In case you hadn’t heard, tomorrow (May 3) is the seventh annual Free Comic Book Day, and comic book shops across the country will be handing out gratis goodies to all comers. Torontoist has a quick briefing today on some of the highlights you can expect:

This year’s selection of free comics is really fantastic. DC Comics offers a reprint of the first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman, widely regarded as the best Superman story in decades. Marvel Comics, not to be outdone, offers a brand new X-Men comic. Dark Horse offers up a Hellboy anthology, there’s free Archie and free The Simpsons comics, the Transformers, Gyro Gearloose, Gumby, and many, many more. There is a free comic for every taste: if you want cute owls frolicking in all-ages-suitable tales, there is Andy Runton’s Owly and Friends; if you want evil people being stabbed in the eyeball, there is an EC Comics Sampler.

We knew comics were a source of distraction for kids everywhere, but who knew they could potentially divert youth from a life of terrorism?

In his column, Newsweek’s Middle East editor Christopher Dickey posits that Kuwaiti comics company Teshkeel’s ongoing comics series The 99 could inspire the impressionable eight-to-14-year-old set with its Marvel-esque group of Muslim superheroes.

[…]when [anthropologist Scott] Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration’s warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called The 99.

The comics are the creation of Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur Naif Al-Mutawa, and—let me make a confession here—I’ve been reading them since my colleague Florence Villeminot first wrote about them early last year. My reasons for following the series are probably as atavistic as analytic. I grew up with Marvel and DC comics, spending my impressionable pubescence getting deep into the gothic drama of Batman, delighting in the athletic insolence of Spider-Man, savoring the unsublimated sexuality of the women in X-Men. And, yes, there’s something of all of that in The 99, with its hulking fighters and sultry enforcers.

Dickey ultimately concludes that a comic book with a run of only several thousand is unlikely to trump the jihadist messages that have far-reaching influence in the Mideast and beyond, but that it’s heartening to see The 99 and its ilk go head-to-head with the bad guys.

On Slate, Canadian comic-book commentator Jeet Heer writes about David Hajdu’s new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Specifically, Heer focuses on Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who stoked anti-comic flames with his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent. Heer notes that while Hajdu and novelist Michael Chabon – who wrote about the early days of comic books in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – seem to hold Wertham in low regard, Canadian academic Bart Beaty has argued that in fact Wertham raised valid and reasonable points.

Adopting the tone of a referee, Heer concludes with his own sum-up: “Wertham shouldn’t be mocked as a simpleton or censor, but he was rather prissy and uptight…. If he had paid more attention to comic books, Wertham would have realized that he was following down the path of villains like Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom, who start off with good intentions only to become prisoners of their own blind arrogance.”

Of course, Doctor Doom was not even a gleam in Stan Lee’s eye in 1954, but that’s neither here nor there. What struck Quillblog about all this was how eerily familiar it sounded. Oh, right – Heer reviewed Hajdu’s book just a couple weeks back in The Globe and Mail (here but subscriber-only, alas), discussing Wertham in that forum. Then, in the following week’s Globe books section, Heer debated the subject further with the aforementioned Bart Beaty (here but, again, subscriber-only).

Having been granted the last word in that last Globe exchange, Heer apparently still felt the need to, um, get the last last word, which may invite its own comparison to some comic-book character or other. (The Double-Dipper, perhaps?) But give him this: although he’s recycled the debate for Slate, he’s managed to do it without recycling any of his actual prose – not a bad trick.

Note also that at the end of the Slate piece, Chabon himself weighs in with an overreaction er, response.

It looks as if Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s planned series of Tintin films is one step closer to reaching fruition. According to the Guardian, a young man named Thomas Sangster has been selected to play the lead.

For those who remember, he was the young boy who gets the girl in the film Love Actually. For those who don’t, Thomas Sangster may yet become a household name. The sixth-former from south London, the Guardian can reveal, has been chosen by Steven Spielberg to be his Tintin for a three-movie adaptation of the boy reporter’s adventures. The trilogy is likely to give the 17-year-old the same profile as Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, or Elijah Wood, who shot to international stardom as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings series.

[…]

Sangster’s agent originally sent a tape to Spielberg as part of an audition for a mini-series of Stephen King’s The Talisman, which never got off the ground. Spielberg saw the tape and realised he had found his Tintin.

Gawker, a favourite website of the chattering classes, is reporting the imminent demise of one of the great characters in modern literature. (That is, of course, if you consider comic books to be part of the canon.)

Say it ain’t so – according to Gawker, industry rumours suggest that none other than the classic masked-and-caped superhero Batman is due to meet his maker this summer in the Robin comics series. (Do note the synchronicity with the July opening of the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight.)

Posits Gawker:

Batman’s death in another medium would make front-page news, especially since Captain America’s death made the New York Times front page last spring.

Incidentally, this sort of stunt may feel like a cheap grab for readership in a dying industry, and it is, but it’s also part of a long tradition in superhero comics of violating all traditional rules of literature. Superheroes have always died, resurrected, and revealed their identities without consequence. Why doesn’t this ruin the brand? Well, when’s the last time you bought a comic book? Modern film audiences don’t need to actually read the comic to get the Batman brand, so DC can do what they like with comic-book Batman while film Batman keeps raking in money.

Michael Chabon has a long essay in The New Yorker on the meaning of superhero costumes.

He writes:

In theory, the costume forms part of the strategy of concealment. But in fact the superhero’s costume often functions as a kind of magic screen onto which the repressed narrative may be projected. No matter how well he or she hides its traces, the secret narrative of transformation, of rebirth, is given up by the costume.

[…]

We say “secret identity,” and adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve it, but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way—and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us. Yet our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of transvestism; our superdrag serves at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.

[…]

Talking, retying the knots of our capes, flip-flops slapping against the soles of our feet, we transformed not only ourselves. In the space of that walk to the pool we also transformed the world, shaping it into a place in which such things were possible: the reincarnation of an Arthurian knight could find solace and partnership in the company of a latter-day Mesoamerican wizard.

[…]

All we needed to do was accept the standing invitation that superhero comics extended to us by means of a towel. It was an invitation to enter into the world of story, to join in the ongoing business of comic books, and, with the knotting of a magical beach towel, to begin to wear what we knew to be hidden inside us.

Translation: costumes make nerds feel cool.

The comics world is abuzz with rumours that current Astonishing X-Men writer Joss Whedon plans to kill off fan favourite character Kitty Pryde at the end of his run. This has got Brian Cronin, a regular blogger for the fanboy website Comic Book Resources, thinking about the subject of death in superhero titles, and he’s come up with an exhaustive set of rules to help writers determine when it is appropriate – and not appropriate – to kill off major characters.

Our favourite rule is #4:

If you need to kill off a minor supervillain, imagine someone else is putting together a new Masters of Evil/Injustice League in a few years. If the character you’re thinking of killing would be seriously considered for such a group – don’t kill him/her. There is a bit of a shortage amongst villains on the lower tier, like Absorbing Man, the Wrecking Crew and Tiger Shark. Don’t kill them off.

Cronin also has a shortlist of the supporting players who can never, ever be killed off. Ever. They are:

Alfred, Foggy Nelson, Commissioner Gordon, Mary Jane Watson, Aunt May, Perry White, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, J. Jonah Jameson, Robbie Robertson, Betty Brant. These characters should be considered practically parts of their respective comics by now. Do not kill them off – unless, of course, you have a darned good reason to do so.

Consider yourselves on notice, comic book scribes.

Spider-Man fans are scratching their heads in disbelief after a plot twist in a recent installment reversed one of the series’ longstanding narrative pillars: Peter Parker’s 21-year marriage with Mary Jane Watson. According to the Guardian, Parker, Spidey’s nerdy alter ego, and Mary Jane make a deal with the arch-villain Mephisto

which sees the clock turned back and their marriage annulled in return for saving the life of Peter’s Aunt May, who has been in a deep coma. Suddenly, Peter is once again young, nerdy and living with his aunt, and his marriage has been erased from everyone’s memory.

Veteran fans of the series are reacting negatively to the news – not for any sentimental reasons, but because Mephisto’s motivation in messing with Parker’s marital life is extremely shaky (presumably, a supervillain has bigger fish to fry). According to one Marvel executive, the annulment was made with an eye to attracting new readers, not narrative consistency.

Marvel claims that a married Spider-Man made life difficult for the comic’s writers and has been a source of regret ever since the couple’s big day in 1987. According to Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief Joe Quesada in an interview with Comic Book Resources:

“At the end of the day, my job is to keep these characters fresh and ready for every fan that walks through the door, while also planning for the future and hopefully an even larger fan base.”

No word yet on how Spider-Man will be spending his bacherlorhood, but Quillblog has received unconfirmed reports that his profile is now circulating on Lavalife.

Ever notice that kids these days just aren’t into ol’ fashioned, ink-and-paper comic books? Well, apparently comics publishers have, and they’re worried that new fangled technologies like the Web and video games are diverting kids from the wholesome pleasure of printed matter. Here’s a Marvel Publishing bigwig – as reported by AP, among other news sources – waxing nostalgic for the golden age of comics readership:

“You don’t have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local five-and-dime any more,” said Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Publishing. “We don’t have our product intersecting kids in their lifestyle space as much as we used to.”

In an attempt to appeal to young readers on their own turf (or “lifestyle space”), Marvel is releasing part of its backlist – about 2,500 titles in total – online, where subscribers can browse, for example, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee’s Amazing Spider-Man for $9.99 a month – or for $4.99 a month for annual subscribers.

The move is the most aggressive Web push yet for comics publishers, reports AP, but still, their embrace of the Web has been tentative at best. Marvel, for example, won’t be releasing new titles online until they’ve spent at least six months on newsstands. For its part, DC Comics – which releases “teasers” of new titles for free on Myspace – is rumored to have shut down one of the most popular Superman fansites for alleged copyright infringement.

That dovetails well with a recent feature article in Wired, in which Daniel H. Pink explores the blossoming culture of dojinshi in Japan. An increasingly popular subgenre, dojinshi is essentially fan fiction that recasts and remixes well-known manga characters and storylines – in flagrant violation of copyright law, it should be added.

Amazingly, mainstream manga publishers seem to have embraced dojinshi, or at least to tolerate it, because, so the theory goes, it sustains the interest of manga’s most fanatical fans while potentially attracting new readers.

Here’s Pink on a recent dojinshi convention – “acres of territory in which the basic tenets of intellectual property seem not to apply,” he writes – which attracted upwards of half a million consumers.

The people selling their wares at the [dojinshi] markets are consumers and producers, amateurs and pros. They nourish both the top and the bottom. If publishers were to squash the emerging middle, they would disrupt, and perhaps destroy, this delicate new triangular ecosystem. And remember: If manga craters, it could drag the entire Japanese pop culture industry down with it.

Whether the dojinshi “business model” can be exported to North America, as Pink suggests, seems unlikely at the moment, but his article does provide an interesting counterpoint to the comic industry’s baby steps online.

If you’ve been following Lynn Johnston’s massively popular For Better or for Worse comic strip lately – and there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t – you’ll know that among the many dozens of soap opera-ish storylines the strip has been dealing with over the past year or two there is the continuing saga of Michael Patterson publishing his first novel (after nearly losing the manuscript in a house fire).

In a recent strip (see below), the book – which has a scarily appropriate title for a Canadian first novel: Stone Season – appears to partly rouse Michael’s grandfather from his coma, proving that literature really does have the power to heal.

Our only worry now is this: what will happen when Michael’s book gets a more realistic reaction – say, a so-so review in the cartoon version of Q&Q? That might just finish off Grampa for good.

CBC’s story of comic book artist Troy Little’s new success may warm the hearts of many a struggling artist. The Kensington, P.E.I. resident self-published his book Chiaroscuro and sold it at a loss at an independent comic book shop in Charlottetown. But the book – about a bitter, unemployed artist who suddenly finds a benefactor to support him – received such praise online that it caught the attention of California-based IDW Publishing executives. Little now has a deal with IDW for a hardcover edition of the book. (He had originally sent his manuscript to the publisher, but it got lost in the mail.)

While the deal with IDW has huge potential, Little won’t quit his day job yet. He knows how hard life could get if the IDW gig doesn’t work out. Little and his wife both lost their jobs a few years ago when the company they were working for closed down. Then they had twins.
That difficult time led to the end of his self-publishing of Chiaroscuro.

“Daily subsistence became more important than publishing comics,” Little said.

“I was working two jobs most of the time, just to try and get ourselves out of the pit.”

With a story like that, even if you are a bit jealous, you’ve got to wish him well. Who knew life could imitate art in such a fairy-tale way?

According to The Guardian, the Borders bookstore chain in Great Britain has decided to move copies of Tintin in the Congo from the children’s section of its stores to the adult graphic novels section, after being pressured to do so by a human rights group.

The Commission for Racial Equality said yesterday it was unacceptable for any shop to stock or sell the 1930s cartoon adventure of the Belgian boy journalist because of its crude racial stereotypes.

The book, which includes a scene where Tintin is made chief of an African village because he is a “good white man” and a black woman bowing to Tintin saying: “White man very great … white mister is big juju man!” was highly offensive, a spokeswoman from the commission said.

She added that the only place the book was acceptable was in a museum - with a sign accompanying it saying “old-fashioned, racist claptrap”.

As The Guardian explains, however, the book already includes a foreward acknowledging the colonial stereotypes, which you would think would mitigate the problem. In any case, this spokesperson from the Commission for Racial Equality might come off a little more reasonable if she didn’t shrilly pronounce the entire book “claptrap.” How about Moby Dick? How about The Birth of a Nation? How about the entire endless litany of artworks that contain outdated values and beliefs? Let’s put ‘em all in museums and never engage with them again! That’ll make the world a better place…

Kudos, however, to Borders for not buckling to the Thought Police and banning it altogether.

Though graphic novels have attained a strong level of acceptance among traditional prose readers, comic stores still don’t seem to be making an effort to embrace those readers. As Douglas Wolk argues in an essay on Salon, “comics culture” is still just as closed-off and unwelcoming to the casual reader as it’s ever been, and, as he sees it, it’s time for things to change.

Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship. (That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places: everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out.) It’s a poisonous mind-set for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that to enjoy a comic book, you either have to be a Comics Person or be able to explain why you’re not really a Comics Person.

As Wolk sees it, comics fans continue to act insular because they’re still a little insecure about the aesthetic worth of the medium.

A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect — to show the world that they were right all along. […] It’s probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness. The snobbery of the rest of American culture toward comics is, if not entirely gone, dissipating quickly.

Heather Smith has posted a witty piece on Bookslut about the recent vogue for deluxe, multi-volume, hardcover collections of old comic strips, which she traces back to Fantagraphics and its Seth-designed Peanuts volumes. As Smith concedes, many of these collections are quite lovely and are enormously appealing to adult collectors, but she wonders what will become of the children who first encounter these old strips in such reputable formats.

Pardon me while I get out my corncob pipe and reminisce here, but in my day, comics were cheap. Skinny paperbacks like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circle were four for a dollar at ubiquitous used bookshops. […] What would it be like, as a kid, to first encounter comics in a format that suggests that comics are actually important? […] The tide of comics as something endlessly disposable is receding before our very eyes, and as we look ahead, the future looks suspiciously like a fluttering mountain range of sewn bindings and velveteen ribbon bookmarks. So how is this strange thing called “dignity” conveyed? Does a velveteen bookmark a classic make? Are we ready for the deluxe leatherette edition of Beetle Bailey?

After expounding further on the topic, Smith takes a closer look at the relative value of several recent collections, including the aforementioned Peanuts volumes, Hank Ketchum’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1954, The Complete Far Side 1980-1994, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven.

With hundreds of thousands of books being published each year and many of those being lacklustre, self-published books are often seen as ones that all conventional publishers refuse to touch — many say for good reason. But over at The Book Standard, Jessa Crispin finds one literary genre whose creators often resort to self-publication — sometimes with positive results.

The genre she speaks of is graphic novels and comics. Pointing to classic examples of self-published comics by Dave Sim, whose 300-issue, self-published series Cerebus recently concluded, and Jeff Smith, whose Bone series has since been picked up by Scholastic, Crispin says that back in the day, when few publishers would touch comics of a non-superhero variety, comics creators who wanted to be published had to do it themselves. But even as graphic novels find their time in the sun, Crispin claims that the spirit of self-publishing rages on in the form of zine-style, self-produced mini-comics produced by the likes of Jessica Abel and Jeffrey Brown, both of whom have been picked up by leading comix publishers. Says Crispin of mini-comics, “It’s a way to get your name out without becoming a cog in charge of inking the latest superhero for DC or Marvel.”

Related links:
Click here for Crispin’s article in The Book Standard

In The Book Standard, Jessa Crispin offers advice for reviewers tackling the elusive comic book or graphic novel. Her first, and perhaps most urgent, piece of advice: “‘They’re not just for kids anymore’ is not an original, interesting, clever or even remotely intelligent opening statement.” She also advises against comparing every artist to Art Spiegelman, or ghettoizing the genre in clusters of short reviews. And for that matter, writes Crispin, “Now that the arty comics are seen as almost respectable, isn’t it time for the superhero comics to get a little mainstream love?”

Related links:
Click here for the full article on The Book Standard