In Review of: Saga of the Swamp Thing Hardcover

So it looks like DC comics has finally started to put their money where their mouth is and remaster the same CD for the fourth time... er... reprint the same material that they have reprinted for us faithful fans yet again.

This time its Moore's Swamp Thing.

So here is the my beef: if I already have these issues in the original form, and i then bought them in the softcover collection since it sat better on the shelf, why do i need this CD.. er... hardcover? Where, to put it bluntly, are the bonus tracks? You are going to have to give me something to justify getting me to shell out even more money. With Sandman and Watchmen, they have smartly given us new coloring to replace the original limited palette, which has, in some places worked wonders.

Small digression here: Watchmen has been slightly improved by the new coloring, while Sandman has improved by leaps and bounds with regards to color choices. As anyone who has see the original Dringenberg/Jones art, there was a wealth of detail lost to the original colors, as well as too much misdirection in the art from the original colors. They were, in many places, a small disaster in the original Doll's House.

But the absolute size has started to point out, sadly, the limitations of the scanning technology and the host files that DC has. With the art no longer being reduced by the typical 64%, we're now seeing what we know were smooth ink lines being jagged and pixelated, without the repro to tighten up the file. Sad but true, the first volume of Starman is horrible for this in the first 5 or so issues, and even later Sandmans, like the Inn at the World's End sequence lack the fidelity of line that they should have. This is, for a $100 hardcover, a serious fucking issue for those of us who love the books so much that we're willing to shell out that much money.

So we now have a Swamp Thing Hardcover with the same light paper stock as the Kirby 4th World books, which is not a great recommendation right there, although it might derail the physical need for recoloring. Those not in the printing are likely not to want to wander into a discussion of ink absorbtion on paper, but it is highly relevant. With different paper comes great responsibility.

We know that Totleben's inks would certainly hold up to the reproduction at even full size, for while I don't own any of the art from those books myself, I certainly have seen originals over the years, and know that Swamp Thing #21-34 would certainly hold up to the absolute treatment, and yes, that include the landmark second annual.

But you're going to have to give me something DC, before I slap down for this. And while I've yet to compare the original printing to the new one, I'll be interested to see if there is any notable difference qualitywise between the two.

And yet again, I say, why doesn't DC or Marvel announce that they are doing these books in time for those of us with originals to send in new stats or 600dpi originals? I would happily have upgraded the printing on at least 5 different pages of the Absolute Sandman Volume 1 for them, free of charge.

And, of course, to tie in with this an hour after I wrote my post is an interview with Jeet Heer over at Robot 6 where he talks about Chip Kidd and Chris Oliveros on this exact subject:

I’m less involved in the production decision, but I often eavesdrop as an interested observer and it’s fascinating to listen to the two Chrises talk about paper stock, the size of books, the color scheme of the covers and other details. For both Ware and Oliveros, book making is truly an art. This is important to bear in mind because until recently, book production wasn’t a big part of comics: most comic strip collection and comic books were shoddily put together.

Yet thanks to the internet, I was able to hook up to ProQuest, a service that let me quickly find thousands of Briggs comics from the early 20th century along with many articles about Briggs. Also, belong to list serves allowed me to hear from many scholars and collectors who had various Briggs tidbits, including a contract he signed in the 1920s and much original art.

Aaaarrrg.

Heath Ledger: The Joker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex In The Comics

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

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

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

Guerra couldn't draw sexy to save her life.

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

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

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

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

In Memory: 5 for Jack Kirby

My answers to Tom Spurgeon's request for the top 5 Kirby Issues -

(You might wish to read my blog post on the dinner after the NYC con where all the Defiant crew, Shooter, Alan Weiss, myself, and others raised our glasses in honor of Jack. Its one of my favorite memories, and worth reading if you've not found it on the blog before).

On to the comics -

Fantastic Four #51



















Thor #156



















The Demon #1



















Challengers of the Unknown #7



















Fantastic Four #25

In Praise Of: The Miracleman Saga

The Miracleman saga never ends. At least not if you're Neil Gaiman. Maybe not even if you're Alan Moore. Certainly not if you're the original creator.

Here, unless you've missed this, is the short version. Todd McFarlane is suing Gaiman for his share of the rights to Miracleman, rights that were given to Neil by Alan Moore, who was given them by Dez Skinn back in the Warrior days. Alan wanted Neil to have a stake in the character that he was taking over, so he handed his rights over. Once Eclipse Comics went under, McFarlane bought the rights to everything, thinking that he would get Miracleman. What wasn't apparent until now is that all this right being handed back and forth is all for naught. Mick Anglo, the original creator, is alive and should retain all the rights to the character.

So Dez Skinn was wrong. And lied about Miracleman to Moore. Among other things should anyone care to do so digging about Dez.

What stands out, however, is the work, ad the fact that it is likely that the Miracleman saga will never be reprinted with all the horrible rights being thus entangled, and that is more of shame than can be imagined.

For those who have never read the whole thing, or just heard about it, it is, with all its early bumps and bruises and false starts, the furthest imagining of what a superman character would actually do to the world. And it is, in a few words, alternately horrifying, stunning, beautiful, and beyond shocking.

Here is reality, if we can call it that: this series will shatter any myth that you might have had over the Fantastic Four or the Avengers as being in the "real world". That's bullshit. The day that a real superman shows up in our world, it will destroy our world to its very foundation. He will change things so much, that we will not recognize the world that he will leave behind. As his first daughter asks non-chelantly, "You decided to leave the sky that color?"

And he will bring, because this is Alan Moore, the evil that will destroy London and the world, eating life and shitting skulls, along the way. And the architect, the human/god that will create all this and then believe that he can control it, Gargunza. All the archetypes are represented, but without a Marvel or DC universe status quo to return to, Moore is free to reimagine just how devastated that world would be, and take those archetypes to their furthest places. A superhero battle? New York wouldn't survive. Not once. Neither would Metropolis. And London doesn't. I've already blogged once about Miracleman #15 being the most brutal comic that i've ever read. And I don't expect that to change.

Gaiman was able to further, as is his want, someof the more interesting tangendental ideas, ideas that we mentioned or hinted at in first "book", and take the time to explore the side roads: Miraclewomen as the Aphrodite/Love/Sex goddess of the world, both unattainable and attainable at the same time; Evelyn Cream, the connsumate intelligence professional given over to being "Number 1", the most brilliant pastice of The Prisoner that i've ever seen; Andy Warhol and whole concept of Pop Art is turned on its head given the artist as our introduction to the artificial underworld that Miracleman creates. Given his head, Miracleman becomes God in all ways, in reshaping the world, repopulating it with his progeny, creating an Olympus for the gods as well as an underworld for the dead to live in.

Its a shame that the series is in true developmental hell; it can't be reprinted nor will it even ever be finished, as the well researched book on the subject, Kimota, from Twomorrows Press, shows us. Gaiman has only one more issue to go, and it, honestly, didn't sound like it would do a lot to resolve many of the questions that Alan and Neil had raised.

Is it worth the time and money to track down the issues? Absolutely. Are they out there? I would suppose so, although I bought the series as it came out, and haven't had to look for the issues. Kimota may be out of print, however, and that is why Ebay was invented. And comic cons.

Go. Discover the ubermench saga the way it was meant to be read. Find the issues and read it.

Illustrations by the magnificent John Totleben and Alex Ross.

In Praise Of: Art & Fear by Bayles & Orland

Fear. Frustration, Anxiety, Love, Excitement, Longing, Trepidition. And these are just the emotions that course through me, depending on the day, when I'm about to sit down to draw. You should hear the list that comes up after I've been at it for an hour.

This post grows out wanting to review the book Art & Fear and describe, at the same time, why this book helped me. It turns out that the post starts to look more like I was tagged with the internet "25 things that we didn't know about you" meme.

I used to sit down and put my head in my hands and not know where to begin. Did this for years. It was why I got into the industry as an inker, since I was comfortable as a craftsman, but not as an artist. Too many years getting slagged off by art teachers who had nothing but contempt for illustration, especially comic oriented illustrations, too many bad critiques by assistant editors who would give blatantly contradictory advise in one on one sessions, too much damn second guessing on my own part.

Being a craftsman was easy. Once I knew where i was going with the brush, it was taking the pencils and making them make even more sense for print. I learned how to do that, and do it fairly well. It also presented me with actual working pencils from guys who barely knew how to draw to guys who knew how to draw way too well.

And therein lies the a bit of the problem that I faced 8 years ago. Trying to bridge the gap between what I knew how to do, and get the inker in me to stop hating on the penciller. After all, the inker was used to working over J. G. Jones, Paul Gulacy, Alan Weiss. The penciller was completely new to the gig. And pretty damn shaky.

Its a double edged sword really. There were precious few opportunities to see professional pencils back in the '70's and '80's, not like now, so one of the real detriments of aspiring to become a comics professional at that time was not really knowing what you were shooting after. To my mind, the artists were like magicians, waving magic pencils and brushes and having page after page of comic art rolling out of their studios. It did not inspire confidence when sitting at my own drawing table and working on the same damn panel over and over and over.

What you rarely saw was the page that got thrown out, and you certainly never saw the sweat of the artist working late into the night to meet the deadline, or the discarded drawings along the way. For the ten or so people in the world who like my work I say this: I never find it easy, but I can do it better now than I did ten years ago.

Art & Fear certainly works to address some of the layers of built up frustration that have built up and hold us up from making art. As they say in the introduction:

This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people - essentially (statistically speaking) there aren't any people like that. But while geniuses may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time.

And they do a good job of puncturing the romantic notion of the lonely genius who is ahead of his time, while at the same time methodically destroying the reasons that many of us as excuses to not make our art.

For me, I've learned to believe in the process. Have faith that if you work with what you know, methodically applying the construction to figure and then applying the lighting and overlaying clothes, that while the figure may not appear at first to be genius, it may be right. And that drawing that you didn't think you could do will start to happen. you're right, its not genius, but it exists, and occassionally you get that one that happens to come alive. You do it, you move on. I have faith in the process, and it enables things to happen beyond just staring at the blank piece of bristol.

...the separation of art from craft is largely a post-Renaissance concept, and more recent still is the notion that art trascends what you do, and represents what you are.

There are many deaths that happen, the big one that we have, but the little ones as well, the death of belief that we can do these things, the death of belief that what we're saying matters somehow. As children, many of had refrigerators magneted with art for years. Magnets that, paradoxically, have much other things to do as we get older and we actually get more skill. Why is that? What is it about art that is so difficult to appreciate?

My grandfather had a collage of covers of that I inked while in the mainstream comics industry. I didn't know this for years. My own mother doesn't have a single piece of art that i produced after the age of 7 in her house.

... most artists don't daydream aobut making great art - they daydream about having made great art. What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the prerfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative or melody - only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata. The artist's life is frustrating not becasue the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

Came up with a great concept last night for a graphic novel. Can already see it in my head, and i'm wondering just when I'll get the time to work and craft and draw and complete the 120 pages that I see happening right now? How to convey that much in your head down to paper in the tediously slow process of actually drawing? Kid sis in hollywood cut through the bullshit the other day in her post here and made me laugh as well. She's good at that.

Think about all this as I'm about to launch my new webcomics portal at YoComics.net and maybe you won't see the sweat behind that ink, but its there, bouyed by frustration and held in place by some craft. Love my trusty photocopier, scanner, brushes and nibs, they can, sometimes, be my friends.

Correction to the Top 5: Swamp Thing #27

Upon further review, I have to take away the Avengers #162 and put, in its place, The Saga of the Swamp Thing #27 and i have to list the reasons why: Etrigan the rhymer, Alan Fucking Moore, Abby Arcane, the dead-but we didn't know it yet Matt Cable, Steve Bissette, Alan Fucking Moore, "Momee needent know", "Evil, though grown small, still has a taste all its own.", John totleben, the Norfulthing, Alan Fucking Moore.

Soon we would be down amongst the dead men. And so would Abby, she just didn't know it yet. But Etrigan tried to warn her.

Alan Fucking Moore.

Movie Posters that Don't Lie: The Happening

i can't get the two hours that i spent watching this film waiting for something to live up to the title, and then the three plus hours that Kid Sis and Todd and I spent trying to figure out if the movie was supposed to be that bad.

This is just a little something that cracked me up.

Stolen from a site that has their image download disabled so they don't get a big call out. C'mon guys, get with it.

Gearing up for WonderCon in San Francisco. I'll be there Saturday and Sunday in Artist's Alley. Stop by if you're a fan of the blog and check out some new artwork!

5 Favorite Single Issues: The Comics Reporter

I missed answering Tom's Friday Question: "Name Your Five Favorite Marvel or DC Comics Single Issues, Nothing From The Same Series Twice." This is how I would have responded:

Master of Kung Fu #39



















Detective Comics #475



















Captain Marvel #29



















Fantastic Four #49



















Avengers #162


This isn't a bad little collection of artists and writers here: Doug Moench Stan Lee, Jim Shooter, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Jack Kirby, Marshall Rogers, George Perez, Paul Gulacy.

Some of them are the beginnings of the story, some the end, some the middle, what matters here is that each of the issues is pitch perfect, from splash page to final panel, and each one presents characters that we grown to love at their peak.

I'm not parting with these fer nuttin'.

Edit: amended two days later, but in a post above, original post not edited for clarity of thought process.

In Review Of: Jews and American Comics by Paul Buhle

Given the shady nature of comics beginnings here in the states, you have to marvel (no, that's not a pun) about the wealth of material that is now available on those self-same humble and rather less murky origins.

Well documented now by a multitude of sources and fictionalized by Michael Chabon, can there be anything left to go over from the 1930's or the 1940's? There are multiple books that focus on Jewish identity as well, (Danny Fingeroth's inparticular, which I will review soon) something that i've blogged on a number of times already, and how that identity came to influence their art.

Buhle was active in the comics world, and could count among his friends other creators, Art Spiegleman among them, so his writing is clearly on the idea of looking out, rather than looking in. The book is short on essays, given a large number of the pages to examples, but Buhle scores on the one involving the 1950's, EC and the power that Mad and Kurtzman had over him. Here is where the true gems of this book lie.

Those of us that grow up reading comics, at one time, will find that four-color voice that speaks to us and we follow under their spell. It will likely be a voice that will guide us, and we will return to it when we find our love of comics waning. In my case, it was the lights of the early '70's at Marvel, Jim Starlin and Paul Gulacy among them, that rewrote the neurons in my brain. In Buhle's case, it was the guiding light of EC, Mad and the genius himself, Harvey Kurtzman.

For all those who have already gotten a decent history lesson about Eisner and Quality, Siegle and Shuster and Cleveland, Buhle moves on to give us a great over view of Will Elder, Bernie Krigstein and the rest of the motley EC crew. With Gaines leading them, we all know how the comics turned out. They turned out so well that the horror comics genuinely horrified people, and the redoubtable Gaines volunteered to testify before a congressional committee. As we all know, it did not go well.

Further on, Buhle does well to bring the modern comics historian up to speed, with discussions about the 1990 MoMA exhibit "Modern Art and Pop Culture", Ben Katchor and Harvey Pekar. All told, well written and with some interesting thoughts along the way. I'm not sure that this isn't a bit of a time capsule, since many of the artists whose work he discusses in the last article have yet to have their story finished. Katchor will certainly add any number of works before his story is finished. I'm just not sure that i needed a hardcover of this to add to my book shelf. Still an interesting collection of material.

For the interested party, there are any number of annotations, and reading through them at the end of the book is fun as well. I think that I might have preferred to perhaps have the annotations at the bottom of the page as footnotes, easier to digest and retain the flow of the reading. A small quibble.

A New Press, publishers of the volume, deserve props and support for their publishing the book. In this day and age, lets give thanks that certain publishers decide to take a chance with books that straddle the line between popular culture and academia.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Out celebrating another birthday, and a few more grey hairs. I'll post some new art later.

In Praise Of: Chandler - Red Tide by Steranko

The images are fuzzy, a remnant of poor 4-color printing circa 1976, yet, should one have known where to look in the far off days of the bicentennial, one could have found the first graphic novel for a single $1.

Armed with a hard boiled tale that could have flowed from Hammett’s or Cain’s typewriters, Steranko went about a new format, on a new page size, for a new publisher, and was met with staggering indifference by the world at large.

What a shame, as the book itself is a corker.

The illustrations are laid out two to a page, with text underneath allowing Jim to both play with the page format yet separate the two pieces as different graphic elements. Given that the eye tends to track better left to right than up and down, the illustrations are all vertical, and in full color, or what passes for color in those days.

Rumor has it that the illustrations were never inked, but refined pencil work, then colored at the plate level, and my eye tends to agree with this, although I’m willing to be told differently. Has any of this original art turned up?

Set in the 1940’s, the book is just about what you would think: a private eye taking on a case that he really doesn’t want, a dame that can’t be trusted with a body that would stop a truck, a nervous client whose story lacks in credibility what it makes up in dead bodies. It doesn’t end well, they never end well.


I suppose that you could get all huffy about Eisner’s Contract With God being the first true graphic novel, and we could go on and on about what constitutes a graphic novel til we’re niggling about tiny details. I tend to go with a broader definition, one that allows the artist to play with the words and pictures, the defining feature being that they were thinking of an adult audience, one that wouldn’t be reading FOOM. Red Tide has literary pretensions, genre ones certainly, but is aiming at adults as sure as Eisner was with A Contract With God. Rather than argue, I would love to point out that two of the industry’s greatest lights were both, to an indifferent public who believed that comics could only be juvenile and purile, to book stores that didn’t have a section to put them in, against a printing process that hadn’t the slightest chance of doing their artwork justice, fighting to create a new product that was beyond much of what had been done since the graphic narrative of comics had been invented.

Good for them.

In doing some research, it appears that Dark Horse might have been in negotiations to reprint Red Tide in an updated edition back in 1999. Clearly that never happened, and it’s a shame. It would have introduced a whole new audience to the work. An audience already used to and accepting of Sin city would have no problem diving head first into Chandler’s world.

If you can find a copy, and they’re out there, pick one. It’ll be the little digest gem hiding in the collection. I’m looking for one of the larger ones, with a much more limited print run right now.

Said steranko in a later interview:

When the book appeared it was not embraced by the comic-book community because it didn't have word balloons or captions. Believe it or not, they found that shocking! Red Tide ran about 130 pages with two panels per page and text underneath. I used Golden Sectioning, a mathematical formula to arrange elements in a unified structure, to create an image-to-text relationship that readers would be very comfortable with. The text on any given page related only to that page. It was like film, where dialogue, sound effects, and music relate specifically to the scene on screen. I doubt there's been another book published like it since. What may also have had an alienating effect on comics readers was that the book was created as an homage to such noir films as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

I developed a different way to tell a narrative story that was more related to film than comics and perhaps that was too radical for the existing comics audience."

RIP: Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner

Sampled to death, trampled on, discussed, diatribed, made into an Ayn Rand-ian statment of purpose, the antithesis of the conformity digitized and made relevant and irrelevant many times over: "I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign."

Patrick McGoohan is dead. The Prisoner is gone.

Arguably, in the pre-HBO era, The Prisoner was one of the most ambitious, and perplexing shows ever created for television. Perplexing only, however, those who like their answers spoon fed to them in easy-to-handle doses of prepackaged blandness. McGoohan laid all his themes out there for everyone to see, even wrapped in the thin blanket of genre fiction: the effect of modern society on the individual, the loss of freedom, the oppressiveness of government, authority figures, schooling, modern psychology, the role of the individual in society. They’re all there. And as for answers, you’ll get about as many as people you ask.

The whole point was to get people asking questions, to make them think, and they could provide some extremely fascinating stories along the way. Is there a better shock than watching the dream No. 6 walk back to his body on the television monitor (an early flat screen) in A, B & C? Or his complete psychological destruction of the No. 2 in Hammer into Anvil? Perhaps complete helplessness of the protagonist himself in Free For All, a brutal condemnation of the modern electorate and electoral process?

The Prisoner was a beautiful, fascinating, infuriating idea that McGoohan droll says, “spun out of boredom”, which is his way of perhaps making light of the near nervous breakdown that he suffered trying to over-control all the different aspects of the production. The idea was brilliant. Sheer brilliance.

The show itself was of its time, and has been analyzed and dissected and picked apart from just about every single angle, but it hasn’t been assimilated. Its too open ended for that. You can dismiss it, criticize its effects or costumes or hairstyles, but the very nature of the story is that if you start to think about the questions it raises, you can’t ignore it. It has had a way of staying with a lot of people for a long time.

McGoohan himself was powerful actor who often would use elegant timing and sheer force of character to play equally memorable heroes (John Drake and No. 6) and villains ("Escape from Alcatraz", "Silver Streak"). If you’ve made it this far into this post, I’m sure that you’ve seen him. If not, you should go rent the DVDs and immerse yourself in the series.

I discovered the series back in the 1980’s on public television here in the Bay Area, concluding each episode with a “Prisoner Wrap Session” with a number of local writers who loved the series. Most of what I got out those wrap sessions in the heady pre-internet days, was that other had already scratched below the surface of the series that I was becoming sucked into, and all they found for all their digging was more questions. I was the beginning of the belief as a creator that not all questions needed answering, not everything needed to be shown, and that psychological understanding of people was more important than anything else. If you understood people you knew how to use them for good or for bad. McGoohan made a believer out of me; a believer in questions, questioning easy answers.

A brilliant man has died, one who could never escape the inevitable questions about The Prisoner for years after, so much so they must have seemed like Angelo Muscat’s butler following him back into the London flat at the end of Once Upon a Time. The irony is inescapable. Later in his life he commented, “I guess I’ll always be a number.” Which is, of course, a wry statement on the last line of the opening, “I’m not a number, I’m a free man!”

To me, you’ll always be a free man.

Willingham, Grant and Superhero Decadence

Whither my decadent superhero? With Bill Willingham decrying the state (and social ramifications) of the current superhero, in a post that has raised a huge amount of internet dust, Steven Grant now weighs in with a post heavy on the history lesson that raises a few interesting points.

If we strip these gaudy costume fantasies back to their core, we end up with a fairly uncomplex series of wishes being fulfilled. But whose wishes are being fulfilled here? The readers or the characters? Batman and Spider-Man arising out of guilt as the character’s prime motivation, yet I see Batman’s true fulfillment as a character (and this is at his roots, not the endless revisions that time has saddled him with.) is as the revenge of the little man. An off shoot of the pulp fantasy of the Shadow, Batman exists as catharsis for the average Joe who had his life (and savings) destroyed by Enron crashing, or by Milken or Madoff’s elaborate Ponzi schemes. We harken back to the last Great Depression and we have the entire financial world collapsing, organized crime running rampant and at his core, the Shadow existed to bring some closure to the pulp readers by being willing to ventilate with his 45’s the gangsters and Madoffs of his day. The Batman exists as a moral, vengeful force as well.

The reality is that we need the origin stories to get the heroes up and running and fulfilling their jobs of providing fantasy and escape. Later day, and more advanced writers have decided to further the characters by using the foibles of the origin story as a springboard for later stories, but then you run the risk (ala Ditko and Lee’s falling out over Spider-Man’s evolution as a hero/character) of furthering the character too far, which is bad for business.

I want the Shadow to go out and run into a mess of bad guys and fight his way out. Don’t mind if they’re a thinly veiled attempt at social commentary as long as you give me a good story. In fact, I might enjoy it further if it has some relevance to current headlines.

What Vietnam/Watergate pounded home for most people is what a complex world we live in. Not binary at all. Not black and white. Gray. Traditional superheroes don't do well with gray, or complexity.

True, unless you buy the Englehart enforced theory of his Batman that “his Batman is right”. Just like you have to buy into the concept that the cool looking cape insn’t a hindrance to fighting, you have to sign on the dotted line that when Batman says someone is guilty, the he or she is guilty. Your other characters, to a one, can live in a grey world, and their choices will enrich that decisions made around the hero, but the hero has to have a stronger moral center allowing them to move within that fabric with a straighter line. Traditional superheroes, as Grant correctly notes, always look for solution A or B, which is the failure of the writer to explore C-Z as options. A lack of creative thinking on the writer’s part tends to limit the character’s thinking as well.

Steven comments that the do-gooder heroes of the 40’s and 50’s looked further and further out of place in the late ‘60’s and that the camp Batman show was really the only way to attempt to sell superheroes to that audience. Noting the next generation:

That's what was really behind the ill-fated "relevance" trend of the early '70s, an attempt to make superheroes not irrelevant. Which was a doomed cause; what it mainly proved was that superheroes and real world complexities don't mix. Part of the problem was that those trying to do "relevant superheroes" wanted both worlds, they wanted to have superheroes face off against real world issues (see GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW) yet maintain the core values of the traditional superhero. That led to some bizarre permutations, because one core value of the traditional superhero – and the main selling point of the genre c. 1972 – was that all problems could be solved by physical intervention. Not all problems can be solved by physical intervention, and not many at all by climactic battle. This presents a problem for the superhero, since in order to be a "real hero" he has to ultimately prevail, and the sooner the better.

In that classic Dennis O’Neil Green Lantern story, with the older black man regaling Hal about all the stuff that “he’s done to save the pinks and the blues, why hasn’t he helped the black man?”, I would love to pay Denny enough money to write the follow-up scene where Hal goes, “The last time I stopped Starro or Sinestro from enslaving the entire planet, I wasn’t just saving the white Americans, I was saving everyone regardless of skin color.”

But getting back to Willingham stir-up: Superhero decadence which is very much a reflection of the audience’s decision as to what is relevant as their fantasy entertainment. Do we buy the argument that video games which show shooting everything as the answer to all our problems is the cause of the real life Columbine massacres? I see the rise of the first person shooter video games as the same sort of power wish fulfillment as simple superhero comics. This is the simplest sort of story that we can tell, one in which a bullet, or a single punch, will solve all the particular problems of the story.

What we need are fantasy figures that work to satisfy a particular social itch. Then you’ll get a lionshare of viewers or readers to put down their money and stay a while. Did we really care about Bronson’s character’s motivations in Death Wish to name yet another wish fulfillment revenge character. Not really, just like the Punisher, he just needed to have a reason to pick up the gun and start blowing away the “bad guys”. Superheroes are relevant when the are able to do the things that we wish we could do. Is the current James Bond any different than the current Captain America? Isn’t Jason Bourne a reincarnation of the Captain America story? Found floating in the sea, left for dead? A capable superspy with abilities that look like what we think we all could do with more training and just a little more toughness? (In fact, Bourne’s moment of revelation when asked to assassinate the rebel leader on the boat in the first movie is very similar to Cap’s realizing who the leader of the Secret Empire is.) As much as I might be tired of the “Decadence”, I’m more tired of having a supposed multi-dimensional hero in a cardboard world. Seems a bit backward that way.

Willingham has created a universe in Fables of decently well rounded characters who operate in a very complex universe. And that equation works. There is no character in Fables that compares in complexity, in my opinion, to any of Gaiman’s in Sandman, yet I enjoy the hell out of Fables, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying that he has already excelled at creating some traditional ideals in a realistic world that have carried the weight of the stories very well. In all likelihood, his JSA may do that as well. I’ll pick it up and take a look. But the strength is world building, and in that, he’s done a great job.

What Hath I Learned: The Mighty Thor #213

All the comics are spread all over the floor last night, reorganizing them the same way at the tender age of 43 that I did at 9 years of age. I put my 8 year old to the task of "organizing" the Supermans, and the Avengers just so that she had the chance to flip through some new comics that she's never seen. And, of course, I run across The Mighty Thor #213, the very first comic that I ever read. I decided to re-read the issue, to see just how it holds up. Just what did I learn from the experience of reading Thor #213?

Well, I learned that the All-Father is a whiny bitch. Odin spends what few panels he has in the story telling everyone not to fight and to give up. I learned that Gerry Conway and Len Wein can knock this sort of stuff out before lunchtime: The Golden City has been overtaken by slave trading giant Lizards and they have sold the Lady Sif off in the gap between issues. The destruction of the secret drug processing plant that is the crux of keeping the aliens docile takes place on a small panel. The drug plant is so secret that John Buscema and Don Perlin never even end up drawing the damn thing. I learned that the plot makes little sense. Thor, the godling who stood up to Magog, gets knocked out by a chunk of masonry dropped on his head. I learned that Wein and Conway decided NOT to use the evil lizard race that they already have in the Marvel Universe, the Badoon, but instead make up an entirely new race, typo-ridden Vrellnexians, whose main claim to fame must be the unpronounability of their race's name.

I learned that a Starlin cover is a Jim frikkin' Starlin cover, regardless of being touched up by Romita. I learned that there is actually a guy dressed like a Greek fisherman who is travelling space and time with the Asgardians and he never even gets a caption, let alone a word balloon. I learned that the Living Zombie was about to debut in "Tales of the Zombie", appearing wherever fine magazines are sold. I learned that John Buscema either got sick or behind the deadline or simply so bored with the plot that it fell to Don Perlin to finish the last 2 pages... and since Vinnie Colletta inked the isssue, its pretty difficult to tell.

I learned via a full page house ad that Gwen Stacy had died by the Green Goblin's hand and Spider-Man is PISSED.

Mostly I learned that this was one damn confusing issue to start reading comics with. At least the next two I bought, Iron Man #64 and Marvel Feature #12 were easier on the storylines: Doctor Spectrum and the Blood Brothers were attacking, and someone named Thanos was in the background. Who said Marvel in the 1970's was easy to read?

In Review Of: Bruce Timm - Modern Masters

One of the joys of the Modern Masters series is the knowledge that while you won't actually get the full on, comprehensive, be-all, Gary Groth digging into the garbage for all the details, end-all interview, you will get a damn good overview.

Such was the case with Bruce Timm, creator of the most distinctive animated look since the Fleisher's put their fingerprints on the Man of Steel (or, at least, since Hanna met Barbara and rented a floor in my late grandfather-in-law's building). Reading this Modern Masters issue was the opportunity to finally get that overview, since it appeared, to me, that Timm just came out of nowhere. As usual, in comics as in most art, it is a overnight success story punctuated by long years of hopelessness and working at K-Mart between gigs. Typical.

What else do I like about the Modern Masters series? Loads of early art, art before the iconic images that we're used to seeing, art that needs a lot of work. Timm himself makes the comment that while doing his drawings in the late '80's that he had no idea who he really wanted to be with his art. And it took, probably with his work in animation, tens of thousands of drawings to start to distill things down to point where he can nail that one Batman drawing with five lines and a number 6 Windsor-Newton.

Some great early art, including a couple Etrigans, a Colan Dr. Strange with the mask, and two bizarre Batman try-out pages that look a lot a like more like Rick Veitch that Bruce Timm. And a story of perseverence that should be required reading for most people trying to get into the biz.

Is it possible that the entire Modern Masters is nothing but Eric Noel-Weathington deciding to spend some time with some of his favorite creators?

TwoMorrows Publishing has certainly done a great job of publishing a tremendous amount of comic related material well beyond the Kirby Collector, which is something that I have spent many hours reading and collecting and I doubt that I have spent any time blogging on. I don't quite know where to start actually, given how many damn Kirby issues I have in the files in my studio.

This is a better volume that the Michael Golden one, which I thought didn't cover the breadth of a creator as innovative and as influential as Golden, but Timm's seemed to be the right balance of art, overview and interesting facts.

A Tribute to Gene Colan: the Cartoon Art Museum

With the original cover for Iron Man and Submariner #1 staring at you from the wall of the Cartoon Gallery, just a foot or two away from the cover to Iron Man #1, and Captain Marvel #1 you come away with three distinct impressions: 1) Gene knew how to put big dynamic figures front and center - they're great covers; 2) Gene definitely wasn't great with knees; and 3) Marvel's production department looks like a bunch hacks given that the printed versions of two of the three covers are not the originals!

Gene himself is a true original, as his one man show at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum will attest. A gracious and talented gentleman, Gene was on hand to soak up the applause last thursday night from the 150 people or so who crammed into the museum to hear testimonials from Steve Englehart, Joe Rubenstein, Steve Leialoha and Stan Lee.

Curated by Glen David Gold, the author of Carter Beats the Devil, who deftly straddles that line between uberfan and actual functioning adult, Glen gave us original art lovers the chance to see some art that, I suspect, we will never see again given that it is all in the hands of private collectors. He also gave us the chance to fete Gene in person, a rare treat.

The scans here are a sample from the catalog of the exhibition, which itself is a nice treat. Great commentary by Gene's peers and collaborators, including excellent reproductions of work that you’re not going to find anywhere else: The original cover to Daredevil #43, which Kirby ended up redoing so that it didn’t appear that Captain America was losing to DD in the ring. For those interested, there may still be more available from the Cartoon Art Museum itself.

Stan Lee didn't come himself, but did send along a video tribute, one that sounded and felt terribly heartfelt. However, it is difficult for me to listen to Stan say:

On a personal note - Gene colan is a gentleman. honorable, dependable and loyal. I always got a kick out of calling him Genial Gene or Gentleman Gene, but most important of all, I'm proud to call him my friend.

Knowing that Stan is in good health, and wealthy enough as the perennial company man that he was, to be able to say these things, while Gene struggled with his glaucoma and no health insurance over the last decade. Once again, Marvel continues to ignore the aching backs of the men that the company was built upon, and it hurts to see.

Given the Gene has no vision in one eye, and limited vision in another, the newer pencilled works here show remarkable clarity of composition and pencil technique. Gene's hand has lost none of its subtlety, and the new work doesn't suffer in comparison to the beautiful two page spreads from Doctor Strange and Tomb.

The best line of night: there are entire schools of Kirby or Steranko or Adams, and yet, there is no school of Colan. There is simply no one with the touch and ability that Gene has with a pencil, nor his idiosyncratic layouts and storytelling approach. In his tribute, Stan uses the word "inimitable". Gene truly define that word, from the ground up.

All the very best Gene, I'll probably never be able to afford a piece of your art for my collection, but I'll never stop trying!

In addendum: the cover for Captain Marvel #1 is completely hacked up, cutting out the Marvell figure and moving it up to change his position on the page. The Iron Man #1 cover has a side note: "after inks - raise up to get IM's head overlap title", which means that the printed cover of IM #1, which has pretty murky line work, is not the result of bad inking by Johnny Craig, but of pasted up stats of the original cover, with some of Colan's beautiful vingettes moved or removed. Craig's line work on the original is actually both bold and delicate and extremely lively.

Cartoon Art Museum: Gene Colan Opening Tomorrow!

I can't wait to be at this, and I would love to see a great turn out to honor Gene, so i'm putting this up again:

The Cartoon Art Museum is honored to celebrate the life and work of cartoonist Gene Colan with a career-spanning retrospective entitled Colan: Visions of a Man without Fear. The opening reception for this exhibition will be held on Thursday, December 4, 2008 from 7:00 to 9:00pm, and will be free and open to the public.

Gene Colan and his wife, Adrienne, will be the Guests of Honor at this reception, as the Cartoon Art Museum pays tribute to one of the most talented and respected artists in the comic book industry with A Salute to Gene Colan. Frequent collaborator Stan Lee calls Colan “one of comicdom’s true immortals,” and Cyrus Voris, screenwriter of the hit animated movie Kung-Fu Panda, describes Colan’s work as possessing “a blazing originality, a uniqueness of vision that owed nothing to anybody.” Testimonials from Colan’s friends, colleagues and fans will be presented throughout the evening.

Gene Colan will also be appearing at Lee’s Comics in Mountain View, California, as part of his visit to the west coast. This in-store appearance will take place on Saturday, December 6, 2008, from 2:00pm until 4:00pm. Colan will be joined by award-winning comic book inker Steve Leialoha, his collaborator on a variety of books including Howard the Duck , Daredevil and Detectives Inc. Please visit http://www.lcomics.com for more information.

New Work: Mary Jane by Hughes & Yoakum

Another Adam Hughes ink job!

Love trying to get that Jazzy Johnny Romita hair sheen on MJ. Adam does interesting faces, not stereotypical women's faces, and I'm noticing it more now inking a few of these pieces than I ever did just looking at the work.

These are fun!

Women In Comics: Yet Again, into the Stereotypes!

Over at the blog, Stuff Geeks Love, the post Strong Female Characters Who Actually Aren't has generated at least three different responses, one at Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader? and two at The Mad Thinker's Blog, and, despite real reservations to this, I'm jumping a little into the fray. (And in the interest of keeping the focus, I'm not going into the "rape origin" discussion.)

First, thoughts on the original post. While the blogger makes some points that I agree with in discussing stereotypes, I disagree with the dismissal of some of the characters that were thrown under the bus in the name of stereotypes. Starbuck is a perfect example. Relegated to the "wo-man" stereotype:

The wo-man is a male character who happens to also have breasts. She is written exactly as the male characters are, shares all the same interests of the male characters, and has all the same problems of the male characters. Other than the breasts, her only other signifier of being female is that she will be in a relationship with one of the male characters. In addition to Zoe, the Firefly character mentioned above, other notable wo-men characters are Dana Scully from The X-Files and Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica.

Unfortunately, the whole "wo-man" stereotype as defined by Stuff Geeks Love, dismisses just about every interesting female character that isn't a) a whore with a heart of gold or b)the innocent virgin. Here are a couple of my givens: that interesting characters are by definition not perfect. They have flaws, they make mistakes, then they deal with the consequences. Another given: that not all women have the same set of "womenly" traits, just as not all men have the same set of "male" traits. What does this leave us with? That there are women who can be mothers and go kick ass like me do. That there are women who can be loving and callous. That there will be women who can have sexual appetites as indescriminately as men, and that those same women reserve the right to change their mind if they want later.

Using Scully and Starbuck as examples of the "wo-men" pretty much invalidates her arguement already. Scully naver moved into the "man with breasts". She was smart, loved her own family, did her job, was, in general, a rather multifaceted character. If Starbuck, a woman in the military who is a trained fighter pilot, comes across as a "man with breasts" for being a killer pilot with a sexual appetite, then I'm sure that the real world should take a look at all the female soldiers that exist in the real world. How many mothers and wives deployed in Iraq would love to be called a "man with breasts" for doing their job?

Sadly, the real world is messy, and the best characters have their own rough edges in fiction. And I totally agree with some of the original post: if I see another whore with a heart of gold in fiction, I'm going to hurl the book against the wall. The next prostitute that shows up in one of my stories will be a cold hearted bitch, just to play against type.

And I do think that "Irony" was lost on the picture of all the different slave Leias posing with Jabba in that picture. Carrie Fisher did have a long discussion, that I cannot find the attribution to, with George Lucas over whether Leia would wear underwear in space on the set of the original Star Wars. She does bounce a lot coming out of that trash compactor.

Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader? veers into the realm of male comic readers becoming uncomfortable with the depiction of, gasp, penises on their beloved heroes. (Which, after all, ties into the sexuality of female characters and is somewhat parenthetical to the rape discussion: if too many of the female characters have been raped, then we would assume that the men have sexual equipment as well). A quick internet search on the Alex Ross Sgt. Steel cover, one that i blogged on back in 2007, should reveal the depths of homophobia that the average comic consumer seems to have.

Scott's Mad Thinker blog is one that I'm not a huge fan of. I've popped over to the blog a number of times and I tend to think that his posts just jump around way to much for me. Its clear that he's thinking about things, but the writing doesn't always gel with me. That being said, he at least thinks about things, whether I agree with him or not. He took the time to do research on the female characters who have been raped, as well as taking the time to annotate some of the lists that he found. He very accurately identifies that fuzzy thinking behind the original posts problems with Buffy, and I completely agree with his case for the men in Buffy being the ones that can't handle sexual power. The women in the series use and have sex according to who they are: evil and good in equal measure.

I think that I have to disagree that simply listing the number of female characters who haven't been raped to get a statistical analysis for the percentage of women in comics is missing the point of the arguement for the data: Comics have primarily been a boys club, and there are years and years worth of negative stereotypes to overcome, especially to a traditional male audience that is generally no known for having fairly enlightened views of sexuality. When the rape stereotype comes up, it can stand out a bit too much like a sore thumb, or at least lazy writing. As the comics ahve become targeted to a more adult audience, the suggestion of the sexual assault have moved from the inference to more concrete, and thus, has become even more disturbing. As a father of two girls, yes, it bothers me tremendously, and while you could argue that that makes the rape an effective dramatic device since I do have an emotional reaction to it, I'm tired of it. Just as too many years of off-off-off-Broadway plays in New York made me hate the "every male is gay, they just won't admit it" plot line constantly written by gay off-off-off-Broadway playwrites.

Give me something else.

There, I'm done. The flames can begin.

Jane's Addiction: the latest reunion

i've usually kept this blog just to comics and tried to keep it well focused, but tonight i realized that i had to post this.

I've known plenty of artists who were total video heads, who could keep the tv going in the background next to their drawing board and just look over occasionally. Ron Lim and Howard Simpson were two like that. I couldn't do that at all. I was the music freak, listening to music as a way to psych myself up or down as necessary, to keep me going on the late night deadlines, to add the soundtrack to the panels and images that i was creating. Each note somehow made the ink lines make a little more sense.

Jane's Addiction was at the forefront of literally decades of artwork on my part. Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Perk and Eric Avery were so much more than the sum of their parts with that band that they created their own little music reality. For those of us who loved them, they took the stature of The Who, or Zeppelin or the Stones for our generation.

I saw them twice back in the day and, sadly, was underwhelmed by the sound system, by that particular night's performance. I've sat through various incarnations of the band, with Flea or Martyn sitting in on bass for Avery during his 20 year feud with Perry and wished that i had had the chance to see them the way i had discovered some other bands: in a small club with all that energy, all that fucking over the top bottled up youth and noise and sex energy ready to burst and bust and explode all over the stage energy bouncing off of the ceiling and back into the crowd.

So it seem that they're playing again. At the el cid tonight down in LA, pretty much only to family and friends, maybe with a few fans coming in, but basically at a club that holds 150 people and you're standing in line for 9 hours on the hope and wing and prayer that you get in.

Except that you can't do that now. You're not a slacker working at Kinko's so taht you can knock out a cheap zine at 3am when no one is counting the paper stock. You're not closing down the bar and then going to sit in line on the pavement for 24 hours so that you can get in to see your favorite band. You're married and you have kids and a mortgage and a job and the time when that music seemed so vital seems like a long time away.

I loved these guys, and it did sit on the pavement back in 1997, drawing backgrounds on the JG Jones' Shi:The Series so that i could make my deadlines, for 8 hours back then to see the best of all the shows that i personally witnessed, and to see the crowd pull the MTV camera in to the pit just to fuck with the corporate tools who were sucking off of Jane's reunion with Flea. I love them, but its not 1988 again and Nothings Shocking is shocking, shocking that it is putting Poison and Def Leppard and all the other hair metal bands into wheelchairs and pushing them gleefully down the stairs to split their skulls open. "If you've got some big fucking secret, then why don't you sing ME something?"

I love these guys, but its not 1988. If they want to play again, I'll absolutely go see them, but it won't be transcendent, it won't change my life (again), and it had better not be the same 20 year old material. For their sakes, i hope that they write some new material and move on. We're not the same, they're not the same.

It was said so well in all the longing post mortems that surfaced in the wake of the band's breakup, "No one listens to Jane's anymore, because Jane's was the fuck soundtrack for a generation that has broken up."

New Work: Donna Troy by Hughes and Yoakum

A little new something. Some more inks over Adam Hughes sketches for a collector. here is Donna Troy, a favorite from back in the days of the Teen Titans, is the cool starfield costume.

Ink and Copic Markers on Bristol. Starfield courtesy of Dr. Ph Martins Bleed Proof White.

Another Adam Hughes piece to follow!

Cartoon Art Muesum: A Tribute to Gene Colan

There isn't a lot of press on this, and there should be. So I'm posting this up to help the great folks over at the Cartoon Art Museum.

Colan: Visions of a Man without Fear
Cartoon Art Museum Exhibition: November 15, 2008 – March 15, 2009

Opening Reception: Thursday, December 4, 2008
With special guests Gene and Adrienne Colan

The Cartoon Art Museum is honored to celebrate the life and work of cartoonist Gene Colan with a career-spanning retrospective entitled Colan: Visions of a Man without Fear. This exhibition will include over 40 examples from Colan’s long creative career, from his one and only story illustrated for legendary publisher EC Comics in 1952, through his career-defining work for Marvel Comics from the 1960s and 1970s on titles as diverse as Iron Man, Tomb of Dracula and Howard The Duck, to his notable run on DC Comics’ Batman in the 1980s, to his more recent efforts, including illustrations commissioned by his fans and his beautiful pencil artwork on titles such as Michael Chabon’s The Escapist, published by Dark Horse Comics.

This exhibition has been assembled by Guest Curator Glen David Gold, author of the novel Carter Beats the Devil and many comics-related essays. Gene Colan and his wife Adrienne will be the guests of honor at the December 4 reception, and many Bay Area comic book professionals are scheduled to be in attendance. Additional information regarding this reception will be announced later this month.

I'll be there for the reception, and so should you if you live in the Bay Area. Imagine, the original art for Iron Man #1 right next to the art for Iron Man & Sub Mariner #1, right next to rejected cover art for Daredevil vs. Captain America. If you don't know who Gene is, you're probably not really reading this blog. I expect to see amazing art from EC, to Tomb of Dracula, to Tales of Suspense, to Steward the Rat, to Detectives Inc. And Gene himself, who has been suffering from ill health the last few years, making the trip out here. Gene and Adrienne are genuinely some of the nicest people in comics and it will be a pleasure to see them again.

Don't miss out. When you come by, tell me you saw it on "Ink Destroyed My Brush"!

In Review Of: Darwyn Cooke's Retroactive

I have to say that there isn't a whole lot to review here, other than to perhaps make the rest of the world aware that this book exists, but perhaps that will suffice.

I missed seeing Retroactive at San Diego this year, partly, I'm sure, since it sold out in the first day or two. A simple hardcover collection, slightly oversized, of Darwyn's work in a hardcover format.

Given the loose brush stroke slightly "cartoony"style that Cooke works in , one might think that it wouldn't be as effective large as it is in reduction, with the tightening effect when the art shrinks in size. The opposite is true, as the larger version lends a greater abstract power to the best images here, the simplicity of the image gains impact as the artist's choices are magnified.

It is a bit like what Lichenstein was after, but Roy was able to demean the medium of comics while at the same time trading in on their power and stealing from them for his source material. Many of the oversize pieces, such as "Old Miami" in the frontpiece, are so enlarged that we can easily make the grain of the rough tooth bristol under his brush strokes on the art. Other skteches, such as "Hal", "Jetage" and "Score" work even better at 500% than the do at actual size.

One of the best pieces in the book, an untitled Spirit piece done on duotone board, is one that i had never seen before, and was instantly captured by. A great deal of work went into this one, the planning of the four different tones (white, black, 30% grey, 60% grey) and it does a magnificent job of capturing the energy and tone of Eisner's best work. In a curious omission, there is no title for the Spirit two pager.

Mint copies of this book, by the way, will be impossible to find unless they're still in the damn shrink wrap. The back cover is mostly white, and already is showing scuffs on it from being in my studio on the shelf or on the table. Now, mind you, books in my studio end up getting used, opened, read, paged through but they're not dipped in ink and driven over by snow tires. Get used to seeing shelf marks on any of these and just move on.

It has long been my contention that more people would be impressed by comic art if they saw it full size. The reproduction may hide some flaws, but it also robs the art of some of its grandeur, and I simply that is a shame. When guests come over and see the various originals that I have in the house, you can see the non comic readers looking at the art in a new way, they're clearly seeing things that they would never have noticed with cheap printing and bad reproduction. Cooke's best stuff, from New Frontier to Catwoman, has the strength to stand no only on its own but to stand up to repreaded examination.

The Iconic Batman: Steve Englehart

With a twist of the cape, and the most devastating cowl ever to be put over Bruce's head, the Marshall Rogers Batman is delicious, dark, powerful version of the revenge archetype, and, as i've said many times before, the best version to ever get laid on to newsprint of the character. The team of Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin laid down the law when it comes to the Batman.

And yet, as Danny Boy posts on his blog, here is a little missive from Steve Englehart that says volumes:

As most everyone getting this knows, I wrote DARK DETECTIVE III beginning in January 2006, but Marshall Rogers died tragically and completely unexpectedly as he was drawing the first issue. What happened after that was puzzling.

A DC editor called up Terry Austin - not me - and said "There are some people up here who want that series dead, and Marshall's death gives them their excuse." Whereupon they cancelled the series. That in itself was not so puzzling, because DC has never liked the idea that the Englehart-Rogers-Austin Batman established the Batman film and animation franchise (and in retrospect, by creating the first adult superhero, the whole superhero film genre since 1989). They never deny that it did, because they can't; they just never talk about it at all.

I've exerpted my favorite part, but you have to go read the whole thing. Don't worry, I'll be here when you're done.

Back? Good. I was watching Constantine on Tivo last night, and basically watched a comglomeration of the best of Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis with a decent budget, but with nary a credit in sight. And its a shame. The Batman movies? Must be even worse for Steve, since, given how many times they're thrown a bucket of money at people to do a new and great version of the character, they keep going back to 1977 to steal the right ideas for the movies. That they decided to rip off the most recent version that Steve did surprises me not at all. Just makes me sad.

And really, they're not going back to 1939 to make this work, are they? They really are going back to Steve's ideas of what makes the character work in a modern context, because going back to a gothic Bob Kane version would be all kinds of retro fun, but would hardly work for the character in the present day.

Lis Fies, fresh from the editing bay, watched Dark Knight and had the same reaction that most people had: why doesn't the film end? Why are we sitting here in the theatre still when the main story seems to be over? Given that Lis was busy paring down her new horror opus The Commune down to its terror-soaked marrow, why, she wondered, is there a whole extra 60+ minutes of padding in The Dark Knight?

Good question, now we know.

Why not just pay Steve to write the damn first draft and hand that over to Nolan? Is it so hard to spread a little of that green around to people who are supplying your main ideas?

Yes, that is rhetorical. I know that. No one wants to let go of their money, not even a little bit. but where do you go from here? Do you want a third Batman film that is as bad as the third X-Men film? If you're Warner Bros., don't you want to give Nolan whatever it takes to get him on the third film?

Howzabout a good story?

Short Takes: Steve Ditko and Defiant Comics

Carl Potts, has a great post on steve ditko on his blog here, the best part being this little bombshell:

In the late ‘80s, Ditko told me that, when he quit Marvel in the ‘60s, he didn’t turn in two Dr. Strange stories that he’d plotted and penciled. My jaw hit the floor.

This was amazing news and I urged (begged) Ditko to bring in the story! He politely declined, saying he didn’t want the pages to ever be published or copied. I told him that I’d be happy to look over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages/ That way the pages would never leave his hands, but he still declined to bring them in. Since then I’ve fantasized about what those pages look like and what the story was about. I wonder if I’ll ever find out!

I somehow doubt that we'll ever see those pages until Steve passes on, and i wouldn't put it past him to have it written into the will to have the executor have to shred them before getting anything else.!

My near-miss Ditko story: I started working professionally at Defiant under Jim Shooter in 1992, just as Ditko had finished drawing the promo-issue of Dark Dominion #0. Defiant had offices on the 15th floor of a building on west 36th st. with both an elevator and stairs. One time Steve showed up and was told that Jim was in a meeting and would be out in about 15 minutes and would he please wait? Steve, who had walked up all15 flights turned around and walked out. He declined to wait, but came back about 15 minutes later for the meeting. Now Ditko was notorious about not taking elevators. Did he just go down the stairs and then come back up? There really was nowhere else to go! Everybody there was convinced that he walked down, and walked back up.

Ditko's last day in the offices was the day before i got there. Argh. I felt like Steve was just out of reach, as if he was slightly at a distance and in shadow, like all those original panels hiding the identity of the Green Goblin.

Ditko's best work, in my opinion was most likely on Dr Strange, although i always see them as an extension of the short story monster work that prevailed in the Pre-Marvel line. Some of those litttle twilight zone scripts received rare treatment by Steve in terms of beautiful light and dark work. His story about the man who traps death in a stasis ray is a great little gem.