First things first: I’ve got Doctor Strange news for NeilAlien! During one of the many Marvel panels at which Joe Quesada was present, an audience member asked Joe about the status of J. Michael Straczynski (I just checked my Amazing Spider-Man trade paperbacks to get the spelling of that name (the Nietzsche of comics) straight once and for all)’s Doc Strange series. “Wait and see” was his answer. Hey, it’s better than Joe’s response to all the questions he fielded about Kevin Smith’s perpetually delayed books: “Dude, you know as much as I do.”
Anyway, yeah, WizardWorld Chicago. All in all, well worth the 30 hours spent in transit (we’re counting bathroom breaks and stops for caffeine free Diet Pepsi, which for some awesome reason is available everywhere outside of the tri-state area). The Missus, K, and I all really needed a break, and we got one. The ladies actually were pleased that this is the dorkiest of the big comic conventions–less pressure to act like a hipster, more freedom to run around harassing backyard wrestlers, letting fanboys grab their asses, and wearing shirts that read “JEFFREY BROWN’S NEXT BOOK.” (Yes, that actually happened.) For a complete neophyte’s perspective on the con, check out my wife’s two blogs, where she posted extensively on the subject: start here and scroll up; then start here and scroll up.
Me? I was divided on the matter. I’m the first to admit that unlike Dirk, I’ve never outgrown superheroes. Well, technically I outgrew them during college (during which the only comics I read were by Alan Moore, Chris Ware, Frank Miller, and Erik Larsen (okay, so he’s an exception)), but now I fiend for the good superhero stuff like it’s crack. Hearing the future plans of guys like Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis is an unabashedly geeky thrill for me, because it’s the work that these guys are doing (along with Grant Morrison and the whole New Marvel regime) that, along with altcomix people like the Highwater crew, got me back into comics in the first place. Basically, my entire life-plan changed because I really liked Ultimate Spider-Man. Point is, WWC is a superhero mecca (moreover, Wizard founder Gareb Shamus (who I didn’t get to see) has never been anything but wonderful to me), and therefore I was tickled to be there. (In addition, it was entertaining to watch the promised DC/Marvel Conflagration fizzle out into a series of non-announcements (mainly “We’ve got nothing to say about Grant Morrison’s replacement on New X-Men at this time” and “We’ve got nothing to say about Grant Morrison replacing anyone on Superman at this time”): turns out the whole shebang was essentially the product of one guy publishing some rumors, attributing them to one side, then attributing them to the other, then saying that it’s all proof that Anything Goes in the Knock-Down Drag-Out World of Mainstream Superhero Comics.)
On the other hand, Jesus, people, but enough with the fucking superheroes already! The problem here is that there seems to be no distinction between The Good Stuff and, well, early ’90s X-books. Good God, but if I saw one smelly, poorly groomed retailer trying to unload his back-issue bins crammed to bursting with Bishop mini-series, I saw 200. Do you know how hard it was to find ANY alternatives to the spandex set, aside from at Top Shelf’s table? Answer: So difficult that I literally came home with no purchases. (In fairness, Chicago Comics had a small but well-stocked booth; but unlike every other retailer there they weren’t discounting books on Sunday, so I didn’t buy. I guess this is their way to compensate for stocking books so good that no one buys them.) Meanwhile, you had folks like Marvel’s old-school editor Tom Brevoort claiming that Marvel came to WWC but not San Diego because SD isn’t really about comics anymore while WWC is. Though my strong suspicion is that Marvel’s reasoning owes much more to Wizard pitching in a bit with set-up costs than to anything else, that’s really neither here nor there: It’s just kind of a bummer to see Brevoort (surprisingly Catholic in taste when it comes to comics–he edited the James Sturm/Guy Davis/R. Sikoryak altcomic in superhero clothing Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, after all) spout such a goofily optimistic assessment of a con that’s at least as much about action figures as it is about their four-color antecedents.
I think Dirk is right (I tend to) when he says that all this emphasis on superheroics is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, given the momentum manga has built up and shows no signs of relinquishing. That’s why two Marvel pseudo-announcements made me as happy as anything else at the con. The first was that they’ll be producing a book called 15 Love, about a teenage girl tennis player. If the sample copy at the Marvel booth is any indication, it’s following the same photo-cover formula as Millar’s Trouble so as to ape YA fiction books, it’s got Chynna Clugston-Major style American manga art, and there isn’t a superhero in sight–as far as I know it doesn’t turn out that this girl grows up to be Sue Storm Richards, either. Second, when I asked the Marvel panel whether they had any plans to experiment not just with manga-style art or even manga-style storytelling but manga-style format and trade dress (as readers of ADDTF know well, this is my Number One Piece of Advice to the Industry), Joe Q. responded with a big smile and a “wait and see.” (A little bird told me that Ultimate Spider-Man, which is shonen manga in everything but art style and name, is slated to be the first recipient of a manga-format edition–it’s the perfect choice, if you ask me….) Since I agree with Jim Henley that the real obstacle to widespread readership isn’t superheroes (sure, they’re too overrepresented, but most normal people don’t mind them) but the format of the comics themselves, this has me quite hopeful. See, Dirk? Amidst all that furniture rearranging, someone’s working the bilge pump after all!
Wow. A quick look around the comics blogosphere shows you how much is going on around here: a mere three days out of surfing range and I’ve got a bajillion things to link to. Here goes:
Bill Sherman reviews two very solid superhero books that came out recently–the second installment of the creepy meditation-on-sexual-assault “Purple” storyline in Bendis’s Alias and the first issue of Straczynski’s Justice League dissection Supreme Power. Both issues prove, among other things, that good superhero writing works soooo much better with good superhero art, provided in these cases by Michael Gaydos, Mark Bagley (out of character indeed!), and Gary Frank (who’s like a much lessy goofy Steve Dillon). He also points out that a quote from a good song goes a long way, a rule I hope to prove true by sticking a Bowie quote into every comic I ever write.
Speaking of “the good stuff,” in the aforementioned Journalista article, Dirk Deppey questions the utility of moving Garth Ennis’s Punisher over to the mature-readers Max line, opining that it’ll yield little more than additional “fuck”s. But during the Marvel panel at WWC (confirmed by Grant Morrison (who has his own things to say about manga (and toys!)), while Alan David Doane has Mark Millar (and in so doing, had a 50% scoop of WWC’s big announcement).
Big Sunny D offers some thoughts on the most recent issues of Morrison’s New X-Men. I happen to disagree with Sunny’s take. As far as I’m concerned, the more Morrison tackles petri-dish worlds, the better, and to judge by his Newsarama interview, his decision to do so basically precipitated his exit from Marvel, so it was a ballsy move to boot. Also, though artist Chris Bachalo’s work during the Proteus storyline in Ultimate X-Men was gratingly claustrophobic to my eyes, I think he’s really outdoing himself with this arc–angry, jagged, kinetic. But it takes diff’rent strokes to move the world, or in this case, The World.
Eve Tushnet makes the connection between superhero stories and opera. Though Frank Miller has been talking about this for years (and indeed did so directly to me during my interview with him for A&F a couple years back), it really took the film version of Daredevil to solidify this connection for me. (Of course, it helps that The Missus is an opera singer herself–I’m more familiar with the stuff than the average fanboy.) Eve, since you were curious, I talked about what I saw as the commonalities between these two types of spectacles here.
Since we were listening to the seemingly omnipresent WCBS NewsRadio 880 AM broadcast as early in our trip back from Chicago as central Pennsylvania, we heard quite a few reports on Marvel’s big stock bonanza. Till Dirk gets his claws into it, why not check out this Newsarama piece on the subject?
In non-superhero news, what hath Blankets wrought?
Finally, thanks to Brian Azzarello, Brian Michael Bendis, Jeffrey Brown, CB Cebulski, Marshall Dillon, Mike Doran, Jann Jones, JG Jones, Mark Millar, John Miesegaes, Mike Norton, Chris Staros, (especially) Craig Thompson, everyone at the Top Shelf booth, and all other pros who extended a friendly hand during WizardWorld; to Bill, Dirk, and Alan for linking to my dispatches from the con; to everyone I temporarily deafened by putting the up-to-11 remastered version of Iggy & the Stooges’ “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” on the jukebox at Knuckles Friday night; and to the Missus and K for coming with me.
And no, that’s not a reference to this blind item.
(But PS: You know this other blind item? Tune into the comics internet tomorrow, when methinks it won’t be so blind anymore. Spectacular!)