Color e-ink on the way - Boing Boing
Like the title says.
So, e-ink is the kind of display used in the Kindle. Portable devices that show color are LCDs that are awful pretty, but have battery life issues.
This is something new. And you will end up reading your comics on it, sooner or later. I recall something like five years or a touch more from "first e-ink reports" to "second-generation e-ink platform". Likely longer, but in the great scheme of things, not that long.
Newsarama.com : Dan DiDio: 20 Answers, 1 Question - 04.16.09
Dan DiDio asks: "And my question this time – it’s the classic monthly book versus trade discussion: what gets you to pick up a trade over the monthly issues?"
Cost - Pricewise there's not much of a difference. Sure, a hardcover costs more, but I'm happy to pay for a more durable packaging of the material.
Perceived value - Three dollars, now four, for a chapter of a story isn't a good trade-off. More on this later.
Format - I like having all the material on my shelf with a spine and in a solid package. I'm tired of rummaging through longboxes.
Convenience - I can't get to a comic store every week or every other, or really month. I'm not a habitual Wednesday shopper. Maybe if there was a good store right next door.
Patience - I'm an older guy. I can wait six months or more to get the next piece of the puzzle. There are exceptions. DC even publishes one of them, that being SCALPED. I don't respond well to the event-driven "You gotta read this now!" storytelling that fills both DC and Marvel's material by and large.
Story - The single issue used to be the story unit for comics. That time is gone, by and large. True, the single issues often fit into huge stories that took place over a year or more, but the chapters themselves presented enough of a story that this wasn't a big deal. The fact is that a single story now takes six issues to tell. This isn't particularly bad or good, but it is probably the single biggest factor in my singles/trades buying decision. Find a good solution to this in terms of making the serial form stand on its feet more and not simply be a chapter of a whole story, and then perhaps more people will respond and buy the singles.
I also understand the economic and business reasons for doing serials, but given the choice between trades and singles, I'll go with trades nearly every single time. Right now the publishers are allowing me to make that choice.
However, I'll freely admit that I'm not part of the market that DC admittedly catering to.
4thletter! � Blog Archive � Sons of DKR: Frank Miller x TCJ
Yeah. Frank.
"MILLER: Yeah. Absolutely. William Goldman once wrote that it’s best to write fast. I believe that, but I also think it’s best to plot slowly."
David Brothers should get a medal for transcribing and getting the scans together for this.
Seeing stuff like this is heartbreaking. Here, Steve Bisette shows us a look at one of the many Never Was projects that he'd worked on in the past. I mean, it's great work, and I totally want to read it.
But it's never coming out. Thus heartbreak ensues.
As spotted on LitG this week.
Six good technological ideas for improving publishing - Boing Boing
Or not. But it's an interesting look at a bunch of stuff that I've never looked at very closely before. Now, go apply this to comics. Or possibly adapt your comics publishing to slip into this sort of thing a bit more easily.
Courtesy of Boing Boing, which you're already reading, right?
Newsarama.com : Sunday Comics on Wednesday? DC's New 'Wednesday Comics'
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see a lot of longevity in the format. Which is too bad, because the mindset and creators behind this look really interesting. But I don't see a broadsheet going over real well. Remember, Image tried this about five years ago and while looking interesting, it never caught on.
But having popular characters appearing in non-continuity series? That's the kind of thing you do to get casual readers who might want to get their feet wet but not dive all the way in.
If I had a sub box, I'd have these set aside for me, based on Kyle Baker's HAWKMAN alone. Like I said, I'm ready to try, but I'm not convinced this will pay out. But bravo to DC for at least trying.
The Submission Guidelines for every Comic and Manga Publisher in the Universe | Optimum Wound
Here's a nice service being rendered. Optimum Wound Comics offers up a list of comics publishers who are taking unsolicited submissions for books.
Unless you're a writer.
Okay, I'm overstating things a tad (as is my wont). However, you'll find a lot more houses who want artists and colorists than they do writers. There's a few reasons for this, I bet. One of them is that a lot of these smaller publishers are formed around a team (or several) who are putting out their own books under their own banner. This is not a criticism. I'm doing the same damn thing. But like them, Highway 62 Press isn't looking for other projects to publish (and yes, I've gotten several queries and unsolicited submissions--mostly at conventions.)
The other reasons for this fall into the category of "why it sucks to be a writer trying to break into comics." 1) Everyone thinks they can write. You can look at your own art and know whether or not you can get a job in comics (or you'd think that, there's some submissions that make me wonder). 2) It takes a lot more work to grade a writing submission than it does art. I can look at art and know in three seconds whether it's worth spending another thirty on to see if it's worth spending three minutes on. That makes sorting art submissions very, very speedy. Reading a script page will tell you whether the writer can do dialogue and set a story. It won't tell you if they can structure one (I still can't.) It won't tell you if they have the full skillset or can be taught it (not that anyone wants to have to teach a writer much, other than in exceptional cases.)
Good luck! I know that there are people who've gotten work through the slush pile, but I don't know any of them personally. Which is why that whole eyebrow raising about Marvel's "new policy" of not reading unsolicited submissions didn't get said reaction out of me. Just because you accept those submissions doesn't mean that they'll do anything other than sit on a gigantic pile.
Comic Book Resources > Permanent Damage - 3-12-2009
So most books that regional publishers sold face to face at conventions. Where readers could look and, rather than make the leap of faith the business has since come to ask of readers again and again with diminishing results, judge for themselves whether a book was worth their money and interest.
Go and read Steven Grant's latest PERMANENT DAMAGE. He says a lot of the same things that I've (far more clumsily) said regarding selling books direct at shows versus the market. Oh yeah, and the total, critical importance of hand sales, which in my experience are a lost art in the DM (aside from say, The Isotope in San Francisco).
The Direct Market is trying to shape itself into something, but the wider market (including many people who feel disenfranchised from the DM) may want something else. It continues to be interesting to see those forces work off one another. Interesting, but painful.
Louis Holt takes an interesting view of the shift from print to digital comics. In the above article he states that the comic book itself is largely resistant to the tectonic shifts that are going through the publishing/media world today. Why?
Because comics are collectible. Or collectable. However you wish to spell it. Well, pulp novels are collectable, so are wax cylinders. So are vinyl records. Anything can be made collectible. Collectibility doesn't mean that a format survives or is necessarily a standard currency any longer. It just means that someone wants the artifact and is willing to pay for it.
When I attend SDCC, for instance, most of the show isn't devoted to a true collector audience. There's still plenty of money trading hands over file copies of EC books in plastic slabs, but those are more and more exceptions and less the rule. Personally, I'd rather get my EC fix in a big Gemstone book, but that's just me. They're still making those, right?
But single issues? Thanks, no. You've heard this from my corner before, so I won't bore you. Thing is, I'm not going to be the only one you hear this from. I hear that Augie de Blieck is raising waves with his recent call to wait on trades (though I hear that he's going to offer the flipside as a bit of perspective next week).
Single issues are much more a collectible object. Sure, there's some trades that command prices (old SANDMAN collections and the leatherbound WATCHMEN edition, for instance.) But those are as much the exception as singles are the collectible rule.
The printed comic book (by which I mean saddle stitched single issue) will one day (soon) be expensive enough that even the most hardened fan will give pause. Four dollars is one thing. Five will be quite another (unless they start minting ten thousand dollar bills again.) And as I've said before, the currency of story in comics isn't the single issue any more, but the trade collection. Exceptions apply.
As more and more people look to digital delivery, or the actual story unit, single issues will find themselves more and more of an outsider format. Sure, that'll make them more collectible, but fewer and fewer people will actually *want* to collect that format.
Mr. Holt does makes some good points about the advantages of digital delivery (and how the marketplace itself is pushing the single issue out, particularly on the indie comics side of things.) Interestingly, he brings up the new Marvel policy of not accepting new creator submissions by way of the slush pile, when that's largely a moot point. I'm trying to think of the last creator who came literally out of nowhere, out of the wilderness of the slush pile to become a paid creator. You do your indie work first to make your bones, then maybe you get to be an overnight sensation after ten years.
But for the life of me, I can't see the collectibility of the format being something that will preserve its own useful longevity. Yes, print delivers a superior comics experience. Today. That's today. But not all that long ago, I was digging my vinyl records (that I had to copy to a portable format in order to listen to while sulking in a corner at high school.)
Of course, comparing music directly to comics as an aesthetic and consumer experience is like dancing about architecture. Mea culpa. But collectibility transcends those sorts of boundaries. Believe me, I know from record collectors (and comic collectors as opposed to readers), and they're closer together in impulse than they are further apart.
I didn't get the following to Chris in time, so instead of being posted at the Robot 6 "What I'm Reading" roundtable, I post it over here where nobody's looking for it.
JOE'S BAR - Jose Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo.
Sinuous and gritty urban drama. Not exactly a crime book. Not exactly a slice of life drama. Not really urban horror, but if you plotted a triangle with those three points, JOE'S BAR would fit neatly in there somewhere, though it would have a habit of sliding around. There's a lot of ordinary madness here, made extraordinary by Muñoz' cartooning, shifting easily between moments of mundane joys and sweaty, nightmarish desperations. I'd seen some of this work in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF CRIME COMICS, which led me to picking up this collection on a recent trip to the Big City, and I'm glad I did. Though the stories themselves are bleak to the end, they squirm with a dark, smoky vitality. Worth reading and examining again more closely.
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER 1 through 4 - Joshua Dysart, Alberto Ponticelli.
Joshua Dysart reinvents the DC war comics character, transporting him from WWII and beyond to a Unganda ground down relentlessly by war without end. And not just war, but war fought by children, holy war, and ultimately the war within one man. Mr. Dysart's one-sentence pitch for the book at a Vertigo panel a couple years back ran along the lines of "By the end of issue one, a die-hard pacifist will become a murderer." My interest was piqued then, enough so that I sought out a chunk of the issues once they came out. I wasn't disappointed. It's not an easy book by any stretch. This isn't a black and white war comic, though the action on the page is stark and unflinching. But it's not an adventure book. Much like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS was one of the best anti-drug movies to come out ever, THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER sucks the myth of the war book dry, and yet it trades on the thrills of those books. Recommended. But I'm going to read it in trades, thereby dooming it.
Started reading the METAMORPHO Showcase collection. Man, that's a lot of crazy on the page there, and Ramona Fradon's art is so perfect for it. But this stuff is largely review proof, you either love it or loathe it. Though I'd say there's a very mannered artcomix vibe to the illustration here, not sure what it is, for it's as intangible as a cloud of Fluorine gas. But it's there for sure.
about the following link:
DC recommends what you should read after WATCHMEN. Courtesy Robot 6, but linked everywhere.
Here's the short form:
Five “AFTER WATCHMEN, WHAT’S NEXT?” Specials featuring a cover price of just $1.00:• SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #21 SPECIAL EDITION
• TRANSMETROPOLITAN #1 SPECIAL EDITION
• PLANETARY #1 SPECIAL EDITION
• PREACHER #1 SPECIAL
• IDENTITY CRISIS #1 SPECIAL
Okay, so far so good. Let's look at some extenuating factors first:
DC will not promote anything that is not a DC book. Get over it. The only promotion for books outside of DC's aegis will come from (if any) additional foot traffic to places that stock and sell a diversity of graphic novels. So, there's no reason for a Borders-type bookseller to not try and capitalize on this with a big graphic novel display to throw some more lines in the water, since we're fishing for more customers. Or are we fishing for readers?
Given that DC is offering single-issue magazines, I'd say that they're trying to farm up some more monthly comic readers, which is understandable, but I think it's barking at the knot as it were. The one-dollar price point is an enticement, I suppose, and maybe people will grab all five of the offerings to give it all a try. Who knows? My gut, however, tells me that trying to sell new customers on the comic magazine format (is that a neutral enough term? I don't think I can be any fairer than that) is going to be a non-starter. At least in a printed format. Again, this has as much to do with what booksellers are ready for as it does with the flimsy nature of the presentation and the poor return on retail real estate and shrinkage of the inventory.
I'd suggest a better return from a bargain priced "first-taste" style format trade-size book. Put it at a ten-dollar price point (since you're already loss leading with a one-dollar single issue), it's still in impulse purchase range and will actually stand up on a table and has a spine, and might have some shelf-life. That's just me.
Let's look at some of the other factors that went into the choices of books here. SWAMP THING is a natural. It's a DC staple character (even if Swampy is in limbo, much to Mikester's chagrin), it's written by the author of WATCHMEN, it's certainly a mature and wide-ranging work with both human drama and plenty of visceral horror. And, as an added bonus, if readers follow along the whole way, they'll get a backdoor entry into the DCU, one that's rewarding to mature readers and may make folks think twice about their preconceived notions of superhero books. I can't remember how they divided up the trade collections, but it strikes me that there was a proper conclusion at the end of each one (now I'm gonna have to check that) so the reader can get a satisfying experience. All good points. I can't argue with the choice, even if I quibble over format.
TRANSMETROPOLITAN seems an apt enough choice. Again, the whole work is collected and self-contained, coming to what I assume is a proper conclusion. No, I never read to the end. First trade was enough for me. PLANETARY is a riskier choice. Most readers will be at sea when it comes to the labyrinth of popkult references that are woven into the book (that was what kept me going for the duration of my readership--I may pick it up again now that the whole thing is ending.) Mr. Cassaday's art is certainly easy enough on the eyes and there's enough crazy on the page that readers who cottoned to the WHAT THE HELL moments in WATCHMEN may have something to grab.
I can't comment that deeply on PREACHER other than surface impressions. I must confess not having read it. I know, I can hear your furious and incredulous keystrokes even now, hours before this gets posted. But again, let's emphasize that this is a self-contained work of consistent artistry on both the writing and visual storytelling sides. It isn't WATCHMEN in that it creates a substantial science-fictional world, but it tells the truth in its own way. Doesn't seem like a bad recommendation.
IDENTITY CRISIS is something of a head-scratcher, but then again it isn't. It's something that people are likely to have heard of, or at the very least heard of Brad Meltzer. It could be seen as an entry point into the wider DCU, but that approach has its own minefields and tiny footprints to watch out for. But for DC not to offer up a pathway to their most diversified product line (even if it, as a whole, doesn't offer the same quality or depth of reading that WATCHMEN does) would be foolish. Will this particular decision pay off? That I can't say. IDENTITY CRISIS didn't do much for me back when it was first offered, and I can't imagine that it's picked up any resonances since then.
Now, let's look over what's not offered:
DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, which was more or less contemporary of WATCHMEN and certainly is kind of a flipside to it. Perhaps the thought was that people already know about Batman and perhaps even this very book and that it didn't need to be boosted further. Maybe because it's not really like the kinds of Batman books being offered now, I don't know.
ARKHAM ASYLUM, though a troubled work, surely fits the mold of "superheroes turned inside-out", and the art is as striking and gorgeous as it was back in the day (though perhaps not as fresh, given that visual overload and layered imagery is as common as dirt now, and it wasn't back then.)
V FOR VENDETTA, which comments on the UK as WATCHMEN did on the US (or at least Moore's perceptions of both) is off the list. Perhaps because it's already been filmed and that option isn't worth as much, or again, because it might be a known quantity already. Even so, in many ways it's a better book, and a much more literary presentation. I do wish they'd do a b/w reprint in an oversize format, maybe with some gray tones, but without the coloring. Oh, I'm digressing, aren't I?
We3. Who doesn't love cuddly cyborg housepets slash death-machines?
ALL-STAR SUPERMAN seems to be a pretty natural choice if you want to ease people into reading superheroes. But maybe it's too weird and too much woven with the threads of traditional superhero comics that it can't really be accessable.
The omission of Y: THE LAST MAN seems a touch puzzling, but perhaps because it's already in production and will get its own publicity boost, it's thought that it won't need to take up space in this salvo. I'm not privy to these decisions, so this is pure conjecture. EX MACHINA's absence is equally curious.
THE INVISIBLES. Okay, yeah, maybe for advanced readers.
GOTHAM CENTRAL, however, seems like a missed opportunity. Very much in the real-world atmosphere of WATCHMEN and even the recent Batman movie (though GC is ever so much better than THE DARK KNIGHT). Again, it seems like a way to maybe interest readers in the DCU but not by throwing them into the deep end and being told to Just Get All The Books, You'll Get It Eventually.
THE HUMAN TARGET is offered humbly in the same vein. Please get the whole series in trades.
I'm sure there's others in the DC/Vertigo/Wildstorm stable that would appeal to readers of WATCHMEN, but these came to mind. Really, though, I'd like to see instead of single magazines, digital downloads made of these, or digital downloads AND the magazines. I'm still dubious on offering a single chapter as a purchased package (but then I felt like giving the first chapter of MURDER MOON away in the hopes of hooking readers, so maybe this isn't so nutso after all.
Now, how many of these publicity waves will be pointing readers at DM stores? Any idea? Anyone?
I can only conclude that I'm no longer the target audience for this sort of outing when my reading can be reduced to pithy little phrases such as the following.
"FLEX MENTALLO did it better."
"I felt as if I were missing every other panel."
"There's such a thing as too many cool ideas."
"An army of characters and not one individual voice among them."
And I count myself as a Grant Morrison fan. I felt like he was pointing at some really interesting and intriguing stuff, but he never troubled himself to actually flesh any of it out. Granted, if he'd done that, we'd be reading twenty five issues of this and all of us would have given up long ago.
Maybe this is a structural deficiency of the form, where you can only get the barest spine of the story in the main books and you have to read the ancillary titles to flesh it out. Though I can't say I felt that way about the original CRISIS, which is epic in scope, even if the writerly execution is very much a thing of its own time. I'm disappointed in that there was an incredible and untapped potential, but that it never felt realized. There were moments of "That's cool!" or "Inspired!" reactions on my part, but they were too far spread-out and ultimately sapped by having nothing to cleave to, having been largely dissociated from the DCU (and a lapsed Marvel Zombie at my core.)
But then Morrison's runs on most books (minus DOOM PATROL, I'd say) have usually been about the books themselves and not necessarily standalone stories. I'd trade ten FINAL CRISES for his X-MEN run, troubled as that was. Yet, the books are about the characters and not much more. Superman is Superman because he can find a way out of anything. Flash is the fastest man alive. Wonder Woman is a warrior supreme. It's a statement of their mythology, but somehow an insubstantial one. A series of colorful and holographic tautologies. Sacred, perhaps. But maybe I'm looking for some more of the profane. And by that I don't mean entrail-flailing tigers or Mary Marvel acting like Reagan being posessed by Desaad instead of Pazuzu. By profane, I suppose I'm looking for something meatier, more earthly. There were hints of that, but only maddening hints.
I'm not one for metatext. I did my go-round with that when I was in college and was watching TWIN PEAKS and got the tie-in books and discussed the interstices of the show with my friends (hint: Laura Palmer's diary made the killer pretty explicit not very far into things). This is why shows like THE X-FILES and LOST are of limited interest to me. I don't want to feel like I have to do extracurricular activities just to grasp the text effectively. Give it to me in the text or don't give it to me at all. Now, the concept of the text is evolving, so that I suppose you can say "Douglas Wolk's footnotes are as much the text as the comic pages themselves." (Not to pick on Douglas here; he does what he does out of love and genuine engagement with the work--an engagement that eluded me.) Of course, at that point, authorship becomes a much more slippery matter (not that I'm fond of the sole God-Author model; something I grapple with on a daily basis. Ask me where my stories come from and I'm likely to point to the sky as much as I'd want to point within.)
When I got to the last issues of the story, I was reading to answer my own questions about the book itself. Not an engaged "what the hell is going to happen next?" but more along the lines of "Oh, now what?" I didn't believe that Darkseid would successfully keep the universe in the thrall of the Anti-Life Equation for a second. That's not how these books work. Superman wins.
In that regard, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN was far more fraught with tension and real risk, its ending more piquant and moving than FINAL CRISIS could ever hope to be. Superman becomes the clock-tender, removed from those he's sacrificed for (unless you read DC ONE MILLION as the ending to ALL-STAR SUPERMAN). I was hoping for that kind of resolution, that kind of jolt and FINAL CRISIS didn't have it to give.
Yes, I know nearly everyone else's opinion differed. I'm prepared to live with that.
Odd that I find myself a liar when those pithy, pull-quote ready quotes don't quite cover things as I intimated that they might. Okay, so I'm a liar.
NY Comic-Con '09: Selling Good Graphic Novels (& Manga) in a Bad Economy - Pt.1
"The impact that Watchmen has had is significant. We sold over 300,000 copies in 2008, compared to 45, 000 copies in 2007, and 17,000 copies in 2006. (Watchmen) is perceived as the gateway book for graphic novels. We're trying to figure out how to ride this in the best way we can in a turbulent market."
When I walk into my local Target store, WATCHMEN is the only graphic novel I see. Maybe there's some manga collections there, but not on an endcap facing a main aisle. This is a big deal.
A very big deal. Such a hugely big deal that it's difficult to put into words. WATCHMEN has done what comics needed to do; to get into public venues rather than the brightly lit side-streets of the Direct Market. And, for the same reasons that Tom Spurgeon does (as enumerated in his recent essay about Diamond's new minimums), I love DM stores. But it's me and a couple hundred thousand other people who love them, the rest of the buying public is simply clueless about them. So they're brightly lit and ornamented side streets that I like to spend time in, but not enough folks do.
WATCHMEN getting people to read comics is great and all, but here's a catch. Using WATCHMEN as a gateway book seems to me to be a recipe for heartbreak. What do you point people at afterwards? WATCHMEN is accessible, wonderfully so, because it doesn't lean on years of backstory. It's a self-contained work with meaty characters and a beginning, middle and an end.
This alone excludes a lot of DM material from being a worthy follow-on. Are you really going to recommend DARK REIGN or FINAL CRISIS to someone who says "Yeah, I liked that, but it was written twenty-five years ago. Got anything more current?" Okay, well, do you give them superhero books or non-superhero books? What did they like about WATCHMEN, what is it that they wish to explore? There's a million dark superhero imitators of WATCHMEN, very few of them worth a read for those who are initiated, much less pointing new folks towards them.
And in some ways, I'm afraid that all this reliance on WATCHMEN as a phenomena will end up preclude it from being an entry vehicle. Or is WATCHMEN being bought and thrown onto the pile of Great Unread Bestsellers (like the collected works of Umberto Ecco, as much as I enjoyed them; I bet most of the people who bought them didn't have the patience to finish them.)
I dunno, maybe they'll like SANDMAN, and maybe the rotating cast of artists and DCU in-jokes will roll off their backs. Perhaps they'll want to give 100% a try, if the rough sensuality of Pope's inks are their taste. CRIMINAL presents a possibility as well, though there's not a mask or science-fiction superpower in sight, though there's humanity to spare. WE3? DOOM PATROL? ALL-STAR SUPERMAN? Morrison has written some good stuff, but much of it leans on superhero comics and might have a tough time standing on its own (though you could make arguments for any of the three above.)
Surely I'm not the only one having this problem. Many of the books above were constructed primarily as monthly comics with certain structural requirements that WATCHMEN largely divorced itself from (one of the things that made it so startling at the time.) I'm sure that folks more knowledgeable in the artcomix side of things could pipe up with a host of recommendations.
It's not an easy problem to solve. Moore and Gibbons are a tough act to follow. Which makes the weight on that work's shoulders even harder to bear.
And instead I'm finishing reading volume 2 of CRMINAL.
Dammit, I should be stronger than this. But I'm not. Or the book is. Or something.
EDIT - Spoliers apply.
Finished. It's a hard, unforgiving book. This isn't frothy caper comics where being a criminal is something the cool kids do. It's what you do when you're too fucked-up to be doing much of anything else. CRIMINAL is a book about people who happen to be criminals, but they're people first and last. The crime is just what they do.
Much like SCALPED (another current favorite), you don't get the lazy categorizations of good and bad to lean back on. Tracy Lawless (the central character of v.2) may be an outstanding soldier, but he's also trouble for his superiors because he lets his sense of what's right get in the way of what's convenient for them. And that sense of rightness finally leads him into the service of a master criminal he not only hates, but is the polar opposite of. It's terrible, but it's so right in the flow of the story.
To say that we need more books like this would be an understatement of comical proportions.
Dagwood splits the atom | The Ephemerist
Just like it says, Dagwood (and some of his comic strip friends) split the atom at The Ephemerist. Found while following links from I Love Comics.
So I dragged myself out of the house on Friday to attend the recent launch event for Parker/Fowler's new book, MYSTERIUS THE UNFATHOMABLE. That means a trip to San Francisco, land of wondrous comic shops and perpetual mist and Hunan cuisine. It also meant a side trip to SFO to pick Parker up (and find his luggage after it was unfathomably deposited onto the wrong carousel).
Highlights:
- Sighting the Wurlitzer building (aka the Sheraton in downtown)
- Lunch at Henry's Hunan, the Hunan ham (and normally I hate ham, but I love this stuff) and fried meat pies being absolutely outstanding. Ate until I could eat no more.
- The Gene Colan exhibit at the Museum of Cartoon Art. (Including a page with Dr, Strange in his ill-conceived mask. The Warren-mag pages were pretty exquisite as well.)
- DInner at Sauce, a couple blocks from The Isotope. And by dinner, I mean, nibbling at appetizers because I was still stuffed from lunch and mocking ARMAGEDDON, which was on the TV above the bar.
- The warm welcome and kingly treatment from The Isotope staff.
- Drinks stiff enough to bring even Jason McNamara to his knees.
- Pillaging the out-of-print european albums from the shelves of Comic Relief.
Lowlights:
- Stomach flu in the family waiting for me when I got home.
- Seriously, lowlights on a trip to SF? Maybe hearing about Bob Schreck being laid off from DC while browsing the internet on my phone instead of writing. That's about it.
Okay, I had a Jack and Coke that was just supposed to have a splash of Jack in it. Weren't no splash.
I'll work on a full write-up a little bit later on. Right now I'm looking for the son of a bitch who invented stomach flu. if you see him, just break his nose for me, or tell me where to find him. There's gonna be a reckoning.
I'm trying to organize the books on my office shelves. I get to graphic novels. There's many considerations.
Size
Authorship
Artist
Primary Character
Publisher
Size is insurmountable. Absolute editions won't fit on a standard size graphic novel shelf. But if I make any shelf able to accomodate an Absolute-size edition, then I'm burning a ton of space.
Now, if I have a single batman OGN by say, Barr and Bingham, should I create a "Batman" section or go by Barr and go alphabetically?
And maybe I shouldn't be doing this while I'm still sleepy from the night before...
Unless you happen to be a SEAGUY fan. Then there's cause for rejoicing. SEAGUY v.2 drops in that blessed month.
Gonna be really interesting to see how it sells and how much Mr. Morrison's name alone can sell a project that's regarded as being "difficult", "nonsensical" and "impossible to read." For myself, however, I'm very much looking forward to it.
Name that song! I can. Can you?
THE BEAT - Blog Archive - Marvel announces THE STAND gn is direct sales only
I'm trying to figure out if this is a really good move or not. Given the amount of the attention that the GN version of THE STAND could *potentially* get, there could be more people coming into a DM store the Tuesday it comes out (at 9pm, for some strange reason--why not the traditional Wed., I don't know.) More people coming into a DM store for one specific item may or may not be parlayed into more people discovering the DM.
But if they're in there just to get one book on one night and that's that, well, that's not quite so awe-inspiring. Now, even if the move doesn't pay off, it certainly shows where Marvel is interested in putting its eggs, even if a softcover version rolls into Borders and Barnes and Noble (and heaven forbid, places like Wal-Mart and Costco where most people shop for their books.)
I'm not ready to place bets yet, but I do know that people tend to want things when they want them. Motivated buyers will go to DM stores, whether they go to them regularly or not. It's in Marvel's court (and the DM retailers) to get feet in those stores, and for the owners to capitalize on any potential opportunities that present themselves.
Marketshare wise, Marvel dominates. Not a terrific surprise. Take a look at the "Top Ten Comic Books" entry to see why. Their monthly books (SECRET INVASION in this case) own the top 10, leaving room for only FINAL CRISIS #1 from DC. Put a 3.99 price tag on those and watch their dollar share soar (at least in the top of the charts). Though one has to wonder if DARK REIGN will be as impressive in terms of owning the top 10, since it crowded out all other Marvel books but for an issue of UNCANNY. Is this success or cannibalizing their own market? I suppose as long as SECRET INVASION purchases don't prevent anyone from buying their issue of INCREDIBLE HULK or any other book, then it's probably all good.
Things, however, look quite different on the graphic novel side of things. DC owns it (with 3 of the top 10 coming from Vertigo - granted, two of those are from Y THE LAST MAN, which is now wrapped up and done.) Marvel has no entries in this category. And why should they? Their ownership of the top 10 in monthly titles is driven completely by single-issue event comics, not even a regular series. Image gets two in the top 10, with WANTED and WALKING DEAD.
Maybe even more interestingly is that one-shot books like JOKER (perhaps driven up by THE DARK KNIGHT, not sure of the timing on that) showed up in the top 10 on DC's side. KILLING JOKE may have ridden that wave as well. WATCHMEN doesn't need comment. It's been a juggernaut since the trailer hit and has a few more months at least of audience, though I figure it'll last a lot longer than that, since it's now regarded as a go-to player by bookstore managers and buyers. Getting good display space will trump outright quality every time.
Image's presence in the top 10 is welcome, with a movie tie-in (WANTED) and an outing from its flagship title (THE WALKING DEAD.) Aside from those two, only a BUFFY book from Dark Horse makes an entry from a non-DC publisher.
Now what's really interesting about this is that this is Diamond's list, and as I understand it, Diamond covers DC's books for the DM, not for regular bookstores (which is handled by Random House.) So these are the books that DC is selling into the DM, and it's still shutting Marvel out in the graphic novel category. Things may be grim for DC in the DM (looking at strict marketshares), but are they really? They're getting great mileage out of (largely) reprint material that's tied to sunk costs. Of course, this could just be from where I'm standing. I'm not looking at all DM sales, so owning monthlies in the DM may well be a bigger deal than I think it is.
Other interesting datapoints: DC is only doing double the "All Other" category in dollar share. That and the "All Other" share is as big as Image, Dark Horse and IDW combined. Now, how many mouths is that "All Other" share being divided up among again?
Superhero Decadance vs. Squeaky Clean
I suppose it makes for a good pastime, but it's not particularly constructive, is it? Let's be clear, much of the 'dark and deep' takes on superheroes were interesting at first. Going back to ELEMENTALS (which is certainly high on my list of favorite books to have come out of the 80s) and even before that (the work of Steve Gerber in particular, but a lot of the frisson of the 70s work out of Marvel, and, verily, even the heyday of 60s Marvel) came from the questioning of assumptions behind superhero comics. Some of these were accomplished more gently than others.
Then there's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN (and SWAMP THING before that.) Oh, yes, and there's the pitches made by Gerber and Miller and someone else to re-do the trinity of DC heroes (that never got off the ground, only belatedly in the form of DARK KNIGHT) that could have worked this ground earlier. Some really incredible comics came out of the whole line of rethinking what you could and couldn't do in a superhero comic (ever read Rick Veitch's take on Batman in the pages of SWAMP THING? Go give it another read if you haven't.) Then there was a counter-current against that, of Morrison's work in ANIMAL MAN and DOOM PATROL. Some really great, great comics that have stood and continue to stand the test of time.
Then there's the rest of it. Nearly all of the 90s which weren't so much dark and morally muddy as they were just randomly violent because they could be. And mostly there were a lot of intricately-illustrated and colored bad comics. Though, truthfully, they'd have been bad and unmemorable if they had squeaky clean paragons of virtue as well. It wasn't the surface emulation of the darkest aspects of DARK KNIGHT and WATCHMEN that made these comics bad; they were just plain bad. But attaching grim and gritty surface veneer didn't really make them any better, did they?
But we never quite shook that, did we? Never quite shook the jolt we got when we read about heroes pushing the limit, or about the Hulk eating the Wasp or dismemberments or what have you? Hard to argue that pushing those buttons moved some books, and still gets them written about even years after the fact. So maybe there's something to it after all...
However, the discussion about what goes *into* the books is kind of a distraction, isn't it? What's more pressing is how to get those books into people's hands, and what form those books will take. Don't get me wrong, this is a great red meat issue for both sides of the issue. You can really get worked up about this sort of thing, righteously indignant or smarmily smug. I prefer the smug side myself. Little more restrained, more opportunities for passive-aggressive digs at the other folks.
The above discussion is likely to be framed in conservative/liberal dialectic as well. Yippee. Now we can really GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THINGS. This is important! We can argue what color to paint the dinghy as the lake is slowly drained away below us. Hooray us.
Hey, it's not my place to tell people what to write. You want to have Superman sleep around? Great. You want to make the Wonder Twins into incestuous lovers because it makes them edgy? Awesome. Don't expect me to get excited about reading those books, though. Not when there's stuff like the following to consider:
“The monthly sales [on Runaways] were so terrible, and then they released it in those little digest collections that most 18-40-year-old readers despise, and the kids just ate up. And I think a lot of those digest collections were out-selling things like Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men in conventional bookstores. It was just something that kids could jump right into without needing a lot of back-story, any back-story.” - Brian K. Vaughan - from the interview in the current issue of TCJ
Really, that's all you need to see to understand the issue isn't Superheroes Acting Badly or anything else. It's a more fundamental concern that confronts us.
And lookit me, I'm part of the problem, having just spent the last fifteen minutes writing this.
RyallTime: Another reason Donald Westlake's loss is so profound
Chris Ryall lets slip the cover for the first of the Darwyn Cooke adaptations of the Richard Stark/Donald Westlake novels. First up? THE HUNTER.
This is one of the books I'm most looking forward to this year, I'll make no bones about it. You can keep your INFINITE CRISISES CONCLUDES EVENTUALLY and the like. Self-contained books that you can hand off to anyone? Gimme more of those.
Everyone else has linked to it, but that's not stopping me, no sir.
This is apparently an anonymous biography/overview of the life and work of Steve Gerber, who passed away nearly a year ago, leaving the world sadder for it. His influence on comics, particularly in the superhero side of things, can simply not be overstated. The work that Gerber did in the 70s (and to a lesser extent, the 80s and 90s) had a tremendous impact on some of the best comics writing of the 80s, leading directly to artists like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison's takes, injecting more fantasy (dark or not) back into a set of tropes that was (and still is) becoming increasingly moribund and earthbound.
Makes me want to pull that MAN-THING volume down off the shelf again, it does.
The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy
Brendan McCarthy has a blog and you should be going there at least once a week. He's got a Christmas card up now, which is more than I can say. But he's also got more art that we all deserve.
THE STORY YOU NEVER THOUGHT WE'D DARE TO PUBLISH! IF YOU READ ONLY ONE COMIC THIS YEAR, YOU MUST READ 'WHEN FALLS A DICTATOR!'
Found the link on Fark.com, so I can't nearly take the credit for it. But it must be read to be believed.
Bad news? Feels like there's a full-sized alligator living in my sinuses. I can feel the leathery ridges and claws rubbing against the inside of my head every time I breathe or sneeze or think.
Good news? Jeff Parker and Tom Fowler are working on a new series for Wildstorm. Parker assures everyone that there will be swearing and all kinds of adult situations, so I guess it's like a Cinemax series or something, only...good.
SUPERMAN story? From a 1985 annual?
Sure you do.
GeniusboyFiremelon: When Words Collide BONUS: Morrison's Very First Superman Story
Spotted at Geniusboy Firemelon, where else.
See, that's the story behind the story with the ALL-STAR BATMAN #10 (it's #10, right?) kerfluffle. The badly printed black bars covering the naughty words aren't what folks are talking about, two weeks out. The language? Folks, this is SIN CITY BATMAN. If you didn't figure that out with the first issue, then there's not much I can do for you. Though honestly, I'd be more interested in it if Miller himself was providing the art.
But back to street dates. Now, why would a comic that's destined to be pulped drive debate over street dates? Because not all retailers got the book before it was supposed to be pulped. It's okay, you can let that roll around your head a moment. There's plenty of retailers who never got a copy, but not before word went out that the run was to be destroyed. Most of 'em were on the west coast, as I understand it.
Now, why is this a deal? Because any books that survive the pulping will be genuine collector's items. That's not something that happens every day in comics, even with variant covers and other attempts to manufacture collectability, rarity. The truth is, if you want a recent mainstream back issue, you can find it without too much trouble. Generally. There's still the occasional book like WALKING DEAD that has sufficient demand to drive up the cost of back issues, at least in the early run. But UNCANNY X-MEN #500? You'll still be able to find it in a year or two for not all that much over cover, if not in a bargain bin.
You heard me. Thought balloons. Even if they’re dressed up like narrative captions, we all know what they are. They’re the expression of internal monologue alongside the action. They can only happen in comics. Sure, you can do voiceover in film and you can run internal monologue in prose, but those thoughts cannot be physically embedded in the action in the way that comics can do them. Thought balloons are a powerful expressive tool, one that’s continually dumped on or laughed at as a crutch. But ask Grant Morrison; there’s something unique about them, about the distillation of mental energy into ink and space.
“They don’t love you like I love you." Just like the song says.
What more needs to be said? When it comes to matters of the heart, humans express their most personal idiosyncracies, personality twitches and hidden needs. How else would it be love? How else would you be granted the strength to express the inexpressible? Only love gives you wings like that. Only love.
I won’t pretend to come up with a list of fifty things. The way things are, if I marshal the attention span to get to twenty-three, I’ll be happy.
Of course, I wrote that yesterday. I’ve got a list. But it’s not much more than that. Perhaps I’ll be adding to this later on. Some of these I’ve already expounded on at great length, but others perhaps not so much so. You’re welcome to guess at the meaning of each, though some are certainly easier than others.
Balloons
Strange
Thing
Ink
Serial
Costumes
Celestial
Disposability
Stack
Monastics
Gerber
Hanks
Cooke
Moore
Kirby
Ditko
Micronauts
Rack
Shakespeare
Surfer
Mutant
Marshal
Fireside
Frank
Thimble
Store
Panel
Horror
Warlock
Talbot
Stupid
McKean
Recreation
Phoenix
Fantastic
Punching
Flex
Silence
Alchemy
Dorkin
Bullpen
Pope
Monsters
Covers
Quarters
Outlaw
Opportunity
Text
Bitch
Deliverance
So asked Michael Stipe in LIFE'S RICH PAGEANT (one of my favorites, even if it wasn't as earthshattering as MURMUR or an album I come back to even now such as FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION.)
News Sleazy Tintin book raises ire of estate - News from Spain - Expatica
So if I call it Tintin fanfic, I suppose I'm going to get a kick in the teeth, right? Oddly, it seems like this whole thing is kind of a non-issue. I mean, there's an issue, but if this book had been written by Herge, the there'd have been no kerfluffle at all, right? The point is that this was an unauthorized work that's being clamped down on by the holders of the copyright.
I realize that I hold an unpopular position in this regard. I don't think that there's any inherent right to profit from fanfiction based on characters for whom you don't own. If you can convince the copyright holders (better yet, the creators, but these two parties are often not the same, sadly) then, great, go ahead and publish the new work. But if you don't own the work and you go ahead and publish it, then you oughta expect to be clobbered.
Now, would anyone in the abovementioned case have cared about the book if it hadn't supposedly been about Tintin in the first place? No. It would have been an unremarkable potboiler by all descriptions. Seems to me that the writer was banking on a character that he himself didn't create (but spent some time re-imagining) to sell their work. I'll allow for the possibility of misreading things, but I don't think that I have.
Now, I realize that in comics we're quite used to pastiche. You know, pastiche, where you copy something not to make fun of it (that's parody) but to comment on it, obliquely or otherwise. For instance, WATCHMEN is a pastiche of the Charlton heroes, whom DC had bought up the copyright on. This allowed the story to go places that it couldn't have gone had the characters in WATCHMEN been The Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, et al. As much as I regard pastiche as theft (in the Wildean sense of stealing and not borrowing), there's a difference between it and outright theft (ie, writing a book about Tintin and getting frisson from the character doing things that they'd not ordinarily do. Yes, you can make the same argument about say, Grant Morrison and Rian Hughe's reimagining of DAN DARE, I'll allow it.)
We've come to lean heavily on pastiche, on "oh hey, so and so is this universe's Superman analogue," and it's far too much like borrowing for my taste. Write your own material. Comics aren't alone in this, mind you. There's been a whole raft of literature since the fifties and sixties where you get "WUTHERING HEIGHTS told from a minor character's point of view." The guilty know who they are.
We're already standing on the shoulders of giants. No need to advertise it.
In 2010, Dark Horse comics will be reprinting Guy Davis' work on THE MARQUIS (which has had a number of homes over the years), and there'll be a new series as well. Apparently it was announced at the comic-con at one of the many panels that I didn't attend.
Good news comes in threes, so I'm anticipating the next jolt.
Apparently this is a deal. I'm not entirely sure why. Lots of folks coming out of the woodwork to announce that the X-Men comics are all about prejudice and living as a persecuted minority. Which is funny, because to my eyes, everyone in the pages of that book is glossy and beautiful and at least come across as self-assured (not to mention comfortable in a skintight costume.) I'm not getting a lot of persecution out of that. Who doesn't want to be a beautiful mutant?
I'd like it more if the book was about the future, about inexorable change and how it best gets integrated into a world that isn't ready for it, whether it's forceful assimilation or quietly retaining a kernel of positive change, even in a sea of sameness that wears down shiny edges with overlapping sheets of dull mundanity.
But really guys, the book has been about persecution for a long, long time. At least it nominally was back when I read it printed on stone tablets that I bought at the corner store.
Quoth Alan Moore: "I will say this: I’ll bet my arse that within 6 months or a year, everyone will be sick to the back teeth of realistic superheroes."
As seen here., which I think was also reprinted in an issue of THE COMICS JOURNAL a long, long time ago.
Again, the irony is rich.
Comic Book Stores: A Niche Within a Niche | KPBS Comic-Con News
I used to shop there, so it's always weird to see the place get written up, even if KPBS is largely dropping the ball on their "Where Superheroes Matter" subtitle for their SDCC coverage. Haven't had a chance to really read it over, but will sometime shortly. Still have a con report to finish...
Jeff Parker, you know him from AGENTS OF ATLAS and THE INTERMAN. Me, well, you know me as the guy who occasionally posts stuff to this blog. In the above link, one of us interviews the other.
(Likely not the only place this appears).
I’m sure that I can not remember the first time that I met Rory, as Comic Relief booths had been fixtures at SDCC before I set foot in his store in the early nineties. This is an odd thing to say, as he cut quite the figure, even if you never had a moment to speak with him. Big as life was he, or even bigger than that.
We’d spoken many (but still too few) times over the last several years, when I was just toying with self-publishing, but was still trying to fill holes in my comic collection (that SANDMAN: WORLD’S END volume will now be a thornier rose, should I find myself reading it again.) And always, Rory was filled with good humor, but that was tempered by his many years in the business as well as practical experience that some zealous types may find themselves lacking. And when I would speak up with naïve sureness, he was there with a firm “but on the other hand…”, in particular regarding the comic to book-store transformation that is still ongoing in the industry.
When I finally announced my book after interminable delays (some of my own creation, mind you), his reply was along the lines of “When can I order it, and what can I help with?” There was no eye-rolling at another anemic indie publisher or impatience when I revealed that I was skipping serialization altogether. Instead, he replied with kindness, suggestions and ultimately happiness that another book would be out there to connect with readers.
That love of readership informed everything that Rory did. When you step in his store (I know that Todd runs the day-to-day, and has for some time, but it will always be Rory’s store to me), you would see books. Books upon books. Towers of books spined-out on countless shelves, rife with characters both diluted by overexposure and muted with dusty obscurity. It did not matter. BATMAN: DIGITAL JUSTICE could be bought right alongside A JEW IN COMMUNIST PRAGUE. It didn’t matter that one of those might sell in a year. Or ten. Or that a copy of ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY (oh wondrous Simonson treasure) could rest on a shelf, just long enough to be spirited away, much to Ian’s chagrin (he was just inches behind).
Though I’m only recently arrived to the chorus, as it were, I’ll miss our conversations at every APE and Wonder-Con. He leaves behind some very large boots (no, really, his feet were huge). I don’t expect that they’ll be filled, but with some luck, others will continue to walk a path not far from the one that Rory set himself upon. Even so, we won’t see his like anytime soon. Perhaps his infectious love of books (illustrated and otherwise) will continue to inspire. We should be so fortunate.
ComicsPRO.org: Rooting for Rory...
Goog Guy Rory Root is, as of this afternoon, comatose in an Oakland area hospital after extensive surgery. Much like Joe Field does in the above link, please keep Rory and his family in your thoughts and prayers if you swing that way.
EDIT to add - You'll be missed, Rory. Those are some mighty big boots, which aren't going to be filled anytime soon.
MILK! AND! CHEESE!
Go now! Read!
There was a time when you learned about new comics by word of mouth. Not by advertisements, or being hand-sold books because they just littered up the newsstands or spinner racks and the clerks didn’t know anything about them, or by the internet.
I know. You’re wondering how we got along. I assure you, we got along just fine.
Comics, by which I mean largely superhero comics, since this was the dawn of the 80s, and both Marvel and DC had tossed their eggs into the basket crammed full of leotards and domino masks (soon to be replaced by black vinyl cut at arresting angles), were a hermetic order. Sure, anyone could pick up a comic at any time and get into the storyline that was unfolding in the sawdust-yellow pages (thank you, Jim Shooter, for getting me hooked on monthly Marvel books). Remember, these were the days of “Every comic is someone’s first comic and we gotta get them up to speed on the whys and wherefores.” Yeah, it makes for clumsy reading in trades of the material from that time, but back then, it was like, electra-glide smooth entry into the polychrome universe.
Let's see, news to report.
Gervasio and Jok have signed on for the main story in the second STRANGEWAYS voume, tentatively entitled THE THIRSTY.
Luis Guaragña has agreed to do artwork for the second story in that volume, "Red Hands". So there's going to be strong artistic continuity in the next book, which I see as a good thing.
Back to filling re-orders and Amazon POs.
Tom says:
Shame on every stupid-ass, morally ignorant fan out there who has expressed even the slightest opinion that this course of legal action in any way reflects an agenda of greed on the part of people not directly involved in the act of creation, or worse, has articulated as their primary concern the potential interruption of their monthly four-color fantasy product. I wish we really did live in the might makes right moral universe that supports such a piggish outlook, because then I could quit my job and drive around on a motorcycle punching people in the face until they penned a formal apology to the Siegel family.
---
Which pretty much sums up my response to the Newsarama thread on the issue. Yes, both National/DC and Siegel/Schuster co-created Superman, and the trademark itself would not have been as fabulously valuable had there not been a publishing company behind it.
But when said publishing company benefits itself grossly in comparison to what the original creators earned, there's a problem. Do I think that DC should be stripped of the character because of the sins of National? No, nor is it likely to happen.
But to hear the bleating of the entitlement-crazed fans, you'd think that the judgement was nothing more than simple money-grubbing and it will destroy the hobby as we know it, jacking up cover prices so that the Siegel family can repose on their new collection of Louis XIV furniture while polishing their new diamond-studded ashtrays.
But if they fashion necklaces from all those outraged fanboy tears and wear them until the end of time, I wouldn't think that unjust.
For the record, this is big news, no doubt. But I doubt it will be big in the ways that people think. The Siegel case has its own set of legal and historic wrinkles that aren't likely to be duplicated anytime soon.
Though I gotta ask, does the Wylie estate see any of this...?
Blog: Siegel heirs awarded Action Comics #1 copyright
There's some loons in this world. Some of them are posting at the above.
By the by, does anyone else find the timing of this incredibly interesting given the big reveal at the end of ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #10 this week? If I didn't know any better, I'd say there was a greater force involved.
Just for Tom, I've kept this all in one post. But something tells me I really oughta break this up.
---
It’s Spelled “F I G U E R O A”, Dummy.
I didn’t reliably know how to spell that until just this week. Forgot the “u after e except after w” rule. Why was I staying at the luxurious, Moroccan-styled Figueroa Hotel in Los Angeles some 350 miles from my newly-native Sierra Nevada Foothills?
Because I went to Wizard World Los Angeles. Which is actually held in Los Angeles now, but used to be called Wizard World Los Angeles back when it was held in Long Beach. Long Beach is NOT Los Angeles, by the by. That’s like saying that Oakland, or more accurately, Fairfield, is in San Francisco. It just isn’t. But I guess Los Angeles has cache that Long Beach just doesn’t. Even if Wizard World fit better into the Long Beach convention center and had a wider variety of nice bars right outside the doorway. Don’t get me wrong. The city of LA has done wonders punching up the Convention Center area of downtown into shape. There’s still some work on the south side of Main yet, but I suspect that’ll be a perpetual condition.
The Savage Critic(s): Arriving 3/19/2008
According to Brian HIbbs' shipping list for the week, which is usually pretty on, Strangeways: Murder Moon ships this week. Which is news to me, as it was supposed to go out *next* week.
Not that I have any major launch plans or anything, but this is a little weird. More news as I figure out WTF is going on.
While waiting for my interminably delayed flight last night, I got about 2/3 through my WWLA report. Some stuff to finish up first, but it should be along this afternoon or evening.
If you want to see a picture of me looking sort of glum and morose (it's not your fault, Mike: I just don't do posed pichers real well), then head on over to Mikester's WWLA report. You can't miss it. And I gotta give Mike an 'attaboy' for running the cover under the picture itself since the flash blew it out, matte coating or not.
Mightygodking.com - Yesterday, At The Comics Store
But Chris Butcher isn't. He actually makes hand sales. Imagine that!
Hand! Sales!
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?
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.
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.
Continue reading "If there are diamonds in the sidewalk, this must be San Francisco." »
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.
"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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The Comics Journal Message Board :: View topic - Baker & Taylor: Blindsiding Diamond?
I need time to go through the whole thing, but there's some interesting stuff going on in this dusty old thread at TCJ.com. I wonder if most of the pertinent content is still...pertinent, or if things have changed in the intervening 1.5 years?
And let the folks over at Hijinx comics know how you like to read your comics. I already stopped by and made the point by picking up some forty bucks worth of trades while I made my goodwill tour of the area in support of STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON. But your vote matters, too! Don't let your voice go unheard!
Just please don't vote for "bubble gum wrappers". I mean, unless you really mean it...
…minus ten percent
Declan MacManus, ladies and gentlemen. Give him a big hand.
And I thought I was loopy when I was posting earlier this week. I’m past loopy to sober and back to loopy again.
As I suspected, the discussion fired off by the ComicsPro position paper on convention-pre-sales is not over. Nor is it prompting any kind of a change in people’s minds, really. There’s a lot of talk, but it’s cross-talk. The pro and con sides have their minds made up (‘cept for those folks who seem to only be mildly for or against it, oh yeah, and everyone else who hasn’t said anything about it, which isn’t me, since I’m still babbling.) There’s a lot of passion and bluster, and thorough proof that the plural of anecdote is bitchfest.
For the record, since I apparently didn’t make it clear in my last missive (unsurprising, since my writing tends towards the opaque side of clarity), I will not be selling copies of STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON at Wonder-Con ahead of the Direct Market ship date of March 26th. Should I have copies, they will be given for promotion to reviewers and contributors (at least I think Steve is going to be there.) If local (or non-local) retailers want to buy copies at cost and I have a supply to meet their demand that is their business. I will be there to sign those books, should customers for them be found. I will have paid the cost to appear there, as will they. Perhaps both of us can benefit from that. As said before, Rory Root from Comic Relief in Berkeley has made such an offer, for which I am thankful.
Hell, in my position, I’m thankful for any customers.
But I won’t put myself in competition with pre-paid orders, particularly from local retailers. After the street date, I’ll happily sell copies at whatever price I choose (and continue to pass out preview copies should it make sense.)
It’s a conflict between a fast sale (or two, or ten) and whatever retailer goodwill I can generate as a result of playing by the ground rules. As I said last time, I’m not in a position to pick and choose friends and supporters. If my selling some copies of STRANGEWAYS over a three-day show is that much of a threat to my long-term presence in my book’s primary market, then I’d be short-sighted to do so. I’m not interested in selling a pamphlet comic with a low-duration shelf life. I was already convinced of that when I started this whole process back in 2003. The Speakeasy diversion and dalliance in the monthly form was me adapting to an opportunity that presented itself; an opportunity cost that was, well, high.
Again, the reality of STRANGEWAYS is that it will be ordered by a handful of stores. I don’t need to muddy up those waters with pre-sales. If a store is going to take a chance on my book, then I should give them a fair chance to sell it.
This does not make it my place to criticize or chide others who choose to pre-sell on convention floors. Eric Reynolds makes his case, and it’s a persuasive one. I am not going to tell him that he’s wrong in his choice. I bought a copy of I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS from a show before it was available in the DM. And then I gave that to a friend for his birthday and I replaced it with a DM-purchased copy.
But then I also believe that we’re not looking at a zero-sum system where a convention pre-sale means that a retailer is going to be left holding the bag on a pre-ordered book forever. For that to be true, then you’d have to prove that only people who go to conventions go to comic shops, and that is simply not true. If it is true, then we’re looking at a terrifyingly small comics market and have far bigger problems to figure out than convention pre-sales.
Long week, folks. I'm goin' to bed.
The morning that I was going to send out a press release about STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON is the morning that Comcast decides that I really didn't want to send any mail out after all. They do know what's best, right?
Hoping to get it out today. I'd post it here, but nobody comes here...
EDIT: Now I'm sure it's gone out twice. At least. Gah.
Okay, Heidi found me and kinda folded me into the current "pre-sale at conventions ahead of Direct Market or not?" meringue/harangue. Like so:
---
Leaving behind the steaming battleground for a moment, there’s this quiet little comment from Matt Maxwell:
I should have something to say about this, since I’m a new publisher in a position to debate a book at Wonder-Con before the official street date. I don’t have the time to devote to commenting at the moment however. Hopefully this will change over the course of the weekend.
And there’s the rub. What SHOULD Matt Maxwell do, ComicsPRO? Diamond isn’t going to help one little man with a book on any significant level. Comic shops aren’t going to order an almost unknown self published western by a creator best known as being an intelligent blogger in numbers that are going to impress anyone. Maxwell’s only business strategy is to raise awareness of his book by the means available to him — internet postings, selling directly to fans at shows, media outreach and, yes, talking to retailers.
The sad thing is that no set mechanism exists for the latter. New publishers arriving on CBIA are inevitably met with suspicion and the equivalent of a “Are you now or have you ever been a publisher who might have sold a comic outside the direct market?” threshhold that just isn’t logical in today’s day and age.
---
Okay, first thing that everyone needs to know about this is that the argument isn’t necessarily about what it’s about. In other words, yes, there is concern about the actual pre-sale of books at conventions on the part of retailers who have to order their books three months of time and on a non-returnable basis. This is a valid concern.
But it seems that some folks have made this into a proxy battleground between some retailers and some publishers/fans regarding how alternative books are sold, or the perception of how they’re being sold. On the independent publisher side, there’s concerns that the DM is a diminishing portion of their actual sales, and that they have the right to shore up their profits by making sales at conventions where they cut out the chunks taken by both Diamond and the retail seller. Notice that nobody from DC or Marvel or Image, so far as I can tell has any interest in this particular discussion. Even though Marvel debuts some big-ticket items in bookstores before the DM, but that’s not being addressed at this moment.
THE BEAT: Blog Archive--Retailer/Publisher/Customer tensions revealed
I open my mouth to say that I should open my mouth on one issue and I get quoted by Heidi. Even if my quote is malformed (as originally posted, no malforming on Heidi's part) to say that I could "debate a book at Wonder-Con" not *debut* a book at Wonder-Con" as it should have said.
I gotta fix that. Then I better hurry up and say something smart. But that's gonna have to wait until tonight, 'cause kids want to drive up and see snow...like now...
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Aw, just go read it.
Tom Spurgeon commented on the recent ComicsPro position paper regarding publisher debut sales at conventions. Brian Hibbs of Comix Experience comments back, and you can read Tom's second-level response in the above.
I should have something to say about this, since I'm a new publisher in a position to debut a book at Wonder-Con before the official street date. I don't have the time to devote to commenting at the moment however. Hopefully this will change over the course of the weekend.
EDIT "debut" was quoted as "debate" in a recent link on The Beat. The error was mine in the original posting. That's what I get before trying to write before my second cup of coffee on a Saturday.
And no, I still don't have anything useful to say just yet. Check back tomorror morning.
EDIT TO THE EDIT - The book in question is called Strangeways: Murder Moon. A preview of Chapter One, as well as detailed pre-ordering instructions can be seen right at this very link.
Stop reading this and click on the above. Now.
About comic-book monsters? That is actually covering new stuff and not just the monster classics from Kirby/Ditko? Who'da thunk it.
I sure hope that link works. My current fave out of the latest batch of Zuda entries. Though I'm curious, wasn't this originally going to appear in an Image anthology of some kind? Maybe I'm just confused on the robot thing. I do confuse easy.
And "A Crooked Man" didn't win the last go-round? WTH?
Jeff Parker interviewed by Park (and Barb) Cooper, wherein he reveals that he tried to sneak a Marvel GODZILLA reference into AGENTS OF ATLAS. In a perfect world, he'd have gotten away with. The rest of the interview is worth reading, too.
It's all dark.
Pink Floyd comics from a 1975 tour programme. Crude, yet enjoyable, I suppose.
Super, All-action & For Boys AND Girls ! � The Ephemerist
As spotted on Journalista.
Zuda, Zu Zu Zu Zuuuu-daaaa
Zuda Comics | Click Here to Continue
Zudacomics went live yesterday. I checked it out, mostly, I'll admit, to see "High Moon", which on its face seems exactly like the cogent plot elements of my OGN MURDER MOON, only in color and in a webcomic. Oh yes, and to see "Bayou", which I had high hopes for.
Let's talk about the good. "Bayou" is the most fully realized of the offerings, with an intriguing setting/cast and charming art that I'm sure belies the real nature of the storyline. It's the first continuing series to be named at Zuda, and deservedly so. I look forward to reading this as it continues.
"Dead in the Now" is also a good read, though you don't read Rey's work so much as you absorb it. It's big, bold, energetic, unafraid to eat up page space, learning lessons from manga without simply aping the styles. There is story there, believe it or not, though it's presented unadorned and unfettered. No messing around. I'll be reading this as well, though I can see how some folks might not be digging it.
"High Moon" actually has some lovely art, but the story isn't doing it for me. However, I'm biased since I'm gonna have to take grief for "hey, cowboys and werewolves, just like that Zuda comic." "Leprenomicon" is intriguing, but I'm going to need more before I'm convinced.
"Alpha Monkey" has some vibrant art but doesn't do much for me (though my son will probably dig it.) "Black Swan" suffers for having a distinctive look that is only used in flashbacks and not in the main storyline (which in and of itself is pretty average). I'd probably like "The Dead Seas" if I was in its target audience bracket (I'm not, by probably twenty-five years or more).
One of the biggest problems seems to be pacing for webcomic pages, and that's a big one. It took me a long time to understand (some would argue that I don't get it yet) how a page and a series of panels needs to flow for story/dialogue beats to work. It feels like too much is being packed into some of the strip pages (while some don't have enough going on at all or following what is there is tricky.) This is a problem that is solvable.
I have to confess I'm not wild about the shockwave-based reader and inability to jump to a bookmarked page, for instance. I might have missed it, I'll admit. But the interface can be changed once the content is placed.
The quality of the offerings is variable, either in the art or the writing (and yes, I know it's unfair to judge writing on the basis of eight pages, sixteen in the case of "Bayou". On the other hand, I knew that Cameron Stewart's "Sin Titulo" was good on the basis of three pages, maybe four.) Granted, there's no way I'm going to be enraptured with "The Dead Seas" or "The Enders" or "Raining Cats and Dogs". They're aimed at literally a different generation of readers. And there's a chance that DC/Zuda will connect with some of them.
Costwise, there isn't much to lose, from DC's perspective. Sure, there's page rates (I'm assuming that there are page rates), but a vastly reduced cost of production comes into play when playing on the digital ballfield. And that cost only drops after you've eaten the initial development (though I'd hope they'd spend a little money on a plain interface for mobile devices, etc.)
But please don't ask me to make a prognostication as to how this is going to turn out. There's some good stuff there, most of it's readable (but largely not my thing), probably enough to keep people coming back, if the content comes in regularly and is updated often. Besides, DC shouldn't be aiming this at me; they should be aiming this at folks who aren't reading comics yet but could possibly be talked into it.
That seems to be the rumor, anyways. I'm pretty excited about this, since I'm one of those five readers who thought that SEAGUY was the meatiest of Grant Morrison's offerings in the last several years. Wonder how much it's going to deviate from the following that I jotted down (and even got linked to in LitG) from Wondercon in 2006. Was it only 2006? Seems like forever ago.
---
High points of the panel included his relating the utterly and beautifully absurd first issue of SEAGUY v. 2, which he’s basically written though there’s no interest in it at Vertigo right now (apparently the numbers on the first series were less than stellar, which is criminal on a cosmic scale.) Apparently our hero has been brainwashed by the agents of Mickey Eye, when he realizes that the parrot who replaced Chubby the Choona at the end of the first series is a BAD GUY. Seaguy is transformed into El Macho, world’s greatest matador! But he’s not a normal matador. See, you can’t kill bulls now, they’re sacred. So instead of poking them with a sword, you have to dress them and by doing so, utterly humiliate them. No really. The ghost of Chubby appears to Seaguy and ultimately, Seaguy follows him out of his artifically crafted life (apparently abandoning his pregnant wife.)
Of course, she isn’t pregnant. She says “Well, we just couldn’t keep him” to her round belly. Then she lifts her shawl and underneath it is not an unborn child, but a Mickey Eye.
---
I'd still buy it.
It's all comics. Some people don't like what you love. Sides can be taken over form versus content. You're all very smart and passionate.
Now please get back to work making comics or getting folks who don't currently read comics to give them a try.
Remeber, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Lessons from the Convention Floor
Stumptown, September 2007
1. Never Fly Alone
Having to totally close up your table just because you need to heed the call of nature really puts a cramp in your style. That and people are gonna steal your stuff, so get a buddy. Well, that and so you can actually see the show, too. I was able to get out for all of about forty minutes to take in the show.
2. The Limits of Electricity
So here I was with a neat little Quicktime movie to show and a creaky old laptop that only had battery power for about two hours at any given time. I brought an extension cord, but not long enough, and not small enough to keep itself from being a tripping hazard. So, no multimedia blitzkrieg for me.
3. Eat a Hearty Breakfast (corollary: bring antacid)
Buffet breakfasts are great bang for the buck, as I learned in college, but man, can they be murder on the digestive tract.
4. Bring a Tablecloth
White vinyl is never in style. I saw some really neat patterned tablecloths being deployed by a number of artists, which were both functional (vinyl makes me sweat something fierce) and easy on the eyes. Now, do I go for basic black or something like a calico given the Western theme in MURDER MOON?
MyFox Dallas | IMAGES: Rare Comics Found At Garage Sale
That this hasn't hit the newsblogs already. What looks like original art from AVENGERS #1 (you know, the really old one, not the other one) and some EC/Warren books has been recovered from a garage sale in north Texas. All the art was reported as stolen from Dallas/Fort Worth airport sometime this year. The investigation, as they say, is forthcoming (but not after the family selling the pages were temporarily slapped in irons.)
Spotted at Fark.com. Yes. I read Fark.com.
Here's all the sprawling mess of my SDCC 2007 reportage. At least Tom seemed to like it; maybe you will too.
Photos
Preview Night
Thursday 1
Thursday 2
Intermission
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Wrapup
Conpocalypse. Contaclysm. Contastrophe.
It’s always a little chilly when I leave Comic-Con. Maybe that’s the onset of Global Dimming talking (Albedo reduction is a serious threat, people!) Or maybe that’s because the Con has always meant the passing of High Summer for me. Well at least the semi-adult-me. I still haven’t put away the childish things yet (actually, some of those childish things being me great joy still.) The sun is setting earlier, rising later. Maybe there’s weekends of Indian Summer or furnace-winds of the Santa Anas (though not so much since I don’t live in SoCal no more), but summer wanes still.
I won’t deny there’s an energy at big shows like this. Even little shows, really. There’s a frisson that sings through the air, a connectedness in the love of pop culture (no matter what sorts of perversions that love might undergo – alternate covers, I’m looking squarely at you.) And I have to say, I miss it when I’m locked away in my office trying to tap into the Thing That Is Bigger Than Myself, wherever the ideas come from, whatever that circuit is. It’s a lonely business, writing. At least that’s the way the cookie has crumbled in my case.
But it’s not sustainable, the avalanche of cultural output, art to satisfy any taste or predilection, from the sparse inkings of Hugo Pratt to the lush forests of cheesecake to the hard shine of metallic battle armor. It’s your thing, do what you gonna do. The presence of such stimulation very quickly becomes enervating; dehydration and fast food take their tolls. But like the first three nights in Vegas, they’re a hell of a ride. Just that all the sex, drugs, rock AND roll can only keep you propped up for so long. After that, you’re on your own.
I must have left off on Saturday. So if it seems that everything is blending together like a Baskin-Robbins store without power to keep the Fudge Ripple from joining up with the Peanut Butter Swirl, then you’ll know why. I shoulda taken copious notes is what I shoulda done.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda, didn’ta.
So, as you all likely know (particularly if you were on the floor) was that Friday, Saturday AND Sunday tickets for SDCC sold out. None to be had. You had a 4-day pass already or you didn’t have bupkis. This, this is madness. But what divine madness, I suppose. The Con has achieved maximum density. Restraint and reason have left the building. Check your conscience at the door, for (contrary to Rich Johnston’s exhortations) anything goes. Imperial Rome got nothing on SDCC. ‘Cause Imperial Rome didn’t have the Team Evil Cheerleaders and Lego sculptures rubbing shoulders with more Fake Jack Sparrows and stormtroopers than you could hope to count. An injunction against attention-seeking cosplayers clogging up already-clogged corridors is just what the convention ordered for next year. Can’t you just see it? There can be HazMat-orange suited goons with the menacing phrase COSPLAY CONTROL stenciled onto their Barry Bonds-like strapping young men chests, metallic voices clipped and distorted into a stream of angry vowels as they go buckwild with cattle prods and pepper spray in the faces of a thousand bawling Narutos and Jedi Knights?
I can see it. It is the future. And the future is beautiful.
Saturday, Satyrday.
First up, breakfast at the Original Pancake House in Kearny Mesa. Cherry crepes and thick-cut bacon. I ate there more times than I could count, having lived in the area for something like seventeen years. It never gets old, though I burned out on the buckwheat pancakes some time ago.
Then the blogging panel. Which not so quickly became a "Is there such a thing as comics journalism" panel. Lots of repeat offenders from last year's outing, minus a couple (Chris Butcher most notably) and the addition of EW's comics blogger (whose name I really should remember and am far too lazy to look up now.) There wasn't the electric tension between Tom and Heidi as there had been in years past, or perhaps my senses are so dulled by boredom and bourbon that I just didn't pick up on it, but I don't think so. My big question is what matters of real journalism are there to cover in comics? The marketplace itself is dissected on a regular basis by all sorts of folks much smarter than myself (though I chime in from time to time.) For the most part, we already know why things happen in terms of franchise maintainence versus audience outreach. We know that women are underrepresented for the most part and that there's still a boy's club mentality at work on the publishing side of things (and at some, but not all, retail outlets.) There's facts that we can report, such as so and so taking over ASTONISHING X-MEN after so and so leaves. And that's probably an issue to so and so's fans. But beyond that? Does it mean more folks reading ASTONISHING? Not particularly.
But then I was never a big fan of master narrative construction, so maybe that's why all this is escaping me. There's plenty of commentary to be offered about creators and their creations, but not a lot that requires undercover investigative journalism to unearth. And finally, I'm a lapsed lapsed comics blogger, so perhaps all of this is suspect. At any rate, it's good to see Graeme in person (even if only for a period of moments.)
Back from Con. Laptop died, so reportage got stopped up. Apologies. Too much to comment on immediately. Going to take some time to dig out.
But Grant Morrison on FINAL CRISIS? Man, I dunno. I'll probably read it, but I'm going to end up feeling dirty, I just know it.
Oh, and the big news so far as I'm concerned? Big creators doing creator-owned stuff and not necessarily hooking up with comics publishers for it. Darwyn Cooke doing his own thing out from under editorial? The same for Grant Morrison and JH Williams? Count me in on that.
Back later.
Ah, where was I? Oh yes. It was the Thursday that felt like Saturday. Which is why I spent an inordinate amount of time not on the show floor and in panels or eating fresh fish and chips (which are criminally underrated--freshness is the key) or drinking (very moderately, contrary to the image of a booze-fueled GIN MAKES A COMICS CREATOR MEAN sort of affair) in the comfort of Seaport Village or the Hyatt bar. But again, if there was a tranquil yin to the swirling yang of the Media side, it was the comics/dustcatcher side of things. But then again, they weren't giving stuff away for free over there. Free stuff (like booze) tends to make people do silly things. Amusing to watch from a safe distance, but sometimes harrowing when you're in the teeth of it.
Heidi has mentioned that folks are shellshocked already. I'd corroborate that, to a point. Pros seem shellshocked; everyone else seems to be having a hell of a time. But for the teenager I spotted out front yelping "Mom, I'm at the end of my rope here! I'm not having a good time!" into the the cellphone screwed into her ear. And if you have costume, you're golden. You're a god. You're a beautiful American freak (no matter what your nationality) living the American dream. Captain Kirk's got nothing on you. Cosplay is king. Bow down to your new rulers, etc.
I have seen the future.
And it is filled with content. A lot of content. So much content that you're going to be hard pressed to keep up with much of it, much less all of it. So much art, so much design, so many characters familiar and yet different, so many situations that you've seen before but just not quite. Toys made for two hundred lucky purchasers. Entire mythologies undreamed of, unimagined, existing alongside one another. It's Timewave Zero out there. So many fictions overlapping, coexisting (not peacefully, mind you.) So damn much information, signal, that it's useless without filters wrangling meaning and desire.
And that's just Thursday. The quiet day. The day before Friday (which is apparently gonna be just like Saturday now that there's been two consecutive days of sellouts.) If you didn't have a badge already, well then Cthulhu help you, because you're going into the grinder, the grinder of souls clutching their filled-out information sheets. And the grinder's gonna take its time getting to you.
Luckily, I got to bypass a lot of that. And I was prepared. I'd spent the morning going through the programming schedule, trying to make the hard decisions (Storytelling clinics with Cameron Stewart/Darwyn Cooke/Carla Speed McNeil/Colleen Coover or BLADE RUNNER?) Of course, preparations go out the window once you hit the hall and start to take it in. I went rummaging through the retailer end of the hall, trying to find STAR WARS toys for my son, but being distracted by the kiosks of Dodgy Purveyors of Asian Cinema. And oh yes, the project that was a cross between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and COPS. That looked promising (even if I can't remember the name right at the moment.)
Returning to San Diego is a little weird. Everything's a little cooler, muggier (Hibbs was right about that much), and somehow distant. Feels like I haven't been away, but that's not the case anymore. I'm just another tourist in a downtown full of tourists. The Chamber of Commerce looks down its nose at us, but giggles a little more with every swipe of the debit or credit card, with every palm that finds itself in posession of a bunch of sweaty greenbacks.
The con in two words? White noise. Three words? Anxious White Noise. My friend Marc (of the Comics Waiting Room) was saying that Wednesday felt like the calm before the storm, but I didn't quite feel that. There seemed to be a lot of breath-holding. A lot of "when's the hammer gonna fall?" permeating the air. See, I think (and I'm not quite alone in this), that this is as big as SDCC is going to get. For one thing, the Convention Center simply can't hold any more. For another thing, making an announcement at SDCC is the equivalent of trying to pass a message by smoke signal during a gale force wind. Any information you're wanting to get out there is just going to be blown to tatters by the wind before it can be read.
Lots of publishers are promising announcements that will shake the halls of the convention center to their foundations, but when you have a lead-in like that, how are you possibly going to deliver?
Somehow, I've got the feeling that it's pointless for comics publishers to announce big stories at the show now, unlike years past where they could save up for either Chicago (Marvel) or SDCC (DC). Feels to me that if you're keeping your powder dry for when it's gonna be most useful, SDCC isn't the place to do it. Besides, with Newsarama and the like, anytime's a good time to try and grab a little thunder, but when you have Zeus-sized entities like Disney and Lucasfilm stomping around, you're going to be hard-pressed to shout over them.
I'd hope that this would mark some kind of splitting of the shows into (mostly) comics and (mostly) pop culture. The thing is, how many people would show up for a primarly-comics-show and how many thousands of more will come to the Megashow? However, E3, which was formerly a fifteen-ring circus, managed to shrink itself and doesn't seem to have lost its mystique (though I bet the businesses around Staples Center felt the pinch this year.)
Anyways, back to the show. Preview Night was plenty busy. I took the opportunity to hit the places that I remembered had show exclusives that I was wanting to get my hands on. First on the list was AdHouse and their double hit of Paul Pope goodness. Then I got the news that First Second was not only putting out Pope's BATTLING BOY (sort of announced last year), but they're going to be re-issuing Pope's THB in a four-volume set. That's music to my ears (particularly since those THB comics are about the only ones I really, really miss from my collection after part of it was stolen during a break-in at my home in 1996.)
I just hope that Jog will still be able to post on his own blog from time to time. But look at that lineup. Not a chucklehead or nincompoop among them.
Well, 'cept for Graeme, maybe...
Now I'm linking to Wizard. But it's okay, because it's a link to the THB: COMICS FROM MARS #1 coming out at SDCC in a mere 10 days.
Courtesy Sean Collins ADD blog.
stevegerblog - Blog Archive - It's All in the Scars
Could it really be? More Steve Gerber MAN-THING? With Kevin Nowlan on the art? Be still my little fluttering fanboy heart.
Apparently this 20 year old project may not be quite dead on the vine, just resting. I'm not going to hold my breath until it's solicited or anything, but I'll keep an eye out for it when/if it hits the shelves.
Now if only Marvel would get around to doing a collection of Gerber's stunning FOOLKILLER miniseries from the early nineties. I read it a couple years back and I'm *astonished* it saw print at all, given the ground that the series covered. You might think you know what it is by the middle, but I guarantee you'd be wrong at the end.
Don't thank me, thank Mr. Spurgeon.
I've clicked it, but I'm not exploring it all this afternoon. I'm supposed to be writing.
Corey Lewis goes all emo. And psychedelic. Not safe for work, at least if they look close.
THE BEAT - DC Comics Month-to-month Sales: April 2007
Okay, a quick look at the above, skipping over the bulk of the numbers and right to the 6 month numbers, I'm struck that only thee monthly titles (out of thirty-five surveyed)have shown growth in their sales (according to the numbers given, granted.) And that growth, largely, is pretty anemic.
Things look better on the one year comparison, where at least one title (JSA) shows great growth (84%), but the next highest growth figure is MANHUNTER at 9.5%. That's a major, major gap.
On the two year numbers, the growth is better still, with three titles posting more than 100% growth. Then DETECTIVE shows 44%, MANHUNTER 20%. A couple more titles follow and then we're looking at shrinkage again.
Interestingly, average sales per title are up, pretty substantially. From 25K or so in 2003 to 39K in 2007. So which of these figures is truthin'? And what happens when you remove event books or 52 from the mix? I'd suspect that the numbers wouldn't be quite so rosy. I know, that's the kind of easy call you expect me to make these days.
Not only do the Big Two like event comics, they depend on them. Without them, I see a lot of belts tightening and a major drain on resources that allow them to even try to get into markets aside from the DM.
But it begs the question, why is this format still hanging around when it's clear that the market for it doesn't seem all that sustainable? What happens when SECRET WARS III doesn't blow the doors off of everything? Not that this seems likely given the market we're in, but one day, it's something they're gonna have to face.
Kudos, as always, to Paul and Mark-Oliver getting the numbers crunched every month.
Can't miss it.
I managed to finagle a day off from watching the munchkins. It happens from time to time. Just that I'm silly and geek enough to take that time off and drive a couple of hours to comic shows. In this case, to the San Jose Super-Con, which takes place in pleasant downtown San Jose. I'm not lying here. San Jose is a relaxed, nice little place to have a show. Plenty of places to eat within a short walk of the convention center, pleasant weather, nearby Pleasanton to complete the pleasant trifecta.
The funny thing was, they didn't hold the Super Con inside the Convention Center. Well, technically, they did hold it in the South Hall. But as it turns out, the South Hall was basically a big circus tent on a bigger concrete slab, with miles of blue and white plastic sheeting held up by a network of metal ribs. Yeah, I didn't get it either. Maybe the convention folks decided that it was eaiser to take down the tent and wash it out than to clean the hall year after year. Who knows?
Gone with the Blastwave - Haven't you heard? Real is brown!
Courtesy Journalista, absurdist military postapocalyptic digital humor. You go read now.
Courtesy Blog, here's some more Fletcher Hanks goodness. Me? I'm there for the comics that didn't make it into the collection, but there seems to be some other stuff to take a poke at. Really, you need to read this stuff, and it's free, FREE! You have nothing to lose but your marbles.
I went to APE with just a few priorities on my agenda. One of them was to visit the RE/Search Publications table and pick up a few treasures from my long-lost youth. Yeah, I hung out with weirdos, but they were the kind of weirdos whose weirdness you couldn’t accurately gauge by just looking at ‘em. To most people, we looked perhaps a little disheveled, but mostly normal. We wouldn’t be the first to go in a Purge, but perhaps would be saved for the second or third round. Stealth weirdo, as it was.
I was lucky enough to pick up the omnibus of RE/Search #4/5 and the INDUSTRIAL CULTURE HANDBOOK, which had recently been reissued as a hardcover edition. This was back in the days before say, Nine Inch Nails, when being into this stuff was perhaps the equivalent of being in beatnik culture in the fifties (as opposed to the Maynard G. Krebsian sixities). I’d make regular trips up to AMOK books with friends, both in its original location waaay down Sunset and then at the newer location on Franklin (or was it Vermont) closer to the center of the city. Drive up, chew on gas fumes for a couple hours, load up on Tommyburgers and soda right out of the can, hang around and get in touch with my inner freak. Stand next to Tim Leary and try to reconcile his counterculture godhead with the earthbound Leary who left his family and became a jailhouse stooge. Then step outside to the crumbling beauty of the dregs of Sunset (almost Silverlake) before gentrification struck in the 90s. Good times.
Continue reading ""A Wholesale Murder Plot and They’re Working Fast!"" »
THE BEAT - Is the pamphlet the future of comics?
Some interesting thoughts here, and in the comments section that follows. I'll post some on this once I get the taxes paid and perhaps have a little lunch.
--
Okay, my debt owed to the state is taken care of. For this year. Sigh.
Like I said, interesting discussion above, and it's tough to nail it down to just one subject, because it very quickly dovetails into other issues that are related, but tangential to the main one brought up above, which is that it's difficult, nay nearly impossible to expect a comics artist to live off the advances of a graphic novel long enough to create said graphic novel because there are typically no advances. (For those of you wondering, an advance is "advance paid against royalties earned", money paid by the publisher before the book in question is published, or sometimes even before it's created. And often it's the only money that the author(s) see out of the book in question.
I really wish I had my scanner hooked up. But it’s downstairs in the garage along with…too many boxes of books and comics and various other sundries that haven’t been unpacked yet. Hey, I can see nearly all the carpet in the new place. That’s a major improvement over the last couple of weeks, lemme tell ya.
The reason why I wish my scanner was here is that then I’d be able to share with you the AWE-INSPIRING WONDER that is ESSENTIAL GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS. It’s the end, the end of the seventies and Godzilla, for some reason, has roosted in the Marvel Universe. And not just the Marvel Universe, but the Marvel Universe of the seventies, where nearly anything was possible and the impossible was mundane.
Issue one? Godzilla wakes up and wipes out the Alaska Pipeline, which if you are old enough to remember, would be roughly equivalent to say, erasing the Internet today. SHIELD is dispatched to the case and doesn’t send out tanks or planes, but a Heli-carrier and a wing of jet-packed and armor-plated agents. See? That’s panache. Yeah, they break out the death-rays, too.
Of course, they get owned by Godzilla. But it’s the effort that counts.
You know what Saturdays at conventions are good for?
Sitting in panels and being off the show floor, that’s what. I did a little too little of the former and too much of the latter for my tastes. Yeah, sure, I was enticed by quarter comics from the 90s, but I managed not to spend any money at the Lee’s Comics two-dollar spinner (think I still have a short AVENGERS story arc that I grabbed from them at SDCC and still haven’t read, lost in moving boxes or somesuch.)
In my early prowl of the floor, I wandered over to artist’s alley (mostly because the artists are often interesting to talk with and there’s fewer folks there). Stopped and spoke with Russ Heath and, well, now I know more about Russ Heath than when I started. And some of it…I really didn’t need to know. Really. But I did find out that he’s supposed to be doing a Jonah Hex story for DC (whether it’s part of the normal series, which has already showcased some famed artists, such as Jordi Bernet or was a standalone miniseries isn’t clear.) What is clear, however, is that I hope to be half the man that Russ Heath is at 80. Damn straight.
(Part One of an indeterminate few)
Oh, you expected a Tom Waits reference? Yes, he was there (along with his son/drummer Casey and possibly his wife/collaborator Kathleen Brennan). No, I didn’t introduce myself and fawn, though I probably ought to have, as he’s one of the single biggest influences on the way I look at language, which sadly doesn’t get much of a workout in comics. But really, he was there to check out the show and dig the scene. Who am I to intrude on that? Really, I have more tact than I often display online.
So, Wondercon. It’s rotated venues so often in the last couple of years, I wasn’t actually sure where it was going to be held this time. Of course, I wasn’t really sure I was even going until just a day before the show, as I thought it’d be a really good idea to twist my ankle a couple days back. Not so good when you’re planning on wandering a show floor for two days (or two hours, really.)
Luckily, my regenerative powers proved to be Wolverine-esque and I could actually get around effectively without resorting to the Romero zombie hobble. Drove down, reveling in the springlike conditions of sunshine and picture-postcard skies, and a skyline so clean as to arouse suspicion. This was kind of a big deal, as I’ve dealt with a lot of rain since moving up from San Diego (where winter is not unlike spring, only colder and the difference of a few degrees of sunlight).
Managed to confidence my way into getting a professional badge, though I’ve done precious little comics work in the last year or so. Though it looks like the submission of STRANGEWAYS to Diamond is imminent. This after almost a year of false starts and showing the book to other publishers, and even going so far as to commission ten additional pages of preview art from a different artist (making three versions of these pages, all paid for, ugh) to appease editors. This is what we refer to in the business as “opportunity costs” in both money and time (and oh yes, my fraying nerve.) Those opportunities haven’t panned out, so it’s back to my original, original plan of a self-published OGN for STRANGEWAYS. The only thing that has changed now is that I’m leaning towards a smaller trim size in the interests of cost as well as making STRANGEWAYS look less like a regular comic book and more like a book book.
Scryptic Studios - Jason Aaron: The Deluxe Interview - Part 1
As seen on Newsarama's blog, Jason Aaron of THE OTHER SIDE talks about his work and in particular the script to page process for some of the pages from the first issue of THE OTHER SIDE (art by Cameron Stewart.)
I've actually wanted to talk about this series a bit, as I'm currently enjoying it, and it's at the top of my (now-monthly or so) stack of comics. But I think I'll do the story the courtesy of waiting until it's actually finished, since it's not presenting itself as an interminable unlimited series.
The odd thing is that I find Vertigo's reluctance to pick up THE OTHER SIDE on the basis of it being a war book and that "war books don't sell" as pretty damn telling WRT the sort of closemindedness that keeps the direct market a closed market. We're in the middle of a not dissimilar war in Iraq right now: why on Earth would there be limited interest on the subject? THE OTHER SIDE is the kind of book that could sell well in a real marketplace, but since we don't have that, it gets relagated to the outskirts of an already marginalized commecial outlet. Damn shame.
THE BEAT: 2007 Eisner judges announced; call for entries
Congratulations, James Sime of The Isotope on being named as an Eisner panelist for the 2006 Eisner awards!
I'd post more comics stuff, but, well, it's been crazy and it's much more fun just being enigmatically snarky.
I was saddened to hear about the passing of comic artist Dave Cockrum. I won’t go so far out on a limb to say that I wouldn’t be reading comics were it not for his work, but I certainly wouldn’t have the degree of affection for say, X-MEN, were it not for his art (and his co-creation of the characters.)
When I came into comics, John Byrne had stopped working on X-MEN. I’d heard folks waxing rhapsodic about his work, which was fine and dandy. To be frank, I got into X-MEN by way of ROM, but that’s another story. I started reading the adventures of everyone’s favorite mutants right as Dave Cockrum joined the book again. Having been a big fan of artists like John Buscema (by way of ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS and SON OF ORIGINS), I took to Cockrum’s muscular draftsmanship and layouts right from the start.
I can still remember being thrilled, yes thrilled, to get my mitts on X-MEN #150, which featured the big showdown between a returned Magneto and a re-united X-MEN on R’lyeh of all places. (Prove me wrong, I dare you.) Could I have asked for anything more? Well, sure, but only an ingrate of a 14-year-old would.
Sadly, Cockrum’s strengths were also perceived weaknesses. He had his finger on the pulse of the 70s in terms of costume design and fashion, as well as his physiques which seemed beefier and not a suitable middle ground between the anorexia/steroid bulk schizophrenia that seemed to grip comics art through the middle eighties and beyond. Even his later efforts on books like THE FUTURIANS felt somewhat dated (and I as a comic fan felt this, I can only imagine what editors thought).
That said, his vision of the Shi’ar Empire is still unique and individual. The fact that I can visualize it now, after years of reading and thousands upon thousands of other images crowding my brain after a lifetime of media absorption attests to that. And were it not for the fact that most of my comics are more than 500 miles away at the moment, I’d take the time out to study those old pages again. Because when I remember classic X-MEN comics, Orange Julius fries in one hand and a coke in the other, murmuring of the mall as background noise and being a kid in 1983, I remember buccaneer boots and flared shoulders and those capes that go from shoulder to wrists and were utterly impractical. Classic X-MEN means Dave Cockrum.
Rest in peace, sir.
Or is it "Stop the horses!!" I can never get that right.
After some digging around, and a fair bit of driving through the suburbs of my newfound home, I've come across not one, but two reasonably good comic shops. By "reasonably good", the following critera have been met:
1) Less than half an hour away. Okay, one of the two fudges that a little bit, by about 5 mins or so. This is a consideration because if it comes down to it, I can drive to San Francisco to hit up my choice of stores that will have everything I'm looking for and more. And really, my time is not as free as it used to be.
2) They order from the back of the catalog. You'd be surprised how many stores I've come across that are nothing more than DC/Marvel (with the occasional DH licensed title and Image comic) outlets. True, there's fewer of those than they used do be, only because they died out or moved onto Pokémon cards or something timely like that.
3) Reasonably friendly, or at least compellingly bizarre counterfolk. Sample conversation "I gave up on Wolverine when he started crying over a bunch of Neo-Nazis that he killed to get a kidnapped girl back." Now, I have no idea if that actually happened or it was some kind of fever dream, but that guy *got it*. Yeah, I gave up on Wolverine a long time before that, but I'm a crank.
4) Have the good taste to have a copy of ABSOLUTE NEW FRONTIER on display. Okay, so I'm arbitrary. But it's also a pretty decent indicator that they have at least some degree of taste.
This doesn't make either shop perfect. In fact, there's plenty of issues with both of them. One of them is kinda clubhousesque, with overstuffed racks and not a lot of breathing room for the merchandise. It's also in a place that's not going to get a lot of foot traffic. And there's enough of an otaku vibe to keep out the un-initiated. The bigger store of the two has big back issue bins, but it also seems to rely pretty heavily on collectable card games and porcelain statues. There's noting wrong with either of those, but my sort of Maxwellian ideal for comic stores are stores that not only get you your comics, but invite folks from the outside (by staying away from the gigantic and tacky Michael Turner posters for one) and feel more like a book store rather than a secret clubhouse.
In short, don't play to the stereotypes.
So at least I can get my floppy fix, though that's feeling kinda elusive these days. Yes, it's common, this whole "writing for the trade" thing, and so very few writers try to put enough in to make the monthly itself something close to satisfactory. But one lone grumpy blogger isn't going to change the fact that this keeps costs down, even if it is a completely unsatisfactory presentation for non-habitual-comics readers.
Oh, and something else that came to mind. People are surprised by the sales and the profits of the ABSOLUTE books. This comes as zero shock to myself. Why? The material has been generated and paid for already. Sure, there's nominal expenses (recoloring, layout, etc), but a far cry from paying all the creators a page rate and generating something from whole cloth. ABSOLUTE SANDMAN might be moving copies, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that you won't see original material in the ABSOLUTE format any time soon.
Or ever.
Right. Back to reading from the haul brough in over the last week or so.
Jon Berger's WAYS OF SEEING meets Michael Turner's how-to draw anorexic superwomen lesson from the pages of WIZARD. I read Berger's book back in the day for a sociology class that stuck with me. Was quite tickled to see it enlivened in this manner.
At least when you do it lame like I do. But I'm serving up some good stuff, seen on the Isotope's blog. 10 episodes of an interview with Alan Moore posted on YouTube. If I spent any time there, I'd get less work done than I already do. Which I hardly though possible. Anyways, go check it out.
St. Thomas Aquinas gonna get medieval on your ass. Courtesy the spiffy folks at ACTION PHILOSOPHERS.
...later, though. In the meantime, go enjoy PDF copies of some of Vertigo's favorite evergreen titles. The first TPB collections (not single issues, but collections) of SANDMAN, PREACHER, 100 BULLETS, Y: THE LAST MAN and FABLES all for your downloading pleasure.
EDIT - nevermind, it's just the first issues, not the entire first collections. And I thought DC was putting its money where it's mouth was...
Will Eisner: A Spirited Life Interview Series: Darwyn Cooke Interview
Spotted courtesy of The Beat, Darwyn Cooke interviewed at: A Spirited Life. Pages from his new Spirit book as well. They do look nice. And while I think DC has the right man for the job with Darwyn, I do wish he would have time to work on some of his own projects and take a run at creating his own characters. But I'll take quality art where I can get it.
Don't forget, ABSOLUTE NEW FRONTIER this October.
I actually do read mainstream comics, contrary to popular belief. Here's a couple worth talking about:
BATMAN #655
It must be great to be Grant Morrison, because I can't see any other writer getting away with what's required to tell this story. Batman wins the war on crime. The Joker is taken off the board by a crazed police officer who dresses up like Bats and guns him down. The end. Now what?
Well, you practice being Bruce Wayne again. You go to benefit galas with Lichtenstein-style prints and giant inverted Godzillas suspended from the ceiling. You have to stop growling all the time.
You've seen this coming, but it's the best Batman book since GOTHAM CENTRAL/CATWOMAN came on the scene and actually did something with Bruce Wayne other than have him as Batman in drag. This isn't just Batman wailing on badguys in the final fight for his life again. It's actually trying to do something with the essential character, even if that means him not appearing in the cowl for more than five pages.
Go read what Jog and Marc Singer have to say on the book, because they're actually smart about it and not all knee-jerk and rambly like me. But the short, sweet review comes down to the fact that it's worth your time and money.
DAREDEVIL
Ed Brubaker's first story arc on DAREDEVIL is complete and I have to say I'm pretty happy with it, though it seems like it wrapped up pretty quickly. I almost feel like there was another issue's worth of Murdock in Ryker's material, but maybe it was wise to move things along more quickly. Maybe I wanted more of it because it worked so damn well. It felt like it was based in reality, with authentic con dialogue, even though things go off the rails very quickly. Daredevil in the same prison as the Kingpin, and Bullseye gets transferred in, just as the Punisher gets himself thrown behind bars!
Totally unreal, but makes for great reading. The bit where the con screams at the Punisher "Righteous cons gonna shank you, man!" and Frank casually breaks the guy's arm just made me cackle with unholy glee. Brubaker knows what works with the characters and it all seems to gel much more solidly than his run on CAPTAIN AMERICA (sorry, Ed). And some of that probably comes from the fact that I'm old and cranky, but that I first read DAREDEVIL as a gritty crime book by way of Frank Miller and CAPTAIN AMERICA as a technicolor daydream by way of Kirby.
Oh, and to answer Ed's question in the back of the book this month "Yes, I did expect you to kill Foggy, actually." Though I pegged Iron Fist as the fake DD the second he came on after Foggy's funeral. Anyways, I'm liking this enough that I'll actually pick it up in monthlies and not wait around for the trade, mostly because the team knows what gives a single chapter enough punch to stand on its own. You'd be surprised how many don't know how to do that...
Okay, back to the salt mines now.
Found this while poking around Guy Gonzalez' transplanted Comic Book Commentary - Say What?. There's an interesting collection of links to other articles there, but this one jumped out at me.
Comics Shops Turn to Book Distributors for Graphic Novels - 7/18/2006 - Publishers Weekly.
Granted, I'm not seeing say, Dark Horse, jumping off of the Diamond exclusive anytime soon, but there's certainly a market for books like SIN CITY outside the DM. So what if (and please don't turn this into a rumor--I'm a lousy source for rumors) Frank Miller wants to take SIN CITY to a different publisher who can present more traction outside the direct market, due to it being tied to Diamond? This has already happened with creators like Craig Thompson and Dan Clowes jumping over to Pantheon. Granted, that's not going to make a huge ripple in the DM because those aren't huge DM books. We can debate how large these books actually are, but my guess is there's more copies of SIN CITY in circulation than BLANKETS.
But what happens when a big player in the DM makes that jump? And what if they find greater success doing it with another distribution system? It's going to happen sooner or later, with someone who's got their own property that has a wider appeal than the restrictive genre constraints we see at the top of the DM. Will DM retailers move to a multi-distributor system?
Of course, lots of the good shops already have accounts at more than one or two or three book distributors. But how long until this becomes the norm rather than the exception? And will it ever force some publishers to consider expanding beyond Diamond exclusive distribution for their graphic novels (monthlies are right out, as that's strictly a niche presentation?) I can't prognosticate as to how that'll change things, but you can bet that it'll be big.
And whether this happens before electronic distribution becomes a mainstream phenomena is another question altogether.
OG Boba Fett hammering everyone in range with his ghetto blaster playing “Trans Europe Express”.
Lee Moder’s hysterical story about how his aunt got peed on by a cranky rhinoceros.
Batman wiping the sweat from his cowl, very intensely, very Batman-like. The picture doesn’t do it justice.
Bob Shreck’s story about getting art from a…pokey indie artist who shall remain unnamed here. Don’t mess with Shreck. He’ll call your mom.
Kody Chamberlain showing off the care and use of the Pentel brush/pen.
Jim Lee handing out boxes of Mrs. Field’s cookies to the Wildstorm panel attendees (they only made it to about the second or third row and no I didn’t get one.)
Watching Graeme’s brain process the magnitude of the show floor.
The Tom Spurgeon/Heidi MacDonald interplay on the blogging panel.
Cameron Stewart showing off his cover depicting the Avengers as MODOKized versions of themselves.
Watching various pros wander into the Hyatt bar, scan the scene in bewilderment and moving on, kinda resigned.
Smugly walking in and not having to stand in the any of the interminable registration lines on any given morning.
Sharing a snack with my son at his first comic-con, huddled against one of those giant concrete columns as the crowds flowed around either side of us.
Talking with Douglas Rushkoff, whom I was flabbergasted to see was sitting there alone and unmolested by fans. But then I figure most of the folks who know who he is aren’t likely comic-con attendees.
Someone went and video'd the only panel that I'm kicking myself about missing at the Comic Con last week. Yay!
EDIT - That someone in question was , writer and bon vivant, spotted at the engine. Though the video was actually shot by Tone Milazzo, who I'd never heard of before this. Credit where credit is due.
Newsarama or anything. I didn't take notes, so this is going to be...fragmentary at best.
Dark Horse is going back to horror. In a pretty big way. Lots of news from the DH Horror line panel today, anchored by Scott Allie and featuring Eric Powell, Jason Alexander, Greg Ruth, Arvid Nelson, Steve Niles and Berni Wrightson. The biggest news was the announcement of the Niles/Wrightson collaboration CITY OF OTHERS, which certainly looks intriguing and would be the first regular series work from Wrightson in some time (never ever a bad thing in my book.) Other titles announced:
Jason Alexander on the Mike Mignola-penned ABE SAPIEN miniseries. Alexander is also producing artwork for a story written by Mike Richardson (president of DH among other things.)
Eric Powell will be working on a GOON storyline called "Chinatown" which promises to be much more serious and dark in tone than his usual Goon offerings, which is fine by me. Powell is quite able to offer stories with gravity and real drama, though lots of readers seem to be taken aback by that. There's also a miniseries called GOON: NOIR which will be written and illustrated by a rotating cast, including Steve Niles/Ryan Sook and a few others who I'm totally forgetting and Mike Ploog, which'll be a real treat.
Greg Ruth has a new story entitled SUDDEN GRAVITY which also looks like it'll be worth checking out, if his work on FREAKS OF THE HEARTLAND is any indication.
Steve Niles' Cal MacDonald character is moving back over to Dark Horse and will be run through a series of continuing minis.
Kelley Jones will be adding some pages to the THIRTEENTH SON trade and be creating a follow-up miniseries: THIRTEENTH SON OF THE THIRTEENTH SON. At least I think that's what it was.
Arvid Nelson and Juan Ferrerya are continuing REX MUNDI at Dark Horse. The first issue of the Dark Horse series (#19 in the story, though) is out next month. The previous trades will be re-collected and given new dressings for their printing at Dark Horse.
THE DARK HORSE BOOK OF MONSTERS has a bunch of work from a bunch of folks that you will probably want to at least look over.
Mike Mignola will no longer be doing any Hellboy art, but will be focusing on the writing side of things. Scott Allie joked that "he's working even harder on the writing to make sure that he's earning his check every month." Don't know if he's still doing covers or not. I'll miss his art, but what I've seen of Duncan Fregredo's art on HELLBOY looks pretty stellar.
Overall, there's a firm commitment to more horror books coming out of Dark Horse, going so far as to desiring to be "The EC of the 2000s". More power to 'em.
Quick little entry about the con so far.
Registration - The bomb, baby. Was done in fifteen minutes. Watched much more important people than me flounder in the "I don't have a barcode" line for nearly an hour. Even that was better than years past where Preview Night was a grueling endurance match.
Weather - Balmy. Actually about as nice as you can expect. If you're not dressed for business. Conditions inside the convention center were fair, but the more people the con gets, the colder the room gets, so I expect adverse conditions starting today.
Programming - Insane. I think I'm going to miss half the stuff I want to see due to scheduling conflicts and the like. Who knows when I'll have time to hunt down vintage Micronauts on the show floor?
Merch - Tons. Some I even want. Though Parker still doesn't have his Tothbook. But they had a whole stack of Bernet books against the back wall. Maybe I'll be able to find them today and throw away what little money I have. I've been accused of being an art junkie and it's absolutely true.
Prospects - Unknown. But I'll be out hawking today. Hooray! My favorite thing to do.
One of the above is an abject and total lie.
ICv2 News - Top 300 Comics Actual--May 2006
There's the link to the boffo May comics numbers, as posted over at ICV2. Folks are ecstatic about these. 13 of the top 15 titles (ordered) sold more than 100K copies. They moved at least 50K copies of everything in the top 38. 52 occupied 40% of the top 10, and DC owns it with 7/10 titles, though they lose the top spot to CIVIL WAR #1. This is all cause for celebration, right?
*shrug*
I can't see it that way. Let's look around a little bit. Now, for instance, where can we find the first book that isn't built on characters that are 20+ years old (and thus showing some kind of renewal of the character and creative base of the franchise superhero titles that dominate the DM).
Top 5? Nope. Top 10? Nuh-uh. Top 20? Keep rolling. Okay, there's the SECRET SIX at #34. That's a new team, right? Uh, kinda. Really it's all very old characters put together and fun at that, but not new.
Top 50 then, surely? Nope. #50 is X-FACTOR, which is what, a twenty year old title now? Would the adventures of Madrox, the Multiple Man sell quite so well without that name?
Hey, look, there's NEXTWAVE at #77. A new vision perhaps, but more old characters. Deranged superhero satire like you like it, but not an easy sell for the most part.
We roll all the way down to #87 and there, selling 25K copies (very respectable in today's market) is Y: THE LAST MAN, which isn't even a superhero book and actually sells better in trades than in singles as I understand it. FABLES comes in at #90, though debates as to pastiche and originality, I'll leave to others at this time.
The first superhero book with all-new characters shows up at #93. RUNAWAYS moved 23.8 K in initial orders (and again, as I hear it, sells better in digests/trades). We have to get nearly halfway through our list of 200 to get to new characters driving a book in the dominant mode/trope of the DM. Sure, the numbers at the top are inflated, perhaps even hyperinflated due to big events that will not always be replicable (you can only unmask Spidey once in the national press, though those numbers hit next month.)
Oh, for reference, the first non-superhero book I spotted on the list was RED SONJA at 73, followed nearly immediately by CONAN at 75. There's another CONAN book at 104, JONAH HEX at 105, more RED SONJA at 106 and 108, SGT. ROCK at 111, FELL at 118 (which is the first appearance by a brand new character, following Y in the 80s above). LOVELESS comes in at #132, moving almost 16K units (not bat for a mature book.)
We actually get to a bit of diversity (well, at least amongst the holy trinity of genres - horror, sci-fi, fantasy) down in the lower third. However, we're looking at drastically different kinds of numbers there as well. Top 50 cuts off at 45K, top 100 at 23K, top 150 at 13K, top 200 at 7.5K, roughly losing 50% of sales per 50 marks in the sales rank.
Do I expect the majority of sales to be driven by new characters and concepts? Well, certainly not new concepts, because there are very few of those. And sadly, no, I can't expect new characters to drive any kind of sales because it's pretty obvious that the majority of readers don't want something new. So, no I don't expect it.
But I should.
Superhero comics desperately need new creative blood. Yes, it's a tough sell (look at HARD TIME, which had a wide cast of compelling characters plus crazy superpowers and sold piss poorly -- DC should be commended for giving it a second chance and letting it end with some kind of dignity.) But it needs to be done. The superhero market is finite and the blood is getting thinner all the time. Sure, we can drive up our unit profits by jacking up the cover prices. But that does nothing for market expansion.
I'll stop now, else I'll just go into the rant I've replayed regularly for the last several years since I got into comics. Market expansion is key. You will only have market expansion when you have a diversity of product to support your efforts to branch beyond the Direct Market. And you need the will to do it.
Okay, back to work for me. There's cities to be levelled...
I'm too busy reading DEATH NOTE. This is some great stuff, kids. Sure, it ain't perfect. There's a lot of talking through the plot, but what a plot it is.
And even if I wasn't reading DEATH NOTE, I should be busy getting story notes together.
Anything but blogging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Late to the party on this one. That's me.
There is more imagination and verve and power in three pages of Corey "Rey" Lewis' SHARKNIFE than there is in a hundred INFINITE CRISES.
LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH.
That is all.
This blog interviews Mr. Stewart as well as gives a quick preview of his Vietnam War-era project for Vertigo, called "The Other Side." Go give it a look, 'cause you're not gonna see this stuff on Newsarama, sadly.
THE ENGINE is one of the best messageboards around:
This particular link should take you to Dave Gibbons' pencils and inks for a WATCHMEN pinup. Not something you get to see every day. And really, his pencils are so tight the inks aren't desperately needed. Well worth a quick look.
Ah, Howard Chaykin's SHADOW miniseries. How I love thee.
When I first picked up the book in 1986, I hadn't been back in comics long, and the most mature title I'd read at that point was probably something like WONDER WART HOG AND THE NURDS OF NOVEMBER, which was a paperback collection of a bunch of Gilbert Sheldon's WONDER WART HOG strips, which fit in well with my skewed view of the 60s as a kid growing up in the early eighties. It also wasn't particularly mature. I mean, yeah, it had mature subject matter (grafting SGT ROCK parody onto the complexities of Viet Nam, fer instance), but it wasn't a 'mature' work per se. And I'd been a bit of a Shadow fan, by way of my father, who had a few of the old radio shows on tape, and some books with collections of the covers and such. Seductive stuff.
I wasn't ready for Chaykin's take on THE SHADOW. It hit me in the frontal lobes like a semi-truck running over a hamster. Sex. Violence. Nobody liked anybody else. It was about as far away from the happy-go-lucky superhero stuff that I'd been reading that you could get and still be reading mainstream comics. It was a shocking slap in the face following a quick kiss. It was a bucket of icewater thrown on you just after a hot shower. It took no prisoners and laughed at you when you showed the slightest weakness.
Lamont Cranston? Lamont Cranston is a dissolute junkie rapist turned crime king. He isn't the heir to a Colorado silver fortune. He's a wheelchair-ridden telekenetic voyeur boffing his game-show hostess wife (who's crazier than a snake's armipt) by way of mentally hijacking his idiot vat-grown son. He's petty, venal, treacherous, murderous. He is not the Lamont Cranston you thought you knew.
The Lamont Cranston/Shadow you thought you knew is really soldier of fortune Henry Allard, spy turned oriental assassin, sent from the city of Shamballah as an ambassador and dispenser of justice. And by justice, we're not talking incarceration until redemption. Justice comes from the barrel of a gun, baby, or two mini-uzis in the Shadow's Case (though he seems to favor Mach 10s in the later series). Chaykin's shadow is also an elitist, chauvinist manipulator of those surrounding him. His loyal army of assistants? It's fairly clear that they're not there entirely of their own free wil. His two sons (by way of Shamballah) come closest, but even they are there primarily out of a sense of disbelief at the world that their father came from and more than a faint mockery lies there. Allard might be an unreconstructed bastard and pig, but he's also charismatic as any lead to grace the pages of a Chaykin comic.
And make no mistake, this is a goddamned CHAYKIN COMIC. This is a no-holds barred affair. Shotguns to the spyglass of a front door? Check. Septugenarian stuffed into a sparkletts bottle? Check. Mushroom-cloud obsessed ultravixen? Check. Style and panache enough to power a thousand lesser comics? You're goddamn right check. You want a taste of the eighties beyond the cliches of sitcoms? Get your taste right here. I'd say that it's a weakeness of the book, but it isn't. THE SHADOW is unmistakably of the middle eighties, fashion and culturewise. It out-Nagels Nagel. The Shadow is sexier than Simon LeBon (bonus points if you don't google the name to get the reference). Crazy sunglasses and Atomic Vampire style rolled up with Ernest and Julio Gallo jokes, all rendered in Chaykin's immaculate style.
Now, why is this book the template after which all superhero revamps are modelled? You were wondering when I'd get to that, weren't you? Let's take a look at a few things that THE SHADOW does that others have emulated to lesser effect.
Build. We don't see the Shadow until the last page of the first issue. And even then, it's just the dapper Allard. We get a sense of what the Shadow is, seen through the eyes of others. By the time we get to him, we're desperate for even a glimpse of him. The entire second issue is basically flashback, to Allard/Cranston's shiny-new-minted origin, but we only get a panel or two of The Shadow proper. We don't get action until the third issue, and most of that is in disguise. But when he hits the page, he EXPLODES.
Everything You Know Is Wrong. Cranston isn't the Shadow, Allard is. The Shadow's arch enemy is actually Lamont Cranston, under a variety of assumed names. The Shadow himself, yeah, he's an ultrabastard. But he's a compellingly and believably-written ultrabastard. He's on the edge of being un-sympathetic, and empathy is a long ways away. He doesn't love and cherish the world that he's protecting. He's largely mocking of it, superior in every way, which makes it easy for him to do what he does, whether that's mowing down mooks or blatantly manipulating his inner circle with his ability to Cloud Men's (and Women's) Minds.
Maturity. This is where most folks fall short, but Chaykin shines here. He's written a comicbook for adults, thinking out how the situation would really play out in the modern world, and not simply changing fashions or giving things a new look. Harry Vincent is an aging Lothario, performing parlor tricks under his old boss' assumed identity. Cranston is a reclusive and insane billionaire with a psychotic trophy wife. Vincent's daugther is a burned out FBI agent who's refused field assignment after field assignment and allows herself to be swayed by the Shadow, even though she outright loathes him for his stuck-in-the-thirties outlook. This is not an *easy* book to read. It'll make you squirm. It's respectful of the source material, but not reverent by any stretch. It is a nearly perfect reimagining of the source material into the time which it is set.
But it ain't for the kids.
Reading it and skipping over the period references, you'd swear it came out this year. Maybe last. Maybe. It has not lost any of its bite or become dulled in the slightest. Like a finely made knife, lovingly preserved for twenty years, THE SHADOW can still cut and make you bleed, even to this day.
Three hundred sixty-seven point five three three zero two.
That's how many times better the Emerald City Comic con was, as compared to the lackluster Wizard World Los Angeles show a couple of weeks back. This is what happens when you base a comic show around a diverse lineup of guests, give the show a local flavor with area artists and writers coming out to show off, get a venue that's roomy but not like junior trying on his dad's coat and place it in an area where you've got a lot to do after the show.
Okay, so that last part is a blatant lie. There's not much to do right next to Qwest Field. Sure, there's the Yelling Kielbasa Guy (who makes a better sausage than you're going to find on the inside--but I'm tasting the grilled onions thirty-six hours later) and the Pyramid Brewery. But there's not much else unless you're going to take a cab to downtown or have a car of your own. That much, this show had in common with WWLA. But the vibe was 180 degrees away from the oversize desperation of the Top Cow and Spike TV booth-dominated show floor in LA. I think the biggest single booth there was Image or Slave Labor's, both laden with wares and artists eager to talk with fans and get some comics into the hands of readers. This is a good thing.
Biggest lines at the show on Saturday? That's easy. Tim Sale/Matt Wagner/Bob Shreck/Diana Schutz doing signings and portfolio evaluations respectively. There's no no shortage of grist for the mills, no siree. Plenty of people wanting to get into the business. Hell, some of 'em had completed western/horror OGNs to shop around. Pity them the most, my friends. Pity them the most. Plenty of portfolios with fresh art, plenty of minicomics by local artists. Some of 'em were even pretty good.
Spoke with the nice folks at Mercury Studios first off. Steve Lieber is a sketching machine. "Fantastic four in a snowball fight? -- Can do!" "Fantasy elf woman? -- Can do!" "Thelonius Monk-inspired organic robot right out of the pages of MAGNUS? -- You bet!" Also met with David Hahn and was inspired by his inspired use of blacks on the BITE CLUB pages he had out to see (this work looks great in black and white.) He's also a heck of a nice guy to boot. Chatted with Paul Guinan about the finer points of artistic forgery and hoaxery, by way of Orson Welles' F IS FOR FAKE.
Did some wandering of the stocks. There was a bounty of cheap comics to be had. Some expensive ones, too. Cosmic Monkey Comics took the lion's share of my cash, but then they had copies of ROGAN GOSH and #20 (the benefit issue) of PUMA BLUES. But I'd been looking for both for a very long time, so I was a happy little geek. Picked up copies of the latest (gulp!) SUPERMAN books on the say-so of Graeme McMillian. Haven't read 'em yet, but if I find that they're not any good, I'm going to kill him. Kill him dead.
Ran into Ed Brubaker signing books over at the Splash Page Art booth, where Sean Philips was sketching. Chatted with Ed for a bit, got a look at his new project, which looks just wonderful with Sean on art. I'm really looking forward to it. And I have to say that I wasn't completely sold on his DAREDEVIL run. The first issue was solidly written, but didn't *move* the way I'd hoped. However, I'm completely sold on it, having read the third issue via photostats. This is gonna be good stuff and I have to say that I'm sorry I doubted where it was going.
Flipped through the pages of SLEEPER art (as well as some of Chris Weston's INVISIBLES and Cameron Stewart's CATWOMAN pages) and cursed the fact that I had to do things like pay artists and mortgages and things. Really, I think that money would be better spent on setting up an original comic art museum, but my family seem to think differently.
Oh, and on Saturday I ran into something that may indeed be a major turning point for STRANGEWAYS, but I really don't want to jinx it by talking about it in public. But really, could be a very big thing if it comes through. Hopefully by summer I'll have some news on that front. Earlier, would be ideal, but I've had to learn patience in this business.
Alas, no post-convention drinking or sushi for me. Just a simple dinner with the family on the shores of Lake Union and a pretty amazing sunset to go with it. Not bad.
Too bad my daughter decided to wake the room with a bloodcurdling scream riped from the bowels of Hell at 5:30 the following morning (with not much sleep the night before.) That turned Sunday into a sort of zombie shambling affair. Though I did run into Mr. Parker finally. That's Jeff The Interman and Marvel Adventures Parker. He's a good egg and the big two could use a couple more like him, able to write stories that kids and adults both can enjoy. I know, the comics industry is FINE with the readership that it already has! We don't NEED to worry about recruiting new readers young! Even so, the ability to do so is a good thing. Heard a couple of plots for the upcoming AVENGERS book he's working on and they sound pretty damn funny. I know. Funny funnybooks. We don't need any of those either, but again, having 'em around is nice.
Bought a bunch of cheap comics on Sunday (Chaykin's SHADOW and the Simonson/Muth/Williams MELTDOWN and some issues of SHADE and some Charlton horror comics for a total of about seven bucks.) I loves the cheap comics. Ran into John Layman and cursed that I hadn't brough his run of GAMBIT for him to sign. I joke. But his first PUFFED miniseries is still well worth reading.
I'm sure I'm skipping stuff. Oh yeah, the fire alarm that got tripped on Saturday that fazed precisely no one. People continued milling and buying as if nothing was going on and there was just the soothing sound of distant bees on the springtime air. I managed to take in precisely zero panels (of which there were only five or so) and only got one sketch, from Corey 'El Rey' Lewis of SHARKNIFE and PENG! fame. I meant to ask him if PENG! had gotten its title from the Stereolab album or not, but completely spaced on it.
All in all, a great show, and a good way to kick off a weeklong vacation. Of course, it's now a working vacation, due to some stuff that happened during the show, but I'll take it where I can get it. Pictures may be forthcoming, but I don't think I snapped a one at the show at all, sticking to subject matter like the rescue mission in Pioneer Square and sunsets through taxicab windows and the skeletons of decayed piers. Oh well, I'm sure someone else likes that sort of thing...
Dr. Strange Comics: The Lesser Book of the Vishanti: Contents
Compiled by catherine yronwode.
Yes, that catherine yronwode. From Eclipse Comics. Never knew she was this much of a Dr. Strange fan. But there you have it. I'm sure if you need something to read while wasting time at work and you're a Dr. Strange fan, then this would be the proverbial goldmine. Me? I got pages to letter...
That Paul Pope's BATMAN: YEAR 100 #1 and #2 (out last week) are going back to press. This is certainly welcome news, as it means more folks are demanding one of the year's best comics. I'm figuring that the book was originally ordered as a Paul Pope title and not as a Paul Pope BATMAN title.
Behold! The power of the franchise!
My exasperation that more folks will read this than have even heard of 100% aside, this is a good thing. And it's great to see support for a book instead of just making potential readers wait on a trade that's likely a year in coming.
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James Jean will be appearing at the lovely and wonderful Secret Headquarters in Silverlake (that's in Los Angeles, CA y'all) on Friday, April 7th. Why do I exclaim "Bastardo!"? Because I won't be able to go. I'll be in Seattle instead.
Stupid Seattle.
Looks to be a fun little event, though. Including an auction of the FABLES v. 7 trade artwork.
Sigh.
...the BIPLANE?
found_objects: david bowie... COMICS?!
I can't even describe the joyous awfulness that this is. David Bowie comics, substandard to even the ROCK AND ROLL COMICS of the late 80s. I mean, real bad. But joyously bad.
NEWSARAMA - SPEAKEASY CLOSES ITS DOORS
And then there are non-surprise surprises. The above is one of those. I'm saddened, because at its inception, Speakeasy could have actually done something. But they made some bad choices and devoted resources to anything but publicizing their line. Speakeasy grew when it wasn't the right thing to do, to their own detriment, precipitating a steady drain on their publishing line.
And yes, this is exactly why I cancelled the Strangeways deal with Speakeasy. I didn't think that they were going to be around long enough to put out the whole of the first storyline, so I took the title elsewhere. Where else precisely hasn't yet been nailed down yet. In all likelihood, it'll go out under the Highway 62 banner as an original trade (I hesitate to use the shorthand OGN.)
Best wishes to those folks who are left in the cold because of this. To Josh and the ELK'S RUN crew in particular, but also to Dean Haspiel's FALLOUT (which is so good that it should have no problem going elsewhere.)
Wondercon - Sunday, and other musings
I spend entirely too much time keepin up on the comics business, both the creative and retail ends, I’ve decided. Mostly I figured this out ‘cause I go to panels with retailers and I pretty much know what’s going to be said. Don’t get me wrong, they’re a smart bunch, by and large, but I’m not going to learn anything at a con panel regarding retailing that I haven’t already figured out.
You’d think that I know this by now. Obviously I’m a maroon. ‘Cause I went to the Sunday morning Future of Retailing panel. Well, what else am I gonna do, go to the DC panel that I’ve seen once before in the hope that someone’s gonna ask questions that’ll flip the lids of the panelists? I could, but I instead tried to keep my finger on the pulse of the larger industry instead of just the dominant mode by the dominant player in the game.
Wondercon: Saturday
Peter’s Café in Millbrae offers a wonderful thing they call Peter’s Special Scramble, which combines the best features of eggs, spinach, ground beef, mushrooms, garlic and olive oil. Add some hashbrowns to that and a pot of coffee, and you’ve got enough power to get me moving on a Saturday morning.
Granted, my soul had already been stirred by the Dodge Challenger Daytona in the parking lot I saw on the way in. This thing was cherry, man. Hood locks, spoiler, mags, enough horsepower to send a battleship into orbit, the whole nine yards. Yeah, muscle cars are utterly impractical (he said, driving his little Prius around SF), but they’re amazing things, utterly of a time that’s nearly lost to us now, designed to do one thing and one thing only (go in a straight line really really fast). But they do it so well.
Continue reading "The Unearthly Power of Muscle Cars and The Matador’s Secret" »
Now that’s a title. ‘Course I can’t take credit for it. Full due would have to be paid to Grant Morrison, if I were a dues paying sort. My check to him is in the mail. I promise. Scout’s honor.
Wondercon is always a fun show, but not always for the reasons that you’d expect. The first year I came to the show, I didn’t know what to set myself up for, really. I was weaned on the bigger than huge sorts of show that they put on in San Diego. Wondercon is not that. Attending the Vertigo panel that year, for instance, I found myself in a room with four other people. Two of them were on the panel. And neither of them were the scheduled presenters. I did my best to ask softball questions and help ‘em out so that they didn’t have to depend on the slideshow to keep the audience from deserting them wholesale.
Image Comics :: View topic - Aqua Leung Is Coming!
Aqua Leung is an upcoming project from Mark Andrew Smith, of AMAZING JOY BUZZARDS fame. He's posted some preview images and script pages up at the AJB forum on the Image boards. Do go check them out. They look great in B/W. Should be interesting to see how this develops.
Chip Zdarsky gets himself a huge audience (1.6 million plus whoever reads it on the net) for his magical realist (okay, it just sounds good) ComicsTrip. It's an engaging read, and best of all, it's a comic that only really works as a comic. Couldn't be film. Couldn't be a novel. Has to be a comic. Simple on the surface, but there's a lot going on in there in terms of manipulating the various styles of visual language in comic strips. I'm looking forward to more of this.
I can't link direct to the story, but you gotta check this out. Dave Crossland (of PUFFED infamy) draws the Amazing Joy Buzzards crew for issue #4 (I think.)
Hope they don't mind me being a bandwidth hog and linking direct to it. Sadly, you can't do directly to the item on the Image blog, seems to be borked somehow. But just click the above link and scroll down to the entry for 12/28. Looks like a lot of fun.
So does ONE MAN GANG, artwise, anyways. No idea how the story will hold up.
Ah, so Gunned Down by Terra Major is finally getting picked up by Diamond. According to Fabio (sorry, can't get the accent up) and Gabriel's blog, it's on page 316 of this month's catalog.
If you haven't gotten it yet (I got mine direct from the publisher at SDCC this year), and you're a fan of Western comics at all, then you owe it to yourself to check out the book. There's a lot of beautiful art, great stories and a chance to see some artists who are destined to be big draws. Check out the link above to grok the artwork. You won't regret it.
A little further digging reveals the following: More technical details on the Sony Reader.
Basically, the important thing is that the screen is 800x600 SVGA, though monochrome only. I doubt it handles animation at all at this point, or if so, certainly not enough to support your average game experience (maybe chess or something that doesn't require smooth animation). The resolution will be better than a computer screen, unless you've got a BIG screen and can step back from it to read. Though you should be able to read the Sony Reader from any angle (but you will need ambient light for it.)
The resolution isn't has high as I'd hoped, but that also keeps the page sizes managable.
I really want to see one of these things in action. And then I want to find the developer's kit.
And why the heck aren't more people talking about this? I'm not saying that this is the iPod, but it sure beats the hell out of reading comics on the iPod. Or the PSP.
MILE HIGH COMICS presents THE BEAT at COMICON.com: The Sony Reader - manga friendly
LInked from The Beat, obviously. And here we may indeed have a big step forward. I was able to get the main page for the Reader to load up, and I'm using Safari. Maybe Sony's site just doesn't like Firefox, I dunno.
I'm guessing this is the first generation of devices to use the new electronic paper technology developed by Siemens, which was talked up at ABE last year. It's strictly monochrome (ie black or white), but looks like it can deal with grayscales pretty well.
It makes no mention of the active resolution. That may or may not prove to be a big deal. Typical comics are printed at 300 lines per inch, higher for black and white art. You can read text at 72 lpi (screen resolution), but it's sure not pretty. I'm guessing this tech is in the neighborhood of 200 or more. I can't remember off the top of my head what sorts of resolution the e-paper tech was generating.
Anyways, it looks ideal for printing up, say, manga, though you won't be getting any double-page spreads in your reading experience. It certainly seems like a far better platform for reading than the PSP. The fact that it's not a backlit LCD screen means a lot in terms of battery life. Though I was interested to see that the device isn't capable of real animation as it renders each page "statically". Perhaps it is capable of animation, but not super-smooth 24 frames per second and up like we're all used to.
Maybe this will TOTALLY KILL animated comics (which to my mind combine the worst features of cheap animation and comics--or at least the ones I've seen lately do, and I've been watching this stuff since they did Video Comics back on Nickelodeon in the mid-80s.)
Am I interested in this? You bet your bippy I am. What sorts of twisted electronic distribution routes will spring up? Will there be syndicates that companies ally themselves with? Will artists embrace the technology and design for it, instead of sticking to comics formatted pages and trying to shoehorn things in?
And yes, you can listen to your MP3s on it at the same time (though since I'm an iPod guy, my .AAC files are hosed unless someone writes a plugin for it.)
Looks like Tokyopop is wasting no time making books available for it. Wonder how they're translating their files to the Reader's format? Is it just a plugin in their page layout application or what?
Oh yes, very interesting indeed.
EDIT to add that Marc-Oliver of POPPD has some additional analysis.
...BODY BAGS?
NEWSARAMA - 12 GAUGE, VIDEOTVISION TAKE BOBY BAGS TO iTUNES
Running headlong into the future, BODY BAGS makes the leap to iPod comics with its first episode "Father's Day." I'm not really a fan of the material, but I was interested in checking out the execution. And like most video comics, it's no longer comics. Instead, it's minimal animation and camera effects with sound and voices carrying the dialogue.
Which, of course, means it's no longer a comic book. The presentation, and not the reader, sets the pace/timing of things, which is one of comics' greatest strengths in my mind. Comics manage time the way novels can manipulate the abstract and intangible. But when you hand that over to the producer of the video, you lose a lot of what makes comics unique.
And it's really damn small. I mean really small. I didn't even watch on my iPod, but on iTunes on my laptop, and even resizing the window up a bit, you lost a lot of whatever sparkle the artwork has. This is the real sticking point. iPods aren't the best sort of viewing device for this sort of thing, though they are ubiquitous (well, at least among the net-enabled--not so sure about how many people outside that group have 'em.)
The PSP seems like a more viable platform for this sort of thing, particularly when you build the comic around the presentation instead of shoehorning a comic page or set of panels into a 3x2" screen. Granted, neither of them is a perfect solution, by any stretch. What we really need is some kind of larger tablet computer/reader or electronic paper (as shown by Siemens recently--too lazy to dig up the link) that can present comics in the format/size they're accustomed to being shown at. Yes, those are years away (though there are tablet computers in play now, but they're too expensive to get wide adoption as of yet.)
The material doesn't impress me at all, but steps taken by guys like the BODY BAGS crew and the NYC2123 folks are necessary. They're far from perfect, but we're not going to jump into an e-comics format without taking a whole series of learning steps first. I'm interested to see how this is embraced, and how many folks check out the first chapter for free, and if they continue on following the story when they have to (gulp!) pay for it.
Happy freakin' Solstice. The flu being passed around has made sure of that. Between that and getting ready to head out of town (not to mention shopping for presents), blogging (or writing time at all) has been zero. There's been a number of things that I've wanted to talk about, but they've all been relegated to low being on the totem pole.
Though I'll stop a moment and speak up on the latest AMAZING FANTASY, which seems to have Marvel actually introducing...new characters... I know. It was shocking to me, too. Not re-engineered old characters, but actual by gum new characters. Some seem pretty squarely aimed at the manga crowd (and the art style helps), but I guarantee that nobody's going to put down cover price for eight pages of story. I wonder, if perhaps they introduced original digest-size material, or perhaps a larger format anthology style, with lesser known artists and writers, maybe they could tap that audience. But the presenatation is going to scare away the manga fans.
The standout for me was Blackjack, which is Dan Slott and Pete Woods turned loose on the Marvel Universe, throwing espionage comedy into the pot along with vampires, de-evolution rays, Ultimate Nullifier knockoffs and the Death of Utopia. I'd pay for a regular book like this, but I can't help but think I'm among the only ones.
All of these stories (but for the above-mentioned Blackjack) are pure setup, some handled more deftly than others. Some simply aren't going to work as continuing characters. I mean, who really wants to read any more of "The Heartbreak Kid" than we get in this one 8-pager, where the titular character (who apparently eats sadness, really) runs into Peter Parker post death of Uncle Ben? Superhero comics are bad enough, ruled by miserabilists who seem go have forgotten wonder. This is the last thing I need, even if it's ably illustrated by Jeff Parker (and inked by Sal Buscema to boot).
I know, most of what they're doing in this issue isn't actually superhero comics. Not a lot of spandex (other than Jack and Ace), mostly stories about lonely and misunderstood loner characters. There's always a market for that, I suppose. But please, for the love of all that's holy, adopt a format that breaks out of the monthly pamphlet mold. Characters like Positron and Mastermind Excello (driven by similar motivating factors) have some real potential, if you push it and look for a market outside the one that you're so desperately trying to hold onto, Marvel honchos.
But you san send more Blackjack my way. That'd be keen.
Stay tuned for post #100 tomorrow! DOUBLE SIZED ANNIVERSARY POSTING!
NEWSARAMA - 2006 EISNER JUDGES NAMED
Turns out one of the Eisner judges for 2006 is the owner of the comic shop I go to regularly. Robert (as in Robert Scott of Comickaze) is a sharp guy, and we don't always agree on stuff, but he certainly deserves congratulations for the accolade, and the solemn duty that he goes forth to perform.
Okay, that last part was laying it on a tad thick...
Heck, turns out that I know two Eisner judges, though it seems like I only chat with Chris (Allen of Comic Book Galaxy) during SDCC itself.
Congrats to Chris and the rest of the judges as well. Go take a peek at their bios at the link above.
BUZZSCOPE :: In the Scope: Speakeasy Shakes Things Up
Following up on my own blog items about Speakeasy and the changes they're going through, comes the above article by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, talking with some of the particulars in this whole thing, including Adam Fortier (the president of Speakeasy), Josh Fialkov (creator of ELK'S RUN), Jose Torres (THE HUNGER), Saul Colt (SSC Comics) and myself (STRANGEWAYS, in case you're new.) If you're following the story, you may well want to give it a read.
Because I'm a huge SAM AND MAX fan. I own all the singles (including the one that you got with DIRT magazine) as well as the long-out-of-print collection from Marlowe and Company. Sadly, I don't own the super-deluxe hardcover, but I know that it'll cross my path one day.
I've even got an original Sam and Max piece from Mr. Purcell, the result of me asking for "something Lovecraftian." Maybe I'll get around to scanning it one day.
Anyways, the idea of new Sam and Max material makes me giddy, even through my beleagured stress-monkey-like state. Which I'll be in until Christmas, at least. Maybe more.
But go, enjoy the brief Sam and Max joy that awaits you.
NYC2123 - PSP Comic / Graphic Novel - Home
Based on Sam Costello's say-so (he of Dark, But Shining fame), I took a look at NYC2123, which is a vaguely cyberpunk (remember them?) comic work, published online and downloadable for your PSP.
I'm more interested in it for the format rather than the content at this point. The story is okay, though it's hard to get a feel for who the characters really are (or they're beyond standard character types) in 59 panels, which might be equivalent to about 20 pages of comic, assuming 3 panels a page (I know, you all can do math). There are some places where the format works, but I can't say I'm jumping up and down excited about it.
However, it's far more likely a format/presentation than the iPod, that's for damn sure.
I'm sure this will be a viable format, once they figure out how to control downloading and prevent piracy (or make it so cheap that piracy isn't really worthwhile, which would have to be pretty damn cheap). The question is, how long will this process/transition take?
Must investigate...
Of course I don't know exactly how the change in Speakeasy's printing policy (as detailed in the latest LitG of about a half hour ago) will affect me. If you're trying to get in and can't read it (like me, only I'm just trying to snake it wholesale for quoting), it boils down to this.
Speakeasy now has order minimums that are above the wholesale minimums set by Diamond at this point ($1600 wholesale as I recall). In this case, Speakeasy's minimum preorder is 1750. If they don't get that number, they're opting not to print the book. If you're on the bubble, you could probably buy your way out of it (and get extra copies in the "bargain"), but that's likely not wise in the long-term, unless you're building those extra copies to build your audience through convention sales/reviews/swaps. If you fall short, you can choose to have your books "printed" on the internet via the Speakeasy site where they could be viewed for free. That way the work would be out there and not leave folks hanging if say your first two issues came in over the threshold, but your third and fourth came in under and you didn't want to buy them up.
Rich seems to think this is brilliant. As follows:
Fortier acknowledges that some retailers may be put out by this, especially those who have sold the book's previous issues and have ordered subsequent issues, with waiting customers. Fortier recommends for retailers with a desperate fan, printing the book out as a PDF as a gift for them. But the alternative was not publishing the book at all. And that this policy is aimed as "extending the longetivity of the product so it that one day it can be printed."And this model has other opportunities. Promoting comics. Completing series from other publishers, by putting already published issues online. This way they can continue the series and allow new readers to get on board. And also create a business model to pay to download comics that have been printed, if a reader has no local comic shop.
This will be a controversial move. Some will see it as a failure of Fortier's vision, or a smack in the face by the reality of the industry. But with the current market squeezing out anyone who's not publishing "House Of M" or "Infinite Crisis,", it's evidence that Fortier is living up to his Smartest Man In Comics TM tag by twisting in new and unpredictable manners.
Of course, he stole the idea from me.
Now if I were a retailer, and I knew about this, I'd be far less interested in taking any kind of risk on a couple issues of a Speakeasy book if I knew that my preorders were going to possibly evaporate. But that's me. If I were a buyer and knew about this (which would assume I had to know who Speakeasy was as a publisher--and there are plenty who don't), then I'd probably be wary of picking up that issue #1. Why should I buy what I could get for free later on (on the assumption that if you publish issue #3 and #4 of a comic on the internet, you'd make #1 and #2 available in that medium as well.)
Granted, if I knew that a book had a strong following on the internet (and that could be backed up), perhaps that would encourage folks to order strong on the print version, but there's a hundred arguments against that, primarly the whole "just because they like it for free doesn't mean they'll pay real money for it", which is pretty strong these days.
Maybe they'll get a system where you can pay to download, and the creators can stand a chance of seeing some money on the deal. That would be great. Just as soon as you can stop one person from taking the digital copies and publishing them all over the internet (just like they do with comics they have to scan and clean up now--a non-trivial task.)
At any rate, I expect to see hearty discussion on this issue in the coming weeks.
It's "Kashimir", not "cashmere."
One is an unspeakably soft fabric for the construction of sweaters. The other is a mountainous region between India and Pakistan (I think.) One is soft like yeti fur, the other is the place where yetis make their home. One is a Led Zeppelin tune, the other is best known for stretching over Mamie Van Doren. Or was that Janet Leigh?
Other than that, the latest issue was joyous perfection. I'm digging this volume more than the first one (which I liked just fine, thankyew.)
It'd be Bill Messner-Loebs that got me blogging again. Welcome to Heaven, Dr. Franklin press release, which you can read over at Nat Gertler's About Comics website. The book looks intriguing to me, but then I'm a sucker for non-dogmatic views of Heaven.
As for the absence, well, stuff like that happens. Particularly when one takes a sabbatical from the blogoverse for a week-long Thanksgiving holiday. That and when you sorta totally burn out on things. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I've only got so much energy to blog about comics when I should really be writing them and not obsessing about the marketplace overall, but really should be obsessing about my own work.
But I'm back. There's really only so long I can stay shut up as it is.
Or very real opportunity to get comics into the hands of people who by and large are completely ignored by the DM as a whole?
COMICON.com: 50 CENT & G-UNIT COMIC BOOK STARS
I'm not all that wild about Mr. Cent or his associate Mr. Unit, but this could be a big thing, assuming that the books are of any reasonable quality to sustain themselves past flash-in-tha-pan status. I know that Ed was hoping for more hip-hop comics, but I'm not sure this is what he had in mind.
And why the hell wasn't there a Wu-Tang Clan comic? Or was there? And if there was, why wasn't it the biggest thing since sliced bread?
COMICON.com: MANGA IN THE NEWPAPERS
Manga (or OEM) comics as part of the Sunday Funnies pages in papers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Los Angeles Times? This smells like it could be something big (though most kids don't read the newspaper, and the average age of your average newspaper reader is more like 55, or so I've been told anecdotally.) That said, it seems like a pretty major barrier to have come down, and look who's standing in the breach: Tokyopop.
Granted, kids who are into this stuff have probably already found it on the net, as opposed to in print, but still this is a big deal in terms of shaping mainstream conception of manga, thogh not necessarily by extension, comic books. Obviously a developing story.
Kudos to Comicon Pulse for picking up on this first (so far as I can tell.)
Check out the "Singles or OGN" thread over at the Engine in the "Starting Out" section. Some nice, chewy reading to go through and consider if you're considering jumping into making comics. I'd love to link direct to it, but the Engine doesn't allow for such fripperies.
Warning: You will not get an easy, slam-dunk answer.
Lately.
Seven Soldiers: Klarion
Okay, I've mostly dug this, particularly due to Frazier Irving's stupendous artwork, which is both spooky and children's-book sing-song-y in a way that nobody else's is. I do kinda wonder where the whole Klarion and Kitty merge into GIANT TERMINATOR DEMON MONSTER came from. Seems like they dropped a page or two along the way. That said, Grant Morrison shows with terrifying ease how well he knows these characters and the sitauations that they find themselves in. And his Sheeva are so unremittingly evil that they're a joy to watch. And that double-page spread with the drilling rig bursting into Klarion's village? I'm swooning! Lovely stuff that more than makes up for its flaws.
Marvel Monsters redux
These have all been a lot of fun. Which is good, because who needs deadly serious Fin Fang Foom in their lives? The Hulk/Devil dinosaur smash up was great, not simply for Eric Powell's art (though that was certainly part of the appeal), not simply because of the appearance of the Celestials (one of my favorite Kirby creations), not simply because of the sheer joy of "Hulk hate space!!", but for a combination of all these things and then some. The embrace of Marvel monstrosity extends even to the underrated Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big in Japan, which is some kind of wonderful as well (even if the ad-content ratio drives me batty, and I'm likely to wait for the trade just so I can have the whole thing on my bookshelf instead of a box full of chaos.) I'll also remind my gentle readers that they can get another monster fix in the pages of the Fantastic Four "baby book", Fantastic Four Adventures, with the latest installment (featuring the Thing versus a brontosaur and Mr. Fantastic on the receiving end of a Tryannosaur chomp). Not to mention Jeff Parker's re-conception of GOOM as a bling-lusting MTV freak a couple months back, which made me laugh out loud more than once.)
Superman Showcase
This stuff is bonkers. It's not always good storytelling by our standards, with >CHOKE< providing its primary emotional thrust, but what it lacks in nuanced characterization it more than makes up for in SHEER, DESPERATE INSANITY. Superman with hydrocephalis? Got it. Superman shoots proxy Superman out of his hands? Got it. Supergirl wished into existence by Jimmy Olsen? Got it. Superman marries Lady Luck and has superbabies that he can't spank into submission? Got it. Superman has to do the will of a vile swindler to maintain his honor? Oh yeah. Imagination on the page, man. It's right there.
The Wintermen
And on the other end of the spectrum is a very sober, non-crazed, expertly-crafted character study/suspense thriller. The characterization is strong and believable, and from my reading in the area, spot on, from a cultural standpoint. Of course, most superhero readers are going to be disappointed, as there hasn't been even a single page of caped heroic, though there's been a few panels of flashbacks here and there. This story could easily be transplanted into today's environment and work just fine (though I don't know how long that will hold true), which does make me wonder why Wildstorm's putting it out at all (instead of Vertigo as it was originally going to be published there.) This is a dense read, but there's not a lot of fat there; like the lead character, this story is all muscle. Hopefully folks pick up on it before the series comes to a close.
Picking up from where I left off this morning...
Amazing Joy Buzzards, v2 #1
I'd liked the title before, particularly as it wasn't being anything more than what it was: densely-packed fun. However, with this issue, things just jelled in a way they hadn't before. Probably because I'm genetically predisposed to lunge at anything Tesla. With a first line like "We have Tesla's ray," and the looming menace of the mod Spiders, something hit me. And when the book goes horizontal for the road race in Monaco, I was knocked out. It all worked. Sure, a reductionist sees that AJB is The Monkees with vampire robots and Mexican wrestlers, but I'm having a hell of a time with it.
Dr. Ready
Brought to you by Curtis Broadway, the Dr. Ready books defy easy explanation. They're part dream narrative, part spy story, part parable, part symbolist fantasy and all good. If you're looking for a linear story, best turn back now before you're irratited by Broadway's staunch refusal to overtly hook everything together. However, if you want a direct taste of someone else's brainspace (and an entertaining one at that), drop by his site and tell him I sent ya ('cause I don't think you can buy the books anywhere but though him--correct me if I'm wrong, and you happen to see this, Curtis). There's two volumes: Cosmogeny and Casa de Perros. One of 'em is in Spanish, but that doesn't present any barrier to getting the joy from the books. Oh yeah, I forgot the banjos, but there's plenty of 'em. Dig it.
Doomed
Doomed is IDW's shot at bringing back the black and white horror anthology magazine (and really, we need all the alternate formats we can get in this business). It seems a tad steep at seven bucks, though, but the ink doesn't come off on your hands and the paper is mostly a uniform shade of off-white and not blotchy, patchy grey like the old Warren mags of my memory. Also, the blacks print black, which is pretty crucial for horror, really. The stories themselves are okay to pretty good (hard to go wrong when you're adapting the likes of Matheson and Bloch. F. Paul Wilson adapts his own short piece "Cuts," which works well. The art delivers as well, Ash Wood bringing some sketchy brushwork that lends "Blood Son" an allegorical, storybook quality that I've not seen from him before. There's a slight disappointment in Eduardo Barretto's work on "Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls", in that it's not as clean as some of his more recent work (such as on The Long Haul), but it suits the style of the story well enough. Geez, but aren't people who work in the entertainment industry real pricks who get what's coming to them? Oh, and "The Final Performance" delivers a real shock and scare with its twist ending, which I was trying to unravel before I got to it, but then it's Robert Bloch we're talking about here. You demand that sort of thing from his work. The adaptation, however, by Chris Ryall and Kristan Donaldson works very well, desperation and ultimately insanity oozing from the pages.
As for Ms. Doomed, the hostess of the affair, of course she's over-the-top to the point of ridiculousness. That's the whole point. That said, it'd be nice to see that mold cracked and something else worked up. Yeah, it's an homage to the Warren magazines in that regard, but if this is to work, we need to move past homage and make something that's our own. That admonishment could (and should) be applied more broadly to the industry at large as well.
I'll be around for the next issue, though. Hopefully it takes off, or at least gets a sustainable audience. Which is kinda sad when you have to hope for as little as that...
Then Rich Johnston has just made me a very happy man. Word is that there will be a second Seaguy miniseries, that being the hinted at "Seaguy and the Wasps of Atlantis."
Which would make me cackle with glee. Positively cackle!
Back to page layout...
EDIT - Cameron Stewart himself has shot this one down, and he'd be one to know. Sigh.
COMICON.com: DYSART'S SPENDING TIME WITH THE SWAMP THING
As you can tell by the above link IN CAPITALS, that's a link to Comicon's interview with current Swamp Thing writer Joshua Dyshart. Writing Swamp Thing after, say, 1990 or so is really a tricky proposition. Writing it today, even after the reboot, which should have streamlined things, isn't much better. All in all, it's a solid book, and certainly a step or two (or three) away from what passes for ordinary in the Big Two-dominated marketplace. Granted, it's sometimes on the obtuse side, and things are often only made clear upon reading the entirety of the arc, but Dyshart has brought a lyric sense and voice to the book that has been missing since the days of Moore and Veitch's writing. And the art is solid, if not amazing (Breccia is really something once he gets going.)
That said, the book seems to have trouble getting traction in the marketplace (even if you follow Dyshart's admonition to regard the numbers with skepticism), which is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. Expectations for the character, given his pedigree are one of two things: insanely, unreachably high or achingly low. Neither of which really enhance salability. And of course, it's something different, which always goes over big...
Dyshart also talks about his other book, Captain Gravity which comes out from Pennyfarthing Press, and I can somehow never get my hands on. Well, with a trade collection together, hopefully that'll be a bit easier.
Cribbed from Hisham's post at The Great Curve: Creepy Magazine: Issues 1-40.
There's some really lovely stuff up here, by masters of comics and horror both: Frazetta, Davis, and Sutton all on the first page. Some of the work just screams 60s/70s, but a lot of it is timeless, and artists working on covers today would serve themselves well by taking a look.
Like I needed an excuse to pick up this book. I really love how Powell is taking the hulk to troglodytic extremes that we haven't seen since the first issues of the book, where there was much more a Frankenstein vibe to the character. Looking forward to this (and to getting Goon #14, which I missed somehow.)
All-Star Superman previewed at Newsarama.com.
I only just got a look at this, but all you need to see is the first page to see how well Morrison not only understands the essence of Superman's backstory, but can convey it with four panels and eight words of captioning.
That page, combined with cultural osmosis, should give just about any reader enough to go on in terms of apprehending the character. No six-issue origin arcs. No interminably long and ultimately unnecessary explanations of motive and character. Just the essence, and then Superman leaping into action.
Can't wait for this.
Has it really been two weeks? I guess it has. How the time flies.
I spent Thursday of last week up in my old stomping grounds of Los Angeles. Not that I stomped there very long, mind you, but long enough to get a feel for the place. What brought me up there, you ask?
Two things. One, Grant Morrison was signing at Meltdown on Sunset Blvd that evening. And since I was a chucklehead and didn’t know that he was coming to Wizard World, I wasn’t able to get anything signed by him. As it happens, I’m a big enough fanboy to make a second trip to do so.
The second thing was to do some selling. In this case, it was selling retailers on Strangeways. Figure the book is going to be soliciting in a few months, so I could do some legwork and talk to some of the better retailers who I could reach in an afternoon and help my book to stand out from the seething mass that is Previews.
First stop was at Comics Unlimited in Westminster. Well, that was the second stop, really. The first stop was my usual lunch with a friend in Irvine. At Del Taco. But not just any Del Taco. Del Taco #125, which is, as anyone who’s been to more than three Del Tacos is the best of the entire chain. Don’t know if it’s in the water or sunshine or what, but it stands out and above the crowd.
I mention Comics Unlimited because I had occasion to shop there when I was in college, so it was a little intimidating walking in there as a guy trying to sell his book rather than just coming in for the weekly haul. Luckily the guy behind the counter was enthusiastic about new titles and something different, which Strangeways certainly is. Or at least I’m trying to make it such.
My next stop? Well, there were countless opportunities to ride the brakes once I hit the slagheap known as the four-level interchange (where the 5/101/10 collide in a traffic engineer’s nightmare.) And did I mention that I’d dressed for the weather three days ago and not that day’s 80-degree temperatures? Bleh.
Finally the Valley. Got there before three thirty, and that was really a tad too late. Traffic had begun to fuse into a solid mass, both north and southbound (and remember kids, there’s only a limited number of ways through the hills once rush hour hits). I made a quick stop at House of Secrets, which had been recommended to me by Josh Fialkov (he of Hoarse and Buggy fame) as a good shop run by good guys who actively push stuff that’s on the fringes (so long as it’s good).
Funnily enough, I’d shopped there back when I was working as an animator at Netter Digital five years ago or so. They’d moved a couple doors down and condensed a bit, but otherwise remained an outstanding comic shop, giving equal shelf space to mainstream and indies, racking things so that they were easy to get to, etc. You know, all the things that comics shops need to be doing. The guy working the store was again enthusiastic about Strangeways, going so far as to trade me a copy of The Guardian for my ashcan. I can tell ya, I got the better side of that deal. Hell, I got a boxful of these ashcans just taking up space.
I know. That means that I’m not giving them away fast enough.
My last stop in the Valley was Earth 2, which I think is a great store. They’re not the biggest, not by any stretch, but everything is clean and well-presented. Comics are easy to get to and look over (can you believe that some stores don’t let you look through the comic before you buy it? Me neither.) Though neither of the principal partners in the store were there, the gentleman who helped me was well-read in what was going on in comics, and was able to make enthusiastic recommendations of books to the folks who came in (which I can’t stress the importance of). Again, warm reception to the book, and more helpfully, recommendations of other shops to hit up. Of course, my time was running out. I wanted to hit Meltdown well before the signing started, then get down to Cantor’s for dinner.
Dinner at Cantor’s. You just have to do it. Particularly if you’re a pastrami fiend like myself. Which I am.
Traffic, however, did not cooperate. My memory of how things worked years ago didn’t do anything but get me in trouble. I headed into the jaws of death, pulling onto the 405 south of the 101. It ran smoothly for a mile or two. Then shut down.
I kicked myself for not taking Sepulveda. But you live through this stuff. As traffic jams go, it was relatively pleasant, actually. I rolled the windows down and felt the cool breeze of sundown roll through the passs, listening to whatever my iPod felt like playing. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty or wanting of anything in particular. It was an oddly-placed moment of peace, the sort of which is all-too-infrequent these days.
As lovely as my moment of metropolitan zen was, I still had things to do once I got down to the westside. Things to do and not much time to do them. Cantor’s was going to have to wait. I rode from the 405 to Meltdown all along Sunset. And as an aside, if you want LA in a nutshell, just drive Sunset from one end to the other. You’ll get a taste of just about everything, from Bel Air’s creepily totalitarian gates to West Hollywood’s pursuit of all that is trendy and now to Slavadorean nightlife and the folks just hanging along the fringes.
Arrived at Meltdown in time to get some coffee and try to get a hold of someone to show the book to, before Mr. Morrison was set to take the stage (as it was.) Finally managed to hook up with Gaston, who seemed to be in charge of the whole shebang (at least that’s what Parker told me) and, in spite of his splitting head and last-moment preparation for the event, managed to give me a few minutes to talk about the book and look it over.
While I’m here, let’s talk about Meltdown. It’s HUGE. The only place that I know to rival it in terms of selection is Comic Relief. Though Meltdown certainly has more toys and chatchkes (including vintage 7-11 Slurpee cups featuring your favorite DC characters, like . . . Metamorpho and Captain Boomerang? What the?!) There’s also a great selection of art and photography books, as well as minicomics and smaller than small press comics. It’s pretty intimidating, actually. But you know what? It looks like a store that anyone in the neighborhood could and would walk into in search of cultural artifacts of nearly any stripe.
About the Morrison talk/signing, I’m not going to bother attempting a transcript or anything of the like. That would be lunacy. Besides, I already did something like that for Newsarama years and years ago (okay in 2003, at SDCC). And really, there was very little directly comics related content. Sure, there was talk of the iconic take on the new Superman book and some discussion of why he didn’t care for working in Marvel’s street-level universe, but a lot of the discussion was about things like the view from the Fifth Dimension and jump-starting human evolution. Oh yeah, and talk about magic. Or is that Magick? I know there’s a difference between the two, but couldn’t tell you what it is.
Though I can say that I stood right next to Robbie Williams the entire time. Which was weird. Weirder still that he wasn’t recognized by anyone other than a handful of fans after the talk ended. I guess he hasn’t broken in America. Even after “Milennium.”
But I finally have a first edition of Arkham Asylum signed by both of the principal artists involved. Knock one item off my list of fanboy dreams to realize.
So my iPod wasn’t working. That meant I was in a relatively foul mood. Well, it actually was working, but I couldn’t find the little transmitter that let it work with my car radio. All this meant that I was left to the tender mercies of various programming directors of various Southern California radio stations while I trudged through the rain and clogged 405, heading to Long Beach.
Which made a foul mood even fouler. Good thing I’d arrived late enough to miss most of the lines to actually get in to the convention center. If that hadn’t happened, I imagine that I’d have ended up in police custody or the local psycho ward, having killed anyone who looked at me funny.
Maybe that’s an exaggeration. I’m glad it wasn’t put to the test.
The place was pretty full by the time I got there. Far bigger attendance than last year, that much I could tell right off. Surprisingly, there was actually a Marvel Comics booth there, but to be fair, there seemed to be more emphasis on the plotless Hulk videogame. Sure, running around and breaking stuff is all and good, but without something to hang it on, and without something to actually fight, it seems relatively pointless. And if you squinted your eyes, you could see a table where they were having signings and the like. It was nice. Took me back to 1998 or so, when, y’know, Marvel actually had convention presences at shows other than Wizard’s. And just in case you missed it, on the banner, it spelled out clearly: The Marvel Comics Booth.
After that, I ambled over to the DC booth, my mood somewhat lightened. Perhaps mindless violence is theraputic after all. Scanning the layout quickly, I paused for a moment on the Picardian figure wearing a hawaiian print shirt. Yes indeed, it was Grant Morrison. I didn’t even know that he was coming to the show, and I cursed myself further for forgetting my sketchbook and not having planned ahead to bring anything for him to sign. Ah well, such things happen when you’re putting all this together last moment style. Took a moment to chat with him and ask if indeed Vimanarama was written as his take on Bollywood (as well as the whole Hindu mythology angle). I was half-correct. He used some of that sensibility, but was angling for something that covered a bit more of the region, including some pre-Islamic mythology, but ended up moving in another direction. Turns out he’s doing a signing this week in LA. Sigh. More mileage.
Spent some time wandering through Artist’s Alley, which is always more interesting than most of what the retailers at shows have to offer (hot books or trade paperbacks I could get cheaper from Amazon or bootleg DVDs. Okay, some of the DVDs look kinda tempting – T-Rex, Gary Numan, Pink Floyd concerts – stop laughing.) Chatted with Brian from Khepri.com for awhile about his experience retailing (which is decidedly different from your usual retailer) and ran into Rob (1000 Steps to World Domination) Osborne, who’s a prince of a guy.
Finally, I wrapped up the evening by speaking for a while with Heidi MacDonald. Yes, you all read the Beat. Admit it. Not being cool enough to score a ticket to the Sin City screening, I headed back home through the rain, not really in a mood for post-con festivities.
I know. You miss all the fun stuff that way.
Woke the next morning reeking of garlic pizza. That stuff oozes from your pores, I swear. Scrubbed down and headed out after breakfast. If you want to know what I ate for breakfast, then you’re harder up for entertainment than I ever imagined and you should probably get some fresh air and sunshine.
Got there early enough to have to do the line dance, which I don’t remember having to do at all last year. They queued up three lines before running a fourth line all the way out to the street below, it seemed. I spent the time reading the Flight anthology from Image, which I’d bought the previous night. There were some nice set pieces and some nice art, but overall there wasn’t a lot of story for me to sink my teeth into. I know. Such are the hazards of big anthologies. Bengal’s story was probably the best of the bunch, but then I’m a sucker for the era that it was set in. Some other Image work looked pretty interesting, The Expatriate being pretty much at the top of the stack. Solid art, good color, though perhaps a tad lurid. I’ll see how the story pans out when the time comes. The reprint of the Negative Burn anthology and the return of Deadworld tickled my 80s comics nostalgia, and I’ll probably shell out for those when the time comes.
Did some business which I can’t really discuss. No, not in the restroom. Grow up. I’ll let you know what comes of it when the time comes.
Picked up tickets for the screening of Undead and somehow never managed to get around to actually being at the theatre in time for it. Odd how that works. But at least I got to watch some trailers for some Japanese horror flicks that look interesting. And some American ones that did not.
Spoke with the Amazing Joy Buzzards guys and picked up some books from them. It’s a fun comic, which we could certainly use more of. And yes, The Monkees was a big influence on them, in case you couldn’t tell already. I guess they’ve got 15 or so issues planned out, which all tell a complete story. After that, who knows.
I’d successfully managed to kill time until the Superman panel upstairs. And let’s be blunt. The only book that interests me out of the whole bunch is the Morrison/Quitely All-Star Superman, which will be lovely but will be very late. Superman/Batman can be a lot of fun, but I really only read it in trades (and waiting for the softcover really tests one’s patience. What I heard about Morrison’s take on the character was very encouraging. Everyone else spoke well and sounded as if they had a solid grasp of the character and what makes him work, but I’ve never really managed to get into the current Superman books. Perhaps I’ll take a closer look once the new teams get in place. Gail Simone’s book sounds like the best of the continuity-driven books (as does her Supervillian anti-team-up book.) But please, for the love of all that is good and pure, don’t link the books. There’s already enough of them as it is. Don’t make your readers pick them all up.
And Greg Rucka had a few wise things to say about the internet and how it can be a toxic influence on writers in particular. Yes, it’s an enromous time sink. Yes, you can’t take anything written on the net personally, good or bad. And yes, you can’t try to please everyone at the same time. That way lies madness.
Afterwards, I was lucky (and persistent) enough to get a chance to have a relatively lengthy chat with Grant Morrison on a variety of subjects, though a lot of it was boring, process-oriented stuff that would be of little interest to most folks here. Safe to say that he’s one of the nicest professionals in comics, particularly in a convention situation (where there’s plenty of reasons to be so busy as to prove totally inaccessable.) And yes, I did the fanboy thing and gave him a copy of the Strangeways preview saying that his work was one of the reasons why I’m even trying to write comics. Fanboy. Me.
Grabbed lunch and a Guinness, planning my next move. Well, there was the DC panel coming up, and I could sit down for awhile there. That would be good.
Then I made the mistake of checking the DC booth again. What did that say? Dawryn Cooke is appearing in fifteen minutes? Okay, so that’s at the same time as the panel. And the panel is only going to make me fretful and worry about their reliance on big crossovers and event titles. So yeah, maybe I’ll just jump in line and chat with him for a moment then catch the tail end of the panel. Q/A is more fun than the canned presentation anyways.
The thing that I’d forgotten is that Cooke doesn’t just dash off convention sketches. And I saw that some lucky conventioneer got a sketch of old Bruce Wayne from the Batman Beyond series with pencils by Bruce Timm (sitting right next to Cooke) and inks by Cooke. The upshot of this is that I missed the entirety of the panel while standing in line. That’s okay, I got my chance to chat with him and ask some questions of The New Frontier and even learned a couple things (like fer instance that The Center = Soviet Communism) in the bargain. Oh yes, apparently he has a big project coming out from DC that he’s working on now, but won’t officially be announced until SDCC. I could guess at what it is, but he wouldn’t say anything than it was something that he very badly wanted to work on.
Headed home after that. And by “home” I mean, “whichever couch I’m crashing on that night.” Was treated to a viewing of 24 Hour Party People at a friend’s place. It’s a solid movie, if you can take the postmodern conventions at play in it (as well as the bending of various histories going on, but when forced to choose between the Facts and the Legend, go for the Legend. Every time.) It’s at turns hilariously funny and wrenchingly sad, conveying pathos without dropping to bathos. Rounded out the night with a viewing of some New Order concert from 1981 or so. Worlds apart from their more pop sound, both primitive and monolithic. I dug it.
Sunday’s hardly worth mentioning, ‘cause I only stuck around a couple hours or so. I’d done pretty much what I’d come for by then, and didn’t feel like throwing a ton of money away on DVDs or back issues of comics that were triple the price I would’ve paid for them.
And apparently, I wasn’t alone in that. Though traffic was up, buzz on the floor was that business was down, particularly over in Artist’s Alley. I didn’t get a chance to ask the 70s TV stars how their tills were doing, though. I can only speculate as to reasons why. I will say that the alley overall was only about 2/3 populated at its highest point on Saturday, and while guys like Greg Horn and Josh Middleton always had crowds, most everyone else didn’t. Granted, most of them were not the names on most comics-reader’s lips.
Their loss, I suppose.
But the name most heard from the PA’s lips was that of Avi Arad, whose autograph session must have been announced six or seven times after it had started. Guess they just weren’t doing the numbers they expected. Of course, most people don’t even know what a producer does or who Avi Arad is. He doesn’t have the drawing power of a Bendis or a Ross.
The oddest thing that happened to me on Sunday, if not over the entire convention, was that I was asked to sign one of the Strangeways previews. I was caught completely flat-footed. It was beyond strange. I dunno, maybe I’m not ready for this.
Guess we won’t know until October or so.
So let’s see. APE is in a couple of weeks. Guess I better start making some plans.
Last year, I attended Wondercon in San Francisco as a respected member of an comics news site, thus getting me in for free. I didn’t feel anything like a pro or industry member. I wandered about, pingponging and kind of aimless.
This year, I coughed up the entrance fee, had no affiliation with any site other than this blog and was weighed down by a Kinko’s box full of ashcans that I’d picked up at 7am that morning, just before dashing to the airport. Most of the week before, I’d spent putting together the booklet itself, first with low-res files and then with the final art which had just come in after I’d spent a day on the junky stuff. Of course, the finals look so much better, but they also brought the hamsters in my printer to their little digital knees. I was forced to print a page and then reboot the printer to clear memory.
Needless to say, I’ve had better times. But each little baby step was a baby step closer to getting Strangeways off the ground, so I can’t complain. Doesn’t make it any easier, mind you.
So, I cleared the smoke from the smouldering ruin of my printer, packed my things, dropped the kids off at their daycare and rushed to the airport. To find my plane delayed. Non-shocker. I munched an egg and sausage bagel that had the consistency of hot vinyl, added coffee to that to make a viscous mixture that posessed the pH of the Venusian atmosphere. If I twitched while reading Bluesman followed by the recent Black Panther collection (of the Kirby run, which has SO MUCH to do with the new take on the character that Marvel’s recently brought out, doncha know?) it was the bagel’s stubborn refusal to digest, and not a lack of quality on the part of the reading that fueled my discomfort.
Jeez, my grammar teachers would kill me if they saw that. Anyone wanna diagram that bad boy?
Landed, got my car with little fanfare and headed out to the big city, head filled with starry dreams. Which were immediately crushed when I found out that Paris Hilton had cancelled her convention appearance. I guess she found out it was a comics show or something. Yeah, fuck you too, Paris.
Made my way over to artist’s alley, as that was my primary destination. I had collaborators to talk with. Dig that. Co-lab-orators. Cool. In this case, it was Jeff Parker (who’s doing character design, logo and covers for The Ward) and Steve Lieber (who’s doing covers for the first story arc of Strangeways). Can I say that? I guess I can. I just did.
Jeff knows what the hell The Ward is about, and so far as I’m concerned he nailed the feel I wanted out of the designs. Should I post one? Maybe later on. I’ll let the suspense build. I also read over his pages from Detective Comics, which were damn nice and funny as hell and paid off beautifully. Too bad they’re not going to run. Apparently they were pulled at the last moment, which is a damn shame. Though his backup stories featuring Alfred in his secret agent days are still happening, as is his Escapist story, which is just beautiful. Jeff himself was filled with good humor, even if his energy had been sapped by his young son over the last several weeks or so.
Steve was his usual fount of energy and goodwill, virtually daring passers-by to hit him up for a sketch or a look at any of his fine wares. He’s a true professional, even if he dresses better than most of his editors. Or is that “especially”? Ask him nicely and he’ll show you pages from his collaboration with Jeff Parker, entitled “Underground” and appearing in the soon-to-be-released Four Letter Words anthology from Image (as well as to be done up as a standalone OGN later on down the road.) Steve also shared with me the secret of working a table, which I may perhaps share will you all a little later.
Having arrived late in the day, I dashed off to catch the Wildstorm/Vertigo panel (missing a fair bit of it in the process, like all of the Wildstorm stuff, which boiled down to “Yes we have plans for The Authority and no we can’t tell them to you.”) I have to say that the q/a session was the highlight of the panel, primarily due to the precence of Howard Chaykin. You wanna know how we got where we are in comics today? Ask Mr. Chaykin, kids! He’ll give you the straight dope, unvarnished and totally without malice. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I’m not the biggest fan of his writing (heretical, I know), but damn, if I bought DC, I’d put him in charge posthaste. There were a handful of Vertigo projects that looked intriguing (The Fountain among them, for Kent Williams’ beautiful art as much as anything else). What I was really hoping for was something that would jump out at me and scream “I will appeal to people who don’t buy comics already.”
Still waiting for that. The DCU panel the following morning did nothing to satisfy that hope, either. In fact, it sorta did the opposite. All ballyhoo about Countdown #1 being 80 pages for just a buck aside (of which there was PLENTY), DC’s plans (with but a handful of exceptions) scare the heck out of me. “Continuity is very important” said Bob Wayne. Continuity isn’t important. Characters are important. Stories are important. Big events that are driven by plots masquerading as character studies aren’t. Yes, I’m being arbitrary and unfair and I haven’t even read these things because they’re not out yet. But I have to call it as I see it. When you have four miniseries building out of the same event, I get a little worried. When I see books being sold on the basis of our favorite nostalgic characters being put in false crises and tugging at fan heartstrings, I get a little worried. The only thing that I saw that gave me any hope was the cover All Star Superman #1 (which you can see right here. Though I suspect that it’ll still be a tough sell to non-comics readers.
Unless DC goes to great lengths to get the All Star books out in outlets beyond the DM, it’s going to be a big gamble. I can only hope that there’s plans in that direction, but I have to admit that I didn’t have the guts to ask (and who am I do deny someone asking their questions in the limited time we had).
Oh and yes, I’m aware my blanket statement about crossovers above quite likely applies to Seven Soldiers of Victory, which I’m dearly looking forward to. Oh well. I like the idea as much as nearly everyone else on the planet, but I’m guessing that it’s not going to prove to be a huge seller. Sadly, Grant Morrison only sells big numbers when he’s on big franchise characters. Sure, Superman will probably sell a ton, and stands a good chance of being the top of the comics market that month, but you know what? The comics market isn’t all that big, and the characters in Seven Soldiers aren’t that well known, for the most part. That aside, the previews of Seven Soldiers look just great. Mick Gray III’s inking on Ryan Sook’s pencils for Zatana are utterly beautiful. Cameron Stewart’s work on The Guardian are cleaner and more refined than anything he’s done before.
The rest of Saturday was relatively uneventful, though I became a member of the Legion of Substitute Cartoonists for a time, holding down tables while artists got much-needed breathers. Gave me a chance to practice up (because that whole running a table thing is a little trickier than it looks. And I’m such a social guy to begin with.) Spent a lot of time talking kids with other recent and not-so-recent dads. There’s more of us than ya think.
I did manage to run into Larry Young, which was good, as I’d missed the under-the-radar Isotope event of the previous night (and there’s no way in Hell I’m going to try to keep up with James and the Isotope crew barhopping; I accept my limitations.) Passed him a copy of the ashcan and thanked him for the advice he’d handed out both in True Facts and online over the last eighteen months or so.
I should mention that Saturday at the show was nuts. It was incredibly busy, probably due to a combination of the Bendis/Smith panel (cancelled) and the rain driving people indoors. I guess Christian Bale showing up for the Batman panel (among the worst-kept secrets at the show) had something to do with it as well. Walking up and down the dealer aisles became unworkable later on in the day, so I just gave up and hid out, reading Whiteout after getting my recently-acquired copy signed.
After the con wrapped on Saturday, I headed out to grab some dinner with Steve and Jeff, then across the bridge to Berkeley for the Comic Relief grand opening party. All mad props to the Image crew for providing the keg for the event. The night’s brew was called “Tree Frog”, a dark ale, with plenty of bite. Allergic to beer as I am, I allowed myself a second glass it was that good. Chatted with a handful of lovely folks, including the talented and take no guff from anyone Lauren McCubbin, the ultraredheaded Kelly Sue (Fraction) and gentle giant Jeremy Love of Ghettosake Entertainment fame.
And oh yes, I saw as the transparent racks that cradled the store’s comics claim not one, but two victims by savagely grabbing them by the ankles and tossing them to the floor like Chevy Chase. Maybe comics and beer don’t mix after all. Oh, and note to the DJ, Wang Chung is never welcome. I don’t care if everybody wants to have fun tonight or not. Your incessant bouncing between that and “Head Over Heels” and not getting it right just made me wanna hit something.
Don’t get me wrong. Playing the “Batman” theme by The Jam is always welcome, but some stuff just shouldn’t be done.
Rolled in late on Sunday and rather quickly ended up behind the table at Jeff’s spot in artist’s alley just sorta hiding out. Though it was quieter than the previous day, I was ready to be off my feet for a little while. But it was not to be. Mack Daddy Graeme McMillan (you know, that Fanboy Rampage guy. Oh come on, admit it. You read his blog and you love it) tapped me for a quick tour of the place, having just arrived there himself.
Not long after, I ran into James Sime, who as is his nature, was filled with enthusiasm on receipt of the Strangeways ashcan. James is another of those guys who’s been of immense help and support over the duration of my work on this damned thing, so it was gratifying to be able to hand him one personally (particularly as I’d heard he wasn’t going to be coming to the show, for fear of making himself penniless after buying out runs of Iron Man and Captain America. And yet, there I saw him, clearing out runs of those very same comics, before dashing off to track down some Dr. Strange pages that were for sale off in the alley.
Had to make an early afternoon of it, running off to catch my flight back to San Diego. I picked up my son’s sketch (the only original art I picked up this trip out) which you can see here.
Paid too much for a bad meal at California Pizza Kitchen and finally got back home. Nice to get out for a couple days, but just as nice to get back.
Of course, I get to do (almost all) this again in a month for Wizard World in Los Angeles. Ah, the glamour!
Over at Fanboy Rampage, you'll find the state of the art in discussion of kid's comics in the industry. This sparked off by the Michael Chabon keynote speech at this year's Eisner awards.
I've seen a lot of threads over at Fanboy Rampage. But I've never seen one grow so large so fast. Well, beats the hell out of discussing Avengers Disassembled or whatever.
For my own part, an industry (any industry) that isn't recruting a new audience to replace natural audience attrition is staring extinction in the face. Comics (and by this I really mean the direct-marked driven western comics format, but that's a mouthful) can't depend on readers getting hooked in college and continuing on afterwards. And comics sure as hell can't hope for crossover audiences from even successful movie franchises (I'd have thought that this point would have been driven home spectacularly by now, but some people keep on hoping.) Were it not for a hundred thousand comics outlets in the form of gorcery stores, drugstores, convenience stores and spinner racks, there would never have been an audience to support a direct market in the first place.
Years after the introduction of the direct market, there's been a coevolution between the marketplace itself and the fans. The big problem is that only one side of the equation has been allowed to increase. Now, it's turned resources inwards and not outwards. It's been servicing the market that can shell out and purchase ever more expensive floppies and trades, and I can't really blame that, but unless you find a way to keep adding to the audience (and I've not seen any evidence of that), then eventually your burn rate will outstrip any kind of natural market increases.
Is it all the direct market's fault? No. Is it all the comics publisher's fault for writing to their perceived audience? No. Is it the fault of the medium for being painted broadly as juvenalia and not worthy of adult attention? Is it because we, as a society, don't read as much as we used to? No. There's a million reasons why things are the way they are. It can't be nailed down to any one single reason. But if you name a single reason, it's pretty easy to attribute *some* blame to it.
The big question is, what's to be done about it? Convince authors to write more all-ages material? I guess. Though some of them are going to be a hard-sell in that department. Let's face it, some authors and artists just plain *don't* want to write to kids (or even smart books that can be read by both kids and adults: evidence Harry Potter and just about all of Pixar's output on the movie side.) Many creators want to write stuff that was like the comics that they read, only with more blood, sex and politics. I'm not even going to talk about the difficulties involved in getting corporate comics behemoths to change course and do things like market research and consider investing in the future of their medium rather than going after the short-term market-share (because having the #1 book in any given month makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE.)
Brian Hibbs tells it like he sees it in the latest installment of Tilting at Windmills over at Newsarama. This week, it's all about taking a dump in the pantry, or something like it.
In it, there's a call for greater communication between the comics companies and the retailers who sell them (remember, folks, the real customers of the comics compaines aren't the people buying the comics, but the retailers themselves), exhorting that such would break down many of the walls that the comics industry finds itself in. At least where retailers and the publishers are concerned.
As much as I'd like for that to happen, I'm not going to hold my breath. Marvel, in particular, does itself no favors with the "no-overprint" policy, which immediately puts a large part of the financial risk on the retailers. But it's working for them, so I don't see it going away. Both DC and Marvel suffer from oversaturation of their marquee properties, but the publishing schedule is the greater concern to Mr. Hibbs. It's not a problem of having too many X-Men related titles, it's a problem that they're all coming out clustered together (like nine of them in a single week.) Same goes for Batman titles, I'd wager (though perhaps in not such an extreme manner.)
Of course, the biggest problem is that the DM is unfortunately dependent on the stream of titles coming out from the big two. Conversely, the big two are beholden to the DM as a whole to buy up all that stock. The two have co-evolved to a point where one sneezing gives the other stomach cramps (or something.) I've been to Comix Experience, and the majority of its stock isn't in the big two (in terms of volume of titles). At least it didn't seem that way, but I suspect that they'd be hard-pressed to make ends meet without the revenue stream from Marvel and DC.
And before I go any further, none of this is intended on a diss of Mr. Hibbs or his store. We have disagreed on, most notably, the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy, but it was far from acrimonious.
At this point, I don't see either of the big two changing their minds for the simple fact that they don't have to. Nobody in the DM is going to stop selling their books because of a policy they don't like. As far as I can tell, nobody told Marvel to get bent after the no-overprint policy was announced (which, frankly, is about the only thing that would have gotten Marvel to change their mind.) From their perspective, it's a case of "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"
That was rhetorical.
Mr. Hibbs goes on to take on the issue of decompression, with regards to value for the money, and I'm not quite sure I agree with his view:
You’ll notice a lot of people complain about prices of comics. And while the increasingly decompressed storytelling methods we’re embracing often don’t yield a good return when comparing dollars to time, I think that the real problem is aggregate pricing – the final total when they come to the register and they gasp in sticker shock. That’s what happens in weeks with 9 X-Men books and 5 Batman titles.
It's not an issue of aggregate pricing. It's an issue of perceived value. I don't know a lot of people who are actually buying all 9 X-titles or all 5 Batman titles whenever they come out in a given week. I realize that I hang out with people who are likely statistical aberrations when it comes to the comics market, so I've a skewed view. What people are irritated with is the fact that they're not getting a story for three dollars. They're getting an episode. A chapter. Sometimes just a scene. I don't care how meaty it is: a scene isn't worth that kind of money unless the art is AWESOME.
And that doesn't happen very often.
Mr. Hibbs talks some more sense here:
It’s really easy to kill the golden goose – as we’ve been busy proving again and again through the years. Not only have we strangled existing franchises by not having the slightest thought for market forces, but we’ve created a circumstance where it’s almost impossible to launch new works because they arrive into weeks where all of the consumer’s cash has already been vacuumed out of their pockets.
I'd add to that the fact that publishers have largely been priming the audience for more of what they're already delivering. That makes for a spiral path. And as anyone who's read Uzumaki knows, that's bad news.
Why I read comics.
Well, superhero comics, anyways.
Boy, scanning double page spreads is something of a pain. Anyways, the above, for folks who can't identify it, is the titanic, yea, apocalyptic battle with the Anti-Dad, as depicted in issue #1 of Seaguy (by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart doncha know). I was blown away by this page when I read the comic and was doubly knocked out by it when I saw the original art. This is the sort of thing that sparked my imagination when I was a wee nipper, lurking around spinner racks and pawing newsprint, hoping for a glimpse into the amazing, the awe-inspiring, hoping for a blast of pure imagination.
Yes, I'm a nostalgic sot, I'll admit. Self-doubt and internal monologue make for meatier stories (sometimes, when in good hands), but there are times that I want a hit of something a little stronger, and dare I say it, a little more fun. Dour and troubled superheroes (and villians) might be the vogue, but they sure get old.
So, anyways, I'm at the SDCC this year, and I walk past the Splash Page Art booth, and of course I have to take a look at Cameron Stewart's books there. And of course, there's THAT PAGE right there in front of me. I could try to talk myself out of it, but there just wasn't any point. Sitting right in my hands was the very sort of thing that got me hooked on comics in the first place (granted, in a slightly different incarnation.) Sure, superheroes are dumb and peurile and dopey, and I don't read nearly as many of their adventures as I once did, but I didn't argue. When you have a visceral reaction like mine, you pay attention to it.
Now the original art awaits a nice presentation and a favored place on my wall. Life's okay like that.