30 posts tagged “comics”

Problem: it's hard to store comic books. You can put them in boxes, but when you stack the boxes you have to constantly move the top ones to get to the bottom ones, which discourages one to file them, leading to big stacks of comics lying around because you're too lazy to unstack the boxes.

Solution: DrawerBoxes. Each box pulls out like a filing cabinet, so you can stack them up and still get to the ones on the bottom. I just bought five of them, and they work great. Detailed reviews can be found here and here.

Dark Horse recently announced Dark Horse Presents, an initiative to produce short serialized comic books for MySpace. The first, Sugarshock, written by Joss Whedon no less, appeared yesterday. It's good, but the computer screen just isn't the right format. Newsarama syndicates one page of Powers each day. It's one of my all time favorite comic books, but it wasn't designed as a daily, so the pacing doesn't work. You can't get a whole page onscreen at once, so you can't appreciate the artist's layout properly, unless you shrink it down to a point where you can't read the lettering (try Marvel's digital comics on a 17" monitor). Marvel used to have a method where you could click on each panel and it would pop up and zoom in, but I'd imagine that took a fair amount of effort for their web team to craft, and it still meant you had to see isolated panels of what were drawn to be one whole page.

The web is just built for the short format. YouTube videos are great if they're a minute or two long, but you don't ever want to watch a full-length movie at your computer. Short news articles and blog posts, good, long, researched pieces or novels, bad.

What does work very well on the web is the comic strip. I regularly read PvP, Penny Arcade, XKCD, Boy on a Stick and Slither, VG Cats, The Perry Bible Fellowship, and Marmaduke (sorta). The traditional comic strip format works so nicely on the web. You can read a strip without scrolling. A funny strip is easy to email to people. You don't need sound to enjoy them at work. And comic strips expose a true talent for compressing a story into a few small panels. If you want to tell a five-part story, each day's installment still has to be funny. That takes real skill.

This isn't to say that the web is perfect for comic strips. Few webcomic sites provide good indices of their archives. Try going back and finding a particular Penny Arcade strip you remember finding funny. Ideally each page would tag its strips by subject matter for easy reference down the road. And all that lettering on each strip is just part of the image, so Google can't index the scripts. Still, as digital distribution of comic books continues to be a hot topic amongst the big publishers, and with DC launching its own online service soon, I'd like to see more attention paid to the comic strip than the longer form book. No matter how you try to shoehorn it in, you're always going to want to read a full-length book in your hands, printed on paper. The strip, on the other hand, loses nothing in its conversion to pixels.

As announced in Philadelphia this weekend, Amazing Spider-Man will move to a three-a-month shipping schedule in the fall. Currently there are three Spider-Man titles: Amazing Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and Sensational Spider-Man (née the "Marvel Knights" Spider-Man). As with Superman and Action Comics and with Batman and Detective Comics, each title usually tells its own story about the main character. There's the occasional crossover story, but generally you can just read one of the titles and get your fix. So there are three Spider-Man books, but most people don't read all three. As editor Steve Wacker puts it:

Amazing is the "main" book to most readers and the feeling is that the important Spider-man stuff happens between its covers. No matter how good the creators and stories might be on the supporting books, when forced to choose, most readers lean towards Amazing.

According to Paul O'Brien's estimates of Marvel's March 2007 sales, Amazing Spider-Man 539 sold 137,730 copies. That's a bit high as it was the first issue of a big storyline (Spider-Man being back in his black costume), but it's by far Spidey's best seller. That month Sensational sold 56,139 copies and Friendly Neighborhood sold 50,665, so both of them combined don't sell what the "main" title does. I'd suspect that most of the 50,000 people buying one or the other of the latter two titles are buying both, so it's possible to assume that there are about 50,000 hardcover Spidey fans out there who are buying all three titles every single month (plus, probably, Ultimate Spider-Man and New Avengers, of which he's a member), which leaves ~80,000 readers who only buy Amazing each month.

So how many people are going to stick with Amazing when it goes tri-monthly? The 50,000 hardcore readers aren't a concern – they already buy three Spider-Man books a month. How many of the remaining 80,000 readers will stick with the new book? If all of them do, Marvel will have picked up 160,000 sales each month, which is well over what launching two brand new books would have gotten them. If even half of the readers stick with it, that's 80,000 extra readers, which is as well as most of their top books do (in March that's what Uncanny X-Men sold, and it's stayed at that level for years).

The question of course lies in how many people decide they care enough about Spider-Man to shell out the extra $5.98 for the two extra books each month. There won't be a choice anymore to just read one book, so you'll either pay $9.00 a month to read Spider-Man, or you'll pay nothing. I'm a bit doubtful that I'll stick with it, but the advantage is that the story will move along at a very nice pace. If the writing quality is good there will be some real momentum and, even if Marvel isn't able to keep it up for more than a year or so, they could cut it back to bi-monthly and still probably stay above the numbers they were selling with three different books.

Yesterday I was talking about bit about how the end of this season of Lost was very good, while the beginning was very slow (duh). I'm sure that the creators of the show may say that the beginning was slow on purpose because it was all buildup, and that if you go back and watch them again you'll understand why they had to be that way to set up the ending to be so good.

Related, today Good Comics writes about DC Comics's Countdown, which isn't quite starting off with a bang. He says:

Serialized fiction does not work that way [...] An individual comic, if it is bad, does not suddenly become good because it tied into a bigger story.

You can choose to tell a graphic novel, or you can tell a serialized story. If you tell a serialized story, you have to live and die with each serialized part of the story. If they are bad individually, then they are bad. The story as a whole might very well be good, but that doesn’t make Countdown #51 good because Countdown #25 might be. [Countdown's issues numbers count down from 51 to 0, so 25 is still six months away.]

I tend to agree. You can't make a bunch of TV episodes that are really slow and don't go anywhere and expect people to trust you in October and wait for a payoff that won't air until April or May. For a movie where the payoff is only two hours away, that's fine, but a week between episodes is long enough that you really do have to judge each episode on its own.

Arriving in stores next week are All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #5 and Ultimates 2 #13. The last issue of the latter series shipped September 27, and the former hasn't had a new issue since May 17 of 2006, meaning it'll come one day short of having been a full year. That both books are coming out on the same day could be a portent of something terrible.

Happily, the second issue of Buffy Season 8 does not disappoint. There's lots of fun stuff in there, and it's neat to see the characters back in action. More importantly, I paid attention this week to which cover I got. Last time I wasn't thinking about it and walked out with the variant cover, as opposed to the very nice standard cover. I'm not a fan of variant covers. Regardless of what their PR says, it boils down to companies hoping some completest fans will spend money on the same book twice rather than buy two different ones. This week, both Avengers: The Initiative #1 and Justice League of America #7 feature the worst kind of variant cover, the two-halves cover. The artist drew a double-wide image and then the companies split them up onto two pages, so you're only getting have a cover no matter which version you buy. The covers themselves are nice, but wouldn't it have been great it they'd spread across the back cover, or been fold-outs instead?

Here's the JLA one, along with the full artwork of the two joined covers:

Here's an article about the JLA cover. The background panels feature previous version of the Justice League drawn by people who were drawing them at the time.

And here's Marvel's Avengers: The Initiative #1:

Along with a key to which characters are which.

I linked to this in October, and wrote about the covers in June, but I'm going to make a plug for a weekly weblog called J.G. Jones 52 Covers Blog. It's hosted on Wizard Magazine's website and doesn't feature and RSS feed, but it's worth manually loading up once a week. For the past year, DC Comics has been publishing a weekly comic called 52. J.G. Jones has drawn all of the covers for the series, and they're spectacular. Each week he writes up a post about the week's cover, how it ties into the main story, and shows off some of his early sketches. The series itself is interesting in that all the major characters come from DC's c-list. It's been a fun read, though as with 24 the real-time gimmick gets in the way (though at other times it pays off, like the New Year's Eve cliffhanger), but reading about the amount of thought and talent that went into the covers is quite something even if you haven't been reading the comic. Also it has one of the best mastheads around, with the giant "52" numbers integrated into the art.

So Buffy's back. I find it feels wrong to be reading a TV show in comic book form, but I convince myself that it's not a comic about a TV show, it's a new, unfilmed season, which is how it's been billed, anyway. It picks up the plot from the finale of the show, and Joss Whedon wrote it. Regardless, the "season premier" is good. If you know and like the characters, you'll like this.

As the Newsarama blog points out, TV Squad is covering the series just like it were still on TV, and in their writeup of the first issue they make an interesting observation:

The pace of a small comic book is certainly going to be very different than a TV episode. In fact, from cover to cover, this issue's pace to me felt very much like the cold open of a TV episode; I could almost hear the familiar wolf howl after the last page.

If you've been reading comics for the past few years, this isn't a revelation (especially if you're used to Marvel's "decompressed" style where it took four issues of Ultimate Spider-Man to cover the one page origin from the original). What's interesting is how easy the new Buffy comic makes it to compare the general amount of content you get in one TV episode versus one issue of a comic. An issue of a comic book takes about 15 minutes to read, depending on how wordy it is. Your typical story arc lasts 3-6 issues, meaning on average you get about an hour of content per story, the same as a TV show. But comics take a month to draw, so you do a lot of waiting for that story. On the other hand, as TV Squad points out, there's no special effects budget to worry about, nor is there a limit to how many sets you can build, so there are fewer limitations on the storytelling.

Novak and I were talking about the difficulties of due process in super hero worlds the other day. I'd imagine if you were a defense attorney in a comic book world, you'd have a pretty cushy job. You see Batman working with Commissioner Gordon from time to time, but it's not like he gets warrants before breaking into someone's house and hanging them from the ceiling by a bat-rope. In the Powers world there's a whole group of detectives who specifically focus on supercrimes, so one would imagine their justice system has some laws about how vigilante justice is dealt with.

The more I think about Civil War, the more I end up on the pro-registration side of it, despite my rooting for Cap as it went along. Part of the reason for this is how unevenly the concept itself was presented during the course of the story. Basically it falls into to possibilities:

1. Superhuman draft. All heroes must register their secret identities with the government, must be trained and certified, and will take orders from SHIELD like soldiers.
   
2. Gun legislation analogue: all heroes must register their secret identities with the government, must be trained and certified, and will be expected to only use their powers responsibly, like a police officer would.

If the registration act were more in line with number one, I'd see a very big reason for Cap and friends to fight it. Most people with superpowers come across them by accident, and they have secret identities because they want to be able to live normal lives. Mutants are just born with them and some of them have to go to a special school just to learn how to handle them without killing people. If the act is a forced draft for those people, requiring them to become specialized soldiers and take orders, while no other citizens in the US are subject to an active draft, that's pretty damn unjust. Many civil war tie-in issues suggest this is exactly how the registration act is going to work.

Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has said numerous times that the Marvel Universe is mostly like the real world. George Bush is president, real world events like the September 11 attacks happened in the Marvel Universe, and so on. That being true, you have to assume that citizens of the Marvel 616 have the same civil liberties we do, chief among those being habeas corpus, protections against unlawful search and seizure, Miranda rights, and so forth. In the real world most arrests are made by police officers, but in a comic book world you've got lots of superheroes bringing people in, and you'd have to think that their rights are being violated all over the place. Imagine a police officer in court saying, "well, he had a note on him saying 'drug pusher, courtesy your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man', so we figured we'd arrest him for selling drugs." One of the most important foundations of our society is that people who are accused of crimes are allowed to have the evidence against them presented and questioned in court. If you have vigilantes running around nabbing lots of people, there's no way to make sure that they're not trampling all over that foundation. Granted, in comic book worlds there's a strong "ends justify the means" mentality, and when you have very, very bad villains out there maybe you want someone who can bring them in and not have to follow the rules to do it, but that's a dangerous road. With SHIELD able to look over the heroes' shoulders, they can make sure that the alleged criminals' rights aren't being violated even though it's She-Hulk making the arrest instead of a cop (though being a lawyer I'd imagine She-Hulk knows all of this, anyway). Now, I'm not arguing that everyone X-Men story begin with Cyclops filling out paperwork for a search warrant to check if a guy has been keeping mutant slaves in his basement, but it'd be good to know that when they do apprehend him it won't just get thrown out of court.

The question, then, is what the ramifications for registering are. If it means you get drafted or thrown in jail, and at times Iron Man specifically says that's the case, then the anti-reg heroes had every reason to protest it. But if it's there just to ensure due process, then not having someone looking out for the rights of the accused is wholly irresponsible. It makes the protest into one on grounds of tradition alone. "We always used to be able to beat up anyone we wanted, why should that stop?"

In this fan Q&A, Civil War editor Tom Brevoort provides the answer:

[The Superhuman Registration Act] requires anybody possessing superhuman abilities to register themselves and those abilities with duly-appointed agents of the government. Additionally, if an individual intends to use those super-normal abilities as an independent peace officer, they must qualify on a training evaluation, be licensed and submit to some level of oversight in terms of their activities. The closest equivalent, although it’s not quite the same thing, is gun legislation. If you want to own a firearm in this country, you need to register that weapon. If you want to use that weapon and carry it, as a private detective or a bodyguard or in any other legal way, you need to be licensed and cleared on a firing range, demonstrating that you have the necessary knowledge, skill and responsibility to use that firearm responsibly. And if you discharge that weapon outside of an authorized firing range, or in the course of one of those jobs, there’s going to be paperwork that needs to be filled out.

Sounds very reasonable, doesn't it? You'd think if someone had just spelled that out from the beginning, there wouldn't have been a need for a whole lot of fighting and death. In fact, the text of the bill itself would say all that, though it's possible it's way too nebulous like the Patriot Act and gives the government lots of powers it may or may not use. The point being, it's sloppy storytelling. The main conflict only holds up if the registration act has bite to it, if you the reader believes it to be a real danger to heroes being able to protect people and from the government not being able to use heroes as political tools. But as soon as the story ends, it turns out to be something very sensible that lets heroes keep doing their jobs but protects the American public from a Marvel equivalent of the Santa robot on Futurama who puts everyone on the naughty list and then maims them.

I went to the comic book store last night to get my books. I usually go every 2-3 weeks and was planning to go last night before the big news broke. I've been reading Captain America as it gets collected in paperback format, and it's honestly one of the best single character books Marvel is publishing right now, if you like the character. Anyway, the man at the store said that he'd had quite a day, and that the phone had been ringing off the hook. This was about 5:45 or so, and he already didn't have any copies of Captain America 25 left on the shelves. He said if I really wanted one he had a stack of about 10 left, but they were otherwise being held for people who'd called in earlier that day. I said I'd wait, as I'll end up buying the trade, anyway and I already knew what happened. (In addition, this week's Civil War: The Initiative reprints a portion of the issue, but I wouldn't recommend buying it overall.) He said that Marvel had overprinted this issue, but at 9:00 that morning had announced they would not be doing a second printing. By 3:00 they'd changed that to "probably not" be doing a second printing, so it's quite possible that they'll have more on the shelves but not until the hype has already blown over.

Brian Hibbs, comic retailed blogger, has this to say about it:

I wish Marvel had laid out the score for us a lot better -- certainly when Superman was killed, we knew MONTHS in advance, and it resulted in millions of copies ordered. Even with the supposed generous overprint, I'll be surprised if we end up with even the same number of copies of CAP #25 on the market as CIVIL WAR (ie, nowhere near enough). The REAL problem is, because (I'm guessing) the reorders are going to fill from newstand copies, and because of the way that Diamond and Marvel work with OSDs (over-short-damage), it seems likely that reorders won't arrive for 2 more weeks. That's going to be way too late, I think.

A slow news day meant that the book got lots of media coverage, and Captain America's an old school wartime hero, so interest seems to be higher than it would otherwise be. Still, I like to see how these things look to people who don't read comics. For one, it's common knowledge that characters don't stay dead. All of the major media coverage of Steve Rogers' death include comments about how characters come back from the dead frequently, and Joe Quesada remains flippant about it in each story. I'd say it's quite possible he will stay dead, but it's also possible in the very next issue we'll see that the assassination was a cover to get him back into the field and escape trial.

Also, it's interesting to see which characters in each publisher's stables are big enough for people to even know who they are. In terms of public consciousness, DC Comics has Batman and Superman, then Wonder Woman, and that's about it. Some people know a few more from Superfriends or more recently Justice League. For Marvel, you've got Spider-man and the X-Men on the top tier, then the Hulk and, I guess the Fantastic Four. Iron Man's getting a movie next summer (which might actually be good), but Captain America hasn't had any film coverage in years, excluding a few direct-to-DVD cartoons, which is odd because, in my opinion, he's really their third-best property after Spider-Man and the X-Men.