Panels and Pixels

An interview with Ed Brubaker

2009-03-12T12:16:00.015-04:00

Below is an interview I did with writer Ed Brubaker a few months ago when his new series Incognito debuted. Originally this was going to run as part of my column but, well, que sera sera. Here's the full interview:

Q: So tell me about Incognito.

A: Incognito is an idea I’ve been mulling over since we were wrapping up Sleeper. I often try to think of the inverse of an idea to see what would be interesting — if this idea is interesting to explore in one direction would it be interesting to explore it in the other? Look at a story like The Shield, where you’ve got a corrupt cop who’s trying to save his soul. What if you flip that to the other side where it’s a mobster instead of a cop? I think of things like that sometimes and try to see if there’s a story in there.

Sleeper’s about a good person who for his government goes undercover as a bad guy and slowly loses whatever moral compass he had and starts to realize that the bad guys and the good guys aren’t that different in the ways that they act. And maybe doing bad things for the right reason is just as bad as doing bad things for the wrong reason. There’s a lot of moral gray areas to explore there, so I was thinking "What if you did the opposite, what if there was a bad person somehow forced into a situation where they actually either had to or ended up doing good things, but they’re someone who has no moral compass, who looks down at humanity and ends up somehow through circumstance being forced to live among them and develop sympathy for them perhaps?"

That’s where Incognito grew out of, trying to figure out, is there a story in that character exploration? Then I started thinking of it in terms of a noir story and suddenly I was "Oh, what if it’s a super villain living in witness protection," and everything started to come together from there. All my love of old pulp characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow started to come out. The idea of trying to do a story that’s sort of a mixture between the modern superhero and a '50s noir story really started to appeal to me. I started thinking “What if the pulps had never stopped? What if instead of crime stories and noir, the crime pulp stuff was mashed in together with Doc Savage and the Shadow and Operator Number Five?” What if they made noir-esque stories with these characters? Everything started building from that.

Q: Tell me a little bit about the main character and how you see him. He comes across as not the most likable character, and that’s always a little tricky because you want the audience to have sympathy for him.

A: He’s definitely an anti-hero. That’s the story. It’s the journey of a bad guy. He’s an Eastwood type. It’s that kind of character, Eastwood in Fistful of Dollars or somebody who is clearly an outlaw. And yet we’ll start to see there’s something about this person. I think by the end of the first issue you get an idea that this guy isn’t just this anti-hero who looks down on everybody and feels trapped by this thing. You see some of the wounds this guy carries and how he became who he is. He becomes a more human character even by the end of the first issue, even though he does retain that hardened edge of a guy who was raised on the wrong side. I guess if you’re raised on it, it doesn’t feel like the wrong side.

Zach and his brother Xander were raised -- they’re twin brothers -- and they were taken from a state adoption home and have no memory of it. They’re earliest memories are of being experimented on by this mad scientist guy who was in this evil organization known as the Black Death. They were taking orphan kids and doing science experiments on them to try to turn them into super villains, basically. He was a twin and he and his twin brother were major enforcers for this evil organization and at some point about three or four years ago something happened to his brother and he ended up turning on the people he worked for. Now he’s living in witness protection, but everybody thinks he’s dead. And he’s on drugs that make him a normal person. They shut down all of the enhancements that he’s been given.

Q: That sounds a lot like some of the characters and themes you’ve been exploring in your other books like Criminal. Certainly the idea of family, like the Lawless brothers in Criminal and even the Cap/Bucky relationship in Captain America.

A: There’s some truth to that. We all have a few themes we explore over and over again as writers, whether you consciously know it or not.

One of the main things in this for me came out as an accident in that it occurred to me that the main character was a twin when I was thinking about the themes of the book, when I was fleshing out the ideas of the book early on. The word Incognito has so many different meanings. You’re doing a story about people who put on costumes and run around but doing it in a sort of noir way -- well, all good noir is at heart character studies with a plot taking place around them. You really build your whole story from the character.

So I thought “Who is this character” and it occurred to me that a lot of what the story is about is a guy who doesn’t exactly know what his identity is. He’s living a lie. The person that he truly is taking drugs and is living in this suburban Anytown, USA, kind of place working an office job and pretending to be someone he isn’t. He’s completely incognito and yet he puts on a mask and feels like this is who he is. Or maybe it isn’t. There’s so much about identity.

And it occurred to me “why does this guy go into witness protection” and then suddenly the whole twin thing came up. Identical twins have so much of their identity sometimes wrapped up in their twin. A lot of time they’re really close friends and have mental connections and things like that. So the idea of a twin separated from his brother and everyone thinks he’s dead and he’s living this new life for the first time on his own, but everything about it is a lie. So it really gets to the heart of what the story’s about in a lot of ways.

Q: It’s interesting because your description also fits Clark Kent.

A: Does it though? He was raised to be Clark Kent. Going into witness protection is a lot different. (laughter)

Q: That’s true, but —

A: "As a baby, Superman killed many, many people, but he was able to testify against Kryptonians and moved to witness protection in Kansas to be raised by an elderly family."

Q: That’s my recollection of the story.

A: That’s actually a pretty good story. If I ever get my hands on Superman ...

Q: One of those Elseworlds tales —

A: Even as a baby he had full adult intelligence. That’s a creepy story though. I like that.

Q: But it does sound like you’re playing off the kind of wish fulfillment that a lot of superheroes provide. Especially in that initial 2-page preview, where the lead is saying “I’m better than all the other people I’m surrounded by.”

A: Yeah, it is kind of the flip side of Superman/Clark Kent sitting there and thinking “nobody knows.” This is him sitting there and thinking “Nobody knows I could kill all of you and not care.”

Q: Are you consciously going to be playing off of the traditional superhero tropes in that aspect?

A: I don’t think so. I never consciously set out to do a parody of anything.

Q: I didn’t necessarily mean a parody —

A: No, I know what you meant. But I don’t think I’m consciously trying to reference any other superhero comics at least. There’s little nods here and there to the pulps because when you do a story like this and you’re creating the whole thing from the ground up, you have to do a little bit of world-building. My world-building was creating these pulp-hero characters from the '30s and '40s and they’re not really important to the story at all, they’re just background elements to the world. You may not ever see them in the same way there’s tons of elements in Criminal that nobody ever actually sees. We referenced Sebastian Hyde a number of times before anyone actually saw him.

With Sleeper we did that thing where the characters all told their secret origins in third person which was a little play on the origin stories of characters and a little play on the way origin stories used to be told. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. Who knows? It’s hard to tell when you’re in the midst of it. I’m deep into writing this project now. All I can think of is the character and the shit he’s getting into. Obviously the point of the thing is to explore the gray area between good and evil from the other point of view. We always see that side of it, the good person doing bad things and how that affects you; on some level this is approaching that.

Q: You talk about taking part of things from the pulps and noir and superhero comics. What things are you consciously taking? Are there any genre tropes you’re taking and how do you roll them up and keep them from bumping into each other, because they’re different genres, or at least perceived as such.

A: It’s kind of apocalyptic noir in this weird way. Noir isn’t really a genre — People think of it as a genre, but the people who think of it as that, when they start to tell you what movies that would fit into that don’t realize how elastic that actually is.

A noir story, if there are rules to it, the main rule seems to be whoever your main character is, nothing good is going to happen to him. (laughs) And at the end of the story he may be dead. If he’s narrating, he may be narrating on his deathbed. It’s more of the way a story is told as opposed to what the story is. Many things that a lot of people consider noir could also be considered straight crime stories. A lot of people consider the Parker novels to be noir, but I just think of them as heist novels. Parker tends to live through all of them and there isn’t a lot of tragedy involved in that process.

I think instinctively I’ve always brought that air of tragic noir element to whatever I'm doing. I’m trying to subvert some of the principles of that genre a little bit by doing this. It’s kind of an experiment to take pulp and make up sort of an evolution of where these pulp styled characters would have gone and how they would have affected a world of also try to tell it through this really character-driven noir story. So it is a little bit of an experiment, but I really like the elements of something like Doc Savage; I love these apocalyptic literature of pulp fiction with these characters who were just sort of weird, crazy, vicious characters who were planning to destroy the world, and you had a guy like Doc Savage who would take out whole organizations and whoever would survive they would take them back to their institute and carve out pieces of their brain so they wouldn’t be bad guys anymore.

There was weird stuff going on in those pulp stories that comics sort of evolved from. As comics started being more and more for kids a lot of that eccentric bizarre early atomic-age stuff just fell by the waste side. That’s the kind of stuff I’m tapping into a little bit with Incognito. Just using that hard, crazy science edge to some of this world. Not as if I’m the first person by any means to explore the pulp roots of what superhero comics grew out of. Alan Moore started a whole line of stuff. But they weren’t the first either. We wouldn’t even have Batman if not for the Shadow.

Q: I talked to you back when Criminal first came out and I remember you saying how with Sleeper, because it was aimed at more traditional comic book readers, you were able to be a lot more experimental in your layouts and design. And with Criminal you wanted it to be very basic so that anyone could pick it up. What about with Incognito?

A: I think it’s mostly pretty straightforward. With every project it seems like Sean starts to experiment a little bit with the way he tells a story or structures a page. With this one, my favorite art from him, maybe ever, is the stuff for Incognito because I love the way he’s doing these no-panel borders, using the gutter space as negative space and hard clean balloons for the word balloons. Everything’s very mechanical except for the stuff that’s hand drawn by him.

Sleeper — he’ll probably do a story like that again, with that kind of experimental storytelling, but I’ve seen what he’s doing now with these odd panels that have these full bleeds. He’s doing this thing where he’ll make certain panels pop so they’ll bleed to the edge of the page.
Q: Of course, Criminal has changed. Both of you have gotten a little more experimental.

A: Yeah, but we’re still basically sticking to a three-tier grid. I can’t remember who said it, but if you can’t tell a story on a three tier grid you can’t tell a story. The first advice I remember reading in a book about experimental layout when everybody was trying to do weird angle panels and imitate Neal Adams with all of his crazy storytelling stuff he did and somebody pointed out that before Neal Adams ever tried that he made sure he could tell a story in 6-9 panels per page. Learn the rules before you break them.

Q: Not to take away from any of the other artists you’ve collaborated with, but this is the third book you and Phillips have worked on and you seem to click together well. What do you think it is that allows you to work together so well?

A: I don’t know. We’re just on the same page about the kind of comics we want to do. I really feel like a lot of what I do pacing wise really fits most of my scripts if you look at any of them have as much description of facial expression and what the character is feeling as it does with "in the background there’s this and this." All my stuff wouldn’t wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t have artists that can really generate empathy from the readers for the characters. Sean just does that really well. We love a lot of the same comics and aspire to do things on the same levels as the books we really dug. A lot of times we’re playing to each other. I feel like I’m writing this stuff to some degree for Sean because he’s the first person that reads anything I write for anything I own.
Q: Is this going to be an open-ended story? Do you have a definitive end in mind? Or could this go on?

A: It’ll depend. I know the end of this story, I’ve got the last scene written already. It came to me early on. It’s definitely left in such a way that if someone were to want to, we could revisit this character or other characters in this world, depending on if I end up sticking with that scene.The plan right now is once we finish this to go back and do more Criminal. We’re having a lot of fun. With Criminal especially built up a pretty loyal, sizable audience of people who are clearly following us over to Incognito. And hopefully we’ll pick up some more from Incognito. As long as people keep buying comics by us in enough quantities that we can afford to keep doing it, Sean and I will put out as many of them a year as we can.

Q: I was going to ask you how Criminal was doing.

A: It’s doing really well actually. We’re one of the more stable books on the market apparently. We’ve been doing about 18,000 an issue. That’s advance orders. I think we’re doing close to 19,000 on final sales. That’s better than most books like that. I always want to reach more people and I feel like it’s still under-performing cause I still hear from people all the time whose stores buy three copies and sell out the first day so I always know they could be selling at least a few more. It’s better than almost everything Vertigo publishes.

Q: I was going to say.

A: Yeah, other than Fables. From my side, once we relaunched with the new format and I think after issue two, the orders for issue three actually went up and in issue four the orders were higher than one even. And we’ve just stayed at that level. One issue I think was 30 copies less. It’s insane to have a book where the numbers are the same every month.

Q: What about the trades?

A: They’re doing really well too. We’ve sent the first one back for a second printing and we’re pretty close to selling out the first print run of the second trade. I’m just waiting to get some statements. but we’re moving really good numbers, and mostly through comic stores. We’re not really doing huge bookstore push because I handle all that stuff myself. Also we’re in print in five or six other countries and our French publisher has gone back to print with the first book. We’re coming out all over the world with this stuff. The more books come out the more they seem to feed each other. Every day I hear from more and more people who are just getting turned onto it, so it just seems kind of crazy, for two years and only 17 issues.

Q: How many issues is Incognito?

A: Five issues and then we’re back to Criminal. We’re doing the next Lawless story after that. Incognito’s just five issues. We’ll probably do more of it. We’ll see how we like doing it the further in we get. So far I like it, which is surprising, because after Sleeper I thought "Let’s just do crime stories and not deal with any of the super-powered stuff at all." But it’s a lot of fun to be back doing something like this with Sean where we get to flex some different muscles and have some fun within that genre. I like working in comics you can do a story like that and a large part of your audience goes into it knowing what a super villain is.

Q: Working for someone like Marvel or DC you’re under these creative restrictions as far as what you can or can’t do with the character. In your case I”m not sure that’s true, because they always say they can’t kill the character and you did.

A: I’ve gotten really lucky with getting away with murder, literally, on books but also I haven’t slammed up against a lot of restrictions. Things you can or can’t say I get a lot, in terms of from month to month it seems to change. There’s never any hard or fast rule. You can say "damn" in a book but you can’t say "damn"19 times on a page. Weird things like that.

I don’t think I could do the work for hire stuff if I wasn’t also doing original work. I think they feed each other at this point for me. I went a few years only doing work for hire stuff when I first started out at Marvel before Criminal. It just seemed like I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t start doing some work that I actually had a stake in and felt like was important to me. I have a big stake in Captain America and Daredevil. They are important to me but it’s a whole different thing when you create all of it from start to finish. You own it and it’s your universe. It’s not everybody else’s too.

Q: You don’t have to worry about tying it into Civil War.

A: But even that stuff, if you take those jobs at Marvel, you can’t complain when somebody says "Oh we want you to tie into such and such." I’ve been really lucky. People think that happens more than it actually does. I have editors who say "Hey our book needs a boost, tie it into such and such a thing." I’ve been on that end at DC. I don’t think I’ve ever been on that end at Marvel but I’m sure there are people who have been.

You’re trying to tell the best story with someone else’s character and I lie to myself and make myself believe I own the Captain America part of the Marvel Universe other than Brian being able to use him in Avengers. But during Civil War Cap was in every third book and usually getting beaten up by the main characters. He probably got captured like nine times during Civil War. I’m the only one who didn’t have him get captured.

You lie to yourself and tell yourself it’s your character while you’re writing it. You have to otherwise you’re not going to do a good job and give the readers their money’s worth. which is what your job is to do. Make people want to keep reading these characters. That’s a great fucking job. It beats flipping burgers, which I’ve done. It beats any job I’ve ever had because it’s still creatively fulfilling. But doing your own stuff is even more fulfilling. (laughs)

I like both. I love Captain America. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve had these ideas that I would grow up and work on Captain America. I probably went a good decade or so without ever thinking about it, but the moment I got that phone call from Brian saying "Hey is there anything you want to do? I know you’re exclusive is ending soon," and Joe called me the next day to offer me Captain America. There was no way I was saying no. It’s pretty cool. It’s the same way I would work on Doc Savage or the Shadow if Marvel had them. I find if I go a full month without writing something that I’m doing — all the stuff is intended to be read and enjoyed by people but Incognito and Criminal, as long as I’m doing something that Sean wants to draw and that I’m really into. Bad Night is one of the best things I think I’ve ever written.

Q: I have to say, I thought that last issue was supurb.

A: Thanks. I was trying to do one of those James M. Cain style things. Jason Star did a book called Twisted City that has the best last scene in a crime story that totally changed everything about the main character in his last moment. I didn’t go for that.

It’s interesting. I do read the odd review and I noticed until issue four’s reviews, almost all people online reviewers were thinking that Jake was having conversations with the Frank Kafka character throughout the whole story. If you read it, you can see that’s not actually happening at all. In the first three parts of the story, up until the very last panel of part three, he never acknowledges Frank’s presence at all. As a reader you can think he’s just imagining what his comic book character would say or do because he doesn’t interact with him. It’s almost like it’s a voice inside of his head, which is what you’re supposed to think. And then you realize it is a real voice inside his head.

That was one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on and one of the hardest things to write too. There’s not a single scene in there that isn’t important to the big conclusion. Even the first line of narration about the house burning down across the street comes back around. Everything comes back around. I feel really lucky to have a platform to do stories like that. The minute that sales started feeling stable, that sense of “Oh this is going to go away someday,” went away. I started to feel like we have a fan base that is actually following what we’re doing. I was always worried during the first 10 issues cause sales would fluctuate where it would seem like we were doing really good and then the next issue orders would be down 2,000. I knew we were being underordered. I didn’t think it was a bunch of "trade waiters" cause I kept hearing from people who could find part five of a five part story. I think we stabilized 3,000 higher than we’d been selling on the last four issues of the previous run. I can’t believe the same stores are ordering the exact same number every time. But maybe.

Q: I suppose in these times retailers can’t afford to take chances on extra copies of anything.

A: That’s why I’m really thrilled Incognito did as well as it did. It didn’t do as well as I initially thought when we first announced it and everyone flipped out. But that was a week before the economy started to tank completely. Or at least publicly tank. Bad time to be launching a new book. I keep reminding people not to flip out too much about the whole economy thing because: a) that will just make it worse and b) even during the Great Depression 25 percent of the country was still working. Don’t automatically assume you’re going to be in the other 25 percent.

Q: Right. It’s just in the newspaper industry.

A: (laughs) Right. You guys need to get a bailout together. The problem is those stupid news media conglomerates that seem to think you’re supposed to make a profit on journalism. Journalism is supposed to be a break even thing at best.

Graphic Lit: Black Jack

2009-02-26T17:18:00.002-05:00

How phenomenal is the mysterious, rogue surgeon known as Black Jack?

He can perform arm transplants! Heart transplants! Even brain transplants!

He’s a whiz at cosmetic surgery, capable of turning the most ugly mug in the world into a Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie look-alike.

He can even operate on himself! In the middle of the Australian outback! While fending off wild dingoes!

I’ve written about creator Osamu Tezuka at length before. Suffice it to say he remains one of the most significant cartoonists ever, having almost single-handedly birthed the manga industry since coming to the fore in 1947 (he passed away in 1989).

And “Black Jack” is one of his most famous creations, at least in his home country of Japan.

Now Vertical, a small-press imprint that has made a habit of translating Tezuka’s works for U.S. audiences, is serializing in what will eventually be a 17-volume collection of these medical tales. The first three volumes are in stores now.

Written for young audiences, the series combines high melodrama (the main character has a thing for wearing long, black capes) with an eye for medical detail (Tezuka trained to be a doctor).

As a result, the squeamish might have trouble with the manga as organs, bones and blood are plentiful and drawn as realistically as possible (in sharp contrast to the series’ more cartoony, slapstick style).

Often, “Black Jack” takes a turn toward the bizarre or downright implausible: That story about Black Jack’s sidekick, a baby-faced, lisping cutie named Pinoko.

She looks 5, but she’s actually 18, as she lived for several years in the body of her twin sister as an amniotic sac of organs before Black Jack built her a synthetic body. Oh, and she thinks of herself as Black Jack’s wife.

I cherish that sort of inspired lunacy from Tezuka. But I think ultimately what makes the manga work is its ongoing themes of humanism, sacrifice and the cruelty we constantly inflict on ourselves.

As a surgeon, Black Jack might be superhuman, but ultimately his adventures tell us a lot about our own frailty.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2009

Well, that was fun while it lasted

2009-02-20T09:49:00.008-05:00

Back when the newspaper that employs me had a books page, I'd occasionally run short reviews of comics, more as a space filler than anything else. One of the higher-up editors, however, who was in charge of redesigning the Living sections at the time, was a comics fan and said "You know, we should turn that into a weekly column. It would go great with that new Friday section we're putting together."

Thus Graphic Lit was born. Overall, the weekly column has been extremely good to me. I got to talk to a lot of artists and writers I admired, I got to be exposed to a lot of great books and new talent, and it led to some interesting and exciting gigs, like giving lectures at my local library or blogging regularly over at Blog@Newsarama, er, I mean Robot 6.

But all that is over, for now at least. The last Graphic Lit column ran a few weeks ago and I've been pretty much told there's no real interest in bringing it back. There's a number of factors responsible for it's passing, the biggest one being a simple lack of space. With the ever-shrinking news hole, we don't have the space to run full-length movie reviews, let alone a weekly column extolling the glories of folks like Kazuo Umezu. Add to that a renewed focus on local news and some changes in my job duties and you've got a death knell.

But what about the video games I hear some of you cry? Well, those are pretty much dead in the water as well. Again, the lack of space is mostly to blame, but to be honest, I've been less and less able to get fired up about video games lately. They require a huge time investment that I just don't have right now. More to the point, though, I find it harder and harder to get interested in the constant cookie-cutter sequels and third-rate "party games" that are glutting the market right now. It seems there's little inspiration or creativity going on in the industry, at least from where I'm sitting.

Don't worry, I'm not going to stop blogging. I'll still be contributing regularly over at Robot 6.

As for Panels and Pixels, well I haven't quite figured out what I want to do with this blog yet. I'd like to keep it going -- I have a lot of ideas, some comics-related, some not. Robot 6 eats up a lot of my free time, though, so I don't know if I could commit to keeping track of two blogs on a regular basis.

At any rate, I have a few more GL columns to post here, including an interview with Ed Brubaker that never got to see the light of day. In the meantime, if you feel like it, drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you'd like to see me do with this space. Should I try to keep Graphic Lit going online? Thrust myself into the video game breech again? Write about something else entirely, like movies or macrame? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Scott Adams

2009-01-06T16:08:00.014-05:00

With all the dire news stories about recession, layoffs and other economic woes plaguing the country, it seems fitting somehow to note that this year marks the 20th anniversary of the comic strip “Dilbert,” the ever-funny, ever-savage satire of life in the modern workplace.

Creator Scott Adams celebrated the anniversary recently with “Dilbert 2.0,” a ginormous slipcovered “greatest hits” collection that includes a DVD containing every strip from the past two decades.

I talked to Adams from his studio in California about the new collection and the strip’s legacy. My thanks to Tom Spurgeon and Tim O'Shea for their help in formulating questions.

Q: Tell me about the new 2.0 collection. How did it come about and how did you go about selecting the strips?

A: I got a call in December a year ago and my publisher said “We’d like to fly out and talk to you,” which is an unusual thing. The telephone usually works pretty well for most things. So I knew they were about to ask me something that would be very difficult and there wouldn’t be enough time to do it. That’s usually what that means.

So sure enough, they described their idea for making this big anniversary book and that we would have less time than any book of this size has ever been created basically. But I really wanted to do it and they wanted to do it and I figured it was worth the work so we cleared our calendars and went to work.

Q: And how did you go about picking strips? Were there any criteria regarding what to include?

A: That was a hard process because I had to read every one of my comics several times and there are 8,000 of them at this point. I picked the ones that made me laugh first of all. That was my first filter, because so much time has gone by that I forget my own comics. I get to read them just like a newspaper reader at this point.

Secondly, anything that had a story involved with it. Sometimes I got interesting complaints or answered someone’s interesting complaint with a comic. Or sometimes I did something so naughty I can’t believe it got in a newspaper.

And then anything that was a key turning point in the life of the strip. When a new character was introduced or a major change, I flagged those.

Q: In the early days of the strip was there an “a-ha” moment for you when you felt like everything clicked, both in terms or readership and aesthetic appeal?

A: There were a lot of steps. It wasn’t a smooth increase. There were these points where something important happened. Probably the biggest one was when I started running my email address in the strip. That was about 1993. At the time, not many people had email so it was a big deal to include my email address in the strip, between the panels.

I got all this email from people that said “We like your strip. We don’t love it. But we do love it when Dilbert is doing things at work.” Which was a big deal because up till that point he wasn’t at work very much. He was a guy that had a job but didn’t spend much time at it. He was usually at home inventing something in his basement.

The email was almost universally consistent on that point. So I just changed the strip and put him in the workplace. That’s pretty much when it took off.

There were some other moments, like when Bill Watterson retired it opened up a lot of things. When I published the Dilbert Principle and that was a number-one best seller. That was another big push.

Q: You talk in the beginning of the book about how interested you were in cartooning as a child. What was it specifically about cartooning that appealed to you?

A: You know just about half of every 12-year-old boys want to become cartoonists. It’s just some phase you go through. Apparently there’s some aspect of the maturation process that did not hit me, cause it never really went away. I could rationalize it and tell you it seemed like a good job because I could work for myself and be created and I liked comics, I could tell you all that stuff, but that would be true for every 12-year-old kid. What’s different is it never went away.

Q: But was it something specific about making cartoons or comic strips that took with you as opposed to writing books or making music or whatever?

A: I think it was a function of where I thought my talents were. I knew I wasn’t going to do fine portrait painting because I didn’t have that kind of artistic chops. I have a — usually, not today so much — economical way with words that kind of suits the comic format.

Q: You include a lot of your early work in the book. What was it like to revisit that early material?

A: Looking at my early drawings, the first thing I wondered was why doesn’t everyone become a famous cartoonist? (laughs) Cause obviously there wasn’t much prodigy in attendance.

I really think it was my MBA that made me successful as a cartoonist, which is not a joke. Most artists have the artists have the attitude of “I’m going to do what I think is right and the audience will follow.” But if you have a business degree you say what does the market want and how can I give it to them. It’s probably not a huge surprise that Dilbert is arguably one of the last mega strips to come out in the past 20 years.

Q: You have a lot of notes in the new book. What do you think is one of the big revelations here that readers might not have known about you before?

A: Oh man. My life is such an open book I don’t know if there’s anything.

Q: That’s kind of why I asked the question, because you have been very open about the strip and how it came to be.

A: Well a lot of that was intentional in that I always thought that what made a comic strip more interesting is if you knew a little bit about the person who wrote it. Because if you read it every day it’s almost like you’re forming a relationship with the cartoonist.

As a reader, that’s how I always felt. I felt like I could tell when Schulz was in a bad mood. Or feeling a little blue. It just seemed to be reflected in his strip. And so I took that to the next level and said the more people know about me the more they can enjoy the whole product. So I think the thing that would maybe surprise people the most is that I never considered myself a cartoonist so much as an entrepreneur.

Q: Along the same lines, it occurred to me that you prefigured a lot of the Webcomics that are popular today in that you’re one of the first cartoonists that have had a really direct relationship with their audience. What are the pros and cons of that sort of relationship?

A: Well, I think this ties back to my comment about being more of a businessperson than a cartoonist in the sense that a huge amount of the input I get is negative and always has been. I think from the first time I got email in 1993, every once in a while I get the letter that says “I used to be a fan but you’ve really gone downhill. You’ve lost it. I wish you could get back to whatever you were doing that worked before.”

Every year I get a number of those. And they’re tough to read. If you have an artist’s mentality, that would crush you and you’d just stop doing it. But you would also miss out on all the useful stuff like the people who wrote and told you that Catbert was their favorite character after he had only appeared twice in the comic. I had no intention of keeping him.

Q: Along the same lines though I imagine there must be times where you have to trust your own instincts. How do you know when reader input is worth listening to versus someone just ranting?

A: Well the great thing is you can do both. I can just try something and see what the reaction is. The reaction doesn’t lie. They have no reason to be nice to me obviously. When I do something that doesn’t work, no matter how much I thought it would work, if the reaction is negative I just get off of it.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: I’ll give you the most direct example. I tried to start a second comic strip, something called “Plop.” It was about a little boy who’s the only hairless Elbonian. It was based on the thought that once I figured out how to be a cartoonist and learned all the tricks that starting a new comic that wasn’t bound by the workplace would be a big hit because obviously I knew how to be a cartoonist, I already had the audience. I had all the assets to make that work.

But I just got eviscerated by readers who saw it. It never got published in newspapers; I tried it out on the Internet first. The trap that was completely invisible to me is that people didn’t compare it to a new comic strip. As if it had been somebody else who had made it. They compared it to where Dilbert was after 10 years of development.

If for example you looked at the first year of the Simpsons TV show and compared it to any comic strip or show you see now, it would look awful. You’d have never predicted it would become on of the biggest hits of all time. And the thing is that when it came out it was compared to nothing, because there wasn’t anything like it. Then they had the luxury of hiring talent and making money and becoming arguable as some people have said the best show ever on television.

Dilbert had already gone through 10 years and people can’t help comparing it to me. So my new stuff didn’t really have a chance. That was a interesting experiment in human behavior.

Q: You talk a lot in the book about people’s overreactions to some strips, the letter from the Square Dance Association being my favorite. Is there a particularly memorable negative reaction that stands out for you?

A: In terms of surprising, I’d say the people who complained about my references to cannibals. I thought cannibals were on TV, the movies, jokes; cannibals are everywhere. It’s just a funny concept. And when I did jokes about cannibals people would write angry letters to their editors, objecting to my cannibal references. That by the way, is an example of something that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know if society changed or Dilbert just became more popular, but I get a little bit of a free pass now.

Q: You don’t get those kind of complaints?

A: I’ve written about cannibals since then just to see what would happen and I got no complaints.

Q: That’s another thing you talk about in the book, how you’ve managed to make the humor a little edgier as it’s gone along. It’s interesting to note how certain words have become acceptable on the newspaper page. Do you think that’s just you, or do you think the comics page is becoming a bit more accepting of the kind of PG-rated humor?

A: Well, I think the more successful you are the more you can get away with, so there’s a little bit of that. There’s also the recognition that Dilbert is not your kids cartoon. That gives me a little extra. It’s often on the comics page just as often on the business page. So I think that gives me a little bit of flexibility. But it’s all in the psychology of the editors. I can’t really get in their heads that much.

Q: Do you think you’ve become a better artist as the strip’s gone along?

A: Yeah, I would say so. If you practice this much at anything, you’ll be better. My lines are smoother and the characters look the way I like them instead of whatever they were when I ran out of time.

When I drew on paper, which I don’t do anymore so it’s easier to correct and get it right this time, I used to have a day job for the first six years. So wherever I could do it — an hour an a half — was what it was. Sometimes it was acceptable and sometimes it wasn’t but I didn’t go back. I just didn’t have that luxury.

Q: Do you think cartoonists these days quit their day jobs too soon? Was there a benefit to keeping your day job as long as you did?

A: Well, in the sense that I had more business experience and it’s a business cartoon, but otherwise no I don't think so.

Q: How has corporate culture changed in the years you’ve been doing the strip and how do you keep abreast of those changes?

A: I still get lots of email from people and I am my own business to a large extent. The Dilbert Empire, if I can call it that, is a business with meetings and conference calls and contracts and lawyers and all that stuff. I’m kind of always in it. And I own a couple of restaurants, which give me the human dynamics that you can never imagine without observing them. There’s a little of that.

Then there’s the memories that never really change. I liken it to if you were going to prison for five years and then ten years later somebody says “Oh, you’ve pretty much forgotten what that was like, right?” You’d say, “No, I pretty much remember that.” And then there’s the fact that things don’t change that much. The technology changes. There are things like IMing someone at work versus conference calling them from the next cubicle, so that stuff changes, the ability to outsource is greater than before, but that stuff is in the headlines. It’s not too tough to know where that’s going.

Q: Is it harder to make jokes about the corporate environment when people are losing their jobs? Do you worry about cutting too close to the bone?

A: Oddly enough that’s when Dilbert had it’s biggest surge, during the downsizing of the mid-90s. The more miserable people were the more they wanted somebody to represent their misery, represent their point of view and displeasure of the whole thing. My popularity tends to track with the misery index. The worst time for Dilbert, in terms of licensing and everything else, was during the dot-com era when everyone felt that if they weren’t already a millionaire it must be their own fault.

Q: I had mentioned to someone that I was going to be interviewing you and they said Dilbert was almost too painful for them to read at times. Have you ever gotten a complaint like that?

A: I hear that a lot. It varies from joke to joke. I can see that. There are TV shows about restaurant owners like Hell’s Kitchen. I can’t watch those cause that’s too much like work.

Q: How do you settle on the design of a character, something like the pointy-haired boss? At what point do you look at it and say “That’s the character”?

A: A lot of it is just accident. As I talk about in the book, his hairstyle which has become the defining characteristic for the boss, just defined itself over time. One day my pen slipped I just drew one of his tufts of hair a little too tall once. I made the other one equal and it just drifted into that pointy-haired direction over time until he started to look right. So I have a quote which I said a long time ago, it’s probably the thing that gets quoted the most, that creativity is making mistakes and art is knowing which ones to keep. So the creativity in the character design is mostly mistakes and the art is knowing that Dilbert looks better without a mouth. It’s a mistake by any definition, it just looks better that way.

Q: Is that something you realized as you went along or were you conscious of it right away?

A: He was originally a doodle, and when he was a doodle he had a mouth. There was probably jut some day — I don’t remember it happening — but I’m sure what happened is I drew him without a mouth, looked at it and said “Huh. Looks a little better.”

Q: Like you said, you are one of the last mega-strips. What’s your take on the current state of comics strips? Is it as dire as people are saying the newspaper industry in general is?

A: Well, yeah, things are pretty dire. I think the thing that hurts comic strips the most, I that unlike television and unlike movies that are able to be essentially uncensored so they can drift to accommodate popular tastes which got more edgy, they weren’t allowed to get edgy, and couldn’t grow with the preferences of the public.

Q: That’s a complaint I’ve heard from a couple of comic strip artists, people like Stephen Pastis. The other complaint I hear a lot is about legacy strips. That there’s no room for new people to come in the door, because readers still want Snuffy Smith even though it’s 80 years old.

A: OK, now you’re channeling Pastis.

Q: Actually a couple of people have told me that, not just him.

A: There’s definitely that. Especially if the strip has been handed off to another artist or the kids or something. You’ve gotta assume that it would be unlikely that a second person would have whatever spark that made the first person so special that they got in the newspaper in the first place.

Q: Do you follow the Webcomics scene at all? And if so, do you feel any sort of affinity towards those comics?

A: No, I don’t follow them but I look at the social Web sites a lot like Digg and Reddit, and so quite often they point to them, and when that happens I look at it.

But I do follow Basic Instruction. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one.

Q: No, I don’t think I’ve seen that one.

A: I did a little experiment on my blog. We tried to get him to become a syndicated cartoonist. We had him switch to a comic strip format and character-driven stuff. That turned out to not be successful but it was a good little boost to his popularity. What he does is just fricking hilarious.

Actually if you want an example, he is the perfect example of what’s wrong with comic strips in the newspaper. Here’s a guy who writes a comic that is completely g-rated, because it’s in a square four-box format and doesn’t draw like other people he has almost no chance of being a popular syndicated cartoonist and yet if you showed it to 20 people, 10 of them would say that’s funnier than anything that’s in the newspaper today. The quality of his art is not a predictor of his ability to succeed in newspapers. I don’t know if that’s true in other media.

Q: I think in comics, timing and being able to tell a joke is much more important than necessarily artistic ability. I think the craft in comics comes from layout and timing.

A: That’s why Basic Instruction is so interesting, because his writing is what is sensational.

Q: How long have you been drawing Dilbert on the computer now?

A: I think it’s been about three years.

Q: Other than the obvious — you’ve had this debilitating health problem — how has drawing the strip on the computer helped you? What are the benefits?

A: A lot of benefits. Anything that involves a straight line I can draw a lot better now. I can finish things in half the time which means if I want to do something that’s a little more complex, it buys me the time to do it. And I enjoy it. It’s just easier. It’s a more pleasant experience.

Q: How so? Can you give me a little more detail?

A: Well pen and paper is kind of tedious. It’s small and tiny and you’re hunched over. Even if you have a drawing board. It feels like work. Since we’ve been talking I’ve finished half a cartoon. (laughs) I did the writing already, I was just finishing up the art work. I can talk with one hand and draw with the other. If I draw a bad line I literally push one button and redraw it. Drawing a bad line with pen and paper used to be a huge pain in the ass. What you do is look at it and say “Eh, maybe it’s not really that bad.”
Q: One of the things I enjoyed in your notes in the book is when you talk about the rules of making a strip. What for you is the most important, number one rule in making a funny comic strip?

A: Well, for Dilbert in particular the number one rule is if there is something you can relate to in it. So I don’t have Dilbert going to the moon and a giant salamander eats his head.

Q: I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

A: I know. That’s the kind of comic I did in the first few years that people objected to. It’s the type of thing that other cartoonists like to read, but the public in general is interested in one and only one thing — themselves. Everybody wants to see something about them.

Even now I’m doing a series where Dilbert will eventually lose his job. You’ll see that in a month or so. But I worry because I don’t take that series too far because all the people who did not lose their job aren’t going to be able to relate to it. So you hope that there are enough people that have been laid off — and I think that’s true at this point — everyone knows somebody close to them that’s going through the same set of emotions so that even if they say “that’s not me” they say “oh my god, that’s Bob. I’m going to send this to Bob.”

So I usually go for something recognizable and then something cruel, something bad is happening to somebody. I make one of the characters a talking cat or something like that so that bizarre is in the mix too.
Q: You were talking before about business culture. Is there anything you can make fun of now that you couldn’t say 10 years ago?

A: There’s the ability to track what your employees are doing, which is interesting because they have company cell phones with GPS. You can track their keystrokes in some cases. you can track their IDs so you know where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing. That’s a little different.

I think maybe just ability to work from everywhere is different. Everything that’s different I would say is technology related. The basic human interactions where you put three people in a room and one of them is an asshole every time, that just never changes. It will always be true that all three people have a different opinion of which one’s the asshole.

Q: You talked about listening to your audience and mentioned getting a lot of negative complaints. Do you worry about jumping the shark, losing a connection with your audience?

A: You’re not in this business unless you worry about that every time you pick up the pencil or whatever this is I’ve got in my hand. You should have a certain amount of panic every time you draw a comic. Without that, I think the whole things falls apart. The reality of whether I need to worry about that is separate from the fact that it’s built into the process. It ought to be.

Q: It’s healthy in other words.

A: Yeah. A healthy fear.

Q: You talk in the book about writing affirmations really helped you focus and get Dilbert published. I was wondering if that’s something you still do.

A: Well you hear me talking, right? I don’t know if you know this story, but I couldn’t talk for three and a half years.

Q: I didn’t know whether to bring it up or not.

A: It’s not a sensitive issue.

So I lost my voice through this thing called spasmodic dysphonia. It was considered incurable, just like my hand problem was. But I was actually the first person — I don’t know if I wrote about this or not — but I was the first person who ever essentially — I won’t call it a cure — but found a way around my hand problem. Through just constant repetition of small motions that weren’t quite the motion that caused me trouble. After a period of years it remapped itself.

At the moment my hand is also fixed because I haven’t used it in a classic drawing or writing way unless I write a check or write a sticky note to myself. But for all of those normal uses — as long as I don’t have to write a college essay — it’s never going to be a problem again.

So I have experience with two incurable problems that I personally have cured. And for both of them I used affirmations. What are the odds? I’m not the only person who had the surgery to fix his voice, but there are probably millions of people who have spasmodic dysphonia, and don’t even know the doctor exists. I kind of came at it through several indirect connections that got me to where I needed to be. Although I probably sound a little nasally or hoarse right now on the phone the thing you don’t know is that is my normal voice. You’re probably wondering.

Q: I thought it might be the phone connection.

A: The spasmodic dysphonia sounds like a bad cell phone connection, so if I were to say “My name is Scott Adams,” which incidentally I could not say, it would sound like “My ame Cott Ada.” That’s all you would hear on the phone. I basically couldn’t use the telephone to order a pizza or spell my name or anything like that.

It’s a good thing my job involves comics. That’s also a reason why I started blogging. It was a way to communicate. And when you don’t have a way you’re used to, you kind of need an outlet.
Q: With the affirmations, do you think it just gives you an ability to focus better? Articulate your goals better?

A: Well, it’s probably several things. I wrote about this in my book God’s Debris, that was my first non-Dilbert book.

I think it’s a number of things. One possibility I’ll call the Boltzmann Brain theory. Do you know the theory?

Q: No, I don’t.

A: If you Google it you’ll find out there are serious physicists who have calculated the odds of the universe just kind of existing in the state that’s perfect for life and the odds that this is all imagined by one brain, because it’s easier for the universe to create simple things such as one brain than an entire universe filled with six billion brains on this planet and other life forms on other planets and all that. There are serious people who say that this reality is not in any way what we think it is. It’s an imagined reality. And if it’s an imagined reality, theoretically you could program it and perhaps affirmations is a mechanism to doing that. Changing what you imagine in other words.

That’s one theory. I don’t accept that theory (laughter), but I’m just putting it out there. It’s one that serious scientists, people who are not even nuts, say is infinitely more probable than whatever you think is real.

The other possibilities are it’s what you said, it’s if you focus more on your goal — and there’s something called reticular activation, which is a fancy name for saying you recognize your own name across a crowded room more than other noises. You just notice stuff that you’re kind of tuned into.

So I tuned myself into all things voice-related and the way I diagnosed my problem with my voice is I woke up one day and thought “I wonder if this has anything to do with my hand problem.” I googled Dystonia, which is the problem with the hand, and voice and up popped a video of someone with spasmodic dysphonia who sounded exactly like I did. That led me down the path that ultimately led me to the solution. It took three and a half years because I tried everything but surgery first, which is rational. But I think back about that moment when I realized which two words to Google, that’s exactly the type of thing that happens when you’re doing affirmations.

Now I can’t say it’s because of affirmations but it’s exactly the type of thing. You notice things or you think of things that you wouldn’t have noticed or thought of without that. So it seems like an insight, but it probably is just a very normal process of focus. The other possibility is affirmations don’t work at all and it’s selective memory. And that I may have done affirmations on lots of things that didn’t work but I don’t remember them. I don’t think that’s the case, you know if you write something down every day for a long period of time it’s hard to forget it. I think it’s worked just about every time.

The other possibility is and this one I kind of lean towards, that on some subconscious level you’re a better judge of yourself than you are on a conscious level. And your subconscious if it even allows you that much time writing something down as a goal, it probably has a good sense that you can really pull it off.

So, for example, if I started writing “I want to become an Olympic gymnast” I’m positive that after the second day my subconscious would find something better for me to do because it knows that one isn’t going to work. When I wrote down “I’ll become a syndicated cartoonist” or “I’ll have a number one bestselling book,” even though those seem unlikely to any rational observer including myself, on some subconscious level I knew I had the ability to make that happen. That’s kind of my best guess.

The way it works is almost irrelevant isn’t it?

Q: Has Dogbert been in the strip lately? I don’t think I’ve seen him in it as often as usual.

A: As a matter of fact I noticed that myself recently. I’m trying to put him back in a little more.

Q: So it wasn’t anything conscious on your part?

A: Yeah, these things happen kind of accidentally. Ashok the intern hasn’t been in lately either. There’s no reason.

Q: I was reading a story recently about the Belgian cartoonist Herge who did a all-ages series called Tintin. They found a bunch of his letters where he rails about how trapped he feels by his character because he’d been doing this character all his adult life. Alongside this question about losing your audience, do you worry about being trapped by Dilbert?

A: Well let me answer the bigger question by saying that cartoonists are the biggest whiners. “Oh boo hoo, I’m a famous cartoonist. I make millions of dollars by sitting in a chair.” (laughter) Well, fuck you. If that’s what you’re complaining about, that you’re trapped by your character that made you famous and let you live in the big house, try a real job.

Q: At the same time I always read stories about people who feel trapped by their characters and start to resent them. It seems odd, but at the same time it’s there.

A: Well, I’m not going to deny that I have those feelings, but I am going to deny complaining about it.

Graphic Lit: Best comics of 2008

2008-12-31T14:32:00.002-05:00

Readers were rewarded with a wealth of stellar comics this year. There were so many good books, in fact, that attempting to group them in some sort of hierarchy could be a bit of a mug’s game.

Not that it’s going to stop me. As before, I thought I’d trot out what I hope will be my annual awards list, tentatively called “The Moxies.” (What? It was my nickname in college.)

Here then, organized into completely arbitrary categories in order for me to include as much good work as possible, are my picks for the best comics of 2008.

Best Original Graphic Novel: “What It Is” by Lynda Barry. This revealing and fearlessly original work deserves as much attention and accolades as it can get.

Runners-up: “Tamara Drewe” by Posey Simmonds, “The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard,” by Eddie Campbell, “Three Shadows” by Cyril Pedrosa, “Bottomless Belly Button” by Dash Shaw.

Best Debut: “Skyscrapers of the Midwest” by Josh Cotter. New cartoonists shouldn’t be able to create works so assured and emotionally devastating right out of the gate.

Runner-up: “Swallow Me Whole” by Nate Powell.

Best Collection of Previously Published Material: “Willie & Joe” by Bill Mauldin. Fantagraphics’ massive collection of Mauldin’s WWII work gives new generations the chance to experience it.

Runners-up: “The Explainers” by Jules Feiffer, “Breakdowns” by Art Spiegelman, “Where Demented Wented: The Art and Comics of Rory Hayes,” “Jamilti and Other Stories” by Rutu Modan.

Best memoir: “Little Nothings: the Curse of the Umbrella” by Lewis Trondheim. Master Trondheim once again shows how it’s done, this time providing a bit of navel-gazing that never becomes solipsistic.

Runners-up: “Paul Goes Fishing” by Michel Rabagliati, “Haunted” by Philippe Dupuy.

Best European Book: “Alan’s War” by Emmanuel Guibert. Guibert uses his friend’s ruminations to provide a unique look at WWII.

Runners-up: “The Rabbi’s Cat Vol. 2” by Joann Sfar, “Aya of Yop City” by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.

Best Manga: “Disappearance Diary” by Hideo Azuma. A chronicle of homelessness and alcoholism that refuses to be gloomy, “Diary” is perhaps the cutest story about despair you’ll ever read.

Runners-up: “Dororo” by Osamu Tezuka, “Cat-Eyed Boy” by Kazuo Umezu, “Red-Colored Elegy” by Seiichi Hayashi, “Good-Bye” by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

Best General Nonfiction Book: “Burma Chronicles” by Guy Delisle. Delisle chronicles his time spent in a far-off, oppressive country with enormous good humor and insight.

Best New Series: “Love and Rockets New Stories” by Jamie, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez. OK, it’s not a pamphlet and it’s not like the Hernandez brothers are new to the scene. I don’t care. I loved this comic.

Runners-up: “RASL” by Jeff Smith, “Glamourpuss” by Dave Sim.

Best Superhero Comic: “Omega the Unknown” by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple. Lethem and Dalrymple offer a decidedly off-kilter take on the traditional superhero tale.

Runners-up: “The Boys” by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.

Best Kids Comic: “Optical Allusions” by Jay Hosler. Hosler drops science with visual aplomb and shows a knack for engaging small minds on tough subjects.

Runners-up: “Kaput & Zosky” by Lewis Trondheim, “Little Vampire” by Joann Sfar.

Best Comic Strip: “Cul de Sac” by Richard Thompson. I don’t care what y’all say. This is one of the funniest strips to come down the pike in years.

Runner-up: “Lio” by Mark Tatulli.

Best Book About Comics: “Most Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester the Molester” by Bob Levin. I didn’t get around to reviewing this in my column, but I’m recommending it now anyway. It’s a harrowing look at family, art and the legal system via the life of Tinsley, a Hustler cartoonist who found his envelope-pushing work used against him when he was accused of abusing his daughter.

Runners-up: “The Ten-Cent Plague” by David Hajdu, “Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front” by Todd DePastino, “Gary Panter,” edited by Dan Nadel.

Best Comic I Didn’t Get Around to Reviewing in this Column: “Travel” by Yuichi Yokoyama. Obsessed with motion to the point of abstraction, Yokoyama’s comics are unlike anything produced either in Japan or here in the U.S.

Runners-up: “Ganges #2” by Kevin Huizenga, “The Education of Hopey Glass” by Jamie Hernandez.

Graphic Lit: Graphic novel mish-mosh

2008-12-22T15:48:00.003-05:00

The end of the year draws ever closer and yet there are tons of notable books I haven’t mentioned.

Let’s try to rectify that somewhat with this quick review:

“Bourbon Island 1730” by Lewis Trondheim and Appollo, 288 pages, $17.95.

The idea of Trondheim doing a pirate story sets up expectations of high farce in the manner of his “Dungeon” series.

The big twist then, is that he and collaborator Appollo play it completely straight, telling a realistic, melancholy tale of colonialism, slavery and the end of piracy that proves to be quite moving and thoughtful despite the fact that the characters are rendered as funny animals.

“Gus & His Gang” by Chris Blain, 176 pages, $17.95.

The unbelievably talented Blain offers a subversive take on the American Western. The catch here is that Gus and his band of expert bank robbers are more concerned (nay, obsessed) with hooking up with beautiful women than making money and keeping one step away from the cops.

Blain portrays the men as hapless romantics, eager to pitch woo but utterly flummoxed as to how to go about doing so. Their cluelessness toward the opposite sex is hilarious and endearing, especially in the case of Clem, a family man who finds himself besotted by an adventurous cowgirl. “Gus” is the rare funny book that resonates as well as entertains.

“Chiggers” by Hope Larson, Antheneum Books, 176 pages, $9.99.

Returning to summer camp, Abby finds herself adrift from her usual clique and ends up making friends with Shasta, the new, weird girl everyone hates.

It’s a slight tale, and I had trouble at times telling the supporting characters apart. Still, Larson shows a real inventiveness (I particularly like the way she handles sound effects) and she takes enough care in shaping her main characters for the book to win over its target audience.

Buy it for the young tween girl in your life.

“Freddie & Me” by Mike Dawson, Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $19.99.

Dawson humorously recounts his lifelong obsession with Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury in this memoir. Dawson is a good raconteur and caricaturist, but he never examines why Mercury and his music meant so much to him and as a result the book feels more than a bit superficial.

“A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child” by Rick Geary, NBM, 80 pages, $15.95.

Having chronicled various gruesome true tales of 19th-century homicide, Geary moves up a century to chronicle a news story that held all of America in its grip in 1932 — the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby son.

True to form, Geary avoids sensationalism to lay out the details of the crime and subsequent trial in thorough, objective fashion. It’s an engaging, fascinating recounting of a sad tale that underscores what a remarkable talent Geary is.
Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: Alan's War

2008-12-16T13:06:00.003-05:00

Those who sit down with “Alan’s War” expecting a conventional World War II memoir might come away disappointed.

Cope didn’t take part in any big, famous battles. He didn’t join the Army until late in the war and spent a good bit of his initial time in training. He got into few firefights and witnessed only one scene of brutal violence (which was a stupid accident).

Despite — or perhaps because of — Cope’s memoir, “Alan’s War,” transcribed and illustrated by French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, is one of the most fascinating accounts of life during wartime I’ve read in awhile.

Guibert (“Sardine in Outer Space,” “The Professor’s Daughter”) met the then-elderly Cope in 1994 and struck up a close friendship that resulted in this book.

Cope is a natural storyteller, relating in relaxed, easygoing detail the people and places he happened upon during the war and afterward, when he resettled in Europe. He exhibits a curiosity that is constantly rewarded by serendipity.

Guibert keeps his backgrounds as sparse as possible in the book, often putting his figures against all-white backgrounds with only the occasional building lining the background. When he does provide detail, the lush black and white watercolors provide a breathtaking contrast.

At times, what Cope doesn’t discuss is just as interesting as what he does. He details his formative friendships in the Army and Europe, but rarely talks about his family.

His wife and children in particular seem pushed aside. Perhaps their presence would have muddied the book’s focus, but their absence nevertheless seems a trifle odd.

What we’re left with in “Alan’s War” is the story of a man for whom war provided the opportunity to expand his horizons and visit the world beyond his backyard, in turn giving him the ability to make decisions in ways that would have never occurred to him had he stayed home.

Perhaps that’s not exactly “The Longest Day,” but it’s a compelling tale nonetheless.Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

From the vault: Tiny Tyrant

2008-12-14T22:23:00.003-05:00

Note: This review originally ran in issue #286 of the Comics Journal.

Tiny Tyrant
By Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme
First Second $12.95

Tiny Tyrant must have taken a lot of hard work to produce.

I say that because it seems so completely effortless. Its wit, both visual and verbal, is so razor-sharp and utterly charming, the net result seeming so delightfully tossed off, that I can only assume a lot of toil and tears when into its making.

The book follows the adventures of King Ethelbert, the six-year-old ruler of the imaginary kingdom of Portocristo, a title that, as you may guess, gives him license to behave like a spoiled brat.

Already I hear the gears turning in your head, no doubt imagining a variety of humorous scenarios spun off from such a story pitch. I’m willing to bet, however, you’re not imagining that in a fit of pique he might ship off all of the nation’s children out of the country and replace them with robot duplicates of himself. Or that, fed up with his small size, he would shrink the entire kingdom down to minute size.

But that’s what’s so great about the book: it combines the premise’s dark wish fulfillment of getting your way regardless of behavior or consequences (and what adult, never mind child, hasn’t at some point dreamed of such an opportunity?) with high slapstick and a large helping of absurdity. Most of the fun is seeing how Ethelbert’s reckless behavior leads to bizarre, but within the Portocristo universe entirely logical, consequences.

As you’d expect from the author of Mister O, Trondheim is in his element here, though he rightly tones the level of violence and scatological humor to better suit his intended audience. Parme’s art, meanwhile, compliments the text perfectly. It’s slick and assured, yet rubbery and playful enough to go absolutely loopy when called for, like when giant rats attack the city (don’t ask).

In the end, the best sort of recommendation I can give for Tiny Tyrant is this: I wish this book had been around when I was a kid.

From the vault: "God of War"

2008-12-12T12:49:00.004-05:00

Enough with the old TCJ reviews. Here's a video game review I did for the Patriot-News back in 2005, before I started this blog.

When the "Prince of Persia: Warrior Within" came out a few months ago, I decried the developers' decision to fill the artful, stylish franchise with over-the-top blood and gore, Goth trappings and needless sexism.

Now comes Sony's new action title "God of War," from the folks who brought "Twisted Metal Black" and "War of the Monsters." If anything, it's got more gore and Goth -- not to mention outright nudity -- than "Warrior Within."

It goes without saying, of course, that I absolutely love this game.

How is such a thing possible? How can I decry one game for its crass trappings and praise another that has virtually similar qualities? Should I just turn in my official game critics card and be done with it?

Well, to quote the old horse, it's not what you do that counts, it's how you do it. And the fact is, "God of War" is such a flawless, epic exercise that one can forgive its excesses.

In "Warrior Within," the violence and scantily-clad ladies seemed like a marketing afterthought designed to draw in puerile gamers, but "God Of War's" level of violence and other "adult" content all serve to aid the game's dark, brooding tone.

Set in ancient Greece, "War" centers on Kratos, a pasty-white warrior who rather unwisely makes one of those"be-careful-what-you-wish-for" deals with the war god Ares. Justifiably burned, Kratos sets off for revenge, helped along the way by Zeus and the rest of the Greek pantheon, who have apparently had their fill of Ares' behavior and aren't above using Kratos as
their pawn.

Most of Kratos' back story is revealed in bits and pieces as you play, but what you learn doesn't necessarily add much to your initial opinion of him. Even from the start, Kratos seems a bit, well, psychotic, and perhaps one of the only serious flaws in the game is that it's hard to feel anything for him as a character.

The game doesn't slavishly adhere to the classic Greek myths so much as take what it sees fit and adapt it to its own means. For example, I didn't know there was a desert right outside Athens, did you? Pandora's box, Minotaurs, Cyclopses and Medusa all show up here, but in a considerably altered fashion. This is Greek mythology filtered through a Nine Inch Nails video.

And yet, it works. The developers did a terrific job of creating a striking, beautifully designed world that seems immense without ever getting lost or being unable to figure out what to do next. It's also probably one of the best-looking games you'll ever see on a PlayStation 2.

But graphics are nothing next to solid gameplay, and it's here that "God of War" really shines. Kratos' main method of attack is a pair of swords on long chains which are in turn seared to his flesh. Kratos can whip these things around like a string of paper clips, and it's a real visual treat to see him fling them around into a horde of undead soldiers. The various attack combos available might be a bit simplified for hard-core action fans, but I found them easy to learn and utilize and the ability to upgrade ensured that I would never grow bored with the system.

In addition, Kratos gains magical abilities such as flinging thunderbolts or turning enemies into stone. And once you've got an enemy close to defeat, you can enact a minigame of sorts that allows you to perform a gruesome finish through some timely button pressing. Each type of enemy has a different minigame and utilizing them adds a needed level of variety.

Like a lot of current action games, "God of War" also has puzzle solving. Unlike a lot of current action games, these segments never seem tacked on or too complicated or confusing to solve.

And perhaps that's the real magic behind "God of War." Most games might focus on one element, say combat, to the detriment of others, but "War" never sacrifices one component of the game for another. Each piece feels like a part of the whole, so that what you are left with is a fluid, enthralling world with no sore thumbs sticking out.

"God of War" isn't perfect. There aren't very many boss battles to speak of and not much variety in terms of different types of enemies (which tend to come upon you in maddening wave after wave). It isn't particularly innovative and doesn't advance the art of videogames. And no doubt there will be those who will be turned off by the huge amount of blood and occasional bare breast.

What "God of War" does is polish the genre to such a sheen that it sets a benchmark in terms of the action genre. To pass it up solely because of its adult content is to deny yourself a massively good time.

Graphic Lit: Tamara Drewe

2008-12-10T15:58:00.003-05:00

For decades, cartoonist Rosemary “Posy” Simmonds has been regaling U.K. readers with her sharp, sly satires of middle to upper-middle class British life.

Little of her work has reached American audiences, the sole exception being 2005’s stellar “Gemma Bovary,” a modern reworking of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”

Her latest graphic novel, “Tamara Drewe,” finds Simmonds drawing upon classic literature once again; this time with Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd.”

You don’t need to be familiar with Hardy’s novel to appreciate Simmonds’ update, nor do you need to be familiar with British life in general. Despite the occasional slang and Euro-reference, Simmonds’ characters are fully dimensional and completely recognizable.

The book is set in a bucolic countryside writer’s retreat, headed by the famous author Nicholas Hardiman. This seemingly idyllic milieu is turned upside-down, however, by the return of former local girl Tamara Drewe.

Newly confident with a nose job and newspaper gossip column, Drewe goes about unintentionally wreaking havoc, having affairs with displaced rock stars, Hardiman and others, while the caretaker she knew from her pre-surgery days quietly pines for her.

This being based on a Hardy book, it isn’t too long before tragedy strikes not once but twice, though some folks do manage to find a degree of happiness by the end.

The story is told from a variety of perspectives, both in diary and journal excerpts as well as dialogue and panels.

Just about every major and supporting character gets their say, from Hardiman’s long-suffering wife, to an insufferable American novelist forever working on his next book to a pair of bored teen girls, one of whom has an unhealthy fixation on the rock star Tamara is dating.

Simmonds gets several sharp digs in comparing the lives of the well-to-do writers and city folk who come to the country looking to “get away from it all” and the poorer country folk who “have to live here.”

Issues of class and snobbery linger tantalizingly in the background, as does the public’s unhealthy fixation with celebrity tabloid scandals.

Simmonds’ art is delightful throughout.

She has a real gift for body language and her use of watercolors (light blue for flashbacks or to denote a chilly winter scene) give the book an added emotional heft.

And though “Drewe” is loaded with text and dialogue it never feels overly busy or overburdened.

“Tamara Drewe” might sound a bit too dry and literary for some. But if anything it’s astoundingly down-to-earth, focusing on the concerns of real people and their messy lives.

Incisive, funny and touching, it’s one of the best graphic novels you’ll read this year.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

From the vault: Villa of the Mysteries

2008-12-07T20:36:00.008-05:00

This review originally appeared in issue #185 of The Comics Journal, which was a looong time ago.

The Villa of the Mysteries #1
by Mack White
Fantagraphics Books

“The Villa of the Mysteries,” a new collection of comics by Texas artist Mack White, takes its name after a famous frieze in Pompeii, the largest surviving Roman wall painting in existence. The ancient work’s real fame, however, rests on its disturbing depiction of a Dionysian ritual.

In one section of the frieze, which White reproduces on the cover of his comic, a female with large dark wings is shown whipping a young initiate, possibly, some speculate, to prepare her for the marriage bed. Whatever is going on in that scene, however, it is a pretty safe bet that White has managed to get his finger on the same pulse.

“Villa of the Mysteries” is obsessed with pagan rituals, especially those involving Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, and general all-out sexual abandonment. He and his cousin Pan, the god of nature, pop up either symbolically or literally in each of these short stories.

In between those ancient references, he throws in a dollops of Christian symbolism as well, as a reminder that the line between Jesus Christ and Bacchus is a thin one. In an introduction that would make a modern mythology major proud, he writes, "Jesus is another of his [Dionysus] incarnations . . . Yet in the translation something was lost. The sexual, animal aspect of the god, deemed incompatible with Jesus' image, was projected onto Satan, and what was natural now became evil." Part of the purpose of White's book then, is to tip the scales in favor of the pagans.

White rolls up his sleeves and dives in with the first story, the unsubtly titled "This is MK-Ultra, Baby." In the comic, big name rock star Dion Nysos (get it?) has arrived to the uptight Texan town where he was raised and abused as a child by his hypocritical aunt. While there, he spikes the punch at a party with an CIA developed aphrodisiac, causing a (dare I say it?) Dionysian frenzy.

Yet things don't turn out quite as planned. It seems there are a number of covert government intelligence groups out to get Dion as well, and the tables end up being unexpectedly turned on him.

As "MK-Ultra's" title suggests, White is not content with simply drawing pagan rituals and orgies. He also seems to have a genuine fondness for pulp literature and conspiracy theories involving UFOs, the U.S. government, and the Vatican. There's enough subversiveness in this one story to delight the most fervent paranoid. In fact, virtually every story in "Villa” has the feeling of coming fresh from of the headlines of the Weekly World News.

“The Nudist Nuns of Goat Island” is a perfect example. The very title brings to mind shows like hard Copy or pulps like Spicy Tales. In this narrative, a collection of, well . . . nudist nuns . . .guard a dangerous secret on their . . . goat island. One which, if let loose, would "have meant the end of the Christian Era." No points for guessing it has something to do with sex and Grecian gods.

The best story of the collection by far is “Cindy the Tattooed Sunday School Teacher,” perhaps because of the chilling way it reminds one of contemporary religious cults like the Branch Davidians. The tale begins in a Southern backwater, snake-handling church run by fire and brimstone preacher Brother Harris.

Into this mix comes Sister Cindy, a former circus worker and tattooed lady whose body supposedly became engulfed with Biblical images at the moment of her conversion. Sister Cindy proves to be a powerful speaker, and it isn't long before she wrests control of the church away from Brother Harris and starts proclaiming herself "the female Christ -- the new Eve."

Unlike the other stories, "Cindy" has a genuinely unsettling tone to it. It's not so over the top that it becomes ridiculous, unlike the one about the nudist nuns. Perhaps what adds to the tale's effectiveness is its ambivalence about Sister Cindy herself. Does she really believe herself to be the incarnation Eve or is it all a scam? Does she have the power to heal, or is she a phony? The story seems to suggest she is lying about her divinity, but she is such a powerful presence in the story, and Brother Harris is so unlikeable, that it is hard not to root for her. I have a sneaking suspicion that White wouldn't half mind us throwing out Christianity for a religion celebrating the "New Eve."

The ambivalence shows up in White's art as well. All of White's stories are done in a very flat, deadpan style, like the cartoon religious tracts of old (Jack Chick would be proud). Yet his art reminds me nothing so much as of those Johnny Craig ECs, where square-faced men with short hair and pounds of guilt sweated over unmentionable crimes.

The final problem with "Villa of the Mysteries" is that it's hard to tell just how seriously White expects us to take this stuff. It's hard to read lines like "Baby, I wouldn't miss this orgy for all the hash in Morocco" without chuckling. In some ways White resembles Sister Cindy herself. Is he trying to say something about the ties between modern and ancient religion, or is it all a big put-on? Both? White keeps a straight face throughout the entire book, but I can't help but feel that he's barely holding back a fit of the giggles.

Still, if nude nuns, strange early Christian cults, tattooed Sunday School teachers, UFOs, and satyrs with really, really, really big penises are your bag of chips, then chances are this comic was tailor-made to fit you.

Graphic Lit: Three from D&Q

2008-12-03T15:27:00.003-05:00

One of the things that comics do remarkably well is provide the reader with a tangible sense of place.

Unlike prose, which must rely on verbal descriptions, or photography, which can only show you a small section of a scene, comics can immerse you in a landscape, be it town or country, giving you a concrete feel for a particular area, real or imaginary.

Three new graphic novels from the small press publisher Drawn and Quarterly underscore that idea by focusing on cultures and countries far outside of the U.S.’s boundaries.

“Jamiliti and Other Stories” by Rutu Modan.

Though not an official follow-up to her acclaimed 2007 book “Exit Wounds,” this collection of short stories by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan nevertheless proves that she’s much more than a one-trick pony.

Modan’s tales deal with longing and isolation, though a sly bit of satire frequently shines through, as in “The Panty Killer,” an unusual murder mystery, or “Homecoming,” about a family that is forever waiting for the return of the prodigal soldier son.

The early stories here tend to take on a fairy tale tone, while more recent work, such as the title story, focus on the characters and the way they brush against one another.

No doubt some of Modan’s themes are lost to American audiences. You get the sense that there are issues specific to Israeli concerns. That doesn’t change the fact that these are wonderful, haunting tales though, that should only further cement Modan’s reputation as a first-class storyteller.
“Aya of Yop City” by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.

This is a sequel to last year’s “Aya,” a charming look at life in the Ivory Coast during the late 1970s, when the country was prosperous and on the verge of modernity.

Thankfully, everything that made the first book so delightful is evident here as well. More soap opera than social drama, “Yop City” finds its characters continuing to make fools of themselves in the pursuit of love and/or success, with issues of gender, class and colonialism well hidden in the background. Only headstrong Aya, the Greek chorus of the book, has any sense.

The book risks turning its large cast into cartoonish types at times, but they remain winning and likable even when some of them are exhibiting inane or frustrating behavior.

This is a sumptuously illustrated book; Oubrerie’s art gives you a real sense of the particular place and time. Ultimately though, it’s the characters you remember best. Even if you don’t know the country, you know these people.

“Burma Chronicles” by Guy Delisle.

Having already chronicled his travels to China and North Korea (in “Shenzhen” and “Pyongyang,” respectively), Delisle ventures into Myanmar with his young son and wife, (her job for Doctors Without Borders providing the reason for the trip).

This is Delisle’s best book, a subtle yet pointed look at life in a totalitarian state. Delisle focuses on the everyday minutiae of expatriate life with humor and insight.

At times it seems as if Myanmar could be anyplace, until he abruptly runs into the poverty and cruelty pushed down upon the country. A visit with a bed-ridden elderly woman, for example, strikes home hard, and not for the reasons you might suspect.

Delisle exhibits a basic, blocky style here but is able to convey a wide range of emotions and issues. It’s an indelible portrait of a people forced to live in ugly circumstances that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

From the vault: The Blot

2008-12-01T20:37:00.003-05:00

This review originally ran in issue #287 of The Comics Journal

The Blot By Tom Neely

There’s a danger in reviewing Tom Neely’s new book, The Blot, of being too effusive, praising the comic to the skies to the point where the reader starts rolling his eyeballs upward and saying “Come on. It can’t possibly be that good.” No one wants to lead the hype parade if the main float isn’t a stunner.

And yet The Blot really is that good. I’m actually sorely tempted, for example, to compare it to the first issue of Acme Novelty Library, or The Biological Show or Good-Bye Chunky Rice. Not that it’s necessarily standing on the same high aesthetic ground as those works (though I’d find it hard to believe it won’t be included on my “best of” list come January), but rather that it’s an impressive and declarative debut in the same fashion that those other books were. This is the type of book where after reading it you get the feeling you’re going to start expecting big things from the artist from here on out.

And there you go, rolling your eyes. Never mind, let’s move on.

The plot of this wordless graphic novel follows a nameless everyman -- let’s call him Tom, since, though I doubt he looks anything like the author, I find it hard to believe there isn’t some sort of autobiographical element that informed this work.

Anyway, Tom’s life is irrevocably and tragically altered by the arrival of a seemingly menacing ink blot. First appearing in the daily newspaper, and then out of thin air around a corner, the blot is seemingly everywhere, the stuff of one’s most primal nightmares. It’s as small or large as it needs to be, and can even inhabit the bodies of the most innocuous-looking folks – like children.

That being the case, the first third of the book resembles a horror film as Tom’s world starts to inexplicably disappear, only to be replaced by the ever growing and ever ominous inkblot. In fact the initial build-up in an early bathroom sequence is the type of thing you might expect in your average slasher film (though Neely subverts those expectations well).

But again, as in most nightmares, attempting to fight off the blot only results in Tom literally battling and destroying himself. Eventually he has no recourse but to give in to it, allow it to inhabit his body, and become a social pariah.

So far so good. In the second third of the book, our hero, resigned to his fate, his face obscured by the blot, finds succor and acceptance in the arms of a young, attractive woman. She gives him the strength to literally rise above the masses and accept his condition.

And it’s here that that book takes one of several interesting turn. Up until now we’ve regarded the blot as a menace, a destructive, dangerous force and something to be avoided at all costs. And we’ve pitied our hero as he’s struggled with his burden. A lesser artist would have left the metaphor lie strictly on that level: a hero burdened by his cross is saved by the love of a good woman.

Neely smartly aims for something a little stranger and deeper than that though. The woman shows Tom not only how to survive his affliction but how to thrive with it. The blot suddenly becomes capable of great works of creation, sprouting flowers where there were none, building homes, healing broken bodies. What at first was perceived as deadly is now a constructive, healing force (though it’s still capable of destruction and later serves as a formidable weapon).

Again, a lesser book might end here, with our hero triumphant over his new-found power. It’s clear from the very beginning, however, that the woman’s feelings for Tom are ambivalent at best and more than likely fueled by pity at worst. You know from her first appearance that heartbreak can’t be far away (in fact, it’s possible that her indecisiveness is one of the few moments where Neely overplays his hand). Her eventual betrayal in a chapter suggestively titled “Wanton” and his subsequent sorrow (he literally beats himself up -- easily the most disturbing section of the book) is harrowing.

Neely wisely never comes out and says what exactly the blot, or any of the other creatures our hero comes across, is supposed to represent. It’s enough that our hero fears its encroaching presence at all costs. There are hints scattered throughout; references to Moby Dick for example. But mostly he refuses to draw any easy metaphors between the story and the human condition. It’s not surprising that Neely’s influences are strongly evident (Jim Woodring, Al Columbia, Floyd Gotttfriedson), though I should add that they’re never so strong as to threaten to overwhelm the work.

If fact, if there’s any theme at all to The Blot it’s the impermanence of things. Nothing lasts in Neely’s world, be it abstract of physical. Everything is immaterial and transient and in danger of literally fading away from one panel to the next.

As you might imagine in a book about a destructive ink blot, Neely uses black frequently and liberally throughout the book, often having it dominate a full page, not only to separate the chapters, but often to offer an extra beat, hinting at shameful, horrors being foisted upon our hero that are best left unseen.

Neely’s imagery, meanwhile, is stark and powerful. On a certain level, that is mainly due to the simple juxtaposition of his early 20th century big foot, Mickey Mouse cartoon style (the main character even wears three-fingered gloves) and the disturbing, adult nature of the story.

But Neely proves to be an adept cartoonist beyond his mere rendering capabilities, using a simple grid structure, often breaking the action down into two, three or six panels per page, to wind up the tension. His sense of timing is excellent.

The book isn’t perfect. Not all of these different stories line up perfectly in a straight line from a to b. To a small extent, the love story regarding the woman and the main character’s troubles with the blot feel like two separate stories that Neely attempted to stitch together. It’s not something so damaging as to harm the book, but it is noticeable.

Caveats aside, The Blot remains a striking, highly original work that succeeds not only in its surreal, disturbing imagery but also in its ability to blend the sour-sad and beautiful in one volume.

It’s not for nothing that the book’s final image is of a lemon tree, which, as the song reminds us is very pretty but impossible to eat. A talented chef, however, can use those lemons to make one hell of a pie.

From the vault: Unpopular Culture

2008-11-30T14:52:00.005-05:00

Note: This review originally appeared in issue #284 of The Comics Journal.

“Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s”
by Bart Beaty University of Toronto Press 320 pages, $29.95

I wasn’t surprised that Bart Beaty’s new book, Unpopular Culture would prove to be so readable. Anyone who’s followed Beaty’s reviews and essays in The Comics Journal, particularly his seminal Eurocomics for Beginners column back in the mid-1990s, ought to be well aware of how good a writer he can be. What did prove surprising to me is that a book so utterly and single-mindedly focused on the European market would actually have something to say, albeit in an indirect fashion, about American comics.

We Yanks tend to imagine the Europeans as being much more enlightened about the art of comics than our own countrymen could ever possibly hope to be. Why, they sell comics in honest-to-god bookstores over there! And not just in the science-fiction section! They write comics about detectives and other, alternative genres! Moebius is a celebrity! Surely Europe, or at least France and Belgium, is a cartoonist’s utopia! Reading Unpopular Culture will, if nothing else, clear that lie out of your mind once and for all.

Comics, Beaty argues, may be a popular medium in Europe, but there’s a big difference between being popular and being respected. The general European public, to say nothing of the intelligentsia, has largely regarded the medium as little more than kiddie fare for the past several decades. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when companies like L’Assocition and Fremok started publishing more art-driven, less genre-derived material, that comics started to be viewed less as some sort of bourgeois kitsch to foist on the dull-minded populace and more as a work of art in its own right, deserving of respect and acclaim.

And it is at this point bells should be going off in your brain if you know anything about the American art-comics movement of the past fifteen years or so. Despite the considerable geographic (and other) differences between the two groups, both seemed to come to prominence around the same period of time and share more than just a desire to overturn the status quo.

What exactly happened in the 1990s is the central thrust of Beaty’s book, and he meticulously goes over what he regards as seven key issues, drawing out examples from various publishers and individual artists to show how such a change came about.

It’s worth going over the individual chapters, not only to get a feel for how the book is laid out, but to also get back to some of those inevitable comparisons that keep cropping up. In the first chapter, Beaty shows how publishers like L’Association imposed a new aesthetic by deliberately setting itself apart from mainstream publishers like Dargaud and Humanoides. In the second, he discusses how many artists came to regard the comic book as an art object in its own right, both creating books whose very binding and choice of paper make the book want to be put on display instead of a shelf.

In the third he examines how the small press challenged itself by undergoing formal experiments like OuBaPo, and by transforming the mixture of text and art in unprecedented ways that in some cases stretch at the very definition of what a comic is or should be.

The rest of the book follows along similar lines. He discusses how autobiography has been used as a way for artists to declare themselves as separate from other, more popular genres. He looks at how the small-press comics movement has developed differently across the European continent. He talks about how indie artists like Joann Sfar have been absorbed into the mainstream comics publishing empire. And then he sums the whole shebang up in a winning final chapter by examining the career of Lewis Trondheim, who, as Beaty makes clear, embodies more of the changes that have gone on in European comics in the past decade and a half than any other artist.

In a wider sense, Unpopular Culture is really about the constant and continual pull between market forces and artistic choices; between the avant-garde and whatever accounts for the mainstream at any given point of time. It’s about how the avant-garde and small press define themselves by what they are not instead of what they are, thereby transforming the culture, becoming subsumed by it, and leaving the door open for another avant-garde movement to take its place.

These are issues that every art form, from cinema to prose, deal with on an almost day-to-day basis and it’s certainly not something which American comics are immune from. That being said, aside from the occasional mention of Julie Doucet or Craig Thompson, Beaty stays clear away from discussing American comics, leaving readers to draw their own inferences.

That’s probably for the best, as doing so would open another very large can of worms, but it’s hard not to think about how these issues affect American artists while reading the book.

One issue that doesn’t seem to be as strong on these shores as Beaty seems to describe in his book is the line of demarcation between the U.S. mainstream and the alternative movement. While cartoonists like Dylan Horricks and Gilbert Hernandez (not to mention Ed Brubaker) have written superhero stories for the big two, it’s hard to see any one creator in the art-comix movement moving back and forth with the ease that Trondheim does. The superhero market is just too narrow a genre to accommodate most alt-cartoonists’ unique idiosyncrasies and individual art styles.

Of course, for a long time Marvel and DC were regarded as THE ENEMY, but I wonder if that’s true anymore. The true enemy of publishers like Fantagraphics (or at least rival for their affections) may be mainstream book publishers like Pantheon and Houghton Mifflin since they’ve snatched up authors like Thompson and Kim Deitch by dangling the promise of greater financial reward in front of them. Chris Ware’s ability to shift from the mainstream book world to small indie houses like Drawn and Quarterly perhaps prove a better allusion to Trondheim’s successes than Horricks’ run on Batgirl does.

Of course, perhaps the most notable difference is that in America we largely see Deitch’s getting a book deal as a good thing, and not a betrayal of all we hold dear. It’s hard to imagine Chris Oliveros writing something akin to Jean-Christopher Menu’s Plates-Bandes (which Beaty discusses at length), railing at the mainstream market for trying to co-opt the small press.

I said Unpopular Culture was readable and it is. But it has a decided academic tome and readers expecting something more akin to the relaxed and occasionally snarky prose Beaty utilized in the pages of The Comics Journal may well trip over some of the meatier sentences.

Overall, Unpopular Culture is a superb, insightful and, I believe, seminal book that will undoubtedly be referenced again and again when talking not just about European comics, but art-comics in general. Obviously the more familiar you are with the works referenced, the more you’ll able to get out of the book (I’m not ashamed to say I was thrilled whenever a comic I owned was mentioned, as though I was a member of some secret club). But you don’t have to have Beaty’s level of experience and knowledge to appreciate the issues that he’s raising. Or enjoy the way he raises them.

Graphic Lit: Bad meaning good

2008-11-21T16:06:00.006-05:00

“My kid could draw that!”

No doubt you’ve heard that phrase spouted at a modern art gallery once or twice. Perhaps you’ve even uttered it yourself, along with a snarky, “That’s not art.”

We tend to have set-in-stone notions about what constitutes art, and can get riled up when confronted with something that doesn’t meet our expectations.

Comics fans in particular can be a conservative lot, trumpeting the ability to render a contorted, physically perfect human specimen above all else.

But does a high degree of artistic skill and craftsmanship automatically result in the ability to make great comics? After all, comics are as much about pacing, timing and narrative dexterity as they are being able to make pretty pictures.

Take the case of Rory Hayes, for example. Hayes was a member of the underground comics movement of the 1960s, though he tends to get relegated to the background, behind more well-known figures such as Robert Crumb.

Hayes is finally getting his due in “Where Demented Wented,” a collection of his work from Fantagraphics Books edited by Dan Nadel and Glenn Bray.

Part of the reason Hayes slipped under the radar was because he wasn’t as prolific as his compatriots. Nor did he have their artistic chops; his art, at least initially, comes off as amateurish and stiff. His early death, at the age of 34 in 1983, no doubt played a part as well.

But probably the biggest reason he never achieved much recognition was due to the intensity and stark horror of his unique vision. Here was an artist who gazed into the abyss and drew what he saw.

Hayes’ initial comics were gory homages to the EC horror comics of the 1950s, usually featuring knife-wielding teddy bears plotting horrible things.

The turning point seems to be his attempt to do a sex comic. Hayes used the opportunity to pour out every misogynist and misanthropic fear that welled inside him, resulting in the most unerotic (and just flat out grotesque) pornography in history.

From there on out, Hayes’ comics become more psychedelic and narratively disjointed, but also more gripping and fascinating. Panels blend into one another; stories end in abrupt violence, bodies mutate and transform, heralding the apocalypse.

There’s the strong sense of exorcism at work here, that Hayes was driven to put this material on paper, perhaps hoping that by giving his demons voice he could silence them.

That didn’t work. Hayes eventually died of a drug overdose, as the heart-breaking afterword by Hayes’ brother Geoffrey (also an artist), reminds us.

Hayes’ work is not easy to digest or what we tend to traditionally think of as accomplished. But it is visionary and compelling all the same. The guy knew what he was doing.

While some cartoonists make art out of the meager talents God gave them, others strive to deliberately be as sloppy and crude as possible.

That’s certainly the case with “Tokyo Zombie,” an uproarious, grotesque manga by Yusaku Hanakuma.

Hanakuma is a member of the “Heta-Uma” or “bad, but good” school. Popularized by Japanese artist King Terry, it’s a movement dedicated to drawing as primitively as possible, the better to keep any technical gloss from removing your work’s “soul.”

As you might guess from the title, “Tokyo Zombie” is a horror story, albeit with rotting tongue held firmly in cheek.

Fujio and Mitsuo are martial arts-addicted tough guys who suddenly find themselves having to kick-punch their way out of a zombie apocalypse brought on by industrial waste buried in a literal mountain of garbage.

Circumstances force the pair to separate. Fast forward a few years. Fujio finds himself battling zombies in an arena for the pleasure of the wealthy few who control. What are the odds a zombiefied Mitsuo could show up to battle his old friend? Apparently pretty good.

As gory and profoundly silly as “Zombie” is, it’s also a heap of fun, provided you don’t take these sorts of things too seriously. Indeed, hard to imagine a more proficient artist being able to mine as much gold with the material as Hanakuma does here. His art may seem sloppy and primitive at first glance, but it’s always assured.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: Bat-Manga!

2008-11-17T14:43:00.003-05:00

Back in 1966 the world was in the grip of an unstoppable force. Batman-fever.

The beloved, campy TV show, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, had transfixed not only America but other countries across the globe, perhaps most surprisingly Japan.

So popular was the caped crusader in the Land of the Rising Sun that Jiro Kuwata, co-creator of the “8 Man” superhero manga and cartoon show, was asked to create some Batman stories for young Japanese readers.

Though Kuwata’s other work is fondly remembered in his native country, these long were thought to have been lost to history. In fact, they were so obscure that Batman’s publisher, DC Comics, wasn’t even aware of their existence.

Enter editor, author and book designer Chip Kidd who, along with collector Saul Ferris, discovered their existence via eBay and set about trying to collect as many of these comics as they could find.

“I had known for many years about Japanese Batman toys from the ’60s, but until about 10 years ago I had absolutely no idea they did their own comics too,” Kidd said. “When I became aware of that I became really, really interested in them.”

That interest has led to “Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan,” an oversized coffee-table book that translates and collects a handful of Kuwata’s stories.

“As a Batman fan who was born in 1964 and grew up with the late ’60s version, to me it was like being a Beatles fan and discovering six new songs,” said Kidd. “These really have a genuine spirit and sense of fun to them that I remember of Batman and Robin back then.”

The stories are both familiar and alien. Kuwata isn’t terribly concerned with mining the traditional Batman mythos or the camp nature of the TV show. There’s no Joker or Penguin here. Or Alfred, Batgirl or Batcave for that matter, although Commissioner Gordon does put in a cameo appearance.

What we get instead are stripped-down but nonetheless thrilling tales of Batman and a noticably younger Robin facing off against some truly noteworthy villains.

As with the traditional Western version, its the villains who make the comic, and “Bat-Manga” features some doozies, such as Professor Gorilla, Go-Go the Magician, Lord Death Man and Dr. Faceless, a disfigured scientist who hates smiling faces so much he even destroys clocks.

“Part of what I like about [the manga] is that, while it is a novelty and the novelty factor is large, [Kuwata] is a really good cartoonist. It’s just beautifully drawn stuff,” Kidd said.

Where Kuwata really shines are in the action sequences, where the dynamic duo leap and swing their way across the page in a truly dizzying fashion.

“There’s this wonderful juxtoposition of whimsy and really eerie, weird scary stuff,” Kidd said. “The fight scenes are truly invigorating.”

Since a lot of this material was tough to find (only two of the stories in the book are complete), Kidd and company opted to simply photograph the pages as is (i.e. yellowed and printed with different colored inks) than clean them up via a scanner.

“I very much wanted to replicate the experience of actually paging through these books,” he said. “When you see a lot of the way vintage manga is collected both in Japan and states, they reduce it to black and white on a crisp white page, and I think that takes away from original experience.”

Though the Batman craze didn’t last long in Japan and Kuwata moved on to other material, he still, as Kidd notes, “did a ton of stuff in a short period of time.”

More than enough, he hints, for a second volume.

Keep your bat-fingers crossed.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

VG review: Guitar Hero World Tour

2008-11-14T14:09:00.004-05:00

“GUITAR HERO WORLD TOUR”
Activision, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 and Wii. Rated T for Teen (lyrics, mild suggestive themes), Prices from $49.99 to $189.99.

It seems unfair to accuse “Guitar Hero World Tour” — the latest sequel in the uber-popular video game franchise — of jumping on the “Rock Band” bandwagon.

At the same time, however, there’s no question that it’s taken more than one page from that book. The formerly guitar-only game now allows up to four people to form a virtual band and play drums, vocals and bass as well as lead guitar. Even little tweaks, such as being able to extend your “star power,” seem directly lifted from its competitor.

Unfortunately, some of the things that make “Rock Band” so enjoyable aren’t present here. The basic “Guitar Hero” experience remains intact and fans of the series will have fun, but many of the new additions seem unnecessary or flawed.

Perhaps the best thing about “World Tour” is the excellent soundtrack, which features well-known tunes by folks like Smashing Pumpkins, REM, Jimmy Eat World, the Eagles and many others.

There are a few head-scratchers though. I’ll be hornswoggled if I can figure out what the heck Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” is doing here. Especially when the drum track consists of rapidly hitting the same drum over and over again ad nauseum.

Before I talk more about the new instruments, I should mention some of the guitar’s new features. It now boasts a “slider bar” along the neck, and when special transparent buttons appear on the screen, you can slide your finger up and down the neck instead of hitting the strum bar. It’s not as accurate a method though, and results in a lot of missed notes and frustration.

The drum kit adds an extra two pads to “Rock Band’s” four. They’re nice and feel more like a real kit, but they’re also a bit quirky. I had to hit them really hard to get them to react and they were very, very loud, making it difficult at times to hear the song.

(To Activision’s credit, it has made a drum tuner available for download. Unfortunately for Mac users like myself, it’s PC only.)

There are other problems. The menu interface isn’t the best, especially in the band section. It’s hard to tell when you’re playing with friends how well they’re doing. And you can’t bring other players back from failure using star power the way you can in “Rock Band.”

The most notable addition in “World Tour” is the ability to use the instruments to record your own tunes and upload them to the Internet. Though it offers a rich variety of tools to mess with, the interface is far from intuitive and you can’t record your own voice or lyrics, making the endeavor somewhat lackluster.

Still, “Guitar Hero” offers enough thrills and boasts a strong enough soundtrack to provide enough rock for your buck. There’s little question, however, that “Rock Band” is victor in the battle of the music games. At least for now.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: On comic books and the bad economy

2008-11-12T14:55:00.005-05:00

Is the comic book dead?

Not comics the artistic medium; that’s never been better.

No, I’m talking about the comic book pamphlet. You know, 32 pages, glossy cover, staples in the middle, comes out on a monthly (or semi-monthly) basis? I’m talking about the physical, periodical format.

Is it dying?

That’s the question that came to my mind while reading “Love and Rockets: New Stories,” the latest collection of work by indie cartoonists Jamie, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez.

For decades, the brothers have serialized their stories in pamphlets before collecting them into trade paperbacks. Now, however, in an attempt to expand their reach into book stores, the publisher Fantagraphics has rebooted the series as an annual, 112-page graphic novel.

“It’s not eliminating the comic shop at all but just opening it up to book stores and any place that can rack books,” said Fantagraphics Director of Promotions Eric Reynolds, “We could have kept [publishing it as a pamphlet], but we saw the way the books sell relative to periodicals and it was kind of a no-brainer.”

(By the way “New Stories” is a fantastic collection. Gilbert and Jamie are at the top of their form.)

The format change signals a shift of some sort in my mind. There was a time, say, 15 years ago, when you could go into a comic book store on a weekly basis and had a wealth of indie titles to choose from.

Now, most of those creators have either abandoned the medium entirely or moved to a “graphic novel only” strategy.

“For [‘Love and Rockets’] to switch to book format is a vote of no confidence from guys who were there first in alt-comics market,” said Tom Spurgeon, who runs the Comics Reporter Web site.

But is this change exclusive to the small-press scene or will it affect larger publishers as well?

I’m not the only one who’s been asking this question. In a recent interview, Dark Horse (publisher of “Hellboy”) CEO Mike Richardson said “As far as pamphlets — especially with what I see happening with the economy — as much as we all love them, the traditional comic book is going to be harder and harder to sell, and harder and harder to make work.”

Here are a few reasons:

An aging fan base. Despite the popularity of films like “Dark Knight,” comic books seem to appeal to a largely older, male readership and there aren’t a lot of new readers coming in.

Emphasis on event-driven titles. Right now, big crossover events like “Final Crisis” and “Secret Invasion” are climbing up the sales charts. But how many times can you return to that “everything changes” well before readers get bored?

The economy. People like to say that comics do well in recessions, but if gas prices go up again or the economy worsens, will fans have to choose between heading to the comic store every week to get the latest issue of “Trinity” versus a trip to the grocery store?

Rising prices. Comics aren’t really disposable entertainment any more. Your average issue runs about $3-$4, and there’s every chance that price could rise even higher.

I called a number of local stores to see if the worsening economy had affected them or if they had seen a movement away from periodicals towards graphic novels and trade collections.

Most of them said that while they may have lost a customer or two, they haven’t experienced any significant drop in sales.

“Pamphlet sales have been up every year for the last six-seven years, even though prices are going up,” said Bill Wahl of Comix Connection in Mechanicsburg, noting that sales of graphic novels also have increased.

“The people who have money or credit are still spending. People living paycheck to paycheck are cutting back,” said Bob Newbury of Cosmic Comics in Harrisburg.

More significantly, several of them noted that superhero fans in particular felt the need to keep up with their favorite series on a weekly basis.

“We sell 40-50 copies of ‘X-Men’ but not a single graphic novel. Fans still want ‘X-Men’ on a weekly basis. There’s not a person waiting to buy it after the story arc is done,” said Ralph Watts of Comics and Paperbacks Plus in Palmyra.

And what would the death of the periodical mean for comics shops?

“What I tell people is the day that happens, we’re all done. There will be no more comic book stores,” said Newbury. “We need that repeat business.”

If you’re DC or Marvel, the periodical remains a viable publishing format, though that’s not necessarily the case for other publishers or genres (DC’s Vertigo line, for example, seems to sell much better in trade than pamphlet).

If this trend continues, or if longtime fans are forced to make tough economic choices, the traditional comic book format may go the way of the blacksmith and long-playing record.

“Just because something’s outmoded doesn’t mean it should be abandoned,” Spurgeon said. “I hope they don’t abandon it. There’s still money to be made.”

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

VG review: Little Big Planet

2008-11-06T14:58:00.004-05:00

“LITTLE BIG PLANET”
Sony, for PlayStation 3, rated E for Everyone (comic mischief, cartoon violence), $59.99.

Few games knock down the wall between developer and player as effectively as “Little Big Planet,” Sony’s big-ticket PlayStation 3 title for the holiday season, does.

Sure, lots of other games have offered the chance to manipulate and create your own virtual environment, but I’ve never seen it done as skillfully as it is here. This is one of the most creative and downright attractive video games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.

At its heart, “Little Big Planet” is a platformer akin to “Super Mario Bros.” and all the other little games that involve hopping around on objects and jumping on the heads of bad guys.

Here, you play as an adorable cloth doll known as Sackboy. Sackboy (or girl if you prefer) can run, jump and grab certain items but that’s about it. You don’t gain any special abilities as the game progresses.

What you do get is a vibrant, photorealistic world made out of cardboard, cloth, string, switches and just about any other material you can find in real life. More than any game I’ve played before, “Planet” has an almost tactile feel to it, as though I could reach out and touch the objects displayed on my screen.

Beyond the look and feel, though, the levels are inspired in their high degree of creativity and challenge. Many times I’d come across a puzzle or objective that would astonish me in its clever design and frustrate me (in a good way) with its difficulty.

The main story section is regrettably short, though there’s a lot of replayability through the collection of hidden clothes, stickers and other objects.

That’s OK though, because the upside is that you can use those objects to create your own levels in the “My Moon” area. Using a suite of PhotoShoplike tools you can make a level that’s hindered only by your imagination.

The tools system is easy and intuitive to manipulate, although the amount of material you have at your disposal is a bit overwhelming, and developing a level that people want to play will take some time and effort on your part.

The good news is you can get other people to try out your levels via the Internet. Unfortunately, Sony’s servers were down just about the entire time I was playing the game, but if they come up soon, I can see this being a big part of the game, with fans uploading, sharing and grading their favorite player-created content.

My only quibble with the game is that Sackboy doesn’t move around as easily as he’s supposed to. Getting from the foreground to the background (and vice versa) can take repeated tries, and the character doesn’t exactly stop on a dime, which can be treacherous when you’re maneuvering across some high, narrow platforms.

Just about every aspect of “Little Big Planet” is pitch-perfect, from the infectious music to the mulitplayer sections to the tutorials narrated by actor Stephen Fry. It’s a joyous, infectious world that I hope to spend lots of time exploring in the near future.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: The big debut

2008-11-05T14:47:00.002-05:00

There’s something about the big debut, that new comic or graphic novel from a budding cartoonist suggesting great promise, that gets people (myself included) all fired up.

Of course, not every artist manages to capitalize on all that initial goodwill, but for those who do, it’s worthwhile to go back and re-examine their initial forays.

Take Scott McCloud, for example.

Before he became renowned for books like “Understanding Comics,” McCloud was best known for his superhero series “Zot!”

The comic centered around the titular hero, a carefree teen from another, futuristic dimension, and his relationship with Jenny, a decidedly more pessimistic girl from our Earth.

The new “Complete Black and White Collection” collects the later half of Zot’s saga (McCloud apparently not being terribly satisfied with its initial full-color run) into one brick-sized book.

Reading the series, you can see McCloud constantly experimenting, taking elements of mainstream comics, the burgeoning indie scene and manga (still new and strange back then) and trying to digest them to form his own style.

The first half of the book is mostly set in Zot’s world and is full of fun, zany, dramatic adventures.

Halfway through, McCloud abandons the superhero stuff almost entirely, focusing instead on Jenny and her friends and their everyday lives.

Combining freewheeling sci-fi tropes (robot butlers, flying cars) with realistic, fully developed characters, “Zot!” helped point the way toward comics’ full potential, a trail McCloud would blaze more fully a few years later with “Understanding Comics.”

Another series that initially dealt with superheroes only to change halfway through was “Demo,” which initially attempted to tell slice-of-life stories about teens and twentysomethings coming to terms with their burgeoning supernatural powers.

Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan then abandoned that tack in favor of exploring young people at crossroads in their lives, be it the end of a relationship or wising up to the fact that it’s time to grow up and get a real job.

Wood and Cloonan made their mark with these smart, well-grounded, emotionally involving tales, and while they’ve done great work since, I’m not entirely sure they’ve done anything that’s surpassed their early work.

But while we might look fondly at “Demo” and “Zot!” with the benefit of hindsight, stellar debuts are far from a thing of the past.

Witness “Swallow Me Whole,” a new graphic novel by Nate Powell. I’m not kidding when I say this book knocked me for a loop.

“Swallow” tells the tale of two teenage stepsiblings, brother and sister, each with different mental problems (the brother displays signs of schizophrenia, while the sister has a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Powell’s tale unfolds in a relaxed fashion as the pair trudge their way through school, deal with family and try to cope with their problems.

Eventually, one sibling starts to get better while the other, tragically, does not.

Powell displays a poetic gift for visual metaphor here, articulating the kids’ illnesses with some deft imagery.

He also has an ear for realistic dialogue and situations (a cringeworthy incident at school, for example, seems particularly drawn from life).

In short, “Swallow Me Whole” is a fantastic book. Keep your eye on this Powell kid. He’s going places.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: An interview with Art Spiegelman

2008-10-22T15:33:00.024-04:00

It's no exaggeration to say that Art Spiegelman legitimized comics.

While he certainly wasn't alone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has been a tireless advocate of the art form and played a large part in shepherding its movement toward respectability.

But arguably nothing he did was as influential as Maus. His haunting retelling of his father's experiences in Auschwitz (with the Jews disguised as mice and the Germans disguised as cats)
helped many to see that comics could be more than superheroes and kiddie fare.

Now Spiegelman has a new book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! It's actually a reprinting of a little-seen collection of early experimental strips that in many ways laid the groundwork for Maus. He spoke from his home in New York City about Breakdowns and his legacy:

Q: What’s it like to revisit this material after so long?

A: Well, that’s what led to that 20-plus page part of the book was trying to understand what it mean to revisit it. What’s interesting for me is it doesn’t seem like juvenalia to me.

That’s the question being asked by my friends, “Doesn’t it feel weird to be showing work from whatever number of years ago?” And it does if I feel to directly attached to it. I’ll go “Oh gee, I really better redraw that part. It’s not right.”

I’ve been very proud of some of the achievements in the old Breakdowns. They’re as important to me as the whole Maus book thing. They were wrested out of nowhere. They were coming out of a context of no context as one of those New Yorker writers used to put it. I look back on those as landmarks for myself and -- it may be hard to say it about oneself but landmarks as to what kinds of comics could be made afterward, even though I didn’t have the facility of a Robert Crumb or the intense madness of a Rory Hayes or whatever. It was offering something new.

Q: Aside from the obvious — the initial Maus story and Prisoner on the Hell Planet — to what extent did these stories shape the structure and story of Maus?

A: Good question, cause I think it was essential. It’s not just a matter of the subject matter which is clearly urgently connected to Maus. Three-page Maus, one hundred-page Maus, you can see that there’s a link-up. But I think that the other material, ones where I found different ways of connecting panels and making your eyeball stutter, skip, jump and bounce in order to try to understand something.

Now the way I was doing it in Breakdowns was guaranteed to find me a very small if any audience, cause it was offering difficulties from a medium that was there to make things easy. On the other hand, all the things I was tinkering with to make you stumble and re-read, could be put together as a kind of Tinkertoy set, but rearranged so that instead of making your eyeball stutter it made your eyeball move. It was the same instruction kit, just putting it from Z to A rather than A to Z or whatever.

Q: Looking at Breakdowns and then reading Maus I can definitely see there’s a lot of the same experimentalism going on, it’s just more in service to —

A: It’s just totally hit and miss. I remember at the time I was reading a lot about Picasso in the 70s, which is what led to that Ace Hole comic strip. There’s a postwar issue of Life magazine where somebody said “What’s the big deal about Picasso? All painters do that except usually they finish their damn paintings.” (laughs)

That kind of impulse of "everything is here but it’s got to be finished so that people will be able to read it." On the surface it’s out of the way, but the way pages were thought about was very similar. It was just with the acknowledgment that people don’t want to think about the stories they enter into completely as a mere armature or hanger to drape something on. The reason they’ve come to the show in the first place perhaps.

Q: Can you tell me a bit about your influences on this material. You talk in the book about expressionist art and Picasso. What were you looking at the time —

A: You mean outside of comic books.

Q: And comic books too. The whole package.

A: Comics were my culture period. And then I came late to thinking about other things as worth looking at. I was almost like a slob snob. Certain things were exempt. As soon as I saw George Grosz’s work I thought “Oh, he’s a cartoonist and he’s a good one.” That was easy. It was one step harder to get to Picasso and several steps harder to get to ultimately people like Ad Reinhardt or Pollack or whatever.

There was a moment where I seemed to understand why they were doing that sort of thing and it wasn’t just to con me, which was the original paranoid thought. It’s better to think of politicians that way than painters.

In literature Kafka I got right away. It was just an extension of the Twilight Zone as I think I said in the introduction. But some of the other stuff, I think Gertrude Stein became important to me. I’ve returned to find it impenetrable, but there was a period where it was very clear. Reading James Joyce. Reading relatively difficult literature as well as my passionate embrace of Philip K. Dick at the time. Loving the noir-novels for their sentences than their stories.

These things sit in different proportions now. At this point, Philip K. Dick, well that’s a no-brainer. If you’ve ever heard of science fiction, that’s him. For me it was strictly finding a very obscure paperback that had a blurb on the cover that said “World gone mad and only a cartoonist can save them,” which fit in with my own messianic needs. It turned out the blurb writer only read the first ten sentences of the novel and thought that was what it might be about. Nobody ever knows what those books are about. But at that time that wasn’t an obvious taste. Nor was the noir stuff, which is now looming as I think one of the main genre achievements of the last century.

Q: What specifically led you to go down this experimental format? As you mention you were kind of alone in this. Your contemporaries were not doing this sort of thing.

A: It was like “Oh, here’s a whole other continent. While they’re colonizing that one, here’s another one!” The revolution in what could be handled in comics content was already well under way with Crumb and Justin Green and even the Furry Freak Brothers because all of the sudden Dagwood Bumstead was smoking weed. There was a content revolution definitely going on.

The thing was hanging out, not just with cartoonists, but really with underground filmmakers. In San Francisco there was George Kuchar, but in New York there was this guy Ken Jacobs who gets this special tribute, a set of panels, in the first part of the book. These were people who grew out of a much more rarefied — they were looking at stuff that was much more difficult. Not for sissy eyes, you know?

It took me awhile to get into it. I’d fall asleep at most of their film screenings cause there was no story. They came to film like abstract expressionists came to painting. Ken Jacobs was a student of Hans Hoffman.

It became clear to me at a certain moment that comics didn’t get to do the same kind of extending and growing that a lot of other mediums in the 20th century did. Why not? One of the reasons is that comics is one of the only ones that stuck with figure drawing at a time when it became really square to draw something representational. Comics were left alone to carry that mantle, but as a result they missed out on a lot of modernism. I was getting interested in modernism at the time, so it seemed natural to try to see what can comics do if they want to enter the same conversation. So that’s what led to that kind of work.

For me, because I’m a cartoonist, I wasn’t interested in something that I would argue about with these friends of mine all the time, which is that I think they saw communication as a nasty word. We’re not here to communicate. What do you mean? We are the "arteest." We are the shaman. We spread our entrails and others read them. I went to a commercial art high school. I was trained to become an advertising artist if I just didn’t have a contrarian ethical streak I could have made out as one of those mad men in the early '60s.

Communication per se was the natural province. I just thought maybe you could change where the communication took place. What are you communicating about? Is it urgent or is it just one more sublimated sexual fantasy, which is the way it was until they stopped being sublimated in the '60s, or is it just one more joke — nothing wrong with jokes. It was like changing the kind of conversation one could have and the thing seemed a miscalculation at the time but now seems more reasonable. One could change the demand one put on the reader to make that communication happen. That line changed, where that gate is.

Q: Yeah, it definitely feels like there’s more of a blending than ever before.

A: But it’s not like I feel comics shouldn’t communicate, because I think they should! That’s what we’re on the planet for. Yes, self-expression is communication as well. It’s not trying to mystify and keep people out. It’s a matter of just having a conversation that can’t take place without some vocabulary.

Q: You talk about this in the afterword, but can you just take me again through the publication history?

A: Oh god. The book came about only because I was doing comics that were easy to miss. I was doing short pieces, very concentrated, that sometimes would take me months, literally to do a page. In order to write that one-page poem I either had to learn Urdu or invent some other language to make that page. It took longer than just writing and drawing a page.

After I had done a number of those things I wanted to see them in their own context. It made me want some kind of collection of my own work and Woody Gelman at Topps Gum thought he was going to win the sweepstakes and had a lot of extra mad money for publishing and was inviting all of — this isn’t short it’s just fast — this guy offered me a chance to do a book. He was a small publisher who thought he was going to make a lot of money.

By the time he realized he was not going to make a lot of money publishing an Elvis Presley poster book my book was at the printer. Fortunately, one of the people I knew who was a porno publisher of dirty comics was willing to put this out even though he didn’t get it himself. I learned at that moment if not before that there really is a difference between printing and publishing. He helped me get the book printed but it never really entered the world. It was "privished" rather than published.

So this thing came out. It took a long time to sell what turned out to be only 3,500 or 4,000 copies after we threw away the ones that came out badly printed when the all-night shift at the printer got so interested in those erotic panels that they stopped looking at the presses.
There were relatively few. 4,000’s not a giant edition. It took a rather long time for those to feed out into the world. A number of those strips within Breakdowns did get printed and reprinted over the years. A lot of people did get to see the individual pieces of it.

At that point I thought that was it. I moved on and actually there it lay as one of the many odd evolutionary sports a hardcover, large size anthology of comics that didn’t seem to come either from a fine-art world or a comics world. It only came out as a book now because of things that happened on Sept. 11, which got me to want to make comics after we were in lower Manhattan for the festivities. The comics I was making then for some newspapers in Europe were things I was just doing to keep myself occupied while waiting to die in lower Manhattan.

Q: You’re talking about In the Shadow of No Towers.

A: Yeah. And I really wasn’t ever expecting that to become a book entitled In the Shadow of No Towers. I was just making pages. I wasn’t going to leave New York, I had vowed to make comics again. There was no reason for me to make comics again where I place the contractual connection between reader and me so far over to the side that I would be hampered in putting down what I needed to put down. When it did come out as a book and people started talking to me inevitably I’d start talking about the work I’d done in Breakdowns prior to Maus. It was at that time that my editor at Pantheon said “What’s this Breakdowns thing?” I showed it to him, he said Hey, we could publish this, it’s great.”

I was kind of shocked and glad, but first of all, as I relate in that essay at the end, I said “but what about these hardcore sexual panels” and he says “the naughty stuff?” Time has passed me by, I don’t know. I said "Yeah sure, if you want to publish it that will be great, I’ll just do an introduction" and then I realized I had vowed to return to comics after Sept. 11. So over two years later I have a 20-page introduction and therefore was able to re-contextualize the book a bit.

Because the first question you asked me is the one that the whole project is about. Looking back at that thing, what led to those weird bits in terms of their content and the peculiar interest they took in form. I thought this was a way to revisit that and make good on one concept I had in the Breakdowns years that I tried hard to realize and it just didn’t work. In the back part there’s that thing called Some Boxes for the Salvation Army. And that’s where I was excited about the possibility of editing a comic after you drew it, which meant making all the boxes the same size. I tried to do that for Arcade the magazine I was co-editing with Bill Griffith. Time ran out, the issue was due and I only made enough panels of the same size to barely last three minutes. Certainly not enough to do what I ambitiously wanted to do.

Those got published as some scrap and I moved on. But I was wistful because that was a good idea and I wanted to revisit it. This became an occasion to use that formal idea again — instead of the page being a unit, making the box the unit, so that the boxes could be 3,5,7, 15, 20, it didn’t matter wherever it ended something else would connect to it. It allowed me to set up different kinds of rhythms, repetitions, moving back and forth in time, and echo something about the way memory works and how conceptual things inter-cut with the memories and make other things happen. So that project became really exciting and I got to do a comic I was supposed to have done back in the '70s now. It was interesting for me to see how it connected to the work I did after.

In a way that long introduction is more friendly than some of the work that’s in the '70s Breakdowns, in terms of beckoning someone close enough to spend time with it. Because I’ve learned something about how to pace and tell an anecdote. It fell somewhere between what I was doing in Maus and what I had been doing in Breakdowns.

Q: Reading the material, in some ways I think it’s more revealing and personal than Maus.

A: Thank you for saying that, because I’m just beginning to have to talk about this thing and I’m realizing how hard it is for me, because I’m vulnerable here.

Q: It’s extremely vulnerable material. I was actually kind of shocked at some of the sequences, how revealing and personal you were. I hate to compare it to Maus, but maybe it’s because it’s taken out of the realm of world history to an extent.

A: Certainly the anecdotes were personal. That’s true. Those are anecdotes that were anecdotable. They weren’t the most wispy, visceral aspects of memory. They were the ones that one could tell someone else should one want to. You have some memories like “and then there’s the time five kids gathered after school and beat the shit out of me” and there’s others where you’re just feeling this horror at what it is to have to get through life and turn into an adult, but there’s no content. It’s just a feeling of horror.

That wasn’t what I was trying to communicate. I was thinking of the ones that were anecdotable and seeing what happens when you put those together in different temporal order and different emotional order and different stylistic order to see how they could fit together and give a overall feeling.

The other part that’s personal is the actual stuff that I'm just calling formal comics or an interest in structure. In a way that’s as personal as the content. Cause that’s the one where it’s about the kind of electrical impulses that carry thought rather than what the thought is. That’s rather intimate in the sense that it’s not as easy to talk about or demo as the content and yet it’s the one that’s about how I think. I just don’t know what to say. It seems really basic to me.

The page called Don’t Get Around Much Any More. OK, there’s some content there, it’s about feeling bummed out, depressed. But the actual way that content is expressed has to do with the ways in which the usual Tinkertoys have been arranged. And that rearrangement makes me experience the feelings that are being described when I talk about being depressed. But that’s more than just saying “I was really depressed, my girlfriend left me, or whatever.”

Q: You’re talking about trying to evoke a particular mood or emotion through the comic rather than simply issue a statement or go from a to b.

A: Right. It’s not just the content or parts of the comic. It’s the very way that comic is built. Is carrying the most urgent part of it for me. What I was describing before was trying to invent some new version of Urdu to be able to do a short strip. But those are the works that made me want this book to happen again because I’d like that to be re-entered into the mix even though it’s not likely that it can have the kind of audience that will go “Ah, I don’t know if I like this guy’s comics. I don’t read comics, but it’s about the Holocaust! And there’s this other thing about Sept. 11 and I was watching TV that morning.” So there’s some reason. Here it’s much more out there on it’s own terms. I don’t know what that means in the world but it does feel like it’s more intimate in that sense.

Q: It doesn’t necessarily have the hook to draw you in. How long did it take you to put the introduction together?

A: It was done over a period over two years. I keep doing other things of one kind or another at the same time, so it’s not like every day I come marching in with the same agenda until I get to the last panel. But a lot of my time was devoted to that. There was footage I didn’t use, there were a lot of sequences that didn’t make the final cut. There’s a lot of just trying to figure out how to do this thing. Sometimes things that looked like they should have been easy, even to me, took a long time to master something stupid and simple that anybody should be able to do if they call themselves a cartoonist.

Q: Like what?

A: There’s one sequence about the Dick Van Dyke Show. That drove me nuts. I knew what drawing style I wanted but it wasn’t anywhere near the vocabulary of drawing styles that I’m usually interested in. So sometime around 1960 or so there was a style called off-beat. It grew out of that Tom Terrific, Gene Deitch thing. It was moving toward a sort of advertising look and it always looked to me soulless even though it came from people like Gene Deitch and Virgil Partch. It came from a genuine interest in what people like Picasso and Paul Klee were doing when they were drawing. but by the time it entered the world of subway poster advertisements and stuff, it was about the most soulless kind of cartooning I could find.

So I had to find some way of approximating what that stuff was for me, because first of all, that’s exactly the stuff that was around at that moment, whatever year that anecdote was. At that time that style was definitely in the ascendancy, and I wanted it for that reason and also because it was about how that artificial humor stuff cracks up against something all too real and looks as artificial as it is. Canned laugh tracks and stuff. I need to make that thing look that way and it took me a long time to do that even though, what is it, like six panels or something.

Q: I think it’s about nine.

A: Oh good, so I got about half as much mileage as I thought.

I wasn’t trying to do these things as Exercise in Style Matt Madden pages let’s say. But I needed each sequence to be thought through in its own complete little world that I could hook up to the world next door. Sometimes it was more like Milton Caniff like, other times like 1930s cartooning and other times more anonymous.

Did you ever see the movie Hands of Orlac? It was this alien hand that you can’t control anymore. Some days the hand can move and pretend it’s a cartoonist’s and some days it doesn’t know what to do with a pencil or how it fits between what fingers. This allowed for that because I could move onto another one where a drawing style was more congenial and then go back.

Q: Not to harp on it, but the intro does feel more intimate, perhaps because you’re talking about your childhood or because you’re less overt in talking about the influence that the Holocaust continues to have on you and your family.

A: Well Maus was more in service of what you were talking about before which was where does history intersect with a personal story. This one, there’s still the smell of the ovens somewhere in the background, but I’m trying to deal with a more banal life, presumably like the ones my comics reader friends would have had as well.

That’s what I was trying to get at before when I said about anecdotable. Even though I was using my own memory, my memories are different from anyone else’s specific memories, I wasn’t interested in my memories as I was in the model of how memories work. I was using things that one could relate to even if one had different experiences.

Q: Tell me a little bit about the Toon Book Jack in the Box.

A: It’s funny because in a way that was coming at things from the exact opposite side of the highway. So here’s this one book that is made for adults willing to re-read. Because most of these things weren’t made to be read once and put aside, like, say, Garfield. They’re meant to be re-read and the only way to re-read is you start doing it once and then have to go back and eventually make all of these connections that I hope are to be found.

At the same moment, I’m working on something that will get kids to learn to read so they can re-read. And it’s coming exactly from some other side except the same issues were at stake, which is a lot of my stuff, even Maus, comes at more formal interest than a content interest. Obviously I am aching with the burdens of history that have been laid on my back when I was just trying to watch TV, but still the thing that made me do the book was not that, but "Ooo, a long comic that need a bookmark. That would be cool."

Most of the pieces in Breakdowns are easily identifiable as exactly that. On the other side there’s you want to make a comic that’s so qualified a kid who would otherwise be reading "See Dick Run" would be reading this, that it would feel richer. I was like that guy Georges Perec who wrote a whole novel without the letter E in it. That kind of limitation.

Here the limitation was the word list — words you’re supposed to know by the end of first grade. And I was starting from that the same way those "I Can Read Books," the Dr. Seuss books start from that list. On the other hand, the work for adults was coming from another set of self-imposed restrictions and limitations.

It grew very specifically out of the difficulty I had writing the essay at the end. There was a certain point where I realized it’s just too hard to say this stuff about yourself. It’s much easier to have professor so and so or a friend write about you and that functions as the essay. But I felt for this book I needed to do it. It was so hard I just gave up after awhile. There was a moment where I figured I’ll just get some art critic friend to blather on for some pages. I’ll give him the necessary data. And while I was at that point of giving up, Francoise is making this series of books that sounds really like a solid thing to do in the world. And that was sort of a vacation from butting my head against the wall of writing an essay about myself.

There’s this one strip in Breakdowns called Cracking Jokes, which Scott McCloud acknowledges as "Oh, you can make comics as an essay, I see." That particular strip, in the very first panel there’s a jack in the box with dicks hanging off of his jester’s cap. There’s a reference to the notion of the jack in the box as a way of overcoming fear and learning the pleasures of narrative.

In a way the jack in the box is the first story. the first time you’re willing to trust your imagination enough to take a little excursion, even if it’s a little freaky the first time around. You understand it won’t really hurt you so you get to put the jack in the box back in and anticipate happily that the little puppet will pop out again. That’s the essence of what gets people to get interested in stories that play with your anxieties and then release them. Right? I wanted that to be part of this comic, the jack in the box keeps coming out in a more scary way until he’s literally outside the box and behind the boy. I thought it would be a way of offering something — the book itself would become a metaphor for a jack in the box.

Did you have an actual physical copy to look at?

Q: Of Breakdowns? Yes.

A: Good, because I was unhappy to find out that most people, unlike you, you must work for a paper with clout, there’s very few of these until this week. They’re on a boat somewhere. It took forever to get them here. As a result people are looking at the pdf version. And printing them out god knows how. And the objectness of it is part of what it is. The cover of the '70s Breakdowns is a different weight of paper than the —

Q: You need to see it in the full color version.

A: There’s shifting paper stocks, in terms of the weight of the paper and the color of the paper, so you can describe that but it’s not the same as viscerally touching it.

I think that’s part of why comics are doing so well in book stores now. Most literature this point, if it isn’t already on the Kindle — I touched it once — seems like it will get there. It’s not that beautiful a machine. It looks like it was made in East Germany. The content works. You can pour various books in and read them. But you can’t pour comics in.

Q: At least not these kind of comics, certainly.

A: Even when they get to the point where they can print in color, part of what’s true now, generally, is the comics are some of the best designed books in book stores. They take advantage of their existence as an object.

Q: You’re regarded in the comics community as the “father of the art comics movement. Not just for Maus but for the role you and Francoise played in shepherding and proselytizing cartoonists in Raw magazine. Forgive me for using the term, but you’re seen as this father figure. Is that a role you’re at all comfortable with?

A: Not at all, because I know a lot about father figures. The first thing you gotta do is kill ‘em! Absolute first order of business. I didn’t read all of Douglas Wolk’s book when I saw one sentence that somebody showed me about my work that said he has to be cut down because he’s the largest poppy in the field. Something close to that. I’m thinking, wait a minute, I know nothing about opium farming but I know a lot about Freud and Poppy. Cut down. Poppy. I get it. There’s definitely some kind of castrate the father figure as quick as you can. I don’t know.

I feel like I’m still one of the tyros trying to learn the basics of a trade that some of my younger peers in their 30s have gotten under control rather easily. I have a very difficult time drawing. It never got easier. I’m still struggling with all that, but as far as being the father figure, I wish that weren’t the case.

I think what happened was I was just following my own nose and interests from a very early age. Back in the 70s it seemed very obvious to me that certain things were true like comics could be art. They don’t have to be, they can be propaganda, they can be pornography. And of course, certain kids of pornography and propaganda can themselves be art. But nevertheless, comics can be any old thing it’s just a medium. And I was interested in seeing whether I could get the same stuff into and out of comics that I was getting from other corners of the culture band.

That led to certain things like finding other people’s work that seemed to fit into that logic system and then making Raw with Francoise, at the time that was a band of outsiders. The artists in there were not on any easy to find a common denominator. It wasn’t even as specific as when we did Arcade where it was mostly San Francisco cartoonists. It was just trolling for people pushing at certain kids of edges.

Over the years, especially in the last few, it seems like those are the artists who are in the main tent now. Gary Panter and I had some kind of public conversation where we were talking about Chris Ware and said it was like a one-man Raw. It did open up a certain kind of zone. It was always with the understanding that it wasn’t the only zone.

I think some of the father figure resentment and anger at me, which sometimes scares the hell out of me really, is that it’s as if I was saying — you used the word proselytize. Proselytize usually means if you don’t believe in my religion you’re going to go to hell. I never had that attitude. I was just talking about what moved me. Stuff I liked. I wasn’t saying therefore you can’t like superheroes. You can do whatever the hell you want. If you hate my work and love Kirby’s work that’s fine. But there’s no reason for me to talk about work I don’t like, there’s so much I do.

Q: Well, you’re someone who has straddled the line between high and low art, especially in works like Breakdowns. And there seems to be a reluctance on the part of a lot of cartoonists and fans to view comics as high art. What are the dangers —

A: That’s a decent question. I think that’s why I was trying to talk about the communication arts, those things that are considered lowly. I don’t think writers have the same kinds of problems. Maybe certain poets. For the most part a person sits down to write a novel, they do their damnedest to make it rich, full of all they know and if not exactly entertain the same way a James Bond movie entertains, it will pull you in and give you something you can follow along with. The idea is not to see how many people you can get to not finish your book. By being involved in narrative they have a less problematic relationship to the notion of communicating.

One of the problems with some comics is when one is specifically going after the mystification that seems to surround certain aspects of painting — “This is a painting. You figure out why I painted it and you figure out where it sits inside the grand philosophical stream of what painting has been." That can get pretty goddamn dry. I really wasn’t after that. I wasn’t after dry. I wasn’t after drowning you in a sea either. It was really just trying to make a different kind of experience happen.

Right now I’m reading lots and lots of very old comic books because they’ve been uploaded. You’ve probably come across Golden Age Comics. I’ve been taking a lot of books down from there because I’ll never see them otherwise. 99.9 percent of it was real sludge. Really hard to plow through and sometimes it’s got a nice visual lick. But every once in a while you run across someone who’s going for broke. Certainly Krigstein was applying all of his intelligence to making that thing happen. Other people had a strong personality. At this point I have a renewed respect for John Stanley as I discover more of what wasn’t Little Lulu stuff I had grown up with and taken for granted.

One of the thing with Kurtzman was the whole anarchic project of making those war and humor comics, but part of what he was doing was finding a usable grammar for structuring a page. I find that really a pleasure to try to understand because it seems like a conscious effort on his part. There’s one thing he does where it’s three panels across with a progressive close-up. And that allows for certain kinds of visual beats to happen. I read somewhere several years ago that if he had three lines of text above the box in one panel he had to keep that the same in all three so you wouldn’t have different sized rectangles. That kind of thing of really thinking about how it all fits together on a page; I really like seeing that secret language. The stuff Picasso left visible because it wasn’t finished is part of the way certain cartoonists approach what they do and it’s really exciting for me to find it again and understand what they were thinking. Certain artists who were moving to the same frequencies with a larger obligation to make sure that one way or another it’s going to entertain those kiddies. Sometimes dealing with relatively dark materials.

Q: Getting back to your influence again, you wrote what is largely considered to be the Great American Graphic novel. I get the feeling frequently — and you mention it in Breakdowns — that you are very ambivalent about its success.

A: Well, yeah. On the one hand, I’m grateful. There it is. It’s obviously going to be the first line in my obituary. So there’s that. And sure, it’s great to have that.

On the other hand it weighs, not only on me, but I think it weighs on all these other cartoonists trying to make work as well. “Oh god, Maus is such a burden.” Not just for me but for the ones saying “But superheroes are good.” Or the ones saying “This a serious story so it’s going to have to go one on one with Maus.” It looms. Obviously it looms larger for me because I’m standing right next to the giant Vladek monument that’s portrayed [in Breakdowns].

It’s not like I necessarily need to make another long comic that needs a bookmark. If anything I’m wondering if I want any aspect of that paternity laid on me. Because there’s one thing that’s definitely part of what’s in both the introduction to Breakdowns and in the older work which is comics as an act of great compression. The idea of a drawing to me is not to make an Alex Ross painting in a comic book. It’s never been a goal. I don’t like looking at it. It’s very skillful but it has nothing to do with me.

But I am interested in highly compressed visual information, what can be fit into a box and be readable and make it composed well. It involves relatively simple marks. That’s what made me want to do comics to begin with. When I was getting that cartooning kit at the age of seven or so. Also the language has to be very compressed, literally, in order to make balloons that are not just insanely tedious, twelve lines of balloon dialogue for each box. It’s an act of real compression there. It’s an act of compression for me.

It’s interesting to me that some people will do comics in which somebody is going down a flight of stairs for twelve pages but unless it’s really about the staircase, it seems to me it’s like watching somebody knit. Staircase, you’ve gotta get on it, you’ve gotta get off it. I think that’s two boxes. And it could be there’s a reason, I’m not saying there can’t be a reason. But very often there isn’t a reason except that the artist is very patient and willing to draw a subway from twelve different perspectives as the guy’s riding uptown and it takes as a real subway ride would take.

I’m more interested in that kind of compressed storytelling. In a way I think Maus is an act of compressed storytelling, event though it is about 300 pages. But if I was approaching it with some of the rhythms of other work I’m seeing coming out now, it would have been 1,200 pages. So not everything requires that breadth of paper to make it happen. It seems to me it has uses in terms of marketing. It’s nice to be able to fall into one long work. But in terms of making, it doesn’t necessarily seem like it uses what comics do best.

Q: What do you make of the resurgent interest in comics these days? Do you look around and think “I had a hand in that?”

A: Well sure. I’m proud of that as well. I think it’s great what’s happening because by making that landscape more visible to people and beckoning people towards it, it allows room for all the Johnny Ryans of the world as well. All of the wiseguy cartoonists who are all about shit, piss and id. Their outlaw culture is closer to graffiti than wall art. Bad example because graffiti crossed over, but you know what I mean.

The thing is that can happen once theirs a grid that includes an audience, and this new audience has to come along with the notion that oh, one doesn’t have to cast aside childish things, one can just let those toys grow up as well. That’s a great thing.

On the other hand, my more pessimistic side sees it as one more fad in a medium that has a history of fadness.

Q: That was my next question, do you think it’s sustainable?

A: Well I don’t think it will ever go back to the darkest days of 1980, when there was this total, arid landscape around us. But it will certainly settle down because when you look at it, it’s like the Yellow Kid became a fad, used to sell stuff, seeds to plant, tobacco and whatever. And that encouraged more stuff which soon became, there must have been about 40 different anarchistic kids dynamiting their parents in between 1898 and 1915 or so. It was a fad. And in an ongoing way, each of these landmark strips set off endless things like them. Things that looked like Terry and the Pirates were everywhere after Terry and the Pirates or — this is more scholarly than you need — but when Roy Crane got it going.

But certainly with comic books the same thing happens. After Superman there’s thousands of trannies in the area. And I think in a way the graphic novel’s following in that great tradition. There were horror comics, there were teen comics, now there’s long comics. I think it will all find it’s place eventually, but now at least there’s something happened. Comics won the trifecta.

Q: What do you make of the manga boom? It seems like it’s a part of what you’re talking about and at the same time very separate.

A: Yeah. What I was thinking of was that the trifecta consists of these things that happened but weren’t directly connected simultaneously. The manga boom? My jury is out because I’m not all that interested in — I get restless. I haven’t found a thing that would take me from beginning to end of a long thing happily.

Q: Have you read any of [Osama] Tezuka’s work?

A: Yeah and I like that best. I read the Buddha book and liked it because I was so surprised. It would go from slapstick to philosophy to violence and pathos, careening through. I didn’t know what to make of it because the cultural contexts didn’t make it clear whether that was the norm or this was strictly someone who needed better meds.

I liked the Buddha books. I like some of the Phoenix stuff. The guy I really, really like and would love to read more of in English is this guy named Yoshiharu Tsuge, who we published decades ago. He’s not receptive to the idea of it being translated, so most of its impossible unless you find scantillations, but he’s as good as Tezuka even in the eyes of japanese comics scholars.

Q: He’s the guy who did Screw Style?

A: Yeah. There’s that and then there’s some more autobiographical stuff, some of which came out in Raw. We did one about an electroplate factory and one about a girl’s first menstruation called Flowers. Those have a kind of — they at first seemed decompressed, but then you find out just how amazingly compressed they’ve been, especially the autobiographical stuff. He’s really been great, and at some point some Japanese artist was explaining to me that there’s the two great mountains of manga which Tezuka and Tsuge, even though Tsuge produced a total, he’s almost as unprolific as me by Japanese standards. He only made 800 or 10,000 pages as opposed to Tezuka’s 20 billion.

But I am interested in it. Certainly I’m interested in seeing that here’s something that unlike whatever we call it — art comics, independent comics, underground comics — there’s something else happening here which is comics as real entertainment the way they were when comics were at the center of the media pile. Specifically it was the ones for girls that made it all happen because they were so neglected that they were even willing to read from right to left.

There’s another thing that ties in which is the movies and comics business now. I think there it’s more the content of comics is migrating over to film and its because it’s no longer necessary to draw a person flying if you want to see a person flying. It’s readily available software. In a way the one franchise comics still had back in the '50s is no longer theirs alone. As a result, a lot of comics just seem like storyboards for film projects. It’s not directly connected with the alternative comics or the manga thing but it’s a third way in which comics have entered into high visibility.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right this minute before I go on a book tour that’s making me quake, I’m doing something for McSweeney’s. The people at McSweeney’s wanted to do a more stand-alone version of that sketchbook. They said let’s expand it and I said well, there’s only about two more drawings you didn’t publish, so how do we do that? After a bit of stumbling around what I’m doing is the hardcover edition of that sketchbook plus two other sketchbooks from different periods in their own format and size. They’ll be bundled together with something that looks like a book strap and a booklet about the sketchbooks. There’s one from '79 when I was starting Maus. one from 83 at the height of the Raw years and the one you just saw as a bundle of books and I’m just trying to get it all done before the book tour.

Q: Wow. When’s that coming out?

A: I think as early as February. And it will be called Be a Nose. One book called Be, one book called A, one book called Nose. There’s a movie called Bucket of Blood, a Roger Coreman cheapie horror comedy from about 1960 in which this guy named Walter Paisley who works at a beatnik coffee shop and realizes he’s not getting any of the girls, the painters and poets are. So he tries to be an artist. At the beginning of the movie he’s got this giant lump of clay and he’s pounding at it, trying to make it into something and he’s saying “Be a nose! Be a nose!” and he gets really frustrated and throws the knife he’s working with across the room and it accidentally kills his cat. He puts the cat in plaster and it’s his sculpture. The girls like his sculpture, it’s called “dead cat” and the girl goes "oh, that’s a cool title" and he gets the beatnik girls.

That thing pounding helplessly going "be a nose" is how I feel my creative process works. and the sketchbooks are a doorway into that process.

That’s what I’m working on at this very second. And then a larger scale I’m thinking about, not the content but the way the portrait of the artist section in Breakdowns is made is still interesting to me, so I’m trying to see what I can build with that. That thing of working in short spurts and putting them together later, so that each chunk can be drawn differently and have a different take on something connected to a larger whole.

I’m also working on Meta-Maus which is the Criterion DVD extra disc of Maus, before I finally put all this stuff away — the sketches, transcripts, etc.

Q: Is that actually going to be a DVD?

A: Well there was something that came out back in the day.

Q: I have a copy of that.

A: You can’t play it anymore, right?

Q: No, I don’t have HyperCard anymore.

A: Nobody does and I’m trying to figure out how to — I can’t reconstruct it, it would be too much. I was hoping and some tech people in Vancouver are trying to figure out how to at least make it in its own primitive way functional by mounting the files onto Flash. That would become the disc that would be associated with the book version that would be something similar, like there’s a long interview that will run through as text and then the rough sketches, alternate drafts, notebook drawings that connect to it, historical photos. We’re going through all that stuff before I can finally pull it out of my studio and get new shelf space again. That’s the more selfish motive for it. It’s also so I’ll never have to explain why mice ever again. (laughs).

So there’s that project in the works and then there’s another one which is an outgrowth of finding all these old comics online and looking at them again which is a big treasury of comics for kids. It’s well under way now. I don’t think it’s been publicly announced yet, but we’ll do it with Abrams.

I think that should keep me busy for the next couple of years.

Graphic Lit: Thoughts on the revamped For Better Or For Worse

2008-10-21T13:34:00.003-04:00

What’s my favorite comic strip?

There was a time not long ago when my answer would have been Lynn Johnston’s family saga, “For Better or For Worse.”

Oh, “Peanuts” was always seminal for me, and “Calvin and Hobbes” was certainly the last great strip of the 20th century. But after Schulz’s death and Watterson’s retirement, Johnston stood head and shoulders above the comics page as the last bastion of quality.

That’s not the case now, and it hasn’t been for some time. Johnston’s constant need for overly cute wordplay, not to mention her forcing middle child Elizabeth into a marriage with creepy former sweetheart Anthony, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the funnies at all, you noticed that “For Better or For Worse” came to a close of sorts recently.

After a yearlong series of “will-she/won’t-she” announcements, reversals and decisions, Johnston opted to bring the current story line to an end and has been redrawing and editing older strips, telling the Patterson family’s story all over again.

As creative choices go this seems a bit like regressive second-guessing to me. Revisiting and altering your older work doesn’t necessarily “fix” or “improve” anything, as most “Star Wars” fans would be quick to point out.

And yet, despite all my qualms, it’s worth pointing out just how good the strip has been over its 30-year run. One of the few strips to have its characters age in real time (“Gasoline Alley” being the other notable example), “For Better” offered an honest portrait of day-to-day family life that drew upon universal themes without sacrificing humor in the name of drama. Or vice-versa.

Johnston frequently explored risky or serious topics, the most famous no doubt being Michael’s best friend’s coming out of the closet. But she also addressed spousal abuse, bad love affairs, teen angst and the pitfalls of raising kids, often with insight and great characterization. She seemed to take an impish delight in walking right up to the line but not crossing it, and that delighted me.

But what impressed me most about the strip was its lovely art and attention to detail. In an era when most cartoonists responded to the ever-shrinking news space by minimizing as much as possible (see “Dilbert”), Johnston grew more ornate and detailed.

Her strip frequently became a thinly sliced series of panels, each crammed to the point of overflowing with words and pictures, but never seeming dense or weighed down.

Yes, she could be sappy and saccharin. Yes, her constant need to add a “rim shot” fourth panel often resulted in terrible puns or awful homespun wisdom that wouldn’t make it onto a sub-par throw pillow. Detractors will get no argument from me on that score.

And there are plenty of detractors to go around. In recent years, Web sites like The Comics Curmudgeon have made a veritable career out of poking fun at the strip. There are blogs devoted to “The Foobs” that delight in raking its characters over the coals as often as possible.

Why such ire over a simple comic strip?

Perhaps they sense how good it once was and could still be. Perhaps such snark was born out of frustration over seeing the characters they watched grow up be contorted into awkward and unrealistic relationships for the sake of a pat happy ending. Maybe they just didn’t like the strip.

Despite the awkward note “FBoFW” ended on, and however iffy I feel about this new 2.0 version, I’m grateful to Johnston for 30 years of raising the standards of the comics page (one of the few women to do so, it should be noted). She remains one of the greats.

VG review: Lego Batman

2008-10-15T15:17:00.002-04:00

“LEGO BATMAN”
Warner Brothers, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Wii and PC rated E10+ for ages 10 and up (cartoon violence), $49.99 or $29.99 (PC and PS2).

The developer Traveler’s Tales has obtained a license to print money recently with its “Lego Star Wars” and “Lego Indiana Jones” series of games.

As the titles suggests, the formula is simple: Take a beloved franchise and set it within the Lego universe, blocks and all.

Now it’s attempted to do the same thing with Batman and his cast of Gotham City characters. Overall it’s a fun family game, though some irksome problems appear frequently.

Unlike past Lego games, the story here is original and not based off any movies, though they keep it as simple as possible. To wit, all of Batman’s villains, from the Joker on down, have escaped prison and are on the loose. It’s up to Batman and Robin to put them back behind bars.

The combat is of the button-mashing variety, with little in the way of nuance. The good news is that just about everything in the game can explode in a shower of blocks, from bad guys to park benches. It’s fun to explode everything, but the battles do get repetitive after a few levels.

More problematic though is the level design, which wavers between clever and annoyingly frustrating. Too many times I found myself stuck, unable to figure out what to do next and forced to either seek help online or start over again. Hiding puzzles in plain sight is not good level design. It shows a lack of imagination and leads to irate gamers.

“Lego Batman” is designed for co-op play, and when you’re defeating the Joker with friends or family, the game is a blast. Playing alone, however, is a different matter, as the computer A.I. is staggeringly dense at times, leaving you to do most of the heavy lifting.

Overall, “Lego Batman” has charm and fun to spare, despite its various problems. It’s kid-friendly enough to play with your children and packed with enough extras and surprises to keep you playing despite the occasional hang-up. But it’s definitely one of those games that improves once you have someone to play with.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: Manga for adults

2008-10-14T15:22:00.003-04:00

Glancing at the manga shelves in the local book store, it’s easy to assume that this art form caters exclusively to teens and kiddies.

That would be a mistaken assumption. While the popular stuff does set its sights on the under-18 crowd, there are plenty of high-quality manga available in English that adults can pick up and read with impunity.

For example:

“Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson”
by Akira Hiramoto, Del Rey, 544 pages, $19.95.

About as far from a traditional biography as you can get, Hiramoto’s fictional account of the famous bluesman (who, legend states, sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to play guitar), is more of a phantasmagorical rumination on early 20th century America than anything else.

Thus, we see sharecropper-turned-musician “RJ” meeting up with legendary figures like Clyde Barrow, running into “dry” Southern towns where drinking liquor can get you killed, and literally growing an extra set of fingers on his hand.

Coming from a vastly different culture, Hiramoto’s outsider approach works against him at times (his early attempts at comedy play a little too close to minstrelsy), but his approach to the material is fascinating. He’s also a wonderful storyteller, and the musical and action sequences have a vibrant and compelling potency. You don’t have to be a blues aficionado to appreciate this.

“Disappearance Diary”
by Hideo Azuma, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 200 pages, $22.99.

In 1989, the constant pressure of deadlines became too much for manga-ka Azuma, and he suffered a breakdown, running away from his home and family to live on the streets.

He eventually returned home, only to suffer another breakdown in 1992, this time abandoning his responsibilities to become a gas pipe-fitter. By 1998, his alcoholism became so bad that he was forced to check himself into a rehab clinic.

Azuma chronicles those experiences in “Disappearance Diary.” This is not a mordant, gloomy affair about a man confronting his darker nature, but rather one of the cheeriest stories about homelessness and despondency ever told.

Drawn in a cartoonish style, Azuma refuses to pay heed to despair, cracking jokes and looking on the bright side when possible.

Yet despite the book’s sunny disposition, there’s a melancholy dread at the center that’s impossible to ignore. It’s this constant “push-pull” between the facts of Azuma’s tale and the way he delineates it that makes “Diary” such an amazing book — certainly one of the best I’ve read this year.

“Good-Bye”
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Drawn & Quarterly, 212 pages, $19.95.

This is the third and final volume of Tatsumi’s short stories that D&Q is collecting (though they plan to publish his autobiography at a later date). As with the previous books, these are largely bleak, dour tales of people on the fringes of society. The obsessed, poor, and utterly depressed make up Tatsumi’s world.

“Good-Bye” might well be the best of the three volumes, mainly because in many of the stories Tatsumi connects his characters’ sufferings to larger social and political events, namely the American occupation of Japan and deep poverty the country dealt with after World War II.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

VG review: Rock Band 2

2008-10-08T11:48:00.002-04:00

“ROCK BAND 2”
Electronic Arts, for Xbox 360, rated T for Teen (lyrics, suggestive themes), $59.99 (for game), $89.99 (for drums), $69.99 (for guitar).

“Rock Band 2” is the video game equivalent of a victory lap.

Having established the equation “Guitar Hero” + “more instruments” = “awesome game,” developers Harmonix do little to alter the basic formula this time around, merely finessing and tweaking the overall experience.

As before, you and up to three of your friends form a virtual band, playing with guitar and drum controllers as well as singing along to tunes like “American Woman” and “Pinball Wizard.”

The solo and group modes have been incorporated under the “World Tour” section this time around. What’s nice about that is that you can switch out band members on the fly, so you can progress with the same band regardless of whether you are playing by yourself or with a large group.

The Internet figures big this time around as you can world tour online and join other people’s bands. There’s also a “Battle of the Bands” feature where you can duke it out for musical supremacy via Xbox Live.

While those sections might appeal to the more expert player, there also are a number of features designed to help newcomers. The “Drum Trainer” for example, is designed to show you how to keep the beat (and might help you with real drums). The “No Fail” option, meanwhile, allows kids to play without fear of being booed off stage.

While “Rock Band 2” works well with the first game’s instruments (as well as the “Guitar Hero” ones), EA has made new guitars and drum kit. They’re nice, and much more responsive than the previous iteration, though not so wonderful that you’ll feel like you’re missing out if you stick with your original instruments.

There’s really not much in “Rock Band 2” to make it stand out from its predecessor. But with more than 80 songs and the ability to download more (plus incorporate your songs from the first game for a mere $5 licensing fee), fans will probably be too busy rocking out to complain.

Copyright The Patriot-News

Graphic Lit: The manga of Takehiko Inoue

2008-09-30T13:02:00.003-04:00

Those who work in or follow the American comics industry tend to get all giddy when a particular comic book or graphic novel hits the best-seller list or breaks the 100,000 unit mark in sales.

That’s all chump change to manga artist Takehiko Inoue, whose 31-volume basketball series “Slam Dunk” sold more than 100 million copies in Japan. Let me repeat that for extra emphasis: that’s 100 million copies. It was so popular it not only spawned the usual cartoon shows and films, but single-handedly brought about a huge surge of interest in the sport in Japan.

Now “Slam Dunk” is here in the United States, courtesy of Viz (a previous attempt to publish the series by the late Gutsoon! Entertainment never got very far).

It’s not too hard to see why “Dunk” was such a success. It’s a light-hearted, occasionally hilarious sports story that plays on traditional cliches (likable neophyte becomes enamored with sport and works his way up through the ranks against all odds) while adding enough characterization and plot development to keep from becoming stale.

The story centers on sullen tough guy and high school student Hanamachi Sakuragi, who is so unlucky in love he’d settle for just being able to carry a girl’s books home.

So when cute student Haruko takes an interest in the big lug and asks if he, by any chance, plays basketball, it isn’t too long before Hanamachi finds himself trying out for the school team.

It turns out Hanamachi has a talent for the sport, but he’s more than a little cocky, and he bristles up against the coach (who just happens to be Haruko’s brother) and upcoming star player (who Haruko just happens to have a crush on).

All this could come off as rote and tired, but Inoue infuses the manga with humor and warmth. He gets a lot of mileage by making his characters reasonably flawed.

After finishing “Slam Dunk,” Inoue followed up with two more realistic and adult-oriented series, “Real” and “Vagabond.”

Like “Dunk,” “Real” is a basketball manga, though its tone is much more serious.

The main characters are Nomiya, a goofy high school dropout who feels guilt over a motorcycle accident that left a young woman paralyzed, and Togawa, an angry young man who is confined to a wheelchair after a bout with bone cancer. Though antagonists at first, they bond over their mutual love of basketball.

If all that’s not enough, there’s the subplot involving the jerky basketball team leader whose spur of the moment bicycle theft leads him to become — you guessed it — paralyzed.

Though Inoue’s art is more detailed and realistic here, a lot of the humor has been drained. As a result, “Real” has a pretentious, melodramatic feel that drags it down. Unlike “Dunk,” in “Real” the traditional boys manga cliches tend to overwhelm the work — you can see plot twists coming a mile away. Worse yet, you get the feeling Inoue is taking himself a bit too seriously.

Much better is “Vagabond,” Inoue’s adaptation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel “Musashi,” a fictional biography of Japan’s most renowned samurai, Miyamoto Musashi.

Like “Real,” “Vagabond” is a much more adult and serious manga.

The real draw, however, is Inoue’s art, which is rarely anything less than sumptuous. Though bloody, “Vagabond” has a compelling, elegant feel that draws the reader in. Ultimately, I prefer the visual horseplay of “Slam Dunk,” but “Vagabond” has enough going for it to warrant your attention.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Oh OK, I'll play along

2008-09-29T11:03:00.009-04:00

See here and here for details.

Plain = Things I don't have
Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough
Underline = Do collections count as runs? If so yes, if no no

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s (my mom's cousin has an impressive collection of these though).
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary (It's included in the Binky Brown Sampler, so I feel safe bolding this one).
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On (Of the first run, I only have the Read Yourself Raw collection, but I do have all the later Penguin anthologies).
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics (these are really my daughter's, but she shares).
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums (I'm a Tintin junkie).
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books (Sadly, most of my original collection has gone the way of the dustbin, twas so overread).
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover (I have the book that came with the recent DC exhibition of Steinberg's work, but I don't suppose that really counts).
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel (D&Q's reissue of Laurence Hyde's book makes this one an easier proposition).
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand (and I can stands quite a bit).
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD (I lost most of my old copies of Mad somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, but I still have a few issues filed away here and there).
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics (I've got a few, but not enough to qualify as a "stack").
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself (I had a brief bout with self-publishing. The less said about it, the better).
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible (I've got that book of reprints that Art Spiegelman wrote the intro for, and I think it counts).
47. Some Weirdo ("one" qualifies as "some," right?)
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

From the vault: God Hates Cartoons

2008-09-27T09:29:00.002-04:00

Note: This review originally appeared in issue #252 of the Comics Journal

“God Hates Cartoons
Bright Red Rocket
$25

If I were to tell you about a new comic anthology featuring work by such artists as Tony Millionaire, Sam Henderson, Ivan Brunetti, Kaz, Walt Holcombe and Jim Woodring, no doubt many of you would be quickly updating your Christmas list. If I were to tell you that said artists’ work was featured not in a comic, but in a new collection of animated shorts, just released on DVD, no doubt many more of you would be doubly intrigued, if not reaching for your wallets.

Well, slow down there pardner, put that billfold back in your pocket. The sad truth is that while such a DVD, “God Hates Cartoons from a company called Bright Red Rocket, does indeed exist, the whole is a good deal less than the sum of its parts.

The compendium starts off strong with a particularly funny contribution from Mark Newgarden. “Cartoons and You” is an amusing parody of a public-service announcement, featuring a chirping little doodle that warns us of the dangers of watching too many animated shorts.

The collection quickly deteriorates from there, however, with “My Friend God” a tired superhero parody involving action figures that’s been done to the point where you can see this type of thing on Nickelodeon.

Other, more notable contributions fare little better. By all accounts, Sam Henderson’s “Lonely Robot Duckling” should be a laugh-filled affair. After all, the original material it’s based off of was great. Yet this adaptation comes off as strangely muted. The timing seems off and the pacing is uneven, even though the whole thing only lasts about two minutes. Overall, it feels amateurish in the bad sense of the word, which is odd since it comes from someone who works on SpongeBob SquarePants (there’s Nickelodeon again).

Tony Millionaire’s “Maakies” are short run-and-go segments lifted straight from the strip. While it’s great to see Millionaire’s work in full color, the segments, again, seem stilted and not nearly as manic or funny as the original material.

And so it goes. Even at a little under an hour, “God Hates Cartoons” feels too long. Virtually every contribution comes off slow or awkward, and the variety of sophomoric toilet humor seemed too obvious or trite to garner so much as a guffaw from me (the two Kaz pieces barely even resemble the original strip).

It’s odd perhaps that what I once laughed at on paper somehow seems so humorless when animated. It could be just a result of poor translation, but to some extent I think there are other forces at work here. Just as you can get away with a certain level of violence and satire in a cartoon that you could never do in a film using live actors (at least not without a great deal of difficulty), so too can what seems offensive but funny in a comic strip come off as just offensive in an animated cartoon. There’s something about reading Ivan Brunetti’s “Diaper Dyke and Captain Boyfuck” strips vs. watching the characters move and talk through my TV. Somehow that distance needed to keep that kind of edgy humor alive has been breached and it falls flat.

The only two bright spots in the collection come from Walt Holcombe and Jim Woodring. Holcombe’s “The Courtship of Sniffy LaPants” beautifully captures the blend of melancholy and slapstick familiar to readers of “Poot.” On top of that it’s the best looking of the bunch as well, with wonderfully stylized animation and brilliant use of color. And it’s pretty funny too.

Jim Woodring’s “Whimgrinder,” meanwhile, is everything you’ve come to expect from a “Frank” story. Disturbing, evocative, black humor amidst a surreal and treacherous landscape. Though only a few seconds long and soundless, it manages to do what none of the other cartoons do, leave you wanting more.

Those who purchase DVDs for their extra features will no doubt be doubly disappointed with “God Hates Cartoons” as there are no real special features to speak of, barring some text biographies of the cartoonists involved. Some artists, like Kaz have included slide shows of their various artwork, but by and large it’s a no-frills affair. Would it really have been that difficult to include interviews with the various creators talking about their contributions?

Normally at this point in the review I’d say just rent the damn thing, if for no other reason than to see the Woodring and Holcombe pieces. Yet I doubt whether your local Blockbuster or Hollywood video store will carry such an obscure item. Part of me wants to say just buy the thing anyway, since you’d be showing your support for a number of struggling artists and Bright Red Rocket seems like a nice company that wants to expose people to good work. The fact remains though; that your $25 would be better spent buying up the original comics by these individual authors than on this DVD. So how about this then: If you’ve got everything else by all of these contributors, and you absolutely, positively need to have more, even if it’s not very good stuff, then get this DVD. But only then.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Eddie Campbell

2008-09-22T12:45:00.006-04:00

He’s done historical fiction, horror, superheroes, adventure stories, sly updates on Greek mythology and (most notably) autobiography. But acclaimed artist and author Eddie Campbell has never once written a book about the circus.

Until now. In his latest graphic novel, “The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard,” Campbell, along with co-author Dan Best, details the life and times of Etienne Leotard, nephew of the famous trapeze artist Jules Leotard, whose work he is forced to continue after his uncle’s untimely death.

It’s a delightful lark of a book, silly and sly while also sincere and moving at times, with Etienne stumbling into one major event after another without ever attaining true fame.

I talked to Campbell while he was in New York City promoting “Leotard.” Here’s what he had to say about the book.

Q: How’s the tour going?

A: It’s exhausting but I’m almost done. I’m at that stage where I’m washing socks in the hotel sink. (laughs) I think one more pair of socks will get me through till Sunday when I’m home with my parents.

Q: How did the concept for Leotard come about?

A: I almost can’t remember where I read this because you never realize the moment of inspiration when it actually happens in retrospect. It’s something that Will Eisner said and therefore I can’t remember where he said it or even if was actually him that said it or Michael Chabon, but he said that all the characters in modern comic books have their antecedents, their prototypes, in the old circus.

I gave this a test, let’s say the Fantastic Four. Obviously that would be India rubber man, the fire breather, the strong man and the girl who disappears in the magician’s cabinet. And all the mutants would be the sideshow freaks. You see what I mean?

There’s a certain type that interests me. Do you remember in the 1940s they started giving the heroes all got to have a midget as a sidekick?

Q: Yeah, like Green Lantern with —

A: Doiby Dickels. He’s my favorite. Or Plastic Man had Woozy Winks. And the Spirit had Ebony White. So my guy Leotard has this midget clown called Zany that follows him around everywhere as his sidekick.

Have you seen the book?

Q: Yeah. I got it twice actually. I just finished reading the color one last night. I had gotten a black and white version earlier.

A: I was annoyed at them for doing that because if ever there was a book that had to be seen in color it’s this one. It’s full of bogus circus posters using the typography of 19th-century circus posters. Every few pages the narrative is carried forward by a double page spread circus poster.

Q: Yeah, the full-color version definitely improves the reading experience.

A: I’m glad you saw that then. I was annoyed with them.

Q: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like starting with Fate of the Artist you’ve been doing more watercolor work.

A: The first opportunity I had to do that was with the Batman book, “The Order of Beasts.” I remember we sold them the script first and then I thought “right now I’ll approach the subject.” I said to Joey Cavalieri, “Now I’d like to draw it myself,” and he said “Oh.” He did a double-take. He couldn’t see my style in a Batman comic. I pointed out I had drawn eight pages of the X-Men.

I said to Joey “And I’d like to paint it.” And he said “Oh, hold on, we can’t do that. It’s too expensive.”

“No, no. You just give me what you’d give a guy for penciling, inking and coloring it and I’ll give you the whole package all on a disk, all ready. I’ll even put the lettering on." Which we did. We packaged the whole thing in house. They just had to stick a cover on.

Q: What does doing that give you, particularly on a book like Leotard, that using another method wouldn’t?

A: I never really used computer coloring, although I told a lie in that Publishers Weekly interview. Actually I told six lies. The interviewer didn’t seem to know who I was. So I thought “I’ll just lie” and I invented a complete fabric of fictions.

I have to put on a different hat when I try to draw in black and white. I’ve always wanted to paint a whole book and never got the chance until just recently. Since 2004 I’ve done a color job once a year. I just love it. I love to throw the colors around and mix them up. The computer guys, they just throw in one flat color and then muddle it. They have to cause they don’t know what else to do. It’s all purple and blacks in the comic books these days.

Every book should have a different color, a different personality. Int he Black Diamond Detective Agency last year, that was all greens and ochers with an occasional outburst of crimson. That was its color character. This one I wanted to have all the primary colors with the lithographic posters of the period.

Q: Speaking of purple you’ve got that beautiful two-page sequence where —

A: Oh yeah, that’s pure purple. That’s deep. The purple of a mystical midnight.

Q: How did you end up working with Dan Best on the project?

A: Dan’s a lawyer by day. There’s a bunch of chartered accountants and lawyers I meet for lunch once a week. All my pals wear suits and ties. They’re comic book enthusiasts. In fact they’ve all ended up doing comic books on the side. One of them commented recently, "How do you get into comics? Well, the quickest way is to buy Eddie Campbell a drink.”

The idea started as that abstract Will Eisner observation. He had the idea that this could be a book and started finding characters. We had already had the idea for a book that would span the late 19th century. We could have characters Forrest Gump-ing their way through the great historical moments from the siege of Paris to the sinking of the Titanic. There’s a 50-year span there and we find this guy Jules Leotard, who was the original "Man on the Flying Trapeze." They wrote the song about him. He’s not named in the song, but he was the inspiration.

He was the Elvis of his day. He was a handsome man and loved by the ladies. He was the first man to wear the tight-fitting costume in a circus act. And he filled it very well apparently. It later became named after him, the leotard.

But for our purposes, he died at the early age of 28 in 1868 of smallpox. He was like the James Dean of his time. But he was of no use to us. So our conceit is that he dies on page 12 and the book is about his much less interesting nephew. And there’s another tie-in to the modern superhero, it’s a man with a secret identity. He’s got a false mustache and pretends to be the great circus star Leotard.

Q: Is there any basis in fact for the nephew?

A: No, we had to make him up. He was an act of desperation.

Q: Can you give me a blow-by-blow account of how the two of you worked on the book?

A: Dan would just keep supplying me with stuff, pages and pages of characters and directions. I told him at the beginning he was going to have to do it on a page by page basis because I could change the direction of the thing at any moment. He wasn’t to write to far ahead in case I derailed the thing and went off at an angle.

For instance, not being a comics writer of long experience he tended to write dialogue that was too much. And I was shortening it and selecting from it and using the bits I needed. So that I’d used up all the material at one point, far ahead of when I was supposed to.

We had 10 years we had to fill to the next important episode and I thought what are we going to do. That’s when we had the idea of having him go to sleep. He tucks himself into bed and then he wakes up 10 years later like some Rip Van Winkle. Suddenly he’s got Grey hair. That was one way of jumping the 10 years. But that’s how it came about. It was just a humorous solution to the fact that I’d used up all the material.

Q: You’ve done a lot of collaboration but you’re equally well known for working alone on things like the Alec series. Do you have a preference?

A: It varies. I like working with fresh ideas that don’t come naturally to me. I enjoyed doing the "Black Diamond Detective Agency" even though it was kind of an odd thing for me to be doing. It’s an odd book altogether. It’s not quite a Western. I call it a mid-Western. It does take place in Chicago.

I do like the challenge, although I consider my core work, my pure work to be my autobiographical work. That’s the work I’d like to be remembered for. “And he also did these other things.” In fact, I’m hoping to be taking that work to another level over the next year because I’ve got a TV show in development.

Q: I heard about that.

A: Has that gone all around the Internet while I’ve been traveling?

Q: Yeah.

A: I haven’t had a chance to get online in days. A couple of producers came to me. They wanted to adapt The Fate of the Artist.” I think they’d seen American Splendor and said "This is great. We should do something like this.” I think they started to see a way of developing the idea further, of adding to it or expanding it. They just needed something to work with.

So they came to me with the idea of optioning "Fate" and I said “Well, I’ve got all these other books too.” They were overjoyed at this huge fount of material to work with. They had originally approached a network -- I can’t name it, it’s not far enough long yet where they’re comfortable with me giving names -- but they approached the network with a plan.

It was originally only going to be these little five-minute things. The network said "This is great material. This is worth the full treatment." So we’re writing it up as a series of eight half-hour shows. It’s going to be a big thing. We’re in development, which means we’ve raised funding to come up with a script, casting, costing and a synopsis for the whole series. I don’t know how far ahead they are because I’ve been on the road for a few weeks. I’m hoping in a couple of months we’ll be green lit and get into production, but you know how these things go. But it’s kind of exciting. That’s what I really want to be working on.

In line with that we’re bringing out the Alec Omnibus.

Q: When is that coming out?

A: That’s definitely coming out next year. It’s all finished except for a couple of pages that I have to fill in. But it’s going to be 640 pages. It’s everything except "Fate of the Artist" which is in color and with another publisher.

Q: So it’s everything up to "After the Snooter?"

A: Yes, except I’ve added a 35-page book at the end that brings it bang up to date. I’ve got the "History of Humor" in there as well.

Q: Are the small books like "Graffiti Kitchen" —

A: They’re all in there. And they’re in chronological order so you can see everybody growing up like in "Gasoline Alley." You can see the kids growing up year by year.

Q: And Top Shelf is putting that out?

A Yeah. I’m excited about that. We’re calling it the "Alec Omnibus," but we want to see what title the TV show ends up with because it’s got three or four titles right now. It would be great if we could have the book tie in somehow.

Q: Well it seems like every big book that comes out is an Omnibus now.

A: Or what is that Sandman book called. Ultimate?

Q: Absolute. The Absolute Alec.

A: That’s why the first one was called the Complete Alec. It wasn’t that it was actually complete. It was more like, you know how you say “He’s a complete idiot?” (laughter) He’s an absolute fool. I’ll pass that along to the editors.

Q: Getting back to Leotard for a minute, it’s striking how experimental it is. You do a lot of breaking the fourth wall, you put a lot of stuff in the marginalia. You’ve got this four-panel grid structure and then you mess with it as much as possible, depending on the situation. Can you talk about some of the choices you made as opposed to doing a more straightforward narrative?

A: I’d been wanting to do something with — I’ve talked about the uses of the margins in medieval manuscripts in "The History of Humor." Michael Camille, the writer on medieval art had died at the young age of 49 a few years ago. A very insightful academic. But he had an idea in explaining marginalia because why are these grotesques and ugly things and obscenities going on in the margins of these holy books? What’s going on there, what’s the point?

He had an idea that the page is the universe and at the center is everything that’s good and holy. Evil is on the fringes, on the outside. That’s why you have the gargoyles on medieval churches. They’re on the outside. The worst thing you could be in those days was outside the church. To be excluded or pushed to the fringes. The page as a representation as everything.

I decided to try and use that so that in my book life is in the middle and the margin is outside. It’s a symbolic commentary on life or footnotes or the author can be in the margin. Characters once they’ve died can have a life in the margin. They can pop up there to make commentary or get messages to the living. By the time this book has finished all the characters have ended up in the margins. There’s nothing going on in the center. Everyone’s in the margins talking amongst themselves. That was the idea behind it.
Q: You also do some things with your two page spreads like using the music sheets in the beginning or the two-panel watercolor done in the childish style. You break up the basic structure like the newspaper article on Zany.

A: This was fun. This is a real book of fun. It’s a book of novelty and conundrum and imaginative diversions. One of me first reviewers said it was so diverse it wasn’t a story. That struck me as an odd comment.

Q: You mention how Etienne is the lesser nephew and it struck me that despite all his fantastic adventures, he never attains any success or happiness.

A: He’s an everyman. He’s a lovable everyman. And yet he’s loved. The point was he was loved by those around him whereas Leotard — nobody cheered when they realized he was still alive. Until they saw it was Etienne. Leotard’s the famous one, but they held him in suspicion and disregard.

Q: There’s definitely a theme of community or family that runs through the book. Is that something you consciously wanted to explore?

A: Yeah. I wanted to create a lovable book. Having made books like From Hell, which are terrifying and frightening. I wanted to do a book without being sentimental, that would be warm and enduring without being syrupy and saccharine.

Q: At the same time there’s a sorrowful thread that runs through the book.

A: There’s a melancholy, yeah. There’s a melancholy glee through the whole thing.

Q: They board that ship to rescue Zany and of course with their luck it happens to be the Titanic. They have no luck at all. They can’t catch a break (laughter). Is that something you were aware of as well, or was it simply putting the characters through their paces?

A: There’s a theme I always come back to in my work, the theme of fate that no matter what we do we’re screwed. That’s one of the overriding themes in my work. The idea behind "Fate of the Artist" is that I’ve never met an artist or read about an artist that ended up happy. Everyone ends up disgruntled and pissed off.

Q: A lot of your works, especially recently, have focused on the late 19th, early 20th century. Is there something about that time period that fascinates you.

A: No, it doesn’t really. The one thing I’ve never done is the future. I did an Escapist story set in 1939. There was a Batman story set in '39. From Hell was in the 1890s. And of course Leotards in the 19th century. I think once you’ve done it once, people come to you with those ideas. You tend to gravitate one way without having made a plan or a decision to do so. it’s like the characters in Leotard. They don’t seem to make decisions and see them through. They just get dragged along by an uncaring fate as we were saying a minute ago.

It’s not something I set out to do. I don’t have a master plan where I want to write world history or something. One of my favorite subject of reading is artistic biography, so I’m always reading about the past, whether it’s medieval manuscripts or 19th-century French art. My mind is always prying and perambulating and peregrinating around the past so I suppose I’m bound to pick up story ideas while I’m there.

Q: I was just wondering if there was something about that particular period of time versus say the medieval era —
A: I’d much rather be writing about the modern day. What’s happening here and now is what I think I am writing about. I regard these things set in the past as momentary diversions. I suppose to my readers that’s what I do, draw the past.

Q: Does that bother you? Do you worry about being typecast as the historical fiction guy?

A: No, just so long as they don’t forget me. (laughter) As long as I’m remembered for something.

Q: You’ve worked in a number of genres. Is there any type you haven’t worked on yet that you’d like to?

A: No. I absolutely can’t think of any. It’s odd that I end up doing crime and detective stories a lot. From Hell and Black Diamond. The one thing I don’t like is horror. I don’t know why I ended up doing Jack the Ripper. The reason I think it worked is that it wasn’t drawn by a horror artist. If Bernie Wrightson had drawn that it would have been filled with macabre glee. He loves drawing gas lamps and fog and evil things lurking in street corners. I think "From Hell" worked because it was so mundane. There was no sense of it being in a horror film word where everything is dripping with evil. It was run of the mill workaday life in Victorian England.

I don’t think in terms of genre. I always like to think I was existing outside the world of genre. I would never want to be thought of as a genre writer or artist. I’d rather be somebody who told the world something about life and the way we live it whether it’s in the past present or future. A non-genre if you like.

Q: Did Leotard offer any sort of specific challenges different than your past work?

A: The scale of it. In my autobiographical work I’m drawing people in rooms or bars. There’s a human scale even with from hell. Drawing large scale disasters like the sinking of the Titanic terrified me at first. It’s something outside of my range. I had to think hard about how I was putting that one over.

Q: I liked how you had it as a page from his diary.

A: (laughs) I’d like to have done the whole book as his diary. That was the most enjoyable part. The fact that his diary is such a mess because the footnote keeps telling us that it got waterlogged. But it didn’t get waterlogged at the sinking of the Titanic. What the hell’s waiting up down the line?

Q: What about the idea of the circus as a metaphor for life?

A: You could be right. Even when I was doing this book, I wasn’t particularly interested in the circus. For instance at no point do you ever see how a trapeze works or how a tent is put up or the grubby goings on behind the scenes that is supposed to be the life of a circus. Carny folk. You don’t get any of that in my book. My book is really not about that, which I think you’ve kind of picked up on.

I was more interested in circus posters. I wasn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of real circus or whether they were likeable folk or washed very often. I didn’t care. The glossy presentation to the world or the pleasing and entertaining image of the circus. I wasn’t interested in looking behind the facade. I think in a sense you’re right. To me the whole thing was a metaphor for something else.

Q: You mention the TV show and the upcoming Alec Omnibus. Do you have any other irons in the fire?

A: No, that’s enough to keep me going.

Q: You mention in the PWCW interview you had a book that no one wanted to publish.

A: Oh, I forgot to mention that. I’ve got a book which — it’s actually finished. It’s my next color book. It’s called “The Playwright.” It’s about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man. I can’t find a publisher that will touch it.

Q: First Second doesn’t want it?

A: It’s kind of outside of their range. I haven't even showed it to them actually. They’re tending mostly to kids books. I don’t think they want to go that way. I don’t think it would be a home for this book. I think Leotard will be good for them because it kind of looks like a kids book on the outside. I just hope they still think that even by the time they get to the bearded pirate.

Q: I think they’re trying to bridge the gap. I think they’ve had the greatest success with their younger books but I think they’re trying to have a foot in the other camp as well.

A: I worry that the whole market is perceived as for kids all over again. The whole thing seems to be obsessed with young readers. I’ve never even heard the expression young readers until the last couple of years but I’ve been offered gigs by two different book illustrating scripts by young reader authors that I’ve never heard of before. What’s going on here?

Q: There’s a lot of jumping on bandwagons, and with the manga craze publishers are looking for a quick graphic novel they can put out. What’s easier than taking an established book and get someone to do a comic version of it?

A: The problem is we’re back to where we started. 30 years ago it was the comic book has grown up and we call it the graphic novel. Last month I read in the Christian Science Monitor, the graphic novel has grown up. We’re back where we started!
Q: I have noticed there’s been a resurgence in deliberately making comics for kids. The difference I suppose is now you’ve got educators wanting to make comics for kids.

A: I think that’s a perfectly good thing, I just feel like I’m getting pushed to the fringes again. I spent all me life on the fringes and now I’m getting pushed back out there. That’s my worry at the moment. As I say I’m having trouble pitching this book around. A few places, they won’t touch it. It’s full of masturbation.

Q: I’d think Top Shelf would want that.

A: It might be Knockabout or Top Shelf. That looks like the way it’s going. I was hoping to get an advance offer from somebody.

Q: Do you miss the days of self-publishing?

A: I got out of it because it became too complicated. Once you’re dealing with the book trade you’re dealing with returns, and stuff like that. When it was just printing comic books monthly, you got the order, you printed what you needed, that’s the end of it. Now it’s all complicated. It’s returns and remainders. It’s another world. We always wanted to bridge that gap or make that interface between the comic book world and the book world but it brings up so many complications it’s too much for one guy. You need more diverse expertise. It’s too much for a one-man operation.

From the vault: The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby

2008-09-21T21:10:00.002-04:00

Note: This review originally appeared in issue #263 of The Comics Journal

“The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby: The First Graphic Novel”
By Dav Pilkey
Scholastic Press $4.99

Why oh why oh why can’t more children’s comics – hell, more comics in general – be as witty, off-the-wall and as gloriously silly as this slight little book? Yes, it’s yet another superhero parody, and yes, as you’ve no doubt guessed from the title, it’s filled with the sort of scatological humor that seems to pervade every aspect of the entertainment world these days until the lowest common denominator has hit negative numbers. And yes, some of the jokes are on the same level as the Bennett Cerf riddle books you used to own as a child (only about poop). So what? “Super Diaper Baby” (a phrase I never thought I’d write in a review) is so thoroughly charming, so cheerfully offensive, so delightfully childish that only the most tight-lipped, blue-nosed, knee-jerk reactionary would be completely immune to its appeal.

Anyone with a child between the ages of nine and 12 (or even a casual interest in kids’ books) should be familiar with Dav Pilkey, as he is the creator of the immensely popular Captain Underpants series. In this spin-off comic, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, two holdovers from the Underpants books, pen the origin of Super Diaper Baby in an ultimately futile attempt to get out of their detention homework. Their story within the story, meanwhile, tells of . . . well, suffice it to say there’s this baby who gains super powers. His nemesis is Deputy Dangerous, who accidentally gets turned into fecal matter. And then there’s Deputy’s sidekick, Danger Dog, who’s just into the whole evil thing for the kibbles. He ends up getting super powers too, and . . . OK, I’m going to stop now.

The Captain Underpants series has dabbled in comics before, but only as short interludes to the main story. This is (as far as I can tell) Pilkey’s first full-length attempt at comics, and he does a good job keeping the action and the humor moving along at a brisk pace. No one would ever confuse his work with Chris Ware, or even Carl Barks, but that’s sorta the point. Since the book is supposed to be drawn by two grade school kids, Pilkey adopts a crude style, but he uses it to his advantage, parodying the inexpressive anatomy and simplistic features you see so often in children’s art. He also pokes fun at their desire when telling stories to get to the good parts and avoid the smaller details that often aid in the telling. (“Deputy Dangerous and Danger Dog went straight to jail. But then they escaped.”) Even though he’s obviously a better artist than the average nine-year-old is, “Super Diaper Baby” feels like kids drew it, perhaps the best compliment I can give Pilkey.

No doubt there are plenty of parents and other adult figures out there that will boycott a book like this based on its content alone. Some might even object to the frequent and deliberate misspellings in the book, fearful that it would encourage bad penmanship from its readers. That’s a shame since the idea of a villain made out of poop is more offensive and disgusting than anything Pilkey does with the concept. And I’d like to think that most young readers would know that you don’t spell pursuit with two “o”s.

The fact is, “Super Diaper Baby” is too eager to please, too busy taking delight in its own impishness to be agitated by it. The book has a manic energy, a spark of goofy joy that puts it high above most of the comics I’ve read this year in terms of pure reading pleasure. And then there’s the fact that it’s really funny. Besides, any comic that contains the phrase “Don’t forget to boycott standardized testing” has already gone a long way to winning me over.

From the vault: Cancer Vixen

2008-09-19T08:05:00.002-04:00

Note: this review originally ran in issue #283 of the Comics Journal

Cancer Vixen
By Marisa Acocella Marchetto
Knopf 226 pages, $22 Color, hardcover

Giving the thumbs down to a book like “Cancer Vixen” seems like the critic’s equivalent of kicking puppies or pushing an old lady down the steps. The woman’s a cancer survivor for God’s sake! How can you possibly say mean things about her book in print? The fact remains however, that “Cancer Vixen,” while far from awful, just isn’t very good.

Whenever author Marchetto delves into the nitty gritty of her cancer treatment, she’s on target. She’s got a strong eye for detail, and including things like the fact that the nurses ask your age every time you go in for chemo give the book an intimate feel that helps glide over some of the book’s rough spots.

It’s when she makes a stab at profundity, however, that she fails miserably. Musings like “When you light a candle you illuminate a soul” are asinine when found in a fortune cookie, never mind a graphic novel. And the book has a lot of these moments.

Credit must be given to Marchetto’s willingness to use visual metaphor and play with the panels in order to get her points across. Rather than attempt a straightforward, dry account of her illness, she keeps morphing her images and layout to keep the reader’s eye moving across the page.

The problem is she constantly relies upon the most banal and obvious metaphors to get her points across. Cancer cells are portrayed as frowny faces. Gossipy people are drawn as literally sour grapes. Angry people have nuclear reactors for heads. Even the Grim Reaper puts in an appearance.

Ultimately, “Cancer Vixen” just doesn’t offer enough insight or nuance to push it above the heads of the dozens of other books out there, comics and otherwise, that deal with this type of subject matter. No doubt those who are suffering from this disease will be able to take some comfort from Marchetto’s story. But that in and of itself doesn’t make the book one for the ages. We all share our stories of suffering with those who can relate. We just don’t always publish them.

Graphic Lit: Two 9/11 books

2008-09-16T16:11:00.003-04:00

As you no doubt already know, last week was the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Certainly the media have been well aware of the date, as there have been several news stories and nonfiction books published about the event and its aftermath.

Comic publishers have been busy as well. Two new graphic novels — “After 9/11: America’s War on Terror” and “American Widow” — have hit stores in recent weeks.

“After 9/11” by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon is a sequel of sorts to their previous “9/11 Report,” a best-selling adaptation of the 9/11 Commission’s report.

As ambitious as that book was, “After 9/11” is even more so, attempting to provide a detailed timeline of the events that occurred in the years after the attacks, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the investigation into the attacks.

Lest there be any doubt as to the author’s stance on the current administration’s handling of these affairs, they open with a pointed 1994 quote by Dick Cheney, citing the “quagmire” that would occur if the U.S. were to invade Iraq.

Jacobson and Colon’s thesis is simple: The war in Iraq was a needless, trumped-up military exercise that has ruined countless lives, cost us our good reputation abroad and potentially created more terrorists than it stopped.

Unfortunately, the authors muddy the waters considerably.

This is an extremely dense book, packed with names, dates and places, and the inclusion of events such as the Space Shuttle disaster — no doubt included to provide some extra context — only make the book needlessly complicated.

There’s also overreliance on talking heads, especially toward the end of the book, where Colon seems to have discovered PhotoShop, altering photos of world leaders so they look more “drawn.” It’s rather ugly and suggests nothing so much as desperation under a tight deadline.

“After 9/11” is useful as a quick chronological reference of recent events, but it fails on many levels as any sort of narrative art.

“American Widow,” on the other hand, aims to tell a more personal story, namely that of author Alison Torres, whose husband perished in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

The book chronicles the following year, as Torres’ attempts to console herself while dealing with the birth of her son, a mound of paper work, unhelpful Red Cross volunteers and the prying media.

Unfortunately, it’s an even less cohesive book than “After 9/11.”

While, to its credit, “Widow” never dissolves into self-pity or solipsism, details often are fuzzy and vague.

Artist Sungyoon Choi’s drawings are nondescript, so there’s no real sense of place. And the narrative jumps around from moment to moment and back and forth in time so often that I found myself frequently lost.

At one point, for example, Torres is given a “family tour” of the disaster and debris sites, but no real explanation is given as to why. A bit more background would have been helpful.

The book is at its best when Torres confronts the red tape apparently given to victims of the disaster.

If she had been as equally detailed in discussing her relationship with her newborn son, late husband and other important people in her family, “American Widow” would have been much better.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

VG review: "Civilization Revolution"

2008-09-12T14:52:00.004-04:00

"SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION REVOLUTION"
2K Games, for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS, rated E10+ for ages 10 and up (alcohol and tobacco reference, mild suggestive themes, violence), $59.99 and $29.99.

I've always been a sucker for strategy games, especially the kind where you're creating and controlling vast cultures, amassing armies and in general playing the role of some omnipotent demigod.

I can, for example, easily (and not necessarily fondly) recall the hours I frittered away playing "Civilization II" on my old Mac, tirelessly building and rebuilding empires.

The game has re-entered my life in the form of "Civilization Revolution," all gussied up for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (and, to a lesser extent, the Nintendo DS).

God games (as titles are referred to) are usually regarded as PC, only their menus and controls are too complicated for console users.

"Revolution" proves that ain't necessarily so. Though stripped down a bit, the game's controls are intuitive and simple, and the tutorial does a splendid job of showing you how to manipulate your various resources.

The game is similar to past entries in the "Civ" franchise. Taking turns with other players (either computer-based or human), you pick from a variety of cultures from Zulu to Japanese. You then go about building a city, raising armies and warriors, garnering knowledge and expanding your empire.

There are several different ways to win, from military might to being the first to explore outer space. You can even win a "cultural victory" by building things like the Great Wall of China or getting famous people like Albert Einstein to settle in your cities.

Diplomacy is tremendously important in a game like this, especially on the harder levels, In fact, I found every level beyond beginner to be surprisingly tough and full of world leaders eager to crush my forces.

Though missing some of the complexity of the PC versions and seeming a bit unbalanced at times (especially in the diplomacy department) I found myself once again completely engrossed and saying "just one more turn" well into the wee hours of the night. Such is the cost of being a demigod.

Graphic Lit: The Victorian Horrors of Old Mauch Chunk

2008-09-10T13:39:00.003-04:00

Having grown up in the environs of Jim Thorpe -- or Mauch Chunk as it was known back in the day -- Michael Bann and Robert Caton have always been fascinated by the area's sense of history and Victorian architecture.

"The town has always held a certain allure, probably because of the geography of the landscape," said Bann, a photographer now based in Washington, D.C. "It just had this power to evoke a lot of imagination. I thought this would make a great setting for a story."

The pair attempt to capture that allure in "The Victorian Horrors of Old Mauch Chunk" a new self-published comic book series plotted by Bann and Caton, with dialogue by Caton and art by Singapore artist Allan Gallo.

Set in the 19th-century heyday of the coal barons, the comic opens with a group of miners discovering a mysterious cave that comes complete with some odd-looking crystals. Enter young geologist James Ashton, who is hired by the mining company to investigate, only to be greeted with dire warnings and ominous happenings.

Caton, now of Mechanicsburg, said the series will combine traditional supernatural horror elements with real-life historical characters and events like the Molly Maguires.

Ultimately, he said, the book is about the transition of power and technology as America moved forward from the industrial age into the early 20th century.

"For every new power there's an old power that's not going to give up easy. The older power wants to hang on to things. The old folks gotta step aside, no matter how reluctantly, to cede power," Caton said of the book's themes. "It's a battle for control of a new century."

Although Bann originally planned to present the material as a novel, he says there are some unique and helpful benefits to producing the work as a serialized comic.

"There are a number of ways we can test it as we go," he said. "We can adapt. There are things you can learn as you get an issue out that helps you better present the story."

Caton concurred. "The power that the medium has in telling a story from multiple perspectives and timelines is unmatched," he said.

Both Bann and Caton are serious about playing up the Pennsylvania angle, even printing the comic and several marketing materials via a Harrisburg company.

"We have a home-team mentality. We want to give back to the community," Bann said.

To that extent, the duo paired with a number of Jim Thorpe businesses (ads for various stores and restaurants dot the inside pages), the most notable being an online contest in which participants can win a weekend for two that includes lodging at a bed and breakfast, a private tour of the Asa Packer Mansion and dinner at a restaurant.

Bann and Caton said the current story will run about 10 to 12 issues then be collected in a trade paperback, though they have lots of ideas to continue the series.

"The town has so many more places to go, so many people that need to have their stories heard," Caton said

More than anything, though, Bann and Caton hope the book draws more attention to Carbon County and its unique attractions.

"Hopefully the book will inspire people to go to the town and learn some stuff on their own," Caton said.

From the vault: Penny Arcade

2008-09-04T11:56:00.003-04:00

Note: This review originally appeared in issue #276 of the Comics Journal.

Penny Arcade: Attack of the Bacon Robots!
By Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
Dark Horse Comics
$12.95.

In the world of Webcomics, Penny Arcade is the shining city on a hill. How many aspiring cartoonists, online or off, can boast the sort of devoted following that writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik have been able to garner? How many Webcomics not only are financially viable but can boast 2 million visitors in one day? How many strips are popular enough to create their own three-day festival that attracts upwards of 9,000 people? Not to mention a yearly holiday charity drive that nets thousands of dollars in toys and other materials for children’s hospitals across the U.S.? I’m wracking my brains and PA is the only strip that has the same sort of devoted following.

A good deal of the strip’s popularity is due to their laser-like focus on video games and the video game industry. As a sort of tri-weekly editorial cartoon of gaming culture, PA has attracted a number of people who are more interested in the specific content than the format. In other words, the gamer geeks who follow the strip for the funny references on “Metal Gear Solid” and Lionhead Studios aren’t necessarily interested in or even aware of “Acme Novelty Library,” much less “Bone.” That’s not true of every single PA fan of course, but I think it’s safe to say that most readers aren’t necessarily devotees of the art form.

Now, at what may be the peak of their popularity, Dark Horse has seen fit to collect a number of initial Penny Arcade strips into one, actual, physical, softbound book, “Attack of the Bacon Robots.” When first published in January, the book sold of its entire 30,000 print run in less than two weeks, again, testifying to the strip’s popularity.

Rather than attempt to cull through the years and compile a “best of” collection, Holkins and Krahulik decided instead to run the strip in chronological order, so that “Attack” (a title which has absolutely nothing to do with the contents inside by the way) covers the period from November 1998, when the strip started, to December 2000.

I’m not sure that was a very good idea, as the strips collected here fail on any number of levels to entertain. This is early, awkward work and not really representative of where the strip is now. If the reason for this book is so Luddites can discover what they’ve been missing, they may ultimately decide they haven’t been missing much.

For those of you not in the know, Penny Arcade deals with two main characters, Tycho and Gabe, who serve as stand-ins of sorts for Holkins and Krahulik (though they don’t look anything like their cartoon counterparts). There are a number of supporting players, including neighbors, wives, second bananas and an angry, alcoholic DIVX machine, but they serve mainly as window dressing or to offer a not-too subtle punchline. This is Tycho and Gabe’s show all the way.

In fact, there rarely is any sort of ongoing plot or continuity in Penny Arcade. Characters frequently die only to pop back up again a few weeks later. Tycho and Gabe are never really developed in any significant way beyond the two-dimensional wiseacres they were designed to be. This is strictly a “get in, get out, three panels and you’re done” comic strip, with nothing extraneous to get in the way of the humor. It’s not character-based like Scott Kurtz’s “PVP,” another popular game-themed strip is. Its sole job is to alternatively ridicule and laud various games and the people who make and play them.

Penny Arcade thrives on anger and antagonism. Violence is its central means of sustenence. Virtually every strip involves someone being maimed, beaten, injured or hurt in some fashion, if not outright killed. Threats are frequently thrown around like so many penny candies at a Fourth of July parade. There is no situation, no set up, and no punch line that isn’t enhanced with someone’s blood or pain. And when they aren’t, there’s lots of good-natured snark to go around.

Oftentimes this in-your-face hostility is quite funny, but it’s so frequent that as a reader I start to wonder if Holkins and Krahulik area just a wee bit defensive about their love for their particular hobby, so much so that they overcompensate in the strip by presenting a faux sort of manly aggression, complete with ironic distance.

The strip, as you may suspect, is entirely dependent upon your knowledge of video games, the more extensive the better. Never heard of Battle Arena Toshiden? Too bad for you. Even with extensive game knowledge, though, you might have trouble. I remember Chu Chu Rocket for the Dreamcast, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly what the particular strip in “Bacon Robots” is trying to say.

Each strip in “Bacon Robots” comes with its own flavorful commentary from Holkins, further underscoring the point for me how much I hate strip collections with commentary from the author. In general these types of annotations are very useful, and Holkins’ is no exception. What I find astonishing is that he had a great opportunity to offer some insight on some of the more dated strips. A few sentences explaining what say, “Soul Reaver” was might have gone a long way to uncovering the humor in jokes that have long since passed their sell by date. But no, instead we get useless blather. A note to all strip cartoonists compiling their work into book form: unless you’re Bill Watterson, Charles Schulz or Gary Larson, let’s just avoid commenting on every single strip you ever made. Use the extra space to add more strips, lower the page count and drive the price of the book down, OK?

I’ve been quite harsh here in my assessment of the “Bacon Robots,” but the fact is, Penny Arcade is frequently quite funny, at least these days. As the cover art for the book suggests, they got a lot better. The strips signal to noise ratio is much higher now than it has ever been (though it’s still pretty low if you don’t follow video games). Much, much better, funnier material awaits future collections, which is where I would recommend most PA newbies go to slake their curiosity.

Or you could just go read it all online for free.

From the vault: Comic Book Holocaust

2008-09-02T08:26:00.004-04:00

Note: This review originally appeared in issue #283 of The Comics Journal

As the title implies, “Comic Book Holocaust” is not a friendly, warm little book. It doesn’t want your love, nor your respect. The only thing it demands is your laughter, and it’s willing to debase itself in the most thoroughly degrading and offensive ways to ensure that you do so.

Good thing the book’s actually funny then, ‘cause it would really be kind of pathetic and just plain disgusting if it wasn’t.

The book collects a number of sketchbook strips Johnny Ryan did (in between bouts of Angry Youth Comics no doubt) parodying an assortment of revered funny book characters, from Beetle Bailey to Harvey Pekar and anything in between. Each strip only lasts for one page and are exactly 12 panels long. And in those panels some of the lowest sort of gross-out humor occurs, usually involving sex organs, fecal matter, vomit and various others sorts of unpleasantries.

There’s no comics cow so revered that Ryan isn’t willing to grind it up into hamburger. Linus, for example, smacks Charlie Brown with his balls. Joe Sacco interviews just his. Krazy Kat builds a concentration camp. And Chris Ware ends up digging through Mort Walker’s soiled garbage. No one is safe from his shit- and semen-stained rampage.

Ryan obviously takes great pleasure in being obscene and shocking as possible. And if that was all there was to the book, then you could pass this off as the work of an emotionally immature cartoonist – someone who’s sense of humor never made it past eighth grade -- and be done with it.

But it’s Ryan’s sense of absurdity, his equally strong willingness to be as utterly bizarre and silly as possible, that makes all the scatological humor work. The strips have a loose, haphazard, anything goes feel to them that suggest Ryan is just following his muse and not worrying too much about where it takes him. That leads to some interesting and often hilarious back alleyways. A strip about Dick Tracy, for example, might start off with him crying over jury duty, have him dress up like Mr. Spock and end with the appearance of a giant floating vagina. A parody of romance comics begins with someone getting hit on the head with a giant McNugget and ends with a boy sucking off a rainbow. The non sequiters build on top of the other at such a furious pace that it’s all but impossible not to grin at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

What also makes Ryan’s strips work is the injection of mundane pop culture banality into his otherwise off the wall parodies. Jimmy Olson’s shameless neediness is funny enough in and of itself, but the fact that he wants to play Cranium with Superman is priceless. Having Tubby dress up as a testicle in a top hat is worth a smirk, but having him decipher the secret of The Da Vinci Code as “Ain’t no party like a West Coast party ‘cause a West Coast party don’t stop” is worth several guffaws.

Ryan seems to save his purest venom for the alt-comix crowd, who have comiited the unpardonable sin of being boring and self-indulgent. His “Every Auto-Bio Comic Ever Written” can easily be read as a manifesto. Some will no doubt blanch at seeing revered icons like Art Spiegelman put through the wringer. I dunno, I like “In the Shadow of No Towers” and I still laughed out loud at the line “I’ll have to borify it by 30 percent.”

Obviously your mileage is going to vary pretty wildly with a book of this nature. Those with weak stomachs or easily rattled consciences are going to be less forgiving of this sort of material than those of a more forgiving (or less sympathetic) nature. Were there jokes in here that offended or disgusted me? Sure. I fully admit to not being tickled by all the overly racist ethnic gags. And the constant references to fecal matter tended to blur some of the strips together in an unappetizing way by the end of the book. Anyway, I actually don’t mind being offended in this manner every now and then. It’s a good reminder to myself that there are things I still care about. That I’m not completely dead inside. Yet.

Besides, that sort of inconsistency is to be expected with a book that has such a scattershot, off the cuff approach. It’s part of its appeal really. The bottom line is, there are enough pure gems here to make the book worth your time. Assuming you’re the sort of person who laughs at the thought of Spider-Man having an immense collection of tranny porn of course.

Because making fun of Hollywood is soooo original

2008-08-28T15:09:00.009-04:00

So I was recently assigned with the task of putting together a fall film preview roundup. Rather than do the dull, dry summations that just about every newspaper and magazine from here to Lower Slobovia will undoubtedly throw together, I decided to spice it up a bit by being really snarky and mean-spirited.

So how'd I do? Eh, I think I pulled my punches a bit too much, but I'll leave it for you to make the final decision. Sorry for the lack of photos, but formatting this took enough work as it was and I'm getting sleepy:

In a world ...

... where Hollywood gears up for one of its largest fall seasons ever, with a slate that includes inane comedies, mind-numbing kiddie flicks, cliche-ridden thrillers and so-called “serious” films aimed at netting an Oscar ...

... when big-budget films featuring vampires, serial killers, zoo animals, singing high school students and Josh Brolin as George W. are all aimed at netting as many beautiful dollar bills as possible ...

... can one man, armed only with Internet access, cut his way through the hype to determine if there’s anything he wants to see in the coming months?

Sure, why not?

Sept. 5

Title: “Bangkok Dangerous”
Starring: Nicholas Cage.
Directed by: Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang.
What it’s about: Lots of guns going off. Things exploding. Cage (playing a hitman) attempting to look cool. It’s a remake of a Thai film.
Will I go see it? Stylish thriller or z-grade schlock? This is the sort of movie that the Rotten Tomatoes Web site was made for.

Sept. 12

Title: “The Women”
Starring: Just about every over-30 actress of note, including Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing, Carrie Fisher, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen.
Directed by: Diane English
What it’s about: It’s a remake of the classic 1939 George Cukor film, only with more of a “Sex & the City” feel.
Will I go see it? The trailer does look amusing, but I fear that attending would force me to turn in my membership in the local “He-Man, Woman-Haters” guild. And we can’t have that.

Title: “Burn After Reading”
Starring: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich
Directed by: Ethan and Joel Coen
What it’s about: A CD holding the memoirs of a CIA agent (Malkovich) ends up in the hands of a pair of unscrupulous and rather dim gym employees (Pitt, McDormand).
Will I go see it? Duh, it’s a Coen brothers film.

Title: “Righteous Kill”
Starring: Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino
Directed by: Jon Avnet
What it’s about: Getting two acting legends together onscreen. In this particular instance, they’re playing cops on the trail of a serial killer who may or may not be a cop as well.
Will I go see it? I’ve seen “Heat.” “Heat was a friend of mine. You, “Rightous Kill,” are no “Heat.”

Sept. 19

Title: “Lakeview Terrace”
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington.
Directed by: Neil LaBute
What it’s about: LaBute hacks it out for this formulstic thriller about a cop (Jackson) who terrorizes his new next-door neighbors. Hopefully the money will help fund one of LaBute’s more personal projects.
Will I go see it? Well, it does feature Jackson in full-on psycho mode ...

Title: “Appaloosa”
Starring: Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons
Directed by: Ed Harris
What it’s about: Harris and Mortensen are a pair of tough gunslingers who have to clean out a one-horse town.
Will I go see it? Hmmm. It’s a “classical” Western, starring two of my favorite actors, with Irons as the villain. Why, this movie seems to have been made expressly for me!

Title: “Igor”
Starring: The voices of John Cusack, Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon.
Directed by: Anthony Leondis
What it’s about: A hunchbacked lab assistant decides to try to win the Evil Science Fair with his own creation.
Will I go see it? It looks like “Nightmare Before Christmas”-lite, which is not necessarily a good thing. On the other hand, it would keep my kids quiet for two hours.

Title: “Ghost Town”
Starring: Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, Tea Leoni
Directed by: David Koepp
What it’s about: Gervais can see dead people. Hilarity ensues.
Will I go see it? The trailer did make me laugh. Put me down for “maybe.”

Sept. 26

Title: “Miracle at St. Anna”
Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy
Directed by: Spike Lee
What it’s about: A 1984 murder investigation leads back to the story of a group of African-American soldiers trapped in a Tuscan village in WWII.
Will I go see it? I’m curious to see how Lee tackles the “war movie” genre.

Title: “Choke”
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston
Directed by: Clark Gregg
What it’s about: Rockwell’s an unlikable sex-addicted con-man who falls for his mom’s doctor.
Will I go see it? A cheerfully black comedy sounds like just the thing to get me through the morass of “feel-good” movies being pumped out around this time of year.

Oct. 3

Title: “Beverly Hill Chihuahua”
Starring: Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek, Jamie Lee Curtis and other actors apparently in desperate need of a paycheck.
Directed by: Like it matters.
What it’s about: Judging by the trailer, which features lots of badly animated Chihuahuas screaming “Chihuahua!” until my ears bled, it’s about making me contemplate how far the current state of American cinema has fallen.
Will I go see it? Unfortunately, I will be very busy the entire time this movie is in theaters trimming my nose hair. Such a shame.

Title: “Religulous”
Starring: Bill Mahr
Directed by: Larry Charles (“Borat”)
What it’s about: Mahr gets all Michael Moore in this irreverent documentary examining the world’s religous beliefs.
Will I go see it? Mahr can be insufferably smug at times, but assuming he approches the subject with a genuine curioity it could be a good film.

Title: “What Just Happened?”
Starring: Robert DeNiro
Directed by: Barry Levinson, John Turturro
What it’s about: DeNiro is a Hollywood producer on his way down the ladder and desperately trying to get his movie made.
Will I go see it? Maybe. Hollywood movies about Hollywood tend to have a bit too much navel-gazing to suit me.

Title: “Rachel Getting Married”
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Debra Winger
Directed by: Jonathan Demme
What it’s about: A young woman who’s been in and out of rehab reunites with her family for her sister’s wedding.
Will I go see it? Depends. Is this one of those painfully funny, awkwardly honest family comedies or one of those simpering, sloppily sentimental family comedies? I prefer the former to the latter.

Oct. 10

Title: “City of Ember”
Starring: Bill Murray, Tim Robbins and a bunch of freckle-faced kids.
Directed by: Gil Kenan (“Monster House”)
What it’s about: A underground city is losing power unless a plucky bunch of kids can figure out how to turn the lights back on.
Will I go see it? I’m beginning to get more than a little weary of movies featuring plucky bunches of kids.

Title: “RocknRolla”
Starring: Gerald Butler, Tom Wilkinson
Directed by: Guy Ritchie
What it’s about: Guns, guys in nice suits, explosions, impenetrable English accents.
Will I go see it? No. Ritchie hasn’t made a good film since he became Mr. Madonna.

Title: “Body of Lies”
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe
Directed by: Ridley Scott
What it’s about: Something about the war on terror, I’m not sure. The trailer’s mainly about DiCaprio and Crowe getting all macho and actorly in each other’s faces.
Will I go see it? This film has “desperate attempt at netting Oscar nominations” all over it. Those sort of films are never any good.

Oct. 17

Title: “W.”
Starring: Josh Brolin, Richard Dreyfuss, James Cromwell, Thandie Newton, Elizabeth Banks, Scott Glenn and many, many more talented people.
Directed by: Oliver Stone
What it’s about: The life and times of our current commander in chief.
Will I go see it? Yes, if just to see how North ties in the Kennedy assassination.

Title: “Secret Life of Bees”
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah
Directed by: Gina Price-Bythewood
What it’s about: A young girl in the '60s learns about life and love through a trio of eccentric beekeeping sisters. Apparently this is based on a popular novel.
Will I go see it? They might as well have titled the movie “Things Chris Mautner Has No Interest in Seeing.”

Oct. 24

Title: “High School Musical 3: Senior Year”
Starring: OMG! Vanessa Hudgens, who is, like, so pretty, and Ashley Tisdae and Corbin Bleu and the totally hot ZAC EFRON! Squee!
Directed by: Some guy, I dunno.
What’s it about: The gang is growing up and getting ready to graduate, so it’s all bittersweet good-byes, you know? Sigh.
Will I go see it? I’ve made an active effort to keep all things containing the phrase “Disney Channel” out of my house. It’s been a successful enterprise so far and I see no reason why I should alter it now.

Title: “Changeling”
Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
What it’s about: A woman reunited with her missing child wonders if the boy is really hers. �
Will I go see it? Knowing the midstate, this probably won’t come around here until March 2009, but yeah. Eastwood hasn’t failed me yet.

Title: “Saw V”
Starring: Nobody you’ve ever heard of. Trust me.
Directed by: David Hackl. I have to say, that’s an unfortunate last name for a director.
What it’s about: Watching people being tortured and maimed in creative, disgusting and completely implausible ways.
Will I go see it? Depends. Will I understand what’s going on if I haven’t seen “Saws I-IV?”

Title: “Pride and Glory”
Starring: Ed Norton, Colin Farrell, Jon Voight
Directed by: Gavin O’Connor
What it’s about: Farrell’s the bad cop. Norton the good cop who has to bring him in. They’re also brothers.
Will I go see it? Great Godfrey, another cop drama? Was their a discount sale over at “Genre Cliches R Us” this year?

Title: “Crossing Over”
Starring: Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ashely Judd
Directed by: Wayne Kramer
What it’s about: A “Crash”-like meditation on illegal immigration, seen from the viewpoint of multiple characters.
Will I go see it? You know what I hate? When Hollywood decides to tackle some “serious issue” like racism or immigration and then they all pat themselves on the back because they think they’re “making a statement,” even though they’re just making obvious points that everyone already knows. I really hate that.

Title: “Synecdoche, New York”
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams
Directed by: Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich”)
What it’s about: A theater director attempts to deal with the women in his life while trying to create a life-size replica of New York City in a warehouse for his next play.
Will I go see it? Yes. Kaufman’s one of the most intriguing screenwriters in Hollywood right now and I’m anxious to see what he accomplishes in the director’s chair.

Oct. 31

Title: “Zack & Miri Make a Porno”
Starring: Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks
Directed by: Kevin Smith
What it’s about: The title says it all, doesn’t it? A pair of friends decide to solve their money troubles by making an X-rated film.
Will I go see it? Kevin Smith is pretty hit or miss with me, but I confess to being intrigued by the premise. Plus, Rogan’s a pretty funny guy. I’ll probably check it out at some point.

Nov. 7

Title: “Quantum of Solace”
Starring: Daniel Craig as 007.
Directed by: Marc Forster
What it’s about: Dude, it’s a James Bond film. What more do you need to know
Will I go see it? Well, I still need to watch “Casino Royale,” but sure.

Title: “Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa”
Starring: The voices of Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith and the late Bernie Mac.
Directed by: Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath
What it’s about: A sequel to the popular 2005 animated film. This time the zoo animals end up in ... well, read the title.
Will I go see it? While I tire of computer-animated animals putting on third-rate Warner Bros. schitck, my kids will no doubt drag me to the theater.

Nov. 14�

Title: “Australia”
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman
Directed by: Baz Luhrmann
What it’s about: Kidman inherits a ranch in the Australian Outback in the days just before WWII. Jackman helps her run it. Sparks fly.
Will I go see it? Luhrmann could make a movie about people watching paint dry and I’d go see it.

Title: “Soul Men”
Starring: Bernie Mac, Samuel L. Jackson, Isaac Hayes
Directed by: Malcolm D. Lee
What it’s about: Jackson and Mac are an estranged singing duo who agree to do a reunion performance.
Will I go see it? Prediction: the fact that the film includes Mac’s and Hayes’ final performances will in all likelhood not obscure how bad a movie it is.

Nov. 21

Title: “Twilight”
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke.
Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke
What it’s about: Film adaptation of the uber-popular novel about a teen-age vampire and the girl who loves him. Anne Rice has a lot to answer for.
Will I go see it? These vampire books are insanely popular, which means there will be tons of uber-eager fans lining the cinema when this comes out. And I will be nowhere near them.

Title: “The Soloist”
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr.
Directed by: Joe Wright (“Atonement”)
What it’s about: Reporter Downey befriends the brilliant but homeless pianist Foxx and draws the world’s attention to his plight.
Will I go see it? Are you kidding? The synopsis alone makes me want to gag.

Nov. 28

Title: “The Road”
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Directed by: John Hillcoat
What it’s about: Father and son wander a post-apocalyptic landscape in search of safety. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy novel.
Will I go see it? I likes me some dour post-apocalyptic drama.

Title: “Milk”
Starring: Sean Penn, Josh Brolin
Directed by: Gus Van Sant
What it’s about: Penn plays Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected city supervisor in San Francisco, only to be assassinated a year later.
Will I go see it? Van Sant and Penn? Hell yeah, I’m there.

Graphic Lit: How-to books

2008-08-26T16:18:00.002-04:00

One of the great draws about comics is that it has such low overhead. All you need is pen and paper and presto! You’re ready to make a comic.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that, as the following “how-to” books show:

“What It Is”
by Lynda Barry, Drawn and Quarterly, 209 pages, $24.95.

Part autobiography, part writing guide, part philosophical treatise and all pure genius, Barry uses a variety of artistic tools — including collage, watercolor and pen and ink — to examine the nature and central importance of art and the creative impulse while touching on themes like memory, imagination and myth along the way.

Barry writes with genuine awe about the creative process, attempting to define near-indefinable terms and ideas (“What is an image?”) while delving into her own childhood and, by extension, our own as well. For her, art is more an act of self-discovery than communication, and getting the work out on paper is more important than finding an audience or determining whether it’s “good” or “bad.”

More than just a mere tutorial (though it excels as that), this is a rich and rewarding book that should be read even if you’re not planning to draw. But especially if you are.

“Drawing Words & Writing Pictures”
by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, First Second, 304 pages, $29.95.

Perhaps you’re looking for a more definitive, textbooklike guide to making comics. If so, this meaty book, based on classes Abel and Madden teach at the School of Visual Arts, more than suffice.

Just about every aspect of comics production is covered, from how to lay out a page to lettering, using computers, developing your characters, inking and much more. Each chapter comes with a “homework” section and exercises, making this book more of a college-level class than a manual.

There have been a lot of “how to make comics”-type books, most of them superficially focusing on rendering and style. “Drawing Words” is a much more thoughtful, comprehensive book that I’d recommend to anyone interested in making comics. I predict it will quickly be the definitive go-to book for budding cartoonists.

“How to Draw Stupid and Other Essentials of Cartooning”
by Kyle Baker, Watson-Guptill Publications, 112 pages, $16.95.

Sometimes though, you want your advice quick and dirty. Enter Kyle Baker, cartoonist extraordinaire (“Nat Turner,” “Special Forces”).

Baker eschews a lot of the traditional how-to-draw advice (Baker on perspective: “Draw faraway things tiny and nearby things big”) in favor of some very useful and no doubt hard-won tips on things like how to stand out (“don’t do the same thing everyone else does”), design characters (“a good cartoon character should be easy for everybody to draw”) and be funny (“hitting is funny”).

This blend of no-nonsense advice and irreverent humor is about as far away from Lynda Barry’s approach as you can get, but if you’re looking to make cartoons in any sort of professional capacity, it’s also essential. Plus, Baker’s a very funny guy.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: Gary Panter and Jack Kirby

2008-08-22T15:05:00.004-04:00

Few artists have been able to combine the conflicting aspects of high and low culture as successfully as Gary Panter.

Appearing on the art scene in the late'70s and early '80s, he was an important member of the "Raw" crowd, frequently contributing to Art Spiegelman's seminal comics anthology.

His work, with its messy, slashing lines and abrasive, in-your-face attitude, was strongly allied with the punk rock scene of the time. Readers holding his books had to be careful lest they cut their fingers on his drawings.

Influenced by the psychedelic and underground comics of the 1960s as well as fine artists like Picasso, his comics disregarded conventional narratives, opting instead for an expressionist approach.

Yet Panter is not some obscure artist slinging paint in a lonely garret. He's done album covers for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Frank Zappa, designed children's playrooms and won the 2000 Chrysler Award for Design. Most famously, he was the production designer for the acclaimed Saturday morning show "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

Now Panter is celebrated in a ginormous, two-volume, slipcased coffee table book simply titled "Gary Panter."

This obvious labor of love focuses primarily on Panter's skill as a painter. The first volume devotes almost three-fourths of its contents to his work on canvas, with his comics and other work sampled toward the back.

The second volume, featuring a wealth of sketchbook pages, is more revealing, offering hints to the artist's development and thought processes.

Overall though, the book is a wonderful testament to Panter's artistic skills. I'm in awe of his ability to take oddball items like old 10-cent toy packaging and, through his brush, refigure and transform it into something extraordinary and significant. His work both satirizes and celebrates America's "trash" culture.

Panter continues to influence generation after generation. One can hope this definitive collection, despite the high price, will continue to spread the good word. It's about time he got a book like this.

'King of comics'

One of Panter's biggest influences is Jack Kirby, the comic book creator who strode like a colossus over the medium during much of the 20th century.

Now the man who helped bring to life Captain America, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, to name just a few, is the subject of his own coffee-table biography, "Kirby, King of Comics" written by longtime friend Mark Evanier.

Evanier has been working on an in-depth biography of Kirby for several years, but this isn't that book. It's more of a cursory overview of the man's life and accomplishments, designed for those curious but unfamiliar.

What makes the book worthy of purchase is the lavish and loving treatment of Kirby's art work. In addition to full-page covers and panels, there's a wealth of sketches and penciled pages, enough to satisfy the devoted.

At times the book veers dangerously close to hagiography. Beyond a few broad strokes, Evanier doesn't really make a case for why Kirby was important; he assumes readers will just infer it from the art. There are also a couple of odd editorial choices -- a foldout spread of painter Alex Ross reproducing one of Kirby's classic panels seems like a real waste of space.

We've been blessed recently with a number of handsome volumes collecting Kirby's work in recent years.

While this book is a welcome addition, I long for a more detailed biography.

Graphic Lit: Glamourpuss and Judenhass

2008-08-18T15:58:00.005-04:00

What do you do when confronted with an artist whose work you admire but whose beliefs you find offensive?

That's the question many comic book fans have had to ask themselves about Dave Sim.

Sim first made a name for himself with the debut of the black and white comic book "Cerebus the Aardvark" in 1977.

Initially a parody of "Conan the Barbarian," after about twenty issues Sim decided to expand the book's scope considerably, ultimately delivering a complex 300-issue epic that spanned 30 years and delved into issues of politics, religion, gender and human experience.

Sim did virtually the whole thing himself, and, for many years, "Cerebus" was lauded as an example of the rewards of self-publishing. Accolades were plentiful and the series had a strong, devoted fan base.

Then, something changed.

Beginning with issue 186, Sim began protesting in lengthy, rambling and increasingly ugly essays on what he regarded as the evil excesses of feminism, liberalism and women in general. Here are a few samples:

"Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn't stand a chance in an argument with Emotion ... this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long."

"What the feminists and their ventriloquist puppet husbands are talking about doing with Government-Funded Daycare is raising children as if they were a herd of interchangeable swine. No surprise coming from a gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong."

"No one wants to be a woman."

As a result of all of this, Sim became one of the most polarizing figures in comics, reviled by some and warily tolerated by others. Those who chose to stick with the series often found themselves beginning sentences with "Yes, but."

Having wrapped up "Cerebus" in 2004, Sim came roaring back this year with two new comics, the bi-monthly "Glamourpuss," and the stand-alone "Judenhass."

"Glamourpuss" is a bit ... idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. It's a parody of fashion magazines, narrated by the title character, a shallow, self-absorbed but witty model who gripes about having to take anti-depressants or deal with her evil twin sister, Skanko.

But really, "Glamourpuss" is an excuse for Sim to practice and expound upon the photo realistic school of comic art pioneered by such folk as Alex Raymond and Al Williamson. Glamourpuss' monologues are frequently interrupted by Sim as he expounds at length about various styles, techniques and influences.

It's aimed at a select audience, but I found the two issues released so far to be a fascinating read. The fashion jokes are a bit obvious (and, considering Sim's professed feelings toward women, come with a slightly bitter edge) but watching Sim try to show what exactly captivates him about these artists is surprisingly compelling.

"Judenhass," on the other hand, tackles a much more somber subject matter — the Holocaust.

Working from the premise that centuries of Antisemitism directly led to the systematic genocide of millions of Jews, Sim juxtaposes noxious quotes from historical figures like Martin Luther and Voltaire with repeated images of dead bodies found at the concentration camps, all done in his new, photo realistic manner.

Some critics have noted that certain quotes seem to be taken wildly out of context, and I'm not sure I agree with Sim that centuries of prejudice and hate made the Holocaust "inevitable" (though it certainly didn't hurt matters, there were certainly other factors at work that led to the rise of the Nazis).

This is at times a harrowing and moving book. Sim takes an interesting tack, using a single image and breaking it up into tiny panels, each focusing on a different aspect, so that we notice say, a victim's teeth or clasped hands. It's a striking attempt to humanize the dehumanized.

There are those who will refuse to give any money to Sim because of his views, and I can sympathize with that attitude to a point.

Yet despite being the self-appointed chairman of the he-man woman-haters club, Dave Sim remains an artist worth paying attention to. Though very problematic works, "Glamourpuss" and "Judenhass" are alive and take chances in ways that few comic books these days are or do.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: Classic manga

2008-08-14T12:32:00.003-04:00

Most of the manga on bookstore shelves these days consist of contemporary works, aimed at a contemporary audience.

What's been pushing my buttons lately, however, are the classic Japanese comics of yesteryear.

Here's a look at some of these time-honored comics from the East, recently translated and repackaged for an American market:

"Dororo Vol. 1 & 2" by Osamu Tezuka, Vertical, 300 and 288 pages, $13.95 each.

Many of Tezuka's stories sound unusual when summarized, and "Dororo" is no exception.

The plot concerns a wandering swordsman named Hyakkimaru who is trying to collect the 48 body parts stolen from him by demons when he was a baby (he relies on a mysterious sixth sense and artificial limbs -- many of which hide secret weapons -- to get around).

Paired with the plucky titular youth, he travels from village to village in Feudal Japan, encountering a number of creepy and increasingly bizarre monsters in a sort of "X-Files" meets "Seven Samurai" fashion.

Tezuka fudges over issues of exactly how Hyakkimaru is able to function, much less wield a sword, but the story is no less compelling or entertaining for all its leaps in logic. Cartoonists-in-training would do well to examine the way Tezuka establishes a setting, for example, or lays out a tense action sequence.

In short, "Dororo" is a rewarding read and one of my favorite books of the year so far. Look for the concluding Volume 3 to come out at the end of the month.

"Cat Eyed Boy Vol. 1 & 2" by Kazuo Umezu, Viz, $24.99 each.

Fifty bucks might seem like a steep price to pay for a bunch of oddball horror tales originally aimed at kids, but Umezu's work here has a propulsive, surreal power that is nigh impossible to shy away from.

The Cat Eyed Boy of the title serves both as Crypt-Keeper-like narrator and protagonist. A wandering trickster god of sorts, his travels constantly rub him against some rather gruesome and inventive demons determined to wreak havoc.

The series preys heavily on childhood fears, such as the notion that your parents may not have your best interests at heart (or may even become monsters when the lights go out).

Like "Dororo," "Boy" doesn't always make sense, but instead is infused with a nightmare logic that anyone who has had a bad night's sleep will recognize.

"Red Colored Elegy" by Seiichi Hayashi, Drawn and Quarterly, 240 pages, $24.95.

Inspired heavily by French "new wave" cinema, "Elegy" tells the melancholy story of Ichiro and Sachiko, two young lovers torn between what society and their families expect of them and their own personal hopes and dreams.

Hayashi borrows heavily from film and animation, loading the book with symbolism (i.e. moths flickering around a lamp).

He also keeps his backgrounds and figures as minimal as possible, all the better to portray the characters' dissolute and existential lifestyle.

While I found the star-crossed lovers a bit self-absorbed for my cynical, Western taste, I was in awe of Hayashi's stylistic choices. Ultimately, "Elegy" had me thinking about comics in ways that I hadn't before, and I treasure it for that.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Jason

2008-08-12T11:26:00.004-04:00

The one-named Norwegian artist known simply as "Jason" has been racking up impressive cultural cachet recently.

Books like the time-traveling, tongue-in-cheek romance "I Killed Adolf Hitler" have won strong reviews and steady sales. More significantly, his latest story, the Western "Low Moon," was recently serialized in the pages of the New York Times Sunday Magazine section.

Now the final volume of his back catalog, "Pocket Full of Rain," has arrived, collecting a lot of his early material, including several stories drawn in a realistic style quite different from the deadpan anthropomorphic style he uses today.

I talked with Jason by e-mail recently about the new book and making comics for the New York Times:

Q: What’s it like to revisit the material in Pocket Full of Rain? How do you regard your early work?

A: It’s a bit strange looking at the old material. It’s clearly a cartoonist looking for his voice or whatever you would call it. Some strips look better than others. And the weakest ones I chose not to include.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how your style changed from the more realistic work in Pocket to the way you draw today? What made you want to change your style and how did you come upon your now trademark anthropomorphic characters?

A: It took me a long time to draw in a realistic style. Usually it took me a day to finish one panel. And when the whole thing was done, I wasn’t that happy with the result. The story as a whole I think is okay, but the drawings are a bit clumsy. So I tried out a couple of different other styles, and the animal characters were the ones I was most happy with. The drawing style in the stories Chalk and Glass I’m also okay with, but I think I made the right decision.
Q: I don’t think many people are aware of this, but you became a published cartoonist when you were still a teen-ager. What made you want to pursue this career at such an early age? Why comics?
A: I started selling cartoons and one-page stories to this Norwegian humor magazine called Konk when I was fifteen or sixteen, but it was just a hobby. Making comics as a profession in Norway was pretty unthinkable at that time. So my education is as an illustrator. It’s only the last four or five years that I’ve been able to make a living just as a cartoonist. There were some lean years before that, but it’s a choice I made, so I can’t complain. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

Q: A lot of your work plays with traditional (for want of a better word) pulp genres, i.e. mystery, science fiction, horror, western, etc. What is it about these genres that appeal to you so much? And is there any particular genre that you haven’t tackled yet that you’d like to try your hand at?

A: Yes, I like the genres. Most of my favorite movies are westerns or science fiction films or film noir. Preferably older stuff, from the 30s up until the 70s. I don’t know why. They have a special quality those old films, I guess, that sometimes is lost in films today. Black and white films have some magic that is lost in color. I have an idea for a werewolf story. I’m not sure if it will be the next album, but I hope to make it one day.

Q: One of the things that I find impressive about your work is that, though your characters are drawn in a very deadpan style, you’re nevertheless able to wring quite a bit of emotion and drama (not to mention humor). Can you talk a little bit about how you’re able to do that? Is it just a simple matter of panel arrangement? Is it something you’re conscious of?

A: It’s something I try not to think about. It just happens. It’s who I am, I guess. I hope the stories are funny, but at the same time, they should have some melancholic quality.

Q: Related to that, you often in your work stick to a very basic grid of six or nine panels per page (more in Low Moon). Why? What’s the thinking behind that decision?

A: I like the grid, the way it looks. This way the panels have the same importance, visually at least. It’s up to the reader to decide which panel is the most important one or have the most emotional impact. It shouldn’t be me as the artist telling the reader what to feel.
Q: How did the chance to be serialized in the New York Times come about? What has that experience been like?

A: They contacted me. It’s been great, reaching a wider audience like that. It’s what you dream of as a cartoonist. And I was given freedom to do what I want. There were certain restrictions on the use of language, but that’s okay by me.

Q: Judging by your reception at MoCCA, you have more than a few American fans. Are you surprised that you’ve managed to find such a devoted audience over here? What is it do you think about your work that resonates so well across the Atlantic?

A; I don’t know. A lot of my inspiration sources are American, either genre movies or directors like Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley. So I guess an American audience can recognize and relate to the material. But I don’t have a specific audience in my head when I work.
Q: Is there any difference between the comics scene in the U.S. and the one in Europe?

Not that much anymore. Not like 20 years ago when you had a bigger gap between the cheaply printed American superhero comics and the French hardcover albums. The more alternative comics are not that different, whether they’re published by Fantagraphics in the US or L’Association in France. And actually a lot of the French comics are overrated. There is a lot of new albums every week, and a lot of it is not very interesting. You have to search to find the good stuff.

Did I mention I reviewed The Dark Knight?

2008-08-07T14:39:00.002-04:00

Cause, um, I did. A few weeks ago. For the paper and all.

Man, I really need to do a better job promoting myself.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Darrin Bell

2008-08-06T12:27:00.005-04:00

Continuing playing catch-up after a lengthy hiatus, here's an interview I did with Darrin Bell, creator of Candorville, for the Patriot-News. Candorville was the fourth and final strip we subbed for Doonesbury while it was on vacation, hence the dated references to Hilary Clinton.

Q: What made you want to be a cartoonist?

A: I’ve been drawing since I was three. My mom taught me how to draw. I always got a lot a lot of attention from teachers when I was caricaturing them. A lot of them told me if I don’t get my mind back on studying I’m not going to become anything. But I give a lot of credit to my mom. She told me if I find something I like doing, just keep doing it and make sure that I do it as best I can and someday I’ll be able to make a living at it.

I kind of forgot about then when I went to college. I wanted to go into journalism. I wanted to be either one of those talking heads on TV like Pat Buchanan or James Carville or I wanted to have my own column. I started writing for the Daily Californian — UC Berkley’s daily college paper. I was excited about it. I was interviewing people like the governor of California, our local congressman, Senator Boxer. I wrote articles and at the same time I had these cartoons that I was drawing in my spare time. I just dumped them on the paper and told them run whenever they feel like.

When my articles ran I asked my friends what they thought. None of them had read any of the articles but everybody had read my cartoons and loved them. So after a few months of that I figured maybe my future lies in that direction.

Q: How did Candorville come about?

A: Candorville grew out of those cartoons that I did. At the time it was called Lamont Brown. It was an autobiographical strip. It gave me an outlet to vent my frustrations about college life. After I graduated from college it gave me an outlet for other things.

I still didn’t want to do that for a living though. I wanted to draw editorial cartoons. I started drawing as a freelancer for the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle and a bunch of other papers. When it came time to submit my cartoons for awards I submitted both those and Lamont Brown. Again, I got more feedback on the comic strips from people who work at the syndicates. I just thought I’ll develop those and keep sending them and eventually I got syndicated.

Q: Give me a time line. When did the strip became syndicated?

A: In 2003.

Q: How many papers is it running in now?

A: Not counting the papers running it as a substitute for Doonesbury, it should be about 70 papers.

Q: How old are you now?

A: I’m 33.

Q: What are some of your influences?

A: Mainly sitcoms. One Day at a Time, the first season. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that.

Q: Yeah, Valerie Bertinelli.

A: If you go back and watch the first season — not the later ones where they parody themselves — but the first season was really honest and raised a lot of questions even if it didn’t know how to answer them. That’s what I try to do in Candorville. It’s called Candorville not because I think I have all the answers but because I ask what I think are honest questions.

There are other sitcoms like All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons and The Cosby Show.

Q: But as far as comic strips go, things like Doonesbury aren’t as much of an influence?

A: Not really. I didn’t read Doonesbury until just a few years ago. Bloom County I read mostly for the penguin. I was interested in the art work. My main influence in that industry would be Paul Conrad, the LA Times editorial cartoonist. His work was just amazing and I don’t think I’d be interested in politics today if it weren’t for him.

Q: I imagine a lot of people label the strip as political or an ethnic strip. Does that sort of labeling bother you at all?

A: It is overtly political but the labeling does bother me a bit because it’s also an overt relationship strip. It’s overtly ethnic just because it has ethnic characters. It deals with the same issues that I deal with on a daily basis. We all think about politics from time to time but we also think about our girlfriend or our friend saying things we wish they wouldn’t say. It’s a slice of life strip.
Q: Do you feel like you have any unique challenges to doing this sort of strip that touches on political and social issues that say, Hi and Lois doesn’t?

A: Yeah I do. I’m sure they have unique challenges too. For one thing whenever I include a character of color, no matter what I’m talking about someone’s going to write and complain because they thought that I was saying that all black people are this way.

I had one black character who doesn’t like to use the crosswalks. He likes to cross in the middle of the street because that’s an easy way to assert control over his own life. I got an email saying “I’ve seen plenty of black people use crosswalks.”

That’s the kind of thing I have to deal with. In general, whenever you talk politics you’re going to offend at least half the people. I try to make them laugh while I’m offending them. That takes the edge off.

Q: What sort of feedback do you get?

A: Judging by the email feedback and the people I meet at book signings, my readership is largely conservative and many of them actually support what I’m saying. Even if they don't agree with it they like hearing an opposing viewpoint. It gives them something to think about even if what they end up thinking is that I’m an idiot. It’s stimulating. It’s something interesting.

Q: What do you see the viewpoint of the strip being? One of the things I find interesting about the strip is you don’t really take sides. You mock Hillary Clinton frequently for example.

A: I’m thinking of endorsing Hillary Clinton actually. Either her or McCain. Whoever is going to give me the most material. I’m thinking of starting a cartoonists for Hillary fan club. A PAC to help her.

I’ve seen it described as conservative depending upon which people first see. When my strip has been commenting on Hillary and that’s the first week people see it in the newspaper, people think it’s conservative and hold onto that opinion. Even if I go on to talk about McCain, they express surprise to me that a conservative strip is talking about McCain. Conversely other people are sure it’s liberal.

I just don’t like being lied to. Whoever I think is lying to me or insulting the intelligence of the average American, that’s who I’m going to go after.
Q: Do you see the strip’s goal then to expose the lying liars?

A: Yeah, exactly. I’m scouring, looking for some examples for Obama. And if I find it, watch out.

Q: You recently led a group of African-American cartoonists in an event where you all ran the same strip one day. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Yeah, I did lead that. The goal of it — we were trying to get editors and readers to start thinking about strips featuring characters of color and to think of them in terms of the themes they were dealing with instead of the color of the characters.

For instance, our syndicate did a survey -- you can get the numbers from them -- they found that most papers didn’t have any strips featuring any characters of color and those that did only had one or two. There are a handful of exceptions, I think it was three or four papers that had three. When one is added to a paper another one is taken out. I’ve replaced Curtis in a number of papers even though I don’t think there are any politics in Curtis and my main character is not an eight-year-old boy. It puzzles me why Candorville is always pitted against these other strips. The only similarity is the color of the characters. I don’t want to think that in 2008 that’s what editors are judging strips on. We give our readers a lot more credit that some of the editors do because we get direct feedback from them. We get feedback from people who feel that they’re right but they still enjoy the strip. Race is still an issue, but it shouldn’t be.

Q: Tell me a little bit more about the event and what sort of response you got.

A: We all ran the same strip on the same day. The strip was a send-up of the idea that all black strips are interchangeable. The only goal was to get people thinking that maybe they’re not interchangeable. Maybe when we want to replace a family strip we should look for another family strip.

Q: And not judge it by what color the characters are.

A: Yeah. Replacing Jump Start with Candorville makes as much sense as replacing For Better or For Worse with Doonesbury.

Q: So what kind of response did you get? Do you feel like it drew attention to the issue?

A: It did. It started a discussion just in the confines of the industry the discussion is important. We heard from a lot of newspaper editors who had been operating this way but not consciously. They thanked us for raising the issue. There were a lot of papers that were hesitant to sample our strips because they already ran one or two black strips and didn’t want to get rid of them so they thought "Why should we even try?" There are plenty of those who decided to give us a try. When Doonesbury went on vacation, there are a lot of papers trying out Candorville that already run one or two black strips. I’m told that many of them wouldn’t have done so without the protest. These editors see it mainly as a social/political strip and not a black strip.

Q: It’s hard enough for up and coming strips to get a foothold in the paper. Do you feel like because you have an ethnic strip that you have one more mark against you?

A: Yeah, that’s one of the arguments we were making during the protest. We face the exact same hurdles as all other new strips but we face the additional hurdle of being seen as a black strip. Where all these new strips are competing from six to 36 spots, we were all competing in effect for no more than two. We didn’t think that was a good situation. The thing about most of the editors I’ve met or spoken to — it’s not a conscious thing. People don't’ get into this business in order to discriminate. So we thought all we need to do is bring it to their attention. Once they start thinking about it, maybe they’ll change.

Q: You deal with some touchy topics — politics and race. Of the two, which do you feel is riskier for an artist to be discussing and how do you get your message across effectively without having a flood of hate mails and dropped strips?

A: I’ve always sort of combined the two in my head because the issue of race in this country is very political. When I first started out, I think race was the touchier issue. I used to get a lot of emails from people saying "Not another Boondocks," "Not another angry black man," "I don’t want my kid reading this." After awhile I think people stopped considering the race of my characters so much and I stopped hearing those comments. I started hearing from people thanking me for the diversity, even if they didn’t agree with what I was saying.

A lot of people used to want me to play up the positive of African American culture, because one of my characters isn’t what you’d consider a positive role model. I used to ask them what would be the point of that. This is a real problem, the hopelessness and bad decisions that some people make. This is a real problem and there’s no way to solve problems unless you first acknowledge they exist. In terms of the comics page, unless you learn to laugh at them. The best way to dismiss a problem is to see that it’s not grave. There’s some humor in it. If you can learn to laugh at something, that means you’ve learned to put it in perspective.

Q: What’s your take on the state of the comics industry today? A lot of the artist I’ve been talking to are very critical of the state of the newspaper industry.
A: I think we all [are]. It’s hard not to when you see papers shutting down or ones that survive slashing their comics section. When they haven’t really changed what they pay for comics since 1972 ... There’s also the consolidation in the industry. There’s huge corporations buying up papers.

We have it better than editorial cartoonists though. There are maybe 250 syndicated strips out there. There used to be the same number of editorial cartoonists, and that profession seems to be dying off by attrition.

Q: Does Candorville pay the bills? Do you have a day job?

A: Well I do two strips. My other strip is called Rudy Park.

Q: Tell me about that. I didn’t know about it.

A: Rudy Park started off in 2000 about a dot-commer who the bust happened and he was forced to get a job as a manger at a cyber cafe. At the cafe he’s got a ruthless, conniving boss, he’s got a 80something Luddite nemesis who hates him because he’s enamored with technology.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Richard Thompson

2008-08-05T15:54:00.007-04:00

Ok, that was a nice break, but now it's time to knuckle down again. We'll kick things off with an extensive interview I did several months ago with cartoonist extraordinaire Richard Thompson, whose daily strip Cul de Sac is one of the best things going today. While Doonesbury was on vacation, The Patriot-News sampled a few new comic strips and I managed to convince the powers that be that Cul should make the cut, hence the interview.

OK, that's enough introduction now. Here's the Q&A:

Q: I’m a little ashamed to say I don’t know that much about your career before you started doing Cul de Sac. Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

A: As with most cartoonists it was something I always did. I always drew, even when I should have been doing other things like homework, back in grade school.

My parents always encouraged it, they liked it. It was always what I was going to be at some point. I just didn’t know what form it would take. I got into illustration 25 years ago, mostly newspaper stuff. I’m near Washington, DC, so I did and still do a lot of stuff for the Washington Post. When I was starting out I did several things a week.

Q: What kinds of things?

A: Oh spot drawings and illustrating articles. Little digbats. This and that. I started doing caricature and goofy stuff. I did some realistic stuff for them too which I didn’t much enjoy but I found I could do it.

I was doing a series for the Post, there’s a column called “Why Things Are.” It was written by Joel Achenbach and they syndicated it too. I guess it appeared in the Post for about five, six years.

It was a dream job. They just gave me an early version of the text and it was a loose-set up. He would take any question from readers and try to find an answer for it. Something as mundane as “Why are there no green cars?” to “What do you see when you close your eyes?” or “What does the inside of your nose smell like?” and on to more cosmic questions like “Why are there things?”

They didn’t much care what I did as long as I had some vague idea, something vaguely to do with the column. And I just went nuts with it. It got to be a little strip in itself in that each illustration had a balloon with some text in it, so it looked like a comic.

The editor there, Gene Winegarten, who started Dave Barry off in Florida, he pushed me — "Things" ended in about '93 maybe — he said "Why don’t you do a weekly comic for us." A year or so later I started dong a weekly cartoon. It was a free-for-all. They didn’t care what I did too much as long as it was spelled right and free of obscenities and nothing legally actionable with it. That turned into Richard’s Poor Almanac, which I’m still doing every Saturday.

Q: How would you describe that strip? Was it a social satire or a political strip?

A: It’s more social. It’s political sometimes, just because D.C. is a political town, but I wouldn’t call it an editorial cartoon. Politicians appear in it sometimes, but as an almanac I can make fun of the weather too.

Again, they don’t much care what I do as long as it’s funny and makes some sense. I just turn it in on Friday night and they don’t even look at it until it shows up. Another dream job. For years I didn’t think anyone was really reading it so who cares? The pressure was off.

Q: So how did doing a weekly strip lead to Cul de Sac?

A: The editorship changed a couple of times. I guess I’ve been through five editors with it. I think the second or third was Tom Schroeder, who came up to the post through the Miami Herald. He’s now the editor of the Washington Post magazine. Somewhere along the line he said, "Have you ever thought of doing a strip with continuing characters in it?" "Well yeah kind of." "Why don’t you put something together for the Sunday magazine and just have it be about Washington without being about official Washington, the people who live around here." I grew up around DC and the suburbs around DC. It sort of grew out of that. It’s a backwater side of Washington. Calling it Cul De Sac made it obvious it was not the center of town somehow. That started in 2004.

Q: This was done as part of the almanac or —

A: No, it grew out of it. It was a complete and separate entity when it started in the magazine. I did it as a full color watercolor drawing and everything.

Q: Now how did it compare to the strip today? Was it pretty much fully formed out of the blue?

A: I fooled around with it for a year before I showed him anything. I knew that it was about this family and took place in a very small neighborhood and that the husband commuted into Washington. It was somewhat specific. They went to Nationals games and the Zoo and the Smithsonian and stuff like that. It took a while though to settle who was what. I knew who the characters were but I didn’t know what they did. Like most strips they take a while to shake out.

Q: What was the idea behind this particular family? Behind just portraying the social life of the DC area did you have any other goals or ideas beyond that? It does feel like a very universal strip.

A: I had the characters lined up. I sort of to know them better. Like most comic strip cartoonists will tell you I started to hear their voices. They start narrating their lives and demanding their time on stage. They do the talking for you somehow. It’s up to you to capture the slice of life that three or four panels can take.

I knew that Alice, the little girl, she’s four years old and kind of — I think of she and her brother, she’s the unstoppable force and he’s the immovable object. And they can collide and sparks can fly. She’s self-absorbed and pretty unstoppable. Just stay out of her way. He’s curled up in his room in a fetal position in his own little world.

Q: How did it move out of the weekly slot into becoming a daily strip?

A: It was sort of a strain of happenstance chain of events. Lee Salem, who is the editor at Universal Press Syndicate, — back when Bush was first elected, to make a long story somewhat shorter, Bush did not have an inaugral poem read at his first inaugral —

Q: Is this about Make the Pie Higher?

A: Yeah. I did a Poor Almanac where I just took a string of Bush quotes that were mushmouthed and didn’t make much sense and strung them together into a free-form poem. When I did it I thought Jesus, this makes no sense but I’ve got a deadline. It showed up the Sunday before his inaugral and it leaked out on the Web somehow.

I didn’t notice, but my editor pointed out some months later that this thing was out there and called Make the Pie Higher. Lee Salem saw it and didn’t know it was a cartoon and he emailed me and said have you got anything else? I said "Where would I start?" He was coming for a conference here and so we met. We chatted over drinks and I gave him a pile of Cul de Sacs. And we kept in touch and some months later he said "We’d like to do something with this, how about a daily?" I said OK. A daily strip was something I’d avoided for years. I wasn’t sure if I had such a thing in me. He said, "We think you can do something with this." I thought, now’s the chance. I can’t back away from this. This was in 2006. And here I am, two weeks behind already.

Q: So what was the official debut of the strip?

A: It was September 2007.

Q: How many papers did it start out in?

A: I think it was 70.

Q: And how’s it doing now?

A: Pretty good. I think it’s in 120 or 110. It’s nice to hear there are 120 newspapers out there still.

Q: What kind of feedback have you been getting on the strip?

A: Pretty good. I started a blog just as an accident. I was kind of embaressed to do it but somebody said I should give it a shot. I get a lot of stuff back. I’ve gotten some responses from Italy recently where they’re starting to run it translated in a comics magazine. I get a couple a day from people saying “Gee you had Petey playing the oboe the other day and I’m a professional oboist and it’s nice to see that.” It seems like the really specific stuff goes over with a bang more than anything more general. I did one recently with Alice just collecting sticks, like kids do. My daughters have done that.

Q: My son’s four so he’s constantly bringing rocks into the house.

A: My daughter was doing that for awhile. She was bringing little pebbles in and drawing faces on them. Then putting them out in the yard thinking people will find these someday and be happy. How can you describe that logic?

Q: You write about these things, but you don’t do something a lot of comic strip artists do which is write about specific references to current events. You don’t refer to the Wii or whatever the hot new movie is.

A: I try to keep away from that. I can deal with that in the Almanac; make fun of that and get it out of my system. Also, I figure the ages of the kids — 4 and 8 — they’re not totally into the more advance pop culture stuff probably. Petey’s into comic books but I think he’s more into Chris Ware-type comic books, which are more likely to be depressing and bring you down more than make you want to go out and beat up bad guys. I can make my own little world and still make it somewhat specific to the real world.

Q: You talked about how you wanted to avoid making a daily strip for a long time. How has the adjustment been?

A: I’m not real far ahead. I’m so used to deadlines that it’s not as bad as I thought. There’s still miles of Bristol board to cover. I still pull all-nighters sometimes. I was talking to Mark Tatulli and we talk in the middle of the night. “What are you doing?” “Same thing as you.” I haven’t gotten it down to a science yet, which is probably a good thing. I don’t want to settle in too much. I’m tolerating it OK I guess.

Q: I was going to ask you what your schedule is like.

A: (laughs) I work at home which is —

Q: Ideal?

A: Good and bad. It’s ideal in that I can just sit in a comfy chair and work on it, but it’s always right there in your face. All the distractions are here. My daughters come home from school and it’s “Oh, what did you do today? What did you have for lunch? Take me out of this!”

Q: How did your previous work doing illustration, caricature and the Almanac prepare you for the demands of a daily strip?

A: I think it helped a lot in that I tried a lot of different things. I can fall back on them or go back to an old idea and rework it. Not so much old stale stuff but see how things fit together that I hadn’t thought of before. I try a lot of different styles over the years. Making things fit into this little world with these little kids and such. When I started it, Lee Salem said “Keep your day job.” My day job is doing illustration work and also the almanac, so it’s more of the same. I still try to do a lot of magazine illustration cause I need the money.

Q: How did you develop your art style?

A: Some of it was intentional. Over the years I’ve admired hundreds and thousands of cartoonists and tried to mimic or steal from them. Style is kind of a Frankenstein monster that you put together these pieces of bodies over the years and the stitches heel and suddenly boom, you’ve got a style. Nobody sees where the parts join somehow. There’s so many I’ve enjoyed over the years from Pogo to Peanuts to Ronald Searle and Chris Ware and everybody today. I hope to try new things and you either fall on your face or you don’t. Hopefully nobody notices that either.

Q: You talk about trying new things, can you give me an example?

A: Using a lot of black or using a thicker line. Stuff that nobody would notice. But when you do it it’s this sudden breakthrough and you go “Geez, look what I’ve done.” You point it out and nobody can see it. I do a strip and think “This is just godawful” and nobody notices that either.

Q: What are you influences? You’ve mentioned a pretty wide net so far.

A: There are cartoonists that you discover and this window opens and this whole new world is presented to you. I think Searle was one of those. I was 19 or 20 and I got this book of his for my birthday. The watercolor and the line and sense of things you can do with ink that I hadn’t even thought of. Then I can go back to Pogo and I remember the first time I read him in fifth grade. When I’m sure I didn't understand hald the jokes, but it was just so funny, this endless stream of vaudeville and characters just tripping over themselves, the language and everything like that.

Q: One of the things that strikes me about Cul is how you present the child as self-absorbed but in their own world completely and oblivious as to what other things might be gong on around them. The things that fascinate a child of four would not at all fascinate a grown-up and the tension you get from that.

A: It’s something my dad pointed out to me a couple of years ago. He said you’ve got all these people here and they’re in these little circles and don’t notice each other too much. All these worlds don’t collide so much. Just enough to create some friction and keep the wheels spinning somehow. Each one is an unreliable narrator. You’ve got this overall plot where the characters fit into it but they don’t see the whole.

Q: Especially with Alice. I was reading the strips where Alice’s Dad comes into read to her preschool and how the kids are more delighted by the fact he can’t get out of the chair than the story itself. How much of that is autobiographical?

A: Maybe that’s just the way my mind works, which is nothing I want to brag about. I don’t know if I could find another job doing such a thing, but I can think up tangents and non sequitars fairly easily. Doing the Almanac for years, when you’re trying to be funny people brace themselves and say “OK here comes the funny part. I have to laugh.” You have to surprise them. There has to be some kind of tangent or association they didn’t expect. Some kick in the pants they didn’t see coming. I try to do that almost continuously in Cul de Sac. One thing does not lead to another. It’s just a string of laundry down the line, flapping in the breeze somehow.

Q: I guess along those lines another obvious comparison would be Calvin and Hobbes, in the sense that Calvin is someone who’s completely in his own world.

A: Yeah, and everything is seen through him. You see the adult level above it, from a distance. But you also see it through his eyes.

Q: How does the strip come together for you? How do you plan it out?

A: It’s usually the words first. I keep a couple of ideas spinning in my head and try to see how they either fit together or don’t. If there are two or three elements that are disparate enough that they’re colliding and making something funny, some friction, then I figure there’s a strip in there somewhere. The rest is just filling in the blanks. Each one is this brief four panel thing. You have only so much time to make your point and get off stage somehow. Just finding that little slice of life is the hard part for me I think.

There are some I’ve drawn first. There’s one with Dil going down this tube slide and it took him 20 panels to get through it. The whole time he’s going “Oh boy, whee!” I had to figure out what happened at the beginning and end. The rest is just getting the timing right.

You leap from one thing to the next. I’ll have an idea for an Almanac or an illustration and think “maybe this would work better as a strip.” It’s not real logical. I talked to Stephan Pastis who does Pearls Before Swine. He’s fascinated with the process of writing. He’s very logical about it. I’ve seen his notebooks where he takes great care in how he writes out things. He can do it beautifully. He does it much more logically than I would. My method is bits of pieces of paper that I keep rearranging until I’ve got something funny.

Q: You cite a pretty wide net of influences. I get the impression you keep up with what’s going on in comics rather well.

A: Well there’s so much interesting stuff going on out there. I gave a Sunday strip to somebody at Drawn and Quarterly for a box of books. They sent me a bunch of stuff I hadn’t seen. That’s a good way to keep up on stuff.

Chris Ware, I first saw his stuff 10-15 years ago in Raw. It jumped out at me immediately. He’s a pretty dense read these days.

Q: With you, Tatulli and Pastis, there seems to be a renaissance in comic strips right now with a lot of new, talented people coming out.

A: Like we were saying, it’s not just with comic strips, the indie field is exploding.

Q: Do you think they’re feeding off of each other? Sometimes it seems like such tiny circles and no one’s paying attention to what the others are doing.

A: That’s more likely it but it might be breaking through. I hope so.

Q: Tatulli and Pastis are very opinionated on the state of the comic strip today. What’s your opinion? Do you find it hard for a new strip to break?

A: I think it is. I’ve had good luck with mine so far, but as Tatulli said, the day of the 1,000 paper strip is almost over. You don’t get that kind of coverage that you used to. There’s a lengthy process to get a strip into a paper and there’s such a long line ahead of you somehow.

Q: Are you frustrated at all? Do you feel like you’re fighting for space?

A: Sometimes yeah, but it’s doing OK, so in these days and times, newspapers are such a dicey concern anyway, that’s just one small part of it. Nobody knows what’s going on. I worked with the post for 25 years and seeing people taking buyouts and they’ve got a new editor and publisher there now so god knows what will happen.

An interview with Gareth Hinds

2008-07-03T14:59:00.005-04:00

Gareth Hinds has made a name for himself in the crowded field of comic books with his intriguing adaptations of classic works of literature.

So far he’s tackled “Beowulf” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “The Merchant of Venice.” He’s working on a version of “The Odyssey” that should be in stores in 2010.

Hinds, 37, was in my neck of the woods last week to host some local writing workshops, sponsored by the Capital Area Writing Project. As a Fourth of July gift to you, dear reader, I thought I'd post the full transcript of the interview I did with Hinds for a story previewing the talk. Enjoy.

Q: Where am I talking to you from?

A: I’m in my office which is in the suburbs of Boston, in Watertown.

Q: Are you from the Boston area originally?

A: Originally I’m from Vermont, but I’ve lived in Boston for about 12 years.

Q: What sort of things will you be discussing in the workshop?

A: It’s going to be an interesting workshop because I’m going all the way from grade 4 through 12 in the morning and then adults in the afternoon. So there may be a range of things that I cover and certainly a range of ways that I present it.

Overall, I’ll be talking about my work and career, how I got to be doing what I’m doing, and also the nitty-gritty of how I do a graphic novel — what the process is and how I approach it.

We’ll also be doing some workshop exercises that are designed to encourage creativity and give the audience a sense of what the possibilities are in adapting something into a graphic novel. Or just what the process is to flesh out a story, both verbally and visually.

Q: Even if you’re not interested in making comics, what could you learn from the workshop about how to be a better writer?

A: For kids, a lot of it is the kind of stuff they’re already learning in their writing classes, but it shows them how it’s applied in the real world and is maybe more interesting to them. They may be more engaged by doing it in the comics form than say, writing a paper. So it’s actually the same principles of writing that their teachers have already been talking about: outlining and brainstorming and that kind of stuff. But we bring in the visual and talk about planning out the moments you show in a comic and how you choose those and can make the composition a little more dramatic or clear. That sort of thing.

For adults, they’re more familiar with the writing principles, so I’ll be focusing more on those things that are specific to comics, the issues of choosing camera angles and moments in time and how the image relates to text. It speaks to any sort of cinematic storytelling, which could be movies or theater or just prose. You want to be able to choose the pacing and the way to create drama.

Q: When I talked to the Capital Area Writing Project people, they were very big on integrating comics and graphic novels into the classroom. Can you talk about the educational potential that graphic novels serve?

A: The main thing that educators now are starting to realize and get in step with is that the fact that it’s so engaging to teen-agers. It’s sometimes hard to get them to read anything, so it’s just a better way to deliver content for their interests. The nice thing is in the last 10 years or so we’ve started to see a greater diversity in subject matter, so there is more, whatever you’re teaching, there are comic books that can be used to shed light on it. In my case, classic literature. But there are nonfiction, historical comics, comics that talk about science and social issues. There’s a lot of really good material and tackling it through that medium is more accessible and engaging to that audience.

Q: Why is it more accessible and engaging? Is it because it’s a visual medium?

A: I think kids these days tend to be more visual and multimedia oriented. They’re constantly bombarded by imagery. In a certain sense they have a high level of sophistication for that. Conversely, they have less attention span because they’re being constantly bombarded by things and may not want to sit down and read something that’s difficult or dense. Much of the information in comics is coded visually so you don’t have to read as much as prose. That’s a big piece of it. There’s also a literal engagement that happens with comics in that the reader is expected to fill in what’s happening in-between panels. Prose requires also a kind of engagement to imagine happening what’s being described, so it’s not that it’s better in that way but it does have a particular way that engages kids. It’s more active maybe.

Q: How did you get interested in making comics?

A: I’ve been drawing stories for a long time, ever since I was a toddler. There was always a narrative to my drawing, there was always a story behind it. At a pretty young age, in middle school, I started drawing comics. I was pursing a lot of other types of art work and illustration throughout school, I went to art school for illustration. What I was finding was I was better at storytelling and it held my attention longer than other forms of illustration. I didn’t have quite as much a talent for summing up a book in one cover illustration as I did for taking an idea and exploring it in a narrative medium.

Q: So how did you find this particular niche of adapting classic works?

A: It really came out of a writing deficiency. I wasn’t happy with my own writing. I wanted to make really good books and if the weak link was my writing I decided to take that out of the picture and use existing texts. The way I ended up with classics — partly it’s because I actually enjoy these works. Not everything that I was forced to read in British Authors I liked, but a lot of it I did. Certainly I liked Beowulf and that was one of my first adaptations. I really enjoyed working with material that’s that old and has a very timeless quality to it. They’ve been a part of the canon for so long.

Once I got into it and started to market these books, I was confirmed even beyond my expectations that it had an educational value and that teachers and libraries were looking for material like that and were excited about it. I’ve stayed with it partly for creative reasons. I still like this better than something that I would write and I still find so much value in the text and things to explore visually. But also from a marketing point of view it’s worked out well. I continue to get feedback. I do King Lear and they’re like Oh, where’s Macbeth?

Q: The history of comic adaptations is kind of spotty, with Classics Illustrated and whatnot. And I go into Barnes and Noble or Borders these days and see tons of Manga Shakespeare adaptations. How do you stand out from the crowd and how do you overcome any misgivings that people might have toward a comic adaptation?

A: I think the strongest initial weapon that I have is just creating a really beautiful book. I think the reason Classics Illustrated didn’t appeal is the first thing you see is the art work, and they always had low production values. They were always using cut-rate illustrations. And even the Manga Shakespeare which — I have some respect for what that series is doing but again, I think they’re using cut-rate illustrators. They’re not using real manga artists, they’re using Americans who are trying to draw in that style.

Initially the first thing I try to do is distinguish myself by making a beautiful book. And also my publisher makes beautiful books. Candlewick is known for beautiful books. They don’t do the cheap paperback version. That’s the first thing. The second thing is how well I’m doing my job as a storyteller and adapter. My adaptations are pretty faithful and that’s partly because I know to a certain extent who my audience is. I’m aware that teachers don’t want a distorted version of the story. But also I just cringe at the notion that seems prevalent in Hollywood that you somehow have to improve these stories. I don’t think you really can improve them. When they go through that filter into a new medium you definitely have to tinker with them a bit. But ultimately this is a story that has remained in the literary canon for thousands of years, it’s not like some scriptwriter’s going to come along and suddenly “Oh brilliant! Why didn’t Shakespeare think of that?”

I definitely have a high degree of respect for the material and I’m just trying to do justice to it. In general I think that comes through and that I’m doing a better job at it than most.

Q: At the same time, there’s the question of "what do you bring to the table?" Why should I read your version of Beowulf when I have the original text right here? There's the idea that there should be some new revelation, which may be an unfair expectation, but how do you deal with that?

A: First of all I’m going to contradict myself a little bit and say there is a little bit of room for improvement in the presentation of these stories sometimes. In the case of Beowulf, for example, it’s an oral tradition and part of the oral tradition is that things get repeated a lot. That was very appropriate when you were just going to have to hear that story once and then try to remember and tell it to somebody else. But when you’re reading it, me, as a product of modern, Western culture, I don’t want to read the story of how Beowulf ripped Grendel’s arm off five times in the course of the book. I’d rather just see it done really well once.

There’s those kind of things that I can streamline parts of the text that are difficult or are boring. I do some of that. In a sense what I’m trying to present is the book the way that I remembered it most fondly in my head. The slightly optimized version of the original. The other pieces are just artistic. I’ve seen Hamlet but I’m still going to go out go out and see another production just to see what someone else did with it. I’m hoping that people are interested in and enjoy artistically what I’m doing with them.

Q: Are there any tricks to making a good adaptation?

A: There definitely are. To me, the part that is the trickiest is that I want to do something that’s a little creative like when you see a Shakespeare play, you don’t want to see the play exactly the way you remember it. You want to have something surprise you pleasantly. Trying to do interesting, clever little things that are still within what’s described in the book and come up with interesting designs for things without pushing it to the point where it doesn’t seem like the original anymore or you’re taking too many liberties. Walking that line is always a little tricky.

There’s always a phase where I’m trying to come up with the most creative things that I can and really brainstorm the visual possibilities for the story. But when I go back to the text I really have to rein some of that in. “I thought that was a really cool idea but it doesn’t really fit with the text. Maybe I wont’ do that.”

Really what I’m describing here are the challenges, not the ways that I attack them, but the other challenge is to condense the text to an appropriate degree. I don’t want to do a 500 page graphic novel, I want to do something that you can sit down and read and not feel like it was a marathon or “Jeez, I could have read the original in this time.” Figuring out how to really preseve the feeling of the original while condensing it is challenging. My biggest trick for that is just to use my memory. Once I’ve read through the thing several times and I have a pretty good idea approach overall, when I’m actually writing the script I’m readinig a large seciton of the book and I sit down and write what I remember as the important stuff. Anything I forgot wasn’t that important though of course I do go back and check.

Q: Did you read the recent story in the Baltimore Sun about the recent Shakespeare adaptations?

A: I don’t know that I did.

Q: It focused on the Manga Shakespeare stuff, but it had a quote from a theater critic who was very disdainful and said how they were meant to be performed. That got me wondering if there was a comparison between comics and theater.

A: I do think there is. What you don’t get from a comic that you do get from theater is all the stuff the actor can put into their voice and some of the physical things they can do. However, what you do get is the staging and the visual acting out, which I think is a great aid for kids trying to understand what is going on. What you also get that’s nice that you don’t get in the theater is the words sitting there in front of you and you can appreciate them because one of the things about Shakespeare — he’s not just considered the greatest playwright, he’s one of the greatest writers because his words don’t just work on the stage they also work when you read them. You can’t appreciate them when someone’s saying them, you have to read them to fully appreciate the quality of those phrases and rhymes. I really like the comic medium for presenting Shakespeare for those reasons. It’s sort of the best of both worlds in that sense.

Q: What sort of research do you do when you’re working on these books?

A: It depends. Some of them I try to be historically accurate. Beowulf was very historically researched. I would spend a lot of time in the library looking at books on archaeological finds from the Viking period. There are other times when I’m not trying to be historically accurate.

For King Lear I didn’t set out to do something historically accurate at all. I didn’t even set it in a particular time period. Right at the beginning I hit the reader with a couple of anachronisms just so they know that I’m not being true to the chronology. Part of the reason is we don’t have a good idea of when that was. in that case the only research I did was to look at costume books for ideas that would get me excited about the different personalities of the characters.

For the Merchant of Venice I chose to set it in the modern day so there was no costume research, but I had to do a lot of research on Venice because I still wanted it to be there. I actually went there and did background drawings. Most of the background drawings were done on location.

Q: What are some of your influences?

A: The comics that I grew up reading when I was little were Tintin and Asterix. Tintin is still a big influence. I love the cultural richness of those books and the fact that he goes everywhere and you see all these cultures. Just the scope and ambition of it is very appealing to me.

I was also a child of the 80s which was when the graphic novel boom started in this country, so people like Frank Miller were influential to me and also Bill Sienkiewicz who revolutionized things. He was one of the first guys doing fully painted comics that were really experimental in their visual style.

Also I would say definitely manga has been an influence. Not so much on my style of drawing but in my style of storytelling. I use some of the manga conventions, motion devices. I used to study Masamune Shirow quite a bit because I loved his action scenes.

That’s some of the comic stuff. I never was particularly influence by the Marvel superhero books except in a negative way. There was a lot of things I didn’t like about the storytelling style. I never want to do a book that looks like a mainstream superhero book. I’m always trying to bring in some different visual influence from other fields of art or illustration. I’ll see something in a gallery and want to bring that into a comic book. All of my books look different from each other. That’s involuntary in the sense that I get bored working in one style and can’t force myself to do that but also really try to come up with a style that will suit the particular book.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on the Odyssey. That’s going to be a big project. Right now I’m about halfway through the layout stage so it’s probably got about another year to go. That will be out in 2010.

VG review: Metal Gear Solid 4

2008-07-02T13:55:00.002-04:00

“METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS”
Konami, for PlayStation 3, rated M for Mature (blood, crude humor, strong language, suggestive themes, violence), $59.99.

I’m about to commit sacrilege here.

“Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot,” the fourth and final entry in the popular series, is a good game.

Note that I didn’t say great or awesome, but merely “good.” It’s fun, to be sure, and will please fans. But best of year? It’s not even the best in the series.

Not that you’d know that from all the praise that’s been lavished on the game thus far. Expectations have run high for PS3 owners and “Metal Gear” devotees, which makes me wonder if there isn’t a bit of hyperbole going on.

Anyway, as with previous MGS games, “Guns of the Patriots” is all about being sneaky and getting the drop on a variety of faceless soldiers using everything from your semiautomatic machine gun to a Playboy magazine (no, seriously).

And, as before, you play as Solid Snake, now called Old Snake, as he’s rapidly aging due to a backstory that’s too complicated to go into here.

Snake is out to stop his cloned “brother” (again, too complicated to get into), the dreaded Liquid Ocelot, from spreading chaos. To that end he has to roam through dangerous warfare scenarios, including the Middle East and the jungles of South America.

Along the way, a number of characters from previous “Metal Gear” games show up, rewarding the faithful and also adding to the overall sense of finality.

Snake has a number of new weapons this time, including the Mark II, a little robot that can scout ahead and shock soldiers and Solid Eye, an electronic eye patch that gives you night vision and a radar-like location of your enemies during the daytime.

There’s also the Octocamo Suit, which lets Snake blend in with his surroundings chameleon-style when he presses up against a wall, crouches or lies flat on the ground.

Snake moves a bit easier now and the ability to do things like fire from the ground makes the controls seem less convoluted. I also greatly appreciated the improved camera and the auto-aim ability.

What I didn’t like are the cut scenes. Lots and lots of cut scenes. Interminably dull cut scenes spoken in drab monotones. The story has always been one of the major selling points of the series, but here they go over the top to the point where lengthy periods of installation are required in order to watch these fun-halting sequences.

Developer Hideo Kojima has always filled his games with political intrigue and philosophizing, but here it seems overly convoluted and confusing. For a game trying to say something about modern warfare, it’s telling that it separates most soldiers into two camps — faceless rebels and faceless government forces, and good luck telling between the two.

The game looks very good. In fact, I’d say it’s the best use of PS3 graphics yet. But every time when I’d admire the pretty pictures or immerse myself in the game play, I’d get confused with the controls and inadvertently blow my cover. Or I’d have to sit through another blasted cut scene.

Part of the problem might be that I haven’t finished the game. Who knows, there might be some mind-blowing spectacle awaiting me past the eight-hour mark. Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to watch a 30-minute cut scene to get there.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008