The top comics-related news stories from March 19 to March 25, 2011: 1. More than five years later, you'd think that all uses and employments of the cultural construct aspect of the Danish Muhammad cartoons had been exhausted. You'd be wrong, but you'd probably think that. 2. The ReedPOP show C2E2 avoids the sophomore slump with the show it needed to have: greater attendance and more widespread approbation in a way that makes it look like it will be around for a while. 3. Hard-working comics publisher Archaia secures significant investment, which they'll use to target brand development and digital publishing. Winner Of The Week Mike Thompson Losers Of The Week Achewood fans Quote Of The Week "She had obtained them after a marital dispute that was widely covered in the newspapers and also involved frogs." -- The New York Times on the mid-20th century dispensation of Mutt and Jeff. That "also involved frogs" line is great and, moreover, it kind of knows it's great, which is why it's weird to see it tossed out there in a NYT obit. ***** today's cover is from the great comic book series Four-Color ***** *****

Every Friday on Twitter we have a contest for our fabulous fans! Except for last Friday. So, to make up for it, the dude that tweets is making it up to you by personally selecting a group of titles. This week, one lucky fan has the chance to win Beasts of Burden, Fluffy, Mesmo Delivery, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man, The Goon: Chinatown, MPD-Psycho Vol. 1, Chickenhare Vol. 1, Flood!, Sock Monkey: Uncle Gabby, Achewood: The Great Outdoor Fight! Holy Poop! Thats alotta comics!...

And it’s not like the saga of Nice Pete hasn’t been brilliant/horrifying thus far. But I think this is a new peak in Onstad’s use of language.

... case will drag on for years to come, but we’ll definitely keep an eye on it. [Image courtesy of Chris Onstad and Achewood ] Oracle sues Google over Java patent infringement in Android originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink CNET | MarketWatch , Complaint (PDF) | Email this | Comments Full published article at:...

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... ). While the eating of the testicles was certainly the hook, the star of the feature is Mr. Chris Onstad of on-line comic Achewood fame. It was an absolute treat to cook with him. But more than that, it was a treat to correspond with him before the actual cooking. Hit the jump for an e-mail excerpt with a few ideas we never got around to. [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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[1]Today feels a little bit like a lazy link dump day, yes?  Good.  You are curious about that sex ed video I mentioned in the headline, I know it, so keep reading and it will await you at the end of this lazy, lazy post.  Let's kick it off with a stroll down the Appalachian Trail. Earlier this week, sex-fiend and former South Carolina Governor Mark Sandford went on a sexcation to Florida and hung out with his Argentinian fire-cracker to talk about maybe sleeping together again sometime, you know, if she's into it.  I side with Josh Marshall, of TPM, who yesterday wrote [2]: [M]ost pols who get caught with a mistress quickly retreat to saying the whole thing was shameful and a terrible lapse of judgment or perhaps that they need therapy for sex addiction (who doesn't?) or whatever else. Sanford could never really bring himself to say that, though, because I just don't think he thought it was true. Sometimes comically but almost always to his political detriment, he simply couldn't resist saying that he loved Chapur very deeply... It happens to the best of us!  Of all the various sex scandals out there, this one almost does seem more like a love scandal.  There's something, I don't know, not awful about that.  He shouldn't have used state funds, etc, but, eh.  I also share a certain cosmic connection [3] with the man, so I'm probably not the best person to judge his behavior. And speaking of Argentina, one of Making a Mockery's foreign correspondents filed a report about what sounds like an amazing protest in Buenos Aires.  Anybody who wants to march for sane drug laws and policy should do it like this [4]: Instead of flyers, they passed joints. Instead of high-rising clouds of fireworks, there were low-rising clouds of pot smoke. Instead of jumping up and down and keeping pace with the drum beats, they walked slow and looked around a lot. Instead of loud banging drums and amplified yells attacking your conscience, muffled and discordant chants could be found. They know how to do it down in BA.  Photos at the link. ****** This post so far is much more positive than I'm comfortable with, so to bring it down a little let's look at how insanely popular [5] Arizona's post-racial "Browns Be Crazy Criminals" law is [via Wonkette [6]]: A solid majority of Americans back Arizona's tough crackdown on illegal immigrants, while just 25% support President Obama's immigration policy, which includes legalizing millions of unauthorized migrants, a study found Wednesday. ... Seventy-three percent said they backed a measure requiring people to produce documents verifying their legal status if police ask for them, while 67% approve of allowing police to detain anyone who cannot verify that they are in the country legally. Do not like. ******* What else is there to mention in this rambling, meandering post?  Oh, right, the military is now considering incentivizing the non-murder of civilians by offering a medal [7] for, oh, not murdering civilians [h/t TJ].  No word yet on whether or not we as a country will start electing presidents who won't occupy countries and bomb their civilian populations.  But, you know, this is a start. The idea of rewarding battlefield restraint was proposed by British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, who is in charge of the international forces in southern Afghanistan. Sholtis said the idea is still in its "conceptual stage." I assume that's Nick Carter of Backstreet Boys fame [8].  Apparently he's done well for himself, and is now British. ******* Oh, and I've been meaning to ask you, are you the kind of person who would mock Roger Ebert for having cancer?  You're not!?  Well then, you're a better person than teabagger extraordinaire Caleb Howe, who is in fact the kind of person who would mock Roger Ebert for having cancer.  Click here [9] to see what is truly the most vile twitter feed you can ever imagine, and then thank your lucky stars that you don't know Caleb Howe, King Ass [h/t Ev Dog and Joe]. ******* Last night, friend of the blog Ross Hyzer and I were knockin' back a couple-a brewskies, and he turned me on to a comic strip called Achewood [10].  I'm probably the last person on the Internet to get to this.  I rather enjoy it though.  My favorite single comic panel of all time, though, can be seen here [11].  Oh, the counter clockwise spinning, it's just so good. Now, for you perverts who just skipped down to see the sexy sexy sex ed video, here you go.  I think Hitchcock directed this, actually. [h/t Chloe, via Feministing [12]]. Okay, one more, this time about the homosexual menace. Good luck with everything this weekend. [1] http://trueslant.com/johnknefel/files/2010/02/round-up.jpg [2] http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/05/endearing.php [3] http://comedyandpolitics.blogspot.com/2009/10/hiking-appalachian-trail.html [4] http://expropiemos.blogspot.com/2010/05/20100508despenalizacion-ya.html [5] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/05/study-finds-broad-support-for-arizona-immigration-law.html [6] http://wonkette.com/415400/los-angeles-cuts-ties-with-nazi-arizona-while-americans-support-nazi-arizona#more-415400 [7] http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/12/military.restraint.medal/ [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Carter_%28musician%29 [9] http://videogum.com/180792/thats-your-boyfriend-caleb-howe/thats-your-boyfriend/ [10] http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05092010 [11] http://xkcd.com/162/ [12] http://www.feministing.com/archives/021170.html

The Portland Mercury 's Patrick Alan Coleman cooks balls with Achewood cartoonist Chris Onstad : "Ooh, the sympathy. The sympathy. It's terrible," says Onstad as he runs the sharp edge of the carbon steel blade across a parboiled testicle . The skin splits open and the meat inside purses outward through the gash. It's the color and consistency of sea urchin. It smells like... "Smells like...

Source : Slog (subscribe)

A nice feature w/ FOC Chris Onstad cooking testicles from a PDX paper. The Achewood Cookbook deux drops soon. Pre-order it here. Betimes, Onstad completists will want to grab Errands into the Metropolis, which has cover art by Onstad, complete...

Source : THE GURGLING COD (subscribe)

Filed under: MemeTracker, Animals

College Humor's Dan Gurewitch posted this photo of his friends' dog on his personal blog. I was so taken by the dog's condescending expression that I decided to turn him into an Advice Dog meme.

Meet Disapproving of the Internet Dog. This guy is so sick of your internet nonsense that all he can do is scowl.

Things Disapproving of the Internet Dog hates:

• LOLcats
• Justin Bieber
• Rick Astley
• The word FAIL
• Mashups
• Vloggers
• Flash mobs
• Chatroulette

If you're reading this blog, he probably hates everything you love! He's like our anti-mascot.

You can make your own Disapproving of the Internet Dog images by checking out this Meme Generator page. Go nuts.

• previously:// How To Write Awesome Captions for Advice Dog and Friends

 

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Just in case it needed to be cleared up. | Chris Haley is... THE ENTHUSIAST!

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Sure, Achewood and xkcd have joked about it, but it took the sadism of Sam Hughes to make Hatetris -- a one-off Tetris clone that spits out the statistically worst possible piece with every move -- a reality. As it damn well would, it starts with a ton of 'S' blocks -- the bane of every Tetris champ -- but just as you learn patterns to cope with that, it throws something more unmanageable your way. Hughes has added a replay feature which allows you to view skillful runs -- here meaning those that score over 10 cleared lines -- by other players. Hughes himself has only managed a top score of 5. My own is 3. It really is mean. Hatetris [Sam Hughes]

My So-Called Blogroll Grande Pescadoes Instapundit Protein Wisdom Ace of Spades HQ James Lileks Achewood Mark Steyn James Taranto Archives There used to be archives going back to January 2003.

The twisted genius behind the cult-favorite online comic Achewood discusses everything from the nature of humor to the business model that made his strip a success, in this 2006 conversation originally conducted for The Comics Journal #277.

Source : The Comics Journal (subscribe)

Thanks to the phenomenon known as "insomnia," aka "the crushing worries of existence, nestled at bedside," what follows is an alphabetical, standardized version of the list of current webcomics produced by CR readers on Friday evening. Although even I can think of a lot of great strips that no one mentioned, I think it's a pretty good list, and only three made me want to build a time machine to go back to caveman times and find some way to destroy mankind's artistic impulse. And then only for a few seconds. Mostly, there's a lot on even this admittedly very standard list with which I wasn't yet familiar. Anyway, I made a folder out of open new tabs and all tabs in a folder function, and look forward to digging in. Maybe you will, too. * 1930 Nightmare Theatre @ Dumm Comics, Kyle A. Carrozza and John Berry * 1977 The Comic, W. Byron Wilkins * Achewood, Chris Onstad * A Manga Addict, Sam Mooney * American Elf, James Kochalka * A Softer World, E Horne and J Comeau * Bad Machinery, John Allison * Bear Nuts, Alison Acton * Between Gears, Natalie Nourigat * Brat-Halla, Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose * Briar Hollow, Terry Blas * Bug, Adam Huber * Cat and Girl, Dorothy Gambrell * College Roomies From Hell!!!, Maritza Campos * Daisy Owl, Ben Driscoll * Dark Horse MySpace Presents * Deadbeats, Richard Howell and Ricardo Villagran and Thom Zahler * Diesel Sweeties, R. Stevens * Dinosaur Comics, Ryan North * Dresden Codak, Aaron Diaz * Ellerbisms, Marc Ellerby * Ellie Connelly, Indigo Kelleigh * EmiTown, Emi Lenox * Endtown, Aaron Neathery * Freakangels, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield * Girl Genius, Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio * Girls With Slingshots, Danielle Corsetto * Goats, Jon Rosenberg * Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton * Haunted, Josh Smeaton * Heropotamus, Josh Alves * Iron, SM Vidaurri * John & John, , d!o * Johnny Wander, Ananth Panagariya and Yuko Ota * Kawaii Not, Meghan Murphy * Lackadaisy, Tracy J. Butler * Let's Be Friends Again, Curt Franklin and Chris Haley * Liz Prince Power, Liz Prince * Max Vs. Max, Wes Molebash * Menage a 3, Giz and Dave Zero1 * Mugwhump the Great, Roger Langridge * My Cardboard Life, Philippa Rice * Nedroid Picture Diary, Anthony Clark * Oceanverse, Michael Schwartz * Octopus Pie, Meredith Gran * Pajama Forest!, Evan Diaz * Penny and Aggie, T. Campbell and Gisele Legace * Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik * PhD: Piled Higher & Deeper, , Jorge Cham * Pokeweed, Drew Pocza * PvP, Scott Kurtz * Questionable Content, Jeph Jacques * reMIND, Jason Brubaker * Savage Chickens, Doug Savage * Sheldon, Dave Kellett * She Said, Kris Dresen * Shortpacked!, David Willis * Sinfest, Tatsuya Ishida * Sin Titulo, Cameron Stewart * Socks and Barney, Steve Conley * Spain & Morocco, Alex Fellows * Steve Bissette's King of Monster Isle, Steve Bissette * Strewth, Josh Way * SubCulture, Kevin Freeman and Stan Yan * Supernatural Law, Batton Lash * The Abominable Charles Christopher, Karl Kerschl * The Bean, Trav * The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, Justin Pierce * Tune, Derek Kirk Kim * Toddbot.com, Todd Webb * Wapsi Square, Paul Taylor * Whubble, Jamie Smart * Wondermark, David Malki * XKCD, Randall Munroe * Year of the Rat, Cayetano Garza Jr. Thanks to all the readers that participated.

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Webcomics You Read That 1) Aren't Any Of The Five I Chose, 2) Posted First On-Line -- Not After Or Concurrently With Print, 3) Are Ongoing (Updating At Least Once This Year)." This is how they responded. Tom Spurgeon 1. Hark! A Vagrant 2. PvP 3. Achewood 4. Sin Titulo 5. Freakangels ***** Brian Moore 1. Endtown, Aaron Neathery 2. Goats, Jon Rosenberg 3. Bad Machinery, John Allison 4. Spain & Morocco, Alex Fellows 5. The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, Justin Pierce ***** Samuel Mooney 1.) remind 2.) Tune 3.) The Bean 4.) Iron 5.) a漫画アディクト ***** Wesley Osam 1. Bad Machinery 2. Dresden Codak 3. Nedroid Picture Diary 4. Pictures for Sad Children 5. Cat and Girl ***** Tom Bondurant 1. The Non-Adventures Of Wonderella 2. Let's Be Friends Again 3. Max Vs. Max 4. Bug 5. Strewth ***** Dave Knott * XKCD * PhD: Piled Higher & Deeper * Penny Arcade * Girl Genius * Diesel Sweeties ***** Jamie Coville 1) Sinfest 2) Diesel Sweeties 3) Dinosaur Comics 4) xkcd 5) The Abominable Charles Christopher ***** Kurt Busiek * Menage a 3 * The Abominable Charles Christopher * Deadbeats * Ellie Connelly * Mugwhump the Great And a special note for Bearskinrug, which isn't remotely conventional but is chock full o' great. ***** Dennis Culver * Haunted * Sinfest * Diesel Sweeties * Let's Be Friends Again * Awesome Hospital ***** Johnny Bacardi 1. Octopus Pie 2. Scary-Go-Round presents Bad Machinery 3. Brat-Halla 4. The Non-Adventures of Wonderella 5. Lackadaisy Cats ***** Michael Carens-Nedelsky 1. A Softer World 2. Piled Higher and Deeper 3. Wondermark 4. XKCD 5. Lackadaisy ***** William Doughty 1. Daisy Owl 2. Questionable Content 3. Shortpacked! 4. Girls With Slingshots 5. Oceanverse ***** Uriel A. Duran 1) Savage Chickens 2) John & John 3) 1930 Nightmare Theatre @ Dumm Comics 4) College Roomies From Hell!!! 5) Kawaii Not ***** Tony Collett 1. SubCulture 2. The Non-Adventures Of Wonderella 3. Sheldon 4. Girls With Slingshots 5. 1977 The Comic ***** John Platt 1. Supernatural Law 2. Steve Bissette's King of Monster Isle 3. American Elf 4. Dark Horse MySpace Presents 5. Year of the Rat ***** Jamie Cosley 1. Heropotamus 2. Pokeweed 3. Pajama Forest! 4. Toddbot.com5. 5. Whubble ***** Jamie S. Rich 1. Ellerbisms, Marc Ellerby 2. Between Gears, Natalie Nourigat 3. EmiTown, Emi Lenox 4. Briar Hollow, Terry Blas 5. My Cardboard Life, Philippa Rice ***** Greg McElhatton * Girl Genius * Johnny Wander * Liz Prince Power * She Said * Socks and Barney ***** Buzz Dixon 1. Sinfest 2. Tune 3. Bear Nuts 4. Wapsi Square 5. Penny and Aggie ***** *****

My So-Called Blogroll Grande Pescadoes Instapundit Protein Wisdom Ace of Spades HQ James Lileks Achewood Mark Steyn James Taranto Archives There used to be archives going back to January 2003.

Noted film blogger Ed Howard has released a list of top 60 works of the decade, with commentary on each member starting here, moving through here, and ending here. It's a fine list, and worth your time to read every entry if you're a big ol' comics geek like I am. 60. Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard, 1998-2004 59. Sleeper, Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips, 2003-2005 58. Popeye and Olive/P+O, Richard McGuire, 2002 57. The Ticking, Renee French, 2007 56. Planetes, Makoto Yukimura, 2001-2004 55. Incanto, Frank Santoro, 2006 54. Lumakick, Richard Hahn, 2002-2004 53. Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak, 2000-2009 52. Tales Designed To Thrizzle, Michael Kupperman, 2005-ongoing 51. The Beast Mother/Mome Stories, Eleanor Davis, 2006/2007-2008 50. Automatic Kafka, Joe Casey & Ashley Wood, 2002-2003 49. Elvis Road, Elvis Studio, 2007 48. 100 Bullets, Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso, 1999-2009 47. Eightball #23: The Death Ray, Daniel Clowes, 2004 46. What It Is, Lynda Barry, 2008 45. Yotsuba&!, Kiyohiko Azuma, 2003-ongoin 44. Skyscrapers Of The Midwest, Joshua Cotter, 2005-2008 43. Powr Mastrs, C.F., 2007-ongoing 42. Abstract Comics: The Anthology, Andrei Molotiu (editor) & various, 2009 41. Asterios Poly, David Mazzucchelli, 2009 40. Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Goran Sudzuka, etc., 2002-2008 39. Sexy Voice and Robo, Iou Kuroda, 2000-2003 38. Likewise, Ariel Schrag, 2009 37. Lost Girls, Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, 2006 36. Black HOle, Charles Burns, 1993-2004 35. Alias, Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Gaydos, 2001-2005 34. Pluto, Naoki Urasawa, 2003-2009 33. Louis Riel, Chester Brown, 1999-2003 32. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, 2009 31. Madman Atomic Comics, Mike Allred, 2007-2009 30. Epileptic/Babel, David B., 1996-2003/2004-2006 29. Chimera #1, Lorenzo Mattotti, 2006 28. Dogs and Water, Anders Nilsen, 2004 27. The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Frank Miller & Lynn Varley, 2001-2002 26. The Squirrel Mother, Megan Kelso, 2001-2006 25. Gyo, Junji Ito, 2001-2002 24. Multiforce, Mat Brinkman, 2000-2005 23. Gogo Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto, 2000 22. How To Be Everywhere, Warren Craghead III, 2007 21. Omega The Unknown, Jonathan Lethem & Farel Dalrymple, 2007 20. The Filth/Seaguy, Grant Morrison, Chris Weston & Gary Erskine, 2002-2003; Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart, 2004 19. The Blot, Tom Neely, 2007 18. Finder: Dream Sequence, Carla Speed McNeil, 2003 17. Ninja, Brian Chippendale, 2006 16. The Lute String, Jim Woodring, 2005 15. Achewood, Chris Onstad, 2001-ongoing 14. Promethea, Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray et al, 1999-2005 13. Alias The Cat, Kim Deitch, 2002-2005 12. Bottomless Belly Button/MOME Short Stories, Dash Shaw, 2008-2009 11. Alec/The Fate Of The Artist , Eddie Campbell, 2000-2002/2006 10. Mary-Land, Mary Fleener, 2002-ongoing 9. X-Force/X-Statix, Peter Milligan & Mike Allred, 2001-2004 8. ACME Novelty Library #18-19, Chris Ware, 2007-2008 7. Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco, 2000 6. Asthma, John Hankiewicz, 2002-2006 5. Kramers Ergot, Sammy Harkham (editor) & various, 2003-2008 4. Ganges/Curses/Or Else, Kevin Huizenga, 2007-ongoing/2002-2004/2004-2008 3. New Engineering/Travel, Yuichi Yokoyama, 2004 2. Jimbo In Purgatory, Gary Panter, 2000 1. Love and Rockets Vol. II, Jaime Hernandez, 2000-2008 ***** *****

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Memorable Entryways in Comics." This is how they responded. Tom Spurgeon 1. Porch/Stoop, Avengers Mansion 2. Tube teleportation system in JLA satellite 3. Charlie Brown's front stoop 4. Reception Area In Baxter Building 5. Rainbow Bridge Heading Into Asgard ***** TUCK! 1. Boom Tube (Kirby's Fourth World) 2. Negative Zone Portal (Baxter Building) (Fantastic Four) 3. Ptuii Tube (Rog 2000) 4. Wayne Manor Library/Entrance to the Batcave (complete with bust of William Shakespeare) (Batman) 5. Knight's Past storefront (Starman) ***** Philip Rippke 1. The grandfather clock entrance to the Batcave 2. The stone steps leading down to Munden's Bar 3. The Boom Tube into New Genesis 4. The lobby of the New Eden Police Department's 39th Precinct 5. The door to Kadie's Club Pecos ***** Rich Tommaso 1. TINTIN -- King Ottokar's Sceptre; cover 2. CEREBUS -- High Society; Telephone book cover 3. ROCCO VARGAS -- Triton; Page One 4. B.P.R.D. -- The Warning; Practically every chapter has a grand entrance! 5. GROO -- The Pescatel Issue ***** Ali T. Kokmen 1. The courtyard of the Hall of Justice in the old SuperFriends cartoons. 2. The JLA transporter tubes 3. The giant key pointing the way to Superman's Fortress of Solitude 4. The road to the Batcave in the 1960s "Batman" TV show, especially that road barrier that would automatically lower when the Batmobile came by in comically fast motion. 5. The entranceway to the very first comic book specialty store I ever walked into back in the early 80s. Truly, for any comics fan of a certain age, the first time you went to a dedicated comics store--and came to realize that you'd never again have to depend on the vagaries of newsstand distribution, nor endure the disdain of a shopkeeper who'd take your money but never understand your hobby -- ah, that was a moment of as much pure joy as anything first love could offer. ***** Cole Moore Odell 1. The door to the Fortress of Solitude 2. Detective Jim Corrigan's cement-filled barrel to heaven 3. The windowless, doorless non-entry of Dr. Fate's Salem tower 4. The belt-activated elevator to the top five floors of the Baxter Building 5. The subway tunnel leading to Shazam's cavern ***** Buzz Dixon 1. That big giant key and lock outside Superman's Fortress of Solitude 2. The "cork" in the bottle city of Kandor 3. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH--BAT-POLES! 4. The bulging vault door to Scrooge McDuck's money bin 5. Little Annie Fanny's ***** Johnny Bacardi 1. The stoop at the beginning of Eisner's Spirit story "Ten Seconds" (with the kid bouncing the ball and singing "A, my name is Anna...") 2. The front entrance to Daimon Hellstorm's Fire Lake mansion, esp. in the Ellis/Manco series 3. The front entrance to Rah El Rex's wax museum in Starstruck 4. The door in the Angel Islington's lair in Mike Carey and Glenn Fabry's adaptation of Gaiman's Neverwhere 5. Any of Dr. Strange's trademark Ditkoeque dimensional doorways ***** Sean T. Collins The black door in Asahi Elementary School The school gate of the El-Ameeriah School The gate to Arkham Asylum The grandfather clock conecting Wayne Manor to the Batcave The gates of Mornemont ***** Andrew Mansell 1. Nightcrawler's Brimstone and BAMF 2. The door to Nexus' Chamber guarded by Kreed and Sinclair 3. The microscope slide that leads to Sub-Atomica in the FF 4. The Entrance to Hell used by Morpheus in Season's of the Mist 5. The "DOOR!!" to the BLEED in Authority ***** Dave Carter 1. Superman's Fortress of Solitude, with that enormous key 2. The Bat-pole entrance to the Batcave 3. Beanish's "Secret Sketch" in Beanworld 4. The Gates of Hell in Sandman #23 5. The Boom Tube in Kirby's New Gods. ***** Marc Arsenault 1. Temple Bar Gate in Sweeney Todd (Gaiman, Zulli) 2. Sandy's mouth in Swamp Thing 43 3. Little Nemo's Bed 4. The offices of Horizons Unlimited in Steve Canyon 5. Wildwood Cemetery in The Spirit ***** Robert Stanley Martin 1. The dimensional portals in Ditko's Dr. Strange (take your pick) 2. The doorway to Nite Owl's brownstone in Watchmen 3. The gate to Auschwitz in Maus 4. The skylight to Peter Parker's East Village apartment in the Ross Andru Spider-Man days 5. The door to the Fortress of Solitude in the Weisinger/Schwartz Superman ***** James C. Langdell 1. Phantom Zone frame floating into the void 2. Chained door to the writer's apartment in Cages 3. Secret tunnel for Batmobile access to the Batcave 4. Distortion Area (access to the Negative Zone) 5. Functional square door labeled "Super Hero Club" leading into an inverted rocket ***** Evan Dorkin 1. Portal to the Negative Zone 2. Boom Tube opening to anywhere 3. Frank. N. Stein's castle doorway w/welcome mat trap 4. Vault door/diving platform to Scrooge McDuck's money bin. 5. Subway entrance that leads to the wizard Shazam. ***** Russell Lissau 1. The fake bookcase (or grandfather clock) passage to the Batcave 2. The giant key needed for the Fortress of Solitude's front door 3. The Tardis' front door 4. The Batcave's road through a waterfall for the Batmobile 5. The skylight of Matt Murdock's apartment building ***** Bill Matheny 1) The Boom Tube from Kirby's Fourth World 2) The Giant Key and Door of Superman's Fortress of Solitude. 3) The cool time platform that Reed Richards built in the sixties. 4) The door to Uncle Scrooge's money vault. 5) Ditko's entrance and foyer to Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum. ***** Tom Bondurant 1. The giant golden mountainside door to Superman's Fortress of Solitude (with accompanying "airplane marker" key, of course) 2. The secret elevator, concealed in a giant artificial tree, connecting the Wayne Foundation penthouse with the downtown Batcave 3. Calvin's front door, often thrown open unexpectedly by an overzealous Hobbes 4. Danny the Street's festively masculine storefronts 5. Reed Richards' portal to the Negative Zone ***** Scott Dunbier 1) Famous Funnies #213 cover, with the creature coming through the bulkhead. The finest Frazetta Comic book cover bar none (yes, including WSF #29) 2) Weird Science #16 cover by the great Wally Wood 3) The WOW Page from The Rocketeer, where the door is knocked from its hinges revealing Betty in the buff. 4) Bessie the Cow, stuck in a black hole in the first Jack B. Quick story by Alan Moore and Kevin Nowlan. 5) The first appearance of Swamp Thing ***** Don MacPherson 1) The grandfather clock leading from Wayne Manor to the Batcave. 2) The hall of seven sins leading to Shazam's throneroom in the Rock ofEternity. 3) The main foyer of the X-Mansion in Westchester, NY. 4) The SHIELD Helicarrier's flight deck. 5) The foyer of the Sanctum Sanctorum. ***** Mark Waid 1. The door to Superman's Fortress of Solitude 2. The who-could-this-possibly-fool barberpole-striped road-closed barrier exactly 14 miles outside Gotham City 3. The entrance to Luthor's Lair 4. The gateway to Arkham Asylum 5. The cork to the Bottle City of Kandor ***** Justin J. Major 1. The grandfather clock entrance to the Batcave (Batman serials) 2. The Shakespeare bust to the bookcase to the Batpoles entrance to the Batcave (Batman TV series) 3. The security gate on the Great Outdoor Fight Arena (Achewood) 4. The Super-Keyed, Super-Locked door to the Fortress of Solitude (Superman) 5. The stoop in Chris Ware's "Building Stories" (Acme Novelty Library) ***** Jacob Covey 1. Manhole into the sewers of New York City. 2. Transmat in the TCRI building. 3. Living room window of April O'Neil's New York City apartment. 4. Front door to the Northampton barn belonging to Casey Jones' family, specifically on Dec. 19. 5. Newspaper draped over Raphael's face, as he lies unconscious in the shit-fed sewer on, presumably, Dec. 23. This last threshold being only a metaphorical one demarcating the thinly constructed wall between the debilitating realities of life and the inner torture of youth's frank and fiery idealism. ***** Stergios Botzakis 1. The Batpole 2. The giant door to Superman's Fortress of Solitude 3. Dagwood Bumstead's front stoop 4. Boom Tube 5. Zeta-Beam ***** Uriel A. Duran 1) The Fortress of Solitude's classic steel door with huge arrow key 2) Waterfall in front of the Skull Cave 3) Wooly mammoth fossil 'protecting' the unexplored valley where Scrooge McDuck got rich 4) Any window used by Spider-man 5) Boom Tubes ***** Sean Kleefeld 1. Kirby-designed Negative Zone portal (Fantastic Four #51) 2. Byrne-designed Negative Zone portal (Fantastic Four #251) 3. Entry gate to Mechanicsburg (Girl Genius, Vol. 7) 4. The SHIELD babershop 5. Boom Tubes! ***** topic suggested by James C. Langdell ***** *****

In honor of the NYT's big announcement today, today's repurposed post is about newspapers : In his paean to Webcomic Achewood the other day, my fellow time.com blogger Lev Grossman mentioned in passing that "I always loved comic stripsa 'that was the sole reason my family ever bought the Boston Globe growing up." That got me thinking.

by Elisabeth@TFAW At Things From Another World, we have pledged to give away signed comics, graphic novels, lithographs, and more throughout 2010! We're starting off the fun with Achewood HC Volume 1: The Great Outdoor Fight , signed by creator Chris Onstad! Read more » Original post blogged on ComicList .

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At Things From Another World, we have pledged to give away signed comics, graphic novels, lithographs, and more throughout 2010! We’re starting off the fun with Achewood HC Volume 1: The Great Outdoor Fight, signed by creator Chris Onstad! Here’s how to win: first, you can go to one of our three Portland, Oregon locations and [...]

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i read ctrl alt del, questionable content, penny arcade, least i could do, gunnerkrigg court, something positive, sinfest, dr mcninja, achewood, xkcd, overcompensating, girls with slingshots, megatokyo, pictures for sad children, cyanide & happiness, smbc

Grant Goggans is the Hipster Dad. Although he's the newest person participating in this series in terms of my reading his work regularly, Goggans has already impressed me with the certainty of the relative straight-forward approach he employs. Grant Goggans does the heavy-lifting required to make himself a stopping point on-line without anyone in particular calling attention to what he does. He grabs comics with both hands. Goggans has a particular passion for the comics spinning out of the UK's long-running 2000 AD. I'm fascinated by a lot of those comics myself, their constant cycle of not quite ever getting over with US audiences, so it seemed a perfect topic for discussion. ***** TOM SPURGEON: Grant, you're an Internet discovery for me, and I know absolutely nothing about you. Could you talk a bit about how you went from reading comics to writing about them, your basic comics resume? Are you a dad? Are you a hipster? GRANT GOGGANS: I was probably never really a hipster, although I have read all the required music magazines, own lots of vinyl, lived for years in a college town (the best one, Athens) and spend most of my music money at independent record stores. Yet I never really went out enough to develop a really refined sense of scene snobbery. I missed almost all the early days of the Elephant 6 collective, and Cat Power's booze-ups, because I was happier staying in and watching Homicide: Life on the Street, really. I am certainly a dad, and from 2003 to 2008, I was raising my two wonderful children by myself. One Saturday in 2004, we made the usual trek from suburban Marietta, where we live, down to Decatur to buy PJ Harvey's album Uh Huh Her from Wuxtry Records. A girl who worked there for a time teased me about my situation, handing the album across the counter while my daughter bawled for Jake's Ice Cream, and gave me the nickname "Hipster Dad." I'd like to think she was just being playful, although the name "hipster" has certainly taken on a pretty awful reputation. I love it, though I think it made several of my friends cringe when I adopted it. I started blogging in December 2000 to promote my own comic. From 1998-2003, I wrote and drew The GMS Legion, an office-photocopier book which was inspired by classic LSH fandom and a desire to do a 1980s period piece set in high school. It was an update of notebook paper comics I did when I was 12. I was never at all successful, nor particularly good, but I did 13 issues, each 80-100 pages long, and did a couple of short strips for the first few Fluke anthologies before the reality and demands of single fatherhood and full time work got pretty heavy and I packed it up. I joined LiveJournal in June 2001 and immediately cajoled everybody I knew to get one as well. Very few of them still use it regularly. In the fall of 2004, I started doing the features which became my old "Weekly Comics Hype," trying to push DC's short-lived line of 2000 AD reprints whenever there was a new one out, or some other easily-purchased comic or collection whenever there wasn't. I've had a lot of luck with that, and several friends and readers who haven't read comics since they were kids have told me they've enjoyed trying the books I recommend. A couple of years ago, during some incident when LJ was sold to the Russians or something, there was talk that it might shut down. LJ was my only real web presence or social media, so I decided to branch off into separate sites on blogspot. I have The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf for all my book and comic reviews and try to update it at least twice a week. Reprint This! is updated twice a month and it rotates between a celebration of an out-of-print property and a follow-up article, usually with a review of an archival reprint and a bit of news about forthcoming collections. Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly 2000 AD blog, but I'm actually taking a break from that for a couple of months while I work on a guide to the library of Doonesbury books, and reread as much of that as I can. I hope to have this new blog at least started before the end of January. SPURGEON: Your most appealing choice to me was 2000 AD. That's not only an enormous work covering thousands of pages this decade, it's a series in which you seem to have a phenomenal and fervent interest . So I guess my first question would be how did you start to build your current level of interest in the magazine, have you personally been reading it for a very long time? GOGGANS: I have been a loyal squaxx dek Thargo since 1986, actually. I was very lucky to have a best friend, Dave Merrill, who now lives in Toronto, during that awful period when you're 15 and realizing that Marvel Comics aren't fun anymore. He had already graduated to books like Zot! and Flaming Carrot and the Eagle Judge Dredd reprints, books I'd never have considered reading as my superhero fandom ebbed. If he hadn't been around to say "No, you don't need to read Secret Wars II, you can read this instead," I'd have probably dropped comics entirely. I liked those Eagle Dredd reprints a lot, even if those great covers by Brian Bolland looked so much better than the poorly-colored, re-sized artwork inside. Eventually I found proper thrillpower in its raw, original form, and it blew my mind. Lots of the Atlanta-area comic shops carried back issues of 2000 AD then, even if none of those stores -- Oxford, Dr. No's, Titan -- seemed to have a consistent run of them. I think every time I went to any of them, I'd find a new back prog that I needed. Of course, I was pretty broke all the time even by the standards of a teenager in the 1980s, so I could only afford to build my collection very, very slowly. (You know, it's just occurred to me that all of those stores I mentioned are still around after more than a quarter of a century! Oxford's not as fun as it once was, while Titan Games & Comics has really become a very good chain, but still, 25 years in this market, they must all be doing something right, huh?) There's something about 2000 AD's classic format, the "bog roll" newsprint as it's called, that was so appealing to me. I guess it seemed so esoteric, having all of these wonderful worlds and all that terrific artwork in such a fragile delivery system. Even the advertisements for these odd foreign products like Weetabix, Spectrum computers and records by Alien Sex Fiend kept me captivated. I also fell in love with the silly affectation of a "Command Module" of Betelgeusians in boiler suits and creator droids assembling the comic, so even as the quality of the content dipped for a few years in the early '90s, I kept reading because it was so different and so much fun. SPURGEON: How have the years 2000-2009 treated 2000 AD? Are there two or three efforts within its pages you can point to as personal highlights? Do you have a take on how this era of the magazine is different than previous ones? GOGGANS: I think it's been an excellent decade for the comic. There were lots of ownership and editorial upheavals through the 1990s, but 2000 AD has been owned by Rebellion for a decade, and has had a single editor, Matt Smith, since 2002. Maybe the late '90s were a little wilder, when David Bishop was editor and throwing something new and weird at the wall every third week to see what would stick, but Smith's been a spectacular Tharg and really brought strong consistency to the comic. You just get some exceptionally high-quality SF every week. Smith's really worked at developing talent, which is one of 2000 AD's most important missions, and giving them room to create series and serials which can interlink and form intricate little comic universes. Ian Edginton gradually let us see that the worlds of his pirate adventure The Red Seas (drawn by Steve Yeowell) and the Victorian crime drama Stickleback (drawn by D'Israeli) are the same, and Si Spurrier did something similar with a wild, downbeat future war serial called The Vort (also drawn by D'Israeli), surprising us with the revelation that it's set in the universe of his cranky, robot-shagging, torturer-for-hire Lobster Random, which is drawn by Carl Critchlow. The most recent run of Robo-Hunter, which is a firm favorite, features the granddaughter of the original character. Another really nice benefit to the comic affording so much freedom to its creators is that they can take breaks and come back fully charged. Robbie Morrison took a very long time off from Nikolai Dante while he wrote The Authority for Wildstorm, and it came back better than ever. In a perfect world, Nikolai Dante would get deserved accolades from everybody as the best comic of the decade. When Simon Fraser returned as the artist, I punched the air and was accosting strangers in the street to tell them the good news. The other thing that really defines 2000 AD in the decade, to me, is the resurgence of Pat Mills. His work in the 1990s just didn't appeal to me, for a number of reasons. I'm just getting into his return in my Thrillpowered Thursday blog, but basically what happened is that he had some disagreements with Smith's predecessor as editor, Andy Diggle, and left the comic in 2001, focusing on publishing in France. Smith lured Mills back, and unfortunately he brought Slaine with him. (That and Dan Abnett's Sinister Dexter, both of which I once enjoyed, are the two strips which 2000 AD could cancel forever and I wouldn't lose a minute of sleep.) But Mills also created several new series, Black Siddha, Defoe and Greyshirt, all of which are completely terrific, and he's resurrected some of his classic characters, The ABC Warriors and Savage, for really wonderful new stories. I enjoy many of the newer writers a great deal, but when Pat Mills is in the prog, everybody's got to take it up a notch. SPURGEON: The people I know into Dredd and the other 2000 AD serials are fiercely devoted, and yet there never seem to be enough people like them to make the magazine even a modest hit in North America. I want to talk about the structural issues in the next question, but are there artistic reasons this material in general may not find a significant number of fans? GOGGANS: That's a tricky question I've considered for years, and I've never quite found the answer. It's clear that 2000 AD's format of wild, over-the-top SF melodrama is one that just never found a broad market in this country. People do find it, but they didn't find it in the big numbers that were needed 20 years ago to make it a long-running, known hit property. I think that when you're a teenager, you hit the point, for at least a few years, where you want to put away the superhero fight club comics. You start to see through them at the same time you discover kissing and your own music, not your parents'. I'm not suggesting 2000 AD is all that mature -- it can be shamelessly, stupidly, lovably adolescent -- but, as far as the North American comic experience goes, it doesn't really fit anywhere other than where it did in the '80s, when you could grow up from superhero fights to Zot! and Flaming Carrot and maybe Cerebus or Love & Rockets or Neat Stuff. I don't think that "step-up" exists today. My son loves Shaman King, Naruto and all the other Shonen Jump titles, and when he steps back from comics in a few years, as he invariably will, I wonder whether anything will be around to captivate him as an older teenager. Maybe if the delivery system in the '80s had been better, or Titan Books' old line of reprints more attractive to this market, you'd see many more fans today. Many of the same late teen boys who fell in love with Hopey and Maggie could have fallen in love with Halo Jones and Judge Anderson and there could be a much larger fanbase today. SPURGEON: How hard has Rebellion -- in addition to fans like yourself -- been hit by the current, half-cracked state of comics shop distribution? If I remember correctly, despite an aggressive trades program not all of the books they've done have even been offered here through Direct Market channels in the first place, let alone supported in a way that might allow them to build. GOGGANS: It's been a disaster, Tom. I think a percentage of the blame is certainly Rebellion's, but the overwhelming bulk of the problem, lately, is Diamond. I talk to shop owners all the time, and I really cannot understand how it's possible to screw up anything as simple as accepting deliveries and shipping them to stores. Diamond has really hurt small publishers like Rebellion and Yen Press. Their announcement about new minimums making life easier for retailers might as well have been made on an aircraft carrier with a "mission accomplished" banner. It would be churlish to blame everybody else for 2000 AD's problems, so yes, the failure starts at home. Rebellion reminds me of Bryan Ferry in 1972. He said that Roxy Music was off to conquer America, and they spent four weeks opening for Jethro Tull and Ten Years After in towns like Augusta, Chattanooga and Fayetteville, then came home and complained that America didn't get it. You can't effectively promote your product, whatever your product, without spending money and grabbing every potential customer by the shirt collar and screaming at them, basically. Rebellion's never done anything so loudly, never signed on for Free Comic Book Day or big ads in Previews or any kind of retailer-focused initiative, and they've devoted their North American promotion squarely on San Diego. I know Comic-Con is huge, but that's just a polite murmur if that's all you're going to do. But really, it's Diamond where the current problem lies. Now, maybe if Rebellion had been buying full-page ads and making Diamond happy with ad revenue for the last few years it wouldn't have been a candidate for this year's purge, but who knows? It's still Rebellion's job to make people interested in their product, and they didn't do it. Yet for ages, buying 2000 AD, the Judge Dredd Megazine and all the books was simple: Diamond shipped two issues of 2000 AD every other week. About once a year, they'd hiccup, skip a shipment and ship four the next time. Everybody was happy. At some point last fall, the wheels went off. There'd be a six-week gap between issues and then four would show up. Six weeks later, the missing two would show up, along with two of the next four. It wasn't just my shop; I speak with fans all over the country and employees of several stores in this area. As far as 2000 AD is concerned, that ship list you see at Diamond's site does not reflect reality, and depending on which warehouse ships product, your store could be weeks ahead of or behind the listing. My wife and I took a honeymoon road trip up to Montreal and back this summer, just before the "prog packs" began, stopping in all sorts of comic shops, and there were issues available in Boston shops we never saw in any Atlanta store, and we got issues here that stores in other cities apparently didn't. In September '09, my shop received an issue from November '08 which I had picked up at Boston's Million Year Picnic in July. This wasn't a reorder; Diamond just finally found a copy. Maybe I'll get the seven mid-2009 issues that I am still missing by next Halloween. So to combat this problem -- a recent problem of their own bungling creation -- Diamond decided to start soliciting the prog in a monthly polybagged package of four-five issues. They don't ship them. Atlanta stores -- three of them anyway -- got the July-offered "September pack" the day before Thanksgiving. That's the day that Diamond's public ship list claimed we'd be receiving the "October pack," which did arrive in Chicago stores. Here, it actually arrived the week before Christmas, when nothing was showing on the ship list. The issue of missing books is another story. Diamond canceled orders for about a half-dozen trade paperback editions because those orders were low. That's unfortunate, but also, disagreeably, understandable. Even if they run a lousy business, Diamond still has a bottom line, and Rebellion didn't create any excitement or demand for those books. There are several other titles, however -- Rebellion releases about two a month -- which Diamond never offered at all. I have also heard several complaints that Diamond doesn't keep enough stock of the books, forcing customers who do hear Rebellion's polite murmurs and want to try them out to wait for very long backorders. All of the books -- and they're terrific books, beautifully designed and printed -- are available from British bookstores or Amazon UK, but I don't want to spend money there, I want to spend it at my "local" shop in Athens, Bizarro Wuxtry, and give them my money. It's the best comic shop I've ever visited; only about two others come close. I could talk for hours about how wonderful Bizarro Wuxtry is, and how they deserve as much of my funnybook money -- and everybody else's -- as is feasible. But if Diamond won't give them the comics that I want to buy, I have no choice but to use the Internet to shop. It's ridiculous! SPURGEON: It was once suggested to me that John Wagner is the most under-appreciated mainstream comics writer of all time. Can you talk about some of his work in the magazine this decade? I'm thinking particularly of Origins, although if you have other works in mind, please expound. GOGGANS: He's more than the most under-appreciated, I think he's just about the best, full stop. He may not always be my favorite -- he doesn't blow my mind or break my heart as often as Grant Morrison or Gilbert Hernandez -- but nobody's as consistent as John Wagner in bringing the quality. It's not only on Judge Dredd, although he's been comparatively quiet this past decade, mainly working just on Dredd and Strontium Dog, which is also excellent. He's nowhere as proficient as he was in the '80s, when he and Alan Grant were co-writing about twelve scripts a week for four different weekly anthologies. Origins is a really good place to start for modern Wagner, although I think it's less friendly to new readers than would be ideal. This was a lengthy epic which ran from the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007, and finally explored the huge global wars that gave rise to the current "Dreddworld," with the Mega-Cities and the judging system, in the 2070s, several years before the beginning of the comic. This story is told in fragments by various characters while Dredd and some associates carry out an important mission in the Cursed Earth. While they're out in the desert, Dredd learns that he has a number of natural-born clone relatives, but they're all mutants and, consequently, it's illegal for them to enter his city, or anybody else's city for that matter. None of the Mega-Cities allow "genetic abnormalities." By the end of the story, Dredd has realized that his world got pretty far away from Chief Judge Fargo's hopes and dreams, and that the mutant laws are long overdue to be retired. So throughout 2007 and 2008, Wagner and the other Dredd writers, most notably Al Ewing, started exploring life in the city where mutants could finally live legally. Unfortunately, it's a powder keg of 400 million mostly unemployed, undereducated, lunatic bigots who've been told all their lives that muties are those terrible people who have to live in the desert, suddenly forced to share space with them. In a city where race, gender and sexual orientation stopped really mattering long ago, nobody ever really had to deal with hate crimes before, and Dredd chose to exhaust all his stock of goodwill and respect among the people and his fellow judges fighting for mutant rights. The real heartbreak finally came this year: Dredd lost. He and Chief Judge Hershey's regime are seen as failures and political embarrassments. So Hershey has been sent packing to a desk job on a frontier outpost on another planet and Dredd's been kicked into the desert to oversee some Mega-City-constructed townships for mutants, along with some failing, mediocre judges as his ineffective support staff. In other words, if the old man likes mutants so damn much, he can go live with them. They've even kicked out his protege to live and work there, to shove his legacy under the rug. Every bit of it, from the allegory of gay marriage being overturned by voters in Maine and California, to the effect it's had on characters we've grown to love, is heartbreaking and powerful stuff. I can't think of any other comic which has allowed a hero to lose so stunningly… Well, it's not all heartbreaking. Mega-City One's mayor is really a serial killer who Judge Dredd believes has been dead for years. That's pretty funny! SPURGEON: It seems astonishing to me to be talking about 2000 AD, with its particular publishing schedule and devotion to serial storytelling, when it seems like that was an outdated mode a couple of generations back. With trades collecting a lot of material, do you still think of 2000 AD as the primary delivery method for these stories? Are there specific pleasures in that format you think other comics efforts could exploit on their own behalf? GOGGANS: Andy Diggle famously described 2000 AD, at its best, as delivering you shot glasses of rocket fuel. You may not like every episode of every tale, but all five episodes each week should try and knock you on your backside with excellent characters in fast-moving, over-the-top stories. Nothing else in comics can give you that thrill, and it's the highwire, anything-goes weekly nature that makes reading 2000 AD so fun. Actually, something that came pretty close, to me, was Kyle Baker's lovely, ridiculous Hawkman story in Wednesday Comics, where the stakes and the scenario kept getting higher, dementedly so, every week. If DC would commit to publishing something like that every week, with a rotating, flexible lineup of stories and creators, not tied to continuity, I would consider buying it. That and the Supergirl story by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner were just hugely entertaining. Really, with 2000 AD, the format is a big part of the fun. Nikolai Dante, Stickleback and Savage would be among my favorite comics this decade regardless of how they're approached, but watching them unfold in cliffhanger fashion week-to-week is what keeps readers hooked. You can tell that some stories are "written for the trade" -- Pat Mills seems to design his storylines in 60-page chunks, rather than ten six-page episodes -- but there's a real sense of excitement to having stories come and go, with new talent trying out a Future Shock in between larger epics. And once you buy into the business of the comic being edited by a space alien who talks in far-out intergalactic slang, with druids sneaking office gossip into the copyright information each issue, you're in for a whole new layer of fun. I suppose Mad is the only other comic that would promise readers that certain, unpopular writers won't be back because they've been fed to a maniacal garbage grinder. SPURGEON: Is 2000 AD still published ten years from now? Will it ever be a hit in North America? GOGGANS: Hopefully, and probably not. Rebellion, sensibly, keeps quiet about the business end of things, but the feeling is that any international sales are just gravy to an operation that needs to perform strongly in Britain, on the newsstand and through subscriptions, which it seems to have done well for more than 30 years. Obviously an increased American presence could help their bottom line, but I wonder just how much is possible. It isn't very "hipster" of me, but I quite like minor league sports, and if you ever want a sobering reality check of how small and insular our hobby really is, try comparing those ICv2 sales estimates to the reported paid attendance of even small market teams. On Thanksgiving night, I watched a AA ECHL team in Duluth host a team from Charlotte with a crowd about the same size as Savage Dragon's nationwide audience. In the direct market, 2000 AD apparently doesn't even sell the 3000 copies it seems to take to reach the bottom of that chart. I think that it's certainly possible for 2000 AD to grow, but it will take a lot of work from Rebellion to finally capitalize on Judge Dredd's name recognition. However, with the Diamond situation as awful as it is, broader success probably won't come in the direct market, and so the public won't easily see, on a chart, whether they're successful at it. You can actually download the comic every week at Clickwheel for less than Diamond charges for a physical copy, and get the full line of books from British sellers who keep it in stock, bypassing Diamond entirely. Unless, like me, you have tremendous loyalty to a much-loved comic store, there's no need to leave the house to get these comics at all. Clickwheel is a very good delivery system. I've begun using it to read the prog week-by-week while hoping for the hard copies to show up for my library, and I like that they have many titles from several British small-press companies available. Rebellion was very forward-thinking in getting this system ready for digital delivery, but I fear it will be quickly swamped by Longbox, should that get up and running, with its planned lower prices and broader selection. I hope that Rebellion is looking forward to the next platform after this. I wonder whether the next generation of Kindle or Nook will be set up for comics, and if so, 2000 AD should be ready for that. There are probably other things that Rebellion could be doing to increase their characters' visibility. I suppose my opinion's not worth as much as a highly-paid marketing consultant, but maybe reaching around the direct market with lots more convention appearances is the right way to go. Finding some common ground with Grant Morrison to reprint Zenith and even present new stories would be an enormous selling point. Announcing that, or similar projects, from panels at big American shows where there's lots of blogger media would be a great idea, rather than letting rumors slip out via Amazon advance listings, which seems to be how it goes today. Getting review copies of books to that same blogger media, to everybody with an audience, is another. Bringing back Samantha Slade for a 26-week residency is another. Well, possibly not that last one, but it would make me very happy, anyway! ***** * 2000 AD, Various, Rebellion, Tabloid, weekly. ***** This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter. * CR Holiday Interview One: Sean T. Collins On Blankets * CR Holiday Interview Two: Frank Santoro On Multiforce * CR Holiday Interview Three: Bart Beaty On Persepolis * CR Holiday Interview Four: Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays * CR Holiday Interview Five: Shaenon Garrity On Achewood * CR Holiday Interview Six: Christopher Allen On Powers * CR Holiday Interview Seven: David P. Welsh On MW * CR Holiday Interview Eight: Robert Clough On ACME Novelty Library #19 * CR Holiday Interview Nine: Jeet Heer On Louis Riel * CR Holiday Interview Ten: Chris Mautner On The Scott Pilgrim Series * CR Holiday Interview Eleven: Tim Hodler On In The Shadow Of No Towers * CR Holiday Interview Twelve: Noah Berlatsky On The Elephant And Piggie Series * CR Holiday Interview Thirteen: Tucker Stone On Ganges * CR Holiday Interview Fourteen: Douglas Wolk On The Invincible Iron Man: World's Most Wanted * CR Holiday Interview Fifteen: Jog On Death Note * CR Holiday Interview Sixteen: Ben Schwartz On BPRD ***** ***** *****

* nothing much that's new in the incident Friday where a 28-year-old Somali man hacked his way into Kurt Westergaard's home, forcing the Danish Muhammad Cartoons cartoonist into a panic room with his five-year-old grandchild, after which the Somali national was shot and wounded and charged upon leaving the house subsequent to failing to penetrate the reinforced door of said panic room. With his axe. There are potential links to Al-Qaida in addition to the radical Somali group Danish authorities knew about before the attack. That same article has quotes from Westergaard. * in happier news, Ken Parille has written a fine, lengthy appreciation of Ivan Brunetti's January 8, 2007 cover for The New Yorker. * Sean Kleefeld looks at the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Didn't King Features have one or two animated crossovers in the 1970s banding all the characters together against a specific threat? Like maybe they were all captured and brought to an island? I seem to remember something with Snuffy Smith and Popeye. * Tom Bondurant looks at the Wednesday comics-buying ritual and suggests that it may be weirder and more special than commonly thought. * happy anniversary to the Robot 6 blog. * recordings from the Women In Comics conference at Cambridge are now available. * Danny Hellman is offering his Typhon anthology at a discount. * the writer, editor, occasional comics critic Gil Roth has listed his favorite comics of the '00s. They are:* Jaime Hernandez's body of work (Mostly Fantagraphics, 2000-2009) * Kevin Huizenga's body of work (Various Publishers, 2000-2009) * Safe Area Gorazde / The Fixer, Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2000 / Drawn and Quarterly 2001) * Achewood, Chris Onstad (Webcomics, 2001-2009) * Ice Haven, Dan Clowes (Fantagraphics, 2001; Pantheon, 2005) * Fred The Clown, Roger Langridge (Fantagraphics, 2004) * Louis Riel, Chester Brown (D&Q;, 2004) * The Death Ray, Dan Clowes (Fantagraphics, 2004) * All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely (DC, 2005-2008) * Wimbledon Green, Seth (D&Q;, 2005) * Don't Go Where I Can't Follow / The End #1, Anders Nilsen (D&Q;, 2006 / Fantagraphics-Coconino, 2007) * I Killed Adolf Hitler, Jason (Fantagraphics, 2007) * Asterios Polyp, David Mazzuchelli (Pantheon, 2009) * Essex County Trilogy, Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf, 2009) * George Sprott: 1894-1975, Seth (D&Q;, 2009) * The Book of Genesis, R Crumb (WW Norton, 2009)Roth has write-ups on each selection and several graphs on how he agonized over the "new work"/"collected work" quandary, so I hope you'll read the posting through the first link. * missed it: one-day passes for Saturday attendance of Comic-Con International are already sold out. Fridays should go pretty soon. * I enjoyed this Noah Van Sciver-cartooned interview with Gary Groth. * finally, just because it's no longer Christmas doesn't mean the holiday gift-giving goodness has stopped: here's one straight from God. I love me some Ed Brubaker Captain America, but Ed's never written anything as funny as the movie Cap snaking Ned Beatty out of his car.

Noah Berlatsky is the prolific critic behind the team blog Hooded Utilitarian, which was folded into the TCJ.com family in early December. One of his choices was the Elephant and Piggie series, from the illustrator and occasional cartoonist Mo Willems. The re-emergence of comics for a wide variety of children is definitely one of the major comics publishing trends this decade, both from comics publishers and from traditional ones, and the Elephant and Piggie books are not just reminiscent of comics but straight up examples of the form. I'll let Mr. Berlatsky explain the rest. -- Tom Spurgeon ***** TOM SPURGEON: Give me the basics on this one, Noah. I know Elephant and Piggie is a series, and I think it may be aimed at the kids in the first half of elementary school. How many books are there -- what's the scope of our discussion here? NOAH BERLATSKY: Willems' books are actually generally aimed younger than elementary school; my son loved them from when he was three, probably, and still enjoys them at six, though they may be getting just a little young for him. The Elephant and Piggie series has multiplied fast; Willem started writing them in 2007, and as of now trusty wikipedia lists ten, with another (I Am Going!) scheduled for early 2010. I think we've read them all and own almost all... at least in theory. Finding things on our children's bookshelf is, alas, often a dicey proposition. SPURGEON: I know Mo Willems as a cartoonist more by his travelogue in pictures You Can Never Find A Rickshaw When It Monsoons, and am only aware of the success of his career in kids' books, not so much what that work is like. How did you discover this specific work? Are you a fan of Willems? BERLATSKY: That's funny; while I have vague name recognition on his travelogue, I've never seen it or even read very much about it. I found Willems because I'm a dad, so we're often in the children's book section. I don't remember anyone recommending these even; I think we just picked one up at the bookstore and loved it. Since then we've found a number of his other books and series, and, yeah, they're all pretty great. His pigeon series ("Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!") is maybe as good as Elephant and Piggie. The Knuffle Bunny series is extremely cute as well. He's got a couple of others that I don't like quite as much -- Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed has one of those "everyone be yourself!" morals that I kind of never need to read in a children's book again. But generally, yeah, he does great work. SPURGEON: What made you think of this work specifically in the context of comics? Is the work like a pair samples I've seen on-line in traditional comics form? How much work have you seen in children's books that's more or less is comics and how much is merely reminiscent of comics? What would you suggest if someone were interested in doing some exploration of those kinds of works? BERLATSKY: I don't think it's an issue of seeing it in the context of comics; Willems' work is comics. He uses cartoony simplified animal characters and makes extensive use of comic tropes like motion lines and speech bubbles. The narrative is entirely advanced through sequential action; the movement and words of the characters directly tell the story; it's absolutely not text with illustrations. Some of the chicken books even use panels. The only reason you wouldn't call it a comic is because it's not sold through the direct market, basically. I think in terms of what's out there in children's books that I've seen, that are like comics, Willems is maybe out on one end of a continuum, but he's certainly not alone or unique. Children's books regularly make use of speech bubbles, for example, and many of them mix comics tropes with some text explanation in varying degrees. Obviously there's Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen, which is a Winsor McCay tribute. Mercer Mayer's A Boy, A Dog, and A Frog is a wordless comic; many of his other classic books rely on images to move the story (as in a couple of spots in There's A Nightmare In My Closet.) Sandra Boynton uses speech bubbles liberally, and her books can often read as comics I think. Satoshi Kitamura is a Japanese expatriate living in Britain who writes both manga and manga-influenced books; and plays very consciously with ways that comics can be children's books and vice versa. Calef Brown's stuff looks a lot like Fort Thunder... I think there are really lots of examples. It's true that a lot of it maybe wouldn't be called comics by Scott McCloud, but I think in some ways that actually indicates it's healthier, more adventurous medium. SPURGEON: Are you familiar at all with Toon Books? Those are comics outright, although one difference is that because Francoise Mouly wanted them to be of value to children in an educational sense you have some input as to the types of language that will work, the clarity of certain visual keys... where does that kind of comics effort fit into your fluid continuity between the two forms? BERLATSKY: I haven't seen these, though I did see the Spiegelman/Mouly anthology Little Lit which I thought was pretty dreadful overall. There are a number of great comics for kids, though. Jill Thompson's Magic Trixie is a favorite in our house. Lewis Trondheim's Li'l Santa books are great, too... and for that matter, my son really enjoyed having me read Asterix to him. The Marvel Adventures series vary widely in quality, but are overall pretty good... and the DC children's series Tiny Titans is particularly good, making use of a more children's booky art style that also happens to be vastly superior to most of the art in mainstream titles. I think more superhero comics aimed at kids and marketed as children's books seems like a no-brainer in a lot of ways. Marvel and DC have taken some steps in this direction... but really, the market there seems potentially much larger than the Direct Market, it seems to me. SPURGEON: What do you think makes successful character designs for works like these? It struck me looking at a photo of the stuffed animals that Willems nailed something here, but when I look at the actual drawings I'm not sure I can qualify what exactly that it is. Why do these characters work, particularly for their intended audience? BERLATSKY: I'm not sure I can really answer that exactly; four- to six-year-olds like lots of things for reasons I find more or less baffling (Bakugan... I confess; I don't get it.) I can talk a little about why I myself find Willems work effective, though. He has a lovely line -- not sure what he's using exactly, but he gets a lot of texture, and the forms are simple but fluid. His facial expressions are wonderful too; he's got some great eyebrows and does wonderful things with mouths and eyes. It reminds me a little of Kate Beaton, actually; just a real knack for expressing a lot with a few strokes. SPURGEON: In your essay on the books, you suggest that they have a slapstick quality that strips don't have anymore. What exactly do you mean by slapstick quality? Can you pinpoint that? Because these don't seem exemplars of slapstick: they're not out of control or super-manic or close to violent. Is there something essential here that makes something slapstick in your eyes that doesn't have to be pushed to the nth degree? BERLATSKY: I guess what I was thinking of here is the way that the characters are so much in motion. They're always skipping and bounding, moving around the page in complicated patterns with dotted lines showing their paths. Even if they just stand there he's often got motion lines showing how and where there feet and heads and hands are twitching. You're right of course that they're very gentle books; nobody's getting crushed by rocks or even hit with pies. But there's an energy there that still says slapstick to me, even if it's just the moment in I Will Surprise My Friend where they jump out from behind a rock and scare each other so badly that they leap in the air and shriek and fall over backwards. You hardly see that kind of expressive, expansive physical humor in contemporary comic strips, it seems to me, because, among other reasons, there's just not room. Part of the effectiveness of Willems' humor and movement is that it occurs on a full page. Reduce it down to strip size and some of those motion lines would pretty much completely disappear. I could be wrong here I suppose; I don't read a ton of strip comics these days -- I guess the one's I'm most familiar with are Get Fuzzy and Dilbert. And I actually think both those strips are funny -- though Dilbert is remarkably ugly. But I certainly don't see much use of this kind of physical humor in either of them, nor in other strips I've occasionally glanced at. As another example, if Chris Onstad was a third of the cartoonist Mo Willems is, I might actually find Achewood tolerable. SPURGEON: Why do you think strips don't have that manic quality anymore? Is it a cultural development, a formal restriction based on size, a self-consciousness about low-class roots? BERLATSKY: Well, as I said, I think a lot of it is size for newsprint…though why it's the case for webcomics I really can't fathom. Though you know, if I have to pull something out of my posterior, it could be that webcomics aren't really for kids for the most part. I think a lot of the physical humor is something kids really enjoy especially. I think adults, on the other hand, can be satisfied by just having some punchline about the HR department even if the drawing looks like a kind of stale wad of gum that would probably sigh and fart and expire if you even suggested to it that it might put a motion line over near its left elbow there. And if you can be satisfied with that... well, good drawing is difficult and rare. Folks who can do that can probably make a living doing something more likely to be lucrative than webcomics. Though, to be fair, Kate Beaton is a fine artist... though she doesn't really do the kind of slapticky action I'm talking about either. I don't know. The truth is, I don't know enough about webcomics to speculate about this very effectively. But why let that stop me? You know, most monitors aren't necessarily going to allow for full page movement either the way the elephant and piggie books do. I think there's an argument to be made that physically and logistically, books just do this sort of thing better than computer screens, at least at the moment. SPURGEON: How much about how the Piggie and Elephant books work has to do with its very basic but obviously effective coloring? Can comics learn anything from children's book illustration in terms of visual language? BERLATSKY: I don't think the color work in Mo Willems is necessarily spectacular; he keeps things pretty simple, and it looks fine, but I don't know that I'd make huge claims for it beyond that. I think if you were going to learn something from Willems' color work, it might be "first do no harm." And, yeah, god knows that colorists on mainstream comics could stand to learn that lesson. 
 SPURGEON: What exactly were you suggesting in terms of a move on-line as a possibility we'll see more work of this type from comics-makers? It seems like you're talking about that cartoonists will be able to take more time to work on more material, but then you cite as a counter-example PvP, which is a daily strip. BERLATSKY: I was thinking of more time and more space. I probably didn't know anything about the mechanics or timing of PVP when I said that except that I thought it was (and that it is) ugly. But... perhaps the demand for daily content on the web could explain part of why there hasn't been an impetus to try more formal experimentation, or at least variation. SPURGEON: It seems like you're for a greater variety of ways of doing things generally, that you have an aversion to the kind of ossification that come with hard categories and boundaries. Is that a fair assessment? It seems like the decade has been really push and pull that way, with a lot of hybrids being published but also a stronger definitional sense of comics. Would comics in general be better off if folks embraced and paid attention to more forms of visual storytelling than the ones usually strictly defined as comics. Is that where comics is going? BERLATSKY: I think it's a fair assessment more or less, at least in regard to comics. I don't think it's a particularly controversial stance to say that American comics with the direct market has gotten itself in a rut in terms of both genre and marketing that it would do well to try to get out of. Some of the alternative models -- like manga -- I quite like; others, like the more literary memoirs following in the wake of Maus, I'm not such a fan of; still others, like webcomics, I'm largely ignorant of. But, yeah, aesthetically and market-share wise, I think comics can only be aided by trying to reclaim some of the limbs that have been lopped off over the years. And I think children's books could certainly be an important part of that. ***** * Watch Me Throw the Ball!, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423113489, March 2009, $8.99 * My Friend is Sad, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423102975, April 2007, $8.99 * Today I Will Fly, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423102959, April 2007, $8.99 * I Am Invited to a Party!, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423106873, September 2007, $8.99 * There Is a Bird on Your Head!, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423106865, September 2007, $8.99 * I Love My New Toy!, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423109619, June 2008, $8.99 * I Will Surprise My Friend!, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423109627, June 2008, $8.99 * Are You Ready to Play Outside?, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423113470, October 2008, $8.99 * Elephants Cannot Dance, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423114108, June 2009, $8.99 * Pigs Make Me Sneeze!, Mo Willems, Hyperion, picture book, 64 pages, 1423114116, October 2009, $8.99 ***** This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter. * CR Holiday Interview One: Sean T. Collins On Blankets * CR Holiday Interview Two: Frank Santoro On Multiforce * CR Holiday Interview Three: Bart Beaty On Persepolis * CR Holiday Interview Four: Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays * CR Holiday Interview Five: Shaenon Garrity On Achewood * CR Holiday Interview Six: Christopher Allen On Powers * CR Holiday Interview Seven: David P. Welsh On MW * CR Holiday Interview Eight: Robert Clough On ACME Novelty Library #19 * CR Holiday Interview Nine: Jeet Heer On Louis Riel * CR Holiday Interview Ten: Chris Mautner On The Scott Pilgrim Series * CR Holiday Interview Eleven: Tim Hodler On In The Shadow Of No Towers ***** ***** *****

Filed under: Humor, Art / Design

My friend Sean and I exchange a certain sort of prank with each other: We try to get the other hooked on a webcomic with a massive archive. It's a sort of death by chocolate: If Sean can get me hooked on a comic, he knows he's tied up a good ten hours of my life, because I absolutely must read the entire thing. The worst are the storyline comics. It's one thing to chug through the three-panel jokes of Penny Arcade or Wondermark; it's another to immerse yourself in the multi-year narratives of comics like the following.

Scary Go Round
This British adventure comedy is the webcomic that most deserves to be turned into a film.


Achewood
Achewood's charm comes from three things: The surprisingly deep characters, the creative situations they're put in, and author Chris Onstaad's unique way of putting a sentence together. An example: "We're wearing the same shirt, carob lips, and he's Heidi Klum to my QE2."


Order of Tales
This massive 513-page volume is a prequel to another story, Rice Boy.


Goats
This series began as a typical talking-heads commentary comic, then developed into a multi-threaded story about almost every human in the world going comatose, a goldfish and a devil hunting yeti in an underworld, and a universe where Woody Allen is in charge of infinite monkeys. Plus a universe entirely made of a drinks lounge.


There, now you've gotta read them too. It's gonna be a great year.

 

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If Tim Hodler isn't my favorite critical voice of the last half-decade, he's in the top three. The New York City-based writer and editor is part of the Comics Comics gang via his participation in The Ganzfeld. I think he has a way of sliding up and over the rhetorical pile-ups that accumulate around various comics works and getting at their heart in clear, forceful language. I was delighted that we ended up picking Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow Of No Towers for our chat. For obvious reasons, that book will be remembered as a comics publication tied into this decade. -- Tom Spurgeon TOM SPURGEON: Tim, I'm going to apologize in advance for a few more questions of set-up than usual. First of all, can I ask you about your personal experience with 9/11? Were you in the city? What are the memories that stick out to you now about that time just after, your own reaction and what you observed from others? TIMOTHY HODLER: Oh, good! If there's one thing I've learned over the last eight years, it's that everyone loves hearing about what you were doing on 9/11. My fairly typical for a New York City resident story: I was lying in bed, listening to my clock radio and procrastinating the start of my work day when I heard a loud bang that may or may not have been one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. I lived in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn at the time, and don't really know if I was actually close enough to hear the collision, but when I got up and turned on the television, CNN was reporting that an airplane had hit the towers. At first, it didn't really sink in as anything more than a freak accident, and I was late for work, so I just kind of goggled for a moment before showering and heading for the subway. When I learned that the trains into Manhattan weren't running, I thought, "Great, one more thing is going wrong." Then I noticed that everyone on the street seemed incredibly frightened, and I began to realize the magnitude of what had happened. Fortunately, I did not know anyone personally who died in the attacks, but like everyone else in New York, the following days and weeks and months were very frightening. I won't rehearse the details everyone has heard a million times (Giuliani, cell phones, ashes, etc.). I was working at New York magazine at the time, and in charge of the letters page, and that became a slight issue after anthrax attacks began that were believed to be targeted at the media. There was a strange but strong feeling of community in those days, which you could tell even at the time was fleeting. When a young person went out at night to a show or a concert or party or something, it felt like an act of communal bravery, like an existential act in the face of apocalypse. You know, someone would always take the opportunity to shout into the microphone some New Normal bravado like, "We're still here!" or something angrier and more profane. Occasions like that were obviously stupid but in the midst of a crowd (and the times) carried an emotional charge. Another difference, I found, is that at any moment, an intense argument could start between people who were friends, each taking on uncharacteristic stances. In retrospect, the intensity of those days is hard to comprehend. The last strange thing from that time I will mention is that on the night of September 11, my now-wife and I walked to the shore of the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to look across the water at downtown Manhattan, and found a large crowd of scores of people already there, staring in silence at the pillars of smoke where the WTC once stood, which were framed by a bizarrely technicolor sunset. I have to admit that I felt a little like a lemming, but also like it was somehow important to participate, for reasons I can't articulate. It didn't feel ghoulish until we spotted a tattered denim-and-leather, tattooed Williamsburg couple, groping each other and making out like there was no tomorrow. Based on the looks people were giving them, not many appreciated their disaster-inspired exhibitionism, but somehow it really brought out the surreality of the situation for me. Very extreme Thanatos versus Eros stuff, all wrapped up in a designer clothing. I was disgusted by them at the time, but I'm not sure I was right to be. SPURGEON: Have you read or seen any other 9/11-related art that weren't comics, like Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, the Onion's post-9/11 issue or Paul West's The Immensity Of The Here and Now? What stands out to you almost a decade later and why? HODLER: Hmm. I don't know how much September 11th-related art I've actually seen. I mean, Reno 911 was okay, but lacked focus. (That's not funny, so pretend I didn't say it.) I didn't see the Oliver Stone movie or read the Paul West novel, but I did read the Onion issue, and found it mostly solid but underwhelming. Like, it wasn't really bad, but not nearly as funny as everyone made it out to be. I mean, take something like the "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule" -- not really a laugh riot, and the ending ("God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.") is sentimental to a fault. I think a lot of that issue was like that. But there's question but that it seemed to serve a necessary function for a lot of people. I could never tell how sincere people were being when I heard the constant refrain about needing "permission to laugh again." When David Letterman teared up on his initial return to television, it felt genuine and moving, but six or seven weeping television hosts later, it started to feel like kabuki theater or something. (Of course, kabuki apparently fills a cultural need, too.) In fact, I would say almost all of the art I've experienced that was intended to be a direct response to the attacks, from Don DeLillo's Harper's article and novel to the statue of a falling woman that stirred up a lot of controversy in the New York tabloids at the time, struck me as pretty strongly inadequate. Michael Moore's an egomanical boor, but the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11, which used audio from the World Trade Center attacks that morning, actually brought me to tears in the theater -- the one and only time I have ever cried at the movies. I actually resented him for including those recordings, which felt like an exploitative sucker punch. (That is also why I have yet to see United 93, an experience I had no interest in reliving, though I've heard some good things about it, and maybe I should.) In general, I have preferred works that indirectly approached the events to ones that tackled it head on. It is quite possible that I am forgetting more than one work that deserves more praise. SPURGEON: Do you think there are difficulties specific to this event in terms of making art about it? I've had it suggested to me that the event itself was such an artistic experience on the ground and on TV that it makes suspect other takes on the same circumstances. But I'm not sure why that is. Is it harder to make 9/11 art than it was to make art about Pearl Harbor? What makes it different? HODLER: Is there a lot of great Pearl Harbor art that I am unaware of? The Michael Bay movie was fairly hilariously despicable, and 1941 is justifiably considered a debacle, but I guess From Here to Eternity had its moments. [Spurgeon laughs] I think it is impossible for an artist to wholly capture the experience of a person walking down the street to buy a sandwich, much less the violent deaths of 3000 persons in a politically inspired attack that ended up effecting the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. Which doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried; I'd love to read a novel that really brought to vivid life the whole sandwich-buying experience. Your point about the vast amount of media exposure that 9/11 received from the get go is an interesting one to ponder -- if 24-hour cable news channels existed in the days of "King" Arthur, would we ever have gotten a book as miraculous as Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur? My guess is no, we wouldn't, and yes, our art and literature has been impoverished by internet-enabled information overload. But that's just how I feel today. On other days, that position would feel like myopic whining. There have always been obstructions to creating complicated, life-enriching art; it's just the nature of the obstacles that change, not their magnitude. SPURGEON: In comics, specifically, did you experience any of the comics tribute issues that came out in the months after 9/11 or have you looked at them or considered them since? The newspaper strips did one as well later that year. Can you articulate a thought or two on the kind of art that resulted? While I'm sure everyone who approached the project did so sincerely, I had a negative reaction to a lot of that art. To paint in broad strokes, I thought the one with the crying superheroes were silly to the point of insult, the ones with people standing outside and musing on the state of the universe were self-indulgent and the ones with patriotic leanings seemed knee-jerk, angry and ill considered. That makes this question loaded as well as rambling, but did you have similar reactions. What did you think then and what do you think now? HODLER: I read the 9/11 Emergency Relief anthology from Alternative Comics when it was published, mostly because my wife was invited to participate and received free copies in exchange, and I read the two DC "Artists Respond" charity anthologies this month, after you invited me to participate in this interview. (I had skimmed them, and the Marvel book, back when they were first published, but didn't read them very thoroughly at the time.) My reactions then and now are extremely similar to yours. In the Alternative book, I found the shorter strips most tolerable, and least risible. Harvey Pekar and Tony Millionaire's modest and clear-headed opening contribution ("I bet it doesn't get any easier from here.") inspired hopes that the rest of the collection couldn't satisfy, though as I mentioned, there are a few strong entries here and there. The stories in both this and the DC books about comic-book fans who just can't believe that Superman didn't save them are and were disheartening, though I remember feeling more sympathy for their emotional stunted nature in 2002, both because the books were for charity, and because many of the cartoonists who participated didn't have a history of artistic ambition. Taking on 9/11 as your first serious attempt at art would be pretty daunting. That said, there was one terrible category you didn't mention: the rambling, twelve-page diary comic stories capturing every mundane detail of the cartoonist's day on September 11, and imbuing it all with terrible significance, even though almost all of them revolved around watching television and talking to Mom on the telephone. (I know I'm asking for it after my answer at the beginning of this interview, but I tried to keep it short and unassuming -- and more importantly, I wouldn't have brought it up if you hadn't asked! I swear.) But yes, supervillains crying over terrorist attacks are moronic, the "philosophical" strips are incredibly underwhelming, and the political strips didn't help much. I did like that Dean Haspiel didn't hesitate about drawing himself shirtless and in boxer-briefs, even in this context. That made me laugh, in a good way. And Frank Miller's "I hate God" strip is fascinating in a keeping-tabs-on-the-progress-of-his-evolving-and-inscrutable-political-philosophy kind of way. There are other strips worth talking about, but I've probably gone on long enough, and anyway, who's rambling now? SPURGEON: There was an interesting notion that was floated around the time of the 9/11 tribute books that they were important divorced from their content because industries that support art forms make books of that kind at turning points in history, have some sort of reaction. To bring it to No Towers, you could also say that art forms that function in a certain way make tribute books and foster books in reaction. Do you think there's anything to that sort of artistic responsibility? HODLER: I can understand why someone in an editorial or publishing position would think, "We need to cover 9/11," or why a weekly or daily cartoonist (especially a political one) would feel obligated to respond to an event of that magnitude. I mean, it would have been weird if Garry Trudeau had just gone on as if nothing had happened. That being said, I would hesitate before dictating to artists any specific responsibilities. I think artists are responsible to their own vision, that they have a duty to express artistic truth (a slippery word) as they see it to the best of their ability. But I think a world in which every cartoonist was forced to publish a response to 9/11 would lead to an enormous amount of bad art. See the contents of the previously mentioned anthologies for evidence of my position. SPURGEON: Are there any works in which you can detect the presence of 9/11 that maybe doesn't work with it explicitly? Is there a hangover that effects the art, and if not, why not? For example, I've wondered after how it hasn't changed the scale of superhero comics, where in the real world this destruction of a few buildings turns the world upside own and in these stories they're frequently leveling entire city blocks in this kind of unrelenting series of physical horrors. But I could imagine a similar effect in any number of comics… is there anything resembling a 9/11 hangover you can think of? HODLER: This is an interesting question for sure, and the answer to it will probably be obvious in hindsight, a decade or two from now. I think in some sense 9/11 itself hasn't caused a hangover (besides a temporary moratorium on disaster movies, and then, as you imply, an intensification of the CGI explosions in them now that they're back), but that subsequent events made possible by it have, such as the Patriot Act, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, et cetera. I'm not sure if I'm reading you right in your comment on superhero comics, but if you're saying that there seems to be even more city-destroying mayhem than before, I think you're probably right, or at least it feels that way. One other thing that has changed is that both of the big superhero companies, Marvel in particular, seem to have figured out that piggy-backing on current events, even in the most half-assed way, can lead to media coverage. This is a pretty obvious thing to point out, but it's still maybe worth mentioning that line-wide events like Civil War and Dark Reign, et cetera, are largely fueled by recent world history, which I think is fairly new for superhero comics, at least to this huge extent. And of course, you have the constant dark "crises" at DC as well, which may not be new, but certainly grew more unrelenting. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is due to recent politics and how much is due to the state of the market as a whole, but it's there. It is fascinating to me how much "alternative" comic-book artists have avoided the politics and history of the Bush era. It's a far cry from the underground days. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it's understandable, as it's hard to make political art that is actually art. But I remember when Zap #15 came out, which included a Gilbert Shelton Wonder Warthog story that took on contemporary American politics. It wasn't really a particularly good strip, actually, but it still felt like something of an indictment of the timidity of so many current younger cartoonists. Then again, the culture has changed, and as I said above, I don't believe that artists have a responsibility to take on these things unless they feel the calling. It still seems remarkable that so few do feel the calling. I also think that without Osama bin Laden, Lord of the Rings would not have won Best Picture. SPURGEON: Can you give me a few sentences of thought on Art Spiegelman, where he stands in your personal pantheon of comics creators and as an arts figure generally? Did you have expectations based on that view when opening this book? HODLER: Art Spiegelman is unarguably one of the most important figures in comic-books of the past thirty-five or so years, but he's never been a particular favorite of mine. I find his persona grating; he is sometimes comes off as irritatingly self-involved, and his critical enthusiasms often appear curated for hip credibility and respectability (an odd thing to claim of a cartoonist, I know, but still). These very personal, unfair, and probably irrelevant criticisms aside, Maus was the first comic I ever read with unmistakable artistic ambitions, and I still think it one of the very greatest, most successful, and most moving single works ever created in the medium. That alone earns him a lifetime pass, and when you add the nearly impossible to overstate influence of RAW, you've got two lifetime passes, which is a record for American cartoonists. His critical essays are pretty much unfailingly insightful and deeply considered, even when I disagree with them, and he's produced a handful of New Yorker covers that will probably be considered classics for as long as the magazine is remembered. Breakdowns and the new memoir are interesting and important minor works, but I'm not much of a fan of most of the other comics and illustrations I have seen from him. His recently published sketchbooks are valuable and surprisingly revealing, of not only his artistic limitations, but also his insecurities, and what I (cringe to) call his generosity in allowing readers access to them. Oh, and the Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics he co-edited this year is impeccable. In terms of my expectations towards In the Shadow of No Towers: I had read some of the strips in their serialized form, and did not have high hopes for the book as a whole, but was still very interested to read it -- as I will be in nearly anything he chooses to publish -- for all the reasons stated above. SPURGEON: Spiegelman was busy enough with various comics and related projects in the 1990s that we sometimes forget In The Shadow Of No Towers was his first major comics project after Maus. Is there anything in the reading of it that indicates its place in Spiegelman's career to you? How does it function as a follow-up to that work? As I recall, there are outright references to this work following Maus in the introduction and in the text. HODLER: Earlier you brought up the question of whether or not artists had a responsibility to cover 9/11. Besides a few stray references in the text to the earlier work -- none of which seemed particularly resonant to me -- I think the main influence that Maus had on No Towers was to make its creation inevitable. Maus made Spiegelman the go-to guy for taking on the unspeakable. I don't think it functions as a follow-up in any other meaningful way, and think Spiegelman was wise to avoid making the connections too prevalent or obtrusive -- though they are there a bit. Mostly, Maus makes No Towers look bad. SPURGEON: As you've probably guessed, I struggled greatly with In The Shadow Of No Towers as a response to 9/11, and I wondered how you looked it. Looking at it recently, I saw a bunch of discordant elements that never really cohered to pull things in any one direction. There's an element of reaction by making art, but also a repudiation of past artistic approaches and this outright nostalgic celebration of a lost past. How do you think No Towers functions as Spiegelman's response to what he saw and how he was feeling? HODLER: In his introduction, he calls it "a slow-motion diary of what I experienced while seeking provisional equanimity," and that strikes me as accurate. More than any of his other comics, with the possible exception of "Prisoner On The Hell Planet," No Towers reads something like art-as-therapy. Much of it appears haphazardly put together, sloppily argued -- often crudely drawn -- and straining for a significance it's unable to articulate for readers. And yet, at least to someone who lived in New York in that era, it definitely evokes the emotional state of those years -- which were often enormously frustrating and confusing and panic-strewn. It doesn't appear to me he was able to shape a lot of the raw emotional subject matter into a cohesive whole, but the parts are there. Or at least some of them are. The most fundamental problem with the book to me is the fact that Art Spiegelman didn't have much of a story to tell -- nothing really happened to him! Or at least, not much more than happened to me. All he did was see one of the planes hit, and then go take his kids out of school. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if so much of the comic didn't revolve around the idea that the experience was profound and of universal interest, something he never convincingly demonstrates. One of the more interesting failed communications in the book can be found in what Spiegelman calls "the pivotal image of my 9/11 morning -- one that didn't get photographed or videotaped into public memory but still remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids several years later ... the image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized." This image, as he created it with computer software, is repeated throughout the ten strips that make up the book, and doesn't really register at all. It's not a powerful image, except apparently in Spiegelman's mind -- instead it just looks cheesy and half-baked. That the symbol so pivotal to Spiegelman, something I would not have guessed if we didn't have the introduction -- and obviously we do have it so we should keep that in mind, comes off as so underwhelming is indicative of many of the book's shortcomings. Despite the book's flaws, it still holds a lot of interest, if only to see how such formally minded an artist as Spiegelman attempts -- and fails -- to solve various problems of representation. And while it often appears overwrought and out-of-control, Spiegelman openly admits as much within the strip itself, and there is, or was -- this is one of the ways a book like this can date itself -- something cathartic about his willingness to attack the then-prevailing let's-conquer-Iraq-and-by-the-way-you're-a-traitor mindset so unequivocally. It sometimes seems impossible to believe just how dramatically limited the public expression of dissent really became. I think it's only in the last strip that Spiegelman really succeeds in his aims -- despite the fairly obvious visual metaphor he creates by formatting two columns to resemble the twin towers. In that one, he recounts an interview he gave to NBC for the 9/11 "Concert for America" as part of a collection of conversations with "typical New Yorkers." For the first time in the book, he describes an experience that really is fairly unique, and he manages to make something funny and poignant out of it. The gears-switching in the final panels displays an awareness and control mostly absent from the rest of the book. Not enough to save it, but enough to make me wonder what he could have done with this subject if he'd waited a few years before taking it on. But then we wouldn't have got the book we do have, which is almost more fascinating because of its flaws. Hell, Spiegelman's already made a near perfect book, maybe it's more rewarding now to work without a net and see what results. SPURGEON: A lot of my comics-reading friends seemed to have a hard time with Spiegelman's choice to look at old art work, both as an appropriate or even interesting way to process the event. How do you view that impulse from Spiegelman? Does it work for you, both as an inquiry of its own and as it's presented here? HODLER: I don't know. I didn't quite buy Spiegelman's claim that no art could get past his defenses in those days except for these old comic strips; the idea that everything from Aeschylus to Rembrandt to Beethoven was useless next to Happy Hooligan is alien to me. But I love old comics too, and the idea of reviving them for a contemporary audience is admirable. (It's interesting that this book came out a year before So Many Splendid Sundays, and in a way, was one of the first books in the recent wave of reprinting old strips in something approaching their original size.) For the most part, unfortunately, I don't think he was able to really make the connections between his project and the older work cohere in any meaningful way. It was nice to see them, but their connection to current events seemed a stretch at best. Except, I guess, for the reminder they give that even dramatic and monumental events usually lose their force and meaning for later generations. SPURGEON: Does looking at In The Shadow Of No Towers now engender a different set of reactions than earlier readings? What maybe stands out now that wasn't apparent then? HODLER: One thing that struck me upon re-reading it at this late date is just how much context it is necessary for the reader to provide on his or her own: just as in the political cartoons Spiegelman has claimed not to want to emulate, very little of the symbols are explained. Why is Cheney portrayed as slitting the American eagle's throat? You'd never know from these comics alone. Also, the crudeness of the drawings and rudimentary experimentation with computers seems far more forgivable to me now than it did in 2004. I basically find it no more impressive aesthetically than I did then, but am more drawn to it as an emotional experience and as a rather audacious act of self-revealment. SPURGEON: One of the ways this book functions as a book of the decade is in its unorthodox presentation and formatting. I know that a lot of people were dissatisfied with it at the time, but how do you feel about this book as an object? HODLER: I think that ideally it would not have been marketed as a $20 oversize book, packaged in such a way as to appear weighty and large, when it really consisted of only ten original comic strips and a handful of reprints. I'm sure market considerations drove that decision, but it isn't surprising that so many readers felt cheated. I remember thinking at the time that it took some guts to put out a ten-page book with pages thick enough to make it look like 200 pages. I mean, look at how much more you got in just one similarly priced volume of Maus. Still, now that my $20 is five years gone, the sense of being taken for a ride has faded. I like that the strips are big. Perhaps it would have been better published as a softcover, but Pantheon probably wasn't interested in letting a potential cash cow gift book like this slip by unexploited. It's nice to have some large examples of [Lyonel] Feininger and George McManus, at least. SPURGEON: Spiegelman had another chance -- an earlier chance -- to comment on that world event: his New Yorker cover with the black on black towers. Do you have any comment on the effectiveness (or not) of that image, and how it might relate to his more considered efforts later on? HODLER: It's hard for me to imagine many cover illustrations that could have portrayed that event without cheapening it; Spiegelman's cover was an elegant and impressive solution. The most obvious way it relates to the book is in its re-appearance on the latter's cover, and in the inspiration it presumably provided for the title. It is funny, though -- the best two pages by far created by Spiegelman were this early cover image and the last strip, nearly two years later in conception. ***** * In The Shadow Of No Towers, Art Spiegelman, Pantheon, 9780375423079, 2004, 42 pages, $19.95 ***** This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter. * CR Holiday Interview One: Sean T. Collins On Blankets * CR Holiday Interview Two: Frank Santoro On Multiforce * CR Holiday Interview Three: Bart Beaty On Persepolis * CR Holiday Interview Four: Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays * CR Holiday Interview Five: Shaenon Garrity On Achewood * CR Holiday Interview Six: Christopher Allen On Powers * CR Holiday Interview Seven: David P. Welsh On MW * CR Holiday Interview Eight: Robert Clough On ACME Novelty Library #19 * CR Holiday Interview Nine: Jeet Heer On Louis Riel * CR Holiday Interview Ten: Chris Mautner On Scott Pilgrim ***** ***** *****

Chris Mautner and I shared a comics shop before either of us did any work related to comics: Joe Miller's The Comic Store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We met in the 1990s after I had moved from central Pennsylvania to Seattle. It was my pleasure to use his work at The Comics Journal in the late 1990s. He's since gone on to a fine run of writing about comics for sources as wide-ranging as the Harrisburg Patriot-News, his own Panels and Pixels and CBR's intimidating comics blog Robot 6. He submitted a short list that included Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. I think that's undoubtedly one of the comics of the last ten years -- look at those covers! -- and I was excited to mull over its success with Chris. -- Tom Spurgeon ***** TOM SPURGEON: Here's a simple question, I hope. How did you discover the Scott Pilgrim work, and if your relationship has changed since that initial encounter, how would you describe those changes? Do you like it more now than you did at first, for example? CHRIS MAUTNER: If memory serves I discovered it a bit before the third volume came out, which would be around ... [sound of shuffling papers]... 2005? 2006? Somewhere around then. I believe like most folks I learned about the series through word of mouth over the Internet. I remember Heidi raving about it at the time and a few other folks as well. Remember that store Riot that Jason Richards owned? He'd always talk up SP whenever I was in his store and I believe I ended up buying the first two volumes from him. It was the sort of thing where "everyone says this is awesome, so I suppose I should at least give it a try." To my delight and surprise, I enjoyed it thoroughly, which is usually not the case in those sorts of instances. I definitely think my appreciation for the series has deepened over time, if only because O'Malley has shown that he's not interested in having the series just be a light, fluffy comedy. There are those elements, of course, and I enjoy them for what they are, but it's apparent with each subsequent volume that he's trying for something a bit more emotionally complex and studied than a simple action-flavored rom-com, if I can use that abysmal term. SPURGEON: One of the things most obviously known and celebrated about the comic is its assimilation of videogame approach to visuals, characterization, timing and even narrative structure. You among all the writers about comics I know have a background writing about videogames, and I wonder how much the knowledge you have of that field drives your appreciation of O'Malley's work? Beyond noting those similarities, do you think O'Malley is using them in a creatively satisfying way? Is there a specific moment or two from the books that speak to you this way? MAUTNER: There have, of course been comics about video games before -- Penny Arcade springs immediately to mind, and I'm sure there were Donkey Kong and Zelda comics back in the day -- but O'Malley is the first cartoonist to my mind to use videogame tropes as metaphors for the characters' inner emotions and states of mind. I know some critics find them kind of glib, I think that was a sticking point for whoever it was that wrote that negative review in TCJ, as though he's doing them "just because" in that kind of facile Dennis Miller sort of way, but I think that's too easy a complaint. It seems easily apparent to me that these references carry more significance than "Hey, Sonic. I used to play that, too." It's important to note, I think, that most of the references are what one would consider "old-school." There's a nostalgia factor at work there (deliberately so, I think). O'Malley doesn't reference "Halo" or "Madden" or whatever the big video games of the past few years have been -- I've been out of the gaming scene for awhile -- but the big "classic" titles like Street Fighter, Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario World. I think these gamers are a real cultural touchstone for a lot of people from O'Malley's generation, in the same way that, say, the Beatles and Stones were for Baby Boomers or Saturday morning cartoons were for Gen Xers, if I can make a ridiculous statement like that. I actually think O'Malley's videogame references are one of his more obvious tics. Everyone notices them but no one seems to really notice or say much about his manga and anime influences (other than Jog, who made it the focal point of his interview with him at SPX two years ago). He's one of the first (if not the first) North American cartoonists to successfully incorporate manga idioms into his own style. I hate to say it, but most of the other "OEL" creators, to my mind, come off as desperately trying to ape manga but only getting the surface elements and coming off as ill-thought out and shallow. I don't think you can say that about Scott Pilgrim. In many ways I see Scott Pilgrim as the dividing line between the new and upcoming generation of cartoonists and the established folks. It's a demarcation point, a push pin in the time line, same as Zap Comix was in the '60s and Love and Rockets was in the '80s. I'm not making an aesthetic comparison here, I'm saying in terms of a historical shift, Scott Pilgrim is something you can point to and say "Here is when a new generation of cartoonists started drawing on influences outside of the traditional comics sphere of influence (EC, the undergrounds, Marvel/DC) and looking to other works, most notably manga." Does that make any sense? SPURGEON: Are there any ways that you feel at a remove from the work? It's by a younger cartoonist, and I remember when I first started reading works by cartoonists from a generation emerging after my own there were frequently ideas and approaches I found tricky to negotiate. How do you reconcile with this comic, and maybe comics generally, that are outside your own immediate experiences? Put another way, do you feel that there's enough that's universal in Scott Pilgrim that people can react to it no matter if they're in that headspace and that general world right now? What exactly are those elements? MAUTNER: Good question. I suppose I feel a bit of a reserve in that I'm in my late 30s and am married with kids and have a midlife crisis waiting for me on the horizon. The sort of angst that Scott and his crew are engaged in -- figuring out who they are, what they want to do with their lives, if they're capable of love and commitment -- is something I've already been through. Having said that, it's not like I can't identify or remember having those sorts of experiences and feelings, even if I didn't experience them as intensely -- or comically -- as Scott. I think O'Malley is touching on some pretty universal emotions. More to the point, I think there's bit of wish fulfillment in that Scott Pilgrim is how we'd like our 20s to be -- to be in a band and going to clubs and bars and having a large group of lovable friends and constantly saying witty things. I think O'Malley's genius lies in how he manages to subvert that in the last two volumes, hinting that Scott's feckless ways may be entertaining, but isn't really that great a way to live your life. Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever come across a comic that made me feel on the outside looking in. I think a good comic invites you in and makes you feel a part of whatever world it's creating and a bad one leaves you standing awkwardly around with a confused look on your face. I suppose that's too simplistic an answer though. What about you? Did you have trouble accessing Pilgrim in the way you describe? Did the anime and game references leave you scratching your head? SPURGEON: Not really, I guess the references I don't get kind of blow by. I realize afterwards I might not be understanding some of the material on a certain level, but it doesn't feel like I'm missing out, if you know what I mean. I'm sort of surprised how comfortable the work feels to me. Maybe I've adjusted to seeing those things through other people's eyes, as you suggest. It does sort of feel like I'm hearing about my friends' kids and their circle of friends than about my own experiences or those of my peer group. But the experience seems grounded and real to me, even if it's on somebody's plate down the table rather than on my own. The characters work for me. What is it that O'Malley does that people are able to imprint on or just enthuse over when it comes to the characters in the books? MAUTNER: I think the characters are the central appeal of the series. I think O'Malley's characters and how he's deepened his portrayal of them over time, so that even walk-ons like Young Neil are shown to have a bit of depth and and complexity to them, is what continues to draw people to the series. I think it's really as simple as O'Malley's cast is filled with likable people that resemble folks we know or have bumped into just enough to allow for reader identification. Again, I think that issue of fantasy and wish fulfillment plays into the series' success as well. Who wouldn't want to live a life where you get to fight robots and ninjas, play bass in a band and have a witty gay roommate while trying to win the heart of your true love? SPURGEON: I think this was true of Peter Bagge's work in the 1990s, but do you think people dismiss or underestimate O'Malley's work because it's frequently funny and drawn in a lively fashion? Do you feel the general reaction to Scott Pilgrim has exposed anything about how we look at comics this decade, what we like and dislike and why? MAUTNER: You forgot to mention the fact that it's been very successful. If there's one thing people are quick to hate, it's something that everyone else loves, especially a quick success that comes from a relative newcomer like O'Malley. To answer your question: yes, I do think people tend to dismiss SP because it's funny and lively. It's not a problem that's particular to comics. It's the old "comedies never win Oscars" thing. I think because it's funny and cartoony, and has stuff like ninjas and video game references, SP is seen as lightweight, middlebrow fare. I don't think it is at all, but I think that's the general perception by some critics, especially those in the more art/indie comix side of the room. Like I said earlier, I think for better or for worse, Scott Pilgrim has become the standard bearer for the new generation of comics and cartoonists who draw from more sources than just Chris Ware or Frank Miller. People like Hope Larson (duh), Brandon Graham, Corey Lewis, Jason Shiga, a lot of the Oni and SLG folks, etc. SPURGEON: I believe this is the only work discussed in this short series of interviews that's serialized in book form, which interests me for a lot of reasons. There's something about the experience of a sprawl of work, where the people following the work get to return to it time after time. Given that you've seen his work over a number of years in this decade, how is O'Malley a different cartoonist in book five than he was in book one? In what ways has he managed to sustain a level of visual quality that allows the series to cohere? MAUTNER: One of the best things for me about reading Scott Pilgrim is you get to see O'Malley steadily improve as an artist and storyteller. His line has become a lot more confident and tighter as the books have progressed. His storytelling skills have increased exponentially as well. It's exciting to see him take chances with the narrative, via flashbacks or what have you. You get the sense he's constantly trying to up his game. It's like you're watching an artist turn from neophyte -- for want of a better word -- to professional, but over the course of one series instead of from work to work, which is usually the case these days. SPURGEON: One of the nice things about these books is that there is a sense of progression, a growing sense of maturity without that notion being pressed -- one of the great traditional strengths of serial art when it's done well. Do you also look at these books in terms of the ideas they communicate on the issues broached? Does Scott Pilgrim say something to you about idea like commitment and friendship and love? MAUTNER: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think those are the main themes of the series -- as a former English major, I'm always looking for "themes." Actually, I think the major theme of SP is the issue of maturity, in the sense of being willing to change your personality or your bad behavior in order to make a more stable and happy life for yourself. There's a scene in Volume 5 where Ramona calls Young Neil an asshole and he replies, "I'm young, I'll grow out of it." It occurs to me in rereading these books that that line is pretty much the epigraph for the series as a whole. Only I think O'Malley would put a question mark at the end of that sentence. SPURGEON: Do you think the fact these books are regarded differently for their almost instant relative success in the comics world and now the film puts pressure on a project like this one, or even potentially changes the work from what it might have been? MAUTNER: Well, success is a bitch and the fact that it's being made into a film that shows all signs of becoming a cult hit will probably create even more of a backlash against the books. I think in the case of Scott Pilgrim, it's pretty clear that O'Malley has had the basic framework of his story set up from the beginning and isn't going to do very much to change it at this point just to answer to the prevailing winds of angry reviews or message board posts or what have you. I've got no business giving anyone career advice, but I hope that whatever O'Malley does for his next project after SP he doesn't attempt some sort of super-serious dramaturgy just to show that he is indeed capable of handling serious stuff. I think that would be a mistake. SPURGEON: How much do you think your opinion of the work could change according to how the series ends? Do you feel sometimes that we rush to judgment about books given that they're frequently serialized either in print or on-line? MAUTNER: Yes, we do frequently rush to judgment, but that's human nature. How many times do we avoid a movie based on the trailer or TV show based on the first episode, etc.? Certainly I think we can both rattle off a number of comics with lengthy stories we've passed on after only reading an issue or two. It's certainly possible that the final two volumes of SP could completely alter our perception of what's come before, though I hope it would do so in a good way. SPURGEON: Where would you detect or how would you measure the book's influence? What's important and emblematic of the decade about Scott Pilgrim? Why are people singularly disappointed when it doesn't appear on best-of lists or enter into the conversation about books of the decade? MAUTNER: Are people disappointed? I'm kind of at a loss as to what the general consensus is on the series. I know there is a huge fan base and some folks who hate it but that's about it. SPURGEON: All I mean is that Scott Pilgrim has very, very devoted fans who are confident of its quality to the point where it not making a list is a cause for indicting that list. I've seen a couple of comments like "No Scott Pilgrim? No way!" I haven't seen, "No The Ticking? No way!" I think that people are so willing to stick up for it is an admirable quality, and suggests how hard the work has hit with a lot of its readers. MAUTNER: It does seem like it tends to get ignored whenever people make up those end of the year lists though doesn't it? I, for example, completely forgot until working on this with you that volume five came out this past February! I probably wouldn't haven't even thought to have included it on my best of '09 list otherwise. And I like Scott Pilgrim! I tend to think that's because it came out early in the year and there have been so many good books in general this year -- to offer another movie analogy, it's the old "the academy only nominates movies that come out in the fall" schtick). I do think Scott Pilgrim gets buried a little bit just by the weight of quality work that's out there. Our inner snobs are probably pushing to dismiss it because it is so light and -- delightfully -- silly at times. It's not about big, weighty issues like Footnotes In Gaza or engage in lots of obvious formalist tricks like Asterios Polyp. Has volume five been on anyone's "best of list" so far this year? SPURGEON: I'm sure it has been. MAUTNER: Would you include it on yours? SPURGEON: I haven't even begun to think about mine yet. I get your point, though. MAUTNER: I think ultimately Pilgrim's influence will be seen in the works of the coming generation. Like I said, I think this series is going to be a touchstone for creators of a certain age and I wouldn't be too surprised if the next couple of years of CCS and SVA grads start listing Scott Pilgrim as one of their biggest influences and we see it referenced in their own comics. I think once the series is done and people have time to contemplate the whole work, its critical cachet will go up a bit as well. ***** * Scott Pilgrim, Volume One: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Oni Press, softcover, 168 pages, 9781932664089, 2004, $11.95 * Scott Pilgrim, Volume Two: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Oni Press, softcover, 200 pages, 9781932664126, 2005, $11.95 * Scott Pilgrim, Volume Three: Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Oni Press, softcover, 192 pages, 9781932664225, 2006, $11.95 * Scott Pilgrim, Volume Four: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Oni Press, softcover, 216 pages, 9781932664492, 2007, $11.95 * Scott Pilgrim, Volume Five: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Oni Press, softcover, 184 pages, 9781934964101, 2009, $11.95 ***** This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter. * CR Holiday Interview One: Sean T. Collins On Blankets * CR Holiday Interview Two: Frank Santoro On Multiforce * CR Holiday Interview Three: Bart Beaty On Persepolis * CR Holiday Interview Four: Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays * CR Holiday Interview Five: Shaenon Garrity On Achewood * CR Holiday Interview Six: Christopher Allen On Powers * CR Holiday Interview Seven: David P. Welsh On MW * CR Holiday Interview Eight: Robert Clough On ACME Novelty Library #19 * CR Holiday Interview Nine: Jeet Heer On Louis Riel ***** ***** *****

I think Christopher Allen is the kind of writer about an art form best served by non-traditional outlets. A lot of what's fascinating about his work might be smoothed over in an old-school print magazine with an firm, outside, editing hand. There's a bristling quality to Allen's engagement with comics, a willingness to give a work of art shit about something personal over an otherwise friendly round of cocktails, that sets Allen apart from his peers. He constantly surprises me. My interest was piqued when one of the books Chris selected was the Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming superhero series Powers. Allen reminds us that sometimes it's the way the book hits you as much as it is the book. -- Tom Spurgeon ***** TOM SPURGEON: Have you been with Powers from the beginning? When did you dive in, and what were your initial impressions? CHRISTOPHER ALLEN: I was there from the beginning, though I should be clear that I did fall off the book for a while and there's a gap of a couple years or more since I've read it. I have read the latest #1 issue, though. My initial impressions were that this was the freshest book of the moment, the year 2000, with a writer and artist whose styles I'd never seen before in comics. You have to understand that Powers arrived at a real perfect storm time for me: I was just getting back into comics after a couple years away and finding that the creators I knew in "mainstream" comics weren't quite doing it for me. I don't remember quite how I started reading Powers, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't an impulse buy in the comic shop. I was just getting into the comics internet and found Jinxworld, Brian Michael Bendis' message board, and just found the guy a natural raconteur, just a really engaging personality. This was such an astonishing development for me, a guy who thought the closest you ever got to comics people was John Byrne drawing himself in She-Hulk, or maybe nervously telling a creator you really liked their work as they signed a book for you at a comic convention. Yeah, I was already 30 or 31 at the time, but was still really taken into this cult of personality. Bendis was just another geek like a lot of us, except he was getting somewhere, and you wanted him to succeed. Hanging out on the message board and trying to amuse him, or striking up friendships with other visitors, was great. You were part of this community and it was centered around this talented guy and you were with him every step of the way as he started working for Todd McFarlane, then Powers, then Ultimate Spider-Man and on and on. I don't mean to devalue the book itself. Powers was a blast. I'm looking at the first trade, Who Killed Retro Girl?, right now, and while some of the art is surprisingly awkward looking back at it now, it still has a lot of charm to it. Good layouts. I was really taken with the big chunks of black space Bendis and Oeming designed to allow moments to sink in, give more space for the winding trails of word balloons, and just give an overall impression that however funny the dialogue might be, there was a lot of darkness in this world. Bendis' writing is so confident here, so full of joy in being allowed to take his readers on a trip through everything he's into. It really could have been a cynical thing: superheroes + police procedural, but it wasn't. Certainly there were plenty of less-inspired books to come after it -- and some good ones, too, like Sleeper. But not only was Bendis sincere, the message board and the book's letter column were really masterstrokes, not just to build up his fame, but to make the readers a real part of the experience. You had to read the latest Powers as soon as it came out, so you could get on Jinxworld and talk about it with Bendis and Oeming and everyone else. SPURGEON: Were you familiar with Brian Bendis' writing at all going in? He's one of the important mainstream comics writers of the decade, no doubt, if not the most important one. Where does this work stand in his overall development, his array of offerings over the last ten years? I know that some people consider it a best work, while others consider it a transitional one from the crime books to his run on superhero comics. What's your appraisal of his career in general and Powers' place in it? ALLEN: I wasn't familiar with his work at all, but quickly caught up with Jinx and Torso and Fortune & Glory. I'm only just now rereading Powers, spurred by this interview, but I think it might be his best work. I'm not saying that's because it's creator-owned -- most of, say, Mark Waid's best work is work-for-hire. And Bendis' Daredevil run is very good as well. That's probably nearly as personal; in fact Bendis' Matt Murdock is probably more fully realized than his Christian Walker, but with Powers, I think you're getting pretty much all of Bendis: the pulpy side, the quiet observation, the humor, the maniacally rhythmic dialogue. I sort of agree that the book very literally led to him doing "straight" superhero books, and in them he found he could get away with a similar approach, a similar ratio of dialogue to action scenes. But I don't think it's transitional in the sense that he's not done with the book, and this is probably where he's going to go the deepest or furthest out on a limb. As far as Bendis' career in general, I confess that aside from this new Powers #1, and that Siege: The Cabal one-shot a few weeks ago, I haven't been reading his stuff since the first few Avengers trades. I wasn't enjoying them that much, but that shouldn't be taken as an indictment of his more recent output. I don't really subscribe to the notion of a talented writer losing their ability completely. I think it's the creators with the most distinctive styles who people really turn on the easiest. Now, we can read all this fun, good-not-great '70s Kirby work and enjoy it for what it is and wonder why people were dissing the guy then, but at the same time, if I had grown up reading Kirby from Fantastic Four #1 or earlier, I might have grown sick of that style, too. I don't know that Bendis' strengths are best utilized in superhero team books, or orchestrating events, but I guess I'd prefer he do them than lots of other superhero comics writers. It's important that he keep doing Powers, or another creator-owned book where he can explore whatever he wants, pretty much unfiltered. If all he did was write Marvel Universe stuff, it's not that his impact isn't felt, but it's easier for those impacts to be minimized, certainly from the standpoint of new creators wiping away what you did, but also because I think you have readers of those books more interested in the characters than the creators or their styles. You know, those people who think it's important that at some point, Iron Man and Captain America have to be buddies again, on the same team of Avengers. SPURGEON: One of the things I forgot about until I went and looked at a couple of the trades is that Powers has one foot in crime procedural and another in tabloid biography of all things -- the "behind the scenes" stuff that maybe you don't see as much as you used to at the beginning of the decade. How do you see that peculiar influence at work in Powers? Does the series say something about celebrity, or is that just another source from which to shape entertaining stories? ALLEN: I think there's a very fannish side to Bendis and it comes across for the most part without pretension. It's not just that he likes police procedurals like Homicide and The Wire and The Shield -- he likes David Simon and David Chase and others and a lot of the fun of reading the book is spotting the influences, what he's into at the time. Reading the first trade again, I'm reminded how much he was into Howard Stern at the time, and there's also lots of famous names that are referenced. You could take Morrison Elementary as a reference to Grant Morrison instead of Jim, until you see a reference to Ray Manzarek. The latest issue flashes back to an unseen chapter in Walker's life that's essentially "The Rat Pack as Superheroes" -- another mash-up -- and I think Bendis does have a real fascination with larger-than-life characters and the behind-the-scenes stuff of how they make their art. I think he's interested in the less famous creators as well -- the writers and directors of TV and film he admires -- and as a writer who wouldn't read and watch biographies of how people tick. But yes, that stuff is not going to play as well in comics and so naturally you gear your stories to stuff that's a little more sensational, like superhero groupies, power junkies, etc. SPURGEON: Including the celebrity culture and its place in the new wave of crime material, do you consider Powers a work rich in metaphor? That's generally a way that people ascribe greater significance to a superhero series outside of its entertainment value. What do you feel are its general strengths? ALLEN: I'm not sure there's a deeper meaning to Powers beyond, "even superheroes are fucked up." That's nothing new, nor is it all that new to have a world where superheroes are the real celebrities -- you don't see much in Powers about singers and actors. But amidst all the wise-ass banter and in-jokes, Powers does have a basic, decent moral about trusting others and putting aside differences for a greater good. It's not easy to package something corny like that in a book so funny and dark. I'm sure for a writer of comics that has to be a prevailing moral for your own life. Neither Bendis nor Oeming are without plenty of other creative opportunities now, and we've seen Oeming write or co-write for others, both work-for-hire and creator-owned. But he and Bendis must still feel they have good work left to do that wouldn't be the same if one of them wasn't in the mix. SPURGEON: Do we sometimes look down unnecessarily on material that's "merely" snappily done and entertains? ALLEN: Yes, absolutely we -- and I'll put myself in there as well -- tend to look down on well-crafted entertainment that doesn't have a deeper meaning or higher aims, or sometimes we like it fine at first and then get impatient when it's just more of the same good. I think about Larry David, who in Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm has consciously created shows where the characters experience little if any growth. He actually set this extreme restriction on his work, but somehow has managed to create this vast catalog of uncomfortable or hypocritical social situations. As ridiculous as they may be played out, those situations are often very real and recognizable. His and Jerry Seinfeld's other innovation in sitcoms was to present characters who were not that likable, often very shallow and vain and selfish. It was the talent of the cast and writers that made it work. Friends was not an innovative show -- it was just the same sort of good looking people with silly problems we'd seen many times before in sitcoms. But Friends was a huge hit because of a likable cast and jokes that made people laugh. Hundreds of sitcoms have come and gone with much shorter lives than Friends, while other similar shows like How I Met Your Mother survive year after year without ever capturing the zeitgeist the way Friends did. I don't think we should get so caught up in whether something surpasses its genre trappings. How many geniuses are there, really? You want to deny yourself Terry and the Pirates or Little Orphan Annie because they're not Peanuts or Krazy Kat? SPURGEON: You mentioned some of these comics earlier, but do you see Powers as a significant part of that whole crime and superheroes genre as it developed -- Brubaker's, Rucka's in particular? Do you think that's been a rich vein for superheroes this decade? What does the overlay of crime material add to the superhero genre? ALLEN: Well, you say "Brubaker, Rucka in particular," but how easy is it to name anyone else? [Spurgeon laughs] It's a pretty small sub-genre. I mean, you're taking about a vein that's only rich because there are so few other veins. Like, Warren Ellis has mixed superheroes with lots of other things in Planetary, but often just for one issue, so that's like a rich network of capillaries for superheroes. I think it's significant only in that these are talented writers working with some very good artists, so some of these books have been successful and opened the door a little wider to the next superhero crime book. If someone took a chance on a superhero sports book and it was better than NFL Superpro, we might see more of those. Superhero romance books have been tried without much success. Superheroes fight crime, and detectives solve crimes, so they go together a lot easier than another genre. SPURGEON: Does Powers have anything specific to say about the superhero genre? There's something about the dark sense of humor that I always take in a satirical way. ALLEN: Yeah. In a way, maybe Bendis needs Powers more than ever, now that he's so entrenched in the Marvel Universe. He's got a dark sense of humor, anyway, and I see Powers as a place where he can explore some of the ridiculous things about the genre, in the framework of sincere stories. SPURGEON: Do you have a favorite arc, a favorite storyline? Why that one? Do you have any sense of what's been more favorably received by the fans of the series and what hasn't? When the comic really works, what factors are in play? ALLEN: I'd have to reread more as far as specific arcs, but I'll be honest; one of the reasons I suggested Powers is that it came at the beginning of my "career" (ha) as a critic, and at the beginning of what I think of as my adulthood as a comics reader. It was a moment for me, just like any of the other books on this best-of list really just represent moments, whether ongoing works or done-in-one graphic novels or collected miniseries or whatever. The moment is past for Powers as the hot book, the book that sets the tone for others. Now I'm interested in what it still might have to say, especially as it tailors itself to readers who may not have read it before and only know Bendis as the Avengers writer or whatever. But I will say in re-reading Who Killed Retro Girl?, there was a very Moore-like sense of a near-fully realized world here, and lots of hints at stories that would take years to explore. That can be so hazardous -- the book from the young creative team who thinks they've got a real epic on their hands and swings for the fences but don't quite have the strength yet -- but with any story, especially the debut of an indie, creator-owned book, you have to convey such immense confidence and just take that reader by the hand and convince them this is a ride worth taking. Powers really did that so well right from the start, and so most of the people who were there were then going to be willing to follow it when it went on perhaps some less rewarding avenues. I know the monkey sex issue, which I think was maybe #37? That number sticks in my mind. Anyway, in trying to bring this sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey type of epic back story to the Walker character, a lot of readers were turned off, because of course then it's not what was expected, superheroes + police procedural. And while I also wasn't a huge fan, it was admirable. It further established Bendis as a real artist, and by that I mean that I believe a real artist has to disappoint his fans at some point. You can't be struggling and searching and looking to grow without inevitably turning off some of those who were there when you were interested in doing something else. On some level we're all the same people we were a few years ago, or ten or twenty, but in other ways we aren't. It's necessary to try other things, even if -- especially if -- you fail. I'd have to go back and read it, but I'm guessing by setting the story in prehistoric times, Bendis wasn't able to fall back on his gift for snappy dialogue. Pretty brave choice, actually. SPURGEON: Michael Avon Oeming is a non-traditional choice for a book like this -- and yet at the same time I think his storytelling precision and design work distinguish Powers in a way that a more traditional superhero illustrator might not have been able to achieve. What is your impression of his work on the series? What are his strongest qualities as evinced through Powers? ALLEN: Oeming is terrific, and only getting better. In retrospect, some of the early stuff is kind of rough but there's still a lot of vitality and smart storytelling there. I happen to like the less blocky current style as he's moved away from what seemed a more Bruce Timm kind of influence and is maybe more Toth-like? I'm going to disagree with you that he's a nontraditional choice. You look at Michael Lark on Gotham Central or Sean Phillips on Sleeper, or Paul Grist on Jack Staff and Michael Allred on X-Force -- when you have a superhero book that has other elements or which purports to be a bit outside of traditional superhero stories, you want distinctive artists whose style immediately says this book isn't going to be Booster Gold. Especially with a crime or espionage book, you want artists who favor lots of shadow and are going to be more concerned with setting a tone than drawing every muscle in a character's torso. Oeming is, like Grist or Timm, really good at getting the essence of a character in a minimum of lines. When he draws even someone else's character, he fits them to his style and they become part of the world he's depicting, even if they have a costume design he would never do or are normally drawn by someone with a completely different style from his. I would imagine Bendis' scripts aren't the easiest to draw, as a lot of thought has to be put into how to fit all that dialogue in and still have clear, dynamic storytelling. An artist also has to be very good at facial expressions and gestures to best hit the dramatic or comedic beats Bendis has written. Oeming does all those things extremely well. He's an artist I don't get tired of looking at, though like a lot of artists with very recognizable styles, I don't much care to look at the imitators. SPURGEON: Powers was moved from Image to Marvel's Icon imprint at about the midway point this decade. For an imprint at a publisher as big Marvel, it seems like Icon never really found a place other than as this odd halfway house for projects by Marvel core creators. Has that been a lost opportunity, do you think? Could the mainstream companies make better use of creator-owned comics imprints? ALLEN: I don't know if it's a lost opportunity; maybe it can still be made into something. But yes, I don't know why there aren't more Icon books or what the whole strategy is. One would think they might've offered to move Kirkman's Walking Dead to Icon, huh? Wouldn't some of the books Ellis and Ennis do for Avatar fit Icon? I don't know if there's all that much benefit for Marvel to only have Icon be for creators who do other mainstream Marvel Universe books for them. Are there many people who pick up Criminal out of the blue and then go read Captain America because they find out Brubaker writes both? I can understand Icon not being an artcomix imprint -- you want the books there to be printed pretty much like the rest of the stuff they do, but why they don't seem interested in books from folks who aren't already in the Marvel firmament, I don't know. SPURGEON: Given its early place in a certain type of superhero comics and as an avenue for on-line interaction between fan and pro, how might the decade in comics be different if Powers had never been published? ALLEN: I don't want to overstate Powers' specific importance. I will say that if not for Powers -- that is, if Bendis hadn't put out this book and if it hadn't been good -- I might not have made some of the friendships I did and might not have started writing about comics at all. A lot of networking went on at Jinxworld. My own story is not important to the decade in comics, of course, but I would say that Powers not only showed people that you could still find a fresh slant on the superhero genre by mashing it up with another genre, but it did some other things as well, for better or worse. For the better, I think Powers is a great example of how important it is for a book -- especially a creator-owned book -- to be welcoming and accessible. Letter columns have largely gone away from monthly comics, due to collections becoming the ultimate publishing format, as well as the internet. Powers has benefited from both those things and yet it still has a letter column as a nice bonus for those who choose to buy it monthly, it's like a thank you note at the end for the hardcore fans. For the worse, I'm sure some creators have taken Powers as a model for their careers: do your creator-owned book as a kind of calling card to doing superheroes for Marvel or DC, or getting a movie deal or whatever. As a more ambivalent model, some might see Powers as an example of "one for them, one for me," as in, Bendis can make his living writing Avengers and other superhero books, but he puts more of himself into his own creation. Scorsese has done the same thing in his career. ***** * Powers Volume One: Who Killed Retro Girl?, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Image Comics, 1582401837, 2000. * Powers Volume Two: Roleplay, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Image Comics, 1582402329, 2002. * Powers Volume Three: Little Deaths, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Image Comics, 1582402698, 2003. * Powers Volume Four: Supergroup, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Image Comics, 1582403090, 2003. * Powers Volume Five: Anarchy, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Image Comics, 1582403317, 2003. * Powers Volume Six: The Sellouts, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, 078511582X, 2004. * Powers Volume Seven: Forever, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, 0785116567, 2004. * Powers Volume Eight: Legends, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, 0785117423, 2005. * Powers Volume Nine: Psychotic, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, 0785117431, 2006. * Powers Volume Ten: Cosmic, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, 0785122605, 2007. * Powers Volume Eleven: Secret Identity, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, ISBN 0785122613, 2008. * Powers Volume Twelve: The 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of all Time, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Icon Comics, 0785122621, 2009. ***** This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter. * CR Holiday Interview One: Sean T. Collins On Blankets * CR Holiday Interview Two: Frank Santoro On Multiforce * CR Holiday Interview Three: Bart Beaty On Persepolis * CR Holiday Interview Four: Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays * CR Holiday Interview Five: Shaenon Garrity On Achewood ***** ***** *****

Anthony Ha: Achewood is kind of the quintessential webcomic -- or, more precisely, the quintessential webcomic that's any good http://bit.ly/4o5afb

(By @anthonyha - Writer - Venture Beat, Technology)

Shaenon Garrity is a veteran of webcomics cartooning known primarily for her long-running series Narbonic. A well-regarded editor in addition to efforts like the currently running Skin Horse (with Jeffrey Channing Wells), Garrity is the rare cartoonist that also writes extremely well about comics. She's a columnist at ComiXology, a featured blogger at The Comics Journal and welcome on this site any time she'd like. From her list I chose Achewood, perhaps the greatest of this decade's popular webcomics. ***** TOM SPURGEON: Shaenon, you made fun of me a little bit for picking Achewood off of your list, and when I asked you about it you said you were pretty certain that I was going to choose that one. What is it about Achewood that makes it such an obvious emblematic work of this decade? Is it just really good? Does it have qualities that allow it to be better appreciated than some other strips by print-focused comics fans? SHAENON GARRITY: Snarky answer: because it was the only comic on the list by a white American male, so I figured the critical consensus was that it was the most important and universal. But I know you probably just wanted me to talk about webcomics. And Achewood is kind of the quintessential webcomic -- or, more precisely, the quintessential webcomic that's any good. The quality that allows it to be better appreciated by print-focused comics fans is not sucking. I had some other webcomics on the list that are equally good, but they're not as well-known, I guess, or of representative of people's idea of webcomics. By the way, in your email you said you didn't know what I was going to say except that it would be funny. I'm sorry to tell you that I will be funny only by quoting all the good lines out of Achewood strips. SPURGEON: How did you become aware of the strip? What was your initial reaction to it? Has that reaction changed over time and if so, how? GARRITY: I think I discovered Achewood the way most people discover most webcomics: enough people linked to it that I could no longer ignore it. I can't remember which strip I read first, but it might have been the one where Lie Bot shows his ass. That is still a damn funny strip. SPURGEON: Has the strip itself changed, do you think? Was there a point at which it kind of settled into its current incarnation? GARRITY: I'm looking through the archives now, and can I just say the site seems to be designed to discourage people from reading all the way through? If you use the "Jump to a Story Arc" dropdown, the earliest arc you can reach is "The Party," six months into the strip's run. You have to dig a little to get to the actual first strip, October 2001, "Philippe is standing on it," a three-paneler that's odd and incomprehensible, yet so strangely compelling it's inspired pop songs. This may be deliberate on Onstad's part. In the new Achewood collection, Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar, he's pretty harsh on his first year of strips. Probably harsher than he needs to be, but it's true that the early Achewood is not radically different from a lot of strips that were nosing around the Internet at the dawn of the new millennium. There was a time when sketchily-drawn cartoon animals saying bizarre and/or dirty things was a burgeoning genre. Achewood seemed to be going for something more interesting than most, but it wasn't that much of a standout. "The Party" is important as the storyline that introduced Roast Beef ("Roast Beef, the other cat / Neither Ray nor Pat"). The relationship between Roast Beef and Ray has since become the heart of the strip, whereas in the early strips it's more about the bears and Philippe. But that relationship only gels in the next big storyline, "Ray's Startup." The first strip in "Ray's Startup" encapsulates everything you need to know about these two characters. Ray wanders in (smoking a cigarette), he asks Roast Beef why he's fiddling around on the computer, and Beef answers, "I guess it's the only thing I'm really good at." That's Roast Beef, all right. In the last panel, Ray has adapted the program Beef is writing, a spreadsheet reminding him to buy eggs and milk, into a makeshift Internet startup and is enthusiastically shilling the new product. This basic premise will be repeated, with minor adjustments (say, replacing shopping spreadsheets with prosthetic testicles for cell phones), many, many times over the course of Achewood. All the key components are in place by about a year into the strip. Personally, I don't think Achewood becomes consistently, untouchably brilliant until mid-2003 with "Oregon Trail," where all the characters play the antique educational PC game and get seduced by Hiram the blacksmith. That's about the point where Onstad starts to put a lot of work into crafting funny turns of phrase, really punching up the characters' individual voices ("Dang what in the heck Ray / How did you get syphilis"). This is immediately followed by Ray crank-calling comic-strip characters ("I'm ready, dogg. I'm callin' Garfield"), another hilarious series of strips. SPURGEON: If you'll indulge me, because I know there's a chance this line of reasoning may have no interest to you at all, but where does Achewood fit into a continuity of webcomics from this decade? My own perception of webcomics is that while they're admittedly while over the place, I think of that group of Scott McCloud stamp-approved formalists from early in the decade -- or from the previous -- and also this wave of more traditionally formatted strips with a huge, ongoing narrative component. Achewood I see as one of those works between those two general camps, along with Get Your War On and PBF, where the basic strip format was used but at the same time gently subverted. I'm way more interested in your opinion, though, and not just whether or not I have way too much time on my hands, because that's obviously true. GARRITY: To be honest, I don't have a clear concept of the continuity and evolution of webcomics beyond a certain point. By now it's an enormous field, and, beyond grouping some works into broad categories (stick figures, furries, two gamers on a couch shilling consumer products -- what a beautiful gory layout!), it's very hard to gauge where individual comics come from or how they fit into a larger movement. One thing I do find interesting about Achewood, which I've said elsewhere, is that it's kind of a stereotypical "bad webcomic." It has the stiff cut-and-paste look of many webcomics, it's never followed a reliable update schedule, the plots have a thrown-together quality, and, again, it's about cartoon animals saying dirty things. There are a lot of bad webcomics that fit that description. But by some alchemy Achewood is really good. I hope it doesn't come off like I'm putting the strip down; I deeply admire what Onstad has done with his material, because I can't do anything remotely like that. It's like improv jazz. SPURGEON: How are Achewood and Onstad perceived by other webcomics cartoonists? GARRITY: Like I said, webcomics is such a huge field that it's impossible to generalize. But I don't know anyone who doesn't like Achewood. I've seen several of my cartoonist friends go through the same phase of discovering the strip and being unable to talk about anything else for weeks. Sitting down and reading through the archives is mind-blowing. SPURGEON: While Onstad's highest regards come to him as a writer, how do you feel about his art? I think it's singularly effective, but I can't tell if that's just because I'm used to it or if I think it actually has qualities that benefit the strip. When do you think the art in Achewood is at its most effective, and what qualities does it have at those times? GARRITY: Onstad is one of those cartoonists, like Lynda Barry, who isn't a good "draw-er" in the sense of traditional draftsmanship or illustration skills, but has a strong grasp of visual storytelling and overall design, which, in my opinion, are much more important skills for cartooning. He knows the strengths and limitations of his art and how to make it work for him. If, for example, you usually create your art by cutting and pasting elements together -- which many, many webcartoonists, Onstad included, do -- it limits the range and subtlety of expression you can get from your characters. In that case, if you're smart, you make the relative blankness of the characters' faces work for you -- draw large, simple faces onto which readers can project themselves, and make more of the emoting and personality happen in the dialogue and panel-to-panel storytelling. Which is what Onstad does. He's also got a great sense of comic timing. Check out the recent strip where Cornelius drives off with his stripper girlfriend for the first time: something about the timing of each event on the drive cracks me up. There's also a lot of good design stuff in Achewood. Onstad seems to be a fan of Chris Ware, and in fact his work and Ware's are similar in a lot of ways. SPURGEON: I re-read a bunch of Achewood before this interview, and I kept on wondering if there was a good question about how the strip is funny. I think that a lot of it is execution, of course, the precision he brings to the characters and the lean to-the-point quality of the gags. But conceptually, I wonder how I would describe it what he does to someone just beginning to read it. Is there an Achewood worldview that can be described? Part of me thinks that he gets great mileage out of these raw characters crashing into a peculiarly complex and idiosyncratic way of doing things, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't come close to describing it. GARRITY: It's elusive, isn't it? A lot of it is in the dialogue, in the characters having funny and distinctive voices, but it's more than that. I can't pin it down. The Wikipedia entry cracks me up with its efforts to explain the strips: "Mr. Bear and Téodor are discussing Téodor's confusion over a drum machine. Mr. Bear informs Téodor that there is an instruction manual. However, Philippe is standing on it." Oh, yeah, I see how that's funny. Thanks, Wikipedia! But why is it so funny? I don't really know. All I can offer is that it's funnier when characters talk without punctuation, and Onstad gets a lot of mileage out of that. SPURGEON: One of the things I've never been able to process because it's just too weird and too incredibly awesome at the same time is the supplementary blogging he's done. I just don't even have words to describe that kind of effort. What did you think of that writing? Is there anything in webcomics that compares to that kind of sustained, sideways, second view of a comics offering? GARRITY: I love the Achewood blogs. Onstad doesn't update them all the time, but when he does he puts a lot of effort into them. I think my favorite sequence was a series of posts by Ray and Philippe in which it becomes clear that they're unknowingly planning parties on the same day. Comedy gold! (This is another key to Achewood being funny: mining classic comedy situations. Do not underestimate the power of a party-conflict story.) Everyone goes to Philippe's party, where they run in the yard and wash the dog, and no one shows up at Ray's party ("ENORMOUS by Ray Smuckles"). At the end Ray's standing around wondering why no one came to his party. There's something about the gaps left in the blogs, the little mental leaps left to the reader, that's very appropriate to comics. Scott McCloud would call it "closure," wouldn't he? I also like it when events from the blogs leak into the strip. I think the bar Cornelius starts, the Dude and Catastrophe, was discussed in the blogs for a long time before it showed up in the strip. Of course the strip never mentioned the whole parallel story going on in Pat's blog at the same time, where he tries to start a vegan restaurant as some oblique form of competition with Cornelius, and it goes horribly wrong. It's all brilliant stuff. SPURGEON: For those reading who have never quite taken the plunge: is there a storyline or run of strips that you feel was particularly well done, and can you kind of unpack it a bit as to why? Related, perhaps, do you think The Great Outdoor Fight breaking out a bit was beneficial or not to reading and understanding the wider work? Was that a good ambassador for the strip? GARRITY: The Great Outdoor Fight encapsulates a lot of key elements of Achewood, so it's a good introduction. It's about the relationship between Roast Beef and Ray, it opens with Ray starting a bizarre business venture, and it's got nearly all the characters in some role, even if most of them are just spectators to the Beef/Ray drama. It also has a great climax and ending, which is one area where Achewood can be a little weak. A lot of storylines just end rather than building to a climax, but the GOF builds and builds and builds. Great Outdoor Fight mania was so crazy! To this day I'm not sure how it happened, but I was there, my son. I realized things were spiraling out of control when some fans started a GOF wiki and started writing entries for dozens and dozens of invented Outdoor Fights and Fighters of the past. My friend and collaborator Jeff Wells wrote at least one. SPURGEON: It occurs to me that Achewood has done a lot of things in order to fund itself, including premium offerings, licensing and print collections. Although I don't know the specifics, Achewood has the reputation of being a successful endeavor that way in addition to its creative success. That's such a part of making webcomics over the last decade. With Achewood with an example or maybe more generally, is there anything about the act of publishing in that basic "find the money to support it" way that you think has even a chance to impinge on the creative side of things? Is the basic webcomics experience different than the more traditionally isolated efforts in cartooning? GARRITY: Okay, here's the one secret I know about Chris Onstad, based on my extremely limited personal contact with him: he's sort of a combination of Roast Beef and Ray. Underneath his shyness, he's a good businessman, and he seems to have unlimited energy for promoting Achewood and developing its world. He's tried every possible revenue stream in webcomics. Hell, he was even in the Modern Tales family for a while (he had bonus content on Serializer.net before moving it onto a subscriber-only section on his own site, which continues to this day). One thing I admire is the oddness of some of the projects he's tried. He's done a series of Achewood cookbooks. He has a hot sauce called Ray's Rad Chilies. I seem to recall that he once wrote and self-published a book the characters were reading. His prints and posters are unique and attractive even if you're not into the strip. I am singularly awful at making money from webcomics, so I'm in awe of all of this. SPURGEON: You're the only thus far with whom I'm talking about webcomics, and to take it back to our first question I wondered if you wanted to point out two or three choices that might have been less obvious than Achewood but perhaps just as emblematic in their own way of the that group of comics in the decade just past. GARRITY: I had some on my list, but it's really hard to be "emblematic" with webcomics, because it's such a huge and diverse field. In the balance, Achewood probably comes the closest. ***** * Achewood, Chris Onstad, Self-Published Webcomic, 2001-present. ***** * images from various Achewood cartoons, all copyright 2009 Chris Onstad ***** This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter. * CR Holiday Interview One: Sean T. Collins On Blankets * CR Holiday Interview Two: Frank Santoro On Multiforce * CR Holiday Interview Three: Bart Beaty On Persepolis * CR Holiday Interview Four: Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays ***** ***** *****

sets up the holiday auto-reply #xmas 15:31 brilliant #Achewood http://www.achewood.com/index.php?dat

... heard have involved looking for comics that feature a not exclusively white cast. Achewood, by Chris Onstad, is a frequently surreal ongoing comic about “alive stuffed animals” and small real animals (mostly cats and a squirrel). It has both long storylines as well as stand alone one-off strips, and has been running for years. It features virtually no humans, and the characters’...

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