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2009 Tweeter of the Year: Brian Michael Bendis

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2009 Sheister of the Year: Alan Moore

Poking around Amazon using their generally quite useful Customers-who-Bought-this-Item-also-Bought feature, I came across Alan Moore's 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, which was apparently published to little fanfare back in October. The book is something of a weird hybrid of neo-Victorian cultural criticism and a 'history' of pornography. The following is taken from the book's description on Amazon:

With each new technological advance, pornography has proliferated and degraded in quality. Today, porn is everywhere, but where is it art? 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom surveys the history of pornography and argues that the success and vibrancy of a society relates to its permissiveness in sexual matters. This history of erotic art brings together some of the most provocative illustrations ever published, showcasing the evolution of pornography over diverse cultures from prehistoric to modern times. Beginning with the Venus of Willendorf, created between 24,000-22,000 bce, and book-ended by contemporary photography, it also contains a timeline covering major erotic works in several cultures. 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom ably captures the ancient and insuppressible creative drive of the sexual spirit, making this book a treatise on erotic art.

I don't really want to spend too much time parsing terms here, but it is noteworthy that this description uses the terms 'pornography' and 'erotic art' pretty much interchangeably, which strikes me as somewhat problematic. Just to satisfy my curiosity on the matter, I checked the OED's definition for pornography (a gesture I imagine Moore would malign as somehow perpetuating troublesome Anglo-Saxon establishment patriarchy) and it seems that the key determinant of pornography is that it is "intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings." Erotic art, on the other hand, is generally not, in my experience, created expressly for the purposes of titillation, although some titillation can be part of it, but rather to engender other aesthetic, affective or even socio-political associations.

Semantics aside, there seem to be two major threads suggested in this blurb: first, that as technology advances, porn quality suffers; and second, that there is a causal connection within societies or cultures between sexual permissiveness and cultural advancement or civilization. The first issue is little more than a standard permutation of technophobic arguments, insofar as they relate to creativity. Whether you are talking about music or literature or plastic arts, the notion that technology drives quality down is a canard generally resorted to by aging establishment figures who fear the dreaded slide to irrelevance. What technology does is put the tools of creativity in the hands of more people--it democratizes art. It also means that more content is generated and distributed and let's be real, most people's art sucks. So while it might appear that there is a direct link between computers and bad porn, what you really have is more porn more easily broadcast.

What really sort of set my critical machinery to work was the idea that Alan Moore, who can't write a narrative to save his life, is going to argue, in 90 pages, mind you, that a culture's success hinges on its attitudes to sexuality? It gets worse. In the spot that Amazon reserves for blurbs from reviews of the featured work, you'll find this:

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. (Alan Moore)

There are so many problems here that it's difficult to decide where to begin, so I suppose I'll begin at the beginning. I am just going to go ahead and guess that by "sexually progressive cultures," he really means ancient Greece. Okay, so ancient Greece did give us literature and philosophy and civilization (I'm not really sure about "the rest," though), but they were also certainly far from an ideal civilization, at least according to the sort of quaint sixties-era morality that Moore tends to espouse in his books and interviews. They had slaves, they participated in all sorts of atrocities in war, they were certainly arrogant, nationalistic, racist xenophobes. They also seem to have thought very little of women.

On the other end of things, I can only guess that by "sexually restrictive cultures" he is referring in general to Christian societies and likely more specifically to the Anglophone West (read: US/UK). Again, I haven't read the book, but I'm really curious to know how Moore deals with the thesis destroying phenomenon of the incredible flowering of erotic literature and art in Victorian England--a society that has become synonymous with prudishness--or if he just avoids the topic altogether.



Besides, the sentence above is nothing more than a bad Orson Welles ripoff. Specifically, Moore is borrowing (I would argue stealing) and perverting perhaps the most famous line from The Third Man. Anyone who's seen the movie will know what I am talking about, but it's in the scene when Welles's Harry Lime and Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins are talking in that great ferris wheel and Martins is objecting to the sorts of black market activities that Lime is involved with on moral grounds. Lime poo-poos Martins's moralism and dramatizes his point, saying:

in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Of course, Welles's version works historically, literarily and rhetorically, while Moore's does not. But the real point here is that Moore is basically a sheister who takes advantage of the generally low cultural literacy of much of his audience by ripping off his predecessors and passing it off as original. Back in the spring when everybody was rediscovering what a boring book Watchmen is, the blog of our favorite local comics shop featured a post that was a general appreciation of Moore and his work. In the course of the piece, the author noted that he had read pretty much all of his comics and even owned a copy of his novel Voice of the Fire, which he admitted had "bested" him thus far.

Moore's novel involves a series of interconnected stories taking place over several thousand years, but always in the same place in England, and each with its own narrator, including one who is mentally challenged. Admirers of the book will often laud its 'experimental' narrative techniques. Yeah, maybe 20-80 years ago when these various techniques were first developed. The following is from Amazon's description of Edward Rutherfurd's Sarum, which was published in 1987: "Rutherfurd's sweeping saga of the area surrounding Stonehenge and Salisbury, England, covers 10,000 years." And a book that uses multiple narrators, including one who is mentally challenged? Really? Does Moore really think his readers haven't read The Sound and the Fury?

Clearly he does and while perhaps there are large numbers of Moore's fans who aren't up on their Faulkner, there are also plenty who are and apparently they don't give a shit. Granted, the novel is not Moore's primary medium, so one can hardly expect a masterpiece. But his readers also seem to employ a similarly myopic approach to his comics. There is no better example of this than Moore's bafflingly popular 80s-era comics deconstruction Watchmen. Whenever I'm put in the uncomfortable position of adumbrating Watchmen's numerous problems with a 'sophisticated' comics reader, they invariably resort to the "but it was so new and groundbreaking for its time" defense. In the first place, even if that were true, that alone wouldn't make the book worth reading today. And besides, it isn't really true in the first place. As Brandon pointed out in the piece he wrote on Milligan and Fegredo's Enigma as part of our "Um, I Don't Really Like Watchmen Week," Watchmen wasn't the first major superhero deconstruction, it was just the first shamelessly self-promoting superhero deconstruction.

And that's just it, Alan Moore is a shameless self-promoter, which helps to explain the latest of his productions to surface in this, his annus mirabilis, the self-proclaimed "First Underground Magazine of the 21st Century," Dodgem Logic. I have to believe that this tagline cannot be serious--does he not realize that we are about to enter the tenth year of this century? Does he honestly think that all of the thousands upon thousands of crackpot geniuses armed with MacBooks and the latest self-publishing software have just been sitting on their hands, waiting for him to ring in the new century ten years late? Besides, the idea that something published under the name "Alan Moore" can be considered 'underground' strikes me as unbearably cynical and disingenuous. This is a guy who priggishly removes his name when his mega-blockbuster comics are adapted into mega-blockbuster movies and who fancies himself as somehow anti-establishment when comics shops around the world order his books by the score. Alan Moore is the bloody establishment.


It occurred to me, though, as I was thumbing through a copy of Dodgem Logic at my local comics shop, that Alan Moore is just a late-20th/early-21st century version of Fyodor Dostoevsky, but without the occasional flashes of stunning brilliance. Dostoevsky, with his grotesque beard and paranoid politics, was afflicted with graphomania--he was literally compelled to write, sometimes covering his hands and arms with illegible scrawls when he ran out of paper. Aside from his famed novels and short stories, Dostoevsky founded a literary journal with his brother and also published the astoundingly prolix Diary of a Writer in order to give his compulsion an outlet. Despite the great power of many of his books, nearly all of them contain some level of the bizarre, nativist, anti-semitic and xenophobic political views that he developed after serving time in Siberia. There is unquestionably a similar paranoid streak in Moore's work, the sort of contradictory pining for the years of Nixon and Reagan that one often notes in the rantings of particularly batty liberals. There is a wistfulness in books like V for Vendetta, Watchmen or even the promotional copy for Dodgem Logic that gives one the sense that the guy really wants society to implode into a dystopic morass.

Whatever his wishes on the matter, it's clear that the economic meltdown has been good for business. As we bravely head into the next decade, one can only hope that people will start heading back to work and Americans can go back to caring more about who's gonna win on American Idol than the next election, if only because that's a general indication that things are well in the world. Alan Moore isn't going away any time soon, but his peculiar blend of paranoid pessimism and literary larceny isn't helping anyone. I'll take Grant Morrison's loony optimism over Moore any day.

The Negative Zone: What If... & Continuity

Something that (most) of us lose as we get older are those “What If?” conversations, born waiting for the bus before school or in the cafeteria: “Dude, what if MODOK killed the Avengers?” or “What if Batman just used guns and killed the Joker?”. Every serious fan has had these conversations at one point or another, some of them lead to more serious conversations (What would you do if there was a real zombie outbreak?) and some not so much (Do you think Plastic Man can just make his dick look like a truck and drive it?), but no matter the case, it’s a big part of the culture because it's both fun and escapist and in a roundabout way, dead serious and connects all kinds of ways to the real world.

Marvel’s What If series has been putting those thoughts into print since 1977, before many of today’s readers were even alive. Stories like What If Spider-Man Joined The Fantastic Four and What If The Beast and The Thing Had Continued To Mutate? give us a look at what could have happened, maybe if a different writer had been behind the wheel or the company was in a different place. It's officially-sanctioned fan-fic and it's awesome.

While these issues are “alternate” story lines or character developments, there are also the stories that are just for fun, like What If Captain America Had Lived In The Civil War? and the classic What If Sgt. Fury had Fought World War Two in Space? which have no real basis in anything, even if they stem from an original issue or story line. These are the gems of the series, what makes What If exciting.

Although outside of 616-Universe continuity, there have been a few issues that have spawned their own series, such as Spider-Girl, a fan favorite that always manages to get cancelled, and the many steps into Marvel’s New Universe and other alternate realities.

While Marvel still does What If stories, they remain alternate paths to mainly event comics, the two most recent being What If? Secret Invasion and What If? World War Hulk. These books give two or three different endings to what could have been, like what if the Skrulls had won?

While these are still interesting, they honestly aren’t worth the print, simply not as entertaining as older issues like What if Wolverine Was Lord of the Vampires?, or even What If The Gamma Bomb Spawned A Thousand Hulks. In their own way, these "What If" stories are in continuity even as they're set-up to be out of continuity. It's weird. They're contained in their craziness so they just don't really work. Like, how do you make something like What If? boring?

DC Comic’s Elseworlds stories, like Superman: Red Son, deliver here where Marvel doesn’t, and it’s pretty rare you see me praising the “other” company. Something we need, all comics fans--hardcore and novice--are issues we can pick up without strings attached. Something that's both a breather from all the super-involved week-to-week, month-to-month event and sub-event craziness and just kinda hits you as a pure, awesome comic. And you get that when a What If? is done right and by "done right" I mean, "done like the old ones".

What If issues of the past were either self contained or at most one or two issues, current character continuity was never important to the story within. We, as readers, want these stories. Non-continuity, original, although sometimes strange, really works. It’s why Jesse loves Marvel Fanfare and why we all tried to love Wednesday Comics and Strange Tales.

Our new way of finding these stories are through comics like Mark Waid's Superman-like Irredeemable, where one day the strongest hero in the world decides to kill everyone. While the series is good, possibly great, it would be better if it were actually about Superman, and not a newly created character. At this point, there shouldn't be anything Superman--iconic hero for decades or not--can't do in a comic book. It's almost as if he should be part of public domain or something, so Mark Waid could use the caves of history and context Superman has behind him for something like Irredeemable or so your favorite indie weirdo could draw him all weird, doing stuff Siegel and Schuster never imagined. What If? comics of today should follow the thirty year old formula, it's changes like these that make you think "What If they listened to their fans once in a while?"

Cliffhanger Endings & Ba & Moon's Daytripper

Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of the comic book storytelling form is the cliffhanger ending. While it was once comics' bread and butter and indeed, still packs a fun wallop when you read Golden, Silver, and even Bronze Age comics, even in collected form--meaning, even when the cliffhanger is immediately resolved--it's simply schtick when dropped into the deeply knowing, all-encompassing irony of the contemporary comics world. Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth would be one recent example, where each and every issue ends on a "Oh man, what will come from this?" revelation. It's grown tired. Once the deer girl showed up, I wasn't even interested in where it was going to go.

And so, it's all the more impressive that Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon's new mini-series Daytripper ends with the ultimate cliffhanger--the murder of the main character--and doesn't leave you cold and annoyed by the calculation of the guys behind the comic. We'll see how this all turns out, but it seems that what Daytripper's gonna do in the next nine issues, is bounce around to bits and pieces of the main character's life in some attempt to have us understand and empathize with Bras de Olivia Domingos, obituary writer, aspiring "real" writer, and yeah, on the final page of the comic, victim of a gunshot during a robbery.

This ending is also less cheap, less schticky than most because it's a comic book about causality and random-ness and so, there's nothing contrived about the odd shift the comic takes on its last page. The reader has been following Bras since the morning and well, this is how his evening played-out. It's "unexpected", it's odd, it's abnormal, but that's the whole point! Ba and Moon tease readers not with "How will Bras get out of this one?" or wow, "my understanding of [insert wonky comics universe here] has been totally flipped upside down" but with, "what new deeply personal pieces of information and experience will I glean from the next issue of Daytripper?" It's about mortality and the whole "one day you're here and then you're gone" contingencies that we just try to ignore most of the time because if we didn't ignore them, we'd go insane or just off ourselves.

And so, all the stuff slyly crammed in between the casual, rolling narrative of Daytripper--his relationship with his father and mother, his father's fame, is rather thinly-sketched out girlfriend--will slowly poke out here and there, in each issue. The cliffhanger still hangs on our desire for "facts" and "closure" and all that and it additionally hangs-on our natural desire for dirt/gossip on people, but all for the noble purpose of explaining a person as best one can and exercising our empathy/sympathy muscles...a noble goal for comic books.

Marvel Fanfare vs. Wednesday Comics & Strange Tales

Variety's the spice of life, but it's the enemy of comics. At least until recently, with both Marvel and DC visiting a creator-driven variety magazine format with Strange Tales and Wednesday Comics. Although vastly different in content, they both share the same intent: to give readers more bang for their buck with multiple, high quality stories wrapped into one package.

The problem with both series' is in part, that with raising the quality and number of creators, up goes the cost of the comic. In addition, they take creators out of their element and provide maybe a little too much variety. Strange Tales features traditionally independent creators and challenges them to make short funny super hero comics, and the first issue--from a quality standpoint--was a success. The next two issues provided inconsistencies in quality and a difficult choice for readers who may have just wanted to read a couple of their favorite creators buried within.

Wednesday comics successes and failures have been pretty well documented. It has far too wide a variety of creators lumped together so no matter how eclectic your tastes, there was guaranteed to be some things you disliked. The format of one, full-page to work with released weekly worked for a couple contributors but the majority seemed lost. You can only get so far with a cool idea before it turns into a gimmick, and unfortunately, that’s what happened to Wednesday Comics .

Marvel Fanfare had a similar approach to giving comics’ top talent free reign over premiere characters, telling high quality stories, and at an increased cost, but it worked a whole lot better. During Fanfare's ten year run (1982-1992) it featured a wide variety of characters and creators but focused on one at a time. It gave control to the reader by presenting a solid main story, so whatever your preference on the character or creative team that month. you could choose. Whether good, bad, or in between you knew exactly what you were getting with each issue.

Fanfare knows that it’s a comic book and doesn’t try to pretend to be anything different. Creators told stories mostly within the confines of a single issue. This restricted the contributors just enough so that they could be creative within the boundaries of the comic while still playing to their strength as artists.

Part of the justification of the price ($1.25 in 1982 when most titles were $.60) was the added bonus of pinup art pages. These are full-page spreads from an artists' portfolios depicting classic Marvel characters. It’s complete eye candy but it forces the reader to slow down and observe--and that’s something that’s lost in most comics today. Usually when I’m reading through a regular comic, I breeze right through it and come back to re-read later, but when I hit the pin-ups, I always head back and check out the rest of the issue in a similar fashion.

Like anything else, some issues are better than others, but here are some of the best. The ones that work within the confines of Marvel Fanfare's editorial stance and stretch that stance to its limits:

Issues #22 and #23 “Night of the Octopus” by Robert McKenzie and Ken Steacy

Tony Stark is showing off his new impregnable super villain prison when Doctor Octopus summons his adamantium arms and breaks out. Of course, Iron Man shows up but he is completely outmatched by Octopus’ second pair of autonomous indestructible arms. His armor is scrapped and stock in his company plummets as investors lose faith in his expensive prison. The story is solid but Steacy’s art is just incredible. He shows Doctor Octopus as a completely disgusting human being without over doing it. Octopus’ adamantium arms are legitimately scary when seen ripping Iron Man’s armor to pieces, all simply communicated by the the tension in Steacy’s art: Combining bright primary colors and an odd air-brushed effect with heavy shadows that highlights hero and villain at the same time.

Issue #29 “A Terrible Thing to Waste…” by John Byrne

John Byrne tells a Hulk story in all full-page spreads. A Native American sitting in the desert stops the Hulk rampage with one word, “Friend.” Byrne subtly shows the Hulk shrinking in size as he is won over by this mysterious stranger. The Hulk is more than just a mindless brute, but not in the sappy clichéd way we're used to in "sensitive" Hulk stories. He’s just slightly more in control of his actions than normal and that’s enough to illustrate that there's a mind inside that green noggin. The man eventually betrays Hulk and there's a particularly devastating death scene of two psychically-linked super villains. The loss of friendship is the main thrust here and the idea that Hulk's anger ultimately stems from some genuine sense of loss is the kind of emotional investment that makes a superhero story a stand-out.

Issue #41 “…Perchance to Dream” by Walt Simonson and Dave Gibbons

It’s a dark and stormy night and Dr. Strange is dreaming. He ends up in the city of dreams, which are ruled by giant creatures that try to trick him into staying in their universe. Simonson’s story is essentially a dream sequence but has Dr. Strange questioning and exploring his magical abilities. The triumph is the panel work and the imagination of Gibbons, giving a palpable feeling of a creepy dream that somehow feels all too real. Gibbons gives his giant creatures a strange, sci-fi scientific texture that helps make them memorable--they seem like something that would lurk in a dream world.

Honorable Mentions: #18 featuring Captain America by Roger Stern, Frank Miller, and Joe Rubinstein, #19 featuring Cloak and Dagger by Bill Mantlo, Tony Salmons, et al., #30 featuring Moon Knight by Ann Nocenti and Brent Eric Anderson, and #34 Mike Mignola portfolio.

Beast Week Coda: Wailing for her Demon Lover

"He's um . . . I don't know, kind of inscrutable." These words, spoken by Colette at the opening of Part Two of Marian Churchland's Beast in an abortive attempt to describe the book's eponymous anti-hero to her friend Jane, could just as easily be used to describe Churchland's book itself. Beast is that rare example of a comic--though we could easily apply this to novels or movies--that, by borrowing elements from other works, artists, movements, forms and genres, becomes something utterly new and unclassifiable and still somehow manages to be beautiful, meaningful and affecting. Originating from a dream that is not a little reminiscent of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Churchland borrows the structure of her favorite fairy tale, using it to construct an ambivalently Freudian, post-feminist pleasure dome, populated by Italian Renaissance artists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and even a little bit of Byron, by way of Paul Pope.


Though Churchland's book ultimately deviates from its original in many fundamental ways, it is useful to remember that "Beauty and the Beast" is a tale that begins with a father's prostitution of his daughter. Beast's opening, in which Colette is taken by her father to a mysterious sculpting commission that he arranged, imposes a sense of ambiguity, the feeling that something is being withheld from the reader, that we don't have all the information, which propels the whole of the narrative. The relationship between Colette and her father is clearly transactional; she relies on her him to divvy out whatever "bottom-feeder" art commissions he is able to, but the revelation that he is unaware that she is no longer with her boyfriend (whose name he struggles to remember) reveals that they have long since retreated from any traditional notions of familial intimacy. The scene is a perfect, exceptionally economical opening to the book, introducing each of the book's major themes--gender politics, creative integrity, menacing and complex sexuality--in a scant few pages.

One of the fascinating things about Beast, and perhaps that aspect of the book that makes you want to keep going back to it, looking at it more closely, is that Churchland resists taking any of its elements to its logical conclusion and therefore pigeonholing the narrative. Thus, while the story has some very definite things to say about women and creativity and power, these statements are problematized by some of the book's imagery and the ambiguous sexual position of Colette vis a vis Beast. A great subtle example is the the juxtaposition of panels which show the upper portion of the Carrera marble slab atop Colette's body from the waist down. At first glance, this appears a relatively straight-forward association of the artist with her medium. But a closer look--perhaps a dirtier mind--reveals the great white phallus of the marble towering over Colette's crotch.


Of course, Colette is only able to complete her sculpture when she abandons the gradual chipping away of the chisel for the power drill's penetration. In effect, Colette denatures the marble's monotonous masculinity by drilling it full of holes. The image, then, is one in which the masculine and feminine are present together--the marble embodies both qualities.


This sort of fluidity of imagery and representation is consistent with Churchland's illustration strategies. Colette, though undeniably gorgeous and feminine, has a boy's long arms and narrow hips. The aggressively Byronic Beast, who owes perhaps just a small debt to Paul Pope's Batman, occupies a similarly ambiguous position with respect to gender, with his long delicate fingers and narrow shoulders.


I don't mean for any of this to suggest that this is what Beast is about. Indeed, as I mentioned above, it is the book's ambiguity, its consistent refusal to lend itself to one particular reading or interpretation that makes it so interesting. There are lots of other curious questions planted throughout the book, such as the hinted at association of Roz with Cecilia or Colette's highly unstable hair-length, but they aren't questions which beg resolution, they just present interesting and variable readings.

The point, of course, is that Churchland has created an admirably, no, remarkably complex and rewarding narrative that augments her already apparent (to me, anyway) illustration skills. This bodes well for those of us who like to read smart comics that aren't smarty-pants comics, comics which are personal but not sappy-autobiographical. Marian Churchland officially enters that growing pantheon of interesting and talented creators who are bucking the typical categorizations of high and low comics and in doing so pointing toward a rich possible future for the medium.

Beanworld: Remember Here When You Are There!

Of all the comics I've read, few are as flawless as Larry Marder’s magnum opus, Beanworld. Dark Horse Books republished the hard to find classic earlier this year, splitting up the original twenty-one issues into two hardcover books. After fifteen years on hold, Marder returns to the Beanworld and brings us new stories, not in issue form, but as a new hardcover book, trade, "graphic novel" called Beanworld: Remember Here When You Are There!.

We here at comicsforserious.com are obviously obsessed with the series, but unfortunately for some comics readers it’s a hard sell. People work too hard at trying to “get” Beanworld and not simply observe the Beanworld. To enjoy what is truly the most immersive comics experience ever, you must begin like the still growing characters: Clueless, overwhelmed by the world around you.

The one caution offered in each book (“Please do not search for scientific or magical explanations; you won’t find any. Beanworld is a separate reality. It’s not just a place, it’s a process. It is what it is—and th-that’s all folks”") is the perfect, and only, way to introduce someone to the series. Beanworld only works when you allow yourself to be an observer, not a reader. You have to let it work out in front of you.

Although all us comics and science fiction readers avoid the idea that our little “hobby” is escapism, it’s the reality of comics. But the less discussed reality of comics is how that escapism actually allows us to consider and reflect on the "real world" in new ways. Most comics are based in the world we live in, New York City being the framework for almost every comic that takes place in a city, current political issues portrayed via space wars or superheroes . Non-sci-fi books like Lemire’s Essex County trilogy hit home because we can put ourselves into the work on an emotional level. That foundation in every day life is enhanced by the art and it's strange exaggerations or simplifications.

But the complete separation between Beanworld and our world allows you to "understand" the Beanworld much the same way we "understand" this world: In tiny, ever-evolving pieces of information and experience. You can’t make guesses as to what’s going to happen because the Beanworld isn’t even complete. Pieces of information about the sociological and biological structures and even about the physical structure of the world itself slowly reveal themselves. Think about it: These first three books have only been the “Spring” cycle of the Beanworld epic, presumably allowing for three more seasons to complete the journey of the beans. We as readers are as much in the dark as Mr. Spook and the rest of the beans, and because of this, each new piece of information benefits them as much as us.

A lot of the “black and white comics boom” classics and almost classics have in effect, been lost for some time now. The issues are harder to find, no one's talking about them, and there's not even a trade available. Stuff from well-known, oft-discussed legends and those white box heroes too. For awhile now, Beanworld was one of these, but it's been saved from this limbo and given a second life, first by Dark Horse reissues and now, by brand new work from the creator Larry Marder.

Beast Week: Realism & Expressionism

First thing I noticed when I picked up Beast was the back cover: A close-up of an oil painting, so close as to only fit the sweeping brush strokes, capturing the 3D effect of thickly-applied paint on more paint. The kind of thing it's rare of a 2D image to recreate. The brush strokes there are so real you expect to be able to feel them and at the same time, they represent nothing; they're totally abstract. After reading Beast, this makes perfect sense; the back cover encapsulates the story’s tension between realism and expressionism.

On the one hand, Churchland gives you panels of just hands, messy crossword puzzles, or dirt around the toilet, and on the other, you get Beast and all the otherworldly stuff he brings with him. It’s the driving force at the center of the comic, highlighting Colette's problems, and more simply, it makes the book interesting to read. Because the story focuses so much on emotions, the headbutting of real and unreal that goes on is perfect. Yeah, emotions are these weird swirly Beast eyes, but they’re also this intensely real things--frustration with dad, an obsession with passivity, a complex break-up--that have the same complexities that Churchland puts in the physical world around Colette.

She’s got to figure things out--just like any of us would--on the fly, in the moment, when it's right in front her face. The characters have this Cassavetes-like realism to them, where their emotions are understated and hardly spoken, but it's clear what they are and that a cavalcade of fears and anxieties are just bubbling underneath the surface. The dialogue has the same sort of realism, with the characters speaking more like actual people rather than characters using comic-book-speak.

Beast is always the one bringing these emotions to the surface, acting as a foil for Colette. When you first read meet him it’s not clear whether Beast is even real. Certainly the first night she’s there Colette wonders the same thing. The first time she meets him, he tells her a story that makes her cry. This is instantly a powerful moment since Churchland has already established--through the story's inherent realism--Colette's rather unsure, inactive character. You know the weight of what's happening even though it's near the beginning, and you can tell she's not a person to cry over everything. Beast is this intangible force that makes Colette leave her comfort zone to explore this unknown world/person that is the future, herself, emotions, creativity, etc.

Even though Beast is central to the story, Churchland talks about reining in the fairy tale elements in her afterword to the book. She says that when she was a kid she always thought that the part when the Beast turned into a handsome Prince was disappointing and fake. There's a natural attraction to fairy tales but any thinking, contemporary reader can't help but yearn for something a little more to them. Something that doesn't play-out quite so perfectly and harmoniously. So, Churchland keeps her Beast lurking on the fringes never gaining control of what is Colette's story.

It’s a clever flip on the classic fairy tale but it still keeps the central theme of transformation. And that’s what makes Beast great because no matter what is going on, each moment always remains rooted in the brain of Colette--be it real or unreal. It’s Colette’s transformation and it's The Beast that allows it to happen. And when Colette finally comes to terms with things, we’re never quite sure what she comes to terms with. Through her work and each encounter with Beast, she gets more comfortable. She starts to listen to him and realizes he’s not something that just comes in through windows and sends chills up your spine but some kind of hard to figure out inspirational force. The Beast is never defined even though he is a tangible character. He’s purposefully kept ambiguous and represent lots of things and one thing. But what's that one thing? Only Colette knows. The ending is the final culmination of it all. Plowing through crayon shadows to get to a photograph. It's art breaking through to our reality, not the other way around.

Beast Week: King City #3 Cover

This week, the third issue of Brandon Graham's King City came out and it's got a cover by Marian Churchland. Like her guest work on Elephantmen this summer, Churchland's cover here has the strange effect of very much keeping in the tradition of the comic she's guest drawing and usurping many of its long-established traditions.

The tension of Elephantmen was always the very smart writing rubbing up against the very typical IMAGE style art--the art's really good, but it's full of muscles, guns, and boobs, so you know what I mean--and Churchland relieved that tension by providing art that was as sensitive and realistic as the writing. The series couldn't sustain itself if this tension were permanently resolved, but for a few issues, it was a delight.

"I grew to particularly like the Miki character, despite my initial grumblings about how drawing wasp-waisted big-tittied ladies is not my thing, and I wanted to do something with her beyond simply illustrating the issue."

That's a quote from Churchland's livejournal and it's an interesting way to enter the like, side-goals of her work. Namely, it seems to me at least, a polite, wise corrective to how most females look--and with Beast act--in most comics. Neither Elephantmen or King City are "sexist" or anything or even negative in their portrayal--I think there's an irony to the way the use absurd proportions for the women--but well, Churchland brings the female characters down to earth in really unprecedented ways.
Above is a terrible photo--sorry no scanner--of the character from King City that Churchland put on the cover. This is of course, Brandon Graham's version. Especially here, you're witnessing the ironic use of the "typical" female in comics art, as the entire point of the character here is to idealize her. To make her unreal, too attractive. She's like a rap video girl and that's awesome. It's also of course, it's own version of "feminism" in the sense that girls shaped like this are just as under-represented in popular media as "average"-shaped girls, but that's neither here nor there right now. The point is to just look at the way Churchland's retained the character and her characteristics, while also slanting the details towards her own interests.
Notice the spindly fingers and the boney arms here. All of these smaller features are aimed at contrasting with the awesomely giant ass the character has--something Churchland retains and maybe even enlarges--but they're also the reality of a particularly thin or oddly-proportioned person. And there are wrinkles in her clothes? Around the sleeve of the hand holding the cigarette. These kinds of details poke through and add a lot to the image. There's also the weird way that part of her arm--around the armpit--sticks out of the dress; it's sliding off provocatively, but also because maybe the dress doesn't fit her right.



For a grasp on rarefied form of "feminism" going on in Churchland's work--a feminism that is basically more like, coming at it from a point of view us dudes are unaware of or not sensitive enough to and nothing more--it's important to notice how indeed, the absurd proportions are keep intact. And also how, the clothes (a tight dress, thigh highs) are given some kind of earthy reality to them, making the outfit both a little more absurd and that much more attractive.

That napkin or handkerchief hanging halfway off the barstool, a nearly empty packet of cigarettes on top of it, is just a small touch of regularity to the image. The same way Churchland peppers Beast with grime on the toilet or numbers scratched on a wall, does she place these slabs of how-stuff-really-is into the image. These are the things glossed over or purposefully forgotten by a lot of artists--especially comics artists--because they de-idealize the image because well, that's the tradition of comics.

And now, the best part of the cover and indeed, the most actively "real": The reinforced toes on the stockings and the rubber soles of the shoes. This is most certainly the kind of thing a lot of people just don't think about, especially if you're a guy. I don't wish to paint Churchland into the corner of "female comics artist" but in a way, she's the proper kind of fact-checker, corrective to a male-dominated comics world. Most guys are not going to think about the toes of a pair of stockings or how even shoes you'd go out to a bar or club in, indeed have dopey rubber soles. When it comes to women's clothing, especially "sexy" women's clothing, all the seams and pieces are ignored for the greater whole. Part of this has to do with a general forgetting of the details, but it also has to do with a tendency to objectify and simplify chicks and chick stuff. Churchland's like "funk that!".

And the effect on the art is not only this subtly political stuff about gender and all that, but a wordless message to sensitive viewers/readers that the person behind the pen here really cares and really thinks about comics stuff and the real world. Churchland's work stands-out because of its careful attention to detail and its thoughtfulness. She doesn't lose track of the importance of things looking good--and in the case of this cover, looking attractive--but it's done on her own terms; wrapped up in the details so often overlooked, but a notable part of everyday living for any female.

The 24-7 coverage of celebrities and celebrity culture has brought about probably one hundred times the number of images we see of famous people. That's to say, the "on-the-fly" or live, untouched photos of someone now far outweigh the fancy, glossy, photo-shopped pictures in magazines. This recent photo of Rihanna, out somewhere or another reminded me of Graham's King City character and particularly, Churchland's variation: That mix of untouchable beauty/sexuality and palpable reality. Most comics art's the spread in Vogue, Churchland's art is the in-the-moment, dress a little wrinkled, candid shot.

Beast Week: Carrara Marble

It’s a rare experience to find a comic that obviously holds great personal importance to the artist, and at the same time, is equally meaningful to the reader. Not to mention a book which is exciting, beautiful and has awesome references to Renaissance art. Marian Churchland’s Beast combines all these things for a wonderfully mastered debut graphic novel.

Most of what I love about this book comes out of my own subjective interpretations of events and details, but I think that’s what makes this book so special. Any artist, writer, or anyone who’s ever created anything can undoubtedly see themselves in Colette, the main character. Her relationship with the dark, amorphous character of Beast accurately captures the confusing, scary, and amazing feeling that comes with the pursuit of artistic motivation. You can feel its presence in a room, maybe you can even put your hand on it, but there will always be times where you question whether or not it’s even real. Anyway, she says it all better than I can.

The art alone speaks on the creative process. Churchland’s visible pencil lines and light, tonal washes seem delicate and deliberate. It’s like looking at an x-ray of a comic, where you can see each individual line and sense all the care that went into making the piece complete. The only issue I have with the art, which Churchland acknowledges in her afterword, is her treatment of Colette’s face. Her expression tends to be repetitive and difficult to read emotion on. From looking at other examples of Churchland’s work, like her issues of Elephantmen and even the work from her personal livejournal and deviantart, she definitely knows what’s up with faces. Perhaps it’s just a problem with the character of Colette in particular, but I feel like Churchland’s art flourishes when she goes for the less literal, more cartoonish expression. I stand by Scott McCloud’s assertion that the less detail in a face, the more room a viewer has to project themselves onto a character (See Understanding Comics, pg. 36). With the meaningful story in Beast, I feel like the answer to the issue of Colette’s face may be closer to what Churchland does in her awesome idea for heated pajamas.

The bean-shaped smile, the sideways apostrophe eyes are goofy, sure, but those objects, when abstracted like that, are read more as symbols than the actual objects they are supposed to be. We already know the meaning they convey. It sounds obtuse, but this technique has the possibility to read deeply into a character's emotions.

As a senior art history major in the process of trying to further my education, and taking steps to make a career out of what I love, the themes in Beast have particular resonance to me. The inclusion of Carrara marble in the book is a factually accurate detail which firmly places Beast's past in Renaissance Florence, but for me it has this dopey, really personal connection which melds the book to my experience. I haven't really been to Carrara, but I took a train through it, and in my hazy, half asleep and madly homesick brain, I have a distinct image of how the mountains looked like they were covered in snow, when what I was seeing was actually marble. I know it's like beyond cheesey, it's like a huge chunk of the stinkiest Limburger from old cartoons, but actually seeing (from really far away, granted) the place where the marble for greats like Michelangelo's David came from and getting this kind of intangible sense of vastness and simplicity of nature and art is, you know, really fucking heavy.

The afterword, where Churchland explains the creation of the book, clearly exhibits the devotion and love she has for her work. Both she and her gentleman caller, Brandon Graham, both have this way of writing about working on comics that gives you so much hope about sustained effort and labors of love that you just want to punch all negativity in the face, grab a pen, a brush—whatever, and do the damn thang.

Beast Week: Stuff Around Your Toilet Bowl

There's a scene somewhere in Part Two of Beast where the main character Colette, takes a break from sculpting to take a bath. The simple fact that Colette's taking a bath in this grimy, kinda creepy rundown house shows how far her characters' comfort--and confidence--has grown since the beginning of the book (Churchland is really good at this kind of squashing of emotions into a single image or scene) but as the scene moves on, more and more piece of Colette's personality rolls out. Details that stretch beyond her character's "emotional arc" and junk poke through.

Sitting in the tub, she recalls her ex-boyfriend's much nicer bathroom and this sends her thinking of/fantasizing him climbing into the bathtub with her. It doesn't go any further than that, but there's something really wise and again, economic, about how sex creeps into Beast here and then slips away. Despite it's meta-fairy tale conceit and it's magic realism, Beast is a book wrapped in tiny pieces of real-ness: dirt on the toilet seat, the "make your dick bigger" e-mails everybody gets, etc. This is not all the comic is, but it's a big part of it and it's all sticking out of the larger, more moving narrative and indeed, makes that narrative a lot more moving.

Because it feels real. It doesn't shout out "gritty" or anything, indeed the narrative is rather mannered, all stuff bubbling under the surface, but suddenly all of it's right there: Something that grounds the story in big, dumb real life. Something that slyly tells the reader "the person writing this lives a life and thinks about shit, the kind of shit a lot of us don't think about". And a big part of life is the dirty around the toilet bowl, or bigger stuff like fretting about one's passivity in the world, and weird stuff like thinking about doing it with an ex even though you basically think the person's a total douche now.

A page or so after the understated sex-fantasy scene, Colette climbs out of the tub and Churchland purposefully shows her naked body. The panel doesn't cut off at her boobs or nothing and there's no like, bathtub fog covering her up somehow, it's just right there. It's understated and it's really in-your-face. At the risk of getting creepy, it's worth nothing that Churchland gives Colette a regular, uh, "bush" or pubic hair. This isn't abnormal in the real world but in comics, it's rare to get nudity this mindfully not erotic. Paradoxically, the reality of it, the accuracy, actually makes it very attractive. I talked about that here though.

This kind of thing, these special touches of detail--sensitive, harsh, sometimes hilarious, often embarrassing--seem like a good place to begin thinking about Beast precisely because it's the kind of thing a lot of people will gloss over for the bigger picture. The genius of Beast--well, part of its genius--is how the bigger picture gains deeper, weirder, more awesome caves of meaning because of its unwavering sensitivity to the small stuff.

Beast Week!

So, this week we're gonna focus on Marian Churchland's book Beast, put out by IMAGE and for sale at any comics store worth anything. Besides just being an excellent "graphic novel"--and it really is, since it's coming out in one big chunk and it very much reads like a real book--it just plain looks really nice, like each and every aspect of the book was thought about and conceptualized, which is nice in a world of comics that either look like crap by accident or are all hip and cool, so they're supposed to look like crap.

It's also exactly the kind of stuff we try to celebrate around here: A smart, complex, literary comic book that still retains a level of wonder and appreciation for comic books as an artform. So yeah, if you haven't read Beast yet, go get it so you can be part of our little Beast book club over here. For right now, I'd love to get some readers' comments about the book, good or bad...

Star Trek vs. Transformers 2

So, J.J Abrams' Star Trek came out on DVD yesterday, so I thought it'd be a good time to revisit it, so you get this lazy re-up of a post from only a few months ago but I think it's worth revisiting to see how/why Star Trek is so good and also, how it really isn't a big blockbuster that Best Buy has all kinds of in-store ads for and stuff. Or rather, it's the good, rarefied kind of blockbuster, you know?...

Even before the absurd racism rushing through the movie (A jive-ass robot...with a gold tooth...really?), Transformers 2 was problematic. We can start with the simple snobby point that it's directed by Michael Bay, he of jingoistic characterization and imagery, or that it was based on a childhood cartoon that itself was pretty racist (something people keep forgetting) just now stretched to marketing-synergy extremes.

Still, simply by being so awesomely explosive and transparently, the party-dude of popular cinema, running down a checklist of audience-pleasing turns and self-justifying thematics, Bay is often sorta celebrated. Armond White's review summed up a near healthy contrarian take on Bay--his review begins "Why waste spleen on Michael Bay?".

As cool as it is when a notable part of the media jumps on some actually racist shit, it's as much because Bay's an easy target as it is actual social/cultural indignation. That Transformers 2 was vilified for its racial hard-headedness and Star Trek not celebrated for its pop-racial sophistication on this front, sorta negates any "searing" critiques of Bay's directorial choices. Had Abrams' Star Trek--written by Roberto Corci and Alex Kurtman (the same two guys behind Transformers 2) and the big, dumb, franchise blockbuster before Transformers 2 stomped onto the scene--not arrived just two months ago, White'd be right. But he's not.

The differences between the movies are clear and fun to list: Meghan Fox's bland beauty vs. Zoe Saldana's rarefied allure, Bay's leadfooted action cutting vs. Abrams' embrace of hand-held chaos and roving single takes, the tension of saying "I love you" between Spock and Uhura vs. Mikaela's cunty frustration with Sam for not uttering those words, the dopey slapstick of Transformers vs. the from the original series dead-pan weirdness. All of these show Star Trek to be both more artistically and socially sensitive than Transformers 2.

In part, this begins with the original show's conceit and the decision to comment or not comment on it. In fact, both directors are essentially "faithful" to the original properties. Bay decided to continue the selfish excess of the 80s (it makes sense as little kids, we loved Transformers, we were 5 yr. old selfish pricks) and Abrams kept-in all the goofball sincere multi-culti 60s stuff of the original Star Trek. When it's 2009 though, and you're doing this, recontextualizing an old time-capsule piece of popular culture, it becomes political. It just does.

There's a scene in Star Trek in which Kirk (at this point a stowaway on the ship, and a total jerk) and Sulu, along with a particularly gung-ho crew member, sky-dive (or something) onto the Romulan's ship. Waiting to leap down, this gung-ho third member is bouncing up and down, full of adrenaline and hubris--in short, he's a character from a Michael Bay movie--as Kirk and Sulu look at him strangely, maybe even sadly. Once they leap, he continues shouting extreme-sports platitudes, and eventually, misses the intended target and gets burned up in the Romulan ship's jets. This scene illustrates what would happen if a Michael Bay character got dropped into Abrams' more studied and realistic (for an action movie) world.

Abrams' perspective in this scene is of course, made more complicated by the character of Kirk, ostensibly the movie's main character and one defined by his daring and arrogance. That's to say, a lot of the time Kirk acts like a Michael Bay character himself and so, having a scene in which a complete arrogant goon vs. a kinda arrogant goon is destroyed by his arrogance is brilliant. It's all about the tiny little details.

Early in the film, we see a very Bay-like flashback to young Kirk stealing his step-dad's car and speeding across a golden, Mid-West vista (it's essentially awful, like, right out of a Bay movie) and it's followed up by a later scene in which a drunk Kirk hits-on Uhura and gets in a fight. What would happen in most movies is that this early awkward assholism would be rectified or shifted to something resembling sensitivity and Uhura, despite her initial disgust for Kirk, would grow to love him...or at least sleep with him.

Not so much in Star Trek, as Kirk never gets "the girl". A scene in which he's shown making-out with a girl at Starfleet Academy is presented as fairly loathsome, sad, even robotic. Even more crazy is that it's Spock who "gets the girl". This shift is not only a "clever" re-up of an old series, but a mindful shift in sensibilities. Abrams' Star Trek rejects Kirk the jerk in favor of Spock's hyper-sincerity. When the movie ends with the famous "Space...the final frontier" and it's spoken by the aged voice of Leonard Nimoy--we're not working with clever revisionism but an ethical improvement on the past.

To base the movie around poetry-reading, In Search Of...-hosting Nimoy vs. the chintzy, hair-pieced, ego-tripping Shatner (the movie's Kirk, when he's at his worst, most selfish, acts Shatner-like) is fascinating. Cynics might chalk this up to some kind of "wussification" of American culture or something, but they'd be missing the nuanced evolution of Kirk's character--both a core decency he clearly gleaned from his father (who we meet before we meet Kirk) mixed with a fuck-it-all sense of confusion a very specific kind of American radical individual feels.

Even at his worst, Kirk's never the gung-ho asshole incinerated by a Romulan ship, but it's through experiences on the Enterprise and the interaction with the ethnically diverse crew that he (and all of them) come together. This is where Star Trek's wizened and realistic understanding of patriotism usurps Michael Bay's U.S of A. belligerence.

Where characters and images in Bay's movie act as short-hands to re-instill played-out, long-internalized values, Star Trek seeks to remind Americans of the importance of plurality and understanding--the rejection of black and white for grey. The Enterprise begins as a sort of "Team of Rivals" and they slowly come to realize their similarities. The merger of Spock and Kirk is, when it finally becomes civil, simply pragmatic, but from that pragmatism it spins into something lasting, true, and worthwhile. Differences are more than accepted, more than celebrated, they're seen as vital.

In this sense, Star Trek indeed, functions like a product of filmmaking or television from the progressive 60s or 70s--what Pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty called, "platoon movies" (100). Platoon movies, Rorty explained, were a byproduct of the pre-60s (pre-P.C) left and "showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side" (100). About the only other successful "platoon movies", that's to say, not movies simply playing on this trope of an ethnically diverse crew working it all out, but really internalizing it, that I can think of in recent years would be Wes Anderson's movies--especially The Life Aquatic.

The movie itself is pragmatic, both giving viewers what's necessary (a ton of action, Saldana in her underwear, bad jokes, old-show reference irony, ethnic jokes) and flipping the script in weird ways, as to never topple over from the unfortunate stupidity necessary for a big-budget movie. Notice the way it glosses over the alien races or nearly pushes all characters not Spock or Kirk to the side, all the while maintaining their humanity...not in a quest to maximize whiteness on the screen, but to treat diversity as a foregone conclusion of life. Abrams is not interested in "other"-ness, even the villains though darkened and evil-ized, get a decent enough reason for their actions beyond simple "evil"--precisely the kind of primitive value system that is literally Bay's meal ticket.

Just as Michael Bay's Transformers 2 begins its second week of hyper-visibility, JJ Abrams' Star Trek makes its way to your city's "dollar" theatre. The decision to see Star Trek maybe again, maybe a third time, over Transformers 2, is not only financially savvy and aesthetically wise, it's ethically prudent too.

-Rorty, Richard. "Achieving Our Country". First Harvard University Press, 1999.

Independents and Strange Tales

Featuring interviews with creators like Kevin Eastman (TMNT, Heavy Metal) and Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), Chris Brandt’s documentary Independents moves slowly away from being about independent comics makers to a film featuring cartoonists conveying one message: “What we are doing is more important than what the other guy is doing.”

“Indie” comics aren’t always necessarily independent, as is often discussed here on this blog. Many comic makers published by Top Shelf and Drawn and Quarterly are considered independent by people who are industry insiders and outsiders. However authors of "regular" books who simply write and aren’t contracted to one publisher wouldn’t be considered “independent” authors. Indie comics makers are really Alternative comics makers, because that’s what these people are really proud of being, the alternative to what is popular. Does independent just mean not Marvel or DC only when we’re talking about comics?

Plenty of people making monthly comics for one of The Big Two aren’t obligated exclusively to one company, and often writers and artists are going back and forth between the comics giants. I’m not talking about an artist who draws one Wolverine one-shot here, I’m talking about people who work on a book month to month.

While I realize being independent is much more often about being capital-"I" Independent--doing things on your own and owning your own work--it becomes more than that. It’s not a matter of just having “not made it”, it’s about not “selling out” to one of the big guys.

This extremely punk rock attitude holds people back, narrowing their already linear thoughts towards art and creativity. It’s like when one of your friends’ crappy bands gets onto MTV and all of your other friends’ crappier bands never change to “stay true”, or become this “experimental project”. This isn’t because everyone should be working for Marvel or DC, but because by trying so hard to not to do what they’re doing, you only box yourself in.

With Strange Tales, Marvel let these work for hire, self-publishing, mostly Indie writers and artists take on their greatest characters. Some of the contributors, like Paul Pope, Dash Shaw, Matt Kindt and Jim Rugg, took the characters and placed their own style of story telling and artistic vision onto the previously existing work to create something attractive to both Marvel readers and fans of their “indie” work who may not regularly pick up a Marvel comic book.

Dash Shaw, known for Body World and Bottomless Belly Button, put his spin on Dr. Strange (specifically Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange run). His story’s perfection comes from Shaw’s ability to place himself, his art, into the world of Dr. Strange, instead of forcing The Sorcerer Supreme into a Shaw-ian place. There's a perfect balance between Shaw the artist and Dr. Strange the character.

While the story ends on a silly note (Strange fighting off a yawn) the rest of the story parodies, but does not talk down to, the original work. Other stories, like Jacob Chabot’s Fantastic Four four page short, Lookin’ Good, Mr. Grimm, are completely silly. The Thing growing a mustache using Chia Pet solution is ridiculous and may never happen in the real comic, but the relationships between the Four Family are on-point, making the ridiculous situation actually funny, and not, you know, ironic.

The other side of Strange Tales is creators who forced the characters into their own styles. Self proclaimed inventor of diary comics James Kochalka’s Hulk Squad Smash reads like the rest of his work. It’s nothing special or new, it’s just a badly drawn, unfunny section in the middle of what is otherwise a perfect comic. Kochalka couldn’t--either he's unable or unwilling--move away from his cutesy style to allow his story to grow. The “Cute over Craft” artist boxed himself in, and sorta put a rut in the issue. It’s the only story that upon a reread I skip, it just steps away from what the rest of the stories are, it stands out only for what it isn’t and not what it is.

Not all of Independents is about what they are not, much of it is about what they are, which is artists. Much of the documentary is about how to succeed in a hard business, regardless if succeeding is selling 100 copies of your mini comic or 100,000 copies of your book.

However, angling themselves against The Big Two, and taking an actual stand against what they do is unfortunate and hurtful only to themselves. Many of these creators and publishers started when comics were very different, but they firmly hold onto their opinions, no matter how irrelevant they are to today’s comics. And they are irrelevant because rarely any comics readers' taste don't include a few super hero books.

Gary Groth of Fantagraphics fame said, referring to super hero comics: “They’ve never been interested in doing work that reflects contemporary life, serious existential issues, independent work, small intimate stories or autobiographical work.” Both Marvel and DC have been taking on race, sex and gender issues since their inception, with a pronounced focus in the 80s--not a shock that it lines-up with "the Black and White boom". Look at something like X-Men: God Loves Man Kills a testament to the real life issues that big dumb ass X-Men deal with. Using a super natural angle to talk about real issues just makes us look at the subject at hand differently, hopefully opening up a few eyes.

Not to be this quote guy, but Linda Medley (Castle Waiting) may have never read a super hero comic in her life but probably stared at the covers: “They’re not risk takers, they’re not trying to communicate, they’re trying to make money and they’re not trying to expand the consciousness of anyone”. Reading Strange Tales may open up lots of super hero readers to independent comics, and I just hope that sometime soon there is a book that ingratiates snobby comix readers to super hero comics, that can make people want to open up a super hero comic for more than big tits and tights.