Category: Comics

It’s entirely possible to be too cynical.

That will likely come as a startling admission to those who know me. Nonetheless, I’ve been fairly overwhelmed by the skepticisim and outright hostility that’s arisen out of DC’s announcement of their new line aimed at young girls.

With any publicity and promotion, there’s going to be BS. And sure, the idea that a publisher is doing anything innovative or creative by marketing comic books to teenage girls is fairly silly, as evidenced by the growing number of publishers successfully. But it has to be expected: It might be more honest to say “We saw lots of other people making money off this audience and we wanted to get in on it”, but that’s just not going to happen.

And yes, DC has enlisted a hot, teen-friendly marketing agency to help launch the books. While I’m naturally skeptical of anything to do with marketing and publicity, it nonetheless shows a commitment to the product that hasn’t always been seen when superhero publishers want to try something new. It certainly beats publishing the books and then hoping that 13 year-old girls wander into a comic shop while engaged in a scavenger hunt or something.

Most of the hostility has surrounded the genders of the creators of the books: Only two female creators are involved in the line to this point, and one of them, Louise Carey, is co-writing with her more established father. Again, some cynicism is understandable, as it does seem a bit odd that there are so few women working on books targeted at a female audience.

But in looking at what the line isn’t, many seem to have missed out on what it does have to offer: A group of very talented writers and artists, many of whom have already produced books that could be successfully marketed to the Minx demographic.

Let’s start with Andi Watson. I’m having a hard time coming up with any creators, male or female, as perfect for this as Watson. This year alone he’s written Paris, a sweet love story, and written and drawn Little Star, a very cute story about a new father. Throw in Love Fights, even though it has superheroes, and you’ve got a writer who’s almost perfect for young adults. Also, his name kind of looks like he might be a woman; is that a plus?

Mike Carey might be best known for his more mature Vertigo work and his increasing work with superheroes, but he’s also the author of My Faith In Frankie, which is just the sort of story I’d recommend to nearly anyone. That he’s teaming up with Frankie co-creator Sonny Liew for one of his Minx books is just icing on the cake.

Throw in some art by Jim “Street Angel Totally Rocks” Rugg and Aaron “Serenity Rose is also pretty awesome” Alexovich and you’ve got a pretty talented lineup.

Should there be more women among that talented lineup? Perhaps. But there aren’t all that many women (or men, it must be said) who are that good at writing this sort of material. Many of them, like Chynna Clugston and Hope Larson, have deals with other, larger publishers. There are plenty of women working at Tokyopop, but how many would be willing to abandon a publisher that’s already successfully selling to young women in bookstores for what is, at this point, still an expensive experiment on the part of a company that publishes predominantly superhero books?

It’s possible that the lack of female creators working on these initial Minx books isn’t due to any institutional sexism, but simply the fact that nothing could be worked out at the time. I’m not so naive to believe that women can’t be sexists, but there’s nothing I’m aware of that would convict editors Karen Berger or Shelley Bond of this. They certainly haven’t shown any reluctance to hire women at Vertigo: Denise Mina is writing what is probably the Vertigo flagship, while Pia Guerra and Becky Cloonan are both drawing successful creator-owned books. Jill Thompson and Colleen Doran have both done plenty of high profile work for the imprint.

It would be nice if there were more women working on the books, but barring evidence to the contrary, I’m content to believe that this is just the way things worked out for the time being. Minx is launching with bunch of very talented writers and artists who seem perfectly capable of producing work that would appeal to a young female audience. (Disclaimer: I am neither young nor female, and may be wrong completely. But I think Chynna Clugston would be perfect for it, too, and Scholastic clearly agrees with me. So there.) Perhaps this is the excuse of a sexist pig, but the fact Minx is hiring some of the best creators and spending a lot of money on promotion is good news, and the lack of female creators is merely an unfortunate coincidence.

Amidst a lot of stupid crap, DC is doing something good, and they seem to be committed to doing it well. That deserves praise, not mockery.

(Okay, a little bit of mockery. But get it over with and move on.)

So Jimmy Robinson’s piece You Are Not Helping Comics over at CSBG has resulted in a small bit of consternation.

Robinson’s premise – though it’s hidden in a fairly rambling and unfocused column – is essentially that comics are awesome but comic fans should read everything, not jus a few select titles. Not only that, but they should take an active role in promoting the medium by recommending books to friends, family, and co-workers.

He makes a pretty decent point. That the direct market is pretty fucked up is hardly a penetrating insight, but word-of-mouth marketing can be an incredibly effective tool. While some movies get massive advertising budgets, others have to start small and work their way up – Borat is probably the most profitable film of the year, and it didn’t receive anywhere near the promotion of a major studio release. It had its North American debut at the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness programme, which is typically home to underdog & low-budget films.

Then again, I’m also skeptical of the “street teams” put together by some bands – particularly those targeting a young teen audience – that puts some of the advertising burden on its fans, encouraging them to request songs at radio stations and pimp the band on Myspace or whatever. Enlist a huge, occasionally influential group for the price of a few CDs and t-shirts? Somewhere between sleazy and brilliant.

Still, I try: I recommend and loan books to friends, though I’ve only ever met with limited success; the only sure-thing convert I ever made was an ex-girlfriend. Most people react with interest, but seem unlikely to ever look for something on their own.

But that’s neither here nor there, really. Robinson is right: Fans can help make comics more successful. It goes without saying that having a MySpace page and asking fans to friend you isn’t much of a marketing strategy, but every little bit helps.

The main problem with Robinson’s argument, though, is where he talks about the diversity of the market. Of course, there is no diversity in the direct market. Most comic stores are happy to carry only Marvel & DC superhero books, along with the odd book based on a license from an 80s toy line. That’s not a terribly welcoming environment to new readers. It’s all very nice to ask retailers to carry a wider range of books, but I’ve heard plenty of stories about stores not ordering anything that deviates from their usual slate. What’s more, even if they do order a copy of Historical Indie Adventures, it’s more than likely to be one copy for that one customer; people who work on the assumption that comics=superheroes aren’t likely to change their belief system.

And in this case, Robinson is not helping. I should say that I’ve never read anything by Jimmie Robinson before, so I have no opinion on whether he’s the next Alan Moore or the next Rob Liefeld. But on the face of it, his books don’t seem to be terribly diverse: Bomb Queen is probably one of the most stereotypically fanboy-ish books I’ve seen in a while, Tarot notwithstanding. And while he worries that “too many are walking lock-step to select titles and not taking advantage of everything comics has to offer”, he doesn’t seem afraid to cash in on the completist collector mentality by doing a What If: Wolverine book. I can’t blame him for wanting a solid paycheck, but let’s face it: He’s benefitting from the mentality he says is hurting comics.

Robinson means well, and he’s obviously enthusiastic about the medium. That’s great, and I’m sure he’s a nice guy, regardless of the books he writes. But he doesn’t get his point across clearly, and he doesn’t seem like the right guy to be writing about diversity and the wide world of comics. He’s not hurting comics, but he doesn’t seem to be helping nearly as much as he wants everyone else to.

… and neither do I.

He’s obviously mighty and powerful, but he also looks kind of down. The captions say “I rule!” but the body language says “Can I go back to bed?” I feel the same way; sometimes it’s just too much of a chore to rule the Earth.

Obviously plenty of people have come here via Comics Should Be Good, so some people have already read this, but others can go and read my guest piece on John Ostrander’s Firestorm that I did last week. Ripoff of Superman IV and Swamp Thing, or sister-title to Suicide Squad and prelude to Spectre? You decide.

(Actually, no, you don’t get to decide. My judgment is fairly authoritative.)

I picked up DC’s Phantom Stranger Showcase a couple weeks ago, and it’s a pretty entertaining read. It can be pretty hokey, and you’re obviously not meant to read more than one or two stories in one sitting, but it’s still fun: The Phantom Stranger is a cool character, and there are some nifty Neal Adams covers. It also features one of the biggest losers in comic book history: Doctor Thirteen.

He means well. He tries to protect people from sham artists and con men trying to cash in on fear and superstition. But this naturally sets him against the totally mysterious and mystical Phantom Stranger — though they always seem to team up reluctantly in the end — and he just can’t win.

Doctor Thirteen, of course, is a guest-star in The Phantom Stranger. He’s not appearing in That Guy Who Pretends to be a Phantom But is Just a Janitor with a Smoke Machine. Granted, the Stranger isn’t a totally out-there spook – most of the time, he’s just mysterious. But the whole point of the book being The Phantom Stranger and not Scooby Doo is that there are mystical, magical menaces out there.

Consequently, Doctor Thirteen, rational fanatic as he is, ends up looking like a complete ninny as he tries to explain away the obviously magical stuff that’s always going on. It would be one thing if he were some sort of lame villain or foil, but he’s actually a good guy, part of a crime-fighting odd couple. He’s just a really, really lame one.

Is it too much to ask him to mellow out? To adjust his position just a little bit, so that maybe most supernatural occurrences are frauds (the Phantom Stranger exposes frauds too), but accepting that there actually are freaky, unexplainable, supernatural things out there? Like, say, the star of the book?

I suppose it is.

This weekend, I did something I never thought I could do.

I threw out some comics. To be entirely accurate, I recycled them, as I am an environmentally concious sort. But it still feels like I’ve done something wrong.

I am, by nature, something of a packrat. I don’t throw things out unless I’m absolutely certain I’ll never need it again, or if it’s taking up too much space. Consequently, I often walk around with a wallet full of old movie tickets, receipts, and expired coupons, and my apartment is full of dubiously organized newspapers, magazines, more receipts, and flyers I never got around to throwing out. And, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, lots and lots of comics sitting about in boxes and random piles.

Most of them are still there, of course. But I found a bunch of stuff that I’m never going to read again: Books that were cool for a week or two after they came out, or were issues I picked up to sample. Plenty of first issues and new storylines. Some of them are actively sucky, while others are just unmemorable. They’re mostly pretty scattered, rarely more than one or two consecutive issues of a series, and aren’t worth nearly enough to go to the trouble of selling them off on eBay. Most of them aren’t appropriate, or interesting enough, for donating to a children’s hospital or something.

Throwing out comics seems even more egregious than throwing out other random crap, but I’m not sure why. Obviously the collector mentality hangs off many readers, telling us that these are valuable items and should be preserved and protected. But as anyone who read comics in the 90s knows, that’s pretty much crap; 99.9% of the books I own have no value beyond that which I assign them. I’ve long since given up bagging and boarding, aside from the highlights of my library. Books I want to re-read long-term are usually in trade format when it’s available.

So this is perhaps the final farewell to any last vestiges of the collector mindset that may have been hanging on. Yeah, I’m throwing out comics. So what? They’re only paper.

After a far-too-long absence, Mike Allred’s Madman is returning, moving to Image, and the entire series to this point is being collected in an 852-page omnibus.

Granted, that $125.00 cover price is pretty high, but not too high for one of the best superhero comics ever published. Not that many newbies will be likely to experiment with that price tag, but if you love superheroes, you should read Madman. This is on my must-buy list, even if I have most of the Dark Horse series in single-issue form.

The direct market in North America is primarily built around superheroes, so it’s inevitable that most writers and artists who want to make a living have to work in the genre at least occasionally. Unsurprisingly, not all writers are terribly well suited to it, even those who are otherwise highly skilled.

Peter Milligan: Milligan’s written some superhero-based material – X-Statix was a solid satire with heart, and Enigma had some interesting ideas about the genre – but for the most part he just can’t play it straight enough to pull off a mainstream superhero book. They might not be bad, but they’re certainly not up to his usual standards, and usually just disappoint his fans and piss off fans of the book and characters. Milligan often writes with a wink and a nudge – you know this stuff is silly, right? – that isn’t appreciated by audiences who take their franchises very silly.

Neil Gaiman: Both 1602 and Eternals seem billed as “Neil Gaiman does superheroes”, which isn’t a terribly good use of either the writer or the characters and concepts. Gaiman likes his stories full of characterization and obscure mythology and literature; Sandman may have its roots in the genre, but it quickly evolved into something else. He can do superheroes, of course – some days I think he could do absolutely anything – but it just seems like such a waste of his talents.

Greg Rucka: Queen & Country is a fantastic book. Gotham Central was pretty good, even if Rucka seems to be replicating his “tough and self-destructive female protagonist” bit too much. Everything else he writes runs the gamut from “okay” to “bleah.” He’s good at gritty, real-world stories, an approach that’s all right on Batman or Wolverine but still doesn’t do enough with the concept, and downright boring on something like Superman. Even the politics and espionage suffer in his superbooks: OMAC Project was an unreadable mess, and Checkmate feels like a dumbed-down Q & C further weighed down by DCU trivia.

Warren Ellis: Aside from Nextwave, which is more about poking superheroes with a stick, and Authority, which was about giving traditional superheroes the finger, Ellis’ superhero work seems so uninspired: Like Milligan’s work, it might not be bad, but you can’t help reading it and thinking “this should be so much better.” I’m not sure if it’s entirely the genre, or if Ellis has simply grown dispassionate about books he doesn’t own; newuniversal should be an interesting experiment, mixing the sci-fi weirdness he loves with some tweaked genre conventions.

Garth Ennis: Duh.

According to the October sales ranking, Wildcats #1 was the 14th best-selling comic in the direct market.

That’s got to be pretty disappointing: Jim Lee, Grant Morrison, a variant cover by Todd McFarlane, a much-hyped relaunch of a once-successful property created by one of the hottest artists of the past decade… and it gets you 14th? Obviously Civil War and 52 are eating up the market, but that’s a disappointment any way you look at it.

The rest of the Wildstorm relaunch isn’t doing so hot, either: The first issue of The Authority comes in at #27, Gen 13 debuts at #34, Deathblow #1 places 51st, and the second issue of Wetworks slides all the way down to #68.

All the big names and hype appear to have accomplished very little, and most of these titles are bound to slide down the charts with their second issues; the delays to Wildcats and Authority can’t help. And unless they see strong TPB sales – something I can only see happening for Authority and possibly Deathblow – I wonder if this will be Wildstorm’s last kick at the can.

Or, My Life in Comics. These aren’t by any means the best comics I’ve ever read, but some of the most important in terms of what I read now and why I read them at all.

ROM #59 – October 1984

This is the first comic I ever remember buying (or, at least, having bought for me, since I was only 7). Rom and his sidekick, Starlight, shrink down to microscopic size (with help from Ant-Man) in order to fight evil bacteria on an ant. I think. I haven’t read it in a long time, nor do I really plan to; some childhood memories shouldn’t be revisited.

Still, this is the kind of awesome, crazy sci-fi fantasy we don’t see as much in comics today, and it was pretty impressive, particularly to a 7 year-old. I read a few Rom comics after that – though I never read the beginning or end of this particular story. One of the things I really remember about the book was an ad for Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar on the back cover: It looked like the coolest thing ever to a kid who thought Star Wars was the greatest film ever made. I’ve still never read it.

Uncanny #209-210 – September 1986

Kicking off an almost decade-long obsession, these two books came in a pre-sealed package I think I got in a departments store on a family trip to Florida. There was also a pack that included a couple issues of Alpha Flight which were less significant in every possible sense.

#209 is the second part of a fight with super-sentinel Nimrod, who proceeds to beat the crap out of most of the X-Men and the Hellfire Club, until Shadowcat helps Colossus escape being buried alive and deliver a serious smackdown on the robot. There’s also a subplot about Rachel wandering around a weird amusement park after being gutted by Wolverine, which didn’t make much sense considering I hadn’t read the previous issue. Wolverine himself doesn’t do a heck of a lot here – he frightens off a bunch of Hellfire goons. But it was pretty obvious he was cool.

#210 is a pretty stark contrast as the X-Men recover from the fight in one of Claremont’s typical slowdown issues. It spent a lot of time discussing past events and hinting at future ones – it leads into the Mutant Massacre – but was much more mellow and in-depth than any comic I’d read before. I knew this was good stuff, and I wanted to read more.

Sandman special #1 – 1991

For the longest time, I read superhero comics. Lots of them. Mostly X-Men and Marvel books, but I wandered every now and then. Eventually, I heard people talking about the Sandman thing, and even though no one ever seemed to adequately describe what it was about, it sounded cool.

I found myself looking at this issue – complete with a glow-in-the-dark cover by Dave McKean that’s actually kind of cool – and picked it up, and it’s as good a starting point for Sandman as anything else: Since I’ve always liked Greek mythology, the story of Orpheus was an obvious winner, and the sequence in Death’s modern-day apartment was confusing yet enticing. Throw in some nice Bryan Talbot art and a bunch of scary naked women and we had a definite winner. Soon after I started the main series in the middle of Brief Lives, which confused the heck out of me in the best way possible.

Archer & Armstrong #0 – July 1992

Along with Sandman, this is one of the books that opened my eyes to the possibility of doing books about something other than super heroes. Archer & Armstrong may be kind of a superhero book, but not entirely: No costumes (aside from the Unity crossovers), and less fighting evil than bumbling from one story to the next. The basic plot of this issue features Archer being almost murdered by his pervert parents, learning martial arts in the middle east, then starting a fight in a bar with a man he’s told is the devil. I’d never read anything quite like it before – nor since, to be perfectly honest – and I was hooked. The awesome Barry Windsor-Smith artwork was a big plus, too: Distinct and memorable, yet cool.

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac #1 – 199?

Wherein I dip my feet into the world of small publishers. This came out originally in 1995, but the copy I bought was an 8th printing or something, so I probably read it in 98 or 99. I was reading comics only sporadically, having gone off to university and discovered alcohol and women, but stumbled across this in a comic store. It was pretty awesome: Morbid and funny and totally nonsensical. Nowadays I prefer Jhonen Vazquez’ work on Squee or I Feel Sick, but this made a huge impact and led me to Lenore and the rest of Slave Labor’s awesome output.

X-Force #116 – May 2001

It’d been a long time since I’d read comics regularly. The late nineties mostly sucked, and I’d found other things to spend my limited funds on. I’d pick up a book here and there, but nothing regularly. That all changed when I walked into a store to browse one day and saw one of the most unexpected comics ever: Mike Allred drawing X-Force.

Madman doesn’t have a place on this list, but it’s still one of the most enjoyable superhero comics ever; Allred’s got a tremendous sense of fun and adventure, and a great clean and expressive style. X-Force brought back memories of Rob Liefeld and polybagged comics full of totally extreme and generic hyper-vigilantes. So the combination was kind of unholy. Throw in Peter Milligan, a guy I was familiar with (but didn’t revere as I do now), and you had a winner. This was a great, funny take on superheroes, and largely redeemed a company and industry I’d almost written off as marketing hype whores. I didn’t think Marvel was capable of putting out a book with this much originality, but they proved me wrong.

X-Force led to New X-Men, which led to coming back to the store regularly to buy more and more books. And that’s where we are now: Spending too much money on comic books.

Damn you, Rom. It’s all your fault.