Now this...
Is some crazy, crazy stuff.
Basil Wolverton illustrates the apocalypse. Spotted at Tom Peyer's SUPERFRANKENSTEIN blog, which I'm too damn lazy to link to.
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Is some crazy, crazy stuff.
Basil Wolverton illustrates the apocalypse. Spotted at Tom Peyer's SUPERFRANKENSTEIN blog, which I'm too damn lazy to link to.
Name two characters that don't belong in the above-linked image of the X-Men, as drawn by Chip Zdarsky and Kagan McLeod, of the illustrious RAID.
To my stance that comics movies don't sell comics (a long-held and not popular opinion in the age of the Spider-Man and X-Men cinematic outings.)
MacGuffin: Moving the Sales Needle
Comics themed movies sell comic BOOKS and not monthly comics. Movies help move those big, fat collections off of the shelves. Non comics-readers don't want to bother with having to go to a store four or six or more times to get a story. They want it in one package and they want to take it home and read it. Or to the beach or whatever.
I'm wondering if comics companies will get that through their skulls. People want books. Books. Monthlies service a shrinking market. If people want a Superman fix, they'll learn to buy thicker collections (assuming the price point on those can be made reasonable--a trick that comics companies have had with original content for some time.)
Spotted courtesy of The Beat (link's on the sidebar, people.)
Incremental progress on work. Readying a new STRANGEWAYS sample for another comics company, one that most everyone is bound to have heard of. Until the submission is all settled, no continuing work on that particular project. I'm hoping that a resolution will present itself shortly, but it's largely out of my hands, and there's not much else to do given that the works are basically ready for press should I go under the mighty Highway 62 banner. The waiting game is in full force. I've had a great deal of practice with it, so it's not the end of the world.
Though it gets aggravating pretty quickly.
Work resumes on THE WARD, once the last design I need gets cleared up, that is. Still, no date set up for publication. Not sure that anything other than OGN presentation makes sense for this project and at this point only 1.5 chapters of 6 are done, so there's still a long way to go? What's THE WARD, you ask? The closest jumping-off point I could name would be something like a modern day take on THE AVENGERS meets TO CATCH A THIEF with a touch of superpowered goodness in there.
Finally, working on preliminary designs/plotting for a project tentatively titled MY WINGS ARE BLACK, which is an Old Testament Judgement meets gangsters story set in a 1920s that never happened. I've lucked out and gotten one of my favorite artists signed on for designs, and I think he'll do a spectacular job with them. I may name him once the agreement gets signed, or I may just leave you all in suspense. I think that this one may turn out to be something really special. I just need to convince editors of the same thing. Easy, right?
Lots of planning, not a hell of a lot of actual writing. I find that I get ahead of myself, latch onto a project and spend a lot of time writing the WHOLE DAMN THING when it's only necessary to get the barebones out and get sample pages together. Hard habit to break.
Musicwise, that new Yeah Yeah Yeahs is really outstanding. Easily album of the year so far. I'm not sure there's an earthshattering single on it like "Maps", but I think the whole works a lot better than FEVER TO TELL did. The new Neko Case is pretty great as well, though not perhaps as great as BLACKLISTED is. But that one's a tough act to follow. Sadly, the latest Calexico hasn't grown on me as much as their last couple of albums have. Should probably go back and give it another spin or three.
Oh, I'm not talking about comics, am I? Mostly because there haven't been that many great ones lately. SEVEN SOLDIERS and BATMAN: YEAR 100 have been exceptions to that rule. Paul Pope's take on Batman is both compelling and exciting, taking the character back to the roots that Frank Miller established for him back in the mid-80s, with YEAR ONE, but avoiding the crazed extremities of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. And surprisingly enough, this is a timely book, in our world obsessed with security and wars against shadowy foes who may or may not be there at all, Pope's Batman manages to mirror a lot of folks' concerns without preaching or offering easy answers.
Okay, so there was kind of an easy answer, when the head of the evil conspiracy got punched out, but that didn't magically solve the issues of privacy versus security. Pope tells a story that leaves other possibilities open before us, and more importantly, doesn't seek to explain every motivation so that we actually will want to come back to this place sometime in the future. And, as always, his visual imagination is something to behold, grounded in a familar reality and still fantastic. Nobody, but nobody portrays action as well as Pope does on the page. I can only hope that artists just learning the ropes today take a look at his work and learn from it. I've seen enough Lee/Silvestri/Liefeld clones to last me a lifetime.
I've also come to the conclusion that books like INFINITE CRISIS just can't be good. That they'll be sketchy and incomplete by design. Books like this exist to solve editorial problems, not to tell stories. It's just not what I'm looking for.
Hopefully stuff like the upcoming CASANOVA will tickle my funnybone a little more.
Not yours, really. Though if you dig "city of the future" sorts of pop culture ephemera, go hog wild.
EDIT to add that there's banner ads that aren't safe for work or sanity, should you scroll all the way down. But I guess they gotta pay for their bandwidth somehow...
That's me. You'd think that the announcement of DC: THE NEW FRONTIER in an Absolute edition would have me shouting from the rooftops in glee, given the ration of grief I've handed to DC about splitting the story into two softcover volumes for bookstores. You'd think that.
And part of me is. Very very happy because I'll get a bigger, prettier edition of one of my favorite comics ever. Never a bad thing. But once the initial euphoria wore off, I realized that in a way, this is as much of a limitation to readership as is splitting the book into two volumes months apart. Normal humans who read books don't want to pay eighty bucks plus for a story, even if it's a gorgeous package. This is collectors only. That's fine, I collect some of the time. I'll admit it.
But most folks don't. Most folks will take a pass on NEW FRONTIER given sticker shock. Howsabout a simple, no-nonsense single volume, standard size? That's the kind of thing that you're going to be able to point readers at and get some response. A whole story in one sitting. Yeah, it's superheroes, but it's superheroes that most everyone knows, with enough meat on the works to make it interesting for culture vultures and hepcats and folks who just want to see the good guys come together and work towards a common goal without having exploding heads thrust in their faces and minus the ultra-salacious ("Dr. Light did WHAT!?) content of other works of late.
You put INFINITE CRISIS and NEW FRONTIER in front of your average reader and I bet you'd get a lot more response from one than the other. And that one would be the one that Darwyn Cooke meticulously researched and pulled out of his own heart and soul.
At least that's how it'd work in a more perfect world.
It ocurred to me this morning that it's been twenty years (give or take a couple of weeks) since I first encountered WATCHMEN. A long time. Yeesh, a really long time. Half a lifetime (or close enough that I can see it from here.)
I remember that I really couldn't deal with it at first reading. I scanned the first issue and I knew stuff was going on, but the narrative unfolded in what was best described as an alien way, when compared to what mainstream comics were doing at the time. There wasn't an omniscient narrator serving to glue the haphazard bits of story together, explaining what was going on in between the panels. I couldn't read it on autopilot, which is how I read comics back then (and approach a lot of comics now, truth be told.) I had to actually READ the damn thing, and put together things like Rorschach measuring the closet in Comedian's apartment to deduce the presence of a hidden chamber instead of having it spoonfed to me by way of cottony thought balloons.
Instead of the tyranny of the BIG YELLOW BOX EXPLAINING IT ALL, I had to work at things. Instead of a single voice, I was treated to what would become a chorus of diverse voices that ultimately joined together in a single song (that took more than two years to complete when all was said and done.) Instead of relatively simple character motivations, I was presented with a cast each driven by their own peculiarities, and adult ones at that. It was one of the first times that I actually looked at these people as people, rather than characters acting out a script. Sure, I devoured Claremont's run of UNCANNY mercilessly at the time, and in the years previous. But it was always an entertainment, never feeling like much more than a really well-crafted adventure story.
WATCHMEN was something else altogether. But, like I said, I wasn't really into it when it first came out. That first issue frazzled me something fierce, or perhaps it was just the fact that I was a freshman in college and I was doing what freshmen did that frazzled me. I didn't really get it until I was able to read all three of the first issues in a single sitting. Which I finally did on a Sunday morning at a friend's place after he urged me to saying "They're really, really good," when I said the first issue didn't do all that much for me.
So I sat. I read. I even read the text bits in the back (though now I cringe away from 'em unless they're written by a choice handful of authors -- mostly they're just dreadful these days; self-important attempts to add depth where it isn't needed or isn't achievable.) And I was blown away by the world that was unfolding before me. Dave Gibbons' art, which I hadn't really appreciated at first glance ("Kinda plain and not so inspiring" was probably my first thought) immediately served to reinforce the documentary nature of the work. By rendering the exotic in a "mundane" (for lack of a better word) manner, his art grounded the work and made it all the more believable. This wasn't rippling muscles and demons from another world bent on the destruction of EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND LOVE. These demons were even more frightening because they were largely real.
Sure, as a kid growing up in the 80s, the possibility of nuclear annihilation was out there, but somehow I always figured that rational minds would prevail (ha!). But in WATCHMEN, doom was a palpable thing. Whether it was Kovacs' literal enactment of the doomsayer or the cancer being suffered by Doctor Manhattan's comrades or the death of the Comedian at the opening of the story, impending judgement was seated right next to me. These stakes were very high and very real. After all, we know that Superman's not gonna die, or he's not gonna stay dead. But with books like WATCHMEN, things could actually happen and have permanent repercussions that wouldn't be whimsically undone by the next writer/artist on board. Dead meant dead in WATCHMEN, to modify a phrase.
And the narrative flowed in such a way that there wasn't a wasted panel, a wasted snatch of text. Scenes intertwined into one another and were paid off, though some took a very long time to get there. WATCHMEN is still an impressive display of how to structure a story, particularly a comic story, even twenty years later when all the surface gimmicks have been appropriated and run into the ground and lots of creators have proven that they missed the point, cramming darkness and despair into their spandex works. Nine panel grids of psycopaths might be WATCHMEN's immediate legacy (that's an exaggeration, folks), but all it proves is that the copycats weren't really reading the work. Sure, there's gloom and snakes' nests of deviancy, but there's also genuinely uplifting moments such as Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre's conversation on the surface of Mars. For Adrian's dark victory, there's the simple act of the newsman trying to shield the once-hated comics leech. For Comedian's atrocities, there's the birth of his daughter to counterbalance it.
Did one side win? Is evil vanquished? Goodness triumphs? Not exactly. The story concludes and yet we can see it continuing (though that will never happen in this universe.) There's enough character, enough fuel to continue the story, though Moore and Gibbons will never do it. And yet, it came to an end, albeit an imperfect one, after having waited more than a year for it.
And because I embraced WATCHMEN, I embraced Alan Moore's work, and my reading of comics has been immeasurably enriched by it. There's a great many books that are described as seminal works, but never so true has that been of a work than it has been of WATCHMEN.
For good and for ill.
My name’s Matt Maxwell, a quite nearly perfect secret identity monikker, if ever there was one.
I was born in California, between Kennedy’s assassination and the Moon landings, which I can dimly remember seeing on the unsteady and flickering tube of our old Zenith television. Though that may well have been one of the later landings, and not the first one. When my family moved to our new home in south Orange County, I can clearly remember being surrounded by rolling hills covered in grass that was only green for three months of the year. By the time I finished high school, the hills had been paved with stripmalls, condominiums and low-density living as far as the eye could see.
My college years were spent in alternating states of unmotivated torpor and ecstatic frenzy, depending on the drudgery level of the classes involved. Against all hope, I graduated with not one, but two degrees: English Literature and Social Sciences (emphasis on Sociology—further emphasis on Ethnomethodology). Neither of these degrees came to be of much particular use in the real world. But they’ve provided an invaluable toolset for writing. And it should be as no surprise that I ended up in fiction, after being raised by a reporter turned novelist and a novelist turned novelist.
After college, I worked for a number of years at a multi-campus thinktank based at UC San Diego, where I was surrounded by professors who’d worked on the Manhattan Project and in international diplomacy and political science. Of course, I was a glorified receptionist who had to fight tooth and nail to prove myself more useful working on computers and setting up webpages (back in the glory days of 1994.) It was a fight I never won, and I burned out on the place.
Of course, I’d managed to write the better part of three novels while I was working there. Hey, text on a screen looks like text on a screen. The kicker was that none of those novels went anywhere, so maybe work got the last laugh after all. Around that time, I started fiddling around with the electric guitar and started up a band called The Roswell Incident with a longtime friend of mine. That continued off and on for a number of years, playing on radio shows and at friends’ parties. Never released an album, though there’s certainly enough material recorded to do so.
Sometime along the way, I’d been bitten by the Photoshop bug. I’d taught myself the program, back around 2.0, before there was such a thing as layers. And if you’ve ever worked in Photoshop, I dare you to do your average job without using layers, just a float for cut and paste. Go ahead. It builds character. My work had caught the eye of a small record label in LA, and I managed to get some work from them. Eventually, I figured that I could get paid for that like a real job.
My mistake was thinking that I needed a piece of paper to get those jobs, so I went back to school. This time, to a small tech school, learning desktop publishing/multimedia/animation. That went well enough, but ultimately it proved to be a bit of a side-track. Though it did provide some structure and focus, which is something I can usually use a shove with, so I suppose it all worked out.
And then I fell into animation. I’d done well in the classes, working with Electric Image and After Effects. Then I took a course in LightWave and spent a few months getting a reel together, between the odd freelance job. And going back to the tech school where I’d been a student, to teach animation for a term. While waiting to hear back from the demo reels I’d sent up to animation/VFX houses in LA, I took a job as an animator on Thumb Wars, a deranged parody of the original Star Wars.
After finishing that, in the summer of 1999, I finally received The Call and took a job with Netter Digital, production house for Babylon 5, as well as the 3D Voltron series. There, I worked on Max Steel and Dan Dare before the shop imploded under the stress of trying to deliver animation on a hyperunrealistic schedule, driven by producers who simply didn’t understand the differences between 2D and 3D animation. And did I mention that I was still technically living in San Diego at the time? I did the commute twice a week and stayed in a very small studio apartment four nights a week.
Until, like I said, Netter fell down and went boom. I then returned permanently to San Diego to take care of my first child. And then my second.
During that time, I finally got back into writing, after hiding from it for years. Rediscovering a love of comics that had been all but snuffed out by the Image Revolution, I jumped back into funnybooks in 2002. By 2003, I was writing the column Full Bleed for the site Broken Frontier, and was getting the first draft of Strangeways off the ground. Which more or less brings us full circle, or at least to where I am right now.
If I have to blame anyone for getting into comics, it’d be Bill Mantlo and that one issue of The Micronauts that cracked my skull open. Issue #29, which found our heroes being shot into the brain of their then-comatose leader who had been gravely wounded in battle with his mentor, the evil Baron Karza who had joined up with the forces of HYDRA to lay waste to earth. And while taking their bicameral vacation, they fought against their own nightmares and the captial-N Nightmare of Dr. Strange fame, all deftly illustrated by Pat Broderick. I’m not saying that any of my work has that same sense of unbounded wonder and fervid imagination, but that sort of thing inspired me, and still does.
As for who to blame that I’m still in comics? Point that finger at Grant Morrison, whose work I didn’t really get the first time around, but once I’d been led back to comics with a real hunger for fantasy and Big Ideas, his work was the one to scratch my itch.
And now, back to work for me. Keep poking around here if you want to.
Hmmh. Seems to me that this should be updated...
Comic Book Resources - CBR News - The Comic Wire
THE RED STAR returns this summer! Now this makes me about a billion times happier than the cessation of INFINITE CRISES. I sure hope they pick up some more readers as a result of this. THE RED STAR really was a unique book, with quality where it counted, impeccable design and a compelling story.
Congrats to Goss and the crew for sticking with it.