The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #2

Despite the similarities of their synopses—eight-part miniseries from big, New York-based comics publisher about a hostile alien force secretly infiltrating the world of their heroes—Marvel’s 2008 Secret Invasion and DC’s 1988 Millennium diverge sharply within their second issues.

As I mentioned in my review of Secret Invasion’s second issue, relatively little happened in it. The 1970’s-looking Marvels mixed it up with the modern Marvels in the Savage Land until a Tyrannosaur broke it up, we learned that at least one of them may actually be the genuine article and not a Skrull (that doesn’t square with Marvel continuity exactly but then, neither does Brian Michael Bendis*), and a bunch of Super-Skrulls attacked Manhattan, which hasn’t been invaded by aliens since the last big Marvel crossover.

In Steve Englehart, Joe Staton and Ian Gibson’s Millennium #2, however, the Manhunter androids have begun giving the superheroes grief, and Guardian Herupa Hando Hu and a Zamaron Nada Surf Nadia Safir begin their quest to find ten chosen humans who will soon give rise to a new immortal race of earthlings.

In other words, here’s where the book starts to get good. Because Englehart is making an earnest attempt to have the ten chosen people be representative of the diversity of planet earth (racially, ethnically, politically and sexual preference-ly) and Gibson’s art leans hard toward the cartoony (particularly when not drawing a superhero with a well-established model sheet), the results tend to be some pretty broad caricatures.


This second chapter opens in The Daily Planet office, where reporter Clark Kent is busy proofing the credits for the issue. He’s suddenly accosted by ex-girlfriend Lana Lang, who can’t stop shouting about Manhunters and Superman.

What’s her deal? Is she trying to blow his secret identity? Perhaps—since she herself is a Manhunter! She wants him to stay out of the Guardian/Manhunter struggle to start/stop a new race of immortals, and if he refuses to comply, it’s out with his secret identity.

But this isn’t a story about Superman. Oh, no. As Englehart’s narration says,
No? It’s not? Then what were the readers of 1988 flushing away their 75 cents-per-issue for?

This is, it turns out, a story about people—regular, run-of-the-mill human beigns like you or me. Or Australian Aboriginie Betty Clawman, whom HHH and NS find at Ayers Rock near Alice Springs:

She’s the first of their candidates, and embraces their offer. The others are much less likely to do so, HHH explains, as he and Nadia begins their visits.

There’s Takeo Yakata, Japanese business man

whose inscrutable face belies no hint of surprise at Herupa’s conversion of his office, although the “surprise lines” that radiate from his head do give away his true reaction;

Chinese woman Xiang Po

whom the aliens decide to approach while in the middle of a crowded Chinese street, where passersby can shout their own opinions about what to do to her;

the Soviet Union’s Nikolai Latikov

(Please note the portrait of Lenin in his office; did you ever notice how much Green Arrow resembles Lenin?);

Celia Windward of “Birmingham-- --Fascist Britain!”


Iranian Salima Baranizar

(What are the chances of seeing a scene like this in comics today, post-Danishcartoonopaclpyse, I wonder?);

South African asshole Janwillem Kroef, who greets the pair with, “Who are you woman, and what do you and your blue dwarf want?”

(Nadia and Herupa seem rather bemused at the casual racism and chauvanism Kroef displays, don’t they?);

and then, everyone’s favorite character from Millennium, Peruvian Gregorio de la Vega, the gayest character in the history of the DC Universe

When I first read Millennium, about, oh, five to ten years ago, maybe?, I was appalled at Gregorio and just how…broad his character was, and that DC was like, “Yes, this seems like a perfect portrayal of a gay character who will be our first out gay superhero by the time this series is over.”**

The magenta shirt unbuttoned to the crotch, the huge hoop earring, the posture, the moustache, the drink—It’s not easy to stand out as visibly gay in a universe that’s home to Vibe, Wonder Woman and Batman and Robin but, well, mission accomplished Gregorio designers!


Anyway, like I was saying, when I first read Millennium, I was struck by how unbelievably broad Gregorio was. But re-reading it to compare it to Secret Invasion, I found Gregorio hilarious. I don’t know, is he still considered offensive? Because he kinda cracked me up with that “E-ve-ry-body fades in!” line.


While the space immortals were making their rounds, the heroes of the DCU had their own problems. Blue Beetle Ted Kord suspected someone was trying to blackmail him on behalf of the Manhunters (someone who pulls a gun on him, which Kord slaps away to the sound effect of “PLOW!”, which is, coincidentally, the same sound that an android’s fist makes against a man’s face). And meeting with his trusted friend James Gordon, Batman learns that no man escapes the Manhunters—not even a Batman!

Lucky for him the Gordon Manhunter decided to simply pistolwhip him out an open window with the gun in his hand and not, you know, shoot him with it.

What’s that? You thought the space immortals needed ten candidates, but we’ve only heard of eight? Well, they have some words with Harbinger from Crisis On Infinite Earths, The Floronic Man seems to think he’s been chosen (although he is crazy, and incarcerated in Arkham when he begins ranting and raving about it) and, they make one more stop: The hospital room of Hal Jordan’s friend Tom Kalmaku.

You’ll remember last issue Kalmaku was hospitalized when caught by the Manhunters he was syping on for Hal, who was busy at a pool party.

Just before Nadia and Herupa arrive to make Tom an offer, he’s awoken by the Green Lanterns, who adopt extremely manly poses and try to comfort him.


Hey wait a minute…

Check this out. Gregorio, outrageous gay stereotype:



John Stewart:



Gregorio:



John Stewart:


Hmm…

Well, best not to dwell.

Will these nine-to-ten Earthlings accept the space immortals offer? Will the Manhunters get to them first?

If it were 1988, you’d need only wait one week to find out in Millennium #3. Now you’re going to have to wait until Secret Invasion #3 drops, and I waste devote another post to last century’s greatest company-wide crossover about aliens secretly infiltrating a shared superhero universe.

Previously:
The Other Secret Invasion: Millennium #1



*Zing!


**Was Extrano the first out gay superhero in the DCU? This period of DC history is pretty spotty to me, as I wouldn’t start reading comics until a few years after this book was released.

Strike while the iron is ice cold!

This past Wednesday DC debuted the first part of a new six-issue miniseries, Huntress: Year One, by Ivory Madison, Cliff Richards and Art Thibert. It's a pretty perplexing release, and retailer/reviewer Brian Hibbs lists some of the reasons in his Savage Critic review.

As Hibbs pointed out, it can't be a book that DC thought would sell terribly well. The Bat-family solo spin-offs—Nightwing, Robin, soo- to-be-cancelledCatwoman—are all doing less than stellar these days, and the Huntress isn't even part of the Bat-family proper any more. The book she calls home—Birds of Prey—only sells in the 20K neighborhood, a bit bettter than Catwoman and there's she's part of an ensemble, not carrying the book herself.

The artists attached are pretty good, and while Madison is an unknown quantity, she's the sort of unknown quantity I imagine readers will be curious about (I was pretty amused to see that her website referred to this comic book series as "a graphic novel;" perhaps it's just shorthand to communicate to "civilians" and/or the book industry, but it denotes a certain amount of shame and/or sensitivity about the word "comics"). But none of them are the sorts of big names that would move a Huntress book in big numbers, so DC can't be thinking these creators will move such a book where the character won't.

One could also raise the question of relevance, but then, that's been the case for all of DC's recent Year One miniseries.

Green Arrow: Year One re-told an origin that gets pretty regularly re-told, but boasted an interesting creative team (The Losers' Andy Diggle and Jock), came at a time when DC was clearly trying to promote the character (around the time of his wedding to Black Canary), and filled the publishing gap between the end of Green Arrow and the launch of Green Arrow/Black Canary.

Teen Titans: Year One similarly tells an origin that isn't very mysterious and which there are no questions about, but makes a certain amount of sense within DC's nonsensical attempts to flood the market with Titans books (Teen Titans, Titans, Tiny Titans and solo minis for Wonder Girl, Raven and soon Cyborg).

And then there was Metamorpho: Year One, the origin of a bit player in low-selling team title The Outsiders by a not-exactly-hot creative team.*

Of course, Huntress: Year One is unlike the others above in that it falls squarely in the shadow of another six-part Huntress origin miniseries, 2000's Batman/Huntress: Cry For Blood, which has the benefit of a higher profile writer, a high profile guest-star (and branding in the title), and being, at the time, much more relevant to other books (Greg Rucka was then writing Detective and was thus part of the Batman office's stable of creators, and Huntress was pretty firmly ensconced in the Bat-family, rather than in Birds of Prey).

From this side of things, it's impossible to tell why DC greenlights certain projects and not others, of course. Perhaps sales on the recent-ish Huntress: Dark Knight Daughter trade paperback (collecting the old pre-Crisis Huntress stories) were brisk enough that DC's data suggested the existence of a bigger Huntress market than seems apparent from where I'm sitting.

What I find most perplexing about all of this, however, is that DC decided to greenlight a miniseries telling the origin of a masked, caped, female, Gotham vigilante, and they went with the Huntress and not, oh, I don't know, Batwoman.

Remember her? The sensational character find of 2006? New character introduced to much fanfare in 52? Often said to be getting her own series (most recently here), a series that never actually materializes? Origins completely shrouded in mystery? Only had a handful of appearances?

She seems like a better candidate for a Year One mini, doesn't she? Her origin is certainly virgin territory, giving a creative reason for such a book's existence, and the fact that she has the word "Bat-" in her name guarantees a higher level of sales than a Huntress series, no matter who the creators are.

Huntress: Year One isn't the only new miniseries starring a masked, caped, female, Gotham vigilante that's not Batwoman, of course. A Batgirl miniseries is also in the works, starring Cassandra Cain. She had formerly starred in an ongoing solo series, which DC canceled not due to sales as much as to streamline the Bat-family and their line of books (presumably to make room for Batwoman and Batwoman). But since that never materialized, they've gone years without selling Batgirl or Batwoman books, and are now trying to sell a Batgirl miniseries. The fact that it is from a writer who is widely perceived as having "ruined" the character and an artist most-associated with Countdown and related projects, makes it another sure-not-to-be-a-hit book.

How did both of these books beat Batwoman out the gate? And why is DC waiting until any and all interest in Batwoman has dwindled before trying to capitalze on her now two-year-old high-profile debut? I honsetly don't know, but these not-Batwoman projects keep raising those questions.



*Meanwhile, top-tier characters whose origins could actually use post-Infinite Crisis/52 rejiggering clarification, like Superman, Batman, the JLA and, most especially, Wonder Woman, get none. I don't think we necessarily need four official Year One minis featuring those characters—certainly they'll never do another book called Batman: Year One—but stories dealing with their new origins would certainly make sense.

Playing dress-up with the DCU

Hey, remember this?


That’s the lovely promotional poster by Adam Hughes in which he gathered many of the DC Universe’s most recognizable super-women and dressed them up like they were going to a wedding (or a Vanity Fair fold-out cover shoot).

It’s a nice image.

I’ne always liked Adam Hughes’ art, far too little of which seems to be inside comics books any more, as he’s sort of transitioned into a cover artist over the year. He’s not perfect—he showed an odd inclination unzipping Catwoman’s top on the covers of her book, for example, and the way he used to draw Wonder Woman’s baggy boots always drove me crazy—but he’s a hell of an artist, and this piece is a nice demonstration of why.

He knows human anatomy and he knows drapery, two things that put him lightyears ahead of plenty of comics artists who like drawing sexy women (And whom DC seems to like to pay to draw sexy women for them).

More importantly, his women all look different. It seems like such a simple, obvious thing, but it’s so damn rare in superhero comics that when you see an artist doing it, it actually seems precious.

Many of the women in the piece are easily identifiable by their props. Catwoman’s the woman with the cat, Barbra Gordon’s the one in the wheel chair, Zatanna’s the one with the top hat, Wonder Woman’s the one wearing the Wonder Woman tiara and bracelets.

But man, how refreshing to see an image of 11 DC heroines in which they’re all different heights and weights; in which they all have different hair cuts and fashion sense; in which they have different bust sizes and different postures and expressions.

Like I said, I like this piece. Hell, I love it. I like the way Supergirl and Power Girl’s dresses reflect their costumes; I like the fact that Catwoman’s wearing black while all the good girls are in white; I like the way Hughes teases the closeness of Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn’s friendship.

The one thing I don’t like is Batwoman, if that is Batwoman in the chair (My eyes tell me its Lois Lane; the Internet tells me its Batwoman). In part because what the hell is Batwoman, whom I don’t think has ever met any of these characters or even appeared in a half-dozen stories yet, doing at a wedding/fashion shoot/Oscar Night party with the rest of them?

Additionally, Batwoman’s an out lesbian, and, well, Hughes put her in pants and has her sitting…well, less than naturally (I don’t know why, but if that was Lois Lane, the pants and weird posture seem less weird to me).

But anyway, a great piece.

It gave Johanna Draper Carlson of Comicsworthreading.com a great idea: How about a male version, with the heroes “in tuxes, classy and attractive?"

I can’t imagine DC hiring Hughes to make one for them, since they seem to only hire him to draw images of sexy super-women (although he is really good at super-men too), but I’m sure Amanda Conner or J. Bone could do something awesome.

Heck, I think Conner was already actually in the ball park during her work on the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special, when she drew the superheroes all in their casual wear:
(Scan ganked from Living Between Wednesdays).

Sure, most of those guys aren’t actually friends with Green Arrow, and I’m not even sure if some of them have ever even met him, but Judd Winick had them all attending GA’s bachelor party, and Conner sure draws the hell out of them, doesn’t she? And you can pretty much tell who they all are, just by their clothes.

Well, Carlson put out an open call for submissions, and I watched with delight as they trickled in. And sadly, trickle they did, as there were only a handful by the point I’m tying this (Thursday afternoon, the day of the deadline).

I really like the one by Johnny Zito; he gives all of the characters an awful lot of personality, to a rather incredible degree in some cases. I really dig his Bruce Wayne, who seems a little uncharacteristically friendly at first, but then, he’s being Bruce Wayne, not Batman.

I also like how different his Oliver Queen looks from most Oliver Queens (the thin moustache looking much more Golden Age Hollywood swashbuckler than usual). And that Clark Kent’s wearing a dress version of the sort of stuff he used to wear to work in the Golden and Silver Ages. And the ambiguous nature of Aquman’s right hand. And that Steel looks like Steel even though there are no identifiers letting you know what his superhero identity is.

For continuity purposes, however, Ryan “Atom III” Choi and Tim “Robin III” Drake shouldn’t be in the same group as Barry “Flash II” Allen.

Here’s one by Paul Savi. It’s of a pre-Crisis grouping, and it looks really great. His Dick and Bruce are exceptional, and good job putting Hal Jordan in a uniform and making Captain Marvel uncomfortable in formal wear. The only one I don’t much care for is the Superman. The pose is nice (as is the suit), but the face just doesn’t really look like Superman in the way that the other faces look like they belong to the heroes wearing them.

Jeff Hebert probably did the best job of them all on the clothes (even the shoes look great!) and of making many of these guys still look totally badass while in their formal wear.

I’m not sure that Jason Todd and John Stewart should be in the same picture, though. The logo on Todd’d boots is Tim Drake’s Robin logo, and his hair looks a lot like Tom Lyle used to draw Tim Drake’s hair in the first few Robin miniseries.

The first entry was an all-Lego one by David Oakes, which allows for a “boy toys” gag. Zatara and Red Arrow…in the same image? Impossible!

Zatara looks sweet though. Too few good guys wear top hats anymore.

Now, looking at these, as well as the original Hughes piece got me thinking about who would be in a male equivalent, and, well, you know where this is going, right?

The thing is, it’s really, really hard coming up with the male equivalents of the characters in that Hughes picture. Some are easier than others, of course. Going by their respective Q ratings, who’s the male Wonder Woman? Superman? Or Batman? Or Superman and Batman? Power Girl is just kind of a random character most associated with the JSA; you could just plot Wildcat in there, I guess.

But who’s the male Catwoman? Is she there as the DCU’s #1 female villain (in which case her male equivalent would probably be The Joker), or because she’s a villain who’s kinda sorta sometimes a hero (in which case it would be…I don’t know, these days. Ten years ago, maybe Deathstroke. Now? Black Adam, maybe?).

Who’s the male Barbara Gordon, former sidekick turned leader-hero-in her own right…Dick Grayson, or is he a level above Babs in that respect? What about Poison Ivy and Harley? They’re both villain-villains, but not all that well known; who are their male equivalents?

Anyway, you see how hard this is? I still can’t determine any real pattern/criteria in Hughes’ piece, beyond the fact that those are the eleven DCU characters he most wanted to draw.

So, here’s what I came up with:

It didn’t turn out too great, but hopefully it’s clear who everyone is supposed to be.

If anyone cares, I used Rags Morales’ current Nightwing issues as a guide for the hairstyles for Superman and the Bat-family, as Morales puts a great deal of effort in distinguishing his characters from one another, and Kevin Maguire’s version of J’onn for a guide on his face (though he got the current all-red eyeballs). The rest are from memory.

And yes, Aquaman’s one water bottle is extremely unfortunately placed. Sorry about that.

Please note I didn’t draw anyone’s feet. I agree with Michael Turner’s body of work—feet are hard to draw.

You may also note that that is an awful lot white dudes. I honestly couldn’t think of a black dude who seemed to fit in the picture. Hughes threw in Vixen, whose current status as a member of the Justice League kinda sorta makes her fit in there. She’s also an original black superhero—i.e. she’s not a derivation of a white hero—and fits on those grounds as well.

I couldn’t think of a male equivalent for her. Black Lightning’s the closest to a male Vixen—on the Justice League at the moment, not a black version of a white character—but I wasn’t sure how one would communicate that he was actually Black Lightning visually, outside of his costume or using his powers (In a tux, he could be an off-model John Henry Irons or John Stewart).

Steel almost works, but is to a large degree just the black Superman (Due in part to the way he was introduced; I believe Jon Bogdanove had the starts of a Steel character in his sketchbook before the Superman office of the early ‘90s decided to use four replacement Supermen after the original’s temporary death).

Green Lantern John Stewart and the current Mr. Terrific are similarly black versions of white characters.

I didn’t want to put both Hal and John in, as their identifier would be the same—the green rings on their hands—although Mr. T. might have worked as a JSA representative, the male equivalent to Power Girl in Hughes’ piece. A couple floating “T-spheres” above him would identify him out of costume, I think.

The best black hero to go with would probably have been Cyborg, who, even in a tux, would have half a robot face and clearly be Cyborg. But Hughes didn’t put any Titans into his piece, so they seemed kind of out-of bounds. If he’d had Starfire in his, then Cyborg would have been a good candidate for the male Starfire, I guess (Him or Beast Boy, both of whom would still look like themselves in tuxes).

The black hero I cam closest to including was Jakeem Thunder, who I figured would be easy to identify by being a) a kid and b) in the company of a sentient purple thunderbolt. Here’s a sketch of Jakeem, the Thunderbolt and Jaime “Blue Beetle III” Reyes:

Jaime is also a non-white version of a white hero too, but the fact that he is carrying his own title at the moment indicates a certain level of status among DCU character, I think.

I was trying out markers instead of colored-pencils on the sketches. I think I prefer how low-tech the pencils looks. Hell, maybe I should transition into crayons. Jaime’s hair is too light there. Also, he shaved his chin due to the formal occasion; that’s why there’s no scruff.

Here are two characters I had intended to include, but didn’t have room for:

That’s Green Arrow Oliver Queen and Hawkman Carter Hall; GA should be easy to pick out of a line-up, but I guess the only clue to that being Hawkman is that he’s giving GA a dirty look. I thought about drawing a flag pin on his lapel, but it seemed too weird on a tux lapel. If he were in a suit jacket, it would look more appropriate. In my original sketch, they were on the far right of the page, and Plas and Cap were where Hal Jordan was, but I ran out of room.

Finally, here’s Ted Grant:

For a while, I was considering putting the JSA old men on the far left, and some younger characters like Jaime and Jakeem walking on page from the far right.

I ultimately didn’t do any villains in that piece, despite the fact that Hughes drew three—although I guess Catwoman and Harley kind of go back and forth between being anti-heroines and outright villains, huh?—but thinking about their DCU equivalents ultimately lead to this:

This time around I used some pretty diminutive characters, and was this time able to get a full eleven in there.

Again, hopefully they’re all self-explanatory. The little guy with black hair on the far right is supposed to be Dr. Psycho. I used the Golden Age H.G. Peter version (i.e. the awesome version) as a guide, and threw him in at the last minute. He turned out pretty fucked-up looking. Sorry, Dr. Psycho.

The original plan was to put Deathstroke between Sinestro and Bizarro, but, as in the heroes piece, I didn’t plan the spacing right and ran out of room. He was going to be wearing a tux like Aquaman’s in the hero version, a white eye-patch, and be holding a .45 at his side.

Oh, and Mxy’s supposed to be floating in the air, although I realize now it looks almost like he’s balancing on top of Manta’s harpoon.

Man, composing images is a tough business; I don’t know how artists do it.

UPDATED TO ADD: Carlson posted all the entries on Friday. Go check 'em out. I think Philip Rice's is by far the best, in that in addition to being very well drawn and defining the characters quite thoroughly in that drawing, he gets 11 in, including a couple of villains who occassionally straddle the line between villains and anti-heroes. There are a lot of nice little touches in it, like the identifying rings on some of the heroes' fingers, and he even makes Mr. Terrific work quite well, having the tux echo the costume, and using T's for cufflinks.

His Booster Gold is great. I like the out-of-style tux. It may seem like decades out of style to us, but I imagine if you're from 500 years in the future, that's gotta seem close enough for "turn of the 21st century men's formal wear."

Bill Roundy's piece has an aesthetic similar to the new Superfriends comic and line of toys. I love the fact that his Aquaman is bare foot and has left a puddle trail.

UPDATED AGAIN JUST TO POINT OUT: That it is still a few weeks before Memorial Day, and that the Hughes peice was unveiled months ago, and yet ten of the eleven women pictured in it are wearing white. Tsk tsk tsk.

Some links to other websites you can read when you're not reading this one

I have a review of Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas #1 in this week's Las Vegas Weekly. Seems appropriate. The above does not occur in that comic. But Fin Fang Foom and Iron Man are both in it. So maybe it will in future issues. If you buy the first issue of only one new Iron Man series this month though, I think you're better off with Invincible Iron Man #1. Because its pretty good, and Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas is not. Despite the presence of Fin Fang Foom.


—The Boneville blog now has plenty of photos up from the Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond exhibit, which offers some great examples of how big the full-color mural is.

Felllow Newsaramite/Columbusite Vaneta Rogers also wrote up Saturday’s Smith/McCloud conversation; you can read her report here. She’s much better equipped than I, and therefore has plenty of photos, including a charming one of Smith and his parents at the end.


—So have you guys all seen the trailer for the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie yet? Is that for real? That’s going to be an honest-go-goodness, shown-in-theaters-for-money film? Seriously? Huh.

The backgrounds and space stuff all look as “real” as they have in the last few films, but the character designs are all just awful. They took the character designs from the Cartoon Network “microseries,” the highly simplified, highly stylized designs created specifically for a flat, 2D, traditional-style animation story, and then just, what, added a third dimension back in there anyway?

Those designs looked kick-ass in 2D, but not so much in 3D. And this movie’s going to have to be really, really, really, really good to stand up to the Cartoon Network series which, visually, had the very best storytelling of any of the Star Wars films to date.

It sounds good though; like, the light sabers and the lasers and the fast action music…I like how all that stuff sounds. And I hope they say “Kit Fisto” out loud a whole lot, because I love hearing that name said out loud.


—Rachelle Goguen seemed to have had a pretty fun Free Comic Book Day, hanging out with the man of the weekend:

The one above is my favorite. I love the way he’s apparently contemplating his hotdog. Is he imagining if its possible to cram it through the little rectangular mouth slot in his mask? Or if he should take off his mask in public, and risk his secret identity, in order to enjoy his delicious-looking hot dog? Plenty more here and here.


—Joe McCulloch wrote what was probably the very best Speed Racer film review I’ve read so far. Of course, a lot of the film critics I’ve read reviewing Speed Racer don’t have the space McCulloch has, nor the ability to write to so specific an audience, but, damn, McCulloch’s was a fine review. Very astute, and very well written.


—Hey, I wonder if the publisher will get Ed Benes will draw the cover?


—Check this out:

It’s our old friends The Red Bee and Michael, as drawn by artist Louis Roskosch. Obviously, I really dig the image. But I think it’s the dialogue that makes it. I mean, Red Bee gives Michael such a complex command, and does Michael refuse, fly away or shirk his duty? No, he gets right to it, and goes about defeating the Nazis. That’s heroism. (Not sure why Roskosch refers to the Bee as a “crappy” superhero on his blog though. Probably a typo.)

There’s plenty more awesome art—including the Legion of Super-Pets, Brother Power the Geek, some maybe NSFW doing-it, and a dinosaur vs. ray gun fight—at Louisroskosch.com. (Link stolen from Dirk Deppey’s Journalista.)


—If you haven’t already, you may want to give Tom Spurgeon’s piece about the cost of comics a read (as well as the conversation it started, on his site and around the web).

Are comics too darn expensive? Yes and no. Some of them certainly are, and I think there’s a point looming in the not-too-distant future when they will all seem too expensive.

Speaking simply from my own personal experience, the market really seems to dictate to me how much a comic should cost: $2.99 for 22 original, full-color pages. The last big leap I remember was when all of the “mainstream” (i.e. DC/Marvel/Dark Horse/Etc.) books jumped from $2.50 to $2.99. At the time, it didn’t impact my own purchasing too much, as it was only 49-cents.

Right now, there seems to be some distressing leaning toward a $3.99 price point. That would certainly impact my purchasing of singles and, in fact, I’ve been skipping a lot of books of late because they were priced at $3.99. Some smaller companies sell $3.99 books, which I’d happily buy a great comic for, but am not willing to read a mediocre one, or one I’m merely curious about (I read a lot of comics on a gamble; I pick ‘em up because I like the art, or the premise or title seems cool, for example). That extra dollar has kept me from trying out a lot of books.

Marvel Comics has really perplexed me with their pricing a lot late. I’ve never understood why their Max imprint books cost a full dollar more, even though they’re the same size. Do swear words somehow cost more?

I was a little surprised that there wasn’t rioting in the streets over Secret Invasion #2, which cost $3.99 for just 22-pages. The previous issue was forty pages for $3.99; what on earth happened in the space of just one month to so radically effect the pricing, and why was it only on the Marvel Universe line’s most heavily-promoted title?

Because of the 22-pages are worth $2.99 formula the market has ingrained in my mind, I’ve found myself buying a lot more manga and those phonebook-like reprints that Marvel and DC put out, because, by that formula, they seem too cheap not to buy. (The main difference seems to be color; I like money more than I like color, particularly given the tendency of Marvel Comics to employ highly-gradated painterly/photorealistic coloring that makes me a little nauseous).

Right now, your average manga digest costs three times as much as your average mainstream comic book, but gives you almost as many pages as ten such comic books. The Essential and Showcase Presents volumes cost as much as six mainstream comic books, but you get as many pages as 22-24 comic books.

I really enjoy the ritual and experience of going to the shop each Wednesday and picking up new super-comics, even as I buy most of the comics from the non-superhero genre in trade format. At $2.99 for 22 pages, it still seems worthwhile to me, even though it’s probably not. Maybe it still will at $3.25 or $3.50. But at $3.99 or higher, the benefits of that ritual and knowing what’s happening in Batman’s life as soon as it happens no longer seem to outweigh the benefits of getting more pages for less money, particularly in an ad-free, trade format.


—Chris Butcher has a very well-written review of the first few issues of Project: Superpowers up at Comics212.net. He seems to like both it and The Twelve a lot better than I do (I wonder if P:S reads better in few issue chunks than in serial installments), but rather eloquently sums up the biggest problem with the Dynamaite Entertainment Golden Age superhero reclamation project:

It’s one thing to have The Spectre, Captain Marvel, or any number of popular iconic characters shouting at one another or uttering mysterious nonsense that might eventually pay off in the story; the reader is already invested in those characters thanks to years and years of familiarity–it’s the very definition of a fanboy-oriented event comic. But when the reader has no idea who any of these characters are? When you haven’t sufficiently invested them with any humanity (other than: blanket tragedy, ‘mystery’, and screaming) it’s really hard to give a shit and I don’t.

Much more at the link above.


—I was trying to find an image of the current Lucky Charms box online somewhere, because the newest marshmallow appears to be Miralco, but no dice. I did find this one from back in the day, when Lucky the leprechaun was horrifying:



—In my write-up of the OSU Cartoon Research Library’s Jeff Smith: Before Bone exhibit, featuring his old Thorn strips from Ohio State University’s school paper, I mentioned Brutus Buckeye. It occurs to me that if you don’t give a damn about college football (as I don’t) and don’t live in Columbus (as I do), then you might not know who Brutus Buckeye is.

He’s the mascot for The Ohio State Buckeyes. He is a a sentient buckeye with a human body growing out of it; or perhaps he’s a human with a buckeye for a head. I don’t know exactly. He looks like this:

Buckeyes are nuts that grow on trees in Ohio. So named because they look like the eyeballs of male deers. I’ve read. I haven’t looked a male deer in the eye lately; certainly not as much as the folks who decided to call the nuts on the trees buckeyes did.

He used to be a lot cuter, though.

He used to look like this

and before that, he looked like this

A lot less bad-ass looking, and a get-up that’s probably a lot harder to dance around in, but definitely a cuter design.


—More news coming out of OSU’s Cartoon Research Library. Here’s what the press release on the matter has to say:

The collection of the International Museum of Cartoon Art (IMCA) is moving to The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library. The union of these two institutions will create the largest collection of original cartoon art in the world.

IMCA was established in 1973 by Mort Walker, the creative force behind Beetle Bailey, as the first museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting cartoons. The museum opened in 1974 in a converted mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Two years later, the museum relocated to a renovated castle in Rye Brook, New York, where the collection was displayed until 1992. At that time the city of Boca Raton, Florida invited the museum to construct a 52,000 square foot facility as part of an effort to attract cultural institutions to Palm Beach County. The museum was a very popular attraction with highly acclaimed exhibits, events and functions for the public. It was still paying off the cost of its construction when two of its financial backers went bankrupt creating a $5 million loss and causing the museum to close.

IMCA’s collection consists of approximately 200,000 works, including original drawings from all genres of cartoon art (comic strips, comic books, animation, editorial, advertising, sport, caricature, greeting cards, graphic novels, and illustrations), display figures, toys and collectibles, and works on film and tape, CDs, and DVDs.

Wow, that seems like an awful lot of stuff to add to the Cartoon Research Library. Where will they put it all?

Efforts are underway to provide increased space for the Cartoon Research Library that will include museum-quality galleries. “It is critical that we have state-of-the-art gallery space to display IMCA’s collection appropriately,” notes [curator Lucy Shelton] Caswell. A gallery in the new facility will be named in honor of IMCA founder Mort Walker.

Awesome!

Weekly Haul: May 14th

Batman #676 (DC Comics) This is it! The start of “Batman R.I.P.,” the climax of Grant Morrison’s troubled run on Batman, drawing the threads of all his previous stories together! The Damian stuff, the “Club of Villains” made-up of bad guy’s alluded to in the Club of heroes arc, the romance with Jezebel Jett, the New-Look Joker…it’s all in here.

It occurred to me while reading this that it’s been written as if Grant Morrison were the only person writing any Batman comics over the past year or so (This Joker is the one Morrison wrote in that terrible all-prose issue, not the one from Detective Comics or Salvation Run; Gotham is apparently still as quiet and super-villain free as it was during Morrison’s first arc, rather than overrun with the normal rogue’s gallery regularly showing up in TEC, Gotham Underground and other books; and so on).

It makes reading this issue a lot of work, as I’m constantly editing out all the other Batman books and appearances, in addition to mentally re-drawing and trying to make sense of Tony Daniel’s art which, I may have noted a few dozen other times, just isn’t up to snuff.

It seems a little better here than in the past—and is certainly better than the work by last issue’s fill-in artist—but feet continue to be drawn around, clothes still fit funny, and double-page spreads (two this issue) continue to be completely underwhelming; more plop than splash. The page layouts still aren’t intuitive, but I didn’t find myself having to re-read scenes over and over to make sense out of them, as I have in previous issues.

That said, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the Arkham Asylum scene, but that likely has more to do with Morrison than Daniel. It doesn’t seem to have been written to make much sense.



Batman Confidential #17 (DC) Having read Avengers comics without any Avengers in them the last few weeks, I was completely prepared for a Batman comic which doesn’t actually feature Batman at all this week. This is the untold tale of Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon’s first meeting with Selina “Catwoman” Kyle, by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire. And by “untold” I simply mean “un-recently retold” (For their real first meeting, pick up Showcase Presents: Batgirl Vol. 1, which also boasts over 500 pages of hot librarian-in-Bat-drag action!).

This issue is one long rooftop chase, with occasional pauses for banter and fighting, as Catwoman (in her gray garb) steals a notebook from Gordon, who tries to recover it as Batgirl.

Nicieza keeps the script nice and light, giving us both women’s interior monologues throughout. I’ve always loved Maguire’s work, and its always nice to see him getting more of it, particularly on something that has nothing to do with “Bwa” “ha” or “ha” (Not that I don’t like seeing him draw Booster Gold and company, but I fear he’s been stereotyped as The Guy We Should Call To Draw Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis’ Funny Justice League Stuff, rather than That Guy Who Draws Really Well, Particularly Facial Expressions.

I’m curious to see how the blogosphere’s femisphere will react to this issue, as it has the words “THE CATFIGHT BEGINS HERE” on the cover, features some costume ripping, and ends with Batgirl disrobing to enter the nudist club Catwoman’s hiding on. None of it struck me as particularly exploitive, in large part because Nicieza gives the ladies both personalities and Maguire draws them like real people. I hope Batgirl’s actually a Batwoman at this point though—she’s gotta be in her twenties by the time she’s working at the library, right?—because otherwise….ew.



The Batman Strikes #45 (DC) This is the current all-ages Batman book, based on the most recent Batman cartoon, The Batman. I haven’t read a single issue of it yet, I suppose in large part because I have so little experience with the cartoon.

I watched a few episodes of it on Cartoon Network back when I had cable, and I appreciated the daring redesigns of the characters—beefy, gray haired Alfred! Monkey kung fu lock-rocking Joker! Red-skinned Bane!—and the willingness to stray so far from the Bruce Timm format, but I wasn’t enamored enough to start picking up a comic based on a cartoon based on comics I was already reading, you know?

It was pure curiosity that drove me to pick this issue up. The cover promised a foursome of famous females from the Batman franchise, sporting their The Batman redesigns, all of which look pretty nice.

Harley Quinn’s not too different from her other incarnations, and Catwoman’s costume seems like a nice compromise between her current in-the-comics costume and a sort of anime design—she looks a bit like Darwyn Cooke’s Pokemonwoman instead of Catwoman, if that makes sense. I really like the Poison Ivy, which is completely different than any version I’ve seen before (and is apparently much younger?), and that Batgirl design rules—she actually looks like a girl.

As for the designs in action, Batman Strikes seems to be like all of the Johnny DC titles—a done-in-one book operating on the “Everybody’s comic is someone’s first philosophy.” Batman and Robin (Tim Drake? Or Dick Grayson?) are going out of town, leaving Batgirl on her own for the week. Things go smoothly until she runs afoul of Catwoman and Harley, who are planning a break-in together. But their motives are pure: They want to save Ivy from an evil cigarette company making super-intelligent tobacco plant monsters or something (Last week, tobacco execs were the baddies in Invinicble Iron Man; I sense a trend here).

Jai Nitz, who wrote the recent all-Spanish Blue Beetle issue does a really nice job on the framing sequence of the story, a week-in-the-life two page spread a the beginning, and a neat punchline last page, and if the rest of the story is predictable and run-of-the-mill, its certainly pleasantly so.

The art is by Christopher Jones, and it’s really strong; he clearly puts more than the bare minimum effort into the book (his splash on pages two and three are more interesting, imaginative and exciting than anything that Tony Daniel has turned in on the “real” Batman book for example), something that’s not always guaranteed on the Big Two’s all-ages books.

I was quite pleasantly surprised at how good this was. I imagine it’s probably being cancelled to make way for a new book tied into the new Brave and the Bold cartoon then, huh?

For any regular readers of Batman Strikes in the reading audience, are the villains on pages two and three regular rogues? The first and fourth look like they could possibly be The Scarecrow and Maxie Zeus, and I can’t even guess on the second and third. Just curious.



Booster Gold #9 (DC) Geoff Johns continues his penance for his part in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, by explaining how on earth it fit with Giffen and DeMatteis’ JLI version of Maxwell Lord (it’s not perfect, but its an attempt at least), and reuniting most of Lord’s League to do something other than act as cannon fodder.

My affection for Booster Gold is so nostalgia-driven, that it can be hard to assess how good it is too objectively beyond, “Hey! It’s that Justice League I like! And they’re all written well and look good!” I’ve been having a ball reading this title so far, and this particular issue is no exception. But then, if you don’t happen to enjoy watching Scott Free escape shit, or Batman getting pissed at Booster and Beetle, or the way Dan Jurgens draws Ice’s costume, then I could see this not doing a whole lot for you.




Green Lantern Corps #24 (DC) I think one (1) is probably the exact number of stories about the evil mind-warping alien flower called The Black Mercy the world needed. This is the fourth, by my count.

I sure do like Patrick Gleason’s artwork though, and the fact that both a talking ground sloth and a talking fly are among the current Green Lanterns.



The Last Defenders #3 (Marvel Comics) Soooo, is this all going to make sense at the end? Because the miniseries is now officially half over, and I don’t have any idea at all what’s going on. Nighthawk buys himself a new Defenders team—hiring Atlas, Paladin and Junta (?) to join him on a mission after he and She-Hulk and Joaquin Pennyworth, Agent of SHIELD stop the Sons of the Serpent’s Mad Bomb, but even if I can summarize it, that doesn’t mean I can comprehend it. Yandroth talks to floating head, there’s some Atlanteans doing something, and the Son of Satan talks with Dr. Strange, who doesn’t really look at all like Dr. Strange.

The story is confusing as hell—it might help if I were more versed in Marvel minutia and/or Defenders history, I suppose—and the art’s not so hot either. When Muniz is just drawing things, they look fine, but there are some extremely awkwardly integrated, computer graphics thrown in odd places, so that a very cartoony, swollen superhero figure will be shown flying over a photo of the moon, or Yandroth and the talking head will walk over drawn fields in front of drawn trees, with a photo sky behind them.



Superman #676 (DC) This is a perfectly skip-able fill-in issue that was originally scheduled to run in Superman Confidential with an entirely different (better) cover. Writer Vito Delsante tells a fleet, compact story of Superman’s first meeting with Green Lantern Alan Scott, one that may or may not make sense continuity-wise (I’ve completely lost track of DCU history at this point). There’s a scene of Superman fighting a giant robot and fixing a bridge, a pitch-perfect Daily Planet scene with crackling dialogue and frenetic pace and Superman and GL taking turns duking it out with Solomon Grundy. The last panel connection seems like a bit of a reach—“These guys are both chalk-white! They must share a bond!”—and Superman’s narration about heroes and Memorial Day can get a bit purple at times, but otherwise Delsante’s script is quite strong.

The art is from the team of Julian Lopez and Bit, whose work has been appearing in Batman and the Outsiders a lot. I really dig their style, and they do a particularly fantastic job on the Planet sequence, investing Lois and Jimmy and Clark with plenty of personality simply through their posture.



Project: Superpowers #3 (Dynamite Entertainment) This series is perfectly awful, and seems to get worse each issue. I have no idea why I’m still reading it, beyond the fact that I really like the idea of a series about The Green Lama, Daredevil and company.



The Twelve #5 (Marvel) J. Michael Straczynski’s premise for this series still seems too forced and convenient, what with the reality show-like “Twelve Golden Age superheroes, picked to live in a house and find out what happens when the future they fought for looks different than the one they dreamed of!” set-up, but the individual vignettes featuring those characters work just fine on their own. Artist Chris Weston, meanwhile, hits a home-run almost every panel, so even if each issue of the comic isn’t that great, it’s a bad comic well worth reading.



Wonder Woman #20 (DC) Wonder Woman puts down three wolves and then cries about it. Then she gets called a whore a couple of times and fights Beowulf, either in the past or in her mind. Meanwhile, in the present or outside of her mind, there’s some grating office politics shit that reminded me a lot of Alias, and a character called Stalker shows up. Is it the same Stalker from The Justice Society Returns!? I don’t know. I do know that Beowulf wears a stupid hat.

Writer Gail Simone’s scripting is head and shoulders above that of her immediate predecessors certainly, but that’s really not saying much. I can’t seem to get into her take on the title and character, and I’m not sure that it has much of anything to do with her skills or talents—it’s well-written enough, and Wondy is given a distinct voice—or that of the various art teams she’s worked with (Here the new regular art team of Aaron Lopresti and Matt Ryan debut, and their stuff is gorgeous). I think it may just be a case of my personal tastes not gelling with those of Simone’s. As long lived as Wonder Woman is, hers isn’t a terribly well-defined character, her current writers and editors offering takes so distinct that Wonder Woman can seem like a completely different superhero from run to run.

Maybe this one’s just not for me? I feel weird saying that too, since Simone’s gone and brought back Etta Candy and everything.

Four Things I Learned From Little Lulu Color Special

If I would have taken the time to flip through a copy of the Little Lulu Color Special in a shop, I probably wouldn't have purchased it, as the stories within are the same ones available in Dark Horse's black-and-white reprints, only presented larger and in full-color. But I ordered it sight unseen from the Internet. (Don't worry, local comics dealers—I was only adding it to an order of a prose book to qualify for free shipping!) Not that it was a complete waste of time and money. I did learn a few things from it. Well, four things.


1.) That old witch Hazel, the villain of the stupid, boring-ass stories Lulu tells Alvin occasionally, has green skin, like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.


2.)Lulu's hat doesn't match her dress. It's yellow, not red!
This honestly shocked me. I was sure it was red.


3.) Willy Wilkins apparently started dying his hair at one point:




4.) Tubby's cousin Chubby isn't a slightly smaller identical version of him after all; Chubby's hair is lighter:

Jeff Smith exhibits: Bone and Beyond and Before Bone

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked down the flight of stairs at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Ohio State University’s campus in the course of the eight years I’ve lived in Columbus.

Entering the building at ground level, you find yourself in a little lobby with a desk, manned by a student or volunteer who will sell you tickets or tell you you’re in the wrong building or whatever. And, if you’re in the right building, then you turn around and there’s a flight of stairs descending to where you’ll find the rest of the Wexner Center: The film/video theatre, their bookstore, their main exhibition space, their music performance space and their restrooms.

A hundred times, maybe?

And yet walking down those same stairs Saturday afternoon revealed a pretty unique experience. See this panel?

It covered a large wall parallel to the stairs, welcoming visitors to the Wex, which is currently hosting Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, and exhibit of the cartoonist’s work (and the work of other cartoonists that inspired it).

I don’t have a digital camera, or even a cell phone camera (or a cell phone, period), which, I realized while taking in the exhibit, makes me a not-very-good candidate for blogging on things like art exhibits.

To give you an idea of the scale though, here’s an image of the piece’s installation, swiped from Steve Hamaker’s blog:

I spoke briefly with show curator Dave Filipi and one the people who helped with the installation about how exactly they put it up, and, while it involves technology so far beyond my understanding that it might as well be witchcraft, its basically a printing of an extremely blown-up original image onto sections of vinyl-y, wall-paper like stuff, and then placed on the wall, in several layers.

The finished product is nice: A gigantic, full-color Bone panel. It was the first of several times during which I found myself divorcing myself from my own experience with Bone, and appreciating Smith’s lines and character designs (and, here, Hamaker’s colors) as art on their own. That is, devoid of context, whoever those people are sneaking around those rooftops, it’s a great-looking image.

Rounding the corner brings you to the exhibit itself, the presentation of which is—I feel a little silly saying this, but what the hell—awe-inspiring.

The entire south wall of the exhibition area is covered in a two-tone vinyl version of a panel, in which Fone Bone and Thorn are shown crouching through the rainy woods. The closest I can come to describing it is this: Imagine being a tiny little bug on the page of an issue of Bone, perched in the gutter below the panel covering the wall. That’s what it looks like.

Here’s an image of most of the wall, which I swiped from the Boneville blog :

(Check out Boneville’s blog for more photos of the exhibit, and some behind the scenes images of the set-up).

As for the exhibit itself, it includes 80 original pieces. The Smith pieces are mostly his original art for the pages of his books, black ink over faint blue pencils, framed and hanging on the walls with notes from Smith and OSU’s Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswel.

It’s a real treat to see the work in person and up so close, both as a comics reader and simply as a viewer regarding the pages as art objects.

There were two pages from Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil (the spread featuring giant Captain Marvel punching out the two giant monsters), and six from RASL #1, along with the cover.

The rest of the Smith pieces are original pages from Bone, including a few color pieces, and Bone #16 in its entirety.

No offense, to Smith, whose art I really can’t say enough good things about, but the real treat of the show was the work of his inspirations sprinkled throughout it.

Here are the original pages and strips you’ll see alongside Smith’s:

—A Carl Barks Scrooge page-long gag strip from 1966

—Two four-panel Peanuts strips by Chrarles Schulz from 1955 and 1958

—Walt Kelly Pogos from 1966, 1971 and 1970

—A Will Eisner Spirit page from 1949

—A pair of Doonesburys from the ‘70s

—A 1932 E.C. Segar Thimble Theatre strip, in which Popeye tries fighting with words instead of his fists, and ends up punching his enemy out (I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud at a gallery show)

—George Herriman Krazy Kat strips from 1943 and 1934

We’re lucky to be living in a time where large chunks of all of the above are readily available in thorough, handsome collections assembled by extremely knowledgeable editors for appreciative audiences. And as cool as it is to be able to read the first few years of Schulz’s Peanuts, back when the lines were more solid and smooth and the character designs cuter, or whole books of giant Krazy Kat Sunday strips, there’s something—okay, I’m gonna say something cheesy again—magical about seeing the actual pages.

There’s a light pencil line Schulz didn’t mean and didn’t ink over here, he lines guiding the letters on Eisner and Barks’ strips. Here is an actual piece of paper that Segar drew Popeye on; here’s one that Herriman himself touched for a few hours, drawing all those individual lines shading the pile of bricks.

I suppose Caswell gets to handle these things all the time, as do the folks at Fantagraphics or DC putting together their various strip collections and The Spirit Archives, but after years of only seeing reproductions, it’s hard to overstate how cool it is to see a Peanuts strip at the size Schulz drew it, complete with every pencil mark, including the ones that didn’t make it onto the newspaper page.


The other Smith-related exhibit currently on view at OSU is smaller and less, um, magical and awe-inspiring, but is arguably of greater interest. It’s Jeff Smith: Before Bone, and its on display at the cartoon research library, right next door to the Wexner Center.

During their talk on Saturday, Smith was telling Scott McCloud about his work on Thorn at OSU’s student newspaper The Lantern in the early ‘80s. It was, he said, essentially just Bone—all of the same characters were involved—but it was obviously a lot less polished, and formatted like a daily adventure strip, rather than a comic book.

When McCloud asked if they’d ever been collected, Smith pointed out that Caswell was collecting them for the first time as part of this exhibit, a limited run of just 500 copies (If there are still some left, you can order one here).

McCloud asked what Smith thought of Thorn now, and he replied, “I hated them; I can’t hardly look at them.”

I doubt others will feel the same. Obviously, the strips aren’t all that great (although they’re certainly not at all bad for a college newspaper strip, for which its incredibly ambitious), and don’t compare at all favorably to Bone the comic, which Smith has tinkered with over the years (Saturday he said he redid about 150 of the 1,300 pages before the final one-volume edition).

But it’s pretty amazing to see this alternate, pre-Bone Bone, like a pilot series for a later series.

The character designs were almost all completely final at that early point, but rougher, and lacking the polish they’d gained by the point Smith started putting them in his comics.

The Doonesbury influence was a lot more evident here than in the comic books, and you can see the constraint the strip format put on the narrative and presentation. It’s hard—if not impossible—to appraise these strips without judging them against what they ultimately lead to.

It sure is cool seeing Bone in this weird, new (and by new I mean old) format, the characters in landscape-less panels, drawn in medium-shot profiles.

As a Columbusite, it’s both pretty cool and extremely weird to see things like the Bones talking about being from Ohio State, or OSU’s mascot Brutus Buckeye showing up in one of the panels.

Caswell describes Thorn as non-linear, and from the strips on the walls, they do seem to go off in weird little tangents, like the Bones getting jobs, a politician that might have been a Ronald Reagan parody asking Thorn to be his running mate because she had great legs (She does; Thorn’s Thorn seems somehow a lot sexier than Bone’s Thorn, for some reason), and several strips in which the characters interact with Smith himself.

In addition to the Thorn strips, Before Bone features a page from Smith’s college sketchbook under glass, along with what’s gotta be the first Jeff Smith trade, Thorn: Tales from The Lantern, and a group of books that influenced his work at the time: Some Gold Key Uncle Scrooge comics, a couple issues of Mad, some DC Tarzan comics by Joe Kubert, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and one of Walt Kelly’s Prehysterical Pogo collections.


Bone and Beyond will be on display at the Wex through August 3. Before Bone will be on display at the cartoon research library through September 5.

Jeff Smith and Scott McCloud talked comics; I took notes

There may not be a better illustration of the unique place Jeff Smith occupies in the history of comics—spanning the end of the black-and-white self-publishing boom and the beginnings of the current graphic novel boom—than the audience that showed up to see he and Scott McCloud speak this Saturday at Ohio State University.

The talk was held in the Mershon Auditorium, and drew a crowd of a few hundred. These ranged from grade school-aged boys and girls to grandparent-aged adults; there were college-aged boys and girls; there were bald men, balding men, men with long hair, men with ball caps and men with cab-driver hats; there were kids who looked like their parents dragged them there, parents who looked like their kids dragged them there, and, most remarkably, families in which both the grown-ups and the kids wore Bone t shirts and seemed equally excited about flipping through the books they purchased on their way in.

It was easily the most diverse comics-related audience I’ve ever seen in Columbus, and it was striking how so few people in the audience even thought that was at all unusual. Several times during their discussion, Smith would mention how much comics had changed—“Can you believe the acceptance [comics] have? Just in the last five years. It’s ridiculous!”—and the fact that it was nice to see so many women attending events like this and comics cons and reading comics in general.

Each time he seemed awed by the presence of women, the audience laughed, until at one point he clarified that, “No, I don’t mean that to sound lecherous or anything,” there was just a point where the only people Smith and McCloud would see at comics events were 35-year-old men. (He related an anecdote about the line for the bathrooms at San Diego, which were the reverse of typical events; long lines to get into the men’s room, none at all outside the women’s room. They both regarded lines for the ladies’ room at SDCC as a great indicator for how far comics have come).

The talk was part of OSU’s Wexner Center for the Arts and Cartoon Research Library’s summer-long exhibit of Smith’s work, Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, one of several such events over the next few weeks.

Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator for the cartoon research library, took the stage first, standing at a podium off to the right to explain how they had decided on the format. McCloud was on campus in ‘07 as part of his family’s nationwide tour (and a few years previously to give a speech about manga in coordination with the library’s celebration of Osamu Tezuka and Astro Boy), and Smith, a Columbusite and OSU grad, was there. The two started talking comics, and Caswell said the grad students present were just in awe of the men’s conversation on comics. So the idea was to replicate that format, “and give us all an opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation between these two old friends, ” Caswell said.

Smith and McCloud then took the stage, sitting in a pair of chairs in the middle of it. Behind them was a projection of a color Bone panel featuring Grandma, the Bone cousins and Thorn peering over a rock ledge (That’s it at the top of the post).

Smith’s longish dark hair was combed back, and he wore a grey/green long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, leaning back in a chair facing the audience.

McCloud’s appearance always shocks me in real-life, as he doesn’t resemble the highly-abstracted, 2D avatar of himself that I’m used to spending time with in Understanding Comics. His hair is now all gray, and wavy in the back, and his glasses aren’t at all opaque. He wore black pants and an unbuttoned black, short-sleeve shirt, alternately hunching forward and leaning back while asking Smith questions.

Upon first sitting down, he brandished a sheet of paper and announced that, despite Caswell’s intentions, he was going to “kill any possible spontaneity” by only asking questions he had previously written down.

That plan didn’t last long, however, as he often held the sheet of paper at arm’s length and squinted at it, mumbling into the mic clipped to his shirt, “That’s not a very good question…I already asked that, not going to ask that, I’ll ask that later…”

McCloud started by asking Smith about having lived in Columbus his whole life—parents were from Worthington, he moved to German Village in ’78, attended Columbus College of Art Design, switched to OSU where Bone began as a Lantern strip entitled Thorn—and about drawing as a little kid.

Smith explained that his father got him started drawing. While he wasn’t an artist per se, he knew how to draw a very good, very detailed Donald Duck. “I still remember him showing me, here’s the white of the eye, and here’s the pupil,” Smith said. “I was only four or five, but I remember it really vividly.”

“It was Mickey Mouse!” his father yelled from the fourth row or so in the audience.

“Yes, I remember it like it was yesterday,” Smith deadpanned at the correction, looking down at the table where their water bottles (and McCloud’s questions) were positioned.

Smith was, like all kids, pretty fascinated by cartoons and drawing (McCloud’s specialty at age six, he shared, was the Lost In Space robot), but it was at age 9 that he settled on his desire to be a cartoonist.

That was when he saw one of the three or so books that would have a profound effect on his career path, a collection of Walt Kelly’s Pogo strips.

He was nine-yeas-old, and a girl at his school knew he was into cartoons and, after the airing of a half-hour Pogo cartoon special, brought her father’s book of Pogo strips in.

“And I thought to myself, ‘She’s never getting this back,’” Smith said. “It just had some of the best drawing I’d ever seen. It looked like a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny cartoon in a comic book form. And I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s what I want to do.’”

Young Jeff Smith was enraptured by the book, and loved everything about it, right down to the lettering. He even went to the library as a kid and asked the librarians to look at the book and tell them how it was made.

By the time he was at OSU in the early ‘80s, he was making a comic strip, the proto-Bone Thorn, which was his attempt at a fantasy continuity strip of the sort that stopped being popular decades ago (“I think the only one left is Mary Worth,” Smith said, prompting McCloud to choke on his sip of bottled water, “Which almost made you do a spit-take.”)

He spent a few years trying to sell the strip to the syndicates, and got far enough that he was being flown into New York for interviews and asked repeatedly for six-week batches of examples, “but something was missing.”

It was a frustrating time for him, but makes for amusing anecdotes now, as he was being given such suggestions as, “Just lose all the human characters and the dragons, and focus on the Bones in Boneville,” or “Have the Bones talk in thought balloons,” because that’s what Garfield did, and, at the time, Garfield was at the height of its popularity.

Then came the next book to influence his move to comics: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was, at the time, gaining mainstream newspaper attention, an extremely unusual occurrence back then.

“I’d never seen anyone deal with a comic in such a cinematic way. He didn’t have any of that, ‘Meanwhile, in Commissioner Gordon’s office,’ he just cut to a different scene, and suddenly it was daylight and you were in a different place,” Smith said. “We’re a very visual society, we all go to the movies and watch TV, we understand cutting to a different scene. I was used to comics treating you like you were retarded.”

“And that lead to the brief period where you portrayed the Bone cousins as these dark, aging vigilantes,” McCloud deadpanned. “The Dark Bones.”

Then came the final book that set his course, given to him by his mother

She was New England for some reason, and was in a comic shop for some reason—“I’m not even sure what she was doing there,” Smith said. “What were you doing there?” he asked, looking to the audience.

Again his father shouted to the stage, “Because we have a son that likes comics!”

There she bought a copy of The Tick #1, a comic that “changed it for me,” Smith said. Here was a comic that one guy was doing all by himself, and it was hilarious. So he thought to heck with the gatekeepers of the comics pages telling him to have the Bones talk in thought balloons because Garfield does, he was going to make comics.

The Tick lead to Love and Rockets, Cerebus, Fantagraphics, Beanworld, Zot! and “this whole underground that’s not doing Spider-Man.”

(In a nice bit of symmetry, his interest in cartooning began with his father, and interest in self-publishing comic books began with his mother).

Sitting down to try Bone as a comic book instead of a comic strip, everything else fell into place, and Smith discovered the infinite room of the comics page. Instead of doing Bone in four panels, wasting the first panel each time to catch reader’s up, know he could tell a joke in three panels. Or five panels. Or six. Or 20. Or 20 pages.

And we all know where it went from there.

Caswell re-emerged to open the talk up for questions, at which point McCloud snapped up his list of questions to hurry through a few more.

“Okay, desert island question,” McCloud said. “If you were trapped on a desert island and had to choose between the complete works of Charles Schulz, Walt Kelly or Carl Barks, which would it be?”

“Oh man, I’m going into the ocean,” Smith said. “How about you?”

“Oh, I’d probably go with Tezuka,” McCloud said, and Smith settled on Kelly.

“I’ve gotta ask about RASL,” McCloud said, getting to the last question on his list. “Is it ‘wrassle’ or ‘razzle’?”

Smith shrugged indicating it was up to him, and then nodded, “Wrassle.”

“Okay, that was my only question about it. No, why did you go back to the magazine format instead of a graphic novel?”

Smith explained that the model of selling comic books serially before re-publishing and selling them as a graphic novel makes some sense economically, but the main reason was he enjoyed the instant feedback he’d get from readers, which in some ways would shape the future narrative of Bone or, at the very least, keep working on it fun and exciting.

He contrasted working on Bone with working on his Captain Marvel comic for DC. For that, he wrote the entire 200-page script, showed it to DC to have it approved, and then spent the next year and a half drawing it and then it started coming out. It wasn’t an experience he enjoyed as much as the work-in-progress nature of serial comic-making.

Then McCloud turned question-asking duties over to audience members, and those lining up in the aisles before two stand-up microphones again demonstrated the wide breadth of Smith’s current fan base. About a third of the questions came from grade-school aged boys, a few from college-aged kids, at least one from a white-haired man.

One boy asked about the backgrounds in Bone, and Smith told the kid, who was from Columbus, to have his parents drive him down to Old Man’s Cave in the Hocking Hills area, which is where Bone is mostly set.

Another asked him why he decided to use dragons and “made-up stuff,” to which he responded he’d need to see the boy’s ID. The dragon, he said, is based on Doonesbury character Zonker (Hey, you can kinda see it in the eyes! A Doonesbury influence is more evident in Smith’s Thorn version of Bone, which we’ll talk about tomorrow).

A twenty- or thirty-something asked about Smith about online comics, to which he turned to McCloud, author of a book on the subject (Reinventing Comics) ) and a longtime proponent of comics’ online future (earlier Smith said McCloud was advocating online comics before there were online comics, and, when talking about the new crop of web cartoonists and how their end goal still seems to be print, he turned to McCloud and pointedly said “for the time being” as if to cover himself).

“Oh, you don’t want to open Pandora’s Box,” McCloud laughed and, despite some prodding, resisted taking off his interviewer hat and putting on his theorist hat. They both marveled at the talent of the current generation of cartoonists, online and in print, and the infinite space the Internet offers them.

“I haven’t quite figured out how you make money on the web,” Smith said. “Me neither,” McCloud sighed.

Another asked the fairly perennial what advice do you have for aspiring artists, and Smith bluntly said that for the most part, everything he and McCloud had learned about the industry no longer applied, since things have changed so drastically since they were breaking into it.

One thing that hasn’t was the need to know as much as you can about comics, who makes them and how they’re made, something Smith started doing when he was only nine. I was quite amused to hear Smith suggest reading Tom Spurgeon’s Comicsreporter.com, which, after only a few days of reading, will give you a good idea on all of the players in the comics industry (McCloud also suggested Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat and Dirk Deppey’s Journalista). You hear that kids? Want to break into comics? Read comics blogs!

They also noted that in the old days, there used to be publishers and syndicates, but more and more there seem to be communities of artists who help each other out on the path to publication.

One person asked about the ending of Rose and how much of it was Charles Vess, another about Smith’s current dealings with Hollywood, and another about why he decided to do Shazam! (“The honest answer is I just thought it would be fun.”)

The final question was from a woman who mentioned that she has relatives who are ages seven and 11 who love Bone, but their four-year-old sister hasn’t been allowed to read it yet, because of some of the violence and how intense it is. She wanted to know what audience Smith intended Bone for when making it.

“That is a really, really good question,” he said. He then turned to McCloud: “Why didn’t you ask that?”

He explained he was writing it for himself, and perhaps other “cartoon head adults;” adults who grew up digging and still dug Chuck Jones and Carl Barks. “It was the book I wanted to see since I was a kid.”

He explained that it really started becoming a book for the all-ages demographic when librarians started embracing the trade paperbacks he was printing, as early as 1995. “We never claimed it was a children’s book; parents and children claimed it as a children’s book.”

With the question and answer portion over, the crowd dispersed, some to buy books and have McCloud and Smith sign them, others to wander around campus to check out the Bone and Beyond exhibit in the Wexner Center (which includes original Smith pages and the works of some of his favorite cartoonists) and the Before Bone exhibit in the Cartoon Research Library, which consists of Smith’s Thorn strips from The Lantern.

Come back tomorrow night for a discussion of the exhibits themselves.

In the meantime, here are some links to the rest of the Jeff Smithstravaganza:



Exhibition info

Show curators Caswell and Dave Filipi to give gallery talk

Some photos of the exhibit set-up from Boneville’s blog

The catalog for the exhibit is on sale

Info on the Before Bone exhibit

Terry Moore!

Paul Pope!

Smith to introduce his favorite Chuck Jones Looney Tunes (You’ll need to buy a ticket for this one)

This week's example of Iron Man's crush on Captain America:

(Courtesy Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, Steve Sadowski and "inLight" Studios. You can find context in Marvel Comics' Avengers/Invaders #1, but me, I prefer to think of Tony brooding in a room-sized, holographic shrine to Cap)