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.

Wonder Woman turns 66

A couple of literary-themed birthdays are being reported in the media this week.

Reuters has picked up on Wonder Woman’s 66th birthday – not much of a milestone, admittedly, but 2007 is, incredibly, the first year that the comic is being penned by a woman, one Gail Simone.

In an interview, Simone explains how Wonder Woman weathered the shifting mores of the 20th century.

A: When she was originally created by William Moulton Marston, he definitely was for strong female characters. But he did have some what we would consider bizarre ideas.

Q: For example?

A: He really thought that the magic lasso was to beguile men and women into doing what she wanted them to do with her beauty. And that’s not a feminist ideal that we really adopt so much today. We like to talk more about character and intelligence and personality and things like that, rather than just beauty.

Simone has plans for the magic lasso, as well:

[What] I’m going to show is that the magic lasso is the most dangerous weapon in the DC universe. It’s more dangerous than any of the major weapons, it makes Wolverine’s claws look like popsicle sticks.

In other news related to iconic expressions of the American spirit, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities turns 20 this year. In a New York Times piece, Anne Barnard explains what 1987 New York had over 1977 New York.

For much of this year, the lens of New Yorkers’ nostalgia has been trained on 1977, looking back 30 years to the blackout and looting, to the Son of Sam killings, to disco. But 1987, too, was a seminal moment for New York, then torn between new heights of wealth and decadence on Wall Street and the draining of jobs and taxpayers from the rest of the city.

Barnard paints contemporary New York in rose-coloured tones, though –

New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white.

The crime drops that marked the Giuliani era — along with some divisive police confrontations with minorities — have continued under a Bloomberg administration that civil rights leaders credit with bringing more interracial respect.

– and updates readers on some of the characters depicted in Bonfire:

“Twenty years later, the cynicism of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ is as out of style as Tom Wolfe’s wardrobe,” proclaimed the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose counterpart in the book — Reverend Bacon — warns that he controls the burgeoning “steam” of black anger.

Another lawyer whose doppelgänger appears in the book is Edward W. Hayes. “Today, there’s not enough crime to become a criminal lawyer,” lamented Mr. Hayes, a longtime friend of Mr. Wolfe’s who was the model for the dapper, street-smart defense lawyer who takes up Sherman’s case. “Nobody goes around and sticks up supermarkets anymore, or armored cars.”

Reportedly, Wolfe’s new novel will be about immigration, but no pub date has been set.

Doctorow to publishers: learn to share, dummies!

With all the hoopla surrounding the launch of the Kindle, Amazon’s portable e-book reader, it’s easy to forget that for some authors the digital revolution has already happened. First among them would be science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, who offers his novels and stories for free download through his website using a Creative Commons license.

In an interview with the alternative comics blog The Daily Cross Hatch, Doctorow explains how he got IDW Publishing, a major U.S. comics publisher that’s adapting some of Doctorow’s stories, to also agree to a Creative Commons license.

My agent said, ‘Creative Commons – you guys okay with that?’ expecting to get a ‘go away, hippie, and never darken our door again.’ Instead, they said, ‘[O]h yeah, we’re totally cool with it, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to sell that to comic book store owners, so how would you feel if we just did that with the trade, at the end of the run?’ And that sounded great. That was the entire thing. It’s like the world’s least interesting story, in that it was just kind of an agreement.

Doctorow adds that in his experience free downloads don’t displace physical sales, but actually encourage them. Plus, he says, sharing is the only way to foster culture.

[Copying and sharing] is as old as culture itself. In fact, when we say ‘culture,’ that’s more or less what we mean. ‘Art’ is the stuff that the artist makes and ‘culture’ is what we do with the stuff that the artist makes. It’s pretty radical to say ‘culture must stop.’ I think it’s pretty conservative to say that you can just go on making copies the way that you spritual [sic] ancestors did, forever. I would hate to be the guy who says, ‘[Y]ou guys are all jerks for loving my work too much, I hate you so much, please stop copying my stuff.’ That would be just a terrible outcome. Creative Commons works, if it’s unpopular, and it works ever more, if it’s popular.

While it may be a bit of a stretch to call free downloads “conservative” from a business perspective, Doctorow seems to have scored a victory for Creative Commons advocates by getting IDW to play along.

Related reading: Doctorow also discussed giving it away in this 2003 Q&Q story.

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.

Chester Brown’s zombie love for Toronto culture

Toronto’s Live With Culture campaign has enlisted the talent of graphic novelist Chester Brown for a series of ads bigging up its efforts to spread the word about Toronto’s art scene. For the ads, Brown has created an ongoing story about a zombie attack on Canada’s biggest city, one sensitive zombie with a thing for live theatre, and a young woman who finds herself strangely attracted to him.

The series is running in the free weekly Now magazine. See a sample below. (And feel free to fill the comments with wisecracks about Toronto’s culture being fit for zombies….)

Tomine to Lethem: butt out, smartypants

Comics artist Adrian Tomine tells The Believer that excessive praise for his just-released graphic novel Shortcomings – which was serialized in his popular comic Optic Nerve – makes him uneasy. Specifically, he raises doubts that long-form graphic novels are the ne plus ultra of comics art, and says that comparisons to masterworks in other mediums are implicitly degrading.

I also am trying to think – and I hope other people will start to see it this way – that sometimes a comic can be a great thing because it’s a comic, not because it’s almost as good as a movie, or as good as a prose novel, which I think is the way a lot of people are now trying to process it …. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.

The above could be a veiled reference to the immodest praise of Jonathan Lethem, printed on the dust-jacket of Shortcomings‘s hardcover edition (published by Drawn + Quarterly). The blurb begins by articulating “Tomine’s genius” and goes on to reference some heavy-hitters:

[Tomine’s] mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer’s in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro.

For criticism more to Tomine’s liking, go to Guardian columnist Ned Beauman’s comics blog. Though he is just as rapturous (he calls Shortcomings “not only one of the year’s finest comics, but also one of its finest works of fiction”), Beauman meets the book on its own terms, and peppers the review with various pithy aperçus, including this one: “Tomine’s artwork is so simple and realistic that it sometimes resembles an airline safety leaflet, and his storytelling isn’t any more experimental.”

Sneak peek of illustrated Life of Pi

Though the new “Special Illustrated Edition” of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi isn’t due out from Knopf Canada until November 17, the Guardian has put together a short slide show of Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac’s full-colour oil-paintings. You can see them here.

For the most part, the images are fairly literal-seeming representations of events from the book, which is fine, but they’re maybe a little too reminiscent of those illustrated children’s bibles a lot of us grew up with. Come to think of it, the illustrations actually make the book look kind of like a kid’s book. Maybe that’s the intention, though, who knows?

Save the seals

Remember how bookbinders and retailers used to advertise their services by posting company labels on the inside covers of books? No? Well a fellow named Greg Kindall, who runs a website called Sevenroads.org, certainly does, and he’s assembled a fantastic virtual museum of book trade labels, which you can see for yourself here.

It’s kind of shocking, when you see them all laid out in front of you, how much care and effort went into the design of some of these things. Does the book trade even have the time and/or money and/or inclination create stuff like this now?

We particularly love the label from the Book Stall in Battle Creek, Michigan, with the little roosters…

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.