Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
The Fantastic Four was my first permanent hook into comics. It was a great book, filled with everything that I was looking for in my entertainment.
There was one thing, though, that... I don't want to say "puzzled" but it never seemed to sit quite right with me. When people talked about the essence of the Fantastic Four, they always said it boiled down to "family." That always struck me as an odd notion because "family" -- as it was generally defined in the 1970s and '80s in America -- was Dad and Mom with their 2.5 kids. Which the Fantastic Four clearly were not. People would use the Thing and Human Torch as euphemisms for the kids, but that always seemed a bit of stretch for me. Sure, they acted juvenile on occasion but I saw them as adults who just weren't as serious as Reed and Sue.
I looked at the relationships there as they were presented. Reed and Sue were married. Johnny was Sue's brother, but had no real relationship to Reed. And Ben was just a friend of everybody's. And then you had these orbiting friends who stopped in frequently like Alicia Masters and Wyatt Wingfoot and Crystal, who weren't actually related to anybody, but everybody knew and liked.
What that did for me, back in the day, was re-define "family." It didn't mean Dad, Mom and the kids. It didn't have anything to do with blood relationships or marriage vows. Family was the people you loved and spent the majority of your time with. The notion of a stereotypical nuclear family didn't make sense in the context I was seeing it. Family was defined by the individual.
That concept took deeper root with me as I continued reading the book. The Thing was replaced by She-Hulk. Ben returned, but Reed and Sue left to be replaced by Ms. Marvel and Crystal. When Reed and Sue came back, Ms. Marvel stayed on as a fifth member, much like Frankie Raye had done years earlier. It reflected life in that individuals move in and out of your circle over the course of time -- sometimes for extended periods, sometimes shorter ones. But you embrace those who you care about, bring them into your home and make them a part of your life. Your family.
And isn't that how all families work at some level? Maybe your brother comes to live with you while he's looking for a new job or you spend all your free time with your co-workers or you maintain close ties with your army buddies for years after you're out of the service. That's family, right? Maybe not a direct blood-line between people, but a direct emotional connection.
So how is gay marriage any different? How different are a trans couple from a cis het couple, in terms of the love they share? How are the emotional bonds between an asexual couple unique from any other couple? They're all just trying to make a family like the rest of us. No, it won't be Dad, Mom and 2.5 kids but that rigid definition was never really even valid in the first place. That's one of the themes I picked up from The Fantastic Four and something I go out of my way to look for in other fictions, and something I'm always striving for in my real life.
Live your life. Surround yourself with people you love and people who love you. That's your family, regardless if you're related by blood, by law, or not at all.
Off the top of my head, here are some of the ones inhabiting my brain:
- The original Bat-Man
- The rather sanitized, if kooky, Batman of the 1950s
- The "New Look" Batman of 1960s and '70s
- Adam West
- The dumbed down version from The Super Friends (which, in my head, kind of blends with the Filmation version, as well as the one that had a guest appearance on Scooby-Doo)
- Frank Miller's Dark Knight
- Michael Keaton
- Bruce Timm's animated version
- The more-or-less current continuity Batman
In my case, the "New Look" and Keaton versions of Batman are the strongest, with the Dark Knight running a close third. Consequently, I think of Batman largely in terms of how he was depicted in the comics in the 1970s, with his Bruce Wayne persona largely informed by Keaton's performance. The Dark Knight angle just punches up his raw power a bit, so he's a little more willing to brawl than the karate expert I grew up with. That's who my Batman is.
And yet, I'm still able to keep all those Batmen separate in my head. I can sit and watch one of the cartoons or read through the latest comics offering and not get bothered by the fact that this Batman doesn't precisely match the one in my head. The closer he does come, of course, the more inclined I'll be to become engaged with the piece and enjoy it. The further from my version, the less likely I'll care.
I think it's a fascinating prospect, though, that I can juggle distinctly different versions of one character in my head and actively keep them all separate while at the same time amalgamating them into a sort of gestalt Batman.
Please accept my thanks and good wishes for requesting my thoughts and suggestion in reference to this coming time of year.I know it's July and about as far away from the holiday season as you can get, particularly with a heatwave ravaging a good chunk of the planet. But I want to call this out because, as much as Kirby is remembered for being an incredible force in comics and an insanely talented creative spirit and storyteller, he was also just a damn fine human being.The gift I would seek for myself would be continuing good health for my family and myself and the rest of humankind. Allow this spirit to bless us all.
- I'd recommend a set of encyclopedias for young people of all categories to gain needed facts.
- Subscriptions to magazines and periodicals that your friends and family will enjoy.
- Reflect the spirit of the holiday.
- Don't reject humor and song.
- Remain confident in your individual skills.
That is why Kirby is king.
I got my first page of art back in 2000. It was a piece by Salvador Larocca, who was drawing Fantastic Four at the time. I had talked to Larocca, and it was my first "professional" comics interview and I bought the piece to commemorate that. It was still early enough in the history of the interwebs that I saw a preview image of an upcoming issue and was able to contact Larroca's agent to reserve the piece before anyone else. (The agent hadn't even seen the page yet!)
I won a dozen other pages in a contest a few years later. Nothing particularly high profile, but they were originals nonetheless, and that really started me actively looking for original comic art. With my graphic design background, I really like examining original pages to study the production process. I'm looking less for "a really cool picture of some character" and more "insight into the production process of making comics."
I would still mostly focus on artists whose work I found interesting, or characters/stories I especially liked. And, in general, I try to score bargains when I can. The vast majority of pieces I have cost less than $150, and at least half were less than $100. Not cheap, to be sure, but not unobtainably expensive either. I've got pages from several friends I've made in the industry; I've got pages that I was drawn into; I've got pages by many of my favorites creators; I've got pages that stood out as particularly memorable years ago when I first encountered them in the comics themselves.
Several of the pieces in my collection are not-quite-but-very-nearly-Grail pages for me. An almost random page from Fantastic Four Annual #22 that I always felt was a little empty, and seeing the original showed that artist Tom Morgan had drawn more, but that part wasn't inked and those pencils erased! I've got a page from Jimmy Olsen #162 which is fairly unremarkable other than being the earliest page I ever saw where a character's action was so powerful, they broke the confines of the panel! (It's not even remotely the first time any artist did that, of course; it was just the first time I had seen it.) I've got a two-page sequence drawn in the aftermath of 9/11 that impressed me as being one of the few comic pieces I saw that put into words why telling silly comic book stories about talking monkeys and mad scientists was not only okay, but necessary. It was also the ONLY comic piece in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that specifically took advantage of comic book's unique method of storytelling.
I don't have any universally acknowledged milestone type pieces. Even the pages I have from bigger name folks are works that most people don't know about. But I like all the pages I do have. They mean something to me, whether because of the story it's from, the background behind it, or the art techniques used. And I just picked them up as I found them, if I had the available disposable income on hand.
And somehow, in the past twenty years, I've got a collection that takes up more than three binders. That's not a whole lot, in terms of collectors of original comic art, but it's far more than I ever thought I might wind up with. Even back in the '80s, before prices got really out of control, the notion of collecting original art pages was so far beyond what I ever thought I'd be able to manage.
I had someone ask me recently if I was successful. Since I'm almost always looking toward the next plateau, it often doesn't feel like it. But it's hard to argue in the negative objectively. And I suppose that's the point of this post: to remind myself that, regardless of how frequently or deeply I feel I'm not doing enough, I am actually doing pretty well. I've already blasted so far past whatever dreams I may have had as a kid that a teenage me would literally not believe anything I might tell him about my life. I've exceeded any dreams I had about being in the comic industry, and I don't even work in it! Helpful to remind myself of that sometimes.
Like people pretty much around the world, early last year Rachael Smith found herself trapped in a once-in-a-century pandemic that was devasting lives and livlihoods. Although the specific restrictions regarding travel and gatherings varied from country to country, they were all basically variations of physically isolating yourself. And given that humans are a social species naturally, this proved emptionally and mentally challenging for a lot of people. As a cartoonist, Smith responded by... rarely getting out of bed or just collapsing in a heap on the floor if she did.
Actually, we know this because she managed to draw a lot of diary comics about her experiences. She posted many (most?) of them online as she created them, but they've now been collected in a book called Quarantine Comix: A Memoir of Life in Lockdown.
Smith's experiences are, of course, unique to her. As I said, her lockdown restrictions were unique to England as are the relationships she had/has. She wasn't able to see her boyfriend in person for months, but both of them had housemates so they weren't in total isolation. She had a small, open garden in the back so once restrictions started to lift, she was able to see a few people even if they couldn't sit right next to each other. She held a part-time job at a coffee shop, and that ended up being completely shut down for a while and she spent the subsequent time with few responsbilities.
At a practical level, this doesn't match my experience at all. I live in the US, so the lockdown restrictions have been different. I'm married, so there hasn't been a single day that I haven't seen my wife. And both my wife and I have office type jobs that we've been able to do from home, so we maintained all the responsbilities associated with them. I think it's fair to say that I've had an enormous amount of privledge beyond what Smith (and many others) have had that has made the pandemic a radically different experience for me.
Despite that, however, the feelings and emotions in Quarantine Comix feel exactingly familiar. Using her specific circumstances, Smith is able to tap into the collective trauma we've all been experiencing over the past year and a half. And while there are certainly a number of jokes in her comics to try to lighten the intense emotional weight we're all carrying, there are any number of moments of sadness and fear as well. We've had days where we didn't get out of bed, or ones where we did get out of bed and found ourselves still in our pajamas hours later when we're ready to go back to bed. We've had days where we want to just melt into the earth, or where we wonder longingly at a squirrel who's obilivious to the pandemic. We've had phone conversations where we had to check ourselves and say, "Wait, I didn't mean that to sound as depressingly desperate and hopeless as it sounded!" because your subconscious mind is in one of the darkest places it's ever been for this long.
Everyone on the planet is experiencing a collective trauma right now. Everyone living through this will have some form of PTSD when it's done. (And I do not mean that hyperbolically!) Smith doesn't provide any answers, certainly while we're still in the midst of this, but she does a brilliant job of reminding us that we're all sharing this worldwide cataclysm together, despite our relative isolation. And I, for one, find that as a welcome, even necessary, reminder.
I first became aware of Smith when my publisher hired her to do the cover for Webcomics. I was certainly very happy with the art she developed for that, and I find myself doubly pleased that the partiucular timing of that meant I saw her posting many of these comics online as she was making them. I think they're individually still available on Twitter (possibly other social media; I saw them on Twitter) but I think the printed copy is worth it, basically seeing all of 2020 bound up in a single book like that. A physical reminder that the past year and change have been absolute bullshit for everybody and that you survived at all is no small feat in and of itself.
Despite this being a diary comic about not going anywhere or doing anything, I found it infintely more engaging and relatable than most other diary type comics I've read. It was published by Icon Books about a week ago and retails for $19.95 US/£12.99 UK.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Kleefeld on Comics: 2017... or 1940?
Kleefeld on Comics: Speed Jaxon
Kleefeld on Comics: Electric Company Spidey Covers
Kleefeld on Comics: Maker Comics Survive the Outdoors Review
Kleefeld on Comics: The Lure of Nostalgia Is Safety
