<![CDATA[comiXology | Articles & Interviews]]>Is it Wednesday yet?http://cdn.comixology.com/v2/xtras/comixology-logo-rss.pngcomiXologyhttp://www.comiXology.comen-usFri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:55:02 -0500<![CDATA[Typologies]]>Karen Green considers writing about comics, and writing about writing about comics.The evolution of comic books." Miller had been listening to an interview with Art Spiegelman, and was intrigued by his observation that we were currently in a "Gutenberg moment," in which technology would change the way we read and create and disseminate comics. She thought it would be interesting to talk to Scott and me about the changes digital media are wreaking and/or have wrought on the medium of comics and its creators and readers. Is the experience of reading comics enhanced by these digital options?

It was a lively—and live—conversation (which was a little nerve-wracking, if I'm honest), and listeners were encouraged to call in and ask us questions. At one point, a St Paul English teacher-in-training called to ask me for examples of using comics as teaching tools and I think I panicked a little. There may have been stammering. But I told him to email me and I would expand on some ways that occurred to me. I actually gave out my email over the air, which didn't turn out to be as tragic a decision as it might have been.

A few hours later I got my email from Jacob, and I started typing furiously. The more I wrote, the more I thought of, until finally a typology—a classification system—began to emerge. As it happened, I was invited to give a talk at Yale that same month, and it was there that I first unveiled that typology (which is where these images come from). I thought perhaps I'd share them here, though, and if any of you can come up with additional categories I hope you'll mention them in the comments.



This is pretty much what I envisioned when I first created the collection, which indicates the limits of my own imagination at the time. I wanted faculty to assign comics the same way they do prose works, to further explore the theme of their course. This was also my approach in the exhibition I curated a couple of years ago—six of the seven displays were devoted to themes that might be featured in a university curriculum, and I offered examples of comics in our collection that explored those subjects.

Some of those examples are here. Maus and Palestine speak for themselves, really; they were, in fact, two of the three titles that formed our collection before I started buying formally. (The third was Persepolis; these were the three that were living in course reserves, because they were featured on required reading lists.) The books in this example tell stories that can be used to talk about the Holocaust, the nature of the crisis in the Middle East, the nature of war, the nature of illness, etc. Mom's Cancer, for example, is frequently assigned in courses in our Master's program in Narrative Medicine, as a [literally] graphic example of how sickness affects both the sufferer and those in the sufferer's universe. Reading it and other illness narratives can help health-care workers understand what patients and their loved ones go through and how the workers' own actions can affect people in crisis.



Within this category there are a couple of different aspects: the history of the medium and the medium as history. That Captain America cover serves as both, in a way—both an example of a superhero comic from the past and a reflection on how World War II was integrated into popular culture. To give another example, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor wasn't the first autobiographical comic, but it certainly elevated the genre to a level heretofore unseen, and it serves as a perfect vehicle for students to trace the parallel development of the memoir in both graphic and prose works.

By calling A Contract with God a "graphic novel"—a term that didn't necessarily have the broadest application in 1978—Will Eisner began the process that allows us to trace the evolution of the phrase in terms of marketing and "respectability." Mad magazine, meanwhile, is a huge milestone in both Jewish culture and in the history of satire. I read an interview with Al Jaffee somewhere recently in which he talked about going to "The Daily Show" studio to do a drawing for them, and getting mobbed by the entire crew. "We wouldn't exist without you!" the cast kept saying, referring to the entire Usual Gang of Idiots. And it's true.

That political cartoon of Hearst and Pulitzer dressed as the Yellow Kid can be unpacked in a myriad of ways. It tells the history of early comics, by referring to Hearst's theft of Yellow Kid creator R. F. Outcault from the Pulitzer newspaper empire. It tells the story of the early 20th-century newspaper circulation wars—and, more centrally, the story of these two newspaper moguls' involvement in the Spanish-American War. That's a lot of history for one little rectangle.

David Hajdu's book The Ten-Cent Plague is not itself a comic, but it relates the story of the demonization of comics in the 1950s by the double-barrelled attack of Fredrick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. A history of social panic, of government censorship, of a radical change in the types of comics that were created, of the backlash that yielded underground comics…a lot to unpack there, as well.



This is a category that hadn't even occurred to me when I started the collection. Talking with cartoonists and comics studies scholars over the years, however, led me to think about how the medium actually functions. I didn't confess to Scott McCloud in that MPR interview that it had taken me a while to get around to reading Understanding Comics, but it's true—it did take me a while. I was really focused on content and history!

But what I discovered when I read it at last was a methodological vocabulary that I could use to understand (oh, see? good title!) what those cartoonists and scholars had been talking about when they talked about how to construct a panel or a page or an entire story. I remember when I first started becoming a film buff as a kid, I didn't think much about the role of the screenwriter or the director. I remember when I first started watching baseball in the ‘80s not initially understanding the role of the catcher and pitcher in how a player fared at bat. Similarly, I'd never thought about the care that went into laying out panel, page, and story, and the techniques that allow readers almost unconsciously to grasp elements of the story that are not made explicit, or to navigate the panel or page.

So here are examples of works, like McCloud's, that explain how comics function, and also works that challenge the reader/viewer to apply different analytical muscles in order to understand the narrative. In the upper right is a page from Richard McGuire's brilliant 6-page story "Here," which I've written about at least twice before. On the bottom, an early page from Rebecca Dart's lengthy story "Rabbithead," in The Best American Comics 2006, shows how a single row of panels begins to split off into concurrent narratives—which eventually reach seven parallel rows before narrowing back down again to a single line. It's a stylistic tour-de-force.

Wordless comics, too, get students thinking about how a story is told visually, and Peter Kuper, Eric Drooker, and Shaun Tan all offer compelling contemporary examples of this very focused variety of sequential art.



Finally: how do you make your own comic? This was the disconnect I felt most strongly when I spoke to cartoonists who taught: they were primarily teaching the craft, not analyzing or problematizing the content or context. But, as I described a few years back, I had actually taken part in a create-a-comic exercise once and, while it made very clear that I should keep my day job, it was also a very, um, graphic lesson in the issues described above, in the category of "medium." You don't have to be an aspiring cartoonist to find the process of creating a cartoon fruitful. I've used this exercise with a number of classes since I first encountered it. In trying to understand the process, you can't go wrong with the work Matt Madden and Jessica Abel have been doing here, both in Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story and in the pair's Drawing Words, Writing Pictures (for which they now have an entire site).

"Nancy" is there, of course, because Ernie Bushmiller is a one-man education in the economical creation of a comic. This was first brought to my attention in a lecture I heard Art Spiegelman give, and it will be hammered further home in a few months, upon the release of Paul Karasik's and Mark Newgarden's loooong-awaited book, How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels. "Nancy" is a handy tutorial in the basic grammar of the medium, and armed with a few "Nancy" strips as a tutorial I'd wager even a neophyte could turn out something readable.

So, there you have it. My first stab at a typology of comics pedagogy. Does it make sense? Are you teaching or learning about or with comics in a way that falls outside these parameters? Let me know!



Incidentally, this month's column comes off a little perfunctory, I know. It's a crazy time. I'm involved, with Danny Fingeroth and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber, in planning a 2-day symposium called "Comic New York" that will bring together creators and scholars to look at the intertwined histories of New York City and the American comics medium. It's going to be a blast—and open to the public!—and I'll have much more about it in next month's column. But, for now, just a tease, while I get back to the heavy lifting…]]>articles<![CDATA[Dick Lit: Habibi and Paying For It]]>Kristy Valenti reviews Chester Brown's <i>Paying For It</i> and Craig Thompson's <i>Habibi</i>.By all appearances, Chester Brown and Craig Thompson put out two of The Most Important Graphic Novels of 2011: Paying For It and Habibi. Both were eagerly anticipated, original works by critically acclaimed autobio cartoonists, extensively promoted (Thompson is still touring) and covered by major media outlets such as NPR. Though, on the face of it, these books are diametrically opposed — Brown's autobio comic catalogs his experiences with prostitutes, while Thompson's graphic novel is a fantasia about two soul mates, an Arab woman and a black man — I noted, as have others (http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/09/27/people-are-talking-about-habibi/, http://goodokbad.com/index.php/reviews/habibi_review), that Brown and Thompson have similar preoccupations, and are working through similar concepts: the separation between love and sex, sex and the spiritual, are concerns from their previous works that have come to the fore. I would argue that, though Drawn & Quarterly and Pantheon would like readers and critics to believe that these are Serious Books, worthy of critics' attention and readers' dollars, they're also something else — something I'm going to try to define as Dick (Graphic) Lit.

Apparently, Dick (Graphic) Lit is black and white on the inside, and coded warm brown on the outside, in contrast to the crude Photoshop coloring of superhero comics, the sleek blackness of a cut-above prestige project, like a Hellboy or an Absolute edition, and certainly far removed from the aggressive pastels that often characterize manga volumes. (Target employs this same trick; "chai" indicates Yoga Mat for Non Girly Dudes.) Both Paying For It and Habibi sport relatively simple brown covers, overlaid with a richer red/orange and both focus on a male/female couple. On Habibi, it is the star-crossed lovers, Dodola and Zam (aka Cham). Dodola, who drives much of the book's action, stares defiantly out at the reader; she holds Zam protectively. Zam, her adopted child/eventual mate, lies on her breast, a position that suggests both of his roles. (On the back, they are older, and their position is reversed, although Zam's expression is more sad than angry.)

Paying For It literally bears Robert Crumb's seal of approval; the lettering is reminiscent of his own, and his name, when his introduction is announced, is second only in size to the title's and the author's. Underneath the text, and only slightly obscured, is one of the book's eight-panel grids; it shows Brown and a prostitute negotiating their encounter. When the dust jacket is removed, the book is blue, with a single panel of Brown and a woman kissing; the "a comic-strip memoir about being a john" subtitle is in his thought balloon.[1] Obviously, both comics are going to deal with male/female relationships, but the brown reassures that, like a "chai" yoga mat, men needn't be embarrassed being seen in public with them.

Paying For It reads like a cross between Sex and The City (both Candace Bushnell's book and the TV show) and Steve Ditko's Avenging World. Like Bushnell, Brown acts as a "social anthropologist." They both rely on "composite" characters; for her, it's Manhattanites, for him, it's the prostitutes he frequents as he purports to represent the voice of the "john." There are pages and panels in Paying For It, funny ones, which could be right out of Bushnell's book: Brown wondering how he's going to pick up a hooker without a car, and then setting off on his bicycle, trolling for one with no success. As if taking their cue from the TV show, cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt play the Charlotte and the Miranda, respectively, to Brown as they stroll around Toronto, hang out in diners, talk about Brown's relationship troubles, argue and support each other. (Can single heterosexual men in their 30s find satisfying relationships with women?) These are the liveliest sequences in Paying For It; Seth's gestural smoking indicates the broadest movement and emotion in the book. (More on that later.) Like Carrie Bradshaw, Brown is obsessed with "shopping," pointing out the features (and flaws) of each woman, like Bradshaw detailing what's so special about a particular pair of strappy sandals; he's the ultimate consumer, thinking about other users' feedback and composing posts for an escort review website, rating their friendliness level, even while with the prostitute in question — and when he's disappointed, he wants his money back. He's a conscientious customer, too, polite, money all ready to go.[2] Like Sex and the City, Paying For It promises sexual frankness and an unsentimental view on societal mores, but doesn't quite deliver.

If Paying For It is the Sex and the City TV show, then Habibi is a little bit like that Sex in the City movie, set in "Abu Dhabi": it's all excess, larger-than-life, Sheik of Araby reverie. Thompson tells the tale of Dodola, a child bride who prostitutes to feed herself and her ward, Zam. The two live in a desert, in a world part Orientalist, part modern and polluted. They separate when she is captured and put in a harem; they reunite after he has chosen to become a eunuch. Though Habibi is obviously fictional, it's hard not to see shades of Thompson in both Dodola and Zam — at one point, she muses that "I'd always felt detached from my body," echoing Thompson's "Since a child, I was always displaced from my body," from his autobio gn Blankets. If Paying For It fancies itself unsentimental, Habibi (floridly) imagines itself romantic; it dallies in romance novel territory, and it's difficult not to read "rape fantasy" into a sequence where Zam falls into a group who voluntarily castrate themselves for rather ill-defined "spiritual" and "ascetic" reasons, and castrates himself as well because he associates sex with dirty prostitution. Though, it seems the prettiest eunuch prostitutes for the good of the group, leading Zam to bravely offer to whore himself after the previous prettiest dies (after apologizing for "judging"), and then he's captured and carried off … and so forth.

The two books seem very different, visually; since Brown wants to make his pro-prostitution argument appear logical, he works very hard not to titillate. The reader is often looking down on Brown and his sexual partner as they neatly perform sex acts on beds that are barely mussed, as if viewing them in an operating theater. Brown's attempts to compartmentalize love and sex are reflected in his rigid eight-panel grids, with small, closely grouped panels set off by wide margins, giving the impression he's got it all sorted and cleared away. Thompson, like a greedy magpie, overstuffs his book with a style inspired by French brushwork, Arabic art, and early comic-book caricature (unfortunately, he seems to be drawing some of his black characters from early comic books/strips, too), bedazzling his own rather simple lovers meet/separate/reunite yarn with Bible and Qur'an stories, folklore, myth and borrowed symbolism. But, like Brown, Thompson wants to find patterns, make connections, impose order, chart the universe; he can't resist the impulse to catalog either (the changes in Dodola's body while she's pregnant, etc.). Brown and Thompson have done their homework, and they want to show it off.

Despite their divergent aesthetic philosophies, however, both Brown ("I'm not trying to seduce you") and Thompson ("Would you like me to seduce you?") are fond of The Word; not only do they support their arguments with literary examples, they both cartooned two very similar sequences, of grids with words, sans images. Charles Hatfield talked about Thompson's sequence at length over at tcj.com (a sequence which calls back the masturbation sequence in Blankets, where sex, drawing and handwriting are all connected); in Paying For It, a sequence like this occurs at the beginning of the book, when Brown's girlfriend, Sook-Yin, tells him she's interested in pursuing another sexual partner. The panels turn black as the two discuss it. This is so private that Brown, who (apparently) discloses the length and appearance of his penis in this book, and draws almost every panel of himself and his sexual encounters in areoles, as if in a spotlight, can only tell, not show. Brown budgets carefully — his money, his time and his orgasms. As this sequence suggests, he's absolutely miserly with depicting emotion. As Crumb points out in his introduction, Brown's — and essentially everyone else's in the book, especially the prostitutes, whose faces are obscured by their hair — have little to no facial expression. Paying For It can be reread as only a study in slight changes or variations in expression, such as the awkward grin of Sook-Yin's new lover as he meets Brown, or her slight frown as she asks Brown not to bring prostitutes into her house. If, as Seth tells him over and over in the book, Brown is repressed, it may explain the emotionally voyeuristic relationship he and Sook-Yin seem to settle into (that's the only way I can think of to describe it). Although he occasionally shows the "Brown" character as irritated or petty, emotionally speaking, he's largely a cocktease.

What really seems to make both Habibi and Paying For It "Dick Lit," though, is that in these works, both Brown and Thompson organize their (and their characters') identity around love and sex. Both present themselves as sensitive males; Brown, in particular, tells himself "he shouldn't care what other people think," but he does; he wants the prostitutes to think of him as friendly and benevolent (he makes mention of nice clean towels he has to offer them); he wants others to see him as cool-headed and reasonable. (I first approached Paying For It in the context of comics like Michelle Tea and Lauren McCubbin's Rent Girl, and books like Shawna Kenney's I Was a Teenage Dominatrix and Diablo Cody's Candy Girl; all explored the feminist writers' firsthand experience with sex work. As such, Chester Browns' Paying For It does, in fact, shed a little light on the experience of one "john"; but, like Crumb's intro, often seems to hinge on the anecdotal.)

Whether Brown or Thompson succeed in these works in their aim to separate love and sex, sex and the spiritual, is up for debate. In Thompson's case, this is most definitely informed and intertwined with his religious upbringing (explored at length in Blankets); it's trained him to separate love and sex. Both Brown and Thompson, as autobio cartoonists, are driven by the need to confess, if nothing else, to alleviate guilt. (Some of Thompson's guilt appears to be of what is termed the "white liberal" variety, as he projects himself as an Arabic woman, a black man, toys with gender roles, and worries about the environment). But what is clear is that neither want to separate sex and cartooning, at least for the moment. In another humorous sequence (for a Ditko-style polemic, Paying For It manages to be a lot funnier than Habibi. Habibi's humor is largely … ineffective), Brown, although initially trying to maintain anonymity with similarly pseudonymous women, can't resist giving one prostitute a copy of one of his graphic novels. Brown is capable of changing his sexual identity to the point where he can tell the world he sleeps with prostitutes; what he can't do, and what Thompson can't do, is think of himself as anything other than a cartoonist. ]]>articles<![CDATA[All the Comics in the World: Best Cartoonists]]>Shaenon K. Garrity names the best cartoonists of her generation.
That slowed me down right out of the gate, because Jason was on my short list.

"Who counts as our generation?" asked my husband Andrew. "Is Jeff Smith part of our generation?"

Jason thought about it. "A lot of cartoonists from our generation were influenced by Jeff Smith, so I'd say no, he's part of the previous generation. But the Flight artists are part of our generation."

Many of the Flight artists, I realized later, are younger than that. They were influenced by my generation.

"So," I said, "guys like Dan Clowes and Chris Ware are part of the older generation, too."

"Yes. All of those Fantagraphics artists, like Joe Matt and Renee French and Peter Bagge, are from the previous generation. Our generation is the people influenced by those guys."

"How about Adrian Tomine? Is he too old?"

"No, Adrian Tomine is part of our generation. In fact, I think it might come down to a contest between Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson."

Wikipedia later confirmed that both Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson are late Gen Xers, and left me with the sobering knowledge that Thompson is only three years older than I am.

Now that I'm solidly thirtysomething, I can start to hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near, or at least the measured step of cultural reckoning on the approach. My generation is the generation currently wallowing in nostalgia, pandered to with movies and TV shows and books about our childhoods. (Another sobering thought: whereas the nostalgia industry of our parents' thirtysomething years focused on things they did and historical changes they witnessed, ours is mostly about crap we watched on TV.) And the artists of our generation are starting to do their important work. Not their most important, maybe. Our Dan Clowes has done his Velvet Glove. Our Chris Ware is just getting out of his Quimby Mouse phase.

Crowning the greatest cartoonist is a pointless game at any time, and certainly so in this case, when the average thirtysomething cartoonist has another good 40 years of work in him; there's no pensions in cartooning, after all. But what the hell, let's play. Early in the race, first lap completed, here are fifteen (okay, sixteen) candidates for greatness among the cartoonists currently working in the American comics industry. Come back in a few decades and see how accurate I was.

To keep things simple, the list will include only cartoonists born in the 1970s. I HAVE DECREED IT SO. Apologies in advance to any cartoonists who were left off the list because I couldn't find out how old they are. Sorry, folks.

Adrian Tomine. Initially one of many '90s-era Dan Clowes imitators, Tomine soon staked his claim to an under-explored patch of comics territory: naturalistic, Raymond Carver-like short stories illustrated with photographic precision. It's no surprise that he often draws covers and illustrations for The New Yorker, as his comics are essentially the visual equivalent of New Yorker fiction. An old-school craftsman, he's one of the last indie cartoonists still doing traditional floppies; his series Optic Nerve doesn't come out often, but when it does, it's still a 32-page comic book.

Recently, Tomine's shown an interest in branching out into formalist experiments like the dryly funny "Horticulture," a story in the latest Optic Nerve presented as a series of comic strips from a newspaper that never existed. Then again, Dan Clowes' recent graphic novel Wilson used the same device. Maybe, despite his coolly deft writing and inhumanly clean linework, Tomine will never fully escape Clowes' long shadow.

Craig Thompson. Thompson's debut graphic novel, Good-bye, Chunky Rice, a sweet (if you enjoyed it) or saccharine (if you're me) fantasy about two gentle friends separated by cruel adventure, set the tone for his work. The polar opposite of Tomine's chilly metropolitan realism, Thompson's comics are the work of a messy Midwestern humanist who wears his heart on his sleeve. His gorgeously drawn memoir Blankets has become one of the comics most recommended to people who don't read comics.

There's nothing timid about Thompson's work: he crafts massive, sprawling doorstop graphic novels bursting with big ideas, raw emotion, and luxurious brushwork. In his early work, his art is much better than his writing, which tends toward unchecked purple prose. But his latest (and thickest) book, the immaculately researched Arabian fantasy Habibi, shows much more control of his storytelling gifts. It's not a work without flaws, but Thompson would always rather make a big statement than a perfect one.

Ariel Schrag. Not everyone gets Ariel Schrag, but the people who like her really like her. Witness Noah Berlatsky closing up the Hooded Utilitarian roundtable on Likewise (archived here), the final installment in Schrag's autobiographical coming-of-age series: "Schrag's Likewise, it seems to me, is about inflated rhetoric and desires, about embracing them and stepping away from them at the same time. It's also about being like and not being like, and about how somewhere between the two you find yourself." And this is a guy who thinks Chris Ware is jejune.

Schrag may never fully escape her reputation as the precocious child prodigy of comics, producing her first graphic novel about high-school life, Awkward, while still in high school. Indeed, some critics seem disappointed by her development from a chirpy teenager who doodles "lala girl stuff" into, well, a cartoonist. Over the course of four books, her draftsmanship advances from nigh-illegible to serviceable, but her strength emerges in her keen documentary eye, her subtle construction of layered narratives and themes, and her seemingly effortless experimentation with the comics form itself. Her work gives the impression of being constantly on the verge of breaking through into an entirely new type of art.

In recent years, Schrag has moved on to a career as a television writer, but she still produces occasional short comics and pops up in the comics world now and then to opine. Will she return to graphic novels someday? If it were me I'd stick with the cable gigs, but there's always hope.

Gene Yang. Yang's best-known work by far is American Born Chinese, his award-winning fantasy about growing up Asian-American, but he's an amazingly prolific creator who, in the last decade, has written and/or drawn a half-dozen graphic novels between his day job as a high-school math teacher. Particularly worthy of note are his short-story collection The Eternal Smile, drawn by Derek Kirk Kim, and his latest, Level Up, drawn by Thien Pham (another contender for this list). He's currently writing and drawing a historical graphic novel set during the Boxer Rebellion.

Yang specializes in allegorical fantasies with Shyamalan-esque plot twists and gentle if sometimes heavyhanded morals, often influenced by his devout Catholicism (one of his lesser-known projects, at least in comics circles, is a Rosary in graphic-novel form). His storytelling is clear and simple, his linework clean as a whistle. As appealing as his own art is, when he's only scripting he chooses great collaborators.

Lark Pien. For example, did you enjoy the glowing colors in American Born Chinese? Thank Lark Pien, the cartoonist, painter and architect who colored Yang's book. A careful crafter of minicomics and children's books, often featuring her signature character Long Tail Kitty, Pien has a delicate touch and a heartbreakingly adorable art style. Her color work is especially luminous. She's had gallery shows and drawn comics for top-tier anthologies like Flight and Scheherazade, but so far she has yet to produce a defining great work. Then again, Robert Crumb never did much of length until Genesis, which wasn't all that great, so maybe Pien just needs to keep producing little gems until the world notices.

In the meantime, visitors to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco can check out Pien's 2007 CAM installation piece "Small Destructions," in which she produces a comic about two furry monsters on a rampage by painting over the same set of canvases. Alternately, you can watch it here.

Gabrielle Bell. If Gabrielle Bell is remembered for nothing else, it will be for a single haunting short story, "Cecil and Jordan in New York," about a withdrawn young woman who turns into a chair. "Cecil and Jordan" was even adapted by Michael Gondry for a segment in the film Tokyo! But Bell's massive short-story output also includes her Book of… series, her semi-autobiographical collection Lucky, and a plethora of stories in Kramers Ergot, Orchid and especially Mome. Clean, direct, and stark in both story and line, Bell is the cartoonist on this list most directly influenced by the 1980s Fantagraphics school, but her particular blend of autobiography and symbolic fantasy is unique. She continues in this vein today, self-publishing her ongoing Diary series (Diary, L.A. Diary) and serializing her trademark autobio and semi-autobio stories on her website.

Derek Kirk Kim. In 2004, Derek Kirk Kim's first graphic novel, Same Difference and Other Stories, scored the Triple Crown of comics awards: a Harvey, and Ignatz and an Eisner. Over the next several years, Kim contributed short stories to Flight and Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, wrote the Minx graphic novel Good as Lily (drawn by Periscope Studio's Jesse Hamm, another Gen X great and a criminally underappreciated cartoonist) drew Gene Yang's The Eternal Smile, and serialized comics on his website, Lowbright. A glorious draftsman with a flexible but always charming style and an achingly clear line, Kim is also a witty writer whose wry, neurotic, Woody-Allen-when-he-was-still-funny persona comes through in all his comics.

From early in his career, Kim complained of finding the drawing process frustrating and difficult, and his comics output has often been slow and erratic. In the last few years he's turned his focus toward filmmaking, and has recently completed the first season of Mythomania, a web series inspired by his experiences in the indie cartooning communities of San Francisco and L.A. Fortunately, he's still making comics, writing the ongoing webcomic Tune, drawn by Les McClaine, another candidate for greatness, and dammit this column is already getting too long.

Jason Shiga. A Berkeley-educated mathematician and the mad genius of comics, Shiga is best known for interactive puzzle comics like his tab-and-line-based, head-throbbingly ingenious choose-your-own-adventure graphic novel Meanwhile. But he's also proven his chops on non-gimmick-based comics like the locked-room mystery Fleep (set entirely inside a phone booth), the '70s action-movie pastiche Bookhunter (inspired by Shiga's former day job at a library), and the cynical romcom Empire State. He's created choose-your-own-adventure Spongebob Squarepants comic strips and is the only cartoonist featured in the text-adventure-game documentary Get Lamp (although, weirdly, Charles Schulz's son Monte makes an appearance), and that's a resume shared by no other human being walking the earth.

Little is known about Shiga's current project, save that it's entitled Demon and will be by far his longest comic yet. Shiga's description, from an Unshelved interview:

The cover has Jimmy, the main character from Meanwhile. You open the book and there's Jimmy at a desk where he's writing. He's just writing and writing for eight panels. Then it looks like he's getting up, and then you see his feet moving off the ground. And you're like, "Wow, he's flying!" But then you turn the page and he's hanged himself. And you're like, "What? Jimmy!"

Kevin Huizenga. This generation of cartoonists hasn't produced a lot of formalists, but we still have Kevin Huizenga, doing low-key quasi-autobiographical comics that turn into panel-breaking deconstructions of the comics form. Another cartoonist who started in high school, Huizenga launched his career in the 1990s minicomics scene, then graduated to full-size floppies with series like Or Else and Ganges. The constant in much of his work is his suburban everyman protagonist, Glen Ganges, whose mundane adventures frequently open up into explorations of time, space, and the possibilities of the comics page. (My favorite of his comics, however, is his eerie adaptation of the Sheridan Le Fanu story "Green Tea.")
The announcement that Ganges #4 would be Huizenga's last direct-market comic book for the foreseeable future marked the end of an era in indie publishing; now only Adrian Tomine soldiers on. In recent years, Huizenga has published Curses, a hardcover collection of his work, and collaborated with Dan Zettwoch and Ted May on the weekly comic strip Amazing Facts and Beyond with Leon Beyond.

Chris Onstad. Is Chris Onstad's Achewood the greatest webcomic? There are many contenders, but Achewood deserves special attention for somehow being simultaneously the webcomic that is most and least representative of webcomics as a whole. From the raw materials of bad 2000s-era webcomics—unpolished cut-and-paste art, a lackadaisical update schedule, dark and surreal humor, cartoon animals saying naughty things—Onstad crafted something far more than the sum of its parts, a bizarre, brilliantly written, invariably hilarious dive into an alternate world called the Underground populated by cats, robots, and stuffed animals. Achewood is a typical webstrip in the same way that Vertigo is typical film noir. That is, it's a perfect example of the form, and classifying it as such also misses the point completely. Or, to put it another way, here's Wikipedia trying to explain an Achewood strip:

The first Achewood strip ("Philippe is standing on it"[1]) was released on October 1, 2001. The strip sets the tone for future strips with its nonsensical humor and flat visual punchline. In this particular strip, Mr. Bear and Téodor are discussing Téodor's confusion over a drum machine. Mr. Bear informs Téodor that there is an instruction manual. However, Philippe is standing on it.


Last year, after increasingly sporadic updates, Onstad announced he was taking a break from Achewood. Recently, he's quietly begun posting new strips.

Fábio Moon and Gabrial Bá. I don't have much to say about these terrifyingly gifted twins, except that their flowing brushwork is gorgeous and Daytripper was a sweet comic. More from these guys, please.

Bryan Lee O'Malley. The massive success of Bryan Lee O'Malley's blockbuster Scott Pilgrim series has so overshadowed his other work that it's easy to forget how versatile he is. His debut graphic novel, the more down-to-earth Lost at Sea, is a pensive young-adult story about a group of teenagers on a journey of self-discovery. Of course, said journey involves trying to catch the cat that one of the teenagers believes has been invested with her soul by the Devil, an early sign that O'Malley might not be your typical sad-autobio indie cartoonist. Then came Scott Pilgrim, a coming-of-age story told entirely in the language of video games, anime, alt-rock music, Canadian pop culture, and other obsessions of people who grew up in the 1980s. In Canada. He's married to the gifted Hope Larson, who has already published four graphic novels despite being too young for this list.

In his relentlessly energetic off-balance storytelling and simple but increasingly sophisticated art, O'Malley somehow hits the happy medium between American indie comics and mainstream Japanese manga, a medium that, before O'Malley, wasn't believed to exist. He's now reportedly working on Seconds, of which nothing is known except the title, which O'Malley posted on Twitter around Comic-Con season. Chances are it'll be something different all over again.

Raina Telgemeier. The stealth superstar of comics, Telgemeier is one of the bestselling and most beloved cartoonists today, thanks entirely to her popularity with the Scholastic Book Club set. Her junior-high memoir Smile and her adaptations of Ann M. Martin's Baby-sitters Club books have made her a grade-school staple and the idol of countless prepubescent readers. She and her husband, cartoonist Dave Roman (another great Gen Xer) also cowrote a Marvel comic, X-Men: Misfits. With a clean, cheerful style that recalls John Stanley—and, like Stanley's work, looks equally good in color or black and white—Telgemeier is one of the best pure children's cartoonists working today, if not the very best.

Charlie "Spike" Trotman. Although she's almost exactly my age, Spike is in spirit closer to the next generation of cartoonists, the kids born in the 1980s. She's one of the earliest major cartoonists to come out of online fan communities; tap any female cartoonist under 30, and you'll most likely find someone who spent her teenage years honing her craft on fanart or furries. After moving into the webcomics world with Sparkneedle, Blikada, and her wonderful but unfinished Girlamatic series Lucas and Odessa, Spike found an audience in 2005 with the still-ongoing Templar, Arizona, which follows a large cast of deeply eccentric characters through an alternate-universe version of Arizona just slightly off-kilter from our own.

Spike's cheerfully rude sense of humor (we're introduced to the city of Templar via a chic restaurant advertising its puppy-based dishes) is complemented by her bold, thick-lined brushwork. Her other recent work includes the Kickstarter-megafunded Poorcraft, a comic guide to frugal living created with Diana Nock. This is the future of comics, and it's a good, good place.

Johnny Ryan. Johnny Ryan abridged Blankets to a three-panel comic about piss fights. He is a national treasure.]]>articles<![CDATA[A Dangerous Method: National Lampoon Presents The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies]]>Kristy Valenti looks at a 1975 examination/parody of comics history.It's strange there doesn't seem to be a contemporary body of discourse surrounding National Lampoon Presents The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies, since it essentially maps out 21st century comics criticism and revivalism. Published in 1975 (several decades after Colton Waugh's The Comics and a decade after Roy Lichtenstein's pop art, but predating The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics), perhaps its most arresting and prescient image is its photographic cover; a sexy woman in juvenile pigtails, bum only half-covered by her cutoffs, looking at a gallery wall, arms akimbo, one wedge sandal pointed up in casual contemplation. "Pow" reads the back of her T-shirt. (If there were some sort of prize for Most Obscure Cosplay, this would be a good option.) Behind a velvet rope, the three most representative forms of American comics (at the time) hang, framed: the lowest is a comic strip in the style of Nancy; the picture in the middle looks like a Golden Age superhero comic-book panel; hung highest is an imitation of a Robert Crumb Mr. Natural underground comic. (They are arranged in chronological order, from oldest to newest.) In the middle ground, and older gentleman stands ramrod straight, gravely guarding the museum's treasures. Glimpsed in the distance is what looks like a Li'l Abner panel.

This cover shows the present, with perhaps some variations in dress.

The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies — a magazine-sized, squarebound collection with very good production value, printed on newsprint with color sections, and readily available through used booksellers — is subtitled "A Never Before Published History of the Comics," and it's organized accordingly, with sections that concentrate on certain decades (the '50s), events (the hysteria surrounding comics and juvenile delinquency) and themes (racism). Other than what appears to be a fairly sincere essay by National Cartoonist Society member David Pascal about the legitimacy of the medium, the material, which parodies both the comics themselves and the way that people (would soon) write about them, was commissioned especially for the book. (Many of the cartoonists associated with National Lampoon's "bullpen," such as Shary Flenniken and Gahan Wilson, did not contribute.)

Perhaps part of the reason contemporary critics and fans haven't seized upon The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies yet is it's a little too perfect an imitation to be really funny; visually, there is little to distinguish these parodies from the genuine article (other than to add back in the sex and poop that were probably removed for a mass audience), and its no wonder, since they drawn by cartoonists/craftsmen such as Russ Heath, George Evans, Howard Chaykin, Neal Adams, Ernie Colón, Berni Wrightson, Walt Simonson, Mike Ploog, S. Clay Wilson and Spain.

Though there are a few postmodern flourishes that could be fresh off a 2012 alt-cartoonist's Photoshop — the Walter Gropius/Tales from the Crypt mashup, for example — the flatness of the parodies is most likely due to the comics' writers. Though they're clearly influenced by Harvey Kurtzman's Mad, they lack his need to expose the truth behind the absurd lies that people accept, preferring it would seem, to overlay their form of absurdity. (I want to make some sort of A Dangerous Method analogy here, with Mad as Sigmund Freud and National Lampoon as Carl Jung, but I'll refrain.)

They come closest to that grain of truth when they're writing about what they know. Then sharpest bits of the book are the send-ups of critical and academic writing about a popular art form — the well educated P.J. O'Rourke and Sean Kelly extrapolated fairly successfully from film studies (to the point where a contemporary academic could probably present O'Rourke's "Translator's Note" and Kelly's "Preface to the Second Edition" as a sort of performance art, mostly likely undetected by his or her symposium audience).

It's also possible that The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies could only be reevaluated now — though they make fun of scholarship, the parodies exhibit an encyclopedic familiarity with the form, spanning idioms such as manga, early-to-mid- 20th century comic strips, Bill Mauldin's WWII one-panels to Bob's Big Boy and Bazooka Joe promos, comic-book ads and other detritus — to get the references, readers would almost have to live in a world where they would have easy access to Krazy Kat, Apartment 3-G, Jack Chick tracts, Euro-comics, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Eric Stanton bondage art, Aubrey Beardsley and Thimble Theater. But there's a dark side to that too, as Patton Oswalt's points out in his Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever theory, and maybe National Lampoon saves its deepest cut for the modern critic. With its painstaking exegesis, Gerry Sussman and Continuity Studios' "Forgotten Comics" needles the championing of meaningless crap (in this instance the faux-generic "young woman trying to make her way" and "forest animals stand in for society" comic strips), motivated by self-aggrandizing desire to "discover" something, or even something as seemingly innocent as nostalgia.

[SPACER]]]>articles<![CDATA[The Great Purge]]>Tucker Stone discusses what he's keeping, and what he's getting rid of.
I don't mean that in a negative way, although I'm fully aware that a portion of you are going to see it that way no matter what type of equivocation I've prepared. I mean just that: I've got to get some of these things out of here, and I'm somewhat excited--needlessly, weirdly, unexpectedly excited--to get started.

I'm not sure what it was that got this particular ball rolling, but I can point to a very specific moment when it did. I was looking at a set of bookshelves--a cheap VHS organizer bought in the 90's from Wal-Mart, precariously perched atop a decrepit antique shelf left behind by an old roommate when he decided to leave New York for the life of a Nashville country musician--and I finally realized that I owned an unread collection of Phyllis Tickle's "The Divine Hours" hardcovers. I remember purchasing those books. It hadn't been too spur-of-the-moment, but it had been ill-thought, a random bit of "maybe this will make the pain go away" spurred after reading Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, which is a really popular book amongst young men who are trying to get over getting dumped by fantasizing about becoming an isolated monk. I don't recall if I ever used the books, if I ever actually got into the business of ritualistic daily prayer, performed at set time periods. (That has me pretty convinced I must not have done it. I think I would remember praying at specific time periods. Hell, I had roommates at the time I bought the books.)

I saw those books, and my immediate thought was this: I really don't want my wife to have to deal with this shit when I die. It was like somebody hit a gong, and the gong spoke that sentence. I'm not a hugely fatalistic type--I don't think I ever finished listening to that Steve Jobs speech about living each moment like it's your last, but I'd bet it's very meaningful--but that was where my brain went, and after it happened, the scales fell away. Everything I looked at started looking different to me, down to the very shelves themselves. (Why, exactly, haven't I gotten rid of these old, hideous shelves? I was given a set of custom made bookshelves for a birthday just a few years ago, I don't need these crappy things.)

I didn't do anything with the comics when the feeling first rose up. Instead, I plowed through the books--all those old, terrible collections of Irish poetry about famines and alcoholism, the stacks of philosophy textbooks, the essay collections about the cultural importance of wearing masks--and the whole thing was immensely rewarding. There was the obvious stuff, the satisfaction that comes from having a cleaner living space, as well as the relief that comes form getting rid of the physical evidence of a lifetime of embarrassing decisions (on that front, I've got a guy coming for my barely-played bass guitar next week), but the real pleasure, the unexpected one, was the curation that occurred. It was an accidental thing, practically organic. As I sat there, choosing which books I would be sending away, I found myself playing as some kind of Star Council or Judge Dredd, picking which of the books would be given space in this new, death shelf. Which of these books did I need to hang onto? Which of these books did I not mind leaving behind for my wife to deal with after I shuffle off this mortal coil?

I'm not going to bore you with a list of the titles or authors that survived the purge, although I imagine that anybody who has made it this far is probably immune to boredom. Suffice to say this: I enjoyed doing it, and yet I knew that comics would have to be next.

The thing about purging comics is--I don't like doing it. Part of my comics impulse has been tangled with hunting down and collecting for so long that the idea of getting rid of them--any of them, really--seems like the exact opposite of how I got into these things in the first place. My initial experiences with comics was all down South, during the time when the number of places to purchase comics dropped down to a meager few stores. If you wanted to get something, and you wanted it to be affordable, you had to hunt for it in the basements of flea markets and pawn shops. If you wanted something that wasn't a super-hero comic--well, I don't want to say "you're out of luck", but where I lived, you really were. By the time the internet came along and exploded the back issue market, making it so that absolutely any comic book was available, I was already ruined. Comics, in my head, were treasures that you had to find, with the hand-made notecard want-lists as check-list and directions gotten out of phone books and the map. Getting rid of them didn't even enter into the equation, the idea that I'd ever reach a point where I might have more than I want once would've seemed ridiculous.

But that's the point I'm at. I was given eight fifty dollar hardcovers for a wedding present. I found a place in Georgia that was selling all those Epic editions of Moebius for cover price. The guys at 2000AD started making their catalog available in phonebook editions. Fantagraphics cracked the code to making newspaper collections successfully, and now I've got a wall of Krazy Kat.

I don't regret a lot of the comics purchases I've made (my track record in books and movies is so much worse), but that doesn't change the simple truth: I'm not interested in living in a library.

I'm not sure how much the great purge of 2012 is going to impact this column. Will it mean long, rambling arguments for why one thing is being kept and another abandoned? Will it spur a Road to Damascus moment, where all of a sudden I acknowledge that it's pretty weird being a comiXology-based columnist who has never used the actual App?

I can't predict any of it. I can tell you that, so far, I've become convinced that there will never be a point in the future where I'll need a copy of the Judge Dredd Mega Collection (which is a bunch of newspaper strips, and while they are not bad, I believe you can get everything you need out of them one time through) but I definitely think Jack Cole's Plastic Man comics are going to be the solutions to a whole measure of problems that will come up when I turn 40, and as such, they get to stay.

Happy New Year!]]>articles<![CDATA[The Best of 2011]]>Tucker Stone's picks.
20: Godland #34

Tom Scioli, Bill Crabtree, Joe Casey, Rus Wooten. Image.

While it would have been nice to have seen at least one of the three promised comics mentioned in this particular issue's letters column, it's hard to be sad for any length of time: any Godland, after all, is a win. And with conclusion hovering on the horizon, this issue saw creators Casey & Scioli playing sturm und drang exclusively. Never a series that kept things close to the vest, issue #34 saw Casey taking the language of hyperbole and bombast as far as possibility allowed. That Scioli was able to find a way to visualize those extremities will come as no surprise--he is, after all, Tom Scioli. When it comes to galactic apocalypse, there is no living man who could do a better job.

19. "Dit Dit Dit Dah Dah Dah Dah Dit Dit"

from Casanova Gula IV
Gabriel Ba, Cris Peter, Matt Fraction, Dustin Harbin. Marvel.

There hasn't been a new Casanova story since 2008, and in that time, Matt Fraction has gone from the guy with great taste who bore all our hopes to the guy who...nah, I'm not doing that here. Visually, little has changed: one of the best looking comics we have, now with a subtle uptick in color choices that makes it just a touch more emotive. A syrupy, doused-in-style scene of violence gives way to a passion draped in blue and aquamarine, all while Fraction stays just on the side of acceptably hysterical, mixing the British colloquialism fetish of 2011's comedy nerd (who looks strangely like 2010's Morrison fan) with the big hips of sexual compromise. Take a note: this is how you're supposed to restart a party.

18. Orc Stain #6

James Stokoe. Image.

Whereas 2011 only saw one issue of Orc Stain arrive, what an issue it was: flashbacks, revenge, surprise and a lot of spicy phalluses. Diving deep into a hot, living cage, this year's chapter of Orc Stain (aptly titled "The Arena of Meat") saw our hero making a dead run for freedom, with the threat of castration persistently in tow. And no matter how many times you read the issue's game-changing closer--it turns out that it DOES matter why the guy has only one eye--the feeling of excitement never lessens. Here's hoping that 2012 provides James Stokoe the space--or whatever else--he needs.

17. Daredevil #3

Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera, Javier Rodriguez, Mark Waid, Joe Caramagna. Marvel.

Opening with a throwback to classic Fantastic Four comics, picking up a thread left from an Avengers tale and then delivering seven pages of the best (and weirdest) fight scene of 2011, Daredevil #3 was the victory lap for the relaunch title of the year. This was it, what we wanted to read, what we just had to see: the father/son Rivera duo building kinetic, clean-lined action inside suffocating sound effects while Javier Rodriguez proves that subtlety isn't dead yet. Accompanied by Waid's deceptively simple plotting--how many times did you read it before you realized that the big bad was never revealed?--Daredevil #3 was a page by page, panel by panel reminder of what's to like in super-hero comics. Hail, hail.

16. 20th Century Boys

Naoki Urasawa, Akemi Wegmüller, Freeman Wong. Viz.

With conclusion still roughly 800 pages away, 2011's crop of official translations of 20th Century Boys served as total onslaught: death followed death, with every heart on the table left broken, if they weren't stopped entirely. And yet, due to Urasawa's able hand, misery never became miserable. Maybe it's because we trust him, or maybe it's just because we're too invested in these characters to leave them hanging now. Whatever it is, each new volume was a jungle of emotions, enveloping us whole. Four volumes to go!

15. Hellberta

Michael Comeau, Seth Scrivner, Tara Azzopardi. Koyama.

Reportedly only 100 copies of Hellberta were printed--I don't know if I believe that, but I do believe I like repeating it--which means there are at least 99 other people right now who should feel extraordinarily lucky to have seen what has to be the best single issue of Wolverine...ever? The story of a mass-murdering revenge spree that climaxes with the apparent destruction of the entire Northern Hemisphere (except for the land), Hellberta is almost completely the work of Michael Comeau, and it's a fantastic piece of gonzo super-hero comics, a hyper politicized critique of hedging one's principles and a beautiful piece of art all by itself. If you see one of its telltale yellow pages--even if it's in someone else's house--snatch it up like it's crack cocaine. I can guarantee you that it will be just as satisfying.

14. Spaceman

Eduardo Risso, Patricia Mulvihill, Giulia Brusco, Brian Azzarello, Clem Robins. DC.

While it wasn't the first time that Azzarello and Risso have worked together since the conclusion of 100 Bullets, Spaceman was the first time we got to see them do something completely new. A sci-fi story firmly set in the "dirty spaceship" category, centered on an ape-man hybrid created by NASA for space exploration, Spaceman arrived bearing all the trappings we've come to expect from the team: Risso's tight, perfect line and Azzarello's split lip dialog. Slipping back and forth between a violent, exhausted present and a curious Martian past, it took exactly one issue for this thing to become whatever you call the comics version of appointment television.

13. The Land Unknown

Gary Panter. United Dead Artists.

While a fine argument could be made that his book is not a proper 2011 release, made up as it is of older (and in some cases, previously published) work, here it is, all the same. Panter hasn't been absent from comics for the last few years--he's actually released a steady stream of short mini-comics, and he's seen more than a few gallery shows--but The Land Unknown was the first major crop of take-it-home Panter since Picturebox's audacious double hardcover in 2008. But whereas that imposing collection saw Panter's work presented as art, proper, Unknown behaves like extreme delivery service: imagine that 80's high school movie cliche, where a fat woman ladles a steaming pile of murk onto a plastic tray, glaring imperiously at you as if to say "so what if there's more there than you can handle, twerp". There are few better ways to experience Panter's work than the one that Land Unknown provides: unexplained and in extremity. Go end some friendships, brother.

12. Uncanny X-Force

Jerome Opena, Esad Ribic, Rafael Albuquerque, Billy Tan, Mark Brooks, Scot Eaton, Rich Elson, John Lucas, Andrew Currie, Andrew Hennessy, Dean White, Jose Villarubia, Chris Sotomayor, Matt Wilson, Richard Isanove, Paul Mounts, Rick Remender, Cory Petit, Clayton Cowles. Marvel.

While the prevalent trend in comics blogsmithery may be to loft one's arrows at the most popular kids in school, you'll have to allow comiXology right of refusal: this time around, we're riding shotgun with the rest of humanity. No super-hero comic had it going on quite like Uncanny X-Force in 2011, and while Marvel's consumer-exploitation publishing schedule forced us to open our wallets way more frequently than I feel should be acceptable when Psylocke is involved, Rick Remender and his bench of artists were able to keep balls in the air for the full term. (The series only just reached conclusion this past week, and yes, it was a satisfactory one.) The story is impossible to summarize in the scant few sentences the powers that be have allotted, so let's try blurbing the concept: this is the comic where the X-Men's cool kids go when there's ornate European music videos that needs making.

11. Lose #3

Michael Deforge. Koyama.

It can't be easy for Michael Deforge, out there on the high wire of expectation. At the same time, it's difficult to feel too sorry for him--after all, it's his formidable talent that put him out there in the first place, and that skill doesn't seem to be flagging. Lose #3 saw one of his longest sustained narratives thus far, a brilliantly funny take on cringe comedy by way of funny (and gross) animal characters summering in the sort of dirty, trash-covered universe that Kaz used to set his Underworld series in. Surrounding that story were the latest products of Deforge's wild imagination (facial font exercises, terrible babysitting, a beastly improv show), all of them acting as a stern, albeit unnecessary, reminder of why this guy is so exciting to keep up with.

10. Color Engineering

Yuichi Yokoyama, Ryan Holmberg. Picturebox.

Any year where there's a new translation of Yokoyama comics is a triumph for American readers, and 2011 saw two of them. And while your sheepish host felt that the other one--Garden, also from Picturebox--was an atmospheric retread of 2008's still-mindblowing Travel, Color Engineering was built, from wide-open start to hyper-packed finish, out of newly trod ground. And, like many of those saddled with the avant-garde label, Yokoyama's work in Color Engineering is winningly humorous, featuring an endless stream of entities seeking to discover. More than audience surrogate, the characters in the work are partners--you know what they know, and the lot of you are trying to figure out what that means at the same time. Any year in comics will produce work to get lost in. This time around, Yokoyama had the deepest one yet.

9. Comics drawn by Marcos Martin

Various issues of Amazing Spider-Man and Daredevil
Marcos Martin. Muntsa Vicente. Javier Rodriguez. Dan Slott. Mark Waid. Joe Caramagna. Marvel.

While Marcos Martin's work on a variety of super-hero comics was never anything less than excellent, in his work since Captain America Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 (a nonsensical comic where Steve Rogers stops a Nazi plot while on his way to get the super solider injection), the artist got bolder with plastering his interests across the page. With his regular gig as rotating Amazing Spider-Man artist as base, Martin has spent the last two years delivering the most imaginative--and yet totally comprehensible--layouts super-hero comics had on offer. 2011 saw his final statements on the genre, with a Quitely-inspired take on Daredevil that found accolades everywhere it landed. Marvel may be poorer for his loss, but comics entire is richer for the lessons he left them to publish. Brian K Vaughan better know how to keep him interested.

8. Gangsta Rap Posse #2

Benjamin Marra. Traditional Comics.

While Benjamin Marra's reputation precedes him enough that the general tone of his work is unlikely to surprise, his experiments in how he exercises that work seem ever-developing. 2011 saw the guy showing up everywhere, but it was in the gray newsprint pages of Gangsta Rap Posse where the most hits landed. One of those long sought after "perfect comics", GRP #2 didn't hold back from a single transgresion, delivering page after page of shadowless violence. More celebration than revelation, Marra's brazen willingness to prize his own taste above all else bore fruit once again. If more cartoonists were as in touch with what their hands want to create, making these lists would be a whole lot harder.

7. Thickness #2

Angie Wang. Lisa Hanawalt. Michael Deforge. Mickey Zacchilli. Brandon Graham. True Chubbo. Jillian Tamaki.

Two issues in, Thickness has yet to sink into the trap of porn-for-snobs that the idea seems designed to create. Instead, the freedom to go blue has seen some cartoonists--Lisa Hanawalt especially--doing some of their most fascinating work yet. The second issue saw heavyweights like Brandon Graham (an old pro at the comic book pornography game) alongside young heavyweight Michael Deforge and the aforementioned Hanawalt, and the result was the most kick-ass anthology of the year.

6. Weird Schmeird #2

Ryan Cecil Smith. Self-Published.

A bicycle action comic made up of speed and spies, a sketchbook diary of a trip to India, a horror manga adaptation, advertisements and an autobio comic about parcel delivery, Weird Schmeird #2 doesn't sound like my sort of thing on paper, but man alive, that paper is incorrect. Whatever code it is that needs cracking, Smith figured it out--there's absolutely no fat to be found in this comic. Panel to panel, story to story, Smith strips everything down to its constituent motives--this has to move, that has to creep, the line needs to feel--the end result being such a variety of styles that the comic succeeds both as art and resume.

5. Congress of the Animals

Jim Woodring. Fantagraphics.

While last year's Weathercraft saw Jim Woodring deliberately examining the souls of his most unnerving character, Congress of the Animals was a resolute return--and as interpreted by some, a deliberate conclusion--to his most loveable, Frank. Deftly exploring the individual's relationship with labor, consequence and love, Congress of the Animals might be Woodring's least nightmarish work yet. (Although there's still a decent portion of it involving face-robbed humanoids that you shouldn't leave lying open if you have junkies visiting.)

4. Prison Pit Book 3

Johnny Ryan. Fantagraphics.

Back in 2009, when Ryan began Prison Pit, it was a revelation; a bone-crushing giant, born fully clothed. Since then, the series has failed only to surprise--we know now what brand of intensity it is we're getting, the pleasures are to be found purely in Ryan's delivery. And while the latest addition to the Pit's cast of characters may lack a bit in the personality department, he amply makes up for it in his stubborn willingness to get the job done. (In Prison Pit, the job is always violence--extreme, no-holds-barred violence.) Make no mistake: if Jack Kirby was born today, these are the kinds of comics he'd be drawing.

3. Hellboy: The Fury

Duncan Fegredo, Dave Stewart, Mike Mignola, Clem Robins. Dark Horse.

An orchestral climax that follows years of ground-laying, The Fury wasn't just the rapacious conclusion to a decade of Hellboy, it was the end of what had to be the most difficult task in Duncan Fegredo's career: following Mike Mignola. What a way to go out, though--knee deep in the blood-drenched ground under skies lit by electrical fire, with all of life in the balance. There wasn't a page in these three issues that wasn't perfectly composed, and yet the series never felt less than raw: panels of finality lining up or raining down, an unstoppable slide towards that last, broken moment.

2. Ganges #4

Kevin Huizenga. Fantagraphics.

While it has been two years since the release of Ganges #3, the only thing that could possibly have dulled would be the audience's memory of how extraordinary the series can be. But where the last issue saw Glenn goofily attacking his own thought processes, this issue opens with him in those embarassing stages of panic that arrive when sleep will just not come. Flashing through a litany of failed attempts--another book, another song, the brow furrowing further--Huizenga just as quickly changes tactics, laboriously stretching out the most minor transitions to the point where any attachment to plot falls away. As with Yokoyama's Color Engineering, the audience becomes participatory witness, buried head to toe alongside Glenn, living and dying by his attempts to conquer. The shaggy dog ending--weirder than the last one--only seems cruel for the length of time it takes you to remember: being broken out of a trance is supposed to hurt.

1. Love and Rockets New Stories Volume 4

Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez. Fantagraphics.

Picking up the plot immediately after the harrowing conclusion of last year's installment, Love and Rockets 4 saw Jaime Hernandez making good on the promise of decades. Resolving with as much finality as one could ask the question of "how's this gonna end", the final passage of this issue's Maggie story was without comparison. There was absolutely nothing else like reading those pages for the first time--the gasp held tight in your throat, the 8 panel grids giving way only once, for a two page silent recap of the last 30 years of a life only we seem to know was well-lived.

I had a chance in 2011 to talk to Jaime about this comic, and these pages. He told me that, if he got hit by a bus, he wanted to bail out of this life knowing that he'd finished the story.

I think he might have made a mistake, though. The next part always lasts forever.]]>articles<![CDATA[Back to the Future: Richard Marschall's The Sunday Funnies 1896-1950 ]]>Kristy Valenti reviews a 1978 Sunday comics anthology.Edited by newspaper strip historian and collector Richard Marschall,[1] The Sunday Funnies 1896-1950 wouldn't be out of place in today's comics market. (It's out of print, but about $20-$40 used). It comes in a 14 1/2" X 11 1/4" box; inside are five folded tabloid sections, one in black and white, four in color, printed on white paper. The color sections are a composite comics section for each decade, while the black-and-white section provides context for the collection, explaining how the strips were selected and devoting a couple paragraphs to each strip and its creator. Interspersed are period mixed media ads (usually a combination of photography, cartooning and text), which get across the flavor of each decade — the language, the styles, the celebrities. (The introductory material also optimistically informs the reader that this is intended to be a series, with thematic collections — adventure strips, girls comics — to follow, and solicits their input. To this writer's knowledge, they did not materialize, and Marschall went on to other projects.) The usual early-20th-century-newspaper-cartoonist suspects are included — Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, Hal Foster, E.C. Segar, Alex Raymond — as well as ones lesser known to, or forgotten by, a contemporary audience, such as Raymond Crawford Ewer (Slim Jim) and Frank Godwin (Connie).

Since Chelsea House published The Sunday Funnies in 1978 and The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics was put out in 1977, it's difficult not to compare how each presented and approached the material, especially the same strips. (Marschall augmented his own comic-strip archives with Bill Blackbeard's, one of the editors of The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics; there's a plug for Blackbeard's San Francisco Academy of Comic Art in The Sunday Funnies.) The 300-odd page, 14 ½" X 10 1/2" Smithsonian book contains short runs of strips, in black and white and color; it's obviously a much meatier work than The Sunday Funnies. (Adjusting for inflation, it understandably would have been a much more expensive book — about $100 1977 dollars, while The Sunday Funnies would have been about $40.)

However, detail and readability is lost in some strips, originally printed much larger, such as Little Nemo. This is not reflected in the works' covers, though; while Elizabeth Sur's cover design for the Smithsonian book is fairly fugly, functionally it samples the art in its pages for the reader. The Sunday Funnies cover, while an eye-catching enough yellow, just lists comics titles, equally privileged in terms of font size, etc. (It's difficult not to make some kind of dude-takes-off-his-hazmat suit-to-reveal-he's-Tyson-Beckford analogy.) It gives potential readers no hint at how beautifully — if perhaps more superficially — the comics are showcased. It's difficult to see how The Sunday Funnies' cover would have any appeal for kids, while the Smithsonian's, by various accounts, introduced a generation of kids to Gasoline Alley, Moon Mullins and Terry and the Pirates. To be fair, comparison is a bit specious, because the two works had different goals: while both collections were/are making an argument for newspaper strips as art, The Smithsonian Collection, unsurprisingly, is designed to prove that newspaper strips belong in museums and galleries, with all of the attendant critical consideration, as a uniquely American art form (SEE: Comics as Art). Marschall's intention is to replicate the childhood experience of sprawling out on the family room floor, reading the funny pages, an act that Marschall envisions as bringing families together.

What makes The Sunday Funnies worthy of reconsideration in 2011, especially since many of its strips are now readily available, is not only that it utilized formal techniques that both avant-garde and Big Two comics have experimented with somewhat recently, but how it deliberately contextualized the comics as an exercise in nostalgia (as Marschall explicitly states in his intro). Even in the '70s, this was a bit of a false nostalgia (mostly likely few of the people who read the Jan. 15, 1905 Happy Hooligan bought The Sunday Funnies, and millions of kids still read some of the same strips, even if they were not in their heyday); in 2011, pretty much in spite of itself, reading The Sunday Funnies 1896-1950 shifts from an act of a nostalgia to essentially an entirely new experience for readers. It's revolutionary in several senses of the word.]]>articles<![CDATA[Don't Know Much About History?]]>Karen Green considers Louis Menand and the value of a liberal arts education in the context of Kate Beaton.Kate Beaton and her webcomic "Hark! A Vagrant." I think I saw it talked up on Twitter first, a few years back. I went over to the Hark! A Vagrant site, and I can't remember which strip I saw but at the time my take was that it was rather crudely drawn and maybe just a teeny bit vulgar. So, because I can be a godawful snob, I didn't go back.

Until a few more months passed, and MORE people were buzzing about Kate Beaton and "Hark! A Vagrant" and I tried one more time. And I can't remember which comic I saw that time, either, but I was utterly entranced by its erudition and its sly wit, and immediately became a rabid fan. Because I may be a godawful snob, but I'm not rigid.

Still more months passed and I posted my favorite strips on Facebook or on Tumblr, and my friends laughed and commented and cheered, and I didn't think much more about the larger significance of Beaton's work until the accidental confluence of the Hark! A Vagrant print release and my reading of a Louis Menand article in a June 2011 issue of The New Yorker (yes, June: I'm really behind in my New Yorker reading).

The Menand article, "Live and Learn," was an assessment of two recent books on the purpose of higher education, and it began with an anecdote. Menand described teaching at an Ivy league institution, then shifting gears to teaching at a public university, where, to his astonishment, a student asked him one day, "Why did we have to buy this book?" Now, Menand received a PhD in English from my own fine institution, went on to teach at Princeton, and then enjoyed a Distinguished Professorship at the CUNY Graduate Center, before departing for Harvard. He's a smart guy, is what I'm saying. But he describes being taken aback by this question (he notes he more often heard its related form, "Why did we have to read this book?"), which, he writes, he "had never been called to think about before."



He then posits two possible answers to the question: a) you read this book to become intelligent, in a way that is measurable by grades (i.e. meritocratic) or b) you read this book because college teaches you things you cannot learn elsewhere and that will enrich your life (i.e. democratic). I read this and thought to myself: "Seriously? You NEVER thought about why you have your English-lit students read, say, Pride and Prejudice? You've never thought about how Austen uses the device of romantic fiction to condemn the effects on families, especially women, of 19th-century inheritance law and the practice of entail? How about Fitzgerald? You've never thought about what The Great Gatsby has to say about class in America and the post-WW1 era? You've REALLY never thought about these questions?"

That is just sad. But then I looked up Menand's dissertation topic and discovered he'd written about 19th-century Modernist literary criticism, not about the literature itself, so perhaps his reaction constitutes an occupational (pedagogical?) hazard. He might want to spend some time reading Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates' brilliant and insightful readings of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton for some teachable moments.

Returning to Menand's two answers, however, I tend to lean more towards the second. A college education--done right--should introduce students to ideas and ideologies that challenge them, that nudge them out of complacency and help shape them as individuals. Where I differ from Menand is the assumption that such books would or could only be read in a university environment; I‘ll wager there's not a book on his syllabus that I hadn't read long before I entered the ivied halls of academe. But, certainly, university professors can often find depths and angles in those books that the solitary reader might miss...if the professor bothers to think about why he or she is assigning the text, that is.

But, honestly, I don't think that's the purpose of a college education. One of the books Menand discusses, Academically Adrift, written by a pair of sociologists, recounts the researchers' attempts to identify whether a college education endows students with those oft-invoked "critical thinking skills." So they created a study where they assessed the critical thinking skills of 2,000 students at about a dozen four-year colleges: they gave a set of problems to the students as incoming freshmen, and then again three semesters later, in the middle of their sophomore year, and measured the improvement in the students' critical thinking.

There wasn't actually much improvement. The liberal arts majors improved the most (yay!). The business majors improved the least (boy, does that explain a lot). But, taken overall, the improvement was pretty negligible. Menand defends the results by pointing out that three semesters isn't much time for critical training to kick in. I agree with him, but I think that that's not wholly the point.



First of all, I don't think that the critical thinking skills one acquires in college magically kick in, like a software upgrade, as soon as they're demonstrated for students in classes. What makes more sense to me is that those skills mature over time, as graduates learn how to apply them in real-world scenarios. Just as wisdom is the product of intelligence and experience, analytical techniques need to combine with experience to mature into true critical insight.

But of course I'm mostly interested in those liberal arts majors. You remember: the ones with the highest measurable improvement in critical thinking skills. That's a great reward, but I don't necessarily think even that is the best reason to pursue a liberal arts education. The benefit that I see--and that Beaton exemplifies with such wit and flair--is to gain conversance with a shared cultural and historical landscape. To be part of an intellectual discourse that begins in the West with the Bible and continues up through Michel Foucault and beyond. To be more than merely charming or knowledgeable (or tedious) at cocktail parties, but rather to understand how every new work of art or of literature, how every new political idea, fits into a long tradition, and to understand the relationship between the old and the new.



I thought of all this as well when I was sent a link, recently, to one of Rush Limbaugh's periodic rants on the topic of liberals and the liberal arts. Limbaugh was mocking an "I am the 99%" protester who lamented the jobless future she has with her Classical Studies degree--he wondered what kind of future she expected with a useless, impractical major like Classics. Limbaugh's not even sure what her major really is: "Tell me, any of you at random listening all across the fruited plain, what the hell is Classical Studies? What classics are studied? Or, is it learning how to study in a classical way? Or is it learning how to study in a classy as opposed to unclassy way? And what about unClassical Studies? Why does nobody care about the unclassics? What are the classics? And how are the classics studied?" He then posits that maybe it's about reading Dickens.



But, after all, colleges aren't trade schools, training programs resulting in a specific skill and a specific job. Their mission is to educate, producing thoughtful, well-rounded graduates, who combine learned skills with their innate abilities to qualify for any number of careers--but rarely aimed at a specific one. And as I read that tirade, I found myself thinking: I believe Limbaugh loves him some Founding Fathers, but perhaps he doesn't realize that the traditional education of 18th-century gentlemen such as our Founders was a complete immersion in classical studies, and it was that familiarity with the political theory of the ancients that underpinned their rationale for revolution, and their conception of the American democratic experiment. So, one perceived benefit of a classical studies education might be the ability to understand the true nature and goals of these United States, and to be a better citizen as a consequence (although, I'll grant you, that's a difficult skill to monetize).

When Beaton was in college, for example, she studied history and anthropology but, as the blurb in her book states, she has enjoyed "lifelong obsessions with literature, history, and drawing." (In other words, she may have immersed herself in literature and history before entering college: goodbye, Menand argument A.) Beaton's own inclinations, combined with her college education and--dare I say it?--the critical thinking skills she exercised there, allow her to comment on and unconsciously promote the western literary canon. You can't fully appreciate Beaton's work if you don't know the literature--or the history--she pokes fun at (or celebrates; it's a toss-up).



Her readers' assumption of cultural familiarity is so strong that, when Beaton introduced fictional poet Charles and his wife Janita, her fans assume they're real, and then question their own cultural knowledge. I know; I did the same thing. "Who is this poet, with the unusually-named wife? Let me use my awesome research skills to identify him!" It was jarring to learn that they were invented. And it was that befuddlement over Charles and Janita that those without familiarity with literature and history must feel whenever they read Beaton's work--the cultural references aren't an extra, they're the feature.



Reading Beaton's work, I'm reminded of advice I once read for aspiring comics writers (I honestly can't remember where; it's driving me crazy): don't read only other comics books. The advice-giver's point was that comics writers who read only other comics can live in a kind of bubble. Getting ideas from outside the medium isn't a bad thing. That advice reminded me, in turn, of a documentary I once saw about competitive hip-hop artists, called "Freestyle: the Art of Rhyme." One of the freestylers they interviewed described spending hours reading the dictionary, in order to expand his vocabulary and make his rhymes more complex. Beaton is like the champion MC of gag comics, dropping rhymes few can equal and virtually no one surpass. There's little that can beat the gratification of knowing you're one of those who knows what she's talking about. That gratification? That's one of the rewards of a college education.

What former professor of hers would not be gratified to read her work? Take a peek at some of her more recent online work: French Revolution comics. Click through and read them--and then read her commentary at the bottom of the page. She's given real thought to the natures of the people who many have never heard of, or think of as lifeless names on a high school history final.

So, essentially, the purpose of a college education is to be able to read Kate Beaton. And, if you're very lucky and very clever and go to a very good school, you might just be able to be her.]]>articles<![CDATA[Theatricality in Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight and The Book of Human Insects]]>Kristi Valenti reviews US editions of two classic Tezuka mangas.Princess Knight Part One (translated by Maya Rosewood) and The Book of Human Insects (translated by Mari Marimoto), both published in English recently by Vertical, Inc., were created by Osamu Tezuka nearly 20 years apart, for very different audiences — or perhaps for the same audience, in a different stage in their lives. "Stage" is a multivalenced word here: Princess Knight, a pioneering shojo manga created in the '50s, was influenced by the Japanese all-female, cross-dressing theater troupe The Takarazuka Revue, whose performances Tezuka had seen as a boy; The Book of Human Insects' (1970-1971) lead character, alias Toshiku Tomura, gets her start as an actress. (Since she's a symbol for postwar Japan, it's emphasized repeatedly that she was born in 1947; she easily could have read Princess Knight during its run.)

Princess Knight is about Sapphire, born with two "hearts," male and female (due to a cutesy mascot figure, in this case, an angel). Raised as a prince for political reasons, when her "princess" side is exposed, she must swashbuckle and fends off an evil demoness in the fallout (the series is set to conclude in Part Two). The Book of Human Insects is about the aforementioned Tomura, who mimics, then outright steals, the talents of the men (and women) she seduces before she destroys them.

Needless to say, both works are deeply concerned with gender "roles": with gender as performance. Each book has a sequence in which this anxiety is spelled out. In Princess Knight, the kingdom's subjects breathlessly await the birth of the queen's baby. If it is a boy, the patriarchy is reinforced, the line to the throne is unbroken, and the child will inherit. If it is a girl, all is lost (one who is unworthy, but male, will inherit in her stead). In The Book of Human Insects, Gang Boss Kabuto explains that a "woman" is like liquor; though the liquor is exactly same, it changes appearance in different glasses, and by adding a subtle twist to it, i.e. a "man" (his quotation marks, both times), it can take on a different flavor. Tezuka shows how Tomura's conquests view her, and more importantly, how they visualize themselves with her: this is particularly pronounced with Mizuno, the artist/designer, who sees himself as an angel and her as a butterfly. Tabloid journalist Asouka sees her like a big-busted American gag cartoon, falling straight into his arms. (He even has a little halo of excitement lines as his cigarette obligingly hovers a few inches away from his mouth.)

Both Sapphire's and Tomura's "transformations" are theatrical. At one point, Sapphire is turned into a swan, but looks like she's just in a swan costume — human legs are visible, and she can speak, although the other characters "see" her as a swan. Tomura swaps places with her double, Mizuno's traditional, and by all appearances, ideal, Japanese wife Shijmi: Tomura draws on her makeup skills from her time in the troupe to accomplish the ruse.

Shijmi, though, serves a very important purpose; she's the reason why "Insect" is plural in the English translation. (The press material explains that it's titled "after French natural historian Fabre's classic essays on the lives of insects and also known as Human Metamorphosis.") As aforementioned, she's Tomura's double, although she wears a kimono and behaves just as an ideal Japanese woman should. Mizuno can't help but fall in love with her (instead of troubling Tomura with her theft and her ambition and her lies, he gets a carbon copy of her that is comfortingly old-fashioned and pliant). So pliant, in fact, that Shijmi let her life be ruined by a man; it's explicitly stated that she was prostituted and then married off to Mizuno. In this context, Tomura's victims looks less like victims; each man tries to pin her down like a moth or a butterfly (her female conquests, notably, are not depicted doing this), and she resists, transforming like a moth or a butterfly to escape; admiration of them, even after they are told to their faces that she will be their ruin (she often does it herself, usually in campy manner, all villainous ho ho hos and body language). Though the male characters might picture themselves as birds or wolves, they're insects, just like Tomura, and Tezuka, a bug enthusiast, helpfully taxonimizes them in the chapter titles (Tezuka was a bug enthusiast; he took his pen name from a beetle, and his animation company was named "Bug Production.") At one point, Tomura is told, point blank, by a doctor that she has no control over her body, as it belongs to a man. They are only victims because they allow themselves to be seduced by her. If Tomura ever let herself be caught, she could share Shijmi's fate. For Sapphire, as soon as she is definitively a man, or definitively a woman, she loses.

Both Sapphire and Tomura have an audience who comment on each woman's performance for the reader; both books utilize slapstick for comic relief. The Book of Human Insects even has an occasional narrator. Sapphire's fairy tale world is inherently stagier; the backgrounds look like animation backgrounds (the Disney influence is can't-miss), and her swordfight scenes look like flashy choreography, complete with dramatic entrances (of the Errol Flynn sort — there's a Robin Hood riff). In what must have been a wink to the audience, there's even a brief sequence with a rehearsal for what looks to be a Takarazuka Revue-type show. (Not to be outdone, there's an All About Eve sequence in The Book of Human Insects, too.)

The demoness' daughter, Hecate, calls attention to the "constructedness" of the milieu, eschewing medieval drag for a ponytail and slacks, like any '50s teen. It's all drawn in clean, bouncy curves, with little to no shadows. The Book of Human Insects takes place in a more realistic, grittily drawn Japan (Tezuka was incorporating some gekiga elements into his work; still, Tezuka employs some light and sound techniques that can easily be adapted to the stage. Lights are "killed" for private or internal moments — the panel is blacked out, while the pile driver sequence is sold with sound effects. Horizontal panels often represent characters rushing along, going with the flow, interacting with each other in the middle ground or close-up; while vertical panels often show the setting, or, conversely, interiority or disruptions for the characters, when they're going against the grain, or their private face. When Shijmi's pimp sets her up with Mizuno, there's a single, darkened panel in which he signals his perfidy, which seems to exist only between him and the reader. Fights are still stylized, but they're brutal: Tomura is slapped, raped and punched in the gut.

Speaking of audience: Tezuka, and his audience, were almost 20 years older when The Book of Human Insects was published, and there's a lot of anxiety centered on that. None of the creators that Tomura rips off expose her, and fail in their endeavors afterward, even if she doesn't wipe them out; partly, it seems, due to their shame of being bested by a mere woman, and partly due to what can be described as unease about women's changing, newly competitive roles in a still-very-new-at-the-time capitalist society. In The Book of Human Insects, women's (Tomura's) changeability is not only infuriating, it gives them an edge. There's also a lot of worry about mass media; specifically, perfect, hollow copies, which can perhaps be read as manga pioneer Tezuka's response to all of the upstarts (including female ones) that rose to prominence during the "manga revolution" in Japan in the 1960s. On page 184, 20-something Mizuno even gripes about kids these days and their music. The anarchist, of course, listens to hard rock.) This worry about copying must have been especially pronounced for someone like Tezuka, who used assistants to help draw his work. Fittingly, Tomura has her own critic, a stage director who knows about her only link left to her "humanity." The director gives way to a photographer, whose "art" is perfect reproduction (the director is always complaining that Tomura can only mimic, not create).

Vertical's take on the books' 21st century, American demographics points to a generation gap, as well. Princess Knight reads right to left, since it's aimed at younger readers who have grown up reading manga; The Book of Human Insects is aiming for an adult, lit and lit-comics crowd, so it reads left to right. Both books' promotional copy helpfully explains where each book lands on the Feminist Comics Scale (Sapphire is "proto-feminist," while Tomura is "far from a feminist role model"). Since neither character is willing to commit to one identity — since both are acting, fluctuating between one role and the next — it might be more accurate to measure the distance between them in innocence. Tomura seeks to return to a more childlike, innocent time; a time that belongs to the younger-in-every-sense-of-the-word Sapphire, whose liminality calls to mind the period in an individual's life when gender roles are not so tightly enforced.]]>articles<![CDATA[Why Daredevil Talks Like That: An Interview with Mark Waid]]>Tucker stone interviews <i>Daredevil</i> writer and industry veteran Mark Waid.The way I see it, there's no better super-hero comic than Daredevil available. A consistently beautiful book with drum-tight plotting as its engine, it's the kind of comic that serves as an almost violent endorsement of the pleasures of serialization: a comic that I absolutely can not wait to read.

It's not wholly unexpected that I feel this way. Marcos Martin--one of the book's two artists--is one of the most innovative storytellers working in comics right now, and I'd be hard-pressed to name his contemporaries. Marcos Martin comics are basically un-ruin-able, and trust a longtime reader: quite a few people have tried. And yet, the first three issues of Daredevil, penciled by Paolo Rivera, weren't even a slight letdown. Instead, the slow-build of Kirby-homaging/new status quo installation worked like a coming-out party designed to re-introduce me to Rivera, whose work in the third issue of Daredevil stands head and shoulders amongst the best fight scenes (and certainly one of the weirdest) that this stripe of comic has seen in its storied history. Rivera's work on the title was such a revelation that the bittersweet news of Martin's departure (issue 6 will be his last Marvel work for the foreseeable future) came with a muted sting...at least, for now, Paolo will be around.

And then there's Mark Waid. Waid's a classic comics writer--the kind of person who produces enough work in enough genres that the only way to really hate the guy would be to hate genre in its entirety. If you like...you know, "stuff", there's something he's done that's going to work for you. For me, it's this series: a comic that lives in full embrace of its pitch black noir past while pointing the way towards a post-modern super-hero comic classicism that rejects cynicism entirely. It's aspirational work, and getting a chance to talk to Waid about it was an absolute pleasure.



Every comics professional I know is keeping up with Daredevil. At the same time, I don't feel like I'm seeing it singled out enough.

I am a little disappointed that it seems to be one of those things that is getting critical acclaim. But at the same time...because it's not tied into events, because it's not one of a "New 52", it's one of "those books". It's doing okay sales wise, but it's not blowing the roof off the joint. For no other reason than because Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin are doing amazing work, I wish it were getting a stronger response. Now, I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Sales are still much better than they were a year ago, and Marvel's very happy, but...it would be nice to be getting as much attention as we possibly could.

Can you walk me through how the gig first came about? Was it your initial idea?

No, actually. I think it was at Baltimore 2010, when I was working on that Captain America: Man Out of Time mini-series. I was doing that for Tom Brevoort, and he came up to me and blurted "What would you think about Daredevil?" And then we both looked at each other agog. I was intrigued because I'm the least likely guy to put on that book as it has been envisioned for the last twenty-five years. I don't like writing dark, cynical relentless stories of utter despair. I like reading them when they're done well, of course. I sometimes still get a bad rap as some "Church of The Silver Age" guy who needs my superheroes frozen in amber, and that's bullshit. I don't give a damn about making comics retro! I've got a bunch of old comics in the next room, I don't need to keep recreating them the way I remember them as a child. I can just go into that room and read them, that's much easier than trying to recreate them.



But I digress. As I say, Tom approached me with an assignment that has been such a dark, relentlessly dour book for such a long time in a way that's emblematic of what most all super-hero comics have been for the last few years. So I said that I'd be interested in coming aboard if I had some elbow room to do my thing. I can write Daredevil with some dark elements, and I can do it with sophistication, and I can do it with some gravitas...but at the same time, I need the character to have a wider range of emotion than just "suicidal tendency.".

You don't want to kill more girlfriends.

I don't want to follow Frank Miller. No one will ever do Frank Miller's Daredevil better than Frank Miller could. Why bother? Why are you wasting your time? Why keep following that same drumbeat? The number of times I've been asked to do a Spirit story? The number of times I passed on it. Surprisingly large. Why would you want to do a Spirit story? What are you gonna do? Be almost as good as Will Eisner? "Do you want to do Swamp Thing?" No, I don't want to do Swamp Thing! What am I gonna do? Be almost as good as Alan Moore? It's not like doing a Superman story. I can compete with the five hundred other guys who've taken a crack at it. But extraordinarily special circumstances aside, I just don't understand why anyone would follow the exact same drumbeat as a defining creator.

Marvel gave me freedom with Daredevil. They said "look, we want to tweak the dials a little bit, to make it a little more of a super-hero book while keeping the street level quality. Is that something you're interested in?" And I was all over that, because I think it's an interesting challenge. And it continues to be an interesting challenge, month after month, because I'm constantly feeling my way along that tightrope between crime and super-heroes. Everything I do in the book that is slightly fanciful or slightly...."super-hero" in nature was something that I have to approach very carefully. I don't want it to come across like a typical super-hero book, but at the same time, it needs something like that! Am I making any sense at all?

Definitely. There's a couple of things that makes me think of, the first being--the one moment that I think brings out exactly what you're doing in the book is in one panel, in issue 4. It's that panel when the Gambonnos are running across the wire...the one from Roosevelt Island?

Yeah, the Roosevelt Island tram exactly. Those goddamned Circus of Crime guys.



That panel, and the part at the end of the Klaw sequence in the third issue...I can't remember the exact line of dialog, but it's when he says "Please." When he's begging Daredevil not to destroy him. It's a comic book, and he's not a person, Daredevil's not killing anybody or anything like that...but there's a level of importance given there, a sense of gravity and panic. It's an action heavy issue, but it's still the perfect mix of that Daredevil crime-y, dark stuff with classic super-hero stuff. It's a Fantastic Four villain, there's even a Kirby pastiche panel recapping who Klaw was and is.

That's the tightrope every month. And it's a tightrope that's tougher to walk than it might first appear. It would be so easy to turn this into such a straight up super-hero book that it may as well be Spider-Man. But, again, if that's the approach, then why not just write Spider-Man? Likewise, it would be equally easy to do nothing but street level crime stuff, but again, I'm not as good a crime writer as Bendis. I'm not as good a crime writer as Brubaker. Why go that route? From my point of view, this seems like the first time in 15 years that somebody has given me the keys to the car and said "do what you wanna do", and I have, and it's succeeded. Generally, I do what I think is best to reinvent a franchise and write for the non-hardcore audience, and the nerd rage is off the charts. I wrote a Legion of Super-Heroes book that you didn't have to have a degree in Legion-ology to read and understand...and? Mistake! Superman Birthright, a Superman take that's not like John Byrne's? Cue the rage. My short-lived return to Flash, breaking with what's been done before? Bear trap. So I'm pleasantly surprised to report that for the first time in a long long time that...I'm zigging when I should be zagging and people are keeping up with me rather than just being mad.

Your knowledge of super-hero history is going to beat out mine, so I have to ask: at the time when Frank Miller took over Daredevil and changed the tone of the comic, wasn't that a similar kind of bucking at the status quo? I know it was different than what was going on in Daredevil, but wasn't it also bucking against what was going on in Marvel Comics, DC Comics at the time?

Completely, it was sui generis.

Isn't what you're doing with Daredevil the same kind of choice that Miller was making, a choice not to continue with the previous style? To move away from gritty, adult-means-nasty/adult-means-cynical comics? Now that the super-hero norm is so much more hardcore stuff, to actually deliver something where the villains are circus clowns running across the Roosevelt Island wire with literal "sacks of cash"...isn't that kind of choice a purposely confrontational one as well?

You know, I haven't looked but I bet the sacks have dollar signs on them.

Okay. I think you hit on it with the magical word: cynical. That's the thing. That is the overriding emotion--although I think I'm being kind by calling cynicism an emotion, but as a point of reference, let's call it an emotion--that has been the overriding emotion in American super-hero comics for the last ten years or so. And that makes me batshit insane. As a status quo, I find it morally repellent, and I think it's really insanely stupid to try to shoehorn characters that were created specifically to entertain children with stories of hope and enthusiasm into this hideously cynical, dark, depressing, life-denying tone of voice. And again, don't get me wrong: I have a wide range of things I read and a wide range of things I enjoy. I'm as good with 21 Grams and Crash as anybody else in the world. I love a really well-told story that is dark and sinister and depressing. It doesn't have to be bright and shiny to entertain me. But when you're telling a damn super-hero story...then perhaps doing it in a cynical way could be the exception rather than the rule?



Which, right now, isn't the case.

Go to a store. Look around. Throw a stick. Find me a super-hero comic that doesn't make you want to throw yourself in front of a bus after you've read it. Go find one that inspires its readers to be heroic themselves.

Isn't it kind of the standard answer to criticize everything and then say "but of course, you should be allowed to do whatever you want"? I mean...I agree with that in principle. But I think what you're saying is that, in the case of super-hero comics...they aren't really the venue that can tell the same stories that something like Breaking Bad can. Breaking Bad is qualitatively better at what it does, the stories it tells, than it would be if it had to tell those stories in the super-hero genre. Certain kinds of dark, dark stories about the underbelly...they just resonate better in other mediums than they do in super-hero comics.

Other media are just made for that, they're better at that. Super-hero comics just aren't genetically bred for that. That doesn't mean that....see, when Watchmen came out, and I was 23 or whatever, I did think it was the greatest comic book I'd ever read. And I still think it's a genius work of art when it comes to structure and the language of comics. I'm not one of those guys who wishes super-hero comics never grew up. Tell whatever story you want to tell! I would never tell anybody not to do a dark and cynical story with cowboys or super-heroes or dinosaurs or whatever the hell...but just be aware. Bear in mind the fact that you're bending the rules already by telling your dark treatise on the savage reality of the world with your Curious George story. Be aware that this is, perhaps, an interesting choice you're making, but maybe all of your stories don't have to be like this.

Did you actually keep up with Shadowland and the previous stories going on in Daredevil before you came on board?

I went back. I didn't keep up with it at the time, but I did go back and do my due diligence, my homework on the last two years of Daredevil. I hadn't read a lot of the last ten years, so I read the stuff from the last 3 or 4 years that had some bearing on what we were doing.

There wasn't much further down you could take that story. Daredevil had a New York sewer jail and was killing people on television.

Yeah, and there's only two ways you can go with that. You can keep going down that road or you can decide not to. What intrigues me about this, what excites me about it, is that I feel like I've got the chance to do something that nobody else in comics has the same set-up to run with: a character who has been through the absolute worst that you can put a character through. And instead of waking up in the morning and being a victim to all of that, he woke up one morning and made the decision that all people who suffer from darkness and depression have to make at some point, which is that you have to go "you know what, I'm tired of my life being like this". It's insanity to keep perpetuating this victimhood, so...it doesn't mean you're absolved of your sins, but you stop living your life in the same way and expecting different results. You ever see Californication?

No, but I've heard interviews where you talked about using that show's main character as a model for Matthew Murdock.

I just like the idea of a character whose double whammy is that he's trying to effect his own redemption while at the same time, doing it in such a way where he also has to win back the hearts and minds of the other people around him, and he's not focused enough or wise enough to do both at once.

Which is what comes up in the first issue, in his conversation with Foggy. "It's been a miserable last few years, and I've finally hit bottom". And he basically says "I'm sorry, but that's all you're getting." I'm gonna be in a better mood now, make the most out of life, etc. Instead of ending on that beat, it ends on the beat where Foggy says "yeah, that's not really enough." That's not an amends, that's just an "I'm sorry your feelings are hurt".



Exactly. It's a "geez, I'm sorry you're upset that I ran into your car." That's hand-waving, it's not being a responsible adult. It's a step in the right direction, sure. But Foggy knows there has to be more to it, and again, that's where we're going in the back half of this first year. There's the novelty of Matt being back to the happy smiling guy around his friends, but then we're onto asking if, maybe, there's something wrong with him. Has he taken too many blows to the head? What's going on in that guy's skull? Nobody could go through what he went through and not had that affect them. We'll be slipping it in the upcoming issues, the odd moments. There's his lighthearted first person narration, with a moment, an aside of him recriminating himself for a split second. A little more harshly than you might expect. That's for a purpose.

Speaking of the "we", can you talk a little bit about the artists on the book, Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin? Were those guys already on board with Daredevil before you? Was it a package deal when you started talking to Tom Brevoort about the book?

Yeah. Either Brevoort or Wacker or both assembled them, I'd bet Wacker. Marcos and Wacker are pretty good pals, and both artists were already on board by the time I signed on. I couldn't have been happier with that. I'd never worked with Paolo before, and I was a little nervous because I wasn't terribly familiar with what the process of working together was going to be like. I met with him and at the Orlando Megacon last year and he got it immediately, I knew we were on the same wavelength because he was all about storytelling. He didn't care about splash pages, he didn't care about some two-page spread he could sell for a lot of money at conventions. He wanted to tell a story.

Now, both of these guys are suffering through the adjustment I'm having to make as a guy who has written 22 page stories his entire career and is suddenly having to write twenty page stories. It probably doesn't seem like it would be that big a deal, and I'm not whining...but it is a bigger deal than it would seem. Every single storytelling rhythm I have, having written comics for 25 years for a 22 page beat....it's instinct by now, my gut knows where I should be by page six, where I should be by page 17. All those rules are out the window, and unfortunately for both Paolo and Marcos, I've been temporarily solving this problem by cramming 22 page stories into 20 pages. That's not a solution. They, to their credit, have gotten my back 100% and they are not afraid of denser material. They still find ways to open it up and surprise me, Marcos in particular.

It seems to me like people still haven't grasped how special Marcos Martin is.

He's groundbreaking. He's absolutely groundbreaking in the way he approaches storytelling, in the way he approaches layout. When I work with him it's a very collaborative process. I was giving him plot first, dialog after the pencils just to give him a little bit more elbow room to storytell but he found it was slowing him down because he really felt like he needed more of the details. So I started giving him full scripts, and even with a full script, he would blow it all up and then put it back together. Which is all fine! He would ask first, sure, but he was turning out these layouts that were moving things around, putting in a new emphasis. The opening to his first full issue was originally a two page sequence that he turned into four, with Daredevil reaching down for the flash drive, the lion growling and stuff. That was his invention, that was not quite what I had called for.



Wow.

A lot of that back-up story in the first issue too. The beats were there, opening on the graveyard dream and closing at his father's grave. The two-page spread of them walking across the street--although that, again, wasn't what I envisioned. I knew I was torturing him, but I said "look, I need the two of them in a street scene in the glory of all of New York". I used that Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali book as an example for him, that famous two-page spread that Neal Adams drew of the city. Do you know the page I'm talking about?

Yes.

It's an amazing drawing. And we needed something of that sensibility. And then I said I was sorry and that I would pay him back for it in the years to come. And you saw what he did. He turned an establishing shot into the Family Circus. And I mean that in a good way!



No, I know exactly what you mean. It's a term I've used myself. The first time I saw it was in his Captain America issue with James Robinson, but he also did it in Spider-Man during a casino fight scene.

That sequence was a case where I asked for that scene and I gave him some dialog. I always give him some of the dialog that I'm going to put in there so he can get a sense of the pacing. And he turns this thing back in and now I've suddenly got to write a lot more dialog on that page because of the way he laid it out. And then there's the page where Matt and Foggy are walking down into the subway...now there's a great example. That scene was not originally set in a subway, it was written as a city park. My thinking was that the last place Matt Murdock ever wants to be is the New York City subway. The smells, the sound, everything about it is just going to make it total sensory overload. But I wanted to do this violin scene and it was Marcos who said "what if we just did it in the subway?"

I had a bunch of reasons why I didn't want to do it in the subway. And Marcos said "The subway gives me trains, and trains give me rhythm. I can use that as a visual leitmotif for the scene where he's learning to play the violin." And that sold me.

It's a fantastic scene.

That's all Marcos. It's him at his best.

Did you know going in that he was only going to be in for those three issues, or was that something that came up while you were working?

Unfortunately, it was something that came up while we were working. He's doing 4, 5 and 6. When he came on, I don't think things were firmed up with his next project and now they have. I salute him, and I think it's going to be great and I want to see him go off and do creator owned stuff. But my heart breaks.

That's the thing with artists though, right? Writers can keep their feet in both camps. Artists...not so much.

No, it's a full time job. He can't divide his attention. We will work together again at some point. We have a pact. We have a list of people at DC who have to fall dead of a heart attack so that we can do Superman, but we will.

Sounds good to me.

It's a long list.

Well, when you have a culling, it's usually pretty wide-ranging.

Tucker, it would have to be a really big and thorough culling at this point. Remember, with the last round of hirings that DC made, I made an announcement that if anybody needed me, I'd be in the Pandorica.

It's against my religion to laugh at Doctor Who references. Are you ready to announce who will be taking over his spot yet?

We've got a few names, but not yet. Honestly, I don't know. I'm not 100% sure who's stepping in after the next Paolo run, but I trust Wacker's taste.

How did Joe Rivera come onboard? Was that something Paolo brought you, having his dad ink him?

I didn't know about that going in, but I thought it was great. I met Joe when I met Paolo, and I loved him--a stoic, salt-of-the-earth guy. It's a great dynamic they've got going. And he did a really good job, especially considering that he'd never inked a comic book before in his life.

It really registered with me. I'd always admired what I'd seen of Paolo's work, but there's something in this stuff that really jumped out. I didn't pay attention at first....to be honest, I was focused more on who was coloring it, but when I found out it was his dad and a first-time inker....there's got to be some credit given there. There's something in that work, in those issues that wasn't happening before. Not that it makes Paolo's previous work seem bad, just that there's something very special here, especially in that third issue. That's one of the best super-hero comics I've seen in a while.

Wait until you see issue seven. It's a done-in-one issue, Daredevil leading a bunch of blind kids down a mountain in a snow storm...the storytelling chops that Paolo has, the chances he's taken in his layouts. He's bringing a whole new level of craft to it, it's really phenomenal.



One of the things that jumped out at me when I read that first issue was Matt's final lines, the "It has been a miserable last few years" part. It felt to me, because of the timing when that came out--right alongside all of DC's new 52, which was just issue after issue after issue of people getting their faces cut off and nailed to walls...that line felt like a response to all of these horribly cynical, dark comics. That's just my feeling.

Not only do I agree with you, I think that you're being kind. I think you're being lenient. Fanboy torture porn, 52 times a month. Yay.

With Daredevil, I felt like I was seeing a direct response to that. It stayed in service to the story, and that was primary. It made for a good comic book. But it also, when read another way, felt like a direct rebuke to the "you have to be nasty and dark to make a mark" kinds of comics. It was a comic that ended on a cliffhanger of a guy saying that he didn't want to be a nasty, unhappy dude anymore with a bunch of dead girlfriends. I'm moving on. I don't need to reboot my continuity or anything like that. A comic that said "yes, that happened. We're gonna do something different now. And we can, because that's super-hero comics."

To be honest, it wasn't an intentional rebuke of a specific publishing move in the last few months, but it was a general rebuke of the gestalt of the past few years. I had no idea when I was writing Daredevil #1 how blatantly cynical the New 52 books would be, how repetitive they would be. It's beyond belief. The patterns, the darkness, the despair..."[Insert Hero's name here]'s arm got cut off. See you next month."

But I've been carrying this banner for a long time: how to craft a first issue that makes people want to come back rather than feel like they're punished for not coming back because they only got a little bit of a story, or because you're not giving them the basics of storytelling. That stuff just makes me insane. I think some of the best work I've ever done has been first issue stuff--the Fantastic Four launch I did with ‘Ringo, or the Legion #1 I did with Barry Kitson. Whether you like the stories or not, the craftsmanship is something I'm proud of. Here is a story. Here's what the characters want, what they're interested in, what they're after and what's in their way, and what they have to overcome in interesting, visual ways that you can only do in comic books. How hard is that, for christsakes?

And yet I feel like a voice in the wilderness when I say that. Again, this is why I'm heartened by the response to Daredevil #1. It really feels like I've been doing these kinds of first issues for a long time. Clean slates, where I'm giving you what you need. And people got it! I feel like one of those guys who tops the charts with a number one single, and then you find out he's been around for ten years and you just never knew. That's heartening, that feeling that my personal taste and the market's taste have finally lined up for a brief second.

The thing about Daredevil is that it reads like proof. It's proof that you can take somebody who can write a good story and you put them together with somebody who can draw really well and you get some decent, non-over-the-top coloring on the book, then you're probably going to end up with a comic book that people want to buy that makes them happy. It's that easy, you know? It's not "easy", but it's that simple.

It is that easy. What we do is not the easiest work in the world, but it's not that brilliant a revelation. Everything you said is absolutely true, but you would think--the way the market behaves, the way the publisher behaves--that you were speaking in tongues when you said what you just said.



This isn't to dismiss the work on Daredevil in any way, but...this shouldn't be a weird book. It shouldn't be weird to be well-crafted. But it is a weird book, it's what I call a "one-issue" book. It's the one Marvel comic that people who like comics but don't have the tolerance for mediocrity buy, and it shouldn't be that way. When somebody walks up with a stack of 20 new super-hero comics, they should be like Daredevil. This is the model that should be followed. Stuff like Detective Comics #1--stuff with weird sex jokes and decapitations...those should be the weird super-hero comics, the outliers. Instead, it's the other way around, and the book where the guy fights dudes with sacks of money, the book that actually has longtime professionals involved...that's the weird comic.

I'm totally in your corner, I feel the same way. I lament, frequently. You're talking to somebody who, for his entire life, has gone to the comic store every Wednesday, or Friday or Monday or whatever day the books came out during that period of time. I was always the first guy in the store. But over the past couple of years, you know...sorry! I'm Tinkerbell and you haven't been clapping loud enough. I don't go anymore, and if you lost me...

I found I was going to the store and picking up books out of habit, and then I would go out to the car and leaf through ‘em. And maybe, if I was lucky, I'd find one comic that I'd actually want to read that day, because it was cool. And I'd enjoy it, but the rest would be crap that I was buying out of habit or whatever.

I've been wondering lately if part of it is the success of Image Comics and Dark Horse, that guys like Mignola don't need to work at DC anymore, they don't need to help out with Rocket Raccoon at Marvel anymore. They can go and do Hellboy, and all of that craftsmanship and work and intelligence can be dedicated towards something that isn't going to be a corporate property. It'll be their thing that they can control, it can live and die with them. In some ways, the dire straits of the DC/Marvel b-list feels like a natural evolution. If you're really good, you don't stay indoors for that long anymore. You move out with the Brian K Vaughans of the world and draw those comics, and that's actually a good thing.



I think that's true, especially at DC. And yeah, imagine the world twenty years ago, and somebody says DC will become the farm team for creator-owned books. That would've sounded insane. And yet? That's the level we're at. And that's a healthy progression for the medium! It's a healthy progression for everything but DC Comics. But, again....

I know! I grew up reading DC Comics. I want to continue reading DC Comics...but DC doesn't seem to want me to continue reading them. The guys who would make the ones I would want to read are off doing BPRD, or for Image or Fantagraphics or the ‘web or whatever. They don't need to work for DC anymore, so I don't get to have new issues of Batman that are actually good comics. And that's fine! That's actually a good, wonderful thing. It only stings because I'm acting like a child, trying to dictate the limits of other people's creative satisfaction.

Yeah, look. I've made my peace with that. I could be part of the vocal crowd that looks at the recent DC books and goes "Bah! I don't like ‘em!" But what's the point? Why be mad? It's like being mad at a soap opera for not entertaining me. Guess what? Soap operas aren't made to entertain me. They're made for a specific audience. And if I don't dig them, no harm, no foul. For me to expect to love DC Comics until the day I die...

It's weird.

Yeah! The fact that I was able to enjoy them way past the time I was 12 years old was a blessing in and of itself. It was a lucky stroke. So we've gotten to the point where I look at the new 52 and go "alright, this is not for my taste." Somebody is buying them. They're outselling Irredeemable 10 to 1. Somebody is doing something right. It's not my taste. Go with God. Do whatever you want.

Ugh.

I'm being a lot more charitable than I would have been ten years ago. Ten years ago I would have been livid over this stuff. But now I've gotten to a point in my career where I just go "All right, it's not made for me." Whatever. I'm not going to get upset at the Discovery Channel because everything they air isn't to my taste. There's some good stuff in there. It's not...I can't turn my back on all of it. Not all of it makes me want to take strychnine.

There's your pull quote, DC. Mark Waid says "Not all of it makes me want to take strychnine."

I could see that on a billboard.



(A big thank you to Dean Haspiel, Michel Fiffe & Mike Cavallaro for their assistance with this interview.)]]>articles