When I was working on my MBA, I had to take a class on business ethics. This was not long after the Enron scandal and there was a pervading concern that business students simply weren't being taught about ethical behavior. Hence, all business students now had to take this class.
One of the things the professor brought to the class was a model for measuring how ethical a company was. You were supposed to rate companies along four major categories, and that got mapped out against a circle divided into quadrants. My first questions were, "Well, how are we actually supposed to rate these categories? What sort of value scale should we be using?" His answer was that zero represented the absolute worst possible set of ethics a company could have in that category, and a four was the absolute best possible... and everything else sort of fell in between somewhere. Based on the individual's value judgement. Irrespective of whatever knowledge they actually had of the company.
I was astounded; this was absolute garbage. He was placing fairly arbitrary and ill-defined limits on the scale in the first place, there was no real value criteria for rankings between those limits, and none of that really mattered anyway since people were just making a relatively uninformed value judgement anyway. "I rate this company a 3 because... well, they're better than some places I've heard about."
I kept questioning the professor, in various ways, on how this made any sense and what use might it actually be. He had broad answers that never really addressed my specific questions, and passed out to the class photocopies of some professional journal article that explained the system in elaborate detail. I noticed immediately that the article was written by the professor himself.
As I read through the piece, other articles were cited, as one would expect in a journal of that nature. But when I scanned through the bibliography, all of the cited articles that actually referred in any way to this ethics model were ALSO written or co-written by the professor. So I started doing some more research on my own, going through journal databases through the school library system. I could not find any references in any other articles anywhere to this model, nor could I find any articles that cited any of the professor's articles in any capacity at all.
I eventually took some of this to my brother-in-law. He was actually an undergraduate business professor at another university. He had never heard of the model or the professor, and shared my belief that this model wasn't worth anything.
The issue wasn't that the professor had a bad idea. We all have bad ideas. The issue wasn't that he was sharing his bad idea with other people, not really realizing it was a bad idea. That happens to everyone at some point. The problem this professor had was that he had so insulated himself from outside thoughts and was so enamored with his idea that he was unable to hear anything else. His field of vision was almost entirely self-referential.
I bring this up because a lot of would-be comic creators look towards comics for inspiration. If they want to draw or write Spider-Man comics, they look at Spider-Man comics and nothing else. Outside influences might be the FF or Avengers books when Spider-Man shows up there. Or maybe the Spider-Man movies or cartoons.
Now, I really hope you've heard this before and you're bored out of your skull from hearing it yet again. But try to draw in as many different ideas as possible from as wide a set of sources as possible. Don't just look at comics. Don't just look at pop culture/mass media. Looks at Egyptian heiroglyphs and Greek statues and listen to some Native American folk tales and watch a bunraku performance and try to sort through a Mummenschanz show...
Got all that? It sounds kind of trite, but try to make a point to take in ideas you wouldn't normally. Force yourself through a book that you don't think is written well. Watch a movie in a genre you don't normally like. I'm not saying to give up the ones you enjoy, certainly, but just don't limit yourself. Take in everything you can, and use ALL of that to inform your work.
Three weeks in a row! It's definitely a feature now!
The original art for one of the best-known images from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is going up for auction with an expected selling price somewhere in the $100,000 neighborhood. I point it out not for the price tag, but because Heritage Auctions has a really good scan of the piece and you can examine the linework very closely. What I find particularly interesting is how clean the overall image is, but how much rework was done on Batman's cowl.
Gem City Comic Con is this Sunday at Wright State University. I won't be attending, but it still sounds kind of cool.
Next Tuesday, Neil Cohn will be speaking in San Francisco at a panel entitled "The Impact of Structure and Meaning on Sequential Image Comprehension." Sounds interesting to me, at any rate.
Al Bigley recently reminded his friends on Facebook that he posted a "rare" 1966 Captain America song from Tifton Records a couple years back. An interesting listen, as it's very different stylistically from both the Grantray-Lawrence cartoon theme song and the Icarus song I noted a few weeks ago. An interesting listen.
I had a bit of a plumbing problem until recently. The outgoing line from my sump pump was busted and, every time it rained, my front yard flooded sending a river down the sidewalk and into my neighbor's driveway. I'll admit that I let go fixing it for too long (knowing it would be an expensive repair) but I finally called a plumber last week. (I couldn't find any local guys who had been reviewed on Yelp or anything, but I tried to find someone who had a reasonably professional-looking website.)
The guy I talked to listened to my explanation, asked where I was located and said he should be able to take care of it. I provided all my info and had him repeat it (it was noisy in the background) to make sure he got it correct. He said he'd be on the next morning and would give me a call when he was on his way. I stayed home from work and... never heard back from him. No phone call telling me he was on his way, or he had to take care of some emergency, or he got lost... nothing. I stayed in the house all day. Never heard from him and he never showed up.
Well, I'm not about to deal with someone like that, so I called another plumber the next day. They said they'd be out on Monday morning (it was Friday) and would give me a call when they were on their way. I wasn't holding my breath since that was almost the same line the last guy gave me, but sure enough, I got two phone calls that morning -- one from the actual plumber and one from the receptionist. The plumber looked things over, figured out what needed to be done and gave me a quote. I said that was good, and how soon can we move on this?
I've had yard work done before so I knew that it would have to be marked for buried electrical and phone wires and such, and that's done by a third party. But they were able to get out there within an hour, and two other guys showed up about an hour after that with a small excavator. The dug up all of the bad pipe, including having to cut away part of the sidewalk that ran over it, replaced all the piping and patched up both the yard and sidewalk by 4:30. Less than one day, from when the first guy came out to when I did the final sign-off.
Nice guys, too. They called me out periodically to make sure I knew precisely where the problems were and what concerns and issues they faced while they worked.
While these guys are out working, I went back to Yelp and wrote a negative review about the dude who never showed up. Not a hate-filled rant, but just a straight-forward, "I called this guy; he said he'd come out; he never did."
That was yesterday. This afternoon, I get a call from the first plumber and I let the call go straight to voice mail. (Since I now have no need to talk to him.) He left a voice mail saying he was trying to follow-up on our conversation from yesterday and I should call him back. I'm thinking that if he's going to try to lie to me about what I myself did -- especially when it's so easy to scan through my own phone records to see that it was almost a week ago that I actually talked to him -- I'm really glad I didn't hire him, and I hope that my review on Yelp serves as a good notice to others.
The reason I'm relaying this story is because it's about a guy who is trying to pull some bullshit with someone who has access to the internet. I'm not a vengeful kind of person, and I'm not out to destroy anyone's livelihood, but I also don't want anyone else to get shafted because somebody else was trying to sell them a bill of goods. That's one of the great democratizing effects of the internet -- you can't hide your bullshit indefinitely.
And that's what really surprises me most about the Rob Granito plagiarism story, that Granito would even attempt it. Surely, he knew that he'd get caught, right? Not only was the guy going to big conventions with thousands and thousands of people in attendance, but this is the frickin' 21st century! And we're talking about comic book folks who can nit-pick the hell out of continuity details! He didn't think that his story would get back to the other people allegedly involved?
I mean, I get that bit in the linked-to article about his not being able to tell the difference in quality between his work and professionals' but going so far as to say that he actually worked on Iron Man and Spider-Man comics? Books that could easily be checked and then verified with the original creators?
Has he not paid attention to... well, anything in the past decade? All of your bullshit gets discovered. Regardless of who you are. Oh, you might be able to pay off enough people in high enough places that you don't actually do jail time for any of it, but unless you're a politician or paying a politician, your bullshit is going to come back to bite you in the ass. Even those at the top of the oligarchy here can't hide their bullshit -- they can just pay people to ignore it.
For as much as I rant about the stupidity of the American people at large, you cannot outsmart them. Not for long, certainly. The world is too small any more to hide your bullshit. It will get documented. It will get posted online. The people you try to rip off will tell everyone they can. And unless your net worth has at least eight digits in it, you're going to catch hell for it.
More than a few years ago, Joe Field launched a campaign to get Stockton, CA named as the definitive birthplace of the Fantastic Four. Here's a local news clip from the time that explains...
The campaign lasted about three months. After Field had collected the petition signatures mentioned in the video, he took that to the Stockton city council. They backed his idea and the LA Times soon picked up the story. Here's another clip shortly after the Council vote was taken...
The Times in turn contacted Stan Lee, who loved the idea...
... not realizing that FF writer/artist John Byrne and editor Mike Carlin were working on #293, which literally removed Central City off the map and sent it several thousand years into the future.
They eventually hit on the idea that the FF's rocket could have crash-landed in a different city from where it was launched. So it was decided that it could crash in Stockton, thus securing that city as "birthplace of the Fantastic Four" without actually contradicting existing continuity where Central City had been named.
Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter called Field to tell him of the decision and asked him to send some reference photos of Stockton for the anniversary issue (#296) they were working on. The photos ultimately were never used, but the story was put together by Lee and Shooter with art from Barry Windsor-Smith, Kerry Gammill, Ron Frenz, Al Milgrom, John Buscema, Marc Silvestri and Jerry Ordway. Here are the first four pages (by Windsor-Smith) which showcase the landing spot as Stockton...
There was a fair amount of media hype at the time. Field told me recently, "I was told that Mike Carlin was not a happy camper about having to try to shoe-horn my campaign into continuity. It wasn't until several years later when I met him in person in San Diego after he had moved to DC, that I went up to him, introduced myself and apologized for getting in the way of his job. Mike is a great guy and waved off the whole thing saying we had given that title more publicity than they could have generated on their own."
Lee in fact visited Stockton in February 1986 as part of a formal celebration in front of City Hall. He was given a key to the city and there was the semi-obligatory signing. Not long after, Lee hired Field on as his and his wife Joan's public relations man, so impressed he'd been with the work Field had done on the Stockton campaign.
The last part of the campaign involved printing up and selling 1,000 limited edition commemorative prints honoring the event. The money raised went to flood relief in Northern California. I still have mine (#278) hanging framed near my comics collection.
Field says he's got other new clips from that whole period that he'll be posting on YouTube as he's able, but that is what the whole thing was about. Keep your eyes out for more footage!
I'm going to try a double review today, just for something different. Foster Broussard: Demons of the Gold Rush #1 and Bonnie Lass #3, both recent releases from Red 5 Comics. We'll start with some basic plot summaries...
Foster Broussard is a British criminal in 1850 who manages to convince Queen Victoria to stay his execution so he can head over to California and bring back loads of gold for England. (Legends of the Gold Rush were quite prolific back then.) Broussard is escorted by a Commander Vanderbuilt Frederick, but when they arrive in San Francisco, the crew is attacked and Broussard is taken captive. It turns out, though, that the attackers are old friends of Broussard and the entire escapade has been a year and half in planning. Broussard soon runs afoul of Damien Victor, owner of the largest claim in the territory, and Raya, a Native American who has been working for several months to get close to Victor. Plans go awry, drinks are thrown in people's faces, and the issue ends with Broussard having a gun pointed at his head.
Bonnie Lass picks up where the last issue left off with Monet and his followers holding Lass and her crew captive aboard their own ship. The crew spend much of the issue trying to escape, only to be repeatedly have their butts handed to them by Monet himself. Bonnie engages with Monet long enough for her companions to get the upper hand against the other captors, but then they foolishly knock out the one element keeping the large kraken-like creature at bay. Bonnie's able to use the ill-advised diversion to capture Monet, but is now facing down a bona fide sea monster.
I've noted in some of my earlier reviews that Red 5 was turning out lots of great comics, and I was constantly impressed with their work. Bonnie Lass has been doing extremely well as a series, and #3 is no exception. But I have to say that I was rather disappointed with Broussard. Despite it being a book that I really wanted to like, it really struck me as incredibly pedestrian.
The first thing I noticed was the art seemed rather flat. Same line weight. No sense of motion. No sense of choreography. Just flat images. Whereas in Bonnie Lass, artist Michael Mayne provides a lot depth by altering line weights, utilizing some motion effects and depth of field perception. Compare two of the fight scenes for yourself and tell me which is more interesting...
Futhermore, the story in Broussard seems a bit more cliched and predictable. It reads like the storyboard for a movie in which the trailers tell the story better than the actual movie itself. Even with the plot twists, it just seemed... not exactly trite, but definitely not very engaging. A lot of staged contrivances and some strange character actions that either weren't explained well or weren't well thought-out.
Interestingly, less actually happens in Bonnie Lass #3. The characters spend the entire issue in one spot. They talk and fight a bit. Fair amount of exposition. But it's a much more vibrant story. You don't see most of it coming (though the sea monster causing problems was pretty well foreshadowed throughout the issue), you get an idea of what next issue will be like and it's by far much more forward-moving than Broussard. That's actually what's striking me about Bonnie Lass as a series, now that I'm thinking about: Mayne is able to do quite a lot of storytelling in a fairly compressed space. In fact, I looked up a little over half-way through the issue, only to discover than I wasn't about to hit the last page!
I don't know if it's really fair to compare Broussard and Bonnie Lass like this. They're very different books in many, many respects. So let me point out the one thing in Broussard that rubbed me the wrong way without anything to compare it against... "Translated from the Native American"?!? Wow. There's not even an ATTEMPT there, is there? I was okay leaving Raya's specific ancestry unmentioned, but they're not even going to try to fake it by throwing in a random tribe name here? They could've said something like "Shawnee" and it probably would've at least slipped by most people that the Shawnee didn't live that far West. But "the Native American"? Really? Here in the 21st century, you're going to write that down and have it published? Wow. Even if I loved every other aspect of the issue, I'd be hard-pressed to look at the second issue based on that alone. Talk about insulting!
Let me end on up beat. Go buy Bonnie Lass. If you haven't gotten the first two issues, you needn't worry -- they're ALL available digitally at comixology and iVerse for $1.99 each. I greatly enjoyed #1 and #2, and the third issue continues to impress. I'm looking forward to seeing how this story wraps up next issue, and when Red 5 will start releasing a Volume 2!
When I first started doing comic book research many years ago, I focused primarily on the Fantastic Four. It was my favorite comic by far, and I found the more I knew about its creation, the more I appreciated the book itself.
One of the theories I had was that creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were influenced in creating the FF by movies of the time, and I went through watching a number of movies that were made from 1959 through early 1961. I even tracked down actual release dates to see which movies would have been in the theater around the time the FF was being created -- probably around April or May 1961!
I pretty well kicked my theory out the window, as I wasn't finding much in the way of direct inspiration. The closest movies I could really get were The Lost World featuring Michael Rennie and Claude Rains, and The Angry Red Planet starring Gerald Mohr and Les Tremayne. As I'm largely taking today off, I opted to re-watch both of them.
The Lost World is (very) loosely based on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel of the same name. Professor Challenger claims he discovered a remote land where dinosaurs still exist, and he takes an expedition down to prove it. Though the group in the movie consists of eight members -- obviously more than either the original novel or the FF that I thought might take cues from -- there are too many characters for the writers here to adequately handle. Professor Summerlee and Costa are entirely superfluous to the journey, and the Holmes siblings do very little to advance the story either. Perhaps most striking about the movie -- as it pertains to a possible influence on Lee and Kirby -- is that love interest Jennifer Holmes follows along mostly to be with John Roxton, and David Holmes comes along because... well, he's Jennifer's kid brother. David is also the smooth-talker of the group, managing to successfully woo a native girl despite a language barrier.
The Angry Red Planet is about a group of four "scientists" that are the first humans to visit Mars, and run into a few scrapes before returning to Earth. They're called "scientists" in the movie, but they're more 1950s-style adventurers; their casual disregard for scientific examination or analysis of anything throughout the whole movie is almost hilarious. They do have more of a physical template for the FF, though: three men, one woman. One of the guys is bruiser type from Brooklyn, another is grey-templed hero. There's not a direct parallel, by any means, but some of the same general themes are prevalent in the early issue of Fantastic Four.
As I said, I dropped my theory as these types of connections are, at best, tenuous. But it is interesting, I think, to help get a feel for where the U.S. was as a society at large. There were all these discoveries and advancements going on, which most people didn't really understand. Science was, for the average Joe, just another big adventure that could wrestled and hog-tied like the Old West. Just charge on in, and you could just figure it out as you went along. Actually, a lot of America's psyche flows from that mindset to this day. We remain a nation playing at "cowboys and injuns". But it's interesting to see that application of science hold true in our fictions, regardless of whether we're sending someone to Mars or tracking through the jungles of the Amazon looking for dinosaurs. I think that was really the big take-away for me.
On a curious side-note, three of the main actors from ARP later went on to take roles in comic-related properties. Gerald Mohr became the voice of Mr. Fantastic (1967 Fantastic Four cartoon) and Green Lantern (1968 Aquaman cartoon). Jack Kruschen played Eivol Ekdol (1966 Batman) and Captain Keene (1994 Lois & Clark). Les Tremayne played Mentor in the 1970's Shazam! show, as well as lending his voice to Ultraman: The Adventure Begins, Challenge of the GoBots and The Pirates of Dark Water among a host of other Saturday morning favorites. Jill St. John, from Lost World, also appeared in Batman and later took the title role in the 1976 Brenda Starr movie. For completeness' sake, I have to point out that Reinne, too, appeared in Batman.
Hello. My name is Sean and I'm a recovering comic collector.
I largely stopped buying comics in mid-2008. Entirely for financial reasons. My divorce from the year before left me with a huge chunk of debt and, although I've been paying that down diligently, I've mostly only been able to pay that down thanks to eliminating non-essential spending. As in, no vacations, no eating out, no movies, no comics. I've largely gotten used to not purchasing anything except food and gas, and I kind of like not being much of a "consumer" any more and that I'm able to keep myself more than busy and entertained for free. (Well, technically, I'm still paying for electricity and internet usage, but I'd be paying for those anyway and I'm not really paying anything appreciably more to surf entertainment sites. Like a couple cents' worth of electricity, maybe?) There are PLENTY of great webcomics available for free online!
But I am human and I've slipped from time to time. I have actually bought a few books, but I have been able to limit that to maybe one book every few months. (The vast majority of reviews I do on this site are books that were gifts, prizes or comp copies.) And the ones I do buy, I tend to focus on indie self-publishers where I buy directly from the creator so I can at least justify it to myself a little more easily. ("I'm helping such-n-such creator! Yay, me!")
Anyway, it got into my head recently that I should swing by a Local Comic Shop to pick up some mainstream-published comics by some friends of mine. Same basic premise of supporting them financially as best as I'm able.
But, long before I stepped foot in a shop, my head ran through, "Well, since I'm in there already, I should also pick up that new FF book that came out this week. It'd only be a couple of extra bucks." In and of itself, that doesn't sound too bad, does it? But you know exactly where that leads, don't you?
"That first issue was pretty good, but it ended with something of a cliff-hanger. I'll just pop in to get #2."
Two issues becomes three. Three becomes four. Four becomes five. It becomes a habit again, hitting the LCS once a month.
"Oh, look. This story crosses over into this other title."
"Oh, look. This writer I really like is working on to this other project too."
"Oh, look. This artist I really like is moving over to this different project."
"Oh, look. A new book by this older creator I always liked."
Before you know it, I'm in the shop spending $20-$30 every week again. It really is something of an addiction. I'm sure many addicts (of all stripes) will tell you that it's much easier to just stay the heck away rather than torment yourself with what well be considered "reasonable" limits.
"It's only one more. How much harm can it do?"
One more, of course, isn't the problem. It's when one more is added on top of the one more you already partook. Which is one more on top of the previous one more.
Once I get this debt paid off (a little less than two years away at this point) then it might not be an issue at all. A quick calculation suggests that I'd only spend about 2% on comics what I'm putting towards paying off debt right now. So once that debt is paid off, it frees up a lot of my cash flow that could be put towards comics.
But I'm not there yet. That money is, for my practical purposes, tied up for the next two years. And, frankly, I don't really trust myself to step into a comic shop for "just one more" comic.
