Blog

Comic Book Artist

I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

No, actually that’s a lie. I wanted to be a comic book artist first. I started like most kids, by copying comics. I was pretty good at looking at things and drawing them. Really good, if I say so myself. But drawing from imagination? Not so much. It’s not that I couldn’t imagine cool things. I could. I just couldn’t get them to look on paper anything like they looked in my head.

So I practiced. I invented all sorts of superheroes. My favorite was the Aviator, who started out at am amalgamation of Speedy from the Teen Titans and Angel from the X-men. For a couple of years, he was just Speedy with wings.

Eventually I ditched the stupid bow & arrows for a sword, and the lame yellow Robin Hood hat for a bandit mask. Instead of having wings all the time like Angel, I made him a shape-shifter, who could change from a human into a white eagle, or anywhere in between. He could turn his hands into talons and grow wings at human size and shit. Much cooler.

But it wasn’t enough, so I gave him invisible force fields like the Invisible Girl.

I was drawing a picture of Avitator in 7th grade music class one day, when I noticed the kid sitting next to me was drawing superheroes, too. I didn’t know him, since I went to Davis Elementary, and now we were in Albert Leonard Jr. high, and he was obviously from another grade school. This was before the kids from different schools started to really mingle and blend, so he was still an outsider.

But let’s be frank. I was an outsider even with the kids I grew up with, and my love of comics over… say, baseball, was a big part of it. So I struck up a conversation. Turns out, the kid was to one day become the Picktarian. He liked baseball, too, but I forgave him that.

We started making comics together. His main character was Prism, a hero who could project beams of light in 7 colors (ROY G BIV, if you will), each with a different property. Aviator and Prism had their first team up soon after, and formed a group of superheroes called The Fellowship.

I know, I know, but we were 12.

The Fellowship were the arch-enemies of Malus Magisti, the supervillain group run by Aviator’s rogue twin brother Hawkwind, separated at birth, who had the same powers, only orange. The Pickytarian’s friend Kenny named him that. We later kicked Kenny off the creative team for wanting to put Conan in the group.

The Fellowship and Malus Magisti drew an endless supporting cast, as the Pickytarian and I were much more interested in creating new crappy characters than we were in writing and drawing actual comics, which turned out to be MUCH harder than we had thought.

The main problem was that we both wanted to be the artist, and neither of us could write for shit. We couldn’t really draw, either, but that didn’t stop us. We would take turns with blank sheets of paper in a cheap plastic book report binder, drawing panels of a comic we were more-or-less making up as we went along, and coloring them on the spot with colored pencils. I would draw a panel in latin class, then Picky would take it for like a week, and give it back with 2 more panels done. I’d take it for another week, and maybe knock out a page.

I still have that comic. I found it a minute ago when I dug up that pic of Avitaor. I’ve got all SORTS of gems from high school to scan and post.

Though we started at more or less the same place, Picky’s pencilling quickly outstripped mine. I was a star in my art classes, because I could draw from life or copy from photographs really well, and had a good sense of color, but comics put different demands on the artist, and it was clear I was losing the race for head-artist on the Fellowship.

But I was also frustrated at the haphazard progress of the book, because we had no plot, much less a script. So Picky and I cut a deal: He would pencil and I would ink. We would both create characters and discuss plots, and then I would write the script.

Sounds fair, right? Only there were two problems. I didn’t know how to ink and I didn’t know how to script.

So I tried to teach myself inking, but I sucked. There’s only so much you can learn from How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way. If I had had a decent art teacher to show me anything, I bet I could have improved greatly, but art class before high school is just baby sitting with finger painting. Even in HS, it’s still pretty shitty.

I also wrote scripts, only to have my IBM PC jr. overheat and lose them before I saved to the giant floppy disk (this was before they invented hard drives).

Picky and I also played creative games, passing loose-leaf paper in class and co-creating little comics. Sometimes, the game would be to do one complete panel about whatver we wanted, and pass it on without saying anything (we couldn’t talk in class). The other person would have to do the next panel and pass it back, and on and on. That resulted in some crazy shit. Somtimes we would create ridiculous plots to allow us to try drawing things we had never drawn before. Other times it was just talking heads.

We would also draw full comics with blank word balloons, and have the other person fill them in.

<–Click the thumbnail to see one such comic full sized. This was a not-so-subtle parody of my HS relationship with Meredith 1.0. I did the art and Picky the dialogue. I am proud to say we did the whole thing in one 45 minute Global Studies class.

Writer

Anyway, I started to like writing. I still aspired to be a comic book artist one day, and took a lot of advanced elective art classes in High School, but I started writing more and more. Short stories and poetry, in addition to comic book plots and “Marvel Universe” style chartacter sheets.

I wrote my first novel in high school. It was called “An Unlikely Champion”, and it was about a metalhead and a jock in high school who are kidnapped by aliens and forced to fight one another in a galactic gladiator contest with specimens from a dozen worlds.

They escape and have to find a way to get along with one another despite their differences in order to survive as the Challenger, their kidnapper, sends all the other specimens to hunt them down. Then they learn magic. It was sort of… The Breakfast Club meets Star Wars meets Dungeons and Dragons. And some “jokes” that I look back at and cringe over how insensitive I was.

Yeah, yeah. It’s stupid, I was in high school.

I tried to rewrite the book in college, but gave up after a while. My writing was improving, but the plot wasn’t. The Pickytarian illustrated it for an art project. I hope he got an A.

The real shift in my dreams came during college applications, when the Pickytarian majored in Art and I majored in English.

Applying to art school is HARD. You have to make a portfolio, which is easy, and it has to be GOOD, which is not-so-easy. I have no doubt that I could have done it, but I was lazy, and decided I would focus on writing and just take a bunch of elective art classes.

I discovered after getting to the University at Buffalo that it would not be so easy. If you weren’t in the Art Department (meaning you had your portfolio reviewed and accepted on application), you had a choice of 3 art classes, and they were always booked up solid LONG before underclassmen got anywhere near them.

I kicked myself for having been lazy, but it was too late. So writing it was. I don’t really regret it. I miss drawing, and sometimes I wonder how good I could have gotten had I really committed to training, but all in all I think it worked out for the best.

For a while, I wrote a lot of bad poetry and crappy short stories. In college I got most of my creativity out in Dungeons & Dragons, writing huge, elaborate plots for my Dungeon Mastering. I was reading a lot of Forgotten Realms fantasy formula novels, and wanted to hone my skills to eventually try my hand there.

Aldun Orion

After college, I went and got a job at a comic shop, which subsequently closed. I also started playing D&D regularly with the Pickytarian and the Suckytarian (AKA Matt). In one game, the Night Below, I created a character named Aldun Orion. I also had a character of the same name in An Unlikely Champion, but the similarity ended there.

Aldun Orion was a half-elven D&D ranger, who started at 1st level and went on through many adventures to achieve 9th level. His crowning acheivements were killing an immense two headed troll king with one backstab that did TRIPLE digit damage, and his killing of a black dragon with the aid of his companions Arkemn and Tasker Vex, and their pet monkey Haverford. Haverford didn’t make it out of that little adventure alive, alas…

I was never satisfied with standard D&D characters. Any character I played had to be special and unique. What made Aldun special was that instead of worshipping the gods of nature, Aldun worshipped the goddess of love. He was the only ranger in all the world to do so, and walked a thin line between his warrior’s path and his devotion to love.

He was the goddesses’ hand in dark places where her more peaceful worshippers dare not go. He was forever doing things he thought would damn his soul, his days filled with violence and killing, but he was doing them because they NEEDED doing. Because someone HAD to protect the gentle worshippers of love from those would would take advantage of their peaceful nature.

I loved that aspect of the character, and it was around that time in 1995 that I penned the first word that put Aldun on the center stage: “Free them, or die.”

In the scene that follows this threat, Aldun slaughters an entire village of goblins in order to free his friends, who are about to end up in a goblin cookpot. Against such numbers, he goes into a berserker rage that relies on lightning-fast murderous instinct, and in the process, when goblin women and children get in the way, they are cut to pieces as well.

When the deed is done, Aldun comes back to himself and has a nervous breakdown.

Most of Aldun’s companions were based on people I know, or D&D characters my friends had played. I wrote a few more chapters, and had notes for more, but then it fell to the side for a few years as life got in the way.

In 1998, my friend Myke was working on a novel of his own, and e-mailed me some chapters to read. I sent him the Aldun stuff, which was laced with great sex and violence, but very little substance. Myke and I began critiquing each other’s writing, and that got me back in the saddle. Really, he gets a lot of credit for everything I’ve written since, as it’s not impossible that I would have put writing aside like I did drawing. Or not. Who knows?

Anyway, I rewrote the Aldun scenes to edit out the D&D references and put him in his own world. The book grew in the telling, and became Heart’s Guard. In it, Aldun is forced to kill his own brother in order to save the woman he loves, and is so doing, nearly damns himself. As a whole, it reads like a clunky mess, but there is some stuff in there that I swear to this day is great.

Following the less-than-stellar completion of Heart’s Guard, I realized that you can’t make a book up as you go along and hope it will all tie together. You also can’t write a book with almost no dialogue. So I decided to table it and write the sequel, but this time, I would do it right.

In Snowcrest, Aldun returns to Snowcrest, the mountain city of his parents, to return the body of his half-brother to his mother, a powerful priestess of the goddess of love. While he’s there, he and his companions have to save the city from a group of powerful citizens who have discovered a powerful new magic that shifts the delicate balance of power in the region. They have to do all of this while working out numerous personal problems.

To date, Snowcrest is the best thing I’ve ever written. Every character has their own story arc, and each grows and develops over the course of the novel, their personal issues woven into the the overall plot with skill and grace, if I do say so myself.

After that book was finished, I read Shogun, and it blew my mind. That book is so goddamn good. It really raised the bar on anything I had ever written, and showed me how much you can accomplish with a novel.

Flush with excitement, I started another book, Crestwood, in which Aldun travels to the ancestral home of his father. The last true heir of a powerful house, he knows nothing of aelven culture, and must quickly adapt if he is to honor his family and name, while protecting himself and his human friends from the murderous intentions of the xenophibic aelves, who do not wish to see one of their noble houses sullied with an heir of impure blood.

I showed Snowcrest to an agent last year. He said it was very good, but that it was ultimately flawed (the second book in a series), and that he couldn’t represent it. He suggested I take my focus away from Aldun for a while.

So I have, working on The Painted Man, another project of mine that has gotten much more acceptance, despite the fact that I don’t love it the way I do the Aldun books. More on that in my next blog entry.

But Aldun is still out there, waiting. His sword, Heart’s Guard, is tattooed on my right arm, to remind me to never forget him. Crestwood will be finished. Heart’s Guard will be fixed. And it will be awesome.

P.S.

A little treat for the nerds out there:

Aldun Orion hem (R9):
Stats: Str: 19* (13) Dex: 17 Con: 15 Int: 13 Wis: 14 Cha: 15
Ac: 1 (Bracers, dex.) Hp: 64
Thac0: 9* (Backstab: 5*, x4 dmg)
Move Silently: 85% Hide in Shadows: 71%
Race: Infravision (60′), Less Sleep, Sword Bonus
Class: HiS, MS, Priest Spells, Sneak Attack, Two Weapon Style, Tracking, Weapon Specialization, Speak w/Animals, Bow Bonus, Animal Empathy
Phobia: Scarring (face) Trait: Allure
Spells: Two 1st level (Usually Cure Light Wounds and Command)
Spheres: All, Charm, Healing
Proficiencies: Healing, Herbalism, Singing, Dancing, Read/Write, Tracking, Common, Elvish, Religion, Riding, Tumbling, Etiquette, Bowyer/Fletcher, Swords broad group, *Katana, Bows tight group, Whip
Free cp: 3
Weapons:
Heart’s Guard – A nonmagical Katana of Sharpness +3, folded mithril. (Specialized, weapon of choice, Thac0: 4, Backstab: 0)
Bond-Cleaver – Dagger +1 (Thac0: 8, throw: 6)
Whip of Entanglement +1 (on command, magically entangles any successfully hit creature or object until commanded to let go). (Thac0: 8, pull/trip: 6)
Longbow (exceptionally well crafted, but confers no bonuses, Thaco:9)
Misc. Magic: Girdle of Giant Strength

*Due to Girdle of Giant Strength

Posted on January 8, 2006 at 11:14 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Life, Writing
Comments Off on Chasing Half-Assed Dreams

Went to see House of Flying Daggers yesterday. I wanted to just do a 2-minute mini-review, but as usual, this essay has grown uncontrollably, this time into a pseudo-dissertation on Hong Kong-style martial arts films in general.

House of Flying Daggers:

Cons:

1)The plot was overly convoluted and choppy, so that while it was not too complicated to follow, the frequent twists did not flow as smoothly as they could have.

2) The characters were opaque and overly melodramatic. They seemed unaffected by events that would stagger a normal person, and yet fell in love, lost control and/or went to pieces over cheesy tearjerky nonsense. In addition, the histories of all the characters are kept secret for the sake of the aforementioned plot twists. Because of this, it was difficult to get inside their heads and understand their personal conflicts and motivations.

3) None of the characters were particularly likeable. To a one, they were cold and self-serving, which made the emotional connections between them ring false.

4) For a movie with so much fighting, there is surprisingly little… violence. The fight scenes, while not comic, stretch the bounds of reality to the point where much of the tension is removed. Unlike Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where much of the plot revolves around the special training of Wudan mountain which gives the characters weightlessness and supernatural grace and speed, House of Flying Daggers seems to assume that all martial artists have these abilities, thus negating the sense of wonder that CTHD awakened in the viewer.

Pros:

1) Visually, this might well be the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of any time my visual cortex was so pleasantly stimulated. It was like ice cream for the eyes.

The two stars, Ziyi Zhang, Takesi Kaneshiro, are easily among the best looking people in show business. It is nearly impossible to take your eyes off them in any event, and when combined with the beautiful and elaborate costumes, makeup, and mind-blowing scenery, along with their natural grace and the aid of wire-work, their beauty seems to transcend mortal limits.

Director Yimou Zhang’s incredible sense of color is a constant delight. Continuing on the thematic color expressions of Hero, each scene has its own palette, which creates different emotional responses in the audience to complement the action in the scene. Ziyi Zhang bathing in the pool filled with lily pads, with the contrast between her cream skin and the lush green of the lilies, was breathtaking.

The martial arts, while not having the visceral violence of, say, Kill Bill, Brotherhood of the Wolf, or even the first Matrix movie, were inhumanly beautiful. The choreography was top notch, and use of scenery and improvised weaponry for effect was truly amazing. It was like watching a ballet… only not boring as fuck.

2) There is a tendency in martial arts movies to either take violence seriously, as in Kill Bill, Brotherhood, etc., or to make it comic, as in a Jackie Chan movie, or Iron Monkey. This movie, as with Hero and Crouching Tiger, creates a third option, which is to make the combat into poetry, each individual move a thing of beauty, like a line of a poem, combined into a cohesive whole. While serious violence will always be my favorite, I am also a big fan of this style. Comic martial arts can have success (Iron Monkey is a fabulous film), but it can go too far and lose my interest (i.e. Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow).

In short, HoFD may not be what you expect, but it is definitely a powerful movie that should be a must-see for any fan of the martial arts genre, and also may serve well as a portal for those with little or no interest/experience with the genre to taste it for the first time.

I assure you, the taste is sweet.

Posted on January 3, 2006 at 12:43 pm by PeatB
Filed under Musings
Comments Off on House of Flying Daggers

This weekend, my goal was to watch 2 movies: Narnia and Kong. I expected to love Narnia and think Kong was so-so.

In reality, the opposite was true. Narnia left me unsatisfied, while Kong blew me the fuck away.

I won’t say I didn’t like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I did. I won’t even say it wasn’t in keeping with CS Lewis’ vision. For the most part I think it was, with a couple of minor exceptions I will note.

But it was… dull. Surprisingly so, for something with such a huge budget and incredible effects/props/wardrobe. Even the actors were all great. And the cinematography. And the direction.

And yet, I was bored a lot. It’s hard to understand why, but I was. I can watch cute kids with British accents have adventures all day, but I expected to be on the edge of my seat more, and that never happened except towards the end when I was shifting around trying to stay awake. Not to say that the movie was THAT boring, but we went to a late show, and I had done a fair amount of eating & drinking beforehand.

After meeting my friend Neil in a bar for a glass of scotch and a beer chaser, we went out for a big Peruvian dinner with Dani’s parents, where I downed a Pisco Sour and something in the vicinity of 3 glasses of red sangria. Duck skewers for an appetizer (dee-fucking-licious!) and strip steak entree (magnifique!). By the time we got to the theater for the 10:10 show, I wasn’t drunk by any means, but I was definitely sated and mellow. That’s fine if you’re going to see an exciting movie, which I thought I was, but it turned out not to be so.

Lewis’ work was never The Lord of the Rings (hereafter referred to as “LotR”… which is kind of like Lotor, the big villain on Voltron, but I digress and you’re not old enough to remember that).

Both Tolkien and Lewis have the same… Britishness about them, but The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (hereafter “TLtW&tW”) and LotR are very different books. LotR is an allegory about war, with a little religious allegory thrown in. TLtW&tW is an allegory about religion with a little war allegory thrown in.

Anyway, Disney, as they are wont to do, managed to excise what little blood and harshness there was in TLtW&tW, in an attempt to make it kid-friendly. I think this does a disservice to kids everywhere. Lewis (I keep wanting to write “Carroll”, because I always mix up CS Lewis and Lewis Carroll, even though they are VERY different) wrote TLtW&tW to include a lot of lessons about suffering and redemption that lose their power when you water down the fighting. His later works, like “The Problem of Pain” also focus not on ignoring the pain in the world, but accepting it as part of God’s plan.

Disney would rather just ignore it.

Cases in point:

1) Peter is a wuss in this movie. He’s got a sword, but he looks apt to piss himself every time he draws it, and even when he’s finally forced into his first fight, they use that same, tired old “fell back with the sword up and the enemy impaled himself on it” trick. God, I hate that device. It doesn’t absolve the victor of killing, it just robs them of their right to claim that the victory was deserved. It’s also bullshit. You don’t find a lot of enemies so willing to fall on your sword in real life.

I checked the book, and Peter actually fights the wolf there, after Aslan practically orders it. Aslan knows Peter needs his cherry popped now, because there is killing aplenty to come. He doesn’t fight well, but at least it’s a fair kill in the book. Aslan makes a point of commenting on the blood on Peter’s sword in the book, too, but there is no blood in Disney movies.

2) Likewise, the torture of Aslan before he is killed is horrifying in the book, and even in the 70’s cartoon version. In the movie, it was eh. This is the PASSION, people! You don’t need to go all Gibson, but breathe some life into it!

3) Even in the big battle scene, there is no real blood. It makes war seem safe and glorious. Is that a better message to children than making it horrible? I don’t think so. I don’t want a generation growing up naive to the realities of war. Bad enough we have a president like that.

So I left Narnia unsatisfied, and then went on to see Kong on Saturday.

King Kong… was one of the best movies I have seen in a long, long, looong time. I don’t have any nits to pick. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Skull Island was jaw-droppingly awesome.

I didn’t understand why Peter Jackson was wasting his time on a movie that’s already been re-made, but I see it now. Jackson, you’re the shit.

Also watched Sky High on DVD this weekend. Not so good. Lynda Cater’s MiLFilicious cameo amounted to about 2 minutes of screen time, and that was not enough by any means. Apart from that… it was a good idea. Harry Potter / Hogwarts for superheroes. I get it. Could have been great, but the acting and writing were terrible, and the budget wasn’t shit. It was more of a direct-to-video special than it was a movie worthy of theatrical release. I could see you liking it if you were a kid with a narrow frame of reference, but believe me, there’s better ways to spend your time… like watching X2 for the tenth time.

Posted on December 20, 2005 at 10:39 am by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings
Comments Off on The Lion, the Witch, and the Giant Gorilla

No longer just a site for a cocaine-infused 80’s dance meat market, Webster Hall is now taking concert overflow from the Bowery Ballroom, and I am glad to see it. I love concerts, even if my aging body is getting less and less resilient to staying out late on school nights.

Last night I went to see Iron & Wine with Claexico with Craig (who, it has been confirmed, is NOT West Side Fo’ Life in Da Hizzy) and Amelia (who’s a just hippie).

The concert was fantastic, but loooooooong. It was just supposed to be me and Craig going, but it turns out there was an internet rumor that Sufjan Stevens, who Amelia loves, was going to be a surprise guest, so Amelia came at the last minute. I met her and Craig at a sushi place on 3rd & 9th, and then we went over to Webster Hall. Got there around 7:45, where I checked my bag and bought a $5 pint of water (5 times the price of gasoline!).

The crowd was mostly liberal east cost intellectual elite. You know, the kind that hate America and drive people away from the Democratic party?

Well, screw the red states, I love these people. So well behaved and mellow, I doubt Webster Hall had ever seen the like. Lots of beards and thick-rimmed glasses, with heavy hemp sweaters. Plenty of cleaner and trendier folks as well, but all with the same impeccable manners. I think I heard the words “excuse me” more times last night that were said at Webster Hall in toto from 1984-1999.

At first I thought it was all college kids killing time until the next Phish tour, but it seemed like everyone there had come because they were fans of one of the bands playing (which makes sense, because who goes to Webster Hall on a Monday otherwise?), and they were really respectful and quiet (with the exception of shouting out their love between songs).

First up were the Ebony Hillbillies at 8:00. Three local black guys, one of whom looked about 70, one was like 50, and the other was probably 45. The youngest guy played the fiddle, the middle guy plucked an enormous stand-up bass, and the old guy sat in a chair with a guitar (sometimes a banjo) flat on his lap, working the slide and singing the most awesomely unintelligible country nonsense I have ever heard.

I tried to find them on iTunes last night, but no go. I went to their website today at lunch, though, and ordered the CD. Thank you, PayPal, for making life so easy!

Next was this band Calexico. Three guys from New Mexico (drums, trumpet, guitar) with a bassist from Germany and another trumpeter / percussionist / backup singer from some Nordic country. They also had this weird guy Salvador who played every instrument under the sun and had a tremendous voice. The music is heavily influenced by Mexican mariachi music, but comfortably blended with American stylings. Very talented people.

Calexico did an EP with Iron & Wine recently (picked it up on iTunes last night, along with one of their albums).

Special guest Sufjan Stevens came next, playing two songs, one of which he had never played in front of people before. Sufjan is a soft-spoken young guy (like 23), who gets impatient with crowd noise and snaps his fingers for silence, going “Come on, people, settle down.”

More like Iron & Wine than Calexico, Sufjan plays quiet introspective songs with a soft voice and an impressive vocal harmony with his backup singer. Just him, his guitar, and his backup singer.

His goal is supposedly to do a theme-album on every state in the Union. He’s done two so far. I bought Illinoise last night on iTunes (I spent like $30 on MP3’s), but I haven’t listened to it. His two theme albums were like 2 years apart. He’s going to have to hurry up if he wants to hit the other 48 states.

Iron & Wine came on next. Word on the street is that I&W is really just one guy and a rotating backup band, like Nine Inch Nails (That’s pretty much the ONLY way you can compare them to Nine Inch Nails). The main guy, Sam Beam, has a longass ZZTop beard (much longer than in the picture I scrounged, though it will be another year or two before he can tuck it into his belt), even though he’s still young and it’s a rich brown rather than gray. He was wearing a thick, multicolored scarf that his wife made for him, and he seemed all hurt when someone in the crowd made fun of him for wearing it inside. He took it off to the cheers of the crowd, and it was passed around the stage for the rest of the night as other people wore it like a badge of honor.

At first I wasn’t impressed by his live work, but once he warmed up and got his groove on, it was a sight to see. He invited Calexico out, and before you knew it there were two trumpets, three guitars, three full drum kits, 4 maraca players, two bassists, a guy playing the harmonica and making clicking sounds with his tongue, and some guy… honestly, I don’t know what the hell that guy was playing. It was fricken’ great, though.

It went from planned stuff into an amazing jam session that didn’t end until after midnight. They never played my favorite song (Each Coming Night), but they did some other great ones like Cinder & Smoke, Woman King, Jezebel, Sodom South Georgia, and about 20 more. We left at the first walk-off, because we were all stiff from standing for 4 hours straight. My feet and shoulder were killing me. I’m kind of sorry we missed the encores, though. I expect they did Jesus the Mexican Boy and maybe Each Coming Night. Someone said they did a cover or two, as well.

Took a cab home. I wanted to take the subway and read more Feast for Crows, but I wasn’t alone, so there wasn’t going to be any reading regardless.

A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin, by the way, is an awesome fucking book. Remind me to blog about that.

Posted on December 6, 2005 at 11:47 am by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings
Comments Off on Webster Hall

I just finished the Wildstorm mini-series Sleeper, by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips. Holy crap, that series was good. It’s definitely the best thing to come out of the Image/Wildstorm universe, better even than the Authority (which turned into a complete crapfest when Warren Ellis and Mark Millar stopped working on it) and Astro City (which, judging by the current run, has lost all its steam). I liked it so much I went back and re-read all the old issues of WildC.A.T.S. that spawned it

It’s funny how bad those classic Image comics look to me now. I was a HUGE comics fan as a kid, devouring every book I could afford, whether it sucked or not. This was back in the $0.60 a comic days. I was a lot less judgmental, then. I was still building my scales.

This obsession lasted until the beginning of my senior year in high school, when I realized two things:

1) Comics had been steadily increasing in price, and were about to hit $1.00/per

and

2) All that money was much better spend on girls.

So I quit buying comics. Then, in one of the more bone-headed decisions I’ve made, I sold the cream of my comic collection to Dragon’s Den on Central Ave. for like $200. Mostly Walt Simonson Thors and McFarlane Spider-mans, plus some other good stuff. Thank goodness I was possessive enough not to let go of my X-men.The Pickytarian told me at the time that if I ever regretted it in the future, I should remind myself that I really needed the money and it beat the hell out of getting a minimum wage job. True enough, Picky.

So I went a few (like 3-4) years without comics. They were years without sunshine. Years without flavor. Years without…Oh, who am I kidding? I was in my prime and actually getting laid. I didn’t give comics a thought.

But then in college, somewhere around 1993, I wandered into the local comics shop in Amherst NY (I went to college in Buffalo. As far from home as possible while still being in the state and therefore keeping my education affordable). Sadly, I don’t remember the name of that shop, despite going there weekly for the rest of my college years.

While there, I saw the new line of Image comics, and was blown away. Spawn. The Savage Dragon. Cyberforce. WildC.A.T.S. All the top creators at Marvel and DC had jumped ship to form their own creator-owned company, because they were sick of companies like Marvel owning and reaping all the benefits of their creations. Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Jim Lee. The best of the best.

Oh, and Rob Liefeld, too, but that guy sucked and so did his crappy Youngblood book.

In addition to outperforming any of the work they did under the yoke of the Big Two, these savvy creators also upped the ante on production, using quality paper and the newly-applied computer coloring processes (before that, comics were colored by cutting out little pieces of colored gel with an X-Acto knife). The result came with a hefty $2.25/per comic price tag, but it was worth it.

Each week I went to that shop and collected my little harvest. I would go back to my room (or sit outside on the terrace if it was one of the two weeks a year in Buffalo when the temperature was above freezing) and plow through them, then e-mail the Pickytarian to talk about them or gossip about the comics industry in general. Wall Street was eyeing comics for the first time. There was a buzz on the street. A tingle in the air. Comics were HOT.

Of course, it took about 5 minutes for the above group of guys to fuck it all up.

Image went from cutting-edge art and stories to cutting edge marketing and production gimmicks. Variant holofoil covers. Annual company crossovers. Collectible trading cards bundled into the books. Shitty spin-off books starring b-list characters. Hack writers and artists taking over for the above groundbreakers so they could ‘focus on the business end’ (the most ass-backwards decision ever). Image comics quickly became unreadable.

When I look back on those books with a more critical eye, I wonder what all the fuss was about. The writing was usually atrocious, and the art makes my head hurt. Every panel bursting with action even when the characters are standing still. Or asleep. It really goes to show how far Marvel and DC had fallen that Image’s shit was considered the best on the market at the time.

A prime example was the WildC.A.T.S. That book didn’t really make much sense if you took a moment to think about it. A billionaire midget alien running a superhero team? Ye, gods. I was about to drop it around 1995, when critically acclaimed writer Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) took over the writing, and Travis Charest, who I say to this day is awesome, started doing the penciling. I got excited again.

But alas, I was to be disappointed. I just re-read those books. Moore created a whole new team of awkward, second-string characters, including a cyborg serial killer with a Pez dispenser for a head and Mr. Majestic, the douchiest Superman ripoff ever. The new team had a seemingly infinite budget and no direction. There wasn’t even a thong-clad female ninja with a sword. The only good thing about that book was one of the bit characters, a genetically designed test-tube baby named T.A.O.

T.A.O. (Tactically Augmented Organism) came on the scene as a superhero whose only superpower was that he’s better at chess than you, but he soon showed that was nothing to laugh at. After manipulating the WildC.A.T.S. into ruin, T.A.O. escaped and became the head of a vast criminal empire. Employing all variety of super-beings, T.A.O. operated on a global level, and only a handful of people knew he existed at all.

In Sleeper, Holden Carver is a government agent sent to infiltrate T.A.O.’s organization. He goes deep cover, his good name destroyed, his old life severed, and he has to become something brutal and harsh in order to survive and gain T.A.O.’s trust.

But when the one man who knew Holden’s cover is shot and left in a coma, Holden is trapped in the criminal identity he has created for himself, wanted by the law and with no one to turn to.

The complete 24-issue run is collected into 4 6-issue trade paperback collections, also known in the comic book vernacular as TPB’s (not to be confused with TPS’s, which are meaningless busywork). Matt, AKA the Suckytarian, whined that the first couple of TPB’s were pricey at $17.95. He had a point, as that comes out to like $2.98 per issue, which is barely a savings over buying the individual issues. I think this is because at that point, the book wasn’t yet on everyone’s radar. Less mass appeal means a smaller print run, which means a higher per/unit cost. Meh. Whaddaya gonna do? The story was worth every penny.

The second 2 TPB’s were more reasonably priced at $14.95, which is about $2.50 per issue. Still not cheap, but fair.

Each time a new trade came out, I eagerly took it home, but did not read it until I had read every delicious line of the previous issues again to prepare myself. I’ve read the first one 4 times now and I’ll read it many more before my days end, I hope. The intensity only builds as the series progresses, and it ends with a mindfuck at leaves you reeling. Jesus Christmas, what a book!

Ironically, despite the fact that tomorrow is Wednesday, and therefore Comic Book Day, I will not be going to the comic store tomorrow. I am taking a course (on blogging, no less) for work at lunch, and then have to stay late to make meeting books or something after hours.

Looks like comics will have to wait until Thursday.

Crap.

Addendum: I love the internet. I just spent 3 minutes on google, and found that comic shop I used to go to in Buffalo: Queen City Book Store. Maybe not the best name for a shop, but they had a good selection, and it was right by the south campus.

Posted on November 16, 2005 at 12:04 am by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings
Comments Off on Sleeper