If I Ran The Comics Industry, Part Three

A Brief Apology

I must confess that the issue of my fourth formalism essay has been weighing heavily on me lately. When I took it down it really wasn't out of pique or anything like that - I just figured out very quickly because of the conversations in the Comments that I had not only not really said what I had initially wanted to say, but I had said it in such a disingenuous and confusing way that I had succeeded in not only obscuring my point but implying a number of things I had no desire to imply. It was a sloppy essay, and I wanted to redo it.

But then things happened... msot of which involved me, as always, never having enough time in any given day to do the amount of work I need to do. The rewriting on the essay turned into a long, drawn out thing and it occurred to me that my silence on the issue might be taken by some as sulking. Well, in all seriousness, I was really just dissatisfied with my inability to communicate myself properly on this issue, because looking over it again it was just not a very good piece. I've had a lot of stuff on the burner lately and oftentimes this blog gets put at the bottom of the pile. It seems there are always folks quitting blogging or cutting back drastically because of circumstances - but if you've followed this one for any amount of time you know I definitely go through phases when I am more prolific than others. This is just a less-prolific phase, is all.

So: the Collaboration essay isn't dead. It was simply a bad essay, filled with sloppy reasoning and some truly egregious bits of synecdochical thinking - mistaking the spandrel for the arch. I am eager to revisit the topic when I can put my thoughts on the subject into more coherent form - turns out I really wasn't talking about collaboration anyway, that's just a symptom of what I actually wanted to talk about. I was over in left field or something... I don't know.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I'll try to keep the horse-shit down to a dull roar, OK?

The Hurting's Weekly Out-Of-Context Mark Trail Panel

For the Week of 04/27/05



(Say it with me, kids - HORSE-SHIT!!!)

Sometimes it's a chore to find one good panel, but this week we're blessed with two that absolutely screamed for coverage... so it's a Special Bonus Panel!!!



(Mark knew he had taken too much mescaline when the squirrels began to talk.)


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If I Ran The Comics Industry, Part Two

Hey

Check out my review of Abe: Wrong For All the Right Reasons here.

If I Ran The Comics Industry, Part One

It's the new style

Or rather, finally, the new remix.

The Shock Ending That Has All of Comics Talking

The Hurting's Weekly Out-Of-Context Mark Trail Panel

For the Week of 04/20/05



(Miss Baker knew of only one way to properly repay the kindness of gentlemen strangers...)

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What The World Needs Now...

...is not a bunch of half-baked comics theory, but Mr. Winkle.

That is all.

The Hurting's Weekly Out-Of-Context Mark Trail Panel

For the Week of 04/13/05



(In her gratitude, the little dog barks the name of her Creator.)

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Pet Sounds





I was watching an episode of the Cartoon Network's new Krypto cartoon - which is pretty good, even for something obviously aimed at younger tots - and came across one of those weird confluences that happens every now again...

...when two nerd worlds collide!!!

During the credits for Krypto I just happened to see something rather strange. The "Superdog!" theme is credited to one Van Dyke Parks. Parks, for those who don't know, was famous / infamous as Brian Wilson's collaborator during the late 60s/early 70s period following the release of Pet Sounds that saw the non-release of Smile and the beginnings of Wilson's gradual dissolution. Parks has had a surprisingly varied career since the mid-60s, with numerous solo projects and credits (mostly as an arranger) for artists like U2, Fiona Apple, Ry Cooder and Frank Stallone (can't win 'em all, I guess).

Now, Van Dyke Parks is just not someone I would envision as a "go-to guy" for animated children's themes... my guess is that Paul Dini or one of his co-producers is a big Beach Boys fan. Hardcore Beach Boys fans are about as nerdy as you get in the rock world - something I learned from a long-ago discussion with Peter Bagge in the Journal messageboard. Odd how sometimes these things crossover, eh?

Construction Time Again



This essay has been removed by Management for reasons of general jackassery and sloppy-mindedness on the part of Management. It shall return in an amended form at some later date.

For the time being, please enjoy this Alf cover:

Junk In Your Trunk

I just realized I never put up the link for this week's remix. Here you go.

Also, my tardy review of the first Complete Peanuts. I think this one turned out pretty good.

Carry on.

The Hurting's Weekly Out-Of-Context Mark Trail Panel

For the Week of 04/06/05



(I know it's easy to pick on Elrod's rather odd use of perspective - but doesn't it look as if these rabbits are about the size of a VW bug?)

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Strange Things That Should Not Be

If you've read this blog for any amount of time you know I don't usually do the whole "linkblogging" thing anymore - I'm content to leave that to more qualified folks, for the most part. But every now and again a few things just demand to be passed on... not passed on like herpes, more like the Happy Cancer.

You probably know that I'm very stingy with my links. I don't link to everyone who links to me - not because I don't love you all, just because I only link to those blogs that I think are really, really worth reading. There are very, very very few blogs that I feel strongly enough about to throw my endorsement - such that it is - behind. I have just found another, however, and it's a doozy: Dandy Don Simpson's The Less Said The Better. It seems like not too long ago I was bewailing the fact that nobody in comics seems to be want to write about the intersections and overlaps between the fine art and comics worlds - well, Simpson does just that. Not only does he do that, but he seems willing and eager to throw around the kind of muscular theory that I , personally, can't get enough of. I'm only a few posts in, and already Simpson's blog is an absolute can't miss for me.

That said, he also says a number of things which I think are, at the least, extremely ill-informed - he doesn't seem to really have a grip on the current "art" comics scene, for one, and still seems to susbscribe to the kind of "art/mainstream" dualism that went out of fashion (for lack of sustenance) a while back. He seems intelligent enough to qualify a number of his more inflammatory comments, however, and I'd be interested in hearing if he really thought works like Louis Riel, Love & Rockets and Teratoid Heights didn't stand up favorably to the best of whatever the creme of contemporary fine/popular arts might be. The fact that he still confuses the almost-exhausted autobio movement with the vanguard of current alt-comics tells me that his information is woefully out of date - but he seems smart enough that I'd honestly like to see him grow out of his few misconceptions and catch up with the current debate.

---

I actually found a few minutes to read an illicit scan of Countdown... and I have to say my criticism of the actual book boils down to a few simple points:

The book would maybe work if you had never before read a superhero comic in your life, and didn't know that Superman, Batman and Co. aren't really super-dicks to their supposed friends.

It seems to me like the theft of 100 pounds of Kryptonite would be, far from the "false alarm" the other superheroes treat it as, a really big fucking deal. If someone you don't know has 100 pounds of a weapon that can kill three or four of the strongest dudes on the planet, it hardly seems like something you'd need to apologize for getting Dr. Fate out of bed early about. "Excuse me, Dr. Fate, we realize you were oh so busy being a useless third-stringer over in JSA..."

A lot of the stupidity just seems to stem from the fact that someone at DC is really upset by tonal inconsistencies. Every DC book that every deviates from "the norm" has to be rigorously explained away so that no-one gets antsy with having funny superheroes in the same universe as serious superheroes. Like, you don't have to "explain" the Giffen/DeMatteis JLA - just go on and use the characters if you want to. Like, I personally have no problems with thinking that Captain Marvel's squeaky-clean fun adventures happen in the same world as something like Batman: Year One if I'm going to enjoy either, it's not something I can get worried about. I would rather you not soil both characters by insisting on some absurd middle ground wherein neither escapes being tarnished.

You will notice that despite all the stupid things they have done over the years, they have never felt the need to have some sort of massive crossover to explain how John Byrne's silly She-Hulk, Joe Kelly's funny Deadpool and Garth Ennis' super-grim Punisher could all co-exist - they just sorta do. It's OK> We understand these things.

It's pretty obvious that everyone involved in making these comics is transfering the social anxiety from their high-school years onto the superhero hierarchy. There's just something ugly about superheroes having the same kind of caste system as a third-period gym class. Aren't super-heroes supposed to be, y'know, cool and stuff?

Finally, haven't they already done the "Maxwell Lord goes evil" story? I seem to recall that from somewhere.

I will also note that the whole mystical scarab MacGuffin gives them a pretty cut-and-dried method to ressurrect the Blue Beetle as some kind of "Grim and gritty" avenger of the night. Also, there was at least a little hint that Lex Luthor migth actually have been behind the events of Identity Crisis all along, which if correct, would prove, for those still keeping track, that these comics "events" really are more predictable than an episode of Pokemon

"Hey, who are those strange people selling ballons? They look strangely familiar, and I don't think they're really sherpas, but do we know anyone with long angular red hair and a fake mustache? Hmmm. I wonder."

---

Ok, I like Seaguy more than should be legal, but man, after reading Ian Brill's two -part coverage of a recent Grant Morrison public appearance makes me want to never read another comic of his again. I mean, seriously, people. If you keep encouraging him to do this, he will keep doing it.

“It’s just fiction, but it’s not just fiction. It’s not something you make up; it’s something you participate in. You can’t fuck with it, it’s a paper universe.”

"Morrison said, when it comes to working with the 2nd Dimension, he’s like one of those higher life forms coming down to working with these life forms of a lower dimension. A fiction suit is an avatar that brings him into the world, like in the last issue of Animal Man or the King Mob character in Invisibles where pretty soon he couldn’t tell what events were fiction and which was real. It can be considered a way of outrunning karma by transferring these different experiences to different characters, but ultimately karma’s about not dying with too many regrets."

"Making an extended storyline was his way of making a 'hyper-sigil' that handles a lot of psychic energy. 'All that is terminology for stuff that’s just happening,' Morrison told us. Now Morrison has his own house in the country with a sun god a top that says 'God is in all of us.'"

Makes you wish they'd bring back the old stereotype of the artist as alcoholic. I'd rather deal with liver failure than pretentious twaddle... sounds like someone believes his own press releases.

He and Alan Moore are notoriously catty (or at least he is towards Moore, don't know if I've ever heard Moore say anything one way or another), but maybe he's just envious of the fact that Moore knows how to say weird things and not make himself sound like an idiot. Every time Morrison opens his mouth about "fiction suits" or "hyper-sigils", my eyes roll back in my head and I want to bash my head with a brick.

---

While we're tangentially on the subject, man, the more I think about it the more Seven Soldiers seems like the sophisticated-superhero version of bear-bating. It's been designed to divide the comics electorate between "cool kids" and not-cool kids, people who "care" about old continuity and the people who are too cool for that. I've seen a number of people commenting on the series with something to the effect that "nobody cares about these characters in the first place" - but the fact that some people do care pretty much kills that theory. The fact that some people do care means that whether or not you will enjoy the series depends on a "litmus test" of sorts, whether or not you remember the Guardian's long post-Crisis history as a member of the Superman supporting cast or the fact that Klarion appeared numerous times in Peter David's beloved-by-many Young Justice series. Even someone like the Shining Knight - almost the definition of a cipher - still inspires loyalty from reviewers who maintain that "this doesn't bear much of a resemblance of the Sir Justin I like".

I don't necessarily agree that characters should be wed to continuity one way or the other, but man, any book that makes a political imperative of chosing one side or the other of the debate in order to enjoy it is just too aggressively cynical in conception for me to get concerned about. Both Identity Crisis/ Countdown and Seven Soldiers ask the reader to pledge alliegance to philosophical viewpoints that, while diametrically opposed, are both the kind of ideological tempests-in-teapots that make fandom so utterly repulsive a place to spend one's time.

In other words, I'll be content to enjoy Plastic Man for as long as it's being published, thank you very much.

---

While you're here, take a look at this beautiful painting by Achewood's Chris Onstad:



What'd I say about retro-computing coming back? There's still time to bid on the painting here.

---

New Rejected Cereal Mascot here. And I'm out, dogg.

Meh.

As expected, the critical reaction to this week's Countdown to the Infinite Crisis is far more enjoyable and involving than the actual book itself. I can say this without having read so much as one panel of the book itself (ooops, I did read four pages of preview, I think). Even at a dollar, I shant be buying it. (But, in all fairness, I'll probably download it just ot see how bad it truly is.)

But as fun as it is to see AK coming out of his self-imposed hibernation to tear the book a new hole, it's also kind of depressing. Everyone, it seems, is basically spending all their time thinking up new and different ways to insult a book that is really kind of a joke to begin with. How many different ways can you think of to say "the Blue Beetle getting graphically shot in the head is a really poor hook on which to hang a plot" before people get the idea that the book is lame?

AK coming out of his retirement to bash the book sort-of clinches a number of thoughts I've had about blogging lately. The Blogosphere, such as it is, really didn't start to become a big deal until around the time he stopped doing Title Bout for my pals at Movie Poop Shoot. AK is, hands down, the single best commentator on mainstream comics currently alive today. He can recognize the (rare) good book and treats the bad with the respect it should be accorded, that is, absolutely none. Anytime AK chooses to speak on a given issue, he essentially obviates the Blogosphere, because the Comics Blogosphere as we know it today was created by God to fill the void opened by the passing of Title Bout. If AK ever decided to start a blog (which would be rather odd and redundant, but bear with me), at least half of my fellow bloggers would have to close up shop and leave, because that would be the Internet version of being outsourced. I at least try to offer the world something unique and different, which they can't get anywhere else - like strange pictures of naked Supermen and ostriches - but when it comes to the satire, the snark, the well-placed bon mot and the rare piece of heartfelt criticism, AK is simply the best.

The best judge of good criticism is how well someone who has no real familiarity with the given medium can read and enjoy a given writer's work. My wife has no familiarity or interest in superhero books, but she loved Title Bout. Tell me that the vast majority of writing about comics on this here Internet isn't a vast digital circle-jerk and I will point out that the only people who read comics blogs are other comics bloggers. This isn't a stereotype, this is a clod hard fact, because if it weren't true Sleeper and Seaguy would sell more copies than whatever the hell kind of Excalibur revamp they're doing this week. I recognize the fact that when I say that a comic is good and that I enjoy it, I am doing the equivalent of putting a target on its chest, antlers on its ears, and sending it out into a forest full of drunken deer hunters. I hailed Plastic Man as the best mainstream superhero book currently published - the fact that it still lives is a testament to the fact that it would be hugely embarrassing for DC to have to cancel a book the month after it swept every legitimate comics award program in existence. But it will be canceled next month, have no fear.

Look at She-Hulk. Fun book. Consistently enjoyable. Great, distinctive art. Hailed across the Blogosphere, including by yours truly and the notoriously tetchy Neilalien. Canceled within a year. I think that inasmuch as the Blogosphere has any value above that of a giant echo chamber, it serves as something of a Darwinistic indicator for the rest of the industry. Whenever we - any of us - get on our soapboxes about some book or other, we might as well be holding up a sign that says "Hey, you predators - here are the arthritic gazelles!" Chances are that these gazelles will not live to pass their traits to the next generation.

I recently wrote a review of the new Black Panther relaunch, going on about how much I enjoyed said relaunch. I'm not too worried about that book, inasmuch as it's got John Romita Jr. on the art chores. It will survive for so long as it's got a marquee name on the cover. But JRJR doesn't have a good track record for sticking on non-Spider/non-X books, and it's hard not to see why. Mainstream comics, and Marvel especially, have not been about building franchises in decades. Used to be that a hot creator on a mildly popular book could build a franchise from the ground up. Now, if a hot creator comes up through the ranks of a company's midlist, they are pretty quickly poached for an assignment on X-Thingie or Spider-Man Cleans His Bathroom. No chance to even build a midlist based on the confluence of lesser properties and top-flight talent. The comics industry is so small-stakes that they need to maximize their profits however they can.

Which means that a name like JR JR, who can theoretically make-or-break a book like Black Panther, is still more valuable when he's drawing Spider-Man. Let's say, just for the sake of a hypothetical argument, that JR JR's name alone ensures that a mid-tier book like Panther or Thor sells a quarter to a third more than it otherwise would, while his name only moves ten percent more of a Spider-Man book. If you consider - in the hypothetical - that Spider-Man is going to automatically move 75,000-100,000 copies on a given month before the retailers even know who the creators are, and Black Panther is going to be moving 20,000-30,000 (which is usually where these books are, notwithstanding stunts and sudden jumps), that means that even though Spidey's sale are relatively stable, they're still moving as many more copies of Spider-Man as they are Black Panther, and what would be a relatively small profit margin for Spidey means life or death for the Panther. What are they going to do? Keep their top artists chained to mid-level books that will never be best-sellers in the current climate or move them onto book that are guaranteed sellers, but can always use the sales goose that a hot artist can bring? As much as I love Black Panther, if I'm Marvel I'm hoping JR JR gets tired of not getting royalty checks and moves back to a top-ten book. That's where the money is. I won't buy it, but as I said before if the Blogosphere ran the comics industry things would be weird. (These numbers, while they are hypothetical, are also more or less accurate.)

As much as we may bitch and moan about Countdown, it's still going to sell like hotcakes at a hotcake-connoisseur convention. I can put up my little remixes with funny words Photochopped into the dialogue bubbles, and it's not going to have any impact at all on whether or not anyone buys it. Honestly, I think the comic book companies all figured out a long time ago that negative controversy is a lot more valuable than positive word-of-mouth. Books that get positive word-of-mouth sell 15,000 copies and get canceled in a year. Books that are universally reviled among the online cognoscente ship 200,000 copies and get second, third and fourth printings. I've gotten some truly bizarre e-mails from creators who absolutely love seeing me tear their books apart in a remix - any advertising is good advertising, as long as it gets people talking about the book, I guess. There was a cultural shift a long time ago, when appearing on the cover of Mad became less a shame than a badge of honor. Nowadays, if a big movie doesn't warrant a cover-feature in Mad, you know it won't be a success because people don't care enough to lampoon it.

I've been trying to think of something interesting to say about Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers project for quite a while now. I've read the first few books. Enjoyed them, I guess, sorta. Just not blown away. I'm surprised, however, that I haven't seen the inevitable Blogosphere comparisons between Seven Soldiers and Countdown - how the former is great because it's Grant Morrison and should be celebrated, but the latter is a horrid corporate shill.

Well, Countdown is a horrid corporate shill - no argument there - but Seven Soldiers is just not setting the world on fire either. There is something profoundly cynical about the way the series is unfolding. It seems almost as if Morrison is showing off for no better reason than that he can. Everybody has been going on about how great his "mad ideas" are, so by God he's gonna give them mad ideas up the wazoozle. He's gonna revamp seven third-tier characters who no-one cared about and make them into something New! and Different! and Weird! He's gonna go out of his way to avoid all the nasty crap in the mainstream DCU these past few years since he left! He's going to Save Comics!

Er, no. He's going to play it safe by putting out books that he knows a dedicated coterie of his fans will lap up but which will mostly alienate the kind of mainstream fans who are enjoying Countdown. On a certain level it seems resolutely boring, because it is so absolutely predictable. If you had asked me six months ago to give you the hallmarks of a Grant Morrison superhero comic, I'd have given you a list of various attributes like cosmic scope, meta-fictional narrative, multiple parallel plotlines, tangential weird elements, the use of animals as metaphors. Seven Soldiers is only three issues old and it's already got all of these elements in abundance. It seems as if he could write this stuff in his sleep. It's every Grant Morrison comic you've ever read before, only moreso. How . . . boring. My reaction to Seven Soldiers so far is a concentrated meh.

Not that I begrudge him the right to do whatever the hell he wants. I'll probably buy it and enjoy it . . . up to a point. That point is basically the vague discontent I will feel watching a very talented person do the artistic equivalent of spinning his wheels. Alan Moore could have become the richest comics writer in the universe if he'd have just stuck it out in mainstream comics and done more work for DC and Marvel. He wouldn't even have had to do Watchmen 2 . . . maybe just a run on Superman or a Spider-Man graphic novel. Do some creator owned stuff here and there to try to convince himself he's doing something interesting.

This doesn't have anything to do with corporate vs. alternative. It has to do with artists working in their comfort zones, and the inferior art that is produced when artists "play it safe". Alan Moore redefined superhero comics in the 80s, so the last thing he wanted to do in the 90s was more superheroes. He wanted to try some big ideas, some downright weird and crazy ideas. Hey, let's try self-publishing a ten-part graphic novel about an English coal-mining town . . . well, that didn't work, how about I stick with this even more ambitious serial on Jack the Ripper, and this book on pornography and hey I've never written a novel before . . .

I have an infinite amount of respect for Neil Gaiman because he decided to leave comics. On one hand, it sucks because his reputation as a comics writer will essentially be forever frozen in time with Sandman, which remains a deeply flawed work despite its numerous virtues. But you know, it must have taken an absolutely ironclad conviction in his own artistic merit to get up and say "OK, I'm not going to take a pile of money to go write JLA or whatever, I'm going to take this not-insignificant fanbase I've accrued and see if the success I've had in comics will carry over to prose books. I might fall on my face, or I might be the next Clive Barker - no way to know but to do it." I respect the hell out of that, even if it means comics essentially lost him. Sure, he comes back every now and again for stuff like Endless Nights or 1602, but neither of these were any more than decent. Writing comics is like writing anything else, you need to do it a lot in order to keep your form. He made the decision to write prose, and as much as we may regret the decision, it was his decision and I'm glad he made it.

But so far Grant Morrison shows a dogged inability to develop past a certain point. The Filth was a great book, but it was in a lot of ways only the maturation of certain themes and ideas that had been rattling around his work for decades. As good as you may or may not think We3 or Seaguy are, both are essentially only refinements of previously established ideas. Morrison needs to break out and do something totally different or in ten years he's gonna be a bald British John Byrne.

Ultimately, whether or not any writer develops has a lot to do with how hard they push themselves. Frank Miller and Mike Mignola both took chances, both artistically and financially, when they decided to leave the Big Two for good and start Sin City and Hellboy - both gambles have paid off enormous dividends. For whatever reasons, John Byrne didn't stick with Next Men when faced with a comparable situation. I don't know if Next Men could have ever been as big a franchise, but as it is we'll never know, and neither will Byrne, and if you don't think this hasn't occurred to him then you're fooling yourself. He decided to go with what he knew, a solid paycheck for doing mainstream superhero books, because his more personal creator-owned book wasn't selling what he wanted. His old pals from Legend are both rich as Croesus, while he's doing a revamp of The Demon.

Will any of the many creators who worked on Countdown ever develop into truly great artists? Never can tell, but I doubt it. I don't doubt that it's possible that some gifted writer could be hanging out doing piece-work for the Big Two to pay the rent, but somehow it never seems to work out that way. How much creator-owned stuff has Judd Winick done since he went to DC? The point is that I can't really get too upset over the Blue Beetle snuff-porn they're publishing because, essentially, they're giving the market what it wants. They want blood - they want superhero comics that read less like fun, imaginative adventure stories and more like third-rate John LeCarre rip-offs. That's OK, I'm not the audience here. I'm content to pick up and enjoy the few books they publish that do interest me in any given month, at least for so long as they publish them. But if Grant Morrison says he's gonna do a big crossover like Seven Soldiers and tries to tell you that this somehow isn't a big waste of his talent, you gotta call bullshit. Where's the Grant Morrison who put so much of himself into something as weird as The Invisibles, or went out on a limb with Animal Man? He's busy revamping the Shining Fucking Knight. He's found his comfort zone and that's OK, but if he doesn't understand that this fanbase he's acquired wants to see him doing something different - and I think the critical response to Seven Soldiers so far makes it fairly clear that a lot of his fans regard it as more of the same. Well, that way lies a grim and dusty death . . .

I could be wrong. The completed Seven Soldiers could stand as the most brilliant and incisive statement in the history of comics, adding up to a massive lot more than the sum of its parts. You certainly couldn't have guessed that Promethea would have evolved into one of Moore's most engrossing and personal works based on the first three issues . . . but if you had had an inkling, you could have perhaps seen how Promethea could conceivably become a vehicle for something bigger. Based simply on what we've seen and what we know, Seven Soldiers looks like it has the potential to be . . . a big character-revamping superhero crossover. Maybe it'll at least be halfway interesting, but at the end of the day it's not that different a beast from Countdown. It may have a different MO, but it tickles the same itch - albeit for a different set of fans.