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. Could Marvel? Would the Byrne/Claremont X-Men work with kids? Would any of the Spider-Man runs of John Romita, Jr.? (No offense to Romita. I’m a fan.) Would any of the “For Kids” comics being published by DC?

–

So. This has served as the preface to the multi-part examination I’ll be doing. The examination itself will not necessarily deal with this particular topic, but I suspect it will loom like a spectre over Europe. Influencing, dig?

Next post: I’ll define the Idiosyncratic Ideal of Comics using Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram, probably the best series I’ve read in the last four years.

Is there such a thing as an Ideal Comic, and would anyone be foolish enough to try defining it?

Sure, why not?

Here’s a working definition: “A narrative which functions most perfectly
within graphic illustration.”

Clunky, but it hits the main points: it’s gotta be at least slightly narrative (otherwise you’re doing numbers in a series) and it’s gotta be something that works best within what people awkwardly call “the medium.” Graphic illustration sounds like porno circa 1964, but is a broad catch-all that avoids a favoring of, say, ink washes over photo collage. You’ll note that nothing is said about the limiting term “Sequential Art.” Narrative ain’t sequence, ladies.

This ad hoc definition ends the never ending battle of ART COMIX versus SUPERHEROS by indirectly pointing out, that, hey, both sides suck. We gather a strange insight from Jack T. Chick who, upon seeing Mao-era Chinese propaganda comics, realized that something about the essential cheapness and their very low threshold of entry (a pen and very modest talent), allows a didactic directness and immediacy unavailable in other artistic forms. In essence, Chick sussed out an unfortunate truth: if you’ve got something to say, but no way of saying it, you can always make a comic. In rough terms, this is why present day superhero comics are usually movies made by Hollywood failures or people with no hope of directing, and contemporary art comics are often boring roman-a-clef novels or memoirs authored by people who can’t write.

Rather than start off trashing people’s work, I’d like to try the novel approach of praising a few books that highlight the Ideal. First up is the recent Phonogram, by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie. This is the best series I have read in four years. How awesome is it? This awesome: I pirated this god damned thing, and having finished reading it, immediately went to Amazon and bought the trade.

Phonogram is about a bunch of British wanker magicians for whom music is their magic. The series rambles on about Britpop and is, to a certain frame of mind, readable as the final and inevitable apotheosis of record store employees and music journalists as Gods of Their Own Making. Is there a book which sounds more horrible? Britpop! Again: Britpop! Written and drawn by English people who like it! So. As one may deduce, this is a title with a lot going against it; and yet, it works. It really, really works.

This is not to say that there are not problems. The writing of the first issue, featuring a truly sad HEY! IT’S LESBIANS! reveal, is far weaker than the next five, and while I think McKelvie’s art is great, it must be said that the dude has a real problem drawing faces that I can differentiate. Thankfully, Phonogram’s characters are all music hipsters, so they can be identified by hair styles and piercings. Theoretically, one could argue that this is an hilarious comment on the Follower Paradigm of popular music fronts, or that the characters were all born in the Forest of Dean, but I’m pretty sure neither is the case.

Also, yeah, it’s a six issue series about, you know, Britpop.

Minor complaints aside, Phonogram is the Ideal Comic. There’s no place but comics where a creative team could get away with this story and not be laughed out of the building, let alone be able to compellingly build an extremely dense symbolism on top of, well, Britpop. Britpop. Blur! Oasis! Manic Street Preachers! And lesser bands that you’ve never heard of! (We exclude Pulp from this sordid mess.) Used for necromancy and geomancy and every other -mancy striking the author’s fancy. Where else but comics could this work?

By sticking to a black-white-and-grey color scheme, McKelvie has achieved something close to a perfect method of having the graphics strengthen, inform and drive the narrative without overwhelming it. The use of half-tone is wonderful; it evokes the distant world of zines and mainstream publishing’s last gasp before it gave over to the Internet and Adobe. It unostentatiously reminds us that coming at 94-96, Britpop was the last hurrah before music fandom moved to the web, a place where it’s languished and withered on shit blogs and, worse yet, Pitchfork.

Gillen has chosen the only medium that could support the story’s essential goal– to examine what seemed, at the time, like a modern mythology being made from nothing. It’s too sparse for a novel, too dense for a film, and too weird for either. Pop music always has been about image and wish fulfillment; what better place to examine that kind of fantasy than comics?

That, basically, is Ideal.

And here’s one really great page:

There’s probably a very dense and boring book published by Fantagraphics tracing the development of Cinematographic Technique in comics– beginning surely with E.C. and the endlessly flogged “Master Race” of Krigstein– but I think it’s fair to say that the major recent milestones were the massive success of the first X-Men and Matrix films.

Together, these films represent the moment when the Great Beast of Hollywood realized that CGI had made flying dudes credible & when the Great Beast and the world’s various mainstream comics artists, writers, and publishers glommed on to a new truth: that action oriented comics could be used as idea incubators for massive media rollouts. Storyboarding itself is nothing new, but with the technology to render on film anything that can be drawn, comics present the novelty of having a completed product which has been, in theory, market tested.

This gets us to 30 Days of Night, the comic most recently adapted for the big screen. I haven’t seen the film, but a few guinea pigs have assured me that it’s terrible. One might note that the original comic series is also trash & is a work that embarrasses its readers by forcing them to think that somewhere, somehow Grown Adults put endless hours into its production– yes, one could, but one will not. For if nothing else, a work should be embraced on its own terms, and judged as to whether or not succeeds in its own purpose.

Therefore, discussing 30 Days of Night as though it were a comic is unfair. Better to recognize the thing for what it is: a visual outline, a treatment conceived for an eventual screenplay, developed entirely around a relatively high-level concept (Vampires in Alaska with No Sun and All Fun) and employing a condensed visual staccato in support of the concept. To expect character development, plot intrigue, coherent storytelling or even an ounce of depth is a great folly– the thing is what it is and nothing more.

Read as a pitch intended for the nancy boy personal assistants of Studio Executives here in the fiery city of Los Angeles, 30 Days of Night makes a perfect semiotic sense. Each panel reinforces either certain prevailing cultural stereotypes– the basic building blocks of genre filmmaking– or reminds the reader of nighttime or vampires, its two major motifs.

In terms of greater trends, 30 Days of Night is fascinating– as it was published in 2002, relatively early in the comic adaptation boom, I wonder if this is not the first book published entirely with the eventual film adaptation in mind. It’s a fascinating harbinger of the dark years ahead. 30 Days also speaks to an often abused aspect of comics– the incredible elasticity of the medium. Like cinema, comics can be anything and incorporate everything.

I’m reminded of late 60s Godard where 1/3 to 1/2 of any given film was guaranteed to be youthful Parisians reading Mao. Boring as it was, and perhaps not the intent of their creator, these films demonstrated that you can shove anything in a film and it’ll at least function. 30 Days of Night reminds us of the same thing in comics. You could shuffle the pages across its three individual issues and still have a functioning work. As much a quality of the artwork as of the writing, the books must be read as little more than extended riffs on the same three ideas: VAMPIRES. NIGHT. DEATH.

Given its intended function, 30 Days works perfectly. Yet if we went back and judged the series on its merits as a comic– keeping in mind our previously Idiosyncratic Ideal– we find that 30 Days of Night is entirely a failure, an unnecessary story ineptly told, existing without any purpose or reason. Is there a single person alive who needs 3 issues of one-dimensional vampires terrorizing one-dimensional humans? Did anyone enjoy the, ahem, Spartan attempts at a human interest love story? Was the art so compelling in its astounding approach to its rarefied topic that it changed forever how we, as readers, would think about vampires with no sun and all fun?

If there’s any love for comics in your heart, you could almost develop a Townie attitude and want to defend your home from the fancy fellas who’ve come in and mucked up your village green with their rotten litter.

As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum, I have a long and abiding love of the autobiographical work of Mr. Eddie Campbell– a man perhaps forever followed by “the artist best known, along with writer Alan Moore, for creating From Hell.” I’ve nothing but admiration for From Hell, but by virtue of its subject and co-creator, the murder book inevitably overshadows Campbell’s achievements with his autobiographical works, which are massive.

Of the four so-called Alec books, my dead on favorite is How To Be An Artist. It’s not simply my favorite work by Campbell, but my favorite work in comics, period. As this is a wildly idiosyncratic choice in many ways symbolic of the Ideal, I decided that it was time to once more crack the old bastard open.

Told across 14 chapters, How To Be An Artist is expansive and messy– in its 128 pages, it’s partly a history of Campbell-as-Alec’s life and early professional career, partly an examination of Art with the capital A, partly an exploration of what it means to be an artist, and partly a history of comics in the 80s and the Rise and Fall of the First Wave of the Graphic Novel. Every page bursts with ideas, visual and verbal.

I chose this page because it demonstrates several of Campbell’s techniques. Most apparent is the 9-panel grid giving the illusion of Sequential Narrative. Certainly, Artist has sequential moments, but it’s better understood as a series of one-off panels on an overarching theme. Occasionally, as in the first tier, these panels will be narratively interrelated, but often as not they’ll be meditations on a central idea occupying either the book, the chapter, or perhaps just the page.

Tying the panels together is the hand-lettered narrative. Several things here are remarkable. It’s in the second person, which is difficult enough, but it’s also present tense. This device is one of the hardest things for a writer in any field, let alone on pages dominated by drawings. Campbell never loses the surety of his voice.

Interestingly, there are some pages where Campbell drifts near a Stan Lee level of word count per page, but because there’s no attempt to have a cohesion amongst the individual drawings, a really wordy chunk can be put with something that’s almost a sketch. The key is flexibility, where the final impact is a balance measured against itself and its page. We also see several examples of Campbell’s sampling & collage. Being a history of comics and art, Campbell gleefully throws in work from his various friends and forbearers. Again, what impresses is the flexibility of his page and the ability of the so-called medium of comics to incorporate anything.

For the record, this is the only time in the history of comics that an artist living in Thatcher’s Britain is happy. Just saying.

Fuck, this page is awesome. Beginning with a pleasant enough drawing of the Artist intoxicated on the apparent success of the ’80s graphic novel boom, Campbell quickly moves to the bastard sons of achievement: gossip and jealousy. In this case, the rumor is that beardo Alan Moore has bought his mother a house with his big 1980s American dollars– Campbell then establishes that, in truth, Moore bought his mother a greenhouse. For her plants. The greenhouse is then employed as a literary and visual metaphor for a very universal condition of envying another person’s success.

Tier three is where the whole thing becomes a masterpiece. The previous set of ideas are enough for another person’s entire book, but Campbell then gets all Socratic and riffs in the final three panels on an idea that’s not only funny, but also deadly true. I distinctly remember reading this page in 2003 and feeling like I was encounter a glimpse of a great insight: other people’s successes have nothing to do with your own, nor your failures.

So much of our culture, especially amongst folks inclined towards the arts, involves hating other people for their success. But, really, why? What’s the point? This isn’t to say that one can’t call The Dark Knight Returns a shit book, or that one shouldn’t wonder if Frank Miller is not one of our leading intellectual lights, but there’s a huge difference between disliking an artist, or an artist’s work, and resenting them for their success.

Now, with all that Ayn Randian blather out and done, draw your attention back to that third tier: it’s nothing but a bunch of very loose sketches, almost stick figures, beneath about 100 words. Dudes like Joe Quesada will go on and on about how comics can do things that no other form can– like show a jackass in tights lifting a car while eating prunes– and that I won’t deny, but these three panels demonstrate exactly what separates comics from every other form of expression.

Basically, you can’t do that anywhere but here.

With a few exceptions, Superhero Comics worked best, and made the most sense, in the Silver Age. Although the genre was born decades earlier, it was a product of the Pulp Era of magazine publishing, and the early work, while often having interesting artists, was crippled by preexisting genre conventions. (Name a single Golden Age character not drawn by C.C. Beck or Jack Cole that’s immediately memorable for the storytelling and not later uses of the character. The Spirit doesn’t count.)

Following WWII, the superhero was dead. Other genres flourished, blah blah, and finally, the superhero was resurrected around 1956. In the interim, these other genres (specifically romance and horror comics, in my estimation) had innovated enough to get comics unmoored from literary pulp convention. When the superheroics genre returned, it functioned on a new platform supported by these previous developments. (Look at Fantastic Four #1’s cover. That thing is a monster comic. But it isn’t.)

Featuring condensed stories with truly dynamic artwork, no profundity was expected of it, and thus none was offered. At one point, Stan Lee started calling his books “Marvel Pop Art Productions.” This is the perfect way to conceive of the era: they are art, functioning on an iconic level superior to their own meagre offerings but still basically just pop. Disposable culture, weird trash and somehow also timeless.

I realized yesterday that the Classic Albums of 1967 are forty years old. Amazing Spider-Man #50, the best “I QUIT BEING A HERO!” Spider-Man story, was published in 1967. Currently Marvel are doing their latest crap iteration on the idea; it’s a trope they drag out about once every year or so. Imagine if one out of every twelve CDs released was a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club tribute album. Same thing.

The problem with superhero comics is that no one figured out what to do next. The genre died decades ago, spawning an industry of necrophiliac fans and creators. There’s a reason why there aren’t any new readers: no one under twenty-five has any desire for these rotting bodies. The path from 1969 is a dark one lit only by the occasional appearance of creative talents slumming it amongst the hoi polloi. I’m not dealing with it. Needless to say that, in 2007, superhero comics are broken so profoundly that there’s no way back. The 70s offered a handful of ideas, which failed, and the 80s did as well. Those too failed, except for one peculiarity: the introduction of Maturity and Grimness.

And with this in mind, kids, I recommend you return for the next installment in which we tackle J. Michael Straczynski’s recent Thor #3, possibly the most flagrant example of everything wrong with mainstream comics. Not only is it a crap unnecessary story by tired creators, it’s profoundly, profoundly offensive and just possibly racist, too!

CYA THEN.

When I decided to Examine a bad superhero comic, I knew that I had to pick a title written by J. Michael Straczynski. The only superhero comic I read with regularity– out of a perverse nostalgia & the fact that my mom reups a subscription every Christmas– is The Amazing Spider-Man. Having now read six years of J. Michael Straczynski’s run, I knew that this was one man who would not fail me.

As of late, Straczynski has been scripting the new Thor. Issues #1 and #2 are standard material– 44 pages of a bloated origin story that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee would have done in 8 panels. But this is nothing unusual– it’s the state of the genre in 2007. Expanded storytelling with pointless devices like eyebrow arching “humor” and “character development” amidst splash panels, impossible anatomy and nonsense narration.

Thor #3 is when the ol’ Straczynski magic appears. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for this issue, possibly the second most offensive comic book that I have ever read.

Thor, having Willed himself to Power and recreated his city of Asgard, is looking for the other Nordic Gods. He flies to post-Katrina New Orleans. Here, he laments that he was too dead to save the city from Katrina and then wonders why the other Marvel heroes did nothing. He then encounters some residents of New Orleans.

Did no one in editorial think about the tastelessness of a giant ARYAN SUPERMAN going to a disaster area where African-Americans in the Lower Ninth Ward were traumatized to a degree far higher than any other segment of the population? And then have this ARYAN SUPERMAN use his visit as a platform to wonder why super heroes aren’t super? Also, check out that crowd scene on the porch– a groundbreaking twist on the DC/Marvel white guilt complex that usually manifests itself whenever Daredevil beats on street thugs and the gang is de facto multiracial.

After Thor’s sobfest, Iron Man shows up and they fight. They damage the city. Thor goes back to the dude who was yelling at him. The dude turns out to be a Nordic God. Thor takes him home.

Just so everyone’s clear, let me break that down: an Aryan Superman visits a ruined city with a large African-American population that apparently only has three black people in the whole place. He gets sad. Then he and his old buddy wreck the place just a little more. Then he takes an angry white man back to his GIANT, UNINHABITED FLOATING PARADISE.

But there I go again, trying to shoehorn logic onto a story that is nonsensical and worse yet, cheapening and offensive. Not only is the disaster of Katrina trivialized, but by the story’s constant appeals to a literal Deus Ex Machina, this comic obscures the basic truth of Katrina and gets the underlying story wrong. The hurricane itself was not the major problem. The problem was that the storm waters breached subpar levees, sending flood waters into the city.

The people of New Orleans didn’t need a quasi-God to fight the rains. They needed their government to do its job.

I’m not from New Orleans, and I’m not African-American. I wouldn’t dare to presuppose that I know what it means to have been black and been in Katrina. But I was on Manhattan for 9/11 and I saw WTC #7 collapse 500 yards in front of me, and I can assure you that at no point did I think to myself, “Jesus Christ, what this city really needs right now is Doctor Doom to be here crying.”

Mainstream comics have given birth to an oddity– creators embarrassed by the medium in which they work. You can smell it coming off the pages– all these hackneyed attempts at relevance, at realism, at engaging with the real world, at metaphor for greater social ills, and as commentary on the perfidy of the sitting government are symptomatic of individuals consumed with shame. Shame, I suppose, that they have to write about dudes in capes fighting other dudes in capes. Yet for all their apparent superiority, they remain funnybook writers with no new ideas, apparently no clue as how to write plausible characters, and ultimately nothing to say.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love genre (any genre) work more than I care to admit– there’s something deeply satisfying about a writer who isn’t playing a daft superiority game with his material and is willing to work within its conventions. This is why, for instance, the first X-Men movie was great, or why Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and All-Star Superman have been so satisfying. Morrison likes what he’s doing and it reflects in his work. Not everyone can be a Morrison, obviously, and superheroes are basically exhausted, but at least I understand someone who grew up reading Spider-Man and now wants to write the character, even if they’re only pushing out rehashed fanfic.

It’s hard to imagine Walt Simonson sending Thor to New Orleans, or Spider-Man and a weepy Doctor Doom to Ground Zero. These are the tactics employed only by a writer desperately trying to convince both the readership and himself that there is Meaning in the Work. This is a mind sussing out the deeper resonances of a one dimensional commercial archetype warped beyond its original context. A nostalgia act, a U2 cover band with the faint hope that, in the end, all those nights of “Mysterious Ways” and “Veritgo” will somehow mean something. Even big hairy Alan Moore fell victim with his Killing Joke, but at least he recognized it:

“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.”

Listen, I don’t blame people who feel above this crap: it is embarrassing. But there’s a solution which doesn’t involve trivializing multiple American atrocities.

It’s called getting a job.

Originally, this post had about 1000 words of an extremely angry denunciation of the J. Michael Straczynski authored Thor #4, in which Thor goes to Darfur and solves the Crisis by smashing his hammer in the earth and creating a big hole between the warring factions. But then I saw this press release from Marvel, and I realized, oh god, they’re bragging.

“In addition to giving Thor additional depth, Straczynski hopes to expand the tapestry of the Marvel Universe by infusing locations that exist and matter in today’s headlines.

‘The strength of the Marvel Universe always has been [that] it operates in the real world,’ contends the writer. ‘That real world is not confined to the United States, it reaches out and penetrates everywhere.’

Sending Thor into situations like these and involving him group such as Doctors Without Borders continues Straczynski’s mission statement to make THOR a book that can be enjoyed by fans of the character’s classic adventures, but also something more.”

Four very simple points.

#1. Stop.

#2. Thor doesn’t go to Darfur– he goes to “Darhan.” But last issue Thor went to a clearly identified New Orleans. Comics have a long history of disguising places under different names– but I believe that this is to avoid difficulties, legal or otherwise. Is there any reason for the switch besides not wanting to cheese off the Sudanese, a potential future, or perhaps an existing (via film), market for the company’s products? Could this be, pray tell, an example of Thor entering the real world of global corporations?

#3. This issue ends with Thor transforming 3 of the Doctors Without Borders into his chums and bringing them back to Asgard. If you’re writing a comic intended to call attention to a catastrophe and the noble beings struggling within it, isn’t it a little weird that a rollicking tale of an Aryan superman wrestling with African problems then ends with that same superman spiriting away the  Noble White Doctors? Counting Thor’s alter ego, “Darhan” is four doctors shorter by page 20 than it was by page 4.

#4. Stop. Really. The real world doesn’t have dudes in capes. You write genre fiction. You’re totally not Alan Moore. You’re not Grant Morrison.

Sir, you are not even Warren Ellis.

Stop.

Update, Later: Oops. A commenter rightly points out that Thor, in fact, takes away the 3 best guards. Not doctors. My bad, and apologies. Either way, Thor’s visit remains a net loss for Doctors Without Borders. If anything, Thor’s continuing Holiday in Other People’s Misery now seems even worse. At least my erroneous read gave a perverse strength in numbers, with me thinking that there were other doctors willing to abandon the noble mission for high times with swords and sorcery.

But let’s not split hairs: I find it hard to believe that anyone could read this book and find the whole story line to be anything other than a nebulously defined narrative pretext for Thor to gather more guns.  You know, the Real Work.