{"id":1129,"date":"2010-03-03T14:32:40","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T19:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2010-03-03T14:32:40","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T19:32:40","slug":"thirteen-going-on-eighteen-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=1129","title":{"rendered":"Thirteen (Going on Eighteen) Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This isn\u2019t a review. These are just a few different notes\/ideas after reading Drawn and Quarterly’s recent collection of John Stanley<\/a>‘s Thirteen (Going on Eighteen)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0These 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<\/a>\u2019s repeated image of Val and Judy in silhouette facing-off.\u00a0If Val\u2019s excited, she grabs Judy by her arms, and then Judy will pull back the opposite way.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s all motion. It\u2019s all high conflict<\/em>, high energy. It reminds me of how kids always run<\/em> towards something.\u00a0They never walk.\u00a0They scream, \u201cNuh-uh<\/em>!\u201d If they don\u2019t like something they run in the opposite direction. It\u2019s super entertaining.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A scene where Val\u2019s stuck in a doorway during a rainstorm, waiting for anyone to come by with an umbrella (anyone but Charles<\/em>!) 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. \u201cOh, I can\u2019t bear it! I can\u2019t bear it!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

2.\u00a0This same back-and-forth conflict carries over to my feelings about Seth\u2019s design. It goes like this:<\/p>\n

Seth\u2019s an amazing designer. Like his Peanuts reprints design, this is undeniably a gorgeous book.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s true. But his Peanuts<\/em>, in my mind, is exactly that: Seth\u2019s Peanuts<\/em>. It\u2019s Seth\u2019s take\u2014his graphic interpretation of the material. That\u2019s great. Peanuts<\/em> has existed in so many different forms over so many years. It\u2019s refreshing to see Seth\u2019s Peanuts<\/em>, or Chip Kidd\u2019s Peanuts<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0These different designers are providing their interpretation of the series. They\u2019re continuing a conversation that existed before them and will go on after them. Everybody knew Peanuts<\/em> before they saw Seth and Kidd\u2019s books. But this Thirteen (Going on Eighteen)<\/em> project is different. Seth is introducing<\/em> it to people in the context\/design that he\u2019s created.<\/p>\n

And isn\u2019t that great? I mean, Seth\u2019s championed this book and probably pushed this project through Drawn and Quarterly and now lots of kids and adults will read it! He\u2019s taking everyone down to the Seth archives, pulling out the long boxes, and saying, \u201cC\u2019mere kids, isn\u2019t this fun?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

But are kids reading this? I can\u2019t imagine a thirteen year old picking up or holding this book. It looks like it\u2019s strictly for older collector types. It\u2019s a three-hundred-plus page long heavy hardcover book that costs forty bucks, with a text-only six-page introduction.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Also, a reader must make the commitment to this huge collection, knowing that they\u2019re in for the whole ride if they want to observe the slow development across issues. It\u2019s not a \u201cbest of\u201d collection and the series takes a while to get in its groove. Seth wrote an intro to some Thirteen<\/em> reprints in the Comics Journal<\/em> (#272) in which he selected stories that he felt were a good introduction to the series and none<\/em> of those stories are in this collection because they\u2019re all from later in the series! That Comics Journal<\/em> issue also had a fun page of reprinted covers. Basically, if someone asked me where to start with this series, I\u2019d recommend they get TCJ <\/em>#272 before buying the big hardcover collection of the first nine issues. But since this Drawn and Quarterly book is gorgeous and widely available, shouldn\u2019t it be the best place to start?<\/p>\n

Does it matter that kids read it? Would they read it in any package? What\u2019s wrong with it just being a book for collector types? They want the complete thing from start to finish.<\/em><\/p>\n

I donno. Nothing, I guess. Maybe only other cartoonists and collectors are interested\u2026\u00a0 Maybe D&Q has a marketing plan that I don\u2019t understand\u2026\u00a0 but they\u2019re so funny, so lively, I feel like lots of people, of all ages, would like this\u2026\u00a0 It just seems, to me, that this sober packaging is not in the spirit of the energetic comics. But, then again, I\u2019m sure Seth\u2019s thought about this a lot more than I have. Maybe this is the best way to do it. Also, it\u2019s possible I\u2019m completely out of touch with the desire to have the complete series of something. I mean, do we need all<\/em> of Dennis the Menace<\/em> reprinted? Maybe this is totally my problem. But, also, in this case, I like it that all of Thirteen<\/em> is being reprinted! I\u2019m going to buy all<\/em> of them! So, what am I doing complaining about something that I like?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Hey wait! What do you know about what thirteen-year-old kids like?! They all love Seth! They want a classy book for their bookshelf!<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, I didn\u2019t realize. I have no idea what I\u2019m talking about. I have no contact with children. I thought they like books that look like shiny cereal boxes.<\/p>\n

Where did this lowly opinion of children stem from? What would make you think this?<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, it all started when\u2026 [etc.]<\/p>\n

3. In screenwriting there\u2019s a lot of talk about \u201cthe first scene with a character\u201d and how important that is. \u201cBe a fascist about the first scene with a character!\u201d This book made me realize how rare it is in comics for a character to be completely realized on page one. Even for non-serialized comic books, usually the characters develop over the pages, slowly coming into focus, for the reader and the cartoonist (way slower for the cartoonist!). That\u2019s why someone working on a long comic often has to go back to page one and redraw the characters; the character designs changed. Stanley will try a character out, see how they react to Judy and Val, and then ditch \u2018em! The characters grew into their being over the pages, the work and time. Thirteen (Going on Eighteen) <\/em>is like this: characters voices take their shape, and characters (Judy) literally take their shape by losing weight, shifting. Seth provides a theory for Judy\u2019s weight loss in the introduction. Anyway, the point is that each story is self-contained but the larger narrative and characters are growing and taking form across the variations-on-a-theme short stories (which themselves vary among half-page strips, cover gags, two-part short stories, etc.) It\u2019s psychotic: a variety of different variations of the same thing pushing a larger story across while it comes into focus. Aren\u2019t comics weird?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This isn\u2019t 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.\u00a0These 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\u2019s repeated image of Val and Judy in silhouette facing-off.\u00a0If Val\u2019s excited, she grabs Judy by her arms, and then Judy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[700,1092,1189],"class_list":["post-1129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-j-stanley","tag-reprints","tag-seth"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}