A co-worker instant messaged me this afternoon asking me to swing over to her cube to help sort out a minor problem. Just as I was turning to get up, two of the office admins popped in. The one who doesn't work for our office, but I'm somewhat familiar with because we see each other in the cafeteria periodically, said, "Uh, do you like comic books?"
I answered in the affirmative, to which the other admin that worked directly with my office waved her arm at the cube walls filled with comic strips and superhero doodles and whatnot. "See! What'd I tell you?"
Apparently, the first admin was trying to help get her sister's 12-year-old to read more. She happened to stumble on the comics being sold at a local Half-Price Bookstore and thought that would be a great way to incent her nephew. She picked up a dozen issues from a title that she thought looked like he might enjoy. However, when she started looking at them more closely once she got home, she realized that the language was a bit harsh in places and didn't figure her sister would appreciate having her child learn how to swear. It turns out the title in question was Tom Strong. (I've never read it, but it was created by Alan Moore so I'm not surprised.)
Since she didn't want to give them to her nephew any longer, she figured she'd try to pass them to somebody at work because it'd be a shame to just throw them out, so would I want them?
"Sure!" Who am I to turn down free comics after all?
She then proceeded to ask if I knew what might be more appropriate for a 12-year-old boy? I had to decline answering since I'm a bit out-of-the-loop when it comes to what types of things a kid like that would even read, much less what would be available. She noted that she'd seen some of the Archie digests in the supermarket, but he evidently wasn't too keen on those.
Fortunately, there happens to be a pretty decent comic book shop not five minutes away from the office! I told her that the folks there would have a much better handle on what's currently available for kids. I said, "Talk to Peter, the owner. Tell him what kind of movies and video games your nephew likes, and Pete should be able to direct you to something appropriate. Just don't go over there on a Wednesday; they get crazy-busy on Wednesdays."
She thanked me and said she'd swing over on her lunch break tomorrow.
I went off to the co-worker who had IM'd me in the first place. By that point, I was due for a meeting and I trucked off to that for the last hour of the work day.
The meeting wound down right around 5:00 and I went back to my desk. Sitting there, just in front of my keyboard, were Tom Strong #1-12! Twelve comics that I haven't read but have heard good things about in exchange for an off-hand suggestion. Not a bad deal at all! By the time I got over to the woman's cubicle to thank her, she had already left for the day, but that was a really great way to end an otherwise lousy Monday.
I can't wait to hear how she makes out at the comic shop!
The Tokyopop tour bus swung by the Books & Co. near my office today, so I stopped over to see what the deal was. I got there about 2:50 and the bus was already parked out front.Inside there were some chairs, tables and a podium set up already where the store often holds signings and whatnot. Conveniently for this event, the store's graphic novel/manga section was right there. The crew, all wearing America’s Greatest Otaku t-shirts, were still setting the tables up with swag of various kinds and Stu Levy was chatting with someone who, even at a glance, appeared to be the store manager. One of the crew members passed out raffle tickets to everyone who had taken a seat, and the store manager then provided a short welcome speech.
After a quick introduction of the "Otaku Six"......Levy talked a bit about Tokyopop's beginnings and answered a number of questions from the audience. Most of them suggested the audience knew little about manga and/or anything about publication in general. There were a few teenage girls in the front row (all cosplaying) who seemed to know their stuff, but I got the sense that most of the audience were folks who happened to be in the bookstore at the time anyway.The Otaku Six then took over the remainder of the program. They plugged a few of Tokyopop's books, some new some older and then raffled off a number of items from t-shirts and hats to DVDs and CDs to manga. They then called up the handful of cosplayers in the audience for some kudos.(I haven't read any of the series these come from, so I can't comment on how 'accurate' they are. Though I will say the girl with the shiny belt buckle above -- cosplaying as Italy from Hetalia -- had on a killer pair of boots, which you obviously can't see very well here because of the heavy backlighting from the windows.) I believe all of these folks got some Tokyopop swag for their efforts.
The Otaku Six (well, two of them) performed a skit of sorts to teach some simple Japanese phrases, and held a trivia contest. The contest was another indicator that the crowd wasn't terribly into manga -- they had to keep resorting to the easiest questions and even some of those didn't get answered by the audience. There was another round of raffles.
That all took about an hour and gave them, in theory, another hour for the crowd to pick up some of the promo materials and get stuff signed by Levy.
The event seemed a little loose, and was largely run by the Otaku Six. Aside from the Q&A, Levy provided little obvious direction. They all seemed pretty enthused, despite having been on the road for over a month (apparently including sleeping in the bus itself) and it was easy to see why those six folks were chosen for this tour.
I think they were thrown off a bit by this particular stop NOT being a part of their America’s Greatest Otaku filming though. I suspect that was a timing issue more than anything, but without a large, dedicated contingent of existing Tokyopop/manga fans, I think they were thrown slightly by what to do with everyone. Still, it was a decent event. Everyone walked away with sampler copies of Deadman Wonderland and Fruits Basket, and I scored Sokora Refugees vol. 2 in one of the raffles. (Which I hadn't heard of before, but the art, at least, looks quite interesting.) Several of the other folks who won items from the raffle seemed genuinely pleased with their loot, and those last two photos show there was a decent crowd who hung around after the main event.
The panel discussion on transmedia storytelling from this year's Comic-Con International. It mostly centers around the Red Faction property but it's still relevant to comic books. It highlights, I think, just how much the biggest comic book companies aren't really utilizing this transmedia approach despite being so focused on broad continuity.
2. If I go see the Scott Pilgrim movie wearing this t-shirt... ... would that make me a hipster? Or only if wear the shirt ironically? Mine isn't the one sold by Hot Topic if that makes a difference. Oh, and it was given to me for free. Does that matter?
3. Anyone go to one of the Tokyopop Tour events this summer? There's one close enough for me to get to on Sunday, but I haven't seen much in the way of reactions to these stops. I'm definitely going anyway -- in part because I don't have anything else to do on Sunday -- but I'm curious how these events have been handled/managed so far.
It was around this time last year that I decided to finally write the book I'd been threatening to write for the previous six or seven years. I'd obviously been writing articles and blog posts for a while, but I'd never tackled anything like a book before. Books are long, and require a lot of planning, and they take a fair amount of dedication to write. But, hey, it was something long past due, so it was high time I charged ahead with it!
I got a little ways into it and started setting some deadlines for myself. They were aggressive, but seemed doable. And they kept me on task, though I really wound up pushing myself to my limits because of them. I was pretty exhausted by the time I finally sent the final files off.
But, despite a few typos and a couple of other minor glitches in production, I'm really proud of it. I periodically look at a copy on my desk and think, "Damn. I did that. That is so awesome."
So here it is roughly a year later and I get another idea in my head. "You know what'd be cool, Sean? Another checkmark you could put on your 'I did that' list?" It's not something that I've been kicking around for any real length of time, but it's something that would definitely set me apart from most of the population. Estimates place the number of Americans who actually write a book (though not necessarily get one published!) at a little over 2%. Other stats I've found place my next goal as being completed by less than 1% of Americans. So it's something I can pretty safely chalk up there in the Life Accomplishments column.
I've only just started, and I can't say that I'm fully committed to this idea just yet. So I'm not going to actually tell you what it is. (Yet.) I might find I will totally fail right out of the gate somehow. Especially after my first couple of real forays didn't go nearly as well as I'd hoped. But that's actually where I wanted to head with this post.
Anything that comes easily isn't really a goal. It's not worth striving for if you can achieve it without much effort. Part of the reason I'm proud of my book is that it took a substantial amount of effort. It was the proverbial hard-fought battle in some ways, and it's a sweeter reward knowing that I persevered through its challenges. I tested my limits, pushed them beyond what I knew I could do, and still succeeded. That's extremely satisfying. My next goal looks like that now. When I'm able to cross that finish line, I will able to look back and say, "Yeah, I did that. Me. Not some guy I read about online. Me. Because I can do anything I damn well want if I really set my mind to it."
So if you've been thinking about doing your own comic or going back to school to learn how to paint or trying to get a job at Marvel or whatever your ambitions are, what are you waiting for? Define your goal, figure out what needs to happen to achieve it, get some realistic deadlines and GO! That's how I got my house. That's why I charged through my Masters degree. That's how I found my current girlfriend after my divorce. That's how I wrote my book. That's how I'm tackling my next big goal. Go already!
As to why I come up with these brilliant charges of insane ideas to work on in the middle of the summer, I don't know, but you don't question those types of things!
(For those curious, I will indeed reveal my Life Accomplishment goal at a later date. Definitely before the end of the year. Though actually achieving it won't happen until next spring.)
Seriously, though, get going already!
Tell me if you've seen this happen...
Somebody you've heard of in comics starts publicly talking about their Next Big ProjectTM. It's not something connected to a well-known, existing player like Marvel or DC or anything, though. Maybe it's a new website or a magazine or a self-published comic... whatever. They start talking it up, and pulling people in to help build/produce it. They probably don't have a huge budget, but it's a genuinely good idea so they're able to convince other folks to help for relatively minimal compensation. After all, it's a good -- maybe even great -- idea and worth pursuing in its own right.
Some time goes by, some buzz starts building and... things just peter out.
I'm not talking about a big launch with lots of money spent that's never recouped. Or the execution is just bad and they lose money hand over fist. I'm talking about things just never really materializing in the first place. Or if they do, it's clearly not to the full intentions of the original idea and it comes across as "Well, we promised you something, so here's what we've got; please don't get too mad at us."
You've seen this, right?
You ever wonder what happens to those projects? Obviously, something happened that's prevented them to really coming to fruition, but what?
About five or six years ago, I had this idea for a comic book database. Something where you could log in the issues in your collection (something not possible with the Grand Comic Database) without having to manually enter a bunch of data yourself. I had been using ComicBase for a few years at that point, but I saw a lot of limitations in it, partially stemming from the fact that it wasn't (at that point) online in any capacity and partially from the fact that the database structure wasn't conducive to cross-referencing anything. You couldn't easily look up, for example, all of the works by Barry Windsor-Smith because he might be listed under Barry Smith or Barry Windsor-Smith or simply Windsor-Smith. So my idea was to create a really great, cross-referential comic book database online. It would be maintained by a number of comic experts and all a user would have to do was select which issues were in their collection. And, as new issues came, they could simply tag which titles they subscribed to so they wouldn't even have to input things every Wednesday.
I got about a half-dozen guys on board conceptually. Between us, we had literally every Marvel comic published since the mid-1950s and almost everything from DC since the 1970s, PLUS reasonably sized collections of a slew of other publishers. It would take some time, but we could populate and maintain such a database. The next step, which took a little time, was tracking down a database programmer would would be able to work for a share of the profits. My startup capital was essentially nil, so I found someone who was interested in the project as a long-term proposition.
Income would be generated two ways. First, not surprisingly, by advertising. Secondly, while the database's contents would be freely viewed by anyone, being able to tag your own collection would require a subscription. I think I was kicking around something in the $12-$15 annually range. I had actually written up a formal business proposal and went through the calculations on realistic costs and income projections and whatnot. (I probably still have that document somewhere, but I'm not in the mood to dig for it just now.)
My competition was scarce. ComicBase had a good foothold in the market, but had some definite limitations. There was Grand Comic Database (and a few similar projects) that didn't allow users to log their own collections. And then there was this new thing that came online right around the time I was putting all this together. It was called ComicBookDB and was pretty much EXACTLY the type of database set-up I was thinking of. Turns out the guy behind it was a programmer himself who saw the same limitations and problems I had, so he started messing around for his own interest and threw the results online.
I was torn. On the one hand, this would be a direct competitor to what I was trying to put together. And he was GIVING it away for free. Anyone could sign up and start tracking their collection. But what I still thought worked in my favor was that he wasn't doing all that much inputting of data. He set the site up so that the users themselves would have to log each and every issue. "A-ha!" I thought, "This will never catch on. No one would be willing to log in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of issues for free!"
I went back to rounding up my partners -- at the time, I was still trying to get a solid commitment from a programmer, who was busy with several other immediately paying projects. A few months passed. I would periodically keep tabs on other sites to see about new developments and was soon shocked to discover something I hadn't considered viable: people were in fact loading issue information into ComicBookDB for free. Lots of issue information. Issues were going in by the hundreds; I want to say something like 400+ issues per day! Most of the low-hanging fruit (the Marvel and DC libraries) was done.
And he was giving the site away for free.
I just couldn't compete with that. Maybe if he had done a lousy job, or even if he did a sort-of-okay job, but he had put together everything I could think of for a good comic book database and then some. Any more efforts on my part would have been a waste of time. And I couldn't even get mad at him because he had done such a fine job with it! In fact, I not only started contributing issue information myself (I've remained in the top 12 most prolific contributors for several years, despite my contributions dropping off considerably since 2008) but I also provided some now-implemented layout suggestions to help improve functionality and usability.
Of course, that doesn't explain all the OTHER stalled-before-they-launched projects you may have heard about over the years. I'm sure financing was an issue in several cases, or other more immediately pressing matters for those involved coming to the forefront, or maybe just the fickleness of the originator. But I wonder sometimes about those projects. What happened to them? Why did they not even get a chance to sink or swim? What are the stories behind them?
I saw this book referenced in one of Rich Johnston's videos from Comic-Con last week and was intrigued by not only the idea, but the way Margie Trundleberry (I think; she's not named in the video) sold it. So I did some digging, found out how to get a copy (their online store isn't quite set up yet, so you have to email them for details) and this evening I found a box on my porch.
So the book itself is about a comic strip called Frank and His Friend which was published from 1975 until 1984 when creator Clarence 'Otis' Dooley died. Rather than a full biography or a complete collection of the work, though, this book showcases 52 comics that had never been published before, as well as many of their original layout and concept sketches. The work largely speaks for itself, but author Melvin Goodge does add a short biography of Dooley up front and provides some annotations on the art throughout, often pointing out inspirations and design references.
Even the best comic historians, though, will be scratching their heads because neither Dooley or Frank and His Friend ever existed. It's what Trundleberry called "instant memorabilia from an alternate universe." But, despite the science fiction-y sounding idea, it is in fact rooted in about as mainstream an American ideology as one can imagine.
Imagine that one of Charles Schulz's kids came forward today with a few dozen Peanuts strips no one had ever seen. Stuff he worked on but discarded for no immediately obvious reason. Maybe he didn't like how he inked a page, maybe he didn't think the gag was funny enough, maybe the art just fell behind the couch and remained undiscovered for several years. Nothing that wouldn't seemingly slip unobtrusively right in to the middle of Peanuts' run but just nothing the public ever saw. Think of the clamor that would arise out that. Imagine how gorgeous a special Fantagraphics collection of those strips would be.
That's Finding Frank and His Friend.
The concept of alternate reality non-fiction (or whatever this genre is called) isn't new. Much of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is along those lines. In fact many books along those lines use the idea as a form of world-building. But the intent of Finding Frank is different. You can discern bits of this other world, certainly -- there are plenty of references to other non-existent comics and family anecdotes that are presented as common legends -- but they don't seem to serve the notion of world-building. At least not in the commonly understood manner. No, the world-building here isn't designed so much to draw a reader into a different world but draw the feelings of a different world to the reader.
Although the inspirations are generally not very obvious, the short annotations provide a reference for how people often read comics like Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes and Little Nemo in Slumberland. Comics that historians and collectors pour over again and again, looking for implied meanings about the creator's life. Looking for what the intent was, what was at work in the subconscious. Schulz famously denied that Peanuts was inspired by his own life, with a few very specific exceptions. But in reading or seeing a biography of the man, it's almost impossible to NOT see the parallels in play. Though the surviving Schulz family, I understand, was somewhat upset by the relatively recent bio penned by David Michaelis -- and I can understand where some exaggerations of tenuous connections may have occurred -- one can scarcely blame Michaelis for seeing the parallels between Schulz's life and Peanuts.
My point, though, is that Finding Frank draws on that same notion. That we -- as outsiders looking back on the life of a beloved creator -- are going to look for connections through his/her works. We use art as a means to understand life, both our own and its creator's. That we use art as our guide to life leads to nostalgia. and this book shows us what that nostalgia looks like from an objective point of view by using as its subject something we couldn't possibly have nostalgia for. One can't get help but feel that Goodge read Frank and His Friend every day, and really admired the work and its creator. One can't help but see how much Goodge got out of the comic, and how he used it as inspiration in his own life. Though he strives for objectivity by citing "either an LH 2170 or an LH 2172" as the model for the lamp in the background of a comic, the reader can easily see the care and attention that was given to creating the book. Goodge loved Frank and His Friend and was absolutely thrilled to find this collection of unpublished work.
In fact, the book itself is gorgeously printed. There's a subtle varnish on the cover and some wonderful end paper designs to entice readers to dig deeper. The interior paper feels exactly right for the type of book this is supposed to be and the printing work is top-notch. Both the sketches and final art are presented in a designerly fashion such that you half-expect to see Chip Kidd's name on the book somewhere. It genuinely feels like it's a lovingly craft book from Fantagraphics in honor of a great comic artist, and there is no hint anywhere in the book that what you're holding is a complete fabrication. It really is a flawless execution of what it was meant to be.
I don't know how much attention this got in San Diego last week, but it's a brilliant work that deserves a lot of attention.
Apparently, the first admin was trying to help get her sister's 12-year-old to read more. She happened to stumble on the comics being sold at a local Half-Price Bookstore and thought that would be a great way to incent her nephew. She picked up a dozen issues from a title that she thought looked like he might enjoy. However, when she started looking at them more closely once she got home, she realized that the language was a bit harsh in places and didn't figure her sister would appreciate having her child learn how to swear. It turns out the title in question was Tom Strong. (I've never read it, but it was created by Alan Moore so I'm not surprised.) 
Apparently, the first admin was trying to help get her sister's 12-year-old to read more. She happened to stumble on the comics being sold at a local Half-Price Bookstore and thought that would be a great way to incent her nephew. She picked up a dozen issues from a title that she thought looked like he might enjoy. However, when she started looking at them more closely once she got home, she realized that the language was a bit harsh in places and didn't figure her sister would appreciate having her child learn how to swear. It turns out the title in question was Tom Strong. (I've never read it, but it was created by Alan Moore so I'm not surprised.) 
