Looking back on 2012

Couple of days late, but year in review time, I guess.  As usual, here for the Ditko and here for the Kirby.

Other than that, kind of a slow year for me in terms of new comics. It was the year I really went digital, after getting an Ipad.  Print first, though...

USAGI YOJIMBO only had two issues before it went on hiatus so Stan Sakai could draw 47 RONIN. I'm not too interested in the latter, might pick it up when it's collected, and might take this opportunity to switch to either collections or digital for USAGI when it comes back. Not an easy decision to make, since I've been reading the book for over 20 years, and with back issue purchases have 198 consecutive issues, plus specials and such, and it's not a matter of quality since the book is still top notch. We'll see, still a few months before I have to decide.

ROB HANES ADVENTURES #13 came out, the first issue in three years, which was a pleasant surprise. Enjoyable issue with two complete stories by creator Randy Reynaldo.

Only one issue of SERGIO ARAGONES FUNNIES came out from Bongo, and the planned GROO/CONAN series didn't come out. Hopefully Aragones' health problems are all in the past and he can get those back on the schedule for 2013.

Picked up a couple of issues of Paul Grist's MUDMAN, and they were enjoyable enough, though I prefer JACK STAFF and KANE. Unfortunately, like just about every Grist project, it's fallen into a black hole of lateness, so I think I'm definitely going to digital or collections for that one.

Mark Crilley got out one book of his BRODY'S GHOST series.  Good stuff, but I do wish it was coming out a bit faster. That really does seem to be a common problem with just about every new serialized comic book I'm interested in.

Alison Bechdel's ARE YOU MY MOTHER?, the long-awaited follow-up to her 2006 book FUN HOME, was pretty good. Maybe a bit too much about the process of writing, too "meta" as the kids say (do they still say that? Did they ever?). I want to re-read the two books sometime to fully form an opinion on them.

DOTTER OF HER FATHER'S EYES by Mary Talbot and her husband Bryan was entertaining, about the relationships between James Joyce and his daughter and between Mary Talbot and her father, a Joycean scholar. Still, I keep hoping every new Bryan Talbot book will live up to SUNDERLAND or ONE BAD RAT or ARKWRIGHT, and so far the last few haven't. I guess that's the problem when a creator has set the bar so high with earlier projects that just "very good" becomes a letdown.

The only other new thing I've picked up is Hunt Emerson's adaptation of DANTE'S INFERNO, but I haven't gotten around to reading that yet.

Couple of new things I'd probably be buying if I went to a comic shop more often (I think I made fewer visits to comic shops in 2012 than in any year since I started going to them  in 1988).  Linda Medley made a surprise return to CASTLE WAITING and had three issues wrapping up the second book. I kind of want to get them, but at this point I'll just wait for the revised second book with the whole story.  JOE KUBERT PRESENTS has some nice looking work from the man in the title, plus some new USS Stevens work by Sam Glanzman. If I was seeing it that would be hard to resist, but as it is I'm hoping for a nice collected edition. Ideally one of the Kubert material, along with more of his later work not available in other books, and the Glanzman stuff as the ending for a complete USS Stevens book. But I'd take just a collection of the anthology. And ADVENTURES OF AUGUSTA WIND is a pretty intriguing looking book from J.M. DeMatteis, which I'm sure I'll buy in some form eventually.

Spent a lot more on reprints, as usual.

CORPSE ON THE IMJIN AND OTHER STORIES BY HARVEY KURTZMAN, I just got and haven't had a chance to read, but just a gorgeous looking book. It's good that someone finally cracked the code on how to do a proper EC reprint series.  Who knew you needed an Enigma Machine to figure out "creator themed collections, split by genre for the more prolific creators". I'm definitely going to pick up the Wallace Wood suspense story book. And I'm disappointed to find out, according to what I just checked, that the Al Williamson book that was supposed to come out last month is delayed a few months.

TALES OF THE BEANWORLD (BOOK 3.5) is a nice little collection of some of Larry Marder's colour stories to prepare for Book 4: Something More, coming... eventually.

It was pretty nice to see a reprint of the Goodwin/Simonson ALIEN - THE ILLUSTRATED STORY movie adaptation. I'd found a copy of the original a few years ago, but it was a bit fragile, so the fresh edition is welcome, and it's good that new people get a chance to discover it.

BONE - THE EPIC CONCLUSION is the third and last of Scholastic Canada's three volume colour hardcover reprint of Jeff Smith's comic. This is my favourite way to read the story now. Nice large pages, good paper, good binding, comfortable in the hand. And a really good story.

I need to catch up on some Osamu Tezuka. I got BARBARA a few weeks ago, but haven't got around to reading it. I think both volumes of the new edition of ADOLF are out, and I'll have to see if I want to replace my old 5 volume version.

I picked up GRENDEL OMNIBUS #1, which has all the Hunter Rose solo stuff by Matt Wagner and various artists, all in black, white and red. I think I prefer the colour version of DEVIL BY THE DEED, but the other stuff, most of which is new to me, has been pretty good, as I work my way through. Haven't decided if I'll pick up the later books.

DOUG WILDEY'S RIO - THE COMPLETE SAGA might be the book of the year. All of Wildey's published Rio stories, with as much as possible newly shot from the original artwork, plus two unpublished stories, one finished and one pretty far along but never completed, which means you get some nice looks at Wildey's pencils and work process. He seemed to work really out of order, with the ending of the story fully done while earlier stuff is still just sketched out, sometimes sketched panels on the same page as finished panels.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS SEA DEVILS #1 and SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE LOSERS #1 are two welcome big thick black and white reprints from DC, with a lot of Russ Heath in the first, and John Severin in the second.

And it was good to see DC reprint THE BIBLE by Sheldon Mayer, Nester Redondo and Joe Kubert.

And, somehow I missed this, the second POGO comic strip collection by Walt Kelly came out, and a copy is now on its way to me. A lot of other good comic strip reprints came out, but I'm way behind on almost everything.

I guess that's enough on comics.  I'll get to the digital stuff in another post.


In movies, I've mostly been trying to make time to re-watch some old favourites and stuff that I should have watched years ago but somehow missed. I mean, re-watching THE USUAL SUSPECTS, FIELD OF DREAMS, WEST SIDE STORY, THE GODFATHER, WILLY WONKA, TIME BANDITS, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and THAT THING YOU DO (that was just December) makes me wonder why I'd ever want to see a new movie again. But I did see a few.

LOOPER was a nice diversion, with a few clever bits, all of which completely fall apart once you start thinking about what's going on, even more than most time travel stories, but pretty good as long as you can avoid that trap.

RED TAILS had some decent bits, enough to be worth seeing, but was a pretty uneven movie overall. A shame, as the Tuskegee Airmen story is pretty interesting, and could have led to a much better movie. Not that I think very many more people would have seen it if it had been a better film.

CHRONICLE wasn't too bad.  The "found footage" conceit was kind of strained, especially in the early going, but it led to some pretty clever visuals in the second half. Some very good effects in the super-powers and their "real-world" consequences.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES wasn't, I guess, a bad movie, but it wasn't a very good Batman movie. A shame, as I thought Nolan had a pretty valid interpretation of Batman from the first two movies, but after this I think I was reading in some things that weren't there and ignoring some things that were. Glad to see the end of this version of the character.

When I saw THE HOBBIT a few weeks ago, I walked out of the theater thinking it was one of the worst movies I ever saw. I've softened a bit on that, but I still think it's far from good, and is so far inferior to the LORD OF THE RINGS movies that it's hard to believe most of the same people are involved. Won't be going to see the next two (at least not in theaters), and overall I'm just confused that most people seem to like it as much as they do.

On the other hand, I've been hearing for months that JOHN CARTER is really good, but Disney screwed up the marketing (deliberately or otherwise), and dismissed that. I've now seen it on DVD, and I'll say now that I was wrong. I thought it was a great movie, something I'd never expect from the handful of ads I saw, and now really wish I'd seen it on the big screen with an audience. I can't remember the last new action/adventure movie I saw that worked as well as this, with good pacing, a plot reasonably faithful to the source, if I remember correctly (it's been a while since I read Burroughs), with changes that made sense, rather than being gratuitous, funny bits that were actually funny (as opposed to every attempt at humour in THE HOBBIT), solid special effects, mostly good acting. The movie they put out clearly was not the movie they were selling. No clue if that was deliberate or just run-of-the-mill incompetence, but I'm kind of upset now that the chance of a sequel seems remote.


On TV, I think KEY AND PEELE is a pretty great sketch comedy show, and may be my favourite show now. I liked the final season of COMMUNITY for the most part, uneven but more good than bad, and always watchable and re-watchable. I liked some of the episodes of LOUIE a lot this year, in particular the story with Robin Williams (as a character) and the one with Marc Maron (as himself), and parts of the "Late Night" plot. Almost caught up on BREAKING BAD, which has been pretty spectacular. MAD MEN is still good, but not as good as it was.  DEXTER, already on a long downward spiral since the Trinity Killer season, went right down the drain, so I think I'm done with it. Still enjoy THE COLBERT REPORT and THE DAILY SHOW, though I skip over huge chunks of both (about half the interviews, and most of the field pieces on THE DAILY SHOW). I watch THE LATE SHOW WITH CRAIG FERGUSON sometimes, and mostly enjoy what I see.

The only music I bought this year was the new Bob Dylan album, TEMPEST. And that was the first time I bought an album digitally, which makes sense since I don't think I've touched any of my CDs in over a year. A couple of good songs on there, but that title song, a 14 minute song about the Titanic, is kind of ridiculous. If Dylan of old did an epic song about the Titanic, it might be about hubris, or class, or something bigger than a boat sinking. This is a song about a boat sinking.

State of Comics "Journalism", 2012

It is now a full week since Frederik Schodt posted about the passing of Keiji Nakazawa five days earlier.

Of seven major English language comic book news websites, including six which have been nominated for the Eisner Award for Journalism, four appear not to have mentioned it at all. Of those, only one has been completely absent of updates since Schodt's posting. The others have all maintained regular posting, including numerous articles which could not have been written in advance for holiday posting.

Keiji Nakazawa, R.I.P.

Keiji Nakazawa has passed away last week at age 73. He was the creator of the comics BAREFOOT GEN and I SAW IT, based on his first hand experiences as a child in Hiroshima during World War II and as a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on that city on August 6, 1945, killing much of his family and having repercussions going on for years, often as a result of inexcusable negligence by both Japanese and American authorities. GEN is a fictionalized account, with the title character being a composite experiencing both things Nakazawa himself did and stories he heard of other survivors and victims. I SAW IT is a shorter work, more strictly autobiographical.

I don't really have much to add right now beyond what I've previously posted on this weblog. In fact, one minor reason for the lack of posting on this site over the last little while was my complete inability to adequately write about Nakazawa's work, with three different unfinished posts still sitting in my drafts folder. It's been over two decades since I first read his work, and it still has some of the most touching and heartbreaking scenes I've ever encountered in any work of art.

Here's a collection of covers from Nakazawa's work as translated into English. If you've never read his work, find some of these and read them.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition, artist Raina (SMILE, DRAMA) Telgemeier has a short comic about reading GEN at age 9, which everyone should read if they're curious about the power of Nakazawa's work and the importance of comics.

GodCorp revisited

Steve Bissette passes the news that Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta got a "cease and desist" letter from Marvel/Disney over the Lee/Kaluta creation STARSTRUCK, which was briefly published by Marvel in the 1980s, following some stories printed by other publishers including Heavy Metal, and subsequently published by Dark Horse and most recently IDW. The matter seems to have been resolved to the creators' satisfaction, but really should never have gotten as far as it did.

In honour of the incident, some images from Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby's DESTROYER DUCK #1 (1982), that strike a resonant chord now more than ever. Gerber and Kirby were always among the most prescient of creators to work in corporate American comics, and prominent on the long list of creators to feel the sting of the corporate policies.

We're long overdue for a reprint of DESTROYER DUCK, aren't we? Hopefully soon. A new generation deserves to be introduced to Booster Cogburn...

KICKBACK by David Lloyd

KICKBACK was the first major solo comic book work by David Lloyd, best known as the co-creator of V FOR VENDETTA. It was originally published in French by Editions Carabas and the first English language edition came out in 2006 from Dark Horse. Earlier this year it was released in a digital edition for the iPad by Panel Nine, their second release after Eddie Campbell's DAPPER JOHN, including the original 92 page story and various extras.

It's an entertaining little crime story about Joe Canelli, a somewhat corrupt but fundamentally good cop in a city where corruption is the rule, and the complicated web he finds himself in when those rules start to change around him, also bringing in some secrets from his past.

Of course the main attraction is Lloyd's artwork, which is always a welcome sight. It's perfectly suited to a crime story, with expressive faces and a good use of layouts to pace the story, especially in the frequent scenes with minimal dialogue. I'm not sure I was really sold on some of the more obvious uses of digital effects in both the art and the colouring (also done by Lloyd). A lot of uses of blur effects and photographic drop-in backgrounds. Those tended to call attention to to the effect more than they enhanced the story, especially with Lloyd's very organic linework. Some of them worked, and I'm sure that Lloyd will get better with the tools as time goes on, but at this point I'd have preferred the classic Lloyd look. Of course, I'm one of those still hoping we'll someday get a proper black&white edition of V FOR VENDETTA...

Among the extras are several pages of thumbnails, layouts and character designs, a cover gallery of the various previous print editions of the book in various languages and an interview with Lloyd about the history of the project, his process in creating it over several years and his disappointment over the marketing of the prior English publication. Some enjoyable stuff for those interested in the process of creating comics and the state of the market. Lloyd also provides audio commentary for many of the pages. I've listened to a few of them, and there seems to be some interesting stuff in there, but it didn't quite work for me. Come to think of it, I don't know I've ever listened to a commentary track for a movie on DVD all the way through except for THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and even for those I listened to in bits and pieces (usually just for especially good or especially perplexing scenes) I prefer it when there's more than one person doing the commentary, so it's a conversation rather than a monologue. The implementation seems pretty good though, with maybe a few tweaks needed, so it should be interesting to see in on some future books.

Well worth checking out if you missed the original print version. You can check out samples in Panel Nine's digital comics magazine INFINITY. As I've talked about before, the Panel Nine format is the best one I've tried, especially for longer form works, with a lot more thought placed into the layout and reading experience than others.

Joe Kubert, R.I.P.

Sad to have to note the passing of Joe Kubert at age 85. Definitely one of the greats of comics on several levels. The art itself is paramount, of course, but he was almost as important as a teacher, with the long list of amazing artists who passed through his school.


A few images of Kubert on Kubert from DC Special #5 [1969], with the cover above.

The last page of a four page autobiographical story from that issue, with his advice to aspiring cartoonists a nice little precursor to the second career he later started as a teacher.

And also from that issue, a neat little look at a few characters he worked in the 1940s, even drawn same style, plus a preview of his then-new character Firehair (SHOWCASE #85-87, TOMAHAWK #132,#134 and #136).

You could write a book about Kubert's long career, but fortunately someone more qualified already did, Bill Schelly and JOE KUBERT - MAN OF ROCK [2008]. More recently, Schelly also edited THE ART OF JOE KUBERT [2011].

Check here for a list of over 1200 cover credits by Kubert (and that's not even all of them), click on any one of them for an illustration by a true legend.

Digital comics, INFINITY magazine and more

I've been thinking about doing a couple of posts about the various formats of digital comics and the various strengths and deficiencies (mostly deficiencies) of each. Might still, but then this was announced which will probably do it better...

Russell Willis sends news that he's launched INFINITY, a new free bimonthly magazine from Panel Nine about digital comics, with a preview issue out now for the iPad, soon to be available as a PDF without some of the iPad specific features, and a formal launch in September. Panel Nine is the publisher of the digital editions of Eddie Campbell's DAPPER JOHN and David Lloyd's KICKBACK, so as you can see from the cover, part of the issue serves as a promo for those two books, with a sample chapter of DAPPER JOHN and excerpts from the interview with Lloyd that appears in KICKBACK. The whole magazine is a nice demonstration of the overall design sensibility of the Panel Nine books, so worth checking out for that. It's one of the few companies that brings a design philosophy beyond just images of printed comics, but still preserving the best aspects of the print reading experience. DAPPER JOHN is still the most enjoyable digital reading experience I've had (especially among longer works, where the table-of-contents, chapter structure and bookmarking really enhance the readability).

In addition to the Panel Nine promotional stuff, there's a detailed look at an older iPhone developed comic, MURDERDROME, which got into some controversy a few years back when Apple rejected it for some over-the-top violence. I didn't pay much attention at the time, since I didn't have the equipment to read it banned or not at the time, but the interview with artist P.J. Holden is interesting, as are his various thoughts about the technical aspects of digital comics and how they're being developed.

The preview issue also has a collection of recent news on other digital comics and some reviews. Perversely, the most interesting thing to me was the almost exact opposite of digital, a look at the original INFINITY, a small press fanzine Willis published in the mid-1980s, with contributions from many of the most interesting British creators of the era, including Eddie Campbell, Bryan Talbot, Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Hope we see some more highlights of that in future issues.

Anyway, worth checking out. Since I got an iPad a few months ago, I've been thinking a lot about the various formats for reading comics. Almost all of them are much more satisfying than reading on a computer screen, but most of them are still far from ideal, a lot more thinking has to be done on how the technology can be used to enhance the reading experience. I find myself mostly in sympathy with the views that Willis has, so I still think that DAPPER JOHN is the gold standard. Of the major platforms, Comixology provides a fairly decent experience, especially for shorter works (which I'd define as under 50 pages). Fortunately on a high resolution screen their "guided view" is mostly unnecessary, since it often seems to be pretty poorly thought out if the layout is more complicated than a simple grid. I guess some people are still trying to read comics on phone screens as small as 4 inches for some reason and need to deal with that guided view, as inadequate as it is. I'd probably rank Dark Horse's app next, fairly straightforward, but a little buggy. iVerse is quite a step down from that, I wouldn't buy anything there if i didn't have an option to go elsewhere, which fortunately hasn't come up yet. And it's especially irritating when you open the app you're usually greeted with those awful Tarot comics in the featured area (presumably since those are as close to a major book that's iVerse exclusive?). And Apple's own iBooks is just not designed for comics at all, it's a prose reader designed to incorporate occasional illustrations, and has too many unnecessary stylizations trying to make the screen look like a print book. Awful reading experience. The Kindle app was recently upgraded so that some of the comics available on Amazon for the Kindle Fire should work on the iPad, but there's nothing up there so far I'd want to buy. I looked at a few samples, and it looks like it might be acceptable, about on par with Dark Horse's app. Their "panel view" looks like it's slightly more thought out than Comixology's version. The Kindle format should allow for some of the chapter structure that I want for longer works, but I don't know if they actually use it.

There are also a few other comics done as standalone apps, which is actually the format I'm hoping takes off for longer works. Nothing really stands out among them, a few go way over into the "motion comics" side, with animation and audio so they don't really qualify as comics anymore. Some get way too cute with the navigation, making them almost impossible to read.

I've also been playing around with various ways to read public domain scanned comics. There are quite a few readers for those, each with its own quirks. I think I've settled on one called iComix for now.

Anyway, should be an interesting few years while all this shakes out.