Thou shalt not kill (except on Earth 2 and Earth 5-C)

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.

America’s top bachelor: Spider-Man

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.

Spider-Man, Superman conquer the Internet

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.

The healing power of Canadian first novels

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.

Bedtime reading for struggling artists

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?

Tintin under siege

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.

Time to get off the stool, comics fans!

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.

Comic strips: too big for their britches?

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.

Lost Girls to be found in Canada

Our short national nightmare is over: Canada Customs has decided that Alan Moore’s controversial graphic novel Lost Girls is not actual porn, just pornish.

As BlogTO reported last week, Customs had initially barred the book, which imagines three classic fantasy characters — Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Alice from Alice in Wonderland — all grown up and getting together for some erotic adventures. The Toronto bookstore The Beguiling managed to get some copies in “under mysterious circumstances,” but quickly sold out and was asked by the book’s American publisher, Top Shelf Productions, not to sell any more pending an appeal to Customs.

The appeal has now been decided in Top Shelf’s favour, and Lost Girls should start flowing into Canada through Diamond Book Distributors. Customs even brushed up on its book-reviewing skills and supplied some blurb-ready copy, saying that the book’s “depictions and descriptions are integral to the development of an intricate, imaginative, and artfully rendered storyline.”

Related links:
Click here for the Top Shelf release
Click here for the earlier BlogTO story

Chapters/Indigo hearts censorship

If you’re looking for the new issue of Harper’s, don’t head to Indigo or Chapters, ’cause it ain’t there. The Globe and Mail reported on Saturday that the mega-chain has pulled each and every copy from its 260 stores Canada-wide. The reason? Those pesky Mohammed cartoons again!

Indigo is crying foul over an Art Spiegelman article that contains all 12 of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten‘s infamous cartoons, along with some new comix, including one penned by Spiegelman and, according to the Globe, “two by Israelis, ‘inspired’ by an Iranian newspaper’s call in February for an international Holocaust cartoon contest ‘to test the limits of Western tolerance of free speech’.”

The Globe also boasts a leaked e-mail that was sent to Indigo execs, instructing them on how to respond to customer complaints of censorship, which includes the ever-so-natural and spontaneous-sounding “the decision was made based on the fact that the content about to be published has been known to ignite demonstrations around the world. Indigo [and its subsidiaries] Chapters and Coles will not carry this particular issue of the magazine but will continue to carry other issues of this publication in the future.”

And the final dash of salt to this wound in free speech’s side? Harper’s publisher John MacArthur chided, “I’d expect an American company to do this, not a Canadian.” Ouch.

Related links:
Delve into the Globe story here