"Brunette reading a comic on the L train - m4w" - Craiglist NYC

Found in Craigslist's Missed Connections this past week:

"As the title says: you were a short haired brunette (with glasses!) reading a comic on the L train heading to Brooklyn on Wednesday. We both got on at 8th ave, and I sat next to you, with the pole in between us. You were reading some DC Comics. I think I've seen you before on the shuttle bus, but I'm not sure.

I got off at Myrtle-Wyckoff, you remained on the train.

I was the short haired hispanic guy in a grey shirt/black tie with a bookbag. I fell asleep a couple of times on that ride, I remember apologizing because I think I bumped into you.

If you remember and are interested, I'd like to take you out for a drink sometime.

- V"

Wednesday. New comic-book day. The week Comic-Con is happening out in San Diego? A day of passion.

I had two house-guests recently. Both are good, clean, comics-reading folk; one from Portland, OR the other from the Boston, MA area. I told them that, truly, the thing that I love most about New York City, and the main reason I never intend to return to the Boston area, is that there's comics culture in the fabric of the society itself here. It's more than just conversation about comics in a populace with a larger percentage of comics-readers, it's an energy and feeling, a zeitgeist, that's created by all that conversation and partially by the comics stores every ten blocks in Midtown Manhattan, but mainly by the history in this great city.

Will Eisner. Jack Kirby. Stan Lee. Harvey Kurtzman. They all grew up here. Eisner in the South Bronx. Kirby in the Lower East Side. Kurtzman in Brooklyn. Lee in Washington Heights. This is where Marvel Comics was once Timely Comics and DC Comics was once National Periodicals and where they both still hold offices today. Comics culture and history is thick on the sidewalks of New York City.


I was just talking with comics writer and sometime artist Brendan McGinley (@brendanmcginley) Tuesday night at the bar in the People's Improv Theater (@thePIT). The weekly Comic Book Club show (@comicbooklive) was long over and we were talking about the neighborhoods of New York. I mentioned that I used to live in Washington Heights and he mentioned that he used to date a girl living there. We both experienced the neighborhood's change. I see it even more clearly after moving away a year ago and coming back to visit. Starbucks. Vegetarian cafes. Fancy restaurants. But it used to be the home of Smilin' Stan!

(There's an experience all by itself. Imagine realizing you'd been living in the neighborhood that birthed your childhood hero on your last week before moving out.)

Brendan said there's a high school that churned out comics guy after comics guy in the Thirties. DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx just happened to be in a thickly Jewish neighborhood at the height of the depression when imaginations seem to have been on overdrive. Lee, Eisner, Batman's co-creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and the co-creator of "Casper: The Friendly Ghost" Seymour Reit are among its graduates. [Read a bit more about that here.]

I suspect the only other place that feels this way at all is Cleveland. The birthplace of Superman's creators Siegel and Shuster as well as the home of the late great underground autobiographical comics writer Harvey Pekar. The two trailblazing, trend-setting pillars of the two main expressions of the medium in America from one Mid-Western city.

Josh and I both grew-up in suburban environments, what an old girlfriend of mine used to call the land of 'white bread' people. We didn't grow up with this and it's almost intoxicating to me. A tiny bit like being in a comics convention going on in secret all around you at all times. Sit down in a park, you might strike up a conversation with someone about Craig Thompson's "Blankets". Get on the subway, you could sit down next to someone reading the latest issue of "Wolverine". Drop by some small cafe in Brooklyn and you will find comics from local indie creators amid the free pile of small-press newspapers and magazines.

It's easy to get spoiled by it. But it does make me less jealous of the people who went to San Diego last week. I'll take New York over California any day of the year.

~ @JonGorga


P.S. ~
I covered a very cool event last year about comics that capture this adopted home of mine and the write-up is here.

Quote for the Week 6/2/11

Technology is inevitable... so we’d better look at it as a good thing and go with the flow—or better yet, stay ahead of the curve and master it.

~ Stan Lee (@TheRealStanLee) in an interview with Success Magazine

Timely advice, given the recent announcement from DC Comics concerning digital comics.

(And yes there was a little unintentional historical comics joke in that last statement. Try googling "marvel comics stan lee hired" if you don't get it!)

~@JonGorga

Impressively Sized Billboards, Budgets, and Bludgeons

Last year, at around this same time, I wrote a somewhat harsh editorial about the comics industry and advertising after seeing a different ad for a fairly different Marvel comics-adaptation movie on this same Times Square billboard:

[If nothing else, it's pretty interesting to see how that specific corner of Times Square has changed in the year since, if you go back and look at my photograph from a year ago.]

Now, unlike "Kick-Ass", I am so freaking excited for this film. Not just because it's a superhero comic-book adaptation spear-headed by a man better known for his Shakespearean adaptations (Kenneth Branagh), and not just because the production seems to have picked up on the crazy design-style Jack Kirby originally brought to Stan Lee's interpretation of the god of Asgard, but because this film is the first to come out of Marvel Studios with Disney (@Disney) money behind it. Thus promising something even more spectacular than "Iron Man" in production, and hopefully, success. (According to rumors...) the production had run entirely out of money and would never have been made if not for Disney's purchase of Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel). The movie is scheduled to arrive in theaters May 6th.

Look at all the awesome on display here as well:

Classy! Let's hope the rest of the ad campaign follows suit...

Oh not so much, huh?

Not exactly classy. But still in the open, where the common man will see it, and that's good.

The film reportedly cost $150 million [via IMDb.com & Wikipedia.org] so I would assume no expense has been spared on advertising. And the billboards and posters seem to be in a wide range of locations here in New York City. The one I photographed is east of Times Square but there's another one just a block away from the 7-11 where I took the other photo in Queens.

I'm currently working at another comic-book shop in Manhattan and several shelves and long-boxes are organized into sections devoted to comics with upcoming film and television adaptations: Green Lantern, X-Men, Avengers, Captain America, and of course, Thor...

People who are going to say: Huh, this idea of the Norse gods like Thor being from a world where science and magic are the same thing is fascinating OR The idea of Thor being an agent of protection for human beings because he is forced out of Asgard for his arrogance is cool OR The sight of a huge dude with a hammer smashing frost giants is super fucking cool AND then deducing that just as a series of novels are more complex, fleshed-out, and original than a film adapted from them, all of these things are available in more complexity, more frequency, and more originality in the Thor comics that have been coming out since the Sixties... will then travel to a store like the one I'm working in to find a few of them.

Well, these are my hopes. It happened on some level with "Watchmen" and "Scott Pilgrim". Let's see if "Thor" brings another piece of the puzzle into place.

~ @JonGorga

UPDATE 7/8/11:

Just discovered this site that makes a much fuller analysis than mine of the marketing campaign(s) for "Thor".

Big Characters in The Big Apple

When I visited New York City at about ten-years-old I needed to see as many locations related to the Marvel universe as possible. (Yes, I was- and am- a big geek. Moving on.) I made my own very, very simple Spider-Man Tour check-list of the real-world local inspirations for Marvel universe events, which I still have! (Okay I am a very, very sentimental big geek. Moving on.)

Apparently I wasn't alone. Among the great revelations of the "New York, The Super-City: Superheroes in New York" panel held about two months ago on March 9th by the Center for Independent Publishing and sponsored by GraphicNovelReporter.com was the discovery that yes, even professional comics historians think about such 'geeky' things. I was delighted to learn that noted comics historian Gene Kannenberg Jr. had the same thought as I did upon visiting the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time:

'wow... that's where Gwen Stacy died'

But this panel discussion was about more than the inner-thoughts I share with professional comics historians, it was about the wonderful inter-textual waltz between reality and fiction that superhero comics (really, all comics and all art) have been dancing since as long as they've existed. Urban centers seem to have held especial fascination to visual storytellers since the turn of the Twentieth Century. And there ain't nowhere as urban as The Big Apple.

The event was part of a series on "Labor, Landmarks, & Literature" covering "the way comics' creators used New York City as a setting an inspiration, and even a character in their works". New York City's influence on the cultural imagination of the country at large is, of course, monumental. We've all known this for years thanks to the film world's heavy use of the city as locus for story after story (as I write these words, I'm sitting in on a friend's NYC movie shoot). But the use of The Big Apple as the inspiration and setting for stories in the comics medium has gotten comparatively smaller attention and this is what Peter Gutierrez's (@Peter_Gutierrez) wonderful evening panel helped to rectify.

Will Eisner loved to quote what Jules Feiffer wrote in his book "The Great Comic Book Heroes" about Eisner's creation The Spirit: "his nose may have turned up, but we all knew he was Jewish." (Feiffer, 39). Eisner usually simplified/clarified it to: The Spirit didn't have a big nose, but everybody knew he was Jewish. By the same methods, even though his home was a littered slum-land noir playground called Central City, everybody knew it was New York. But some fictionalizations aren't so clear-cut...

Superman lives in Metropolis.
&
Batman lives in Gotham City.

Two major urban centers that reflect these two heroes' personalities/philosophies: one unflinchingly positive, the other dark and brooding.

[Comics panel images of the DC universe cities are from their respective ComicVine.com pages.]

Everybody knows and agrees upon this. But where do they REALLY live? What's the real world model? Christopher Nolan's film "The Dark Knight" presupposes that everyone will accept a re-tooled Chicago as the stand-in for Gotham, despite the fact that painstaking effort was put into the first film to create a unique fictional CGI cityscape for the Caped Crusader to slink through based on the Gotham City of the current comic-books.

It was always my understanding that "gotham" is just old-english for city or something, and thus was one of the nicknames for the biggest city in America: NYC. (Actually, a little research leads me to the discovery that it means a home 'where goats are kept' but I suspect once upon a time that was the height of civilization...)

However, Clare vehemently disagrees with this interpretation, pointing out to me that Chicago's fame as the first home of organized crime in America makes it a far better candidate for the source Bill Finger and Bob Kane used to create Gotham in the late-Thirties. I knew "Gotham" is the nickname for New York City, so I figured NYC was the only logical location for... Gotham. Metropolis, the home of Superman, is a city of steel canyons that looks like certain parts of this city and like no where else in the world. But the truth is that no part of Manhattan gleams with such a clean white sheen. So Gotham City = New York or Metropolis = New York? Or both?

For that matter what about Star City, home of Green Arrow, or Keystone City, home of the Golden Age Flash?

As you can see it's all pretty impossible to determine conclusively. Hell, the DC writers can't even decide what state all these cities reside in!

The answer according to these assembled historians, comicsmiths, artists, writers, and editors seems to be that while nothing is sure, bet on The Big Apple.

The second major point of the evening's presentation was more interesting to me as a long-time Marvel Comics fan: Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four live in New York City. Plain and simple. It was no question that Stan Lee's placing of Marvel's major heroes and villains in front of the backdrop of New York was going to figure heavily in the evening's talk.

That was the great thing about having former Marvel Comics editor Danny Fingeroth (@DannyFingeroth) on the panel to talk about the ways his era utilized the setting that Stan Lee passed down to them. [He was the editor responsible for several cool (and some downright silly) photo covers for Marvel's comics in the mid-Eighties (like the one above for "Marvel Team-Up" #128) featuring photos of real New York locations with either costumed actors -cough- intern and future comics artist Joe Jusko -cough- or drawings superimposed over them.]

The different strata of New Yorker culture are represented in Marvel's comics from the homeless kids Spider-Man helps out and the junkies Daredevil 'interacts' with to the rich and famous models Patsy Walker parties with and the dignitaries the Fantastic Four meet in the Baxter Building.

The creators themselves and their characters have almost always been New Yorkers. As a result, the powers that be at Marvel felt there had to be some effort in their comics at addressing the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in 2oo1 and this was the next topic of March's panel. This was even more interesting to me as I had given a small presentation myself about the comics world's reaction on the sixth anniversary of the attacks in my second to last year of college. "The Amazing Spider-Man "#477 was the first topic, followed by Marvel's "Heroes" charity publication and the ones from other companies that followed. The speakers focused on the famous issue of "Amazing" and moved on to talk about other comics reacting to the attacks including Art Spiegelman's "In The Shadow of No Towers".

This also brought the discussion to the work of panelist William Tucci. Tucci's "Shi: Through The Ashes", which was also for charity, tells not only a fictional story about his character Shi (who fights in a secret half-millennium-old war, sometimes on the streets of NYC in the dead of the night) but also about real fallen New York City firefighters and policemen whose accounts were related to him by their fellow servicemen.

Comics utilizing the history and real locations of New York City with both satirical and memorial intent are legion and often fascinating. As a comics maker/historian/reporter I reveled in the chance to get a refresher in the history of Comics' interaction with the mythical and real sides of New York City as well as learn about work I had never seen adding new chapters to that story.

[This drawing of Ana Ishikawa (a.k.a. Shi) in the ash cloud created by the fall of the World Trade Center towers from William Tucci's "Ashes to Ashes" was among the images displayed during the presentation.]

~ @JonGorga

DVD Comics Talk: "Marvel Then & Now: A Night With Stan Lee & Joe Quesada"

While I was in Japan for a short period in the Summer of 2oo4, I flipped through the channels on the TVs in the various hotel rooms I stayed in at night if I didn't feel like reading the Japanese history books or komiksu and manga (Japanese words for American and Japanese comics) I'd brought with me. Usually the best thing I could find was a prime-time samurai drama or a Hollywood movie in English with kanji subtitles. Mind you, at this time I knew maybe... ten phrases of Japanese? "Hello." "Goodbye." "Thank you." "Excuse me." "Good morning." "Good night." "Where are the comics!?" (DOKO MANGA KA!?) Stuff like that, you know, the important stuff. So I barely understood any of what I was seeing.

[The awesome promotional logo for the recorded event I'll be talking about later is above!]

To my excitement, one afternoon I changed the channel and I saw a panel of people sitting behind a table across from a person seated in a slightly-goofy-looking throne-like chair. Each of these people had a small stack of mass-market paperback-sized books next to them. After watching for a little while, the scene switched to a young man standing in front of a screen with a digital pointer pointing out random bits of a page of manga. Upon returning to the other side of the room, I realized that each person had an identical small stack of paperback-manga reprints of the work of the creator, or mangaka, sitting in the 'throne'.

Holy crap. A talk show about manga. A talk show about comics.

This is something America needs! Indeed, this is part of why I talk to everybody I meet about comics, why I wrote my senior thesis about comics, and why I was absolutely ready to sign-on to write this blog. The medium of comics doesn't get a ton of exposure and, when it does, it tends to be dismissive or commenting on how SURPRISING it is that it's not easily dismissed.

I assumed this show was a one-time thing but I was even more excited to discover that the same show came on a few days later with a different mangaka!! It wasn't pure promotion. It wasn't pure academia. It was a pleasant, normal (for Japan) TV show that featured different comics creators each week talking about their work like it was no big deal. (Now I wish I could direct you to the website for this show, but I have forgotten the name and lost the browser bookmark I made years and years ago. If anybody reading this has an inkling about it, please let me know.)

One of the closest things in the Western world is this:

"Very, Very, Live: Marvel Then & Now. A Night With Stan Lee & Joe Quesada" - 2007. Single Disc DVD. The Hero Initiative. Maverick Interactive.

On December 2, 2oo6 on the UCLA campus Kevin Smith interviewed Stan Lee (Marvel Comics' Editor-in-Chief from 1941 to 1972) and Joe Quesada (Marvel Comics' Editor-in-Chief from 2ooo to the present).

I watched it recently and LOVE, LOVE, LOVED it.

The atmosphere is shockingly laid-back as these three media giants sit in front of a crowd and pontificate about the history of the company called Timely, Atlas, and then Marvel Comics. Stan Lee comes right out and lays down on the couch. Kevin Smith stands up or turns the chairs around as he feels comfortable. Plus the fact that they're playing to a live audience at UCLA makes everything even more alive. As a result of the live audience and the friendly presence of Smith and Quesada all of the OLD Stan Lee stories that he's told a million times feel much fresher here than in other places.

HIGHLIGHTS:
Description of what Stan Lee did as "creating" the universe, and what Joe Quesada does as "managing" that universe and the varying difficulty of both tasks.

Smith asks Quesada about the iconic nature of the Marvel's characters and whether or not new ones are being made now.

Stan Lee: "I didn't want them [the Fantastic Four] to have secret identities. Mostly because I'm conceited. ... I would want the world to know!"

Joe Quesada: "The way I see it is: we tell the story of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things under extraordinary circumstances and triumphing over evil. As long as we kept to that mission statement I felt like we were okay."

Smith lovingly calls Stan Lee "the biggest flim-flam artist there is!"

Quesada asking Lee about the Black Panther, in regard to his ground-breaking status.

Guest appearances from Reggie Hudlin, Brian Pulido, Jeph Loeb and Tom DeSanto no less.

Reggie Hudlin thanks Lee for creating the Black Panther.

Quesada referring to what would become "Brand New Day" as a Spider-Man revolution.

Lee: "For the villain, I thought the greatest power -really my greatest invention- I said he had the power of magnetism! ... I called him Magneto! If he had a different power, I would have given him a different name."

Quesada recounting how the Marvel Knights line was started by making a crazy bid for control of the entire line of Marvel comics to insure that he would get his childhood favorite: Daredevil. And then how Smith came to write, and Quesada to draw, that hugely successful comic.

Quesada tells the story of the 'saving' of the "Spider-Girl" title.

In fact, the only negative things I could say about the film is that the atmosphere is a bit too loose as the evening wasn't tremendously well-organized, although everyone admits this over and over again to hilarious effect. That and the production values on the recording: the cinematography and the sound mixing are a disaster. Audio levels change when camera angles change sometimes. It's distracting.

The DVD can be bought here. Also available from Amazon.com.
It's quite informative and the whole damn thing makes me laugh.

As you can see from these quotes, there's a great deal of self-ego-puncturing and mockery from Smith that keeps things light.

"government cheese" "the gay X-Men, again" "I didn't have a clue" "burn that fucker down" "it could be Brainiac" "until he takes off his mask" "almost lost my job then and there" "dudes in tights" "see Daredevil call somebody a cocksucker" "they gave Captain America tits" "we did something cool"

It's kind of a three-way comics roast. I could watch it over and over again.

At the end Stan says a basic 'we gotta do this again'. I wish they did. America needs some capital-M-Media celebrating, and commenting on, the medium of comics. So I will be reviewing other DVDs on which you can see comics writers and comic artists (and comicsmiths!) talking about their craft (or themselves) in the future, both full-length feature documentary kind of stuff like this and big budget movie DVD special features. Look forward to them!

Gazing Into the Abyss of Steve Ditko

Last night (at precisely 7:35 PM) my Facebook profile stream read like this:

Jon attended YOE INTERVIEWS FAUX DITKO w/Faux Stan Lee. · Comment · Like

Jon Gorga I am watching two men pretend to be Steve Ditko and Stan Lee by holding little placards with drawn representations of the two men's faces in front of their own.

This is among the more surreal things I have ever seen wih my own two eyes!
Yesterday at 7:35pm

And it is true! Although what I didn't mention (because it hadn't happened yet) is that there was a wonderful and actually informative session after the scripted dialogue.

I think I shall write more about this event later because it was in fact the fourth in a grouping of events I attended over the last month (with one more tonight celebrating the return of the brilliant "DEMO" at Rocketship Comics in Brooklyn) and I think it would be best to have them in some vague kind of chronological order.

So look forward to a small series of
Jonathan Gorga's NYC Comic-Book Events of January And Early February!!

Excelsior!

Models and Marvels

Last night I read a friend's copy of "Models, INC." #1 from a month ago or so, and was shocked to discover that it's not the complete schlock it looks like. In fact, it was fun. It's cute. And with Wikipedia at hand it actually makes sense in the larger context of the Marvel Universe and ours! Of course, I'm not saying Wikipedia is required to enjoy this comic. It just helps.

The main character is professional model Millicent Collins (the blonde, at left). Sound familiar? It should, she had her own romance/humor series for almost thirty years "Millie the Model" (from #1 in 1945 till #207 in 1973). Her close friends Toni Turner and Chili Storm (the redhead, also at left) who appear in "Models, INC." are originally from that series as well.

The other major character at play here is Patsy Walker, the first romance/humor character from Marvel Comics. She premiered as a secondary back-up feature character in Miss America Magazine #2. She eventually took over the book. It was reamed "Patsy Walker Starring in Miss America" at this issue.

Stan Lee brought all of these characters officially into the cohesive meta-story he was building that has come to be called the Marvel Universe in "Fantastic Four" Annual #3, where Patsy and her friend Hedy Wolfe appear hoping to spy famous model Milicent Collins attending the wedding of Reed Richards and Susan Storm, the celebrity superhero couple Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman! Freaking amazing, right?

The Patsy Walker character eventually grew-out of the romance/humor genre and begged to be a super-hero. Suddenly, after hanging out with X-Men's Beast for probably ten seconds in Amazing Adventures #13, she's wearing spandex and calling herself Hellcat in the Avengers #144. So she's a super-hero AND a model. Some girls have all the fun.

Superhero secret I.D. Kyle Richmond's name is dropped several times and the Human Torch, Johnny Storm makes a pretty wonderful cameo.

On the other end of things, photographer Demarchelier is mentioned as are designers Anna Sui and Alexander McQueen. Then Dolce and Gabbana gets a mention in the Tim Gunn back-up story. (A long time mainstay of these humor/romance comics as you can tell!) And I would never have had a clue about any of that crap if it weren't for my buddy Dave Goren explaining everything as I read his copy.

This is one of the many wonderful things about mainstream comics! We get a game in which puzzle pieces come together to make a story, even one as small as this one about four professional models who are friends, part of a larger tapestry. The past! The present! All in one! Like all good art! Even if all of that was out the window, I'd still have had a ball reading Tim Gunn giving fashion advice to an A.I.M. henchmen.

Is there a lot of cheesecake in here? Yeah. Is there a lot of bad jokes and unnecessary sub-plots? Yeah... But it takes place very much in a double historical context of celebrities guest-starring in comics (from John Belushi, David Letterman, and Jay Leno to George W. Bush and a whole damn lot of Barack Obama). and old-school humor comics like Millie the Model and Patsy Walker. As well as the context of the Marvel Universe and the present-day fashion world. Personally, I find that fascinating.

And it was fun. And cute.