-I’m slowly getting into Michael DeForge’s work. It’s weird and a little out of my wheelhouse of cusswords and violence comix, but I like how creepy and weird and John K his style gets sometimes. He’s put Kid Mafia #1 online for free, asking only that if you read and enjoy it, you kick him fifty cents via Paypal. I read it, I liked it, and I paypaled him fifty cents in Canadian dollars. If you like it, you should do the same.

I like this idea, and I hope more cats who produce minicomics start doing this. I’m not much for paper books and totally fine with making it rain via Paypal. Hopefully you are, too!

–I did a podcast with Chris Eckert from Funnybook Babylon about our comic book origins. I really like this photoset he made for the chat, which really says it all:

Is it any wonder my taste in comics turned out like it did? That Batman cover is crazy, though. I also spill the beans on the time I had a nightmare about Terry Kavanaugh, which is one of the stupidest things that has ever happened to me. We talk a lot about Image comics, too. I guess I hadn’t realized how fundamental their stuff was for/to me until this chat, so it was nice to look back and sort of reconcile what I like now with what I liked then.

-Michael Peterson and Kevin Czapiewski have launched Project Ballad, a webcomic about a girl named Kendra Price, RPGs, and maybe… video games?? Start reading it here. It’ll update Monday-Wednesday-Friday from here on out. You should read it. I am.

-I watched Lena Dunham’s Girls, but I don’t really have a thinkpiece in me like the rest of the internet. I hated it, basically, because the experiences and people I watched on TV were so completely and utterly alien to my experiences. Like, magic, kung fu? I can buy that. Asking my mother for eleven hundred bucks a month to pay my rent while I douchebag around town? My mom would die laughing and then haunt me for the rest of my life, telling me to get a job in between ghostly guffaws. So yeah: not for me.

-I watched Frederic Jardin’s Sleepless Night the other night. I liked it a lot. It’s this tight little crime thriller about a cop who robs the wrong guy and gets his son kidnapped. Most of it takes place in one building, there are several factions, and I love love loved that the violence was so awkward and off-putting. Tomer Sisley as Vincent is not playing Jason Statham as Jason Statham, as the fight scene in the kitchen proves. He’s just a cop, rather than a supercop. Also there are father/son issues, and I’m a sucker for those, not to mention gunfights and action.

A lot of Sleepless Night takes place in a nightclub, but it never dragged the movie down like every other nightclub scene does for me.

Sleepless Night reminded me about Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank because… well, they’re both in the same genre, French, and pretty good. Point Blank shakes out a little differently. Samuel is a regular dude, a nurse, put into a tough situation. He sucks a a lot of things, but the movie livens things up by teaming him up with a hardened criminal. That doesn’t mean that you won’t see cross on double cross on triple cross over the course of the movie, though. Gilles Lellouche is perfect as the desperate regular dude, and Roschdy Zem gets a good turn as a gangster. There’s a scene in an apartment that was tremendous, really great writing, action, and film-making.

-My man Sean Witzke put me onto Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, which is a… some type of band. Rock? Noise? Whatever. I really like “Hoshi Neko,” but the entire album is pretty good.

I don’t really have the frame of reference to describe it in proper terms, I guess, so I’m going to copy & paste from their blog:

YT//ST was founded in late 2007 by performance artists alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood, born from the ashes of the late Lesbian Fight Club. Armed with mixed-race identities, mad illustration skills and a whole pile of home-brew junk electronics, alaska and Ruby wrote and performed the first mini ‘Noh-Wave’ Opera, ‘YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN I’ in April 2008. YT//ST continued to perform short homebrewed operas, eventually forming a network of Asian and Indigenous artists through collaboration and formed the current YT//ST collective.

They have this weird multi-disciplinary sound, sort of dissonant but appealing at the same time. The vocals sound like they’re coming in from a distance, or through a filter, and instruments sound like they fade in and out of the mix as needed. I dunno, I could keep putting words that don’t quite fit on it or you can listen to “Hoshi Neko” and “Reverse Crystal//Murder of a Spider” and hear exactly what I mean. I bought the album and it was more than worth my time.

–This guy Boulet is so good. I love this strip about childhood dreams, too.

-Philip Bond is still drawing spacegirls.

-Faith Erin Hicks is great. I think she’s super interesting as a person, going by her essays on making a living in comics & animation and whatnot, and of course she’s scary talented. She’s got a Tumblr now, which includes this great picture of Liz Sherman from BPRD:

I really really like this. Liz’s bored expression, which extends to the lazily arcing cigarette smoke, is pitch-perfect. Even the lazy posture, starting from her bent left leg on up. But, and maybe this is weird, my favorite part is Hicks’s signature. “feh.” is the best signature since Walt Simonson’s dinosaur. Someone should do one of those knock-down, drag-out, ultra-long, “here are all of my opinions on every subject ever” interviews with Hicks. I bet it’d be a great read.

–Powerhouse blogger Kate Dacey is curating a Manga Movable Feast on Viz Signature, which may well be the best comics imprint since the glory days of Wildstorm. The MMF is a collection of reviews, criticism, and just content in general, all on the subject of Viz Sig’s fantastic catalog. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to contribute this time (my motivation for everything these days is on approximately a negative thousand million, but it’ll pass. I’ve been working on this simple post since Wednesday, ha ha), but I did pick Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond Vizbig 9 and Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka as part of my best of 2010, and I still like this look at Inoue’s writing. I’m down for another Vagabond reread, actually. Maybe that’ll be this summer’s big series of posts? Inouefest, 2012. In-No-Way-Fest 2012. Anyway! Go, read! Kate’s list of 7 essential books is pretty good.

-I’m probably going to pre-order the super deluxe funcrusher plus monster package of El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure (that title!!!!!) and Killer Mike’s RAP Music. I love those guys, and dropping 85 bones on their work doesn’t seem like a huge extravagance. I’ll have to wait to see how next payday shakes out, though. I definitely want the vinyl of both. I just have to make sure the math makes sense. It may be smarter to just order Cancer 4 Cure and R.A.P. Music on vinyl separately, though. I don’t necessarily need the instrumentals or poster.

-Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos have a kickstarter going for their book Fairy Quest. Here’s a video:

And a widget:

I like these guys, especially when they work together. I’m going to kick some cash their way come payday, too.

-Here’s a couple STS videos I liked. I like how regular the video for “Good Intentions” is. It’s just a bunch of guys hanging out and doing things. It fits the theme of STS’s Goldrush, too, which is laid back flips of established songs. And STS is a spitter, too. Always a treat to hear a new verse.

-Tucker’s Comics of the Weak is still the best post every week. He’s got Jog and Abhay backing him up this week, plus Nate Bulmer, so maybe you should get down or lay down. Also, I vote you don’t get to make the Holocaust into a pithy comeback in your stupid fight comics. Been there, done that.

-Next week: I’ve got my uzi back, you dudes is wack, face it, the Wu is back (hopefully, but if the Celtics beat the Hawks on Sunday, I may spiral back into the Pit of Depression)

Last time on We Care a Lot, I talked about Daniel Way’s Venom on-going. Hitting the halfway point, I decided to stop and give myself a break to recuperate. It’s good to know that while that series was going on, Venom started to appear elsewhere. And why wouldn’t he? The reason he was turned into a full-blown bad guy again was so he could go back to being Spider-Man’s threat of the day.

Venom would make his return to Spider-Man’s world in Spectacular Spider-Man #1 for a five-issue story called The Hunger. This isn’t to be confused with the super-awesome four-issue story from years earlier called Venom: The Hunger, but it usually is. It’s kind of funny how although it’s obvious Paul Jenkins probably didn’t read that Len Kaminski story, he more or less wrote the same story, only with Spider-Man and without the happy ending.

As Paul Jenkins writes the story, we get Humberto Ramos on art. This is rather interesting, considering Francisco Herrera is doing the art on Venom at the same time. A little research shows that Ramos mentored Herrera and that really shouldn’t come to a surprise of anyone. Case in point:

Which came out a month apart.

Though there are parts that annoyed me, The Hunger isn’t so bad. If anything, it’s easily the most important Venom story in the past 15 years, so you have to give them that. Really. While it introduces some ideas that don’t go anywhere, it still gets the ball rolling and leads us to where we are today.

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Comics are a bastard medium.

It isn’t fine art. Even the commercial art doesn’t quite stick– it’s for sale, yeah, but it’s still somewhere between the two.

Comics are for children. They feature men in tights re-enacting the same simple good versus evil fights they’ve been doing for decades. How deep do you think Batman vs the Joker really goes? Don’t even try to play the “graphic novel” card– graphic novels are just comics with a spine.

The time of comics being worth a grip of money is over, too. It kind of blows my mind when I see people buying variant books for twenty bucks. I have trouble paying more than ten cents a page– why would you go for a dollar a page? Do you really expect that much of a return on your investment? That comic is worthless, son, and it isn’t going to make you money. The ’90s are dead and gone.

Comics are the red-headed stepchild of Hollywood. How many IP farms are out there now? How many people write comics that are obviously movie pictures or storyboards in sequential art form? How many Hollywood writers drop in, dabble a bit, and drop back out, sometimes mid-series? Hollywood options are big news these days– why? Easy: Hollywood is where the money is, friends. Money talks.

Comics are a bastard medium. Not quite fine art, not quite commercial art. Disrespected, not respected, and used as a stepping stone. What do comics have to lose? Nothing at all.

Why not take greater advantage of that?

I love Gotham Central. It’s a great little police procedural. Everything from the writing down to the art clicks. But, take a look at it. It looks like it could have been The Wire or The Shield. It’s staged and laid out like a TV show. It’s got realistic angles, establishing shots, and pretty realistic looking characters. This could’ve easily been a TV show. I’m not dissing or anything. The realism is a point of pride for the series, I’m sure.

Comics can do Hollywood. Hollywood is easy. However, can Hollywood do this?

Look at that. Hyper-compressed information dump gives way to a wonderfully wide open two page spread. The eighteen panel grid is positively claustrophobic. The lack of words and panel size forces you to take your time and pore over each panel. The panels even reflect the reality of the situation. They’re inside an oppressive military facility, and when they escape? A wide open breath of fresh air.

What about the insane style switches in Seven Soldiers #1?

Comics can do so much that movies cannot. However, the general style at the Big Two, and even beyond, tend to stick to realism. Chris Bachalo and Humberto Ramos are a nice look, but work by them, and those like them, is fairly rare.

David Aja made wonderful use of the comics page in his work on Immortal Iron Fist. He kept the straight-forward, realistic storytelling and flipped it. Each strike gets its own panel. Iron Fist dances around the comics page in a scene that would take a split second of action in a movie. He makes the page part of the story.

I loved We3. There are a ton of little narrative tricks and details that force you to read the book slowly and take it all in. The spread above, of the animals attacking the soldiers, is more exciting than bullettime was when the Matrix hit. Every single action gets its place in time. If you look at the panels in order, it’s like looking at a film strip.

No one cares about comics, so comics can get away with a lot. Grant Morrison’s Flex Mentallo is one of my favorite comics. It tells the tale of a forgotten superhero and how you can make fiction a reality. It’s a love letter to comics and it flits from era to era over the course of the series. It’s brave.

We need more Flex Mentallos. Tell a story that might not sell, but is worth the time. Marvel’s started moving in this direction with their revamped Marvel Knights series. Who’d have thought that a story about Daredevil’s Dad would be an excellent comic?

There’s a lot of attention paid to continuity, as well. Things have to line up just so or else the story is ruined.

Screw that.

Keep the stories internally consistent, but go wild. I may not like Marvel Zombies very much, but I can respect what it represents. Take advantage of the fact that most of these characters are unbreakable. Toss Captain America into 1602, sure. Pop Spider-Man into feudal Japan. What if Luke Cage was in his ’20s in 1930s Harlem? What did the Black Panther cult do to fight colonization in Africa?

Take your characters and bend them. If they break, guess what– you can just dial it back to what it was before. You don’t need Continuity Patch Comix. Fans aren’t stupid. If you say “That was then, this is now,” they will assuredly grumble. They’ll grumble regardless, to be honest. But, they’ll get over it. They always do.

Spider-Man made it through the Clone Saga. Batman made it through the ’90s. Luke Cage, Ms. Marvel, Emma Frost, and a host of other d-list characters are headlining now. You can’t break these characters, so don’t treat them like fine china. Throw them against the wall. They’ll bounce back.

Comics need to start acting like comics. No one expects anything out of them but a story that goes from A to B to (sometimes) C. If no one expects anything out of you, you’re free to do what you like.

We need more Seth Fishers.

Shots are up from Mike Carey’s signing party at the Isotope. Check the Isotope blog here, or click here to check out the photos directly. Yours truly may be in a picture or three.

It was a great bash! Kirsten was working the bar, as usual, and James, Josh, and Ash were playing enforcer/host. Mike Carey was pretty cool, and stayed until after midnight. Mindy Owens, writer of the Runaways Saga and an upcoming issue Spider-Man Fairy Tales (how lucky do you have to be to have your first two comics drawn by Humberto Ramos and Mike Allred…) was there, Matt Silady popped in, and a gang of other people. Apparently Mike Choi was there, which kind of blows my mind. Met some cool new people. SF is full of great cats, Saturday night kind of proved that. I think I dipped at around 1, 130 or so.

Can’t wait for the next signing. Go see how much fun we had.

The new banners are in effect! We’ve got around 53 in rotation right now. New ones, old ones, ones with NFL Superpro in them. I like the new look and the logo is clean.

Let me review a couple things before I get into the meat of it, though.

Black Panther 23: This book has gotten better and better thanks in no small part to Civil War. One problem: Koi Turnbull’s art is completely inappropriate for the book. He reminds me a lot of Larry Stroman, from old school X-Factor and Tribes, I think it was called. The characters are big and chunky in general, and Panther in the sewer? I thought it was a new character. The surprise Soviet guest star had a cool scene with some interesting storytelling, but the storytelling in the rest of the book was just kind of soso, particularly in the last confrontation between Panther and an old friend. It’s decent, not good, solely due to iffy art.

Loveless 14: Obviously, I’m an Azz fan and this book is staying true to form. Daniel Zezelj provides appropriately moody art as we find out exactly why Ruth and Wes hates Blackwater so much. It is extremely harsh and pretty chilling.
The Union army, after raping Ruth, drag her into the city and talk trash. The top dog humiliates her in the city square and not one person lifts a finger, though they’re all watching. That’s heinous.
Azz is playing with time on this one, too. It takes place during July 17, 15, and 10, with July 10 featuring a not-so-surprise in terms of a death. The requisite flashback also pulls the present day (or past day, rather) person looking at their own past. it’s a technique I like quite a bit. One thing that’s certain is that Blackwater and her citizens deserve the hell that’s coming. Harsh book, but earns its A.

Okay. This next bit isn’t quite a review, more like a ramble.

I like Iron Fist. I like Luke Cage. I like Iron Fist and Luke Cage because it’s a merge of two of my favorite genres of film: blaxploitation and kung fu. The Heroes for Hire is one of my favorite duos and a great gimmick, I think. The slumming rich kid and the slum kid who wants to get rich.

The Immortal Iron Fist captures what I love about the duo and makes it work. The series gets better with its second issue as we get another glimpse of an old Iron Fist protecting what’s hers, the Iron Fist from the previous issue using the Fist in a new and intriguing way (these are not the droids you are looking for), and some wonderful Heroes for Hire interplay. Also, John Severin (yes!) does art on a wonderful flashback with tremendous payoff.

The idea of an Iron Fist lineage is one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?!” ideas. It’s so blindingly obvious and perfect that you cannot help but wonder why no one has done it before. A big part of kung fu movies (and actual kung fu, I assume) is passing down what you know. Kung fu is your techniques, your style, and your heritage. Having there be previous Iron Fists gives Danny Rand something to both live up to and pass on.

(This, of course, means that when I get a job writing for Marvel in the future, I’m going to have Danielle Knight, prodigal daughter of Danny and Misty, take up the Iron Fist in a rocking adventure across the United States to reclaim her heritage.)

The best part of this is that, if Marvel is feeling really brave, we can get an Iron Fist miniseries or one-shot about one of these old Iron Fists, be it about Wu Ao-Shi, the Iron Fist of 1545 or whoever. Please Marvel!

Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker are doing a ridiculous job with this book, and David Aja’s art is top notch. Very moody and it really fits. He does dopey Danny Rand (Helllloooo Nurse!) just as well as he does fight scenes, especially the aftermath of Randall’s scene. Danny’s father issues sound quite interesting, too.

Best new Marvel book in ages, I think. Brubaker is hitting on all cylinders with Daredevil, Criminal, and Cap, while Fraction is rocking the house with Casanova and Punisher War Journal. Two great tastes that go well together.

Oh, and Mike Carey and Humberto Ramos on X-Men is as smooth as butter. Lovely issue, lovely art.

If I’m posting on this here comics blahblahblog, I try to ensure that we’re working with snark-free waters. Not these Snark Free Waters, but similar in spirit nonetheless. Personally, I feel that comics are too awesome to waste sniping at each other and the creators. If I have a grievance, I’ll air it out professionally, courteously, and in a coherent manner. If I can at all help it, you’ll never hear the words “(author) is a hack” come out of my mouth. 99% of the time that word is thrown around, it’s completely untrue, and there’s really a better way to say “I don’t like this guy’s work.”

So, in the spirit of the idea that comics are freaking awesome and we’re all freaking awesome for reading them, even you in the back with the bad haircut, I’m going to present to you a Cool Comics Love-In. It’s a snapshot of what I like in comics right now, be they single issues, series, or other, and you better like it, too, or else I’ll and hopefully you’ll dig it as well. Let’s see if I can do these three or four at a time, once or twice a week okay?
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Well, it’s like this.

I love Spider-Man. I could give you five different reasons why your favorite hero is completely inferior to your Friendly Neighborhood Notaninsect. Your Superman is nothing. Behold, I teach you the Spider.

This is the Spider-Spotlight. Once a week or so, I’m going to headline a few of my very favorite Spider-artists, Spider-writers, and Spider-stories. Originally, this was just going to be an art feature, but comics are a visual medium, too, so the art and the words go hand in hand. I’ll do my level best to keep spoilers at a minimum, just in case i convince you to go out and pick up these books.

Don’t take this as a Best Of… list. It’s just some stuff I think is pretty awesome and that you should think is awesome, too, or else Slappy the Spider-Fairy is going to come down and eat your soul.

First up? Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos. Read the rest of this entry �