Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Success—Easier or More Difficult?, Part 1
https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF
https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
The name Allegiance Arts and Entertainment probably doesn't sound familiar. As a company, they're new. The creators behind the name, though, are not. The company was founded by Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser (also seen in the picture here).
Those names might sound familiar because they're connected with Comicsgate, the loose association of people who are opposed to diversity and inclusivity in comics. While not as central to Comicsgate as, say, Richard C. Meyer or Ethan Van Sciver, known Comicsgaters did heavily promote the Breitweiser's various crowd-funding campaigns (all of which are the books that will be available through Walmart, even the ones which Breitweiser has not yet sent out to his backers!) seeing a kindred spirit in the creators and the book. Certainly buoyed by Breitweiser's vocal support for Trump.
Heidi Macdonald points out that most Walmart shoppers don't give a shit about Comicsgate, but will still probably give a pass to the 24 page periodical format for characters no one has ever heard of. Especially at $5.00 a pop. In the comments, retailer Brian Hibbs does some quick math and has trouble picturing a scenario where these are even remotely profitable.
In an interview over on ICv2, Breitweiser explains his thinking for getting these comics into Walmart. It basically boils down to: this is how kids discovered comics 40-50 years ago. And while that was indeed how a number of kids did discover comics up through perhaps the 1970s, that model stopped being viable in the 1980s and has been completely untenable for over three decades now. The idea that it will somehow work like that again now is driven more by nostalgia seen through rose-colored lenses than economics or business sense.
Breitweiser, true to Comicsgate form, is using some mythical dream of decades-gone-by to inform a myopic view of today's realities. The reason you don't see spinner racks in drug stores or grocers any more is because it's not an economically viable model. You think Marvel and DC don't have a couple dozen MBAs who've looked at that idea over the years trying to figure out a way to make it work? It's not that they don't want to be in that space, it's that they can't. The finances simply do not work. Probably even less in Walmart's case since they tend to be hyper-aggressive in the deals they strike with producers who get goods into their stores.
My bet is that displays will quietly be removed from stores after a few months of dismal sales. But if you happen to find yourself in a Walmart and happen to see one of these displays, I'd recommend walking right about without even giving it a second glance. Given their connection to a hate group like Comicsgate, they are not worth that much of your attention, much less your money.
The Ghost Rider is not there to “play in a sandbox,” the Ghost Rider is there to make big, hands-on changes to a world filled with things he doesn’t like.It strikes me that that is the biggest failing of Fantastic Four 2099, moreso than any other title in the line. While most of the 2099 titles featured characters that took up the mantle or were inspired by their 1990s namesakes, the Fantastic Four of 2099 were... the Fantastic Four. They seemed to have been literally plucked from the timestream and dropped into the 2099 world. Nothing about them seemed any different than what you could read in Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four 2099 took the exact same team and just dropped them into a different environment.
This is a possibility available for any fantasy fiction, including all superhero comics and especially a sprawling “imaginary story” like the 2099 line. The great majority of major superhero comics are ultimately informed more by preserving an existing order than by changing it, though.
(This was later revealed that they were actually constructs made by Uatu, and not the original Fantastic Four. But even the Fantastic Four of 2099 did not know that, and they fully believed themselves to be the original characters. I'm not sure if that was part of the plan from the start or this was a later idea.)
So not only was Fantastic Four 2099 about maintaining their status quo, but they were effectively maintaining the status quo of the source title they were expressly supposed to break from.
Now, personally, I like that concept. The Fantastic Four are generally explorer characters, but they explore from a solid base of operations and go off exceptionally prepared. Often thanks to whatever gizmos Mr. Fantastic has packed into their vehicle. There's backup equipment and redundant operational functionality; they can head off into completely unknown dimensions and rest assured that they'll have a safe way home. So the idea that the team is thrown into a situation in which they have no fore-knowledge and no equipment, where they can only and exclusively rely on their own powers and wits is one that intrigues me. And, in fact, some of the issues on their own are pretty good in that respect (Karl Kesel always writes a darn good FF, and the art in #2 is by the incomparable John Buscema!)
But that doesn't need its own title. As Kuhns pointed out, Fantastic Four 2099 just didn't "have any persuasive sense of a reason for existing." It was just the same book. In point of fact, in January 1996 when Fantastic Four 2099 launched, the main Fantastic Four book was wrapping up a story in which Mr. Fantastic had been time-displaced and forced to live by his powers and wits alone. A notably different execution between the two, of course, but the point being that there wasn't a huge difference between the two conceptually. For a team who's rooted in exploration, Fantastic Four 2099 largely did the opposite of that by largely retreading old ground.
The whole 2099 line went down in flames when Marvel fired line editor Joey Cavalieri, and several of the writers left in solidarity. All of the titles were cancelled almost immediately and replaced with a single 2099: World of Tomorrow title that tried to wrangle all the various storylines together. That book was cancelled after eight issues.
For as good as some of the 2099 titles were (Spider-Man 2099 ran for an impressive 46 issues) and broke new ground with the character concepts, Fantastic Four 2099 was disappointingly built off a very different concept that didn't really stand apart from its namesake.
The book charts the history of women in space exploration, narrated largely from the point of view of Mary L. Cleave, an astronaut that went on to serve as NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate for several years. The story starts early in America's space program and runs up through the modern day, although with Cleave as the focus, a good chunk of the book not surprisingly covers the program in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This largely coincides with when women finally began making some headway in NASA and Sally Ride's first space trip -- for which Cleave was Ride's earth-bound CAPCOM -- is well-documented here. As with any/all Ottaviani's books, this is very well researched, well documented, and well organized. If you've seen my reviews of any of his previous books, all of the craft that was on display there is seen here as well.
While the sexism and misogyny that hindered women's progress in the space program for decades is plainly evident throughout the story, it does feel a little... sanitized? It's very clear that women are being treated unfairly and are being sidelined and largely dismissed because of their gender, but I can't help but believe that the only systematic barriers are being relayed and the more overt, personal attacks were left out. I mean, this isn't the first book I've seen that compared it to a "Good Ol' Boys' Club" so I can't imagine that any number of insults and slurs weren't thrown around with casual regularity. There could be any number of reasons this type of gross behavior was omitted -- children are most certainly a prime audience for this book; Cleave herself may not have subjected to (or remembered being subjected to) much of it; maybe Ottaviani felt it distracted from the focus on what the women themselves were actually doing, as opposed to what they were subjected to. Maybe all of those reasons and more. I don't know that I'd consider a fault of the book, but I do wonder if it undersells the obstacles women had to overcome.
Maris Wicks does an excellent job relaying everything. He deceptively simple style might not seem an intuitive choice for a book that has dozens of unique, named individuals and literally tons of specific scientific equipment to be rendered, but she conveys all those things with a straight-forwardness that keeps them all easy to visually read and understand. This is her second time illustrating one of Ottaviani's books (she previously worked on the Jane Goodall biography Primates) and the two seem to work well together. Or at least well enough to make some great comics!
If you've read and enjoyed any of Ottaviani's work in the past, you'll enjoy this. He does an excellent job of relaying practical, historical information in a fun and engaging manner. You get a good story and learn something as a bonus. Why these books aren't on every comic fan's bookshelves, I don't know!
- The Center for Cartoon Studies has been posting a variety of dispatches from cartoonists such as veterans Art Spiegleman and Seth, and alumni Melissa Mendes and Chuck Forsman. One of their most recent is a dispatch from Roz Chast.
- France Culture spoke with Joann Sfar. The audio is obviously in French, but several snippets are pulled out as text and can be readily translated by your browser.
- The Cashing in on Creativity Podcast spent some time talking with cartoonist Rina Piccolo about her career, her style, and what cartoonists need to know about the cartoon industry.
- Finally, this one was from a week ago, but Damian Duffy, John Jennings, Nalo Hopkinson, and N.K. Jemisin got together to talk about the graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower.
So I spent the next couple of decades try to learn and absorb as much as I could about the Marvel Universe. I obviously didn't have enough money to buy every comic Marvel published, so I had to be judicious in my selections. Especially when it came to (often expensive) back issues. So I tried to focus on the bigger, more significant events. "Wait, here's another reference to the Kree-Skrull War. I should probably see if I can get that." And even though "continuity" wasn't a thing back in the 1940s, I found myself looking to dig up what I could on those as well since the Sub-Mariner was in regular orbit with the FF and the Human Torch's namesake was a 1940s hero as well.
All of which is to say that I knew a fair amount about the Marvel Universe. Maybe not the specifics of each and every event, but I knew most of how the history of the entire universe was put together. (At least however much had been relayed through the comics.) Even the stuff that had been retconned and re-retconned several times. Up until I stopped reading Marvel Comics after Civil War, I was pretty knowledgeable about the Marvel Universe.
My interest in coming to History of the Marvel Universe is two-fold. First, I'm curious to see what might have happened in the decade or so since I've been paying attention. Second, I'm curious to see how much of what I did know has been changed. I've gotten the sense that Marvel has largely had at most a casual disinterest in their continuity beyond a few key stories, so I suspect more than a few things had been added that unintentionally ran counter to whatever we had already seen. I know writer Mark Waid to be a huge continuity buff, so I was interested to see what he included and how he was able to reconcile potentially disparate histories.
The book opens with a framing device of Galactus and Franklin Richards at the very end of time and space. Galactus' energy will be used to kickstart a new universe and Franklin will be reborn as its first inhabitant, so he asks Galactus to remind him of the history of everything so that he might carry it forward into the next universe. The book, then, is Galactus relaying the history of the Marvel Universe to Franklin. It's a heavily abridged version, of course, with everything from the Big Bang up through the start of the 20th century covered in 20 pages. Most of the rest of the story covers the next 120 years with a handful of pages dropped in to remind readers this is a discussion between Galactus and Franklin, and an additional three pages to cover all the future stories. (Killraven, the birth of Kang, etc. I was surprised there was no reference to the 2099 stories at all though. Limited space, I suppose.)
I'll start by saying that I was impressed how much ground was covered in a fairly short amount of space. Even though things were abridged (every Western comic Marvel ever produced was summed up in a single panel) it touched on enough different elements of Marvel's history that someone who wasn't knowledgeable could have their interest piqued by a passing mention of a story or character. And the annotations in the back readily point to some of the specific issues in question. The teenage me who was just beginning to explore the Marvel Universe would have loved, loved, loved having a book like this back in the day!
I was also pleasantly surprised that there hasn't been nearly as much retconning as I would've guessed. There were only a handful of elements that had been changed since I was last paying attention, and some of them were in fact just changed in this very comic so I hadn't actually missed them previously. But that brings us to one of the problems: Siancong.
I recall hearing a bit about this when the monthly issue first came out, but one of the things that Waid has done was retcon several of the characters' backstories to have them fight in the fictional country of Siancong instead of whatever wars they originally might have fought in. I get the idea behind this change. Mr. Fantastic and Ben Grimm were originally veterans of World War II, but that becomes problematic if you say their first rocket flight only occurred 10-15 years ago. If the Punisher had served in Vietnam, he'd have to be at least in his 70s today. So Waid has created a war for the Marvel Universe that can move along with its own floating timeline, and is no longer tied to real-world events. You can provide characters with a backstory of military service, but it doesn't have to keep getting modified or appended from Germany to Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to wherever the next conflict is. I get that from the sense of streamlining the continuity. But it creates a couple of other problems.
First, it's now conflating very different types of wars and very different types of experiences. War is hell regardless of when/where it's fought, but the veterans from Vietnam had a vastly different experience from veterans from Afghanistan. Both on the battlefields and upon returning home. You could argue that different regiments fought on different fronts of this Siancong War, and that could account for those different experiences, but that leads us to the second, more problematic issue. That is that this new war is presented specifically as a broad-based but geographically localized "yellow peril." That is, they've mashed together several different Asian cultures into a general demonization of the entire hemisphere, concentrated in a single, small country. Siancong was originally a stand-in for Vietnam, but assigning Chinese and Japanese characters to the same conflict while wrapping in elements of Cambodia and Korea effectively says to readers, "Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, whatever. Those Asian countries are all the same! They're all bad guys!" Further, shoe-horning Lady Lotus -- a character who was created in the late 1970s to expressly serve as a WWII era villain and thus did not have any continuity problems tied to her being in that war -- into this Siancong War seems to underscore the issue. "Let's just throw all our Asian bad guys in here!" The conflicts in those various countries at various times were different; their cultures are different; they're being papered over here and trying to be dismissive of the racism that permeated those original stories. (You can't be racist against a fictional culture, right?) And given that this was created under the leadership of an editor-in-chief who spent years writing in yellow-face -- an act which has had zero repercussions for him after it was discovered -- it's really not a good look.
I get the intent they had here with a 'floating' war, and I'm cool with that. It's a clever idea. But the execution is a bit off the mark. Had they made it a broader conflict that perhaps included parts of Europe and/or the Middle East -- a kind of World War Two-and-a-Half -- they could have included a range of conflicts that allow for very different experiences and not focus on the "evil Asian" stereotypes. As it is, they solved a continuity "problem" but doubled down on the racism present in those older stories. Even the art on the page in question has been compared to the decidedly racist movie poster for The Face of Fu-Manchu.
There are two other things I'll mention; neither of which are a big deal, but they are things that struck me. As a history, the story flows more or less chronologically, which makes sense. But there were a couple instances where some retcons were placed here when they were introduced, and not when they were supposed to have happened in continuity. The most noticeable examples I saw were the introductions of Sentry and Jessica Jones. Both characters were introduced in the early 2000s and they're presented here around the time other circa-2000 stories are cited. However, both characters were given back stories that go back to the 1960s -- Sentry is shown interacting with the Avengers from their first dozen or so issues and Jessica went to high school with Peter Parker and is expressly shown to have witnessed the events from the Galactus Trilogy. Other recent retcons -- like the First Line, a super team created also in the early 2000s and designed to fit in the nebulous time period between the end of WWII and FF #1 -- were placed according to when they would have happened; but why not all of them? It just seemed a little disconnected, like an afterthought.
The other thing I'll mention is more a curiosity: namely that this largely is not comics. The handful of pages of Galactus and Franklin interacting are, but the majority of the book is basically illustrated prose. That's not a criticism -- I think you'd be hard-pressed to present this type of information as comics and still keep any sense of story flow. This is more of an updated (and, again, abridged) version of the old Marvel Saga than comic retelling of Marvel's history. Mind you, this is much more attractive a package than Marvel Saga as that used a mish-mash of images lifted from a wide variety of sources and here Javier Rodríguez drew everything fresh specifically for this book. There are a lot of really gorgeous page layouts here, and Rodríguez's illustration skills are top notch. But, strictly speaking, I don't think they qualify as comics for the most part.
I'm genuinely surprised Marvel chose to develop this project. This sort of Gruenwaldian approach to continuity hasn't seemed to be a concern at all in the past couple decades. Like I said, though, the teenage me would have loved to have a book like this back in the day! Today, I'm obviously a little more critical of things, but I still found it refreshing to see that much of what I had spent decades learning about the Marvel Universe was still considered in-continuity, and it had not been whole-cloth dismissed as I thought it might. Do today's readers care about this kind of thing any more? I couldn't tell you. But I suspect any older fans who were into comics the way I was would enjoy learning about the state of the Marvel Universe as it stands now.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Kleefeld on Comics: Big Black Review
Kleefeld on Comics: Alterna as a Disruptor
Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Defining Success, Part 1
Kleefeld on Comics: A Morrie Kuramoto Anecdote
Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Defining Success, Part 2
Kleefeld on Comics: Why Comics Readers Won't Migrate to Digital
