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Jack Kirby's Erotic Flirtations: The Sensual Side of the King of Comics [Sex]

Jason Michelitch — 2012-02-24T14:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Culture

When legendary artist Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics in 1970 and went to DC, he was lured there in part by the promise of doing work in new genres and new formats. He always envisioned comics going further than the pamphlet; he wanted to see glossy magazines and long-form books with enough variety to appeal to everyone. Most of his proposals fizzled out before he had the chance to put pen to paper, but one that he at least got started on was the stupendously titled Uncle Carmine's Fat City Comix (named after Carmine Infantino, DC's then-publisher).

Fat City was intended to be a tabloid-sized magazine filled with underground-style comix by various artists. For the proposal, Kirby took the opportunity to experiment with a genre that was catching on and that he had little affinity for: erotic comics. He drew two pages of a new strip he called Galaxy Green, about a space-faring group of superwomen who roamed the galaxy looking for men to mate with. The result was fairly tame, very strange, and utterly Kirby.

99 percent of all superhero comics ever made speak with Kirby's visual vocabulary. When his compositions and characters aren't being aped directly, they're being regurgitated either as expert internalization of technique or unconscious fourth-generation copies-of-copies-of-copies. In the great teeth-gnashing debates over sexiness in comics, the argument is often made that super-hero comics are sexual in nature because their art depends on idealization and stylization. When it comes to style in mainstream comics, Jack Kirby is The Source, but despite founding the modern style, creating super-heroines such as The Invisible Woman and The Wasp, and even co-inventing the romance comic, Kirby isn't well known for getting sexy with his art.

For the most part, Kirby wasn't the most comfortable creating overly sexualized content. He turned down offers to work on art for Playboy magazine, and there's a story that he once changed a female character's bikini into a one-suit because some fans who had seen the art pre-publication had gotten too excited. But Kirby was still Kirby, a man who processed all stimulus through his churning creative engine, and there were moments in his body of work when the erotic drifted to the foreground.

In the Galaxy Green art, you can feel Kirby's discomfort with shoehorning sex into the rhythms of his action. In one panel, you can see Kirby predict the now-common practice of tilting compositional angles and contorting female figures to show the maximum amount of boobs, butt, and crotch possible. It's worth noting that, while Kirby tried this technique in literally one panel and then tossed it out as too awkward, there are artists today who draw almost nothing but panels like this one:

Kirby abandoned overt eroticism after that two-page experiment, but his other work was not devoid of sex. In the early '70s, like all of visual media, comics got looser and bolder with its depiction of women, and Kirby's work was not immune. One of his most-loved and well-crafted characters from that period is Big Barda from the New Gods cycle. A warrior woman from Darkseid's evil army who switches sides and fights for right, Barda's strong-willed and fiercely protective personality was based mostly on Roz Kirby, Jack's wife. But visually, Barda was inspired directly by a series of photos of singer Lainie Kazan that Kirby had seen in Playboy.

Kazan was a fit woman with a larger physique, and Kirby liked the notion of creating a female super-hero with that kind of build, or as Mark Evanier puts it, "a super-heroine who looked like she could do the feats of strength that Wonder Woman or Supergirl did with more dainty physiques."

In Kirby's drawings of Barda, you can see him taking pleasure in exploring the female form more explicitly than in his past works. I suspect one of the reasons he was able to do so without the discomfort of something like Galaxy Green was because, to Kirby, Barda was as full and important as any of his characters -- maybe even more so, given her close ties to Roz. To Kirby, Barda was a strong woman who was also sexy, as opposed to a sex object for which he had to devise some plausible characteristics or storyline.

Kirby's art wasn't known for its sex appeal, but it's fascinating to look at the small elements of eroticism that show up in the work of the man who defined super-hero art, especially since the super-hero art of today is filled to the brim with sex. It's additionally interesting to note that, while Kirby decked Barda out in a two-piece for lounging around, her outfit becomes all business as soon as she needs to throw down. One more lesson we might learn from the King.

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The Honesty of Exploitation: Sex in the Art of Milo Manara [Sex]

Jason Michelitch — 2012-02-17T11:30:00+00:00

In discussions about the great living cartoonists, the name Milo Manara is rarely bandied about, a state of affairs that is both impossible to believe and very easy to explain. Manara is a comics artist of uncommon ability, a master of linework and layout, whose storytelling chops deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those of Kirby, Crumb, Toth, Moebius, or anyone else you'd put in that same grouping. He also happens to specialize in pornography in which women are sexually dominated and abused for the titillation of the reader. Our erotic comics fortnight rolls on, gentle Comics Alliance readers, so let's get sexy. Let's get problematically sexy.First, let me show you what I mean when I say Manara is a great comics artist. Just look at this two-page spread from the recent Dark Horse deluxe reprint of Indian Summer, by Manara and writer Hugo Pratt (click to enlarge):

Notice the way subjects and shapes echo across the two pages to move the characters and the reader through space and time. The receding fire on the first page gives way to the rising moon on the second, which then prompts a move back towards the fire. The boy in close-up on the far left runs so far and fast that he becomes a small figure in the distance on the far right. The three instances of the moon on the right hand page create a triangle, pointing us towards the center of the composition. The placement of the boy in relation to the moon gives us a sense of place that carries over into the fifth panel, with the moon behind nehind. Manara's art achieves all this and more -- and this is only an exposition scene!

Of course, it's the non-expositionary moments that get us into trouble.

The above is a bit from the inciting incident of Indian Summer, the rape of a Connecticut settler by two Connecticut Indians. Most of the scene looks like this: a clothed struggle which ends behind a sand-dune, with the actual rape obscured from view. But just at the end of the struggle, the dress comes up and the undergarments come off, and the reader is given a clear view of the woman's naked bottom half, rendered in Manara's trademark sensual line. The resulting sexiness of the abominably violent scene is, at the very least, uncomfortable. And this discomfort sets the tone for much of the book to follow.

Indian Summer is a meticulously researched historical drama of Puritan New England, and claims to tell the true story that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. (This claim might be a purposeful flight of fancy, or it might be legitimate. I couldn't confirm it, and I'm not smart enough to know if I should know that it's not serious. Either way, and for whichever reason, the text of the story purports this.) As such, though Indian Summer is a historical drama and not one of Manara's outright pornographies, the story is very much concerned with illicit sexual behavior going on under the noses of the repressed Puritan society.

There are two extended sequences devoted to men of the cloth secretly abusing young female charges, and these acts, while described as abominable by the text, are depicted with a heavy dose of erotic allure. Eroticism spreads from those two anchor points to suffuse the book, so that even non-sexual scenes are given heavy sexual undertones, just from the way Manara draws his women. What to make of a book, then, that trades so heavily in sexiness but whose only sex scenes are of rape and abuse?

It's tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and dismiss the book as unreconstructed misogyny. Why should I treat Indian Summer's weird sexual politics any differently than those on display in that Titans book about Starfire wanting to bone dudes, or that New Avengers comic where Tigra got to star in a sexualized scene where she is beaten on film? Can I really just get out of this jam by pointing to the formal mastery of the work, the historical verisimilitude of the writing, or the highfalutin' European/Artcomix pedigree of the whole work?

Well, partially, yeah. But there's also something going on in Manara's eroticized violence that isn't reflected in the kind of sexualized nonsense that's rightfully called out by a lot of people, particularly around here. There is an upfrontness to the eroticism in Indian Summer that borders on confrontational with the reader. It demands recognition, and it demands an effort of reading that the casual sexism of mainstream comics does not.

Manara's erotic imagery implicates the reader in the abominable acts on display through arousal (a sufficiently sensual depiction of a naked woman can excite either sex) and the combination of arousal and revulsion forces the reader to leave behind simplistic moral judgments and engage critically with the text, with questions such as: Why is this arousing when it is also abhorrent? Is it okay to be aroused by fictionalized sexual violence? Is a denial of this arousal moral, or complicit with the repression of the Puritan minister in the story, who claims to despise all sexual impulses yet acts on all of his basest whims?

Manara's art is able to complicate the reader's response for two reasons. The first is because the sexually explicit imagery he creates is transgressive enough to shock, as opposed to the merely suggestive sexual imagery which permeates mainstream comics (and mainstream culture at large). The fact of Manara's transgressiveness is proved by the fact that I can't actually show you any of the images in question on this blog due to their sexual content. But, of course, I can show you this:

The writer of the above scene (from New Avengers #35, 2007), Brian Michael Bendis, on the subject of any inherent titillation in a half-naked woman being beaten and videotaped, has been quoted as saying: "There wasn't anything sexual to it, except that her costume happens to be a bikini." Which is as tellingly oblivious a sentence as I think I could ever possibly read, but which also goes towards my point. That a costume might "happen to be a bikini," and be accepted uncritically, is a sign of the complete sublimation of sexual imagery. The sexual imagery is clearly there, yet can go unnoticed on a conscious level if one wishes to put blinders on.

Manara's explicit sexual imagery, in contrast, cannot be ignored as such. More importantly, Manara knows that it can't. And this is the second -- and more significant -- reason why Manara's erotic imagery is a successfully complex literary device: it's honest.

There is nothing ambiguous about the sensual charge of Manara's line. When he portrays a lascivious minister sexually abusing his niece, Manara's intent is upfront: He poses the niece nude, full-frontal to the audience nearly the entire time, and renders her with an achingly beautiful sexuality, even in her facial expressions. There is no attempt to hide the titillation factor of the scene, and there could never be any attempt to deny it.

The New Avengers scene above operates on a juvenile level above the surface but a strenuously-denied exploitative level below the surface, such that any attempted discussion of the sexual content of the scene to first pass the hurdle of preposterous argument over what constitutes sexual content. Manara places exploitation in center frame, for all to see, making sexuality not only an automatic but a necessary part of the conversation.

This is not to say that Manara's eroticism is completely un-problematic -- far from it. But through the honesty of his titillation, Manara invites discussion, rather than discouraging or avoiding it, and that makes a world of difference. Truly, who could look at X-Women, a comic by renowned pervert Chris Claremont and world-class pornographer Milo Manara, and not be automatically assured that the honest intent of the book is to get readers all hot and bothered?

The great bulk of Manara's work is dominated by the sexual adventures and misadventures of young women in various states of undress and consent. In a strange way, the more explicitly pornographic Manara's work becomes, the less morally problematic it seems. After all, he's explicitly drawing sexual fantasies to turn people on, and little anyone can do to control what sets their blood pumping. There's both a big and important gulf between sexual fantasy and reality; why not have an honest understanding between creator and reader as to what this is all for, and then have at it? And even in work devoted to being naughty, Manara cannot resist confronting the reader with complexity. Take this sequence from 1992's Click 2 (the majority of panels from which I can't even show you a little bit), in which an uncle has been whipping his niece in a rage over her public displays of lewd behavior.

By having the niece turn the tables on the uncle and confront him with his own deviant arousal, Manara once again forces a conversation with the reader over the uncomfortable confluence of desire and violence. The palpable fear in the uncle's expression in the last panel is the reader's fear. Both the uncle and the reader are shocked and appalled at their own sexual arousal, and yet for both it is a fact that must be reckoned with. The uncle reckons his with further violence. It seems inescapable that Manara is holding him up as a bad example, and urging the reader to reckon with acceptance, and to find a safe release in his dirty pictures.

Through his bracingly bawdy art, Manara argues that when it comes to desire, honesty really is the best policy; that if through fiction we can embrace our arousal, it'll all come out right in the end.

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Variant Covers to 8 'Flashpoint' Tie-In Comics Revealed [Exclusive]

Jason Michelitch — 2011-04-01T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, Humor, April Fools' Day

The mega-crossover Flashpoint has been shrouded in secrecy for months, but DC Comics has been dropping Flash Facts like hotcakes all through March, giving eager fans tantalizing teasers and blazing preview images. Now, just when you thought the big summer event couldn't get any hotter, comes the biggest reveal yet: Comics Alliance has eight exclusive variant cover images from Flashpoint tie-in comics that contain hints to the plot of the mysterious crossover.

"We held back the real covers because they contained crucial story information," said a DC representative. "but now we're ready to give fans a taste of the world-shaking events in store for them as everything they know about the DC Universe changes in a flash. Prepare yourselves, because nothing will ever be the same again after the events of Flashpoint."

"All the artists involved did a fabulous job on these covers," said DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns. "Barry's relationship with each of the featured characters is integral to our overall story, and these variant covers really put their finger on the emotional core of those relationships."

Check out these exclusivecovers for Flashpoint: Batman, Flashpoint: Booster Gold, and six other must-see Flashpoint tie-ins! [Brought to you by the experts at Let's Be Friends Again]

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'The Wire' Re-imagined as Illustrated Victorian Novel: Omar Comin' on Dickensian Streets

Jason Michelitch — 2011-03-28T13:30:00+00:00

Sean Michael Robinson and Joy Delyria, in their contribution to "The Wire" roundtable over at Noah Berlatsky's Hooded Utilitarian, have performed a pop culture criticism triple gainer by thoroughly re-imagining David Simon's The Wire as a Victorian-era serialized novel.

Often compared to Dickens by critics, The Wire is a critically-lauded, five season television series that focuses on the drug war in Baltimore and the systemic corruption and failure of urban institutions. Robinson and Delyria take the comparison ten steps further, deftly re-contextualizing the gritty crime drama in the equally-gritty actual Dickensian era."There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire," they write, then later continue:

"The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years. Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter "Bubz" Black, and selling for one shilling each. After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three."

Their article comes complete with examples of Bubz's illustrations, including the masterpiece reprinted below. Click through to Hooded Utilitarian for more illustrations, excerpts from the "original" Victorian text, and a spot-on analysis of how the brilliant novel The Wire clearly influenced Dickens' more socially conscious works.

(Conflict of Interest Note: I am also a participant in Hooded Utilitarian's roundtable on The Wire. I do not think, though, that this disqualifies me from judging the below image as Totally Freakin' Awesome.)

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Awesomely Absurd 'Dune' Coloring and Activity Books Defy Reason, Sense, Taste

Jason Michelitch — 2011-03-07T13:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Humor, Culture

As we've all known for years now, the true purpose of the internet isn't the connecting of disparate communities, or making the vast wealth of human knowledge accessible to anyone with a Netbook and a Starbucks. No, the internet is for taking the incredibly weird stuff that once might have sat in a shoebox or on a bookshelf, and spreading the lunacy as far and wide as possible. And in that arena, Meredith Yayanos WON THE WEEK over at Coilhouse with her reason-defying presentation of the children's coloring and activity books released to promote David Lynch's 1984 film version of Frank Herbert's DUNE. The brain recoils! Neon pink flame, ahoy!

For those unfamiliar (and its dire box office numbers and lackluster video sales would seem to indicate a great many are unfamiliar), Dune is an epic space fantasy based on the classic novel by Frank Herbert, about a young man named Paul Atreides who perseveres through murderous palace intrigue, galactic drug dealing conspiracies, and a barren desert world filled with thundering worm monsters to become a messianic figure in intergalactic politics. David Lynch wrote and directed the 1984 film adaptation that, while truncated by Universal Pictures from its original 5 hours to a more commercial 137 minutes, remained largely faithful to the source work and retained a great deal of the depth and intelligence of Herbert's writing.

Universal Pictures, however, was not looking for depth and intelligence. As evidenced by the coloring and activity books Yayanos displays, what Universal Pictures wanted was a Star Wars of their very own -- a whiz-bang space adventure for eight-year-olds that they could merchandise the heck out of to the wide-eyed kids that just a year previous had wheedled their parents into buying plush ewok dolls and toy lightsabers. Instead, Lynch and producer Dino De Laurentis provided them with a dark epic actually fit for consumption by thinking adults. Imagine their chagrin.

The saga of Dune's production is an infamous mess, including the halving of the film's runtime, as well as rumors of a budget that ballooned to $75 million, twice the reported $40 million, and of strange behavior from the marketing department -- jerking around critics with multiple canceled screenings, leaking word that the new studio head had screened the film and hated it, and generally creating a sense of doom and terror regarding the movie.

Harlan Ellison, writing in the August '85 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, posited a troubling yet troublingly plausible theory that Dune was a victim of studio politics, the aforementioned new studio head wanting to ensure that Dune flopped as big as possible, so as to embarrass his predecessor (who had green-lit the thing) and make himself look better in comparison.

Such is the weirdness of Hollywood maneuvering, and in light of such, the bizarre sight of the Dune Coloring and Activity Book becomes so much more understandable. Somewhere along the line of Dune's years-long production schedule, a decision was made at Universal to create the kind of kid merchandise that had sold so well for George Lucas, to capitalize on what would doubtlessly be the latest "sci-fi" monster smash.

Later, when new management sent all the pieces scattering across the board in a crazed attempt to sow chaos and doom, no one noticed or cared that some segment of the marketing department was blithely trundling along, turning psychosexual alien faces, psycopathic royalty, and intergalactic narcotics into fun all-ages activity pages. Now on display through the glory of the internet and the good auspices of one Meredith Yayanos:

Much more available if you just click through to Coilhouse. Enjoy. And...what's wrong with your eyes?

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Diamond Digital: It Might Be of Some Small Use

Jason Michelitch — 2011-02-16T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Opinion, Digital Comics

Diamond Digital was announced last week -- a digital comics delivery system based around going to your brick-and-mortar store, purchasing a download code printed on a piece of paper, and then taking that code and punching it into your phone, tablet or home computer via iVerse. It's the kind of odd left turn you expect from the comics industry at this point -- "Oh yes, you'd like to read our comics on your computer? Well, come buy this sticker on a piece of cardboard. WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL AGE!"

Dave Bowen, Director of Digital Distribution at Diamond Comics, speaking to The Beat:

We have a logic problem that we have to work through with this. Why would someone come into a comics shop to buy a digital comic?

Indeed.The thing to keep in mind about Diamond Digital, though, is that it's clearly and knowingly a stop-gap solution; a temporary system to fiddle around with while we wait for the real future to show up -- kind of like LaserDisc. As such, while in three or five years we'll likely have our digital comics consumption methods reasonably standardized (Marvel could start by winnowing its digital strategies down to two or three, maybe) for now it's worth setting aside easy mockery and looking at what Diamond Digital could actually accomplish.

It's important to look at Diamond Digital for what it is: a tool for direct market retailers. Diamond Digital is NOT a program designed to take full advantage of the growing digital marketplace. It is not the "iTunes" for comics. It is a program designed to function at a low overhead cost for both Diamond and the retailers, and to allow both of them to earn a small amount of money in the grey area between the physical retail model and the digital retail model. That grey area isn't huge, but it also isn't nothing, and in comics retail, every little bit helps. The way I see it, the best that Diamond Digital can offer is to fill in a few gaps for retailers.

GAP #1 -- New customers looking for something you don't have.

When I worked comics retail, we had a modest but steady flow of people who were not familiar with comics calling or coming in to ask us questions. Every person like that is a potential not only for a single sale, but to prove your worth as a specialized, knowledgeable retailer. If you don't have what their looking for, though -- whether it's because of a high-demand sell-out or you just didn't order it because of lack of interest from your regular customers -- then they aren't likely to try you again the next time they read a planted news story about Archie getting married, or get a nostalgic hankering to see the Transformers hang out with G.I. Joe.

The potential new customer's curiosity probably isn't strong enough to sustain the momentum required for them to wait on a special order from Diamond. Being able to offer them a cheap digital download, and putting on your friendly retailer face as you print out the code and walk them through downloading it right then and there on their dataphone, could win you the best kind of new friend -- the kind that comes by and gives you money for stuff.

You might also have regular customers who get a hankering to try something new, only to find themselves in the same circumstances, with the book sold out or never ordered to begin with. That regular customer might be fine to wait on a special order, but they might be a lot happier with the quicker gratification of a download code slipped in with their Wednesday stack. Speaking of regular customers, that brings me to the next point...

GAP #2 -- Current customers wary of digital comics.

Now, a retailer's gut instinct may be to want to keep current customers wary of digital comics, so as to continue feeding them a glut of print -- and they might be right, in the short term, but they'd be losing sight of the long game. Digital comics are undoubtedly going to factor big in the future of comics as a medium and an industry. If I were a comics retailer, I would be looking for ways to turn digital comics to my advantage. Comixology's recently announced digital storefront -- a service that allows retailers to sell Comixology's digital comics library through their own websites, taking a portion of the proceedings -- seems like an interesting and positive step towards marrying traditional comics retail and digital purchasing without tying said digital purchasing to the actual physical storefront.

However, I would bet that there's a significant section of the Wednesday crowd that is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with digital comics. As a retailer, it might behoove you to try and make your current clientele at least baseline comfortable with digital comics, so that you can continue to serve them in an increasingly digital future. Provided the buy-in costs were low enough (and the buy-in cost on Diamond Digital, at least, appears to be pretty low) I could easily see a comics retailer participating in both Comixology's program and Diamond Digital, using the in-person hand-sell comfort of the latter to cultivate a digital audience that they can then serve through the former. This would prevent those current customers from drifting to a different digital outlet, and also lessen the daunting task of finding a whole new set of digital customers.

GAP #3 -- Losing sales to missing back issues or shipping costs.

The back issue market isn't what it once was, but customers do still ask for older comics, whether to fill in a gap in a collection, to catch up on a current storyline being joined in media res, or just to find an old story they heard was worth reading. In my retail days, I had customers walk away without buying anything because I was missing one or two issues out of a storyline they wanted. They would gladly pony up for a whole six-issue run if it meant they got the whole story, but they wouldn't buy four or five issues if it meant skipping a chapter or two.

If Diamond Digital is able to build a large digital back issue inventory, a retailer would be able to offer all manner of old comics without worrying about using up space with physical inventory, or not being able to supply a crucial single issue out of a run. What's more, the several calls a month I used to field from people who lived too far away from a comic store to visit one but who balked at the idea of shipping fees or who were resistant to sifting through an online store (and let's not forget that there is a percentage of people who only access the internet through their phone) might be cheered by the notion of buying a few download codes over the phone, hanging up, and punching those codes into an app.

The back issue market might be further diluted by the availability, but that's mostly a dead horse anyway, and frankly anything that moves the comics industry further psychologically away from comics as collectible fetish object and towards comics as arts and entertainment medium is probably a good thing. (Note: I will still require my artistic fetish objects, thank you very much.)

THE BIG HONKING CAVEAT:

If I'm being honest, the above examples almost all work better or best when dealing with publishers who are not currently part of Diamond Digital -- namely, Marvel and DC. While the current focus on independent-mainstream publishers might have a nice by-product of diversifying the buying habits of the Wednesday crowd (the digital versons are cheap for the customer and require no initial outlay or inventory space from the retailer), for Diamond Digital to be a truly useful tool for the retailer, they'll need to get Marvel and DC on board.

And while I'm making armchair criticisms, offering its digital comics as exclusive to comic shops for 30 days is a pretty useless feature of Diamond Digital. The people coming into comic shops already might be interested in exclusive special features on their digital comics, but they won't care if the comics themselves are exclusive. They'll buy them or not based on the convenience of already being at the store and whether the product is something they want at all. Meanwhile, folks who don't have access to a comics shop but don't want to wait 30 days for that exclusive comic to become available online will just pirate the book, since they won't have the option of a legal place online to purchase it.

Playing digital comics fantasy baseball for a second, what I'd like to see as the digital marketplace sorts itself out over the next few years is (a) an abandonment of the silly proprietary formats and readers that currently abound, with the industry settling on an easy-to-use mostly-universal format, and (b) for as many comics as possible to be offered digitally online, and in both physical and digital form in retail comics shops.

No participant or spectator could possibly expect Diamond Digital to function as a major player in the burgeoning digital market, but if it can earn its keep in the direct market by offering comics retailers an easy, cheap way to supply their customers with stuff they might want, it could be a very nifty addition to this weird industry we all call teacher, mother, and secret lover.

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'SMBC' Webcartoonist Wreaks Rainbow Revenge on Anti-Gay Marriage Site

Jason Michelitch — 2011-02-08T15:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Humor

Last night, idly clicking on a cryptic link at The Comics Reporter led me to a story that may be my favorite thing to happen in comics so far this year. Zach Weiner, creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, had one of his cartoons misappropriated by NOM (National Organization for Marriage), an organization opposed to same-sex marriage. NOM didn't actually repost the cartoon, however. They hotlinked it, which meant that the image itself still resided on Weiner's own server. Which gave Weiner the perfect opportunity to wreak sweet revenge that managed to be both badass and classy.

The original cartoon, which if I squinted with heavily agenda-blinkered eyes, I could kind of see how you might assume was about gay marriage. Oh wait, no. No, I can't.

Weiner's blog post, here, takes readers through the events of February 3 blow-by-blow. Essentially, after pondering some more juvenile ways to respond to the use of his cartoon to advance a bigoted lobbying campaign, Weiner and his webmaster brother hit on a stroke of genius. Because the cartoon in question still resided on Weiner's server, Weiner could change the image to whatever he wanted.

Unlike some of us, who might have chosen to replace the cartoon with a picture of a phallus decorated with obscenities, Weiner swapped in a rainbow flag and a quote from the Declaration of Independence. Which then proceeded to hang out on NOM's front page until the website crashed from Saturday Morning Breafast Cereal fans descending upon it to snag screenshots.

What I would have given to have been in the room with any NOM personnel paying attention to their webpage that Wednesday morning, as their site first transformed before their very eyes into its own evil (read: good) twin, and then spasmed out of existence as their server crashed. I wonder if they even realize now how much their own sloppy internet skills (seriously, who hotlinks on a professional blog?) contributed to the headaches they most surely endured.

Along with the link from The Comics Reporter, Weiner's clever switcheroo has been flagged (pun mercilessly intended) in numerous spots on the internet, from an article at popular tech blog Gizmodo to a shout-out from syndicated sex columnist and gay-rights advocate Dan Savage at the blog for the Seattle newspaper The Stranger.

Weiner and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal deserve to have their hilarious and righteous prank become a hugely successful if unintended PR bonanza, and if nothing else, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is guaranteed at least one new reader -- me. And if any of Weiner's cartoons are even half as funny as this stunt (note: they are), I think I'll stick around for quite some time.

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'Freakangels': A Western Comic That Breathes Like Manga

Jason Michelitch — 2011-01-25T13:00:00+00:00

"Manga are emotional comics. They want nothing more than for you to breathe together with them. To conspire with lives." - Warren Ellis

The other day, I finally caught up on Freakangels, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield's fine sci-fi adventure comic published online for free by Avatar Press. Avatar still has an unfortunate and somewhat deserved reputation as a purveyor of endless variant covers wrapped around T&A gorefest horror movie licensed tie-ins printed with ink that smells funky if you hold the page too close to your face. But the publisher also regularly gives free rein to some of mainstream comics' finest writers, such as Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Jamie Delano, and the aforementioned Ellis, resulting in some very strong, uninhibited works like Narcopolis, 303, Crecy, and Neonomicon. Avatar's finest hour to date, though, is Freakangels, which ranks among the best works of Ellis' career, and may come closer than any other current English-language comic to feeling like good adventure manga.Western comics creators and publishers have often looked longingly across the Pacific to Japan, where legend holds that every person is issued a copy of Akira at birth and the streets are paved with Tezuka drawings. "If only we could be like them," comics folk have been wont to think in voices I supply for them, "then we'd really have something cooking." And while manga has never been the one-medium-to-rule-them-all success it's pictured as in Western minds, it's certainly been a much healthier thing than Western comics, with a much wider and more diverse readership.

Numerous attempts have been made over the years to graft replicable elements from manga onto Western comics, but most of these have either focused on the wrong things (big eyes! speed lines! disturbing sexual imagery involving tentacles!) or been short-lived or one-off projects. Creators like Scott McCloud, Frank Miller, and Becky Cloonan have successfully mined manga for individual tics and strategies, but have subsumed these elements more completely into the idiosyncracies of their personal styles or publishing circumstances.

Freakangels succeeds as an OEL (Original English Language) manga more completely than any other work I've encountered, and without seeming self-conscious or flashy about it. While I'm sure some readers may be able to point out an earlier work that does all these things (and if you can, please do in the comments!) I'd like to list out the qualities I see in Ellis and Duffield's work that move me to make such a pronouncement.

1. Freakangels is serialized in short bursts.

Freakangels has been running more or less weekly for almost three years, published in free six-page episodes posted every Friday. Western readers are used to encountering manga once its finished and collected in thick paperbacks, but most of the manga popular in the West was serialized in one of Japan's comics magazines, usually in short chapters. Anyone who has ever looked at a Shonen Jump can attest to the brevity of the installments for many manga, often picking up in the middle of a scene and ending similarly.

Western mainstream comics are obviously no stranger to serialization, but their serials don't tend to function the same way, normally featuring longer chapters with an emphasis on maximizing the number of plot points featured per installment. Freakangels doesn't work like that, often putting chapter breaks in the middle of conversations or action sequences, the beginnings and ends of episodes not completely random, but not tied to the overall arc of the story either.

2. Pacing

As a result of the short serialization, Freakangels has to juggle multiple levels of pacing. The book doesn't feel slow, but it doesn't concern itself with hitting major plot points with each new installment, either. Knowing they only have six pages per episode, Ellis and Duffield don't concern themselves with choking each installment full of plot, instead letting each section of the story play itself out for as long as it needs, relying on the steady beat of acerbic Ellis dialogue and the deft visual characterization of Duffield body language and facial expressions to pull the reader through until whenever the next major set piece kicks off.

This kind of storytelling strategy is much more in the manga tradition than the Western tradition. There's an old (okay, probably not that old) saying that Western comics are about the destination (i.e. plot-focused), and manga is about the journey. While Freakangels certainly can ramp up the potboiling plothammer when it needs to, the overall pleasure in reading it is in the way the story unfolds.

3. Decompression

One identifiable tic that has carried over into a lot of Western works from manga is called decompression, though for at least half of you, that isn't what you think it is. Decompression is one of the most misunderstood storytelling tools in comics. Most of the time, when I see Western comics readers discussing decompression, they're complaining about Brian Michael Bendis taking six issues to tell a story they think should have fit into three. Bendis, however, fills his comics with scenes of dialogue and character interaction. That might be pacing that's too slow for you, but it isn't what I've traditionally understood as decompression.

Decompression is the breaking down of brief moments into numerous comics panels to achieve an observational technique somewhat akin to slow-motion in film. When a bullet takes three panels to leave a gun, hit a target, and fly out the other side, that's decompression. It's a tool you see used often in manga, where because the emphasis is less on plot and more on experience, being able to break down quick action and force readers to move through it at a particular rhythm is vital. Ellis has long been fascinated by decompression, and he and Duffield use it to great effect when Freakangels abandons the talky for the kick-shoot-'splode.

4. Page construction.

Most Western comics pages are built on a three or four-tier visual structure, these days often utilizing "widescreen" horizontal panels (also made popular by Ellis in The Authority with Bryan Hitch). In part as a strategy to deal with the shape of browser windows (after considering different sizes and shapes and web-readers, Ellis decided to just chop the page into a top half and a bottom half and let readers scroll down) the pages in Freakangels are built on a two-tier system, often divided into four equal panels. The result is a great deal of visual clarity, and pages that feel very open and airy, which is very manga-esque.

One of the surface elements of manga often copied in the West is the manga digest format for collecting comics into books -- a smaller format than traditional Western comics collections. For most Western comics, though, this format is a travesty, because the work was never designed to work on so small a page -- unlike manga, and unlike Freakangels, which could be printed at manga digest size easiy and remain completely readable.

Freakangels, art by Paul Duffield, on left; The Authority, art by Bryan Hitch, on right.

5. It looks like a regular comic.

This one is hard to sell without sounding like I'm trying to insult the work, but bear with me. Freakangels is, without a doubt, swimming in identifiable Ellis dialogue and preoccupations (societal institutions, Britishness, goth steampunk, alternative lifestyles) and it's undeniable that Paul Duffield has a style and look that is his own. However, neither the script nor the art is so far off the beaten path as to make Freakangels an aesthetically unique or even drastically idiosyncratic project. It functions comfortably within the visual and story expectations of a commercial comic book, and this actually helps the analogy to popular manga.

When I pick up Twentieth Century Boys, it is not aesthetically a world away from Akira, or Maison Ikkoku, or Death Note. There is a commonality even in popular manga's diversity that brings with it a comfort of environment that is a genuine pleasure, like seeing a familiar character actor show up in two wildly different television shows. In an alternate universe of Western comics, if I squint, I can see a number of projects picking up where Freakangels will leave off after its planned end in a year, with short serializations dedicated to breezy, entertaining stories, published free on the web and collected in quick, light paperbacks. I'm sure there are any number of reasons why this isn't politically or economically viable in the current comics arena, but it's a nice vision.

6. It collects nicely as a light, quick read.

One of the primary qualities of the manga in my life is that I buy it in thick paperbacks that I devour like potato chips. All of the storytelling strategies -- the open, airy page layouts, the devotion to rhythm and flow of a scene over plot information, the decompression of vital individual moments -- serve to make the most popular manga a light, fast, fun read.

Obviously this (and everything else I've been talking about) doesn't apply to every kind of manga. There's dense manga, and plot-heavy manga, and manga with all manner of complicated page layouts. But the most common, popular form of manga, the ones that devoured whole shelving units at your local Barnes and Noble while Western comics got shelved next to the role-playing games, read like popcorn.

This doesn't mean they can't be substantial, but merely that the page-to-page experience has a light touch as it moves you through the story in seemingly effortless fashion. The abiding strategy of most Western comics is to try and find ways to slow down the reader's eye, to force them to linger, in order to make the individual comics experience more "worthwhile." In the hands of too many average creators, however, this strategy churns out books that are a slog to get through. I'd much rather have something good that moves fast, and that leaves me wanting more at the end of it, which is what so many manga supply, and at which Freakangels often succeeds.

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The 5 Worst Comics of 2010: #1 -- Superman: Grounded

Jason Michelitch — 2010-12-30T15:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Opinion

#1. Superman: Grounded

Initially intended to be a twelve-issue story following Superman as he walked (adamantly not flying) across America and reconnected with the country and its people, "Grounded" became more a publishing irregularity than anything. It's the Superman story that J. Michael Straczynski abandoned to write a different Superman story, one that's more lucrative and targeted to a wider audience. Straczynski ended up managing four - #701, #702, #703, and #705 - and then called it a day.

I have no idea what Straczynski ultimately intended to say with "Grounded," and since he isn't finishing the story, I'll never know. But Superman #701 reads like a mini-thesis of its own, and it has a very clear message: Anyone who criticizes this comic is stupid and shallow and should shut the hell up.

The comic is crazy defensive from the get-go, obsessed with boxing out its inevitable critics by devoting four full pages and parts of three others to condescending to belittling or humiliating reader stand-ins who dare to question the wisdom of the story Straczynski has chosen to write. Reporters ask Superman questions and get disdainful, witheringly minimal non-answers in return. One reporter gets aggressive with his questioning, and so Superman physically humiliates him.

Lois Lane makes an appearance to ask some of the same questions the reporters ask, but since she has sex with Superman he dismisses her with a slightly warmer flavor of condescension. She's the good fan, the one willing to trust in Straczynski/Superman that this whole walk-across-America really is a good idea, and not just an empty high-concept pitch line. The rest of the reporters are the bad fans, the small-minded ones who wander away a few pages later, complaining that "You can't make a story about a guy walking down a street."

At the end of Superman #701, a random man-on-the-street asks the perfectly reasonable question of why a hero like Superman is wasting time on a preposterously long walk, time that could be spent on any number of other things. I'm reprinting Superman's reply in full, below, because a summary or quote just won't do. This is the penultimate page of the comic, leading into the final splash. The construction of the comic therefore makes this THE point of the story. Here it is:

To be clear: Henry Thoreau spent one night in jail for not paying his taxes. His aunt paid his bill the next morning, and he was released. The friend that visited him was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who presumably did pay his taxes, and Thoreau's bars of principles extended to accepting a place to live on Emerson's land near Walden Pond, and then in the Emerson family house, where he ate Emerson's mother's food while he wrote Walden, a book about his self-sufficient simple life in the woods on Emerson's land near Walden Pond. Thoreau would also dine out on his night in jail for years to come, writing Civil Disobedience, which is a book with a lot of good ideas in it, but the writing of which doesn't mean that Thoreau actually ever sacrificed much at all for what he believed in. All of which is fine -- my point is not to attack Thoreau, but to attack the idiocy of using him as a simplistic bludgeon against people to whom you wish to feel superior.

What Straczynski wants is for Thoreau to function as an easy metaphor for the misunderstood hero, the guy who does something crazy out of principle and gets ragged on by the scared drones around him who see anything that shakes up the status quo as a threat. I understand why Straczynski wants that -- it's an appealing, flattering metaphor to apply to your main character, particularly when that main character is clearly acting as a channel for your own posturing.

The problem with making Thoreau a generic patron of holier-than-thouness, though, is that it ignores that his principles weren't generic. He wasn't against abstract "injustice." He had very specific political reasons -- opposition to slavery and to the Mexican-American War -- for not paying his taxes, and his actions and public statements were stridently against the prevailing attitudes of the general populace. He spoke out in defense of John Brown, for crying out loud, a man who encouraged armed insurrection against the U.S., who killed slave-owners in American territories, and who most of America considered a terrorist and a murderer. Thoreau may have only spent one night in jail, but it was the result of some pretty heavy, risky opinions.

What are Superman's great controversial moral stands in Straczynski's run? Well, he's not fond of drug dealers, he's against illegal immigration unless America gets something out of it, he's for sweetheart government deals for corporations to jumpstart the economy, and he thinks child abuse is just awfully tacky. WAY TO GO OUT ON A LIMB, BIG GUY. You're such a maverick. Superman isn't the principled outsider in these comics. He's the roving monitor of the status quo.

In Superman #701, our hero runs some black drug dealers out of a foreclosed neighborhood in which they've set up shop. (These are, it should be mentioned, the first and nearly only black people he meets while walking through Philadelphia, a city with a higher proportion of African-Americans than New York City.) Superman's brilliant strategy for getting rid of the drug dealers is to set fire to the drug stashes in each of their houses with his heat vision, and then... leave. Now, I guess you can read the comic and assume that he has the whole thing under control because, you know, he's Superman. But setting a half-dozen large fires throughout a neighborhood and then just walking away seems stupid.

As he leaves, Superman comes across a magical white child who appears and offers him candy. Superman smiles, asks this random little kid to deliver a message to the drug dealers for him (?!?), and then gives a total nonsense speech. I have to show you this one in its entirety, too:

WHAT IS THAT LUNATIC TALKING ABOUT? He's arbitrarily chosen this neighborhood to keep an eye on, but the next neighborhood, well, it's just up a creek. That neighborhood has to "stand for itself." What? How hard would it really be for Superman to, say, keep an eye on both neighborhoods? My guess, since he's going to be checking in on this one only every few weeks, presumably by flying in from Metropolis for about 30 seconds: not that hard.

This is the problem with trying to tackle "real world" problems in a "serious" way with a character like Superman. He's basically God. He can walk into a neighborhood full of drug dealers and just magically destroy all their drugs and drive them off. In order to explain why he doesn't just do this all the time, or any number of other things that he could do with minimal effort that would drastically change the lives of every single person in the country, if not the world, writers like Straczynski resort to utter inanity. "Over there has to stand for itself, has to speak for itself, because it's only when over there becomes here that we can stop this once and for all." Read that sentence again. It means nothing.

Superman threatens persecuted "illegal aliens" with deportation if they don't prove their worth to America.

"Grounded" is full of this kind of ponderous, pretentious gobbledygook, meant to show the reader how important and thoughtful it all is. Over and over, Straczynski inserts shrill arguments for how seriously the reader should take this pointless exercise in Superman solving "real" problems through glib assertions of nonsense axioms and generous application of brute force and intimidation. It's made all the more ludicrous, then, by Straczynski leaving mid-thought, before delivering any of the intellectual meat promised by the self-important build-up.

Instead of being some grand statement on heroism and America, "Grounded" is just one introductory issue bloated with preposterous ego, two mediocre and forgettable Superman stories in #702 and #703, and then #705, a rushed piece of mechanical hackwork featuring a child abuse story made up of half-remembered garbage cliches from network television specials 20 years ago.

Aaaaaand scene. Exit Straczynski, stage left, to the sound of 1,000 flatulent windbags vigorously deflating.
-Jason Michelitch

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Jason Aaron Offers Straight Talk on Cutting Comic Prices and Pages

Jason Michelitch — 2010-12-09T12:30:00+00:00

In his latest column at Comic Book Resources, bearded word-warrior Jason Aaron (Scalped, Wolverine) discusses the latest price moves at Marvel and DC with uncommon candor (as covered by ComicsAlliance way back here). The piece is a good read for anyone interested in getting a glimpse behind the scenes of this kind of industry shift, and should be required homework for all those fans who, without bothering to stop and think about whether they even remotely know what they're talking about, regularly stand around comic shops or linger on message boards having loud conversations about how comics are or should be made.

Of particular interest in the column are Aaron's personal reactions to DC dropping its prices back to $2.99 while cutting the page count of their comics from 22 pages to 20 pages, which will affect Aaron's creator-owned Vertigo series Scalped. Aaron writes:

First of all...I didn't hear about this change until the same time everyone else did. No matter how you slice it, this page reduction amounts to a pay cut for all DC creators.

A few of Aaron's other works.

This kind of cold, hard, nuts-and-bolts discussion of economics and labor doesn't usually get thrown around in comics circles. It's refreshing to have touch-points like this to refer back to when discussing any aspect of the industry, if only as a reminder that comics people aren't a monolithic block, with creators and companies acting in concert toward agreed-upon ends.

Aaron continues with some discussion of the effects of the page cut on the creative process as well:

Now you might argue...that doesn't really have to amount to a pay cut. After all, you can just go right from one script into the next and continue working, making up the difference. True, but that's assuming that it takes less work to write a 20 page script than it does a 22 page script, which I'm not convinced is true. I can almost guarantee you it takes Warren Ellis and Matt Fraction a lot longer to write their 16 page issues of Fell and Casanova than it does any of their 22 page comics. It's sometimes hard enough to fit a story into 22 pages. Taking pages away does not make the job easier. Even just two pages. Instead it necessitates that you either take stuff out of your story or dramatically change the way you're telling that story.

Now, pay-cut or no pay-cut, if losing those two pages is the only way to keep my series "Scalped" from bumping up to $3.99 (which I had already been told was going to happen, across the board at Vertigo), then I'm all for it.

I once had to have an argument with a co-worker in a comics shop (who was a smart fella and should have known enough to know better) who complained about Fell's lateness on the grounds that, being only 16 pages, it should be the easiest kind of book to put out quickly. The more creators like Aaron put out solid information about what really goes into making these four-color funnybooks we all like so much, the less I have to yell at people who don't know what they're talking about. From one Jason to another, thanks.

The whole column can be read here.

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'What I Did': Guilt and the Anthropomorphic Simplicity of Jason [Review]

Jason Michelitch — 2010-12-02T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Indie, Opinion

It seems hard to overestimate the affection Norwegian cartoonist Jason (one name only) creates in comics fans of many stripes. When I worked in a comic book store full of Fantagraphobics, the one book from the House of Groth I can remember being recommended by a spandex-loving co-worker was Jason's Hey, Wait... I bought it then, but never read past the first few pages, and so it is that I was able to approach What I Did, a new collection of some of Jason's earliest translated work from Fantagraphics, more or less tabula rasa.

A snapshot of Jason's career from 1997-2001, the stories in What I Did are also loosely thematically collected, circling around guilt as their central emotion. Hey, Wait..., Jason's translated-into-English debut from way back in 2001, and The Iron Wagon, a long out-of-print adaptation of a 1908 Norwegian mystery novel, bookend the collection, and both address the theme of guilt acutely.The Iron Wagon is the most obvious, being a murder mystery, where there is a literal guilty party. Hey, Wait... deals in survivor's guilt, and the confusion that arises from being partly responsible for a tragedy but not in a way that you actually deserve any blame, which makes it almost harder to absolve yourself. The middle story, and the longest piece in the book, Sshhhh!, holds guilt at more of an arm's length, though it's certainly present in places. Being the life story of a single anthropomorphized bird-man in a fedora, Sshhhh! puts the book's title in a light more to do with memoir and a sweep of personal history than with a single, remembered, regretted event.

I have to say, these are good books, but they aren't great -- which might seem like a petty or snobbish distinction, but I think it's an important one to draw. There are many pleasures to be had from Jason's work, among them a wealth of clever cartoon metaphors and a impressively economic storytelling tricks. A perfect example of both of these strengths can be seen in a two-panel sequence from Hey, Wait..., in which a child rears back to sneeze in the first panel, and finishes the sneeze as an adult in the second. But he shift isn't through time, as nothing else around the character changes, and other children remain children. Adulthood takes the character by surprise, like a sneeze, involuntary and unpleasant but necessary. At his best, Jason pieces together representations of complex thoughts and emotions through simple visual building blocks.

Simplicity is also one of Jason's flaws, though. While he can pack a heap of metaphorical resonance into a scant few panels, he builds his regular, naturalistic scenes very deliberately, taking time to move his characters around in space bit by bit, meticulously sticking to the page as storytelling unit. Each page in the book is built on a six-panel grid, with scenes often starting at the top of a page and finishing at the end of the same page, or at the end of a following page, never the middle. The repetitive rhythm can dull the senses, though, and reduce the impact of what should be the stronger moments in his story. Interestingly, only the Iron Wagon -- an adaptation rather than an original story -- breaks with this, juxtaposing red and white panels near its climax to heighten the action.

There is also the visual sameness of the characters; while attractive and idiosyncratic as a whole, Jason's character designs never stray far from a few basic types: anthropomorphized dogs and birds with blank eyes and expressionless faces. The designs are smart -- the adorable animal qualities set the readers up to sympathize with the characters, and the blank faces allow them to impose whatever emotions they imagine -- and in small doses they are probably quite effective. Over multiple stories, or over one long story, they start to blur together. At one point in Sshhh!, I thought a cuckolding lover was an older version of the cuckold's son, last seen two chapters prior. While that would have made the scene a lot more interesting, I doubt it was what Jason intended, as the story is built around basic, archetypal (sometimes painfully stereotypical) life situations, and intra-family sex swapping doesn't really fit the mold.

It also doesn't help that all three of the stories in What I Did center on solipsistic sad-sack men, with women relegated to mostly passive supporting or cameo roles. Hey, Wait... and The Iron Wagon barely touch on women at all except as distant lust objects, while Sshhhh! engages in some odd gender politics through the main male character's three romantic involvements: The first woman dies tragically to ennoble the main character's story, the second woman is an anonymous sex partner who exists for one scene and then mails the main character a child to take care of on his own, and the third woman leaves the main character and is then subjected to a full 11 different emotionally or physically violent revenge/recapture fantasies on the page -- all imagined with blank eyes and an emotionless face.

Jason's formal inventiveness is clever and at times breathtakingly elegant, but the two original stories presented here don't have the substance that his style seems to demand. It should be remembered, of course, that this is early work, and what I've seen of his later comics suggests an upswing in inventiveness. Something like the recent Werewolves of Montpelier, while still looking like a Jason book on the surface, inhabits a different territory entirely when it comes to character and tone. It has, after all, been a decade or more since some of this work was written and drawn, and an artist of Jason's caliber should be expected to advance in his interests, goals, and abilities. Jason remains a widely beloved and renowned cartoonist, and those seeking an entry point could do worse than What I Did, but it should be read with the caveat that the work within is a starting point, not the finish line.

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Paul Chadwick Reveals New 'Concrete' Series, Harlan Ellison Sci-Fi Comic Near Completion

Jason Michelitch — 2010-11-24T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: News

Creation and Creator, both hard at work. Concrete in the fields, left. Chadwick in the studio, right.

Paul Chadwick's Concrete debuted in 1986 in Dark Horse Presents #1, and quickly became a touchstone work in what might be called the "alternative mainstream" of comics, the non-superhero comics from publishers like Dark Horse and Comico that sought to emulate the aesthetic strengths of superhero comics while expanding their focus to other genres of stories. Though he hasn't published any comics for the last five years, Chadwick is still working hard on the stories he wants to tell, and in a new pleasantly forthcoming and plainspoken interview at Guerrilla Geek, he drops the news that he will be launching a new Concrete series called Stars Over Sand, which he says is about "how much we can lose and still be human." Also, he said that he is near completion of Seven Against Chaos, his science fiction comic with Harlan Ellison that is seven years in the making.Chadwick's Concrete was much-loved and influential for the way he pit his superhero-esque Man of Stone not against dastardly villains in tales of derring-do, but against thorny philosophical dilemmas, interpersonal relationships, and political and social issues. The off-beat, contemplative, and clever stories were breaths of fresh, quiet air in the bombastic world of comic books. The last new Concrete story was published in 2005 ("The Human Dilemma," available to read for free at Chadwick's website here), and while Chadwick has been more or less absent from comics since then, he hopes to be "a more frequent presence in the comics shops" once he gets his college-aged son out the door to pursue a degree in Physics.

excerpt from "The Human Dilemma," Dark Horse, 2005

Chadwick dishes tantalizing bits of news on his upcoming projects, and if everything mentioned comes out as planned, the man is working one heck of a comeback: a new Concrete mini-series titled Stars Over Sand, a children's comics series about "a little guy in a nightshirt and cap carrying a candle through a gloomy castle" who is rescued from strange dream adventures by an obnoxious dog. And in possibly the most appetite-whetting news, though he claims he's "actually not supposed to talk about it," he reveals that his long-gestating sci-fi adventure comic with Harlan Ellison, Seven Against Chaos, is nearly complete, seven years after it was first announced.

The book has been a long time gestating, and I'm actually not supposed to talk about it, but it is a pulpy, time-traveling adventure about a group of despised misfits (Harlan's favorite theme) who risk all to save a corrupt but all-we-have world. DC will announce it when it's scheduled. I recently finished the art - the last of four 48-page issues. Ken Steacy is lovingly coloring the book, using a great deal of purple.

Concrete meets Harlan Ellison, in "Byrdland's Secret" from Dark Horse Presents #66, 1992

Chadwick has worked with Ellison in the past, supplying the art for a Jan Strnad adaptation of one of Ellison's short stories in the mid-90s anthology series Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, and Ellison actually made a guest appearance in a 1992 Concrete story, "Byrdland's Secret," in which Concrete meets writer Dwayne Byrd, a thinly-disguised analogue for Harlan, with the story a fictionalized account of Chadwick's visit to Ellison's home. Since first mentioned in a Chadwick interview from 2003, there have been few official updates on Seven Against Chaos, which once published will be the pair's first full collaboration, with Chadwick drawing directly from an Ellison script.

The Guerrilla Geek interview contains much more, including a discussion of Chadwick's creative process, with a look at one of his rough thumbnails side-by-side with the finished page. Below is a small version of the comparison -- click through to the full Guerrilla Geek interview to find larger images, and to read a worthwhile conversation with an always interesting creator.

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Batgirl Fights For Equal Pay (From Batman) in New Ad [Video]

Jason Michelitch — 2010-11-14T09:00:00+00:00

Batgirl hasn't always been the best representative for feminism in the super-hero community. A quick scan of her history in the comics will find her stopping during a melee to fix a run in her tights, participating in a cheesecake-tastic all-nude fight scene, and being the prototype victim for the Women in Refrigerators trend in The Killing Joke. But you, me, and Yvonne Craig have always known there's more to Barbara Gordon than that, and a new video released in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act aims to remind everyone that Batgirl is no one's pushover.

Produced by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), the video features Yvonne Craig as Batgirl, Burt Ward as Robin, and standing in for Adam West, Dick Gautier as Batman. The scene opens with Batman and Robin tied up dangerously close to a ticking bomb. Batgirl swoops in for the rescue, but before she defuses the bomb, she takes the opportunity to press Batman about the unfair pay gap that the Caped Crusader apparently maintains between Batgirl and Robin. Batman, true to his super-dickery ways, tells her to stop kidding around, and then hums and haws uncomfortably, while Robin chimes in with his usual "Holy [insert word]" inanities, presumably to drive home the point that there's no way he would be paid more than Batgirl if sexism weren't a factor, as he's clearly mentally deficient.

The video is a remix of a Public Service Announcement shot for the U.S. Department of Labor in the early '70s to raise awareness of the original Equal Pay Act, which banned wage discrimination based on gender. The new act aims to buttress the original law by strengthening penalties for cases of equal pay discrimination as well as creating new incentives for employers to follow the law, new educational and outreach programs, and giving women greater leverage in civil court to fight for equal pay. Supporters of the new law are most likely ramping up advocacy for it now in order to try and have it passed in the lame duck session of Congress, before the next Congress is sworn in with a stronger GOP presence.

While we're pretty sure that pseudo-fascist criminal vigilante gangs aren't covered under any federal labor law, it's nice to see Batgirl take a feminist stance for once, threatening to actually let the Dynamic Duo blow up unless they knock off their Mad Men-esque nonsense of paying her bupkis and asking her to make coffee all the time. Remember, kids: Yvonne Craig did all of her own stunts, and Adam West had a stunt double with a pot belly. That an advocacy film she made 30 years ago can play more or less unaltered today and still be just as applicable is a crying shame.

We here at Comics Alliance prefer to imagine she's saying the above
in the sassiest, most sarcastic tone possible.

Click here to go to the "Help Batgirl in the Battle to Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act" page where you'll find more information from the campaign. Embedded below is the original Department of Labor PSA.

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Don't They Know It's 'H DAY'? [Review]

Jason Michelitch — 2010-10-01T17:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Reviews, Indie

If the back cover copy hadn't told me, I probably never would have realized that Renee French's new Picturebox graphic novel, "H Day," was about her struggle with migraine headaches, although the adorable shelving classification "migraine / graphic novel" might have tipped me off. Not that it matters much for the work whether I would have figured it out or not, since the book is "about" French's migraine headaches the same way the film "The Shining" is "about" massive cocaine use. Kubrick gave us endless snow, claustrophobic compositions, and paranoid hallucinations of dirty pig-humans having obscene sex in the room right next door CAN'T YOU HEAR THEM?

French, for her part, gives us a fleshy gun-shaped creature with a stinger that lives inside your head disguised as part of your brain, like one of those parasite bugs that crawl into the mouths of fish in order to eat and then replace their tongues, except that instead of just hanging out and eating part of your food for the rest of your life, French's brain-creature just stings the hell out of your gray matter and then grows tentacles to try to strangle you in your sleep. But horror is relative, and maybe that sounds like a trade up to you from having a parasite live in your mouth. I wouldn't know.

"H Day" is split into two equally strange narratives, each presented one image per page, side-by-side on facing pages throughout the book. On the left hand side is a glacially-paced, simply-rendered view of a faceless person being overrun by the aforementioned brain creature. On the right hand side is a dark, painstakingly shaded and textured fantasy story about a city overrun with clouds of little black bugs (according to the back cover copy, analogues for an infestation of Argentinean ants that recently plagued French).

The two stories have some interplay (the brain creature is seen early in the book poking its stinger up out of a lake and releasing the black bugs, suggesting that the fantasy landscape is internal to the person suffering on the left-hand pages) but mostly they stand in stark contrast with one another, creating a bifurcated reading experience more conflicted than complementary. The pages interrupt each other, and the two narratives -- directly opposed in use of pacing, shadow, texture, setting, and action -- become hard to process simultaneously. This could easily be intentional, an evocation of the mental state brought on by intense migraines, but it nevertheless makes for a frustrated reading experience.

One of the beautiful things about comics, though, is how modular and malleable the "reading" experience can be. Unlike prose books, most of which have a linear flow from word to word regardless of visual presentation, comics are made up of discrete visual units, and units within units. Panels, pages, facing pages -- any and all of these things can be taken as individual experiences, and in any order. Artist's intention counts for something, sure, but as Eddie Campbell says, all the pages of a comic arrive at once.

As a reader, I have the freedom to dip into those pages wherever and however I find most useful, and unlike cinema or music, the ease with which I do so is not restricted by technological presentation. All of which is a long way around to admitting that I liked "H DAY" a lot more once I realized that the comic on the left worked best as a horrifying flipbook, which is how I've now experienced it numerous times. Detached from its partner on the right and flipped through at a brisk pace, the sparsely drawn migraine session pulsed and undulated with motion, and actually managed to startle me, which is something comics hardly ever do.

Having isolated and sped up the left-hand story, I found myself psychologically freed to go back and linger over oblique passages, beautiful compositions, strange juxtapositions. I read through the right hand story at a slower pace and savored the narrative beats -- a harrowing moment where the main character, a small dog, is washed about in the current from a raging drain pipe sticks in my mind, as does a sequence in which a mysterious young girl (or at least I think it's a young girl) lowers an ominous package into the heart of the city from a high rooftop.

That the two halves of the book support such radically different styles of reading is, to me, a strength. You get two books in one, a quick one and a slow one, and because they exist on facing pages a little piece of the other drifts in your peripheral vision no matter which story you're visiting. Once I found my way into "H DAY" it was easy to get lost in the rich visuals and strange imagery. I just hope Ms. French doesn't mind that I had to break a window before I could unlock the door.

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Dazzling, Filthy Violence: 'Prison Pit 2' by Johnny Ryan [Review]

Jason Michelitch — 2010-08-16T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Reviews, Indie

It's hard to write about Johnny Ryan's new book from Fantagraphics, "Prison Pit 2," without resorting to profanity, if only because the three most common thoughts blurted out while reading it rhyme with "Holy spit!", "What the duck?!?", and "Jeeeeeeeeebus Diced." "Prison Pit 2" is mental, obscene, and grotesque, and I'd guard most normal people against even venturing further into this review. But the book is also pretty astonishing and at least several parts awesome, so to my fellow freaks in the audience, venture forth past the jump and we'll talk disgusting violence, blood-soaked symbiotic sentient prosthetic limbs and other such fanciful notions. To envision "Prison Pit 2," try to imagine the kind of juvenile, sex-and-violence doodles your average angsty young schoolboy might fill up a notebook with during math class, if those feverish doodles could somehow appear on the pages as extreme and bombastic as they seemed in his head. "Prison Pit 2" operates on an engine of rolling, escalating action scenes -- there's almost nothing else in the book -- in which Ryan manages to stack extreme moments in such a way that each moment constantly feels as though it must be the climax, but on the very next page the energy somehow goes up yet another notch.

It put me in mind of a compositional technique I once heard Stephen Merritt explain on NPR (and "Stephen Merrit on NPR" is about the last thing I'd expect to be referenced in a Johnny Ryan review, but there it is). The technique is called a Shepard tone, and it involves layering ascending tones in different octaves to create the illusion of an ever-rising musical scale. Ryan pulls what seems to be a similar trick: He saves the most ridiculous, over-the-top moments for right after a brief lull in the panel-to-panel action, giving you the sense that it never descended from the previous peak.

If it seems odd that I have yet to mention the plot of the comic, it's because I have no idea how to explain what happens. The book also purposefully leaves out story elements like motivation and exposition, and all that's on the page is straightforward, if deranged, action. Our main character, CF -- the guy on the cover -- comes across another guy who apparently ripped off his arm and ate it. They proceed to fight for something like 40 pages. Later on CF is kidnapped by a scientist living in a cave who installs a computer in his penis and sends him out to rape a pterodactyl with the torso of a woman. The book ends on an almost 100% literal cliffhanger.

It sounds like anarchy, but it somehow it all seems to make sense in context. There's a certain logical progression to be found in a fight scene that starts with poop and ends with vomit. It feels right. It doesn't necessarily feel good, but you find yourself nodding as you read it, and thinking "Oh, well, of course. Makes perfect sense." There's a craft to the crudeness, something you see in the art itself; Ryan's drawings are in his signature childish, thick-line, squished-perspective style, which lends to the "schoolboy doodling" mood of the piece, but they are arranged with a keen sense for composition and implied motion that betrays the level of skill Ryan brings to the table.

The enjoyment in "Prison Pit 2" is largely on the level of spectacle, of having your jaw drop at Ryan topping himself in the progression of each set piece. The K.O. move in the first fight, in which a defiant rude gesture is transformed into a blistering kill-strike, is a brilliant marriage of vulgarity and cartooning ingenuity. I'm dazzled by the bloody chutzpah and dirty bravado of Ryan's fight comic, the sheer devotion he shows to violence for violence's sake, thoroughly removed from any hollow "redeeming values" or "character development." While I may not actually fully enjoy the book, there's a respect to be had for that kind of commitment to an aesthetic principle. I don't know if I could in good conscience recommend this book to most people, but to anyone wondering if "Prison Pit 2" really delivers all the weird, filthy violence it promises, the answer is a resounding yes.

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Dream Thieves: What Comics Should Learn to Fear about 'Inception'

Jason Michelitch — 2010-08-02T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Movies, Opinion

Christopher Nolan's recent movie "Inception" has been called a puzzle-box, a brain-twister, and a "Kubrickian masterpiece." It is none of these things. It is a straightforward heist movie with a fantasy twist, in which every plot point is explained at length in direct exposition, usually at least twice. It's a better-than-horrible adventure film that fills the time it takes to project pleasantly enough and then quickly unravels in the light of day with even the slightest application of critical thought.

It is also, unknowingly, a pitch-perfect metaphor for (1) its own failings, (2) the failings of Hollywood, and (3) everything the world of comics has to fear from the world of film.

The plot of "Inception," in quick summary in case you haven't seen it yet or haven't read eleventy-billion spoiler-filled blog posts already: Leonardo DiCaprio is the leader of a team of thieves who invade people's heads while they sleep and create elaborate dream worlds as ruses to trick their victims into giving up the secrets stored deep in their brains. The team takes on The Hardest Job They've Ever Done, complications ensue, fights occur, things blow up, and then there's an ending. It all doesn't amount to that much more than an exercise in plot mechanics, except that, by accident, it does. As follows:

(1) Its own failings.

"Inception" is no better or worse than any other serviceable adventure movie, but it suffers from its choice of subject matter. By declaring loudly that it is about dreams, the film calls direct attention to its own paucity of imagination. The settings in Inception do not function like dreams. In dreams, sounds and images shift and meld, people and places have more than one identity at once, and your subconscious suprises you with symbols that carry double, triple, or no meanings at all. In Inception, the dream worlds are like video game maps, with secret passages and floor plans. Everything is painfully literal, and dull as dishwater.

During one sequence, DiCaprio's character spends decades building one dream world out of his utmost fantasies, and comes up with nothing more interesting than a series of sleek high-rise buildings just like ones he admired in real life. It's a perfect expression of the cipher his character is, the cliched "One Last Job and I'm Out" master operator of dozens of heist and con-artist films gone before. You can almost see DiCaprio's character as a stand-in for Nolan as a filmmaker: a crafter of dreams who once had a good idea, but given an infinite canvas he opts for a cleanly-lit, well-organized survey of ground already covered.

Guns and high-rises - the film's central preoccupations feature prominently on the poster.

(2) The failings of Hollywood.

In "Inception," one character is fending off enemies with an assualt rifle; another character implores him to "dream bigger"... and pulls out a grenade launcher. It's a gag bit, but it serves as the perfect encapsulating metaphor for the barren landscape of big-budget Hollywood films. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow into making virtually anything appear on a movie screen through the wonders of special effects, enough to give even the most improbable visions substance, and what are those dollars spent on? Bigger guns. More impressive explosions.

Throughout the film, characters are warned not to shake things up in the dream world too much, lest they tip their hand to the sleeping target. Don't do anything too weird, don't draw attention to yourself, or the teeming masses populating the dream will turn on you and rip you to shreds. Every time a character was warned against being too flashy, I thought of article after article I read in the run-up to "Inception"'s release that worried whether Nolan would "lose the audience," or whether Inception might end up being "too smart for the room." Again and again this theme sounded in the pre-release press, and there it was running through the film.

In dreams we often see recurring symbols of our deepest anxieties, and clearly Hollywood's is that the great mass audience will turn on them if they try too hard, if they act too smart, if they make people feel challenged or confused. The best thing to do is to not expect too much of the audience, to reassure them and over-explain things, and to make sure to throw in a half-clever twist so that the mass walks out of the theater feeling smart. Given that the most frequent compliment to "Inception" I've heard is that "it never loses the audience," their strategy seems to have found fertile ground.

Tread carefully and carry a big gun.

(3) We know he directed Batman and all, but what does this have to do with comics?

Comics and Hollywood have entered the heavy-petting phase of their relationship, and it's worth taking a moment to step back and observe what Hollywood truly strives for. Because make no mistake, "Inception" is a quintessential glimpse into the world of big-budget film. It is Hollywood speaking through Christopher Nolan to expound its ultimate statement of artistic principles: when told to dream bigger, just think up a better gun and a more convoluted way to say what your predecessors have already said in order to seem like you're saying something new. Don't change too much. Don't risk the audience turning on you. Just blend in, trick your marks out of their money, and disappear before the lights come up and they realize what happened while they were asleep.

Over the last decade, there's been a fractured but widespread push to make American comics more like film. Cinematic storytelling has always loomed over comics as an influence, but from 2000-2010 it became more and more pervasive. Younger creators looking to distance themselves from the embarrassing history of superhero comics marketed their comics as "paper movies" in an attempt to align themselves with a more acceptable-for-adults popular visual medium in the minds of potential readers. Major comics companies saw more and more properties successfully go through film production and became eager to produce the next wave of trademarks for sale. Think: how many times have you heard the phrase "Comics are ready-made storyboards" in the last ten years?

Every time you see mediocre new comics with some celebrity's name over the title, every time you see laboriously photo-referenced art pre-casting popular actors as characters, and every time you read a comic that feels like someone's failed movie pitch, remember: these are the conscious and subconscious effects of becoming Hollywood's farm team, and they should be fiercely guarded against. The reduction of comics to motionless cinema is a mental disease borne of self-loathing and envy, and should be resisted at every level, fought off like a thief you find poking around in your head in the middle of the night, pilfering your favorite dreams.

Excerpt from the rather clumsy Inception tie-in comic book.

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Judge Rules for Neil Gaiman Against Todd MacFarlane in Medieval Spawn Case

Jason Michelitch — 2010-08-02T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: News

As reported by CBR (and relayed by Tom Spurgeon), U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled on Friday in favor of Neil Gaiman in the long-running legal struggle between Gaiman and Todd McFarlane over the ownership of several characters in McFarlane's "Spawn" universe.

A previous lawsuit between Gaiman and McFarlane, which Gaiman won, concerned Medieval Spawn, Angela, and Cogliostro, characters created directly by Gaiman in Spawn #9 in 1993. The latest conflict is over characters McFarlane has introduced since the previous lawsuit, which Gaiman considers to be "knock-offs" of those he created. In this latest development, Crabb writes definitively in her opinion "that the newer characters are derivative and that [Gaiman] is entitled to his share of the profits realized by these characters."

On the left, Medieval Spawn. On the right, Dark Ages Spawn. No similarities here, nosiree.

Anyone looking at the situation with eyes half-open could probably have predicted Gaiman's victory, but Judge Crabb took far more than a cursory look before writing her decision (available as PDF here), which contains intricate discussion of "the rules of the 'Spawn' universe," not to mention the phrase "kick-ass warrior angels."

Much as defendant tries to distinguish the two knight Hellspawn, he never explains why, of all the universe of possible Hellspawn incarnations, he introduced two knights from the same century. Not only does this break the Hellspawn "rule" that Malebolgia never returns a Hellspawns to Earth more than once every 400 years (or possibly every 100 years, as suggested in Spawn, No. 9, exh. #1, at 4), it suggests that what defendant really wanted to do was exploit the possibilities of the knight introduced in issue no. 9.

She also shows an affinity for the imaginative, expounding on the possibilities of historical Spawn characters:

If [McFarlane] really wanted to differentiate the new Hellspawn, why not make him a Portuguese explorer in the 16th century; an officer of the Royal Navy in the 18th century, an idealistic recruit of Simon Bolivar in the 19th century, a companion of Odysseus on his voyages, a Roman gladiator, a younger brother of Emperor Nakamikado in the early 18th century, a Spanish conquistador, an aristocrat in the Qing dynasty, an American Indian warrior or a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I?

Any comics companies in a position to offer Judge Crabb a mini-series to write might want to do so while the publicity's still hot. "From the mind that brought you Gaiman v. McFarlane II, comes..." The copy just writes itself, I swear.

McFarlane was one of the founders of Image Comics, which was formed by a group of superstar Marvel artists in the '90s as a creator-owned publishing company. Image was lauded at the time as a corrective to mainstream comics' entrenched attitude towards corporate ownership of creative properties, with McFarlane himself attracting such creators-rights stalwarts as Alan Moore, Dave Sim, and, of course, Neil Gaiman to write for "Spawn." While Image Central remains a strong staging ground for creator-owned work, McFarlane's side of the house has become dedicated to work-for-hire writers and artists furthering the "Spawn" property. The irony, as ever, is palpable.

McFarlane (right) and "Spawn" writer Brian Holguin (left), outside the courthouse, after giving their testimony. Posted by Gaiman at his blog, where he also gives his comments on the case.

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Nick Cave to Write New 'Crow' Movie, Improving Its Improbable Chances of Rocking

Jason Michelitch — 2010-07-30T13:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Movies

Up until now, you could be forgiven if you were unaware that director Stephen Norrington has been planning a new film version of James O'Barr's 1988 comic "The Crow," because up until now there has been no good reason to care at all about a new film version of "The Crow," which was first adapted semi-interestingly to film in 1994 by director Alex Proyas, and then flogged to death over a series of three sequels, one TV series, and an endless amount of Hot Topic merchandise.

However, as reported by The Wrap, production company Relativity Media has made quite possibly the only choice they could make that would result in a new "The Crow" movie that will not only be worth checking out, but potentially worth getting excited for: they have hired gothic rock star Nick Cave to pen the script.

"Dig, Lazarus, Dig" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

"The Crow" comic follows the story of a young man named Eric who is raised from the dead to exact bloody vengeance on the roving gang of thugs that brutally and randomly murdered him and his girlfriend. Originally conceived as an artistic catharsis for artist O'Barr's own torment after his fiance was killed by a drunk driver, "The Crow" comic is a strange marriage of trashy pulp cliches and deeply personal storytelling, with some impressive scenes of violence, arresting dream sequences, and scenes in which Eric -- against action-hero type -- performs modern dance routines as a sort of meditation between revenge killings.

While the cartooning never quite transcends what you would expect from the '80s black-and-white boom (a period in comics that saw, among other things, the birth of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), "The Crow" is nevertheless possessed of a genuine nature and an idiosyncratic charm that sets it apart from similar works, and it's easy to understand how it captured the devoted cult following that it has.

The dance scenes, of course, were one of the first things to go in the 1994 film adaptation. The hero was given an electric guitar to brood over instead, which was much more acceptably macho.

The material is a perfect match for Cave, who is known primarily as the singer of dark and clever lyrics with his band the Bad Seeds, and whose film work includes two films written for director John Hillcoat -- the prison-drama "Ghosts...of the Civil Dead" and Australian pseudo-Western ultraviolent period piece "The Proposition" -- as well as copious amounts of soundtrack music composed, and an unfilmed script for a sequel to "Gladiator," written at the behest of Russell Crowe, which begins with Crowe's Maximus being raised from the dead, and then travels through centuries, including a sequence in the Vietnam War, and ending in a men's room at the Pentagon. Yes, you just read that correctly. Cave's keen sense of absurd humor may also help to rescue "The Crow" from its own self-seriousness, which ranks a "Billy Corgan" on the scale of One to Overearnest.

The article at the Wrap, seemingly blissfully unaware of the project's comic book origins (nowhere in the article does the name "James O'Barr" even appear, which is sort of shameful), doesn't tackle the question of whether Cave will be sticking close to the source material or not, but they do offer up that Cave's script will "feature the titular bird as more of a full-fledged character than in Alex Proyas' 1994 [film]." While not much to go on, this seems to indicate the project moving away from director Norrington's original desire to make a more "realistic" film, and back into the realm of strange gothic fantasy -- a.k.a., Nick Cave's backyard. Now here's hoping he does the soundtrack, too.

Nick Cave makes a cameo as a troubador in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a film he also scored along with fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis (no, not that Warren Ellis)

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It Hurts To Laugh: R.I.P. Cartoonist John Callahan 1951-2010

Jason Michelitch — 2010-07-27T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Comic Strips, Opinion

As has been reported in numerous outlets, cartoonist John Callahan died on Saturday, July 24, after an extended hospital stay. He was well-known for what is now being politely referred to in obituaries as his "politically incorrect" sense of humor. John Callahan was not politically incorrect. John Callahan was just plain wrong.

"This type of cartoon one would expect to find in some establishment-bashing underground publication, not in a feature magazine of one of the foremost newspapers in the United States."
- excerpt from one of what must have been thousands of letters of complaint received over his career, found in the "Hate Mail" section of Callahan's website.

Callahan operated way outside practically everybody's comfort zone. It doesn't matter who you are or what you believe; at some point, Callahan probably offended you. His was not the calculated use of "edgy" of a Dennis Leary or Carlos Mencia, tossing around well-worn reactionary or racist observations with a wink and a smile to win over the baser instincts of a crowd. Callahan's work was like a raw feed from a dark and twisted id. His crude, squiggly drawings enhanced the immediacy of his work, with the unfiltered, uncensored humor of an enfant terrible who made you laugh and cringe in equal amount.

"I'm very baffled by the weekly appearance of Callahan cartoons."
- more Hate Mail

Callahan stood out wherever he was published. Part of this was due to his no-holds-barred taboo-shattering humor, and part of this was his scribbly, chaotic, "bad" art, which looked like the doodles of the world's most disturbed six-year-old. A car accident having left him a quadriplegic since age 21, Callahan's technical draftsmanship was obviously impaired, but his cartoons were nonetheless more visually energetic than many of his contemporaries who had full use of their limbs. I used to read his work in "Comic Relief" magazine, sandwiched between the latest inert editorial cartooning and the likes of "Foxtrot," where each Callahan cartoon was like a surprise attack from a meth-crazed weasel on a quiet suburban street. A Callahan cartoon looked and acted like nothing else around it.

"There are two basic reasons I enjoy Callahan's work so much: First I think his cartoons are just plain funny, and second, he makes my own work look normal."
- Gary Larson, cartoonist, The Far Side

Callahan's quadriplegia was occasionally raised in defense of his more beyond-the-pale strips, particularly his frequent strips making a gag out of being in a wheelchair or otherwise disabled. But to make that argument -- to point and say, "Well, he's ALLOWED to make fun of that" -- misses the point of Callahan. He didn't care what he was allowed to say. Heck, I thought the guy was amazing, but there's a good third of his strips that I can't even read without shriveling in embarrassment or feeling my face flatten into a grimace of disapproval. And that taboo shattering was the point of Callahan. He was capable of funny yet innocuous gags when the spirit so moved him. But he was an artist who could make even his most fervent fans recoil in horror, and what's more, he wasn't afraid to do it.

"Until Mr. Callahan can understand the emotions behind such a life of struggle, I feel he should not fell [sic] to [sic] freely about poking fun at the disabled."
- another Hate Mail pull quote, possibly the best one, in response to the cartoon below, one of his most notorious, and the caption to which Callahan used as the title to his memoir.

Callahan lived a prolific artistic life, producing work not only as a cartoonist but as an author, a songwriter who worked with the likes of Tom Waits, and creator of two animated series, one for adults and one for kids, both centered around quadriplegic main characters. He was a fierce presence in the world, and though he drew more than one cartoon that made me question my belief in a right to freedom of expression, I'm terribly sad that his voice has fallen silent. You should be, too.

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Something's Missing: The Loss of Buenaventura Press

Jason Michelitch — 2010-06-24T13:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Indie

It's been almost two weeks since we found out that it's been five months since Buenaventura Press closed its doors. The span of time between the event and the news breaking had an odd cushioning effect, like when you find out someone you used to know and lost track of has died, but years ago. It's still a shock, and it's still horrible, but the time removes the "what's going to happen next?" moment, the "how do we go on after this?" feeling, because whatever happened next, it already happened. You've come to the tragedy late, and you're already on the other side of it.

Many have commented on how it took the comics news cycle five months to discover that one of its finest publishers had shut down, generally expressing dismay at how such a thing could occur under all our noses. While I understand that Buenaventura's absence from the scene has been a topic of discussion in certain circles for some time now, I think it's undeniable that the broader circle of discussion that makes up comics culture had little to no clue this has happened, and I'm not convinced this is entirely a bad thing.Now mind you, Buenaventura Press closing down is unequivocally a Bad Thing, but the fact that they were able to fade away with only a select few really noticing at first is somewhat heartening to the strength of Art Comics in the 21st century. Imagine if, in 1990, Fantagraphics Books hadn't started Eros Comix but instead quietly run out of money and closed its doors. American Art Comics would have been dealt an earth-shattering body blow from which it may have taken a depressingly long time to recover. Today, as Chris Butcher's oft-linked list shows, there's such a wealth of quality publishers putting out daring, interesting, not-really-like-anything-else works that the loss of a publisher as iconic and important as Buenaventura Press, while awful, can be taken in stride.

This is not to say that nothing has been lost with the passing of Buenaventura Press. (Which I'm being painfully careful to avoid shorthanding as simply "Buenaventura," as I don't need my syntax implying that anything nasty has befallen publisher Alvin Buenaventura. For equally obvious reasons, I'm taking great pains to avoid calling the defunct publisher "BP," lest they be blamed for some truly tragic circumstances.)

First of all, they published some amazing books. Lesser known contemporary artists like Vanessa Davis and Ted May were given spotlights from which to dazzle us all. "Jack Survives," Buenaventura's first real reprint volume (first of what we all hoped would be many) is a big, beautiful book that's a pleasure to hold and leaf through, and also happens to be one of the most important reprint volumes of what many (including myself) have taken to calling the Golden Age of Reprints. And I don't think there was anyone not left wondering what shape Kramers Ergot 8 might take, and just how exactly it would crush us all and rule us with an iron fist.

More than just the product, however, we've lost a strong advocate for a certain attitude, a way of thinking about comics that is difficult to master and impossible to fake. Alvin Buenaventura started out in fine art printmaking, and though he grew up ingesting comics he was primarily attracted to original art as art, as opposed to the adventure stories or the fan culture. He came to publishing comics not out of some nostalgic desire to be part of the comics culture, but out of an artistic impulse to package and present things he found beautiful and important in the ways that best suited them. It's a difficult distinction to make without accidentally disparaging some very good publishers, and it's not my intention to look down on others' efforts in the slightest.

But the way Buenaventura Press treated a release was not as a book that needed the best possible design and shape, but rather as a unique opportunity to create something visually and physically new that would just so happen to be a book at the end of the process. If it were possible to bottle and save the psychic energy Alvin injected into the world of art comics, we wouldn't need people like him to come around and stay as long as possible. But that kind of worldview can't be duplicated, and so I sincerely hope that Alvin both wants to and is able to re-enter the fray in the near future, the sooner the better.

On a truly personal note, I'm looking ahead to September, when each year I make a pilgrimage 20 miles north to Bethesda, MD, where at the Small Press Expo I wander around and breathe in The New. I'm notoriously slow to grasp new trends, find new artists, absorb new works. The hectic pace of keeping up with the newest in any artform stresses me out and ruins my ability to actually enjoy the work in question, and while I love new sounds and styles I almost always let things pass me by and then observe them from a slight remove, and then carve out what I find most interesting. A convention table is therefore maybe my favorite context in which to look at comics, as I'm presented with a flat surface full of all the new stuff from the past however-long, and I can flip through and linger over a huge shock of newness (even though, to many around me, a lot of the books are old news).

Over the past years, Buenaventura Press has been one of my favorite stops -- admiring the galleys to the yet-to-be-released "Kramers Ergot 7" quickly became one of my fondest convention memories -- and when I wander through the rented Marriott ballroom this September, they won't be there. In thinking about what's been lost here, that inevitable absence is what looms largest in my mind, and of all the reasons I can give for why we're poorer for the passing of Buenaventura Press, that one makes me the saddest. Good luck to Alvin, his crew, and the artists he published. We hope to see you all again soon.

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