(the balloon goes up and this time there won’t be jolly knees-up singing along in the shelters as the Blitz falls outside in Raymond Briggs’ classic When the Wind Blows, published by Penguin)

I’m not going to list the award winners and the categories again, but one or two of the awards struck me as being almost antediluvian.  It was sort of like, “best remnant of a by-gone age”.  I mean, if you are going to narrow an award to something like “best pocket-cartoon in a national newspaper that still publishes pocket-cartoons” then you really must be struggling for new winners if you’ve been awarding it since 1995 – unless, of course, you employ a rota-system, or you give someone you like the same award several years running, or everyone on the rota the award several years running for that matter.  Let me be honest, I’ve actually never liked pocket-cartoons, I never rated Lancaster or Calman or Boxer, and I could never understand why the cartoonists who were really very bad were never replaced by someone with a sense of humour.

This award ceremony did nothing whatsoever to calm my major worries for the future of cartooning in general, but in Britain in particular.  Where was there a mention of Kieran Meehan’s achievement in getting his comic strip, Pros and Cons, syndicated across the world by King Features Syndicate?  Where was there a recognition of Trains are Mint being shortlisted for an Ignatz award (do the “Cartoon trust” even know what that award is)?  Where was the recognition for Jamie McKelvie’s work for Image Comics, for Brian Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland, or Tom Gauld’s achievements getting into The New Yorker, The Harvard Business Review and Kramer’s Ergot 7?  Or, for that matter, Simone Lia’s Fluffy being picked up by Dark Horse.  All these people surely create cartoon work that has more in common with the work of Raymond Briggs than any one of the Cartoon Trust award winners.  Looking at the site, and the original cartoons on sale, I see the people behind the awards have a very narrow definition of what constitutes a cartoon, and that’s fine, but let’s not pretend these things are the best example of cartoon art, they plainly are not, and let’s not try to associate some of the really poorly executed cartoons from a handful of publications, with illustrations from a golden age of British illustrators.  It is either a museum of cartoon art, like America’s MOCCA, which embraces the old and the new, or it is a shop selling an antiquated idea of cartoon art.  Again that’s not a bad thing; but it is what it is.

This is not so much a criticism of the cartoonists themselves; they simply made a large and easy target.  To be fair, they are simply making a living and do not make the rules, but the small amount of publications that make up this small, insular world of parochial British cartooning has no real impact outside its own peculiar goldfish bowl, and it doesn’t gain credibility by trying to adopt Raymond Briggs as a member of its tribe.

The factors that cause me concern are compounded by the economic downturn, but have, in the main, been around for a long time and they are partly psychological.  Cartoonists, and once again bear in mind that I am one, so I am also part of the problem, are often dishonest with themselves and everyone else about the state of the market, the money they make, and the future.  As a very young man, with a very young family, I launched myself as a self-employed full-time cartoonist when I sold cartoons to Punch, and almost simultaneously sold a comic idea to IPC.  Of course as soon as the difficulties of “payment on publication” as opposed to “payment on acceptance” started to factor-in I realised that my income dipped, because I was constantly overdrawn and paying interest on the overdraft so that when the payments did arrive they substantially devalued.  Nobody in cartooning, in those days, bothered to talk about this stuff, and I really felt very betrayed to discover that many of my peers had other jobs that paid the bills, or very understanding wives with enough income to keep them afloat until things evened out – which is generally calculated as anything from 2 years to never.

About a year later, when I had to supplement my income with the Government’s Enterprise Allowance, and FIS, Family Income Supplement, which I had to appeal several times to receive, to allow me to continue working as a cartoonist, I was equally astonished to discover that quite a few other cartoonists shared my guilty secret.  I had discovered, in short, that cartooning didn’t pay very well, that it wasn’t a very secure job, that being published regularly didn’t mean being paid regularly, and that there were often fewer opportunities in many publications than there first appeared to be.  That is to say, there are contributors to whom most publications are fiercely loyal, and their spots are more-or-less guaranteed so that a magazine that publishes maybe 10 cartoons every issue, actually only has 6 spots up-for-grabs.  This understanding, of course, helps explain the earlier quandary about why many of the pocket-cartoon producers remain in a job despite being pretty darned awful, and way past their use-by-date.

One of the worst aspects of an arrangement like this awards ceremony, for me, is that we appear, we cartoonists that is, to be encouraging two new people every year to take up cartooning.  I can only hope, especially if it is the narrow definition of cartooning that the Cartoon Art Trust seems enamoured with, that we encouraging them to take up cartooning as a hobby.  After all, the world has changed dramatically since a number of the “judges” of these awards had any sort of contact with the real world of freelance cartooning.

Back when I began as a cartoonist there was, let me see, Reveille, Weekend and Titbits, and the Weekly News, all publishing weekly pocket, single-column and magazine cartoons, and between them they carried around 80 cartoons a week.  In addition, the Sun, the Express and the Mirror all carried about 6 cartoons a day, 6 days a week, with the Sunday papers carrying maybe another 6 cartoons each, that’s around 108 spots a week.  Then there were monthly magazines like Accountancy and Woman’s World, and She Magazine, also publishing cartoons; maybe 30 between them, and there were dozens of trade papers like the TASS News and Journal,  that paid at least as much as the national papers, that’s maybe another 100 spots.  Even The Stage carried gag cartoons, there’s another 20 a month.  Of course we also had those great cartoon-supporting markets, Punch and Private Eye and the Spectator and the New Statesman, and Readers Digest, running tens of cartoons every month and in addition we had many regional dailies like the Yorkshire Post and the Edinburgh Evening News, running maybe 2 to 4 cartoons a day.

I haven’t counted it all up, but it must have come to around 2,000 or more cartooning opportunities every month, less those spots that went to the regular dependable cartoonists favoured by the publications, and that still left almost 2,000 spaces for a freelance cartoonist’s work.  And there was even more opportunity, if you include all the Spot the Difference cartoons, and the slots in puzzle magazines, and the possibilities of slipping one by in the Radio Times, or Sounds, or the NME, or even the Guardian, and other cartoon-friendly papers and magazines.  Sometimes, there was even the odd gap in some of IPC’s kids’ comics for half a page, or even a full page, of cartoons, and cartoonists like Ken Pyne or Styx or even me, could eagerly fill those.

(Ken Pyne’s reaction to the government’s convenient scapegoating of the BBC to cover their own policies, (c) Ken Pyne and borrowed from James Miller’s Pyne website)

Today, in the UK, cartoon markets that published bread-and-butter cartoons, like Weekend Magazine have long gone – and new magazines with a cartoon-friendly ethos, like Chat Magazine, came and went, and of those that once offered so many opportunities only the Weekly News is left (at least the last time I looked that publication still carried some cartoons).  Of the daily papers, only the Sun still publishes cartoons, although it abandons them every so often, and the monthly magazines aimed at female readers have completely lost their sense of humour – there is a whole new generation or two out there who don’t even know that those publications often published cartoons.

Some trade papers still publish the odd cartoon, now and again, but Punch has gone, and the New Statesman isn’t really a cartoon market anymore, not in the sense that freelance contributions are widely accepted.  The regional dailies that do buy cartoons buy them from stock agencies, and none of the other markets that carried the odd cartoon still do, that’s those that are still around.  Private Eye and the Spectator and Readers Digest are still publishing cartoons, of course, and they have been joined by a new market, Prospect Magazine.  What does that offer up then – around 200 a month?  It is less of course, when you deduct the spaces filled by certain cartoonists who have earned (or not, as the case may be).  And most annoying aspect of that situation is that these cartoonists, the “dependable” and “reliable” ones that the magazines can “trust” to get the fun into the pages regularly, is that those dependable and reliable cartoonists are not on the equivalent of a New Yorker contract, which recognises the role of a “dependable” funster, and pays those stalwarts a fee for being “reliable”, they are just secretly recognised as so.  This then, is the brave new world of cartooning that we cartoonists have introduced, I take it, 2 new cartoonists to every year for some years now.

These things trouble me, not because of the small amount of increased competition, because I work largely in the US these days and I don’t do a lot of traditional gag cartooning, but because this paucity of markets, and of cartooning space, contributes to what I have described as a de-skilling effect.  There is no need, really, for anyone with a local spot on one of these dailies to continue with any form of professional development – why should they?  There is, in fact, one “award” on the list who was a very important cartoonist, a very influential one; I have an original of his in my living room wall.  He was, in the 1980s one of the few new Punch cartoonists who had his own unique style.  Many, like me, were still copying Mahood and Noel Ford, and trying to find our own style, but he was bold and confident and was already carving out new territory.  He was, along with other cartoonists of the day, profiled in She Magazine (those were the days), and he drew a comic-strip for a national paper, and his comic pages for IPC.  He was a well-rounded cartoonist, but we had the outlets back then.

Since then, as I have outlined, many of those avenues have closed to cartoonists, and you have no idea how depressing it was for me to read that he has been “awarded” for working in a medium that sounds to me like a wholly retrograde step.  Surely, in a country that really celebrated the art of cartooning, he would have published a string of books in the manner of Claire Brétecher over the last couple of decades.  Dear God, when did we take that wrong turning?

More now than ever then, cartoonists have to look toward new outlets for cartooning opportunities, or the craft of cartooning, in the UK at least, will surely wither and die.  From what I can see, many of the established cartoons are not worried about the future and perhaps it’s only right that they shouldn’t be, but most cartoonists do not have a regular spot and therefore a regular income, and as a result we cartoonists are not prepared for this economic calamity that will see newspapers abandon cartoons and comic strips and even fold completely, or just appear online, because we have narrowed our vision to suit the constraints of the market we have left.  Or rather the markets that are left are dictating the amount of skills or lack of skills we need by sticking to tired old formats like pocket-cartoons.  The next Raymond Briggs, will most certainly not be a cartoonist who has spent every day of the last decade drawing a 4”x3” “topical” cartoon – they just won’t have the skills, and the talent and promise they did have will have been wasted.

(New Labour meets Scanner courtesy of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, borrowed from his site)

In the next post, we’ll look at how forward thinking cartoonists like Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Ger Wyhman, John Allison, and this blog’s own Darryl Cunningham, are preparing their cartoons for the challenges ahead.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod McKie has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

Of course in some circles of Literary Criticism we are encouraged to ignore any input from the author and work directly with the words on the page, because once a text (a story, a painting, a cartoon, an illustration) is presented as “public art”, that is to say that it is intended for an audience, it is open to an infinite amount of interpretations and should not be limited to any one in particular, even that of the author..

There are, to be sure, many good examples of a text running counter to the author’s intentions, but there are also some terrific examples of the Lit’ Crit’ business racing away with possible interpretations that accord huge significance to ideas that  the author has a very different spin on.  One example would be the ending to Robert Frost’s famous poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922), where the repeated last line seems to suggest that the “I” of the poem has drifted off into possible hypothermia, which will undoubtedly lead to certain death.  According to Frost’s letters to a friend though, written around the time he wrote Stopping by Woods, the poem was annoying him because he couldn’t think how to finish it and so he decided on the wizard wheeze of simply repeating the last line.  Another example, this time from TV, would be the debate around the significance of the form, the shape, the size and even the colour of “Rover”, the balloon-type guard from Patrick McGoohan’s celebrated serial, The Prisoner.  McGoohan had actually planned a very different “Rover”, a mechanical one, but it sank like a stone in the waters of Portmeirion and because they were already shooting, panic set in, until someone else on the set looked up and spotted a weather balloon, which was immediately cast in the role (6,000 balloons in total).

Such events are very inconvenient truths, and we have created a way to ignore such things by applying a psychoanalytical tactic, and delivering a Freudian analysis of the text.  We say then, that behind her back, the author’s subconscious has been at work and there is no such thing as chance or coincidence, and we should just ignore any biographical details about the author, and work with the words on the page – within reason, of course, for instance the word “gay” had entirely different denotations and connotations in 1930.  I have to say, I do often find this view that the empirical author is some kind of gormless automaton practising a form of automatic-writing a little troubling at times.

For a couple of reasons then, I find I largely agree with the points John Carey makes in his review of Jenny Uglow‘s new book, Words and Pictures, Writers, Artists and a peculiarly British tradition (Faber) in last Sunday’s Times (09/11/2008).

It’s not that I’m against book illustrators per say, or for that matter the people publishers now tell us are “graphic novelists”, but I am against the needless illustration of texts, especially when  those illustrations run counter to the author’s intentions or even instructions, and serve only to place limits and boundaries on the reader’s imagination.  Far from helping to illuminate the text, which was once free-floating and open to an infinite amount of interpretations, the possible meaning of the text is now fenced in by, not the author’s vision, which we have been encouraged to ignore, but the illustrator’s vision.  And often, by the illustrator’s lack of knowledge about not just the text, but the witting and unwitting testimony of the text, what the text does not say because of the rules and institutions at the time of production, and of the illustrator’s lack of knowledge of the signs and symbols at work.  My favourite examples of this is the illustrator who was knocking out very literal illustrations to accompany poems; to him Yeats “Wild Swans” were “just swans” but Ted Hughes’s poem, The Thought Fox, was more promising because he wanted to draw a sort of “computer game/manga-type fox, in a “sort of Middle-Earth type forest”.

“I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.”

Extracted from The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes.

This is on my mind at the moment because one or two posts and reviews over the last couple of days tie-in with some issues I touched on when I wrote about illustrating The House of Usher on my own blog.  Many of the points John Carey raised about how unnecessary and even redundant or counter-productive some illustrators are, certainly had some resonance for me, despite the fact that I am an illustrator to trade, because I have always been uncomfortable with the view that any “classic” or any out-of-copyright work, is fair-game for an illustrated “re-imagining”.  Although I do wish Carey had worded some of his article a little better because his main point, that the illustrators concerned often had little or no familiarity with the particular work they were illustrating, comes over, at times, as a snobbish put down:

“That is a trivial matter, though, compared to Uglow’s uncritical acclaim for book illustrators as a species, and for those who applied their dubious talents to illustrating Milton in particular. He had been dead for 14 years when the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost came out in 1688, and even if he had still been alive his blindness would have prevented him perusing it, which is just as well. The engraving Uglow reproduces from Book I, which depicts Satan rousing his legions from the burning lake, shows the archfiend as a sort of gnome in a miniskirt, with pixie ears and a small curly horn poking out of his forehead. Milton did not suffer foolish artists gladly. He had disapproved of the portrait frontispiece prepared for the 1645 edition of his poems, and requested the artist to engrave a Greek epigram under it. The wretched limner complied, unaware, since he knew no Greek, that the epigram denounced him as a rotten artist.”

The point is not lost on me though, and I remember a cartoonist who had drawn a comic about a meeting of Joyce and Proust in a Parisian café, happily declaring that he had read nothing by either author.  I’m not suggesting that in order to draw a one-page comic about a meeting of these two giants one should first read Ulysses and perhaps just volume one of A La Recherché, but I am suggesting that by a certain age, say twenty five, you should at least have tackled Dubliners or a story from that collection, and at least be familiar with the importance of the symbolism of a piece of Madeleine cake in the story you are drawing.  Something one can probably achieve by reading two sets of York or Cliff Notes, or the excellent Icon Critical Guides – tax deductible for an illustrator, in this sort of instance, as essential research.

There were no such handy cheat guides around during William Blake’s day, of course.  And it is clear, in Carey’s article, that he feels that Blake’s unfamiliarity with Milton’s work, or misreading of it, meant that he should never have been allowed anywhere near Paradise Lost:

“Worst was William Blake, who responded to Milton’s epic with a series of his usual dead-looking muscular nudes. His illustration for the temptation of Eve shows her with a snake wound round her naked body, holding what looks like a yellow plum in its mouth and thrusting it into hers. This is a vulgar travesty of Milton’s poem, where Eve’s temptation is quite specifically intellectual, not sensuous – the result of a debate between her and Satan.”

I have to admit that in this case Carey has a point.  I personally like Blake’s illustrations, but I think they are clearly doing their own thing, and they are not adding anything other than eye candy to Milton’s text, which as Carey points out Milton warned his reader was intended to be writing about things above “the reach of human sense”.

Some publishers, of course, are all over the classics like a bad rash because they are out of copyright and they can simply dial-up a work-for-hire illustrator, who will deliver them a book that effectively repackages their “free” story.  That book of course will be a “graphic novelised” or “re-imagined” version of an established, even Canonised, book, that has perhaps, like Alice in Wonderland or The Wind in the Willows, already been helpfully tagged with illustrations of characters eager to be transposed to comic strip form.

In some cases those illustrations will be exactly what the author had in mind, either because the author actually drew them, or insisted that his ideas were accurately illustrated.  Lewis Carroll’s sketches were nowhere near as expertly executed as John Tenniel’s, but he knew what he wanted his characters in the Alice stories to look like, and he insisted that Tenniel remain faithful to his vision. As Carey points out Uglow’s argument that “despite the author’s bullying, Tenniel’s brilliance shows through (in the illustrations)” is as wrong-minded as it is impudent.  Tenniel did not dream up the characters or tease the form of the drawings from some crudely formed text, he was given the job of a lifetime, that of illustrating a work of exceptional brilliance.  But whilst I do agree with Carey that without Carroll’s brilliance there would be nothing for Tenniel to illustrate, I prefer to think that Tenniel’s excellent job of illustrating the book was made easier because Lewis Carroll had already largely painted the pictures with his words.  Without the drawings, the Alice stories are still brilliant, and the drawings often serve, at best, as a one-dimensional aid to the imagination-challenged reader – or so that a helpful adult reading the story to a very young child, can point to the picture, after reading the text.

I have to say, I think Carey’s example of Henry James, who said “he would regard the attempt to impose “a picture by another hand on my own picture” as a “lawless incident” is an excellent example of the very real and correct fears an author might have about the interpretation of the text by the illustrator imposing artificial boundaries on the text.  It is something that Charles Dickens, like Lewis Carroll and Henry James, was rightly determined to avoid.  I don’t mean to suggest that the fate of Dickens’s first illustrator, Robert Seymour, who blew his brains out after an argument about one of the illustrations for The Pickwick Papers, should be the norm, but surely if there is to be only one version of what Samuel Pickwick or Mrs Bardell should look like, that version should be the one Charles Dickens wants.

I think the problem with the two positions though, Uglow’s over-emphasis on the brilliance of some key illustrators, and Carey’s dismissal of many of the same as lesser talents than the wordsmiths, is that, as is always the case, things are never that simple.  Mervyn Peake, for instance, features in the book, and Mervyn Peake happens to be one of my favourite illustrators, whether he is painting a picture with words or a brush.   To complicate matters I draw no distinction between Peake’s drawings for his own books, Mister Pye or the Gormenghast trilogy, and his drawings to accompany the writing of others, including Coleridge – they are all brilliant.  The reason for this is two-fold, and I make no apologies for saying this, author/illustrators are simply different.  In their own work they create a symbiosis of words and pictures, and their understanding of how texts work carries on over to the work they do for other authors.  In other words, put simply, they create pictures that work with the text.    I’m not saying that illustrators who don’t write are somehow lesser illustrators than those who do, or that they are necessarily less sympathetic to a text, but it seems obvious to me that illustrators who write will be more likely to have studied the process of writing, and they will understand that simply mirroring the words on the page, no matter how beautiful the drawing, will not add anything to the reader’s experience.

As Paul Gravett points out, there is currently what he describes as a “vigorous trend, notably among new British graphic novel publishers”, for “stylish strip adaptations of the works of Shakespeare and those of other literary giants”.  It is something he celebrates, and I do wish I shared his enthusiasm for the development, but having seen how badly the great Will Eisner delivered “Hamlet on a Rooftop”, featuring a gang member with a flick-knife, and no idea of the weight of possible sin on Hamlet’s slender shoulders, I can’t say I hold out a lot of hope.  I do appreciate his faith in what this renaissance could be, but from what I have learned of Paul Gravett, I am inclined to think that he is welcoming this “vigorous trend” as a champion of more work and recognition for cartoonists, a cause he has lead for decades, than for the literary merit of what might be being produced.  Although he does, correctly, highlight the Government and almost every parents concern at the depressing decline in reading levels and the literacy rate as a good reason for making books, any books, more accessible, I’m not convinced that these books will be picked up by kids who are not even interested in comic books.  As someone who has studied and taught Literature in English, and History, I’m not convinced at all that “Boys Into Books” is the panacea that we would all like it to be.  Like Paul, I suspect, I would be delighted on a number of levels if indeed it was the answer, but I honestly think is unlikely that an 11 year-old child, acting as primary carer for his drug-addicted lone parent, will have any time to polish his reading skills no matter how much more attractively the words are packaged.

I have to admit, and I hope it is clear, that my preference is for, either work that the author illustrates herself, no matter how technically inept the drawings are, or for the sort of team approach that sees the writer and a penciller and an inker and an editor really work and rework the ideas before bringing the lines to life.  I think the best work comes from the author who illustrates their own work, or from the sort of teaming you find with Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky Crumb or Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, or just to prove that I don’t think you need to be related or married to one another, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, or Harvey Pekar and Josh Neufield, or Darwyn Cooke, or Gary Dumm, or Dean Haspiel.  It doesn’t matter what the relationship is between the writer and the illustrator, although it undoubtedly helps if they are close and work well together, but it does matter about the relationship between the illustrator and the text.  Simply farming the text out to people who draw figures really well, technically, but have no idea what the text and importantly the sub-text is about, is surely the book publishing equivalent of taking a really good song and hiring a boy band to sing it – it generates product, but the culture, and the art form suffer.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod McKie has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

Like the comics we used to produce here, Japanese comics are often printed in black and white, or half-tone, with only the odd colour page, on cheap newsprint paper.  But the main difference between British comics and Japanese comics is the amount of effort required by the reader.  Whilst Mandy and Judy and The Bunty might have borne a superficial similarity to Shōjo manga, our British comics were often full of one and two-page stories, occasionally as many as four, but never, under any circumstances, would they stretch to a continuous narrative of 114 Chapters, published over a period in excess of a decade, as Ashinano Hitoshi’s charming sci-fi story, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Yokohama Shopping Log) did in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine, where it ran from 1994 until 2006.

Like traditional British comics, the Buster, Wow, Whizzer and Chips, Sparky, June and School Friend, Tammy, Japanese comics are anthologies, but unlike the British model the Japanese comics are filled with creator-controlled content, and often, most unlike their British counterparts, Japanese comics celebrate the artists and writers who create the characters that bring success to the publications.

With the Japanese method of production, the comic readers follow the adventures of their favourite characters, in the weekly or fortnightly or monthly comics anthology, for a sustained period (more often than not building an interest in other characters) and then when the various chapters are pulled together into a series of “graphic novels”, each comprising one meaty volume, the fans are more than eager to collect the new books.

Those same fans are similarly delighted when their favourite idol graduates from their own graphic novels to anime, and even live-action TV shows, and then sometimes movies and more often than not games – and it goes without saying that the accompanying merchandise is equally eagerly sought.  This, almost organic business model, where the character, if successful, follows a very well trodden path, has proved both robust, and an important source of income for the cartoonists and writers, the comics publisher, the graphic novels publishers, the printers, the animation studios, the TV companies, the actors, the film studios, the toy designers and toy companies and, of course, the entire Japanese economy.  It is a business that although past the zenith of its popularity, generates 500-billion yen, and employs hundreds of people.

The British method of comics production, on the other hand, was strange and insular.  The comics seemed to be a sort of afterthought, created because the printing presses were already there, on the premises, and in use anyway.  Whether that was the case or not, the Japanese system of allowing creators free-reign to produce their wildest imaginings, and to reap a share of any profits, was not practised in Britain, where comics artists and writers got no more than a fixed payment per page.  In fact, it was only with a degree of reluctance that one of the two major British comics publishers’ even “allowed” their artists to sign their own art work.  This obsession with exercising strict control over the content invariably led to the companies pushing their own in-house characters, rather than anything the cartoonists and writers might come up with, unless of course they handed “all the copyright in all the world” over to the publisher.  And, arguably, ensured that British comics were essentially pushing old concepts and ideas onto their readers, decades after those ideas had already become tired and old fashioned.  This meant, inevitably, that there were no new and relevant characters that spoke to the succeeding generations.

It seems, that for the longest time, the young comics reader was seen as a disposable commodity, a unit, that would pass through a comics reading age from the ages of say 8 to 12.  For that reason, successive generations of comic readers simply outgrew the comics they had been reading, and found themselves replaced by a new generation of comics readers.  Unlike the Japanese market where the tweeners and the teenagers and the adolescents and then the adults all have titles waiting to welcome them into their family of readers, Britain’s young comic fans found themselves abandoned.

Not only were the young readers of Britain’s comics served very badly, by two companies that produced a narrow vision of comics, but when they reached a certain age they were cast adrift, with only one British title, 2000AD, even trying to attract their attention.  Is it any wonder then, that when it finally hit the shelves Viz Comic went on to pick up 1,000,000 readers – ranging from adults who should have known better, to kids whom DC Thomson and IPC assumed still wanted to read the Buster and the Beano?  Such unenlightened disregard for the very readers on whom the various titles, and the companies’, success was built, was nothing short of a disgrace, and it was also incredibly short-sighted business practise, given that every indicator available pointed to a falling birth-rate and an aging society.  At any rate, the old titles haemorrhaged readers, kids stopped buying the comics, and one company went to the wall whilst the one that remains is but a pale shadow of its former self.

Now I’m not pretending that everything is rosy in Japanese comic land.  It can’t possibly be, given the current economic situation, but the Japanese business model is well placed to withstand changing reader patterns, and although sales of the print issues of many titles have fallen, the E-readership has grown substantially, and a lot of manga is read daily on phones, dedicated readers on computers, and even on games consoles.  In 2007, about 30 billion Yen, two-thirds of all the money spent on digital content in Japan, was spent on manga.

Manga’s success, in print and digital format, the current economic melt-down not withstanding, will be emulated in the West, not just because of online publishing houses like the Papyless Company, whose Executive Director, Munetaka Matsumoto has plans to make the company’s several thousand strong manga archive available in Korean, Chinese and English in the near future, but because of the continued support of the Japanese government. The Japanese government, lead by enthusiastic and supportive politicians like Prime Minister Taro Aso, and Masahiko Komura, regard the manga and anime industries as valuable (soft power) exports, and as “vehicles to project Japanese culture around the world.”

For me though, the printed Japanese comics remain fascinating; not just to be studied as an example of good business practise, or what might have been, here in the UK, but also because they are outstanding value, and just plain fun.  The first thing that catches the eye of the eager British comic reader, looking at a recent issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, is the thickness of the publication.  In the 1980s, before the majority of British comics disappeared, more and more comic titles were merged and those merged comics became thinner and thinner, and the small amount of titles that are still around today, have continued this trend.  In contrast, even today, the Japanese comics routinely have almost 500 pages of action and adventure, with some features up to 40 pages long.  It’s astonishing to think that the publication of a 40-page long chapter in a British comic, at one page a week, could have taken the best part of a year.

I think another strength of Japanese comics is that they are not trying to make some huge artistic statement.  WSJ is as powerful, as artistically adventurous, as Metal Hurlant ever was, and it contains much better stories.  It is an example of the comic art stripped bare; a functional, utilitarian comic book on bog-standard paper.  It doesn’t care what it looks like, it doesn’t need glossy pages, it is simply a vehicle to deliver stories; and it does so – with knobs on.  With a stellar line-up including  Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, Psyren, and Prince of Tennis, Weekly Shonen Jump is a fantastic read, and although some stories do include the obligatory T&A drawings that are often a feature of comics aimed at males, they do not pepper all the pages of the comic in a way that might alienate female readers.  My Spidey-sense tells me this is not accidental.  This comic’s pages might look a little cheap, but there is nothing second-class about the work that fills them.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod McKie has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

Hugo Pratt was a magician.  He took some blank sheets of paper and wrote some words on the sheets, and squared some boxes on those sheets and drew some drawings in those boxes on those sheets, and then that paper became something else, and it gained the power to transport everyone who read it to another place, in another age.

(An example of the Corto Maltese Tarot pack)

With one of these books in your hands; Fable De Venice, La Ballade De La Mer Saleé, Mǖ, Tango, Le Celtiques, you were no longer alone in your bedroom; you were in Ireland, or in the sultry Caribbean, or walking along the seabed, and you were someone else, you were the adventurer, Captain Corto Maltese.

Not all writers and artists are magicians.  They can’t all weave those spells; that’s why some books don’t transport you, but merely borrow your time – for a short while.  But Hugo Pratt was, and his magic didn’t stop there, with just the creation of the character, because as many of you know, after you have read any one of the adventures of Pratt’s greatest creation, you simply have to have more – that is magic.

There is another explanation of course, it is that Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese books, complete with maps, and sketches of uniforms, and technical notes, and drawings, and historical details, and luscious watercolour sketches, and, of course, the rip-roaring adventures themselves, are just so rewarding that other ‘graphic novels’ seem pale and colourless in comparison.

The adventures of Corto Maltese are, after all, surely the adventures Tintin dreamed of having, if he hadn’t been a boy scout; and if he had instead, been a cigar-chomping, whisky-drinking, pirate-like adventurer, not a junior-reporter – and if he had preferred the company of a string of beautiful women, to Captain Haddock, and Snowy.

Born in Rimini, in Italy, in 1927, Hugo Pratt spent his childhood in Venice, before, at the age of 10, moving to Abyssinia, with his mother, to join his father, a member of Mussolini’s army. By 1941 British troops had captured the place, and Hugo’s father was taken into captivity where he later died.  Before being sent back to Italy by the Red Cross, Hugo and his mother were also interned, and it was during his internment that young Hugo got a hold of, and eagerly read, the comics that were to be such a tremendous influence on him, from the camp guards.

After the war was over, Hugo moved back to Venice and in time joined the Venice Group, along with several other Italian cartoonists, including Alberto Ongaro and Mario Faustinelli.

In the late 1940s, Hugo moved to Buenos Aires to work for Editorial Abril, alongside, amongst others, Argentinean comic artists José Luis Salinas, and Solano López. Teaming up with writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld, on Editorial Frontera, Pratt, who was already working on Ongaro’s Junglemen, started work on Ernie Pike, Ticonderoga, and his the most famous character of that period, Sgt. Kirk.  Combining his love of comics, with his love of travel, Hugo also taught drawing in the Escuela Panamericana de Arte, and travelled extensively in South America, including trips along the Amazon.  It was during this period that Hugo wrote and drew his first solo comic book character, Ann of the Jungle, which was followed by Capitan Cormorant and Wheeling.

In 1959 Hugo moved to London where he drew more stories for the war comics he had been sending work to from Argentina, for Fleetway Publications; War Picture Library, War at Sea Picture Library, Battle Picture Library and others.  In 1960, before returning to Argentina, Hugo went to Ireland to conduct some research that would later prove useful in Les Celtiques, a Corto Maltese adventure.  In 1962, he left Argentina and moved back to Italy, where he worked for the magazine Il Corriere dei Piccoli, adapting classic stories, including Stevenson’s Treasure Island, to comic book format.

Five years later, in 1967, after further extensive travel, Hugo Pratt and Florenzo Ivaldi, got together and created the comics magazine Sgt. Kirk, which launched the comics career of Corto Maltese, with the story Una ballata del Mare Salato (The Ballad of the Salty Sea).   The character was an enormous hit, and in 1969, starred in his own adventures.

One reason for suggesting there may be a little alchemy at work is because for all the impeccable research involved in Corto’s adventures, and despite the fact that Hugo Pratt’s credentials as a traveller and adventurer were second only to  those of his creation, lending the tales more credibility than otherwise, the stories are still actually very formulaic, in that they are, like fellow European  bande dessinée , Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, Jeanette Pointu and Largo Winch, essentially picaresque.  In some cases, the travellers in these tales even visit the same countries as one another, but what really sets Hugo Pratt’s work apart, is the psychology of the protagonist.  Captain Cortese is no cub-reporter, no private eye, no junior photographer, stumbling into an adventure and trying to escape back to the safety of home, he is deliberately sailing into the eye of the storm in search of adventure.  A fighter, a lover, a student of the Occult and the Kabala, Corto Maltese is a man of destiny.  Against a backdrop of real colonial disputes, the characters of Pratt’s stories, a mixture of historical fact and fiction, sail from one breathless, brilliantly researched adventure to another.

Hugo Pratt’s attention to detail played a huge part in the success of the stories, and it shouldn’t be overlooked that between them Hugo Pratt and Casterman published exactly the sort of graphic novels comic book fans want to read.  Not only is much of the research included in the form of sketches and wonderfully evocative watercolours, but the books also often contain maps, technical details and even some historical background details.

In 1970 Hugo moved to France where Corto Maltese became the main character in the magazine Pif Gadget, and from the mid 70s until he left France for Switzerland in 1984, Corto Maltese reigned over the seven seas, in his own Band Dessines, with his adventures translated into many languages.  In a testament to the character’s success, in 1983, several magazines in France and Italy were entirely devoted to the adventures of Captain Maltese.

From 1984, until he died in 1995, Hugo Pratt lived in Switzerland in a house overlooking Lake Geneva; where his vast library of some 30,000 books, including his beloved tales by Conrad and London and Melville, could be easily housed.  Corto Maltese brought his creator some well deserved fame and wealth, and in exchange Hugo Pratt brought joy, inspiration, adventure, and a little magic, to many.

(All Hugo Pratt illustrations, copyright, ©, 2008, Hugo Pratt, the estate of Hugo Pratt, Casterman, or their respective copyright holders)

Internationally published cartoonist Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

What we need to bear in mind is that when they talk about the “low cost” of producing a minicomic, many creators are talking in relative terms.  They do not include the time it takes to produce the publication because they are often seasoned minicomics creators, or full-time, or part-time, professional illustrators, writers, or cartoonists, and they often just “tack” the tasks involved onto their normal working day – which unless a tight deadline is looming, can often be a moveable feast that can easily accommodate a little extra drawing or scanning or printing.  It’s not thoughtlessness, it’s just that after a time, tasks like drawing the thing in the first place, balancing the page count, producing the master-copy, and scanning and printing, have all become second-nature.

The fact that many other minicomics creators might not be able to afford the time demanded by a traditional minicomic, because they have to fit all the tasks involved in making the thing around a demanding full-time job, real life pursuits, and maybe raising children, is often as overlooked – as is the fact that the job of producing the minicomic yourself, actually requires quite a few specialist skills.  Again, this is not thoughtlessness, I’m afraid that experience has taught me that cartoonists simply, routinely, undervalue the skills they have, and the work they do.  In my opinion, whatever else the self-publishing lark may be, it is far from simple, and not always an enjoyable and stress-free hobby.  In fact, an illustration of just how many ‘skills’ the average minicomics producer uses, and takes for granted, was demonstrated to me when I saw just how many students at Teacher Training College couldn’t produce the most basic photocopied 4-page booklet, as a teaching resource, despite being able to access the very best equipment available.  Imagine then, how they would have coped if the booklet they were producing was the same size as just one volume of Gerry Mooney’s Sister Mary Dracula comic, pictured in progress below.

(Gerry Mooney’s studio as he works on his comic book Sister Mary Dracula)

Of course if you already have some of the tools of the cartooning trade at home, the paper, the pens, the ink or the graphics tablet, the computer, the scanner, the printer, a paint programme like Photoshop, a layout programme like Acrobat, or Quark Express, or In-Design, or even a trusty old copy of Pagemaker, the time and effort it takes to do the job will be lessened.  Okay, I’m playing the Devil’s Advocate here, it’s not absolutely necessary to have all that stuff at home, but it is the basic kit that someone like me has, and quite recently I found myself opening my big mouth and telling someone who might not have this sort of gear how quickly and easily they should be able to turn-out a page or two of artwork for an anthology we are working on –  I apologise, it’s just that cartoonists do tend to take it for granted that everyone involved in comic work will be tooled-up.

(Cartoonist Bill ‘Stik’ Greenhead, at work, in his studio, on his World of Cow drawings.  Note the dual-screen set-up, the Graphics Tablet and the scanner or printer, nearby)

Yes you can make your minicomic without all the equipment cartoonists tend to have, and you can access a lot of the tools outside, but again that comes at a not inconsiderable cost, in time and money.  I just can’t help but feel that the cost involved in self-publication, and the sheer hassle it can often be, must be discouraging some and perhaps even many, really talented individuals from getting their ideas down on paper.

If the first-time minicomics creator does intend to produce a lot of minis, then the additional cost of say, a guillotine, a Print Gocco, plus bulbs inks and paper, a long stapler, or some other kind of binder, additional laser cartridges, or the printer inks, will all be money well spent in the long run – but it still makes the set-up costs for that first minicomic alarmingly high.  One thing’s for sure, whilst the end result can look charmingly traditional, even amateurish and folksy, you certainly need to know what you are doing in order to put the thing together yourself.  So whilst the relative cost of producing a traditional minicomic can be cheap, if you know what you are doing and providing you are not going out and buying £800 worth of hardware, and £1200 worth of software to produce 10 copies of your one and only comic; that ‘relative’ cost, also cloaks a number of otherwise hidden factors.

It is easy therefore, to see the attractions of publishing your comic through a POD service like ComixPress, or Lulu, or Ka-Blam, instead of printing the thing yourself.  Instead of searching around for a small copy shop with a good attitude, a good photocopier, and maybe a stapling service, you can simply create one virtual comic, turn your comic into a PDF file, jpegs, or tiffs, and upload it to the POD Company’s website and then sit back and wait.  And for around $160 (I don’t know, one minute that’s £80 and the next £90 – let’s call it £90, or 90p a copy) you can then have 100 copies of your own 24-page, black and white, comic book with full colour cover, delivered to you, or delivered elsewhere, or sold online through your own shop-front on the Company’s website.  And whilst, I’m sure that route is not totally hassle-free, it is nonetheless, as far as I am concerned, an option that any serious minicomic creator has to consider.

Of course I’m slightly partial; the last time I produced a 12-page minicomic, it cost me around £100 (say $180) for hardware, because I had an inkjet problem, and then had to have a new scanner sent over from France (yes, I bought a scanner that was made in Britain from France and paid duty and tax and it was cheaper than buying it in Britain) plus around another £15 ($28) for paper and ink, to produce around 20 copies (x 12 pages) – which works out at £5.75 (around $10 a copy), which is ludicrously expensive – and that figure doesn’t include the 5 days I stopped earning whilst I drew the thing, and then planned it out, and put it together, and then my postage costs.  And what’s more, I wasn’t sure how to work my new scanner-software and printed many of the pages below print-quality at around 150dpi (dots per inch, 300 is the start of print quality); so it was expensive and it still contrived to look pretty bad.  That episode caused me to pause, and led me to rethink my attitude toward self-publishing, and I haven’t made any traditional minis since, and I don’t think I’ll be making any traditional-style minis again.

Other advantages of farming the job out are, you have an additional shop-window through which to sell your masterpiece in hard copy, or as an eBook; you don’t have to store lots of comicbooks in the garage, unless you want to, and you can meet up online with your fellow creators between Comics Cons.  A quick trawl through the sites tells you that the POD Companies are becoming more and more sophisticated, boasting point-and-click online stores, news blogs, and forums.  The forums are a particularly good idea because networking is important for self-publishers and in general the buzz between the various creators on those forums seems to be very lively, and supportive.  Self-published work has always thrived on friends and community, and there certainly seems to be a good community spirit and plenty of moral support on the various boards.

Publishing with 4 of the best known POD Companies

With most of the POD companies, when there is a set-up cost, you pay that cost only once.  The set-up cost is calculated according to the specifications of your book, and one proof copy; and it’s a charge for the work involved in getting your files ready to print. Your proof can be in your hands very quickly, in most cases within around 10 days.  If you find there are corrections that need to be made, the setup fee should cover those corrections – and you should not be expected to pay additional “set-up” fees for reorders.

1. Café Press – The example that Café Press gives is for a 100-page perfect-bound book, so, maybe a comic book creator should think of this as a “graphic novel” or a collection, or anthology, of 3 issues of their comic book bound as 1 volume.  Viewed like this, the base-price that Cafe Press quotes, of $10.00, around £6 or £7, does not sound so high.  Pricing is based on the number of pages in your book, plus the type of binding you choose, and base prices are the same for all book sizes.  You have the benefit of no setup fees, or minimum quantities, for your black and white book with full colour cover, and in addition, you can choose from Saddle Stitch, Wire-O, or Perfect Bound, binding, and from 5 different book sizes.  According to their press, the pricing, in this case $10 per unit includes book production, order management, fulfilment, and customer service.  As with any means of POD production, you choose the retail price; and sales from Cafe Press’s site earn you the difference between the retail price, what you charge for each copy, and the base price charged by Café Press, in this case $10 per copy.

2. Ka-Blam – Ka-Blam boasts that their price for POD colour is “the best around”.  KA-BLAM offers 100 full colour comic books, with full colour cover, inside and out, and full colour artwork, with a Kablam advert on the back page, for around $2.64 (£1.50) per copy.  The same specs, but with a cover that has full colour on the outside with black and white insides and black and white artwork, with a Ka-Blam advert on the back cover of your comic, brings your unit price down to around $1.55 (around 80p) per comic.  Of course, you may feel that you can find a business that will pay you more than that to advertise on your back cover, so you would do your own bit of business there and the cost with no Ka-Blam add would be  $3.29 (£1.70) and $2.20 (£1.20) respectively, meaning you would want to sell your ad-space for at least enough money to cover the difference.  There is also the bonus that all new Ka-Blam customers get a $20 credit when they register.

You can publish standard-sized comics or manga-sized comics, saddle-stitched to a maximum of 52 interior pages, or fill their perfect-bound trade paperbacks with up to 800 pages of comic adventures.  They do not handle PDF files, preferring instead Tiff files, PC formatted, flattened with no extra layers or channels, and RGB colour mode, for best results.  The work should be archived in a Zip or Rar or StuffIt file.  You can sell your published comic through Ka-Blam’s online store, IndyPlanet.

3. Lulu – Lulu has much more choice when it comes to formatting your work than the other POD companies.  Their shop-window is excellent, and creators can have their own shop on the Lulu site.  The Lulu forums are lively, and the site has a good collective spirit about it.  However, Lulu is the priciest of the three POD companies we are looking at here, and each one of our 100, 32-page (32 is the minimum amount of pages) black and white comics with full-colour wrap-around cover costs around $3.57 or £2.00.  There is mention of a bulk discount of 31% for ordering more than 25 comic books, and I would assume that is not included here, so that brings the cost down from $357 (£180) to $249.90 (£130) or around $2.49 (£1.30) per comic book.  The collection of World of Cow cartoons by Stik is an attractive 45 – page, full colour book, printed on nice heavy gloss paper, with a full-colour cover, but the unit cost reflects that quality and it is a hefty $15 (£7.50) or so per book.

4. ComixPress – ComiXpress offers a 24-page black and white comic, with full-colour outer cover and black and white insides, and a ComixPress advert on the back page, for $1.43 (around 80p), plus there’s a set-up cost of $16.90 ( around £10).  For a full colour cover, with black and white insides and full colour pages, carrying a ComixPress advert on the back page, the cost is around $2.56 (around £1.40), with a set-up fee of $19.20 (about £12).  With ComixPress, a new customer referred by an existing customer will receive a 10% discount on their first order, with the referrer receiving a $5.00 credit on their account, which brings the price for our black and white comic, with full colour cover on the outside and black and white cover on the inside, down to around $1.29 (maybe 70p) per comic.

If I’m to be completely honest, for me, the hitherto best argument, and the main selling point of the traditional minicomic, is the very personal quality it affords.  A traditional minicomic has a very personal touch; it often comes signed and personalised by the creator.  It can also be hand-coloured, be personalised with different added inserts for every different buyer, or be presented in a completely non-traditional and surprising way, such as Mark Campos’s one-page story about a frog – which was also folded as an origami frog (I love this idea.).

(Mark Campos’s charming mini comic unfolds to reveal a one-page story that features a frog)

Just knowing that a highly skilled and talented illustrator/musician like Marcellus Hall actually goes to the trouble of signing his comic, and dropping his promotional postcard into the package he sends you when you buy his book from his website, somehow makes the whole thing less like commerce, and more like a shared secret, or like belonging to an exclusive club.  Although I think Marcellus’s book Legends of the Infinite City, which is filled with his drawings of New York, was printed by a booklet company, the paper is really nice, it still retains that folksy homemade minicomics appeal.

(Marcellus Hall’s illustrations can be found in the New Yorker and other publications)

Nowadays though, it is perfectly possible, and not at huge expense, using POD, to have your comic book printed in a variety of ways, shapes, and styles.  If you wish, you can have just one copy of your comic printed, and so theoretically make a different and unique insert for a hundred copies of your comic, and even a different last page with a different ending for each one if you so wish (Has POD made the labyrinthine book, in Borges story The Garden of Forking Paths, where everything that can possibly happen does, possible?).  You could even, if you had a mind to, create an entire comic book of stories with pages that can be assembled into a Mark Campos-style origami frog, or whatever object the story was about – there are many exciting possibilities – and you can even have your comic books printed, sent to you, and then you can colour every page by hand, if you have half a mind to do so. In other words, the fact that the comic isn’t printed out on your own printer, or photocopied and stapled in the local Xerox, but is instead photocopied on a digital copier and stapled somewhere else, provides no bar to the creator providing a personal touch.  All you have to do is take shipment of a batch of your comics or books, and then sell them from your own website, or provide them to shops that sell independently produced comics, with signed issues and/or different inserts and other personal touches added.

Having said all that, there remains one reason for digging our heels in and arguing the case for self-publication, and it is, I think, the loudest and best argument; the worry about ceding editorial control over to another body – the POD Company.  Well, we are all adults, and it looks as though at least one of the POD publishers is content to label any mature work as such, and print it, but it is unlikely that any will print work they consider to be outrageously obscene.  To get round this problem, we just have to admit to ourselves that some minicomics are better off being produced the traditional way, although I have to say I have seldom if ever seen a minicomic as obscene as the Tijuana Bibles, which were perhaps very much a product of their time.  To my mind, neither POD nor self-publishing diminishes the status of the minicomic, and as far as I’m concerned the new POD services enrich and empower us as creators.

Whilst the shape of the new non-traditional minicomics is more uniform than some traditional minis, with many creators opting for the traditional comic book format, the contents are still as rich and varied as ever, ranging from kid-friendly stories, to humour strips, to mature reader titles – and from stand-alone stories, to complete series.  With his comic Sister Mary Dracula, published through ComixPress, Gerry Mooney is in the process of producing a series, whereas Jason Nocera, also through ComixPress, used the same format to create a comic book featuring his comic strip characters Buddy and Hopkins.  The cartoonist known as Stik, Bill Greenhead, meanwhile, publishes his Cow panels and strips in an ongoing World of Cow series, in a slightly smaller, book format, with a thicker cover and glossier full-colour pages inside, through Lulu.

(Gerry Mooney’s Sister Mary Dracula #2, Paul B Rainey’s Memory Man, Stik’s Cow Tales and Jason Nocera’s Buddy and Hopkins)

The major difference today is the cost involved in producing the publications.  Where once only very daring and brave creators like Harvey Pekar dared to tread, because having your own comic printed to industry standard was a very risky and expensive business, thanks to POD, anyone who wants to see their work produced in a high quality format, can follow.

Gerry Mooney’s Sister Mary Dracula, is the story of Terry Malloy, a fourth-grader at St. Egregius, the Stricter, Elementary School, who is sure his teacher is a vampire and that she has selected him for her next victim.  Mooney, who has created work for various publications including Forbes, Parents, Publisher’s Weekly, the New York Daily News, Mad, Newsweek, and The New Republic, has embraced the non-traditional route when it comes to getting his project out to the public.  An enthusiastic user of POD, Mooney says:

“Print-On-Demand publishing allows artists to sell merchandise with very minimal start up costs, or even for no upfront costs at all.  Anyone can go to sistermarydracula.com to read several sample pages, view the original flash animation, tour the Sketch Gallery, read the “How I Draw a Comic” feature or buy the comic book and a raft of merchandise online.”

Mooney’s Sister Mary Dracula was created, first, as a Flash animation, and in 2004 the movie was selected to premiere at the San Diego Comic Con, Independent Film Festival.   With more and more people heading to his site to see the animation of Sister Mary Dracula, Mooney began thinking of creating a graphic novel based on the movie, and establishing a Sister Mary Dracula website.  It’s from that site that Mooney sells the first two chapters of the graphic novel, in comic book form.  With this series of steps, Mooney is utilising all the modern technological advances that are now available to creators and with the publication of his graphic novel as a series twenty four-page comic books, each of which continues a chapter in the story of Sister Mary Dracula, Mooney’s use of ComixPress’s POD service looks like a natural progression in what is swiftly becoming a necessary part of the serious creator’s new business model – with the creator in control of his or her creation’s every development.   According to Mooney the process of publishing through ComixPress is painless and relatively straight-forward:

“The way it works is like this: You go to their website and set up a print job, specifying number of pages and other formatting. You then send your files (I send a CD but I think they have an ftp site) in PDF format. Once they receive and check the files, they send an email invoice.  For the 24 page comics I am doing, the setup fee is about $18.00 (which is currently around £11 I think) which includes one proof copy.

It takes about three weeks to get the proof. If you like it you can then order any quantity, as well as have it sold on their web store. For the 24 page comic each copy costs $1.35, and I sell them for $2.95.

None of this involves any copyright or rights to the content of any kind. ComixPress is just a Print-on-demand service. I also have been very happy with the quality, so much so that I skipped getting a proof copy for chapter two of Sister Mary Dracula and just ordered copies when I sent my files in.”

(Like Achewood, you can buy Sister Mary Dracula comics directly from the creator, Mooney’s, site – www.mooneyart.com)

Another convert to POD, is Bill (Stik) Greenhead.  Like Gerry Mooney, Stik is a cartoonist and an animator, and his POD characters from his World of Cow series also appear in Flash movies that you can find on his site – along with information about buying his books.  Unlike Mooney, though, Stik publishes his books through Lulu, and his comics are more a soft cover book than a comic book; and they are in full colour.

Stik started drawing his cow jokes when he was one of only two cartoonists in the running to design the Kraft Dairylea Cows, but even as he was supplying the agency with his designs, he could see the possible gag potential of his bovine characters:

“I thought it would be great if each triangle or pack had a different joke on it. Cards perhaps, a huge collectable range. I think the creatives were very keen on my ideas, but there was a problem. My cows were essentially the same design as they are now, except the legs were more like thick string. I think ultimately the design put them off and they went with the other fella.”

Stik, who draws his cartoons directly into the computer using a Wacom tablet and Photoshop software, “to keep a natural freehand look”, continued to work on and develop his characters and the internet, particularly his blog, provided an opportunity for him to develop the work and get it out to the wider public:

“I developed the cows, but never really found a home for them. Then when I turned 40 I started a blog. To fill the blog daily I thought I’d set myself a challenge. I was feeling like I wasn’t capable of creating new material, so I declared to the world (about 100 odd readers, anyhow) that I would create a cow joke a day for a year. I did it and, my book 365 Cow Jokes later was the result of that first challenge.  I’m up to 524, and counting.

It’s amazing to see how the strip has developed over the last 2 years. The cows now talk, fly, tell gags and even the grass is beginning to get a part. It’s all down to blogging. It forces me to create cartoons daily; something I’d never have done. I’d start out with good intentions and get to about 30 strips and give up.”

(Stik’s storefront at Lulu.com via his blog)

Not so very long ago, none of these comics might have existed at all, unless the creators’ had been willing to either wait until some publisher got around to maybe taking a chance on the work, or unless the creators’ themselves came into a large amount of disposable income to take on the Offset-printing gamble.  I costed this stuff myself back in the day (BPOD – before print-on-demand) and the best deal I could find for a 32 page, full-colour comic, was a five-figure outlay for the 100,000 copies I needed to subscribe to, in order to keep the cost down.  Today of course, I can use POD with ComixPress, or Lulu, or Ka-Blam, or We Do Comics, and I can have as few as one single copy of my full-colour comic book printed for me, and no doubt thanks as much to the new competition as technological advances in traditional printing, I can even find a printer who will knock me up as few as 50 or 100 Offset copies.

The very low cost of getting a very professional POD publication out there is surely very tempting for those who have had their fingers burned creating the allegedly cheap-as-chips traditional minicomics.  Their experience flies in the face of the received wisdom that producing a traditional minicomic is fast, easy and cheap – all of which is true, up to a point, because whilst it can be relatively easy and cheap for some people to produce a traditional minicomic, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is going to be easy and cheap for you to produce your minicomic, particularly if it is your first.  In fact I would go so far as to say that unless you are putting together a very short, very basic, comic, with the same paper outside and in, and handing the job of printing and stapling over to an outfit like Kinkos, that you might be in for a shock when you see just how much time, effort and money it takes to put even the most amateurish-looking, little minicomic together.  Anything more sophisticated, will very probably require at least your presence during the printing process, if not your direct supervision, and possibly a lot more of your time, and your effort than you can afford to give.  I, for one, am not going to refuse to recognise a self-published comic as a minicomic, simply because it has a different format, or because it looks too good.

In The Changing Face of Minicomics, Part 3, we will look at more closely at the pricing of POD and the true cost of making a homemade, folksy, traditional, minicomic; Part 1 can be read here.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

(Just one small corner of what I laughably refer to as a studio.  If I get cold-callers, they usually end up listening to Sully)

And then there’s the American Splendor DVD, which has a tiny free American Splendor comic book in it, well that leads to all the American Splendor collections and anthologies and graphic novels and comics needing to be added to the ‘must get’ list; and this throws up all sorts of additional problems because whilst Harvey Pekar writes all the stories in American Splendor, there are many illustrators, and they are now all linked in this chain of relevance on the OCD scale and their output has to be collected too.  It is easy to see how these collections -  sorry, this “research” library -  can get out of hand.

But don’t take my word for it, to test the extent of some cartoonists’ obsessions, all you have to do is go to any cartooning forum and look at the threads.  I guarantee you’ll find the inevitable posts on ‘best paper for drawing comics on’ and ‘best pens for cartooning’ and ‘how big do you like to draw your originals’ have many, many, more views and responses than almost any other threads.  Of course part of this obsessive worrying about how their own drawings size and shape up has a lot to do with the loneliness of the job that Seth spoke about in The Quiet Art of Cartooning in The Walrus, but it pops up so frequently that some cartoonists have started referring to these obsessions as ‘pen envy’.  Every so often though, the many obsessions of these strange creatures throws up an interesting debate, and one such dialogue has been the one surrounding the nature of minicomics in the face of new technologies.

For some people, a hardcore of creators and consumers out there, a mini-comic must stick to the traditional mini-comic format, with pages no larger than around 5 1/2” x 4 1/8” or around 5 3/4 “ x 4” or ¼ A4 or in the US ¼ Letter size.  This was the format I used a couple of years back when I made the mini Little Cenobites, with the rest of the KDR McKie clan.  The back and front cover below covers half an A4-size page so I printed 2 covers per A4 sheet and guillotined them in half.

(Little Cenobites, copyright, ©, 2006, KDR McKie)

For some, it is only by sticking rigidly to this format that we ensure that this egalitarian art form can be created with a minimum of fuss and a minimal amount of materials, either on a home-printer or in a local copier shop.  For others though, and there is a growing number of them, minicomics have already changed, and must continue to change and take advantage of newly affordable technologies, particularly Print-on-Demand, POD, which makes it cost effective for the first time for creators to publish as few as 1 or as many as 1,000 or more copies of their minicomic.

Print-on-Demand, POD, comic books are produced using high quality laser printing.  Because this is essentially a very high quality photocopy, rather than a job that requires expensive printing plates or negatives, the POD printers can print as few as 1 copy, which the company can produce for the small set-up fee some of them charge for the initial proof (most have now waived the set-up fee completely), or as many copies as you require.  Traditional Offset printing, which was once the only way to go, can produce each comic book for less, but the set-up fee is usually higher and you almost always have to order a minimum amount of comic books to keep the cost per unit low.  In other words the cost for just 1 copy or just 10 copies using this method is just too prohibitive.  Today, thanks to technological advances, the difference between the quality of POD and Offset are not so large, and decreasing all the time.

I have to admit, I am one of those who believes that the term “minicomics” means much more than just a “small-comic format”, or “handmade”.  My own feeling is that the key elements that make a minicomic, is being creator-owned and self-published. However, I may have to rethink the ‘self-published’ element because I think that groups of creators and small publishing firms with indy sensibilities do publish what I would call minicomics because the emphasis is more on publishing a work of art than making a profit at the expense of the creator.  With these small publishing concerns and groups, the publishing exercise is more a partnership of equals than is the case with big mainstream publishing concerns.  In order to arrive at this conclusion, I suppose I have to add as an inherent quality in respect of a minicomic would be an anticipated small readership, and the word ‘anticipated’ allows me the wriggle-room for runaway successes like Adriane Tomine’s hugely popular minis.

(Sleepwalk, © 1995, Adriane Tomine)

It seems churlish and even a little Luddite-like to bemoan the new technologies now available to us and argue that professionally printed comic books and POD books and booklets cannot be referred to as minicomics, despite the fact that they are published by the creators and marketed in minicomic venues, simply because they look either too different from traditional minis, or too like traditional comic books.  The argument appears to be that they can’t be “minicomics” not because of their format, because the minicomic format should be unregimented and free, and not because they are not published by their creators, but because they look too professional.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that hand-made, stapled, minicomics have a long and proud history, and many minicomic producers see themselves, rightly I think, as part of a long established tradition of self-publishing that embraces sedition, subversion and even revolution – especially the sexual kind.  Perhaps, for that reason, those mini-comics producers who are wary of a POD service feel that the people who provide such a service might try to proscribe the sexual or religious or even the political attitudes of the work they print.  This argument does have merit, would any POD service publish those infamous Tijuana Bibles today?  And some minicomic reviewers seem to be suggesting there is a tightening of the drawing, if not a softening of the tone or a lessening of the humour in Josh Latta’s now much more polished looking Rashy Rabbit – that, I hasten to add, might actually just be down to artistic development and a change in drawing format.  It looks terrific to me.

(Rashy Rabbit, © Josh Latta, 2008)

Meanwhile the poor minicomics, the professional looking ones, are regarded as too professional looking in some circles, and not professional enough in others.  Most mainstream publishers regard anything not published by a mainstream publisher as vanity publishing, even if the “vanity publisher” happens to be an illustrator and/or writer with years of experience and a truckload of published work to his or her credit.  Here, in Britain, the Arts Council do not consider self-published work for any grants or bursaries because, I presume, that would lead to amateurs attempting to obtain funding to produce art – Heaven forefend (they’re not overly enthusiastic about helping small professional publishers doing graphic novels or comics either – Joe).  Today, surely, more than ever, the pejorative term “vanity publishing” no longer has any relevance as many proven professionals are going the self-published route because they want to make more than the £4,000 to £8,000 per annum from their books that traditional mainstream publishing secures for them.

Not that every minicomic makes its creator money; most don’t, but the internet has played a large part in making the art form more accessible, and it has helped bring more people to minicomics.  Whilst it is still a truism, I think, that you should make minicomics because you want to participate in an exciting, vibrant, and dare I say ‘currently hip’ art form; it would be naive of us not to notice that the Internet has, thanks to sites like Rick Bradford’s marvellous Poopsheet Foundation, Whitey’s equally wonderful  Optical Sloth,  and the currently mothballed USS Catastrophe (still worth the visit to see Kevin Huizenga’s artwork in the online archive), et al,  helped, generate more interest in minicomics.  And with independent-creator friendly shops like Forbidden Planet International, in the UK, and Quimbys in the US, to name but two very important links in the chain, to say nothing of forums like SPX and Fluke, this previously underground art form has all but surfaced into the clear glare of daylight.

The Internet has also provided some creators of webcomics, who have built up a loyal audience of readers eager to get hold of printed matter, an opportunity to get their creations down from the web, and between the sheets of a professionally produced comic book well ahead of some of their “better known” print syndicated rivals.  And where many supposedly popular comic strip collections, that still command a place in newspapers all over the world, would simply appear briefly and head for the remainder bin, the POD collections of many web-based comic strips will remain on sale forever, thanks to the Long Tail business model and the increasing popularity of digital books.  Thanks to POD, comics that were once regarded as outside the mainstream, can actually straddle the divide and have one foot in the mainstream and still keep one foot firmly on independent ground.  Spike’s popular web comic Templar Arizona’s first print run was funded by donations from the strip’s eager readers and like the incredibly popular Achewood, it has not needed to compromise on its “indie credentials” in order to achieve its success.

(an example of successful minicomics – www.achewood.com)

Creative, and financial success stories like Achewood, have helped encourage the evolution of both minicomics and cartoonists themselves, because it is difficult nowadays to look at some cartoonist’s websites, and equate the people behind them with the popular myth of someone who draws well, but has little or no business acumen.  The advent of POD, along with the ability to get associated merchandise online at little or no cost, along with the increasing popularity of EBooks has certainly woken some creators up to the possibilities (and mobile phone content publishers like ROK are offering another possible method of distribution and possible revenue – Joe), and many are taking the opportunity to produce and control their own very professional-looking work on both sides of the Atlantic.

In The Changing Face of Minicomics, Part 2, we will look at examples of the new professional-looking minicomics from Gerry Mooney, Stik, Paul B. Rainey, and others.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

(the Batman Black and White Bob Kane statue, (c) DC)

I was intrigued by masks.  Every weekend when I was growing up the Saturday Matinee bill was full of masked people: The Scarlet Horseman, Zorro, The Lone Ranger, Rocketman, and my favourite, The Batman.  Intriguingly, many of the baddies also wore masks; all the baddies in the cowboy movies wore their neckerchiefs over the lower halves of their faces to mask their wicked deeds, and Batman regularly took on some masked nemesis or other.  The mask kept all their true identities secret, it was hard, at times, to tell the good guys from the bad guys – which was possibly, on reflection, a good lesson to learn.

(the Batman serial from 1943, Copyright, © 1943, Columbia TriStar)

Of all these characters, only The Batman continues to have any meaningful cultural impact, and the Batman, from the series, made in 1943 (it ran in UK cinemas for years throughout the 1960s in matinee shows), looks remarkably like the template for Batman today, with no Bat-signal yellow disc surrounding the Bat-logo on his vest, and a very dark, bat-like cowl.  Of course he drove a Cadillac, rather than a Batmobile – but it was the way he drove that mattered.  Also, in a strange way, it too was masked, with the soft-top down Bruce Wayne was at the wheel, and with the top up, the car carried The Batman.  And that Batman, the 1943 Batman, carried more menace than the Batman from the 1960s, and had more in common with Tim Burton’s movie Batman of 1989 and Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight, mainly because all these visions of Batman, like the 1943 serial contained more elements of the original 1939 comic book character than the 1960s pop art, version.

It’s easy today to pick out elements of the story of Batman that came from existing ideas, you can see a bit of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a little Sherlock Holmes, a touch of The Shadow, some Tarzan, a bit of The Bat and much Pulp sensibility.  Kane himself credited Zorro, Leonardo Da Vinci’s bat-like flying machine, and the 1930 film The Bat Whispers as influences, but that is how these ideas work, there is, as they say, nothing new under the Sun.  It is how these characters are combined in a new way that matters.

Much more irritating is the attempt, in some circles to almost remove Bob Kane’s input from the mix, and that is quite ridiculous.  If you take away any other characters, including Bill Finger, who joined Bob Kane’s studio in 1938, as a writer, after meeting Kane at a party and being offered a job ghost writing the strips Rusty and Clip Carson, you still have Bob Kane coming up with his idea of a Batman.  Of course the character may well have looked entirely different; in his autobiography, written in 1989, Kane admits that:

“One day I called Bill and said, ‘I have a new character called the Bat-Man and I’ve made some crude, elementary sketches I’d like you to look at’… I only had a small domino mask, like the one Robin later wore, on Batman’s face. Bill said, ‘Why not make him look more like a bat and put a hood on him, and take the eyeballs out and just put slits for eyes to make him look more mysterious?’ At this point, the Bat-Man wore a red union suit; the wings, trunks, and mask were black…Bill said that the costume was too bright: ‘Color it dark gray to make it look more ominous’. The cape looked like two stiff bat wings attached to his arms…we realized that these wings would get cumbersome when Bat-Man was in action, and changed them into a cape, scalloped to look like bat wings when he was fighting or swinging down on a rope… and we added them(gloves) so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints.”

Kane would later express regret that Finger wasn’t given a co-creator credit for his input, honouring him as ‘a contributing force on Batman right from the beginning’ and praising him for being ‘influential in setting the style and genre’ of the comic.  Certainly there can be no denying that Bill Finger’s input was essential, suggesting Batman’s cowl instead of the domino mask, a cape instead of wings, removing the red sections from the original costume, and of course creating an explanation of why Batman exists.  It was Finger who came up with the name Bruce Wayne, an amalgam of Scotland’s Robert the Bruce and Mad Anthony Wayne, so his input was clearly invaluable.  For my purposes though, it is worth noting that whilst Bill Finger played a large part in the creation of The Batman’s more menacing look, he also played a large part in softening the character by moving Batman away from Kane’s vision of a superhero-vigilante and turning the character into a scientific detective; and by introducing Robin the Boy Wonder, both testaments to Finger’s appreciation of Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Doctor Watson; and both elements that detracted from the darker, Gothic elements of The Batman’s character.

“Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob… Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn’t have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That’s how Robin came to be.”

For me, Kane’s interpretation of the character remains the best interpretation of The Batman.  Kane’s Batman had more panels, and was drawn smaller than all the other characters in Detective Comic #27, and yet that 6-page inaugural episode was the most dramatic, most visually arresting, story in the comic book, and its impression lingers long in the memory.  It comes as no surprise to me, that there is a notable inclination amongst all the more recent Batman artists, and movie makers, to model their characters not on the later ‘ghosted’ illustrations of the character, but on the original drawings of Bob Kane himself.  And although these drawings are often referred to as ‘crude’ and ‘rudimentary’- sounding eerily reminiscent of the criticisms Siegel and Shuster had to put up with while they were working on Superman – it is not a view shared by the many of today’s Bat-fans, or by illustrators like Jerry Robinson, one of the art assistants Kane hired when DC wanted more Batman stories than Kane’s studio could deliver.

(Millennium Edition, Detective Comics 27, Copyright ©, 2000 DC Comics)

The massive success of the character, and the merchandising opportunities that success afforded, was surely at least part of the reason The Batman began to veer so drastically away from the original vision of a ruthless, masked, vigilante.  As ‘ghost artists’ like Dick Sprang, drawing unaccredited under Kane’s supervision, and writers like Gardner Fox, created a more child-friendly super hero with a heavy emphasis on Batman’s super arsenal of Bat-toys, the character became less of a dark, night-time avenger, and more of a primary coloured day-time hero.

It should be no surprise that Kane’s drawings are still popular, he was, after all, an accomplished and skilful illustrator, who studied art at Cooper Union, and the Art Students League, and then spent time at the Max Fleischer Studio as a trainee animator, before, in 1936, he began producing original comic characters for Wow, What A Magazine!.  About a year later, he joined one of the first ‘comic book packagers’ (a company producing comics on demand for publishers), Eisner & Iger, where he created the impressively dark Peter Pupp, and during this period he would also produce work for the companies that would later merge to form DC Comics, where his creation, The Batman, would debut.

It is not just the look of the character that has endured; the original Bat-vision has too.  In addition to the Bat-costume, all the elements of the Gothic that persist in the story today existed in that debut, and the initial episodes.  Bruce Wayne had a dark doppelganger that haunted the night-time streets of Gotham City, and crept around in a secret bat-ridden passage-way that ran underground between Wayne Manor and an old barn.  Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego was a dark and troubled double, a brooding, masked, vigilante who found justice inefficient, and took the law into his own hands, much to the chagrin of Gotham City’s police department and politicians.

(Millennium Edition, Detective Comics 27, Copyright ©, 2000 DC Comics)

In the first ever Batman story, The Case of the Chemical Syndicate, Batman was pure Pulp, showing no remorse for the criminals he killed and maimed, using whatever weapon came to hand and the police and politicians of Gotham City, and indeed the real people in the real world outside comics, who thought The Batman a bad role model, had a very good point.  That is exactly what he was, and remains, providing people stick to the original template.  The Batman is, after all, a transgressor, a tyrant, a self-appointed judge and jury.  A wealthy socialite and playboy during the day, in the rational world, he becomes a brutal force of nature when night falls on Gotham City’s landscape.  In this respect, Batman is the quintessential Gothic outsider, and the reader can enjoy the terrors and horrors of his transgression, whilst questioning the right of one man to place his judgement above that of others; allowing all the readers themselves to become armchair-vigilantes who rejoice in dispatching the evil doers with extreme prejudice.

Whilst Batman’s exotic villains undoubtedly add to the mix, it is the bare-bones story that continues to thrill, because no matter how many times it is revisited, it adheres to the classic Gothic template.  The Batman’s story produces an uncanny experience for the reader by revisiting the classic Gothic tropes recast to embody and invoke many of the cultural anxieties of the early 20th Century mind; an alienating landscape, in this case Chicago with its dark alleyways and rampant mob murders, a wild untamed forest, represented by the cloud-bursting skyscrapers, and a castle-like building, Wayne-manor, with hidden passageways and hidden chambers.  And it is possible, as Gothic fiction centred on the Southern States of America often focuses on a grand house and an established Southern family disintegrating and decomposing, that the politicians of Gotham represent that decomposing ‘grand house’ and society itself that established disintegrating family.

The “I” of the Gothic tale, the narrator at the heart of the story, is always deserving of special attention and that is especially so in this case.  Is Bruce Wayne a reliable narrator?  He was surely driven at least half-mad in the history that Bill Finger created for him.

(Batman Comics 1, Copyright ©, DC Comics)

It was, surely, at the very least, traumatic when in Gotham’s increasingly lawless streets, young master Bruce Wayne stood by helplessly as his parents were gunned down in cold blood, in front of his eyes, in a robbery.  Just how deep is that scar?  And how brutal was the writer when, as a Gothic plot device intended to create an emotional response in the reader, he orphaned the boy?   The tale of the Batman’s birth is surely one of the most brutal in comicdom.  Forget the story about the fortuitous bat that flies into Bruce Wayne’s room one evening years later, The Batman’s bloody delivery into the world took place in that filth-strewn back alleyway of Gotham, and in that moment, the young Bruce Wayne’s psyche was split in two.

The inspiration of the look of the Joker in Batman: The Dark Knight, supposedly goes back even further than the first Batman story, back to a silent classic made in 1928.  According to Bob Kane, Bill Finger and he created the Joker.  Finger had been to a lot of the foreign films and when he saw the early drawings of a character he remarked that it looked like Conrad Veidt from the movie The Man Who Laughs. A movie, incidentally, based on a story by Victor Hugo about Gwynplaine, whose face has been mutilated into a clown’s mask, his mouth carved into a perpetual grin.  Kane said “He (Finger) took in a movie book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, ‘Here’s the Joker’. Jerry Robinson had absolutely nothing to do with it. But he’ll always say he created it till he dies. He brought in a playing card, which we used for a couple of issues for (the character) to use as his playing card”.

(Conrad Veidt, from The Man Who Laughs, 1928)

The latest Batman movie isn’t perfect, but it is a scary rollercoaster ride, and Heath Ledger is brilliant and terrifying as the Joker.  The thing about The Batman though, is that unlike other major Gothic tales, the story of Batman has been revised and rewritten time and time again, and yet it endures; and more recently it has gone back to its original roots.  At its heart, it is a dark, dark, tale, and at the very end, instead of choosing the rooftops that represent the Sublime, the Batman chooses to head deep into the forest of the city because that is what is required.  It is just another sacrifice for someone who has nothing left but his own sense of duty and personal morality.  No matter what form the story takes or how the adventure twists and turns from here on in, at the heart of its darkness is the story of a young boy whose parents were cruelly taken from him before he could really get to know them, and before they could see what sort of man he would become.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

I have to admit, I found it tough going wading through the smallish section on the UK Underground revolution.  It struck me, reading it, that the history of Britain’s most significant independent comics is becoming more difficult to analyse from our present position.  This is because the work that someone is creating today makes each tiny step they took along the way look significant, so publications that really didn’t, appear to have played a more significant role in the history and development of comics than they really did.  It also means that the narrative becomes more complex as chronological leaps appear between publication dates as artist X, or writer Y, appears in this publication and later, in that one.  For instance, is Electric Soup really a significant publication because Frank (Vincent Deighan) Quitely drew The Best of the West… for it, on his way to create his stellar works for Marvel and DC comics?  Frank’s work apart, arguably, Electric Soup would never even have existed without Viz Comic leading the way.

The tendency is, of course, to regard publications like Viz, and like 2000AD, and even the highly influential Near Myths and Warrior, which Dez Skinn himself edited, as ‘ground-level’ publications, a sort of bridge between the underground and the mainstream, rather than underground, and so therefore, less than ‘revolutionary’.  In this way these comics fall somewhere between the history of British underground comics, and the history of Britain’s mainstream comics, and yet anyone who grew up reading Whizzer and Chips and then happened one day to get a hold of Viz Comic or 2000AD or Warrior, certainly knew that Whizzer and Chips was mainstream, and what they were reading was not – regardless of whether or not the work was published or distributed by a mainstream publisher.  I mean, is Zippy the Clown no longer underground because it is distributed by a major US syndicate, and is Ghost World an indy publication in Eightball and an indy publication as a Fantagraphics anthology, but a mainstream graphic novel as a Jonathan Cape book?  Given that Viz was, initially at least, put together in a bedroom, photocopied, and distributed by hand, it’s hard to see how it could be described as anything other than an underground comic.  The problem seems to be that it became too successful, and in many people’s minds that means mainstream, even though very, very, few mainstream comics, in fact none, ever sold the 1.2 million copies that a single issue of Viz did.

So anyway, there I was working myself into a lather over this, and I kid you not, within minutes, I found myself on The Times online reading Tim Harrison’s article on Viz, from The Times, July 15, 2008;  Viz:  My Part in the Rise of a Canny Comic.  In the article, Tim Harrison talks about his first-edition copy of Viz #1, which is expected to fetch somewhere in the region of £1,000, at Sotheby’s, any day now.  In the piece, Harrison, who once went by the very grand title of ‘Viz’s Southern Regional Chief Editorial Representative Reporter (Articles)’, looks back on the early days of the Newcastle magazine and he mentions something that sounds very familiar to me:

“I’d never answered a small ad in Private Eye before, and I’ve never answered one since. But there was something beguiling about the one that I spotted in May 1979. It read: Bogus correspondant [sic] seeks similar. C. Donald, 2 Lily Crescent, Jesmond, Newcastle 2.”

You see, that’s also the reason why I have the copy of Viz # 12 that you see above.  I also got in touch with the Donald brothers when they were advertising, in Private Eye again, for cartoonists, in 1984.  And I have to tell you, when I opened my little A4 envelope, removed the cover letter from The House of Viz, and read the first Viz Comic I had ever seen, I was helpless with laughter.  I had never read anything so funny.  In fact it made such an impact on me I phoned the creators immediately to congratulate them, and the wear and tear on the comic above happened within weeks of its arrival as I showed it to every one I knew.

Of course Viz worked a little like the London gig by Iggy Pop that inspired everyone who saw it to form a band, and over the next 10 to 15 years the Viz-like publications, including Electric Soup, started to appear.   What didn’t appear though was the comic that Viz almost inspired, Squelch.  In 1985, years before the IPC-friendly version of Viz, Oink, saw the light of day, then IPC comic artist Tom Paterson and I got as far as creating a mock-up copy of our own publication, but the cost of web-offset production was prohibitive.  There was, I’m afraid, no POD and no digital machines and no short print-runs back then, so our comic never quite got off the drawing board.  Years later, one of the characters Tom created for Squelch, The Wet Blanket, had an outing in Oink – the tamest attempt at an underground hybrid ever published.

Of course if Viz #1 goes for more than expected then my comic will also be worth more than it presently is – not that I’m ever going to sell it, you understand.

Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.

Danny Hellman’s Typhon is equally deserving of a handful of superlatives; it is very big, and very colourful, often mesmerising, and very thick, crammed as it is with almost 200 pages of, at times, dizzying talent.

(the cover to Typhon, published and (c) Dirty Danny Press)

Hellman says, in the introduction to this excellent collection for Mature Readers, that whilst he wanted to publish another anthology, he didn’t want it to be connected with the infamous Rall v. Hellman lawsuit, as his previous anthologies Legal Action Comics 1 and 2 had been, so the proposed Legal Action 3 became the mighty Typhon.

There is good reason to believe, I think, that Hellman does indeed want to move on and put the past behind him and that this big full-colour book represents that break with the past. Edited and published by the man himself, it is a much more confident, mature, and polished publication.  It is also a very generous book, because Danny Hellman is himself an accomplished and talented illustrator, whose work has appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious publications, but he makes no attempt to hog the limelight here.  His one story opens the anthology and sets the scene with a modern take on the Typhon legend, but from then on he exhibits a light editorial touch; whilst still managing to succeed in creating a book that is a good read, is well-balanced, harmonious even, and which also showcases the talents of the team of contributors he has assembled.

The question of balance is important in an anthology like this, because to some contributors ‘mature content’ will mean sex and nudity, to others it will mean addressing politics and social issues in a more direct fashion than usual, and to others it will mean experimenting with form and shape or story telling or all of these elements.  Without a sure editorial hand and a clear vision of how the collection will work as a whole, any anthology can come across as a real muddle – leaving the reader alienated enough to put the book down after nothing more than a quick flick-through.  There is a feeling then, that this anthology has been created with the reader in mind, and there is a sense that the editor has carefully considered how all the elements of the book, the drawing styles, the colouring techniques, the flow of the stories, will be perceived by the reader – which does not, believe me, happen as often as one might like it to.

So what we have in Typhon, is a book that successfully blends the disparate styles and talents of all the contributors in a way that is never less than entertaining, and is at times exhilarating.  We move from Hellman’s own steady, Line Clear, drawings, in the opening story, The Terror in Peep Booth Five, all the way through to the hacked and scratched Mummies Curse, by Jeff Roysdon (coloured by Hellman and Paul Hernandez) passing on the way the amazingly intricate, and hugely enjoyable, Strings by Pshaw, the startlingly modern colour work of Motohiko Tokuta’s Signal, and Bald Eagle’s utterly astonishing visceral biro-pen work on Nocturnal Omissions.

As you might expect with an anthology this thick, I have my favourites.  I have been a fan of Hellman’s work for a few years now and loved what he did with Aquaman in DC Comics Bizarro 1.  I like looking at the way he creates depth in his uniform-lined drawings by a clever use of perspective, rather than by using line thickness.  It is a way of drawing that can look deceptively easy and is difficult to master.

That’s what I like about anthologies, you can have favourites.  You can enjoy one or two or three or ten stories, and working your way through to your favourites will almost inevitably lead you to spot something new, perhaps by someone you had never previously heard of, that you can add to your reading list.  One way or another, over a period, your list of ‘favourites’ will grow to include everything in the collection and there is an impressive cast of contributors in Typhon to pick and choose from:  Ken Avidor, Derek Ballard, Gregory Benton, Rupert Bottenberg, DJ Bryant, Mark Campos, David Chelsea, Chris Cilla, Max Clotfelter, Patrick Dean, Bald Eagles, Chance Fiveash, Richard Gagnon, Nicholas Gazin, Robert Goodin, Glenn Head, Danny Hellman, Hugo, Hawk Krall, Tim Lane, Jeff LeBlanc, Pat Moriarty, Cliff Mott, David Paleo, Lorenz Peter, Grant Reynolds, Hans Rickheit, Pshaw, R. Sikoryak, Doug Skinner, Fiona Smyth, Steak Mtn., Takeshi Tadatsu, Tobias Tak, Eric Theriault, Matthew Thurber, Motohiko Tokuta, Rich Tommaso, Rick Trembles, Henriette Valium, Dalton Webb, & Chris Wright.

Tobias Tak is a favourite of mine.  His work reminds me of the old German TV show, ‘Tales from Europe’, and of Rupert the Bear, and of the work of the Brothers Grimm, but funnier and darker, and a lot more fun.  It is at once traditional looking and strange and new.

Another favourite of mine is Hans Rickheit, of Chrome Fetus fame.  But in order to get to his second story in this meaty volume, I had to plough through the work of some cartoonists and writers who were new to me, one of the delights of anthologies I mentioned earlier, and they have now also been added to my list of favourites.  So in addition to being introduced to, and enjoying the work of Derek Ballard, Fiona Smith, Pshaw, Lorenz Peter, Chance Fiveash, Motohiko Takuta, Henrietta Valium, I will now look up other work by theses artists.

I don’t know what it is about Fiona Smith’s work I enjoy so much.  It is, I suspect, elemental, something to do with the colours and the symbolism.  I didn’t even read the story, treating the black word balloons as part of the art.

This is what a good anthology does; it introduces you to new and varied work.  That is why I have described this anthology as ‘generous’, I can tell by the constant delights and surprises on almost every page, that every contributor deserves to be here – or at least that’s the impression I get.  I don’t feel I have been short-changed because the editor or the editor’s agent has angled to get someone into the collection.

The work of Pshaw made a particular impression on me.  When I first picked up the book, I read Strings twice.  The first time was a sort of scan where I just delighted in looking at the drawings, the second was a more measured and studious look, where I followed the intricate patterns of the work, studying the way the artist changed styles on every page of this eight page contribution.  And then I set about reading the words and enjoying the drawings at the same time.  Not consciously, you understand, it just worked out that way.  I’ve read those same eight pages several times since.

I’ll be honest with you, I like the idea of anthologies, in principle, but I often find them disappointing because I almost always find more stories in them that I dislike, than I like.  Recently, I’m come to the conclusion that this is often because of the influence of agents and commissioning editors ‘placing’ clients and/or friends who do not merit inclusion in the work.  I’ve also been annoyed with so-called anthologies that appear to be nothing more than a collection of ‘part-works’ designed solely to promote other work by the contributors.  It doesn’t work.  It doesn’t work because the anthologies themselves don’t work.  Anthologies like Typhon on the other hand, created as a real project, with a real philosophy and aesthetic, and with the reader in mind, do work that way, but it’s a by-product.  The primary aim of an anthology like Typhon is to entertain the reader, and it certainly succeeds in that respect.

Lorenz Peter’s hopelessly inadequate vampire, Gregory Spalding, is hugely enjoyable.  It isn’t very sophisticated and it’s episodic, and it’s silly, but it’s funny, and the vampire squirrels are a great touch.

But now I feel I’m short-changing you, I want to show you drawings from Chance Fiveashes’s charming Robot, from Gregory Benton’s deeply red and bloody and funny Deep as the Ocean Goes, from Into Pieces by Grant Reynolds from Satan’s Slaves by Rich Tommaso.  I want to show you drawings from Hans Rikheit’s Cochlea & Eustachia and I want you to see the marvellous drawings of Henrietta Valium’s The Mask.  But I just can’t show you all of these drawings, there simply isn’t enough space.

What I hope is coming across loud and clear here, is that this very thick, very big, very colourful anthology has something for everyone, and then some.  It has, thankfully, more very good stories than disappointing ones and it has more than its fair share of absolute gems which could be down to chance or down to there being a good crop of cartoonists around, or it could be down to the good eye of the editor – which is my choice of the possibilities.  This anthology has come as both a surprise and a delight to me, and I’ll be reading it for some time, beginning with my ever-growing list of favourites and then spreading to every story from cover to cover.  I’ll also be puzzling over exactly how Motohiko Tokuta achieves the colour effects in Signal – I may be gone for some time.

All Typhon artwork is copyright, ©, 2008, Dirty Danny Press. You can find further details about Typhon on Danny’s blog here, and you can find out about signed, limited edition silkscreen prints by Danny Hellman here (I love his crucifixion scene of a certain troubled pop star myself – Joe).

Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.