Having been an Internet user for years and years and years, I’ve racked up a fair number of web results. Many of them embarrassing. Some are from the days before there was a web, let alone search engines. Had I been named Steve Jones or Bob Smith or something even mildly obscure, I could claim that there was someone else with the same name who was making all the trouble. But given that my name is double imaginary (last name invented during Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s westernization reforms, first name invented by my mom misremembering the credits on Gunsmoke) this is impossible. There’s only one Jarett Kobek in the world. Me.

A long available result for searches on my name has been the capture of a Usenet thread, wherein I started a flame war in alt.fan.harlan-ellison by contending that Ellison’s writing had fallen off ever since he’d met his most recent, and final, wife. This was an obnoxious claim that never should have been made. My only defense is that I was 18 or 19 years old and thus knew no better.

Remarkably, negative responses came not only from the regulars, but also Dave Gerrold, who threated to punch out of my teeth, and Harlan Ellison himself, who went on and on and on about young people and this, that and the other thing. For those of you not geeky enough: Dave Gerrold wrote the screenplay to The Trouble with Tribbles and Ellison was the screenwriter on The City on the Edge of Forever. This means that I managed to really, really upset the writers of the two most popular episodes of Star Trek. Much as I regret the whole affair, I admit that this abstractly remains a pretty funny thing to have done.

Okay, fast-forward. A few months ago, Ellison filed suit against Gary Groth, Kim Thompson, and their company Fantagraphics. Without going too far into the nitty-gritty, these guys have had bad blood for almost 30 years. After years of back and forth & chicanery on both sides, Ellison has decided that he’s had enough. Based on my unexpert readings of his filings, I don’t think he has a case. Am I convinced that this is the RED LETTER FIRST AMENDMENT issue that Fantagraphics wants it to be? Not entirely, but enough to think that they’re technically in the right.

The interesting part is that Ellison is wrong in a more general sense. The worst possible way to fight perceived insults is by trying to suppress them. This has always been true but is only more so in these days of the Internet, where the biggest sin is any action that is regarded as censorship. If Ellison succeeds in court– and while I hope he won’t, I certainly can’t say it’s impossible– what’s the best case scenario? What happens to Fantagraphics? And how will that result be felt? Who will be the real loser?

For reasons beyond me, a few weeks ago I decided to weigh in on all of this with an anonymous comment in a long, stupid thread on Publisher’s Weekly comics blog. This comment ended up being praised not only by Heidi MacDonald, the blog’s author, but also Eddie fucking Campbell. If you’ll excuse the burst of sycophancy: Mr. Campbell is pretty much the foremost talent in comics, both as an artist and as a writer. He’s most famous for illustrating the pictures that accompany Alan Moore’s text in From Hell. (This book, by the way, ruined my life. But that’s a story for another time.) I recommend everyone check out his Alec books, the last two of which strike me as the single smartest works in the history of comics! (I mean How to be An Artist and After the Snooter here. Sad to say, I was a bit cold on Fate of the Artist, which anyway I don’t think is classified by Campbell as an Alec book.)

So, high praise indeed. I posted anonymously because I didn’t want anyone digging up the old flame war and accusing me of having a bias in the whole deal. Which I may have. Who knows? But now that I’ve been given attention, I’ll take the credit.

Personally, I think the whole thing sums up a lot of character development: from snarky teenager to Voice of Reason. Can there be a better narrative?

A pleasure of returning home is the revisitation of old habits & things. Of particular interest is the book collection. As I’ve roughly 5-6,000 books stored in Rhode Island, I’m unable to bring them wherever I go. When I move, typically I take those books most salient to my present state of mind. This time, the coastal transfer put the kibosh on the deal. I brought 3 books. Strange days.

Knowing that I was coming back to Rhode Island, I had thought about what books I should open while at home– one was Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, published by PictureBox, and edited by Dan Nadel, the imprint’s founder. When I saw this book at last year’s MoCCA, I bought it on the spot. The concept is great: unsung heroes given the high class presentation ordinarily reserved for the acclaimed Masters of the Form. You know, like Jack Kirby!

I was interested because the book contained some work by Rory Hayes, the oddest of the underground comix oddballs. Hayes was (in the awful and irresponsible manner of the day) metaphorically adopted by the SF scene and embraced as a contemporary. Except he wasn’t– in essence, Hayes was an outsider artist with minimal formal training. He was also about 18. It shows. My favorite (and totally unobtainable) example of early Hayes is CUNT Comics #1:

And that’s only the cover, folks!

Everything here is fantastic: the image’s unbelievable crudeness matched by the execution, the shock joke illustration underscored by the bawdy subhead, and then the hilariously unsubtle parody/worship attribution to “R. Fuck”. It comes across like the epitome of the kind of comic that would be produced by an intellectually precocious, emotionally immature and painfully undersexed 18 year old boy.

The beauty of SF & its underground comix scene was thus: Hayes may have written and drawn CUNT, but someone else published it. (Of course, the print run was only about 100 issues. Which is why it’s impossible to find.)

When I finally read Art Out of Time, I was disappointed– not only had Hayes been given about 5 pages, at most, but the book’s internal categorization of different artists seemed utterly random and meaningless. We’re talking about “Exercises in Exploration,” “Slapstick,” “Acts of Drawing,” “Words in Pictures,” and “Form and Style.” None of which inform the reader of anything besides someone’s memories of foundation year courses in art history & theory.

The categories wouldn’t be a problem if they in any way were defined. They’re not. Each has a terse, one-to-two paragraph introductory blurb as vague as the names. Furthermore, after a section has been introduced, other than changing names at the top of each right page, the artists appear one after the other with no break. This might be an appropriate if new each artist was different from the last, but this is often not the case.

Far, far too many pages are given over to the early days of newspaper comics. Two problems: one, the reproductions are small and barely readable. Secondly, few of the artists reproduced are distinct from one another. Most seem typical examples of their day– distinguished either by a supposed lack of formalism, or too much formalism, or a Strangeness of Content.

Given that the artists best loved from the early period of newspaper comics– McCay, Herriman, and Segar, for example– all produced unbelievably weird work & were all masters of the form, one starts wondering about the integrity of the book’s core concept. After 13 pages of Harry J. Tuthill bleeds into 13 pages of C.W. Kahles, this impression is only reinforced. Even more baffling is that the truly distinct artists, like Hayes, or like Fletcher Hanks or George Carlson, have significantly fewer pages than the aforementioned Tuthill or Kahles.

Hanks is what had me re-reading Art Out of Time. There’s been a lot of discussion of his work lately, brought on by the forthcoming Fantagraphics book. I’d found the online scans of Hanks’s work hard to read, so I had hoped that Art Out of Time might be an alternate resource. Inevitably, I was disappointed: there’s only one story, and while great, it’s 8 pages long. By contrast, it’s followed by 17 Sundays of Garrett Price’s White Boy, the most interesting feature of which is its title.

My final complaint, and a not insignificant one, is that the last 12 pages of the book contain breezy and uninformative biographies of the artists. While I recognize that space constraints determine the length of such things, I find these entries to be particularly uselessness.

Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s quote from the Rory Hayes bio:

“He, like Fletcher Hanks, drew without reference to any known world besides the one inside his head.”

And what does the Fletcher Hanks bio read?

“All of his work is crude, but like Rory Hayes, completely self-assured.”

Both artists are part of the ACTS OF DRAWING section of the book, and their bios are separated by less than two pages. What do these two sentences even mean? I assure you, they’re not taken out of context.

With Art of Time, you ain’t gotta worry about no context.

Yesterday’s post reminded me that I’d read an article about Rory Hayes in The Comics Journal. This lead to digging through back issues and old books. Eventually I found it: issue 250, February 2003. I was living in a basement outside Detroit. This was much earlier than I’d thought.

The article was written by Bob Levin, author of the Air Pirates book, and has since been reprinted in another of his books. I haven’t read the latter, but I’m sure that like everything by Levin, it’s fascinating, informative, and poorly written. I wouldn’t mention the quality of writing if Levin hadn’t himself poked fun at Hayes’s supposed grammatical errors. Glass houses, kids.

Another resource for much of Hayes’s art is this site. There’s about five pages of 15 scans each, but no complete stories. Still it gives one a taste of the artwork. The cover of Hayes’s first comic, Bogeyman #1, pretty much sums up the distance between he & his contemporaries:

Is there any other early underground cover as stark?

And for the hell of it, here’s a few more images:

I’m mystified that Fantagraphics has yet to issue a collection of Hayes’s work– from Levin’s article, it seems that the entire output totals less than 150 page. If they’ll give Victor Moscoso his own book (where the posters are great but the comics kind of boring), why not Hayes?

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. I was wrong in the last post. More than 100 copies of Cunt were sold.)

I saw 300. Only about half a year late. This delay puts me in the strange position of having no need to enumerate the film’s many flaws and historical inaccuracies. Nor do I have to belabor its oddly homophobic (esp. considering the manboy love of Antient Sparta) portrayal of the Persians. Nor does one need to critique the bad acting. All of this has greased the gears a million times over. Thanks a bunch, blogosphere!

However, I do think a point in particular needs be made: Frank Miller is an idiot.

Most adaptations are too loose; this one is too faithful, and suffers for it. The film clocks in at about 2 hours, when it could have been about 1 1/2. The direct cause of the bloat is thus: Miller’s dialogue and narration have survived completely in tact. The viewer suffers through about one thousand and thirty definitions of what Spara is (everything but a Hellenic city-state) and about 1500 speeches about the birth of reason and Greek freedom.

The end of the film infers that Sparta defeated the second Persian campaign by leading the unified Hellenic forces into an enormous land battle. In fact, the Battle of Salamis, at which the Persians suffered their most significant defeat, was naval and lead by the Athenians. This directly contributed to the rise of Athenian preeminence amongst the Hellens, which in turn lead to chicanery with the Delian league, which in turn lead to the Peloponnesian War. This is the war in which, briefly summarized, the Spartans destroyed the Athenians and set the development of Western Civilization back hundreds of years.

300 casts the Spartans, whose society was structured atop a caste system utilizing slaves called Helots, as the defenders of freedom and noble warriors fighting for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is akin to making a film about World War II that depicts the Nazis sitting shiva.

One could blame the nonsense on director Zak Penn, but Penn’s direction is the film’s saving grace. As a giant mindless spectacle of war & blood, 300 is great. This is the kind of goofy extravaganza Hollywood has been cranking out for almost 100 years– the only things that change throughout the decades are the faces and the technology. Some, like D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, are less stupid, some more.

300 is really dumb. Again, we come back to my central point. Frank Miller is an idiot. I remember being in my friend Andrew’s bathroom, trying to read the original graphic novel, and giving up around the point where a Persian emissary is thrown down a well. The scene itself, based on an incident in Herodotus, was not objectionable– it was the tone and delivery. It was clear I could keep reading and (a) find the cutting edge of Superheroic Graphic Design (yawn), (b) be entreated to a lot of garbage about Men being Men and (c) somehow, somewhere find a woman being a whore.

For 20 years, Miller has written only one story. Much like the aforementioned cinematic spectacles, the only differences are place names (Gotham, Sparta, Sin City) and proper nouns (Batman, whatever the Sin City characters are called, Leonidas, Batman). So long as Miller kept amping up the art, no one really noticed– sure, someone could point out that the Yellow Bastard book is pretty much the same thing as the other 6, but c’mon, it’s got a dude that’s yellow! In a series that’s black and white! But times change and Miller stumbled– the sequel to Dark Knight Returns looked like crap, so people ended up reading the story. Big mistake. Some of the more brainy folks took DK2 as a parody, but then came All-Star Batman and Robin the Wonder Boy. The dawning realization: either Miller’s serious, or, if this is parody, it’s unfunny. Which ends up being the same thing as serious.

One wouldn’t even complain if it were a good story.

The sad thing about the graphic novel, and the film, is that Sparta was one of the most fascinating cities in the Ancient World. The structure of the society, its relative lack of achievement in any arena but war, its sexual progressiveness, and its destruction of the birthplace of philosophy all make it incredibly compelling. Even the heart of 300, the Battle of Thermopylae, is incredibly fascinating and nuanced.

But the film and book squander opportunity in favor of Freedom.

At least in 2007 that’s something to which we’re accustomed.

In a previous sycophantic post, I mentioned that I think Eddie Campbell is the single smartest person, both as an artist and a writer, to have ever worked in comics. Bacchus (under its 200 different titles of publication) was possibly the only character based series of the go-go B&W era that managed to achieve profundity, however fleeting, and the Alec books, individually and as a whole, are my favorite comics, period.

Whenever I feel like I’m throwing my life away, which is at least once a day, I think about How To Be An Artist. Read a certain way, the book tells the impressionable reader (me) that it’s OK to go ahead and bury that bastard in the dustbin. Thankfully, Campbell also published what I consider a companion volume, After the Snooter, demonstrating that once you have done, things work out all right. As long as you know Alan Moore. Which I don’t. You’re so going to Hell, Campbell.

Which says nothing about either of the two books’ artistry. Simply put, they’re masterpieces. Buy them while you can. More recently, Campbell released The Fate of The Artist, which everyone loved. Except me. Usually I’m all for pretentious gobeshit and Examinations of Art and Its Role but for whatever reason I couldn’t get into it. Anyway, I’m probably wrong, and I certainly recognize the book’s intrinsic merit. Just not for me.

Now Campbell’s got a new book out, The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I’ve only read one or two things about its genesis but I gather that it was a previously existing screenplay which Campbell was asked to adapt. If I’m correct, this is the thinking behind such a move: movie executives, being exceptionally stupid, are much more likely to buy a film if they get a package of pretty pictures and dialogue balloons instead of a bunch of INT. EXT. DAY. EVENING. printed across a page. This may well be true!

Campbell’s art is top notch and entirely on the ball: lots of experimentation with form and content but never so much as to distract. This leaves the reader’s focus on the story. Ah, yes, the story. Therein lies the rub. It’s by the numbers detective investigation set in the fin-de-siecle (one before last) American midwest. Whatever else may be said, from the characterization and plot development, it’s rather clear that this tale began life as a screenplay.

This point is important– screenplays, even detailed shooting scripts, are weird beasts. The format is designed for the intense collaboration of film making. A line of dialogue on the page allows for the impact (negative or positive) of the actors, the cinematographer, the foley artists, the scoring, and finally, the director. While not every screenplay is bereft of, say, characterization, it’s also much, much less necessary than in other storytelling mediums.

To put it another way, think of a film like the overrated Goodfellas. Think of any one of Joe Pesci’s hilariously psycho monologues. Now imagine them delivered by Bill Pullman. Directed by Uwe Boll.

Either way, it’s the same screenplay.

Campbell has taken on the unenviable task of filling each major (and minor) role himself: he’s the gaffer, the director, the actors, the DP, and the caterer. It’s Eddie Campbell’s personal vision of someone else’s post-Watergate detective story set in a random historical milieu.

The most bizarre aspect of this book is Campbell’s status as possibly the least cinematic major artist in comics. Under every other imaginable circumstance, I’d count this as a truly great thing. But presently it compounds the problem, and we are left with the barebones of a screenplay developed into a visual medium sans any of the technique for which it was intended. It’s not bad, per se. It’s just strange.

I’ve never bought into the idea of Comics as Incubator for Cinema, but at least Marvel and DC provide existing product envisioned first as comics and then adapted. Black Diamond’s reverse-engineered approach has only made me more suspicious about the perceived relationship between the two mediums. (It’ll be interesting to see if Marvel’s bet the farm on the wrong horse.)

But before you think it’s all crying & boo-hoo and Campbell what have you done, let me hit the positives.

As I’ve mentioned, the art. It’s great. The colors, the figures, the landscapes– all wonderful. Generally, when I think of Campbell’s work, what comes to mind are scraggly drawings of the artist playing fetch with his dog or a murder victim being pulled from a dodgy London gutter. Don’t get me wrong: these are always lovely. But in Black Diamond, there’s a real grace to much of the figures and coloring that I don’t remember seeing previously. Secondly, for what the story is, Campbell’s handled it as admirably as he could. Third, huzzah for the choice of full-bleed! It works well. (A minor complaint is the gutter: I feel like I’ve lost about 1/20th of most pages to the binding.)

So. All reservations aside– I enjoyed the book, it’s an affable way to spend a few hours, Campbell is a master, and if I weren’t embarrassed to recommend comics, I’d tell people to buy it.

A bunch of stuff that’s too insubstantial for posts of their own.

#1. Everyone’s favorite hysteric, Andrew Sullivan, posts an English WWII propaganda poster that’s been making the rounds, including a mention on the dread Boing-Boing. I hadn’t seen it before, but… if we were living in a totalitarian city-state and I were your tyrant tyrant, this poster would be on every wall and in every home and building. People, listen up! By these words should your lives be lived!

#2. Speaking of propaganda, I found this story on Newsarama. It’s a by-the-numbers ain’t-they-great puff piece on Marvel’s forthcoming & so-called Indie Anthology, which has been drawing many second and first tier artists like moths to a flame. The sound of backs being slapped all around except for this remarkable quote:

“‘Another great thing about it is that it’ll be a perennial seller, since it’s not in continuity,’ said Sitterson.”

Uh, what? Is that an accidental admission that continuity, lately Marvel’s bread-and-butter (Cap’n America dead! Skrulls! Spider-Man angry!) doesn’t sell over the long term? Or an admission that continuity based stories are a niche-based market incapable of developing a broader audience? Or is it just Marvel, finally, thankfully just admitting its published product is purely boutique?

What a wonderful business model! Especially considering that the characters are now in hock to the bank.

#3. A commenter on my earlier rambling on the occult history of Mormonism writes in to say,

“Let’s remember that Christianity is also qite goofy: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so that he can remove from your soul an evil force that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree …”

Well, yeah. My post was not intended to defend Mormonism on the basis of it being Serious, but rather as Equally Ridiculous as any other religion. In the end, this is the same thing as being Equally Serious (it’s a collapse of the either/or binary) and not a valid criticism of either faith. As I mentioned, religions ask their adherents to believe weird, often crazy stuff. This is the mystery of faith and either you got it or you don’t.

In the eyes of latter day Atheists, who strike me as mostly anti-Christian with a bit of post-9/11 anti-Islam, this weird, crazy stuff is evidence of awful, earth-shattering superstition. Opiate of the masses, etc., etc. Which can be true, but it’s a little like being upset at rocks because someone’s taken out your eye with a sling. What isn’t a weapon in the wrong hands?

This argument also ignores the possibility that people know how strange their beliefs are and keep on believing. It’s not just the magical realism in Christianity that’s counter-intuitive (love thy enemy? turn the other cheek? give alms to the poor?). Do atheists really believe that any intelligent member of a religion hasn’t had this dialogue with themselves? C’mon kids, the whole point is believing bizarre things!

Like most arguments against religion and faith, it also seems a little sorry– the best example of a weak Atheist argument is that old favorite Why Does God Allow Evil, which really means Why Does God Let Bad Things to Happen to Good People, which really means, Why Did God Let Bad Things Happen To *ME*? Memo to Christopher Hitchens: somehow I don’t think the best argument against the existence of God is your girlfriend breaking up with you sophomore year. (Or whatever its English public school equivalent. O-levels? A-Levels? Who cares?)

But there I go again; atheists always turn me into a religious apologist.

‘Nuff said.

As I’ve mentioned, most of my books are bought in a haphazard fashion, generally at the Hollywood & Western Out of the Closet. The most fascinating thus far has been Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus. Published in ‘73, it’s an insider account of the lives of journalists covering the 1972 election, focused by necessity on the ill-fated McGovern campaign. (Nixon’s strategy was an imperial one; he used the strength of the office to enhance his stature and to highlight the many undeniable flaws of McGovern.) In the run up to the ‘08 election, the book has a OH MY GOD NOTHING EVER CHANGES feel. The players are the same & there’s a looming spectre of a war that can’t be won haunting America. Concerns about the quality of journalism, and its impact on the electorate! Etc! Etc!

Crouse had the bad luck to be the other political reporter for Rolling Stone. Along with the work of Hunter S. Thompson, his campaign coverage in 72 remains the magazine’s high-water mark for writing. (Incidentally, one of the most interesting developments of the last few years has been the current political correspondent, Matt Taibbi.) Thompson’s own brilliant book on the 72 Campaign has overshadowed Crouse’s achievement. The Boys on the Bus is most often referenced as a source book for Thompson’s Crazy! Insane! behavior, which is a shame. There’s a lesson in that for you, somewhere.

Tolling like a bell throughout Crouse’s book, and once again making 2007 feel a lot 1971, is the impact of technology. One section on the advent of cable news could be used nearly verbatim as a description of BLOGGING, YOUTUBE, and the INTERNET. Wild crazy guys on a lawless frontier taking on traditional media! Newspaper circulation declining! Traditional reporting going out the window! (And we shouldn’t forget, either, that 72 was early enough for reporting to still be feeling the shocking impact of plain old network news, the novelity of which is examined at great length by Crouse.)

Technology and its supposed impact have been on my mind– so imagine my surprise when I checked !Journalista! and discovered Mr. Dirk Deppey’s on-going discussion of comics piracy. Deppey’s blog is one of my favorites, but it does have a dark downside: very occassional links to articles about e-books, digital paper and comics going digital! Mostly I ignore them. I try and have the same truce with articles about technology blowing up everything we know that I have with God: if He’s not thinking about me, I’m not going to think about Him. But Deppey’s question about the tipping point has, uh, tipped me over my point, and someone’s gotta say something. And that someone’s gotta be me. I guess.

So, let me state a basic rejoinder to every article about digital paper, about comics disappearing, and about the iPhone delivering babies: shut up. Everything is always going to be the same. I know it’s a depressing thought, but there it is. Nothing, not even newspapers, are going away.

The problem really began with everyone under 50 first noticing the impact of COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY when they threw out their CDs and took up MP3s; ever since, we’ve been on High Red at the Event Horizon. Unfortunately, this model isn’t scalable outside its first occurrence.

MP3s became dominant because CDs and cassettes were terrible, terrible mediums. (At least Vinyl had huge art.) You loved listening to Hendrix, but you didn’t love a CD. They were clunky, hung around, and took up too much space. It was a stupid and overpriced (this fact is not insignificant) way to give people what they wanted. Take, on the other hand, cinema. Chain exhibitors are doing everything they can to destroy the experience and yet people are still going to films. (Ignore the nonsense about the current box office slump; this is market variation which will correct itself.) Despite many fears, the theatre is never going away. The experience can not be replicated by DVD, by torrents, or by legal direct-on-demand cable.

We move to comics. HAS COMICS PIRACY impacted the industry? Absolutely, no question. Have Marvel and DC and even our highly valued indy publishers lost money? Possibly. It depends on what you consider a sale. If I, for instance (and I didn’t) pirated the Kree-Skrull War trade paperback, would that be a lost sale? Marvel, with its vested interest, undoubtedly would argue yes, but in reality, unless I was getting that garbage free, I’d never read it. On the other hand, there obviously are people getting a mainline fix via the new weekly torrents. But would they buy these books if the torrents weren’t available? The question, really, is this: have “mainstream” comics become such a boutique industry that they can survive piracy because the audience only wants the books in a certain way, in a certain format, with non-zombie variant covers? Recent blockbuster sales make me lean towards yes.

But that’s the short term. Eventually the cholesterol in those hearts will harden and the target audience will die. What of the long term impacts? Here, we return to The Boys on the Bus. (Remember it?) 35 years later, what most comes across is the concern of newspaper reporters that network news can do their jobs better, and quicker; and if you look at the quality of most political coverage circa 1969, that’s certainly true. Why read a 500 word article when you can hear Dan Rather say it in 30 seconds? I may be wrong, but I believe that the papers were forced to adapt and adopt new forms of longer, analysis based journalism (at least until the advent of USA TODAY) that buoyed them for several decades. This lasted until the World Wide Web, a medium absolutely perfect for longer, analysis-based journalism. Now what will happens to the papers!??! Do they go away entirely?! Some will, assuredly. Maybe even one or two biggies. But someone’s going to figure out a new way to write and present data that’s better suited in a physical, newsprint format than the web. Listen, I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for like 15 years. Half of the articles are online now, and I still read that damned thing front to back each week. The reason why is simple– it’s less irritating to read a 15,000 word piece over a few days on the toilet than it is to read it in a single, or multiple, viewings on a webpage. Even if it is an article about not thinking making you’re smart.

(This is why e-books are, have been, and will be the great chimera of publishing. I’m sure there are some dope addled freaks who do prefer reading Dickens like this, as opposed to this, but we can’t allow drug addicts to shake our faith in a 500 year+ perfected technology. And I say this as a guy who’s got a website full of PDFs.)

How does this relate to the weird world of comics? I’m willing to accept that in the long term, piracy may mean the death of “mainstream” comics in the pamphlet format, and my god, wouldn’t that be great? If so, it’s because the virtues, so-called, of mainstream comics exist in the Bizarro World of anti-reading. When big, meaningless splash pages of exaggerated musculature and striking B&W graphic design hide the fact that neither Brian Michael Bendis nor Frank Miller can write, then of course it’s going to be pirated– these are objects to look at, not read, and a backlit LCD screen is the perfect medium for such an endeavor. Even the great online success story of web comics is based on having, at most, 6 panels that can be viewed in a glance.

But the long form comic that requires its audience to actually, you know, read is much better suited to the printed page. Even if that form is only 25 pages. Sorry, Scott McCloud, but it’s true. Any other way and it’s too annoying.

Much like me posting 30,000 words about comics piracy.

(P.S. The title of Boys on the Bus got me an attempted gay pick-up on the Red Line. It took me about 3 minutes to realize the guy wasn’t crazy and figure out what was happening. Nice enough guy.)

I’m most dissatisfied with my review of Eddie Campbell’s The Black Diamond Detective Agency. Somehow I came off 1000% more negative than I had intended and not enthusiastic enough about the book’s many virtues. I’ve noticed that this negativity is a reoccurring trend whenever I mention comics.

But I have profoundly idiosyncratic taste & am not in any way a typical comics reader. I’m not even a typical atypical comics reader. My brain processes comics as a primarily literary form, rather than a visual one. This goes back to the earliest days– I’ve memories of being 8 years old in the mid-80s, in a cottage in Hampton Beach, NH, and reading Peter David’s Ace stories in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man annuals. I couldn’t tell you anything about the artwork, but I remember some of the dialogue.

So for this entry, I’d like to be unremittingly positive, and in that spirit, I direct your attention to this post by the aforementioned Mr. Campbell, celebrating his daughter’s 17th and also reproducing a page from one of the Alec books.

The Alec books are always mentioned in the same breath as early 80s comics– generally this chatter is about the pages that ended up finally collected as The King Canute Crowd, a hugely influential romantic autobiography about being a drunken Scots youth (Glasgow’ll set about ye). But Campbell continued on with the Alec books, and the narrative followed his path from dissolute lad to actual & true comics artist to reasonably-happy domestic in Australia, and I think it’s with that last lot that Campbell achieved something wonderful.

My favorite of the Alec books is How To Be An Artist, but that’s the preference of a person throwing away his life and needing encouragement– in an argument on the bizarro world where I got into arguments with people about Eddie Campbell, I’d claim After the Snooter as the greater achievement. The titular Snooter, if I remember it right, is a sort of bug-headed avatar of Campbell’s anxieties and concerns about aging and hitting middle age. By chronicling the minute particles of his domesticity, Campbell ended up with something even more significant than his initial goal. For he gives us a picture of married life and parenthood being, you know, basically happy and genuinely so.

This is an image rarely encountered in any media. If one thinks of the (now-dead? I haven’t watched tv in years) Family Sitcom, long the last outpost of marriage, the couples are never, ever happy. If they were, where should the jokes come from?

But especially not in comics. We need not go into the depths of superhero marriages, but so much of what used to be called independent comics (what’s it called once you’ve got major publishing outfits behind the stuff?) is crap relationships and bad parenting. What other creators have really gone out of their way to document the day-to-day and show the rest of us it how it can be done? How many people have taken such an incredible delight in their families? (Or had families willing to put up with it?) It’s a sad state of affairs when it’s almost revolutionary to show people being happy.

There’s something subtle and wonderful about the book, and I do think it’s one of the great achievements in comics, because Campbell, as ever, is a master of the written word and the visual form. My basic rule of thumb about what makes a Good Comic Great is: could this easily translate into another medium, or is it so ineluctably of the pen and paper that it’s only conceivable as it is?

Need I even answer my own rhetorical question?

All of the Alec books are still available from Top Shelf. As they were issued under Campbell’s now defunct self-publishing imprint, I assume there will be a time when they will go out of print. So buy them now.

P.S. I pledge not to mention Eddie Campbell again at least until August.

Jarett Kobek
Los Angeles, CA 90029
USA

Mr. Dave Sim
Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

7 July 2007

Dear Dave,

Three points:

#1. A post in Neil Gaiman’s blog extends your offer a free, signed Cerebus comic to any and all who drop you a letter and I’m wondering if that offer’s still open? If so, can you please send me a comic? I’m not really concerned with which issue—but if you have any of the Sandman spoof left, why not? As to why I’d like an issue: I like free things & I also enjoy writing letters, and I like letters that bring me free things, especially signed comics by revered and reviled independent publishers and artists.

#2. Forgive me if this is an issue that’s been addressed, but: have you given any thought to publishing a volume of the 300 Cerebus covers? I’ve no idea if cost would make this logistically possible, but I’ve long thought that Cerebus, if nothing else, had the best covers of any pamphlet comic.

#3. Forgiveness please if this happens to be another issue that’s been addressed, but could you lose the Fifteen Things preface to your blog posts, or at the least vary it up a bit? My complaint isn’t content–it’s just that I find scrolling through with each post to be unusually irritating. This kills my ability to read your blog, which is a shame as I do enjoy your posts, and frankly, I’m one of this planet’s most important people.

Thanks for your time, I am,

Most Sincerely Yours,

Jarett Kobek

Jarett Kobek
Los Angeles, CA 90029

Mr. Dave Sim
Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

July 19, 2007

Dear Dave,

You blog post of July 1st touches, in part, on your syncretic view of the Abrahamic religions. I was hoping that I could get clarification on a few of the ideas you mentioned, and maybe a sense of how you arrived at them.

Excuse my inevitable misinterpretations, but I gather that your beliefs are roughly as such: there is a Creator God, Who created not only the world, but also a (or a number of) Demiurges, one of whom was the Canaanite god Ba’al. Ba’al is more commonly known as YHWH, and you believe that YHWH was the entity responsible for the inspiration of the Torah, the New Testament, and the al-Qu’ran. This semi-reliable source, I would gather, accounts for the crap thrown in alongside the quality.

I hope that this summary is roughly accurate, as I’d like to ask you a few questions based on it. Obviously, with the identification of the Demiurge with YHWH, you have a direct antecedent in some of the Gnostic sects, but the conflation of YHWH with Ba’al is, as far as I know, unique to you. This brings up any number of questions: foremost, I think, is how you came to the idea that the two were one and the same? Secondly, does the literal existence of one pagan god imply the literal existence of others? Or is YHWH somehow a special case? Third, if YHWH is a special case, do you have any idea why? Fourth, and finally, I think, what exactly do you believe the nature of YHWH to be? Corporal being? Metaphysical entity? Something else entirely?

Thanks for your time. I am,

Most Sincerely Yours,

Jarett Kobek

We went to San Diego for the Comic Con 2007 International Biennial. I wish I had more to say about it, but I’ve got nothing. I may still be exhausted. We didn’t even take any pictures, which is strange. San Diego is beautiful, though.

Update: In my exhaustion, I neglected to mention that I went to the Comic Con hoping to score the only thing I could think of that would be Comic Con worthy (i.e., not so easily acquired via Internet or comic book stores): European reprints of Corto Maltese stories by Hugo Pratt, regardless of language. But nada.

Dirk Deppey links to this post by Adam Hughes, How To Make Love the Ben Grimm Way.

It contains this image:

It is, in fact, the single most disgusting and disturbing series of panels ever published.

Dirk Deppey has been linking, and probably causing, a mini-debate amongst female fans of comics regarding Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. This centers, as with every other discussion of The Killing Joke, on the victimization of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl by The Joker. The Joker shoots Gordon in the stomach and through the spine, thus paralyzing her, and then takes pictures of her bloodied and naked body. (To my mind there’s also the implication of a rape.) One blog thinks it’s alienating to women, another says no, this stuff happens, it’s in the handling of it. Depictions of violence are not innately improper or alienating. Yeah, but…

A cavalier and socially irresponsible comic shop owner sold me a copy of The Killing Joke when I was about 11, and it, of course, blew the back out of my mind. At that point I had yet to develop abstract thinking, so I can’t say how aware I was that someone was responsible for writing this story, and I certainly hadn’t heard about Alan Moore, but it was clear that this was Something Different and significantly better than the usual Batman comic.

When I look at the book now, with wizened eyes, the The Killing Joke is still Something Different. It’s also bad. I don’t disagree with my childhood assessment that compared to whatever the hell else Batman was doing in 1988 (fighting Iran?), it shows a depth of craft far exceeding what had been achieved with the character. (And, yes, I include Frank Miller’s book in this assessment.) This tells one a great deal more about previous standards of writing and character development than it does anything about The Killing Joke.

In many ways, as it usually is, the blogosphere is half-right: the worst part of the book is indeed the violation of Barbara Gordon. Not because of its inappropriateness, nor because she’s a woman, but for the fact that it uses the character as a McGuffin, and uses her in the worst way possible. Not only is she subject to an unusual depravity, but the consequences of this depravity seriously damaged the character for future storytellers. I think that this is the worst thing that can be done with a genre character; you can let them grow, but you really shouldn’t screw them up for whomever is going to be working on the character after you. (To DC’s credit, and ain’t that a phrase I am not oft to utter, the pointless injuries sustained by Batgirl weren’t retconned and were developed into a new phase for the character. Has this ever happened before or since in comics?)

And what’s this claptrap about driving Jim Gordon insane?

Like the victimization of Batgirl, it’s pretext, one of several nonsense excuses strung together to get Batman and the Joker into a funhouse (because the Joker, you see, is a twisted image of fun) where they can then beat the crap out of each other. And since this is 1980s Alan Moore at his lowest, a book titled The Killing Joke has to be meta and have an actual joke at the end, allowing the reader the deep insight of Batman and the Joker laughing together and oh my god is there a ying-yang kinship between them? No, really?! Is there? Can Batman be just as crazy as the Joker?!?! Is this a metaphor for the madness of Thatcherite England?!

First, let me just out right say it: that joke isn’t funny and it never was. There. I’ve been waiting 16 years. But secondly, who cares if Batman is or isn’t crazy? This is the book’s payoff? That a genre character in an admittedly unrealistic medium is just as nuts as his arch-nemesis? Dude dresses up like a bat and is fighting an evil clown. How profound can it get?

Moore himself says this and, uh, more, in an interview on the great Daev Walsh’s Blather:

“But at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they’re just two comic book characters.”

Some people blame Watchmen or Miller for the current state of comic books– personally, I blame The Killing Joke. To get from the ‘86 books to current comics, you have to strip those books of any of their plotting, any of their character development, any of their innovation and technique, and any of their ideas. (Obviously, with the last, I mean Moore. Miller’s ideas, such as they are, have always been: Mike Hammer Smash and Freedom Isn’t Free.)

The Killing Joke, on the other hand, presents an easy template for how to be an Editor-in-Chief and have an Event: kill off, mame, or otherwise screw up an existing character to get other characters together to fight, fight, fight. Provide pseudo-insights into their pseudo-psyches, preferably while they’re punching each other, and if, perchance to dream, along the way you can establish a heavy handed metaphor for the Current State of Things, then boffo for you!

(UPDATE 9/7/07: Honest to god I have a life. The latest.)

The Harlan Ellison -vs- Fantagraphics Lawsuit has been resolved through mediation and the details of said resolution have at last been posted. I’ve commented on this lawsuit before. (And as that link demonstrates, I’ve had my own long-forgotten and kind of hilarious digital encounter with Ellison.) Off site commentary here.

The terms of the resolution are, basically: Fantgraphics + Co have to shut up about Ellison, Ellison has to shut up about Fantagraphics + Co, everyone has to pay their own legal bills, no one admits any wrongdoing, Fantagraphics has to delete the Offending Passages in the book that started this whole go-round, Ellison’s name and interview are dropped from any further reprints of the interview book, and, not insignificantly, Gary Groth is allowed to post for 30 days a 500-word rebuttal to Ellison’s claims on Ellison’s own website.

This may seem like a sort of mutual defeat, or possibly even a defeat for Fantagraphics. Maybe it is. However, I see this as a fairly significant Ellison loss brought upon the man by himself, and one displaying how tricky the Internet can be for those with only a poor-to-middling grasp of the consequences of a medium in which seemingly nothing ever dies. To my mind, the key points of the agreement are this: that Fantagraphics has to delete the Offending Passages and that Groth gets the last word and that Ellison has to publish it.

The deletion of the passages apparently goes against the blessed 1st Amendment & sticks in the craw of every hard cussing American kid raised on his or her own inalienable right to mouth off and sass his or her betters. I’m not going to get into the ethical implications of which side was right. What’s the point? This was decided in mediation. It has no significant consequence outside the immediate case. No real damage done except possibly to Ellison’s reputation as a staunch defender of free speech.

In this specific matter, Ellison may have won a technical victory, but the truth is way murkier. If the point of the lawsuit was to reap damages from the imminent publication of the Offending Passages, well, obviously he lost– he’s paying his own legal bills and collecting squat. If the point was to suppress the passages, then, again, Ellison lost.

Anyone who wants to read those passages can now read them free and possibly forever. When you sue someone you have to say what you’re suing them for, and in a document that is filed with the court. Ellison’s lawsuit specifically quotes and reproduces, verbatim, the Offending Passages. The passages have now become a part of a standing public record. My legal knowledge here is sketchy, but I believe that as this document was filed with the court, pretty much anyone can go ahead and order a copy from now until the end of time. In my ever bizarro working life, I’ve had to order deposition testimony from civil suits, and there never was any trouble getting one’s hands on them, nor on reproducing them.

Plus, the damn things are all over the Internet. They’re quoted in blog reports. They’re quoted in news reports. They’re still on Ellison’s website. So they’re there. And they aren’t going anywhere. It took me two minutes to find the Offending Passages.

The fascinating thing about this agreement is the Groth rebuttal. I have no idea whether or not Fantagraphics + Co thought about the implications of getting the legally sanctioned last word, but I’m gonna assume that someone knew they were winning a huge victory. The extreme specificity of the terms– no more than 500 words, no more than 30 days, must go up 5 days after the lawsuit resolution– demonstrate a hard fought battle, presumably on Ellison’s side, to minimize the impact of this statement.

For lack of a better term, this is Print Mentality. Because in print, stuff dies. News disappears and goes away with the thrown out newspaper. Or people buy up the physical commodity and then there’s no more for anyone. If you didn’t get that information while you could, then you’re out of luck. Maybe they’ll reprint it. Most likely not.

The moment that Groth’s statement goes up, twenty to thirty blogs will repost it in its entirety, thus ensuring that it never goes away. And you can cram a lot into 500 words. Other than length and duration of availablity on Ellison’s site, the terms of the rebuttal agreement are hugely favorable to Groth. Ellison can’t edit it, Ellison has to post it, and Ellison can’t sue or complain about anything that Groth says in it. Considering the earlier provision in the settlement barring ad hominem attacks, Groth probably can’t call Ellison a crapface, but that’s about it. He seems to be able to say anything he wants. Wasn’t that the gol’ darn problem in the first place?

And since Ellison is a Highly Controversial Figure with a Big Mouth who Likes to Fight, who brought this lawsuit that pretty much everyone thought was a bad idea, and Fantagraphics was able to semi-successfully cast it as a First Amendment issue, and the end result is a book being edited & having passages from it deleted… well, I think it’s safe to say that there are going to be many people (myself not included) who will be overjoyed at the spectacle of him having to put Groth’s words on his own website. And quote and copy at will.

So is everyone happy now?

UPDATE, A DAY LATER: Harlan Ellison quasi-responds.

UPDATE: Even more.

Good God, will it ever end? Of course it’s my fault for perpetuating this by continuing to comment, but I checked the original post on Heidi McDonald’s The Beat and discovered yet more by Harlan Ellison. Quoted in its entirety:

HARLAN ELLISON Says:
08/19/07 at 1:01 pm

I was edified to learn that according to some wittling thng called blog.kobek.com posting just prior to this, that I “lost” my recent lawsuit.
Simple objective reading of the original suit filing, and what I was seeking, followed by simple objective reading of the final settlement, and what I got, might suggest that the great legal mind behind that kobeckoid pronouncement is, well, to be kind, predisposed — whatever the empirical evidence — to skew and slant and knock-cockeyed-to-produce-a-prejudged-result. Tsk-tsk. Even troglodytes should behave more honestly.

The most obvious point of Ellison’s post is that I was reading with Unobjective Eyes to join, I guess, the International Conspiracy against the Great Writer. In a way, I almost understand this– I certainly linked to, and did not hide, the fact that the man had some choice words for me in the distant past, but c’mon, really? Does this putdown from days of yore color my thoughts so deeply that I’m signing up for the Great War?

Hardly. As much as Ellison’s big dog persona is obnoxious, I hold a great fondness for the pleasure his stories brought me, and I still find a few of his books to be pretty great. Gentlemen Junkie, in particular, remains a favorite. My interest in this lawsuit has always been Ellison’s approach to this matter, which I consider a case study in how not to deal with your enemies, especially in these here days of the Internet.

Reading the settlement, we can safely say that, technically, yes, Ellison did not lose. That’s because the case was, you know, settled. Neither party admitting wrong-doing. Technically, neither side lost.

My original post was intended as a corrective to much of the commentary that I had seen on the message boards at The Comics Journal, which I felt looked at the settlement in the wrong way entirely. Obviously, yes, redacting passages from a book isn’t the greatest outcome for anyone except the Plaintiff, but on the other hand, should this matter be considered as zero sum game?

In my opinion, emphatically not. Harlan Ellison can justify why he filed suit & why he felt that he needed to do so, and he was certainly within his rights to file, but I felt then, and feel now, that in the grander scheme, Ellison lost at the exact moment when he filed papers. Because honestly, and I’ve said this before– who in the hell wants to read a history of Fantagraphics as written by itself?

Ellison’s suit took passages from a book that had an audience, at most, of two or three thousand people, and turned it into a cause celebre. The words of his Most Hated Enemy, Gary Groth, a man considered by many to be, at the least, smarmy and self-satisfied, were broadcast to an audience far wider than the number of people who would have read them in their original context. Furthermore, the suit enshrined the Offending Passages in legal filings that were made immediately available throughout the Internet and even on Ellison’s own website. No matter the outcome of the case, Ellison had ensured that these Offending Passages would never, ever disappear.

And, as I made clear in my first post, I feel like the settlement made things worse. The most striking aspect is that Groth gets to post a 500 word essay on Ellison’s website. I presume that earlier aspects of the settlement prohibit Groth from an ad hominem attack– but so long as he doesn’t call Ellison a jerk, or a big mean bastard, it seems that he’s free to say whatever the heck he wants. Ellison has agreed, legally, that he can’t respond, and that he can’t sue Groth or Fantagraphics about what is said in the rebuttal.

If the intention of the lawsuit was to make Groth shut up, how exactly is it winning to not only give Groth the last word, but also be legally obligated to provide him the forum in which to say it? The terms of the settlement– 30 days, 500 words, etc.– reflect what I called a Print Mentality; this was a crap term to describe the idea that such limits mean zero in a medium where nothing ever goes away. Groth’s rebuttal will appear on Ellison’s site & then be copied and distributed around the Internet. And because of the terms of the settlement, that’s it. It’s the last word on the matter. And it’s never going away.

In the bigger picture, I do not understand what Ellison was thinking. Was the Great War irritating? Sure. Were there really a lot of people paying attention? No. When I read the Offending Passages in Ellison’s filing, I groaned. Here was a 40-something-year old man getting his kicks out of badmouthing Ellison in a little book being published by the same 40-something-year old man, dedicated entirely to the history of this 40-something-year old man’s own company. Talk about putting the vanity in vanity publishing.

If we assume that the balance of power always tilts towards the party with the least interest, then in this situation, Ellison was the one with far greater power. His silence could only have ennobled him. But by filing this suit, he shifted the power to Groth– yes, I’m sure Fantagraphics took a big hit on this financially, but where else? Has Groth’s reputation suffered? Has Fantagraphics? Or does this only enhance the company’s carefully cultivated Rebel Image?

Meanwhile, Ellison, a man that frequently touts his credentials as a staunch defender of Free Speech and the First Amendment, has been cast in the role of the guy who couldn’t take the heat so he sued to have words removed from a book. I’m not saying that this is a fair or unfair assessment– but it is a general perception. He’s the guy who got the passages deleted from a book. And he’s an author.

Equally baffling is Ellison’s eager willingness to now repeat the same mistake by engaging with, well, me. First, on general principle, I don’t feel that I’ve been unfair to Ellison in this matter– if anything, I’ve only had a sympathy for seeing someone get caught (as I have in the past) in a serious misunderstanding of how information works in a world where anyone, and everyone, is constantly blogging and spouting off about nothing, and where nothing ever goes away.

Secondly, of the two of us, who has more to gain by a back-and-forth? The sheer amount of traffic this nonsense has driven to this website has literally dwarfed the traffic of all its previous days combined. All Ellison gets out of this is the ability to protest, really protest, that he’s happy with the terms of the settlement. He probably is, but when the lady doth protest too much on the Internet, it reads ironically.

Third, and finally, doesn’t this reinforce the perception of being unable to brook criticism? After all, Ellison put this lawsuit in the public sphere. Did he not expect people to comment and have differing opinions on it? Did he not prepare himself that some of these opinions might be unfavorable and not to his liking? Does he feel like his status as defender of free speech is enhanced by referring, in an obscene manner, to an innocuous piece of commentary by a self-professed gnat?

So at last we come to what I hope will be my final words on this matter, and I direct them entirely to Ellison himself: Honestly. Stop. I understand why you think what you’re doing is the right approach, but it doesn’t help.

UPDATE 9/7: More.

Yet again Heidi McDonald’s inimitable The Beat has another post about the Ellison -vs- Fantagraphics lawsuit & fued. As my few readers no doubt recall, between homoerotic paeans to the Egg King, Arafat Kazi, and being quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one of this blog’s highlights has been my inadvertent provocation of Harlan Ellison’s mighty wrauth. My comments had the big dog protesting, really protesting! that he was satisfied with the outcome of the mutually agreed upon settlement. And also not giving a fuck about me and my opinion. (And proving this by posting in multiple public forums to give the world a head’s up that AYO, homeboy’s sick of using TECHNOLOGY and he don’t give a fuck!)

Both of my posts on the topic were centered on the strangest aspect of the settlement– Ellison agreeing to host, for 30 days, a 500 word rebuttal by Gary Groth on Ellison’s webpage. Unlike much of the rest of the settlement, which was nebulous in terms of victors, this struck me as an actual loss. If the purpose of the lawsuit was to stop Fantagraphics from its potentially libelous speech on the subject of Harlan Ellison, in what way is this accomplished by letting Fantagraphics’ co-owner & figurehead put up a rebuttal on the very topic & hosted entirely on the website of, uh, Harlan Ellison?

I recommend that everyone go through the back links and look at the terms of the settlement– it’s clear that the rebuttal must, on one level, deal with the accusation that Groth molests kids, but otherwise the wording was remarkably open ended. From my Uninformed Opinionated Blogger reading of it, I think Groth had free reign to say whatever the hell he wanted, and that Ellison had agreed not only to publish it, but also not sue over its contents. This felt incredibly strange: because in the world of the internet, 500 words for 30 days means 500 words forever. Like I said. A loss.

Well, jeez, never in my wildest dreams did I think Harlan Ellison would not give a fuck enough about my opinion to take it to heart & not comply with the settlement. Which, according to the above post on the The Beat, is exactly what’s happened: while Ellison was battling the dread Blogosphere and its Uninformed Opinions & other Terrible Crimes, Groth sent in his rebuttal. Ellison has since refused to post it on his website. As this blog kept getting hits from people looking for the settlement, I’ve known something was up but I hadn’t been paying that much attention– some weeks you have better things to do. (Only some!)

It goes without saying that Ellison’s decision is a terrible one. All along I’ve found this spectacle entirely regrettable. Whatever one thinks of Ellison as a man, it’s indisputable that he’s written some truly wonderful work. I’ve enjoyed much of it– as it happens, I’m typing this in a room with many of my own personal copies of his books. In my ideal world where everyone acts their age & knows when they’ve won at life, this is the time when Ellison would be enjoying the fruits of his many labors. The man is a Grand Master! Instead, his time seems increasingly wasted on fighting Wikipedia and suing Fantagraphics over vanity publishing.

Outside of the tiny cadre of Peter David and other die hard fans, Ellison has only enhanced Fantagraphics’ reputation while tarring himself as an opponent of Free Speech and the 1st Amendment right to sass your betters. Since filing suit, Ellison’s actions have only reinforced this perception, right or wrong. Yelling every chance he gets before the settlement, picking fights with nothing bloggers (yours truly included!) after the settlement, and then not abiding by the terms of the settlement: these are not the actions of a man looking to maintain his reputation and standing.

I have no god damned clue what they are. But I know what they ain’t.

I consider Cerebus to be the single most illustratively innovative comic in the history of the form. If there is/was another series as consistently successful at expressing ideas with such elegance, I should very much love to know its name.

The credit here is not only Dave Sim’s. It’s impossible to separate his contributions from those of his collaborator Gerhard: there was a weird alchemy unlikely to be repeated or surpassed. Sim’s design sense and his character work played off the austere backgrounds and gave us Something Else in a truly glorious use of black and white and grey.

That said, I find Cerebus to be deeply, deeply problematic. I would be hard pressed to call it, for instance, “Good.” I certainly would never recommend it to anyone who had not been a long initiate in the arcane world of Comics– and even with an initiate, I could think of probably 50 titles, off hand, that I would recommend before Cerebus.

Since there has apparently been a Homosexualist-Feminist-Marxist-Trotskyist-Situationist-International Conspiracy to prevent Sim and Gerhard’s work from getting the Just Airing it Deserves, let me say, flatly: no. This has nothing to do with Sim’s Theories & Ideas & Truths. Seriously, if there’s one thing that’s been constant through my various stages of life, it is thus: I really don’t care. Anyone can say whatever crazy nonsense they want– and at this late date, I’m way beyond offense. And, again, as I articulated yesterday, I’m not sure that Sim believes any of it. His constant Self-Appointed Gadfly routine strikes me about as a genuine as one by Andrew Dice Clay or Rodney Dangerfield. Could it be that our Form has become a Void?

No, my concerns with Cerebus are best exemplified in its most basic element: there is something distancing about the character of Cerebus himself. Throughout this hugely ambitious work about power, religion, love and every other aspect of human existence, our guide is a cartoonish Earth-born pig that is completely off-model from every other significant personage. This is not to say that Animal Books, or any other type of comic, are inherently unprofound. But books like Goodbye Chunky Rice or Maus work because they are self-consistent. At some point, the little Conan-parody-that-could can no longer bear the weight of 20+ years of Serious Inquiry. If Cerebus himself were merely an avatar, an odd image representing a plausible character, would anyone notice after page 12? Yet, weirdly, Cerebus never loses his initial jokey persona– he always talks like The Incredible Hulk, referring to himself in the third person and flashing one-liners.

This idea is scalable to the series as a whole. For every moment of power or profundity in Cerebus, the reader is expected to suffer through 30 pages of Moonroach. Cerebus is attending to matters of state? Time for a Wolverine parody! Cerebus has just had his heart ripped out? Time to bring in caricatures of the Rolling Stones! And hey, here’s a lot of crap about Oscar Wilde! The entire world is ending? Oh, there’s Alan Moore in a funny hat!

Every major work of literature has its share of digressions and sidepaths– but when these things occur in, say, Ulysses, you know that you’re eventually, somehow coming back to Papa Joyce’s master plan. That’s the key: a plan. A plot. Cerebus wasn’t conceived as a 300 issue series– it ended up as one, and no matter protests to the contrary, it shows. We are in the presence of someone making it up as he goes along. Other people may have an opinion to the contrary, but Cerebus’s many elements never gel for me. They never add up to a whole.

Plus, for such a character driven narrative, Sim can write some truly awful dialogue.

–

OK, like yesterday, this post was supposed to be about what many people consider the High Point of the series, Jaka’s Story. Clearly that’s not happening. See you tomorrow, chums!

UPDATE, LATER: Incidentally,  this post by Noah Berlatsky, discusses the immutability of Cerebus (the character) and considers it (at least in part) an asset to Cerebus (the series). Which proves: different strokes for different folks.

Hey, many days of no updates; a combination of Hard Living and finishing projects has made my blog time non-existent. ANYWAY, I’d like to point everyone to this fine post on Will Kane’s blog, discussing the art of Guy Peellaert.

I’d never heard of Peellaert, which is fascinating, as the images from The Adventures of Jodell appear to be stolen directly from my mind by a malicious djinn. This really is what goes on in my head. Reading down further, one will see images of another Peellaert strip, Pravda. Something clicked and I realized that I had seen one of the images before– in the set design for 1970’s Performance.

Here’s Peellaert’s image:

And if you look to the center, here’s the same image in Turner’s basement, behind a gigantic head of Mick Jagger:

As I’ve mentioned, much of the set design for Performance was clearly the work of Martin Sharp of OZ fame and contains some of the more famous Sharp/OZ images, including a modified version of the Jagger cover from #15, and a heavily stylized version of Sharp’s famous Dylan poster. Seeing Peellaert’s comics, one retroactively detects his very obvious influence over Sharp.

Digging around the Internet, I discovered that Sharp + Co have begun selling artwork from the OZ days. While I believe that Sharp is the great unsung artist of the 1960s, and I can only applaud his decision to make this stuff available, it’s kind of depressing to see the wildly exorbitant prices of his prints. Who in god’s name wants a $299(AU) poster of the cover to OZ #16, Oz Proudly Presents the Magic Theatre?

You know, other than me.

Amongst the comics cognoscenti, such as it is, there’s been yet another iteration of endless debate as to What Are Good Comics and Can’t They All Get Along brought on by Heidi McDonald’s slightly incoherent but well meaning post on the topic of the Chris Ware edited 2007 Best American Comics anthology. I haven’t read the Anthology, but I’m familiar with every artist in the anthology. Even though lots of her arguments are ridiculous, I do understand where McDonald’s coming from. Given the choice between reading 90% of the artists present and sitting around doing nothing, I’d rather do nothing. This isn’t to say I’d go and run and pick up, say, World War Hulk. I’d rather twiddle my thumbs and curse God.

Since I tend to find both ART COMIX and Superhero comics utterly horrible, I’ve decided to run a multi-piece exploration of What Makes Comics Good to my totally idiosyncratic tastes. But that’ll start tomorrow. In the meantime, I wanted to post the John Romita, Sr. cover to the recent Daredevil #94– it escaped me at the time of its publication, but I figure putting it here on the blog means I can come and look at it whenever.

Awesome. And for once, thank god, Marvel has managed to pair Romita with a colorist that doesn’t make the thing look horrendous– I remember a few pages from Amazing Spider-Man about 3 years ago where the coloring totally destroyed the art work and made it seem as if Romita had lost the touch. My only complaint is how weirdly placed the logo is– but that’s comics design. Awful as usual.

Also, by the way: Dave Sim has admitted that I am one of the most important people alive.

Over the last few years there’s been so much upper middle class blather about comics as fine art that it’s overshadowed a far more significant development: the embrace of manga by the West’s 13 year old girls. In the not too distant future, a point will come where the vast majority of the mythic New Readers ages 13 through 25 shall have come to the form with no point of reference to traditions that have dominated in the Occident.

A few weeks ago, I attended a panel about the Future of Comics at the Los Angeles Public Library. Each of the guests proved to be thoughtful and concerned with comics but I came away with the impression that, with one exception, no one had any clue about the coming sea change. Let me put it this way: Daniel Clowes, an artist I admire very much, owes an enormous debt to the work of R. Crumb. Crumb, in turn, owes an enormous debt to the funny book animals of his youth, which in turn owe an enormous debt to early newspaper strips. Whomever is penciling New Avengers owes an enormous debt to those horrible guys at Image, who owe an enormous debt to Neal Addams and John Byrne, who both owe an enormous debt to Steve Ditko and especially Jack Kirby, who both owe an enormous debt to the newspaper strips of the 1930s.

Both chains of influence are totally arbitrary and made up on the spot to illustrate a point: no matter how far modern Western comics go in their varying directions, all strains are based on modalities of operation that have evolved over decades. The distance between an artist like Clowes from a book like New Avengers is far, far less than the distance of either from Naruto. If the New York Times has suddenly discovered that Whizz! Bang! Comics Aren’t For Kids! this revelation only came after they read, and understood, the basic language of the quote-pornographic-unquote Eightball #22. The idea of “not just for kids!” contains an implicit truth: each writer of the latest iteration of this kind of article must have, necessarily, read comics as a child. The reason why they now realize that Eightball is for adults is because they have a comparison with when they learned comics grammar in their youth.

If that’s confusing, let’s make it simple: go to Borders and choose a random manga title. Not good manga that’s been recommended by tastemakers, but just some crappy title about some crappy girl who loves some crappy guy who loves another crappy guy, none of whom will ever in a million years kiss, let alone have sex. Make sure everyone is in some kind of outfit you only vaguely recognize as clothing.

OK. Try and read that thing.

Come back when you’ve failed.

Right now all across America there are hundreds of thousands of early teenagers for whom that very book is no problem. To whom that book is Amazing Spider-Man #300. They speakee a different language than you, Kemo Sabe. Now, run that scenario in reverse, with those kids trying to read not only Ghost Rider #13 (guest starring World War Hulk!) but also Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings.

Two questions to ask are these: what happens when you have an entire generation of kids who’ve learned a different language? What happens when they grow up?

I’m really not sure. There’s an obvious counterargument, which is that kids seem to have no problem picking up accessible comics and understanding them– one of the few real success stories of the last years has been Jeff Smith’s Bone selling something like two and a half million copies in its Scholastic trade paperbacks. But I wonder if Bone’s success is an indicator of anything other than the eternal appeal of a very specific style. If Disney had a clue, they could haul out the early Gottfredson Mickey Mouse strips and the Barks Duck stories and have the same trade success. Cou