NOTE (8/29/2011): This is a reposting of my coverage of the Michigan State University Comics Forum from 2010. The entries at their original locations have been lost, and the text here was retrieved from archived versions. The full explanation for the loss of the originals can be found here.
Blogging the MSU Comics Forum, 2010 (part 3)
This post is a continuation of my coverage of the MSU Comics Forum 2010, which began in this post.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 11:17 AM
The artist alley meet ‘n’ greet has begun, and the first panel starts in about 15 minutes. Might be a good time to grab some pictures of the gallery stuff, which is still here, but will be gone soon.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 11:56 AM
I just had the opportunity to speak for a few minutes with Randy Scott (at work as usual, acquiring comics for the world’s biggest collection), Ryan Claytor (tabling for And Then One Day and chatting about my recent published article, on comics at MSU), Matt Feazell (The Amazing Cynicalman, great stick figure comedy), Matt Dye (who does his whole production right here at MSU), and Jeremy Bastian (whose Cursed Pirate Girl features artificially aged paper and absurdly intricate line work, done, amazingly enough, at a 1:1 scan ratio).
After dawdling in the artist’s alley for a little too long, I arrive a little late for the first panel. (Oops.) The current subject, with Ethan Watrall, is the future of comics, or comics in digital media. iPad, cell phones, iPods, Kindle, color e-ink, and so on. Will this mean the death of the direct market/local comic book stores? What about publishers? There are analogies to be drawn with the music industry, with greater creative control but perhaps not as much money in physical media. This could be expounded upon at length.
The second speaker, Lee Sherlock, is on his way up now, discussing “Digital Culture Rhetorics in City of Heroes.” Superheroes in gaming space, in other words.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 12:06 PM
City of Heroes is an online games that allows fans to develop and play as their own characters, designing the costumes, creating names, picking from sets of powers, etc. On the one hand, it’s a fascinating example of drawing upon an archetypal kind of character, but it also seems to be an illustration of how formulaic the genre has become. It seems that the old characters are living in endlessly recycled stories, and the newer ones are further recycled versions of the old characters.
One of the cited examples from City of Heroes, Captain Quebec, could be thought of as post-modern: a superhero knowingly patterned on a preexisting character, and as a commentary on that character. A self-aware pastiche. The whole character creation process is an exercise in reshuffling preexisting elements to produce a character who is ostensibly new, but does not offer much that hasn’t been seen countless times before.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 12:21 PM
The next speaker is Joseph Darowski, who presents in the “old school” fashion of printed notes derived from his masters thesis. He raises the point that the superhero–particularly Batman–shares the underpinning of anxiety with the American gothic genre, in that the hero must confront the possibility of becoming the very villain he battles against. This is an interesting thought to pursue, though the converse is also true. The superhero, after all, is what the supervillain is patterned on, and not the other way around.
I’ve thought, on and off, that it would be interesting to see a story in which Batman’s strict moral code and self-image as a crime fighter is revealed to be a complex psychosis. A mechanism to guard Bruce Wayne against the reality that he is virtually indistinguishable from the other freaks and weirdos who populate the underworld of Gotham City. Such a story might be too outrageous for the notoriously risk-averse DC, though for all I know, it’s been done 147 times already.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 12:37 PM
Our latest speaker is looking at the X-Men. He introduces the oft-repeated idea that X-Men originated as an allegory for the Civil Rights Movement, with some going so far as to suggest that Professor X and Magneto are representative of MLK and Malcolm X, respectively. Our speaker is careful to quote Stan Lee, who has refuted such claims and instead proposed the X-Men as a more general parable about persecution against those who are different. (I would further cast doubt that Stan Lee is as responsible for the X-Men as is often suggested. He has admitted on several occasions to taking any credit that isn’t nailed down.)
The speaker also points out that the early X-Men, for all the posturing about struggling against bigotry, were fairly middle-class white characters who, in their civilian lives, could walk among ordinary humans without being noticed. It’s fair enough to claim that this perhaps isn’t quite the racial prejudice metaphor that it’s cracked up to be, but it could be viewed as an unintentional allegory for homosexuals closeting themselves in public.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 12:46 PM
I found the focus on superheroes in the academic panel to be certainly interesting, but a little dissatisfying. For one thing, I thought there was a disconnect between the content of the panel and the largely non-superhero content of the artists alley, which may be more representative of “what’s happening now.” There is so much more to comics culturally than the superhero. Unfortunately, the moral panic of the 1950s effectively killed all the other genres for decades, and recovery has been a struggle. Perhaps the academic analysis of superheroes might be additionally supplemented with a look at the 1960s undergrounds, for example, or Eisner and the birth of the graphic novel. All just as important.
The next panel, in which some of the artists will be talking about their work, will be at 3:00.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 1:22 PM
Some thoughts over lunch:
So far, I like the way they’ve organized the event this year. Last year, with several things happening concurrently, it was hard to get around to all the stuff I wanted to do, and inevitably I had to skip some of it. This year, things are staggered in a way where this isn’t an issue.
There is the aforementioned disappointment with the first panel, which–I want to reiterate–wasn’t bad by any means. It was good, but it had a different focus than what I would have wanted. I do think the superhero is one of the most interesting archetypes that American culture has produced, and there is much to be explored.
My big worry is for the hypothetical casual visitor. Somebody who maybe has a curiosity about comics, but doesn’t care for superheroes. (The common public perception of comics is that superheroes are all there is.) That person might wander into the forums, check out the panel, and come away feeling that this preconceived notion has been validated. There’s more to it, and I think part of the advancement of comics will necessarily be convincing people of that fact.
I really do think comics are on the way up. We’re living in a multimedia world where we’re becoming increasingly used to the integration of text and visuals as a single language of ideas. Web browsers, modern advertisement, new media content–the foundation is in place now, more than ever, for the public acceptance of comics as a medium of art and entertainment.
Furthermore, I was listening to a podcast interview with Art Spiegelman from a couple years ago (it can be found here) in which he said something very interesting. My paraphrasing: though the publishing industry is in a rough patch, and though the comics direct market is still not especially concerned with anything outside of its niche audience, there are two forms of literature that are doing better and better. In the red states, it’s religious-themed literature. In the blue states, it’s graphic novels.
In my own personal observations, it’s the inclusion of comics in the big book chains–think Borders and Barnes & Noble–that is majorly responsible. The average reader isn’t going to amble into the local comics ‘n’ games shop to pick up the latest issue of the X-Men, but he (or she) might be interested in self-contained stories, created and packaged in a novelistic format. These, as well as digital comics, are the greener pastures that comics has been waiting for.
It is encouraging to see comics finding their way outside of the dedicated Graphic Novels sections at these stores as well. I have seen From Hell shelved with historical fiction on one occasion, and on several others, I’ve seen Maus shelved with the biographical books. Though I personally would prefer that comics be recognized as its own medium, independent from purely text-based literature, this phenomenon may indicate a wider acceptance of comics as “real” books, rather than mere juvenile amusements.
Or, as Frank Miller has said, we might be looking at an era when we’ll see “Sin City shelved next to Mickey Spillane instead of Spawn.” The mainstream audiences, which have been thus far kept at arm’s length from comics, might be primed for them now, more than ever.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 2:44 PM
There’s a tour coming through the hallway with the comics exhibit display cases. The tour guide just gestured to the case with the artwork by Toepffer (1799-1846) and said, “And these are examples of student artwork…”
I just made another pass through the artists alley and picked up some stuff: a mini-comic issue of The Amazing Cynicalman by Matt Feazell, a mini-comic “As Eavesdropped…” by Suzanne Baumann, one of Ryan Claytor’s And Then One Day compilations, Gary Scott Beatty’s Jazz: Cool Birth, Jay Jacot’s 24 hour comic: The Chase – A Twist of Fate, and an issue of Jeremy Bastian’s Cursed Pirate Girl. Definitely more on these when I get a chance to discuss them.
Lindsay Gordon, one of the artists tabling today, does knitted dolls of famous characters. They’re pretty amazing. I haven’t seen anything like them. I also spent a few minutes chatting with Jay Jacott, discussing his 24 hour comic and my own abortive attempt from a few years back (more on this, perhaps, later), during which time a drawing board came around to him. The challenge: everybody draws a monster. There was an observable trend of increasingly elaborate and twisted creatures, which Jacott seemed more than enthusiastic to perpetuate. I’m sure the finished product will find its way online eventually.
Feazell does seminars on making mini-comics, and also offers a small guide to making them. I’m noting it here to remind myself: send him an email to inquire about getting one of the guides.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 3:15 PM
Bill “Wolverine MacAlistaire” Messner-Loebs enters: “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve asked you here today.”
The creator panel begins, with Jay “Dead Duck” Fosgitt and Guy Davis joining Messner-Loebs. Jacott is moderating. Fosgitt grew up on newspaper strips and Jim Henson, and narrowly missed working for Henson due to an unfortunately timed death. Davis brings in influences from everyday life–looking at a hinge or a joint in a piece of machinery and dressing it up to make it look more bizarre, for example. Messner-Loebs: “Everybody thinks I have a strong Eisner influence until they put my work up next to Eisner’s.” Messner-Loebs takes Frank Miller’s mindset to heart: cartoonists are cartoonists, and should resist splitting up into categories.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 3:49 PM
Messner-Loebs, on doing historical comics: “History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. We’re living the farce, so it might be instructive to go back and look at the tragedy.”
Fosgitt: meet people at the big cons. Everybody knows somebody, even “whatever hooker they got to pose as the pin-up girl in the back.” He met the first publisher for his work at Wizard World Chicago. Davis adds that it’s all about perseverance. Keep drawing new samples, even as the rejection slips come in. Messner-Loeb: “The first book, let them screw you. Let them publish it.” In this way, you’ll have something out there that you can show people. “The 30th issue, get someone who will pay you.”
Messner-Loebs again: “You need to be good, you need to be fast, and you need to be able to work with people. But you only need two of those.” This was also said, almost verbatim, in Eisner/Miler–but I don’t remember which one said it.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 3:56 PM
Q&A begins, to “a round of silence,” to quote Gary Scott Beatty from last year. A good story from Messner-Loebs, at Fosgitt’s prompting: Al Capp suggested to Will Eisner that they fake a feud between the two of them. Eisner would parody Capp’s Li’l Abner in The Spirit, and Capp would parody The Spirit in Li’l Abner. Doing so would be a boost for both books. Eisner followed through, and Capp never did. A good summation of the character of the two artists.
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 4:05 PM
Curiously, Guy Davis was not raised religiously and is not a religious person, and draws upon religious imagery in The Marquis purely as a means of portraying good and evil. In Dead Duck, Fosgitt doesn’t consciously work from any political or religious dimension, but does portray various forms of afterlife. Believing in Elvis, for example, will lead to an afterlife in Graceland. Once in a while, politics find their way in, such as an issue set in Canada that deals with universal health care. Though Messner-Loebs considers himself religious, he says, “The doctrine is right there. To make fun of.” Fosgitt: you don’t have to insult something in order to parody it. One of his titles, “Everybody’s Working for the Wiccan” gets a good laugh.
Bill Messner-Loebs absolutely does not have a secret project, for Vertigo, 130 pages in length. There is no secret project. Or so he assures us.
And with that, the panel comes to a close.
In Closing
Overall, I had a great time at this year’s event. Depending on where life takes me, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to attend next year, but I’ll certainly hope for it. I’m definitely on the side of comics as a form of both entertainment and self-expression, and it is my view that comics deserves a better shake than it routinely gets. Events like this can help to legitimize the medium in the eyes of the general public.
Here are some cell phone pics I snapped during the event:
Ryan Claytor’s original artwork for the promotional poster. (Pardon the blurriness and light streaks; they’re reflections in the glass.)
A Guy Davis original, from B.R.P.D.
Guy Davis artwork from The Marquis.
A historical comic: Charles the Disobedient Boy (y. 1888). This, and the next three, are originals, not reproductions.
A historical comic: the artwork of Rodolphe Toepffer.
Another historical comic.
Another historical comic.
Superman. The lower one is an original, while the copy of Action Comics #1 is (obviously) an oversize reproduction.
Batman. Same deal here.
Figurines, done in the style of their original artists–Joe Shuster for Superman and Bob Kane for Batman.
Dolls hand-knitted by Lindsay Gordon.
And a bit of comics from the bathroom.