Marvel Dimensions is the latest among Abrams ComcArts' line of Marvel books. (I think that makes it an imprint of an imprint?) Ostensibly, the Marvel books are to be considered part of Marvel continuity, but this one is a bit of a question mark in that respect, which I'll get to in a bit.

The simplistic way to explain the book is that it's an extended issue of What If? in which the heroes are villains and the villains are heroes. Complete with a "here's what happened originally" before it gets to "here's how things are different in this story." However, that belies the more interesting/clever idea behind the book.

The book is, in fact, addressed directly to the reader. Not like Uatu's introductions/framing device used in the comics, but starting before and running through the copyright pages. As if the book itself is just a portal and you're being spoken to around the story that's being presented. And the "bonus 32-page comic" that promoted as being included is a story within the story of the book. Like you were handed a comic book that was actually produced in the universe you're witnessing. (A little like those "Marvels Comics" one-shots from 2000, where they published comics that were supposed to be like the ones actually published within the Marvel Universe.) So the whole book has this very cool metatextual vibe to it, where you as the reader are almost part of the story itself.

There are couple things I can tell you that should be no surprise because it's by Alex Ross. First, it's wonderfully illustrated. The artwork itself is gorgeous. Second, there are a lot of Easter Eggs available for old school fans. Homages to specific pieces of art, and just oblique nods in some of the modified costumes and such. If you're a fan of Ross' art for either of those reasons, you'll not be disappointed.

However, as lovely as his art is and as cool as the concept is, there're some notable flaws in the execution. The first he spends nearly half the book with very repetitive origin recaps. Two pages per hero/group, narrated by a sidekick or "lesser" (by 1960s standards) character. The original Human Torch, Namor, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man, Ant-Man & the Wasp, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, Dr. Strange, Daredevil, Black Widow, Silver Surfer, Black Panther, Wolverine, Phoenix, and Dr. Doom. The exact same format, over and over and over. Nearly the whole first half of the book. They're all very nicely done, but he doesn't add anything to the origins that hasn't been covered a hundred times already and, coupled with the recurring format, it gets really, really monotonous. Somewhere around the X-Men or Avengers, I seriously considered just putting the book down altogether. If you were a fan of one of those characters, and had their spread as a poster, that could be cool but as a series of vignettes? No, thanks.

The other problem is that, even setting aside the extremely long introduction, there's no real story here. There's some character bits to show you how many of the characters are different from their original, and many of those are interesting, but they're not even vignettes. Just a couple of lines of dialogue or a couple panels of action. Spider-Man and Professor X probably get the most extended 'treatment' by way of that comic-within-a-comic bit, but most of the characters get as much focus as their origins earlier in the book. There's a set-up for an "Secret War" type of story, but we never get that. A battle starts and we end on some more meta-speaking-to-the-reader stuff, leaving mid-fight.

The "evil doppleganger" idea is hardly new. That's even acknowledged in the book itself. But you need to do something with that idea, not just leave it sit there for the readers to sort out. This feels like the concept from an adventure module for the old Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game from TSR back in the day. We get the set-up and we're in charge of the telling the story, but it's up to the players to play out the actual adventure. It's not the module booklet itself that it was fun; it was in seeing the story actually play out with your friends around a table covered in dice and chips and Mt Dew. And we're missing that part in Marvel Dimensions.

The book came out a couple weeks ago from Abrams ComicArts, so it should be readily available from your favorite bookstore. It retails in hardcover for $29.99 US.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: A Special Labor Day Thank You To Comic Creators
https://ift.tt/NR2G7Fi

Kleefeld on Comics: Rocketeer The Island Review
https://ift.tt/sH7fkIE

Kleefeld on Comics: Billy's Line
https://ift.tt/YlSzMXO

Kleefeld on Comics: The Speed of AI Comics
https://ift.tt/8D0HqZN

Kleefeld on Comics: Because...
https://ift.tt/CvZ5uxz

Today, of course, is the 25th anniversary of the attacks on World Trade Center. For many people, myself included, it's one of the significant markers in their lives. There's "before 9/11" and "after 9/11." I don't need to tell you that; most of my audience is well old enough to remember.

There were a number of charity books put together in the wake of the event with proceeds going to fire fighters and the families of those killed and such. Most of the comics versions did things to cast first responders in superheroic light. Some were quite moving. However, the one piece that stood out to me at the time -- and continues to stand out to me to this day -- was a short, two-page piece by Jon 'Bean' Hastings in which he talks about why it's important to continue to tell goofy stories about superheroes and space aliens and magic wizards and all that. Particularly in light of the past year and a half, I find myself continuing to refer back to it...

A few years ago, I reached out to Hastings and was able to buy the originals from him. I was a little surprised he still had them after 15 or 20 years or whatever it'd been. Most of the time, when I'm interested in picking up a piece of original comics art, there's a strong element of seeing the craft that went into it. The ink smudges that got digitally removed, the pencil marks that were erased but still left a slight indention in the paper, the additional piece of paper physically taped to the art board with a significant portion of the art completely redrawn on top of it... But with Hastings' piece here, it's presented pretty much exactly as he drew it. Setting aside the powerful and concise message he has here, it's just an exceptional piece that really leans into the physical craft of making comics. This kind of approach does show up from time to time in other comics, but rarely is it handled so elegantly, pretty much precisely and evenly breaking down the art process forward and back. What shows up on the art boards doesn't look any different than what wound up getting published in this instance.

Much of the original art I own has some emotional meaning for me. It comes from a particularly powerful story that I love, or the particular craftsmanship on display really strikes me as impressive, or it acts as a reminder of when I met and talked with a particular artist at a convention or something. These pages, I believe, though, are the only ones I have that do all of that. Hastings never really made it big in comics (Ironically, it was this very piece that got him set up with some connections to do other types of gigs. He mostly works as a photographer now) so he's not well-known and this particular piece wasn't as widely distributed as the memorial books by Marvel and DC. So I bring it out not infrequently because it's a great piece with an incredible and powerful message that people need to be reminded of.

Particularly on a day like today when many people are mourning both the lives lost (both in the initial attacks as well as the years-long aftermath) but also the loss of the types of lives we Americans are no longer able to lead. It's 9/11 that very directly led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE and the TSA. All this <<< waves at everything >>> comes through a direct line from 9/11. So I bring this piece back to the fore repeatedly. To remind people why stories matter. Why art matters. Even in the face of everything awful that we're forced to bear witness to every day.

I just stumbled across this post I made back in 2021. It refers to a research paper in which scientists were able to create AI comics by feeding it some video footage, and then the computer would identify "key" frames to use as panels, and apply word balloons as appropriate based on the spoken dialogue. The resulting comics weren't great, of course, but made for some serviceable materials that could be an alternative to the actual video. I likened the idea to "video novels" of the 1970s that basically created the same thing, but had to be done manually and, thus, were financially impractical from a production perspective once commercial home video became commonplace in the 1980s.

Today, of course, we have tools available in which you can type in a sentence or two prompt and have an entire story generated. It's already been fed scripts and photos and video footage of all sorts of media, so you don't necessarily have to provide a specific video that you want to make into a comic. And it's not limited to specifically what's in any one video either, able to combine elements from other sources it's been previously given. The resulting comics still aren't great, but are usually cohesive enough that you can get an idea across.

I'm not going to get into the ethics of all those other materials being essentially stolen to create modern AI materials. I'm not going to get into the huge resource drain creating AI material this way is. I'm not going to get into the psychological impact of relying on AI instead of your own brain to work through ideas. You've heard all those arguements already, and I'm not going to be able to add anything new to those discussions.

No, the point I want to bring up is the date of that older post I mentioned: March 8, 2021. Five years ago. Five years ago, "AI-created comics" was highly technical research conducted by a small handful of scientists at a couple academic institutions. The stuff of research papers. Two years later, comics were able to be made commercially by AI, but still required a lot of trial and error. (Though the comic was written/published in 2023, I reviewed The Last Survivors in 2024.) Today, you can get more more cohesive, consistent results with less direct intervention or manual manipulation.

Five years ago, creators were absolutely not thinking about their hand-crafted work being used without their permission to create slop because it was simply not on anyone's radar. Five years ago, "AI comics" was the subject of an obscure research paper. If you're wondering why it feels like AI is being shoved down everyone's throat faster than any product ever, that's because it is.

One of the reasons I like looking at original art is to see more of the process that creators put into their work. How did they go about actually creating the page? How did they achieve certain effects? I find it gives me a better insight into both their specific methods, but also comics production in general.

Here's an interesting example: a 1978 Sunday Family Circus from Bil Keane featuring the oft-copied/parodied dotted line showing Billy's path as he runs through the neighborhood.

(It's currently up for sale on ebay if you're interested.)

What I find interesting here is how Keane actually drew that dotted line. My assumption had always been that he inked a solid black line, and then went in with some white paint to create the spaces between the dashes. That would strike me as the easiest way to have done these. But let's take a look at what Keane actually did...

You can just barely make out the pencil marks in a few places that show he did indeed sketch things in as a "solid" line. Two parallel pencil lines snaking throughout the piece. He's then gone in with a brush to ink between those two pencil lines to make a single, solid black line. In a few places here, you can see how the ink of his brush flows from one trapezoid to the next. And then there are stripes of white paint cutting through the line to create the dotted effect, as I guessed. But it's very high quality white that, over three decades later, still retains its pristine color and hasn't even begun chipping away.

All of which says what? Well, first, that Keane was no idiot. He knew how to create that dotted line effect efficiently. And, although I didn't touch on it much here, there's some subtlties in the execution of it, too, that make it a lot more readable than it might've been. That's probably why so many people remember the motif -- because Keane always did an excellent job of communicating the line even as it weaves in and out of other lines on the page. The reader never has to question where it goes. In large part because Keane spent some amount of time on the details of the line itself.

The other thing this says is that Keane used some really high quality materials on his work. Granted, he'd been doing the strip for nearly twenty years at this point, so we're not talking about a fresh-faced kid but a middle-aged adult who'd already made a successful career for himself, and could afford quality materials. He was a professional, and treated his work very much as a professional would.

I'm still not a big fan of Keane's style of humor, or his occasional heavy-handed religious iconography, but the man was unquestionably talented in his illustration and studying an original of his for the first time does give me a greater appreciation of his work.

I'm behind on my reading, so I only just got around to The Rocketeer: The Island. The story is, I understand, based around an idea Dave Stevens had before he passed that basically boils down to: The Rocketeer versus King Kong. Now because of that simplicity in concept, I don't know how much Stevens had actually fleshed out, or if the "based around an idea" part is just that someone once heard Stevens once say, "Hey, Cliff versus Kong would be neat." Regardless, the book was actually written and drawn by John Layman and Jacob Edgar, so it falls to them to execute on the concept.

The setup is that Cliff Secord is being hired by the US government to help look for Ameila Earhart after her disappearance. They're aware of his Rocketeer alias (and we learn the rocket technology is in fact fairly simple and dirt cheap to produce, so the government has kept it under wraps because they fear it would be far more dangerous if every regular Joe had acccess to it) and are hiring him specifically because of it. Betty and Marco go along to get a South Seas island photo shoot, and the group is also accompanied by Tintin (acting as a journalist to document Earhart's rescue), Popeye (who owns the boat they charter to get to the area) and Alexandra Payne (I believe a new character who has some background in the region). They dock at Skull Island and begin looking for Earhart, who they believe may have crashed there. While they begin to grow worried after encountering some slain dinosaurs, Betty is captured by natives who offer her to Kong. (Basically just like the original movie.)

Cliff runs into a giant Tyrannosaurs while looking for Betty and damages his rocket pack. It's then that he runs into Earhart, who takes him back to her plane, hidden behind a waterfall. Meanwhile, Betty finds that Kong is actually pretty friendly and he protects her when the T-Rex shows up. There's a giant Kong/T-Rex battle -- joined by Earhart in her plane and the natives being led by Alexandra -- and the dinosaur eventually goes down. Betty, pointing to Kong's behavior, is able to convince everyone that he's actually friendly and helpful. While they've found Earhart and prepare to leave with their mission accomplished, Earhart opts to stay behind on the island, as she detested the spotlight she was always put under in the States and couldn't stomach the thought of being center stage even more after her prolonged absence.

The critic in me found some foundational issues with the premise. First, Earhart disappeared in 1937 but Kong was killed in 1933, so he shouldn't even be around. It's a minor point, but it's one thing that's bugged me about pretty much every Kong appearance post-1933. Second, Popeye's and Tintin's appearances here feel like stunt-casting. Neither one do anything for the story that couldn't be handled by any nameless background character, and seem dropped in only because they're come into the public domain recently and they could be dropped in. They're not badly handled in their appearances, but they don't serve any purpose other than to say, "Hey, Popeye and Tintin also appear in this story!"

Despite those critcisms, though, I still found it to be a fun story. It's grand adventure in much the same way the original King Kong movie was. It's not especially deep, but it makes no pretense otherwise. The Rocketeer on Skull Island with King Kong. It delivers pretty much exactly what it says it will deliver. If you get past a couple of those conceptual conceits with the setup, the story holds together pretty well. In fact, I accidentally read issue #2 in its entirety before #1 and I had zero problems following along. The first issue offers some additional context and setup, but Layman and Edgar do such a good job with their storytelling that you can jump into the middle and pick up everything critical really quickly.

I'll also note that Edgar's illustration style here works really well. I'm used to seeing Rocketeer in a more finely detailed manner, following closely in Stevens' style, but things are a little more simplified here. Which, with the additions of Popeye and Tintin, acts as a really good middle-ground between Steven's elegant linework, the overtly cartoony style of E.C. Segar, and the ligne claire style of Hergé. While none of the characters 100% match their original design specs, all of them remain easily visually recognizeable and none of them feel out of place relative to one another either.

It's a fairly quick and enjoyable read, as long as you can get over yourself about largely inconsequential points of continuity. 😉 I think it's worth picking up if you're a fan of The Rocketeer, the original King Kong film, or just that type of pulpy adventure in general. The four-issue series wrapped up a couple months back, but there will be a trade paperback collection out in November for $17.99 US.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S., which is a federal holiday dedicated to honoring working class folks. Except it's becoming less and less relevant for people.

First, how many millions of Americans have to go to work today? McDonald's is open. So is Target. Walmart. Best Buy. OfficeMax. Just about every retailer in the country, really. The people who are, you know, laboring have a holiday honoring their labor, but they still have to labor through it.

The second big group of Americans who have to work today consists of those working in a freelance capacity. People who are their own boss, and take jobs on an ad hoc basis. They have deadlines to meet with their projects and, while there likely aren't any deadlines today, they still are expected to get their work done by a certain day/time, regardless of what's going on between now and then. If they work super-hard and their projects are going well, that's great; they might be able to relax a bit. But often, they have to work right through holidays and weekends because their clients still want their work by that deadline and if they don't deliver, there's likely someone else who will.

Comic creators largely fall into this second camp. Whether you're working for Marvel or DC, or you're doing a small, independent book, you've still got deadlines that don't care what holidays come up. Let me ask you about any webcomics or newspaper strips you might regularly read? How many of them ran as usual today? Granted, a lot of them would've created today's strip a little while ago, but if they took today off, there'd be a hole in their update schedule in a week or three.

The comic news sites -- The Beat, ICv2, Graphic Policy, CBR, etc. -- they all posted new content today. Again, some of it could have been set up in advance, but certainly not all of it.

No rest for the weary and all that.

So I would like to take a moment to say a special thank you to all the comic creators and freelancers who've spent much of the day working in spite of the federal holiday. Your stories entertain and inform me (else I wouldn't continue reading them!) and I appreciate that you work harder than I do with my regular 8-to-5, holidays off job. Even if I don't read what you create today for another week or three or five, I am thinking about the work you're putting in today, and I appreciate that.

Thank you.