At the very end of 1973 I was lurking about in a Woolworth’s in downtown Montreal. I was suffering from my worst case of comics envy ever.
I was seduced by the graphic novels rack. That’s not what it was called, but that’s what it was. Dozens of titles by Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), Phillipe Druillet, and all kinds of master comics creators the likes of which we had not seen in the States. Beautiful stuff. I could follow much of the storytelling but little of the story itself.
I was also seduced by the wide range of subject material, with nary a cape in sight. Western, science fiction, private eye, romance, ennui-ridden existentialism, and stuff that seemed as though it was influenced by lysergic acid diethylamide the likes of which we never had on St. Mark’s Place. In short order I stumbled upon equally awesome material from Japan and Italy and, possibly, Mars. I experienced a beautiful work covering the widest range of subject matter imaginable. But in comics, such a range was not imaginable, not in the United States.
A couple years later the National Lampoon folks started up Heavy Metal, and while it wasn’t as interesting as it could have been, the new magazine got this material out there. At worst, it was a gallon of water brought to the desert. At best, Heavy Metal was a door opener.
One might think that a logical way of dealing with my comics envy would be to learn a foreign language – certainly French or Japanese. No such luck. Like most Americans I’m lacking in the foreign language learning gene: I took five years of Spanish and lived (and now live) in neighborhoods with or near a significant Latino population and I can barely mumble a few phrases, “perdóname” being my most heavily used.
38 years later a lot of wonderful material has been translated – but that’s not the best part. The best part is, the American comics medium has grown to the point where we now create stories that cover many of the genres that we see overseas. Not anywhere near all, but many. We still don’t have comics for senior citizen grandmothers the way they do in Japan, but we’ve gone a lot further than the 1973 diet of capes, muscles, some horror, a few klutzy teenagers, and a smattering of “children’s comics.” For one thing, we are finally seeing something of a return of children’s comics, thanks to outfits like Boom! and Ape.
Sadly, we’re not seeing a lot of sales in these categories. Most comics shops really can’t afford to risk stocking them in any depth and then promoting them to the appropriate audiences, and most publishers – maybe all of them, now that the tide has changed at DC and Marvel – really can’t afford to help them in any dramatic and useful way.
Maybe electronic distribution will change all that. Clearly, it’s the best way right now to attract new readers, but the promotion budget has to be there and that ain’t easy.
Here’s an interesting holiday recipe – take a popular stoner comedy franchise, toss in some claymation and even a musical number. It’s A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3-D CHRISTMAS, destined to burn up DVD shelves after it escapes theaters. We talk to John Cho & Kal Penn about how they’ve changed even if their movie counterparts haven’t. Plus more with Ed GHelms on how THE OFFICE still owes so much to Steve Carrel, and DC breaks even bigger comic sales records in October.
I’ve had some medical tests recently. Seems I have heart palpitations; lordy me, Ah do seem to be a swoon and mint julep away from being a Southern belle. (Hm. Wonder if they make chocolate mint juleps?) It means that my heart skips a beat every so often.
So I went to a cardiologist and he set up a battery of tests to see what this all means. In the first one, they injected a radioactive tracer so they could then do X-rays of my heart from different angles and see what’s going on.
I was ready. I knew the score. If comic books have taught me anything, it’s that radioactivity triggers a DNA change and gives you super-powers. Prime example is Spider-Man – got his powers from a radioactive spider, right? The Hulk got his from gamma radiation, which is a type of nuclear radiation, right? And it was a stress test, okay? What happens when you combine radiation and stress? The Hulk.
So I figured the radioactive stuff would combine maybe with X-rays and I’d get X-ray vision whenever I stressed out. Or maybe a bug might creep into the machine and I’d get X-ray and bug like powers. Spider-Hulk.
All I got was a bill. Not a duck bill. Or a goose bill. I received a financial statement saying I owed them money. What a rip off!
They also did what is called an “Echo Test” a couple of days later. It’s like when they do a sonogram for pregnant women using ultrasound only they do it for the heart. Ultrasound, eh? Okay, that could become something. Something ultra. I know the Ultra line was a failed bunch of comics for Malibu that Marvel bought up and forgot they had until recently… but it could maybe work, right? Combine ultrasound with the radioactive particle and the stress test and maybe I wind up with ultra hearing and X-ray vision. Add in any Hulk-like side effects and now we’re getting somewhere!
Zap. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. That’s what I’ve gotten. So far.
When they did the second part of the stress test, I had a choice. I could climb on a treadmill and get my heart rate up to a certain point or they could do it via an injection of chemicals that would also make my heart beat faster. Of course, some of the shots of the naked Scarlett Johansson – soon to return as the Black Widow in The Avengers flick – that popped up on the web would also probably do the trick but I wasn’t offered that option.
It was a hard choice. We all know about the treadmill in The Flash and how he uses it combined with his superspeed for time travel. Maybe being on the treadmill would combine with an increased heartbeat and would trigger the change. Seemed reasonable.
I opted, however, for the chemical version for three reasons. One – that seemed more likely to interact with the other events and convert my DNA to complete the change. Two – if I got superspeed and went back in time, I might change a little something that would induce a reboot of reality and DC just did that and it resulted in a skinny Amanda Waller. Third – I could do the test lying down. At my age, if you can do something lying down, that’s the option you take.
So I got the chemicals injected, waited forty minutes for them to travel through my system, and went back for more x-rays. I had high hopes for this one. I’d seen Captain America – The First Avenger and that’s more or less what they did with Steve Rogers: injected him with chemicals and bathed him in rays. That turned out pretty spiffy, right? Not only did he get turned into Captain America but it was a pretty darn good superhero film to boot.
SPOILER WARNING: There are no spoilers. You already can guess the outcome. I just got test results is all. They said I was normal. Normal. Since when?
I go in to see the cardiologist next week to get the findings. Friends have suggested that all I’ll get told is that I have an overheated imagination.
There are few songwriters – few writers – I respect more than Pete Townshend. Were this a music column I’d go into detail why I hold this belief, but today in this venue he’s a means to an end.
Last week, Pete (okay, we’re not on a first name basis; the only time we were within 10 feet was when he bashed my boss in the back of his head with his guitar) accused Apple’s iTunes online retail store of being a “digital vampire.” His analysis was fraught with mistakes and revealed a genuine lack of knowledge of the situation. He was defending a system that treated him and his band, The Who, very, very well – a system that no longer exists as a creative outlet for newcomers going back at least a full generation. He also mistook iTunes for a label and not what it actually is: a retail outlet. A very successful one, but then again Pete’s net worth is in the neighborhood of $75,000,000 – a true one-percenter – so success isn’t the issue here.
What does this have to do with the wonderful world of comics? Hang on. I’ll get there.
Pete also said “It would be better if music lovers treated music like food, and paid for every helping, rather than only when it suited them … Why can’t music lovers just pay for music rather than steal it?” That’s the heart of my diatribe today: people who sort of steal artists’ works instead of paying for it.
Bootlegging is a serious issue, but more a moral one than financial. Sure, Disney and Warners will bitch about all the milions they’re losing but that’s because they see every bootlegged item as a lost sale. Few are.
When it comes to comics, sometimes it’s a matter of convenience. Some people boot stuff they’ve already purchased because they prefer reading on a tablet. After all, we’re in our third generation of comics fans who go bugfuck whenever somebody folds the cover back in order to read the damn thing. Still others are sampling new wares: with literally over 300 new comics released each month and maybe a third of them brand-new titles or “reboots” (a word with unintended irony) a reader can’t afford to sample even a fraction of the new stuff.
And then there are the idiots. Stupid people who live the life of Wile E. Coyote until they finally look down.
Our buddy Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool reports of a guy named Stephen Chandler out in Glasgow, Scotland who is offering every comic book published each month by the “major” publishers (DC, Marvel, IDW, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, and perhaps others) in electronic form for the low price of about $27.00 a month – 20 Euros, so the price fluctuates.
His is a for-profit operation. No matter what you think of readers downloading comics illegally, this guy is taking money out of publishers’ pockets. Most publishers can’t afford that; even the big guys are responsible for delivering an acceptable bottom line to their masters.
Steve, pal… look. Maybe your heart is in the right place. Most comics readers pay more than $27 a month for a fraction of the content you’re delivering on disc. And you’re entitled to a reasonable profit for your work. But that’s only in the sense that Al Capone was entitled to a reasonable profit for his work.
Eventually, Wile E. Coyote looked down. So will you, Steve. You work and perhaps live near the All-Saints Secondary School. You might dine at the Delhi Darber. Maybe you drink at the Aushinairn Tavern and shop at Asda Robroyston. Or perhaps you go to the Food Cooperative off of Wallacewell Road.
Typing that title hurt. A lot. It’s been stated here time and again: I am a Kyle Rayner fan. Here I sit, sarcasm sitting in its glass jar next to me, legitimately about to make the argument that my favorite character in comics be given a dirt nap… and I don’t mean the Steve Rogers–Bruce Wayne dirt nap kiddos. I mean the Gwen Stacy sleep of the pulpy gods. But why, you ask, would I suggest such a fate to the character that inspired this bearded bloke to make comics himself? I paraphrase Dr. Denis Leary:
“Elvis Presley should have been shot in the head back in 1957. Somebody should’ve walked up behind Elvis in ‘57 with a 44 magnum, put the barrel of the gun right up to his brainstem and just pulled the trigger, so you can remember Elvis in a nice way. Wouldn’t it be nice to remember Elvis thin, with a big head of hair? Maybe that gold lame suit. Wouldn’t that be nice? Because how do you remember Elvis? You know how you remember Elvis. He was found in the toilet with his pants around his ankles and his big fat hairy sweaty king of rock and roll ass exposed to the world and his final piece of kingly evidence floating in the toilet behind him!”
And as I look on the career of Kyle, since 2005, I see a fat Elvis, crapping on the pot.
Kyle Rayner was brought into the fold of DC Comics in January of 1994. After they wrote off Hal Jordon as a villain-turned-martyr, they introduced new blood into the comic. Kyle represented everything Hal didn’t. He was timid, indecisive, and anything but fearless. All he was, was a kid with an amazing imagination. A kid given the ultimate toy, and a universe to save. For lack of a better M.O., Kyle Rayner was DC’s Spider-Man. An everykid being shown that with great power rings comes great responsibility. It was a bold move. And over ten years he was given free reign to learn, and grow. I grew with him. Kyle joined the Justice League (during the fantastic Morrison run), and became the POV character we could get behind. While Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman were the serious heroes, Kyle was the kid who could still yell “cool!” Simply put, with Kyle Rayner, DC had the bold and inventive reboot they’re so desperate to have now.
In 2005, Dan DiDio and Geoff Johns decided that the comic book world had enjoyed too much of this “modern” era and declared the silver age be reborn! Hal Jordan was resurrected, and with it took every last ounce of thunder Kyle had mustered in his 10 year tenure as the torch bearer. This is the moment folks, where, had I the will power, I would politely take Rayner’s ring and hurl it into the sun. Ever since “Rebirth” Rayner has floundered, flopped, and died a slow and pitiful character death. Ask ole’ Geoff or Dan, and I’m sure they’d feed you a brilliant line on how he’s still “relevant and as awesome as ever!”… Let’s go to the tape!
Since 2005, Kyle Rayner has… uh… got chummy with Guy Gardner… and… became Ion until they gave that to another alien we’ve since forgotten about… and … uh… got taken into Parallax for an issue… put on a blue lantern ring for a day… oh! And at some point his mom died, and he lost 17 girlfriends. Some died. Some blew up. Others turned out to have daddy issues. Ain’t it riveting?
Simply put, with Hal as the lead green meanie, Kyle fails to matter in the great scheme of things. As Barry Allen came back put Wally West out of a job, so too, does Kyle remain a waste of ink. The whole concept of legacy is so strong at DC (far more than Marvel…), but with the reboot, and continual Geoff Johning of the multiverse… legacy is fast becoming nothing more than an MMO title.
And so, this September, DC rebooted its entire universe. With Hal continuing to be the star of the flagship series (mainly because he was the star in a wonderful flop of a film this summer…), and John Stewart (affirmative action at it’s best!) and Guy Gardner (because we all love angry Irish guys, right?) over on GL Corpse (pun intended), what was Kyle given to do? Well, with GL: New Guardians… He’s the top banana in an adventure that will undoubtedly:
1. Have him shack up with a random space chick. And then she’ll die.
2. Have him wear a plethora of rings, resulting in him changing costumes 10 more times.
3. Remove any semblance of his character, and have him shout various generically heroic things as he saves the day.
4. At some point, he’ll mention all the good things he’s done as a Green Lantern, reminding us Raynernauts that he mattered there, for a while.
5. He’ll grow a bitchin’ half-beard.
I’ve been through the first two issues of the series. I’ve yet to be impressed. It’s like a cattle call for all the last two years worth of Lantern D-listers, all brought together for yet-another-unforeseen-prophetic-battle. Rayner will end up working with Bleez (the slutty Red Lantern), Arkillo (the tongue-less Kilowog of the Sinestro Corps), the Orange jelly-bean thing from Larfleeze’s lantern, Fatality (the only character in the DCU to have even less to do since Kyle Rayner’s original run on GL), an Indigo Lantern (who we still know nothing about, nor care about at this point) and Saint Walker (all will be well, and have some milk!).
Two issues in and nothing has happened. Seriously. 40 pages of content that has seemingly set up a single final splashpage of him in some kind of White-Lantern getup. As if we haven’t seen that before?
Ultimately, if DC wanted to ‘shake things up’ with their reboot, it was the perfect time to shed some dead weight. Since the love affair with all things Silver Age is still in full swing, the world simply doesn’t need a Kyle Rayner. And as one of his biggest fans, I’d much rather have seen him retire his ring for a desk job… instead of continuing to not-matter in the grand scheme of things. He could take a seat next to Wally, and they could simply wait until the next crisis. Or until someone recalls why he mattered in the first place.
[[[Government Issue: Comics For The People, 1940s-2000s]]] By Richard L. Graham Abrams Comic Arts, 304 pages, $29.95
The rich history of comics is also one of the public’s perception of it being mainly for children. What is only recently being uncovered are the many ways comics have been used beyond cheap entertainment for the masses. As early as 1940, Will Eisner saw their potential and he was among the first to use the graphic form for educational purposes with what became P*S, the preventative maintenance magazine produced by the Army. During World War II, Stan Lee wrote comics to explain how forms need to be filled out and DC Comics did special editions of Superman to help teach America’s soldiers to improve their reading.
Now, we’re learning that the Federal Government has long been a proponent of using comics as educational and propaganda tool, dating back to the field’s infancy. Thankfully, Richard Graham has done the spadework that has uncovered the full flavor of material offered using your tax dollars. Government Issue is actually an important addition to our comics history, demonstrating the reach of the format and the value placed on its ability to communicate with the masses
Graham organizes his book by different subject matter – “military,” “employment and economics,” “Civil Defense, Safety and Health,” and “Landscapes and Lifestyles” – so you can get a better sense of how far-ranging this had become. And like most government operations, there was no central plan or design; no comics czar to ensure federally-produced comics met certain criteria for quality of accuracy. As a result, we see a variety of writing and artistic styles brought to bear in conveying the information to its intended audience. One of the worst results of this lack of control has to be the ham-fisted writing and terrible artwork accepted by the military for a piece on how homosexuals should consider admitting their persuasion to superior officers during the period of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
“You can’t go back home” Thomas Wolfe wrote in a novel and I cry, amen. When I return to visit relatives in Missouri, I find the city I left almost 50 years ago strange and, in places, unrecognizable – alien, even. And last week I visited DC Comics, my employer and sustainer for decades, and found it much changed, beginning with the entrance to the building and the security forces guarding the lobby. I was told that if I wanted to see the floor that once housed Mad Magazine, I’d better hurry because it was being gutted, and the corridors leading to where I had to be were cluttered with cardboard boxes.
Maybe the whole experience was just a little forlorn?
But after a long and pleasant conversation with Dan DiDio, who honchos the company’s editorial department, I thought that perhaps the company is, in a modest, limited, yet quite good way going home again and we funny book aficionados will benefit.
The home that’s DC’s destination? Why, old comics. I mean, really old. Really old. Your grandpa’s comics, published before Marvel made continued stories the norm in the 60s. Stories of six, eight ten, maybe 12 pages, complete in one issue. (And a bunch of them in the – sigh – 52 page total package. Which cost a dime.)
An eight page story? A story even shorter than eight pages? Bizarre, you say?
No, not bizarre, Maybe even beneficial. Indulge me while I quote something I wrote a while back: Every story has to end with a lesson learned, an evil thwarted, a problem solved, a defeat, a triumph – some kind of resolution. The events of the story show how that resolution occurs. And if the writer doesn’t know how his story will end he can’t create a logicalprogression of scenes leading to that ending…writing an eight-pager forces the writer to know his ending before he submits the manuscript. (Except in rare cases, the beginning and end are in the same sheaf of pages, or email.)
So, knowing what his destination is, the writer can move toward it confidently instead of – brace for metaphors! – stumbling around the narrative thickets hoping to find a path. And limited length forces the writer to write only those scenes that move the plot along and this, in turn, tends to keep the story interesting: no pointless digressions to create ennui and yawns.
So: DC Comics is going to give us a glut of short fiction? No, of course not. But Dan told me that most story arcs would be limited to six issues – not exactly haiku territory, but not a completely open-ended narrative that will meander into the murk until somebody figures out how it might end, either. And writers must tell someone – probably an editor – something about the tale that’s to be told. Again, no making it up as you go along, with no clear plan on how the pieces will fit together.
Usually, I question looking to the past for answers. But every so often, answers might be found there. Don’t try to go home again, not permanently. But a now-and-then visit? To capture a bounty?
Recommended Reading: Pretty obvious, isn’t it? I should be recommending You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. But in the interest of keeping myself honest, or at least honestish, I try to read before I recommend, and if I’ve ever read Wolfe’s novel, it was long, long ago and I have no memory of it. So instead of recommending a book, let me recommend the author’s hometown. Last year, Mari and I toured Wolfe’s boyhood home in Asheville, S.C. while visiting Mars Hill College and found the house interesting, the school welcoming, and the city delightful.
Sometime in the late 1970s, there was a show in New York where DC Comics actually had a booth and I got to wander over as a fan and chat casually with president Sol Harrison. It was the earliest memory I had of a publishing taking booth space on the convention floor. Before then, the tables were given over to fanzine vendors, back issue and new release dealers and that was about it. Little in the way or merchandise and even less original art was being sold.
Fans and creators could mix in the aisles, chat in the lobby, and talk before and after panels. It was a far smaller, more collegial atmosphere and certainly formed relationships with people I still have today.
By the time I joined staff at DC in 1984, the major publishers had been taking booth space with increasing regularity at shows from coast to coast. These were standard trade show booth designs that were decorated with the company’s wares, maybe a TV monitor with a video tape playing but that was about it. Editors and creators sat at tables and signed comics, did sketches, and handed out sampler comics or buttons.
During the 1980s, things continued to grow and more customized booth set-ups were showing up but fans could still walk into a publisher’s booth and talk to editors and talent. That began to change in 1992-1993 when Image arrived with show biz razzle dazzle and DC, flush with Death of Superman profits, gave us a mammoth booth dubbed Wayne’s World, nicknamed after Bob Wayne. Since nature abhors a vacuum, this new space filled with a growing number of fans, but patient ones could still talk to staff and freelancers.
Comics made the mainstream news only with some event regular folk could understand and think was worth going into a comic book store for the first time…ever.
Superman is dead.
Superman gets married. Which is the same thing as being dead.
Spider-Man gets married.
Spider-Man becomes Latino and black.
Spider-Man gets divorced (because he became Latino and black).
Archie kisses a black girl.
Archie is booted out of the Tea Party (you know why).
The news that DC is being kicked out of major bookstore chains because of an exclusive deal they made with Amazon is messing with my head.
That’s not the only thing either, I read an article in Wired magazine recently that stated that iPads could both revolutionize and destroy the industry.
Again. My head is being messed with.
I don’t want to see mainstream media talk about comics unless it’s a new comic book movie, Comic Con or Archie uses the ‘N’ word during a argument with his black girl friend.
Yes, I know I’m being naïve. Yes I know that comics are a business and change is inevitable, yada, yada, whatever. I get that.
But…
I long for a return to the good old days when the press would make a big deal out of The Death Of Superman and regular folk would be naive enough to buy dozens of copies because it never occurred to them that Superman would be back.
“It’s a comic book you moron.” I said to about a zillion people who were shocked that Superman was not dead forever so the 50 copies they purchased along with the 50 billion sold would not be so valuable as to put the kids through college.
I remember a “regular folk” about to pay a retailer $40 bucks for two copies of The Death Of Superman at a NY Comic Con when the very same issue was cover priced at a newsstand in the lobby of the Javits Center where the con was being held.
I told the guy about the newsstand price and assured him they still had plenty of copies left. He thanked me like I just handed him a winning lottery ticket. Man, was he happy!
The retailer, not so much.
Yes, mainstream press, give me that kind of comic book news and keep your gloom and doom for what you do best: Lindsey Lohan.
At the very end of 1973 I was lurking about in a Woolworth’s in downtown Montreal. I was suffering from my worst case of comics envy ever.
