Highway 62

Wonder-Con, Day 3

Used to be that fifty cents would buy an album’s worth of singles. Today it buys you two. Less than six minutes of music. Geez, no wonder the kids love The Pirate Bay so much.

Spoke at length with Aussie cartoonist Paul Power while in the waiting area to get into the con and out of the rain. He had a ton of interesting stories to tell about working with Alex Toth on SUPERFRIENDS and regarding his experiences as a production artist in Hollywood, some of which dovetailed nicely with my experiences there, so we had quite a bit to talk about. Interesting guy.

I trekked over to the Comic Relief booth once more in hopes of landing a copy of the Kirby book (so frustrated was I that I bought a copy of the FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS from Mike Royer the previous day, at a nice discount even). I hear that he’s even getting work inking the next GALACTIC BOUNTY HUNTER thing from Marvel, so that was nice to hear. Anyways, Rory was indeed able to get a copy of the Kirby book in my hands, and I was yeah and verily thankful for it. You may not care for Kirby’s art, but if you love superhero comics, then you in fact love Kirby’s art, because those comics without his influence would be ever so much duller and more lifeless. Imagination matters. It matters more when coupled with hard work, which Kirby could pull off in spades. Pencil and write (in the FOURTH WORLD era) an entire book in a week? After having done that or more while working for Marvel for the previous ten years? Unimaginable. But then those were different times, weren’t they?

I dropped in on the Future of Comics Retailing panel, and as usual, found it an interesting look into that slice of the world. I probably should have been much more forceful in introducing myself to the guys who sell the funnybooks, but on the third day, folks are beginning to look a little shellshocked. Myself included. And really, I’m terrible at that. Just terrible. I have no business trying to market much of anything. Most interesting, I suppose was the uniform opinion that most superhero comics these days are too dark and too adult to build up a new audience on. Now it might be because these were guys who were my age or older and are just nostalgic codgers. Or they might actually be onto something because they’re the ones selling the comics day in and day out. Nah, it’s just the nostalgia thing, isn’t it? As for predicting the future out of something like this, it’s a good conversation starter, but not much more than that. As Dan from Hijinx Comics pointed out, all of his predictions of 5 years out from last year came true by this year. The future ain’t what it used to be.

More floor wandering. Some tempting things. Like the 15 Godzilla movie set covering the Toho years for all of fifty dollars. Yeah, they’re sure cracking down on the bootleggers this year, aren’t they? It’s no more or less blatant than years before, aside from the fact that I didn’t have that many concert bootlegs to look through, but I could still get all the HERCULOIDS I’d ever want. Which in this case was a sketch of Monolith from THE ELEMENTALS by Bill Willingham himself. The added word balloon spouting “I am NOT Igoo!” was the icing on the cake there. Pity that stuff will never ever see print again. It really helped prime the audience for Vertigo-style books, particularly with the dark superhero flavor. I suppose Dirk will pin it as one of the roots of Superhero Decadence now. I wasn’t thinking about that back then; I just liked the book.

Hmm. What else. Oh yes, the Sam and Max panel. Let’s be honest. It was titled “Making comics you love into games you play,” but it was all about Sam and Max. This is not a bad thing in my book. Some nice glimpses into the early lives of the characters in comic form and some good stories about HIT THE ROAD, the original game from LucasArts. The panel, however, was mostly for the hardcore fans, and they, myself included, got what we showed up for. I only wish Jog could have seen it. Oh, and Jeff Lester (he of The Savage Critics) got a nice shout-out as the genius who breathed new life into Flint Paper, private eye and the guy you don’t want to have in the next-door office. I really should tune into the game, but I’ve grown pretty frustrated with adventure gaming, and I think I’d rather just watch the whole works pre-solved. Is that even an option these days?

On the way out, I spotted friends Ian and Graeme talking in a clutch outside of another meeting room. It happened to be a sort of nondescript “Why we love comics” sort of affair, only it was chaired by Dan DiDio, and featured Mike Carlin, Mark Bagley, Jann Jones and Fletcher Chu-Fong from DC (apologies if anyone’s name got munged – I don’t use Google to check these things because I am lazy.) I’d been thinking about going, but then I’d been thinking about just cutting and running, too. Graeme asked if I was staying for the panel, somewhat in disbelief.

I say disbelief because there were maybe thirty people in the audience. That includes the guy who came in to ramble (expertly cut off by Mr. DiDio) and finally fall asleep on some chairs in the front row, beer gut hanging out for all to see, and the brave to perhaps draw funny faces on in permanent ink. So, this wasn’t a bitch about the other guys and how they’re killing comics panel, but that got touched on. And it wasn’t a cheerleading session for DC, either, though there was some of that. Instead, it was folks sharing their experiences with comics, what they want to read out of them, how they got started in comics and how do they actually read comics nowadays.

It’s really hard to call this a focus group, because this was a self-selecting thing, but there was certainly an element of that to the proceedings. Mr. DiDio was particularly interested in how folks got into comics, many of whom seem to have been introduced to them by their parents, so there had to come a distinction between “the first comic you read” and “the first comic you bought for yourself.” In my case, it was KAMANDI #22 and MICRONAUTS #20 respectively. There might have been a STAR WARS comic or two in there, but I wasn’t reading them regularly at that point.

Conversely, there was a question, and some interest, about lapses in readership. Oddly enough, a sizable number of readers came back for the same reason I ended up coming back to comics: Grant Morrison on NEW X-MEN. Granted, this was not a scientific survey, but I did find it an interesting coincidence. There were a number of folks who’d bailed out about the same time I did, around or before the Bust in 1994, most of which were citing “lots of crap comics” (my words) as a reason for bailing (my reason.)

The matter of timeliness came up in reference to the recent story regarding DC’s crackdown on slow artists, as it had come up during the other DC panels I’d attended. If it’s a hoax, it’s a pretty good one. Now whether or not it’s an attempt to circle the monthly reader wagons remains to be seen. There’s certainly an emphasis on the periodical side coming from Mr. DiDio, and rightly so, as that’s where his main market resides. There was some digging at “trade guys”, yes, that’s me. Because we’re killing the industry. Or transforming it, whichever. But I talk about that all the time already, no reason to bore you (again) with that now, right?

But I can take a ribbing. “Why trades?” Mr. DiDio asks. Because I want the story in a single place. Because I don’t have the ability to drive out to a comic store every month to follow it, assuming the book is monthly. Because I don’t like dealing with the advertisements in the comics magazines. Because with some projects, I never know if the story is going to finish serialization until it actually does. Because I want a more permanent form, as the monthly books are already being written to be collected and included in a permanent form. And mostly because most material doesn’t have such a hold on me as to demand my immediate purchase of it, honestly. I only got to cover a couple of those when I answered the question, though. Stating the rest for the record.

In a lot of ways, I’m a bad guy to have in a focus group. I’m going to skew their curve. A lot. But I suppose if you just ignore the outliers, your marketing plan becomes a lot easier. But then, trying to define anything resembling a “typical” comic book fan is folly. Granted, it might be folly that desperately needs to be undertaken, but folly nonetheless.

Though in one way, I wasn’t an outlier, ‘cause I’m a comics blogger. And bloggerdom was very well represented there. I’m guessing that at least a third of the audience blogs or writes for the press, which is certainly unlike the wider comics audience, even the con-attending audience. And given that there’d been a lot of joking in previous DC panels about how this was being blogged/reported as it happened, DC is clearly aware of the level of engagement that’s been spurred by a shift to online reportage.

And no, I’m not a reporter. I’m far too imprecise. Same reason I’m a pretty dodgy critic, too.

An interesting panel, to be sure. Certainly the highlight of the show for me. Of course, now that I’ve publicized it, all ten of you who read this blog regularly are going to go stuff the room next year. Then it’ll have to be moved to a big room and become another impersonal pep rally.

As for the rest of the show? I spent it scouring out some bargains. The first DEVLIN WAUGH and CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN collections amongst those. Oh, and some cute toys for the kids. Then it was drop a friend off at the airport and drive back home through the drizzle while munching on a Carl’s burger that was the first thing I’d eaten in ten hours. Water to a dying man and all that.

I’ll miss prowling next year. But only a little.

Posted by Matt M. at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I forgot to mention that on Friday afternoon, I had coffee with the Most Hated Man In Comics. No, not that one. Not that other one, either. And certainly not Graeme, who could hate him? (And I didn’t even see him until Saturdayish). Yeah, him. That’s the one. He’s not so bad, really. He even bought the coffee.

I also kinda forgot to mention that I caught John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS on the telly back in the room while I couldn’t sleep. No, I can’t sleep in hotels. Don’t know what it is, but that’s just the way I am. I’d been on a big Carpenter kick lately, so I stuck through it, but I have to say, I liked ASSAULT ON PRECINCT THIRTEEN a lot better, and GHOSTS hit a lot of the same notes, only with more boom boom and Natasha Henstridge. It wasn’t terrible, but I wasn’t enthralled, either. But I don’t have to be enthralled: I’m an insomniac.

Breakfast at Mel’s. The “Elvis Scramble” in honor of the sideburns and semi-pompadour I’m apparently rockin’ lately. You can see for yourself in the Io9.com photo gallery from the CBLDF party that night. I’m in two of them, but you wouldn’t know unless I’d told ya. Off to the show after liberating my car from the varlet parking at my ex-hotel. The first place I stopped was at Comic Relief to grab one of the Kirby books that I’d seen so many of yesterday. Remember, they had eighty of them, right?

Well on Saturday morning, they had bupkis. They’d actually moved stock in from the store to fill the wish lists of five Wonder-Con attendees. And yeah, I was number six on that list. Lucky me. Hey, on the bright side, the project was a success and more folks will get exposed to the Kirby Love, right? That’s never a bad thing. Though my gut tells me that more people are exposed to Kirby through the invisible aspects of his style and the impact he had on superhero comics storytelling. His mad imagination is impossible to emulate, even when some guys try really, really hard.

Made a quick run through artist’s alley and the small press area to get a glimpse of my future fate. Next year, that’s me. No wandering, and probably no panels, unless I’m speaking on one for some godforsaken reason. I mean, geez, what could I possibly have to say about anything that’s of any use? Yeah, thought so.

First panel of the day: DCNation, I think. No, it wasn’t. It was the Kirby panel. Other folks have covered that reasonably well, and I don’t think anyone left much out. Really not much to add, other than Darwyn is a big softie (and I mean that in the kindest possible manner). It’s a testament to Kirby’s power that he can still get an emotional reaction thirty-five-plus years after a story was published. Hell, I still recall the stabbing feeling in my six-year-old chest I felt after watching that dolphin get skewered in KAMANDI.

There were lots of DC fans and Dan DiDio and some creator folks, including JMS (no, I’m not going to try and spell his name from memory and this is being composed offline, so no wikipedia for me) who didn’t have any snarky things to say about Marvel now that he’s working for DC (though I can’t recall if it’s one of those “Exclusive to everyone but the other guys” contracts or not.) And a lot of talk about a new weekly series, this one “Trinity.” Realize that there’s no way I’m going to like this project, pretty much no matter who’s attached to it, because it’s another kinda gimmicky presentation that only reinforces the weekly comics run. Which I’m more or less over, to the chagrin of my local retailer, I’m sure. But, they’ve got good people on it, so I hope it all turns out well for them, though it’s not my thing, you understand.

As for the rest of the panel, I guess the operative word was “Mayyyybe.” Which was the answer given to most fan questions about the fates of their favorite characters or whether they’d appear in a given series or hook up or whatever. At this point, I’m basically impervious to the kinds of…audience manipulations, for lack of a better word. The version of Superman that I give a damn about only comes out once every six months or so in the pages of ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I haven’t found a version of Wonder Woman to cotton to, but maybe I’ll check into the first arc of Gail Simone’s take. Uh, as for Batman, no offense to Mikester, but even ALL-STAR so totally doesn’t connect that really there’s no way for me to engage the character any longer (though Ed Brubaker’s overlooked DETECTIVE issues) are a good place to start. Yeah, I’ll read FINAL CRISIS, and try not to feel too bad about it (oh, yeah, the tagline is “The Day Evil Wins”), but again, without a satisfactory place to take things, and y’know, conclude them, there’s not much of a place for me to grab a toehold into these books. I’m not motivated by an unbreakable connection to the characters (and that goes for all the publishers out there.) If a book doesn’t click, or doesn’t interest, I don’t have much patience for it, and it gets unceremoniously dropped.

Huh, I didn’t talk much about the panel. Sorry, folks. There was a little good news, like DC attempting to get a Supergirl book for kids. TINY TITANS looks promising for a kid’s starter book, but I don’t know what exactly they’ll transition readers to. The biggest problem for DC (and Marvel, too), is that they let their books grow up with their audience in the 70s/80s/90s. And now they’re kinda stuck. Their main lines are tailored for readers who’ve been longtime readers and they have blessed few entry points, and even if they cover those, what books do kids pick up between TINY TITANS and the new TITANS book, ‘cause I’m just guessing that most parents would freak right the hell out if they knews that a 13-year old was reading it. But then maybe my mom thought the same thing of UNCANNY X-MEN back in the day. I never heard about it, however.

And I still haven’t talked about the panel so much. Sorry, my head just wasn’t there. Though the reappearance of Wyatt was kind of a nice touch. I’m almost suspecting that he was planted, but sometimes real life trumps fiction.

Decided that I was going to stay at the con on Sunday, so I needed a new place to flop for the night. I went back to the Courtyard on Second street. They treated me nice last year, and were a far sight chaeaper than some alternatives. Moved the car, got the room, had some lunch at the sushi bar right across the street from the show. I drove off the chill silver drizzle with a big bowl of miso soup. Nothing beats miso soup for that. Returned to the show in time for the Vertigo panel.

I was a bit more receptive to that than the main DC panel, but then Vertigo has a different model, one that actively embraces stories with endings, so I can get down with that a bit more. I suppose the most welcome news out of that, though, was the announcement of a James Jean ART OF FABLES book. Which is kinda funny, because I’d asked Mr. Jean about it last year, and he asked me to pitch it to his editor.

Oh, I didn’t. But there are some things that you just can’t stop. James Jean’s art is as much a part of FABLES as Dave McKean’s was part of SANDMAN, though both of them stick to covers. This is a welcome move, and I’ll be picking up a copy just as soon as I see it. I seem to recall that it’ll be out next year sometime, loaded with all sorts of nice touches, in an oversize format. Whether that’s DUST COVERS oversize (just barely) or PROCESS RECESS 2 oversize (HUUUUGE) remains to be seen.

Let’s see. Oh yeah, Matt Wagner on MADAME XANADU with an unknown artist whose name I don’t recall. This looks promising. I’m generally a fan of Mr. Wagner’s writing (particularly on SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE, whose trade status seems stalled, sadly), so I’ll give this a look. Apparently it also co-stars the Phantom Stranger, who “you don’t know whether to like or hate” and is “more active” as his previously-shown stoic neutrality is brought into question. The Phantom Stranger is one of those characters who’s better the less you know (y’know, like Wolverine), so this should be an interesting balancing act.

And the crowd finally teased the DEMO 2 announcement out of Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan (didn’t see that one coming, did ya? Oh, you did, right along with me. Okay then.) It looks as if Vertigo has found their current round of baseline titles: FABLES, JACK OF FABLES and DMZ. Now they really need to find a way to foster a new group of writers/artists. SCALPED is really solid, but has a ways to go before it finds itself shouldering a load of the line. And the continuing tug of war between Mainline DC and Vertigo over Swamp Thing is always precious. Vertigo hasn’t leaned on DC concepts for some time (barring HELLBLAZER, which was always in a shifty little corner of the universe.) But SWAMP THING has an aura about it that still seems worth digging in and bearing down for. Maybe Mike can explain that to me.

Oh, and apparently Mike Mignola was at the panel. Who knew? Oh, it wasn’t Mike? And that questioner embarrassed himself horribly? Yeah, that happened.

Spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Rory over at Comic Relief who asked me if I had books to drop off. Sadly, no books. Heck, I’m on pins and needles myself. I did inquire as to stocks of the Evanier KIRBY book, and he told me I might be in luck. Maybe. But I’d have to tune in tomorrow at the same Bat-Time and channel. Some more vague discussion of the DM and where it’s been, plus where it might indeed be going. Always an interesting time, and I’ll be blunt. Rory’s offered support where I got stony silence from a lot of retailers. That means quite a bit to me. He’s doing it his way, and seems to be doing just fine. Granted, that means he found something that worked for him, and it’s likely not going to work for anyone else.

Oh, I almost forgot. Stuart Ng books has a one-volume compilation of all the TORPEDO albums by guys like Alex Toth and Jordi Bernet. Half of this stuff hasn’t been seen in the US unless it was imported in small batches. I was ready to drop a C-note on it right then and there. And then I tried to read the text.

Yep. Italian. My Italian is really bad. I know that I’m supposed to just look at the pictures and shut up, but I can’t quite do that. Folks have assured me that it’ll make it over here in English sometime, but I think I’m weak and will break long before that. Besides, Bernet is going to be in San Jose in a couple of months, and the thought of getting a signed volume will probably hurl me right into the abyss. Besides, other, ulterior, motives may be at play here…

Joined up with Ian (Brill, doncha know) and forged out into the rainy San Francisco night, which was cold, rainy, and umbrella-inverting windy. Went several blocks in the wrong direction before we figured out that it was indeed the wrong direction to get to the Io9/CLBDF party. iPhone to the rescue. That map thingy is pretty darn handy when you don’t know exactly where you’re going (oh yeah, and Minna Street, which we were searching for) breaks in the middle. That’s cheating, so you fight cheating with mobile internet technology is what you do.

Finally made it there, pelted by the rain-howl being funneled down alleys and generally wondering why the hell I wasn’t just going back to my room. But we made it. One bourbon on an empty stomach later, I was at the party, doing my usual anti-mingling thing. Had an interesting conversation with Brian Hibbs, which I really should follow up on sometime. Finally caught up with Graeme there, and a few other SF folks who I end up seeing only once a year if that. Didn’t take long for the bourbon to catch up with my lack of food and I stepped out before making an ass of myself (which I am capable of doing, really, you should see me once I get started.) I’d hoped for a bit of Hunan Ham and Hunan Henry’s #2, but those guys close up miserably early. Settled for a plate of curry at the Thai place across the street that was still open. Nice and sweet, though not hot at all, even after assuring them that I wouldn’t burst into flames if they served it normal strength.

I really wanted to get over to the Isotope for the Darwyn Cooke party, but I was about peopled-out I’m no misanthrope (that may be a lie), but I don’t always do well in crowds. And it was raining. And cold. And the New Year’s Night parade was making an utter mess out of Market street, so the thought of walking down to the Isotope just didn’t win. I heard it was a good time, though. James knows how to throw a party. I just wasn’t going to appreciate it, so better that I tried to sleep, after a couple nights of junk sleep from the days previous.

And watch those steel utility/access panels. Even with the diamond grip texture, the rain makes them slicker ‘n deer guts on a doorknob.

Posted by Matt M. at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Full Bleed 17 at the Comics Waiting Room.

New installment is up. This time it's about the new DC crackdown on art schedules. Funny, but it came up as a big topic of conversation at both panels that Dan DiDio ran at Wonder-Con last weekend. More on that later, though. In the meantime, give the column a read, won't you? Every hit counts!

Posted by Matt M. at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

WONDERCON '08: HERB TRIMPE SPOTLIGHT - NEWSARAMA

Geez, what was I doing that I missed that? Must have been something important like transplant surgery or something.

Posted by Matt M. at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being a Wonder-Con 2008 retroperspective.

Things started about as badly as they could start. At least I had a hotel. And boy, did I ever. It was the con hotel, the big juke-box looking thing that towered over fourth street like a green-mirrored Wurlitzer, only without the stream of oldies (but you could get a reasonable approximation of that at Mel’s Diner on Mission, where I paid fifty cents to hear some Etta James and Junior Walker.)

Of course, it being downtown San Francisco, there was only one way to get into the hotel, and it wasn’t on Fourth Street, even though the street address clearly said Fourth Street. Go figure. So I got to make two passes, cursing my inability to turn left on Market while driving through the broken sunlight.

Check in, get my room, go fetch my badge. Relatively painless, as opposed to the overnight parking charge for the room. Which was basically a third of the room price. Yeah. Right. I wasn’t going to stay there a second night. Don’t get me wrong, the Wurlitzer is a nice hotel and all, but come on.

Friday at the show? Dead. Pretty dead. Deader than last year dead. And when I got there, Image was indeed parked and ready to go, contrary to reports to the contrary. That SILVER STAR book looks pretty tempting, now that I’ve actually seen it and all, but the 35.00 pricetag puts me off just a bit. I’ve waited this long; I can wait for the paperback.

Speaking of waiting. I saw that Comic Relief had copies of the new Jack Kirby book, KIRBY: KING OF COMICS by Mark Evanier. They had stacks. 80 copies to be precise, that they themselves paid to have air-freighted out to the show. That’s proactive. I glanced at the stacks and figured, “Okay, they’re set for the show. I’ll grab one on Saturday on the way out or on Sunday. Easy.” Only it wasn’t. They were gone by Saturday morning when I checked back. But more on that later.

Oh, did I mention that I’d been in a foul mood since pretty much Thursday? Draw a little stormcloud over my head. As I’d joked, my bad Friday had started the afternoon before and didn’t show many signs of letting up, since I’d really come in about two hours after I wanted to, being tied up in stuff that was out of my control, and did nothing but intensify my pissed-offed-ness at the universe in general. Enough so that I was wondering what the hell I was even doing at Wonder-Con. I didn’t have any books to sell, no table to sell them from (mostly because I wasn’t going to have the books to sell in the first place.) I was suffused with malaise and really ready to pack it up after I’d seen one aisle of Japanese import toys and custom vinyl figures that cost more money than I’d been able to save up before I was age thirteen. It was a moment of profound dis-connect from pretty much everything in the room, like the one decent scene in BEING JOHN MALKOVITCH where Malkovitch enters himself and sees the entire world as Malkovitches murmuring “Malkovitch” and being all the more alien for it. I was of this world, I knew it, but at the same time, I wanted nothing more than to go to my room, pull the blackout curtains and just stare at a corner.

Yeah, a Cyclops-esque funk. Oh, please, like you didn’t see that coming. He has always been the X-Man that I identified with. Some things never change; some people never grow up, encased in Lucite and unchanging, foil stamp declaring value right on the front there.

So instead of actually grappling with the Otherness of the show, I instead sought some sanity in the Art Noveau/Deco prints and Gustav Klimt pencil sketches at the Art Booth Of Utter Doom. Seriously, that’s like heroin to me. I know I’m supposed to stay away or my probation officer is gonna chuck me back in the joint. But I can’t. I’m not strong enough. Surrounded by plastic artifice, I sought some solace in capital A Art, though to be fair, much of it was art in the pursuit of commerce a century or more ago.

And just across the hall was one Steve Lieber, who’s still the most consistent operator in artist’s alley, as well as being a talented and hardworking artist to boot (and those two don’t always come in conjunction now, do they?) Sadly, he didn’t have any copies of his Alcatraz project, which I’d been hearing about for years and is now supposed to be out. I guess I have to go to the state park there myself and pick up a copy. Yes, he’s hard at work at WHITEOUT 3, which probably isn’t going to be called that. Ended up having dinner with Steve, Sarah (Periscope’s talented intern from Cologne, Germany, who’s going places once folks see how talented she is) and Thomas Galloway (he of rec.arts.comics from waaaay back in the day, and DC trivia master extraordinaire, as well as an all-around good talker.) Vietnamese food was on the menu. Spring rolls and a peanut sauce, too-strong green tea (stupid me for putting the basket back in the kettle) and lovely beef stir fry with scallions (not unlike a chewier Mongolian beef).

A brief adjournment to the Cartoon Art Museum party followed, though I pretty much ignored the room and just stared at the art on the walls. Milton Caniff originals? Right next to a Will Eisner SPIRIT page? E.C. Segar THIMBLE THEATRE and a Harriman? I just wish the light had been a little better.

I still had my little raincloud following me when I trudged back to the hotel, trying to figure out if I was even going to stick around past noon tomorrow. Fun is fun, but when you’re not having any, and you can’t even conduct some business, well…meh.

Saturday follows. Need to get some other stuff together first.

Posted by Matt M. at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture

This seems very familiar somehow. It's a call to critique rather than review for the medium of video games. No, I haven't had a chance to read it just yet, but I get the feeling that I've read it before somewhere else, just shift around a few nouns and adjectives.

Spotted on Boing Boing.

Posted by Matt M. at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tired. 2 days of hotel sleep (which for me means it may as well have been no sleep), 2.5 days of walking and lugging around that stupid darned satchel, 6 panels, 1 hunt for the new Kirby book, 2 conversations with Rory Root, 1 conversation with Brian Hibbs, 1 wrong way trip in search of Minna street in the rain and driving wind, 1 undigested Carl's Jr. Hamburger, 1 sketch for the sketchbook.

More later.

Posted by Matt M. at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"As we already discussed, the Best-Seller in this category is Frank Miller’s 300, with 72,328 copies sold, and an astounding $2.2 million in sales, if they all sold at full retail – that’s a crazy big number, and shows the ability of a film to sell a single-volume title. Someone coming out of Spider-Man 3 might be interested in Spider-Man, but the possible range of choices they have is enormous – they might pick up an issue of one of the half-a-dozen Spider-Man comics, or maybe one of the several score graphic novels, but their choice is diffused over the sheer number of choices that exist. Not so with something like 300 – if they’re interested in reading 300, they have exactly one choice."

This from the latest Tilting at Windmills by Brian Hibbs over at Newsarama. Interesting because it partially refutes a point I made in this week's Full Bleed which you can read right here. That point being that movies based on Spider-Man comics don't actually sell Spider-Man comics. But they do apparently sell 300 graphic novels. That's the Frank Miller 300, not the quantity. And Brian makes a really interesting point: that the wide variety of Spidey material actually makes it harder for people to pick the book that the movie may have interested them in. There's only one volume of 300, which directly ties back to the movie. Not so with Spider-Man. And the words "movie adaptation" don't usually sell those single issues so well, either.

This is good news for folks who get their OGNs optioned (assuming that their books are still in print and in books for the time that the movie comes out -- not always a gimme.)

Here's another point:

"Buffy, to me, is a disappointment, for much the same reasons as delineated in the discussion about Dark Tower in the Marvel section. As a periodical comic book, the first issue of Buffy seems to have sold at least 158,437 copies, or more than ten times what the trade sold into the book market. To a certain degree, I’d say that Buffy is the “civilian friendly” comic following an extremely popular property with a rabid and dedicated fanbase that is both well-connected and well-educated about availability. And yet, against all conventional wisdom, the periodical performed significantly better than the collection."

Seems pretty simple to me in that the folks who desperately wanted the episodic story (as they're used to getting from Whedon) went and bought the comic but didn't feel the need to buy the graphic novel afterwards. As for being *the* "civilian-friendly" book, I'd argue that BUFFY is super-friendly for the BUFFY fans out there, but that's a large and vocal minority compared to the rest of the buying public. I'd also note that if these folks are anything like me, Buffy works better in an ephemeral sort of format and doesn't really reward repeated viewing/reading. But I'm a notorious crank.

Posted by Matt M. at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Comics Journal - The Steve Gerber Interview

Well worth your time, and could pretty easily be about the Current State of Comics, though it's thirty years old. Which is more than a little sad.

Posted by Matt M. at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jordi Bernet is coming to the San Jose Super-Con? I am totally there. Paul Smith too? Ryan Sook? It's a veritable who's who of artists I love who are pretty much overlooked (or so it seems to myopic me.)

Posted by Matt M. at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comic Book Resources - Comic Book News, Reviews and Commentary - Updated Daily!

Go read this one, if you don't read Grant already, which you should be doing. He puts up a powerful remembrance of Steve Gerber, tying him into some hidden threads of both the aesthetic and more sanguine aspects of the industry.

Frank Miller and Steve Gerber redesigning the DC Universe in the early 80s? Just imagine that for a moment.

Posted by Matt M. at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Full Bleed 16

I expect to make lots of friends with this week's entry, all things considered.

Posted by Matt M. at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If, like me, you’d been reading Steve Gerber’s weblog, you’d have known that his health was suffering of late. Pulmonary fibrosis isn’t something that magically goes away, short of a double lung transplant. That’s not exactly a walk in the park, but I’ve seen folks walk away from a transplant better than they started out, so, like a fool, I’d held out hope that Mr. Gerber would turn it around. He’d had some close calls before, and there didn’t seem to be much reason to think this one was different, given the casual voice he’d used in his weblogging.

And reading it, you wanted to believe that he was going to knock this thing out. I wanted to believe it, anyways. If for no other selfish reason than he’d be well enough to write again, and assumedly be deriving whatever pleasure he could from the act. When his health allowed, he seemed to have found a good working relationship over at DC, who even allowed for a second season of HARD TIME in the face of uninspiring sales (it was the only survivor of the Focus line of DC sci-fi/superhero books) and gave the series an opportunity to wrap up with as much grace as could be mustered. A well-deserved tip of the hat to Paul Levitz there, who I’m convinced lobbied hard on the book’s behalf.

HARD TIME was one of the few times I had the pleasure of following Mr. Gerber’s work in a month-to-month basis. When I’d discovered his work by way of HOWARD THE DUCK, it was long past its original run relegated to warehouse clearances and back-issue bins. I didn’t even know he’d written any DEFENDERS books until after I’d gotten a hold of his HOWARD run in Essentials form. And here I just blogged something about those a couple weeks back.

Having read those, alongside MAN-THING, I’m convinced that without Steve Gerber’s work, authors like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison would have had a much, much harder time of getting their skewed stories into the US comic market. And without Mr. Gerber’s rabble-rousing and stink-raising regarding creator’s rights, we’d be years behind on these issues. I’ll even go so far as to suggest that the Image revolution wouldn’t have happened without the platform that Mr. Gerber built up. HOWARD THE DUCK had become a cautionary tale for a generation of creators. If Marvel could bald-facedly strip Steve Gerber of the rights to Howard, then maybe everyone had better watch what they do for the Company. That lesson was not lost on creators, and the backlash, to a large degree, still cripples the output of the Big Two (well, that and a steadfast desire to polish the franchises rather than expand them). But still, Mr. Gerber fought battles so that others could recognize that there was a battle to even fight.

But back to his storytelling for a moment. What really made his work stand out from his contemporaries was Mr. Gerber’s interest in the heart that beat beneath the invulnerable shell of the super-hero. He was interested in the human part of the super-human equation, even to the point where the “super” part was pushed aside. I can’t imagine reading, say, WATCHMEN, with its focus on secondary, human characters, without Steve Gerber having made his career on doing the same thing. MAN-THING was never really about Ted Sallis; it was about the constellation of characters that surrounded the muck beast in the Florida swamp. THE DEFENDERS was more about the humans under the masks than it was epic cosmic adventure (though he didn’t skip on the latter). HOWARD THE DUCK was far more a book about humans (even ones covered in feathers) than just freaky adventures. In that, HOWARD read as much like an homage to FURRY FREAK BROTHERS or WONDER WART-HOG as it did a mainstream Marvel book.

And Mr. Gerber’s overlooked grim take on THE FOOLKILLER (a character he himself invented) is about nothing more than choosing life in the face of an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of nihilism. Written in the early part of the 90s, during the swelling wave of “gritty realism” that was washing over mainstream comics, FOOLKILLER did the “common man’s revenge” story, but refused to do it straight. Instead of embracing self-destruction, as we’re led to believe is all but inevitable for the Foolkiller, he’s brought to embrace life and change, and yes even pain. Instead of being allowed to remain an unfeeling killing machine, the Foolkiller is made to grow up; a lesson that could stand a little more learning.

I look at this and find my own words inadequate in describing my feelings towards the man and his work. He fought the same battles that we’re still fighting today, in terms of comics readership and public perception. Read the interview with him that’s reprinted in THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY: THE WRITERS and it all sounds eerily the same. Which is sad, when you think about it, since that interview was probably some twenty-five years ago. We’re still the same humans muddling through the same sets of problems and challenges. Which is why Steve Gerber’s work still resonates today, even past the topical references (satire has a somewhat problematic shelf-life) and the prose-heavy style of the day. Look past that, though, and Mr. Gerber still delivers a sense of wonder and power in his stories about all the superpeople who are still struggling with their state of ecce homo, dig?

And I can’t help but think that life is still unfair, in that I can eat my dinner and bathe my kids and write this out on my computer, but Steve Gerber can’t. My hope is that he’s plugged into something bigger than himself now, bigger than himself but not so big he can’t remember what he came from.

Yeah, still unfair. But that’s the hand we get dealt.

Posted by Matt M. at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rome did indeed burn. Due to changes on the proofs that I kept screwing up and a shift in the way Lebonfon ships copies out, STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON will not be printed in time for Wonder-Con. So much for the pre-sale at convention controversy I found myself embroiled in. Kinda anti-climactic, I know.

And without copies to have available at the show, my need for a table is obviated, so I won't be having one.

Oh yes, and pre-orders for STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON came in. They weren't as high as I wanted them to be, but my math tells me that I made Diamond's minimums. Hooray.

Minimal update for today. Other stuff on the plate.

Posted by Matt M. at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that I have an office to work in, mostly.

This is mostly the way I want it, still need to do some fine-tuning and actually organize my books.

Some prominent features:

- Triple rank of wardrobes to house the bulk of my collection of single issues.
- Original artwork from both SEAGUY and THE FILTH staring down at me from the walls.
- Balinese mask glaring at me, making sure I actually work and not goof off and just make blog posts all day (he must be nappin' now...)
- Authentic Highway 62 sign, obtained at a garage sale in a purely lawful manner.
- Lots of fake Tiffany lampwork. Like I can afford the real stuff.
- Tour poster from the '89 Spacemen 3 tour of the USA that never happened, sadly.
- John J. Muth sumi brushwork.
- "Hot Rod Race" print by Robert Williams, signed to me and my wife (it was a wedding present, if you can believe that.)
- Three coats of red paint. Three.

I'm sure it will be unrecognizably messy within twenty minutes of this posting.

Posted by Matt M. at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cloverfield: First Official Clip of Cloverfield Monster

Has convinced me that CLOVERFIELD would indeed be a waste of my money, time and patience. I can't say I was excited about it even when it was the Hot Geek Something (though I'll admit being intrigued) but eighty minutes of this or the equivalent? Actually, it wouldn't be equivalent, since this is clearly Money Shot territory.

So, where do I turn in my geek cred card? I figure this is a bannable offense. But I was ready to punch out after thirty seconds. There's "how people would really act in the presence of a giant monster" and "an entertaining portrayal of how you might imagine people would act in the presence of a giant monster." This was square in the former.

Posted by Matt M. at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There was a time when I was a Marvel zombie. The combination of hyperbolic heroics built on a human heart engaged me in a way that DC comics of the early 80s never did. Granted, by the time I was in Marvel’s thrall, they were but a ghost of their former greatness, but that didn’t really matter, because I had yet to discover a lot of the classic Marvel material. And I’m still discovering it, even now.

If you’d asked me a week ago, which of the Marvel ESSENTIALS volumes was my favorite, I’d have said, unhesitatingly and without irony, HOWARD THE DUCK. It’s crazy, loopy, absurd, and yet has at its core, a concern for the everyday sorts of humans (even ones who happen to be feathered) dealing with the grind of modern culture. This is not to say that it’s perfect. Being a work of topical satire, you’d best be fairly well grounded in the popular culture of the 1970s, as well as have a background in Marvelania (though this was back in the days of editor’s footnotes, so you could at least get an idea of what was going on even if it was just your first issue.)

That, however, was last week. This week, the crown clearly belongs to ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS, though it’s a split decision between volumes two and three. Writer Steve Gerber’s title-defining run actually begins in MARVEL TWO IN ONE, but that’s par for the course where the Defenders are concerned. At best, they were an ad-hoc group of heroes who really didn’t belong in any other group (the aloof Dr. Strange, the even aloofer Silver Surfer and the antisocial Hulk). In fact, they weren’t a superhero group as much as they were an encounter group, working out their own issues (and boy did they ever have ‘em) in between bouts of mystical threats and bizarre villainy.

In the first five pages of “Death-Song Destiny”, we’re introduced to a host of characters (aside from the ones we already know, that being Dr. Strange and his sometimes paramour Clea): an unshaven drunk who may or may not be fated to destroy the universe, twin faces of burnt-out humanity who callously destroy a figure of cosmic innocence, and a couple of yuppies (some ten years before the term would be coined), and the harmonica-playing woman who explodes into a shower of sparks as she’s run over by a 2nd Avenue subway train (she being the figure of cosmic innocence). All that remains is the harmonica, “Celestia” engraved on its face. Five pages, ladies and gents, and already we’re treated to absurdity that superhero comics have forgotten to even dream of. And it only gets better.

This being MARVEL TWO IN ONE, we get a big helping of Ben Grimm, who shows his more human side, coming to the aid of a figure from his past (the grandmother of one of the twin faces of burnt-out humanity mentioned above). Turns out that the matronly figure was a surrogate mother for Grimm during his days on Yancy Street, and she’s concerned for her grandson. Why? Because he’s being consumed by his own perceived destiny, that of being a rat in the rat-trap tenements of the city. And he’s not the only one. The yuppie couple end up facing their own anonymity in the success machine. Luckily the Thing and Dr. Strange are able to help both parties get Their Heads Straight, but only after they overcome their own feelings of powerlessness. Yeah, there’s plenty of melodrama to go around, but this is superhero comics. More interestingly, it’s superhero comics where the superheroes are mere facilitators. They can’t do a thing until the ordinary people make the first move. I guess there’s only so much that costumes and omnipotence are good for, eh?

The second part of the story involves the Thing and the Valkyrie (one of the few constant members of The Defenders) tracking down the cosmic harmonica and keeping it out of the clutches of the Enchantress and her crony, the Executioner. You’d think that this would be a more straight-up long underwear punchfest, but you’d be wrong. Because it’s really the story of Alvin Denton, onetime lawyer and now a professional drunk. As it turns out, he’s the father of Barbara Norriss, who is the mortal vessel for The Valkyrie (and thus is just the merest surface of a tortured backstory that could only exist in comics). When Denton, who’s lost it all and thinks he’s recovered a piece of it in his daughter, is rejected, he becomes despondent, shattered. And in that moment, he blows on the harmonica. The harmonica that is somehow tied to all destiny. The world, all of it, is destroyed, leaving a handful of beings in limbo. One of them is the Thing, who gets his hands on the harmonica and blows upon it, playing a tune to bring Everything back. And this exchange from the last two panels really says it all, as Valkyrie mourns the passing of Barbara Norriss’ father.

Valkyrie:
He is…dead. The one man who could have told me all about Barbara…her childhood…her likes and dislikes. Her bonds with outher humans…All the factors which made her a person and without which – I am but an empty façade, a fiction.

Thing:
Uh-uh. Whatever ya are, kid – it ain’t that. Or my shoulder wouldn’t be getting’ drenched. Paper dolls don’t cry. Only us real people got that problem.

Only in comics.

Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to the Headmen, who become the arch-nemeses of the Defenders (though working from the shadows for the most part) for the entire length of Gerber’s run on the book: Dr. Nagan, organ transplant specialist whose human head was grafted onto a gorilla’s body, grafted by the very gorillas he operated on (wrap your noggin around that); Jerold Morgan, who tried to beat Henry Pym in the shrinking sweepstakes, but only did so in a half-measure, shrinking his bones but not his flesh and skin; Chondu the Mystic, a third rate mystic who ended up having his brain transplanted into the body of the Defender Nighthawk, before being transformed into a hideous refugee from a Ray Harryhausen movie; and Ruby, a computer scientist who replaced her own cranium with organic circuitry, able to take a multitude of shapes and forms.

This being the 70s for Marvel, the storylines are all epic. The Defenders/Headmen plot ran from issue #20 of the DEFENDERS to #40. So much for being constructed in tidy six-issue arcs. It was understood that the writing had to drive a monthly comic book, that people had to be paradoxically satisfied and yet left wanting enough to come pick up the next issue once the month turned over. And it wasn’t enough to point at character motivation, it had to be made explicit and in quantity. So certainly by today’s standards for superhero books, these stories are over-written. But in comparison to these, today’s are under-written and un-ambitious. Instead of Kyle Richmond, the Nighthawk, silently anguishing about his personal pain and his inability to take advantage of what’s been given to him (as would be a subplot in NIGHTHAWK GETS REAL SAD COMICS), we get Kyle Richmond reliving his life as a brain in a jar (after being removed by the Headmen) and using that experience to integrate his character.

It’s crazy. It’s demented. It’s deranged. It only works in comics, but it works. And that’s only part of the Headmen story. There’s the baby deer who’s saved by the hulk, only to become the receptacle for the disembodied mind of Chondu the mystic, whose brain resides in Nighthawk’s body, but is exorcised by Dr. Strange in an effort to find Kyle Richmond’s ex-craniated brain. And as a diversion, there’s a story featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Defenders joining forces to overthrow the Badoon who’ve taken over the earth a thousand years from now, rampaging through the most memorable of a long line of Grim Futures envisioned for Marvel Earth.

Satire goes belly-up to farce when Nebulon (who wants to save humanity by enslaving it) opens up a new school of self-help where people embrace their inner Bozo (as in the scarlet-maned clown) and admit the absurdity of their own lives. It’s a three-way battle for the fate of humanity between the twin forces of Order Gone Amok of the Headmen and Nebulon and Benign Chaos in the form of the barely-holding-it-together Defenders. And they’re barely holding it together because they’re just humans. In the end, that’s enough.

And in Gerber’s world, that’s enough. It’s enough that humans strive to live with themselves in their world. He’s not interested in titanic gods who shrug their shoulders and make mountains fall. Gerber, above all, writes these people as characters with their own failings, but ultimately, these characters never forget that they are heroes. More interestingly, he can do this while working within the 70s Marvel house style, which is as bombastic as any you’d care to name. But I never got the sense that THE DEFENDERS was out to break the mold of the regular superhero book. There were moments where Gerber was questioning some of the goings-on in these books, to be sure. However, he embraced the form as much as he asked questions of it, daring it to do more than it had perhaps been asked at the time.

And that’s not a feeling I get from superhero books much these days. I see a lot of outright rejection of what makes the genre so durable, and at times, admirable. I see a lot of effort going into jettisoning the “ridiculous” aspects of these books, in an effort to keep things real, often making things more ridiculous than they would be otherwise. Gerber, like Grant Morrison, understands that there’s a certain level of simplicity, even dare I say it, goofiness, that is required for superhero books to work. It’s not a taste for everyone, I’ll grant you. At their best, superhero comics are literature of imagination. While that’s largely forgotten today, in this age of franchise maintenance and grim reality, superheroes as imagination given form was something that Steve Gerber understood intimately.

Posted by Matt M. at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've had a lot of time to read comics. What's on the reading list? Mostly trades that I've purchased over the last several months and just hadn't gotten around to. Here's what I've racked up over the last few days.

ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS v 2 & 3
LONE WOLF AND CUB v 7
DOOM PATROL: PLANET LOVE
GOD'S MAN: A NOVEL IN WOODCUTS
MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED
MAKING COMICS
YESTERDAY'S TOMORROWS (yes, the Rian Hughes collection, that one.)

But aside from that, this whole sick thing has become a wonderful adventure in suckitude. Sneezing or coughing (which I do more than a little of) gets me this wonderful stabbing pain in my chest. And every decongestant in the house has got me feeling twitchy or speedy, enough so that I've given up on them. I suppose I'm going to have to escalate to antibiotics at some point. Bleah, just bleah.

Posted by Matt M. at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)