I stumbled across this clip from season 7 of Sesame Street... It originally aired in January 1976, so it would've been around the time I was regularly watching, although I don't recall this specific scene at all. But what struck me today was that as Harry walks up to Luis, he passes the normally-open door of Mr. Hooper's Store; however, since it is closed, there are several comic books visible attached to the inside of the door window. You wouldn't normally see these on the show since the door is almost always left open; I don't know why they would've had it closed here. In any event, none of the comics are shown very clearly, but I was curious to try to see if I could identify any of them.

It was a bit tricky, but I was able to figure out five out of the six...

Sad Sack #237 (middle left)

Richie Rich Millions #74 (bottom right)

Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers #12 (top right)

Archie #248 (middle right)

Our Fighting Forces #161 (bottom left)

All of these are cover-dated November 1975, so they were probably about as current as you could get when they filmed this. Most of the titles make sense for a kids show in 1975, but I have to admit I'm at a loss about the inclusion of Our Fighting Forces. I mean, it's a DC comic from 1975 so it's not super graphic or anything, but it is expressly a war title, so it seems a little odd that they would include it on Sesame Street. Even just as a background prop.

Here's the description of You Must Take Part in Revolution from the inside flap...

It's 2035. The US and China are at war. America is a proto-fascist state. Taiwan is divided into two. As conflict escalates between nuclear powers, three idealistic youths who first met in Hong Kong develop diverging beliefs about how best to navigate this techno-authoritarian landscape. Andy, Maggie, and Olivia travel different paths toward transformative change, each confronting to what extent they will fight for freedom, and who they will become in doing so.

The war itself is very much not the focus. Rather, it's primarily on Andy, a Chinese-American veterinarian who moved to Hong Kong in 2021. It's at his first protest that he meets Maggie and Olivia. The wind up attended several protests together, but Maggie gets increasingly agitated and eventually starts resorting to using car bombs on police vehicles. She's eventually caught and imprisoned for life. It's at that point when Olivia disappears and Andy drops out of any protesting at all.

Andy continues on with his vet work but almost incidentally starts helping out by providing some medical care off the record for some activists. He's slowly pulled back into the fold, and starts to see some of the more active elements of the resistance groups. He himself is drawn deeper and deeper, and becomes more and more active. He seemingly randomly bumps into Olivia again; she apologizes for disappearing years earlier, blaming it on fear, but Andy invites her in to help. And then... well, I've leave the ending open to avoid spoilers.

The story takes place over a period of a little over a decade. But, as I said, the war itself isn't so much the focus as three characters and their positions about both war in general and this war in particular. None of them end up in the same place they start, all of them shaped by their individual experiences. Both from before and during the story. All of it tracks and all of it makes sense. Everybody's decisions here, even when they contradict each, have solid rationales behind them. And the people whose decisions are based on belief? Even when those decisions change and even their whole belief system changes, they continue to make choices that reflect who they are.

Towards the end, Maggie says, "Nothing we do happens independently. Everyone and everything is connected." The actions she took that put her in prison affected Andy and Olivia. And their actions at the end of the book -- again, over a decade after the start -- are the result, albeit indirectly, of Maggie blowing up a police vehicle. But there's no real judgement by or from any of the characters. Their actions are their actions, and they all seem to take responsibilty for them. But there's no commentary on who is right or wrong, who is more or less justified.

Badiucao and Melissa Chan put together an excellent story here. It's uncomfortable given the insanely petty and authoritarian whims of the asshole in the White House right now, but it offers a lot to think about and worth the read. The book came out earlier this month from Street Noise Books and retails for $23.99 US; it should be available from your favorite book seller.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Telecomics
https://ift.tt/TqDIlB6

Kleefeld on Comics: Comics Business Turbulence
https://ift.tt/1T4LOvU

Kleefeld on Comics: What Will Alliance Bring to Comics
https://ift.tt/67IyabD

Kleefeld on Comics: Sturgeon's Law and the Quest for Maintaining Relevance
https://ift.tt/Zvw1WHK

Kleefeld on Comics: Old as Stone Hard as Rock Review
https://ift.tt/XlaVOux

The simplistic summary of Alessandro Sanna's Old as Stone, Hard as Rock is that it's the history of war and warfare. From the first rock some proto human picked up and smashed onto someone's head to intercontinental missiles that destroy entire cities from an ocean away. All told only through pictures.

That's the simplistic description.

But largely owing to the fact that the story is wordless, the reader is forced to consider each image more. And while they're not overly complex -- most of the humans shown are barely more than stick figures -- the sequences play out in a way that offers more reflection. You're thinking, "Hey, they've taken that rock and are doing something with it? It looks like they're breaking it up, making it into something. They're... forging something? They're making... swords. Because of course!" Now a writer could certainly craft a paragraph together to not only relay the same basic information, but without that critical revelation about what they're making, but I think it hits more powerfully when the reader has to sort through and process it themself.

(Hmm. That I used the word "hits" just now was just a natural flow of my writing here. But particularly in light of this book's content, I'll take a moment to reflect that "hit" is an act of violence. Our very language is built up around war, even when we're talking about non-violent acts of processing thought. That seems to play very much into the drum beat of Sanna's work here, that human kind just keeps waging war after war after war, long after we've theoretically understood that it's nothing but senseless killing.)

At the close of the book, though, Sanna does leave readers with an open ending. The Earth is presented in an entirely different setting, one big rock among many with a hand reaching to examine it. I'm sure many will read it as a divine selection of some kind, a message of hope. Given that we just went through nearly two hundred pages of violence, I'm more inclined to think that it's more premonitional. We've just seen how man keeps making bigger and bigger, and more and more powerful weapons -- eventually the planet itself will become another weapon in man's hands. A planet is just another rock like all of the others after all.

Sanna's paintings are sublime. In most cases, not an abudance of detailed linework but the images are nonetheless very engaging, using a lot of broad shapes and colors to draw people in. The images are more symbolic than representational, which tracks against the history itself -- it's not a strictly linear timeline we follow but more a symbolic one. Which makes all the more sense that this had to be done in a graphic novel format. That the pages are scanned from the full art, too, including smudges of paint towards the edges and bits of tape that remained from masking off borders gives the reader a more direct sense of the art that went into everything. The story isn't "clean" -- it hasn't been sanitized in any way. Humans are a violent race, and trying to suggest otherwise is a form of white-washing. Sanna is clear that he is not doing that here.

Because the book is wordless, it can be read fairly quickly. But I do recommend taking at least some occasions to pause and reflect on individual pages and panels as you're going through it. Again, there's not detailed linework to study, but loads of meaning to absorb. After a 2019 debut in Italy, it was just published in the United States last month, and the hardcover retails for $34.95 US.

Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. Although he was originally expressing the sentiment with regards to a macro-level of art (i.e. 90% of films are crap, 90% of books are crap, etc.) I think it also applies at decidedly more micro-level as well. Meaning that 90% of everything you or I produce is crap.

Obviously, crap is relative here. If 90% of what I make is crap, but I always produce something better (or worse) than the next guy, then a strict definition of crap would mean 100% of his (or my) output is crap. What I'm saying, though, is that 90% of what I make is crap only when compared to what I make. The next guy might be infinitely better or worse than me, but his stuff is still 90% crap... relative only to the broader body of work he produces.

With that in mind, then, it makes sense, as a creative individual, to create as much as you possibly can so that the 10% of your work that isn't crap is enough to make a living on. And, if you're extremely talented or incredibly lucky, some of your non-crap work will even find it's way up to the 10% of non-crap work overall.

But here's the other thing: the 10% of your non-crap work changes over time. You don't just create 10% of your life-long awesomeness when you're 20 and produce nothing but crap for the rest of your life. By the same token, you don't produce crap exclusively until you're 60 and suddenly come up with your 10% of non-crap. No, 90% of what you've made by the time you're 20 is crap, and 90% of what you've made by the time you're 60 is crap. Some of that latter crap may well include things that were part of your 10% non-crap work from when you were 20!

You ever look at something you created years earlier? An old drawing or a poem or whatever? You thought it was absolutely fantastic at the time but, now, 5... 10... 20 years on, it looks like crap. That's what I'm talking about. In fact, if your older work doesn't look any worse to you now than it did before, then you haven't really grown or improved in the intervening time.

Now, if you took a decade off from painting to focus on raising your kids (or whatever), obviously your painting skills wouldn't improve over that time, and your older paintings probably look just as good to you now as they did then. That's perfectly reasonable, I think. But once you get back into painting, you should start improving again (once you've gotten past whatever level of atrophy your skills fell into) and you should soon see your older work as crap.

Everything is changing all around us. Technology, of course, but also the way we interact with the rest of the world. Bluesky didn't exist twenty years ago, and internet-connected cell phones were still quite the rarity. But not only do they exist now, but they've changed the face of how we think and act on a day-to-day level. How much of your Bluesky stream got filled up with election day coverage back in November? That wasn't a news feed like you might see scrolling across the bottom of CNN; that was running commentary shared by your friends and acquaintances from around the country, if not the world. That was you and hundreds, if not thousands, of loosely connected individuals having a large group discussion in real time about an event that was going on throughout the country. Twenty years ago, you could do something approximating that with a dozen or two people in a chat room or message board. Thirty years ago? Almost unheard of. You sat in a room, and any discussion was limited to the people in that room. Maybe one or two people on the phone line. The technology has enabled a fundamental change in how we operate as a society.

So, here's the tricky bit for the 21st century. The work of a creative individual tends to be most successful (i.e. not part of the 90% of crap) when it's a good reflection of the culture it's in. Looking at old comics, they tend not to work as well today because they reflect a very different time and place. Yellow-skinned, buck-toothed depictions of the Japanese look horrible today, but it was almost unpatriotic (for Americans) to depict them any other way in the 1940s. But if the technology keeps changing at a faster and faster pace (which it does) and that keeps impacting society at a faster and faster pace (which it is) then it's inherently more difficult to make art that's reflective of society. The time you might take creating a piece might be longer than the time it takes for the culture to change around you.

And if the art you create isn't reflective of society, it's more likely to be seen as a failure. That is, it's more likely to be seen as crap. The implication here is that it's becoming harder and harder to create art that's not crap, and that the improvements that you used to see in your work are potentially less relevant/important. Meaning that your more recent work is going to be less likely to supplant your previous work, and your window for creating additional non-crap gets smaller instead of larger. After all, how many comic creators do you know that made something fantastic in their 20s or 30s, and have produced nothing of any particular note since?

I might be full of crap with this. This post could well be part of the 90% of my work that is crap. But I tell you, this is the kind of stuff that scares me personally. For whatever insignificant level of relevance I have here and now, how much less do I have to look forward to because I can't keep up? I'm certainly going to try to fight that notion as long as I can, but mankind as a whole does not have a good track record in that department.

Here's hoping this post is part of my 90%!

The big news in comics yesterday was that Alliance Entertainment purchased many of the assets from Diamond Comics including Diamond Comic Distributors, Alliance Game Distributors, Diamond Select Toys & Collectibles, and Collectible Grading Authority. The question I think many people are asking is: what does that mean for the comics industry?

Frankly, I don't think much.

Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has a nice piece trying to look into Alliance as a company since it sounds like pretty much no one in the comics industry is familiar with them. Over at ICv2, Milton Griepp speaks to their existing resources and their potential for changing/updating the distribution channels. But here's the thing: who do they serve any more?

DC Comics switched to Lunar Distribution and UCS Comic Distributors for periodical releases and Penguin Random House for graphic novels in 2020. In 2021, Marvel made a deal with Penguin Random House to distribute their monthly comics and graphic novels to comic shops and Hachette Book Group to handle distribution to the bookstore market. IDW is with PRH for bookstores and comic shops. Archie Comics is going through Lunar for comic shops with PRH to handle their bookstore options. Dark Horse has an exclusive deal with Penguin Random House. Image Comics is exclusive with Lunar. And nearly all of this was set up before Diamond filed for bankruptcy. You could technically still get Marvel, Archie, and IDW through Diamond but only wholesale, which I don't expect many individual comic shops would realistically be able to do as they likely wouldn't be ordering the volumes needed for that.

Now, that's not to say Diamond wasn't distributing anything prior to their bankruptcy, but in terms of volume, the vast majority of comics getting sent to local comic shops across the US were no longer being distributed by Diamond as of the end of 2023 anyway.

If Alliance throws a ton of money at infrastructure upgrades and the like, yes, they absolutely could improve on what Diamond had been doing. But whatever improvements they make only be available to the smaller publishers. The larger orders made from most comic shops -- the titles from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. -- will come from other distributors that they've been using for the past couple years.

Now, an Alliance-run-Diamond could certainly offer new deals as the various contracts currently with PRH, Lunar, Hachette, and so on are up for renewal. And Alliance could make things look attractive to publishers by cutting special deals where they take a smaller cut of the cover price or adding other perks. But I think they're going to seriously upgrade their services first and foremost, and then prove themselves for several years with whichever smaller publishers are still working with them before a significant number of these publishers sign back on. And I'm certain even then those won't be exclusive deals, meaning that retailers will continue to order through which distributors are being used now.

Now, as Alliance also purchased Diamond Select Toys, they'll likely still have orders coming from comic shops that carry nothing but Marvel and DC. They might be able to use that to "prove" themselves a little faster than if they just relied on the smaller comics publishers' titles. But even so, they'd still have to A) up their game, and B) court the larger publishers back from the existing deals they had now. Recall that those publishers all left Diamond because they were having so many problems years before the bankruptcy; it's going to be a while before that lost trust can be regained. And even then, they're only going to entertain switching distributors again if there's enough benefit from leaving who they're with now; I don't have a direct line of intel on that, but I certainly haven't heard of any of these publishers being unhappy with PRH, Lunar, Hachette, etc. Why would a publisher want to disrupt something that's working?

So whatever Alliance does here, and however much they improve on what Diamond had been doing previously, I don't see Alliance's purchase of Diamond as being especially significant to the comics industry from a practical point of view. At least not for several years, and even then in an ideal (for Alliance) scenario.

In early 2020, the comic industry -- and, frankly, the entire world -- got clotheslined by COVID. It was a new virus that nobody yet understood, even how it was transmitted. So a great many businesses shut down or went fully remote or something to that effect. The businesses that stayed open -- notably things like grocery stores and pharmacies -- were largely considered "essential" and so many businesses that did not fall into that loosely-defined category were ordered closed by state and municipal governments. That included not only comic book shops, but pretty much every business associated with comics in any way. Publishers were mostly able to get work-from-home setups for the staff, and much of their work was done remotely by freelancers before then anyway. But printers and distributors has to close their doors for a while. In the United States, though, it wasn't "distributors" (plural) but "distributor" (singular). And, in going back through my notes from that time, Diamond whiffed that really, really, really badly.

Today, five years later, Diamond is having many of its assets auctioned off to pay off the debts that led to their bankruptcy. Now, to be clear, COVID did not cause their bankruptcy but there is a pretty direct path (with a few stops in between) from their handling of COVID to this bankruptcy auction. When others started taking advantage of Diamond's 2020 difficulties, the sudden pseudo-vacuum was filled quickly... and that speed to fill in the gaps led to other indusrty-wide problems as I noted in 2021. Folks were scrambling to get system up and running quickly, and that inevitably leads to stop-gap measures that remain in place far longer than they should.

When Diamond first announced it was filing for bankruptcy in January, everybody knew that meant things would get seriously disrupted. That was kind of a no-brainer since, despite having a few other companies step in to the comics distribution game since 2020, Diamond still was the only distributor for most comic book publishers. (Although it should be noted, not for the most actual comic books since Marvel and DC had both parted ways with Diamond by then.) What I don't think anyone predicted -- what I don't think anyone could have predicted -- is how things would shake out. We've got several relatively small distributors having to up their game considerably. Heck, we just learned that IDW Publishing will be acting as a distributor for Valiant/Alien Books! Frankly, I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one.

And all of this against the backdrop of a broader economy that is seemingly being deliberately wrecked by an administration by throwing markets into chaos with -- among other things -- arbitrary tariffs, which are implemented and rescinded on an almost hourly basis. ("Deliberately, though, Sean?" Yes, deliberatley. Consider this: if you wanted to tank the world's largest economy, would you do anything differently than what's being done now?)

Things are very, very, very much not stable in the comics industry right now. I'm seeing literally almost daily articles now about major staff shakeups at comic companies, unexpected distribution deals, and all sorts of significant business moves that would normally take up the comics news cycle for a week each. Yesterday, I just saw that several UK comic publishers just formally organized a trade association, the first of its kind since 2011!

Where am I going with all this?

There is a fire hose of news getting blasted as us these days. The United States has heel-turned in less than two months from being aligned with democracies around the world to being a suck-up to the two most authoritarian regimes on the planet, making enemies out of virtually everyone else. That this much news is happening within comics, an industry that has historically worked very hard to remain stable, on top of the daily US and world news showcases just how guano crazy things are these days. We're going to see a LOT of changes to the comic industry throughout the remainder of 2025, regardless of what happens anywhere else. Please make sure your tray table is securely stowed, your chair is in the upright position, and your seat belt has been tightened and secured. Things are going to get very bumpy.