Up From Genre City

"Whoever Heard Of A Mad Horse?"

Shining Knight #1: "The Last Of Camelot"

We open on a weirded out version of the Knights Of The Round Table.  They're fighting demons with laser guns.  It's possible that all the things I said before about low-level personalized conflicts might have been a bit premature.  After all, what we're seeing here is a completely mad and epic battle between good and evil.

We're finally introduced to the Queen Of Terror here, as Justin (the Shining Knight in question) is seperated from the rest of the Knights and discovers an artifact that could turn the tide of the battle.  Although we're still early on in the series, there have been a lot of artifacts in the books, and they all serve as a kind of lynchpin to the events in the opening chapters of each series.  Strangely enough, they all can be found in the center of a strange body of water; ocassionally blue, occasionally green, occasionally toxic.  In Justin's case, it's cauldron surrounded by a green lake that, apparently, flows through time itself.

This seems to hold true as Justin and his talking flying horse Vanguard follow the cauldron into the lake and end up in present day Los Angeles.

Like all the first issues of the Seven Soldiers books, this is simply an introduction story, a set-up to propel our protaganist into the first of three relatively stand-alone adventures.  Mired as it was in celtic language and mythology, it was the least impressive book to me upon first reading.  It's clear that this first issue holds an enormous amount of detail about the true nature of the threat that the Seven Soldiers will be facing, but overall it didn't really knock my socks off.  Especially after the emminently relatable adventures of The Whip and her cabal in #0, this story about a Knight Errant just wasn't as engaging.  As a repository of detail, however, it works pretty well.

One of the better things about this particular story is the way that QoT seems to personify all of our fairy tales and legends about evil queens and stepmothers.  When she says "Let them relearn all their secret sciences and magicks," one gets the impression that all of our modern day myths are just trace memories of the atrocities that we see first hand in the opening scene of this issue: The Harrowing Of Avalon.  10,000 years later, we're left with a world with no mystery and no magic left.  Only darkness.

Not the most original of conceits, but it does have potential when you put it in the context of the rest of the series.  So, while it didn't leave as strong an impression as the prequel material, it does seem to be a necessary starting point to the series.  Onward and upward.  Or, in Justin's case, downward.

"Very Cool Stuff. I Suggest We Bond Fast And Learn To Work As A Team."

Seven Soldiers #0: "Weird Adventures"

The title alone pretty much sums up what's in store over the next year, and what's so appealing about this whole undertaking.  For a while now, Morrison has been telling stories with a very wide lens, about threats or adventures with an enormous scale.  Ali watches entire cities get razed to the ground before he finally gets the girl in Vimanarama.  Magneto decimates Manhattan in a single day in New X-Men.  Seaguy uncovers a conspiracy that spans a good 2/10ths of the entire solar system.

Seven Soldiers, from the very beginning, makes it clear that the stories we'll be reading are on a much smaller scale, even though a threat just as all-encompassing lurks in the background.  And it becomes clear almost immediately that this is a necessity.  Because we're dealing with the grass roots super-heroes here.  The kind who answer want ads and get caught up in trips to mystery swamps just to try and get the chance to do some good.

The story begins with the fate of True Thomas, who becomes I, Spyder.  We are also introduced to the Seven Bald Men who are apparently behind the formation of a team of Seven Soldiers who are, I guess, all that stands between Earth and The Queen Of Terror's Harrowing, who we still haven't officially been introduced to.  At this point, the threat that the Seven Soldiers will be tasked to face is still a mystery. We just know that it's sort of psychedelic, involves the Sheeda we've already met (and who show up in the mystery swamp very early on), and that it's naturally very very bad.

Oh, and this particular story has nothing to do with Seven Soldiers that the Mega-Series itself will be centered around.

I, Spyder, along with The Whip, Vigilante, Gimmix, Boy Blue, and Dyno-Mite Dan form the clearly-doomed-from-the-start team that we'll be following in this particular book.  it's not clear who the seventh member of the team would have been.  Vigilante describes him or her as getting "cold feet" at the last minute.

Vigilante, it should be noted, was a member of the original Seven Soldiers, of whom I know very little about.  One thing these little commentaries will not be focused on is the arcana of DC Continuity that Morrison quite adeptly brushes upon in pretty much every story in this series.  I wish I did know more about it, because it's quite fascinating the way he willfully introduces all this strangeness but never once lets the DC Universe off the hook by seperating these stories from its continuity.  It's clear that all this weird shit is going on all the time while Superman and Batman fight giant robots in Metropolis.

(Note: Most of this stuff is actually talked about in depth here.  Just click on the individual characters or the bookend links to get info on all the references.)

This is basically The Whip's story, and she's a perfect fit for this story.  Cynical on the surface but, deep down she's got an abiding love for the kind of madcap adventure that her level of super-hero is hardly ever privy to.  And that seems like an over-riding theme to this entire project.  We've been introduced, so far, to a series of characters who really just want to find that spark.  This bookend story features six of them, and they all end up dead.

What I found interesting was, in the closing pages, we learn that the Seven Bald Tailors Of The Space Time Continuum really figured that this was the team they needed to save the world.  "This wasn't meant to happen -- They were supposed to save the world."  What we'll be reading over the course of the next year or so is their Plan B.  It's sort of like seeing a commercial for that new Dance reality show on ABC with "celebrity" contestants that also features "celebrity" judges.  If the contestants are that low on the totem pole, one wonders where the judges stand.

So that's sort of where the reader is at at the end of this story.  "Man, these six guys were pretty half-assed.  What kind of shape are the backup guys going to be in?"  But what that sentiment really does is give the seven protagonists on the way an instant level of relatability and underdog status.  We're already rooting for them.

"...There's No Point In Asking, You'll Get No Reply..."

JLA: Classified #1-3: "Island Of The Mighty"/"Master Of Light"/"Seconds To Go"

While not officially part of the Seven Soliders project, Morrison's three issue inauguration of this new JLA spotlight series actually has a lot more raw data about the evil nemesis that's behind, you know, whatever it is that Seven Soldiers will eventually have to fight.  It introduces the Sheeda, which we'll be seeing a lot more of, and Neh-Buh-Loh, who shows up here and there. 

It also, by default, introduces the nemesis we first see in Shining Knight #1, when Neh-Buh-Loh drops this on us, as per his origin: "My original country is in the cold region of The Vampire Sun.  I was born of the eternal fogs, there in Last Country.  Neh-Buh-Loh, The Huntsman, am I, Master of the Wild Ride.  I prepare the way for my Queen Of Terror, who will come soon.  I will spread at her feet a carpet of skulls."  We see pretty much all of this in the opening sequence of Shining Knight #1, so it kind of makes sense that Justin's book is pretty much where the main SS story gets started.

This story also serves as a kind of antithesis to what Seven Soldiers is really all about.  This is a widescreen, big action story with Sci-Fi Closets, Gorilla Terrorists, and Hijacked Superheroes.  So, pretty much your typical Morrison JLA story.  What we'll see in Seven Soldiers is much more about the mundane aspects of superheroics, and the battles the protagonists engage in are on a much smaller and personal scale.  You'll notice that the threat in this story is global and that the only thing personalizing the conflict for, say, Batman, is the potential for destruction of everything, and by default, potentially something he has a personal investment in.  Everything that the Soldiers end up facing, threatens either themselves or someone they love directly.  An intersting and potentially important distinction.  And possibly the reason why a reader is automatically invested in a character that they have had no previous exposure to.

Also, just to note, Ed McGuiness is completely insane on this book.

Seven Solidiers Walk Into A Bar, Thirsty

So I finished The Diviners the other day.  While I loved all the way to the end (and the last sentence, which literally changes the entire book that came before it), it ended up being the most political book I've ever made it through.  Only you don't really notice it until the last sentence.

That being said, the structure and the writing were definitely the biggest and best parts of the book.  I'm quite eager to see the "splash" it makes when it comes out in September.  (Get it?  Splash?  Diviners?)

The book's layout, with a chapter focusing on an individual character and usually one scene or moment as the larger narrative unfolds in the background, felt a lot like what Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers is turning out to be. 

I didn't realize it at first, but not only has Morrison fashioned each of the seven mini-series that make up the project into stand-alone reads, he's also made each individual issue of each mini-series a stand-alone story as well.  So, when it's all done, you'll not just have nine stand along stories (each mini plus the two bookends) but rather 30 individual adventure stories.  Which is pretty remarkable.  It's gotten me heavily interested in looking at the series as a whole and looking at each indiviual issue of the series as a stand-alone piece.

So I'll probably be taking up a lot of space here doing just that.

The Three Hundred And Twenty Fifth Time The Title "Pilgrim's Progress" Has Been Used To Discuss Bryan Lee O'Malley

One of the few books I picked up this weekend at MoCCA (Bonus Rule #7: GONE ARE THE DAYS WHEN YOU CAN JUST TOOL AROUND THE CON AND LET OTHER PEOPLE PIMP YOUR SHIT), was the latest volume of the Scott Pilgrim saga (actually, I like to think of it as a series of video games) Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.  Shock and surprise, it's fucking outstanding.

One of the very few comics out there that literally defies description (God knows how it was pitched for movie adaptation), it's awfully hard to review.  I mean, what, do I talk about what exactly Mal is doing contextually by putting a fight scene that in any other comic would be a dream sequence into the actual narrative of the story?  No.  I'm not going to do that.  Because anyone who's ever read a Scott Pilgrim story knows that it exists in its own world, and in the context of that world, everything makes perfect and beautiful sense.  This fluidity, combined with Mal's enviable ability to convey incredible amounts of detail with the fewest and thickest lines imaginable, creates one of the better examples of comics' ability to just straight up transport you into another dimension for about an hour or so.

My favorite example of this, and I'm really loathe to spoil this moment because it's so charming and wonderful and it made me laugh out loud on the train this morning, is that after the hilarious finish to Scott's latest battle against one of Ramona's Evil Ex-Boyfriends (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't read Vol. 1 and, thus, I don't like you) an Item box appears.  That tried and true staple of video games, this particular Item Box contains, PERFECTLY, a Mythril Skateboard.

A Mythril fucking Skateboard.

There are singular moments in comics, moments where the very last thing you'd ever expect happens and every time you think about comics from that day forth, part of you will be thinking about that moment.  You know the ones I mean.  The "And, of course, he never did" page in Jimmy Corrigan.  Beak and Angel drawn by Frank Quitely in New X-Men.  Other stuff like that.  Part of me will always be thinking about that Mythril Skateboard.

That's the thing about the world of Scott Pilgrim.  If it hits you, it hits you the way you've always wanted to be hit.  With perfect levels of emotion, comedy, and cultural detail.  Not to mention just flat out incredible storytelling.  Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World contains one of the best rendered phone conversations ever, and Mal never gives you a double page spread that doesn't emotionally affect.

And the comedy is just top drawer in this book.  Scott and his friends and enemies are the kind of funny that only your friends can be and Mal's dialogue elicits the kind of laughter that is usually only reserved for the inside jokes your friends pull that make you laugh the hardest because you and maybe only two other people know what's up.  All of his jokes are like that.  Hell, all of the comic is like that.  It's like one long inside joke that you can't believe anyone else is getting.

Also, this book features the ultimate insult, free to use in any situation deemed appropriate:

"YOU SUCK, SURPRISING NO-ONE!!!"

That, and the comic on either side of it, is the best I've read all year.

The Things That MoCCA Taught Me (2005 Edition)

So I rocked myself a table at MoCCA this weekend grudgingly debuting a mini-comic entitled Kevin Analog, as some of you may already know.  I found it to be a learning experience on several levels.  Allow me to explain.

Rule #1:  BORING IS ALL YOU CAN AFFORD

Alot of what happened with Kevin Analog, a book which some of you may now be familiar with, had to do with the siren call of this fairly new development in self-publishing: digital printing.  What it promises is incredibly appealing.  For a surprisingly low fee, say 50 cents a book, you can get a color cover on your mini-comic.  Now for someone like myself, who is heavily into cover design and logo design, this is all too appealing.  I designed my first mini to look like a 7" single with a label depicting the comic inside.  I remember when I first got the box of books, my first reaction was that the printing wasn't all that bad, but it wasn't that great either.  The saving grace was that it was surrounded by a white background, which rendered any print deficiencies pretty moot, as you could barely notice them.  But it did plant that teensy voice in my head, saying, "Benjamin, you realize this is not offset printing.  This is digital.  If you look for even a few seconds too long, you will see the flaws inherent in this process."  I didn't listen to it.  Instead, several months later, I designed, drew and colored a cover I fell absolutely in love with.  With the promise of digital printing in my mind, I had visions of sellouts and raves, of several cries of "Oh, the book of MoCCA 2005?  Are you fucking kidding?  Kevin Analog.  No question."  Having a cover in your PhotoShop window that you literally can't go fifteen minutes without pulling up, even when you're drawing something unrelated or watching Scrubs Season One with your girlfriend, can do that to you.  So, the day before the convention, the box arrives on my doorstep.  And my friends, I had no clue what I was looking at.  There are a zillion reasons why the gap between what the cover looked like on my iMac looked so very and ghastlily different from the one I stared at that morning, and most of them are my own fault.  There are obviously differences between print colors and screen colors.  Had I given the printer more time to work, I would've gotten a proof (See: Rule #2).  But the resounding lesson was clear: A Book You Spent 1/3rd The Money On And Printed At Kinko's Would Look 175% More Professional This.  So, Rule #1: Boring Is All You Can Afford.  Until you can raise enough money to go Offset, don't waste your time calibrating a beautiful balance of color and design nuance.  Here's the perfect example of why.  The back of the Kevin Analog book was the simple monochrome image of a Cassette Tape  with lightning bolts around it, surrounded by white and balanced by my admittedly gorgeous Interstate ! logo.  A bold design that had the pin it was also on pretty much flying off the table.  On Saturday, I displayed the book with the front cover facing up right next to a copy of the book with the back cover facing up.  Literally, EVERY SINGLE PERSON who picked up the book went straight to the back cover version, even in some cases PUTTING THE BOOK DOWN when they flipped it over and saw the other side.  Obviously, Sunday, I only displayed the book back cover up with a gorgeous glossy mounted print out of the cover behind it.  So, the copies that didn't sell (and, friends, it is miraculous that I sold even one) are never ever leaving the box that they're in right now.  Kevin is going back to press with a completely bare bones black and white cover, featuring the logo and nothing else.  Because a good logo, which I tend to come up with occasionally, can move a book on its own, if you just get the fuck out of its way.

Rule #2: MAKE MINI-COMICS WHEN YOU HAVE THE MATERIAL, NOT THE TABLE.

This should have been obvious from the get go, but the self-publisher can easily delude him or herself into thinking that, even in this day and age of teeming internet commerce, that you only really sell books four or five times a year, from behind a table.  This is bullshit.  And the only thing it gets you is a table with two books and a hard drive at home with another 60 to 70 pages that the thousands upon tens of thousands of people who actually don't have a Modern Tales subscription have never seen, but after marvelling at that legitimately bitching Mix Tape button you made and then dropping fifty cents for the priviledge of putting it on their backpack, probably might have had a legitimate interest in.  If you had been smarter and put out cheap mini-comics whenever you had eight pages of comics to stuff them with, you would have been behind a table just flat out teeming with content.  And that means diversification.  And that means, inevitably, $$$.  (See Also: Rule #4)

Rule #3: CARROT TOP WAS RIGHT

So, the table is set up , you've got your comics, you've got your buttons, you've even got a showstopper of a banner behind you that is easily the most professional looking thing you've ever had printed.  But, for those first few hours, the interest is sort of minimal.  So, it dawns on you that you're hocking a comic about a guy who, ostensibly, uses mix tapes to fight crime.  You run to the new Best Buy which opened a mere two blocks away from The Puck and you buy ten blank tapes.  A few brilliantly conceived labels later (BANK ROBBERY 4.02.03, PRISON BREAK Vol. 2), and you're now running a table with a visual representation of what your book is all about.  I sold my first copy of Kevin Analog not ten minutes after the mix tapes appeared and spent the rest of the weekend explaining to people why there were blank tapes on my table of comics.

Rule #4: DIVERSIFY YOUR BONDS

Apparently there's this guy who walks around comic festivals, berating the exhibitors for not having more stuff.  He's, obviously, right.  The obvious change one first arrives at when considering Rule #1, is that, still, America loves beauty and color and zazz in her comic artwork.  But paying out the nose for it is just cold not worth it unless your going to do it right.  Scratch that, unless you CAN do it right.  And most self-publishers who don't have their day jobs at a Professional Printer can't.  But one thing most self-publishers DO have is a halfway decent printer.  So imagine this table, a good selection of mini-comics, that are now a bit cheaper since you didn't have to drop so much on them, with really sharp, simple, and eye catching covers.  And what's that behind them?  Glossy prints that you printed out yourself, full color and exactly as gorgeous as you envisioned them.  Hell, print five and sell them for ten, they are 13x17 after all (yeah, I happen to have access to pretty incredible printer).  Not everyone is going to buy them, of course, but all you need is that one person.  The person that actually reads Genre City every week, the person that actually knows who you are and loves your work.  On June 10th, 2005, you would've only allowed him to give you six dollars TOPS.  June 11th, 2006?  You could be looking at forty bucks easy.  Also, if you've got a sneaking suspicion that something you designed is cool enough to be on a button, for God's sake, throw that shit on a t-shirt.  I could have sold at least a dozen of those this weekend if I'd had the foresight to make them.

Rule #5: FREEDOM ISN'T FREE

I just don't get people who give away their comics to their friends and their family.  These are the only people on the PLANET who you can count on for sales.  That's it.  That's the rule.  Charge your friends, they should be over the moon to buy your shit anyway.  Otherwise they're just hanging out with you to up their street cred and they officially suck.  If your family won't buy your comics?  I don't know, man, that's some Dr. Phil shit.

Rule #6: AMERICA LOVES CONTESTS

It took me about two hours to take the Kevin Analog Mix Tape Competition from wild idea to almost fully designed flyer and press release.  Two days and one gorgeous illustration later, it's getting press on Fanboy Rampage.  MoCCA weekend, it's wowing passersby right and left.  It's the easiest thing in the fucking world to cook up and it will cost you next to nothing.

So, thanks so much, MoCCA, for the sales and for the lovely new friends I made and old friends I saw again, but more than that, thanks for the things I'll take with me to SDCC.  And APE.  And MoCCA 2006.  Etcetera, etcetera.

Score

I'm reading "The Diviners" by Rick Moody which I totally scored at the BEA this weekend, a festival I was totally basically snuck into and I can't believe my luck. The novel (apparently slated to come out even later then it's claimed September 12 release date [now I'm just gloating]) is, to my mind, out of control fantastic. Although I just read Dale Peck's legendary review of The Black Veil ("Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation") and I was all "Huh. Maybe Dale's right. Maybe I'm a sucker for patently awful fiction." After all, what Peck describes as Moody's penchant for pissing contestian beginnings could not be an apter description of the opening of this novel which I could describe quite patly (A description of the light of the sunrise starting in Los Angeles and over the course of like twenty pages that aforementioned light making its way slowly Westward across the entire planet before landing on New York City) and in a way that makes it sound completely interminous but fuck it, man, I was completely enrapt. In his review Peck also predicts that Moody's next novel would be his version of The Corrections, which is probably sort of true here, although it does not deal with a family per se but rather a loose collection of interelated charaters orbiting the entertainment industry.

I'm about halfway through the book at this point and although it hasn't really maintained the pace it opened with, as in, I could actually put it down at some points, a feat I couldn't hope to accomplish through the first few chapters, so concerned was I with the the plight of an overweight producer and her Sikh livery driver, I still find myself inhaling it with the same gusto I displayed for like The Order Of The Phoenix. It's that engaging.

So, I don't know. It's a weird thing with Peck. I was in a class of his once upon a time and I quite respect him. This was before he gained his current status as a reviewer. He has since come down quite hard on two things I quite enjoy, being Rick Moody and Six Feet Under and, now that I think about it, it's quite possible he had a hand in the way I approached my prose after Grad School, when I spent a lot of time paring down and basically doing away with the sprawling influence of not even the whole of David Foster Wallce's ouvre but simply one novel: Infinite Jest. Looking back at just this post it seems that I might have started to shed that impulse.

Which is probably for the best. The very first reaction I had to this book was "Fuck, this is the kind of book I'm dying to write." The first few chapters are completely bursting with forward momentum, there's even a bike messenger scene that's just pure propulsion. And throughout the whole thing is this overflowing of detail and, well, it's basically exactly the kind of story I'd like to be telling.

Anyway, I'll probably be finishing it in a day or so, so I'll have more to say then. I'll note, though, that I'm a complete sucker for things like the endings of Infinite Jest or Purple America or The Corrections, endings that leave a lump in my throat and I that have to read quite a few times and that I always end up talking to someone about. And these all seem to be the kinds of books that Dale Peck loathes. And I know for sure that he's thought about it much more than I have. I'm sure he's smarter than I am. I'm sure he's read more than I have. But, and maybe I'm just an ape here, I get so much personally out of these books. So who gives a fuck, right? I'm part of the problem sure, but it's not everybody's problem now is it. Maybe it is. I could go back and forth all day so it's probably better if I just go back to reading.