Comicon News Roundup

Fantagraphics to publish Complete Four Color

Fresh off recent convention-season announcements that venerable art comics publisher Fantagraphics had secured reprint rights to the classic EC Comics library as well as the groundbreaking underground anthology Zap, the publisher announced their further acquisition of the reprint rights to one of the most important series in the history of comics: Dell's long running Four Color series.

"This announcement is a long time coming," states Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. "Over the years we've become adept at working with a wide range of rights holders in order to reprint a large variety of archival material running the gamut from Charles Schulz's Peanuts and E. C. Segar's Thimble Theater through to Floyd Gottfredson and Carl Barks' classic Disney comics. Licensing the Four Color series required working not only with Dell itself through Random House, but with the rights holders for every individual licensed feature published in the magazine's long run. Thankfully, our relationship with Disney meant a large chunk of the prime material was already squared away, but that still left Warner Brothers [Dell published the Looney Tunes characters side-by-side with their Disney counterparts for decades], in addition to other properties as diverse as Raggedy Ann & Andy, Felix the Cat and Zane Grey's Westerns.

"It's taken - no exaggeration - years of diligent work to bring together all the rights holders. But it'll all be worth it be able to present the highest-selling and most influential comic series in history in strict historical continuity. There's a lot of work here that contemporary readers are completely ignorant of - Jack Callahan's Tillie the Toiler, for instance, is really going to wow people. Just the other day I was poring over a stack of Harvey Eisenberg's amazing Charlie McCarthy books - these stories definitely deserve their chance to once more stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Barks' more famous Ducks."

"We haven't completely finalized the details of the books, but we're most likely looking at publishing the series five issues at a time, in oversized hardcovers that will probably come out to around $40. If we can keep to a strict quarterly schedule, we'll be on track to finish the Complete Four Color in only 67 years, give or take. I think any serious historian of the medium is going to want to find room on their shelf for these books."

R. Crumb takes the reigns of Iron Fist

In a surprise announcement on Saturday's Cup of Joe panel, Marvel CCO Joe Quesada stunned panel attendees by introducing perhaps the last creator anyone expected to see in residence at the House of Ideas: legendary underground comics pioneer R. Crumb. Crumb will be writing and drawing a relaunch of Marvel mainstay Iron Fist to be set in the immediate aftermath of the company's line-wide Fear Itself event.

"I'd been talking to Joe off and on for years about doing some work for Marvel, but the timing never seemed right before now. But since I wrapped work on my Book of Genesis adaptation, I'd been casting around for my next project. By happy coincidence I happened to run into Joe and he let it slip that Iron Fist was going to be left in a particularly interesting situation in the immediate wake of Fear Itself. After a little bit of prodding he explained exactly what Iron FIst's new status quo entailed, and the more I heard the more I realized that these were stories I wanted to be a part of telling."

When asked by audience members why the notoriously independent Crumb was making a move to Marvel after almost five decades of independent publishing, the underground pioneer demurred. "I don't think it's as much of a stretch as some people are likely to believe. In hindsight I think it's obvious that a lot of my career has been building towards working with Marvel. I'm finally ready, I think, to put my nose to the grindstone and built up a nice, long run. That I've been given the opportunity to work with such an iconic character as Iron Fist is just icing on the cake."

"There are probably some old underground fans who are going to be disappointed that I'm working at Marvel, but I'm confident that once people start seeing these pages any objections are going to be completely forgotten. This is some of the best work of my career. I really feel that this is the work I'm going to be remembered for."

When asked about the new series direction, Crumb was chary. "Basically, there's a lot I can't say because, well, we're going to be picking up almost immediately after the final pages of Fear Itself and Joe here would have to kill me if I gave away the ending! But rest assured, longtime Iron Fist fans are going to be pleasantly surprised - we're happy to be picking up on Matt [Fraction]'s work both in Fear Itself and The Immortal Iron Fist, sort-of dovetailing a number ideas that have been put out over the last few years about just where Danny Rand fits into the cosmology of the Marvel Universe. He's going to be a major player in the next year, he's still going to be in New Avengers and also in The Defenders. It's a good time to be an Iron FIst fan. This book is going to be ground zero for some very important developments that are going to be felt throughout the Marvel Universe. That's all I can say for now."

Finally, Crumb concluded with a few specifics to appease still-curious audience members. "Alright, I will say there's a lot we don't know about the Seven Cities of Heaven. That's something I really want to explore, so be on the lookout for that. And also - OK, I'll just say, sometime in the first six months we're going to be seeing a big fight with Darkhawk, simply because," Crumb concluded with a laugh, "I've always wanted to see who would win in a fight between Iron Fist and Darkhawk."

Harry Potter comes to DC

In a move many feel was years overdue, it was finally announced that DC Comics would be publishing a comics adaptation of the enormously successful Harry Potter series of novels.

"I'm thrilled to say that, after years of work, Harry Potter is finally coming to DC," co-publisher Dan Didio announced to thunderous applause on Friday. "You may have heard of this guy," Didio say, gesturing towards a large slide of the iconic boy wizard atop his trademark racing broom, "he had a movie out not too long ago, some low-budget independent thing. It made a few dollars." The audience laughed: the highly anticipated eighth and final film in the Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 has broken worldwide box office records in recent weeks.

"Harry Potter is one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world, and his entrance into the world of comics is years - decades - past due," Didio continued. "This is one of those instances where our creative synergy with Warner Brothers [makers of the Harry Potter films] really paid off. After some initial discussion, we realized that not producing comics to tie-in with these phenomenal books and movies was really just leaving money on the table.

"Comics have a huge advantage over any other medium, in that our production budget is limited only by our imagination. We have as much space as we feel necessary to do these books justice, and we're working very hard to make these comics the most accurate and exhaustive adaptation possible. Harry Potter fans love every word, every supporting character and every scene, and we're going to take advantage of the medium to show you every detail of Harry's world, including all the stuff they just couldn't show in a two- or three-hour film. Whether you've been a fan since the first book or you've just recently jumped onboard the Hogwarts Express, we want readers to feel like they're coming home with these books.

"We know Harry Potter is immensely popular, and even with no new books or movies on the horizon he's likely to remain popular for a long time to come. We could probably make money by publishing 22-blank pages with Harry Potter's name on them every month" - the audience laughed again at this line - "but we've taken steps to secure the best talent we could, the most qualified creators in our stable and the ones we feel best suited to meeting the creative challenges presented by Harry and his world. We're pleased to announce that J. T. Krul will be spearheading the adaptation, with Philip Tan on art. I was happy to be able to work with Philip on Outsiders, and his skill has grown in leaps and bounds in the last year. When you see his Potter work, you're going to be blown away, he's really taken it to the next level."

Didio concluded his presentation with an admission of the unique opportunities presented by adapting such a popular and well-known franchise. "I think anyone coming to these books is going to be impressed, whether they've been reading comics their entire life or whether this is their first time. We know these books are going to be huge. We know that Harry Potter has the potential to be a lot of people's first comic. We want to do our best to put the medium's best foot forward."

And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World



I moved to Massachusetts in late October 2003, and began The Hurting in January of 2004. A week and a half ago I moved out of Massachusetts and back home to California. It had been, all told, an exile of exactly eleven years: I moved away from the west coast in June of 2000 (to Oklahoma, where I lived for three years), and marked my official return in July of 2011.

Moving is terrible. I've certainly done it a few times over the years: I lived in five different houses in Massachusetts, which adds up to a lot of unpleasant lifting and carrying, to say nothing of dismantling and reconstructing cheap furniture. But hopefully this will be the last move for the considerable future.

In the beginning and for a few years thereafter this blog had a decidedly more personal bent - which was not so much an intentional focus as an unavoidable consequence of the unpleasant circumstances surrounding my life at the time. I was living in the middle of what could only in hindsight be described as a slow-motion nervous breakdown, unemployed, in a shack in the middle of the woods with a crumbling marriage. (Hindsight being 20/20, the writing had been on the wall regarding the marriage for a long time, but it took a while before either of us realized that fact.) The reason this blog was titled The Hurting wasn't just tongue-in-cheek - there was a thick layer of real bleakness caked underneath the orange Blogspot template.

If you have had a blog for any amount of time, you should be intimately familiar with the unpleasant sensation of rereading your earliest posts. For me, however, the sensation is doubly unpleasant on account of the fact that my circumstances have changed to such a significant degree that I can barely recognize the person who wrote the first few years of this blog. It's been a long time since we were so poor I had to beg readers for money to buy groceries (that grocery money actually appeared is one of the great miracles of my life). It's been a long time since the "we" in question was a going concern. Now the "we" in question is entirely different, and the person with whom I moved to California represents a definite and marked improvement over the one with whom I moved to Massachusetts. I've gone from working the night shift at a children's mental hospital to working in academia. A working scholar and a teacher, of all things. Jesus H. Christ!

After having lived there for almost eight years, I can say with some degree of confidence that New England sucks. I'm sure it works fine for Andrew Weiss and Kevin Church, but I'm simply ecstatic to once again be in the land of Mike Sterling and David Brothers. It's not the winters, as most people would maintain - I grew up in the cold parts of California, after all, so I'm hardly a stranger to the snow. But there's something indefinably uncomfortable about the region, a coldness that goes deeper than the weather if you get my drift. If you weren't born there, it's hard to really make yourself fit - which is in itself an odd thing to say about a region filled to the brim with immigrants - but there you have it. Whenever people found out that I had come from California, they're first question was always "what the hell are you doing in Massachusetts?" In all the years I lived there I never found a good answer, and I still don't have one. Thankfully, it's not a problem anymore. The whole place may be two minutes away from falling down around my shoulders at any moment, but I'm back in California, and be it ever so humble there's no place like home. (And, not for nothing, it's worth pointing out that even with a crumbling infrastructure, the roads out here are still better than the roads in good ol' Taxachusetts - and no tolls to ride the damn freeway, either.)

I'm not a superstitious person - or more precisely, I'm one of those people who always likes to say he's not superstitious, but is in fact just as superstitious as the next person. It is therefore submitted without comment that upon returning to California the very first song heard on the radio in the rental car on the way from the airport to town was "Once In A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. Don't ask me how, but David Byrne knows these things.

Now might be the time you could reasonably expect me to say something along the lines that, given the change in circumstances over these past eight years, The Hurting has run its course and it's time to put the blog to bed. Well, fuck that shit, you should know me better by now. We're gonna rock it till the wheels fall off. Stay tuned for more half-assed content delivered on a completely inscrutable timetable from now until the end of the world.

DON'T BUG ME

The Two Donalds



Everyone knows Donald Duck, right? Three feet tall, orange bill, sailor suit and cap? This guy?



Donald needs no introduction. He's three years older than Superman, having first appeared in 1934's The Wise Little Hen, from back when every Disney cartoon was a "Silly Symphony." Gaining in popularity steadily throughout the 30s and into the 40s, Donald soon threatened to eclipse Mickey Mouse as Disney's most popular character - much to Walt's chagrin, if the stories are true.

But the Donald we know from the cartoons and even from his appearances in Ted Osborne and Al Taliaferro's Donald Duck newspaper strip, is not the same Donald with whom comics readers are most familiar. As you probably know, the person most closely associated with Donald and his family in comics is a man named Carl Barks.



I don't know - I can't recall - if anyone has ever pointed this out before, but Barks' Donald is not the same character as the cartoon Donald.

Go back up to the top of the post and watch a minute of that Donald cartoon. What's the first thing you notice about Donald? What's the one thing everyone knows about Donald? He talks funny. He talks like a duck. His inability to communicate properly became a trademark, much like Porky Pig's famous stammer. The Ducktales cartoon even specifically referred to it as a "speech impediment," I want to say, in order to explain the fact that literally every other duck in the world could talk normal except for Donald.

Funny voices are just not something comics can do very well. Accents are notoriously difficult, and rightly so: almost every attempt to convey a regional dialect in comics comes across as awful.



Given these limitations, it's probably a blessing that no serious attempts were ever made to replicate Clarence Nash's distinctive quack on the comics page. But in the absence of his recognizable voice, Donald slowly evolved into an entirely different character from the one in cartoons. By 1947 ("The Waltz King") this is what Donald "sounded" like in Barks' comics:



I've always suspected (perhaps its been verified elsewhere) that Barks was fully aware of the discrepancy between the way his Donald spoke and the way the cartoon Donald sounded. The comic Donald is a fast-talker, glib and confident, and that's significantly different from the way Donald was ever portrayed in the cartoons. There's a reason for this: it's impossible to imagine Barks' dialogue for Donald coming from Nash's mouth.

The nerve of that chick! Tellin' ME that I might not be able to waltz well enough to be her partner! I, who invented pressurized tails for zoot suits!

These tongue-twisters would be gibberish in duck-speak.

This is one of my favorite Donald bits, from that same year's "The Masters of Melody":



Three years earlier, the issue of Donald's voice was specifically addressed in the story "Kite Weather."





Donald puts on a show in drag by assuming a different voice altogether, including an exaggerated lisp. It's only after Donald gets popped by the boys' slingshot that he drops the act - "Oh! Oh! I know that voice!" the boys scream.

Barks' interpretation of Donald became the standard interpretation for subsequent generations of Duck artists. In 1987 Don Rosa made his entry into the field with a style that very consciously recalled Barks. His Donald was, just like Barks', an extremely verbal, even loquacious character.



But the Donald we know in the comics could never properly translate to film. When Barks' Duck stories were adapted into the widely successful Ducktales series, Donald was notably absent. He appeared in the first episode and rarely thereafter, leaving his nephews with his Uncle Scrooge to accept a new commission in the Navy.



In Barks' classic Scrooge stories, the dynamic between the flinty, uptight Scrooge and the lackadaisical Donald was central to many plots. Writing Donald out of Ducktales required significant alteration, and so the character of Launchpad McQuack was introduced as a kind of surrogate Donald. McQuack was similar enough in conception that the substitution was relatively painless. Most importantly, however, the character had no speech impediment. His dialogue would not slow down or unnecessarily complicate the expository mechanics of a fast-paced weekday-afternoon cartoon plot. I don't know exactly why Donald was written out of the series, but I can't imagine that the difficulty of understanding Donald's (instantly recognizable and thereby inalterable) voice over the course of a 22 minute cartoon was not a factor. Perhaps someone out there in readerland knows more.

What does "our" Donald sound like? Of course comic book characters exist in a silent medium, but all of us in our heads carry around some idea of what these people must sound like. From a very young age I had no trouble whatsoever discriminating between the two Donalds. I understood that the comic Donald had to have his own voice. He didn't have a noticeable speech impediment. And because I grew up with Carl Barks' stories I always felt that this Donald was the true Donald, and that the cartoon version was a bowdlerized doppelganger. In my mind Donald has always sounded just a bit like Spencer Tracy.

Superman Returns



One of the bigger mistakes (among many) that the people at DC have made in the last few years has been to almost completely disregard Clark Kent. One of the very best things to come out of Byrne's Man Of Steel revamp was his reconceptualization of Clark Kent as more than just a mask for Superman. The idea of Superman as someone fully in touch with his Kryptonian heritage and slightly removed from the run of humanity ran its course in the years leading up to the original Crisis. Introducing a Superman who never even heard the word "Krypton" until (I believe) his late teens meant giving us a Superman who believed himself to be fully, completely human in every way that mattered.

This might seem like picking nits - after all, Superman is Superman, right? - but it goes back to the compassion at the heart of Superman's character. Despite his great powers Superman really does not - cannot - believe that there is any meaningful difference between him and any other other person on the planet. He truly believe that the only thing separating himself from the run of humanity is that he has been given by accident of birth the opportunity to act on his compassion. And therefore it is necessary for him to believe himself human, to believe that as much as he is Superman he is also a man named Clark Kent who uses the means available to him in order to fight for the same ideals that Superman holds.





The biggest mistake any writer can make is to portray Superman as naive. Superman is an optimist, yes, and an idealist. He honestly and genuinely wants to see the best in every person he meets. But Clark Kent is a journalist. As a journalist he is necessarily well-acquainted with the absolute worst humanity has to offer. Different creators are inconsistent as to exactly what kind of journalist Kent is - specifics don't really matter so much. Journalism is essentially a good plot device to enable Kent to be put into a number of different situations. But whether he's walking the political beat, doing crime or business or war or even sports, Clark Kent is constantly being pulled into close contact with bad people doing worse things. Whatever kinds of corruption and cruelty might miss his eye as Superman, he sees as Kent. He's a trained investigator with a super-brain, able to sift through massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye, and probably about as shrewd and clever as he wants to be depending on his circumstances. His limitations as Kent are that his reporting is obviously limited to what he can verify as Kent with the cognitive faculties and resources of a normal human at his disposal. (It strikes me that there is a great deal of story potential to be found in the discrepancies between what Superman can know and what Clark Kent can prove.)

So it's probably fairly hard to surprise Superman. He's seen it all, either as a super hero or a journalist. And that is one very important reason why Clark Kent is so necessary to Superman: without Kent, it's easy to lose sight of how smart Superman is. He is very smart. He may not have the same instincts and specific detective experience as Batman, but he's usually able to suss things out just fine on his own. It's important to Superman not to be seen as particularly calculating or cynical - because he's neither of these things, not really. But he can be these things, and being Kent is necessary because it allows the reader to see that the character understands shrewdness and cynicism just fine. Most of the time Superman can't afford the luxury of being cynical: he has to be perceived as eternally optimistic, because that's where his power lies. He is eternally optimistic, but it's not because he's ignorant of the "facts" regarding things like recidivism rates and political corruption and ethnic cleansing. It's in spite of these things that he carries on in the face of the worst the world has to offer.

If you wanted to make the comparison to Batman, this is where the two characters differ. It's Clark Kent's job to acknowledge the hard facts and expose malfeasance, to be suspicious and to act on those suspicions. Superman presents another option: an alternative based on forgiveness and an ideal of mutual responsibility. Bruce Wayne, as a public philanthropist and not-so-public captain of industry, uses his great resources to work on the larger scale for hopeful outcomes, helping ex-cons get back on their feet and funding educational initiatives to lift the working poor out of the desperation that begets crime. But as Batman he deals with the failures of the social welfare system and is forced into close contact with the scum of humanity. Superman and Batman are both essentially two people working for the same goal, but the genius of their dual identities is such that they are each able to become their own compliment, should the need arise. It's moot since (in most incarnations) Batman and Superman always know each other's identities, but it's conceivable that a Clark Kent / Batman team up - two investigators using their minds to expose corruption - might be almost as interesting as the traditional light / dark dichotomy of the World's Finest team.





Garth Ennis is rightfully praised for Hitman #34, featuring Tommy Monaghan's first unlikely encounter with Superman. Rarely discussed is the follow-up, 2007's JLA / Hitman, a direct sequel from the first story picking up the thread of how exactly Superman would react once he knew that the man with whom he had shared such a powerful moment was, in fact, a hired assassin. Everyone in the JLA reacts to Monaghan with the same identical abhorrence - he's a killer, a mercenary, a murderer. But Superman . . . Superman can't forgive Tommy for what he's done and what he does, but by the same token he can't bring himself to condemn anyone - even a hired killer with hundreds of lives on his hands. It's not moral cowardice that compels him to great benevolence even towards his enemies, rather, it's his limitless compassion that enables him to perceive the best in even the worst specimens of humanity.

There was a truly great moment in the otherwise underwhelming conclusion of Paul Cornell's recent "Black Ring" arc in Action Comics. At the climax of the story, after chasing a serious of MacGuffins halfway across the universe and coming into contact with some of the most terrible villains in the universe (as well as Death), Lex Luthor has achieved his lifelong goal of godlike power. He has the ability to do anything - to remake the universe in his image, to create lasting prosperity, eternal peace and harmony. He even wants to do these things - but there's one thing he wants to do first and more than anything else. That's right: kill Superman. The only problem is, because of how the power works, it will only obey him if his actions are completely benevolent.



It shouldn't require any kind of spoiler warning to tell you that, of course, Lex is unable to overcome his animus against Superman, even at the highest cost imaginable. But what's Superman's first instinct, when face to face with a godlike incarnation of his single greatest enemy? Forget me, forget everything about me, he says, I'm not important, I'm every bad thing you've always said I am. Just put me aside and do something good.

Because that's what Superman is all about: everyone, even Lex Luthor, is as capable of doing good as anyone else. We all possess within us the potential to perform great acts of kindness, because simply by being human we have been given the ability to choose good over evil. Even if he's 99% certain that a person will do the wrong thing, he has to believe that, if given the chance, anyone will be able to rise up and better themselves, to be that 1% that bucks the odds and makes the world a better place. If he didn't believe that with every fiber of his being, he wouldn't be Superman.