- Voting is now open for the Autostraddle Comic and Sequential Art Awards, "the only comic award that focuses on feminist themes and queer women’s representation in comics."
- Gene Luen Yang reflects on the 10th anniversary of American Born Chinese and talks about his current project, Secret Coders, over at Entertainment Weekly.
- Responding to that Augie De Blieck piece from a week and a half ago, Hervé St-Louis says "Comic Journalism Is Not Dead!"
Now, a few years earlier, I had been gifted a trade paperback of the middle of Hickman's run and, while I liked the basic characterizations, found that the stories were very dense with then-current continuity. So even as a FF fan going back a quarter century, I was at a bit of a loss on multiple occasions.
But now I had the opportunity to read everything Hickman did in order. I also basically did it in one sitting too. So what did I think?
Well, I have to say that I liked it a lot better than the short snippet I had read previously would suggest. The three main problems I had with that trade were 1) the dense continuity that doesn't make much sense to an outsider, 2) the lack of attention given to the Invisible Woman, and 3) the lack of focus showcasing the FF as a family as they're adventuring. With the broader context of the rest of Hickman's run, those issues were largely addressed. The continuity concerns were largely relative and exclusive to Hickman's work, and all of the concepts and ideas were introduced in earlier issues. Susan does get some good spotlight pieces in other stories, as does the FF's functioning as a family.
I also liked that Hickman did not have any major line-wide crossovers to deal with. This was pretty much exclusively his story, and he didn't have to shoehorn in some Avengers plot or anything. But there are still nods to the outside Marvel Universe (obviously, with Spider-Man joining the team for a while, and some Avengers cameos) so it doesn't feel as if the FF were working in isolation. That's an especially good thing, given how dense Hickman's overall run is.
I found the storytelling enjoyable overall. Hickman was clearly playing a long game here, letting plots slowly percolate in the background for a number of issues before coming to a head. And many of the stories that might have seemed as one-offs at the time wound up tying back into a larger story by the end of his run.
What was impressive was the size and scope of what he did. There were clearly too many stories for one title, and the first ongoing spin-off title (simply called FF) was indeed necessary just to tell all the stories he was trying to get in. Honestly, a third title might have been useful too. That he crammed in as much as he did into his 60-ish issues is no small feat. That it still made sense at all deserves kudos.
If there is a problem with Hickman's run, it's that I don't think it can be really separated. You almost have to read the whole thing (both titles) from beginning to end. Marvel did smartly collect everything, but it still required TWO omnibus packages. I think that's a lot to ask of readers, particularly when the real payoff is only after having gotten through to the last issue or two.
I wonder if Marvel's apparent pettiness with Fox Studios, who currently has the movie rights to the characters, worked in Hickman's favor here? After all, with Marvel downplaying the title (and now cancelling it entirely) to theoretically hinder the movie's potential success, Hickman may have been given a creative freedom to write this extended narrative. He didn't have to tie in to any huge marketing campaigns or add story elements/characters for the sake of making recognizable the characters movie audiences might be familiar with.
I'll admit that going back to sort through these issues was a bit of a slog. The original title ran up until #588, then switched over to FF for eleven issues before restarting Fantastic Four at #600 while still alternating with the FF for another year. Plus there was a weird #605.1 wedged between #605 and #606. While it probably made more sense if you were keeping up at the time, sorting through back issue bins for this was kind of a pain. The remaining numbering looks to be a bit of a mess too. I don't envy any libraries trying to catalog all this!
But, like I said, once I sorted through all the barriers that were preventing me from starting this run, I did find the overall read quite enjoyable and it's good to know that something akin to my version of the FF was still out there at least as late as 2012.
Labor Day became an official U.S. federal holiday in 1894 to celebrate the "labor movement and the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the country." (From Wikipedia.) In the mid-1960s, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen put together a few comic books highlighting the benefits of unions and union workers. So to celebrate Labor Day today, I thought I'd run the first of them here. It's called Cliff Merritt Sets the Record Straight with art by Al Williamson (yes, that Al Williamson!) and Angelo Torres...
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
Michael Cavna has a very good piece on the use of the cartoon obituary. After a celebrity's death, many cartoonists draw up something noting the event. Sometimes they simply draw the person in their own style with an "in memory of" type of inscription, other times they try to do something funny. I suppose partially to lighten the somberness of the death itself, and partially because they might hold to the idea that all cartoons should be funny. Or at least all of their cartoons.
Cavna, and several of the cartoonists he talks to, note the commonness of having the celebrity walking through the gates of Heaven or talking with St. Peter or something along those lines. And, sure enough, Gene Wilder's death earlier this week resulted in some of those as well...
What the artist is effectively doing is superimposing their own religious beliefs onto someone else. The person who died was clearly wrong when it came to their religious beliefs, as the Christian interpretation of the afterlife is obviously correct. You see the same thing with all celebrity deaths. Regardless of what the person actually believed, there are inevitably cartoons of them going to a Christian version of Heaven. Muhammad Ali was a Muslim. George Carlin was an atheist. Steve Jobs was a Buddist. David Bowie was agnostic -- "not quite an atheist." They all had cartoons depicting them going to Heaven.
One could argue that the iconography of St. Peter at the gates transcends Christianity and is a well-known enough visual that many non-Christians get the basic idea. This makes sense from the standpoint of a cartoonist's basic job of using iconography to get ideas across quickly. But it also shows a disrespect for the deceased and, more significantly, for the loved ones of the deceased who know that the person wouldn't want to be associated with a religion they didn't believe in.
Flip the situation around for a minute as a thought experiment. If you're a Christian yourself, would you want to be remembered as stepping into Jannah? (We'll set aside the notion that non-Muslims aren't actually allowed in.) The theology says it's a literal paradise, but would you want people to think that was what happened to you after you died? Or what if you were remembered as having Chitragupta tick off your deeds before handing you over to Yama? Or your body was mummified and your spirit was brought before Anubis to be judged?
I could keep going, but my point is that you wouldn't want to be remembered as something you're not. Why wouldn't that apply to anyone who doesn't believe in God, Heaven, and St. Peter at the pearly gates? Why would you think it's okay as an artist to memorialize someone in a way that's flatly at odds with their beliefs? If you're trying to pay your respects to someone, doesn't that necessarily mean you should avoid disrespecting their beliefs?
Cavna, and several of the cartoonists he talks to, note the commonness of having the celebrity walking through the gates of Heaven or talking with St. Peter or something along those lines. And, sure enough, Gene Wilder's death earlier this week resulted in some of those as well...
I’m going to tell you what my religion is. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Period. Terminato. Finito. I have no other religion... I don’t believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion.So the notion of Wilder meeting with St. Peter makes no sense twice over! If Wilder didn't believe in God, he would never have pictured himself going to Heaven. But even if you want to assert -- against his stated thoughts on the matter -- that he was never fully atheist and held some portion of Judaism in the back of his mind, Peter was a New Testament figure and not a part of Jewish theology in the first place!
What the artist is effectively doing is superimposing their own religious beliefs onto someone else. The person who died was clearly wrong when it came to their religious beliefs, as the Christian interpretation of the afterlife is obviously correct. You see the same thing with all celebrity deaths. Regardless of what the person actually believed, there are inevitably cartoons of them going to a Christian version of Heaven. Muhammad Ali was a Muslim. George Carlin was an atheist. Steve Jobs was a Buddist. David Bowie was agnostic -- "not quite an atheist." They all had cartoons depicting them going to Heaven.
One could argue that the iconography of St. Peter at the gates transcends Christianity and is a well-known enough visual that many non-Christians get the basic idea. This makes sense from the standpoint of a cartoonist's basic job of using iconography to get ideas across quickly. But it also shows a disrespect for the deceased and, more significantly, for the loved ones of the deceased who know that the person wouldn't want to be associated with a religion they didn't believe in.
Flip the situation around for a minute as a thought experiment. If you're a Christian yourself, would you want to be remembered as stepping into Jannah? (We'll set aside the notion that non-Muslims aren't actually allowed in.) The theology says it's a literal paradise, but would you want people to think that was what happened to you after you died? Or what if you were remembered as having Chitragupta tick off your deeds before handing you over to Yama? Or your body was mummified and your spirit was brought before Anubis to be judged?
I could keep going, but my point is that you wouldn't want to be remembered as something you're not. Why wouldn't that apply to anyone who doesn't believe in God, Heaven, and St. Peter at the pearly gates? Why would you think it's okay as an artist to memorialize someone in a way that's flatly at odds with their beliefs? If you're trying to pay your respects to someone, doesn't that necessarily mean you should avoid disrespecting their beliefs?
My wife and I were at a party at a friend's place back in February. Maybe a couple dozen people, and we knew many of them already, so we were all talking and laughing and having a good time. At some point, I walked into a room where my wife was chatting with several of our friends about Beyonce's Lemonade album, which had dropped earlier that day. Now me? I'm not much of a Beyonce fan, but I'd been hearing chatter about it online throughout the morning, so I made a point of watching the whole thing that afternoon, knowing many people who would be at the party were Beyonce fans and the album was almost certain to be a topic of discussion.
So stepping into this conversation my wife was already involved in, I responded to someone's comment in a way that clearly indicated I had watched it. The discussion stopped for a second as everybody expressed surprise that I'd seen it already -- like I said, it had only dropped earlier that day and I don't exactly fit the mold for Beyonce fans. My wife, who didn't know I had seen it, calmly noted that she wasn't surprised because I was the most woke white guy she knows. (I suppose I should make clear that she's Black.) I take that compliment as something of a point of pride (I would never try to claim that badge for myself and I don't know that I deserve being called woke given how very little racism I've seen first-hand) but, really, that's a sad state of society that a putz like me is more woke than any of the friends and co-workers my wife has known longer than me.
The question, then, is how did I get woke? The town I grew up in certainly didn't afford many opportunities to interact with minorities of any sort. It was a small, extremely homogeneous place. The first Black family didn't move in until I was almost in high school. The closest I really interacted with any non-whites was watching Sesame Street when I was younger and The Cosby Show as I got older. So what happened?
One of our friends at that party had actually asked me exactly that maybe a year earlier. I didn't have a good answer for him at the time but, on thinking about it, I think a lot of it had to do with Frederick Douglass.
See, my father had salvaged most of a set of Golden Legacy comics from a Cleveland school that was going to throw them out. I expect he just thought he was helping to feed my interest in comics and, hey, if they were educational, so much the better. Whatever the case, I did indeed read through all of them and picked up on some things that I hadn't yet learned in school. One thing that stood out, however, was the Frederick Douglass' story took up TWO issues instead of the one that everyone else got. They went into a lot more detail, and clearly emphasized Douglass' importance in getting slaves their freedom.
As it happened, we were covering about that same period in my history class at the time. And within a week of reading that Douglass biography, sure enough, his name popped up in my history textbook! He was talked about for all of two sentences, and then was never mentioned again. I scanned through the next parts of the textbook looking for other mentions to no avail. Here's someone who I just learned was instrumental in freeing the slaves, and he barely gets a passing mention in our textbook!
That experience did two things for me. First, and most obviously, I saw via the biography itself that Blacks could be strong and talented and important people in history. I was certainly aware of talented Black actors and athletes and such, but the notion that they could also be powerful statesmen and history-worthy wasn't something had ever really be said to me before. Second, it forced me to wonder what else we weren't hearing about in school. And how our textbooks might be biased. It made me start to really think critically about what I was learning, and that what we were being fed in class wasn't necessarily accurate.
That further means that I brought that skepticism to other venues as well. I tried applying that to watching the news or hearing speakers or reading books and magazines. I'm obviously not always able to get a complete picture of things, but I at least am aware of that and try not to take everything on face value. That includes what the media, politicians, police, and other "authority" figures tell us. So when I first started dating my wife, her experiences filled in many of the holes that I already knew were there.
All because of a well-timed Frederick Douglass comic book.
So stepping into this conversation my wife was already involved in, I responded to someone's comment in a way that clearly indicated I had watched it. The discussion stopped for a second as everybody expressed surprise that I'd seen it already -- like I said, it had only dropped earlier that day and I don't exactly fit the mold for Beyonce fans. My wife, who didn't know I had seen it, calmly noted that she wasn't surprised because I was the most woke white guy she knows. (I suppose I should make clear that she's Black.) I take that compliment as something of a point of pride (I would never try to claim that badge for myself and I don't know that I deserve being called woke given how very little racism I've seen first-hand) but, really, that's a sad state of society that a putz like me is more woke than any of the friends and co-workers my wife has known longer than me.
The question, then, is how did I get woke? The town I grew up in certainly didn't afford many opportunities to interact with minorities of any sort. It was a small, extremely homogeneous place. The first Black family didn't move in until I was almost in high school. The closest I really interacted with any non-whites was watching Sesame Street when I was younger and The Cosby Show as I got older. So what happened?
See, my father had salvaged most of a set of Golden Legacy comics from a Cleveland school that was going to throw them out. I expect he just thought he was helping to feed my interest in comics and, hey, if they were educational, so much the better. Whatever the case, I did indeed read through all of them and picked up on some things that I hadn't yet learned in school. One thing that stood out, however, was the Frederick Douglass' story took up TWO issues instead of the one that everyone else got. They went into a lot more detail, and clearly emphasized Douglass' importance in getting slaves their freedom.
As it happened, we were covering about that same period in my history class at the time. And within a week of reading that Douglass biography, sure enough, his name popped up in my history textbook! He was talked about for all of two sentences, and then was never mentioned again. I scanned through the next parts of the textbook looking for other mentions to no avail. Here's someone who I just learned was instrumental in freeing the slaves, and he barely gets a passing mention in our textbook!
That experience did two things for me. First, and most obviously, I saw via the biography itself that Blacks could be strong and talented and important people in history. I was certainly aware of talented Black actors and athletes and such, but the notion that they could also be powerful statesmen and history-worthy wasn't something had ever really be said to me before. Second, it forced me to wonder what else we weren't hearing about in school. And how our textbooks might be biased. It made me start to really think critically about what I was learning, and that what we were being fed in class wasn't necessarily accurate.
That further means that I brought that skepticism to other venues as well. I tried applying that to watching the news or hearing speakers or reading books and magazines. I'm obviously not always able to get a complete picture of things, but I at least am aware of that and try not to take everything on face value. That includes what the media, politicians, police, and other "authority" figures tell us. So when I first started dating my wife, her experiences filled in many of the holes that I already knew were there.
All because of a well-timed Frederick Douglass comic book.
