I have to believe that whenever Marvel had some initial discussions with Neal Adams about what would eventually become Fantastic Four: Antithesis, everyone at Marvel said, "Neal Adams? Hell, yeah! Whatever he wants to work on!" I totally get that. The man is a wicked talented artist, and has been for decades. And looking through Antithesis #1, it's easy to see he hasn't lost any of that ability over the years!

That being said, though, I don't think he should work on the Fantastic Four. It took me a little while to sort out why, though.

First, what's evident on the cover is that he draws the Thing, to my eye, very awkwardly. In the first place, he shouldn't be drawn with a neck; his head rests right on his shoulders. Adams also draws him with a protruding lower jaw, giving him a more ape-like appeance. More subtle, but still significant, is that he draws his poses and movements as if he's simply a strongman in a bodysuit painted with rock patterns. His whole physicality is "off" as a result.

Reed Richards is also a problem. Particularly his stretching. There are actually two issues I see here. In the first place, Adams just has Reed stretching all over the place in a seemingly random, uncontrolled fashion. This approach would work for Plastic Man and perhaps Metamorpho, but it comes across as pretty haphazard for Mr. Fantastic. Almost as noteworthy, though, is that Adams drops pretty much all detail from the parts Reed is stretching. That might be fine for artists who are light on details to begin with, but Adams includes a phenomenal amount of detail on the character, right up until the point where he starts stretching. And then it just becomes two lines for as long as the limbs are doing whatever crazed loops Adams seems to arbitrarily fill up space with.

Lastly, Adams draws the entire team's uniforms as if it were just painted on. The uniforms were originally designed by Jack Kirby more like jumpsuits, with folds and wrinkles. And even though artists like George Perez would sometimes make them more skin-tight, they still maintained at least some degree dimensionlity to them, bunching up a little at seams and corners for example. I'm not seeing any of that in Adams' work here.

These would all seem to be pretty superficial issues. But I think they speak to a lack of really understanding the characters. Adams is drawing superheroes here, but the FF -- while super-powered -- are fundamentally NOT superheroes; they're a family of adventurers. That's a different aesthetic. Similar, but different. Now you can certainly pull in different aesthetics if you're deliberately trying to subvert expectations or present a n alternate take on the genre trappings or something, but I don't get that sense here. This feels like it's trying to be a straight-forward Fantastic Four story, but with a visual approach that more befits Superman.

As this Dennis the Menace comic notes, it's National Preparedness Month. The question is: are you prepared? If you're like most Americans, probably not.

A few years ago, I noticed a couple of things. First, there was an increasing number of natural disasters that were causing larger and larger amounts of damage. Natural disasters, of course, have been around since literally the beginning of the planet, but climate change has had enough of an impact at this point that both their frequency and intensities are impossible to ignore regardless where you live. Second, the federal government is decreasingly able (or even willing!) to assist people who have been impacted by these disasters. Hurricane Katrina is kind of the poster child for this type of thing, but we're seeing it more and more. Worse still, we're also seeing clearly man-made disasters happening more and more as well. (Flint, MI still does not have clean water; a report last year classified over 47,000 of America's bridges as “structurally deficient.”) This means that you're more likely to get hit by a disaster, it will likely cause more damage than it the past, and you'll get less assistance.

So despite not living in an area prone to earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, or any other natural disasters, I began putting together an emergency preparedness kit. A crate of supplies that we could rely on in case we're cut off from... well, anything. Matches, first aid kit, flashlight, radio, multitool, etc. After I pulled some basics together, I expanded to include bottled water, MREs, camping supplies. My wife and I each put together a bag with spare clothes we could grab if we needed to race out the door. Extra food for the pets. A waterproof/fireproof lockbox with a handle for important papers. Rain barrels for non-potable water. A small generator. Everything we can think of (and afford!) to prepare ourselves for any sort of emergency.

Some of the basics here are spelled out on variety of websites of folks like the Red Cross and the ASPCA. But I found a lot of that to be dated. I mean, they are keeping up to date by mentioning things like extra phone chargers, but the thinking behind these sites still assumes the government will come to assist you in a few hours, maybe a day at most. So to get more/better information, you almost have to start looking at prepper culture.

There's a lot of overlap here with gun culture and there's an entire industry built up just around building underground bunkers/fall-out shelters that caters to this community. But there are some sane, pragmatic folks out there advocating prepping, once you filter out the deep conspiracy theorists that are genuinely fearful of a for-real zombie apocalypse. I would personally recommend ThePrepared.com They have a pretty comprehensive, but practical approach and they aren't just looking at things from a pure survivalist mentality. They really do have an interest in actual preparedness, and include a fair amount of information about getting your finances and legal paperwork in order.

As far as I can tell, though, there's nothing out there currently in comic form. There have been a few emergency preparedness comics that run a basic story about preparing for an emergency and make some high level recommendations, but they tend to be light on specifics. Which I suppose is good enough to get people thinking about it, but it doesn't do much beyond that. I've also seen a few comics that try to show a prepper or some survivalists actually in a SHTF setting, but the focus there seems to be on the story of survival after the event, not on the preparations beforehand.

So what I think we need is an instructables-type webcomic that shows how to go about getting prepared for emergency situations. I'm thinking it would need to be a webcomic versus a printed one because while individual portions would be linearly narrative, the overall piece would not be; so if you had it as a webcomic, people could check out the specific portions they felt were most important and/or they were most ignorant of without having to wade through everything else. There might be some sections that just talk about some of the supplies you'd need under different emergency scenarios, or for different geographies. Another section might look at administering first aid. Another might be packing a Go-Bag versus a Bug-Out-Bag, and why you might need one over the other. Maybe something about what you think you need versus what you most likely will need. What about legal emergencies? Do you have a will, power of attorney documents? Are they secure? Financial emergencies? How much should be in your emergency fund? Digital emergencies? Is all your data backed up?

The basic point of the whole thing would be how to implement the old Boy Scout motto of "be prepared." Obviously, not everybody was in Boy Scouts in the first place, and I'm sure many who were haven't thought about some of those ideas since before they had a spouse and kids and day-to-day job responsibilities and whatever. But, like I said, in a day and age where disasters are getting deadlier and more damaging, with less likelihood of any help from the government, I think something along these lines would prove incredibly beneficial if it were done with practical steps in mind. I think there's a lot of far-out-there people in the prepper community that give them all a bad name, and turn off others from even entertaining the notion of emergency preparedness -- you wind up sorting through bizarre conspiracy theories just to see a list of items to include in a Go-Bag! There are some decent folks out there with YouTube channels and such, which is great, but a webcomic would stand out since there simply isn't anything like it out there right now. People just starting out could check it out without getting scared by the crazy tinfoil hat types.

This strikes me as a huge missed opportunity!

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Long Live the King

https://ift.tt/3gOy39D

Kleefeld on Comics: Any Signature Experts Out There?

https://ift.tt/3gPn0NI

Patreon: Lessons in Annotating, Part 3  

https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: I Did It 35 Minutes Ago

https://ift.tt/3bmQOQo

Kleefeld on Comics: Personal Kickstarter Stats

https://ift.tt/3bl1PSw

Patreon: Lessons in Annotation, Part 5

https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: Friday Links

https://ift.tt/3h0QzvC

• The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium has posted a listing of all their events through the end of the year. Normally, these would only be availble in person, but this year, they're all being held online.
• I don't know that I've mentioned it previously but Rhymes With Orange's Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo have been playing with making interactive cartoons in Mental Canvas. The comics are created in a virtual 3-D space that viewers can navigate around to encounter different jokes and gags. Piccolo will actually be doing a live demo/webinar on September 15 at 1:00pm ET. You can register for the free event here.
• Ken Eppstein has posted the results of another survey he did on creators who table at shows. "The primary goal of this survey was to get some context on how artists participate with these transient marketplaces, what are the goals they have related to that participation, and what barriers they face in participation." He doesn't get into a whole lot of analysis here, but the results suggest a lot of flux was happening even before the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into public gatherings.
• Over at BoingBoing, Thomas Dunn has a nice piece on David F. Walker's and Sanford Greene's Bitter Root.
• 10 years of comics in Russian libraries. Pros and cons. Featuring Scott McCloud, Paul Gravette, Alexander Kunin, Stepan Shmytinsky, Dmitry Yakovlev, and Mikhail Wiesel. September 5th, 9:15-10:00pm Moscow time. How many more details do you need?
• Channel eNews has a brief report on how Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Hyung-Ju Ko -- the creative team behind Banned Book Club -- met with Changwon's Mayor Heo Seong-moo.

I logged into Kickstarter, as I do from time to time to check on the status of undelivered projects, and happened to catch that I have so far back 178 successful projects since 2011! I was surprised the number was that high, so I thought I'd dig into my numbers a little deeper to see what's what.

In addition to those 178 successful projects, I've also backed 20 that were not successful (either they didn't meet their goal, or they were cancelled by the originator), and there's one project actively underway that I'm a backer of. The vast majority of all 199 of these projects were comics related. Mostly the production of actual comics, but a few went to comics documentaries and such. I think there have been two that weren't comics related at all, and one of those was for my father.

Of the 178 projects, 142 of them are what I would consider complete. They've delivered whatever they were supposed to have delivered. Or at least something very nearly. That's an 80% hit rate. However, 18 of the projects that haven't come through have an "estimated delivery" that hasn't passed yet. If you factor those out, that bumps the successfully delivered project rate up to 89%.

I also have two projects that were partially delivered (one partial due to a unique item being lost in the mail) and two projects that weren't completed at all but the creator refunded my money. And, unfortunately, there is one confirmed case of deliberate fraud.

So out of those 178 successful projects, there are currently 13 that have passed their expected delivery date with nothing to show for it. Five of them have at least posted status updates within the past couple months, but the rest of them have gone for a year or longer with no communications at all. I've pretty much given up any hope of seeing those.

All of that brings us to the real point of concern. Of the 199 projects I have backed so far, I feel like I've been totally burned (where I don't think I'm ever getting anything) on 5% of them and singed (where I've only gotten partial delivery or the project is recklessly late and I'm pretty skeptical about it) on another 4%. That's... not terrible, but not all that great either.

Obviously, Kickstarter is not at fault here; delivery is dependent on the individual project owners. I've definitely become more careful of which projects I back (most of the projects I feel burned on had delivery dates from 2017) and I tend to focus on ones that are people with a proven track record in their field. I'm not going to back video game or animation projects from comics folks and vice-versa. If you don't have a history of delivered Kickstarters, do you have a history of doing professional work over time? I don't think most of these people are intending fraud, but I don't want to back projects where I think the creator might be in over their head. I want to support comics creators, particularly the independent folks who aren't going through a major publisher. But I also don't want to just throw my money away either; I've done too much of that already.

I saw Star Wars during its original theatrical run back in the '70s. I was probably only six when I saw it and, like a lot of other kids my age, it left an indelible mark on my childhood. I obviously didn't have a wide experience with science fiction or fantasy at that age, so a lot of the ideas and concepts in the movie were entirely new and different to me. I remember the cantina scene was a standout because it was the first time I'd really seen multiple alien races all mingling together; every other sci-fi story I knew from before then was humans and one other alien species, and always a very human-looking one at that! So the idea that this universe was inhabited by dozens of aliens races was mind-blowing to me!

As I got a little older, I started to analyze it a little more and looked at it from a stortelling perspective. I recall having to write a short story for our eighth grade English class, and I wrote a two or three page warrior versus dragon fantasy piece. I think it was a pretty standard save-the-village-from-the-evil-dragon concept, but I vividly remember starting the story in the midst of the battle bewteen the two. No setup, no introduction, nothing like that. I think the first line or two may have even just been sound effects of swords slashing and fire breathing and such. I also clearly recall doing that expressly because that's how Star Wars starts. It opens with a screen full of stars and then two spaceships fly through blasting at each other. "There'll be no escape for the Princess this time!" Wait, what? What princess? Who's she trying to escape from? What do you mean 'this time'?!?

By the time I was hitting puberty, I had already recognized that you could catch a reader's attention immediately by skipping the start of the story and just dropping them right into the middle of it. They'll catch up soon enough. Star Wars was one of the first pieces of fiction that made me re-think storytelling. You didn't need a "once upon a time" (which, technically, Star Wars has but I can guarantee you I didn't read that when I was six!), you didn't need to stop the narrative to introduce each character as they appeared... The information all needs to be present in the story, but it doesn't need to be laid out at the outset. I've watched the movie repeatedly over the years, and I absorbed a lot about narrative fiction by doing so.

Watchmen was also kind of like that for me. There's the notion running through most of the story that the captions don't necessarily have to tell the same story the artwork is telling. The captions' narrative can run parallel to the art's. That whole bit when Tales of the Black Freighter is introduced was impressive, and really caught my attention. But honestly, the standout moment -- in terms of my learning about storytelling -- can be boiled down to: "I did it 35 minutes ago."

It sounds a little cliche now to say that it's my favorite line from, well... anything by Alan Moore. But it was, for me at least, a really defining moment in learning about storytelling. I was still in my middle teens when I read that in '87 (when it was just a monthly limited series, and not a graphic novel, thankyouverymuch!!) but that line was revelatory. I mean, he's clearly breaking the norms of the genre; Ozymandias even contrasts himself against the stereotypical villain. But the notion that, as a writer, you could lay out the entire plot retroactively was mind-blowing. I'm pretty sure when I first read that, I just stopped cold on the page. "Can... can you even do that?"

Moore somewhat famously re-wrote the rules of comics with Watchmen. And it's been pointed out by many others in the past that many people took the wrong lessons from it, helping to give us a decade of superficially "grim and gritty" stories with no substance to them. Granted, there's a lot going on in Watchmen and much of it was novel at the time. But the next time, comics gets a re-defining how stories get told narrative, be sure to keep your eye on the story itself. Don't get distracted by the bells and whistles. Star Wars is really just a simple "hero's journey" story, but there's still narrative lessons that can be learned, if you look past the invented-for-the-movie special effects and innovative ship and set designs. Whatever the new whiz bang story is that everyone's trying to copy, keep your eyes on the story itself. The other bits might be flashy and clever and original, too, but it's the story that's drawing people to it.

I was reminded recently that my copy of Comics Between the Panels is signed by... someone. The book was given to me as a gift back in 2011, and the accompanying photo here shows the title page with someone's autograph on it. The problem is that I have no idea whose name that actually is.

The first letter of the signature is clearly a "B" so that kind of rules out the actual authors, Steve Duin and Mike Richardson. But the book is basically an encyclopedia of comics people, so it could reasonably be anyone mentioned in the book. The second mark seems to be a "W" but I've gone through all the "BW" comics people I can think of and this doesn't match any of their signatures. Bernie Wrightson, Barry Winsor-Smith, Bill Willingham, Bill Wray, Brian Wood... Nothing seems to match. It's possible that "W" might be something else, though. I could see it possibly being an "ill" to make the first name "Bill" or an "en" for "Ben"? But that last half is just a random squiggle as far as I can tell.

It's clearly dated May 26, 2004 so it's obviously not anyone who died before then. But it's been nearly a decade that I've had this and still have zero clue who it might be.

So let me put this out to the internet again... anyone have any idea whose signature this is?