The state of the industry.
What’s that? I haven’t told you that all the cool kids are bookmarking the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon’s new(ish) source for comics industry news and reviews? Oh. Sorry about that. I meant to, that’s for damn sure. Anyway, today he links to this Ninth Art diatribe on the current industry practice of relaunching struggling titles with a brand new issue number one, with an eye towards those last few folks left in the world who’ll buy any goddamn comicbook on the shelves, so long as it’s got a number one on the cover. —And I know I’ve told you before that no matter how badly the industry might be doing, the state of the art in comics has never been better, and I know that we’re in the midst of a long and painfully drawn-out shift from periodical pamphlets sold on a non-returnable basis through a tightly knit network of specialty shops to bound books and web-based content sold through a mix of venues yet to be determined, and I know the numbers you’re about to see reach back to the dim ’n’ misty newsstand days, when Spider-man tussled on a regular basis with Look and TV Guide, but hey—every now and then a little perspective slapped upside the head like a cold fish doesn’t hurt:
Everyone knows that the market is much smaller, but it’s worth throwing in a historical comparison to flag up the scale: when X-Men was cancelled in 1970, the final issue contained an editorial explaining that “the plain truth is that the magazine’s sales don’t warrant our continuing the title. We feel that the artists and writers involved can better devote their time to other projects, other characters.” Two inches below, the Statement of Ownership appears, revealing that the previous issue had a total paid circulation of 199,571. Dipping below 200,000 was disastrous in those days. Today, Identity Crisis is considered a hit with sales in the region of 125,000, and Fallen Angel hovers around the 10,000 mark. No wonder the publishers are more interested in licensing.
I mean, sometimes the state of the art just isn’t enough, as Spurgeon’s eulogy for the late lamented Highwater Books will tell you.
One thing after another.
I do write about comics occasionally. —Over at Mercury Studios, Steve Lieber interviews himself with a list of “What’s it like to be a guy in the comics industry?” questions proposed by Devin Grayson, who’s maybe a little—tired?—of distaff curiosity. Dylan Meconis, meanwhile, having chewed what she bit off, teams up with Hope Larson for a lovely little online mini. And y’all are reading the Graphic Novel Review, right? Jenn did this month’s cover, since she’s between chapters on Dicebox—her shoes being ably filled with a charming little aside called “Sprouts,” by Kris Dresen. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, go, read it now: the first pages will be free till tomorrow morning, when the next pages upload.
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I write about comics. Sometimes I just link a bunch of stuff.
Splitter.
Joey Manley’s Graphic Novel Review has launched with, among other things, a meaty interview with Eddie Campbell; read it, even though he’s cranky, and you’ll mourn the vine-death of Egomania and The History of Humor, and despite the fact that in his laudable attempt to atomize all of art into a great amorphous cloud, he somehow staggeringly misses the point of the comics on Trajan’s column. The syllogism Campbell disparages—
- Comics are sequential art;
- Trajan’s column is sequential art; therefore
- Trajan’s column is comics
—is lousy logic, true, but it’s also made of straw. Say instead that you accept, for the sake of argument, the definition of comics as sequential art, well, look at Trajan’s column: see? How much bigger your idea of comics has become? —Campbell and McCloud are trying to do the same thing from the opposite ends of the table: grab somebody, anybody, readers and artists both, by the collar and show them that all they have to work with is one picture after another. That’s it: the only tool; the only limitation. Go! But Campbell’s trying to do it by jettisoning the word “comics” and the brightly colored longjohns overstuffed into its baggage; he wants a new name, a new movement, of graphic novelists, doing some different, other thing. And he’s not without his point, and his point is not without its sympathy. But we’re you and me both at once tenacious and fickle: once we’ve named a thing, we balk at the idea of changing that name—but that very truculence lets black-garbed stagehands work some magic by changing the thing just enough when we’re looking somewhere else. I’ve seen previous attempts to do what Eddie Campbell wants, from “comix” to “drawn books,” and while I’d never say never or not in a million years, nonetheless: my money’s on “comics.” Sad as it may seem, it’s much, much bigger than the longjohns—and it always would have been, if only we’d known how to look.
(“Manga”? Well, yeah, manga’s caught on as a term, but hey: those are Japanese comics. Different thing entirely. —Geeze, what were you expecting? Logic?)
Portland is a small town, except when it isn’t.
It’s pretty much a truism, once you’ve been here longer than, say, six months: you go to a party here in Portland, you’re going to meet somebody you know from a context other than the one which occasioned the party. (Someone who actually knows network theory help me out: your supposedly discrete nets overlap in ways you don’t expect. Two degrees of separation recursing back to yourself. Or something.) Anyway: Portland’s a small town, is my point; maybe the largest I’ve ever lived in, and it’s a small town in part because it’s easy to curl up with your own ontogroups of choice and let the rest of the world go hang, until you’re at a party and see somebody you know that you’d never have expected in that context.
So it’s nice to pick up the Mercury and read an article on the local comics scene and realize I only know one of the cartoonists mentioned. (Though if I’d been paying attention, I would have remembered most of the rest from Team Alternative. Did I tell you Team Alternative totally rigged the scoring? Had some people up on top of this closet that boomed when you kicked it. Plus they had foam fingers. On the merits, trust me, Mainstream kicked their scrawny indie butts. —Did I tell you I was cheering for Team Mainstream? —Did I tell you the most mainstream team Portland could field was three out of four self-publishers, who’ve dabbled in the capecapades trade? Portland. Small town.)
On the other hand:
Now that I’ve snarled and snapped, I’ve got to tell you: ain’t nothin’ in comics lately that’s filled me with that shivery oh boy! Comics! glee like We3. Except maybe Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men, which keeps getting better with every issue.
Oh, and Flight is finally out on the shelves, but I’ve raved about that enough already. Go, get yourselves a copy, if you haven’t yet.
¡Viva Dirk Deppey!
You know, he was wrong about DK2 (God, that comic blew), but one small stain doesn’t wipe out a legacy of some of the finest comics blogging the Islets of Bloggerhans have ever seen. Still: eons ago (way back in February) Dirk Deppey abandoned the Islets for finer pastures, up there in the High Country, where paper-bound dinosaurs graze. —Given the time lag endemic to the nervous systems of those vast, lumbering beasts, it’s only now we’re starting to see the fruits of that devolutionary step. And fine, fine fruit it is: a linked pair of essays writing around Grant Morrison’s recently(ish) concluded Nantucket sleigh ride on Marvel’s X-Men, looking at some of the industry backstory that led up to “NuMarvel” and leafing through the comics that are not so much following in his footsteps as, well, not. He nails the at-once powerful appeal and, yes, limitation of Whedon’s just-commenced run with the same characters:
Wisely sidestepping the futuristic pop-culture snap that Morrison injected into the longrunning mutant soap opera—an act one suspects he probably couldn’t have matched—Whedon instead wanders amiably amongst the collected memories of an army of longtime fans, concentrating on emblems and tropes that have worked for decades and making them shine with the skill of a master children’s novelist.
On the nose. —The problem, of course, is I’m going to hit the bookmark tomorrow morning and there won’t be anything new to read! Curse you, dinosaur!
But viva Deppey, nonetheless.
Elevenses.
The meme is this: Steve Lieber wants you to list eleven comics works that libraries ought to shelve—and what Steve wants, Steve gets. Of course, being late to the party means you have to dig a little deeper: my own belovéd Spouse beat me to three of the choicest plums left untouched on the table, and can I pause for a moment to weep at the state of the world, when no one else has yet bothered to list Zot! and Stuck Rubber Baby and Hicksville?
The which done:
- Pickle. No, I’m not trying to ride the Hicksville bandwagon. You really do need the ten issues that make up Pickle (and most of Hicksville) to get a clear picture of what Hicksville was, and what happened to it on its way to somewhere else. Pickle was a delirious anthology comic that slowly but surely began to collapse on itself, as individual strips encompassed the characters of other strips, as you began to realize the whole thing was the work of one Dylan Horrocks, and as it finally accreted into the best comic about comics ever. Hicksville is a lovely book, and fully deserves its space on any short shelf, but it lost something when it was rendered down to one big story. (Then, it’s finished; Pickle—sadly—just stops. Of course, looming over both of them are the shadows of Island of Venus and Atlas...)
- Wendel All Together. Okay, I am trying to ride the Stuck Rubber Baby bandwagon on this one, but honestly, folks, if you’re going to point to the Great American Graphic Novel, the one that gets in the ring with prose and kicks up some serious dust, Baby is it. (Jim Ottaviani gets half a point for listing it with his also-rans.) Cruse’s ability to layer his narrative, moving deftly through time and memory, is unparalleled, and shows us all a toolbox crammed with goodies comics hasn’t used nearly often enough. So I’ll add Wendel All Together to my list: it’s a light-hearted sitcom, yes, but it’s a damn good one, and a slice of gay history to boot.
- Alec MacGarry, wherever you might find him. Okay, so it’s not a title; still, it can be hard to sort him out. These are the quasi-mostly-autobiographical comics Eddie Campbell has done about his alter-ego, Alec MacGarry, and if I’m unwilling to give up the form I know them in—the Acme and Eclipse “Complete” Alec—I’d better, since it’s a long ways out of print. So start yourself off with The King Canute Crowd, then move on to the gobsmacking brilliance of Grafitti Kitchen (it’s a third of the Three-Piece Suit), and finish up (or not) with How to Be an Artist, Campbell’s graphic novel about the rise and fall of the graphic novel.
- Elektra: Assassin. There’s Dark Knight; there’s Ronin; there’s Watchmen; there’s American Flagg. (Oh, hell, we could add Buck Godot to the list, if we were feeling silly.) You can keep ’em all; for my money, this is kick-ass take-no-prisoners hell-and-back superhero breakout of the mad old, bad old ’80s. Miller’s neo-pulp poetry, before it staggered off and collapsed into self-parody; Sienkiewicz’ eye-popping you-won’t-believe-he-got-away-with-it cartooning—and the astonishing charge of watching them dare each other to giddy new heights on almost every page. (Added timely bonus: the Reaganesque president is eerily similar to our current incumbent, and you won’t watch a Kerry-Edwards commercial the same way again after “Not Wind like a watch, but Wind—like the air…”)
- Flex Mentallo. Grant Morrison’s masterwork. Sad but true: everything he’s done since this four-issue miniseries has come close in one way or another to the mark he made, but none of it has surpassed this astonishing one-two punch of despair and hope that comes as close as anyone can to explaining why it is that superheroes wear their underwear on the outside. (It doesn’t hurt he was working with Frank Quitely, who fits him like a glove.) —The good news, of course, is he’s got plenty of time and opportunities to keep trying. (Newsflash: I’ve just discovered why the trade paperback is so hard to find: it was never published. Charles Atlas threatened to sue for trademark infringement. Jesus fucking wept.)
- Through the Habitrails. Oh, this one will be hard to find. Jeff Nicholson did these creepy short pieces for Taboo back in the day, and though it was clear they were coming together into a larger piece, a surreal horror story about slaving away the best hours of the best days of the best years of your life in a horrid, soulless cubicle farm, Taboo was irregular enough to make following it difficult, and folded before it could ever come to an end. Nicholson gathered the strips together into a single, self-published volume in 1994, and we were lucky enough to stumble over one in somebody’s half-off bin somewhere. (Maybe it was in St. Marks?) —But it’s your lucky day: Top Shelf picked up a batch of them to re-sell, and Nicholson might even have some copies of an earlier printing left.
- Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons. The quirkily simple philosophizin’ is going to come off as neohippy if you’re not in the right mood. Stick it out: it’ll slip some knives in when you’ve think you’ve got it sussed. Lovely humane minicomics, where the words and simple, scratchy cartooning blend until you can’t tell the one from the other, and you’re reading melancholic tone poems and silly superhero slacker stories and in the middle a gorgeously lonely travelogue through Finland that all somehow end up being about Abraham Rat, a delightfully poor stand-in for cartoonist Glenn Dakin. I keep coming back to it, so onto the list it goes.
- Same Difference. Derek Kirk Kim is a goddamn supernova rock star, and Same Difference deserves every award it’s won. It’s pretty much that simple.
- Cages. Oh, God, yes. It’s pretentious as all hell. It’s art about art. It’s got a Disaffected, Blocked Young Man, the Love of the Woman who Saves Him, the Cranky Old Man who Must Rediscover the Meaning of Life, a Cat, a Magical Negro, and Dottily Wise Homeless Folk. It’s also got some breathtaking cartooning: real people walk through these pages, and they somehow against all odds ground all these clichés and (yet) launch the whole thing into the air. I wish to high heaven Dave McKean would put away his book covers and his art installations and his computer animation and sit back down at the drafting table and draw—his next big work in comics would be better than this, and that would be something to see.
- Nausicäa of the Valley of Wind. There’s a reason all the kids these days doodle dumpy little Miyazaki critters in the margins of their sketchbooks when they aren’t thinking much of anything else. In Nausicäa, Miyazaki does for comics what he’s been doing for animation: reminds us all why we got into this mess in the first place, with a deceptively simple story full of wonder, set in a gorgeously detailed, lived-in world. The penciled artwork is beautiful, and the more European panel layouts will help those who think they’re allergic to manga. Oh, and the story will snap your heart like a twig.
- Bruno. It’s the best daily strip on the web. It’s one of the best daily strips being done, period. Eight years of Bruno’s life, bound up in eight essential volumes. Chris may get a little wordy at times, but let him; he’s earned it. The crazy-beautiful cross-hatching sets every stage with grace and witty verisimilitude, and the ups and downs of Bruno’s life are things you know in your bones. (Even the time when the circus camped out in the living room.) —Browse through the entire run online for a taste, and bookmark the main page for your future daily hits.
The crueler version of this game, of course, is easier to play: what’s on the short shelf in Kupe’s lighthouse, where the comics that ought to have been but never ended up are kept? Big Numbers, for sure. Starstruck, I’d add. THB, though that’s been rumbling lately. Beanworld, yes; oh, yes. Though much further down this path lies heartache and despair.
So, instead, a question: we’ve got all these Best American® collections that Houghton Mifflin puts out every year, with the Best American® Essays and the Best American® Sports Writing and the Best American® Short Stories and the Best American® Travel Writing and the Best American® Non-Required Reading and the like. Where the fuck are the Best American® Comics collections? I want a nice, classy anthology, where every year the best shorts are gathered together: someplace for Dan Clowes’ “Caricature” to rub shoulders with David Mazzuchelli’s “Discovering America,” say. Somebody get on that, would you?
Just who the hell is on monitor duty around here?
Eight million comics bloggers in the naked blogosphere, and I have to randomly surf through Grand Text Auto to find out about the Cartünnel?
(Actually, EGON was on the case. It’s the rest of you I’m looking at. Yeah, you.)
Doing my own part: those of you who remember oubapo, but who are as disappointed as I am that indymagazine’s domain name oblivion took Matt Madden’s Exercises in Style offline, will be pleased to note that he’s got a book of them coming out. —Ooh! And with a little Google work, I discover he put those exercises online himself, so hey. Go have a look.
The important thing is, I beat them by about two hours.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, live, from the City of Roses, the Town of Stumps, those crusty concatenators of Comic-Con coverage, those redoubtable relayers of restive reportage, those illuminated impresarios of insider information, the admirable, the pleasurable, the ink-stained—the one, the only, the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con International Report with Parker and Lieber!
(And I wasn’t even mentioned in it. How generous am I? Huh? C’mon, you can tell me.)
Gabba gabba hey,
or, Vootie!
The climax of the First American Transcendental Exhibition comes early—it’s the eighth of eleven stages: “God’s Universal Form.” When “Krishna’s Transcendental Manifestations” winds down, your dhoti’d guide will appear, flashlight in hand, to lead you into the largest room in the tiny museum. There’s three folding theater seats (for Jenn, Lori, and Lori’s friend Sara, though I might be misremembering the name), and he’ll close the door, revealing a padded bench that unfolds from the wall and hooks onto the last theater seat. —On a little stage in front of you is a miniature of the statue you’ve seen once already, of Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot, talking theology and philosophy while the two greatest armies ever assembled await the trumpet blast. Those bedevilled by that hobgoblin of subcreation—continuity—can see if Krishna’s wearing the same necklaces of flowers and if Arjuna’s crown matches the one he wore in “Setting the Stage”; me, I’m looking at the big black curtain behind them. Something is about to be Revealed.
And sure enough, as the synthy Hindipop remix of the Firebird Suite’s finale gets up a head of steam, the curtain is drawn back, revealing the godhead in all its multitudinous forms: “I see Brahma,” cries Arjuna, “sitting on the divine lotus!” (In English, or Spanish, French, Hindi, or Japanese, depending.)
That’s what Comic-Con is like. Except bigger.
You’ve got to understand: I was always a New York City kind of guy. LA? Please. —It wasn’t just the Woody Allen movies, though those didn’t help: New York City is a goddamn city, with skyscrapers and subways and yellow cabs and Central Park and all the other signs that say you aren’t on the farm anymore. LA is hellish, sunsoaked, shallow sprawl. Wake me when there’s a there there.
It also doesn’t hurt that when we visit Lori and John in LA, we see things like Soapy Smith’s only honest roulette table and the First American Transcendental Exhibition. We go shopping for inflatable furniture in an art gallery full of Taschen books and pieces by Kaz and Baseman and some creepy Struwwelpeter pen-and-inks (pause for a lengthy confab via cell phone with Scott, and Jenn isn’t kidding when she says she can give him the Pantone color of the chair we’re looking at, to match the ones he’s bought). We eat bubbling hot soon tofu and some incredible conveyor-belt sushi.
So LA is very much a city, after all.
I mean, it’s the sort of city where you go into a bar (the door is too hot to touch outside and the inside is conditioned to an admirably arctic degree) and as you’re drinking the Mai Tais that the bartender agreed to make despite not having the the recipe, Lori asks you who does the voice of Spongebob Squarepants, because maybe it’s that guy there at the bar, the one from Mr. Show.
But still.
(Also: lychee martinis.)
The less said about driving from LA to San Diego, though, the better.
(Lori: here’s a song by Regina Spektor, and here’s a song by the Dresden Dolls. Sorry we couldn’t arrange an iTunes party en route.)
I think it was Scott who said they were competing for “least desperate booth in the Con.” Or maybe it was Patrick. Whatever—a cool blue cloudy backdrop, lots of computers, nothing to sell, plenty of room to hide out behind the table, splayed out on inflatable chairs, a small plot of grass: they didn’t call it Tranquility Base for nothing.
It is highly recommended that you secure one of these as a base camp on the floor. Makes walking a third of a mile up and back again conceivable. Heck, I must have done it three or four times, myself! (I saw Dylan, crouched at the back of the Flight booth, mouth downturned, eyes raccooned. “Dylan!” I cried. “Why aren’t you out on the floor? Seeing what’s to be seen?” —This was on Saturday. Saturday was among other things Star Wars Day. 45,000 people were in the room on Saturday. That’s as many people as came to the con all four days total back in ’98. They had contingency plans in place in case the fire marshal showed up. They dimmed the lights on Saturday because it was getting too hot. So Dylan rolled her eyes, her mouth souring around a grin too wry to bother showing up. “Kip,” she said, “I was out there. Pushing through the crowds. Trying to make it across the hall. Kip—I’m armpit height.”)
Anyway: you’ll have to find your own base camp. Ours was pretty full.
Here’s what I know, economically speaking: I went to buy a copy of the single-volume Bone collection on Sunday morning, and they’d sold out. We wanted to buy some Scary Go Round collections. John Allison had blown through his inventory. Kazu Kibuishi had to keep going over to the Viper booth to steal more copies of Daisy Kutter #1 because he couldn’t keep them from flying away. Whoever was taking money for Flight had a hell of a job, wadding all those twenties and finding a pocket somewhere to stash them (Vera did the money dance, her cargo pants swaying like bells); they’re saying it came in second in the bestseller sweeps, after that Bone volume, and even with the hype that’s something. —Artists’ Alley was smaller this year (“This is the year Artists’ Alley truly became an alley,” said Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald), but it wasn’t sealed away behind a giant screen, and it wasn’t a deserted wasteland: Rebecca could barely stop sketching and chatting to laugh, and Parker’s audio posts (“This is me, trying again”) capture something of the progressive degradation the Con will work on you no matter where you are, and if Steve was as resigned as ever, well, it’s part of his shtick, and anyway, Comic-Con lost his table application, the bums, and besides, it was only Saturday morning, and the storm had not yet achieved perfection. (I never saw them again, but hey: check in with him and Parker in a bit for the traditional Only Report You’ll Need.)
A lot of people are talking about how this is the con where the movies finally stopped being ashamed of the comics and embraced the geekiness of it all, which is strange: the movies don’t give a damn about comics. The movies give a damn about 100,000 people showing up to buy stuff and get jazzed with that all-important viral buzz marketing stuff. The 100,000 people were showing up for the Star Wars pavilion and the video games and the trading cards and the Sky Captain robots and Jude Law and Eliza Dushku and The Incredibles and Smallville and, yes, the comics: the comics were there, too. But you could have cut the comics away and it would have hurt, but half of that 100,000 wouldn’t have noticed a thing, except maybe that the manga was missing. —This was the year Comic-Con became Pop-Culture–Con, or at least this is the year I’m saying it finally happened. Comics rolled over and stopped pretending it was all about them: this is escapism and empowerment and the promise of hundreds of worlds built just for you, and comics is just one of a dozen ways to make good on that promise. (Happy trivia fun-time: when Diamond muscled Capital out of the comics distribution biz, and reigned supreme [and pretty much still does] as the only mainstream comics distributor to the direct market, they came up with a unique defense against accusations of monopoly: they aren’t a comics distributor. They distributed collectibles, you see, such as statues, dolls, special DVD editions, sports and non-sports trading cards, and games and books; comics were just another item in that broader category, and there’s lots of distributors of collectibles. —This was back in 1997. Comic-Con has just now finished catching up, in a weird sort of way. —Then again, they’ve been subtitling it as “a celebration of the popular arts” for how long now? Maybe it’s just us that’re catching up. Except with the stuff I’ve seen some folks saying, maybe we aren’t. Of course, the Beat’s all over “Hollywood’s Summer Sundance.” So she is, at least.)
But: this is not necessarily a bad thing for comics.
For one thing, there’s always going to be a place for comics at San Diego, and not just in the name. (The Eisners, for one.) —The pop culture (or popular art) being celebrated is a very specific one: highly visual, escapist adventure stories with the sort of whacked-out goshwow eyekicks that comics pioneered—had to pioneer, because for years film couldn’t do it and video games didn’t exist. Now they do, and film and television and video games can do it better, faster, cleaner, purer, and 100,000 people will mill back and forth over a third of a mile for a taste. Comics will always have a place at that table, with the superheroes and the crime comics and the supernatural adventure yarns and the farm teams testing properties and the tie-ins and marketing opportunities before the big bucks go all-in, as well as whatever mad experiments are swirling around Grant Morrison’s fevered brain.
But these other things have their festivals, too, and we shouldn’t let the ginormity of San Diego eclipse them: APE, MoCCA, SPX, and can I be cheeky and mention Stumptown in the same breath? Not yet? Ah, give us a bit. —The immediacy of comics is lauded in the New York Times; formal techniques pioneered in comics are taught to web designers and usability mavens every day; Chris Ware just curated an edition of McSweeney’s, you might have heard of it. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep on saying it: for all the shakiness of comics-the-industry (as we know it: watch those bookstore numbers!), comics-the-art has never been better.
And that includes the art of goshwow eyekicks. —Do I need to point out that the eyekicks in comics have an intimacy and immediacy, depend on and have created and honed fantastic formal conventions, can become beautiful, lasting works of art and design? That intimacy and experimentation and craft have eyekicks of their own?
Probably. Anyway. That’s what it all looks like from where I am, but I’m not that much taller than armpit height, myself. (You’ll notice how I’ve left out the bit about how all this affects webcomics, and how Flight is cleverly—savvily? inevitably?—reaching out to all the various factions that don’t really exist when you stop and look at them closely enough. This has gone on too long already. Maybe next time. —Tranquility Base didn’t sell much of anything, though. Then, they didn’t set out to.)
Jenn Manley Lee; Tracy White; Patrick Farley; Daniel Merlin Goodbrey; Scott McCloud.
Terry Rossio wants to know what the Next Big Thing will be.
“Entertainment used to be appointment-based,” he says. We just had dinner for 20 or 30 or so at Bucca di Beppo’s. It’s Friday night. We skipped dessert. I should maybe have had some coffee but I didn’t and it’s not like I need coffee. “You’d wait for opening night or the next episode or the next issue. You’d make an appointment to see it. Now, with DVDs and the internet and trade paperbacks, you can see it whenever you want, the whole thing, or just a piece here and there.” He didn’t make the point about trade paperbacks, but it fits, so I’ll make it for him. But maybe I should stop putting words in his mouth, since I’m bound to get his argument wrong. I didn’t take any notes. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have gotten some coffee anyway. —The point is this: appointment-based entertainment builds buzz because it builds community. You’re all waiting for everybody else for the same damn thing, and then you’ll talk about it after, and not a little of the drive to see it in the first place is that hankering to talk about it after. (Half the appeal—a third?—of preordering the next Harry Potter is knowing you’re reading it at the same time as how many millions of people? Hundreds of thousands? It’s shivery cool, if ultimately evanescent.)
But the advent of 500 channels and niche publishing and the death of radio—the turgid stop-and-start media revolution, the guerilla war of many-to-many against all manner and model of broadcast, to draw a megalomaniacal analogy—has caused appointment-based entertainment to wither away, if not yet die. There’s so much out there, and the barriers to get it out there are lower than ever, are falling away to nothing, and this is good, this is fantastic, phenomenal—but there’s so much out there. How are you going to get noticed? Get everyone picking your signal out of the glorious noise? How are you going to line ’em all up for the Next Big Thing?
Momus says Warhol got it wrong: we’re all going to be famous for fifteen people. And that’s great, that’s fantastic, that’s phenomenal—but fifteen people can’t feed a family of four. Much less draw up the standard rich-and-famous contract. Fifteen people can’t even keep you in beer money.
Terry notes the fervor hardcore fans bring to things like fanfiction; he talks about how people will follow sports teams, even though there’s no set story: any given Sunday, and all that. So I pick up on the threads he’s dangling and suggest a soap opera following the members of various teams in a, say, quidditch league. Thinking sports because you could stage the games on a regular basis (rotisserie-baseball–style), which supplies the (I’m thinking) necessary appointment basis, but also limits the wild cards: there’s no set story in sporting events, but that doesn’t mean anything goes—rather, a pre-set number of possible outcomes have a greater or lesser chance of occurring. (Storytelling is always about rules: horses and harnesses, tennis and nets. You abstract a set of rules from the larger storytelling set and dance with them, and adhering too them too slavishly is as bad and dull as ignoring them utterly.)
But he’s smiling at me. “You’re taking the sports thing too literally. Imagine a castle. When you first see it, it’s full of people. You don’t know any of the relationships, any of the alliances, how anything works. And you don’t get told who to watch or follow. You can go anywhere, see anything that happens, but as you’re doing that, something else is happening somewhere else. You can go back and catch up, but you can only watch one thing at a time. That way, you can come home, pop it in, follow a little bit here or a little bit there, you don’t have to live in it eight hours a day to pick it up. But it’s big enough to have that draw.”
So not anything goes— there’s a set storyline, but it’s multilayered, multivalent, and the uncertainty comes from the happy accidents each reader makes as they see this scene or that scene first, followed by something else; each reader writes their own path through. And appointments can be made with story and setting updates. “Did you get part three? Oh, man, you know that bit with the princess—you’ll never guess what happens—” It’s a video game with a narrative flow, it’s interactive fiction with a budget: call it a MMOTE. (Massively Multi-audienced Online Theatrical Event. Okay, maybe not. For the record, here’s a primitive something of what it is he’s on about.)
But whatever: the deeper thing we’re talking around is worldbuilding. It’s no longer enough to sit around a campfire and just tell a story. People want us to give them worlds to escape to and the tools they need to climb into or even make up their own stories there. They write fanfiction about their favorite characters. They build levels for their favorite video games based on scenes from their favorite movies. They mashup pop songs and remix them and make playlists for their own personal soundtracks. They roleplay in the settings of their favorite TV shows, and they dress up as their favorite superheroes for a day. (Or they want to, but don’t have the time. Or the energy. They want to make a gesture in this direction. They want something close to it, closer than they can get now.)
—New pop culture technologies. Fiction suits. Worldbuilding. This is what the Next Big Thing looks like.
So I mutter something (once again) about Dylan Horrocks’ essay, and look over at Scott, at the other end of the table, who’s waxing theoretical about Classicists and Iconoclasts, Formalists and Animists.
It’s a good dinner.
It’s on Saturday, I think, that I nearly trip over one of the Haradrim. And you have to ask yourself: what is it, exactly, that you desire, when you dress up as a spear-carrying bad guy seen in medium shots for less than a minute’s worth of footage, total?
I did try to warn you: “one thin layer of parody or pastiche,” I said, “and this whole house of cards of mine collapses into a merry war.” And fans are parodists and pasticheurs: they can’t help it. Those are the iron-clad forms of sub-subcreation.
Trouble and desire: it’s a refrain from a Hal Hartley film, which is why it sticks in my head, and I think I did a better job of laying out what I’m on about with it last year, though that fit’s not much more coherent than this year’s, which went on about desire at the expense of trouble, which is to slight one half of the engine’s kick: you have to have trouble, so you can unleash your power; you have to have desire, or you’re not going to give a good God damn about the trouble. (And I should warn you that I get lost in the nuances of that peculiar, Lacanian sense of desire: “When all the elements of need are satisfied in the situation of want, the remainder is desire.” Seems straightforward enough? Well, watch it: it gets slippery fast. —So I don’t even know what the hell I’m on about, myself. I just take comfort in the way Barbara Johnson bitch-slapped Lacan and Derrida with a purloined letter.
(Um. As described by John Irwin. God, you think I’ve done any of the actual reading myself? I cribbed the Lacan quote above from Delany. Oh, hell, let’s climb out of this pit and get back on the con floor.)
But don’t think we’ve banished sex and the appetite for sex from our equation. Just because you’re lost in the trees doesn’t mean there isn’t any forest. —There was not only the Elvis stormtrooper this year, there was also an Elvis Ghostbuster.
See?
(I’m reading House of Leaves again, and just thought I’d mention how cascadingly funny it is that just about everything is cited to articles written in hundreds, thousands of magazines and books, as if the central events of the book were covered in one facet or another by everybody from Newsweek to Outdoor Life to Ladies’ Home Journal, and all those Tweely Clever Title: Wretchedly Explicatory Subtitle books from all those academic presses. Worldbuilding again: the story, and the space around the story, its echo, the wider world, and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore: it’s creepy, it’s obsessive, it’s weirdly claustrophobic, it’s frightening. —Good book, that.)
Comics?
Well, sure: Flight, of course, which sold more copies than anything else on the floor except the giant all-in-one Bone. It remains to be seen, time will tell, but in this reporter’s opinion, here and now, I think it can be said the promise is being fulfilled. (Volumes 2 and 3 are underway.) Picked up a copy of Kwaïdan because, ooh, pretty; it ended up as just about the most European Japanese comic I’ve ever read, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But I also picked it up because the size and format—slightly smaller than a regular comics TPB, but not manga-tiny; good thick matte paper; the spine was a little stiff, but the price—$14.95—was just about perfect: it’d be ideal for (say) print runs of Dicebox. (Know anybody who wants to publish a 90-some-odd–page comic? Second most popular strip at Girlamatic…) —Finally dropped some money for the Darwyn Cooke Catwoman trades, because cons are where you finally break down and buy the stuff you’ve been dickering over for a while. The cartooning—like Matt Wagner in his prime, and that’s a very good thing—was almost enough to make me overlook the mawkish noir. (I was surprised to find Cooke’s solo effort a much more appealing story than the regular Ed Brubaker-written stuff: I haven’t kept up with Brubaker’s capecapades, but back when the Comics Journal accused him of drawing like Chester Brown he could, you know, write. But this, this was warmed-over treacle: hookers in danger, a cheap Clayface knock-off, some awkward hand-waving about what sounds like a ridiculous bit of retrocruft [Selina Kyle ran for mayor of New York? When Gotham City was going through that we’ve-been-destroyed-by-an-earthquake crossover? What?]—I realize that when you’re working on something like a Batbook, you’re largely rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic that will not sink, and there’s some deep fucking grooves in the deck that it’s hard to yank the chairs out of at this point, but still. Better was expected. Thank God for the kinetic jam-kicking cartooning.)
What else? Daisy Kutter #1, because what Kazu Kibuishi’s doing with Bolt City is a thing of wonder and delight. But it’s a number one. A nice-enough opening; we’ll see what happens next. Jenn ended up with a Wigu collection, and what little I’ve seen is inspired sophomorosity. Clio dropped her sketch ’zine in our hands at the last possible moment, and Lord, but the girl can draw. (Those fish!) —I’d say something about all the other Pants Pressers, but they’re all in Flight, so go look at that, and anyway, Clio was the only one who gave us freebies. Street Angel? No, wait, we picked that up at APE…
Oh! Right. Isaac the Pirate, vol. 1, because Dylan made us. (And Chris.) Which I still somehow haven’t really sat down with yet. Hmph. Oh! And we saw the Incredibles preview and the Farscape preview and I won’t tell you what I was thinking during the Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean panel on Mirrormask because Ivy would glare at me and we leaped to our feet when Joss Whedon came out and said, “I’ve got something to show you,” and then when he said, “I’ve got something else—well, actually, nine somethings,” we leaped to our feet again and whistled and I think Jenn even stomped, because nothing says that indiepop cartoonists and British invasion formalists and bootstrap bricolagistes can’t let themselves get swept away by the razzle and the dazzle of the Cannes for Fans, the Summer Sundance.
There was going to be more, because there was more. More about the dinners (the second one, which had less theory and more sketching, and had more laughter but only because there were three times as many people), and the people I’ve slighted horribly, like Ivy, and Winter and Sky, who’s taller than you remember; Merlin, who was there to assure us that Spaced lived up to its hilarious promo; Steve, whose head is bumpier than mine; Tracy and Lakshman and Lauren and Tammy and Heidi and Anne and Jen and Bill and, um, and— I don’t even think I mentioned the grass! (Oh. I did. Briefly.)
Me, Ivy, and my hat.
There was going to be more, but the music’s falling away. The lights dim, the halogens fade, leaving red and green light-smears to chase the edges of all those dancing arms, those beatific faces. There’s a rattle of rings as the curtain jerks its way back across the stage, and all that’s left is the little statue of Arjuna and Krishna on the chariot, talking theology, there between the two largest armies ever assembled, waiting to crash together in the greatest battle for righteousness and against tyranny that the world has ever known. Sandals slap, and the flashlight comes bobbing. It’s our guide. “I’m sorry,” he says, as he asks you to stand. He fusses with the bench you’ve been sitting on, lifting it up and hooking it back against the wall, opening the door it had blocked. “I have to put this back now,” he says, “or I’ll forget, and I’ll run through here in the dark and bang my shins and end up with my dhoti over my head.”
We can’t have that.
There’s more—three additional stages, in fact: “Ocean of Birth and Death,” “Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Festival,” and “Goloka—The Spiritual Realm.” But don’t follow him out into the next cramped hall just yet: stop a moment in the doorway, turn, look back. There’s a gap between wall and curtain, and you can just see the forms of all those gods: clay statues, brightly painted, carefully dressed, standing perfectly still under all those mirrors in the dim light.
And then even that’s gone. —Our guide’s about to start the next display. Go on. We can’t keep him waiting.
And this, this I don’t say often enough.
The Spouse, ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Jenn Manley Lee? She’s a bona fide rock star. If you aren’t reading Dicebox, well, now you have no excuse. Start here. (It’s where everybody came in.) The main site has the first 40-some-odd pages up for free; after that, you can subscribe to Girlamatic and get caught up. (Be sure to mention her when you do: she gets a bonus.) It’s $2.95 a month for an excellent assortment of fine new mainstream comicking, and that’s less than most 22-page super-pamphlets, and it includes a page a week of one of the most important SF comics of the past, Christ, good long while, and I’m not entirely swollen with spousal pride on that score.
I’m telling you, folks. Rock star. Go pay your respects.
Together again for the first time.
I already told you the one about the guy who bought the most expensive copy of that Superman comic because, y’know, it had to be the most valuable. Well, here’s what we did the last time Liefeld and Nicieza and X-Force rode into town:
It was June of 1991, and I was clerking for New England Comics, splitting my time between the Allston and Brookline shops. Allston was the shop for the hardcore regulars, selling probably 60 – 70% of each week’s new books out of subscribers’ boxes rather than off the shelf to walk-ins; it had the most wallbooks (the valuable collector’s issues, kept safe in mylar sleeves, hung from hooks on every vertical square inch) and a whole room filled with grimy once-white cardboard longboxes on folding tables, crammed with comics going back decades. Brookline was more of a kids’ shop: the sort of friendly neighborhood brightly colored shop full of comics and toys that most people thought of when they thought of comics. It had its regulars, too (one of them a disreputable chap who subsisted on issues of Cherry Poptart and Dan DeCarlo reprints; Barb liked to slip him copies of Real Girl from time to time, but we’ll get to her in a minute).
And Marvel had noticed, to be sure, and was wildly casting about for the next Next New Thing, and the next #1 to give him. They fingered Rob Liefeld, whose style—well, it was idiosyncratic, at least—had gotten noticed on New Mutants, and they decided to let him loose on X-Force.
What was it about? Who knew? Who cared? It was going to be big. Everybody knew it. So everybody ordered accordingly, and comics clerks all over the country sighed accordingly, and heavily. —I was scheduled to work the Brookline shop on the Wednesday X-Force would debut, which was fine with me. The Brookline shop was managed by Barb, who was as much about fuck tha superheroes as I was: Sandman was okay, and she could tell Hayao Miyazaki from Masamune Shirow, and she liked Zot!, but mostly she liked the underground and its descendents: Los Bros. Hernandez, Dave Sim, Dori Seda, Mary Fleener, Donna Barr. (She also lived in a Buddhist monastery where she rather seriously pursued the art of kendo. So I had a crush. So deal.)
As per our plan.
We left the shop (opening the door, exciting the somewhat longer line of kids, dashing their hopes when we locked it up again) and headed across Beacon Street to an upscale supermarket (this being Brookline), where we picked up orange juice, a couple of pastries, a bottle of champagne, and some plastic cups. Back at the shop (open, excite, lock, dash), we mixed a couple of mimosas, toasted the coming day, and tossed ’em back.
Then.
Barb ceremoniously pulled a buck-fifty out of her pocket and rang up a sale as I grabbed a copy of X-Force #1. We walked up to glass front door where the head of the (longer still) line had a good clear view of us. I held up that copy of X-Force #1 to general oohing and aahing and yaying. Then Barb pulled out her lighter and set it on fire.
And then we opened the shop.
Image was born out of a feeling that I had that [the days of] our positions at Marvel were numbered. We had become too big for the system. Marvel didn’t want a star system, but with Todd’s, Jim’s and my books selling millions of copies, that’s what we were becoming. They were trying to reproduce the success of our books. They were going to put out a Cage #1 with an acetate cover. Like, “We’ve got to prove it’s the gimmicks, not the creators.” But the truth of the matter was Spider-Man happened because Todd had heat on Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men happened because Jim Lee had heat. They were trying to replace us already, and we hadn’t even talked about leaving.
—Rob Liefeld, on why he decided
to take part in Image Comics
That was July of 1991. In December of 1991, Marvel’s hotshot Next New Things marched as one into the office of the president of the company and made him an offer they knew he’d refuse: give them—all of them—creative control of their own properties, or they’d walk. All of them. (They never joined the Wobblies, but they figured out what it is about a union: it’s a way of getting done together what you can’t get done alone.) —Marvel said, roughly, shyeah right, and so Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Jim Valentino and Erik Larsen and Mark Silvestri and Whilce Portacio and Rob Liefeld walked and founded Image Comics. They nearly killed Marvel, and they came even closer to killing the direct market itself, and you should go read Michael Dean’s “The Image Story” to savor the rise and the fall. They put out hundreds of shitty comics and ran a handful of superhero æsthetic trends out past their logical extremes and over a cliff, and it’s as much their fault as anybody else’s that the big Comic-Con is all about movies and videogames now, and they changed the course of history and the flow of capital; nothing was ever the same after they did what they did.
I used to say that the punchline to the story above was that later that day, after we and everybody else in the country had just about sold out of the first printing of X-Force #1, this guy offered to pay five dollars for the ashes of the copy we’d burned, which we’d slipped into a mylar sleeve and hung from the counter by the cash register. (Hey. Five bucks.) I used to point out that a near-mint first print of X-Force #1, which once was bought at $50, $60, $100 a throw, by people who forgot to buy low and sell high, could now be had for the low, low price of, yup, five dollars. Whoa. That irony’s a bitch.
But I found out that isn’t the punchline. The punchline is reading this:
This fall, Rob Liefeld, Fabian Nicieza and X-Force return for a six to eight issue miniseries as announced at WizardWorld LA’s “Cup O’ Joe” panel with Marvel E-I-C Joe Quesada.
And hearing Liefeld say this:
Oh yeah, there was plenty of trepidation. In fact I turned it down twice before finally convincing myself to do it because I was really intimidated and let’s face it, it is a gigantic, daunting challenge to see if we can restore this book to anything resembling the glory days when this book was a top seller and the characters were extremely relevant to the Marvel Universe. It’s been quite some time since this franchise was a water cooler book and I’d be lying if I told you I have doubts about what we can accomplish. We’re giving it our best effort though, trying our hardest to make this as exciting as possible.
And this:
The situation is as follows: there is a terrorist group from the future that is hell bent on awakening a terrible menace from our past in the present. One really cool monster, ninjas, assassins, barbarians, time-travelers and plenty of intrigue. All the ingredients that set X-Force apart from the pack 13 years ago are front and center here. The sins of Cable’s past really come back to haunt him this time around…
The punchline is this:
And you know what? Rob Liefeld is an ass. He’s a shitty cartoonist in every conceivable sense of the term who thinks ninjas and assassins and time travel are innovations. He isn’t unsubtle when it comes to slamming peers and burning bridges. His popularity then and now is an occulted mystery, even to his fans (perhaps especially to his fans). The comics he’s produced are without exception qlippothic works, darkly sucking away from superheroes whatever magic and wonder and naïve dignity they can muster. Him, and Marvel, and X-Force—they all deserve each other, and good riddance.
Still: that story isn’t nearly as funny as it used to be.
Your very blood screams indifference towards defining the need to fight versus the desire to fight. You have failed in your mission, Gaveedra-7. You must leave the Sacrarium.
Biff, pow, yadda yadda.
A good first effort, Mr. McGrath; I particularly like the group shot of some of comics’ eminences grises. There’s a couple of nuggets of genuine insight. Well done. Definitely a step up from “Bang! Zowie!”
But there’s still room for improvement:
- Your opening, for instance: the question of declining or expanding literacy is complicated enough at the present moment that fashioning from whole cloth a poetry-like decline of the novel in favor of comics makes you look a wee bit poltroonish. Also, if you’re going to cite highbrows that claim comics are “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit,” do be so good as to name them and quote them directly. Otherwise, the brickbats we’d throw at them for snobbish provincialism and sloppy sloganeering will end up aimed at you, instead.
- Also, try to be a bit more au courant in your examples. I think the last Broom Hilda collection was printed in the mid-’70s? Your point is taken, and could as easily have been made with Foxtrot, or Zippy the Pinhead. (We’ll let the manga punt slide: authorities within the industry can’t wrap their brains around this phenomenon, either, so expecting more from a source like the New York Times is, perhaps, unfair.)
- If you’re going to set up an equivalence between “graphic novels” and “‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world” (scare quotes sic), take care that later quotes don’t directly undermine your point.
- Regarding the “minor flowering of serious comic books in the mid-80’s”:
This is, without a doubt, the single most breathtakingly heartbreaking summation of the comics industry’s boom and bust that I have ever read.But the movement failed to take hold, in large part because there weren’t enough other books on the same level.
- Kudos for noting Watchmen was drawn by Dave Gibbons. Points deducted for failing to note that From Hell was drawn by Eddie Campbell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was drawn by Kevin O’Neill, and Lost Girls was drawn by Melinda Gebbie.
- Have you seen many Persian miniatures? Have you seen the art for Persepolis?
- “Many practitioners of the form” do not prefer the term “comix.” Art Spiegelman prefers the term “comix.” The man deserves our respect and admiration, but there are limits.
- His name is Scott McCloud. Will Eisner is the cartoonist who prefers “sequential art.” You mention neither Eisner nor Jules Feiffer, nor their seminal comics A Contract With God or Tantrum. This is inexcusable. Failing to note McCloud’s Understanding Comics is less of a crime—you’re dealing with the literature itself rather than the criticism of that literature (stop trying to join split hairs, you in the back)—but it is suggested that you arrange to have read a copy before next tackling this subject.
The graphic novel is a man’s world, by and large, though there are several important female artists (not just [Marjane] Satrapi, but also Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet and Debbie Drechsler). And to a considerable extent it is a place of longing, loss, sexual frustration, loneliness and alienation—a landscape very similar, in other words, to that of so much prose fiction.
This is a worthwhile insight, unless I’m misreading “the landscape” when I apply to it the conditions noted throughout the paragraph, and not merely those ascribed directly to “a place.”
Many more are set in the slacker world—the skanky Washington Heights neighborhood of Doucet’s My New York Diary, the coffee-shop Portland and East Village sublet of David Chelsea in Love, the diners, card shops and apartment complexes of Adrian Tomine’s West Coast—where people are always hooking up and breaking up and feeling both shy and lousy. It’s the pictorial equivalent of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
This, on the other hand, is cheap and pandering. (Also, see above re: au courant.)
- Not every graphic novelist—to wed ourselves momentarily to the terminology out of necessity—has drawn stories about their masturbation, excessive or otherwise. (What works as a one-off joke should not be stretched into a paragraphs-long case study.)
- Ghost World the comic was, indeed, better than Ghost World the movie. (It’s surprising how many people get that one wrong.)
- Become more attuned to the ironies within your own work: on the one hand, you have highbrows sniffing at comics as “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”; on the other, you speak with graphic novelists (still wed) who describe their art as “an incredibly inefficient way to tell a story,” and note of their working process:
“It involved maybe 8 to 10 seconds of actual narrative time,” he said. “But it took me three days to do it, of 12 hours a day. And I’m thinking any writer would go through this passage in eight minutes of work. And I think: Why am I doing this? Is the payoff to have the illusion of something actually happening before your eyes really worth it? I find it’s a constant struggle and a source of great pain for me, especially the last day when I’m inking the strip. I think, Why, why am I doing this? Whole years go by now that I can barely account for. I’m not even being facetious.”
- You have your reasons, yes, or rather there are reasons why it probably never occurred to you; nonetheless, I’m feeling parochial, and so I will dock you for not mentioning Grant Morrison when you name-check Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.
- Given the context, you don’t need to explain what “a fair cop” means.
- Your point re: Blankets is well-taken, although you make precisely the same point a paragraph later, re: Adrian Tomine.
- Excepting (the astounding, the amazing, the incredible) Joe Sacco and Joe Sacco alone from your single paragraph summation of the strengths and weaknesses of the graphic novel makes you seem parochial, as if you’ve only read the books you’ve mentioned in this piece. It also lends too much emphasis to Sacco-as-exception, which is a recurring theme. The narrative that emerges—R. Crumb, social outcast and chronic masturbator, revives comics as a niche form of self-expression; many cartoonists who follow in his footsteps are also social outcasts and chronic masturbators; Joe Sacco is a well-spoken cartoonist with a comendable panoply of social skills; comics as a medium (or is it graphic novels as an idom? Or genre? Sloppy!), as practiced by these social outcasts, is not well-suited to lyricism or strong emotion, and does not take itself seriously (look at all those wanking jokes!); it therefore follows that only the comics of Joe Sacco, smooth, confident, jet-setting journalist that he is, are capable of proving this rule—this is just plain ugly, and detracts from the value of what has gone before.
- Admit it: you only read City of Glass because Paul Auster wrote the prose novel.
All this and ego, too!
It’s a miracle traditional American comics get made at all (and still with the same characters they’ve had since the fucking Boer War or something. Mister Terrific! How can these things still exist? What monstrous act of love and will keeps a comics ‘universe’ alive for so long, against the odds?). They’re the last bastion of something, that’s for sure, but it’s hard to imagine them, through the compound eyes of future eons, as anything other than a curious example of primitive, hand-drawn ‘virtual reality’ technologies. Most of the people who do this kind of work, do it out of love, like the love you’d show to an ailing friend.
That’d be Grant Morrison, and this helps explain why he’s on my shortlist of all-time favorite comics writers ever.
Seduction of the innocent.
Local cartoonist Steve Lieber actively recruits the youth of today into the dank cult of comics. (Also, the cartoonist agenda.)
Not-quite-so-local cartoonist Erika Moen, one of today’s youth, is tragically already lost. (She’s even doing a signing.)
Gaudy nightstepper Jim Henley provides a cautionary tale from the mouldering longboxes of yore. (Nor does Jeff Parker escape the collective popconsciousness unscathed.)
Customers interested in Flight may also be interested in:
Expedia: Flight Deals
Great Rates. Great Flight Times. Save when you book at Expedia.com.
Not to knock Amazon overly, but y’all might want to take a look at that algorithm. —All of which is by way of saying: you can pre-order your copy of Flight now. And you should. Oh, my, yes. You should.
A cavalcade of comics coverage!
I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
—Vladimir Nabokov
And Me, too! I’m thinking, except there’s only really one Russian phrase that I can pick out of my foamy brainwaves these days, and that’s “Ya sliushayu jazz.” —But you’ve probably already got this. So you’ve seen the quote. Ah, well.
So we had the first-ever Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend, and all in all it went quite well. The Old Church proved a startlingly apt environment for comics geeks of every stripe, for which Messr. Deutsch (Hereville!) is owed many thanks. And if you were there, and you bought a ticket from a bearded guy in a vest who kept stamping people on the palms of their hands rather than the backs or the wrists, well, that was me; hi. Sorry about that. Hope you had fun. But if you weren’t, well, I’d like you to take a look at this, for instance—
—which would be a photo of Bill Mudron (Pan” alt=”” />), Kevin Moore (In Contempt!), and Bethanne Barnes (Future Ruler of the World!), all vamping in front of guest of honor Christopher Baldwin (Bruno! Little Dee!). Also, I’d ask you to take a gander at this—
—which would be Ty and Ian Smith (Emily and the Intergalactic Lemonade Stand!) working out some sibling rivalry or other. Heck, I’ll even ask you to peer thoughtfully at this—
—if only because the pipe organ is pretty much a visual definition of boss. (You’ll have to click through for a glimpse of the stars up Bethanne’s nose, though. —It’s a long story.)
Once you’ve done that, I’m going to ask you to read this.
TO THE EDITOR: This is for “Mr. Hip” Erik Henriksen. Nice of you to feature something comics-oriented, but you forgot something very obvious—the true comics community is made up of geeks [Destination Fun, Stumptown Comics Fest, June 3]. Now I know “geek” is extremely hip right now, but I don’t mean indie rock/hipster geek. I mean the real geeks, the intelligent outcasts that played Magic in junior high while you made fun of them and hiply listened to grunge and Snoop Dogg.
Now pretty much anything in this city with an ounce of underground coolness has been taken over by scenester fucks, exploiting it until it’s sucked dry and turned to shit. But the twice yearly Portland Comic Con you mentioned in your article is not for the too-cool-for-school crowd—it’s for the real people. Not a fucking fashion show where scenesters can strut down their runway and “oooh” and “aaah” over each other’s generic black/brown wardrobes, sip wine, and snub each other (which I’m sure the Stumptown indie comic extravaganza will be).
Just become the fucking yuppies you’re destined to be and go to First Thursday like the rest of them. Stay out of the comic scene before you contaminate it more than you already have.
—Heather Lockamy
Now—and I’m being totally honest, here—it’s hard to blame Heather. It is. Really. —See, “Mr. Hip” did a very enthusiastic job of talking up the Stumptown Fest, but he did so in that inimitable Portland Mercury fashion of trash-talking everybody else on the field in question: in this case, the venerable Portland Comic Book Show, for years pretty much the largest comics event in the Pacific Northwest. Henriksen’s piece doesn’t seem to be archived online, so I’ll take me some liberty, here—
Twice a year, there’s a really horrible comic convention in the Memorial Coliseum basement, where dusty boxes of old superhero comics are hoisted out of geeks’ basements for other geeks to oooh and aaah over. It’s the type of place where you expect to see the Comic Book Shop Guy from The Simpsons waddling about, and unless your idea of a good time is debating the continuity errata of Stargate SG-1, it’s best to stay away.
Ten points from Gryffindor, Mr. Henriksen. This is a lazy opening, tagging such vastly overused tropes as the Comic Book Shop Guy and continuity neuroses for a cheap, crowd-pleasing us-them shot. —I’m not knocking the praise he goes on to slather over the nascent Stumptown Fest; heck no. And he was slathering that praise under a deadline, and I’ve been there all too many times myself not to recognize the siren song of said cheap shot and the easy, welcoming rhythm of a well-worn cliché. You just don’t have time to fact-check every puff-piece in the weekly what’s-doing section and deathless up the prose it deserves. (Of course, our major news media works under similar circumstance, which led us pretty much into a spectacularly stupid war in Iraq. Surely we can learn from their example?)
Said venerable Portland Comic Book Show is, indeed, in the basement of the Memorial Coliseum, and its overall ambience is one of dust and flea market. But that’s where you go for old skool superhero books and original Pogo newspaper strips and sugary J-pop soundtracks and abstruse action figures. And yes, there’s usually a buxom B-movie scream queen signing autographs next to the guy who played Second Jawa from the Left. Movies and video games steal attitude and approach from comics, to say nothing of talent; so comics in turn leans on movies and video games to draw a crowd, and if you’re going to turn up your nose at that, you might as well give up utterly on the mighty San Diego Comic-Con. —But there’s also reps from three of the most notable publishers in the industry, and writers and cartoonists from the superhero mines and the new mainstream; for years, this show has been a steady and reliable anchor in the Pacific Northwest comics scene. The Stumptown Comics Fest isn’t supposed to replace it, gentrifying comics out of the reach of ordinary, everyday geeks—it’s there to augment it. (Seriously. The Comic Book Show could only offer up ten tables for small press cartoonists. The Stumptown crew was convinced they could sell twenty. And the Old Church was just sitting there, on the corner…)
But all this nuance can’t fit in a quarter-page puff piece, and so Heather’s knee jerks rather understandably, and she misses out on a fun time and ends up calling the lot of us “scenester fucks” and “fucking yuppies,” and we’re standing around with paper stars up our noses going “Wha?” and wondering when the Buffy animated series will start already.
So really, in the end, it’s worth one of those tired, long-suffering laughs. The real people, lost in the epistemological mix, talking past each other once again. Us? Them?
Anyway, Heather: I’m sorry I didn’t play Magic in junior high. I was too old when it first got started. But I did play it, and I understand somebody who threw down with you back in the day had a book for sale at the Fest. So please, feel free to show up next year, because there will be a next year, and it’ll be as geeky as this one was. And if you don’t end up liking it? Well, I guarantee you the Comic Book Show will still be there. This town is more than big enough, and then some.
Now, I’m going to steal one last photo from Erika’s report (so I didn’t take any myself. So sue me):
Yes, that’s Jenn (Dicebox!), but the gentleman she’s speaking with is Dapper David Chelsea (David Chelsea in Love! Perspective!), who recently played host to a smattering of Portland’s finest underground inkslingers in a 24-hour comics fest. The results are now online for all to see. Go! Free comics!
Finally, a moment of silence: Dirk Deppey admitted the obvious last week. ¡Journalista!, one of the leading lights of the comics blogosphere, just ain’t coming back now that he’s editing the Comics Journal. Well, damn, says I. I hadn’t been holding my breath, but I’d still been holding out hope, a pale slender thread of it, anyway, and, well, sure, the comics blogosphere is bigger and bawdier and just plain noisier than it was when he got started, and if a lot of that’s due to him, well, it’s showing no signs of letting up since he had to go away. But still: something’s been lost. An important focal point, a dollop of healthy snark, a one-stop shop for industry gossip and pointed pontificatin’. Hats off, sir. —But he does enthusiastically recommend Kevin Melrose’s Thought Balloons, and heck. That’s good enough for me.
So there’s your cavalcade already. I’ve got to get back to reading about the Weimar Zukunfstroman which, let me tell you, is depressing as fuck. (A hasty postscript to Mr. Henriksen: no hard feelings, ’kay? The publicity really was much appreciated, and I have no doubt that Gryffindor will make up those points easily, and more besides.)
