The first issue of my comic book Everyman is available to be read online here.  Have a look, won't you?


Technical stuff by Mr. Greg Aubry, without whom none of this would be possible.

I stumbled onto this random article concerning the estate of Jack Kirby suing for rights to the characters he created for Marvel Comics.  And it starts out with a characteristically misguided attitude:

In a move the (sic) reeks of opportunism and greed…

(Why I bother with idiot writers who can’t be bothered to edit their work is quite beyond me.)

Opportunism and greed, you say?  Well, what do we have a few paragraphs later?

When a programmer working for Microsoft writes a new program and it turns into the major code behind a new piece of Microsoft software, that programmer doesn’t own the rights to his code. He was paid by Microsoft to write it and has already been fairly compensated for his time and effort. He doesn’t have the right to sue once that program starts making millions of dollars, just because he is jealous.

What difference is there, ideologically, between the Kirby estate’s bid for copyright control and Microsoft parlaying some poor, likely underpaid schmuck’s hard work into a million-dollar seller?  NONE.  That’s CAPITALISM.  Opportunism and greed are the cornerstones of this economic system.  Already this article’s logic has cancelled itself out.  Lesson to wannabe journalists and self-righteous bloggers: check your moral compasses at the door.

A word about the notion of “fair compensation”: Why shouldn't these companies be obliged to pay some small stipend or maintain a profit sharing arrangement with the employees that are directly responsible for their success?  If the employee fails to perform and deliver successful work, they are FIRED.  No longer paid.  If that's fair, then why isn't the reverse – a perennial bonus based on individual contribution – also?  Both the film and recording industries maintain this sort of practice.  Residuals, royalties, why doesn’t a similarly creative field – i.e. COMIC BOOKS – follow suit?  Why is it acceptable for cartoonists to be shat on?  Why is it so reprehensible for a family to recoup some fraction of the income they should have received in the first place?  The blatant hypocrisy exposed in the general punter is alarming.

“Work-for-hire” is an archaic concept that was always ill defined in relation to intellectual properties.  I don’t think either side – either employer or employee – fully grasped the repercussions of such vague contractual agreements.  How quick people are to defend the "rights" of corporations over those of individuals is baffling.  I assume it relates to the American Dream, the inherent money lust built into any citizen of this Great Country of Ours.  But the sides taken are conspicuously ironic.  Why should anyone take the side of a huge conglomerate over that of an individual?  What’s the motivation there?  Jealousy?  Resentment?  Those are the only two that spring immediately to mind.

A sense of fair play is a matter of reason and logic.  Unfortunately we live in a society that is heavily informed by emotional reaction.  That element – our “feelings” as they are called – undermine any accurate meting of justice.  We are fucked in the head by our own traitorous heart.

Full article here.

I found a copy of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware at Book Buyers last week.  It was only thirteen bucks, so I snapped it up.  It’s always nice to find quality comics literature in a used bookstore, even if it does indicate some dabbler abandoning a lonely book (even more ironic in light of the little strip on the back cover of the softback edition).

Anyway, at first I found it visually stunning but nearly incomprehensible to read.  The art is rich and simple, the colors muted and lovely, and while the dialogue has its shining moments of efface, the layouts and the garbled continuity got to me.  Working together, the vagueness of the thing started to wear.  Yet so caught up in the sensory delights of the art, I found the more I persevered, the more rewarding the book became.  To the point now where I can scarcely put it down.

I made myself this morning, so I may get some of my own work done.  So after coming to an appropriate break to leave off, but still craving a little more, I decided to inspect with more scrutiny the other ephemera the book offers: the covers, pull quotes, etc.  Ware works all these tiny details into a daunting whole, but if given the proper attention, it soars with humor and sadness, and sets free the imagination.

The pull quotes were very broad.  Some praised the book, and others damned it.  What struck me about this contrast was its direct relation to the modern human condition.  That is how we treat the glib as virtuous, and the thoughtful as tedious.  The negative criticisms of the book were clearly motivated by a refusal to pause, slow, and give the proper attention, just as I was at the outset.  Yet these “critics’ speak with the authority of someone who has put in the proper amount to get out, and suffice to say, these men are liars.  It’s one thing to glean the surface and just comment on the surface.  It’s another entirely to dismiss an epic work when you can’t even be bothered to read it.

This is why I find most popular criticism i.e. career critics to be nigh unto useless.  Opinion is a veritably random confluence of bias, personal experience and circumstance.  We all weather that storm.  So why do some guys get paid for it, and others ridiculed?  It’s nonsense.

Anyway ~ Jimmy Corrigan is shaping up to be an excellent book.
 

Overall I had a pretty good time.  It was strange being on my own for the most part, and despite an impressive roster of guests, attendance seemed lighter than last year.  Also, the Small Press, Indie Island and Artist Alley sections of the show comprised more space than the Exhibitors, taking up just over half of the hall.  I can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing, or just a thing.  Regardless, it was a fine way to blow a weekend and a wad of cash, and waste some time.  Hopefully, come next year, I’ll have some copies of Art the Amoeba and Oh, Heavens! to trade.  We’ll see…

Here’s the list of loot:

Trades (all either $5, ½ off, or BOGO)
Appleseed: Book One – Masamune Shirow
Cerebus – Dave Sim
Easy Way – Christopher E. Long/Andy Kuhn
Fanboy – Mark Evanier/Sergio Aragones/various
Flaming Carrot Comics – Bob Burden
The Groo Jamboree – Sergio Aragones
Jack Staff: Soldiers – Paul Grist
Mister Blank: Exhaustive Collection – Christopher J. Hicks
Nevada – Steve Gerber/Phil Winslade
Stray Bullets vol. 1 – David Lapham
Stray Bullets vol. 2 – David Lapham
Stray Toasters – Bill Sienkiewicz
Superpatriot: Liberty & Justice – Tom & Mary Bierbaum/Keith Giffen/Dave Johnson
Marvel Essentials: Tales of the Zombie – various
Trasition: Phase 7 #010 & #011 – Alec Longstreth

Singles (all from $0.10 – 1.00)
1963 Book Two: The Fury
1963 Book Five: Horus, Lord of Light
Teen Titans Spotlight on Aqualad (early Erik Larsen art!  Sienkiewicz cover!)
Iceman #1-4
The Thing #2
Miracleman #2-6, 9 (ok, ok, these were $5 a pop, but that’s a steal)
Nightcrawler #1-4
Power & Glory #1 and 3 (I already had 2 and 4)
The Awesome Slapstick #1-3 (no 4, DAMN IT, but I’ve wanted this book for a while)
Sludge #2-9 (more Gerber!  I was on the hunt for plenty o’ Gerber)
Wildstar: Sky Zero #1-4, Born to Be Wild #1

Minicomics, Zines, etc.
Cosmic Adventures: A Mini-comic for Coloring! #1 – Justin Gammon
The Dvorak Zine – Alec Longstreth
Phase 7 #005, 006, 012-014 – Alec Longstreth
Weirdotoys – Justin Gammon
 

“It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

-The Monarch, paraphrasing MacBeth

This quote is from an episode of The Venture Brothers [1].  In it, Monarch is describing a failed effort to void his bowels.  This quote resonated the entire time I watched Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film.  The more I considered it, the more I came to realize its relevance.  With Watchmen, Snyder has digested the source material, absorbed every possible bit of nutrition, and left a steaming pile for his audience to step in [2].

I read comic books.  I have those obvious biases.  But I can, believe it or not, divorce myself from my fierce devotion to the great work of Alan Moore.  Hence, I shall articulate my hatreds of this movie in two streams of consciousness: strictly as a motion picture, and as relating to the book from which it allegedly sprang [3].

Superhero movies are - like the comic book genre that inspire them – quite insular.  They operate on a long defined set of conventions, a common vernacular, their own spectacular iconography.  In translating these four-color wonders to the silver screen, a lot of the magic is lost.  It becomes familiar (i.e. palatable).  The movies must continuously vie to outdo their predecessors, heaping action upon action, stunt upon stunt, assailing the imagination, rendering it comatose.  This betrays a central idiom of any form of art/entertainment: audience participation [4].  Movies must be accessible to the lowest common denominator.  Therefore they are often polished to a crass sheen.  For some stories, this is a serviceable treatment.  In some characters there is no depth.

The characters in Watchmen have no depth.  The Comedian and Rorschach are simplistic, antagonistic right wing caricatures [5].  Ozymandias is the dandy liberal villain, blatantly arrogant, plainly evil [6].  Silk Spectre is the token female lead to a T, never finding consistency nor variance in her personality, resulting in a presence akin to a mannequin [7].  Only Doctor Manhattan, in his superhuman alienation and Nite Owl, caged by a denial of his own design, only these two roles even begin to hint at something memorable or worthwhile under all the cacophony [8].

Without convincing, compelling characters to drive the proceedings, that thrust is left to the plot, of which there is little.  What could be a marvelous take on the murder mystery is obliterated before the opening credits have even rolled, as the Comedian’s murder is recounted through a brutal, egregious fight scene.  From the outset it is plain that whoever did the deed is at the very least the physical equal of Edward Blake [9].  Following this blunder the aforementioned credits present a compressed, alternate history of the US, using touchstones from the lives of first generation heroes the Minutemen to lend the film’s present day points of reference.  These are scarcely followed up in the film, leaving the entire exercise largely a waste of time [10].  In a movie that’s nearly three hours long, a director should have better things to do than hide Easter eggs.

And that’s the central failure in Watchmen: its gross, overdone nature.  While there are moments taken verbatim from the graphic novel, they stand in stark contrast to the filmmakers’ additions and revisions [11].  This creates a sizeable gap that is never bridged.  It also buffs the peaks and valleys necessary to an effective drama down to an even plain.  At its core Watchmen is a drama, not an action blockbuster, and being approached as the latter undoes the movie’s grand potential.

The gratuitous nature of the sex and violence only exacerbate the hackneyed story [12].  Coupled with stilted acting, the picture is dropped in league with so many other also-rans.  The Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Spectre I, for example, is so overwrought that the characters’ later relationship is unfathomable.  Similarly, the catharsis of Walter Kovacs’ psychological transformation into Rorschach is eclipsed by the grisly murder that inspires it.  So many profundities are lost in the application of the Hollywood formula.  This attempt to relate to the general moviegoer will be likely met with ambivalence, simultaneously irritating the book’s ardent fans.  Zack Snyder has pleased no one but himself, and his studio masters [13].

Were the film played as a straight action flick full of bluster and bravado, it may have been easier to watch.  But given the proclamations of the ubiquitous press junket, “Based on the Most Critically Acclaimed Graphic Novel of All Time”, “From the Visionary Director of 300”, etc., clearly we are meant to expect more than a Mel Gibson-meets-Wachowski Brothers grotesquerie of this caliber.  Fortunately  I did not, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be as bad as it actually is.

Seven pages left to letter and ink and I’ll have issue 2 of Everyman in the bag (except some tones and cover colors, but that won’t take too long)!  The page today has gone by easy as pie.  Just some blacks to fill and that’s a wrap!

Oh, Heavens! was initially intended to be a 12-page tract, but I’m already up to 8 pages pencilled on that, and I haven’t even got God back into Heaven yet.  Initially I struggled with coming up with a clever beginning, and then I opted to keep the narrative straight, with little humorous flashbacks where needed.  I think this will probably top out at 20 pages, but the dimensions are considerably smaller than a normal comic page, so the work is much, much quicker on them (a page of this is 4x8; I can do two pages on one 11x14 sheet of Bristol).  Plus I’m using my cartoonier style, which saves time.  I’m trying to find a decent reconciliation between my streamlined, exaggerated impulses and my more traditionalist ones.  It’s slow going in Everyman, because I want that to be really, really comic booky, but stuff like Oh, Heavens! is wide open.

It’s getting easier to see why comic artists usually do their best work toward the end of their lives.  It’s neat to work at a craft where I’ll only get better, as opposed to something like rock n’ roll, where it seems to be general consensus that you lose the magic the older you get.  That’s not necessarily true for all musicians, but still it’s nice to think I could be 70 years old someday and doing the best work of my life.  That’s exhilarating. 

I worked on comic stuff all day today.  The progress feels good, but man am I beat.  Hard to believe how much it takes out of you, hunched over a drawing board, making all these meticulous little lines over and over again.  My neck is sore and I’m hungry; I haven’t eaten since around one o’clock.  Nevertheless, I’m past the halfway point on Everyman #2, so there is that.

It’s hard to keep my enthusiasm up.  I have all these other stories I want to tell, and a lot of ‘em aren’t superhero yarns.  I keep asking myself, “Do I really want to put out just another superhero book?”  They’re rampant.  I enjoy the characters in Everyman enough to keep working with them, but I have other things I could be doing that would stand out a lot more, and therefore more likely to get published.  Or maybe I’m just deluding myself all around.

Anyway, with last night’s song and this little missive, that’s a double post today, which means I can have a day off from this thing sometime.  Daily journal entry is an immense challenge.  I’m glad I’m doing it, though, my writing is improving exponentially for it.  See?  I use words like ‘exponentially’.  And I can spell ‘em right, too.

Good night, dear readers.  Time to walk the dog, and scavenge for food.