Comix – Page 14 – Wis[s]e Words

Joyce Brabner 1952 — 2024

Published on August 20, 2024Leave a comment

Joyce Brabner, writer, activist and the widow of Harvey Pekar passed away on August 2 this year, after a long struggle against cancer. For The Comics Journal, Andrew Farago wrote an excellent retrospective on her life and career in comics. Particularly interesting I found evaluation of Our Cancer Year, the graphci novel she wrote together with Harvey Pekar about his first struggle with the disease and the impact it has had:

Misery enjoys company, however, and readers and creators connected with their memoir on a personal level. “Our Cancer Year was a seminal work of graphic medicine, a growing field of medical humanities combining comics and healthcare, before there really was such a thing,” says Brian Fies, whose autobiographical account of his mother’s illness, Mom’s Cancer, was serialized online in 2004 and published in a collected edition in 2006. “Along with a few other graphic novels such as Justin Green’s Binky Brown, it was a prototype for an outpouring of deeply personal, acutely revealing nonfiction comics centered on their authors’ experiences with illness and treatment. Graphic medicine is now taught in medical schools and discussed in academic conferences around the world, and Our Cancer Year was the soil in which it took root.”

Not everybody can say they helped create an entire new field of comics non-fiction! Our Cancer Year was coincidentally the first work of hers and Harvey I ever read, a few years after it first came out. A pity it no longer seems to be in print. This is also is the case for the most important non-Pekar projects she was involved in as an editor, the Real War Stories and Brought to Light antiwar comics she did for Eclipse, both of which are excellent as well.

As one of the artists that worked with her and Pekar puts it, it’s easy to think of her as simply “Joyce from American Splendor“, a trap Andrew Farago here neatly avoids. Even if you only knew her from American Splendor, Farago gives an excellent overview of how much she mattered as her own creator, not just a supporting actor in Pekar’s comics.

Having an idea does not make you a creator

Published on August 2, 2024Leave a comment

Roy Thomas wants to claim credit for the creation of Wolverine and it has upset quite a lot of people:

John Romita's original sketches for the Wolverine

But 2024 is not 1974 or 1994, and in the wake of more high-profile attention on the neglected past generations of comics creators, it has become increasingly de rigueur for writers and artists associated with comics-based movies and tv shows to see at least a nominal reward for their contributions. There is money at stake, to say nothing of glory, such as it is.
Which is why it managed to generate a fair amount of attention – and a fair number of raised eyebrows – when it came to light at the beginning of April that former Marvel editor Roy Thomas would be receiving credit as a co-creator of Wolverine in the credits for the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine film, coinciding with the character’s 50th anniversary.

Apparently he’s doing so, according to the Zach Rabiroff article I’m quoting here based on the fact that he proposed the character originally, after which Len Wein and John Romita designed him together, with Wein and Herb Trimpe then using him in Incredible Hulk #180-181. Wolverine of course would only become popular a while later, when Wein included him in the roster of the new X-Men a year later and especially after Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Frank Miller got their hands on him. There was a hell of a lot of work done after that first appearance by at least a good half dozen creators, those mentioned above just the most prominent, before he became such a household character that Hollywood blockbusters could be made about him. But none of that, according to Thomas, matters as much as him having the idea for a having a little scrappy Canadian superhero guest star in those two issues:

Note that there are three points here to Thomas’s recollection about his role in Wolverine’s genesis. In his account, he proposed that there be: a) a Canadian character; b) named Wolverine; who was c) “a little like Wildcat or the Atom.”

Personally I think it’s bollocks. Even if this is the exact truth, having the idea for a character does not make you its creator. It’s Wein and Romita as the people who designed the character from that idea, together with Trimpe who first put him in action who deserve that credit far more. In a just world Roy Thomas’ name would be nowhere near it. Rabiroff’s article as a whole makes for fascinating reading, showing how complex establsihing creator credits can be for any character with a fifty year history even when obvious grifters are not trying to insert themselves in it.

Dumb fucks doing comics criticism

Published on June 24, 2024Leave a comment

This asshole really thought he was qualified to critique Haus of Decline’s comics for having too much text, so he crossed out everything he thought was unnecessary so it would make a better meme:

A Haus of Decline four panel comic in which Basil crossed out most of the text

To add insult to injury, he then said that notorious Nazi Stonetoss makes better comics. Various other numbnuts then jumped on the bandwagon and one of them produced the ‘improved’ comic:

The same comic with all the text removed

Which I’m grateful for because it clearly shows that without the original text, this cartoon is neither funny nor coherent, but is just a collection of random images. You only know what it is saying if you read the original.

This whole episode is yet another example of the eternal centrist need to hand it to the Nazis (Stonetoss in this case) and desire to attack trans women, as Haus has recently come out as one. (Fun activity: check the thread and quote tweets to see how many people suddenly are able to use they/them pronouns to misgender Haus.) Lurking in the background, the idea that all art should be propaganda and should only be judged on how effective it is according to cretins. And you wonder why the US is sliding into fascism even without Trump being elected yet…

I never knew Guido Crepax did history illustrations

Published on June 17, 2024Leave a comment

Because my mother volunteers there, I have been frequenting the local church’s charity bookshop. One of the books I bought there the last time was a pop history volume I remember from my parents’ bookcases, about the ancient Greeks, which I literally read until it fell apart as a child. Browsing through it to sate my nostalgia I found something surprising, a familiar looking signature in the two page illustration of Createan bull jumping:

An illustration by Guido Crepax which shows the ancient Cretean sport of jumping over bulls

Tucked away on the bottom left there it was: “G. Crepax”. In case you’re not as familiar with European comics, that’s Guido Crepax, the Italian cartoonist who is best known for, as the Lambiek Comiclopedia linked above calls it, “his depictions of elaborate and aesthetic erotic fantasies”. Once I noticed it was him it was quite obvious: compare the illustration above with the Shell advertisement shown on the Comiclopedia e.g. I bought two volumenes of the series (7000 Jaar Wereldgeschiedenis) and both have his illustrations. No actual credits are given in either but the style is unmistakeable. A really fun thing to discover some four decades later.

Maybe check his hard drive?

Published on April 5, 2024Leave a comment

Why is Greg Smallwood taking a principled stance for the rights of abusers not to have their careers harmed by their own actions:

I’m done pretending that an apology or atonement gets you anywhere with these people. Tell me, Liam – did an apology change Warren Ellis’s circumstances? How about Jason Latour’s? Cameron Stewart? Brian Wood? There is no path and you know it.

Has Ed Piskor’s suicide unhinged him that much? Why does he feels so much sympathy for abusers but not their victims? Ellis abused, hurt and damaged the careers of literally dozens of people, many of whom had to leave comics because of it. Smallwood never mentions them, but he is very upset that people “bullied” Ed Piskor. Where the ‘bullying’ consisted of two women accusing him of secual harassment. Piskor committed suicide a week later and left a suicide note in which he blamed various cartoonists including one of the women who accused him for it.

Which on its own is a tragedy, but is also incredibly spiteful, to use your last action in this world to try and start a lynch mob, handing an excuse to people like Smallwood to start a harassment campaign. Maybe Piskor did have mental health issues that drove to suicide, but that doesn’t excuse this, nor does it make his accusers into retroactive bullies. In the end he turned to be somebody who couldn’t hack it that his own actions had maybe destroyed his career.

Smallwood is worse though, using Piskor’s suicide as an excuse to rehabilitate some of comics’ worst abusersm, trying to frame it as an antibullying campgain. You’d expect that from the comics gaters, the usual frothing rightwing assholes eager to attack women and people of colour and who indeed have joined in harassing the people mentioned in Piskor’s suicide note. Way to out yourself as being the same, when you could’ve just kept your mouth shut. The eagerness with which Smallwood insists people like Brian Wood or Warren Ellis should be able to “return to comics”, that somehow they still deserve a career despite ruining those of their victims, but that mean bullies won’t let them no matter how sorry they are, is vile. If anything it shows he’s not a safe person to be around.