Remembering the Wizard Years

To commemorate the 4th anniversary of the PanelsOnPages web site--which sprang from the ashes of the Wizard message board--Jason Knize put together a piece chatting with some Wizard alumni, including myself, talking about our time there and where we are now.

Really enjoyed participating in this with my long and rambling answers and even more dug reading the answers from my colleagues and friends. We talk about our favorite work and moments, plus it's a nice chance at least for me to say thanks to some of the people who got me where I am.

If you want some more insight into Wizard and the folks there, whether you're an old fan or somebody who's always been curious, highly recommend this one.

Kiel's "Gareb Shamus Enterprises Presents Wizard World Chicago Comic Con 2010"

OK, beyond the title of this post (which I mostly chose because, all other things aside, that name is funny) I don't have much to add to the whole "Does Wizard put on worthwhile/relevant/comics-related/cost-effective events, and are they honest/forthcoming/fair about how they run them?" debate. I just don't care to sit around playing arm chair convention critic (not to detract from folks with legitimate criticisms focused on what they look for in a comics show) as I doubt I'd be good at it or that anything I'd say would be of any value to anyone really. But you can check out Shaun Manning and I's report on the show over at CBR if you like. We tried our best to give an honest picture of what most attendees experienced at the show in between the official and non-official responses of organizers and exhibitors...or to paraphrase an evil corporate cable channel and Marvel's silliest campaign of the past 15 years: "We report, U decide."

I will say that personally, the three days of Chicago show at Rosemont I attended were a tremendous amount of fun thanks to the dudes I hung out with. Wizard's Mike Cotton and James Walker were gracious beer-buying hosts. Shaun was an A-list work cohort as always. Meeting the excellent Matthew J. Brady for the first time was everything I imagined it would be and more. And Ethan Van Sciver was pretty hilarious during his late night piano concert. Props to all around!

And on top of the radical hang out time, I also had a TON of time to buy all sorts of dopey comics at the show this year...the first such show I've been able to do so at in I don't know how long. Rickey wanted to know what it was I got, so I'ma list it in honor of him. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to snap photos of all my schwag like he usually does, so you fools are going to have to cope with covers off Comics.Org. But I will categorize them for easy browsability!

1. Comics I Put At The Top Of The List To Sound Pretentious And Hip

You heard me right!

Actually, I put this kind of "Art/Indie/Harder To Categorize With Shitty Back Issues" category out front to note the fact that I went into the Rosemont show mostly looking for crazy dollar bin deals and other bargain basement style comics. I know that if you read Matthew's report, you'll see that there were a lot of art comics and the like out on sale at the show, but a lot of them fell out of my "just finished paying for three summer vacations" price range.

Still, I was FINALLY able to nab a copy of Kevin Huizenga's Ganges #2 at the show after somehow missing the issue when it hit shops in NYC years back. I liked the issue quite a bit, and it made me think about video games in a way I haven't before, but after hearing a lot about that story from friends of mine, the issue failed to hit me in the gut and brain the way #3 did. Of course, how many comics can do what Ganges #3 did?

One totally random dollar bin find I did locate was a promotional Ashcan for Paul Pope's early effort The Ballad of Doctor Richardson. Holy shit, you guys...remember Ashcans?!!?!? I kind of miss them.

Finally, I bought the "digest" trade paperback of Mike Allred's excellent sci-fi love letter to Rock N Roll Red Rocket 7. I almost never buy books in more than one form, but I bought RR7 three times now: once in single issues, a second time as a bigger album-sized trade whose glue binding eventually cracked letting most of the middle pages fall out and now as the slimmer digest. I hope this one lasts me a long time.

2. Crazy Beans Old Comics Mostly Made Before I Was Born


I've been following the ongoing, round robin series of critical essays about the 1970's Don McGregor/Rich Buckler/Others serial "Panther's Rage" in Marvel's Jungle Action (what a GREAT name for a comic!) as well as Tom Spurgeon's subsequent writing on the book and list of how it and other comics are emblematic example of the form in the '70s for the past few weeks now, and it's been enlightening and fun reading for me. For one, I was completely unfamiliar with the storyline's existence before the critical run by Tucker Stone, David Brothers and (I'm assuming) others got underway, so it was really nice to have that "here's a comic I've never heard of" experience which has become more and more rare in the past five years or so once again. For two, despite my general wankery over older comics of all types, I've steered clear of most '70s titles since I was very small for reasons I'm not even sure of. Best I can figure, my avoidance probably stems from equal parts disinterest in a decade whose aesthetic sense never meshed with my own in the slightest sense (I was one of those kids who got into swing music and rockabilly and that greaser/Darwyn Cooke bullshit in Middle School and never really looked back) and the unavailability of affordable back issues from those years throughout the "mark up everything you can" comics market of my youth. In any event, I'm making the effort now to correct that gap in my reading, starting with issues #10, 11 and 14 of that very Black Panther serial.

Speaking of my general love of comics much, much older than I, I nabbed a copy of the second and final issue of Eclipse's (I'm assuming) largely forgotten Siegel & Shuster: Dateline 1930s comic. The reprint book presented early science fiction efforts by the eventual creators of Superman. The comics and stories within are surely crude even compared to those rough-yet-compelling early Superman strips, but the further I get into my own career in the comics game, the more the story of those two men resonates and affects me in weird ways. This is the point in the paragraph where I'll promise a more complete post unpacking that last thought down the road on the CKT, but we both know the chances of me getting to write that post are slim to none. I suck, right?

I also got to scratch my "buy everything Jack Kirby did at DC in the '70s" itch (hey! an exception to prove my earlier rule!) by picking up two issues of the DC First Issue Special series I needed (the "Dingbats of Danger Street" and "Manhunter" issues to be precise). Also on the Kirby beat, I picked up a few issues of the '90s Secret City Saga books from Topps, egged on by another event from this weekend that I'll keep under my hat for now (watch CBR soon!).

On that same front, I snatched up the first issue of DC's original Justice, Inc. comic with the Joe Kubert art because I've already got the Kirby #2 and 3, so why the hell not?

3. Random Marvel Shit


I'll admit it: I can't stop buying Force Works comics out of dollar bins these days. I don't know. It started as a goofy nostalgia itch the week "Iron Man 2" came out and I saw some episodes of the mostly awful in retrospect '90s Iron Man cartoon on cable, but since then I've had a post percolating for the blog about how Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning dropped a superhero team book that presaged a lot of what we're now calling "Comics Clichés of the 2000s." Anyway, amongst the random issues I picked up this time was the Century: Distant Sons one-shot by DnA and Jim Calafiore which I've been looking after for a while now. As their only original creation from that book and a weird alien to boot, I'm kind of surprised DnA haven't used Century in one of their cosmic events somewhere yet. Am I alone in that thought?

On the modern Marvel front, I picked up a copy of that silly Who Won't Wield The Shield? one-shot despite my general distaste for superhero industry in-joke projects as well as the handbook-like Marvelman Classic Primer because, again, I like weird old shit of all stripes and have been a junior Miracleman buff since doing that Wizard profile on the rights issues back in the day.

One of the few "Five Dollar Trades" (LOVE that that's catching on, by the by) I picked up at the show was the Immortal Iron Fist: Escape From The Eighth City trade by Duane Swierczynski and Travel Foreman. Seriously, those guys STEPPED UP after the departure of Fraction and Brubaker from that title, and it's a crying shame not enough people bought it after that point. Actually, it's a crying shame that not enough people bought it throughout the whole run. What in the hell is wrong with people, man?

Oh, and I also bought the first issue of Solo Avengers Featuring Hawkeye And... because despite Jim McCann's effusive promotion of the pair, I'd still never read a Hawkeye/Mockingbird story of any kind and this issue had some early Jim Lee art, which the 12-year-old in me will always be a sucker for.

4. Random DC Shit


For those of you still reading and keeping track of the random claims I make here: yes, the issue of Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman that I bought because both the cover and interior art made me giggle should probably go up in the "Crazy Beans Old" section, but I bought less modern DC stuff this show and wanted to show off this cover in addition to the Black Panther stuff. So here's where she be.

Beyond that, I bought a random handful of Tony Daniel Batman issues for a buck that I needed. I don't really feel like launching into an appraisal of Daniel's work right now, and me talking about my buying of Batman in general is a whole 'nother blog let alone another post, so let's just say I was glad to get them and move on.

Last but not least, I broke my "never buy it twice" rule a second time and snapped up the trade of Morrison and Millar's Aztek The Ultimate Man on the cheap cheap. Holy Lord, has it really been back to college since I last read this book?

5. Random Everything Else Shit


I have so many terrible Mighty Crusaders comics from Rich Buckler's 1980s relaunch of the franchise that I doubt I'll ever need to buy another without even considering the fact that I've probably bought a few of these issues multiple times. Still, when I saw the above cover to Steel Sterling #5, I almost choked I laughed so hard. What in the hell is the story solution to that fucking cover? "Steel Sterling, thank you for teaching us that a democratic society shouldn't endow its citizens with the right to operate automobiles!" It kills me. I think I got #6 too?

Hey, I also bought Starslayer #2 and 3 – the first two appearances of Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. I buy those comics every time I find them in a dollar bin and then give them to someone I know who hasn't read them yet. If that description fits you, post in the comment thread, and I'll mail you both books free of charge.

Got the sixth issue of SLG's Gargoyles comic, which I NEEDED.

Also for no good reason I can think of, I bought my second ever NOW Comics issue of Green Hornet. I think it was actually this one? I don't know. It just kind of shocks me how that series from a kind of forgettable publisher has come to define EVERYTHING that's being done with that franchise today in print and on screen. Why does the NOW legacy version of the character have so much influence?

Finally, I bought an issue of this awful-looking comic called Shuriken on a lark to round up an order at a $0.50 booth and regretted it almost immediately after.

Comics...you know I love you, but sometimes I fucking hate you.

My Five Favorite Celebrity Interviews

Celebrity interviews: I love them and I hate them.

The love side of the equation is obviously that you get to talk to interesting people and, perhaps more importantly, accumulate cool stories to tell folks you’ve just met or family members you don’t see often thus making you seem like the raddest person alive.

The hate side for me comes from the crippling nervousness I tend to get before these interviews, which I went into detail on in an earlier post. I’ve actually gotten a lot better with this in the last couple years, though I’ve also gotten to interview far less celebrities, so there you go.

Back when I was at Wizard, I had the opportunity to interview many folks from the worlds of film and television; honestly, I had the opportunity to conduct many more interviews than I actually did, but weaseled out of many due to the aforementioned nervousness and dished them off to my colleagues (one of my biggest regrets is never getting to do a set visit on account of anxiety; I was set to go to Canada for the Fantastic Four sequel but chickened out and Rickey went instead).

Most of the interviews I did end up doing though, I recall quite fondly and, of course, recount every chance I get. Those I enjoyed most went so well by the end I felt like me and my interview subject had really bonded on a level transcending mere professionalism and would of course be crushed to meet them today and find that they have no idea who I am despite the memorable 20 minutes we spent on the phone together five years ago.

So that said, here are my five (plus one) very favorite celebrities I got to chat with and the anecdotes that come with (I left off professional wrestlers because though they are indeed famous folks, I have done enough of those to get a whole other post, and I’m certainly not wasteful).

HONORABLE MENTION: DEAN CAIN
I was a gigantic fan of Lois & Clark as a kid, so it was a total joy/dream for me to get to talk to Dean Cain—the live action Superman of my childhood—when he did a guest spot on Smallville and I had to include it here. It’s only an honorable mention however, because despite Dean being really nice, I can’t for the life of me recall a single thing we talked about. Oh well…

5. ROBERT RODRIGUEZ
One of if not the very first non-comics people I interviewed for Wizard was movie director Robert Rodriguez, less than a month into my tenure if I recall correctly. It was for our Holiday Special as part of the Wizard Gift-Giving Guide. The thing is, if I’m getting my timeline right, I have no idea why I would have been speaking to Robert Rodriguez for Wizard in the fall of 2004, as Sin City was still months off and his most recent credit at the time was a Spy Kids sequel. I do distinctly remember that we discussed cooking and he told me an awesome quesadilla recipe he may or may not have used on the Sin City set.

Honestly, maybe I’m a year off on this and it took place in late 2005, meaning the Sin City DVD was the gift in question. Regardless, I wasn’t too familiar with Robert’s work outside of Desperado, but even just by his laid back voice and chill laugh, you could tell the dude was cool as ice and it radiated through the phone. I felt about a thousand times more bad ass just by talking Mexican cuisine with him for 10 minutes.

4. ROSARIO DAWSON
End of 2005 (for sure this time), I had just seen the movie version of Rent and totally gotten hooked on it. I saw it like three times in the theater and bought the DVD as soon as it came out. I’ve still yet to see the stage show, which seems ridiculous, but the film really spoke to me for some reason, and I thought Rosario Dawson was tremendous in it. She had also just come off Sin City, where she kicked ass, and was getting set for Clerks 2 plus she was producing her own comic, OCT, making her a nice coup for a Q&A in the Wizard Hollywood issue for winter 2006. I definitely campaigned for this one and was pleased to get it.

Rosario was on West Coast time, so I ended up calling from my shithole old apartment to speak with her and her uncle, Gus Vazquez, a comic book artist and real cool guy. Going completely against what my editor would have wanted, I kicked off the “interview” just telling Rosario how much I loved her in Rent, which she really appreciated, but then went off on a lengthy tangent about how she had just seen the original production it was based on in Rome.

And that was how the next hour went: a lot of tangents.

Rosario was incredibly sweet and answered every question I had and then some, but damn, that girl can talk! She talks super fast and goes off in about a billion different directions every other minute. It was actually pretty impressive because in the course of a single question she’d end up speaking confidently and knowledgably about multiple subjects, some related to the topic, some not so much. The read I got was that she was incredibly intelligent as well as extremely energetic and enthusiastic—it made for a really enjoyable conversational experience, but a total nightmare transcribing later on.

Guilty secret I don’t think I’ve told anybody but my wife in the last five years (hello, Internet!): Rosario and her uncle thought and I had hung up when I really hadn’t and started chatting; I totally listened in for like two more minutes. I don’t remember what they said (it was nothing salacious), but I still feel kind of bad about it.

Summation: Rosario Dawson is awesome and I wish she was in more stuff.

3. JAMES MARSTERS
Covered this one at length in a prior post.

2. TOM WELLING
Ah, Tom Welling: one of the big reasons I can never write off Smallville since it stars one of the nicest dudes I’ve ever had the pleasure to interact with.

The background on this one was that it was early fall of 2005 and earlier in the day I has just gone to the doctor to get tested for lactose intolerance.

Had I known what the test for this was, I would not have scheduled it on a day I had to interview friggin’ Tom Welling.

Basically, they (or at least my guy) inject you with a vial full of concentrate lactose, and if you feel like crap later, you’re lactose intolerant. I believe there may have also been a blood test or something involved, but that’s the part I mainly remember—and folks, I am definitely lactose intolerant.

So I drag myself into the office and am feeling absolutely awful. My stomach is gurgling like nobody’s business and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I vomit. My “office” at the time was a little corridor off the main hall that I shared with Rickey, and I’m pretty sure he can still remember and attest to what bad shape I was in. I basically told him that if I had to puke during the Welling interview, I was grabbing the trash can, tossing him the phone and question list, and it was his show.

I wasn’t actually speaking to Tom about Smallville, but rather the remake of The Fog he was starring in with Maggie Grace and Selma Blair, though we did talk Superman stuff at the end. Since I was nervous and just wanted to get it out of the way, I was straight up with him after we began talking and exchanged names and told him my situation, right down to “…so if you hear something that sounds like somebody heaving their guts up in the background during this call, that’s totally me.”

Now many celebrities—or, y’know, people—may have been a little weirded out by this, hung up the phone and called their agent about never speaking with Wizard again, but Mr. Tom Welling gave an only slightly nervous chuckle and assured me everything would be fine.

And it was! We ended up having a great interview and I felt totally calm about 30 seconds in because Tom was so eloquent, witty and I daresay quite charming that I really enjoyed the conversation and totally forgot how sick I was.

But it wasn’t the main interview that gets him this high on the list, it’s the back-and-forth that ended the call:

Me: “Well, those are all the questions I’ve got, Tom—anything else you wanted to say?”

Tom: “Just that I hope you feel better, man.”

Me: “Aww…you know, after hearing that, I do already!”

Tom: “Oh great, now I think you’re going to make me puke.”

We both laugh heartily and say goodbye.

And that is why, Tom Welling, you are my Superman.

1. KRISTEN BELL
Not long after I got bumped up from research assistant to staff writer at Wizard, I started getting a decent amount of pull in terms of suggesting features and interviews, and one of the first non-comics things I pitched was an interview with Kristen Bell. This was when Veronica Mars was going strong (creatively at least if not commercially) into its second season and I felt like it was the type of show our fans would be really into if they knew existed, and Kristen was the kind of cool, quirky chick who we’d do well to hitch our wagon to.

For months, no dice.

I pleaded, campaigned and even made charts (for real), but the powers that be did not see the value in speaking to an actress on a UPN show that was a niche hit at best. I played up her being in Fanboys to try and work the Star Wars angle, but even back in 2006, that movie had been delayed like 27 times.

I finally got an opening when she started doing publicity for the movie Pulse, which was more up Wizard’s alley, and we had another Hollywood issue to fill, so I made the pitch one more time and finally got approval.

I was so excited to speak with Kristen I did research and everything (a rarity for me), finding out she went to NYU and was a musical theater major, just like my then-girlfriend, who I had feed me some facts to make it sound like I knew that stuff.

And then, of course, the week of the interview, I got the flu and ended up bedridden for a couple days.

Screw that—with the encouraging spirit of Tom Welling willing me forward, I had my neighbor/co-worker Dylan snag me a cell phone recording device and was determined to do this one from home, even if I needed to pull my “puking in the trashcan” routine without Rickey as a safety net.

Recording device in one hand and tissues in the other, I was connected for the interview and almost instantly I knew it was a home run. Kristen was exactly how she was on TV: really nice girl with a lot of smarts and very sharp wit. I was proud of myself for actually keeping pace with her and even making her laugh more than once, as it seemed like she was enjoying the interview as much as I was. I did a modified version of my Tom Welling opening about how sick I was but mentioned my dedication to doing the interview, then as quickly as I could dropped into the conversation that I had read she went to NYU and mentioned my girlfriend was also a musical theater major (my editor totally made fun of me for this, but I stand by that if you’re a dude who works for a pop culture magazine interviewing a young actress, it very much helps to mention your girlfriend as early as possible to put your interview subject somewhat at ease knowing she’s not being hit on when you try to be clever—seriously, take notes on this).

We were only supposed to be on the phone for 15-20 minutes, but I believe ended up going closer to 40 and Kristen’s publicist actually had to pull her off for another call, which I took as a huge compliment. I got plenty of material for the first of what would be many Kristen Bell interviews to come in Wizard (and also told her when had cast her as Namorita and her Pulse co-star Ian Somerhalder as Namor in a fictional Sub-Mariner movie, which, after I explained to her who those characters were, she got totally excited about—so look for that any day now).

I would have the good fortune to meet Kristen in person a couple times: first at Wizard World Philadelphia later that year, where she was cool enough to write a personalized letter to Megan encouraging her in her acting which remains on the wall next to our bed, and again the next year at Wizard World Los Angeles where I did a video interview with her after being laid up with a cold in the hotel the first two days of the show (yeah, I got sick a lot back then) and she told me to get some vitamins. I’m not sure she had any idea who I was either time, but she certainly made me feel like she remembered me, and that’s what counts.

Unfortunately, the very last experience I had interviewing Kristen Bell wasn’t the best one, as I spoke to her on the phone right before she started on Heroes in 2007. For whatever reason, I was cranky that day, and I remember sounding really morose during the call, which definitely killed the vibe. Floundering, I pulled out a line I had used with Dean Cain to great success about how lucky she was to be in California since it was pouring on the east coast, to which she responded with “Oh…I love New York” and I replied “Yeah, well…” followed by several seconds of awkward silence.

Ugh. I suck sometimes.

Regardless of that nasty bit of business, Kristen Bell is hands down my favorite celebrity I’ve ever interviewed, and I hope someday our paths cross again as she remains one of the most talented actresses around and her fiancé is awesome on Parenthood. Word.

Wizard Features That Never Were: Run Phil Jimenez's Career!

I feel like I say often "so and so is a really cool person" when referring to comic creators, but the lovely truth is I've had the good fortune to work with and befriend more excellent folks in this business than jerks.

That said, I hope it still has appropriate impact when I say Phil Jimenez is a really cool person. Seriously: really cool.

I have great relationships with a lot of creators, but Phil is a guy I can truly say is my friend. I've actually hung out at his apartment and grabbed dinner in the city with him, so that's the litmus test right there. Heck, my wife complains his Facebook feed takes over her page, so that's friendship.

It's always neat when I get to meet and in some cases get to know artists and writers whose work I remember from my childhood, and such is the case with Phil (and I don't feel bad saying that because the handsome devil doesn't age). I totally remember him as the guy who used to do the awesome fill-ins on Robin for Tom Grummett and who crammed a zillion people into that issue of Guy Gardner: Warrior where Guy opened the bar. Before I had any idea who George Perez or even Jack Kirby was, I thought Phil Jimenez had invented the crowd scene, and if he didn't, well, he packed so much detail into his that he may as well have.

While I can't quite remember how I first met Phil voice-to-voice and then face-to-face, I'm sure it was around Infinite Crisis time, as that was one of the first big deals I was intimately involved with covering for Wizard; most likely Geoff Johns made the introduction.

What I do remember was how taken aback I was by not only how nice Phil was, but how inquisitive he was and how he genuinely seemed to want your opinion on everything. He's for real a guy who just loves soaking up what everybody thinks about everything and applying it to what he does; nobody's take doesn't matter to him.

Phil is also ridiculously smart and knowledgable on just about everything, from comics to literature to architecture to theater to medical oddities (those last two comes from Wizard World Philadelphia 2006, during which Phil took me, Megan, Sam and TJ out to an amazing Italian lunch and was the life of the party, seamlessly switching from talking Wonder Woman and zombies with TJ to musicals with Megan; at the end of the meal, he recommended the girls check out an exhibit on medical oddities at the Mutter Museum because they were bored). He can regale you on pretty much any topic for as long as you've got to listen. I've had awesome conversations for hours with Phil on comics, but I'm pretty sure if I called him to talk European history he'd still manage to hold both our sides of the exchange.

It was around early 2007 or so that Phil called me very excited about an idea he had for a Wizard feature. Since Infinite Crisis had wrapped, he had been laying low a bit, recuperating from that epic, doing a gorgeous issue of 52 now and again and looking for his next project. Since he had not settled on said project quite yet, he told me he wanted his fans to do it for him.

As reality shows were (and are) all the rage, Phil wanted to run via Wizard one of his own after a fashion in which the readers helped him select what comic he should draw next over the course of several months. He had thought a lot about it, saying he could come up with a list of characters he was interested in, do up sketches, we publish them, then fans respond with which they liked best. Each month, we eliminate a project or two, and he does more sketched of the remaining characters; wash, rinse, repeat. There would also be an opportunity for folks to suggest their own ideas (though I think that would just be a courtesy; Phil wasn't going to completely surrender his professional destiny and end up drawing Amethyst or something...though as I type that I realize Phil would probably love to draw Amethyst).

I don't remember any of the characters from his initial list other than Green Arrow, who I believe was his example, so maybe he really was pulling for that one.

I loved the idea and also mentioned that we were trying to get some more heat on our web site at the time, so perhaps we could post more frequent updates there, including each sketch, selected reader feedback, polls, and maybe even some video with Phil. He was game for playing around with the format and finding what worked best.

My editors were also keen on the idea, we just had to cross some T's and dot some I's from a legal perspective to make sure it was all kosher. Unfortunately, when you're talking about something as ambitious as what we were, that kind of due diligence takes time, and of course Phil needed to work. Still, I thought we could make it work.

We couldn't.

Why not? Because somebody gave Phil a job first.

It's a shame there was so much manuevering necessary to get the pieces in place for this, because I think it not only would have been real fun not to mention awesome to see Phil drawing all these characters, but also because you'd have virtually a stone cold lock for a hit book off the "fan-selected" angle, I figured.

It didn't work out, but Phil is still awesome; he owes me a Nova sketch though.

Our Comics Decade: 2007

Kiel
2007 was a year chock fucking full of great comics. The short list of books I dug that also seem to qualify as critical darlings includes Exit Wounds, Town Boy, The Blot and Bookhunter not to mention everything Gipi had hitting. And there were scads of amazing mainstreamy projects from Criminal to The Immortal Iron Fist to the first of those jaw-dropping Kirby reprints DC put out.

And for me personally, 2007 was a year where I did a lot of writing that was both challenging and rewarding (yet not always both at the same time!) I wrote a profile on artist Brett Booth's return to the limelight after a year of living in a van (sounds more dramatic than it was, but still a great story), finished a mega-engaging and mega-controversial profile of Darwyn Cooke (better saved for another post, me thinks) and a profile on Kirby's creation of the Fourth World (still SUPER bummed that thing never saw print).

And I was looking over all these great books and all these great memories from that 12-month period and trying to decide which one thing I could write about...and then I just thought, "Fuck it. I'ma write about G.I. Joe!" And not just any G.I. Joe series but a G.I. Joe series with the added layer of jingoist absurdity that is the subtitle "America's Elite" as well as the chronically overused/unimaginative story title of "World War III." Even if you're a little predisposed to like G.I. Joe in general, that sounds pretty silly, right?

But, look...like a lot of people my age, I'm a big fan of Larry Hama's '80s run on the Marvel G.I. Joe series. At its best, that book was a prime example of straight to awesomeness comics craftsmanship – well-paced, smartly-written and highly entertaining comics. At its worst, that book was still fired from the hip in each new issue, pulling gonzo sci-fi surprises and inexplicably fun plot twists from God only knows where. It was unsurprisingly a great gateway comic for young people and a cultural artifact from an era when comics still had a chance at holding that mainstream junk culture status and blah blah blah, you've heard it all before.

I feel like I should cop to the strong associations I have to the franchise in general from my elementary days and the burgeoning would-be comics professional's appreciation I have for Hama's work right out front. Nostalgia obviously plays a HUGE part in why I started picking up this series from the Wizard office comp stack that year, and I'm positive that I wouldn't have enjoyed the final year of the Devil's Due run on the series nearly as much without that childhood fondness in full effect. That said, writer Mark Powers and artist Mike Bear still pulled one hell of a story out of "World War III." It's got everything that you'd be looking for in an over-the-top action comic about a highly trained special missions force with an unlimited budget for transforming tank/helicopter/space shuttle laser-powered vehicles fighting against a serpent-themed terrorist force with similar capabilities as well as wild super science on their side. Cobra hatches a real plan to take over the world, spreads the resources of the Joe team super thin in a fire-fight across the great cities of the globe, kidnaps the president and fires a bunch of bombs all over hell's half acre. In terms of "going out with a bang" the creative team raised the stakes for the entire franchise and expanded the scope of the whole series, bringing some actual consequences into play for characters built on being locked in an eternal stalemate. All of this is played with a surprising amount of subtly by Powers and drawn with some great, gritty (in the best sense of the word) atmosphere along with a lot of clean, crazy action pieces at the hands of Bear and his collaborators. Plus, whether you notice it or not, there are a million little nods to continuity bull and character arcs from the old Marvel series that don't get in the way of the action.

It's fun comics.

And sure, there are plenty of criticisms to level against this kind of thing. Were these comics created specifically for an ever-shrinking fan-base obsessed with the minutia of the stories of their youth? Pretty much, yeah. Was the book cancelled during the course of the story line by not even meeting the sales standards the licensor expected even considering that small, inbred market? Yup. Is this a comic whose shelf life only extends maybe a year or two past its initial serialization? I'm betting that's a big "Uh huh."

But I really could give two fucks. We're lucky enough to live in a world where new, interesting, challenging, beautiful works hit every year, pushing the boundaries of comics as art and entrenching the medium more and more into a popular and respectable place in the broader culture landscape. I love living in that world, not only because I get to track that great growth in comics quality and popularity as a reader and reporter, but also because when a good ol' fashioned slice of comic book comfort food comes along, I can dive in and enjoy it for what it is without having depressing thoughts of, "Is this really what we've come to?!?!?!" running through my head. Isn't that a great thing?

Ben
In the summer of 2007, I came to a major crossroads in my professional life. Following my and Rickey’s super-successful hosting of the Wizard Fan Awards at Wizard World Chicago for the second straight year (or more accurately later that evening), my old chum and former Wizard editor Ryan Penagos, who had since moved over to Marvel where he was editor of Marvel.com, brought up with me the potential of coming onboard as his assistant (he didn’t offer me the job outright, mind you, just the opportunity to interview for it).

The idea of leaving Wizard wasn’t actually anything new at that point, as I had interviewed for positions both at DC and Marvel in the year leading up; however, first those were both straight-up publishing editorial gigs, and second, with each I had a chance of landing the job, but not an amazing one. With Ryan’s offer, I stood a significantly better chance of actually getting the position, though I would be transitioning from working in print back to the web.

I went into Marvel a couple times, interviewed pretty well, and got to meet (or re-meet) some of the folks I’d be working with; I really felt at home there pretty instantly and also the idea of moving back over to the digital side of media was starting to really grow on me as I saw the potential. However, signing on with Marvel wasn’t really such a tough decision (I’d wanted to work there since I was about eight—this was the dream), it was leaving Wizard.

Say what you will about Wizard Magazine, but the people there were very good to me. They took a shot on me straight out of college and provided me with all the contacts in the comics industry I needed to make a (potentially) lifelong career. Additionally, I owe guys like Pat McCallum, Dan Reilly, Joe Yanarella, Brian Cunningham, Mike Cotton, Andy Serwin, Jesse Thompson, Mel Caylo and plenty I’m forgetting a ton not just for helping me come into my own as a writer or an editor, but in many ways adopting me and helping me learn how to live as an adult truly away from home for the first time.

The people running Wizard were also not shy about letting me know how much they appreciated me when I told them I was thinking about leaving for Marvel, both in the form of heartfelt words as well as the offer of a potential raise and promotion. I spoke to pretty much everybody important in my life, from Megan, my friends and my family to comics pros I respected about what road I should go down. Appropriately enough, it came down once more to Geoff Johns, who offered me the advice that every few years you need to look at what you’re doing with your life and determine whether there’s still room for you to grow and try new things in your current situation, or whether you’ve pretty much gone as far as you could go there; for me, leaving Wizard wasn’t about money, or mistreatment or any grudge, it was simply a matter of having achieved all I could there and wanting the new challenges that Marvel represented.

One of those new challenges was chucking years of travelling primarily by car out the window and adapting to a daily train commute from my home in Saddle Brook, New Jersey into New York City. At the time, I was aghast, always having been a hardcore car guy, but now, just over two years later, I take the train everywhere I can possibly go. A big draw for train travel to a guy like me is that once you get your schedule and commute down, you can very easily lose yourself in a book, magazine or comic, which is exactly what I did.

Interestingly enough, one of the very first things I utilized my new train commute into Marvel to read was Maus. I say this was interesting because reading Maus was something I was supposed to do for Wizard, but just never got around to.

Earlier in 2007, the aforementioned Joe Yanarella called me into his office and tasked me with conducting Wizard’s first major feature/interview involving Art Spiegelman. For those not familiar, Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, writer, editor, etc. viewed by most as of one the—if not the—most important and respected figures in the alternative comics movement. He’s a certifiable genius, a huge advocate for creator rights, and has won a bazillion awards, so needless to say he’s a huge deal.

Joe had reached out to Spiegelman and gotten him to agree to an interview with Wizard, which was kinda tantamount to Entertainment Weekly landing an interview with Nelson Mandela to discuss Invictus in terms of a legitimizing event. Wizard had long been seen as the unruly frat house of comics, so a working relationship of any sorts with Art Spiegelman, complete with meaty interview and profile, would be a huge first step in Joe’s savvy plan to up the mag’s profile and pedigree.

The only problem was I had no idea why he wanted me to do it.

Yeah, I was the primary staff writer at the time and, don’t get me wrong, I think I’m pretty decent at what I do, but I had an embarrassingly limited knowledge of Spiegelman and his work as well as alternative comics in general. Also, I had tanked my last major profile assignment on Bill Messner-Loebs big-time. Undaunted, Joe said he had faith I could pull it off—and I appreciate that to this day—and sent me home with Wizard’s copy of Maus and orders to get a crash course from Kiel and Sean on all things Spiegelman.

As it turned out, Kiel would end up going to WonderCon that year in my place (I can’t remember precisely why) to meet and take initial notes on Spiegelman, though Joe still intended me to ultimately be the guy conducting the feature. The interview kept getting moved further and further back until I made my intentions about potentially leaving for Marvel known, at which point it was decided that Kiel—who had already logged plenty of time on this and was way more familiar with Spiegelman and his world to boot—would inherit the assignment regardless of whether I stayed or went. It took awhile, but Kiel did eventually publish the profile and I for one am extremely glad he did as opposed to be, because it was a damn fine piece.

So getting back to the main point here, I had this perfectly good copy of Maus, one of the most highly-touted works of graphic literature of all-time, and it seemed a shame not to read it before having to return it to Wizard. So read it I did in some of my very first train rides to and from New York City.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about how great Maus is, since obviously it has won a friggin’ Pulitzer and if you really want to read some decent essays praising it you can find them pretty easily. I’ll simply say that I enjoyed the heck out of it and started actively looking forward to my two-hour roundtrip simply because I wanted to get to the next chapter and see what happened. I’ll also say that one thing I’ve certainly learned from reading more indy or alternative comics in the past couple years is how they all seem to aspire to using a more down-to-earth conversational tone and yet still convey excitement and heightened emotion worthy of visual accompaniment; I’ve seen both hits and misses in this regard, but no bigger home run than Maus, where Spiegelman goes about just telling a story the same way he likely would if he were sitting right across from you sans theatrics or explosions and yet it’s the most exciting, tantalizing narrative you could imagine, complimented perfectly by his art, subversively placing cute animals into such horrific situations as the Holocaust and mundane ones like a mid-life semi-crisis.

Though my father is Jewish and thus I’m half myself, I don’t consistently feel a real kinship to that faith by virtue of not being raised that way, by having many Christian influences in my life, by my dad really not being all that religious, and so on; however, Maus is one of those works that reminds me that I am a part of an often terrible one, yet one that yielded incredible stories and amazing survivors. Little about Maus could really be called uplifting, but that it connected me in some way with part of my heritage, albeit through tragedy, did give me some sense of odd pride. I also never felt lost or confused by it, a testament to the man who created a story that could win a Pulitzer yet appeal to the masses as well.

I’d still be terrified to try and interview Art Spiegelman though.

Rickey
If you look up the year 2007 in the dictionary you'll find "The shit" next to the definition because that's what the year was for me - THE SHIT.

That was the year my girlfriend moved up from Austin, Texas to live with me in the New York area (marking the first time we ever lived in the same town together), and it was the year I did several movie set visits (The Dark Knight, Watchmen, Iron Man) for Wizard as part of my new role as Entertainment Editor. And 2007 was the first year I ever went to San Diego Comic-Con, this little show out on the west coast. I was so busy at the show that I didn't get a chance to give the floor a thorough probing, but I did make time to stroll through artist's alley. Even though I was generally let down by the selection, I DID find a book unlike anything I'd ever seen before: boy's club #1 by Matt Furie!

I was at the Sparkplug booth and overheard a random guy telling the cashier that he's seen Matt Furie's art show in LA and loved the book, which they were distributing. So I flipped through it and actually chuckled out loud at the unnaturally nuclear levels of goofy irreverence (goofeverence?) inside. Imagine four endearing, harmless, pop-culture quoting, hot dog-eating, video game-addicted, beer-guzzling, pot-devouring anthropomorphic dudes just hanging out and living together in que sera sera bliss. Now imagine they invited you to hang out at their place for 40 deceptively simple pages and you've just pictured the most care-free day you never realized you could have - and the funniest, most fun comic I've ever read. And shit, this book reminds me of some of my friends so much that I can pick it up and read any page and it's practically like I'm hanging out with them (I'm looking at you, David and Kiel).

That first issue find was a grand one, too. The book doesn't have any indicia, copyright or website info, so I had to look up Furie's name and the name of the book online. I couldn't find dick, and none of my friends had heard of the book, so I just had to wait till a new issue came out. Luckily issue #2 did. And then so did issue #3! My first print of issue #1 is at a slightly larger scale than the more recent printings, too, so BONUS! I finally met Furie at San Diego Comic-Con in 2009, and he even did a Watchmen sketch for me. But never before or since that 2007 show have I ever blind-found a new creator or book that so perfectly encapsulated what I love about comics - or what I never realized I COULD love about comics.

P.S. My BFF Sean T. Collins wrote about the series here. Check out his better-written reasons why you'd love the comic. He's got better sample images than I do, too.

Our Comics Decade: 2006

Ben
No doubt for me 2006 was the year of 52.

Only a few months into my tenure as DC contact for Wizard, my first two major assignments were steering to a compelling close the coverage of Infinite Crisis my predecessor Rich Ho had begun and coming up with my own plan to cover this new initiative. And with all due respect to Rich, while managing Infinite Crisis, DC’s biggest event in nearly two decades, certainly must have provided quite the challenge, figuring out how to give monthly love to an innovative new kind of beast—a weekly series with a rotating A-level writing team that impacted the entire publishing line—was a whole other level.

Luckily, I had a lot going for me: I had a great support team both at Wizard and at DC, I both got along with and respected the folks involved with the series, and last but not least, 52 was really really good.

Upon becoming DC contact, I inherited a huge pile of notes, sketches, etc. related to a project with the working title of “52.” My then-boss Brian Cunningham had been on hand for one of the very first meetings where 52 (I’ll take it out of quotes because obviousy the working title stuck) had been discussed, so he sat me down for a lengthy period and gave me the short version of what was being discussed (said meeting took place in the fall of 2005, over six months before 52 would actually launched, so as has been said in many interviews over the past few years a lot changed, but an impressive amount remained intact as well).

To sum it up, I was impressed, both with what a bold move this was and also by how much the folks involved had their shit together and were working so far ahead of the curve. Later on, both to my additional respect and sometimes unavoidable frustration, I’d discover they were equally adept at changing on the fly when necessary. Mostly though, I felt both because this was my first major chance to prove myself professionally and because I had such appreciation for the guys involved (Geoff Johns in particular, who as I detailed two posts ago basically got me my start), I was bound and determined to cover this sucker to the best of my ability.

The first thing I did to this end was convince my superiors that it would be a good idea to send me solo to WonderCon in San Francisco in January; it was a show that Wizard did not typically attend, but as the entire 52 writing team of Geoff, Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka as well as editor Steve Wacker and DC head Dan DiDio would all be there, I saw an opportunity to kick off our coverage with a bang, and my bosses concurred.


WonderCon was a weekend of excess in some ways for me, but mostly good ways (and I’m a fairly conservative person when it comes to a lot of stuff, so “excess” for me might be tame for a lot of you). First off, Wizard put me up in a way nicer hotel room than I’d ever stayed in before, so that was pretty cool; one of the first things I did when I got there was to call Rickey (I called Megan first), tell him how sick the room was and then send him pics. I also ordered this crazy ass deep-fried sushi from room service because I was starving and had not eaten since leaving Newark.

Not long after my “dinner,” I got a call from Geoff telling me to meet him, Steve and Mark in a bar down the street. I had met Steve a couple of times at that point, but I’d never had any contact with Mark Waid, who was one of my major heroes and influence, so I was nervous and starstruck from the start. So rattled was I, in fact, that I let Geoff order me a bunch of Jack & Cokes without paying heed to the fact I hadn’t had caffeine since my freshman year of college because I was enraptured listening to Mark tell stories about writing issues of Spider-Man Team-Up in the 90’s. I think the worst that happened that night was that I completely inadvertently implied that Mark was old at some point, but the next morning my stomach and I were feeling the combination of the time change, fried sushi, and Jack & Cokes pretty bad.

I was scheduled to sit in on a closed door meeting of the 52 braintrust to observe and take notes around noon and to say I was physically a bit rough would be an understatement, something anybody who had the misfortune of being a stall over from me in the convention center restroom an hour before would be able to attest to (sorry, guy). Fortunately a quick trip to CVS to grab some Pepto Bismol and a cross-country pep talk from Joe Yanarella later and I was back in business (Geoff and Steve would later tell me they had no clue I was ready to puke into my briefcase most of the meeting).

The meeting was incredible and certainly unlike anything else I’ve ever gotten to experience in or out of comics. The natural rhythm and flow between these five creative forces working seamlessly as one was a thing to behold. During the period I observed, I got to witness more or less in its entirety the genesis and evolution of the Black Adam-Isis wedding and all the things swirling around it from large chunks of Renee Montoya’s journey all the way to the eventual murder of Osiris. At other creative summits I’ve attended, I’ve freuqently piped in with a suggestion here or there for some minor thing, but for this one, I just sat in rapt attention and watched tose gents do their thing (and not just because I was kinda queasy).

I had some other neat experiences out in San Fran (being a question plant at the 52 panel, watching Frank Miller and Jim Lee hold court at our hotel bar, mocking Christos Gage at the galling thought that he could actually get a Union Jack limited series greenlit at Marvel), but pretty quickly it was time to head home and get back to work.


As a professional working to cover 52, I had both my good times and my bad times. I loved fun little things we’d come up with on the fly (as the nature of the project often demanded) like doing a faux tabloid mock-up in one issue of Wizard covering the big mysteries/events where Greg Rucka and Keith Giffen shind as my “correspondents.” On the flipside, we did a sketchbook feature featuring what would become the Great Ten and Lex Luthor’s Infinity Inc. that was a nightmare to coordinate because there were a lot of last-minute changes going on in 52 itself (they proved positives for the book, which was of course the real priority, but stymied me a bit as a guy trying to produce coverage three months out, but that was a tightrope we often walked and fell off at Wizard).

As a fan, I loved 52, perhaps even moreso than the average dude since I got to see the whole script-to-art process at pretty much every step as my weekly FedEx packages from Alex Segura at DC came in. I will always tip my hat in reverance at how the writers were able to take perennial also-rans like Booster Gold, Ralph Dibny or Montoya and elevate them to being every bit as fleshed out and important as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in my eyes. I had immense respect for Keith Giffen’s ability as layout artist to give the book such a consistent feel despite working with literally dozens of other creative types. And perhaps above all, I marveled at the tremendous feat Steve Wacker (and later Michael Siglain accomplished) making the trains run on time. As far as personal favorite issues/moments, I gotta go with the infamous “Wicker Sue” chapter where Ralph and friends break up the ceremony that may or may not have resurrected his wife Sue both due to its incredible emotional wallop and because my buddy Todd Nauck showed once and for all he could not be boxed in as an artist simply capable of humor stories.

In the end, neither Steve nor I would make it to the end of 52 “on the inside.” He left DC for Marvel during the summer of 2006 (which is a bit deceptive as it makes it seem as though e was only onboard a few months, but in fact he’d already helped plan out at least half the series by then) and I moved from the DC beat to the Marvel one a couple months later. I actually sent Steve, Geoff, Mark and Greg a pic we’d all taken at WonderCon with mine and Steve’s faces exed out the day I got transferred with a subject line of something like “Casualties of 52: Who Will Survive?” (I don’t think I included Grant on the e-mail because Grant Morrison has better things to do than read my crappy jokes—ok, all those guys do, but I didn’t know Grant as well).


52 stands to this day for me as milestone in comic book accomplishment and I’m not sure what those guys did can ever be quite duplicated (though Mr. Wacker has done an admirable job with a similar though not exactly the same task on the thrice-weekly Amazing Spider-Man these past couple years). It was also another career milestone for me, as it was the first project I really felt a part of—whether deservingly so or not—and what a way to start.

Rickey
In 2005, Grant Morrison wrote me a love letter. But I didn't really start to understand it until 2006.

It was late in 2005 when All-Star Superman dropped and a lot of the guys at the Wizard offices lost their minds over it. The issue even won top honors in the "Single Issue of the Year" category in the "Best of 2005" issue. But, really, I didn't think it was that great. Between the odd designs from Frank Quitely and the dwarf star density of the plot, I just wasn't that intrigued. I think a lot of that had to do with not understanding the All-Star line period at the time. Then, in early 2006, when I finally sat down with issue #2, my stomach began filling with nerdy butterflies AND STILL HASN'T STOPPED. The only ceiling that seemed capable of containing Grant's cosmic ideas and break-neck plot pacing was my own limit of imagination/understanding and the implied motion and flourishing detail in Quitely's art made me feel like I was watching a cartoon painted cell-by-cell by, I dunno, Moebius. And the colors! I'm convinced Jamie Grant INVENTED new hues for the series. How else do you figure out the color of a Kryptonite eye-beam shooting out of a giant synthetic man and bouncing off the indestructible back of Superman before crystallizing in space? (See issue 4, story page 14)

So instead of talking your ear off about the series, I'm just gonna give you my favorite scenes from issues #2-#5 - the issues that came out in 2006:


Issue #2 - While impressing Lois Lane with his Fortress of Solitude, Superman takes a moment to feed (by hand) a baby Sun-Eater he keeps as a damn pet. What does he feed it? A miniature sun he cracks into pebble-sized pieces with a hammer on something called The Cosmic Anvil, of course.


Issue #3 - After Atlas and Samson show up all Silver Age-y in an effort to win Lois' affections, they wind up fucking up and attracting a mad god who plans on deleting Lois from existence. This series of panels tickles me pink with A) a perfect summation of how serious the Lois/Clark love can be portrayed and B) a dope-ass threat from Superman so palpable it kinda chokes me up.


Issue #4 - When Jimmy Olsen takes over leadership of the top science program in all of human history, he pulls a boner and falls into a vat of something called the Underverse - a newly discovered realm of super-heavy gravity hidden in the basement beneath the known structure of the universe (WHAT?!). Superman not only pulls Jimmy free - he yanks out a mineral specimen from the dangerous reality with as much effort as it takes my chubby ass to shovel snow off my sidewalk.


Issue #5 - In my favorite issue of 2006, Clark Kent visits Lex Luthor in prison to do a Daily Planet story on the villain's incarceration and finds himself the first-hand witness of a superhuman riot. Frank Quitely blew my mind with this sequence as the ultra-strong Parasite's rampage creates an earthquake so vengeful it literally cannot be contained by the panels and rips the fucking page apart!

And yo, the continuity! This was the first place I noticed Grant's proclivity for stringing all his DC stories into one linear continuity all his own. DC One Million, JLA, Animal Man, 52, All-Star Superman, Batman - it's alllllllll connected, and this was the series that showed me that truth. Comic life hasn't been the same.

So I admit, the love letter wasn't to me, or even exclusively FOR me - it was meant for Superman and all the creators over the past 70+ years who have made the Man of Steel one of the most stunning examples of how far and wide comics can journey into the fun-zone of the imagination. Don't get it twisted: All-Star Superman is as wholly about the infinite possibilities of comicdom as it gets. And I'm proud to say that since 2006, after at least 7 or 8 more read-thrus, I'm proud to call it my favorite comic ever. Big words for the comic that gets me more giddy than any other. Now please go and read an issue - any issue. Bet you'll smile at least once.

And for the record, in all my years in comics, I've never spoken to or met Grant Morrison. It's kind of pathetic of me, but I just never got the chance.


Kiel
Maybe my favorite moment in the whole of DC's 52 series comes at the beginning of issue #31. As the cosmic zombie legions of Lady Styx circle in on a planet that just happens to be a lot like Victorian England, all but forgotten '50s space hero Captain Comet makes a last stand, sending a desperate telepathic message across the cosmos asking for help. But no help is on the way, and so a whole civilization is eaten away by blind white cubes as its people have their chest cavities cut open with oblong scissors.

The scene is dramatic and strange and more than a little creepy, despite the fact that it relies on a few well-worn genre and character tropes and has next to nothing to do with any of the regular cast of the 52-issue weekly series. For me, that was one of the series biggest strengths – not the drama of "Can they pull it off?" or even the tension in the many mysteries confronting the main cast, but the weird inventiveness and joy that Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid were collectively able to pull out of that cut-and-pasted mess (and the DCU is a TOTAL fucking mess) of a universe.

But even considering all those brilliant left-field moments, they aren't the reason I'm writing about 52 for 2006. They just helped me through the reason I am.

See, 2006 was my first full year at Wizard, and while I could go on for a while about my experience landing and keeping the job at the magazine, all that's really germane to this discussion is that I was one of the first staffers (if not the first) tapped to work on Wizard's first stab at having a real online presence with the now defunct WizardUniverse.com. It was an odd thing that first year. Shortly before the summer con season rolled up, I was asked along with new hires Brian Warmoth and Rick Marshall to build an entire back catalog for the site by inputting former magazine features into our super jankety FileMaker Pro-based blogging system. And before we were even finished with that task, the three of us were thrown into the deep end of on online comics journalism when Wizard had its annual Philly convention where it was our stated task to "beat CBR and Newsarama" in posting panel reports and on-the-floor interviews from the show. Boy, did that suck balls.


All things considered, I think the three of us did a pretty great job that year of making the Wizard site viable in the online marketplace, and one huge part of that for me was 52. In any online venture, a big part of getting people to give a shit about what you're writing is interactivity – how many people you can get not just to show up and read or show up and comment, but to show up and link back to you from their own site. With their chock-full of fanboy Easter Eggs approach to throwing every character and their brother into the mix approach, the 52 writers gave our first year on the site a giant gift. Warmoth and I split duties with the series with him interviewing cover artist J.G. Jones each week (and it's still a fucking shame those columns are now gone) while I organized a rag tag bunch of staffers that included everyone from Ben and Rickey to Dave Paggi, TJ and a series of random interns to pitch in to the regular "52 Roundup" column highlighting each issue's biggest moments, plot twists and hidden clues.

That column was occasionally a bear to put together as I had to dive into each Wednesday's new stack of comics (on the week's we couldn't get an advance copy from DC), grab the new issue, pass it amongst the gang and then discuss, assign and write the column with their help. But most of the time it was a total blast. From the ongoing mystery of what exactly Ralph Dibny was going to find throughout his resurrection quest to whatever the hell was going on with the mad scientists of Ooolong Island, there was plenty of addictive cliffhangers carrying along our discussion each week with plenty of curveballs thrown in. And as our silly little column went along, it felt more and more like the round table chats we'd have each week at the Wizard offices was starting to spread around the internet from the site's own message boards to Douglas Wolk's invaluable 52 Pickup blog.

And even though I'd been working at the magazine and having my stuff read by several thousands of fans each month for nearly a year at that point, I didn't feel like I was a part of the broader comics community until that year. While 52 the comic dolled out its thrills over a long, slow-boil story arc, 52 coverage was all about the instantaneous gratification of geeking out over moment of continuity or making some extremely corny (and sometimes just plain mean) joke to see how many people you could get to laugh along. I'm sure that can be said of damn near all writing on the internet, but I never really felt that way about what I did until that 52 column. By the end of it, we even had the writers following along (sometime at a con, ask me about the scariest e-mail I ever got from Mark Waid), though those interactions are dwarfed by what I'm sure Ben's writing about for this year (and if he doesn't include that photo from his Facebook page, he's cheating you poor bastards).

Anyway, the first iteration of the Wizard website collapsed shortly after my year of 52-ing (plus I had to write about Countdown each week during the decline...woof), and it would be easy for me to look upon the whole enterprise as something that never came together in the way I'd quite hoped. But just like 52 the series, that website's bright spots and downturns and (hilariously) dramatic moments added up to a lot more than they'd seem if held in amber (or mylar, to keep my metaphors in house). I wish those archives were still around.

[NOTE: Since it was my turn to post one of these entries, and I see now that Ben did NOT in fact post that pic off of Facebook on the site, I'm doing for him. HAHA! - KP]

Our Comics Decade: 2005

Rickey
I don't think I stopped smiling ONCE in 2005.

I graduated college that May because I double-majored, so I needed a few extra courses than the ordinary 4-year education. I moved to New York before the ceremony, though, after taking a second job offer from Wizard and stayed for the summer on a futon in the house of some of the best friends I've ever had. "The Summer of Fun 2005" yielded dozens of BBQs, Halo tournaments, genre TV watching marathons, binge drinking adventures, and so much more that looking back, I feel like I was living in an Apatow comedy about working at a comic book magazine. I had a job in comics, I was on a career path for the first time ever, I had amazing friends, and I was enjoying my life so wholly that I hope hope HOPE that all of humanity has felt - even for a few seconds in their lives - a FRACTION of what it was like that orgasmically fervent year for me. You know that part in high school movies where it's Fourth of July and fireworks are exploding and someone looks over at someone else while, like, Duncan Sheik or whatever plays in the background and says, "This is the best it's gonna be for us"? That was 2005 for me.

And the comics! HOOO BOY, the COMICS! At work, I was devouring EVERYTHING. The fabled Wizard library, with its dense paper-pulpy aroma practically dying my hair four colors, was filled with everything you could want and that's where I tried out everything from Miracleman to Clive Barker's Night of the Living dead comics to early Top Shelf anthologies to Preacher. Shit was tight! And the new comics that year - JESUS! DC played me like a Namco handheld game by dropping dozens and dozens of books in my lap that I just could not stop hoovering up. In 2005 alone, the world was served Green Lantern: Rebirth, Geoff Johns on Teen Titans and Flash and JSA, the Bizarro World hardcover, Will Pfeifer’s criminally underrated HERO, Grant Morrison's PHENOMENAL Seven Soldiers epic, John Arcudi and Patrick Gleason on Aquaman, the juicy launches of JLA Classified (Morrison and Ed McGuinness!) and JSA Classified (Johns and Amanda Conner!), the Kinetic trade paperback (the only full book I actually buy copies of to give as gifts whenever I can), Scott Beatty's fun-to-champion Son of Vulcan, Eaglesham's Villains United, the start of fucking Infinite Crisis, ever-lovin' SOLO, and sooo soo much more!

So, there's the thing - I can't choose just one book. So I'm picking DC Comics as a whole as the book that meant the most to me in 2005. I think it was because I was the most happy I've ever been in my life that year that I allowed myself to be so positively receptive to an outstandingly creative year from DC and ended up falling back in love with comics and what they meant to me. I was already smiling - but DC kept me right on grinning and fueled up a nostalgia I don't think I'll ever run empty on.

Kiel
When I went back to my mom's place this past week for the holiday break, I looked EVERYWHERE for the comic I wanted to write about for this year. You know what? Bupkis. Now, this probably has a lot to do with the fact that I own way too many fucking comic books, but it may also have to do with the fact that Robert Ullman's "Old Timey Hockey Tales" is a very small comic book – some would say a "mini comic."

During the spring of 2005, I made what was either the very stupid or very smart move of packing my 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier with a bunch of crap and driving to Long Island to stay indefinitely with my aunt and uncle in hopes of landing a job in publishing. What that ultimately meant was several months of applying to any and every job open at any book publisher in Manhattan (and some pretty suspect teaching gigs) while spending my nights eating cheap pizza and watching a shit load of "West Wing" reruns. However, during those dark days I had a few bright spots which included my first forays into what I can today loosely call a career.

Stop one on the comics job express was my first trip to the MoCCA Festival in the city. Thanks to the referral of one of my former teachers in a summer science fiction story workshop, one of my first outreach ventures in the city was to meet with Tor editor David Hartwell. This wasn't an interview or anything, just a "Hey, David...won't you take this poor jobless kid to lunch?" David was supremely cool though and gave me a lot of good advice in general, but the more important discovery I made that day was randomly bumping into Tor assistant (and my former DC co-intern) Liz Gorinsky. Aside from helping put together some rad sci fi novels, Liz runs the volunteer program for New York's preeminent alternative comics festival and invited me to join in for that summer's festivities.

If you've been to MoCCA, you know how exciting the show can be for a comics reader of any stripe, and working on the show at even the most basic level is an energizing and enjoyable thing. Even mundane shit like setting up tables and selling tickets is fun at a good MoCCA, and the other folks that take part in the museum and the show are amongst the smartest and nicest I've met in the industry. But most important of all, I bought a ton of comics from some of my first Jeffrey Brown minis to a ton of printmaking-influenced comics from the PARTYKA crew and Ullman's short mini featuring true tales from the Golden Age of the NHL. High fives all around.

Shortly thereafter, I started pitching Alan David Doane on doing some writing for his recently relaunched Comic Book Galaxy site. I have no idea why I did this. I wasn't a journalism major in school (something several of my readers at Wizard and CBR have surmised over the years ;)) and at that time had no real interest in becoming a journalist or reviewer. Mostly I think I was looking for something to do with my time while I waited for more rejection e-mails to come in from publishers, and I'd seen a post somewhere at ADD was looking for people to contribute to the site.

All of this collided when "Old Timey Hockey Tales" became my first semi-amatuer published work in comics journalism. You can read it here. As you can see, the review wasn't particularly insightful or even well-written, but looking back I'm pretty sure I stand by what I said about the book (like I said, I couldn't find it to re-read for this post). That piece led to a handful of reviews and one live con report from the Detroit area alt comics fest Snap! (you can read most of my work for CBG here) as well as one disastrous pitch of a critique of event comics (the less said about that, the better).

Within a few weeks, I had to drop the CGB gig because I'd been brought on at Wizard after another "Why the hell not" round of e-mailing my resume around to try and make any kind of money. In the end, everything worked out surprisingly well considering my total lack of experience in journalism. I'm still not 100% sure how or why that is. What I do know is that I still feel extremely grateful that comics as a whole seemed to reach out to me right when I needed it. There were plenty of times during that year when I was sure I was going to return home to Michigan an abject failure, but thanks to folks like Liz, ADD and Joe Yanarella at Wizard, I ended up getting a chance to prove myself as a professional.

So I guess what I'm saying is "Thanks."

Ben
As I sit down to write this post, I’m somewhat surprised and interested to find that Neil Gaiman’s Sandman intimidates me as much in 2009 as it did in 2005 and every year prior, albeit in a somewhat different way.

In the last few posts in this series and generally when talking about my earliest comic book reading days, I think I’ve always made it pretty clear I was quite the meat and potatoes super hero guy. I’m not too ashamed to admit that before I had a peer group who exposed me to true indy comics and alternative non-capes and tights fare, I unironically thought Vertigo pretty much was indy comics and was pretty skeeved by it. Like I said during my 2003 entry, the idea of branching out beyond Marvel and DC scared me in that I figured that pretty much anything that wasn’t X-Men or Justice League was too heady for me and I’d feel dumb when I didn’t connect to the material.

Being full-time at Wizard, I began to be exposed to and expose myself to a gradually wider variety of comics via the access the company library gave me. I started small just checking out other super hero imprints I’d never explored like Valiant and WildStorm, but I did gradually begin to check out a variety of outside-the-box for me genre stuff such as 100 Bullets and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, discovering along the way both that I could appreciate comics that didn’t involve guys and gals in their underwear and also that doing so seemed to make me a better fan and professional in that I really started to get the full impact and capability of this medium I was dedicating my life to.

And yet still, of in the distance, Sandman loomed ominously.

Excepting perhaps Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, no comic book body of work had been hyped more for me than Sandman. The fact that I really didn’t care for DKR and enjoyed Watchmen, but really no more than something like Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s Avengers, made me leery of reading anything my more learned contemporaries regarded as the seminal stories of our time; I didn’t want to always be the one guy who didn’t get it.

Sandman grew in my head to some crazy threshold that should I cross it I would be passing into a comic world I could get lost in like Alice down the rabbit hole.

But I’m sure by this point you have figured out that I did in fact read Sandman in 2005, so I’ll cut the posturing and get down to it.

Long story short: I enjoyed Sandman. I got absorbed in it pretty quickly and didn’t slow down much plowing through the entire 75+ issue series in a couple months. There were some valleys (early on I wasn’t enthralled with The Doll’s House and some of the short stories collected in Fables and Reflections I found more hit than miss), however, particularly as I think back on it, there were far more peaks.

From the obvious department, yeah, I thought the Doctor Destiny story was one of the scariest fucking comics I’ve ever read, and pretty much every time Death shows up it’s sublime. I also really enjoyed A Game of You and Brief Lives, particularly the latter as I was fascinated by the expanded dynamic of the Endless and their resemblance at times to something like the Greek/Roman pantheon. Honestly though, I think my favorite Sandman story arc—and the only one I actually own—is one that Morpheus barely even has a presence in, that being Worlds’ End, Gaiman’s Canterbury Tales tribute (yes, I read Chaucer in college) in which he really gets to show off his story-telling and genre-shifting skills.

To go on a quick tangent, I actually ended up getting perhaps more into Lucifer, the psuedo-follow-up series to Sandman written by Mike Carey, featuring the retired Lord of Hell whom Gaiman introduced and used sparingly. That series took some of that old school mythological magic I was just talking about in reference to The Endless and really steps it up; Lucifer is quite underrated and I’d love to see Mike Carey write Son of Satan just because.

Getting back to Sandman, one last thing I will say is that I wasn’t always bowled over by the art, but as TJ and I have talked about in private, the art never really seemed to be the (pardon the pun) draw for the old school Vertigo titles that came before you had guys like Eduardo Risso on 100 Bullets or Mark Buckingham on Fables. With Sandman, the art is always competent and conveys exactly what Gaiman needs to say, and occasionally you get a standout performance from a Sam Kieth or Jill Thompson or Charles Vess, but for the most part you just get dependable pictures that get their point across.

So the reason I’m still a bit intimidated to write about Sandman four years later is that those three paragraphs you just read, well, that’s pretty much all I’ve got. I don’t really have any particularly deep musings on Sandman besides saying I liked it and being able to point out my favorite stories (and that it led me to Lucifer—the comic, not the embodiment of evil). I guess that shouldn’t be a really big deal, but there’s still that nervous fanboy in me who feels like I need to have more to say about comics as important as this.

But I don’t.

Ok, I will say this: I really really did get invested in Morpheus and the characters around him to the point where even though I knew the end of the series going in, I was still kinda on the edge of my seat as the issues wound down. Gaiman sure as hell knows how to tease out a character arc over the years like few others.

Honestly, Sandman probably wasn’t even my favorite comic that I read in 2005; I really did dig it and don’t want to undersell it, but I really dug Young Avengers and Green Lantern: Rebirth too. I do think Sandman was the most significant thing I read in 2005 though for a lot of the reasons I discussed above, mostly that I did conquer my great white whale and proved to myself I could do it. Despite still having that nagging feeling that I should have headier thoughts on the work, I recognized then after I finished and still do now that sometimes just enjoying a comic is enough.