Another week, another Dogsbody
(The Comics Journal) If it's Friday, it must be time for another episode of TCJ.com's own minicomics review column, Dogsbody. This week, critic Daniel Holloway reviews a self-published collection of editorial cartoons by Oregon artist Tom Lechner, plus the latest exercise in anger mismanagement from Jenny Gonzalez. Enjoy!
Posted @ 3:25 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

New Zealand cartoonist fired over pro-Palestinian cartoons
(Editorial Cartoons) Arthur M. emailed to alert me to this Sydney Morning Herald news story, which reports that Malcolm Evans, editorial cartoonist for The New Zealand Herald, was fired after continuing to sumbit panels critical of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite being told not to by his editor:

"Evans, who denied that his cartoons were anti-Semitic, said while he accepted an editor's right to reject a cartoon, he did not accept an editor's right to direct what he should draw.

"He said the paper's editor-in-chief, Gavin Ellis, had told him to stop submitting cartoons on Israel.

"However, Ellis said Evans had been sacked on legal advice, but would not comment further."

The article never identifies the cartoon that finally got Evans the hammer, but his website offers a number of samples; I would imagine cartoons like this one probably helped do the trick.

The New Zealand Herald managed to further compound the controversy when it hired an Australian, Rod Emmerson, to take Evans' place rather than a homegrown cartoonist. Ironically, Emmerson is reported to have recently travelled to New Zealand to urge the island's cartoonists to band together, in part to provide themselves "a united voice against editorial interference".
Posted @ 3:25 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Jesus Castillo and the Monday morning quarterbacks
(Censorship) As noted yesterday, the blogosphere (comic and otherwise) has been all abuzz with reaction to the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the Castillo obscenity case -- word has gotten to political weblogs from Tom Tomorrow and Atrios on the left to Reason and National Review on the right, and aside from the occasional email from wingnuts, reaction is pretty uniform in its outrage.

As also noted yesterday, however, questions have begun to arise as to how diligent Castillo's lawyers were in defending him in the original Dallas trial. It began when Houston attorney William J. Dyer, flustered by what he saw as overreactions from the webbloggers' Wailing Wall, dug into the case and found what he felt to be missed opportunities by the defense. Now a second critical voice has asserted itself -- leftie political cartoonist Ampersand rebukes the quickly congealing consensus on the grounds that, what do you know, the book in question (the second volume of Toshio Maeda's Demon Beast Invasion) really is obscene:

"The bottom line is, the jury believed their own eyes. They were given a comic book to read featuring demons variously seducing/raping humans; the comic had no characterization to speak of, lousy drawing, and had nothing to say. It was an empty-headed collection of mean-spirited, degrading sex scenes. It had no artistic merit -- at least, not to anyone who doesn't consider the idea of artistic worth to be more than a joke."

Later, Ampersand claims that this doesn't necessarily mean that any cats are being let out of bags, here:

"Get real. The jury found no artistic merit because there was none to find. If a comic book that actually had some artistic merit had been under issue -- one of Robert Crumb's pornographic comics, for example, or an issue of Naughty Bits -- the defense would have had a much easier time, because then they could have made substantial, reasonable arguments for artistic merit.

"But it's unlikely that any Crumb comic would ever get to that point -- because prosecutors and police don't like losing cases, and don't tend to pursue unwinnable cases. Which is almost certainly why the cop picked out Demon Beast Invasion, rather than picking out Crumb or Naughty Bits."

I'm actually sympathetic with the first part of this argument. Arguing that Demon Beast Invasion contains some sort of serious artistic worth is an uphill battle, especially once you've read the work in question. It's a classic in what's known as the "tentacle rape" genre, a genre its creator invented almost single-handedly with the series Urotsuki Doji. According to this interview with Maeda (first linked in this weblog last December), such lofty creative intentions are probably news to him:

"At that time [pre-Urotsuki Doji], it was illegal to create a sensual scene in bed. I thought I should do something to avoid drawing such a normal sensual scene. So I just created a creature. [His tentacle] is not a [penis] as a pretext. I could say, as an excuse, this is not a [penis], this is just a part of the creature. You know, the creatures, they don't have a gender. A creature is a creature. So it is not obscene -- not illegal.

"Drawing intercourse was, and is, illegal in Japan. That is our big headache: to create such a sensual scene. We are always using any type of trick."

Pretty much defines "prurient interest", doesn't it? I'm suspicious of the claim made by webloggers that the jurors heard the prosecutor's claim that "all comics are for kids" and somehow shut down their sense of judgement on the spot -- I just don't think such paranoia is needed to explain the verdict. Far more likely is the notion that the jurors actually saw the book in question, with its screaming women being raped by tentacle-waving monsters, and said, "Yep, that's obscene, all right."

Where I get off the boat is the notion that there somehow isn't a slippery slope under this line of reasoning. Ampersand tries to assure his readers that such logic somehow leaves Crumb and Gregory safe, but I have my doubts. Would a housewife in Oklahoma find artistic merit in "R. Crumb Versus the Sisterhood"? How much artistic merit would a Cinncinati cop find in "Crazy Bitches", anyway? Ampersand later hedges his bets by noting that he disapproves of censorship and thinks the prosecution was wrong to take Castillo to trial. Fair enough. Likewise, both he and Dyer note that the hysteria over the ruling is overblown: no precedents were set, comics were not suddenly ruled "just for kids", et cetera. I agree entirely, and as I noted when the Supreme Court denied Castillo's writ, all it really means is that obscenity is still subject to the same "community standards" test that it has been for the last three decades or so. I'm largely behind Ampersand's view of how the case went down, and while I'm angered by the resulting ruling, I'm not particularly surprised by it. That said, the notion that other works are safe from this sort of chicanery because us enlightened types can tell the difference between erotica and smut is more than a little naïve -- unless the artistic works I'm reading are, say, direct photographic evidence of a violent sexual crime committed against another living human being, I don't want my neighbors even having the option of deciding what line I should or should not be crossing.

(Incidentally, I should also point out that Dyer has added additional comments to his original post that are well worth checking out, especially in regard to the narrow-minded class bigotry shown by several people discussing the case. Go get 'em, Mr. Dyer!)
Posted @ 3:25 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Let's take one last spin through the internet before closing down for the weekend, shall we?

• Over at Silver Bullet Comics, Michael Deeley offers a heartfelt essay decrying the Direct Market's myopic stance in the face of a changing marketplace, noting that manga is selling hand over fist seemingly everywhere except in comics shops, while the comics of Jhonen Vasquez have found a comfy home at goth-accessory chain Hot Topic. Meanwhile, webcartoonist John Barber kicks in with a similar rant over at the Talk About Comics message board. Hmmm, what would the funnybook faithful have to say about all this, I wonder?

• Newsarama's Matt Brady offers his analysis of the Direct Market's performance in July. Once again, Brady paints a considerably sunnier picture than ICv2, claiming that retailers ordered 159,986 copies of the top-selling comic for the month, Batman #617, as compared to ICv2's estimate of 146,601 copies.

• Ninth Art's Alasdair Watson defends The Pulse's pseudonymous comics critic Jess Lemon against his/her detractors in a scathing editorial.

• Are you secure enough to enter Sophie Crumb's "House of Shame"? (Incidentally, be sure to stop by the lobby before leaving.)

• The film adaptation of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor opens today, which means the unanimously positive reviews are pouring in from everywhere. In keeping with the autobiographical theme, MTV's Kurt Loder Kurt Loder writes a movie review about himself. Clearly, someone thinks he's Lester Bangs...

• Finally, if you're like me you still haven't quite gotten over the withdrawal symptoms following the end of A.K.'s heee-larious comics review column Title Bout -- fortunately, if you're careful, you can still find him freestyling the commentary on message boards. (Thanks to Secret Santa for the link.)

With that, we're done. Have a nice weekend, and I'll see you back here bright and early Monday morning.
Posted @ 3:25 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Manga enters Bookscan's top twenty
(Graphic Novels) As if the present stack of evidence wasn't enough, another sign of manga's continuing domination of the graphic-novel shelves presented itself when the seventh volume in Tokyopop's Chobits series cracked Bookscan's top-twenty list for adult fiction trade paperbacks to take the #17 slot -- again, that's "adult fiction trade paperbacks", not the graphic novel list. The thirteenth volume of the Love Hina series showed significant traction as well, placing at #27 on the very same list. Meanwhile, over in the graphic-novel category -- well, let's let ICv2 take up the story from there:

"With the passing of the Marvel movie effect, manga reclaimed nine of the top ten graphic novel slots and 46 of the top 50 for the week. Six of the top ten graphic novel titles were Tokyopop, and 30 of the top 50. Three of the top ten and 16 of the top 50 were Viz (with Naruto Volume 1 at #3 its top title)."

Repeating for effect: four of the top fifty graphic novels on the chart were not manga softcover volumes. While Bookscan's listings are of necessity incomplete -- the sales-tracking service has only partial coverage of the bookstore market, as many stores don't contribute data and thus their sales do not show up on its radar -- the service's list of contributing stores is spread out wide enough that the relationship of sales from title to title seems to be treated as fairly representative by journalists covering the bookstore network, even if the actual sales numbers are almost certainly skewed too low. In short, manga rules the bookshelves.

It's fairly easy to see why if you read from some of the more popular titles. I'm unfamiliar with Chobits, but I have now read the first volume in the Love Hina series, and the appeal seems fairly obvious to me. The story centers around a somewhat uncouth young man who by circumstance finds himself overseeing a private college girl's dormitory; it essentially consists of an endless string of sexually awkward situations, usually involving nudity or groping on one form or another. The trick here lies in where the emphasis is placed. The series' major obsession is with a group of female young adults, somewhat awkward about their relationship with adult sexuality but nonetheless perfectly aware of the effect they have on the boys around them. The hero, Keitaro, finds himself frequently in all-to-close contact with the girls, only to find himself getting shut down again and again, usually in a humiliating and/or painful way.

The series allows its largely young-female readership to have it both ways -- on the one hand, they can look on in voyeuristic fashion inside the mind of a healthy young horndog, getting what is presented as a privileged view of what makes him tick. On the other hand, at no point do the girls ultimately lose control of the situation, and the first volume reads like a virtual textbook on how to keep the boy in his place, always through organic storytelling and plot, without ever resorting to empty moralizing. Furthermore, there's genuine teenage romance in the book, with all the fumbling and awkwardness this implies. Like I said, the appeal of the book seems pretty obvious.

Compare this to Marvel's first real attempt to capture Love Hina's principal audience: Trouble, the second issue of which hit comics-store shelves this week. Before we get into discussing the series, allow me to correct an earlier mistake -- two months ago I defended the cover of the first issue of the series, on the grounds that it might have looked creepily pedophilic by Direct Market standards, but was perfectly acceptable if judged by the covers of other books targeted to a similar audience. The second issue's cover, by contrast, features another photograph of the same two teenage girls, only this time one is leaning in close enough to the other's face to begin sticking her tongue in the girl's ear. I'm not sure how implied lesbianism is supposed to sell this series to its intended audience, but I nonetheless take back what I said earlier -- Marvel doesn't have the slightest idea what the fuck they're doing.

This is all the more obvious if you read what's under the cover. What's been released so far reads like nothing so much as a Porky's sequel that's been plot-checked and edited for television. There's the Bad Girl (May) who puts out, the Good Girl who doesn't (Mary -- don't want Spider-Man's mom to be a slut, I suppose), and if the advance press is to be believed the Bad Girl will be punished by God ...err, "face the consequences" of her oh-so-rash actions by getting pregnant, despite being responsible and using a condom. Indeed, at one point during the second issue Mary gives John a lecture about why she's chosing sexual abstinence for the time being that sounds so thoroughly Ad Council-approved that I almost expected her to turn to the reader at the end of it, wink and say "...and that's one to grow on!™"

This isn't a young-adult novel, it's a finger-wagging high-school film strip, with a some extra T&A to keep the little monsters awake. Whereas Love Hina offers a truly engaging teenage soap-opera, Trouble seems destined to become a cautionary tale, scolding you that your parents and clergymen were right. Gosh, it's difficult to tell that some guy in his thirties wrote this crap, isn't it? For the short term, at least, Tokyopop has nothing to worry about.
Posted @ 3:40 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Here's what else is playing out over the internet at this moment:

• The International Federation of Journalists is protesting the recent death sentence issued by the fatwa department of Afghanistan's judiciary against two journalists on the basis of two articles and a cartoon that they published, which allegedly mocks Islam by advocating a separation of church and state. IFEX has the letter the IFJ sent to Afghani President Hamid Karzai.

• Weblogger Franklin Harris points to the increasing anger raised in various weblogs against the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the Jesus Castillo case. More interestingly, though, he links to a weblog entry by Houston attorney William J. Dyer, who argues that the real problem with the case is that Castillo's lawyer didn't do his job properly.

• Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail shines a spotlight on cartoonist Chester Brown, whose new graphic novel Louis Reil is slated for release in September.

• We seem to be getting a new Harvey Pekar story daily, don't we? Today's offering: USA Today spoke to both the people who inspired the new American Splendor film and the actors and actresses who played them, and asks the former how well they think the latter did their jobs.

• Funky Winkerbean artist Tom Batuik is providing cartoons for SupportMusic.com, a website devoted to promotion music education in America. (Link via Andante.)

With that, we're done for another day. See you tomorrow.
Posted @ 3:40 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Marvel posts $32.8 million profit in second quarter
(Comic Books) Marvel Comics released its 2003 second-quarter earnings report to the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, claiming $89.9 million in net sales over the last three months, primarily from film and toy licensing, for a total profit of nearly $33 million. Publishing generated $19.5 million in net sales this quarter, up from $15.2 million in the first three months of 2003 -- although the report acknowledges that this increase is mostly due to a rise in revenues from advertising and "custom publishing" (i.e. comics produced for business clients, primarily for advertising purposes).

Of principal interest to Direct Market watchers, though, is the fact that Marvel has placed some $118 million into certificates of deposit (definition here), in anticipation of paying off its debt once and for all in June of next year. Barring unforseen financial calamity between now and then, this move effectively retires the Movie Doomsday Theory, ensuring that a sudden downturn in movie licensing and merchandising money will no longer leave the company threatened with a second spin through bankruptcy court.

The market responded favorably to the report; further encouraged by news that the Federal Reserve would not raise interest rates, investors pushed the price for shares in Marvel stock up by $2.85 at yesterday's closing bell, while investment analysts for WR Hambrecht raised their rating for the stock from "hold" to "buy", predicting a stock price target of $25 per share.

You can hear the yesterday's conference call to investors at Yahoo! Finance (note: requires Microsoft Media Player); the actual SEC report can be found here, while the best summary of the report's specifics can be found at Newsarama.
Posted @ 5:05 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Other news? Oh yeah, there was other news yesterday. Here's a quick rundown:

• As you'll recall, Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez recently attracted the interest of the Sercet Service after publishing a panel which depicted President Bush being shot. Ramirez recently published another cartoon, reacting to the brouhaha in his own unique style. (Links via Laura Gjovaag.)

• Last week it was reported that Syrian cartoonist and publisher Ali Farzat's satirical newsweekly, Al-Domari, was shut down by authorities on the flimsy pretext that it violated the law by not publishing for a three-month period. Lebanon's Daily Star quotes a news analysis from Beirut's As-Safir, which in turn quotes Syrian columnist Adnan Ali as having a different take on the reason for Syria's action:

  " 'The Beirut-based weekly magazine Al-Muhawer has recently devoted an entire issue to the structural changes taking place in the Syrian media. The entire issue was written and produced by Syrian writers and journalists,' he stated.

  " 'Subsequently, a seminar was held on the realities of the Syrian press, which focused on the problems and potential resolutions. Then came the issue of the [Al-Domari] comic paper, which resumed publication after it was forced to stop publishing, according to columnist Fayez Sara.

  " 'The latest issue of [Al-Domari] was... devoted to the development and lack of development in the media sector,' he said, 'and this has led the authorities to once ban the distribution of the magazine in Syria.' "

• Neil Gaiman's lawyer sends the nicest cease-and-desist letter ever composed -- and offers a good summation of who owns what of the Miracleman comic book. (Link via Rich Johnston -- hey, nice to finally see that quote confirmed!)

• Pouring over ICv2's analysis of Diamond's numbers for July Direct Market sales, Babar of Simply Comics did a few calculations -- using ICv2's own figures -- and came to a surprisingly different conclusion about the results.

• Speaking of fact-checking, Steven Grant takes issue with Wizard Magazine's contention that Marvel and DC constitute 95% of the Direct Market.

• Via that same Steven Grant column, David Lee Ingersoll recounts what he learned while attempting to publish a free comics tabloid. (Note: the permalink doesn't work, so scroll down to the August 3rd entry labelled "GLYPH - A Brief History (and Ramble)".)

• Sequestial Swap: I suppose you could call this "analog filesharing"... (Link via Alan David Doane.)

• Over at Silver Bullet Comics, Tom Spurgeon continues to make the rounds in support of the new Stan Lee biography he co-authored with Jordan Raphael.

• Sean Collins wraps up WizardWorld Chicago.

• Let's throw a bone to NeilAlien, shall we? Forager23 looks back at Lee and Ditko's Doctor Strage comics.

• Mark Evanier reviews the early-1960s Dick Van Dyke Show comic book, one issue at a time, despite the fact that no such comic book was ever printed.

Finally, weblogger Jim Henley offers up some thoughts on why superhero comics don't hold a wider appeal for children. I agree with much of it, but this statement caught my attention:

"Once upon a time, American superhero comics were bad because they only appealed to children and adolescents and not to adults. Now they're bad because they don't appeal to children and adolescents, but only to adults. That's some bad timing, huh?"

I don't recall any argument that superhero comics were damned by their childhood appeal ever being advanced. The closest I can find to this argument on short notice would be various criticisms leveled by The Comics Journal in its early run, but even there the argument wasn't that superhero comics "only appealed to children and adolescents" but that they were simply badly written.

The second half of Henley's strawman, however, contains a grain of truth. I think the main reason kids aren't reading superhero comics isn't that kids just don't like comic books -- TokyoPop and Shonen Jump burst that little balloon quite nicely, thank you very much -- so much as that today's writers keep trying to turn them into something they're not. I realize that this comes close to personifying exactly the contradiction that Henley laments, but there is an example of a comic that gets it right conveniently close at hand: Grant Morrison's New X-Men, which features smart writing and clever ideas, yet never tries to be anything other than a really cool X-Men comic. As Alan Moore noted shortly after he left DC Comics a decade ago, if you want to write deep and meaningful stories about the environment, at some point the addition of an elemental muck-monster begins to pointlessly detract from your message.

The problem isn't so much that superhero comics are "too adult" as that they're frequently too eager to be taken seriously as something deeper than they really are. The success of Watchmen (and, to a lesser extent, The Dark Knight Returns) rested on the incongruity of the core concept, and only ever really worked as a counterpoint to the other works on the shelves. Watchmen pointed out the perils of introducing too much Real World into escapist fantasy pretty clearly, and yet despite this it somehow became the benchmark for what superhero comics should strive to become. I'm guessing it was the attention from the press that did it; soon it seemed like everyone wanted to be known for writing Watchmen. The result was and is an extended period of High Decadence, where complex and distracting themes are stuffed into a genre originally created to provide a nice escape from reality. Such works are fine for longtime fans of the form, who've exhausted the basic tropes yet still hold them in fond regard -- for people first approaching superhero comics in search of escapist fun, however, works that strive too hard to be something else just don't do the trick.

Far too much of what passes for superhero comics these days are like episodes of Doctor Who directed by Hal Hartley. The real world should be left to comics about the real world. Spider-Man comics should be cleverer than they have been in the past, yes -- but making them more sophisticated is another matter altogether.
Posted @ 5:05 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Slow news day
(Potpourri) In the aftermath of WizardWorld Chicago, most of the comic-book industry seems to be taking a quick nap. Perhaps that's all for the best; my energy level's pretty low, and I don't think I've got a full day's suite of blog entries in me at the moment.

The only major news to have cropped up in the last twenty-four hours comes from Pakistani news site PakTribune.com, who are reporting that the fatwa department of Afghanistan's supreme court has used a cartoon as evidence in support of a ruling that sentences two staffers of the Afghani newsweekly Aftab, Ali Raza Payam and editor Mirhassan Mahdawi, to death over articles perceived to be critical of Islam:

"The 10-page recommendation to the judiciary, seen by IWPR, gives detailed citations from the Koran and hadiths to support its ruling, and quotes from portions of the two articles that criticized Islamic practice. The decision also cites a cartoon illustration to one of the articles, which shows a monkey evolving into a man slumped over a computer, accompanied by the words, 'Government plus religion equals cruelty.'

"Showing humans as evolving from apes is against the Koran, the ruling said. The proposal ends with the declaration, 'The Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan is obliged to give the death penalty to the people who have abused or made fun of Islam, and also to the ones who cause public disruption.' "

The article goes on to speculate that the ruling may be an attempt to usurp the authority of Afghanistan's President Karzai, who had ordered the judiciary to wait for a review of the facts of the case by the Ministry of Information and Culture before proceeding with prosecution; the fatwa department, by contrast, is supposedly not required to abide by the dictates and rules of the secular judiciary. The article further reports that the two men sentenced may have already fled to Pakistan.

It's all downhill in terms of importance when compared to that. Here's what's happening at the moment:

• The Shanghai Daily notes that Taiwanese artist Jimmy Liao has taken two Chinese publishing houses, Taihai Press and Hualin Publishing House, to court over allegations that they've been bootlegging Liao's popular "picture stories" without compensation. The case will be heard in September.

• Here's a story that keeps repeating itself: ICv2 has the Diamond Distributors sales figures for July, as well as an analysis purporting to show that comics-shop sales were flat last month.

• For retailers depressed by the previous item, perhaps this might cheer you up: The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has the word on two thieves who were busted while trying to sell thousands of dollars worth of comics that they'd stolen from Lauderhill store Future Comics. The two men had given a list of comics for sale to the owner of Phil's Comix in neighboring Margate, who was aware of the recent heist and promptly called police. The thieves have been charged with armed robbery and dealing in stolen property.

• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recounts the 1931 depression-related suicide of Ralph Barton, famous for his cartoons in the New Yorker.

• The Guardian celebrates the release of Marvel's tepid Rawhide Kid revamp in trade paperback by dredging up a few obscure cranks offended by the presence of one of them thar fagimits in a comic book. That's journalism!

• Neil Gaiman is interviewed for the gothporn website Suicide Girls.

Finally, Newsarama has an interview with writer Grant Morrison concerning his post-Marvel career, and I can't resist quoting from it at length:

"The rise of the teenage manga audience is very heartening to me, however, and suggests a future for new work which moves away from the storytelling clichés and endlessly recycled images of traditional, mainstream superhero books. The last time I was in a comic store, I smelled a stale, dread-inducing fog of middle-aged smugness from the monthly comics on the racks. With a few exceptions, they seemed old and creepy and out of touch, like relics from some war or other. In crushing contrast, the shelves of beautiful toys, shiny manga and big, sexy euro albums radiated health, youth and vitality. I’m definitely much more interested in what's happening on the fringe where comics cross over with general pop culture and I find myself resonating strongly with the super sci-fi, hyper-realist and fantastic elements which teenagers are absorbing again via comics and via artifacts which owe very little to the weird reiterations of the superhero books."

He shoots... he scores! See you tomorrow.
Posted @ 2:20 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Shuffling the deck chairs
(Comic Books) As you've probably figured out by now, I don't really go in for the whole "superhero" thing all that much; it's not that I have some weird animosity for the genre so much as I basically outgrew it when I was seventeen, and there's very little out there capable of renewing my interest. Given that, I hope I can be excused for not really caring too much about last weekend's WizardWorld Chicago, a comics convention almost exclusively devoted to the men-in-tights trope.

Aside from the usual huckstering and networking, the big point of this thing is the various announcements of new acquisitions and projects by the likes of Marvel and DC. To the extent that I do care, it's basically my curiosity over the question, "Will the Direct Market's major publishers announce any kind of initiative likely to attract new blood into the comics shops, and thus provide some kind of antidote to the death-spiral?" Well, the fat lady has now officially sung, and the answer is, for the most part, a resounding "no".

Marvel Comics' announcements were particularly unimpressive. The big news was that Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar would be writing more comics; this might be news if Bendis were going to be creating more of his kickass crime comics, but no, it's superheroes and more superheroes. Also, semi-competent hack Chuck Austen will be taking over Avengers -- man, now that's what I call scraping the bottom of the barrel.

(Incidentally, remember when Austen did good work? No seriously, he used to be an interesting cartoonist, creating lightweight but entertaining adventure books like Hero Sandwich, as well as the only porn comics with enough characterization to actually give Omaha the Cat Dancer a run for its money. What the hell ever happened to that guy, anyway?)

The only announcement from Marvel that even mildly piqued my interest was the news that Garth Ennis' gleefully mean-spirited Punisher series would be moving to the company's adults-only Max line, but even here the news was of limited worth at best -- Ennis is a good enough writer that he could produce hilariously over-the-top material even if forced to adhere to a strict all-ages rating, so all this announcement really gives him is permission to say the word "fuck". In any event, would a person browsing through the graphic novels at Barnes and Noble really think the book was any different for the "adults only" advisory label?

Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada hosted his usual off-the-cuff Q&A session, at which he did his best to squelch those nasty rumors about Marvel spreading nasty rumors:

"Asked if he spread rumors about DC trying to lure away exclusive Marvel talent, Quesada said, 'Why the hell would I start a rumor about my talent going to another company?'

"This was followed by a quick, 'Is that a denial?' from a member of the audience, to which Quesada replied, 'Yes,' while rolling his eyes."

DC Comics really didn't do much better. They announced more fan-favorites creating superhero titles, which means the same thing as Marvel's various announcements -- the Direct Market's regulars will now be buying a different set of A-list superhero titles, meaning that various B-list superhero titles will suffer an equivalent drop in sales as Peter is once again robbed to pay Paul. From a macroeconomic standpoint, the various announcements are functionally meaningless to anyone not on either end of the contract pen.

DC did, however, make a few announcements that could mean more sales. Howard Chaykin will be returning to the full creation of comics with a new Challengers of the Unknown miniseries. For those of you young 'uns who don't remember, towards the end of the 1980s Chaykin was justly known as one of the few creators fit to be placed in the same company as Frank Miller and Alan Moore, and his solo work has never been less than brilliantly engaging. The fact that he'll be creating a non-superhero adventure comic capable of possible bookstore traction is always good news. Better news is the announcement that zombie-movie legend George Romero will be writing a new six-issue horror story, with Richard Corben illustrating, no less. This certainly has the potential to attract outside interest, and could conceivably be the most significant news of the weekend.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Aspen Comics announced the end of its legal troubles with Top Cow.

Yawn. If your interest in these sort of things exceeds my own, of course, there are any number of news-sites ready and willing to cater to you. I also recommend Sean Collins' weblog, where he's been offering his own unique take on the whole shindig.
Posted @ 6:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Arrr, matey!
(Comics and the Internet) It's been a while since we took a look at online piracy, hasn't it? I haven't really got anything new to report at the moment, save that other people are starting to notice the subject. Taking her cue from the wholesale bootlegging of the new Harry Potter book and a hoax concerning The Naked Chef, Slate Magazine's Joy Press took a look at the growing phenomenon of literary file-trading, and finds the skepticism of publishers to be less than convincing:

"Still, most publishers are skeptical that readers will trade paper for pixel, pointing to the relative failure of the eBook as proof that people don't enjoy viewing text on a screen. (There are plenty of other reasons eBooks haven't caught on, though: The technology isn't yet up to snuff, and the lack of a uniform format for eBook players severely limits which eBooks you can access.) But if a book you were dying to read—let's say the new Jonathan Franzen novel—just popped up in your e-mail box, would you delete it? And if you already have it, or know you can get it for nothing, would you really trudge to Barnes & Noble and pay the full hardback price? Be honest: not always. This is what has left record stores like Tower looking like the Marie Celeste.

"What steps are publishers taking to prevent piracy? Surprisingly, the answer is: very few. 'If it's really important, I hide the manuscript under my desk,' laughed an editor at a major house. Security measures are only used with heavily embargoed books, when advance copies are limited to an extremely select few reviewers and in-house personnel. EBook publishers had hoped to protect content from bootlegging with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial statute prohibiting the development of technologies that interfere with copyrighted material, but a lawsuit last year suggests these legal issues are still up in the air. Despite the risks of piracy, some mainstream and university press publishers are embracing the idea of digitizing back lists as a step toward creating a system where college students pay for downloaded texts, rather than just photocopy them. Of course, it was computer-savvy college kids who pioneered the whole peer-to-peer MP3-sharing free-for-all."

Replace the word "texts" with "comics" and the results would be just as accurate. Indeed, the folks over at the techblog Slashdot, always quick to take digital phenomena to their logical conclusion, seized upon the article in question and immediately began discussing the subject:

"Not only books, but comics too. Already I've seen complete archives of all X-Men, Spiderman, etc. I think that might actually become a bigger problem, because comics are easy to scan and distribute, and their readers probably fit very well the profile of your typical 'downloader'."

I have of course seen comics bootlegged through any number of different distribution methods -- hell, Yahoo just shut down a major source of such trading when it deactivated the image-archiving capacity of its various groups. This is little more than swatting one fly in a swarm, however, as Usenet, IRC and non-file-specific peer-to-peer programs do the job just as well. Such trading has been on the upswing for some time, and shows no sign of abating. Silver Age fans have by this point probably assembled an online library of classic DC comics comparable to what's sitting in Paul Levitz's archives, while new BitTorrent pirate sites pop up seemingly every day.

My question: which publisher will be the first to throw their hats into the ring and wage a useless, RIAA-style campaign to drive such miscreants off the web? My money's on DC, if for no other reason than the fact that Marvel has all its spare cash tied up in waiting for the day they can pay down all that godawful debt. This isn't to take The House That Jack Built completely out of the running, of course -- goodness knows, Marvel and DC comic books are both the prime targets of such activities -- but DC's got a nice corporate sugar-daddy whose music division will feel their pain the moment they speak up. I suspect it's really just a matter of feeding the lawyers a few additional names, at this point. The obvious wildcard: Tokyopop. Has manga started making the rounds yet? It occurs to me that I should do some digging and find out.

In any case, the sopeanas won't be flying just yet; we're still in the "ignore it and it'll go away" phase of the cycle right now. It's happened before. For the music industry, 1996 and 1997 were the years of Blessed Ignorance, when techies and college students first discovered MP3. Movies? On the weekend of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace's opening, George Lucas took to the press-conference podium to announce that his film wasn't being bootlegged online, nope, no sir -- even as copies of same flew around the internet, to be followed in short order by a "Phantom Edit" constructed by some clever weisenheimer to remove all the endless Jar-Jar and "wheeee!"-ing from young Anakin. Both web phenomena profited greatly from the blinkers corporate rightsholders wore, and the same is undoubtedly true for comics as well. Still, mark my words: we'll see the campaign to eradicate comics bootlegging begin soon. Who'll be at the helm? Seriously, someone should start a betting pool...
Posted @ 6:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) A fair amount of comics-related items surfaced over the weekend. They are:

• Amanda Lang of Canada's The Globe and Mail checks in with what is by my count the three billionth story on Marvel's financial turnaround; her recommendation that the stock could be going somewhere is tempered by the caution that "the recent stock-price runup may all but guarantee some kind of correction" -- a prescient statement, especially in light of the fact that said correction occured back in June -- but she does bring up an interesting point about the company's now-spent tax credits, without which Marvel could find itself paying by her estimation as much as four times the taxes next year.

• Publisher's Weekly notes that printing companies are currently having something of a tough time of it, as demand for their services continues to drop. The article cautions against expecting printing costs to drop, however, as costs have risen simultaneously.

• Hey, San Francisco comics fans -- Dan Shahin jumped onto our message board recently to point out that Al's Comics could use your help right now to get over some financial hurdles.

• I wasn't going to link to any more of these San Diego wrap-ups, but this one's pretty informative -- comics historian Peter Sanderson explores Comic-Con past and present.

• Egon kicked in with a couple of interesting New York Times links -- here's a nice profile of cartoonist Ho Che Anderson, and a review of a new biography of James Thurber, which concludes that Thurber the cartoonist was superior to Thurber the writer.

• Channel News Asia offers a profile of Hong Kong cartoonist Zunzi, who's proven extraordinarily effective at being a thorn in the side of the city's government.

• Time.com's Andrew Arnold offers yet another interview with Harvey Pekar, who's still in promotion mode due to the impending nationwide release of the American Splendor movie. Speaking of which, weblogger Bill Sherman has a few thoughts on the career of Mr. Pekar as well.

• A new documentary, Adventures Into Digital Comics, "tells the story of the decline of the comic book as a popular entertainment through the 1990s, followed by the rebirth of comics as a new digital art form designed for the World Wide Web", according to its website. Said website also has an impressive number of interviews with various cartoonists, writers and industry professionals who appear in the film, including demian5, Rob Feldman, Evan Dorkin, Peter Bagge, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum, Ernie Colón, Gerry Alanguilan, Kevin Conrad, Todd Dezago and Steve Buccellato. The interviews all cover the changing comics marketplace and how webcomics connect to the rest of the artform. (Link via Evan Dorkin.)

• Crap on a stick! I almost missed this Pulse interview with Jill Thompson!

• Sluggy Freelance creator Pete Abrams answers questions from the readers of webcomics news portal Comixpedia -- hey look, another webcartoonist actually earning a living off of his work!

• Australian newspaper The Advertiser runs a feature story on its longtime cartoonist Michael Atchison, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday.

• Here's the fourth and final installment in the Seth diaries from Canada's National Post -- for that matter, Pete Ashton has created a mirror site with all four parts of the series available.

• Ninth Art does the Q&A thing with small-press cartoonists Stan Yan and Jamar Nicholas.

  

• Found on PopImage: this banner ad for Dean Haspiel (right). Now do you see why the indy cartoonists' beach party is so popular at San Diego?

• Two weeks later, the Associated Press discovers that William Woolfolk is dead; naturally, The New York Times' wire service quickly follows suit.

• A top-selling Japanese business self-help book dissects the management style of manga/anime star (and hired killer) Golga 13, notes The Times of London.

• The Pulse's pseudonymous hatchetperson, Jess Lemon, checks in with her latest review, this time of the cringe-inducing first issue of a Vampirella/Witchblade crossover miniseries.

• Here's an interesting eBay auction linked from the Yahoo Platinum Comics list -- a soldier's cartoon diary from the Civil War (note: contains racist content).

• Your politically-motivated detournment for the week: it's Tintin in Iraq! (Thanks to Joseph Antoine for posting this to our message board.)

I should note that I've been extra busy since returning from San Diego a few weeks back, so I've fallen criminally behind on answering my email -- all apologies to those who've sent me email recently.
Posted @ 6:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

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