An idea I've been kicking around for the past several days is that of a new comic. ('Cuz I don't have nearly enough to do as it is!) The idea is based loosely on the Chinese legend of the Monkey King. The legend is open to a pretty wide array of interpretations; the character is old enough to be in the public domain; he's not terribly well-known in the U.S. making it look more original; avoiding drawing humans would allow for some greater freedom as an illustrator; plus, who doesn't love monkeys?

I've really got two problems in this area. First is one of format. It seems unlikely that I'll be able to sell this as a comic book straight away, but it should be able to slip into the online comic strip format fairly easily. The issue, though, is that web comics can be relatively open-ended as far as format is concerned. I could make it a "traditional" horizontal strip like you find in the newspaper, but on the web, I'm not limited to that. I can make it considerably longer, or vertical, or something more physically amorphous. It can be three panels or a dozen or a hundred just as easily.

It seems to me that, given the limitless options I have, I should choose a format that best suits the types of stories I'm trying to tell.

Which brings me to my second problem: what types of stories do I want to tell. There are times when I'd like to do just a stupid, one-note gag and there are others when I'd have a political or social statement to make and there are still others when I might want to do an extended adventure story. I was discussing the idea with a friend of mine over lunch, and he did make an intriguing suggestion that would allow me to incorporate all those ideas relatively seamlessly under one umbrella. But I still have to come up with a format that would allow for that flexibility. I have some ideas swirling around in my head, but I think I'll have to do some more decisive sketching to see how it might (or might not) work realistically.

I'll post more as I continue to develop the idea (or don't).

You know what strikes me about comic fans is how little overlap there seems to be between comic book fans and comic strip fans. The visual language of two is the same, but there's not much translation from one format to another. Take a look at Spider-Man. The Spidey comic strip is still syndicated nationwide in newspapers, but how many people who read the strip regularly turn around and buy any of the comics? Conversely, how many of the comic book fans actively hunt down the comic strip? I certainly don't have actual numbers, but I would bet the overlap is minimal.

Most of the comic strips that got published as comic books were compilations of already published material, repackaged in some way. Indeed, the first comic books as we know them were entirely just reprint material from the Sunday funnies. PvP is a good, modern example of this -- most of Scott Kurtz's material that shows up in his comic was already used for his web site strip.

I suspect that the format has something to do with this. The daily newspaper strip doesn't lend itself to extended story-telling. Most of the strips around are 3 and 4 panel gags. Some of them have "themes" that run for a week or so at a time, and a very few (like the aforementioned Spider-Man) have storylines that are extended over several weeks and months. But generally, the small strip format doesn't allow for much story progression, lending to the decline of long, ongoing strips like "Mary Worth" and "Rex Morgan, M.D." This further lends itself to comedy and the set-up/punchline format.

Comic books, by contrast, have more time to get a story moving along. At twenty-two pages, even a paltry two-strips-per-day format would give you more room to tell a story than a month's worth of compiled comic strips. Plus, the larger format allows for greater flexibility in what the artist can/can't do. (Bill Watterson did a lot to push the boundaries of the comic strip format and his book, Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversay, speaks a great deal towards the restrictions comic strip artists have to work around. But the format is still restrictive thanks to the syndicates.) Now comic books are still somewhat more genre-resticted these days but it's still much more flexible.

Availability is another question. Comic books aren't as readily available as they once were. In recent years, they have become easier to get a hold of, thanks to some of the larger chain bookstores, but comic strips have been much more pervasive in our culture. The decline of newspaper sales has hurt somewhat, but the syndicates have been able to work out alternative methods of distribution (largely, through the Internet) that still allow everyday readers to get their daily comic fix for free.

Do I have a point here today? No, not really. I was just thinking about some of the differences in format and how they impact readership.

One of the most interesting things I find about fandom is the notion of community. People reaching out and communicating with one another through a common interest.

I just got finsished watching Done the Impossible, a documentary about fans of Firefly and Serenity. One thing that's readily apparent throughout the documentary is how much emotion the Browncoats have attached not just to the show, but to each other. Now, I've certainly been a fan of the show and done some work on behalf of it myself. But I somehow have been unable to connect with that community on any sort of emotional level.

I bring this up in the context of a comic book blog because, as I've repeatedly noted here, the fandom of comics has been documented substantially less than that of science fiction, but the similarities between the two, I feel, allow for some cross-references in their study. It's curious that I essentially have the same problem in comic fandom that I have seen in Firefly fandom; over the past two to three decades of being a fan of comic books, I really have very few friends in fandom. Certainly none of the friends I do have are physically close to me -- I know them from e-mail and message board communications.

So the question in my head at the moment is this: am I qualified to study this on any sort of professioal level? Does my emotional removal give me an advantage to study comic fandom from the inside without losing perspective? Or does it mean that I won't be able to fully comprehend and understand it? It certainly helps explain my interest in wanting to study fandom, but does it make me a good or bad candidate for trying to explain that to others?

So I watched the second episode of Who Wants To Be A Superhero? last night. I mentioned herer earlier that I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the show and felt that the producers were laughing at the contestants. But I'm running a contest about the show over at FFPlaza.com and figured I'd probably keep an eye on the show's progress.

I have to say that I was more impressed with the second episode than the first for two reasons: Monkey Woman and Dark Enforcer. (This will start getting into spoiler territory really quickly. If you want to watch the show unravel naturally and haven't seen the second episode yet, you might want to leave now.)

The episode's major contest was essentially to walk across a "helpless" woman's yard and get to her back door. See, she's locked herself out of the front door and two professional attack dogs are in the backyard. Each hero donned a protective suit and had to fend off the dogs until they reached the door, or they yelled "uncle". The contest seemed a little overly in favor of the male contestants, given their greater muscle-mass and we watched the women get dragged down one by one until they gave up... generally within the first minute or so. However, Monkey Woman crawled the 100 feet or whatever it was with both dogs pulling trying to pull her in opposite directions. It took her nearly ten minutes, but she simply would not give up and inched her way across the lawn in what must have been an excruciatingly difficult and terrifying guantlet. Especially in light of the other women's runs, I was impressed.

What I at first thought was curious, though, was that Iron Enforcer -- the show's physically strongest contestant, who all but admitted to using steroids earlier in the episode -- actually gave up after a couple of minutes, only inches from the goal. This, I realized later, was intentional and provided the impetus for a "plot twist" I wasn't expecting. After Iron Enforcer was eliminated from the show, they had the typical wrap-up interview in which he ranted about how unfair it was and how angry the decision made him. As he dramatically leaves and is walking out the back alley, Stan Lee stops him and offers to make him a super-villain to torment the rest of the cast. One quick make-over later, he steps back in front of the camera as the Dark Enforcer.

Clearly, Iron Enforcer knew in advance that it was a set-up to make him a super-villain and that he intentionally failed the dog fight test accordingly. I suspect he knew before the series' filming had even begun and spent the whole time acting instead of competing. It further suggests that each contestant is actually coached on their roles off-camera -- they may still be competing and the winning/losing of each contest may be genuine (or, as genuine as can be expected by Stan's seemingly arbitrary elimination decisions) but they seem to be catering to viewer's expectations. I can imagine the director talking to each of them...

"Cell Phone Girl, you're playing the part of a spoiled princess. Lemuria, I want you to be a nuturing mother figure; think 'soccer mom.' Major Victory, pretend you're the Adam West version of Batman..."

This strikes me as a more honest approach to "reality" television, and I have more respect for the show now that they're being a little more obvious about it being written.

I just learned of a graphic novel published back in March called Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain. It was written by law professors at Duke University and covers the law surrounding documentary filmmaking. It's not just a primer, either, coming in a whopping 76 pages. When questioned as to why it was presented in a comic book format, one of the authors said, "We care about the subject and, for some strange reason, none of our intended audiences seemed eager to read scholarly law review articles. What's more, there is something perverse about explaining a visual and frequently surreal reality in gray, lawyerly prose." Kudos to them for "getting" the benefits of comics!

You can buy a copy from Amazon here, or just download a free digital version from their web site. I've only had a chance to scan through it so far, but it looks to be an excellent read with some clever graphic narrative devices and very informative to boot. I'll definitely try to make time to read through this in more detail.

Evidently, they're already working on another book covering music and copyrights.

I just discovered on YouTube a short (roughly 20 minutes) documentary on why comic books are an integral part of our culture. (I say "our" but the filmmaker is clearly focusing on the British comic scene by and large.) It's not terribly insightful, but I give Robin Harman (who blogs here) a lot of credit for taking a shot at something like this.

In any event, here's the first part of the documentary. The rest can be found on YouTube.

There was an announcement late yesterday that Claypool Comics will be ceasing their print operations. I haven't seen too much reporting on this yet -- mostly just reprints of their press release -- but this I think definitively shows that Diamond Distributors is indeed a monopoly.

In 1997, the Department of Justice began an antitrust investigation of the comic book industry, but the suit was dropped in 2000. The ultimate finding was that Diamond was simply a magazine distributor and they're just silly comic books anyway. (Although, to be fair, I don't think the actual DOJ wording was quite so blatantly dismissive.)

But it seems to me that any distributor that can dictate the terms of a producer's business so decisively has more power than they ought to. Yes, Diamond should have the ability to refuse to distribute Claypool's titles, but that that decision would effectively eliminate the possibility of Claypool continuing business operations at all with no viable alternative constitutes a near-monopoly. Where can Claypool go for comic distribution, if not Diamond? Sure, there's Cold Cut and and a couple of other small places, but how many comic shops use them? Even if a publisher doesn't have an exclusive contract with Diamond, and another distributor offers a better deal than Diamond, most retailers are still going to order expressly from Diamond. Why? Because Diamond carries Marvel and DC, which constitutes the bulk of their ordering. So why go through the hassle of a second distributor to save ten or fifteen cents on a comic that probably won't sell more than a few copies anyway? It's infinitely easier to simply tick a couple more boxes in Diamond's checklist as you're ordering Amazing Spider-Man and Batman than it would be to fill out a completely new set of forms for someone else. Unless, as a retailer, you've got a phenomonally huge client base (which I suspect only applies to less than a handful of retailers) or you deal almost exclusively with titles OTHER than what Marvel and DC are printing (in which case, you're probably not a comics retailer primarily), it doesn't make financial sense to use anyone but Diamond.

Yes, I realize Diamond is not running Claypool out of business entirely. I also recognize that Diamond generally works for their clients' best interests, and they are -- comparitively speaking -- an altrusitic company. We're not talking the evils of Wal-Mart here. But I do think that competition fosters benefits for everyone across the board, and everyone in the industry -- from publishers to fans to retailers to distributors -- isn't getting as good a deal as they could get if some competition were around to heat things up.