Comix

Hello comics my old friends…

Comix, posts interesting only to me
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If it hadn’t been for one little thing, 2010 would’ve been a good year for us. Work went well, was very rewarding both financially and in its own right and in turn this meant some of the low grade money problems we had been having ever since we first bought our house finally disappeared. A bit materialistic perhaps, but even Dickens knew happiness in a capitalist society depends on money in the bank. But of course there was that little thing of S. and her ongoing medical problems, having spent most of the year in hospital due to complications upon complications emerging from her kidney transplant. At the moment she’s still in hospital, recovering from a second operation done to repair some of the damage of the first (more or less). She’s on the mend, but not yet home and there have been many ups and downs on the way, perhaps more to come. At times it all was a bit too much for me, but luckily there was always an escape mechanism nearby to help lose myself for some time.

Comix.

Or did y’all think it was just a whim that made me pull a dumb stunt like reading fifty Marvel Essentials in fifty days?

Comix, especially fat compilations of not especially good seventies or sixties Marvel superhero comics, are very good fodder to suppress your emotions with. They require much less effort to read than even simple novels and as with every collection of serialised material, there’s enough repetition and recapping to get the gist of a story even when reading it next to a bed in the ICU waiting for your partner to finally wake up again…

It only occured to me a few days ago that this escapism is why I went back into comix in such a big way this year; I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Yet through all the years me and S. have been together, from when we first met back in December 2000 up until last year, I never cared much for comics, despite having been a serious collector for thirteen years before that. Not that I got a girlfriend and dropped comics, rather that I quit comics in disgust in June or July 2000, had just gotten sick of them, sick of wasting money, sick of the scene and dropped out completely, from one day on to the next, just stopped buying them. It’s only then that S. appeared — which may be coincidence, or it may not.

But it’s no coincidence that I started collecting again once she wasn’t around. Comics may or may not make you fat but they are a solitary hobby. Despite the camaradie of the comics shop, the conventions or the blogs, in the end you still end up reading them on your own, absorbed in the four colour wonders on offer. True, reading books is the same, but the difference between the two is that you can get through so much more of the former than you can get through the latter. So if you got the bug, you need to spent more time and money buying your fix, especially back when the primary delivery mechanism was the 32 page pamphlet. You’d go to the shop, get your pile of comics and spent a couple of hours plowing through them: the ideal hobby for a lonely by preference kid like me.

And now when the loneliness wasn’t by choice comix were there again…

So farewell then Dirk Deppey

Comix
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Fantagraphics has had to let Dirk “¡Journalista!” Deppey go as they could no longer afford a fulltime blogger. Dirk takes the opportunity of his last column to look back:

In the last ten years, I’ve thrown away a career, assembled porn mailers, drew comics, wrote essays, raised money for a homeless cartoonist, organized Seattle’s worst benefit concert ever, digitized hundereds of hours of cassette tapes containing (I think) the largest oral history of comics in the United States, started a weblog, kick-started a blogosphere, attended a bunch of geek festivals (including four San Diego Comic-Cons in a row), edited a magazine, interviewed cartoonists whom I greatly admired, got quoted in major newspapers on topics in which I was often unqualified to hold a quoteworthy opinion, became several bibliography citations, became a footnote, became an Internet micro-celebrity, became a Wikipedia entry (it reads “mostly harmless”), helped facilitate a manga line and spent a full four years working from home in my living room, naked! And I got paid to do all of it.

It’s a real pity it had to come this far, but completely understandable that it had to happen. Comics being not the most stable or profitable business at the best of times, with the recession grinding on indeterminably in the US, it’s not surprising Fantagraphics was wanting to cut costs — and a fulltime blogger is a luxury that is easily cut… You could call it a small miracle that they had been able to keep Deppey employed for as long as they did.

Luxury or not, Deppey’s importance in developing a proper comix blogosphere is not easily overestimated. Just having somebody there day in, day out collating and reporting on all sorts of comix related stories, directing traffic to blogs or websites otherwise overlooked, has helped to mold the blogosphere. What’s more, Deppey also served as an example for other bloggers, again both by being there every day and through the quality of his blogging. Sure, most of it was link blogging, but he always managed to pick at least two-three, sometimes even five or six interesting or thoughtful links every day, which few people could’ve equalled over so long a period. And when he wrote longer posts, it was always interesting as well.

On a more personal level, ¡Journalista!, was one of the blogs that managed to suck me back into comix again. If only for that he will be missed.

Dylan Horrocks: better to be pirated than to be forgotten

Comix
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Somebody uploaded a torrent of Pickle #1-10 onto Demonoid and then Dylan Horrocks, its creator showed up to voice his approval:

A quick note of thanks to the uploader from me, Dylan Horrocks. These comics are long out of print now, and quite hard to find, and I’m thrilled to have them made more available to people – and appreciate all the trouble someone went to in scanning and packaging them.

And just to clarify: Hicksville was serialised in issues 2-10, although I made a few changes to the early chapters when it was later collected in book form. Also, the final chapter of Hicksville was going to be in issue 11, which was never published due to Black Eye shutting down (and for which I apologise!).

Issues 1-6 of Pickle also include other material that has never been collected.

If anyone wants to see what I’m up to these days, my website (where I’m serialising a new story, ‘The Magic Pen’) is here: http://hicksvillecomics.com

Thanks again – and don’t forget to seed! ;)

Leaving questions of morality aside, for the vast majority of cartoonists and writers, obscurity is a much greater danger than piracy. Dylan Horrocks obviously understands this. Having somebody who is prepared to go to the trouble to hunt down out of print comics, scan and upload them is a compliment more than it is an infringement. It means somebody cares about you work. (To be fair, I can also imagine getting pissed off if it happens to you…)

Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville, originally serialised in Pickle was reprinted this year in a new edition. If you don’t have it yet, it’s well worth getting, a comic about comics and its history and why they are important.

Zot! going cheap

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For anybody near a de Slegte bookstore — thanks to the internet, this is everybody — here’s a top tip. De Slegte has Zot! — The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 going cheap, from 25 euros for less than eight. If you want to sample one of the best independent comix of the 1980ties, here’s your chance. Me, I bought it at full price a few years ago already, alas.

If only there was a collection of the original colour run as well, or the 1/2 issues done by Matt “Cynicalman” Feazell. Yes, I have the original issues, but this material is too good to leave smoldering in back issue bins.