At a simplistic level, the reason why we don't see more diversity in comics characters is because there's little diversity in comics creators. A lot of privileged white folks are making comics, and so they follow the old "write what you know" saw and fill their stories with white people like themselves. But here's an easy way to shake things up.

The next time you want to introduce a new character, start by going to MapCrunch.com. It taps into Google's street view and pulls up shot of a random location. That's where your new character and/or their ancestors are from. Maybe not that exact spot (I just called up the middle of a forest in Poland) but that general area. Sure, sometimes, you're going to get a nice neighborhood in New England where all the rich, white folks live but you're sometimes going to get a slum in Thailand. Or a military base in Singapore. Or a small village in Hungary. Or a few houses overlooking a fjord in Norway. (All of which are locations I just randomly called up using MapCrunch.)

Bam. Instant diversity. You've immediately given this new character texture and background completely separate and unique from the rest of your cast without having to do anything more than click a link.

"But what if I need this character to be a certain type of character?"

Why does that matter? I mean, why does your character need to be from a certain location? If you just need to show your character's boss, why couldn't she or he be from Spain? If you need to introduce a love interest, what's wrong with their coming from Iceland? That new antagonist to spur your hero onto greatness can be from Estonia just as readily as Chile.

Plus, I'm not suggesting that these characters need to have just stepped off the metaphoric boat either. Maybe it was their parents or grandparents who emigrated to wherever your story takes place. Like I said, I'm just talking about texture and background here.

Now, sure, you could easily come up with some country you know nothing about. But how difficult is it to look that up on Wikipedia anymore? I'm not suggesting your new character needs to start spouting off the GDP and principle exports of Andorra, so you don't need to become an expert. Again, I'm just talking texture and background.

So with with a single click for each new character, you can broaden your comic's scope and diversity. It will instantly seem more inclusionary than everybody else's because their characters all look and act the same. And you didn't even have to rack your brain trying to figure out what nationality or race would make for a cool new character!

• Stephen Bissette jazzed himself up into doing more comics... by giving a talk about comics to college students.
  
• I'm a little light in the links department this week, I suspect, because everyone has frozen solid and are waiting to thaw. But I will post the video for a cool Kickstarter project that ends in a couple days. It's already successfully funded, so they're basically just looking at being able to pay the artists more. Which is a trend in Kickstarter projects that I'm happy to say I'm seeing more of lately.

I've been getting back into one of my research projects, and was talking with someone who had interviewed many of the creators involved before they passed away. I was telling him about my project and noted that I was hoping to reprint a few of the issues these guys had worked on as part of it. After all, they were printed back in the 1940s and most of the publishers involved have long been out of businesses. To which he responded that he was certain a good number of them had their copyrights renewed.

Naturally, I got worried. I thought I had checked this a while back, and was pretty certain many of them had fallen into the public domain. So I spent a good chunk of Saturday night and Sunday morning trying to re-check things.

I immediately discovered that the issues he had told me were still under copyright were. They'd been renewed in 1968, just a hair shy of the 28 year renewal deadline at the time. After hours of scouring copyright renewal records -- and how awesome is that those are online now -- I can't find any references to the other issues I was concerned about.

So that means I'm good, right?

Well, not necessarily. As the saying goes, "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." Just because I can't find anything that says those books were never renewed doesn't mean that weren't; it just means I can't prove they weren't renewed.

Some of the books I'm looking at here were actually published by Timely. You know, the folks who are known these days as Marvel? As near as I can tell, this particular set of stories were never renewed. I can find all manner of other Timely books from the same era -- Captain America Comics, Patsy Walker Comics, Venus, etc. -- but no references to the titles I'm interested in. But, it's still Marvel. Which is now owned by Disney. Do I risk publishing a book that I'm pretty sure is in the public domain? One that, if it is owned by anybody, it's owned by one of the largest intellecutal property holders in the world? I'm thinking that might not be a gamble I want to take.

See, because even if those issues are in the public domain, Disney can still make a claim of ownership. For that matter, anyone can make a claim of ownership. Your average schmuck off the street won't have anything resembling evidence to back the claim up, nor would they likely have lawyers willing to argue the case, so they'd likely be thrown out of court pretty quickly. But Disney? There's enough superficial evidence that it's going to at least get a hearing, and it's frickin' Disney -- they've got more lawyers than they know what to do with! So even if I have every legal right to republish those old Timely issues, it could still wind me in a costly legal battle.

So that's something I'm kicking around still. I'm much more positive the three issues published by an almost non-entity in comics publishing and who's long been out of business is much less of a legal threat. Those three issues might well be sufficient for what I'd be interested in.

The reason why I bring all this up is that the research that I'm doing, or rather the research that I'm trying to do, is focused on the comics themselves, their creators and their production. And yet I still find myself taking on the role of a law clerk, just to be able to publish my research and findings in some form of context. Comics history is a broad topic, by no means limited to which creator contributed which pieces to the final story!

Norm Feuti has been working on the syndicated comic strip Retail since 2006. (Well, probably since before then since it actually debuted in papers on January 1, 2006.) It's a humorous (and often cynical) look at the world of big box retailing, and it received its first collected edition late last year. In 2008, Feuti began shopping around a second comic strip he wanted to do called Gil, "a realistic and funny look at life through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a lower income family." Despite Feuti's success with Retail no one opted to pick up Gil.

Wanting to scratch that creative itch, Feuti launched Gil as a webcomic. He garned the praise of other cartoonists and gathered a pretty decent following. He ran the strip for a year, but had to ultimately cancel the strip in 2009 to free up time for other projects.

Then, almost in answer to many a cartoonist's dream, King Features Syndicate decided to pick it up after all. It began running in newspapers on January 2, 2012 and Feuti kept both strips running evidently seamlessly. I might go so far as to say, having been reading both since 2008, that Feuti did some of his best, most creative, work during that period.

But in the beginning of December, Feuti announced that KFS had decided to cancel Gil and the last strip would run on December 29. After two years, it basically boiled down to not enough newspapers picking up the strip to make it profitable for King.

Not surprisingly, there followed a number of comments from fans expressing their shock and outrage and disappointment. But what struck me was that there were several comments that suggested Feuti run Gil as a comic online... apparently ignorant of the fact that it started as a webcomic, or indeed that there was even such a thing as webcomics!

I discovered Gil a few months ago and love it. I hope you somehow continue it either online or in a book. Thanks for a great strip.

Go run a website with Gil. People have done it and made it work.

Can you somehow continue Gil online for us diehard fans? Pretty please??? I will sure miss my daily Gil fix otherwise.

Please, can someone tell me where I can find Gil, or is he discontinued forever? I finally found a comic strip I can identify with from my childhood and Gil is so cool! Please bring him back! Even online.....anywhere! PLEASE! He is my favorite!

I find this striking because these are people who seem distinctly apart from what we typically think of as comics fans. They come across -- to me, at least -- very much like a modern version of the your average American newspaper reader from the 1950s. They got a newspaper to read the news and, oh hey, there's some comics here as light entertainment... boy, that Dagwood sure is a goof! The comics were just a part of their landscape, and not as front-and-center as those of us deeply embedded in fandom see them. And for many of these commenters, Gil was was still just a part of the landscape -- not an insignifcant part, mind you, as they clearly looked forward to reading it every day, but it was juxtaposed against the rest of the content people get online. Their news, Facebook updates, cat pictures, and whatever else.

Just like the content people used to look in the newspapers for.

See, we're not talking about tech junkies on the bleeding edge of news and entertainment outlets here; we're talking about normal, everyday people who just want to read a few comics after they've clicked off the CNN website. A little levity to wash down whatever scandal is rocking the government today.

Now I don't mean to suggest that newspaper comics as we know them are doomed or anything to that effect. But what I am suggesting is that the historical comics syndicate model isn't working. And while both Andrews McMeel and KFS have other models out there (namely ad-supported free apps, and subscription-based ad-free apps) that Gil is getting canceled from low newspaper sales suggest those are not fully profitable venues on their own yet.

I think there's something to be said for a syndicate to provide an easy, consistent, online interface to comics for casual readers. And I think this is what the current syndicates are going to increasingly morph into.

Which means that what we think of as newspaper comics now will become true webcomics. In the sense that the syndicates will be primarily focused on their online delivery, and revenue generators will need to come from sources that aren't large publishers hawking hefty licensing fees.

In any event, Gil may be off the grid now, but as Feuti notes, "This is the end of Gil’s journey in newspapers, but who knows what the future will hold? Perhaps I’ll bring him back in some other medium one day." And maybe that medium will be more profitable for Feuti to boot!

I mentioned over the summer how I've been adopting a style of dress that wouldn't be out of place in an Indiana Jones adventure. Not quite to the extent of the artwork here, but still reminiscent of the style. And while I like that it's been a very practical wardrobe, I'd be lying to myself if I said there wasn't a nostalgia factor involved.

Indy never quite rose to the level of hero status for me in the way that some of my favorite comic book characters did, but I definitely gained an appreciation for the adventure genre he embodied. When Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring 'Em Back Alive tried to ride Indy's coattails, I was right there. My interest lessened a bit over the years, but that appreciation still remained. Later, despite having some issues with the way Lara Croft is frequently portrayed, I did break down and pick up a couple Tomb Raider games. And heaven help me, I even forced myself to sit through several episodes of Relic Hunter.

Now, with my wardrobe perhaps not complete but well enough along that it's an ongoing look for me, I find myself eyeballing comics touching back on that genre. The Indy comics, naturally, but things like Relic Wrangler and Temple Run (which I know is based on the game which, yes, I have downloaded and play frequently) as well. I haven't actually purchased any of these recently because... well, why would I? I mean, the genre as a whole is only of a mild interest to me and there aren't many of these types of stories in the comic format that have any particular significance for the medium; I'd be better off spending my money on a set of Jack Kirby reprints or a manga like Attack on Titan which I've been hearing so many good things about.

There's some part of my brain, I think, that exects that reading more about those Indy-style adventures helps me to embody the lifestyle that represents. After all, part of what led me to adopt the clothing style was the notion that I was digging around in obscure places looking for rare treasures like Indy. And that while it was ostensibly for academic purposes, a lot of it was driven by personal satisfaction, also like Indy. Of course, I'm not exactly fighting Nazis for the Ark of the Covenant, but I still liked the idea of getting my hands metaphorically dirty teasing out comics history using a smattering of half-documented clues.

So, at some level, I think that taking in more of those types of stories would bring me closer to being that type of character. Of being an Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. That bringing more of those superficial elements of style into my own life would bring me closer to living the kind of lives they live.

Which is nonsense, of course. Those stories are fiction, generated by writers and artists sitting in comfortable studios, extrapolating whole adventures out of the merest nuggets from the biographies of Roy Chapman Andrews or Giovanni Belzoni. What matters in those stories is what looks or sounds entertaining, not what's useful or accurate. Particularly when the stories range into the mythological or spiritual. Logically, I know this and yet I still find I'm having these pangs of interest...

Knowing more of these stories almost certainly won't help me to understand anything about comics research, or even adopting a style for comics research. Knowing more of these stories will simply be an exercise in seeing variations on a theme.

But that nostalgia continues to tug.

The challenge is continuing to recognize that nostalgia does nothing but replay what you already feel. It's really just a memory of a feeling. And that is a far cry from gaining insight, wisdom or knowledge. Nostalgia isn't just looking back; it's feeling back at the expense of seeing what's coming. What I want to do is look back in order to understand what's in front of me, and perhaps even predict what's further out than that.

The Dallas Morning News just ran this piece on schoolteacher-cum-comics-creator Hector Rodriguez. The comic he's created and is currently working on is called El Peso Hero. The character is kind of a Mexican version of Luke Cage, and operates along the Texas/Mexico border. Rodriguez created him because he wasn't seeing any Latino superheroes out there, and wanted something that would be a better reflection of the population he saw every day.

El Peso Hero, of course, isn't the first Latino superhero. Heck, DC's El Dorado got his own action figure a couple years back, and Marvel's Sunspot got one back in 1994! Granted, we're not talking about particularly high-profile characters for the most part; I think the most commercially successful Latino comic book hero (by way of Puerto Rican descent) is probably the Miles Morales Spider-Man. But that it's difficult to name-check Latino superheroes at all, and the ones you can find often have mixed-race backgrounds, says a lot about why Rodriguez felt the need to create his own.

The original stories are both written and drawn by Rodriguez. There's a guests story getting shown now that is still (I think) written by Rodriguez, but drawn by a variety of artists. While I think there's some room for improvement in the art and storytelling, Rodriguez is doing still some interesting things. First and most obviously is that he's addressing issues that are of more immediate concern to people who might live along the US/Mexico border: things like human trafficking. I can't speak to the realism of it, but I suspect there's something at least closer to first-hand experience there than what I've seen elsewhere.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, Rodriguez keeps all of El Peso Hero's dialogue in Spanish. Other characters use Spanish, English or Spanglish as befits the individual, but the main character is resolutely tied to his Mexican heritage. This doesn't impact readability much, as he's not very talkative and tends to be very curt when he does speak, which means people with even a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish can often get the gist of what he's saying. Furthermore, other characters' dialogue does a good job of keeping readers from getting completely lost linguistically.

I don't know if El Peso Hero will capture enough people's imagination to become a huge commercial success. I suspect a number of people might get turned off by the lack of professional polish. But I think it should be given a broader awareness precisely because Rodriguez is trying to say something no one else is in comics. He could sit around and wait for decades to see some real progress towards Latino representation in comics... or he could do it himself. If nothing else, it can help others more deeply embedded in the industry to broach the subject.

Hispanics and Lantinos are the largest minority in the United States, accounting for a little shy of 20% of the popluation, but you'd never know that to look at our media. Rodriguez's just pointing out that omission via his comic might raise some questions in some comic professionals minds, and I think that's well-worth applauding and supporting.

Rodriguez just launched a Kickstarter project to print issues 2 and 3 of El Peso Hero, the latter sporting a cover by Sam de la Rosa. He's only trying to raise $1000, and he's got almost two months to do it, so I'd be sorely disappointed if it didn't happen. But the more voices out there that aren't Caucasian men, the better, so I hope he'll make some progress and bring some attention to this huge void in comic publishing.

• Christina Blanch, who taught the superMOOC class on Gender Through Comic Books last year, has a new course lined up to begin in March. This one is Social Issues Through Comic Books and will also be free to attend online. I got a lot out of last year's course, so I'm already signed up for this one.
  
• This is a couple years old, but I just came across Alex Jay's extensive and thoroughly-researched biographic post about Artie Simek.
• Late on December 24, Wowio posted an amendment to their S-1 filing. I don't see anything significant in it myself, but my inner cynic says that the only reason anyone posts anything that late on Christmas Eve is because they're desperately trying to hide something.