New Work: Captain America and the Red Skull

I'll admit it, I have been pretty ambivalent about the Captain America character for a lot of years, especially when he's been divorced from politics, which isn't terribly appropriate for a character created by two Jews who was punching out Hitler before the United States declared war upon Japan and Germany. The character, supposedly a representative of "American Ideals" (and I put the quotes around that phrase for a reason), is not only steeped in the current political climate, but also in your own personal version of what those "Ideals" mean.

N one has actually excited me about the character since Steve Englehart had his Cap watch Nixon commit suicide pretty much on camera back in 1973 (wish fulfillment for that generation). And all that being said, Brubaker has absolutely made the character relevant and interesting with his run of Cap, currently collected in the the Winter Soldier trades, as well as the follow ups (which I've not finished reading yet). Which is why I found myself putting together a Cap piece for the local comic shop that I go to: Blue Moon Comics in Novato, CA.

And for someone who actually found the Red Skull scary when Kirby drew him, that craggy brow, the madman mouth, for someone who didn't seem to see through his mania that activating the next generation of the Sleeper probably wasn't in his best interests long term, the Skull is pure hate masquerading as a reasonable villian, which makes him all the worse. Doom thinks that he's a reasonable dictator, rationalizing himself as a positive force in Latveria, but the Skull is pure hate, pure evil, pure calculating evil. Brubaker recognizes this, and makes the best addition to the canon that we've seen in 30 years: that those who use the Cosmic Cube do so at their own risk: the Cube never promises happiness, never delivers either. The Cube is pure Genie of the Lamp without Robin Williams, it will always bring the worse of endings to user. The motto, that Kirby may have never intended: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

Thanos at least had an abstract reason for obtaining the Cube: to become a God. But the Skull is pure meglomania. You can't reason with him, you can't logic your way around him, you simply are stuck with a human that would never deny the holocaust, but would rejoice in the genecide of 6 million humans, and would simply fret that they didn't finish the job.

Captain America rides a thin line between the unwavering patriotism of idealism and realism, which definitely makes him a victim of the current writer's biases. If you 're in tune with that writer, then you'll enjoy his take on the character: i.e. he'll represent your America. There is the America that wants to invade Iraq, and his no qualms about being there, and then there is the America that thinks that invading Iraq is like watching japan bomb Pearl Harbor and deciding the invade Spain: it simply makes no sense. My Captain America would never have to worry about hanging chad, and would never have seen the logic of going to Iraq. Brubaker has made his Captain America the idealist on the tightrope: he understands the politics that exist, he's not stupid, but occasionaly he wants to do thing the old fashioned way: by force, by moral imperative, by his moral imperative. Steve Rogers would have no problem acknowledging this truth: history is written by the winners. The Cap in the main book, as well as the one in the Ultimates, would not have a problem with this: both of them want, expect, to be the winners.

Evanier's Kirby: King of Comics

Mark's book, which many of us in comicbookland have been waiting for, has been delayed, as mentioned here on Mark's site:

Unfortunately, it looks like Kirby: King of Comics, my book on Jack Kirby, will not be out in time for either con. We're still finding new treasures to include and it's now scheduled to come out in February of '08...I think. However, I expect to be signing it at Wondercon in San Francisco at the end of that month and I've tentatively accepted invites to a half-dozen other conventions next year. So I'll be around.

Link provided, although there is no more info that I've quoted here.

In Praise Of: Paul Gulacy and Master of Kung Fu

Occasional Superheroine has this post up as her start of Paul Gulacy week. I'm excerpting a bit here that is one of those quotes that certainly sums things up:

One can only imagine the reaction a kid had to a comic book as kinetically wild and relatively exotic as "The Master of Kung Fu" in the early 1970s. It certainly had an impression on a young Quentin Tarantino, who has been quoted as saying that the title was his favorite.

Valerie, I was that kid, and found myself poring over the Fight Without Pity and the Murder Agency, stunned by the choreography and violence and cinematic beauty of Shang and Shen, awed by the beauty of Leiko Wu, and overwhelmed, to this day, by what Doug and Paul were able to do in a monthly Marvel comic.

Paul forever raised the stakes on the subtlety of character interaction and he had a writer that didn't pull any punches either, giving him some real, true emotion. Do we feel the betrayal of Leiko's feelings in issue #40 when Shang innocently breaks her heart by not realizing that she is in love with him? Or is there a more fully realized death (that has stuck) than Larner's sacrifice in #49, visions of his dead wife around him?

The 12 issue run from Master of Kung Fu #38 to 50, barring #41 which is a fill-in, is a remarkable run from 1976, a literate, adult, kung fu and espionage thriller certainly better than anything the Bond franchise was putting. Doug's plotting was matched by Paul's pencils, and he gave his stories a gravitas because he could pull off the subtle character interaction that made the series. In another artist's hands (and you only have to read issue #41 to see how the series could have looked), we would have lost most if not all of what made the book unique.

Accused early on of being a Steranko clone, Paul certainly wore his influence on his sleeve, but there is nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, Jim went on to become a great designer, but Paul became the greater illustrator. In defense of this, I'll point out the two issues where Paul inked himself, Master of Kung Fu #29 and #40, and the subtlety introduced in the reflected light and shadows of #40 is a quantum leap over the earlier issue. And #29 still rocks to this day with one of the great comic fights of all time between Razorfist and Shang Chi and some deliciously deep and subtle shadows in an issue that would carry three parallel plotlines, a rather ambitious storytelling devise, in the same issue. But issue #40 is brilliant.

Paul went through any number of inkers back in those days; a scheduling issue perhaps? Something, actually, that i've never thought to ask him about. Dan Adkins, Pablo Marcos, Jack Abel, Tom Sutton and, most forgettably, Vinnie Colletta for part of issue #50, contributed to the book. For my money, Paul was best served by Adkins and Marcos. I know that Paul feels that Adkins did the best work on his pencils back then, but I really enjoyed the energy that Pablo brought with his brush work to art. Paul's work is so exacting that it has the potential to stiffen up when traced over, and so I modeled my own inking over him along the line of Marcos and Adkins.

(I finally met Pablo just a year or so ago, and was overjoyed to have the chance to tell him how much I enjoyed his work. I'm not sure that it meant as much to his as it did to me, but I pulled out a stack of Batman work over Gulacy that I had done to show him. His wife, at least, humored me and said that she saw echoes of his style in my brush work. I commissioned an expensive Living Zombie sketch that was really an excuse to give Pablo some money to thank him for his work. Of course, he kicked out an amazing Zombie sketch that I will always have.)

Paul, as you can see from the artwork scanned, has been well and interestingly served by his inkers over the years. I had the pleasure of working over Paul on a number of series, from The Grackle, Eternal Warrior and Turok/Timewalker at Acclaim to Batman: Outlaws over at DC Comics. His work on that Batman series was exceptional, as these scans from my originals show. I'll leave it to the gentle reader to decide how close to the Adkins/Marcos ideal I really hit, but I spent a hell of a lot of sleepless nights trying to get close.

I just upset that I didn't get asked to contribute to the Gulacy book that Vanguard put out. They certainly scanned in enough of my inks for the book.

Panels: Detail from Master of Kung Fu #40, inks by Gulacy; uninked pencils from The Grackle #2; Marcos inks on Master of Kung Fu #49; Yoakum inks from the final page of Batman: Outlaws #1

Kirby on the Lower East Side: RAB's post

One of the joys of having a diverse number of other blogs to read, is the ability to run across a geat post covering something that I would certainly have missed since I no longer, sadly, live in New York City. However, i certainly would have loved to have been there. RAB has a great post titled Kirby in the Park that you must read not just for the fact that its a great story, but because he has some great observations on Jack's particular place in the popular culture at large, as opposed the comic geek culture at large., particularly in New York.

That dovetails with my own post on the dinner after Jack's death, that the Defiant crew held after a New York convention over on 8th Ave. Have a read if you missed it the first time. Its one of my favorite stories of all time. Jack was one of them, a true New Yorker at heart, soul and upbringing, and, finally, the rest of the country is slowly but surely getting to realize what a giant he was in his imagination and the effect he had on the 20th Century through pop culture.

Great great post RAB. Wish that I could have stopped by.

Marvel's Kirby Covers: the editor's speak

Tom Breevort has an interesting collection of Kirby's covers over at Marvel.com and makes a number of small but interesting comments on each cover as you scroll down.

Interestingly enough we get to see the design sense of Kirby down through the ages, ones that likes a certain number of motifs and layouts, and reuses them many times. Obviously Kirby relied on a short hand in his work, similar figures, similar layouts, and it is this shorthand that most people draw when they do a kirby homage or parody, but it was a shorthand that he created over all those years of work.

Kirby's covers were very often masterpieces of having more than one level to them, so that even the most static told a story, or the teaser of a story, that made you want to decide to pick the book up. Many of the same static poses used today on covers are simply that, static, without life or energy. I sometimes wonder that artists haven't figured out that you can use story elements as compositional devices that will give you an exciting cover, a good pin-up piece, and something to grab the reader's eye. Is this truly brain surgery?

It is interesting to note that many of the Kirby covers lean left, and I wonder if this is because, as many folks have mentioned, that Jack would start at the left corner of the cover and and work his way right? Maybe he just thought out the cool elements and started over there and went further right. Perhaps it was because he knew, knew, that Stan was going to put a hyperbolic caption somewhere on the cover, and he had to leave some negative area for the lettering.

Perhaps we should ahve a Jack Kirby Collector style article with all the rejected covers that he did, alongside the ones that ran, so we could try to get a handle on the rejected material as well. That might prove interesting.

The Shooter Story: Beginning, Middle and End

Just a week or two after I make the comment on Jim Shooter's assertion that comic book storytelling should be done a certain way because "Its always someone's first comic." then this quyote shows up on the Comic Journal's Journalista site (as well as the Comic Book Guy site) :

"The art in comics is generally better than ever, the writing is often clever and glib, but in spite of that, far too many comics are utterly unreadable. Even hardcore fans find many comics daunting to follow! The craft of storytelling is all but lost. A who's who of industry big shots have privately agreed with me when we've discussed exactly this subject, but it's a tough problem to fix, given the often huge egos of the creators, general creative anarchy and lack of trained editorial people".

And he's right. I'm not going to argue with him on the main part of his message. However, I will make the case that there were plenty of hard as hell to follow '70's comics as well, when we had exceptionally talented editors and writers like Marv Wolfman overseeing the biz. The quextion is, what is a readable comic? Isn't a comic that a 7 year old can understand different from a comic that a 25 year old can understand? How about a literate, educatated woman of 38 who simply hasn't grown up with comic?

My focus group on comics generally comprises my almost-7 year old daughter, who is a voracious reader, and my wife, with a Masters in Journalism, who didn't grow up in a comic book world like many of us did. I keep a spinner rack in the TV room at home loaded with everything from '60's Marvel to Dodson's Wonder Woman and Cooke's New Frontier. And I've found poor storytelling in every era, regardless of editor, but obviously, different things jumped out at the 7 year old versus the 38 year old.

The panel to panel transitions on the modern Wonder Woman comic are clearer to the 7 year old than some of the transitions in the 60's and '70's, with their greater degree of story compression, as they depend on the captions to make certain elements of the story clear. Not fully understanding the vocabulary, she needs a greater degree of visual communication to make this work, and I'm not certain that Jim allow this degree of latitude with most of his artists. Certainly, Marvel in the 80's had the superstars who could experiment (it seemed like every issue Moon Knight was a Sienkiewicz experiment) regardless of the failure rate, and everyone else, who were ruled by an iron editorial hand. Perhaps if there is someone to who helped create the superstar system, it may have been Jim. Miller got to do what he wanted. Daredevil was either Frank's or Rogers, and as we saw, editorial went with Frank. As many times as I've seen Frank interviewed on the subject, I'm not sure I've ever run across a Roger McKenzie interview where he addresses it.

Having been around the comics for so long now, I see head editors that were editorial assistants or interns when i was inking books 10 years ago. If there is anything that comics doesn't have, its any sort of organized training system that addresses the twin disciplines that our medium encompasses, and that may be a huge failing point with comics direction. Some editors become traffic directors simply, some stamp their view point so strongly on the books that they may as well be a modern Mort Weisinger. Many fall in the middle, caught and pulled in many different directions, by the prevailing marketing conditions, the overall corporate direction, the whims of the writer or artist, the latest company crossover (Counting Down to the Crisis on Infinite Hulks), the modern editor might long for days of simply getting the writer and artist on the same page and turning out a nice monthly book. It can't be easy.

It will be fascinating to see if Jim's Legion harkens back to the '60's DC, '70's Marvel or 90's Defiant. Especially with editorial changes that pretty much everyone in comics is predicting will happen to at the DC offices.

The Comic Shop Without Comics

Just a quick link out to ICv2's Steve Bennett, whose column Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Does The Name Slappy Freelance Ring A Bell? continues to make the case for trades that I've been harping on for a while now. Of course, as I'm not a comics retailer, it is all rather murky and hypothosis based, so its nice to read that its working for someone!

To whit - the trade is simply a better format to induce adults to actually pick the damn things up... whether Maus, Watchmen, Persepolis, The Salon or 300. If it reads like a book, and looks like a book, its a book, not a pamphlet.

If Its Always Someone's First Comic, Couldn't It Just As Easily Be Their Last?

There is a popular thought process that Jim Shooter was the perfect cheerleader for: the notion that the comic must be basic enough for anyone to read, after all, "Any comic could be someone's first comic." An attitude that has been championed by more than a few people in the business. Recently, however, I've had reason to rethink the old canard, and I wanted to put this out to you, blogdom assembled.

The notion that any particular comic could be someone's first issue, and thus would need not only a recap, but a degree of "dumbing down" on the storytelling side so that the visual language of the comic would not be an impedement to understanding this month's story. Unfortunately, over the last couple decades, what we've seen are a far greater number of comics that become the last issues rather than the first issues. comics have been losing numbers in droves, so making the point that we have to potentially sacrifice the complexity of story or storytelling so as not to drive away a potential new reader, may well be moving us in the wrong direction. We may have been actively pushing away the reader who is constantly looking for something to grow with them.

It does make sense, for instance, to keep the "every issue a first issue rule" when you look at the industry demographic/marketing plan through the 1940s to 1960s: your comics were targeted towards the same age range, so instead of moving upwards with a person's age, you had to hope to replace the same number of readers that "age out" with a similar number that grow into reading your books. Already there are flaws with the system, when you look at birth statistics during the baby boomer years. Without new product to go along with your new kids, you really have no hope of expanding your market.

And of course, this ties back to my In Search Of: The Elusive Bridge Comic" post that generated some interesting discussion, by trying to make the point that we come to different content within the same media over the years with different expectations. It would be interesting to say that "every movie is going to be someone's first movie", so we shouldn't do anything too advance in terms of flashing forward (The Shining) , flashing backward (Momento) or being too inventive with out camera angles (Seven) . There should be no room for ambiguity (Lost in Translation) lest we basically piss off the viewer so badly that they never return to view another movie again.

Hard to read that without laughing, isn't it?

So here's what we do: we don't continually tie the hands of creators. We have books that are not meant for the 6 year old, or the 12 year old, but for the adult. And we make sure that we have books at that 6 year old level that don't insult their intelligence. My almost 7 year old daughter is already telling me what the theme of a movie or book will be in the first third of the story. She understands subtext without knowing what that word means yet. We don't need to keep the material within the medium stupid.

Challenge me. Make me think. Keep me awake. Keep me buying. Or that next comic might be my last.

Sane Comments on the Mary Jane Statue

I stayed far, far, farrrrrrrrrrr away from the whole Mary Jane statue when it hit, and even farther away when the ensuing firestorm hit the blog world. So imagine my surprise when I follow a Journalista link over to Phillopos live journal, and find actual discussion with nary a flaming post in sight about that same Mary Jane.

In the blog-eat-blog world of internet time, there clearly have been enough days to allow for the cooling of passions about the statue, and for there to be a good, general agreement about the whole debacle.

rachel edidin puts it succinctly:

Y'know what? I actually dug Adam Hughes's original sketch for the comiquette statue. MJ *did* look feisty, and while she was hella sexy, she also had a lot of spirit. I could buy that MJ discovering and being amused by Spidey's costume in the laundry. It was a cute pin-up, and it worked as a pin-up. The problem with the statue was that it had little or none of the charm of Hughes's version, and he was stupidly defending it as a direct translation of that art--and the intention behind it.

And with that, you pretty much have, word for word, my feelings on it. Men like the Hughes, they're sexy babes without looking like idiots, prostitutes or whores, and women like the Hughes, for many of the same reasons: sexy without being sexist. (Personal favorite: the Wanda in the Sentinel hand. Wow.) And none of that made it to the statue.

I never quite got the superheroes as sexy thing, to be honest, even when I was younger, until we get to the John Byrne Jean Grey, who had this "real" body. Yes, she was curvy and sexy, but John was a good enough artist to make her move, to make have have breasts that would actually flatten down if she was lying down, to have hips that would turn properly when she was surprised by Magneto. The John Buscema Sif didn't have that, the Herb Trimpe Betty Ross didn't, neither did the Sal Buscema Valkyrie. And I thought that Jean was pretty wow. All the art books that I had said to try to actully observe people, how they move, and John's moved a lot more like women than anyone else back then. Michael Golden's did as well when he came along.

And somehow, from there, we progressed to Michael Turner. sigh.

But I digress. Mary Jane, we know that you're a hottie, and if Marvel does break you and Peter up, it'll be a shame, but know that we loved you. Not for your thong, but for your spirit.

The Comics Journal: Still Relevant After All These Years?

Over at the Hurting, Tim goes off on Scott Pilgrim and video games, but stops to make a side comment her that caught my attention. Reproduced for your convenience:

The fact that this review landed like a wet turd at midnight begs the question, does no one read the Journal anymore? If the Journal can print a ritual disemboweling of one of Team Comics' most sacred cows without inspiring so much as a blink, well, I don't believe the magazine is penetrating anywhere near as deeply into the "intelligent, opinionated" comic reader demographic as it once did. Perhaps the price increase really hurt the magazine?

You think? Perhaps the magazine has simply painted itself into a corner when it comes to comics with its reviews and focus, while comics have been branching ever outward in the last 10 years. Perhaps its just too damn big.

The reality is, from this devoted former Comics Journal reader, is that there was a time when I would have defended the Journal from almost all criticism, not because it was perfect, but because at least it tried. And back in the desperate, newsprint CBG infested '80's, no one else tried to put two brain cells together and approach comics from an intellectual place.
Groth, for all the times his ego ocassionally overwhelmed the actual content of the magazine, had the right idea, and made more than a few years worth of attempts to get his audience to read critical reviews, to break down the language of comics to something that could be studied, addressed with formalism and standards, and taken apart so that we could see the innards. That he and we saw more offal that could have been imagined through the '90's is not his fault.

And yet, somewhere in-between the comics getting mass acceptance again, not just as a juvenile product but with the greater mainstream American public, the Journal, which should have been on the vanguard of the publishing, started to slip out of view. It got too expensive, too thick to read, too much information packed in one space. It was as if going to a quarterly publication allowed them the time to go deeper into their subjects, which one would have thought would have been a good thing, except that its possible to go too deep and simply overwhelm your reader.

And it became hard to find. I recall that quite clearly. And that is just the buying habits of the shops that I went to, so its partly their fault.

But the lack of monthly publishing meant that there was less timely reporting, and a periodical without an imperative to read is a slightly less appealing periodical. Illustration and Comic Art and Sweeneys fall into the same trap sometimes, no question, and we've already seen the change in the publication schedule for Comic Art in response to that.

Without being privvy to any of the nuts and bolts or finances of the Comics Journal, I hope that Gary is making good money, and I greatly enjoy many of the Fantagraphics books, so many props to the whole crew there. I'm just not sure of the Journal itself anymore.

New Work: Carnival sketch

A study of Santiago, the main character in The Carnival, done in wash, two beers and a shot of Centenario Anejo tequila.

The Latest Cover Controversy: Ms. Marvel #21

OOooooh! Can I possibly be the first person to blog on what I'm sure will be the latest Marvel Feminist controversy?

Yes, yet another Boobs not quite falling where they should, female in peril cover of Ms. my ass is barely covered in this costume Marvel.

And its not good. Oh no, the composition and negative space are terrible. Just because you have paint is no reason to go overboard like this.

I knew letter writers back in the 1970's who would constantly point out that Iron Man was brutalized more on his covers than any other hero in the Marvel Universe. Whereas Cap or Thor would be menaced, Iron Man was being melted by acid, crushed, whipped, and being blasted into a grave by Firelord. You had to believe that Tony had a slightly masochistic relationship with his villians (Doctor Spectrum in particular, who had a particularly "pretty" costume). I'm not sure that is anything on what female comic characters have to face. Always being knocked around, breasts spilling out (and yet always defying gravity in certain ways), and male artists always having to draw around to complete crotch shot for the costumes.

You'd think, after the amount of feminist angst and the Mother Jones article, they might get a clue. And here's a thought, if I were to do a a run of Ms Marvel, with her looking hot and Cho-like sexy, battling villians, but holding her own, do you think that they would see any less than the book already is? Make her sexy, make her beautiful, just make her strong. I can still see the 'boys picking it up.

And last, is that a Brood queen come back?

Adults Just Get Better Toys: The New Gods Action Figures

Found this on the web, future action figures of the New Gods, circa Jack Kirby, and just had to stop and appreciate the design sense that Jack had once again.

Despite the fact that Orion's jaw looks like its already been in a fight with Kalibak, and Lightray, sadly being portrayed all too well looks like a grinning idiot, how, and I repeat, HOW can you not want a freakin' Mister Miracle? Man does that costume look good in 3D. And Darkseid? Yeah, I'll take the father and the adopted son please.

Jack was so far ahead of his time that we should just label some things on "Kirby-time" and leave it at that.

For Better or Worse: Worse, Worse, Worse

I don't normally go into the comic strip world all that often, although I did go after Johnny Hart after his death for his religious bent, but the trend in Lynn Johnston's For Better or Worse has been so disturbing that I don't think that I can ignore it for that much longer.

Funny then, that I find the whole BlogospHere going off about the Lizanthony couple as well. Chaos Theory has a great compilation of quotes, many of them seriously pissed off aobut the pairing of the weak willed shmoe that is Anthony to the commitment-o-phobe that is Elizabeth.

Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, Lynn is going there on purpose: she clearly has made Elizabeth a certain type of character, although she wasn't as evil as she should have been to the character when she deliberately made her boyfriend Paul move to her town and then up and left a month or so later. Quite honestly, she deserved everything she got, and she should have gotten a lot more. I had a sudden urge to channel Ross and yell, "You were on a break!" at the morning paper in response. Perhaps it would have been better if she'd discovered them in be together.

If Lynn wants the drama of getting Elizabeth into an unstable/rebound relationship then she's going to get it, but I'm not sure that she has the energy for the inevitable disintegration that accompanies that type of break up, especially one that will involve a child. I wonder if anyone has asked Lynn point blank whether she's aware how unaware of her fecklessness Elizabeth really is.

It is interesting that so many people are so angry about this. Not upset that they don't like the direction, or critiquing the change in the character, but really, really angry. Perhaps because we all know Anthonys in real life, and rarely do they work out well in relationshipland. We all want a little better for Lizard Breath now, don't we?

San Diego Comic Con: the Carol Lay Experience

Carol Lay has a wonderful comic about her experience at this year's San Deigo Comic Con that is, as always, illustrated with her wonderful quiet and sardonic wit.

I love Carol Lay. I have no idea why she isn't a bigger star than she is.

Of course, if the artist in question is Molly Crabapple, as this message board thread has it, then, the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, as Carol has already posted an apology in the middle of the thread.

Of course, I then wonder about Occasional Superheroine's thoughts on female comic creators and whether or not they have an obligation to be nicer to their female colleagues or call it like it is. I'll let the ladies fight it out over that one.

In Seach Of: The Elusive "Bridge" Comic?

The bridge book: the future of the medium?

Much has been made of the elusive bridge book, the comic tht would allow the reader to move gracefully from the Ritchie rich to the fantastic four to Kill your boyfriend in three easy steps and 30 years worth of maturity. So much time has been spent looking for this progression that I’m not sure that anyone has recently looked at it in light of today’s marketplace.

We often talk about comics and don’t necessarily define our terms for the discussion that well. There are comics as the things tht we read, a particular issue or trade or long box in the garage, and there are comics, the medium that we have works produced in, in the Scott McCloud definition of words and pictures working in concert to tell a story. Frequently the two get mixed up and the discussion gets muddied, which is not my intent here at all.

What we’re discussing today is comics as medium, a mass medium, which is not something that we could have said as easily 10 years ago, and how it relates to today’s buying public. It is helpful, and occasionally instructive to look at other mediums, vastly more mature mediums, (for all that the comic has been around since the 1930’s) such as books and film in this regard.

I believe that the notion of the crossover comic is not one that is particularly relevant anymore, if we could accept the premise that the person who is likely to rent Terminator 2: The Director’s Cut is not generally the same consumer who rented Mansfield Park, or is going to go pay to see Becoming Jane. What those two people have in common most is a love for the film medium, and an understanding a) of the storytelling conventions of the medium and b) that Terminator 2: The Director’s Cut is not an acceptable choice as date night.

While there is the occasional crossover blockbuster in any medium, as I defy most any of the Merchant/Ivory filmgoers to actually deny, with a straight face, that they have never seen Jaws for instance, it would be far more helpful and interesting for there to be as wide an array of comics available to the potential reader.

Last week I went home with the following in my bag to read:

• Criminal #8 by Brubaker and Philips
• Mighty Avengers #4 by Bendis and Cho
• Powers #25 by Bendis and Oeming
• The Salon by Nick Bertozzi

And I think nothing of mixing Criminal in with the slowest moving Ultron saga ever (literally, Mantis had become the Celestial Madonna in the time it has taken Ultron to take over the world again) or moving over to the over the top art references of The Salon, but I’m beginning to think that there may not be that many of me out there. It has been put to us in America that the manga in Japan, for instance, has so many volumes out that that the adolescent Japanese female who wants to read lesbian vampire fiction can easily have a series targeted towards her particular tastes. Certainly there are enough DVDs out in video stores to accommodate such a specific request for material. The real question is, is there enough American material to allow for targeted reading?

It is, alas, the terrible fact that to be a true mass medium, you need the mass of numbers. Because without that, you're a pretender, which is what comics have been for the last 20 years. It really is my answer to those that think that teh San Diego Comic Con should spin off the comics into their own con again: we've waited long enough in the wilderness as fringe media, don't exile us again because you don't like crowds. We need a huge number of readers, used to the conventions of visual storytelling to continue the tradition, and we need a great wealth of material to bring people back again and again. It is not the book itself a lot of times, but the habit of reading the book. If the habit is there, then they will go seek out the books themselves, and, thankfully, these days there are more and more books to fill in the gaps.

OK, so I'm being a half-full kinda guy these days. Can't help it. Came back from the San Diego Comic Con believing that I saw such an amazing breadth of material being published that almost any age should be able to find a comic to enjoy.

If only they know to look. And its a big IF.

In Review Of: Powers #25 by Bendis and Oeming

Man, it seems like a long time since I've done a simple comic review.

See, heres the deal. I liked Powers, I really did. I recommended it to my friends and enjoyed the stories as being, really, my favorite Bendis work.

I'm getting a little tired of the reboots on the series. It’s starting to feel like the X-Files, and nobody wants that.

... and yet the current storyline is still working for me, in an odd little way. And I'm not sure why.

Oeming's art is something that I continue to enjoy, enough that I picked up a couple pages from him a year or two. Really nice stuff, bold in a non-derivative of Mignola way, which is something that many artists can't pull off. Mike's work, while it has certainly changed over the years, continues to be an interesting draw for me.

I almost dropped the book an issue or two ago when a promising storyline, with Queen Nior killing the other members of her team in ways that protagonist of the movie Seven would have approved, when the ending devolved into a simple wrap-up with a demon from hell. (And only in comics would that be considered a simple wrap-up, even a cop out really.) There was nothing clever about it, and it annoyed the hell out of me, because I really liked the build-up from the preceding issues. Nothing has a comic fan scorned like a simple ending, like having, I don't know, Elektra be a skrull or something.

Did I just say that out loud?

In any case, issue #25 promises all new story (which it starts, continuing the rest of the subplots from the earlier issues), a new format (with a different paper, which is really nice) and more pages, which is never a bad thing on a comic that you like. Especially when plenty of us are getting used to the longer reads in the trades, so extending your work beyond the usual 22 page fare is a good way to go.

End result? A nice issue and I'm staying with series for a while longer. I'm not quite sure about the two page sex scene, which comes off as terribly gratuitous, but the rest of it is solid and entertaining. I'll be waiting with patiently for the next, oh, say 6 months, til the next issue comes out.

The Pioneers of Comic Book Collecting

Sunday morning, Comic Con, Todd Severin and I stop off at a collection of Mutt and Jeff originals from 1924 at Robert Beerbaum's booth, and start flipping through the 12 or so boards, neither of us with a huge love or appreciation for Bud Fischer, but with the same thought: neither of us, in our original art collections, have anything this damn old. After all, the latest piece here was 1924, the earliest was 1921, and, while i lack the provenance here, they have the distinction of being pieces that had been taken to england and had places or money references changed for publication in the UK.

We also, being long time Bay Area comic fans, myself from Marin County, Todd from Danville, had a long discussion with Robert about the "old days", which was, for us, the rough and tumble 1970's. Todd and I share the distinction of being the next wave of dedicated comic book fans, those that followed the pioneers in the comic fandom like Thomas and Shelley, and the first real wave of retailers like Rozanski in LA, and Beerbaum with Best of Both Worlds in Berkeley. We went to those early conventions that were being produced in the mid to late 1970's, not realizing that the rules of fandom were being made up around us, and that the direct market was about to change the retailing world forever in comics.

What we didn't know, as impressionable kids, was all the behind the scenes drama that would go on: Golden Age books being stolen, friendships torn apart as collections vanish and reappear, retailing horror stories when things were a lot less controlled than today. Drama from the original Bay Cons at the Jack Tar Hotel, or the Old California Hotel, both on Van Ness in San Francisco. It fills in a lot of gaps to tell you the truth. Perhaps a great new book for someone to write would be the history of Phil Seuling and the Direct Market.

The problem here is that we approach this both as a business and as a hobby, a collector's mentality. And most of the dealers that you see on the convention floor will make decisions that any sane business man would never make, regarding cash flow and inventory. How many of then have everything computerized? How many of them run reports on a weekly basis to check sell thru and inventory? And god bless them, because the true businessman would never have kept the comics scene alive with one hundreth the passion that these guys do. They become the conservators of the field, an oral history of comics that only comes out with a few beers.

I certainly think that the original art field has become almost all business, especially as collectors with real money, Hollywood money, hell, decent job money, have moved in and allowed the Albert Moys of the world to bring their prices up to levels that we honestly never would have ever thought.

Next post, we discuss Allen Siegel and the pricing of Dave McKean.

In Review Of: Terry Dodson's French Album

Seen to the left is a post card from Terry Dodson's gallery work from a french comic, the title of which escapes me, as I cannot read French. Suffice to say that it is a beautifully rendered, very lush tits and ass romp with aforepictured blonde woman.

The oddity, and it reminds me very much of early cable TV in the United States, is that cable knew that it could show us breasts, but simply didn't, to mix my metaphors, have the balls to do so. The cable execs would hedge their bets and give us one of the most convoluted stories of all time to try and justify the excuse to show us a mammary gland or two.

Simply put, we hadn't evolved (or devolved depending on your viewpoint) to the Red Shoe Diaries. If Zalman King hadn't been born, we would have had to invent him.

But I digress.

Terry draws beautiful women, not weak women, or jailbait, or bizarre ideas of what a woman might look like by someone who has never actually seen a woman. They aren't Michael Turner women; even if they're large busted, they actually have internal organs and hips and bodies. I love that they move and flow and generally have eyes like Lynda Carter even.

So the oddity of the bodice and boobs story, like the aforementioned French volume, resorting to the bizarrely placed strands of hair to cover the nipples of the gorgeous protagonist is so... so Blue Lagoon. I find it an odd choice and I wonder who dictated that type of censorship: the publisher, the writer, Terry himself? Since I've run across other nudes that Terry has drawn, I doubt it was him. Did the publisher not realize the type of book that they were going to print? did the writer get cold feet at the last minute? Certainly there are very different standards of nudity and what constitutes line crossing in America and Europe, but the book is far tamer than most of the european albums brought over to this side of the pond.

Blue Lagoon. How bizarre.

And the art, yes the artwork, is really, really beautiful. I'll be digging around the galerie9art site just to look at some of the illustrations when I have time, since they have lots of beautiful scans, from artists that I'm very familiar with, and some that I'm not.

If some nudity offends you, then following the link would be a very bad idea, by the way. Not entirely work safe.

Comics as Pop Culture: Fanboys in the Driver's Seat

Steven Grant, in his recent Master of the Obvious column goes on at length to delve into what I've postulating both live in person and online for a while now: that comics have been moving into actually being pop culture, not fringe culture for quite some time now, and with the ascendency of 300 to the top of the movie charts, we might now consider the movement to be fairly complete.

Of course, Steven, ever the better writer than I, sums it up well as this:

The comic book is no longer the pariah of pop culture.

And this is clearly true in the movies, the "hip" media references, the graphic novel section of the local Borders (significantly, a much better section that then hipper over-all local bookstore, Book Passage) and simply in other media references.

I'll put it as such: We don't suck as much as we used to . At least in the eyes of the public at large.


What I've been thinking since coming home from San Diego is that the movies may be driving people into respecting the comic field now, but comics are actually in the driovers's seat. And part of this this is generational. Many of the same young men that loved the Claremont/Byrne X-men are now pitching and optioning movies in Hollywood. Unlike prior generations of power brokers in Hollywood, who grew up with the view of comics as disposable trash (Oh yeah, like they're gonna throw 35 Million at the Angel and the Ape movie), this generation of movie makers doesn't look down on the source material. And I like that.

Significant is that they have the effects to translate the comic material into proper big screen visuals, which is one of the main reasons that Sci Fi was such a laughing stock before Star Wars. (You want me to take the Cylons seriously? Well, yeah, now we do.) Suddenly, Wolverine doesn't look so stupid with Hugh Jackman playing him, and the claws? Yeah, they work too.

Steven makes some interesting points on the properties, and how they make or break the movies... with some comments on the Green Hornet and Spirit movies. What I find interesting is that they have moved to optioning properties, probably for financial reasons, that have little or no following, unlike the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man. Green Hornet? Never understood that one, especially when you have a further multitude of good properties that could be better mined. Oddly enough, Marvel has been better at getting the small properties to screen. (I really never thought that I'd see the day that I would be seeing a Ghost Rider movie in the threatres. I'm sure that Mike Ploog never did either.) Where is the Wonder Woman movie? Where is the Green Lantern movie? Hell, where is the Black Lightning movie at this rate? How could you not simply let Joss Whedon make the damn WW picture anyway? (Who, in Hollywood, has a better resume with female characters than the man with 7 seasons of Buffy?)

Heroes, by the way is such a close concept to the Good Guys, my first profession venture into the world of comics via the defunct Defiant Comics that I did a head spin when I saw the premise.

Comics have long been about being able to reflect the times, and nowhere is that more apparent than reading books in hindsight, when we are accurately able to judge the tenor of the times. The Batman is a revenge fantasy that spilled over from the lawless Robber Baron Gangster 30's, and by the middle of the 1950's he'd been tamed into a reassuring man in a mask. Marvel had long had a history of moving slowly, due in part to Martin Goodman's "find what's hot and make a copy" philosophy. Thus we had Master of Kung Fu long after the craze, and the Disco Dazzler showing up in 1980. But mainstream America is also slow to get to get with the times. The producers of Saturday Night Fever have gone on record as saying that they did the movie to document a culture that was in New York and that had died out. No one knew that it would ignite a new trend for the entire country.

What I hate seeing is comics having to be reactionary at all. Steven is still thinking of the monthly periodical version of comics, and I think that I'm far more focused on the novel/novella format. I personally like the idea that there should be less layers in the editorial system in publishing, and I'm sure that it's a personal frustration for someone who has pitched as much material as he has that editors cannot simply champion a project and bring it to fruition, but we all know that the star editorial system exists in all layer of the publishing world, and that there are very few Archie Goodwin's out there who have that sort of amazing taste as to the projects that they can get behind. (We can thank Archie for getting behind Starman, the great American comic book for the decade of the '90's.)

Political cartoons are reactionary, we don't need to to. The current crop fo graphic novels currently gaining a certain level of respect have a longer shelf life, and make for interesting movies. Ghost world is a good example, and it doesn't need a $100 million budget. I thought that Linkletter did a great job bringing A Scanner Darkly to life, and Phil Dick's book could easily have been a comic for all its twists and turns and drug addled visuals. Hell, it could have been an Englehart/Brunner comic with its level of paranoia.

And Steven, when I think of Leonard Cohen, I thinkof the chilling album, the Future. That is not easy stuff to digest. Leonard makes it sound nice, but its scary stuff. Just check out Natural Born Killers.