End It All

2011: the best.



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NEW COMICS

1 and 2. Color Engineering and Garden, by Yuichi Yokoyama. Picturebox/Nanzuka Underground.



I've harbored the opinion that Yuichi Yokoyama was making the best comics of anyone working for years, but with the dizzying one-two punch of these books, he stated it in blazing day-glo letters for all to see. Garden was "lit comics" introduced to hardline experimental literature, a near-endless journey through human history and technology that ends in apocalypse and a hint of rebirth. That hint is ravishingly elaborated upon in Color Engineering, which may prove to be the best and final word in art-comix; a completely overpowering visual tour de force that strips the mechanism of comics storytelling back to its most basic elements before reconsidering them and giving them a polish for this new century. Yokoyama's output in 2011 is best described as a two-part textbook, a map of where it's possible to go -- not just next year or next decade, but next epoch. Like all the truly great stuff, it's better seen than described. I wrote about these guys here, and I interviewed Yokoyama here.

3. AFFECTED, by Matt Seneca. Self-published online.



Whatever, I liked my comic better than all the other ones this year. If I didn't I wouldn't make it! It's mostly because AFFECTED is (obviously) the exact type of content I want to see getting put out there, but there are also things I know I'm doing (because I'm the one doing them) that I wish I saw a little more of on the new racks. A cursory reading of the past decade's aesthetically satisfying American comics gives little to no indication that we live in a nation at war, or that we're experiencing a very real shift in the way we live our lives, or that this thing the internet exists. I also think one of the most valuable things happening in comics right now is cartoonists' folding of the pure-visual punch of last decade's art-comix into more considered literary structures, and the way young cartoonists are beginning to interact more directly with the medium's history on the page -- as critics and commentators rather than just followers. It's up to you to decide whether I'm succeeding or failing, but I'm having more fun doing my best to achieve these things than I am reading any comics. (Besides Yokoyama.) I got interviewed about AFFECTED here and here and here.

4. Obsolete, by Mikkel Sommer. Nobrow.



If you're looking for a perfect comic, look no further. Danish artist Mikkel Sommer's slow-burn crime thriller Obsolete is a stone masterpiece from start to finish, not a panel wasted, not a ropy, scratched line out of place. Beautifully printed, told mostly without words, brutally short and to the point, shocking and touching in the same gasped breath, it's almost frightening in its economy. Single gestures tell of years' experience, scribbled landscapes cough up their fractious histories, and characters flower into vivid life with a glance or a plea. Though Sommer's Frank Quitely-meets-Gipi art and ice-cold sense of pacing and plot are astounding, what's most impressive about Obsolete is its tone, which throws the nervy futurism of Scandinavian crime literature over a heartbreaking Mideast War fallout narrative. It's a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky to see something this accomplished -- we're talking Eisner-on-Spirit, Ditko-on-Question levels of bluntly stated, transcendent genre comics -- from such a complete unknown. After such a formidable display, Sommer deserves our full attention. To my great shame, I didn't review this one yet, but rest assured I will soon. In the meantime you should definitely buy the thing, and then you should read Nina Stone's note-perfect take on it here.

5. 2001, by Blaise Larmee. Self-published online.



In a year of formalist comics, Blaise Larmee's gorgeous, ephemeral 2001 managed to be both the prettiest and the most relevant. It's a stunning thing to look at, filling every computer screen it's spread onto with a minimal, hauntingly evocative black and white world that moves with the verve and decisiveness of youth. Larmee's drawing has developed to a point where it can stand comparison with just about anyone else making comics at the moment, and each panel of 2001 is a treasure, more than enough to keep frozen on the screen and simply stare at. But what makes the comic so exciting is how relentlessly it pushes the reader forward, whisking the eye down and down until the experience of reading it comes just about as close to animation as still images can get. Larmee has found a new acme for webcomics, something that truly can't be replicated on the printed page, and the 2001 site is its home environment, a place not a little bewildering in its beauty, one it seems impossible to get tired of visiting. I wrote about 2001 here and I interviewed Blaise here.

6. Kramers Ergot 8, edited by Sammy Harkham. Picturebox.



The joyous explosions of color and noise and brilliant ideas that were Kramers 4 through 7 are probably the best printed summations of the bull market that comics experienced last decade, comics conceptualized as a (if not the) vital, modern art form with all the potential in the world. It was a creative flowering on a level that's only been seen in comics a few times before. But every wave crashes to the shore eventually, and this new, quieter, more focused Kramers brings the comedown with a laser-beam focus. Rigid, complex story structures bracket in the visionary drawings, the small size of the book pens everything in a little tighter, and the ideas on every page seem to broil at finger-burning heat rather than bursting outward. It's angry comics for apocalyptic times, but beneath the book's dour pessimism (itself a highly engaging virtue) is a picture of a new world for comics, one that has perhaps reined in the excesses of the utopian vision Kramers previously put forth, but one more realistic and workable for that. And all conceptualizing aside, it's got knockout stories from an all-star list of the best cartoonists going, including career highs from CF, Dash Shaw, and Johnny Ryan. I wrote a little bit about it here.

7. Daredevil, by Paolo Rivera, Marcos Martin, and Mark Waid. Marvel "Fuck Marvel Comics" Comics.



Given the current state of mainstream comics, it looks pretty damn impressive when something that doesn't allow itself to be aesthetically compromised by its milieu in any way comes along. Daredevil is just that, a superhero book that wants to be a superhero book and does so beautifully. It's a shame that the most noticeable aspect of this series is its lack of crossover marketing hype, inappropriate attempts at "maturity", knee-slapping editorial gaffes, et cetera, but c'est la guerre: that leaves all the more room to marvel at how well Mark Waid can layer vicious fighting and deft character acting and seamless incremental plotting into page after page of beautiful (and beautifully produced) drawing by Rivera and Martin. It's craftsmanship, not art, to be sure, but this is work for hire that its creators deserve to be very proud of, perfectly pitched as the kind of high-octane escapism the marketing department needs it to be, but also a virtuoso-level workout for the fundamentals of action comics. They don't all have to change the world or even the medium, but it would be quite something if they could all be this beautiful and fun to read.

Honorable mention. Love & Rockets New Stories #4, by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez AND Ganges #4, by Kevin Huizenga. Fantagraphics (both).

Both of these comics are completely amazing on every level, and are probably better than many of the ones on the list. But they're also both ongoing series that have spanned many years of greatness at this point, rather than anything that belongs to 2011 exclusively. They're not listed, but they're on the list. Read them.

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TRENDS

1. Newspaper/broadsheet-format comics.
This one's been boiling up to steam for a good few years now, but it really bloomed this year. What started with Sunday Press Books' re-presentation of classic newspaper strips in their cartographic original size has turned into a full-blown revival of the original delivery method for comics, the massive single newspaper page. It seems like everyone who's anyone in non-mainstream comics (and a few people from across that border too) had something out on a broadsheet this year, and the results are certainly looking like a reconsideration of what's possible in comics. The surface level thrill of simply seeing more from our favorite cartoonists on every page is just as material a part of why broadsheets are great as anything else, but the storytelling possibilities that the extra space is opening up for artists who always seem to be pushing against something in their more traditionally formatted work has the potential to permanently change what we expect from comics. This year Matthew Thurber and Benjamin Marra packed graphic novels of content into a few pages, Blaise Larmee redefined "comics interview", Jonny Negron brought the classic "cutaway view" shot to a Hieronymous Bosch level of head-spinning perversity, and um, Michael DeForge drew the most baller fucking Fantastic Four comic ever. (That matters as much as all the rest of it, folks.)

Of course, the cloud behind the dazzling silver lining is that a lot, maybe even the majority, of cartoonists doing this stuff are still trying to get paid for it. But if that does end up happening, it might very well bring lasting positive change to the economics of comics also. A single page from a cartoonist at the top of their game is as much a desirable piece as a canvas by a master painter, and by encouraging artists to focus on just that -- the page, and not the issue or the book -- broadsheets are reminding us how important every little piece of this art form really is.

2. The risograph.
The what? Get hip fast, son: the risograph is changing the look of comics' cutting edge in a hurry. It's an absurdly simple transition for minicomics and zines: what if, instead of printing your scummy piece of shit in black and white on a normal xerox machine, there was a contraption that allowed you to put some color to those lines? The products, as most impressively exemplified in books printed on the machine by Ryans Sands and Cecil-Smith, come close to revolutionary. Suddenly the cheaply printed, hand-folded, late-night-stapled zines in the corner of the comic shop are the prettiest, most visually arresting things in the building. Riso printed comics are both boldly futuristic in their sense of difference from anything that's come before and strangely nostalgic in the way they put the laborious, mechanically-produced aspect of comics on display in an era of seamless digital gloss.

It's quite something to see minicomics finally put on the equal visual footing with the mainstream that they've always deserved; but even more important are the possibilities risograph printing is allowing the artists who've gotten in on it thus far to explore. The waves of color and printing-machine grit the process bathes the comics it touches in are a veritable tone factory, lending the work an intense tactility, one only enhanced when the ink colors up your sweaty fingertips. Small wonder, then, that the most visible of the riso printed books, Thickness, is also probably the medium's best-ever erotic anthology. New technology, put to new use. A great thing is happening, and it looks as though next year will only bring more of it.

3. Sex comics.
Not exactly new and certainly not universally welcomed, but vital and necessary nonetheless. What kind of case for relevance can a medium present without some truly great erotic art, after all? While it's responsible for a lot of Europe's most lyrical and lovely works in comics, and a lot of manga's wildest excursions into the unknown, pornography has always been a touchy place to go in American comics culture. From under-the-counter sales of bootlegged "Tijuana Bibles" in the earliest days of the pamphlet format to obscenity raids on the saucier undergrounds to the crippling misstep made by the modern era's dominant publisher of intelligent comics, Fantagraphics, in their ghettoizing of porn as a potential-lacking moneymaker, it's been a hard road to legitimacy for sexualized sequential art here in the States. However, that seems to be changing. The aforementioned Thickness anthology is leading the charge, but 2011 also saw a sexy anthology from perennial alt-comics cool kids Closed Captioned Comics, mass market highbrow porn books from crossover superstar Dave McKean and bonafide Great Cartoonist Chester Brown (even if they both totally sucked), harsh-noise erotic interludes in the new Kramers, a killer art-porn webcomic from yers truly, and most importantly, a general acceptance of these things from both critics and fans. It seems as though comics isn't afraid of having a sex life anymore.

What's really exciting, ahem, about this new crop of porn comics is the sense of a wild new frontier they provide. American comics has spent a solid eight decades coming up with eye-popping new ways to show people fighting a few different times a month, and now the other way people have vigorous physical interactions is finally opening up. The formal possibilities are just about endless: Jonny Negron's leapt out early as the man to watch, but fascinating new voices are cropping up all the time, and established ones are rushing to join the chorus. That's not to mention the enticing possibility of translated foreign sex comics coming along to teach everyone a lesson or three, which seems too good an opportunity for enterprising publishers to leave on the table much longer...

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CRITICISM

Three big ones this year. Tucker Stone's recent interview with Tom Spurgeon is a masterpiece on both sides of the mic (or um, modem), a gentle, often hilarious planing open of the diseased guts of the comics industry -- both mainstream and alternative -- that leaves the question of what to do about the mess we're in where it should be, in the hands of you the passionately concerned. Read it here. Adam McIlwee's postmodern detective story about his attempts to unravel Blaise Larmee's online persona is the best profile piece a cartoonist has received in years, and seems almost like a step forward into a new kind of writing about human identity, one that takes the complications of the internet age into full consideration. Read it here. Finally, the pseudonymous White Shasta's confession to impersonating CF on twitter is full of the same art-and-identity concerns: lyrical, personal, abstract. But it also brings the missing element of comics criticism -- the pictures -- to fully developed life, making it more engaging and affecting a read than innumerable typed works on the medium. Read it here.

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JUNK I WROTE THAT I DIDN'T HATE

- On Jack Kirby, Gary Panter, and what we see when we look in the mirror

- My two part kiss-off to caring about Grant Morrison comics

- A survey of the unexplored territory provided by webcomics

- Here's where I singlehandedly beat Drawn & Quarterly out of 2000 sales of that fucking stupid Chester Brown book

- Stealin' Geoff Johns's soul, take it bitch

- Eulogy to Gene Colan, who was murdered by Marvel Comics

- That time I smoked that Punisher comic

- "Idiots", a short story I wrote about my inability to make it work with a girl was dating, disguised as my hugely popular DC Relaunch article

- White Shasta unmasked

- GARY PANTER INTERVIEW

- How we look at comics, I love this one

- Aaannnd, Jeph Loeb makes a lot of comics about his dead son.

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COMICS I DREW

Here and here.

Happy New Years. Stick around for more in 2012 if you've a mind.

"Iceland"

I made a new comic about finding out the place my girl and I used to go ice skating when I was a kid got closed down. It's pretty great. You can read it here. Below is the essay I wrote to go with it.



I guess it's hardly anything new to be making nostalgic comics about old buildings (hello Eisner, Seth, Ware, like a billion other dudes), but that's what makes it kind of nice. Not quite the same as covering a song, more like writing a new one around a familiar old chord change or something. It's fun to create subject matter that's nothing new in order to focus on finding a way to make it your own. And also, I mean... this one is all real, and it does hit pretty hard to come home for the first time in years and see everything torn down or shuttered. Just a while ago Berkeley had a big fire that took out the place I used to play pool as a teenager too. I guess this kind of thing has always been happening, but it seems to really have been in the air for the past few years.

Chris Ware was obviously a big influence on this comic: I drew it here in the Bay Area, where unlike LA there's actually a shift in the weather toward winter, so I really wanted to capture the cold tone Ware hits so beautifully. I'm not sure how well I did. Blaise Larmee's 2001 was another big touchstone; the ice-skating sequence was originally blocked out exactly like that comic is but I changed it up because it was really a little too close. Most of all though, this comic owes a big debt to Frank Santoro. Frank's new Blast Furnace Funnies comic tackles some pretty similar subject matter as this one with an incredible amount of elegance, something I tried to capture as well. He was also the one who told me I should start doing my linework in color, something I haven't really been able to do in Affected because of how regimented my process on that book has become after drawing hundreds of pages of it; but also something I've been eager to try. I'm going to do my next book with color linework, so this was sort of a "workshop" attempt at figuring out some of the basics. Finally, a recent talk with Ryan Sands about short stories and page size helped me think this through.

I'm fairly happy with how this comic turned out. I really like the layout, it all seems like one big motion to me. Some of the drawings are good, some could be better, mainly because I tried drawing on ultra smooth Bristol paper instead of the really toothy stuff I like to use. I don't like when it's too easy to make a line. I think it accomplishes what I was trying to do all right. Those of you who've followed my work for a long time will note that this is another comic about the same girl I always make comics about; "get over her!" I hear you say. Well, this is probably the last one like this now that I have rewritten the ending to Affected. As an unheard goodbye, I think I like it well enough. Go check it out!

World Scene Report 2011*

What It Is.



We still die and we still go to market. This morning my mother sent me out to get a bottle of rye for the Christmas party they were throwing later and I dropped by the comic book shop on the way back, talked with the boys, picked up two riso'd minicomics and that Daredevil.



Right now, I can go out and get a North American comic that draws from all over Europe and Japan as well. We are in a peaceful and productive mode of cultural exchange. This is a renaissance, people. No matter how it feels to be here.



The governors of Nueva España, now called Mexico, wrote of themselves as "we who have been placed at the end of time". It always feels like the world is ending.



We all of us look out our windows upon change, but I don't think anyone would want to go back to the way things were. Technology will not save us but it can help. And it seems like everyone "in the scene" has a clear image of something better.

We'll get there.



Because so many have fought the good fight. A Kirby panel exploding into atoms of xerox-machine grit. The sands of time symbolized by old newspaper and Yokoyama panels and Moebius hatching. The four frames from a superhero monthly that stay with you for a lifetime. And the books full of art that you keep your whole life. Zines. Tezuka. Knowing we do it here as good as anybody else did it. Being part of something.

No matter where we go from here, we can only go forward.



Images from all the great comics I've read over the past three days:

1. SFSF Supplementary File 2A by Ryan Cecil Smith, self-published
2. Daredevil vol. 3 #7 by Paolo Rivera and Mark Waid, Marvel Comics
3. "Hell's Angel" by Yoshikazu Ebisu in Comics Underground Japan, Blast Books
4. "Little Red Riding Hood" by Juani Ta in (ku)š! #7, Bidriba Grafiskie stasi
5. Paranoia #1 by Kipper and Paul O'Connor, Adventure Comics

*DTU turns 2

Your Wednesday Sequence 37

Ditko's World #1 (1986), page 19. Steve Ditko.

Today on my Robot 6 column, I talked about the sublime design sense and pure cartooning Steve Ditko has fallen into during his under-discussed "modern period", sidelining into ideas about use of black and white space on the page, comics as a vehicle for abstract information, and the strange career of an artist who should have been a cult figure but couldn't help creating Spider-Man. You can read it here.

Inkstuds Year-End Total Insanity Edition

... featuring me!



That's right folks, I was recently invited to participate in a critics' discussion of the best comics if 2011 on Robin McConnell's endlessly wonderful podcast Inkstuds. I was joined by Tim Hodler and Joe McCulloch, two very smart men who are both more articulate and possessed of a greater understanding of comics than me. It was a really great time: two hours of non-stop back-and-forth comics talkin' with some of my favorite critics. And I even got Robin to lead off the show with some prime LA noise rock! You should probably go listen to the podcast right here.

Dead Art

once more into the breach



Avengers X-Sanction #1, by Ed McGuinness and Jeph Loeb. Marvel.

This is how I pick the superhero comics I'm going to read nowadays: I go to the store once a month to get that Daredevil and that Wonder Woman and then I kind of look around for some old nonsense to spend the rest of what's in my wallet on. I defy you to find a better way of doing this whole "reading mainstream comics" thing. I fully understand that I'm in the minority on this, but I've ceased picking up current superhero titles in hopes of finding any artistic value whatsoever in them. (Again, that Daredevil's an exception here, people.) Today though, I had something a little more specific in mind. It's been too long since I read any so-awful-it's-at-least-interesting superhero comics, and I'd been hot for this one since I saw the teaser image of Cable below in Marvel Previews.



Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness on Rob Liefeld's greatest creation: there's an itch this combination scratches really really well. Over the past half-decade Loeb's gone from a well-enough-respected (in those circles) superhero writer to just the worst hack working, scripting comics that are almost like conceptual art in how few of the requisites of competent storytelling they give the reader and how far they push the envelopes of loudness and saccharinity and suspension of disbelief. Loeb's stated somewhere or other (or maybe he hasn't, and this is just comic shop clerk rumor) that the only measure of success he applies to his comics is the number of copies they sell. By this measure, he's doing okay. I mentioned that he wasn't always that way -- he was never Alan Moore, but once upon a time his work indicated that he was perhaps trying now and then -- so I could note something everyone who gets a little too into their superhero shit's noted: his work started its migration toward its current state right around the same time his teenage son passed due to cancer. It's understandable. What people don't talk about, though, is how interesting Loeb's more recent comics are.

There is a purity of intent -- of spirit, even -- that mainstream comics attempting to "be art" or "say something" never attain. At some point the aesthetic goals bump up against the ad pages, the computer lettering, the losses in translation caused by the assembly-line method of collaboration employed in manufacturing them. The idea always loses something to the form. But Loeb's comics are downright Shakespearean in the immensity of their surrender, their acceptance of what they are. They may be tales told by an idiot, sound and fury signifying nothing, but there is no gap between conception and execution in them. Loeb quite obviously wants his comics to be mindless and bruising and both easy and surprisingly difficult to read (because they speak the little-known language of hardcore superhero continuity)... and they are. Exactly what he wants them to be, in full measure. The thing is, you can't dodge the pitfalls of superhero comics when you're making superhero comics. To make work that isn't corrupted by commercialism, you have to aim for those pitfalls, to throw yourself into the pit. Loeb has. It's understandable.

And Ed McGuinness! It's been a good while since I've looked at a new comic featuring his art, but the sight is always welcome. His style is singularly suited to Loeb's writing: it's superhero art on steroids, the shiny surfaces and straining figures of modern photoreferenced hero comics reintroduced to the classical cartooning value of exaggeration. Muscles pop from bodies and veins from muscles on McGuinness's pages, faces contort in agony or surprise or even just the effort of outlining a conversation's particulars, and the panel borders of the quirkily blocked layouts almost bend outward with the sheer volume of what they contain. McGuinness is one of a few American mainstream artists to have based a successful career in embracing the manga aesthetic -- or more specifically, what the superhero community thinks of as "the manga aesthetic", one in which names like Tezuka and Tatsumi may as well not even exist and even Otomo is a pretty distant memory. Everything is drawn from the screaming, byzantine substance of '80s and '90s action manga, which emphasized deformed, explosive action and dirtied up the cleaner cartooning style of Japanese comics with diagrammatically detailed machinery, architectural cityscapes, crumbling facades, trash.



McGuinness crosses Kirbyist superheroics with this aesthetic quite successfully: everything he draws appears to be made out of some miraculously strong and flexible derivative of rubber, perhaps the Fantastic Four's famous "unstable molecules". But there's a strong horror vacui pushing back against the slick polish of McGuinness's cartooning, one that suits a Rob Liefeld-derived comic perfectly. Panels are packed into pages like sardines, spotted blacks give way to intricate crosshatching, and the characters are framed so tightly in every panel that their figures often have to overlap the boundaries of the individual rectangles, sprawling out into the free space on the page. It's an approach as addictive as crystal meth, and one that actually manages to work as comics, too. McGuinness comics read well, fluffed up with hot air though they may be. Looking at his pages is like taking part in the kind of epic action figure battles you never quite had enough imagination to pull off as a kid.

Finally, this comic stars Cable, which automatically makes it super complicated to explain -- and that, of course, makes it nicely indicative of superhero comics as a whole. For those who don't know (and I'll be the first to admit that I don't fully understand the story here either), Cable is a mutant warrior from a dystopian future who came back in time to prevent the world he grew up in from occurring, but I think he also goes back and forth to fight battles in the steadily worsening future timeline too. Then he's also a Christ figure because he's trying to save the world by redeeming it and because he's Phoenix's kid and she's a Virgin Mary figure (hellooooooo). But he's also kind of a Virgin Mary figure too because he just adopted a girl named Hope who's the for real mutant messiah and he's raising her to grow up and save the world or something. Oh yes, and he's half robot. Also he had a punk rock activist phase that was pretty baller.



This comic features Cable finally getting to the part of his future timeline where shit gets real and there's a nuclear winter he wanders around in waiting for his robot body parts to grow back. I'm pretty sure they don't explain how or why the nuclear winter happened but maybe I'm missing something. (There are actually a lot of things in this comic that they might have explained but I didn't catch it.) But if you were thinking that's the only future timeline running through this book, you'd be mistaken: there are also a few flash-forwards to Hope watching Cable die, apparently. Why or how or when this happens isn't explained, and neither is how Cable knows he's going to die. Cable runs into some kind of alien guy in the nuclear winter timeline and gets told that it all happened because his daughter died and couldn't save the world. Also that he has 24 hours to live. There's a pattern here: none of this stuff is explained either. This is all exposition, though: the main part of the comic is Cable realizes he can fix everything back to how it was (which is like, very slightly less shitty) if he goes back in time and kills all the Avengers. He makes a big deal about how he's a military man and this is a war with a limited time to be fought, but doesn't kill a single person despite spending the majority of the issue with both Captain America and the Falcon tied up at his mercy. The issue ends with a gun shooting off-panel, which we all know means that miraculously it didn't hurt anyone.

It's a really stupid comic, and it isn't even approachable in its stupidity, but there's a lot of appeal to how Loeb writes it nonetheless. He makes sure we know who every character is, both civilian and superhero names. He has people explain what they're doing as they're doing it. He doesn't go nuts trying to make something as nonsensical as Cable's backstory make sense. This shit is hard to understand, but it's easy to read, and that's a fairly singular virtue in superhero comics these days. And I really appreciate how allegorical and allusive the continuity stuff is, honestly -- there's no way anyone could possibly render a coherent Christ narrative from all the information about messiahs and world saving and world destruction that this comic and those it makes reference to contains, but just the fact that it's trying is really pretty cool to me, the fact that this stuff is intended as superhero comics with straightup biblical undertones about the for-realz Second Coming even if it totally fails at being that. When people talk about superheroes as modern gods they're either being purposefully ignorant or just retarded, because those Greek and Roman myths were actually intended as teaching parables and people really believed in them, but in the very small column of religious outsider art, this X-Men stuff stands tall as hell. It's heady material, and the fact that it fails on multiple levels means it's bad, but it's not that much less exciting than reading something good to try and keep track of what's going on in all those levels when they're this bizarre.



So haw haw, superhero comics sure are dumb, but they can look cool sometimes and the cynical laff value they provide is matched by little else, right? Well yeah, of course, but there's more going on in Avengers X-Sanction, surprisingly enough. We've got grizzled old Cable (only superhero with gray hair who isn't the older version of a more recognizable one?) fighting to prevent a "bad" but deeply indeterminate future (or a few of them, actually) that's chiefly characterized by the death of a member of his father-child dynamic. Willing to kill anyone and cause any level of destruction to preserve what he's got. And it's not there in the text at all, but these are feelings Jeph Loeb must be on intimate terms with. A willingness to kill in order to change things, a desperation that could turn back time, a grief that dares any peril. These are the genuine emotions of a father who's lost his child, and it's only because they're run through the stylistic mechanism of superhero comics that they look so absurd, so ingenuine. It would be a fascinating treatise in how what genre comics are kill the personal artistic expression of the people making them, but this is Jeph Loeb we're talking about: the writer who has perhaps embraced the conventions of the idiom to the greatest degree of anyone going right now, who has shown the most willingness to work within them without pushing back.

I imagine a few possible scenarios. Maybe Loeb knows how doomed to fail his attempt at creating a personal story that realistically depicts the pain of a dead child's father is within the milieu he uses but simply doesn't care and goes for it anyway. Maybe he thinks that superhero comics is a tonally appropriate place to work with this kind of content and actually believes that what he's doing is like, "good" or some shit. Maybe he has no consciousness that the story he's telling, which after all is Generic Action Comics Plot #2313, is even relevant to his own personal experience and this stuff is just bubbling up out of him unbidden -- which would make sense given that he's been pinned to such commercial work for so long and hasn't been able to create any art that really deals with his loss head-on. (Except that one Superman short where it gets put into Actual DC Continuity that Clark Kent used to hang out with Jeph Loeb's Son as a kid and was really upset when he died. I'm convinced that story is the reason they found it necessary to do that relaunch a few months back, but I digress.) Finally, and I hope this is the one -- it's certainly the only one where the comic works out as intended -- this is Loeb, who looks like this, in full on wish-fulfillment Avatar mode, living vicariously through Cable, killing with conviction and without mercy to save his kid. Maybe -- hopefully! -- this is even Loeb raging against the superheroes that prevented him from spending more time with his boy while he was still around, finally letting the resentment that has to come with a multi-decade career writing these things rip out of him long and ugly.

In other words, Jeph Loeb's pain is too big to fit on the scanner bed, and this is what it looks like:



So that's what I thought was noteworthy about this comic, the fact that it seems to be a uniquely personalized statement expressed in the medium of sequential art, and in a corner of that medium so incredibly ill-suited to supporting it. It's something unique for superheroes to say the least. But there's something else going on here too, something I think is worth mentioning. I read Avengers X-Sanction right after the new issue of that Daredevil, the final page of which is the letter column, and in that letter column was this:



It's a story from one Percy Yap of Edmonton Alberta, about how his girl died of breast cancer a few years back, turning his world into a joyless place, robbing the comics he read of the meaning they had once held for him. But then he found the new Daredevil, which he and I agree is the best hero book around at the moment. "For the first time in a long time," he says, "I could feel the joy of reading a comic book slip back into my life."

Are superhero comics stupid, are they juvenile, are they artistically compromised to a usually-fatal degree? They are. But these are the comics people care about, this is the stuff that actually means something to the greatest number of human beings. It isn't Ghost World, it isn't Blankets, and it isn't Jimmy Corrigan. Somehow this stuff -- this stuff -- touches hearts, it consoles the despairing, it mends people's lives. And if I can't see it, and if you can't see it, maybe we're individuals of higher standards and more rarefied tastes, but maybe we just need to get with the fucking program.

Your Wednesday Sequence 36

"Jimbo" strip (1988), page 4. Gary Panter.

This week on my Robot 6 column, I talked about a particularly choice Gary Panter page, one that spotlights each of his many different drawing styles. Even though I did that big interview with Panter a while back, I realized I've never really dug into analyzing what makes his art work as well as it does. It was a real pleasure to be able to do so, and I was pretty happy with the way the column turned out. Go give it a look, I think you'll enjoy it too.

um linkblog

all these links are old, wah wah who cares


- Above: Fiffe and O'Connor do Beta Ray Bill. Look out.

- Total blockbuster: Gary Groth interviews Carmine Infantino. That's the top of the heap for comics critic and superhero penciler, yakkin' for your pleasure right there.

- It must just be Daredevil o'clock up in here, because not only did Tucker interview Mark Waid (who's currently steering one of the two superhero comics that I have to think about before I condemn the entire genre outright), Robin Barnard completed his epic cover version of Frank Miller's Daredevil #186, thus proving yet again that he's far and away the best human xerox machine operating.

- Great CF interview, done before everyone (including me) started asking him these same questions over and over again. Also the last two comments are pretty hilar.

- Damn dude, this is a ma zinggggg: the Least Exciting Action Sequence Ever.

- Missed this one last time: Jog's take on Color Engineering is better than mine (big surprise).

- YES: IDW is reprinting Otto Soglow's minimalist masterpiece The Little King in what looks like a pretty baller format. Soglow (little bit here) might be the biggest missing piece of the newspaper-comics reprint puzzle that's been so wonderfully constructed over the past decade. This is gonna be a buy-on-sight book if there ever was one. Garrett Price and Gus Arriola next please! (Google them.)

- Speaking of old comics, here's a bushel of old Gluyas Willaims comics for your pleasure. Williams has gotten some praise from the cognoscenti in the past few years, but no reprint love, maybe because there's old books by him cluttering up the cartooning section of every half-decent used bookstore in the country. Fun stuff. The selection linked to are from a daily comic Willams did that had no name but should have been called "Annoying Shit" -- few were better at capturing the way the high drama of mundane bothers and slight irritations unfolds.

- Hell yes they do. The cool thing about Rube Goldberg's early strip Don't Some People Ask The Biggest Fool Questions is how it presents six panels that could each easily function as single-image gags in sequence, the general topic forming the only connection between one and the next. It's pretty typical of "early comics", I guess -- guys trying things because they actually hadn't figured out what worked well and what didn't yet.

- Eddie Campbell on bitchez' feets. Not the first consideration a cartoonist brings to the table, but speaking for myself there's been no article I think about more when I'm drawing comics since I read it. "Remember that Eddie Campbell article!" my brain screams at me whenever I get my pen past a female character's shins. Essential reading for people who draw, and also lots of fun for those who don't, I'd guess.

- My all-time fave record label, Living Tapes, upgraded from a myspace to its own website a while ago. LA local represent.

- Finally, after an unscheduled hiatus due to technical/medical difficulties, my comic AFFECTED has roared back into action with a pretty awesome fake-Frank-Miller's-Sin-City sequence, and will resume its regular Monday/Thursday update schedule. Get readin'.

Brooklyn Comics Fest Report

I went to the greatest comic book show of all time and then I wrote a highly enthusiastic diary of it for Comics Alliance. You can read it by clicking here. This article may also function as a review of some of the year's best comics (the new Kramers Ergot, Jonny Negron's latest works, Ben Marra's astounding "American Psycho" zines, Frank Santoro's breathtaking Blast Furnace Funnies, and Michael Comeau's indescribably wonderful bootleg Wolverine comic Hellberta). And as if that weren't enough, it includes an exclusive preview of that sexy new Kramers I know you're all salivating for! Helloooooo! Get to reading!

Big Audio Dynamite

The setting: New York City, shortly after the two-part comic book overdose that was the fabled Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and the equally legendary Second Avenue Comics Warehouse.
The players: Tucker "the mouth from the South" Stone; Joe "please, it's just Jog" McCulloch; myself.
The comics: a boatload of the newest cutting-edge art comix from the Fest, and a bounty of crusty back-issue-bin treasures from the Warehouse.
The form: this podcast. If you don't want to hear me and Jog and Tucker talking about comics together for well in excess of an hour, I'm genuinely mystified as to why you're visiting this website. GO

(UPDATE: Jog proves once more why he is a better human being than the rest of us by annotating the jesus out of the podcast, in case you just had to know what a dude's body coming apart due to voodoo looks like.)

Two Marvel Pages

Analyzed here and here on Robot 6. Romita and Rogers: two of the unsung best. Check 'em out...

The AFFECTED Interviews, part 3

Hopefully you're not sick of interviews that involve me in some way or another yet, because this one's a blockbuster every inch of the way. For the third time, my boy Adam McIlwee has picked my brain clean on the topic of my comic AFFECTED, which he aptly characterizes as "art porn". (I might add that it has guns and fighting, plus people in it get high a lot. You should go look at it if you haven't yet.) I'd imagine you read this blog because you're interested in my ideas about comics, and I tend to drop a greater volume of them in these interviews than anywhere else, so go read. I love you.

Larmee/Seneca: Friday

intro/Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday



MATT SENECA: So I guess we should wrap up back at the beginning. How do you see comics right now -- the form, the market, the community, the whole thing that falls under that word.
What’s the state of our union, if you will?

BLAISE LARMEE: Well, the people are good. I really like some of the people I meet. And then I like their comics. And if I like someone’s comics often it’s a way of liking my image of that person. Or it’s a real part of that person. Maybe comics gives this sort of … maybe there’s a humanist tendency in it because the hand is very much alive and it’s so narrative, it really seems like a human activity.

MATT: Does comics seem small to you, in comparison to other forms? I agree with you about its human aspect, and aside from the presence of hands in the finished work, a lot of that feeling for me comes from the sense that it’s very close-knit and none of the history’s so far in the past as to be invisible yet.

BLAISE: I can connect with people one on one in a way that’s impossible in groups. Or at least, most groups I’ve participated in. So the whole ‘community’ aspect of comics is really gross to me. Gross in an unhealthy way. Like, impure, incestuous. Like the dads are having sex with their sons. It seems to limit growth.

M: I think you and “comics” have different ideas of what growth is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be saying that growth is incorporating a wider aesthetic/formal range of work. For most people in comics I think growth isn’t something horizontal, but vertical: this climb toward better, more complex stories.

B: Right. Like a family business passed down, like building on top of what you already have rather than setting off and building your own home elsewhere.

M: Something just occurred to me: we’re only now starting to enter a time period in which new cartoonists have come up knowing that comics history is documented, “safe” in hardcover books and university archives. For so long, the mentality wasn’t just reactionary (ie “why SHOULDN’T we build on what’s established, that stuff is great”), but downright protective -- if the past wasn’t a working part of the present there was a real danger that it would disappear forever. From that mentality you get the generational saga of comics, as well as aberrations like the collector’s market. I think only now are cartoonists who feel no responsibility to also be archivists emerging.

B: Yeah, you see that?

M: Well, we’re here talking about this stuff, aren’t we?

B: We’re archiving this …

M: You got me there. But let me ask you straight out: do you feel any obligation to comics’ past?

B: If you’re making comics you’re going to have that reading no matter what. I agree with what you said about archivists and collectors but with the internet everything’s being archived.



M: Hmm... you can’t archive the print form itself though, and that’s inherent to a lot of past comics. Let me put it another way. When I asked you about influence you talked about your friends’ comics, and Scott McCloud, and I know you’ve mentioned CF before. But all those people are part of comics’ present. And when we were talking about comics being cool, you equated “cool” with a present moment. Am I right in thinking that’s what you want to capture, not the past?

B: I dunno. I mean ‘the present’ can be reified and as soon as something’s reified it’s part of the past in a way. It’s lost its potential. As art enters art history it becomes illustration of concepts or historical context or whatever. And this in my mind is what protects comics and narrative art from criticism that demands some sort of ‘4th wall breaking’ aspect of art. But maybe art always has this potential to totally disorient and captivate you. Obviously you can’t do that with the Mona Lisa … or maybe you can … but it’s so reified - ‘la joconde’ - that it’s quieted. So that’s what I mean when I say the past. A reified past. And the idea of the present as the threshold of that reification process. But reification has its own economy and things go in and out of being ‘things’.

M: For me what’s exciting about the current present in comics is that a lot of the past is being reintroduced as living art. A lot of the reprint stuff is both unread and unheralded. It’s like work from the past is able to contribute to the aesthetic present -- a lot more things are “things” now, I guess. Comics history is no longer linear, we have work from every era (even though it’s only a century of history I’m talking about) in the “present”. It’s like the way classical culture contributed so heavily to the Renaissance. All that said, though, this doesn’t feel like an especially good time for comics. Do you think we’re in an “up” period or a “down” period right now?

B: What do you mean, comics history is no longer linear?

M: Like, everything is available and there’s no section of the past that’s been fully absorbed and incorporated. There’s work from every era that’s being introduced as new via reprints. None of the past is “dead”, we can still get yields of living art from all of it.

B: There’s some visual artist I was looking at and he draws from Tintin, Moomin, and Akira - the comics. And that’s it, as far as comics go. I like that austerity. When everything’s available … I mean that’s the fantasy … a giant feast laid out and you can eat everything. It’s difficult to talk about ‘comics’ as a whole because it’s really these autonomous narratives - Akira, Moomin, Tintin - that are experienced singularly. They don’t relate to this larger narrative in the way that art does. At least, not immediately. At the same time they’re more difficult to reify. The romance comic was reified. The superhero comic. Gag comics. But Akira can’t be reified, really. I mean, there’s the image of the guy walking to his bike, or powersliding his bike, but that’s more the image of the promotion for Akira.



M: I think it’s all a matter of perspective, though. Like, in Europe Tintin is incredibly reified -- he has his own museum! Same with Moomin, to a slightly lesser degree. And there are people who can know comics history backwards and forward but only like, say, Titian, Lichtenstein, and Picasso paintings. I think you nailed something when you talked about austerity of influence though, because it’s only when you’re aware of the past that you can know you aren’t going up the same dead-end trail as someone did before. I think that’s one of the main reasons internet comics is such an appealing thing, because it’s almost this formal guarantee that you won’t end up in the same place as anyone in print did. Like, even pages of a print comic scanned and put on the internet are a really different experience than the print version.

B: Yeah, it’s fresh ground. I mean, comics itself. I think that’s the draw for a lot of people. It’s hard, though, because they’re drawn in and there’s all this renovation to make it seem like a historical space. A sense of unity in creating the image of legitimacy. And maybe that’s why I’m avoiding this question about the state of comics, because if I’m feeling positive I do see it as this unstructured series of semi-autonomous spaces.

M: I think that’s definitely the most productive way to look at it. Maybe even the only way forward -- if you see the practice of comics as creating your own autonomous space rather than following in the footsteps of giants. Let me ask you this then: you talked about how comics seemed innovative and exciting when you first started, and how now those winds seem to have slowed. What do you feel is the tenor of the thing now? Just the feeling of it.

B: Uh … the feeling is just some people on tumblr and flickr. I mean, that’s where I get my breeze. And there’s some printed matter that comes out of those sites but that’s more about the preview images and the announcement than the actual book. In my mind.

M: Do you like that it’s that small a site, or wish it was bigger?

B: I dunno. Sometimes I get that feeling where you’re new at school and you’re just hanging out with other people with whom you have in common the fact that you don’t have any friends.

M: Does it feel positive? Like a productive place? Or not?

B: I mean … I follow less than 20 people who make comics. I mean as far as tumblr is a ‘site’ … which it is … but in a funny way where no one knows what your dashboard looks like. And the dashboard is the site, in my mind. So really it’s your own site, your own party, and the way in which the guests interact is sort of up to you. But anyway at this party … actually I guess I have two parties since I have two tumblrs. One is mostly cartoonists. And not much happens. Mostly reblogs. And i don’t feel connected to that tumblr because my name isn’t attached. The other party is I guess people I like … people I feel connected to … but none of them make comics. This is the dashboard connected to my personal site. And so it’s strange. I don’t get much response from people I like.

M: Do you think you inhabit an autonomous site, then?

B: Yeah, in a way. In the sense that the only thing I can see as ‘progress’ within comics is self-produced. And I guess I would consider my ‘peers’ in comics as those who can recognize this progress. One of the things being on tumblr has changed in my work is being able to see the people who reblog you. Creating images then becomes creating audience. If you don’t like where your images end up you stop making those images. There are a couple tumblrs I follow in a web 1.0 way, where I have to go to their url. and there’s something about purity in that, preserving the autonomy of these users, both of whom only blog about themselves. I guess I’m attracted to these narcissistic types, at least for awhile. I think it’s also about preserving my autonomy as a consumer. Where I don’t have to have the responsibility of being a ‘follower’. Yeah I guess autonomous sites are … I can’t imagine any other kind of mode of production that would interest me. Even the idea of a collective would have to be my personally constructed image of a collective.



M: So do you still see “comics” as a useful term for the work you’re interested in making? I think we agree about the necessity of comics to go outside itself... but I guess there must be a point where it goes so far outside that the word “comics” stops being a relevant categorization. Do you have any investment in staying within “comics”?

B: I dunno. The altcomics tumblr is about mapping ‘comics’ but is that useful, to cling to this medium-specific way of thinking about work? I feel like making publications is enough. I mean that’s really a ‘medium’. Whereas comics is this collection of stylistic and formalistic tics. I was asked to be in an anthology recently and I sent them something I felt proud of and got back a nice email asking for something more traditional. This is a familiar narrative, but these are actually really progressive guys. So what does that mean, a traditional comic? This is where the definition becomes relevant.

M: Your guess is as good as mine. Is it anything beyond formal parameters to you? Does comics have a “spirit”?

B: No, it’s just a loose collection of things. It’s a weird math. Like you can add word balloons to a classical painting and it would probably be accepted as a comic. Or you can make a grid and do anything within each panel and it would be accepted. Or make a drawing and then make a similar drawing but change something. But it can be a crutch. Or just a platform for experimentation. But also a crutch. A good drawing can just be a good drawing. But adding more drawings will enter it into this context that becomes relevant when you’re dealing with a higher authority (publisher/editor) who for most people represents this context.

M: Does anything represent this context for you?

B: Certain websites, publishers, critics, creators, schools, publications, the way the mainstream records these things.

M: Anything that defines itself as being a part of “comics”?

B: Yeah, that’s pretty much the only qualification. Not evenly distributed, obviously.

Larmee/Seneca: Thursday

intro/Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday



MATT SENECA: I’ve been meaning to ask, with 2001 on hiatus and Cruise as your current project, are you going to be doing any drawn comics any time soon?

BLAISE LARMEE: The last Cruise had a little drawing in it. I’ve done maybe 5 more pages in that “interview format” that ran in Smoke Signals. The last couple pages actually seemed French in like, a really indulgent and lazy kind of way. Um, but no “Young Lions” type stuff anymore. Probably. I dunno.

MATT: Is there a place you want to push the typical comics narrative to? Even Young Lions, which was more novelistic than the rest of your stuff, was fairly elliptical. Is there a kind of thing you’d like to see more comics doing with their narratives?

BLAISE: I guess … if I were a teacher, say … maybe an excercise I would give would be to make a comic that doesn’t try to innovate, isn’t “experimental” or abstract, and maybe also that doesn’t exploit “what comics can do”. Like, a comic that would be better as something other than a comic. I mean, this is the exercise I feel I’ve given myself. I don’t trust that innovation within the medium will result in any progress outside of the comics realm.

M: I can’t bring myself to type “you should draw a superhero comic” in response to that without laughing. Is the outside-comics progress you’re talking about influence on other forms?

B: Progress is something I think about a lot and it’s impossible to … I don’t even have the basic language to explore it. I get lost in these circuitous and self conscious loops. I mean at some level it seems everyone involved in creating community is involved in creating a shared language. The architecture of community. Like, you see this in flickr groups, in local economies, subcultures, academia, all that stuff. And looking at it all from afar it seems arbitrary where you build. Maybe it’s just what language you respond to and what language you can speak. I’m aware of comics as this vernacular but everything else is probably vernacular as well. Like if you’re just engaging with these large, removed constructions like academic language -- I mean that’s its own abstraction, obviously. It has its own limitation. I guess maybe a difference is that people in comics know they’re only speaking to each other whereas academics and artists imagine they are interacting with something larger than just their sphere. I at least like that image more. Even if it’s illusory.

M: Are you saying you want to interact with those other spheres, the fine arts and academia? Because one of the things that was always exciting to me about your comics was how well they fit into the larger sphere of (this is meant in totally positive terms) hipster culture. And how it felt like you were aiming for that and didn’t have any stigma about it, as opposed to how like, even rock bands or fashion labels will try to distance themselves from it. That was probably the biggest thing I saw in your work that I tried to bring to my own. Do you just want a different sphere than comics, or do you have a specific one in mind?

B: I think I make it difficult for anyone to be a “fan” or even a friend. Like, if I feel something I’m doing is becoming successful I’ll stop doing that. If I make friends it’s only the ones that are constantly moving themselves that last for me. I hate the idea of being stuck in a stagnant community where your “role” is extremely articulated. I feel like the spheres I am interested in constantly reevaluate their position.

M: I can see why comics’ obsession with its continuous biographical narrative would be tough to deal with then. In comics even if you are constantly changing then you get slapped with “innovator!” or “provocateur!” and get stuck there. Do you feel like the comics community doesn’t have much to offer a person with your goals?

B: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, the comics community is solid, right, it’s a real thing. I have no image of it except as this … collection of books and blogs. The image I have is very solid. For awhile it wasn’t. It was wild, it was innovative. It felt like strong winds were blowing through the comics shop.

M: Do you think comics changed, or you changed?

B: I think comics didn’t change. The winds slowed to nothing. Or maybe they died awhile ago and I was just encountering the echoes. I was catching up on the comics narrative (the past decade). Maybe it was the economy. I’m sure that was part of it. It really felt impressive to me that there was all this money being spent in such frivolous ways. Like, that really destabilized my conception of worth. That’s maybe what was … that’s one reading of that work that stays with me.

M: The high presentation values that got given to such lo-fi work?

B: It didn’t even come down to high presentation values - I’m not talking about the sort of “comics page as object” thing that sort of came to be the standard way of publishing art comics - just the time and labor represented in the work. Or presented rather. Or represented, I dunno. Like, also the commitment of printing 1000 copies of something that seems valueless in a market sense. I think that was what was inspirational. Hedging big bets on what in hindsight might be seen as highly undervalued work.

M: I think that mindset would never have existed without the long single narrative of comics history though -- just because it seems to spring directly from like, “how is this amazing comic in the quarter bin?” The desire to publish those amazing quarter bin comics while they’re still new. Is it possible to want to be part of an art form without romanticizing something about it, do you think?

B: Why do you ask?

M: Because you seem to have a lot of the same feelings as me about the sphere of comics -- I spent a lot of time, years and years from when I was a kid, on the outside of the community looking in, and pretty much as soon as I got inside I started looking out again, wanting to bring in other things and disengage with a lot of what the community is. I romanticized comics to an incredible degree, I pictured comics artists as like, millionaire superstars as a young kid, and then cool underground rock stars as a teenager, and that was what got me going. And I think the reasons I still want to make comics are maybe more romanticized pictures of things than truthful appraisals. You’ve got a pretty dispassionate way of analyzing comics, but when you mention the image of wild innovation bringing you in and then dissipating once you had a clearer picture, it seems like you also had this romanticized view of some things that became less prominent.

B: Like what?

M: This view of comics as a place where your artistic interests could be given an opportunity for both free rein and evolution, I guess.

B: Yeah. But I think in any environment I would seek the limitations, the periphery of what’s acceptable. I was also younger, more “collegiate”. I remember a year after I moved to New York I was genuinely surprised I didn’t “make it”. I had a blog and I was just updating it every day. It got maybe 10 views a day or something. No links or comments. And I thought, I really felt like I was just plowing away at this work that was really significant. And it was! But it was this sort of collegiate naivete that I sort of left behind when I left New York. After this was the “ironic capitalist” phase where I sought to create little value and promote it heavily. But this phase was also good in that it related me to the outside world, not just the feedback loop of my art and myself. I was frustrated that I was forced to “grow up”, to develop a praxis in addition to a practice. Before that I just wanted to be discovered.



M: Are you glad you weren’t? Because I mean... to a pretty good extent you did “make it”, Blaise. People buy your books, people read your webcomic, people talk about you in pretty much every critical organ that’s worth anything. Do you think that could have happened for you without your having to shed some of the naivete you talk about? Or would you have wanted it to?

B: The first narrative I wanted was Adrain Tomine’s. To be published at 17. Or rather, to achieve stability at a young age. And now, seeing his narrative, how he’s developed, I’m glad I went a different route. Or rather, it would have been impossible for me to go down that route. I mean, any venue in comics where my desires have not been realised -- like I used to fantasize about being in um … the Fantagraphics “art comics” anthology … right, MOME! - yeah, now it’s all sort of … not a relief, but not a “missed opportunity” either. But I was still happy when Aidan got in.

M: And now Mome isn’t a thing anymore anyway. I think a lot of people in comics feel the same stuff we’re talking about, this sense that we’ve ridden this wave for a while and now it’s hit some new shore and we’re just waiting around for something else. So going outside comics, or not wanting to engage with what it is right now... that makes sense, because it’s not so lively at the moment.

B: It could easily be a survival impulse. It’s sort of required now … the flexible worker ... the permanent part time worker.

M: Well, that isn’t just comics either. You have no idea just how many individuals here in LA “have a production company too”. If anything maybe the last few years have been a crash course in how tied to the national economy comics are.

B: Apparently luxury industries are thriving. Maybe this is why I’m looking in this direction. Maybe people are looking to invest in other currencies. There was some article about … maybe it was Slovakia … how it became a member of the European Union not because it was a good idea economically, but because of the signification of it. The idea of “class” and even “cool” maybe.

M: That’s interesting because comics switched identities so quickly. Like Superman coming out of the phone booth, ahem! For a century it was low-class and uncool and then suddenly it was the New York Times arts pages and celebrities trying to be seen with books, and now that that’s dried up a little there’s an identity crisis. Where are we now, do you think? High, low? Cool, uncool?

B: There was that sort of adolescent flaunting the newly reclaimed identity of “comics”. Maybe nationalistic. But it was … in the style of … identity movements. I think that was shortly after people started identifying as “nerds” and “geeks” … like, just after alt porn took off. I think its reclusive, interior quality makes comics difficult to integrate -- or translate -- into broader outlets. So it either becomes an awkward prop in a photoshoot -- the cover always as stand-in for comics, for the interior and for the medium/culture, never cover-as-cover -- or it becomes a vessel for content, and for juxtaposing content against a sort of easily reviewable/accessible format.

M: (I just gotta say that this is dope how we’re both “voices” in comics who came up during/after the mass-acceptance phase, and we’re here analyzing it as history.) Do you think the wider media fixation on comics-as-medium, often, as you mentioned, at the expense of appraising the art or content comics were presenting, fed into the pro-comics, medium-specific chauvinism so many comics people carry? Like, did it make that mindset okay?

B: Wow, chauvinism is the perfect word for that. Yeah I think the wider media became a threat sort of, like it threatened the boundaries, the autonomy of this tradition which I’m going to assume hasn’t been too welcoming to outsiders. And my memory of that period is mostly white males “defending” this medium, warning of all this heritage that might be lost in translation, losing this medium to a wider culture. Maybe there’s a parallel with those who defended the book against Oprah’s Book Club or punk against disco.

M: Harold Bloom and poetry slams. It’s always “the death of art” and then somehow it always doesn’t happen. Maybe everyone in comics grew up reading stories where belief in the literal end of the world and all humanity was required to make the narrative work and that’s why everyone’s so paranoid about change that goes beyond slight modifications to how the pages look. Do you have any particular idea about what “the future of comics” might look like?

B: It’s hard to talk about comics in that sense because it’s sort of … it’s like, what’s the future of fan communities. It’s an international style of local community in a way. Or that’s my image of it. There’s parallels between the otaku and the webcomics fan and all these other kinds of fans … and there’s overlap … but there’s also this “insider”-ness to it all … that’s kind of what being a fan is … having this image of being inside a culture, or making your own self an embodiment of this culture, so you can always look around you to see yourself. I mean ideally I guess comics would sort of dissolve or … I dunno.

M: Stop being a community and just be a form? I’m thinking of how saying “the film community” would be really silly... or “the music community”, same thing.

B: Right. I guess “comics community” is used because it’s a lot smaller.



M: Closer-knit, too. I mean, I think I’m pretty open minded about these things but it’s still slightly gross to me when people who like Spiderman won’t read Love and Rockets. But would I feel the same way about the teenager at the Katy Perry concert’s refusal to listen to my Polish harsh noise album or whatever? I think the real thing is that comics people insist on thinking small. It’s one of the dearest parts of their identity.

B: Yeah. And it does seem dear in a way, especially if you’re processing this community/identity with language developed in this local=good era. Where local is seen as a mode of resistance to globalisation and the destruction of cultures and traditions.

M: It comes close to paradoxical. The only reason you’d want “comics” to expand is because you care about “comics”... like, we aren’t talking about our work specifically, or the ones with Green Lantern in them specifically, but a whole idiom. But the problem we’re talking about is a community made up of people who are invested in “comics”, not the average mass-media consumers who know what they like and are basically ignorant of everything else. That mass audience are the people comics needs to reach, exactly the kind of people that those who are interested in comics’ expansion are opposed to seeing become a part of the sphere.

B: Yeah. Jason used a phrase a couple times, “blue collar snob” … something like that. Anyway, I’m not sure medium will be the path to unity. Or it seems like that idea only exists because of this small, tight-knit history. Maybe I’m wrong. Do you think a fan would be into [Jason Overby's] 2101?

M: Probably not... well... I dunno. I like that comic, but I do wonder about its audience. There is this reactionary fervor against something that doesn’t look like it took anything from anything, if you know what I’m saying. Like even your stuff has certain callbacks to other comics, there’s the CF connection in Young Lions, 2001 looks a little like Winsor McCay. But Jason Overby, Renee French, Austin English, that stuff seems to get comics “circling the wagons” against people who come in wanting to use the form but making work in which attention to its historical narrative can’t be inferred.

B: Austin and Frank Santoro have their comic book store street cred. The job demands incorporating difference, as far as audience and work go. Jason just makes no effort to have any sort of working class likeability. (At least in his comics. He is the friendliest guy ever in person.)

M: “Blue collar”, “working-class” -- do you see this stuff as inherent to the community comics has constructed?

B: Yeah. It’s about hard work, the sweat of the brow.

M: Which is weird, because it feeds into a market that hasn’t been populist for a good three decades. I don’t necessarily think that “blue collar snobbery” is keeping anyone away from comics though. Nobody would be reading this stuff if it weren’t for all the roughnecks nose-deep in Eightball down at the comic shop. It’s just a weird specificity of the community. It seems like you’re pretty eager to embrace comics’ status as a luxury market though, what appeals to you about that?

B: I see a gap in it that could be filled, I guess. Price is contested but it’s rarely engaged directly. Actual worth value … methods of appraisal … are rarely questioned. They’re manipulated, and there’s reactions against this manipulation, but these seem to happen in pretty comfortable and familiar narratives, pitting the heartless corporation against the average joe fan. It’s system vs individual, it’s just “business as usual”.

M: Is there a more aggressive engagement of price-as-content you’d be interested in seeing? I mean, it’s content that’s tough to go anywhere too unexpected with, I think...

B: Why do you say that?

M: Up and down, high and low... it seems like one manipulation or the other to me. But I could be missing something.

B: You mean it’s all artifice?

M: I wouldn’t put that judgment on it, I’m just saying that the ways you can manipulate it seem few.

B: I had a theory at some point … this was in my first interview I think I expressed this … that maybe creators get so caught up in the demands of the medium - the construction and deployment of an idiosyncratic template - that the content suffers for it, gets marginalized. Like, it seems ironic that form is - according to this reading - the essential draw for most cartoonists and perceived demand for content is like the guilty conscience hounding the creator. Like how many cartoonists say they like to draw but they need to work on their stories? Or at this school, say, the focus seems to be on learning and building a language. Form. But it’s strange that Frank Santoro is out there by himself, pretty much, working on form. And even he can’t let it stay pure form, he has to plug in content. It’s strange to me. This binary, this dualism, I guess it comes from its assembly line history. And where that’s led readers, what their expectations are.

M: Totally. It’s always astonishing to people when form actually manages to propel content. But that’s what comics is, that’s what art does! This is where your conceptualization of price as art is intriguing to me, because the assembly-line process that keeps comics stuck in this binary system of writer-to-artist construction is purely a byproduct of comics that function primarily as commodities. Take away commercial concerns and I think the number of collaborative comics would vastly decrease.

B: Hm. It is interesting, this system that requires more than one person to create an effective comic. Even the way “auteurs” work by writing first, then penciling, then inking. A mimicry of this industrial system. I guess this is where the idea of re-establishing a bridge with this fan base worries me. Or why I never thought about it. I think creating a void -- this has been described as the feminine mode of seduction -- and an image of beauty on the other side of this void, this is a good model.