A lot of people, when first introduced to the works of William Shakespeare, are turned off by the language. Many of the words and phrases are obviously dated, but also the tenor and cadence are unfamiliar. (Also, it's often not taught very well, but that's another issue entirely!)

A friend earlier made reference to Jack London's A Call of the Wild and noted that he really liked both it and its sequel (of sorts) White Fang. I read both books several years ago and, while I could see why they're considered great novels, I didn't get much out of them. Something about London's literary voice that didn't strike me as engaging.

But as I thought on things for a bit, I realized that I actually don't really care for any American authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, L. Frank Baum... Again, in all these cases, I can see why their works are considered good, but I just don't really care for them personally.

As I thought a bit further, it dawned on me that it really can't have much to do with the language specifically, as might be the case with Shakespeare. I actually do like many of their contemporaries... but primarily those from other countries. Lewis Caroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, George Orwell... I don't really start enjoying American authors until the mid-to-late 1930s and, even then, it's primarily limited to science fiction and pulp novels.

What's striking about that is that it roughly coincides with the rise of comic books as we know them. So what is it about the American voice that's resonates with me at that time that wasn't there before?

Well, the obvious answer is that the Great Depression happened in there. That had a HUGE impact on the country that lasted for decades and, somehow, the lessons Americans learned during the Depression worked their way into their writing.

I have to wonder about that, though. Because I do respond well to comic strips like Little Nemo and Krazy Kat which clearly pre-date the Depression by at least a decade. And Art Deco, which also pre-dates the Depression, is one of my favorite styles regardless of the artist's country of origin.

I do note that early American novels tend to have themes surrounding man's self-reliance, but that's not exclusive to America certainly. Indeed, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland features a more self-reliant protagonist than just about any other author's work I've cited here. As do some of those later American works I enjoy like, say, Detective Comics.

Maybe something about agriculture and wilderness? Those early American novels focus on man's self-reliance because there was just nothing else around anywhere. London's books are set in middle of frickin' nowhere. But here again, that idea doesn't hold up unilaterally. Oz is a pretty bustling place, and The Great Gatsby takes place in New York City.

The only thing I can think of (admittedly, it's not something I think about a lot, but I have been thinking about it off and on for the past decade!) is that there's something about the tone those early American authors use. Something about the level of informality, perhaps? Or maybe that it comes across as a forced informality?

Anyone out there study that era more deeply and have any other ideas?

Comic creators, by and large, know how their work is going to be presented. There was an old "rule" in writing comic scripts that you couldn't end a sentence with a period because there was no guarantee it would actually get printed. It wasn't a naive way to generate excitement in the story; it was a manner to work around a technical limitation of the printing technology they had available. Likewise, the comics back in the day were colored using lots of solid, bright colors because they didn't have the capability then to publish anything more nuanced.

This latter issue began raising its head several years ago when printing and paper technology had advanced considerably. There were more than a fair share of complaints fired that reprints of old books looked garish because these bright colors were intensified with better ink and whiter paper. It didn't look quite right because it was being presented in a format it wasn't originally intended to be presented in.

The same holds true for online comics. Yes, I can sit here at my computer and scan every page of a comic and post it online. I can even reconfigure the page scans so that they're all embedded in one file. But it's not going to be an entirely good reading experience, regardless of whether that's a PDF or whatever, because the original was not intended to be read like that. Of course a gorgeous page layout from Neal Adams is going to suffer when it's read on a computer -- he created it to be read in a pamphlet comic!

Adams is actually a good person to bring up here. Setting aside his incredible illustration skills, he's very conscious of how his work is being presented and adjusts his designs accordingly. Before his famed work on Batman, he was in DC's coloring department. He spent quite a deal of time and energy learning about what was and wasn't possible with the printing technology available at that time. His studies led him to realize that Marvel had a different deal with the printers than DC did that allowed them to use more colors in their books, making them look more sophisticated visually. Adams was able to take the ideas to his superiors and eventually get a better coloring deal for DC -- because he knew how things were being produced. Years later, when DC started to reprint his Batman stories in a nice, hardcover format, he opted to go back and recolor them all himself (for free, I believe) because he knew that the printing technology had changed sufficiently that the old coloring would not translate well to these new printings. And if you look at those books, you can see that, sure enough, the couple of stories Adams didn't recolor look decidedly muddier than everything else. Not that Adams changed the actual colors themselves, but he utilized the new coloring technology to achieve the same effects he created using a decidedly different -- and not immediately transferable -- technology decades earlier.

So when you look at Marvel Unlimited books digitally, or if you illegally download scans of the same books from a torrent, you're reading a story in a manner in which it wasn't intended to be read. Likewise, if you go to Webtoons to read a Marvel comic per their recently announced agreement, you're going to be reading comics that were designed to be printed and, even if they've been re-formatted for vertical scrolling, your satisfaction is going to be less than what's possible. This is why Comixology's "guided view" never caught on -- it was a less-than-ideal compromise that inherently changed the storytelling experience.

So, is it possible to write comics for an online venue? Absolutely, but the only people doing it are webcomic creators.

So here's the thing. Many, many more comics were written and designed to be presented in a format other than online than were made for the web. That's mostly just a function of how long the web has been around compared to pamphlet comics. But as long as creators continue developing comics with a "traditional" presentation in mind, their success is going to be limited in the online world. The problem isn't that the delivery mechanisms online are flawed; it's that people are using them to deliver the wrong material. Comics of any sort need to be created to take advantage of the unique properties of how they're being created to be truly effective.

It is good that digital options are available; it makes accessible thousands of comics fans might not otherwise have access to because the original printings are too expensive for them to buy and reprints for obscure issues are too expensive to print (for the limited audiences they'd attract). But my point is that it will always be an inherently inferior reading experience because they were designed to be read differently.

Lately, I've been reading some files I found buried in my archives from several years ago. It was a series of text pieces written by comics retailer Robert Beerbohm called "Comics Reality." They were all written in 1997 and '98 for the Comic Book Network Electronic Magazine. There have an interesting look at comics retailing, partially being a history lesson, but also addressing some issues that were JUST old enough to no longer be current.

I think I first came across the pieces around 2001/2002, so they were slightly dated at the time. Still in the "just old enough to not be current" ballpark. But I vaguely recall thinking at the time that I'd save them and read them later when I had a chance. Apparently the chance didn't show up for over a decade, as I've didn't pull these out to start reading them until relatively recently!

I'm only on the fifth installment out of twelve. But all that "not quite current" stuff is now at least 25 years past and Beerbohm's writing about it with then-little hindsight is quite interesting relative to having a few years to reflect on things. History as it was happening, if you will.

I bring this up for a few reasons. First, I think it's fascinating and I'd like to highlight Beerbohm's work/research. I knew he'd been working on a book about comics retailing for a while, but I found several references to it in "Comics Reality", meaning that "a while" has been nearly three decades. To be fair, I've heard he did have at least a partial draft that was over 800 pages long when he passed away last year. I know his daughter Katy had expressed interested in seeing it eventually published and I'd love to see that as well. While his writings could sometimes be a bit unstructured/disjointed -- Beerbohm even noted to me once that he needed a strong editor -- I don't doubt the information in his manuscript is invaluable. I realize that it's only been a year since he passed and Katy had plenty of her own challenges even before then, but I do want to keep the idea of this book alive and floating in the ether at the very least.

Second, what he has written for "Comics Reality" is incredibly enlightening, if a tad unpolished, and I'd like to encourage anyone who has the remotest interest in comic retailing to check out at least the first two installments. Sadly, the only place I can seem to find them online is through the Internet Archive. There's a very good explanations of why Jack Kirby's Fourth World books were canceled despite their popularity and how/why Howard the Duck commanded such erratic pricing when it was first published.

Beerbohm was one of the few people who seemed actively interested in the history of comics retailing. And being one of the first generation of them himself put him in a nearly unique position to document that period. Years ago, I'd toyed with the idea of writing that myself but only before know Beerbohm was already doing so. I've since come to realize, too, that it's very much the type of subject that I would be really bad at writing. (Well, not bad the writing per se, but I'm bad at doing the first-hand research that it would require.) How many of those early retailers are left at this point? Bud Plant just retired at age 73. Chuck Rozanski is still going strong, it seems, but he's 70 himself. They're only still with us mostly because they started selling comics when they were teens; any of those early retailers who was even slightly more adult back then would be in their 80s now.

That's why I'd love to see something comprehensive of the history of comics retailing. Let's capture what we can before it's all second-hand heresay.

What is a superhero? OK, Wonder Woman? Sure. Spider-Man? Yeah. Batman? Definitely heroic, and there's an arguement to be made that his is super. (I saw once someone had calculated what kind of training regimine Batman would need to do the things he does in the comics, and they wound up figuring he'd need to work out something like 20 hours per day. So he either doesn't need to work out as much as Olympic-level athletes or he can manipulate time.) In 1954, the New York Court of Appeals, in speaking of the infamous legal battle between Superman and Captain Marvel, defined superheroes as characters "of unprecedented physical prowess dedicated to acts of derring-do in the public interest." Webster's has a more broad definition: "a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers." In any case, though, we're generally looking at someone with beyond normal human abilities who acts in a socially positive manner.

Alright then, so who was the first superhero? Well, let's limit that to the first American superhero, so we only have to work through a couple centuries and not all of human history.

My first thought is to go to American folklore. Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and the like. The first recorded accounts of Paul Bunyan, though, don't occur until 1906 and Pecos Bill wasn't invented until 1923. John Henry seems like a contender -- the latest anyone's suggested his story started has been the 1870s. Davy Crockett (1786-1836) and Jim Bowie (1796-1836) are possible, too, but their legends tend not to get too much into the superhuman category. Mark Twain's characters are all fairly solidly grounded in reality -- even the Connecticut Yankee Hank Morgan was just a normal guy caught in an extraordinary circumstance. The first Oz book appeared in 1900.

Who else can we consider? The Yellow Kid wasn't really heroic, nor super (unless you count a constantly-changing nightshirt). John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman could be considered heroic, but not really super. Natty Bumppo doesn't really get into the super range either. What about Nikola Tesla? While his feats are lauded by some folks today, were his inventions magical enough to be considered super? Speaking of magical, what about Harry Houdini? His career as a magician started in 1891, but he didn't really do much in the way of the escapes he became famous for until 1900.

I'm drawing a blank on any other possible contenders beyond John Henry, Nikola Tesla, and Harry Houdini. Any other nominations? Can we put these guys to a vote somewhere?

Today is Labor Day here in the US, and Labour Day in Canada. It is intended to honor and recognize the labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the two countries. So today I'm presenting Labor Is a Partner, a comic produced by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society in 1949 to promote unions and laborers' rights. I can find no information on who wrote and/or drew it, but judging by a note on the back cover, it seems to have been sold to unions to be distributed among members.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Personal Kickstarter Stats v2
https://ift.tt/PAcf4oT

Kleefeld on Comics: Red and Blue
https://ift.tt/qfEl5eX

Kleefeld on Comics: November 1961
https://ift.tt/IPfNAO7

Kleefeld on Comics: My First Comic Book
https://ift.tt/TjSyd4i

Kleefeld on Comics: Graffiti Comic
https://ift.tt/pxClZdq

On August 10, an employee of the Justice Department, Sean Charles Dunn, approached one of the federal agents Donald Trump has unconstitutionally been using to enforce what is effectively martial law on Washington, DC. Dunn yelled, "Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!" and threw his sub sandwich at the agent.

No one wanted these agents partolling DC. DC's Mayor Muriel Bowser said, “This is a time where community needs to jump in and we all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our Home Rule, and get to the other side of this guy, and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push.” DC Federal Judge Zia M. Faruqui said, “The Sixth Amendment doesn’t get thrown out the window because the government has decided to make a show of arresting people.” A Washington Post-Scar School poll released last week found that 80% of DC residents opposed Trump’s actions.

So when Dunn threw his sandwich at the agent, everybody absolutely understood his anger and frustration. But he was immediately arrested and charged with a felony.

A felony. For throwing a sandwich.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also fired him the next day.

For throwing a fucking sandwich.

A. Fucking. Sandwich.

A grand jury said these charges were a load of bullshit and correctly refused to indict Dunn.

The situation was entirely absurd from top to bottom, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that a great many jokes were made at the expense of Trump, Bondi, and the federal agents wasting taxpayer dollars on the streets of DC. While smaller incidents tend to only generate online memes and quick one-liners on late night talk shows, there has been a greater foray of commentary carrying into the physical world. People are eager to show EVERYBODY, not just those online or watching TV, that everything Trump does or is even associated with is worthy of mockery. He's a petty, narcisistic bully whose only power is surrounding himself with racist sychophants. Everyone needs to see that at every opportunity, and thus we're seeing an increasing use of graffiti to express these sentiments.

All of this has been preface to this image...

Posted near Howard University in DC, it's an image of a man (not Dunn) throwing a sub sandwich at Steven Miller, who is widely believed to tbe brains behind many of Trump's executive decisions. (Because Trump sure as hell isn't smart enough or creative enough think of any of this himself!) And while I agree with the basic sentiment, what I find more interesting in this particular piece is the execution. Because it's a comic.

Those are four sheets of paper pasted up next to one another on the wall. Each one represents a discrete moment in time. The first "panel" is the man preparing to throw a sandwich, the second and third panels show the trajectory and arc of the throw, and the final panel shows it landing. That's not four sandwiches; that's one sandwich at four moments in time. It conveys the message quickly and easily, and I daresay there are few people who would see this and not understand the basic message, even if they didn't know Miller specifically or if they hadn't heard about Dunn's story. I think it's a great, subversive use of the medium and I would love to see more graffit artists leverage this type of approach.

Particularly when it comes to pointing out to everyone, regardless of what kind of news bubble they might be in, just how hideous, destructive, and cruel-for-the-sake-being-cruel this fucking administration is.