Do Not Seige Walled Cities - 232
I’M HAPPIER THAN I SEEM, I SWEAR
I realized in reading this newsletter back to myself that I can appear angry or hostile or downcast. I’m not really any of those things, broadly. It’s the product of writing about something you care about. When you write about something you don’t care about, glibness can rule the hour. But if you’re passionate, it will occasionally manifest as primary colors and basic emotions. I assume you understand.
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
ANTIOCH trade paperback has a December 27 street date. It’s been a labor of love and a learning experience, and now it will be a great read and an impressive artifact for your bookcase.
This series was inspired by anime OVAs from our childhoods. And it manifests on the page in an undeniable fashion. Marco is operating on a very high level on these pages and the book is destined to turn heads.
Tell your shop you want it.
SORRY, GUY-I-DON’T-KNOW. I’M JUST TIRED.
A DC writer did a video for social media in which he asked the readers to please go buy his book. Ok, that’s relatively normal. It had a desperate vibe to it, but that’s normal too. The video came after final order cutoff for his title, which gives the impression he didn’t know his release day or orders were bad and he’s hoping for a low-print sellout to goose speculators. Still normal.
What was not normal was his angle. “Buy my book or the homophobes win” was his take.
This is anachronistic. Encino Man energy. Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer swag. Rip Van Winkle. Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Etc. It’s one from the 2016 playbook and does nothing for us now. Dated. Trapped in amber. Stop it.
A guy with a lotta DC credits told me “yeah, I can’t pitch here anymore. It’s not serious people.” This is the eventual impact of “look at me, I need sales, let’s buy comics to defeat fascism!” You lose capable creators who aren’t interested in the circus of it all. It’s a tradeoff that I’m not sure the corporate publishers know they are making.
Homophobia is bad. If this guy wants to fight it, I support that project. But get out of here with the idea that your comic -or more to the point your comic SALES- will somehow accomplish this. It’s a transparent hustle. It attempts to weaponize an otherwise inert culture war to further his career. The only thing this type of bullshit does is animate the fringe while alienating the base. Nuts on either extreme of the political spectrum love this. But you know who hates it? People who buy comics.
Practice the art of firing people. It doesn’t mean you’re pro-homophobia if you fire someone who claims his superhero book will cure social ills.
Notice I’m not saying never hire this guy again. Hire him again in a month; I don’t believe in blackballing capable people. But if you’re so goddamn corporate about everything, how about maintaining some corporate standards? ‘Corporate’ refers to the diffusion of accountability across a private bureaucracy. No one to directly blame for the poisoning of our water. No one to point the finger at on massive layoffs. Etc. One POSITIVE practical application of this inhuman arrangement is you can credibly tell employees/freelancers “sorry, that’s just our policy.” So just make it the goddamn policy that when someone uses your company name to provoke the readership with a high schooler’s idea of ‘politics,’ you let them go.
STOP BALKANIZING THE READERSHIP. A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND.
Enough.
GAMES CAREER ENERGY
I’ve got a new term for the guys who insist on living in 2016 and are tryna make their names off their politics rather than their writing ability. These are Games Parachute motherfuckers.
I work in video games. MANY of my colleagues in comics do as well. For some, it’s a thrilling thing. They love games and they want to contribute to that art form. For others, it’s a check. A much nicer check than comics, but still not the check they prefer. They want to work in comics. Comic books are their first love and what they devoted their adult lives to. But sometimes you’ve gotta love the one you’re with, and games is the industry that feeds their families. After all, mortgages can’t be paid in “they fucking hired a columnist for The Atlantic to write the comic I was up for! Do you have any idea how fucking bush league that shit is?!”
What’s increasingly apparent is people are out here doing comics to get to the games jobs. A DC credit means SOMEONE will hire you in games. You will get your foot in the door. And that promise of working in a more lucrative field is the ONLY reason I can deduce for comic creators not giving a shit about the industry they are currently working in.
I see these people portrayed as ideological. But that can’t be true. They’re middle-of-the-road liberals, never actual radicals. These aren’t the type of people who die on hills. They’d only ‘take a stand’ if there was nothing at stake.
But, here they are. Chipping away at the readership. So I assume there’s no fear here. On to the next thing soon enough.
“It’s not serious people” rings in my ear.
What are we doing, man? Get this Games Parachute bullshit outta here. Be cavalier with someone else’s industry.
APPRECIATE PEOPLE WHILE THEY’RE HERE
No, Dan Panosian isn’t sick. Don’t worry.
He just doesn’t get the acclaim he deserves.
Marco and I were pouring over this cover the other day and I said, “hold up, lemme read the comments. Bet it’s 90% other creators who recognize just how special this dude is.” Marco replied “I read them already. It’s 95% creators.”
Which of course isn’t to say Panosian doesn’t have regular fans. He clearly does. Carved a nice space for himself in the industry and I’m sure makes a nice living. The problem is he should have all the space he wants and make a billion dollars. He shouldn’t be an “artists’ artist.”
There’s just more on Panosian’s pages than his contemporaries offer. And I don’t just mean ink, though there is more of that too. There’s more ‘comic book’ per square inch than almost anyone in the game. And when I see readers take him for granted, it sorta makes me sick.
“We have to educate the consumer!” is always a path to ruin. People like what they like. But when the average reader doesn’t have the eye to appreciate very obviously great work, it speaks to some need for a change. This feels like one of those tired Scorsese films vs Marvel films discourses, but maybe there’s something to that. Maybe it’s nice to sincerely appreciate greatness rather than passively absorb bombast. In the way people talk about Toth they will talk about Panosian.
All I’m saying is look at that goddamn cover.
THAT’S NOT GOOD
I feel like Michael Burry, but without a single possible way to benefit from all the forewarning.
NEW APPROVED TAKE ON PALESTINE JUST DROPPED
Comic pros who were too scared to have an opinion have finally put their finger in the wind and found a slogan that doesn’t risk anything.
The people who ALWAYS have a moralist solution to EVERYTHING decided to go camping the past week but have now reappeared with an answer for us.
“Ceasefire.”
Yup. And then?
Never mind, please don’t answer. Just stop offering solutions in general.
MEDIA ROUNDUP
Just got home from Five Nights At Freddy’s. It’s my stepson’s birthday weekend and we kept the party going with some Gold Class moviegoing.
I’ve never played this game, though I guess I know something about it via pop-culture osmosis. I had read online that this was a movie for the fans and was heavily laden with easter eggs and nods to deep lore.
I couldn’t detect any of that, as you might expect.
Just felt like a young-person horror film to me and I didn’t need a wiki to get anything more from it.
On some level I like the idea of a movie that only aims to satisfy fans. Feature films feel like compromised bits of half-art to me in the best circumstance, so why not just make your customers happy? Not sure I believe that’s best, but I get how someone could arrive there.
Saw the trailer for The Marvels ahead of our film. I don’t typically write about superhero movies here. I think they are pretty distant from what I like about comic books, even superhero comic books. Different audience and I’m fine with that.
But woof, man. Woof.
I knew this movie was coming out, but I didn’t know a thing about the plot. It’s a Freaky Friday power-swap thing played for laughs. I totally admit I’m checked out from these movies, so tell me if I’m crazy- is this what people want?
I get there’s 7B people on Earth, so you could safely say someone wants anything you could name. If Captain Marvel smelled a dog’s foot for 90min of the movie, someone, somewhere would be very satisfied by that. But is there enough people to justify the $100M I’m sure they spent on this thing? And are we at the stage of superhero movies that runs comparable to throwaway single issue stories from fill-in teams? Because that’s what this feels like.
In comics, I dove into the Hard Case Crime titles while I was on vacation. I’m sure I’ve spoken of my affection for the Vertigo Crime books. The manga-ish size hardbacks were a great presentation of the black & white art. I wonder if any of these things made money outside of the ones they turned into films. Feels impossible, but maybe comics were selling that well in the book market? If you worked for Vertigo around this time, lemme know.
Anyway, I like the idea of Hard Case Crime as a publisher. And I know this isn’t a popular view, but comics NEED publishers that are willing to take a chance on relatively low-cost series in the hope of a film flip. It’s just too crucial a pipeline for new talent AND there’s some great books in that world that wouldn’t be made otherwise.
I don’t know what HCC’s actual deals look like, but I imagine the standard one didn’t apply to THE ASSIGNMENT. My understanding is this series was an English-translation of the original French graphic novel. Walter Hill, the director, wanted to make a trashy movie and couldn’t get it made so he willed a graphic novel into existence. It is trashy and definitely borders on trash. A hitman gets turned into a woman by a vengeful relative of one of his victims. It was eventually made into a film.
It feels translated. In every respect. Every page is the worst page of comics you can imagine, but I never wanted to put the book down. Matz is the writer of THE KILLER, the book Archaia pushed hard at conventions for the years it was a publisher and is the basis for the new Linklater movie people are excited about. Just had to hang in there another 8 years, Archaia! Matz apparently well-regarded in France and I wouldn’t judge him on this adaptation from a script that has now been translated by what feels like ChatGPT. Jef, the artist, is uneven. But I think he delivers what readers of this type of thing may want. Grimace or grimace are your options on facial expressions.
I don’t know how to feel about this one. It was really bad. But, again, I didn’t stop reading. And I’ll typically stop at the first sign of something sucking. So, take this endorsement however you choose.
LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT READ-THROUGH
We’re at issue 32 and it’s a three-part story called ‘Blades’ courtesy of James Robinson and Tim Sale.
Sale is great on these pages. I don’t know that anyone wold call it his best work, but it’s some of my favorite. Unapologetically cartoony. Fun throughout.
Robinson’s script is walking a tricky line here. Stories where someone admires the hero or attempts to replace him really requires a lot of the writer. Someone has to look bad in the end, and writers are often not willing to go there.
I think this one relies on a bit of a get-outta-jail-free card, but is still a good ride. Even if the story is simple, it gives the impression a lot is going on.
Of the LOTDK stories I’ve read so far, this is among my favorite. Maybe it wouldn’t be in the top ten without Sale, I dunno. But it’s got Sale, so it’s a win.
ALRIGHT THEN
Enough of me. Hopefully next week I’ll be less irritated at comics. There’s some great things happening generally and I’m over the moon at what I’m co-creating. So I can’t be mad, per se. I’m just tired of the unserious. I know comics aren’t life-or-death, but they also sorta are. Either we’re a real art-based industry, with room for everything from low-brow to genre to literature, or we’re just fucking bums and scam artists. And I’m not willing to join the goofs on that side of things.
Stop the bullshit, brothers. We can do this better than we currently are. Ever upward, right? C’mon. Do for self.