My manga posts seem to be generating a lot of attention, to the point where I feel I need to expand on my theory a bit.

Yes, I do feel that manga is the future of comics. Why? For starters, it’s what real people are actually buying. The industry (and by that I mean the five big superhero publishers, the indie companies that ape them, and the retailers that sell their wares) try very, very hard (or at least talk a great deal about trying very, very hard) to get young kids, girls, and other atypical comics readers to read comics–but the thing is, they’re already reading ’em! They just happen to be reading comics from Japan. So in a very simple sense, comics stores need to be selling the comics that people want to buy. Like Dirk always says, the longer it takes the Direct Market to realize this, the worse off the DM (and by extension the American comics industry) will end up. I do see some inroads being made–both of the big comic book stores in New York City, Midtown Comics and Jim Hanley’s Universe, now have manga featured prominently either on their very popular website (in the former case) or in their heavily trafficked store window (in the latter). However, it’s safe to say that Midtown and Hanley’s are on the leading edge of smart-retailership in general, so this doesn’t necessarily indicate industry-wide foresight.

At this juncture in the argument, many people say that, in fact, manga will not save comics–the only thing that manga will help the American companies sell is more manga. By manga, such pundits are referring to Japanese comics written and illustrated by Japanese people in Japan, then at some point translated into English and sold in America. (At this point, the big manga companies aren’t even “flipping” the stories to be read from left to right in Western style–that’s how into the Japan-ness of the material the audience is!) This is to say that to them, manga really is a “genre”–when, as many have pointed out, to say that is akin to saying that Hollywood is a “genre.” (Technically they’re both modes of production capable of producing work in a wide range of genres, but, I suppose, with a proscribed range of affect. At a certain point, though, that proscribed range doesn’t really matter–Hollywood has produced both Taxi Driver and Spy Kids, and manga has produced both Screw Style and Yu-Gi-Oh!) Right now there’s little evidence to contradict this assertion about the provincial nature of manga readers, since the attempts at cross-pollinization have been fairly sporadic, and since the places where, in the main, manga is bought and sold are NOT direct-market comics retailers where buying patterns could be anecdotally, if not statistically, monitored. My own extremely limited experience with manga-reading kids does indicate a certain degree of over-the-top cultishness that brooks little deviation from the norm of big-eyed Japanese-style drawings done by people with Japanese names. Moreover, much of the manga phenomenon in America is tied to anime cartoons and gaming of both the card and video varieties, which would appear to provide even more ways for the manga consumer to spend his every entertainment dollar on stuff from the land of the rising sun.

But I’ve never intended to come across like I think that manga readers would jump to The Incredible Hulk or Black Hole the second those books are published in little squarebound softcovers. My proselytizing for manga-formatted comics is more a question of removing unnecessary obstacles to readership than it is of creating some sort of tesseract that’ll transport fans of Love Hina or Dragonball Z to Hellboy in the blink of an eye.

What do I mean by “removing obstacles”? Let’s look at New Marvel for some for-instances. When Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada took over, they slowly instituted aesthetic and business changes that are now largely line-wide. Here are a few:

1) Stop writing continuity-heavy or continuity-dependent stories that require a familiarity with the characters unattainable to the casual reader

2) Stop doing multi-title crossovers that require readers to purchase and be up to speed on several titles

3) Start writing in 3-8 issue story arcs that will make for smoother reading when collected

4) Start publishing those collections as often as possible

5) Stop doing text-heavy, visually “busy” covers featuring tons of characters and replace these with simple, iconic images of the main characters

6) Start printing the books on high-quality paper line-wide

7) Stop using ALL CAPS lettering and switch to the same kind of mixed-case fonts that most publications use

Now, we’ve all got our opinions as to the overall character of the New Marvel regime, and as to the success of their initiatives. Certainly, no one (not even Quesada and Jemas themselves) thinks that every single book Marvel has put out since 2000 with these guidelines in mind is a rip-roaring success. Indeed, none of the above are guarantees of quality in any way. But that’s not the point at all–they’re not intended to be construed as guarantees. Rather, what these measures (and some others) actually did was remove several long-standing and frustrating obstacles to acquiring a larger readership for Marvel’s books. They made the books easier to read, easier to understand, easier to find, easier to afford, easier to follow, easier to hold, and easier to look at. Even if you believe that 99% of what Marvel does is total dreck (and I don’t, at this point not by a long shot), at least that 1% has a much better shot of attracting an audience.

This is what I’m getting at when I talk about the strength of the manga format. Manga collections look like–and read like–books. They’re the size and shape of a regular old paperback novel, and since you’re getting a couple hundred pages of story at a shot, they’re pretty much the length of a regular old papeback novel as well. Even if what’s inside is utter crap, at least someone who comes across it in a bookstore can say to herself, “Yep, that’s a book, alright.” (The price point is far more in line with regular paperback books than most trade-paperback American comic collections’ are, too.) Moreover, manga companies go to great lengths to ensure uniform, attractive trade dress throughout a series’ duration, meaning that they actually look nice when put next to each other on a bookshelf. In a bookstore, where you need to do whatever you can to catch the eye of the buyer, this simple step is a godsend. And you’re never gonna see a manga collection that needed to be reissued after Volume Two came out because the publisher never bothered putting Volume One on its spine. (Folks, this isn’t some act of hubris like Eddie Van Halen prematurely assuming he’d eventually be able to release a VH Greatest Hits Volume Two without people pointing and laughing at him–go ahead, put Volume One on the the first collection you publish! We won’t mind!)

Compare and contrast with the standard American comics format, the pamphlet. (For the record, blogosphere, I prefer the term “floppy,” but pamphlet seems to have stuck.) It’s much bigger than a book, but also much thinner and, well, floppier. In that sense it’s closer to a magazine, but it’s thinner than most magazines as well. Outside of Marvel, chances are good that its paper quality is closest to a tabloid or newspaper. Of course, it’s work of literature (broadly defined, for the most part), though, so it’s alienated once again from its magazine and newspaper similarities. And of course, there’s no spine to speak of, so you’re stuck with sticking them in longboxes if you want to keep them around and in reach. The pamphlet comic book is this weird non-thing, in a twilight zone of bad design, bad size, bad durability, bad quality. Plus, now that most mainstream publishers have switched to telling genuinely serialized stories (as opposed to more-or-less complete tales with a “to be continued” thrown in during the last half page, or installments in ongoing soap operas with no beginning, middle, and end), the pamphlet is being used as a containment device for one-fifth of a story, and it’s one hell of an awkward container. I happen to think that mainstream comics have, in the main, improved in quality since this new mode of storytelling took effect, and to me the pamphlet is now an obsolete mode of delivery for the kind of stories even the big superhero characters are being used to tell–not to mention an expensive one: prices for most pamphlet comic books hover around $3.00, which means you’re paying quite a bit for not a whole lot of story.

Now, I know that fanboys (and we’re not just talking about superhero people here–I’ve seen altcomix titans talk about the dusty books in their longboxes with a level of nostalgic sentimentality that’d make a Norman Rockwell retrospective look like a 24-hour live reenactment of the making of “Piss Christ”) talk about the charm that these objects (the pamphlet comic books) have. In addition to the “that’s how I read ’em as a kid” factor, there’s the “monthly fix” element in terms of storytelling method. But in business, charm is for cereal-hawking leprechauns. And comics is a business, protestations of the “it’s art!” crowd be damned. It has to be, or everyone from Brian Michael Bendis to Chris Ware would be reduced to xeroxing minicomic copies of the new Powers or Acme Novelty Library and swapping them over the internet. The pamphlet is an obstacle to selling comics to non-traditional comics fans.

(And yes, I think a lot of these complaints still apply to trade paperbacks, and in some cases even hardcovers. Though the range in size of literary fiction and prose nonfiction hardcovers means that comics hardcovers don’t stand as far out from the crowd, in many cases they’re even more expensive than a fat first-run hardcover novel. And the trade paperbacks suffer from that same “what the hell size am I trying to be?” problem that besets the pamphlets which comprise them. Of course, don’t even get me started on how haphazard and slapdash trade dress is for these things. Christ, my shelves look like they were stocked with books from a printing press run by the zombies from 28 Days Later. Production values at art-house publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf, and (real bookstore publisher) Pantheon tend to offset these drawbacks, both because the books are thoughtfully designed and formatted and because the content within them tends to be so self-evidently good that idiosyncratic packaging is less of a distraction or impediment.)

To sum up, Direct Market retailers need to get manga books in their stores, prominently display them, do their damndest to sell them and to get the people who already buy them to do their buying there instead of elsewhere. That’s pretty much a bare-minimum industry-wide bankruptcy preventer at this point. But beyond that, the publishers that depend on the Direct Market for an obscenely high percentage of their profits (despite some legitimate inroads being made into bookstores) need to remove obstacles to their readers (and to those bookstore inroads) by experimenting with publishing their books in manga format.

No, they shouldn’t do it all at once–they’re still too dependent financially on the Direct Market’s audience of fanboys, for one thing, a crowd notoriously resistant to change and one that’s unlikely to buy anything that even looks like “that crap from Japan”–but certain books would actually make sense for demographic, aesthetic, or storytelling-style reasons. I’ve suggested Ultimate Spider-Man because it basically is shonen manga, in pacing, characterization, tone, and content, if not in artistic style. I’ve also suggested Sandman, because that book’s anomalous audience–teenage girls and young women–is one that snaps up shoujo manga with gusto, so I imagine that, in the immortal words of Egon Spengler, the door swings both ways. I’ve seen folks suggest not-quite-mainstream, not-quite-altcomix books like A Distant Soil and A Thousand Ships, which make sense because of the clear-line black-and-white art the books employ (theoretically this should reduce in size well without losing much in the way of comprehensibility or attractiveness), the epic/romantic feel of the stories, and (oddly enough) the queer-friendly tone that is (increasingly obviously) appealing to the teen-girl manga-reading audience.

There are some promising signs in this regard. DC has published a Sandman spinoff involving the insanely teen-girl-popular character Death that not only employs manga-style art, but was released in actual manga format. I’m unaware if further volumes are planned, but the addictive serially-released nature of manga volumes means it would behoove DC to get cracking in that department one way or the other. Meanwhile, Marvel is at the very least trying very hard to use manga content, in several ways: On big books like Uncanny X-Men (an actual Japanese person!), in their now-largely-defunct Marvel Mangaverse titles (which usually related to the original Marvel characters only in name) and in their kinda sorta manga line, Tsunami (well, at least that was the idea at the time; for the most part it’s now the pacing that’s manga more than the art or the creators). Rumor has it that, indeed, Ultimate Spider-Man will be collected the manga way; I’d speculate that when the first Tsunami collections bow, they too might be manga-sized; the Epic books may get that treatment as well. Dark Horse already has manga books, so they’re in okay shape, but it seems criminal to sit on books like Hellboy and Sin City (not to mention their teen-girl friendly Buffy tie-ins) without putting them into what’s become the popular format. Image has the benefit of a high profile name with virtually no central administration, so individual Image creators appear to be exploring the possibilities–Devil’s Due’s Semantic Lace was published directly into manga format. CrossGen may do a lot of things wrong, but I think they’ve been right on the money with their incessant experimentation with format; aside from manga-sized collections of individual titles (called “travellers,” I believe), they’ve also gone a route that few American publishers have dared, and published big omnibus collections featuring issues of several different series for relatively little money. This, of course, is the publishing model available at newstands all over Japan, where a guy on his way home from work can spend a few bucks on a big collection, and even if 80% of the (often 40 pages or longer) stories in there don’t tickle his fancy, he’s still gotten his money’s worth with the other 20%. Unfortunately, CrossGen’s publishing savvy can’t change the fact that these well-packaged, well-formatted volumes contain CrossGen comics. (I appreciate that they’re trying to cover all the genre bases, but it’s amazing how so many books that are supposed to be so different all look and feel exactly the same: “You know what this line needs? Another book featuring female characters with heads of really full wavy hair!”)

The case for manga is often obscured by what amount, I think, to fears that the Japanese Invasion will crowd out all other forms of storytelling and art. Which, of course, it will–if the American publishers that produce those forms don’t get their act together and adopt the aspects of manga publishing that they can–that is, remove the obstacles to readership that the more successful manga books have proven to exist–while still retaining the qualities that make their own books different and, in those wonderful rare cases, special. If the American comics industry doesn’t want manga to close the book on American comics, they would be well advised not to close the book on manga.

(Update: I just want to say this within this actual post–I should note that for all my pontificating the only manga I read is Battle Royale, the grand guignol dystopian kids-killing-kids tale. I’d hope that any gross inaccuracies found above are due to my unfamiliarity with much of the material, and not simple stupidity on my part (not that I’m saying we can rule that out).)

Boy, that was a doozy, huh? I’m pretty proud of it, actually–I think it ended up being pretty comprehensive and, dare I say it, insightful. I should note that for all my pontificating the only manga I read is Battle Royale, the grand guignol dystopian kids-killing-kids tale. I’d hope that any gross inaccuracies in my manga article are due to my unfamiliarity with much of the material, and not simple stupidity on my part (not that I’m saying we can rule that out).

Things are going very well with Amanda, as you might have guessed from my improved mood. I’ll be travelling to visit her once again tomorrow. If I’m lucky I’ll get a chance to blog from the hotel.

I’m doing a lot better today. I think at long last I really appreciate what people mean when they use the phrase “emotional roller-coaster.” And as tough as it is for me it’s got to be about a gajillion times more so for the missus. She’s being extraordinary, through and through, and I love her and miss her.

One good thing to come of this all is that I’ve learned that maybe the Internet isn’t the miserable vortex of bastardry that I thought it was. I’ve received many messages of support from the blogosphere and messboard denizens, most of them from people I’ve never met, some of them from people I barely know from Adam.

So thank you to Bill Sherman, Kimsquit, NeilAlien, Eve Tushnet, Jim Henley, Alan David Doane, Big Sunny D, Sterile Thunder, Jim Treacher, Tom Spurgeon, Jim Dougan, Bill DeFranza (an old buddy of mine, but hey, he has a website too), and anyone else I’ve momentarily forgotten. Your kind words mean a great deal to me and Amanda both.

Whoa! How’d I miss this? A blog post of mine on the importance of the manga format (as opposed to manga-style content) to the future of comics led Mr. Dave McKenna to start this TCJ.com messboard thread on the topic. If everything magically stops being completely awful at some point soon, maybe I’ll chime in once again, but there’s nothin’ stoppin’ you guys.

Actually, you know what? Here goes (to an extent):

I’ll dive into this at length as soon as I can muster the energy, but I really do think that the manga format is strong enough that the manga content cultists can be convinced or seduced into wandering into American comics presented in that format. I think certain comics would make a better bridge than others–Ultimate Spider-Man and Sandman are my picks for the big companies to try out, though Colleen Doran’s A Distant Soil, which someone in the thread brought up, is a good idea, too–but ultimately manga-format comics just look more like books, not these weird not-quite-magazines not-quite-books odd-sized pamphlets and TPBs the mainstream comics companies rely on. As proof of this I offer the Barnes & Noble in Consohoken, PA, which shelves shoujo manga right there with the Francine Pascal young adult novels, and believe me, you can’t tell the difference from the trade dress of the spine without flipping them open to see that some have pictures and some don’t.

Few more things:

Milx, the artist responsible for the beautiful new Silver Surfer book (part of the “great two or three weeks of Marvel comics” mentioned in the post below), is missing, according to Newsarama. Damn.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Tom Spurgeon, former editor of the Comics Journal, about what makes for a good comic convention. I think that if there’s a real problem with conventions like WizardWorld, it’s not so much that they focus on superheroes, but that they reinforce the perception that the superhero-comic industry IS comics. (This is the kind of worldview that leads people to depict the “diversity” of comics by listing all the different writers working on Superman.)

On that note, John Barber offers a heated indictment of this mindset at Talk About Comics (link courtesy of the ever-lovin’ blackout-bravin’ NeilAlien). He focuses particularly on the head-in-sand attitude of the big American publishers toward the manga model, which as time goes by looks more and more insane.

This just in: Dirk Deppey’s an asshole!

A great mainstream-media article about some great comics can be found in Time magazine (link courtesy of Kim Thompson). And yes, Blankets is in there.

The “extras” to which I am referring are the following sentences, basically.

For obvious reasons I lack the energy to write at length about anything. This stinks, because there’s an awful lot I want to write at length about: my take on Kevin Smith’s Daredevil run, the Postal Service’s album Give Up, how good the last two or three weeks’ worth of Marvel comics were, Jeffrey Brown, the limits and strengths of supercomics and altcomix, and so forth. But I just don’t have it in me. (This also applies to all the emails I owe people–I’m sorry!) I still want to blog, though, for my sanity’s sake, hence this round-up.

If you want to see how thoroughly the Internet influences mainstream comics, check out this Pulse interview with writer Chuck Austen. About half of it is devoted to talking about just how much shit this guy attracts (some of it deserved, some of it not, most of it inane) on message boards.

Ninth Art’s Paul O’Brien points out just how stupid it is for Marvel’s teen-girl-targeted (and quite good) series Emma Frost to have Greg Horn’s painted salutes to Scores girls on its covers every issue. I read this series, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why they couldn’t see that the covers and the content are almost diametrically opposed.

Jim Henley and I disagree about a lot, but this post on the Jesus Castillo case and the role of government is beautiful–the best yet written on the subject. Hear, hear, Jim.

Jim also takes a look at Neil Gaiman’s much-ballyhooed Elizabethan Marvel tale, 1602, and finds it wanting. I see many of Jim’s points, but this seems like too much of a “wait and see” series to cast judgment just yet.

Eve Tushnet offers her usual inspiringly fresh take on several comics, evsicerating one for its sophomoric politics (always a fun thing to do with comics). She also talks about some Daredevil books I recommended to her in her quest for a decent treatment of DD’s Catholicism. She gives ’em mixed reviews, which I’d love to respond to, if I had it in me.

(In the meantime, here’s some more Daredevil recommendations, from Ninth Art. Can’t vouch for ’em all, though.)

Eve’s also discovered what layout is all about, and offers a good introduction for the layman.

Alan David Doane and Big Sunny D doubleteam the Big Two Altcomix Titans, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. Each offers his thoughts on Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook (here and here) and Clowes’s Eightball #22 (here and here). Man, EB22–talk about a book you need a lot of energy to, well, talk about!

Sunny also posts on the dangers of shopping for expensive comics when you’re not bankrolled by a major clothing corporation. Apparently this applies to some people.

Alan, meanwhile, links to Sequential Swap, a graphic novel trading site. Seems like a good idea to me, particularly for those who are put off by the steep pricetag of some collections.

Johnny Bacardi liked the Daredevil film more than Eve but less than me. He also offers his own thoughts on the general musings on the maturity and purpose of superhero comics that have been making the rounds these days.

Speaking of which, here’s a lively debate about the superhero genre from the Comics Journal message board, in which superhero fans give as good as they get, and which actually lasted till page four until someone said “Frank Miller is a fascist.” I think that’s a record. (Link courtesy of NeilAlien.)

Bowie Quote Alert at Bill Sherman’s!

Courtesy of Dirk Deppey, here’s a Portland Tribue article on Craig Thompson of Blankets fame. You’ve all read this book by now, right?

Unlike me, Dirk apparently does have it in him to wax thoughtful: He does so on the true ramifications of the Jesus Castillo case, on the politics and purpose of Free Comic Book Day, and on the nature of layout (his recommendation of Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics is heartily seconded by yours truly, pretentious comicscholars be damned.)

Thanks very much to everyone I’ve linked to. Your inspiring and intriguing thoughts are some of the only things that are keeping my spirits afloat these days. Go, Team Comics.

The blackout sucked.

I miss my wife.

That’s all I got, folks.

Earth to the Direct Market: MANGA IS THE FUTURE. So sayeth me, and so sayeth Dirk Deppey, who today has a lengthy analysis of the meteoric rise of manga in the bookstore market, and the towering dominance of manga in the graphic novel market specifically. He also points out the demonstrable qualitative difference between manga’s depiction of teen sexuality and the American mainstream’s opening shot at same.

Yesterday Dirk also took another swing at superhero comics, this time arguing that the inherently escapist qualities of the genre preclude it from yielding sophisticated work except perhaps with the most herculean effort and Shakesperean talent behind it. For various reasons I lack the emotional attention span to rebut at length, but I’ll just say this is pretty much the same way the big Hollywood studios felt about gangster pictures before Bonnie & Clyde and The Godfather and about science fiction before 2001 and Star Wars. While there’s something to be said against the countless lame attempts to make superhero comics Relevant (I find the Green Lantern/Green Arrow “my sidekick is a junkie” idea particularly annoying), to say that “the real world should be left to comics about the real world” is to deny the effective communicative properties of genre, which would lead to a pretty boring “real world” indeed.

(Meanwhile, Dirk, if the “superhero comics suck because they’re for kids” diss is such a canard, then what do you mean by calling DC, Marvel et al “children’s publishers”?)

Let’s hear it for the BBC, our allies in the War on Terror!

Some of you may not come here for either the comics or the politics (or the music or the movies or the obscenity-laden rants about commercials). You might be a friend of mine who comes here to read about what’s going on in the life of Sean T. Well, long story short, my wife is being hospitalized for anorexia.

She’s doing okay about this, I guess. Obviously she never thought things would get this bad, as cliched as that sounds, so she’s ready and willing and able to get better. But I think the diagnosis, and the severity of the treatment, has shocked her quite a bit. Me, I’m sad she’ll be gone for so long (three weeks), but happy she’ll be getting the attention and treatment she needs. If nothing else, she’ll have a little free time everyday to reread Blankets for the umpteenth time.

If the situation permits, she’ll be blogging through her stay at the treatment facility: Expect her to be candid on this one and funny on this one (though the two blogs do not have a mutually exclusive hold on those qualities). You can also email her your well wishes at lucyhoney23 *at* yahoo *dot* com.

So please bear with me if blogging is occasionally sporadic throughout the next month or so–I’ll be driving to and from the center, which is about two and a half hours away, quite a bit. But we firmly believe that you can’t keep a big bad anorexic and her geeky husband down, so you’ll be hearing from us, back to our old selves, in no time.

Franklin Harris points out that the blogosphere (not just the comics subdivision) is all over the egregious Jesus Castillo non-decision. He’s also pointing out that some say Castillo’s counsel is partially to blame.

This sure won’t stop me from encouraging you to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, though.

(Don’t fret because of the comicsy inside joke in the subject–this is a political blog entry! Remember those?)

Yesterday morning, as the Missus and I enjoyed our complimentary continental breakfast at a Days Inn in western Pennsylvania, the Fox News morning show Fox and Friends was doing a story on the bias of the New York Times. Despite the fact that I agreed with virtually every word they said about The Old Grey Propagandist, after a couple of minutes I wanted to put my fist through the screen.

First of all, have you ever seen Fox & Friends? If there exists, anywhere on Earth, a more annoying group of airheaded blow-dried anchorzombies, please, Donald Rumsfeld, call in a couple of MOABs and blow that place to motherloving Kingdom Come.

Second, where in hell does Fox News get off calling ANYTHING biased? The painfully, transparently phony incredulity of the show’s host as they discussed the issue–“So you’re saying that it’s not just the opinion page, but that the regular stories are slanted? Might there be rules of journalistic ethics that this violates?”–was so patronizing that I nearly choked on my donut.

I’m not one of those people who sits around decrying Fox News as the end of journalism as we know it. All news is biased, and thanks to outlets like the NYT and BBC, this is true, ahem, now more than ever. Moreover, despite how annoying their protestations of innocence may be, Fox is pretty nudge-nudge wink-wink about the whole “fair and balanced” routine–as most of their viewers could tell you, they watch it because it’s conservative. Finally, Fox News is something I’ll occasionally watch (or watched, back when I got it on my cable package) for entertainment value, and certainly not for news–in other words, I know the deal, and won’t get bamboozled. But this segment was so egregiously phony and condescending that, to me, it called into question the entire enterprise. Conservativism–even the poorly thought out inconsistent big-government cultural-conservative mishmash advocated by FNC–shouldn’t have to equal stupid.

Which brings me to Fox News Channel’s decision to sue Al Franken over his use of the phrase “Fair and Balanced” in his next book, an anti-FNC screed. Apparently they’re worried that someone might mistakenly conclude that Franken works for Fox.

Bullshit.

This is a big corporation bullying someone into not criticizing them any longer, and is as egregious a violation of the First Amendment as you’re likely to see (unless, of course, you’re Jesus Castillo). In protest (at the behest of Neal Pollack; link courtesy of Tegan Gjovaag), I’m going to be using the phrase “Fair and Balanced” as often as is humanly possible.

And I assure you, I don’t work for Fox News.

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!)

Methinks my big WizardWorld wrapup will have to wait till Tuesday night at the earliest, since the Missus and I will be driving back home till then and you’ve got less time at these hotel business centers than Angelina Jolie did to catch her breath at ComicCon. The nutshell version till I can expand on it a bit: It was the best of cons, it was the worst of cons.

Here’s a quick NerdNews update from the last day of the con:

* Captain America will be taken away from Chuck Austen (who, as Dirk Deppey points out today (no time for a link–click on the blogroll!) and as I’ve pointed out many times, is at his best when he’s at his sleaziest, and his Cap run is snoozy, not sleazy) and given to writer Bob Morales (of Truth fame–or in fanboy eyes, infamy) and artist Chris Bachalo (whose weird work currently graces the pages of New X-Men). It’s great to see Marvel reward the author of a quality book that didn’t sell, ignoring the latter and paying attention to the former.

* For those who care, Mark Waid and Joe Quesada promised more Mark Waid Fantastic Four work in the future. The Marvel Meltdown theory takes another hit in the gut with that little fence-mending announcement.

* Letters pages will be back, meaning letterhacks can complain about the cast of X-Force being gone in more than just X-Statix.

See you, everyone!

Oh, great. Now I see that ADD is alerting his readers to come here for regular WizardWorld updates, just because I happened to say that I’d actually be offering them. When will people learn not to believe what I say?

Oh well, here goes: There’s going to be an Ultimate Carnage, (essentially the evil twin of Venom, himself the evil twin of Spider-Man–in other words, this was not a character many people expected to appear in the stripped-down world of the Ultimate books) in the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man soon. (Hey, I’m at WizardWorld–you were expecting maybe an update on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown graphic novel?) The reason I bring this up is because Bendis said Carnage would be someone we’ve already met in the series, and later on in the panel had to fend off rumors that the Ultimate version of high-school bully Flash Thompson was gay. “What’s his secret, then?” “You’ll just have to keep reading.” No one else seemed to put two and two together, so, uh, you heard it hear first: Ultimate Carnage will be Flash Thompson. I think.

Moving on, scuttlebutt has it that Jim Lee’s return to monthly drawerings of comic books is lighting a fire under the ass of the other non-Erik Larsen Image founders. Marc Silvestri is already a done deal on the final New X-Men arc, but will we see even the most famously prodigal artists cum millionaires cum whipping boys head back to monthly work?

You know, it’s just a lot of fun to be at a comic convention with two women who don’t really read comics, and certainly aren’t immersed in the geek culture of these things. I basically keep up a running stream of “And that guy played the Incredible Hulk and that guy played Willow and that guy played R2-D2 and that guy draws Batman and that guy writes Captain America and that guy runs Image and that guy writes Wolverine and that guy runs Marvel and that guy wrote Clumsy…” Hmm. Do you have that “one of these things is not like the other?” song in your head all of a sudden?

Finally, another blind item: Which friend of mine was involved in a threesome in which the guy insisted on referring to her and the other lady involved as Jean Grey and Rogue?

Blind Item: Which spectacular scribe came thiiiis close to starting a fistfight with a certain gutter-dwelling internet rabble-rouser–in front of an enormous line of signature-seeking fans (and yours truly) at the Marvel booth, no less?

As that little anecdote might indicate, I’m having a good time here at WizardWorld. A lot less alt-comix representation, which is extraordinarily depressing, but the presence of Craig Thompson is quite a boon to the spirits (especially those of my wife).

I also got to spend some time with Mark Millar, who turns out to be about 180 degrees from the cocky persona he’s constructed for his press releases. He’s an awfully friendly, smiley guy who seems genuinely tickled pink to be doing what he does for a living, as well as pleased that so many people seem to enjoy it too. Today he announced that he and Brian Bendis will be tag-team writing Ultimate Fantastic Four, which, given Bendis’s knack for dialogue and Millar’s for action, might well be the comics equivalent of Jay-Z and R. Kelly’s The Best of Both Worlds, only with less statutory rape. Seriously, I jones for those Ultimate books like they’re horse or something. This should be a pip.

You know, the events of today once again made me think of Gary Groth’s criticism essay. I said to Gary at San Diego that I thought he was presuming too much of comics creators to double as critics as well, and offer harsh criticisms of the work of their peers. My assumption was that most people simply don’t want to be seen as an asshole or a troublemaker. But I think that once you get to know a person who you’ve only previously known through their work, you recontextualize that person’s output based on their personality and thought patterns as you’ve seen them in action. If you get a favorable impression of the person in question’s heart and mind, you’re liable to take another look at their work and find strengths where you’d once (in ignorance?) seen weeknesses. This actually happened to me with Gary’s fellow Fantagraph, TCJ editor Milo George. Back when Milo and my communications with another had gone no further than me getting called a dumbass by him on the TCJ messboard for saying something apparently overly reverential about Frank Miller and DC Prez Paul Levitz, I extrapolated that his callous disregard for the feelings of his readers translated into a badly run magazine. But now that our e-relationship has extended beyond that somewhat into some illuminating conversations about the workings of the Journal (preceded by a mutual apology for our messboard snippiness), I find that I’m able to appreciate aesthetic and critical decisions he’s made for the Journal with which I once disagreed.

In essence, then, Gary’s complaint may well be valid, but I think it’s an unavoidable dilemma in a medium as inbred and insular as this one, where everybody knows your name. It’s more than a question of not shitting where you eat–it’s that once you get to know someone, you get to know where they’re coming from, and where they intended their work to go, too.

Another fun day here in beautiful scenic Rosemont. Once again, the Missus and her friend K ran around causing trouble whilst I geeked out in panels about the future of Daredevil and whatnot. K seems to be auditioning for the role of the main character in Jeffrey Brown’s next book (don’t you love altcomix inside jokes?), so that’s pretty cool.

Actually, I really do love the panels at these things–there’s something just shy of insane about a place where fans of a particular writer or artist can grill that artist in a totally freeform Q&A session for literally an hour and a half at a time. After my sources revealed to me that Marvel wasn’t going to be flooding the zone with Big Announcements To Counter DC’s Momentum or whatever, I was able to sit back and enjoy these things for the “only in comics, kids. only in comics” phenomena that they are. Today’s panels featured Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, and as usual I left feeling very optimistic about the future of mainstream comics after hearing these guys talk about them. Quesada seemed audibly grateful to have fielded at least as many questions about Peter Bagge and James Sturm’s Marvel work as he did about whether Power Pack would be returning any time soon. (He also VERY strongly denied Rich Johnston’s theory that Marvel started the rumors about all those big creators leaving Marvel: “Guys, think about that for a second–that would be like me starting a rumor that my wife was leaving me for another man.”) And Bendis displayed the same love of craft and joy in the work of writing that came through in the interview I did with him for A&F. I found that even mere discussion of his continued collaborations with artists Alex Maleev and Michale Gaydos got me jazzed up to go home and pore over the intricate, moody work those two artists have produced for him. (Also, after a question touched on autobio comics, he asked the eternal question, “Is that really how Joe Matt masturbates?” Good times.)

We capped off the evening with dinner with Craig Thompson, his lovely girlfriend, and her very cool cousins. It’s really a pleasure to be able to talk to the guy about his book–or anything, really–without the discussion devolving into the acrimonious free-for-all now in progress at the TCJ.com message board. It’s also a pleasure to see just how non-emo the guy is in person–again, an example of how personal knowledge of a creator can lead to an enhanced understanding of the work, not a watered-down willingness to take it apart.

The one big drawback to this show? Nearly every dealer sells almost exclusively crappy back issues. At San Diego, you can come home with more graphic novels than you can shake a stick at. Here, you’re lucky if you can find any, outside of Top Shelf’s prime-real-estate table. But what WizardWorld lacks in altcomix collections, it makes up for in the fact that I stood about one foot away from Sean Astin in the hotel bar last night.

At approximately 1:00am, the fire alarm began going off here in the beautiful Hyatt Regency O’Hare. I say began because it went on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, for about 20 bloody minutes. Now it’s over, and we’ve moved on to an automated voice repeatedly asking for everyone’s attention and that they’re assessing the situation and asking for everyone’s attention and that they’re assessing the situation and asking for everyone’s attention and that they’re assessing the situation and–well, I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Thank you, Anonymous Fanboy Alarm Setter Offer, for creating an impromptu pajama party consisting of now wide-awake people standing around on the walkways on every level of this big atrium-style hotel. If Wolverine were here, he’d raise his brewski in salute to you while nodding his shadow-cloaked head in your direction. Then he’d get on a motorcycle and drive off and go on a berserker attack with his adamantium claws and then he’d have sex with a lady. Also, ninjas!

One of the simultaneously exhiliarating and depressing aspects of the comic book medium is the extraordinary level of accessibility of big-shot creators to Joe Fanboy. (Exhiliarating because hey, it’s fantastic that anyone can meet their idols; depressing because this means that even the biggest, best creators on Earth aren’t important enough to warrant handlers and bodyguards and PR flacks and all the other intermediaries that stand between most famous folk and the hoi polloi.)

This ease of access extends to fanGIRLS, too. Witness The Missus’s account of meeting Blankets author Craig Thompson. And by “meeting” I mean–well, read it for yourself. I think she made an impression on the guy.

Appy polly lodgies for the absence, but I’ve spent the last couple of days driving aaaaaall the way from Long Island to Chicago to cover the WizardWorld comic book convention. It’s been fun; also, during the trip I gained a whole new appreciation for the Britney Spears tune “Boys.” I guess one can’t begrudge the Neptunes for still wanting to work while the Ol’ Dirty Bastard is in prison.

So it appears I will be posting occasionally during the con. I’ll even try to bring you updates on all the big DC/Marvel scuttlebutt that’s supposed to be announced here. And I’ll probably do some namedropping as well.

As an example, here’s update number one: Within an hour of checking into the hotel, I had my first Lou Ferrigno sighting!