Fantagraphics – Wis[s]e Words

The real shock is having Fanta publish it

Published on December 1, 2014Leave a comment

Greg Hunter reviews Fukitor for The Comics Journal:

Intentionality becomes a consideration while reading comics like this. Here are two ways to consider “Operation Cockblock!”: 1) Karns uses satire as a pretext to include content that’s upsetting by design; 2) Karns’s ambitions as a satirist outstretch his gift for satire to such a degree that the story is a near-total failure. Not all art has a social intent, and not all art is best viewed in these terms, but we can certainly judge ostensible social comment by its follow-through. Fukitor manages little with respect to race except the visual parroting of hateful tropes.

It’s possible Karns doesn’t consider the reactions of readers while drafting his work. Not likely, but possible. If he does consider reactions, we can posit that shock is not merely expected but desired. So criticizing Fukitor because of its harsh content feels uncomfortably like playing a game that Karns has arranged. But Fukitor can also be critiqued on the grounds of its eventual boringness. By the end, viscera fall with plodding monotony.

As I’ve said before, there’s nothing shocking about Fukitor, satirical or otherwise. It just draws on the same wellsprings of racism, sexism and bullying as everything it’s “inspired” by. It’s the alternative comix version of Identity Crisis, a deeply cynical attempt to exploit aging fanboys’ confusion of maturity and adult material with asshole behaviour. Are we sure, in fact, that Jason Karns isn’t a Mark Millar pseudonym, because the trolling style is the same.

And if Fukitor is just a giant troll attempt, it’s overshadowed by that of its new publisher. The first book in Fantagraphics new F. U. imprint (and I see what you did there), it’s a clear statement of intent, and a giant troll to pretend that this book, out of all the interesting work being done, is good enough to launch this new imprint. One of the great things about Fantagraphics is that it has always been in the forefront in the fight for artistic freedom in comix, but it does lead them sometimes into tedious épater le bourgeois territory, like it seems to have done here. You can, if you squint, draw a line from certain of Crumb’s racist fantasies and Bagge’s more outrageous libertarian strips to what Karns does here, but it doesn’t make it more interesting, here in 2014, to again see yet more racist, sexist power fantasies get preferable treatment just because it offers the illusion of transgression, when in actuality it does nothing but riff on the same tired old stereotypes already all over mainstream media offerings.

Brian Hibbs: boldy marching forward into the past?

Published on November 18, 2013Leave a comment

I have my doubts about Fantagraphics doing a kickstarter to finance their 2014 lineup, but Brian Hibbs response to it misses the point entirely. First:

But my twinge came from the place of pragmatism. This is at least the third, and maybe the fourth, time that FBI has come to the market, hat-in-hand, needing a cash infusion to continue publishing. This is a bad habit, and one that I very much want FBI (and almost all of their contemporaries) to avoid going forward.

No. Instead of avoiding Kickstarter, it would actually make a hell of a lot of sense for Fantagraphics to continue using it as a funding mechanism. For a successfull Kickstarter you need to have a potential audience that’s familiar with and interested in what you’re offering, which has both the faith that you will deliver that and the disposable income to back you; all of which Fantagraphics has in spades, therefore they’re uniquely suited to take advantage of Kickstarter’s funding possibilities. Whether or not this funding model is good for comics as a whole, for Fantagraphics it could be a good way to remove a lot of the risk in publishing, or at least shift it towards their fans. The morality of this is another story, but it makes a lot of business sense and you see this model being used in a lot of geek hobby fields.

But as said, Hibbs rejects this in favour of a much different, much older publishing model, serialisation:

From this point of view, even a serialization even loses a small amount of money is worth pursuing — if it costs $4000 to produce a work in the first place, and $500 to make the same work ready for collection, even if you only make $3000 from the serialization, you’re still in a better place for the collection than you would be if you had gone straight to OGN — you only have to make another $1500 to start making a profit on the book, not the full $4000 you’d need to recoup without it.

Which is of course the model Fantagraphics (and all other comics publishers) have historically followed, up until about a decade ago (curiously enough the last time Fantagraphics got into financial trouble). These days however almost all art comix publishers like Fanta, D&Q, Top Shelf etc have largely abandoned this format in favour of the comics album or “original graphic novel”. Is that because they’re all idiots and like leaving money on the table, as Hibbs suggests here?

That seems unlikely. Isn’t it more likely that while the serialisation, then trade paperback model does make sense for “mainstream” projects, it has long since ceased to make sense for art comix? Even fifteen, twenty years ago publishers like Fantagraphics struggle to get their comics noticed in the direct market, depending on a handful of stores for most of their sales; heck, Fanta had to resort to publishing porno comics to keep themselves afloat at one time. It wasn’t a fad that made these publishers start publishing for bookstores rather than comics shops, but pure necessity.

Now, you could argue that in the current climate, it does make sense to go back to an older model of publishing comics (and as Tom Spurgeon says, it’s hard to argue with a hypothetical), but the track record for serialisation of the sort of comics Fanta publishes isn’t great. Hibbs’ suggestions sounds a lot like that of well intentioned fans twenty years ago who were convinced comics could become a mass medium again, if only they’d get back on the newsstands and out of the direct market.

The perfect place to start Cerebus

Published on September 22, 2012Leave a comment

a page from High Society

It’s a strange situation. First you had Dave Sim running a very successful Kickstarter campaign to republish the entire Cerebus series as high quality digital comics, including all the ephemeral content left out of earlier reprints. Then a fire destroyed many of the Cerebus negatives, which, combined with the end through low sales of his Glamourpuss project left Dave Sim pondering the end of his career as a cartoonist. Finally, this triggered a response from Fantagraphics, with head honcho Kim Thompson offering to reprint Cerebus in a more market friendly format:

I’d be perfectly happy to repackage the CEREBUS material in a more bookstore-friendly format than those fucking phone books and give the material the new lease on life it (or at least the first two thirds of it) so richly deserves.

Dave Sim responded and now you have what’s basically a contract negotiation happening in public, which Tom Spurgeon is right to think is absurd. Great fun though and it inevitably leads to thinking about how to start the series. As Kim Thompson put it:

Actually, I feel it absolutely must start at the beginning. CEREBUS is a very complex story and everything builds on what’s come before. The liability is of course that the first several issues are crude and jokey, so you’re not leading with the best work, but if you don’t make these available the stuff that follows is a lot harder to make sense of. That’s a curse of serial comics created by a developing cartoonist.

but there’s a solution to this dillemma and it’s not a difficult one: start with High Society. As Kim Thompson says, the problem with starting reprinting Cerebus from the beginning is that it started out int he late seventies as not that good a parody of Conan the Barbarian as well as other contemporary comics, one of the first wave of creator owned alternative comics, together with series like the Pinis’ Elfquest and Jack Katz The First Kingdom. These first few issues just aren’t that interesting, though Sim develops fast and gets more and more ambitious over time, but they are of a particular time and place and perhaps less interesting if you’re not a hardcore comics fan.

High Society is different. It’s one single story, originally told over twentyfive issues, which if I’m not mistaken was even the longest story told in American comics up to that time. It’s also the story in which Dave Sim came into his potential, complex, cynical, incredibly funny. Best of all, it’s also a story that really needs little to no introduction, no knowledge of what had gone before. All you need is half a page introducing Cerebus, then the story can start with him coing into Iest looking for a room to sleep and expecting to be thrown out of the city, only for everybody treating him with respect and fear and eager to make him happy, which drives him up the wall until he sees a way to profit from it. You don’t really need to know that Dirty Fleagle McGrew and his baby brother Dirty Drew were modelled after Canadian cartoonists Gene and Dan Day to enjoy the story. All you need to know is that it starts off a little bit like Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector and take it from there.