I can’t fold, I need gold, I reup, I reload, product must be sold To you.

17 Jun

By Ayo

Minicomics, artcomics, lit-comics, indie comics, alt-comics. That whole region of comics falls under a general umbrella. The problem is that nobody is making it rain.

There is a lot of talk about how strong comics are as an artform and how important the independent/art/lit-comics world is. Over a decade since Fort Thunder and Jimmy Corrigan and it seems like it mostly is just talk. Yes, some individuals have made a career crafting a niche product while NPR hosts scramble to describe them as “not the comic books you may be used to,” but it still does not amount to a very powerful movement. It is more than selling individual books to decent numbers of people, I am talking about does this field of art mean something to culture as a whole. Does it factor into a moderately average person’s daily life? Or are literary/art/alternative comics just an occasional novelty, like a parlor trick?
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Even when you win, you lose in the end.

16 Jun
By Darryl Ayo

Returning to Wolverine and the X-Men, No. 31 for deeper consideration.

wolverineandthex-men0g8ug0 wolverineandthex-men0aeuta

 

Why is it that the bad guys lose? Not only lose but keep trying as though they will eventually win? And when they win, as Norman Osborne did in Marvel Comics for a while, they eventually get beaten up extra-badly and placed in a prison beneath the earth, never to be free again. Crime really does not pay when one is a supervillain?

The problem with villains winning in comic books (or similar media, television, movies, “genre” novels) is that the villains goals are fundamentally unacceptable to the audience. The world will no longer be “like ours” if a villain transforms all the people into monsters or detonates the Earth’s core or succeeds in invading the USA or what-have-you. The sense of it being “our world” becomes lost.

I think it would be interesting to experiment with villains who have more modest goals. Things that can be lost to the hero without changing the fabric of society, thus ruining the “world outside your window” illusion.

Let’s say you’ve got a villain who likes robbing banks (an archaic crime, if you look up the real stats, but roll with it). Then your superhero (Batman will do) attempts to foil the plot. He fails, gets beaten up, the villain gets the loot and Batman staggers back home with his cape between his legs. Lesson learned. No second act, no “this time it’s personal,” just simply “you win some, you lose some.”

I would like to see an element of plot uncertainty in action stories where the goal being battled over is forgiving enough that there remains a fair chance that the writer can send the hero into defeat without ruining the world.

@darrylayo

*art by Nick Bradshaw, story by Jason Aaron

Extremely Blunt and Incredibly Hostile

16 Jun

By Ayo

“I Think of Demons,” b/w “Sticky-Icky-Icky”
Box Brown
Drippy Bone Books, 2013

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Box Brown captures a lot of middle-class male aggression in these two stories and previous comics in this tone. Brown pares down his style and uses super straight contour lines and unusual angles to build his forms. This time around, the cartoonist is striving for a sort of minimalism at the opposite end of the spectrum than unformed; this minimalism is highly informed minimalism. Reductionism, I suppose. Essential elements.

“I Think of Demons” is a personal favorite of mine, in Box Brown’s repertoire of stories. His young man protagonist (Prickly Pete) is angry at the world, drenched in a misanthropy that he can no longer contain and that is poisoning his immediate relationships.

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On the literal flip-side, “Stiky-icky-icky” is a comic about stoners, getting stoned. They are a bunch of jerks in some ways but as the story progresses, it seems that the characters are more abrasive than abusive. Although they aren’t kind. These characters don’t truly have much open communication between them so they hurl invective and act carelessly as a desperate attempt to connect to one another.

Life is a struggle.

@darrylayo

Influence of modern comics

16 Jun

By Ayo

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DeathZone!
By Michel Fiffe, after John Ostrander, Kim Yale, Luke McDonnell
DC Comics property, Fiffe tribute.
1988, DC; 2012, Fiffe
Essay by Tucker Stone

This sixteen-page comic is based on an old Suicide Squad comic that Michel Fiffe liked. This isn’t an homage, it’s a cover. Based on the description, it appears to be an abridged cover of the 1988 story–at sixteen pages, it’s much shorter than the three issue span that Fiffe’s notes cite. Anyway that’s technical.

The first thing that this comic does is introduce all of the characters from the story and indicate who created and co-created them. Shot one at DC Comics.

The last thing that the comic does is enlist critic Tucker Stone to write an essay about Suicide Squad that is both complimentary and condemnation.

Those are the inside covers. Now the meat of the comic is something special.

If you are familiar with Michel Fiffe’s comic Zegas, you will know his facility with multimedia. Fiffe combines traditionally inked line art with pencil pages and colored pages that appear to be watercolor. He also colors with colored pencil and computer programs. As the story’s location or tone shift, so do Fiffe’s working methods. The result is a visually lively sequence of images that avoids the appearance of arbitrary whimsy.

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This comic begins with two panels that I particularly like: Deadshot shooting Rustam with a ricochet shot. I like the first panel’s drawing of Deadshot and I like the scaly armor texture of Rustam’s leggings. That sort of texturing is something that I’m experimenting with in my own work and so it’s is fantastic to see it done in such a way by another artist.

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Another panel that makes me happy is Duchess machine-gunning Manticore on page 5. Fiffe’s confidence with that machine gun gives lie to most of the firearms that I see in comic book art. It’s a thing of beauty. Cartoonists tend to be unconfident about machines and so I have a lot of love for when someone pulls off a believable complex tool.

All in all, this comic works in the same way that indie bands doing covers of classic rock songs work. It showcases the quality of the less-known artist by showing audiences their take on something familiar. That DeathZone! goes a step further and hoists up the full list of creators in this tribute adds yet another layer: the original Suicide Squad influenced Fiffe but he doesn’t uncritically accept DC Comics’ treatment of the many creators.

It’s a good balance.

@darrylayo

Cut to pieces

16 Jun

By Ayo

“L.A. Silence on Cermak”
Sweetmeats, No. 1
By Edie Fake
Originally published: Vacuum Horror, No. 1
Edie Fake: P.O. Box 891231; Chicago, IL 60608

This is a screenprinted minicomic by a cartoonist who knows a thing or two about patternmaking. Edie Fake’s comics are densely packed with tone-setting texture and detail which add a heavy layer of atmosphere to the story’s literal actions.

This comic is enhanced by the gritty texture of the paper, the thick patterning in the panels themselves and the emotionally-detached stamp-lettering. Is it stamped? It looks machine-made in some way or another. These are Edie Fake qualities.

There is sex and gore and body-horror and there are nightmares and witches and transformations upon transformations. The physical destruction of the body seems important to Fake’s work. Transformation involves some level of ruination or at least breaking something that previously existed in the process. It sounds disturbing as a concept but can be read as a sort of liberation.

One last thing: there is only one page of comic on every two-page spread. As readers, we only see one page at a time, further narrowing our view into this world. Interesting stylistic choice.

@darrylayo

You’re so vain, you probably think this comic is about you.

16 Jun

By Ayo

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“I should have dumped you…”
Tragic Relief, No. 15; 2013
Colleen Frakes
tragicrelief.com

This is a comic consisting of single-panel gags completing the sentence “I should have dumped you…”

The central character is a woman who is depicted being subjected to her current boyfriend being exceptionally sleazy and hostile. From body-policing to infidelity to stealing, this boyfriend does it all. The amazing, adaptable Bad-Boyfriend-Man! The panels within this small comic are not quite “funny” as they are cringe-inducing. I don’t believe that these panels are meant to be funny but rather cathartic. For any person who has absorbed bad treatment from a spouse or significant other in the course of their relationship. I didn’t laugh with this comic but I felt reinforced in my own views about bad relationships: “OMG DTMFA!”

One especially fun aspect to this comic is the packaging. It comes wrapped in a magenta band that acts as both cover and dust jacket. The “meat” of the comic has no internal cover. Inside the cover is a two-panel strip featuring caricatures of some cartoonists who are not named (but I recognize them). Is it okay to take your grievances with ex-partners I to the realm of your artwork? To duke it out with the ghosts of your past relationships in public? The answer is obviously “yes, that is totally okay.”

@darrylayo

Saving people by beating up people: the Carol Danvers story

14 Jun

By Ayo

Avengers: the enemy within, No. 1 (Captain Marvel)
Kelly Sue DeConnick, Scott Hepburn, Jordie Bellaire

~what is this~

Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers has a brain lesion that exacerbates whenever she flies. She is essentially in the position of Superman during the “Grounded” storyline except that not-flying isn’t her choice. Watching Captain Marvel struggle against her medical reality and her impulse to simply take to the skies is a wonderful tension.

Personally, I recently began wearing sunglasses because the direct sunlight has started to give me migraine-like symptoms. I know that feeling of suddenly needing some form of tool or technology to do what one used to do effortlessly.

Also, like Captain Marvel’s flying jet-sled, my sunglasses look cool. But I resent them. I just want to walk down the street in the day, not have a piece of breakable equipment on my face, filtering my world. I feel you, Carol Danvers.

The best part of this here comic book (Avengers: The Enemy Within) is that Carol Danvers’ buddies in the Avengers have been eager and happy to lend assistance to her, different from that old Avengers comic that I read in which Steve Rogers/Captain America was like “Carol Danvers, you are not on top of your game, YOU’RE OFF THE AVENGERS!!” Seriously, former Avengers writer Kurt Busiek, you really hung Carol Danvers out to dry that time! Rude.

~AnyANYway~

This comic, DeConnick and Hepburn and Bellaire with “The Enemy Within,” features the things that I love the most about superhero comic books:

1) took a while to read. I didn’t breeze through this in ten minutes, it lasted me for like twenty, which is half of my commute. I enjoy density in comic books.

2) Carol Danvers and Jess Drew (Spider-Woman) have a wonderful rapport and I just want them to be buddies forever. I’m a big fan of buddies and Carol & Jess: Super Friends is totally pressing all my buttons. It was also nice and considerate of Jess Drew not to fly. Like, in solidarity with Carol who medically can’t.

3) the fights were fun to read. A bunch of heavy hitters, hitting heavily. Hepburn’s twisty, bendy-limb style is well suited for kinetic scenes of people knocking each other around, particularly due to the lighthearted banter that accompanies these fights. These aren’t scary superhero fights, they’re funny superhero fights.

3a) dinosaurs!

4) that Carol Danvers is friends with her neighbors in her apartment building (what is with superheroes renting among civilians though) is charming and heartening. In my building, there are only ten apartment units and people still act like they don’t know me, slam the gate or door on me when I’m dragging in my groceries. There’s only two black people in my building, you can’t argue that they don’t recognize me… Okay, getting personal, moving along…

5) Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel has a definitive weakness (again, the flying) and has an irresponsible urge to exacerbate it time and again. As the title suggests, she is her own worst enemy.

5a) I like it when protagonists are the instruments of their own conflicts/downfalls. It is an appealing story dynamic that a person has control of his or her destiny and that their problems are at least partly their own doing (especially if not in a retributive sense).

6) Should have been number one to me, but: this comic was *funny* There was verbal humor, there were sight gags and physical comedy. I almost think that it is irresponsible for a comic about solving problems by hitting things to NOT be funny, at least sometimes. “The Enemy Within,” despite its ominous title and brooding cover (illustrated by Joe Quinones), was a charming and humorous issue to read.

7) I’m on a mission. A holy crusade, in fact. I really like when the characters in a scene are together inside the same panel and continue to coexist in panels as the scene progresses. This is an Eddie Campbell thing but it’s turning into a Darryl Ayo thing. Chris Samnee does it in his comics and I’m seeing a lot of it here with Scott Hepburn. He breaks from the patterns during various moments for fight purposes or to do closeups but mostly this comic hangs close to the principle. Thank you, Scott Hepburn.

All in all: I had a good time.

@darrylayo

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