I get a fair amount of column and comics-related mail. Not as much as Brian or our other Greg,
but enough to keep me occupied one afternoon a week or so. Some of it’s review stuff, some
of it’s press releases, and some of it’s questions from readers. The readers ask
questions that are legitimate, they ask others that are less so, and occasionally they ask stuff
that’s just …odd.
Just for fun I thought I’d answer a few here this week. Even the odd ones.
*
Here’s one I see a lot lately: Why do you hate DC so much, you DC-hating
bastard?
I don’t. As I have documented many, many times — here and here are the most prominent — the DC characters were my
gateway to comics and superheroes. And finding those changed my life.
I will say, though, that I’m beginning to hate the people who insist that the fact
I’m fond of Batman as a character apparently means that I signed some sort of loyalty oath
or something. The latest iteration of this seems to be readers bellowing at me over DC’s
current inability to tell the difference between “unfit for children” and
“mature,” which I guess I started a month or so ago with the frat-boy column,
enlarged upon somewhat again last week, and now our other Greg has fanned the flames with his
disgust at the latest issue of Nightwing.
So clearly, the inescapable conclusion for some wild-eyed reader out there is that both Mr.
Burgas and I must be in violation of our sacred pledge to never say or do anything to make people
think any DC superhero comics are bad.
(Pause while your columnist takes a deep breath and shakes his head.)
Look, I’ve gone over this ground many times, and so have my colleagues here at CSBG. But
okay. Let me try one more time, for the slow students out there: R-rated is not
synonymous with “adult” or “mature.” For God’s sake,
Roadhouse is rated R and it’s one of the most adolescent dumbass B-movies
I’ve ever seen.
(Which is not to say that I don’t love Roadhouse. I adore it. It’s the
classic hero’s journey, with Patrick Swayze as the young hero with a tragic past that has
to save the princess Kelly Lynch from the evil emperor Ben Gazzara. More, Swayze serves a good
and just king in Kevin Tighe, he learns from a wise Merlin figure in Sam Elliott, and he has a
faithful squire in Jeff Healey. It’s incredible how many of those classical marks the movie
hits. Except for the part where it’s about– wait for it– a bar bouncer.
A guy who throws noisy drunks out of a club. That’s what makes
Roadhouse so delightfully deranged. The foundation it’s built on is the lunatic
idea of doing a classic hero quest movie about a Legendary Figure with a Tragic Past, and his
struggle to uphold the Noble Tradition of… being a bouncer. It’s a measure of my own
lunacy, I suppose, that we own the Deluxe Edition DVD of this movie. On
purpose.)
….Sorry, got carried away there for a minute. The point is, as much as I adore
Roadhouse I would never argue for it having actual artistic merit, and certainly not for
it being “mature.” Anything but. It is raucously adolescent. The only
difference between Roadhouse and, say, Nightwing #149, is that
Roadhouse is at least fun.
That’s all I want. Fun.
Seriously. I don’t need the DC heroes to return to any idealized era of my youth, or dumb
things down for the kids, or sanitize anything. What I object to is the joylessness. How
many DC heroes have attended some kind of funeral in the last year or so, or brooded over someone
close to them getting killed? Where’s the fun in that?
Although, for the record, I really have been enjoying Peter Tomasi’s Nightwing run
up to this point, he’s done a lot of rebuilding there that’s been badly needed. That
made the mess that was #149 especially galling. It’s exasperating, because for a few issues
there, the book was really getting a sense of fun back.
I just want the DC spandex books I read to be fun. As in, “less morose.” You can have
fun without getting silly. The Maltese Falcon is fun. Die Hard is fun. Burn
Notice is fun. None of them are “silly” or “kiddified.” It’s
not a binary, either/or thing.
But I am beginning to suspect that DC does take a binary view of it. As far as I can tell, they
don’t seem to think there’s any kind of middle ground between Super Friends
and Identity Crisis. Every time a DC superhero book starts to look like it’s
ramping up towards being fun, like Nightwing or Action, suddenly someone dies
horribly or something. You really get the sense that it’s some sort of house policy.
“Your book’s not serious enough. Your protagonist smiles too much. Superheroes are
serious business and you need to show that. Kill off a cast member.”
Grim-n-gritty worked with Watchmen and Dark Knight because of the
novelty. But lately I see the Alan Moore style of reverse-engineered superhero
characterization he used in Watchmen (the idea that if you put on a costume and fight
crime, you’re really screwed up somehow) applied across the board, to books and characters
that were never meant for that and don’t benefit from it. It sucks all the fun out of the
enterprise.
When DC brings fun back to its main line of books, I imagine I’ll have nicer things to say
about them.
*
Another DC loyalist– I swear, I really am wondering if there’s some sort of
cult– want to know, Why don’t you beat up on some Marvel books for a change?
Don’t you read any Marvel stuff?
I read a lot of Marvel stuff; in fact, I was rude about Astonishing X-Men here last
week, for those that keep score.
But I don’t talk about it here much because for the last year or so I’ve been getting
all my Marvel books used, on Amazon. So I’m not terribly current.
See, Marvel has taken to re-issuing stuff in hardcover, including those big Omnibus things, and
whenever they do that, the prices of the previous collections of that material drop down
to almost nothing. The earlier version gets remaindered and you can pick those remaindered books
up for peanuts.
So I do eventually get to Iron Fist and Captain America and
Thunderbolts and so on, but it’s about a year behind everyone else. On the other
hand, I get those trades cheap. I just finished Planet Hulk, which retailed for some
hideous insane amount like $34.99, only mine was $2 plus shipping. Once you get used to this kind
of deal, you never go back. But it does put me way behind on current stuff,
there’s a time lag before you can get that price. As a result, there’s very little
from Marvel that I’ve read that hasn’t already been discussed to death. That’s
one reason I don’t get to them much here.
The other reason I don’t do more Marvel-centric pieces is that, although by and large I
enjoy the Marvel books I get, they’re not really blowing me out of my chair. I usually
write about stuff that I really was impressed by and thus want to share, or that I was really
annoyed by and thus want to vent. Neither one of those applies. Marvel’s superhero books
are doing around a solid C-plus or B-minus with me right now. Even critical darlings like
Captain America or Iron Fist strike me as being just “pretty good,
enjoyed that, I don’t feel cheated.”
Although I think a lot of you should get off Greg Burgas’ back about Moon Knight.
The art’s not to my taste and the book isn’t a patch on the glory days of Moench and
Sienkiewicz, but it’s well-written and it’s got an interesting hook. I
thought it was okay. Bit morose for me– there’s that word again– but I think
Huston did nice work on those first two trade collections (which set me back a combined total of
$6.89 including shipping, by the way. In hardcover.)
I have noticed something about the Marvel collections that irritates me a lot. The
coloring is awful.
Seriously, whoever’s doing it– especially on Moon Knight and
Brubaker’s Cap– needs to get into a different line of business. The colors are dark
and muddy, making pages hard to read, sometimes even obscuring captions. I’m reminded of
something my first boss said to me in a production art department twenty years ago: “These
kids get a MacIntosh for Christmas, by June they hang out a shingle saying they’re a
graphic designer.”
I always think of that line when I open up something like Winter Soldier volume two and
can hardly see the art. Because it’s obvious whoever colors the books is doing it all on a
computer and has no grasp of the fact that the colors on the screen look different than
colors on a printed piece. Computer palettes on a monitor are based on
“RGB,” meaning red, green and blue layered in different combinations to give you the
illusion of full spectrum color. But printed material is done based on “CMYK,”
meaning cyan, magenta, yellow and black layered on one another to provide the
illusion of a full spectrum.
Most of us that labor in magazine and book production pre-press know this. We use charts that
translate what you see on the screen in Photoshop to the corresponding Pantone ink
designation. Press operators, in particular, know how this works because they often
have to mix colors by hand out of the inks they have on the shelf. Good artists and designers
know this too, and do press proofs before the job is run so they can see how it will print.
(There was once an infamously screwed-up proofing process done for DC’s collected V For
Vendetta, the printers had a hell of a time getting the color where David Lloyd wanted it. I
respected Lloyd so much as an artist after I read about that; I thought he was amazingly
professional for wanting to do his own press check. That never happens in comics.)
Here’s the problem, though. Most current illustration software now lets the user call out
his own colors using the Pantone system, by typing in the code for the ink color he wants. So far
so good. But bad or lazy colorists often don’t bother to look at the actual printed version
of the color code directory to make sure that the printed Pantone color is the one they want to
use. They assume it’s the same one they are seeing on their screen. It’s
not. Almost always, the printed color is darker.
I could go on, but that’s the gist of it. You can read more here if you
are interested. The point is, Marvel’s art department doesn’t seem to have a grasp of
the principle, and it makes the books hard to read. I bet I’d like David Finch’s art
a lot better if it didn’t feel like I was trying to read something dropped in a mud puddle.
I’m not sure if it’s the colorist that’s screwing it up or the printers
themselves, but either way, it’s an amateur mistake, guys. There’s no excuse for it
to keep happening over and over, especially with reprint collections when the mistake should have
been spotted in the monthlies the first time around. Clean it up.
*
Here’s one that made me smile. Your wife sounds so cool. How did you
meet?
At the Alki Beach art studio. Julie was the pottery TA on the Tuesday evenings I had the
elementary-school cartooning class down there. She poked her head in the door to see what all the
kids were laughing about. Later, during our fight with the city to save the studio, we ended up
spending a lot of time together, and nature took its course.
*
From a former student of mine: I’m having a really a tough time drawing a kissing
scene, could you tell me how to draw people kissing?
Well, it’s a hard thing to explain by e-mail. But the short answer is that the faces
alternate overlapping, sort of. Basically if you can see one person’s NOSE in front, then
you only see the other person’s CHIN in front. I’ve attached some scans to show what
I mean.
All those shojo digests you have, there’s bound to be more examples available. Don’t
slavishly copy what other artists are doing, obviously, but don’t be afraid to look and see
how the other guys attack it as a design problem. You can learn a lot by looking at comic pages
and trying to figure out why the penciller makes the choices he does.
*
As long as we’re on the subject, every time I write about my class there are usually two or
three people that want to know something like, How did you start the program? What would
it take to get something like that going at our school/club/YMCA/other community outlet? What do
you use for curriculum?
The story of how I personally backed into this vocation is here, but my practical advice is this: Non-profit youth
organizations or schools fund things that are A) cheap, low-impact programs and B) demonstrably
of interest to the kids they serve. Basically you want to prove that it CAN be done before you
try to get them to do it.
If you’re a teacher or a librarian you probably already know the hoops you have to jump
through to get something funded. If you’re not a teacher or a librarian,
but rather, say, an artist who’s willing to try teaching a comics class for kids–
then I recommend you partner up with a school or a local library. You need that infrastructure
and– sorry, but it’s true– the air of respectability they lend to the
proceedings.
Most schools and libraries are underfunded for this sort of thing. If you just want to volunteer,
then may God bless you, you are doing His work. If you need to be paid or reimbursed, then you
need to thread the budget labyrinth and submit some sort of proposal, most likely.
The beauty part is that comics are cheap. It’s pencils, pens, paper, and photocopying, at
least for us, so that helps your budget get through; especially if you can use the school or
library’s own high-speed copier to do your stuff on. I go through this proposal routine
every fall and even though I’ve been at it for fourteen years there’s still some new
bureaucratic wrinkle they find to add to it each time. Hang in there. It’s worth it, and I
assure you they’ll be thrilled to have you, though you may have to do a little stumbling
through the bureaucracy before you find the right person to help you. At a school it’s
probably going to be the after-school activities director if they have that kind of
program– if not, then it’s whoever’s running the art department. At a public
library it’s going to be the “youth librarian.” (The person may have a
different title but saying “youth librarian” will probably get you where you need to
go. They’ll know who you mean.)
As for curriculum… Lessons vary with different groups but I think these are the basics you
MUST cover. I break it down into four areas.
CARICATURE AND MOVEMENT. In other words, the drawing part. This isn’t about
getting them to draw so much as it is teaching them about the visual alphabet of a cartoonist.
Faces and facial expressions: what happens to a face when it’s really happy? What kind of
mouth, eyes, eyebrows? what gets bigger or smaller, what changes position? Now answer those same
questions for sad, for angry, for frightened, etc. Start them with a very baseline cartoon face,
expressionless, and make them change it. Also, this is where I talk about things like speed
lines, impact bursts, etc. There are different exercises for this but I try to make
THEM draw as much as possible and then make corrections as necessary. “Show us on the board
what angry eyebrows look like. Okay, do the rest of you agree with that?” That kind of
thing. Walk them through as many facial expressions as you feel like doing, start with easy ones
like angry or happy and on up through smug, embarrassed, hopelessly in love, etc. The idea is to
make them understand that it’s not enough just to draw a face, that face has to convey a
variety of emotions. It’s good to talk about body language and different poses, too. Even
your most talented kids tend to learn to draw ONE face and ONE pose, and riff on it over and
over. Make them do variety.
LETTERING, WORD BALLOONS, CAPTIONS. Hammer home the idea that the words are just as
important VISUALLY as the pictures. Talk about sound effects. What kind of a noise does a rock
make when it hits a wall? No, not bang or pow, the REAL noise. (Usually someone comes up with
KRRCCKK or something like that, with a little prompting.) Okay, now, how do you spell it? (Coach
them into coming up with a workable spelling.) Write it on the board: krrcckk. Okay, how do we
make that look louder? Eventually, you lead them towards an all-caps rendition of KRRCCKK!! with
blocky lettering and a cracked-rock texture. Explain that the lettering is as visual as the
drawing, it’s words and pictures together that make comics. Talk about word
balloons and how their shapes change to create a whisper or a shout, the electronic shape for
radio-speaker voices, icicle balloons for disdain, etc., etc. Make them do a drawing that
incorporates a sound effect word they INVENT (no bam, no pow)and a lettering style to match the
noise they create.
DESIGN. Who’s your story about? Okay, so what does he look like? Bullies and villains
are drawn differently than heroes and nice people. This can bounce off the caricature lesson but
it also involves things like how you dress people, what landscapes and architecture look like,
how you light things, etc. Give them a simple action — a man walks down the street —
and make them design it to suit the mood. How does that look in a comedy story? An adventure
story? A horror story? A hero walks vs. a villain walks. Any variations on these you can come up
with. The idea is to show them how they can change the mood with ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the
drawing.
POINT OF VIEW and PAGE LAYOUT. Most kids will always want to do comics that are
medium-distance shots, straight-across side view. Show them how dynamic it makes a page to change
the point of view: establishing shots, close-ups, etc. (By the way, it helps a lot if you can
draw and do demos of all this on the board! I usually do “A man slips on a banana peel and
falls,” first with the six-panel grid all straight-across side views, and then another one
with as many different dramatic angles as I can think of.) Then I make them do a wordless page,
with changes of point of view, and then they swap with their table mates and see if they can
‘read’ the page aloud to the class just from the visual storytelling.
After that, it’s “putting it all together.” I make them do story pages
incorporating ALL of those techniques, they do thumbnail roughs that I look at and kibitz on,
then they do final pencils and inks. Those final pages become our zines. All of this includes
coaching on inking, layout, everything. I walk around the room as they work and sort of coach
them along as they are doing it, bearing in mind that the STORY is all theirs, my job is aiding
in its presentation.
Try to figure out a way to give them a final project where they can demonstrate all these. A
‘zine, or even a web page or a bulletin board in the hallway, but let them do work for an
audience somehow. And be sure they always know that’s the goal. “You aren’t
going to be able to run along behind them and explain all this, it has to be ON THE PAGE.”
Collaboration is fine but I like to make sure every kid in the room understands the principles
involved. Comics is a language. Everyone in the class should be fluent, whether they draw well or
draw badly.
*
And finally, here’s one I see at least once a month: How come you guys are such
prudes? Commander Steel’s package, Frank Miller swearing, your blog is always saying EWWW
like a little girl. What’s that all about?
Well, obviously, it’s because we’re terrorists who hate America.
I always regret trying to answer this, but the short version is– come on. Why is it that
we’re the weird ones for saying EWWW over some of this stuff? Defend it on
a story level. Show me it’s necessary. Then maybe you’ll have an argument.
This question always annoys me because of its implication that if we think something’s over
the top, then we’re somehow betraying the cause and opening the door for the next Wertham.
That’s a complete straw man. We’re not objecting to the content itself. We’re
objecting to its gratuitous nature. I could rattle off a laundry list of comics here in
the house with shockingly adult content, but that’s not the point. We shouldn’t have
to prove to you why we think gratuitous sex, violence and rampant misogyny are creepy. You should
be proving why it’s not gratuitous in the books you’re defending. Until
then, let’s just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Besides, I can’t be that big of a prude. I like Roadhouse. I can look the other
way on gratuitous sex and violence once in a while if it’s a fun project. Remember, a sense
of fun excuses a lot.
*
And that brings us full circle. That’s the reader mail.
See you next week.
Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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