The HYBC Comics Journalism Master Class Masterclass - UNIT 01: Welcome!
In our always faster, always more interconnected world of near-constant begging for people with expertise in all matters comics, the demand for high quality comics journalism masterclasses has never been more prevalent. And yet; until now, there hasn’t been an intensive course of study capable of teaching the ins and the outs of hosting a comics journalism masterclass. Which is where I come in. Hi, I’m Aurélien Fontaneau, from HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS, the world’s most correct comic-book newsletter. In our one-unit seminar, you will learn everything there is to know about running the perfect comics journalism masterclass, what to do, and what not to do. Sound any fun? It shouldn’t! This is serious! This is my fucking life! Stop laughing at me!
Lesson One: Should You Administer A Comics Journalism Masterclass?
The first question one must ask themselves before hosting a comics journalism masterclass seems obvious, but never take things for granted! Before hosting a comics journalism masterclass, ask yourself this simple question: “Am I qualified to do this? I don’t even call myself a journalist! At best, I am a small-time muckracker piece of shit, and at worst, I’m one of the many enablers of bad industry practices and bad faith discourse from the fascists trying to recruit among comic book fans! My one trick is to draw insane conjectures from half-baked rumors, which I frame as fact to draw traffic to my page! I report on comic book creators’ tweets like it’s something that matters, despite knowing in my heart of hearts that it’s not! I get scoops from throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, or just from violating press embargoes! I am fucking scum! I, Rich Johnston, of Bleeding Cool, am fucking scum and I should not be hosting a masterclass on comics journalism! That’s what this is about!”. To make sure you always remember it, there’s an easy mnemonic: “No one that works at Bleeding Cool should teach anyone ANYTHING about ANYTHING.”
Lesson Two: Be Clear And Concise!
Remember: you are talking to people who are looking to be educated on the ins and outs of comics journalism! They will not have your experience level! Clarity is a must! When writing things down, keep the most important information you want to get across in mind, and make sure it is communicated clearly and accurately. For instance, if you want to make clear that Rich Johnston is a piece of shit dancing around the notion of whether or not he’s even a journalist to avoid having to be accountable for all the useless harmful bullshit he prints on Bleeding Cool on a near-hourly basis, just say that! If the fact that his last scoop could be disproven by anyone with half-decent reading skills is important to the point you’re making, make sure it’s part of your demonstration!
Lesson Three: Really, Fuck Rich Johnston
That’s the entire point, we don’t even need the pretense of a premise, fuck you Rich.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: DOES YOUR WEBSITE BLEED? IT WILL.
Is it something about us? Is it something about these strange times we live in? Does it have anything to do with the massive changes that DC Comics have gone through in 2020? Why is it that Infinite Frontier #0, a comic so completely dedicated to playing it safe, is the most exciting thing you will read this week, and possibly even this year? How is it that I had so much fun reading something that did not challenge my assumptions in any goddamn way? In my darkest moments, I will be angry and confused about this undeniably beautiful thing, a near-perfect masterclass of populist storytelling.
It’s nothing you haven’t read before if you’ve bought any one of these specials, whether it’s “Marvel Point One”, “DC Universe: Rebirth” or “Incoming!”. First, you’ve got the universe-spanning frame story, which follows Wonder Woman and the Spectre in a journey across the cosmos, and which gives John Timms the opportunity to show his superstar potential by stretching his already considerable register to operate at the largest possible scale.
Then you have the teasers for coming attractions. The highlights go like this: Bendis, Bonvillain and Marquez do their thing on Justice League, which is a total treat (and you’d have to be a completely dishonest morally bankrupt reactionary clickbait monger to claim it renames Black Adam in any way, shape, or form), an as always completely on point Jimenez, Morey and Tynion Batman story building to all the Future State stuff (more on this in about two paragraphs?), Igle and Johnson on a quintessential Superboy story, and let’s just throw the two pages of Maleev Black Canary and Green Arrow on top of that as a bonus.
The lowlights, well, mostly it’s disgraced film executive Geoff Johns and Todd Nauck trying to pretend it’s 1999 all over again based on the fact people seemed to like that Stargirl show on the CW. It sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of all the forward-looking stuff, and it might not even go anywhere since most of Johns’ enablers are disgraced DC editors like Eddie Berganza. I’m sure the show is great, but no one in France has acquired the rights for it, so either way, thank you and fuck off.
And at the end of it all, as is tradition, you have your big group shot teaser splash, followed by a crazy last-page cliffhanger reveal that threatens to change the universe forever. All of this is textbook, and it’s all executed with relentless subtextual reminders that everything has happened and nothing has changed, most obviously when the Superboy feature stops dead in its track to retell in one page the complete history of Jon Kent. This is a comic that wants you to know that you’re in good hands, and the old regime is gone, so everything is gonna be fine. It’s executed well enough to back that claim up. In the end, this is a promise that DC will release more good comics, and, on some level, being all about good comics, I cannot help but feel satisfied.
And if you’re looking for a demonstration of what the new era of DC entails, might I recommend Batman #106? Because while it is obviously following up on the events of Batman #105 and Infinite Frontier #0, there is a clear contrast between it and everything that has come before. Jorge Jimenez’s character designs get crazier and more ornate, while his layout work bends and breaks around the action in cooler, more dynamic ways as things get faster and crazier than they ever had.
Meanwhile, Tomeu Morey enriches the palette of Gotham City with bold neon greens, blues and pinks, building a continuity of color between Batman’s currently ongoing affairs and Bellaire and Bonvillain’s work in the Future State books. Even Clayton Cowles’ letters get in on the action: there’s creative lettering work all over the issue, from the new voice of the Scarecrow to using little bats as your censor.
It is the superhero action drama you’ve known to come and love, kicked into its next gear. Batman was as good as Batman comics get, and this is better. I’m not about to spoil every little cool thing in there. Go get it! Go get it now!
To tell you the truth, I’m even more glad for the fact that, amid all the restructuring and the streamlining of the publishing slate and all that nonsense, there’s room for something as beautiful and as unique as The Swamp Thing #1. It’s a blend of several things that hadn’t been put together in this way in a while. The clearest influence, obviously, is Bissette, Moore, and Totleben, the layouts give that away when they represent the nightmare that is being a creature in service of the Green with all the ferocity of an invasive species. (The lettering also does the “unboxed white text over dark space” trick, and that’s also a big part of the style guide)
The recipe then calls for some very classic horror, here provided by a nice little riff on “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” serving as our big spooky scare of the issue. But the secret ingredient that pulls it all together is the ideas that Ram V is playing with. It’s a pinch of “the horrors of what we’ve done to the Earth”, a dash of “identity and becoming in the context of being an immigrant to the United States”, serve with a zest of “the power of folklore”. It will remind you of a lot of things, because it’s in a continuity of thought with a bunch of great stuff, including Ram V’s own “These Savage Shores”, but there’s enough big swings in there for the whole thing to still feel new. I didn’t even get into the fact that this is an all-new Swamp Thing! That’s how cool this is!
That’s the new world struggling to be born, but what about the ashes of the old? Well, Tony Daniel, Tomeu Morey and Scott Snyder have a new comic out at Image. It’s called Nocterra #1, it’s been a crowd-funding success story, and you don’t even have to pick up a copy to know that you’ve already read it. It’s not bad, it can’t be bad, other comics have been made this way before and they were good, so it logically follows that this is a good comic too.
But the moves are depressingly familiar. It’s first-person narration, you open on a personal anecdote which serves as your setup for motifs and themes, you skip forward in media res to the high concept, get an action setpiece, resolve and go to worldbuilding, get into the personal stakes, give an objective, and finish on a status-quo threatening cliffhanger. It’s post-apocalypse too! Sure, the idea of a world plunged in a forever night where the darkness twists everything into monstruous creatures is new, and the book gets most of its interesting moments from that, but is that enough? I’d like to say it’s not. It almost kind of is. Somehow there’s nothing quite like it.
And somehow, we’re at the end of our time! Thank you again for reading, subscribing, liking, and commenting! We’re still at this! We’re still not talking about Marvel books! Sometimes that’s really hard! But we do it! See you next week and until then, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!