Read Comics

Alison Bechdel spoke Thursday night at the University of Minnesota campus, and fortunately I found out early enough to attend, along with a nearly full auditorium of fans. Also, fortunately, I got to go with a good friend who had an awesome appreciation for her and her work. I’ve read Dykes to Watch Out For for years, while it was published in our various gay publications in Minneapolis. I don’t remember the last time it was running here, but I know that, sadly, it hasn’t run for a few years. More the pity us, who even hosted Alison for a few years in the ’80s. She spoke about how much she loved it here, working for Equal Time, and that she misses it, but that she’s very happy in Vermont. Again, the Twin Cities are that much poorer for her absence.

She started her presentation talking about her comic strip, which she’s worked on for over twenty years now. She spoke a bit about the evolution of the strip, and how when she started, it was part of an effort to change the world. That the characters weren’t part of the mainstream, and were never meant to be. Funny thing was, the mainstream changed around the characters. She talked about how gay books weren’t carried in mainstream bookstores, gay news wasn’t carried in the mainstream press, and gay characters weren’t shown realistically on television. Well, two out off three ain’t bad. She included a presentation featuring characters from the strip and how they’ve changed over the years. Projected onto a large screen, we got to see just how good her line art is. The detail that she puts in every strip amazes me. From her characters, each of whom is distinctive, to the objects and backgrounds, her panels are interesting but not cluttered. I particularly love the way she draws hair, swirling around like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Seeing the art blown up with a hi-def projector spoils you for seeing it in any other way.

She followed this with readings from Fun Home, her graphic autobiography (as opposed to novel). I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I took the opportunity to buy a copy and get it signed. (Amazon Bookstore was there selling copies) Between the two readings, Alison showed us a video of her techniques for working on the book. She uses herself for most of the photo-reference for all of her characters, including her mother and father. Her technique starts with rough sketches, which she then places on a lightbox and uses tracing paper to get continuously more detailed, until her final inking. For Fun Home, she decided to change her normal technique of shading. In the strip, she uses crosshatching, but for the book, she took a last piece of tracing paper and used watered down ink to do her colouring. She scans in both images and combines them for the final pages.

She hosted a final Q&A at the end, where she fielded questions from her artistic influences (Norman Rockwell, Mad Magazine, Edward Gorey, and Herge) to why she left the Twin Cities (the oldest of reasons–for a girl) to how she’s getting by with the diminishing number of papers carrying gay strips (she’s still exploring that issue–but she does have a paypal button on her website). All in all, she was extremely well-spoken and entertaining. And I’m glad I read about the event in the City Pages before it was too late.

Thanks to a last-minute email from a friend (fellow poster Jason), I got to see Alison Bechdel when she gave a reading at the U of Minn on Thursday evening. Alison is famous in some circles for her enduring comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I discovered collections of this comic in my university’s Women’s Center library. A green-haired girl at a mostly-male engineering school, I often retreated to the Women’s Center to feel a sense of belonging. There weren’t many of us there, but we managed to generate our fair share of glamorous drag parties, heated discussions about the gay boys leaving our toilet seat up during their meetings, and drama amongst the many cute baby dykes and bi-curious flirts who danced and drooled over one another.

Dykes to Watch Out For showed me a mirror of my own little experience and a vision of a much bigger and more diverse queer community out there in the world. A chosen family of socialist radicals, lawyers working on the system from the inside, independent bookstore-owners struggling to compete, and kinky girls just looking to get laid. Actually, they were all getting laid, and it was a heady vision of what grown-up life could be like for me one day. The idea that so many options could lead to love, professional success, undermining the dumbass status quo, and even when all of the above seemed lost, a group of friends who would always be there with support and validation. Needless to say, at 17 this vision was all still a distant dream for me, and I am grateful that her books were there to give me hope.

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I read Gravel #0 and Gravel #1 just now, without any prior knowledge of the character or universe. Each issue gives you a complete story, while still tying in with a larger story arc about “The Sigsand Manuscript”. The tone of these comics is dark, featuring regular killings and gore, so if that’s the kind of thing you actively dislike, stay away, but otherwise the story seems to be fairly well written and compelling.

What I didn’t know, until I read through Issue #1 and found an ad at the back, was that Ellis has written about William Gravel before! Apparently the character was created for Strange Kiss, a three issue b&w miniseries that went on to inspire another three issue b&w series called Stranger Kisses. I am now tempted to find copies of these to read (hopefully from the library).

The character William Gravel is a “battle mage”, which, aside from making it sound like Ellis made up him up while playing D&D, actually makes for a pretty interesting premise. He’s basically in some special arm of the British armed forces, one that has no qualms whatsoever assassinating terrorists in Issue #0. Gravel does this in the first few pages without being seen, and then we get to the beginning of the real plot which loosely revolves around the “rediscovery” of the aforementioned Sigsand Manuscript.

The Avatar Press website page about the new Gravel series invites you to google for “The Sigsand Manuscript”, Thomas Carnacki and William Hope Hodgson. A good summary can be found over at the wikipedia page on Carnacki, who was author Hodgson’s creation. It’s all sounds very Lovecraftian, and maybe (since I finally read The Call of Cthulhu last month) this is the year for that. I’m tempted to also find a copy of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder when I make that trip to the library.

Let me just re-iterate that I am a huge Warren Ellis fan. I have liked and/or loved almost everything I’ve read of his. That having been said, this is way down on the liked/loved scale for me (maybe actually below “liked” and into “could care less about” territory).

Part of the problem is that I’m just not sure I can ever be a fan of these “bad guy perspective” comic books. I don’t feel like there’s anyone for me to empathize with, no protagonist, at least not in the traditional sense. And therefore they’re usually just lost on me.

I do think Ellis is doing a good job of trying to get us to empathize with some of the recurring characters in spite of their evil-ness. But then of course they just go and kill an innocent bystander or in some other way show their lack of moral fiber, and it’s like all of that care he’s carefully built up is gone in one quick fell stroke.

Oh yeah, and conclusion? I thought this was a complete arc! The next issue has a different subtitle entirely, yet this arc has about as much conclusion as a single issue of some other comics out there.

The art is good, and the characters are fun, so I think it’s really only the story that I disliked. I’d say read it if you’re into it, but don’t go out of your way.

Written and illustrated by Jeff Smith

Wow. A new comic from the creator of Bone. And it’s stunning. The artwork is beautiful. Jeff’s style is evocative of the best animators in the business. It’s a cartoon in still-life, making you want to forget that Pixar ever came into being. In an interview, he said that his primary influences have been Carl Barks, of Duckburg fame, and Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo. You can see a definite evolution from Uncle Scrooge to Pogo to Fone Bone, and while RASL isn’t anthropomorphic animals (or Bones), that same sense of design is there.

RASL (first name? Initials?) is a thief, a cat burglar, with a taste for fine art, not so fine hooch, and cigars. He’s also good at getting out of tight spots, which he appears to have no trouble getting into in the first place. This is a noir story, where we’re coming in after a lot of the action has occurred. RASL is injured, but appears meditative, and then we’re taken back to what happened to him. Or at least a part of what happened to him. In fact, RASL and Kick-Ass both kind of start the same way. The heroes of our stories are injured, in danger, something dire has happened to them, and we start finding out what, piece by piece. This was a common trope of noir films, such as D.O.A, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, where we know the ultimate fate of the protagonist, and the unraveling mystery is how they got there. And how did RASL get to the desert? We’ve barely begun to find out, but what was revealed in this first issue is enough to hook me. There’s a combination of the fantastic and the mundane, a combination of noir and sci-fi, a little bit of Chinatown and a little bit of Blade Runner, with a touch of Looney Tunes thrown in for good measure.

The next issue comes out in May, according to the last page of this one. It’s going to be a tough wait.

Written by Mark Millar, drawn by John Romita, Jr.

Awesome comic. Creator-owned, so not beholden to Marvel, although they do a lot of name-dropping of Marvel stuff in there, which makes sense since it’s an Icon book (Marvel’s creator-owned imprint–they publish Powers).

It’s about a teenager who decides to become a super-hero. He doesn’t have any powers, he doesn’t have any special training, he just has a costume and the balls to do it (although maybe not for much longer after the third page). The rest of the issue is a flashback of his “origin”, what there is of it.

I’m kind of surprised by how much I liked the comic. I’m not a huge fan of either Millar, or Romita Jr, but don’t really have anything against either of them. Romita Jr’s art really works here, although I keep picturing the main character as a cross between Sprite from the Eternals and Ken Connell from Starbrand. The first issue goes by really fast, but that seems to be the state of comics these days–everything seems to be written for the trade, or maybe that’s just the expectation that we give comics now. I finished it wanting to read more right away.

The story itself seemed very realistic to me in terms of what a teenager, what I as a teenager, might think of doing. That you might actually think it’s a good idea to put on a costume and go beat up bad guys, and how that might end up not working out so well for you. It’s pretty brutal, both in violence and in how teenagers get treated by each other.

Susie just sent Florence and I this awesome Dork Tower comic. For those of you who haven’t read Dork Tower before, it’s easily one of my favorite web comics.

I even got a chance to meet John Kovalic at last year’s convergence. He was on the other panel about Board Game creation (I had presented earlier in the con on nearly the same topic). He’s worked on a bunch of board games, including Munchkin, Apples to Apples, and of course Dork Tower the game. There was also an issue of Dork Tower called A Brief History of Gaming that was particularly good, I thought. Although when I asked him about it at the con, he said he’ll probably do the rest of the history of gaming as a TPB, rather than additional Dork Tower issues. I know I’d buy it!

Just a quick post to link to the Comic Book Conspiracy’s blog. There’s a lot to read there, but basically, it’s an organization of people who make comics. Amateur comics, although I suppose there’s probably lots of overlap.

While we’re on the subject of webcomics, my friend Kyle introduced me today (yesterday now) to Kevin Cornell’s Bear Skin Rug (via Typesites). Cornell is an illustrator by day, and it shows in that his site features mostly one-off newspaper-type comics, but they are pretty funny, and well worth a look.

Also, Cornell is one-half of The Superest, “a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.” (From the site.) Anyway, it’s pretty… um, super. Check it out.