Things I Did On My Content Break
You know how it is: some weeks there’s just no no content worth talking about, and you somewhat feel like garbage, and you’re still boycotting a company that has done absolutely nothing about the fact one of their flagship books is illustrated by a bigoted creep that has faced no consequence so far for sneaking his most hideous bigotry past several of that company’s editors. (To be clear: I am talking about Joe Bennett, fuck him and fuck Marvel for covering for him.) This is the nature of the game, and sometimes, after fifteen weeks of hitting deadlines with HIGH QUALITY critical writing on comic books and the industry of comic books, you’ve earned yourself a one-week reprieve from it all. But conversely, you, my dedicated readership, have earned some degree of transparency into the making of these newsletters. Here then, are some things I have taken from my time away from the content grind.
- So, how about that Fortnite, huh? Turns out, they did keep on making video games after Pac-Man, for some reason. And then they made comics based on those video games! And those comics have Batman in them! The series is called “Batman/Fortnite: Zeropoint”, it’s presumably about Batman and Fortnite, and copies of it were going around for ten times the cover price on eBay because comic book retailers had, for the most part, massively underestimated the appeal of a comic that came with free content for the single biggest Thing in the world. In itself the story is not that big, since DC will provide ample opportunities for everyone to course-correct through later printings and all that jazz, but it is more fuel for the theory that the comic book direct market, and the retailers that drive it, have been out of step with the mainstream, and that the efforts currently underway to professionalize how that whole thing is run, chief amongst them being the move away from Diamond as the single exclusive distributor of the whole industry, aren’t so much portents of comics’ impending doom so much as they are a long-overdue correction.
- Falcon and the Winter Soldier finished its 6-episode run last week, and boy, that thing just happened, didn’t it? It’s hard to have any take on it, since the show tried its hardest to be nothing of substance. And anyway, all the good takes have been posted already. I’m telling you about it because it happened, to me, last week, and this is full disclosure. Next item!
- I’ve felt pretty shitty for the past week, because thinking and writing about comics is how I keep some of the darkness away. I didn’t have a full-on crisis or an episode, thank fuck, but I did for a moment think about this, where it’s going, and whether or not I’m half as good at this as I pretend I am for one reason or another. And then someone pointed me in the direction of C.B. Cebulski’s WONDERLOST, and it killed the fear in me.
The story goes like this: a couple of years after attempting to defraud Marvel and the comic book industry by trying to pass himself off as a japanese comic book writer named Akira Yoshida, future Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski wrote a comic miniseries, released at Image, that is supposedly an anthology of short autobiographical stories about his teenage love life in the Midwest in the late 1980’s. I have read two issues of it, and I can tell you it is one of the worst things I have ever read. It’s nominally a sex comedy, but the jokes aren’t funny, either focusing on joyless grossout humor, dated slapstick, or loathsome referential wordplay, and it’s not really sexy either, committed as it is to the aesthetic trappings of the already-dated-for-2008 80s sex comedy. For all its braggadociousness about his many conquests, Cebulski is painfully tame when it comes to the action, leaving only the many scenes of awkward fingering, and the one story about cunnilingus as explicit content.
But worse, for an autobiographical work, there’s absolutely nothing in it that feels specific. Cebulski seems to think “drinking and fucking” counts as a personnality trait, that “being a fan of U2” makes his experience of the 80s unique, and that there’s never ever been any observational comedy about bad incidents occurring during oral sex. He’s wrong on all counts, in a way that feels pretty insulting, especially in the context of the man’s actual career. There’s nothing in there that would tell you this man is interested in comics in any way. There’s nothing in there that would tell you that he was into manga in any way, despite the fact it’s practically what has defined his career. This could be about anyone, and it probably would have been less offensive if it had been about anyone. At least, then, we wouldn’t have to believe that one’s life can really be made of every single cliché there is.
And somehow, he got a wild roster of artists to illustrate it. Travis Charest did a cover! There’s Rafael Albuquerque in there! Some of them even gave a fuck and actually tried! It’s fucking baffling. It’s honestly cursed. There are ways to read it for yourself but I will recommend you don’t, for your own sanity. But if you’re in need of a boost, if you need to see that you can make something completely terrible and still somehow have a career, if you need to feel good about your own writing, or if you want to write off Marvel Comics forever because THIS GUY made Editor-in-Chief, it’s gonna do the job.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: COMPLETELY OPEN ABOUT THE FACT THAT I WAS A SHITTY TEEN
By the time this newsletter drops, you will most likely have seen a whole mess of praise levied on Robin #1. All of it is earned, as we’re going to discuss, but first I have to drop a compliment of my own: Robin #1 is maybe the most genuine comic I have read this year. It is completely honest about what it is and what its influences are, and it is executed with perfect clarity. It is a wholly uncynical book, and that’s a beautiful oddity in an industry that has spent so long creating so many cynics.
It would be a tremendous disservice to keep on waxing poetic about Robin #1 as a gesture of comic-making for any longer, so let’s get to discussing what it is as a comic. Well, simply put, it’s a world-travelling fight comic, and its first story is a tournament arc. It’s about Damian Wayne going on a personal journey of initiation through DC’s incredibly vast underground of cool fighters, having sick one-on-one punchups and learning a little something about not being an overconfident little punk along the way. And because it is so genuine about that, every little twist hits that much harder. One of the inaugural issue’s many highlights is a one-page pause in the narrative, where Damian takes a moment to catch up on his favorite shojo manga. The pastiche work is impeccable, channeling as it does the wide-eyed style of Rumiko Takahashi with finer detail work that is reminiscent of later classics of the genre like Fruits Basket, but stronger still is the parallel that’s being drawn from it to Damian’s tribulations. It’s a small hint of a romantic inner life beginning to bloom, and I leave it to you to figure out who these feelings may get directed towards (the clue is very obvious). The important thing is, it pulls on the heartstrings like nobody’s business.
And as I said up top, Gleb Melnikov, pulling double duty on art and colors, and henceforth only referred to in this newsletter as “Big Gleb” or “The Gleb Man”, renders it all with incredible flair. The brief, which mostly consists of incredible vistas and the aformentioned one-on-one punchups, is deceptively simple. In the big splashy moments, it demands a strong attention to detail, that we may appreciate the scale and the beauty of it all. When it comes to the action, it needs to be at once incredibly cool and completely legible. Big Gleb does it all, and, very smartly, he knows when to drop the backgrounds entirely to just focus on the essentiality of a moment. It’s rare that we talk about the material necessities going into making comics, but I need to highlight how good he is at spending the time he has where it needs to be spent.
All in all, then, Robin #1 is just two hard-working creators showing you a whole bunch of cool stuff they thought of. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, it’s comics, I love it.
I didn’t talk about it in the news recap up top, but DC did announce a whole bunch of stuff having to do with their line of Superman comics, and while all of it sounded pretty exciting, I was a little bit worried, because Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s Superman story, playing out in both Superman and Action Comics, had left me quite underwhelmed. I am please to report, however, that Action Comics #1030 did a lot to alleviate those worries. Playing to Johnson’s strengths, it does a lot of worldbuilding, mostly centering around the court intrigue and the many secrets of Warworld, with all the gleefully grandiloquent speechifying and deadly theatrics of power one might expect from the hardcore fantasy writer.
But really, the whole issue is way better at introducing the status quo of Superman and his supporting cast than the three issues that came previously, to the point where it’s worth taking the round trip and checking in. First of all, as prophesized a long time ago and later explored by Grant Morrison in several genre-defining works, Superman is dying from some kind of radiation poisoning. His son Jon, having learned of that fact, is struggling with the idea that this might be the end, and that he might have to become Superman himself. Meanwhile, Lois Lane is still writing her book, you know, the one she began in the Bendis run, that one. And while we know now what pieces are being set up here, and the purpose for which these pieces are getting set up, there’s great care being put here to give everyone their due, to allow them to have these emotional journeys, which have been in motion for a while, and which might just end up at the place we left them in Future State.
The issue is packed with emotional developments, but, thankfully, it does still find room for a couple of small action bits. Daniel Sampere renders it all with suitable epic grandeur, delivering the iconic Superman action beats, boosted by the bright color work of Adriano Lucas, so radiant it almost acts as a reassurance that, even in the wake of massive changes to the Superman family, DC still knows what works in a Superman comic. If this keeps up, it’s gonna be a hot summer.
I don’t know why it took me until Crossover #6, the finale of the series’ first story arc, to arrive at the conclusion that seemed inevitable when I finished #1. It’s not good! It’s a strange, baffling failure. Sure, it delivers on its promise of an indie comics Götterdämerung where Hit-Girl and Battle Pope fights hordes of black-and-white walking dead from The Walking Dead, and hey, look in the sky, it’s The Samaritan, from Kurt Busiek’s Astro City! But what is it all for? Well, it’s your standard #TeamComics boilerplate positivity about comics inspiring us to be greater than what we are, how lovely it is to be part of this wonderful community of artists and fans, inspiring and challenging one another for the love of it all. That loving comics makes you beautiful and special in your own way. It feels like a lovely sentiment, but it feels outright indecent in the context of this industry and this fandom being made so toxic for so many by bad-faith actors, from the fascists to the the grifters, and the many gatekeepers in-between.
Worse, in order to set the stakes for its dumb story about comics being all-good and all-wonderful, it deploys the imagery of religious extremism, government-mandated racist exclusionary violence, and mass incarceration; and yet, it does nothing to earn that gravitas. It has one move, which is piling on the loud spectacle and the cameos in the hopes of earning some degree of significance. But it’s got nothing to say that hasn’t been done better in another meta-fictional comic. This is Flex Mentallo without the heart. It’s a Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt that’s perfectly content with the current status quo. Geoff Shaw and Dee Cunniffe are incredible at being expansive and epic, and it’s all for nothing. For a book that uses the ellipses as a reocurring motif, it is shockingly pointless. I can’t fault Donny Cates for the fact that that the rights to Youngblood are held by some asshole who obviously doesn’t care, but I can fault him for everything else that makes Crossover so bad.
Finally this week, I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up: Batman: Black and White #5 is cool as hell. Every story in the issue is a highlight, perfect short bursts of storytelling, and while obviously my heart fell deep for the devious design of the Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie Riddler showdown, I gotta say: it’s a total mindblower to see just how good people like Jamal Campbell, Jorge Jimenez, or Lee Weeks are at putting together a story all on their own. Powerhouses, the lot of them. This volume of Batman: Black and White is a fucking triumph, catch up with it as soon as you can. That’s the advice we’ll go out on for the week.
Wow! And I didn’t even tell you about the page printed upside down in Wonderlost’s absolutely fucking wretched cunnilingus story! Okay! I did it now! We’re good here! Let’s go! Tell your friends about this newsletter, like comment and subscribe wherever these things are done, pass the word around! Sorry again for dedicating so much of today to WONDERLOST! Ah well, you live, you learn, you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.