Comics

I kind of abhor the term "web comics" as, while I understand it is simply a way to differentiate a subset of the overall comics medium, I feel like it has a stigma attached to it so I simply avoid using it as much as I can.  I've been reading a lot of new comics lately though, and I thought I'd create a list of links here to share them and sort of keep track of the ones that stand out.  The problem is, there are a lot of good ones, but there are a choice few that have simply hit the mark for me.

http://amultiverse.com/ - Scenes From A Multiverse by Jonathan Rosenberg
http://gunshowcomic.com/ - Gunshow by KC Green
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php - Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ - Diesel Sweeties by R Stevens

That's all for now, I may update this list later.

Comicon 2009

So this has been somewhat of a whirlwind of a year. The kind that picks you up and moves you around a whole lot but you still end up set down no better or worse than you started... The theme however as Sean says is "tangible progress". We'll see...

In other news, I am in San Diego at Comicon! Holy shit! Anyways, it's been pretty cool so far. The novelty isn't quite there as this is the second one I've been to but it's still only the second and so, still pretty overwhelming. So far my time has been spent doing secret things but tonight, Richard and I are going to head out to a Drink and Draw at a bar downtown so that should be cool. I will be doing the drinking and wondering why I am not a more prolific writer that can take advantage of this opportunity to meet and drink with (maybe) great artists.

The only things of note that I have done are wait in line, wait in line and then there was some more waiting in line. I also took some pictures of some of the people I have seen but there's a lot. I hope to have a lot more pics by the end but as I post them I will let you know. After that, I waited in line some more. Oh yeah, Warren Ellis is gonna be here! I need to remember to stop by one of the discount trade retailers for a book to get him to sign and any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm wishing I had brought my copy of Ocean now that I think about it. But whatever, I may see if I can't find a copy of New Universal in hard cover or something.

Anyways, I did go to one panel so far. It was an Assassin's Creed 2 panel so I got to pretend I was at E3 cause they gave the exact same demo. Am I allowed to talk about video game panels at a Comicon? I guess I better remember to add Video Games to the labels for this post. It looks awesome but the panel really bored us with their talk of convergence or, as it is better known to some, CROSS PROMOTIONAL MARKETING OF AN IP THROUGH A COLLECTIVE OF MEDIUMS AS OPPOSED TO ONE. Basically, Ubisoft paid to make some assassin's creed live action movies along with the studio that did all the cg work for 300 and Sin City and they're excited that they didn't just throw money around to farm it out like some big corporation might have done. Wait...

In other news, the booths are all lively and more or less the same. Marvel is all about the Iron Man 2, DC is all about the Blackest Night but not as much as they should be since it's the only cool thing they've got going on, boosh! Also, they did give lots of room to their Vertigo and Wildstorm friends so that was nice. I hope I get to see Becky Cloonan somewhere... She doesn't know it yet (except in dreams and premonitions that come to her in the night) but she and I are getting married. I should carry around a bag so I can capture her Borat style as soon as I see her. I think they're giving away bags at the Warner Bros booth that are just about right actually...

for lack of a better post

I was at wizard world recently and picked up the first hardcover volume of supreme power, having recently come to J. Michael Straczynski thanks to his run on Amazing Spiderman and also from reading a few issues of Squadron Supreme. I thought I'd check out how that whole supremaverse reboot began. Turns out it is a really good read but it isn't just the work as a whole that brings me to this virtual repository for brain droppings but something that according to his introduction he put forth as a deliberate challenge for himself in approaching writing this particular comic. Throughout the book, he chose to not one single time use the caption as a story telling device. For those of you who just came in, a caption in comic books usually consists of a floating box in which we are let in on the secret inner thoughts of the person who's point of view we happen to be seeing the action through. Sometimes it would be narration from the writer, sometimes it's voice over from the protagonist in a very noir style. Stan Lee and Ed Brubaker respectively come time mind as examples of those two types. Now, the interesting thing is that because comics provide that one of a kind presentation of story through visuals and written words, you would think that everyone would be using captions all the time. I mean it's a pretty easy way to give insight into deeper happenings within your narrative that you might not otherwise get across by just using dialogue or action. Book writers do it a lot. Straczynski however showed that he was more than capable of producing a coherent and fascinating narrative through only showing you action and dialogue. I liked it a lot. And I started paying more attention to other writers that do so. I don't know about you but when I first got into comics, I used to really love the captions. I loved seeing the innermost thoughts of a character and the reasonings behind their actions laid out in perfect prose. It was sort of a way to get away with adding poetry to comics and elevated them to some higher literary form in my mind. Sometimes it got to be too much though and a lot of writers are guilty of Naval Gazing and completely taking you out of the story by providing you with aimless stream of consciousness meanderings from the characters that make you want to shout at the page "GET TO THE FUCKING POINT!"

I guess the thing is, comics are a visual medium of story telling. The words are necessary and maybe needed at times when there's more that you need to explain than there is room on a page to convey. It's possible though that if there is such a thing as perfection as an ideal that can be approached by comics writers, it may just not have any room for captions. After all if pictures are worth any amount of words, shouldn't the visuals speak for themselves and be capable of providing more of an emotional context for your story than any silly captions could?

THE DISCLAIMER
I still love captions. They're really well used by people like Ed Brubaker and Allan Moore and Paul Jenkins (when he isn't naval gazing) and I do think they are relevant in comics as a useful and even positive story telling device. So don't get all reactionary. Or do.