Michael May’s Adventureblog

Slow Storm (and other Jeff Smith recommendations)

Filed Under comics

I love Jeff Smith’s work enough that if he likes something, I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it too. So, when he comes out with his list of his favorite comics of 2008, I’m paying a lot more attention than I usually do to such lists.

Slow Storm sounds especially interesting. Jeff says, “Danica (Novgorodoff) weaves a slow burning story of frustration, fear and trust – - all against the backdrop of a threatening storm.” And it’s from First Second Publishing, which also bodes very well for my digging it.

He also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to try out Terry Moore’s Echo.

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Quote of the Day: "There IS a book somewhere…"

Filed Under comics, jeff parker

“…if you do read some title simply because you’ve always read it… if you’re not enjoying it, please switch to something else. Believe me, in this day and age, there IS a book somewhere that will make you feel like whatever it is you keep going back to your old standby for and missing.”

–Jeff Parker

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Awesome List: Talking owls, the return of Vin Diesel, why Star Trek sucked, Peter David’s Peter Pan, and more

Filed Under apocalyptic, bond, comics, harry potter, iron man, peter pan, predator, star trek, talking animals, three musketeers, vin diesel

The Monday post date on this one is a lie. I actually started it late last week and didn’t wrap it up until Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the extra time I spent on it does not mean a corresponding increase in quality. It just means that I’m getting ready for Chicago and am falling behind.

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Made Me Quit (Adventureblog Edition): Fantastic Four

Filed Under comics, fantastic four, superheroes

Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery has a cool feature called “Made Me Quit” (the most recent one is here) in which he talks about the final straws that got him to stop reading comics series he was no longer enjoying.

I thought about that feature a lot as I was reading the most recent issue of Fantastic Four.

When I started regularly reading comics in high school, I was a fan of the characters. Who was writing or drawing a comic were secondary considerations to who the comic was about. As long as it had a member of Alpha Flight in it, I bought it. After a while I got into the X-Men and I had to have all the comics about them too. I still have some of that in me. Any comic that features Alpha Flight (or Wonder Woman, Shang Chi, Black Canary, etc.) is going to at least get my attention.

But after a while I started realizing that just because a comic had my favorite characters in it that didn’t mean it was good. I should’ve learned that lesson as soon as John Byrne left Alpha Flight, but I didn’t. Eventually I figured it out though, and I started buying comics based on who created them.

I should’ve known better than that too. I mean, I loved John Byrne’s Alpha Flight and Next Men, but I didn’t care at all for his work on Wonder Woman. I loved Denny O’Neil’s first thirty issues of Azrael, but after that it became apparent that he’d told the story he started out to tell and was keeping the series going anyway. I guess I’m a slow learner.

But I finally learned too that just because I love Brian K. Vaughan’s The Hood or Y: The Last Man doesn’t mean I’m also going to love his Ex Machina. Or just because Bill Willingham rules the universe on Fables doesn’t mean that I’m going to dig the way he writes Batman comics. In fact, I can’t think of a single writer or visual artist where I’ve loved absolutely every single thing he or she has ever created. Nor can I think of a single writer or visual artist where he or she has loved absolutely every single thing they’ve ever created. Art just doesn’t work that way.

So these days, I’m more into “runs.” I’m looking for that combination of creators who absolutely get the characters they’re working with. That happens all the time in independent, creator-owned comics, but it’s rare in the work-for-hire superhero world. Every once in a while though you’ll get Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on The Fantastic Four. Or Stan Lee on Spider-Man. Or Jim Shooter and then Paul Levitz on Legion of Super-Heroes. Or Walt Simonson on Thor. Or Chris Claremont on X-Men (at least during the first go-’round). Or Frank Miller on Daredevil. Or Neal Adams on Batman. Or David Michelinie and Bob Layton on Iron Man. Or Mark Waid on The Flash. Or Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting on Captain America. Or Greg Pak on Hulk. Or Jeff Parker on Agents of Atlas and X-Men: First Class. Or Gail Simone on Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman.

That’s a long list, but there are so many others I could mention. Those are the great superhero comics and they’re the standard I’m trying to use these days. I’m trying imperfectly, because dang it I do like Alpha Flight and Black Canary, but I’m trying. I even passed up a recent issue of Marvel Adventures Iron Man because it made Alpha Flight look stupid and amateurish. I wouldn’t have cared a few years ago. I’d have had to have it anyway just because it was them. These days, I try to have standards.

Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Fantastic Four doesn’t meet those standards. This most recent issue has a few examples of why that is, which is why it’s my last issue of the series until a new team comes on. And that’s kind of ironic, because Millar’s Civil War was at least part of the reason I started reading Fantastic Four in the first place. I’d always sort of liked the Thing and the Invisible Woman, but it was Millar’s horribly out-of-character writing of Reed Richards in Civil War that made me curious about checking out FF to see how the Invisible Woman would respond to him.

When Dwayne McDuffie took over the book after Civil War, I stuck with it and was glad I did because McDuffie’s an idea machine and filled the series with lots of cool, crazy adventures. The Michael Turner covers were a drawback, but I could deal with those to get at McDuffie’s stories.

Millar and Hitch though are doing some things that I really hate. Their story has a cool idea at its core though. A think tank of scientists has constructed a duplicate of Earth so that when the real version is inevitably destroyed humanity has a place to go to. Of course the scientists can’t help but make a few “improvements” as long as they’re starting from scratch, so they build in some rules and safeguards to make sure that they’ll have ultimate power in the new world. It’s an interesting twist on the old take-over-the-world scheme and it would be really snazzy if Millar and Hitch weren’t taking so doggone long to unfold it.

Their dragging it out isn’t even one of my big problems with it though. Millar’s writing always seems to be winking at the audience and saying, “Yes, I know superheroes are dumb kid stuff, but I’ll make it all realistic for you and we can pretend it’s grown-up. But we all really know it’s not.”

His use of the term “costume” to describe superheroes is an example of that. Any time I hear that or “cape” or “tights” to describe superheroes, I hear a writer who’s really not comfortable in the genre. He’s not embracing it, so he’s got to poke a little fun at one of the tropes – the superhero costume.

But you know what? Superheroes are dumb kid stuff. That doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy it. I think we should. But then, I also like The Wiggles. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with grown-ups liking some kid stuff. And I don’t even have a problem with superhero comics that cover some heavy themes. But damn it, Millar, if you can’t call a superhero a superhero with a straight face, you should find something else to write about.

I’d cut Millar some slack if this was somehow in character for Johnny Storm to speak derogatorily of his profession, but as irreverent a character as he is, he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s embarrassed by what he does.

He is in Millar’s Fantastic Four though. Last issue, he tried to tell a cute supervillain that he’s not really a crimefighter. And while technically he’s not (the Fantastic Four are really a family of adventurers, not vigilantes), he’s certainly done more than his share of fighting crime over the years and I don’t understand his quibbling over the semantics in the middle of a fight.

Of course, I also don’t get why he’d rather sleep with a cute supervillain and let her go in the morning than put her behind bars, but Millar has him doing that too.

Okay, wait, I do get why he’d rather do that. I just don’t buy that he actually would. Especially the letting her go in the morning part.

Enough about Johnny. The rest of my problem has to do with what happens when the Nu-World scientists’ secret weapon gets loose on the real Earth. Again, the weapon is a cool idea. It’s a giant robot called Conserve and Protect; CAP for short, and it’s even painted to look like Captain America. But it’s an idea that’s presented in as dull and boring a manner as possible.

When the Fantastic Four (minus Reed Richards, who’s off planet at the time) are called in to battle the robot, they go in expecting to join forty of the biggest hitting superheroes in the Marvel Universe. When they don’t see any of the others, they and their think tank liaison call in to check up. “Where are they?” they ask.

“What are you talking about?” comes the response. “They got there about eight minutes ago.”

So, the Fantastic Four look around and see this:

Look who’s there lying unconscious. There are some lightweights, but you also have Storm, Ares, Iron Man, the Vision, Wonder Man, Ms. Marvel, and the freaking Sentinel. I don’t care how tough CAP is supposed to be, it should’ve taken a lot longer than eight minutes to put down any one of that group. And even – just to give Millar the benefit of the doubt – if CAP could take them all out so fast and so easily, why the heck didn’t we get to see it? I certainly would rather have seen three pages of that fight than three pages of Johnny Storm getting yelled at by his manager for missing band practice. I mean, honestly.

But then again, when the heroes regain consciousness and resume the fight, this incomprehensible mess is what we get:

I can’t tell what’s going on there, but I’m starting to figure out why we don’t get more pages of fighting. There’s no choreography; it’s just a bunch of superheroes flying around, some of whom are unconvincingly attacking the robot. We get one other panel of the fight beside this one and it’s just as bad. Millar and Hitch are faking it and they’re not even faking it well.

And then on the next page, they quit even trying to fake it and just have some guys in a room describe the rest of the fight.

That’s Mr. Fantastic on the speaker by the way. Fresh back from outer space and rarin’ to go. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The giant robot has kicked the butt of every single Marvel hero there is off panel, but now we’re supposed to get excited because Mr. Fantastic is on the way.

I’m so done.

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Writing is Hard: Putting the audience last, part 342

Filed Under comics, writing is hard

I’ve got some reviews coming (Doomsday and The Bank Job, at least), but I haven’t been able to get to them yet. I’ve got a set of interviews coming for Newsarama that’s been taking all the time I usually spend for reviewing.

So instead, I’m gonna talk about writing some more. I’ve added a Writing is Hard link to the sidebar under Writing Craft and Life. It’s basically a collection of my posts on the craft of writing, but I don’t mind recommending them because hardly any of them contain original ideas by me. Most of them are other people’s ideas and me just sort of learning aloud as I share them. Anyway, good stuff in there.

One of the recurring themes in Writing is Hard has to do with the obligation (or more accurately, the lack thereof) that writers owe to their audiences. This seems like a hard idea for readers and fans to swallow, but the more I listen to writers talk about it, the more I believe that you have to write (or draw or paint or whatever) first for yourself and then hope that people dig what you’re doing.

This comes up again because of a recent(ish) post by Cheryl Lynn on the whitewashing of non-white characters. I mention this with some fear and trembing partly because I absolutely love Cheryl Lynn and I think she’s right pretty much all of the time. And as far as her main point goes, she’s absolutely right this time too.

But I’m mostly nervous about saying what I’m going to say because I’m not going to address her main point other than to agree with it. Instead, I’m going to nitpick her suggested solution to the problem:

[There] are those artists who have wonderful artistic skills but simply think that white women are the most beautiful women on earth. Scratch that. The only beautiful women on earth. And because they believe that all heroines should be beautiful, the result is that they depict non-white heroines with stereotypically white features. They give a character like Storm the features they think a beautiful woman should have instead of the features a beautiful woman from Kenya would likely have.

And that’s a problem. How do you resolve it? Well I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to change what he or she finds to be beautiful. Hell, that’s impossible to do anyway. But those artists will have to work against their brains a bit. Those artists may think that giving a character a wider nose or eyes without lid creases will make that character unattractive. What needs to be realized is that the audience has a much broader definition of what is attractive. Have you ever given someone a gift that you didn’t like but you knew the other person would love? You put the other person first. Those artists need to put the audience first.

The bold text is my emphasis, because that’s where I disagree with her. I would much rather see Vixen (and Jubilee and any number of other whitewashed characters) drawn accurately, but I don’t think my wishes on the matter should affect how any particular artist chooses to draw. There’s a lot I don’t like about Ed Benes’ art, but I don’t think he needs to change it to suit me. Not if that’s the way he really, truly wants to express himself artistically. He should absolutely be able to draw however the hell he wants. I don’t have to like it though and I don’t have to buy his stuff.

Now please don’t get me wrong and think I’m saying that Cheryl Lynn or anyone else doesn’t have the right to complain about this. They so do. But the complaint needs to be married with a strong, economic message that those who are concerned about this aren’t going to keep spending money on it. The solution isn’t for Benes to suddenly change his art style because someone wants him to. The solution is for DC to hire another artist because no one’s buying Ed Benes anymore. Then, if Benes isn’t getting work and decides to rethink how he’s expressing himself, that’s something he’s going to have to wrestle with. But it’s not going to happen – nor should it happen – just because we’re crying out, “Think of the fans!” while continuing to buy whatever he’s putting out.

Thinking of the fans, after all, is what got us Venom in Spider-Man 3. It’s what got us Nikki and Paulo in Lost. It’s why most fantasy novels suck and why there are three billion new vampire-romance novels published every week. Thinking of the fans makes creators less creative. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Benes draws the way he does precisely because he is thinking of the fans. Just not ones like me.

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Writing is Hard: Mediocre doesn’t cut it anymore

Filed Under comics, writing is hard

This article by Steven Grant is a couple of weeks old, but it makes a point that I want to reinforce. Grant says:

It’s not uncommon to hear some, even among top talents in the industry, talking about how comics are just comics, will always just be comics, should always just be comics, and anyone in comics thinking otherwise is a pompous self-loather trying to rise above their station. And they’re wrong.

The American comics industry has lived for a long time on its own relatively isolated little island, where things have developed under fairly unique circumstances. But the medium’s no longer an island; only the business is. And now only if we choose to be. Because comics are mainstream now, as mainstream as anything. They’re acceptable. They’re accepted.

Comics have been in the literary ghetto for a long time. I remember a quote that I think was by Warren Ellis maybe? I can’t find it now, but whoever it was who said it was actually quoting a Japanese director and talking about how when no one’s paying attention to your stuff, you have a lot of room to be bold and take big risks.

Unfortunately, for a lot of creators, having no one around to read your books just meant that you could be lazy and put out crap. I know because as a comics reviewer, I’ve read a lot of it. I’ve even bought some of it because I was wanting something new to read and there just weren’t a lot of choices available. But there are choices now and that means that everyone’s got to bring their best to the marketplace.

As Grant says:

Just “making comics” isn’t good enough anymore. Used to be – and a lot of creators and would-be creators still operate like this – that to “make comics” all you’d need is some rough idea and somebody to draw pictures about it, and because it was in comics format and the market was predisposed to be sympathetic, it was easy to pass that off as a story. The comics industry was considered to be working under special circumstances, and special dispensation was handed out like Halloween candy.

If you haven’t noticed, even on our little island sympathy is a scarce commodity these days. There are still plenty of books flooded out there that are incoherently written, or have art that doesn’t mesh with the subject matter, or are seemingly plotted via dart board, or lack noticeable structure or hooks, or are predicated on ideas that are utterly unoriginal or uninteresting. There are also a lot of comics that don’t sell to save their souls, though the two things never quite hit a one-to-one correlation. It’s pretty obvious that at a lot of companies the title “editor” is sort of an honorific handed out and a lot of people claiming the title have no editorial training and an infirm grasp of what exactly an editor is supposed to do.

There was a time when all of that was good enough, when the industry and the market may not have considered any of that good, exactly, but it was considered good enough.

Now it’s just not good enough. It’s time to reimagine what constitutes a “good” comics story, and how this applies to the growing graphic novel market.

I’m finding that’s true in my own comics buying. I’m less and less willing to shell out three bucks for a crap – or even mediocre – comic. I want Awesome. And I finally have enough choices that I think I can get Awesome.

But the real message for me here is that if I’m going to write comics, I’ve also got to deliver Awesome.

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Found this picture; thought I’d share

Filed Under comics, michael

Speaking of my dad, it was his dad who indirectly got me interested in comics. My grandfather wasn’t a big comics fan himself, but he owned a barber shop in Memphis and always had a bunch of Dennis the Menace, Richie Rich, and various Marvel comics lying around.

That’s me in the picture above, obviously still waiting on my haircut.

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The Awesome List: Burn Notice DVD, cute Indiana Jones, Adam Baldwin in Seattle, Sinbad (the cool one), US comics scenes, and robots vs. animals

Filed Under burn notice, chuck, comics, firefly, gorillas, indiana jones, robots, sinbad

It’s getting late, so I’m gonna skip the Day Watch review until tomorrow. Here’s your Awesome List.

It’s true!

As if there was any doubt. June 17. Write it down.

Cute Indy

This may be cuter than I want Indiana Jones to be. Except for that Marion with the monkey. That I want. (Via.)

The hero of Seattle, the man they call Jayne

Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck) will be at Emerald City Comicon. I’ve never wanted to go to Seattle as badly as I do right now. (Via.)

Dan Wickline’s Sinbad

Dan’s a pal of mine and Sinbad’s a hero I have a lot of affection for, so this is an easy sell. Especially when Dan describes his series this way:

“Sinbad was by far, the world’s worst sailor. He went on seven voyages and never once came home on the same ship … To me, I don’t think he was Sinbad the Sailor until after the voyages. He learned who he was and what he can do through those journeys. The Sinbad we have here is at his confident, charismatic and creative peak. Why just save the girl when you can do it with style? Why retreat when you can charge? And he will always have a plan, even if it’s made up as he goes along.”

Comics scenes

Tom Spurgeon is collating a list of US cities and their comics scenes. “Kind of a first stop on who to contact if you were planning to relocate,” Tom says, “or where to go if you were planning a visit, or who to invite if you were having a show, or who you might profile if you were writing a feature article.” I’ve always known the Twin Cities has a great comics scene and now it’s documented.

He’s also soliciting updates to the list.

Robots vs. crocodiles and gorillas

Lady, That’s My Skull has scans from “My Brother Was a Robot,” a story in My Greatest Adventure #42. As Sleestak says, “I’m presenting ‘My Brother Was A Robot’ here not because it is particularly good, the plot is pretty dull actually and is an otherwise forgettable entry into the annals of comic history. What makes this story worth noting at all is that it features a robot beating the crap out of some crocodiles and a gorilla. Sometimes comics just don’t get any better than that.” Amen, my reptilian brother.

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Comics and Writing Odds and Ends

Filed Under comics, firefly, writers strike, writing is hard

Blogarama has a couple of previews of what promises to be a very cool comic called Aqua Leung. I’ll be looking forward to that one.

Comic Book Resources has a good article on how the WGA strike will likely affect comics. Regardless of what some folks are saying, more Allan Heinberg or Serenity comics are a good thing.

Cory Doctorow has the right idea, I think, about copyright in the 21st century. Everything’s changing and writers (and other artists) need to stop thinking like the Internet doesn’t exist. He gives three reasons for this: one economic, one artistic, and (the most compelling one to me) one ethical.

“(T)he ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they’re doing it electronically. You know, there’s no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They’re copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they’re all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that’s a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.”

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Comics and Writing Odds and Ends

Filed Under aqua leung, comics, firefly, writers strike, writing is hard

Blogarama has a couple of previews of what promises to be a very cool comic called Aqua Leung. I’ll be looking forward to that one.

Comic Book Resources has a good article on how the WGA strike will likely affect comics. Regardless of what some folks are saying, more Allan Heinberg or Serenity comics are a good thing.

Cory Doctorow has the right idea, I think, about copyright in the 21st century. Everything’s changing and writers (and other artists) need to stop thinking like the Internet doesn’t exist. He gives three reasons for this: one economic, one artistic, and (the most compelling one to me) one ethical.

“(T)he ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they’re doing it electronically. You know, there’s no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They’re copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they’re all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that’s a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.”

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