I suspect a large percentage of the American population has not yet learned about how their own government incarcerated anyone of Japanese descent -- regardless of where they themselves were actually born -- in the time immediately after the bombing of Peral Harbor. George Takai's They Called Us Enemy from 2019 is perhaps the most widely known/circulated graphic novel on the subject, but it's the most widely known/circulated in large part because there's almost no other competition. There is frighteningly little acknowledgement of what was done to Japanese-Americans at that time.

Fortunately, that's starting to change (albeit slowly) and the latest graphic novel on the subject is Josh Tuininga's We Are Not Strangers. While Tuininga comes at the story from a very personal perspective as Takai did, his view is a little more removed. He himself was not incarcerated the way Takai was, but his grandfather was directly involved in helping those who were. In many of the instances of discussing how the government rounded up anyone who seemed vaguely Japanese, the focus is almost entirely on what went on in the concentration camps themselves. What's spoken about less often, or certainly afforded less attention, is what happened with all their stuff while they were in camps. Basically, it was all given to other people so that once the camps were eventually closed, the former inmates had literally nothing to go back to.

SO in Tuininga's story, his grandfather saw what was happening and, recognizing that it was astonishingly similar to what the Nazis began doing to Jews a few years earlier, he went about working with his Japanese friend Sam to be set up with Power of Attorney rights over Sam's property. They were able to get all the paperwork formalized before Sam was imprisoned, which meant that Tuininga's grandfather could then take care of the propety in Sam's absence ensuring that Sam and his family would have a home to return to if/whenever they were released. He evidently helped out many other families in the same way, and acted as a landlord renting their houses out for years until the government finally released all those they wrongfully held.

What's intriguing about the book is that we, the audience, don't really find out what Tuininga's grandfather is doing until quite late in the book. Much of the first three-quarters of the book is spent showcasing the life Tuininga's grandfather built for himself and his family after emigrating from Spain, and providing social context of how/when/where average people started seeing sentiment turn against Japan and those of Asian descent. This follows Tuininga's grandfather's whole approach, which largely consisted of doing the hard work and simply not talking about it. It's clear some of that was from concern about reprisals, but I suspect there is some measure of humility there as well. Partiucularly since Tuininga himself never learned of any of this until after his grandfather's death.

The story is strong, indicating the impact even a single person can have in another's life when it's not possible to correct for the government's heinousness. Tuininga's couldn't stop the incarcerations, or shorten them, or make them more tolerable. But he was able to give those folks something to come back to later. And even if that was only for a handful of families, it is worth noting that that no doubt made a phenomenal difference to those individuals. It's a, at times necessary, reminder that not everything has to be a grand gesture just to help. Use the skills and knowledge and resources you have to help who you can, even if that's just making sure a single family has a home they can come back to.

We Are Not Strangers came out last month from Abrams Books and retails for $24.99 US. You should be able to pick it up from your favorite book shop.

I don't need to tell you how Vladimir Putin's Russian military invaded Ukraine on Feburary 24, 2022. It the largest attack on a European nation since World War II, also causing the largest flow of European refugees since since then. It's seen the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukranian civilians, and caused untold worldwide supply chain issues (already strained because of the pandemic) particularly for grain and wheat. Some aspect of the war has been on the news (regardless of your outlet of choice) literally every day for the past year and a half.

It should come as no surprise that any number of groups, both formal and informal, have done what they could to aid the Ukranians. Some of that is food aid, some is transportation, some is just sending money to use however they see fit. Scott Dunbier's approach has been to get together a group of comics creators to make an anthology book, the proceeds of which will be/are being donated to Ukranian refugees. He's rounded up the likes of Kurt Busiek, Walt Simonson, Howard Chaykin, Stan Sakai, Matt Wagner, Jill Thompson, Emil Ferris, Colleen Doran, and a bunch of other creators to contribute new pieces to it. That's you really need to know, honestly. If you've got the money and want to help, go pick up a copy.

"Well, that's not even close to a review, Sean!"

It isn't. In the first place, I'm not good at reviewing anthologies. Inevitably, some stories are better than others, some stories speak to me more than others. Is an anthology "good" if I think half the stories are good? Is it "good" if one story is really brilliant, but the rest are only "meh"? Is it "good" if the individual stories are good, but the organization and editing are crap? I'm never quite sure how to adequately/fairly review an anthology book.

I'll say this about it. If you like the work of any of the individual creators generally, you'll like their work here. If you like Chew, you'll like the Chew story here. You like Groo, you'll like the Groo story here. The creators all turn in work that's on par with whatever else they've done. I will also say though, that for me, the most powerful and most impressive story was Larry Hancock and Michael Cherkas' "Talking to a Hill" which was the only story that didn't add a layer of metaphor, and spoke to some of what's happening in Ukraine specifically without just presenting a "war is bad" message.

But in the second place, that's not why you should get the book anyway. You should get it to help the Ukrainian refugees. Yes, you can (and should) donate money directly to organizations that are trying to help and your donation will go farther since the printing costs of the book don't have to be factored in. But that's abstract enough for many people that it's difficult to justify, so this will put something in your hands as well and might make that decision a little easier. You can get a variety of different versions, hardcover or paperback, signed or unsigned, as well as t-shirts and prints. There's plenty to choose from. Go pick up a book or two today.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: In Search of Gil Scott-Heron Review
https://ift.tt/koMSsFz

Kleefeld on Comics: Multi-Purpose Con Marketing Idea
https://ift.tt/OWRwgq7

Kleefeld on Comics: King Finally Listens to Me

http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2023/10/king-finally-listens-to-me.html

Kleefeld on Comics: Kirby's Black Panther
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2023/10/kirbys-black-panther.html

Kleefeld on Comics: Influence
https://ift.tt/JrxEpd9

When I was 12-13 years old, I wanted to be a comic book artist when I grew up. I thought the coolest thing in the world would be to draw the Fantastic Four every month. After a few years, I came to the realization that I simply was not a good enough illustrator. I didn't feel I'd improved as much as I should have by the time I was 15 or so. I don't know if I'd seen professional artists' work from when they were kids or if I was simply grading my work against professional level illustrations, but I realized that I was not talented enough, nor fast enough, to make a living illustrating anything.

At some point, I got a copy of the Marvel Try-Out Book. I believe it was a gift and came a couple years after its original publication, so I couldn't enter the formal contest, but I still thought it was useful. And I thought, as kind of a last chance for drawing comics, I might be able to become an inker. Before finishing a full page, I could tell I was crap. My attempt at coloring yielded equally lack-luster results. (I've still got the book. I looked again just now, and I was REALLY horrible!) I still enjoyed art, though, and that prompted me to study graphic design when I went off to college.

Sometime towards the end of my college career, it occurred to me that I might become a comic writer. I'd had enough different people say that I had a talent for that I thought it was a possibility. I actually toyed with that idea probably the longest, sending unsolicited scripts to Marvel and doing a lot of letter-hacking to get my name noticed. But after doing that a while, I realized that most of what I wanted to say wasn't through the metaphors of stories. It was research and fact-based pieces like what's here on my blog.

All of which is to say that I've never had anything resembling a career in/around comics. I worked as a graphic designer for many years, sliding into web design when that was in its infancy, and eventually climbing the corporate ladder high enough that I don't do much in the way of actual design any more. Which is cool because I learned that I wasn't all that great a designer in the first place, and in the second place, I was pretty certain I'd have more and more trouble sustaining that as a career as I got older and fell more out of touch with design trends and standards.

What that also means is that, by focusing on a career in corporate America, I'm almost certainly making more money than I would be if I'd have gone into comics professionally. But, more interestingly, I've been able to use my non-comics resources and funnel some of that back into comics. I've almost always got at least a couple comic book Kickstarters being backed, and books on order from both creators and online book and comic shops. I've got an almost-weekly "In today's mail..." photo to share on Mastodon showcasing whatever comics just arrived.

That's definitely not as "glamorous" as being asked to draw Batman every month., and I'm certainly not spending enough to subsidize a comic creator. But maybe I bought the book that took a creator past the break-even point at a convention. Maybe when I said, "Hey, this looks really cool" that gave someone an incentive to keep working through an otherwise trying period. And maybe I'm only impacting a small number of people whose work isn't as popular as, say, Spider-Man. But I daresay that my impact there, even among those few people, is greater than anything I would've been able to do as a comic creator.

I find that an interesting notion to think about. That my influence on comics is greater from outside the medium than from inside. I'm not sure what that says. About the medium. Or me. Well, I know it says my skills as a comic creator are total shit, but beyond the obvious, I mean.

Today, I'm going to run my "Incidental Iconography" column from The Jack Kirby Collector #68, focusing on the Black Panther. I've re-published it on my blog before back in 2017, but it's one of the more interesting pieces of research I've done in that column, and it has some points about how Martin Goodman deliberately downplayed Panther's race against Kirby's intentions that I would like to see get wider circulation.

Incidental Iconography: Black Panther

If you’ve read my column before, you’ll know that I use take a look at how Jack would modify character designs on the fly, sometimes changing them from panel to panel, creating what ultimately become iconic visuals. If you’ve read my column before, you’ll also likely be familiar with Jack’s original sketch the Black Panther: a watercolor design he entitled Coal Tiger. So why would I spend time travelling over well-trod ground?

Despite that original sketch being relatively well-known (including having been reprinted in this very magazine repeatedly) I don’t think many people have really looked at in comparison to Jack’s evolution of the design. I think people see it and think, “Wow, that’s… yellow!” without going much further. But we have some additional steps to examine before getting to the Panther’s formal debut in Fantastic Four #52.

We of course start with Jack’s original watercolor. A non-atypical Kirby design, although he tended to avoid capes as a general rule. If Jack hadn’t made the character dark-skinned (which in 1966 was virtually unique) the cape is probably the most outstanding design element from Jack’s perspective. Take a moment, though, to look at the costume without the color. The changes between this design and the final Black Panther costume are minimal -- aside from the mask, the types of changes Jack might make absent-mindedly on any design from issue to issue. Really, besides only the removal of the stylized “T” on the belt and the vertical stripes on the tunic, the only change to the costume is in the coloring. Note that, although difficult to see in the final published comics with color, the stripes on Panther’s gloves and boots remain in place.

Now, here’s some interesting considerations. We also have a rejected cover for FF #52 featuring the Panther, now named as such, wearing basically the Coal Tiger costume minus the stripes plus a half-mask. Since the final cover features a Panther costume that completely covers the character’s face, I think it’s safe to presume that either Stan Lee or Martin Goodman made a request to change to a full mask out of concerns of a potential backlash. Again, we’re talking about 1966 here, squarely during the Civil Rights movement. A year after the assassination of Malcolm X and two years before Martin Luther King, Jr. A good many people were uncomfortable with Black people getting increasingly equal rights, and those who supported them sometimes found themselves facing some arrest, imprisonment, or worse.

Here’s another consideration, though: Jack usually drew his covers last. It wasn’t part of the story he was telling, so he’d dash something off after he did the last page because a comic needed a cover. Which means that we’ve got a 20 page story featuring the Black Panther in a half-mask basically done before someone suggested that maybe showcasing a Black person on the cover was too risky. This suggests to me that it was Goodman’s concern. Wherever you fall on the who-did-what debate between Lee and Kirby, Stan was certainly aware of the story being told beforehand, and he would’ve had ample time to mention to Jack that showing a Black man on the cover might be risky if that was a concern of his. Goodman was less involved in the day-to-day operations and probably only noticed the cover shortly before the book was ready to go to press.

But changing the costume for the cover produces the additional problem of having to adjust the interior art to match. If you look at the story, you’ll notice that Panther’s mask -- indeed much of his costume -- is covered in shadow. But it doesn’t seem as if Jack drew it that way. There are no highlight details that one might expect around the nose and mouth; everything is just completely blacked out. As if inker Joe Sinnott (or, more likely, another inker who happened to be in the office that day) simply washed over the original, probably already inked, art with black. Indeed, looking at #53 and #54, Panther’s mask shows a greater level of detail with more highlights. It seems to me that tweaking Panther’s costume to accommodate a full mask was a rush job, done well after Jack had any input on the story. The costume that Jack drew in FF #52 was his Coal Tiger design with a half-mask added, and it was only really changed at the inking stage or later.

By #53, Stan had evidently told Jack of the changes that had been made and the illustrations in that issue show that Jack refined the notion of an all-black costume by designing in appropriate highlights. And while many people point to Nat Freedland’s infamous “Super Heroes with Super Problems” article that ran shortly after this as the start of Jack leaving Marvel, I can’t help but wonder if that all of these changes to a character that he saw as part of an important social issue began influencing his decision to leave before Freedland’s piece. Did Jack really care if Panther’s trunks were black or yellow with black stripes? Probably not. But I expect he did care that the character he designed specifically for the purpose of promoting Black men as heroes being literally relegated to shadows out of fear of reprisal struck a bad nerve with him. Maybe the “baggy Robert Hall-ish suit” reference was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but seeing Coal Tiger become a shadow of what he could’ve been was the penultimate straw, even if the Panther’s ink-rushed design made the character’s costume about as iconic as they come.

I've been saying off and on how I've thought that King Features was doing something of a disservice to its adventure properties like The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Mandrake the Magician. I've said as recently as April that I don't think anyone at King really has a good sense of what they have, or what to do with them. Their last "big" move with Flash Gordon, for example, was that they licensed the comic book publishing rights to Mad Cave Studios back in July with an intended release of a middle-grade version through Papercutz in 2024. I can't find any actual mention of it at all on Papercutz site, and Mad Cave's only has the initial press release with no notes about who might be working on the books, or even what part of 2024 they might come out. I don't know about you, but I don't find that particulary encouraging.

On the other hand, we just got news this week that King will be bringing back Flash Gordon in comic strip form. It'll be the first new Flash Gordon comic strip in thirty years and it will be written and drawn by Dan Schkade, whose work I loved on the Lavender Jack webcomic. It seems a little unclear precisely in what form Flash Gordon will be returning, though; they haven't specified if it will be syndicated in newspapers or presented only on the web or some combination or..? Schkade is probably more familiar with working on webcomics, but he's done his share of printed comics as well, having tackled The Spirit Returns for DC and a Dark Horse title called Saint John that just debuted last month. King also hasn't announced a date when readers can expect to start seeing the new strips, which is also a little concerning.

I've read enough of Schkade's work that I have no doubt I'll enjoy his take on Flash Gordon. And hiring him is the first decent move I've seen King make about the property since... crap, probably when they licensed it to Filmation back in the early 1980s. However, King sadly also has a... less than stellar track record when it comes to promoting their adveture heroes. (They're not all that great about promoting their funny animal characters either, if I'm being honest.) So I'm not sure if this new Flash Gordon strip will take off or not. Regardless of how good it is, if nobody sees it... King is going to consider that a failed experiment. But they've at least done a great job with Step 1 here and got some real talent to work on it. I'm definitely going to keep my eyes and ears open to see how well it does! Good luck, Dan!

One of the challenges about tabling at a convention is that you almost can't do it by yourself. Sure, you can sit there and sell books and make change and sign autographs and do sketches yourself, but at some point you're going to have to leave the table. Even if you bring tons of food in a cooler that you have with, you're going to have to take a bio break at some point! And if you don't have a partner there to watch over your table while you're away, you wind up having to ask one of your table neighbors. (Side tip if you didn't already know this: make friends with your table neighbors!) So, in general, you want to keep your table absences to a minimum particularly if you're tabling solo.

But sometimes things come up and you need something away from your table.

A few years ago, Alex Heberling posted about a clever (I think) solution. Basically, she put note on her table offering a free copy of one of her books to anyone willing to go stand in line for her and pick up some french fries. She was still paying for the fries, so the book was just so she didn't have to leave her table. She had about six or seven people stop by, curious about the offer, before someone took her up on it. It was less than an hour between when she put her sign up, and when she had fries and a soda sitting in front of her.

Now, when I asked her about it, Heberling said it felt a bit like "holding a cardboard sign on the exit ramp of a highway." I suspect that was mostly because she had a hastily crafted hand-written sign, and it wasn't something she planned on doing. But I think that, if you approached it the right way, it could work as a marketing tool.

What if, instead of leaving a hand-written note quietly on your table, you had something actually printed up? Something that was in the same style as the rest of your table materials? You wouldn't leave it out all the time, of course, but pull it out maybe around 11:00, and make an announcement of it. "Free book if you bring me food!"

One of the other things Heberling noted was that several of the people who stopped by had their attention grabbed by the "free book" notion. Who doesn't like free stuff, right? There's a catch, of course (getting food for you) but you've hurdled two important challenges: you've gotten their attention, and you've given them an built-in discussion starter. A lot of people are introverts, and some people are too shy/nervous to come up and ask you about your book. Or maybe they just don't want to engage too much if they're unsure. But this starts the conversation, and gives you the opportunity to not only get some food without having to wait in those sometimes horrendous lines but also sets you up to give a quick sales pitch about your book to someone who might not have even stopped by your table!

Heberling seemed a bit uncomfortable with the idea, but I also know her to be somewhat shy about that kind of thing too. She suggested it would be easier for "someone with a higher charisma stat". But with the right attitude and approach, I think this could be easily turned into a marketing schtick. It gets word about your book(s) out to those who aren't already familiar with you in an environment that's already primed for people ready to buy. And because it's rare to see someone do this (at least for now) you'll likely generate a little buzz as well.

I think the key, from a marketing perspective, is being able to sell the idea. You'd need some level of carnival barker-ism to make this effective. But, then again, don't you need some level of carnival barker-ism to table in the first place?

One final note: since she was kind enough to let me borrow her photo and answer some of my questions about her experience, I will plug her The Hues webcomic (currently on hiatus). It's a good story, and worth checking out if you're not familiar with it already.