' "Year One" and a Half' or 'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scott Snyder's "Zero Year" '

Why?

We ask this awful little question of our art and our artists often. Why did you make this choice? Why didn't we get to see that thing? Why does this entire thing exist?

(Ask me someday about the time I met Rick Remender. Boy, did I put my foot in my mouth!)

You're far and away not going to be the first or the last to ask that question about the current epic Batman saga from Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo: "Zero Year," yet another reimagining/updating of Bruce Wayne's return to his corrupt hometown and first steps toward becoming the world's greatest crime-fighter.

The Kane/Finger Golden Age original

Yeah. Batman's origin. Bob Kane and Bill Finger's story. Again. Why is Snyder biting off more than he can chew? Why do this again?

I asked it. Vehemently, actually. Why measure yourself directly against the greats of the past? Why take the risk?

But I'm reminded of one of my proudest academic moments: I sat discussing "Othello" in a freshman year Shakespeare class at Bard College and another student questioned Shakespeare's placement of a long side-narrative soliloquy spoken by the poor, much-abused O himself, pretty much right in the middle of the otherwise fast-paced big suicidal finale. 'Why do this whole side-monologue-thing?' my fellow student asked. And he wasn't entirely wrong. But I blurted out something along the lines of: Because it's FUCKING BADASS! That's why! He put it in because it's good!

Now we're less than half-way through the Snyder/Capullo team's eleven-issue-long-origum-opus, but I'm going to go out on a limb and declare it to be GOOD.

The third issue makes remarkably intelligent and brave storytelling chronology choices I've never seen in comics before. American superhero comics, certainly. These three panels below are in their intended order but Panel 2 takes place before both Panel 1 and Panel 3. Somehow this works, despite all sanity.

The jarringly beautiful storytelling on display in the new "Batman" #23

Seriously, read issue #23 if you read nothing else of the story. It's pretty amazing. If you want to hear more about my thoughts on the quality of the issues, it just so happens to be the subject of the first episode of my new podcast recorded in comics-related NYC locales reviewing recent comics related to those locales.
(Listen here, I'd love it if you do!)

Capullo's hologram bats...

Perhaps strangely, perversely even, the parts of "Zero Year" I'm enjoying the most are the parts that reference and directly or indirectly contradict Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's celebrated work from 1987: "Batman: Year One."

I suppose that shouldn't be so strange since I've said for years that although "Year One" is good, it's not really Batman's story but James Gordon's. Until the Miller/Mazzucchelli story, Commissioner Gordon had been a paper-thin character. Miller introduced us to LIEUTENANT Gordon, made him ex-military, gave him an ex-wife, and made him extremely angry. As insipid as that makes it sound, he lives and breathes as a vivid personality in the books. 

So, for example, we've been given very little of Gordon so far in "Zero Year." I have no idea where he comes from or if he has a pregnant wife fed-up with his workaholism, but he is certainly angry. And tough. The few times we see Snyder's Gordon have had added weight for me because nothing has contradicted Miller's Gordon. They are, so far, identical characters.

The same is nearly true of Bruce and Alfred. And, more importantly, their relationship.

Miller/Mazzucchelli 80s take on the moment

In-between page 8 and page 22 of the first issue of the 1980s "Year One", Bruce is put through a torturous evening his first night as a crime-fighter that forces him to rethink his entire plan. Until he sees a bat fly into his father's study and realizes he needs to make people fear him on a primal level if he's going to win his war. A similar event happens over in the entire third issue of "Zero Year", in the aftermath of just about everything in issues #21 and #22.

3 panels- expanded to 14 pages- expanded to roughly a full 22-page comic-book.

None of the three make it explicitly clear that all the events depicted happen on the same night or that they don't, which keeps it loose. Most importantly, we see a scene of Alfred and Bruce after the resourceful butler has performed the life-saving surgery Miller hinted at and the scene is sad, beautiful, and rings true. I imagine the scenes Snyder wrote fitting precariously in-between the pages Miller wrote, the pages Miller wrote filling-out the panels Bob Kane wrote, and we get something even more powerful than each was separately. Seventy-plus years in the making.

(I actually wrote an editorial years ago about how awesome it is when this happens. Intertextuality, yo!)

Snyder/Capullo version of the same

The answer to this article's initial question could be many-fold. Snyder thought he deserved a crack at it. (He may as well be right.) Capullo wanted to do it. Snyder thought "Batman: Year One" didn't have enough Batman in it. (I'd say he's right.) DC Editorial figured it would sell them some comics. (They definitely turned out to be right.) Some fan somewhere asked for it. Liberals hate Frank Miller now. Everyone agreed it could be badass.

Who knows? But, in other words...

Why not?

~ @JonGorga

Burnham and Quitely

From the Department of Things You Can't Unsee Once You've Seen Them, comes something I'm sure everybody else realized months ago:

          

Chris Burnham's art (left) looks a lot like Frank Quitely's (right).

It's got that same sort of kinetic sketchiness, although Burnham's is firmer and less prone to random lines while Quitely's work moves better, so it's a nice way to tie the second phase of Morrison's Batman run together. I just wish they'd managed to coax Quietely out of the cover artist hole he's fallen down. His collaborations with Morrison are cackling, electric, his live art and Morrison's energetic scripting coming together for work that is an experience like reading animation, fantastic comics, in other words. That said, Burnham's work on Batman, Inc. has been excellent, and he's worked with Morrison on Batman longer than anyone has in years. For the first time in a long time, the book has a consistent aesthetic, which is a nice thing to see, particularly as Morrison's time on the series comes to a close. 

Comic-Stripping

In my teenage years I used to say "the comic-strip is to the comics medium as the music video is to the video/film medium." My thinking was (a) length = complexity and (b) something produced mainly for commercial, dispensable uses could only be artistic in the rare exceptions.

That was dumb.

Especially since I grew up mouthing off about the artistic and profound nature of the Stan Lee and/or J.M. DeMatteis Spider-Man. If the comic-book isn't a near equally commercial and ephemeral form to the comic-strip, well... few things are. (Not to mention, the comic-strip was first. As I've noted elsewhere on The Long and Shortbox Of It, the first comic-books were reprinted comic-strips.)

The strip, as a work of small units, has been an excellent format to dive into this year, one of the busiest of my entire life thus far: retail-management, freelancing and on and on.

Of late, to make myself feel like I'm not a complete drop-out from the hard school of reading difficult, brain-breaking comics, I've read the collection of the first year of Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" on the subway. When I'm not sleeping on the N train from exhaustion.

That's as a break from reading the satirically genuine depths of Ben Katchor's comic-strip about travel "The Cardboard Valise." Ben Katchor (@benkatchor), whose previous collection "The Beauty Supply District" (collecting his strip "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer") I am a HUGE fan of, is the creator of the driest, smartest, wittiest comics you'll find in newspapers, books, on the web or any other sequential art delivery method yet to be invented. My discovery of his work at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) in their recently abandoned location in SoHo was the THIRD sign I was a fool for thinking so little of these 'little' comics. (Wait for the other two, they're coming!)

And, as we had a big Batman sale at my store Manhattan Comics & More (@MnhtnComicsMore) recently, I bought a lonely, unwanted, dusty, old volume I'm working through: the Batman newspaper dailies first year collection. The Batman strip is interesting because, if nothing else, it's quite nearly the only Batman material actually drawn by Bob Kane, the character's celebrated 'creator.' (As opposed to his army of in-studio writers and artists responsible for the creation of the Batman comic-books. [See this strange but informative article on Dial B for Blog.]) Most of the Batman stories in the books or the strips were written by the man many now recognize as being the real force behind Batman: Bill Finger.

The SECOND major wake-up call for me was in the early stuff. A college friend showed me a hardcover collection of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" by Winsor McCay. The realization that a comic in a newspaper could have at one-time been so big, so beautiful, so colorful and detailed! 'You've never read this?!' she said incredulously. (You can read some for free here and I highly recommend you do.) And Lyonel Feininger! I have a collection of his work sent my way by Fantagraphics (@fantagraphics) last year lying in wait. His work lacks McCay's smooth flourish but makes up for it with his sharp angular expressive characters in "The Kin-der-Kids." Those first newspaper strips from the turn of the Twentieth Century are the best ever. Truly, not hyperbole because they were produced before the newspaper strip syndicates arose and determined rich full-color engraving an unneeded expense in a section predominantly for children. I've also perused Milton Caniff's collected "Male Call" hardcover from Hermes Press (@HermesPress), a Christmas gift from a different college friend. Caniff is universally-regarded as among the best to ever have a contract with the syndicates. ALSO bought at the store, it is very much a traditional comic-strip: humour, romance, and a pretty lady at the center of it all.

But all has really just been prelude, -just mere preparation- for the mother of crazy, brilliant, exciting comic-strips: "Dal Tokyo" by Gary Panter. Also, yes, recently purchased from my store. (I'm not a complete retail whore, I swear.)

Although I didn't avoid it or anything, I wasn't a voracious reader of the Sunday comics section as a kid. As I wrote at the top of the post, I looked down on them! But the moment I reached the second corner room at the Jewish Museum of New York in the late Winter of 2oo5 (after the room of Eisner work and the Kirby corner, after the long thin room in which I discovered Harvey Kurtzman and delved deeper into R. Crumb) I saw for the first time in my life, outside of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", the art of Gary Panter. The Masters of American Comics exhibit had on display the full original art pages for "Jimbo at Hiroshima." HOLY CRAP. Life-changing. And several of the "Dal Tokyo" strips in their original art sat in a glass case opposite. Finally, I'd found something that used the slim rectangular block of a mere four panels to smart visual-storytelling effect. 'Why couldn't it all be like this?' I opined. The Masters of American Comics exhibition was the FIRST eye-opener for me. (Not just in terms of strips, obviously. But that's what we're talking about today.) Check this out:

Break a single landscape into panels. Give us four instants that add up into a moment taking place across that landscape. The background becomes a passive but strong frame for the action of the story-- everything feels grounded, more real. Simple idea that had never occurred to me!

Even "Calvin and Hobbes" does something like the reverse of this in small doses but with more flexibility, more child-like fluidity:

The background is merely background, totally blank, the characters in full detail, total character hyper-focus. Watterson's neo-"Peanuts" style plus whimsical internal imagination is a powerful combination that understandably speaks to people of all ages. And it's beautiful.

Watterson cleaves out the background and just lets the characters dance in the spot-light while Panter etches out a detailed landscape to reel in the background behind his characters, grounding them in the setting. Which just happens to be a post-punk post-apocalyptic colonized Mars.

Katchor's work... defies description. Subtle. So subtle sometimes you're almost not so sure it's doing anything. But often filled with such simple eloquent beautiful ideas that you keep coming back for more. (At least I do. I love his work so much I interviewed him for LongandShortbox.com back in 2o11.)

He, too plays with landscape, but it's all about vintage urban ones. And it's more intellectual. Tearing apart and laying bear the little weirdnesses of modern life. Even the strip in which he posits the idea of a minisculey thin but extremely long nation nestled into the border between two other nations uses a New York City-circa-196os-style traveling bus between the two normal 'large' nations. Among Katchor's most famous works is the 23-page-long story "The Beauty Supply District" about a neighborhood that specializes not in fashion nor Indian food, but the application of aesthetics.

The opposite cultural force is at work in this later 2oo1 work by him:

I find a great deal of his work endlessly fascinating! And quietly hilarious.

Kane, too, in the Batman strip is interested in a fictional urban world. Just one entirely focused on crime and punishment. Comic-strips and comic-books, with their geometric blocks in rectilinear arrangement are perfectly suited to describing urbanity. Squares and rectangles.

The classics are the ones I have the most trouble with. The Batman newspaper comic-strip wasn't the first appearance of Batman, but it was the first print appearance of the Batcave (and home is where the heart is!).

The evidence in Milt Caniff's abilities as an artist and storyteller is that I cannot deny that this strip "Male Call" made exclusively for the US Army during World War II as a just-for-the-enlisted-man spin-off of his extremely successful "Terry and the Pirates" war/adventure strip is eminently enjoyable. I do find myself suddenly sucked in much like I do with "Calvin and Hobbes."

The strips can be like candy. Short and sweet. You can't read just one.

These are the pieces that interest me least now as an adult who never fell in love with the comics section... Give me kooky ideas in even kookier settings with meta-commentary on the nature of comics plus a message of beauty and art and truth-- I'm right at home. Three panels of set-up and a fourth panel punchline and suddenly I'm a judgmental 15-year-old again: "There's nothing going on here!" whines the academic in me. But there's something to appreciate in everything. There's even oft-times an element that's excellent to appreciate. Whether adventure, superhero, comedy, romance these strips are bite-sized sequential art explosions of awesomeness! From the childlike charm of "Peanuts" to the brilliantly hilarious biting political wit of "Dykes to Watch Out For" or the radiant psychedelic beauty of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" (that stuff is truly astounding if you've never read it) to the unique cultural perspective of "The Boondocks."

I suppose that's all to say there's unknown depths to art, even when short and ephemeral.

The comic-strip was the first form. Not the first art, but the first artFORM! The first time artistic expression was recorded, trapped, frozen in a physical form, stained on cave walls to be viewed repeatedly. Shared. Preserved. In a simple, short, digestible form. Perfect for the modern man on the go. Or the homo-neanderthal searching for the meaning of the hunt.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ Except for "Doonesbury." Stay away from that junk.
P.P.S. ~ Disclaimer: I have read very little of "Doonesbury." Do not take my opinion of it seriously.

The Dark Knight Rose

There are many things to say about Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, and about what happened at its premiere in Aurora, Colorado. I say a few of the things I'm thinking about over at Crowded Fire, my more general culture blog. For what its worth, though, I quite liked it.

New Dawns

These early days of the new year find me once again reading as many of the past year's comics as I can in feverish preparation for the decisions (both very easy and very hard) behind my annual Best of the Year post.

A large number of what I'm reading is from DC Comics this year as their New 52 reboot was one of the big news stories of 2o11 and a lot of the titles excited me but I burned myself out on their characters writing a long retrospective of the first 75 years of the publisher's characters that posted as the second month of the relaunch hit comics stores.

So here I am at the start of 2o12 reading the start of DC's new universe/status quo as well as many other comics I've never read or haven't read much of: "Spontaneous" from Oni Press, "T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents" (which may or may not take place in the DCnU), and "Mudman" by Paul Grist.

2o11 was a strange year.

We saw DC claim they were about to become the new hotness then actually become the new hotness.
(Yeah. I just used 'the new hotness' to describe an American comics publisher. I'm a little bit embarrassed too. You can deal with it.)

We saw the return of Craig Thompson to the full-length graphic novel format in "Habibi".

We saw Ultimate Peter Parker die and be replaced as Spider-Man by a new multi-racial character.

We saw Batman dress up in a new costume for the start of "Justice League" #1 and then promptly get undressed in a semi-sexually explicit scene at the end of "Catwoman" #1.

And that just about all happened in or around September, folks!

DC Comics' share of the monthlies market nearly doubled in September 2o11 then actually grew in October, shocking us all. Unfortunately the high was not to last. November brought them down to a slim, slim margin above Marvel's share and last month's number sees the company returned to where they were before: below Marvel's percentage.

[see article with details by Nicholas Yanes (@NicholasYanes) here]

What will this mean for 2o12? What will this mean for my annual Best of the Year post?

Only time will tell.

~ @JonGorga

The Gentleman of Comics is Gone

People revered Jerry Robinson in our industry because he created The Joker and worked on Batman when he was seventeen years old. I revered Jerry Robinson because he survived our industry with his integrity intact.

He died two days ago, here in New York City.

[via NYCGraphicNovelists.com]

In 1938, he started working for Bill Finger and Bob Kane on Batman as a letterer and assistant inker. A year later, he was inking the book, then naming Robin, on to creating The Joker, Two-Face, and the best butler in popular fiction: Alfred Pennyworth. Soon, he was the key writer, then he switched to penciling the adventures of the Dark Knight.

Later he moved over to newspaper strips, creating two different strips in the 60s and 70s, which in turn led him to two terms as the president of two different nation-wide cartoonists guilds. He next tried his hand as a comics historian, penning a comprehensive history of comics in newspapers.

Most remarkably, in 1975, he and superstar artist Neal Adams secured credit and a lifetime stipend for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, long-since cast-away. Siegel and Shuster were literally brought in-house and eventually fired from DC after selling them their biggest cash-cow: the first superhero, Superman. Thanks to Adams and Robinson, a small permanent salary was established and their names have been attached to every piece of media featuring Superman ever since. Although even partial ownership rights to their creation was still not granted to them or their families until quite recently, the first steps were made by Adams and Robinson.

In 1978, he upped his commitment to this industry and founded an international syndicate of comics creators, one that still exists today.

This man's accomplishments are not just wide-ranging, not just impressive. Not merely great. They were genuine. They displayed integrity.

When I met Jerry Robinson, very very quickly, in October 2o1o, I was delighted to discover that he was a gentleman. I also learned about his versatility that night: Artist. Writer. Historian. Humanitarian.

Jerry Robinson was an inspiration. A direct inspiration, as I foresee in his legacy a world where comics creators don't have to be cheated out of their rights or their pay.

Losing this man is a loss for us all.

~ @JonGorga

Seeing SuperMen and Women As They Were

So the new DC Universe has launched. The first month of new series and newly re-launched series has passed and the shared fictional universe inhabited by the DC superheroes 'will never be the same'. Sorta-kinda-not-really.

[Josh has already reviewed two of the re-launching books "Justice League" #1 and "Wonder Woman" #1, and I intend to review at least one of them myself, but here I'm trying to take a big-picture outlook on this relaunch and the superhero characters at its center. This is a snapshot, a time-capsule, of the moment before long-time superhero reader Jon Gorga has read a single one of DC's New 52 issues.]

The truth is that this is far from the first time these characters have been reinvented. (1986's "Crisis on Infinite Earths", most notably.) The highest-profile retro-fitting maybe. Mentioned in newspapers. Advertised on TV. But still. As I've written before, these long-running pop culture characters have to be treated like rubber bands. Stretch! Stretch who these characters can be! Make Ray Palmer, the superheroic, super-shrinking Atom, a widower to a crazy serial killer. (That was done back in 2oo5 in the near-universally-revered mini-series "Identity Crisis".) Make Batman and Superman aging neo-fascists. (Frank Miller seemed to have no fear in pushing that concept in his works "The Dark Knight Returns" and "The Dark Knight Strikes Again".) Place Superman's famous crash-landing in the corn fields of the USSR instead of the US circa 1938. ("Red Son", Mark Millar's alternate take on the DC mythos is also a popular one.)

Over these past weeks of reading and rereading, I've (re)encountered:

4 versions of Wonder Woman
9 versions of Superman
and
25 versions of Batman...

plus:

3 versions of the Martian Manhunter

2 versions of the Flash

2 versions of Green Arrow

3 versions of the Question

And so on...

I finished reading all the non-continuity Elseworlds stuff sitting around my house from Frank Miller's goddamn Batman to J.M. DeMatteis' Realworlds TV producer Batman to Warren Ellis' interpretation of Adam West's Batman to Brian Azzarello's First Wave Batman to the kiddie Batman from "Batman: Brave and the Bold".

Then I moved onto the origins of these fantastic characters: "Batman: Year One", "Superman For All Seasons", "Superman: Earth One" (which I reviewed when it came out last year), "Superman: Secret Origin", "DC: The New Frontier".

I followed this with two issues of "Justice League of America" circa late 1973 I've had sitting around for a very long time. #107 and #108, which make-up "Crisis on Earth-X!" specifically. And I chose to finish in entirely unfamiliar territory: a copy of Jack Kirby's "OMAC" #6.

The result? A whole mess of Batmen, actually. I realized that my first childhood favorite was still my favorite among the DC pantheon and the amount of his appearances among my reading material from the company belied this.

But in that, I discovered something about all these different interpretations of the character: they are all completely different but they all have something in common. Something that makes them all still qualify as Batman.

From Warren Ellis' original pitch for the one-shot "Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth":

"The Batman sees how to end it -- and tells Blank how to see the world. What worked for him when he's teetered on the edge. How to perceive the world." Batman, the man who "tries to make the world make sense by thinking about it..." (Batman/Planetary Deluxe Edition, p. 50)

From the script to the same:

"[Elijah] SNOW; YOU'RE NOT A COP ARE YOU?

SNOW; I DON'T THINK VIGILANTE IS THE RIGHT WORD, EITHER.

...

BATMAN; DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR PARENTS?

BLACK; YES.

...

BATMAN; DO YOU REMEMBER TIMES WHEN THEY MADE YOU FEEL SAFE?

BLACK; YES.

...

BATMAN; THAT'S WHAT YOU HOLD ON TO.

BATMAN; THAT'S WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR OTHER PEOPLE.

BATMAN; YOU CAN GIVE THEM SAFETY. YOU CAN SHOW THEM THEY'RE NOT ALONE.

PAGE FORTY-SIX

Pic 1;

A half-page portrait of the Batman, head and shoulders -- THIS is the reason he does what he does. This is the lost core of the man.

BATMAN; THAT'S HOW YOU MAKE THE WORLD MAKE SENSE.

BATMAN; AND IF YOU CAN DO THAT --

BATMAN; -- YOU CAN STOP THE WORLD FROM MAKING MORE PEOPLE LIKE US." (Batman/Planetary Deluxe Edition, pgs. 91-94)

This got my wheels spinning... Batman changes his point-of-view through sheer willpower and that altered POV is absolutely required to do "what he does"? If Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) says it, it must be true!

Same sentiment said faster, perhaps, by Brian Azzarello (@brianazzarello) in "Batman/Doc Savage: Bronze Night" one-shot:

"I know I can make the world better. ... Hell, from before I could think for myself, that's all I thought to do." (Batman/Doc Savage Special, pgs. 4-5)

I don't talk much about Realworlds: "Return of the Justice League" in this article. You should read it anyway.

In "The Dark Knight Strikes Again", on his return to Earth after a very long sojourn, at Batman's request, Hal Jordan the Green Lantern thinks:

"How strange that it would be you. The mean one. The cruel one. The one with the darkest soul. ... How strange that you, of all of us, would prove to be the most hopeful."

(The Dark Knight Strikes Again Deluxe Edition, p. 202)

"The Dark Knight Strikes Again" really should be titled something like "The Justice League Returns" as it's more of an ensemble piece than the name suggests.

Furthermore, a careful reading of Neil Gaiman's (@neilhimself) "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" brings us a parallel as the supposedly dead Batman speaks to his long-dead mother Martha Wayne:

"You don't get heaven, or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman." (Detective Comics #853, p. 19)

Perhaps a better selection from that work, that comes closer to the meat of the answer I want, is:

"I've learned... that it doesn't matter what the story is, some things never change.

...

The Batman doesn't compromise. I keep this city safe..." (Detective Comics #853, p. 12)

Batman is the man who makes the world a better place by altering his point of view.

But what about those other two heroes of DC's holy trinity?

Superman seems so simple on the surface that most discount him entirely. 'Superman isn't brave, he's invulnerable', I've heard people say. This is a mistake.

Superman is vulnerable in that he is too emotional, too nice. Too perfect.

Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Strikes Again" presents Superman as a man broken by the yoke of his own fears. A superhuman so afraid of any loss of human life, he allows for a complete destruction of the quality of all life.

The sequel to "The Dark Knight" quadrology from 1986 is almost universally reviled among comics-fans. It's a tremendously dark and depressing portrayal of the DC Comics superhero characters. In the end, Superman is convinced by the daughter he has had with Wonder Woman as well as Miller's fascist Bruce Wayne that the remaining superheroes ARE categorically different, ontologically different, and unquestionably better than petty, average, normal human beings. So why NOT rule over them and force them to live better lives? Millar's Emperor Superman from his "Red Son" comes to the exact same conclusion: be the alien overlord, force the peons to be good.

In the movie "Kill Bill:Vol. 2", David Carradine gives a soliloquy on the nature of Superman in the middle of a fight scene with Uma Thurman. Quentin Tarantino very smartly cribbed from Jules Feiffer's famous essay "The Great Comic Book Heroes" when he had the character of Bill say:

"Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that's the costume." ("Kill Bill: Vol. 2", 2oo4)

So:

Superman is the secret identity.

Clark Kent is the disguise.

But:

Clark Kent is the everyman.
And Superman is like no man.

Emotionally and psychologically very human but ontologically alien. Biologically Kryptonian. Somewhere in-between is the real person, Kal-El. The Superman, the Ubermench, the In-Between Man. He may not be the everyman, but he is of every person who's ever lived.

Somebody wise once wrote: Batman is a man trying to be a god, Superman is a god trying to be a man.

I think that's the truth. Just not the whole truth. They are both men and both gods, both effect change in a positive way, but from different sources of energy.

-Superman is 'good' striving forward, positively
-Batman is 'bad' striving forward, positively.

That's why Batman appeals to people who find the Superman character repulsively simple, while Superman fans rarely fail to be Batman fans also. Batman took negative energy, used it, and spun it positively. Parents murdered in front of him at an early age. So he struggles to fight so that none may have to experience what he did. Superman took positive energy and spread it exponentially. He was shown kindness by his adopted planet from day one, despite his great loss in never knowing his birth parents, his birth home. He struck out to make others feel as welcomed and safe as he was.

So then...

Is Wonder Woman just a female clone of Superman? Just more good vibrations? A god trying to be a woman? It's been suggested that as she is the enemy of Ares, and thus the enemy of War, she is the peace-maker of the DC pantheon. ("Super Heroes United!: The Complete Justice League History", Justice League: The New Frontier DVD, 2oo8) Yes, but they are all peace-makers! I think Wonder Woman might be among the clearest examples of what all mythic characters are at their core: ideas striving to be alive. Womanhood. Strength in femininity. Fortitude in the face of social-bondage.

And what of these other men and women with remarkable abilities?

The Flash has been portrayed as a man running away from his past and/or toward solutions. The Martian Manhunter feels like an old soldier brought into a new fight. Green Arrow is the superhuman social conscience. Black Canary is the superheroic working woman. Green Lantern is a bureaucratic superhero, a space-cop who has to answer to the intergalactic Guardians. The Question is the spiritual warrior.

They each serve a purpose, fill a role. All evolved from very simple to complex characters, and all have their own personal struggles. All reflect something different back at us, the reader.

I believe, now, what I've always believed: superheroes are an intrinsic part of the human psyche exploded and clarified, expanded into colorful representations of our desires, our needs, our hopes, and our dreams. DC was there first and, in some ways at least, did it best. And I suspect no re-boot, re-launch or re-imagining will change that.

~ @JonGorga

NOTE, a full Flickr set exists that tracks my adventures in reading this stuff...

P.S. ~ I'm looking forward to reading some non-DC comics for the first time in roughly two months...

Sequential Fiction Archeology

Hurricane Irene is supposedly slamming into New York City this weekend. My friend and comicsmith Ellen Stedfeld (@Ellesaur) wrote this on my Facebook wall last night:

Ellen Stedfeld

No, I think God sent a hurricane to get us reading more great comics :)

20 hours ago ·

I agree. In fact, I was already planning on doing a 24-hour cycle [-cough- let's make that five weeks -cough-] of reading only DC Comics with all this free time.

And so I'm sitting around my home in Astoria, wearing Batman pajamas and reading sixty years worth of comics as fast as I can.

+ First, I'm reading the stuff that's not a part of the main continuity: the Elseworlds stuff.

+ Then, I'm going to read a bit of the stuff that's all about the past: the Western stuff.

+ Next, I'll jump into the main continuity's origins: the Year One stuff.

+ And finish by moving through the decades: Silver Age, Bronze Age, up to present events.

~ @JonGorga <<---- Watch my Twitter account for updates!

One Expanding Comicsmith in DC's Reboot, Many More in Other Avenues

Is a filmmaker better if he plays several roles in the creation of his film, like a writer/director or writer/actor? Is a film better for having a single authorial voice or better understood for being watched expecting a single voice? This guy thought so:

Francois Truffaut first advanced the position that the director of a film was its primary creator in France in the 1950s
Auteur theory (auteur is merely the French word for author) is a term for the theory or concept that states: the director takes control of a film, therefore he/she is responsible for it. It seems to me, the term could apply to any of the other principle craftsmen on a film, and I prefer the less-pretentious filmmaker. Film + maker.

Firstly, as I understand it from studying the industry, the closest parallel to the director in comics is the editor. The editor coordinates and guides the writer, artist(s), colorist, letterer, etc. to make a single cohesive work of art. The Japanese already have a word for a one-man-comics-machine as their comics industry is primarily made up of writer/artists leading teams of assistants. They call creators manga-ka. Manga = comics + ka = person. This is as similar as we will get to auteur in comics. As a parallel and as a hopefully more down-to-earth option, I have been referring since sometime in college to someone who undertakes several roles in the creation of a comic as a comicsmith. Comics + smith, a synonym for maker.

-Language lesson OVER.-

Storytelling in comics is a unique game. It requires visual/space thinking but also narrative/time thinking to do both sides properly. Doing both well is a rare thing.

MajorSpoilers.com has posted a simple list of the new series debuting from DC's re-boot in August/September you can read here. Out of the 53 titles they list, one of them will be written and drawn by the same person:

"Detective Comics" will be scripted and penciled by Tony Daniel. [The cover of the new #1 by Daniel is at left.] After illustrating Grant Morrison's scripts for a few years, Daniel held-up both ends of the creative exchange on "Batman" from issues #692 to #699 and then from #704 to the most recent issue, #711.

CBR interviewed him about his work at the keyboard and the drafting table twice. Once when his first run was about half over and again recently when his part in the relaunch was announced.

My opinion?

Sadly, Tony Daniel's issues of "Batman" were some of the most boring superhero comics I can remember reading. Very nice art. Nothing in the writing made me want to continue reading it. And sometimes I felt that things in the art seemed rushed and I suspect that it looked as good as it did thanks to inker Sandu Florea.

I thought of Daniel's first stint as a comicsmith as an exciting experiment for contemporary American mainstream comics and expressed that I would be curious to see how it was way back when we were posting weekly looking-forward-to posts here on The Long and Shortbox Of It. But as an experiment, I was sadly dissatisfied with it. DC doesn't seem to think along the same lines. According to Daniel's second interview linked-to above, he was approached by the company to do the writing for a second series as part of the upcoming relaunch. He is now also writing "The Savage Hawkman", to be drawn by Philip Tan (@philipsytan) according to Daniel's scripts, as well as swapping Batman titles with Scott Snyder (@SSnyder1835) and Francesco Francavilla (@f_francavilla), who were the team on "Detective Comics" previously and will now work on "Batman" instead. And Daniel is actually just one of several comics-artists being given a crack at writing scripts for another artist to illustrate. They might all turn out to be excellent writers, but it seems like a dangerous chance to take at such a crossroads for the company and the whole industry.

(Before I move on I have to say: "Batman" #702 written by Morrison, drawn by Daniel, and inked by Florea made it to my Best of the Year post. So I've got nothing against Tony Daniel. Truly and wholeheartedly, I wish him luck writing two series and drawing one of them. A challenge for anyone.)

Why is it the Japanese mainstream makes the comicsmith position the norm, and the American mainstream makes it the exception? I suspect a great deal of it lies in the aforementioned art teams the Japanese creators regularly employ. Here, artists do often ask the help of their fellow artists to complete their work, but only in a time-crunch, and always under the radar. Americans have this silly concept of the individual against the world, fully self-reliant. Which brings me back, of course, to the main question: Why so few creators who do it all themselves?

Mind you, that's entirely untrue outside of the American mainstream, these are all American comicsmiths:

Jason Lutes
Jason Little (@beecomix)
Chester Brown
Jeffrey Brown
Peter Bagge
Gary Panter
Gabrielle Bell (@luckygab)
Brendan Leach (@iknowashortcut)
Julia Wertz (@Julia_Wertz)
Dennis Pacheco (@dpacheco)
...

THAT list goes on far too long to name them all.

So could it be that being a good comicsmith, making quality comics all on your lonesome, simply takes time? Time not available to the maker of the monthly 22-page corporate comic-book? Seems possible. Could it be that the simple exchange required with an editor, inker, colorist, production man, etc. makes it far too messy? Seems equally possible. (As someone who makes comics without any collaborators himself and does it very, very slowly... I can tell you those ones make sense.)

There's a new comic-book called "All Nighter" I'm looking forward to reading, available in comics shops across the country from Image Comics, written and drawn by one man: David Hahn (@david_hahn). Looks good. Look for a review of that book from me in the coming months with a bit more commentary on this subject.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ This gent over at CBR has some excellent and clear things to say about both DC's reboot and the digital release news in general.

I've written three articles that at least touch on the DC re-boot now. I think I'm done talking about that whole mess for now. Until the books are actually on the shelves, at least. Josh looks like he has a bit more to say on it. You'll get your fix from him hopefully.

Weekly Process Roundup 6/3/11

The weekly process roundup is a collection of sketches, pencils, inks, thumbnails, everything other than finished product, from The Long and Shortbox of It's favorite artists and illustrators, hitting every Friday.

• DC's blog The Source shared Jock's cover art-process for the upcoming final issue of the first volume of "Detective Comics". Yes, #881 will be the last issue before the big DC reboot. [See above.]
• The Source also gave us Grant Morrison's commentary with Frank Quietly's three stages for the cover art of "Batman & Robin" #16.
• Comicsmith Monica Gallagher shows us how she stays awake in boring meetings: life-sketching people in the room!
• Jason May demonstrates inking with a slide-show of himself drawing and inking a page of comics on his website to use with a group of Fifth Graders he spoke to.
• Reilly Brown (recently on art for "The Amazing Spider-Man"!) posted character sketches on his Tumblr account for two characters: Mac and the Ice Queen from his own project "Power Play" with Kurt Christenson, mentioned at the end of his interview with us here at The Long and Shortbox Of It late last year. I believe this is the first time any work from this project has been released!

I think I found cool stuff this week!

(Shhh... Don't tell anyone but I'm in charge of these things for a month while Josh is in Greece!)

~@JonGorga

Talk Over Balloons: artist Shawn Martinbrough

This past February, after attending a Meet the Artists night at "Marvelous Color", an exhibit held at the Gallery of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, I had the stroke of luck to meet Shawn Martinbrough, the artist who drew "Luke Cage Noir", a Marvel Comics mini-series I'd recently reviewed. We've been in contact since and Shawn is highly appreciative of the type of work we do here at The Long and Shortbox Of It so he agreed to answer some questions about what was, in my opinion, one of last year's best minis. You, the reader, get to enjoy the dividends of our good luck in the form of this, our second interview on The Long and Shortbox Of It!

Jon Gorga: Shawn, thanks for answering some questions for us! So you're credited as penciler on "Luke Cage Noir" but I can see from your website that you did a great deal of reference research and I know that you were invested with the character from way back. I'm curious how much input, if any, did you have on the plot?

Shawn Martinbrough: No. When I came on board the script was already written by Mike Benson and Adam Glass. My role was to design the characters and visualize the script.

JG: Was that final plot presented to you 'Marvel style': outline without dialogue, or full-script: panel-by-panel descriptions with completed dialogue?

SM: I received a full script complete with dialogue and general panel descriptions. For the most part, the details were described very well in the scripts by Benson and Glass. I was really fortunate to have a ton of freedom to recreate the 1920’s Harlem and to create the look of the characters.

JG: You described the two common scripting styles in your book "How To Draw Noir Comics" as the simple script and the wordy script. Do I detect a preference there for you, as a penciler?

SM: For me, a simpler script is always better. It might create more work for the artist to interpret fewer descriptions but it also leaves more room to be creative. More importantly, a simpler script allows the art to have room to “breathe” and helps to tell the story visually.

JG: Makes sense. I always think of it as a balancng act: enough information to move the story, but not so much information that you bore the fuck out of the artist. I was really curious (and, honestly, at first skeptical) about how and why Tombstone was chosen as the 'super-villain' of the piece. Could you talk a bit about how you see his role in the story?

SM: Well, the decision to include Tombstone was totally up to writers Benson and Glass. Visually, he is an interesting character and his look is adaptable to the time period. In terms of his role in the story, Tombstone is the antagonist in both the past and present scenes in the story. When I first got the script I didn’t realize Benson and Glass’s version of Tombstone was supposed to be an albino African American so I designed him to resemble a John Gotti type. Later, I decided to pattern him after the famous Black activist Marcus Garvey. Tim Bradstreet, the cover artist for the miniseries, did an amazing rendition of Tombstone for the cover of part two. I plan to frame that print and put it on my wall.

JG: On the subject of drawing 'adaptable' to the time period, it must have been difficult to find the research materials necessary to give us a believable Harlem in the Twenties. Did you primarily use period photographs or some other method?

SM: Being a native New Yorker, I took numerous reference shots of present day Harlem. I always make mental notes of interesting locations for future projects and there’s so much beautiful architecture that’s still preserved in Harlem. The challenging thing about assembling photographic reference from that period is that there were not a lot of pictures taken in Black neighborhoods. Many of the famous photographs have been used repeatedly over the years. Certain locations in the script, such as the historic Theresa Hotel, are now office/apartment buildings so I had to extrapolate from past architectural reference to figure out what the hotel entrance and interiors would look like at the time.

I bought a few books on the Harlem Renaissance as well.

JG: One of my few critiques of "Luke Cage Noir" was the flashback scenes. I found them confusing for the first two issues until a bit more context was established in the third. So my two-part question is: Did you have a chance to talk with Benson, Glass, and your colorist, Nick Filardi, to strategize about the flashbacks? and Were you happy with the way they turned out on the printed page?

SM: I didn’t strategize with colorist Nick Filardi on his approach to coloring the flashbacks sequences. It’s always a little challenging from a writing standpoint to jump from present to past without actually stating “Flashback!” in a caption. I thought Nick did an interesting job of using black and white/grey tones to distinguish the flashback scenes from those that took place in the present.

JG: I loved that many of the scenes and pages in the series work fantastically as stand-alone one-page comics stories. Was that a conscious consideration for you and/or the writers? And, if so, would you recommend it to others as a way of constructing a story visually?

SM: Thanks. It’s funny. I remember when Axel Alonso, my editor at Marvel, first approached me about doing the project. Axel really stressed that he wanted simple layouts. No fancy floating, weird shaped panels, etc. He just wanted clear storytelling. I thought this was great because that’s pretty much my style of telling a story. If anything, with "Cage Noir", I probably simplified the storytelling layout even more.

I definitely try to make each panel interesting and strong enough to stand on its own as a single illustration but more importantly, to work as one part of a sequence. As an artist, the top priority is to tell the story that the writers have written in the most effective and interesting way to the reader.

JG: If I could move way off the main target for one question, I didn't realize until doing some research that you were one of the many artists working on the Batman character during the "No Man's Land" story-line, or 'event', whatever you want to call it. Those were the comics that brought me back to Batman after a long time in the Marvel camp. DC editor Denny O'Neil's description of the working process for that project from his "DC Comics' Guide to Writing Comics" paints a pretty interesting picture. Could you talk a bit about working on a project that massive, with so many different writers and artists?

SM: It was a fantastic experience working as the regular artist on Detective Comics during the 2000 relaunch. When the new creative teams were selected for each title they were given a new bible of Batman designs to follow and new elements to redesign. In regards to Gotham City, I was assigned specific neighborhoods to design from scratch. When working on Detective Comics, it was primarily writer Greg Rucka and I working with group editor Denny O’Neil and associate editor Joseph Illidge so it felt pretty insular from the other books.

JG: Wow. A chunk of an immortal imaginary city has your stamp on it, Shawn! Switching gears and looking forward: What's your next project in comics? And outside of comics? I know your company Verge Entertainment does film work as well as illustration and design.

SM: I’m pretty happy that my art instruction book “How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling” which is published by Random House was recently selected for their e-Book series and is in its second printing. My company Verge Entertainment co-created with writer/artist Kevin McCarthy www.expoweekly.com, an entertainment website using an ensemble cast of fictional characters to comment on real-world celebrities, politics, and pop culture.

Imagine New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver working on staff at a Hip Hop inspired news/blog/gossip site. We’ve partnered up with Rodney Barnes the executive producer of the “The Boondocks” cartoon to develop EXPO for television.

We also have a number of original projects that we’re working on for animation, graphic novels and children’s books.

___________________________________
That all sounds pretty damn cool, right? A big thank you to Shawn Martinbrough for making the time to answer some questions from a reviewer (and a fan) for our readers!

Shawn keeps a personal site up an' running that you can see here and his production company Verge Entertainment can be found at Verge.tv

Friday Double Feature Comics Show: The Bat-Man

Welcome to this week's edition of the Friday Double Feature Comics Show, The Long and Shortbox of It's tribute to that most abstract, underrated and misunderstood quality of comics- pulp. This week: The Bat-Man.

In some ways, Batman is the most pulpy figure in all of comics. He's the world's greatest detective, he's trained to physical perfection, he's rich enough to maintain all sorts of useful gadgets, and, as a matter of official policy, he doesn't exist. It's almost as if he's Sam Spade, Doc Savage and the Spirit all rolled into one cool bat-package, as if he was created to take some of the most popular features from all of the pulps and use them to complement each other.

In other ways, though, Batman has a sheen that makes attempts at adding a little grit to the character fall flat; this is, I suspect, a result of the campy television series featuring Adam West as the Caped Crusader. For a long time, this is the vision of the character that held sway. Then the 80's happened, and grime came back to Gotham, and, while sometimes the two visions of the character manage to coexist (notably in Tim Burton's movie), Batman's pulpier side has been winning ever since. Even the campier parts of the Batman mythos- like the Batman of Zur-Ehn-Arrh- have been pulped a little bit in the recent past, and, as a result, are both a little more serious and a little more wild than those elements were originally.

In this context, then, the presence of two very pulpy Batman-related miniseries makes a great deal of sense. Both Brian Azzarello's First Wave and Grant Morrison's The Return of Bruce Wayne are pulp rewritings of DC history, with the former combining the various worlds of characters like Doc Savage, The Spirit and the Blackhawks with that of the Caped Crusader, while the latter suggests that Batman is sort of an every-hero, at least as far as pulp standbys are concerned: cavemen, cowboys, puritans, detectives, pirates, etc. Both ideas are fascinating, and both series are pretty good, if also flawed, and last week's releases are pretty good examples why.

The Return of Bruce Wayne #4, which is officially titled "Dark Night, Dark Rider" but which everyone is calling "The One With Cowboy Batman", is, in terms of its self-contained story, the clearest entry in the mini-series yet. Everything about this issue, in and of itself, makes complete sense: there's a clear narrative arc, we understand each character's motivations, there's no difficult to understand sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that will prove unnecessary because of a much simpler explanation later and, most importantly, it all connects back into itself. The story is Grant Morrison at his absolute tightest, if not his absolute best (there's nothing mind-blowing here, just comics in a grand style); others have found the inclusion of Jonah Hex a mite superfluous, but in giving us Hex rather than some random bounty hunter, Morrison gives us a clear idea of his intentions for the part Hex has to play and of the story's stakes. This makes "The One With Cowboy Batman" an extremely satisfying single issue- it successfully tells its own story while also moving the larger picture along, giving us hints at what's to come and revealing just enough to make questions about what's in that box with the Bat Symbol just as intriguing as any possible answer. As this series goes on, the way Grant Morrison sees Batman becomes increasingly clear, and I suspect the revelation he's building towards is going to indicate, in a much more decisive way than I have above, that Batman is the ultimate pulp hero.

Georges Jeanty's art, although rushed, has its moments too- there's a particular image of smilin', batarang throwin' Batman that comes to mind, but there's nothing all that special about it, nor anything particularly pulpy. It's not like Jim Lee's art, for sure, but there's nothing grimy or ever slightly so gratuitous about it- it's just solid and business like.

Something similar could be said about Rags Morales' art in First Wave #3 although I'm curious how a color scheme without the same texture as Nei Ruffino's would affect the way the book is interpreted. Morales' pencils are appropriately grim and his characterizations are strong but, surprisingly given the way DC is selling the book, it doesn't seem to be particularly pulpy.

Azzarello, too, runs into some problems here- it's hard to distinguish between the different narrators, and the scenes, short and choppy as they are, sometimes make it difficult to follow the story in any real coherent way. Azz is just trying to do a little too much here, and the book's every other month schedule doesn't help matters. He is, however, letting his intentions for the book's tone show on his sleeve and, even if his story isn't great, the characterization is pretty good: Batman is skilled and dangerous but new to the life of a man of mystery, The Spirit (whom, of all the characters, Azzerello seems to have the best handle on) is goofy but ever so serious in just the right way, the Blackhawks are hellbent on completing there mission, Doc Savage is determined to figure out what's going on and there's a mystery afoot, one which is going to bring all of the characters into the vortex of a deeply scary group with utopian intentions. This book's headed deep, deep into pulp territory and, if Azzerello can reign himself in, it could end up a truly great comic, one that's proud of its influences- influences that are nothing but pulp.

These two books together make a good barometer for where the understanding of Batman is as at the moment, or at least of the understanding that DC is trying its hardest to push, and it is a pulpy vision indeed. I'm interested to see where these books go, and the ways in which they intersect and diverge in the future. Hopefully Morrison's ending lives up to its potential and Azzerello finds his way, because they are two comics that could go a long way to adding a little grit into superhero fare, into bringing a little pulp back into style.

How In The Name Of Blog Did We Miss This...

Another exciting announcement that is totally and purely about us... and Batman!

Clare's excellent article about the mini-series "Batman: The Long Halloween" which she presented at the Bard Comics Symposium this year has also been accepted for publication in the first newsletter from The Nollij Korner!

The issue became available for downloaded ten days ago at The Nollij Korner's site here!

You just click on the words "June 2010" to open it right in your browser or right-click on it and save it to your computer or mobile device to read it.

Check it out!

~ @JonGorga

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

A Call to Ads

Sometimes I wonder about things. Arty medium difference economical things...

I've mentioned finances and how they affect the Comics industry in a few of my recent posts, and I'd like to expand upon some of that while tackling a whole other industry: the Advertising industry. More importantly, I want to address the connection between the two industries and the wide potenial for the Comics world's deals with the ad men of Madison Ave as I see it.

So "Kick-Ass" (@kickasscomic) is one of the hottest comics on the stands right now (when it comes out). I haven't read every issue yet (the last issue of the first volume, #8, came out back in January). I happen to think it's pretty over-done violent junk, but who am I to judge the tastes of the people.

"Kick-Ass" also just received the silver-screen treatment (@kickassthemovie) and made a somewhat disappointing weekend release that, however, hasn't dropped off in huge numbers since. In the weeks leading up to the adaptation's arrival in theaters this giant billboard could be seen in Times Square here in Manhattan:

Pretty sweet, right? Well, I can't enjoy it because all I can think is why couldn't it be this:

Comics billboard advertising. Why not?

Well, I think to myself: Self, comics can't have billboard ads because the amount of money the rental agency charges the ad agency who charges the person who gets the advertising contract is too huge for the number of people who are expected to see it and then follow their nose into a comic-book store or into a box-chain bookstore and ask for the Comics & Graphic Novels section.

An unfortunate truth, I guess.

Films cost millions of dollars to make and make tens of millions of dollars in revenue, so the ad agency charging the production company can be paid tens of thousands of dollars and in turn spend thousands of dollars on a giant fucking billboard.

So the problem is one of scale or, perhaps more accurately, perceived scale.

But perceptions can be changed, can't they? We just had the annual Free Comic Book Day this month and although it wasn't a failure by any stretch of the imagination, it was pointed out to me by a comic shop manager friend of mine that his boss HATES Free Comic Book Day (@Freecomicbook). Why?

Well, because it's a day on which he is required to shell out money (although not a lot, something like ¢8 a comic-book) for product that he is then going to be expected to give away for free. If he doesn't give the comics away, he looks like a jerk. If he absconds from the whole event, he looks like a jerk who isn't current with the times. So far, financially, this has all worked out because so many people come into the store looking for something free and leave with a few things that aren't free that the store makes enough money to cover the expense and then some. But he still hates that he's giving the product away and there's something else. There's a bigger problem here:

Most of the people coming in are comics readers already because most of the promotion for the event appeared in places comics readers look.

I can understand his point of view even if I don't agree with it. (As I wrote the next day, I saw quite a variety of people.) Most specifically I can agree with the undeniable fact that comics still don't get promotion in the same way the other arts do.

Graphic novel ads on Times Square billboards. Why not?

Comic-book ads on television. Why not?

Magazines, newspapers, radio, subway cars. Why NOT?

Because less people read comics? No. That may be the truth, but that isn't why these ads don't exist. There are ads for all kinds of things that have no market whatsoever in reality. That's the American way. Sell 'em something they don't need! Advertising isn't based on reality it's based on expectations about reality:

Perceived economies of scale.

Whether changing the perception will magically change the reality or vice versa I have no idea, but I do know there are some softball ways to start this process. In fact, some of them are already underway.

Facebook user-designed ads which can be set up to direct a user to a Facebook page are so cheap and, as a result, are appearing for comics, webcomics, and comics-related events. That's really exciting because not only is that advertising in the face of people who theoretically want to see it, it's designed directly by the artistic creators/event planners for those people.

But these are probably called-up from text-search algorithms based on the user's habits. So they'll see these ads only if they already happen to be on Facebook pages with words like "webcomics", "comic-books", "artists", etc...

Marvel advertises for its Digital Comics Unlimited streaming subscription service on all kinds of websites. They have a bunch of them, they look like this:

Not exactly as professional looking as I'd like. It is a web banner ad; it doesn't really need to be too fancy but it only looks marginally better than the user-designed Facebook ads!

The "Scott Pilgrim" people at Oni Press (@OniPress) and Universal Pictures (@UniversalPics) really have a good thing going. They've printed up bookmarks that have an ad for the upcoming film adaptation on one side and an ad for the soon to be completed graphic novel series on the flip side.

See?

"SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD" (the movie adaptation)

"An epic of epic epicness."

in Theaters August 13 & @ www.scottpilgrimthemovie.com

*Turn it over...*

"SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR" (the sixth and last graphic novel)

plus! "Catch up on Scott Pilgrim at your local Comic Shop!"

in Stores July 20th & @ www.scottpilgrim.com or www.onipress.com

Now that's smart marketing. You see one side, it excites you and you learn about either the adaptation or the source material when you flip it over!! The film gets advertising, the comic gets advertising, the customer gets a free bookmark. Each side is the same size and in the same place and thus gets the same exposure. Both are true to their respective logos and designs/aesthetics. Nobody behind this marketing tool made an a priori assumption about the number of people potentially interested in a film or the number of people potentially interested in a graphic novel. It's trying to get as many people as possible interested in both and as a result probably has gotten a maximum number of people interested in the related product. Everybody wins!

I don't mean for this post to be a series of admonitions and accolades. All comics companies could be doing more to promote the Comics medium in mainstream avenues.

I saw a Las Vegas comic-book store make shockingly good use of advertising in a large theater in the weeks after the release of "The Dark Knight" two years back. They placed Grant Morrison's recent issues of "Batman" in a nice fan shape (with Alex Ross' gorgeous cape and cowel cover on top) with the deluxe Batman movie dolls Warner Bros. released in a small glass case next to the concession stand. Why couldn't DC Comics do something like that on a huge scale?

Why didn't "Kick-Ass" the movie have a teeny tiny bump play before it started in the theater for the Comic Shop Locator service? Did you even know such a public service existed? 1 888 COMIC BOOK. Really.

Why don't the mid-level to major-level companies create a multi-million dollar coalition (they've done that before on at least two occasions I can think of, off the top of my head) to buy ad space in People magazine or The New Yorker or time on WFMU (I'm told they love Dan Clowes over there. Fantagraphics, you're not taking advantage of a golden opportunity!) or during the goddamn Super-Bowl or ANY OF THE MILLIONS OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA SOURCES SELLING ADVERTISING TIME/SPACE?

I don't mean for this to be about what the Comics industry is doing wrong. This is not a badgering admonition. I mean for this to be about what more the Comics industry could be doing right. This is a call. A call to the weapons that lay waiting at the feet of the Comics industry.

I believe in marketing comics, because I believe in the power of the Comics medium. Sometimes, I wish the publishers and advertisers believed in marketing comics too. Maybe the recent acquiring of Marvel Entertainment by the Walt Disney Company will enliven things in this department a bit. I wrote a bit a few weeks ago about the first appearance of Marvel merch in Disney stores. Disney owns radio stations and television channels up the wazzoo, so are we going to see Disney/Marvel making use of those outlets for more than just cartoons of varying quality starring Marvel characters?

I hope so.

~ @JonGorga