Dear DC, Please Publish More Wonder Woman Comics Like This One

So the other day I was going through the July DC Comics solicitations for work, when I noticed that they're publishing an honest to goodness Wonder Woman comic for little girls that month: DC Comics Presents: Wonder Woman Adventures #1.

I couldn't help but comment on how this is pretty great...But it's also kind of strange.

This is a reprint containing four issues of the late '90s series Adventures in the DC Universe, which was an oddball little series. It launched in 1997 shortly after "Superman: The Animated Series" and its comic tie-in started expanding Bruce Timm's "Batman: The Animated Series" setup onscreen and off. But with no TV precedent set for a lot of the DC heroes, Adventures in the DC Universe ended up being a weird DCAU/DCU mash-up. When someone from the Batman or Superman shows appeared up in the series, they'd be consistent with their onscreen appearances. When anyone else showed up, they'd be consistent with whatever was going on in the DC Comics of the day.

This made for a few head-scratcher stories, such as issue #16 (which I have in my apartment somewhere) where Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and Green Arrow Connor Hawke starred in a kid-friendly spiritual sequel to Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' iconic "Speedy Does Heroin" story.

Luckily, Wonder Woman wasn't in one of her leather jacket phases then. So the comics being reprinted in July star pretty much the classic Wonder Woman – the character that also appears on any number of t-shirts, coffee mugs and Halloween costumes sold by Warner Bros. Consumer Products every year.

Now, when I first saw this book I had to put on my Graeme McMillan speculation hat and wonder exactly who greenlit this series and whether or not DC sees it as a way to test the waters on more WW material for girls. I really doubt that, because you figure they would have promoted this SOMEWHERE if its sales performance would at all impact future publishing launches. But wishful thinking has me hoping someone at DC is talking about doing this...because it would be SO radical if they actually did.

Pound for pound, "A Wonder Woman comic you can give to a little girl" is the #1 thing I hear from retailers/parents/comic readers-in-general when discussing obvious comic projects they'd like see. It is just such a basic "They should be doing this" observation. And I'm not one of those people who likes to go around the internet looking at daydream pitches for comics starring teen reporter Lois Lane or manga-esque Wonder Woman saying, "I'd buy that and it would do really well." Because I'm not sure I would, and I AM sure that those comics wouldn't sell huge numbers at launch. But you've got to think SOMEONE would buy a kid-friendly Wonder Woman comic at some point along the distribution/platform chain.

I mean, okay, posting the above picture of a totally adorable little girl in a Wonder Woman costume standing in front of a totally gross picture of Catwoman on all fours licking up milk is a cheap tug to the heartstrings on this issue. I know it is. And I don't want to make this a blog post decrying things like the New 52 Wonder Woman series or DC's Wonder Woman output in general. I've only read a few issues of the latest book, and I think that taking the gore of Greek myth and twisting it into the WW mythos with an eye towards horror is a perfectly valid direction for the character. It might be fun, I don't know!

But for real, that photo illustrates a valid point at the same time. Wonder Woman is used to sell products to little girls – often via their moms and grandmas who grew up on a kid-friendlier set of comic books and the TV show. And the comics that get put out are never consistent with that image. I don't make an absolute or moral judgement on that. I think there can be room for all sorts of Wonder Woman comics, and I'm happy to have DC continue to make them for fans of the "serious" superhero universe that comprises its main line. I just don't think that kind of product and a kids product are mutually exclusive concepts.

Speaking from personal experience, I know that my sister-in-law has literally dozens of Wonder Woman products around the house for herself and some for my niece LuLu as well. But not one of those products is a comic book. And LuLu LOVES comics! She goes to bed every night reading my brother's old Garfield collections, she devours Archie Digests, and this weekend she flipped when I brought here a stack of FCBD books including Peanuts, Tinkerbell, Yo Gabba Gabba! and The Simpsons. But until July comes, I'll have no Wonder Woman comics to give her, no matter how happy that would make her and her mom. The reason is simply because there's been almost no basic kid-friendly WW material created since the early 1980s.

In fact, the whole DC Comics Presents format was created to collect material that isn't substantial enough by volume to justify a full trade. And what that means is that DC doesn't actually have enough Wonder Woman material suitable for little girls that they can put out a trade collection. Actually, even the four issues in the upcoming reprint aren't ALL Wonder Woman stories. One is the series debut, which focused on the whole Justice League, and amongst the stories reprinted is a short Batman Vs. Poison Ivy piece. That makes for less than three single comic books starring Wonder Woman. Compare that to the fact that since DC started doing kid-friendly superhero books in the early '90s, they've published hundreds of Batman comics, hundreds of Teen Titans comics, over 100 Superman comics and over 100 Justice League comics.

While that's a little depressing in its own right, it also makes it harder for DC to place Wonder Woman as a character in the kid-friendly initiatives they've already got going. For example, recently the kids book publisher Capstone Press, whose Stone Arch imprint did a fine job teaming with Art Baltazar on a series of DC Pets chapter books, signed a deal to release library bound collections of DC kids comics for educational and mass market distribution. And as you can see from that link, all the 100+ issue franchises I mentioned above have entries in Capstone's launch scheme. Wonder Woman doesn't.

But all hope is not lost!! Like I said, I think DC publishing even this one mini collection is a very positive step and something we should give them a collective internet high five for. And even though there are scarcely any more Wonder Woman comics from recent years to represent (ignoring the question of new books for little girls), I think there are just enough issues around for them to do another collection like the one shipping in July. If you take the comics from the Justice League Unlimited series (which I remember Adam Beechen doing a fine job on back in the day) that focus on Wonder Woman in total, you'd have the promising-looking issue above as well as this one with Deadman, this one with the Royal Flush Gang and this one with DC's Western heroes. That's not quite as strong a start as Wonder Woman meeting Catwoman or Supergirl, but I think it's enough to make for a DC Comics Presents: Wonder Woman Adventures #2.

And hey, two issues of DC Comics Presents: Wonder Woman Adventures is practically the same thing as two Capstone Wonder Woman library collections. See what I just did there? Sure, it wouldn't mean that hundreds of thousands of little girls would suddenly know the joy of having their own awesome superhero comics to go with their Halloween costume, but it would at least ensure the character had the same chance of finding some readers in a market where the big boys of the DCU already have a head start.

After that, who knows? I know that the DC kids comics are at least 80% based on current animated series, so asking for an ongoing Wonder Woman comic out of the blue is a stretch. But if the publisher wants a shot at reaching the same little girls whose nerdy parents make them clothes out of this kind of fabric, they've got to have more material suitable for that age group to play with. It has to start somewhere. Maybe it'll start in July.

Let's Get New: Kiel's Free Comic Book Day 2012

What it is! I'm surprised to say that this is the fourth year – yes one, two, three, FOUR – that I've written up my Free Comic Book Day experience here on the Cool Kids Table. As you're probably well aware, I'm a big proponent of the annual industry promotion both as outreach to new customers and a celebration of the old school ones (read more from me on this here).

Like last year, I threw together a video chronicling my stops for your viewing "enjoyment," but my goal for this year's event was to try and stop at as many different Chicago area locations that I HAVEN'T ever been to in order to expand my base of shops where I can pick up stuff and chat up all the amazing folks who dedicate their careers to feeding my funnybook addiction. With that in mind, I had a few other thoughts outside the clip reel above to share on what I was up to. Let's get crackin!

Sadly, my usually stalwart FCBD companion Kegmeister was out of commission this year for a very good reason (he was super, super, super, super, DUPER hung over and couldn't get up at 11:00). But it was still a blast to start my day at the grand opening of acclaimed kids cartoonist Art Baltazar's own comic shop – Aw Yeah, Comics – just north of my place in the suburb town of Skokie. I'd actually heard the store was opening a few weeks back when I traveled to the UPS store in downtown Skokie to mail back the video camera CBR used for C2E2 to Uncle Jonah in LA. As I was filling out the address label, the guy who worked there saw "Comic Book Resources" and just excitedly launched into a "You know they're opening a comic shop right across the street!" conversation. I'd made a mental note then to come back and investigate, but when I heard it was Art's store, that cemented it.

As you can tell by some of the crowd shots in the video and the two cosplayers who were in attendance, the grand opening of the shop had a really festive atmosphere (there was even cake and hot dogs!). But more than that, the great thing about Aw Yeah, Comics was how it was essentially built to be the kind of store parents will bring their kids to. Art painted bright, primary colored murals across the various walls of the store, and aside from a real killer kids comics section and the standard wall of new floppy releases, the shop also boasts a nice toy aisle with crazy amounts of action figures from Marvel, DC, Star Wars and the like. That's got to be a boon to a small business in a high-foot traffic area like the main street in Skokie.

As always, Art and his partner in crime Franco had a long line of parents, kids and fanboys waiting to get free sketches and signed copies of the pair's Superman Family Adventure books. I've got to admit, I was incredibly bummed to hear that DC was pulling the plug on their Tiny Titans effort – perhaps THE definitive kids comic of the past ten years with a lot of young fans – in favor of the Super book, but Art spoke with a lot of enthusiasm about the new project and the crazy guest stars that will appear (including the Tiny Titans).

Aside from getting to chat the guys up, I also nabbed a Kid Devil sketch, which has been a favorite character for my girlfriend Jami and I since meeting one of Art and Franco's young fans at the first C2E2.

But yeah, I definitely plan on heading back to Aw Yeah, Comics before too long.

My second stop on the FCBD tour was Evil Squirrel Comics in Rogers Park. I'd actually been to the shop once before as it was the closest Chicago store that carried my friend Sam Humphries self-published series Sacrifice (Where's issue #4, bro?), and I enjoyed the visit. Though, unsurprisingly, there were a lot more folks filling up the shop this time. Plenty of kids were in attendance, but this was the first time I'd gotten a feeling for Evil Squirrel's core customer base as a lot of dudes there seemed to know each other and were chilling in the all ages-esque reading lounge that makes up the store's bay window area. Tucked away next to an underground theater and some other kind of bohemian-looking shops and such, this seems like it'd be a fun store to go to each week if you were nearby.

Oh, and I should mention that I tried to buy some comics at the shops I hit up for the first/second time on this trip. Here, I got a copy of James Robinson and Nicola Scott's new Earth-2 series, which I think has some legs.

I've been hearing that Third Coast Comics in Edgewater was a really nice store for a few years now, so I was psyched to pencil it in on my tour this year. The place did not disappoint. In a way, this felt like a more established version of the store Evil Squirrel (which I believe has been open for a year) is working to be. Third Coast had a nice sitting area up front with a few local artists plying mini comics and prints and a big section of high-end art and hardcover comics (flipped through Womanthology for the first time in person here) as well as a deep local mini comics rack.

In the second, "creator with a Free Comic in distribution" sighting of the day, DC inker Christian Alamy was on hand signing books for a few folks. He was having a very intense-sounding discussion with a fan. At least I think it was intense. They were speaking French, so maybe it just sounded that way to me. Either way, I chatted up a mom who was picking up free Sonic The Hedgehog and buying new Scooby-Doo for her son. Then I bought a copy of Saga #2 and headed out. Not to sound like a broken record on all these shops, but I'm totally coming back to Third Coast again.

I've had people I've told about my multi-shop FCBD excursions shocked there are so many stores I can hit up in one day. But what's really crazy is that if I only went to Graham Crackers comics locations, it'd still take me all day. This year, I hit a different Graham Crackers location than I'd ever been to: their Edgewater location.

While each location in the chain has its own particulars, all the Graham Crackers I've been to really do feel like part of a chain – similar set up and even shelves and what not. But they're always run by very friendly staff and seem to be full of folks. One thing I noted this year (and I think MAYBE you can tell this in the video above) is that for the DC New 52 FCBD special, Graham Crackers had special covers printed for their chain with the store logo on the cover rather than the traditional "White spot for mailing labels" that most shops get. Being a big account with Diamond has its perks, huh?

For the second half of my trip, I ended up hitting shops I'm more familiar with. Alley Cat Comics in Andersonville is a relatively new store (less than a year), though since I've got a friend in the area, I've been in a few times. As you can tell by the video, the store is situated off the main street in the very busy neighborhood by way of a long alley next to a Potbelly Sandwich shop. I'd often wondered whether being set off only by some (very classy) iron lattice sign work and a sandwich chalk board on the street meant that Alley Cat had trouble getting foot traffic. But it sure as hell didn't seem like that when I stopped by Saturday.

There were a ton of people in the store whose best fixture to my mind is a very well-curated kids comics section (only place in town I've found copies of Princeless), and the manager was saying to a regular that it was even crazier earlier in the day. Aside from picking up some free books, I also dipped into the $0.50 bin at the shop and got Stephen Platt's final issue of Moon Knight from the '90s (FACT: I am an unashamed fan of both that artist and that character). Solid!

Second to last for the day was foundational Chicago comic shop...um...Chicago Comics (sorry, I'm too tired to come up with a more clever transition). I've written about the pleasures of this very well stocked shop in the past, so I'll just add here that you should watch the video above to see how many people were coming in to ask the staff behind the counter for their three FCBD book picks. And the guys working were pretty hilarious in their calling out for comic requests.

Finally, I wrapped the day at my regular Wednesday stomping grounds of Challengers Comics + Conversation. As in year's past, Patrick and Dal tapped some of the local cartoonists with books available on the day to do a signing. This time out it was Chris Mitten signing Oni's Bad Medicine and half of the Four-Star Studios team in Tim Seeley and Mike Norton (each of whom had two upcoming series previewed in Images releases with Witchblade, The Atomics and their team-up series Revival. Early in the day, I saw on Twitter that Challengers had a line going out the door for people showing up, and surprisingly, they still had free books when I got there shortly before the signing ended around 6:00. I was witness to Seeley signing the last two copies of Witchblade in stock as Mitten had maybe just a dozen Bad Medicines left. So yeah, Challengers orders just the right amount of free books, it seems.

Crazily, there were a few more stores I wanted to hit on Saturday that I just couldn't get to including two of my regular shops in Dark Tower Comics and Variety Comics, and I'm pretty bummed I didn't get to check out G-Mart Comics for the first time. But there'll be plenty of time on FCBD 2013 to hit them up. Hell, I think I'll end up doing it before then.

Grocery Store Comics: "General Mills Presents: Justice League" #1: "Unstoppable Forces"

[You may not always realize it, but there are a number of random print comics on sale at general retail outlets across America on any given week. A lot of them are for kids. Whenever Kiel comes across such a comic at a grocery store, a stop n' gulp, a newsstand or anywhere else they sell Doritos, he buys it. This column is the place where he rambles about those purchases.

As always, reviews on The CKT should NOT be considered any of the following things: The opinion of anyone who works at DC or Marvel. Brief. Smart. Entertaining. Insightful. Spoiler-free. Or vaguely resembling something resembling actual comics criticism. We cool? - KP]


General Mills Presents: Justice League #1: Unstoppable Forces
DC Comics
Written By Scott Beatty
Art By Christian Duce
Free With Cereal...my box of Trix cost $3.99
Website Here

Hey! An actual comic from an actual grocery store!

When I was a kid, I LOVED it any time DC or Marvel would offer some throwaway comic as a publicity stunt whether it be mailaway offerings on the back of pizza boxes or random Toys R' Us handouts. So when I heard that DC was working up a handful of Justice League one-shots to stuff in cereal boxes as the latest in DC Entertainment's attempts to brand build with little kids (never forget attempt #1), I was all for it. I know a lot of people would write this kind of thing off as the most crass of marketing ploys, but I know from experience that little things like this can be both entertaining for certain kids and foster a deeper love of comics in the chase to nab the books up if not the execution of the story on the page.

But to my mind, for the actual comics of one of these promotions to actually work they need to accomplish two basic goals: some solid action comic entertainment value (not just basic competency but some honest-to-goodness storytelling thrills) and that indefinable quality that makes these characters seem radical in the eyes of America's eight-year-olds. And this installment of the digest-size giveaways doesn't really succeed on either account.

While I've always found Scott Beatty's work perfectly serviceable in general and have honestly dug a lot of his more YA-ish work (Batgirl: Year One and Son of Vulcan both come to mind), his script here doesn't ever cohere in a way that overcomes its structural flaws. Setting aside the broad plotholes you'd be willing to write off for this kind of thing (the story opens with the League burying the Shaggy Man under a mountain and then forgetting about the comatose villain for two years while an entire city is built atop his resting place), the arc of the whole comic falls flat. The Shaggy Man is put down, he breaks out, and then the League finds a slightly better way to put him down. It's basic stuff, made even more undramatic by some awkward storytelling moments both in dialogue and the art.

Speaking of which, I have never seen Duce's name or work around before, but from the look of it, the artist is on his first full gig here. Not only does his cartooning embody the sameness of most licensing art, his storytelling has some major hiccups in the fight scenes in particular. There's got to be room for growth with someone this new, but woof...not an auspicious start.

But hey, there are a few better points on the "make these characters seem rad" front. Starting with the inarguable fun of cut-out Batman masks on the back of the cereal box:


Sure, this isn't part of the comic in question, but I think this cheap but fun part of the promotion points to something about how DC has approached this kind of thing. As I'm sure you can tell, the image above isn't from the actual box of cereal I bought. But as far as I can tell, EVERY box that contained a Justice League mini had a Batman mask on the back – nothing for the Flash of GL even.

If nothing else, DC as a corporate entity gets that Batman is a bad ass to everyone. They won that battle sometime around 1989, and the sentiment is as powerful now amongst general audiences as it's ever been probably. So the challenge here becomes making the the rest of their properties (God, I hate referring to characters like that, but in a product like this what the hell else can you call them?) seem as cool as the Dark Knight. If DC Comics is really going to compete as DC Entertainment the way Warner Bros. wants them to, their recently rebranded "Big Four" of Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Flash need to be able to hold their own in t-shirt sales against Captain America, Hulk, Thor and Iron Man at least if not Spider-Man and Wolverine to boot.

So it seems to reason that if this giveaway is going to justify its cost in the eyes of DCE, the characters should all get their due on the page in one way or another. And this comic almost pulls some of that off. Batman is uber-prepared and flies a jet. Superman can punch out anything. Green Lantern makes some fun, goofy stuff with his ring (and some inexplicable stuff...do kids think big metal spikes are cool?). Flash even finds a few decent moments in creating whirlwinds, though I'm not sure how awesome it is to declare yourself "faster than a text."

But Aquaman and Wonder Woman? Holy shit do they get the shaft here. The King of the Seas spends most of his page time running himself down for having lame superpowers. Honest to God, there's a whole page where he stands there and just complains about not being useful on dry land to which Batman replies "You're a last line of defense." And poor Wonder Woman's plane seems cooler than here in this thing. She's only in about five panels and has two lines of dialogue. I guess little girls don't eat cereal anymore?

Overall, I'm probably being too harsh on something that was put together under a handful of content restraints and on a tight budget/deadline, but I'd like to think that a comic with hundreds of thousands of copies in print which will doubtlessly land in the hands of thousands of kids would put a better foot forward.

I'd still like to read Paul Tobin and Derec Donovan's attempt at one of these as they were the creative team on this I thought would do the best job at the outset, but I'm not due for more cereal pickups for a while. Let me know if you find one, huh?

LuLu Phegley's First Comic

This is my niece LuLu.

LuLu is four, so she can't quite read yet beyond occasionally spelling "MOM" or "OWL" and somehow knowing which letters form to make "Spongebob Squarepants" on the TV's digital guide. But she loves books and magazines and anything with pictures that's made out of paper. She'll cart her copy of "Olivia" around the house with here and take toy catalogues that come in the mail to bed and generally wants to be read to every 38 seconds or so.

I went home to Flint last week for a few days where I discovered my older brother – being the rad dad that he is – had pulled our old "Calvin & Hobbes" collections out of the basement and given them to LuLu. Particularly, she seemed to have Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat or Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" with her whenever I'd turn around.


Two things would happen whenever she was reading these books. 1) LuLu would surmise what was going on from the pictures alone and then run up to me to declare "Calvin ate something yucky!" or 2) LuLu would laugh hysterically at the pages for a few moments and then turn and go, "Uncle Kiel, WHAT ARE THEY DOING?" It was pretty great.

LuLu is also starting to actually draw things of late after that super long period where kids just rub crayons in chaotic fashion all over whichever piece of paper you give them. She's very fond of drawing spiders right now, though sometimes they have nine or eleven legs. At some point in the weekend, she came up and handed me the following drawing, and it kind of blew my mind a little:


COMICS! AHHHHHHHHH!

What a strange, powerful, invisible, awesome art form we follow that a little girl who can't write out a word with two syllables can grok the core of what it takes to make a little comic. It's like the art contains a low level signal that's constantly convincing your brain that these people and bubbles really exist in their own reality made up of so much more than lines and paper and madness. I tell you, there are days I really need to be reminded of how wonderful this stuff is and why I keep doing the job I do. Thanks, LuLu.

Grocery Store Comics: "Phineas And Ferb Holiday Special 2010"

[You may not always realize it, but there are a number of random print comics on sale at general retail outlets across America on any given week. A lot of them are for kids. Whenever Kiel comes across such a comic at a grocery store, a stop n' gulp, a newsstand or anywhere else they sell Doritos, he buys it. This column is the place where he rambles about those purchases.

As always, reviews on The CKT should NOT be considered any of the following things: The opinion of anyone who works at DC or Marvel. Brief. Smart. Entertaining. Insightful. Spoiler-free. Or vaguely resembling something resembling actual comics criticism. We cool? - KP]


Phineas And Ferb: Holiday 2010
Disney Publishing Worldwide
Written & Drawn by Various
$9.99
Website Here

Purchased At: Walgreen's Drug Store, Irving Park Rd., Chicago, IL

So to start out for anyone who doesn't know – because I didn't know exactly what this was until I bought the above magazine – "Phineas And Ferb" is a pretty popular cartoon show that Disney produces for their Disney XD cable channel. I mean, it's a big deal in that way that every few years some show comes along where they make a ton of cash selling alarm clocks and Nintendo game and tooth brushes with the characters on them, and Tina Fey does a voice for an episode or whatever. Maybe if you have kids you know this?

Anyway, I picked up this holiday special when it was, you know, the holidays, but I think they actually still have copies at the drug store up the street from my apartment. The cover boasts "9 Exclusive Comic Stories!" which is what caught my eye, and those pages are about evenly split with a bunch of regular kiddie magazine stuff like puzzles, cutouts and little features centering on screencaps from the show. But the comics themselves I found interesting for two reasons.

First of all, one of the head editors on this is Steve Behling – longtime editor of the comics in the late lamented Disney Adventures digest magazine. I always remember Behling's name not just because he put together some fine comics in that previous gig including work from Art Baltazar, Matt Feazel and the very first Roger Langridge Muppets comics but also because when I first moved to New York I applied for a job as his assistant at United Media like 14 times only to be thwarted by pretty tough HR woman. Behling is credited here as co-executive editor of the whole Phineas And Ferb package, and Rob Tokar – who's got a pretty wild mix of credits on Comic Vine ranging from '90s Marvel series like a Northstar mini to Brandon Graham's King City – served as Comics Editor. Really great to see people who know their stuff finding work on a comics-focused project like this.

The second really noteworthy thing out the gate is the fact that the comics pages really stand out, thanks largely to their design simplicity. A lot of the text and image features in the mag are clip-art heavy and somewhat indistinguishable from the advertisements. So when the comic show up – often at five to nine pages at a clip – their clean white gutters make them pop. Flipping through, that content feels like its both the meat of the package and the main event content-wise.


Beyond that, the actual strips are a mixed bag. I watched a few episodes of "Phineas And Ferb" on Netflix before I wrote this, and from what I gather, the whole series follows a pretty strict formula from show-to-show. Each time out, the titular step brother leads launch an improbably crazy project that takes up one summer – building a rollercoaster in their backyard or (in these comics) throwing their pet platypus Perry a birthday party complete with carnival games. In the process, a few things always happen: their sister tries to rat them out to mom unsuccessfully, they're confronted by an adult who asks "Aren't you a little young to be doing X?" to which Phineas replies "Yes, yes we are" and most wackily, Perry always runs off to put on a fedora and fight a mad scientist who's built some tangential plot-point generating machine with the suffix "-inator" attached to its functional name.

If that sounds extremely repetitive, it feels that way watching the show too. I mean, I only saw two episodes, and I got the formula down pat real quick. Hitting those many specific notes in a few comics pages AND matching the simple and pretty flat geometric character designs makes crafting a unique comics story pretty tough. There's nothing here that a kid who likes the show wouldn't instantly recognize as being "on model" but there's also nothing that leaves a big mark on you. I recognize a lot of the creators who worked on the strips including former Justice League Adventures artist Min S. Ku and frequent DC and Disney kids comics artist Eric Jones (not sure if the Scott Peterson credited as writer is the former WildStorm editor or a TV show staffer), but I saw very little from the work here of their personal cartooning flourishes. Some things stand out – a cartoon show within the context of one strip lets Jones get loose one some character doodling for example – but overall I guess my feeling is that these comics don't feel comics specific enough. The stories try a bit too hard to be exactly like the show – one even attempts one of the cartoon's song sequences with a panel of dancing kids accompanied by some floating musical notation – rather than tweaking the premise for the printed page. A little play breaking the Phineas and Ferb threads from the Perry secret agent stuff as separate stories doesn't quite cut it.


But hey...with the names involved here, I'm sure there's room for growth if this particular brand of comic keeps going a while. I originally thought this holiday special was a one-off, but reading the issue, a lot of the text features push kids hard to subscribe to a quarterly iteration (which I think launched this month, though no copies were at Walgreen's). In fact, it looks like Disney Publishing is ramping up for a few different kinds of these $10 comic-heavy magazines under the direction of Behling and his Co-Executive Editor Amy Weingartner including a "Thor" movie tie-in I just picked up and I believe those Pixar magazines that were recently announced. Marvel Editorial provided the comics for the former, but I'm not sure who's going to be putting together the new Cars 2 stuff after they run out of Boom! reprint stuff. Either way, I'm happy to see more kids comics hitting the once mighty general retail market and hope Disney keeps this stuff up for a while.

Kiel & Kegmeister's Free Comic Book Day Video Extravaganza 2011

We've got a brief break in "Smallville Week" right now to bring you my annual Free Comic Book Day round up. As you guys may remember from my marathon shopping spree last year and the 2009 edition featuring my bro Kegmeister, I'm a big supporter of FCBD as an event and comics retail in general. This year, I thought I'd switch things up from the regular diary post and took a little video camera with me to try and capture some of the crowds and folks I saw along the way while hitting up seven Chicago comics retailers. I'm pretty much awful at camera work AND editing, but the song I used in this thing is pretty choice, so I hope you'll watch:

Big thanks to all the shops that were open and friendly and holding big events during the day including my own regular shop Challenger's, Dark Tower Comics, Comic Vault, Chicago Comics and Graham Crackers at Lincoln Park. Also props to creators Jonathan Hickman, Chris Burnham, Hilary Barta, Chris Mitten, Mike Norton and Matt Anderson for kicking it all day and making sketches for the kids and generally being rad.

Comics, you guys!!!!

So It Looks Like I Have A New Professor...Named GENE YANG

So I don't know if our regular readers recall a few months back when I blogged about cartoonist and American Born Chinese creator Gene Yang coming to my graduate program at Hamline University and pretty much blowing everyone away with his presentation on comics and sequential narrative. It turns out the esteemed Mr. Yang impressed the Dean at school so much that she's turned right around and hired him on as a professor in my program – an MFA in Writing For Children.

This is kind of crazy to me. To be perfectly honest, one of the motivating factors for me getting into the Hamline program was to finally get something on my professional resume that DIDN'T involve comics. Still, I'm never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, particularly one that gives me the opportunity to study with a creator with chops like Gene's. This is a very small world sometimes.

In any event...welcome to Hamline, Gene! Prepare yourself for the blistering cold of the Twin Cities for ten days out of the year!

That Time Gene Yang Came To My Grad School And Blew Everyone's Mind

So I think I mentioned this once before on the blog, but I just started making my way towards a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing For Children at St. Paul's Hamline University. And when I say "just started" I mean my first contact of any kind with any person or work connected to school was a ten-day intensive residency earlier this month. In fact, "intense" is a pretty good word for the experience as a whole. When I arrived in the Twin Cities, my plan for absolutely no comics work on the week was crushed when Marvel named Axel Alonso Editor-in-Chief. Meanwhile, they were warning us about the cold weather with phrases like "flesh can freeze in seconds."

BUT, one crazy twist to my first residency at Hamline that made me feel right at home was that one of our required readings coming into the workshop week was Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. And – if you couldn't guess by the post title – Yang played guest lecturer to talk about the creation of the book and generally blow the minds of everyone in attendance.


Think of it this way: the crew that works for and attends my Masters program write kids books for a living (or are trying to). That includes classic picture books, chapter books, and novels that range from zany middle grade and tween tales on through some provocative and smart Young Adult stuff. But the majority of these people had ZERO experience with comics before reading Yang's book. So much so that "comics" didn't even break into the vocabulary for a lot of the folks. The writers at the school were introduced to our medium (if they'd been introduced to it at all) through the term and category of "graphic novel" which might not sound like too big a distinction but really stood out as the week went on.

I mean, there were a few comic woks that were familiar to members of the residency – all of them produced and promoted through the lens of the book industry. I heard more than a few people mention David Small's Stitches. Everyone was passingly familiar with what Bone is. Neil Gaiman is a rock star and a half in this world for reasons other than comics, but I think most people knows he wrote them before blowing up as a novelist. But most importantly like I said, anyone at least partially interested in kids book publishing these days understands that graphic novels have spent the past few years as the super hot category. They think of what we do as the "cool new thing" in general and want to know more about it even when they're a bit confused by it.

Being the resident "comics guy" in the group (a position I happily played up perhaps too much by weeks end), I fielded a lot of questions and comments through out the week because of that. Common things I heard:

"I was trying to read this, but some times I was confused on what I was supposed to be looking at. Am I following the pictures? Do I read the text first?"

"So the difference between a comic and a graphic novel, what is that? A comic is silly, but a graphic novel is like a real book, right?"

"I'm really interested in writing a graphic novel myself. How would I go about doing that?"

I don't mention these as a put down to any of the supremely intelligent and creative people who I learned a whole hell of a lot from about writing in those ten days. I just wanted to express how strange it was to be in a position where I'm talking about the thing I spend my entire working day talking about but where I can't assume any of the basic knowledge or terminology I rely on. So it was pretty tough at times for me to try and speak on comics without sounding super jargony or super nerdy or both.


Luckily, Gene Yang is the straight up Jedi Master of talking comics in front of book people. I can't imagine how many times he's had to talk about ABC in front of librarians or school groups or teachers or traditional YA writers, but his behind the scenes breakdown of what cultural and visual influences shaped the book was as engaging and accessible and well rehearsed as any talk on comics I've ever seen (and I've seen art spiegelman speak on comics like four times so I feel pretty confident saying that Yang was on his #%@&!ing GAME).

The real defining moment of the whole experience was Yang's breakdown of Cousin Chin-Kee, the highly over-the-top caricature of Chinese stereotypes who plays a central role in ABC's story. He took a lot of time to explain the cultural references that influenced Chin-Kee's creation from early racist political cartoons about Chinese immigrants and railroad workers to Long Duck Dong on through to the recent response to/debate over the sudden popularity of "American Idol" reject William Hung. Over the days following his speech, I heard several classmates confess that they'd initially been put off by American Born Chinese because they felt uncomfortable with Chin-Kee's role in the story until they heard Yang place the satirical elements of the caricature in context. The act of cartooning as satire and commentary rather than just being broad stereotyped comedy hadn't even occurred to them.

And on a nuts and bolts craft level, there were so many ideas about how comics are made that came out and caught the audience totally by surprise. The idea that Yang would script pages before drawing was revelatory for some. Others asked about why someone else would color his work for him. And even the briefest mention of the punk rock respect comics self-publishers get had people looking around going "Whaaaaaaa?"

[I should note that the kind of "THAT'S how they do it?" experience hit me in the reverse sense later in the week as we discussed the ins and outs of picture book creation. I had to have it explained to me several times that the authors and illustrators of something like 95% of picture books have no creative interaction or collaboration. You write some words, you send it to a publisher, and they get it drawn by someone. In fact, pitching picture books as a writer/artist team is really frowned upon...which is INSANE to me still today. One professor told us a story about a woman who wrote a picture book manuscript meaning for the characters to be two children, but the illustrator decided to make them cats, and that was that. Writers in comics would go apeshit if they experienced that lack of control, which is saying something.]

Finally when Yang read his NY Times Magazine strip turned First Second graphic novel Prime Baby and his incoming Level Up, I began to see people really "get" what comics could offer on their own as a medium. The rhythm of his in-panel jokes, the power his page turns held and the raw emotional information given off by his cartooning had everyone completely pumped by lecture's end. In fact, for the rest of the week I don't think I heard one person refer to Yang without some variation of "And Oh My God...Gene Yang!" being uttered.


Okay...so why the hell am I doing all this anecdotal blathering on my comics blog? I guess partially I just wanted to illustrate for any comics folks out there how big the gulf between what we assume and understand about the medium and what even the most literate and engaged "general audiences" think about comics. Even a decade or so into the graphic novel book store boom, our status amongst readers and publishing professionals is still very new and not at all assured in a long term sense. Just because Comics Project X earned Major Accolade Y recently doesn't mean that the book publishing world will continue to find comics a necessary part of their business model.

And it would be TERRIBLE at this point to lose the interest and resources of that market. Even with book stores in general in rotten shape, the kinds of material that have a chance in those outlets but have such a harder time in the Direct Market can have a fighting chance at big publishers. And while we all know that artists looking to work in that segment of publishing should know how that game is played, I think it's of equal importance for us core comics folk to reach out to traditional book people and open channels of discussion on why comics are rad.

I've been thinking a lot about how to do this lately in terms of my writing about comics here and at CBR as well as my work in the Hamline MFA program. As a first step on the latter front, I put together a suggested reading list for my classmates and profs at the end of residency which included ten comics aimed at the kids-to-YA market and five more from the literary publishing spehere. I won't post all the descriptions and stuff I gave the Hamline crew, but the books I suggested were:

1. Blankets by Craig Thompson
2. The Comics of Hope Larson
3. Owly by Andy Runton
4. Smile by Raina Telgemeier
5. Selections From The TOON Books Line Edited By Francoise Mouly
6. Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi
7. Mouse Guard by David Petersen
8. Saltwater Taffy: The Seaside Adventures of Jack And Benny by Matthew Loux
9. Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane by Sean McKeever, Takeshi Miyazawa & David Hahn
10. Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

1. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth by Chris Ware
2. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
3. It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken by Seth
4. Wilson by Daniel Clowes
5. Love & Rockets by Los Bros. Hernandez

Was there anything I missed? I will say that so far, my playing comics pusherman seems to be working as thanks to the help of my comics-literate classmate Peter Pearson, some of the folks on the staff went right out and bought Blankets, and my advisor for the semester – the super awesome Anne Ursu – got Understanding Comics on my recommendation the week we were at school.

In any event, let me know what you think in general in the comments, and I'm sure we'll swing back around to this topic sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I'm blogging about my grad writing and reviewing a metric ton of kid lit at my Rockopolis blog if you're interested.

[Note: Props to my rad classmate Tracy Pagel Wells for snapping the shots of Yang lecturing at Hamline.]

I'll Buy That For A Dollar?: Jonny Quest #10

Jonny Quest #10 (Comico)
March 1987
Willaim Messner-Loebs (W)/Marc Hempel & Mark Wheatley (A)

My high school Shakespeare class totally ruined this issue of Jonny Quest for me.

It's like this. I've seen a lot of Shakespeare performed, and I've "acted" in a little bit of Shakespeare and most importantly I've read a ton of Shakespeare's plays in an academic setting, but I've never really dug Shakespeare like some folks do. But I took this class in high school in Shakespeare. I don't know why but it had something to do with having a semester spot open after Debate or wanting to get out of Psychology or something. Really it was a good excuse to act like this.

But I did read a lot of the plays in that class and remembered a few things about some. Mostly I remember that in a world of Shakespeare plays I found to be a real drag, the histories were the draggiest. And one of those draggy histories was "Richard III," of which I also remember the fact that the play begins with the titular character – a fugly hunchback of an evil king – explaining how because he is in fact fugly and a hunchback, he's decided to be super evil. And I remember that clearly because we also talked about how even with plays history(ies) gets written by the winners. And Richard lost big time. So Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard isn't accurate at all. He wrote what the powers wanted him to. Sure, there's a lot more to it, and some of you probably know way more about the War of the Roses than me (one half a semester of English 301 at college ain't much), but the end lesson I picked up is the same: Shakespeare Wrote For Money.

So Jonny Quest #10, right? I buy it for a buck because I'd herd the Comico version was a hoot and because Dave Stevens did some covers (not this one...bummer). And right there on page one, boy adventurer Jonny Quest is seeing "Richard III" performed in England. And oooooooooo...Jonny hates that mean old king! What a rotten fink he must have been, etc etc, And then the whole Quest gang goes backstage to talk to the actor portraying Richard, who also just happens to be a hard on his luck scientist who moonlights as a Shakespearean actor and who also really needs Dr. Quest's advice on his new "time viewing machine" which must be a moneymaking hit or he'll lose his massive English estate which he knows he really owns but whose deed bequeathing it to his family went missing hundreds of years ago. Following me still? So back at the estate, the science actor shows Jonny and Hadji how his machine's TV screen can look back in time...even to the era of Richard III. The ZAP! The machine blows up in their faces! Everyone is OK, but the next morning Jonny and Hadji mysteriously wake up in 1485.

I'm sure you see where this is going. While in the past, Jonny befriends Richard and sees he's not a bad dude. Plus, he helps the Kind hide the deed to the manor that our boy the stage scientist lives in. Plus, Hadji hypnotizes a horse. Then they all flash back to the modern day where Jonny both uncovers the deed in the Tower of London and teaches everyone a valuable lesson about that dick of a liar Bill Shakespeare. I know it all sounds a little uselessly complicated, but in the hands of Messner-Loebs the script moves along and gives all the information with some kicking and punching and intrigue too, and Hempel and Wheatley do a really solid job on the art. Their storytelling chops were very strong even this early in their careers, plus their linework held some sharp, distinctive character where most licensed cartoon titles look stiff and on model. From a basic craft standpoint, there are some guys who really know how to put a solid comic book together, and it shows.

In that, judging the comics qualities really comes down to how the story works in a broader sense. Is it fun? Is it exciting? Does it pull together its weird, disparate comic book adventurey elements into something resembling a worthwhile 15 minutes of reading? On all of these, I've got to say, "No" for two reasons. First of all, regardless of my 17-year-old's remembrance of "Richard III's" historical inaccuracies, those opening pages with Jonny's intense dislike of Richard's character just scream "there's a lesson coming" in a heavy-handed and anti-climactic way. I honestly don't know if Comico produced this direct market-only series with kids in mind or if they just kept the book kid friendly to appeal to the growing nostalgists who comprised it's real audience, but the didactic elements of the plot cry "written for little kids" in the way that people say it as an insult. I'd like to think that even as an eleven-year-old I'd have seen the "Richard's really all right" twist coming, but even if that's giving little me too much credit, I know I wouldn't have been shocked or excited by the outcome.

And the second reason the issue fails for me is because it's an ill fit for Jonny Quest. Watching the original episodes of the Hanna Barbera series on reruns as a kid, the killer hook to "Jonny Quest" was its gonzo pulp adventure tone. From the big brass theme song and spider robot footage that drove its addictive opening to the story lines involving escape from mad scientists' laboratories and shotgun shootouts. It was a kid's version of "Dr. No" and a precursor to "Indiana Jones." The time travel and English kings don't seem to match the milieu the character was created for. This is Peabody and Sherman territory, and it feels more like a fantasy bent despite its being written off by pseudo-science. Jonny Quest #10 would never have made it as an episode of the show, and here that is a very, very bad thing.

So Jonny Quest #10? Worth a dollar? Nah, not really. Maybe if I saw an issue with a sweet Stevens cover, I'd pick up another, but otherwise I'm continuing to flip.

Also, the important lesson of this post: if you're reading something to do with Richard the Third, don't read "Richard III" or Jonny Quest #10. Read The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck. That book made me cry, you guys.