I bought Mike Allred's Red Rocket 7 on Comixology last night...

Man, I remember when Red Rocket 7 came out.  1997.  It's right at the tail end of what I consider appropriate for this blog-- pre-2000 stuff.  I try to keep to stuff even earlier than that, largely the late 70s through the mid-80s when I was first following comics as a fan rather than an occasional reader.  But why not talk about some late 90s/pre-millennial stuff?  You know, if it's really funky and cool.  Like Red Rocket 7!

Anyway, I'm about to tell you a fun story about buying the original print version of Red Rocket 7.  I didn't start buying it until later, much later, than its debut.  I believe this.  I may be wrong.  I think I started buying it in the summer of 1998, after its print run concluded.  The reason I think this is I have a strong memory of buying it in Athens, Georgia, and getting into a discussion about its weird dimensions.  If I had bought it in Albany, the people there wouldn't have said boo about it.  People in Athens have opinions about things and they like to engage with you about said opinions.

I didn't move back to Athens until the summer of 1998.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment off Baxter Street and the A/C was a wall-mounted unit in my bedroom.  It sounded as if someone had cranked up a VW Beetle in there, barely put out any cool air at all, caused me to buy two box fans which further contributed to my localized noise pollution and kept me up all night with the sweats.

My job was as a "graphic designer" at the local daily paper and I was supposed to be sort of an on-staff cartoonist as well, but mostly what I did was put together used car ads I had very little say over the design of all day then drive home and read comics and try to draw, draw and draw more at my lovely drafting table in the sweltering sauna I called an apartment. 

My salary was dismal, my career prospects even more so.  My social life consisted of crashing parties with the few friends I had and eating food out of the refrigerators or popping microwave popcorn and having fights with it in the kitchen.  These friends and I sometimes crashed tailgate parties outside Sanford Stadium during football season got on free beer and stuffing our faces with free chicken sandwiches and hamburgers, and, when everyone else had gone to watch the game, stole all the whiskey fifths we could get our hands on and passed them out to homeless people on North Campus like liquored-up, idiot Robin Hoods. My romantic life consisted of mooning over this incredibly cool and well-connected artist and her hair of ever-changing shades of red, who sometimes talked to me and sometimes ignored me depending on her mood or what drugs were influencing her that night. 

What little money I had in those days I spent on Chinese buffet, beer and comics.  Comics, especially those by Mike Allred and Mark Schultz and Los Bros Hernandez and Peter Bagge, were fast becoming an obsession with me again after years of remission.  So of course I wanted to read Red Rocket 7. 

But when I bought it, the guy who owned the comic book store told me it pissed him off.

"Why?  Why would it piss you off?" I asked.

"The size and shape are totally fucked up!" he told me.

I was standing there thinking what a neat little package Red Rocket 7 was.  It had these sturdy covers of some kind of thicker-than-usual stock, and both the graphics and dimensions recalled 45 RPM records, of which I still had a stack of back at my mom's house.  The comic book store guy told me he got all that and thought it was pretty clever and would always be enthusiastic about Allred's work, but at the same time, the size and shape it meant the book sat like an oddity on the shelf.

Maybe it affected sales.  I don't know.  For all I know, Red Rocket 7 sold billions of copies.  Maybe the comic book guy was upset at the idea people would reject Red Rocket 7 because they couldn't fit it in their comic book longboxes and that was a downright shame, because it deserved a much wider readership.  Maybe I destroyed my memory with a few too many drunken weekends-- god knows I can't remember much about any of them but I hear stories that fill me with shame-- and I'm making up most of this story out of bits and pieces of things that have nothing to do with Mike Allred and Red Rocket 7.

Still, nearly sixteen years later, I'm fairly certain the book's size and shape were at issue.  And for some reason, I never bought every issues.  I think I bought the first four or five, then stopped.  I have no idea how the story ends.  And I do know now that it's been digitized, its size and shape no longer matter in the least.  It fits right inside my phone and I can take Red Rocket 7 everywhere I go.

Now I do own all of it, and if I feel up to it, I'll post some thoughts about it here.  It will probably be the most recent comic we wrestle with on this blog.

Mike Allred on the Fantastic Four?

Okay, it's not Marvel, but it's Allred!

Whereas DC's kind of like, "Nyahhh nyahhh, we don't need you!" it seems Marvel's going out of its way to solicit my hard-earned yen.  They've got Dani Moonstar practically headlining a book and now this exciting news.  Exciting to me, anyway!

I've loved Mike Allred's art for quite some time now-- and he's just such a positive, nice guy I can't help but like the man himself and his whole family, too-- and have especially fond memories of the last Marvel series other than the new New Mutants I bought with any regularity.  I'm talking the awesome X-Force/X-Statix book Allred did with Peter Milligan.  I really need to go back and re-read that.  It's been too long since I communed with the likes of Mr. Sensitive, U-Go Girl and Doop.  I can't even remember the other characters' names.  Spike?  Tike?  Man, it was gloriously weird and emotionally engaging in a way few mainstream comics ever are.

While I'd love it if Allred also happened to be writing Fantastic Four, just the presence of his artwork is a guarantee I'll be tracking this down over here, across the sea in Japan!

Excelsior!

Comic Report: Japan!

After a long break back in the States, I'm in manga heaven again.  Not that I'm a fan of manga in and of itself.  I enjoy a few titles, consider myself a fan of a few creators, but I don't separate Japanese comics and Western comics.  Comics are comics.  Sure you read Japanese comics right to left and that takes some getting used to, but with the borrowing and blending of elements over the past few decades, a comic story consists of drawings and word balloons arranged in a particular order according to the creator's intent no matter where it comes from or who wrote or drew it.

If you're a regular reader of various Western monthly comics, you have to work a bit harder to find them here in Japan.  There are online sources and if you happen to live in a large enough city, you might find a few odd titles in the English language section in a bookstore.  Just be prepared to pay three to four times the suggested retail price.  I haven't tried downloading any digital comics yet, but I'll give that a try later when I'm more settled and have my own Internet connection.

In the meantime, I'm making do with the comics I brought with me:  the superb Solo #7 (2005) by Mike Allred and family, and the award-winning Nexus: The Origin (1992) by Mike Baron and Steve Rude.

Solo #7 is one of the best things DC's published in the past ten years.  Maybe twenty.  It serves as the perfect antidote to all those gloomy, doomy negative portrayals of their own characters DC's dished up in the years since Identity Crisis, and it's a lot more fun than their similarly nostalgic Wednesday Comics.  Yeah, not every superhero comic should be this kind of poppy fun.  We like our supergods with a touch of realism these days.  But as Batman's faithful butler Alfred points out here, "Why is it the good things are never 'real life,' only the bad?"

Who can argue with Allred's winning cover depiction of Wonder Girl doing the batusi?

Nexus:  The Origin is a bit darker.  It starts with genocide, includes a starvation death and Nexus excusing his own killings by claiming self-defense.  This is the comic that hooked me on Horatio Hellpop, Sundra Peale and all the frog-like aliens and hairy Thunes that inhabit their universe.  Baron condenses the entirety of Nexus's early years into several poignant vignettes and Rude illustrates with his strong sense of anatomy and page design.  Inker Gary Martin perfectly complements Rude's pencils-- I've seen a number of inkers on the Dude, but Martin is far and away my favorite.  Rude "re-mastered" this book in 2007.

These are a couple of thick, meaty magazines that invite you to chew slowly and savor their delicious taste.  Which I suppose taken literally would mean you should eat them and enjoy some paper.  But you know what I mean-- read them over and over again.  Both were well worth dragging thousands of miles across an entire continent and ocean.

Well, I promised you a comic report, didn't I?  If you happen to be in Minami-Funabashi, Chiba prefecture, go to Vivit Square.  The Tsutaya there has a huge selection of Japanese comics, plus a teensy-weensy grouping of some translated ones in their English language book section.  Unfortunately, I can't remember which ones.  Probably Death Note and Vagabond.  The Japanese originals, though, boggle the mind.  So varied in genre and style.  Why aren't there comics about baseball and basketball teams in America?  Where are the simple stories of high school kids falling in love?

I guess they're in the manga section at your local Books-A-Million.  Which, combined with their Western graphic novel section, can't hold a candle to what they have at Tsutaya in Minami-Funabashi.

"Maybe they'll flourish and help bring about the utopia you're looking forward to, where janitors don't get paid."

Because I'm more of a freak than a geek (but not in the Freaks and Geeks TV series sense; in the sense that I've got an abnormal mind), I've been following this awesome online argument between comics writer Kurt Busiek and a bunch of other people about DC's digital pricing. Some people are convinced DC's announced price structure is too expensive and that 99 cents is the magic number for what a digital comic should cost, based apparently on the iTunes model or something. Busiek convincingly argues otherwise, other people jump in and out, there's a lot of talk about robots taking over human labor and-- what for me put this into the "must read" category-- a hilarious zinger from Busiek, which I've used as the title of this blog entry. For some reason related to my freak mind, I keep hearing it quoted by Philip J. Frye from Futurama. Sorry, Kurt!

Here's a snippet of the retailer letter from Bob Wayne (you can read it in its entirety in the The Beat article) that set it off:

DIGITAL
 To clarify from my last note, we will be at “price-parity” for same-day digital. No DC digital comic will be cheaper than its physical counterpart at launch. Same-day (a.k.a. “Day/ Date”) parity pricing is for the first four weeks of release; thereafter, the digital titles will follow our standard pricing, with $2.99 comics dropping in price to $1.99, $3.99 comics dropping in price to $2.99, and so forth. Keep in mind that our goal with our 52 new #1s will be to ensure that the physical comic book is more compelling than ever!

The best parts of the discussion are Busiek's exchanges with a rather excitable guy calling himself Darryl, who doesn't "have time" to "mince words" and absolutely will not pay more than 99 cents for a digital comic (although I wonder if his resolve would waver at 1.01). Busiek uses insider knowledge and experience to shoot down every single one of Darryl's points, one after the other, but Darryl keeps coming back with a new argument. The last one I read has something to do with "putting the kabosh" on the idea DC's having financial difficulties and makes the fairly outrageous claim that DC's potential profits on digital comics will be "found money."

Yeah, I don't get it either.

I sympathize with Darryl, though. If DC were forcing me to buy their digital comics at an outrageous price, I'd be pretty angry about it, too. Poor guy. I don't know how DC thinks it can get away with this. And I can’t contradict him because as he energetically points out, “the customer is always right” and he’s the customer. At one point he seems to suggest he’s the only customer. What Busiek, Dan Didio, Jim Lee and Bob Wayne can’t dispute is Darryl knows what he’ll pay for his comics and DC can suck it if they don’t match his price.

I can dig it, Darryl. I'd rather pay less than more for something, too. I'd love to set my own price for everything I want and indulge myself in my every whim. Who wouldn't? Actually, I kind of do already, but the end result is I do without a lot of things. My utopia doesn't involve janitors working pro bono-- it's a land just over there, just around the river bend, where the living is easy and DC and Marvel have joined together just to give comics away for free, or maybe even print certain titles with me as the sole demographic, like one starring Cassandra Cain, Dani Moonstar, Xi'an Coy Manh, Hellboy, Conan and the original Teen Titans all partnering up in running an ice cream stand in a small college town. I'd LOVE that, especially if I get to choose the creative teams for each arc!

Maybe where Darryl and I part ways is I know I’m not the sole reader of DC’s product. I'm not even in their audience demographic for their monthlies anymore, and I’m gradually learning to accept this fact. I’m a niche inside another niche. Lately, I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised that DC is still meeting my comic reading needs—they’re just doing it with Showcase and Swamp Thing reprints and Neal Adams and Jack Kirby hardcovers and the occasional—just occasional—Cassandra Cain story. I'm even allowed to buy comics from Marvel, Dark Horse, IDW, Image, Fantagraphics and... gasp... manga publishers! This is the agreement DC and I have reached, our little accord. Because the iTunes/music analogy has been so popular in this discussion, look at it this way-- I’m not angry at Lady Gaga for not appealing to my listening tastes and not even trying to by giving me her music for my personal quoted price. I’m too busy listening to Melt-Banana.

At the same time, I do wonder why certain comics feel more expensive to me now than any ever did when I was a kid and a comic cost 35 cents. In those days, I only received a dollar a week allowance-- enough for two comics with something left over for maybe a Tangy Taffy or a Mountain Dew. In the past 20 years or so, I can't think of a single Marvel or DC comic I've bought that cost more than 1/3rd of my weekly income, yet I often feel the hit to my finances disproportionately. When I was a kid, I didn't think of the price other than in terms of "How many comics can I buy today with this much money?" Now I think, "Is this book worth it?"

The market will inevitably decide the digital pricing issue and what formats survive in the long run as it does on everything else offered for sale. DC feels this price parity structure is in their best interest, and I’m pretty confident the marketing people and accountants and whatever other executives were involved in this process at Time-Warner have taken into consideration more angles than either Darryl or I realize. We’ll all find out together come fall when we see the numbers. Until then, I can't and won't fault DC for making an effort not to alienate or even ruin retailers while chasing those digital readers. They're not taking the "destroy the village in order to save it" path. Scorched earth and all that. I don't think the industry has come to that pass, an apocalypse with DC devouring retailers in a cannibalistic frenzy while savage motorcyclists war on the highways for fuel.

I think it's important for DC to take this path because I seriously doubt John and Janie Dontcareaboutsuperman would buy any comic books-- paper or digital-- at 99 cents, or even if DC paid them to. Most people don't read comics not because the monthlies are too expensive. They don't read them because they don't have any desire to read them at any price. This is one major reason WHY monthly comics are so expensive. Fewer readers and higher overhead means raising prices to maintain profitability. DC can't just assume at 99 cents they'll pick up whatever number of new customers-- readers they then have to retain-- to offset their costs. I seriously doubt they'd want to set up a situation where their digital comics are in competition with their paper comics at the cost of all those comic book shops they still need for now and into the foreseeable future. And like it or not, publishers and retailers are doing all of this to make money, not to steward superhero icons for pure altruism or some sense of duty to pop culture.

At this point I have to admit while my intuition rarely failed me when it came to choosing which train to take in Tokyo's spaghetti-like tangle of train and subway lines, it frequently falters when it comes to this comics industry stuff. I hope with all my heart DC succeeds fabulously, changes the game and enters a new golden age of stability and profitability. I hope those elusive readers do come to "sample the wares," as Jim Lee put it. Not just sample them, but stay and join with the rest of us comic book fans every Wednesday or whatever day companies release the new comics in the utopian future. We might even get our cheaper comics then. In fact, DC might even stop harassing poor Darryl with 2.99 and 1.99 digital comics and offer him some at 99 cents.

But whatever happens, the one thing I'm absolutely certain of is I'll continue to carefully pick and choose which books and formats and companies deserve my hard-earned money. If I dig on some of these new DC books, I'll buy them, happily so. If not, there are still plenty of other books out there to read, digital or otherwise.

And to be honest, I'm selfishly hoping that in the mass of DC's new #1 titles, there's one called New Teen Mutants and Their Titanic and Barbaric Ice Cream Stand starring Hellboy. With the first six issues written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mike Allred, with Nick Cardy covers.

Today's lesson: Buying comics is an expensive habit!

Yeah. I'm thinking about giving up comics and taking up cocaine again. Just kidding. I've never used cocaine. As far as you know. But today was payday, so I went to JJ's Comics & Cards, my local comic book store, looking specifically for comics featuring Cassandra Cain in her new costumed identity of Blackbat. Which means-- choke!-- I bought a few DC Bat-books! I even bought some I wasn't sure she was in just to make certain I didn't miss even a fleeting glimpse or hint!

But I spent close to 40 bucks. They had stuff there I didn't even know I wanted until I saw it on the shelves. Here's what I ended up buying:

Batman: Gates of Gotham #1: Cass in civilian clothes, towards the end of the issue, just as promised. The way artist Kyle Higgins draws Cass-- her anatomy, her clothing, her body language-- and the way writer Scott Snyder handles her mode of speech do nothing to define her as anything more than just another generic superhero person, which lead to something of an anti-climax. Here's hoping a closer reading proves me wrong.

Batman Incorporated #5: No discernible traces of Cass in civvies or otherwise, but lots of Batwoman. I like Yanick Paquette's art with these Michel Lacombe inks. Solid figurework, nice facial expressions.

Batman Incorporated #6: Chris Burnham's art combines the thin, scribbly lines of Frank Quitely with the deranged facial expressions of Ito Junji. I'm not sure I like Bruce Wayne looking kind of crazed, but there's Cass as Blackbat more than making up for it with a nearly silent action sequence. Leave it to Grant Morrison to give us Cass doing what she does best-- whomping on people and leaving no room for discussion. Liking the pointy little mask and cape, can't tell much else about her costume.

Conan: Road of Kings #5: I passed on King Conan to pick this up. No Cass whatsoever, just Conan in his warrior prime as written by Roy Thomas. Which reminds me-- I need to turn to the back for "The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob," the biographical Robert E. Howard strip by Jim & Ruthe Keegan. It's always excellent. Cass's appearance in this book cancelled due to licensing difficulties between Dark Horse, Time-Warner and Conan Properties International. Too bad. Thomas's take on her would have been interesting, to say the least.

Hellboy: Being Human: Mike Mignola script, Richard Corben art, complete story in one issue. Of course I bought this! No Cass appearance, Cass not referenced in dialogue.

John Byrne's Next Men #6: The return of one of my favorite-- yet somehow frustrating-- titles from years past. Byrne's telling a convoluted time travel mystery but the story feels somehow beefy. I get that same full-belled satisfaction from reading it I used to get from comics, rather than the sense I've eaten a single cookie a lot the flimsy, underwritten books give me these days. Not saying Next Men is gourmet fare so far, but it does hit the spot. Will I be able to keep it down? Cass appears briefly disguised as a Union soldier. Sure, the figure's tiny and consists of just a couple of ink swirls, but I'd recognize her anywhere.

New Mutants #25: "New Direction!" huh? How about A direction? This is a book I've stuck with because I like Dani and Xi'an so much, but it's been nothing but fragments of crossover stories, frequently with the New Mutants team barely appearing on the pages of their own book. And it got off to such a decent start before being consumed by the needs of modern epic storytelling. I'm not quite ready to give up on it yet, but if this book is just going to be a bump on the ass of the greater X-franchise with no stories to tell of its own, then I'll be bailing soon. Very soon. Rumors of Cass taking over as team leader in this issue prove unfounded.

Red Robin #23: Another false alarm. No Cass.

The Rocketeer Adventures #1: The lead story is all about Cass and explains how she came to choose "Blackbat" as her new super-name. Yeah. I didn't make that up. It's... really... I bought "cover 8," the Dave Stevens variant. I also hate multiple covers. But this one is a beauty. And inside there are stories by Mike Allred, John Cassaday and Kurt Busiek. Busiek's just happens to be illustrated by Michael Kaluta. Are there really people who have to collect each and every variant cover of a single issue? Do those kinds of stunts really help publishers? Or do readers just choose their favorite one and go with that? If it's the latter, I'm all for it because it's kind of interactive. If it's the former-- YUCK. But what a gorgeous book! John CASSaday, but no Cass Cain.

X23 #10: I've always hated this X23 character. Well, not the character, just the concept. To me, you need one Wolverine, one Batman, one Superman, one Wonder Woman, one Spider-Man. Not clones and extras. Which may sound strange coming from someone who bought a bunch of comics based on the erroneous assumption a former Batgirl would be in each and every one of them. And I've always been indifferent towards Jubilee. Then a funny thing happened. One day the comic store had nothing I particularly wanted so I picked up the first issue of the Wolverine and Jubilee miniseries. Jubilee as a vampire? DOUBLE YUCK. DOUBLE SURPRISE! It turned out to be a pretty compelling story, quite well-written by Kathryn Immonen and nicely drawn by Phil Noto. It made me care about Jubilee for the first time. So when I saw a comic featuring vampire Jubilee fighting X23 with art by Sana Takeda? I felt perfectly willing to climb off my high horse and--

Cassandra Cain is back in action!

I'm happy with all these purchases, and I'd openly shill for JJ's Comics & Cards because of the royal treatment the owners have always given me-- and they're just so nice-- but these books cost me around 36 dollars. Actually, if I want to keep up my comic book reading habit, I'm probably going to have to give up a lot of other little things. Like electricity, clothing and food. Or I may have to resolve once again to stick only to collections, trades and archives, and then only very selectively.

But there's that Cass factor. Yes, there is.