In Review Of: Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour

From the costume, I thought that we might be looking at a performance quite a bit like Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor.

But I would have been wrong.

Watched the new Doctor Who episode last night at Wonder Con and was blown away by a couple things. Given that I've been with this franchise since 1980, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the new direction of the series.

First - it feels different with Moffat in charge. Just as "Rose" was such a departure from the JNT series with Sylvester McCoy, and the abortive TV move from the 1990's, this is a departure in tone from the RTD era. After 5 years, its time. Doesn't matter that Moffat wrote most of the best episodes during the RTD era, they were shot with Davie's sensibilities in mind. Makes me wonder how much better the series could have been if JNT had left at the end of Davison's run, instead of being pushed to stay. Colin might have been, would have been a completely different Doctor.

The episode spins in a number of different directions, almost too many, as if, with the biggest and best toy in the universe to play with, Moffat can't help but doing a few spin-outs in the parking lot now that he's been given the keys. That's ok, I like the energy.

Second - Matt is out of the box great as the Doctor. Eccleston is a Doctor that i enjoyed tremendously, simply because he's such a good actor that his emotionally scarred Doctor is all kinds of manic and unpredictable. Much in the same way that Tom Baker was in his first couple seasons, you never knew which way he was going to turn, or how he was going to react. He is, after all, an alien and i prefer him to be unpredictable. Tennant's Doctor, while given some excellent scripts, took a while to grow on me. His early turns in the Christmas Invasion and New Earth weren't quite my taste.

Matt works for me right out of the Tardis... er... box. Now, I'm trying to remain spoiler free, so we'll see how the rest of the season plays out, but right now Matt has something that I've not seen since the second episode of Robot: someone who looks like they've dropped right into the role so quickly that they're already doing all the small things that sell the part.

Waiting for the second showing of matt smith's Doctor Who at wonder con. Just missed getting into the first showing by 13 people in an 800 person room.

Dick Giordano and Wonder Con

When Dick passed away last week I found myself thinking back to the slightly sepia toned days of Valiant Comics/Acclaim Comics and of Dick coming by to hold impromptu inking/advice clinics up in the bullpen area.

As naive as it may seem, it really sounded like fun when Shooter decided to remake a comic company with a bullpen area that might actually be like Stan used to make Marvel sound in his Stan Lee soapbox pages. Naive in that artists now live all over the country as opposed to being cloistered into the few square miles of Manhattan, but in the pre-internet being everything days it rather was a good idea.

Being an inker at Acclaim was a little scary, since Bob Layton eventually took over the EIC chores, so you knew that every page he looked at he must have seen with a, "Oh I can do better than that." Bob never particularly liked my work, although there were times on my best jobs that he did come through with a nice compliment or two.

It was a big deal when Dick would come into the office since most everyone there knew his reputation, who he had worked with, what he had done. (He was one of the few that Andrew Wendell would get off his high horse and talk to.) So what was nice is that no one was defensive about his or her work, after all you couldn't be with Dick his resume was impeccable, but he was simply so nice and affable to deal with that the criticism always came off as helpful. It was great to listen to old school comic fans now professionals ask Dick, "What is the secret of getting that Wonder Woman sheen on the hair?", "Why did Sekowsky do this on his pencils?", "How did Joe Orlando get that look to his brush work?". Dick answered all of the questions to best of his ability and was thoroughly entertaining really. Layton was usually in a good mood those days as well, they seemed to get along well.

Do I recall any one thing that i learned from Dick's visits? It wasn't a specific brush technique (although, now that i think about it, he did show a certain pen line out of a spotted black that i think i do use), but it was more about giving back and sharing the wealth of skills and approaches that can work in comics. He was a great guy and, like Archie Goodwin, one of a few guys who were very good at getting the best out of the people around them. We'll miss him.

I'll be at Wondercon on Sunday wandering around, hope everyone has a good time there. I won't be sitting and signing but I'm hoping that Radical Publishing might have some of the TimeBomb work at their booth! I'll be live blogging any good stuff that comes up. Saturday night, however, is the big deal: the premier of Matt Smith as the new Doctor! I'll be surprising my two daughters by bringing them in to watch the episode... and they have no idea its coming. Should be fun.

Will we finally get a new Red Tide?

Neil comments on my long ago post on Steranko's Red Tide that the originals were recently exhibited in the Geppi Museum, and that a new version might finally be in the works.

That is good news indeed.

i know that Mike Richardson of Dark Horse was talking about a new version as long ago as 1999, and that, somehow, nothing ever came of it. So it would be something if it were to finally happen.

For one thing, I could finally replace these crappy scans with crisp new scan of Steranko artwork properly colored and separated. Hopefully without breaking the spine of my new book.

This is Steranko at his game changing best folks. This will be a revelation to people if given the same treatment that Dave Steven's Rocketeer was just given. In the era where it was finally time for someone to step and take the next step after Jack Kirby at his 1966 heights, not one but two people came up: Neal Adams and Jim Steranko. The two of them came at the work from different approaches and, like rock and roll in the post-Beatles era, divided all who came after them. Neal, with his highly illustrative approach, took Batman into a new level of iconography by going the opposite of Kane: his Batman, and Green Lanterns, were populated by real people, with clothing that folded realistically over forearms containing arm hear and fingernails that needed to be trimmed. Steranko took Nick Fury to new heights of symbolism, bringing in pop art influences and different production techniques, but more inportantly, taking the vocabulary of comics to a further extreme than Jack did. If jack's Captain America leap with his feet 6 feet apart, Steranko's Captain America was almost 12 heads tall and had his feet 8 feet apart. All while defeating the hordes of Hydra while a jet black dyed Madame Hydra gesticulated hypnotically in the overlay.

Yes, Chandler was Steranko reigned in, but in service of the story, and adapting his prodigious talents to the form that he himself set up: 8 lines of text broken to under two panels per page.

A Big Little book for adults.

Haiku detective fiction.

And unlike other artist whose blank canvas projects stare back and defeated many an artist, Jim had a work ethic and brought his storytelling talents to bare and nailed the book. Even for a conservative 1976 audience.

Hopefully he will restore the text to the original form that had been intended before, as i understand it, moderate censoring by original publisher Byron Preiss.

More info as we go...

Bill Jaaska RIP 1961 - 2009

The comics community is an interesting one, one of names, not faces, that flit in and out of our awareness with extreme rapidity. We end up discussing artists and writers and inkers as though we're on a first name basis with them, because, well, we kinda feel that after we read their work enough. How easily the names trip off of my tongue like I know these people! Loved Sam Rosen's lettering in that issue, enjoyed Bill Everett's work on that issue, or Jim Lee's on this issue. And I've met none of those people.

I can say that i worked with Bill Jaaska, but I never met Bill. Did one issue of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and that was that. Bill was doing a rather strange over-rendered pencil style that did not mesh well with my inks at the time. But that was what needed to be done so I did it. Since it was only a single issue I didn't have the editors give me his phone number so that i could call him. I turned it in, submitted my voucher and moved on to an issue Eternal Warrior.

Welcome to the disconnected world of comics. I've inked plenty of people that i've never met, and any one of them could easily be have died, alone, in a rented room like Bill did, and no one in the comics community or myself would ever know. And thats sad.

As artists, much of what we do it solitary. Many of us aren't great socially and so we retreat into the quiet shelter of our drawings. Its part of what makes us artists, being able to visualize alien worlds in our heads and bring that out on the paper. The internet has been a huge boon to us however, allowing us to communicate at 3 in the morning with people around the world via email and become more connected without having to be over connected.

Still, it took a very long time for the comics community to realize that Bill had died. The story, as it is, is in the blog here, and it makes for interesting and sad reading. While I didn't follow his career, it seems that Bill, after working on some fairly high profile gigs with Peter David on The Hulk, dropped off the radar, and stayed off the radar.

And that's pretty easy to do in comics back then. After inking Batman:Outlaws with Gulacy in 2000, I decided to stop inking professionally and do some other art, so it would have appeared that i dropped off the radar as well. But you could have found my graphic design on the web by Google, and then the blog, and then the web comic. Bill didn't do that, not that anyone can find.

And its sad. Go read. And think about all the comics that you've read and re-read, and start to wonder where some of those people are now.

Englehart: The Point Man and beyond

Great interview with Steve Englehart over at Newsarama today by Zak Smith, and I wanted to highlight it so that people will know that not only is the Point Man going back into print, but that the sequel, 30 years in the making, will be out next month.

Englehart is one of the great lights of the 1970's comic movement, and while less flashy than a piece of Jim Starlin or Mike Grell art, his stories, along with Steve Gerber's and Don McGregor's helped to truly take the next step from where Marvel was in the 1960's with Stan and Roy. People are still going on and using his concepts, especially his ideas for Captain America. Brubaker is his soul mate with the series that he's been writing for years now. His Batman, in both my eyes and in the eyes of DC Comics obviously, remains definitive.

Its comments like this that just confirm what we thought about how they approached the comics "back in the day":

The last stuff I did for Marvel and DC had way too much editorial back-and-forth. Once upon a time, editorial said, “These are your books, do whatever you want to do.” The story I’ve told a zillion times is that Roy Thomas said, “We’re giving you Captain America – if you can make it sell, we’ll keep you on, if not, we’ll fire you and we’ll get somebody who can.”

That was the sum total of the editorial influence! What I did and what Steve Gerber and those other guys did came from that. Now, editorial says “Here’s what we’re going to do with the line and the major books, and we’ll just get people to fill in the blanks.”

And from an editorial standpoint, I can see how that would make sense when you're doing a huge Secret Invasion crossover. From a writer's standpoint, that would simply suck unless you were the one behind Secret Invasion. Its one of the reasons that the only Marvel comics worth looking at are ones that are divorced from the current continuity: Guardians of the Galaxy, Nova, FF. They even ruined the fun read that was Thor. Thanks a lot guys. You had me there for a little bit.

I still have my copy of the original pressing of the Point Man, and while its a bit tattered from the years, its still a fairly good read. I followed Steve to the paperback market after his Avengers and Batmans and enjoyed the novel. Not perfect, but i kept thinking, "That was just the first book, wait til he hits his stride." But he never did another novel until now. I'm looking forward to it.

The Unvarnished Horror of "Spook Hunt"

A shout out to local filmmaker and good friend Todd Miro who is, over at his blog, detailing the process of shooting and producing and putting all the pieces together for his movie short Spook Hunt. Go over and take a look. He's got a great idea and and a great script and if any of the execution doesn't come up to snuff its only because he's got a amateur in front of the camera.

Yeah, I'm in the movie. sheepish grin.

This acting thing is hard. I can hear the inflection in my head that i'd like to use, but the voice, like any instrument, is only as good as the musician playing it, and as a bit of a novice I can't always get the instrument to do EXACTLY what I want it to.

As much time as I spend thinking about layouts and storytelling and variations of shots and all the different ways to present information on the comic book page, its fascinating to have someone else direct and edit and be the sole arbiter of how to tell the story. I'm a prop. I'm trying to be a damn good prop, but i'm still a prop nonetheless.

Todd is spending a great deal time documenting both the technical means that he's using to shoot the piece, as well as the aesthetic choices in picking shots, angles, takes. Its a great way, other than director's commentary tracks and deleted scenes, to see how a film comes together.

So pop on over to see some of the early scenes as we shoot them and he starts to assemble the footage into something resembling a real film!

The Book of Genesis by Crumb: A Review

I was unaware that Crumb had his entire book of Genesis on display for a time at the Armand Hammer Gallery at UCLA, but I'm glad that Charles Hatfield was there to report back with text and photos. I've stayed away from reviewing Crumb's Genesis for a while to let the work sink in. With 4 years of illustration behind it, it deserves to be marinated on for a while as opposed to a simple quick reaction.

Hatfield comes in with a number of points in his review of both the exhibition as well as the book itself. One of the interesting ones was this:

The pages were traditional inked originals on Bristol board, maybe (I’m guesstimating) not quite half again as large as their printed counterparts, so minute attention was needed. I was able to seek out marks of correction, or adjustment, in the inking: for instance, Crumb’s subtle use of white-out, sometimes for texturing, sometimes because he apparently changed his mind about minute elements of the text. Evidence of “mistakes” or second-guessing was pretty minimal, though; Crumb’s facility and focus remain mind-blowing.

So all that ink detail is literally at a denser, small size in the originals? Wow. More impressed than i was a few minutes ago. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Crumb's work has always been problematic. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the dirty aftermath of the hippies, I've had no illusions at the golden era of peace and love. I rode my 10 speed past the burn outs on the sidewalk all the time growing up. So reading the Zap comics that were floating around? Revering Crumb and Sheldon and the rest? Difficult to read pot jokes when you're surrounded by people who got used to being stoned and lost the capacity to do anything with the rest of their lives.

Of course Crumb, like him or hate him, continued on to make statement after statement in the world. Like him or hate him, he's an artist down to his DNA. And he's a sequential artist to boot, which is an interesting difference to him, something that many artists can't say for all the interpretations that we've seen of biblical stories.

In the end, after reading through the entire Genesis book, I was struck that the project is one that stands more on its own merits as simply being completed, a four year marathon, than on being the sort of book that you can comment on in the usual terms (story, art, characterization, plot, etc.) Yes, it did get done, and I'm not certain how many artists would have taken those years to synthesize the different texts down to a single, cohesive graphic text. Crumb spends a great deal of artistic energy differentiating the faces and characters, so that he and we can have a visually identifiable Cain and Abel, but, and i suppose this is crucial to your enjoyment of the story, does he add anything to the fable to Cain and Abel? Should he add anything might also be a question that, depending upon your interpretation of the Bible, you might wish to add.

For me, I don't think that anything was really added. Yes, his women look rather like Crumb women, but that doesn't bother me. It doesn't add anything to my appreciation of the text either however. For all of my time invested in the reading, I only came away with an appreciation of the sheer amount of work involved, but not any new ideas towards the text of Genesis. Again you could argue that perhaps I shouldn't be asking anything to be added to stories, given that they alternate, in odd fashion, from the beginning of the Hebrew tribes to the creation stories, to parables, to extended family trees (intent most likely upon making sure that certain families allied themselves directly the originators of the 12 tribes). But,yes, I did want a little something more there. What more, I don't know, but a regurgitation or distillation of various texts in a graphic format doesn't really have a place in the "books I've been looking forward to".

I read a number of reviews of the book and have yet to run across one that really mentions a distinct benefit of having the book. And that bothers me. I'd like there to be a reason for it to exist, beyond just "I wanted to see if I could finish it." Is it an artistic statement to just finish the marathon?

Genesis will sit upon the bookshelf, but, like many bibles I'm afraid, will continue to gather dust rather than being referenced frequently.

The JLA by Bruce Timm & Yoakum

The second Bruce Timm commission inks, following the Batgirl of two days ago. you know what i learned from inking this one?

Hawkgirl is bad ass. She's fun to draw. Why don't we have a monthly Hawkgirl comic?

Corporate Comics: bad art or bad direction?

We interrrupt the posting of a new bruce timm /yoakum piece for this bit of snark.

Is this professional art, or is this professional coloring? 'Cause it ain't professional drawing.

Recently I had linked to a black widow page of art work that was simply so boring and incompetent that i had to hold it up as an example of bad comic art. This piece is a totally different example of bad comic art. this one is far better about pointing the direction of where corporate comics might be going.

And its scary as hell, if thats the case. Someone channeling James Jean with no structure to the drawing at all.

I mean, look, we all started out apeing someone. But it used to be that you would be told to quit drawing like Kirby or Gil Kane or John Byrne and go learn how to draw. This seems like the perfect example of... well, just about everything bad.

Batgirl by Timm and Yoakum

Bruce Timm. Love his stuff.

Was given a couple of his pieces to ink over for commission. Had no idea how hard it would be to get something that i liked.

How about 5 tries?

I ended up doing this Batgirl 5 times before i was happy with the result. The commissioner of the piece has been extremely patient what i fiddled with them to my satisfaction, and had to delay finishing the work while i took on the Gulacy job.

And then I came back to them and hated them again. So I redid this piece, and the JLA piece that i'll post tomorrow, again.

So what was the problem? Well, Timm's stuff has its own cartoony logic to it, and if you don't nail the line thickness right off the bat, then you're basically dead in the water. There are no little rendering line that might take you eye away from the holding line, nothing to distract you. And maybe i'm being overly picky with my work, and no one else would have had a problem with them, but i did, and since there is no deadline on these, i continued to work them again and again.

And now i need to get them out of my studio before i start to harsh on them again.

BTW - saw some of Rain's colors for Timebomb over my inks and was totally blown away. TIMEBOMB will likley be the best looking book color and production wise that i've ever been involved with and I'm really psyched to see how it all looks in print.

Cross-Over Craziness vs Single Issue Fun

Todd Allen at Publisher's Weekly does a good job of summing up the recent Cross-Over Craziness that is happening at Marvel and DC, and pointing out just how difficult it is to actually find something that isn't part of being tied in to 7 other titles.

This is exactly how I, as the doting father of two girls, who has spent a great deal of time and money over the last 6 years trying to get my children addicted to comics, see the market place. And it sucks.

i hate the idea that my 9 year old will say to me, "What is actually happening in Wonder Woman?" because she can't just pick it up and read a single great storyline. I've started to not pick up the books if they're so convoluted that i can't understand them. And if I can't, there's no way that she can.

Sadly, the Green Lantern series has long since descended into zombie nihilism and i'm not going to subject my kids to the over the top nastiness of Blackest Night. Is it any wonder that they've moved into reading Simpsons Comics over DC in the last 7 months? I was actually buying Superman for a while, enjoying Robinson's run onthe series with Guedes' art. I dropped that when the cross destroyed whatever interest i had in the storyline.

And that sucks again. I would like to love comics again on a regular basis, but almost none of the series will give me a fun reason to show up in the store month after month. As my hands stay covered with small black ink stains as i finish up the Gulacy pencilled pages for TIMEBOMB, I would love to relax with a small stack of enjoyable comics.

And they keep letting me down. And they're letting my kids down. And its pissing me off.

Tired! Putting the Brushes Away for Tonight

You want to know the truth? I'm halfway through my initial commitment to TIMEBOMB, and the truth is, I'm tired and nothings working tonight. i'd love to show you some of the new inks over Gulacy, but I can't, so I'll save the scans til after the book is released and then you can check it out without color.

I'm just a little beat.

Out of Print: Out of Sight, Out of the Bookstores

One circular topic of discussion about superhero comics concerns the jumping on point: In the now common long story arcs, it seemed that things were so convoluted that it was necessary to figure out how the make the story accessable to an average reader. Do you only do short contained stories? Do you have a precis page to recap the prior issues?

Jum Shooter's oft repeated adage has been, "Every issue is someone's first issue." True, but where do you subvert the story to the format? After all, the entire comics industry was built on disposability. You never had access to any of the prior issues if the newsstands had their way with returnability.

So we move to the graphic novel, obstensibly because it is easier to keep on the bookshelf, will last much longer in print and can continue to gain readers as time goes by. Great idea.

Except when you have a two part graphic novel and the publisher is letting part one go out of print before part two comes out. Why you, as a publisher, would want to have this happen unless you were basically bankrupt, is beyond me. No wait, its not. Its the typical short sighted thinking that has ruined more than a few books along the way in this industry.

I have just finished reading my youngest daughter Amulet, a long continued story that has only, to date, two volumes out. you can tell by reading it that this could be a 7 or 8 volume story, and given the thickness of the books, plus the lavish full color artwork, that this is going to be a long project. That's ok. My kids were mesmerized from the first chapter. They'll continue to read the books when they come out. And, like Bone, Scholastic is likely going to have a long running serial that future generations can come to and fall in love with. Just so long as they keep it in print.

After all, what good is Two Towers without Return of the King? Or Two Towers without the Fellowship? Or, in manga terms, Nana pt 12 without part 11?

Kudos to Kean Soo for a solid piece of work and my hopes for better publishing days ahead. And to Disney/Hyperion? Aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggg.

New Project! TIMEBOMB by Palmiotti, Gulacy and Yoakum

Hey there folks, wanted to let you know that I'm hard at work on 20 pages of TIMEBOMB, a new three issue series for Radical Comics. Here is the press release:

From comic superstar Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray comes a time travelling adventure!

A group of international scientists and archaeologists on a publicly funded dig discover a hidden city beneath the streets of Berlin. Constructed as a failsafe option for the Nazi party should they lose the war, the city is also home to Hitler’s ultimate doomsday weapon- an Omega bomb designed to wipe out the human race- and it’s just been activated. Now, crews of scientists with state-of-the-art weapons and equipment must travel back in time to 24 hours before the disaster to stop the bomb from going off. However, they soon discover that, rather than going back in time for 24 hours as intended, they’ve been sent back 65 years to the height of Hitler’s Germany.

Please note that I do not resemble a "comic book superstar", but i have played one on TV.

Can't show you any artwork yet, but its cool stuff, and I'll be curious to see what the pages look like with the full process color that Radical uses. More updates as the project moves along!

The Miracleman Copyright Case pt. 17

Its been a bit since I blogged about the Miracleman/ Marvelman fiasco and certainly been a while since I pissed Dez Skinn off enough to post a comment, but things just keep popping up and adding fuel to the fire. And because its a legal issue, instead of every getting simpler, it just keeps getting more and more complex.

Sigh.

Rich over at Bleeding Cool has brought up two graphics, a reprint of a 1958 story that has a copyright affixed to it, and the original version, which does not. Shown here is the original panel, lacking the attribution. And all this because Pádraig Ó Méalóid keeps digging around to get to the bottom of the controversy.

Now we have to wonder if the copyright notice on the reprint has any claim, see what English law from the time that the original publisher went out of business says about rights becoming either public domain or reverting to the original artist, and see when Dez Skinn put in his claim of use on the property if they were public domain.

And I may owe Dez an apology.

But we'll see. The problem here is that the real world is messy and complicated and Pádraig Ó Méalóid will likely keep unearthing new material that will just certify how messy it all is. Certainly when Len Miller & Co, the original publisher, went out of business no one in the world would have considered that they property would have become so valuable so many years later. Moral high ground still goes to Mick, however, and his 1978 claim shows that he wanted ownership to something that he had put his time and love and hard work into.

Whither the Fun?

Got hit by this one twice in the last couple days, the Comics Journal's quote of the day with Pat Boyette missing fun comics, and Jennifer De Guzman talking about a comic that perhaps should have been another Scott Pilgrim: Street Angel.

And I don't think, from her column, that Jennifer is having a lot of fun right now either.

...SLG began publishing the comic book series Street Angel by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, about a homeless twelve-year-old with extraordinary martial-arts skills that she uses to fight ninjas, pirates, rednecks—anyone that needs a butt-kicking.

Now, that sounds like a fun comic. You pull off the right balance on that story and you have a comic that can be enjoyed by a huge audience, male or female, young or old. Good ol' fashioned silliness.

I don't remember ever seeing it, but then, there are so many damn comics that it is easy for stuff to fall under the radar no matter how much it gets the press. If I have a hard time going and picking the thing up off the rack, and I do have a hard time with that since the LCS is somewhat small, then its just too damn easy to forget. I'm still missing a Rocketo trade and i LOVED that series. I'll try to get this one at WonderCon.

So that takes care of the fun comic, but more importantly are the questions that Jennifer is rhetorically asking herself about Street Angel these first days of 2010:

Why didn't hype translate into more orders and sales? Was it the quarterly schedule? A need for even more outreach to retailers? A need for outreach to a different audience? The book itself? Do retailers even look at advance hype from third sources when they place their orders? ... A project can give every indication of being wildly successful or a niche-audience sleeper and turn out to be just the opposite.

And those are great questions. Look, I feel for the publisher and retailer here: there are only so many square feet in a shop to display things, there are only so many dollars to put out there for product, and if you happen to have a few dollars left over for non-X-men/Batman product, how the hell do you decide which to order? And if you primary customer is the X-men/Batman person, do they care about Street Angel? probably not. So how do you get that customer?

I wouldn't want to have to go through the dreaded Previews catalog to decide what to order. There's just too much there. The reality is that there are a lot of good comics these days. If you were to only wander the aisles of the small press area of San diego, skipping Marvel and DC, you could walk home with an armful of fun, interesting, occassionally great little books. So I do wonder if the average comics retailers looks at 3rd party recommendations. They should, although I have to wonder. Travelling to San Diego last year I was seated directly behind an artist, and across from a retailer who said that this was likely to be her first time just walking the aisles in years. In reality, that should be a necessary function for just about all retailers to keep theirs eyes open for the next big thing, and yet the reality of manhours are that they're not likely to have that time.

I'll be looking for Street Angel. I could use some fun in my life.

And i'm working on a new project for Radical Comics. More later when I can say something....

Why Do Adults Read Comic Books?

Why do they indeed? R. Fiore ponders the question from the viewpoint of someone who has been writing about comics since he first joined the literary heathens at the Comics Journal in 1979, the dark distant days of 1979. I had started reading comics in 1973, and grew up with all the various starts and stops that he talks about in his article, but with a different viewpoint. Perhaps because he was integrated into the comics criticism culture, or perhaps because his natural inclination was to prefer classic newspaper reprints at the time, but i had a slightly different take on the situation, as well as that question: Why would a grown man read comic books?

A question that has occupied my mind ever since I began writing about comics: “Why would a grown man read comic books?” I was never satisfied with the conventional answer, which had to do with the potential of the medium to be a great art form. While it does have that potential, and part of the reason to champion the medium is to give it the prestige it would need to one day attract the caliber of artist that could fulfill it, the potential doesn’t explain why you’re reading them now. You don’t eat hot dogs because you think they’re going to turn into steak someday.

Classic last line that. No, would answer, I read comics because they gave me a type of escapist fiction that i'm not getting anywhere else. To further R's analogy, I didn't give up hot dogs for steak, I happen to like both at different times. I was absorbing the acutely developed melodrama/roller coaster ride that was the Claremont/Byrne/Austin X-Men at the same time i took an entire 3 days of summer vacation and read Sophie's Choice by Styron. And I knew that one day there would be comics that matched that same punched-in-the-gut feeling that i got from that book. As holocaust literature, I will certainly read Sophie's Choice as well as Weisel's Night as well as Spiegelman's Maus. I don't need to pick and choose one as better or more relevant. Al three are powerful works.

The same collections that interested Fiore, such as The Hyperion Library of Classic American Comic Strips, were both interesting as artifacts and boring as examples of how much the current form HAD NOT advanced to me back then. They also pointed out a time, and perhaps reinforced a time, that believed in comics as juvenile art when i was sure that you could do so much more with the medium. I argue that Smith's Red Nails was as good as the damn Frazetta covers that everyone fell in love with. Certainly the newspaper artists knew how to advance a narrative slowly, keeping the tension as long as possible, which was just the opposite of the DC artists who had one panel in Superboy to portray a mind numbing interstellar war. I knew that somewhere in the middle of all that were artists that would both give us a narrative with greater consequences and more acute insights, and I was willing wait while enjoying some cheap fun with the Avengers or Iron Man or The Teen Titans.

We didn't have long to wait really. When Fiore started to write, Sabre was already out by Eclipse, and Detectives Inc by the masterful Marshall Rogers was soon to be out, as was A Contract With God. Maggie and Hopey and Luba were also right around the corner. American Flagg teased with becoming the great American Satire for a moment or two before Chaykin succumbed to the needs to produce 22 pages each issue and things went flat. His far greater work, Times Squared, was never appreciated and should be revised any day now if there is any justice.

As to why comics created by grown adults to resonate with children should still attract us, in to parse the adult from the child in each person, and that's bound to be difficult with the sharpest of scalpels. Many of the same things that we expect to attract children: a silly but well timed joke, an imaginative other world, interesting and unusual characters, should certainly attract adults as well. Adults appreciate well done comedy and drama, and it would be the rare movie goer who didn't appreciate dropping into a totally new world for two hours for their ticket money. Early comic strip creators knew that their work was going into the family home and would be read by Dad and Junior alike, and as the later Looney Tunes cartoons, so that work that could be enjoyed on more than one level would have the greater chance of staying in papers. There is also the nostalgia factor, which is always difficult to predict.

We think about them [omic books] and write about them because we perceive we like them not in the way we like, say, chocolate ice cream or pictures of naked women, but because they mean something to us that we can’t readily define.

Why did a grown man read comics? Because it is a unique medium, a combination of words and pictures that operate on both two or three different visual levels at once of meaning that, in skilled hands, can convey more together than separately. And because there are a host of stories to be told, and now, more than ever, more ways to tell them. I can readily define why i've been reading comics for 36 years: I enjoy then tremendously when they're well done, and I've seen a lot of well done ones, regardless of genre, regardless of critical acclaim, regardless of format in that 36 years. If the creation of critical language means anything (and the Comics Journal has played a huge role in that) then it has given us the means to describe why enjoy certain comics so much. Explaining why I like chocolate ice cream is actually a lot more difficult once you get beyond the word "yummy".

And for the record, in the original piece, Fiore does an excellent job on the next paragraph of explaining exactly why he does love comics as a medium, and I suggest that you take the time to read through the piece.

Happy New Year all.

Meditations on Women's Faces and Difficulties Thereupon

How do we represent the faces of women? Are we culturally bound to try to duplicate what pleases our eye thinking that it will please the eyes of others? But isn't it culturally different when we compare standards of beauty?

The Illustration Art blog has a discussion on the difficulty of protraying women's faces, along with a number of fairly current examples of comic art (and one illustration piece) to give us visuals to discuss.

Comparing comics alone from the 1950's to today should point out just how different the make up that is generally accepted is, not to mention hair styles. How many lines can you put on a woman's face before she looks like she has crow's feet? Well, the answer is, how old is your character supposed to be?

My wife hates it when i put heavy shadows on my female character's faces, and my arguement is thus: if the men have heavy shadows on them, it will look awfully weird to not have shadows on the woman's face. If i am doing nothing by drawing beautiful women in the mid-20's then perhaps I should be drawing nothing but very idealized features with minimal shadows. But to do so leaves the reader with a far more vaccuous presence: you're not allowing the female characters to participate as fully in the story by making them always be beautiful and well lit. Screw that. Let them get hit by shadows and be a part of things. Life in not built around standing pretty and looking pretty, and the characters shouldn't be stuck in that role either. Besides, some of the sexiest stuff that i've ever seen in both illustration and photography has features hidden in shadow, cheekbones or lips lurking beneath the darkness.

If your character is a woman in her 30's or 40's, both of whom has basically vanished from both your movie screen and TV set, then its likely she has a few wrinkles and its up to you as the artist to show that. And make it work.

Besides, it was only 100 years ago that Charles Dana Gibson was drawing some of the most beautiful idealized women of his time, and creating them out of linework!

The beauty and intelligence of this woman have been captured for an entire century, and through beautiful use of delicate lines the structure of her face is delineated, including her cheekbones. That this very linear style has fallen out of favor says something about our media (what will and won't reproduce) as well as art tools being used.

Could Leonard Starr have created a number of delicate sweeps of a crow quill to further render his artwork? I've no doubt, but it wouldn't have played in the newspaper reproduction room, so Starr, just like Caniff, developed a style that could reproduce well. Within comics, there was a distinct shift in ability to print line work when the metal plates started to get thinner and thinner before being replaced by plastic ones in the late 1970's. Vinnie Colletta's Thor linework simply wouldn't have been reproducable only a decade later, let alone Gibson's.

Here's your homework: find a way to produce emotion on the face of a 17 year old girl. How many lines do you have to do that? And still make her look 17? A quiz will follow later! Class dismissed!

The Carnival: The Human Hourglass page 13

Just posted three new pages up on The Human Hourglass storyline. This is the largest single update that I've done yet! And it contains some of the work that i'm most proud of, so go take a look when you've got a second.

Only 7 pages to go on this first Carnival story. When finished, it will be available on print on demand. Best suggestions for who to go with? Anyone? Bueller?

http://www.yocomics.net/thh/page13.html