Back in December, I hinted at a "Super-Secret Project X" I was involved in. Well, Sequential Tart has the honor of announcing the debut of Sequential Heart (no relation). The basic upshot of the idea is to get comics in the hands of less fortunate kids because... well, because comics are cool. It's the brainchild of Dark Horse assistant editor Rachel Edidin and she was able to get creator Dean Trippe on board pretty quickly. You can read all the details at the article I just linked to.

It's a fledgling organization, obviously, and one that I don't think is pretentious enough to think we're saving the world through comics or anything like that. It's just about getting comics in the hands of kids who might not otherwise get a chance to read them, plain and simple. It's a great idea, I think, and certainly one with a much broader scope than my handing one or two comics at a time to trick-or-treaters every Halloween.

If you're interested in helping out, please email us at volunteers@sequentialheart.org. (The web site is still in progress, but will obviously sport greater details once it's up and running.) As Rachel is quoted in that article as saying, "we won't turn down offers of help from anyone - if we don't have something for you to do immediately, there's no doubt that we will soon!" I'm psyched!

Henry Jenkins recently posted an interview with Matt Ogden, director of Confessions of a Superhero.

My mom actually called this morning to alert me to Mike Sangiacomo's article in today's Plain Dealer about Classics Illustrated. Now I've done the same for you, but I didn't have to wake you up to do it!

February here is Black History Month. I covered my personal background/history about that particular topic last year, so I thought I'd try something more forward-looking this year.

Most of what we might recognize as the United States was created by older white men. Often on the backs of Africans dragged over here against their will. Often by kicking the Native Americans to the wayside. So it's hardly surprising that, a century ago, the earliest comic book heroes were white men. Certainly not to dismiss minorities, but the older white men were in positions of power and authority, and directed the writers and artists to draw white men as heroes. I make no apologies for that history -- it was all well before I was born, after all -- so as unfair as that may have been, that's the starting point we had.

In the past century, though, there have been great strides made with regard to social tolerance. There's plenty of room to grow, but can you imagine what a citizen of 1908 would say if you told them that there's an African-American poised as a serious contender for the presidency of the United States? I mean, there were still plenty of Jim Crow laws on the books when Barak Obama was born.

So, if you'll indulge me, let me run through the new comics coming out in the month of February that feature an African-American...

DC Comics...

CHECKMATE #23 Written by Greg Rucka & Eric Trautmann Art by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson Cover by Kalman Andrasovfsky "Castling" begins here! It's been over a year since Pawn 502 went deep undercover inside the cult of Kobra. Now he's resurfaced, warning of a plot that will cost hundreds of thousands of lives and ignite a holy war across the planet, a plot that the Royals may not be able to stop in time. But can Pawn 502 still be trusted? This 3-part epic lays bare the workings of the DC intelligence community worldwide -- and threatens to destroy it altogether! (I gather from the cover art that "Kobra" is a black guy?)
TINY TITANS #1 Written by Art Baltazar & Franco Art and cover by Baltazar & Franco Awwww yeah, Titans! Join us for the exciting first issue of Tiny Titans written and drawn by the amazing Art Baltazar and Franco! See what life is like at Sidekick Elementary and meet the new staff! Follow the madness that ensues when Beast Boy gets a puppy friend! Witness what happens when the girls meet a pink stranger with a melted ice cream cone! Find out what makes Cassie such a trendsetter! All your favorite Titans, in their cutest possible form, are here and waiting for you! (Well, Cyborg is shown on the cover...)
TEEN TITANS GO! #52 Written by J. Torres Art by Alexander Serra Cover by Joe Quinones The Teen Titans thought they were the only game in town -- so who are all these new teen superheroes popping up all over Jump City? With some of the Titans experiencing some problems with their own super powers, maybe it's a good thing! (Cyborg on the cover, again...)
LOVELESS #22 Written by Brian Azzarello Art by Danijel Zezelj Cover by Marcelo Frusin The year is 1927. In the hills and back roads of Missouri, two fugitives are about to experience how little times change, as they come across secrets from a not too distant past, and a local legend guarding them closely... (Do I need to start making snarky comments yet?)

marvel comics...

BLACK PANTHER # 34 The Story: “GANGSTA LEAN,” PART 3 It's clobberin’ time—in the arena and in the streets, between the Gangsters and Panthers, and between the Fantastic Four and the elusive, malicious Golden Frogs! (Ah... here we go! This is a progressive company! Should be plenty of stuff to look forward to here!)
NEW AVENGERS # 38 The Story: The break up! CONSPIRACY, PARANOIA, BETRAYAL may have taken their toll on the Avengers newlyweds Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. After the shocking turn of events at the end of last month's NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL, has Jessica Jones turned her back on THE AVENGERS? Who better to help tell this story than Alias artist Michael Gaydos returning to Marvel for this special issue. Guest-Starring the Mighty Avengers. WHO DO YOU TRUST?
NEW EXILES # 2 The Story: The Exiles have barely arrived in a new dimension before they’re struck by disaster! Sabretooth, Psylocke and Mystiq find themselves in the middle of a long-running conflict between the two most powerful figures on the African Continent, the Black Panther and Ororo. As for Rogue, her fate ends up in the hands of a young man who calls himself Gambit — but if you think that tells you what to expect from this character and this story, try again! He needs Rogue to help him save his parents — Oh, and did we mention he breathes water?
MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #21 The Story: The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! Get ready to cry "Wolverine!" at the top of your lungs, 'cause Avengers Tower is about to go all "Red Dawn" when the Crimson Dynamo invades! But who is the super-spy on the armored villain's trail...and can she be trusted? (Yeah, there's Storm. Now, we're talking! She's popular, isn't she? She'll be all over with guest appearances!)
BLACK PANTHER ANNUAL # 1 The Story: “BLACK TO THE FUTURE”: A special double-sized issue to commemorate Black History Month. It’s 2057 and the Watcher’s prediction came true: Wakanda is an Imperial Power steering the course for humanity’s future. As T’Challa prepares the next Black Panther for the great responsibility ahead, he must first reflect on the road traveled–a long and winding journey filled with surprises.
CRIMINAL 2 # 1 The Story: That’s right, the most acclaimed crime comic in the industry is giving readers and retailers a second chance to get onboard as we relaunch with a new format, featuring more pages, longer main stories, and an expanded magazine section! “Second Chance In Hell” begins the first of three standalone issues, this one focusing on Gnarly the bartenders and telling the story of the last days of his life as a boxer and revealing how the Undertow bar came into his hands. It’s a hard-hitting period-piece, set in the grimy early 70s, where crime, seduction and betrayal go hand-in-hand. And on top of this longer-than-usual length main story, CRIMINAL now features an expanded back-pages section, as well – with articles by Brubaker and other top crime writers, from novelists to screenwriters to comic writers. These noir articles have become a popular piece of the CRIMINAL package, and are something that can only be found in the comics, not in any collections. So please take this SECOND CHANCE IN HELL to find out what everyone’s been talking about!
HOUSE OF M: AVENGERS # 5 The Story: The action-packed conclusion! Thunderbird and the Brotherhood begin their purge of Sapien Town, backed by the authority of the House of M! Only Luke Cage and The Avengers stand in their way! But will there be anything left of Sapien Town when the smoke clears...? (Wait -- are there THREE black folks on the cover here? Can they do that?)

Image Comics...

’76 #2 (of 8) written by B. CLAY MOORE & SETH PECK art by ED TADEM & TIGH WALKER cover by ED TADEM In 1976 New York, Jackie Karma reconnects with his sixties street–fighting partner Marcus King, and the two consider a return to kicking ass. In the second chapter of “Cool,” LA bounty hunters Pete Walker & Leon Campbell begin the hunt for a runaway stripper and we meet Jimmy Length, porn star turned hit man. (Hang on! We're done with marvel already? I only saw Storm once!)
THE CIRCLE #4 written by BRIAN REED art & cover IAN HOSFELD “THE GOLIATH TRAP,” Part Four The new series from best–selling writer BRIAN REED (Captain Marvel, Mercenaries, Ms. Marvel, New Avengers: Illuminati, Red Sonja) and artist IAN HOSFELD continues! As the history between The Circle and the murderous CIA Agent Y is revealed, MI–6 Agent Wallace Christopher and an unlikely ally chase the Goliath missile train through the wilds of Kazakhstan! (And what about John "Green Lantern" Stewart? I didn't see him anywhere!)
SPAWN #179 Spawn #179 previewwritten by DAVID HINE art by BRIAN HABERLIN cover by GREG CAPULLO Spawn battles his greatest enemy... HIMSELF! When Al Simmons was resurrected as a Hellspawn, he became symbiotically connected to his living necroplasmic costume. Now that costume has turned against him, and it’s tearing him apart... (Or Black Lightning? I mean, he was created as the token black guy for DC!)

... and that's about it. I didn't go through each and every publisher and I'm sure I glossed over a few things, but out of a couple hundred new issues coming out this month, and I only saw 14 that seem to feature an African-American at all, and most of those appear to be smaller characters in an ensemble cast. That seems... well... wrong. Especially when these publishers have great black characters at their disposal. I can almost see not having a lot of black characters appearing regularly, but it's not like the publishers didn't realize Black History Month was coming -- it's the same month every year, you know? Proven by the fact that it IS referenced once!

I wouldn't go so far as to start making claims of racism, only that it's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from the publishers. They sit there on their loathsome, spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for other cultures. They're excrement! Whining, hypocritical toadies, with their color TV sets and their Tony Jacklin golf clubs and their bleeding Masonic secret handshakes! They wouldn't let me join, would they, those blackballing bastards! Well, I wouldn't become a comic pro now if they went down on their lousy, stinking knees and begged me!

Sorry -- started channeling John Cleese there for some reason...

Seriously, though, it does seem awfully obtuse of the entire industry to largely ignore vast segments of potential markets. It's not that black folks don't like comics as a medium; they just don't see them themselves reflected in it very often. And yeah, I know that putting out even a really good Black Lightening comic isn't going to bring African-Americans into comic shops in droves, but Milestone had a fair measure of success but couldn't really keep up with the bursting comic bubble back in the 1990s. But whatever successes they had didn't happen overnight. It took time to build an audience and I don't see the major publishers granting that time. And the smaller publishers don't have the money to afford that kind of time.

But it still seems to me that there's a large potential audience that's just waiting to be asked back to the party, if only the comic industry served up something palatable.

One of the debates that's been going through the comic industry lately has been "pamphlets vs. trades." There's been a growing market in trade paperback sales (largely noticeable in chain bookstores) and publishers have responded accordingly by increasing the volume of those types of books they produce. A number of comic fans, tired of dealing with constantly rotating creative teams, event-driven stories, and the often far-too-amateurish atmosphere of comic shops, have switched to getting their comic fixes in the comparatively cheaper TPB format.

Curiously, though, there's an aspect to this discussion that is largely absent (at least, from what I've seen). Namely, does the "main" published format make sense for the story?

Consider the newspaper strip for a moment. There was, once upon a time, a number of comic strips that contained serial adventures. Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Prince Valiant, Little Nemo in Slumberland... Over the years, they've largely been replaced by shorter gag cartoons with no real continuity, or ongoing story. The reason is because newspapers began cutting back on the amount of space devoted to any given comic, forcing artists to reduce the length of an individual day's story. The reduced story space meant that it was more difficult for anything significant to take place on any given day -- there just wasn't room for much. And, if the artist tried to do any sort of recap of previous events, they cut that limited space by 1/3 on top of it! Extended storytelling became extremely difficult to pull, and only a handful of masters were able to pull it off at all. Thus, we've seen the demise of the serial adventure comic strip, next to the rise of the gag cartoon precisely because of the format.

The same holds true for comic books. The serial pamphlet format allows for enough time to tell an extended story but, with a limit of 20-30 pages, longer epics need to be broken down into something equating chapters of roughly equal length. The format helps dictate the "beats" of a story.

Then we get into the decompressed storytelling that Brian Bendis has made popular. He (and many others, to be sure) have taken a more leisurely approach to comic storytelling, allowing for more "talking head" scenes where extended discussions can take place. But shunting that into the pamphlet format gives rise to complaints of "nothing" happening in any individual issue. To get the rise and fall of the full story, one has to read all of the chapters in close succession -- as one might in a trade paperback.

This is, though, something of hybrid approach to storytelling. Since many of these comics are still being written/read for a pamphlet format, many of the story beats are dictated by the shorter format. You wouldn't end an issue on a non-dramatic moment because you'd unnaturally interrupt the flow of the story, since there's physical break in the story because you've gotten to the end of an issue. But because you're in the larger story, the -- if you'll excuse the pun -- ultimate execution is directed more towards the longer trade paperback format.

So what?

DC and marvel have been tending towards longer stories suitable for easy TPB collection. The month-to-month continuity is being coerced into succinct story arcs and many writers, it seems, are then "forced" into hitting the beats of the monthly comic instead of letting stories flow organically to a final format. If they were writing with the monthly publication format top-of-mind, they still have to hit those 20-30 page dramatic points to end each issue on, but that doesn't mean that a particular story has to start and end exclusively on that beat. Many of the comics I grew up on in the 1980s were of this type, where sub-plots would be slowly ebbed into a title one or two pages at a time. Some of books had multi-page prologues to stories in the final pages of the comic a month before the "main" story began. The creators at that time were working towards the pamphlet format to, by and large, good effect.

Likewise, the graphic novel market of the 1980s worked well too (in terms of writing to the TPB format, at any rate). While I've heard editors from that period remark that some of the books produced at the time weren't high enough quality to warrant printing in that format, the fact is that they were designed to it. Can you imagine trying to break The Death of Captain Marvel down into some sort of serial format extended over several months? I'm sure Jim Starlin is talented enough that he could've done that, but I can guarantee the story would have read much differently.

Again, so what?

Comic creators today are being asked, often indirectly, to take on a more difficult job by writing to two formats simultaneously. Take Civil War for example. Regardless of what you thought of the execution of the story, or even the basic concept, the story itself was designed essentially as a single, continuous narrative like you'd find in a typical graphic novel. I think this can be seen pretty readily as some of the ending issue beats seemed forced (because, in many cases, they were due to the page limits) and some of the sequences seemed padded unnecessarily (because, in many cases, they were to try to end an individual issue on a natural story beat). The result -- again, whether you liked it or not -- is something less than what it could have been if the story was allowed to flow organically towards a single format. Instead, it was trying to serve two masters.

To be fair, you can't blame the creators. They're doing the best they can given the circumstances. And you can't entirely blame the editors and higher-ups at marvel and DC either -- they're in a position where they can't (at this point) financially afford moving entirely to a TPB-driven market without alienating a good portion of their existing customer-base who still want their monthly fix of Superman or Iron Man.

Personally, though, I think they're hedging their bets a little too much. After all, we've seen through any number of late books that those same customers, while they might complain, will still wait, in some cases, months on end for their stories. Think of the sales that would've been garnered from the initial hype if All-Star Batman had only been released as a single TPB once they'd actually finished writing/drawing the whole thing.

Personally, I would prefer seeing an approach where any given project is examined up front on a case-by-case basis and determined if it makes sense creatively to publish it in the pamphlet or paperback format. Granted, the financial side still needs to be considered, but it seems to me that you won't sell as much if your final output isn't as good as it could have been.

CNN interviews Brian K. Vaughan about wrapping up Y: The Last Man.

So I'm talking with this woman on eHarmony. I managed to pique her curiosity with my interest in pirates, but I noted that it was a somewhat less interesting subject to me than comic books. Part of her response, though, read...

I'm just being honest here! I never got into comics. The closest I came to like one was watching Sin City in the theatre. Even then it reminded me of the reasons why I couldn't stand comic books. A lot of misogyny and racism. Even as a kid I caught on to it. Maybe things have changed, but that ship has sailed for me.

Having spent decades reading comics and having to respond to people asking why I enjoy them, I'm usually pretty quick to defend the medium. And I can rattle off dozens of reasons why there are great things happening in comic books, and how they can really be sublime pieces of art.

This time, though, I was stumped. I could defend the industry a bit by saying that there's not much racism in comics per se, even if the industry is still dominated by white guys. But her claim on misogyny? I can't really even pretend to dispute that.

I defended myself a bit by saying that, generally speaking, I don't read those comics. In all honesty, though, I can't claim that I don't read them at all. Even though I buy Return to Wonderland for the updated twists on the Alice mythos, it's still a book from Zenescope, and it's hard not to notice the protagonist's clothes being ripped to shreds, "forcing" her to put on a French maid's outfit.

But citing some of the titles I read that have strong female leads isn't going to help because the books aren't that well-read in comic circles, let alone outside them. Show of hands: how many of you read Dorothy? Local? Bizenghast? Pirates of Coney Island? That's about what I thought.

The only other thing I felt I could do was to say that yes, it's an issue and it's actually been getting some attention lately thanks to some vocal feminists (for lack of a better word). But what else can I say? "Yeah, but comics aren't as bad as movies and TV?" Well, no, that's not really accurate, is it? I mean, sure, they put Hayden Panettiere in a cheerleader outfit, but that's nothing compared to the they-might-as-well-just-be-body-paint tight outfits in any given superhero comic. I mean, can you compare ANYTHING that ANY of the women on ANY of the CSI shows have ever worn with this...
(And don't give me any lip about just pulling one specific example. You know as well as I do that I could come up with hundreds of more gratuitous covers.)

Is it any wonder that our Occasional Superheroine recently discovered that 90% of all American comic readers are male? If it's obvious from a decidedly outside group that women aren't wanted in this little boys' club we call comics, of course there aren't going to be many women wanting to join! And if it's kept as a boys' club, why shouldn't the ringleaders cater to what that demographic wants to see? Especially when that very same set of visuals also serves to reinforce the notion that women aren't welcome! It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

Oh, I could've brought up the whole manga thing, but there's a danger there, too. While there are plenty of girl-friendly titles available, when you hit one that's not girl-friendly, it tends to be REALLY not girl-friendly!

So I'm left with, "I don't read those comics." And that is just sad! I shouldn't HAVE to defend the industry on this! I should be able to point to at least a couple dozen name titles that are actively promoting a consistently positive outlook towards women. But not only are those titles absent, but the name publishers almost revel in their "women in refrigerators" approach.

"I'm more interested in comics as a medium. I don't care about the adventures of Spandex-Man and She-Hostage."

Damn it, though! I shouldn't have to defend the whole, frickin' industry!