Big, Long, Thick Comics


 


Time for some fanboy bloggy goodness again.
Just in time to switch up those who may be looking for some more salutary political rage--and palliate the folks who check in from time to time to see--nope, stuff about Anna Nicole Smith this time.

(Anyway, my invocation of the Gods of Progressive Wrath seem to have worked: not only did Fitzmas come in most gratifying fashion--but--and despite my principled skepticism, this is too good to be anything but divine providence, at least from Loki or Coyote--it turns out that one of the speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference--you know, the one where Ann Coulter called John Edwards a faggot?--this buff handsome Marine reservist of color who told the conference about the evil liberal anti-military students in higher education--well, he turns out to be a gay porn star and male escort .)

Since it's clear my work is done for the moment, I thought I'd actually break the unspoken agreement of being a kind, reminiscent old duffer, and say something about What's Wrong With Comics Today.

Of necessity, it's going to be colored by geezerhood--harkening back to the good ol' days. Because there's no way I can talk with any sincere passion about comics without grounding it in the stuff I grew up loving--and the work I did my damnedest to get right. But I'm going to try to compensate for the childhood-good/now-bad tendency as much as I can.
In one way, comics today is like living in the promised land. Instead of being printed on the crappiest paper available, hand separated and filled with ads for x-ray spex, they feature full color work, printed on glossy stock, and supported by major motion pictures and big-time games.
And if I feel a little like Moses on Mount Nebo here, it's because--after being converted to the one true Macintosh religion and co-producing Shatter with Mike Saenz, I spent a whole lot of energy trying to convince the comics companies to move to digital separations, which would make full-color comics feasible and affordable. And I left the business not too long before the switch was made.
The number of laments we in the business all made over the lack of respect for comics in America due, we knew, in part to the fact that they looked cheap and shoddy would have filled a large book. Prestigious formats were a consummation devoutly to be wished.
And we finally got it, as soon as 'we' no longer meant 'me.'

Digital color and good paper did have its downsides, from my distant vantage point: there were an awful lot of books put out in the beginning of that new era where the full process color was the only good thing about them: bad drawing, clumsy storytelling and who-cares writing all slathered over with inches of delicious frosting.

That era passed, as it had to, and the good part that we'd been hoping for did indeed some to pass: that a wider variety of styles, of graphic approaches, became available for comics. Everything from photographic realism to radical stylization to old-fashioned outline-and-color.
(historians will note that Bill Sienkewicz ws doing all this by his lonesome a while before I left: but Elektra: Assassin and Stray Toasters were prestige, expensive projects--and it was desktop production that made it industry-wide.)

But there was one tendency that remained from those days--something that would have been simply ludicrous on bad paper and printing--and that was the thin comic.
They were notorious: full of big poster-shots, double page spreads and long visual sequences, with almost no plot, and often less scripting. (I remember reading one comic of that era--an Alien vs. Predator, but I could be wrong--full of sound and fury, but where not one of the characters' names were mentioned.)

As comics devolved back to substance, that thinness evolved to openness, a much more cinematic approach to exposition and dialogue. Gone from the house style of the major companies is the descriptive caption. Voiceovers are allowable, but no more three paragraphs per panel. Paul Levitz pointed out that the difference between (Silver Age) DC comics and (Silver Age) Marvel was that, in the DC sty;e, an action took one panel, while at Marvel it took three. These days, that traditional shorthand is all but gone: instead of storytelling compressed into nodes, the ideal is to present a scene--any scene--as the equivalent of a real-time cinematic shoot. Coupled with great-looking art, the seduction of the innocent reader is much more complete.

Some of this migration is also due to the vastly increased influence of manga. I was as much a sucker for the dynamism of Japanese storytelling as anyone: thanks to the expertise and influence of my friend Doug Rice, I acquired both piles of anime laserdiscs and stacks of manga long before they were available anywhere but by select dealers at comics conventions. (My collection of European stuff was similarly large (minus the laserdiscs)--but that's another post.) The manga approach, while instantly accessible, was different in pace and focus, and was a big wind blowing through American comics.

How much current American style is owed to manga is grounds for much discussion--but it's not central to my point here. I'm really only bringing manga up because of what else they get right.

Briefly: Manga have an open, flowing, cinematic style--and are about 96 pages long. If not 196.

Two comics I recently read, upon recommendation, and which I was impressed by, were Ex Machina, and Y: the Last Man. This guy Brian K. Vaughan does good, intelligent work. He goes up on my "buy stuff by this guy" list.
The only thing about the experience is that I read both of them in graphic album form. Five, six issues bound together. They were eminently satisfying that way--but I realized that I would have felt differently had I read them in installments, with a month (or *gasp* two) between chapters.
Some of this is, of course, me. It takes a geezer to remark that a story from Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets (another on the BSFTG list), while beautifully done, would have taken Charles (Crime Does Not Pay) Biro about three pages. Similarly, I read the first Y volume and felt that I'd read one fine comic book, and was looking forward to the next one.

Now, if I were channelling C.C. Beck, I might start fuming that these young whippersnappers are doing it wrong, and why can't we go back to compact and efficient storytelling? But thank the gods of Comics Journals past, I've resisted those emanations from the Rock of Eternity. No, the problem is not the creative work.

The problem is the packaging.

From where I sit, the natural format for these cinematic, open, art-abundant comics is the album. That's where these strips shine. Having imported the manga pace and flow, I think it's high time American comics import the manga format as well.

Of course, the comic book business model has been locked into the monthly comics model for nigh onter 75 years now. and brightly colored, 32 page regular books for kids is really hard to abandon as a concept. But face it: comics are not doing all that well by that model any more. There are fewer and fewer places that stock the books, and hoping that a casual reader will pick up a comic that happens to be issue 4 of a six-issue story arc (me! me!) and be captivated and delighted by it is, simply, wishful thinking.

I don't know whether companies would flourish commercially by moving from an American size to a manga-sized format. Not my job, and not the concern of this post. My concern's an artistic one today: I think that, by accident, design, inspiration, or the guidance of Osamu Tezuka, American comics have been moving to an album format: bigger, longer, and thicker (and who doesn't want that?) I've realized that a lot of my irritation with reading current comics arises from the fact that I've been reading them the wrong way. The fact that it's the way the companies are making me read them is unfortunate (and significant) but not insurmountable.

(Now where's my copy of Empire ? Ahhh, there it is...)

Posted: Tuesday - March 06, 2007 at 12:14 AM        

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