Category: Comics

I went ot the comic shop Thursday. It was the first time I had been there in ten weeks, judging by the number of copies of 52 that were waiting for me. I didn’t touch the pile of comics until this afternoon, when I pulled out two issues of Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes, enjoyed the Barry Kitson art, and found myself mildly irritated that the storyline in question would continue for at least one more issue.

I think the lesson has finally cracked my thick skull. I’m just not enjoying comic magazines anymore. I think they’re too short a reading experience, I hate having to organize them in a bunch of boxes in my basement, and the hassle of the aforementioned boxes means I almost never reread them. For the amount of money I’ve been spending on these things I ought to be racing to read them, and I’m just not anymore.

This is part of a larger problem I’ve identified with myself, that I’ve started collecting media more than enjoying it – a backlog of books, DVDs, and stuff on my DVR. But the comics are really the worst example. So I’m culling just about all of the issues. If I care enough about the series to buy a shelf copy, I’ll buy the trade. If not, oh well.

I really hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for comics and me. They’ve given me a lot of happiness over the last eighteen years. (Good Lord.) But something’s gotta change.

Pattie, Alex and I went to the Baltimore Comic-Con earlier this month. We’d heard a lot about the con, but never quite managed to get there. It’s quite a nice gathering – very comics-focused, unlike cons like San Diego and Wizard World that have a heavy pop culture emphasis. I’d say the guest list was 99% comics, and the retailers were probably 80% comics with some non-comics toys and DVDs thrown in. I really wish I had brought my want list, because I may have actually made a dent in it.

George Perez was there, but was swamped. I don’t know if he was taking commissions that day, but if he was, his list filled up in nanoseconds. I did meet Perez’s old partner on New Teen Titans, Marv Wolfman. Wolfman seemed excited to be writing Nightwing for an extended run. I really hope it works out. I like happy endings, and I don’t think the last few years of Wolfman’s run on the Titans count as one by anyone’s measure.

By far the highlight of the con for me was meeting Barry Kitson, who had flown into the States for a meeting and was thus available to do the show. I’ve done two interviews with Barry for the site and swapped e-mails with him over the years, but this was the first time I’d get to see him. Better yet, he was doing sketches – for free! (As long as they were in a sketchbook or personally dedicated, as a small line of defense against the sketch being immediately resold. As one guy in the line joked, “Yeah, could you make that out to Mr. Bay? My first initial’s ‘E’ . . .”) I got in the line, and we pretty quickly realized that Alex was not yet into the whole line-for-sketches thing. We had the following dialogue:

ALEX: Why are we here?
ME: Daddy wants that man to draw a picture for him.
ALEX: Why?
ME: Daddy likes the pictures he draws.
ALEX: Why?
ME: Well, kiddo, art’s a subjective thing . . .

After that, Pattie took Alex back to the hotel pool. There was a fire alarm that evacuated the hall, but once that was over everyone very politely resumed their original place in line. The folks in front of me were serious original art collectors, buying pages and bringing full-sized boards and paper for Barry to draw on. As I watched Barry do full-figure drawings, I started rethinking how I’ve been going about this whole sketch business. Maybe it would be worth it to ramp up to a higher scale. (Then I look at my bank account and think maybe not so much.) At any rate, Barry was every bit as nice a guy in person as he has been over e-mail, and eventually I got this sketch of Golgoth from the Empire series: Continue reading “Baltimore and Barry Kitson”

I wound up being disappointed in DC’s Infinite Crisis crossover in large part because, as I said in an earlier post, the main draw for me was Phil Jimenez drawing the crap out of the DC Universe. For whatever reason, that didn’t quite happen – Jimenez was unable to draw every page of every issue, and a number of fill-in artists had to pinch hit. Now, sometimes that meant pages of George Perez drawing the crap out of the DC Universe, and I really can’t complain about that. But some of the other artists took the sheen off a little bit.

On the other hand, at least DC didn’t take a shotgun to its own foot the way Marvel apparently is with its Civil War crossover. The next issue was supposed to be out tomorrow. Instead, it will be out a month from tomorrow. And a huge amount of Marvel’s line will also be delayed, because those books depend on the main Civil War series in order to make sense. And there are new series scheduled to launch when the series concludes, and now they’ll be delayed.

To get a sense of why this is very, very bad for comics retailers, check out Brian Hibbs’ post on his Savage Critic blog. Retailers are gonna take a very serious hit to their cash flow, and that could have ripple effects.

I guess DC announced that they’re resoliciting the next issue of All-Star Batman and Robin again out of sympathy. Sheesh.

Been doing a lot of story-reading at bed time these days, and it strikes me that Grant Morrison is considered a genius, in part, for breaking the fourth wall and inserting a metafictional component into his comics like Animal Man and Invisibles. Meanwhile, thanks to Jon Stone and Liz Smollin, we’ve been feeding the same concepts to four-year-olds for years in The Monster at the End of This Book. The whole story relies on the main character realizing that he is a character contained within the physical object of a book and trying to interact with the world of the reader. Deep stuff, man.

And an excuse to read with funny voices.

Comic-Con International is almost upon us. I have to admit, at this point, I feel almost no pangs of regret that Pattie and I aren’t going this year. We’ve done it three times, and it is truly exhausting. There’s a little bit of a diminishing returns factor, in that we’ve seen a lot of the people we want to see. And numerous Web sites are going to be posting updates about any major news that comes out of the con. I’ll miss seeing Team red Star’s triumphant return, and I’d kinda like to go see Bryan Singer’s presentation to hear what he might have up his sleeve for more Superman movies, but that’s really not worth a cross-country flight.

This year’s Baltimore Comic-Con, on the other hand, I’ll be there with bells on. It’s only a few hours away, and I’m hoping the smaller size means I’ll be able to grab some more sketches this time around.

I feel like blogging some good news tonight. Universal Studios has optioned The Red Star. There aren’t many details i nthat article, and it mostly focuses on the Russian director that is developing the film, but this is great news for Christian Gossett and the folks at Archangel Studios. Not only is it a nifty bit of validation, I have a sneaking suspicion that this option is helping to finance the comics projects that Goss has been dropping hints about on his blog. And believe you me, more Red Star comics is very very good news indeed.

OK, Netflix just delivered the first disc of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman season 1. And I may very well review the whole set when I’m finished. But between this, Superman Returns, DC’s Infinite Crisis and One Year Later extravaganzas, and maybe the occasional Smallville episode, I figure I’m going to do a fair bit of Superman conversation over the next year. And lest I repeat myself, I figure I’ll get the following rant out of my system now.

Before the late 80s, most of the most popular depictions of Superman in comics and other media depict Superman as the “real character and Clark Kent as a mere persona or disguise, usually one who’s comically inept and clumsy. While I recognize that this depiction goes right back to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s original comics, I have always thought that the more interesting and more logical depiction would be much the reverse. John Byrne’s Man of Steel revamp in 1986 and Lois and Clark are two examples of the approach I’m talking about. A man who thinks of himself as Clark Kent realizes that in order to do what he wants to do with his abilities and still be able to live his life, he needs a public identity, and therefore assumes the role of Superman.

OK, so why do I think this makes sense? Well, just about every version of the Superman story has the character being raised as Clark Kent and then, at some point, adopting the role of Superboy/Superman. So from the chronological point of view, it makes sense. I think of myself as Dave Thomer. When I talk to myself, I call myself Dave. I consider who I am now to be part of a continuity with my past experiences, which I also associate with being Dave Thomer. I think that the Clark/Superman dichotomy works the same way. There’s a scene in the premiere of Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s Superman: The Animated Series where, the first time Superman shows up in costume, he makes a small mistake and then berates himself saying something like, “Oh, nice, Clark.” That’s the approach I like.

Now, just about everybody who does any work with Batman these days will tell you that “Batman is the real guy, Bruce Wayne is just an identity that he puts on.” And I’d agree, although some creators take that too far. But that interpretation of Batman works to show you how traumatized the character is, and to give you a certain sense of tragedy as to how Bruce’s life really ended when his parents got shot and he became obsessed. Superman doesn’t have the same kind of emotional trauma, and I haven’t really seen many creators try to play up “He can never have a normal life!” as a tragic dimension to the character. Kurt Busiek’s Samaritan in Astro City is a good example of what this kind of interpretation might look like.

To get around the notion that Clark would see himself as, well, Clark, some comics have had Clark becoming Superboy at a pretty young age, to help break the association with his human identity. (I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of modern interpretations have Clark discovering his powers and alien ancestry more gradually.) And I give Richard Donner credit for having Kal-El spend well over a decade traveling the universe with Jor-El. After an experience like that, his life as Clark must seem very distant – and Donner makes a point of not referring back to Clark’s childhood except for a very brief mention of Clark sending money home to his mother. (We’ll ignore Superman III here.)

Beyond that logic, though, why do I think it’s more interesting for Clark to be a real identity and not just a disguise? There are a lot of people who see Superman as a godlike character, an example of perfection. Mark Waid has commented that he had a hard time in Kingdom Come writing a Superman who was fallible, who kept making significant mistakes of judgement. With the god-among-men approach, Clark Kent is just a disguise Superman throws on to slum around with us mere mortals, perhaps playing a prank on Lois Lane along the way. The approach stresses the alien, the otherworldly nature of the character. It also enforces a certain distance. He isn’t really dealing with anyone who’s on the same level as he is. And if he’s so darned perfect, there’s not a lot of internal struggle for the reader to relate to. Even Alan Moore’s Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, in which Superman gives up the Clark Kent identity, has to then humanize the Superman persona and make him vulnerable – which is possible because the character no longer has to lie to everyone about who he really is.

On the other hand, what’s always interested me is the idea that Superman is a guy who was raised and educated by normal everyday human beings. That he accepted and adopted our values, that he became one of us. That he’s a human being, with all the wants and hopes and dreams and foibles that come with being human, and a huge responsibility to others on top of all of it. Clark Kent needs to be more than a foppish disguise for that aspect of the character to work. He needs to be a real person – we need to see how the person that Ma and Pa Kent raised became this hero, and how being the hero affects him. We also need his life to matter – we have to believe that when the world sees Clark Kent, it sees someone with the skill and personality to be a reporter for a major newspaper, someone who’s a worthwhile friend or adversary in his own right. All this does invite a somewhat more soap-opera-esque version of the character. It invites a focus on his personal relationship, on his career, on his problems, and so on. Some people may just want to see the action and the hero elements. I can certainly respect that. For me, I think the added humanity of my favored approach is worth it.

OK, end of rant.

Chris Gossett, whose Red Star is one of my favorite comics ever, has just launched the Project Antares blog to keep folks up to date on the status of Red Star-related projects. Since it’s Goss, and the man has a bit of a verbose streak, you can also expect plenty of personal anecdotes and political observations. Check it out.

Finally got around to reading the first hardcover volume of Marvel’s Supreme Power series. It contains the contents of the first 12 issues, or the first two softcover collections, in a larger size that really benefits Gary Frank’s art. I read the first softcover and reviewed it for theLogBook, but decided to switch to the larger format going forward. Of course, then Marvel decided to end the Max (i.e. rated-R) version of the series with issue 18, and now I have no idea how whether and how they’re going to repackage the remaining issues and other Max spinoffs into hardcover, if they do at all. However that works out, I really liked this first hardcover. J. Michael Straczynski pushes the story forward at a pretty good clip and we start to see how everything is falling apart. I’m half tempted just to get the third softcover, but I have more than enough to keep me occupied for now.

Included there are a few Vertigo series I really need to catch up on, 100 Bullets and Fables. I like both series, but I gotta get into a certain mood to read ’em, and I have been nowhere near that mood lately.

I have caught up on all of the trades and issues of Quicken Forbidden, an independent series from Dave Roman and John Green, the same people that make the Teen Boat minicomic. (If you don’t know what Teen Boat is – it’s about a Teen that turns into a Boat. Sometimes simplicity is best.) The creators have decided to go with publishing chapters online and then collecting them in book form, which given the economics of the comics market is a pretty good move. Hopefully this lets them fully explore their settings and characters – I liked the first 13 chapters of Quicken Forbidden, but especially towards the end the story felt a bit rushed. Good stuff, though.

This is a belated post, but I figure I should point out that my brother Brian has been the namesake for not one but two bit characters in DC Comics over the last several months. Marc Andreyko named a federal agent (or is he?) after him in Manhunter, and Geoff Johns made him a prison guard in Green Lantern. We’re hoping that Warner Bros. will option the movie rights soon.

In the meantime, Brian’s trying to boost the readership on Manhunter. Check out the site for the 20K challenge. Andreyko cowrote Torso with Brian Bendis, and that was a darned good book, so I can wholeheartedly endorse this effort.