The Factual Opinion

The Best Comics of 2017

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A Brief History of Hellboy

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History According To Huizenga: Ganges 1-6

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From A Distance: Then as Farce

[This column originally appeared on comiXology in December of 2009 and I was recently reminded of it by Abhay Khosla in his must-read conversation with Tim O'Neil that recently appeared at When Will The Hurting Stop.]

If you're looking at the world from a macro level, this decade hasn't been an extraordinarily good one for the USA. It started amidst the terrors of your personal computer exploding, and then it burrowed its head back inside an electoral fight that served as the rest-of-world's introduction to how much two specific groups of American people had grown to hate each other, and then some religious nuts who actually lived in caves knocked down some buildings and killed a whole lot of people. 

In short order, America got into a couple of wars that they're still fighting, took some breaks to remind anybody who was still paying attention how much the crewcuts hated the goatees in a fashion that grew more and more humiliating as it went along, and then, right around the time that half the country split its seams praising the election of America's first black president, the long-range game of jacked up musical chairs that the world's economy had become collapsed on its ears.

In between all that, Britney Spears shaved her head and attacked an SUV with an umbrella while the music industry blew its collective brains out, everybody got a blog to write about how they'd lost their virginity and their job, television became the domain of fertility-drug-addicted sociopaths, and we all bought DVD sets of the television shows that we watched when Aqua Net was popular in preparation for the 200 million dollar remake version of the same.

Oh, and comics got cool.

Although it would be hard to look at the last ten years of comics and see much of the decade's woes frankly expressed, it's not hard to see the seams of conflict that float beneath them. Marvel spent its time messing around with the same sort of surface-y relevance that used to be the purview of the 70's clunky DC Comics about race relations and drug abuse comics, with stories like Civil War that could be seen as an exaggerated version of Red Staters versus Blue Staters. (Or Secret Invasion's religious nuts are a-coming. Or Dark Reign, which was probably planned by a group who assumed America wasn't gonna Choose Hopefully.)

DC went in a different direction, embracing the public's love for nostalgia mixed with Will Ferrell's adult man-child films, and started telling various kids' Crisis stories with hard R plot twists. Manga publishers underestimated their audience, then overestimated it, and are now currently in the throes of figuring out how big, exactly, it is. Companies like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly kept their toes in the new, but found that the market for high-priced reprints of classic comics was strong enough to make a Comics Criterion Collection viable.

And down at the bottom, abandoned by a distribution center that didn't care, tiny publishing houses carved out a business carrying unedited works of self-expression, depending on the Ignored Masterpiece rating doled out by the blogosphere to sell off their 200-count print-run. Webcomics became an actual opportunity for creators to make a living outside of the direct market. The internet forced comic stores to look for a living outside of the direct market. Arrogant loudmouths got an opportunity to pay for the comics they hated by writing about why they hated them.

And none of these things were unique to comics, and the tininess of the industry makes it impossible to make sweeping judgments on the actual culture surrounding them, but they happened.

Thing is, you know all that, or at least, you know some different version of some of those things, because hey, you got it all figured out, because we all got it all figured out. (Except for those that follow the old Socratic maxim of not knowing anything, but that's just another version of knowing everything--it's an attitude that translates to end-all-be-all.) Pithy garbage talk is the product of most comic book conversation, when you boil it down to the food/air/shelter level. 

Comics spent five decades bouncing off the world around them, they just spent another one doing the same, and they'll keep doing the same from now on. They're just too small an artform to have an impact on the overall culture--take them en masse, you're still not nailing an audience of large enough import to effect any major result. You can't look at the world and see what the comics did to it, and the only way to see what the world did to the comics is to either spit out surface-y maxims or to create fantastic nimrod academic-speak and rely on the fact that nobody wants to (or will) read you long enough to call you on it.

Because this decade, if anything, was the year that readers told everybody to go right to hell. Not just on message boards--actually, most of them didn't go to message boards at all. None of them read Wizard, none of them read the Comics Journal, they didn't waste their time on dinky blogs (like mine, yours, That Guy's) and while they should've read some of the stuff that certain people with glasses write, they didn't read those either. They didn't go to comic shops. They didn't have pull lists. Some of them didn't even have penises.

(You want this to be about manga, but it's not about manga. It's not about Peanuts reprints, and it's not about price guides.)

Readers. That's what made comics cool again, or if you've ever stopped for a second and really looked at how resolutely uncool Little Lulu was, that's what made it cool for the first time. They were people who tried it after 300, who had a kid who loved that Tobey Maguire movie, because Buffy was cancelled, because a whole new row of Japanese stuff in Barnes & Noble exploded, because Amazon kept them from an hour long drive just to be told that Diamond farts/box/backorder, because...skateboards!, because...Geoff Johns!, because....making a baby!

As precious and cornball as it was when Time magazine put a mirror on the cover for Bestest Person, and as copout and Cry Foul as it was when Spin magazine said the album of the year was "Your Hard Drive", comics caught up with the rest of the world faster than they ever have before, because we actually hit a point when a whole bunch of different kinds of comics became available, and unlike the previous periods when that happened, nobody cared about the distinctions anymore. Instead of having a bunch of shoppers and readers who felt the need to draw a line between Green Lantern and Maus, you had people who just bought the damn things, took them home, and then they bought some more.

They didn't hang around and talk about their favorite Bleach storyline with the clerk at Barnes & Noble, they didn't read the Amazon user reviews for Batman RIP, they didn't talk about Alt versus Art versus Super-hero versus manga versus find a new hobby. They killed that, because they didn't care about that, because those conversations existed only because comics shop employees, cartoonists and fanzines needed something to talk about after Who Would Beat Hulk In A Fight got old, and because Which Company Screws Artists Over The Most made everybody depressed and whiny.

People bought comics because they wanted to buy them, they read webcomics because they wanted to and they could, people did that, you, did that. You figured out that the 90's crazy bag and board mentality was bullshit. You figured out that you're better off chasing a writer than a character, or you figured out that you only really cared about a couple of characters anyway. You waited for the trade to keep up space in your house. You did that, not comics. They tried to keep up, as best they could, and while this year has been rife with big comics that were unavailable because the companies didn't know what they had, didn't have the initial cash to print enough, or just didn't know how to get it to you, the internet and some smart retailers started to close the gap between you and what you wanted better than they ever had before. 

You can do this all day, make up reasons why comics just started showing up in places that they didn't show up in before. Sometimes you'll hear that you should wait for professionals to explain it, but...really, just finish that one in your head. That's what we do now, anyway. We're talking about comics, remember? Unless you're poor, you're making up your own info/entertaining train all the time. Maybe you're downloading massive zip files illegally of the A-Team, maybe it's that 27 gig file of the first 1800 issues of 2000 AD, maybe it's youtube videos and a slingbox, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, I can't keep up with what you think is cool or what you like anymore. I had a card catalog in elementary school. (You seen those? It was a bunch of cards. In a bunch of drawers.) I just keep up with what I think is cool. You're doing the same, it's all good. And while all of this can't last--somebody will go down eventually--this ten years proved one thing, and that was that there were enough of you to keep Batman going. 

And Scott Pilgrim. And Naruto. And Joe Sacco. And Grant Morrison. And Matt Fraction. And Get Your War On. And Powers. And Daredevil. And John Romita Jr. And Nana. And the Acme Novelty Library. And Emma. And Evan Dorkin. And 100 Bullets. And Captain America. And MOME. And Krazy Kat reprints. And Judge Dredd. And David B. And Urasawa. And Ganges. And Winter Men. And Tatsumi. And Walking Dead. And WildCATS. And Automatic Kafka. And Cromartie High School. And Achewood. And Perry Bible Fellowship. And Ninja Baseball. And Ghost Rider. And Punisher MAX. And Love and Rockets. And Drifting Classroom. And Black Hole. And The Blot. And Sleeper. And B.P.R.D. And Bodyworld. And Frank Quitely.

And you can keep going. 

And you will.

-Tucker Stone, 2009-14

The Return of The Virgin Read

A note from The Powers That Be:

Nina is a bit irritated that a kibosh was thrown down on any new title for her columns that featured the word "rape" in them, even after it was explained how creepy your google results get when you start tossing that one repeatedly into the can. The title "Virgin Read" may have lost a bit of its accuracy--as has been pointed out before by, you know, those people--but it's still got a bit of accuracy that should be obvious, and so it has made a return.

And with that, here's this, and her.

Okay, so I think my husband picked this as my comic this week because he thought I’d find it sweet.  

Sure. I guess it’s sweet.

But for the most part?

I found it stressful.

Now, look - I am not going to be talking shit about this comic. That is not what is about to happen. I’ve got nothing bad to say about it. I am just going to tell you what my honest response was to it. My reaction. It isn't a reaction to the art, and it isn't to the method of storytelling used. My reaction is about one thing, and one thing only: reading about the planning of wedding.

See, I’m a girl. A married girl. I lived through this already. And I lived through it in New York City, which is where I believe this comic takes place.

Everything in Scenes is so close to what actually happens that I couldn’t find it funny or nostalgic at all. (Hey, we’re just coming up on our 3 year anniversary, and this still wasn't some kind of happy skip down memory lane. It just reminded me of that entire year of stress that went into planning the wedding - from the guest list to the music to a million other things I don't feel like revisiting.  

There were a few specific things that were just too similar to our experience that it became impossible for me to get any distance. Like:

1. The whole guest list thing. Especially the part where my parent’s list was 3 times as long as me and my (then) fiancee’s list put together. That happened to us, it happened to this couple and it was a totally real thing that drove me crazy. (And sometimes still makes me mad!) 
2. The invitation. Unlike the book, we didn’t have the whole thing about designing our own invitations happen, but we did have a whole thing go on with finding save-the-dates and then creating our own.  And then most of them never being sent. (See....I’m still kind of angry. It’s not good for me to be revisiting any of this! It’s done! That shit is OVER! We are blissfully MARRIED!)
3. D.J. - We had a band, not a DJ. But these two kept getting DJs that would include “Love Shack” on their samples. Our most-annoyingly-overused-song-on-wedding-band-sample-CD was “Dancing in September.” (I know! Right?!)
4. OH - that one part where he says, “Did you see what those idiots did to my suit?!” Dude - ask my friend Tucker Stone about his suit on his wedding day. Ask him. It was so bad that he kept it from me until the Honeymoon. And I still cried, even though he and his friends fixed it!
5. And craziest of crazy coincidences - we too were starving when we got back to our suite. We too tried to order room service and couldn’t get any. WE, TOO, ORDERED BURGERS AND FRIES FROM A 24 HOUR DINER AND SAT ON THE FLOOR EATING THEM IN OUR WEDDING ATTIRE. (See, now I’m actually just angry because I’m a bit of a brat and I’m all like, “that’s OUR memory! Not YOURS! I can be such a 4 year old sometimes.)

So, that’s my deal with this. It sort of tired me out because it brought it all back to me. If you’re not married yet, this is a totally cute thing to read and see the comedy in being part of a couple who is planning a wedding. If you are married, and you’ve been married for a while, it might be fun for the two of you to read this together and laugh nostalgically at over how cute the two of you were back in those pre-wedding days.

But perhaps you’re in the situation that I’m in, where you're still close enough to that big day and all that planning. In that case, you might want to buy a copy of this comic and give it to your loved on on, say, your 5th anniversary. Or 10th. Yeah 10th...that’d be good.

-Nina Stone, 2011

New Character Parade

New Character Parade
By Johnny Ryan
Published by Pigeon Press

This is what looks to be the first "book" to arrive from Pigeon Press. Similar in format to Ryan's Comic Book Holocaust and Klassic Komix Klub, New Character Parade is a collection of one-page gag strips--many of which were previously available online--which stretch the boundaries of what some might find tasteful. (There's a few rape jokes, plenty of racial slurs, the occasional fecal/penile/clitoral humor.) In keeping with his non-Prison Pit/Blecky work, Ryan's gag comics are a hit-or-miss kind of experience, with the ratio on this one skewing funnier than it was in Holocaust or KKK. The misses need little introduction, you can usually just check the last panel: if it seems clever or odd, it's a good one; if neither, it probably isn't.

The big change to be found is in the hits. Whereas the most spot-on strips in the previous collections derived their zing from the painful accuracy of their victim's satirization (Art Spiegelman's attempts to "borify" his comics even more, the politically correct update inherent in giving Captain America "AIDS breath"), the best moments in New Character are when the comic takes bizarre left turns, abandoning the offensive for the strange. The first time it happens--when an attempted chainsaw rape results in an absurdist shout out to "generation stink", complete with fist bump--the pace built by the prior pages is thrown off, leaving the reader completely unprepared for "The Chris Benwah Story", which might be the darkest piece of comedy in Ryan's entire career. Here's a taste of that:

There's no comparison, even to Johnny's 9/11 strips: this is harsh. From there, the book jarringly reverts to form, with the next page delivering a lazy (and toothless) attack on the Pope. And while nothing else in the book ever gets as dark as "Benwah", Ryan's contempt for "popular" humor quickly returns, with a one panel punchline focused on the idiocy of Larry The Cable Guy that contains such withering disgust ("git 'r done" being the obvious byproduct of castration) that one questions whether Ryan just isn't as irritated by the Catholic Church as he is by a comedian who eats out the lowest common denominator. But as the book continues, the strangeness starts to dogpile. 

The comics above have nothing in common in terms of "plot", they don't share the same punchlines, but what they do all have is an unbelievable weirdness, a wholesale rejection of the types of jokes that Ryan's done so often before in this type of work. Oh, you'll still find plenty of funny, mean shit here: Ronald Reagan's Oval Office assault on Q-Bert will fill a gap that most would take to their graves, and there's something inherently satisfying to the concept that Kenny Loggins lives inside everyone's toilet. But then there's "Casino Splatz", with a street hustler (dressed like a silent movie villain) being forcibly inducted into the Maggot Brotherhood by way of a Prison Pit style body possession, or an openly desperate plea that Americans never forget their inalienable obligation to "kick it up a notch". The joke in "Neato Keitho" isn't that he was trying to rape the infant descendent of Hitler, it's that he used his last breath to apologize to the American flag for failing to give it the revenge he knew it deserved.

In mainstream comics, there's no reason to concern oneself with intent: they exist to make money, they have no other purpose. But in the outskirts, in something like this, where Ryan's reputation so far precedes him (and his content precludes so many of the regular channels)--intent and motive become an active component of the work while reading it, no matter its unknowability. "Why did he go that far" might be the popular one, but that's usually a sham question, designed just so that his critics can smugly respond "because he's not any good". The better question, the interesting one: Why is he doing it like this, now?

The change could be Prison Pit, it could be Angry Youth # 14, but more likely, those are mere outgrowths of a more exciting development: he's moved on. He's written the best shit joke, his best rape gag, his funniest story about two kids who kill one another. What he's doing now--toying with a formula he arguably perfected back in the early pages of Comics Book Holocaust--is exploring the tangential gags that made that last issue of Angry Youth such a revelation. (You might not remember how Boobs Pooter's joke finally ended, but few forget that throwaway moment in the middle, when a paramedic looked at his partner and said "Are you crying?")

It doesn't seem to have totally caught on. For some reason, Ryan includes two painful strips near the book's conclusion--one made up from the ceaseless stream of negative comments left on his Vice comics, and the final strip, where a man happily abandons suicide after hearing that Ryan has shut the project down. Both the strips aren't funny, worser still, they seem a bit clueless, as if Ryan was disappointed that he failed to find a large audience for hyper-offensive shaggy dog stories, anti-jokes, and a gleeful depiction of a horrible double murder.

He'll never be everybody's cartoonist--there's too much he does that people will get turned off by, too little time for his fans to continue the fruitless conversations about why dangerous comedy enthralls them more than observational bullshit and corny pop cultural referencing. But the truth is that he could've kept going, dropping a yearly Prison Pit and a couple of self-published "Fuck Spiegelman, Wolverine Too" comics, and the praise would have kept rolling in. Instead, he's letting his past triumphs stand behind him, and plunging forward. And if it seems clumsy at times, even embarrassing, it's a price worth paying.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Advanced Common Sense

The latest episode of ACS is now freely available for those of you with the time and interest to spare. If you'd prefer watching it in HD--god help you, he doesn't get prettier--it's available in that format on the Youtube and comiXology pages.

The Virgin Read: Chris Ware, Tough Words, Her Longest Piece To Date, Just Different

Acme Novelty Library # 19
By Chris Ware
Published by Chris Ware

This is my first experience with the work of Chris Ware.  This is old school Virgin Read.

Let me begin my saying how much I love this art.  If you've read this column at all before, you might remember that the only other art I’ve raved about is Michael Avon Oeming's art for Powers.  Something about these two artists--who have nothing in common–is just so smooth, and creamy.  I just want to drink the art off the page. 

Acme Novelty is the truest art of storytelling with pictures I've seen.  There’s text, yes.  But the quietness and loneliness portrayed throughout the pictures in the first few pages is the hook.  I just knew that this was a sad man.  Something was wrong…but what?  And even more engaging was after being led through the quiet sadness of this man’s daily ritual, he walks outside to face the huge silhouette of a rocket ship.  Huh?

So, I kept reading.  I definitely enjoyed it.  I initially didn’t think I’d be able to finish it in time to write my weekly review.  (And, well, I didn’t.  I’m a day late! )   But I’m torn now by my need to please all of you comic folk who know way more about this stuff than me, and my desire to tell you my most visceral reaction to this experience.

Tearing over. Here goes nothing. 

My most visceral reaction is that I kept getting really irritated by the bleakness.  Irritated at the author of this bleakness.  I guess that could be a testament to how "good" the art is.  The story of the dog and the perimeter, followed by the perceived deception and betrayal of his “friends”….it wasn’t just that all that stuff was "well told."  It was the illustration of the dog as she died, or the illustration of our protagonist as he desperately ran through the night to find an extra suit in the pod.  It was all so painful, but in this encompassing way that honestly, I wasn't prepared for, never would have expected, and am not really sure I wanted to go through.

But I hung in anyway, through the irritation, through the bleak portrayal of this sad man and his pain.  I hung in because after such a set-up, and such a conflict, I wanted the pay off of a resolution.  I wanted it to end, to climax, to--not a happy ending.  Just an ending.

BUT THERE ISN’T ONE.

Which is TOTALLY irritating.

There I was learning that this story is just a story inside of a story.  I had to put the book down--and this was days ago--and I couldn’t pick it up again for awhile.  I'll be honest--I felt gypped. And tricked.  I felt used.

I got over it.  Wanted to read more.

So there I was, and there it goes: story within a story number two.  (Which had a flashback in it.)  And again, yes, the pain and desperation and discomfort of our young “hero” (hardly!), was palpable and well depicted.  But things just got worse and worse.  There’d be an upswing and then a downturn again.  Oy.  After a while, this became almost totally repellent.  There’s some humor thrown in, sure--this guy likes to randomly pull his pants down to his ankles and expose himself when he is by himself.  Ha Ha.  I’m not sure I understood this joke, and probably had the same quizzical expression on my face every time I came across this--is it just another part of the storytelling, where the joke stands in stark contrast to other things around it?  It just seemed so "male."  Not in an Alpha-dog, macho kind of way.  It's just all wrapped up in sex and lust and what male people do when male people are by themselves and feeling, um,sorry, lame.  It was like reading the diary of an extremely wimpy younger brother.

You know what came to mind for me?  The Moth’s Story Slam instructions.  Yeah.  Let me explain.  A few years ago I heard about these Story Slams at a café in the West Village in NYC.  I don't know why, but it sounded really interesting.  People get up and tell a story, and the audience votes.  And the whole thing is like a tournament with big winners at the end.  They win the big story slam prize.  I don't know what it is.  They get to be king of stories.

Anyhow, I never attended one, but I thought about it and thought about telling a story there.  Here’s some of the key points from their “how to” page.  (The stuff in italics is there words.)

First:  Start in the action.  Have a great first line that sets up the stakes or grabs attention.

Not This Way: "So I was thinking about climbing this mountain. But then I watched a little TV and made a snack and took a nap and my mom called and vented about her psoriasis then I did a little laundry (a whites load) (I lost another sock, darn it!) and then I thought about it again and decided I'd climb the mountain the next morning."

Yes This Way: "The mountain loomed before me. I had my hunting knife, some trail mix and snow boots. I had to make it to the little cabin and start a fire before sundown or freeze to death for sure."

I think Acme started just as suggested.  Like I already mentioned, in the first few pages it started in the action, set up the stakes – lonely guy with dog, sad – and they seem to be there (wherever "there" is) due to this giant spaceship sitting in the field.

Here's the next Slam tip:

Steer clear of meandering endings.  They kill a story!  Your last line should be clear in your head before you start.

Now, sure, they’re talking about when you’re telling the story.  But I think it goes for any book too!  And this seems to be almost the style Chris Ware kept using.  The stories would trail off with one ending and then start telling another story.  Look, I understood how "they are all connected" and that "it's part of the storytelling," but the meandering definitely had the power to lose me.  And it did lose me.  And sometimes it threw me out of reading it completely.

There are several other Slam tips, but the last two that I want to mention are:

Contestants are judged on ……sticking to the theme and having a story that sticks—one that has a conflict and a resolution.

and

No rants!  Take up this anger issue with your therapist, or skip therapy and shape your anger into a story with some sort of resolution. (Stories = therapy!)

I felt like I was reading a lot about conflict and very little about resolution.  And when there was a resolution it didn't feel like it was any kind of choice--it felt like random happenstance.  This character is a classic victim – at least that’s how it felt, to me, to read.  It was like hanging out with that friend who only knows how to complain.  They want things to be different, but jeez, if things would only go their way for once!  It's exhausting.

Which brings me to the final tip up there, “No Rants.”  There’s no anger issue here, but there is a whiny, wimpy issue.  Enough already.  It's really boring.  I mean, you really are "catching him with his pants down" over and over again.  Now, sure: we all have plenty of these moments in our life, but god, it doesn't really make for great entertainment.  It's therapeutic for the writer, for sure, but not for this reader.  I just felt uncomfortable.

All that being said – this is unlike any other comic I’ve read to date.  I recently wrote about Punisher and how I wish the artist would have taken a little more time with the moments that could really have shown some difficult emotion, any difficult emotion.  That’s something I'm not coming across in comics, and I'm starting to wonder if it just doesn't happen that often.  And here’s an entire work that deals so well with art and emotion in a totally unique way.  I should be standing up in my chair applauding.  One could argue that this is true blue, honest to god, Big Bold Letter Art.

But honestly, you know what it reminded me of?  It reminded me of that actor or actress who is really good at crying.  Crying in a scene is hard to do.  It's not merely making your eyes water.  The impressive part is in witnessing an actor so committed to a role, and so committed to buying fully into the desires and objectives and obstacles of the character that they are playing, that they truly react as if they are that character.  That takes true talent.  But even though it takes skill, and even though it takes talent, going to watch a great actor or actress to a series of unconnected monologues in which the actor/actress cries every single time?  Well, that’s boring.  I don't care how talented the actor is with that skill.  When there’s no distinct conflict and resolution, well, there’s no drama.  And if there’s no drama? 

Then you’ve just got someone crying on stage for a couple of hours.  It's not entertainment.  It's not art.

Now, that comparison right there, that isn't really fair.  Acme Novelty Library isn't extemporaneous public storytelling.  It's an exquisitely drawn piece of work, an emotional comic book by a legendary artist who I know very little about, and the very little I know comes from one other person.  I feel, and I felt, completely over my head in this task of "reviewing" it.  I don't pretend that I've got any expertise in talking about this, in reviewing it.  I've never read a comic like this, I've never spent time with one of this caliber.  I don't even know what to call it--comic book doesn't even feel right, it's nothing like what I've read before for these columns.  I'm glad I read it.  It took a while, and it...hurt.  You understand?  This hurt to read, and it's hard to explain.

I didn't know that they could do them like this.  Okay?  I didn't know.

-Nina Stone, 2008