comics
April 26, 2006
My Comics Subscriptions
As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a big comic book fan.
Although I loved superheroes as a little kid, I actually wasn't a comic book geek in high school. (I was a sports stathead instead, which may be even geekier.) And I got back into comics the wrong way around - in college, rather than moving from the mainstream to the indies, I started with R. Crumb and Los Bros Hernandez, got into Neil Gaiman, and gradually worked my way back to the guys in tights. Today, I find the indie scene disappointingly thin (beyond Carla Speed McNeil's amazing, overlooked Finder), but there's lots of superhero genre stuff I love - especially the work of the astonishingly prolific Brian Michael Bendis, who combines the dialogue skills of David Mamet with the mythographic imagination of Alan Moore. There's a superhero comics renaissance going on, as great writers like Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Warren Ellis, Alan Heinberg, Paul Jenkins, Robert Kirkman, David Lapham, Brian Melzer, Mark Millar, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith, Brian K. Vaughan and Bill Willingham reinvigorate a genre many gave up for dead years - if not decades - ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love seeing the classic archetypes put through their paces - and I'm still thrilled when a visionary like Bendis rings some new changes on the old tunes.
For years, I stopped by my local comics shop every Wednesday to pick up new releases. But it closed down a few months ago, leaving the nearest store a little too distant for a regular haul. So, I've started mail-ordering my purchases from an online subscription service, Sci-Fi Genre. It's not the best way to buy comics - I miss the weekly ritual, the browsing, and the overheard debates over whether Picard could take Kirk in a fight - but it's better than waiting a year to get the trade paperbacks on Amazon.
So, here's my current subscription list. It may look like a lot of comics - alright, I admit, it is a lot of comics - but it boils down to about 5-10 issues a week. Since each issue takes about 15-20 minutes to read - more for the talky ones, less for the ones with lots of fights and explosions - that's roughly 2-3 hours of new comic book reading a week, less than the time it takes to watch one baseball or football game. The only problem comes when responsibilities intercede and I start falling behind. Then, catching up can start to seem like work rather than fun, and I end up feeling like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World when he tells Thora Birch, "I hate my interests!"
I'd probably read fewer comics if there were more good SF on TV, or if SF literature weren't currently dominated by the "hard SF" genre, which so often boils down to blowhard scientists with guns. But I'll take my pleasures where I find them.
Ted's Comics Subscription List
Albion
All Star Batman and Robin
American Virgin
Apocalypse Nerd
Astonishing X-Men
Astro City
Battle Pope
Books of Doom
Captain America
Checkmate
Civil War
Colonia
Conan
Daredevil
Dork Tower
Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink
Eightball
Eternals
Expatriate
Fables
Finder
Girls
Hate Annual
Hawaiian Dick
Invincible
Justice
Love & Rockets
Luba's Comics and Stories
Marvel Team-Up
Nat Turner
New Avengers
Palookaville
Polly and the Pirates
Powers
PvP
Queen & Country
Runaways
Shadowpact
Stray Bullets
Superpatriot
True Story, Swear to God
Ultimate Extinction
Ultimate Fantastic Four
Ultimate Spider-Man
Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk
Ultimate X-Men
Ultimates
Usagi Yojimbo
Walking Dead
Wonder Woman
Y: The Last Man
Young Avengers
Posted by tedf at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2006
Gotham Central, RIP
One of my favorite comics just ended its run: Gotham Central, a DC genre experiment that really worked. It was set in the city of Batman, the Joker, et al, but it wasn't really a superhero comic. Rather, it followed the cases of Gotham homicide cops. Superheroes intersected their world, but the primary characters were just ordinary detectives trying to do their jobs. It was grittier than anything else at DC, but with a different tone than noir Marvel comics like Daredevil. It was more of a straight-up policier, in the mode of the TV show Homicide, but with an honesty about bureaucracy and corruption that recalls HBO's great crime series, The Wire. The superhero angle just gave it a little extra edge - these cops know they need Batman, but they also resent that they need him, and don't respect his vigilante approach. This makes them much more sensible and human than all the other cops over the years who've simply stood by as this guy in a cape has walked right over them.
The comic was co-written by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker. They're both very talented writers - see especially Rucka's Queen & Country, and Brubaker's current run on Captain America. But Gotham Central is the best thing either of them has worked on, matching Rucka's strong characterization with Brubaker's tight plotting.
Gotham Central didn't have quite the fizz of the best stuff from Brian Michael Bendis or David Lapham, noir tyros who will eventually become Hollywood heavyweights like Frank Miller, if that's what they want. Instead, it had the more deliberate pacing and rich ensemble acting of the best TV cop shows. That probably was a hard sell to the DC demographic. It also had a grimy look that too often was outright ugly - although the art got better over time. I can't be outraged the comic got cancelled - it had a good run, including a dark, powerful final arc. But I do hope it doesn't cement in comics editors' heads the assumption that there's no room for further experimentation in the superhero genre.
Posted by tedf at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2005
Comics Book Writers: Brian Azzarello
Writer: Brian Azzarello
Current Comics: 100 Bullets
Brian Azzarrello does great noir, and can be very effective when his stories are tightly plotted. The first few storylines of his long-running series 100 Bullets are gems of hard-boiled storytelling. The concept behind 100 Bullets is a great pulp premise: a shadowy organization selects people who've been betrayed in some way, and gives them a gun and 100 guaranteed untraceable bullets to use as they see fit to rectify the situation. Violence, of course, usually begets more violence, and revenge is rarely a simple matter. The agenda of the organization itself is only gradually revealed over the course of the series.
At its best, 100 Bullets mixes the campy-but-gritty pulp of Sin City with the paranoia of X-Files. Unfortunately, as the conspiracy grows ever more elaborate, the storytelling has grown more opaque - there are simply too many conspirators to keep track of by now. Likewise, Azzarello's recent runs on Batman and Superman were shaggy and disappointing - full of portentious dialogue and moody lighting, but missing the payoffs. He's clearly having trouble adapting his style to the superhero mainstream - although if he can ever make it work, the results could be spectacular.
One hint of that promise is a great Hulk miniseries he wrote a few years ago, Banner
Posted by tedf at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2005
Comic Book Writers
OK, the semester's over, I'm coming back from my prerequisite end-of-semester illness, and it's time to start consistently blogging again. I hope some of you have stayed with me through the thin weeks - I promise I'll start posting with more consistency now, as I've got a huge backlog of stuff to talk about.
To begin, I'm going to start a new series of posts on my favorite comic book writers. I'll try to cover every writer whose work I read regularly, from Brian Azzarello to Bill Willingham.
I actually organize my comics in a way I've never seen anybody else do it: by author, rather than title, artist, or publisher. Many people would assume the true auteur of a comic is the artist. The cult of Marvel great Jack Kirby, for example, rests on the claim that while Stan Lee may have written the dialogue for those great Silver Age heroes, it was Kirby who not only conceived of their looks, but structured the storytelling panel-by-panel, the way a director crafts a film from the raw material of a screenplay.
But while that may have been how Lee and Kirby worked (although I think that story gives short shrift to Lee's inventiveness), it's not an accurate reflection of how most comics seem to be written today. Alan Moore, author of the epochal Watchmen, is clearly the guy who raised the bar here - he's published some of his comic scripts, and you can see how completely he envisioned the material he handed to artist Dave Gibbons - not simply writing the screenplay, but storyboarding down to the smallest detail of the mise en scene.
The fallacy of the artist-as-creator was driven home by the crash-and-burn of Image Comics in the early 1990s. The Image founders were a bunch of superstar Marvel artists like Todd McFarlance and Rob Leifeld who left to develop properties they could own themselves. After having worked with writers at Marvel, they began writing their own stories. No more chafing against the demands of plot and character - they could stretch out that fight scene for as many pages as they felt like, with nobody to tell them otherwise. The results were some slick-looking characters like Spawn, but pompous, bloated storytelling. Eventually, the fans caught on. Today, for many comics fans, the real heroes are justly celebrated writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka, and Bill Willingham. Art still matters, of course - sludgy art, as on Rucka's Gotham Central, can bog down excellent storytelling, while great art like Cary Nord's work for Kurt Busiek on Conan can transport the prose. But a dull story is a dull story, however beautifully drawn. And if a story is well-written enough, it'll peek through the cracks of the most uninspired artwork (as in Gotham Central.)
I buy a lot of comics these days - many more than I did when I was part of the putative target audience. And I buy more mainstream comics - and fewer underground comix - than ever before. The decline of the underground is a huge disappointment. A generation of brilliant writer/artists like Chester Brown, Seth, Joe Matt, Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes have either slowed their production way down or moved out of the medium altogether, while few new artists have emerged to pick up the slack.
On the other hand, the mainstream is more vibrant than at any time since 1987 - the year of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as well as Maus, and not surprisingly the year that got me excited about comics again after rejecting them in early adolescence. Writers like Bendis and Rucka are exploring not just the psychology of individual characters, but how those characters intersect to create rich mythic universes.
For those of you who've read my previous posts on Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, and the politics of myth, you could see why I'd be interested in these themes, and fascinated by these writers' explorations in these rich, resonant universes of story. In the next few weeks, I'll try to work through my ideas about these storytellers, one writer at a time.
Posted by tedf at 05:38 PM | Comments (2)
April 15, 2005
A Little D&D/LOTR Humor . . .
Posted by tedf at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)
March 31, 2005
Mashup: Family Circus vs. H.P. Lovecraft
This project reminds me of another bootleg classic, "You're Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown," a very illegal minicomic which featured a series of Peanuts strips with the word balloons replaced with disturbing, sexually explicit dialogue.
Beatrice.com: I Will Tell You About Something Else Horrific I Witnessed*
Posted by tedf at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2005
Illo Watch
My friend Andrea has started a great blog on a subject I never would have thought could generate so much smart commentary: the daily New York Times editorial page illustration. Andrea's analysis combines Edward Tufte's focus on informational clarity with a long-time comix fan's appreciation for the aesthetics of line drawing. And I don't know where she learned so much about the history of illustration - it's one of those weird subjects that doesn't just fall through the cracks (the way comics do) but falls through the cracks between the cracks (between, say, political cartoons and graphic design). If anyone's going to write "Understanding Illos" - a version of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" for this vital little field - it'll be Andrea.
Here's her take on one of the more provocative recent NYT illos:
Illo Watch: "A Force for Good," 3/3/05
Posted by tedf at 02:29 AM | Comments (1)