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.

Watchmen Porn: Watching the Watchmen by Gibbons

Is there any Chip Kidd book that doesn't have a serious staredown happening somewhere in the end papers, let along the cover? Am I alone in thinking that the books tend to follow you across the room?

Watching the Watchmen is really Watchmen porn, with every single bit and piece of the creation of the seminal series held up to 600dpi treatment, and it is hard to think of many other books that could really stand this sort of scrutiny. Sketches, thumbnails, watercolors, bits of Alan's scripts all litter that book which should be a primer for anyone that has ever wondered just how easy it is to produce a comic book, let alone one with this depth. The answer, to no ones surprise, is that it was a mountain of work, and it shows in each series of thumbnails as Gibbons lays out panel after panel after panel of nine panel grid, moving the camera around, in, and out and around each of his set pieces.

My god is it a ton of work. I'm exhausted just looking at it.

How much new stuff is there you ask? Hard to say, given that the best of preliminary work was all put into the Grafitti hardcover from back in '87 that i own, so i've not bought the Absolute edition, although the new coloring is quite a draw honestly, as it the increase of page size. The thumbnails are a masterful touch, but I think only to someone who is really deep into the artistic process. (Seeing the transition from Sharpie thumbnails to pencils to full inks is quite an education in itself.) If this is art porn, and, lets face it, it really is, then its got a very specific fetish audience in mind.

But there is some delight in seeing all the work that was put in behind the scenes, even though two things, of course, jump out at me: that some 16 pages in we have the handsomely put together indicia page "WATCHMEN and all related names, characters and elements are trademarks of DC Comics" and that 200 pages or so into the book, Gibbons writes

It was certainly beyond the imaginings Alain andI had as its creators. We expected that three years after the original series had gone out of print the rights would revert back to us, as stated in our contract. Instead, it has been in print ever since.

Meaning, of course, that this is why Moore will never work for DC again. Victims of their own success, the work has been in print ever since. Had we all just stopped buying the damn thing it could have gone back into the hands of its true parents: Alan and Dave. Sad. DC could never bring itself to do the one thing that financially would have paid huge dividends: bit the bullet, given them the rites back in exchange for all that Alan could have brought to them over the last 20 years. Small change for what they could have had.

Sad. Sad. Sad.

This is a beautiful companion volume, one that sits perfectly on the shelf next to the Grafitti edition that I had to freakin' pry out of the hands of the Downtown Sacramento Comics and Comix guys. They only received two copies and sold the two of them to myself and Ron Lim. Sorry everyone in the Sacramento valley, we got 'em.

Who is watching the Watchmen? These days, just about everyone.

In Review Of: Local Hardcover by Wood and Kelly

I came to the Local series in the middle, and made a totally 2008 decision: to not search out the back issues but simply wait for the trade. Except that the trade isn't a trade, but a beautifully produced hardback . And the series holds together exceptionally well. The issues that I had with it when it first came out are the same that i have here, with all the supplemental material in one spot.

The series was a good idea, one that allowed for some fascinating vignettes in the life of Megan. Stories like "The Last Lonely Days at the Oxford Theatre" don't have to go too far to wallow in the level of fucked-upedness that so many of us felt at that age. Wood has captured it beautifully; the hopelessness, the subtle treachery of the minimum wage worker, the small victories that the lost feel with the subtle deception of the switching name tags. There are other standouts here as well: the abject hopelessness of Megan's cousin as a teenager, and, best of all, the real coda of the series, issue #11.

Wood had taken a pretty unflinching look at Megan and her immediate family: her father and brother's alcoholism, her own inability to make commitments or to have any empathy for others in her travels, her cousin's casual violence. After suffering through all the growing pains and intransigence of her earlier years, the story actually opens on Megan in a good space, perhaps the only time that any of the stories have, and puts her into a story headlong with a younger self, and not a carbon copy but simply another young woman with with as little empathy as Megan ever showed in any of her earlier relationships. It not only lets us revisit the small bits and pieces of her past as they're shown on display in the gallery, but puts us in the position of being both voyeur and sympathetic friend. We have been there as Megan ran out on roommates, blew perfectly healthy relationships, lied casually to anyone that she had run into and yet we're to feel her violation as her things are stolen and held up as fictional items for everyone to see. It is both a betrayal of trust and a suitable comeuppance to her. And it helps her take one more step forward in her level of maturity.

If there is any problem that I had with the series, it really is only in the last issue. The story tries to follow Megan back home to the house that she ran away from 20 years earlier, and tries to answer the nagging questions that we all have as we get older: am I just the sum of my experiences, the sum of my parents longing for me to become something else, the sum of my own mistakes? For most of us, and for Megan, the we're left with our own answers, since the ghosts and wall don't talk. But the issue is oddly overly sentimental, and, in returning Megan to the old house, seems to betray the growth that we had finally seen from her in the last issue. Megan steps back, and seems to be going back to nothing particually interesting. It serves the authors needs, but not Megan's needs, and that's an issue. There really is nothing there for her, at least not for the character thatwe've been seeing, the walls won't talk, and her mother's decision to leave the house to her may not have anything deeper to it at all as much as Wood might wish to pretend.

The package of the book is superb, with great design and all the bits and pieces that made the series interesting to pick up along the way. The guest pin-ups in the back are all included, and I'm sorry taht I didn't get mine in in time to be included! I had a neat one with Megan and her shirt is a map that was kinda neat. While i doubt that I'll need to go back and reread all the text pieces for each issue, they are an intersting slice of time when each issue was created. I specifically like the "soundtrack" portion, since I tend to have different CDs that I can recall listening to as I worked on each page. Practically every comic that i ever drew has its own soundtrack. Overall the hardback is essentially better to have, in my mind, than the original issues. It sits better on the shelf and reads well, since this is a series that works as a thematic whole, despite being a collection of single stand-alone stories.

New Artwork: First Look

A little pencil work for you all to check out...

Comics as Metatext: These Are The Days of Our Lives

So why is it that I know more about Tony Stark’s heart condition than I do my own father’s? Why am I more curious about Wolverine’s past than my family’s own checkered and mysterious past? Why, sadly, do most fanboys know more about Diana Prince’s bust than… well… then about any real busts?

Are comics the true metatext for our times? Have the long running series developed a life of their own in our memories, and our discussions, and our continuing their lives into other media? Have the Fantastic Four become more real to those that had their brains permanently scarred by Lee and Kirby, or those whose chromosomes were altered by Claremont, Byrne and Austin?

For all those that will claim movies as our fictional consciousness, can six hours in the life of Indiana Jones compete with months and years of following the minutea of Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben? Like the album that was playing when you had your first kiss, your first break up, your first make up sex, these serials become the soundtrack to our lives. I can recall not only the 7-11 where I would purchase the X-men comics, but also all the little bits surrounding going down there on Wednesdays after school, getting that hideous Charleston Chews to go along with the new comics. What else can make all that come back?

As well, comics have provided the same sort of story stability the music can provide. When all else is going to hell, you can go back, again and again, to stories and watch everything going to hell, and somehow come out all right yet again. Comics can personify the cathartic element in storytelling as our heroes confront an endless series of troubles that should seem to overwhelm them, and yet somehow do not. While we might expect that somehow there will be a point where they breakdown over the troubles and yet they do not.

If there is a furthering of the metatext, then it is in the addition of the breakdown that has taken heroes one step further than they ever went before. Daredevil breaks down with Karen Page as she returns from her drug addiction, and takes his life as Matt Murdock down with it. Jack Knight, father and girlfriend gone, breaks down with his newborn son in his arms, his precious Opal City no match for his personal losses. Comics grow up when our characters face real dangers, but those dangers act as a real advancement of the characters, which is a danger to the corporate metatext. Perhaps the only way to continue then is to follow the prince Valiant path, where the characters do age, obviously not in real time, but slowly and surely, so that their path eventually mirrors our own.

It is perhaps The Batman who personifies the longest running metatext currently available to those of us who follow popular fiction. Superman has been rebooted enough times that only the very basics of his Jewish origins have stayed true: Ma and Pa Kent, Smallville, and a few others. Batman, on the other hand, has been the true Gilgamesh, whether written by Kane, Fox, Miller or Moore, he’s never quite been able to shake Joe Chill pulling the trigger on his parents. Whether it was from a distance or so close that the pearls break and spill to the ground, it matters not. Two-Face will always be Dent on his worst day, the Joker always the rogue force of chaos, Catwoman his own self with a looser set of morals and a greater sense of who she really is.

Bob Segar once sang, “Come back baby, rock and roll never forgets” but comics do forget. DC and Marvel have, in some measure forgotten where they came from. There is nothing wrong with adult heroes, but we need the heroes of our children as well. While Civil War was heavy handed allegory, Secret Invasion takes the very underpinnings of the Marvel Universe and spins a tale out of Skrull cloth whole. Right now, the Marvel Universe is an odd mix. DC had dragged the entire universe into Morrison’s world, and it is not a happy place with Final Crisis. Oddly enough, Grant knows almost better than anyone how to mix the light and the heavy into a delightful stew that many different ages can enjoy (see his All Star Superman). Somehow, in all the politics and editorial decisions seem to have driven the fun out of it. A selective memory is what is called for here.

And memory is what its all about, then, isn’t it?

Gallery Show: Cici's in Mill Valley Calfornia

A few pics from the my first gallery show ever. Been meaning to post these all month!

Shown here is one wall solely devoted to work on The Carnival:The Human Hourglass while the opposite wall was a mix of illustrations from the original Pistoleras graphic novel proposal and some spot illustrations.