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Hey everybody. I thought I’d copy Jeet and post some of the things in my notebook that I’ve been carrying around for the last few weeks. Nothing super substantial but hopefully enough to get some discussion going in the comments.  I just got back to Pittsburgh after a week in NYC working with Dash on his animation project. He and I talked a lot while I was up there and I gotta get this stuff outta my head. Please forgive the randomness of these notes. Maybe someday I’ll turn some of these riffs into more well-rounded posts but until then this is it. 

Why don’t the old guard guys make graphic novels? As someone who loves tracking down old comics by Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Barry Windsor-Smith, Michael Kaluta, and other guys who made “art” comics back in the day, I often wonder why these guys don’t make long form works. Chaykin just did a new Dominic Fortune story but released it as a serialized comic book. His pair of Time2 graphic novels from the late ’80s were amazing and it makes me wonder why he doesn’t “do a Mazzucchelli” and really show us something. Is it the money? I figure he probably knows he can do it as a serialized comic and get paid. I’m guessing that not many publishers can offer guys like him a hefty advance so he can take time off from the pulps and focus on a long form book. But it’s kind of weird, isn’t it?  When I dig through my collection I come across comic after comic from the ’70s and ’80s by guys like Chaykin, Windsor-Smith, Corben, and many others that all held the promise of some future where they could make long form “adult” comics that would appeal to a wide audience. Well, the time is now and it’s strange to me to see them still doing serialized comics. Only Mazzuchelli made the jump. Will others follow his lead and do long form works that aren’t serialized? Does it matter? No, but it is weird, I think.
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I was rooting around the other day for back issues of Third World War, that gently diplomatic Pat Mills/Carlos Ezquerra strip from Crisis — the short-lived, politically-engaged sibling magazine to 2000 AD, initially set up so that its contents could be collected into strip-specific comic books and sold in North America — when I came across on old collected edition of the feature to the left: Devlin Waugh, which turned out the most interesting comic I picked up last week. As the caption indicates, that’s Sean Phillips providing the art; he’s known best these days for his Criminal series with Ed Brubaker, but he’s got a good deal of British work behind him, dating back to the late ’80s. I actually don’t think I’d ever seen this painted style, 1992 vintage, which he switches up with the occasional buckle of monochrome line art panels a bit more reminiscent of his current look. There’s also a smearier look for violent scenes, some photographic elements for television monitors… a pretty versatile, cocky outlay.

The writer is John Smith, among the most prominent British sci-fi comics types to have never quite registered with Vertigo or thereabouts. He’d wanted to take over Hellblazer after originating writer Jamie Delano left, but Garth Ennis was taken on instead; a single issue of Smith’s material (#51) was released, drawn by Phillips, a regular cohort, as a taste of what might have been. He then worked on a big showcase revival of Dr. Fate, which wound up knowing a troubled life as Scarab, an eight-issue 1993-94 Vertigo miniseries. That was the year after this debut Devlin Waugh strip, Swimming in Blood, which was apparently a huge success with readers of the Judge Dredd Megazine. Indeed, the character Waugh is both a denizen of Dredd’s world and cut from the same cloth as that famously droll take on costumed action hero rhythms, but instead of a dutiful authoritarian he’s a ruthless aesthete, a Vatican assassin sent to quell a vampire uprising in the undersea prison Aquatraz, only to preen and flex and admire his collection of watercolors (which he has taken along) and demand apologies from the beleaguered staff for wholly perceived slights. Only after dozens of pages does he take action, leading to his own transformation into a vampire, his blood lust calmed through sheer force of superior breeding, at which time a pointed anticlimax arrives.

It’s a curious, fascinating work, stuffed with literary nods (“Interzone Pest Control,” tee hee) and odd flourishes, like parenthetical captions supplementing narrative captions for lyrical effect, maybe the only prominent, semi-recent use of parentheses by an action comics writer outside of Brian Michael Bendis. It’s from 1992, though, and it feels like that to me – Phillips’ muscular characters bring to mind a lot of the roided-out superheroes I was reading at that time, but fucked around with from the careful tension between writing and art. His massive he-men grimace and flex like any Image revolutionary, but Smith’s story gives it specificity; of course Devlin Waugh poses and struts around, because that’s his sense of beauty. The easy spoof of muscular art is to say that it’s all posturing and no real action, but Smith makes it clear that Waugh can throw down, just as Phillips shows his drawing board versatility – the real joke is that Waugh is a creature of ultra-refined id, and prefers to just pose, because that’s his aesthetic, his veritable meta-attitude. Even as the story threatens to linger on past its welcome, much like its ‘hero,’ Smith & Phillips assure us it’s all in the best, most considered taste.

This really got me going; I haven’t even gotten into the overtly camp and homoerotic elements, which wash the whole thing over. I immediately got to looking for more, and (inevitably) discovered that the collection I’d read had been subsumed into a larger collection of Waugh strips, two softcover volumes (Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood & Devlin Waugh: Red Tide) released as part of the very short-lived mid-’00s DC/Rebellion publishing alliance. This led me to glance again at my Third World War issues and realize that Smith & Phillips had also worked on an early Crisis serial, The New Statesmen (the originating artist of which was Jim Baikie), which was also released in North America in both comic book and bookshelf formats in the early ’90s.

One thing just leads to another. I can’t hang on to money in comics, and I don’t even publish the fucking things. I… what? You want more, NEW options for expenditures this week? Good! GOOD.

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We’ve spent a good portion of the last week or so batting around ideas about comics reprints. Taking a sideways glace at the theme, I offer Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s Afrodisiac, an expertly conceived and executed hardcover that presents an anthology of, well,  comics ephemera related to the titular blaxploitation character. Rugg and Maruca smartly present not complete stories, but rather snippets, splash pages, covers, and even the “final” Afrodisiac story, all rendered in a variety of styles that emulate the look and feel (right down to the paper tone and off-register coloring) of 1970s and ’80s Marvel comics.

Comics making as comics history is not new, of course. Dan Clowes did it wonderfully in his The Death Ray and Alan Moore, et al, did it in 1963, not to mention Image’s recent The Next Issue Project. But what I like here is that Rugg and Maruca don’t try to create an overarching narrative – they’re less interested in the stories themselves than in the junky world they inhabit. (more…)

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What if Disney does away with the culture of freelance lifers at Marvel Comics and replaces pencillers and inkers with animators and storyboard artists?

WHAT IF? What if Disney takes control of the characters from the Marvel brass and assigns their own artists/animators to work on some properties like Iron Man or Spider-Man? Like what if they start developing a whole strategy around releasing a comic series that is intended be an animated series and also a live action movie? (And an iphone comic, etc, etc.) I just think that the parent company will eventually start orchestrating whole events around the launch of high profile projects and sort of blur the lines a little between what is a comic and what is an animated movie and who works on them. As it is now, it’s still the old system: there is a comic that fans love and then there is a movie version that many of the original fans despise because it is not true to the comic, the original text. I can imagine a comic that is developed at the same time as an animation or as a live action movie – which as Avatar has shown can be the same thing: animation and live action.
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Burne Hogarth interview with Gary Groth, The Comics Journal #166, 1994:

“[Hal Foster] is one of the great geniuses of the comic strip… one of the great things he did was to bring the human figure from the great achievements and virtues of Renaissance art, the whole of the empirical figure, down into that small space of a panel, and he made it live; there are damn few people who could ever do that. … I began to realize that what I was doing, what [Alex] Raymond was doing; we were developing a whole new syntax of the figure. By that I mean taxonomy–the organization of all actions. No one had ever done it human history, no one! Not even Winsor McCay, because he always had that gravitational feel of the perspective of the great city forms, and the little figures that he did were rooted, again, down onto the bottom line of the panel; they were walking and standing on firm ground, he seldom lifted them up and let them soar, even though he had the chance in Slumberland to do that.”

This seems like as good a description of the virtues of Foster as any, whatever hyperbole might be in play. Foster leads directly into Kirby in the sense of dream-like figures in play, in motion — these moments of sublime force on a page.

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More gleanings from my notebook:

Herriman’s Missing Signature. Michael Tisserand has a question: “Does anyone know (or have any ideas why) George Herriman generally no longer signed neither his daily nor his Sunday comics in their final years? How uncommon is this? Are there any reasons having to do with comics production, or is this a purely personal decision? I also noticed that there were periods of time in Herriman’s early stint at the Los Angeles Examiner where he didn’t sign his comics. These are the only comics in those issues that are unsigned.” Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Jack Kirby Was the 20th Century. Jack Kirby was the immigrant crowded into the tenements of New York (“Street Code”). He was the tough ghetto kid whose street-fighting days prepared him to be a warrior (the Boy Commandos). He was the patriotic fervour that won the war against Nazism (Captain America). He was the returning veteran who sought peace in the comforts of domestic life (Young Romance). He was the more than slightly demented panic about internal communist subversion (Fighting American). He was the Space Race and the promise of science (Sky Masters, Reed Richards). He was the smart housewife trapped in the feminine mystique, forced to take a subservient gender role (the Invisible Girl). He was the fear of radiation and fallout (the Incredible Hulk). He was the civil rights movement and the liberation of the Third World (the Black Panther). He was the existential loner outcast from society who sought solace by riding the waves (the Silver Surfer). He was the military industrial complex (Nick Fury). He was the hippies who rejected the Cold War consensus, and wanted to create their own counterculture (the Forever People). He was the artist who tried to escape his degrading background (Mister Miracle). He was feminism (Big Barda). He was Nixon and the religious right (Darkseid and Glorious Godfrey). He was the old soldier grown weary from a lifetime of struggle (Captain Victory). There was hardly any significant development in American 20th century history that didn’t somehow get refracted through Kirby’s whacko sensibility. Jack Kirby was the 20th century.
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Very soon a new Chris Ware book will be hitting the stands, a volume that most people probably haven’t heard of. It is not by Ware, but it’s about him. It’s a collection of essays titled The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (University Press of Mississippi, April 2010), edited by Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball.

I’m in the book so I won’t say too much about it except that the editors are very intelligent and the table of contents (pasted below) looks promising. The book will also have a lovely frontispiece by Ivan Brunetti.

As it turns out, my contribution to the book is relevant to the discussions we’ve been having here at Comics Comics about book design and reprints of old comics. My essay is about Ware’s work on the Walt and Skeezix series and the Krazy and Ignatz series, which I try to place in the larger context of the history of comic strip reprint projects and also tie to Ware’s thematic concerns in his own comics with family history, the legacy of the past, and the pathology of the collector mentality.
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This isn’t a review. These are just a few different notes/ideas after reading Drawn and Quarterly’s recent collection of John Stanley‘s Thirteen (Going on Eighteen).

1. These comics are like a ping-pong match. Val runs right, runs left, right, left, back and forth. The dialogue is like this too, like Seth’s repeated image of Val and Judy in silhouette facing-off. If Val’s excited, she grabs Judy by her arms, and then Judy will pull back the opposite way.

If there are six panels on a page, the average page could be seen as battle between the right column and the left: running, bouncing back and forth, with each panel having two characters screaming, grabbing, pulling each other back and forth. It’s all motion. It’s all high conflict, high energy. It reminds me of how kids always run towards something. They never walk. They scream, “Nuh-uh!” If they don’t like something they run in the opposite direction. It’s super entertaining.

A scene where Val’s stuck in a doorway during a rainstorm, waiting for anyone to come by with an umbrella (anyone but Charles!) would be a static scene in any other comic, but here the rain substitutes for the running zig-zag ping-pong motion. Stanley took a quiet scene and made it an energetic back-and-forth riot. I love how Val balls together her fists and leans back when she yells. “Oh, I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!”

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Hey everyone. My name is Joe McCulloch, although you might also know me by my various internet aliases, like “Jog” or “Thierry Groensteen.” I was a contributor to two of the print issues of Comics Comics — and I currently write reviews and essays at The Savage Critics and The Comics Journal (er, soon!), while contributing to a weekly movie column with the Rev. Tucker Stone and occasionally blowing dust off my homepage — but I’m here right now to put this site into compliance with recent amendments to the Greater Internet Funnybook Discussion Act of 1933 (initially prompted by an especially potent stack of Tijuana Bibles and, likely, the repeal of Prohibition) requiring all comic book websites redesigned after December 31, 2009, to furnish a weekly post detailing all the neat-looking shit due in comic book stores that particular Wednesday, or be liable for penalties, including and limited to death.

So here’s a short rundown of comics and things due imminently (3/3/10) at Direct Market retailers serviced by Diamond Comics Distributors (and whatever else I find). Not all of this stuff is guaranteed to show up, although most of it stands at least a fighting chance.

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