I haven't seen much in the way of promotion for this yet, so I wanted to take a moment to highlight an upcoming comics convention: Webcomicon. It's a convention specifically focused on, not surprisingly, webcomics. As you can see from the promo image at the right, it'll take place August 3-4 in the Detroit area and will feature a number of well-known webcomikers.

I believe this is the show's inaugural year (the web domain was only registered last month) and, given the heavy promotional support from The Awkward Store, I presume it's largely been set up by Nick Seluk. I think it's fantastic that we finally get a webcomics-focused convention and I hope it's wildly successful so we get more.

(I'd love to be able to go, but I continue to be very concerned about COVID and am still not attending any conventions. "Con crud" was not uncommon before the pandemic in the first place; I'd not like to layer COVD on top of that. But that's me -- do your own risk assessments.)

Best of luck to Seluk and I hope everyone who's able to go has a brilliant time!

It occurred to me that I haven't really looked at any Lynd Ward material in about a decade now. I haven't reviewed any here on the site since 2011 and that was Ward's first graphic novel, Gods' Man. The book was novel in literally every sense of the word and it was relatively popular back in the day. So how did Ward do with his second book, Madman's Drum?

Ward apparently set himself up with a bigger challenge in this book. Not only is it a more complex -- with more characters over multiple generations -- and not reliant on a basic story trope, but it's also is 15% shorter, using only 118 woodcuts compared to Gods' Man's 139. The question, then, is: did he succeed? To which I would answer: mostly, I guess?

The story is about a slave trader who takes a tribal drum from one of the tribes he raids. The man becomes financially successful, but dies on a subsequent trip a few years later. His son grows up to become an astronomer but his rejection of religion literally kills his mother. He throws his energy into his work exclusively, and subsequently loses his wife and their two daughters. Surrounded with so much death and grief, he slips into madness, picking up his father's drum and joining a crazed-looking piper who's been seen leering at all of the funerals.

Firstly, the actual illustrations are excellent. Very richly detailed and evocative. An incredible step up in Ward's already exceptional illustration abilities. He seems to also have spent more time organizing the compositions and layouts. A lot more working with foregrounds and backgrounds to relay multiple ideas in a single image. Indeed, David A. Beronä's Introduction in my copy notes that Ward would sometimes spend hours on a single woodcut, only to discard it entirely because he didn't like the figure positioning or the layout.

Of course, that's not to say the book is without critcism. While most of the page-to-page transitions (or panel-to-panel transitions, if you prefer; with only one panel per page, they're interchangeable here) were smooth and flowed well, I did have a bit of trouble following along every time the story switched focus to another member of the the family. Going from the father to the son wasn't too bad, but it took a couple of readings for me to register when we switched to the son's first daughter and especially when we switched from the first to the second daughter. I see how Ward tried setting that up, but I think that could've been made more clear. To be fair, some of early the indicators for that may have been more obvious when it was first published, and I'm simply a century removed from some cultural signifiers that may have been commonly known in 1930.

I also think the overall message of the story lacks any real weight to it. It seems to be trying to say "slavery is bad and it will bring ruin upon you." Except it doesn't really. In the first place, the focus on the drum suggets that it's not really slavery that's all that bad, and it was really stealing from the people you're enslaving that was a step too far. And in the second place, even that isn't really all that consequential. The slave trader was successful for years after stealing the drum, and his son also became very successful and well-respected. And the deaths that seemingly followed him around really just seemed like deaths that would've naturally happened around the time they did anyway. His mother dies well after he becomes and adult, and his children also grow well into adulthood before anything unseemly happens to them. When the son has finally been driven mad with grief, he's an old man with a full life behind him. The apparent curse took a solid generation and a half to play out. So the actual message being conveyed is "slavery is not great but not all that bad really, and the worst you'll get is that your son might get dementia as an old man several decades from now."

I mean, I get that it's supposed to be more of a generational curse and the drum is just a symbol of the slave trading that can last over that entire time, but I feel like the metaphors here are a little strained. There's literally zero connection between slavery and the drum, and whatever fate befalls anyone beyond the slave trader himself. Whatever ill fortunes occur, those could all be easily seen as just part of the random crapshoot that is life. Anyone can trip, fall down the stairs, and die; you don't need to have been the wife of a slave trader for that to happen. Heck, even the son doesn't seem to see any connections there until the penultimate page, after he's gone crazy.

Don't get me wrong. I quite enjoyed the book, and I plan on checking out some of the works by other artists that Madman's Drum evidently inspired. Otto Nückel, István Szegedi Szüts, and Bob Blaisdell are next on my list. ("Inspired" probably isn't the right word. Maybe "encouraged by its commercial success.") My copy of the book was published by Dover in 2005. It doesn't appear to formally still be in print, but it doesn't seem to be too hard to find a copy either. If you can't get the Dover edition, Art Spiegleman edited a collection of Ward's work in 2010 that includes the story. And, heck, there's an original 1930 edition (without the dust jacket) available on ebay right now for only $35 US. Absolutely worth checking out, particularly considering how few people -- even comics fans -- are familiar with Ward's work.

Back in November, I blogged about how I had created my own funny pages to automatically pull in all the comics I wanted to read. I did that because A) there was no single app or platform that does that in any meaningful capacity any more, and B) I don't want to spend an hour every morning going through a series of bookmarks and trying to remember which strips run on what frequency. As I mentioned at the time, it's very crude but it works well enough for just me. It hasn't remained static, though, as I've made updates that stemmed from either format changes (in the case of Comics Kingdom strips) or from just wanting to add another title I had either forgotton about or just discovered.

But I was working on the code yesterday, trying to add a webcomic with a sporadic posting schedule. The image file names were predictable enough, but the ad hoc posting schedule meant that I couldn't assume there would be a new comic to pull in on any given day. (And, to be 100% clear right upfront, I am not at all mad about the lack of scheduling here! Webcomics are a tough gig, and often a side-hustle. If you can't post daily, weekly, or even monthly with any regularity, I've got no issue with that! No webcomiker has any obligation to me whatsoever!) Now, they do have an RSS feed available, but the challenge for me was to set something up that could read the feed's most recent update first, check to ensure it's less than a couple weeks old, then pull out the thumbnail image file name from that update ignoring the rest of the content, rename it to follow the original source image's file name format, and then reformat the image to fit within the confines of my page. Now I'm sure this would be child's play for a dedicated programmer, but using Javascript to pull out particular elements as they're defined with CSS when I don't necessarily know what those elements even are was totally new for me. I was indeed able to figure it out, probably in about an hour. Certainly in less than two. I realized, too, that I could apply the same idea to another webcomic which posed a similar set of challenges. And the entire time I was in the code, I was making tweaks and adjustments to other comics I already had in place. Minor alignment and sizing issues, for the most part. All in all, I think I spent about three hours on things.

With the end result that it would save me maybe five or ten seconds a week maybe?

Which, if I'm mathing properly here, equates to being time-efficient if I save that full ten seconds every week for about twenty years.

But my point with doing that is NOT to be efficient with my time. I mean, yes, I do not want to spend any time in the morning trying to manually go through a list of fifty-ish comics, which may or may not be updated that day, before I've even gotten through my first coffee of the day. So the end result of having all these comics automatically updating on a single page, automatically hiding ones that have not seen an update that day, so all I need to do is scroll through them is something that makes it easier for me to keep up with various comics I enjoy. But that's not my overall end result. My overall end result is having learned more about coding than I knew previously. It's having gone through the process of sorting out what works and what doesn't and why. I could sit down and read some book or website talking about all these elements I'm using, or I could watch videos on the subject easily enough. But that would all remain just theoretical for me. Working on a comics page -- finding actual, at least reasonably practical, solutions for an actual page I want to use on a daily basis -- puts down for me a definite goal to work towards and having to figure these solutions out means that I have a better/more practical understanding of how those operations work. Which means I'll remember them.

The end goal isn't comics. Comics are just the means by which I'm educating myself. Comics make that learning process more entertaining and more satisfying, but they're not the goal themselves.

Geek culture has exploded over the past decade or two. I know I watched with interest as the significance of Comic-Con became more and more widespread, as laid out in Con & On which I reviewed last week.I've always been interested in geeky things anyway and I long-ago developed something of a work reputation at work as the pop culture guy. It seems to work well for me professionally. By regularly dropping very-non-work references into conversations, it tends to put people at ease by using cultural touchstones, and casts me in the light of a real human being, and not just that-guy-who-works-on-web-sites.

The danger, of course, is over-emphasizing the geek factor. To come across as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, or John Cuszak's character from High Fidelity. There's a line between referencing popular culture to put people at ease, and geeking out and alienating everyone. I think a lot of the fanboy stereotype comes from those folks who cross that line without realizing it.

As I see it, the best approach is to, first, stick with fairly common and readily identifiable reference points. Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, Superman, Popeye... Notice that I'm not italicizing them -- I'm talking here about the broad strokes of those IPs, not the specific books and movies and such. Try to keep in mind that most people (well, most Americans at any rate) are going to be more familiar with intellectual properties that had some major marketing efforts behind them. Iron Man references, for example, didn't work very well outside of comic book circles until after the first movie came out; no one knew who Tony Stark was prior to that and everyone's understanding of the character comes pretty exclusively from Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal.

The other thing you need to remember is DON'T QUOTE ANYONE! With a few rare exceptions, most folks will not remember any specific dialogue from a TV/movie/whatever. And the lines they will remember are repeated so often (and frequently repeated inaccurately) as to be cliche. Trust me, as cool a set of lines as these were, no one will understand:

• "Snakes - why did it have to be snakes?"
• "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."
• "They killed Kenny! You bastards!"
• "No soup for you!"
• "You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work."

You get the idea. Doesn't matter how popular you think the original reference material was, quoting it to a non-geek marks you as someone who's spent WAY too much time absorbed in fiction and not nearly enough time in reality. Not to mention that it suggests that you're not smart or original enough to think of your own response, and are forced to borrow from others.

Now, if you establish that your audience is geek-oriented in some way, you're naturally free to geek out along those lines. My boss is a big Star Trek fan, so I can usually quote from the shows around him without worrying about his not understanding the reference or thinking that I've seen them too many times. I can usually make more obscure references in general with him because some Trek adjacencies -- Patrick Stewart as Professor X for example.

Bear in mind, though, that I still have to keep my comic book references limited! Anything that's hit the movie screen (essentially, intellectual properties with a marketing budget) is fair game, but even those folks who can catch a Battlestar Galactica or Stargate reference are going to likely miss nods to the New Gods, the Eternals, The Question or The Creeper. Yes, technically there was an Eternals movie but 1) no one saw it, 2) anyone who did see it didn't understand it because it was a train wreck, and 3) it didn't really have f***-all to do with the comics in the first place.

My point with all this is to let you know that it's okay to show you geek side at work, or in other traditionally non-geeky circles. Bringing up the idea of trading cards is cool; being able to reference all the producers of trading cards and which properties they have the rights to, not so much. Just be sure to not let your geekery get away from you. You don't want to geek out so much that you launch yourself well over that line between "that guy who can make pop culture references" and "unsociable geek who you can't relate to."

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

Kleefeld on Comics: It's Not Me, It's You
https://ift.tt/0C3Pb1o

Kleefeld on Comics: Glorious Standing Around
https://ift.tt/jP5HqoO

Kleefeld on Comics: Con and On Review
https://ift.tt/Poxj7C2

Kleefeld on Comics: Monkey King and the World of Myths Review
https://ift.tt/PHmAwUB

Kleefeld on Comics: Comics Journalism Is Social Media
https://ift.tt/ni70rZs

If Marshall McCluhan is right and the medium is the message, what is the message of social media?That is in reference to McCluhan's 1964 book Understanding Media in which the author contended that the medium in which a message is delivered is as powerful and impactful as the message itself. "The medium is the message." So what does the existence/use of Bluesky (or Mastodon or X or whatever) say about us, both as creators and recipients of content via that outlet?

Henry Jenkins responded to this idea years ago with an extended answer on his blog, but the short answer is: "Here it is. Here I am."

What he was getting to is that social media like Facebook and blogs are the drivers of capturing people's attention in the 21st century. Traditional advertising essentially doesn't work because there's simply too much competing for our time and attention. It's become white noise. We have, as consumers, learned to filter out much of what does not interest us, so we're not apt to pay attention to, for example, traditional car commercials unless we have an immediate interest in car commercials -- if we are actively ourselves in the market for a new car and need to get up to speed quickly on what's currently available. This means anyone trying to market a product or service needs to quickly and fairly efficiently target people who are already pre-disposed to hearing what they have to say.

The question about "gossip comics journalism" leads quickly to the state of comics journalism in general, and I've seen a repeatedly complaints over the years that were generally disappointed with how the "main" comic news outlets were little more outlets for publishers press releases....

Comics Gossip Sites are as close as the industry gets to journalism.

Since there is no REAL journalism in comics, gossip columns are all we really have.

i'm sure has been noted already but comics (& every medium) needs better journalists.

depends what you term gossip. all other comics news sites are intermediaries for soft interviews & press releases

It's essentially the same debate that's being held about journalism at large. Although the AI-generated content angle has entered that broad discussion but has yet to permeate into comics journalism, as far as I'm aware.

Part of the reason I, and many others, write these kinds of things is simply to keep my name and identity in your consciousness on an ongoing basis. Years ago, while I was still running my Fantastic Four fan site, I made a point of making regular, weekly updates so that there was always something there for people to check in on. The same holds true for my daily blogging today. Part of it is an exercise in writing regularly as a form of practice, but part of it is to keep my name out there. I make a point of trying to write posts in advance of every day that I know I won't be at a computer and able to blog, precisely so that the stream of information coming from this location is continual. (I'm not always successful, admittedly, but I do try.) I'm deliberately trying to build cultural capital within the comics community by standing up every day to say, "Here I am."

Of course, just saying "Here I am" would get repetitive quickly and people would pay it little heed. It would be more white noise to ignore. But if I said something different each day, something interesting, THAT might provide enough incentive for people to return. Think about it in terms of the funny pages from the newspaper...

People came back to read Calvin & Hobbes each and every day because they enjoyed it. Some jokes were funnier than others, some strips were drawn better than others, but there was a more than good chance that creator Bill Watterson did something entertaining on any given day. Other newspaper strips (which I'll leave nameless, but you know which ones I'm talking about) are trite, repetitive, uninspired and generally boring. A strip created yesterday doesn't look all that different from one created 30-40 years ago and, because of that, a lot of people don't bother keeping up with them. (Unless it happened to be physically wedged between Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side on the newspaper page and you couldn't help but follow it.)

The same idea holds for me. If I don't at least try to come up with something clever and original on a regular basis, I'm going to fall off your radar. So guys like myself are out here trying to generate NEW content all the time. That includes interviews, reviews, anecdotes, photos, videos, and a whole host of other options. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Newsarama or CBR or The Beat or Bleeding Cool or anyone else who's provided some information about the comics industry. Not all of it is useful or pertinent to me, just like not all of it is useful or pertinent to you. You, as an individual, are going to pick out the sources of the information you like, the information you want, and you'll follow that. Maybe that information will be nothing more than official press releases, maybe it will be news peppered with a heavy dose of personal bias, maybe it will be little more than snark, but there's an audience out there for all of it.

And the things that matter, the things that people respond to en masse, will arise from whatever corner it happens to stem from and spread out accordingly. Maybe it comes from a publisher's web site, maybe it comes from a creator's Facebook page, maybe it comes from an interested, but decidedly third party's blog. And maybe it comes from a video taken with a cell phone camera by an otherwise anonymous individual who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Regardless of where it comes from, though, it will be passed along through other blogs and emails; it will be reTweeted (re-Xed?) and Redditted; it will be the inspiration for message board discussions and vlogs.

Comics journalism is not really any different than comics gossip columns, then, as both are essentially just an ad hoc group of individuals all trying to say, "Here I am." And while that could be read to have negative implications, it's actually intended to have positive ones. Information about comics -- whether it's considered "journalistic" or "voyeuristic" is irrelevant as someone will take interest in it -- is being disseminated through a vast network of people, largely unhindered by any interests but their own. This sort of approach brings more information to light more quickly, and allows the individual consumer to determine for themselves what is important and/or relevant in a more honest fashion. And, further, it allows -- even encourages -- greater discussion about the events in question.

Here in the 21st century, we have an overwhelming surplus of things to hold our attention. We're not limited by whatever filters "traditional" channels historically held (and continue to try to hold) up. We're consumers of information, just as we're consumers of food, clothing, and shelter. We can shop around for the sources and types of information we want to receive, and filter out the everything else. Don't like what I have to say? Go read Rob Salkowitz. Don't like what he has to say? Go read Johanna Draper Carlson. Don't like what she has to say? Go read Josh Fruhlinger. The list goes on and on. There is an audience for everything, and everyone can find an audience. Comics journalism does NOT rely on the narrowly-defined model of journalism that's been taught in schools for generations; it's every discussion you have and every post you make. Every time you log in and say, "Here I am," you have joined the ranks of comics journalists whether you know it or not, whether you intend to or not. Just because you don't have a business card that says you work for The Comics Journal doesn't mean you're not as much of a news/information/gossip source as they are. You are seeing comics journalism here, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on every other social media outlet available. Comics journalism isn't just a handful of websites; it's everywhere.

Welcome to the 21st century.

I first heard about and became interested in Sun Wukong the Monkey King about twenty years ago. I was initially attracted to the basic design of the character -- at least the version I first happened to see as a bronze statue -- but once I started looking into who this character was, I immediately saw why the character has been a staple of Chinese storytelling for centuries. I've gotten several versions of the basic story over the years and it was kind of a no-brainer to order a copy of Maple Lam's Monkey King and the World of Myths as soon as I heard it was coming out.

The book opens with a modified-for-the-sake-of-brevity 13-page origin of the character. If you're familiar with the original story, you might find yourself saying, "That's not how he got his staff!" or something but it's an early indicator that the book's more about getting to some new adventures than just another retelling. And sure enough, it's not long before Wukong is off on a quest to slay the beast that's terrorizing the people of Crete. In a somewhat traditional fashion, though, he's sidetracked briefly, runs into Hades and is coerced into potty training Hades' new dog, Cerberus, who he ends up taking on his quest. The beast he's tracking is evidently in a labrynith and is half-man and half-bull. Instead of beheading the Minotaur, though, they become friends and Wukong re-unites him with his father, who then teaches him how to swim.

At this point, even if you're not super-familiar with either legend of the Minotaur, you might be thinking "What the heck?! I'm pretty sure the original legends didn't end that way!" You'd be right, of course; they didn't. As Lam mentions in her end notes, she deliberately wanted to mix and match mythologies, likening the idea to her own upbringing with both Chinese and American influences. The basic idea of mixing cultural gods in hardly new, of course. Even within the realm of mainstream comics, Hercules from the Greek pantheon was introduced as a rival to Thor of Norse mythos back in Marvel's 1960s books. In this particular case, we have Chinese and Greek but the implication both in Lam's notes and by the open-ended nature of the story suggest she'd like to continue this as a series (presumably if sales do well). I'm not sure which other myths she'd like to tap into, but there is a page in the story itself when they're explaining about all the gods that one of the figures looks like it might be intended to be Cthulhu.

The story is definitely aimed at kids and I think would be a fun read for them, with many light-hearted moments and a couple morality lessons on clear display. As with any interpretation of a centuries-old character, some of his personality aspects are played up more than others. So while Wukong does have some narcissistic tendencies here, for example, Lam puts more emphasis on his impishness and playfulness. The same can be said of the other characters, too -- Cerberus is very much more of a naughty puppy than the typical hellhound they're often depicted as.

Overall, it's a fun look at the character and I enjoyed seeing him interact with characters I don't think I've ever seen him interact with before. Worth taking a look at, particuarly if you'd like to introduce younger ones to the Chinese legend. Monkey King and the World of Myths is available from all major bookstores now and retails for $13.99 US.