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.

Assembling To Protect A World That Loves and Hates Them

Next month, the Marvel universe is starting over, or, at least, parts of it are. There's a whole slew of new #1's, from an Avengers one pictured above, to new Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man volumes, some of it really interesting sounding and some of it, well, less so. What's going on, though, is not a hard reboot, like the kind DC did a little over a year ago with The New 52. It's not really even a soft reboot, either, since no continuity is being reset; instead, many of Marvel's characters are simply entering new phases of their ongoing stories, with new creative teams on the books that star them.

One series, though, is conspicuously absent from the books that have been solicited so far. There has not, at least not as of yet, been an announcement of a new Uncanny X-Men. That book, the flagship of America's second most popular superhero family,has been published with only two interruptions since it first emerged in the early Sixties, and, so, this disruption, the second in as many years, is much more interesting than any of the various and sundry renumberings that are going on, since, for example, this must be the seventh or eighth volume of Captain America and the above images represent, I think, the fourth volume of The Avengers, which is less ridiculous than the fact that we're on the third volume of New Avengers, a title that Marvel has been using for only seven years. Of course, the fact that there's no new volume of Uncanny is sort of explained by the new Uncanny Avengers series, written by Rick Remender, which is premised on a post Avengers vs. X-Men alliance between the two groups.

On its own, that seems like a typical big two throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks sales strategy, but by publishing an Uncanny Avengers without publishing an Uncanny X-Men, that is, by shifting the Uncanny moniker away from its classic association and towards a new brand, I wonder if Marvel is tipping its hand. The whole thing sort of suggests a solidification of holdings, both in corporate and story terms, under the newly, massively, fortified Avengers brand. We've known for a while that Remender's book is going to prominently feature characters from both groups (and art from John Cassaday!). I remember reading a mention I can now no longer find of preview art for a Wolverine and the X-Men issue with a heavy Avengers presence in the Jean Grey school. And, oddest of all, in the interlocking covers for the first three issues of Jonathan Hickman's new Avengers series, Cannonball and Sunspot, two of the New Mutants, are the only featured characters who are not associated with the team in some prominent, iconic way.

This kind of synergy with the rest of the Marvel universe is sort of new for the X-Men, who were sort of left to do their own thing, particularly since they moved across the country and onto Utopia. The cynic in me says its about weakening a brand that the company doesn't totally control, and thereby strengthening the case for the inclusion of some of these characters in upcoming Avengers spin-offs, Fox be damned. I also suspect that, solely in the terms of the economics of comic books, it will be good for sales, since the two franchises are the best selling in all of American comics, and this sort of permanent crossover builds off of both the premise and success of Avengers v. X-Men. I don't know how wide ranging this effect will be, since I don't know how many New Mutants readers there are who don't already Avengers, but I guess you never know.

In story terms, this new synergy presents some interesting questions-- does the acceptance of mutants into the Avengers on a more general basis than Beast and Wolverine mean that mutants are no longer hated and feared by the society they're sworn to protect? Does that mean Xavier's dream is realized? And is that really only possible because the good professor is now, again, dead?*

All that, of course, sets up some really interesting possibilities having to do with Brian Bendis's All New X-Men series, and my whole theory might fall apart in the pages of that book. If it turns out that All New is Uncanny's replacement within the insular X-Men family, it won't be too surprising. But consider that these characters on the covers are all, excepting Magik and Emma and those two in the background**, iconic X-Men, ones that were used in the nineties cartoon, which is still probably the most recognizable group for much of the comics reading public, and certainly for my generation. They're also, again excepting Magik and the two question marks, characters that have been used in movie versions of the characters, so maybe we're not seeing a solidification so much as a kind of shift, which moves many of the excess X-Men under the Avengers umbrella. This could both strengthen the former brand and broaden the latter one, particularly if Bendis can build on the last few years' good work by Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron, and if Hickman and Remender can manage the onslaught of characters effectively.

I'm surprised to find myself writing this, but I'm actually pretty excited for what comes now-- rather than feeling forced and random, like the New 52, this seems like almost a natural progression, everything seems to fit together, despite the fact that some of the decisions were probably made for artificial reasons. It's All New, and All Different, and that can't possibly be bad.***

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*I haven't read Avengers v. X-Men #11 yet, but, when I do, I suspect I'm going to have some very critical things to say about how the book handled the death of Xavier. As an idea moving forward, it's not bad, particularly in the context I'm talking about above, but it doesn't really ring true in terms of the crossover's plot, in part because he shows up absolutely out of nowhere in #10. I don't even think we've seen him since Matt Fraction left Uncanny and his death just doesn't have any gravity, given how unimportant the character's been since Joss Whedon chastised him a few years ago. But maybe they handled it really well. I won't know until I go to my LCS.

**Is that one on the far right Rachel Grey?

***By the way, the powers that be at Marvel, I have a request-- can we get the 616 Nightcrawler back?  Please?

Visited: Cave Comics

Cave Comics, Newtown, CT

Heart of Ice

Yesterday, we got our first glimpse of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's first post League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century collaboration, which stars Captain Nemo's daughter, Janni. You can read the full synopsis on the Gosh Comics site.

This project, which must be set between the first and second Century volumes, is in particular interesting because both its length and its solicitation text seem to suggest that it is going to be much simpler than that recently concluded arc, which was so thick with reference and allusion that it often seemed a parody of Moore's original project. Here, we get a short work, only 48 pages, and only two explicit references to the tradition in literature in English, Poe and Lovecraft, Americans both (no matter how much H.P wished he'd been born across the pond). Invoking those two suggests that Heart of Ice is going to dark and horrifying as well as lithe, a prospect that has my pulse up, if only a little. Of course, the quality of the project is going to be directly related to whether Moore can control impulses towards excess-- if he can, this may very well be the best League adventure since the band got back together.

A Note On Ed Brubaker's Move From Marvel

So long, Ed! (source)

I want to take a moment to talk about last week's news that Ed Brubaker is leaving Marvel in January, when he entrusts his Winter Soldier scripting duties to Jason Latour's very capable pen.

Since the announcement of Brubaker's imminent departure from Captain America, I've been been thinking about doing a rather extensive annotation of his run with the character. Such a project would be both massively enjoyable and massively time consuming, and I'm not sure if I have the wherewithal or, more importantly, the knowledge base, to do it properly. Now that I know that Brubaker's time with the House of Ideas is coming to an end, my impulse is to expand the scope of my annotations, which would, of course, mean both more time and more research. Even if I decide not to undertake such a sprawling project, watch this space for a couple of retrospective essays, which will deal with his Captain America work and his writing for and influence on the company in general.

Right now, though, I think its important to talk about what, exactly, is ending when the man who brought back Bucky Barnes walks away from Marvel to concentrate both on his creator owned comics and on ventures in other media. Much more than any other superhero comic book writer in the last fifteen years or so, I think that Brubaker understood that, when he was dealing with Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, or even when he was dealing with Iron Fist or Daredevil, he was dealing with the stuff of legend, and so he always approached the material in its own terms, with gravity and without anything resembling irony. Given the generally accepted absurdity of comic book superheroes, it would be very easy to laugh off Brubaker's seriousness as a kind of misreading of the state of mainstream comics, but I think to see him in this way fundamentally misses the point.

Indeed, I've always gotten the sense that Brubaker believes in superhero comics, that he believes in what they're capable of, and that he believes that they can affect the culture at large even if they don't often reach beyond an, unfairly stereotyped, niche market. That he is ambitious in this way is evident, of course, in his politically resonant work on both Captain America and Winter Soldier, but I think it can also be seen in his incredibly well respected Daredevil issues and the Gotham Central series he wrote at DC with Greg Rucka, and in his flawed X-Men work, and in his abortive run on Secret Avengers. His attraction to the big idea, to the conspiracy that takes years to unravel, to the story that takes dozens of issues to unfold, is clear in all of his work, but his ability to use the combination of medium and the genre as a certain kind of more- or less- subtle allegory is what sets him apart from even from the talented writers, writers like Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman and Jason Aaron, that are guiding Marvel's bold new direction. What Ed Brubaker gifted to us, more than almost a decade of excellent stories, was a renewed sense that not only could mainstream superhero comics be culturally important, but that they could also be literary, particularly if their readership was willing treat them as such.

Not all of his allegories are played out, yet, and the real shame here is that, for the next few years, even if new writers pull at the threads that Brubaker left behind, the work will probably lack that double ambition, that driving desire to tell stories that matter to everyone and that are also great. Everyone who is going to have to pick up from where Brubaker left off is going to have to deal with this, and I think that, rather than try, most are simply going to give up the gun; Andy Diggle's Daredevil run is the cautionary tale here. There is an obvious exception to this in Winter Soldier, but I wonder if, even with a talented writer like Latour and a movie with that title on the way, the book has any long term prospects without its creator at the pen. On the other hand, Captain America has, in the last year and a half, certainly begun to feel less essential, even as the month-to-month quality of the book hasn't dropped in any significant way, and so I'm not sure that Brubaker is pulling as hard as he used to, not even at his own big ideas. Still, if Rick Remender's high action Steve Rogers as John Carter of Mars new direction for the character is any measure, we're not going to get a chance to see superhero comics done quite as well, or quite as seriously, as Brubaker did them, at least not for a long time.

While this turn is lamentable, it is certainly not disastrous. Its important for those of us in or on the edge of fan communities to remember that nothing lasts forever, and doubly so in this case, since to act like it should, to assume that it would, betrays the high quality and literary aspects of Brubaker's work. Rather than mourn the end of something I love, something I think is important in way that superhero comics tend not to be important, I would much rather celebrate it. There are, after all, volumes of Captain America on my shelf, just waiting to be annotated.