Chris Haley is... THE ENTHUSIAST!
From FF #2
Written by Johnathan Hickman
Art by Steve Epting
Inks by Epting & Rick Maygar
Colors by Paul MountsSince I just bagged on Epting for phoning it in on Ben Grimm’s boot treads in issue #1, I’ll give him this: the rest of his Ben Grimm is pretty dang great. I think it was Doc Shaner who pointed out that the Thing isn’t some bulky guy with a skin condition (as seemed to be the house style, at least for merchandising for a little bit there after the Tim Story Fantastic Four movies/travesties); he’s a Marvel monster like Badoom or Zzutak or Orrgo or any of those other crazy Kirby/Lee creations. And Epting draws him that way, which, all credit to him.
Also, this page is perfectperfectperfect, from the dialogue to the pacing to the lettering. I love that Doom walks into the Baxter Building and immediately starts being a massive, merciless jerk. He can’t not be a tool. And I love that. In fact, I loved the the whole issue. High fives, guys.
I started a comics nitpicking Tumblr called Guttersniping. Here’s my first post on the credits splash from this week’s issue of Batman, Inc.
I’m also opening the blog up for submissions, so if you really need to gripe about some little detail in a comic that’s bugging the crap out of you, feel free. All I ask is that you keep your language PG-ish and that you try to be fair and constructive in your criticism.
Cheers.
So, let’s look at Planetary and talk about my own bête noire: trade paperback/graphic novel design.
I recently purchased all four volumes of the series. I had the first two trades from a previous printing, but I gave them to a friend, and besides, they didn’t match as a set like these do. I mean, look at these covers:
They’re simple, iconic, actually relate to the interior stories (a theme I’m sure I’ll be hammering here), and more importantly, are consistent across the board. This is a closed series, so it’s pretty easy to make sure they all match up. And they do. Wonderfully.
Until you put them on your bookshelf. Look at this mess:
I think the most annoying thing is how close they are to matching up. I could overlook that the second volume doesn’t treat the title as a subhead. It’s shorter than the others and might have looked goofy. Who knows? I’ll let that one slide. It’s annoying, but I’ll let it slide.
But why aren’t the author credits even close to lining up? Or the volume numbers? It’s not a matter of production issues (inconsistent trimming, etc.), as they all match up at the top of the spine just fine, they just fall apart as you travel downtown. It’s just a matter of sloppy layout.
And then there’s the fourth and final volume, which, honestly, I think works best proportion-wise, but it’s the most problematic when placed next to the other three. Part of the problem is that Wildstorm went away sometime between the printing of the first three and the last one, so we have a different publisher credit area that doesn’t even get close to matching the other three volumes. It would not have been difficult to switch the volume number and publisher info, but I’m assuming future printings will use the publishing info in a way similar to the fourth volume. One would hope. But I don’t have those future editions. I have these. And so when I look at these books on my shelf — where they’ll be viewed most often — rather than a cohesive while, I have a scattershot (no, not Shattershot) mess staring back at me.
C’mon comics. You’re a big industry full of talented professionals. Let’s act like one.
But I don’t know if I can do it. It’s not fun or funny or clever or smart. It’s the most aggressively hateful, nasty, vile thing I have ever read, full of rotten people saying and doing the most rotten things Millar can think of. Not even John Romita, Jr.’s stalwart pencil can save it, as all he’s called upon to draw are mutilated corpses and bloodied, swollen faces. Reading Kick Ass, I felt like Millar hated these characters; that he just created them so that he could mutilate them and laugh at all the pain he heaped on them. It just felt dirty and mean-spirited and pointless.
And yeah, it’s unrelentingly violent, which, I mean, I’m a guy who was cackling like a madman during Inglorious Basterds, but something like that or Kill Bill never tries to present itself as reality. We can debate whether that’s a cheat or not, but at least it allows you to laugh at human misery the same way you would an Itchy & Scratchy bit on The Simpsons because it’s not reality. Kick Ass takes every chance it gets to try and convince you that guys, this is like totally reality — even though the reality of Kick Ass looks about as real as a high school production of Death Wish — that this is how things would happen in the reallyreal world filled with MySpace and internet porn and YouTube and Marvel comics.
What are we supposed to take away from this? That superheroes wouldn’t exist in reality because in reality we’re always murdering/raping/beating/hurling homophobic slurs at each other all of the time? Is the difference between reality and comic books that reality is infinitely more terrible? Is that the message I want to spend my time reading? I dunno. I’m not the type to get offended or upset about this kind of stuff, but this is just … it’s pointless.
Y’know why I like listening to Jay-Z’s later stuff, than his earlier stuff? His use of negative space in his verses. He’s gone through an interesting evolution that inevitably, a lot of emcees (who consider themselves, y’know, WRITERS) would probably go through. Having started out in the early 90s right on the tail end of the Rakim/Kool G Rap/Big Daddy Kane (Kane being the biggest influence on him, probably), he used to rap in a fairly straightforward style. Coming in on the beat 1, stopping on the beat 4, AABB rhyme styles.
At a certain point, probably from his being thrust into the KONY role and the whole war with the more lyrically complex Nas, he became very much a complex, what I like to call a “cascade rhyming” style emcee. He started doing the thing where you start on the 1, and then double up certain portions within the bar, which then leaks over to the next bar, and so on, and so forth. He dabbled a bit with double time rap. He played around with Southern bounce. He slaughtered most of the tracks during this era, but it’s also interesting to note that this was probably his least memorable era (the Vol. 3/Dynasty era, which also came up again on the panned BP2 album). But dude was killing tracks left and right, he just stopped focusing on the songwriting, more on being a lyrical monster on some uninteresting (to some people) song topics and structures. Quick! Name a hook from a song off of Vol. 3. See? you can’t do it can you. And Dynasty, you can probably only name “I Just Wanna Love You” right? Which is not really even his hook, it’s Pharrell’s But I’m getting way off the point.
Somewhere around Blueprint I, and most notably on the Black Album, he started backing off this cascade style, and replaced it with a more subdued, laid back style. He started being way more selective with his lyrics, and more in tune with understanding when to unleash a little cascade here and there, understanding where to string together multiple rhymes. And on the Black Album, it was here that he began playing around with stretching words past their beats, letting silence sit there (see: “Threat”, probably the best example of this). He kept going with this, whether it was due to age, due to just stylistic evolution, due to him feeling like he had less to prove, or the fact that he just naturally evolved into that kind of a writer (or a combo of any and/or all of those), it all culminated in “Death of Auto-Tune,” which is a track that has so much negative space in it, such an economy of words. He manages to say vicious diss rhymes in the most economical way, it’s kind of mindblowing. Almost every punchline is childishly simple:
“You n*ggas’ jeans too tight
Your colors too bright. Your voice is too light”“This ain’t a number one record
This is practically a deadly weapon
I made this for Flex and Mr. Cee,
I want n*ggas to feel threatened.”Just simple disses, but said with a conviction where a rhymer has gained a full amount of confidence in their voice, and has shaken off the shackles of feeling like he has to say a rhyme like:
“I’m so far ahead of my time, I’m bout to start another life
Look behind you, I’m bout to pass you twice
Back to the future and gotta slow up for the present
I’m fast, n*ggaz can’t get past my past
How they propose to deal with my perfect present?
When I unwrap “The Gift & the Curse” in one session
Ain’t no livin person can test him
Only two restin in heaven can be mentioned in the same breath as him”I mean, that is dripping with effort, even though it’s from maybe my favorite Jigga song of all time, “Hovi Baby”. Even more impressive is the use of negative space in D.O.A.:
“This ain’t a number one record ____
This is practically a deadly weapon_____
I made this for Flex and Mr. Cee,
I want n*ggas to feel threatened._______”The blanks are where he doesn’t feel the need to fill the line to the brim, he just lets it breathe, he comes back in on the next one. It makes the whole song vicious, as if he doesn’t even need the whole line to adequately get across his contempt for commercial rap (which is hilarious considering he basically characterized all of commercial rap in the late 2000s with “Empire State of Mind” but that’s another topic entirely).
A lot of people talk about how early Jay-Z was his best, and hey, I like it too. But I think a lot of people who only talk about how the Blueprint, Black Album, and Reasonable Doubt are worth listening to miss his evolution and how he basically raps unlike any other NY rapper that’s currently commercially successful.
It’s just interesting, is all I’m saying.
It’s also telling that the only independent nation of women in the superhero mainstream is here being associated so definitively with sexual abuse, to say the very least, and, once again, organised mass violence. Indeed, it’s not so very long ago that that DC had the Amazons invade the USA. Whether in an alternative DCU, where we might expect characters to be behaving atypically, or not, the message does seem to be one that finds the very idea of a state ruled by women rather than mostly by men to be deeply threatening. It’s as if the very idea of women who are powerful and independent simply has to be associated with men having their testicles cut off, with the sacred symbols of Washington D.C. and London’s Westminster being trampled on by armies of Nazi-Amazons. Those nasty vicious women just won’t listen to reason, and they’re going to emasculate poor helpless men too.
Some of the most terrible aspects of the suffering of women and girls are here reduced in the superhero narrative to elements of fun, the most noble of their aspirations twisted into comicbook evidence of how dangerous and threatening their silly ideas are. Worse yet, at this point of “Flashpoint” at least, such vital matters are just there as side-issues, as little storytelling lures, to spice up the apparently far more important issues of changed continuities and altered superheroic identities.
”(via bigredrobot)
Sometimes I go through phases of really believing that cape comics have a chance of evolving and sticking around, rather than navel-gazing their way into oblivion. And then I see the sales charts and find out that John Rozum and Frazer Irving’s Xombi shipped 12k and get depressed and bitter. Twelve thousand is pretty bad, particularly in today’s crappy comics market.
I keep forgetting that the echo chamber that is the people I correspond with isn’t made of the traditional direct market consumer.
Cape comics fans don’t want new, or diverse, or fresh, or even really interesting. They want what they have always had, but maybe slightly different from the last time. Maybe a new face, but not too new, in some old clothes, or an old face back from the dead and a little sexier.
David Finch’s incredibly ugly, boring, and awful The Dark Knight came in at #4, and a couple books saw sales spikes for Reign of Doomsday.
This is the comics industry we’ve built, and it’s gross.
David Brothers, 4th Letter!
Sometimes I go through phases of really believing that cape comics have a chance of evolving and sticking around, rather than navel-gazing their way into oblivion. And then I see the sales charts and find out that John Rozum and Frazer Irving’s Xombi shipped 12k and get depressed and bitter. Twelve thousand is pretty bad, particularly in today’s crappy comics market.
I keep forgetting that the echo chamber that is the people I correspond with isn’t made of the traditional direct market consumer.
Cape comics fans don’t want new, or diverse, or fresh, or even really interesting. They want what they have always had, but maybe slightly different from the last time. Maybe a new face, but not too new, in some old clothes, or an old face back from the dead and a little sexier.
David Finch’s incredibly ugly, boring, and awful The Dark Knight came in at #4, and a couple books saw sales spikes for Reign of Doomsday.
This is the comics industry we’ve built, and it’s gross.
David Brothers, 4th Letter!
At first, I wondered if maybe 12,000 in sales wasn’t so bad. It was around Sweet Tooth’s sales, another stellar series that gets high ratings, but seems to only bring in under 10,000 in sales. Given that few books have grossed over 100,000 in sales since November 2010 and the general decline of the industry as a whole, I thought this was to blame. And I do think that is a factor, but not the entirity of the problem.
Looking at April 2011 sales, Xombi #2 dropped down to 8,345 in sales from its first issue sales of 12,035. Which is immensely disappointing, given that Xombi #1 is so freaking good. No, I mean, seriously. I wasn’t a fan of Frazier Irving’s art on Batman, but it is so perfect for this series. And it’s funny and different. I can’t recommend this book enough. And it was very highly reviewed. I want to see this series make it beyond a year. I want to see this series make it.
Why are the sales so low? Is it a lack of publicity/promotion* coupled with general lack of fan interest? *And I should add, there were interviews with John Rozum and news when Xombi #1 came out, and there were previews of both issues so far.
My concern is now the news of Static Shock ongoing being cancelled — is this DC looking at the sales of Milestone character Xombi and deciding it’s not worth it? That one will dictate how the other sells? And then to throw up their hands and say, “Well, we tried.”
Like I said above, Xombi is great. Please give it a shot. Trust me, it’s worth it. If not, you can complain all you want, but at least just try it out.
Sweet Tooth, and other Vertigo series, usually perform well in trade paperback collections, so DC can afford to print the monthlies at somewhat of a loss, knowing they’ll make money back on the trades. Xombi, on the other hand, will probably not sell a whole lot more in a trade than it’s currently doing in monthly format, so if it’s losing money as a monthly and won’t recoup some of that loss in trade, why keep it going?
And I don’t think the problem is lack of promotion. I think the problem is that the market has shrunk to the point where there are roughly 50,000 hardcore comics fans who like the same 10-20 characters and buy their titles because they “matter.” Everybody else is either a small enough minority that their dollars don’t make a dent (A big “Hello,” to my fellow Thor: the Mighty Avenger and Nextwave fans!) or have been priced out and moved on to other forms entertainment for their geek fix. So these 50K guys, they drive the market, and a look at the buying habits of this group is any indication, a book’s quality is less important than its perceived “importance” in the larger schema of whichever of the imagined universes they pledge allegiance to.
Would it have made sense to launch Xombi as a Vertigo book to appeal to that smaller, but equally devoted, audience? Maybe. I know I’ll check out a book solely because it has the Vertigo logo on the cover and I would guess that there’s a contingent of comics readers that thinks the same way. It makes sense to me, as Xombi is definitely closer in spirit to, say, iZombie or Hellblazer than it is to Green Lantern Corp; but Milestone is DC’s baby and so therefore, a book that falls between the stools of DC and Vertigo got dropped in the DC pool and expected to swim like the big kids or drown.
I picked up Xombi because of good reviews from the “echo chamber” Brothers mentions and the fact that I really, really dig Frazier Irving’s art. (And I have the copies of Iron Man: the Inevitable to prove it.) But I’m not shocked that a non-superhero book starring a relatively unknown character who sits — for all intents and purposes — outside the mainstream universe, written by a writer who isn’t Geoff Johns, or Peter Tomasi or Judd Winick or any of the other DCU Playhouse Players and drawn by an artist whose style sits outside the established superhero style, is under-performing.
I’m hoping DC has the cajones to do a real universal reboot. They might pick up new readers; older ones like me will stick on; it’s the middling ones, the ones who can’t imagine a world without a “Nightwing”, who might bolt. But DC has got to do something to make their stories more accessible. Mainstream comics have long since given up on the principle that “every comic is someone’s first”; instead they cling desperately to the principle that “this comic must NOT be someone’s last!” This gives us an endless cascade of ‘can’t miss’ cliffhangers to keep dying addicts addicted, rather than an endless parade of new stories to keep new readers interested. That parade is EXACTLY why fans love most of the multi-media versions of the DCU: stories that are enriched by having knowledge of DC history, but not dependent on it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if DC were bold and brave enough to take that approach to their monthly comics? I think it’s time.
”