comiXology | Articles & Interviews

The Day NASCAR Killed Comix (And Other Tales)

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0500

I decided to try an experiment where a lot of the topics I planned to blog about during the week -- but was too crazed schedule-wise to get to -- I post here. A catch-all of controversy, musings, and personal ephemera. Let's give it a shot, shall we?

First they came for my Supergirl knicker collection, then my Alan Moore

Technically, if a group of people pressure a comics publisher to not publish art or images of a certain prurient nature, and said publisher capitulates: does that mean that censorship has won? Or is the high-brow or low-brow nature of the art in question a factor? I believe that in the comics industry, some advocates for free speech remain conveniently silent when Supergirl's knickers are successfully covered up. Are there no tears shed for Supergirl's thong among those passionate advocates for our innate rights to self-expression? How about from the crowd who says they are so hyped about freedom of expression, they would even defend the rights of neo-Nazis to have free speech? The buck stops at so-called "trashy" comix. Oh, I'm sorry: comics, not comix. If it was "comix," then that would be different.

Not that I care, I'm just playing devil's advocate. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me. Especially if it Twitter trends.

The Day NASCAR Killed Comics

I love when pundits insinuate that because a webcomic is sponsored by a major publisher, it is somehow not a "real" webcomic. I love the controversy surrounding the Harvey Awards nominations, because it brings the topic of what is and what is not "art" in comics to the fore, and along with it people's prejudices. Not that I don't believe in one being a discerning comic book aficionado. But I think there were no bigger instigating factors regarding the public outcry over the noms than two facts: 1) NASCAR is a red state icon, and 2) Zuda is owned by DC "Cue The Imperial Guard Theme Music" Comics.

"WE NEED TO CANCEL THE HARVEY AWARDS BECAUSE NASCAR WAS NOMINATED!"

I mean, holy crap. I love that. Can we do that for all nominations that we don't like? I wanted to do that when I was a little kid and Gandhi got the Oscar instead of E.T. I was really pissed off. I loved that f**king animatronic puppet.

You know what was considered low-brow entertainment back in the day? E.C. Comics.

You know, what I don't get sometimes is how the E.C. Comics horror line could be seen as so edgy and modern now when they were basically your old standard blood-and-guts fire-and-brimstone morality plays. I used to wonder if it was possible to make a comic or a movie that is both highly gory and moralistic. Yes, and yes. I saw this cheap direct-to-something movie the other day that was like boobies, boobies, blood, and intestines more than halfway through, and then became really moral towards the end. Complete with a busload of Jesus Camp children. I kid you not.

Anyway, I'm up for creating a new comic book award: The Liefelds. But it doesn't award best comic book talent. Instead, the Liefelds are given to those bloggers and pundits who can come up with the best bitching about comics that they think suck and are beneath them. I mean, truly epic bitching. I have stuff to submit for this year, perhaps from this very column. I'm also up for the morality play about the busload of Jesus Camp children. I'm very versatile.

Wing-Head Versus The Boy Scout

I'm really hyped for Independence Day, but I don't want to seem like a yahoo about it. I don't want to seem passé or hopelessly unhip. I mean, even GI Joe has dumped the "Real American Hero" angle in that new movie that's coming out. And I heard that's really working out well for them.

The truth is, if you go out on a blog and say: THANK GOD FOR AMMMMMMERICA and stuff like that, some people think you're a yahoo, ascribe to you all sorts of sinister agendas. The only one who really can get away with it is Captain America. I sincerely think that's the last stars-and-stripes icon that doesn't provoke immediate derision among the cognoscenti. I think ol' Cap is less bashed by the postmodernist comic book writer than Superman is. Both stand for the Red, White, and Blue. Literally. But why do the deconstructors of our childhood mythologies hate on Superman just a bit more?

Notable: I have no photo of Rocky Balboa on my wall, but I do have one of Apollo Creed in that full red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam boxing outfit with the top-hat. I have it next to Tony Manero from "Saturday Night Fever" and Nosferatu.

"Zowie, She's Gay!"

Wow, there are still new mainstream online news outlets finding out about "Lesbian Batwoman" after how many years? What can you say, the story's got legs. And the rest of her isn't too bad either (Ed McMahon: hahahaha).

Does that sound kinda offensive to you? "Lesbian Batwoman?" That's pretty much the tone of the majority of these news stories: "LESBIAN BATWOMAN!!!!" In one of those articles, Greg Rucka was described as "growling" when asked about the lesbian angle. He was so offended about any insinuation that the lesbianism was a gimmick, or that it was being used as a selling point, that he was described as growling. That was a very dramatic moment in the history of LGBTs in comics. I think we've come very far.

DC's shocked (simply shocked!) that the media is picking up on the lesbian angle. And more than shocked, they are dismayed and embarrassed. That was not what they meant to happen at ALL.

The most refreshing thing I've ever seen was a movie where there was a gay main character and nobody made a big deal about it. You may not have heard of this film. I think that's the point.

Oh, the fine line we have to walk between promotion and excess. But we have to walk it, don't we?

Marathon

Last Sunday I think I wrote the best thing I've ever done in my life. Finished the entire project in one day, 12 hours straight. Given the scope of the project, that was way too intense a time-frame to pack it in. But I just couldn't stop. It frightened me, because I wrote it and I felt like: this is it. Like all these years I worked and worked just to get to the point where I committed this particular thing to paper.

Wouldn't you like to know what it is? Maybe, one day, I will tell you.

Like I said, it's a fine line. ;-)

And This Has Been...

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I Like It!... But Is It Comics?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Were any of you at MoCCA Fest last month? I thought it was a terrific show (hey, any time I have the chance to meet Charles Burns, I don't ask for much more), and the panels were amazing: informative, challenging and hilarious, by turns. One of the best panels of the weekend, in my opinion, was Gary Panter's discussion of modern artists who stand as the spiritual forefathers—or perhaps kissing cousins—to comics artists. If you missed it, you can still listen to it and see examples of many of the paintings he discussed, as well.

Panter spoke of the relevance these artists had to the comics tradition, and it's difficult to fault his choices when you look at the images. But his reflections on these fine artists led me to think about certain types of graphic narrative that are seldom included in even the most expansive comics canon. Sometimes it seems that, no matter how many times people come up with a definition for comics, there's always something that's going to challenge that definition's boundaries.

One such example is a remarkable graphic narrative, Scottsboro Alabama: a story in linoleum cuts. It was formally published in 2002, after NYU's Tamiment Librarian Andrew Lee discovered the self-published manuscript in the archives of Joseph North, a major Communist journalist of the early 20th century. I saw the book on the desk of a librarian friend of mine over at NYU, and was immediately captivated by its raw power and skill.

Do you know the story of the Scottsboro Boys? In 1931, in Scottsboro, Alabama, nine young black men riding the rails were pulled from their train car after two white women, likewise "hoboing," accused them of rape. Although few of those nine young men had even been aware that the women were also on the train, they were sentenced to death by an Alabama court—the sort of sentence that often was short-circuited by the brutal tradition of lynching. But in this case the cause of the Scottsboro Boys was taken up by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a group founded by the Communist Party USA six years earlier to defend "class war prisoners." The ILD had [unsuccessfully] championed the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and now they focused all their energies on the Scottsboro case. They succeeded in getting the nine a new trial and their hopes rose when one of the two women confessed before the trial even started that no rape had occurred. Notwithstanding their accuser's admission, the jury of their "peers"—entirely white, as had been the first—returned a second guilty verdict. A third trial was called after a circuit judge overturned that second verdict (also ending his judicial career), but the new trial judge guided the third jury to yet another verdict of guilty.

The ILD dropped out after it was revealed that the group had tried to bribe the second "victim," but the Communist Party continued to champion the cause of the Scottsboro Boys, joining with the NAACP, the ACLU, and other groups to form the "Scottsboro Defense Committee" (SDC). In 1937, the SDC negotiated a lopsided plea bargain: four of the young men were convicted (with one sentenced to death, though that was commuted to a life sentence in 1938), one was sentenced to 20 years for assaulting a sheriff, and the final four were released.

It was in 1935, however, that two otherwise unknown artists, Tony Perez and Lin Shi Khan, created a graphic story of the trial—but more than the trial. Perez and Khan begin their tale with slavery itself, breaking the narrative into three parts: "Negroes Come to America," which sets the Scottsboro struggle in the context of American racial history; "The Nine Boys of Scottsboro;" and "White and Black Unite," an attempt to demonstrate solidarity between the plight of African-Americans in the United States, and exploited and abused workers of all races. The images, chiseled out of linoleum squares, and featuring bold, crude figures, embody the dramatic power of the story itself. Michael Gold, founder of the Marxist journal New Masses and author of the original introduction to the book, wrote that intellectuals and artists had recognized in the Scottsboro story "one of the major battles against the monstrous Fascism by which a corrupt and expiring civilization attempts to clutch to its last straws of existence."

Uh, okay.

But, ideological jargon aside, Scottsboro Alabama is a work of propaganda and a call to activism…but also a work of art…and also a reflection on racist hatred and violence, and of man's inhumanity to man.

So—is it "comics"? Perhaps I should ask more formally: is it a narrative in the form of sequential art, generally but not exclusively with accompanying text? Well, yes. Which means it's just as fair to ask if the woodcuts of Lynd Ward's God's Man are comics, or those of Franz Masereel's Passionate Journey. Is this when we're supposed to use the term "graphic novel," because it has more…gravitas? Does the actual physical medium complicate the issue? Okay, what about Eric Drooker's scratchboard novel Flood—does that count as comics? Is it the content? Scottsboro Alabama is ideological and propagandistic; can it still be considered comics? If not, what about Chick tracts, or Steve Ditko's more oppressively Objectivist oeuvre? Is it easier to call it a comic if it was made in the last 50 years? I'm not asking this to be combative or disingenuous—I really want to know. I consider Scottsboro Alabama to fall into the medium we call comics or graphic novels—do you?

Here's another example: Edward Gorey. When people ask me what comics I grew up reading, I always include him. But how many people shelve Gorey with their comics collections? How many people who own Gorey even have comics collections (or vice versa)? But how does Gorey not fit into the definition in the paragraph above?

Who could fail to be moved by the sight of poor Nellie's shoes, which add such pathos to his slightly surreal text? Gorey's Gothic Edwardiana seemed sui generis to me in high school, but mostly because there really wasn't anything else that looked like it. (In the late ‘70s, I used to see Gorey in the lobby at performances of American Ballet Theatre, in fur coat and Keds like a character out of his books.) Gorey was like neither the Archies I'd recently graduated from reading, nor the Crumb I was simultaneously devouring. As a fan of 19th-century melodrama as found in the novels of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, I was drawn into Gorey's intricately-created worlds, whose inhabitants lived in absurd hamlets that could have been named by a young S. J. Perelman. These days, when the comics that are published fall into a hundred stylistic categories or more, Gorey seems less of an outlier. Most recently, for example, at MoCCA Fest, I thought I saw hints of his unique world in Joshua Ray Stephens' The Moth or the Flame, especially in Tempest McGillicutty, the nattily dressed, teacup-headed protagonist. My more widely-read audience can probably come up with a dozen or more other examples. But who talks about Edward Gorey at comics conventions? Is he considered a comics artist?

Perhaps this debate is a straw man I've concocted as a consequence of my own defensiveness over not having grown up reading mainstream comics, for having to educate myself at this late date on things like the Kirby crackle and the chains of relationship between Golden Age, Silver Age, and modern artists. Perhaps artists like Perez and Khan and Gorey missed their time; perhaps today they would be speaking to packed rooms at comic-cons and lecture halls. Perhaps I'm silly even to imagine that there is a "they" who determines what is or isn't comics—some kind of star chamber with white and black balls, like in Renaissance-era Venice.

Perhaps it's up to me, and to you. If I consider Scottsboro Alabama or Edward Gorey's tales to be comics, then so be it. Is it really that simple?

The Sausage Factory

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Like a lot of comic readers with internet access, there's a few places on the web that I check up on right after I fire up the machine. One of those is the ¡Journalista! portion of The Comics Journal's website. Every monday through friday, Dirk Deppey churns out a daily grind of what's going on in all kinds of comics. I'm not sure how much introduction Mr. Deppey requires--he is, without a doubt, one of the primary reasons beyond luck that I ended up writing this column for comiXology in the first place, and I'd be surprised if you weren't already aware of him already, dear reader. That being said: Dirk Deppey is currently the online editor for the Comics Journal. He writes ¡Journalista! I'm a fan.

This Ship: What's your background with comics? What was the impetus behind making the change from a consumer to your current professional relationship with them?

Dirk Deppey: I've always been a fan of comics and illustration in some form or another, going back to the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, which I discovered in my local library as a small child. I guess you could say that my professional relationship with comics has been "serial accidental" -- after abandoning comic books in high school, I fell back into the medium after a comic-book shop opened up in my neighborhood, where I wound up working for a stretch. There is where I met an indy cartoonist who published during the black-and-white boom, for whom I briefly worked as an art assistant. But until this century, it was never a case of my having a plan to "get into the industry" or anything.

As for my current gig: I got the job at Fantagraphics by making fun of The Comics Journal's website on its message board, basically. It was in the summer of 2000, and I had just quit a fairly lucrative dot-com gig a few months prior. One night, I noticed that TCJ.com had an ad banner for a CBLDF fundraising cruise that had actually taken place some six moths prior, so I started a thread entitled "Looking Forward to That Cruise" – ha ha you lamers suck, crap like that – and the next day was surprised to discover that Gary Groth had posted to the thread, announcing that Fantagraphics was looking for someone with both print and Web experience who could, among other things, take over the Journal website. (The person who'd previously maintained the site had departed the company months back, and there was no one else at Fantagraphics who knew how to update a webpage.)

At the time, I had just gone through a string of job interviews where I was being offered $50/60,000-a-year jobs by people who gave me no indication that they knew what they were doing – dot-com opportunists who had "venture capital," were getting into "business to business" and couldn't answer the simple question, "So how are you going to make your income once the venture capital runs out?" My friends at the time thought I was crazy, turning gigs like these down left and right, but I simply didn't trust them to still be in business six months later. Unfortunately, my severence package from the last gig was starting to run out, so it was looking like I'd have to swallow my pride and compromise if I wanted to continue swimming in those juicy corporate-idiot paychecks.

So I sent Groth my resume almost as a lark. On the one hand, Fantagraphics was offering less than half the money that I'd earned at my previous job. On the other hand, I've been reading the Journal since the late 1980s, really respected Fantagraphics as a publisher, and figured I'd never again get the opportunity to throw away a promising career in the service of something that sounded like so much fun. It turned out to be an easy choice to make – Gary and I spent a week trading phone calls, and before I knew it, I was loading up a Ryder truck and leaving Arizona for Seattle.

Six months later, the dot-com bubble burst. Conclusion: I am a visionary.

TS: What made you decide to make the transition from the print version of the Journal to the Online Editor position?

Deppey: The stock answer is that our Advertising Manager, Matt Silvie, said that it'd be easier to sell ads on the website if I was doing ¡Journalista! again. There are really two reasons I jumped at the chance: First, I'd done just about everything that I wanted to do with the magazine, and second, I was really homesick for Arizona – nothing makes you appreciate a desert landscape like eight months of grey skies, it turns out. The one condition that I placed on going back to the website was that I do it from Tucson. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Gary said yes.

TS: How involved were you with the decision to create an online version of the Journal for subscribers?

Deppey: Well, it was part of the pitch that I made for revamping the website, basically. Say what you will about Gary's opinion on comics, but he's under no illusions when it comes to the future of print – as time goes on, digital readership is going to become progressively more important, and he agreed that laying the groundwork now for the Journal was a good idea.

We've since begun offering online-only subscriptions. It hasn't yet resulted in a big wave of digital subscribers – such readers are still a small fraction of our print readership – but the trickle of new subscribers continues to flow in, and I expect that the accumulation of such readers will justify the effort over time.

TS: Besides Journalista and handling the online version of The Comics Journal, what responsibilities does your Online Editor position include?

Deppey: That's pretty much it at the moment. Every once in a while we'll post an MP3 or archival interview to the homepage, but honestly, the two primary tasks eat up so much time that I can't imagine being able to do much else – the first time I did the blog (before I gave it up to edit the print magazine), I was pouring so much effort into it that burnout seemed like a real possibility. I'm trying to guard enough of my free time that it's not an issue, this time around.

TS: What's your ultimate dream goal for Journalista and your online work for TCJ? How long are you willing to keep plugging away?

Deppey: As long as I possibly can. This is such a cool gig – I'm working from home and writing for thousands of readers that I'd never have been able to attract under any other circumstances. I'm not sure that I have any "ultimate dream goals" above and beyond what I'm currently doing.

TS: How do you determine what goes up in your Journalista pieces? It's obviously not an "all-in" approach, and the no-sales thing is clear too, but there's definitely some method of selection going on beyond "this happened."

Deppey: Well, it's certainly not an "all-in" approach, no. ¡Journalista! is a content aggregator blog, my attempt to sift through the sea of information out there so that other people don't have to – if you're reading the blog, presumably it's because you don't have time to read a lot of comics-news sources, and trust me (among the other bloggers that you read) to do the job for you.

I don't really have many hard, fast rules about what I select for the blog. Mostly, it comes down to one of two things: Does this interest me, or could I imagine it interesting me if I had an interest in that sort of thing? I've seen other bloggers refer to this sort of thing as being like making a mix tape, but having come straight off of the print version of the magazine, it feels to me more like assembling the table of contents to a new edition of the Journal every weekday... except, of course, that I don't have to do any proofreading or payroll sheets, which makes the gig infinitely better than editing a print magazine.

TS: Do you have any interest in returning to longer reportage/op-ed style pieces on a more frequent basis, or are you content to just use the "above the fold" approach to deal with those yearnings?

Deppey: Yes and no. On the one hand, I love writing and can't seem to keep from knocking out long essays when a short note would often do just as well. (Maybe you've noticed.) On the other hand, there's always the danger of turning into a Keith Olbermann-style blowhard – or worse, a Dave Sim-style crank – if you feel obliged to keep churning out 14,000-word essays three or four times a week. This became clear to me through the course of that Mary Jane Statue fiasco a while back; the more I wrote, the more I found myself circling around to points that I'd already made. Now, in a certain sense this is inevitable in blogging. Since almost everything I write is a mildly edited first draft, I find myself narrowing in on cogent points over the course of several days, refining my arguments as I read responses and get the chance to think more about a given subject. Still, it's a gateway to intellectual stratification as well, since the further you go in defending a point, the more you feel in your bones that You Are Inarguably Correct in whatever it is you're talking about. The longer I do this, the less I trust in such positions.

There's also the fact that I only have so many things to say in a given period. The comic-book industry tends to be very conservative, insofar as it cruises along on the same set of business practices until circumstances force it from its collective lethargy. While it stands still, there's only so many ways you can describe it, and I strongly suspect that repeating yourself too often can bore a readership to tears.

TS: What comics are you keeping up with nowadays?

Deppey: The only series that I'm following these days tend to be manga titles – Nana, Mushishi, Honey and Clover, that sort of thing. I've dropped comics pamphlets altogether, as they're a pain to store and simply not enough value for your money these days. I also follow a variety of webcomics, which I've discovered can compensate admirably for the regular print series that I used to follow.

Beyond that, my comics buying tends to be geared toward stand-alone graphic novels, which don't really qualify as something you "keep up" with.

TS: Are you still able to find surprises on your own, or does all your comics reading get skewed by the time you spend online?

Deppey: Well, my print reading in general tends to get skewed by the time I spend online, though I've been making an effort this year to reserve more time for both comics and prose books. Finding new things to read isn't a problem for me, if for no other reason than that the blog keeps me in touch with critics who I trust to point me toward new and interesting works. Actually sitting down and reading them, on the other hand, can be a bit of a struggle.

TS: Regarding DC Comics' recent foray into blogging (The Source, Graphic Content, The Bleed), where they are currently publishing their own version of a long-form press release, what kind of impact do you think that might have on websites like Newsarama and CBR that usually rely heavily on those sorts of articles?

Deppey: I don't think it'll have much effect, if any at all. The thing is, unless you're a hardcore fanatic who only buys DC comics and nothing else, you'd be better served by visiting sites that have a greater range of information, especially if those sites are going to feature the pertinent material from DC's blog anyway.

As Jeff Jarvis notes, the Internet exists in a link-based economy; the wider range of links a website serves up, and the more tailored they are to your individual tastes, the more likely you are to visit that site. There are undoubtedly a number of people who visit company blogs, but the amount of hits a given entry will receive is nonetheless almost certainly determined by the number of other blogs and content aggregators that link to it, saying "This is interesting; check it out."

TS: Do you keep up with any of the "news" portions of sites like Newsarama, CBR, Ain't It Cool, etc., or do you just stick to the column/interview stuff they publish?

Deppey: These days I use an RSS reader to keep track of them all, so I seldom "visit" anyone's site save for those precious few that don't maintain such feeds – and every time I decide that I don't have as much time to complete a given day's blog entry, it's almost always the non-RSS sites that I skip in order to make up the time.

TS: Here's a big one, and you can go any direction you'd like: what are some of the positive and negative impacts that the internet has on comics from a business standpoint? In my brief experience, it seems to usually come down to two incorrect extremes--talking about blog reviews and republished press releases as if they have some notable effect on the industry seems a bit overblown, whereas the alternative, that it's all a big echo chamber that has no real effect at all, seems inaccurate as well.

Deppey: I think that blog reviews can drive some sales for books, just not as many as some people want to believe. You can also create a cascading effect by building buzz on a bunch of different blogs, although the utility of this is likewise debatable. The real effect that blogs have is indirect, insofar as there are a handful of blogs that are followed by tastemakers whose influence goes beyond the Internet – newspaper journalists, editors for general-interest websites, industry professionals and the like. I've lost track of the number of times that I've stumbled across obscure websites while searching for something else entirely, and linking to them on ¡Journalista! only to watch the link fly across the blogosphere over the course of several days, eventually landing on sites like Digg, Boing Boing and MetaFilter.

Commercially speaking, the big difference is in whether you're blogging about something online or something that exists in real space. Blogs are an excellent way to advertise webcomics, for example – just ask Kate Beaton – but once you're talking about something that requires you to get up from the computer and go somewhere to purchase something tangible, the chances of motivating someone into action drop considerably. It's just so much easier to click a link, especially if a financial transaction isn't involved.

But the Internet has an effect that goes far beyond sales; it's an enabler for aspects of culture that might otherwise have gone marginalized when the price of print-production was still a key factor in the dissemination of information. In the Direct Market, there's something of a Sharks/Jets culture between two rival factions: literary and superhero comics. (You can expand each group a bit, depending upon your definitions, but let's stick with these for now.) There's a huge gulf between these two groups, which some have attempted to label as the "new mainstream" but might more profitably be referred to as "everything else."

Now, if you want to grow comics as a medium, this is a serious problem. Take a look at bookstores: YA series like Harry Potter and Twilight might be serious blockbusters – in the case of the former, a new release was sometimes the difference between an up or down sales quarter – but bookstores don't devote their entire sales strategy towards teenage fantasy novels. A good chunk of sales come from new books and perennial sellers in a wide range of genres and interest topics, which is why a wide range of consumers still shop in such places.

The Direct Market doesn't have this advantage. Thanks to the various sales and distribution fiascos of the 1990s, comics shops have pretty much been reduced to hardcore superhero fans and a smaller collection of art-comics readers for their bread-and-butter, which effectively cuts off the oxygen for publishers of most other kinds of books. And "most other kinds of books" is what most other people in North America tend to read.

(This isn't just a problem for "everything else," mind you – without casual shoppers wandering in for the latest romance/sci-fi/crime/whatever comic, your chances of picking up new readers for superhero and lit-comics in comics shops drops proportionally as well. The battle between Sharks and Jets therefore winds up hurting both parties without their ever being able to acknowledge it, since doing so involves admitting that the argument between them is an incomplete representation of market reality, and neither side has a lock on the moral high ground.)

Mainstream publishers in the booksellers trade have begun picking up some of this slack, but the bookstore market presents a further problem for pre-existing creators and publishers – you can't really break into that market without a good distributor and excellent marketing, and without a sales base in the Direct Market, you don't have the clout to attract the former or the income to achieve the latter. It's a no-win situation.

This is where the Internet comes in. If you can't attract enough sales in comics shops to justify a series of comics pamphlets, then the barriers to online serialization drop away, allowing a given creator another outlet for getting one's work out there and attracting eyeballs. It's by no means a sure thing, of course – aside from Phil Foglio, Carla Speed McNeil, Spike Trotman and the Act-I-Vate crew, there aren't too many examples to which one can really point, at least if you're talking about extended stories rather than newspaper-style comic strips – but the very fact that there are a few out there who've managed to buck the system using the Internet is by and of itself a potential game-changer, at least insofar as it points the way to another method of presentation and distribution. I mean, that's an option that wasn't there a decade ago, and it has almost unlimited potential for growth given the right work and marketing approach. You certainly can't say that about the Direct Market.

See what I mean about my tendency toward long essays? It's congenital – seriously, I wish there was medication for this sort of thing.

Batman Did a Bad Thing in 1943

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:00:00 -0500

"They represent American youth who love their country, and are glad to fight for it. Wherever crime raises its ugly head to strike with the venom of a maddened rattlesnake, Batman and Robin strike also. And in this very hour, when the Axis criminals are spreading their evil over the world, even within our own land, Batman and Robin stand ready to fight them, to the death."

- Batman (1943), from the opening narration

***

So I heard last week that Grant Morrison is writing a "definitive" history of superheroes from the 1930s to the present. Funny, I thought he'd already written one about Batman.

Oh sure, Morrison's tenure as writer of plain vanilla Batman had a continuing mystery at its core, with subplots and character introductions and whatnot, and it didn't lay out the specifics of Bat-arcane year by year or anything, but to me it was undoubtedly a history of Batman, taking the sprawling entirety of the character's improbable life and times and trying to say something about where it‘s left him. Same as All Star Superman, really; it's said that most superhero comics in this age of decadence are metatextual at their core, but few are so broad in their scope; Morrison's Batman groaned almost audibly under the weight of its prerogative, and even what little we've seen of the new Batman and Robin seems keen to pick and choose from happier/scarier passages from the Batman era.

But who says history need be comprehensive? There's a bit of an argument blinking in and out of view these days as to the presentation of history in vintage comics reprints, which are more patent today than ever in their status as visions of a time, design and scholarship combining with the source texts to create impressions of Gasoline Alley or the John Stanley catalog or your favorite gekiga from days long gone. I'm prone to thinking that everything sends a message; the rub, one presumes, is whether the message sent is responsibly steeped in facts as opposed to merely dazzling the reader with misleading assertions in the costume of truth.

History is not a block of concrete, though, and idiosyncratic impressions can have their own pleasures. One of my favorite books so far this year is Fantagraphics' Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941, edited by Greg Sadowski. It's primarily a collection of 20 superhero stories published before the U.S. entrance into World War II, but through its intense variations in tone -- often departing from how you'd expect old-timey superheroes to behave, as in "don't stab people" or "maybe your secret identity as a drug addict merits some rethinking" -- it posits the pre-WWII era as a time of furious energy for superhero comics, still hot from the proverbial Big Bang of Superman (if sometimes even older than that), and not yet constrained by codification of what superheroes "can" or "can't" do.

There's very little prose in the book. Endnotes are brief, and interestingly inclined toward narrative rather than annotation. Combined, all elements of the book dress their period as mad and wonderful, burning and colorful, with WWII and the even greater fortunes of publishers acting as the boot camp to whip those crazy costumed kids into shape, to be "good" in a prescribed way, to be a grown, sedated industry.

Yet we all remember Batman carrying a gun. I doubt Morrison will forget in his book. He didn't forget in his comic, where he cast that early aspect as a mourning period for the Caped Crusader, swinging around to deliver the piece that killed his parents back to the murderer, the most intensely hurtful, raw time in his history.

It overlaps, ‘history.' Yet how can these often eccentric multitudes help us process the facts that are cruel? The undeniable moments where the culture shifts, for a time, in a queasy direction? The stuff even Grant Morrison left out of his Bat-saga? The stuff people still remember?

As WWII raged, Batman first hit the silver screen. It was a 15-chapter serial, titled simply Batman; the year was 1943. This was far from the first superhero serial, of course; some say the very first superhero movie was a serial, French filmmaker Louis Feuillade's Judex, produced in 1916, as the Great War devoured France's youth. The serial format had changed by ‘43, however; the novelistic style and varying tones of the early stuff had congealed into a fun but simplistic approach, with the last five minutes of every near-uniform chapter consisting of chaotic fistfights or stunt sequences, always with a cliffhanger to be resolved next week. Still, superheroes thrived in chaos, and it seemed as good for Batman as anyone.

But there had to be more there, in ‘43. A patriotic wartime message, suitable to fire up a Dark Knight against the true evils of the globe. As the narration of Chapter One boomed, a shabby line of shops and doors coming into view:

"This was part of a foreign land, transplanted bodily to America and known as Little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs it has become virtually a ghost street, where only one business survives, eking out a precarious existence on the dimes of curiosity seekers."

That's right, this was no Joker Batman was facing: it was the new-old Yellow Peril, in the form of one Dr. Daka, a wicked Japanese spy who murderously evaded virtuous deportation to strike at Gotham and our United States with his hideous zombie machine and a hand-held Radium Gun that'll blow up anything. Daka hides in a haunted house ride, the Japanese Cave of Horrors, devoted to wax scenes of Japanese military atrocities against white soldiers. That's the aforementioned one surviving business, and a telling one: the only value of trash Japanese culture is the novelty of white enjoyment, and the rest is at best worthless and at worst overtly sinister, best locked in a camp somewhere. As it did actually happen.

Need I even mention that Daka is played by Caucasian ‘ethnic' character specialist J. Carrol Naish, speaking in an off the mark accent equidistantly between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd (shoulda made that left at Albuquerque), squinting through heavy makeup that has the bonus effect of making him seem distinctly effeminate? Double the bad, that!

Batman, meanwhile, is played by Lewis Wilson, whose second most noteworthy film role would be 1951's Wild Women (aka: Bowanga Bowanga: White Sirens of Africa), which probably says enough. He does look great as Bruce Wayne, but he essays a distinctly husky Caped Crusader, saddled with a legendarily shabby costume adorned with devil horns and granny panties and sagging fabric on the legs. His crusade against foreign terror is aided by Robin -- perfectly decent, 16-year old Douglas Croft, known for his boyhood portrayals-in-flashback of the leading men of Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Pride of the Yankees -- and William Austin as a frantic, comic relief Alfred. Former Miss California Shirley Patterson screams and faints a lot as the obligatory female, and Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton pops up for a few chapters as the grizzled owner of a radium mine. Many stuntmen tumble; rear projections menace. The cliffhangers creak, with Our Hero often surviving more out of sheer luck rather than any skill or daring. Spoiler: we win the war, and Batman prompts The Doom of the Rising Sun (ch. 15).

On one hand, I sort of can't believe Morrison didn't bring back Dr. Daka for a spin in his own Bat-run, but I suspect nobody at DC is eager to relive the magic of these halcyon days, as influential as they were. I do, however, imagine Morrison has read Bryan Talbot's 1992 Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight story Mask (#39-40) -- the story of a hurtful doctor who drives Batman mad with doubt over his tortured history -- which obliquely references one of the serial's cliffhangers and pays some silent homage to its ratty costume as the ugly ‘realism' behind the Batman ideal. Sure, it's an out-of-continuity movie, but this serial marked the first appearance of "The Bat's Cave," entrance via clock, dig the rubber bats on strings and minimalist desk ‘n seats décor, and its Alfred likely inspired the formerly corpulent butler's shift to the svelte gentleman's gentleman we know today.

And its superhero history stretches back and forth. The Yellow Peril villain is a long-standing icon of majority Western fear over immigration and Eastern influence, active in the serials and pulp magazines that inspired Batman's creation. Even Judex, the first movie superhero, was born from the success of movie adaptations of popular super-criminal novels, the reign of Fantômas. From there came the ‘dark' superheroes, drawing a line of aesthetic from Judex to the Shadow to Batman. And hell, Dr. Daka even has a zombie machine; do consult Jess Nevins' essay in the back of the new Incognito (#4) for some info on that.

So it's not just a serial; it's a pulp serial, on film, racist and ragged as those early avengers could get. The ‘ragged' got adopted more than anything, as the Batman serial fell into obscurity, then rose again as a favorite of clubs and college audiences in the ‘60s, a new icon of camp that influenced the creation of the Batman television show. You don't think those cliffhanger endings came out of nowhere, do you? Some Bat-fans used to get angry that the show didn't take the character seriously, which is silly, but often today you hear folks go on about how the show was really a very faithful translation of the comics of the time, which is politic but hesitant, lingering on adaptation like it's nothing more that a computation of how best to be ‘faithful' in the most efficient manner.

No, Batman the show was camp, man, a knowing appropriation of mainstream detritus for various effects, maybe only to build a culture of love from the slime and prejudice of the past, where effeminacy is no longer wicked and capers could pulse vibrantly with humor and sex. Morrison has said that he never knew the old Batman show wasn't serious, and neither did I. It's a continuum, this history; I was really worried that Batman and Robin would die bloody deaths in the show, like Jason Todd died in the comics, because fun and energy and blood and angst were what superheroes were to me in the ‘80s, as a kid, watching reruns, and maybe it's bad news that the genre is like that, prismatic, but it assured its future, its niche, Batman's mission.

How excellent that Morrison's man who prepares for everything managed to take even the grotesquerie of his racist ‘40s past and transform it into part of the very thing that assured his brighter, moral survival. Buckle up old chum, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE FOREVER.

And yet.

The racism isn't a huge part of the 1943 serial. These things never are. It wasn't necessary to sell the internment camps, say, to the audience, the kids and such; it's just mentioned, with the expectation of scattered applause and happy acknowledgement, nudges and smiles. It's normal, the camps, normal for Batman.

That's how it soaks, and sickens.

You think back to the Batman cartoons of the ‘90s, and the gangsters in hats. That's these thugs! Real ‘40s men in real ‘40s hats, firing death rays at Batman and Robin on a rooftop! Batman is led to Dr. Daka.

"Oh, a Jap!" shouts Batman. The Oriental sneers, and leads the costumed hero to the zombie chair.

"Why you Jap devil!"

This is the idealized era. The flashpoint of wider Bat-popularity. They changed the comics to look more like this, because this was popular.

And then Sadowski's history springs to mind. WWII as the calming of the superhero. Where the violence used to be random, ugly and varied, it became focused on nations, and peoples, in wartime. It too became codified, nationalized, politicized. And then came the Batman serial, the next big step in a superhero's popularity, and his most lasting expression of reprehensibility; the stain of growing bigger, as the history informs up.

You might say it was wartime, sure. That's right. Media was racist all over, then, and it turned off with the combat. Except, the Yellow Peril never did turn off, from its origins, did it? It found new purchase.

So I think back to Judex, the first movie superhero, fighting at the height of WWI. All those French boys dead, yet there's no racism in there, no propaganda; instead it's a ‘dark' man with a profound care for life, every death a tragedy, even in the worst conditions, even knowing the state of the world in 1916.

Excuse my French but that is goddamned superheroic. Call it a beginning to history. Hell, pray it is.

The Fan Who Got Away

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:30:00 -0500

"Ra's!"

Seeing Batman "rise from the dead" in the "Demon Lives Again" qualifies as my all-time biggest OMFG moment as a comic book reader. That scene was so exciting and gripping and raw, I almost peed myself. That shirtless Batman looked so shatteringly angry, I thought he would leap off the page (I was scared more of him than I was of Ra's Al Ghul). Far more exciting than a handful of summer blockbusters, in my opinion.

Who wouldn't pay $4.00 to read a comic like that new off the stands the Wednesday it came out, to watch Batman and Ra's Al Ghul fight with swords? It is a must-have, the way "LOST" is a must-watch. It's an event, but not in the way we have been taught to think of events.

It surpasses expectations, surpasses the staticness of paper. It will drive us, like a love-crazed suitor, to the shops every week.

The Fan Who Got Away

I recently spoke to an old friend of mine, who was one of the world's all-time big comic book collectors. He had been collecting comics for the last seventeen years, but suddenly stopped a few weeks ago. His reason? "I just can't justify $3.99 for ten minutes worth of story."

But if the comics he had to chose from were exciting, I'll bet he could have justified the cost. You remember exciting comics, don't you? Those gripping stories you can't put down. Dynamic art that bursts off the page. And heroes whose exploits you breathlessly follow month after month.

Almost sounds like hyperbole, doesn't it; some idealized version of what a comic should be? "That's too high an expectation," you might say, "that's the type of stuff they might save for an annual, or other special edition. But not a regular monthly comic book."

But I submit to you that every comic book should be gripping and thrilling and exciting. You've just been taught, by repetition and lack of choices, not to expect too much from comics. That is the real reason readership has dropped to such historically low numbers. Not even video games and the switch to digital could have hurt Comics the way Comics has hurt itself by not being exciting.

Understand, I'm not talking about every comic on the stands; I'm just talking in general. If a comic book truly gripped the mind and heart and soul and zeitgeist of the nation(s), it would be a million-seller.

When The Hard-Core Base Gets Bored (or Poor, or Both)

Instead, we play largely within our comfort-zone, to a fanbase who have proven their loyalty time and time again. But as the old saying goes, "familiarity breeds contempt." The industry subtly mocks and is ashamed of the Fanboy at the same time that it plays to him nearly exclusively. Like a long-time married couple who long ago lost their spark, the parties simply don't try anymore. They take each other for granted: "He will always be there for me" and, "He's not much, but I guess this is as good as it gets."

But what happens when a long-time fan like my friend, who faithfully dropped $60 a week on comics and used longboxes as furniture, stops buying cold?

It is this movement, which I call "The Fanboy Revolt," that, along with the switch to digital and the recession, could spell the end of the comic book as we know it. And I am being dead serious. This triumvirate of reader dissatisfaction, format change, and poverty packs a triple-punch that could spell the end not just of an era, but of what we have always assumed was a way of life.

We ignore the rising tide of the Fanboy Revolt at our peril. They are there on the message boards: not so much the brash commentators as the the ones with the calm, steady prose, explaining how they are dropping this book or that, or why they only buy reprints. We used to be able to write off these fans as "curmudgeons" and perhaps older people who want to hearken back to an age when Curt Swan was illustrating Superman.

Seeking not Nostalgia, But an Indelible Feeling

But the Fanboy Revolt involves both old and young alike. And don't kid yourself thinking these fans are only interested in nostalgia. It's not about the nostalgia, folks. THEY WANT EXCITING COMICS!!! When they refer to comics from their youth, they are not doing so because they want to see Geo-Force come back. They are simply relating a time in their lives when they found comics to be exciting.

Exciting. Engaging. Pulse-pounding. All those fancy Stan Lee adjectives.

And if a comic book can't deliver that, it's not worth $3.99, or $2.99. Or 99 cents. You can't pay me to read a "meh" comic book. I don't have the time to waste, not even ten minutes. Not even if it's my favorite character from back when I was in footie pajamas. And I wouldn't download a "meh" comic for free, legally or illegally.

If three of the comics your company puts out, totaling around $10, can't provide the amount of entertainment found on a new DVD at the same price – you have a big problem. And nowadays, they don't even need to buy the DVD. They don't even need to leave their house to acquire the movie. They might not even need to pay to see the movie.

It's time to get the excitement back or die. It's come to that. And maybe you need to find new talent. Maybe you need to get another pair of eyes in on the comic-producing process to point out what's not working. Maybe you need to make some hard decisions. Maybe you need to start taking more chances. Whatever it is, you need to do it soon.

Because a lot of your fanbase is struggling economically, and you know what they say: financial concerns are the biggest cause of divorce.

AND THIS HAS BEEN...

The fifth edition of Comics-Op!

You can check me out at Occasional Superheroine!
Thrill to my tweets on Twitter!
Email me complements, tips, and awesome gossip I probably can't print at valerie dot dorazio at gmail dot com!
And buy my eBook Memoirs of An Occasional Superheroine via Paypal!

Advanced Common Sense

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Like High School Redux

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Multiple graduations last weekend and preparations well under way for Comic-Con International: San Diego caused me to not-very-originally observe that the event's nerd-prom nickname is apt. I don't mean in that exaggerated, teen-movie sense — I've never seen the Spider-Man cosplayer from the wrong side of the trolley-tracks move in slow motion toward the Black Cat cosplayer while attendees slow-clap. However, when I'm there, it's hard to resist the urge to become a shallower version of myself, name-dropping, trying to figure out if I can get into the coolest parties, find a group of popular kids to hang out with, etc. More specifically, here are some reasons why, in the vernacular of my youth, SDCC is totally like high school:

What table you sit at actually matters.

Professionally, obviously, it marks you — your clique, your place in the food chain, etc. If someone knows nothing about you, they will judge you by where you sit in the Exhibit Hall before they judge your work. What table you sit at matters socially, too. Not only can it help or hinder how enjoyable whatever you're doing is, it can honestly affect your career, whether you're pestering a group of professionals who are just trying to eat dinner or make a little extra room for someone who later on offers you a business opportunity.

Labels matter, too.

In high school, people are often socially categorized — stoner, nerd, popular, jock, whatever. At SDCC, people are literally labeled by the color of their badge —pro, exhibitor, attendee — and treated accordingly both by their peers and The Powers that Be (there are even hall monitors and security). Of course, there are subcategories, just like high school — a tennis jock is differentiated from a football jock, just as James Kochalka is probably treated in not quite the same way as, say, Jim Lee, for example.

You want to look as good as you reasonably can.

Obviously, if you wear something uncomfortable or impractical, you will suffer. But, I used to not make much of an effort — starting off the con by waking up at 4 a.m. to fly out of Seattle and working Preview Night until 11 p.m. will do that to you —until I realized that when I'm in a photograph of the booth or whatever, it's more like a yearbook, and represents whatever I'm affiliated with — the drama club, the handbell choir, Fantagraphics — for years afterward. So, now I make a bit more of an effort (sit up and stand up straight when I can remember to, bring a change of clothes to events where people are likely to be wielding cameras, like the Eisners) and, when I'm not doing the 60-second journalist thing as I dash from the booth to cover a panel or whatnot, I try to extend the courtesy of giving someone a sec to compose him- or herself whenever I take photographs. (The upside is no crowd appreciates a good T-shirt like an SDCC one.)

Knowing how to get your homework done even when you don't want to/make your own fun are valuable skills.

The first obviously translates to planning properly and getting what you need to done even though you'd rather be hanging out with your friends. The second sounds a little strange at first, with all of the hoopla competing for your attention and, by extension, your dollars, but I run into these weird pockets of time in San Diego where I can't quite work and I can't quite socialize, and knowing how to entertain myself comes in handy. I know this affects small-press artists who are tied to their booth, too.

And, finally:

You have to deal with being in a large group of overly stimulated people jammed closely together.

Of course, this means that your reactions to things are heightened in the way that they are during adolescence, and things that normally wouldn't get to you start to wear. (And, just like high school, sometimes there are women crying in the bathroom.) Ultimately, you lose quite a bit of the control you're used to in daily life.

(In this vein, I'm taking a mini-summer vacation from the column for the next two weeks.)

You Have to Get Paid: Lessons in Freelancing

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:00:00 -0500

This week's column is a "very special episode" of Comics-Op. As I've been telling some of my friends over the last several weeks, I had a client bail on paying me, which effectively rocked my world. As an update of sorts, I've since secured far better employment elsewhere, and I'm going to be OK. But the whole incident made me reflect on being a freelancer – and how my recent experience, though not in the comic book industry, had its mirror in many industry stories I have heard over the years...

The Ashes Of Bad Clients

If you do work, you need to get paid. Paid by money, paid by barter, paid by added publicity, or paid just by the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing you helped better the lot of your fellow human. But whatever the agreed-upon payment is, you need to get it within the agreed-upon time-frame. Even if it's comics, and comics are of course awesome.

I've never had a problem getting paid for freelance work in the comic book industry, but I have a collection of horror stories from other freelancers stretching back for almost 15 years. These range from:

Doing the work but never getting paid.
Doing the work but getting paid outrageously late.
Doing the work and getting paid, but only after legal threats.
Doing the work and the publisher dying on you, with payment and rights to the characters in limbo.
Getting paid late and as a result almost being evicted (requiring note from editor to landlord explaining that the vouchers were screwed up).
Investing tons of "sweat equity" in a publishing venture that either never materializes or dies prematurely.
Spending time on serial "spec" projects with nary a single one getting off the ground; you can actually fill an entire career with this, if you're not careful.
Taking lots of abuse and crappy unethical behavior from bosses because freelancer is afraid of being blacklisted if perceived as "troublemaker."

But the genesis for this article originally came not from comics, but my recent experience in another field. Basically, I did the work and did not get paid. And because I did not get paid, I almost could not pay my rent. Because I did not get paid, I was eating lots of ramen and cheese sandwiches. And when I asked to be paid, my client acted like somebody just farted. And when I again asked to be paid, client said the check was coming. And when the check didn't come and I again asked to be paid, client admitted she did not have the money.

Awesome.

Freelancer Mistake #1: No Contract

I made several mistakes with the aforementioned client. The first biggie was not insisting on a contract.

For review, a CONTRACT:

Specifically indicates what is expected of you.
Specifically indicates how you will be recompensed, and within what time-frame.

If you are doing work for someone, even in an industry as awesome and fun as comics, you need a contract. For example, this gig for ComiXology required a contract. The first column could not go up before the contract was reviewed and signed. Work should not begin before the contract is signed and the terms made clear.

But I made the mistake of not entering into a contract with this recent client. Part of that was because of a second mistake that seems to particularly afflict some members of the comic book industry...

Freelancer Mistake #2: "WE ARE ALL JUST FRIENDS HERE WORKING TOWARDS SOMETHING AWESOME"

Yes, the project is awesome – it's COMICS, after all! And I'm working with my BUDDY! So to even bring up contracts and terms and rights would be kinda gauche. It's not about the MONEY – it's about the LOVE!

This is a potentially fatal viewpoint: fatal not only financially, but friendship-wise.

In my case, the client and I shared certain hippy-dippy viewpoints on life like "going with the flow" and "universal awakening for the betterment of mankind." Screw contracts: did the ENERGY feel right? Whenever I talked payment with this client, the energy was decidedly "low." Because it's materialism, man. There are things more important than money. It will all sort itself out by the wisdom of the planet.

I honestly believed that anyone that enlightened couldn't possibly back out of payment – why bring the vibe down by talking dollars and cents? Which, I realize, put me in the John Locke incredibly gullible category. At least I didn't donate a kidney.

I go back to the comic book industry, and stories I've heard from freelancers. "But he was my friend! I knew him for 15 years. We started out together in the biz, man. I didn't think there was a need to worry about a written agreement/fair terms/timely payment." OR "Yeah, I know I'm being severely jerked around here, but at least I'm working in the field I LOVE."

When the the time came to invoice my client for Month One, she related a different version of the verbal contract we had made over lunch thirty days previous. In her version, I was paid simply by virtue of her incredible wisdom and insight. In my version, I was paid $460. And this, my friends, is why verbal contracts suck ass.

Freelancer Mistake #3: Not Keeping a Paper Trail

But she grudgingly paid the $460, and we entered into plans for Month Two. We almost committed to an agreement on paper – but then she said something to the effect of "I think we're onto something good here – why restrict our awesome potential by writing it down?" And I, in my stupidity, said "OK – we'll deal with the contract later. Let's make the magic happen now."

Flash-forward to invoicing for Month Two. Client doesn't "remember" that I did any work for her. Seriously. This was her response to my inquiry about invoicing: "I'm not sure what we are doing here." So I write out a long dated list of everything I accomplished, with emails to back it all up.

And here is another point for you budding freelancers to take with you – SAVE EVERYTHING FROM YOUR RECENT ASSIGNMENTS! Emails, notepads, receipts, EVERYTHING.

And that's why I love Gmail so much, and rarely delete an email. It provides me a complete record of the work I do (which mostly involves the Internet). "What, you don't remember the work I did? Here it all is – I can forward you every email, if you'd like." And so, the proof of work firmly established, the client promised me she would send a check out.

Freelancer Mistake #4: Not Saving For A Rainy Day (Or Cluster****)

The check, as of this writing, has never been sent. Even the disclosure that I would not make my rent payment had no effect on her, except for her insistence that she would "take care" of me. (Note: not "pay" me for work done. "Take care," as if she was doing me a favor. The verbage used is very revealing) And the client's appeal to poverty in our last email exchange has pretty much made me lose hope that I will ever see that money (though miracles are known to happen).

And why is it in her best interest to put me on the top of her "must pay" list anyhow? The work she needed me for is finished. We had no contract. I'm a nobody. It's not like I'm a grade-A ball-busting blogger or anything...

When I first became a freelancer, a friend of mine in the comic industry told me that the #1 advice he had to give was to save my money. Build a savings for rainy days, lags in gigs, and the possibility of rotten clients. I did not do that. I operated as if every gig I had would go off without a hitch, no lapses in payment...and yeah, that happened for a good long while. I was very fortunate. But when one client flaked, I folded.

Mr. Miyagi Can Kiss My Butt

The irony of ironies is that early on, my former client had given me the following assessment regarding my career shortcomings:

"Valerie, you need to value the work you do. Don't give it away. Specify terms up-front. And insist that you get compensated."

So it was like in the end, she served me up a Mr. Miyagi-esque lesson in exactly that. Sometimes, I like to believe that she planned it all out this way on purpose. Sometimes.

But the ball now is in my court. Do I make a stink? With the connections she has, will I get "blacklisted?" Will my insistence on the stinky fartiness of "payment" make me look tacky?

Similarly, I knew a freelancer who had consistently been treated like crap by his publisher. It was one outrage after another, including late pay and possible "borrowed" material and ideas that he never got compensated for. But every time I told him to put his foot down, he was worried that he would be blacklisted, seen as a troublemaker. And I am convinced that part-and-parcel of that worry stems from the love of comics – the need to stay, somehow, in the industry one has revered from childhood. Would this same freelancer put up with this crap if he was in the rubber tire industry, for example?

As freelancers in the comic book industry, you deserve to be valued for the work you do. You shouldn't have to give it away. Always specify terms up-front. And always insist on getting compensated.

THIS IS NOT A HOBBY (Unless you specifically acknowledge it is, and have an alternate means of supporting yourself).

THE COMIC BOOK FREELANCER TEN COMMANDMENTS:

Sign a contract
Check with a lawyer.
Never assume anything.
No, I don't care if this is your drinking buddy from 15 years ago. Never assume anything.
Keep a paper trail and save emails.
Save your money for a rainy day.
Never feel shy or demure about following up on payment issues.
And you need to be treated with respect.
Employers who insist you be treated like crap or else be blacklisted are TERRORISTS. If you give in to their terms, they will only hurt you again and again.
Comics are awesome, but not so awesome that you don't need a living wage and health insurance.

A Brass Pair

My brand-spanking new client emailed me a contract the same day we agreed to work together. I received my first check in the mail within a week-and-a-half of invoicing. And when I mentioned to my old client that I got this new job, she asked me to put in a good word for her so perhaps they would hire her too.

AND THIS HAS BEEN...

The fourth edition of Comics-Op!

You can check me out at Occasional Superheroine!
Thrill to my tweets on Twitter!
Email me complements, tips, and awesome gossip I probably can't print at valerie dot dorazio at gmail dot com!
And buy my eBook Memoirs of An Occasional Superheroine via Paypal!

[SPACER]

Shaenon's Half-Assed Guide to Comic Book Message Boards

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Comicon.com Forums

Just as the arid deserts of the American West were once verdant prairies where the deer and the antelope played, Comicon.com used to be a lively place, a huge, bustling forum where fanboys rubbed shoulders with Wizard Hot Picks. If you wanted to talk creator rights with Kurt Busiek, swap manga recommendations with Colleen Doran, discuss scripting with Nat Gertler, or get into a pointless argument about Jack Kirby with Erik Larsen, the Comicon boards were the place to go. Even the flamewars were star-studded; in my early days as a webcartoonist, I danced around the edges of an epic weeks-long battle in the "Online Comics" section between Scott Kurtz, Cat Garza and Scott McCloud. I think it was about hippies.

Today the Comicon boards, again like the American West, have been reduced to tumbleweeds and bunker-dwelling psychopaths. Many nerd historians believe the death warrant was signed in 2000 when Marvel.com shut down its terrible forums, releasing upon the Internet uncounted hordes of socially retarded people with pent-up rage and no jobs or friends to interfere with their posting time. Many of them found their way to Comicon, where they began a dedicated campaign to drive away the board's resident comic-book creators. Threads that used to consist of several industry pros casually shooting the breeze with fans turned into fuck you judd your pissing in the eyesokets of Hal Jordan teh one true GL!!! Which is arguably true, but not the stuff of lively debate.

Even without the Marvel exodus, however, the Comicon boards would've fallen in the end, because they were a favorite hangout for comic-book creators, and if there's one thing comic-book fans hate, it's comic-book creators. Superhero fans, especially, see their favorite characters as independent entities who exist apart from human interference; the artists and writers are just jerks who try to get between Spider-Man and his fans and mess stuff up.

Nowadays, Comicon retains only a small, tenaciously Erik Larsenious population. It's a fave hangout of old-school trolls and embittered refugees from the John Byrne forum. Most of the other regulars are the kind of fans who not only download all their comics off BitTorrent, but will tell the creator and then get enraged when he asks them not to. Don't you know what a favor they're doing for you by ripping off your self-published comic, Erik Larsen? Why aren't you grateful for having fans? Huh? Huh? Asshole.

Traffic: Low
Reading Level: Third grade
Popular Topics: superhero movie gossip, crazy things John Byrne said, retailers arguing about why nobody reads comics anymore
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Tony Isabella
Typical Thread Title: The Bryan Talbot "Extreme Dislike" Thread (10 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Depressingly Low

TCJ.com Forums

The Comics Journal message board is worth watching for two constantly recurring events: twenty-page threads on Dave Sim, which tend to adopt the dual position that he's a hateful misogynist and that women are mentally inferior animals or possibly some form of unusually alert topiary; and threads where Tony Millionaire gets drunk and calls people out. It's lucky that both threads pop up on a more or less bimonthly basis, because otherwise things get pretty dull over there.

The most necrotic section of the board is the "Comics Journal" section itself, where people only post to bitch that their subscription copies are late. Many TCJ subscribers seem to be under the impression that Gary Groth runs not just Fantagraphics but the U.S. Postal Service from his basement. They get really pissed. No one ever posts about the content of the magazine itself, proving that not even the most hardcore fans of The Comics Journal read The Comics Journal.

The only other time the board gets lively is when someone brings up superhero comics, which the regulars all hate the way Elizabeth hated Mr. Darcy. There were also massive threads on the Transformers movie.

Traffic: Moderate
Reading Level: Community college dropout
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, which creators are overrated, plot developments in Spider-Man comics and how stupid they are
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Rick Trembles
Typical Thread Title: I Don't Get It!!!!!!!!!!! (Manga) (8 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Acceptable

The Warren Ellis Forum/The Engine/Whatever the New Thing Is Called

Warren Ellis runs his forums like goth nightclubs. As soon as they get popular enough to attract anyone besides aspiring Suicide Girls and guys who draw vampires, they cease to be cool and he shuts them down. The original Warren Ellis Forum was the most fun, largely because of Ellis's proclivity for making Hunter S. Thompsonian posts from local pubs and flamboyantly banning anyone who mildly irritated him (including, on at least one occasion, himself). Also, he knew girls. The other great thing about the WEF was that one guy had an icon that was a recent photo of Michael Stipe with the caption MICHAEL STIPE IS OLD. Not a day has gone by that I haven't thought of that icon. He really did look very old.

Eventually the WEF ceased to amuse Warren Ellis, so he shuttered it and opened The Engine, a meeting place for entry-level comics pros, specifically creators of what Ellis termed the New Mainstream. "New Mainstream," as it turned out, was industry terminology for "mostly comics about zombies." The Engine had its moments, and it helped some would-be writers hook up with would-be artists, but it was telling that the section of the forum set aside for TV shows was several orders of magnitude busier than any of the sections for comic books. Still, Tom Spurgeon got in some good jabs at "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," so it wasn't a total wash.

After that Ellis started another forum, designed to serve simultaneously as an online community for comics pros and a place for Ellis to plug his newest comic. I dunno. Warren Ellis's forums are so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.

Traffic: Whatever Warren Ellis says it is
Reading Level: Prissy English schoolboy
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, hot goth chicks, anime, cooking, the BBC, anything to avoid talking about comics
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Warren Ellis
Typical Thread Title: Time's almost up: What are you drinking? (49 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Favorable

Newsarama.com Forums

I have this friend, Rob, one of those guys who loves superhero comics with a burning passion but wishes they'd get back to the kind of stuff Jim Starlin did in the 1980s. (Of course, all comics fans think the comics they read when they were twelve are the greatest comics ever made. It's built into the fabric of fandom itself.) Rob doesn't like most comics published within the last two decades, but he still follows all developments and has passionate, if almost uniformly negative, opinions on every issue that hits the stands. He's horrified by everything but unable to give up hoping, the comic book equivalent of a Cubs fan.

Anyway. From time to time Rob will ask me why everyone loved the latest terrible Marvel or DC mega-crossover, why everyone was wowed by some shock-value plot twist, why everyone dug Satan magically dissolving Spider-Man's marriage or the Scarlet Witch doing the makeouts with her brother. When, against my better judgment, I inquire further, it always turns out that "everyone" means "Newsarama." And that's Newsarama. It's where dumb comic books spawn dumber opinions. It's the message board of bad life decisions.

Also, bad spelling. Rob has cerebral palsy and it's physically hard for him to type, so he's got an excuse. Everyone else needs to get with the program.

Traffic: High
Reading Level: Preschool
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, superhero comic book gossip, how to "fix" various superheroes, what cartoon women might look like naked
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Rob, or so he claims, but he'd totally post there even if he didn't have a website
Typical Thread Title: Poll: Were those that said they were boycotting able to go 3 weeks without Spidey? (2 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Negligible

The DC Message Boards

Once, Kyle Baker went on the DC message boards to promote his then-new run on Plastic Man. He was chased away under a hail of abuse and slurs in under 24 hours. Later, somebody posed as him under a fake username to further smear him. Populated by self-hating teenagers, woman-hating teenagers, and self-hating, woman-hating, forty-year-old teenagers, each a few IQ points short of the people who post comments on YouTube, the DC message boards are the most grotesque comic book message boards on the Internet, but only because Marvel doesn't have its own boards anymore.

Traffic: High
Reading Level: Remedial Preschool
Popular topics: DC superhero movie gossip, DC superhero comic book gossip, how to "fix" various DC superheroes, what real women might look like naked
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: No one on here is capable of running a website.
Typical Thread Title: Poll: Anyone here sick of Dwayne McDuffie's racial biased against Superman? (4 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Hopeless

Byrne Robotics

To non-regulars, the John Bryne forum is famed in song and story as the source of John Byrne's most spectacularly wrongheaded comments, including the time he argued at length against describing Christopher Reeve as a "hero," the time he opined that Hispanic women with blonde hair look like hookers, or the time he lost it over whether Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew was officially part of the DC Universe. What many people don't realize is that it's not just John Byrne, and it's not just once in a while. The entire board is like that at all times. Pop into any thread and you'll see a dozen opinions with the same high concentration of angry and nutty, only some of them from Byrne himself.

The Byrne board is particularly treacherous for dragging you into that most frustrating variety of online argument, where you wind up defending something you don't even like because other people dislike it for the wrong reasons. For example, John Byrne and I agree that Fantastic Four is a bad movie. But I think it's a bad movie because the writing is bad, the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, and the story is bad, whereas John Byrne thinks it's a bad movie because the filmmakers cast a Latina actress as Sue Storm, destroying Lee and Kirby's bold vision of Sue Storm as a white woman. In the course of arguing with Byrne, I wind up defending Fantastic Four, which, after all our sturm und drang, is still crap.

There was only one time the Byrne board regulars turned against Byrne's decrees and openly argued with him, and that was when Byrne declared The Incredibles taboo because the scene where a superhero's cape gets caught in a jet intake was "disrespectful to superheroes." A lot of things are accused of "disrespect to superheroes" on the Byrne board, a charge at least as serious as racism. Come to think of it, Byrne once posted that using the term "word bubbles" when you mean "word balloons" is equivalent to a racial or ethnic slur. Ever since, I've been calling them "word wops" in his honor.

With all that said, at least the Byrne board actually talks about comic books, unlike the other comic boards I've listed, which mostly talk about nerd TV shows, nerd movies, action figures, why women are inferior to men, why downloading isn't stealing, and tits. Also, flamewars are rare on the Byrne board, for much the same reason that heated political debates are rare in North Korea. It's even possible to discuss normally charged topics like abortion, gay rights, and atheism, as long as nobody drifts into really controversial subject matter, like what shape the serifs on Superman's "S" should be.

Traffic: Moderate
Reading Level: Eighth grade
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, John Byrne, civil rights, the existence of God, how much Marvel sucks since John Byrne left, comic books from the 1980s, JB's awesome run on X-Men, Roe vs. Wade, how his old stuff totally wasn't better
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: There is only one website, and its name is Byrne Robotics.
Typical Thread Title: Have you liked any Marvel or DC comics in the last ten years? (4 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Probably banned

Seriously Dweeb, Where's The Spandex?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:45:00 -0500

The last time this little column went to the MoCCA festival, we came back and churned out a Top Ten list almost immediately. This time, it took us a few days, and we ditched the whole arbitrary numbering system for the sake of a bullet review round-up of some of what came down the line. Let's dispense with the introductions now, and as Lesane Parish Crooks once said, "Put your mouth on the pistol."

Wait, what?

....Oh, because they're bullets. Still, that's kind of gross.

Your Disease Spread Quick, by Tom Neely
Published by Tom Neely

300 copies of this mini-comic were included with a four-record Melvins box set in 2008, but Neely figured he'd run off a few more for the people who had read his excellent graphic novel The Blot and said "More please." It's an interesting little mix-em-up project, one that's obviously created more with a Melvins audience in mind than comics fan--but hey, 300 copies for a four-record box set? That's a specific group that's going to catch the song lyrics and horse-head apocalypse, but the Neely fans--of which I'm one--will still find enough to enjoy here. There's a touch of the ink-heavy vomit of Blot on one page, a two-page spread of Lucifer's bar where Stalin and Hitler are holding court with a variety of history's greatest monsters, and a pretty compelling bit of nonsense that runs through the whole thing. If everybody did "Inspired by" work like this, the world would probably be a....oh, I'm not in the mood for that kind of nonsense. We're all going to die, and the goal should be to have a good time before the shade gets drawn. Your Disease has some excellent stuff going on it, and if I knew more Melvins albums, I'd have more to say about it.

Brilliantly Ham-Fisted, by Tom Neely
Published by Tom Neely

Nothing against any of the people at MoCCA, but why isn't this Neely guy a superstar? Some of the stuff that you get at MoCCA showcases this amazing level of talent obscured only by youth and inexperience, but Brilliantly Ham-Fisted is only recognizable to me as what's called a "mini-comic" because I'm buying it from Neely himself. Maybe it's because he doesn't have enough out there yet, or maybe it's because not enough people have checked out The Blot--whatever it is, it's always a great opportunity to see a cartoonist jack around with the format and release "23 comic strip poems", all of which are presented in the sort of four panel layouts you might see in a newspaper that had wider margins. Similar in tone to the idea that Yoshihiro Tatsumi described at the PEN World Voices event earlier this year (honest work in gag strip panels dealing with emotion), each of these "poems" is a scattershot attack on moment, dealing out a random Ziggy-like joke before watching a little cartoon man slam his head repeatedly against the panels that contain him. On his way out of frame, a voice calls out "I thought he'd never leave." His response?

"That hurt".

The Rack: Year One (Mostly), by Kevin Church & Benjamin Birdie

This is one of those in-print collections of a...popular? I assume any webcomic I've heard of is popular, because I just read what other people tell me to with webcomics, so I never really know whether what I'm reading online is a big deal or not. It always seems like a big deal. There's probably enough accuracy in the Rack's soap opera/soap boxing stories of what goes on at the world's most over-staffed comic shop that one could keep up with what's going on in mainstream comics with just this particular comic as their primary source. When it's funny, it's pretty funny, but it probably could have done without the backpage interview, where writer Church likens his style to David Mamet's. Really? There's a really funny joke involving the Machines of Loving Grace that reminds me of the time when my high school girlfriend broke up with me so she could be single at space camp and I spent the whole night in my buddy's closet listening to "Love Is Blindness". That kind of comedy is the kind of comedy I like. It hurts.

Ace Face: The Mod With The Metal Arms, by Mike Dawson
Published by Adhouse

Although there's a lot of solid complaints regarding the prices of some of the mini-comics on sale at the MoCCA convention, there's also stuff like this, a pretty fat collection of comics for only $6.95. Most of the stories revolve around the TITULAR charater, who had a Henry Heywood kind of uncle that grafted gigantic cybernetic arms to his young, armless body. I'd read some of these stories in Superior Showcase, so I already knew that Dawson could draw and write funny, but I wasn't sure if he could draw ears that didn't look like featureless jug handles--he totally can! There's still that one two-page sequence where a couple of characters have these gigantic things sticking out of their heads, but the rest of the comic doesn't have a single pinna problem. Besides the adventures of the grows-up-to-be-arrogant-then-depressed main character, there's these little insert stories about a couple of terrible super-powered children that points to why super-powered children never work in super-hero comics. At some point, comics creators figured out what Dawson explicates: little kids who have super-powers would end up damaging each other in their fits of rage in ways that, while hilarious, are also somewhat horrible to imagine. Delightful!

Call All My Dawgs #3, by Sam Gaskin
Published by Sam Gaskin

This is a one-page mini-comic about the adventures of Sinbad--the "entertainer", not the swashbuckler--and it involves pooping and hallucinations. I've read all three of Gaskin's Call All My Dawgs thus far, and I've yet to find a thing to complain about. I hope he sticks with comics forever. The idea that this dude might someday drop a 100-pager of this kind of stuff is an idea that makes my chest feel funny.

Pope Hats #1, by Ethan Rilly
Published by Adhouse

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem like there should be more alternative talky-type comics about characters who are right-wing Republicans or work in the decaying auto industry? It's not Rilly's fault that Pope Hats is yet another look-at-some-random-white-people comic where jobs exist so that characters can complain about and show up late to them, all the while pining away for the moment when they can "achieve their dream" or "get in a relationship" or whatever it is that moody white people do when they aren't appearing in moody white people comics. It's gotten to the point where I'm not even paying attention to whether the actual comics part of the comics is done well, even when the back half of the comic consists of a basic one-shot repetition of one image over and over again while the main female character tells "a couple of stories", and that's normally something I'd be irritated by. Pope Hats isn't a stupid comic, and it isn't a lazy one, but it's a subject that I find myself less and less willing to give a shit about, which is sort of insane considering the amount of leeway I'm willing to give to comics about Norman Osborn's Purpose Driven Life. If it was set in a Montana survivalist camp, if it was about snuff snorting Jiffy Lube employees, maybe so. But white chicks with hopes, a local bar, and a random ghost that steals cell phones? I'm napping already.

Ghost Arm Volume 1 Episode 5, by C. Marie
Handed out by someone, the artist I'm assuming, on the stairs outside.

This is a one sheet comic about a ghost who runs out in the street and gets hit by a car. Oh god man, I'm sorry. SPOILER!

It's actually kind of cute, although I think it's kind of weird that something as simple as this necessitates the inclusion of both a "Volume" and "Episode" numbering. Oh well. There's a link to the Ghost Arm website on the back, so I guess this is what you call Building A Brand. The world will probably reach the breaking point on the whole anyone-can-do-a-webcomic thing eventually, but hopefully they won't lump anyone-can-do-a-sarcastic-comic-column in, or I'll be back to what I used to do for drug money behind the Winn-Dixie.

Cold Heat Special #9, by Frank Santoro & Lane Milburn
Published by Picturebox

I'm curious as to how much the Cold Heat Specials interact with the Cold Heat series proper, as they seem to be purely designed as an opportunity for Santoro to team up with various colloboraters in an attempt to expand and explore Castle, the comic's primary character, and less to do with the narrative. I wouldn't say that the Specials vary in quality--I've found something I liked in all of them, even the one that was barely more than what looked like Sharpie markings on colored paper--but I haven't found myself thinking of them as being neccessary to the comic's narrative. They remind me of that Wolf Eyes/Anthony Braxton team-up, in that they aren't a full-on studio album with all the wants and cravings that a full-on studio album entails--the Specials just like to focus on one or two aspects until that one aspect is either exhausted or explained. I don't know, maybe that's just blathering about something I don't fully understand. I really like that they're out there, and this particular issue--a heavy, silkscreened comic where Castle hangs out in an actual castle while digging on the local fireplace--is one I find myself going back to, if just to marvel at the way the art flows across the panels. Like a lot of comics readers, I hope, I come to this stuff knowing there's more to it than can be digested and expelled on the first experience--but as the various Cold Heat stuff trickles out, I find myself less and less interested in exploring or demanding its meaning. In other words, I really want to spend more time around people who love Cold Heat. I'm just not as excited by the prospect of hearing them talk about what it means at the same time.

Real Bad #1, by Connur Willumsen
Published by Connur Willumsen

Used my last bits of cash to buy everything I could off Willumsen, based solely off a postcard and a Groo sketch shown to me by my stalwart MoCCA companion, Mr. Matthew J. Brady. Whereas Real Bad shares some of the "boring white artist with creative blockage goes a-wandering" tendencies that's beginning to irritate me, it's also got a little story-within-the-story portion where Willumsen's narrator fantasizes about the characters in his novel--Noble Savages, cut and tender--slaughter him on his knees. It's a real nice sequence--the first page is a fetish-y drawing of a muscular black arm holding a gigantic machete, juxtaposed against a page where the mutilation is dealt out in all black panels while the victim dispassionately narrates each slice. The conclusion of the book, where our narrator finds his own very real savage to tag along with on their way to falafels and "dive bars", seems to be the set up for future stories, is one that I'm a little apprehensive about--god knows that all it needs is a fumbling homosexual relationship for it to read like that terrible Michael Chabon novel--but not enough that I don't want to see a ton more. Willumsen was also showing off pages for an upcoming comic called Everett that looked amazing. He's somebody I'll be keeping an eye out for.

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Shaenon's Half-Assed Guide to Comic Book Message Boards

Comicon.com Forums

TCJ.com Forums

The Warren Ellis Forum/The Engine/Whatever the New Thing Is Called

Newsarama.com Forums

The DC Message Boards

Byrne Robotics

Seriously Dweeb, Where's The Spandex?

Your Disease Spread Quick, by Tom Neely Published by Tom Neely

Brilliantly Ham-Fisted, by Tom Neely Published by Tom Neely

The Rack: Year One (Mostly), by Kevin Church & Benjamin Birdie

Ace Face: The Mod With The Metal Arms, by Mike Dawson Published by Adhouse

Call All My Dawgs #3, by Sam Gaskin Published by Sam Gaskin

Pope Hats #1, by Ethan Rilly Published by Adhouse

Ghost Arm Volume 1 Episode 5, by C. Marie Handed out by someone, the artist I'm assuming, on the stairs outside.

Cold Heat Special #9, by Frank Santoro & Lane Milburn Published by Picturebox

Real Bad #1, by Connur Willumsen Published by Connur Willumsen

Your Disease Spread Quick, by Tom Neely
Published by Tom Neely

Brilliantly Ham-Fisted, by Tom Neely
Published by Tom Neely

Ace Face: The Mod With The Metal Arms, by Mike Dawson
Published by Adhouse

Call All My Dawgs #3, by Sam Gaskin
Published by Sam Gaskin

Pope Hats #1, by Ethan Rilly
Published by Adhouse

Ghost Arm Volume 1 Episode 5, by C. Marie
Handed out by someone, the artist I'm assuming, on the stairs outside.

Cold Heat Special #9, by Frank Santoro & Lane Milburn
Published by Picturebox

Real Bad #1, by Connur Willumsen
Published by Connur Willumsen