of comic books’ most popular characters including Captain America, The X-Men, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, Darkseid, and The New Gods. ... Almost everything that was different about comic books began in the forties on the drawing table of Jack Kirby. This is his story by one who knew him well—the authorized celebration of the one and only “King of Comics” and his groundbreaking work.

“I don’t think it’s any accident that . . . the entire Marvel universe and the entire DC universe are all pinned or rooted on Kirby’s concepts.” —Michael Chabon

Original pull-out poster art by Alex Ross

I've linked out to the Amazon page, but if you really care, take the ISBN number to your local book shop and have them order it. Chances are that they could use each and every sale.

This is due out October 1, 2007, if they publish on time. Pity it won't be out for San Diego.

While I've never really met mark and sat down with him, I enjoy that he does as much work as he does in the comics and pop culture realm, and also appreciate that he answered my queries about the Kirby signature that was on the FF #20 page that I purchased last year. His work in the Jack Kirby Collector is always a good read if you ask me!

Lets Talk: Eisner Nominations 2007

The Eisner nominations have just been released for this year, and I wanted to dissect just a few of them, starting with an interesting list for the Hall of Fame:

Hall of Fame

Judges’ Choices: Robert Kanigher and Ogden Whitney

Voters will choose four from among:

• Ross Andru & Mike Esposito
• Dick Ayers
• Bernard Baily
• Matt Baker
• Wayne Boring
• Creig Flessel
• Harold Gray
• Irwin Hasen
• Graham Ingels
• Joe Orlando
• Lily Renée (Peters) Phillips
• Bob Powell
• Gilbert Shelton
• Cliff Sterrett

Now, each of the last couple years there have been a few complete no-brainers, ones the no one in their right mind with passing knowledge of comics could pass up for the Hall of Fame, but this year we've got more than a few open to interpretation and debate. Here are, for better or worse, my picks to vote for:

Cliff Sterrett - One of the true unacknowledged masters of the comic medium from the early 20th Century. Very few people seem to know about him, but the artwork on his strip Polly and Her Pals continues to delight me whenever I crack open any of my kitchen sink reprints. Not nearly as heralded as Krazy Kat or Nemo, and I agree that his work is a step below those masters, but I like it much better than many of his comtemporaries. Cliff gets my vote.

Matt Baker - Good Girl artist extraordinaire gets the next vote. The master of the Headlight Cover (Note to Heidi Meeley: We need to put up an old Matt Baker cover for your "Is it gratuitious?" feature) could really draw when he wanted to and that helps to get my vote. He had solid composition skills, even when his elements were pulchritude and created a true look, something that the better artists are able to do.

Harold Gray - All the debate over Harold's politics has washed away over time, which might allow us to take a better look at the quality of his comic strip. Since his strip was rooted in the times that it was being drawn, Little Orphan Annie had a great deal of social and political commentary, which invariably was something that predjudiced readers for or against him. (My two daughters have discovered the Annie movie musical, and I've not the heart to bring up the unlikelihood of a black female assistant marrying a rich white billionaire back in the 1930s, much less how Daddy Warbucks made his millions.) Harold was a shrewd observer of his times, and made no bones about using the strip to comment, skillfully, on what was happening around him. Annie's eyes may be vacant, but her head isn't. I vote Annie and Sandy in to the Hall of Fame. Harold was skillful enough to raise the hackles of people who disagreed with him.

Here is where it gets tough: there are any number of others who will have partisans in their corner, but it will be tricky to get a critical mass to actually vote for Ingels or Boring. I would disagree with Andru and Esposito being in the Hall of Fame for instance, or even Wayne Boring for that matter. Competence and longevity are not the things that should get you into the Hall of Fame, and that is where I place them. Gilbert Sheldon may have been unconventional, but he was a true trailblazer, and there are far more Furry Freak Bros. tattoos on stoners than their are Wayne Boring Supermen. My final vote would go to Sheldon or Joe Orlando.

Agree or disagree?

Blast from the Past: Void Indigo

Happened to run across this, a link to plot for Void Indigo #3-6, Steve Gerber's much reviled, overlooked and, now infamous, work from the early '80's. Along with Val Mayerik, Void Indigo simply was too different to succeed back then; the sex combined with too many disturbing images, too much weirdness in the story about the coming of the Dark Gods, just pretty too much everything.

Of course today it would sell buckets.

But back then it was a total of one graphic novel, god knows how long it too Val to paint the entire thing but I hope he got a good page rate, and two issues of Marvel's Epic line.

And it was an odd failure. Steve, in his post-Howard the Duck and Man-Thing days, kept branching out and trying new stuff: not all of it was successful, but I give him major points for trying back then as a fan. As a professional now I appreciate the amount of work that he was putting out. In any case, you're bound to have some successes and some failures along the way.

Comics back in 1980 were a bizarre mixed bag. You certainly had a number of creators that had grown past superhero comics, Gerber, McGregor and Starlin for instance, that were trying to say different things, deeper stories and were looking for venues to do so, but the publishers needed reliable outlets for their magazines, and there needed to be an audience to buy this stuff.
And there wasn't yet any of these things. And yet still they tried, through Marvel's epic line, through the first Graphic Novels, to bravely determine if anyone would buy stories about love and revenge and aliens and death where the good guys didn't always win, and things weren't always so clean at the end. God bless the pioneers.

So yeah, Void Indigo. I always kinda wondered what would have happened next. Now I know. god bless the internet for keeping things like this around.

First Look: the Original Iron Man

Not the fascist Tony Stark currently running (ruining) the Marvel Universe, but the real one ala Don Heck and Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. Go kick some Mandarin butt Tony. And say "hello" to Professor Yen Sin.

In Review of: Johnny Hart's B.C.

Someone, a long time ago, made a point of putting a time limit on the comic strip: i.e. any single strip that hit 35 years needed to be retired. Even the great Peanuts was tired at 35 years of age, and finished up its run dimming the memory of just how good it was in its decade long prime.

B.C., which obviously will end with Johnny Hart's death, will end, but it will be remembered more for the its controversy than for its earlier highlights. As a child, I read the paperback collections that were published in the 60's and 70's and didn't always get the sardonic tone that Hart had in the strip, not did I get some of his more obscure puns, but there were others that were so simple and direct that they were the equivalent of a visual knock-out punch.

What, unfortunately, will be remembered, is Hart's overt religious stance in the last 16 years of his life, and the effect that it had on his strip. The Washington Post's Obit on Hart has two paragraphs on two of the most directly offensive strips from the last 16 years of B.C.:

One Easter "B.C." strip showed a menorah's candles being extinguished as the candelabra morphs into a cross; the final frame included the words, "It is finished." To his critics, this symbolized a triumph of Christianity over Judaism, but Mr. Hart said it was meant to "pay tribute to both" religions.

Muslims were enraged by another "B.C." strip that ran during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It featured an outhouse with multiple crescents -- a symbol associated with Islam -- and showed a cave man saying from inside the makeshift bathroom, "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?"

Wow, that's really subtle. Hart also has this quote from 1999:

"I don't know if it's the liberalization of this country or whatever [that] has taken prayer out of schools and pulled the Ten Commandments off the walls of courts, and we've become a nation of heathens. The Christians are still out there, but they're hiding," he said. "They're afraid because every time somebody tries to make a move, somebody steps on them and pushes them back or locks them out. So they think that I'm a hero, and I'm not. . . . That's probably the most pathetic thing of all, that they admire me and think that I'm courageous and brave to mention God's name."

Guess what, last I heard, there was separation of church and state in this country. And, by the way, calling the rest of the country "heathens" if they don't believe what you believe is a good way to get people to hate you, even people like me, who strongly believe in the right for you to say whatever you wish with your art. Even if it gets you into trouble.

No one gets a free pass with their death, and, personally, I dislike Hart's overtly religious cartoons, no matter who they're directed at, even while I appreciate the talent in the early years. Unlike the Anti-terrorist cartoons that landed the dutch in trouble (since they were labeled as anti-muslim), his cartoon have no specific statement, other than: "My religion is better than yours." If you want to go after my work when I'm dead, don't pull your punches, 'cause my feelings won't be hurt, I promise you.

Especially using a caveman to write a poem lamenting Jesus' death. Sorry, the title of your terrible screed is "B.C." as in "Before Christ". This is the only bit of continuity cop I'll bother to play: duh, Johnny, Jesus hadn't been born yet.

I won't miss having to watch more trees destroyed for B.C. or the miserable Wizard of ID. Both strips are better off six feet under.

Edited to add this terrible news:

Daily strips already done by Hart will run through April 28, and Sundays through May 20.

In tribute to Hart, his family will select six weeks of their favorite “B.C.” strips to run daily between April 30 and June 9, and Sunday between May 27 and July 1.

After that, “B.C.” will resume its regular schedule. As previously reported, Hart’s children and grandchildren will continue the comic.

MIA

Sorry to have been missing but real life has been calling. I'll be back soon with new reviews and comments on:

• the seven soldiers of confusion... er... victory
• a concentrated dose of Y: the last man
• a new Pistoleras cover
• more good stuff!
  

Marshall Rogers: A Remembrance

I just received the word that Marshall Rogers had died and I still don't want to believe it. Marshall, who I've written about before, was, in my opinion, the greatest Batman artist of all time. What he lacked in technical ability at anatomy at the time that he burst on to the scene in 1977 was far overcome by his natural gifts in storytelling, and his unique vision.

The scans are from my originals of Detective #478, Eclipse Magazine #8 and an unpublished page from a Goodwin/Rogers/Austin that was abandoned when Archie died. The Panel from Detectives Inc. is scanned from the book.

Why should we remember Marshall? I only met him once in person, as a teenage fan, and I was looking forward to seeing him at the Super-Con on June 2nd and getting the chance to chat with him. But not knowing him moves his work in to a totally different realm for me: I don't have the chance to know that man behind the curtain, and now I never will. His Batman will remain enigmatic to me, a creation of Englehart's brain and Marshall's and Terry late hours at the drawing board.

DC, has, by a loose count, reprinted the seminal Batman tales that the three did in Detectives #471-476 more than 6 times in the last 30 years, which must be some kind of record. For all that people say that O'Neill and Adams reinvigorated The Batman, I believe that it was the Rogers/Austin Batman that set the template for the many more years to come, until others decided to subsume Miller's future Dark Knight persona in to the modern day.

Oddly enough, I always believed that those issues were the pinnacle to the three teaming up to produce such a rare and perfectly balanced masterpiece of a story, and yet that was hardly the truth at all. Steve wrote all six issues and delivered them to DC and went off the write his first novel, the underrated Point Man. The pacing of the books was modified by Marshall in places, as was some of the dialog, to fit the story on the board. That's incredible. Marshall was just channeling this new version of The Batman from his head and filling pages with it. The movement of the cape alone was so... different... than those that had come before it, that I still can't quite figure out how he decided to put so much air under the thing.

I fully intend to do a long look at the O'Neill Rogers Batman text story someday. And I'm not even biting into the Mister Miracle issues, which had their own mix of Rogers and Kirby pastiche. I don't think that they were as successful as The Batman work, but they should have been.

Leaving DC, Marshall was on the vanguard of alternative publishing, with Don McGregor on the inaugural Detective's Inc: A Remembrance of Threatening Green. Filled with beautiful odd moments, Marshall pulls out all the stops, including using a whole art store's worth of zipatone on the opening night sequence alone, and the panel here, with its reverse sihlouettes on the trees.

I Am Coyote, my personal favorite, was serialized in the B&W Eclipse Magazine, and was a stunner of a story. Off on the deep end of magik ans science with Englehart again, Rogers took the art to town and went big (the originals are much larger that regular art, and seem to have a much more epic feel to them, just as Kirby and Ditko did on the twice up art) and went weird. Coyote and the Void were scary and funny at the same time, and you got the uneasy feeling that you had stumbled onto some bizarre part of Steve Englehart's brain that wanted to put one hell of a fresh twist on the usual shadow cabinet rules the world story.

While Coyote would continue as a character on Marvel's Epic line, it would never have Roger's unique vision on the art again.

Scorpio Rose, the Strange Apparitions portfolio. The Madame Xanadu one shot. Oddities that crept out of Roger's studio, but that never scratched the itch that the prior work had given us. Marshall was a visionary, but his vision let us to the Foozle and that wasn't what we wanted at the time. Mainstream comics were not at the right spot for Marshall.

I wish that we had had more issues like those of his '70's work. I wish that Levitz hadn't gone to the Dollar
Comics and simply left his and Giordano and Wein on the regular book for a year. Just so that we could have see where it all would have, could have gone without the interruptions. Most comic fans don't need the history lesson, but I want to go down memory lane, when Marshall was an innovator whose work floored me, and I wanted for people to see some of exquisite work in all its original black and white glory.

I wish that i had had time to go to dinner and bullshit with him for a while. But I can't, and it violates my cardinal rule: find the people whose work you love and tell them that. Buy them dinner and beer. Give them their props. I just ran out of time. Damn.

A nice quote from Steve in the LA Times Obituary:

"He drew a total fantasy world, but he wanted it to be a very real fantasy world," Englehart said Tuesday. "It was very striking, it jumped off the page … another artist could have worked on pages every month for 30 years and not made the impact Marshall did."

In Praise Of Mentors: Alan Weiss

The Wardancer panels are scanned from my original pages.

Like many comic artists, I was essentially self trained in the specifics of comic art. Like most I nicked a nose from Adams, a hand from Gulacy, a layout from Perez and tried to synthesize them as my own. As I worked more on my inking I studied different approaches, from the thick line approach of Dick Ayers and Jack Abel, to the studied contrast in Klaus Janson and Pablo Marcos' work, to the precision in Terry Austin's.

How cohesive is this really? I recall seeing the swiped Chaykin figures in Jim Lee's early work. How do we develop a style and a language that will allow us to actually critique our work and make it better?

Arriving in New York for my first comic book work back in the early '90's, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on the book Wardancer with Alan Weiss. Alan had been through the trenches of '70's Marvel with all the people that were my idols, creators of my favorite comics: Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Barry Smith, et al, and had a million and one stories to tell.

And he could draw. Oh yes he could.

It would end up being the best situation that I could have imagined. My ink work looked terrible on the pencillers who came up with outlines and no substance. (Take a look at the first half of Good Guys #4, or better yet don't) Alan's work was a substance and form, all muscle and sinew, light playing over the figures as they moved and breathed in a 3 dimensional space. It was both a joy to work on and pulling out my own fingernails tough.

After I did each batch of pages Alan and I would meet at a diner to have a bite, talk some life and go over the work. He had asked me to do less feathering and use more texture to round the figures. I ended using a combination of grease pencil and dry brush work to add the grain he was looking for. It made for absolutely beautiful originals; they had depth and clarity and fullness to them that is lacking on more graphic work. Given the color process at Defiant, it also led to horrible, horrible printed work. It was a shame.

Alan gave me the terms and verbage to adequately discuss the art of comics, the art of lighting a figure and how to, if need be, fix said art. I did as much fixing as I could along the way. I learned how to sculpt the figure with the brush, much you might sculpt stone in three dimensions. I also found that few editors have the knowledge and language to adequately convey what they want from artists, which is a huge issue when it comes to review artists work at con, or being able to actually discuss the work in the office. It may be one of the great failings of the comic biz, that there are very few Archie Goodwins nuturing new talent or tweaking existing talent to being better.

It was an amazing education in a short concentrated period of time, punctuated by lessons on the politic of comic books, as well as the brutal reality of the comic market circa 1993/94, which was not a great time for comics. I know that in talks with Alan, I saw an extremely creative individual with a number of fun, interesting ideas, many of which were simply too far afield to have worked in the "grim and gritty superheroes or bust" world of the 1980 and 1990's. In a world of Rocketo and Milk and Cheese, Steel Grip Starkey would certainly have had a better chance of finding the sales it needed.

While those days of living in New York are more than a few years in the past, I still remember so much of those afternoon sessions poring of the artwork with Alan, figureing out ways to make things better. I still look at my own work with that eye: does it have form? Does it have substance? Does it take life on the page?

Viva La '70's: Part Two

An interesting debate rages over the blogosphere over the quality of the '70's comic, with some popular players weighing in. Here are a few bits to catch you up:

Over at Dick Hates Your Blog is a rehash of the 1970's era books, and, lets face it, he doesn't think very much of the them. In particular is his comment that nothing very good came along during the decade.

Marvel and DC were likewise rehashing the previous decade until Claremont and Cockrum (with much help from Len Wein) reinvigorated the superhero team comic. But again, the new X-Men are often lumped in with the comics of the 80s, perhaps because it was so influential on the comics of that decade.

and Heidi MacDonald retorts, quite correctly:

Come on now! Is Dick trying to be silly? As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the current comics biz is mostly run by post-boomers who all came of age reading 70s comics... Marvel in particular, had a great run that is still being strip-mined to death.

and Journalista at the Comics Journal, the vanguard of comics criticism, weighs in with this deep thought:

But let’s face it: 1970s superhero comics sucked pig balls.

To which many pigs, said "Yeah!" But the rest of us who were picking up the rapidly escalating 20 cent comics of the decade probably have a more informed take on the work. Our friends over at Journalista have their view, now here is mine.

The '70's, which have been labeled by Dick to be a decade without an identity had their high and low moments, but that was all against the backdrop of a huge shift in business and distribution that certainly had an effect upon the content in the books. The traditional newsstand distribution that existed, and thus a particular audience was starting to shift in the '70's, and you would soon see books that were selling on a fraction of the numbers that prior decades had seen.
Marvel, which has a ton of low points, although many of them not as low as DC's in the same decade, also had some very interesting high points. Want to look at Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock? The prototype for the giant universe ending crossover. Don McGregor's Killraven and Black Panther were almost of a lyrical bent, with metaphysical leanings, and certainly were the most literary comics prior to Alan Moore's arrival. Steve Gerber's acerbic wit lent Howard the Duck and Man-Thing a bite that would be hard to imagine in today's corporate driven properties. Moench and Gulacy's Master Of Kung Fu was an artistic delight to read (Doug's final story arc of multiple first person narratives in MOKF from #40 - 50 was certainly something that Marvel in the '60's would never have tried). Heidi had it right: Marvel is still mining the second generation of artistic talent that came in after Kirby, Ditko and Steranko.

Do I even need to mention the All New, All Different X-Men? I doubt that we would have comics today without them. As I mentioned in an older post on Dave Cockrum's death, we should be kissing the feet of Claremont, Byrne, Austin, Wein, and Cockrum that we have an industry to blog about.

That was Marvel in the '70's. It didn't need to establish one single identity to have some great high points.

DC? Put this in your pig testicles: Kirby's Third World is modern mythological foundation for the DC universe, started in the '70's. Do we have the Batman of today without Rogers and Adams' versions? Nope.

Your turn!

The Dark Phoenix Always Rings Twice

Odd Jack has some nice thoughts on making Mary Marvel evil, but besides being snarky about it, as I was on the Turner JLA cover, he starts to go into the odd thinking that happens when "Good Girls" turn to the Darkseid... er... Side.

Its amazing to see how often the new "Bad Girl" decides to use sex as her weapon of choice, or at the writer will use sex to show how uninhibited the new "Bad Girl" is, as if women with repressed sexuality are still a horrible norm in our society. Perhaps they are, but then why don't we see men expressing the same bad tendencies? Because men are already allowed to screw all the women that they want anyway and called "studs" while women who follow the same path are "sluts"?

If we try to go and rip away the odd victorian morality that we still see in some comics, it becomes obvious how "blah" the usual "Bad Girl" is. She puts on a darker costume (Dark Phoenix), uses her powers more creatively (Sue Storm), starts to use her vagina a little more, throw in a little lesbian kink and, PRESTO! You've got the "Bad Girl".

Perhaps if we didn't have such a stultified view of sexuality we would have far darker "Bad Girls". (Oddly enough, since so many of the comic founders were Jewish, their heroes and heroines were terribly whitebread. There is none of the deep sexual guilt in Judaism that we see associated with many other religions.) When I hear about mothers who lock their kids in the car and push the car in a lake, that is a far darker version of a "mother" than most comics will ever tolerate.

In order to make our characters "dark" we have to first identify with who they really are, not just men and women, but how they interact, what their fears are, and then we start to turn the screws on them and the reader. Repressed sexuality may be a part of the character, and, perhaps for Sue Storm, it makes sense, but I'm far more worried about a writer twisting our usual preceptions of women in interesting ways. Morrison's Zatanna from 7 Soldiers was a far more interesting version of her than we've been allowed to see. but Morrison's a great writer.

At least Dark Phoenix didn't have to die for having premarital sex with Scott. She just shouldn't have killed the damn Broccoli people. Perhaps Lis over at Kid Sis will haul out her thoughts on evil Scarlet Witch. Vacation on Wundargore Mountain anyone?

Rhetorical Question: Do Turner's Women Have Intrernal Organs?

Of course not. We all know that. Its just been proven once again by the sneak peak cover of JLA #10 the Meltzer has posted on his My Space page, that I've stolen and posted here.

OK, I'll be up front about this: I like breasts as much as the next heterosexual man, probably even more so. But this Power Girl is just out of bounds. Really. If they are going to be that big, than I want a body behind them that can at least look like it might hold them up and instead we literally have a chest cavity smaller that the mammary gland on top of it.

Obviously I'm wrong and the market place is correct because Turner keeps getting work, and I've never met Michael so I'm not picking on him personally, but this just doesn't work for me.

I'm clearly not a true fan boy anymore. I've lost my credentials.

Sneak Peek: Pistoleras Page 6

Another sneak peak at Pistoleras artwork with the tones added in.

Comments? Questions?

Oh That Pesky Generational Gap: Marvel Essentials

Over at Continuity Error is a post on the Essential series by marvel, which adds a wish list of new essentials.

This paragraph caught my eye:

Pretty much anything by Stan Lee is unreadable (sorry, Stan, you're a great creator but those old issues were baaaad), who the hell is Killraven and I don't think I'll ever want to read 500 pages of Ant-Man

as did this is at the top of the Essentials list most wanted:

Secret Wars: You can go two ways with this. There can be a single volume version with both Secret Wars and Secret Wars II along with some essential tie-ins, or it could be a two-volume set, one for the original and one for the sequel and each with plenty of tie-ins. I think it this would be a cool Essential mostly because I'd like to see the series feature important and classic storylines, not just reprint old stuff in order.

I respect Continuity Error greatly, first because I love the title of the blog and wish that I'd thought of it, and secondly because he featured the Godzilla vs. Barkley comic that a good friend of mine was the inker on, but that first paragraph just got to me. After all, I understand that you can't immerse yourself in that much Hank Pym at any one time without going so mad that you might find yourself turning into Yellowjacket.

However, I would make the case that McGregor and Russell's Killraven (i.e. The War of the Worlds) was an astonishing read in its day. Without having the issues in front of me, we had an interracial romance (which was not the sole focus of the sub-plot thank you), a father-daughter horror story as one of the band of adventurers has to care for her father who has had his mind taken away, and a whole host of emotionally wrenching episodes as they journeyed across the Martian devastated USA.

While starting out in a fairly generic Marvel style, P. Craig Russell moved forward at lightening speed (as did a number of his Marvel contemporaries most notably Starlin and Gulacy) both in terms of layout and illlustrative style. The rotating series of inkers on the book may have had the effect of making sure that some of the artistic growth was being buried under diverse hands, but for those who were looking it was apparent that Russell was something special. The series finale Mourning Prey was a monster step forward with P. Craig Russell's style, one that would signal his shift artistically to where he has gone to today.

And when it comes to the Secret Wars essential: Jeez, I can hardly believe that anyone would want read that again, much less have it in a squarebound edition, but hey, someone bought the thing in the first place, so there must be a level of nostalgia around it. I think that I would love this essential: Marvel's Essential Failures. Comprised of Omega the Unknown, Black Goliath, the odd Marvel Premier (Legion of Monsters, Seeker 3000, and Paladin), and The Champions (with unpublished material). Lets hear it for '70's Marvel goofiness!

We're Watching the Watchmen: Moore and the Movies

Buried on the Wired Blog I found this lovely still, which should wet the imagination of just about every comics fan out there, while igniting the same level of dread at equal proportion.

Why dread? Shouldn't we be overjoyed to have one of the signature works of the comics medium finally transferred and adapted to the big screen with a great big budget?

Having suffered through more than enough adapted Alan Moore movies, I can say that the dread has long since overtaken the excitement portion of my brain. Why should we expect that this adaption will be any better than From Hell or V for Vendetta? I would love to say that "Hollywood doesn't get it." but I don't think that that is actually the case. I think the makers of V did get that elusive "it" but were unable to fully translate the material to the screen. I'm not so sure about From Hell, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt a little bit.

The problem lies in a couple different areas: one, primarily, being that Moore's work tends to work on a number of different levels all at the same time, layers of subtext upon subtext. From Hell builds upon itself and the degree of drama is inherent in that, since we all know the general story of the Ripper. The standard screenwriter's "A" story, "B" story and "C" story seems to not be able to convey the material in a fashion that allows it to be adapted without being disemboweled.

The second, and this is key, being the episodic nature, never more so than in Watchmen. Squeezing all 12 issues will require so much material being taken out that I doubt that the murder mystery part of the material will get its proper due, much less the underlying motivations of the different costume wearers, the history of the alternate earth, the relationship of heroes to the community during different time periods, etc. Look at Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling's most successful long form book in the Potter series: at 3 hours it plays like the short version of the book, with all the most important plot points, for the Harry Potter fan. Those wishing the real deal will work their way though the book. The same need to condense the material will most likely happen to Watchmen, and it will lead those non comic fans to say,"What's the big deal?"

A modest proposal: Watchmen as an HBO miniseries, like 24 or Carnivale, that would require the viewer to come back again and again as the clock moves closer and closer to midnight. I would allow the material time to breathe and the view digestion time to appreciate the subtextual material better. It makes the payoff at the end all that much better.

A Boom Tube Full of Comics: Jack Kirby Omnibus

Now, this is the RIGHT way to do this.

Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus vol. 1 will be released in May, marking the first salvo in DC’s plan to reprint the entire Fourth World saga in order of publication. Readers today will be able to read the stories in the order that readers in the early 70s were able to read them. Vol. 1 collects stories from Jimmy Olsen #133-139 and the first three issues each of Forever People, Mister Miracle and New Gods.

The important part of this, really, is the ordering. Kirby was, without any question, a real stream of consciounce writer, one whom ideas and concepts would cascade into the forefront of his mind and spill out onto the page.

Mark Evanier has certainly written about how Kirby created the Black Racer and agreed that maybe he would hold off on using him so that the readers could get used to the lay of the land with Lightray, Orion and Darkseid, and then the very next issue #3 of New Gods had, you guessed it, the Black Racer!

This will be a great pickup, and an entertaining read for those who have never read the original source material that DC has been using and sometimes abusing for over 30 years. Even for us old timers, I know that I have gaps int he original issues that I read, thus missing some of the narrative thread, and that this will give a fresh approach to the material. I'll be very curious to see others make a fresh evaluation of the material. My guess: the ordering of the comics will point out that the series was even better than people remember, but that its flaws, because its certainly not perfect, will also be magnified by the printing here. Just my guess. Soon we'll see

The Cynic: Jennifer de Guzman and More Wonder Con

De Guzman has a post about WonderCon that she label's "I'm so cynical", and after prowling the aisles myself, I can certainly see the side of things that are doing such a good job of bringing her down. Here is her most positive paragraph:

I think what depressed me is the separation I feel from comics and graphic novels as storytelling and art when I'm in convention crowds. Sometimes it is not like that. Sometimes I'm gratified that we're getting these comics into people's hands. And there are those moments, when more girls pick up Wonderland or GloomCookie, or I say, "Oh, no, they can look at it all they want! We don't believe in putting comics in plastic bags around here!" when a father warns his kids not to touch copies of The Super-Scary Monster Show too much, and the kids open the book and grin at the art, and one declares, "I want to be a cartoonist when grow up!"

But lets be realistic. There will always be chicks in tight skirts and cleavage to draw attention to people's booths. I've been going to comic shows longer than she's been alive, and while I deplore the emergence of porn as a viable sales vehicle in the comics/collectibles biz, this is no different than the shift that has happened in the outside world. So after all these years of Cons, here's what I think: things are miles better than they were just 10 years ago in the long off age of 1997.
Yes, there is a disconnect between the folks that desperately want to be having a picture taken with the Adam West Batman (although the kitschy part of me thinks thats OK) and the Eddie Campbell, Gene Yang, Evan Dorkin fans, but that's OK. Hell, Evan might even go pose for a laugh.

For while our little comic get togethers like Wonder Con, San Diego, and (god help us) Wizard Con may be examples in geek excess, indeed almost any gathering of people devoted to one particular subject tends towards that, but in the real world, the aisles of Borders as opposed to Wonder Con, there is a much great relevance of Gene and Eddie's work than there is for the dreaded Spider Sperm saga.

This is a GOOD thing.

We're winning the battle, slowly but surely. And for every well done graphic novel by Slave Labor, Oni, NMB, Fantagraphics or any of the others, we increase the chances that our medium is taken seriously and rejuvenated as a popular media form.

So, jennifer, take a deep breath and relax. Your Monkey "scratch and sniff" shirt is in the mail.

The Art of Storytelling: Should Cinema Rule?

Eddie Campbell, over at his site, has been putting up a number of "rules" of storytelling that he tries to live by, and I was caught by this one, In Thrall To The Cinematic Principle, which uses Bernie Kriegston's powerful EC tale, The Master Race, to discuss how comics are like and not like movies.

Eddie makes a number of good points about highlighting the drama and the action between the figures in the story, and brings a arguement against the modern comic page layout: i.e. one large panel with a splashy figure surrounded by a number of small panels that break time and action down in a series of step whether equal in time or unequal. (Image to be posted later)

I recall someone who was editing a version of the Marvel Universe guide discussing how hard it was to find a shot of Cyclops using his eye beams with the effect of the beams being shown in the same panel. He had to go all the way back to Kirby's layouts in X-Men 13 or so to get the shot.

Its true, we have a tendency to focus our camera on the protagonist of the panel often, and in doing so, we lose all the tension of the proximity of the figures to one another, their body language, their reaction to a word balloon in the same panel (thus compressing time into an immediate reaction shot in that panel). Twice in Pistoleras, I have scenes in the first 10 pages where the girls are stuck in smaller spaces and have to react to each other in a relatively quick series of exchanges, whether verbal or non-verbal. It seems rare to have that many "two-shots" in succession.

Krigstein, in other interviews, rails against the limitations that were laid upon him by Gaines at EC, and there is no question, given "Master Race" and what he would have liked to have done with it, that we would have far more advanced work from him had he been allowed to continue.
What is shocking is how Gaines couldn't see the forest for the trees here, while being so good as to allow Kurtzman the ability to follow his genius, and Woody his muse.

"Master Race" perfectly illustrates what Campbell is talking about, and he reproduces one of the pages at the climax of the story that makes a point to contain both characters of the story in each panel, thus never decreasing the drama as we're always aware of the proximity of each man to the other.

With all apologies to Scott McCloud, it has nothing to do with what is being said or done between the panels here. Each image is chosen to follow into the next, and makes for a powerful read-thru. It is in direct contrast to reading an episode of Love and Rockets, where so much is being set up in panel, and then we have an eighth inch of white space and we have to figure out what happened between Hopey and Maggie from the next 10 panels. Two different approaches. The latter rewards clever writing and patient readers.

I'm personally quite glad to see that Bernie left us at least this work to study, read and enjoy.

More on Eddie's rules later.

In Praise of: The Return of Jack Knight, Starman

This little tidbit came from the DC Comics WonderCon panel:

James Robinson does have a story in mind for more Jack Knight stories, and the door is open, Didio said, now, schedules just need to match up.

Amazing news to me. Starman is the Great American Comic Book from the 1990s, and deserves all the acclaim that it can muster. DC knows this, and has done a wonderful job of keeping the trades in print so that just about anyone can jump on board this wonderful series.

Jack Knight's personal journey, and his comic book journey, have plenty of meaning to me, and so I revisit them, both journeys, reasonably often. Especially the first 50 or so issues. tony Harris made his name and his career on this book, and so its easy to overlook the stylistic oddities of the early issues knowing the marvelous art that is to come.

I respect Jack's decision to move on, and appreciate the end of the series because it has just that: an end. His property, legacy as a character, is not diminshed one iota over the last 10 years. Should James have another story in mind, all I can say is this: pick the artist with care. I had a difficult time with Peter Snejbjerg, and would not want to go there again. Tony, you got room in the schedule to do one more run at this?