Best Comics of 2016, Nos. 11 - 6

An extra heavy period at the day gig slowed my writing, so I'm going back to the model I used last year: multiple books in every post. I will expedite matters, since I had originally planned on being done with these on the 16th of January. This is time-sensitive material, after all. In response, I am writing all the entries in three posts before making them public.
11. Backstagers

Despite all the backlash snobbery of the 90s, comics can be for kids. It takes nothing away from comics to have some dedicated to younger audiences. Regardless of the target audience, quality will out.
The Boom Box line has been producing  genuinely smart kids' comics for a while now. Their biggest success, Goldie Vance, has been on my radar for a while, and in addition to the title we're discussing now, I'm reading the trade of Help Us, Great Warrior, which is wonderful fun.
Backstagers is a very clever and humane comic about young adult theater. The book goes behind the scenes of a high school play, and discovers a world of magic, wonder and danger in the nether regions of the props archives. If you have to have labels, think of elements of Narnia combined with A Chorus Line. A profoundly inadequate description, to be sure, but it serves to get the conversation rolling.

Stars Kevin and Blake
at their self-congratulatory
best.

The characters, even the self-absorbed and cruel show stars, are wonderfully engaging.  There's a mystery and excitement to every issue.
The colors are lush and vibrant. The book is smartly laid out. One of the things that chafes me is any creative team dumbing down their work, pandering to readers. This is particularly insulting when you're treating kids this way.
When I started teaching high school age kids, I quickly learned to respect their intelligence. Yes, yes, we've heard the arguments- kids' brains aren't fully formed, they lack sufficient experience to make informed decisions. What excuses do adults use? So many so-called grown-ups make much worse decisions than kids do, and with farther reaching consequences. The kids in Backstagers understand strategies, motivations and their own desires much more clearly than many who claim to be adults. Yet they're clearly still kids.
This is one smart book. I'm sticking with it.

10. Bombshells

Some surprisingly good comics have come out of marketing gimmicks. The 1960s  Captain Action book, the 70s (and 90s revival) Micronauts and Rom, Space Knight come to mind. DC created Bombshells as a way to sell statues, glasses and posters. In fairness, it's pretty cool merchandise, but we're here to talk about the story.
Bombshells shouldn't work but it does.This WWII alternate reality pastiche of DC superheroines and villianesses recast in curious ways is full of verve, smart art and impassioned writing. I'm sure a lot of people are buying the book just to look at the girls/women. In fairness, that's on my list too. I love the evocation of classic pin-up art that dominates the book. As one who's often waxed effusive about the virtues of pin-ups as opposed to porn, the art in the series delights me.
The take on Wonder Woman, usually my favorite, is good but not great here. I like Mera!
The plotting is a bit on the nose at times. Batgirl as a baseball player- get it? She uses a bat! Look at us, we're being clever!
Even with that, the story remains engaging. I was taken aback by the Stargirl storyline.The Russian aspect, coupled with the heartfelt self-sacrifice really resonated with me.
I continue to enjoy this book. I picked up the newest issue just today. Since it's a bit gimmicky, I had my doubts about how well it would sustain, but so far it's remained worth the money.

Batgirl in action, pre-hero!

9. Wimmen's Comix

My favorite cover from the series!

One of the frustrations of comic book binding is that sometimes you bind a book that later gets reprinted. Though I accumulated all the issues of Wimmen's Comix with a bind in mind, this collection came out before I could complete the project. I'm glad.
The blurb from the Fantagraphics website:
"In the late ’60s, underground comix changed the way comics readers saw the medium — but there was an important pronoun missing from the revolution. In 1972, ten women cartoonists got together in San Francisco to rectify the situation and produce the first and longest-lasting all-woman comics anthology, Wimmen’s Comix. Within two years the Wimmen’s Comix Collective had introduced cartoonists like Roberta Gregory and Melinda Gebbie to the comics-reading public, and would go on to publish some of the most talented women cartoonists in America — Carol Tyler, Mary Fleener, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Dori Seda, Phoebe Gloeckner, and many others. In its twenty-year run, the women of Wimmen’s tackled subjects the guys wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole: abortion, menstruation, masturbation, castration, lesbians, witches, murderesses, and feminists."
So much work here to love! From the welcome inclusion of It Ain't Me Babe, the first all-woman comic, through #18, so many brilliant artists are included here. 

The good: the collection is very well archived and edited. There was a slight variation in format between some issues. This is rectified by allowing luxury margins for the art. There was also a wide range of quality in the printing of the original comics. Here, the art is cleaned up and printed on decent bright paper, with very good separations for the covers and the 3D issue (glasses included, of course!). They were even nice enough to include a 2D version of the 3D issue at the end of the book!
The bad: This thing is a brick. Two hardcovers, over 700 pages on heavy paper in a slipcase, weighing in at just over 7 pounds! I've questioned the formatting, which set the list price at $100, several times. This is 18 comics, plus the Babe issue and the 2D/3D issue, for a total of 20 comics. I have several custom binds of just over 20 issues, including some underground stuff. They fit neatly into one book. Did the reformatting demand the luxury treatment? I'm not sure.
Aside from the inconvenience for people who aren't avid bibliophiles, the price point of a deluxe volume might keep some people away from this collection. If it were in paperback at half the price, would more people buy it? This ranks at #436 in Amazon's Fantragraphics sales ranking, while the cheaper and smaller (and admittedly collecting less work and having been in print longer) Inner City Romance ranks at #328. That's hardly conclusive evidence. I do note that Fantagrphics did a paperback reprint of its Usagi Yojimbo 2 book slipcased set. It continues to sell briskly, while the HC is long out of print.
There's little material aside from the comics- one essay and some photos.
Either way, I hope for a more accessible printing, even though I do so love a well-made book, which this clearly is.
There's also a strange practical incongruity. The spines are flipped. The spine that reads "The Complete Wimmen's" is on book two, while the spine that reads "Comix" is on volume one! This puts the avid owner of a comic library in the awkward position of having it wrong no matter what she does. Either the spines are in the slipcase out of order, or the books are. Grr.
But the descender on the N in "Wimmen's" links with the ascender on the X in "Comix", making such a wonderful design touch, it's almost mandatory to leave the spines in that order.
Retrospective volumes are often given the prize/curse of being "important". This is more than an important book or a reflection of decades of feminist evolution. It's a fun and compelling collection of comics.
8. Paper Girls

Brian Vaughan has been a fixture on the comics scene for some time now. His first comic work appeared 21 years ago. Despite the unrelentingly downbeat ending, I adored Ex Machina, and found his take on Doctor Strange, The Oath, refreshing and surprisingly optimistic. I may be the only person in comic readership not drooling over Saga. Frankly, I find it too cynical, and its "fresh" ideas are reminiscent of things Philip Jose Farmer was writing 50 years ago.
That said, Paper Girls cheers me.

A Vaughan comic with bleeped out
swear words!

Maybe it's the support text, the letters pages dedicated to the delightful myth of being a paper girl, echoing the supporting text in Lumberjanes. Maybe it's that these girls prove to be so capable when they're catapulted into a nightmare world that's part future dystopia and part mythological realm. Maybe it's just that, for a change, Vaughan doesn't let cynicism and snark dominate the narrative, though there's still enough of both.
This book is cleanly drawn, fast paced, complex enough to engage the mind and a roller coaster ride. Having teen girls as protagonists without pandering to the stereotype of the month is also quite refreshing! In fairness, Vaughan's work on Runaways also handled teen girls well (I didn't mean that the way it sounded - ick!)
Cliff Chiang's art is clean, energetic and on point. He composes frames seamlessly, and has a clean line that brings Geoff Darrow to mind. Yet he's very much his own artist.
I've only discussed the plot in vague terms. This is a chronic condition with me. I want to give you enough to want to read the book. The book in question has time travelers encountering their younger selves, strange monsters from another dimension, and tons of late 80s nostalgia. Is that enough to whet your appetite?

7. Art Ops

Here's a clever idea. A spy agency dedicated to keeping subjects in their respective artworks. Of course, things go wrong, like Mona Lisa escaping and getting in a family way. Oh, and the son of the lead Art operative loses an arm, which is replaced with living artwork.
Art Ops is a lot of fun, but is a bit on the nose at times. It plays with reality, suing tones that echo Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, but lacks the subtlety and nuance of Morrison's work. Writer Shaun Simon brings a decent knowledge of art history to the book, but the story rarely goes much deeper than well-known and well-trod grand masters. It's a chaotic ride, but it doesn't go any place too scary once the reader adapts to the premise.
And really, it's not all that chaotic. There's an inevitability bordering on cliche to some aspects of this. The expatriated artworks take haven at the Chelsea Hotel? My, how novel. Nobody's ever used that setting as a metaphor for escape of tortured  souls before. Please.

Mike Allred's art, however, is expressive and on point. I'm on record as liking good fundamental comic art (and one of these days I'll try to define that), and Allred has long championed comparatively simple and anarchic comic art. Sometimes it works well. I  loved his work on X-Static. Sometimes it doesn't. His Fantastic Four run left me cold. Here, it's very effective, and just plain fun to look at. Rob Davis' fill-in on the penultimate issue, #11, lacked some of Allred's verve.
As alluded to above, the series is concluded at 12 issues. The first half is out in trade now. This chafes me a bit. This is a short series. Why break it into two books? Apparently marketing is more important that reader satisfaction.
Perhaps that's the crux of the biscuit. The underlying cynicism of this book is irritating, not because there's no place for cynicism in comics, but because of what it says about how the creators value art in the world. It's well worth reading, but there are other comics about art that tell better stories.
6. Electric Sublime
In contrast, here's a surreal adventure comic about art that shows a deeper understanding of art.
As far back as Frederic Pohl's novel Drunkard's Walk, and more recently the play and film The Caveman's Valentine, we have narratives dealing with the challenge of the mentally ill person who sees things as they truly are. Add Electric Sublime to that mix. While I have major issues with the whole "tortured artist" syndrome, it's used here in an interesting way, echoing the lost and lamented series Millennium. A central character is pulled from an asylum to use special abilities to solve an inexplicable puzzle- in this case, a winking Mona Lisa.
Main characters are trapped in the winking painting. In the so-called real world, mass suicides complicate matters.
Evoking many of the usual suspects of art history, this book strikes many of the same notes as Art Ops. But where the latter uses amplified guitars and buzzsaws, Electric Sublime uses a string quartet playing a Berlioz string quartet that sneaks in some Philip Glass riffs on the sly. In short, this is a much more elegant and nuanced look at art and its place in society.
Electric Sublime manages to address the whole "crazy artist" cliche while treating artists with a measure of respect. And the book is much more visually intriguing than Art Ops, using a controlled palette where necessary, and evocation of numerous styles from both comics and the "legitimate" art world. The book reminds me of artists ranging from Hannes Bok to Ben Templeton in places. And the use of the artist's pose-able wooden mannequin as a Greek chorus of sorts is quite charming.
The first mini of four books recently concluded. While there was a sense of resolution, it was clearly left open for a new series. I'd like to see more, and like to see writer Maxwell Prince and artist Martin Morazzo play with even more art history - tropes, memes, riffs, chose your visual motif. I just want more.

Klimt, anyone?

Next: entries 5 - 2.

Unwelcome Powers (Faith and Thin)

A few quick thoughts on a recent revelation: I have a superpower.
I'm not sure exactly when it started, but I can be invisible. I have no control over it at present. I first noticed it about ten years ago.

It happened when I started gaining a significant amount of weight. People who once saw me and sought me out for casual conversation, social interaction and dating started passing me by. When I first noticed this, I started feeling like the central character in Robert Silverberg's To See the Invisible Man.
This didn't make sense to me. The visible spectrum of light still hit me, and there was more of me for it to hit. The people I passed didn't walk in front of cars, or run into doors or to each other, so clearly they could see. They just couldn't see me.
Or like the society in which Mitchell found himself in the story, they chose not to see me.
One can argue for weeks about fat people. It's their fault, it's genetic, it's laziness, it's a sleeping gene. Who cares? In a practical sense, it doesn't matter how you got here. You're here.
And you want to be dealt with fairly and respectfully.
In that spirit, two recent comics come to mind. The first, less obvious one is Thin by Jon Clark.
This is a horror book, which may color its perspectives a bit. After all, as Stephen King notes, horror is about despair, while SF is about hope. Even in light of that, and as intriguing as the first issue is, I'm having a really hard time with this one.

The arguable protagonist, Doris Greene, begins the story with a gleeful eating binge followed by shame-based burying of the fast-food containers in the trash. She sees a baby alone on the threshold of her home, and enters  only to find her husband Gerry having sex with another woman, while commenting on how thin she is after having given birth. Rather than confront the cheating creep, she apparently blames herself. She takes off to the grocery to stock up for yet another binge. The clerks snicker at her. Rather than call them on their rudeness to a paying customer, she leaves.
In the parking lot, she chances on a woman named Lacy, an old friend who's lost a great deal of weight, but still has disproportionately large breasts and the vapid, self-absorbed attitude of the stereotype dumb blonde. Page 9 opens with a gratuitous butt shot of dear Lacy. Lacy tells Doris the secret of her weight loss.
Over supper, rather than confronting her cheating husband, Doris tells him of her new plan to lose weight. He shows contempt for her goals rather than support. She responds with yet another binge on her way to the treatment Lacy disclosed.
She meets Doctor Romero, the man who supposedly administers the weight loss treatments. He also breeds dogs (and mentions in passing, in broken English, that his specialty is cross-breeding species, a probable clue to the storyline).
Doris goes to the Doctor's basement, where the procedure is to be done.
I'll stop there rather than reveal the whole first issue, though that's a great deal of it.
There's not one likable character in the whole book. Gerry only cares about himself, the store clerks are immature and empty-headed, Lacy is vapid, and Doctor Romero is tired and resigned to his fate, which he obviously loathes.
In a Comics: the Gathering interview, creator Jon Clark said, "I tried to stay true to how it would feel to deal with the issues that she has and perceives that she has, and if a message comes out of that, well, that’s just a gift." From this I infer that Clark is not a heavy man, in the sense we're addressing here. And maybe this level of cynicism is necessary for a horror book.
But I don't care about that. I care about Doris, and the other fat women, real and fictional, whose lives are ruined by the contempt of others. This is not exonerate anyone who's overweight from their own actions. It's to say two things:

1. Not everyone who's overweight is unhappy or has low self-esteem. 
2. Judging us almost never helps. If all you want to do is impose your values on somebody else, preach away. If fat people need anything, it's real friends and real support.

Fat people in the comics are mostly invisible. Sometimes they're villains like The Kingpin or The Blob (how's that for a reaffirming name?). Fat women in comics are pretty much nonexistent, with the exception of the (again) evil Granny Goodness.

I'm working from memory to get this written in a timely fashion. If I've overlooked any significant characters, please let me know. However, I contend that fat people in general, and fat women in particular, have rarely, if ever, been fairly treated in comics. Most often either we're not there, or we're seen as objects of contempt, ridicule or pity, as in this page from the otherwise wonderful Fantastic Four story Unthinkable.
Now, in fairness, that's a shot at the whole country, but the artist, Mike Wieringo, has chosen to use mindless, heavy people eating junk food to convey the concept, as though heavy people exemplify the nation's worst. It may not have been that overt in intent, but what does it say that the artist's mind went there to present that idea?
This is not to say that there are not, and have never been, positive images of fat people in comics. Inspector Dolan in The Spirit was somewhat heavy-set, as was Batman's Commissioner Dolan and Superman's Perry White.  But for women, sadly, we often had this:

To be fair, there were also 50s and 60s stories in which Superboy gained weight, and the anarchic personal favorite, Herbie, the Fat Fury.
And then there was the early 70s underground Dynamite Damsels, the first collection by Roberta Gregory. Shelley's story has a mostly positive end on its second page, and shows a fat chick with the capacity for actual self-acceptance. Despite her small victory in finding clothes that are affordable and fit her in the Men's department, she still has to deal with the barbs and slurs of others, including two young male toughs, one of whom shouts at her, "Hey, I like a chick I can find in the sheets!" That aside, this comic dares to show a fat woman as an empathetic person, a whole person, and to show the narrow minded responses of those who have bought into the whole "thin = healthy and beautiful" myth. She's also drawn realistically, not as a caricature of a human being, as fat people often are.

The other underground character that comes to mind is Lee Mars' Pudge, Girl Blimp.  This story of a teenage runaway who lands in early 1970s San Francisco deals directly with the fat question- sort of. Mars' contention is that fat people are really Martians who are distorted in appearance by Earth's atmosphere, which is also why we feel constantly alienated! Unlike the mainstream characters, Mars' characters are all sympathetic and empathetic, even adversaries to our heroine. And the cat is a delight too.
There was supposed to be a TPB collection of this delightful series a few years ago, but I can't find it anywhere. Any help on the matter is welcome.

There are some characters in Bitch Planet who manage to bypass the whole "fat = self-shaming" thing too. Not going to elaborate at this point, but it does deserve mention.
However, in contrast to Thin, another recent book saves the day.
I'm talking, of course, about Faith.
Many folks have recognized this book as the breakthrough that it is. In short, it's a fat girl who's happy with her life, has a good social life, a good (if tentative, but hey, in the economy of the last 20 years, what isn't?) job, and happens to be a super-heroine named Zephyr.

I'll comment more on the Faith book itself when I do my Best Comics of 2016- not sure yet where it will place, but it definitely makes the list.
This is going to come across as "there's no pleasing that girl", but sometimes I think Zephyr/Faith's world is a little too good. I mean, if thin people don't get perfect lives in the comics, why should we? It's a very chipper little book, and I do like the optimism. I just hope for balance. Even in light of that, the idea that fat people deserve every kind of love and a full, happy life is revolutionary in contemporary comics, and a step in the right direction.
If this keeps up, maybe someone will see me again one of these days!

A memory and a reflection: Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 1944- 2011

The comics world is full of people who call themselves artists, for better or for worse.
The larger art world has a similar circumstance.
Few cross the arbitrary boundaries of the two worlds.
Jeffrey Catherine Jones was one of those few.

 

Beginning her comics career with some one-off stories for Charlton and some work in the undergrounds, notably on her stunning solo book Spasm!,  Jeffrey's work first gleaned national recognition through the pages of the National Lampoon. 

Her strip IDYL, stunning in its clarity, was a series of sardonic and melancholy short moral tales, often strangely out of place among the strip's peers, but always welcome and eagerly devoured by the readers. During this time, Jones also took up with Bernie Wrightson, Micheal Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith in the short-lived adventure known as The Studio. Wrightson spoke to me concerning The Studio at San Diego a couple years ago. To paraphrase from my spotty memory, "It was this huge, rat-infested space with great light. We only worked there together a short time (he specified the time frame, but I don't recall specifics- it may have been less than two months) until the whole thing caved in. But we produced some incredible work." Shortly thereafter, Jones shared an upstate New York home with Vaughn Bode', a colleague from the undergrounds, another collaborator with Wrightson (on the Purple Pictography strips for Swank), and another artist with transgender leanings. Bode' and Jones were fast friends by all accounts, and some of their adventures living together are documented in the Comics Journal special issue on sex. The article is reprinted at this link, on the website of Vaughn's son Mark Bode'. 

Vaughn's strip Jones Goes to Bones is a loving jab at Jeffrey's perspective that her art would make her immortal. I'll add the strip to this post as soon as I can get a decent scan of it.

I have no direct knowledge of the problems Jeffrey faced in the subesquent years. She finally had her sex-reassignment surgery fairly late in life. 

She had personal problems following her surgery, but based on secondhand reports from mutual friends in the comics community, these were problems she had experienced prior to surgery as well. Her bouts with mental illness have been documented, by her, on her website. She appeared to be in recovery in the final years of her life.

I wrote her in the early 1990s as part of my research for my book on GLBT comics.We struck up a brief correspondence thereafter, truncated by her aforementioned illness. 

Her reply to my specific query about her sexual identity, which I promised to use verbatim:

"That I am a transsexual is a matter of public record. But I am a woman first and an artist second and wish to be seen on those terms. I find no others acceptable."

I reconnected with her via Facebook, as did so many others. I suspect she was surprised to find out just how large a following her work had. 

L to R: Wrightson, Jones, Kaluta, Smith: The Studio

A Jones Tarzan painting

Ms. Jones in recent years

In the spate of obituaries I've seen today, there is a bit of well-intentioned stumbling over pronouns. My response is direct. She chose the terms of her life. Respect them in her death.

Finally, here's a video obituary that includes the trailer for a recently funded documentary on the life of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Like Roy Orbison, she was lucky enough to live to see a renewed interest in her work.

Goodbye, Ms. Jones. I would have liked to have known you better, but I feel honored to have known you at all. Your work made all our lives a bit richer.