DAYGLOAYHOLE, no. 1
“It’s All Over!”
by Ben Passmore
self-published minicomic

http://daygloayhole.tumblr.com

1.

Immediately after complaining that too many cartoonists simply draw their characters *existing* but not really *doing* which is to say, the cartoonists fail to have their characters engage with the actions that they are supposedly performing, I read DayGloAyHole by Ben Passmore which antidoted that cartooning crisis with finesse.

The characters of DayGloAyHole are very animated and very present in their roles. Whether its walking, running, leaping or whatever, the characters appear to be *really doing* the actions that they are shown to be doing. Rather than characters that appear posed as doing a thing.

2.

Something that really bothered me is that the first protagonist of DayGloAyHole doesn’t have a name. The character drives half of the book (another character named “NO LIMITZ” drives the other half), yet he has nothing to identify him by. That bothers me. I literally read this book forwards, backwards and forward again before giving up hope. This character is literally nobody.

I’ve got a bone to pick with “The Everyman,” “The Unnamed Protagonist,” “The Man With No Name,” and other such nonsense. Commit to something, authors. You have to give things names. This “general” stuff just doesn’t hack it. There is no “everyman,” there is nothing to gain from obscuring basic contextual information. It doesn’t allow me as a reader to project myself onto a character or immerse myself into a character. It just makes me think that something is missing and makes me leave the story to try and see what I may have overlooked. Just name characters. Even Scott has a name. It’s “Scott.” Why does Scott get a name and Protagonist Man remains nobody, going nowhere, doing nothing? I don’t even want to hear that “thematic” stuff, it’s just lazy.

Authors have been pulling this “man with no name” nonsense forever and a day and that has to stop. It’s not about whether the character is named “Jeff” or “Herbert,” it’s about how can I think about this character? What do I even refer to him as? I mean, there’s a character in this book called “NO LIMITZ” because he has “NO LIMITZ” carved into his forehead, presumably with a knife. Any name will do. Just something to hold on to.

3.

There are basically no women in this comic, except for two backup comic strips that exist outside of the main story. Written and drawn by Kate Hanrahan and Erin Wilson, these strips gently play at undermining the hyper-masculinity of Passmore’s story. A fitting close for a book that reveled in maleness for its duration.

Jupiter’s Legacy, no. 1
Mark Millar, Frank Quitely
Millar World/Image Comics
April 2013

Look, Frank Quitely is the best superhero artist in the world. His use of space in his signature horizontal compositions is still understudied and overlooked. Nobody put out a better superhero comic this week because nobody is better than Frank Quitley.

But sweet heaven, this was also likely the most boring comic this week as well. As a debut issue this was about equivalent to the first track on a hip hop CD that features two and a half minutes of the rapper talking lazily to his friend over a good beat about something so vague that it fails to even make an impression. Feels like a waste of a good beat.

The Comics Journal’s Tucker Stone and Comics Alliance’s David Brothers already gave this comic as serious a looking as it deserves. This is the kind of work that gets produced when writers and artists are allowed to rest on their laurels and feed off of the fat of their past achievements. As the introduction of a new work, Jupiter’s Legacy is lazy. It is banking on the reader’s emotional investment., not the work at hand. But as a brand new story with new characters, a new world to explore, the only emotional investment of loyalty that a reader can have is an investment in the authors. Having enjoyed another work previously doesn’t make this project better than what appears on the page. On its own merits, Jupiter’s Legacy is just no good.

Saga, chapter twelve
Brian Vaughan & Fiona Staples
Image Comics, April 2013

We open as chapters of Saga so often do, in a flashback or dream. This time, it’s both. The war flashback of Prince Robot IV gives this chapter the shouting action that the genre demands so that the present-day, waking-world events can proceed at a suitable pace. Slower.

After several chapters involving the freelancer (a sort of assassin) named “The Will,” the decision to close Book Two of Saga on the other major enemy, Prince Robot IV is a fairly significant jump in idea and tone. Where The Will is all action, all chase, all square-jawed-adventure, Prince Robot IV is like a detective. He’s done his life’s share of fighting. His Highness was an active duty soldier in the war but his official tour of duty has already ended. IV’s current assignment reveals that his true nature is cerebral. While The Will crushes people’s heads or swings by rope, Prince Robot IV talks. Leisurely. His investigations are usually polite or at least cordial but he is prone to sudden outbursts of violence when he finds the people who he interrogates to be uncooperative.

Prince Robot IV is the prince of The Robot Kingdom. His wife is pregnant for the first time and he does not want to play hunter. His mission to kill the heroes of the story isn’t personal to him. His temper flares because he wants to be at home. On the other hand, his capacity for patience seems to increase as he suspects that his prey will soon fall into his lap. In the end, inaction is action for Prince Robot IV.

My mom was driving my car when we got hit by a Mack truck on the expressway but since my mom was driving it was no big deal. However it made a bit of an impression when we drove up to the Puck building with the front bumper hanging off. This was how I arrived at MoCCA in 2003, my first time professionally exhibiting at a comics show.

The MoCCA Art Festival has had its own brushes with death. For one, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art no longer exists. For another, the MoCCA Art Festival has seen its prestige as the pride of New York City’s comics community decline as the organization became increasingly chaotic. But through the Society of Illustrators, the Art Festival lives on. The Society of Illustrators has adopted an aggressive and responsive attitude toward addressing the years of comics community complaint about the MoCCA Art Festival. The result of this community outreach has been an immediate upswing in community attitude. For the first time since the Art Festival’s 2009 move to The Armory, people seemed positive. Even happy. Maybe it’s me.

It’s 2013 and the tenth year of my working comics convention tables. For the first time since 2008, I did well at MoCCA. I may have done *too* well, I’m starting to feel important.

Here are the objective facts:

The Society of Illustrators administration cut down the visual noise and sensory overload by dividing the aisles with curtains. These curtains also provided exhibitors a place to hang up their own decorations, or display art prints.

The Society created overhead aisle markers which helped both exhibitors and attendees to understand where they were at all times.

There was an on-site cafeteria and there were multiple seating areas so that people could relax and refresh during the festival.

The volunteer staff is always excellent at MoCCA but this year, the volunteers were trained to assist and also trained to suggest ways in which they might assist. That’s a significant jump.

As a touch of irony, the Society’s most drastic adjustment was creating a space inside the festival, on the actual showroom floor, for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s display collection. That’s right, for the first time ever, representative artwork from the now-defunct museum was available for public viewing at the art festival.

Comics is a hard business and even harder when the infrastructure is not supportive of the practical needs of the people in this business. 2013′s MoCCA Art Festival felt like a success because it sought to improve the morale of the community that uses the festival. I hope that the Society of Illustrators continues to move the MoCCA Art Festival in the direction that they’ve steered it.

And happy ten years of comic shows for me, specifically

“Let The Good Times Roll”
Uncanny Avengers, no. 5
Rick Remender & Olivier Coipel
Marvel Entertainment

Not to be Mister-Anti but I actually liked this comic book. It moved several characters with distinctive worldviews through one day that ended with somebody getting his neck broken by accident. The flat-note ending was pitch-perfect for me and I like that the ending’s implication is…implied by the way Rogue looks up to see the press cameras all directed at her. Not a word is needed after that moment and not a word is offered. That is the end of the story, CRACK, neck broken.

But let’s be reality, the reason people care about this particular comic is a scene that happens earlier. Alex, a character who is indicated by the story to be the leader of this group of characters, delivers a press conference where he says something so silly that I’ve never heard it before in real life.

Alex:

Short and simple: my only problem with Alex’s speech is that “mutant” isn’t “the M-word.”

“Mutant” in comic storyland isn’t a slur in and of itself. It’s a group descriptor like “gay,” “black,” “Muslim.” A slur would be a crude term of division which shouldn’t be spoken in polite company (taking its cue from “the ‘N’word” of real life). The slur would be a term of undisputed hostility and derision (ie, “gene-joke,” “mutie,” “freak”), not the term which merely describes the group of people.

Now, Alex could be a “self-hating mutant,” I suppose. Particularly to contrast with his brother Scott, who is concurrently raising a mutant revolution army in some other comic book. Scott the separatist and Alex the assimilationist. That could work as a believable tension. But it still doesn’t work in the particular language twist that this scene tries to achieve. This scene doesn’t achieve its goal of paralleling real-world expressions of oppressed people (which the mutants are meant to represent).

Here is writer Rick Remender weighing in about the contrasting opinions on twitter

Not a problem, I live in Greenpoint.

All jokes aside, I strongly suspect that Remender was responding to people who opposed his story’s anti-bigotry message rather than members of oppressed groups who objected to the logic of his story’s argument. That said, he’s made his statement and that’s that. I do find it interesting that nobody in Marvel Entertainment editorial second-guessed the tone of character-Alex’s press conference. That nobody saw the glaring problem of equating general group description with the idea of a pejorative slur. Because even a character who is self-hating in his or her cultural identity would know that the generic descriptor isn’t a “___-word.”

This comic makes a try at tackling a real-world issue. It misfires. That’s okay, try again.

-Ayo2013xoxo.

*Stuart Immonen w/ Brian Bendis*

Last night I watched a bunch of episodes of the CW network’s evening drama Arrow which is based on the comic book hero Green Arrow.

It wasn’t a great work of art but neither is Green Arrow as a comic book. What does distinguish it is that it is solidly entertaining. There is an overarching storyline for the entire series, a storyline that seems to comprise the season and an individual storyline or each given episode. Just like most other evening dramas. And not at all like most comic books. This isn’t rocket science but it is something novel in the comic book field: trust.

Trust that you have created an engaging premise with captivating characters. Trust your writers. Trust your art direction. And then don’t rely on cliffhangers to try and compel people to return to you. End the short term plots and slowly build up the long term, character-driven plots. It’s very basic, my friends. People don’t come back because your hero is in danger. We know he’ll live. So stop trying so hard to extract drama out of the immediate conflict and simply resolve the immediate conflict in the same episode. People come back because they like the hero and they like how he or she solves (or simply manages) problems. If you take six months to get to a resolution like comic book writers do, you lose readers. That’s because the readers lose sight of what is interesting.

Each unit of storytelling that is sold or released should give the audience a plot with a resolution AND the seeds for developing overarching plots. It’s not a secret. So stop writing comic books all wrong.

That goes for all of you.

On HBO, there’s a show called Girls that you probably heard about. Some of the characters have storylines based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn which is where I live. It’s a pretty good show. Much more amorphous than many other modern television dramas are structured but much more interesting for the fact that this show eschews many of the tried and true formulas. Yet it clings to other formulas.

I’m not usually happy with the way sex is used in popular entertainment stories but the sex scenes in Girls are pretty shocking for how lived-in they feel. These aren’t sex scenes where the cameras cut to artful montages of knees and shoulder blades. The sex scenes are actual stories in themselves. With each participant wanting something from the sex and often with differing results.

Sex that is treated as a battle of sorts, something that can leave participants happy, empty, deluded or amused. It’s very rare to see sex depicted as the lively, continually-evolving part of a relationship that it factually is.

Speaking of sex, here’s a page from Cable designed to appeal to women whose fetish is men who are literally half-automobile. By Ariel Olivetti.

By Ayo

So I was—

“Walking down the street/to the hardcore beat—”

—and it occurred to me that one of the things that binds the cultural narrative of this society together is homogeny. We can talk about how the idea of a “melting pot” subtly implies the loss of individualism as the ingredients of the mixture melt and meld into one continuous mixture. But again, that’s implied in the name itself. What isn’t explained so often is the way in which the loss of discrete identity is harmful. Because the culturally dominant force doesn’t lose anything, the minority loses its identity; the minority dissipates into the melting pot just as a sliver of onion dissipates into a literal cooking pot.

As storytellers how do we push against that? Today’s lesson challenges the assumptions that we commonly hold about vantage point characters. Protagonists. The common mode is for a protagonist to be hollow. A default setting. The protagonist is generally the character who (in the context of that particular narrative) is closest to our cultural norms. The Everyman. Within the constraints of the story, the protagonist is The Most Normal within the cast. On a large scale, a cultural median is established and people are reminded of what their culture wishes for them to conform to. As the narrative advances, the protagonist’s normalcy (or relative normalcy) plays against the foils, and antagonists. There is a villainous force which seeks to disturb the social order represented by the protagonist. There are foils, characters who are generally share the protagonist’s goals but disagree on the details. There are the disinterested, characters who lay outside of the range of the narrative’s objectives and also are cast into relief against the protagonist’s goals. All the while, the protagonist is the median perspective.

No matter the story’s outcome, we are given little choice in how to perceive the world through that narrative’s lens: a protagonist designed to be inoffensive and median will always represent social norms and thus, remain passively hostile to cultural diversity. That is to say the fiction of the story will be hostile to real-world cultural diversity.

Every piece of media enforces an idea in a public’s mind. Whether they admit to it or not. This is why women and minorities instinctively know that they must seek greater representation in the arts and the media. Because being represented means having their perspective dealt with. This comes before being tolerated, accepted or embraced. This is just awareness.

Having different perspectives play out through characters is positive for a story and for the society from which the story is a part. But having those different perspectives come from the central actor in a narrative, the protagonist, does all of that while also rejecting the idea of self-normalcy. The hollow, easily accessible everyman protagonist is “me” in the narrative. But given specific traits and strengths and weaknesses, the “me,” becomes “that person.” But lest you worry that putting distance between the Generalized Protagonist and the audience makes for a colder experience, the simple fact of being a protagonist gives an audience an intimacy of character that we all seek in fiction. It’s more challenging to the reader but also more rewarding.

One of the primary effects of fiction is building and encouraging empathy. In order to do this effectively, storytellers must give the audience somewhere outside of themselves to “go.” Be aware of the generalized social standards and moral ideas of a society. And trust an audience enough to give them a character who isn’t perfect (or near-perfect). The audience wants to be challenged. They want to explore. Take them on a journey. Little by little, story by story, storytellers can nudge the world toward a different place: where diversity isn’t melted and absorbed into a larger whole but rather a place that is inclusive yet appreciates life’s textures.

Human beings don’t act like this.

“Cable and X-Force,” no. 1
Dennis Hopeless & Salvador Larroca
Marvel Comics, 2012

Here’s what I can understand from this comic: previously, Cable was dead. Now he’s alive and stalking his daughter. Not in the “bad” way but in that creepy movie way where he watches her from afar. For no apparent reason. The implication is that he wants her to live a normal life with her foster parents but let’s be honest: Cable is a psychic, cyborg soldier from the future and his daughter is also a soldier from the future. He could just send her a telepathic “hello” message and be done with it.

This comic has no real thrust to it. It does the thing where the story starts in the midst of action then backtracks to some causation. But the reader isn’t given enough of the action OR the causation for it to have any effect. It’s all just layers of vague implication. Also Cable shoots his uncle Havok in the face which is only funny because Havok’s enduring character trait is that he’s a rube and a chump. He’s all “I know this man. Please tell me this isn’t what it looks like…” ZAP.

The highlight of this issue is Domino. She’s Cable’s ex-girlfriend, a super-proficient spy/assassin/mercenary who smiles as she jumps from high places. I like Domino a whole bunch and have to restrain myself from buying comics that she stars in. As you can see, my will was weak this time.

I’ve been in this game for years, it’s made me mechanical/
There’s rules to phone comics, go read the manual:

Rule # one: a smartphone orients vertically in one hand, horizontally in two hands and awkwardly if you make people switch back and forth.

Rule number two: every time the user switches the orientation of the device, s/he is pulled out of the storytelling a bit.

Rule number three: it is good to densely illustrate your panels because each one will be in the reader’s eye, holding his/her attention

Rule number four: stuff like splash pages, two page spreads, etc simply do not work. Space doesn’t expand on a screen.

Rule number FIVE: keep an eye on your lettering and general legibility. If the reader has to pinch and zoom, you’re messing up.

Follow these rules you’ll have mad fans when you wake up; if not, the people that loved you will want to break up.

Gotta go, gotta go more rhymes to make up.

“Arrête, cést icî L’empire de La Mort”
“Bad Brains/WOTW”
By Simon Hanselmann
Space Face Books, Nov. 2012

http://girlmountain.tumblr.com/

http://spacefacebooks.com/

Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that I read somewhere that Simon Hanselmann is relatively new to cartooning. If that is the case then he has taken to the vocation like a fish to water. This is a beautiful comic. Clean character design, expressive storytelling and smooth panel-to-panel transitions: nothing is awkward about reading this story. The drawings are relatively pared down but are so instantly readable and the panels’ relationships to one another are so effortless that the reading experience feels fully immersive and engaging. Slick cartooning.

As a narrative, I don’t quite understand the comic. I know Hanselmann’s characters Megg, Mogg and Owl from the strips that he has posted on his website. But the actual plot events of this particular story are mysterious to me. I’m not complaining. I’ve read more than my share of abstract minicomics in my day–and I’ve made them too. But Hanselmann doesn’t feel to me as though he is trying to go over our heads; even though his work is richly coded in a language of his own symbols. I just feel as though I’m missing a step somewhere in this story.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

A lot of Hanselmann’s Arrête, cést icî L’empire de La Mort reads essentially like stream of consciousness psychedelia. The storyline is very much about drugs and possible psychological problems, which both effect people’s perceptions and coping abilities. These combine with the general setting and characters which are all a fantastic in composition and in nature. Talking animals who shift between humanoid and beast mode. Alien spaceships. A television actor. All just sort of appear and can be accepted as nothing strange.

This sort of storytelling convention is quite common in the world of artcomics and minicomics. The story takes place externally but it feels internal, like somebody’s dream. Part of me feels that externalizing psychological and emotional strife is an excellent use of visual storytelling.

It is interesting that Hanselmann uses no captions or narration. Everything happens by action or by characters talking. This furthers the feeling that I get as a reader that the author himself is in a process of discovery and exploration as much as his characters. I’m happy to follow him along and learn whatever he discovers.