Tweaked somewhat from my original 2010 post, itself borrowed from Van Halen...

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Right now, someone is picking up a comic for the very first time.
And someone else is putting one down for the last time in their life.
Right now, a child is excitedly using their undeveloped abilities to create their own comic.
While a professional comic creator is procrastinating when they know they should be getting back to work.
Right now, someone is reading a comic instead of doing their job.
Right now, someone has just come across a brilliant idea in a comic they'd never heard of before.
Right now, someone is upset because they just read a comic that challenged his beliefs.

Right now, a comic creator has just finished what will be seen as their greatest work, but
Windsor McCay
Will Eisner
Walt Kelly
Jack Kirby
Dik Browne
And Charles Schulz
Will never create another comic.
Though someone has just discovered their work.

Right now, only some of you caught my visual pun.

Right now, comics are being created that won't be seen by anyone but their creators for another several months.
Right now, comics are being created that won't be seen by anyone but their creators.
Ever.
Right now, comics are being published using languages you'll never learn.
Right now, comics are being published utilizing nothing but illustrations.
You will never have enough time to read them all.
Right now, more comics exist than ever before.
You will never even be aware of most of them.

Right now, someone just had an inspired idea for a comic they'll never have the chance to make.
Right now, someone was just inspired by a comic to create something wholly unrelated to comics.
Right now, someone is working to preserve the comics in their collection.
While someone else is trying to color within the lines.

Right now, someone is dreaming about comics.
Right now, you're thinking about them.

Back in 2017. Shen Comix created this comic in a response to how awful the previous couple years had been...

The following year, various people made updated versions. I can't find who did this modification, but the most widely circulated variation (I believe) was this one...

I think this one was most successful because it followed the same format of the original. Even going so far as to literally duplicate the 2017 figure, and making adjustments based on that.

As with any meme, it slipped out of circulation. But when Mags Visaggio asked if it had been updated recently, Naomi Rubin replied with a new last panel...

When asked what happened to 2019, Rubin responded, "Yep, anyway at this point 2018 was too scared to turn around for a year or so."

Of course, now I'm terrified to see what turns up next year.

Over the weekend I got the last of any newly published comics I'll see for who knows how long. (My newest ones are in the picture here.) Although the situation changes on a day-to-day basis, the last I heard, Marvel and DC are still producing comic stories but it's unclear as of this writing how/when/where/if they might get distributed later. FYI, I had my recent books mailed to me; I'm not even going out to pick stuff up at this point!

Me? I'm not worried about not having anything to read. In the first place, so far I have found I have pretty much no more time than I had prior to any stay-at-home orders; I'm privileged to be able to do my work remotely, so I'm still putting in a full work week. In the second place, I have a huge To-Read pile of books and comics sitting here with me already. Even setting aside digital comics and webcomics, I could probably keep myself occupied for years just on what's sitting in my personal library right now. I've been very privileged in being able to buy a large number of books, but I've also picked up two additional collections for free: my dad gifted me his collection about a decade back and I found someone else who had literally left theirs out on the curb. I've still yet to read most of those books, so I'd guess I've read at most maybe half of the books I have in my collection today.

But the question of the day, then, is what can comic fans who haven't been as fortunate as I have do while they're waiting for new comics to get published again?

I think there are a couple of good solutions. I'm not sure how obvious these are to everyone, so I'll explain them here.

First, start looking at webcomics. This might be tricky for a number of reasons, though. While they are (generally) free, there is a definite shift a reader has to make in going from print comics to webcomics. The problem isn't the content or the format or even the venue, but the rhythm. Going to your local comic shop every week to pick up books was a habit many print readers picked up ages ago. Having them forego a Wednesday trip to a comic shop is vastly different than checking a digital bookmark every day or looking at an RSS feed regularly. That habit shift is, I think, what's often problematic for people; they don't like having their schedule and habitual rhythms changed. Another problem can be the material itself: if you're a reader looking for a specific character or creator, there's a good chance they're NOT doing anything online at the moment. There is no Spider-Man webcomic and I don't think Scott Synder is writing any webcomics right now either. If you're a fan of those, you're out of luck in terms of new material. So switching to webcomics will mean finding new creators, characters, and ideas to interact with. There's plenty of good, even great ones out there, but none of them feature the Justice League if that's what you're really interested in.

The second idea is to start searching the back issues. If you're interested in a particular character, start going through other titles they appeared in. If you're a Fantastic Four fan, maybe check out the Marvel Two-in-One series that featured the Thing in every issue. There's another 100-plus issues (if you include the Annuals). Or maybe track down the old Strange Tales stories that focused on the Human Torch. If you really liked Warren Ells' writing on Trees, see if you can find Transmetropolitan or Planetary. Find out where else your favorite characters and creators were featured -- you're online; the information is readily available! -- and start using the money you would've spent on new comics on these back issues. If your local comic shop doesn't have their inventory listed online, call them up and ask them what you're looking for! Even if they don't have it stock themselves, they can probably help track it down for you! (Although make sure you have them confirm pricing on things before they acquire it for you -- you don't want them to buy a book for $100 if you're not willing to spend more than $10 on it!) Many shops now have delivery or curb-side pick-up; you can still take advantage of those.

You might not be reading the newest comics, but you'll still be enjoying stories about your favorites that you yourself haven't read before! And, importantly, you'll also be helping out your local comic shop who's obviously seen their income fall dramatically with all these stay-at-home orders. When state governments start lifting those stay-at-home orders, you don't necessarily need to keep hunting those back issues if you find you didn't enjoy them, but it will have given you a deeper insight into your favorite character/creator at worst, and maybe given rise to a new appreciation of some other work that you had never experienced before!

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: When a Library Isn't a Library
https://ift.tt/3aAfwvO

Kleefeld on Comics: Nimbleness Amid Disaster
https://ift.tt/2WXYtQk

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Discussing Webcomics, Part 2
https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: Comic Strips as a Bellwether
https://ift.tt/2WVl67U

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Discussing Webcomics, Part 3
https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: Sturgeon's Law & The Quest For Maintaining Relevance Redux
https://ift.tt/2JDGZR3

Kleefeld on Comics: Wally Wingert's "Adam West" Redux
https://ift.tt/2X7gwDI

This pandemic stuff is starting to mess with my head a bit. I'm going to dig back into my archives for something decidedly more fun to think about, if only for a few minutes...

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You know, once upon a time -- back in the late 1980s -- there had been only one actor who was identified at all with the role of Batman. Namely, Adam West. The 1940s serials starring Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowery as the character were almost entirely forgotten and Olan Soule had only lent his voice to the character in cartoons, only to be replaced by West eventually anyway.

So not surprisingly, there was quite a fair amount of speculation of who would wear the cowl when Tim Burton first announced his Batman movie. West was largely out of the running as he was in his 60s by then. But then it was announced that the role had been given to Michael Keaton, a man who was almost exclusively known for broadly comedic roles such as the title characters from Johnny Dangerously, Beetlejuice and Mr. Mom. There was, as I recall, quite a lot of hoopla about the casting decision.

"Why would you place a clown in the role of a superhero?"

I wasn't especially concerned. I remember hearing Burton note sometime early on that Batman was just a suit; anyone could play Batman. What he wanted was someone crazy enough to play Bruce Wayne. (As an aside, I think Keaton's scene where he grabs the fireplace poker and screams, "You wanna get nuts?!? Let's get nuts!" is precisely where I think Burton was coming from with that statement.)

Anyway, all of this background is to put the following song into context. Wally Wingert wrote and recorded "Adam West" to comment on his casting preferences with the song coming out some months before the movie. The tune itself is borrowed from The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" with a dash of the old Batman theme song thrown in for good measure. I found it quite amusing back in the day and wanted to share...

You know what my problem is? My brain is so overwhelmed with pandemic news that I'm having trouble processing anything besides that right now. So to have at least one thing this week that is NOT pandemic-related, here's a re-post of a piece I wrote back in 2012, updated slightly to keep the dates accurate. I kind of liked it back then, but today, I'm still not sure if it qualifies as part of my 90% or not...

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Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. Although he was originally expressing the sentiment with regards to a macro-level of art (i.e. 90% of films are crap, 90% of books are crap, etc.) I think it also applies at decidedly more micro-level as well. Meaning that 90% of everything you or I produce is crap.

Obviously, crap is relative here. If 90% of what I make is crap, but I always produce something better (or worse) than the next guy, then a strict definition of crap would mean 100% of his (or my) output is crap. What I'm saying, though, is that 90% of what I make is crap only when compared to what I make. The next guy might be infinitely better or worse than me, but his stuff is still 90% crap... relative only to the broader body of work he produces.

With that in mind, then, it makes sense, as a creative individual, to create as much as you possibly can so that the 10% of your work that isn't crap is enough to make a living on. And, if you're extremely talented or incredibly lucky, some of your non-crap work will even find it's way up to the 10% of non-crap work overall.

But here's the other thing: the 10% of your non-crap work changes over time. You don't just create 10% of your life-long awesomeness when you're 20 and produce nothing but crap for the rest of your life. By the same token, you don't produce crap exclusively until you're 60 and suddenly come up with your 10% of non-crap. No, 90% of what you've made by the time you're 20 is crap, and 90% of what you've made by the time you're 60 is crap. Some of that latter crap may well include things that were part of your 10% non-crap work from when you were 20!

You ever look at something you created years earlier? An old drawing or a poem or whatever? You thought it was absolutely fantastic at the time but, now, 5... 10... 20 years on, it looks like crap. That's what I'm talking about. In fact, if your older work doesn't look any worse to you now than it did before, then you haven't really grown or improved in the intervening time.

Now, if you took a decade off from painting to focus on raising your kids (or whatever), obviously your painting skills wouldn't improve over that time, and your older paintings probably look just as good to you now as they did then. That's perfectly reasonable, I think. But once you get back into painting, you should start improving again (once you've gotten past whatever level of atrophy your skills fell into) and you should soon see your older work as crap.

Everything is changing all around us. Technology, of course, but also the way we interact with the rest of the world. Twitter didn't exist twenty years ago, and internet-connected cell phones were quite the rarity. But not only do they exist now, but they've changed the face of how we think and act on a day-to-day level. How much of your Twitter stream got filled up with election day coverage back in November? That wasn't a news feed like you might see scrolling across the bottom of CNN; that was running commentary shared by your friends and acquaintances from around the country, if not the world. That was you and hundreds, if not thousands, of loosely connected individuals having a large group discussion in real time about an event that was going on throughout the country. Twenty years ago, you could do something approximating that with a dozen or two people in a chat room or message board. Thirty years ago? Almost unheard of. You sat in a room, and any discussion was limited to the people in that room. Maybe one or two people on the phone line. The technology has enabled a fundamental change in how we operate as a society.

So, here's the tricky bit for the 21st century. The work of a creative individual tends to be most successful (i.e. not part of the 90% of crap) when it's a good reflection of the culture it's in. Looking at old comics, they tend not to work as well today because they reflect a very different time and place. Yellow-skinned, buck-toothed depictions of the Japanese look horrible today, but it was almost unpatriotic (for Americans) to depict them any other way in the 1940s. But if the technology keeps changing at a faster and faster pace (which it is) and that keeps impacting society at a faster and faster pace (which it is) then it's inherently more difficult to make art that's reflective of society. The time you might take creating a piece might be longer than the time it takes for the culture to change around you.

And if the art you create isn't reflective of society, it's more likely to be seen as a failure. That is, it's more likely to be seen as crap. The implication here is that it's becoming harder and harder to create art that's not crap, and that the improvements that you used to see in your work are potentially less relevant/important. Meaning that your more recent work is going to be less likely to supplant your previous work, and your window for creating additional non-crap gets smaller instead of larger. After all, how many comic creators do you know that made something fantastic in their 20s or 30s, and have produced nothing of any particular note since?

I might be full of crap with this. This post could well be part of the 90% of my work that is crap. But I tell you, this is the kind of stuff that scares me personally. For whatever insignificant level of relevance I have here and now, how much less do I have to look forward to because I can't keep up? I'm certainly going to try to fight that notion as long as I can, but mankind as a whole does not have a good track record in that department.

Here's hoping this post is part of my 90%!

One of the most frequent complaints about newspaper comic strips these days is that they're not funny. That they're so bland and generic as to never offend anyone. But part of their blandness, too, comes from the fact that they almost can't be topical at all. They're worked on so far in advance that anything that might be newsworthy today could be well out of date by the time the comic sees print.

Which means that whatever makes it into a comic strip is thought by at least the creator and their editor to have some degree of staying power. It's a topic they believe will still be making headlines in several weeks' time.

With that said, here's a handful of comics from yesterday...

Whether or not you think any of them is funny is irrelevant here. What is relevant is that these cartoonists, in the early part of March, felt confident that the coronavirus would still be making big news at the end of the month. Recall that the major sporting franchises didn't cancel their seasons until the middle of March, and the first state-wide "stay at home" order wasn't issued until the 19th.

Now, it's certainly possible these cartoonists aren't working that far in advance. Lalo Alcaraz's La Cucaracha for example seems to touch on more-or-less current topics frequently enough that I suspect his deadlines are pretty late. But, Ziggy!?! Come on! When you've got Tom Wilson making 'topical' jokes in Ziggy, you know this is something that's going to be an issue for a long time!