What Makes the Art Sequential?

"Being in a sequence," you're probably saying to yourself after reading that title.

I posted this on Flickr recently:


So... is it comics?

A few nights ago at the house of someone who's work I'm editing I was reacquainted with my Bard College senior project. I'd e-mailed it to her on request months ago and she printed it out. I wrote over two years ago:

"In his ground-breaking book with a textbook approach to explaining comics, Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner defined comics immediately as “the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea” but then far more simply as “Sequential Art” (Eisner 5) i.e. visual art in sequence. Scott McCloud followed Eisner’s lead in his own Understanding Comics when he put forth his suggestion for a dictionary definition of comics: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 9) and continued in the following pages of Understanding Comics to demonstrate how his definition broadened the world of comics both historically (McCloud 10-17) and artistically (McCloud 18-20) by demonstrating that many things were comics, simply because many things had not appeared to be comics by old, restrictive perceptions. This thesis borrows McCloud’s definition, attempting to simplify it nearer to Eisner’s compact version, synthesizing them to: visual art in deliberate sequence to create meaning. McCloud’s “juxtaposed” is the first to go as there are several kinds of juxtaposition in comics (left to right panels, top to bottom panels, pages left to right) and not all are key to the medium, McCloud’s “pictorial and other images” falls under the umbrella of “visual art”, McCloud’s “deliberate sequence” is the most important part of his definition, as images in sequence are to be found in a few cases that are not comics but not in deliberate order, and is thus retained exactly, and McCloud’s “convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” can be summed up as the creation of informational/aesthetic “meaning.” Simpler, more concise, and more accurate: visual art in deliberate sequence."

Putting images into a sequence. Is it enough?

~ @JonGorga

"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.

THIS Is Why I Do This.

The Society of Illustrators held an evening panel entitled "Drawing the Line: An Evening with Comic Luminaries" three nights ago on Wednesday the 11th of May. The Society brought together mainstream American industry legends Jim Steranko, former Marvel Comics E-i-C Joe Quesada, and Walter Simonson to be questioned by Dennis Calero, a man with a young but varied career in comics himself, to speak about the craft of making sequential art.

Here's my Twitter blast from the evening with some new, fuller commentary from me:

@LongandShortbox
Listening to Jim Steranko, Joe Quesada, & Walt Simonson at the Society of Illustrators in NYC moderated by Dennis Calero! Amazing.~@JonGorga
11 May

Jim Steranko: "You want to be in comics? Four words: Draw. Like. John. Buscema. Draw every day until you have maximum facility."

The statement sounds like he's saying 'Just get good enough so you can coast' but the three artists were talking about 'good-art' days and 'bad-art' days. Times when the pencil just doesn't flow over the page like it should. The goal, as a professional, is to be able, even on those really bad days, to produce work that is still competent.

Jim Steranko: "I can't recognize my own work as apart from other artists. I'm in the middle of the forest, I am the forest."

As an over-active creative myself, I am far too familiar with being unable to see the forest for the trees, but what Steranko is referring to here is seeing instead of his own style or his own hand, only his mistakes. More on this concept to follow.

Walt Simonson: "I had to quarry it from the blank page. I know two people who seemed to just trace it out: Jack Kirby & Bernie Wrightson."

Simonson revealed at several points over the evening genuine frustration at making the lines on the page do what they needed to do. And the subsequent unique solutions and creative diversions that resulted from that frustration.

"Your style is defined by the things you can't draw well because you have to make it work in your own way." ~ @JoeQuesada

Quesada followed this by saying: 'You'll always hear people say "Oh, I love how you draw feet" and you smile and thank them while you think to yourself: "I can't draw feet to save my life" because you came up with a creative solution to a personal stumbling block.' (This writer thinks it's entirely possible that the specific mention of feet was a side-jab at a certain well-known artistic punching bag in the American comics industry whose ability to draw basic things such as feet has often been called into question.)

"Great advice I received: You won't be good until you have complete disregard for your own work. You have to forgive yourself." ~@JoeQuesada

This was really good for me and I suspect any and every young artist to hear. He also said 'Somedays it's all coming out of the pencil just the way you want, and somedays it just doesn't flow. On those days you have to forgive yourself for sucking, take a breath, and go write or go walk in the park. Just take the time to be away from the drawing-board and when you come back tomorrow you'll be refreshed instead of losing multiple days to the frustration and anguish of being angry at yourself for sucking.'

Walt Simonson: "I came in the 70s. I thought I'd be in comics 5 years and get a real job. I never got a real job and I'm happy to be here!"

Simonson was asked about how it felt to see some of the things he'd created for the world of Marvel's Thor become three-dimensionally realized for film and he proceeded to share some delightful stories from his three days on the set of "Thor" a year ago.

Q&A time. I REALLY don't want this evening to end.

I really didn't.

Walt Simonson: "I took mythology classes in college, I was fascinated by the stuff as a kid and it had a huge influence on my work on Thor."

This was, I'm sure, especially interesting to hear for long-time Thor fans. The statement was part of Simonson's answer to an audience question for all three panelists: 'Do you find your work draws on mythology?'

Jim Steranko: "I think many comics creators are children of urban mythology."

This was part of Steranko's answer to the question about mythology. He went on to say: 'Comic-book artists often grow up in cities and draw cities. Into these urban settings they place gunshots and brawls and crime, but these guys have never been in a fight in their lives!'

Jim Steranko: "Don't try to beat us at our game. Find what's unique about you and you'll make a name for yourself." #makingcomics #advice

This is where things went from educational to inspirational.

"Pacing is important. Find the crescendo. There might be smaller ones, but find the largest. The explosion could be a kiss." ~ @JoeQuesada

Quesada illustrated this by telling a story. A younger and more popular artist in the mid-Ninties saw him at a convention and asked: 'How do you get that awesome pacing down, Joe?' And Joe asked the intense prototypical 90s artist back: 'How would you open a story with all the major Batman villains sitting in a hideout drinking tea?' And this young gun answered: 'I'd draw them really angry and excited with The Joker screaming so there was spittle flying out of his mouth and the tea splashing everywhere!' Joe then said: Okay, then on page two Batman crashes the party.'' This got the guy even more excited according to Joe: 'I'd have him crash through the skylight with glass everywhere and his boot coming right at the reader's face!' Then Joe said: 'Okay. Page three. An atomic bomb goes off. How do you sell it?' And the guy had nothing to say. Hopefully he learned something.

"I always do my main layout at print-size, otherwise you'll have to walk ten feet away to see your work as the reader does!" ~ @JoeQuesada

This is really interesting because it is industry standard to my understanding to work at roughly 1.5 times print-size. Marvel and DC's pencilers and inkers produce their artwork on huge pieces of bristol board that look almost like the boards we all used to buy to display our science projects with in elementary school.

"I took two #comics classes at #SVA. One with Will Eisner. One with Harvey Kurtzman. I failed both of them." ~ @JoeQuesada

Quesada didn't intend to enter the comics industry when he was a student. He took the classes for the fun of it and when push came to shove between doing those classes' finals or his non-sequential illustration classes? He just didn't pass anything in. He learned his sequential storytelling from a storyboard class he took at SVA. (I stand outside SVA's main building as I write these words.) He went on to say he saw Eisner years later at a convention and thought they could have a laugh about it now as two adults in the industry, but Eisner wouldn't have it. He was still mad.

Jim #Steranko: "Start with the story. The story will tell you what to draw, what to do."

I can think of fewer words that make for better advice for comics artists and/or comicsmiths. Find a good story, then find what that story needs on the page to be most effective.

That was one of the best #comics events of the season. #Makingcomics #advice & #comicshistory, all #wonderful! ~ @JonGorga

That it was.

~@JonGorga

"The Spirit" of Will Eisner is Warmly Remembered

Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of a man credited as the 'father of comics', a man who was among the first to push the formal boundaries of the comics medium (most definitely the first to utilize the unique aspects of the comic-book format). He chose to leave behind the creative effort of commercial comic-books in the 1950s for something even more commercial: instructional illustration. And after making a bundle of money doing that, in the Sixties he suddenly encountered the underground 'comix' movement, sold his company, and began a third career creating, publishing, and codifying what we now call, thanks to him, graphic novels. Sadly, we lost him in 2oo5.

That man was, of course, Will Eisner.

Google knows how to show respect, the famous corporation's search-engine homepage looked like that yesterday! That fun and inventive manner of showing and telling at the same time is all Eisner. His comics splash pages usually looked like this (but often far more elaborate) in the series starring the character he created, and is attached to by posterity, The Spirit.

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) wins by bringing even more respect to the day. The museum held a screening of the excellent documentary by Andrew and Jon Cooke (@jonbcooke) "Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist" at their gallery on Broadway in grand old Manhattan. I own this particular documentary on DVD and I've seen it multiple times. Bought it at NY Comic-Con directly from the director. Love it. [Read more about it here!]

In fact, MoCCA is holding an exhibit currently called "Will Eisner's New York: From The Spirit to the Modern Graphic Novel" curated by publisher of Kitchen Sink Press and friend to the late Eisner, Denis Kitchen; and former Marvel editor, Danny Fingeroth (@DannyFingeroth).

MoCCA is located at 594 Broadway Avenue and the exhibit focusing on Eisner will be held until June 30th of this year. See a bit of comics history, New York City history, and support a great independent museum at the same time! Or order the documentary on DVD/BluRay and support the creation of high quality film about comics. Most importantly, learn about this truly remarkable man and the huge amount of varied work he produced in his long lifetime. You won't regret it.

~@JonGorga

San Diego 2o1o Final News Round-Up!

So it's been over a week since the end of the San Diego Comic-Con but there were a few things Josh didn't cover in his previous post and that I think should be talked about. They are laid out below:

-"Concrete", Paul Chadwick's unique man-trapped-in-the-body-of-a-monster character returns after an absence of about five years! The unfortunate professor, the gal pal, the assistant (all of whom I cannot remember the names of, but fondly remember the existence of) will return with the series that was one of Dark Horse's first critical successes. The related and almost equally cool announcement is that Chadwick's characters will return in "Dark Horse Presents", the company's original anthology comic which is itself returning to a printed page existence (after several years in webcomics form as MySpace Dark Horse Presents) sometime soon!

-"Kirby: Genesis" is the (I hope, tentative) title of an unusual project from Dynamite Entertainment bringing old Jack Kirby characters and concepts (some of them long since lost from the public eye) back in what will probably be a comic-book mini-series written by Kurt Busiek, designed by Alex Ross, and drawn by some artists yet to be announced. As you may have gathered, the details are fuzzy.

-Although I'd be lying if I said it excited me personally, John Byrne's "Next Men" will be returning with IDW Publishing in December 2o1o after disappearing from shelves, on a cliffhanger ending, for fifteen years!

-"Ultimate Doom" will complete Marvel's trilogy of minis started with "Ultimate Enemy" years ago. They seem to be making a concerted effort to not reveal the 'ultimate' enemy but... they've titled the final mini "Ultimate DOOM". If you're any kind of fan of Marvel Comics I think you know who this'll be.

-I suspect this will mean nothing to many of our readers but: Marvel has acquired CrossGen's old characters. It probably wasn't too hard since Disney bought them years ago and then bought Marvel late last year, putting them both in the same 'house' so to speak. Now Josh mentioned in his post that "it can't be every year that Marvel buys Marvelman and promptly does nothing of note with the property" but in a way we do have a very similar announcement here. Marvel now owns a cadre of little known, but in some cases well-loved, series: "Sigil", "Scion", "Ruse", "Way of the Rat", "El Cazador", and J.M. DeMatteis' "Abadazad". The shared universe in which many of them live having been cut-short in the middle of its first crossover event by bankruptcy in 2oo4. Only in the past few months have we finally seen some actions utilizing the Marvelman family of characters that Marvel announced acquiring at the San Diego Comic-Con LAST year. Hopefully we won't have to wait as long to see an effect from this year's acquisition.

-And connected with the new direction for Spider-Man Josh mentioned there will be:
A. A new series featuring Arana re-branded as a new Spider-Girl.
and
B. A Norman Osborn mini-series.
and
C. A Carnage mini-series.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ And well, of course, on the adaptation movie front there was this HUGE news. Awesome.

That and there's going to be an "A Contract With God" film. Exciting, but sad for me. I wrote an adaptation script for that classic comic by Will Eisner back in college... Probably never going to get that job now!

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