Graphic Novel Of The Month

Asterios Polyp (Pantheon): I was reading some Roger Ebert essays the other day and came across one of his basic litmus tests for critiquing a film. He explained that in order to quickly eliminate the mediocre from the ridiculously high volume of films he must endure, he uses this technique as a basic sorting filter. Essentially, you take everything you are as a person, along with all of the films you’ve previously consumed, into the theatre with you. You watch the film and then simply decide if anything’s changed for you as a person, either for you intrinsically or for your external world view. That’s it. He notes that the older you are and the more films you’ve experienced, the game changes because you’re taking more in with you at the onset. Naturally, my mind seized on this methodology and how it could be applied to the large number of comics I read; I found myself applying it to David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, the first graphic novel from a creator who’s been working in the medium for years, known to most for his work on Daredevil and Batman. It has certainly escaped classification as anything remotely mediocre and lingered with me days after reading it. I find myself remembering passages, still trying to analyze and decipher meaning long after I’ve put it down. It’s caused me to observe my own actions and interactions with people a little more closely. It seems that I’m probably the last reviewer on the interwebs to write about Asterios Polyp, the New York Times even got in on the action, but it does deserve the widespread attention and highlighting as a Graphic Novel of the Month. The themes of isolation, completion, and balance run rampant through the work, best evidenced visually by the yin/yang symmetry of the living and deceased twins, best evidenced spiritually by the ever-present kinship of Asterios’ deceased brother. To say that Mazzucchelli’s art is energetic would be an understatement. The book literally opens with a scene of a lighting strike, imbuing the story with life, with a charge, setting events into motion. From there, we see an outline of a figure following Asterios through life like a shadow, and even when it’s not there, he’ll invent it with technology to maintain the comforting illusion for himself. Is his brother’s presence a simple companion like a guardian angel, is it an echo of a life that could have or would have been, or something more sinister? The book doesn’t necessarily answer the many questions it poses, but illuminates them in a thought-provoking way for the duration of the tale. When Asterios meets Hana, he’s depicted as a blue form, her as red matter, and when their figures overlap they form a more complete figure – almost like emotional content filling an empty vessel – symbolic of their physical union and eventual ongoing relationship. Mazzucchelli’s art is full of clean expressive lines and tiny details that make a world of difference. Whether it’s small speed lines to provide a sense of motion for a cat jumping or the tiny motion lines around a taut nipple emphasizing breasts bouncing during sex, the scenes would be lifeless without them. Artistically, there’s an ingenious sequence of three running threads that are set off horizontally across the page, tracking memories. Along with a set of standing figures that show an ideological continuum from white to black, these are pages that would make Scott McCloud proud in their ability to make us understand comics intuitively. I found the diversity of the art offered wonderful, some pages with panels, some without, different fonts, free floating text and images, caption boxes and word balloons being traded back and forth. Most of Mazzucchelli’s panels are extremely sparse, with lots of white background space intentionally left blank. I found it fitting that contemporary artist Mark Rothko was mentioned during a bit of dialogue (also found myself wondering if Rothko’s real world suicide was not another layer of commentary about the “death of self” that Asterios describes in relation to his brother). Having stood before some of Rothko’s larger works at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, it becomes quite clear that you can use extremely sparse shapes and a limited color palette for the most dramatic emotional impact. As Asterios himself says, “anything that’s not functional becomes decorative.” Veering away from the art and considering the more subtle ideas at work, some interesting things pop up. One of the symmetrical notions involves balance and competing systems. Notice when Asterios’ apartment is on fire and he must leave quickly, he grabs three items. Does he opt for the pragmatic or the sentimental? What does this say about his character? Later we discover him giving away some of those objects, but keeping one in particular. What does this say about the value he places in each? Rather than answering these questions, what I found myself doing was asking myself the same questions. What would I choose? What would I do? What would I say? Like any great art, it causes an introspective reaction. I find myself telling this to people all the time at the museum when they ask about “good” art or what a piece “means.” It doesn’t tell you what to think. It asks what you think. Mazzucchelli proves that he also has a keen awareness of psychological drivers. When the Hana character is introduced, we learn all we need to know about her psychosis; it’s revealed effectively in just a few lines of dialogue about her birth spoiling a party and her attempts to live up to her brothers. She lives out the rest of her life attempting to compensate for these past perceived transgressions; it even affects her relationship with the titular character and the manner in which they choose to argue. As a “paper architect,” a piece of Asterios’ existence is not very enduring, it’s literally paper thin. As someone who searches for something tangible and lasting in his life, it was delightful to see him helping build a tree house for Jackson. On Asterios’ personal little quest, we see Mazzucchelli play with non-linear time, embed interesting commentary about sexual politics, and find intellectual stimulation through abstract thought. It’s interesting that this quest for man-made excellence and non-natural academic quandaries consumes so much of the book and Asterios’ life, yet the story is bookended by two very natural events. There’s the initial lighting strike, the giver of life and energy, balanced perfectly against the cataclysmic life-ending meteor at the end, dueling alpha and omega events, symbolic of birth and death. Along with the peaks and valleys of Hana’s unpredictable love, Asterios is ultimately taught emotional humility in the face of his intellectual arrogance. Like Skyscrapers of the Midwest and Bottomless Belly Button last year, I foresee Asterios Polyp being a strong contender for many eventual best of the year lists in 2009. It’s quite an achievement in craftsmanship, the way the book is so deliberately and carefully constructed to emphasize layers of meaning. Grade A.

My 13 Favorite Things of 2009 (Part 11 of 17)

Asterios Polyp (Pantheon): Brian Michael Bendis used to like to talk about “breaking the internet in half” with fan reaction to some of this storytelling choices, but if there was one single book that unified the entire interwebs, that every fractured corner of the blogosphere came close to agreeing on this year, it was the seemingly unanimous praise and admiration lavished upon David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. It’ll probably go down as a, if not the, book of the year when everyone’s lists are finally submitted and the larger meta-lists are tabulated. Every small time blogger, big time news writer, and even the mainstream media got in on this action. There’s not much more for me to say about Asterios Polyp other than I really enjoyed it, it comes bearing lessons in cold craft, but also contains a warm emotional core, that it rewards readers with repeated readings, and that there’s a reason everyone agrees, it truly deserves the praise it’s garnered to date. It’s layered and nuanced, and I called it back in August, saying that it’d be a strong contender once the dust settled on 2009 and everyone began to check in with their “best of” lists. It’s interesting once something has built momentum based on positive feedback; do future reviewers like it because they’re supposed to or because they truly do? The only way to be certain is to read it if you haven’t and make your own assessment, draw your own conclusion. While I always encourage this type of independent thinking, I’d be surprised to hear why anyone read it and didn’t appreciate the craft on display or have some sliver of the narrative resonate emotionally with their own life.

8.15.12 Releases

I’m excited to check out The Victories #1 (Dark Horse) from Michael Avon Oeming. If it’s anything like his old collaboration with Neil Vokes called Parliament of Justice, it has the potential to be one of my favorite dark superhero deconstruction bits ever. Next up is X-Men #34 (Marvel) from Brian Wood and new series artist Roland Boschi. Honestly, Boschi wouldn’t be my first choice for this, not even my tenth, but I’ll admit the art samples I’ve seen look much better than what I remember from their recent Wolverine & The X-Men: Alpha & Omega collaboration, almost as if he's aping the style of the amazing David Lopez. The guy at my new LCS was telling me that sales on this book have been picking up, so I’ll be curious where it (and Wood for that matter) end up in this whole new Marvel Now! re-shuffling of talent. The only other sure buy for me this week is Saga #6 (Image) and, uhh, anecdote alert, I guess? When I worked at a Fortune 100 company a few years back, the CEO always had this saying that you get more blame than you deserve for things that go wrong, and you also get more credit than you deserve when things go right. I guess that’s my way of saying that I think this book is good, but that it gets more hype than it probably should. At this point, I basically put it in the guilty pleasure category, sort of an offbeat soap opera. But hey, there's a reason General Hospital has been on the air since 1963. It’s worth pointing out that Saucer Country #6 (DC/Vertigo) is also out this week, but I’ve basically decided to trade-wait this series to see if it peps up. If I was still buying company owned, I’d be all over Batwoman #12 (DC), which sees the return of JH Williams III on art duties, and thank the heavens for that. It’s basically the only book I miss since I quit non-creator owned Marvel and DC fare. On the GN front, I give The Making Of (Drawn & Quarterly) my highest recommendation. I picked this HC up at SDCC from Drawn & Quarterly and fully expect to see this new Brecht Evens project on My Thirteen Favorite Things of 2012 list at the end of the year. It should be getting all of the buzz that Asterios Polyp got the year the critics went crazy for it, only with a level of warmth and accessibility that outshines the sometimes clinical feel of Asterios Polyp, essentially highlighting the process of creating art, or the journey, being far more important than the end result, or the destination. Buy it.

2010 Eisner Award Nominees

I don't really have the time or inclination to go into detail on every single category; in fact, Rich Johnston has already done a bang up job over at Bleeding Cool, so I'll just mention a few things that popped out at me. Overall, the Eisner Awards are losing credibility with me. Either the process and participants are so desperately out of touch with reality that I just don't get it and question the value of the entire endeavor, or my own personal tastes have strayed so far from the mainstream that I don't even know what the awards mean any longer. They don't seem to hold any relevance for me. In most cases I find myself just totally disinterested. The remainder of the time, it seems that my reaction is an exasperated "WHAT?!" due to what is, or in some cases, what is not present.

So, yeah... it was nice to see Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life and David Mazzuchelli's Asterios Polyp nominated in multiple categories. Sure, it's all a bit predictable and safe, particularly in the case of Asterios Polyp, (I'm secretly hoping A Drifting Life wins), but they're both great books and it's reassuring, if nothing else, that there still exists some sanity. Probably my favorite nominee, and one of the very few that seemed to make sense in my opinion, was Terry Moore's Echo in the Best Writer/Artist category. It's very much deserved and I hope he outright takes a win in this category to send a clear message about the quality existing outside the mainstream. I also thought it was nice to see JH Williams III getting some love for his work on Batwoman in Detective Comics, though it seems ironically ill-timed with DC's clusterfuckish handling of the series, the character, and both creators involved. It's critically lauded, nominated for an Eisner Award now, so yeah, let's just stop publishing that, ok? I, too, think it's kinda' irreverently funny that Robert Crumb's The Book of Genesis: Illustrated adaptation - of the Bible - was not listed in the non-fiction category, thus by default appears in the fiction category. From this we can assume that all of the liberal arts Blue Staters are secretly behind it all. Ha! Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as Best New Series? That's a joke, right? Because the art is so awful, and apparently nobody had an issue with an interpretation of a decades old Philip K. Dick story, already translated to film, being considered "new" material.

Where it all really totally derails is the Best Writer category. If that list really represents what anyone involved in this believes the best writers working right now in the industry are, then we're all doomed. That list is a joke. It's painfully mainstream, painfully repetitive of previous nominees, and doesn't at all reflect my taste, the taste of the people I associate with, or the taste of the critics I read and their online discourse. Perhaps these writers sell the most, or are the most commercial, but that's not supposed to be what this is about. Is it? Isn't it about the art, the craft, not the popularity contest of who's working the most high profile crossovers? To rub flaming gasoline right into the gaping flesh wound, included is James Robinson (who, in his defense, is a writer I've enjoyed in the past - hello, Starman), but is nominated here for Justice League: Cry for Justice, easily the worst book I read all year, a book that has been universally panned and painfully cited as an example of everything wrong with the industry, fullfilling multiple stereotypes around editorial interference, poor plotting and mis-characterization, awful panel to panel storytelling, indecipherable page composition, downright mysogynistic and/or homophobic tendencies, and outright superhero tragedy porn. Whew! It's just ridiculous. On top of it all, (sometimes) series artist Mauro Cascioli (really, shouldn't you have to actually complete the entire mini-series to be nominated?) is nominated in the Best Painter/Multimedia Artist category for the same awful book. Really? Really? REALLY. Look at that picture! It's like they missed April 1st and forgot to run the announcement that day as a prank.

San Diego Comic Con 2009: Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends

I went just two days this year, Friday and Saturday, and overall it turned out to be a good convention. Not as great as 2007, but much better than 2008. Sure, there were still plenty of things that aggravated me, namely the insane volume of people (I really hate crowds), the stupidity of the lines, flaky creators who disappeared from their booths (there’s a difference between “5 minutes” and an hour and 15 minutes, people), and my general disdain for things not having to do with comics. The lines are usually ridiculous, but this year they seemed to take it to a new level of incoherence. Jaime from SoCal Comics probably summed it up the best. “These people are so stupid; they don’t even know what they’re in line for.” There were about 300 people in a line in front of his booth. He’d asked 4 of them what they were in line for and not a single one could tell him, they just followed the crowd hoping for something free. Turned out it was a free Twilight book, but it’s silly they didn’t know. Not to mention the fact that they were blocking access to his booth for the better part of an hour; this is in the Silver Age section!

The rampant sense of consumerism also sickens me. There were so many people racing around trying to get their limited edition Han & Luke bullshit from Sideshow Collectibles or Orange Green Lantern whatever the fuck ever figures. I overheard one bloke explaining that you had to go to one line and enter a drawing to get a ticket and then if you got a certain ticket you could redeem it in this entirely different other area for another thing that let you go to this other place where you could fight the crowd and only get two and then he would repeat this process over and over until he got all the colored figures and then he could keep one set for himself and then he could sell one on eBay and then his friend said that… Now I’m all for a bit of the hustler mentality. My parents are antique dealers and they hustle. I’ve been with them in the bowels of Philadelphia as they scour some old lady’s attic discovering an oil painting from the 1800’s that they then turn at a high end auction at Sotheby’s in New York. That’s hustling. But there’s a world of difference between that and getting your retarded Doctor Who action figures and hawking them online. That’s just manufactured demand. From a financial perspective, I actually only spent $208 this year, which is nothing for me. Two years ago, believe it or not, I actually spent 10 times that amount.

I think the biggest lesson I was reminded of this year was that San Diego Con is a humongous place, you will never see everything, and every single person has a unique experience. Because it’s so big, there’s still room for you to be able to carve out your own individual con experience. You can eke out a con that works for you. If you’re smart about it and know what you want to buy, who you want to see, what friends you want to hook up with, or what panel you’d like to attend, you can be in and out and make it happen. Having attended too many panels last year, I tried to spend much more time in the Small Press Pavilion, Artist’s Alley, and the dealer’s floor in general. I basically stayed in a triangle around Oni Press, CBLDF, Top Shelf, and Fantagraphics, with occasional forays into the Small Press Pavilion, the Silver Age dealers, Artist’s Alley, or down to Avatar Press.

After some online exchanges, I finally met Brian Wood! He was gracious and complimentary about my reviews. We chatted briefly about his new DV8 book, some other projects in general, and the highs and lows in telling a long form story like DMZ. I picked up the first two Northlanders trades from him, since my LCS is so inconsistent with the single issues, and he gave me a copy of Public Domain #2. From there, I met up with Ryan Claytor from Elephant Eater Comics. I learned about a new gig he’s got in the works, it’s not even my place to say, but I’m proud of the guy. He’s living his dream, teaching comics at the collegiate level and cranking out self-published work. He’s going to be the next Scott McCloud; the guy from our generation who teaches people about the medium with wit, style, and insight. I picked up his latest autobio book And Then One Day #7, along with his latest 24 hour comic, The Machinist. Another highlight for this year was finally meeting Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten after much online correspondence. I met up with them during their signing at the Oni Press booth and picked up my copy of Wasteland: The Apocalyptic Edition: Volume 1 along with Wasteland #25 (I swear I think I have the only copy known to exist in San Diego County). It was just an exuberant meeting. We’ve chatted online numerous times and believe me, having worked at the largest networking company in the world for 11 years, I have a deep understanding of how the interwebs has empowered voices and revolutionized the communication paradigm, but there’s nothing like a good old fashioned handshake and looking someone in the eye as you tell them how much you respect their work. They too were gracious and complimentary about the reviews and there was a real sense of genuine appreciation that was flowing back and forth.

After those meet and greets, I headed into the Silver Age area and picked up a copy of Strange Tales #120 from a dealer from New York. This is the first team up between Iceman and Human Torch from 1964 and I’ve been looking for a clean copy of this book for years, ever since I sold the copy I used to own and regretted it ever since. I really enjoyed attending the Wednesday Comics Panel moderated by Editor Mark Chiarello, who delivered SOLO to us a couple years ago. Paul Pope characterized the process of creating for this project as “brutal and elegant” comics. He said that the format forced you to eliminate the superfluous, which was extremely difficult, but ultimately yielded astounding results. He further explained that from his experiences working for Kodansha, it felt like the opposite of manga in a way. Manga can give you a decompressed 40 page fight scene, but Wednesday Comics forces you to pack the contents of an entire issue into just one page. It was also great to see everyone, including Paul Pope and Dave Gibbons, lavish so much praise on Ryan Sook, who’s really turning in the best stuff of his career here. Gibbons explained that doing Kamandi was a treat, he had the Hal Foster Prince Valiant in his head, along with Kirby’s The Demon, which he felt was just Kirby riffing on Prince Valiant. I met up with Jason Crowe, a friend from the Bay Area, and sold him my copy of Asterios Polyp. We discussed him doing some more reviews for 13 Minutes, perhaps Asterios Polyp itself or even the Berlin trades from Drawn & Quarterly.

The next day I spent some time in the Silver Age area, looking for a few key books that I’m still interested in, including Uncanny X-Men #168, Uncanny X-Men #129, Fantastic Four #10, Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD #7, etc. I checked out the V panel, where they screened the pilot episode of this reimaging of an 80’s cult favorite ala the recent Battlestar Galactica. A decent first episode, though there were some wonky acting bits and very predictable moments, it leveraged 9/11 paranoia in a great way and touched on some hot button social triggers like universal health care. It was great to see Morena Baccarin, Alan Tudyk, Scott Wolf, and Morris Chestnut discuss the project. I met up with Tim Goodyear, another friend from the Bay Area who now lives in Portland, and works with the Sparkplug Comics crew. I gave Tim a script to work on and picked up Reich #5 and 6 from Elijah Brubaker. Tim threw in a free copy of an interesting little book called Sausage Hand from his Teenage Dinosaur imprint. I spent some time at the Avatar Press booth looking into some Warren Ellis junk, and then headed over to Top Shelf to chat with Matt Kindt. I crossed the way and picked up I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! from Fantagraphics. I thought it was silly that by Saturday morning, they’d already sold out of the follow up You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! While it’s nice to see the high demand for this great book, you’d think the publisher would come plenty stocked with a book that just came out that very week. Generally speaking, I like picking up books directly from the creative team or publisher, but I was forced to buy it from Comic Relief around the corner. I chatted briefly with Nathan Fox in Artist’s Alley and then suddenly realized that I’d completed all of my goals for the con by about 4pm on Saturday.

Overall, it was generally easy to navigate in terms of spatial relationships, since it’s for the most part the same people in the same places. Some people I encountered seemed to have a pretty sour attitude about the recession. While dealers seemed ready to wheel and deal, often dropping the price without me even asking, my observation was that the middle ground was being eliminated. Meaning that you could find deals on low grade books and numerous tables with 50% off trades… or you could find ultra high end CGC books holding their prices steadily – with nothing in between. I didn’t miss not being at the con on Sunday. I sat at home with a cold drink, my daughter in my lap, and watched about 3 hours worth of coverage on G4TV’s Attack of the Show, which was great. Not only was it more relaxed, but I didn’t have to inhale fanboy funk (would it be crass to suggest a booth selling deodorant at the con? I think I’d either make a ton of money or… hrmm, perhaps not a single dollar). I saw decent interviews with Ian Sattler, Joe Quesada, and Jon Favreau, and where else can you see Olivia Munn dressed up as Emma Frost fondling Kevin Pereira’s furry testicles?

For the completists, here’s what came home;

Free Crap:
Top Shelf 2009 Catalog
Athena #2 (A.M. Works)
Some New Kind of Slaughter #1 (ASP)
Dark Horse Preview Book 2009
The Talisman #0 (Del Rey Books)
The Last Days of American Crime Preview (Radical)
Wildstorm Universe #0 (DC)
The New Avengers #54 (Marvel)
The Engineer #1 (ASP)
Primordia #1 (ASP)
Killing Pickman #1 (ASP)
Awakening #1, 2, 3 (ASP)
Absolution #0 (Avatar Press)
The Comics Journal #269 (Fantagraphics)
Comic Strip Masterpieces #1 (Fantagraphics)
Fantagraphics Books Catalog: Spring/Summer 2009
The Dark Hunters: Volume 1 (St. Martin’s Griffin)
IDW Coming Attractions: The Hunter
IDW 2009 Catalog
Hybrid Bastards! #1, 2 (ASP)
Okko: Cycle of Earth #1 (ASP)
Okko: Cycle of Water #2, 3, 4 (ASP)
The Killer #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 (ASP)
The Secret History #1, 3, 4 (ASP)
Entertainment Weekly #1057

Purchased Items:
And Then One Day #7 (Elephant Eater)
The Machinist #1 (Elephant Eater)
Northlanders: Volume 1 TPB (DC/Vertigo)
Northlanders: Volume 2 TPB (DC/Vertigo)
Public Domain #2 (Brian Wood)
Wasteland: Apocalyptic Edition: Volume 1 (Oni Press)
Wasteland #25 (Oni Press)
Strange Tales #120 (Marvel)
Uncanny X-Men #168 (Marvel)
Reich #5, 6 (Sparkplug Comics)
Sausage Hand (Teenage Dinosaur & Sparkplug Comics)
I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! (Fantagraphics)
You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! (Fantagraphics)
Freakangels: Volume 1 (Avatar Press)
Freakangels: Volume 2 (Avatar Press)

San Diego Comic Con 2010: Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends

The San Diego Comic Con is like that ex-girlfriend who will always occupy a special place in your heart, but that you simply grew apart from. Before I explain my personal disheartening further, let me give you a fairly straightforward laundry list of my experiences this year. I always enjoy reading these personal recaps, and I hope you do too.

THURSDAY

• I met up early with Ryan Claytor from Elephant Eater Comics, who was located in a terrific location right on the corner of the Small Press Pavilion at a busy intersection across from Oni Press. Ryan was the first to receive one of the super limited edition hand silkscreened 13 Minutes t-shirts I had printed up! I took an early trot through the main exhibit hall and got the lay of the land, which hadn’t changed much aside from the slight relocation of Artists Alley.


• My first stop was the Strangeco booth, and I was able to pick up an extremely limited edition “Mr. Spray” vinyl figure designed by Shepard Fairey. Shepard is currently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art where I work, along with several other prominent street artists.


• As I walked through the exhibit hall early, I luckily stumbled upon a booth handing out free t-shirts to about 50 people, and was able to get a cool “Blue Sun” t-shirt from Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity Universe.


• After that jaunt, I wound up back in the Small Press Pavilion and suddenly saw Rich Johnston from Bleeding Cool going up and down the aisles interviewing small press creators, which I thought was really cool. I decided to introduce myself to Rich, told him how much I liked the site, and handed him a 13 Minutes business card. He was super gracious, appreciative of the feedback, and struck me as a surprisingly humble guy, which sort of defied the preconceived notion I had of him judging solely by the snark on his site.


• One of the creators I wanted to establish a relationship with was Kody Chamberlain, who recently put out a book called Sweets, published by Image Comics. I found him early, bought the first issue from him, and also continued my (long) streak of handing out 13 Minutes business cards. He seemed excited by the prospect of an additional review, and also struck me as really down to Earth. I can’t wait to finally read that book after holding off buying it the previous Wednesday.


• My next stop was Sparkplug Comic Books, in an effort to find my old friend Tim Goodyear, who was the artist of my first mini-comic, The Mercy Killing. Tim wasn’t in yet, but I ended up having a long chat with Sparkplug Publisher Dylan Williams, who I’d had some sporadic online correspondence with. Dylan was genuinely thankful for the reviews I’ve done of Sparkplug’s output here at 13 Minutes, and also over at Poopsheet Foundation. Dylan was kind enough to comp me a handful of review copies for some new books from Elijah Brubaker, Chris Cilla, and David King. They all look terrific and I’ll tell you right now, Sparkplug is really turning into my favorite indie publisher, reliably pumping out one interesting project after another. One thing led to another, and I also gave Dylan a couple of copies of my mini comics The Mercy Killing and Blood Orange after he inquired about them. I left Dylan a business card and continued my day.


• Next door to Sparkplug was Tom Neely from I Will Destroy You, whose book The Blot is one of my all time favorite works. Every year I purchase all of Neely’s new stuff and Poopsheet Foundation readers will recognize his name from one of my “Top 10 Mini-Comics & Small Press Titles of 2009.” I purchased a couple of books and when Tom realized who I was, he was kind enough to comp me on a couple of titles as well. I really appreciated that and he too received, you guessed it, a 13 Minutes business card.


• I ended up back in the Small Press Pavilion and found a great looking book called The Wandering Shaolin Monk, which is a handsome hardcover and a Xeric Grant recipient. I bought the book, which came with a free t-shirt and a homemade cookie! You’d be crazy if you think these creators didn’t also get a 13 Minutes business card.


• I ran into Stan Yan, who did a book called The Wang: Erection Year, which I reviewed mostly favorably at Poopsheet Foundation. I bought Stan’s new books, called SubCulture (one of which I already read and loved!) and he gave me a couple of free books as well. Did Stan get a business card, you ask? Yes, of course he did.


• I picked up another book in the Small Press Pavilion at this point called The Society of Unordinary Young Ladies, which was pitched as an indie riff on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but starring 80’s TV show girls. Honestly the pitch didn’t do much for me, but damn the art looked nice and the covers were amazing. Yes, dear friends, the roll of self-promoting 13 Minutes business cards… Did. Not. End. Here.


• I hooked up with my friend Jason from the San Francisco Bay Area and we attended a CBLDF Spotlight Panel on Paul Pope. Pope is one of my favorite creators, certainly my favorite writer/artists double threat, and it was great to see him ink a page live, which I think he said was the cover to a Hamlet adaptation, since it featured the infamous skull of Yorick. This was also a nice chance to get off my feet and eat my lunch as I watched Pope ink. It was a pretty technical session, all about specific brushes and pencils, brush techniques, types of ink, hand motions, and different line weights, but really was amazing to see how effortlessly he creates. I know Pope takes plenty of high paying freelance jobs in fashion, graphic design, and many other industries, but hey, this here’s a comic site, and I’d sure like to see Battling Boy and the Total THB Collected Edition, which were both announced oh, I don’t know, three years ago when I bought a piece of original art from him in 2007. Seriously, what’s the hold up?


• Jason and I continued our team up and I went with him to the Radical Comics booth, so he could pick up The Last Days of American Crime from Rick Remender. I like that book, probably the only book from Radical that I buy, but dude, their booth was kind of a joke. Heavy media spin, buxom blonde booth babes handing out recyclable junk, and nothing new to note. Jason and I split up at this point since he was on a mission to find some exclusive toys, so I handed him a 13 Minutes t-shirt and we went our separate ways.


• I retreated from the media saturated end of the exhibit hall to the Small Press area once again, and scoped out about 30 people in line at the Oni Press booth picking up their Scott Pilgrim: Volume 06 (with free wristband!) and found myself back at Sparkplug, this time with buddy Tim Goodyear. We got caught up on personal news and he comp’d me a bunch of ‘zines he’s been working on, in which he illustrates his movie reviews. I haven’t read them yet, but they sure looked entertaining.


• My friend Mike, who was only attending Friday, wanted to get (another) commissioned piece from Matt Kindt, so I met with Kindt at the Top Shelf booth and got him started on this project. The end result was a beautiful watercolor of some favorite X-Men and this has become an annual tradition for Mike, to get a Kindt original. Pretty cool.


• I was in the area at this point, so I did a deep dive on Top Shelf, Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Oni Press, and Heavy Metal. After scoping it all out, nothing really caught my attention very strongly, but the large 50% off signs at Heavy Metal drew me in. I was handed a free copy of the latest issue, which, surprise, surprise, had a cover drawn by Nathan Fox, who is becoming one of my favorite artists. I swear, this guy is going to be a rock star. This guy is going to be the next Paul Pope. I’ve been saying it for a couple of years now. Check out Dark Reign: Zodiac with Joe Casey at Marvel. Check out the fill in issues he’s done with Brian Wood for DMZ (another one of those coming, btw, starring Wilson!). Anyway, apparently he did this huge HC OGN for Heavy Metal, with writer MF Wilson and colorist Jeremy Cox called Fluorescent Black. It looks amazing. I couldn’t fight my way through the crowd and was running late to meet up with Jason again, so I decided to skip it and cross my fingers they wouldn’t sell out.


• I met up with Jason and we attended a panel starring James Sturm, moderated by Tom Spurgeon. Some official walked in and presented Sturm with an Inkpot Award, which was cool to see live. I’m not a huge Sturm fan (though I do love his Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules project), but this retrospective survey of his career was really interesting. He was a great speaker and dropped a couple memorable quotes, like “make media, don’t just consume it” and warned about “being a slave to your own vanity” when he swore off the internet for a few weeks.


• I decided to do a thorough tour of Artists Alley, and honestly this was a really underwhelming process. It seemed like a wide canyon, with overpriced superhero nonsense, ala Whilce Portacio on one end, and decrepit stick figure entry level mini-comics and buttons or whatever on the other end. One of the very few bright spots was a little corner occupied by Zander Cannon and Ryan Kelly. I got a good deal on two of Ryan’s creator owned projects, All The Fun and Funrama.


• The day was just about over, so I headed back to meet up with Ryan Claytor at Elephant Eater in the Small Press Pavilion. I hadn’t paid much attention to Oni Press honestly, since I knew that Antony Johnston, Matthew Southworth, and Brian Wood weren’t going to be there, and it was looking like all Scott Pilgrim, all the time, a long line of people still, who were buying two and three copies of this book apiece. However, I casually looked across the aisle and there’s Christopher Mitten, the (former) artist of Wasteland. I walked up and we chatted for a few minutes. Chris thanked me again for all of my reviews of that book and I learned some of the plans for the remainder of the book (which I won’t spoil! but it’s really fucking cool!), along with some new work he’s doing at both Oni and IDW. I ended up giving Chris a 13 Minutes shirt as well. And thus concludes day one!

FRIDAY

• My friend Mike and I got in early, so while we waited for the exhibit hall to open, we purchased our tickets for next year and I also seeded with freebie table with some business cards.


• When I got home Thursday night and unpacked, I learned that the Nathan Fox book at Heavy metal was limited to 500 copies(!) and started panicking that I wouldn’t be able to get a copy. So, first stop Friday morning was the Heavy Metal booth. I’d seen Nathan Fox in Artists Alley, so I figured I could buy the book, then run over and have him sign it up. We chatted briefly, and as he did a quick sketch, he suggested I come see him at the Heavy Metal booth for the official signing between 1pm and 4pm to get some additional swag.


• On our way back from Artists Alley, Mike and I got sucked into the DC Booth somehow, I swear it’s like a vortex you can’t escape with lines swirling around the entire area, and found ourselves in line to get free books. The line was fairly sluggish, but we ended up with some decent freebies, number ones of The Flash, some Justice League thing, the new Green Arrow (which I will enjoy detesting), iZombie, DV8, Action Comics, American Vampire, Sparta, etc.


• We ended up in the Silver Age area, which used to be a prime hang out for us, but didn’t stay long. We were able to see the last remnants of the Mile High Collection that’s being cut loose, all CGC’d out, and Mike picked up a few stray issues of Bronze Age Iron Fist that he was missing.


• We hit Top Shelf to pick up the Matt Kindt piece, and I also purchased Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic #1-3, which I have yet to see at any LCS. I paid a little over cover price, but they looked quite interesting, with plenty of bonus inserts.


• We wound up at Last Gasp, and I was able to pick up Dodgem Logic #4, which is, I believe, the newest issue, so I’ll be all up to speed.


• Mike and I hooked up with my friend Jason and our big panel of the day was the Grant Morrison shindig, moderated by Senior Story Editor Ian Sattler. Morrison is always entertaining, that Scottish brogue and general worldview endlessly charming to me. It was interesting to hear about Grant’s affinity for the DCU, his outlook on America and Superman from his outsider perspective, his thoughts on violence after his WWII veteran father raised him as a pacifist, and his general approach to writing Batman. Grant let slip that he was on food stamps for 9 years before breaking in, which lines up with quite a few theories I’ve been hearing about that suggest all “great creators” in many divergent mediums toil away in obscurity for approximately 10 years before breaking in. If you subscribe to that hypothesis, then I should be writing for Entertainment Weekly by about 2015. Anyway, I love that Flex Mentallo came up more than once. He and Ian seemed to insinuate there could be news in our future about a (finally!) collected edition. I actually own two sets of the single issues, but he said that a collected edition would surely have the already penciled Frank Quitely cover, along with some bonus scenes he had to cut out of the serialized version. For me, this is Grant’s magnum opus, and I’d love a swanky HC, even an Absolute Edition.


• We dropped by the CBLDF booth, where I always buy something to support the cause, but there was really nothing that looked interesting or that I hadn’t already read. When all else fails, I will buy a t-shirt in lieu of a book, but the one I wanted, with all of the Free Speech text, was sold out on my size. So, for the first time in years I did not make a contribution to the CBLDF, for shame!


• I checked in with Ryan Claytor at Elephant Eater, and Ryan was cool enough to give me one of his new t-shirts. They’re really sweet!


• Mike and I decided to see if we could get any free goodies at the Marvel booth, kind of like how we scored at the DC booth. What a disappointment this was. The Marvel booth had a palpable media slant to it, with video games, err... something, statues in cases like priceless Etruscan artifacts, and a big ass set piece that I guess was a throne room from the Thor movie. It took up about half the square footage. It was gaudy and awful. Oh, and guess what? Not a comic could be found in the Marvel Comics booth. Lame.


• After a leisurely lunch on the back mezzanine overlooking the bay, we attended a panel on the 24 Hour Comics Day Challenge, which Ryan was also appearing on. I had some issues with the moderation of the panel, which I’ll be a gentleman about and won’t get into, but the good news is that there were some good tips for both retailers and creators, along with a free anthology of some of the 24 Hour Comics made during one of the events.


• We decided to go through the entire exhibit hall from beginning to end, one final time, and I got caught up in some of the toy booths. I’ve been casually buying the DC Universe Infinite Heroes 3.75 inch figures whenever I can get a deal. I’ve never paid full retail and have managed to get most of them, but am missing a few. I ended up finding one or two singles I didn’t have on a sale table, and then scored three of the three-packs, two for $10 each and one for $5(!) These things are usually pushing $20 each in typical retail outlets, so I picked those up, getting one with Animal Man, and one with Harbinger. I’ve never been a toy collector, but these are just too cool, also – my kids really like them!


• Along the way, I ended up with free copies of the latest issues of Wizard Magazine, Toyfare Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and the TV Guide: Comic Con Edition which all seemed to get shoved in my hand and make it into my backpack without me remembering exactly how.


• I talked to Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, who were next to the Jill Thompson and Cliff Chiang booth and checked something for Ryan Claytor. In short, they are definitely NOT selling any original art pages from Daytripper, because it is just too personal a work for the brothers from Brazil.


• I finally made it back over to the Heavy Metal booth during the right window and really scored. I got sketches, signatures, and personalized stuff from Nathan Fox (artist), MF Wilson (writer), and Jeremy Cox (colorist), along with a beautiful print of a page from the book. This was well worth the three attempts it took me to get the whole swag package and will probably go down as my favorite buy of the con this year.


• And that was pretty much that. Mike and I rendezvoused with Ryan and Jason and our foursome decided to grab dinner before attending the Eisner Awards. We bet on the tourists all going toward the Gaslamp and decided to go the other way to avoid them all. Our gambit worked. We walked right into Joe’s Crab Shack, about one block behind the Convention Center, around 7:05pm right after the exhibit hall closed, and waited all of 5 minutes for a table. We ate some awesome food, shared beers and laughs, and replenished our energy for the three hour Eisner marathon.

EISNER AWARDS

• We actually left Joe’s Crab Shack right at 8:30pm when the Eisner Awards were supposed to start, took a nice quick stroll to the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton Bayfront (the one with the huge Scott Pilgrim banner) and walked right in. As we sat, they were just getting started. We didn’t miss a thing. So, the Eisners. In short, I’m losing faith in this process and don’t seem to identify (or agree) with the majority of the selections. They're losing credibility with me. There’s always this running debate I have with myself between who I *think* will win and who I *want* to win. I can accurately predict who will win with about 90% precision, but it rarely lines up with my personal preferences. The larger issue is that I’m picking from a list I don’t agree with in the first place, which I don’t feel represents the best that comics has to offer in any given year. My nominees would look entirely different. In any case, here are a few random observations, some about the actual winners (or losers) and some more about the proceedings, which were kicked off by the cast of the Scott Pilgrim movie.


• My favorite quote was “an undereducated waffle iron assembler from Missouri.” It’s totally out of context, but trust me, it wouldn’t help if I cited it properly. This guy had me stifling laughter so hard that I began tearing up. It was ridiculous, because he really wasn’t trying to be funny.


• The big news was that Will Eisner’s seminal graphic novel A Contract With God is going to be a movie!


• Thomas Jane is a jackass. Really, this guy was an embarrassment. He came off like a total tool, an outsider who didn’t know anything about comics, attempted to be funny and wasn’t, butchered names, was a distraction, and his antics served only to de-legitimize the dignity of the entire affair. It was awful. I was ashamed to be in the same room as this douchebag.


• I don’t like the notion of a rotating emcee or host or whatever. It’s very inconsistent. If it wasn’t Thomas Jane up there mucking it up, it was incoherent Chris Claremont, who was either dyslexic, drunk, or just plain illiterate. He couldn’t pronounce his own name correctly. If you’re going to have presenters, you might want to, I don’t know, I’m just spit-balling here, but you might want to make sure they can read? See if they speak English (hello, Milo Manara)? Ascertain ahead of time if they’re comfortable in front of 500 people? Provide them a script ahead of time? Coach them on particularly difficult Japanese names? I vote for a presenting duo of Chip Kidd and Paul Levitz. Chip was actually funny on the fly, deadpanning some lines without dragging jokes out, getting his point across without being disrespectful. And Paul Levitz just strikes me as a classy cat. He is knowledgeable and articulate, providing the right level of intellect and gravitas to what is hyped as the “Academy Awards of Comics.” So yeah, we’re a big boy medium now, right? Let’s class it up a little. No more Stormtroopers at the Eisners. No more drunk Frank Miller. No more Thomas Jane. No more Chris Claremont. When it all goes on the web for you to see, really pay attention to Chip Kidd and Paul Levitz. They have my vote. Also, three hours is just too long. The last hour is painful. Maybe tighten that up. Maybe start earlier. Or maybe leave it the same. Maybe I slit your throat and play around in your blood a little.


• As for the awards, there were a couple I found sensible. Since James Jean was not nominated in the Best Cover Artist category, it allowed the very deserving John Cassaday and JH Williams III to be nominated, and JH Williams III ended up taking it. I have no problem with that. Though I will say that John Cassaday does have a larger body of cover work to his name. Jim also ended up winning for Best Penciller/Inker, which is great, because that Detective Comics run with Batwoman was fucking great, but this double win does expose a weakness in the voting process. Once the committee down-selects the finalists, the body of professionals does a blind vote to determine the winner in each category. Since they have no holistic view of the entire process, they’re unable to spread the love in a more equitable and strategic fashion. For example, in this specific scenario, if you know JH Williams III is going to win for Best Penciller/Inker, why not allow John Cassaday to take the Best Cover Artist category? The problem is that the voters have no holistic view of the entire field and simply vote in isolated categories. This is a flaw to me.


• A couple of years ago, they changed the rules to allow online venues to compete in the Best Comics Related Periodical/Journalism category. This is great – and really interesting. This year, four of the five nominees are exclusively web-based, with The Comics Reporter taking the win. Print seems to be dead, as far as comics criticism and journalism goes anyway.


• I cannot believe that Mauro Cascioli was nominated in the Best Painter/Multimedia Artist category for Justice League: Cry for Justice. This book was universally derided and generally considered one of the worst books of the year. The writing was indecipherable tragedy porn, and the art was equally awful. Cascioli couldn’t find a consistent light source or a tit smaller than a D-cup if his life depended on it, and even though this was a seven issue mini-series, he couldn’t even be bothered to do the damn interior art in the last two issues!


• Someone, somewhere, sure had a boner for Absolute Justice. It beat Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? in the Best Publication Design category, which is a joke, and then took a second award for the Best Graphic Album – Reprint category, beating out Eddie Campbell, Jeff Lemire, and John Porcellino. What?! Long live superhero comics, I guess.


• Something about the Best Writer category disturbs me. I don’t read any of those writers regularly and I don’t buy any of those books regularly, though I have sampled them sufficiently courtesy of quarter bins. It seems like it’s not about “best,” but most popular or recognizable. Everyone’s heard of Geoff Johns and Ed Brubaker, so it’s no surprise one of them (Brubaker) won, but do these people seriously think these are the best writers working in comics today? That’s sad. And James Robinson for Justice League: Cry for Justice? Are you fucking kidding? I think we’ve covered this haven’t we? Universally panned. A parody of itself. Dozens of bloggers openly mocking this. The worst book of the year.


• It was really refreshing to see Terry Moore’s Echo nominated in the Best Writer/Artist Category, but he lost to David Mazzucchelli and Asterios Polyp (of course). Asterios is a great book, but again, to me this exposes a procedural weakness. If a panel of judges could openly discuss a holistic set of awards and knew that Asterios would be taking home two other Eisners, they could spread the love and give a nod here to Terry Moore and let him take this category, but instead, he gets shunted and Asterios Polyp ends up sweeping three Eisners.


• It’s about time that people start taking notice of Joe Sacco’s work; I was pleased to see a win for him in the Best Writer/Artist – Nonfiction category for Footnotes in Gaza. Sacco’s got an amazing body of work.


• Back in the “another travesty that proves superheroes trump indie books,” we have Captain America #601 beating Ganges #3 by Kevin Huizenga in the Best Single Issue category. Lame.


• Overall, the big winners were Asterios Polyp, with three total Eisner wins, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life with two well deserved wins, and Scott Pilgrim (surprisingly) only taking one. The big loser of the night seemed to be Robert Crumb and The Illustrated Book of Genesis, which was shut out in the three categories it was nominated. Again, this seems kind of strange and I’ll keep harping on process. Not only is it a slap in the face to not get Crumb a win, but it’s further evidence that the love can’t be spread around due to a systemic flaw. If the judges had foreknowledge that Asterios Polyp would win in two other categories, they could grant a single win for Crumb in say, Best Graphic Album – New. But since they’re voting blind and independent, there are these odd double and triple dips, which seem excessive, while other deserving work gets repeatedly shut out. It creates a needless imbalance.


• The end trifecta of Best New Series, Best Limited Series, and Best Continuing Series saw wins for Chew, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and The Walking Dead respectively. Those books are all… ok. They’re not bad, but I don’t think they’re particularly great either. Chew is original, but one-note, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has great Skottie Young art, but let’s call it what it is – an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz after all, and The Walking Dead is a zombie book that’s been going a really long time. I enjoy it when I get the trades at a discount, probably the best book in a genre that is tired and played out, for whatever that’s worth. But none of this stuff has any pizzazz! It’s bland! Where’s the innovation!? Even looking around at the other nominees, nothing lights me up. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Awful art! Another adaptation! Blackest Night? Really? Geoff Johns and the endless Green Lantern crossover? It certainly sells a lot. Does that mean it deserves an Eisner? Why don’t we just have a Most Popular or Best Selling/Best Revenue Generation category? Fables? Yeah, I do like when literary canon gets blended with fiction. I liked it the first time, when it was called Sandman. I liked it the second time, when it was called League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You see what I’m saying? I’m not particularly excited about comics, judging solely from the Eisners.

San Diego Comic Con 2010. Overall, I spent around $300, including a meal. That’s slightly more than I spent last year, but is severely down from the 2007 time frame, which I guess was the peak of my purchasing habits and general interest. My thoughts haven’t entirely coalesced around this year, except to keep returning to that word – disillusioned. This is going to sound like a blasphemous fart in church, but there are days when I wonder if I really like comics anymore. Maybe it’s just the Con scene getting me down, but as a whole, as a majority, purely statistically, there’s evidence to suggest I don’t, or that it’s at least on the decline. What is clear is that I like a small handful of creators very much. I’m very loyal to these folks and will follow them just about anywhere. Even to Con. The rest is just context. And it is needless and disposable. I don’t like the crowds. I don’t like the inevitable intersection of art and commerce. I don’t like all the retards running around for their hyped up Con exclusives. I thought the Warner Brothers canvas bags were so dumb, so non-functional. I don’t dig the marketing hype, which was so frenzied it seems like everybody announced whatever they had to announce two days before Con, so when Con came, everybody was scurrying about looking for something they didn’t know about. I’m tired of hearing people complain about Hollywood invading Con. I’m tired of people saying they’re tired of Con, which is what I’m doing now. Is this self-loathing? Should I write a navel-gazing mini about it? I’m tired of wading through the sea of poor quality. For every Nathan Fox, there are literally hundreds of people who are not nearly as good, and who never will be, because they’re not willing to put in the work to get better. I’m tired of looking at their stuff. It’s clogging up my Con. It’s clogging up my art. It’s clogging up my life. After just two days, I’m worn out. I must sound depressed. I’m not. I love comics. But, I want to read comics for the sheer love of it, nothing more. For sheer love of the game, love of the craft, none of the other stuff I just mentioned. It is 80% pointless non-related chaos, followed by 20% that feels just right. I like seeing my friends and extending my personal and professional network. I like connecting. I like finding that one gem amid the detritus. I like the few surprises I got, like the Nathan Fox book, like the warm welcome from Dylan Williams at Sparkplug, bumping into Rich Johnston, buying Sweets #1, not from an LCS, not from Image Comics, but directly from creator Kody Chamberlain, getting Dodgem Logic when my LCS doesn’t carry it. But the scale seems so tipped in favor of what annoys me vs. what delights me.

It’s a game of diminishing returns. More effort, less results. The effort exhausting, the minority results somehow still managing to keep me hopeful and interested – until they don’t. Perhaps this is the typical life cycle of a fan, ebbing and flowing, but never managing to cease completely? Does every fan need an occasional respite from their passion? Am I just reeling from sensory overload, will this feeling pass? I’ve never been the type of person who was given to extremes. I’m not naïve. I’m unable to muster the type of hopeful optimism that would suggest we’re due for some Renaissance in comics. It doesn’t feel like the beginning. I’m also not a bleak pessimist who will cry that I’m done with comics. It certainly doesn’t feel like the end just yet. My stoic pragmatic heart probably lies somewhere in between. When I’m away from the buzz of the crowd and can create a quiet place to listen to the faint whisper of my own intuition, maybe I’ll look back some day and think this was merely the beginning of the end.

So Buttons #2 @ Poopsheet Foundation

“…there was some very interesting experimentation with panels and duplication of figures with “shadow images” that reminded me of David Mazzucchelli’s avant-garde work in Asterios Polyp in the way it played with time and perception.”

Check out my latest full review over at Poopsheet Foundation.

If You Blame Others For Your Failure, Do You Credit Them With Your Success?

Sea Donkey did it to me again. Yes, I just returned from my weekly run to the LCS and of course the one book that I am most interested in, Wasteland #25, is nowhere to be found. After I inquire, I get the usual, "yeah, we didn't get it for some reason." Really? Really? How can it be that about every 2 to 3 weeks, the one single item that I am most interested in just doesn't show up somehow? I understand that mistakes or snafus or fubars or cock-ups occasionally happen to even the best of us, but when it becomes a routine occurrence, you have a systematic failure, a monkey-wrench thrown into the works, a fly in the ointment, a tic in the Sea Donkey swill, if you will. This happens all the time. Fix it! It never occurred to you to figure out why this happens? You have no explanation? Did you even order it? Is it lost somewhere in this wonderful miasma of boxes and clutter and Robert Pattinson posters and Nic Cage Ghost Rider action figures dustying up your shelves? Did you check with Diamond? Did you check with your shipper? Do you know when you'll get it in? Will I have a copy? Have you done anything productive to provide your loyal customer with any useful bit of information? I'm generally aware of what's coming out and it's odd to me that you got everything else that shipped this week. Hell, you even got Asterios Polyp (Pantheon). I'm pleasantly shocked you got it! But how can you get multiple copies of a very offbeat book from a publisher that publishes very few comics, yet somehow manage to avoid getting a very special issue of a book that you normally order from Oni Press?! I don't get it. Once again, retarded retailer practices at their donkiest. Now I'll spend my commute time home searching two other craptastic stores that likely won't have it, and pray that Antony Johnston or Chris Mitten will have copies at San Diego in two weeks. Bad retailer! Boo!

My 13 Favorite Things of 2009: Summary (Part 17 of 17)

My 13 Favorite Things

Wasteland (Oni Press): “Holding this brick of fiction in your hands you realize at long last that the scale and gravitas of the object delighting your senses finally tangibly reflects the scale of the immense writing talent that spawned it. Yup, big ideas belong in big books.”

Echo (Abstract Studio): “If you want to understand how to make effective comic books in every aspect of their production, watch Terry Moore a while, and look no further than Echo.”

Invincible Iron Man (Marvel): "Yeah, I think I just said that Matt Fraction is the Jamie Foxx of comic books, whatever the fuck that means.”

Scalped (DC/Vertigo): “I’ve been saying all along that I want to see this on HBO. It’s no slam against our beloved comic book medium, it’s simply a testament to the fact that Scalped is deserving of a more widespread audience, one in the millions and not the tens of thousands.”

The Hot Breath of War (Sparkplug Comics): "My personal desire to see more of his work has only emboldened with this divergent tale that disproves the artistic notion of a sophomore slump.”

A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly): "Tatsumi is that rare artist who doesn’t preach a message, but invites you to consider your own thoughts about whatever subject matter he’s become fascinated and inspired by, and that process lends a timeless and enduring quality to his work.”

Northlanders (DC/Vertigo): “It is poised to redefine the genre.”

Detective Comics (DC): “This is mainstream superhero comics at its finest.”

Dark Reign: Zodiac (Marvel): “We should have all paid more attention to this quiet little coup d’etat. Because these guys? These guys are the future.”

Wednesday Comics (DC): “There were sure hits (Strange Adventures), and sure blunders (Teen Titans), and noble failures somewhere in between (Wonder Woman), but like Solo before it, the project conceptually was brilliant and should be encouraged.”

Asterios Polyp (Pantheon): “It’ll probably go down as a, if not the, book of the year when everyone’s lists are finally submitted and the larger meta-lists are tabulated.”

Aya: The Secrets Come Out (Drawn & Quarterly): “If inherent quality of craft were the true driver of fame and success, then the multi-part saga of Aya should catapult these creators to stardom, or at the very least – prolific future projects and enhanced recognition at the Eisner Awards.”

Abhay Khosla’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “If that doesn’t make any sense, it’s because Khosla’s writing isn’t just on another level, it’s from an entirely different dimension, and I don’t possess the critical vocabulary necessary to explain it, much less deconstruct its origins or articulate why it’s so successful in execution.”

Honorable Mentions

Driven by Lemons (AdHouse Books): “If only it were a bit more accessible, like its great forerunner Skyscrapers of the Midwest.”

3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man (Dark Horse): “Bottom line, pretty frickin’ good, but not quite the intricate achievements that I felt 2 Sisters or especially the superb Super Spy were.”

I Am Legion (DDP/Humanoids): “It won’t be remembered as one of Cassaday’s most popular books, but it is certainly one of his best.”

The Lone Ranger (Dynamite Entertainment): “It’s one of the best examples of a book whose narrative momentum and ultimate greatness is hampered by the floppy serialized format and would function better as a series of OGN’s.”

Luna Park (DC/Vertigo): “Kevin Baker’s debut work in the comic book industry remains a flawed, but deeply engaging read.”

Special Prize

JLA: Cry for Justice (DC): “It was so bad, it was good.”

My (Not So) Favorite Things

Sea Donkey: “If you worked for me in any of the jobs I’ve ever had and brought that same disgruntled befuddled ennui to the table, that general penchant for caca, I’d have fired you long ago.”

The X-Titles Flounder: “It’s been a slow, lazy spiral toward the drain, with occasional bursts of brilliance and beauty like Uncanny X-Men #512 with Yanick Paquette.”

Comic Foundry Goes Bust: “Oh, Comic Foundry. We’ll always have that Jonathan Lethem interview that led me back to Omega: The Unknown.”

Amazing Spider-Man #583 & All It Symbolizes: “1992 called and it wanted the lesson you were already supposed to have learned back.”

I Shouldn’t Complain, but Paul Pope…: “I suppose art takes time and that I should be thankful for the awesome Adam Strange story that largely made Wednesday Comics for me, but damn if it’s hard not to be greedy and feel like the ultimate First Second Pulp Hope c--k tease was in effect this year.”

Expectations Not Met: “There were a few titles that just didn’t live up to my hopes right out of the gate.”

Late, Stalled, Delayed, Postponed, On Hiatus: “Oh, is this book still being published?”

Warren Ellis: “By my totally subjective non-scientific personal arsebiscuit guesstimation, he only “hit” about 40% of the time.”

That, my friends, is 2009 in a nutshell according to 13 Minutes. As I write this, I’ve also just surpassed a personal web traffic milestone. 13 Minutes typically ranges anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 hits per month, with occasional spikes from things like an Antony Johnston tweet or a link from a CBR article. This month, it was the perfect storm; the combination of people’s love of searching for lists and my end of the year “Favorite 13” posts, my conversation with Ryan Claytor about the relationship between creators and critics, a well-timed tweet from Brian Wood regarding a Northlanders review, and plenty of referral hits from Poopsheet Foundation, which all conspired to push 13 Minutes over the 10,000 hit mark for the first time ever. I thought that was a pretty cool way to end the year and wanted to take a moment to say thanks to everyone who visits. See you next year!

4.14.10 Reviews (Part 1)

DMZ #52 (DC/Vertigo): At first glance, this issue feels like more of the same, it's just Matty Roth wandering the city looking for a point to his sudden newfound style of existence, but the real world political commentary is quite profound. It’s full of zingers about the de facto “Bush Doctrine,” justification for pre-emptive military strikes, and the suspension of personal rights if you happen to be characterized as an enemy combatant without that pesky little thing called due process. We’re used to being told about these things occurring abroad most of the time, but it’s chilling to see them play out on American soil, even in this fictitious reality. Brian Wood makes a wise choice because it personalizes those dynamics when they’re very close to home and makes us question their validity when we realize the parallel line of thought – that they’re actually occurring out there in our real world. They stop being lost in the nightly news, stop being abstract things occurring in faraway places, and stop being lost in a fictional story, they become real and relatable. DMZ is such an atypical work. It’s not often that a piece of fiction can be entertaining, but also worthy of CNN style examination, worthy of study in college classrooms around the country. Regular series artist Riccardo Burchielli is in top form as well. It’s easy to get lost in the dirty glory of thousands of empty shell casings raining down from attack helicopters overhead, as they attempt to eradicate the surviving remnants of the Delgado Nation. But, when you look at the longer arc of Burchielli’s penciling, you see that he’s slowly and steadily been increasing the urban decay we see in this book. In just a couple of short years, his NYC now looks more like Mogadishu, or Beirut, or Port-au-Prince, or what I imagine parts of Baghdad looking like. It’s an open expanse of desolation, despair, and destruction that’s not as cute as that alliteration makes it sound. Grade A.

I also picked up;

Bodyworld (Pantheon): Dash Shaw’s latest project is a marvel of unique production quality and will surely be worthy of some eventual in depth analysis, but what I loved more than anything was the pull quote on the back cover. It’s from David Mazzuchelli, who in addition to being the writer/artist of Asterios Polyp (the other book besides Shaw’s own Bottomless Belly Button that comprised the most universally praised duo of publications last year), actually produces a pull quote that’s a direct homage to music critic John Landau’s description of his first encounter with Bruce Springsteen. Landau was an influential critic, wrote for Rolling Stone, and saw Springsteen’s performance one night in 1974 in Cambridge, Mass. The actual quote by Landau was "I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. I saw something else: I saw rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen," but over the years it’s been condensed and bastardized to the point of becoming accepted music industry lore as “I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Here, Mazzuchelli writes: “I have seen the future of comics, and its name is Dash Shaw.” Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but if you read some of Landau’s accounts of Springsteen, it makes for an interesting (if gushing) comparison to Dash Shaw’s work vis-à-vis the typical output of the comic book industry. For example, "Tonight," one of his columns began, "there is someone I can write of the way I used to write, without reservations of any kind. On a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time. When his two hour set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good, can anyone say this much to me, can rock and roll speak with this kind of power and glory? And then I felt the sores on my thighs where I had been pounding my hands in time for the entire concert and knew that the answer was a resounding yes. Springsteen does it all. He is a rock n' roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, bar band leader, rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock n' roll composer. He leads a band like he has been doing it forever. I racked my brain but simply can't think of an artist who does so many things so superbly. There is no one I would rather watch on a stage today." That all might sound a bit hyperbolic, but I’m pretty excited to sit down and absorb this book, and I really like Springsteen, in case you didn’t catch that.

HEY REMEMBER WHEN I USED TO WRITE REVIEWS ON THIS SITE [Advance Review]

Now Nowhere (Self-Published)
Printing @ www.perfectly-acceptable.com
Ordering @ www.elevatorteeth.com

Now Nowhere is the type of sophomoric work I’m tempted to give a negative review because at first glance it can come off as obtuse, pretentious, or even cloying. When I slow down and absorb it, I realize that superficial reading would actually belie its rather fundamental strength. The world of (self-published) small press is full of navel-gazing ingénues addressing existential dilemma, self-prompting with entry level philosophical questions that only lead to more questions. Now Nowhere rises above these mundane offerings because it pushes further and begins to address the reconciliation of purpose. It doesn’t just ask the “Why?” but becomes a wise self-aware exercise in “Why Ask Why?” which is infinitely more interesting.

My favorite moment in the book, though I admit I’ve grown weary of specific “moments” in life – for reasons I will explain shortly, is a page that posits “Don’t Worry. This Is Part Of The Process.” That’s a motto I could easily live by. It infers the old adage about life being a process, a cycle that flits and renews, the proverbial journey, the lack of destination, the lack of fixed place, no illusion of fixed moments, no “where” as the title suggests. We are all time travelers in a sense, we’re all moving perpetually through a non-linear construct, chrononauts of the infinite. If you’re always looking ahead to the fleeting promise on the horizon, or backward toward the lie of nostalgia, you’re never living the present, doomed to the life of a temporal refugee.
 

The book opens with a blue grid pattern teasing some order to things, but quickly devolves to chaotic questions, decrying the very nature of reality with clever wordplay. For example, “The Things We Are” and “Are We?” appear wrapped textually as one sentence, but are interrupted by smart panel design and color choices that separate the words into two parts, implying a sort of call and response that uses the medium very effectively. The duality of man is represented with the primal colors of red and blue, overlapping shadow imagery echoing in the manner that practitioners David Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw used respectively in Asterios Polyp and Bodyworld to illustrate our sense of fluctuating reality. The figures in Now Nowhere always give the illusion of motion, they’re always traveling, entering and exiting, pulsing with life, one action bleeds into the next and is rarely accompanied by fixed borders.

Now, I’m in a rare position where I know the identity of the artist working under the online pseudonym elevatorteeth. You too can see odd bits of street art and stickers littered around certain San Diego haunts if you know what you’re looking for. While it’s not my place to divulge the information I’m privy to, I will say that I’ve consumed snippets of the artist’s older work-in-progress, and in true elitist hipster fashion, I can say I prefer the older stuff. The artist’s work of just two or three years ago is full of hand-drawn textures and raw patterns that seem to undulate with an odd sexuality. Imagine thousands of areola swaying together in off-kilter unison, their rhythm never quite coalescing, wantonly teetering just on the edge of order.

Thankfully, traces of that dynamic linger in Now Nowhere, some of my favorite parts involve the attempted resolution of chaos and order. Consider the shots of a wall of bricks, from a distance they are neat and orderly, but zoom in for closer inspection and the more fractured and damaged they become. The bricks in the wall are no different than the various components of our life, a job, a friend, or a lover, our reality is always susceptible to enhanced scrutiny and disappointment. That’s not the point. The point is to revel in the beauty of it anyway. While Now Nowhere might sacrifice the raw determination found in the artist’s earlier work, it hums with vibrancy, there’s a cohesive confidence to these new lines that is less random and hesitant. It’s as if the artist finally worked out the non-linear narrative they wished to express.

Now Nowhere is self-published as a two-color risograph and was printed at Chicago’s Perfectly Acceptable Press, but you can easily imagine it at home in a lineup from Sparkplug or Uncivilized or 2D Cloud. It’s an accomplished aesthetic that understands the deceptively simple notion that in life, things happen. Sometimes in sequence. Sometimes not. Sometimes there’s causality. Sometimes not. Sometimes they occur unexpectedly, or not in the way we anticipated. There’s ebb and flow, beauty in mistakes, and as the Hawthorne Effect postulates, we change something just by looking at it or touching it, the interaction leading to a new divergence of multiple possibilities. Now Nowhere embraces this limitless quality instead of being stymied by it, it favors chaos theory in life, beginning and endings in a constant state of flux. There is lack of a divine plan; there is only the process. There are simply events, reactions, and motivations all crashing together to create the spectacle we navigate moment by moment.

Graphic Novel Of The Month

BodyWorld (Pantheon): On the back of this hardcover book, David Mazzucchelli’s pull quote pays homage to music critic John Landau’s description of Bruce Springsteen and reads “I have seen the future of comics, and its name is Dash Shaw.” I don’t disagree with that bit of projection, but in the here and how, I’d say that Dash Shaw is the Gary Panter of our generation. Instead of infusing comics into his Fine Art the way that Panter did, Shaw seems to infuse Fine Arts into his comics. To see the most ostensible connection between the two artists, look no further than Shaw’s “Origin Story” for Johnny Scarhead. For me, it was a big signpost that called to mind the uncredited work that Panter did for Marvel’s reimaging of Omega: The Unknown about the origin of the Omega Corps. If that’s an obvious visual cue that connects the two, the more subtle clues in their shared approach involve the way Shaw blends so many cultural influences and nods to various arts into his work. There are literary references to John Norman’s Goreans, advertising imagery, the still life of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, dance moves from Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal video, and plenty of sci-fi nods to George Lucas’ “Outer Rim,” and James Cameron’s “No Fate” carved into a table. All the while, Shaw is careful to root the endeavor in comics, with some panel emulation of Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a copy of Ross Campbell’s underrated sleeper Wet Moon in the background, a Professor X and Magneto analogy, and Alan Moore’s The Courtyard from Avatar Press, which seems to be a seminal work in this 2060 setting.

Shaw also continues his fascination with maps and cut-away diagrams. There’s an early shot in BodyWorld of a floorplan that reminds me of an early shot in Bottomless Belly Button that was a cut-away of a family riding in a car. Like the various maps and dieball court layout, not only are these terrific examples of world-building, but they seem to highlight the way Shaw is concerned with man’s place in a man-made world. It’s an odd dichotomy of natural beings attempting to navigate the unnatural environment they’ve created. The journey is aided significantly by faces which are penciled so full of emotion. If you happen to notice the way Miss Jewel reacts to being photographed or Billy’s sexualized panic at his teacher wiping down his chest with a wet towel, you’ll see pages of emotion being conveyed silently in a single static shot. I remember Bottomless Belly Button’s black and white rendering fondly, but BodyWorld reads as a completely difference experience in full color. If Belly Button seemed to use black and white as a means for you to slowly draw emotion out of life’s daily monotony for yourself, then perhaps they are polar works, and BodyWorld pushes you to retreat from the garish colored futurism it presents in order to find the very same emotion that’s been lost in the pseudo-utopia. Structurally, Shaw begins with a fairly rigid approach, relying on 4 rows of 3 panels to create a 12 panel grid that probably mirrors the pacing of the original web-comic. It’s worth noting as an aside that Shaw is very adept at pacing, his use of all black panels as story beats shows masterful control of the passage of time and what he expects the reader’s eye to do on the page. As the story progresses, he begins to use overlapping forms to represent figures and thought patterns. This complex presentation is more like what David Mazzucchelli did in Asterios Polyp. I think that’s also an interesting inter-textual reference since I feel those two books will be forever linked, as they were generally considered the best two books of the year when they debuted. I’d be surprised if Shaw doesn’t rack up another Eisner nom for this work as well. Shaw really pushes the synaesthetic experience hard, forcing his audience, through his characters, to perceive multiple layers of meaning embedded in the narrative, both textually and visually. The best example of this is the dual running paths of panels where Billy and Paul’s paths converge and they ultimately undergo a very intense drug trip together.

Hopefully that’s a nice segue into discussing the drug. It’s discovered near the school and Paul is sent to investigate its properties through actual consumption and experimentation. The drug causes users to “read” other people and experience their memories as well as their physical form. Often times, these experiences involve reading people at their most revealing or embarrassing moments. The drug only seems to work when people are in close proximity, and has no effect when taken alone, which emphasizes the connectedness between people. The entire tone for these shared experiences is unapologetic and accepted, echoed in the way Billy’s mom matter-of-factly discusses her cheating. There’s no attempt to edit herself; she mentions it casually and without shame. That need for connectedness is an important theme that runs throughout this book. In this sterile future marred by a recent Civil War, man – as a single super-organism on the macro level – attempts to reconnect to the natural world. Miss Jewel insists on licking the sap of the mysterious drug when in plant form. She is quick to put her feet in the dirt. Paul is eager to smoke the new plant, eat it, or climb trees in one of the only remaining forests. The dieball players smear their bodies with diegunk, so that they can feel anything, even a loss of mental acuity. Female characters are seen reveling in the sweat of the boys they’re interested in. Building a camp fire is a lost art that’s carefully explained, drug trips appear as communing with nature, everyone is desperate to connect to someone else, even teachers justifying ways to connect with their students. They’re all desperate attempts to connect to something real and earthy, not the artificial future that’s been homogenized for them. We learn that the closed society is being watched by an alien race that is attempting to homogenize the humans. Through the drug, by engineering common experiences and perceptions, they eventually become all the same, and are thus easier to control. It creates a hive group-mind, stressing that it is actually strength in diversity that keeps societies afloat. Paul is a very liberal guy, fearful of bureaucratic and Orwellian thought police in the age restricted zone, frequently seen doing drugs with students. His path is fraught with failure, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, the conformists that succumb to groupthink are equally culpable in failure. This suggests that there is a happy medium of diversity which is appropriate for survival. There were a couple of oddball typos that distracted me, I don’t know where else to mention them, so I’ll just do it now before I sum up. There was “mam” instead of the more common ma’am, things like “donno” vs. dunno’, “fellah” vs. fella’, and one “seperated” vs. separated.

Those very minor quibbles aside, an overwhelming response for me was that I kept thinking about James Cameron’s box office blockbuster Avatar. Let me say in no uncertain terms that I absolutely hated Avatar, and when I say hated, I mean almost everything about it. I didn’t find it that interesting visually; I thought the blue people were dumb, ill-functioning, and hilariously stupid. The 3D gave me a headache, the CGI envelopment was off-putting, and the whole affair lacked any identifiable humanity. I detest being hit over the head with the big stick of meaning. I’m sure the shouty environmental messaging appealed to the lowest common denominator to ensure mass market appeal, and you can blame the system for that – “hate the game, not the player” – but, players are capable of changing the game by their actions. In addition to blatantly ripping off the major arcs of Dances With Wolves, Avatar beat its simplistic points home with a big rock, using overt methods, and stereotypically horrible and clichéd acting performances. It’s too long, too loud, too predictable, and too obvious. For me, everything that Avatar tried to be in its big spectacle of intentions-on-the-sleeve manic reaching, BodyWorld does with careful nuance and subdued subtlety. BodyWorld is for the more discerning consumer. It’s the opposite in so many ways. It doesn’t preach, it converses. It doesn’t tell, it shows. It doesn’t force, it allows organic expansion. It uses homage, it does not steal outright. It doesn’t insult, it elucidates. It doesn’t sacrifice humanity for achievement. It doesn’t sacrifice substance for style. It proves that yes, millions of moviegoers actually CAN be wrong; the Avatar phenomenon is the very groupthink mentality that BodyWorld argues against. It proves in the most natural way, without the aid of multi-million dollar digital production, that man has an inextricable link to nature and when that symbiotic relationship is strayed too far from, bad things can happen. As for pull quotes, “I have seen the thinking man’s Avatar, and its name is BodyWorld.” Grade A.

The 12 Days of Comics: 2010 - Day 4

"Shockrockets" by Kurt Busiek & Stuart Immonen (IDW)
Demographic: Star Wars Fans
Selected by: Justin Giampaoli
Subsequent Interview by: Ryan Claytor

Justin: “Shockrockets” should appeal to anyone who is a George Lucas aficionado, and hey, who doesn't like “American Graffiti?” Oh. Yeah. He did those other movies too! “Shockrockets” uses a lot of the same themes as the “Star Wars” mythology. It's about a young kid seemingly adrift who is suddenly thrust into this adventure, swept up in a larger conflict that initially seems overwhelming. He's compelled to step outside of himself and see the bigger picture in order to fulfill his destiny. It's typical Joseph Campbell style Hero's Journey, Monomythic Self-Discovery, Crossing The Threshold stuff. Plus, it has really cool spaceships.

Kurt Busiek put this project out years ago under the Gorilla Comics imprint (remember that?) in 2000, but IDW recently collected it this year in a handsome little hardcover that's perfect for gift-giving. The art is by Stuart Immonen, who is someone I've been fascinated by for a while now. For me, he sort of operates in that space of David Mazzucchelli, a creator who can flip back and forth between mainstream superheroics and more personal indie projects. Mazzucchelli delivered celebrated runs on “Batman” and “Daredevil,” but then astounded everyone with “Asterios Polyp.” Similarly, Immonen has worked on high profile projects like “Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.” with Warren Ellis, and currently “New Avengers” with Brian Bendis over at Marvel, but then delivered an introspective book called “Moving Pictures,” about the Nazis systematically looting fine art museums in Paris and Western Europe during Word War II.

Anyway, the year is 2071 and Earth has been devastated by an alien invasion. There's a small band of rebels who've concocted this hybrid terrestrial/alien technology for their ships; the "Shockrockets" are the last line of defense as Earth tries to rebuild and awaits the impending final battle to save the planet. It's rousing and high-spirited, like an action movie on paper. The 160 page hardcover makes an impressive gift and ordering information can be found at: http://www.idwpublishing.com/

Ryan: I'm familiar with Stuart Immonen's work from the more recent issues of "Ultimate Spider-Man." As a frequent reader of that title, I was pleasantly surprised at Immonen's seamless transition onto the series. His art really seemed to fit. Although I haven't read "Shockrockets," the review images I managed to find seem like a more shadowed/noir approach to illustrating than what I'm accustomed to seeing from him on "Ultimate Spider-Man." Do you feel like Immonen alters his illustrations to fit the title on which he works, or do you see the art as more of a progression from "Shockrockets," a work done in 2000, to "Ultimate Spider-Man," a book penciled in the late 2000's?

Justin: I think he definitely adapts his style to suit the tone of the series he's working on. In the case of “Ultimate Spider-Man,” I think he consciously attempted a seamless transition from Mark Bagley (the previous artist) and the result was a style that was more light, airy, and in sync with what had come before. Conversely, “Shockrockets” has a relatively dark and somber tone (in the manner of “Empire Strikes Back” to continue the “Star Wars” comparison), so his penciling took on those characteristics. I'm sure the inking of Wade von Grawbadger also assisted that effort. And of course, there is the book I mentioned, “Moving Pictures,” which is done in black and white, with the use of lots of shadows and negative space, emphasizing the covert art siege the Nazis were executing, with the secret maneuverings of the resistance in Occupied France. So, Immonen certainly exhibits conscious versatility.