“How Angry Freelancers Made It Possible for A New Mainstream Comics Era (Including Vertigo) to Exist“

It all starts off looking at the moment in 1986 where comic publishers began to get a little twitchy over the content of their increasingly adult books – remember 1986, we’re in Maus, Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen territory, the era of “comics aren’t just for kids” and a real move on the part of major publishers (particularly DC) to embrace a new wave of writers and artists wanting to tell far more serious stories.

So far Bissette’s looked at the infamous Friendly Franks bust, the on-cover ratings that both Marvel and DC threatened to bring in, Words & Pictures magazine, Diamond Comics Distributors, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Miracleman, Jack Kirby, Marv Wolfman, lawsuits galore, and much, much more…..

There’s an awful lot of reading there, together with a lot of original documents from the time from Bissette’s archives. Fascinating stuff. Part 1 is here, the latest is Part 7. But Bissette has more to come.

(Creator’s letter from 1986 and a Frank Miller cartoon of the same vintage)

(The first and last issues of S.W.O.R.D. by Gillen and Saunders)

This week saw the final issue of Kieron Gillen’s Marvel series S.W.O.R.D. ship to comic stores. I’ve only read issue one since every time I popped into a comic shop I couldn’t find any issues available. But issue 1 was a blast.

That it’s finished isn’t too much of a surprise; a space based minor X-Men spin-off was always going to be a hard sell. But the difficulty of generating enough sales for series like S.W.O.R.D. is something that, at least to my mind, highlights the problems of the modern superhero comic industry.

Innovation is difficult and different needs time to develop, but it appears that there’s just no time available – sales have to be there from the start and we’re stuck in a cycle of big event series, superhero comics just chasing their own tail, repeating formulas, recycling ideas and failing to innovate or develop. Sure, there are exceptions but there appears to be a complacency in modern superhero comics that worries me.

(The two collected volumes of Phonogram – and that may be all you get)

Another Kieron Gillen comic at an end was highlighted this week in a very frank and illuminating interview over at Comics Alliance in which Gillen talks about the economic factors that essentially mean that the only way we’re going to see a third series of Phonogram illustrated by Jamie McKelvie is posthumously:

“Best plan I have is just writing series 3 and then writing into my will that assuming I die young and Jamie’s still around, lob him whatever’s in my bank account to draw it. Which is assuming he’d even be willing to do it then. It’s not that we’re bitter about it — well, not just because we’re bitter about it — but that it’s been emotionally exhausting.”

“There’s a difference between making only a little money and starving. We’re very much in the latter. Jamie’s lucky to get a couple of hundred dollars from an issue. While he didn’t tell me about this until after it was all done, there were three occasions when Jamie was seriously considering throwing in the towel. The problem is that Image’s deal is a back-end one. Will we make some money off the trade? Maybe. And that’s a big maybe. But that means Jamie not earning any money for the six months it would take to draw it, which is the main reason why we took over a year to do 7 issues. As in, every time Jamie ran out of money, he had to stop and do something else. A couple of hundred dollars doesn’t cover rent or pay for his fashionable haircuts. And doing this bitty work f–ks up the production anyway, because you can’t concentrate or plan. You just spend your entire life in low-level money panic.”

That something as universally acclaimed as Phonogram couldn’t generate enough sales to keep it’s creators in food and hair products is a terrible admission and evidence, if any were really needed, that this comic industry of ours is still resolutely set up to sell stories of super people to an ever diminishing and ageing audience.

Seems to me that we’re seeing the medium increasingly polarised between the high profile literary graphic novels receiving great acclaim and sales and the insular, repetitious world of straight superheroes continuing their perennial recycling of concepts and ideas into huge event driven series that dominate the comic shop shelves.

And somewhere in-between critically acclaimed books like Phonogram, books that potentially have a huge appeal to a real mainstream audience of general book readers seem to be suffering from this polarisation and being lost in the middle.

Phonogram is available in two collections: Rue Brittania and the soon to be published Singles Club. S.W.O.R.D. will no doubt be collected sometime later in the year.

It’s the nose isn’t it? “I’ll get you Peter Parker, I’ll get you“. Or is it just me?

The villaious Red Hooded Claw or Lobster Man is actually a new Vulture. Just in case you wanted to know.

Cyclops and Storm seem somewhere about 7ft tall, Storm appears to have forgotten most of her top and, from that waistline, hasn’t been eating properly either. And poor Emma Frost has suffered from some really bad plastic surgery that’s taken at least 2 ft off her height. Kaare Andrews is normally a pretty good artist, but this is just pretty awful.

This “Astonishing X-Men:Xenogenesis” relaunch from issue 1 marks the start of a new Astonishing line from Marvel, followed swiftly by “Astonishing Spider-Man/Wolverine” by Jason Aaron and Adam Kubert. According to this solicit information:

“They are firmly set in Marvel continuity but also accessible to new readers,” said Marvel Senior VP of Sales and Circulation David Gabriel. “If you’re looking for big changes and character developments or a place to start reading if you are new to comics, this is where you come. Thanks to Joss Whedon and John Cassaday, the name Astonishing is synonymous with excellence. That’s what this line is all about, from the creators to the characters.”

Hang on, “accessible to new readers“, isn’t that what the Ultimate line was touted as? Except Astonishing is “firmly set in Marvel continuity but also accessible to new readers“. Is that even possible anymore?

However, based on just those two titles, Astonishing should be a big hit. I did enjoy Ellis’ first Astonishing X-Men storyline and by all accounts, Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider series from Marvel was a highlight of 2009 from the company. But after that, the almost inevitable wave of Astonishing titles, the crossovers, the major events and everything else that just seems to dilute good, simple, old fashioned storytelling may do to Astonishing what it managed to do to the Ultimate line.

(Gossip by Bob Kessel, after Norman Rockwell.)

(Without Fear by Bob Kessel)

(Via Robot 6)

We’ve seen the cover to the new Brendan McCarthy Dr Strange meets Spider-Man for a while now, but isn’t it about time we actually saw some of McCarthy’s artwork from the series? Absolutely, and thanks to Comics Alliance, we now get a first look. They’re looking just gorgeous, but that was really to be expected – it is Brendan McCarthy after all.

Spider-Man: Fever issue 1 is out in April.

(cover to Marvel’s Timely Comics 70th anniversary hardcover, art by Daniel Acuna, (c) Marvel)

by Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi

Marvel

I enjoyed, and wrote about the first issue of this storyline when it came out here and this collection basically gives us more of the same, which is to say more of Ellis’ voice through the medium of Marvel’s mutant team. Everything you’d expect to find in an Ellis book is on show in spades here; all the sarcasm and cutting dialogue, all the tech heavy plotlines, all the excitement he can generate when he’s even mildly on form.

After finishing Ghost Boxes I realised that what made it feel good and comfortable and enjoyable was the familiarity I felt, not only with Ellis’ writing but in the situations and characters he’s using. Essentially something like Ghost Boxes is a nostalgic look back at the X-Men for those of us who grew up enjoying the heyday of the title. Everything that my teen self found entertaining and enjoyable then is here, just written for the older, more world weary self that I am now. It’s fanboy fiction for an older generation.

The story; The X-Men are off investigating a murder in their new home of San Francisco, where the victim turns out to be an artificially created mutant. They get drawn into a pursuit of the murderer, another mutant, and end up in Indonesia, where amongst an alien tech spaceship graveyard, they find the killer desperately trying to activate a “Ghost Box”. He commits suicide before the X-Men can discover much more of his motives or origins. But the subsequent investigation, much to the chagrin of team leader Cyclops, involves Beast’s half alien girlfriend Agent Brand of S.W.O.R.D., who’s had plentiful contact with these Ghost Boxes before:

Brand: “It’s a Ghost Box. You’ve never seen a Ghost Box? What the hell have you guys been doing all these years that you’ve never seen a Ghost Box? A Ghost Box opens gates between parallel Earths.”

And then it all fits into place. The killer had non Earth mutant DNA because he’s simply not of this Earth, he’s a traveller from an alternate universe. The pursuit takes the X-Men to China and a five square mile scanning dead zone – an area of China that no-one, not even the Chinese themselves knew what went on. Turns out this area was home to the Chinese equivalent of the X-men, mutants who suddenly de-powered on that fateful M-day when most of this Earth’s mutants were de-powered. From here we career into a plotline of alternate earth mutants staging a possible invasion of this Earth and an army of artificial mutants being made just to fight back against this invasion by a figure the X-Men know only too well.

(Such an Ellis panel there. Dazzling us with absolute cutting edge science that he’s amazed by and rolling it out for his story; From Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box. Published and © Marvel)

So in a few short pages Ellis manages to turn a simple murder mystery into a multiverse threatening alien mutant invasion, where the X-Men find themselves in the middle of a war between an old colleague’s artificial mutants and the invading mutants from a parallel Earth. Throw in incredible tech, with a foothold in the here and now but with Ellis’ imagination escalating that real science into sci-fi, verbal sparring between everyone and anyone, and some good old fashioned superhero violence and you end up with a superhero comic with everything that’s good about Ellis’ writing.

Like Morrison with his New X-Men and Whedon with the Astonishing X-Men before him, Ellis dialogues the X-Men as some disfunctional family, all spats, sarcasm and quips. But that’s again just an updating of the classic mutant family idea of Claremont’s time. It’s just that Ellis gets to play to a slightly older crowd. They’ve matured somewhat, but the basic characters are still the same, with the notable exception of Scott Summers. Ever since Morrison’s classic X-Men run I’ve really enjoyed the tension that comes with the idea of Scott Summers and Emma Frost being together, so strangely suited to each other. With this improbable love story Cyclops has developed far beyond the uptight, insecure two-dimensional character he was, and so much of it is down to the incredible Emma Frost – and Ellis gets Emma Frost just right:

(Emma Frost and Cyclops with dialogue courtesy of Warren Ellis. From Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box. Published and © Marvel)

Or the wonderful dialogue between Emma and Storm, as two old adversaries meet:

Storm: I never knew that guilt-free shopping and constant lovemaking could get so boring
Emma: I don’t want to start some tedious argument , Ororo, but let’s be clear. .. I am sick and tired of old team members denouncing me as an evil witch five minutes after they walk in the door.
Storm: Do you know how far I have to go in Wakanda to find someone who’ll dare have an arguament with me these days? I will drink champagne with you and let you insult me until the sun goes dark, I promise…
Emma: Oh, for God’s sake. Drink your tea and shut up woman.
Storm: Oh, thank you.

It’s delivered at breakneck speed, with a constant stream of clever and plot developing dialogue throughout. This is Ellis obviously having a blast, getting to play with Marvel’s premier team, and it seems he’s enjoying himself. Bianchi’s artwork is a lavish affair, full of painterly effects and organic panel borders. It should be distracting, but once I’d managed to get used to it, it wasn’t so bad; all the show and all the flash was thankfully supported by a good sense of storytelling and Bianchi’s art allowed Ellis’ story to flow in just the way it needed to.

The collection also includes the quick short stories of alternate universe X-men by artists as diverse as Alan Davis, Clayton Crain and Kaare Andrews. Originally released as ridiculously overpriced single issues, here they just act as a pleasant enough postscript to the main story. Interesting enough, but nothing compared to what has gone before.

Ellis’ Astonishing X-Men really is a modern day updating of all the stuff we loved as teens, just written with a cutting edge sensibility. Whether it’s designed to hook in new readers is doubtful, but as a nostalgic piece of modern superhero work it had me smiling.

Richard Bruton.