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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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Since the issue of Chip Kidd’s book design for The Art of Charles M. Schulz (as well as Kidd’s other books) came up in Tim’s earlier posting, I thought readers be interested in my review of that book, which ran in the National Post on Dec. 1, 2001. Re-reading it, I wish I had said even more about Kidd’s design, which really did shake up our familiar perception of Schulz and started the process whereby people started taking a closer look at the Schulz as a cartoonist.

Here is the review:

The Art of Charles M. Schulz is perhaps the most lavish tribute any cartoonist has ever received. Assembled by Chip Kidd, the most influential designer in contemporary publishing, the images in this thick book have been culled from a variety of sources, including Schulz’s high-school yearbook and his private notebooks.
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I’m only about halfway through Todd Hignite’s upcoming The Art of Jaime Hernandez, but while it’s possible if unlikely that the whole thing falls apart near the end, and while I have a few mostly minor qualms (some fair, some not) about its approach, even at this point it is clear that this is a rich and beautiful book, and an essential volume for the advanced Hernandezologist. I’m not going to review the book right now, but just point out a few thoughts it inspired.
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Below are some jottings from my notebook. They are not substantial enough to be essays but might spark some thought or debate.

Praise for the competition. Lots of spitballs have been thrown at The Comics Journal‘s new web format, some of them hurled by mutinous writers from the Journal itself. I care more about content than format, so I don’t agree with the general line of criticism. For me the biggest problem with TCJ these days is that there is an overabundance of good stuff. It’s hard to keep up with the magazine since it offers so much to read every day. Put it this way: the magazine features long essays by Donald Phelps, Gary Groth, and R. Fiore. These aren’t just three of the best comics critics around, they are among the best essayists around period. Phelps is a critic of the stature of Manny Farber or Pauline Kael. (In fact, the Library of America’s great volume American Movie Critics has essays by Farber, Kael, and Phelps). Fiore and Groth are a notch below that Olympian level but there essays are as good as anything found in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Believer or n+1. Aside from these key writers, the magazine offers regular essays from a strong cohort of intelligent, informed critics — Clough, Worcester, Ishii, Kreiner, Suat Tong, Crippen, Garrity, etc. (Anyone who isn’t on the list shouldn’t be offended, I’m writing off the top of my head.)
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