ready to give up so i seek the old earth
created: I’ve seen a few posts over the past couple weeks about the role of criticism and negative reviews online. I dunno–I feel like the only thing that matters is the work. Criticism, reviews, all of that stuff is just toppings. Eat it or don’t, find pleasure or pain in it, but you shouldn’t really try to place rules on it or minimize it. You don’t like it, but somebody else does, and honestly, somebody really needs to be there to say that Grimm Fairy Tales Inferno looks and reads terribly (it does, I checked). Long story short, I hate reading posts that are about posts. And look what I just did! Onward:

–You should’ve read Zeb Wells’s run on New Mutants. It’s cool, though: you can pick up New Mutants, Vol. 1: Return of Legion for cheap. I’m not too fond of John Rauch’s color work on the series (everything seems sort of washed out/overbright, like Pete Pantazis over Ed Benes on JLA a couple years back), but the rest of it’s solid.

–There are five different ways to buy Marvel digital comics. There should be, at most, two. I think the strongest strategy, once they get it straightened out, will be Marvel DCU + Marvel Comics on Chrome. Not perfect, but a good step.

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who explained working hard may help you maintain
consumed: iTunes is doing this thing where it only plays several albums I’ve heard in a row, and then something I haven’t listened to in months. I dunno how to feel about that, but it was nice to hear that Johnson & Jonson again. Blu & Mainframe are ill. Here’s “Disco DYNAMITE”:

-That breakdown at 1:50 is the sort of thing I listen to rap for. In comics, it’s like if the CMY dropped out of the CMYK, the lettering went translucent, and the panel borders faded away. (Also the girl at 2:05.)

-An interesting thing about that album is that they did it under fake names for their fake names. Blu, Mainframe, and their guests took on a Johnson alias (Don, Magic, Jack). There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. They shout out their real fake names during the album, they shout out their fake fake names… it’s just an interesting gimmick. It’s meaningless, maybe, but the sort of thing I dig. I think it’d be interesting to take established personas and flip them for a new project. “I act like a dick, so hence the name Johnson.”

–“Hold On John” is nice, too. That boy Blu has range. He needs to drop an album yesterday. I’d put ten on it, first day. I’ll end up getting his Amnesia EP next week, too.

-Blu, Blur, what’s the difference I ask you?

-I sat down with the Catherine demo and was STUNNED to find that it isn’t even really an RPG. It’s a puzzle platformer/dating sim/texting game. It isn’t exactly like Intelligent Qube, which I loved, but it’s similar enough that I’m honestly thinking about importing a game for the first time since whatever that last Fire Pro Wrestling was on PS2. Essentially, you have to scale a maze. You can push and pull blocks left/right/forward/backward or create new blocks. You have to navigate to the top of the stage to escape whatever’s chasing you. I like it. I like it a lot. Importing is probably a bit much (Play-Asia is talking about 90 bucks shipped), so I’m just gonna have to deal until E3 and hopefully an announcement for a US release. There’s a ton of English text in the game, though, so fingers crossed, minna-san.

–Matt Seneca wrote about Grant Morrison and Jim Lee’s Wildcats. I don’t know if I agree with all the specifics of his post, but I do agree that it’s by far the most interesting book Morrison and Lee have done in the past ten years. I tried to wrap my head around it in ’09. I like seeing how we have the same or opposite opinions on certain things. We both had the same reaction to the psychedelic superhero sex.

-I wonder if that scene was supposed to be a Steranko thing, with the pulling in of various styles and influences to make comics that run counter to what you think they should be? Maybe so, maybe no. I’d kill to see Lee on a book where he can cut loose, though. I’ve got high hopes for Dark Knight: Boy Wonder with Frank Miller. Guaranteed to be hands down the most interesting Batman book all year, and probably the most entertaining.

-Speak of the devil, and you will see the weird way everyone draws his radar–Tim Callahan and Ryan Lindsay on Frank Miller’s Daredevil. Next week is Ann Nocenti. To say that I’m on pins and needles would be an understatement. Callahan is good at his job. The Aphrodite/Athena thing–I never picked up on that, and I’ve read all these comics back to front and back again.

-Big KRIT is ill, and he’s got a four song EP with live instruments and an R&B band out now. It costs four bucks. I bought it.

–Aw, sugar, you just gone and wrote the dumbest thing in your whole life.

-MTVGeek interviewed Gareb Shamus. Spurgeon suggested skipping it, and I agree. It’s full of garbage marketing speak and shamelessness. But first, read this excerpt:

“And when it comes to ex-employees, you’ve got to understand that they’re ex-employees: they’re people who have just lost their jobs. And it’s very unfortunate, but unfortunately you’ve got to take what they say with a grain of salt. You’ve got to understand where it’s coming from. It doesn’t diminish their contribution to what we’ve done, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t appreciate their hard work – but when you look at the landscape of comic books today, a lot of these people wouldn’t even be working in this business if it wasn’t for Wizard giving them their first start.

So, when you look at a lot of the people saying those things about us, if it wasn’t for us transplanting them from where they existed – from jobs that weren’t even in comic books, where they were in school and looking for their first opportunity – they might not even be in comics now. So in a sense, I’m really happy – we’ve been able to influence so many different outlets out there, and we gave a lot of people out there a chance to be involved in this industry.”

“Don’t listen to these people. We fired them, and they wouldn’t be anything without us, so how dare they say word one?” Scum.

–Jared Lewis shows off his thirty characters. See what procrastinating gets you? I’d been meaning to email him for weeks (seriously, since November) about this project to get some commentary-type interview going, but he went and did it himself before I could get off my lazy butt. Click through, check it out.

-Jared and Sean are talking Art Adams and Sean’s ’80s hair fetish over at Supervillain, too. Worth reading.

-Also worth reading: Mike Mignola talking about buildings.

–Sequential Tart catches up with Faith Erin Hicks. I like her work, but haven’t read enough of it. Something else I need to fix this year. And hey, look at that–Zombies Calling is four bucks and The War at Ellsmere is five on ComiXology. I’m down with those prices.

-I wanted Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku this weekend. A friend gave me the Criterion months ago and I finally made time. Watching subbed movies is tough for me–I’m used to being able to multitask and write while I watch movies and stuff, and you can’t do that when you have to read. I usually do it on the weekends or between projects. Anyway, trailer:

-It was probably very edgy for its time, but in nowadays, it’s actually kind of boring, up to and until the point the setting shifts to Hell. I mean, honestly. Anyway, I was talking to my friend while and after watching it, which I don’t usually do (death to liveblogs, enjoy things while they happen instead of trying to document them), and here’s a few lines from our conversation:

dub> “stand in a circle in front of this video of fire”
dub> japanese hell is awful
dub> i do like how ironic all the punishments are
dub> it’s like how the Spectre comic used to be
Esco> the best thing is that there is no message other than “Hell sucks, don’t go there”
dub> haha yeah
dub> “if you witness an accident… say something about it”
dub> “unless a dude who is clearly the devil kills your wife first”
dub> man is it just me or is this guy innocent of everything?
dub> “You are guilty of getting depressed when your fiancee died! TO HELL WITH YOU!”

-The thing about the Eight Hells is that apparently people just yell at you in between being dismembered and set on fire or chasing babies. Sometimes the yelling is just your name, and other times, it’s people shouting revelations about the past at you. And that’s the story of why there’s a surprise almost retroactive incest toward the end when a guy finds out one of his love interests is secretly his sister. Not even half-sister. Just straight up sister. His mom was like “I’m not sayin I’m number one–uh, I’m sorry, I LIED.”

–This Black History tumblr is probably my favorite website.

-I ventured back into the badlands of TCJ.com to read a two part Geoff Johns interview with Nathan Wilson. Part One and Part Two. He says a lot of things I thought were pretty interesting, whether in terms of how he approaches comics, the difference in approaches between him and Grant Morrison, or even competition in comics writing.

-Gonna karaoke this weekend. Looking forward to it.

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to learn to overcome the heartaches and pain
David: ha ha ha
Esther: For sure: Batgirl 18, Batman and Robin 20, Birds of Prey 9, Knight and Squire 5
Possible: The Brave and the Bold 4, Red Robin 20
Gavin: Batman And Robin 20, Justice League Generation Lost 19, Knight & Squire 5, Carnage 3, (maybe) Casanova Gula 2, Deadpool Team-Up 885, Heroes For Hire 3, Incredible Hulks 622, New Avengers 9,Power Man And Iron Fist 1, Punisher MAX 10, Secret Warriors 24, (maybe), Ultimate Comics Avengers vs New Ultimates 1, Ultimate Comics Captain America 2

Kyle Baker
Selected Works: Deadpool Max: Nutjob, Nat Turner, Special Forces, Modern Masters Volume 20: Kyle Baker (the Modern Masters volume is really good)

Kyle Baker is mean, man. He’s got a well-deserved rep for being the funniest guy in comics, and his only real competition is Sergio Aragones, I’d say. If you put Baker on a book, he’s going to make you laugh, guaranteed. But at the same time, some of my biggest laughs from his books have been in how he walks that fine line between unbelievable cruelty and amazing comedy.

Take Plastic Man. It was a back-to-basics approach to a goofy character that had been turned fairly serious. Baker took it back to the Jack Cole days, with lots of funny shapes, sight gags, and rapid-fire jokes. At the same time, he slipped in some pretty overt commentary on the state of the general style of DC Comics at the time, which was largely focused around emotional and physical trauma. So Baker took shots at the new Dr. Light, Identity Crisis, Plastic Man being a deadbeat dad, and everything else, while simultaneously having Plastic Man ensure that Abraham Lincoln dies, adopt a goth girl after he killed her vampire dad, work for the FBI, and team up with a fantastic foursome.

Special Forces is a straight up war/action comic, a Bush-era fantasy that’s full of glory, boobs, and great action scenes. The punchline comes when you get to the end of the book and realize that the cast of felons, autistics, and mercenaries are ripped straight from the headlines. That awesome war comic you just finished? That’s social commentary, sucker.

Deadpool MAX with David Lapham is a new level of comedic cruelty. Lapham knows how to inflict emotional trauma (whattup Stray Bullets) and Baker knows how to make it funny. In the end, Baker and Lapham justify Deadpool’s existence by way of a story where he kills Nazi Klan members with guns, swords, and Krav Maga while dressed like a Hasidic Jew.

Baker keeps getting meaner and meaner, and his books just keep getting funnier. I can’t wait to see his next self-published work.

I wrote a bit about Cat Shit One for AOL. You can read that here before watching Cat Shit One in full rightchea:

Or you can buy the DVD or Blu-ray. 30 bucks feels like a lot for 22 minutes, though. I’m torn. I liked it, but I dunno if I thirty dollars liked it.

I liked Deb’s look at the series a lot, too. Great job breaking down the context.

-We saw Green Hornet!
-You’ll never guess what we thought.
-This is late because I forgot to put it up yesterday.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Keith Knight
Selected Works: The Complete K Chronicles, The Knight Life: “Chivalry Ain’t Dead”

Keith Knight is funny, but not funny like a lot of funny people are. Some people specialize in certain types of humor. They’re good at gag humor, or building a story up until you’re begging for a punchline, wordplay, or whatever whatever.

Knight is good at several different types of funny. He can roll out dumb jokes one after the other, embarrassing personal anecdotes, storyline-based gags, and ripped from the headlines, all in one strip and with the same cast. It doesn’t ever feel out of place or jarring. My favorite of his various styles of humor is where he takes a real life situation, breaks it down clearly, and then throws a mean punchline onto the end of it.

Knight’s got two strips that you can read for free online. The K Chronicles is more politically oriented, while The Knight Life is more of a real life diary. K Chronicles is where the knives come out. He takes on politicians, real life, and anything and everything that could be considered pop culture. He’ll rip on Obama, music, or whatever’s made the headlines. It’s essentially a political cartoon in terms of execution, with a new target every week.

There’s a little personal spillover, generally of the joyous variety, but The Knight Life is where Knight takes on real life, rather than public life. Details from his life form the backbone of his strip, especially his relationship with his wife. It reminds me of Kochalka’s American Elf, in that both of them are more than willing to 1) make themselves look dumb, 2) sometimes share with surprising honesty, and 3) are punishingly funny.

I catch up on Knight’s strips about once a month. He’s super prolific and can work with serialized strips and one-shots alike, so catching up is a always nice way to kill an hour or so. Put that in your RSS and smoke it.

Trevor Von Eeden
Selected Works: Blood Syndicate 1, The Original Johnson Volume 1, The Original Johnson Volume 2

I came to Trevor Von Eeden very late. He’d done Thriller the year that I was born, and Power Man & Iron Fist before that. On top of that, the majority of his work was done at DC Comics, a company I generally didn’t read as a kid. It was a mix of not knowing anyone past Superman and Batman and Marvel having all of the hot artists of the time. I almost definitely saw his work on the first issue of Blood Syndicate, but I was definitely too young to get the significance.

As it turns out, Von Eeden is a dude who was worth paying attention to. He has an interesting approach to panel layouts in comics. Each panel is a specific moment in time, and how you move from panel helps dictate the pace and mood of a comic. Watchmen was a hard nine panel grid, with a few exceptions, throughout, and everything in it feels inevitable. Like, bam-bam-bam–you can’t escape its pace. It moves along at the same speed. Layouts are vitally important, and if you get them wrong, you can wreck a comic.

In Thriller in particular, his work with Robert Loren Fleming, Von Eeden takes that most basic part of the comics page and starts playing with time travel. There are pages that depict one very short moment in time, broken up across several panels. Others have panels that don’t just read left to right. They bounce back and forth across the page, creating a zigzag of storytelling. Other pages have one moment per panel, and then a huge splash of several moments.

It’s an interesting technique to utilize, and while it isn’t necessarily uncommon, seeing it done as well as it is in Thriller is nice. What’s nicer would be a digital comics release, of course.

from george herriman’s krazy & ignatz 1916-1918: “love in a kestle or love in a hut”.
krazy and herriman are two kool kets i wish i’d discovered earlier. thanks to jacq @ fantagraphics for the preview.

Billy Graham
Selected Works: Essential Luke Cage/Power Man Vol. 1, Marvel Masterworks: Black Panther

Billy Graham is an art monster. He helped define Luke Cage for the first sixteen issues of Hero for Hire and he worked on what is still the best Black Panther story of all time: Don McGregor’s Panther’s Rage. Prior to that, he worked at Warren and banged out some perfectly solid horror comics work.

This guy draws great comics, with a Gene Colan’s figurework meets Jack Kirby’s explosive action sort of thing going on. He has these wonderfully proportioned and fairly realistic figures doing insane Kirby judo throws and flips. Characters have genuine facial expressions, often exaggerated for effect but still reasonable, and idealized bodies. Graham can even draw people of different races without descending into caricature, a gift that some modern artists can’t even match.

More than that, though, is that Graham’s art is raw. There’s this looseness or roughness that make his pages really interesting. They aren’t unfinished or lacking in detail, but the detail they do have is rendered in a way I don’t see too often. His work is chunky and scratchy, and I always feel like if you could wipe away the color, you’d see pencils that were worthy of being shot straight from the board.

Graham’s Kirby-influenced realism was vital for both Cage and Panther at the time, I’d say. The two books depicted a Marvel universe that varied from being even more street level than Amazing Spider-Man to being about half as cosmic as Fantastic Four. Graham’s art split the difference. Cage and Panther were both grounded, but not so grounded that they couldn’t expand into more comic book-y situations. If you look at something like Daredevil, which has been banging the Early ’80s Frank Miller Drum for entirely too long now, you see a series that has been defined and limited to one style. Graham was just street level and cosmic enough to make everything work.

two men stand, one’s gotta go
created: In the truck with the windows down–why is he playing Beanie Sigel?

–Black History Month piece. Long story short: Black History matters. Knocking it out in 350 words or less this month.

–Cat Shit One looks great. Weird that they didn’t call it Apocalypse Meow, but I figure that name is both basically unknown and out of date, since CSO isn’t in Vietnam.

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one falls down to the ground
consumed: I broke a tooth! Not even a cool chip on the front teeth that gives me roguish charm, just a straight up broken tooth that no one will see until it gets infected and kills me in my sleep. Did y’all know there are dentists that are closed Fridays? Anyway, in and out this week, cause I got so much trouble on my mind. Next week will be back to biz as usual.

–The Realist is genuinely amazing.

–Jeff Parker and Erika Moen’s Bucko is off to a good start.

–Kyle Baker interview

–Jog talking Ditko is great. Ditko’s a guy I love for Amazing Spider-Man more than anything else. I need to branch out into his other work sometime soon.

–This Archaia book Cyclops, by Matz & Luc Jacamon, caught my eye. Anyone read it? Or The Killer? They sound ill, but you know, floppies these days. I’d rather cop trades or digitally, but that brings an entirely different set of problems (space, mainly).

–Money Making Jam Boys mixtape! Black Thought, Dice Raw, Truck North, Sugar Tongue Slim, and PORN? I’m there.

-For everyone interested in Catherine, and I hope that’s everyone here, the demo is live on the Japanese PSN on PS3. This is a good tutorial to get your free account made. I downloaded it on Sunday (I think?), but haven’t found time to play it yet, ugh. This weekend fa sho.

–Persona 3 Portable is on sale on PSN right now. Twenny bucks. Looks like P3P slipped out of stock (out of print?) on Amazon, too, so get on that if you haven’t.

-Shaky Kane and David Hine’s Bulletproof Coffin is finally complete on Comixology. Two bucks each? I think? Click.

-I like this post about Egypt.

-I really enjoyed this look at Memphis Bleek’s career. At the same time, I dunno if I’m gonna download the mixtape.

–This bit about the future of bandes dessinées in the US was neat. My only request for the future of BD over here is “more please.”

–Jack Davis Flickr motherlode.

-I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Tactics and NBA 2k11 exclusively. Gotta get back to P3P in a couple weeks and see about writing a little bit.

-When Sean Witzke talks about movies, you just need to sit and listen.

-I’ve been bumping Yelawolf’s Trunk Muzik 0-60 all morning. It’s good. I wish the “I Wish” remix was on it, but hey, it’s still ill. And I know I talked about that joint a couple weeks ago, but it sticks with me.

-“Au contraire mon frere one pure pain giver/ Don’t ingest this, it might cause corrosion of the liver”

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one walks down to the road
David: Rap music and britpop i guess
Esther: Whatever comics people read when they go on vacation!
Gavin: Azrael 17, Secret Six 30, Time Masters Vanishing Point 6, Invincible 77, Irredeemable 22, Daken Dark Wolverine 5, Deadpool & Cable 26, Hulk 29, Ozma Of Oz 4, She-Hulks 4, Ultimate Comics Thor 4

Matt Baker
Selected Works: It Rhymes With Lust, Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour (forthcoming)

Matt Baker’s another creator whose name I’d heard in passing but never realized was black until a couple years ago. C’est la guerre, right?

Baker’s a master of good girl art. There’s the obvious, of course–pretty girls in comics are great as a general rule. But on top of that is something a little less obvious. Drawing pretty girls isn’t as simple as heaving bosoms, full lips, big butts, and pokey nipples. You can’t just draw smiles and long legs. You need to be able to draw grins and gams. Skintight clothes are all well and good if you’re lazy, but good artists will throw in fantastic looking dresses, interesting heels, great hats, fabulous hair, and a good sense of humor. What’s more–no two women will wear the same outfit. Proper good girl art requires a certain level of skill that simple T&A-centric art doesn’t.

Baker had all of it down pat. His Phantom Lady work is top notch, as goofy as it is sexy and heinously violent. There’s another strip of his that I like called Canteen Kate. Kate worked with a bunch of Marines, and her stories are somewhere between Milton Caniff’s Male Call and I Love Lucy. It’s all slapstick and goofy pratfalls, but it’s enjoyable.

Baker knew what he was doing, and he excelled at it. The thing is, good girl art is good for comics, period. It shows an attention to detail that needs to be present to make good comics art. Look at how John Romita turned Amazing Spider-Man into the most exciting romance comic ever, due at least in part to some good girl stylings. You can’t hack this stuff out or else people will get bored.

I could look at Matt Baker’s work all day long.