Wednesday's New Things: Big Monsters, Big Egos

1) If there's one comic that's not going to get enough press this week, it's this one, from Brazilian cartoonist Gustavo Duarte. I'm very careful about unconditional recommendations, but Duarte's stuff is as close as I'll come. Almost wordless, his comics are carried on the strength of a visual style anchored by clean lines and clean compositions, extraordinarily emotive with neither a line amiss nor a single detail too much. That efficiency belies a particularly expansive imagination, one that values wonder over all else and has to be seen to be believed. I own most of his output in original Brazilian editions, purchased from Duarte at two separate NYCCs. Among those is "Monsters," featured here, a kind of interesting and clever version of Pacific Rim. Also included is a story, "Po," which I haven't been able to get my hands on yet. Originally released as a minicomic, I came to Duarte too late to have acquired a copy on the primary market. That was several years ago; as you can imagine, I'm eager to finally get my hands on it. I'd have preferred the inclusion of the charming "Taxi" rather than the morbid "Birds," but, at, $12.99, the price is right. 

2) Speaking of almost unconditional recommendations, you won't go wrong with Francesco Francavilla's Black Beetle comics. Francavilla is one of mainstream comics' true talents, and you can find his work in all sorts of projects, from After Life With Archie, to the-beloved-by-me Black Panther: Man Without Fear series, to this creator-owned joint. Here, Francavilla writes and draws and, although his dialogue can be stilted, the art, both creative and restrained, should be enough to keep you interested. You can also pick up the collected edition of the first Black Beetle mini, No Way Out. 

3) Look, Stuart Moore's Egos is basically a Prophet knock off, with a slight soap opera twist:  

Years ago, The Earth/Galactic Operatives defeated Masse, a sentient, hungry galaxy—but now Masse has returned, consuming entire planets and killing millions of people. Deuce, an aging hero, decides to reform his old team and go into battle to save the day. But in order to do that, he must cross a line with Pixel, his wife and former teammate, an act that threatens to tear apart the life they've built together. 

I mean, come on, you can't get a whole lot closer than that. Even Gus Storms's (what a fabulous name) art looks a little bit like sometimes-Prophet artist Simon Roy, although the lines are little more direct. Still, there's a lot to be said for looking at the same subject from a different angle, and, with Prophet's end nigh, Egos may be a half way decent substitute. 

Oh, The Inhumanity!

Inhumanity #1 is a not-bad comic book. The story is a little too talky, the art's pretty good, but the talents of both Matt Fraction and Olivier Coipel are wasted, basically, on a book that has two serious issues. The first of these is in kind, the second is in concept. 

The problem with the kind of comic book that Inhumanity is that such books are not comics-- in fact aren't really art-- in a traditional sense, because they doesn't serve their own purposes. Instead, they're merely set up for something else, in this case the upcoming Inhuman series, which once upon a time was going to be written by Fraction, and now is to be written by up and comer Charles Soule.  And, so, Inhumanity #1 is loaded with information; the prehistory and current state of the Inhumans, what exactly went down at the end of Infinity, the unknown status of most of the Inhuman royal family, and so on. For fans of comics with deep worlds and dense mythologies to explore, this is a doozy. But it makes for boring reading. 

So Matt Fraction does his best to keep us interested. He brings in the Avengers. He has a character walk out of a window at the end. But these things are a distraction, at best, from the fact that his job here is to manufacture interest in a story, which brings us to the problem in concept: it's not clear to me that this is a story that very many people are going to be interested in. It's not clear to me that anyone really cares about the Inhumans, a property that has been humming along quietly since its introduction forty years ago. Occasionally, they've been players in Fantastic Four stories, and they have regularly appeared in minor Marvel mini-series every couple of years since the beginning of the century. Every character is somebody's favorite, but the number of people clamoring for a density of books about these characters were likely few and far between.

This isn't to say that I don't think that the Inhumans are interesting, or that I think that Inhuman isn't going to be good. It's not out yet. I can't say. But I do know that Marvel fired Matt Fraction off of the comic, which means that they have certain things that they want done with it, things that Fraction wasn't doing. That suggests that Marvel has big plans for this story. But for those big plans to work, people have to actually care. And the biggest barrier to caring here is that readers actually have to know about the Inhumans, and I'm not sure that many people, particularly many casual readers of comics, do. 

To some extent, Inhumanity is the remedy to that. It's a history lesson, more or less, and it lays out the major players. But, even so, it relies too much on its readers when it expects them to know who Medusa or Triton or Lockjaw (here referred to as "the king's dog," perhaps the blandest possible way to describe a giant mustachioed canine teleporter with a tuning fork on his head) are, or when it expects them to feel something when Karnak, a character with an interesting history that most of them have literally just been introduced to, steps out of a window. In some ways, it seems a little bit like an exercise in erasure, which may actually be the solution to the problem I'm describing. 

The problem, at least for right now, is that you can still see Jack Kirby's chalk on the board.

Missed It!

I'm no good at year-end best-of lists. Writing them, I think, requires a certain amount of self-confidence, requires the ability to say "I read a large enough number of comics this year that I feel I can make an evaluation on the state of the art for the past twelve months" while keeping a straight face. Somewhere in the middle of that I always crack up a little bit; I just don't think I have. Maybe, one day, if I'm lucky, if reading comics is my job. For now, though, it's an exercise I would rather leave to others, confident in my own belief that I read just enough comics this year, even though next year I would like to read more.

Now there's an idea! Reading more. A perpetual new year's resolution, something I intend to do every year, something that I never quite get to. I think it will help, though, if I have a place to start and, so, here's a different kind of year end list, one that I'm perfectly qualified to write. Here's a list of comics, published in 2013, that I would like to get to sometime in 2014. Some, like Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals, I've bought faithfully and just haven't read yet. Others, I intended to read put off for some reason, time, expense, whatever. More still, I saw, thought they looked interesting, and moved on with my life. The selection of publishers here is limited; this is reflective of the facts that my knowledge of minicomics publishers is woeful (do you have recommendations? Email me!) and that I tend to buy floppies rather than books. Furthermore, this list is in no particular order and is by no means comprehensive; it should not be held to have any other meaning outside of that of a to do list. Nothing will happen if I don't get to at least a few of them by the time 2014 is done, but I expect my life will be a little richer if I do manage to crack open a couple.

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Coming Soon to A Spinner Rack Near You: Seconds

Seconds, Bryan Lee O'Malley's follow up to Scott Pilgrim, is due in July. Mosey on over to io9 for some art.  

Competition and the Comics Marketplace

Although I'm trying to move away from writing about industry news (there are other, much better sources, for that kind of info, chief among them Comics Reporter and Bleeding Cool, the latter of which I lifted the substantive content of this report from), it seemed worth noting that both Marvel and DC dropped below 30% dollar share of the comics market in November, particularly as both companies finally seem to be abandoning lower price points for higher ones.

Comics are, I think, the most expensive form of popular entertainment. People complain about the cost of going to the movies more often and more loudly, sure, but a movie typically lasts in between 90 and 120 minutes and costs, in my recent experience, anywhere between $8 and $14. A 32-page comic, read exceptionally slowly, takes maybe a quarter of an hour from font to back, and costs between $2.99 and $3.99. I won't do the math for you-- the difference is clear. Obviously, you get to keep your comic book, and buying a DVD is significantly more expensive than going out to the movies (something, incidentally, I never hear anyone complain about), but the experience of buying and reading individual comic books is, I think, closer to the ephemeral experience of going to the movies than the permanent ownership of a DVD; you buy your comics, you read them, and then you put them away. They go into your longbox, out of sight, unlikely ever to be read again.

And, so, that people are choosing to bring their money elsewhere is significant, since it suggests that readers are trying unfamiliar things.  As Marvel and DC continue to stumble (the latter, perhaps, more than the former) they may very well get scared. Since neither is likely to retreat on an increased price point, they'll either double down on what isn't working (which will continue to drive people towards more inventive publishers, which will in turn fund greater output from those publishers), or, hopefully, they'll try more new and possibly interesting things. Either way, if you're a comics reader, these numbers are a good sign.