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

Kleefeld on Comics: Big Black Review

https://ift.tt/3eAU6Rw

Kleefeld on Comics: Alterna as a Disruptor

https://ift.tt/3asaT63

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Defining Success, Part 1  

https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: A Morrie Kuramoto Anecdote

https://ift.tt/3bvXRFI

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Defining Success, Part 2  

https://t.co/jsQLjvZmxd

Kleefeld on Comics: Why Comics Readers Won't Migrate to Digital

https://ift.tt/2S6zk2B

There's been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about traditional publishers moving to digital distribution until physical distribution is possible once again. Reactions have been mixed, but one of the primary counter-arguments has been that if readers start reading their books digitally, they'll never go back to reading physical copies and thus will absolutely kill comic shops. The most prevailing counter-counter-argument has been that won't happen because comic fans like the physicality and tactile nature of paper books; it's that inherent physicality that's valued almost as much as the story contents themselves.

While I don't disagree with that last statement, it occurs to me that's missing an even more significant rationale, which I discussed here on this blog in the past. Namely, that comic shop purchasing is often as much about the community aspect of the store location itself as it is about picking up your weekly stack of new comics. The comic shop -- at least any comic shop worth its salt these days -- is a destination in and of itself. The best comic shops don't sell comics -- they sell friendship and community; you can still buy comics there, but that's just an ancillary activity. Comic shops are selling a location where people of a certain mindset (that vaguely defined class of superhero/fantasy/sci-fi/gaming geeks) hang out.

You've been able to order new comics online for years now. With the pandemic, many shops have instituted some version of curb-side pick-ups. You, as a comic fan in the 21st century, don't have to deal directly with other humans if you just want to get new comics. But people (stay-at-home orders aside) generally don't do that. They make a special trip to their local comic shop every week; they pick up their books, but also spend the rest of their lunch talking with the other folks there. Norm didn't go to the Cheers! bar to drink; he went to the Cheers! bar to hang out with Cliff and Sam and Carla and everyone. Comics is much the same.

Whether comic shops survive their current shut-down status is another issue, but once people are able to go to comic shops again, they will. Not because they're able to get comics again, but because they'll be able to see their community again.

I've relayed this story before, but given the harassment many Asians and Asian-Americans seem to be facing these days, I think it's worth repeating. Mamoru “Morrie” Kuramoto worked at Timely Comics as a letterer and production artist until 1957. He returned to the publisher (now called Marvel Comics) in the late 1960s where he continued until his death in 1985. I'm liberally swiping the rest of today's post (and this accompanying image) from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Facebook page...

Rick Parker recalled: "'December 7th, 1941....a date that will live in infamy...' ...I remember that every December 7th, we would mercilessly tease the one Japanese co-worker we had in the Marvel Bullpen, a fellow by the name of Morrie Kuramoto. Cartoonist Marie Severin would annually do a hilarious cartoon of Morrie engaged in some type of war-like situation and we'd all gather 'round his desk when she presented the cartoon to him and we'd all have a good laugh... everyone, that is, except Morrie, who managed a tight-lipped smile or took a long drag on the Chesterfield King that hung permanently from his lips, making him look like some character in a B movie. One year, though, when Marie had him piloting a plane and dropping bombs on the Empire State Building, he just couldn't take it anymore. That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. This time instead of bombs exploding, or peals of laughter bursting forth from the assembled multitude, it was Morrie who exploded. He really let us have it. We learned a lot that day. We learned that following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, as a young man, Morrie and his parents and sister were rounded up by the U.S. government and locked up in a prison camp in Arizona. We learned that his family's house and property were confiscated. And this was all done to protect them from possible repercussions to the attack on Pearl Harbor -- or in case they were thinking of sabotage. Morrie was born in the U.S.A. He was an American citizen. Morrie did manage to escape from the camp by serving honorably with the United States Military in WWII. We learned that there is often more to that co-worker sitting quietly in the corner doing his job, than we thought. We also learned that freedom is not something we can take for granted, even in America. Morrie had a heart attack and died on the subway on his way to work one morning. I heard it said that his old black raincoat hung in the closet in the back of the Marvel Bullpen for many years after he died. I wonder if the person who eventually took it out and disposed of it realized to what kind of person it had belonged."

For some additional context on how Japanese-Americans were treated in the period shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, please check out They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven Scott. The book is very moving and provides a first-hand account of Takei's time in a US-run concentration camp for people of Japanese descent, regardless of their citizenship status.

In the ongoing onslaught of publishing news that is largely being dictated by the coronavirus pandemic, Alterna Comics has mostly slid under the radar with their updates. They're not one of the larger publishers, so their news is often subsumed by whatever is going on with Marvel, DC, Scholastic, and the other top dollar publishers and/or their primary distributor, Diamond. As it turns out, though, Alterna has been charging ahead with a plan to keep their books going despite various shutdowns throughout much of North America.

(That their own website doesn't have a news or updates section might have something to do with their announcements getting missed as well. You have to either subscribe to their newsletter or check their updates on Facebook. Why there's nothing available on their own site, I don't know; that's generally been considered a best practice for decades. But I digress...)

In late March, they announced that they will continue to have their comics printed. Their printer was declared an "essential business" and they can continue on with only a slight delay. I suspect this is part due to Alterna's greater flexibility in the paper stock -- their books are printed on newsprint; while originally done as a cost-saving measure, it would seem this also gives them an edge with regards to using a printer that works on other newsprint items. Like, presumably, newspapers.

They also seemed to bust their humps to get direct ordering capabilities up and running on their site. While they were selling direct to consumers previously, it was primarily through subscriptions. They were able to scramble quickly enough to add in an ordering system for individual issues, and had that up and running the first week of April.

Part of how they were able to do that is because they've spent the past couple years developing a direct sales infrastructure. This was primarily aimed at retailers, who could order books through them and bypass Diamond. (Publisher Peter Simeti noted that over the past 18 months, their month over month direct sales to retailers were greater than their whatever they sold through Diamond.) But having this in place allowed them to open it directly to readers as well, and it gave them an additional outlet to sell their comics digitally.

What this also means -- both having that infrastructure and having spent years cultivating retailer relationships -- they're able to halt their relationship with Diamond entirely. They've cancelled all future solicitations with Diamond, and are handling that all internally now. While they'll certainly take a financial hit of some kind from retailers who refuse to order through more than one partner (i.e. Diamond) that they're able to continue selling while Diamond is not distributing anything will put them ahead of virtually every other comics publisher.

While they certainly could not have known a pandemic was going to grind the economy to a halt, and they don't seem to have yet figured out how to handle distribution outside the US, they were savvy enough to not only recognize the limitations of going through Diamond exclusively, but had set themselves up to shift over to other venues. Their agile approach to selling comics means that they are much farther ahead of the game than virtually, if not literally, every other comics publisher out there.

This pandemic has been a massive disruptor for the comics industry. (As well as almost every other industry, but let's focus on comics here!) Virtually every business has had to modify their business models very quickly to adapt to the current climate. But in comics, Alterna is acting as a disruptor as well. They're shaking up how comics business has been done for decades. It's not really something they set out to do, I don't think, but they've been nimble enough as a company to not only ride one disruption but cause another in the process. I think other publishers are going to seriously start looking at what Alterna is doing now, and do their best to copy those ideas as quickly as they can. Their problem, though, is going to be trying to do the two years' worth of work that Alterna already put in in a matter of months.

Keep an eye on Alterna. Will they become the end-all, be-all model of comics publishers going forward? Probably not, but they're now out here driving the whole industry forward while everyone else has been waiting at the stop light.

I was born a year after the Attica Prison massacre* so I obviously don't have any direct recollections of the events at the time. I was also too young to recall when Dog Day Afternoon came out and threw the chant of "Attica! Attica!" into pop culture. Consequently, I'm mostly familiar with the events through third-hand parodies that use that chant as a cultural touchstone. I'd learned enough to know Attica was the name of a prison and that there was some kind of incident there where inmates were treated horribly, but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge going in to reading Big Black: Stand at Attica.

What actually happened in Attica is relayed in Big Black: Stand at Attica. The story comes from Frank 'Big Black' Smith, who was a central figure in the events. Although he himself died in 2004, he had been working with writer Jared Reinmuth since 1997 to get his story out in various forms, and Reinmuth continued working with Smith's widow afterwards. So while the graphic novel itself (drawn by Améziane) was made after Smith's death, it draws heavily on his own words and experiences, and provides a direct view of what happened inside Attica's walls.

The story was hard to read. Not because it was written poorly, but because of its brutal honesty about how awful the prison was. The prisoners' revolt was initiated in part because the corrections officers were literally beating other prisoners to death. There was such rampant racism in place that officers were actively looking for any excuse to mistreat the prisoners. Often that was beatings, but it also included starvation and isolation. Through a stroke of fortune, they were able to take over the prison facility and basically just demanded they be treated like human beings. Governor Rockefeller sent in troops to slaughter them, and prisoners such as Smith were then tortured by the officers for days afterwards. And the entire time, the media was fed lies about how the prisoners were killing hostages and threatening to overrun the nearby towns. It was only the honesty of the coroner (who continued to going to the press insisting the slain officers died of gunshot wounds -- wounds that could not have been inflicted by the unarmed prisoners) that people began to understand the truly heinous treatment the prisoners were being subjected to.

The sheer depths of depravity that the guards sank to, that Governor Rockefeller -- and indeed President Nixon himself -- not only condoned but actively endorsed, that the media casually neglected to investigate... it's absolutely horrible. I hate our prison system as it stands today; I can't imagine how staggeringly bad it must have been in 1971.

But as painful as it can be to read, this story needs to be shared. Because here in 2020, we like to think we're better than we used to be. That we've overcome a lot of the problems that were fought against during the Civil Rights Movement. But there's a lot of this still out there. You see people complaining about treatment from ICE? They're doing the exact same shit. But to get a sense of what they're stonewalling away from reporters today, I think it's relevant to look at what kinds of things they did in the past. I can almost guarantee the same horror stories are happening right now, and we're just not hearing about them.

The storytelling is really solid. They make the unusual challenge of telling things somewhat out of chronological order, with most of it couched as a series of flashbacks. This can be tricky to juggle for readers, as they try to remember where/when they are during different parts of the book, but it's handled well here, and I never got any sense of confusion from that perspective. There were a couple of individual figures that were drawn similarly enough that it was a little difficult to distinguish one from another on occasion, but that was generally rectified fairly quickly in the dialogue.

I liked the approach overall. I find that many biographic and/or historical narratives are so intent on making sure they remain accurate that the story becomes more illustrated prose than comic. But things flow smoothly here with a lot of (I expect invented) dialogue to ground the story more directly. Some of the public pronouncements -- things that showed up on the news or came out as prepared statements -- seem to be pulled from actual source material, and provide more authenticity. Particularly to the blatant attempts by the government and prison officials to snow the public.

The events that occurred in Attica probably aren't going to be taught in any social studies class. We're far enough removed from the original events that most everyone directly involved is dead. But these problems still haunt our overcrowded prisons and other detention facilities. I suspect the biggest learnings people got from the Attica Prison Massacre were how to better conceal mistreatment, and how to manage the PR better if it's discovered. (See the fallout from the Abu Ghraib torturing for evidence of that!) So despite the difficulty in reading through Smith's story here, I think Big Black: Stand at Attica is well worth reading so we all know what to be on the look out for in our prison system.

* This incident is more commonly know as the Attica Prison riot, but I take the term "riot" to be propaganda. The prisoners did NOT riot. The incident was, by any factual accounts, very orderly and controlled. Until the police came in and start shooting anything that moved... including their own. Nine officers were killed and one was wounded by their own gunfire. This incident was about police lashing out of sheer hatred, indiscriminately killing anyone who was even in the vicinity of a Black person. The Attica inmates were armed only with sticks and pipes, and were gunned down by officers who were embarrassed by their own inadequacies. Big Black: Stand at Attica doesn't refer to this as a massacre, but that's absolutely what it was.

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

Metatextual Artifacts
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2020/04/metatextual-artifacts.html

USPS Concerns
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2020/04/usps-concerns.html

Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Genres in Webcomics, Part 1
https://t.co/jsQLjvZmxd

Remember 2010?
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2020/04/remember-2010.html

September 1947 Redux
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2020/04/september-1947-redux.html

Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Genres in Webcomics, Part 2
https://t.co/jsQLjvZmxd

Kleefeld on Comics: My Friend Dahmer Review
https://ift.tt/2zc7uvj

I sat down last night to watch the 2017 movie adaptation of My Friend Dahmer for the first time. It's of course based off Derf Backderf's 2012 graphic novel of the same name, and recounts Backderf's friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer in their last year or so of high school, with the story ending only a few hours before Dahmer commits his first murder.

The trick with a story like this is that the protagonist becomes an unrepentant serial killer and commits some incredibly heinous acts, so how do you convey him in such a way that the audience finds him relatable enough to be willing to follow his story, but not so relatable as to try to excuse his actions? In the case of the graphic novel, I think Derf was able to do that (at least partially) through his illustration style, but that's clearly not an option here. I believe Backderf himself has said that his approach to that was just to present the story as honestly and objectively as he could, but here, using live actors, there's a very fine line to be walked I think. The fact that it's a movie instead of a comic means that there are dozens of people lending their interpretations to the project, and injecting their own thoughts, ideas, and biases into it. Not just the director and the actors, but the screenwriter, the composer, the costume designers, the lightning technicians, the prop folks... essentially everybody listed in the end credits provided some level of input into this film.

The only thing I can think of that happened here, though, is that Backderf and writer/director/producer Marc Meyers were able to sufficiently emphasize that notion of objective honesty. This movie felt frighteningly like high school. No one was playing to broad stereotypes of "the jock" or "the nerd" or whatever. Despite my going to high school nearly a decade after Backderf and Dahmer, those school halls and classrooms were very familiar. The interactions of the students were ones I had. The banter, the attitudes, the angst... I recognized all of it. It all felt 100% authentic. Even down to the way the glasses didn't sit quite straight on lead actor Ross Lynch's face.

I think that's what really sold the film for me. It presented the utter mundanity of rural Northeast Ohio with sincere accuracy. It presented the utter mundanity of high school sincere accuracy. It presented the utter mundanity of a small town in the late 1970s with sincere accuracy. I felt all of it in a way that I don't get out of the original. Honestly, I usually have trouble connecting with Backderf's work. I like it well enough, but I don't really connect with it at an emotional level. Something with his illustration style, I think. But the movie crew seemed to go out of their way to make everything feel absolutely spot on.

I realize the film played a little more loosely with the story than the original graphic novel. The timeline's changed a bit, and there's some factual inaccuracies. Nothing huge, but enough that I wouldn't want to use the movie as a source for a school report on Dahmer. The changes are obviously to streamline the storytelling a bit, and given that it's not intended to be a strictly factual recounting of Dahmer's life, I'm okay with that. The spirit of the movie is true, even if some of the particular details are a tad off.

All told, I think it was an excellent film. Frankly, I found it improved on the original graphic novel and made for a compelling watch. I feel I understand the hellhole Dahmer came from better after having seen the movie, relative to how much I understood from the graphic novel. The movie is currently available for free on Amazon Prime, and probably available via other streaming platforms as well.