Hey, Jeff here.

I realize there may be some people who follow us almost exclusively through RSS, even though the posts aren't complete any more, and so don't know that we've moved the site.

You will be able to find us now at http://www.comixexperience.com/blog/ I say, "will be able to" instead of "can" because our service provider turned dickish on us and wanted a ton more money to continue to host us.

As for the RSS feed, its new location is http://www.comixexperience.com/blog/feed/atom/

See you there! Uh, when we're back up anyway... Click Here to Read More...

According to the advertisements all over the side over there (---->) Stan is, apparently, back. Wouldn't it be cool if it was some sort of zombie-related thing with Stan feasting on the hearts of the wicked? "Face Front, True Believer.... so I can reach your braaaaaaaain!"

No? Maybe it is just me...

Well, I thank them for the ad dollars, anyway!

So, some quick reviews (yeah yeah, I missed the goal of one-a-week-for-the-quarter -- I had a hectic fortnight!)

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #42: Yeah, liking this. This is really how I want a JLA comic to be -- taking place in, and mining the DC Universe. I also quite liked the (Earth-3? Well or whatever they're calling it today) New Gods appearance. My only real quibble is what Plas is doing in the WW2 era, that's a continuity change, ennit? Anyway, I like the scope, the byplay, the whole thing -- I'll say VERY GOOD.

JOE THE BARBARIAN #2: I didn't love this as much as issue #1 -- and I think it is down to the "real world" scenes. I didn't feel like there was any stakes or peril there, though it appears we're supposed to think the kid is dying, but that didn't really come across very well for me, and felt very disconnected to the Fantasy world stuff. Still, the art is faboo, and the book is a fair amount of fun. I'll go with GOOD.

SUPERGIRL #50: It's not that I have anything especial to say about this issue, but I was deeply, massively, profoundly amused by the screaming headline on the cover: "Featuring a tale by HELEN SLATER!". Yeah, there's maybe 17 people in the entire world who get why that might be even vaguely interesting (it isn't), and that's COUNTING Slater's immediate family. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the actress in an awful movie can get a byline in a comic... but it is like 25 years too late for that to be meaningful to anything remotely resembling today's audience.

In the main story, I was a bit bugged by the (at least) three instances of swearing -- even if two of them were in "Kryptonese". I'd kind of prefer a Suprema-esque use of language, really. But then, my Supergirl doesn't wear a belly-shirt either, so I guess I'm not going to win that one any time soon... Anyway, I thought the entire issue was a bit EH.

GREEN LANTERN #51: I really liked the deftness of having this be a (fairly integral) crossover into the main BN story-line, but that if you didn't read BN, or, conversely, read BN, but not GL, you're probably just fine in reading along. I thought this was pretty GOOD.

DARK AVENGERS #14: I'm fairly uncertain how this is a "Siege" crossover, really, except for the one little sentence about it, and I remain unsure about the value of jerking Sentry around like that. Despite the fact that it is a manufactured and inserted character, it would appear to me that this gives the character even less possible places to go -- except, maybe? becoming the Marvel version of Superboy-Prime, which would be a fairly tragic mistake, IMO. Overall, this was only OK.

ZOMBIE VERSUS ROBOT AVENTURE: I still don't really "get" the missing "D" in the title (wiki says that it is a noun: aventure (plural aventures)

1. (obsolete) Accident; chance; adventure.
2. (obsolete) A mischance causing a person's death without felony, as by drowning, or falling into the fire.

and none of those really seem to fit much?

There's some nice art in here, but it all feels... well, it feels a bit like HEAVY METAL where it is like the story isn't supposed to matter, really, because the art is so nice. Which, in premise, is fine, but then, where are the titties? It seems to me that the value in the "ZvR brand" is really all about Ashley Wood, but none of the styles involved here are really anything like Wood, so, yeah, I Don't Get It. My customers don't seem to, either -- sales on this were very poor, and much lower than the Wood-driven issues. Overall, I thought it was pretty EH.


That's it for me this week -- what did YOU think?

-B

Labels: Brian

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It must be the last week of the month...

(I'll have reviews tomorrow)

28 DAYS LATER #7
AIRFIGHTERS #1
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #622 GNTLT
ARCHIE #606
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #33 SIEGE
AVP THREE WORLD WAR #2 (OF 6)
BART SIMPSON COMICS #52
BATMAN AND ROBIN #9
BILLY BATSON AND THE MAGIC OF SHAZAM #13
BLACK LANTERN GREEN ARROW #30 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
BLACK TERROR #8
BLACKEST NIGHT #7 (OF 8)
BLACKEST NIGHT JSA #3 (OF 3)
BUCK ROGERS #9
CAPTAIN SWING #1 (OF 4)
CHOKER #1
CHRONICLES OF WORMWOOD LAST BATTLE #3 (OF 6)
COWBOY NINJA VIKING #4 (OF 4)
DARK TOWER BATTLE OF JERICHO HILL #4 (OF 5)
DARK WOLVERINE #83 SIEGE
DEADPOOL #20
DEADWORLD FROZEN OVER #4 (OF 4)
DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #351
ENDERS GAME MAZER IN PRISON SPECIAL
FALL OF HULKS RED HULK #2 (OF 4) FOH
FANTASTIC FOUR #576
FLASH REBIRTH #6 (OF 6)
GOTHAM CITY SIRENS #9
GRAVEL #17
HALO BLOOD LINE #3 (OF 5)
IMAGE UNITED #0 (OF 6)
IRON MAN VS WHIPLASH #4 (OF 4)
IRREDEEMABLE #11
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #36
KING CITY #5
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #159
MADAME XANADU #20
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #60
MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ #4 (OF 8)
MARVELS PROJECT #6 (OF 8)
MS MARVEL #50
MUPPET KING ARTHUR #2
NATION X #3 (OF 4)
NEW AVENGERS #62 SIEGE
NORTHLANDERS #25
OBAMOUSE
OFF HANDBOOK MARVEL UNIVERSE A TO Z UPDATE #1
OFFICIAL INDEX TO MARVEL UNIVERSE #14
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #139
PVP #44
REALM OF KINGS INHUMANS #4 (OF 5)
ROBOCOP #2
SCALPED #35
SECRET WARRIORS #13
SPIDER-MAN CLONE SAGA #6 (OF 6)
STAR TREK TNG GHOSTS #4
STAR WARS LEGACY #45 MONSTER PT 3 (OF 4)
SUPERMAN #697
TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #37
TALES OF THE DRAGON GUARD #1 (OF 3)
TEEN TITANS #80
THOR #607 SIEGE
THUNDERBOLTS #141 SIEGE
TRANSFORMERS ONGOING #4
ULTIMATE COMICS ENEMY #2 (OF 4)
UNKNOWN SOLDIER #17
USAGI YOJIMBO #126 NUKEKUBI
VICTORIAN UNDEAD #4 (OF 6)
VIKING #5
WALKING DEAD #70
WALL-E #3
WE WILL BURY YOU #1
WEB #6
WEIRD WORLD OF JACK STAFF #1
WILDCATS #20
WONDER WOMAN #41
X-FACTOR #202
X-FORCE #24 XN
X-MEN FOREVER #18
X-MEN LEGACY #233 XN

Books / Mags / Stuff
BATMAN CHRONICLES TP VOL 09
BATMAN KING TUTS TOMB TP
BEN TEN ALIEN FORCE DOOM DIMENSION GN VOL 01
DAREDEVIL LONE STRANGER TP
DEADPOOL & CABLE ULTIMATE COLLECTION TP BOOK 01
DODGEM LOGIC MAGAZINE #1
HALO HELLJUMPER PREM HC
HITMAN TP VOL 02 10000 BULLETS NEW PTG
IMMORTAL WEAPONS TP
INDIANA JONES FURTHER ADV OMNIBUS TP VOL 03
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #294
JUXTAPOZ VOL 17 #3 MAR 2010
KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE TP VOL 10
LOST OFFICIAL MAGAZINE #28 PX ED
MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN SPIDER-MAN TP DIGEST
NEW AVENGERS PREM HC VOL 12 POWER LOSS
POPGUN GN VOL 04
PREVIEWS #258 MARCH 2010
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS CHAPTER TWO TP VOL 01
REQUIEM TP VOL 02 VAMPIRE KNIGHT
SPARROW HC VOL 14 ASHLEY WOOD VOL 3
SPLENDID MAGIC OF PENNY ARCADE 11.5 ANNIV ED HC
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #185
WIZARD MAGAZINE #223 MCKONE SPIDER-MAN CVR

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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My very very first thought was "Well, wait, where does that leave Karen and Vertigo?"

My second thought was "Just knowing the little I know about Life and Power, a five-headed power-sharing structure doesn't seem like it has much practical chance to work."

My third thought was "Well, good for Jim and Geoff" as this expands on what they were pretty much already doing, and gives them some Portfolio, and, we would hope, a pay raise to keep doing it.

My fourth thought was, and this was my uncharitable one, "Uh... Dan? Really?"

I haven't made any particular secret that I don't like many of Dan's editorial policies and instincts, but that's all Armchair Quarterbacking on my part. *I* don't have to like them, as long as enough of my customers do. But that's just difference of opinion and if Warners like his sales figures, then who am I to say otherwise?

But I have major concerns about Didio in terms of his willingness to engage with the Direct Market retailer; which, given the rhetoric on display about the importance of our segment of the market and the dominance of intent on comics and print makes it kind of all the more nerve-wracking.

(Not that I am not pleased that they crafted that rhetoric in the first place -- because that puts them at least a step above Marvel's historical public statements -- but things change when the rubber meets the road, and "say" and "do" are very different things)

From a business-to-business POV, rather than the do-I-like-his-output POV, I've found Dan to largely be dismissive of any idea that doesn't fit his notions, and defensive about the ones he has. That's not necessarily a bad thing for an editorial position, but I deeply fear the potential problems as the publisher.

I remember Dan angrily yelling at me (I nearly typed "screaming", but that's maybe a touch too strong) on the floor at WonderCon... '07 was it? when I questioned how they handled the solicitation process for COUNTDOWN. I mean on the floor of the con, seriously.

Here's the thing when dealing with retailers: when it comes to something within their own four walls, they're almost always correct. When I come to you with, "this is what my preorders have been on project x, y, and z; but project Q had this minuscule fraction of that number because of how you chose to release information in the name of 'secrecy'" then you have to give that weight, you have to take it seriously, even if it goes against how you'd like to run things.

I want to underline that I'm talking about business-related things, not opinions like "I don't like title Q".

I also remember the ComicsPRO meeting where a bunch of concerned retailers from, let's call them Red States, were really upset about the content that was going into ostensibly "code approved" DCU titles -- the drug use in that issue of FLASH, the "God damn"S and so on, and, again, Dan get utterly dismissed these concerns as having any validity whatsoever. I mean, at all -- "it's nothing worse than prime time TV", I think was the phrasing? Angry raised voices again.

Look, I'm in the Bluest neighborhood in the Bluest City in the Bluest state in the country, and when I hear these retailers say, "We're really concerned because these things hold a lot of potential problems from angry parents, and we're afraid it is possible some of us might even get arrested", and I instantly agreed -- because that is the truth within their four walls. I don't have a horse in that race, but I sure understand that THEY do.

I've seen Dan be utterly dismissive of retailer concerns on things like not having the named protagonists even appear in their own books for extended periods of time, and so on and so forth.

I do think that the job of EIC of a super-hero universe might mean always thinking you're right, once you've made a decision, is the only way it can work. But I think that the job of Publisher needs someone who knows that they're probably wrong a lot, and hopefully you become a little less wrong the next time.

It has been at least a year since I've had any interaction with Dan, so this isn't any recent activity, to be sure; and I'm sure at least one person reading this is slavering to respond with "further proof you hate the guy", but I don't. I completely admire his energy and above all else his passion for what he does -- I like people who BURN. That's what moves the world.

But what I want, and what I think the Direct Market needs, is a publisher at DC who is extremely willing to change their mind on business matters when presented with appropriate evidence, and none of my business interactions with Dan have given me confidence he would do so.

My fifth thought was "Well, let's see how it works"

My sixth thought, and one I had seconds after hitting "post", so this is an edit about 90 seconds later, is "don't be a douche, Bri, congratulate him" which is absolutely correct, I'm a douche: Congratulations, Dan.

And, of course, the seventh thought was "Man, it must suck to be the '...and the rest' part from the Gilligan's Island Theme Song", so congrats to Caldon and Rood as well. I'm sure they'll learn to hate me soon enough! (Starting....now!)

-B

Labels: Brian, DC

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Been away from the Savage longer than I expected to be, and that's how it goes when you can't see your keyboard through a veil of tears. I'm not the political type, so don't expect any side-taking in the whole Communist America controversy, but I will remind you of this one fact, learnt from my pappy's knee: any sort of testicular manipulation (including "teabagging") is a 100% fantastic way to spend one's time, and a little summer fun with the Lord's satchel never hurt a soul. Stealing the term for usage in the latest re-re-remix of party over here/party over there may not be an actual crime, but no matter which side you take on the Bookscan debate, we've all lost a bit of our innocence.

Let's ask the mainstream to bring it back to the center, and let the groaning commence. (These came out last week.)

Hit-Monkey # 1: Let's Make This Perfunctory

The "monkey with guns" idea works best when you're Mike Mignola and the beast only gets a couple of panels, but it's obvious from Marvel's "Heroic Age" banner that some people won't let the sun go down on an idea until that idea's corpse is ejaculating maggots with last names. Hell, this comic isn't even about that Agents of Atlas gorilla with the wisecracks, it's about some other monkey, who has other guns. So what is Hit Monkey? Some kind of weird bet amongst creative types? A convention sketch come to life? On the plus side, there's one joke in here that hits the mark (that one being where the assassin chooses to wear his suit throughout months of recuperation, including all the time he spends pruning up in a hot springs), but this is otherwise AWFUL fare. That's not really a shocker. At least it's only a one-shot, and all the people involved can get back to whatever it is they do with the rest of their time. Deadpool? Being legitimized by Giuseppe Camuncoli?

Batman & Robin # 8: Let's Make This Personal

I gather I'm just not the audience for this. I came to the idea of Grant Morrison-doing-Batman with a level of anticipation that no actual comic could have ever met unless it magically teleported into my bathroom and started bench-pressing victory. Honestly, the last few years have been a lesson in how little I really do want to read super-hero comics that "take post-modern chances" or whatever histrionically worded expectation I've placed on this writer's output. The things that I loved about his "mainstream" work on Doom Patrol, Animal Man, JLA Earth 2, New X-Men--they weren't the Invisibles style idea exercises, the "at play in the fields of symbolism" Seaguy-ish bits, they were how well that Morrison handled the perfunctory moments of kitchen sink standards. I liked when the Beast would get to jump around and hit shit in X-Men, the long-form friendship drama between Cliff Steele and Crazy Jane, the desperate sadness when Batman got to team up with the father he still keenly missed. I'm a sucker for it when it works, and all that Buddy Baker crying and wanting his wife back kind of stuff, all those moments of simple, easy drama worked so goddamned well whenever Morrison felt like throwing it in.

These Batman stories haven't had a lot of that. There's been a good bit of Morrison's Justice League kind of lines, where Batman says threatening stuff, scenes where he's presented as the be-all, end-all of the Being One's Best bootstraps fantasy, but there's so little sweetness in between. Damian is the main exception--under Morrison, he's a genuinely funny character--and the art has had some considerable moments of grace and beauty. (Cameron Stewart's bleeding headlights in issue 7, or the way this issue presented Damian as a sweatervest-wearing Bruce in miniature, complete with pomade slicked hair.) Domesticity and Batman can go well together--there's still a lot of pleasure in the moments that force Bruce out on dates--but everything here is set at the Final Crisis interpretations of super-heroism, frenetic depictions of guy-fights-evil that never take a second to look around. It's still a GOOD comic, and I can imagine a genuine appreciation for its style that would push it higher, but it would be a lie to say I shared it.

Adventure Comics # 7: Let's Make This Punditry

This is a Valentine's Day Special in everything but name, throwing a heart on the cover just to make it clear. Expanding on the portion of Blackest Night where resurrected super-heroes became short-term Black Lanterns, it's up to writer Tony Bedard (and a five man art squad?) to get Superboy from point A (is Black Lantern) to point B (is not Black Lantern). It's a job, not a story. Page limitations lock the guy into treatment writing, the ensuing battle between Superboy and his sorta girlfriend Wonder Girl is as paint-by-numbers as it gets, which means it's easiest just to focus on a piece of spiky dialog to test the comic's pulse. That piece of dialog is where the mind-controlled Superboy tries to scare/humiliate/upset his sorta girlfriend by strongly implying that he masturbates to fantasies involving his cousin Supergirl. That--yup--makes sense within the story, as the Black Lanterns have been consistently shown to be interested in arousing a lot of emotion in their super-powered victims, and telling your girlfriend you'd rather jerk off to thoughts of incest than have sex with her is probably something that would result in a bit of a tiff. (Wonder Girl is occasionally portrayed as having a self-esteem problem, so it's also wholly possible that she considers herself less attractive than Supergirl. Which might be true? It would seem impossible to tell the difference between the two characters if they were wearing street clothes.)

It's besides the point whether this is "gross" or "decadent" or not. Again: this isn't really a story, it's a task. Adventure Comics was going to be handled by Paul Levitz by this point, that changed because DC's going to move to the West Coast and everybody's going to get fired so the companies intellectual properties can become digital avatars that are transmitted for free through radio waves, all so that You Too Can Write Blue Beetle At Home, or whatever the latest explanation via Mad Libs is. This is a filler story, something that could've gone anywhere, that could've been handled in a couple of panels in the Blackest Night series, or it could've just never been told at all. Point B--Superboy not being a Black Lantern--was all that "had" to be reached, Adventure # 7 exists because the 22 page solution was the one picked out of the editorial hat. Is it an AWFUL comic because a bunch of random good soldiers collected a paycheck to get the pencils inked and its writer delivered the geriatric plot that editorial selected? Is it an EH book from a "is this product worth your time or money" standpoint? Is it CRAP because some people find its dialog offensive? Or is it VERY GOOD, maybe even EXCELLENT, all because it doesn't resort to the cliche of having the mind-controlled person hammer their friend's face into the pavement over and over again, until their friend's face is a bloody pulp, and then, right before the final killing blow is thrown, the mind-control wears off and the pummled meat of the friend's face mumbles "it wasn't your fault" through broken teeth shards?

Labels: Tucker

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Comix Experience is extremely proud to celebrate its 21st anniversary, on Saturday, April 3rd, starting at 8 PM, with a “Coming of Age” party, and you’re invited!

CE:21 is a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund – a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community – and happens during WonderCon weekend in San Francisco.

Featuring an El Toyanese Taco Truck, sponsored by Image Comics, and delicious beer courtesy of 21st Amendment Brewery, this is the comics event of the year!

Comix Experience is the oldest comic book store in San Francisco with the same owner and location. All attendees making a donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will receive a “goodie bag” filed with neat stuff. There will also be an art auction, to benefit the CBLDF, and donations are still being accepted.

For more information, please contact Brian Hibbs at 415-863-9258

Hope to see you there!

Labels: Brian, CE:21

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I mean, if I had just waited 20 minutes to post, I could have done this in the first post, but then Tom has to go and post something from Eric Reynolds...



First off, seriously, "Bookscan Analysis as Direct Market Public Service Announcement"? Really? I feel like I've been told to get off Tom's lawn for playing too much...

Eric's comments are wonderful, but I don't really see that they have much (if anything) to do with anything that I actually WROTE, as opposed, possibly, what people might want to think that I wrote.

If someone can point me to anyplace where I've represented the BookScan numbers to be anything other than what I say they are -- that they "don’t, in any way, represent all 'book stores' selling comic book material." That "Also, remember that this analysis represents RETAIL SALES. This absolutely doesn’t include anything like Library sales, or School Sales, or things like book clubs and so on. Those are not RETAIL SALES." Or that at any place in the piece that I ever represent these numbers as anything other than "sales from the stores that report to BookScan", then I would dearly love to see it.

I've also never suggested, thought, implied, or even believe that virtually any publisher anywhere could survive or prosper without ALL channels working to sell books. Again, if anyone can cite a statement like that, please feel free.

I like Fantagraphics' output. A lot. They are clearly an important publisher in terms of the bodies of cartoonist's work they are bringing to the market, and many of the things they publish are among my best sellers.

I might be worth noting that the word "Fantagraphics" doesn't appear in this year's column whatsoever, and I make a single passing reference to one book of theirs (as noted before, intended purely as a follow-up from the '08 column), and a handful of the cartoonists they publish. The context of that statement is, at least I think, to express regret and amazement that those cartoonist's works aren't selling better, via the stores that report to BookScan, then they are.

Eric says, "I did a cursory look at a half-dozen titles from the last couple of years, and in some cases, our library/institutional sales can amount to as much as 30-50% of our overall book trade business. This is one stream that does not report to Bookscan..." which, as far as I can tell, is exactly what I said! It's also largely irrelevant -- the BookScan analysis is NOT a report on everything that sells in non-DM channels. I directly and repeatedly say that. I directly and repeatedly say that this is retail sales (repeat it with me!) "the stores that report to BookScan".

Further, BookScan is sales made to consumers -- not wholesale. Let's say, with no basis in reality, that 1000 stores that report to BookScan rack L&R #2, that could mean that there are 1000+ copies out there on the racks awaiting purchase by some sophisticated buyer with taste. Awesome. BUT THE NUMBER OF COPIES THAT SOLD TO A CONSUMER (via "the stores that report to BookScan"!) is 374 copies. If anyone, anywhere, has any evidence that this is not a factual statement, then I'd like to hear it.

That DOESN'T MEAN that FBI should abandon the bookstores, or that those are not "good" sales, or anything else that Tom or Dirk would seem like to spin as something that I am implying. I am not.

If people want to engage in arguments that *I* am not... well, I can't stop you, but there's no other possible way for me to respond except for "I never said that. I never implied that. I don't believe that. And anyone who does is, actually, not very smart, whatsoever."

Look at the numbers for what they say. Criticize me for things I actually say -- that's totally fair game. But don't criticize me for what you infer that I am saying, because that inference is on the plate of the reader, and does not bear any relationship to either what I wrote, nor what I believe. I think we'll all be much happier that way.

Eric concludes with "I don't pay attention to Bookscan too closely, but one thing I've gleaned from reading Brian's annual essays is that either he reads way too much into Bookscan numbers, or we pretty dramatically buck the conventional wisdom of what Bookscan "means" in the bigger picture."

At a guess, I suspect the latter is the case. As for the former, the only thing that I'm really "reading into" BookScan is that a work as (in my personal opinion) over-reviewed and mediocrely done as, say, Stitches, sells like 30 times better than something as transcendent, and created by cartoonists at their peak of craft and skill, as L&R.

-B

Labels: BookScan, Brian

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Tom Spurgeon has some excellent comments up about my BookScan Analysis, and I feel compelled to engage his commentary. This is not a Blog War, but I'm hiding most of this behind the jump for those of you who Don't Like To See The Parents Fight...



Let’s start with motivations, which works nicely as a “response” to numbered point #1 ("I know I'm grateful...It's fun to see how certain books did on the chart"). First and foremost, I'm getting the Top 750 out there, and if you don't like my analysis, in the words of the great "Scoop" Nisker, "If You Don't Like The News, Go Out And Make Some of Your Own"

The entire reason I bother to write that beast every year is because *I* want to see the bookstore data. We’ve known that data was there, but it used to be locked up in a black box. I wanted to see it, so I called in favors and got it set free, and my assumption has always been that if I want to see it, then others do as well. As long as I had it, I might as well actually write about it and expose that data to a wider number of people.

I’ve always disliked and mistrusted the few shimmering glimpses we get at the data, generally because it is coming from people with something to lose (read that specifically as “access to the data” in the main) if they get too specific about their reporting. That’s why we get ICv2 headlines that say things like “Watchmen #1 on BookScan for xth week in a row”; which I find to be more frustrating than illuminating. I mean, what does that mean in any kind of broader context, or in relationship to other things? Comparative analysis gives a much better picture of what the trends and things really are.

So, yeah, I want that information out there, and I want it out in a venue that it might attract some attention and be searchable rather than, dunno, putting it up as a torrent or something, where only people who know to look for it might have a chance of finding it.

I think that books, in general, are weird because it is very hard to get specific data about how well they’re doing – I love the existence of a site like boxofficemojo because it presents virtually any piece of information you might want to know about a film’s performance in a pretty easy to find format. I also like sites like John Jackson Miller’s Comichron because it attempts to do much the same for the comic book industry. Its major flaw, however, is that it ONLY does it for DM sources of information.

So: at my core the reason I write this every year is to give a chance for that information to be out, natively in the wild, and to be a part of the Historical Record.

I will tell you this: I’m not convinced that my analysis is really any good. I mean, if you have like 6 spare hours, go through and read all seven years of analysis, one after another, and look at how much my tone and methodology has changed. In year one, it is really about 90% Direct Market, and maybe 10% bookstore because what I was actually hoping in my heart is that someone else would actually take up the data and perform their own analysis on it, so that I wouldn’t have to.

As I came to understand, over the years, that no one was going to bother to do that, I’ve gotten closer and closer to writing something actually worth reading – the first 3 (I think?) years had entire “What about the Direct Market?!?!” sections that I ultimately abandoned as being counterproductive to the exercise.

Anyway, my motivation to release this information is simply that: I want the information released, I have a long standing and “well respected” comics industry opinion column, it seems like a good match.

But, I also have to think of what I understand about my audiences.

Primarily, I write for and to other Direct Market comic book retailers. That’s the entire point of these columns. Remember, TILTING started in the controlled circulation COMICS RETAILER magazine, only ever seen by 5000 people, maximum.

Secondarily, ever since I made the switch to the wider internet with Newsarama, and, current, Comic Book Resources, I feel like I have to spend a reasonable amount of time writing for the “lay” audience. Which is why you’ll see me over explaining things, sometimes (“What is an SKU?”, that kind of thing), because I want the layfolk to at least have a notion of what I’m talking about. More importantly, my “lay” audience is mostly comprised of folks who are really really interested in the Direct Market version of “comics”. That is to say, disproportionately interested in “mainstream” Marvel and DC superhero comics. That it to further say, I believe that 75% or better of the people who read TILTING know nothing whatsoever about the industry except whatever “common truths” they’ve managed to absorb, and repurpose to their own ends.

My tertiary audience is that of the “Decision makers”, and it’s tertiary because they have much better data than I do, have to balance the needs of a much wider range of participants, and because they’ve already made their decisions. The chances of my actually directly impacting or changing any decision made is vanishingly small. I’ve been writing columns for nearly twenty years now, I know that very very well. At absolute best, I can hope to possibly influence some potential future decision by adding to consensus (and, in fact, I think that one of my leakers gives me data for precisely that reason)

So this comes to Tom’s point #2 –- "Hibbs' qualitative analysis is so infused with this highly insistent defense of the Direct Market" -- yes, it IS a DM oriented column for a DM oriented audience written by a DM oriented participant. I literally don’t know if it is *possible* for it to not be “infused” with a pro-DM slant, given its genesis, and ongoing status. I write 11 months of the year in a DM-oriented fashion, it is extremely difficult to expect me to not do that on the 12th month.

In my “defense” (though I don’t think this is something that needs a “defense”, per se – because I think it IS extremely valid) not only do I specifically (overly?) point out my biases and directly ask for other perspectives, but I’ve made my best faith efforts over the years to become as dispassionate as I can be. Again, read the way the commentary has changed over the course of seven of them: it has gone from DM-centered to DM-“infused”. I count this as a victory!

Having said that, I have to tell you that in the Best Alternative Universe Ever, I’d rather read a 20k word essay on the Annual BookScan analysis by Tom Spurgeon, than writing this shit myself, because I think he’d do a much better job of it than I ever would in keeping Professional Distance. He’s a Reporter by nature – I am an Opinion Columnist.

Tom’s point #3, and the first of the “big, sweeping problems” is “I can't figure out who on earth holds the positions he insists on dismantling.” And I guess Tom and I just travel in different circles. Again, Tom does note people “in a difference-making position”, but, as I said before, they’re my tertiary audience. Because I hear a lot (a LOT) of misinformed, or downright wrong statements from both my primary and secondary audiences quite a bit. Now, I will grant you that “bookstores will save everything” was actually replaced in 2009 by “digital downloads will save everything”, and that my own conflation of the two may be at fault here, but anything that I wrote stemmed from something that I’ve heard recently as a continued meme.

Let me sidebar for a second and talk about my working method. Because there’s a certain amount of boilerplate that I only rewrite slightly (for instance, just about everything before I get to the actual yearly overview), and there are all of the charts that I’m just adding new rows to, I actually just open up the previous year’s column and start editing and rewriting. Typically I go into each section, add two pages of carriage returns, then start writing the new piece. After I handle a subsection of each section (say, “10 ten books over all” followed by “top 5 dollar books” and so on – though I don’t explicitly label those subsections, that’s how I write it, in order to stay sane), I’ll scroll down and see what the results were in the previous year, and add in any relevant comparisons (“such and such grew by this much/lost this much”)

So, because of this, there are sometimes things I return to simply because I talked about it last time. Example: the citation of L&R #2. So, there are a handful of things in any given report that will be “last year’s discussion follow-up” items.

Anyway, for Tom’s #3, I guess I’d say “I’m writing for a mass audience for whom a significant number still hold these views as not-debunked; and not really for the ‘intelligentsia’ or 'Decision Makers'”. It is fair to question whether that is right or wrong decision (or if I’ve over-inflated in my head the actual response) but that’s what I’m thinking.

Also, I hear similar kinds of things from new entries into the market quite a bit. I get lots and lots of blind “I’m going to be a new publisher and this is how things work!” emails, maybe more than Tom does? Admittedly, virtually all of the people who come in with those thoughts either get gutted instantly, or quickly modify their tune, but while it is true “Everyone that matters knew this years ago,” some of the people who will matter 20 years from now are likely starting their education today.

For Tom’s #4, ("Hibbs admits the numbers are untrustworthy in a lot of ways... and then compares them anyway and goes on to make sweeping statements...") I think there’s value in comparing two relative performances, even if they’re gathered by wholly different methodologies and are less-than-perfect measures in the first place, as long as you know what the limitations of that data are going in.

That is to say, looking at the number sold for Fables, Y or Sandman in Direct, and comparing as a percentage to the Vertigo Crime line, and that looking for that same number sold for Fable, Y, or Sandman via the stores that report to BookScan compared as a percentage to the Vertigo Crime line, and seeing that it follows basically the same pattern that the Minx line did before it, and drawing a conclusion from that… well that seems like a fair conclusion to make. That doesn't mean I inherently believe that either set of numbers are actually 100% accurate (or tracking the same things -- no not at ALL!), but that a trend can be perceived. Is that perception right or wrong? Dunno, that's why I put it out there, let's have a conversation on the merits of the argument itself?

So, I don’t want to necessarily disagree with Tom’s point, but to say that I think that I’ve handled it appropriately, and I’m much more eager to engage on the specific conclusions than on “Don’t cross the streams, that would be bad” as a general point.

And I think (repeat: think) that I either slather any direct comparison between channels with Weasel Words (“I would strongly suggest that this indicates”, yikes!), or I do so otherwise only in the abstract. If there are particular and specific instances anyone disagrees with, I’d be glad to discuss them. No, strike that, I would be ecstatic to do so!

Tom’s #5 ("...bookstore vs. DM argument takes over those sections even when it's not brought up. "), I appreciate his acknowledgment that it might be his personal weakness. And I think some of it is, because I’ve tried, continue to try, and will continue to try to tone it down over the years.

I like his questions, though! The answers are...

"Could this leave bookstores open to someone suggesting they have the next Watchmen in the form of some Green Lantern book?"

More willing to try something new that hasn’t ‘proven out’ in Direct first, but not so willing as to position a capey book that flops in Direct. ‘Earth-One’ would seem to be our next available test, as it was positioned as a ‘bookstore initiative’ as I read it.

"Will they favor the shelving of DC books for a while?"


Potentially, but of course, Chain bookstore shelves are ultimately For Sale, plus there’s a pretty big X-factor in ‘how many of these books are selling on Amazon, et al’, where there isn’t ‘shelving’ in the way you meant it.

"Will this make it that much harder for Marvel to kickstart their post-Disney purchase bookstore program?"


I’d think not; why would it? And those shelves are For Sale, anyway.

"Were stores stuck with Watchmen copies as the cycles worked themselves out?"

Unlikely to be ‘stuck’ that significantly, because I bet you $1 that result is as much a function of expanding the number of storefronts carrying the book in the first place as it is from copies-sold-per-store, and IF anyone was carrying way way too much inventory, and if DC did sales into bookstores even remotely in parity as they did in the DM, they were taking full 100% returns on that one book, as needed.

"Are they asking for new Watchmen material?"


No clue from me. Ask Dan DiDio.



OK, that was fun, and I wish the entire post was just that!

On Tom’s #6 ("I think Hibbs vastly underplays the recession."), I am not sure how so? And in regard to “And if everything must be a market to market dick-measuring contest, it also makes perfect sense to me that a market serving relatively casual readers is going to be hit harder in the first 12-15 months of a recession than a market serving the most devoted fans.”, I have to say “huh?” Or did you not see the sentence about the DM being down FIFTEEN percent, which is a LARGER drop than the bookstores? Muh?

#7 ("I think Hibbs underplays the effect the quality of books has in a lot of comics' sub-markets."): Wait, now you’ve totally lost me. You’re positing that quality of a work is the most important reason it does or doesn’t sell? Really? That’s why nothing by, say, Urasawa, hits in the Top 750, but Naruto is #1 in manga? Is he saying that Stitches is externally and qualitatively a better book than, dunno, Optic Nerve? (*I* don't think so!) I don’t know how to engage that one at all! Quality doesn't have but the most cursory relationship to sales, look at the music, TV or film charts, if you doubt that...

#8 ("I think Hibbs overplays a manga "freefall.""): Fair enough. Actually, if you go back and look, those 3-4 paragraphs are almost completely lifted from the ’08 report, because I felt it was still pertinent, but yeah, fair enough.

I very very much look forward to any independent analysis that Tom can muster, and, like I said, that’s what I absolutely hoped would happen when I started this 7 years ago. (Not just Tom, I mean – I’m always hoping for 4-5 competing analyses!)

As for Tom's "challenge", I will forthrightly state that I don’t envision anytime in the future that I say *nothing* about the DM or my own individual experiences. That’s not why I write TILTING, and if I'm not entertaining/being relevant to my perceived audience, then I don't expect to keep it. But I will promise to at least to continue to be conscious of it, and to continue to try and tamp it down if I keep getting access to the data (which is, by no means, guaranteed)

-B

Labels: BookScan, Brian

Click Here to Read More...

Please note that the Monday holiday this week is NOT one of those that delays comics -- everything should be on sale on Wednesday, as usual (barring snow problems on the East Coast?)

AIR #18
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #621 GNTLT
ANGEL #30
ANYWHERE #2 (OF 6)
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #206
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #21 (RES)
ATOMIC ROBO REVENGE O/T VAMPIRE DIMENSION #1 (OF 4)
AUTHORITY THE LOST YEAR #6 (OF 12)
AVENGERS VS ATLAS #2 (OF 4)
AZRAEL #5
BATMAN #696
BATMAN STREETS OF GOTHAM #9
BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #14
BETTY & VERONICA #246
BLACK WIDOW DEADLY ORIGIN #4 (OF 4)
BLACKEST NIGHT THE FLASH #3 (OF 3)
CAPTAIN AMERICA #603
CARS #1
CHASE VARIANT ONE SHOT IS ALL I NEED (ONE SHOT)
DAREDEVIL #505
DARK AVENGERS #14 SIEGE
DEADPOOL #19
DEADPOOL MERC WITH A MOUTH #8
DEATHLOK #4 (OF 7)
DEVIL #1 (OF 4)
DIE HARD YEAR ONE #6
DOCTOR VOODOO AVENGER OF SUPERNATURAL #5
DOMINO LADY #4
DOOMWAR #1 (OF 6)
ENDERS SHADOW COMMAND SCHOOL #5 (OF 5)
GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS HAPPY VALLEY #3 (OF 9)
GREEN LANTERN #51 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #45 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY #23
HELLBLAZER #264
HULK #20 FOH
INCORRUPTIBLE #3
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #141
INCREDIBLE HULK #607 FOH
INCREDIBLES #5
INVINCIBLE #70
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITTS MUSIC BOX #3
JOE THE BARBARIAN #2 (OF 8)
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #42
LOCKE & KEY CROWN OF SHADOWS #3
LOGANS RUN #1
MAGOG #6
MARVELS EYE OF CAMERA #6 (OF 6)
MICE TEMPLAR DESTINY #7
MODERN WARFARE 2 GHOST #3 (OF 6)
OUTSIDERS #27
PHANTOM GENERATIONS #8
POWER GIRL #9
PSYLOCKE #4 (OF 4)
PUNISHER #14
RESURRECTION VOL 2 #8
SIMPSONS COMICS #163
SONIC UNIVERSE #13
SPIDER-WOMAN #6
STAND SOUL SURVIVORS #4 (OF 5)
STAR TREK DS9 FOOLS GOLD #3
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OLD REPUBLIC #50 (OF 50) DEMON PT 4 (OF 4
SUPERGIRL #50 (NOTE PRICE)
SUPERMAN BATMAN #69
SUPERNATURAL BEGINNINGS END #2 (OF 6)
TALISMAN ROAD OF TRIALS #4
TICK NEW SERIES #2
TINY TITANS #25
UNCANNY X-MEN #521
UNCLE SCROOGE #388
WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #5 GNTLT
WEEKLY WORLD NEWS #2
ZMD ZOMBIES OF MASS DESTRUCTION #6 (OF 6)
ZOMBIES VS ROBOTS AVENTURE #1 (RES)

Books / Mags / Stuff
ALMOST SILENT HC
ANGEL ONLY HUMAN TP
BLACK PANTHER POWER TP
BROKEN TRINITY TP
DC UNIVERSE ORIGINS TP
GI JOE TP VOL 02
HEAVY METAL SPRING 2010
IGNITION CITY TP VOL 01
JACK STAFF TP VOL 04 ROCKY REALITIES
KICK ASS PREM HC (RES)
LEES TOY REVIEW #207 FEB 2010
MEANWHILE PICK ANY PATH 3856 STORY POSSIBILITIES
NAOKI URASAWA 20TH CENTURY BOYS GN VOL 07
STAR TREK ROMULANS PAWNS OF WAR TP
STARMAN OMNIBUS HC VOL 04
WIZARDS OF MICKEY HC VOL 01 MOUSE MAGIC
WOLVERINE DARK WOLVERINE TP PRINCE

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

Click Here to Read More...

(both from Viz, both $12.99)

***

Biomega Vol. 1 (of 6):



It's the 31st century and a virus from Mars is transforming everyone into mutant zombies; a synthetic human dressed in a black uniform and a black helmet rides his talking motorcycle at 666 km/h into a walled city on a mission to find a teenage girl, whom he almost immediately runs over as she crosses his path, tearing her leg most of the way off, only to have it heal herself in a manner perhaps expected of an Accommodator of the virus from Mars - the dazed girl, however, is also the ward of a talking bear with a rifle who shows up and whisks her away to a tall castle, wherein she is disguised in a bear costume which fails to bamboozle a Cenobite-looking villain with a bloody smock draped over a black cloak who defeats the talking bear and the synthetic human in combat and then stands on a ledge, the girl hoisted over his/her shoulder, shooting the castle with his gun until it explodes, albeit as the synthetic human rescues the talking bear, Kozlov L. Grebnev, who retreats to a submarine while Zoichi, the synthetic human, rides on his talking motorcycle, Fuyu, her AI materialized holographically as a woman in white, through a whole crowd of zombies, whacking at them with an axe en route to shooting the Cenobite-looking bloody smock villain in the head from a distance away while another Cenobite-looking villain in a gown of bandages loads the girl onto a shuttle, leaving her compatriot to mutate into a less human form and lecture Zoichi, who cuts him to pieces, on the villains' terrible plan to purge humanity forever and start a new race with the Accommodators, as emphasized by the sudden launch of thirteen intercontinental ballistic missiles -- while the talking bear watches television in a submarine and a newscaster shoots himself in the head because he cannot abide the baptism of the new society -- upon which Zoichi assembles a very long cannon from out the back of his talking motorcycle, somewhat in the manner of that very long gun the Joker pulls out of his pants in Tim Burton's Batman, and shoots all the missiles out of the air, a la the Batwing, as told to another black-uniformed rider, elsewhere, who fires his own wounded talking motorcycle's AI away in a rocket before confronting another Cenobite-looking villain in a trench coat with a gigantic sword who whacks him on his head, smooshing it all the way down between his shoulders, as the rocket evocatively clears the Earth's poisoned atmosphere into the dead silence of cool outer space. Comics.



Biomega is a big, loud, ridiculous heavy metal tractor pull of a comic, a nakedly derivative blood-on-black-leather action/sci-fi jamboree aimed squarely at 14-year old boys prone to drawing ninjas in class and 14-year old boys prone to drawing ninjas in class at heart. It's the kind of manga that mother (Studio Proteus) used to make (localize to English), and highly OKAY on that level, even if most of us can name a lot of recent zombie-dotted action/horror comics from out of North America; I've often found that manga iterations of such familiar material tend approach things with a notable lack of inhibition (see: talking bear w' rifle), and that's pretty much the prevailing virtue here.

Also, of course, there's the art of creator Tsutomu Nihei, whose 10-volume magnum opus Blame! (pronounced "BLAM" like a gunshot) was released by Tokyopop a few years back, along with an odds 'n ends 'prequel' book NOiSE, although he actually enjoyed the unique honor of a North American-specific color comics introduction prior to any of his Japanese manga seeing release, courtesy of the late Jemas Era out-of-print Marvel curio Wolverine: Snickt!, continuing the onomatopoeia theme.

You might therefore conclude that Nihei is a man of lean, sleek action, but that's not quite right; a former architecture student and studio assistant to seinen suspense artist Tsutomu Takahashi (whose Ice Blade was among Tokyopop's early, unfinished translations), he's more 'François Schuiten reborn as an Image founder,' which isn't to say that his work looks like any of those artists' on the surface -- his settings owe more to the late Zdzisław Beksiński while his character art somewhat evokes Hiroaki Samura of Blade of the Immortal, comparisons which frankly do him no favors -- but that he practices a funnybook monumentalist approach reliant on the stillness of figures, be they looming man-made spires or detailed humanoid forms tense in action poses and thereby as awesome as skyscrapers.

So, yeah, it's more Cyberforce than Les Cités Obscures, despite Nihei drawing much influence from European sources; while Schuiten might reinforce the vulnerability of humans against massive mortar metaphors, Nihei explores the similarities of the two by rendering them both as cold structures -- with a few fuzzy talking anomalies -- coherent only in that they look as awesome as possible on every page, fully appropriate for his scenarios of humankind caught mid-transition into something new and less emotive, a theme sometimes attributed to other Japanese action stylists, like dubious anime legend Koichi Ohata of M.D. Geist and other bloody messes spattered over winning steel and augmented bones. Unlike many North American comics, which you can easily imagine spinning Biomega's man-against-many story as a fable of enduring individuality, this one explicitly casts its hero and villains as representatives of unseen organizations, literally built to order. The sociologists might have more to say on that.



This points to Nihei's faults as well. His plots tend to be exceedingly basic, elaborated upon mainly to throw obstacles in front of characters prone to coughing expository matter into each other's faces when they open their mouths, which is not often. Nihei demonstrates little command of body language, and seems disinterested in the niceties of facial expression. Moreover, he's largely inapt at conveying physical contact between panel elements, which, all visual-thematic analysis notwithstanding, is kind of a problem for an action comic that boils down to Kamen Rider Vs. the Zombies; that early bit with the talking motorcycle running down the heroine is so lacking in visceral impact its huge overcompensating WHUMP sound effect -- admittedly a publisher's addition, but I tend to presume these things roughly match the Japanese sfx elements -- comes off as simply funny.

What makes this more worrisome is that Biomega is a newer work (serialized 2004-09), and seemingly intended as a more directly engaging piece; say what you will about Jim Lee, but when, say, All Star Batman kicks All Star Corrupt Police Officer in the face, you can fucking feel it. Little of that comes through in Nihei's art, and I do get the impression he's keenly aware of it - a later bit with the Cenobite smock villain winging a punch off of Zoichi's helmet sees the entire point of impact covered by a helpful shower of sparks. Likewise, virtually all of the big action sequences are powered by fairly clever shifts in perspective, like a close-up panel of a character firing a rocket -- and speaking of stillness, Nihei is extremely fond of stroboscope-like images of projectiles frozen in mid-air having juuuust exited the barrel of a weapon -- followed by an over-the-shoulder glimpse of the target with the prior character now in the background, the rocket halfway between them. All posed, all tense.

An interesting effect sometimes results, circumstantial evidence of the artist thinking his limitations through. Zoichi is a very fast character, even without his talking motorcycle, much faster than most of his opponents. Nihei will sometimes use good ol' speed lines to convey this, but other times, without warning, he'll lay out a series of panels depicting Zoichi performing some activity grossly out of synch with everyone else around him, so that he'll nonchalantly draw his gun and calmly point and fire at everyone's head while other characters spend every panel in either exactly the same pose or some barely-along variant of such, save for their heads erupting. Their bodies will still be in mid-fall as Zoichi prepares to leave, and then the in-panel action will snap back into synch. A very cool effect, and I mean 'cool' as in disaffected, and neatly facilitated by stiff, posey characters.

He can't do that all the time, so, despite his rough, scratchy lines, some pages replicate the detached feel of slick, heavy realist superhero artists, though Nihei is closer to Jae Lee's intense reliance on mise-en-scène then overt ships-passing-in-broad-daylight chaos. From this, the artist taps his greatest effect - the sense of place that admirers tend to cite. That's not just in background drawings; David Welsh recently compared Biomega's overall style to that of a first-person shooter -- and indeed, Nihei is supposedly an avid Halo player, preceding his contribution to The Halo Graphic Novel -- but it struck me as more of a 3D action platformer, where the fighting is often secondary to exploring landscapes, just being there, although you can't really advance without fights.

In this way, the key problem with this first volume is that it's an awfully event-heavy play-through, a straight shot, I guess more of a 'proper' crazy uninhibited action manga, from an artist that's defined by his visual/tonal departures from the norm.



But the oddest clash in this book isn't so visual. Keep in mind: when I say the story is "uninhibited," I don't mean it's something like Hiroya Oku's Gantz, which is so po-faced skintight sleazy it borders on camp; in fact, Nihei's body of work is notable in being almost totally without overt sexuality, to the point where I was surprised to learn that his official art book has 'erotic' pages. To my eyes, Nihei's depiction of bodies implies reproduction as a mechanical operation, an act of necessity in appropriate circumstances, as suggested by Blame!'s particular transhuman blend.

Even though I look at the villains in this book and think "Cenobites," Clive Barker's creations tend to be very specifically sexual beings; with Nihei, the surface is adapted into a larger asexual aesthetic. H.R. Giger is another popular point of visual reference, but his fetishistic aspect is diluted into people-as-buildings-as-society totality. Certainly there's no superhero mega-cleavage or male manga fanservice, although the perpetually dazed, childlike 17-year old at the heart of Zoichi's quest showcases several prominent traits of the helpless, hapless, tragic moe girl, which makes for a hilarious, brilliant, and almost certainly unintentional illustration of exactly how little this character type differs from the damsel-in-distress stock of the most clichéd, retrograde macho man heroic fantasies imaginable in genre fiction.

I wonder if that kind of stuff was added to this book to make it more 'appealing' to a wider audience? The back cover and the color front section are decorated with the image of a zombie woman in low-riding bikini bottoms. My problem isn't these images on their own, or Nihei's sexless style, but how badly they jar, like a (possibly editorial) grandmother sitting down with a boy who'd rather play video games than talk about girls and awkwardly inquiring as to his favorite actresses. "I think Kevin Costner is very attractive." Hence: bottoms.

Yet Nihei's true fascination manifests. When a zombie woman shows up, lean and mostly unmutated in a little black dress, her cheekbones are good mostly for detailing how her teeth come out when Zoichi blows open her skinny head. When the girl Zoichi seeks appears, walking in a skirt, it's mainly much the better for tracing the luxurious stretching and splitting of a nude leg torn open by a (talking) motorcycle's tires, and then the recombination of its bloody strips and dancing tendons into a filmy new whole. Better hop into that bear suit, kid - it's a short life for the old flesh.

***

All My Darling Daughters: So, this girl walks into her teacher's office and starts taking off her clothes. She keeps repeating "It's all right" as the flummoxed lecturer urges her to stop, eventually trying to run away when she lifts up her bra. Despite this, he concedes that he likes the girl's breasts, causing her to tear up. She pins him against a bookshelf and demands that he let her go down on him or else she'll yell. He relents -- even though the girl is weird and her hair is oily and sticky -- much to the chagrin of his circle of acquaintances at dinner later on. Yet the girl is among the only ones in his class that seems to listen to him at all; even he considers some of his lectures to be boring. After a subsequent encounter, he offers the girl coffee, which she frantically insists he cannot do, although she tells him he's kind. The teacher idly imagines that he'd accept a more beautiful student's advances anytime. The girl, however, insists that the two of them should not have sex, because it's too good for her; and sex is for the female partner's benefit, while blowjobs are what a man likes best. He smiles when he sees her dutifully copying his words in class. She tells him later that she'd die if he only looked at her face when they're together, and that she used to be embarrassed by her big breasts but accepted them after she learned guys like them; her ex-boyfriends told her that her breasts were her only asset, though she insists they were great guys, because they came to her apartment and ate her food and accepted her presents. She says she likes him better. He admits he's starting to like her, and a friend tells him to return to where it started to go wrong. The next time they're together, he tells her not to go down on him; she cried, but her offers her tickets for them to see a movie. They embrace, and she tells him he's too good for her. In class, he reprimands her for coming in late, and the boy sitting next to her calls her a slowpoke and an ugly bitch. She grins at him as he looks away. "I hope she finds a guy who's a little better than I am." The teacher smiles. Comics?



Well shit, of course it's comics. Not long ago, folks would've called it 'literary' comics, and while that might have raised annoying qualms about imposing prose publishing's literary-genre dichotomy on a different art form -- in that a literary comic could simply be like 'literature' in the sense of being like prose writing itself -- it would nonetheless signal some form of thematic or formalist ambition on the part of various North American comics, albeit at a time when possibly any departure from genre apparatus could be construed as just that.

But comics have grown a lot in the past decade, and the old labels don't stick so well. Case in point: Fumi Yoshinaga, doujinshi-making fan turned pro, the widely-admired creator of the workplace dramedy Antique Bakery and the ongoing alternate history serial Ōoku: The Inner Chambers. This is her newest English release, hailing from 2003 in Japan, a suite of five interconnected stories, one of which I've synopsized above in a way that doesn't leave it too dissimilar to something out of, say, Optic Nerve, Adrian Tomine's quintessential literary comic, which, particularly in its later issues, always struck me as far more cinematographic in its ice-carved observational visuals than anything else. Er, should I mention Raymond Carver?

Prose is not always to be trusted, though, particularly when the prose writer's chief qualification is his blogspot account. What quickly leaps out from Yoshinaga's story is something a plot synopsis cannot capture: how the artist's handling of such potentially risible subject matter is inseparable from her use of the most time-honored aspects of manga iconography. Sweatdrops, booming sound effects, wacky cartoon faces, tiny balloonless dialogue asides - the gang's all here, if not as blatantly so as in youth manga. Still, they are the operations of a mangaka working in a relaxed idiom, a detailed comics language so fully hammered into place by decades of usage in a mass medium that they needn't be questioned. The purpose of Chibi-like cartoon faces are easy to understand (someone is losing their cool), so why not use them in a painful story about a teacher and his student? Because people won't take you seriously? Because you need to look like something else?

Manga may not be the most seriously considered art form in Japan, but it's understood enough that its toolbox doesn't need to be emptied to meet some threshold burden for adult consideration. It's like this: when Jaime Hernandez uses zany cartoon effects dating back to before Dan Decarlo, it's Jaime Hernandez being Jaime Hernandez; when Fumi Yoshinaga does it, it's manga being manga.



Another crucial difference: North American comics don't have a tradition of perfectly GOOD dramas like this to draw from. Currently, they have a small niche capable of selling drama as literature, without the distinctions that mark prose literature, or a limited means of presenting drama as an accessory to genre mechanics.

The beauty of manga is that drama can be simply drama, which, oddly enough, allows for less fussy access to certain literary qualities -- psychological depth, social inquiry, etc. -- though some might claim a more direct comparison to television drama; indeed, Yoshinaga is no stranger to that terrain, in that Antique Bakery was adapted into both live-action and animated television series in Japan, in addition to a feature film in South Korea. This might be a product of comparative serialization, though; certainly most of the television comparisons I hear regarding North American works surround superhero comics, the last big holdout of monthly or weekly chapters around here.

What Yoshinaga's work lacks is interaction with the comics form beyond that of the relaxed idiom. I doubt most non-devotees could even pick her artwork out of a lineup, it's so placidly observant of developed manga values, although a likable blockiness to certain obstinate characters' faces becomes noticeable over the course of the book; certainly she can put together attractive page designs, as evidenced above by the interplay between tones and blocking and those narration-only panels for... special... emphasis.

All of this is directly communicative, however - Yoshinaga is just not a fancy storyteller, rarely attempting even basic dissonance between words and pictures, except for comedic effect. It could be the tide of critical thought is turning, and that as drama becomes more commonplace in North American comics -- hardly guaranteed, given the precarious state of the market -- formalism might yet emerge as the new easy-reading shorthand for 'ambitious' funnies; last year's darling, Asterios Polyp, would obviously fit that bill. I haven't read every manga in the world, but I can't imagine a work like Mazzucchelli's coming out of Japan; maybe my imagination is limited, but it could be that the conditions necessary to conceive of such an obsessive metaphorical outlay just don't exist with manga, where even 'art' comics tend to study movement, like Yuichi Yokoyama's, or play with perspectives or drawing styles, a la Shintaro Kago or the heta-uma artists, or swing a hard fist at societal conditions, as did some of the older gekiga.

You don't need to fulfill any of these criteria to make an effective comic, much in the way you don't need to appear on critics' Top 10 lists to be good. The point I'm getting at is that the transformation of North American comics' makeup will probably cause a shift in how comics are analyzed qualitatively, and it's unassuming books like this that'll raise the biggest questions for readers disinclined to let nationality serve as their co-pilot. Yoshinaga remains upfront, like literature also can. As a writer, she typically has her characters flatly state their minds, confessing to or confiding in one another to move the plot, laughing and crying. She draws superb tears; there's these two pages with a little kid waking up sick, crying and spitting and puking, and there's a world of pain in that, one of the simplest ways comics can charge you up by being what they are.



The stories of All My Darling Daughters aren't very tightly connected -- the characters are all somehow friends or relations of each other, if sometimes tenuously -- although the last one does circle around to compliment the first, and the passage of time is duly conveyed as characters build relationships or get married. All of them concern women struggling with a deterministic world that ensures their relationships are connected to events of the past. Schoolroom slights create lasting tension between a mother and daughter, understandings between friends are informed by teenage vows for the future; probably the most complex aspect of the book is its title, indicating a particular parental concern, a love that Yoshinaga's manga reveals as potentially stifling.

"She said I was too good for her," says the teacher to his friends. That's a recurring sentiment throughout the book, a summary of the neuroses bedeviling Yoshinaga's characters. From this union of aching, across the book as a whole, we can understand the student in that story, even while the artist maintains the male's perspective (the only one of the book) throughout. She is young, and she might find her way out of the trap, although the only characters to really take control of their lives are prompted by one mother's life-threatening disease, thereby signalling a daughter to do the same.

Well, there is another character that undergoes a big change: a young woman who seems to care for everyone, yet never manages a romantic relationship. She's the star of the book's longest and most troublesome story, illustrative of Yoshinaga reaching too far, working with the fairly sophomoric notion of falling in love as potentially cruel discrimination between people as its thematic axis, then ungainly dressing it with allusions to the early 20th century struggles of Japanese leftists and the teachings of Christ, after which a perfectly logical and still faintly silly conclusion is reached.

This character is the counterpoint to Yoshinaga's mother and daughter, a person that can't stand the vagaries of romantic love and thus cuts herself off entirely from mainstream society. It's tempting to read this as revealing of the artist's own position, more adept with smartly observing domestic interactions than grappling with headier stuff; she does seem to want after something different, given this false start's inclusion, and the vastly expanded scope of Ōoku. We may be coming into a time where the new critical biases will demand more, and maybe in a way that Yoshinaga's straight-shot art cannot provide.

Yet maybe the nurturing of calm drama will spark its own nuanced appreciation, and readings will spread outward. Just having a book like this glide across bookstore shelves like it's just manga shows how much the years can change comics, more pliable than Yoshinaga's drawn families and nervous lovers for sure.

Labels: Jog

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Ah! It is the longest thing I write every year.

WITNESS: 6 weeks of my life in the look at BookScan in 2009, in TILTING AT WINDMILLS #189

http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=24818

-B

Labels: BookScan, Brian, Tilting

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This is up late because Diamond was completely shut down yesterday, though West Coast books are shipping on time. Still, puts me a day behind on everything else I do, too...

Another tiny week. Which I suppose is good for people caught in Snowpocalypse '10, but not so good for the rest of us. Publishers are breaking the weekly habit.


2000 AD PACK JAN 2010
ACTION COMICS #886
ADVENTURE COMICS WITH BLACK LANTERN SUPERBOY #7
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #620 GNTLT
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PRESENTS JACKPOT #2 (OF 3)
ANCHOR #5
ANGELUS #2 (OF 6)
ANITA BLAKE LC EXECUTIONER #4 (OF 5)
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #140
BATGIRL #7
BATMAN AND ROBIN #8
BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #178
BLACKBEARD LEGEND OF THE PYRATE KING #3
BOOSTER GOLD #29
BPRD KING OF FEAR #2 (OF 5)
COLT NOBLE AND MEGALORDS (ONE SHOT)
DARK TOWER BATTLE OF JERICHO HILL #3 (OF 5)
DARK X-MEN #4 (OF 5)
DAYTRIPPER #3 (OF 10)
DMZ #50 (NOTE PRICE)
ENDERS GAME COMMAND SCHOOL #5 (OF 5)
ESCAPE FROM WONDERLAND #4 (OF 6)
GEN 13 #34
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #29
GROO HOGS OF HORDER #3 (OF 4)
HAUNT #5
HIT-MONKEY #1
HUMAN TARGET #1 (OF 6)
INVINCIBLE PRESENTS ATOM EVE & REX SPLODE #3 (OF 3)
JOHN SABLE FREELANCE ASHES OF EDEN #5
JSA ALL STARS #3
JUGHEAD AND FRIENDS DIGEST #36
LEGENDARY TALESPINNERS #1 (OF 3)
MARVEL ADVENTURES SUPER HEROES #20
MARVEL BOY URANIAN #2 (OF 3)
MUPPET KING ARTHUR #1
MUPPET SHOW #2
NEW MUTANTS #10
PHANTOM DOUBLE SHOT #2 (OF 6) KGB NOIR
PHONOGRAM 2 #7 (OF 7) SINGLES CLUB
PUNISHERMAX #4
REALM OF KINGS IMPERIAL GUARD #4 (OF 5)
REBELS #13
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY ILLUSTRATED #1
SCOOBY DOO #153
SECRET SIX #18 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
SHIELD #6
SOLOMON KANE DEATHS BLACK RIDERS #2 (OF 4)
SPIDER #3
SPIDER-MAN AND SECRET WARS #3 (OF 4)
STARSTRUCK #6
STRANGE #4 (OF 4)
SUPER FRIENDS #24
SUPER HERO SQUAD #2
SWORD #4 (MARVEL)
TAILS OF PET AVENGERS #1
THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY #8
TITANS #22
ULTIMATE COMICS ARMOR WARS #4 (OF 4)
ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #7
UNCANNY X-MEN FIRST CLASS #8 (OF 8)
UNWRITTEN #10
VENGEANCE OF MOON KNIGHT #5
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #703
X-MEN FOREVER #17
X-MEN PIXIE STRIKES BACK #1 (OF 4)

Books / Mags / Stuff
28 DAYS LATER HC VOL 01
ALL STAR SUPERMAN TP VOL 02
ANCHOR TP VOL 01
BRAVE AND THE BOLD MILESTONE TP
CHOCOLATE CHEEKS GN
ESSENTIAL DAREDEVIL TP VOL 05
FROM THE ASHES TP VOL 01
HELLBLAZER PANDEMONIUM HC
HULK TP VOL 03 HULK NO MORE
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #293
KING SPECIAL EDITION HC
LITTLE NOTHINGS GN VOL 03 UNEASY HAPPINESS
MADAME XANADU TP VOL 02 EXODUS NOIR
MARAT SADE JOURNALS ULTIMATE REVISED ED
MARVEL 1602 TP NEW PTG
MESMO DELIVERY GN VOL 01
MICKEY MOUSE CLASSICS TP VOL 01
MUPPET PETER PAN TP VOL 01
NEWAVE UNDERGROUND MINI COMIX O/T 80S HC
NEXTWAVE AGENTS OF HATE TP ULTIMATE COLLECTION
OBEDIENT ONE (A)
PREACHER HC BOOK 02
SPIDER-MAN 24 7 TP
STAR TREK NERO TP
STAR WARS LEGACY TP VOL 08 TATOOINE
TOYFARE #152 MATTEL DC UNIVERSE CLASSICS CVR
WIZARDS OF MICKEY SC VOL 01 MOUSE MAGIC
WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED #40


What looks good to YOU?

-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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I should have mentioned this earlier in the week, but I Forgot.

The gents at Comic Book Geek Speak have be back yet again, and I get all pontificatey in episode #777, which you can listen to here: http://www.comicgeekspeak.com/episodes/comic_geek_speak-999.php

Enjoy!

-B

Labels: Brian, Comic Book Geek Speak

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I'm pretty good about doing my own research, most of the time, but as I wander through my BookScan Analysis this year (Sheesh, I'm at 12,000 words, and I still haven't touched 2 of the 4 categories!) I'm hoping I can depend on YOU to help me a bit.

What movies based on comics were released in 2009?

Watchmen, obviously. And Wolverine. Astro Boy. But then I start to blank. Name me some titles, would you?

Thanks in advance!!

-B

Labels: Brian

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