All Apologies

Or

An Open Letter to Kyle Baker

My favorite mainstream superhero title is Kyle Baker's Plastic Man. I was excited when I first heard about the book, and my excitement did not waver when I got the first issue in my hands. It quickly became my absolute favorite.

I don't read any of DC's mainstream superhero books. I read a few Marvels, but not many. Plastic Man is a reason for me to get to the comic shop every month, without fail.

I was scanning the Pulse recently when I came across their monthly examination of DC's sales figures. I can't seem to link to the article itself so I will reproduce the numbers here:

(150) PLASTIC MAN
12/ 2003: Plastic Man #1 -- 31,512 (copies sold)
01/ 2004: Plastic Man #2 -- 22,681 (-28.0%)
02/ 2004: Plastic Man #3 -- 19,196 (-15.4%)
03/ 2004: Plastic Man #4 -- 17,191 (-10.4%)
04/ 2004: Plastic Man #5 -- 15,877 (- 7.6%)
05/ 2004: Plastic Man #6 -- 14,885 (- 6.3%)
06/ 2004: Plastic Man #7 -- 13,648 (- 8.3%)
6 months: -56.7%

"God-awful numbers. Barring a small miracle, expect PLASTIC MAN to be axed any day now."

I must admit that for the first eight months of the series' existence I didn't devote a lot of time to wondering how it was selling. Of course humor books never sell well in the direct market, but still - it was a high-profile JLA spin-off by one of the foremost cartoonists alive. if ever there was a no-brainer, it would be this.

But of course, I wasn't thinking. Sure, DC's Plastic Man Archives have been a surprise success. That series surprised more than a few by selling as briskly as it does. There have been six volumes in the series to date, whereas most Archive series are stalled at one or two volumes for lack of enthusiasm. I think a large percentage of these sales probably come from a generation of cartooning fans who were turned on to Jack Cole's work by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd's Forms Stretched to Their Limits essay book. I would predict that Fantagraphics' recent collection of Cole's pin-up work will see similarly brisk sales. My holy grail remains a collection of Cole's full-color Playboy work, and perhaps we shall see that sooner rather than later.

But all this attention to Cole has not necessarily meant an increase in attention for Plastic Man as a character. Its not hard to see why: the character has always been so intimately identified with his creator that any attempt at updating or modernizing him has come across as unbelievably limp. Mostly, the character is represented as a wise-cracking buffoon, a pliable court-jester in the Justice League. Not hard to see why no-one likes him.

But Kyle Baker gets it. He gets that Plastic Man isn't a comedian. Plastic Man is, oddly, the straight man in his own adventures. His body and his powers are odd and funny, but his own personality, as defined by Cole, is about as low-key and easy-going as it gets. Everything around him is strange, and that's the beauty. Anyone who tackles Plastic Man has to be able to grasp what Cole was trying to accomplish, by making their comics pages as gleefully wacky as Plastic Man is able to make his body.

Baker doesn't have a lot of patience for the self-importance in modern superhero comic books, and neither do I. His latest storyline, beginning with issue eight, stands poised to take the piss out of just about every unbearably pretentious and unbelievably silly trend in superhero storytelling of the past few years. The fanboys will scream and moan, undoubtedly - the few who actually read the book, that is. It's obvious not many of them are.

I wish I could make some sort of point out of this. I wis hI could say "this is proof that the direct market is broken" or "this proves that superhero fans are philistines". I'm not going to use this is an excuse to trot out any of these tired arguments, because I don't want to get into any arguments.

The fact is, I will be very sad to see Plastic Man go. It seems to have drifted down past the point where mainstream DCU titles are routinely cancelled, and is headed towards levels where even Vertigo titles are axed. We are probably well beyond the point where a reader initiative a la Spider-Girl would do any help - Spider-Girl sells about twice as many copies as Plastic Man does. I don't think the book would necessarily appeal to kids, either, because even though its drawn in an appealingly cartoony manner, the humor is too conceptual and sophisticated to appeal to the kindergarten set. It is that rarest of superhero titles: a book intended to be enjoyed by intelligent and discriminating readers with a wide knowledge of the medium's proud and distinguished history. Are there that few of us?

Part of being a comics fan is having favorite titles that come and go, while mediocre books that no-one admits to reading are consistent sellers. The direct-market comics industry just can't support anything even slightly left-of-center. Even most hardcore superhero titles fail to find an audience, becuase there are only so many readers left, and those readers only have so much money.

I feel bad for Kyle Baker. He gets nothing but praise for his graphic novels, which are perrenial "real world" successes. His latest, Birth Of A Nation, written by The Boondocks' Aaron McGruder, will almost undoubtedly be a success as well, perhaps his biggest to date. But whenever he comes back to the ghetto of mainstream comics, he gets a proverbiual heap of shit for his efforts. Never mind that The Truth was a beautifully produced, thought-provoking and intelligent examination of racism and war - there are hundreds of retailers across the country who are using unsold copies of the book for insulation. The reason for this can probably be placed on Baker's artwork. Only in comics could an instantly accessable, easy-to-read and blatantly commercial art style like Kyle Baker's be so radically unpopular. The man is one of the most gifted natural cartoonists of his generation, and in the superhero direct market he can't even get arrested. No wonder he's so fucking cynical.

But it boils down to this: I wish Plastic Man wasn't selling so poorly. Its not as if Baker's going ot have any trouble finding something to do when the book inevitably gets canned, but I like what he's doing now. I'll continue buying Plastic Man for as long as they continue making it, putting it right on top of my pile every month until it no longer exists. And when it is gone, my already thin pile of monthly comic purchases will become that much smaller.

Tales of Terror, Rutland Edition

I had an interesting conversation with my wife on the way home from the comic book shop today.

It had been a while since I had had any scratch for comics so I was actually catching up on a few things that have been out for a while - stuff like Eightball #23, TCJ #261, and the enormous Savage Dragon #115. I forgot that Seaguy #3 was out or I would have grabbed that as well.

Man, is it me or has Gilbert Hernandez been eating his wheaties? I also bought Love & Rockets #11 and Luba #8 today. Seems like L&R #10 was only a couple months ago, and the last Luba's Comics & Stories was just about a month ago. And the ad on the inside cover says that the next issue of Luba C&S is coming out in September - which is next freakin' month! Like, I'm used to Fantagraphics artists just sort of not doing anything, and now he's putting out about as much as Erik Larsen currently is (of course, Larsen also got hampered by suddenly becoming a publisher, but still, he's supposed to be the fastest pencil this side of Sergio Aragones). Gilbert's also got another freakin' graphic novel (or limited series? don't remember) coming out from Vertigo. I don't know what he's smoking but God-damn I wish he'd ship some over to Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Joe Matt (especially Joe Matt, come to think of it).

Anyway, back to the conversation.

I was flipping through the new issue of the Journal in the car and showed the cover - the Phoebe Gloeckner photo cover - to my wife. She looked at it and had a - shall we say - extremely negative reaction. I shall attempt to boil down the main thrusts of her argument:

Why is it that no male cartoonists have photo covers? Why is it that regardless of whether or not a female cartoonist's work is acclaimed or respected, there's still a premium on her being attractive that wouldn't be there for a male cartoonist?



I explained to her that Gloeckner, as with every cover-featured Journal interviewee, designed and crafted her own cover. In other words, she chose to have the photo cover, she took the photo herself, and she even chose the silly captions on said photo cover. I also explained that, even though I'm not as well-versed in Gloeckner's work as I could be, I knew that her comics specialized in multi-media experimentation and cross-contextual narrative - in addition to a hearty dose of veiled autobiography. So, in other words, a photo cover was definitely appropriate (or at least more appropriate than it would have been for, say, Kurt Busiek or Peter Kuper).

But still - she maintained - why did she do it? I don't think being a "feminist" means that you have to deny your femininity, but there are so many mixed messages sent by our culture on so many different levels. The question remains: if she were a handsome man, would she have had any desire to expose her face on a photo cover? The Journal always prints a nice photo with their interviews, its not as if people wouldn't get to see her. Furthermore, it seems an odd choice whenever a comics magazine does a photo cover.

I explained the Journal's torrid history with photo covers - the horrible Marv Wolfman cover and the just not very good (albeit not horrible, just not spectacular) Victor Moscoso photo cover. These were the only two I could remember off the top of my head, but there are probably a few I'm forgetting.

I hate sounding like Dave Sim on this point - (Dave Sim is something of a generic bugbear in our household - "be good or Dave will come and tell you about how YHWH controls the feminist/homsexualist axis from the center of the Earth!") - but I don't see how you can be a "feminist" - wanting to be treated totally equal to a man in terms of the way you're worth is preceived by the world - if such a big part of your artistic presentation revolves around your picture on the cover of a magazine. If you're a guy, no-one cares what you look like. But if you're a woman, it is naturally accepted that the way you look will be an integral part of your "persona". Furthemore, that comic strip on the back cover seemed silly - like she was trying to "excuse" her vanity by being self-consciously weird and "artistic".

When she saw that I was writing up this conversation for my blog, she wanted to assure my gentle readers that she's not a man-hating diesel dyke or anything like that.

I also think - she adds - that it sucks that feminism has to focus so much on appearances, either in the positive or the negative. Why does is matter what she looks like, either way? Why should I care? Does the fact that I'm even wrestling with this problem mean that Dave Sim has won?

I think her point has some validity, although because of the fact that I am not a Gloeckner expert - I haven't even read the interview yet - I don't have enough context to judge the cover in the framework of her career as a whole.

But there's one thing of which I am sure:



DAVE SIM ALWAYS WINS!!!

Adendum: I was just flipping through the Journal on the john: um, how come no one ever mentioned the fact that Sleeper is a Gen-13 spinoff? I mean, come on, people. The most critically acclaimed mainstream comic of the last year is a Gen-13 spinoff? Oh, I'm laughing. I'm soooo glad I never picked it up.

Super, Thanks For Asking

Well, for some reason I just haven't got much work done at all the past few days. I really couldn't tell you why. Nothing really strange has been going on, except my computer's long slow death. There will be a reformatting soon, and I am not looking forward to this. I am having to use the Wife's computer in order to do a number of things, which makes life insanely difficult. Having two computers should ideally mean that there are no arguments over when to use the computer... but when one of the computers is shitting its pants on a regular basis it creates problems.

So, anyway.

Some of you (well, OK, probably just Slote) may have been wondering just where our old pal Chinese Bizarro Spider-Man had gotten off to. Well, he's finally landed on the first leg of his adventures. Check it out here, courtesy of our new pal Jamie Tarquini, aka: pmpknface. He says there'll be some sort of magic contest to decide where Spidey gets to go next , so I'd be on the look out! Any new revelations will be posted here as well, of course. I really would like to know just what Mr. Turtle did to deserve suc ha sound thrashing. Is he an evil turtle?

Could Aquaman talk to a turtle? Thay're amphibeans, I think, so they spend at least part of the time in the water. Aquaman talks to whales, dolphins, lobsters and eels, and they're not fish. Maybe Aquaman could get to the bottom of why the turtle is so cranky. And dude, I always new CBS-M was a ladies man, but he's cold gettin' fresh with Batgirl there. I guess he's just suave like that.

Anyway, nothing new and fun today. If you're bored, check out any of my reviews on the sidebar. Hell, go over to the Wife's site and check out one of her mixes - you'll probably be glad you did. Tell her Aquaman sent you.

Get Me My Flagon of Mead, You Comely Wench

So, like, what's up with Modest Mouse? I never had much use for them before but that new song of theirs seems to be following me around. It's got a nice beat but the thing that throws me is that whenever the guy opens his mouth to sing he sounds like a semi-retarded idiot manchild. Maybe it's just me.

Apparently Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag's recent road trip took her down I-5 through the heart of Northern California. Which would mean she passed through my ancestral home of Siskyou County, where my friends and my parents still reside. If you're driving down 5 just south of the Oregon border you pass within eyeshot of my old high school, and my parents to this day live about five miles east of the freeway, as the crow flies. It's beautiful country but about as depopulated as you can get in California... and seeing pictures of places I remember very intimately from my youth taken with Aquaman is slightly surreal. I've spoken in the past about the fact that I just don't "get" the Aquaman fetish thing, but I realize that my recent voluminous Quasar posts probably mean that I don't have a leg to stand on, "pot" and "kettle" comparisons being somewhat apt. Still, Quasar could kick Aquaman's ass any day of the week.



I can tell you exactly where this photo was taken. My parents still live in Weed, and it's got probably the best view of the mountain in the area. Mt. Shasta itself is too close to the base of the mountain, so it's hard to gain perspective. Dunsmuir is down in a gully and Yreka proper has no view because the city lies just north of a small range of hills which obscure the view (although if you go on the hills just west of Yreka you get a fabulous long-range view). Weed, however, is perfectly placed for a medium-range view of the mountain. The only reason my parents don't have a killer view at their place is a copse of about half a dozen trees. Otherwise, the mountain is omnipresent anywhere and everywhere you go.

You don't realize just how much you take these things for granted until you are gone. I lived in Oklahoma for a while, and they don't have so much as a hillock in the entire damn state. Going home periodically I am filled anew with appreciation for the natural beauties of Northern California. I didn't appreciate it when I was younger as much as I could have, but having lived all across this country in various places, and especially after having endured the almost desolate flatness of the Midwest, I appreciate the splendor of California's natural resources all the more.



I am pretty sure this was taken at a vista point just north of Yreka, where I spent a few evenings in high school just chillin'. I think my buddy D stole a road sign from here, but I can't for the life of me remember what the road sign said. The memory is the first to go.

Finally, a few people have mentioned this.

There's an unwritten rule that says that regardless of who gets what award, in any awards event, there is no bitching by any of the participants. This means that all the losers have to smile graciously and continue to parrot that "it was a pleasure just being nominated" and all that crap. It's silly and we know they're pissed, but its also civil and decent. If you won, you wouldn't want anyone raining on your parade by being pissed, would you? Bill Murray was very visibly upset when he lost to Sean Penn at this year's Academy Awards. It was a telling, very human moment, but it looked odd considering just how robotically gracious most people in entertainment take losing. It's their job to look nice, even when they want to go kick over a vending machine.

But by that same token, there's another unwritten rule about the fact that under no circumstances should the winner ever say anything but the most gracious things about their vanquished foes. Everyone else can bitch and moan all they want about who got robbed or who didn't deserve or whatever... but it's expected that the winners and the losers stay silent on the manner. It's just good form. You don't gloat, you don't justify, you don't explain. You smile.

So by coming out and saying what he said, Bob Greenberger looks very, very petty.

Besides the fact, it should go without saying - even though, if Greenberger's reaction is to be judged, it doesn't - that this is a travesty under any circumstances. I don't put any stock into most awards, and considering the fractious nature of the comics world, I put even less stock into comics awards. But why the hell couldn't we have at least given one of those stupid awards to a book that was unbelievably deserving, just this once? There's not a one of the four other nominated books that would have been unworthy of winning. I have them all on my shelf and they're all beautiful, simply fantastic objects in and of themselves, even without taking the content into consideration. If I had had a ballot, I think that despite my stated affection for Louis Riel, I would have voted for The Frank Book... but I also think I have what you might term an "unhealthy fascination" with that particular artifact. (Let's just say I can stare into its hypnotically brilliant pages for hours at a time, totally oblivious to the world around me. There's a kind of drug in the printers ink, I am certain...)

I can tell you exactly why Batman won: the vote split. Of the four deserving books, there was no clear winner that stood above the others. Each probably garnered a healthy slice of the vote. But given the catholic nature of the Eisner balloting process, there were just enough devoted fanboys who had probably never cracked a copy of Acme Novelty Library or Love & Rockets and voted for Batman out of some sort of deep-seated knee-jerk Pavlovian reaction to spandex stimulus. If there had only been one or two clearly superior products, Batman wouldn't have stood a chance. But since there were four more-or-less equally brilliant competitors in the same field, they deadlocked, and Batman won.

So enjoy your award, Mr. Greenberger. You won it, fair and square. Congratulations. But don't try our patience by defending your victory. Under the best of circumstances it would be tacky. Under these circumstances, you look like a fool.

What sort of a field is this in which we toil? Imagine, if you will, a Pulitzer nomination field including works by Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillio and Toni Morrison, but wherein the victorious book turned out to be... the latest novel in The Destroyer series by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir. It could be the best gosh-darn Remo Williams novel in history, but I'll be damned if you're going to convince me, under any circumstances, that it would deserve to win in such a field. That's the equivalent to what we've got here. Pretty damn sad.

Tomorrow will see either a new installment of Travels With Larry or Can't Riel Just Get Along?, which I feel like doing. Until then...

Part Two – The Irascible History

Before the first issue of Louis Riel was released, way back in the last millenium, I knew as much about the life and times of Riel as the average American: that is, nothing.

I consider myself a reasonably educated person. I’ve studied history extensively, in college and in general. I like to think that at the very least I have an above-average understanding of the history of our country and of our world, enough to give me a layman’s grasp of most anything I come across. But there are always blind spots, and until I began thinking about Louis Riel, it did not occur to me just how much of a blind spot Canada represented.

In most American history classes, the importance of Canada is usually undersold. The development of the colonial system in North America is usually covered up to the point where the initial thirteen colonies revolt and the Canadian territories do not. Considering the fact that we share our largest border with Canada, this seems somewhat foolish, but no one ever said that America couldn’t be chauvinistic on occasion.

So I came to Louis Riel with no expectations or preconceived notions. Not knowing anything about the story, I had no set notions in regard to the historical disputes. Not knowing anything about the man, I had the envious privilege of seeing Chester Brown’s story unfold independent of any expectations whatsoever.

Louis Riel was born October 22, 1844 in the area that would later be called Winnipeg, in Manitoba. The settlements along the Red River were populated by a mixture of English and Metis settlers. The Metis were a primarily French-speaking group composed of mixed-race descendents of the area’s original native American population and French settlers who originally explored the region. Naturally, they were also predominantly Catholic.

Whereas the late 1800s saw the United States already well ensconced as a national power and fighting a bloody civil war between two factions of rival states, the same period saw Canada struggling to cohere on a national level. The events which conspired to create Riel’s unusual career were the outcome of a particularly strange series of historical anomalies. At the same time that Britain was fighting across the globe to conquer and keep multiple colonial properties, her holdings in Canada were only loosely overseen. In July of 1861, the British North American Act created the confederation of Canada, a self-governed subject of the British crown composed of four colonies: Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. (Quebec and Ontario had previously been joined, in 1840, into a single Dominion of Canada, before being split again in 1867, into majority English and French speaking areas [Ontario and Quebec, respectively]).

The land to the west of the newly consolidated Canada was called Rupert’s Land, named for Price Rupert, the first chairman of the Hudson Bay company. The Hudson Bay company had been granted exclusive economic dominion over the region during the reign of King Charles II. By the late 1800s the growing trend towards Canadian nationalism made the prospect of an unconglomerated Rupert’s Land untenable, so the Hudson Bay company negotiated an extremely lucrative contract with the newly formed Canadian government in 1869, ceding the territory to Canada. The Hudson Bay company relinquished their previous economic monopoly in the region in exchange for 7,045,000 plum acres and unrestricted trade therein.

John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, was a canny operator. He knew that the tumultuous ethnic composition of the Rupert’s Land settlements would make it difficult to install the kind of English-majority government he desired. The example of Quebec still sat uneasily in the minds of the Canadian government, and Macdonald had no desire to create another province dominated by the notoriously fractious French-speaking Catholics. So territorial elections were postponed and William McDougall was appointed territorial governor. It was believed that McDougall, a Protestant and member of the notorious anti-Catholic Orange Order, would be able to successfully accomplish the dual goals of restraining the Metis population and deterring Quebecois emigration to the new territory.

(As an aside, I find it especially chilling that Macdonald was so ready to tempt the fates by summoning the exact same confluence of forces that had created ethnic and religious turmoil in occupied Ireland for hundreds of years – with repressive Orangemen set against loyal Catholics. I’m over a hundred years removed from Ireland but there’s still a strong racial memory there. Of course, the eventual civil rebellion would take a decidedly different tone than the Irish uprisings, and considering the deadly and persistent nature of the Irish conflicts, the people of modern-day Manitoba have much to be grateful for.)

Of course, Macdonald was all too eager to lay claim to Canada’s new territory. Accordingly, the Metis along the Red River settlements were not eager to cede their territorial autonomy on the whims of the Hudson Bay company. Some of them wondered as to how legitimate the company’s claim stood in reference to land which had been inhabited by the Metis and their ancestors for - in some cases - hundreds of years prior to the Hudson Bay company’s incorporation.

The Metis, led by Riel, organized in order to repulse the Canadian government’s premature survey teams. Further, McDougall was denied access to the territory by the new Metis authority. Riel’s position of primary authority in the rebellion was almost accidental: he was the only person in the nearby settlement who spoke enough English to communicate with the survey teams and the subsequent Canadian government representatives.

Riel’s youth presents an inauspicious foundation for his career in politics. He learned English while attending seminary in Montreal. A youthful love affair led him away from the priesthood. After a period spent as a clerk in a law office, Riel returned to the Red River area. He was all of twenty-five when the rebellion began.

In the history of armed uprisings, the initial Red River rebellion was remarkably successful. McDougall was effectively barred from entering the territory, and he returned to Ottawa in disgust. A provisional government was formed, with Riel as the titular and eventual literal figurehead. Despite persistent trouble from a committed group of English loyalists (spurred in places by McDougall), the provisional government is formed with an even split of Metis and English representatives. The legitimacy of the government is thereby easily established. It was decided that the provisional government would enter into negotiations with the Canadian government to allow the region a fair and equitable entrance into Canada.

Despite an instance of vote rigging by the Hudson Bay company that almost resulted in bloodshed, the entire affair was remarkably bloodless. If the story had ended here, Manitoba would have successfully engineered their entrance into the Canadian body politic without any taint of violence, and Riel’s reputation would have remained intact. If this had occurred, perhaps the Metis would have been better able to negotiate the circumstances springing from the Canadian government’s inevitable betrayals. But of course, events soon escalated beyond the ability of Riel to control, and a series of unfortunate lapses in judgement eventually led him down the path of no return, and into a moral, political and psychological no-man’s-land.