[This column originally appeared on comiXology in June, 2011]
Various
Edited by Chuck Forsman, Alex Kim, Sean Ford & Joseph Lambert
Root Rot
Various
Edited by Anne Koyama & Michael DeForge
As it so often goes without saying that comics anthologies are of a hit or miss variety, it becomes those of us bearing the professional stripe of comic book punditry to occasionally play the card of the iconoclast and actually go ahead and say it in print and out loud, saving you, the reader, the time it would take to conjure said response on your own. It's knee-jerk, at the ready, so here it is: these comic book anthologies? Some of the comics are good, whilst others of the comics are bad.
But wait! What does one mean by "bad" and "good"? Does one mean that the comics contained within are amateurish chattel? That they are poorly drawn exercises that should have been forever encased in sketchbooks, hidden from all naked eyes but those who spat them forth? Does the writing in one of the comics cry out for the stern tongue and sharpened blades befitting a stronger editor?
Most importantly, would any of the stories benefit from the inclusion of a graphic sex scene?
Not to be a tease, but the aforementioned questions aren't ones that I'll be directly answering, mostly because the one about sex scenes is one each man (or woman, comiXology will forever remain an egalitarian enterprise) will find most pleasantly answered in their own brainstorm laboratory. Answering those questions specifically--giving the report card style rundown that I usually would on these sorts of "produced by various" collections--struck me this time around as being the incorrect way to look at them.
Some of the most important non-genre (I originally wrote "anti-genre" there, I'd be curious to know if that's actually the correct term) comics have come from the anthology format. Zap andRaw are the ones I'm most primed to think of, and I'd guess the last ten years have seen it become something a little more tame, a little less likely to produce aesthetic wildfires. That isn't to say that the form is a dead one, just that it seems like it might have lost a bit of its sturm and drang, and considering how much easier it is to make a splash with online debuts, I have to wonder if the widespread impact it once could have will ever return. Nowadays, anthologies are less like coming-out parties and more like coronations and acknowledgment parties, designed to say "out of all the people who were making free stuff online, we picked these to represent our subject matter or movement, which we call _____."
So is all this spitballing a big wind-up to saying that Root Rot andSundays 4 are those things? Important statements of artistic expression, willed into existence by forces with higher, loftier ambitions?
I'd say yes, by halves. There's people involved in these books--the obvious ones being Michael DeForge and Joseph Lambert, who show up in both collections in part because of their skill and in part because those two basically show up everywhere, including Marvel Comics, but there's a whole laundry list of names-you'll-recognize-if-you-read-indy beyond them--cartoonists who are clearly bitten with the comics bug, making and creating stuff that has zero potential for becoming the next failed FX pilot, cartoonists who are quite clearly possessed with dedication. There's crappy stuff in both of these books, sure, but there's not a lot of crappy stuff, there's just some. For the most part, you're getting Hellen Jo, Sam Gaskin and somebody I'd never heard of named Warren Craghead III making good on the promise that comics holds.
Ambition goes a long way in my book, I'd wager a guess it does in most people's. If you're in need of some--well.
I guess I'm telling you where you can find it. You know, besides obvious places like Smoke Signal and DeviantArt.
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