Comix – Page 59 – Wis[s]e Words

Bearing false witness

Published on March 8, 20122 Comments

cartoon about Sandra Fluke

It’s just a coincidence that on international women’s day Tom Spurgeon linked to two of the most horrible cartoons that have been published about Sandra Fluke. The cartoon above, by Gary McCoy, is one of them, while the second one puts some racist icing on the sexist shitcake by putting in a Huggy Bear style pimp.

Sandra Fluke was the woman who testified before Congress about having anticonception as part of health care insurance and how when it isn’t covered by such insurance it can be quite expensive to pay for, especially for oral contraceptives like the pill, which have to be taken regularly and which can vary widely in cost and effectiveness. Frustrating enough that such hearings need to be held in what calls itself a civilised country, but for the dimbulbs on the American right who oppose any sort of measure that can give women any sort of control over their own bodies and sex lives, this made Sandra Fluke a whore and a slut, as Rush Limbaugh called her.

It’s no surprise therefore to see some cartoonists pushing the same stupid, hateful lie, but is depressing. Unlike Tom Spurgeon, I don’t think anybody actually believes this bullshit, unless they’re very sheltered and ignorant about how the pill works, which is impossible but unlikely and in any case no excuse. It isn’t viagra, you don’t swallow it just before sex but actually need to take it on a fairly rigid schedule to get its benefits and apart from being an anticonceptive, it’s also used to help women with a host of medical problems. To believe it’s a sex pill and a woman taking it is a slut is so incredibly stupid that it cannot be done other than in malice.

The secondary features of these cartoons confirm this malice. Gary McCoy turns Fluke into a bloated monstrosity scribbling on the doors of a men’s lavatory, while Mike Lester silences here completely, while a stereotypical pimp figure tells the reader she’s a whore. These are nasty, vile cartoons and the people who made them should lose their jobs over them, just as Limbaugh in a just universe should lose his radio show.

Because what Limbaugh and these cartoonists, as well as all those good Christians chuckling over their jokes” are doing is bearing false witness, lying about and attempting to destroy one ordinary woman just because they see some transient political gain in it.

Sadie Hawkins Day lives

Published on February 29, 2012Leave a comment

the first appearance of Sadie Hawkins Day

L’il Abner, All Capp’s hillbilly humour/adventure comic strip was of course hugely popular for decades and hugely influencial on American popular culture. One of the things it popularised was Sadiw Hawkins Day, an annual day on which women of l’il Abner’s hillbilly town of Dogpatch got to propose to their men; the rest of the year they had to sit around and wait for their lazy and marriage afearing beaus to propose to them. Even on Sadie Hawkins day they still had to ketch them to actually be able to propose and All Capp managed to milk the pursuit of L’il Abner by his girlfriend Daisy Mae for decades before he eventually married them off.

Sadie Hawkins Day meanwhile had become popular outside the L’il Abner strip as well, merging with an older tradition of February 29th being the only day in the year that women could ask men out to dance, or marriage. That sort of topsy turvy craziness was hilarious back when gender roles were somewhat more strict than in modern times, but Sadie Hawkins day still is celebrated.

As my foster brother found out this morning. He has been living together with his partner for years now, they have two children together and while she would like to get married, he was in no hurry to do so. Which is why a few weeks back she took the matters into her own hands and asked my father for his hand, then surprised him this morning with a true old fashioned marriage proposal, having first collected several witnesses including his daughters and my mother, going down on one knee and popping the big question. He said yes of course; he’d better if he knew what was good for him.

So congratulations to the happy couple and I hope to get the wedding invitation soon.

Whither back issues?

Published on February 29, 2012Leave a comment

Tom Spurgeon asks what we think will happen with the comics back issues market in the next few years or decades:

So what do you think? Is this even a market 10, 15, 25 years from now? Is it all digital? Does it shift to newer comics as more of those children try to recapture their past? Will people buy from the original run of DC New 52 comics in 2028? Will Jack Kirby comic books still appeal? What happens?

I think a lot of it will depend on what happens to the comic book format in general. To say it’s not in the best of health is an understatement and I can see it dying quickly once digital comics become fully accepted and every important publishers offers them. If that tie between the weekly batch of new comics and the necessary trip to the comics store is broken, that will inevitably mean fewer opportunities for the stores to sell back issues too. Especially once there’s a generation of comic book readers who’ve never known anything but cheap and easy availability of digital comics and who are happy to buy their back issues that way too.

Which would mean that most back issues will only be bought by a slowly shrinking base of aging consumers who have grown up with that way of buying comics, as arguable is already the case for new comics anyway. Which in turn means fewer comics stores, with those that survive having to specialise in something that makes them desirable for consumers who can get their normal comics fix through the internet. This is not a new development of course; just ask your local independent bookseller.

The upper segment of back issue sales, selling Golden Age, Silver Age and key Bronze Age and more modern comics can go two ways. It may develop further into a sort of pseudo arts market, with speculators and collectors both wanting to get the rarer, more exclusive comics, driving up prices on the usual suspects, with perhaps a lowering of prices for your run of the mill Golden or Silver age comic. But it may also go the way of the “normal” back issue market, as newer and younger collectors no longer see the point and value in getting them when they can get the stories either digital or in nice, luxurious hardcover collections.

In either case, there will also be a new market for these sort of back issue: the institutional collector, working for e.g. a dedicated comics museum, an university with a comics and sequential art department or even more general musea and universities wanting comics not so much for their intrisic value but for what they can say about a given period’s zeitgeist. For all these parties having the original comic can be as important if not more so than having the stories they contained; rule of thumb in any sort of academic research is always to go to the sources after all.

This is something that has happened to other once popular mass media. Way back in 1992 or so a columnist in the Comics Buyers Guide of all place dropped the example of the dime novel, hugely popular in the early twentieth century, having a resurge in the twenties and thirties as people started buying back issues for nostalgic reasons and once that audience died off, largely only of interest to the type of institutional collector I described above.

The biggest worry in all this, if we ignore the economic turmoil these developments will wreak on the already fragile comics industry is one that Tom touched upon as well, that certain comics will become genuinely rare once the market collapses, that there won’t be anybody who saves them and hence that we’ll be in danger of losing parts of our history. This is an even greater worry with digital formats. Paper is much more durable than silicon: even if the hardware remains usable, the software might not be, while data formats in particular are incredibly vulnerable to bitrot. Paper comics also don’t have any nasty digital rights management build in that prevents you from reselling them. Worse with some formats, your comic exists as long as their publisher keeps them alive in “the cloud”. Ironically, it might be the comics pirates who are our best bests in keeping these comics available after their publisher has given the ghost…

Support Gary Friedrich

Published on February 12, 20121 Comment

support Gary Friedrich

Capitalism is always exploitative, but the American comics industry has always been more aggressive and barefaced about exploiting their talent. The socalled Golden Age of the 1930ties to 1950ties was filled with mobbed-up distributors, shady businessmen and fly by night publishers and while after the fifties comics went respectable, the business methods remained. Sometimes it seems that just because comics are such penny ante operations compared to other media companies, that this explains the petty, spiteful and pennypinching ways in which publishers treat their workers. But then along comes Disney to show it takes a huge company to be truly spiteful.

Gary Friedrich is the creator of Ghostrider, which is a character that has been fairly succesful for Marvel/Disney, having had several series over the decades, as well as several movies in the last few years, the latest having just come out. Friedrich has not shared in this success as Marvel argues that he had signed over the rights to his creation when he signed the paycheck paying him for his writing work — the back of which had a rubberstamp agreement stating that signing it meant the loss of all rights. Friedrich obviously disagreed with this, opened a lawsuit against Marvel to claim his rights back and lost; leaving him having to recover the costs he made pursuing the case somehow. This wasn’t enough for Marvel however and they countersued him, claiming 17,000 dollars in damages for his “illegal” selling of Ghostrider merchandise — selling sketches at comics conventions. Oh, and they also want him to stop calling himself Ghostrider’s creator.

Petty, no? About the only way Friedrich (who can’t get any work for Marvel or another comics company) could make some money was by trading on his stature as the creator of Ghostrider and sell sketches and such of him, something that’s a longstanding perk for comics creators though theoretically is infringement on a Marvel or DC’s copyrights/trademarks. These companies have never sunk so low as to interfere with this trade, often the only way in which elder or retired comics artists can still make some money of their skills, but with Marvel now owned by Disney, a company never caring much for how it treats its workers, there obviously isn’t the same courtesy anymore.

This case should put the fear of god into any comics artists, because now the taboo has been broken, it may only be a matter of time before Marvel and DC go systemically after all “infringers”. Gary Friedrich therefore needs our support, not just out of ordinary human decency, but to stop this further landgrab in its tracks. If you want to help, you can donate a few bucks to him to help pay for his legal and other costs. As Tom Spurgeon put it:

It doesn’t really matter to me at this stage to come to some sort of merit-based appraisal of Gary Friedrich’s recent lawsuit against Marvel, let alone his entire professional life. I frankly never quite understood the former and I think engaging the latter invites madness and an appreciation of the trees when it’s the forest that’s maybe more important. Right now it just sounds to me like the guy could use a hand, and for whatever reason — justice, the timing of history, God’s will, stupidity, a lack of grace, boiling-cauldron evil, gremlins — the way that he was able to do his work in the comics industry was not rewarding to him in a way that would forestall such trouble. I’m willing to risk a few bucks in that I may be eventually proven wrong somehow in extending that very modest hand.

New Watchmen? What’s the point?

Published on February 2, 2012Leave a comment

If DC is so determined to get new Watchmen material out, why not this?

I’m with Andrew Weiss on this; putting out prequels to Watchmen is only slighty less obnoxious than imagining a need for a prequel to Maus, but so much other cultural landmarks, both high and low, have been remade in the past few decades that it was only time before Watchmen got its turn. It’s what happens when “intellectual properties” (ugh) are owned by companies only interested in the next sure thing, the next bestseller, who know full well that whatever internet outrage there is today, many of the same people will end up buying these things anyway, curious as they are to see what a Darwyn Cooke (retro kitsch with little originality) or a J. Michael Straczynski (let’s hope it’s not a long miniseries) will make of it. Few comics fans can tell shit from shinola anyway, not when presented in a $99 Absolute Edition Hardcover.

In the end, what remains impressive is how long it took DC ultimately to throw all their scruples to the wind and do what they’ve been wanting to do ever since Watchmen turned out to be a hit, to do what’s in the company’s DNA, what they always do when they have a hit: exploit the hell out of it and get more like it out there on the stands. It’s what comics publishers have always done, chase the trends, sling shit to the wall and if it sticks, sling more. At the time they barely and only halfhearted recognised that not doing this would be more profitable this time, though not before driving away Moore himself. What DC finally realised was that Watchmen, along with The Dark Knight Returns and Swamp Thing, as well as a handful of lesser titles gave them prestige, a reputation as a the more creator friendly and innovative of the Big Two. They got themselves a boatload of British writers, people like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan et all to repeat the magic that Moore got going with Watchmen, got it with Sandman and ultimately got Vertigo, a whole line of slightly off kilter not quite superhero titles for those who had outgrown the DC universe, the one really smart bit of business DC has gotten together in the past four decades. The rest of the company may have been just as dumb and exploitative as Marvel (who never got as much credit for Epic as DC did for Vertigo) or Image at their worst, but Vertigo made it acceptable.

But the American comics industry still crashed and burned and nobody but Steve Bissette still cares about creators right and self publishing and boycotting Marvel for its treatment of Jack Kirby and its heirs. And Watchmen, which had remained in print and a steady seller for the company all those years turned hot again, what with the movie and everything and the old itch to exploit it better, to get people to not just buy new and more deluxe versions of it popped up again. More than a quarter of a century after its original publication it’s finally safe to give into it, even if it’s pointless. The suits will have their way, the second rate talent making the comics will think they’re making art or doing a homage and that DC will still respect them in the morning, the fans will lap it up anyway.