D.O.A.: The "Comic" -- Exhibit III

The third in a series of posts examining my favorite pamphlet comics of the decade



Solo #3, by Paul Pope, edited by Mark Chiarello. Published by DC Comics, April 2005.

The best comic series of the 2000s? I’m not going to name one. Too many different factors in play, too subjective, too contentious a task for my blood. I’m not even calling these nine pamphlets the “best” for those exact reasons. And there were a number of truly great series this past decade.

However, there’s only one series with more than one of its issues in this list, so make of that what you will. The series in question is editor Mark Chiarello’s Solo. (Expect my post on another issue in a few days.) Solo was the biggest commitment made this decade by either of the “Big Two” to capital C-A Comic Art; a 48-page canvas given to a different master artist every two months to do whatever they pleased with – each issue a four-color trip into a great artist’s headspace. Some played with DC’s stable of super-icons, some focused on more personal stories, but the best issues of Solo were the ones that melded the DC library with an unmistakably individual approach to its portrayal. This is one of those issues.

The selection of artists showcased in Solo was and remains a testament to Chiarello’s unparalleled taste. He picked serious craftsmen with greater skill and less public profile than DC’s fan-favorite superhero scribblers, but he was also careful to select those with a good deal of mainstream appeal – at least until the book’s cancellation was announced. Solo’s willingness to wedge itself between the comics industry’s cracks made it one of the most unique series in recent memory. Was it a superhero rag or a curated art-comic? Were the artists work-for-hire hacks or elite auteurs? Solo was always none of the above, and that was its charm.



Perhaps the Solo artist who best exemplified the book’s in-betweenist aesthetic was Paul Pope. One of the most purely talented comic-makers of his generation, Pope has admirers on both sides of comics’ superhero/indie fan divide. His critical acclaim is almost unmatched, but his comics have sold rather modestly – especially before his 2006 Batman miniseries introduced him to a wider audience. Pope’s usually black-and-white, creator-owned stories of human drama and emotion are some of the most affecting the medium has seen in quite a while, but he also keeps a foot firmly planted in the superheroic side of things. Neither the arty nor the corporate aspect of the comics business can quite claim him as its own. The only setting that he’s ever truly made sense in was Solo.

If the personal, almost achingly human side of Pope’s stories kept him a step away from being a simple superhero artist, it was the aesthetics of his art that kept him plugging away at the capes and cowls anyway. Pope seems to physically need to draw the human body in action, and he excels at it.



His long, lithe figures seem capable of any possible motion, but still heavy with the weight of reality. His figurework and choreography make his superhero fight scenes some of the best in the business, and he has a rare gift for action layouts. Pope’s best stories are those which meld his affinity for superhero art with his strong-yet-sensitive authorial voice, giving readers the maximum effect, as he does in his Solo issue.

The issue kicks off with a tale of yesterday’s superheroes – the Greek demigods. Pope gives us a dangerously skewed take on the tale of the king of Minos and his bovine child, with a sympathetic, helpless Minotaur and a psychopathic Theseus. The story thunders with the vigor of ancient times, panels filled with waves crashing, blood flowing, flames raging, Pope’s calligraphic brushstrokes delicately pounding out the rhythm of a world ruled by vengeful gods and human monsters. It’s a bracingly new take on a classic tale, and Pope uses it to lay down his aesthetic with no uncertainties: this comic will show us a world simultaneously grander and more human than the one we’re used to.



Then we are snapped back through time and into the apocalyptic future of another classic tale, the origin story of ultramodern war god OMAC, Jack Kirby’s most confrontational creation. Pope eschews revisionism here, though, instead giving us a near-exact copy of Kirby’s original story. The difference is in the art alone, and what a difference! While Kirby’s OMAC illustration conveyed an abrasive, machinelike detachment from men and their concerns, Pope’s art is hot with humanity, bringing us scorchingly close to the scenes of destruction that Kirby only cast a cruelly impassive eye on.



Pope’s near-worship for Kirby, evident in his choice to adhere to the exactitudes of the original story like a holy scripture, comes through best in the scenes of epic destruction at its end, where the two creators’ approaches finally unify, as if taken over by the sheer, kinetic cataclysm of the scenes they represent.





OMAC makes a surprise second appearance in the next story, “Life-Sized Monster Ghost”. By far the issue’s shortest and lightest piece, it’s a cute, gorgeously drawn piece of autobiography, outlining Pope’s experience after ordering a plastic phantasm from an advertisement in the back of a 1970s superhero comic.



The product is, of course, less than Pope’s childhood self desired (“I should have gotten the sea monkeys”, he laments), but the story gives us a fascinating insight into Pope’s approach to superheroes, and particularly his decision to use Kirby’s exact script for his OMAC story. These were his childhood myths, not those of Theseus and Ariadne. He believed in them, assured of their truthfulness and veracity right down to the ad copy. These stories are important to Pope, which is why he’ll keep drawing them in the face of little notice from superhero fans and derision from art-comics followers.

But first, the interlude, “En Esta Esquina (On This Corner)”, a slice of life direct from the Lower East Side, in which Pope takes the opportunity to quote another of comics’ grandmasters – Will Eisner. Working backwards from a scene out of Eisner’s A Contract With God, Pope constructs a mélange filled with slices of lives that read like a hybrid of Roberto Bolano and Ernest Hemingway. The art cools down as well, going from action to half intimate character studies, and half painterly compositions.

It’s over after six pages, but we want more, we want to stay on the corner Pope depicts forever, and let a long time pass us by there instead of just one night.

The story stays with us long after we close the comic.



Pope’s cover of Eisner’s song stuck in our heads.

Then, the encore, as Pope gives in to the temptation that struck almost every other Solo artist and does a Batman story. There’s no revisionism here, either – it’s about as straight up as you can get, Batman and Robin facing certain death before triumphing against the Joker. But Pope’s narration is quite something else, as he dispenses with the usual action-to-action monologue, lets his kinetic art take over the storytelling, and uses his moment in Gotham City to share his ideas about the what resides inside the superhero costumes.

His art is a revelation here, as sensitively colored by James Jean. The characters’ bodies are completely on display, given a showcase beyond even the fetishism of the average superhero comic. Robin sweats, the Joker has stubble, and everyone looks like they’re a person, not a posed avatar. Pope humanizes the myths of his childhood, and it’s a refreshing thing to see.

By the end of the story, there’s no need for the one-panel coda:



We’ve been convinced for pages by now. But either way, that picture sure is beautiful.

D.O.A.: The "Comic" -- Exhibit II

The second in a series of posts examining my favorite pamphlet comics of the decade


Young Liars #16, by David Lapham. Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, August 2009.

They don’t sell pamphlets at Borders.

It’s a major reason that serialized monthly comics seem to be on the way out, this inability to crack the major corporate book chains. So it makes a dry, desert-y kind of sense that one of the best pamphlets of the decade would channel as much righteous rage as possible at the big box stores that are so predominant in modern America. Plenty of people, plenty of potential readers, live in towns where they can only read comics from Barnes & Noble, after all. The town this issue’s story centers around is one of those places: Freedom, Arizona, population 897. One of those 897 is Ronald, a small-minded, slightly strange fellow who runs the town’s sandwich shoppe. He’s got all the loaferish, satisfied complacence of your average American hick – he likes his tiny patch of ground all right, and he doesn’t care what else is out there as long as he’s got what he sees. But two new arrivals in Freedom – Brown Bag, a Wal-Mart-style outlet store, and Lorelei, a dangerously sexy woman – end up being the total destruction of the way of life he was so OK with.

This issue’s story works on multiple levels, so first the obvious. Young Liars #16 is a great primer on how corporate expansion sweeps away small towns. It’s got the cause-and-effect storytelling, the emotion, the human interest – it’s almost like the comics version of a Michael Moore documentary. You feel for Freedom’s people, and Lapham takes extra pains to make them seem as small as possible in the face of the enormity of Brown Bag’s power. All they need is the offer of money, and they curl up like dry leaves. This comic says something about the times we live in, and it leaves much more unsaid. It’s an ideological time bomb, provoking the reader to think more and more about the subjects it broaches. What they used to call “thought-provoking”.

Lapham is hardly content with his devastating exploration of modern America, though.





In comes Allegory on page 12, the walking sex bomb Lorelei sweeping into town just after the new superstore goes up. She’s vice president of Brown Bag, and functions throughout the rest of the story as the personification of corporate evil, ruining Ronald’s personal life just as the new outlet ruins his shoppe.

Ronald’s characterization is dead-on perfect. He’s the man up against things too big for him to even fight, let alone win against, and his mixed acceptance, humiliation, and rage is visceral. His scenes with Lorelei are especially good – she nakedly functions as the trashy appeal of American capitalism, dressed in next to nothing, flirty, calculating, and he can only soldier on through her seductiveness, taking small victories in spitting on her sandwich as he makes it or watching her undressing through a window despite the price these actions will exact later. It’s like Nabokov in parts, like Swift in others, viciously clever; Ronald and Lorelei could easily fill up a few great graphic novels.





But Young Liars was first and foremost a personal series, as tangential and winding as a sack full of tall tales and as bizarre as the pull of bad drugs. Part of the series’ unique charm was that it was impossible to tell what was really happening and what was just fantasy, as the same events played out over and over against different backgrounds. It had an at times indecipherable internal logic that obviously meant a lot to its creator, and certainly did to its small cult audience. It’s appropriate that #16’s most affecting layer of meaning is the one that casts Ronald as Lapham himself, the small comics auteur with a creator-owned book that goes head to head every month with sales juggernauts like Thor and Spiderman. Ronald’s sandwich shoppe goes belly-up after the superstore opens their own sandwich counter:



“They had a $2.99 meal deal. Sandwich, drink, chips. And a cookie. How do they do all that for $2.99?”


Reality is knocking at the door of Lapham’s small personal comic, now, as the $2.99-priced Young Liars was being pushed off the stands by more commercial, less inspired fare. And when Ronald’s sister tells him that the only reason his shoppe went under was because he “put three dollars of meat on every sandwich” as opposed to the cheapest possible amount, it hits hard. It hit even harder last June, when news of Lapham’s series (the one that gives you your three dollars worth of creativity with every issue) had recently leaked out from DC/Vertigo: it was to be cancelled in two issues, and Lapham was moving on to the uniformly terrible Wildstorm imprint for a series of video game-adaptation comics.

Ronald ends the issue pleading with the girl who gave him his first and only sexual experience to remember him, to tell him who he is after his idyllic world has been set to flame. Maybe she doesn’t remember him, maybe she does and won’t admit it. Either way, the outcome is the same. She is the potential reader, and Ronald is Lapham, and she isn’t buying what he’s selling, and yes, it is too late.





Then, the end:



“I got a job at the Brown Bag. Sporting goods department. They made me a manager.”


The commercial failure of Young Liars should fall front and center in any explanation of the pamphlet’s own failure. Vertigo again failed to promote an incredibly creative, intelligent comic, instead putting an unprecedented advertising push into the vapid, unoriginal Vertigo Crime line of hardcover graphic novels. If the publishing imprint that bills itself as the face of intelligent, new, creative mainstream American comics couldn’t save a series that personified all those adjectives, just because it was competing with other pamphlets and not graphic novels, how could there be room for any pamphlets but those featuring cash cow superheroes? Young Liars was a series that deserved so much better, that showed us something new for comics to be before it fell victim to an uninterested public. This issue has everything that made it such an indelible read; unforgettable characters, crackpot conspiracy theory, skillful world-building, truly deep meaning, and a thick, swampy surrealism that puts Daniel Clowes in the shade.

But it was one of the final issues of a series whose cancellation had already been announced, a series dead in the water. As that, Lapham’s story takes on an almost mythical dimension; a metafictional rebel yell, screaming out at everything wrong with the market forces that govern the comics industry. This issue is a blazing streak of brilliance scored across a medium that is content to push mediocrity. Lapham was going out, but he wasn’t going before he got his jabs in at the system that screwed his series. Young Liars #16 is an object lesson in human rage at the inhumanities that govern our lives, as right and brilliant and perfect as a big fucking loogie in a rich bitch’s sandwich. At least they couldn’t cancel this.

D.O.A.: The "Comic" -- Exhibit I

The first in a series of posts examining my favorite pamphlet comics of the decade


Vertical, by Steven T. Seagle, Mike Allred, & Philip Bond. Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, December 2003.

The pamphlet is dying for a lot of reasons – public perception and economics, mostly, as I detailed in my introduction to this series. But there’s another reason, too, and it’s quite important, if not quite as apparent. Not only are all of this decade’s mainstream-market comics hits not pamphlets, they aren’t shaped like pamphlets, either. The pamphlet is a little too big to be portable, a little too small to be luxurious, whereas manga volumes fit in your pocket, webcomics fit in your phone, and graphic novels are increasingly given the deluxe, hardcover art book treatment in whatever size the artist chooses. Pamphlets offer little in the way of competition besides being tangible and cheap. But for a clearly outmatched format, the pamphlet did little to diversify this decade. It seemed every “new idea” it manifested itself in was just a rehashed old one, from the ‘70s redux of Marvel and DC’s 80-Page Giants, to the Golden Age-flavored disaster of Image’s Next Issue Project, to the newspaper page nostalgia of Mark Chiarello’s Wednesday Comics, to the few who tried Frank Miller’s 300 approach out in horizontally-oriented pamphlets.

But – blink and you’ll miss it! – there was at least one actual innovation, Steven Seagle and Mike Allred’s one-shot Vertical. Twice the height and half the width of a normal comic, it was a unique, stylish object, with a smart, eye-catching cover that was seemingly designed to be noticed on the subway or the bus. I would encourage readers who own the comic to try taking on public transport some time to test out that assertion, but sadly, Vertigo put no promotion whatsoever behind it, despite the fact that it was drawn by an X-Men artist and a Superman writer, and given that its odd dimensions meant very few stores knew quite what to do with it, sales were very poor indeed – enough that few of you probably noticed it at all. It’s been completely forgotten now, never reprinted, never fondly remembered or critically-reevaluated; dust in the comics industry’s wind.

And it was brilliant.

Vertical is the best “entry-level” comic I can think of. It’s incredibly ripe for reprinting – a pair of hard covers, a $7.99 price tag, and a decent promo campaign and this could sit comfortably on many a teenager’s bookshelf beside volumes of One Piece. It’s a romance comic, which has somehow become incredibly novel in the American industry, and Seagle’s script is smart and perfectly pithy, with readymade characters and just the right amount of interplay between real life and something slightly more interesting.





It’s the tale of Brando, a suicidal romantic, and Zilly, an aspiring actress, two hangers-on at Andy Warhol’s Factory during its mid-1960s peak. Their story is better written than anything on TV, and the characters’ sweetness works with the setting to make the comic incredibly charming. Brando is a great protagonist, lovable and attractive, with just enough mystery to make him enigmatic as well. We want him to find the inner peace he’s been jumping off skyscrapers in search of, but at the same time we’re frightened about whether the romance that shapes the book’s plot is going to lead him to it at all. It’s exactly the kind of uncomfortable fascination we get from following our best friends’ love affairs, and it can provoke the same kind of emotion. Two young, attractive, exceptional people letting their irrationalities and emotions sweep them into drastic situations – this is the comics equivalent of a great summer pop song, the kind you remember for the rest of your life.

Allred and Bond’s art is perfectly suited to this material, playing with the format when it aids the story, as in Brando’s 21-inch fall from the top of a building, and other times just trusting the modified six-panel grid that Vertical’s tall, thin pages lend themselves so wonderfully to, building up a rhythm as irresistible as anything the Velvet Underground ever laid down. Allred’s art is just right for the setting, too – he exercises his inner pop artist all over the place, from the album-art-looking long shots to Zilly’s monochrome screen test.





The whole thing, stylish cover and all, feels like something Roy Lichtenstein might have come up with if he had actually deigned to make a comic while he was busy copying them. It’s nostalgia that’s somehow more modern than what passes for modern now, especially given Seagle’s slick handling of 1960s New York, which is refreshingly free of cliché, but still romantic enough that we want to throw on our turtlenecks and make it back there somehow. This comic is a four-color version of every cool teenager’s dream world, and it’s an absolute travesty that it didn’t reach more of them. This is the kind of virtuosic pop that changes the lives of smart kids with big dreams, or at least inspires them like crazy. It’s a perfect advertisement for the comics medium.

And it must be said -- we just about fall in love with Zilly from the moment she first shows up:





Vertical is a flash of brilliance that went unheralded, but it pointed the way to a newer, stronger pamphlet, one that stood a better chance of surviving the 21st century than the one we’ve got now. It is exactly what it is – the story is pitch-perfect at pamphlet length, and the format and art just couldn’t translate to a computer screen or a Kindle. A beautiful, different, exceptionally well-produced comic book, Vertical is a wonderful example of what comics are capable of doing outside of fantasy or autobio. Things like this are the mainstream that comics should have, and while this one in particular strikes me as a huge opportunity that Vertigo failed to capitalize on with good marketing, comics readers should count themselves lucky that we get stuff this good at all.

D.O.A.: The "Comic"

The single issues of the decade

We stand poised between eras.

The first decade of the 2000s has ended, and the beginning of the ‘10s is as good a place as any to mark the death of the single-issue comic book. The past decade has seen unprecedented sales of comics through mainstream outlets in the form of the so-called “graphic novel”, in addition to a wellspring of new ideas introduced through the format of webcomics. Superhero movies and New York Times write-ups are merely the icing on the cake. This was the decade comics went normal.

But as the medium moves further into the worlds of high-art acceptance and commercial popularity, it is simultaneously leaving behind its traditional mode of delivery. There were a raft of comics that made considerable splashes in mainstream circles this decade – Naruto, Watchmen, Achewood, Persepolis, the reprinted Krazy Kat, et cetera – and though each suddenly-popular book was different in its own way, every one of the books that played big to new readers had something in common. People weren’t calling them “comics”.

In the reality that is the 2010s, it seems clear that “graphic novel” – a marketing term designed to disguise comics as something that might appeal more to adults – is going to eat the American comics industry. It grew with the Barnes & Noble sections that bore its name, it rose with every superhero movie that used it in advertising, and it reached the level of some kind of cultural force in 2009, when Watchmen took over the world and Asterios Polyp tore out every critic’s heart. You don’t even hear Marvel and DC talking much about producing any “comics” now, at least not anywhere outside of the fansites and conventions. With the bookstore trade in “graphic novels”, and the parallel rises of kids’ manga and webcomics, it seems the only place left for “comics” is the traditional, superhero-swamped, Diamond Distribution-dependent specialty stores. Probably the places that are least likely to attract new readers, especially now that free, online-only comics are gaining more and more of an establishment infrastructure.

Here we are at the beginning of a new decade, one in which the future for the comics medium seems brighter than it ever has been. But the 2010s also seem to be the decade in which the “comics” format will peter out and die.

So what are “comics”?

I’m using the word “comics” (in quotes) to refer to a specific format common in the medium of comics (sans quotes). Comics encompasses multitudes – it is serialized magazines, newspaper strips, “graphic novels”, manga, European albums, webcomics, hardcover reprints, and a whole lot more. Comics is a medium that employs sequential pictures, and often integrated text, to convey a meaning. Two panels of Peanuts is comics. So is 4500 pages of Fruits Basket.

But “comics”, as used here, refers to the format for comics that was created in the 1930s and possessed utter market dominance for the rest of the 20th century. Despite plenty of effort by plenty of people, it is probably still the format most Americans think of when they hear the word “comics”: a stapled pamphlet of about 30 four-color pages, priced to sell to children, basically designed as a moment’s cheap entertainment.

This format was comics for more than half a century. It provided the gestation period for the art form that now dresses in grownup clothes and cuts a swath through pop culture. The direct-sales market, a network of specialty retail outlets monopolized by Diamond Distribution, has provided its economic support for the past thirty-odd years. It is a shrinking medium, one ill-suited for mainstream bookstores and Amazon.com. It is a whipping boy for industry pessimists, superhero haters, and the medium’s critics. Publishers of more “serious” art-comics fled from the pamphlet in this decade. Seven of the nine comics featured in the series this post introduces were published by the business’ “Big Two” of Marvel and DC, and that isn’t because those publishers were the best of the decade (they weren’t) but because by the end of 2009 they were the only publishers releasing pamphlets in any significant quantity. By the end of the 2010s, the “Big Two” might be the only ones using it at all, and even then it will certainly be in a much smaller capacity than they employ it in today.

But for now, it survives, and that is a good thing. There is something special about the “comicbook,” known also as the “floppy” or the “single issue”. It is incredibly cheap to produce, and it is a populist medium, much more approachable than the often cumbersome “graphic novel”. More comics have been released in pamphlets than in any other format. Much of the comics medium’s history, many of its best works, are only available as single issues. Serialization has sharpened generations of comics storytellers’ skill sets by subjecting them to ruthless release schedules that demand quality in tandem with precision. The abbreviated length of the pamphlet has produced a storytelling method unlike any other, unique to the comics medium – one economical and fast-moving, yet fluid and capable of jaw-dropping dramatic range.

Comicbook collecting has been ridiculed into a social disease by those both inside and outside the industry, but it is comics fandom’s logical conclusion. There are only so many Mauses to read before one must go in search of the rare and the apocryphal. Digging through back-issue bins for hidden treasure will never cross over to a mainstream audience in the way that being seen reading a Chris Ware book has, but nevertheless it possesses a charm all its own. The feeling of Silver Age dust and ink on the fingers. The method of quick-flipping a box full of comics with a hand motion that takes years to develop. The smell of old cover stock. The obsessive joy to be found in piecing together a run of a series. These experiences are part of the fabric of what it is to partake in comics, which can be the most sublime of all art forms. The momentary nature of the current issue of a monthly periodical, distributed often enough to be vitally of-the-moment, but with enough time between releases for the authors to sit back and construct something that feels timeless. These too will be lost when the pamphlet is discarded in favor of spines and pixels. And that is a tragedy.

It's a scrappy, punk-rock, imperfect format that is uniquely suited to the medium it purveys. It feels like comics more than any hardcover book could. It's the equivalent of singles in music -- three minutes, 22 pages, to launch ideas, to play out themes, to display virtuosity, to detonate. Room only for what is necessary, nothing more. Geniuses of the medium walked here, and many of them walk here still, where the marks made by Kirby, Moore, Kurtzman, Eisner, Krigstein, Miller, Shelton, found release. This is history. This is the medium's past, if not its future, and it deserves appreciation for that if nothing else. Are we really to cheer the end of the pamphlet, to kick dirt over its ignoble grave? Let us not. Let us give it the elegy it deserves. Let us appreciate it, if only with the fatalism that we enjoy a sunset with.

What will follow, then, in honor of the last decade in which the pamphlet held sway over the industry (or, depending on perspective, the first decade in which other formats got more attention), is a list of nine great “comics” from the 2000s. They are just flops of stapled paper, spineless, disposable, perishable, antiquated – but they are the best that a classic American format had to offer in its last decade of popularity, and that is important enough, relevant enough, good enough for me.

(The comics are presented here in no particular order. They are not ranked, because to number them would reduce some and inflate others, which is not something I’m interested in doing. They are all the same thing, really – beautiful notes from a swan song.)