Sacrifices

When you're doing the whole "life beyond comics" thing, every little once in a while something pops out of your interactions with other ideas and hits you as something that dialogues with the world of comics. Superhero fans see their icons as avatars of the same forces personified in latter days by gods and demigods, partisans of art-comix draw direct lines from the work of canonical painters to modern-day zine makers, and very much so forth. Well hey guys, I got a new one for ya!

Lately I've been reading some about the sacrifice of living beings (often humans) in ancient societies, and more specifically scapegoating. The modern use of "scapegoat" as a single life representative of all that's wrong with a culture doesn't quite catch the term as it worked back when it was actually a thing. More often than not, the human scapegoats chosen for sacrifice or ritual slaughter weren't the reviled outcasts with nothing of value to contribute. When you kill those guys it's culling, which is a like a grosser version of doing the laundry: not an affirmative community-building exercise so much as just making sure your shit isn't getting all nasty. The sacrifices that were seen as serving a positive function usually centered around the killing of a fully assimilated, respected member of the community, one who embodied its values and morals.

Ritual sacrifice (again, culling is a different thing) is a rare occurrence in societies where subsistence is a difficulty, for obvious reasons. In cultures where waste is more or less acceptable, where a surplus has been built up and excess is considered a force to be reckoned with, it's much more common. The basic idea is to kill someone who represents not something bad, but too much of a good thing -- drawing a line to point out the place where something seen as a positive cultural value becomes a negative. An overzealous warrior, an uncommonly fertile woman, a precocious child... be too much of what you represent to people and you become not just expendable, but an example to be made. Think about the word as it's used outside of killing: giving up something important for the greater good. The ethos of sacrifice remains part and parcel of modern American culture: see everything from a nation of McDonald's eaters' revulsion for the obese to the moral condemnations of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and My Lai, which just killed the enemy way too good to be stood. Hypocrisy or demarcating the boundaries of acceptable behavior? U-Decide!

Can you see where I'm going with this one, or do I need to provide a few Helpful Examples?

If you insist...

EC COMICS



That picture up there is "A Man Taken By Surprise", an oil painting done by Bernard Krigstein, the leading artistic light of EC Comics, right around the time the company he worked for was being systematically dismantled by the medium's new self-censorship board. Estes Kefauver's 1954 Senate hearings to determine whether or not comics were the cause of American juvenile delinquency (verdict: unproven) were themselves a form of ritual slaughter, though more of a culling than anything else, assigning all blame for a massively complicated societal problem to a form of artistic expression and attempting to discontinue its practice in order to solve said problem. But what happened in Kefauver's wake was perhaps comics' first, and certainly its most historically significant sacrifice. Rather than submit to government censorship, comics publishers banded together to create a list of regulations that would ensure nothing even remotely objectionable would make it to the pages of a printed comic again.

The new Comics Code included provisions that seemed intended specifically to shut down EC, then far and away the most popular line of books, as well as the closest thing work done in the comic book format had come at the time to legitimate art. In essence, crime and horror comics, EC's bread and butter, were completely illegalized, cutting down one of comics' best ever lines in its prime as well as dealing the idea of comics as art a blow from which it would take well over a decade to recover from. EC was a dangerous company not just for the high murder-and-dismemberment quotient of its most popular titles, but also for its near-monopoly on artistic talent, the freedom it allowed its artists, its tendency to discuss the base, nasty realities of the hard-capitalist comics industry in its letter columns, and the gorgeously illustrated polemics for racial harmony and social change it led a string of Shock SuspenStories issues with. EC was too good for comics: too literate for a pulp medium, too controversial for an economy based entirely on depriving kids of their dimes and nickels, and too powerful for less successful publishers to deal with. Though it personified a massive amount what was good -- and accepted as good -- about comics as an art form, there was a point at which the community at large believed that if EC didn't go, it would be the entire industry. And so it went.

ROB LIEFELD



In the comics community's internet age, there's no more reviled cartoonist than Rob Liefeld. Though his comics still tend to sell okay, the drop-off from his heyday at Image Comics has been millions of readers, quite a few of whom seem to truly hate his guts. Of course, the dropoff in readership for comics in general since 1991 or thereabouts also numbers in the millions, thanks to the collapse of the market for speculation on "collector's item" issues and an endless amount of terrible comics pumped out to service said market. There's a desperate current underlying a huge amount of conversation about comics, a hysterical tone that whines where did all the readers go? The reality -- bad comics and worse marketing -- is far too systemic to be changed without getting rid of at least ninety percent of people employed by publishers of sequential art in America, which of course will never happen. So in the blighted field comics has become, it's much more convenient to find a whipping boy, someone who rode the rise to a high enough level that he can be blamed for the fall.

Enter Liefeld, who set sales records with hyperkinetic, often logic-free comics whose amplified exteriors belie a deep knowledge of exactly what the commercially lucrative audience of teen and pre-teen boys is looking for. The claim that Liefeld's massively copied but never quite duplicated style is what "ruined comics" is as common as any topic of conversation in comics circles, and blaming the entire economic cycle of boom and bust that accompanied the speculator craze on him is similarly de rigeur. In this, Liefeld is a scapegoat as we use the term today: an individual who, for the community, embodies all that's gone wrong since better times.

What qualifies Liefeld as a sacrifice in the more traditional sense is the substance of the criticism against him, which focuses not on his exploitation of the artificial speculator market, but his style of comics making. Both the vastness and extent of fan hatred for Liefeld come close to paradoxical when one considers how easily the majority of comics being published can be tarred with the same brush that covers Liefeld over daily. Criticism of his furious, line-heavy, anatomy-free art style can be applied to fan darling Jim Lee word for word, and the claim that Liefeld's comics are caffeinated, meaningless exhibitions of yelling an fighting is true of just about everything that comes out from a major publisher today. Strangely enough, Liefeld's purity of commitment to liney art and high-octane actionfest stories is what marks him out for abnegation by the very audience that eats such things up. The fan culture's general hatred toward Liefeld is as potent an example of sacrifice to demarcate cultural boundaries as any. We'll canonize overworked art and harebrained stories, the message goes, but only up to the point represented by the work of this one individual.

ALAN MOORE



If Liefeld's rejection by the same fans that once worshipped him is a continuing ritual to inure mainstream comics against what's seen as the "low", fan culture's recent rejection of its one-time chief deity, Alan Moore, can be seen as a similar action brought on by a fear of the "high". In his mid-1980s commercial prime, Moore mashed up what was and remains the beating heart of American comics, the superhero genre, with virtuosic displays of literary technique and psychological theorizing. What was even more remarkable than the craft value of Moore's comics, however, was fandom's wildly positive response to them. In doing the same thing Liefeld did (albeit in a very different way) and showing up superhero comics for the hollow farces they all too often were and are, Moore struck a nerve, more or less singlehandedly elevating the quality that fans expected from their superhero stories.

In the masterpieces Watchmen and Miracleman, superheroes were painted as decidedly inferior to, and indeed unworkable within, this new intellectualized approach to action comics. This was the part everybody missed, and despite the occasional brilliance of Moore's post-'80s work outside the corporate genre comics, the overwhelming fan support has never followed Moore into alternative comics. In recent years Moore himself has lashed out at the questionable business practices and low quality native to the superhero industry in a sequence of bewildered, frustrated, but generally eloquent and well-reasoned interviews, fan reaction to which has been overwhelmingly negative. Basically, the comics community has turned its back on Alan Moore, with current fan darling Jason Aaron delivering a hilariously childish, generally well-recieved attack on Moore and literary-superhero-writer heir apparent Grant Morrison making reductive comments about his work into a minor cottage industry. The same people that elevated Moore chose to stay behind rather than follow him beyond the small-minded kind of stories he made his name by reconsidering, and in his absence he's become a mockery, an example of the bad things in store for those who question the governing paradigms of comics, both in fandom and industry. Moore was lauded for telling comics to reach higher, but at some point he just went too high for most readers' comfort.

***

In a sense the ebbs and flows of consumer acceptance and commercial feasibility discussed above are simply native to capitalist industry, which mainstream comics, at least, is very much a part of. (Alternative comics, with its reliance on government grants and emphasis on community support for less-than-stellar work, has its own set of problems.) But the venom with which the comics community greets its scapegoats, and the willingness with which it puts old heroes to the torch, goes beyond simple booms and busts into something more atavistic. We are a sacrificial culture, one that has real trouble burying work that's no longer useful without spitting on its grave, or marking out communal boundaries without unnecessary vehemence. Comics culture's most recent sacrifice, that of Jack Kirby's heirs after they lost the lawsuit by which they hoped to reclaim their father's creations from Marvel Entertainment, may just have been an all-time high in reprehensibility, with fans crawling out of the woodwork to declare allegiance to their spending habits over giving what was due to the man who provided the material for them.

None of this is to say that comics doesn't also practice scapegoating, but that's too big a world for one blog post to even approach. If there's a point to be garnered from shining the spotlight on the sacrifice phenomenon, it certainly isn't anything cheery or positive. Maybe it's just that this is why it's bad when an entire art form can't garner anything but a tiny, fanatical audience: the general shittiness of people living together in a confined space begins to sink in. Or maybe it's that we are such a culture of excess that we are choking ourselves, and really do need sacrifices of some kind, firm boundaries between the comics that are allowed to exist and the ones that have to be done away with, solid statements that there can be and often is too much of a good thing.



You think?

Your Wednesday Sequence 26

New York: The Big City (1981), page 6. Will Eisner.



Over at my Robot 6 column this week I wrote on a page from Will Eisner's criminally underrated graphic novel New York, which has more great examples of one-page comics storytelling than anything short of a great newspaper-strip compilation. I talked about the uniqueness of Eisner's career (he was a man of many hats, to say the least) and how interesting it is that he basically used the same style through all of its phases. Also his formal mastery -- just look how controlled and clear that page is! Anyway, go read the article, it starts like this:

Will Eisner’s transition from superhero comics production lineman to game-changing action comics auteur to early master of the graphic novel is really something of a stunning career path when you think about it. It happened over such a long period of time that it isn’t seen as the kind of bold, unexpected move David Mazzucchelli’s sudden dismissal of Marvel heroes for one-color art comix is; but past Mazzucchelli there isn’t really anyone else who’s had a career in comics that traced so many disparate paths. Imagine, for context, Bryan Hitch cranking out Blaise Larmee-esque underground webcomics 10 years from now, or Jim Lee announcing his intent to take the reins as the new artist of Prison Pit. Read more

Sequence Is Magic

I've enjoyed Jason Shawn Alexander's comics quite a bit, but I think his paintings are even better. I found the image above on his website -- details from a few of his paintings smashed together in one image, not intended as a comic per se. But it works incredibly well as a piece of sequential art, a beautiful comics page. As impressive as each painting is, put together they harmonize, dialogue with each other, even though they weren't made with the intent that that would be what they'd do. Put in sequence, they can't help it. There's an inherent appeal to the comics form no matter what's in the pictures, to simply seeing different sized rectangles set onto one big canvas together. The image above, an accidental comic that still looks incredible, is a great demonstration of that.

Your Wednesday Sequence 25

Tintin In Tibet (1959), page 15 panels 7-9. Herge.



In my latest Robot 6 column, I compared the effects the most influential practitioners of American, Japanese, and European comics (that's Kirby, Tezuka, and Herge) have had on their art form. I also talked about the density of comics pages and how little that factor seems to be thought about or talked about. Then I wrote on the gorgeous sequence above, which might just be my favorite thing Herge has drawn. You can read it all here. Starts like this:

Figuring out the density of a page of comics is one of the most important challenges that a cartoonist faces between idea and finished product, but it’s also one that’s frustratingly tricky to talk or even think about. How does one measure how much happens on a page other than pointing and saying “this much?” And how does a cartoonist decide on the optimum amount of story to convey with each canvas? I’d hazard a guess that most of the time for both reader and creator, these aren’t conscious practices, and the varying densities of different cartoonists’ approaches simply occur rather than being plotted out.

The vast majority of American comics on both sides of the mainstream/alternative divide stick to the rhythm of (roughly) six panels to a (roughly) three-tiered page, sequenced from character action to character action, with maybe three seconds of time depicted in-frame and five or so passing in each gutter. Japanese comics tend to move a little quicker: a few less panels per page, a bit less time taken up in each individual one. European comics, on the other hand, typically have much more density than their American counterparts, with more panels per tier, more tiers per page, and more story time taken up in each image. Some of the difference in density of information can be chalked up to the average size the comics are published at: in Japan, digest-size books are most commonly the final state of comics, so less is crammed onto the page than in American “comic-size” comics, which in turn can fit less than album-size European books. Read more

On The Trail of Martin Millard

My back-issue find of the year surfaced at the comic shop in Los Angeles, wrapped in painted Jerry Moriarty covers and printed on heavy black-and-white paper stock that recalls the California public school textbooks of the mid-1990s. It's issue number 2 of the Ben Katchor-edited Picture Story magazine, an anthology of comics and theoretical pronouncements that takes up the high intellectual demands placed on the reader by Art Spiegelman's Raw (generally accepted as the opening salvo in the explicit positioning of Comics As Art), but with none of that publication's reactionary posturing or uptown snootiness. By the time of Picture Story's 1986 release, Raw had done a great deal of the hard work for it: no longer did a magazine of comics have to distance itself from superheroes or address the worthwhile aspects of commercial comics' history. All Picture Story does is present the form as it is and could be, with short after stunning short putting forth a wide-ranging but aesthetically unified vision of comics as the medium for the "common thinking man", approachable and unpretentious but full of ideas about drawings and stories that can't quite be contained by any other art form. In that sense, it's one of the earliest examples of the modern comics anthology, in which the material's worth is a given and all that matters is the context and presentation of it.

But the most surprising thing about Picture Story #2 is that amid a treasure trove of stellar work by All-Time Great Cartoonists like Katchor, Moriarty, and Mark Beyer (not to mention the mind-expanding contributions of Peter Blegvad), the best comics come from a complete unknown by the name of Martin Millard.



Two short stories by Millard, one five pages and one four, bookend the issue, unified by thematic similarity. The first, "Truck Journey", is exactly what it sounds like, a wordless document of a delivery truck driver's passage from London to Dover through the thick darkness of an English night. The driver stops for a cup of coffee, continues, drops off his delivery at the despatch office in Dover, and spends the night in a hostel before refueling his truck and heading down the road once more. The quiet tone and observational quality of the tightly gridded pages bring Chris Ware to mind, but the flawless mid-20th century period detail and clusters of dense, energetic pen lines also have much to do with the work of Eddie Campbell. Millard's "Truck Journey" pages balance flow and density with an ease that's all his own, however, switching from strings of close-up coffeehouse snapshots to the widescreen gloom of a truck barreling through moonglow, headlights blasting pure white onto the road as it blurs by. The pull of the comic comes less from the story information than the impulse to see how Millard will draw whatever he draws next -- artist and subject are perfectly matched here, the craggy, casual virtuosity of Millard's pictures bringing a pin-point clarity to the gray English highways we can all see hazily somewhere in our imaginations.

There is an intense tangibility to Millard's penwork here, which trails long, gently unspooling lines through open areas of white space and stamps down bold shapes filled with the near-black of his tight crosshatching. These are drawings whose existence as lines made on paper is just as important as their depictive quality: the fuzz of light shadowing marks on a pant cuff or the blots of stubble on a pubgoer's cheek are instances of ink that catch the eye as much as the full effect of the panels holding them. Millard's unruled panel borders, his use of hatching to fill black space, and the resolutely handmade stray marks scuffled across his backgrounds all help bring the comic close to the aesthetic of early observational film -- wavery, grainy, and somehow truer to life than what our eyes show us most of the time. Though an aching nostalgia runs through "Truck Journey", it isn't due to any sentimentalism on Millard's part. Rather, the world he depicts is so beautiful and feels so close at hand that the reader can't help but wish to have been a part of it whenever it was real.



"A Trip To Wales", the second story, goes even further into the documentary roughness of "Train Journey", stripping away even the thin coat of illustrative polish covering that story and leaving the bare bones of a diary entry in comics -- one which isn't quite discernible as either fact or fiction, taking up residence in between in the territory occupied by the best yarns. This time the journey referred to in the title is taken by train, from London to Milford in the Welsh countryside. The narrator (who himself is never glimpsed, acting strictly as the conduit for the reader's viewing of his story) watches the rain and passing stations from the train, eats "a moderate meal at a high price" aboard it, debarks in Milford, meets an old friend at a pub, suppers at his house, and then takes the train back home. No small amount of warmth is curled in each 20-panel page, the dreariness of industrial Wales counterpointed by Millard's studies of the human bustle beneath the scaffolding and derricks and his detailed descriptions of the food and drink partaken of during the journey. Here, unlike in the previous comic, the story is everything, its smallest wrinkles brought to paneled life for our consideration.

As before, Millard's drawing is the real delight, though what sticks out about "A Trip To Wales" is the jettisoning of the stylistic mastery that runs through "Truck Journey". Each small panel is sketched out with incredibly broad strokes, a few lines implying whole landscapes, the compositions pulled strictly from the world as seen, the camera mounted firmly on the ground and its subjects brought to life with little more than a scribble or two. The casual grace and confidence behind Millard's line is hugely impressive: the story is like a master class in showing as much as possible with as little as possible, and the varying density of Millard's scratched marks betrays a nuanced understanding of tone and texture. The scenes Millard depicts are never less than perfectly clear and readable, as are the pen-in-hand gestures that brought them to life (the squiggles of rendering line in every frame slant down and to the left, giving the whole thing a feeling of speed and unity that makes it hard work indeed to stop reading). Rather than word balloons or text boxes, Millard captions each of his drawings with a few lines of text, handwritten with the same brusque elegance that powers the drawings. It's a trick Kyle Baker would make much use of later in his career, and the breakdown from the jagged refinement of "Truck Journey" to the freehand ebullience of "A Trip To Wales" recalls the similar breakdown that occurs halfway through Frank Santoro's Storeyville -- but Millard was there first in both cases, with these two remarkable comics from 1986.



I came away from Picture Story #2 convinced I had discovered the work of a bona fide Unheralded Genius, a cartoonist whose work stood shoulder to shoulder with that of Katchor and Moriarty while pointing forward to that of luminaries like Ware and Santoro. However, scouring the internet for further Millard appearances was next to useless: he had apparently dropped off the map after his brief surfacing in Picture Story. I could find no comics by him for sale, few mentions of Picture Story and none of his work in it, and hardly any clues as to who the man even was.

But there is another fragment of Millard art in Picture Story #2: a quarter-page advertisement for a minicomic called "Wartime Experiences", showing an observational two-panel gag strip about anti-German paranoia drawn in a style somewhere between that of the two stories featured in the anthology itself. A crudely handwritten note following the comic encourages readers to send four dollars to the Picture Story offices in Battery Park. 1986 was the early days of minicomics, and 25 years is a relative eon for a xeroxed, low-run piece of sequential art to survive over. Needless to say, I myself have never seen a copy of Wartime Experiences, and my attempts to purchase one using the internet were utterly fruitless.



However, I was able to track down what seems to be the sole mention of the comic online. English zine artist Ed Pinsent's online gallery of UK minicomics contains the scan of Wartime Experiences' cover seen below. And not only that, it has information on two other British minis that Millard contributed to. The first is 1989's Ugly Mug #3, which also featured work by Brendan McCarthy collaborator and Fantagraphics publishee Carol Swain. The second is 1988's Fast Fiction #25, the page for which gives the most compelling clues I've found as to Millard's existence beyond his nine pages in Picture Story. The table of contents listed reveals that Millard drew a three-page story called "Sudden Disappearance" for the issue, and the footnote Pinsent provides states "Martin Millard, also a painter, was associated with Jerry Moriarty’s Picture Story magazine." Here, finally, was a concrete link between Millard's brilliant entree into American comics and some kind of presence in the UK comics scene.



From what I understand, Fast Fiction was a long-running minicomics anthology and mail order service founded by notable critic Paul Gravett in the early '80s before being handed off to Pinsent. Sold at bimonthly comics conventions in Westminster and through the post, Fast Fiction was a highly visible and well-remembered platform for the minicomics aesthetic in the UK, as well as a home for early work from prominent artists like Swain and Eddie Campbell. And, as it happened, Martin Millard. Martin Millard, who was also a painter.

There is a website -- oddly designed and apparently rarely updated -- showcasing the paintings of a UK-based Martin Millard, but at such small size and low resolution that it's next to impossible to discern any mannerisms and hiccups of style that might give a clue as to whether this was the same man who drew those brilliant comics a few decades ago. There is no mention of any comics work there, and it's a common enough name. To make things even more perplexing, the website's "Information" page is completely blank. But one of the headings under which Millard's paintings are listed under on the main page is "Multiple Images", a tab which leads to a small gallery of pictures like the one below, all reproduced at miniscule size -- but comics nonetheless, paintings of different subjects set into sequence on a single page, with something of the brusqueness that characterizes the image-to-image sequencing in "Train Journey".



A bit more searching unearthed mention of a Millard art exhibition in Fall 2010 at Potterton Books in Kensington, entitled "Town & Country" -- and a PDF copy of the catalog for the show. The catalog's brief introduction refers to Millard as a "local artist". It also reveals that he graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1975, which places him at the school while Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman were teaching classes there, only a few years before students like Mark Newgarden, Drew Friedman, and Kaz took Spiegelman lecture courses that turned into Raw contributions. If ever there was a place for a cartoonist to have come from, this was it.

Finally, the Potterton Books website led me to this painting, scanned at a size big enough for it to be scoured for clues as to its artist's past. The casual mastery of the black marks are the same, as is the easy facility with shadow and light. But what really does it is the scrawled note captioning the painting, which tells the viewer that this is "13 Mallard Street, Chelsea, the house where the author of Winnie The Pooh lived." It takes a bit of study, but it's recognizable as the same hand that captioned each panel of "A Trip To Wales" with warm, understated descriptions of pictures that barely clung to depiction.

Below that is the signature of Martin Millard, who, it would appear, is a painter living in London.



* * *

NOTE: I've contacted Millard as well as Katchor and Pinsent in hopes of fleshing out this article with some solid information to complement my guesswork and online sleuthing. Hopefully there will be more about Millard available soon.

Developing....

Deathcast: Episode 4

Cover your ears! Another episode of my quarterly-ish podcast on all things comic booky is up right here, and as always it's better listening than whatever you've got the itunes doing right now. Yes, the sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that this episode is hosted at a new url than my last ones, but that was cause they wanted me to pay a hundred dollars before I could record anymore at that address. You don't even want to know what percentage of my yearly income that is. So look for a new podomatic site every four episodes from here forward, I guess. Topics I discussed include:

* Yuichi Yokoyama's new (and impossible to find) book Baby Boom,
* The incredible new Daredevil series and the slightly lackluster new Batwoman series,
* Recent back issue finds, mainly the Ben Katchor edited Picture Story #2, which is the dopest anthology of all time,
* The process I use to draw my comics pages and my own "anxiety of influence" as a cartoonist,
* Russian models,
* Why I don't like/even read any Vertigo comics,
* The most underrated and overrated cartoonists,
* Comics as commodities versus comics as art,
* The moral failings of Grant Morrison's new book Supergods

...and like a million other things too. With topics of discourse contributed by Special Celebrities Tucker Stone, Sean Witzke, and Frank Santoro! Listen up!

Your Wednesday Sequence 24

New Gods (1984 reprint series) #6, page 30. Jack Kirby.



This week on my Robot 6 column, I took a break from the usual program of talking about art by cartoonists nobody's ever heard of to go in deep on a page by the King of Comics himself, Jack Kirby. I used the gorgeous piece of comics above to talk about Kirby's unusual approach to sequencing, the harmonious quality of his overall page designs (just look at those two white panels!), how his action blocking got a lot sharper after his drawing ability degraded, and the way he rarely did the kind of typical choreographed moment-to-moment storytelling that has since become the "correct" mode of action comics. The Comic Book Resources fanboys haven't jumped all over the thread to castigate me for questioning the validity of some of Kirby's choices, so now's the perfect time for you to get over there and check out what I wrote. Starts like this:

The comics-critical landscape that has sprung up around Jack Kirby — often the man himself as much as his work — in the past few decades can be worryingly polarized. Though there’s plenty of good, clear-headed writing on what Kirby did with and for comics, there’s reams more of both hagiographic praise (which is fair enough, because this is one of the great artists not just in comics but of the 20th century) and the-emperor-has-no-clothes teardowns (which is also fair, because no one short of world leaders can really be said to deserve the amount of hosannas that have been heaped on Kirby).

Of the brickbats most commonly thrown at Kirby’s golden legacy, one of the most compelling is that he very rarely “told a story” in the traditional manner with his sequencing. Especially in his action scenes, Kirby’s storytelling style was often simply too wild to support “correct” sequencing, with each panel giving a clue to the content of the next and every prop and figure grounded in recognizable three-dimensional space. In Kirby fight scenes characters transmogrify from one physical state to another between panels, hurl each other across vast chasms of space before clashing again within an instant, and reveal heretofore unknown powers as the conflicts crescendo. Usually there’s just too much going on in a Kirby fight scene for the traditional values of motion tracking and choreography to hold much sway. It’s also why Kirby comics are so verbose: take out the explanatory word balloons and you haven’t a hope of understanding the specifics of what’s going on half the time. What Kirby captured in his action scenes wasn’t the balletic wax and wane of physical confrontation so much as impact after impact after impact. It’s up to his readers to decide how valuable an approach that is, but its undeniable that he did it brilliantly. Read more

Linkin' Park

Time again for our monthly survey of what's bustin' heads on the comics internet....



(holyshit, Frank Frazetta sketchbook page!)

- My boy George Elkind started a comics blog, and he's kicking out the top-drawer criticism with downright wild abandon. Seriously, guys: Broken Windows is already primed to be the new big destination on the comics internet, and George gets better every time he posts something. If you don't know, now you know. So go.

- Johnny Ryan gives with some killer comics-as-criticism on the book I love to loathe, Chester Brown's Paying For it. LOLZZ.

- If you're a fan of art in any capacity, you need to get hip to Rodin's erotic watercolors yesterday. But ESPECIALLY if you're a cartoonist (aspiring or otherwise), absorbing the quick gestures, flat painted color, and above all the godlike confidence on display in these drawings comes close to revelatory. It's the human figure as cartooned -- yes, cartooned, simplified and rendered into a basic assemblage of pure shapes -- by the hands that sculpted some of the most famous bodies of the modern age. That is to say, cartooning by a dude who knows his shit better than anyone to ever have worked in comics. This stuff is up there with Kirby, with Herriman, with Moebius. Worship.

- As the DC relaunch soldiers on, I get more and more skeptical that superhero comics were ever actually a proposition that had something of value to give to the art form. And more and more when I think of the good ones, I think of Bill Jemas era (2000 to 2003, roughly) Marvel Comics. Then I figure that it's just because those were the books I myself was reading when I really fell in love with monthly hero books. Luckily, bona fide Dangerous Minds Tucker Stone and Noah Berlatsky just teamed up for an epic inter-blog discourse on the Cable comics of that time period, and yeah, those things were objectively good. Read to remember/find out why.

- Anybody who knows what this Brendan McCarthy "Ark" comic is (or if it is/was anything at all), drop the knowledge please.

- Michel Fiffe puts together an exhaustive history of the alt-comix world's close encounters with the superhero genre, in an article that's as fascinating to read as at least half the comics it discusses.

- Adam McIlwee put together my favorite comics-related blog post of the year with his Blaise Larmee profile, but I already linked to that one. Fear not: there's a sequel, and it gets so much better.

- My own reaction to the Larmee/McIlwee duel can be seen here.

- If the new Kramers Ergot isn't the upcoming comic whose release you're anticipating most breathlessly, you must know about some shit I haven't heard of. I read this Tom Spurgeon interview with Kramers compiler/prime mover Sammy Harkham to whet my appetite, and then I read this one too. Workin' on an article about Kramers right now, as it happens. When it comes around it'll knock your socks off.

- After forever changing Daredevil and the work of Jim Steranko, the inimitable Robin Barnard turns his xerox-machine-like gaze on... um, me. I got the originals of these in the mail the other day, and good heavens, to behold such beauty is unlike anything but sweetest love...

- Secret time: I read a lot more fashion blogs than comics blogs these days, and this one is my all time fave. Mary Eng probably influenced my writing style more than any other blogger -- she's slowed down on the couture writing lately in favor of equally interesting culture blogging, but the stuff from like mid to late 2010 on is really incredible. Have fun.

- My webcomic Affected continues apace, with chapter 4 having just wrapped up and chapter 5 begun just this morning. Get onboard while the getting's good! I also just posted yet another brightly colored "comic about a girl" to my other webcomics site, should such things be of interest to you.

- Finally, on a more serious note: Dylan Williams, publisher of the excellent Sparkplug Comic Books, has passed away far, far too young. A fellow alumnus of Comic Relief in Berkeley, Dylan first got in touch with me last winter and has comped me Sparkplug books ever since. I got back to LA from New York a few days ago and the latest envelope full of cutting-edge sequential art was sitting on my doorstep with his name on it. A little more than 24 hours later, I found out he was gone. The world's lost a great guy, and comics has lost a hugely important publisher (as well as a heck of a cartoonist). Listen to his Inkstuds interview here, buy some Sparkplug comics here, then raise your glass. That's what I'll be doing. Rest in peace, Dylan.

"Scubadive / No"

In the middle of a conversation about something else somebody said something like this to me:

"And your comics... I really admire what you do... but that stuff is just so vindictive and hateful, and I don't ever want to be a part of that world."

"jacksurvives.blogspot.com"

I made a webcomic remixing one of Jerry Moriarty's brilliant Jack Survives comics. It's a two-panel strip that was published in the Ben Katchor-edited Picture Story #2, which is my new favorite comics anthology of all time. Rather than being printed one panel after the other this comic is printed on the inside front and inside back covers of the magazine, making simultaneous viewing of both pictures impossible. Instead, you have to flip the pages of the magazine back and forth to engage with the piece as a comic and not two individual pictures. I like the idea of putting the element of sequence completely in the reader's hands, and I thought it would be interesting to make a digital version of the comic, effectively separating the images by posting them on different pages and forcing the reader to click on a link (the internet version of "turning the page") to complete the comic. So that's what I did, and then I wrote a little essay about Moriarty's piece, bookended by a little essay on sequencing that the artist himself wrote for the same issue of Picture Story. Check the whole thing out right here.

FROGS!

Look at that. What is it? It's Jim Steranko comic you never knew existed, the one-sheet psych-out "Frogs!" from the self-published Comixscene #3. And I wrote about it at length here, creating another fragmentary piece of analysis in my quest to eventually write on every comic Steranko ever did. As far as I can tell a scan of "Frogs!" in its entirety has never appeared on the internet before (cause the thing is friggin' HUGE), so all thanks to Steranko-philes Tony Robertson and John Gandour for hooking it up with that image magic. "Frogs!" is a really interesting piece of work that, while obviously still a "comic", more or less defies the label "sequential art". How's that? Come find out!

Swipefile: Jim Lee x Tony Daniel

Question: How does a working artist get a ripoff this blatant past the higher-ups in editorial?



Answer: Make sure you're ripping off a drawing done by the top man. Above, Jim Lee from All Star Batman & Robin #5. Below, Tony Daniel from Detective Comics volume 2 #1. I always complain about how Jim Lee as DC co-publisher has seemed to override the solid stylistic sensibility of Mark Chiarello as art director in recent years, and to my eyes this is the most compelling evidence yet that they're just asking them to copy the boss wholesale over at 1600 Broadway. Of course, you can make up your own mind....

"Idiots": Notes On The DC Relaunch

Baby Don't Cry:



- FROM WHERE I'm sitting DC Entertainment's much-hyped renumbering/recontextualizing of their line of comics was a failure before anyone could even read the first of the new books. (Justice League #1, this past Wednesday). However, the same machine that was trying to convince people that This Stuff Mattered is now engaged in trying to spin the tale of the initiative's success, so let me qualify that statement for you. DC's stated goals were expanding the comics medium's readership, bringing their books up to a mass-audience level on par with media like film and television -- transcending the increasingly tiny sphere that the American comics industry and readership has become, and making comics that could truly be classified as "popular entertainment". That's a hell of a goal, especially these days, and if it had been a working part of the actual books' creation then DC would deserve some plaudits as well, no matter how successful they ended up.



Of course, all the rhetoric was just that. DC kept the exact same people that had been stewarding their comics into the hot and arid land of five-figure sales for the past decade on board, launched books with no realistic hope of ever making it above commercial mediocrity, and ballyhooed the best sales in three years (200,000; a laughable figure for any mass medium but comics) as the triumph they'd been hoping for. And yes, it was exactly what the people who were actually involved in the operation had wanted. While I'm sure plenty of Warner Brothers suits who've never read one of these things in their lives are nervously poring over the sales figures asking why more people don't want to read comics, those who know understand that it was really only ever about reclaiming the lapsed DC readership that went Marvel-only as the Geoff Johns books got grosser and the House of Ideas crossovers got poppier -- maybe if they were lucky even some of the Image readers from the '90s who could be fooled into seeing periodical comics as hot commodities once more.



It's just sad. I didn't open Justice League #1 expecting a bold new kind of superhero comic or even any kind of a break with the past, and I got what I expected. But imagine if that hadn't been the case...!



- JUSTICE LEAGUE #1 wasn't, in fact, the worst thing in the world, only the biggest disappointment. (That's what we call poetic overstatement.) One of the biggest problems with comics' readership and the level of attention that gets paid to the medium goes like this: even if we got more people to buy them, even if we broke into the millions and tens of millions and had another golden age, it's still incredibly distressing how few readers give their comics the attention they deserve as works of art. How many people live with a comic, reread it deeper again and again, consider its meanings and avenues of possibility in spare moments, spend time on the page that isn't reading but swimming, drinking, experiencing? Oh, you did that with the new Grant Morrison? Or the new Charles Burns? Or the fucking new whatever it was? But you don't do that with every comic. You didn't do it with this one. I didn't either. And that's because for all the flash and dazzle of Alex Sinclair's digital color job and all the meticulous immensity of Jim Lee and Scott Williams' linework, that deeper engagement is denied by this comic, by what this comic is.



People use the word "shallow" as an abstraction, some vague negative descriptor, but when I say Justice League #1 is shallow I mean that giving it a serious critical reading feels like trying to plunge your entire arm down into a pool of water three inches deep, or walk into a room whose back wall is a foot from the open door. No one of Williams' ink lines speaks of greater consideration and time than any other, and there are so damn many of them that he just can't have been giving each one more than a few seconds of his life. Johns' dialogue says what it means succinctly, sometimes even with a little snap, but what it means is simply what we see going on in the pictures. It means that Batman and Green Lantern run from the cops and fight a robot, that Cyborg likes playing football and has a difficult relationship with his dad, and that the new Superman is unfuckwithable, bitches. Put blunt: it means nothing of any importance whatsoever. And when Jim Lee draws Superman's torso too big to fit a full figure drawing on the final splash page, he doesn't erase and start again to make a better first image of the new greatest hero of all, he just has the head and trunk shot from straight on and draws the legs at an angle that makes them look like they've been shot from ten feet above. Problem solved, and nobody noticed.















But it means something when they don't try, even when they get away with it. Yesterday somebody told me he thinks comics are a "cash-out" medium, one that doesn't demand anything but passive reception from its audience. Being a huge fan of the element of work involved in stitching together the panels of a comic book to make it function, and knowing the person I was talking to is just as much of one as I am, I disagreed. But then I read Justice League. And it's true, because most of the comics that get made are ones like this but even less well-crafted, and if you do anything but the passive reception bit on them, if you try to go deeper, they let you down. Every single time. Not their fault -- work pieced together under brutal deadlines by teams of people communicating second- or third-hand via email almost never ends up art -- but it would be better if it wouldn't be that way. Did I misinterpret the marketing when I took it to mean that they would be trying to change these things, the important things? Maybe, but I don't think so. I think they just want people to believe things have changed when they haven't.



- THE OTHER day Benjamin Marra told me he thinks that McCarthyism is what killed comics as a mass medium. He lays out a convincing argument that you'll be able to read in full soon enough, but I think it's more than that. While the Estes Kefauver-led senate hearings that gutted the most popular comics publisher of all time, EC, were certainly the still-echoing clarion call that Comics Are Not Okay To Like, there was a broader social and artistic shift occurring around the same time that I think needs to be taken to task for the fact that the medium's never been able to muster a lasting resurgence. Comics were knocked down and raped just as television was coming into its own as a mass medium for both entertainment and communication (the latter part of which means that it could be conceptualized as something essential, which comics just can't), broad-market Hollywood film was booming, and the recording industry was discovering that teenagers really really fucking like to listen to music. I think it probably would have been a solid decade post-Kefauver no matter what before comics could regain their former cultural relevance, but by the time that decade was over three new mass media had erected such massive platforms of social domination that comics can't really be blamed too harshly for gathering its skirts and deciding to cling to the few who'd never deserted it like a lover who settles for faith without romance.



I don't have the exact quote at hand, but in the liner notes to his Early Minimalism box set, Tony Conrad talks about what it was like to observe the American arts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the era of shock trauma that followed comics' transition from mass medium to cult form. Conrad talks about the emergence of Abstract Expressionist art and avant-garde jazz and classical music as a triumph of style over content -- and not that there's anything at all wrong with that, he says, but it has to mean something that those cutting edge art movements were co-opted into corporate advertising more quickly than any that had ever come before. By destroying figurative content, the Pollocks and Cages gave the anti-art forces of commerce blank canvases and silent spaces to assign meaning to. Having trouble figuring that splatter of pure paint or sound out? Simple, it means you should buy a Pepsi. Something like that. And so popular television slid into simply filming real people's flagrantly consumptive lifestyles, popular movies became multi-company advertising platforms, and popular music grew into an increasingly symbiotic relationship with advertising jingles. (I love Jersey Shore and James Bond and Robyn too, but loving someone doesn't mean you can't see the dark circles under her eyes.)



Comics are an odd man out, a form that at its best is full of figurative content and proscribed meaning and work for the audience to do. This is where the great draftsmen of the human form find a living wage, where didactic writers find obsessive audiences, where the reader is forced into a collaboration with the artist that bears more fruit the more effort each party puts into it.



We are no longer what the masses want.



- A FAIRLY perceptive recent New York Times article about the relaunch by Dave Itzkoff contained this tidbit:



Henry Jenkins, the provost’s professor of communication, journalism and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California, said the idea of returning classic heroes to their origins long predated comic books.



“Part of the nature of culture is that we retell stories that are meaningful to us, again and again, in different ways,” Mr. Jenkins said, pointing to Homer’s “Iliad,” Virgil’s “Aeneid” and Dante’s “Inferno” as “continual reboots of Greek mythology.”



I always hate to smack down comparisons of comics to more respected literary forms, because Wouldn't That Be Nice. But people cared about Homer and Virgil and Dante, people thought the stories they were telling were things that actually mattered. Once upon a time, people even believed that the characters in those stories were what controlled their consciousness, that their actions were actually dictated by that earlier pantheon of superheroes, that the stories were telling themselves every day in their real lives. Today, the best-selling comic in years is printed in numbers that equal one half of one percent of the American population, and even if every copy sells, even if every copy sells to a different person, how many of those buyers will think the story they are reading matters in any way?



- I TRY to keep a respectful distance from corporate superhero comics because when I think about them too much I get thoughts like the one I had on the train home from selling people their copies of Justice League today.



Imagine if the average monthly superhero comic book artist came home from the studio one day, opened the door, and found his family had been brutally murdered. (It's a "he" because DC Comics employs 1% women.) Imagine his wife had been cut open and spread around the room, his children tortured before being allowed to die, the objects that held his most cherished memories of them smashed and torn and burnt up in the fireplace, and very very much et cetera. Imagine it emerged after the subsequent police investigation that it had been his boss the editor, or the publisher, or the art director, who committed the crime. The boss goes to jail, the artist quits the company and probably never works in the medium again. But his art can and will continue to be published by the house that he worked for, and money from it will continue to pay the salaries of the editor, the publisher, the art director.



I'm aware of how completely ridiculous that paragraph is, and of the fact that comics isn't the only industry in which that's true. But comics, superhero comics, is the one that makes me think of things like that. Maybe it's because superhero comics are dark things, corporate advertisements built on the stolen creations of angry ghosts.



Or maybe it's because I'm kind of dark myself, and maybe that's why I read shiny superhero comics to try and cheer myself up. I sell them to people every day, and after I argue with my girlfriend for a few hours when I get home I sometimes wonder how many of those people are happy with their lives. What percentage of them genuinely like themselves? The number that comes to me first is fifteen percent. Then I go down. Ten? Five?



Based on the conversations I have, the number of them who like every superhero comic they regularly buy is even less.



- AND YET when I turned to the big opening splash page of Justice League, with Batman writhing through a hail of police-helicopter bullets in an inky Gotham City rain, my first thought wasn't any of what you're reading. I thought to myself that somewhere out there a kid is reading this comic and he or maybe even she is just so excited to see where this goes next, to soak up more and more of what's going on in these thin and glossy pages, to break the bottom of the shallow pool that superhero comics is. This is the right comic for somebody. If I had come to it when I was beginning my obsession with this medium, it's completely possible it would have been the comic for me.



My next thought was that if this hypothetical kid truly grows to truly love this art form, the one that I think is the greatest of all, it's inevitable that they will realize one day that the comic that made them love comics isn't very good.