Rolling Comic Books 2020 Visions

Sic has a 20-pt list of insider facts and a complete timeline of the incident he's just putting together for you, ulysses.

Having said that, all power to the guy, but I can't imagine wanting to actually read this.

we’re going to be in real trouble if someone who is a better artist makes a more-competently executed version from her perspective

lol mh

As much as I laud the intention behind this comic, I gotta agree with Sic that the art looks awful, mostly because of the colouring , which looks like they're straight from the "now that we have them fancy computer colours, let's make everything shiny!" '90s school of comic colouring.

Also, on minor note, the writing on that NYT article really illustrates why replacing the word "comic" with Will Eisner's more respectable term doesn't necessarily work... A 10-page "graphic novel", huh?

frankly the art is the least interesting thing by far about that and i would imagine that should be obvious?

Then why make a comic, sorry Graphic Novel?

I sometimes think some people do comics to do things that probably would have gone mostly unnoticed (fairly or unfairly) in another medium.

okay, maybe you guys ARE unfamiliar with the details here? this was a huge story in NYC. Christian Cooper, the aggrieved birdwatcher in this situation, has been doing comics with Marvel since the 90's. Via wiki:

Cooper has written stories for Marvel Comics Presents, which often feature characters such as Ghost Rider and Vengeance. He has also edited a number of X-Men collections, and the final two issues of the Marvel Swimsuit Special. Cooper was Marvel's first openly gay writer and editor. He introduced the first gay male character in Star Trek, Yoshi Mishima, in the Starfleet Academy series, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in 1999. He also introduced the first openly lesbian character for Marvel, Victoria Montesi and created and authored Queer Nation: The Online Gay Comic.Cooper was also an associate editor for Alpha Flight #106 in which the character Northstar came out as gay.

If you're completely unfamiliar with the incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_birdwatching_incident

why make a comic, sorry Graphic Novel?

Cooper got to rewrite himself as the hero in a story that put him in potential danger and, better yet, couch it in a way so that people who can't connect the dots between this kind of harassment and police brutality can see how one leads to the other. He got to do it in a media that was meaningful to him and then distribute it broadly to a mass audience without putting a price point on it. If your takeaway from all that is that the light sourcing is off...

It can be a great and noble and worthwhile project and still be shit.

Exactly. I was aware of the incident and Cooper's background in writing comics, so when I saw the link I got excited about what this comic could've been, and was subsequently disheartened to see the art. Obviously his intentions are laudable, and if the comic reaches a wide audience and has an impact on the US discourse on racism, that's fantastic, but I don't see why we can't also lament the fact that a comic with great potential was saddled with such substandard art?

gosh, i wonder why cooper or his editor may have picked Alitha Martinez and Mark Morales to do the "substandard" art on this book?

Forget it, forks, it's TCJ-town.

gosh, i wonder why cooper or his editor may have picked Alitha Martinez and Mark Morales to do the "substandard" art on this book?

Ronald Wimberly had a quiet, single-page comic about an experience he had the month after the bird-watching incident spiked by the New York Times: https://www.patreon.com/posts/40895750

Are you really trying to suggest that because of the comic's message and creators it's somehow above criticism?

Wimberly did get this run in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/greetings-from-the-new-brooklyn
Also LAAB #2 (actually #3 but whatevs) just got funded.

I'm fully aware of the details of the story, I just didn't think this was very good. But as I said, all power to him. Just because it's not my thing doesn't mean it won't do what it's meant to do.

Anyone else read Scioli's new Kirby book? Quelle surprise given the subject and creator, but it's really goddamn good.

Yeah, I picked up the Free Comic Book Day preview, which takes us up to the creation of Captain America and the first encounter with Stan Lee. Thought the use of first person narration was a bit of a risky move that mostly paid off, although if anything it made Kirby sound more... linear... than he tended to be in interviews - does the full graphic novel list sources? I'm hoping that this will at least nudge Evanier a bit into completing his Kirby biography.

I know I am wrong, but I have never been especially moved by Kirby's work. Handing in my ILC badge.

I mean, it's hell of al lot of work, in different styles and genres over 40 years, not to be moved by. Once Kirby hit his mature style in the 1950s almost everything he drew was pretty magnificent, and some of it could be surprisingly elegant. Even when his drawing chops declined in the late 70s, you'd still get glorious psychedelic pages that are genuinely visionary and have worn far better than some of the more 'relevant' superhero stuff, imho.

I think he's best when his dialogue and his art are working together towards a heightened affect - everything is urgent, everything is alarming, if people are sitting around at a picnic then you can only assume that their mental machinations are drowning out the shuddering squeals of monstrous machinery happening just out of the panel. (okay, the terrible alliteration was more a Stan Lee thing)

But both threads are definitely an acquired taste!

I think it's also easy enough to just not be able to get with non-modern superhero comics, or indeed superhero comics at all.

I'm sure it's a lack in me, definitely.

Again, there's lots of Kirby stuff that's in other genres apart from superheroes (although yes, the 60s Marvel era is what he's best-remembered for now).

I'd recommend his Fourth World stuff and his 2001 adaptation to those who aren't otherwise onboard. The closer you can get to unadulterated Kirby, the better.

Now I'm one of those 'wrong' Kirby fans who doesn't particularly like the Fourth World stuff, or at least doesn't hold it in such high regard as many (I prefer pretty much all of the other early 70s DC stuff - Kamandi, the Demon (Kirby's most underrated series imho), even The Losers. ) The early 4th World comics are marred by some especially poor Vince Colletta inking (talk about adulterated JK!) and the whole thing would have benefitted from stricter editorial control/advice, although not necessarily from Stan Lee-dialogue/captions. Kirby was so stuffed with new ideas he sometimes lacked the discipline and focus to stick with a consistent storyline - and sometimes he simply lost interest (I think the original plan with the New Gods was to hand over the three linked titles to other creators, something that DC were never go to play along with, having 'captured' their rivals' key artist).

Once Mike Royer came aboard as Kirby's main inker at DC, things obviously markedly improved visually and yes, it's a much 'purer' version of the Kirby aesthetic - although it seems clear that the general readership preferred Kirby inked by someone like Joe Sinnott, who smoothed out some of the rough edges in Kirby's pencilling. The 2001 Treasury edition was inked by Frank Giacoia, an excellent veteran inker who really preserved the power in Kirby's work while at the same time giving everything a nice crisp line finish.

Also, the pasted on Superman heads in Kirby's Jimmy Olsen books are so jarring and inappropriate that I find it hard to look at those issues.

FYI, the Scioli bio touches on many of the points in your post. I don't know exactly how fact-based it is (although, to answer your question upthread, there are a number of sources cited), but it gets pretty deep into the weeds.

I'll give Scioli's Kirby book a shot sometime; I was reading the early bits on Instagram last year and it was intriguing. It'll probably hit the local library system sooner or later.

I really, really like the unhindered, unedited quality of the Fourth World material. Kirby was such a fount of pure creative energy, at times it's like staring directly into the Source Wall. Overwhelming, bewildering, thrilling.

70s Kirby is my favorite Kirby, honestly

late 60's thor is prob mine

though new gods is hard to argue with

Apart from a couple years of FF and Thor I find him unreadable, but genuinely love him in separate panels

brings up the question of "readability" as it involves images. His stabs at copy, assisted or otherwise, tend to be unreadable but the images (and sound fx) alone tell more of the story than many superhero genre writers can.

It's weird but on a drawing level I prefer his work in the 40s and 50s but on a design (costumes, settings) and composition level I think he peaked in the 70s.

Yeah I like him an imagemaker first and foremost, so fwiw I don’t think his work would’ve been better (perhaps the opposite!) if he’d only been paired with a good writer

the less "other writer" there is, the more readable Kirby is. Simon & Kirby collaborating as a team: clear and coherent. Gerber writing something pitched exactly at Kirby's 1980s level of wackiness and rage at injustice: good stuff. Mark Evanier doing the odd tidy-up or copy-edit on Kirby's syntax: the balloons have the same spirit as the individual drawings and storytelling, just a great charge of the author's strengths. Stan trying to fill half the panel with entirely redundant enuniciations, or outright contradictions, of the action being powerfully depicted: gtfoh you jealous sad-sack.

Yes, I think this thing of Kirby as imagemaker is all well and good and true to some extent, but ignores his own commitment to narrative storytelling throughout his career. Again, according to Evanier, Kirby was surprisingly indifferent about inkers, because he felt it was almost impossible for any kind of professional to fuck up the panel-to-panel continuity - the story - established by his very complete pencils. Kirby only swapped Mike Royer for Vince Colletta as the Fourth World inker when he found out Colletta was showing the pages to people in the Marvel offices prior to printing - and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them. And when Stan Lee and John Romita and Roy Thomas and others instructed artists to 'follow' (ie copy) Kirby's work at Marvel, it was his especially dynamic way of telling a story that they wanted someone like John Buscema to imitate (it seems clear that Stan in particular favoured the more elegant, illustrative style of a Romita or Buscema while, ruefully or otherwise, knowing full well that no other Marvel artist could match either Kirby's inventiveness AND his ability to engage the reader and stir their emotions.)

Ward, the fact that you keep dropping knowledge that I only just learned from Scioli would seem to suggest that his book is fairly accurate + granular.

xxp good summary, sic

Didn't know this was coming out
https://www.blackgate.com/2020/09/17/fantasia-2020-part-xvii-feels-good-man/

I think it's already rentable VOD

Yep, just finished its digital "run" via one of the shuttered arthouses here.

Furie and the director were on Marc Maron's WTF a few weeks ago, and Furie kept referring to the original Boys Club issues as "zines," RIP Alvin

i saw it; it was okay? not deeply revealing and sorta necessarily overstructured to force a redemptive arc on it. Furie seems like a tremendously sweet guy.

Passmore is great
https://hyperallergic.com/586973/sports-is-hell-ben-passmore-koyama

one helluva title page

and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them

I saw a blog with a bunch of these compared to Kirby's pencils and the final product and it's shocking how much he just decided to not do