By Ayo

Hit the ground running.

If the first track on your album is titled “Intro,” you’ll be first against the wall. Except DMX because his “Intro” tracks were complete three-verse songs.

Hit the ground running.

It’s so unusual for the first track to be a song and more unusual still for the song to be topical, rather than introductory.

Nas “Get Down” from /God’s Son/
Slick Rick “Treat Her Like a Prostitute” from /The Great Adventures of Slick Rick/
Dead Kennedys “Kill the Poor” from /Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables/
LL Cool J “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” from /Radio/
Dead Kennedys “Soup Is Good Food” from /Frankenchrist/
Oscar Brown Jr. “Work Song” from /Sin & Soul/

There are some…but it isn’t universal. Personally I would like to cut the crap and the “hello, my name is” stuff and dive right into the difficult material. Plus starting off deep with a song about a specific subject suggests a strength and confidence that is rare and compelling.

Hit the ground running. “Ox Out the Cage” is actually the second song on Cannibal Ox’s /The Cold Vein/ but “Iron Galaxy” is a beautiful opening, serving the dual purpose of introduction and catalogue of inner-city decay, which is the specific topic. However, “Iron Galaxy” still feels quite “overview”-like and lacks the specificity of “Get Down,” the first track on Nas /God’s Son/.

Hit the ground running. Ox Out the Cage. All killer, no filler. Leave the chatter for the interviews. Open with a bang and leave people begging for more. Don’t rap about how generally cool you are, don’t sing about the general excitement of life. Go in.

Hit the ground running.

I read a lot of comic books. Most of them are terrible. Even a bad comic book can be good if its author isn’t worried about how serious the story is or isn’t. If the author isn’t concerned with making sure that I knew a whole lot of specific things. /Just rhyme, homie/

Superhero comics are the worst. Why are you drawing my attention to characters who aren’t even properly in the story? Waste of time. Why pages and pages of exposition? That is terrible, make it stop. Nobody cares. Scenes of superheroes making speeches for pages to inspire other superheroes (or more exactly, to clumsily introduce plot points) this is boring and I’m not reading the rest of your comic.

Hit the ground running.

Don’t ever write a panel with one character speaking in four word bubbles. I will never know what those bubbles say. I’m a busy man. Kill that shit or don’t even turn your mic on.

Go hard or go home. Hit the ground running or tell your story walking.

By Ayo

Here is a post about Marvel Comics. If that offends you, click the X button.

I will never work for a company like Marvel so here are my overall ideas for free:

The Fantastic Four shouldn’t be a superhero team, but should be an honest-to-golly science fiction comic. Star Trek, Doctor Who, Lost in Space–that sort of thing. They should be using their skills like Odo in Deep Space Nine or Spock from The Original Series. That is to say, in supplemental ways.

Jonathan Hickman gave it a noble try but at the end of the day, he still needed to have Ben Grimm punch monsters. Boring.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

The X-Men shouldn’t be connected to the world of superheroes. The notion that people would hate “mutants” but would love “super people” is ridiculous. However, if the X-Men WERE connected with it all, I’d like an honest try at making it a school comic. Only Grant Morrison came close. His stories about “The Special Class” came dangerously close to summoning a tear to my eye.

I like the idea of the X-Men as true and honest pacifists who don’t get into fights but rather use their terrifying skills to be creative problem solvers.

Note: “pacifists” would not type into my phone. It autocorrected that word away FOUR TIMES.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

Spider-Man would be the only super hero. The only freelance people-saver.

See, because he is special.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

Hulk is a monster.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

SHIELD and The Avengers make sense as they exist in Ultimate Marvel: not superheroes per se but government supersoldiers.

It would be cool to see that “50 State Initiative” that was referred to. Go Great Lakes Avengers!

xoxoxoxoxoxo

It would be fun if Doctor Strange were doing something like Madame Xanadu. Helping people with weirdness and talking with spirits from all over the world or something.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

Most of these comics have good ideas behind them but get mired with the need to beat up bank robbers and foil international terrorist schemes or something.

It would be a relief to get away from the need to punch all of the problems in the world to death.

Happy Passover and Happy Easter!

By Darryl Ayo

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

It was a wonderful day for comic books this Thursday, February 9th, 2012. Marvel Comics, upon triumphantly defending their title against the evil creator of Ghost Rider, Gary Friedrich, decided to take a victory lap by pressing their countersuit for $17,000–literally suing him for drawing his own creation their legally-won property.

Here’s the low-down on how the House of Ideas put Friedrich in his place: http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/gary-friedrich-enterprises-llc-et-al-v.html

I have to tell you, DC Comics is looking like straight up punks by comparison for their relatively soft approach to spoilsport Alan Moore who keeps saying mean things to them about their brilliant exploration of the Watchmen brand which they graciously permitted him to create own associate with for a while.

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Apropos of nothing:

By Darryl Ayo

Sometimes I fantasize about newspaper comics returning to the forefront of the North American comics medium.

Reading comics stresses me out. I don’t enjoy the continual accumulation of comic book magazines or the promotion machine that produces them. Graphic novels often leave me wanting for more depth and consideration even though they take cartoonists off of the map for years at a time. Manga that makes it to North America tends to overwhelm me with volume while disappointing me with substance. Webcomics make me feel shackled to my technology. What I really desire is a good old-fashioned newspaper and a cup of coffee.

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By Darryl Ayo

The superhero comic book writer faces an impossible task. This person is asked on a continual basis to be at once engaging and to cause no significant change in his or her domain. It’s what people often refer to as “zen-like.” Paradoxical. The job is less “writer” and more “steward.” As condescending and dismissive as that sounds, I mean it with a great deal of kindness to the precarious nature of the occupation.

When one reads heroic fiction, we are accustomed to a certain range of story possibilities and a certain range of behaviors of the primary heroes. Often it is said of Superman and Wonder Woman that these characters are boring or that they have no personalities. The characters are presented with a sort of even-temperament that is perhaps ever-so-slightly conservative by the day’s standards and coupled with an abnormally high depiction of tenacity and personal bravery. Which is a pretty big cop-out as far as I’m concerned because it’s the easiest thing in the world to have a fictional character present “integrity” and “bravery,” since there is literally no consequence to a make-believe person’s bravery. I digress.

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By Darryl Ayo

“Self-centered
Rise is the baddest MC
My old rhymes, my influence
My favorite rapper is me.”
-Rise, “Wickedest Flow.”

As of today, November 25th, I am 30 years old. When I first heard the above-quoted lyrics 10 years ago, Rise was on stage, entertaining the crowd between sets. It just sounded like absurdist boasting, intended to provoke with its impossibility.

But with the benefit of a little bit of age and a little bit of experience, that passage takes on new and earnest meaning. I *am* influenced by my old comics. And while I would not say that my favorite cartoonist is *me* I do rate myself a bit higher than most other people do. I think I’m pretty danged special, to be honest!

My work is most often driven by my past work and the idea of making more work itself. I *have* become my own influence. And to an extent where my past work leads me to try to expand my archive into variations on theme, even though I’m not literally my own favorite, my older work informs my current work a great deal. And yes I *like my work a lot!*

Right below is the first “real” comic that I ever drew. It was probably back in 2000, definitely over the summer. I had just completed freshman year at Rochester Institute of Technology and had realized that I had better stop dreaming about comics and finally create some. This one features “Sid the Kid” and “Mark the Magician,” two characters I had created in high school in 1998:

I still love this strip.

And here is the first installment of my Little Garden series, when I started it on the morning of December 30th, 2004. It features “Angela,” the dreadlocked, overalls-clad angel:

And then here’s a page that people liked from a comic called “Ghost!” which won me the Ignatz Award for “Promising New Talent” earlier this year:

Thanks for taking this time to reflect with me. I hope that I can continue to find inspiration from without and from within. Here’s to the next year, ten years, twenty years, whatever. And since she’s pretty popular, here’s a page with my character Lizzie to leave on:

“Ego
I’m on my own jock still
‘Cause if I don’t say I’m the best
Tell me, who the hell will”
-Phife Dawg “Word Play”