On perspective and influence in Orwell’s “Shooting An Elephant” and Moore & Lloyd’s V for Vendetta

The influence of George Orwell’s writing on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta is inescapable. It is nearly impossible to describe the text, as well as an innumerable amount of dystopian fiction, science or otherwise, without using the word “Orwellian”. It says so much about the lasting impact of Orwell’s masterwork Nineteen Eighty Four that while he certainly had forefathers, contemporaries and usurpers for the definitive depiction of the dystopia. Of the modern world led into collapse and disrepair, from Wells to Huxley to McCarthy to Delilo to Otomo, there have been hundreds of candidates yet “Huxleyan” seems to not have the etymological weight that comes with “Orwellian”, despite Huxley’s work being arguably more prescient.

Alan Moore appears to have been influenced by Orwell on a far greater level than simply implementing a dystopic worldview for many of his works. In fact, in Moore’s work, which is heavily allusive and done so in a very literary manner (he is perhaps the definitive comics creator in exerting a truly post-modern approach to fiction, more akin to Stoppard and Pynchon than modernist Orwell), he goes beyond Big Brother references to the larger intent of all of Orwell’s fiction. Nineteen Eighty Four has greatly influenced Moore’s entire career, early on (in 1985) he wrote a Captain Airstrip One parody serial, and one of the later (in 2008) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories, the Black Dossier, features a London ten years after the collapse of the Oceania government (and the titular dossier itself is framed in spot-on newspeak documents). Both of these are explicit examples, Orwell’s work has had larger implications, in terms of subject and style, on Moore’s career. This is found most explicitly in V for Vendetta, which it must be said is noticeably the work of a younger artist. Clearly, unlike the playful literary games of the Black Dossier, Moore is deadly serious in the themes which Orwell brought forth in his own work, and the transliteration by Moore in V for Vendetta is itself a deadly serious act of tribute.

The opening line of Nineteen Eighty Four, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” has been crafted explicitly to create a discontinuity with readers. Moore follows Orwell in the second panel of  V for Vendetta by having his omnipresent Voice of Fate explaining “The weather will be fine until 12:07 AM when a shower will commence lasting until 1:30 AM” followed by the ominous, more explicitly “Orwellian” statements of totalitarian control. There is authorial intent in both opening sentences, which can be used to show the contrasts between the work’s creators: Orwell’s line is meant to create an immediate discontinuity between language and our understanding of it as readers. Conversely Moore’s line is meant not only to illustrate an eerie sense of control in the fascist state we are being introduced to, but also it creates a doubt in the reader of whether or not that could ever be possible, even in a predictive manner.

Orwell’s greatest influence on Moore is not the oppressive, matter of fact horror that colors Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, though surely that is present in much of his work. No, instead it is the sense in which Orwell spent a lot of his work humanizing the cog in the clockwork of the fascist machine. One could call it Totalitarian Empathy. You can see this in both author’s work, over and over again, where instead of portraying the members of the ruling party as snarling monsters they are consistently shown to be human. Not simply human even, but people who are defined by the fear and helplessness that such a society creates at all levels. V for Vendetta’s three-act structure begins with what one could call the de riguer slings and arrows of the angry young man. Wherein all the fascist monsters who run the country are killed off one by one (the media, the government, religion, and the military are all establishments tarnished by the corruption inherent in these people) and policeman are portrayed as racketeers and rapists. But Moore, either intentionally subverting this tone or maturing past it, begins not only showing these ostensibly evil characters as people but begins showing the hero of the piece as nowhere near morally good, whether he understands it or not. In fact, possibly the greatest achievement of V for Vendetta is that as it makes its antagonists more human, more aware of themselves, it makes its protagonist less, despite the formation of the character as seemingly all-knowing. One of the major themes in V for Vendetta, as the book develops, is that all that separates people is perspective and experience. The characters of Inspector Finch and Evey both change drastically from when they are introduced by simply experiencing an aspect of V’s life. It doesn’t mean that they understand him, or that they become him, instead it shows that it is possible to become a better person by understanding someone outside of one’s self.

George Orwell’s short, semi-autobiographical essay Shooting An Elephant is an early example of the use of a sympathetic narrator to illustrate the kind of moral tension that imperial culture creates. The narrator of the story, likely Orwell himself, finds himself in a position of finding the empire deplorable while still presenting himself, and yes, acting, as the personification of the empire’s iron hand. The speaker from the beginning states his disdain for the encompassing arm of the British empire, but still performs his duties. He fulfills his role not simply because he is asked to, but because he feels that the people around him create societal expectations of his role.

“Shooting An Elephant” is in fact, the key to understanding the dichotomy at the heart of Orwell. He is a vehement figure in decrying fascism, imperialism, and control. He is also experienced enough in the day to day personal compromises that add up to complicity. He is at once, understanding of the kind of person who can allow themselves to become part of something he finds, ostensibly, to be evil. It is this quality which makes Orwell’s indictments so biting. Orwell himself wrote “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”

Orwell’s position as he describes his politicized work he maybe misses this empathetic nature. There is a kernel of what makes Orwell’s work so powerful in “Shooting An Elephant”, wherein we find the internal life of a compromised man as sympathetic and possibly heroic as those which can be called legitimately “heroic”. It is this ability to shift sympathies within character moments, of placing on inside the contradictions of a human being, which has had the greatest effect on Moore’s writing. And ultimately, on V for Vendetta.

Unlike the collapsing postwar British empire that Orwell was creating in, Moore was responding to the tenor of his time, Margaret Thatcher’s England. While both texts are personal, Moore felt that he had particular stakes in what he was discussing, as he was involved in a nontraditional relationship with two women at the time, one which, under Thatcher’s proposed policies on homosexuality (such as the famed “concentration camps for AIDS patients”), he would be considered a criminal. While I think that it would likely be an overstatement (and one deriding the sheer skill and insight which Moore possesses as a writer) to say that this personal stake in the events is what makes V for Vendetta the only legitimate successor to Nineteen Eighty Four. It certainly exposes how unlike Moore’s other highly held work, no matter how accomplished, it never feels as immediate as V for Vendetta does. Orwell, for all his progressive intent, is inherently a Victorian at heart, and his work argues for those ideals. Moore on the other hand is in many ways an anarchist, and progressive in his attitudes concerning much more than Orwell’s sympathies.

The narrator in Shooting An Elephant is never clearly defined as Orwell himself, though it is intimated. We’re never quite sure if this is a memoir or short story, as it would be possible that this event really happened but nothing in the work tells us that this is not it’s author, whether it was documentation of a real experience or not. One could, if they felt like following this line of logic to V for Vendetta, could argue that V is Moore’s personal projection into his story. The sequence in which V dies and remains unmasked, and the character’s argument that V himself is an idea, in a way blurs the authorial stand-in. Surely, the character pronouncing himself an idea which cannot be killed is one of the more audacious (and yet successful) moves by the young author; but there is an obfuscation at work there as well. Perhaps Moore understood that when he was finalizing the book (there was a 5 year publishing gap between the second and third volumes of V for Vendetta) that it was an author surrogate in a lot of ways and sought to distance himself from that.
V, as a character, is problematic when describing him as the hero of the story. In fact, V is a character who appears to come from the long line of British villains-as-heroes, a lineage ranging from Robin Hood to Richard the Third to Sid Vicious. The formulation of the character of V seems to exist to bring contrast to the world Moore creates around him. There is a sense that only in the world that is as horrific and dour as this, only then could a character such as V be considered a hero. One could describe V for Vendetta is the story of a villain who does what he does for arguably the right reasons.

He murders, destroys, tortures, drives insane, manipulates. He commits so many evil acts that calling him a hero is interesting. Moore himself has described it as “a terrorist superhero story”. Which is interesting when you consider how Moore has approached superheroes over his career, ultimately creating political, sexual, and spiritual contexts in which they can exist, and applying the consequences inherent in those contexts. It then means that “terrorist” is the operative word in his description. It was David Lloyd’s idea of adopting the image of Guy Fawkes, and Moore who took his gunpowder plot and use it to open up their story.

The image of a historical terrorist, one that has been made into a folk hero by the British people; manipulating that into the “caped avenger battles fascist dystopia” concept that he and Moore had been batting around when devising a new serial gave the concept a unity it was lacking. Any similarities to Batman and the Shadow are superficial at best, despite both characters influence.

No, V’s every action and characterization are objectively that of a villain. His origin, revealed in narrated journaled flashback similar to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s introduction of Doctor Doom but full of subject matter closer to Thomas Disch’s darkly comic Camp Concentration, belies nothing but how evil has been portrayed throughout 20th century fiction. Built on medical experimentation and dehumanization, his face obscured for the story’s entirety. His dialog, chock full of a lingering kind of insanity, is built on alliteration but quickly shows the fierce intellect and dangerous mercuriality of megalomania. He grows roses, he stockpiles plastic explosives. He monologues. V’s home is composed like the famed Winchester Mystery House, doors opening into brick walls, rooms interlocking with one another like the elements of the master plan. V’s lair is eventually revealed to be located in the disabused London Underground, allowing him to be everywhere and nowhere (is there any phrase more apt than describing terrorism?). He appears throughout the piece in disguise, playfully compares himself to Satan, and is most sympathetic when he is about to kill someone. Maybe most importantly, he’s got a dead (non-romantic) love of his life he’s dedicated his quest to. V’s commitment to her is perhaps his most traditionally “villainous” quality, a trait long kept on the side of villains in western literature. V subjects people to torture in order to force them to think like he does, to recreate versions of himself. He kidnaps a young girl, brainwashes her, and makes her an accessory to murder of a prominent figure. When they part ways, he kidnaps her and destroys her personality through concentration camp style tactics and torture. He brings her to the brink of insanity and death, only to create another person like himself. Finally, upon his death, he asks her literally to become him. This not an anti-hero, or a subversion of an archetype, insomuch as it is making the idea of the  terrorist and the super-villain into something like a hero. For in this world that Moore creates, developing motivations for even the most vile human being. There is a twisted kind of equilibrium in V for Vendetta, one that I think is the opposite side of the Orwellian approach to characterization. V is not ever given the chance to become truly human for the reader. V is instead an idea, a hero who is also simplified enough to simply call him a terrorist without any explanation of motivations. He is an argument, a cipher, and yet he is still so compelling that it would be short sighted to call him a non-character. V is a bad person, who does what he does because it’s right. He wants to make the world a better place, and the only way he can do that is by burning a society down to its knees, just to prove a point.

The brilliance of V for Vendetta is that not once as a reader does one ever think V is in the wrong. Not once. There is certainly some doubt about his methods, but he is completely in the right, killing his way across his past so as to clear a path for his ornate terrorist plans. To bringing down an entire fascist government. To bringing about an age of anarchy, one carved in his own image. As Finch says in the middle third of the book, he is either enacting a Hitchcockian revenge plot and then escalating to a society, or he misdirecting the cops while he moves toward a larger and more sinister plan. Still, because of the way he moves, the way he talks from the first scene on,V is doing what he does because he knows it needs to be done. Moore and Lloyd are truly interested in portraying the terrorist, the villain, as a moral force.

Being moral, of course, does not mean that he’s not evil. Evil is something which both Orwell and Moore tend to avoid discussing. As with both of their works, the intentions behind actions, if truly understood, cannot be described as evil. If looking at both author’s careers, the presence of evil is there in the work. Surely Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four can be used to show that there is a malignancy within people. Moore has spent a lot of time portraying murderers, rapists, and monsters as human(his finest character may very well be Jack The Ripper, not to mention his “I had a bad day” motivation for his Joker in The Killing Joke), but throughout the work there is a sense of something ineffable about these sympathetic portrayals. There is a driving force behind transgression and violence that could easily be called “evil”.

That is what makes V for Vendetta worth discussing in relationship to Orwell, that even in it’s most sympathetic portrayals of the character there is an allowance, maybe one the author is not even aware of, for the ineffable. Beyond that, instead of a morality play in which we learn that fascism is wrong, we are given a story with no easy answers. V for Vendetta’s core scene is often said to be Evey’s experience in the prison, and the narrative within the narrative of Valerie’s letter. The other scene frequently discussed is V’s to-camera monologue where he gives humanity their metaphorical walking papers. There is no disputing what either of those scenes is “saying”. In the story around it, the argument is that ideology forever hurts people when it is put into practice, and that putting ideas over people is always going to be damaging. No matter what the ideas are, whether they are paranoid and venal or V’s own, ultimately the lengths gone to have compromised any ideals held in the fist place.

There is another scene in V for Vendetta which moves past the argumentation stage, and reveals the ineffable sense of something more than ideas. Near the finale of the piece, where Evey sits staring at V’s body, following his pronouncement to Finch “This is an idea. And ideas are bulletproof.” and his order to her to never know his face. Evey sits and walks herself through unmasking V over and over, each time thinking about who he could be, until realizing what V meant by his final words. The smile, Lloyd’s closeup of Evey’s ear to ear grin is perhaps the most disturbing moment in the entire story, giving the impression of not just an idea being passed but a malevolence reasserting itself on a new host, a demon of anarchy finding a new messenger. There is something terrible about this moment, the only way for V’s terrorist plot to be fully achieved is through this young girl. Even if this is what needs to be done, if it is the right thing (and Moore has spent a large amount of time dissuading us from the idea that there is a right thing to be done), it is a horrible gut-sick beat for the character. One would be hard pressed to call it “evil”, but it is the one moment in the piece that allows for such an idea to fly. Perhaps Moore and Orwell would prefer their gallery of characters to all be believably human in some way, all of their moments to come from a place of understanding, the one that stands out most in these two works is where it was impossible.

-Sean Witzke November 2011

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“So — punk WHAT? Actually, what do the purported punk SF writers have in common? Stylish Gibson, antic frazzled Sterling, the pure-hearted and liberal Robinson, hot-eyed Shirley — all over 30, perhaps, but what else? I see no commonality of vision. Vague similarities — bedazzled by technology, fond of street-savvy brutality, some preference for ravaged landscapes — also link them with a horde of other SF writers.”

- From a fairly savage review of Neuromancer in Cheap Truth #12, note that all the people being talked about are actually the people that ran Cheap Truth, and people who were big enough fans of the work to follow it with their own.

This post started out on tumblr as just a followup comment to this quote, but I think that I need to expand this into a real post because all I’ve been reading lately are wrongheaded  posts from all kinds of people about what criticism’s relationship to creators is (also in the incredibly backwards world of comics, retailers and distributors as well because apparently that’s a thing now, like being a locovore or something else only an insane isolated ultra-privileged subculture would decide was a good idea). I’ve been reading a lot of Bruce Sterling for most of this year, and I’ve been thinking about Cheap Truth and it’s relationship to comics for a lot longer than that.

Cheap Truth was a series of copyright-free one-sheet/zine/newsletter made by Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker and guest contributors including the inestimable Brian Aldiss. It was antagonistic, discursive, contradictory, fiercely brutal with itself and it’s peers, shameless in self promotion and calling out editors, the industry, critics, and slaughtering and dismissing any heroes, even their own. It is the work of smart asses, guys in their late 20s and 30s just starting their career, throwing on pre-internet aliases and starting enough shit to form a real movement. They had their guns aimed at the mainstream of their chosen genre, which even though it was doing better than it ever had been in history was and remained forever marginalized outside of a few massive successes. They wanted to shake some shit up, and were a little unsure about how to do it, and found it in fits and starts, by not just barreling forward with a unified front. No instead they would publish joke columns, angry screeds against the establishment, a glowing love letter to Gibson followed by not one but two takedowns because it had enough space in itself to allow more than one opinion. Hell they even had a comics column once, where they talked up American Flagg as not just exceptional comics but exceptional scifi. This is the start of a movement, one that even called itself “The Movement” before the term “cyberpunk” came along and sorta fit, that openly encouraged it’s critics, that asked for more than cheer-leading from it’s audience. Because, I think this is the most important thing, it saw that anyone reading a shoddily printed science fiction broadsheet and knew what they were talking about was going to have at least something of an opinion of what they were talking about. And their approach alienated or forever won over the people exposed to it. Even, in their final issue, they killed off their fictional leader and went off to do something else, but not before interviewing Sterling’s alter ego in a Space Pirate Captain Harlock t-shirt, saying they blew it up cause it was being recognized and respected and that the reader should start their own damn zine.

The answer to the question in the quote up top – what did these people have in common that separated them from other writers with their same interests, which have been important interests to their chosen genre since it’s inception? The answer is that these writers were rare in the sense that their engagement with each other and the people reading them made their work more vital than it would have been without that engagement. They were punks because they wanted to start some shit and promote themselves, but they did it in a way that wasn’t just BUY MY BOOK. This wasn’t a letters column, it wasn’t an advertisement, it wasn’t “community building”, at least not in the way we define it now.  This was something else.

Science fiction, like American comics, encouraged a fanzine culture, and almost immediately became symbiotically linked to it because science fiction itself was a pulp magazine business. To say nothing of the ghettoized nerd mentality that floods both worlds, or it’s cross-pollinated history of contributors, or even the extended periods of stolid doldrums, awkward approach to diversity, etc, etc.

This piece I’ve quoted at the top, that to me, is what’s missing from comics right now. A sense of… not just engagement, but legitimate conversation with the criticism against itself. Science fiction in 1983 was an art form that was largely experiencing a lot of the problems that comics has in 2011. What happens when you’ve won the war and you find out there’s no spoils? What happens when the world changes at the exact right time that there’s no future to adapt to? You end up where we are right now, and where they were back in 1983 after Star Wars proved that it was the medium not the content, just like this past decade of superhero movies (and comic movies in general) has done for comics’ “aw shucks a movie, and you’ll pay me?” mentality. The situation is only compounded by the myriad changes to distribution, production, creation, and conversation that have happened in the past 30 or so years.

If this kind of thing even attempted to happen in the world of twitter and facebook and comments sections, what would happen? What do you get when you try to corral all these ideas together, to be this antagonistic and sharp and committed without falling apart or being co-opted or getting tired or any of the other problems with trying this again. Also being good – that’s the biggest problem actually I can name 30 loosely affiliated crews of creators or critics or both offhand. I can name maybe 3 that are good enough to actually be considered as good as the Cheap Truth contributors. If you look for something like this in comics today, what do you find?

Do you get the hall of mirrors Comets Comets guy(s) who are more interested with obfuscating their identities for a small audience than anything else? Do you get the trolling for the sake of trolling for the sake of antagonism for the sake of fuck you for the sake of academia for the sake of getting Eddie Campbell to call you out lulz of the Hooded Utilitarian? Do you get real life collectives that would never in a million years bring that shit to print, having these same ideas but never putting anything out there but the work? Do you get the frat boy echo chambers of creator-run boards? (Here’s a tangent – maybe the biggest problem with the trajectories of the internet is now that no one wants to conquer the world anymore, no one wants to take their shit to the masses, they want to cultivate an audience and make a nice living, no one is willing to risk fucking up on a large venue anymore blah blah). Or the pseudo-intellectual version of the same? The faux-David Eggers assesment of critic motivations from creators who no one likes to talk about started their careers as critics? The screaming for recognition from creators by jilted critics (hey, look I’m a part of this too). The call for community in an artform of loners and indoor kids, of blind positivity from the people who have the most to lose, of TEAM COMICS desperation and the culture of inferiority complexes that spawned all of it. Do you get the halfhearted us vs. them mentality that creators and readers are forced to sleepwalk through while waiting for something interesting to come along, even if it is a Mark Millar selling them battery acid as gatorade and calling them retards for it because dear god at least we know how he really feels… I don’t fucking know…

But anyway, comics needs something, anything, like this. It needs people at the top of their game that take criticism as a challenge rather than wave it away as a lunatic fringe, and it needs critical voices that are willing to actually be honest and not fawn and gasp when A Someone links a positive review on twitter or shows up in the comments section of a negative one. We need some kind of professionalism to where it’s not name calling and taking offense, it’s like comics is a bad marriage, we don’t even fight anymore. Comics needs antagonism and a new movement that walk hand in hand, but still cordial enough with one another to entertain a decent argument once in a while. God damn it, everyone on every side needs to grow their balls back.

“CT: I guess I see… Any final words?

VO: I hereby declare the revolution over. Long live the provisional government.”

- SEAN WITZKE, OCTOBER 2011

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Blick takes the Shadow Line another way, with elements of recent noble attempt at novelistic British television, Red Riding; to create a show that seems to be ornately composed within only a scant few hours of narrative. Red Riding’s filmic novel’s heartbeat seemingly considered along with the Wire’s organic pacing, only Blick does something interesting with that space between moments of just-the-facts recording of occurrences. It allows events to linger and characters to wait, for tension to build and crime to occasionally lapse into suspense or even horror. This is realism in the sense that the real world frequently can confront the sensible and even the most degrading aspects of life with the inexplicable, the sudden, the larger than life. There is, it would seem an internal procedural at play in the heart of this show along with an external one.

There is a sense that this is the argument at the heart of The Shadow Line is that yes, larger forces dictate the actions of characters on both sides of the law, and yes, humanity and emotion is something completely unconsidered by these forces. But instead in The Shadow Line, there seems to be a sense of lingering need to consider the emotional aspects of these characters. And a sense that complicity is what destroys people, both spiritually and physically. There seems to be a sense with nearly every character except for the youngest, that the cost of doing business is something that is destroying their personal lives, and eating away at their moral compasses. The characters that would be the protagonists on any other show – Joseph Bede and Jonah Gabriel – are men whose lives are defined by loved ones and guilty consciences. They are managing their way through worlds they cannot help to navigate without comprising themselves. Bede is an all-business money man who is only acting on a criminal enterprise in order to ensure the care of his wife, who is in the middle stages of early onset Alzheimer’s. If you like, he is a keen inversion of Stringer Bell, who sought to walk away from criminality in order to become a businessman, and was cost everything because of his feelings for others. Gabriel is even more blatant about finding his footing – recovering from a bullet in the head on a mission he can’t remember, with evidence piling up that he may have been dirty and his actions may have gotten him shot and his partner killed, he spends much of the show in fear for his own soul and his wife’s unborn baby (after multiple miscarriages) and her finding out about his mistress and other child. These are two men who understand they are working on borrowed time, and their parallels are the show’s soul, and it is shown to be constantly degraded and slung in shades of moral gray. And doomed, if you had any doubt, their eventual fates are the same, and obviously headed towards death from their first scenes.  But these two also share something else with every other character who appears in the Shadow Line – their past, their intentions, and surprisingly often enough their actions, are in doubt. Always in doubt.

The reporter (who unlike in David Simon’s world, is not the highest moral position a man can occupy) is portrayed as an antagonist for Gabriel for most of his time on the show. He is a figure of dubious morality and appears to be after Gabriel for almost no reason other than to hound him for some imagined slight. As the story goes on, though, he is shown to be more in the right than other shows would be comfortable giving a villain, and never once redeemed. He is only dispatched from the show when he breaches his own convictions, not the ones imposed by the show. His failure is to himself, not to the forces above him or the writer’s whim. There is a sense that the universe in The Shadow Line is more set on the internal live of it’ characters. The kids as well – Rafe Spall’s Jay Wratten is a constant reminder of the possibility of insanity floating around the proceedings. The comparisons of his performance to Heath Ledger’s Joker are not accidental, only instead of a moral aberration in this world his opposition to every other character’s obsession with family or relationships. As he says in the final episode “Family. Or Business.”, and he means it. He is autonomous in this world because of his emotional disconnect, and his intense, unpredictable performance turns out to be more of a force of nature than one dictated by one. Rafe Spall is legitimately scary here, something that is nearly impossible to do on a show like this. He’s not even really the scariest thing here. Unnamed in the story but named in the credits is Rattalack, a response to legendary gay stick up artist Omar on the Wire. Introduced in the middle of the first season to massive fanfare, here is a gay character that eschews the macho aspects of his counterpart and instead shows the possibility of a high camp mastermind that terrifies his elders, simply by being younger and prettier and smarter than all the old men he’s talking at. Wratten and Rattalack are the two characters that make it out unscathed – physically and spiritually – because of their willingness, dictated by their youth it seems, to place business above all attachments.

The final parallel, the most important one, isn’t really a parallel at all, is that of Glickman, who barely appears in the show and lingers around the proceedings, and of the breakout star of the series Gatehouse, played by Stephen Rea. Gatehouse is really this show’s Omar. If only because like Omar, you can talk to someone about the series by just talking about how great a character Gatehouse is. Gatehouse and Glickman are the ghosts here, the men who actually know and understand what is going on. Gatehouse is not just a small man who speaks very quietly and does terrible things. He’s not just someone who we can watch methodically go through atrocity while all the other characters simply deal with the aftermath. He is the forward motion of the plot, he is the catalyst.

Glickman’s son describes him by saying “He puts things in boxes”. Glickman is the horror of compartmentalization, the part of the western world that can allow itself to wage a cold war and pretend that nothing is happening. Or a real one now, now that we no longer care (the relationship to crime and real war is something that should never be discounted – American Noir has always been the conscience of our wars, why should the English be any different) Gatehouse is the figure who does horrible things, all the time, every time. But Glickman is a lot harder to reconcile. Because he isn’t the one that pulls the trigger but is completely fine with doing so. The cold war never ends, as they say. It has never been more true than when these figures enter the picture, completely bereft of any and all purpose beyond gamesmanship. There is no moral compulsion in their actions – there may have been at one point, but there isn’t any longer. This is just control and conflict, occurring because it has to.

It’s not perfect. In any sense, there are times when it feels like the most important elements of the plot are held back in order to dwell on uninteresting points. Certain things are reiterated. Blick seem more at ease writing any character complexly as long as it isn’t a woman (seriously, there is a gay character here to rival and maybe top Omar Little, but the women are written atrociously except for Eve Best). Still, the images are what lingers, not so much the lines. The strobing baby monitor as Gatehouse screams. The horror of Jonah Gabriel as he finds the money in his closet. The  blood on the floor in Bede’s kitchen. Wratten’s face against the elevator door. Glickman’s face lit red. A motorcyclist sitting bleeding on the road. A child’s coffin lowering into a grave. Eve Best with heart monitors across her chest standing over Gatehouses body, timing her count to his heartbeat, before the soundtrack screams atonal. This isn’t simply a refutation of the Wire, it may be something even greater. This is truly realistic television, and truly novelistic as well. It allows for an internal life for it’s characters, and in turn a more nuanced approach to the uncomfortable parts of their lives. This is the crime drama of the unconscious, concerned with the chance that we can’t really know what is going on and still be human. Because maybe, just maybe….

We can’t.

- SEAN WITZKE, OCTOBER 2011

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Western comics and their readers have for so long been the subject of stigma. Of comics being for children, for the socially awkward and maladjusted, for the intellectually slumming, for perverts. The problem is that this stigma no longer exists, or at least has been diluted to the point that any and all thrashing out against it from people that read comics feels like they’re stuck in an old aspect of cultural conversation. There are a million examples of this urge to change perceptions – from pointing out that famous figures read comics, feeling validated by film adaptations of a work, “comics ain’t for kids anymore zap pow” articles, Read Comics In Public Day, Free Comic Book Day. All of which reek at least a little bit of desperation in the light of the way the world is now. Geeks, or whatever pejorative term you wanna throw around and/or identify with, have won. The major literary publishing houses are releasing books by O’Malley and Clowes and Mazzuchelli, superheroes dominate the cultural conversation, comics are taught and discussed at most of the colleges in the country, and the internet has exposed most of the world as fixated unhealthily on something whether it be Glee or fantasy football or scrapbooking photos of Condi Rice. Or, I dunno, xvideos. Or searching xvideos for Condi Rice.

There is a sense that in fighting against these ideas, comics has made some it’s greatest strides. Which is in at least some ways true, there was a conception that needed to be battled and whether it was Watchmen or Blankets or something else big enough to crack the real world, it’s been thoroughly beaten back.

The urge of creating counterprogramming; of being the smarter, cooler more of the moment variation of the art form in response to (superheroes) (big two) (newspaper strips) (editorial cartoons) (movie pitch comics) (indie) (underground) (graphic novels) (manga) (euro) (porn) (OEL) (autobio) (genre) (literary) (pop) (noise) (limited print runs) (experimental printing processes) (curating audiences) (webcomics) (any and all of the above) is so strong that it permeates every aspect of the medium in some form. In every one of these situations comics are being redefined by it’s readers or creators as this years model. This new one, it’s SO much cooler than the last one. Trust us.

The idea of scenes, the idea of rock star creators, of cults of personality, of living and creating in opposition; they all come from the kernel of “how do we make comics cool?”. How do we convince OTHER people, all the people who never cared before. More modern, more literary, more adult, more punk, more young. The need for acceptance, of trying to distance ourselves from all the kids who got picked on for reading comics (and yeah, it happened to me too, I even had someone tell me “Comics are so last year” when he saw me reading Knightfall in the 4th grade. I got over it) is palpable in every move we make. The neurotic boy outsider prototype has now been outdated long enough that the only people still clinging to it are the ones it applies to, and the only people persecuting them for it are themselves.

And where has it gotten us? Specialization, myopia, crowd-sourced publishing, scripts by committee, twitter and facebook “community building” that amounts to racking of faceless numbers or naked careerism, scanlations of foreign comics that are more accurate than the official printings, and a distribution monopoly that no one really can get behind but still cannot bear the (frankly inevitable) idea that it will fail.

Comics as a medium is experiencing a problem that most of the popular arts now have – because of the internet and a massive boom in reprints, the entire history of the medium is accessible. Books that were white whales and holy grails years ago come into print, they pop up on ebay or amazon marketplace for cheap, you find them in dollar bins. Maybe someone has scanned it and thrown it up on their blog, tagged with all the other out of print bronze age shit your little heart desires. The hurdles of jumping to print have been lowered or done away with altogether. Gigatorrents of 2000AD or translated Metal Hurlant to make you feel totally okay with being born in the wrong hemisphere. Like film or music, you can no longer tell the difference between talented amateurs or decades-deep trained professionals because of the tools available. Both of these changes have created a climate where influence, cross-pollination, and taste become incredibly malleable, and the battle lines that were drawn decades ago seem arbitrary to someone who wasn’t raised on an us vs. them mentality (any one of the dozens that litter comics).

Incidentally, the most interesting comics right now are scattered in idiom – amazing stuff found randomly on the web, ranging in style from gag strips to medium-smashing experiments. The odd issue of a big two comic that sneaks out with a great artist at the helm. Self-published one man single issue anthologies. Prestige adaptations of decades-old novels. Veteran-built character dynasties. Pictographic mind vomit with really nice publishing values. The two or three Image series that quietly outdo all their peers without making a show of it. Exceptional manga reprints. All of these are the kind of comics that can be held up and examined as great, and not one of them seems to be dealing with a need to make what they are doing acceptable. The best comics right now, like all the best comics historically, don’t seem to be taking any consideration for legitimacy or reaction to what has come before, or even shitting on whatever is most the most sacred cow of the moment. The best we have to offer is always going to the work that has greater concerns. While the rest of us shackle ourselves to ideas that ultimately ghettoize a storytelling art form that has little to do with the subcultures we continually create around it.

Comics will never be any more or any less “cool” than they are right now. There was a piece of graffiti from the Paris 1968 student riots: “The future will only contain what we put into it now”. If comics are to move forward, it will not be through a new scene or a change in presentation, it will be through works that cannot be denied. Comics haven’t had need of being saved for some time now, if they ever did. Except maybe from the culture that surrounds them.

The only revolutionary act left in comics is to live up to its potential.

- Sean Witzke, continually failing to live up to his own standards, October 2011.

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Here’s the list I submitted to the Hooded Utilitarian master list back in May, which is written in order of personal importance for me:

Le Garage Hermetic, Moebius
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, Jim Steranko
Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
The Nikopol Trilogy, Enki Bilal
Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison and Richard Case
Elektra Assassin, Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz
The Winter Men, Brett Lewis and Jean Paul Leon
SCUD the Disposable Assassin, Rob Schrab
Black Kiss, Howard Chaykin

And here were the other possible candidates, making a nice unranked top 30

100%, Paul Pope
American Flagg #1-12, HowardChaykin
Barbarella, Jean-Claude Forrest
Born Again, Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli
Domu, Katsuhiro Otomo
Dork #7, Evan Dorkin
The Filth, Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, and Gary Erskine
Get the Freebies, Jamie Hewlett
Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow
Hellboy, Mike Mignola
How to Be An Artist, Eddie Campbell
King City, Brandon Graham
Mr Miracle, Jack Kirby
Ronin, Frank Miller
Strange Days, Brendan McCarthy, Peter Milligan,and Brett Ewins
Tintin in Tibet, Herge
V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Wally Gropius, Tim Hensley
Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker
WildCATS vol.2 #13, Joe Casey and Sean Phillips
- – -

So. For the second list – let’s run through them fast in alphabetical order.

100% is a fantastic work of science fiction covering up a really wonderful romance comic, Capra meets Gibson even though I’m sure that Pope would hate those comparison points.

American Flagg is the biggest of Chaykin’s masterworks, and it probably has done more for me than the other Chaykin book I put in my top ten, as I am far more of a science fiction person; Flagg is the comic that made it possible for Frank Millers media overload and Watchmen’s scope and depth. Flagg comes from a much gutsier place a well, Chaykin begins examining his own ideas and finding them wanting by the middle of the first year.

Forrest’s Barbarella is pure cartooning. I don’t know if comics have ever been as unabashedly gorgeous and sweetly perverted as Barbarella could get.

Born Again is pretty obvious, I’d assume. Miller at the peak of his writing abilities, Mazzuchelli caught in the moment between profound action genius and figurative caricaturist. The finest moment in the series has nothing to do with superheroics or operatic violence at all, it’s Ben Urich’s slow deterioration into a compressed slab of a figure, and his final confrontation in the bathroom with the nurse, his terrified eyes as he barely saves his wife, his only friend not helping but taking pictures as it happens. There have been few if any scenes in comics that can twist your stomach like a wet gym towel the way that scene does.

Otomo’s Domu is a masterpiece of slow-boil tension that also includes some of the most spectacular violence ever drawn in a comic, without ever changing the very specific tone. Domu illustrates the horror of the place its set, a huge housing block filled with poor people plagued with an uptick in suicides.The nature of its cast is broken people – shut-ins, the elderly, latch-key kids – this is real horror and EC horror at once.

Dork #7, entitled “Auto-bio Hazard”, by Evan Dorkin is the single greatest comic about making comics ever made (and yeah that includes other list entries How to Be An Artist and Black Kiss). This book is what happens when an artist actually examines themselves in as harsh light as possible, as funny and dark and savage as comics can get. With comics history filled with so much autobiography by people with nothing to say and boring lives, here is the truth.

The Filth is Grant Morrison’s response to his own idealism of his work The Invisibles, and the realization that it is utter bullshit. The Filth is about loneliness and perversion and filling your life with so much fiction that the every day seems like a sham and the fiction starts to get perverted, everything turning to shit and trying to make sense of it. Given his writing and his actions in the past few years, Grant Morrison apparently hasn’t read it.

Jamie Hewlett’s Get the Freebies is the totem of garbage culture forming a narrative backbrain. For Hewlett, all the pervy stuff infecting the Muppets and Green Hornet and Johnny Quest and the Goodies wasn’t the bad end of a horrible spiral, it was the best thing that could possibly happen.

Ghost in the Shell is a profound mutation of cyberpunk. Shirow spent every successive work destroying his own style with photoshop effects, so this is really the last time Shirow was at the peak of his powers. While the fights aren’t as good as Appleseed, the story is fantastically labyrinthine.

Mignola’s Hellboy is not here because of how great an artist Mignola is, or how sophisticated his writing has become. It’s here because Mignola has spent almost 20 years developing a comic where a guy fights monsters into a series of gorgeous, lyrical ambiguities. Moments of birds resting on statues, lilies, nooses swaying in the breeze, skulls wired into a circuit board, characters pausing with tears in their eyes. There are few if any references points for this kind of storytelling, and nearly every one isn’t done as seemingly intuitive as Mignola makes it seem.

Eddie Campbell’s Alec entry How To Be An Artist is a lesson in autobiographical storytelling, proving that even a life sitting down and drawing and talking to other people who do this, scrapbooking, having kids, loving your wife, trying to grasp an art form that’s mostly been discarded and that you sometimes want to discard yourself. Campbell slyly reasons that all of this is important and noble, even though he winks and tells you it isn’t. How To Be An Artist was given to me by a friend (your friend and mine, Tucker Stone, prince among bloggers) who told me that it was a big deal to him at a certain point in his life and while I didn’t catch it at the time I read it, the more I think about it, the more I think that it was for me. Tucker of course, was teaching me something without me knowing it.

Brandon Graham’s King City is the book I’m most ashamed of not putting in my top ten, I think my reasoning at the time was that it was too fresh in my memory from rereading at the time so I was over-ranking it. A couple months later, I can see how much bullshit that is. King City is exactly the kind of comics I wish I could read every time I picked one up, but there’s really just this one and how it manages to be the most “comics” comic I can think of, with ideas flowing so fast that you will not be able to catch them all, a thousand strains of scifi all flooding the scenery with yayo and greenery. Actually, with drug knives you can have sex with, but that’s not a Black Thought line. King City is the most alive comic book to come out in the past decade plus, the most in love with being a comic and the most brilliantly anti-narrative. King City is about everything in the world, but it’s actually the story a few small people deciding they can do better than the lives they were living at the start of the book. And that’s bigger than all the insane ideas in the world.

Jack Kirby’s Mr Miracle is a strong contender with the Fantastic Four and OMAC as his finest work, the one part of the Fourth World  that is completely airtight and yet not obsessed with epic portent the way that the New Gods title was. Mr Miracle is an adventure comic that slowly uncoiled into a galaxy spanning story, but it has everything – love, friendship, sly commentary on his experience at marvel, his friends the comics artists, jokes about his own dialog, the most insane ideas, the most berserk technology, the most arcane mythos-building. Mr Miracle is Kirby’s finest hour.

Frank Miller’s early masters thesis. And it reads as a thesis – it’s “what I learned from Lone Wolf and Cub and Heavy Metal and Jack Kirby and Eisner and Kurosawa and Phillip K Dick”, all ideas that have been studied and an attempted synthesis of those ideas. There is an artists statement for his entire career buried beneath all of it, which is that he’d rather pick the adolescent fantasy that all these comics are built for because the ultimately they’re better stories than the alternative.

Strange Days by McCarthy, Milligan, and Ewins is the comics equivalent of an obscure game changing record that no one bought but every one who did eventually became a big deal – a Tago Mago or a No New York. McCarthy and Milligan and Ewins were a gang, where self-mythologizing themselves, were working from the position that outdated and bizarre reference points were the keys to the future (The Prisoner staring out from behind Paradax – a hero wearing the Kid Flash outfit underneath street clothes – on the final issue’s cover, the scroll declaring their heroes John Lennon, Phillip K Dick, and Steve Ditko in the first). Strange Days was young arrogant guys doing everything they wanted and getting away with it because no one noticed. It’s still as alien as it was in 1984, only moreso because of how deeply it effected everything that came after, and is still doing so today.

Herge’s Tintin In Tibet is maybe not the best Tintin comic, and it is certainly not the most beautiful or the most fun. It is however likely the one that feels the most personal to its creator, the one that bears its heartbreak on its sleeve, that breathes with emotion and pain.

V For Vendetta is perhaps the greatest angry young man comic, the one where Alan Moore said the most because he couldn’t actually say every thing he wanted, the one where David Lloyd brought 9-grid thought bubble free cinematic pacing to the game fully formed. These are comics by guys just finally finding their footing, and one that tells it’s message through not formalism or theme but through CHARACTER, something that Moore would forget and discover several times over his career. Evey and V are indelible characters, and the things that they do are going to stick for a long time, a lot longer than any of the technical achievements or thematic statements of this or any of Moore’s other books ever will.

Wally Gropius is Tim Hensley’s dadaist Archie/Richie Rich/Impossibles comic which is actually not really dadaist or any of those things. It is so pretty and so fucked up and says so much without really talking about Huey Lewis or massive tooth-chipping tone changes, in one page chunks, in long narrative digressions that go nowhere, vomiting all the right words but not knowing the tune its dancing to. Calling this “Lynchian” or “surrealist” does it a disservice. Its something else.

Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn is the most human comic I’ve ever read. It is prickly and cynical and nonsensical. 200 pages of talking that is also brilliantly cartooned story of people how they are, this is proof that good comics can trump subject matter if the writing is this good.

And finally, Joe Casey and Sean Phillips’ WildCATS vol 2, #13. There are longer works by both of these men that I love dearly, and that I could probably put on this list instead (Sleeper, and Bad Night for Phillips, Automatic motherfucking Kafka for Casey). This issue is special for me, though. Only tangentially related to the WildCATS story that Casey inherited from Jim Lee and Alan Moore (in his slumming at Image for ca$h years), where Casey and his collaborators (Phillips, Dustin Nguyen and Duncan Roleau) took what was essentially an X-Men ripoff and turned it into the story of veterans after a war, and te concept of business as heroism. #13 was something else, though. A short science fiction story about Void, the cosmonaut possessed by an alien artificial intelligence that had been under-written in the series for years. This issue is far closer to Bergman and Bilal than it is than the X-Men roots it sprang from, a conversation between an alien and a cosmonaut in battle for one another’s souls. It is a small, beautiful one-off about family and what it means to be human and that doesn’t shy away from the possibilities that the science fiction affords it past simple metaphors. This is perfect comics that quietly does everything I want a comic to do.

And going into my top ten, which I think is probably more obvious than the other chunk of the list. Here are my reasons for picking these books. First up Calvin and Hobbes, which is the purely most sentimental and funny comic ever made. Here’s what happens when a guy who could draw anything (and does whenever there was a fantasy sequence) would rather just have these small conversations between a kid and his imaginary friend, talking about the profound and the ridiculous from day to day. I understand that taste is taste, but I think I could disagree with anyone about every book I’ve written about here and still be okay, but someone not liking Calvin and Hobbes is a red flag for me, and I think for a lot of people.

Elektra Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz is the greatest, strangest satire ever released by Marvel or DC. Like a lot of my top ten I’ve written about it before, but I feel like I haven’t quite nailed down exactly how great it is. So lets try and do it in brief. Assassin is amazing because it is neither a work of Bill Sienkiewicz or Frank Miller, but something that needs both of them to work, for the Sink’s bizarre expressions and Miller’s fragmented cacophony of voices patching the holes in the other’s flaws. It’s Dr Strangelove of a far more ridiculous and terrifying era, doing lines of cut up cat medicine off it’s copy of Bruce Lee’s The Way of Jeet Kune Do. Comics have never been this shuddering, broken mass of Marvel Comics insanity flooded with real world anxieties, grindhouse sensibilities and literary ironies. They haven’t been since, this kind of high wire act is a fluke of history the likes of which made sure that it will never happen again. It’s the bomb going off in the 80s, not DKR or Watchmen or Maus, it’ as far out on the bridge mainstream comics has made it out, never to go again. That shit doesn’t look safe, you don’t want to drive on that.

Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s Doom Patrol (with a chunk of guest stars including Steve Yeowell and Jamie Hewlett) is probably the best example of the pre-Vertigo era British writer-driven comics, the best example of an extended revamp of a superhero property, and the best example of a Grant Morrison comic. Morrison, in the past few years has given up on a lot of the ideals that made him a great writer in my eyes, capped off by his disgusting statements about Siegel and Shuster in that corporate mash note he called an autobiography. Morrison as a person has disabused himself of all the amazing things that made him write comics like Doom Patrol in favor of appeasement and buying a house that looks like a castle so he can write Batman and Superman like his 14 year old self always dreamed. Doom Patrol under Morrison and Case is one of the most emotionally naked comics ever made, in its writing and art. This is something “weird” each issue disguising characters that make it a routine at breaking your heart. Sure you could say that about everything from the Claremont X-Men saga to Nana, but there is something about the emotional journey of these characters to okay that makes it particularly effecting. From the first time Cliff and Jane are standing on the asylum lawn watching her painting get destroyed by a storm to a similar moment of the two of them walking out of despair into an entire world that’s built like them. Morrison might have made a better moustrap since then, and he may have had better collaborators than Case (and far far worse) on heartbreaking stories. But none that got this close to me, not one.

Jim Steranko’s Nick Fury stories. I have written and said more about these few issues of comics than any other, I believe. Steranko’s swinging sixties are the fictionalized version of the time period I would love to go back to. These are the most amazing comics ever made with formality in mind, the stories’ episodic structures slowly turning Nick Fury into a figure trapped amongst unending schemes within schemes. The paranoia isn’t the main feature here, but it is shown time and again that, because of the nature of the way Steranko was telling the story, that the rug was always a few pages away from being torn out from under. Most famously the silent pages of a lone figure breaking into SHIELD’s base, shooting Fury in silence, and then unmasking himself as Fury on the next page. Espionage comics have never felt as shakily footed and gorgeously unnerving as Steranko did here.

Black Kiss by Howard Chaykin is the nastiest work of anti-comics ever made. Chaykin wanted out, and he wanted every single person reading to know how much he hated them. Even if that’s not true, the comic certainly reads like it. Porn fans become comics fans, one group of asocial weirdos standing in for the other. They’re all perverts, anyway. Chaykin was pulling out all the stops, it never got meaner or funnier or more obscene. It was a porn comic that didn’t even have the good graces to tell you that the woman giving all those blowjobs had a cock until issue 4 (oops, spoiler alert hard-ons). The hero is an ineffectual shit, and clearly a play on every other Chaykin protagonist up to that point. It is also the best written, and the best drawn of all of Chaykin’s pre-Hollywood work, and an accidental commentary on Chaykin’s next job as well as his then-current one. The go to comparison seems to be De Palma, and the story equally toys around in the realm of Blow Out and Body Double, only meaner and darker and with a lot more in frame jizz. No one burns bridges this well anymore.

The Winter Men by Brett Lewis and Jean Paul Leon is proof that the comics, hell even the format of the superhero comic, could contain multitudes even 25 years after it’s agreed upon high watermark of Miller/Moore’s prime material. The Winter Men is also proof that comics coming out “on time” is the mentality of a periodical driven culture created by retailer need and fan ocd that has absolutely dick to do with things such as quality, nuance, and narrative power. Winter Men was developed under one studio publishing arm then came out through another years later, issues came out whenever, years apart, finally dropping the issue format entirely an the rest of the story coming out in a special. This of course, meant nothing. The story, while at least in nature a superhero comic, is much more about present day, post-cold war Russia and the nature of the kind of people it creates than anything superheroes have represented before. Structurally, is this comic very different from Watchmen? Probably not, but it reaches so much higher and without even trying. Leon’s charactersare minimally drawn but still act with a breadth of expression and gesture closed off from all but the best comic artist. Lewis’ dialog, a combination of artfully awkward subtitles and David Milch patois, speaks volumes in what it says and what it leaves out, going pat localities into cultural identity and abstraction. I’ve talked before about the amazing action sequences in Winter Men (A great car chase! Do you know how rare that is in comics?), and the brilliant final page and how it reframes the entire piece as deftly as Bullit or Sanjuro’s final moments do about their portrayal of violence. But I think the takeaway of Winter Men is that not every great story is about change, and change is not essential to a great story.

The Airtight Garage, Moebius’ stream of consciousness great work of art, isn’t really about anyting other than it’s creation and the unconscious itself. As I’ve said before, it is the greatest comic ever made because it is every comic. Now what I meant at the time is because Moebius places elements of everything into his work as he’s creating – tributes to the greats and the jokes about the rest. But I think it could even be taken down to a more specific core of what makes this book perfect. The Airtight Garage feels like it is Moebius tapping into the unconscious of all those comics creators, good or ill. These are dream comics, not in a rarebit fiend kind of way, but comics that have the qualities of dream, where stories string along vitally then drop out, where odd moments or things take on great significance. The final moments, where Major Grubert escapes into the real world, dragging the color of the Airtight Garage with him, is him taking fiction with him into the real world, something that all of us who spend our lives neck-deep in the fantastic do every day.

Nikopol Trilogy, three comics created by Enki Bilal and released over a 13 year period as he collaborated with others, worked on films, directed films, and dropped a few other masterpieces. The three stories all feature the god Horus, Alcide Nikopol and his clone/son, and Jill Bioskop (who might be the most nuanced portrayal of female character ever to appear in a comic). The centerpiece of which, The Woman Trap, is unassailable as a work of science fiction. Bilal created ideas that were too vast for him to do anything but get a glancing blow of them on the page, ideas that need to be represented as images in order to be communicated at all. Nikopol is a comic that is about the heirarchies of power, about the insanity of war while living on the fringes. As an astronaut (the biggest signifier of Cold War pawn there is), as a reporter, as a filmmaker and the fragile and transitory nature of all three, it’s also about being a human being in a horrible time for the world at large. It is the comics of grasping for humanity in an inhuman age.

Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo is the finest epic ever made in comics, starring the whole of a city in the midst of a cataclysm. Akira is the story of a military experiment, a resistance group, a group of teenage bikers, a religious cult, a group of scientists. Akira is best read in the six phonebook set, where the action scenes play out in large chunks and the narrative plays like symphony movements. Kanaeda’ absence in the middle of the book is only something that hits the right way when presented at the end of such a massive massive series of events. Akira is one of the only cyberpunk stories that could lay an honest claim to the “punk” aspect, as while it is a story about the destruction and rebirth of a city is also about what it is to bee a teenager. To be that angry, where every moment is as elating or as devastating as the true moments of victory and destruction in the book. Kaneda’s journey from uncaring thug to great man, and Tetsuo’s journey from callow youth to monster and cycling through again are played out in almost real time, the span of the thing more than the amount of the destruction levelled against this city and these people.

Scud the Disposable Assassin is the one book I am certain no one in the Hooded Utilitarian poll ranked in any way (I don’t know about Black Kiss, there were definitely other Chaykin books, though). I think that it’s the kind of book that no one else thinks is worthwhile because it is an artifact of the 90s. Thought of in the same way that Deadpool is. He’s a character that kills people, makes wisecracks, has no mouth, etc etc. Scud is something different though, it is a comic that shows, time and time again how much Rob Schrab loved drawing it. And in the land of comics academia, “important” works of art, “significance”, and “objectivity’, the easiest thing in the world to lose is that comics are first and foremost about how much fun it is to draw. SCUD isn’t this important signifcant work of art I can objectively argue a place for next to Watchmen and Peanuts and Love and Rockets. Why would you want to? What is the point of any kind of objectivity if it seeks to judge art on a basis which had no element in it’s creation? SCUD is a comic so full of ideas, drawn with a commitment verging on psychosis, all secretly covering up that Schrab created it to distract himself from a break-up, and left the series on an incredibly brutal years-long cliffhanger on another breakup. Like a lot of the work here, it’s ridiculously genre-specific because it is a cover for the work’s personal nature. If I had one book I could magically have re-assessed by whatever critical press that we might have it would be this one. I don’t think it would change any minds, but I think that SCUD says more about what comics should be than any of the official canon. This is comics, anyone writing a canon with literary or academic merit (or I don’t know, cinematic? architectural?) is playing with the wrong set of rules.

- Sean Witzke, August 2011

- Bruce Sterling, Cheap Truth no. 2 (1983?)

At a time when comics has been stratified into all kinds of classifications and genres, Brandon Graham‘s work is joyfully impossible to nail down. There’s no easy box to put Brandon’s books into. King City and the upcoming Multiple Warheads aren’t  really any specific genre, other than being great comics. Graham is candid about how he works, comics as an art-form, and about his relationship to it. His comics are exceedingly human, full of characters that behave and interact rather than fill roles, in worlds that have real life to them. The visual and verbal play in Graham’s books shows that there are endless areas of the medium that are under- or un-explored. He is willing to go places in his stories that no one else would dare to, without ever feeling inorganic or intentionally scattered. King City has, over its storied production history, managed to feel more of the moment upon reprinting rather than less. By the time the first new-content Image issue hit the stands, King City had created a pretty complex language that legitimately stepped forward from the first Tokyopop volume and progressed from there with each issue. The ongoing Multiple Warheads series takes King City’s stylistic and narrative daring and doubles down on it, while never becoming “formalist” comics.  These are great stories first, and that is why they are special.

My favorite of Graham’s work is the short story IOU, in the Escalator collection. A ten page autobio piece where he manages to bypass the many pitfalls of autobio becoming masturbatory. Instead it is in turns lyrical, personal, funny, and betrays how much Graham really cares about comics as an art form. He discusses a transition in his life, seemingly towards comics. He says  “It’s about getting my life together between the pages so I can work on the pages”, which is about as succinct a comics lifer statement as you’re ever going to get.

Brandon was incredibly generous with his time, and we spoke at length about everything from science fiction to collaborating with other cartoonists, but mostly we talked about storytelling.

Part I – Olympus Mons

Sean Witzke: So to start off I wanted to ask you about something you mentioned in a recent blog post. About talking to Brian Stelfreeze and him saying that there’s a point where craft plateaus but storytelling doesn’t. Which I think could be a great way to see how you view your work. In the broadest sense, where do you think your comics are in terms of storytelling? And where is the ideal destination point? Like… clarity of communication? Control of exactly how the page is read? Something else?

Brandon Graham:  I’m really into the idea of conveying a story clearly enough for the reader to get all the basics while at the same time having enough information going on where you don’t necessarily get it all or even miss something on the first read through.
I think it’s something that came from me reading a lot of European and Japanese comics growing up and just not always getting everything, culturally or just because of weird translations.

I like that nice mystery.

And there’s the idea that when a story doesn’t give you everything it forces the reader to think a little more. Turns them from being a passive reader to an active one.
I think that would be my ideal destination, some kind of clear and simple with a background of complexity.

SW: Are you consciously doing that on a lot of levels, not just the narrative but with settings and dialog as well? For example I never really caught on how much personality you gave Earthling was until my latest reread of King City, he’s a separate figure outside from Joe with his own thing going on. Some of the best moments in the whole thing are his reactions. Are there story elements that you’re downplaying for the reader to make them participate?

BG: Thanks. I feel like the only way I can get through drawing everything is by entertaining myself thinking about what’s going on with everything I’m drawing. –It all needs a story. A lot of that doesn’t get conveyed when it’s just background stuff. It gets harder to rein it in when it’s a bigger part of the story.

Like in KC issue 12 when they go to rescue Max at the Mercy clinic and there’s a stone baby all the chalk addicts are hooked up to. I had to figure out that they were using the chalk to make a kind of Chalkenstein monster and It was kind of hard not to be all –”Look what I did here!” and not just let the reader get as much as Joe gets out of the scene.

And sometimes it’s not even something I spend all that much time figuring out. Like in this short I did called Under where the guy has a drink named after the girl in his bed that used to be named after another girl. Sometimes I’m only figure out as much as I put on the page.

SW: You spend a lot of time humanizing your characters. I’ve seen you mention before that you like to have characters eat and use the toilet in stories. In the scene from Under it works as the quick shorthand so you don’t have to spend a lot of time endearing the character to the reader in an obvious way. Do you think that those kind of scenes are important as a story element or is it just a subconscious effect on the reader?

BG: BG: Yeah, I think they can be the main event sometimes. I’ve been reading a lot of Murakami the past few months and that dude can write a scene where all I care about is a character sitting in a bar with a cucumber sandwich and a beer. It’s comforting and relate-able. But also the same kind of thing can work as just a subconscious trick. the cool thing about doing that sort of thing in comics is that it not only shows the character as more human but it also gives you an excuse to draw them doing something in a scene when something else less visual is going on.

The Blade of the Immortal guy has this thing he does where he’ll set up scenes with all these props around the characters. One of them will be smoking a pipe while another is basket weaving or whatever.

And then he can draw a long scene in the same spot with the characters just talking and rather than redrawing the same room over and over he focuses’ on everything a character could do with a pipe or the basket being weaved.

SW: Do you have any specific rules for each kind of scene as you’re working? Say, for an action scene, are there certain things you’re trying to do or avoid? There’s a scene in KC #10 where Joe is breaking into Greenest Grass, and he drops the gargoyle on the guards leg; it reminded me of something Shane Black said about how violence needs to be awkward to be really effective.

BG: BG: I hadn’t though about violence needing to be awkward, I like that.
I guess In an action scene I’d only want to do if I could think of a joke or a fun way to show it. Violence needs to be violent.

When I was drawing porn comics I used to think about how to make it work you had to have things happen that the reader couldn’t get out of a video or photos.

Stuff like a guy ejaculating a fish or a girls tongue turning into a penis–circus stuff– I think there’s some of that mentality when I try to do action.

SW: Did working on porn change the way you make comics? How do you feel about that stuff a few years on? You can see a progression when you read the first Multiple Warheads story on, from there the way you’re approaching sex scenes as just a scene involving the characters instead of the most important part of the show.

BG: I think it changed my work in both in good and bad ways. Porn along with doing the graffiti stuff helped me get used to just fucking around and having fun while I draw.  Recently I think I’ve started to work some of the porn out of my system. I’m trying to learn to not always draw girls like they’re on the page to jerk off to. Not that I don’t still like drawing that stuff but I think it can be limiting.

Looking back I don’t feel like I was able to pull off what I was aiming at with porn. With Perverts of the Unknown I had to give up on it ever being what I wanted. I was doing a lot of messy detail then and drawing the pages smaller than I prefer. (10 by 14) I resigned myself to the idea that I’d try to make it a comic you’d want to find in a gas station bathroom.

And with Pillow Fight I just couldn’t get the characters past generic porn personalities.
Although I did have fun with the jokes in it.

SW: When you’re developing a series/story/etc are you starting with characters or do you start world-building first and develop the characters out of that? KC seems a lot more freestyle with the world development, but with Warheads and a lot of the stories in Escalator it feels comprehensively built from the ground up as sci-fi worlds. In general, how much do you think you’ve been effected by reading sci-fi? I know that seeing you draw Neuromancer characters a few times has been pretty illuminating to what you can accentuate in a character design, maybe more than just you drawing comics characters.

BG: I seem to start with the characters. Like you said King City being freestyle, it was just me treating the setting like it like it was in modern-day and fucking around with it. I had some rules where I tried to only mention real cultural references that I thought wouldn’t date it too much. I tried to avoid mentioning America or any police or government. –Although the Xombie war has an army. I don’t think I got too into it but the world in that is all policed by gangs, so maybe the army is just another gang.

Warheads is lots more work, I’ve been trying to go at it based loosely off what little I understand of Chinese and Russian history mixed with some fantasy stuff. Also idea that England and Spain don’t exist and America was never colonized (but heavy metal music was still invented). So everything’s passed through that filter. I had to figure out what was going on all over the world. Like America (or whatever I’ll call it) has giant Totem pole robots. And Japan is a big outer space empire ran by a dragon. And none of this is even talked about in the pages I’ve drawn so far but I kind of needed it to just know where the characters are coming from.

My mom writes science fiction so I grew up pretty immersed in the stuff. I think I was pretty affected by stuff like the Oz books where there’s just a ton of crazy shit going on at once.
My mom would read a lot to me as a kid. I feel like sf is at the base of my interest and understanding of writing. It’s like I’m a planet and my atmosphere is made of science fiction and any new ideas that enter or leave have to pass through that.

And thanks– the Neuromancer pin up was fun to draw. I was into the idea of trying to show it without any of the stuff The Matrix ganked from it.
I’m really into finding drawings of the characters in books I enjoy, With some stuff like Heinlein’s Friday there’s a book cover that I think fits perfect.

But as influential as Neuromancer is, I can’t get into any of the covers of it I’ve seen.
Even Snow Crash, that I regard as an off-brand Neuromancer, has these amazing japanese covers that look like FLCL art.

SW: I remember buying the US edition of Snow Crash and having to explain to the person I was with that it wasn’t the horrible fantasy novel the cover made it look like. All the cyberpunk books – none of them really have covers that wow, I guess. Do you think that your covers have to carry as much weight as a novel cover? The best give you a really good idea of tone and scope if nothing else, maybe what the main character looks like. And comics covers are normally either super-specific to what’s going on in the issue or it’s a completely unrelated shot of the main character, and once in a while there’s the Criterion-style ultra-designed covers. Do you think that, say the KC photo cover or the game pieces cover, are good indicators at what the book is like? Or are they just trying to stand out against a lot of the same-ness, and be more playful with design and color?

And following that, when you’re working on a page or a sequence, do you make a conscious effort to not just do regular no-frills storytelling? Because there are things like the board game in KC, and the connect the dots page. Those are kind of the big examples, but there’s a lot of little things you do to be more playful with the artform — Earthling slicing a word balloon in half, stuff like that. Do you think that there’s been a lack of innovation with what you can do in comics (for the most part) recently? I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the lack of thought balloons in comics anymore, because it’s cutting off a tool of the vocabulary, but that’s a drop in the bucket for the potential tricks that could possibly be used.

BG: I think there’s a lot of weight put on novel covers being the one and only image you get to represent a whole story.
For the King City covers I was mostly just trying to keep myself interested. I’d be fine putting out a book with a blank cover. But they can be an excuse to try out some fun stuff.

Sometimes I make a conscious effort to just do more basic storytelling and go into every page thinking it needs a trick. If I come up with one for fun I keep it but I don’t want to feel like I have to be doing tricks all the time.
It’s like reminding myself that it supposed to be fun. It’s hard some days.

Didn’t Marvel get rid of smoking? Maybe the thought balloons got cleared out with all the tobacco smoke. Mostly I try to ignore the dumb shit, I’m seeing a ton of recent artists really pushing what’s possible. I just got Theo Ellsworth‘s Capacity. Just how it starts out with a knock at the door and the narration reads ” If you want to answer the door turn the page. If you don’t want to answer the door close the book, sorry this isn’t a choose your own adventure.” that shit gets me excited to make comics.
The frustrating thing for me is so many of these new creators are putting out books outside the comic book issues that I love. And a lot of that seems to be the companies not digging for new talent.

SW:  So your livejournal (and now wordpress) seems to fill this really interesting place in comics, because it’s a really accurate extension of you as a creator; its kind of one part your work process, one part promotion for your friends and peers, and one part an exploration of all kinds of comics that never get talked about. English language comics are generally discussed online as either superheroes or indie/art comics (or translated manga/eurocomics) and you generally discuss a lot of things that don’t fit into either of those categories. Do you think that having an active interest in comics, where you’re still looking for old Bilal book covers or John Workman short stories, is important to how you work? Do you think of it as research or just trying to stay interested in comics outside of what you’re drawing yourself?

With promoting other cartoonists – is it just to get your friends’ work out there or do you think creating a kind of community in comics is important? I know I wouldn’t have heard about cats like Simon Roy or Milogiannis without Royalboiler. You’ve lived in real life artist collectives with Yosh! and Dicecat so do you see your blog as just the online extension of that? Do you think having a scene is important?

Graham and Farel Darymple.

BG: Part of it for me is just to remind myself just how big the art form is, and talk about stuff like Appleseed and Moebius that got me excited enough about comics to devote my life to this. Looking at other people’s work is a big part of how I work.

Right now I’ve pulled out all the books I have that’ve some kind of storytelling tricks in them, stuff like maps as part of the story or choose your own adventure comics, comics that you can fold into mobius strips etc. . Looking through that stuff I’m trying to come up with things that I haven’t seen done. It’s both entertainment and research.

Talking about other artists comes from a similar place as all that and it’s also about pushing the kind of work I want to see more of. I think as readers and creators we all have a lot of power in the kind of scene we’re part of. I think a scene is so important that isn’t all tied up in the industry side of comics, this is so much bigger than just making a living. This is our own culture.

One important aspect of a real scene is rewarding the good work but also having standards you want to live up to. People you trust to call bullshit and keep you on your toes.

SW:  So it seems like there’s a pretty strong undercurrent of autobio in a lot of your books, do you think that you have to incorporate that into your work to keep it honest or is it just something that you find yourself doing as you are writing? How do you feel about the “write what you know” maxim when everything you’re doing is almost always in some kind of genre?

BG: I’m always trying to write from my own experiences even if it gets layered under the all the sci-fi/fantasy stuff. It’s a really conscious attempt to put real feelings into what I’m talking about. Sometimes it ends up with me putting how I feel about fictional things or just trying to think about how It would feel to be in whatever situation but I really want some stink of truth in there.

When I was younger I used to always argue that if you can draw anything in comics why not use fantastic visuals to show everyday feelings. It’s a little bit of that still but also I think that those are just the terms i think in now. I think I’m into “write what you know” but in a flexible way.  I’m into writing what you know to write about what you don’t know. You know?

SW:  I was just looking at that 24Seven story you wrote for James Stokoe, and it was the only instance I could find where you were writing for someone else, and the Madame Xanadu story is the only one where you were working from someone else’s script. I know in general you tend to work as a solo act but how did you feel about collaborating on those short pieces? How do you feel about the writer/artist/whatever divide as a person who does all that stuff on his own?

BG: I feel like those might both be bad examples of collaboration. For the 24seven story I just sat  in a bean bag chair and yelled out what would happen in the story and then when Stokoe would ask what he was going to draw I wouldn’t remember and have to come up with something else. I think I had so much faith in James that it felt like trying to tell someone how to eat or walk “you know how to do this right?” In retrospect I should have gone about it differently.

The DC job was just an art job, I wasn’t really able to make storytelling decisions. I mean not to shit talk too much, I enjoyed drawing it and I like how the art came out but I wouldn’t buy the thing.

My ideas about collaboration have changed a lot in the last few years with seeing the stuff Urasawa does with a team of assistants or how the BPRD guys work with a couple different writers and make something that feels more like a group effort. It’s opened me up to the idea of collaboration as a good thing. At the same time in my work where I write and draw everything I’ve become less willing to collaborate. I don’t have any interest in ever working with letterers or colorists on something I draw again. Not that it was awful, it was just less my own.

I’m working on a comic now with my pal Simon Roy doing the drawing. I’m trying to approach it more as 2 brains on one book rather than one artist one writer. I’m more co-writing it and I have faith in him to push the story in places I wouldn’t. I don’t think I could work with an artists who I didn’t have faith in as a writer.

SW: Writing for Simon Roy, do you think of that as just something you haven’t tried before and you want to collaborate with Simon, or is it a conscious attempt to branch out from what you are doing? How much do you think about the thing you are working on at the moment as it fits into your body of work as a whole?

Maybe a wider question – do you think when you’re working on your books do you have like a central theme you’ve been consciously focusing on in everything you do? Or do you think that having something like that when you’re going into a story is a bad idea?

BG:  The thing with Simon started out as a money job for Image but I’m getting really into working on it. As much as I have to pay rent I’m hoping to not have to do it by putting out bad comics ever (again) Sometimes the kind of comics I’m doing are more about what’s being thrown at me than what I would do in a vacuum. I like that,  it forces change and hopefully growth.

I imagine King City would have ended differently If stuff with TP had gone differently. One of the main reasons I don’t show the final big fight was that i had a set amount of issues and I wanted to focus more on what I would miss when they were done.

I only think of my body of work in terms of not wanting to get too repetitive, most of the stuff I do is going to have a lot of similar stuff but hopefully I’m not just doing the same story over and over. And working with Simon should result in new kinds of comics for me– so that’ll be nice.

I could see central themes being a good thing even you allow the story to become something else, but it’s good to remember what the idea was when you started something.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in writing is the unspoken deal with the reader— ” if you get into this I’ll try not to fuck with you.”

But I also want to use reality more as a guide to what to do rather than just other fiction. I feel like it’s easy to get caught up in a ton of story bullshit that doesn’t actually relate to how things work in real real life. It’s ok to not have closure and maybe even preferred if it makes the reader mull it over after reading it.

SW: Do you feel like that unspoken relationship with the reader is something you’ve got to cultivate with each new thing? Or are you moving forward with it as you go? I was listening to a Ridley Scott commentary the other day and he said that as he gets deeper into a story he can take more liberties because he’s earned it with the audience. And I thought that’s kind of a dangerous idea but also a powerful one for an artist to run with.

BG: I like the idea of knowing you have the trust of the readers, I was just talking to my misses about how I don’t think I’ve got the nerve yet to entirely pull away from the things that I know work. But I’m taking baby steps, like I’ve been working on more serious stuff without the King City type comedy. I feel like the important thing is that the same amount of effort goes into the work.

I love that I’ve spent my whole life drawing comics and I still run into that feeling like–holy shit can I get away with this? recently I did a MW page where I scanned photos into it to use in a panel. And I think it worked (I hope) in a kind of early Tank Girl way, but it could have gone bad bad.

Most of the relationship with the readers for me is getting people to know that I’m going to try to not put out books that I wouldn’t want to buy. Like the thing with Simon, I was joking that the ads would say “do you trust me?”

Because I do think it’s a cop out a lot of times when writer/artists work as just writers. It’s real easy to get all –page 7 –more fights. that’s why if I’m working with someone I need them to be able to call me on shit and carry some of the writing weight as well. I was so happy when I sent Simon my first page breakdown and he sent it back with changes.

SW: When you talk about the idea of comics that haven’t been done – that’s kind of hard to actually achieve. Branching out of the moves you know work , and the idea that everything has been done – is it possible to actually make something new in comics? Not just in the “webcomics are the future” way, but just in paper comics – from page layouts to subject matter – is it possible to keep finding new ground?

BG: I can’t say with certainty what has and hasn’t been done since there’s so much unseen out there but there’s a hell of a lot that I’ve never seen tried in comics.

Emily Carrol just put out a set of zines with each one showing one page moments from a different member of a family’s life leading up to a big fire. and you get different sides and different clues deepening on which zine you read.  Or there’s that Pat McEwan short in the back of Weasle #1 where each panel is a room and you don’t read left to right — you follow individual characters. I think that idea could be pushed even farther. — you could combine both those ideas and have choose your own adventures that read what direction the reader chooses to look and have it jump books or have pages fold out like posters in it.

I had this idea for a book that starts as a Scott McCloud how to draw comics or how to do perspective or draw manga book– hosted by a guy and his beautiful assistant.  3 chapters in to a standard how book to the assistant is found dead and then the learning comics part gets dropped and it switches to a murder mystery.

Or like, I’ve never seen a serious comic showing the life cycle of a fungus

Even if stories come from the old roots I think doing them in new ways creates something bigger than just the root idea. plus as a reader or an artist I feel like you have to have hope for undiscovered country. You can’t be an explorer that already expects every mountain to have a flag planted on it– there are still mountains on mars.

Part II -  (Comics Creator) Melee Mode

Here are Brandon’s reactions to a list of creator names I sent him, kind of lightning-round style.

Herge
I read a lot of Tintin as a kid. I like how he can have murder and opium dens and it’ll still feel charming and for kids. I like the swirly lines he draws when someone is running or drunk.

Osamu Tezuka
I remember being a teenager and hearing that he died. I was really bummed out about it, and I’d only seen the tip of what he’d done. I like the idea that he was a dude that was so inspired by what Disney was doing that he took that and ran farther with it than Disney ever could.  He’s another dude who you can tell just has so much fun drawing.

Jack Kirby
I didn’t read much Kirby until i was in my 20′s. When I did It was like –”oh that’s where everything came from”. I like how much fun he was having, His take for 2001 is great where he takes the movie as the basis and then goes completely off the rails. I like that he made collages on his pages and had celebrity guests. Just a guy having great fun.

Every once in a while I’ll pick up a new Fantastic 4 issue and really enjoy it and then I’ll go back and read a Kirby issue and it’ll ruin the new stuff for me.

Matt Howarth
I feel like Howarth in the 80′s really pushed what could be done with the medium just about more than anyone. When he was doing time travel comics that folded into mobius strips and the page out of his WRAB Pirate TV where you hold it up to the light to see the subliminals printed backwards on the other side of the page. 

Moebius
I heard Michael Kaluta once say that Moebius is the kind of artists that teaches you how to draw just by looking at his work. I think that’s true.

It seems like he’s just an amazingly talented guy who was reigned in drawing cowboy comics for 10 years and then discovered the freedom of the american underground and ran with it. I feel like his work just opens up the possibilities and at the same time makes it seem easier to get there. I’m afraid to ever meet this dude, I’d kiss him on the mouth.

Kenichi Sonada
I really like that clean 80′s manga style he does. and I like that he’s a dude that will draw porn comics of cartoons other people hired him design characters for (along with other people’s cartoons). And apparently he’s hired assistants that he found doing porn parodies of his work.

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez
I think of him as like the pinnacle of artists who work with writers. He manages to get so much personality, style and craft into his pages. His Cinder and Ashe book is amazing.

Katsuhiro Otomo
When I have to really get serious on an illustration I open up his Kaba art book to remind me how good it can get.

When I was a teenager I was so into his Akira, it’s so teenage boy in all the best ways but only recently have I been able to track down his work he did before Akira and see how much he was pushing it. Like a book he did that shows a war start to finish and how it affects characters all around the world. Or his sci-fi parody called Hair where a bunch of future hippies try to bring back the common cold.

Carla Speed McNeil
I feel like her work shows how big comics can be. She does such a great example of what I was talking about earlier with clear enough storytelling over dense complex backgrounds.

Recently I got to do a panel with her at a con and took her calling me babe the way other dudes would take home an Eisner.

Enki Bilal
I love The Woman Trap. I love his way of dealing with color and storytelling. Bright blue or red hair with white skin and pipes running with rust.  I like how much he gets into a 48 page book full of 3 panel pages.

Akira Toriyama
Early Dragon Ball was some of the first manga I ever got. My brother brought home a 1985 phonebook sized Shonen Jump. It was a story of Goku and a winged bat dude fighting on the out stretched tongues of 2 statues that were sitting on toilets. He even drew a stone toilet paper roll.

I’m always amazed by the ideas he put into early DB and Dr Slump. That stuff is a good argument for how well kids comics can work if you don’t shy away from genital and poop jokes.

Masamune Shirow
I’m so fucking impressed by what he did in the 80′s. There’s still parts of Appleseed that I don’t understand but I keep going back to it and finding new things to be impressed by. It’s so dense and the tricks he does with story telling are amazing. I’ve read his books hundreds of times now and I’m still finding new stuff.

I always feel like one of the best and worst things about Appleseed is that it’s about future cops in a cyborg city because it makes it’s not where comic book scholars would look for amazing storytelling but also in that sense it’s there for kids that want a cyborg cop comic. And then they can spend the rest of their lives freaking out about how fucking impressive it is.

Paul Pope
His work in the 90′s got me so excited about comics. When he was putting out his giant Buzz Buzz-sized books there was such a cool air to his comics.
I love that inky coffee fur coat cool.

When I moved to NYC Pope’s Heavy Liquid was coming out. It made the city a much more exciting place for me to find the real places he used as settings in the book.
I remember seeing Grand central and thinking “Oh shit it’s that thing from Heavy Liquid and the Michael Golden picture!”

Katsuya Terada
I saw him at a San Diego con years ago I was really impressed watching him draw pictures for people. Each one was dramatically different, in one he drew a baby and then the next a guy with a guitar and then motorcycle. He just seems like a dude who loves drawing. He’s like a sketchbook king.

Vaughn Bode
I think a lot about how much guys like Bode and George Herriman for how much great story they could get on one page. And also how much personality Bode put in his work.
I feel like I got to know the guy long after he died through his pages.

John Buscema
I love Conan comics and I don’t think I’d care half as much about them if not for Buscema.
In my comic book brain I imagine him to be just like the Cimmerian he drew.

Naoki Urasawa
Reading his stuff changed my mind on assistants and plots.
He seems to have found a way to direct comics and even if he doesn’t draw every line you can tell how invested he is in the work. It’s a new kind of comics for me to read.

Adam Warren
Sometimes I feel like Warren is a dude who never caught onto how damn good his own work is. It broke my heart to see him just writing for Gen13 comics– I felt like after Dirty Pair he should have been doing Neuromancer-level sci-fi of his own.
I’m thrilled he’s making Empowered now. That’s one of the rare comics I will set my alarm to go to the comic store on the morning of the day it’s out. It’s like x mas.

Fil Barlow
Zooniverse is 6 issues that changed my whole idea about the art form. I feel like there are more ideas in his Zooniverse than 50 issues of most comics. And that coupled with how little notice the book got really ruined my faith in popular comics opinion.

I’ve been talking to Barlow recently, and it’s been so rewarding to learn that this guy who influenced me so much is still just a cool guy who is excited to make art

Kyle Baker
I feel like he’s another dude who just doesn’t even know how brilliant he is. Or maybe he’s just over it. It kind of breaks my heart to think that the Why I Hate Saturn dude is working on Deadpool and not even writing it himself.

I love what he did with Why I Hate Saturn and Cowboy Wally, I don’t know if anything exists with more wit.

Frank Miller
I always like how in the Dark Knight he has all these little panels on a page so when he gives you a full page drawing its seems fucking HUGE. Such great pulp ninja comics.

I just reread Ronin, It’s great to see him so excited about French and Japansese comics and getting that into his own work. It’s always funny for me to see anything from an era where you had to explain what a samurai is.

Graham and Quitely

Frank Quitely
I’m really impressed with the way Quitley shows movement and space. Before I’d read his Morrison Superman book I would had said that there was nothing that would interest me about that character.

Mike Wieringo
When I first moved to NYC I would go visit Rob Stull who was inking Wieringo’s Tellos book. And I got to see Wieringo’s pencils being worked on. It all seemed like a part of comics that was far from where I was.

Then later he contacted me and drew fanart for King City. I really admired how much he was interested in what was going on and still had his eyes open for new work. I would have liked to meet him in person.

Dave Sim
I like what Sim did with self publishing and just making his own world outside of the comics industry.  I love that there was someone with his wit and drawing ability to be a 3rd part in the 2 sided Fantagraphics and mainstream of the time. Plus how much he pushed other people’s small press comics was amazing.

I can’t speak too much on his reputation as a misogynist because I still have yet to read the stuff he’d written that pissed everyone off. The whole thing does feel pretty glass house in this misogynist industry.

Eastman/Laird
The Raphael one shot with the black and red cover was one of the first comics I remember buying for myself. I didn’t even know how much they were playing off of Miller’s DD stuff.
And in the end it seems like they created something new. Plus whether or not it all worked out, I think they used their powers for good once they got the loot.

Hugo Pratt
I’ve only read about 3 issues of his Corto Maltese, it’s fun adventure comics.
He’s a dude who I’ve built up some respect for by just seeing how many artists I respect love him. But I haven’t delved deep enough myself yet.

Dylan Horrocks
I think about Hicksville a lot, I feel like it exists in how many great comics are out there that I have yet to see.

There’s a great Inkstuds interview he did that I bring up as why sane people shouldn’t work in super hero comics. A bunch of writers had to plot how some fictional teenager was going to be killed. He talks about being creeped out by being in a room full of grown men all talking about murdering a little girl.

Jose Munoz
There’s this trick I do that I got from Munoz where mid comic conversation he’ll show a far away shot with its own story going on. His use of blacks is so cool. I love Sinner.

Ralph Bakshi
Wizards was like my gateway drug into Vaughn Bode. Years ago some of the Meathaus dudes took me to meet him when they were taking his class at SVA.

He walked in the room and said “I just threw my back out in the crapper” Like he just stepped out of one of his own cartoons.

Wendy Pini
Elfquest was huge to me growing up. I read the collected books backwards 4-3-2-1 It worked nicely like that. Like TMNT It seems like they took the Conan magazine stuff and ran with it to new places.

Milo Manara
He’s another dude I feel like the early work that he’s less known for is the stuff that has blown my mind the most. I love his Bergman books where he’s really pushing the medium. Like where he shows the teenage girl narrator and have her talk about how the reader would think of her different if she was just drawn slightly different. plus just his ability to use such simple pretty lines on everything.

Jamie Hewlett
Like Pope, he’s another guy that makes comics that are cooler than Rock & roll.
I like how he would just throw photos onto Tank Girl pages or just have British celebrities I’d never heard of show up. When I was a kid I assumed, like Zooniverse, that he was Australian and it made that place seem like the best comic spot on earth.

KRS-ONE
His whole attitude about how to treat your art has taught me so much. I’m into longevity and making the community you’re in the best it can be.

I always think about his “Health, Wealth, Self” song. Where he talks about 3 lessons to longevity, (1) “if it ain’t fun, you’re done” (2) make sure you got a dope crew.  And (3) have other ways of gettin’ money so your longevity isn’t based on sales and so you don’t have to choose what work you do based on how much they pay.

- – -

(all photographs via Graham’s blogs)

- Brandon Graham, Sean Witzke, July 2011

Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics have, in the past few years, become this paragon of consistency. To the point where every time one of these issues drops, the “what’s being released this week” columns routinely seem surprised that something with Mignola’s name on it is not just coming out, but is without fail a good-to-great comic as well. Is it that people didn’t expect these books to still be good? Or that there’s a franchise of comics that (while not Batman/X-Men overextended) that doesn’t just hang together coherently but is actually well made? Or maybe that Mignola isn’t drawing any of them at the moment? But I think that there’s a sense that the big standard bearer of quality genre comics is a guy they’ve never taken seriously as a writer, and are kind of dumbstruck that, this stuff stays good. Mignola’s current work on the main Hellboy book with Duncan Fegredo is ornate and expertly crafted, the one-shots with artisans like Richard Corben and Kevin Nowlan are loose showcases, each approach is rewarding as a reader in different ways. The main BPRD book, which is co-plotted by Mignola but mostly put together by John Acurdi and Guy Davis, is more down to earth than the mythology- and folklore-driven Hellboy, with it’s characters running around in the midwest of the U.S. torching monsters. But that down-to-earth quality (that Barton Fink feeling?) and the series-of-miniseries format mask that BPRD is one of the most engrossing long-form narratives in comics.  It’s not just that Acurdi can take Mignola’s sensibility into a more visceral place, and sometimes a more character-driven place. Hellboy has become more elegiac as the story has progressed, and BPRD is more likely to have a cluster of giant robots vomit fire onto a city.

Right now, though, I’m going to discuss the spinoff to the spinoff, and a prequel at that. It’s when you look at this on paper you can kind of see why someone would go “how can this possibly be good?”. Of course, 1946 is the worst looking on paper, featuring almost none of the regular series characters, a writer and artist team new to the material, and is coming out a decade into the life of the idea. Of course, 1946 is a strong contender for one of the best books to come out of the Hellboy universe since Mignola was handling the whole thing solo. Oh and the real reason people don’t take this shit seriously – this is a comic about a Vampire Nazi Doomsday Bomb, and one that makes no apologies for being anything other than a comic about a Vampire Nazi Doomsday Bomb. And in this age of high concept bullshit comics that throw signifiers like “Vampire” and “Nazi” around like nothing, it’s easy to go “oh that book”, I guess. Joshua Dysart and Paul Azaceta have made a book with Mignola that maintains Mignola’s tone and affectation for historical accuracy and occult Nazi imagery, and managed to weld them together into a story that could not have appeared in any of these books before but fits perfectly.

In the afterword of the book, Dysart talks about the pitch he gave to Mignola for the series, which is that he saw Hellboy as a metaphor for the Cold War, with the 20th century spent dealing with the aftermath of the Nazis. 1946 is set in Berlin immediately after the war, with a cast built out of Americans, Russians, and Germans; occupying territory usually reserved for Graham Greene and Germany Year Zero. What little I have read of Dysart’s work (the two BPRD series and Unknown Soldier) betrays that he’s smart enough to understand where to deploy a lot of research and where to let that stuff slip so it doesn’t get in the way of the story. 1946 seems astoundingly well researched, but it doesn’t fall into that trap of feeling like the author is trotting out his research in place of essential elements like character and tone. The gist of the story is that Professor Bruttenholm, a character who appears briefly in Hellboy and kind of haunts the early half of the series, is sent to Berlin with his partner to document the Nazi’s occult dealings. He is secretly looking for information about Hellboy’s entrance to earth, and finds that upon arrival he’s too late and the Russians have been busy seizing and cataloging anything he’d have been able to find. They are given a small detatchment of soldiers and spend months going through paperwork, only to find nothing. When Bruttenholm meets his Russian counterpart, who is a small girl posessed by a demon, and discovers a nazi plot to create a vampire army.

This is all kind of boilerplate Hellboy/BPRD stuff, only this time with a clever location and time that adds a layer of complexity to the proceedings simply on its face. Berlin 1946 is one of the most immediately interesting settings you could have for a story. Even a hamfisted attempt at portraying two occupying forces inhabiting the same place after the most devastating conflicts in the history of mankind, let alone the start of another massive rivalry developing a boil between superpowers on the same city. Dysart does the material a service, though, with these characters actually being people – German farmers terrified of soldiers, American soldiers exhausted and waiting on their way out, Russians considering their treatment of the city as just revenge. Hell there’s even a Nazi general portrayed as having motivations beyond “nazis evil bad” which should get a gold star considering the post-Call of Duty approach to history that most fiction takes these days. Sure, there is a Nazi scienctist head in a jar with robotic spider legs screaming about destroying America, but he’s portrayed as one voice of many, something I don’t think many people writing Nazis even sit down to think about. These aren’t monolithic groups that immediately get stamped with traits, so much as characters that have affiliations and jobs that effect their actions. Maybe what makes this a great story is that the characters are illustrated and defined entirely by their actions, and in doing so create ambiguities in those actions – we as an audience are left to decide the moral state of these charcters, it is not once presented to us as a given.

While 1946 was conceived and released at the same time as Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon’s The Winter Men, it feels like a comic that shares the same sensibility of applying the historical and cultural specifics to genre (or in this case the Hellboy formula). 1946 feels like it might be the first post-Winter Men comic, even though that might just feel that way because Paul Azaceta comes from the same Leon/Edwards/Martinborough/Murphy school, and the Russians speaking English feels a lot more accurate than simply accented. Of course it probably isn’t at all, Winter Men reaches a lot higher than 1946 does in most areas, but there is a feeling of shared sensibility that almost nothing else has.

There are a lot of fine moments in the series, ranging from small character beats, brief silent panels that perform tonal shifts, to extended minor narratives. Steiner nervously telling his fellow soldiers about how he’d rather being playing in his band back home before he’s attacked by vampires, only for the rest of the men thinking he’s lost it instead of seeing the danger. Sgt. Maes really losing his composure when he finds out he’s on a rocket full of cyborg monkeys and frozen manmade vampires, firing randomly. The unsettling pause of the drawing of frowning angels on the wall in the mental institution, immediately after Azaceta draws a swarm of vampires consume a person like insects boning a corpse. The finest moment in the entire series, something which I didn’t even catch until my latest reread, is the story that Varvara tells Bruttenholm when he asks who she is. Varvara tells a story of Peter the Great searching for a way to conquer using “old knowledge”, meaning the occult. He searches through every kind of magic available before discovering a way that works, summoning 3 demons. The demons help him, but in return they take part of Peter – the first his sons, the second his heart, and the the third is meant to take his soul but leaves it. Varvara implies that she is the demon, and would rather be trapped on earth. What I didn’t catch at first is that Dysart is drawing a direct correlation with the Nazis, who used the same search through the occult (and, as in the real world, science) to attempt to conquer. And like in the story, even after the Nazis are destroyed, the fruits of their searching, something they could not hope to control or understand, is doing far greater damage without them. It’s the story in microcosm, but it’s also the story of Hellboy, and the story of the real world. The history of countries, he is pointing out, is riddled with unknown consequences to conquest, and cleanup is never entirely possible. That’s why the story is worth telling.

- Sean Witzke, June 2011

“Then the whip cracked over the jutting bones of the horse; it lurched forward, snorted and began to gallop down the street at enormous speed. Jerry clung on as the cab rocked from side to side and hurtled across an intersection. From over his head he heard a strange, wild droning and realized that the driver was singing in time to the rhythm of the horse’s hooves. The tune seemed to be Auld Lang Syne and only after a while did Jerry realize that the song was a favourite of the 1917-20 war.

‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,’ sang the driver, ‘because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’ “

- Michael Moorcock, A Cure For Cancer, the not-amazing sequel to a book that I really liked.

Annotations for Flashpoint #1 and #2.

Summer, 2011. The world is ending. Not the real world. I mean, sure, the economy is collapsing, there’s a natural disaster once a week that qualifies as horrific and soul-destroying, royalty are getting married on television, diseases are flourishing, people are making up fictional drugs that then get reported on by massive news outlets, etc etc; but no, the real world isn’t ending right now. Maybe next year Terrence McKenna and 1999 Grant Morrison will be right and everything will end then. But right now, the real world isn’t going anywhere, no matter how many signs of revelation appear to be fulfilled every day. The world I am speaking about is a small, fictional world, that only a few thousand people even having a passing knowledge of, one currently managed by Geoff Johns and 2011 Grant Morrison, whose cells have been completely replaced since 1999 and can (maybe must?) therefore be considered a different person by the standards of Morrison comics, have been triage doctors in a disaster zone for some time, and the disaster zone is called the DC universe. It’s ending. And if you really think about it, you being one of the fraction of a fraction of a percentage who actually would read something on this site instead of somewhere else, who actually read about comic books on the internet, who in the grand scheme of things has absolutely no effect on the comics industry outside of con attendance numbers, because let’s be really honest the same people bought Flashpoint and Paying For It and any dichotomy that you want to create there is imaginary…. the DC universe is ending and you can’t force yourself to care.

DC comics characters are always going to be around in some form, any intellectual property that can produce a movie as lucrative as The Dark Knight will always be allowed to produce in some form, and saying that DC is going to keel over and die is, at best wishful thinking and at worst, a facile basis for an argument (you may think of those two things reversed, but whatever). Not going anywhere. There might not be a print arm of DC after a while, but there will always be a DC comics. But not this DC comics, not the one that has existed for twice as long as I’ve been alive. There’s a reboot coming, and a massive shift in the company’s business model that is WAY MORE IMPORTANT has, and let’s be honest, needs to be, the real news story. Comics going digital is happening and the direct market isn’t going to exist the way it does right now, and may not exist at all, in ten years time. This is going to happen, the question is just timeline of events. DC going day-and-date digital with 52 books at once is a nice way of them saying “we’re sick of waiting for someone else to do this”.

The big reboot, the first of it’s kind, as it is specifically targeted with making these characters saleable as media properties instead of juking the stats with the pre-existing DC/Marvel audience; is simple – they need to change the Superman origin (pesky copyright law and creators families saw to that) and they need to streamline everything else and bang it into easily translatable shape, which means Batman can’t be semi-outing himself the way he did, and the way Professor X did the exact same way in New X-Men almost a decade ago. It means Superman can’t be “walking to find the spirit of the USA” and Wonder Woman needs to actually make sense (or as much sense as possible). And Green Lantern can stay the same because it’s been written with twin goals of making it unassailably simple and yet ornate enough to resemble biblical hierarchies, something that Geoff Johns is spectacular at doing. Green Lantern may be ridiculous as a concept and as a “mythology” (in the JJ Abrams sense not the Joseph Campbell sense, though really who can tell the difference anymore when Edgar Wright wrote a Joseph Campbell speech for Scott Pilgrim specifically to show to JJ Abrams, then cut it when Abrams went “I’m the only person in the world who’d find that funny”), but it’s the kind of material that can easily be handed to a Hollywood screenwriter and hammered into shape over a weekend instead of the months-long process off writing, editing and thematic hedging that the Nolan Bat-movies have been said to go through (Marvel just writes the scripts on set, it’s much easier). Essentially Geoff Johns’ approach to Green Lantern is what they now have to do with every DC comics character and title. Which is interesting in a lot of ways, particularly in that Johns isn’t a particularly great writer so much as he’s someone with 1) a lot of commitment to the DC Universe, maybe the most committed since  Roy Thomas was walking the earth, making things safe for alternate universes; and 2) a innate, Richard Donner-trained skill at developing plot and theme independent of any other elements needed in a story.

Geoff Johns was essentially born to write for DC comics, and is great at doing so – his run on the GL books has been proof of that. The problem is in doing so, in fixing the entire mythology of a character that was dated when Gil Kane stopped working on it, he was in effect making the template of the destruction of the thing he loves as it exists today.

By exposing that these characters had been mismanaged – maybe interestingly, maybe not – it soon became obvious that they needed to fix the entire line, and after multiple attempts to fix them piecemeal, and the continuity line-wide jerry rigging that’s been in play since the original Crisis on Infinite Earths failed to work no matter how quickly they’ve done it. So here we are at 2011, which is a fallow period for every edge of comics concerned (current comics superstars include the people who were doing amazing work ten years ago, a guy who likes to draw himself banging faceless prostitutes, a bunch of names you vaguely know, webcomics people on forums, veterans doing stellar work between ad jobs, and…  yeah. I buy Orc Stain and BPRD mostly), the now-even-more-corporate DC comics decided that they need to make a move, and they decided that Geoff Johns had the right idea – and streamline everything. But instead of just doing what Johns does, which is essentially write his way out of a corner, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and chucking the entire universe. Worse yet – they’ve hired Johns himself to perform the act of destroying the universe he loves so dearly. I believe that he took the job knowing that if he didn’t take it, someone else would. Someone who probably wasn’t going to apply the care he would (whether you or I agree with this, the simple fact is that Johns loves DC comics in a way few do). So Johns took the job, and decided that it was best to tell the story in an alternate world apart from the DCU he loves.

Alternate universe stories, particularly in superhero comics, exist for one reason: to prove that the core world, the original world, is the only one that is correct one. Every issue of What If? and every Elseworlds ends in the world ending because they are secretly reinforcing the dedication of the readers of the major comics world. Not only in the “only fans could notice all these minor changes”, which is something that Flashpoint deals in too; but simply that these worlds are broken because they have deviated from the timeline. Any deviation from the real world results in death and destruction. That’s something that needs to be said to the reader – you know that this is wrong, because you understand the correct way of things. They are reassured by the differences.

Flashpoint is, generally a series of conceits with characters filling different roles than they’ve had – some of them in-character, some of them not. Generally, the timeline is changed because without the Flash, without Bruce Wayne as Batman (which is probably more telling than it wants to be – don’t be surprised when entire chunks of Morrison’s Bat-stuff disappears when the reboot happens – Bruce Wayne will be the only Batman). Without the characters that anchor the DCU, everything and everyone falls into global sectarian violence – Wonder Woman and Aquaman are evil dictators, other segments of the planet are written off casually because THEY DON’T MATTER. Gorillas running Africa may be casually racist but really its the result of that same reassurance – there are no characters that are important to the DCU in Africa. It’s dismissive more than anything, not for any reason other than it not being Gotham or Metropolis or Keystone City or whatever fictional place they need to tell a good Metamorpho story.

A bunch of villains are pirates (Captain Marvel Jr’s cameo on the pirate ship was probably the only thing in the entire series that I thought was kind of brilliant). Honestly, Andy Kubert is a pretty great action artist, and these are comics where characters stand around and discuss huge events. The events in the story “happen” in the way that big crossover comics have had them happen since time immemorial, which is really get all the heroes together and get them to talk with some occassional stabs of big reveals/twists. JJ Abrams is a great comparison point, because this is exactly what Lost and Alias episodes did. And it is done well, there’s not much you can say about it. So Kubert is kind of misused, I guess, but you can’t really fault anyone here for the work they are doing. I’m not that big of a DC guy, I don’t really go for this kind of story, but it does what it does well, kind of in defiance of the material on the page. Here are a bunch of characters I don’t know- – alternate versions of said characters no less – standing around discussing a fight with Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Okay. But this isn’t for me, this isn’t for anyone except the most devout DC fans. This isn’t a story, not really. This is apocalyptic literature, this is a message of the end times from the last deigned prophet, who’s job it is to document the last days of a fictional world. While DC, and superhero comics in general, have toyed with the imagery of the apocalypse for decades — Kingdom Come explicitly quotes John’s Revelation — but this is one the only mainstream comics that actually fills that role. This is the last time this world is ever going to exist, and not in the Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? way, or the House of M/Age of Apocalypse way, or even the Promethea/Earth X actually-well-done way. This is the series that will end DC comics forever, that will put the universe that Johns loves in the ground. Sure, he’s one of the architects of the new one, and I’m sure that’s what is getting him through this, but god, it must be rough for him to write this. It has to be excruciating.

Flashpoint #1 starts off with Batman, of all people, narrating. Not the real Batman. The alternate Batman. Which is Thomas Wayne and… yeah. Not the Dr. Hurt one, the original one. He’s the one in the story who’s telling it. But it doesn’t really read like Batman. It reads like Johns.

“I’m not the hero of this story. I’m a man who’s been corrupted by his own unbearable pain. I’m a man who has too much blood on his hands to be called good. I’m a man who had nothing to left to live for… Until the day I met the Flash”

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. DC Comics come out because they need to. There is no other reason. And no matter how much love was put into them, it just wasn’t enough to keep the thing going.

And Geoff Johns just found out. Flashpoint is his confession to us all.

- Sean Witzke June 2011

03. It Felt Like a Kiss (2009) Adam Curtis
04 – 06. The Living Dead part 1-3 (1995) Adam Curtis
07 – 09. Pandora’s Box pt 1-3 (1998) Adam Curtis
10 – 13. The Century of Self pt 1-4 (2008) Adam Curtis
Spurred on by the trailer for ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE (which is coming up later) I watched and rewatched a bunch of Adam Curtis’ documentaries. Curtis is most interesting, outside of his adeptness for audio/visual collage, is that he’s interested in how the individual effects mass history. More than that, though, is that the intention of the individual almost always mean nothing to the sweep of history, positive or negative. It Felt Like a Kiss is his masterpiece.

14. California Split (1974) Robert Altman
15. Images (1972) Robert Altman
California Split has a perfect opening crredits sequence, which drops you into these characters’ world long before you ever get to deal with them (or they each other). This is a behavioralist approach to characters but doesn’t sacrifice character, these two being Altman’s best. Images is less successful, but still completely compelling. The use of the storybook narration as a counterpoint to the story we’re watching, never overlapping or even commenting on each other, is inspired. This would make a pretty perfect counterpoint to Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. The ending is razorwire sharp, gut you in a second.

16. Hunger (2009) Steve McQueen
The opening 20 minutes are ice-cold, and Michael Fassbinder doesn’t screw around.

17. All the Real Girls (2003) David Gordon Green
David Gordon Green is one of the few filmmakers who can make movies about normal people doing not extraordinary things and make them into gorgeous and touching stories. On paper this is the kind of movie I can’t stand, but Green is so skilled at just showing people relate to one another, something that most movies ignore completely for things like “characterization”. Danny McBride’s first movie, and you can see even here he’s got the chops to handle real drama that he only really gets to use briefly in East Bound and Down.

18. Days of Heaven (1978) Terrence Malick
One of the most beautiful films ever made, and perfectly poised between biblical allegory and Andrew Wyeth painting brought to life. Richard Gere was never this good again. Can’t wait to finally see Tree of Life.

19. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) John Cassavettes
My final exam in my theater class gave me flashbacks to this film, because it largely consisted of me talking into a spotlight for an audience of one, playing for time. Gazzara at his finest.

20. Kill Bill vol. 1 (2003) Quentin Tarantino
21. Kill Bill vol. 2 (2004) Quentin Tarantino
22. Inglourious Basterds (2009) Quentin Tarantino
I’ve been watching Kill Bill because there’s a part of me that really wants to sit down and write a book about Kill Bill, and every time I sit down and start writing it I’m another few months deep into wannabe cinephilia so I see more of what he’s doing in the film, but I get the feeling that seeing every reference is actually impossible without sitting next to Tarantino while watching it. The other thing is, that.. no matter how many reference points you can spot, you are likely getting no closer to the actual heart of the story at hand. At a certain point, you realize that the amount of time it would take do it justice you could probably just write a goddamn screenplay (in this sentence “you” is in reference to “me”) or least spend some of that time in the gym. Inglourious, I think is just as complex as Kill Bill but I think I understand more of that film’s core because I actually know less of the quotes, it’s a forest/trees situation. Anyway I wrote more about Basterds in the previous post.

23. El Topo (1970) Alejondro Jodorowsky
Haven’t seen this in a few years, still a fantastic psychedelic western (in the sense that all psychedelic westerns are a perversion of the Western as a journey towards death not that it’s “trippy”). I do think that it has less of an impact after you’ve seen it once, in a way that Holy Mountain still has teeth on every rewatch. I guess it’s a trade-off because El Topo is a much more strong story than Holy Mountain, even though it fucks with you a little less.

24. Blade Runner the Final Cut (1982) Ridley Scott (Commentary)
Watched with the commentary track because I hadn’t gotten around to it. I’d put this commentary as a kind of home film school essential. Scott isn’t the most interesting interview, but it is incredibly honest and informative when it comes to just how much work went into the film, from what he was reading (BILAL and MOEBIUS) to who took Leon’s photographs (Douglas Trubmull).

25. Mystery Men (1999) Kinka Usher
If I ever have the chance to dj for people, I’m totally showing up as DJ Casanova Frankenstein. This movie is one of the best comic book adaptations, and features both the Goodie Mob and Michael Bay as supervillians. Of course, it has maybe one of the worst soundtrack of any movie in the 90s, so I guess that’s why people hate it as much as they do. Still: really funny, best of career performances from at least half of the people involved (Hank Azaria, Geoffrey Rush, Paul Reubens, and Tom Waits just as a start) and it really seems to get what is actually appealing and fun about superheroes as a concept in the in the same way that things like The Tick did, which is something that has existed in superhero comics in a long time.

26. Naked Lunch (1991) David Cronenberg
The scene where Weller is reciting the story of the talking asshole as we see the headlights play over a street that is neither NYC or Interzone, is Cronenberg’s mini-masterpiece of filmmaking.

27. Conan the Barbarian (1982) John Milius
Arnold and Milius better make a King Conan movie before one of them dies. Maybe a little dated, but truly committed to being a series of living Frank Frazetta paintings, and full of dialog that holds up better than any other fantasy dialog in film, simply by sticking to it’s cutthroat,  utilitarian nature.

28. Dune – Theatrical Cut (1984) David Lynch
Thought about watching it after reading about Ridley Scott and Jodorowsky’s failed attempts to make this into a movie. It’s fun to watch this to see the Lynch qualities that do show up, and the thought-bubble approach to narration, but this is on the whole terrible.

29. Men In Black (1997) Barry Sonnenfeld
Great buddy comedy.

30. Due Date (2010) Todd Phillips
Awful buddy comedy. Galifianakis in exile.

31. Fight For Your Right Revisited (2011) Adam Yauch
The Beastie Boy’s Hot Suce Committee pt. II is the album of the year, and this short is absolutely brilliant in how it goes “Oh yeah we’re still the Paul Revere dudes”. Chock full of cameos but that seems kind of beside the point, the actors here add up to a kind of texture, and to betray obscure in-jokes (Orlando Bloom I don’t care about, but Orlando Bloom playing Johnny Ryall? Hell yeah). My favorite moment outside of the literal pissing contest (and just how great the chemistry two casts of Beasties are) is the brief moment of Ad-Rock’s faux-Beatles narration as he gets stabbed by the metal girls on acid.

32. Sanjuro (1962) Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa’s brilliant auto-critique on action movies, specifically his own. The film plays as a boys adventure fiction with Mifune replaying his Yojimbo role only more weary, the young samurai who follow him think they’re having a fun romp, but only in the last few seconds do they understand that being a samurai means playing for keeps.

33. Battle of Algiers (1966) Gillo Pontecorvo
Peeled my cap back. Still kind of reeling a week later. Battle of Algiers is the best movie about terrorism ever made because there is no judgement of either side, there is only actions and consequences. The filmmaking is stunningly good because you forget about any filmmaking being done, even though the leading of the narrative is being pulled along masterfully, you don’t see an edit after the opening introduction, it plays like a newsreel. I’m gonna watch it again soon, I’ve got to see if it grabs me again or if I can approach it as a technical object.

34. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) Robert Weine
They really do not make movies this pretty anymore.

35. 39 Steps (1935) Alfred Hitchcock
The first half of the film I had trouble getting into, the second half, where the film transforms into a romantic-comedy-cum-spy-thriller, is a good candidate for my new favorite Hitchcock film. Also – even this eary Hitchcock understood how to show how large crowds act on film.

36-37. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace pt. 1-2 (2011) Adam Curtis
Part 3 of this is airing next week so I can’t really say much about this work as a whole. So far, Curtis has gotten an even better selection of needle drops to break your heart (Pino Donaggio’s DePalma scores, late period NIN, Burial), and a need to expose the development of the modern condition from machine logic, using clear and concise lines of historical fact to take apart something as basic as ecology.

- – -
current count in 2011 – 117

- Sean Witzke June 2011.

- – -

- In Arzak: L’Arpenteur, which I have only read in french (which means I haven’t really read it), Moebius clearly communicates Arzak’s status entirely in his body language. Early in the book, Arzak bears himself in a combination of warrior/samurai defensive readiness and officer class dignity. It is clear that Arzak has great dignity by the way he carries himself but he also has no problem absolutely destroying the men who ambush him. The ease with which he’s shown killing three men without breaking a sweat. This is why Moebius is a master, because volumes about a character are given by simple, easy to read actions.

- I recently read the first volume of Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which betrays maybe the sharpest learning curve in the history of comics. In the span of 12 issues, Sim goes from endearingly shaky-but-committed to talented guy going places. In 6 more issues he’d hit whatever sweet spot he was looking for and started doing olympiad comics. I really like how the stories start off as not-great parody (they’re parody because they have a funny animal!) and then progress to a pretty good approximation of Conan comics. After that, something interesting happens – the stories don’t change but there is a connectivity to them, and there is a feeling that Sim wants to start looking for larger ideas but doesn’t have the tools to do it yet? And when he does finally get to the point where he could start discussing these ideas he gets sidetracked by doing kind of tone-deaf parodies. Its unbalanced and charming, and by issue 15 or so it’s drawn by someone with the chops to be a modern master (serious the issue where Cerebus is drugged and stuck in the null-space that’s simply a figure on black and grey shadows? That’s some serious comics there). I know at some point it gets to be absolute classics and then turns into a soapbox about women and religion, but these early issues are great because of the flaws rather than in spite of them.

- Harvey James is a goddamn beast.

- Peter Milligan and Keiron Dwyer’s Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City is one of the touchstones for Grant Morrison’s overlong Batman run (seriously #666 was a classic  but it was YEARS AGO, the well is dry). It is a bit dated, especially the lettering which gets unreadable at moments, but it resounds so much better. In a short 3-issue blast Milligan works in huge ideas and sort of plays to the tenor of the times of silly-villians-now-with-knives. In brevity, the story seems so much more ambitious (and yet, it’s still a little mystery for Batman to solve instead of a series of check boxes to be ticked off) and more importantly, character-driven, than anything that Morrison has done attempting to follow it. Peter Milligan, I haven’t read many of your books, but the ones I have read are stellar. And Keiron Dwyer should be a bigger deal.

- On my latest re-watch of Inglourious Basterds, I think I’ve picked up some more of the nuances of the layers critique going on in the film. I believe that there is a whole criticism of the movie brats going on throughout the film, but I recently figured out that the Basterds themselves might actually BE the movie brats – with Donny Donowitz specifically meant to be Steven Spielberg, finally able to reach catharsis by synthesizing Raiders of the Lost Ark and Schindlers List by unloading a clip into Hitler’s face. The similarities to Raiders in the final moments can’t be overlooked, down to the gaze into the face of evil and paying for it,I remember Tarantino talking about the death camps in The Big Red One in The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, saying “that’s Luke Skywalker. And that’s real evil. That’s not Darth Vader”(I’m paraphrasing), but that statement hangs over this film for me because of the demarcated chapter progressions (which stylistically goes from Big Red One/Cross of Iron somber actioner into DePalma/Spielberg hollywood operatics). What if Donny is supposed to be Spielberg? What would that mean? I’ve also been thinking that the spaghetti western tone of the opening scene (which is the best scene Tarantino has ever written), essentially transplants Lee Van Cleef’s scene at the dinner table in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly into a different moral universe. That scene, I think is about how Leone approached the Civil War as just another setting, and what that means morally for the film and it’s audience. Why then, wouldn’t you make a World War II movie with the same approach? And finally after watching The Battle of Algiers (holy fucking shit, that movie, will write about it on the first) I now can see that the scene in the prison where that film’s theme drops is a big message to anyone who’s seen it – these aren’t the good guys, these are just the guys we’re following. It says “these guys are fucking terrorists”. Full stop.

- In Jean-Claude Mezieres and Pierre Christin’s Valerian: On The Frontiers, the main characters don’t even show up for the first 20 pages and you would never notice until the second read. It is incredibly economic and precise storytelling, even when doing things that are absolutely counter-intuitive to what you’d expect a story to deliver. Non-sequiter pages, weird pulled-from-the-headlines nature of some of the material, a manga-like willingness to use panels for atmosphere, big chunks of expository dialog and characters that derail the proceedings entirely. And yet, everything that would be a failing is an asset in Mezieres’ hands, because of just how good he is. Nothing is ever cluttered or inexpressive, everything does work, from the photoreference (hey, that’s from Dr. No!) to the broad caricature. Something as simply as the way Laureline’s hair changes over the course of the night in the latter half of the story, that’s what makes this comic great.

- David Brothers and I have been discussing a sequence in Akira, spurred on by Zack Soto’s launch of the fantastic Otomo fan-tumblr OTOMBLR. The sequence in question, where Tetsuo makes his way to the refrigeration chamber where Akira is being held. Otomo draws Tetsuo wearing this fur-lined vest – and looking at the book (vol 2 of the Dark Horse trades for those playing along at home) it takes Tetsuo 80+ pages to get to the chamber. The emotion played out on Tetsuo’s face, going from sneering casual victory to hurt to anger, but on the page David has focused on – the same one I have marked in my copy forever – is just of Tetsuo barely in-panel. The slow crawl of the elevator platform and the massive siren sound effects denote the trudging quality to the motions, in a book where everything seems to be flying at top speed, here Otomo uses the same approach to make you feel time slow down. This is machinery on a massive scale, so Tetsuo is all the way over on the left of the panel, leaning down to look out through the frame, barely mobile. Afterward, Otomo takes literally pages to have Tetsuo walk a hundred feet, here are the tools of action being repurposed for intensity and drama. Thinking about it for a little bit, Akira vol 2 is end-to-end great comics (even though I think my favorite parts of the story come a lot later), and these moments are the peak of a peak. Also it has the craziest A Clockwork Orange shoutout this side of Inglourious Basterds. And no one ever talks about either of them. I think that qualifies as summing up.

- Sean Witzke May 2011

Anyway listening to commentaries and watching interviews with Ridley Scott I’ve picked up something – you need to be able to reach outside of the sphere of your project to give it any real weight. On the commentary for Blade Runner and the making-of docs, there is a lot of talk about Moebius and Bilal’s comics. But there are also moments when designing JF Sebastian’s home, he speaks about showing his crew David Lean’s Great Expectations and Jean Cocteau’s The Beauty and the Beast. When he was working on his failed staging of Dune, he thought of the Battle of Algiers as a perfect baseline. When he was selling himself to the producers of Alien, he talked a lot about the merits of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Now none of these things is particularly mind blowing in and of itself with Scott referencing an earlier movie for a design element or a thematic similarity. But I caught that nearly every time he referenced a movie it was less likely to be a direct forebear to the picture at hand and instead betrayed a massive knowledge of film as a whole, and the strengths of all kinds of film. It also shows a – maybe intuitive – drive to look outside of the subject matter which almost always helped the final product. Catholic taste is the greatest tool he had, more than his eye, more than his story sense. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Scott saw himself as a follower of Kubrick, who had a similar  “plan obsessively until the day of shooting, then improvise” style. The difference is, at least in Scott’s first 4 films, that Kubrick would focus on mastery of the subject before he dealt with it to it’s nearest facet, and Scott was focused so intently on the frame itself before anything else. The world building is the product of that, I think, not the need to tell stories but to create a place.

What I think I’ve picked up though is that knowing something isn’t necessarily going to give you mastery over it, especially in storytelling. You have to know everything else as well.

I said I would stop linkblogging on here. But for this, I’ll make an exception – my friend David Allison aka Illogicalvolume has posted his final entry into his years-long extended analysis on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s The Filth over at the Mindless Ones. It’s his best essay on the topic, and maybe is last. What David has done discussing this book over the ears has seen David develop his on voice and point of view while consistently drilling down into The Filth, using the work as a window into his own personal life and critical biases. David’s entire blogging career canbe seeing as a complex, wide-branching 33 and a 1/3 style examination of The Filth, and there isn’t really another blogger who has done anything even close to it. It’s a great acheivement and I just wanted to call some attention to it. Please go check it out.

02. Hard 8/Sydney (1994) Paul Thomas Anderson  - *(commentary)
03. Hard 8 – no commentary – *, 2
PTA in screenwriting mode (he was working on Magnolia at the time), barely talking about the movie at hand and just going off about the most interesting thing which is writing and working with actors. This is a bit of a slept-on classic, especially with the cast of Sam Jackson, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, and Gwenyth Paltrow (now she’s in 3 movies I love, that’s weird). Really played cool, probably too cool, but this is like a slightly noir-ed and tarted up version of Altman’s California Split. The hotel scene is almost certainly what Tarantino was thinking about when he was doing the Beaumont sequence (which Elvis Mitchell once called the finest  sequence in Tarantino’s career), as it follows the exact same rhythms and screws with the audience in the same way.

04. 48 Hrs (1982) Walter Hill – RW, *
Best nasty one liners in any movie, Nick Nolte at his racist, hangdog best, Eddie Murphy actually acting instead of performing his persona. Walter Hill is the definition of not fucking around as a director, inventing the modern buddy action comedy without even trying.

05. Hackers (1995) Ian Softley
Oh god, this is bad. I left it on while writing a theater paper because I reread all of the William Gibson short stories a little while ago and figured I could trainspot it for references. Dumb, great soundtrack, incredibly dated. Angelina Jolie used to be a)way more interesting on camera and b) a pretty game actress before she became an “actress”. Back when she just needed work, in the Cyborg 2 days, she was totally down with dressing up like Maria from Metropolis for a sight gag. The Bunk and Fiher Stevens are always great to pop up steal ten minutes of screen time realizing they are in a bad movie and camping it up, Matthew Lillard is actually kind of funny, the rest of the cast are 15 and rattling off jargon that was dated before the thing was released. Basically, it’s Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown made into a Wipeout commercial. Still a good way to kill 2hrs, though.

06. A Journey Into the Mind of P (2002) Donatello and Fosco Dubini
07. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (directors cut) (1984) WD Richter – *, RW
I read Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 finally, and started Gravity’s Rainbow (again), planning on read through all his stuff this summer, so I figured I’d try and learn about the guy a little bit. The documentary is a german television production, with a soundtrack by the Residents (which considering that it’s a documentary about a recluse, that’s kind of a coup). Pynchon’s a pretty awesome figure to discuss because there is no possible way all the stories about him are true but some of them have to be. So he’s either a CIA rocket scientist who knew Lee Harvey Oswald and is confessing his knowledge of mind control experiments on the population in his work, or he’s a crazy guy who has a monochrome wardrobe and dresses up like his own relatives for some reason. Either way, it’s pretty great material for a documentary. This one is kind of terrible, though, padded out like crazy and really unfocused.
Buckaroo Banzai, on the other hand was once rumored to have been secretly directed by Pynchon (as WD Richter, who also wrote Big Trouble in Little China), and has a ton of references to Crying of Lot 49 in it. This is a great movie, and it is still the only movie that is structured the way as it is. In the director’s cut, with the extra opening scene (hey Jamie Lee Curtis cameo) means that you don’t see Peter Weller’s face until almost 20 mins into the movie, and how crazy effective something simple like that is at getting a viewer invested.

08. Evil Dead 2 (1987) Sam Raimi – RW, *, C, T
First time seeing this in a theater. Whole new movie, with all kind of ancillary details foreshadowing events Coen Bros/John Landis style that I’ve never caught watching vhs bootlegs of it. Raimi is putting on a clinic here of amazing filmmaking skills, from dumb jokes to technical mastery all on a zero budget. Also has a Rock of Ages/Hand of Glory crossover quality with Raising Arizona, where certain shots or certain techniques mirror the other film and add texture if you have seen/obsessively watched both for years. Watching it in a theater, with a bunch of the shittiest people I’ve seen a movie with outside of a bunch of fucked up teenagers watching The Lost World. There were a lot of bad laughs, a lot of people laughing at the acting instead of the gags, a lot of fat guys with beards who thought they were at a Mystery Science Theater screening ( I swear if I could destroy that show retroactively I could, it has ruined ever ejoying a movie).

09. The Other Guys (2010) Adam McKay
Michael Keaton on fire. Steve Coogan taking a paycheck. Rob Riggle completely underused. The Rock and Sam Jackson completely owning their two scenes (I wish the whole movie was a parody of Bad Boys starring them instead of what it is). Ferrel and Whalberg… well they do their thing and the movie turns into this half-assed message movie against white collar crime? Which is… well I guess it makes sense knowing how much McKay cares about that stuff but I really like Anchorman and Step Brothers and the idea that in the age of Apatow comedy-is-pain school, the funniest thing to do is be really really stupid and juvenile. This is either too straight or not straight enough to succeed at whatever it is trying to succeed at. Like, I get that that Keaton has to work two jobs to put his kid through college is the real point of the movie, but what the movie does best is Keaton rattling off TLC lyrics whenever there’s a lull. McKay and Ferrell  produce East Bound and Down, and I understand that movies like this fund stuff like that and all other kinds of things, so they understand what’s funny. But heartbreaking movies that make a socioeconomic point? That might not be a thing they are good at.
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-81 movies in the year so far.
- Sean Witzke April 2011

Lose #2- “It’s Chip.”
Michael DeForge
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Michael DeForge is probably the universal answer for everyone when they are asked “who’s the greatest cartoonist coming up today?”, which is probably a weirder fact than it seems. Because there actually is a universal answer, it is kind of hard to know about DeForge and not acknowledge that the guy is amazing, whether you’re coming from seeing him in Strange Tales or Vice online or are actually lucky enough to find a physical copy of his own books – no matter what it is undeniable what the guy is capable of, regardless of the reader’s tastes going in. Personally, I’ve only seen bits and pieces of DeForge’s work, and Lose #2 is the first thing of his I’ve read that goes past a few pages. What struck me the most when reading it wasn’t just how well it was drawn (and make no mistake, it is), but how gripping “It’s Chip.” is as a story.

DeForge has developed the strangest tone – I’ve seen it compared to David Lynch but that’s not right. Lynch is similarly interested in brushing the horrifying with the banal, but even at his weirdest, Lynch is easily understandable as exposing the emotions underneath the common and the everyday. Lynch is about the unconscious in a really straightforward way, and “It’s Chip.” really doesn’t feel like it is aiming for those buttons at all. It feels like Deforge is more interested in underlining a specific series of types (he gets the way people speak down on the page, especially kids) that just happen to be suburban people, instead of make a commentary on them, Lynch-style. The story of “It’s Chip.” is a kind of update on an old Night Gallery trope of having a small child fall in love with something that’s not just horrifying, but dangerous to the entire community surrounding the child. The update here is that instead of illustrate some kind of emotional damge in the child, Rod Serling-style, there is an almost Miyazaki-like sweetness to Chip. A sweetness, as blind as it is, that is absent in the whole of the characters he’s got to interact with. Chip and his brother Reggie (who has a great line “He’s that weirdo whose Dad talks all retarded because of the war or something”) find a rotting body of a horse infested with giant insect-spider things, and Chip falls in love with one of the spiders that walks around with the horse’s severed head on it like a hat.Instead of being about how society tries to separate Chip and his pet, it is kind of played as a real love story for Chip – with the spider-horse wandering off in the night to leave him despairing, only to find a sac full of hundreds of spider maggot babies he can love in it’s place. It’s like My Neighbor Totoro with devastating physical deformities or Charlotte’s Web with death creeping around the edges.

Chip’s love of the thing is shown to be pure and innocent. And the spider, while malicious, seems to hold the same affection for Chip, at least temporarily. But it’s played for tragedy, which only adds to the sickening crawl of the story as a whole. This is as successful a horror story I’ve read in comics – it kind of gets at the ability of images to add up to a feeling of unease, which I associate with Otomo’s Domu more than any comic I’ve read that’s been labeled “horror”. Telling a horror story in comics is always going to be reliant on how grotesque the artist can get and still be coherent, and DeForge has managed to be both consistently clear and increasingly contagious.

The control of the page DeForge has – this works the way it does because of the clockwork pacing his choice to use the 9-panel grid makes the piece read like a metronome, reliably drilling to the reader as the story takes confounding turns or shows us something scarily brand new. The pacing remains the same no matter what – if it is a conversation, a series of actions slowly delineated, or vast jump cuts. It creates a sense of mundanity even with the most disturbing drawings, but it also creates a kind of continuity so all the scenes maintain a visual tone even though the emotional tone goes through huge shifts scene-to-scene.

It isn’t all cute or disturbing, either. What the most affecting about “It’s Chip.” is how beautiful it sometimes is. The page where the horse-spider walks through the darkness, it is simple and does narrative work. In leaving, there is more of a separation going on than a phsyical one, it falls apart in the next scene because of the separation from Chip, and it’s visual annihilation is a great foreshadowing of that. But it is also just this gorgeous, lyrical moment that shows a lot of atmosphere and motion without really changing much from panel to panel. It is the key moment to the story, not the venom-fried face of Reggie or the army of spiders swarming the school, or even any scene with Chip. Here’s where DeForge wins me over forever, the horse head bobbing in the night wind. Horror is rarely this pretty, and never in comics. Yeah, DeForge can make your skin crawl or your heart break. But lots of people can do that in comics. Taking your breath, that’s not an everyday thing.
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-Sean Witzke, April 2011

(Special thanks to Matt Seneca, bad motherfucker who sometimes writes about my favorite comics ever, for the hook up)