Since no one is able to get together in person, a lot of people have been resorting to video conferencing. And while that's typically not as satisfying for the individuals involved, it does mean that a lot more is being recorded and is made available online for others to enjoy. Here's some of what I've found over the past few days...

• Tales from the Grim has hosted a pair Marvel superheroes RPG games called "Avengers: Until the End of the World" for charity. The players are all folks from the comics creators community. Here's Part 1 and Part 2. One more should be coming soon!
  
• Comics Relief from FirstSecond Books was an online festival where a lot of comics folks talking about various aspects of their process. They've got six videos with folks like Gene Luen Yang, Lucy Knisley and Kat Leyh.
• Gene Luen Yang was also the keynote speaker for Everywhere Book Fest! This one's not exclusively comics, but there's more than a few comics folks that show up including Marie Lu, Scottie Young, Preti Chhibber, and Saladin Ahmed, among others!
  
• Mark Allard-Will has been running a Quaratine Reads series where he interviews comics creators. His most recent was with Brian Bolland!
  
• This one is a little more widely reported (it's coming from The Beat, after all) but since Dan Shahin did talk with Steve Geppi, Mike Richardson, Gary Groth, Dirk Wood, and Ross Richie, I did want to call out the video itself. I suspect a number of folks read through the summary and forgot the video was even there to take in for yourself!
  
• The Ohio State University Libraries has been posting short Curator Talks pieces from their collections, and two of them so far feature Jenny Robb, curator of The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, talking about "A Female Suffrage Fancy" and "Jiji Manga."
  

There's enough here for at least a few days of non-stop binge-watching if you're so inclined!

I wrote this in 2012 when I was still living in southwest Ohio. Kind of naively quaint and privileged. I seem to recall reading somewhere that if you can't look back at your work from five years earlier and not cringe, you're not growing as a creator. I believe that was originally intended specifically in relation to visual artists, but I think it applies to all creatives endeavors. I even half-wonder if you can broaden that to say that if you look back at your ideologies from five years earlier and not cringe, you're not growing, period.

---

I was reading Warren Ellis' Ignition City this afternoon. Good story, as is pretty typical with Ellis. The story, not surprisingly, mostly takes place in Ignition City which can probably be described as a shithole built largely with half-wrecked spaceships. Kind of like Mos Eisley, except where the Star Wars city might be described as far from the bright center of the universe, Ignition City really is the cesspool toilet that the universe crapped out, spit on and then decided to use as toxic waste dump.

A lot of Ellis' stories are set in dystopian societies of some sort. Ignition City just happened to have a decidedly more visible component to it. As is also fairly typical in a dystopian story (not just those from Ellis) most of the population just live within the confines of the dystopia, and try to make do as best as they can. It's usually only one person or a small handful people (usually the protagonists) who're able to affect change. Your Elijah Snow or Spider Jerusalem or whomever.

So I'm sitting here in southwest Ohio, pondering the nature of dystopias. Interesting thing about them: they're not really dystopias for everybody. If everybody were that bad off, people would be able to change things a little more readily. No, there's generally a small, elite group at the top of the food chain who are controlling some scarce resource(s) and living comfortably while forcing the rest of the population into some kind of dismal servitude. You look at 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 or THX 1138 or whatever, and there's a very clear, virtually insurmountable, separation between the vast majority of the population and the people at the top. Because they're able to control that resource, that gives them power to keep the other 99% of the general population oppressed.

Of course, most dystopian stories have a somewhat exaggerated locus of control. The ability to clamp down on all of the resources needed to have that level of control isn't functionally possible in this day and age, I don't think. At least not to the extent that we see in stories.

But they still exist after a fashion. Especially when you consider that one person's dystopia is another's luxury. This corner of Ohio is only just barely in the "Bible Belt" but I still find it far too religious for my tastes. (I pass a billboard on the way to work every day which posits the mind-blowingly absurd notion that Jesus was more responsible for my ability to read than my parents and all of my school teachers. Not to mention that I also live near the site of Touchdown Jesus -- built well after I moved here, by the way.) Not exactly "living in hell" for me since I can generally escape the torment from church-goers -- and Tea Partiers and bigots and the population of a district that always (and I mean, always) votes 180° opposite of me in each and every election regardless of the issue -- by holing up in my own home, but it's only a small island of respite. So you might call the overall area a dystopia for me.

But just like fictional dystopias don't exist in the same fashion in real life, there will not be a hero to come down and put things right. Because it's not just handful of people that are running things, but a larger group. One that can't be removed by one person, or even a group of them. It would take a significant population influx to change the area, and anyone who might want to live differently can just as easily go somewhere else that is more accepting of them instead of moving here.

Ultimately, dystopian fictions are like any other fictions in that they're an abstraction of reality. And while it might be easy to look at Doktor Sleepless and see parallels in the real world, they're not perfect analogies. Maybe it's not an problem that the rest of you have, but I'm enough of a cynic that I have to remind myself of exactly that from time to time.

Marvel just announced that it's making a decent number of mostly recent comics available for free digitally via their Marvel Unlimited program as well as comiXology. I can't find any explicit marketing messages from them that are tied to this, but it seems as if Marvel is doing it as a means to keep readers interested in their comics until their printed comics make it back into stores. (Their current schedule has books beginning to roll out on May 27.)

What they're releasing digitally for free -- temporarily, it seems -- is actually a good chunk of stories, many of which are the entire run of limited series like Secret Invasion, Secret Wars (2015), Captain America: Winter in America, Straight Out of Brooklyn, Captain America: Sam Wilson, and Dr. Strange: The Way of the Weird as well as some older material like Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man vol. 1 and Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne vol. 1. Plus some collected runs of ongoing titles like Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, Venom, and Incredible Hulk. There's a not insignificant number of comics in there!

I don't know how/why Marvel selected those particular ones to make available. There's clearly some intent on getting a variety of characters (with the notable exception of the X-Men) but whether or not these tie into any upcoming new stories, I can't say. And while it's mostly newer material, the inclusion of some 1960s Spider-Man and 1980s Fantastic Four might be of interest to older fans. So the intent seems to be to appeal to a reasonably wide variety of fans.

This does two things for Marvel. First, it keeps their characters more towards the forefront of readers' minds. There's enough material there to keep readers busy for at least a little while, and it's hopefully enough to tide them over until the end of the month. Second, it makes Marvel look pretty benevolent. "Hey, fans, we know you want to read more of our comic stories, so here's a bunch for free!" But the thing that I feel compelled to point out here is: this costs them nothing. Literally nothing.

These aren't new stories, obviously, but they're not even newly scanned or anything. These are all comics that were already in their system; it took a developer all of ten seconds to switch the prices on them to zero. There was more cost involved in whatever meeting Marvel had to decide which comics to make available.

There's not even an opportunity cost here! The most recent comics here date from 2018; pretty much anyone who was going to buy either the single issues or the trade paperbacks has already done so. The handful of people who might buy one of those trades now will likely do so because a retailer already has it in stock -- meaning the retailer already purchased it and Marvel made it's money a long time ago. Plus it's not like people aren't going to buy the Secret Invasion TPB because it was available for free digitally for a month (or however long they opt to leave these free). We've known for a while now that, generally speaking, digital comics readers have almost no overlap with print comics readers.

I say none of this as any sort of condemnation of Marvel. It's a pretty obvious business move, honestly, and I'm more surprised they didn't do this earlier. (Didn't they have a promotion several years back where they released, like, 1000 issues for free for a limited time?) Less surprising, but more revealing, is that DC isn't doing anything comparable. DC's digital policies seem unchanged, and they continue to hold a very tight leash on what they make freely available. How/why in 2020 they continue to have such a Luddite approach to marketing/selling comics digitally, I have no clue.

Seriously, this is an easy win for Marvel. Like I said, zero cost for a huge amount of goodwill and promotion. And especially next to DC's archaic position, Marvel looks golden. It really is mind-boggling to me that DC can't seem to get their act together on digital. This decision is a no-brainer that any first-year business undergrad could make. Sure, they still make the majority of their sales in print, so I wouldn't expect them to be super adept at digital marketing and sales, but to be so obtuse when it comes to digital requires a LOT of effort!

I've been trying to support independent creators and publishers during this lockdown, and one of the books I picked up recently was Seth Tobocman's The Face of Struggle from AK Press. Tobocman's intent was to to relay a very contemporary allegory in the same vein as Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward had done a century earlier. I don't believe Tobocman is using actual woodcuts here, but he carries much the same design sensibility, including a lack of any words.

The story is fairly short, a mere 37 individual images. But the images are powerful, and strongly resonate. The first 30 basically relay Trump's rise to the Presidency and his first years in office. It's not a literal recounting of events, but a more impressionistic one. However, the individual allegories used to relay collections of events are both striking and unmistakable. Tobocman pulls no punches by showing Trump taking the hair and actual face of a woman whose been fighting for justice and equal rights and peace, and then using them as a mask to incite violence and fear. The last few pages turn towards a more optimistic ending as Trump is found guilty, the police turn on him, and people rejoice after stabbing him to death. I say optimistic, of course, because Tobocman clearly is showing justice being served, but given that Trump has bought his way out of justice for over seven decades, I'm skeptical it's about to be served now.

With only 37 images, none of them containing any words, The Face of Struggle is initially a very quick read. I say "initially" because if you read through it just for the superficial story, it does go by pretty quickly. But after you finish, you'll find some of the images stick with you and you flip back to look at them again. And as you're flipping through to the right page, you catch other images and those catch your attention too now. And as you start studying the individual images, you realize that, despite seeming to very simple on the surface, they all actually do an amazing job of capturing entire episodes pretty masterfully. For example, Hurricane Maria, the devastation it wracked on Puerto Rico, and Trump's response are summed up in a single image. It's deceptively simple, yet it is absolutely unmistakable what Tobocman is trying to convey there.

Tobocman's comic here is perhaps THE most openly oppositional to Trump I've come across. It's not like a political cartoon that might focus on a single thing Trump said or did, or maybe criticizing one of his policies. No, this is a more extended indictment of... well, I don't want to say everything because Trump has done a HELL OF A LOT OF AWFUL THINGS, but this does have a great deal of the evil Trump has perpetrated in office. Make no mistake, Trump is evil. He's encouraging Klansmen, he's ordering murders, he's making disasters even worse. Both in the story and in real life. Like I said, the book isn't a literal recounting of events but it's definitely one of those books that speaks the truth.

The art here is incredible in its power. The story is blunt, but necessarily so, I think. The Twitter feed for President SuperVillain puts Trump's actual words into the mouth of the Red Skull, and you frighteningly can't tell the difference. Which is kind of the joke of the whole thing, right? It's funny because it's comparing Trump's actual speech to the dialogue of an often badly written comic book villain. The tension between the two ("No one would actually say that, would they?") yields a humorous response. But that also makes it safe. What we see in The Face of Struggle is the reality of the situation. It's still taking actual events and putting them into an over-the-top comic format, but doing so as a direct allegory carries more weight to it, and says, "No, this is not something to laugh at -- this is some really mind-bogglingly terrifying shit!" And I think we need more of that.

Trump is incomprehensibly dangerous. People keep coming back surprised that he's done something even more awful than before, and I find myself saying over and over again, "There is no bottom here. Think of the most one-dimensional evil-for-evil's-sake Saturday morning cartoon villain you've ever seen, and you'll START to get a sense of Trump's motives. Nothing -- NOTHING!!! -- is beneath him." Tobocman is the first cartoonist I've seen that seems to get that. And he does so with a masterful eye on simplifying complex stories and ideas into strangely simple drawings. This won't be a book to eat up a lot of your free time while you read it in lockdown, but it will eat up a lot of your brain space as you mull things over for days on end.

I originally ran this piece about the Yellow Kid music almost a decade ago. Since that time, Christina Meyer has come out with an excellent book examining at the mass market appeal, including the commercialization, of the Yellow Kid: Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. I'm no Yellow Kid expert, by any means, but it was seriously the most enlightening work I've read about the Yellow Kid. It puts this music into a much better context than when I first wrote this post and really speaks to the speed with which people were trying to capitalize on the comic strip's success!

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So you're familiar with Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid as one of the original newspaper comic strip characters, right? He debuted in Truth magazine #372 in 1894 and quickly moved over to Hogan's Alley strip, published in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Outcault was hired away by William Randolph Hearst a year later, but Pulitzer retained the rights to Hogan's Alley. Outcault continued drawing the Yellow Kid, though, in comics of various names for Heart's New York Journal American.

The Yellow Kid became immensely popular very quickly, and many people tried to capitalize on that with their own marketing efforts. Mary Wood cites the character appearing on "pins, cigar boxes, sheet music, dolls, cap bombs, postcards, and a number of spin-off variety skits and theater productions." Some of these were officially licensed, some not.

One of those pieces I stumbled upon recently was a scan of sheet music. A piece called "The Yellow Kid: The Latest and the Greatest." It's adorned with Outcault drawings of the Yellow Kid, evidently done expressly for sheet music, if not this sheet music specifically. The Kid is dancing and singing around the margins, very visibly holding sheet music himself.

It strikes me as kind of an odd concept, since the Yellow Kid famously never actually spoke. Anything the character "said" was displayed on his dressing gown. So to provide music to a deliberately mute comic strip comes across as a curious pairing. But I supposed that people have always liked music, and since recordings were unavailable in the 1890s, sheet music was the way to go. Paper was relatively cheap, too, so if you already had a printing press, throwing together something like this would have been an easy way to make a buck, I suppose.

The music was written (and published) by Homer Tourjee with words by William Friday, Jr. There's a 1895 copyright on the page, but the lyrical reference to The Journal suggests it was actually 1896. Interestingly, I found another piece of sheet music dated 1896 called "The Dugan Kid Who Lives in Hogan's Alley." It's the exact same music, with slightly altered lyrics.

But what does it sound like?

So what I've done is taken the sheet music and transcribed it, note for note, into Garage Band. As I was going through, there were several things that struck me about the piece. It's written pretty simply; almost the entire song is in quarter notes and it's got what I would consider a slow pace. With that, though, there's a time change for the chorus, going from 4/4 to 3/4 and the transition between the two might be described, at best, as awkward. There were also several instances where the notation doesn't make sense -- notes that don't really make chords, rhythms that don't really fit in place, lyrics that don't line up with the music. If you take the piece as it's written, it's not all that good. I eventually found a version of this online where someone had actually arranged it so it sounds half-decent, but that's not what was written. The link below is what I put together, picking up a strictly literal interpretation of what was on the sheet music.

Play The Yellow Kid: The Latest & The Greatest

Let me reiterate: this is NOT somebody playing the music badly; this is how it was written! The chorus is meant to be played twice through each time, but it was honestly getting hard for me to keep listening to it, so I opted for just once each. The full lyrics are at the end of the post if you want to try follow along. (Like I said, though, they don't always line up with the music, so it can be a bit difficult in places.)

I would chalk the poor quality of this song up to the commercialism that allegedly drove Outcault from continuing with the character a couple years later. Recall that this was licensed, composed, written and published within a year of Yellow Kid's debut. It was most likely scribbled down hastily by Tourjee, typeset by someone else who probably had no real musical knowledge and edited quickly, if at all. Any "quirks" you might hear from someone playing would probably be attributed to the pianist and dismissed.

The song sounds very much in the style of the late 1800s, but it's almost refreshing to know that the crass commercialism we see in America today isn't entirely new.

LYRICS
Who doesn't know the "Dugan Kid"
He is the very latest
You'll find his pictures in the Journal every Sunday morn
He wears a mellow yellow dress
Of kids he is the greatest
Because he is the "slickest kid" that ever yet was born

Although but three or four years old
He's quite well known to fame
E'en though he has a homely face
Likewise a homely name
But he takes in all the picnics
Doesn't miss a baseball game
The "Dugan Kid" the latest up-to-datest

CHORUS
He's a plain little chap
From the heart of New York
Is the gay little Dugan boy
With smiles so sunny and ears so funny
He's New York's joy
When the band starts to play, is he in it?
"Well Say," Dugan's out of sight
For he's a corker a born New Yorker
And he's all right.

Some of his slang expressions
Have completely caught the city
You can hear them if you listen on the street most ev'ry day
Now though young Dugan's but a kid
His talk is often witty
And no matter where this urchin goes he's sure to have his say
When ever he gets rattled
He will holler "Hully Gee
Dere isn't any duck in town can get away wid me
For I'm a holy terror
When my fur is ruffled, see"
Says the "Dugan Kid" the latest up-to-datest

CHORUS
He's a plain little chap
From the heart of New York
Is the gay little Dugan boy
With smiles so sunny and easy so funny
He's New York's joy
When the band starts to play, is he in it?
"Well Say," Dugan's out of sight
For he's a corker a born New Yorker
And he's all right.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: History of the Marvel Universe Review
https://ift.tt/3aGT0jR

Kleefeld on Comics: Audio Interview Links
https://ift.tt/2W53cNT

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Defining Success, Part 3
https://t.co/jsQLjvZmxd

Kleefeld on Comics: Astronauts Review
https://ift.tt/2xjxPa7

Kleefeld on Comics: Fantastic Four 2099
https://ift.tt/2WgYyMK

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Success—Easier or More Difficult?, Part 1
https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: Comics to Avoid
https://ift.tt/3f8QtlU

See the comics display in this picture? On Tuesday, May 5 those will be popping up in over 3,000 Walmart stores across the US. You probably last heard about comics and Walmart when DC struck a deal to get some of their titles into stores a couple years ago. These comics, however, are not published by DC, but independent publisher Allegiance Arts and Entertainment.

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.