You Must Go: The Jack Kirby Museum Opens for One Week in NYC!

The Jack Kirby Museum opens TODAY for one trial week:

Monday, November 4–Sunday, November 10th
178 Delancey Street, New York City
Admission is FREE; suggested donation $2 for adults

It looks like it’s open 12pm-7pm most days, but check www.kirbymuseum.org for details. There’s an opening reception Monday night at 7pm.

Missing In Action - Charles Yoakum

OK, I've been a bad blogger. I admit it. I've not posted much in the year 2010, especially in the last couple of months.

Its not that I've not been reading comics, or thinking about comics, or doing some sketching on my recent trip to New York. I just haven't been motivated to talk about comics. In most any way shape or form.

I simply haven't had the energy to talk about finally getting down to reading the entire run of Planetary up to the final trade (when it comes out), or getting to read Madame Xanadu, or getting my Adam Hughes cover parade book or sitting back down to finish up the Human Hourglass pages.

Sorry. My bad. Although I'm not sure that anyone really missed me. There are just so few minutes in life and I wasn't spending any of them constructing great and funny thoughts about storytelling or artwork or anything. Perhaps if I was a faster and better typist it would be easier to get them out, but that would preclude the editing process.

I need to be a Dragon software adoptee. Seriously.

Recent trip to New York: me with an old friend from the Acclaim days to discuss what he's publishing these days. Should anything work out I'll let you all know. Took time in the Met and the MoMA to pull out my sketchbook and draw a little Modigliani and Klimt. The heat and humidity felt wonderful and having my daughters lead me through the subway passages at Union Square made me proud.

New York inspires me and makes me want to do art. There is some vitality in the people and the energy that makes me want to work. You walk around and see everyone and think that somewhere in that naked city area a million visual ideas and they're just bouncing around in your head and you need to get them out.

Stay tuned. Above sketch of my daughter playing on my wife's iPhone on the flight to NYC.

Virgin Comics Closes Down: Still No One Gets It

The last two days poor Dirk Deppey's blood pressure must be going though the roof over at the comics journal. With the closing of Virgin Comics' New York offices, we've watched yet another comics company implode and all for many of the same reasons. Dirk has one of his best rants in ages of why it didn't work:

Lots of books that I think are badly executed nonetheless find readers (see: Marvel’s Civil War). The question is, can they find the market where such readers might be available? I argued yesterday that because Virgin’s outreach seems to have been restricted to the Wednesday Crowd, the answer was effectively “No.”

and the truth, as they used to say in the 90's, was out there. I don't recall seeing a single Virgin TPB at any of the stores that I go into. They were playing to a calcified audience, one that is simply too locked into prior patterns to want or to be able to support the new.

And that is their perogative. I'm all about comics audiences voting with their money, as for years they supported bad series and poor editorial choices because they had to have a complete run of Black Goliath and Night Nurse.

The problem is that the business model really is broken to get new work in front of new eyes. Not, and lets be clear here, old work in front of new eyes, or new work in front of old eyes. The powers that be have every intention, we know by now, of sitting on thier butts and staying with what isn't working until they're forced out on the street.

And yet the new business model is working. Jeff Smith didn't get to where he is by doing Spider man before doing Bone. The manga audience has come in droves for what American publishers were sure they wouldn't buy. Diary of a Wimpy Kid has only moved a few copies since being picked up off of the web.

There you go, three different business models to follow, and the powers that be in marvel and DC aren't doing any of them. Scholastic has an entirely different distribution model, manga digests are filling the shelves in Borders and B & N, and the web is filled with tiny little pockets of coolness that can prove the effectiveness of micropayments.

The answer here, with all of Virgin's money, is to simply not go the Marvel/DC route. Don't try to compete with that universe. The audience won't accept it, period. Cross Gen and Virgin simply bare this out. There was solid talent here, putting in time and money to create books that were halfway between something alternative and Marvel/DC. And that space is clearly NOT a good place to be.

When i was in Paris a month ago, in a Virgin Megastore on the most famous boulevard in the fabled city of lights, I went to the top floor and found a huge area of graphic novels. And in the middle of the day were all sorts of professional adults, on lunch hour, lounging, browsing and reading graphic novels. The vast majority would have separated well into the similar catagories that we stuff movies into at the video store: Adventure, romance, comedy, adult, a little fantastic history or sci fi, but then again, thats the whole point. There was a huge range of graphic novel for everyone, just as even the tiniest video store is filled with something for everyone. My average comic shop can't say that, almost none of them can.

And I can recall seeing pretty much none of Virgin Comic's work in the Paris Megastore. Why? Can't guess, but if I was Richard Branson, I'd have made sure that some of it was there. Unless comics mean a lot more to us than Richard Branson.

The Ashes of Comic Shops Past

Valerie's write up on the Last Exit to Brooklyn comic shop should touch a nerve with just about any comics fan. I doubt that I was ever far enough out in Brooklyn to have touched upon the shop that she describes, but there was no shortage of bizarre comic shops in the boroughs. In fact, the very worst comic shop that I ever walked into was actually in Manhattan.

About 3 blocks from the Valiant offices in the Chelsea district, it sat on the same block as the infamous Chelsea Hotel, famous if you were a Sex Pistols fan. I cannot for the life of me remember exactly what the name was, but it sat on west 23rd st, between 7th and 8th Avenue, much of hte time its dingy signage covered by the work awnings as they renovated the Hotel next door.

While on a pretty central street, 23st ceased in the 1990s to be particularly well trafficked past 7th Ave. While the multiplex sat on the corner of 8th ave, the Krispy Creme had yet to open across the street, and the dilapidated Hotel Chelsea seemed like an embarassment: a reminder of another time when New York was broke and subways waited for yet another Bernie Goetz. People would walk by and simply not turn their heads. 8th Ave? Are you crazy? I only go there for B&H to try an talk the Hasidiam into yet another deal.

So this grimy little shop had the greatest accumulation of ill advised promotional items that I recall running accross in all my years. It would be harder to imagine more poorly placed posters for Image books that never shipped or never sold, for Marvel titles that would never be collectible, for Valiant and Acclaim comics that would never lay claim to having the "Shooter" magic touch. The carpet was a non-descript color not chosen because it would hide the accumulated dirt of a thousand unwashed fanboys, but because it had seen that sort of traffic. That is, when the carpet was covering the old floor tiles.

Long and narrow, the shop was filled with all the prerequisites: poorly organized comics in the front, a mixture of spinner racks and wooden displays against the wall, a smattering of the growing threat graphic novels (collections of other superhero crap from the 1980s, some Fantagraphics, or the latest Europorn from Milo Manara), and then rows and rows of cardboard boxes housing essentially all the issues that you didn't need to complete your collection. i never once found a single thing that I was looking for in all those damn long boxes.

Sounds like a lot of other shops doesn't it? It is just that this one did it all, and did it worst. Especially in comparison to the other shops in Manhattan, such a Cosmic Comics, that did well with half the square footage. But Cosmic didn't have the overly large and completely disinterested store owner, asshole staff, and regular crowd of hip hop bloods, street junkies or ratty neighborhood boys that would inhabit the place. While Hanleys was getting the money to go upscale over on 34th Street, this place was a time machine.

Why did I go there, you ask, if it was that bad? I have to say that I had a perverse hatred of it, and would simply go by after leaving the Valiant offices three blocks away, just so that I could dogear a few books and slum it, before I walked cross town to one of the better shops, any of the better shops, to give them my money. Just as record producers would use the legendary car test (taking the song that they had just finished in the studio and play it on the small shitty car speakers to see how the average radio listener would hear it), I wanted to see how the new comics that we were putting out, the latest issue of my Turok or the Grackle, how they would look on the stands.

That place was my lowest common denominator of comic shops. And I never once saw a female in there. Ever.

Kirby on the Lower East Side: RAB's post

One of the joys of having a diverse number of other blogs to read, is the ability to run across a geat post covering something that I would certainly have missed since I no longer, sadly, live in New York City. However, i certainly would have loved to have been there. RAB has a great post titled Kirby in the Park that you must read not just for the fact that its a great story, but because he has some great observations on Jack's particular place in the popular culture at large, as opposed the comic geek culture at large., particularly in New York.

That dovetails with my own post on the dinner after Jack's death, that the Defiant crew held after a New York convention over on 8th Ave. Have a read if you missed it the first time. Its one of my favorite stories of all time. Jack was one of them, a true New Yorker at heart, soul and upbringing, and, finally, the rest of the country is slowly but surely getting to realize what a giant he was in his imagination and the effect he had on the 20th Century through pop culture.

Great great post RAB. Wish that I could have stopped by.

Off to New York!

A quick note that there may not be any new content for a bit while I'm away in New York. I hope to write some right before San Diego, and then do some blogging from the Convention itself. Lis Fies and I will be pitching Pistoleras to a number of publishers there, so we'll see if there is any interest in our work so far.

I'm clearly inferior to Valerie D'Orazio, whose Occasional Superheroine blog is taking over the world, if not the San Diego Comic Con.

Everyone be good and I'll catch up on the comic news soon with you.

Paul Pope and the imagination of Jack Kirby

Paul Pope, over at PulpHope, has a great little story about a conversation that he had about Jack Kirby. Takes two minutes to read, and I love it.

"Sometimes I feel like all science is doing now is reverse-engeneering Jack Kirby," I say.

.. is just one great line. I'll let you savor the rest yourself and then you can come back here.

Great. All done?

What I'll bring up is a subpoint in the discussion, the vitality of comics. Elsewhere in the world, with comics hidden into the small stores sucking on the teat of the direct market, run by dedicated comic lovers who can barely afford the rent on their stores, comics aren't anywhere you can see them, and, as objects, lose their relevance to today.

New York is different, perhaps because its been the home of comic book publishers and many of the artists, perhaps because of the sheer density of people and, therefore, density of retailers to serve the population, perhaps because people there still read because they have time, time on the subway platform, on the train, on the bus, as opposed to sitting in a car driving and not being able to take their eyes off of the road, the nature of transportation demands a way to escape from yet another long hot wait on for the N and R at Union Square.

Whatever reason, or combination of reasons, comics there do maintain a certain relevance to populace, and, as an artist, there is such a joy in that that it is truly hard to express. After all, there was a time, 10 years ago, when you could have likened the comic artist to the horse and buggy salesman: they had their heyday, and would likely have been sure that their market position would be secure; after all, people had been using the trusted horse as transportation for hundreds of years now. Surely this new horseless carriage would never really replace the equine animal.

Now, with success of manga and the cartoon channel and 300 and Spiderman and Hellboy and X-Men and, god help us, the FF2 movie, we can continue to see the ideas generated by comics, and that energy, brought out to the masses...

...and we're relevant again. groping blindly most of the time, but relevant.

i'll take that.