Batman wearing a Bathead. That will never stop being awesome, and I will always be a little bit placated whenever I see it. That’s just how it’s going to be around here.
Look at that art. Look at it!
And oh my god, the clasp on the cape is another bat!
DC, sometimes you are smooth.
We’re doing it and doing it and doing it well! Chad has part 4! This is part 5!
DB: I’ve had a slightly different experience. It leads to a lot more off-the-cuff remarks, brief bursts of info from myself regarding whatever book I just finished reading or whatever subject I care to talk about. I kinda like how, barring extra late nights, I can post an update about the latest issue of Amazing Spider-Man or throw up a link to some amazing art I found and get an almost instantaneous response. It extends the Wednesday-at-the-shop experience over the course of a week.
You’re definitely right about 140 characters being a real constraint, but I’ve found that it really forces you to get to the point. Writing posts tend to involve a certain amount of beating around the bush sometimes, though I’ve been trying to break that habit. Sometimes I want to soften the blow before bringing the hammer down on a book, or explain the context of where I’m coming from. With Twitter, there’s no context and no room for softening. You have enough room for “That was a really bad issue, and I’m pretty appalled that anybody in that company thought it was worth publishing. Why even bother?” It’s all very blunt, but I appreciate that. Sometimes I’m reading a post and just waiting for someone to actually make a declarative statement– be it “this book is good” or “this book is bad.” With Twitter, that’s all you have.
I’ve found Twitter most helpful when it comes to getting book recommendations. #MangaMonday has been a huge help for me in finding new manga to read, not to mention people being excited about books I’d never heard of before.
Here’s a different direction- how do you find stuff to read and review for the blog? What’s your type of comic and do you have trouble stepping out of that comfort zone?
CN: To be fair, I’m usually a pretty direct guy, so Twitter hasn’t changed that. One of the things I hate most about my writing is how direct it is and how tough I find it to write really long posts at times because I’ll say in one sentence what others seem to take five to say. I don’t know why I see that as a bad thing, though… probably has to do with minimums on essays in school.
I’m a pretty ‘mainstream’ guy in that most of the comics I buy are from Marvel or DC. A lot of the non-Marvel/DC comics are written by guys who I discovered at those companies like Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis. It’s a weakness that I have tried to overcome and keep on trying to overcome. But, given money issues, it can be hard to step outside of the comfort zone. Or, rather, not being able to afford to possibly waste your money on something you’ll hate is an excuse to stick with what you know. I’ve used the CBR gig as a chance to try some new things, but even that’s fairly limited to the regular Marvel/DC output for the majority of my reviews because, well, that’s what the majority of readers want to read reviews of. But, when I get the chance, I’ll try anything new if someone whose opinion I trust recommends it. If I see you or Tim or Tucker or Jog praise something quite heavily, I’ll usually write it down or make a point to remember it somehow. You mention manga, of which I own exactly two books. I know! Shameful. The two books, though, were purchased because I saw a lot of praise for them from people whose opinions I trust/agree with and I loved both. (The books being Ode to Kirihito by Tezuka and Tekkonkinkreet by Matsumoto.) I’m pretty open to giving anything a shot if people say it’s good (and I have the cash to spare).
My reviews on my blog are usually just whatever books I bought that week and didn’t review for CBR. For the longer essays/posts that are different… that just depends on if I have something special to say. Usually it will be motivated by looking out and seeing that no one has said anything yet. I did my post on Brian Azzarello’s Deathblow because I hadn’t seen anyone else really talking about it. That’s how I got started on Casey’s work and Starlin’s… even the Bendis Avengers stuff was because I hadn’t seen anyone really tackle all of it as a whole despite his work being dismissed for only reading well in bulk… I like to be a little different, I guess.
My pull list these days is pretty much determined by creator. I’ll buy almost everything by Warren Ellis, Joe Casey, Grant Morrison… I’ll usually give Vertigo books a shot if they seem interesting. Some small press stuff like glamourpuss and Rasl I buy because I’ve read so many great things about Sim and Smith’s work that I didn’t want to miss out on them this time (and I love both books).
I don’t know what my type of comic is. Do Joe Casey and Warren Ellis have a lot in common really? I think my type of comic is the sort that approaches the material (whatever that may be) with genuine intelligence and an attempt to not simply do the same old thing. People accuse Ellis, to give an example, of doing the same thing over and over, but that’s not true as anyone who actually pays attention to him knows. His characters may not change, but his approach to writing books, to creating comics, is always in flux as he works to do new things and find new ways to communicate in the medium. It’s not always obvious and may be something as simple as releasing a bunch of three-issue minis to see how structuring a story across 66 pages works, but it’s something. It’s more than a lot of people try. Casey is the same way, always trying new things, always experimenting… I like people who try new things within the confines of pop comics. Of balancing the needs of experimentation and entertaining. Go too far in either direction and it’s a little boring. Of course, how Bendis’s Avengers work for Marvel fits into that is questionable, I know. Ha.
I’ll admit that some books will get a look before others because of that whole ‘I loved the character as a kid and I can’t help myself’ bullshit. I gave Straczynski’s Thor six issues to win me over because I like Thor. And it won me over. I know you have a similar thing for Spider-Man. Those characters that we’ll check in on for no reason other than we like them. Do you ever find that mentality a little weird? How you do buy/find books? Did what I just say make sense? Heh.
Power Girl’s cat has been amazing and delighting us for decades. It is Alfred to her Bruce, chocolate to her peanut butter, Simon to her everyone else on American Idol. It’s the Candy in her land, the Trivial in her Pursuit, it adds the poly to her Mono.
I could go on. Trust me. I love that damn cat.
Here’s hoping the thing is always featured in the many Winnick issues to come.
Flashbackville continues! Bloggers talking about bloggers! Read part two and come back here to read part 3! Words!
DB: Oh, I did feel that pressure. It was shortly after I got attention for blogging about race, I think, when I felt like I absolutely had to comment on everything. Very much a “If nobody else is gonna do it, then I will!” It was “with great power comes great responsibility,” but arrogant and stupid, because I absolutely did not have to say something about everything. It felt like an obligation, but in reality, it was just me being foolish.
Before I learned to say “Whatever,” I was over-extending myself trying to keep up with what was going on in blacks and comics. I still do feel that pressure, but I’m smarter now, and more discerning. I understand that comprehensive coverage isn’t necessarily the best thing, choosing instead to focus on a few worthy subjects. Sometimes I hear about something that I could write about, but it’s just a joke to me at this point. “Oh, Brian Bendis wrote a comic where Luke Cage was felled by a heart attack? What, all the black characters got high blood pressure?”
I like your point about Graphicontent being “Two English lit guys talking comics.” I don’t think bloggers need anything more than two eyes and a brain, but I’m kinda in the same boat as you guys. I started really studying lit in high school, thanks to a teacher who would crack the whip if you didn’t slacked off, and kept that up through college. In fact, if you go back and look at my transcript, I’m willing to bet that they were the only classes with consistent grades, because I actually cared about reading and dissecting what I read. For me, it’s very much about using skills that were nurtured in school. “After Apple-picking” isn’t so different from Seaguy or DKSA, I don’t think, you know? They all use references and metaphor to illustrate a point, and sometimes that point is open to interpretation. I think I’m pretty good at that critical analysis thing, taking one specific aspect of a book and talking about what works about it. It’s a little different from annotations, which are David Uzumeri’s trade, or the way that Jog puts everything he talks about into their exact historical and artistic context, but no less valuable.
Approaching comics like real books with meaningful content and all gives me a kick. I feel like you and I have similar approaches, though you’re better at reviews than I am. Your Splash Pages with Tim Callahan feel a lot like what I’m talking about, two guys dismantling things to see how they work. Does that sound right to you? How’d you end up hooking up with Tim? Was it a case of like minds seeking each other out?
CN: I found about Tim through his book on Morrison’s early work. That got a lot of buzz when it came out, including an interview on CBR, I believe, so I ordered and read it (aside from the Doom Patrol chapter since I hadn’t read that run completely at the time). Around that time, I decided to write a big post on Morrison’s first year on Batman and wound up referencing him and Geoff Klock a little bit. He somehow came across the post and left a comment about how it was good or something and I geeked out a little since here was this guy who wrote a book about Morrison and he liked what I wrote about Morrison. After that, I read his blog, he read my blog, we left favourable comments back and forth, and in early 2008, he asked if I wanted to do the Splash Page with him for Sequart’s website. It began with us just picking a book each week and discussing it, and people apparently like it, and it’s gone through a variety of formats since Sequart had site problems, including a lovely stay at CBR. I’ve never quite understood why it works since Tim and I are pretty similar in our tastes and approach to comics that you wouldn’t necessarily think it would be interesting to read. Usually, when you have two people talking about anything, the appeal is that they approach things from different perspectives like you and Esther in the Fourcast, but Tim and I… I don’t know how that works, but it seems to be the work people like best from both of us — which is gratifying and a little frustrating since I’m sure we’d both rather be liked for our own work more than the discussions we dash off in spare five minutes here and there.
The thing I actually like best about the Splash Page is just having a chance to discuss comics with someone. I gave up message boards years ago for a variety of reasons and the blogosphere has filled that gap a bit, but talking with Tim is also good for getting that need to discuss things out of my system. (Though, twitter is filling that gap pretty well, too.) Is that why you began the Fourcast with Esther? And why podcasting instead of something like the Splash Page that’s text-based? How do you find discussing comics for a podcast compared to writing about them? One of the things I worry about when it comes to doing a podcast is that I’ll sound a lot worse than I present myself since, with words, you can delete and rewrite until it says what you want it to say. Going from that much control to just hoping you don’t say stupid things is a little scary.
Leonardo Da Vinci was an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. So was Issac Newton. So were Imhotep and Zhang Heng and Galileo and many other geniuses throughout time. They were the first heroes to defeat Galactus and the Brood and turn Celestials back. They saved the world long before Captain America or Iron Man were ever born, but what does this mean to our heroes of today? What does this mean to Nick Fury? Do not miss this Marvel Comics masterpiece that fans will be talking about for decades to come. All the insanity is courtesy of JONATHAN HICKMAN (FANTASTIC FOUR, SECRET WARRIORS, Nightly News) and DUSTIN WEAVER (X-MEN).
It’s a neat idea, the sort of thing What Ifs are made of, and while I’m not super excited about it, I’m a little interested. Sort of thing you skim to see if you want it, or maybe just cop the hardcover a ways down the line. CBR recently posted an exclusive unlettered preview of the first issue, with nine story pages and one cover. We get a look at (and these are educated guesses going by the text above the issue) Zhang Heng staring down a Celestial (maybe Gammenon the Gatherer?), Da Vinci strapping on a flight harness, and Galileo getting ready to face Galactus and his herald. That leaves one guy facing down the Brood. He’s dressed in Egyptian garb, which makes him Imhotep. Here’s what he looks like:
Here is the problem with that image: he looks like a generic white guy. Imhotep, to my understanding, was worshiped in Greece in the form of a brown-skinned man. Much of the art I’ve seen, or books I’ve read (granted, this was years ago), supports that idea. I don’t know whether he was black or not, but I think it’s fair to say that he wasn’t white, either.
The subject of the race of ancient Egyptians is an intensely frustrating one, and one likely to not see any closure ever. I’m reasonably sure that everything I have read says that the Egyptians were not white, but they weren’t black (as we know the term), either. They were somewhere in-between, some flavor of brown.
The thing about the race of the ancient Egyptians is that the water is severely muddied by past racism. Egypt was essentially claimed by white scholars and separated from the rest of Africa, which served to further the idea that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites.
(Another similar instance of this is the story of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, the three sons of Noah. The three sons theoretically represent three races: African, Semitic, and European. As Ham was cursed in the story, and blacks were descended from him, they were also cursed. This is taught in black churches and is the worst kind of self-loathing there is. If you believe this, please, wake up. Don’t be ignorant of your own history.)
Later, Imhotep as a black man was fully embraced by afrocentrists, people desperate to rebuild a culture that had been stolen from them. Having the father of medicine and architecture be a black man is a huge boon to the self-esteem of an oppressed people.
You can see how this can get very complicated, and very touchy, very quickly.
I’m not here to say that Imhotep was blacker than the nighttime sky of Bed-Stuy in July. I don’t know, I can’t say, I’m not qualified for that. I do feel confident in saying that he was probably brown. He was definitely African. He was an amazingly smart man.
But, he wasn’t white. And the rest of the Egyptians on that page– they wouldn’t have been white, either.
I’d like to enjoy SHIELD. But honestly, stuff like this makes me a lot less likely to pick it up. Maybe that’s just me.
edit: I emailed Dustin Weaver to ask, and he said that the coloring is a mistake, something that just slipped through the cracks. Hopefully it’ll be fixed in the trade. Either way, Weaver is a cool dude, so I’m trying the first issue at the very least.
The image up top comes from Jordan T Neves, a reader who shot that over to me on Twitter a couple weeks ago. Thanks Jordan! Check out his site (with sketchaday) or his twitter.
On with the bloggers talking about blogging! There are going to be several parts spread between 4l! and Chad’s site over the next few days, each in relatively easy to manage chunks. I’ll update this with links as we go along. Chad’s piece should be up later today.
Chad Nevett: I guess we should begin at the beginning… February and March 2005. Where were you at the time, what were you doing, and why did you begin a blog?
David Brothers: I’d have to push back to January 2005, when I started Guerilla Grodd. Or actually, a few months prior is the true secret origin of 4thletter!. I’d spent the past couple years making side money reviewing video games for a fistful of websites while sleeping my way through state school. I noticed that a comics site had an open call for reviewers. I figured, hey- I can do this for video games, why not comics? I picked JLA Classified #1 (a Grant Morrison and Ed McGuinness piece), wrote a review, and mailed it off. I never heard back, or maybe I didn’t wait to hear back, and posted it on a brand new Livejournal account.
Basically, I began a blog just because I could. Why not, right? After a couple months and 54 posts doing brief reviews, a couple of analytical pieces on the first two Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy (which remain unfinished, but are still online), and some pretty basic and personality-less linkblogging, I bought a domain, moved the site over to Blogspot, and christened it 4thletter! because I’m an unbelievable narcissist. I drafted Gavin “Gavok” Jasper and Thomas “Wanderer” Wilde, old e-friends of mine, to help out and we took off running.
Kinda. We made 50-some posts between March and late September, mostly courtesy of me and Gav, before petering out. But, it was enough to build a small fanbase as a foundation and kind of get our legs under us, comics blogging-wise. I put down some money on a server in November and launched all over again.
What about you? I feel like I was a Millarworld poster/reader/lurker (now reformed) back when Graphicontent first launched. I know that I was aware of it back when I started writing about comics. Did I imagine the Millarworld connection?
CN: Nope, I am a Millarworld alum… if you can call it that. GraphiContent began with myself and another Millarworld poster, vacuumboy aka Steve Higgins. We, in our naive way, were bemoaning the lack of intelligent blogs about comics and decided to start our own. If you read the GraphiContent missions statement that I wrote for the blog’s launch, you can cringe with me. Some big goals and high ideals brought about by not knowing what else was out there (though, there was a lot less then, I believe). At the time, I was in my third year of my undergrad at the University of Western Ontario, earning a combined honors BA in English and political science, and, oddly, looking for anything to do outside of school. I was also writing for the school paper and felt pretty confident that I had something to say. Which I did for a couple of posts on Marvel Boy and Codeflesh with the odd ‘snippet’ thrown in. Sometime near the beginning, Steve and I recruited a few others to join, but that didn’t really increase our output and the blog remained pretty unused for a couple of years as my life got a little busier with school and being an editor at the school paper.
Things didn’t really pick up again until the fall of 2006 when I moved out of my parents’ house and a couple of hours away to Windsor to get my master’s. Being in a strange city resulted in me needing to fill time a bit more, so I began writing about the trades and random issues I got at the school’s bookstore, which slowly became writing about all of the comics I bought and my opinions on various developments in the industry. And slowly building back a readership after so much time giving them no reason to visit us. Around this time, I officially made the blog just Steve and myself with me doing the bulk of the posts. I don’t know how, but people slowly noticed that I was alive and I began making nice with others like Tim Callahan… the rest, as they say, is history.
I find it funny that both of us went the groupblog route and maintain that mentality now. Why did you get others to join you? Why not just go it alone? And when did Esther join?
Continued over at Chad’s spot!
This was a tough one. Even the second issue of Birds of Prey looks grim.
But there’s still First Wave, and its unabashed pulp to fall back on. I like The Spirit, though. I like that it looks like Doc Savage is punching him in the nose. And I like that the shadow of Batman’s hand looks like a cartoony claw.
It’s funny how David loved the idea of this series and I was luke-warm, and now I’m having much more fun with it than he is.
Of course I’ve only seen the first issue.
It’s not hard to see that Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours is going to end horribly for everyone involved. The book opens with pictures of fifteen characters, eight boys and six girls. They are the main characters of the book, the ones who will be piloting the giant robot against whatever threats care to invade Earth. Save for one younger girl, they’re all in the seventh grade.
The cast feels distressingly large. Not helping matters any is the way that the characters fade into a vague blur shortly after they each deliver personal introductions. We know their names, we know their ages, we know their relationship to each other (friends, with a sidebar for family), and that’s it. We’re instantly faced with a cast that means nothing to us.
Generally, large casts can mean a couple of different things. In the case of Lord of the Rings, a large cast is an opportunity for an author to tell several stories at once by splitting the cast into smaller, more manageable pieces. In Uncanny X-Men or Legion of Superheroes, a sprawling cast allows for serial storytelling that has a fresh, but regular, cast. In Bokurano: Ours, the cast is so large because basically all of these children are going to die.
The story should sound familiar to fans of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Fifteen young kids sign a contract to play a game with a giant robot. They soon find out that the robot is real, the threats are deadly, and the robot is powered by their lives. After the threat is defeated, a person’s life force is sapped and they fall down dead. Later, when another threat appears, another pilot is chosen and the process is repeated.
Bokurano: Ours feels like a counter-shonen comic. A lot of shonen comics, like American adventure comics, revolve around wish fulfillment. The scrawny nerd gets powers, the village idiot finds out that he’s the most important person of all, a fighter becomes the best in the world, and a dumb kid no one likes ends up being the only person who can save the world.
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The rest of the movie works similarly. The violence is ugly and awkward, with none of the style and swagger of Fistful of Dollars. There’s no “My mistake: four coffins,” to be found here, just a man bleeding out on the sand and desperate for a drink of water to quench his thirst. There is only an old man who has outreached his grasp and outlived his own usefulness.
And then Morgan Freeman, his friend, dies because of what Munny did and is trussed up in the town square as a warning. After that, Munny takes his first drink of liquor in years, and then he goes and proves that gunfighters do exist, but they are cruel, evil men, and God help you if you get in their way.
Another good example is in The Bourne Ultimatum, or possibly The Bourne Supremacy. At one point, Jason Bourne is arrested and taken to an embassy. He’s meek and silent throughout the scene, despite having displayed the ability to mow through trained soldiers with ease. However, he waits, and when an agent gets too close, he explodes into the action we expected to see.
I don’t know the term for this sequence of events. It’s different from the normal action movie move, where the hero is beaten down before getting a second win or new motivation. The best way to describe it is to describe a boiling pot. It is the conscious avoidance of explosive action on the part of a character who, by all rights, should be knee deep in it until the anticipation reaches a certain level, critical or not, and then the pot boils over and we’re in the thick of it. It’s always done for a specific storytelling reason.
Call it “suspended expectations,” maybe?
(An aside: Mark Millar and Steve McNiven bit the plot for their Old Man Logan, but never even came close to stepping out of Unforgiven‘s shadow, nor approaching the subtlety to be found in the film. When Eastwood starts gulping whiskey, there’s no clever callback to when his wife made him stop. It just happens and it is up to you to connect the dots. In Old Man Logan, Millar and McNiven pull the trigger on the violence too soon, save the turning point until after the violence, and then spend an entire issue bathing in blood. It doesn’t work because it has none of the pointed menace of Munny shooting an unarmed man and listing his sins, and hinges on excess, rather than precision and context. Millar, as ever, is derivative to the point that he cannot escape his influences.)
One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is in Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. OP is dumb boy’s comics, like Naruto or Bleach, but consistently maintains a higher level of quality over its several hundred issue run. This is due in large part to the fact that Oda often focuses on characterization over action, building a fairly tight cast who are funny, engaging, and most of all, fun to read about. We want to know about their quirks and their tragedies.
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