After Watchmen: the DC marketing blitz

There is no question that DC Comics and Marvel Comics have finally broken a lot of the stigma of the "comics are crap" tag that was stapled to the American public's mind for so long. Not only are the books in more book stores than they ever used to be, but we have a number of very successful movies that have faithfully adapted the stories that we loved into all ages entertainment. So wither the comics? What did Marvel do the capitalized on the success of 3, count 'em, 3 successful Spidermen films? Or Iron Man? How could Marvel have let the Iron Man collections not be in the warehouse to ship out when the film broke (because they didn't!). There have been any number of us comic bloggers that were ready to rake them over the coals for not having a single marketing initiative in place when those films opened.

Now DC has finally put together a 32 pamphlet, that takes me longer to read than your average comic book by the way, directing people to other books that they may want to read. To which I say:

Duh.

It is marketing 101. And while it may be a small campaign (as I've not been privvy to whole scale of where they're putting it out there, although I'm damn curious), at least they're doing something. And, for some reason, Tucker Stone has a problem with that. Perhaps we're just looking at it from different angles.

Every comment section I've ever seen that follows the question "What should I recommend to my friend who just read ____ for the first time?" detoriates into the same thing: the answer is nothing, because the answer is everything.... That's not really the way you want a recommendation to work. It's the equivalent of going to a music store and saying "I really liked John Coltrane's Giant Steps. Where should I go next?", only for the clerk to smile and say "Buy anything in the store! They're all awesome and spectacular in their own way!"

And that is completely opposite to everything that I've seen in the last 25 years, and certainly now more than ever. First off, I love the music analogy, which is a perfect example. If someone I know admires Giant Steps in my CD collection, then I'm loaning them A Love Supreme and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and some Brubeck and sending them on their way. For the rest of the decade of the '80's the answer to Watchmen was Dark Knight and then... nothing. Believe me the answer was not Camelot 3000 or Justice League Europe. Perhaps Ronin, but Ronin was a bit more genre soaked. Now? The answer, if you're forming one to stock up for party talk in the future should be fairly short (just like my jazz recommendations) so that they don't get overwhelmed. Here's mine: Sandman: Doll's House, Why I Hate Saturn, Blue Pills, Signal to Noise or Violent Cases. I'll pick 3 and put them out there. You may have your own choices, but the answer is not "everything". The answer is be selective and don't limit them to superheroes. I've blogged before about the number of Doll's House trades that I lost in the 80's and 90's to women who would never have read comics and who fell in love with Sandman.

It's unlikely that anybody at DC took the time to ask any decent swath of retailers what they thought about After Watchmen in the first place.

And that, sadly is probably quite true. DC and by extension, Time Warner, have their own little feifdoms of marketing that i doubt talk to each other that often since that is so very corporate. Bringing in new readers to direct market shops that are damn near impossible to find is going to be very hard, although i have no doubt that Watchmen will certainly result in at least some new lookers at comics, if not new readers. Thats good, we'll take them. But lets put Tucker's comment in a spin: specialty comic shops, used to doing their way of business for last 30 years, may be the last place you want ideas on where to get new readers. You may want to go as far away from them as possible so that you really do get to a new audience. After all, if they're going to the comic shop to begin with, aren't they already coverted?

De Blieck vs. Yoakum: Buying comics online

Someone actually came to my site by Googling: "the meaning of the movie watchmen". Which says to me: I don't think that you were really watching if you have to Google it.

And welcome to my readers from Singapore, Poland and Portugal.

Augie over at Comic Book Resources puts out a Watchmen-free column on waiting for the trade and buying your comics online. And I read it, now wondering where to start.

Augie has an interesting experiment with waiting to purchase comics for a week, writing a list, and then seeing a week later if you still want those comics. When he decides that very often you may change your mind a week later, I believe that it shows what sort of consumer he thinks we are. And perhaps the younger me fit that bill, but for now, I know that I'll want to read the new Guardians of the Galaxy as much today as I will one week from now. I don't impulse comics and if I do, its because I fell in love with the art or the story, things that are only available if you get the chance to flip through the issue.

When he makes the comment that it would be more satisfying to read all the issues together, I say "yes", but not always. Just like movies and TV, there are some stories serialized that work well in that fashion, but others that work much better in collection form. So yes, I enjoy reading Guardians of the Galaxy as a serial, and I am waiting for The Twelve in the trade. Hows that?

Quick experiment: Go to your local comic shop and see if those two books are currently in stock. I'd say you have a pretty good chance of the X-Men title being on a shelf somewhere. I wouldn't lay any bets on a random "Asterix" volume haunting the same bookshelves. And even if your retailer stocked "Asterix," would that particular one be on the shelf?

Sadly, that's the state of the North American comics market today.

Both books are available through Diamond (for now). If you wanted, you could place an order through your retailer, and you should be able to pick it up from them in a couple of weeks, if you're lucky.

But I would almost bet the house that they wouldn't give you a 30% discount for your order.

You're right. They wouldn't. Because they have to make money to keep the doors open.

Its really that simple. They cannot stock everything, but they could order it for you. And you would have no place to actually go and browse and look for anything new.

And this really is the crux of the matter. Try this experiment: imagine that you're a kid again, and your mom says, "I'm going to the store and I'll pick up your comics for you." (And, no, this never happened to me, nor would it ever have) If she walked in with the series you liked, (which in my eight year old brain would have meant getting the new Avengers, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and Captain Marvel), would it have been as satisfying as going to the spinner rack and flipping through them yourself? There is a joy to browsing that some people get and some don't.

I can name the number of regular series that I read (not collect, actually read) on two hands. Thats not much. I could simply regularly order them online and not think anything of it. But my LCS would. And without Blue Moon Comics in Novato Ca. in business, there would be no place to flip through anything new. I wouldn't have read Local, nor have found my two daughters responding to Simpsons Comics like they did. If you want them to stay open then you have to support them. And be aware that they have to make money just like you. You're day job must, at some poing make a profit to keep paying you. you have to aknowledge that others will too. Your LCS cannot stock everything, but if you can get them to order it, then you should. If you don't have a local shop then Amazon is your best buddy, I totally get that. But c'mon, cut those guys a break. If you want something as esoteric on the American market as a specific Asterix volume, then get them to order it.

to be continued....

In Review Of: Dave McKean

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast has an interesting interview with Dave McKean with some great career retrospective moments along the way. You'll find lots of bits and pieces along the way that you probably hadn't seen before unless you were a dedicated fan.

i met Dave many years ago at the original San Diego Con, back when it was all randomly thrown in folding tables, and Dave and his wife were sitting there chatting with the few people that recognized that he was the artist behind the then recently released Black Orchid mini series. Dave had lots of lovely large pages from those issues, and had taken the time to not only paint the images but to glue down actual folliage. As I picked up the pages, his wife said in the sweetest possible voice, "Dave has pasted down actual bits of our garden on these pages." And so he had.

I had bought a couple of pieces of art from him along the way, and am proud to have a page from his Hellblazer story as well as an old Hellblazer cover, even if I don't have pieces of his garden pasted on.

Given that his output has been both large and diverse over the last few years, it is hard to actually keep a handle on the work. His stuff is made for publication, many of his Sandman covers were little multimedia constructions that needed to be photographed, and much of what looks like smeared photos with jam and Kryolite sealent were actually photos smeared with jam and sealent. But given that he has been directing movies as well as doing books like The Wolves in the Walls, it is the sort of work that has been in front of the eyes of millions and yet not in the eyes of the average comic fans at all.

The piece above is from my personal favorite series, Cages, a monumental work that sprawls and spirals and basically spun completely out of his control for ten rather interestingly scheduled issues and is since compiled into a rather fetching hardback. A number of intertwining stories work into different creation myths with the story of an artist looking to take a break and get away. Of course, the artist is both overwhelmed by his own neurosis, meeting the brilliant musician upstairs, Angel, the neighbor across the way, the mute gallery representative, and a whole host of other, interesting cast members.

Signal to Noise, which has been released with at least two different covers along the way, is also an interesting piece of work, one that was originally serialized in the UK and then collected into a square bound, tells the story of a dying director casting his final film in his head as his own clock winds down.

If you only know McKean from his Sandman covers, read this interview, and feast on a great collection of jpegs, including some new ones from the Graveyard book with Gaiman that I will now have to rush out and get. Feast away.

Watchmen: The Movie Review

Just got back from the preview of The Watchmen at San Francisco's Metreon, a benefit for the Cartoon Art Museum. The question that has been on my mind, and just about everyone elses is this: can you possibly translate the comic to the movie screen? Or is it simply unfilmable?

I got news for you: it is filmable. And it is well done. Anyone who doesn't see the craft in this film is missing the trees for the forest. It is a monumental piece of work to translate Morre and Gibbons work this faithfully. It is filmable when you take the comic and strip away some of the multiple layers of meaning and transition that were present, and so often talked about, in the original work. Instead of 8 layers of meaning, you get 2 layers of meaning, and some terrific performances along the way.

And yes, this review will contain spoilers. You are duly warned.

Patrick Wilson is excellent in an understated performance as Nite Owl, a role that requires some much quieter moments than Jackie Earl Haley's Rorschach. Wilson conveys the level of regret that Drieberg carries since giving up the mask very well, as well as his longing for Laurie. Certainly Haley's Rorschach will get a lot of attention, the most famous black and white vigilante since the Batman to make it to the big screen, and Haley's performance is up to the task. It is an astonishing transformation to see him take on the role, and play it with such conviction. Moore's best lines in the book are given to Rorschach, and practically none of them are edited out. Haley's performance and narration as the character grows through out the movie, but it is more that we have grown accustomed to his delivery than a change in his acting.

Carla Gugino is solid as Laurie, and Billy Crudup essentially does voice work for Doctor Manhattan. To the line, "We have met God, and he is American," I would add, "and he is circumsized." What does that say? Jeff Morgan practically steals the film as the Comedian, and for a dead character, he takes over just about every scene given to him in the first half of the movie. Done in bits and pieces, it is an excellent portrayal of a character hard to make sympathetic, and Morgan delivers on pretty much each and every scene given to him.

The most impressive performance, however, is the director's and the art direction. Working this faithfully must almost be a straightjacket to them, to translate the story and vision this directly. This movie, for all the ensemble cast, is a triumph of control by Zak Snyder, to not only coax all the performances out of the actors, but also to coax all the work out of the art department as well and assemble all the pieces in the editing room. This is a masterful creation that can only be assembled in a modern editing/compositing room. We get little tidbits, like a Rorschach walking down an alley and in the background of the shot is the storefront of "Treasure Island Comic Books", a nod to the original and abandoned Tales of the Black Freighter storyline. I'm sure that there will be tons that we will catch when the DVD comes out.

The worst performance, and in my mind the only bad one, is Matthew Goode as Veidt. Goode doesn't resemble the comic Veidt enough to make the character work, but that is less a criticism than the fact that i don't think he makes the character work on screen. The performance is somewhat wooden, and he simply doesn't convey the physicality, the handsome magnetism nor the arrogance that Veidt needs to have. It is a role that, while crucial to the plot, is the weakest in the film.

Much will be made of the change to the ending of the film, and perhaps this will be the most debated topic. I will put out here and now, I love the ending of the film. It is stronger and more interesting than the opening of issue #12, and it is a far better master plan for Veidt. Without the movie filming subplot, it certainly is a necessary change, but it simply works better. We do feel a bit rushed towards the ending of the film, not so much as to ruin it, but to simply give the impression that if we liked it, we can look forward to a Director's Cut on the DVD.

The movie simply feels like its missing about 30 minutes, in the same way that the Lord of the Rings movies, while longer, allow you to really luxuriate in the world that the filmmakers have created. We only get one scene at the Newsstand in Times Square, we only get a couple moments of the psychiatrist at the prison, some bits with the New Frontiersman paper; we barely get to see Laurie's resolution with her mother at the end. These are a ton of places that this expansive story was tightened up so much in the editing that we barely have room to breath in the theatrical version, a version that will likely not be the one that we will be watching on the Blu-Ray at home for years to come.

After all, coming down from Veidt's master plan we need a little time for our characters to come to terms with the new world that exists post Antarctica, and for us to see how they've handled it. There is more emotion there, more world building, just simply more ending. We will always miss the smile on Dr. Manhattan's face as he walks through Veidt's utopia, seeing Laurie curled up post-coital with Dan, and also his last conversation with Veidt, which is perhaps the only unsettling defeat for Adrian in the entire original comic. The realization that even his vision had limits, while John's has none. Here, his line is given to Laurie, and it is lighter in context than if John had delivered it.

My buddy Todd made this comment as we exited: "I think Moore will regret taking his name off of this. It is his vision. Its not a comic book, but it is his vision." And that is completely true. Moore may still be rightly pissed off by DC and has been willing to put his money where his mough is, so you cannot say that the man doens't have integrity. But someone finally got it right. They got the project and had the talent and balls to follow through, bringing Moore truly to life on the silver screen.

Roger Ebert has a wonderful review that can be found here: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/03/were_all_puppets_laurie_im_jus.html And lets face it, you trust Roger more than me don't you?

As well, here is a parody cartoon of Watchmen as a 1980's cartoon by HappyHarry that is really worth watching.

Moore and The Watchmen: The best parody ever

This

is

genius.

Post Post-Superheroes: Where do we go?

Steven Grant, under the influence of the flu a week or so ago, dragged out an older Master of the Obvious column, which I'm excerpting two paragraphs out of here:

A few years back, I coined the term "post-superhero" to represent a sea change in American superhero comics underway at the time, mostly at the hands of British writers. It was the first real shift in paradigm since Stan Lee introduced the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man – then commonly labeled "anti-heroes" – forty years ago.

These were superhero comics stripped of many familiar trappings, from costumes and unexamined kneejerk morality to subplots, though few stripped out everything at once. They often focused more on mood and character than action. (It's likely no coincidence that many who produced "post-superhero" comics cut their teeth on Britain's 2000 AD and short-form strips like "Judge Dredd.") Some (Warren Ellis on THE AUTHORITY; Joe Casey on WILDCATS 3.0) operated out of boredom with the superhero concept, some (Alan Moore on the ABC books, Grant Morrison on JLA and NEW X-MEN) were genuinely fond of superheroes but wanted to restore a sense of wonder to the genre and make it speak better to modern audiences.

And, without going down the same road as Steven, it dovetailed with my going to Wondercon this last weekend (just going on friday, and not even getting the chance to sit at my spot in artist's alley, which is just sad, but real life intruded upon my con plans. Not the first time....) and wondering just what the role of the hero is these days. I was struck, also, to see the marketing, logistical and organizational nightmare that is your 21st Century Con through the eyes of my 8 year old daughter.

Now, this is no neophyte to the world of fantasy and fiction. She is on the 5th Harry Potter book, regularly reads Wonder Woman, Justice League, New Frontier, Loony Tunes and the Simpsons comics, and has seen 5 of the 10 Doctor Whos and can answer questions about the Cybermen and Daleks quite well. Navigating the aisles of the convention, in search of some new action figures and the rest... well, that's a different story.

I was watching to see what she gravitated to as well: Struzman posters, McQuarrie production art for the original three Star Wars movies, Nightmare Before Christmas peppermints, DC and Doctor Who action figures to compliment the ones that she already has. What she had a perverse reaction to: the "Hot Zombie Chicks" booth. Zombie chicks in bikinis on T-shirts made her wrinkle up her nose as say, "That stuff is weird, I don't like it."

She straddles the two worlds: those of us who were raised reading the old guard comics of straight edge morality, and those who came along in the post-Dark Knight world of grim and gritty superheroes. She comes in reading things like Cooke's New Frontier, which present moral heroes that face a grittier world than Julie Schwartz ever dreamed of. She still sees heroes that make the right choices, but faces a more complex world to make those choices in. For her, Wonder Woman is a heroic figure fighting for the greater good against evils, but they are evils that are harder to understand (many times because of the cross-over and tie-ins, the current storyline for instance), and so Diana's heroic stance is lessened since the choices that she has to make are a little less comprehensible. My daughter has little need to delve into the psycho-sexual context of Wonder Woman; what she needs is a consistant character with stories that you can follow from issue to issue.

There will be time enough for grim and gritty, although I'm sure that what will follow instead will be things like Twilight, or Buffy-style material. And, getting back to Grant's comments on the post-superhero material, whatever it is will be more intense, since the better authors have spent a great deal more time throwing away many of strictures that kept our fiction relatively safe along the way. After all, until Moore, Gaiman and Morrison came along, we thought that we knew where the walls were in the DC Universe, and we knew that we were safe behind the fourth one. But Swamp Thing taught us that everything we knew was wrong, Animal Man taught us that there was human longing and lonliness behind the goggles and behind the typewriter, and the Sandman taught us that there were a lot of soft edges to our world in every place and time.

Conversely, as well, Moore taught us the interspecies love and sex was possible, Morrison taught us that believing in the Kingdom of Keys as real was a good thing, and Gaiman gave us a death we could live with meeting. In a way.

The better creators have restored a sense of wonder in their series, and it really doesn't matter where. My daughter and I thrill every time the doors of the Tardis open on a new time or new world, we enjoy when Diana conquers a new challenge that isn't part of a damn crossover, and we laugh everytime that we get a Scooby Doo that manages to subvert the standard formula cleverly. That sense of wonder can be revisionist superheros, fantasy or cartoony, it really doesn't matter. The world building in Harry Potter has captivated her, as has the Justice League, as has Star Wars. Post post-superhero to me means finally having deconstructed many of the convention that we can move on to telling more stories, without the sacred cows, whatever they may be. What do you all think?

In Review of: Saga of the Swamp Thing Hardcover

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

This time its Moore's Swamp Thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaaarrrg.

Heath Ledger: The Joker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex In The Comics

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

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

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

Guerra couldn't draw sexy to save her life.

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

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

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

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

In Memory: 5 for Jack Kirby

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

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

On to the comics -

Fantastic Four #51



















Thor #156



















The Demon #1



















Challengers of the Unknown #7



















Fantastic Four #25

In Praise Of: The Miracleman Saga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustrations by the magnificent John Totleben and Alex Ross.

In Praise Of: Art & Fear by Bayles & Orland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correction to the Top 5: Swamp Thing #27

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

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

Alan Fucking Moore.

Movie Posters that Don't Lie: The Happening

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

This is just a little something that cracked me up.

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

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

5 Favorite Single Issues: The Comics Reporter

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

Master of Kung Fu #39



















Detective Comics #475



















Captain Marvel #29



















Fantastic Four #49



















Avengers #162


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

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

I'm not parting with these fer nuttin'.

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

In Review Of: Jews and American Comics by Paul Buhle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday to Me!

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

In Praise Of: Chandler - Red Tide by Steranko

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Good for them.

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

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

Said steranko in a later interview:

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

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

RIP: Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner

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

Patrick McGoohan is dead. The Prisoner is gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To me, you’ll always be a free man.

Willingham, Grant and Superhero Decadence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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