Very sketchy...

Some ink sketching I did today while looking at a book by a Japanese artist and one of the Al Williamson Archives from Flesk Publications.  I am not one of the greats or even one of the merely competents!

I did it! I ordered Ghost World!

I know you're fascinated by this Ghost World saga and relieved to know I'll have a brand new copy sometime in the next two weeks thanks to my good friends at Amazon Japan and Sagawa Transport.  I also ordered New Mutants Classic volume 4, two Marvel Masterworks Uncanny X-Men books and John Byrne's Compleat Next Men 1.  What a dork!

Along with those I sent for Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and On the Beach by Nevil Shute.  I'm not just a sucker for comics about disaffected youth and mutated super-beings with soap opera-ish personal issues but also for the nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies.  I'm a big fan of the apocalypse.  When you grow up party to a murder-suicide pact involving you, your government, its chief ideological rival and every other higher order of life on the planet, you tend to find such concepts as missile gaps, fallout, mega-deaths and half-life fascinating and fun.  My first words were, "Mein Fuhrer!  I can valk!"

So I've read On the Beach multiple times, but I read Alas, Babylon only once, when I was a child.  All I remember about it is someone gets blinded by staring at an atom bomb blast.  Probably some punk teenager.    Teenagers are always staring at things.

I remember that, and Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas, which were a staple of my summertime diet in those days.  The rich, probably artificially-flavored with chemicals later proven to be carcinogenic tomato taste of Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas is forever linked in my mind with Alas, Babylon and the novelization of George Lucas's early film THX-1138, my copy of which apparently had a few pages missing.  I assume the movie has a happy ending like most of Lucas's other films, right?  I stole Alas, Babylon from my older brother who read it for a high school class and THX-1138 came courtesy a used book sale at the public library.

Holy moley, I'm like Proust with brain damage.

Speaking of Love and Rockets...

Fantagraphics promises a "major Love and Rockets-related announcement" to be made at the San Diego Comic-Con this year.  Well, they are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the ground-breaking series from Los Bros Hernandez, and they have a lot of Hernandez-produced books coming out shortly, including Love and Rockets New Stories #5 and Gilbert's all-ages graphic novel The Adventures of Venus, the cover of which looks adorably appealing.  And here's their slate of signings and what-have-you's, which I took from the email they sent, not because I'm special but because I signed up for their emails:

Wednesday, July 11th:
7:00 - 8:00 PM Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

Thursday, July 12th:
12:00 - 2:00 PM  Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez
2:00 - 3:00 PM  Esther Pearl Watson/Trina Robbins
3:30 - 5:30 PM Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

Friday, July 13th:
10:30 - 12:00 PM  Gilbert and Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez
12:00 - 1:30 PM Dave McKean
12:00 - 2:00 PM  Gilbert Shelton
2:00 - 3:30 PM  Gilbert and Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez
3:30 - 5:30 PM  Justin Hall/Trina Robbins/No Straight Lines special guests
5:30 - 6:30 PM  Mark Kalesniko/Shannon Wheeler

Saturday, July 14th:

11:00 - 12:30 PM  Gilbert and Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

12:30 - 2:30 PM  Johnny Ryan/Steven Weissman

3:00 - 5:00 PM  Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

5:00 - 6:00 PM  Mark Kalesniko/Michel Gagne

Sunday, July 15th:

10:30 - 11:30 AM  Mark Kalesniko/Michel Gagne

11:30 - 1:30 PM  Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

I would LOVE to meet Los Bros, but also Trina Robbins.  Frankly, some of the other names are just mysteries to me.  But I've always been... one step... BEHIND!

A Xenozoic tease...

Is this what I think it is?  Mark Schultz's Xenozoic Tales and Other Stories over on a certain social network is making me drool in anticipation of what-- if it is what I believe it to be-- the most eagerly awaited and anticipated comic book event of my lifetime so far.  I mean, if you think Mike Baron and Steve Rude returning to Nexus made me excited, the potential for another issue of Xenozoic Tales to go along with said Nexus has me in severe need of heavy sedation.  I mean, really, Xenozoic Tales, Nexus and Love & Rockets fulfill my comics needs.  They are filling enough they leave me satiated.  When I have new stories from any of those series to look forward to, why should I care about re-boots and crossovers and capes and underwear and all that?

Apparently there will be some sort of announcement at one of Mark Schultz's panels at the this year's San Diego Comic-Con.  He has several:

Thursday, 7/12/12
10:00a.m. - 11:00a.m.
Room: 32AB
Flesk: Celebrating a Decade of Publishing

Thursday, July 12
12:30-1:30PM
Room 4
Spotlight on Mark Schultz's Unlikely Career

Friday, July 13
11:00-12:00PM
Room 23ABC
The Artists’ Way

Friday, July 13
3:30-4:30PM
Room 7AB
75th Anniversary of Prince Valiant

Sunday, July 15
2:00-3:00PM
Room 25ABC
Cover Story

Being as ah'm a-way over here in the south-- south central Japan, that is-- I'm going to miss out on seeing one of my writing-and-drawing idols in person, the man who inspired me to try dry-brush on my graphic design entrance portfolio at the University of Georgia.  The man whose comics I spent money on even when I didn't have money to spend on food.  There hasn't been a new Xenozoic Tales comic since 1996, just the odd print and sketchbook now and again.  And the damned thing ended on a cliff-hanger!

If you have the fat Xenozoic volume from Flesk Publications, which reprints the Schultz-illustrated stories from the 14 issue run of the original series (but unfortunately leaves out the Steve Stiles back-ups), you remember the promise near the back:  "The adventures of Hannah Dundee & Jack Tenrec will continue.  Look for more mystery, mayhem & intrigue in future Xenozoic stories!"

I will!  I will look!  You started something!

Is it that time again? Time to re-read Ghost World?

Ghost World.  You've seen the movie.  You've read the book.  So have I.  Let's form a club, okay?  We'll meet in my tree fort out back and read Ghost World over and over again, and act out the scenes and we won't let anybody join we don't want to join!

That's a stupid idea.  Sorry.  But the feeling I should read Ghost World one more time is growing deep down inside, a brilliant idea which somehow sprang from the exact same place as that stupid one.  To read Ghost World again requires the purchase of Ghost World, which I can easily afford.  I have a battered pre-movie version back in the States.  Yes, I was into Ghost World before it became a movie.  I'm not bragging or trying to pose as some hipster cognoscenti.  It's a matter of chronology.  Time and setting.

Ghost World just crept up on me in a melancholy, mysterious fashion that seems completely fitting.  It was the way back when, during that time we called the mid-90s because we were in the middle of a decade that started 199 and finished with a number somewhere between 3 and 7, Bill Clinton was president, Kurt Cobain had just died and I was in college for the second time, studying art, spending a lot of free time between classes at the student bookstore.  I kept finding Ghost World on the shelf among the humor books for some reason.  I guess because a lot of them were cartoon-based.  Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side.  College faves.  And, for some reason, the trade paperback of DC's Camelot 3000, which they probably still have.  Every once in a while I'd pick up Ghost World, scan a page, get some kind of misjudged message from it and suddenly feel very alienated.

Which wasn't an unusual feeling.  I lived in a party dorm with a series of the most mismatched roommates possible-- first an Eagle Scout/Eagles fan/outdoorsman who littered the room with belongings and food, and over the course of our semester together completely coated the mirror with his sebaceous eruptions but objected my my beard shavings in the sink; then two jocks who pledged frats, one of whom would bring his girlfriend back to the room for strangely chaste yet very loud make-out sessions early in the morning after Date Night or whatever event it was her sorority sponsored that weekend.  That I was drunk or high myself most of the time did nothing so smooth our relations.

With 8 a.m. studio classes and an amateur 24-hour a day casino open in the room next door, I developed a hyper-sensitivity to noise which led to several confrontations with other students, culminating in the most excruciating one of all.  When you can't ask someone to please close her door or at least make sure she's actually inside her room when she wants to enjoy loud music without being asked later that evening by your RA to fill out a form stating you're not a racist, then you have no place in dormitory life.

But I've always been an Enid Coleslaw.  Too smart to accept life at face value, too stupid to do anything about it.  It's only in the past few years I've dropped at least some of my cynicism and contempt for pop culture and tried to embrace it.  Probably as a result of over-exposure to post-modernism, where ironic enjoyment of the kind Enid and her pal Rebecca Doppelmeyer specialized in has become mainstream.  Mass culture has appropriated our outsider stance, leaving us with nowhere to turn except sincerity.  Like Enid, I even had a somewhat more popular best friend who shared my sense of alienation and otherness, with whom I could heap mocking scorn on such daring targets as America's Funniest Home Videos and generic dance music.  Like Enid, I left town to start a new life.

Unlike Enid, my Rebecca turned out to be even more dysfunctional than I was.  Instead of growing into a beautiful young woman, he died of an accidental overdose in 1999, in a hotel room, on a business trip.  So maybe I was Rebecca after all and all my Enid-isms-- so Enid I even to this day occasionally wear ugly plastic rimmed glasses and occasionally have for years and years and years-- were just a pose.  Well, I don't know what to think about that.  I guess I'm just one more of those people.

By the time we buried that guy, I'd finally read Ghost World.  Multiple times.  Flash forward two years and I was so excited about the movie.  I watched the trailer at work-- a private office, a souped-up Mac with the fastest Internet connection available at the time made that possible-- then went with friends to the little shopping center theater where the movie played. Liked the parts that captured the disconnected, ambivalent tone of the book, felt a little let-down by the emphasis on jokes and linear plot.  Good performances.  Kinda want to see it again, too.

Yes.  It is decided.  Today, I order Ghost World.  After all, if I do produce my own comic, I need something to rip o-- I mean, provide inspiration.

Oh, yeah.  I also relate to Clowes's original "Art School Confidential" short story.  Hilariously accurate, perfectly acidic take-down of art school.  The movie, on the other hand?  It stinks.  Maybe I need to read that story again, too, while I'm at it.

You know who you are? You're the two idiots what want your comics on the Internet...

When I'm not teaching kids the English, reading comic books, writing about comic books, solving crimes for Scotland Yard and hunting the wily and elusive wookalar, I'm thinking of comic book stories.  Comic book stories I half-assedly try to get into print by sending them to a single company, taking two years of silence as the rejection it is, then abandoning the idea entirely until it starts welling up inside me again, which I, in my advanced case of idiocy, assume means it's a story I simply must tell, somehow, someplace, to someone.

How wrong I am.  And yet I must.  Unless I prove too lazy, which is possible.  Drawing a comic is hard work.  It's easy for fools like myself to complain about them or mock them online.  But when you're making a comic you have to think about characterization, pacing, page design, story flow, anatomy, perspective, black spotting, mood.  All kinds of things that have to work in harmony so you don't end up with something embarrassing that people can hold against you while saying, "And you have the nerve to make fun publicly of Superblubber #987?  You ass!"

So here I am, once again threatening the world like some kind of pathetic super-villain.  I may or may not put my skills where my mouth is (or something like that) and show you what I can do.  I have the scripts, and I think they're neat.  They need an editor's tender touch.  That editor will have to be me.  They need an artist.  I'm okay with drawing single figures, or groups of figures doing absurd things as a single image, but I'm not so sure I can sustain storytelling panel after panel, page after page, with perspective and angles and all that good stuff.  I know what that takes and I'm not convinced I have it.  Sure, I could enlist an artist but that would entail nasty contractual matters and legal briefs and boxers and cheekys and thongs and possibly some sort of support girdle and who has the time?

As an artist myself, one who's been burned financially by people well-intentioned and otherwise, I'm not sure I want to involve someone else. I'm also not sure I can afford to commission someone or pay someone up front, which is how I'd prefer to handle it and there are too many horror stories of would-be comic book entrepreneurs ripping off naive young artists.  I've been the latter, not interested in becoming the former.  And should this story become popular enough to involve other media, how then to slice the pie?  How large a slice is equitable?  How can I not become Marvel to someone else's Jack Kirby?  We're talking a very large pie here.  Perhaps as large as the moon, metaphorically speaking.

So the artist will also be me.  While I'm no doubt incapable of doing the work, at least when it comes time to rip me off I'll have my laziness as a way to rationalize it.  "I'd deserve more of the money I earned for myself if only I'd worked harder."  Or something.  I'll be the penciller and the inker.  As well as the letterer, the colorist, the graphic designer and the publisher.

Publisher.  Which means finding a host service.  Is it best to reserve your own domain, or to sign on with one of those web comic hosts?  Those seem to go out of business too often for comfort.  The market for substandard web comics seems pretty well glutted at the moment, too.  Maybe online distribution isn't the way to go.  Would on-demand publishing or something Kindle-related be a better choice?  What I'm looking for is the way to reach the largest number of potential people to ignore my work.

But I advise you not to hold your breath waiting for this miracle of a comic book, this industry-changing phenomenon that will inspire a generation and lead to a new Siglo de Oro for pictorial literature.  I'm always brainstorming these ideas then running out of energy to make them so.

Also, I've just heard of the murder of the Lord and Lady Morley and must put aside dreams of glory to rush off with my intrepid partner Inspector Winship for the Morley mansion deep in the wilds of unexplored England...

Alex Toth hasn't a moment to spare for noncommissioned officers...

Here's the time on this blog where we spend a few moments comparing a hilarious scene from the 1958 Andy Griffith service comedy No Time for Sergeants (directed by Mervyn LeRoy, in case you were wondering) to the Alex Toth-rendered version from Dell's Four Color #914 (July 1958).  Here's the movie:



And here's Toth's take:

As you can see, Toth's staging is quite different from the film's. Toth has flipped the composition-- in the movie, the captain enters from the right, but here from the left. This has to do with directing the eye through the page. It's called storytelling, for those of you who like to simply reproduce photographs or still frames.   For some reason, he's added an officer.  This officer isn't present in the film, says nothing, does nothing and adds nothing to the comic book page.  I think of Toth as more an artist of subtraction, so it seems uncharacteristic of him to stick some extraneous guy in a scene, but there he is.

Toth doesn't attempt perfect likenesses of the characters, either.  Study the faces.  Toth's Bartlett Robinson, Myron McCormick, Nick Adams and even his Andy Griffith are only approximations.  I've always felt Adams resembles the later Our Gang member Froggy in No Time For Sergeants; he doesn't really, except here in the comic where he could be played by the same actor.  But the important thing to note is how Toth goes for the gist rather than either a portrait or a caricature.  There may have been image licensing problems, or maybe this was a conscious decsion on Toth's part.  Whatever the reason, it frees Toth from the constraint of relying too much on photo reference-- although from some of the poses it's obvious he saw some or screened the film beforehand-- and allows him to manipulate his figures freely according to his needs and, more importantly, animate the faces.  A good storyteller "acts" for his or her characters, and this means giving each one distinctive facial expressions and trying not to repeat them.  Go read John Kricfalusi's blog where he writes extensively about acting in animation.  It holds true for comics.

Because Toth was a superb storyteller and artist each of his characters has a look that remains consistent within the story and wonderfully plays each scene (the sergeant's hands upraised in dismay despite his head being cropped by the lower half of the first panel on page two, the Griffith character's happily clueless reaction in the second), and those are far more important than exact likenesses.  I can't think of anything that  spoils my suspension of disbelief when reading a comic than some static, overly-rendered attempt at a perfect likeness after a lot of panels where there's only a passing resemblance.  Only Al Williamson could do that and get away with it.  And even worse is a failed attempt at a portrait.  DC's Star Trek books and the later issues of Topps' The X-Files used to just kill me with that kind of stuff.  A page and a half of tiny Picards or Mulders and then a big, expressionless, crosshatched head staring straight out at you-- with crooked eyes or the cheeks too flabby. 

Better just to internalize the characters and put your own vision on the page the way Toth does here-- and Charles Adlard so brilliantly did in the first issues of The X-Files.  I wonder how the licensing people at 20th Century Fox Television felt about that.  According to Bruce Canwell in Genius, Isolated:  The Life and Art of Alex Toth, at one point while working for Dell, Toth got grief from Danny Thomas when he drew Thomas's nose too large for comfort in the comic version of The Danny Thomas Show.  Zazu Pitts complained he made her look too old.  She was 66 when Toth drew her in the Dell adaptation of her show Oh! Suzanna.  Dealing with Hollywood must be a real bastard at times.

Licensing.  Nowadays any property worth its CGI bombast has statues, toys, t-shirts and all kinds of add-on "universe-building" novels and comics.  Back before I was born, movies like No Time for Sergeants got only these funky comic book adaptations-- and who the hell knows what kid this was really meant for?  You have your Superman, your Batman, maybe a gruesome dog-eared EC Tales from the Crypt... and then this.  What self-respecting kid would turn up at the treehouse with No Time for Sergeants rolled up in his back pocket?  Pre-teen Bartlett Robinson fans?  Precocious aficionados of character actors like Myron McCormick?  Mervyn LeRoy fanatics?  Or me?  I was all of those things at one time, and while I certainly love this movie if I had my choice I'd prefer a Toth-drawn adaptation of Mr. Roberts.

Well, I'm digressing.  Let's just say if you're obsessive enough to need the definitive portrait of Andy Griffith in this story, he's right there on the comic's photo cover.

For some reason, though, Toth sticks Griffith's garrison cap in his shirt epaulet, a detail conspicuously absent from the film scene. No Time for Sergeants features the first on-screen pairing of Griffith with Don Knotts (he made his Broadway debut playing the same part in 1955), who would later play Deputy Barney Fife opposite Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor. The No Time adaptation leaves out their brief scene in the interest of page count. But don't worry-- Knotts would get his shot at comic book immortality a few years later in Dell's adaptations of The Andy Griffith Show.

At the end of the book he gets the pony anyhow!