comiXology | Articles & Interviews

Advanced Common Sense Episode 6

Tucker Stone — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

New Atom Angel

Joe McCulloch — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

The first time Astro Boy attacked United States servicemen was in 1967. Circumstances were dire, mind you; Astro had been thrown back in time from his home era of 2017, and could not find an adequate energy source to keep his body going. He'd been subsequently coerced aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine, at which time he realized he would be pressed into slavery as a living American weapon. As a result, the ostensibly peace-loving lad wound up beaching the mighty vessel and literally pounding its exterior until it exploded, acknowledging its personnel only to invite them to run.

Flying away from the mayhem, Astro then came upon a village under fire from U.S. aircraft, arriving on the scene just in time to find adults and children alike, unarmed, laying dead in the open. Vowing to protect the people from further aggression, Astro Boy then punched American bombs out of the air and stacked American tanks one on top of another, over a dozen high, to tear them all in half with his lunging fist. Noting the imminent arrival of a village baby, the little robot then ascended to the center of the bombing fleet to declare himself an Angel of Death and fire bullets from his butt at Americans, causing them to flee as he destroyed their jets.

Powerless, spent, Astro Boy then sank mentally into a dead sleep and physically into a deep river. Only one day after his fabulous rescue the village was bombed again, and everyone died, day-old baby included, a plain wartime event noteworthy only for the uncanny appearance of rising lights from the blasted ground, lights shaped like Astro Boy. America's Air Force turned away in fear, for they were confronted with the souls of the dead, perhaps, albeit shaped like a metal Japanese child in short pants with a gun muzzle for an anus.

I suppose it wasn't a terribly subtle or complicated story, that; it was part of the later incarnation of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy comics, a decade and a half running in ‘67, then appearing as a serial feature in the Sankei Shinbum newspaper.

It was more complicated, I know, when U.S. aircraft firebombed Japan's industrial sites in Osaka in mid-1945, in the final year of World War II, though I don't think it came off as very subtle on the ground, where thousands died, but 17-year old Osamu Tezuka did not.

And it isn't difficult to imagine these wartime experiences informing Tezuka's most famous creation, both in terms of The Angel of Vietnam, the Astro Boy story mentioned above, and as a larger thing: a direct product of WWII, a pacifism-themed sci-fi boy hero manga that contrasted the still-recovering Japan of young 1950s readers' daily lives with a peaceful, bright, technologically top-of-the-line country of the 21st century, a cosmopolitan land where the new struggle would not be over sustenance or pride but robots-as-humans. Cautionary stories, told from a place nonetheless soothing in how much plain damn better it was from the real present day.

Knowing all this, it's interesting to study the middling fortune of the new computer-animated Astro Boy movie. An international affair, produced by a Hong Kong-based animation studio (Imagi Animation) and directed by an English animation veteran (David Bowers), this latest incarnation hasn't really set American theaters on fire -- though it did break an opening weekend box office record for feature-length CG animation in China -- pulling in only $18 million over three weeks on a $65 million production budget. In terms of public visibility it seemed to vanish as soon as it arrived, quickly replaced by that creepy-looking CG version of A Christmas Carol (and its sexy poster), which itself may have been washed away recently by Roland Emmerich's 2012, which behaved like a proper spectacle and racked up $230 million worldwide in four days. Astro Boy wasn't ever in danger of making that kind of money, granted, but it didn't do much to carry forth the banner of what once was the landmark television anime back in 1963; comics never were enough for Tezuka.

That's not to say being a landmark necessarily means being loved by everyone. To hear Hayao Miyazaki talk of the old Astro Boy show (as I've mentioned before) you'd think he was dealing with Original Sin, a high-speed low-quality precedent that damned anime to soupy prolificacy for hapless generations. Truth be told, the manga isn't nearly Tezuka's best either; it's got visibility and nostalgia and some socio-political kick behind it, but it's also a blunt, repetitive thing targeted firmly at young kids. Go leaf through Dark Horse's 23-volume comprehensive reprint project and just try and count all the times Astro is reluctantly pressed into action against his fellow robots or struggles to keep the embers of optimism stoked after some tragedy. It can be charming, sure, and in its early episodes it certainly ranks above much of the world's comics output in terms of emotional complexity, but none of that abrogates the fact that Tezuka would release considerably more sophisticated works in the future, even as popular Astro lunged warily into a darker, more political manga scene as the ‘60s wore on, resulting in awkward sequences like The ‘Nam: Mighty Atom as described above. I wonder if he ever met Frank Castle? He must have survived, since he kept on flying until 1981, the year I was born, when they started depicting Japan as scary corporate devils, intent on buying America and obviously far away from the reconstruction spurned by the Atom.

So, the funny thing about the new Astro Boy is how much it gets right, which means picking up Tezuka's weaknesses as well as his strengths. A lot of the manga's in-joke charm is preserved, from various Tezuka Star System cameos (including Tezuka himself and his lil' pig-faced critter stand-in) to tactical citation of earlier bits of its own history - some of the ‘60s anime title sequence gets subtly remade as Astro zips around exploring his powers. The original's dour origin premise is dutifully updated, with brilliant Dr. Tenma's beloved son violently killed (sadly, Nicolas Cage restrains himself from chomping into the Dr.'s potentially livewire role) and Astro Boy created as an imperfect twin replacement, the imperfection always figuring into the work's grand theme, since robots are individuals like people are too.

Then there's weaker stuff. Some have criticized the movie's politics as shrill - the miracle power source that gives this Astro Boy life is peaceable and loving Blue power while the entirety of violence and cruelty in the world is Red, the preference of a cruel, militaristic supervillain politician. This is mostly true, but it ignores how Astro Boy's politics are always shrill, from the vs. America skirmish summarized above to Naoki Urasawa's booming Iraq War backdrop for his own recent Astro update Pluto; the new movie even tosses out a hapless trio of specifically Marxist robot revolutionaries, in apparent homage to Tezuka's own discomfort with the radical politics that powered some of the gekiga he found himself competing with as the Japanese comics form matured. C'mon: Marxism jokes in a kids' movie! How can I stay upset?!

The very least effective aspects of the film are, unsurprisingly, where it diverges from Tezuka's scheme. Its particular version of the future isn't so much a gleaming funhouse mirror on today as a takeoff on the venerable proles-below, gardens-above setup of Fritz Lang's Metropolis -- on its own a witty enough reference to Tezuka's own 1949 manga of the same title -- with a floating city shadowing a ruined Earth heaped with rusty metal garbage in enormous stacks, almost exactly as seen in the recent hit motion picture WALL-E. Worse, Astro Boy falls to this Earth and makes friends with a bunch of mononominal spunky orphans straight out of the North American kids' movie playbook (maybe attributable to co-writer Timothy Harris, of Kindergarten Cop and Space Jam). There's even an uneasy pseudo-girlfriend type that gets mad at Astro Boy but then learns an important lesson about family and stuff. These concessions jar badly with the stuff of Tezuka's concept, imperfect as it may be - Astro seems a hundred times more at home in a gladiatorial robot arena forced (by reliable Tezuka heavy Hamegg, played by Nathan Lane!) to fight his own kind.

Inevitably, we have to face the absence of Tezuka himself, as with prior Astro adaptations. He was only ever truly close to the ‘60s animated series, which was actually the third television Astro Boy, following a 1957 kami-shibai presentation of narrated drawings and a 1959-60 live-action series. It's the anime everyone remembers, for its historical achievement, sure, but also I think for the rough and ready energy hewing so close to the manga provided. Tezuka lived to see a later television adaptation, a 1980 project directed by Noboru Ishiguro (later of The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, itself paid due homage by those clever 2009 animators as Astro confronts a brief swarm of missiles with curling smoke tails, an Itano Circus, named for animator Ichiro Itano) with some storyboards and direction by Tezuka himself, but it wasn't so popular in Japan, as noted by Tezuka expert Frederik L. Schodt in his invaluable The Astro Boy Essays. In case you thought the country just couldn't get enough domestic Astro-product.

Schodt has commented on the new film, by the way, in the comments section to Manohla Dargis' review of the picture for the New York Times. "Osamu Tezuka created Astro Boy to be an emissary of peace," he writes, "and in this new film he continues to function as one." Schodt refers to the international nature of the production, spreading the Astro-message as wide as possible. I'll add that Bowers and company do grasp the essentially optimistic nature of Astro Boy, who melds his Blue power with the rampaging Red at the film's climax, obliterating both and leaving Our Hero stone asleep, just like back in ‘Nam. Ah, but Astro used a fragment of his Blue power to wake up a scary robot voiced by special guest cameo Samuel L. Jackson, who then uses that force, growing, to wake the Boy back up, as he's woken back from death many times in the comics. As he woke television cartoons, and the imaginations of kids in hard times. This trail of resurrection is Tezuka's optimistic legacy, even if it means the series can't stay down for long, rust and bumps and everything else.

Two by Tashlin

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

When people remember Frank Tashlin today, they probably think of him as a director/screenwriter: of the Jayne Mansfield vehicles The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), or the movies Cinderfella (1960) or The Disorderly Orderly (1964), both starring Jerry Lewis. If one is an animation buff, he or she might also recall his work on Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck Warner Bros. cartoons. However, Tashlin was a prolific mid-century print-and-film cartoonist.[1] Not only did he draw a daily comic strip (Van Boring) and one-panel gags for magazines, he was influential in the field of animation.[2] His The Fox and the Grapes short inspired Chuck Jones' Road Runner and Coyote series, and, as Columbia/Screen Gem's production supervisor, Tashlin plucked animators from the Disney picket line and let them loose to experiment: many of these men, such as John Hubley, would go on to carry the torch at UPA (whose limited animation techniques would, in turn, change the course of American cartoons).[3]

Tashlin also wrote and drew three children's books that could easily function as graphic novels for adults today: The Bear That Wasn't (1946) The Possum that Didn't (1950) and The World That Isn't (1951). Two of these, The Bear That Wasn't and The World That Isn't, were hiding inside library binding at my local branch.[4] The World That Isn't is a satiric, rise,-fall,-and-rise-again-of-man story, of the type that cartoonists still do today. Its pen-and-ink lines are controlled, flattened and simplified, with occasional tight curlicues.

Even Tashlin's crosshatch-strokes are short and even (though not to the point that they lose the touch of a human hand); the flume from a bomb explosion has the texture of cheesecloth. Though symmetrical, his humans are lumpy men of the gray-flannel-suit variety and bleakly grotesque, grasping women. (Women do come off as worse than men in this book, to the point where the imbalance can be off-putting.)[5]

He employs numerous sight gags, but they are not anarchic: they are of a piece with the action being depicted. People are often viewed from overhead, as if from a crane shot, overwhelmed and zigzagging about their gridded, urban environment. (One can't help but imagine Tashlin supervising and organizing an animation-cel assembly line, Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse B" tune playing in the background.)[6] This perspective, and the third-person narration, gives The World That Isn't a removed mean-spiritedness.[7] What is beautiful in The World That Isn't is its impeccable page layout and design: he uses spotted blacks sparingly, and with maximum impact. He also masterfully combines words and pictures, and isn't afraid to let the latter carry the story, though in Tashlin's hands, a blank two-page spread with a two-word sentence and an ellipsis is bona-fide comics.

The Bear That Wasn't is an earlier work; it's gentler. It's a man (or, as the case may be, bear) vs. society story about a bear who is systematically told he is not one, not only by people but by other bears, as well, until he believes it himself, going to work in the factory that was built over his cave until his instinct kicks back in and he reverts to his true nature (and Nature). (Tashlin's natural backgrounds, too, are just as balanced: they're just more spread out, less suffocating; only the Bear's cave, where he can be himself, is comfortably irregular.)

Tashlin's use of typography is integral to the book: he mixes fonts, using a larger sans-serif for emphasis or onomatopeia, such as when disbelieving "ha"s burst out of the mouth of the factory foreman, whose straight-lined body mimics the "ha"s capital "A" shape. (Given the children's book format, there are no word balloons.) Unlike The World That Isn't, The Bear That Wasn't has a protagonist, and a sympathetic one at that, the frowzy, pot-belied, fly-away-furred Bear. In contrast, the humans are all geometric patterns that interlock perfectly into the clockwork of factories and boardrooms (even the identical secretaries' derrieres are divided neatly by the backs of their chairs).

This carries over into body language: during their confrontation, while the Bear is slump-shouldered and curled inward, the foreman leans into him aggressively at a 45-degree angle. The Bear That Wasn't was adapted into an animated short by Chuck Jones. In his interview with Mike Barrier, Tashlin revealed that the hated the adaptation. (According to the Big Cartoon Database, http://www.bcdb.com/bcdb/detailed.cgi?film=2979 it was the last short cartoon that MGM made for theaters.)

There's something sour about Tashlin's sensibility, which would become even more pronounced in his later work; in these two books, however, he's merely tart. Taken together, they shed new light on a less-explored facet of a prominent 20th century cartoonist. Though it seems as though Tashlin's trilogy (The Possum That Didn't is the story of a possum whose smile is mistaken for a frown, so he's dragged to the city in the belief that that will make him happy) would be ripe for a one-volume collection, only the quite popular The Bear That Wasn't — which, for some people, was a beloved childhood classic — has been reprinted.[8] It's available in an out-of-print-but-still-inexpensive Dover Thrift edition, and apparently it's going to be released in a new edition in March 2010 from NYR Children's Collection.

22 Ways of Looking at a Sheep

Noah Berlatsky — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

Comics are sequential art, I'm told. So how do you get art into a sequence? The usual answer is through narrative. Superman helps a little old lady across the street in that panel; fans get older and creepier in this panel; Superman feasts on the blood of innocents in the third panel; Frederic Wertham weeps silently in the final panel. Sequence.

There are other ways to organize images in a sequence though. For example:

There's an obvious, instantly recognizable progression there. But it doesn't use narrative.

On the one hand, putting images in a simple numerical sequence seems…well, simplistic. And it actually is simplistic, of course — this is how children's books are organized, after all. At the same time, though, breaking away from narrative, however it's done, is a step away from traditional structures and towards modernism. Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is the Western referent that leaps to mind. But perhaps even more apropos are classic ukiyo-e Japanese print series, like Yoshitoshi's 100 Aspects of the Moon. In these prints, a central theme approached from a set number of angles creates the opportunity for unity, rhyme, and even sequence without narrative. For example:

This is an image of a great Chinese general Cao Cao, crossing the Yangtze river on the day before his defeat.

[SPACER]

And this is the same place, eight centuries later, Su Shi, a poet, composes a verse by moonlight about, or inspired by, Cao Cao.

The two images aren't contiguous in the series...they were made four years apart, apparently. But you have to think that Yoshitoshi remembered the first while he made the second, and that they're meant to nod back and forth, at least. Certainly, they complicate or expand on each other; in the first Cao Cao, in full glorious color, sails towards a tragedy he doesn't know. But the poet (in a much less elaborate, less bright image) does know it; the boat in fact seems to be sailing back, returning in the opposite direction from Cao Cao's voyage. You can almost see Cao Cao and the poet looking at each other, one not seeing (turned away), one seeing...but both transient compared to the ever-cycling, singular moon (and it is singular, since the moon in the first print actually seems to provide the moonlight for both images.)

(I discuss some other images from Yoshitoshi's series here, for those who are interested.)

A more recent series working in the number-rather-than-narrative vein is Satoshi Kitamura's When Sheep Cannot Sleep: The Counting Book, published in 1986. Kitamura — a Japanese ex-patriot living in London — splits the difference almost exactly between simplicity and sophistication. The volume is, as the title makes clear, actually a children's counting book; the protagonist, a sheep named Wooly, sees one butterfly on the first page, two ladybugs on the second, and so forth. At the same time, though, the way in which Wooly's adventures are presented is suggestive and elliptical in a way that recalls the Japanese print series. For the most part, and unlike most counting books for kids, the book does not specifically list the number of objects Wooly encounters. Instead, the counting theme is unspoken; unifying the series silently, the same way the Chinese general's goings and comings form a clear but unstated link between the Yoshitoshi drawings above.

Kitamura's book reads like a Japanese print series in a number of ways, from his off-center compositions, to his subtle use of blank space, to his lovely color palette, all the way to his clever, intentionally humorous use of visual puzzles. You're always wondering from page to page what you're supposed to be counting and where it is, just as in Yoshitoshi's series you're always looking for (and not always finding) the moon.

[SPACER]

There is a significant difference in approach, too, though: Kitamura has a narrative. His lumpy sheep can't fall asleep, and the book follows Wooly as he wanders through a nighttime landscape, eventually finds a house, and starts performing the usual children's nighttime rituals of eating, bathing, and finally getting into bed. In short, it's a typical kid's book about getting ready to go to sleep.

Except, that, again, it isn't. The narrative is there, but it doesn't control or guide the book. Counting moves the book forward; narrative is a bonus rather than an engine. As a result, Kitamura can let his mind and paintbrush wander, and the story and images float free, almost unconscious of the story's mooring. When Sheep Cannot Sleep has a dreamlike aura entirely appropriate to the subject matter; each of Kitamura's vivid watercolor images seems like a quietly disconnected, hyper-real moment. Mysteries — what are those UFOs doing? whose house is that? who put out the pajamas? —don't ever resolve . Or rather, they're resolved in the humor, or poetry, or eeriness they bring to an individual image, rather than through narrative closure.

When Sheep Cannot Sleep isn't hard to follow, and it's certainly not avante garde. Wooly is an unassuming creature, and his needs are straightforward; he just wants to get into bed and dream. Not much happens, and the book is too simple to allow for a complicated plot — or too complicated to allow for a simple plot, depending on which, of various ways, you look at it.

[SPACER]

It's So Dark Every Time I Shove My Head Up Here

Tucker Stone — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0600

Earlier this year, Tom Spurgeon began his "best of the decade" project at his website, The Comics Reporter. In the past few weeks, a website called Berkeley Place began posting their own version of the same, and depending on when you read this, the AV Club may have posted theirs as well. While Tom's is still mid-creation, currently operating as an unranked list broken up into categories that includes multiple reader recommendations, it seems most likely that the end result will operate as the most definitive one, the "list to beat", if you'll pardon the competitive language.

That's not to dismiss what Berkeley and the AV Club have to offer, but it's always worthwhile to remember that Spurgeon operates from a rare place, that of the "professional" reader--he's one of the few that makes a living off comics without actually writing, drawing or publishing them, and he's more well read than most. When he calls something "the best", you know it's not the only thing he bought in the past month, you can trust that he didn't say that based off whatever most excited him in the last few weeks, and you can rely on him not to be swayed by an aggressive marketing campaign. (Which, unsurprisingly, many terrible comics now have.)

Non-Comics Reporter-based lists have something to offer in that they're more specifically user-created, and while most current installments are rife with choices that I disagree with, there's an obvious passion and honesty to the delivery of those choices--and to be frank, I'm usually more interested in passion and honesty than I am in whether or not a list consists of "correct" choices, since "correct" invariably boils down to "do I agree with it."

After Tom posted his initial call-for-response article, I thought for a bit about whether or not a project like that would be something I'm interested in doing, and whether anybody would be interested in reading it. It didn't take long (seconds, really) to realize that the answer was a solid "no"--I've neither the time nor inclination to plow through the various comics I've missed or "meant to read" over the last ten years, and I can't imagine that anyone but the terminally insane would find any value in it. Honestly, it's only been in the last few years that I've made an active project out of "keeping up", meaning that I spent the better part of the last ten years only reading comics that I was already drinking the Kool-Aid for, only trying out new creators that came bearing the rare trusted recommendations, and only forcing myself to experiment with the strange in intermittent comics-shopping fiestas while out of town.

Not only would any best-of-the-decade list I make be inherently dull, it would point to what I consider my own failings as a reader--my willingness to ignore the faults of a writer I'm an obsessive fan of, my unwillingness to give certain genres a fair chance, and, ultimately, my disinterest in viewing most comics as works of art independent of the various forms of stupidity involved in their creation. End-of-year lists are fun, because they're immediately tied into recent work, they're easy to write (which is why every publication features them about every form of entertainment), and they consistently irritate the sort of people that I cannot stand. A decade list? That sounds like work, and work is something that most comics rarely require or deserve.

But even thinking about Tom's list has kept the subject fresh on my mind. It's got me asking myself all kinds of questions, and some of them...honestly? They might be fun to pursue. I want to know, without sarcasm, whether or not there's been a Batman story from the last ten years that I like as much as I like Year One. I want to sit down with ten years of Daredevil and pick out my favorite story. I want to find out if there's any decent genre comics that have engaged with the multiple wars that my country has spent the majority of the last decade participating in. While limiting the scope of the "what's the best of the decade" question to various categories inherently makes the end product less useful to the sort of consumer who views these lists as "shopping requirements", those people are...well, stupid. Making things more difficult for stupid people was the second reason the Internet was invented, right after that whole "the department of defense needs better ways to kill people" thing.

So yeah. That's where we're going, for the next month. There will be a video show next week, and then it's Time To Get Positive About The Past. After all, you can't see me, which means I can't rely on you to give my navel the ADA's recommended amount of staring. These cakes don't bake themselves, buttercup.

All the Comics in the World: Zot!

Shaenon K. Garrity — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

Every science-fiction geek has a favorite Harlan Ellison story, right? Mine is "Jeffty Is Five," about a little boy born in the 1930s who never ages past five years old. Gradually, it becomes clear that not only is Jeffty an eternal little boy, but he's surrounded by a sort of bubble of childhood, trapped in amber. Jeffty can put Ovaltine lids in the mail and get back a Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge. His radio plays Terry and the Pirates. When he goes to the movies they show three cartoons and two serials. Of course he gets comic books: new adventures of Dollman and Airboy, new Jingle Jangle Comics by George Carlson (Ellison's longtime dark-horse favorite). And so on, and so on.

Anyone who's ever read anything by Harlan Ellison, ever, can guess that the story doesn't end happily. When I first read "Jeffty Is Five," I thought the bleak ending was a cop-out, another case of Ellison going grim and violent because he couldn't think of a better way to resolve the situation. Now, even though I still find it unsatisfying, I've come around to accept that perhaps the Jeffty story can't end any other way. Tackle the story honestly, and there's no way to stop modernity, cynicism, adulthood—whatever you want to call it—from crushing that bubble of innocence.

I thought about "Jeffty Is Five" when I finally sat down to read the entirety of Zot!, the charming 1980s indie comic doomed to be known forever as "the thing Scott McCloud did before Understanding Comics." And in fact you can see Understanding Comics take shape in Zot!, as McCloud develops from a shaky would-be DC draftsman into an experimenter playing with layouts and panel progressions, struggling to breathe life into cold ink. Other critics have noted the resemblance between McCloud and his Zot! villain Dekko, a cybernetic artist whose vision reduces the world to abstract symbols right out of the Understanding/Reinventing/Making trilogy.

(What I should say is that Dekko resembles McCloud as he appears in Understanding Comics. The real Scott McCloud reminds me of most of the professional scientists I know, which is to say that the earth, and every common sight, to him do seem apparell'd in celestial light. "‘Why'—now that's a beautiful word/The second best there is," sings the scientist in Alan Menken's musical Weird Romance. "The very best there is/Is ‘because.'")

Above all, Zot! is McCloud wrestling with superheroes. Superhero comics were getting grim and violent in 1984, when Zot! debuted, and McCloud's title character was designed to fight the trend toward gritty relevance with an old-fashioned knockabout punch. A superpowered blonde teenager who always wins because he knows he can, Zot looks like Captain Marvel and flits about like Peter Pan, two of literature's great overgrown boys. He comes from an idealized retro world of the future, a Tomorrowland that preserves the best of the past; just as there's no Great Depression raging in Jeffty's 1939, no racism or anti-Semitism or European pogroms, only Tom Mix and Amazing Stories, Zot's world is ours without the bad parts. Zot's world contains no problems beyond the periodic supervillain attack, and in fact the heroes regularly hobnob with the villains between battles. Its shine attracts protagonist Jenny Weaver, a teenage girl fed up with her own imperfect universe—i.e., ours.

Zot! wants more than anything to retreat into a mix of 1930s pulp idealism and 1960s technocratic optimism. But it can't. The deeper McCloud delves into Zot's shiny world, the less satisfying he seems to find it. Even in the earliest stories in the Zot! omnibus, you can feel McCloud losing interest in the biff-bam-pow aspect of the superhero story; the external conflicts are often resolved abruptly, sometimes without explanation, and the focus keeps shifting to the characters' feelings and relationships. Zot's world, vast as it is, seems increasingly inadequate as a stage for the kinds of stories McCloud wants to tell. McCloud's own essays in the omnibus come back again and again to his annoyance at his younger self for clinging to the superhero as a story device—and yet Zot is a charming character, one who develops personality and nuance even as his surroundings lose cohesion.

For all McCloud's sunny intentions, Zot! gets progressively darker and more adult. Issues 23-25 form one of the most melancholy storylines, "The Ghost in the Machine," in which living computer virus 9-Jack-9 (McCloud concocts gloriously weird villains) kills ruthlessly, reduces Zot to tears, and comes out of it all nigh-invincible. In the next storyline, "Ring in the New," Jenny and her sometime boyfriend Woody finally confront the logical inconsistencies in Zot's world. How can the great peace songs of the '60s exist in a world that never had a Vietnam? How can Zot and his friends see the supervillains as serious threats but also invite them to dinner parties? "It's like someone went rummaging around in history and just took out all the bad stuff," Woody observes. "What's left is nice enough, but it doesn't always make sense!"

"Ring in the New" includes what may be the most deeply unsettling sequence in Zot!, a New Year's celebration where December 31, 1965 turns over into…January 1, 1965. Zot's comic-book utopia is sterile, self-contained, an unstable bubble of space-time. "The laws of conservation of energy occasionally break," explains the protagonist of "Jeffty Is Five." "These are the laws that physicists call ‘weakly violated.'" A candy bar costs a nickel for Jeffty, but there's no economic depression to explain prices. Jeffty lives in a kids' world, and kids don't care about economics.

Having exposed its flaws, McCloud abandons his utopia. At the end of "Ring in the New," Zot and Jenny get trapped in Jenny's world, the "real world." The remainder of Zot!'s run comprises the "Earth Stories," a series of short stories following individual members of Jenny's circle of friends and family. In most of these issues, Zot is little more than a background presence, a symbol of a better way of life. The "Earth Stories" are frequently, and justly, considered the best portion of Zot!.

But if we can't live in Zot's world, neither can Zot live in ours. The "Earth Stories" issues periodically touch on the difficulty Zot has pursuing his profession—costumed crimefighter—in a world where the laws of superhero comics don't apply. In Issue 39, "The Great Escape," he's shot while attempting to aid police in a drug raid and lands in the hospital. Not long after that, the portal between the worlds reopens. Zot! ends there, with the characters granted one last temporary escape into fantasy.

And it has to end. The superhero is an antique fantasy for children; he's not compatible with the modern adult world. One or the other has to break down. McCloud's childhood friend Kurt Busiek grabbed the horns of the same dilemma with his series Astro City, a sort of history of superhero comics dramatized through an average, contemporary city that happens to count dozens of superheroes among its residents. As the series has progressed, the stories have grown more sophisticated, but also darker. The alternately cheerful, nostalgic, and sentimental one-shots of the early issues have given way to longer, grittier story arcs, all building up to the current storyline, "The Dark Age," a sixteen-issue metaphor for the end of the Silver Age of comics and the dawn of the bloated, downbeat "adult" superhero stories that started to proliferate in the 1970s and continue to dominate the genre today. It's a metaphor for the shadows that fell over American culture in the real 1970s, too. Since Astro City is, like Zot!, a self-conscious reaction to this trend in superhero comics, an attempt to recapture the old optimism and sense of wonder, "The Dark Age" is Astro City looping back on itself, trying to explain its own existence.

This is the way every attempt to return superheroes to a state of innocence ends. The story inevitably starts to grow up, even if the superheroes don't. Maybe it would be different if superhero comics were still written for children, but they're not. Harlan Ellison used to like to say that happiness is doing as an adult what you wanted to do as a child. But he took it back when it came to comic books: "In some way, I don't know how," he told The Comics Journal in a 1980 interview, "Friedrich and Denny and Gerber and all of those guys got burned out in their brains. They worshipped the idols of childhood."

Not that Ellison doesn't understand that worship. The protagonist of "Jeffty Is Five" breaks down in tears when he hears those new old radio broadcasts. He wants things to be as rich and good and simple as he remembers them being long ago, even if no one who was an adult at the time remembers things that way (one of the most telling details of the story is that Jeffty's parents, trapped in the 1930s with their son, are miserable). He indulges in the fantasy of all fantasies, that heaven really did lie about us in our youth, and it wasn't our youth that made it that way—it was true. Ellison's story ends on a repeated, childlike plaint: "Tell me. Somebody please tell me."

As does Zot! "We'll be back; we know we can't stay away forever," Woody reflects, contemplating that bright futuristic skyline. "But just for a while… Just for a while…"

That He Loves: Bread & Wine

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

1999's Bread & Wine, a 44 pp., squarebound 10" X 8" autobio comic written by black, gay science-fiction writer, professor and theorist Samuel R. Delany and drawn by artist /martial arts instructor Mia Wolff, is difficult to write critically about; I'm afraid I'm going to lapse into mere rhapsodic description. (In all fairness, I think that Alan Moore, who wrote the intro, occasionally struggles with this impulse too; at times, his habitual purple prose goes positively eggplant.) Which is too bad: Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York —the story, told in flashback, of how Delany became a couple with a homeless man, Dennis — is a rich text deserving informed analysis and a sense of how it fits into Delany's larger body of work. Whereas, I just read it as the rarest of all love stories (and autobio comics, for that matter): though there's quite a bit of sexual heat (graphically depicted, too) between the two men, their relationship is fundamentally built on kindnesses, forthrightness, and trust. It's romantic, intelligent and, yes, erotic, simultaneously warm and unsentimental.

I remembered Bread & Wine fondly from when I read it almost 10 years ago: rereading it, I saw what initially appeared to be amateurish art on the first page, so I was worried that it wouldn't hold up. Instead, I was able to appreciate Wolff's black-and-white, pen-and-ink work more fully with more knowledge of the comics medium: she mostly draws full page, using panels to pinpoint intimate moments or showcase important details. The New York setting is often represented via crosshatching that manages to impart both urban density and the movement of a city street, while also conveying the sense that Dennis and Delaney exist in their own private, charged space. Words look more handwritten than lettered; she vacillates between elaborate rendering and scribbles as the story calls for it. But even her loosest drawings have an acute sense of bodies in relation to space, to one another; her figures' body language is easily "read" (perhaps her professional physical pursuits helped her to develop this artistic ability).[1]

Wolff is also adept at using visual strategies to represent emotions: on page 7, while Dennis is talking about how he's longing for intimacy, both sexual and otherwise, his braid coils around the front of the panel, appearing to tentatively forge a connection with the figure of Delany. On page 13, when Delany and Dennis enter a hotel that Dennis has been nervous about gaining entrance to (given his state of hygiene), Delany, a man of letters, leads the way, holding a book (or maybe a folder or a binder) protectively, as if it shields them both. I might not be able to pick the real-life Delany or Dennis out of a police lineup after reading the book, but I know precisely how Delaney felt about Dennis every minute of their offbeat courtship.

Delany is especially attracted to Dennis' hands; accordingly, Wolff lavishes extra attention on hands. Stephen Frug writes about that at more length here, though I'm a bit surprised Frug didn't mention page 37, in which the reader sees Dennis' reactions to and pleasure in new foods expressed through his hands. (In fact, Frug's exercise of focusing on a single page of a comic, coupled with Leigh Walton's comment a few weeks ago that certain comics images are seared into his brain, led me to think about the page from this comic I've held in my memory for years: page 3. What is being depicted isn't, in and of itself, very exciting: Delany is facing the reader, hand out, taking a book from Dennis, whom he's met only moments before. He doesn't have the money on him to pay for the book, but Dennis gives it to him anyway, telling him to come back and pay for it later. I'm not as familiar with Delany's oeuvre as I'd like to be, but I do know, from Earl Jackson Jr.'s book Strategies of Deviance, that he often writes couples in which the power dynamic is fluid. In B&W, the power shifts are gentle; visually, on page 3, Dennis' generous act is given equal weight to Delany's when Delany invites Dennis into his life and into his home.

Though Delany's writing in B&W is enough to keep a lit major busy (it takes lines and a little of its structure from the poem "Bread and Wine" by the German lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, not to mention the possible applications of Delany's paraliterary theory to the book)[2], Wolff also indulges in art references (Picasso's "Starry Night" makes an appearance on page 11) and visual puns (on page 9, when, in his own words, Delany is propositioning Dennis, they are standing under a sign for a store that reads "BEDDING"). Delany and Wolff's pacing is deliberate: though it's short, B&W is not a quick read. But it's all sustained by a real core of emotion: though the book could have easily turned into mere pornography, revelry in abjection, and/or, worse, look-at-my-sexy-boyfriend, Delany chooses to show things like a nostalgic reaction to a PBS special and Dennis endearingly asking basically everybody he knows about what he should do about their relationship. (Nick the Cop: "If he was going to do anything weird sexually, he'd'a tried that at the motel. What can you lose?").

B&W is also beautifully packaged by Juno Books: the title is in embossed gold, and the cover is an oil painting featuring (what else?) Dennis's hands. (Actually, B&W is out of print, but very cheap in the used book market.) Not only is this slim volume filled out with the aforementioned Alan Moore intro, but also an afterward of sorts in which the book's real-life counterparts critique it, also mentioning some of the things they had to leave out. The back cover has a banner proclaiming it a "graphic novel" (as well as suitable for friendly neighborhood bookstores' autobiography/Erotica/Gay Letters sections). Now that Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an established critical and commercial success, no doubt assigned in many a graphic novel, lit, women- and queer- studies class, I hold hope that some sort of halo effect may cause readers to discover Bread & Wine.

Panels in the Ivory Towers

Karen Green — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

Last month, the eye, the arts magazine section of the Columbia Spectator (Columbia University's student paper since 1877), published an article on the graphic novels collection in Butler Library. The reporter—a tall, lanky, and enthusiastic fellow named Tommy Hill—interviewed Ben Katchor, Columbia professor Richard Bulliet, and me. It's a terrific piece of writing, engaging and thoughtful; you can read it here.

I was pretty chuffed when the piece came out, not least because it was so much better written even than I'd hoped (despite a sporadic use of "illustrator" for "artist" that may irk some). The true source of my delight, however, was in the approach the article had taken. When the article appeared in the eye, I had sent the link to a variety of family, friends and acquaintances, some in the comics biz, and one industry professional had replied, "Pow sock comics aren't for kids anymore!" At first I thought this was a gently humorous jab, but I eventually realized that this person had dismissed the article as yet another mainstream-press piece that marveled, "Golly gosh, look what's happened to comics; they're all grown up!" Lord knows there are a lot of these CAFKA articles out there (hat tip for the acronym coinage to The Beat and its commenters), mostly written by people who are still stuck in some kind of Frederic Wertham mindlock, assuming that all comics are read by budding juvenile delinquents, even comics that win National Book Awards or special Pulitzer Prizes.

But this wasn't a simplistic "comics aren't for kids anymore!" slant on the collection; this was about the role that a comics collection can play in an academic milieu. Academic libraries contain hundreds of thousands of books that can be read either for entertainment value or in close-readings for study. They can be explored for their artifactual qualities or for the cultural or social historical weight they bear, as I discussed last year. The money quote for me was from Hill's interview with the brilliant scholar and fanboy Dick Bulliet:

Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. "What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and '70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven," he says. "Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying." The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. "You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic," continues Bulliet. In Bulliet's view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.

This isn't about comics being not just for kids. This is about comics having a meta-life as objects of study. Columbia is not, of course, unique among universities in valuing comics on this level; really, we're just in the embryonic stages. I've written before about the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University, the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University, among others, where enormous resources are devoted to preserving comic and cartoon art for research. And now Japan is kicking our collective academic asses with the planned Tokyo International Manga Library at Meiji University, expected to hold fourteen million items, starting with Yoshihiro Yonezawa's collection of 140,000 comic books. Shucks, Columbia's only spent about $27,000 on comics so far; Meiji is sinking the kind of cash that represents more than just an interest in scholarly study, but an investment in Japan's patrimony.

During the time I spent with reporter Hill, I took him on a tour of our collection. In Butler Library, oversize books are shelved in a special folio section at the west end of every floor of the stacks, so after I showed him the bulk of the collection in the regular stacks, we walked down to the large-format area. There one can find books like Little Nemo in Slumberland: so many splendid Sundays! or The World on Sunday: graphic art in Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper (1898-1911) or Storeyville. I pulled out some Winsor McCay to show him and his response to it was immediate and almost visceral. One could argue that Little Nemo was never simply for kids, nor for that matter were most of the early newspapers comics. Nor are many newspaper comics today, although we tend not to have cultural critics of the standing of Gilbert Seldes trumpeting the virtues of For Better or Worse, as Seldes did for George Herriman's Krazy Kat, saying "With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic" and comparing Herriman to the Primitive painter Henri Rousseau. The comics published in the New York World, the jewel in Joseph Pulitzer's crown, appealed to readers across all economic, social, ethnic, and generational boundaries. The World page below, by George McManus, features characters from his strip, The Newlyweds, which was based on McManus' own family life—making it more akin to today's sitcoms than to Saturday morning cartoons.

It's this aspect of comics in the university—not comic history, not why comics are for grown-ups, but comics as scholarly object—that informs work such as Dave Purcell's recent Columbia master's essay in American Studies, Superheroes of the pastoral: the development of American mythology through the landscape's liminal spaces, in which he traces the development of American mythological archetypes from western frontier heroes through urban noir superheroes, paralleling the nation's transition from rural to urban pre-eminence. Academic prose isn't going to be to everyone's taste, obviously: I'm thinking of Tucker Stone retching as he pages through A comic studies reader (see 1:06, 4:13 and 7:36); yeah, this kind of writing is definitely not for everybody. Even I….well, my job is to help scholars with their research, so you could probably say I'm more of an enabler than a practitioner. I mean, there's a reason I prefer to write these columns rather than present papers at the Modern Language Association on the meta-narrative of Pogo as a multivalent transcultural signifier. But my point is that the eye article—along with my own efforts—isn't about comics being read by different audiences, it's about their being read for different purposes.

This is the impetus behind an exhibition that will soon be on view in Butler Library at Columbia. This past summer, I was asked to plan a display on graphic novels to be mounted for the spring 2010 semester. I was given total freedom on how it should be framed, and I sketched out some rough ideas, all of which I trashed after a fruitful discussion with friend-of-comics and tenured faculty member, Jeremy Dauber. Dauber pointed out that I didn't need to explain the history of comics or talk about why they were worth reading. I had unwittingly created a fairly CAFKA-esque concept, but we decided that that was altogether too defensive—too much "why" and not enough "how." Why not operate on the principle of how comics can be used in an academic setting?

So, when the exhibition goes up in January, it will look at themes that are explored in college-level curricula. Each of the eight display cases will present a concept and then trace how artists have addressed it, both in more traditional art and in comics. So, for example, one theme might be "didacticism," or works created for the purpose of instruction. First up could be an image from the 1735 Hogarth series, A Rake's Progress. In this series of eight paintings, later rendered as engravings, Hogarth presents wealthy ne'er-do-well Tom Rakewell, who fritters away his inheritance on wicked and wasteful pursuits, ending up first in debtors' prison and finally in an insane asylum. In the first engraving, below, Tom is busy: he's getting measured for new clothes while ignoring both the servants who are preparing his father's office for the wake and also his pregnant fiancée and her outraged mother. Hogarth fills the image with telling details, such as the defaced leather binding of the Bible in the lower left, out of which Tom's penny-pinching father has cut a new sole for his shoe, and the anthropomorphic family arms on the wall at upper right, three vises (vices; get it?) over the word "Beware."

Did comics embrace such didacticism? Short answer: did you grow up reading Mary Worth? I know I did, and I always resented what seemed like the endless busybody-ism of that silver-haired know-it-all. While early strips establish that her advice was not always unsought, and was often clearly on-point—witness the panels from a 1947 strip below—when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s she tended to come off as a more genteel version of the voice of the Establishment.

Another example, with a far more serious intent, is a recent comic developed specifically for returning war veterans who face difficulty in reintegration to civilian life. Coming Home: what to expect, how to deal when you return from combat, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón—the same team that created the graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 Report—was commissioned by Military OneSource, a resource created by the Department of Defense to offer support to current and former members of the armed services as well as to their families.

The 32-page comic tells the story of a three friends, Iraq War vets who are experiencing various symptoms of PTSD, rage, alcoholism, alienation—a virtual mini DSM-IV of psychological trauma—and when, where, and how they get help. Two final pages list contact info for a variety of support services—from the Veterans Administration, from individual branches of the military, and from independent organizations. The comic is free in print to members of the military, although anyone can read the online version.

All of these images both tell a story and provide a lesson, in the same tradition as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. There are a host of other options for this theme, and a host of other themes, as well, many of which I've referred to here from time to time: perceptions of war, sexuality and gender, religion, visual rhetoric. In fact, I'd love to hear from you all, in the comments or in emails, about themes and examples you think would work, too. Let's make this a group effort, shall we? Because exhibitions aren't just for kids anymore!

The Manga Cargo Cult: How Manga Got Long (and Short Again)

Jason Thompson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:00:00 -0500

Almost every comic artist I know wants to write really, really long stories. Hundred-page stories. Thousand-page stories. Jeff Smith's Bone at 1,300 pages, Dave Sim's Cerebus at 6,000 pages. Long page counts are a comic creator's badge of honor, and they also speak to something fundamental about comics: they are a solitary art form (unless you share a studio) and they take a long time to draw. During those days hunched over the drawing board, with ideas transferring to paper at slow upload speeds, your thoughts wander, simple plots get more complicated, and soon you're plotting a life-consuming epic, like Philip Seymour Hoffmann's character in Synecdoche, New York.

While not generally as introspective as a Charlie Kaufman movie, manga gives people even more role models for really long comics: Dragon Ball, One Piece, Glass no Kamen, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Lone Wolf and Cub are just a few of the story manga to reach over 8,000 pages in length. What Warren Ellis once called "decompressed" storytelling, with pages upon pages to set the scene or show moment-by-moment action, is now accepted and welcomed by most comics readers (even ones who don't like the big eyes and other stereotypical signifiers of 'manga'), and a 200 page graphic novel, what would have been an epic in the 1980s, might even seem short.

But there's a problem; the American market does not necessarily bear long-running, creator-owned comics. Such lengthy works are a big risk on the part of publishers, and require a lot of work time on the part of artists, who don't necessarily have teams of assistants like Masashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto. In America, sales of multiple-volume manga generally drop with each new volume, making 10+ volume series a very risky publishing venture. Some publishing trends seem directly opposed to the nature of traditional manga; with paper prices rising, and gorgeous color printing of the Flight and Popgun style becoming ever cheaper and easier (not to mention that color is free online), there's less and less incentive to create lengthy stories in B&W print. Will the American market ever encourage truly epic, zillion-page stories in the style of manga?

In a word, no. In more words, even the manga market doesn't really encourage zillion-page stories as much as we think it does. The format of manga—the bones of manga beneath the flesh of art and story motifs—is created by publishing and economic factors, and out of the thousands of manga which debut in Japanese magazines each year, only a few dozen make it to a second or third graphic novel volume.

With a few exceptions, mostly from established artists who have proven themselves with shorter works (such as the novel-like works of Kazuo Umezu and Naoku Urasawa), even the longest running manga were not conceived from the beginning as bookshelf-destroying behemoths. Published in anthology magazines, the typical manga has the story structure of a TV pilot—the first chapter sells the "pitch," and only if it's successful does the manga keep going. If Eiichiro Oda's One Piece had scored poorly in reader polls, instead of reaching 50+ volumes, the characters would never have gotten off the first island. (On the other hand, sometimes a manga intended as a one-shot, like Azusa Izumi's The Lizard Prince, is picked for expansion into an ongoing series—never mind if all the loose plot threads have already been tied up, make some new ones!) Sustaining interest over the long haul is not easy; Dave Sim's Cerebus is the longest Western comic book series written by a single creator, but as Sim himself has pointed out, he didn't set his grandiose goal until after he'd built a readership and cut his teeth on 25 self-contained, 20-page issues. Throughout his epic, Sim also kept trying to bring in new readers, usually by parodies of then-popular comics such as Moon Knight, Spawn and the Sandman—parodies which date the comic and make it harder to read today (though arguably less so than Sim's infamous conversion to right-wing religious fundamentalism, speaking of isolation and thoughts wandering).

In manga, as in all things, format and medium determine the structure of a story. Creating a long-running series is a balancing act of keeping the readers' interest with every individual installment while also keeping your eye on the "big plan" (assuming you have one). Within manga, there are several different publishing formats which steer towards several different types of stories—not all of them towards the super-long, decompressed mega-manga which Americans know from Dragon Ball, Fruits Basket and Bleach.

(1) Weekly manga. There are scarcely more than a dozen weekly manga magazines, but among them number the highest-circulation manga magazines in Japan: Shonen Jump, Shonen Sunday, Shonen Magazine, etc. With an average of 20 pages a week, 80 pages a month, weekly stories use more pages than almost any other manga. The drawn-out fight scenes of manga like Dragon Ball, Naruto and Bleach are a product of weekly manga. Weekly manga also has the luxury of not having to tell a complete story in every chapter; when the reader is coming back in just a week, it's okay to end in the middle of a battle or on an outrageous cliffhanger. When collected in book form, the result is usually a very smooth, "cinematic" read, like flipbooks that go on for thousands and thousands of pages.

Weekly manga magazines were introduced around 1959 to compete with television shows, another traditionally weekly medium, which was just beginning to be introduced in postwar Japan. Weekly manga can also be compared to American newspaper comic strips in the first half of the 20th century—they're designed to be as cheap, B&W, disposable and widely read as possible. Until the 1960s, before the heyday of weekly manga, most manga was not unlike American and European comics; very short works of a few chapters or volumes at most. But with weekly manga, page counts grew and grew; the goal is to hook the readers in and keep 'em reading. Akira Toriyama, it's said, wanted to end Dragon Ball long before volume 42, but was pressured into continuing by the sheer popularity of the series, like Douglas Adams cranking out yet another Hitchhiker's Guide novel.

But for all their cultural clout, weekly manga, like newspaper strips and network television, is a fading medium. Except for Weekly Comic Bunch (which skews towards an aging readership anyway), all the existing weekly magazines in Japan are at least 20 years old; recent attempts like Comic Gumbo have been failures. Publishing a weekly manga magazine requires tremendous resources, and with the fragmentation of media, perhaps the generalist audience required to sustain these massive magazines is dwindling. Oddly, there are no weekly shojo manga magazines (although there are several biweekly ones), possibly a sign of shojo's smaller economic footprint; a few weekly shojo magazines were published in the 1960s but never caught on.

(2) Biweekly or monthly manga. The vast majority of manga magazines are monthly. Individual comics run approximately 30 pages a month, approximately the same as American comics. A monthly manga has to make tighter use of its pages than a weekly manga, and it's arguably due to this format that monthly manga—such as Gunsmith Cats, Blade of the Immortal, Fullmetal Alchemist—have traditionally been some of the most popular manga in America, particularly in the 1990s before the massive page counts of weekly manga had been accepted by the American publishing marketplace.

Biweekly and monthly manga have tremendous variety, but the monthlies have one major difference from weekly manga: they're more likely to be the work of a single person. "Weekly manga requires at least 4-5 assistants," says Hideki Egami, the editor of Shogakukan's monthly magazine Ikki. "Monthly is close to the maximum frequency that a manga came come out and be drawn entirely by one person." Although popular manga artists often have massive staffs of assistants, there's a sizeable number of manga artists who, either by choice or poverty (drawing a monthly manga series is not necessarily a get-rich-quick scheme), have no full-time assistants or just call in their friends for help when a deadline looms. Some artists, like Hitoshi Iwaaki (Parasyte), draw everything themselves on principle; some artists, like Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist), employ large studios.

(3) Bimonthly, quarterly or irregular magazine manga. Magazines with such an infrequent publishing schedule tend to be subculture mags: the lesbian manga magazine Yuri Hime, yaoi magazines such as Be x Boy Gold, or spinoffs of more frequent magazines such as Dengeki Teioh and LaLa Dx. These magazines are often the easiest to break into, with yaoi in particular being an entry point for many female manga artists, much the way that male-oriented pornographic manga in the 1970s was a breeding ground for underground manga artists like Hideo Azuma (Disappearance Diary). As long as you deliver the goods, you have a certain amount of freedom, and it was in this environment that artists like Fumi Yoshinaga and est em developed.

The general consensus in manga publishing seems to be that, if a magazine comes out this infrequently, the manga should be one-shots since it's almost impossible to keep readers' attention for an ongoing story. (Shhh…don't tell any American indy comics artists…) If bimonthly manga do have an ongoing story, such as Natsume's Book of Friends, Land of the Blindfolded, and Palette of 12 Secret Colors, it's necessary to re-explain the basic story premise in each episode and make each episode as self-contained as possible. The result is handy for a reader randomly picking up the magazine, but makes for a repetitive experience when the manga is later collected in graphic novel format.

(4) Standalone mange. Although it's still rare in Japan, a growing number of manga are published in standalone books without magazine serialization, like most American graphic novels. One example is Taiyo Matsumoto's 448-page graphic novel Go Go Monster. The real problem with standalone graphic novels in any country, of course, is how long they take to produce, during which time the artist has no reader feedback and, possibly, no source of income.

(5) Yonkoma (four-panel) mange. Four-panel manga, such as Azumanga Daioh and a bunch of books recently published by Yen Press, are the equivalent of American newspaper/web comic strips. Aside from a focus on cute girls, they eerily parallel the dynamics of Western gag strips: they are character-driven, rather than story-driven, and they rarely have much ongoing plot.

Yonkoma manga is easy to make, easy to read, and—surprisingly considering its low profile in the U.S.—very successful. While other manga magazines' circulations dwindle, yonkoma manga is the fastest growing area of the manga industry. Four-panel series such as Lucky Star are increasingly being adapted into animation and merchandise. There are many magazines devoted solely to four-panel manga. Online and cellphone manga is overwhelmingly four-panel-oriented, as it's the easiest type of manga to read on mobile devices, and some yonkoma webcomics, such as Hidekaz Himaruya's Hetalia Axis Powers, have even become hits and made it into the big time.

The 8,000+ page manga mega-epics are the result of a very specific, monolithic publishing culture, and as circumstances change (for instance, into the casual culture of webcomics and cell phones) the nature of "manga" will change with it. On the other hand, the fragmentation of media means more opportunities for creators; there's no reason you can't tell an epic, 1,000+ page story on the web. The trick is not to do it blindly, thinking that by mimicking the traditional print-derived structure of manga (or to give another example followed by way too many young artists, by drawing your manga right to left), you'll have the same success as mega-manga which arose in Japan's magazine boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but creating a manga cargo cult won't necessarily cause riches to fall from the sky.

Phil & John

Tucker Stone — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:35:00 -0500

Phil Schaap hosts a daily radio show on Columbia University's radio station called "Bird Flight". It's roughly 90 minutes long, and it's about Charlie Parker, and that's been true for nearly 30 years. If you've ever heard it, you know it's not just about Parker--it's also about Schaap, a man who knows more about Charlie Parker and jazz than just about anybody on the planet. (The article about Schaap in Da Capo's Best Music Writing anthology includes multiple anecdotes to back this up; the best one is undoubtedly when Sun Ra "kidnapped" Schaap so that Ra could find out his own biography from the guy prior to a club date.) Schaap's memory is beyond even a comic-obsessive's definition of remarkable, and his desire for more--Charlie Parker music, Charlie Parker information, Charlie Parker facts, What Happened to Charlie Parker on That Tuesday--remains just as strong.

John Peel died in 2004. He was an English radio disc jockey, although he did quite a bit of other stuff as well. His career is one that encompassed a much wider strain of music than Phil Schaap, but it had a similar sort of obsessive quality to it--Peel was always on the hunt for the new. He brought entire genres to radio listeners before anyone else, he extolled the virtues of unknown artists and bands, and while Peel was more than willing to call out to the past for quality, Peel's shows weren't the sort of thing that could randomly be moved across the decades indiscernibly.

There's something of immense value in both Schaap and Peel's approach to music, although it's probably easier to praise Peel. After all, he was the guy in the trenches, a man who was aging in a medium that extols youthfulness above all other qualities. But constantly moving forward has its negative marks against it as well--if you're constantly digging new holes in the back yard, you'll never make it to China. If that's your goal, you have to throw down in one location. While Peel probably took more knowledge of the long view to his grave than Phil will, Phil's depth of specific knowledge is just as worthwhile. But what was lost with Peel--and it's not hard to call it lost, when you consider how splintered the audience for music criticism has become--was that sort of breadth. Few go to one individual for everything anymore--you get your rap writing from one, your treacly nu-folk writing from another, a list of aggregate numerical ratings from others, or you just get everything from your brother.

So which one are you?

Comics has a lot of Phils. That's not an insult, although the more aggravated stereotype of the "every Frank Castle appearance ever" does exist and probably shouldn't be a model for any sane person to follow. Delving into self-defined buckets of obsession, churning and turning every aspect of a specific fictional character that--if we're going to be honest--is rarely going to have that same depth of thought put into its creation and maintenance as can be found in its audience. That's a part of comics, and it's not only the purview of the Thunderbolts reader--there's a subset of comics readers who, like Phil, can tell you more about George Herriman's life than George Herriman knew himself. Phils are the type who loudly reject casual reading, surreptitiously using the phrase "just looking to be entertained" while secretly pursuing the Holy Grail of completionist intake. There's a Jim Aparo Deadman that retells the death of Jason Todd from an alternate perspective? There's a Frank Miller back-up story that pre-dates 300 but uses a similar character design? I mean, sure. If it's cheap. (Even if it's not.)

Meanwhile, the Diamond distribution system forces a John Peel consumption. It's not just the latest issue of Stormwatch that "comes out" on Wednesday, it's also the English translation of "You Are There," the latest collection of 20th Century Boys. It's new, even when it's just new to us. And due to the low print-runs and the difficulties inherent in re-orders, some of that new stuff will disappear off the shelves within weeks of release, the same way that copies of Parker or Asterios Polyp entered a weird period of "we're waiting on a new printing" within months of their initial appearance. It doesn't take that many trips to the comic store before the buyer realizes that some of this stuff--the good, yes, although sometimes it's just "the popular"--may disappear into the secondary "collector's" market the same way that a first printing of Chew might. Like Phil, they want to take it all in, but like John, they want to keep up with all of it as well.

Theoretically, this would be the moment where one would point to the professional comic Peels, the men or women who do the trawling and trolling for the reader, the ones who voraciously plow into the swamp of comics to find the Ones That We Should Care About.

Theoretically, yes. Realistically?

Not so much.

See, people like Peel were rare, and today, they're rarer still. They weren't just critics, they were Tastemakers, Trendsetters, and they were paid to do it. They found the stuff that only a few obsessive Phil types could, but they had a receptive, vocal audience that attacked that "stuff" with the same voracity with which the recommendation had been delivered to them. It wasn't that the actual Peel had an audience who only did what he said--track down his listeners' yearly "favorites" and listen to the excitement with which Peel responds to the choices he didn't care for--but that Peel was somebody that the audience trusted enough to take chances on. Not just for reggae, or punk, or The Fall, or electro, or girl group pop, or soul, or drudge, or scludge, or fill-in-the-blank. For everything music. He was somebody who knew what he was talking about, and even when you disagreed with his choice, there was never a doubt that it was a random lark, a favor for a friend. He cared about where music was going, and he fired his estimable intelligence towards convincing his audience to do the same.

Comics doesn't have Tastemakers, maybe they did once, but that time is gone. It's always been a fractured landscape anyway--initial chunks of comics criticism doled out in fanzines or fan clubs, with the occasional academic polemic turned out for audiences in the low hundreds--and the Internet was able to finish the job of fracturing quicker than it's been able to on music and film. We all do it, you, me, the guy at the store--reading only those who agree with us up until they say something we don't like, we burn bridges, blog ourselves, trusting no one. After all, That Guy likes Guggenheim's Blade series--what's he know? That Girl's favorite comic last week was some manga about dating--all the smart kids know it was the GI Joe/Cobra Special!

The one place where the Peel style of "look upon this perfect diamond" survives is, sadly, in the dusty archives. Like their parents--or really, anybody's parents, or just the Platonic ideal of "parents"--before them, there's more than a few places where old comics are found and resurrected with the type of fervor and detailed exposition that only a fan could be capable of. Speaking of the virtues of the old newspaper strip, the Golden Age crazy, the EC horror, there's plenty of excellent, smart people doing neglected classics a service. Good for them. But they aren't Peels. They're Phils, and as smart, funny and intelligent as they can be, we've got plenty of them already--if there's one thing comics has too many of already, it's people obsessed with the past.

What about the rest of it? Where's the individual who will dive into Wednesday's delivery of cardboard boxes, dash their hands across the distended shelves, pulling and opening the new classic we haven't heard about yet, the comic that wasn't written by the ex-editor who knows all the big bloggers, the comic that couldn't make the Diamond catalog due to its lack of pre-orders?

They're never coming. There will never be a website that has a comics writer like Peel. Like movie reviews and music criticism, the internet has destroyed all of the potential jobs available for future John Peels. As the old guard of film & music die off, they'll join in line with comics, with a wide swath of user-generated content and aggregate "score" based reviews taking all of the eyeballs. But because of the nature of it, the fact that it's user-generated content--you can control it.

You just have to decide which model you want to follow.