The DCU blog released a preview of Batgirl #1.  Don’t bother checking.  They don’t say who she is.

Although there are strong hints, and as far as I can tell no comics company has ever played the game slyly enough to counteract people’s expectations with misplaced hints, the identity of the new Batgirl has not been announced.

Back at Wonder-Con I was bubbling with anticipation.  Now I’m just so tired.  Just.  So.  Tired.  I know that anything to do with comics means a long waiting period, but at some point the question is drawn out long after the answer becomes a source of irritation instead of curiosity.

I know all comics readers, all media consumers in general, have had experiences where the storyline, the movie, the build-up, the series, the idea, or the wait is drawn out so long that the pay-off no longer seems worth it no matter what it is.

So spill, oh faithful gripers.  At least it will take my mind off of things.

A friend of mine, who used to enjoy the Batman: The Animated Series back when it aired, recently told me that her regard for Batman was finally snuffed out.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a lead into griping about how Batman is being portrayed these days.  I’ve done that enough. Read the rest of this entry �

This one’s easy. We talk about the ways comics, both superhero and otherwise, are slipping into the mainstream and then talk a bit about Wednesday Comics’s not-quite-halfway point. Quick and easy, right? As usual, 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental is our music.

Longer explanations next week, because I’m wiped. Grab our podcast-specific RSS feed or subscribe on iTunes. Get the full-blown RSS feed here, or join the Facebook group.

I have no memory of what made me buy my first comic book, and I don’t know what made me buy the one after that.  What I do know, is that I never would have gotten into comics at all, let alone bought half the comics I own, if it weren’t for fan culture on the internet.

You want to know who the current Robin is?  There’s a site for that.

You want to know what happened in issue 82 of Legends of the Dark Knight?  There is a site for that.

You want to talk about the psychological problems of Batman, or the physics of Superman, or how cute Nightwing’s butt looks, or the exact continuity of the Crises?  There’s a site for that, and that, and that, and god help you, but that, too.

There are also scans, and stories written by fans, and fan art, and a thousand arguments to get involved with.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about how comics, particularly superhero comics, are dying a slow painful death.  I have no idea whether they are or not, but what I do know is that you’re unlikely to find people down the street from you who are into comics.  The internet serves as both a social place in and of itself, and a way to meet other people who have an interest in the same things you do.

It also serves as a way to gather information.  How many people here would be into comics if they couldn’t get online?  How many became more involved when online societies began forming?  What ‘net stuff do you like?

I first met Nicholas Doan, the writer of Pray for Death, from Zuda, DC’s webcomic division at Wonder-Con.  When I ran into him in San Diego, with the comic’s artist Daniele Serra, they very kindly agreed to tell me about how their journey to publication.

Detective Abigail Jenkins is the inverse of the typical pop-culture cop; the one who is labelled a ‘loose canon’ by the press while the guys at the station indignantly talk about how he ‘gets things done’.  She’s lauded by the press after an early success, but condemned by her peers.  When she starts to investigate a serial killer with a religion fascination who thrills at the thought of getting caught, it seems everyone around her is setting her up to fail.

I ask Doan what inspired him.

“I think serial killers are society’s most complex, interesting and disturbed monsters,” he says.  The idea flowed from there.

How did he come to work with Serra?

At first, Doan was in contact with Septagon Studios about Pray for Death.  They put him in touch with Serra.

“I thank them every day for introducing us,” Doan tells me.  “I came up with the concept and he made it look pretty.”

‘Pretty’ isn’t the word I would use, either for the concept or the art.  The people in this comic aren’t glamourous.  They have weathered faces and preoccupied expressions.  The background is hazy.  The pages themselves look muddy and grim, with dark splatters of pigment splashed over them in places.  This style amplifies the noir tone of the book, as well as our sense of forboding as we look through it.  There is a feeling that the killer could very well jump from the shadowy panels.  And there’s the blood.

“The blood,” Doan says, “is perfectly used.”

He tells me that Serra used coffee to get the right pigment and texture.  When I ask Serra where he go the idea, he shrugs and says, “My breakfast.”

Septagon asked them for five pages and two covers, which they supplied.  Then they waited, for days, weeks, and finally months.  Two months in total, which as any creator can tell you, is grueling.

Finally, they went to Zuda.  I ask how their experience was there.

“They took care of us.  It was a good opportunity to be placed in a big company.”

And so, outside of Pray for Death, at least, there is a happy ending.  Inside?

Check it out.

I’m generally of the opinion that the world would be much better if I ran it.  (What?  Like you’re not?)  This principle applies to panels, and all of the things said by all of the people on them.

It applied especially to the Sunday Conversation With Dan Didio panel at Comic-Con.  I generally like these panels very much because they leave aside the usual slideshow of covers that we will be seeing in eight months to two years and the painfully awkward questions.  Instead, they’re a bunch of people talking about comics.  Dan Didio generally does a great job of moderating the responses from the audience, and a panel of comics professionals cuts in with funny commentary.  It’s a really enjoyable panel.

One of the questions this year was, “What was a big ‘wow’ moment you’ve read in comics?”  That was where the panel spiralled down from something fun into the realms of what I can only describe as extreme unacceptability.  Every single reply was “When ____ got killed.”  Every one.

People!  Stop encouraging them!  We just barely got them to stop playing darts with the members of Young Justice!  Maybe it’s a question of when you started reading comics, but to me, standard character death that comes with every single big event is the most predictable and un-‘wow’ thing in the world.  You can practically set your watch by it.  How were any of those people shocked?

But what’s more, one of the other questions was, “What do you like to read in comics?”  My answer?  Fun.  A lot of it.  I want to have a blast when I’m reading.  I want the characters to have a blast.  I want the comic I’m reading to be so much fun that if you gave the reader the option of falling through the paper and joining the characters, they would do it in a heartbeat.

I don’t know if the panel was Bizarro World or if I’m truly that alone in preferring comics in which a hero’s death isn’t the most memorable event.  Aren’t there so many better things to remember?  And if there aren’t, shouldn’t there be?

Adam Warren was kind of enough to consent to an email interview, so of course I immediately bombarded him with way too many questions. As a result, we’ve got a long, and wide-ranging, interview that I think is pretty interesting. We cover a lot of ground, and Warren does it with good humor. And I do mean a lot of ground– this thing weighs in at over 5800 words. I went through and added in links for context or reference, in case you’re curious about a few of the topics that come up.

Thanks to Ken Kneisel for supplying me with the majority of Warren’s run on Dirty Pair, Jacq Cohen at Dark Horse for turning an offhanded Facebook comment into a fun interview, and finally, Adam Warren for answering a million questions.

After you finish reading, you should buy some Empowered (One, Two, Three, Four, Five), Dirty Pair, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, and Livewires. While you’re waiting for those to arrive, visit his DeviantArt to look at some art.

(and yes, adam warren week is just three days long. shut your face.)

At the time that I’m writing this, Empowered has been out for a couple of weeks. What’s your workday like now that it’s on shelves? Do you take a vacation between books or get right into working on the next volume? What do you do to relax?

Right now, I’m working on an Empowered one-shot (in conventional comics format, for once!) and frantically trying to wrap up a few other miscellaneous art jobs before I head off to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (ouch). This is more or less par for the course, as I usually try to work up other pitches or grind away at brief stints of better-paying work before I go back to full-time work on the next Empowered volume; in a way, though, this almost is a vacation, compared to the crazily long hours I often have to work as a volume’s deadline looms ever nearer.

As for relaxing, well, once the workday’s over, I might read some books, watch a DVD (starting over with The Wire season 1, at present), or crack a Sam Adams or two and catch some Craig Ferguson in the wee hours… (Though the latter’s not an option, of late. Since the spectacular onset of the digital TV revolution, my remote neck of the woods went from receiving about eight different TV stations’ signals to receiving a grand total of none whatsoever; yay, DTV! So, no Craig Ferguson for me, nowadays.) Ah, the manifold joys of the rural-dwelling freelancer’s off-work lifestyle…

How fast are you, art-wise? Do you do any digital work, or are you strictly lo-tech? What do you listen to while you draw?

I certainly wouldn’t claim that I’m an especially speedy artist in general… but, when working in the straight-to-pencil format used for Empowered, I can usually turn around at least two pages per full workday, which isn’t too shabby a production rate.

That’s the whole point of the format, really: to move on to the finished page as quickly as possible, leaving out all the intervening stages that used to slow me down as an artist. As in, my technique used to progress from scrawled roughs to very tight but undersized layouts to even more tightly penciled, full-size pages to final inks that were even tighter still; on Empowered, I jump from the thumbnail/rough stage straight to final, penciled pages (at the wee 8.5” X 11” size, BTW), a considerably more streamlined process.

While the technique I use on Empowered is indeed extremely “lo-tech”—nothing but graphite on letter-size copy paper, without resorting to such high-tech, cutting-edge, space-age innovations such as bristol board or inks or a separate lettering stage—I  can’t say that it’s strictly lo-tech, as the pages still wind up getting scanned into Photoshop, then tweaked and cleaned up (and lettering-corrected, as necessary) at Dark Horse. Contradictorily enough, only modern scanning and printing technologies make Empowered’s primitive process viable in the first place…

Nowadays, I listen to a helluva lot of talk radio when I’m working, mostly of the sports-related variety (I am a New England native, so Pats/ Sox/ Celts interest comes naturally to me), occasionally mixing in some books on CD for variety… I do, however, switch over to music from the ol’ iPod when working on scripts, due to the sad fact that talk radio’s babble frequently derails my train of dialog-related thought. (Unless I actually want to mix references to KG and Jonathan Papelbon and Randy Moss into my scripting, which is rarely the case.)   

While doing research for this interview, I realized that you don’t sell your original art. I don’t think that you travel to many cons, either, so genuine Adam Warren Sketches(TM) are pretty rare. Do you prefer to keep your art within the confines of published books, rather than sketches and such?

It’s not that I’m particularly opposed to selling my artwork; it’s just that I’ve never clawed out enough free time to set up some means of actually selling the stuff. (Plus, I am a tad paranoid that some Empowered material might need to be rescanned at some point; such are the problems inherent to working in the ever-tricky medium of grayscale.)

I should say that, back when I used to attend considerably more conventions than I do now (the invites dried up a long time ago, for better or for worse), I did crank out a goodly number of commissioned sketches every year… Empowered is descended from the last major clump of such commissions (mainly of the “damsel-in-distress” variety) I took on, after all. Now, though, I no longer have the time to deal with many (or any) more such requests along those lines.

Side note: Come to think of it, my attendance at San Diego this year will mark my first convention appearance during the entire time that Empowered has been coming out… Alert the media! Well, perhaps not.

In general, I suppose that I do prefer to keep my artwork within the confines of a published book, or at least within the confines of a story… Drawing as such doesn’t interest me all that much, save for as a means of conveying a narrative. I’ve never filled a sketchbook, I don’t draw people in the subway (er, that is, assuming I moved to a location that had a subway), I don’t hang around sketching with fellow artists after conventions (though the first part of the social “Drink & Draw” experience does appeal); in short, I don’t do the things that a real artist, someone who’s Crazy In Love With Drawing, should do. Luckily, this isn’t a major, psyche-twisting source of angst for me, as I pretty much see myself as a writer who happens to be able to draw.
Read the rest of this entry �

I wrote, a few posts ago, about selective continuity, the practice of admitting some parts of continuity into your vision of a character and setting other parts aside, and the way that that leads to wildly different visions of the same character.

At the end, though, I mentioned that often I will dismiss a writer’s version of a character, particularly if it is a character I like and want to keep seeing in a certain light, while being fine with that writer mucking up another character’s reputation.

I’ve seen this happen a lot in comics, and there seems to be a consistent excuse for it; that the writer him or herself is biased toward one character, or one type of character.

“Don’t read him, he always writes women as bimbos.”

“She hates that character and is using the comic to make them look bad.”

“He’s given an interview where he talks about how that’s his favorite character from when he was a kid.”

What better way to drown out continuity than with a resounding cry of “NO FAIR!”  There are, however, a few problems with it. 

The first is the way it tends to exaggerate creator’s preferences.  A casual mention of a character that a writer or editor liked or disliked as a child can lead to endlessly recurring denunciation by fans, who assume that any plot point is either meant to artificially build up or knock down that character.  I’m not a huge fan of Wonder Girl, but if I ever write Wonder Girl in comics, I don’t think I’d take a hit out on her just because of my lack of appreciation.  (And I’ve mentioned several times on this site that I think Batman is a jerk, a prick, and arrogant idiot, and a torturer.  I hate to see what kind of backlash that will bring about when I write Batman comics.  ((And I will.  I swear it.)))

The second problem with taking a writer out by questioning their intentions is that it often turns into a self-selecting point of view.  The few times when they did not adhere to their supposed pattern?  Flukes.  Fear of being mocked.  Or something prevented by the constraints of the story.  It’s never that their styles are more varied than critics will admit.

Finally, this view prevents readers from even considering a new take on their character.  You cannot imagine how much it pains me to write that last sentence, but it is true.  Characters often need to change or they stagnate, and seeing your character built up over time is a fun thing.

That being said, I do enjoy torpedo-ing a piece of bad, or obviously biased, writing from time to time.  Writers as well as characters can stagnate, and writers as well as characters can have bad habits.  (Of course I wouldn’t know about either.)  And fans are free, and often eager, to point it out.  Plus there is a air of good, old-fashioned village gossip to that kind of talk.  As long as it doesn’t escalate to torches and pitchforks, it can be a lot of fun.

It’s time to take another trip to the Graphic Audio well, this time for the audio book based on the novelization of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I’ve dealt with the Graphic Audios for Infinite Crisis and 52 on this site, which were both adapted by Greg Cox. I don’t think I’ve ever shown that guy the respect he deserves, since he’s done a rather good job with what he’s been given. He’s able to translate from art to text very well, while making the right decisions on what to cut for space reasons. I notice this mainly because he didn’t write the CoIE adaptation.

Rather, it was Marv Wolfman, the man who wrote the original comic series over twenty years ago. My feelings on Crisis is that it was average. It has its moments and the art is very nice, but it’s very boring most of the time and centers around some mostly mediocre characters. Still, it’s one of the first major epics of comic book storytelling and an important part of comic history.

You might think that having Wolfman adapt his own comic could only be a good thing. Who knows more about what was going on in Crisis than the man who wrote it? Sadly, this isn’t the case. The novelization of Crisis comes off like it’s being retold by a guy who read it once twenty years ago, but keeps getting it confused with how much he loves Barry Allen.

If you’ve read the original comic, you might be wondering what I mean by that. The Flash only got captured, died blowing up that machine and then inspired Wally West to take up the mantle. As important as the story is to him, he’s only a supporting character at best (which could also be said for Supergirl’s role).

Read the rest of this entry �

Batman doesn’t care about sex.

I mean, sure, he’ll have sex sometimes. He’s had a series of short-lived relationships, the most popular of which involve an easy escape hatch. Benefit of dating criminals, right? It’s pretty clear to me that he doesn’t care about sex. He’s got a mission, he’s been trained, and guess what! Sex is entirely beside the point. He’ll do it when he has to, but you won’t see Bruce at a bar talking to Bonita Applebum.

Parker is the star of more than a few of Richard Stark’s novels. He’s a no-nonsense thief and strong-arm, very expert in planning and even better at putting a stop to any funny business. If you cross Parker, he’ll lean you before you even get a chance to think about what you just did. He enjoy sex, but only at specific times. If he’s on the job, or planning a job, he’s got no drive at all. After, though, he can spend several days horizontal. His drive slowly fades away after that, until he’s practically a monk in the run-up to the next job.

Ogami Itto? Don’t even. I’m six volumes in, and I don’t think he’s had sex for pleasure once. He’s done it to save someone’s life, and to grease some wheels, but never because he chatted someone up. It’s entirely possible that he’s just respecting his dead wife’s memory, but it’s much more likely that it’s because he’s walking the path of the assassin and has no time for physical pleasure.

All three of these guys are focused, motivated, driven, and paragons of self control. They all approach sex on their own terms, blatantly ignore it when they feel like it, but are still considered virile. It’s definitely fair to say that they are all generally portrayed as Real Men, even across cultural barriers. Ogami is a hop from Parker, who is in turn a skip from Batman, who is himself a jump from Ogami. They have very similar characterizations, despite having some fairly irreconcilable differences between them. Ogami murders for a living, Parker isn’t opposed to slapping a woman around if it’ll help a heist, and Batman is a manchild who sates his desire for justice by beating up criminals.

Together, I think that these three say something pretty interesting about what it means to be a man. They all fit the basic stereotype of a Real Man. They’re physically attractive, be it in a pretty boy sort of way or a more rugged manner. They’re physically capable, able to demolish most men with a single move, be it a punch, gunshot, or swing of a sword. They’re intelligent enough to create complicated plans that always come off perfectly, human error aside. They’re witty enough to be able to think on their feet when a situation goes south and to come out on top. They aren’t afraid to use violence when the time comes, either. That sounds like a Real Man, doesn’t it?

The sex thing is what makes it interesting. Virility is tied up in violence and physical strength, and all three of these guys have it in spades. Ogami kills dudes by the baker’s dozen, Parker is a machine, and Batman is a highly trained non-lethal ninja. When they do have sex, it’s never shown as “making love.” It’s something fast, primal, rough, and vaguely taboo. There’s a thrill to it, particularly when it comes to Batman and Parker. Parker is only interested after he re-establishes his manhood by making a lot of money and breaking a few heads. Batman’s biggest flame is Catwoman, the object of many a late-night chase and cowled makeout session. To borrow a line, they keep the masks on because it’s better that way. Ogami himself only indulges, or lowers, himself in sex when it fits into his quest. The first time he has sex in volume 1, it’s to show exactly how little he cares for the samurai customs of the day. In fact, he proves his manhood by rejecting the traditional notion of it.

I think it comes down to control. Men are supposed to be in control of themselves, their emotions, and the situation at all times. What better way to show this control than to refuse sex, one of the most primal needs of human beings? Ogami treats most women he encounters, and definitely the prostitutes, with something approaching contempt. They, like anyone else, are beneath his notice. It seems like every Parker novel has him refusing the advances of an appropriately attractive and willing woman until he decides he wants to bother with her. Batman’s celibacy is practically a superpower, considering that a couple of his villains are outright seductresses and the rest are openly sexy/sexual.

This occurred to me after finishing one of Stark’s Parker novels, one in which Stark has Parker question his sexual habits. It got me thinking, and I soon realized that Ogami Itto was similar in execution, if not in tone. It all really clicked into place once Batman came into the picture, and I realized that it was more of a trend than I’d expected.