- Matt Kuhns points us to a series of graphic novel talks at the Cleveland Public Library through the end of May. Some weeks focus on individual works and others look at broader topics.
- "Enter the subversive and revelatory world of comics, from the earliest pioneers to today’s digital innovators." Info on the Comics Unmasked exhibit, the UK’s largest ever exhibition of mainstream and underground comics. Info here.
- Charles Webb talks about FreakSugar's mission and what we're collectively trying to do over there. Also, apparently there was recent news about a Justice League movie or some such.
You probably know a bit about EC Comics and that, despite having some phenomenal talent creating their books, they were essentially kicked out of the comic book making business in the wake of the whole Seduction of the Innocent/Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquincy hoohah. But because so many of them were so well-done -- and cut short in their prime -- they were fondly remembered and well-respected for decades afterwards.
In the latter days of the 20th century, Russ Cochran got the rights to reprint all of those old EC stories. He was even able to get access to many (if not all) of the original art files and shoot new negatives from them, so he was able to work with the cleanest, best set of source material possible. Beginning in the late 1970s, he published large hardbound black and white collections in slipcases. Quite handsome volumes.
Later, as a general interest in EC was renewed, he went on to reprint titles as individual pamphlet issues, with reworked coloring to closely match how they were originally released. And a few years after that came Archive editions, similar to the Marvel Masterworks or DC Archives.
I recently came across some trade paperback versions that I hadn't seen before. Same concept as any other TPB program you've seen: 5-6 issues, reprinted on slightly cheaper paper than what you'd find in an Archives edition. Once I got home, I pulled them out of the bags they were in and noticed a couple oddities.
First, the interior pages were mostly newsprint, but the cover reproductions were on a higher quality, glossy paper. Second, the letters pages that were included were from the reprint series, not the original books. (This is plainly obvious by the fact that several of the letters included email and website addresses.) I thought it was very strange to have reprints of reprints, given the time and attention that had been paid to previous versions.
I was soon enlightened on these books' origins, though, thanks to Ken Eppstein. There's a surprisingly simple explanation that accounts for both oddities, and shows a bit of clever thinking.
The books weren't actually reprinted; they were the actual comics Cochran had put out earlier, bound into sets with a new cardboard cover wrapped around them. He had taken the individual issues from his back stock that were no longer selling, collated them into sets, and bound them as a single TPB. Rather than having to hunt down a dozen or two individual issues, a reader just grab the few TPBs and be done. It gives an entirely new lease on existing material, without the extravangant expense of reprinting whole collections.
I picked up mine cheap in the last hours of C2E2 when dealers started using some fire sale tactics, but even if you pay the ten bucks apiece directly to Cochran, you're getting a great deal on some fantastic pieces of comics history.
In the latter days of the 20th century, Russ Cochran got the rights to reprint all of those old EC stories. He was even able to get access to many (if not all) of the original art files and shoot new negatives from them, so he was able to work with the cleanest, best set of source material possible. Beginning in the late 1970s, he published large hardbound black and white collections in slipcases. Quite handsome volumes.
Later, as a general interest in EC was renewed, he went on to reprint titles as individual pamphlet issues, with reworked coloring to closely match how they were originally released. And a few years after that came Archive editions, similar to the Marvel Masterworks or DC Archives.
First, the interior pages were mostly newsprint, but the cover reproductions were on a higher quality, glossy paper. Second, the letters pages that were included were from the reprint series, not the original books. (This is plainly obvious by the fact that several of the letters included email and website addresses.) I thought it was very strange to have reprints of reprints, given the time and attention that had been paid to previous versions.
I was soon enlightened on these books' origins, though, thanks to Ken Eppstein. There's a surprisingly simple explanation that accounts for both oddities, and shows a bit of clever thinking.
The books weren't actually reprinted; they were the actual comics Cochran had put out earlier, bound into sets with a new cardboard cover wrapped around them. He had taken the individual issues from his back stock that were no longer selling, collated them into sets, and bound them as a single TPB. Rather than having to hunt down a dozen or two individual issues, a reader just grab the few TPBs and be done. It gives an entirely new lease on existing material, without the extravangant expense of reprinting whole collections.
I picked up mine cheap in the last hours of C2E2 when dealers started using some fire sale tactics, but even if you pay the ten bucks apiece directly to Cochran, you're getting a great deal on some fantastic pieces of comics history.
I attended C2E2 this weekend and had a great time. Always a fun show for me! But there were also several business-type things I noticed while I was there that I thought I could point out in this week's column.
I talked with several creators in Artists Alley about how the show was going for them at multiple points over the weekend. To a person, they all said they were having a great show. Lots of people buying stuff, and everyone seemed happy they tabled there.
I talked with one dealer, and he was less than thrilled with business. He said they were at least breaking even, and he enjoyed himself, but he didn't make a lot of profit. I suspect he might make a point of not figuring out what his hourly wage would work out to.
I also talked with Brigid Alverson, who had chatted with several of the larger publishers. She gave me the impression that it wasn't a particularly stellar show for any of them. (Although keep in mind, of course, that I'm hearing this last bit third-hand.)
So why this disparity? It certainly wasn't for a lack of people -- the early estimates I heard put attendance up by at least 10,000 over last year.
Well, the dealer I spoke with was pretty matter of fact with what he was having problems with. He recognized that he had too few items available at really low price points (many for only one dollar), and hardly anything at the higher ones. So while he was selling a fair amount, and had decent booth traffic, his overhead (namely, the booth fee) was high enough that he wasn't able to make up it in the volume. For the type of merchandise he had, he does much better at smaller shows with an appropriately lower registration fee.
The creators I spoke with had mostly mid-range items, primarily $10-$20 books and prints. Plus because they were (mostly) only doing tables in Artists Alley, they had lower registration fees than a dealer setting up a full booth. So they have to sell fewer items to get the same revenue, and they have a lower threshold to cross in order to break even. Add on to that a much higher number of bigger ticket items ($100-$200 for a page of original production art) and it's much easier to have a good convention.
Then there are the larger publishers who take up a good amount of floor space towards the front of the convention. They have to shell out a lot more cash for a show like this -- first because they're using more space than a typical dealer booth, and second because they're (frequently) asking to be placed up front where there's more immediate visibility. But then they're primarily limiting their income to those mid-range items. People seemed happy to drop $25-$50 bucks on books and t-shirts and such, but they didn't have (that I saw, at any rate) any large ticket items. Which means that they'd have to sell an awful lot of people spending $25 to make up for the investment.
While I don't have specific numbers for any of these examples, I think the economics of attending any given show is a point worth considering. Who is the show's audience? What price points do you have available? How much do you have to spend in registration fees? It's great to say you're tabling at such-and-such convention, but you need to make sure to put your business hat on, too, in order to ensure that you make it worthwhile.
The other, unrelated and relatively small, point I'd like to make is with the convention center itself. Here's a picture of part of the con floor from Sunday afternoon...
Notice that there's a black curtain that runs along the back to determine the show's perimeter. But beyond that, there's another 100 feet along two walls of the hall that isn't being used at all. Which strongly implies that ReedPop's move from one building to another this year was expressly one with growth in mind. Not only to be a larger show this year, but to have room for expansion. They could easily grow another 25% next year with no crowding issues to speak of. It's possible they wanted to fill the whole space this year and just couldn't get enough dealers/artists/publishers to come, but I suspect that's not the case. Admittedly, that's only a hunch on my part, but something to keep an eye on going forward.
There's always a LOT going on at a convention, especially ones of this size, but I think it's always worth it to look at a show from multiple angles to really gauge its success. How many people showed up and how much noise they made is worth noting, but what else is going on that lends itself to analysis? Who was making money and who wasn't? What was -- or wasn't -- being done to keep the crowd from getting too crowded, but also keeping them restricted enough so that the show doesn't feel empty? These overhead photos are always cool because you get a pretty wide view of the con floor full of people, but what details can spot in them that speak to a less obvious goings-on? Just some things to think about.
I talked with several creators in Artists Alley about how the show was going for them at multiple points over the weekend. To a person, they all said they were having a great show. Lots of people buying stuff, and everyone seemed happy they tabled there.
I talked with one dealer, and he was less than thrilled with business. He said they were at least breaking even, and he enjoyed himself, but he didn't make a lot of profit. I suspect he might make a point of not figuring out what his hourly wage would work out to.
I also talked with Brigid Alverson, who had chatted with several of the larger publishers. She gave me the impression that it wasn't a particularly stellar show for any of them. (Although keep in mind, of course, that I'm hearing this last bit third-hand.)
So why this disparity? It certainly wasn't for a lack of people -- the early estimates I heard put attendance up by at least 10,000 over last year.
Well, the dealer I spoke with was pretty matter of fact with what he was having problems with. He recognized that he had too few items available at really low price points (many for only one dollar), and hardly anything at the higher ones. So while he was selling a fair amount, and had decent booth traffic, his overhead (namely, the booth fee) was high enough that he wasn't able to make up it in the volume. For the type of merchandise he had, he does much better at smaller shows with an appropriately lower registration fee.
The creators I spoke with had mostly mid-range items, primarily $10-$20 books and prints. Plus because they were (mostly) only doing tables in Artists Alley, they had lower registration fees than a dealer setting up a full booth. So they have to sell fewer items to get the same revenue, and they have a lower threshold to cross in order to break even. Add on to that a much higher number of bigger ticket items ($100-$200 for a page of original production art) and it's much easier to have a good convention.
Then there are the larger publishers who take up a good amount of floor space towards the front of the convention. They have to shell out a lot more cash for a show like this -- first because they're using more space than a typical dealer booth, and second because they're (frequently) asking to be placed up front where there's more immediate visibility. But then they're primarily limiting their income to those mid-range items. People seemed happy to drop $25-$50 bucks on books and t-shirts and such, but they didn't have (that I saw, at any rate) any large ticket items. Which means that they'd have to sell an awful lot of people spending $25 to make up for the investment.
While I don't have specific numbers for any of these examples, I think the economics of attending any given show is a point worth considering. Who is the show's audience? What price points do you have available? How much do you have to spend in registration fees? It's great to say you're tabling at such-and-such convention, but you need to make sure to put your business hat on, too, in order to ensure that you make it worthwhile.
The other, unrelated and relatively small, point I'd like to make is with the convention center itself. Here's a picture of part of the con floor from Sunday afternoon...
There's always a LOT going on at a convention, especially ones of this size, but I think it's always worth it to look at a show from multiple angles to really gauge its success. How many people showed up and how much noise they made is worth noting, but what else is going on that lends itself to analysis? Who was making money and who wasn't? What was -- or wasn't -- being done to keep the crowd from getting too crowded, but also keeping them restricted enough so that the show doesn't feel empty? These overhead photos are always cool because you get a pretty wide view of the con floor full of people, but what details can spot in them that speak to a less obvious goings-on? Just some things to think about.
One of the common refrains among those criticizing newspaper strips these days is that the strips themselves are given so little room any more that the artists can't do much more than draw talking heads. There's no grandeur in the comic strip, as there was back when Winsor McCay and George Herriman were doing full pagers with wild layouts. Check out these examples from some arguably masters of the medium in the late 1950s...
Al Capp, Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff. All of them restrained down to a few square panels. The most innovative piece of panel structure among these three pieces is that Caniff doesn't use a solid border in one panel. And with only a few panels per day, how can they be expected to progress an ongoing narrative forward?
And yet, look at what they all do within those panels. They change up the viewer angles, there's a range of distances across the panels, there's a lot of depth to each panel. Not to mention that Kirby and Caniff have some excellent use of spotted blacks. (To be fair, the blacks in Sky Masters are more the work of inker Wally Wood, another master of the medium.) They're all absolutely gorgeous.
Furthermore, check how big these are showing up on your screen. They were originally printed much larger, but here, they're probably about the size that you'd find in many newspapers. (Maybe a scootch larger.) Sure, some of the detail gets lost, but there's no loss in the overall legibility. You have no problem following along. Plus, the increased effectiveness of newspaper printing means that they can be printed smaller and still read comfortably; there's not as much smudging or bleeding of the ink.
Comics that appear in newspapers have some big issues to deal with, one the most significant being the problems facing the newspaper industry as a whole. But I'm not entirely convinced that people can't do great, artistic comic strips because of formatting concerns. Yes, I'd love for comics to get more real estate in the newspaper and I wish they weren't facing the budget and formatting constraints the newspapers are placing on them. But I'm skeptical that a smaller final size is an entirely valid excuse for simplifying the illustrations to a level barely above stick figures.
And yet, look at what they all do within those panels. They change up the viewer angles, there's a range of distances across the panels, there's a lot of depth to each panel. Not to mention that Kirby and Caniff have some excellent use of spotted blacks. (To be fair, the blacks in Sky Masters are more the work of inker Wally Wood, another master of the medium.) They're all absolutely gorgeous.
Furthermore, check how big these are showing up on your screen. They were originally printed much larger, but here, they're probably about the size that you'd find in many newspapers. (Maybe a scootch larger.) Sure, some of the detail gets lost, but there's no loss in the overall legibility. You have no problem following along. Plus, the increased effectiveness of newspaper printing means that they can be printed smaller and still read comfortably; there's not as much smudging or bleeding of the ink.
Comics that appear in newspapers have some big issues to deal with, one the most significant being the problems facing the newspaper industry as a whole. But I'm not entirely convinced that people can't do great, artistic comic strips because of formatting concerns. Yes, I'd love for comics to get more real estate in the newspaper and I wish they weren't facing the budget and formatting constraints the newspapers are placing on them. But I'm skeptical that a smaller final size is an entirely valid excuse for simplifying the illustrations to a level barely above stick figures.
G.B. Love was the driving force of comics fandom in South Florida and one of the main forces of comics fandom in its infancy."But, Sean," you ask, "isn't this one of your -isms posts? This sounds like it ought to be filed under your History pieces."
G.B. published The Rocket's Blast, a comics fanzine, in the early 1960s, which later merged with another fanzine to become The Rocket's Blast ComiCollector, known to most simply as the RBCC. The RBCC was an expensive ($5) magazine-size publication with fan (and future pro) art and articles and tons of ads from comics fans and dealers. It was one of the first and largest forums for fans to buy and sell comics through the mail. This was in the days before comic stores and before The Buyer's Guide (later known as Comic Buyer's Guide) existed. Often, the only way for fans to get back issues was through ads in RBCC. The RBCC also showcased fan art and many whose work appeared within its pages often went on to professional comics careers. The RBCC was also an educational forum, with rich articles devoted to comics and creators long absent from the newsstands, such as EC Comics.
If that were all that G.B. Love had done, he would definitely have earned his place in the annals of comics fandom, but he was also active on the local level. He organized the first comic book conventions in South Florida, beginning in the late 1960s in the unairconditioned Fireman's Hall in Coral Gables, and later at various American Legion Halls in Coconut Grove.
Bear with me as I run down a quick timeline that might shed some light on things...
- 1939 - Love was born
- 1961 - Love launched The Rocket's Blast
- 1962 - Love launched Fighting Hero Comics
- 1964 - The Rocket's Blast merged with The Comicollector
- 1965 - Love launched Fantastic Exploits
- 1967 - RCBB went to photo-offset printing, so Love no longer had to collate and staple each issue himself
- 1968/69 - Love organized the first comic convention in South Florida
- 1971 - Love launched The Golden Age Collector
- 1974 - Love moved to Houston and launched Trek: The Magazine for Star Trek Fans
- 1974/75 - Love helped organize Houstoncons
- 1980 - Love began editting Trek: The Best of Trek books
- 1990 - The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed
- 2000 - Love was seriously injured in a car accident
- 2001 - Love died at age 61
Yet, by all accounts, he was a very successful writer/editor/publisher. In a time well before people with disabilities had a collective voice. When "handicapped" was a derogatory term. You might recall that even into the early 1990s, In Living Color felt comforable enough to regularly try to get laughs with Damon Wayans' Handi-Man character.
Now, as I mentioned a few weeks back, some cons are going out of their way to ensure people with all sorts of disabilities are being treated well. So things are better, right?
Well, that's hard to say. While we (or at least I) don't really hear any stories about bad experiences from people with disabilities, that could well be because they're superceded by sexual harassment of women. Or discrimination against racial minorities. Or any of the other issues that caused me to start an -isms column in the first place. I'd like to think things are better than they were in general -- I tend to view the past with whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses are -- but the sparks of progress are frequently countered by increased reports of people being asshats.
Love faced a challenging life and managed to succeed far beyond anyone's expectations. But that was in spite of the society he lived in, not because of it. After all, how many other examples like his can you point to in fandom. And while there still aren't people with disabilities crowding out others on the convention floor, I can see a greater number of them in attendance than even ten years ago. So that has to be some kind of progress... right?
- Free Comic Book Day is just over a week away, and Shaw Theatres in Singapore announced that it will be joining in and handing out 1,800 comics. This is the first I've heard of a business that was not a comic book shop participating in FCBD.
- Jim Shelly talks about Captain America, Nedor and Earth 2.
- Gene Kannenberg and Derek Royal interview Shannon "Too Much Coffee Man" Wheeler for The Comics Alternative.
One of the issues I run into not infrequently is one of self-doubt. I like to think that I know a fair amount about comics and comics history, but I am pretty regularly out-classed by others and feel like the dumbest kid in the metaphorical room. Someone might post a group photo from the 1940s, and ask for help in identifying some of the comic creators and I find myself not only not recognizing any of them, but not even recognizing the names of half of them once they are identified! These days, I'm finding myself more frequently among actual scholars and it can be a little intimidating at times.
However, they're not universal experts! Part of why those old photo identifications are getting crowd-sourced is precisely because none of us have all the answers. I mean, would you have been able to pick out Wally Wood from this picture if I didn't tell you he was in it? Can you even pick out Wood now that I've told you he's in it?
That's the interesting thing about studying comics history online. Not only are there more resources available so I can look up some obscure creator I've never heard of before, but it's that much easier for like-minded people to share what they know and find. Patrick Ford recently caught sight of this...
The Comic Magazine Publishing Report contained statistics on all comic titles on sale over a period of several months including on-sale dates! It also notes which titles ceased publication and which new titles debuted. Most of the other scholars he brought it to the attention of responded as if they'd never seen it before. And none of the librarians sprang to the table with claims of having copies in their collections.
I caught somebody a month or two back who asked about why The Jack Kirby Collector was still being published. After all, hadn't Kirby's work been analyzed to death? What could you possibly find that's new? I responded, of course, by saying that we are always unearthing new material. Not every bit of it is completely revolutionary, naturally, but there's a near-continual flow. And there's no one who knows all of it.
So, to any would-be or amateur comic historians out there, it is absolutely worth pursuing even in the face of others who seem much more knowledgeable than you. They don't know it all, either, and that's why we talk and try to figure this stuff out together.
However, they're not universal experts! Part of why those old photo identifications are getting crowd-sourced is precisely because none of us have all the answers. I mean, would you have been able to pick out Wally Wood from this picture if I didn't tell you he was in it? Can you even pick out Wood now that I've told you he's in it?
I caught somebody a month or two back who asked about why The Jack Kirby Collector was still being published. After all, hadn't Kirby's work been analyzed to death? What could you possibly find that's new? I responded, of course, by saying that we are always unearthing new material. Not every bit of it is completely revolutionary, naturally, but there's a near-continual flow. And there's no one who knows all of it.
So, to any would-be or amateur comic historians out there, it is absolutely worth pursuing even in the face of others who seem much more knowledgeable than you. They don't know it all, either, and that's why we talk and try to figure this stuff out together.
