Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
Here's a two-page spread from the October 14, 1940 issue of Life...
For the record, that Ace Comics issue is mostly filled with reprints of newspaper strips including The Phantom, The Katzenjammer Kids, Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, Blondie, and Prince Valiant.
The shadow of the treaty by which Japan joined Germany and Italy in military alliance fell more darkly over Washington last week than it did over the flowered fields and coastal cliffs of Southern California. To Americans in the West it sounded a summons for increased watchfulness over the big Japanese minority swelling in their midst.I can only find one response to the piece in the various Letters to the Editor that followed from the October 28 issue. It refers specifically to the spread I've included above and reads, in its entirety...
For the record, that Ace Comics issue is mostly filled with reprints of newspaper strips including The Phantom, The Katzenjammer Kids, Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, Blondie, and Prince Valiant.
Right off the bat, I cannot take credit for the following idea. This came from Ladies Making Comics. She and I talked a bit about it on Twitter a few ago, and I've presented it here before. But since no one has seemingly taken up the idea, I'll throw it out to the world again now.
Let's start off with a hypothetical. Let's say that you would want to read a collection of stories from Marvel's 1989/90 "Acts of Vengeance" crossover. You could, of course, track down all the individual issues but that was 70+ individual comics; that would take a while and probably wouldn't be cheap. Marvel did put out a $100 omnibus edition, but I don't think that actually collects everything. Plus, what if you didn't actually want all of the individual issues? Maybe you're perfectly fine skipping over all of the X-Men related stories. You'd be paying a big chunk for a book in which you only want to read about half the stories.
Here's another hypothetical. What if you're amused by Marvel's Captain Ultra character and you want to read all of his appearances? Again you could track down all the individual issues -- and in this case there's less than two dozen -- but they're a bit all over the map, so there's a bit of a hunt involved. And that's really your only option because his stories have never been collected in a single volume. Several have never been reprinted at all, I believe.
But what if you could go through a list of comics, select the ones you liked, and have them printed up in a single bound volume? Any random collection of titles or stories, in any order you wanted, all in one set of covers.
The technology exists to do precisely that today. Print on demand services basically do this all the time. Not just writers who use POD to print off and sell their books without a formal publisher, but think of those photo album books where you upload a bunch of pictures, write some captions, and get a bound book in the mail a few weeks later? The printer has a template set up, drops in the images you select, and run it as a single print job. Custom comic TPBs would be even easier since you'd be selecting exclusively from pre-existing artwork (the already completed individual comic issues) and the POD folks would just crank out your specific set.
All a printer would need for this would be access to the digital comics files. And Marvel and DC have both got digital versions of just about everything in their catalogs at this point. I mean, how many of them got digitized for comiXology or to make ready for print collections? You could go through a comiXology-like interface (I'm talking about the old comiXology UI, not the mess that Amazon turned it into) and the issues would get dropped into your cart. But then, instead of checkout leading to gaining access to digital versions of those comics, you get a bound book in the mail a few weeks later.
The database setup is all there; you would just need a print-on-demand printer to get access to those files. Print-on-demand is definitely not something all printers can do, so Marvel and DC likely couldn't use the printers they have for their regular books. Would they be pricier on a per page basis than regular TPBs? Almost certainly. But how many people these days go about taking the original issues and having them professionally bound into collections? That's the same idea, but more expensive and, in the cases of Bronze Age books and older, you're stuck with whatever crappy newsprint they were originally printed on.
Admittedly, there's a fair amount of logistics that would need to happen in order to set this up, but once it was set up, it would largely run itself. You'd obviously need press managers to make sure nothing funked up on the actual printing line, and some support staff and such, but you could have an automated system feed the POD database new issues as the files were completed from the publisher, and kick print jobs out more or less automatically as they came in. People expect POD books to be a little pricier already, I think, so you could still print the books one at a time and make money off each one. I think this would be a totally do-able idea, and I'm kind of surprised no one has worked to implement it yet. (At least, not that I've heard/seen in any capacity.)
I think it's a frickin' genius idea, and I'd love to be able to put together odd collections of books that don't make any sense to anyone else but me! C'mon, somebody get on this!
Let's start off with a hypothetical. Let's say that you would want to read a collection of stories from Marvel's 1989/90 "Acts of Vengeance" crossover. You could, of course, track down all the individual issues but that was 70+ individual comics; that would take a while and probably wouldn't be cheap. Marvel did put out a $100 omnibus edition, but I don't think that actually collects everything. Plus, what if you didn't actually want all of the individual issues? Maybe you're perfectly fine skipping over all of the X-Men related stories. You'd be paying a big chunk for a book in which you only want to read about half the stories.
But what if you could go through a list of comics, select the ones you liked, and have them printed up in a single bound volume? Any random collection of titles or stories, in any order you wanted, all in one set of covers.
The technology exists to do precisely that today. Print on demand services basically do this all the time. Not just writers who use POD to print off and sell their books without a formal publisher, but think of those photo album books where you upload a bunch of pictures, write some captions, and get a bound book in the mail a few weeks later? The printer has a template set up, drops in the images you select, and run it as a single print job. Custom comic TPBs would be even easier since you'd be selecting exclusively from pre-existing artwork (the already completed individual comic issues) and the POD folks would just crank out your specific set.
All a printer would need for this would be access to the digital comics files. And Marvel and DC have both got digital versions of just about everything in their catalogs at this point. I mean, how many of them got digitized for comiXology or to make ready for print collections? You could go through a comiXology-like interface (I'm talking about the old comiXology UI, not the mess that Amazon turned it into) and the issues would get dropped into your cart. But then, instead of checkout leading to gaining access to digital versions of those comics, you get a bound book in the mail a few weeks later.
The database setup is all there; you would just need a print-on-demand printer to get access to those files. Print-on-demand is definitely not something all printers can do, so Marvel and DC likely couldn't use the printers they have for their regular books. Would they be pricier on a per page basis than regular TPBs? Almost certainly. But how many people these days go about taking the original issues and having them professionally bound into collections? That's the same idea, but more expensive and, in the cases of Bronze Age books and older, you're stuck with whatever crappy newsprint they were originally printed on.
Admittedly, there's a fair amount of logistics that would need to happen in order to set this up, but once it was set up, it would largely run itself. You'd obviously need press managers to make sure nothing funked up on the actual printing line, and some support staff and such, but you could have an automated system feed the POD database new issues as the files were completed from the publisher, and kick print jobs out more or less automatically as they came in. People expect POD books to be a little pricier already, I think, so you could still print the books one at a time and make money off each one. I think this would be a totally do-able idea, and I'm kind of surprised no one has worked to implement it yet. (At least, not that I've heard/seen in any capacity.)
I think it's a frickin' genius idea, and I'd love to be able to put together odd collections of books that don't make any sense to anyone else but me! C'mon, somebody get on this!
This was my first experience with Doom Patrol. I'd heard of them previously, but never read any of their stories. Any version. I'd heard about some comparisons to Marvel's X-Men, but it was never a topic I looked at very closely. So I was coming to this about as fresh as I could.
In finally reading Doom Patrol, my initial thoughts were that it bore no real resemblance to The X-Men at all. Or, I guess, The X-Men bore no resemblance to Doom Patrol. It did seem to me, though, that Doom Patrol read a lot like the early days of Fantastic Four. Say, the first 20-25 issues or so. Not so much the specific characters or power sets (although there are some oblique similarities) but more in terms of how Stan Lee handled the character dynamics. Doom Patrol was a team, yes, but the bickered among themselves, they was an unrequited love interest, there were concerns about how their powers worked... and the only place that was really doing that at the time was over in Fantastic Four.
Recall, that both X-Men and Avengers were still months away. Marvel was starting to fill out the Marvel Universe: Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor and Spider-Man debuted in 1962, and Iron Man first showed up early in 1963 with Wasp a couple months later. With X-Men and Avengers yet to see the light of day, the only comic Marvel was producing with any sort of team dynamic at the time Doom Patrol debuted was Fantastic Four.
Now, the Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four most people remember actually begins around #35. That's about when they start building the individual issues as parts of a larger story. By #41, it basically becomes a long graphic novel with the Frightful Four attack blending into an encounter with the Inhumans blending into the Galactus Trilogy blending into the introduction of Black Panther and so on. The first couple dozen issues of the book, though, are more self-contained villain-of-the-month stories. It's those later issues that they really get into the team's exploration and extended storytelling.
Over in Doom Patrol, there's still some holdover storytelling conventions from DC's 1950s books -- the general hokiness and bad pseudo-science. I suspect these were at least in part pushed by editor Murray Boltinoff. But I think the direction writer Arnold Drake was given was to emulate the style of the superhero books that Marvel was doing. So we see in his early Doom Patrol issues that the stories are very character-driven. Something that wasn't common at DC at the time. Especially their superhero stories -- the characters had more-or-less interchangeable personalities, and the only real distinctions between them were their costumes and specific powers. The characters in Doom Patrol were unique and reacted to events individually and differently. And since Marvel's only team book that even could be emulated was Fantastic Four, we get character dynamics in Doom Patrol that aren't dissimilar to those.
Where things diverge, as I alluded to above, is that Kirby and Lee would soon take Fantastic Four is some very creative directions, with Kirby throwing new ideas into the book seemingly on every other page! Drake continued using the same formula that he picked up in 1963, and basically did variations on a few themes. The books are done well, and I actually enjoy them more than anything else I've read from DC prior to the 1970s. But it still feels like an imitation of 1960s Marvel.
I don't think Drake was copying anything going on at Marvel, but there's clearly an influence of the "we want you to write a book like them" variety. I suspect, though, there was still enough heavy-handedness in editorial, though, that kept things still pretty closely aligned with everything else DC was publishing at the time. Still, those early Doom Patrol books are fun and well-done for what they are; like I said, some of the best work I've seen from DC prior to the '70s for my money. Although that I've long been a much bigger fan of Marvel than DC is almost certainly why I think that.
I've been doing some research the past couple weeks on a 1970s Disney comic. I won't go into too many details here because it's due to be published later this year, but one of the key findings was that some folks at Disney felt that the freelance artist who worked on it didn't adhere closely enough to some of the characters' visual design and had another artist change it. It was a situation not unlike when Jack Kirby was drawing Jimmy Olsen, and DC editors brought in Al Plastino and Murphy Anderson to re-draw Superman's and Jimmy Olsen's heads every time they appeared.
Now, we're talking about the 1970s here, so marketing was a very different beast than it is now. Today, you can readily find many large companies offerring up their charcters in significantly different styles than what had come before. On the newspaper funny pages, we've got legacy strips like Flash Gordon and Popeye with significantly different designs than what they'd been known for.
In cartoons, both Disney and Warner Brothers have in recent years eschewed their 'traditional' character designs for exaggerated ones that have almost single-line-thin limbs.
In comic books, artists are regularly brought in specifically to bring their unique style to the characters; there was a Fantastic Four comic a couple years ago in which every page was by a different artist and the art style shifted radically
on a literally page by page basis. People seem to have largely come to the realization that what fundamentally makes a character that charcter is NOT the specific art style they're presented in, and audiences understand that not every artist draws in the exact same style.
Part of the interest is in seeing how another artist interprets the same character -- witness this sketch of Don Martin's Captain Klutz as rendered by Fred Hembeck.
But what strikes me is that this had been proven plenty of times by the 1970s. Did Kirk Alyn's portrayal of Superman bear any resemblance to the Fleischer animated one? Did Arthur Lake look like the Dagwood Bumstead that Chic Young drew? You want to stay within the same medium -- compare Robert Lowery's performance as Batman against Adam West's. Compare Mort Weisinger and George Papp's Green Arrow against Denny O'Neil Neal Adams' version. Heck, go back to the earliest days of published comics -- there were two simultaneous versions of the Yellow Kid in different papers back in the 1890s, one by Richard Outcault and one by George Luks.
Now clearly different creative teams are going to have differing levels of perceived quality, so some versions are going to be more popular than others. And in some of the examples I noted, they weren't running concurrently and, thus, didn't really "compete" with each other in terms of impacting the brand of the character. But collectively, I think they very much do illustrate that the important elements of a character's "brand" are not what they look like. Why people didn't seem to understand that in the 1970s is beyond me.
Was it simply an exercise of power? I recall the story a friend of mine told me back in college where he worked at an ad agency that worked with Hanna-Barbera, and they had to get H-B approvals for any illustrations they did. Those were always a pain in the butt, and would frequently come back with notes like, "Fred Flinstone's left arm is a centimeter too thick" or "Yogi Bear's nose should be pointed half a degree further downward." It turned out that those comments were all coming from one guy who felt a sense of ownership over the characters and made comments like that expressly for the purpose of being able to claim he had input on each illustration. So were those other instance similar? Just exerting power for the sake of saying they had a hand in it? Or was it a personal thing -- that they felt the need to display power over the freelancers? "You have to produce art to my specifications, no matter how inconsequential"?
Without knowing all the specific individuals involved, I don't think anyone can say. But I bring it up to emphasize that character designs are really exceptionally maleable. What makes a character speak to an audience isn't the specific style of line that's used, but what the creator is imbuing into the work. They'll obviously bring their own style to the work and that will have an impact on garnering people's attention, but it won't have an appreciable impact on the character brand.
But what strikes me is that this had been proven plenty of times by the 1970s. Did Kirk Alyn's portrayal of Superman bear any resemblance to the Fleischer animated one? Did Arthur Lake look like the Dagwood Bumstead that Chic Young drew? You want to stay within the same medium -- compare Robert Lowery's performance as Batman against Adam West's. Compare Mort Weisinger and George Papp's Green Arrow against Denny O'Neil Neal Adams' version. Heck, go back to the earliest days of published comics -- there were two simultaneous versions of the Yellow Kid in different papers back in the 1890s, one by Richard Outcault and one by George Luks.
Now clearly different creative teams are going to have differing levels of perceived quality, so some versions are going to be more popular than others. And in some of the examples I noted, they weren't running concurrently and, thus, didn't really "compete" with each other in terms of impacting the brand of the character. But collectively, I think they very much do illustrate that the important elements of a character's "brand" are not what they look like. Why people didn't seem to understand that in the 1970s is beyond me.
Was it simply an exercise of power? I recall the story a friend of mine told me back in college where he worked at an ad agency that worked with Hanna-Barbera, and they had to get H-B approvals for any illustrations they did. Those were always a pain in the butt, and would frequently come back with notes like, "Fred Flinstone's left arm is a centimeter too thick" or "Yogi Bear's nose should be pointed half a degree further downward." It turned out that those comments were all coming from one guy who felt a sense of ownership over the characters and made comments like that expressly for the purpose of being able to claim he had input on each illustration. So were those other instance similar? Just exerting power for the sake of saying they had a hand in it? Or was it a personal thing -- that they felt the need to display power over the freelancers? "You have to produce art to my specifications, no matter how inconsequential"?
Without knowing all the specific individuals involved, I don't think anyone can say. But I bring it up to emphasize that character designs are really exceptionally maleable. What makes a character speak to an audience isn't the specific style of line that's used, but what the creator is imbuing into the work. They'll obviously bring their own style to the work and that will have an impact on garnering people's attention, but it won't have an appreciable impact on the character brand.
In any event, the subtitle of the book is "An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis" and it's setup as a dialogue between Blain and noted climate change expert Jean-Marc Jancovici. Blain puts himself in the everyman position and lets Jancovici walk through all the the hows, whys, and wherefores about climate change. Though Jancovici does explain things largely in layman's terms, Blain does frequently offers practical examples as he begins to understand things, frequently borrowing Jancovinci's metaphor of modern machines effectively making every person a kind of Iron Man type of superhero.
(In fact, the original version of this has Blain wear actual Iron Man armor throughout much of the book to emphasize this point. You can see this in many of the French language previews online. I suspect that to avoid litigation he's gone back and re-drawn all of those instances with a more generic "Armor Man" for at least the US publication. That might explain part of the multi-year delay between the French and US publications.)
Now, you might think, "Well, yeah, I know the gist of things here... fossil feuls released CO₂, which traps heat on the Earth, and everything gets hotter, so we should use more solar power, yadda yadda yadda... I don't need someone else to explain all that." But that's not what this book is.
In the first place, while Jancovici does use a portion of the book to explain where greenhouse gasses come from, he also spends a fair amount of time explaining how and why we started using them in the first place. And not just the technical reasons, but the social and economic ones as well. He makes it very clear that, unlike a lot of climate activists who might come across as upset that anyone has ever burned an ounce of gasoline, there are a lot of valid and justifiable reasons why it made -- and in many ways continues to make -- sense. He's also very candid about using "green" power sources like wind and solar, noting the current limitations of how much power they generate relative to the amount of resources they use in their creation.
One aspect of the book that I quite liked was that Jancovici seemed to really try to take a holsitic, nuanced approach to the topic. Frequently, things get simplified to little more than "fossil fuels are bad" but Jancovici's look at the economic reasons for how and why they're still used (again, in a more nuanced discussion than "oil companies are greedy") is insightful. It feels more honest and less judgemental. Indeed, he seems to make a point of using statistics from all over the world and not saying "the US is worse than everybody else" or "China has the most blame" or anything. He does call out the US and China on multiple occasions, but he also calls out France and England and India and Russia and Japan and...
That also means he recognizes the practicalities of things as well. He doesn't say, "never drive anywhere" or "never eat meat" or anything. His biggest suggestion is really to reject the "growth at all costs" mentality that has become very part and parcel to capitalism any more. That doesn't mean growth by itself is evil -- yet again, it's a nuanced discussion -- but that it's not a failure if you're not increasing revenue all the time.
It's a solid and informative book; one that I wish I could've read a decade or two ago. If I had, I might be more optimistic than I am now. Not that Jancovinci isn't optimistic, but personally I find it difficult in light of where we are collectively right now. Neither Jancovici or Blain claim to have all the answers. There's some suggestions and ideas that will probably help, but mostly at an individual scale. Will it help more globally if enough people adopt those ideas? Probably. It certainly won't hurt! It's definitely an insightful look at climate change, regardless, and it's a book I wish more people would read.
As I said, the book came out in the US last week, published by Zando. It's retails in hardcover for $32 US. I believe it's been available in the UK since October and in France for a couple years now, so you should basically be able to pick it up at your bookstore of choice pretty readily. Well worth the read.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
Kleefeld on Comics: The Internment of Morrie Kuramoto
https://ift.tt/LlOocVQ
https://ift.tt/LlOocVQ
