- David Robson examines ancient Mayan pottery and sees that they were making what we can easily recognize as comics as early as 650 BC.
- Michael Davis wonders what happened to the Milestone Comics that were announced last year.
I knew Phil's work from years earlier when he did the "What's New?" comic strip in the back of Dragon magazine in the 1980s. I didn't buy the magazine regularly, but that was consistently one of the highlights of every issue I read. His illustration style was delightfully energetic and he had a great sense of comic pacing. I stopped reading Dragon (or indeed paying attention to any role-playing games!) when I left for college, and Phil fell off my radar.
Cut to a decade later and I heard he and his wife were starting a new comic book called Girl Genius. I was immediately on board based on what I remembered about Phil's older work, and I was not disappointed. They were doing a lot of great things in the book, and I enjoyed it immensely for the next several years.
Somewhere around then, I had certainly become aware of webcomics. But I didn't care for reading them on the screen. Primarily because, at the time, I was unaware of feed readers or other methods of delivery. I was forced to go to each webcomic site individually and click through to wherever I dropped off last and then navigate through whatever clunky navigation was set up. (There were no good navigation standards developed at that point.) So even though the Foglios had moved to presenting their story online, I kept buying the print version. That is, until they stopped doing a print version with issue #13, and presented the material only online. I was enjoying it enough that I didn't want to miss out.
That's when I started doing some digging into better ways to read webcomics. Because I still wasn't down for this just-go-check-the-site-every-day bullcrap. I was already familiar with RSS, thanks to some work projects, but it was only after I "needed" to keep reading Girl Genius that I really began investigating feed readers and found something I liked. But once I did, that's when I started actively looking for more webcomics to read.
I recall thinking at the time that I was coming to the webcomics party exceptionally late. I mean, guys like Scott Kurtz, Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahuli had been working for years at that point and they weren't even really the old guard. It already seemed like a crowded market, and I was thrilled when I could find the occasional webcomic that was JUST getting started. (Now that I think about it, I recall having similar feelings when I first discovered comics in general and came across a new series.)
That's what continues to catch me off guard today though. That over a decade ago, I was thinking I was late to webcomics and yet all this time later and we're just now starting to see mainstream comic news sites talk about them with anything approaching regularity.
In any event, it was my following creators in their transition from print to digital that really got me interested in webcomics. My journey followed theirs and, since I still read Girl Genius, I suppose it still does.
The obvious answer to address that issue, then, is to block up the windows. Many stores I've seen plaster the windows with a variety of promotional posters and standees they get in the course of running a store. This not only blocks UV light from getting into the store, but it also serves to promote the store's contents as the posters frequently depict characters that are readily identifiable with comic books.
The downside to that approach is that, while ultraviolet light is blocked, so it visible light. You don't want customers stumbling around a store without being able to see anything, naturally, so overhead lights are added. Usually fluorescent because they tend to be more efficient for lighting stores. However, the effect isn't always the best.
(Side note: fluorescent lights do emit UV rays as well, but at significantly lower amounts than sunlight.)
Typical office-style fluorescent bulbs have a CCT (correlated color temperature) of around 4,100 K. This means that, to the eye, they have about the same color as bright moonlight. Daylight tends to start at around 5,000 and go up from there (depending on the time of day, amount of overcast, etc.). Further, without enough actual illumination, the CCT visually appears to skew downwards -- basically, that in order to make a high CCT light appear "normal" or "comfortable" there needs to be a lot of it. So a store setting which only has enough fixtures to supply supplemental light to the large picture windows at the front of the store won't appear comfortable if those windows are blocked, making the florescents the only source of light. Which means that it'll be darker than it should be in the first place, and the light that is available will appear unnaturally pale. Which means you wind up with a dark and dingy feeling store that people aren't comfortable in.
This can be addressed in different ways, and what makes the most sense would depend on the actual structure of the store itself, I think. They do make window films that block UV light, but still allow in visible light. The front windows could be covered with these relatively cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't help the lighting situation on dark or overcast days. Another option is switching to higher temperature bulbs; they do get more expensive, but I know 6,500 K bulbs are available and probably higher ones are too. A third option would be installing additional light fixtures throughout the store. This could be either more flourescents, or perhaps a series of smaller spotlights or track lighting.
The point is that, while light can be very damaging to a store's actual stock, it's still necessary in order to provide a comfortable setting for customers. This isn't something that I expect more store owners think about even after they open a store, but every aspect of a location contributes to a store's brand, and it's worth giving some consideration to both the goods that are being sold and the people buying them.
You know that the first published Superman story from Action Comics #1 was initially intended to be a comic strip, right? Comic books were still pretty new and not well tested, so Jerry Siegel's and Joe Shuster's aim was to produced a syndicated comic strip. When they eventually sold their Superman idea to National Publications, they were told to rework the idea into a 13-page comic book story. Because of a tight deadline, they opted for taking the existing artwork, chopping up all the individual panels, and pasting it into more of a book layout.
I started thinking, though, what did that original strip format look like? I wondered if anyone tried using Action Comics #1 to work backwards and see if they could approximate what Siegel and Shuster's submission looked like. It turns out, though, that we don't need to imagine it -- it still exists!
Before National bought the rights, McClure Syndicate tried shopping the idea around to newspapers, like any other comic strip. Naturally, newspaper editors weren't going to buy some totally new idea sight-unseen, so McClure printed up small booklets for their salesmen to carry around with them and show editors. Thirty individual Superman strips -- the month's worth of samples Siegel and Shuster had worked up, including a more detailed and gorgeously illustrated origin.
It was just a sample of a still-untried concept, so they weren't widely distributed. Nor were they realized to be of any value until some time later, so these booklets are exceptionally rare. There's only a handful believed to still be in existence, and they occasionally come up for auction.
So in case you're curious what the first Superman comic strip looked like -- before the character showed up in Action Comics -- here's the art that was shown from the latest auction I've seen for one of these...
I started thinking, though, what did that original strip format look like? I wondered if anyone tried using Action Comics #1 to work backwards and see if they could approximate what Siegel and Shuster's submission looked like. It turns out, though, that we don't need to imagine it -- it still exists!
Before National bought the rights, McClure Syndicate tried shopping the idea around to newspapers, like any other comic strip. Naturally, newspaper editors weren't going to buy some totally new idea sight-unseen, so McClure printed up small booklets for their salesmen to carry around with them and show editors. Thirty individual Superman strips -- the month's worth of samples Siegel and Shuster had worked up, including a more detailed and gorgeously illustrated origin.
It was just a sample of a still-untried concept, so they weren't widely distributed. Nor were they realized to be of any value until some time later, so these booklets are exceptionally rare. There's only a handful believed to still be in existence, and they occasionally come up for auction.
So in case you're curious what the first Superman comic strip looked like -- before the character showed up in Action Comics -- here's the art that was shown from the latest auction I've seen for one of these...
On one level, that shouldn't come as a surprise. The story concept (what if only Black people had super-powers) is brilliant, and there's some A-level talent with Osajyefo, Tim Smith 3, Jamal Igle, Khary Randolph and Sarah Litt working on it. Of course a project like that would do well! Of course!
But then again, it still is kind of surprising. We are talking about a blatantly socially charged concept here, which comes on the heels of several years of high-profile racial discrimination cases. (I feel compelled to point out, though, that these types of cases and/or their frequency are not at all new! But the combination of video-capable cell phones and social media have been able to shine a spotlight on these issues in a way that mainstream media has spent most of its existence ignoring.) And these election primaries have brought out some vitriol that I expect many (white) people haven't seen or heard in decades; as if it's okay to be a racist asshole because we have a Black president and we're "post-racial" now, I guess?
Seriously, I expect a lot of it does have to do with Barack Obama being elected. Prior to that, anyone who harbored those racist sentiments could simply avoid dealing with Black people. They lived in their quaint neighborhoods and didn't have to venture out beyond their comfort zone by, you know, even seeing a person of color. Or, if they did, it was on a news report about someone committing a crime. But now, with Obama in the White House, they see someone they actively don't like in charge of their country and who knows what kind of weird, Black ideas he might implement!?! Then, coupled with the heightened awareness of systemic racial injustices occurring roughly at the same time, it might look like their comfort zone no longer exists. That this Black man got elected and now he's somehow pushing this Black agenda and trying to punish police officers for just doing what they've always done! They're scared because they're having to confront broad social issues that they've conveniently been able to ignore their entire lives. Social issues that contradict the jingoist propaganda we've been fed since birth.
So in light of that, Black's success is kind of surprising.
Now it could be that they were able to hit and surpass their goal thanks to a few backers who ponied up a crudload of cash. Any project can succeed if there's that one rich guy who likes the idea and donates a small fortune to the project, right? But take a look at the numbers more carefully and you'll see that, as of this writing, 85% of their backers pledged less $25 or less, for a total of fully half of the money the project's raised. Given how much better that is than what the Pareto Principle would suggest points to the notion that a lot of readers are really eager for this type of thing.
Think of this, too. The somewhat-greater-than-2000 people who are essentially buying the book via Kickstarter? That would rank it in the Top 25 for book sales through Diamond in most months. And those Kickstarter backers are people supporting the book sight-unseen! These people want this book enough that they don't even need to browse through the final version in order to make up their minds. And there's no advanced version either; like how many TPBs are just collections of stories that already saw print in pamphlet form. No one's saying, "Hey, I read this when it was serialized six months ago -- it's really good."
There's an audience for this. Despite the hate speech you might hear from some presidential candidates, despite the almost-daily news reports of police killing an unarmed person of color, despite the legal fights people are putting up to continue to use their racist imagery... There are more people who want Black than most other comic trades. Black's "pre-sales" are almost on par with the top three Star Wars graphic novels that came out in December. Or the latest volume of Attack on Titan.
Why more publishers aren't seeing the significance of this and acting on it, however, I don't know.
- Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, granddaughter of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, tells the story of how she recently met up with Harry Donenfeld (grandson of the elder Harry Donenfeld) and Laura Siegel (daughter of Jerry Siegel).
- Author George Khoury was a guest on The George and Tony Entertainment Show, talking about his upcoming book: Comic Book Fever: A Celebration of Comics: 1976-1986.
- Felicity Morse writes about how webcomics talking about mental health are changing the way we talk about it.
- The Feburary issue of The Journal of East Asian Libraries includes an interview by Caitlin McGurk with Maureen Donovan about the manga collection at The Ohio State University Library.
- This year's SPACE prize winners have been announced. Congratulations to all of the winners, particularly those in the webcomics category where there were ties for both first and second places!
