Things I Bought at the MoCCA Festival

Brigid Alverson persuaded me to make the one-day trip to Manhattan to attend this year’s MoCCA Festival. So for real money and everything I bought…

My part of a brunch with Brigid (MangaBlog, Robot 6, School Library Journal), Johanna Draper Carlson (Comics Worth Reading, Manga Worth Reading), and Johanna’s mother, who was in the common role of family member dragged to an event of limited interest and being genial about it.

“Drought,” a one-sheet comic by Kenan Rubenstein, whose FoldyComics website I highlighted here but have yet to contribute to. (I have ideas for improving my final page.)

A copy of Guinea PI, vol. 1: Hamster and Cheese autographed by both writer Colleen AF Venable and artist Stephanie Yue. One of the great pleasures of this book is the richness of the supporting characters.

For my collection of comics based in eighteenth-century history, E. J. Barnes’s “Caroline’s Catalog,” about astronomer Caroline Herschel, and Joel Christian Gill’s Strange Fruit, #4, about Massachusetts-born magician Richard Potter.

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson, Dan Jolley, Joëlle Jones, and Jenn Manley Lee, just because it looked interesting. (I never read the prose original.)

Western, an anthology from Dave West and Colin Mathieson’s Accent UK, since I was impressed by its production values.

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden, a book I’ve checked out of the library enough times that I decided I should own my own copy—which came with Madden’s inscription.

And a piece of original art I’ll write about at the start of next week.

The Psychoanalysis of Superheroes and Their Fans

This image, by Norm Breyfogle, adorns Spencer Ackerman’s article in the new Pacific Standard on “Comic Con on the Couch: Analyzing Superheroes.”

It’s a profile of Robin [yes] Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist who edited the essay collection The Psychology of Superheroes. She’s also written about psychological issues in the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books, and has a blog at Psychology Today titled “The Superheroes” as well as her own.

Rosenberg’s website promises some more books this year, including What Is a Superhero? coedited with Peter Coogan, Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care, and What's the Matter with Batman? She’s already written “What’s Wrong with Bruce Wayne?” for Dennis O’Neil’s Batman Unauthorized.

As part of her research, Rosenberg visits comics conventions interviewing cosplayers about their costume choices and what those heroes mean to them. Ackerman reports:

Usually therapy takes weeks or months to cultivate the trust in a doctor necessary for patients to open up. But when Rosenberg asks even the least invasive of questions — Why are you dressed like this hero? — the cosplayers can respond with a surprising amount of intimacy. One cosplayer in a black cloak and orange wig, acting out a part from an obscure Japanese anime show, explains that, just like his character, “I never really knew my father.”

Rosenberg, who loves cosplay and cosplayers, gets reactions like that more often than you might expect. At conventions, “people are so open, so nice and so friendly,” she says. When the orange-haired fellow shuffles on, she adds, “This guy was very psychologically insightful. He understood how he felt. Those people can get quite personal.”

Rosenberg is banking on that. Her unconventional career choice is based on two related hunches. First, superhero fans, used to viewing their idols as allegories for the good (or bad) life, are actually hungry for psychological insight. Second, those allegories provide a prism to introduce and popularize psychology.

I’m sure Rosenberg has considered the irony of hearing honest and open remarks from people in disguise—often masked. Does the costume or the persona provide an extra layer of visual or physical protection that empowers more emotional vulnerability? Or does the melodramatic style of superhero comics and similar cosplay-attracting genres encourage fans to bring emotions to the surface?

Cold Wind and the Limits of the Superhero Genre

Cold Wind is a short adventure comic written by Dan Mazur and drawn by Jesse Lonergan, independently published by Mazur’s Ninth Art Press.

I saw this story grow from a script that Dan shared with the Boston Comics Roundtable to its final form. Dan writes in screenplay format, not breaking his story into pages and panels. Often he draws his own art, so that’s obviously not a problem. In this case, he left it up to Jesse—who’s scripted his own Flower and Fade, Joe and Azat, and other tales—to divide the screenplay into images. Yet another approach to collaboration.

Dan’s told me a couple of times how he’s no longer a fan of superhero comics because of their repetitive themes. He reads one Spider-Man story, learns that “With great power comes great responsibility,” reads another story—and learns the same thing.

As former Marvel editor Jim Shooter has commented:

Comic books have become like opera. You go to see a particular performance of an old story, not a new story. How will this performer handle that familiar role...?

That familiarity is part of the appeal of a series, or a genre.

At the last roundtable meeting, Dan wondered aloud if Cold Wind is a superhero comic. I said it qualified, despite his ambivalence about the genre. It’s a pumped-up action story taking place against a fantastic landscape. Its characters are largely symbolic, and they work out the fate of the world through violence.

But Cold Wind reflects Dan Mazur’s take on the superhero genre, with the theme that things don’t change significantly. For all the adventure’s sound effects and fury, its surviving characters achieve only a short pleasure before the world spins on.

Cold Wind is on sale today at the MoCCA Festival, in the better Boston-area comics shops, and over the web.

Why Republicans No Longer Like American Cars

In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated Charles Erwin Wilson, head of General Motors, to be Secretary of Defense. In his confirmation hearings, Wilson said he could make decisions for the sake of the country that would be bad for General Motors, but couldn’t foresee such a choice coming up “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

More recently, many American conservatives insisted on the value of buying American cars, criticizing politicians who drive vehicles from foreign companies. As recently as February 2009, Pat Buchanan was writing about the necessity to “Buy American!” in The American Conservative. It’s part of the basic platform of the Conservative Party USA and the “paleoconservative” America First Party.

Of course, American unions also campaigned for people to buy domestically made cars and other products. And on the right, free-market conservatives argued that products’ national origins shouldn’t matter. Buying American wasn’t therefore synonymous with the American right, but Republican politicians and pundits rarely criticized US industry and often jumped on opponents who did.

That changed after President Barack Obama threw his administration behind resuscitating the US auto companies in 2009. Since then, Republicans and their media voices have become hypercritical, and hypocritical, about American carmakers.

As I noted two weeks ago, Mitt Romney came out against Obama’s policy without being able to say how his prescription for a “managed bankruptcy” was significantly different or better. After Chrysler showed a Super Bowl commercial made by Clint Eastwood, Republican propagandist Karl Rove went on FOX News to denounce it and the bailout. As Charles Blow pointed out, Rove neglected to mention that his own creation, President George W. Bush, had started the loans to Chrysler (since repaid).

And then there’s the saga of the the Chevy Volt. General Motors introduced the Volt as a concept car in early 2007 and brought it to market nearly four years later. Its sales, like those of other cars with electric motors, have been boosted by a tax incentive. The law that included that provision passed both houses of Congress by large margins, with most Senate Republicans voting for it. George W. Bush signed that bill into law. Many other governments have similar provisions to encourage the use of non-gasoline-powered cars.

But because the Volt came out after the Obama’s administration bailout, Republicans can’t say enough bad things about the car. They even make things up. Automotive designer Bob Lutz, normally a right-wing Republican, wrote about this phenomenon in that champion of the planned economy, Forbes Magazine:

I am, sadly, coming to the conclusion that all the icons of conservatism are (shock, horror!) deliberately not telling the truth!

This saddens me, because, to this writer, conservatism IS fundamental truth. It only damages its inherent credibility with momentarily convenient fiction.

So, Mr. [Charles] Krauthammer joins the list of right-wing pundits I no longer take seriously. [Lutz had previously listed Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Lou Dobbs.] After all, how do I know they’re telling the truth when the subject is one I’m not as familiar with as the Volt?

That does leave everyone’s trusted favorite, though. The disarmingly modest, low-key, warm, fuzzy, dependable, kind of your favorite uncle when you were growing up … the Reverend [Mike] Huckabee! He wouldn’t unjustly attack the most celebrated example of American engineering of the last 30 years — or would he?

The other night on Fox, he, too, had his way with the Volt!

So who am I going to believe now? 

Lutz had spotted the symptoms of OIP Derangement Syndrome, which drastically affects how President Obama’s opponents view facts or their previous positions. Of course, at that moment their false statements were affecting Lutz’s own creation. Those same “icons of conservatism” have been “not telling the truth” about many other things as well.

Alan Moore and the Pitfalls of Unforeseen Success

Folks who blog about superhero comics are apparently supposed to have a moral stand on DC Comics’s decision to commission prequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, despite the former’s vociferous opposition.

I don’t view that as a major ethical issue, but rather a business venture that will find its judgment in the marketplace. The American superhero comics industry has grown over the decades from writers and artists taking inspiration from and contributing to collective narratives. Moore knew that when he signed his contracts with DC in the 1980s, and in fact much of his work has grown from other writers’ creations.

Moore’s main beef with DC now is not that the company isn’t abiding by the contracts he signed, but that it is. He just didn’t expect those contracts would still apply to him.

That’s not because Moore thought his work was special. It’s because he didn’t think it would be as successful as it’s been. Moore assumed that Watchmen would go out of print after just a few years. He’s said as much in many interviews, but here’s a recent one from Kurt Amacker:

KA:  I thought we could discuss the initial ownership dispute you had with DC back in the 1980s, wherein you and Dave Gibbons expected to get the rights to Watchmen and its characters back a year after the trade paperback went out of print. But, it never went out of print--and one suspects DC probably knew it wouldn't.

AM:  We were told that. That was the understanding upon which we did Watchmen--that they understood that we wanted to actually own the work that we'd done, and that they were a "new DC Comics," who were going to be more responsive to creators. And, they'd got this new contract worked out which meant that when the work went out of print, then the rights to it would revert to us--which sounded like a really good deal. I'd got no reason not to trust these people.  They'd all been very, very friendly. They seemed to be delighted with the amount of extra comics they were selling. . . .

Now, I've since seen the Watchmen contract, which obviously we didn't read very closely at the time. It was the first contract that I'd ever seen--and I believe that it was a relatively rare event for a contract to actually exist in the comics business. Most of the time, people just signed away all their rights on the back of their invoice voucher. But, I was so pleased with the deal with Watchmen, that I suggested to David Lloyd that we do the same thing on V for Vendetta--which was, again, something that we owned and that we wanted to carry on owning.  The contracts actually are some of the most anti-creator contracts imaginable.  They've got clauses such as, if I refuse to sign for any reason any agreements in the future, DC can appoint an attorney to sign them instead of me. 

Actually, that last is a rather common clause, but not one that publishers try invoking often, if at all. No company wants to work with someone who can’t stand to work with it. I also don’t know if there are any strong precedents for that clause standing up in court.

As for the provision that most arouses Moore’s resentment—that a publisher keeps the copyright holders’ license to issue a literary work as long as it remains in print—that’s completely standard for the book industry.

I’m sure that Ernest Hemingway signed contracts with that clause, and Stephen King, and J. K. Rowling—even after they became bestselling authors. Most authors are happy when a publisher keeps selling a book. That’s a lot easier and more lucrative and less ego-deflating than when a publisher puts a book out of print and reverts the rights. Moore has never denied DC’s statements that the company’s paid him all the Watchmen royalties he’s due—a considerable sum, given the book’s sales in the millions.

It’s probably true that Moore, Gibbons, and DC didn’t expect Watchmen to still be selling strongly nearly thirty years later. No one had the superpower of being able to foresee that future. As Moore admits, he recognized that mid-1980s contract as far better than anything he’d seen before and didn’t consider its terms carefully. But a good contract is negotiated to anticipate all possible outcomes. The Watchmen contract spelled out what would happen if the book stayed in print, and that arrangement is simply industry standard.

By his own account, Moore took the same approach to his movie rights, including not only Watchmen but League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This spring he spoke about that in a BBC interview, quoted here on semi-coherence:

Originally, I was under the illusion that the way that films worked was that you got a lot of option money, and then after a couple of years they decided that they weren't going to make the film. Which was the perfect result, the film didn’t get made, you got the money. Then they actually made a couple of my films, and at that point I decided, well, I'll just distance myself from them as much as is possible.

Again, Moore signed contracts anticipating the most common outcome but didn’t think through the possibility of success.

Perhaps that reflects Moore’s upbringing in the working class of northern England, where folks might not expect anything to work out well, much less phenomenally well. The American publishers and movie producers, in contrast, were ready for things to work out better than they expected. Maybe that’s characteristic of American businesspeople, or maybe it’s just why they were willing to put up the money.

Harry Potter Changes the Rules Again

Every new Harry Potter book changed the rules of American publishing. The first book signaled the resurgence of fantasy after years of doldrums. Then readers started using Amazon.co.uk to get the second volume. That necessitated worldwide publication dates, which led to midnight book parties.

The New York Times changed its bestseller lists to keep those darned kids from annoying authors of adult fiction. Volumes 4 and above showed that ten-year-olds gladly read books more than twice as long as people expected, and so on.

I thought that the end of the series might mean the end of its disruptions. But the recent release of J. K. Rowling’s digital editions is making the same sort of waves. Not only is she managing those rights herself through her Pottermore site, but her team decided to release the ebooks without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Mike Shatzkin passes on the results he heard from Charlie Redmayne of Pottermore:

The key to Charlie’s disruption was his willingness to substitute watermarking for DRM. He said it definitely made him nervous to do it, but he couldn’t see any other way to achieve what he wanted for Pottermore. He had to be able to sell to any device; he wanted to be able to allow any purchaser complete interoperability. There was no way to do that and maintain DRM. . . .

Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what we’ve been asking for: delivering content DRM-free, across devices, at a reasonable price. And, by the way, don’t you know your file up there on the sharing site is watermarked? They know who you are!” And then the pirated content started being taken down by the community, before Pottermore could react. And very quickly, there were fewer pirated copies out there than before.

Shatzkin also reports that major British publishers were saying they might discard DRM as well. Already Tor announced that it would stop using it. Paid Content quoted an anonymous publishing executive saying that he or she now breaks DRM on ebooks. The industry may decide that going DRM-free is the only way to stem the rising flood of Amazon.

Of course, whenever the Harry Potter books shift the ground in publishing, the big question is whether those changes will benefit, or even affect, ordinary titles. Most books don’t have thousands of people lined up to buy them before pub date. Most authors haven’t become richer than the queen of England and therefore able to take chances with their digital domain.

Max Acts Out

I may be wrong, but I’m assuming the kid in the metal costume with a pointy nose and an empty chest is dressed as the Tin Woodman. That’s enough Ozzy content for a Tuesday, I decided.

These panels come from this August 2010 installment of Max Overacts, a webcomic about a theatrically minded (i.e., loud, egocentric, and usually irrepressible) nine-year-old. Yesterday I received my copy of the first collected volume of the strip, subtitled Hold On to Your Stubs, mailed to me direct from Calgary.

The comic’s creator, Caanan, published the book in part by soliciting advance orders through Indiegogo last year. The paperback volume is nicely printed in full color. There are previously unseen strips about Max’s older sister, Andi. The only thing I feel is missing is some sort of introduction or commentary.

The book has the horizontal format specified by DC Comics’s Zuda initiative years back. That’s designed for reading on a computer screen, a format that goes back to the movie screen via TV. A lot of other webcomics have adopted the same aspect ratio. Zuda is no more, but its specs live on. As I wrote back here, that's a less common format for books and comics, but I expect we’ll see more of it.

Also from Caanan, a convention sketch of the New Teen Titans, disco era:

Knock-Offs Come to the Book Business

Fortune reports on a new trend in digital media—knock-off books:

And if you want to buy bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow on Amazon, be careful where you click. A number of Amazon shoppers looking for the book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman ended up with Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels, which until recently was also on Amazon. Says Kahneman of his doppelganger, "There is no such expert, it's a rip-off. The comments on it are quite amusing – rather shocking that Amazon allows this sort of thing."

Amazon not only allows such knock-offs to be sold, but it facilitates their creation through its service for self-publishing authors.

All of the apparent copycat books that Fortune found on Amazon were made through CreateSpace, which is a division of Amazon. Authors can use CreateSpace's system to design and self-publish their own books. The books then go on sale on Amazon and other sites. Amazon splits the proceeds with authors.

Those authors use pseudonyms that resemble the original authors’ names (especially for a reader typing a few letters into a search engine) and choose similar titles. Amazon doesn’t vet CreateSpace books until someone complains—which of course reduces its costs while maintaining revenue.

Of course, there have always been quickie books published to exploit a trend or interest. But this sort of knock-off scheme was unprofitable when the time and labor it took to create, manufacture, and distribute a book was too costly to be sure it would reach the market before demand cooled. Digital technology has sped up those steps, especially for “authors” who take their material off Wikipedia.

A Kid Sidekick in the Comics Business

As I’ve written before, the quick inclusion of kid sidekicks in early superhero comics at the dawn of 1940 reflected not just the industry’s target readership, but also the industry’s work environment. Teen-aged assistants were part of the business.

Jerry Robinson was only eighteen years old when he co-created Robin, for example. Other teens, such as Stan Lee and Bill Gaines, started working at publishers even younger because of family connections.

Carmine Infantino (shown above), who helped to create the “New Look” Dynamic Duo of 1963, had started out in the business even earlier than those men, as he described in this interview in The Comics Journal. Born in 1925, he recalled going to work about 1940:

A chance meeting took me to 23rd Street, this old broken-down warehouse, and I met Harry Chesler. One day I met this artist in the coffee shop, and he told me about it. He was a guy who worked up there, Ken Battenfield, and he said, “Why don’t you come up and look around? Maybe you’ll learn something.” But he said, “Harry’s not a nice guy. I don’t know if he’ll let you stay. But just take a chance.”

So I did. Now, I was told he was a mean guy and he used people and he took artists. But he was very sweet to me. He said, “Look, kid. You come up here, I’ll give you a dollar a day, just study art, learn, and grow.” That was damn nice of him, I thought. He did that for me for a whole summer. . . .

It was my first year in high school, the School of Industrial Arts. So I would probably be 14 or 15. So I hung around and met some artists there and I studied them. That was a very nice thing to do. And a buck a day was a lot of money in those days. . . .

I just sat and studied the art. There were a couple of people whose artwork I studied there. One was Ken Battenfield. I believe, another was Dan Zolnerowich, and a couple of other guys. I’d sit and study their artwork. I’d practice my inking, and then they’d come over and make corrections for me, they’d show me what I was doing wrong and why it was wrong. And they encouraged me to go to the Art Students League at night.

It was a little tough at that time — I was still going to high school. But they pushed it and I knew I needed it, so I started. So during the day I’d go to regular school, then I’d go to Chesler’s for a couple of hours, then I’d run down to school at night. It was a very long day. But when you’re young you can handle that kind of thing.

Which is just the sort of attitude that Tim Drake would display decades later. Infantino got his first comics assignment from Timely editor Joe Simon in late 1941, inking a “Jack Frost” story penciled by another teenager: his high-school classmate, Frank Giacoia.

Another Hellbound II Review

I’ll shortly start my workshop at the SCBWI New England conference, but I’m logging in to quote my favorite part of Emi Gennis’s review of Hellbound II:

While some of the pieces in this anthology are eerie and ominous tales, others were a bit more lighthearted and silly. Logan Faerber’s “Grampire,” comes to mind… a story about what you may have already surmised – a very old vampire! JL Bell and Andy Wong‘s “RobMeBlind.com” also stood out as one of the more humorous pieces. Funny and creative from the set up all the way through to the ending, this story takes a more tongue-in-cheek approach to the horror theme and is well complimented by a cartoony, and maybe even cute (although perhaps that’s not the right word in the context of this subject matter) visual style.

The review offers praise and thoughts on other stories in the anthology, plus sample illustrations. Here’s Steve Cartisano’s interview with me and Andy about the story and horror in general. (Neither of us really like it. Maybe that’s why we tried to be funny.)