comiXology | Articles & Interviews

Stitches in Time

Karen Green — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:00:00 -0400

Do you ever have so much in your head that you can barely find the words for it? That's my concern this month, as I try to marshal all the thoughts teeming in my head about this topic. (It's also why this column is, once again, late…)

I've recently been reading Hillary Chute's terrific Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, in which Chute notes how particularly well-suited comics are for narratives of trauma. She observes that such works are "not only about events but also, explicitly, about how we frame them. The authors revisit their pasts, retrace events, and literally repicture them."

Chute's focus is on women's autobiographical comics—and the women she chooses (Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel) are certainly legends in the medium—but her argument can apply to other memoirs as well. Which brings me back to David Small's Stitches, a work I've written about, earlier and fleetingly, in the context of med-school humanities classes, but which merits, and rewards, a deeper look.

Back in October, I was asked to interview Small for a session at last month's Wildcat Comic-Con, at Penn State's Pennsylvania College of Technology. In preparation, David and I exchanged a few emails, in one of which I'd asked him if he wanted me to talk solely about Stitches or if I should address his children's-book work as well. He answered that he'd be happy to talk just about Stitches, noting how different it was in style and tone from his children's work. But he went on to describe some of his books: Imogene's Antlers is "about a little girl who—Gregor Samsa-like—wakes up one morning to find herself metamorphosed, with a huge rack of antlers on her head." Hoover's Bride is "about a man who marries his vacuum cleaner." Fenwick's Suit is about a man whose "suit of clothes takes over his whole identity." And, finally, he added that his very first picture book, Eulalie and the Hopping Head, "was about such strange goings-on I don't quite know how to describe it."

Clearly, that was the one I was going to buy.

David added that the books he writes and draws himself are also quite different from the ones he illustrates for his wife, Sarah Stewart, which are generally about young women who triumph over physical or psychological displacement. Curious, I bought a couple of those, as well.

[SPACER]
Finally, David volunteered an observation that I found especially fascinating, without even having read his children's work: "perhaps my brief descriptions show how they might spring from the mind of the boy from Stitches. The problem of identity which seems to permeate my work makes sense in that context, as does the dilemma of separation (both physical and psychical) from one's family, which typifies Sarah's stories."

Do you all know Stitches? Do I need to give you a little background? Basically, it is a memoir of Small's childhood: an accounting of his painfully dysfunctional family and the operation he underwent to remove a cancerous tumor from his throat—a tumor that no one bothered to tell him was cancerous. Or even a tumor. The book is atmospheric and painterly and cinematic; there are often entire pages of panels that are close-ups of the character's eyes, truly windows to the soul in this case. The book will break your heart.

In anticipation of the interview, I compiled a slideshow and some questions. The show opened with some images from his children's books, notably this page from his Eulalie and the Hopping Head and a double-page spread he'd created for one of his wife's books, The Gardener:

It seemed significant to me, in light of the nightmarish ways young David is treated by father, mother, and grandmother in Stitches, that Small would write in Eulalie that Mother Lumps' noisy, troublesome child was the one she loved a thousand times more than her quiet, perfect one. When I mentioned that to him, he informed me that no one had ever made the connection between Stitches and his children's books before.

I believe it was at that moment that we bonded.

The image from The Gardener demonstrates Small's masterful use of color. When we first met in Williamsport, he had his sketchbook with him. He opened it first to a breathtaking black-and-white drawing of the Hamburg Rathaus tower, completed "in about 20 minutes" (and which I'm still kicking myself for not sneaking a shot of). Other pages were filled with drawings he'd made in trips abroad, some, as in this spread from The Gardener, washed with color that evoked the Dufy-esque paintings that open the ballet in "An American in Paris" (see time-stamp 1:35 of the first video here; you knew this would come back to film, didn't you?).

After setting the scene, I switched to images from Stitches:

[Frontispiece.jpg]

When I was re-reading the book to choose slides, I'd noticed that there were very few references in the book—until he gets to his life apart from his family—to any artistic activity. I wondered, then, why the book's frontispiece was almost the only image of the young artistic David as well as how aware he'd been, as a child, of his artistic ability. He replied that, if you'd asked any people who'd known him growing up, they would have assumed he would become an artist. But he wanted to be a writer. Partly, he noted, because writing came harder to him than did art, which, unsurprisingly, given his upbringing, he therefore believed made writing more worthwhile, more virtuous. So he worked diligently at being a writer: short stories, plays, etc. And then one day, in college, his roommate said to him, "You know, those doodles you draw when you're on the phone are better than anything you write." Not a welcome observation but, upon reflection, a valid enough one that he changed his course of study to art, and the rest, we know. My question wasn't unique; it turns out that more than one person had read the story and asked, "Where's the art?" Small's reply: "The art is in the book."

Oh, and that surprising frontispiece? Turns out his editors chose it for him.

Here is an example of one of those wordless pages of eyes. Young David, whose father is a radiologist, is waiting in the hospital for his family and finds a long, deserted hallway perfect for sliding on in sock-feet. But he gets creeped out by a bottled fetus in a case on the wall—which, nonetheless, he can't stop staring at. The panels cut quickly back and forth from young David's eyes—in which the irises become the fetus at one point—to the implausibly opening eyes of the creature, glaring at him: glaring in a way that we'll soon find all too familiar.

Eyes are incredibly important in the book. Nearly all the adults wear glasses—with the interesting exception of the clear-eyed neighbor woman who is the first to notice the unusual swelling on David's neck—and the lenses are often reflective, masking the wearer's thoughts. When the lenses turn clear, revealing the person's eyes: that is the moment to pay close attention. In this image, young David is staying with his incredibly disagreeable grandmother, and the look on her face in that final panel, when her eyes are revealed, says pretty much everything you need to know about her store of familial love.

In the spread below, about ten pages later, David's mother has arrived to pick him up, and, again, her eyes are masked until that final panel, in which her face is in many ways a mirror of her own mother's earlier, but with cruelty replaced by fear. This, in turn, tells you everything you need to know about how she became the mother she was.

Even tertiary characters, like the many medical personnel David meets during his ordeal, tend to have glasses that mask their thoughts. Here, one doctor's eyes and smile are equally blank, revealing nothing through the layers of false bonhomie often associated with medical care. The arrogance and assumed omnipotence of doctors was pronounced in the 1950s, and David knew it well through his father's medical connections. The only eyes we see here are his mother's, as she focuses on the aspect of David's medical care that's most important to her: the price tag.

The image below occurs the evening after preliminary surgery revealed—unbeknownst to 14-year-old David—that he had a cancerous tumor rather than a sebaceous cyst, as he'd been told. His mother comes to his room and asks him if there's anything he wants: an unexpected kindness. David is understandably suspicious. The one thing he wants is the copy of Lolita that his mother had discovered in his room, removed, and burned to ashes. Her accustomed anger has softened, and his accustomed deference has hardened into resentment. Again, we see his mother's eyes–then his belligerent face is presented dually with her bemused one. Small mentioned in our interview that he took after his mother in looks and that resemblance is made concrete here, as their glowering brows, long noses, and sour mouths combine into a single face. This is the fearsome consequence of cruel parents—the possibility of becoming cruel ourselves, of the resemblance becoming more than merely physical. Just as his mother carried on some of her own mother's traits, those traits clearly live within her unhappy son, as well.

David's angry mother is complemented by a relatively remote father. At one point early in young David's diagnostic journey, his father calls him into the living room. His mother is practicing tying nautical knots, as if to enclose safely the elements in her nature she fears too much to expose. His father begins, "Your mother has asked me to speak to you about something we both feel is important." If you think this is the moment that David is going to be told the nature of his illness, you are mistaken. Instead, his father launches rather pompously into a lecture on David's posture and the medical dangers of slouching. As he goes on, 11-year-old David hunches lower and lower in his chair, with Small at last showing the father towering blankly, as seen from below, and then David, dwarfed by the easy chair, revealed in little other than his stubborn brow.

This final image is from late in the story. Young David has lost his voice as a consequence of the cancer surgery; he retains only one vocal cord. He loses his voice metaphorically as well; he disappears at school, first virtually and then actually. After being expelled from an east-coast boys' school, he is called on the carpet (well, into a chair, once again). His father demands, "Have you nothing to say? About all the money we spent? All the money we wasted on you and your education?"

Turn the page to find a spread featuring one of the most savage images in the book, brush-strokes like claw marks striping David's face as he depicts the voice inside his head…and then uses the classic broken-line speech balloon to indicate the whispered voice in which the actual David counter-accuses his parents, revealing that he knows about the cancer they never mentioned to him. Soon after this confrontation, young David begins therapy. His psychiatrist is depicted as the White Rabbit from the Alice stories, and with this benevolent figure David's healing truly begins. He finally, tearfully, faces the truth that his mother doesn't actually love him—an almost unthinkable taboo. (About that taboo, Small noted that nothing is worse than a mother who doesn't love her children, which is why we see the motif worked out in fairy tales. "But those are stepmothers," I protested. And he replied, of course: the stepmother is used as a displacement tactic, since it's so forbidden to talk about unloving mothers. Oh! Right.) Eventually, as with all successful therapy, he finds help to break out of the pattern that led from his grandmother's behavior to his mother's, and he can begin to become a whole person, a loving person, the very kind and gentle person he now is.

In our talks, Small mentioned that he is still friendly with that psychiatrist and that, when sent a copy of the book, the doctor's only quibble was a plaintive "Why did you make me a bunny??" In the book, David's love affair with the Alice books is made clear, but the doctor didn't see the homage in this depiction. But, as Small observed, the White Rabbit and the psychiatrist were both escorts into a sort of underworld, and so he merged them into a floppity-eared Hermes, Psychopomp, beginning David's journey into hell in order to lead him out of it.

One could be forgiven for thinking David an only child, as the book only cursorily indicates an older brother. Small told us that, just as he was delivering the book to his editor at Norton, a news story broke about a critically-acclaimed memoir of LA gang life that had just been revealed to be a complete fabrication. The author's own sister had blown the whistle on her. Small's editor had asked if he had any family who might object to the book and, in the wake of the gang memoir debacle, insisted that the brother be sent a copy before release.

Small and his brother hadn't spoken in four decades; not since the brother's early escape from their family. But Small dutifully sent off the book and soon, with some trepidation, contacted his brother to get his reaction. On the phone, there was a pause, and then his brother's deep, slow voice, "David…it blew me away." The brother was taken aback at the clarity and accuracy of Small's memories of their childhood. A rapprochement followed; their estrangement had been, in great part, a retreat from the pain of their own memories. A story of healing became a vehicle for healing.

One question I had for Small concerned the grey washes that characterize Stitches' visual palette, and which stand in such stark contrast to the luminous color of his children's-book work. What drove the choice? Was it a result of a different intended audience? Of the subject matter? Both? Mostly the latter: "Color is a distraction," he said. For reader and for artist. At one point, when shopping the book, Small met with Mark Siegel, editorial director of First Second, who gave him what he said was the best advice he'd ever gotten: "Draw it like you're writing." A careful reading reveals that he took Siegel's advice to heart; the lines are often simple, with much of the complexity of the panel coming from the greys of the overlaid wash (I was reminded of that 20-minute Hamburg Rathaus drawing). He noted that when he wanted to slow the reader down, he would load a panel with more detail. At one point, for example, young David's love affair with Lewis Carroll's Alice led him to don a talismanic yellow towel to evoke her long blonde hair and to dash about the neighborhood; one such adventure leads to a confrontation with a crowd of young toughs, whom he must escape. The hurried line—those quick cuts—culminates in a meticulous rendering of the mass of brutishly grinning faces, each one distinct. This technique provides the highs and lulls that carry readers along without exhausting them.

Heavens, there's so much more I could say. It's really just a remarkable and rewarding book. I've barely touched on the way the cinematic nature of those quick-cut panel images serves as a nod to one of Small's first loves: film, especially movies of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Filmmakers like Antonioni, Bergman, and Hitchcock exercised a profound influence on him—he told us that image of his grandmother, above, is a swipe from "Psycho"—and watching their films, with strong, expressive-faced actors and sometimes claustrophobic interior scenes, is a window into Small's artistic evolution.

I've also barely touched on the ways Stitches gets used in the curriculum. That column from two years ago details one approach, in the medical school. The Narrative Medicine faculty also use it in workshops with health-care workers, patients, and their families. One of the program's professors, who also teaches at Sarah Lawrence, has also used it in a "fictions of embodiment" course—and all who teach it talk about how accessible and inviting it is to their students.

But, geez, enough from me! It's your turn. If you haven't read it, go read it. If you haven't taught it, go teach it. You won't be sorry. Then come back here, and tell us how it went, won't you?

Best of Enemies: A History of US And Middle East Relations Part One 1783-1953

Tucker Stone — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:00:00 -0400

I probably would've made it out of college without Richard Osborne's illustrated guide to philosophy, but I imagine I would have had a lot less free time. A hideously drawn book with a hilariously palpable distaste for Christianity, the book was a godsend every time I had to stay up late writing the endless reams of paper that philosophy classes require. It may have been possible to get things done in that class earlier, or to have made better use of the actual textbook, but thanks to Obsorne, I learned to put everything off until the last minute, which is a skill that has motivated much of my adult life.

I hadn't thought of that book in years, despite seeing the publisher's wares consistently hawked at the annual New York Comic Con. But after sitting down with Best of Enemies, a new work of nonfiction comics by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B., I couldn't help but recall those Osborne nights. Philosophy for Beginners wasn't a comic, and I'm not sure that Best of Enemies is either.

Described by its American distributor as "a wonderfully illustrated book meant to educate and entertain", Best of Enemies is certainly set up like a comic, and inarguably reads like one for pages at a time. Panels, dialog balloons, cartoon figures moving around in space--all of the nuts and bolts are here. And while it isn't the most immersive text in existence, there's plenty of comics that aren't either. Not being able to "lose oneself" in a comic isn't always a demerit.

When I sat down with Best of Enemies and decided that this was what I wanted to say about it, I started thumbing around the book again, looking for a panel or page that might better represent the "not really comics" criticism--after all, that's a pretty harsh thing to say, and pretty harsh things should be accompanied by evidence, and in comics, all the evidence you'll ever need is just a scanned image away. What I found instead was that there isn't one specific page that I dislike, that there's honestly no drawings or text here that I have a problem with. All the parts here work--the text is readable, the research (which is arguably the most important part of the work, considering the nature of its subject matter) seems solid and uncontroversial, and yes, the book is absolutely brilliant to look at. A lot of my favorite cartoonists--Chris Ware, Kevin Huizenga, Jack Kirby, Jaime Hernandez--inspire a little bit of wistfulness at what it would be like to lay down the kind of art they deliver, and David B. gives me that same weird jealousy. And yet when I sit down with the book in its entirety, I can't pretend that it's something I want to read again, the same way I don't have much interest in reading an old textbook from college, or a research paper my wife wrote in grad school.

That being said, I'd recommend this book unreservedly to someone who wants to drink in some exciting art, I'd donate a thousand copies to school libraries throughout the world. There's a lot to be found here that I knew nothing about, the most revelatory one being the "Piracy" chapter, which details years of bloody maritime conflict between the US and multiple countries in the Middle East. The reveal that America was openly spending thousands of dollars to buy peace--and that in many places, it worked--is exactly the sort of stuff that blunts any negative aesthetic feelings I have towards Best of Enemies. Seeking out the information it provides--information that David B.'s art has seared into memory--would have probably remained the province of a someday/maybe list, to be put off until long after I'd organized some hardcovers, dusted the bookshelves, and yet now that it's here, I'm tremendously grateful.

A Conversation about Freedom

Tucker Stone — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:00:00 -0400

I started reading Seamus Heffernan's Freedom about two minutes after I first heard about it. It had shown up unsolicited at the comic store where I work in a brown envelope, along with a pleasant note on the stationary of a company called Potato Comics, requesting that we order more of them if we saw fit. I was immediately sucked in. Freedom is a wonderful comic, a triumph of story and art working in combination to deliver a unique, compelling story set squarely in the genre commonly referred to as historical fiction. After finishing its 64 pages, I had to know more about what was to come, and who this person was. Seamus was willing to tear himself away from his new daughter--only one month old when we spoke--to talk to me about the making of Freedom, how he got into comics, and what he hopes to accomplish.

Could you give me a short history of Freedom?

The idea for the story initially came while I was in art school. For a project dealing with heroes, I'd decided to make a fake, mock-historical painting about the Boston Tea Party and I tried to do it very much in the Enlightenment tradition, very grandiose, very much in the style of a Napoleonic era painter. Like George Washington crossing the river, something like that. What happened was that, after I'd done the painting...I'd changed the history. Basically, Sam Adams was rowing out to do a suicide bombing on the tea company's ship, instead of dressing up as Indians and throwing the tea overboard. When I presented the painting to the class, the whole class was confused as to why I'd done what they saw as a boring, straight historical painting. Pretty much no one got that I'd completely changed the history of it. I was really surprised by that, and it got me thinking: how much could I push that? Changing history, so that you're discussing contemporary problems, but in a subtle enough way that the reader thinks they're experiencing something quite real. Particularly in terms of the American Revolution, in the beginnings of American history. I'm American. I grew up in New England. One of those things that I've always thought was important in creating any kind of art or discussing any kind of contemporary problems is to look at the roots of it, how things began. By messing with that kind of history, I'm trying to see if I can get at a deeper truth about where we are today. The American Revolution seemed like a pretty obvious place to start. And it's also a fascinating time period that doesn't get a lot of play in mainstream media. Probably because all of the badass heroes wore tights, you know? Nobody was really "cool" back then. Every gun took 30 seconds to load. Not a lot of tense action there.

Anyway, I began researching, and I spent a loooong time on this first issue. I wrote out a baseline for how I think the whole thing is going to go, the longer story. Tons and tons of research for three years, all while I was slowly drawing and writing, while working on other jobs and stuff like that. This last year, I was able to take a sabbatical and just crank out the book. I sent it out for a Xeric grant, and they liked it enough to give me twice the amount of funding I'd actually requested, which was really sweet. That allowed me to make a bigger piece. I got it printed at Deschamps Printing, a local printer here in Massachusetts, and I debuted it at SPX last year. For being a pretty unknown artist and having a really new project, one that's historical, I thought it sold pretty well. So far, so good.

It's being distributed by Diamond pretty soon, correct?

Yeah, it should be. Actually, if it's not arriving in stores this week, it should be arriving the week after. I'm just getting it distributed right now...I had a whole lot of stuff going on. I got married right before SPX--the book was being printed, basically, while I was getting married. Then I moved right after marriage, so all the work of getting the book distributed had to be pushed back. Now it's finally coming out, and I'm really excited to see it in stores.

How long do you think Freedom will end up being?

The way that I have it planned now is that there's three major books, and each book would be six to seven chapters, and each chapter would be about the size of Freedom #1. So 60 to 70 pages each, in the large format. Mini-graphic novels I guess, although I just prefer to call them floppies. It's gonna be pretty long. Six issues per book, three books. It's going to be a long, long story. But that's okay! Those are my favorite stories, the ones that end up being the long trajectory of a bunch of characters, watching them change, seeing characters you love die. Shit happens that you don't expect. I feel like you can't get that richness of character in a singular graphic novel, even if it's like 500 pages. You need time to see things develop, to see the characters breathe and develop. I'm making it my central life's work, but I'll do other things on the side.

What art school did you go to?

I went to the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. It's a cool art school, and I had a pretty great time there. Portland's a really great comic town. Surprisingly, when I was at school, comics was kind of...I didn't have much guidance in the way of comics. But I met Ryan Alexander Tanner and Alex Cahill there, both dudes who are hardcore comics guys, and we banded together. We like to say that we got comics "happening" at that school, with the help of one of our teachers, Daniel Duford. He's a fine artist, but also a man severely dedicated to comics. He's been making his own comic, a long American epic, called The Naked Boy, which is pretty fascinating stuff.

Pacific is more of a conceptual art school, a contemporary art school, so I didn't get quite the amount of hardcore illustrative training that I would have liked. But I met some good people and had a good time. I also studied abroad, in Greece for two semesters. There, I studied classical painting and art history, stuff like that. That was a blast. I feel like I got a lot of good technical training in Greece and a lot of great conceptual training in Portland.

Did you start the research on Freedom while you were still in school?

I did, I think it was during my last year there. The idea simmered for a while after I'd done that painting, which was the initial spark. I started playing around with the idea of the "Liberty Eagle", or the "tarred and feathered man". It was a figure I was playing with in paintings, in random sketchbook doodles, sort of like the way you see Chris Ware's little robot guy show up in random places. Eventually, when I came back from Europe and all the inspiration from traveling abroad kind of petered out, I really got back into it. I think the idea had properly fermented by that time. I graduated in 2007. I'd already done a lot of the thinking and started the research. I made the mistake of starting to draw too soon. I was just so anxious to get it out. I'm much more of an artist than I am a writer--writing is kind of a necessary chore for me, whereas drawing is just so much fun. So initially, I made the mistake of trying to draw the first issue while I was researching and writing the larger story. Just to get it out, because I wanted to so bad. And then I ended up having to redraw the entire first chunk of the book!

The research continues to this day. There's so many characters I want to introduce--some historical, some completely fictional, so I've got to figure out who these people really were. One of the things I'm really trying to keep alive is the idea that the history has changed, all the people are the same people. The world is the same place. It's really important to me to make the world seem real, even as all these mystical things are happening, even as the history changes. So it becomes important that a pub looks the way a pub would have looked, that the world is grounded. It goes the same for the characters.

One of the things that really made the first issue jump out was how developed all of the characters are. I started off cynically assuming that the story is going to be just about Adam, that he's going to be the only developed character surrounded by a bunch of props, and then it rapidly became clear how wrong I was--there's so much depth to all of these people. Noah, the nice British captain, those shitheels who try to murder them...they're all just as deep and involving as Adam. It's surprising to hear you refer to writing as a necessary chore, because all of these characters are so vibrant and unique.

Well, thanks. That's probably why it took me so long to write it. It's true that a lot of non-main characters can just seem like props. That's just not how books that move me work. I've been devouring George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books lately, all the Game of Thrones stuff. The fact that there's like ten million people, and they're all real people...I do feel like that makes the world way more realistic. That kind of depth motivates a lot of my own research. There's actually been a few historical characters already, in the first issue. I'm keeping it pretty subtle, just to tease it out. Like in the barfight scene, that short, stocky guy that causes all the trouble? That's Paul Revere. And the nice British captain is actually Nathanial Hale, who in actual history was hung as a spy by the British. He had infiltrated British lines during the Siege of New York, and they caught him and hung him as a spy. He's the guy who is attributed that famous phrase, "My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country." It's kind of dubious whether he said that or not. But that's the kind of thing that I grab onto, that idea of "what might have happened." Maybe he didn't get caught. Maybe he infiltrated and worked his way up in the British Army. He made his way up to the rank of Captain, all while feeding information to the Americans.

That's kind of a spoiler, actually--you can't actually tell that now. That becomes more clear as the story goes along.

How much of the larger story is already prepared?

I have the whole story plotted out. It still needs work, a lot of editing. I think it's a little too long, there needs to be a little finagling. So it's all laid out, but only the first chapters are scripted. I'm currently drawing the second chapter now. There's going to be three books, with a lot of wiggle room. As you're writing these characters, they kind of tell you what to do a little bit...you have to be flexible with that. I don't want to say "it's done", but it's all laid out in my mind.

Just to be clear, the length is going to be three books, and each book will consist of six issues?

That's my thought so far. It could change, be a little bit less or a little bit more, but that's the length I feel is necessary to tell the whole story. I think these first two issues are the major introductory chapters for the two leading characters, but after that, you'll see the pace take off and be more integrated.

Potato Comics is just you, right?

Yeah, that's just me.

Are you interested in taking on any help? Or is your plan to continue with self-publishing and self-distributing?

Oh, I would love help. I'm a horrible businessman. I'm the typical artist who can't figure out how to set aside enough money to pay my self-employment taxes. Luckily, I have a beautiful wife who helps. She's the one who sent out comics to stores to get them interested, she's been really huge in helping me promote all this stuff. Mainly because I have to do work that makes money also. If I could figure out some way...maybe it's Kickstarter, maybe it's getting the book to stores and getting some steam behind it, to get the money to print another issue. It's not easy in the changing market to figure out how I'll be able to keep self-publishing. Especially when I'm just struggling to keep my family fed as a freelance artist.

So yeah. If I get a call from a publisher tomorrow that said "hey, let's work this out", I would definitely consider it. But I'm not quite jumping on that boat, not quite yet. I want to see how this goes first. I think the trick might be that...any larger mainstream industry, I'm sure there would be some kinds of logistical problems. The size of the book, the fact that it's black and white...all of these are artistic choices that I definitely feel strongly about, and I would be really hesitant to change. I can see that potentially causing some problems. I've talked to some store owners, and a few have asked why it has to be that size. It's a pain in the ass, I know.

I'll admit that I had some misgivings about the size at first, but when I got to page 24, that sequence where he throws the apple...that sold me, all the way. That moment alone demands the size.

I've gone to great lengths to make the book seem like an artifact of the time while still trying not to completely alienate the reader. The art and the writing has to be contemporary enough to get through. If you try to read Enlightenment era writing, Revolutionary War era stuff...it's horrible. The research for this is so hard. It's all overwrought, flowery stuff, sentences that go on for two pages. They'll use fifty words to say what you can say in a five word sentence. If I'd completely stuck to that cadence--and I'm not saying I'd even be capable--it would have driven everyone to the hills. But I did want the book to be as much of an artifact as possible. I'd initially planned to print it as a broadsheet and have the art actually be 1:1 from the way I drew it, so every page would have been 11x17, and it would be folded up into quarters, like those Wednesday Comics from DC, or Diamond from Floating World. Something like that. I had a lot of really grandiose ideas, like finding something to stand in as the vellum of those days.

But then the question became whether I actually wanted to sell any of them, and so I had to scale back. I went to the Boston Library, which was an incredible resource, and I went through their rare book room. They had all of these printed manuscripts from that time. I went through a lot of those pamphlets and newspapers, and I found that a lot of them were actually in that size and format that the book ended up being printed as. So there was a way to make it work, to print it at the size of what a pamphlet would have been, back in that time period. That's one of the reasons I chose that size, on top of the fact that the art is pretty dense. I wanted all that line work to come forward. That's how that choice was made.

Were you in the last crop of people they gave Xeric grants to?

Second to last, actually. I think there's one more grant cycle, and it's happening right now. So I got in right under the wire.

That's great. And they gave you twice the funding, right?

Yeah, I asked for $5,000 and they actually said "how about twice that?" So I got to print it big like I wanted to, I got to use nicer paper stock. Now I just have to figure out how to get that money for the second issue! It's not a cheap book to produce.

Sure, that's obvious just from looking at it. And it's got a pretty low price point as well. Seven dollars for something this size and length seems pretty unusual.

It is, and it's kind of an introductory price point as well. Make it cheaper, so that people will take a chance, with the hope that they like it and want to read more and are willing to pay a little more for the next issue. Seven's a great number too.

How did you end up being able to take a sabbatical? Was that because of the Xeric?

No. I was working as a freelance artist and graphic designer in Portland, Oregon. I had a really good job, and saved up a bunch of money. Then, me and my girlfriend at the time--now my wife--made the decision to move back to Massachusetts, where I'm from, where I grew up. We both had projects we wanted to work on, so we saved up a bunch of money, moved in with my mom--which is funny, because that's sort of the thing you do when you're 35 and a complete deadbeat who doesn't have a girlfriend--and we looked at it as an artists' retreat. So that's what we did. We moved across country, paid our bills, and didn't have to pay rent. I had to do a little bit of work here and there, and Liz (my wife) ended up very graciously taking on work to keep us afloat but I was basically able to work on that book for eight hours a day, if not more. In fact, my wife had to drag me away from the drawing table sometimes, when I'd be on hour nine. "Alright, days over!"

I was having so much fun. There's nothing like being able to work fulltime on a comic book and still feel like you're surviving. It's so good. Up until then, it was just every spare moment that I got, I would work on it. For me, it was really hard to get the flow that allows for good work. I feel like the best pages of that book are from the barfight scene until the last page. To me, those drawings are some of the tightest, the gestures work the best, the page compositions feel like they're the richest and...that's from then, when I had all the time in the world to just work. Sabbaticals work. If you can do it, if you can save up the money to just cram out a project. Now that's all over with. I'm back to being a fulltime freelancer, and my wife and I just had our first baby.

How old is she?

Just over a month right now. She just showed up. She's a wonderful delight that has absolutely sucked away all of my time. She's also, paradoxically, got me even more inspired to make art. To work on my comic book, to make art for her, to doodle...I don't have any time, but it's all dedicated to making stuff. I play with her, and when she sleeps, I draw. I've started keeping my pages close to the bed, so that when she wakes up screaming at 3 in the morning, I can throw out a couple of lines.

Let's talk about influences a little bit. Did you know when you went to art school that this is what you wanted to be doing?

I knew before I went in. I've always been drawing, I've always been inspired by comics and video games. I'm a child of the 80's and 90's. I grew up with Nintendo, Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side. My comics love came from newspaper strips, particularly Calvin & Hobbes. I probably owe Bill Watterson more than anyone else for starting me on becoming an artist. When I was a kid, I tried to be Calvin. You look at my sketchbooks from when I was a kid, everyone in there is a Calvin knockoff. It's almost sad. But that was it, that was what taught me that pictures and words could tell a story. And of course, as you get older, those things age so well, they get even more beautiful.

I feel like I'm a little bit of an anomaly in the comics world, because I'm actually not as well versed in comics as I'd like to be. When I was back in Portland with my buddies, we would have these drawing nights and they'd talk about who was the editor for some specific Justice League run back in 1989, and...I can't. I don't even know who was drawing comics back then. If I know at all, it's because I discovered them recently and went back. I just never read any mainstream comics back then. Well, except for the Image boom. I got suckered into all that bullshit, I read all of those books. That actually introduced me to a huge inspiration though, Sam Kieth. Sam Kieth was the next big artist who got me was an adolescent. When I saw The Maxx, it was like a switch got flipped. There were all these stupid super-hero comics and even at that age I was starting to realize how mindless it all was--fun, very very fun, but not very deep. And then there was this Maxx character, who was so weird and going in and out of different dimensions. He was a super-hero and a homeless guy, he didn't seem to have any concrete superpowers...it struck a much more emotional core with me at that age. On top of that, I think Sam Kieth was drawing the best he ever did, on that early run of The Maxx. That Bernie Wrightson influence was right there, there was that old EC style that Sam Kieth imitated a little bit. As far as that, those were some big ones. I was into Todd McFarlane and, in a sense, Rob Liefeld. There was all that childish mythology wrapped up in Image comics. It was really exciting. But after that all crumbled I got more into Vertigo books and all that. I was never really into all the super-hero stuff? Just the more abstract mainstream stuff, that was what fell into my lap. I mean, there was stuff like Frank Miller. He was a huge influence for a while, I drew everything in stark black and white for a bit. But I feel like my predilection is always going to be drawing. Crumb, Moebius, Bernie Wrightson. I love line art like that, creating forms like that, all the crosshatching, all of that. I'm also drawn to stark linework like Mazzuchelli---it's the all familiar names. City of Glass is a huge influence, Batman Year One. Not so much the drawing style, but the storytelling. After I discovered who Moebius was, after seeing all his work...I really glommed onto that. That kind of style. Bernie Wrightson just--there was something about the way you could mash all those lines together. That was really huge.

I think my tendency is to noodle at drawings. I'm a woefully slow artist, where my pages are more like paintings in that I just build them up over time. All of the blacks are built up from one tiny little nib.

Whoa!

Yeah, I just needed that to build up texture.

Wow. I can see it now. I was actually curious about the little white lines, I wouldn't have guessed that's where they come from. Jesus.

It's a pain in the ass. Half of me really really hates myself for that decision, because now that I've done it, I have to keep doing it to stay consistent. Some of the pages it's helped, because filling in those blacks is a way to convey motion and to create form in complete darkness, which is always there in real life. That often gets lost in comics. It also has that old printer-y feel. That's why I do that, even though it kind of drives me nuts.

I cheated on a couple of panels. When I was getting down to the wire, when my hand started to cramp. It does speak to my obsessive nature of drawing things, shadows and forms and things. Blacks. I think that's why I probably respond to all the old school crosshatchers so much. I could probably talk forever about influences. There's such a rich history out there, and I like to get lost in it.

Do you work digitally at all, or is this all pen and paper?

For this book, yeah, it's all as traditional as possible. I do quite a bit of touch up in Photoshop of course. I'm a pretty sloppy artist. Lines go out of the borders, that kind of stuff. I trim it all back on the computer. It's astounding to me to think about times before Photoshop. Inkers that actually managed to work without being able to trim things back or move things around digitally...that's mindblowing to think about.

I try to do as much as I can on paper. It just feels better, you know? Using that nib, putting it to paper, dipping it in the ink...it's so visceral. Especially now, where everything looks so digital, and ALL of the commercial work I do is pretty much digital at this point. It's kind of a sanctuary to work on my comic book, at this point. Dipping ink and paper. You know.

Do you have any interest in releasing any of Freedom digitally?

I'm thinking about it more and more. It seems like the thing you kind of need to do, now. It's not really well formatted for digital release, I don't think.

Well, there's a lot of the presentation in the physical object that won't translate.

Yeah, for sure. Conceivably, if I designed a special website just for it, something that would present it in the proper way, with the old school printed text, all of that. But you only have so much room on a screen and I hate--as much as I love looking at art on a computer--I hate reading comics on a computer. Even on an iPad, even though that's better. Zooming in and out on a page, for me, just destroys so much of the magic of comics. To look at the whole page, to look at the whole spread--there's layers of composition that happen on the spread, on each page, and on each panel...zooming on each panel, the comiXology reader or anything that guides me through the page? Drives me nuts. Now, if I was going to do a psychedelic sci-fi comic, something like that? I could totally see it working. But this comic is about the old world. It's about, in part, what happened in a preindustrial society that falls apart. It almost feels antithetical to release it digitally.

I say all this and yet, if I go to my computer and look at the numbers and I see I can sell a lot of books that way, then it's going to be kind of hard to say no.

Kurt Busiek, Astro City and the White Man's Burden

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:00:00 -0400

Astro City, written by Kurt Busiek, proves him to be one of the most conservative writers of superhero comics today, despite its postmodern metatextuality, in terms of aesthetics, craft and, most importantly, values. Over the last six years, however, I've noticed an element creeping into the series, especially in its treatment of female characters; a sort of watered-down White Man's Burden. (Others have perceived this, too: some "Conservatives" are put off because they expect the Norman Rockwell-like art and subject matter — an inquiry into what makes a hero into a hero — will match their politics, and that's far from the case.)

A lot of ink and bytes have been spilled about Astro City and Superhero Reconstruction; I won't go into that, other that to summarize that Astro City is a big city that mirrors Metropolis and/or Gotham. Chock full of superhero analogs, it's a fan-tasia, with its topography named after famous-and-not-so-famous comics creators/businessmen (such as Harry "A" Chesler): as it goes through each decade, the characters and its tone shifts and comments on that period. Much has been written about Alex Ross' covers (he does the covers for the series); a little less so about Brent Anderson's realistic interior art. Brent Anderson is an "Old Boy" artist; what he draws best, and therefore, what I imagine he loves to draw the most, are older, paunchy men who have been ravaged by hard experiences.

Ross is inherently romantic; even when he depicts chubby, older men, they always have a carefully made-up, well-lit Hollywood sheen to them; he is all about mise en place — even his Robert Mitchum lookalike, Steeljack, is a pro at catching his light. Anderson is more like Dave Gibbons in that he's more interested in mise en scène; his characters are often frumpy (Anderson's costuming is skillfully bland; clothes just sell the characters, and never draw attention away from them), and I imagine smooth surfaces and perfection bore him. Even his supposedly young, beautiful female figures, like Astra and Beautie, look stolid, due to his crosshatching. (A bit of an exception are children: Anderson drew Power Pack in '80s, and he obviously relishes the playfulness of li'l Astra, a Julie Power stand-in.) In Astro City, superheroes are like presidents; responsibility weighs them down, and they look about 20 years older than they are.

Busiek's and Anderson's sensibilities mesh, since Busiek adamantly and publically honors his "elders" (the comics creators that have come before him). But Busiek wants to do more than slavish homages to Jack Kirby and Gil Kane — he is doing his best to update and be more inclusive of black, LGBTQ, female, etc. characters whose stories have traditionally been elided in classic superhero comics. While this is certainly commendable, his comics can occasionally take on something of an apologetic, even hectoring tone, to the point where it can undermine his own good intentions. It may be the result of the forum-ization of comics. Busiek is active in comic-book forums, often attempting to combat with racism/homophobia/misogyny, and some of that register seems to be seeping into his fiction.

As of late, his patented switching-the-first-person-point-of-view has begun to seem more like setting up an argument, a technique that's more effective when he's writing for black characters. In "The Eagle and the Mountain," which focuses on the relationship between the supervillain Infidel and the superhero Samaritan and comparing and contrasting their worldviews, the broadness of Infidel, a black slave-turned-sorcerer, plays well against the doofy, archetypal Superman/Samaritan.

The "argument" structure becomes more nuanced in the Dark Ages graphic novels, which alternates narration between two black brothers, Charles and Royal, experiencing the social upheaval of the '70s and early '80s in a comic-book universe as a low-level cop and a low-level crook, respectively. Because the brothers share the narration, Busiek is able to couch the argument — ultimately, how far one should go for vengeance — inside a sibling dynamic. Unfortunately, Busiek can't help but get bogged down with cosmic energies, crappy clones, elaborate organizations, overlong arcs and drawn-out fights, etc. (Because this is all metacommentary on the Bronze Age, basically, the characters themselves observe this. Charles: There was something out there. Something more than just us. Royal: But it was reachin' out — changing us. Makin' things darker. Makin' everyone angrier? Was it changing us? Or were we feeding it?)

I can't speak for black readers (and I'd be curious to see what kinds of things they had to say about it), but it seems to me that brothers do more than just represent; they have moral dilemmas to ponder, love lives to navigate, and jobs to do.

Where Busiek seems most likely to tip over into preachiness is in his one-shots that focus on female characters. While the rack focus of his "Lois Lane" story, "Shining Armor," packs a good punch — the "girl reporter" sees herself as a Howard Hawks type, while the object of her affection/contention interprets her behavior quite differently — a weepy coda, where it's explicitly stated that, due to social mores, she was forced to channel all of her ambitions into a man, does a disservice to the reader. "Beautie: Her Dark Plastic Roots," too, has another one of these sequences, in which it's made plain that a woman's thwarted ambition and lack of male approval ruined lives. (There is a scene in which a man is lecturing a woman, a sort of female Dr. Frankenstein; however, there's also an uncomfortable sense that's she's being castigated for giving up a "child" she was too young to have.) Cue: crying.

While many of Busiek's points are valid — attempting to repress or silence people ultimately hurts everyone, everyone needs to feel accepted, superhero comics done effed up, etc. — it seems to me that so adroit a storyteller, especially one who's somewhat subversive, could perhaps deliver them in a method other than a lecture. Especially since Astro City is essentially an "artisan" superhero comic, created and owned by the same small team, released sporadically. Though there are ventures out to the country and outer space and whatnot, Astro City is local and organic. (Though I'm not sure what DC is going to do with it, now that their non-Vertigo imprint for creator-owned material, WildStorm, is gone.)

In the Astro City universe, the greatest, most chivalric value is self-sacrifice, something that both men and women are capable of, on both small and large scales. In fact, much is made of a time-traveling superhero that allows himself to be martyred. Unfortunately, from there it's a short leap into martyr complex territory. Busiek may wish to absolve himself of the sins of his fathers, for the greater good of his characters (and his readers), if for no other reason than he has the freedom to "stay small." Busiek, despite his best efforts, isn't going to be able to resolve all of the problematic racist/sexist/homophobic issues that plague superhero comics. Mind: I'm not suggesting that he stop trying to include diverse characters; rather, I hope that they get Busiek at his best: when he keeps his goals modest, in high-quality stories and arcs.

The Fifty Greatest Pop Songs About Comics, Part II

Shaenon K. Garrity — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:00:00 -0400

25. "Spiderman '79," Veruca Salt
You're so nice, you tie me in a web
And cradle me 'til dawn.
You're so deadly, I can see your breath
Beneath me when you're gone

Just when I think the Marvel superheroes are underrepresented in pop music, here comes '90s alt band Veruca Salt with a tender ballad to Spider-Man. Or possibly just some web-spinning, arachnoid shitkicker Veruca Salt has a thing for. Spider-Man has so few love songs; let's let him have this one.

24. "Spiderman," Katrina and the Waves
People can tell me that he's not real
But I go crazy 'bout that silken shield
I wanna be rescued from bad guys' clutches
I wanna know what that Spider-Man touches

I spoke too soon! Katrina and the Waves deserve to be known for more than "Walking on Sunshine"; they should also be remembered for their desire to be rescued by Spider-Man so they can crush hard on the web-slinger's charms. Sadly, neither Veruca Salt nor Katrina and the Waves love Spider-Man enough to spell his name correctly. It's got a dash, people.

23. "Comic Book Heroes," the Tearjerkers
I wanna be a comic book hero
Flex my muscles on the beach
I wanna be a comic book hero
Comic book heroes are outta reach

Sure, any late-'70s Northern Irish power pop band can fart out a song about wanting to be a superhero. But the Tearjerkers go the extra mile with knowledgeable references to Cyclops, Angel, Doctor Strange, and other Silver Age Marvel heroes. "From the age of six they've never changed," they cry, rocking out punk-style. But an old 1977 punk style, not like some modern hardcore asshole, as Enid from Ghost World would say.

22. "Ghost Rider," Suicide
He's riding through your town with his head on fire
Halo burning, eyes are crying, halo burning, eyes are crying
Ghost Rider, Ghost Rider, Ghost Rider, Ghost Rider keep riding

Not only does this song rock hard while dropping unexpectedly charming lyrics like "He's looking so cute/Riding around in a blue jumpsuit," the later and even more rocking cover by the Rollins Band was included in the soundtrack for The Crow, based on a completely different comic. So this is like a double secret probation comic song.

21. "Sunshine Superman," Donovan
Superman and Green Lantern ain't got nothin' on me
I can make like a turtle and dive for your pearls in the sea
And you just sit there thinking on your velvet throne
About all the rainbows you can have for your own

One of the pioneer psychedelic songs, "Sunshine Superman" evokes the feelings of a really good trip with a semi-nonsensical blend of sunshine, rainbows, superhero references, and sitar music. In counterpoint to the feel-good '60s groove, the lyrics have a strangely threatening edge, as the singer muses about his resolution to use his druggy superpowers to impress a disinterested girl. You know, if he can get off the couch this weekend. The song was most likely inspired by Donovan's then-girlfriend, teenage actress Sue Lyon—Kubrick's Lolita herself!—who eventually left him after he spiked her drink with LSD without her knowledge. This is why Metropolis doesn't let Sunshine Superman defend them anymore.

20. "Magneto and the Titanium Man," Wings
I didn't believe them
Magneto and the Titanium Man
But when the Crimson Dynamo
Finally assured me, well, I knew

As far as I can tell, the plot of this song is that Magneto, the Titanium Man, and the Crimson Dynamo appear before Paul McCartney and warn him that his girlfriend is about to rob a bank. Paul goes with them to stop her, but at the last minute he realizes that Magneto, the Titanium Man, and the Crimson Dynamo are all supervillians, and his girlfriend is on the side of good, so presumably she's got a legitimate reason for robbing that bank. Damn, that's pretty nerdy for Wings.

19. "Ghost World," Aimee Mann
So I'm bailing this town
Or tearing it down
Or probably more like
Hanging around

Aimee Mann is one of the great storytellers of folk-rock. "Ghost World" takes the Dan Clowes graphic novel of the same title as its inspiration, but the lyrics are more general, reflecting the ennui of a teenager fresh out of high school and baffled about what to do next. "Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool," the Enid-like protagonist complains, so she's on hold until the summer ends, taking childhood with it for good. Bonus comics connection: Mann's album Lost in Space, with its melancholy cover art by Seth, belongs on a list of Fifty Best Album Covers by Cartoonists.

18. "Barney Google," Billy Jones and Ernest Hare
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googily eyes
Barney Google is the luckiest of guys
If he fell into the mud, he'd come up with a diamond stud
Barney Google with the goo-goo-googily eyes

Billy DeBeck's comic strip Barney Google was a phenomenon in the 1920s, especially after the introduction of Barney's adorably incompetent racehorse, Spark Plug. Music inspired by the strip included "The Barney Google Foxtrot," "So I Took the $50,000," and "Come On, Spark Plug!" But there's no beating Jones and Hare's upbeat march, which forever branded the strip's hero as "Barney Google With the Goo-Goo-Googily Eyes." That is, until the world forgot about Barney Googlie and his inbred cousin Snuffy Smith took over the strip. Today, Barney Google's most lasting legacy, even in the comics world, is arguably Charles Schulz's nickname, Sparky, which came from Spark Plug.

17. "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," the Ramones
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now

The Ramones were fans of the 1940s Fiction House comic Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and named one of their greatest songs, and the first punk song to chart in the U.S., after the leopard-skin-clad heroine. As Joey Ramone explained: "To me ‘Sheena' was the first surf/punk rock/teenage rebellion song. I combined Sheena, Queen of the Jungle with the primalness of punk rock. Then Sheena is brought into the modern day: ‘But she just couldn't stay/She had to break away/Well, New York City really has it all.'" Speaking of which, when is some brave publisher going to start doing Fiction House reprints?

16. "Brainiac's Daughter," the Dukes of Stratosphear
All across the land the bells ring out
It's night, sun shines bright
So I reach to hold her frozen hand in flight
As we alight in the bottle city of Kandor

I'm bending my one-song-per-band rule here, because the Dukes of Stratosphear are just XTC doing psychedelic music instead of New Wave music, and XTC will be appearing elsewhere on this list. But what the hell. If there isn't room here for a trippy Beatles-on-acid tribute that name-checks Brainiac and the bottle city of Kandor, why am I even making this list?

15. "I Am the Law," Anthrax
Truth and justice
Are what he's fighting for
Judge Dredd's the man
He is the law
DROKK IT!

Oh, right: so I can pay proper tribute to Anthrax's headbanging ode to 2000 AD stalwart Judge Dredd. Every line of this song is amazing: "A man so hard his veins bleed ice/And when he speaks he never says it twice." Hardcore! The repeated "DROKK IT!" puts it over the top, and then, just when you think it can't rock any harder, Anthrax starts totally thrashing out and repeating "I am THE LAW!" Because that's the way it is in Mega-City, citizens.

14. "Alley Oop," the Hollywood Argyles
There's a man in the funny papers we all know
He lived way back a long time ago
He didn't eat nothin' but a bearcat stew
Well, this cat's name is-a Alley Oop

David Bowie once proclaimed "Alley Oop" the most perfect pop song ever made, and am I going to argue with David Bowie? No. I am not.

13. "Comic Book Heroes/I'm Your Superman," Rick Springfield
There's times when real people let me down
When the temperature falls to zero
I curl up by the fire with a good book
And for a while I am a superhero

Early in his career, Rick Springfield recorded the currently-out-of-print album Comic Book Heroes, the opening tracks of which form an epic tribute to the spun-sugar joys of superhero comics. After the short, somber intro of "Comic Book Heroes," Springfield launches into the glammy, piano-driven "I'm Your Superman," in which, between na-na-na-na-na choruses, he assures his special lady that with her "I even feel real bulletproof too." Try to listen to it and not crack a smile. You can't.

12. "Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)," XTC
I'm enlisting overseas aid
Need assisting, help with a maid
Get the expert on mademoiselles
He could diffuse any bombshell

XTC recorded two major comic-book songs, this one and "That's Really Super, Supergirl," both of which are about men intimidated by women. That's probably appropriate. In "Sgt. Rock," a timid British virgin imagines the hard-bitten hero of Our Army at War coming across the pond to help him get a girlfriend. "Girls are foreign and strange to me," he confesses, and who knows how to conquer foreign territory better than Sgt. Rock? I'm somewhat less sold on the singer's belief that Rock is also "the expert at kissing and stuff."

11. "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron," The Royal Guardsmen
In the nick of time, a hero arose
A funny-looking dog with a big black nose
He flew into the sky to seek revenge
But the Baron shot him down—"Curses, foiled again!"

One of the most epic novelty songs of all time, the Royal Guardsmen's dramatic musical recreation of Snoopy's WWI fantasies recounts every detail of the literal dogfight with martial solemnity. The Guardsmen followed their first and only hit with two sequels, "The Return of the Red Baron" and "Snoopy's Christmas," as well as other songs about Snoopy. Amazingly, "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" was released only four weeks after the first Red Baron strip in Peanuts. In that shining moment, the Royal Guardsmen saw a legend being born and leapt to commemorate it in song.

10. "Superman," R.E.M.
I am, I am, I am Superman
And I know what's happening
I am, I am, I am Superman
And I can do anything

This is one of the definitive '90s alt-rock anthems, and I'm a sucker for any song with echo and reverb. But if you listen to the lyrics it's fairly disturbing, inasmuch as it's about how Michael Stipe plans to use his super-powers to stalk a girl he likes. Like "Sunshine Superman," it's more of a fantasy about abusing Superman's powers to get girls than it is about Superman himself. Which is not to say the real Superman didn't occasionally pull that sort of thing with Lois Lane, back in the Golden Age, but still, dick move.

9. "Hello Tiger," Urusei Yatsura
Hello tiger
You're a wonderful star
Your bikini
Isn't tiger fur

Here we have another rare case of both song and band name being comic-inspired. The Glaswegian alt-rock band Urusei Yatsura named itself after Rumiko Takahashi's manga of the same name, and this catchy lo-fi song pays tribute to Lum, the alien demon girl in the tiger-striped bikini who made Urusei Yatsura Takahashi's first hit. Urusei Yatsura also recorded a song about tabletop roleplaying called "Slain By Elf," and all but one member went on to form the band Project A-ko, named after another anime whose fansub was on the program of every sci-fi convention in the 1990s. So they're clearly a nerdy bunch of Scotsmen, even if they used to hang out with the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand.

8. "Challengers," the New Pornographers
On the walls of the day
In the shade of the sun
We wrote down another vision of us
We are the challengers of the unknown

Songs about Superman and Batman are so done. The New Pornographers went above and beyond, building a song around Jack Kirby's legendary, but widely unread, proto-Fantastic Four series Challengers of the Unknown. Comic-book connection aside, it's a lovely song, and its mournful tone and cryptic references to mysterious ancient ceremonies jibe unexpectedly well with the nod to half-forgotten old Kirby comics.

7. "Cartoon Heroes," Aqua
We are what we're supposed to be
Illusions of your fantasy
All dots and lines that speak and say
What we do is what you wish to do

Every time I play this glorious Europop meringue, my husband criticizes its confused evocation of a generic "Toontown" where Superman comes from Never-Never Land and rubs shoulders with Spider-Man. Or maybe he just wants me to stop playing my Aqua albums over and over. But why would anyone want that? Here, the bubblegum band famous (or infamous) for taking on the roles of Barbie and Ken in "Barbie Girl" casts itself as a gang of cartoon characters frolicking in a comic-strip wonderland. Because they're Aqua, and they can do that, and no force in this world can stop their relentless assault of synthesizers, timpani, and Danish rapping. Everyone, even the haters, will be welcomed at the Toontown party.

6. "I Wupped Batman's Ass," Wesley Willis
Batman got on my nerves
He was running me amok
He ridiculed me, calling me a bum
I wupped Batman's ass

The legendary Wesley Willis, a schizophrenic with a Technics KN keyboard, entertained thousands on the streets of Chicago and recorded over 50 albums of his immediately recognizable music. But even he ran into trouble sometimes, as in this confrontation with an uncharacteristically rude Batman. Batman beats the hell out of Willis and knocks him to the floor, but Willis gets up and gives it right back, because Batman is being such a jagoff. Inasmuch as all Wesley Willis songs have the same tune and structure, it's hard to rank them, but this may be the best Wesley Willis song. Willis also recorded the suspiciously similar "I Whipped Spider-Man's Ass," in which he is forced to wail on Spider-Man for cutting his girlfriend out of 70 dollars. Rock over London, rock on Chicago.

5. "Scenes From a Night's Dream," Genesis
Little Nemo rubbed his eyes and got out of bed
Trying hard to piece together a broken dream
His visions lifelike and full of imagination
It's strange to think they came from such a tiny head

If this were a list of Fifty Best Music Videos Inspired by Comics, the top slot would surely go to Tom Petty's animated Little Nemo homage in the video for "Runnin' Down a Dream." But in this list, honor must be paid to prog-rock mainstay Genesis for crafting an appropriately dreamy/trippy song about Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland/Little Nemo in the Land of Wonderful Dreams, the most unabashedly beautiful of all comic strips. There's even a sly reference to McCay's other dream strip, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, in the lyrics "Eating all kinds of food so close to bedtime/They always made him have these nightmares, it seemed." O Mama!

4. "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman," the Kinks
I'd really like to change the world
And save it from the mess it's in
I'm too weak, I'm so thin
I'd like to fly but I can't even swim

Superman has inspired more songs than any other comic character. Is this one the best? Yes. Yes it is. The plaint of a knobbly-kneed weakling who wishes he could change the world like a superhero continues the Kinks' fascination with modern young neurotics and the impotence of the individual against society. This guy can't even muster the super-power to pay his bills. But thanks to the Kinks' relentless beat and screaming guitars, this tale of proletariat woe never turns into a Sad Superman Song. Anyway, don't we all wish we could fly like Superman?

3. "Flash's Theme," Queen
He's for every one of us
Stand for every one of us
He saved with a mighty hand
Every man every woman every child
He's a mighty Flash

The glittering hierophant of all theme songs for comics-based movies. In fact, this could well be the greatest movie theme song ever, period, were it not for the existence of "Theme From Shaft." There are basically no bad Queen songs, but the group's bombastic, operatic style is especially well-suited to Alex Raymond's sci-fi adventure strip. Splice in some representative lines from the movie ("I like to play with things awhile…before annihilation"), and you've got the iconic comic-strip song beside which all other comic songs are judged.

2. "Comic Books," Debbie Harry
Eighteen I was guaranteed
I would lose my teenage dream
But it's so funny how I got to look
Like all the people in my comic books

Even better than songs about comic characters are songs about the pleasures of comics themselves. Debbie Harry, minus Blondie, sings the praises of comic books—"Archie, Josie, superheroes/I would read them by myself"—to a relentless punk beat. In the end, instead of growing out of comics and becoming a responsible adult, Harry becomes a rock star and a living comic-book heroine. Comics are more than childhood escapism; they're the road to a bigger, brighter, more colorful life.

1. "DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake," Art Brut
I'm in love with a girl
At my comic shop
She's a girl who likes comics
She probably gets that a lot

Adulthood is overrated anyway. That's the theme of English/German indie band Art Brut's ode to arrested development and superhero comic books. The singer is 28 years old and still can't get a credit card, but it's okay as long as he can afford a steady supply of breakfast cereals, chocolate milkshakes, and Superman comics. So what if people accuse him of Peter Pan syndrome?

Almost as good as this gloriously rocking Art Wave song is lead singer Eddie Argos, at live shows, describing the band's trip to the DC offices after its release: "The first thing you see, when you get out of the lift, is the Daily Planet. The Daily Planet is where Clark Kent works! The second thing you see, the second thing you see is Superman, just hanging around. I thought, this is it! I love Superman! But no. I'm not going to waste this opportunity. I've not even got free comics yet." Raise a milkshake to the ultimate comics love song.

Talkin' Comics Up In Morningside Heights

Karen Green — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:00:00 -0400

As you know, if you've been reading these pieces for any length of time, I've been building the graphic novels collection at Columbia for over six years now. A gradually increasing circle of faculty, in a gradually widening range of disciplines, have been using the collection in teaching and research, and students have been writing senior theses and masters essays that use our comics holdings as well. But there's nothing that says a topic has arrived like an academic symposium. Am I right?

The "Comic New York" symposium had its genesis well over a year ago, out of conversations between a School of Visual Arts professor and Columbia PhD, Chris Couch, and a long-time comics professional, Danny Fingeroth. The two thought that Columbia should host some sort of major comics event, and they gathered several academics and comics industry folk around a lunch table to figure out what that should be. By the end of the lunch, we'd run some ideas up a flagpole, but no one saluted, so it was decided that Danny Fingeroth, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber, and I would assume responsibility for planning and figure out something satisfactory.

There ensued a series of lunches. It's always good to plan over lunches! Food stimulates the brain cells. I don't recall whose idea it was, in the end, to focus on New York and comics. It was probably a function of our having no actual budget, and wanting to concentrate on the plethora of comics talent that's here in our own back yard. And when we started to think of the huge supply of talent here now, it became inevitable that we would eventually begin to think of the huge supply of talent that has been here always. And once we started thinking about the twinned and intertwined histories of comics and New York City…well, the ideas for panels practically started generating themselves.

[SPACER]

How many times have you been to a panel about the legends of the medium, for example, and heard mention of the High School of Music and Art (left) or DeWitt Clinton High (right)? I know I've heard it a million times. Al Jaffee and Will Elder were sent to the High School of Music and Art when it first opened, and it was there that they met Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, and John Severin. Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Irwin Hasen, Bob Kane, and Bill Finger went to DeWitt Clinton. What are the odds of so much talent congregating in a couple of NYC schools?

Today, nearly all the comics talent seems to come out of (or move into) Brooklyn. You can hardly throw a rock in Williamsburg without hitting a cartoonist. I found myself thinking about the Graphic NYC website, where Chris Irving and Seth Kushner have been chronicling the current crop of cartoonists, and how much fun it would be to have a panel of creators from those old schools along with new collectives like Act-I-Vate or [the late, lamented] Pizza Island. And, lo, the idea of a "New York as Breeding Ground" panel was born.

We thought about how Marvel Comics used New York, undisguised, in their stories; we thought about cartoonists who were Columbia alumni; we thought about the early newspaper strips and the war between the Hearst and Pulitzer empires; we thought about the comics zines in Barnard College's library and how some have grown into the graphic novels in my library; we thought about the community that has produced World War 3 Illustrated for thirty years and all the NYC political history it chronicles…and we started working out a format. We didn't want people presenting papers—we wanted conversation. We wanted stories. And we wanted creators—lots of them. But we also wanted this to tie-in with academia, so we decided that we would have cartoonists as panelists and academics, if possible, as moderators.

In the middle of all this planning, I was also working with a Columbia curator, negotiating with Chris Claremont for the donation of his archives to our Rare Book and Manuscript Library, or RBML. (This has been a year filled with newly-acquired skills.) Chris and Beth, his wife, were both [rightfully] concerned that, once the archives were on-site and processed, we should take care to promote and publicize their use, both to aid scholarship and to attract the archives of other creators. The director of RBML had been incredibly supportive on this front, and had assured me that he wouldn't be as interested in taking the Claremont archives unless we were likely to enhance our holdings with similar collections—no point in having one lone comics archive.

(This is an example of the first page of an online finding aid for our William S Burroughs archive; the Claremont papers will have one like this when they are processed)

So it seemed natural to feature Chris in the symposium, and we offered him the keynote spot. (And this is when the entire symposium became more of a libraries event, as we realized that we could make an appeal to all these NYC-area cartoonists to consider depositing their archives at Columbia.) We weren't sure whether we wanted a Claremont-focused panel, where colleagues would talk about his work, or whether we would have an academic chatting with him about his significance, but Danny came up with the perfect solution when he suggested that Chris's longtime editor, Louise Simonson, sit in conversation with him. And what a wonderful idea that was! Louise's enthusiasm, as well as her affection for Chris, was palpable, and she seemed as eager as any fan to hear his answers. Everything that Chris said was as thoughtful and considered as one might expect, although the two big news-stories turned out to be the alternate Sara Grey story that never happened and the James Cameron/Kathryn Bigelow X-Men movie that also never happened.

But back to the planning—which began, slowly, to coalesce. We wanted a real mix of young and old, of indie and mainstream; we wanted to show the amazing variety of this medium, even when just taking a sampling from a narrow geographic slice of a single country. We wanted diversity, too: I remember returning to my office to revise our panelist wish-list and realizing with dismay that every last name on it was male.

We didn't get everyone we asked, of course. How could we? But, you know what Harvard's admissions department always says about their freshman class? That even if they tossed out the entire list of first picks, and cobbled a new class from what was left over, it would be just as high quality as the original list? That's kind of how we felt about our lineup. It made us a little giddy, quite frankly, when we looked at the names we had.

So whom did we get?

Well, the panel about Marvel Comics' use of NYC morphed a bit, into an examination of the New York we know and the New York that appears mythically, or incognito: "New York, Real and Imagined." One of the first names that had occurred to me was Ben Katchor, because the city of Julius Knipl had always seemed like an alternate New York to me—the strange businesses Knipl visited might be around the corner, on one of the streets I'd never ventured down. But Katchor ended up on a different panel completely, so we kept thinking.

Happily, we ended up with Ariel Schrag—a Columbia alumna, no less, who left the moderator and the audience helpless with laughter from her story of a fight at a gay prom held while she was a student here—and Molly Crabapple, who has a view of New York which, she explained in her panel, was most informed by Hieronymus Bosch. Danny Fingeroth managed to score us not one, but TWO Romitas, and I'll tell you that watching father and son banter back and forth was one of the most winning moments of the entire weekend. And one of our earliest choices for that panel was actually not a cartoonist but an academic, Kent Worcester, who has presented quite a bit on New York in comics, and contributed a series of examples of comics' use of the city's grid as well as its verticality—stunningly captured in this Punisher page.

We thought that the World War 3 Illustrated idea might be better served by being about political comics in general, so we chose only Peter Kuper and Sabrina Jones from the WW3 family—two cartoonists for whom my admiration falls into the "unabashed" category. We wanted to provide ideological balance, though, which was tricky—we don't actually find a lot of conservative political cartooning particularly…funny. What were we going to do, bring in the Mallard Fillmore guy? That's not even about New York! A New York Post editorial cartoonist? Those cartoons aren't even funny! But Denis Kitchen has a biography of Al Capp coming out, and Capp's journey from ardent New Dealer to crotchety reactionary would make for some interesting discussion. (Not to mention that Denis Kitchen talking on just about anything makes for pretty compelling listening.) And David Hajdu, the Columbia Journalism School professor, and author of The Ten Cent Plague, who was moderating, asked us to include the terrific John Carey, an editorial cartoonist who provided a nice history of New York political cartooning to complement Peter Kuper's slideshow, together tracing subjects from Boss Tweed to Donald Trump.

We had thought we'd have a panel on New York's underground comics community, but we had a hard time fielding a team. Of our A-List, only Bill Griffith joined us, which was, admittedly, quite a get. But Kim Deitch, Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, and Françoise Mouly all said no, so we had to rethink our theme. "Underground" was perhaps a dubious label—as Griffith himself noted, "Zippy the Pinhead" is distributed by the largest and oldest syndicate in comics, which is hardly "underground"—so we zigged a bit, pondering, "What IS the modern ‘underground'?" In the end, we chose local cartoonists whose work could be thought of as "alternative," instead. In addition to Griffith we had the masterful R. Sikoryak, who has made his monthly "Carousel" slideshows one of the must-see features of any NYC comics festival, and Julia Wertz, whose "Drinking at the Movies" was one of my favorite books of 2010. And finally, to contextualize underground and indie comics, and to address the challenges those creators have faced—and still face—we added Charles Brownstein, director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, who had stories to make the blood run cold.

The panel about newspaper comics and the Pulitzer-Hearst circulation wars was also expanded, first to include newspaper comics across time, and finally to include magazine cartoonists and web-based content, too. Basically, a range of people who create comics periodically: "Periodical New York." We had wanted Art Spiegelman for this one, because of his encyclopedic knowledge of early newspaper comics, but he was too busy. It was Art who suggested Ben Katchor for this panel, though, saying he'd be a far better choice. What?! Who am I to know better than Art Spiegelman? And, after all, Ben Katchor had a long history with the NYC periodical press. And is a really interesting person! Emily Flake, who is a regular cartoonist in The New Yorker, not to mention a really, really funny person, joined us, along with Lauren Weinstein, whose blog regularly showcases her new work.

But the glue that held the lineup together, and the undisputed star of the panel itself, was the irrepressible Irwin Hasen, creator of the long-running newspaper strip, "Dondi," among other notable feats. Irwin is 93 years old now, and he is indomitable. Irwin has stories, he does. He wants you to hear them and, trust me: you want to hear them. Irwin is a crowd-pleaser—but he was just as much a panel pleaser. When you watch the video, look for the lovely rapport that developed between him and Emily Flake. I'm rooting for those two crazy kids to make a go of it.

Remember that "New York as Breeding Ground" panel? Remember the names that went to those two NYC high schools? Al Jaffee and Stan Lee are the only two still working in the medium (or still with us)—but only one of them lives in New York, and was gracious enough to agree to participate. Yes, the wonderful Al Jaffee agreed to take part in our symposium. Who else? A lot of cartoonists are New Yorkers, born and raised, after all. One who combines two elements of the city, though, is Dean Haspiel, who grew up in Manhattan and then made the move to Brooklyn. And is always entertaining on a panel.

Tracy White, best known perhaps for How I Made It to Eighteen, and also a New Yorker by birth, was added to the list early on and, to emphasize that New York doesn't merely give birth to cartoonists but draws them here like a magnet, Miss Lasko-Gross, who left suburban Boston to find a home on the Lower East Side, joined us as well. The entire panel was dedicated to the memory of Jerry Robinson, who had attended Columbia briefly before leaving to get a job. His was a name that we'd considered for the Columbia cartoonists panel that never happened—James Romberger was another—but circumstances intervened. It's nice that we were still able to keep him on the program, even if only in memoriam.

The final panel of the weekend took everything that came before and anchored it in Columbia's scholarly life. Moderated by co-organizer and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber, it marshaled Chris Couch, Jonathan W Gray (of CUNY/John Jay), and [now Columbia's own] Paul Levitz to discuss how the comics and creators we'd discussed all weekend long are—or could be—understood and studied by scholars. "Comic New York and the Academy" touched on scholarly process, but it was also a clarion call for what the academy—and its libraries—can do to preserve and promote this unique medium.

The spirit that hovered over the entire proceeding, of course, was that of über-NYC cartoonist Will Eisner, whose love for and memories of the city infused his work. The week of March 6—Eisner's birthday—is celebrated as Will Eisner Week, with comics-related events scheduled across the country and, while our symposium didn't quite fall into that time period, we just stretched out March into Will Eisner Month. Nearly every cartoonist at the event had either worked with or been inspired by Eisner, and his name came up frequently—not just in "New York as Breeding Ground," but throughout the weekend.

So, was it a success? It was certainly well-publicized! The New Yorker included it in their event listings, which almost made me pass out. The Village Voice did, too. We began to worry that we might not have enough space. We increased the chairs in the room from 80 to the maximum of 160. The programs I was going to print out and staple up myself, when I thought I might only need about 100, were sent to Print Services with a request for 300. We kept fund-raising almost up to the last moment, and added DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Alexander Street Press, and the Will & Ann Eisner Family Foundation to the university departments that had already contributed so generously.

And lo and behold: we were a resounding hit! On Saturday, we had standing room only. On Sunday we were about 65% full—probably close to 300 unique visitors over the two days. Publishers Weekly's Philip Turner wrote a terrific roundup. The bookstore sold a ton of books at the author signings that followed each panel. People met and mingled, made connections, smiled and looked happy and excited to be there.

We had an audience filled with scholars, librarians, students, cartoonists, publishers, journalists, and fans of every stripe. Library administration was happy. Panelists and the moderators (oh, man, I didn't mention all the moderators! Major honors to Chris Irving, David Hajdu, Gene Kannenberg Jr, Eddy Portnoy, and co-organizers Danny Fingeroth and Jeremy Dauber) were happy. I was blindingly happy.

Next week, the videos of the panels should be linked at the symposium's program page. Have a look, have a listen, and tell me what you think. And leave a comment with your ideas for what kind of program we should do next…

The Fifty Greatest Pop Songs About Comics

Shaenon K. Garrity — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 22:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: The following are solely and entirely my personal choices as the comics community's only licensed and bonded Shaenon K. Garrity. Only one song per musical group has been permitted. For the purposes of this list, I have excluded TV themes and numbers from musicals. I have, however, included songs from movies, because reasons.

50. "I'm a Boinger," Billy and the Boingers
If you don't know by now
Bill bit the head off a cow
That's no lie
That's no lie, 'cause we're the Boingers

Children of the '80s may recall the ongoing saga of Deathtöngue, the Bloom County heavy metal band comprising Bill the Cat (vocals and lead tongue), Hodge the Rabbit (drums), and Opus the Penguin (tuba), later renamed Billy and the Boingers at the insistence of sleazy manager Steve Dallas. And children of the '80s who were into comic strips will invariably issue a sigh of nostalgia over the 1987 Bloom County anthology Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, which included an actual flexi-disc single of the band's music.

In reality, the song "I'm a Boinger" was performed by the Harry Pitts Band, and the B side "U-Stink-But-I-♥-U" was performed by a New Jersey band called Mucky Pup. And in honesty, neither song is very good. Even the lyrics to "I'm a Boinger" admit, "At best, the music could be described as lame," and the boing-boing sound effects are, though thematically appropriate, not very metal. But where else can you hear a rock song by a cat-and-penguin-fronted cartoon band?

49. "Side Kick," Rancid
I had a dream I was a vigilante sidekick
My name is Tim, I'm a lesser-known character
I had a dream I was a vigilante sidekick
Fighting crime in the streets together

There's something charming about a singer a) imagining himself not as Batman or Superman, as most pop stars are wont to do, but as the humble Robin, and b) helpfully explaining that he's a lesser-known character. But then Wolverine shows up and fights a SWAT team and it's like, what? They're not even in the same universe!

48. "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs," Chris Christensen and Mark Schultz
Cadillacs and dinosaurs
Sleek and shiny monsters with the carriage of lords
Evolution, baby, is a thing of the past
When you're living in the moment and the moment can't last

Why wait for some random band to compose songs about your comic? With musician Chris Christensen and copious guest appearances from members of Seduction of the Innocent (about which more later), Xenozoic Tales/Cadillacs and Dinosaurs creator Mark Schulz produced Songs from the Xenozoic Age, a lushly illustrated Cadillacs and Dinosaurs concept album. Of all the tracks, my favorite is this rockabilly song about, obviously, Cadillacs and dinosaurs. Say what you will, I admire a cartoonist who knows what he likes.

47. "Men in Black," Will Smith
The good guys dress in black, remember that
Just in case we're ever face-to-face and make contact
The title held by me: M.I.B.

For a while there in the 1990s, it wasn't a summer movie without a tie-in rap over the end credits. Since Men in Black, based on the comic by Lowell Cunningham and Sandy Curruthers, starred the young Will Smith, a rap was inevitable. And yet the question remains. Which moment more perfectly encapsulated the '90s: the Fresh Prince dancing with a CGI alien to the strains of this laid-back R&B-style ditty, or Vanilla Ice rapping "Go ninja, go ninja, go!" for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze?

46. "Batdance," Prince
I've seen the future and it will be
BATMAN
And where, and where…is the Batman?

For that matter, could there be a more perfect close to the 1980s than an MTV video featuring a team of Batmen, Jokers, and Vickis Vale performing a sensitive interpretive dance to Prince's pounding seven-minute electronic dance track? It may sound as corny as the Batusi to today's Christopher Nolan fans, but this single went platinum in 1989. NEVER FORGET.

45. "Little Orphan Annie," the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks
Little Orphan Annie
You go smiling through
Telling Mr. Trouble,
"Who's afraid of you?"

Novelty songs about comic-strip characters were quite the thing back in the day, 23 skidoo and oh you kid. Frankly, "Little Orphan Annie," recorded by the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks just four years after the debut of Harold Gray's comic strip, doesn't have much to do with the comic besides the name. But its focus on Annie's relentless optimism surely influenced the 1977 musical Annie and its hit songs "Tomorrow" and "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile."

44. "Electric Barbarella," Duran Duran
I plug you in
Dim the lights
Electric Barbarella
Your perfect skin
Plastic kiss
Electric Barbarella

What does this song about making out with a robot have to do with Barbarella? Pretty much nothing save the title. But not only is it an awesomely trashy dollop of New Romantic pulp, we have here a rare case where both the song and the band itself are named after comic-book characters. Unless Duran Durand is only in the movie. I have to go read a bunch of Barbarella comics.

43. "Addams Groove," M.C. Hammer
They do what they wanna do, say what they wanna say
Live how they wanna live, play how they wanna play
Dance how they wanna dance, kick and they slap a friend
The Addams Family

Another corny 1990s movie credits rap? You bet. But let's face facts here: Hammer understands the twisted charm of Charles Addams's proto-goth family. As he explains at the end: "Speaking and thinking about the Addams Family: they don't hurt anyone. They just like to have fun." They are also, as he repeatedly points out in an effort to create synergy with his biggest hit single, 2 legit 2 quit.

42. "Not the Red Baron," Tori Amos
Not the Red Baron I'm sure
Not Charlie's wonderful dog
Not anyone I really know
Just another pilot down

Is it possible to create a song about Peanuts that's even sadder than Peanuts? Only if you're Tori Amos. In this song, Snoopy's the lucky one compared to all the anonymous pilots of life who go down unmourned. And there's Judy Garland and Jean Harlow and, you know, sadness. But what would you rather have, a Tori Amos song inspired by comics or a comic inspired by Tori Amos songs?

41. "Doctor Octopus," Crack the Sky
Captain America, and you, the Avengers
You will fall at my feet, you will all surrender
Fantastic Four, and you there, Hulk,
You're gonna cry like babies, and you're gonna sulk

For this list, I've generally avoided songs recorded for comic-book premiums, including the many flexi-disc singles produced by Marvel in the '60s and '70s. But there is no ignoring Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero, the Spider-Man concept album produced by Lifesong Records "with Stan Lee" in 1975. Ballyhooed by classically goofy Stan Lee narration, the uncredited band (actually Lifesong studio band Crack the Sky) performs some truly amazing numbers. Highlights include jazzy opening track "High Wire"; "Peter Stays, Spider-Man Goes," a howlingly angsty number written by 15-year-old Mike Ragogna; the do-wop song "Square Boy"; and the upbeat Neil Diamond-like single "Spider-Man," which scored some radio airplay in the '70s.

As great as these songs are, if I have to choose just one track for this list, it's got to be "Doctor Octopus," a glam fantasy in which "a gloating Doctor Octopus, at the command of a worldwide rally of his brainwashed disciples" (Smilin' Stan's narration, natch), reigns supreme over the pantheon of Marvel heroes. Between the rock-opera bombast, the clanging piano, and the swaggering, bizarre lyrics ("Hey, Thor! And you, Black Panther!/I'm gonna turn you all into go-go dancers!"), the song seems designed to make you weep with frustration that there was never a Spider-Man movie in the 1970s featuring Elton John as Doc Ock. That should have happened, dammit!

The other gift this album gave the universe is the gorgeous John Romita cover art, including illustrations crediting the music to Marvel superheroes. Black Panther is on guitar, the Silver Surfer on keyboards, but Captain America gets the tambourine and the Falcon gets "handclapping." Those two must've showed up late to rehearsal.

40. "Beatomatic," Bob Schneider
I turned around and dropped my drink
There was this girl in a mink
She was the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, I think
I turned to Robin and I said, "Yo, this is Rob
My name is Batman, but you can call me Bob."

This affable stoner ramble goes from tolerable to unforgettable with the repeated lyric, "My name is Batman, but you can call me Bob." Schneider's version of Batman, as recounted in long, sporadically rhyming verses, fights crime between bong hits and efforts to get Robin past the bouncers at bars. Wouldn't we all love an easygoing Big Lebowski Batman who went around telling people to call him Bob? P.S. The beautiful girl is Catwoman in disguise. Watch out, Bob!

39. "Superman," the Ides of March
Well, I'll be your Superman
Grab a hold of my super hand
Take you to a never-never land
Great Caesar's ghost, I'll be your Superman

There are a surprising number of funk songs featuring superheroes, thanks to that sparkly period in the 1960s when pop met pulp and comic books were briefly groovy. Extremely long-lived counterculture band Ides of March, formed in 1964 and still alive and kicking, provided Superman with blaring horns and a driving backbeat for this very funky love song to the Man of Steel. Expect to see more songs like this on the list, because I cannot get enough of the funk.

38. "Comic Strip," Serge Gainsbourg
J'distribue les swings et les uppercuts
Ca fait VLAM! ca fait SPLATCH! et ca fait CHTUCK !
Ou bien BOMP! ou HUMPF! parfois mme PFFF!

Hip-beyond-hip, relentlessly eclectic, they-love-him-in-France experimental musician Serge Gainsbourg teamed up with sometime muse Brigette Bardot for a deliberately kitschy '60s pop-art pop song built around the extended metaphor of comic-book sound effects. That's as far as I can guide you through this one, gentle reader. Explaining the French is past my pay grade. But it'll sound great at your next "Mad Men"-themed ironic cocktail party.

37. "Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future)," by Elton John
So long, Captain Dan
I fail to see what motivates your hands
Goodbye, restless night
You know I loved Dan Dare, but I couldn't make his flight

Elton John, in his classic 1970s incarnation, was so gloriously, glamorously cartoony that it's surprising he didn't do more songs about comics. But at least he gave us this ode to square-jawed English space pilot Dan Dare, who has battled his alien arch-nemesis The Mekon and other threats to Earth's peace since his creation in 1950. Dan Dare also gets name-checked in songs by David Bowie and Syd Barrett, but Sir Elton's closing line, "Dan Dare doesn't know it, no, he doesn't know it...But I like The Mekon," is the definitive Dan Dare lyric.

36. "Hanging Out with Halo Jones," Transvision Vamp
Now Halo Jones, she's a nuromancer
Well, she looks like a dream and she moves like a panther
Halo, Halo Jones is a girl of ice and fire
She got everything that all the boys desire

As will be seen elsewhere on this list, British comics mag 2000 AD has inspired many a fine song, including this ode to the heroine of Alan Moore and Ian Gibson's unfinished epic The Ballad of Halo Jones. "Hanging Out with Halo Jones," from British alt-rock group Transvision Vamp's first album, Pop Art, switches back and forth from dreamy to poppy as the singer makes it clear that, like eternally wandering spacefarer Halo, she's "got things to do and places to go."

35. "Jimmy Olsen's Blues," the Spin Doctors
Lois Lane, please put me in your plan
Yeah, Lois Lane, you don't need no Superman
Come on downtown and stay with me tonight
I got a pocket full of Kryptonite

Roughly 90% of Spin Doctors songs are about how unfair it is that some girl wants to go out with a cool guy instead of the Spin Doctors. In this song, which provided the title for the group's biggest album, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, the Spin Doctors go up against the ultimate alpha male, Superman himself. Given the competition, they sound a little too cocky. Like Lois Lane is going to spend the night with Jimmy Olsen, here played by the Spin Doctors, because he sits at home reading Shakespeare and being all sensitive and shit while Superman is off saving the world. Nice try.

34. "Superman's Song," Crash Test Dummies
But he stayed in the city and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phone booths 'til the work was through
And nothing to do but go home

I'm generally not a fan of sad Superman songs (and "Sad Superman Songs" could be a 50-entry list all by itself), but the Crash Test Dummies get points just for the rhyme "Superman never made any money/Saving the world from Solomon Grundy." Could this be the only pop song to name-check Solomon Grundy? "Superman's Song" focuses on what I love most about Superman: the idea that, out of all the infinite things he could choose to do with his powers, he chooses to do good. And it's not always fun, his alter ego isn't glamorous, but he clocks in every day anyway. Because that's what you do when you're Superman, Spin Doctors.

33. "Secret Wars," the Last Emperor
KRS and Professor X would battle each other mentally
With rhymes, these two team captains waste no time
Charles Xavier tried to invade Kris Parker's mind
He shot a cerebral probe at Kris's mind, but he missed it
Professor X taken out by the Blastmaster's metaphysics

In this hip-hop epic by Jamal Gray, a.k.a. the Last Emperor, rappers battle Marvel Comics characters. Stan Lee and the Emperor himself take the role of the Beyonder, overseeing a conflict that pits Redman against the Hulk, Doctor Octopus against Busta Rhymes, and Nas against Spider-Man. "There's no match for Storm? I guess he's never heard of Lauryn Hill!" The casts of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe also show up, because why not? And yes, there is a "Secret Wars 2."

32. "This Vicious Cabaret," David J
At last! The 1998 Show!
The ballet on the burning stage
The documentary seen
Upon the fractured screen
The dreadful poem scrawled upon the crumpled page

David J, one of the founding members of goth-rock titan Bauhaus, has collaborated with Alan Moore more than once, starting with a four-track V for Vendetta mini-album released in 1984, when the comic by Moore and David Lloyd was still being serialized. "This Vicious Cabaret" takes the lyrics to the piano "Prelude" by V that opens Book Two and sets them to Bauhaus-style evil carnival music. Not long after this project, David J formed the band Love and Rockets, sealing his comic-fan credentials forever.

31. "Stop Talking About Comic Books (Or I'll Kill You)," Ookla the Mok
I just couldn't care less if they bring back Kraven
And I don't care if Spider-Man's a clone
Stop spending all our cash on back issues of the Flash
Or I swear to God you're gonna spend your twilight years alone

Filk group turned cult nerd-rock band Ookla the Mok has built its career on songs about such subjects as the Super Skrull and how Aquaman feels about being the lamest member of the Justice League. But even they reach the end of their rope in "Stop Talking About Comic Books," in which they declare that they no longer wish to debate post-Zero Hour continuity, whether the Hulk could beat Superman, or the term "graphic novels." In the end, though, they admit they still need their monthly Grant Morrison fix. Even when castigating fanboys, Ookla the Mok is still the nerdiest band.

30. "The Golden Age," Seduction of the Innocent
I was just a kid
I did what I did
I drew what I drew
Yeah, them and him too
What the hell, I got paid
Six dollars a page
Who knew?

Or is it? Back in the 1980s, before the San Diego Comic-Con became the vaguely comic-book-themed multimedia extravaganza it is today, it was possible to chill out with some Tijuana weed and enjoy the dulcet tones of Seduction of the Innocent, a supergroup composed of mystery writer Max Allen Collins, RoboCop and Twin Peaks character actor Miguel Ferrer, DC inker Steve Leialoha, and the Billy Mumy. Guest musicians included Shaun Cassidy, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and basically anyone who attended a West Coast comic convention and could play an instrument.

Songs on the group's sole album, The Golden Age, include "More Fun," "Flame On," and "King Jack" (Jack and Roz Kirby slow-danced to Seduction at Comic-Con '88). Their song "Reality Break" is a sweet tribute to escaping the daily grind through comic books, but for this list I'm going with the title track, a mournful noir tribute to the artists exploited by the comics industry. Which is most of them, in the end.

29. "Now I'm Following You," Madonna
Calling Dick Tracy, calling Dick Tracy
Come in Tracy, this is Sam, what are you doing up there?

Madonna got so into Breathless Mahoney, her character in the film Dick Tracy, that she recorded I'm Breathless, an entire album performed in character. Or maybe not, since Breathless Mahoney and Madonna are close to indistinguishable. Despite giving the world "Vogue," I'm Breathless got a lukewarm reception, which is too bad; it's a fun, weird pick-a-mix of jazzy retro numbers (including "Sooner or Later," the Stephen Sondheim-penned song that won an Oscar), stagy show tunes, and pure Madonna pop. The only thing the tracks have in common is that none of them even mention Dick Tracy—except "Now I'm Following You," which inserts a little dialogue of the cops trying to contact Tracy while he gets breathless with Breathless.

28. "What's the Name of This Funk (Spider-Man)," Ramsey Lewis
What's the name of this funk?
What's the name of this funk?
What's the name of this funk?
Spider-Man!

This funk superhero song, from the 1975 album Feel Good, gets points for choosing Spider-Man, a hero seldom celebrated in funk, as its subject. Admittedly, Ramsey Lewis doesn't go into much detail about Spider-Man, as most of the lyrics are either a) "What's the name of this funk?/Spider-Man!", b) "It's funky funky for Funkytown," or c) unintelligible. But damn is it funky.

27. "Here Comes a Special Boy," Freezepop
Oh Philippe, oh Philippe, you bring us very special joy
Dressed like a bumblebee, with your special kind of glee
Oh Philippe, oh Philippe, you're a very special boy
Because you're squeaky clean, standing on the drum machine
(manual)

There are a surprising number of songs out there inspired by Chris Onstad's webcomic Achewood, thanks to frequent crossovers in the 2000s between the Song Fight! online songwriting competition and the Dumbrella webcomics group. But for Achewood songs, it's hard to beat synthpop group and frequent video-game soundtrack contributor Freezepop's "Here Comes a Special Boy," an electronic love song to the strip's innocent young otter, Philippe. The title, for those unfortunate souls unfamiliar with Achewood, refers to a pair of talking shoes sent to Philippe by his absentee mother, which play the line every time Philippe takes a step. Oh, Philippe.

Runner-ups in the "songs inspired by webcomics" subcategory: "Crazy Utahraptor," by Joey and Gilyan, which sets the dialogue from Ryan North's first two Dinosaur Comics strips to a synth-pop beat, and "DJ Coffman (What a Piece of Shit!)," by Brian F, a memorial to the drama-mongering webcartoonist of the mid-2000s.

26. "Batman and Robin," Snoop Dogg feat. Lady of Rage
Ay-yo-yo-yo, kick back, Robin
Get Alfred and tell him to have BBQ buffalo wings
And a pitcher of Kool-Aid on chill
It's about to get real in the field

Snoop Dogg is already close to being a comic-book character, but what if he literally were Batman? This rap describes the scenario in remarkably plausible terms. Over samples of the Adam West TV theme, Snoop and Lady of Rage (as Robin) team up to explain how they would clean up the hoo-bangin' in Gotham City. "Switch on my utility belt, make yo' facility melt," promises Robin, as Batman describes Catwoman as "She who spits it like she was sippin' rotten brew." Pure poetry. Only one Batman song ranks higher than this one.

Can't Forget Those Things I Saw

Tucker Stone — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:00:00 -0400

Backing up personal experience with years of dedicated research, Derf Backderf's recently published biography of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer--his high school classmate--makes one of the most satisfying non-fiction comics I've ever read. Focusing on the dawn of Dahmer's brutal transformation, Backderf's emotional responses to that time period in his life are never far from the page, and yet the sober, honest eye he casts on the decisions made back then is intimidating and unflinching, even more so as the pages fly by and the grisly moments guaranteed by the subject matter begin to approach. The timeline of the book overlaps the first of Dahmer's murders, however, Derf wisely chooses not to depict the crime--or any of the later ones to come--on the page. Even without them, the book is as grueling a portrayal of horror as one can imagine. In no small part, that's because it's founded in the uncomfortable truth that Dahmer was, at one point in his life, just another weird little boy.

As a field of literature, true crime is a category whose sights seem rarely set much higher than the bestseller shelf in an airport bookstore. Often buried at the tail end of the mystery section in larger bookstores, true crime is a genre populated, for the most part, by ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation books pumped out as close to overnight as possible. Few of these books survive on the stands for long; yesterday's Lacy Peterson book is tomorrow's sale item. And yet, it isn't so difficult to suss out what sees some works become long term perennials in the field. Works like In Cold Blood, Homicide, or Helter Skelter stand the test of time, either because of the skill of the writer (In Cold Blood), a depth of research that necessitates serious, long-term commitment (Homicide) or, like Helter Skelter, a subject matter of such depraved magnitude that historical importance arrives guaranteed. My Friend Dahmer has all three.

It wasn't until after reading My Friend Dahmer that something else clicked with me: American comics doesn't seem to have true crime classics. There have been attempts, certainly, and there's definitely a hungry enough audience for them that these lesser installments (books like Image's Torso, or last year's Green River Killer from Dark Horse) are often welcomed with the greedy acclaim of the starving. Theories abound as to why, but the most obvious ones are repurposed versions of the remarks used to explain why Joe Sacco's work in the field of comics journalism remains so unique: there's a lot more opportunities for failure in non-fiction there are in fiction, the audience for comics is historically tilted towards the "escapist" side of the divide, and the amount of money made available for this kind of work renders its creation the province of the few--either the rich, or the crazy. You can make this stuff off of dimes earned doing something else (invariably, that sort of subsidization is an immediate indicator of lesser work), or you make it on spec because you have to, always operating beneath the understanding that most comics readers don't come to this medium looking for journalism--an investment with little popular or financial regard to hope for.

It wouldn't be fair to speak for what motivated Derf Backderf throughout the twenty year creation of My Friend Dahmer, but this being a comics column on the Internet, fairness is a loose and malleable term. Beginning as an eight page short story in 1991, then as a story in a 1997 issue of Zero Zero, and then in 2002 as a 24 page Eisner nominated one-shot immortalized by Chuck Klosterman in his Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs essay collection, the lengthy gestation period of My Friend Dahmer carries with it the implication that Backderf hasn't just been haunted by the story, he's been obsessed with it. For those used to the way comics creators bend over backwards to compliment and excuse the most shallow work, Derf's description of that one-shot--which was not only critically acclaimed but also well received by the general public, a rare feat--is so cruel as to be almost brutal. ("Stinks", and "a mess" are part of his own broadside.)

And while self-criticism is so often designed merely so that a creator can then luxuriate amongst their fans' rejoinders that "you're being too hard on yourself", Derf actually followed up his own self-immolation with the exact opposite: he busted his ass. Years of research followed, then rewriting, then--and if you've met comics people, you'll know how tough this next part is--redrawing. The 200 page result is a testament to hard work, and amongst comics, it's the first of its kind--a detailed biography that works as journalism, psychological profile, and exacting social criticism. It's compelling, heartrending work, riding a razor thin line of describing the disturbing circumstances that victimized Dahmer while never descending into acceptance of the ultimate direction the boy eventually took. It's a dark, horrible world that he ended up in. For delving into it so extensively--and for presenting the portion of it glazed with his own culpability--Derf's earned a shot at your attention more than anyone in recent memory. This, they should say, is what journalism feels like.

Emerald City Comicon 2012: Diffusion

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:00:00 -0400

The 2012 Emerald City Comicon, held Friday March 31-Sunday, April 1 at the Washington State Convention Center, was arranged hierarchically. The lowest floor, and lowest priority, had/was tabletop role-playing gaming; the next level, videogames; then panel rooms, media guests, and, highest (and most important) of all, the exhibition hall, filled with comics and cartoonists (guests this year included Bill Willingham, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Jhonen Vasquez, Jeph Jacques, Ryan North and "regulars" such as Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction). It's a show that attempts to have something for everyone, aiming for a diverse, all-ages crowd, and in this, it succeeds. Accordingly, it reached critical mass: Friday was busy and Saturday was shoulder-to-shoulder from start to finish; it only slowed down Sunday (although it never reached the easy breeziness of previous years).

ECCC 2012 seemed to be about defining the New Mainstream, one that is made up out of creator-owned comics-turned-into-TV-shows-or movies, webcomics, licensed and genre material, high-concept mashups, and comics for kids. Publishers like Boom!, Avatar and Archaia were in their element, offering material slightly left of the superhero dial. Just about every professional I spoke to, from self-publishers to game store owners to people anxious to take advantage of digital platforms, seemed focused on how to reach out to new audiences (or, simply, how to get stuff into the hands of an unrecognized audience already there). Everyone seemed to be after "new" dollars, and were developing strategies around them - everything from how the hall should be laid out to "shower" policies to store human moderation. It seemed like a real possibility this year; attendees appeared to be evenly distributed on the show floor, buying comics in Artists' Alley and flipping through short boxes. Meanwhile, DC, Dark Horse and others seemed to be conserving their energy for later conventions.

It's a family show: I watched little girls sift through quarter bin X-Men comics on the floor, listened to a mom earnestly tell a writer that she was happy that he had written Marvel Adventure comics that her daughter could read, and overheard a dad briefly explaining to his son why Watchmen was considered an important comic. (Even the Comic Book Guy types, of which there were few, seemed to be sharing the experience with a loved one.)

As always, it was well-organized, with volunteers attempting to keep the aisles unblocked and standing with signs indicating the ends of the lines for creator signings/sketches. (In fact, according to some of the exhibitors and in my own experience, a few volunteers were perhaps too eager to perform their duties, falling into hall-monitorism.) Parking appeared to be becoming an issue, as well. Convention organizers struggled to improve their panel programming, with mixed results. Everything and everyone, from Browncoats to Bronies to Darth Vadar bagpipers, seemed very matter-of-fact; the novelty of a comic convention seemed to have worn off somewhat for mainstream media outlets, although ECCC appeared to have garnered more attention from the comics blogosphere.

ECCC is never going to be a convention about where the medium is going intellectually or aesthetically. At its heart, it's a local con, but the community that shapes it, for the moment, is geographically, culturally and temporally unique: now that cyberspace has failed to create a utopia or a dystopia, it's a space where the comics industry is at work on business-as-unusual.

All the Comics in the World: Kitties

Shaenon K. Garrity — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 -0400

Dear American Comics Industry,

As you know, this isn't the first time I've stepped in to save you from yourself. But never before has salvation been so easy. Perusing Diamond catalogs and sales charts while observing global media from my Ozymandias-style control center, I have pinpointed precisely what American comics lacks.

Cats.

You scoff. You doubt. But that's why you're constantly in need of rescue, comics industry: your inability to see the big picture. Look how popular the Internet is. And the Internet currently runs entirely on cat pictures. You need to seize that zeitgeist and put more kitties in your comics.

Jeffrey Brown got the memo back in 2007. He drew Cat Getting Out of a Bag and went from that extra-sad minicomic guy to that bestselling graphic novelist and filmmaker who hangs out with Death Cab for Cutie. Is it any coincidence that the most revered minicomic of all time is John Porcellino's King-Cat Comics? Or that no comics fan can ever, ever say no to more Catman? I don't think so.

You can do it, rest of the comics industry. All it takes is more cats.

I propose that the rollout begin with the licensing of all the cat manga you, the American comics industry, can get your ink-stained hands on. You've already laid the groundwork with adorable cat manga like Chi's Sweet Home, published in English by Vertical, and What's Michael?, published by Dark Horse. But let's go full panzer attack here. Thinking only of your best interests, I've compiled a retail catalog—and no, I refuse to say "cat-alog"—for a new all-cat manga line. One word of warning: all my research was conducted through often-untranslated fan websites which may or may not have actually been about manga. But I hope the spirit of the project carries it through.

I call it VIZ KITTIES.

Once this thing takes off, we can expand to other manga publishers, then start talking turkey about why the current lineup of the Avengers includes no (0) cats. Upon these humble foundations, comics industry, we will build an empire to rival that of ancient Egypt, which was also big on the cats.

VIZ KITTIES
THE WORLD'S MOST KITTY MANGA
Summer 2012 Catalog

Atagoul
by Hiroshi Masumura

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
Welcome to Atagoul Forest, a world apart. Hideyoshi, a big yellow cat with a weakness for sake and squid, is happy to guide you through its quaint villages, towering mountains and enchanted woods, all with the help of his human friends Tenpura and Takuma. But step carefully, for the Cats' Forest is as unpredictable as it is beautiful...

Sales Points:

Serialized in Japan since 1976

Adapted into an animated feature in 2006

The most famous work by Tezuka Award-winning artist Hiroshi Masumura

Kitties

But Gou-Gou Is a Cat (Gou-Gou Datte Neko de Aru)
by Yumiko Ōshima

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
Devastated by the death of her irrepressible cat Sava, Yumiko reluctantly adopts a wide-eyed kitten named Gou-Gou. But when Yumiko is diagnosed with breast cancer, Gou-Gou turns out to be a source of support she never expected. Hilarious and heartbreaking, this autobiographical manga by one of the members of Japan's legendary Year 24 Group captures the mysterious connections between humans and animals.

Sales Points:

Winner of the 2008 Tezuka Cultural Prize (for the chapter "Cher Gou-Gou...Mon Petit Chat, Mon Petit Ami")

Adapted into a feature film in 2008

Created by Yumiko Ōshima, winner of the Kodansha Manga Award and Japan Cartoonists Association Award

Kitties

Leo-Kun
by Moto Hagio

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
Leo just wants to be a normal little boy, but there's one big problem: he's a cat. With the help of his human mother, he tries to fit in with the other kids. But between disrupting class with his feline energy and shocking restaurant staff by ordering rat pizzas, it seems like Leo will never learn to be human!

Sales Points:

Appropriate for all ages

One-volume length appeals to children and casual manga readers

The newest manga from legendary, award-winning artist Moto Hagio (A Drunken Dream)

Kitties

The Adventures of Cat Mix Toraji (Neko Mix Genkitan Toraji)
by Yumi Tamura

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
In a world where human-animal hybrids mix with true humans, vicious mice in human form terrorize the populace. The warrior Pai'yan, with the cat-boy Toraji at his side, travels the country searching for his stolen son. But to save the boy, they must take a stand against the king of the mice...

Sales Points:

By Yumi Tamura, two-time winner of the Shogakukan Manga Award

Previous Tamura works published in English include Basara, Chicago and Wild Com.

Kitties

The Children of the City of Cats (Neko no Machi no Ko)
by Satoshi Morie

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
In a village in Japan, an old abandoned teahouse has become a haven for the local stray cats. Shiloh, who once lived with a human family, rules the roost as a surrogate father to the other cats. But the teahouse's makeshift feline society is turned upside down when a little boy becomes determined to befriend them.

Sales Points:

By the fan-favorite creator of Gakkou Hotel, Ikebukuro 13 and Love Sick

Kitties

Super Cat
by Mineo Maya

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
Rocketed to Earth from a distant planet, Super Cat fights for truth, justice and the occasional nap! In this outlandish one-shot set in the universe of the legendary shonen-ai comedy Pantalliro, the world's most courageous feline superhero takes on devious spies, scheming assassins and mad inventors. Nya ha ha!
Sales Points:

Pantalliro serialized in Japan since 1979

One-volume manga provides a jumping-on point to the ongoing Pantalliro series

Kitties

Cat's World
by Okama

[SPACER]
Synopsis:
In a world where terrorists attack with gene-bending bioweapons, the counterterrorism squad Green fights back with its all-purpose humanoid weapons, the OBs. Into their struggle comes a teenage girl named Kaka, who's been searching for answers about herself ever since the day she survived a bioweapon attack that left behind 30,000 cats!

Sales Points:

The only non-adult manga by popular artist and character designer Okama

Kitties