Wednesday's New Things: It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's a DC Comic I Actually Want to Read?!

1. I don't know when the last time I read a DC comic was, or even what it was-- it has to be two or three years ago already, and it was either Wonder Woman or Batman, Inc. The latter ended, and the former was excellent, the only new 52 book I ever really liked, I just lost track of it. This new John Romita Jr. Superman comic, though is pretty tempting, even if I've been burned by star turns on this particular book before. With Geoff Johns doing the writing, the story will be decent but not spectacular; Johns sells a lot of perfectly competent, crowd pleasing comics, but JRJR is really the big draw for me. There's not a whole lot of pleasingly blocky art that still has motion-- Chris Samnee also comes to mind-- but, given that JRJR is the godfather of that kind of style, that's exactly what you'll find here.

2. This is something else I've lost track of, but my lovely lady has been reading it regularly and likes it ok. Avatar has been doing this sort of internet first publishing for a stretch already, with one of its Crossed spin-offs, but we'll see if this six months of free online comics into one $20 trade paperback translates into sales for a property without an already established fanbase. Si Spurrier is an excellent writer of comics and has an extraordinary range, while German Erramouspe is surprisingly dynamic given that he's hampered by the Avatar house style. One of the things that I pointed out when Disenchanted debuted in October was the way that the square presentation of the comic online was hampered by the fact that the pages were obviously drawn for a typical, rectangular page. It'll be interesting to track if Erramouspe has adapted to this weird double form over the last six months. 

3. Lane Milburn's weirdo science fiction/adventure comic Twelve Gems looks like a live one. From the preview, the plot seems to be an 80s cosmic cartoon bent through the lens of Fletcher Hanks, while the art has R. Crumb's loathsome doughiness reigned in by an affinity for shading and dark space-- it's hard to tell on the preview, but the dark color seems to be bluer than a true black-- straight out of Charles Burns. 

4. This collection of The Hypo artist Noah van Sciver's early work features a preface by cape comics artist Ethan van Sciver, who happens to be Noah's much older brother. That's the kind of detail that I always wonder about, but rarely have the desire to actually go and investigate its veracity. The younger Van Sciver's work is nothing like the older one's; the lines are few, many of the characters are ugly, designed to show human frailty sickness than the fantasy of physical will to power. There's a fair amount of alt-comics weirdness here, too, although its wrapped up in a neatly into the stories at hand. Preview here.

5. I just love The Goon.

Wednesday's New Things: Getting Intentional

I've been gone for a while. After my semester ended, I expected to take a break from blogging that coincided with the vacation that took me first to Chicago, then to New York, Connecticut, the middle of nowhere in Virginia, Memphis, and back to Austin. I intended, as I often do when I travel to visit comics shops in the places I hadn't been to before, and take pictures of the storefronts and post them on this blog. I didn't do that. And, until the Buttersafe post last week, I didn't do anything -- I couldn't interest myself enough in whatever cape comics were coming out the last few weeks to put together a Wednesday post and I haven't really read anything during the last month and a half, so I couldn't write about anything either. Basically, as a comics reader, I was feeling sort of stuck.

Partially, this ennui is a function of some other stuff that's going on in my life, but its also a recurring theme. A couple of times a year, a gimmicky new storyline is announced or the price of all the comic books goes up and I begin to wonder how much I care. And then I go to the store on Wednesday, and I buy a bunch of comics I don't read, which may be the wackiest part of all of this. Somnambulating through a weekly ritual that I'm supposed to love says something ominous.

So I'm going to get intentional. I'm going to think more critically about what I'm buying, and more critically what I'm not buying. I'm going to take some of the capital I'm spending on, say, cape comics every week and put it aside so I can look into "graphic novels" and in particular, comics from abroad and minis. To go where the excitement is, basically.

With that in mind, here's some stuff for this week.

I've been waiting for this one since Young Avengers wrapped up in January. New Gillen and McKelvie (hell, new Gillen or McKelvie) represent an automatic buy for me-- in some ways this may become the model for how I buy floppies, and in particular superhero comics, in the future. I do have some reservations about this title; it looks great, of course, and the dialogue is excellent, but the premise seems unusually forced, an advancement on some of the ideas from Phonogram combined with a certain amount of the superheroes as modern myth stuff that seems somehow artificial, almost cute. We'll have to see if these concerns bear out, but I'm hopeful that this is an if-anyone-can-pull-it-off-its-these-two kind of situation.    

Non-fiction comics are one my great loves, and one of the things that I'm most excited about looking deeper into. Nick Bertozzi's last book about explorers, Lewis and Clark, seems to have been pretty well received, and his new one, Shackleton, also looks to be pretty good. Finding some way to minimize exposition is one of the big problems with books like this, and Bertozzi seems to have found a good way to balance the need for information with the associated need to not be boring. Pay particular attention to the panel and page designs, which look particularly excellent and elucidating.   

This goes on the list of books I'd buy if I had all the money. IDW's artists editions are an amazing resource for those of use who are interested in artistic process, and, an investigation into how Schulz developed and then guided his minimal, yet highly expressive, line, seems particularly rewarding. I'm hoping there'll be a copy I can flip through at my LCS.

Ed Brubaker is my favorite writer of comics; the fact that the great genre at Marvel has been the espionage comic for the last half decade or so is basically his fault. On his own, he's another one of those insta-buys for me, but I've lost track of his work in the last year or so. I stopped reading Fatale in the shuffle of moving from New York to Texas and I bought the first two issues of Velvet and then I missed an issue and couldn't find it, so I never caught up. This is a good place to pick it back up; Image's policy of pricing their first volume trades at $9.99 makes it an easy pill to swallow. 

Meags Fitzgerald's Photobooth is another intriguing non-fiction work out this week; unlike Shackleton, it takes the traditional comics step of integrating memoir into the cultural history that's the book's sell. I think Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother as the apotheosis of that sort of work, and the greenish wash on the cover of Photobooth is reminiscent of the former suggests that Fitzgerald is very consciously influenced by Bechdel here. If you take a look at the preview, you'll see it elsewhere, too.

Finally, Eye of Newt is a relatively typical YA-fantasy plot illustrated like an illuminated medieval manuscript. Although Michael Hague's art is mostly very attractive, it will be interesting to see whether or not the unusual approach will make the comic seem stilted over the course of 20 or so pages.

Scrolling

One of my favorite webcomics is Raynato Castro and Alex Culang's Buttersafe, which is the gag-a-day strip equivalent of a ball fake, setting you up for something particular seeming and then tearing down your expectations in a deadpan, often brutally sad, way. Last Thursday's strip, "Eye Infection," is an excellent example of this kind of style, except that the usual premise has several layers, going from quotidian to terrifying and back to quotidian again. The design of "Eye Infection" is extraordinarily unusual, a sort of cascade of panels that moves both from left to right and right to left, using what would otherwise be an excessive amount of negative space to guide the reader through, teaching them how to read the comic and setting up expectations for the rest of the strip.

This being Buttersafe, though, those expectations are upended rather quickly. As you continue to scroll, something kind of wild happens:

That little rectangle of black just peaking through the screenshot ominously grows block by block, filling in the negative space, building on the initial sense of dread created by something filling that space where nothing is expected, until the bleak future revealed by the oracular infection is revealed. Taken in simple terms of artistry, this is A+ work, but I also think it's worth mentioning that a strip like "Eye Infection" only really works on a computer-- although scrolling mimics on the page reading, it also obscures certain elements in a way that you can't hide what's on a single page. On paper, the surplus of negative space in combination with the big image at the bottom would draw the eye toward the reveal, rather than toward the top left hand corner of the page, and placing it on a second page would screw with the effect. The difference is small, but significant; the constraints of a computer screen are much different than the constraints of a physical format. Digital comics and real world ones are similar, but not the same. 

Intermission

I'm taking a little break-- back in a week or ten days!

Process: Jamie McKelvie

Gods of the Jazz age, from the upcoming The Wicked and the Divine (via McKelvie's tumblr)