I found on YouTube a documentary called, simply, "Fandom" by Edgar Monetjano. (Uploaded just last week.) First off, I am thrilled that there's more attention being paid to the notion of fandom itself. I think there's a lot of interesting ground to cover that hasn't even been touched yet, so I'm always happy to see people exploring the notion of comic book fandom.

The film-maker talks one-on-one with several fans of comics books and one comic shop manager about what a comic book fan is made of. They even follow one of the fans into a comic book convention and talk with Andrew Crosby. I've got a few criticisms, but take a look a Part 1 (of 5) first...

Let me state that this is, according to the author, for a school project. I think that's important because it shows that A) this is largely a one-man job done on small budget and B) being done by a student, he's still in the process of learning and we shouldn't expect something that's ready for The History Channel.

That said, though, I'll make a few critical comments. Not about the film or sound quality or anything like that -- I don't know the circumstances around or requirements of the project -- but about the content. Monetjano starts with, I think, something of a faulty/out-dated premise. The idea is that he's trying to dispell the myth that comic book fans are all geeks who live in their mother's basement with no social life to speak of. The problem, as I see it, is that that myth doesn't really exist any more. At least, not outside of comicdom.

Take a good look at pop culture references to comic books. Sure, you can point to Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons as a negative stereotype of a comic book fan... but isn't Bart a big comic book fan, too? Gus and Jess from Psych were both shown to be normal comic book fans. Stephen Colbert, the media persona, is a comic book fan.

And what about real-world celebrities? Kevin Smith is an unabashed comic book fan, and Quentin Tarantino isn't that far from the scene either. How many fans followed Joss Whedon or J. Michael Stracyznski over from their TV work to comics? And you have to figure Guillermo del Toro and Robert Rodriguez are fans to a degree. For that matter, SOMEBODY has to be green-lighting the slew of comic book based movies!

Oh, there are still "geeks" out there that hold that negative stereotype -- The 40 Year Old Virgin seems like a prime example. But even the incredibly campy Who Wants to be a Superhero? showed a much greater breadth and depth of character in all of the characters -- even the arguably geeky Feedback showed there was more to him reading comic books all day.

It would seem that American society has accepted that being a comic book fan does NOT equal being a geek. Being a part of comic book fandom can almost be cool in and of itself. Further, it would seem that American society has defined two types of geeks: the dorky "classical" geek who's social awkward and quotes Star Wars ad nauseam, and the hipper intellectual geek who's comfortable with their self-image and knows when it's appropriate to make Star Trek jokes.

From THAT standpoint, I think Monetjano has a faulty premise. One, perhaps, that isn't fully recognized yet inside the comic book fan base. Whether that stems from a long collective memory of fans, or the insular nature of the industry, I don't know. Either way, I'm still thrilled that Monetjano made his film -- it shows there's more interest in the subject matter and can elicit conversations (assuming someone responds to this) like this one.

Today is the thirteenth anniversary of the death of Jack Kirby. I'm generally not one to dwell on or celebrate anniversaries like this -- I'd prefer to celebrate the individual's life. But I do have some regrets with regard to The King, and this seems like an apporpriate day to share them.

I was born in 1972. By that time, Kirby was already well-known and established as The King of comic book storytelling. Indeed, he had alreayd caused a huge stir by leaving the Marvel Universe that he co-founded to create a new universe with his Fourth World series at DC, which also was beginning to wind down. By the time I was old enough to read and, more significantly choose what I wanted to read, Jack was largely retired from doing month-to-month publications.

As I noted some time ago, I didn't really become a fan of the comic book medium until 1983. Marvel and DC had both left Jack behind for young hot-shots like John Byrne and Frank Miller. So for an eleven-year-old like myself -- for whom history is largely unknown and even wholly irrelevant beyond one's own memory -- I had no real grasp on who Jack was or what he had done.

My favorite comic at the time was John Byrne's Fantastic Four. Over the course of a few years after beginning the series, I learned something of the comic's history. In the days before the Internet, information was relatively scarce and costly for the limited resources of an early teenager. I have to admit to being somewhat grateful a year or two later for the arguements Jack had with Marvel about their returning his original artwork -- it gave rise to a number of articles about Jack's history in comics, as well as articles about his early creations at Marvel. This proved to be an invaluable source of information for my sponge-like brain at the time. I didn't fully understand all of the issues involved, but I understood the basic history at least.

As the years progressed, I continued learning more about the Fantastic Four. In my search for back issues, I began reading the original Lee/Kirby stories. My resources were expanding (I had gotten a job at McDonald's) but it was still slow-going. The demands of my college major were especially absorbing (including spending whole weeks at a time living out the campus studios) and I did little more than read the new issues as they came out. It wasn't until I finished college in 1995 that my parents got me a copy of Fantastic Four #1 as a graduation gift, and essentially finalized my collecting old stories about the FF.

Now in the working world, I began taking a larger interest in the men behind the Fantastic Four. I had learned a few things about Stan and Jack over the years, but that was usually tangental to the Fantastic Four themselves. And it was only then that I learned that Jack Kirby had died. And it was only AFTER that that I really began to appreciate what Jack had done. Not just for the Fantastic Four, but for the comic industry as a whole. I had heard he had been influential, but it wasn't until I started, really started, to read about Jack that his impact began to sink in. I began to understand just how much impact he had indirectly had upon me.

When I can, I like to express my appreciation to people who made an impact on my life. Not just in comics, but in life in general. Several years back, I made a point of writing letters of appreciation to some of the surviving teachers I had back in high school. When I read a particularly moving story or see an especially well-done show, I'll try to say something to those involved. It's not a matter of trying to gain their favor, or bask in the light of their talent(s) hoping something might magically transfer to me through osmosis... I simply and sincerely want to show my appreication. When I talk to comic book creators, I give them my honest opinion and make a point to elaborate on exactly why they (or their work) had an effect on me.

But I never did that with Jack. I only paid attention to his shadows while he was alive, and I never took the opportunity to see if I couldn't tell him what he meant to me. Jack wasn't exactly a spring chicken by the time I could even read his name, but I feel like I should have made a stronger effort. Maybe I couldn't have flown out to see him at Comic-Con, and maybe he didn't have e-mail, but I could still have written a letter. I could have c/o'd it through Marvel or DC or someone. Maybe it wouldn't have been as articulate as I could make it now, but it would have been something.

I don't have many regrets in my life; I'm fairly happy with how things have gone overall. But if I could go back in time to tell myself anything, I'd see if I could look up myself at age 16 or so. I'd say, "First of all, this high school crap is just crap; things get much better for you in college. Secondly, tell Jack Kirby what a great storyteller he is." That's it. (Well, I might add something about investing in Marvel Comics when they drop below 50 cents a share!)

I never really knew Jack to say that I miss him. I'm envious of anyone who ever had the pleasure of even meeting him. I'm sorry I never told him what he did for me.

There's an interesting post over at the Comics Should Be Good blog about what factors go into choosing which comic books we buy (or don't). I find the post itself to be interesting, but the responses moreso.

On a fairly superficial level, there's some basic data collection on the criteria that some people use to make purchasing decisions when it comes to comics. Some people buy for the the character(s), some buy for the creator(s), etc. Naturally, personal finances are a factor, but it's particularly interesting to note that the issue seems to go without saying initially. The apparently understood assumption is that everyone would buy everything they wanted if they had the resources to do so. But everyone does have some resource limits -- even with the absurdly comical supply of money that a Bill Gates or a Donald Trump might have, I doubt there would simply be enough time in the day to read each and every comic book published. Some people might only have three bucks a month to spend on comics; do they buy the same title every month, or do they follow a particular creator?

What's fascinating, too, is that there's some acknowledgement of multiple criteria affecting one's buying choices and rarely does one of those criteria ALWAYS win out over others. But there's little discussion about how the various criteria mix to form an ultimate decision. How much weight does any given author carry over a given character? Can a generally-low-ranking criteria (like, say, publisher) ever outweigh a high-ranking one?

I was trying to think of looking at this mathematically. Obviously, a different equation/program would be need be created for every comic buying individual, but could you theoretically write something that could tell you what you should be buying? It's possible, I suppose, but it would need to be fairly extensive. You'd need to assign values and weights to every possible variable; not just "author = 50% of buying decision" but something like "Warren Ellis = 90% of positive buying decision, Chuck Austen = 95% of negative buying decision, Kurt Busiek = 75% of positive buying decision..." and so on. And it would need to be constantly ammended/updated as new variables (new creators or new characters or what-have-you) came onto the field.

But it's interesting to think about it in those terms because it goes to show just how complex a process deciding which comic books to buy really is. Maybe that's why so few people really think about it very consciously -- the equation they've subconsciously created is simply too vast and complex for them to study.

Being Black History Month, I thought I might take another post here to look at what could be considered the premier black comic book superhero: the Black Panther. A little while back, I picked up the two volumes of The Black Panther by Jack Kirby and the absurdly over-rated Superbowl Weekend has allowed me some extra time to start reading them.

These were stories written after what might be considered Kirby's prime. Two things struck me in general. First, Kirby's dialogue is fairly stilted. It reads decidedly like someone who's out of touch with what's "hip" is trying to write "hip." In that sense it's like many TV shows from the 1980s. Looking at Kirby's work with a few decades of hindsight, the dialogue seems a little more quaint than I expect it came across at the time, fortunately.

The other striking thing was how much raw power is in Kirby's work. The illustrations themselves are not his best, but every panel just exudes power and energy unlike anything I've seen from any other comic book artist. There's such a deep intensity in the layouts and the linework that even a shot of a couple people sitting and chatting has more power than a great many other artists.

These books really prove to me (again) that Kirby was an extremely powerful storyteller, and it makes me proud (yet again) to be able to write for The Jack Kirby Collector.

It looks like that the future Superheroes & Trauma book I had been developing an essay for is in some serious doubt. Evidently, there have been some issues with some of the writers, something about not making their revisions in line with what the editors requested. I don't know the details about that but one of the editors last week began to suggest that their not making the appropriate revisions was calling some doubts into the project. Then one of the two editors removed himself from the project, citing increased workload from other projects.

This, and my previous attempt at being included in a published book, begins to suggest to me that getting published in even an academic environment is very difficult. It further leads me to wonder about the diffiuclty in getting published in general, and even further leads me to wonder how many hundreds of thousands of people out there are working on stories or essays or what-have-you that will never see the light of day.

I'm starting a new experiment. Because everyone, as we all know, loves monkeys, I'm going to see if I can't pick out one newly-released comic every week that features a monkey on the cover. I chose to this BEFORE actually looking to even see if there were any monkeys featured on a new cover this week, but was pleasantly surprised to fairly quickly find...
Cartoon Network Block Party #29
Our monkey today is a Brazilian spider-monkey named Lazlo. The comic is, not surprisingly, based off the Cartoon Network show Camp Lazlo. This issue was written by Bobby London, Abby Denson and Jim Alexander with interior art by Mike Kazaleh, Phil Moy and Mike DeCarlo. Most importantly, though, the cover is by Robert Pope and DeCarlo.

Well, here in the U.S. (and Canada) we're celebrating Black History Month throughout February. It'll be easy to find scads of documentaries on various historical figures like Fredrick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. I expect it won't be hard to trip across "hipper" things, too, like Halle Berry and Will Smith movie nights, Snoop Doggy Dog concerts, or a Chappelle Show marathon.

Now, let me state from the outset here that I'm not black. I make absolutely no claims that I have any real knowledge of the "black experience" in America. My father DID spend most of his teaching career in inner-city Cleveland public schools, so I was aware at least of some of the issues blacks faced in the 1970s and 80s, but I grew up in a white, middle-class suburbia and was largely removed from any problems or issues many black people faced.

I've talked before about the old Golden Legacy comics my father brought home. Since my favorite comic was Fantastic Four, I saw a decent number of appearances by the Black Panther (where some of the stories even made quite deliberate commentaries on what was going on in South Africa and other problematic areas). Ezra Jack Keats was also a favorite author of mine as a child (it wasn't until I met him in 1981 that I realized that he wasn't African-American like so many of his characters) and I hold many of his books in the same esteem as those of Dr. Seuss.

When I was in seventh grade, a new family moved into town. They were black and had a son, named Guy, about my age. He and his younger sister were the only two black kids in our school system, and there was... tension right from the start from too many people. I thank my parents, through exposing me to some of the issues of blacks in America in various forms of literature, for ensuring that I was enlightened enough to not consider this new classmate a threat or an object of ridicule. There was incident the first month he was in school where a fellow classmate deliberately mispronounced Niger while reading a passage in our social studies textbook in class. I hadn't really met Guy yet, but I creditted him with an inordinate amount of class for NOT slugging the idiot.

I was somewhat disappointed when I did start to get to know Guy, though. He was a nice enough chap, but he wasn't too bright and probably didn't study as much as he needed to. He was more interested in sports and music than reading and video games, so we didn't share much in common. I was always on friendly terms with him, but we didn't become great friends or anything.

Now, where is this going in relation to comic books?

Well, I think there's a significant disconnect bewteen comics and minority audiences. Rattle off the comic book titles you're familiar with and you'll likely fine none that feature a significantly minority character of any sort. And even when you do come across a Storm or Black Panther, they're somewhat removed from the urban "black experience" from America. (That's not to say there are NO black characters that aren't steeped in it -- Luke Cage is a prime example -- but they're the decided exception and not the norm.) Christopher Priest, I think, did an excellent job in his Black Panther and I understand that the folks at Milestone Comics did admirable work as well. But shouldn't there be more?

One could argue that the comic book industry isn't particularly conducive to letting minorities in. There's certainly some validity to that, I think, but not particularly moreso than any other entertainment industry. But I feel that folks already within the industry could do more to make in-roads. Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams (both caucasians) did a fair job introducing John (Green Lantern) Stewart into the DC universe; as I noted earlier, I didn't even realize that Ezra Jack Keats wasn't black. Why don't we see more white folks incorporating the reality of minorities into comics?

I suspect that it has more to do with a lack of thought than anything. We write/draw/create characters that we can relate to -- "write what you know" and all that -- and that tends to mean "similar to ourselves." Unless someone's specifically trying to do a story about racial tensions or something like that, they simply don't think to include minorities. I give a lot of credit to Mark Waid and Karl Kesel (both decidedly white guys) for creating (and repeatedly using!) a black character to head up the legal/political arm of Fantastic Four, Inc. It was never brought up as a racial issue, just "here's a new character who works for the FF" -- that she was black was irrelevant. But that still required a bit of extra thought; Waid could've said "Oh, I need this type of character for this story" and assumed that it'd be a white male. But it was that extra bit of "why couldn't it be a black female" thought that rounded the book our more pleasantly. (Pity that J. Michael Stracynzski hasn't picked up the character for his run on the book. Maybe new writer Dwayne McDuffie will bring her back.)

If more creators put that extra bit of cultural thought into their stories, maybe Guy would've been interested in reading comics. Maybe he and I would've had more in common. Maybe we could've been better friends. Maybe that could've extended to more people who read comics. Maybe the world would be a little nicer place.

So take a few moments this month to appreciate black culture. Flip on the Biography Channel and catch a documentary on Sojourner Truth. Track down an issue of Golden Legacy and read up on someone who ought to be more famous than they are. Take a few extra moments to write to Marvel and ask them to see more of the Prowler, or ask DC to show more with Black Lightning.