Bits of the Past: The Comics that Neverwuz

Went searching for the damn Good guys origiinals in the closet and ran across other interesting stuff, pieces that I'd not seen in a long time.

Perhaps its the good red wine hitting me, but as I found myself looking over pieces that I had done 15 years ago or more, I found that I could remember a lot putting them together, perhaps more that I could remember about the times and places that surrounded the artwork themselves. I remember placing those blacks in just such a way on the page, or doing a trick to ghost in a hand that I couldn't quite pencil correctly. Holiday cards that bespoke of myself in college, living in some oddball apartment, surrounding myself with the oxygen that keeps a 20 year old alive: music, comics, scraps of paper with phone numbers, old grocery receipts heavy on Ramen, old running shoes under the bed.

And I stared at the lump of papyrus in my lap thinking, this is the most accurate way that I've measured my life: in lines on paper, in fantasies brought stillborn on the tip of a pen or brush. And its somewhat sad, in one way, since its filled with far more failed experiments that ones that work, but in another way I think: at least I have some way to measure; at least there is some path here.

lately I've been missing, again, youthful arrogance, in all its wonderful glory. Because, just as I can see the obvious lumps and bruises in Guy Davis' Baker Street, hear the frantic glory in the Jam's first album, I love these things that they were too stupid to know that the couldn't do. I love the bad posturing in Jim Starlin's early Captain Marvels, I love all the crazy little lines in Jamie Hernandez's early Locas stories that he would soon edit out, I love that someone believed enough in them to give them the opportunity to go and do.

As you can read in my earlier post about Defiant's Good Guys, it took years of going to conventions with my inks and having different editors say, "Well, that looks good." It finally took David Lapham looking me in the eye and saying, "This is really good stuff. Why aren't you working professionally yet?" and I looked him right back and could truthfully say, "I don't know. No one will give me a chance." and I knew that I wasn't hiding a single weakness in my game, I knew that I was ready. I had been ready. Perhaps thats why when Neil Pozner died, and practically everyone, it seemed, had a great note about what a wonderful guy he was, there was a contingent among us who knew that he was simply the gatekeeper to keep us out of DC, out of getting our work under the eyes of someone who could actually have given us work. I was jealous of the guys who had someone who would look at their work and say, "You know what, its not all there, but I'll give you a chance to get there. Here's the assignment."

At the top of this post is an early work, copyright myself and Todd Miro, that I still love. Just give it a click to see the larger version. I'll be raising my Led Zeppelin shot glass to toast all those who have helped someone along the way.

Fantastic Four: Review of the Silver Surfer

OK, I fully admit this is pretty damn hard to write a review of. We get the inevitable "Kirby whirlwind" in this movie . Seriously. A whirlwind. When was the last time that you saw one of those since "Twister" came out?
For years we've been decrying Hollywood messing up perfectly good comic stories by having to change and add and tweak the source material, material that clearly worked perfectly well on the printed page. "Why would you mess with the Galactus Trilogy?" we ask.

And we have our answer here. And its not an easy one to assess. We have a movie that is closer to the source material that any movie has come to, barring only X-Men 2. I was actually thrown by the early scenes in New York, with the FF in the Baxter Building, because the tone was so different from the first movie, and then I realized: I was actually seeing a Lee/Kirby comic, somewhere around FF #25 or so, brought to life. Ben and Johnny fighting, Reed and Sue having their small spats, using their powers casually amidst the banter. And it makes sense that they would, when you consider that we shouldn't have to see all the drama of Johnny flaming on, and Ben using his strength, the powers simply become an extension of what the characters do and who they are.

So, does all the Lee/Kirby banter and play translate to the big screen? Not entirely, although it seems to be a noble attempt. Someone really went back and read their Marvel essentials to try and get this right, and they almost did. I have to say, I love Alicia as a black woman, and think that it would be really cool to see her father, an African-American Puppet Master at some point.

When you consider that the first FF movie was one of the very worst superhero movies that has ever come to screen, stunned was a damn good description of just how different this script is. And I can't help but think if we had spent more time with this version of the characters, as opposed to the morose "grim and gritty" versions from the first movie, that we would care more and feel more feeling for when everything goes wrong in the second act.

And what a second act it is, really. A great combination of FF #49 and #60 which should be one hell of a winning storyline when you think about it. Doom, the Surfer and a weird cloud thing called Galactus (don't get me started on this one yet). And yet... despite a great helicopter crash sequence, the tension never really rises as much as it should, and the return of Doom falls far flatter than it should with Julian McMahon's missing the mark performance. But the whole thing simply never jells. I suppose I keep thinking that this would have been a great season finale, when we'd had time to share all the earlier adventures with them.

Alas we don't have that time. We do get treated to a Surfer that looks a whole lot like Kirby's version, and we even get a whole mess o' Kirby action, although forgive me if, for some reason, I thought that the action also seem choreographed somewhat by George Perez. I wish that we had more Ben Grimm in it to tell you the truth. Perhaps the next movie will be The Thing vs. The Hulk two parter.

And, at the last, Galactus as a huge cloud. Perhaps I'm alone in this, and believe me, I inwardly cringed more than most when I read about this one on the internet, but I have to say that I'm not sure if the comic book Galactus would have worked. Really. I'm not saying that the illegitimate son of V'Ger is really working for me, but it is better than some of what they would have come up with.

I don't think that this is a great movie by any stretch of the cinematic imagination, and yet, it is so damn superior to the first that it shines far more brightly than I think it should. Props to all for trying.

When is Original Art not what it appears?

Danny boy continues his great writings about the original art fandango that exists with the published version, or the credits on the published version not being what they appear. I love reading this stuff, of course, the behind the scenes being fascinating to me.

I recall all the different pages of the Good Guys #1 that we went through, including the notorious page 8, notorious to me at least. Here is the story: Defiant contacted me to a sample page of inks before I had ever broken into the industry and sent out a xerox of page 8, pencilled by Grey. A pretty good copy too, by the way, and I set about to light boxing it and inking it on 1 ply vellum, a killer paper that strathmore no longer makes. they specifically told me to keep it very clean. so I did. I then fed ex'ed it to NY and waited to hear. Of course 4 days later I got a call telling me that it was too "clean" and not what they wanted. I fully admit, I was crushed, and proceeded to tear the damn thing into pieces. I knew that the work was good, and was enraged that nothing was ever going to let me get my big break.

Here's where it gets interesting. Of course, two weeks later, they call me back to tell me that the veteran inker they ended up sending the first batch of pages to ruined them and they wanted me. But, since I was new and in California, I would have to come out and work under their eyes at the offices in New York. So they fly me out there and I see that they have only photocopies of the pencils of the first 8, but they aren't the nice photocopies, they're ghostly white. And they say, "Well, at least, we have your good version of page 8."

Page 8 was, I stress again, shredded. Shredded into the types of pieces that only truly righteous anger can lead one to making.

So I end up re-inking, via lightbox, the first 7 pages, and then using the poor xerox and my own xerox of page 8 to recreate page 8.

So what happens? They end up cutting up the xeroxes and condensing pages 1-8 into pages 1-6 and just glue the xeroxed panels onto bristol anyway.

And that's just the first quarter of the book.

Scans to come.

In Review Of: Blacksad - Arctic Nation

Had the genuine good fortune of getting a couple of graphic novels for father's day, and the one that I want to review today is probably the least well known of all of them.

First off, lets get this out of the way: I'm not generally down with anthropomorphic animals. Don't really know why, perhaps it was Ty Templeton getting to me with his classic "Even Teddy Bears Get the Blues" story in an old issue of Critters, but it even was a central complaint of mine when Spiegelman did it in Maus, so i'm putting everyone on warning. It bothered me in Omaha The Cat Dancer as well, since you asked.

And I'm trying really hard to put aside for this graphic novel, since the story is straight up, with almost none of the cutsey crap that infects other anthro animal tales, and the artwork is drop dead gorgeous.

The skinny on the plot is something right out of Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe: Blacksad, the Private Detective, is in on a case on an ecomically depressed area of the city, one littered with racism, lies and corrupt cops. Something that is generally overlooked in the Chandler and Hammett writings is that they were very much products of their time in all ways, especially in the social and economic locales that they inhabit. People continue to think of Chinatown as the Jack Nicholson movie, when it really is a story about people who really run LA: the money, the power (or lack thereof), and the control that they have. Blacksad takes a case in "the Line", which is overrun with the animal versions of the Ku Klux Klan who have taken the depressed economy as leverage to gather others to their "white" side. Against all this, a child is missing: who might be kidnapper, and why?

The artist and writer, both Spanish, should have a lot to thank for this translation, with never gets too bumpy or incomprehensible in a convoluted murder mystery. And the reproduction makes Guarnido's art look beautiful, the fulfillment of all those poorly printed Heavy Metals from the '70's giving us a taste of what full color comics should look like.

I guess that should be raving over the work, since I'm a real sucker from someone who gets the roots of why noir works, as opposed the simply aping the trappings, and make no mistake Canales does, but my brain kept slipping out of gear on certain things. things like the scene where our hero, a black and white cat, is getting something in a bodega, when a gang of black anthropomorphic horses come in and beat up the storekeeper as well as a ferret reporter with Blacksad. They then turn on Blacksad, who has white fur on his face, and say "what happened to your face brother?" and I'm thinking, why would horses care about the white fur/black fur race issues of the cats? If we're really dealing with race issues, wouldn't there be disention among the cats over other animals taking their jobs? And how did the horses get on the same evolutionary plane as cats and ferrets anyway?

Am I thinking about this too deeply?

And yet, the rest of the story, the resolution of the story, has a gravitas to it that doesn't demand light reading, it is ready to bear the full dramatic weight that Canales and Guarnido can convey. And I don't want it to fall apart at the last minute becuase the animal metaphor doesn't happen to hold up on a scene or two.

Quibbles perhaps, but worth noting, since the last thing that I want to have anything jar me out of a story as compelling as this one. I'm now on the hunt for book 1 in the series. I have no idea how many shops have this one on their shelves, but its sure worth a look. Canales and Guarnido make a dynamite team.

Original Art to Die For: The Holy Grail

20th Century Danny Boy has a long post about the art recreations that Mike Zeck is doing, has been doing, since 2000. I have to say that it was interesting reading, as I hadn't given much thought to the idea of recreations, much less the way that Zeck is doing them. While I've certainly seen some recreations in my dealings, I find myself wary of them, especially if you don't know the source.

As we all know, there isn't always the single original that we expect the art to have been shot off of. I know that I've run across a cover version of Detective #475 at a New york Con a number of years ago that was being offered as the "original", yet had no stats or even the glue marks of stats, which is pretty much unheard of from that era (1977). Yet it did look as though part of it was "original", i.e. that it had ink on paper that was put there by Terry austin. The clock artwork appeared to be a stat. Is there a story of how the cover was put together? Perhaps worth exploring. In this modern age of photoshop, it is even easier to manipulate the printed version. Dave McKean's Sandman covers looked wonderful in print, but the originals were multimedia nightmares to collect. I'm sure that most have gotten destroyed by this point.

Grail artwork:
There are a few grail artwork pieces that, if I were stupid rich, I'd be out there trying to find. I have no idea if they all still exist, although I do know for a fact that some are still in existence.

Captain Marvel #29 Cover













I know that this piece still exists, but without the Romita paste up face.

Miracleman #15 Cover

Johnny Bates and Miracleman in the most violent comic ever.

Saga of the Swamp Thing #24

The amazing two page spread with Etrigan making his appearance at the end of the book.

Master of Kung Fu #40 Splash page

The printed version of the page is a stat, and the main image exists somewhere out there...

Fantastic Four #51 Cover

Jack Kirby and his amazing creation, Ben Grimm in a beautiful pose on the cover.

Tower of Shadows #1

Steranko's splash page, which Albert Moy has had for years, is a masterpiece. I simply lack the 8 thousand dollars to purchase it!

i'm sure there are others, but all of these would be serious Grail pieces.

San Rafael Italian Street Painting Festival 2007: The Batman piece

Had the great experience of taking the weekend to finally participate in San Rafael's Street Painting Festival. Sponsored by Youth in Arts, which benefits local high school arts programs, it draws some absolutely tremendous artists to the street, and they produce come amazing work. After 6 years of walking down it and each time promising myself that I would remember to sign up for the next year, I would always forget. Didn't happen this year though. I signed up early, and then had do decide on a piece to do.

The square was 6x6 feet, a good area size, and while looking at a number of more classic pieces, I learned that Marshall Rogers had died, and I then decided to honor him by doing one of his works. I almost settled on the cover of Detective #475, but decided finally to go with the best plate from his 1981 Batman Portfolio, with Joker menacing the Batman with his joker fish. Its a particular version of the scene that I doubt that most people have ever seen.

Started to work at about 9 am on Saturday, and finished around 3 pm on Sunday. Got some good props from the folks walking by. While you can't see it in this picture, I did a bio labeled "Marshall Rogers 1950 - 2007" and taped it to the pavement. Had a lot of people stop to read it.

I'll post a finished picture later when I receive it, this picture is from early Sunday morning.

Original Cover Art: X-Men #137 by Byrne and Austin

20th Century Danny Boy ferreted this one out: a great scan of the original art for this classic cover. I'm putting this up for one reason: its amazing to see. As a professional inker, I have to admire Austin's linework up close and personal as much as I can.

Enjoy. This was part of a run of issues that was as good and classic as anything ever in superhero comics.

More discussion of recreations and "grails" and original art to come.

Men are from Talos IV, Women are from Metebelis 3

Lord Dingsi had this to rant about over at his live journal, regarding the gender divide and all the feminist thought currently making the rounds on the comic boards:

First, if women were a monolithic block of people with a similar mindset and the same goals and desires, targeting them as a market would be easy, right?
But they aren't. And we should all know that, because even if some of us aren't women ourselves, we still have girlfriends, or sisters, or mothers, or daughters, or female buddies and friends and workmates. They are no friggin' ALIENS, they are LIVING NEXT TO YOU. ON THE SAME PLANET. Stop pretending they were a different species.

"Comics" doesn't mean "genre", it's a medium, and people who love that medium pick the genres -- and the themes and artists and writers -- they like.

And this classic comment followed:

I don't know what's up with this 'the female market!' as though there really is a hive vagina, but I'm kinda sick of it!

Heh, heh. First off, the "hive vagina" phrase had me laughing for a whole minute and half, its such a good term to coin. Secondly, I appreciate the thoughts from Dingsi about the diversity
in the female population, as well as the diversity of their likes and dislikes.

The distinction between the medium and the work in crucial here. Just because you like going to see the movie does not mean that every movie is for you. Just because you like to read a book doesn't mean that the entire bookstore will appeal to you.

I certainly I know that my wife wouldn't be caught dead reading a single superhero comic book in the house, and yet I know a woman who can quote, verbatim, Scarlet Witch dialog from the
wilds of Wundagore Mountain, and clearly neither of them got the email to join the hive vagina. What comics do they like to read? I've yet to find a comic that grabs my wife's attention, period, so clearly the medium doesn't grab everyone, yet she loved Calvin and Hobbes, and we were devoted followers of the first time Shtinky Puddin' got lost in the snow in Mutts all those years ago. So its not the medium, but the work. My friend deeply loves the Avengers and superheroes, and I have no idea which, in any, of the alternative works have caught her attention. Does she like Andi Watson? I think that Breakfast Before Noon is a great work, but I've never asked her whether she's read it.

We are clearly at the growing pain stages of having all this diverse work exist out there, but with spotty distribution, and even spottier availability. Think about it, there is more great work of differing nature than we've every had before. Period. Maus can coexist with Cerebus, Strangers in Paradise, Powers, the Fantastic Four and Stagger Lee quite well thank you, but unfortunately, not everyone has equal access that, just as movie goers in NY and LA have more short run stuff, more art theatres, more access to the films than someone in a small town in Kansas does.

Distribution and availability will determine choices, as well as marketing by the companies, not just Diamond. After all, if you don't know that its out there, you're not going to go look for it. We would have less of discussion of the Hive Vagina if everyone could find work that they liked. Then we could get back to discussing important subjects, like Hulk versus Thor... er... sorry, old habits die hard.

Bonus points for anyone who knows both planets referred to in title of the post.

Tough to be a Fangirl: Notes from the retail front

Over at Sequentially Speaking is a great post on being a fangirl in today's comic world, and I especially like that fact that its written by a woman who owns a retail comic book outlet.

A couple of things in her list of real world examples stand out:

A young girl comes into the store with her dad and tells him how she would rather have the Teen Titans Go! comic over the Barbie comic. Now, KellyAnn doesn't say if dad encouraged the Barbie comic over Teen Titans Go!, but one could assume that he at least pointed it out to her - encouraging the young girl to go with the more traditional Barbie over a superhero comic book.

Oddly enough, I spend my entire time trying to explain the background of the JLA to my daughter, the barbie comic doesn't even apeal to her. Try explaining the current Wonder Woman comic to a 6 year old who really wants to understand it. Not easy at all.

Here is the best part:

Here's another point that I borrowed from a couple of blogs I've read recently - if a man walked into a store that had pictures of nearly naked men wrestling around with each other, toys of half naked men, and t-shirts that had pictures of half naked men in costumes on them - they probably wouldn't come back to that store.

And we certainly can thank Alex Ross and Citizen Steel for proving this point.

Lisa also relates an interesting story about two girls who had been regulars to her store but, three years later, one had found comics "not cool" and asked the other not to bring over her comics to a sleepover. Honestly, this story rather parallels the classic development of comic fans through the ages. It was no different that the 1970's when I recall going over to a kid who lived next door and asking him is he was still buying Detective Comics since this new Marshall Rogers guys was really doing interesting stuff. He gave me one of those "Oh, still playing with baby toys" kinda looks, and I realized that he simply didn't see what I saw in those books. I appreciated them on a completely different level, and so continued to find them interesting. It has always been this way, you could make the case, with genre fiction. Romance novels, detective stories and all the rest: they either engage or cease to do so when the hormones kick in.

In this respect, Manga continues to offer a great alternative to superheroes, and to give all the different aged tiers comics that they can move to. The teenage girl can move on to angsty teen stuff from a girls point of view in a manga book, but there, lets face it, little or nothing in the American comic line to move to. Certainly, one or two of the solicitations that I've seen for the Minx line look like they might make my last sentence moot, and I hope that they do, but we clearly have a long way to go.

As a retailer in a totally different business, I find myself looking to always broaden my marketability to people: to get different people to walk through my door, while not losing my regulars. Comic stores have long operated on the principle of just getting the regulars to come back... somehow. That's not good enough in this environment. Especially when you realized, and any number of studies on retail shopping will back this up, that the majority of shopping is done by women, why oh why would you not want to do something that would not appeal to them? If that mean not carrying the MJ statue, then good, don't carry it. It sucked anyway, in a way that the original Hughes drawing didn't. Don't carry Heroes for Hire #13. No tentacle rape here.

And here's hoping that 13 year old girl who still reads comics doesn't have her love of this medium shamed out of her. Stick to your guns girl!

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?