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

Kleefeld on Comics: Shubeik Lubeik Review
https://ift.tt/U1kV4pq

Kleefeld on Comics: The Prohibition Era Review
https://ift.tt/BdgknUJ

Kleefeld on Comics: Behind the Scenes of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
https://ift.tt/6qJ7SnO

Kleefeld on Comics: Thankful For... (2024 Edition)
https://ift.tt/TRYDyrn

Despite my displeasure with how Thanksgiving got started I am thankful for everything I have. I've particularly been cognizant of it the few years in the wake of dealing with the pandemic. But I'm sitting here at the tail end of 2024 under my own roof. With my wonderful wife in the next room. Who's been extremely supportive of my crazy notions like building a personal comic library and running a marathon. Which I've been able to comfortably afford because I've got a secure and well-paying job. Which allows me the luxury of being able to work from home.

I'm sitting here in my library right now, and I repeatedly finding myself just staring around the room, still giddy at having been able to realize a dream I had for many years now. And even in lieu of the holy-crap-is-this-the-most-fantastic-collection-ever sense of awe I had at the Billy Ireland Library and Museum, that I'm able to do something even remotely capable of being called a comics library makes me inordinately happy.

And within the sphere of comics writing, I usually just sit off in my own little corner, banging away on my keyboard. I don't have a lot of interaction with other folks about my ideas, so I'm left to assume that I'm shouting at the wind. But I wrote a textbook on Webcomics that was nominated for a frickin' Eisner Award! And I served as an actual Eisner judge last year! Even the couple years since Webcomics was published, I've already seen it pop up in the bibliographies of other books!

I wonder sometimes what my teenaged self would think of current me. I suspect there'd be some level of disappointment at not being professionally employed in an expressly creative field and having instead "sold out" to "the man." But being an award-nominated writer, having run several marathons, being an extra in an Avengers movie (that there even IS an Avengers movie!), appearing as a character in dozens of comics, having a smart home more advanced that the one Bill Gates ostensibly had in the 1980s when I first heard of the idea, surviving a lightning strike, literally saving the life of a drowning cousin, being able to 3D print almost anything I want out of my utility closet... Fifteen-year-old me would probably not even come close to recognizing current me; what I've been able to do in my life, both in terms of the technology at my disposal as well as my personal skills and talents, is well beyond whatever I might've dreamed of doing. I've never had a formal "Bucket List" but if I had, I would've had to re-write it several times over with the number of Bucket-List-level items I would've checked off.

I am absolutely bat-shit terrified of what might happen next year. I'm scared hundreds of thousands of people will needlessly die because of idiotic racist policies, and millions more will be irreparably harmed, both physically and emotionally. I think the damage Trump will do to the country writ large will literally destroy it; I don't see the United States surviving as a country beyond 2030. My wife and I are currently trying to speed run as many of our major 2025 plans as possible to build up as much as a buffer as we can against what I think will become a failing economy and a useless, chaotic federal government. We're in a much better position than probably a majority of Americans; we have a number of options to pivot fairly quickly if we need to. I see/hear the struggles some my own friends and family are dealing with, and I help when/where I can but there's only so much I can do. The fact that I was born when I was or graduated when I did or bumped into the right person when I did or whatever random collection of happenstances separated my situation from theirs years ago has led us to very different outcomes with different active and present concerns. From raising trans children to paying for the roof over their heads to even finding a job to begin with, they have challenges I do not. I do have challenges of my own, certainly, but I've also got flexibility in a lot of other areas they don't have to be able to deal with them.

But my wife is in the kitchen working on what I have no doubt will be a delicious meal. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, pumpkin pie... a lot of the foods you might expect for a Thanksgiving feast. There is seemingly no end of awful things going on in the world right now and there are no doubt many more to come. But I am thankful for where I am personally in my life. The friends I have, the things I've been able to achieve (or were priveleged/lucky enough to stumble into!), the safety net I've been able to craft for when things do go sideways... I remain thankful for everything I have.

These are from a decade ago, but Francesco Marciuliano put together some deleted scenes from “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”...

History Comics: The Prohibition Era is the latest in First Second's line of young adult comics covering a variety of historical topics. First Second's approach to these has (as far as I can tell) largely been to just hire talented comic creators an let them tell the story how they want to tell it. The one on the Great Chicago Fire followed two kids and what the experience was like from their perspective, while the one on the Stonewall Riots had people time-travelling to the past to witness the event. In the case of The Prohibition Era, the story is told by John Barleycorn, the personification of beer and whisky.

The book covers a surprisingly large amount. It starts with the history of alocohol itself, how it's made and its effects on the human body. And while prohibition formally lasted in the US from 1920-1933, the book sets up all the precedents for it, beginning with the Plymouth Colony. (No doubt there were antecedents in other countries as well, but the book does have the subtitle "America's War on Alcohol" so the focus here isn't unjustified.) There's also a surprisingly refreshing amount of coverage for Native American and Black temperance efforts. They're perhaps not as detailed as I would personally like for them to be, but that they're called out specifically and distinctly from the more widely publicized efforts from white populations is good to see. Although, I think leaving it unstated why minorities had to have their own efforts is a bit of a miss, particularly when why women's efforts are explicitly shown why they were excluded from men's. (To their credit, though, some of the reasons for segregation are talked about a little more as the story gets to the more formal prohibition era of the 1920s.)

I largely picked the book up because the artist on this particular volume is Roger Langridge. His storytelling abilities, I believe, are under-appreciated in the shadow of his incredible cartooning talent. His characters are drawn with such a superb line that people often overlook his story pacing and structure, I feel. So I was curious to see what he would do here, particularly on a relatively sober (if you'll excuse the pun) topic with another writer. That writer is Jason Viola, whose work I wasn't familiar with previously but I do know he's written several of the books in First Second's Science Comics line.

Unfortuately, I don't think the two creators make a very good pairing. The book isn't bad by any stretch, but I don't feel like either is playing to the other's stengths in any way. Viola's style is pretty straightforward and expositional. It's not dull, and he does mix in a fair amount of dialogue, even using period-appropriate dialects and slang. But the pacing doesn't allow for Lagridge to play to any of his slapstick strengths. Conversely, Langridge's page and panel layouts -- with only a few exceptions -- don't bring as much visual interest to Viola's story as they might. I don't know precisely how they collaborated on the book -- it seems pretty clear that they did collaborate at least somewhat, and it wasn't a case of Viola just turning over a full script that Langridge executed on -- but it comes across as two professionals just doing their jobs but neither being particularly excited or engaged in their collective work. Maybe I'm reading too much into things, though.

As with the other books in the series, this one is aimed at 9-13 year olds, and both the writing and drawing seem spot-on for that range. I really appreciate what First Second is doing with this series as a whole, both in their just bringing in talented creators to begin with and for tackling subjects that, by and large, haven't been done to death already. Even if this isn't my favorite book by Langridge, it's still pretty solid and will absolutely work well for one of those 9-13 year olds who wants to learn about that part of American history.

The book came out last month, and should be available through any bookstore. It retails for $13.99 US. I believe First Second's next books in the series are on Ellis Island (by Felipe Galindo Feggo and Tait Howard; due out in January) and The Great Depression (by Tim Stout and Joe Flood; due out next October).

As noted in the introduction to Deena Mohamed's Shubeik Lubeik, the phrase "shubeik lubeik" is from Arabic folklore and is narratively the first thing the genie says when they come out of the lamp. "Your wish is my command." That's the initial hook of the story -- what if genies were real and granted wishes like that? And you might think, "Hey, wasn't there a comic about exactly that just a couple years ago?" Yes, Charles Soule and Ryan Browne did the excellent story 8 Million Genies in which every person on Earth got a wish, and all sorts of things went to shit right away. It was also a plot point from the WW84 movie in 2020, although that was... a less than excellent story.

From a practical perspective, though, Shubeik Lubeik has a different setup in that not everyone is simply granted a wish all at once. There's an extraction and manufacturing process involved, which takes time to ramp up beginnning in the 1890s, and government regulators around the world start cracking down their distribution and usage, so by present day, there is a significant wish industry but it's extremely costly now. (There was a low-grade "third tier" wish industry that was more affordable, but those wishes tended to be more of the monkey's paw variety and got a lot of people hurt, so those have been outlawed by the start of the story.) The upshot of all this is that wishes are thing that theoretically everyone still has access to, but they're realistically only available to the very wealthy. And, not surprisingly, those often get used for things like pet dinosaurs and flying cars.

Here's the thing, though: despite the amount of careful thought and consideration Mohamed's put into what a wish-enabled world looks like, and the amount of world-building she's put into those ideas, that is all totally ancillary to the point of the book.

See, Shokry's this owner of a small newsstand and somewhat reluctantly has three wishes for sale. Reluctantly because it's against his religion and the only reason he has them in the first place is because they were given to his father in lieu of payment for a job many decades ago. This gets casually brought up in conversation with one of his regular customers, who has their grandchild work up a better advertising flyer for them. They still take a while to sell because it's the equivalent of a small body shop trying to sell three brand new, top-of-the-line Rolls-Royces; everyone is going to question their legitimacy and assume it's a scam of some sort. But Shokry does eventually have someone take interest and saves up enough over several years to buy one.

We then follow an incredibly sad and powerful tale of how she's railroaded by the governement for her purchase (was the license transferred properly, etc.) and they throw her in prison under the assumption that she stole it because she was clearly too poor to actually afford it. The wish itself is largely irrelevant to the story; the focus is on her resistance of a bullying, authoritarian, corrupt system who try to force her to turn the wish over to them. (They need her consent or the wish won't work.) It's a story about how the powerful hold on to power by intimiadation and beaurocracy, and force everyone not in a position of privilege to remain under their bootheels indefinitely.

The next person to purchase a wish is a young man in college. He's found himself to be increasingly struggling with... well, everything despite having a very promising childhood. He wants the wish to "fix" everything, but he's not entirely sure what's wrong and doesn't want his wish to fail or get executed wrong or anything. In wrestling with the notion, he learns that he's suffering from depression, a concept he can't adequately communicate to his parents or most of his friends. Here again, the wish is largely irrelevant to the story; it's a spotlight on how depression manifests and how people suffering from it try to cope and how/why they're often able to mask signs of it to others.

The third person the book focuses on is Shokry's regular customer from the beginning. Shokry, upon learning of her impending death from illness, tries to simply give the final wish to her, but she relays a story of how wishes were used when she was a child in the 1940s and '50s, and how saving her hometown from a conjured dragon led her down a life path where she felt cotinually trapped, gaslit, emotionally abused, evetually unable to support her children. She used a wish she had been given for killing the dragon all those years earlier to essentially re-live her life on her own terms. She was at the end of her second life, and was ready to be reunited with her long dead children. The wishes here were decidedly more central to the story, but largely only to explain why she was refusing one now.

Most wish fulfillment type stories put an emphasis on facing the consequences of poorly-thought-out ideas. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it is something of a well-worn trope now. But what Mohamed has done has put her effort into exploring what people might say and do and think before they even put a wish into action. It's an exploration of people wrestling with their own inner demons; the wish fulfillment notion is just an excuse for their introspection. The chapter on depression I found especially powerful given how badly it's usually portrayed in media. Mohamed does a phenomenal job exploring what makes people tick, and conveying how they think and feel. The book was originally published in Arabic and won both the Best Graphic Novel and Grand prizes at the Cairo Comic Festival in 2017, and the English version was nominated for this year's Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material. It's easy to see why. It's incredibly engrossing and engaging, and I encourage you to not be daunted by the 500+ page count or the fact that it has to be read right to left. Very well worth it!

The book came out from Pantheon Books last year, so it should be available from any bookstore. The hardcover retails for $35 US and is suitably impressive, particularly for a cartoonist's debut graphic novel.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Future Shock
https://ift.tt/xXfpqNn

Kleefeld on Comics: Off the Backs of Fans
https://ift.tt/0bP1rTu

Kleefeld on Comics: Legendary Lynx Review
https://ift.tt/7yktmcb

Kleefeld on Comics: Justifying Webcomics
https://ift.tt/pClRZEv

Kleefeld on Comics: An Extension of Self
https://ift.tt/Sry68w1

I think most readers are generally aware that any creator puts some degree of themself into their work. For those creating fictional narratives like books, movies, and comics, it’s not uncommon for the writer to write all of their characters as extensions of different aspects of themself. Sometimes that’s more evident than others, but a writer who tries writing a character in which they don’t put some of themself into is likely one that comes across as flat and uninteresting.

So it should come as no surprise that webcomic creators do this as well. In strips like Bob the Squirrel, creator Frank Page literally draws himself and his family into the strip as primary characters and the plots are frequently lifted from actual events in their lives. In cases like Penny Arcade, Gabe and Tycho are analogues of creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. At the other end of the spectrum, there are comics like Hunter Black with sorceries that couldn’t possibly be pulled from real world events. But even here, you’ll find pieces of creators Justin Peniston and William Orr. I don’t know them well enough to say which pieces, but I guarantee they’re there.

But here’s an interesting twist I’ve been noodling with regard to webcomics specifically. With other creative works, there’s some level of removal between the creator, the work, and the audience. If you want to experience a statue, for example, you have to view it in person. You can reproduce an oil painting in a book or online, but you miss the tactile aspect of it. But webcomics are largely created on the computer, to be seen on a computer. The audience is seeing the art in pretty much exactly the same way that the creator makes it. So the creator and the reader are closer to seeing each other eye to eye than many other art forms.

Add to that that the creators and their audience must both be online. So the creator her/himself can actually be seen in the same manner and environment that their work is displayed in. Even if, like Sinfest creator Tatsuya Ishida, the creator remains almost invisible online, that still leaves an impression of themself.

All of which means that, in webcomics, readers see extensions of the creator in both their work and their online persona. That they’re both in the same environment links the two more directly than if the work (and therefore the creator) were only seen in analog. The work could be more easily separated from the creator, and they could be treated independently. But with the intimacy of the digital space, the lines between creator and creation are blurred somewhat, making what the creator do online a direct reflection of their webcomic. Similarly, their webcomic is a direct reflection of their personal online presence. The two are linked in a way that happens in few other media.

The question that arises, then, is how much of a webcomics’ readership is drawn to the work itself, and how much is drawn to the creator? Which is more significant? From a practical perspective, does it matter?