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.]

'Force Works' Was Ahead Of Its Time

Admission: I can't stop reading Force Works comics.


Super serial.

For anyone who doesn't know, Force Works was a Marvel team book published between 1994 and 1996 that was ostensibly a continuation of the publisher's slowly dying Avengers West Coast title with a '90s coat of paint. I'm sure even the most ardent fans don't consider the series much beyond a a footnote in Iron Man history, but the book is kind of notable for being one of the first major American efforts by reigning superhero sci-fi scribes Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (AKA "DnA").

I don't have a tremendous amount of fanboy nostalgia for the book, though I did initially come to the series as a seventh grader. That Halloween, I went trick or treating at a buddy's neighborhood, and one of the houses there was owned by someone who must've had a comic shop because instead of Snickers or candy corn, they were passing out comics. Once the night ended, a bunch of the kids there passed their comics to me because...well, because I was that kid. So I ended up walking home with a few random things like Malibu's Deep Space Nine series and the first issues of Marvels "Marvel Action Hour" tie-ins, which were 22-page adaptations of the Iron Man and Fantastic Four cartoons in syndication – the former of which inexplicably featured Force Works prominently.

Over the rest of middle school, I watched that TV series (even though it ran at 8:00 AM on Saturday in front of a Canadian "Saved By The Bell" ripoff called "Boogie's Diner") start to finish because...well, because I was that kid too. In the meantime, I picked up a few more issues of the Iron Man Marvel Action Hour comic series – attractive to me as someone who'd never found a jumping on point to Iron Man, plus I liked the art by Anthony Williams – as well as a few scattered issues of Force Works (most memorably the series finale which I got mostly because Andrew Wildman drew it). After that, the team remained largely forgotten.

Earlier this summer, that DisneyXD cable channel started re-airing episodes of the '90s Iron Man 'toon in a little bit of inter-company cross-promotion for "Iron Man 2's" imminent arrival in theaters. When I'm up late transcribing (or writing CKT posts, even!) I end up flipping to DisneyXD's late night superhero marathons whenever MSNBC becomes too depressing, and this was no exception. Combine that confluence of events with a string of conventions this summer where the majority of my brief shopping time was spent diving in dollar bins, and I ended up nabbing a handful of the 22-issue Force Works run on a lark.

I caught up reading those books over the past week, and I'll be damned if DnA didn't turn out a story that while not an awe-inspiring game changer for the superhero genre was strangely prescient considering the trends I see in today's superhero team books. Let me show you what I mean.


1. Force Works Was A High-Concept IP Reinvention

Like I said above, when you get down to brass tacks, the Force Works monthly was a simple rebranding of the failing Avengers West Coast series. The big A franchise was hardly in the shape it is now back in '94 (I'm pretty sure the main title was in the throws of Ben's favorite "bomber jacket" era then), and so it's no surprise that the West Coast title was on its way out after a nice run of 102 issues. What is a bit different for the time was that said team would get a high-concept facelift so soon after its demise, and Force Works was the West Coast Avengers team in everything but its name. It featured most of the same characters (Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, U.S. Agent and, to start, Wonder Man) except that they got a new name, a few costume redesigns and a kitschy new tech-powered HQ.

More importantly, the big hook for the Force Works monthly was that this team wasn't just going to sit there on their laurels and wait for supervillains to attack. They were going to be proactive heroes! Or, as the tagline stated, Force Works was "The Best Defense In An Offensive World." If that hook sounds at all familiar to you, it's because the same essential idea is at the heart of a ton of current or recent hero books including Cry For Justice, JSA All-Stars, Uncanny X-Force, Outsiders and probably a half dozen other books I'm forgetting.

These days, almost every new title launched at either Marvel or DC is a tweak or twist on series or concepts from years past, generally pulled out of the back issue bin either to play on nostalgia for a former success or to polish up a good core idea with a modern allegorical twist. Force Works was both as it spent its first year showcasing how much more bad ass the West Coast cast could be in action by telling stories that allowed its heroes to get fake comic book political by taking on everything from rogue super general in former Soviet block countries to corporate raider revisions of old villains. In that respect, the book feels a lot less '90s than it probably should.


2. The Series Launched With The Death Of A Fan-Favorite Character

If you bought the first issue of that best-selling Busiek/Perez Avengers reboot and thought, "Oh hey, Wonder Man is back as an Ionic energy hero...wait! Wonder Man was dead?!?!?" (and I know some of you thought that), know that Force Works was the final resting place of former Hollywood hero hunk Simon Williams. In fact, our boy bought it straight out in the very first issue after the proactive superteam was (ironically?) caught off-guard by a rogue Kree battle ship that appeared in the skies above earth. To keep said ship from crashing into our planet and taking possibly dozens of people with it, Wonder Man flew it into the stratosphere and E-X-P-L-O-D-E-D.

Do I even need to point out how common this is these days? From ongoing series reboots like the recent killing of Ryan Choi in Titans to the death of Banshee in X-Men: Deadly Genesis and from the big events that kick off with shocking murders including Blue Beetle in Countdown To Infinite Crisis and Bullseye in Shadowland, killing an expendable but known character at the start of a story is now the go-to way to ramp up fan reactions to the book. And just as it went with Wonder Man in Force Works, the message being sent by C-list slaughter is clear: "This shit is fucking SERIOUS, you guys. You HAVE to buy our new book because EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW HAS CHANGED."

And in honesty, I'm going to give an edge to DnA and Force Works on this one too. While I know death has never been permanent in superhero comics, it still feels (to me at least) that death had a bit more gravitas attached to it back in the '90s than it did for most of the '00s. Back in the halcyon days of shoulder pads and ammo pouches, when a character like Wonder Man got killed, you had to accept that the creators who pulled the trigger weren't going to go back on that – unlike today when death and resurrection for a hero are planned from page one. In other words, back then you had to wait and see IF Marvel would bring back your fav character fro the grave. Today, you just wait to see WHEN it'll happen.


3. The Support Heroes Mattered Way More Than The Marquee Guys

All right, I know that it's been common knowledge that team books have been able to get more done with B-listers pretty much since Stan Lee introduced "Cap's Kooky Quartet" into Avengers. But even though the best team books hold the honor of kind of making the Hawkeyes and Martian Manhunters of the world feel like they might one day carry a long-running solo series, both Force Works and a number of modern team comics place extra importance on the lives of their marginal cast. And the real reason for this is that writers can fuck up the lives of said cast members.

Over their 22 issues, DnA bolstered the status of perpetual also rans like U.S. Agent and the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman (who besides juggling an in-headquarters stalker and being a single mom ended up dating a mysterious boyfriend no one remembered appearing late in the series...though that last part was on purpose). But the most important thread in the series revolved around the alien warrior made up of 100 alien warriors' minds Century. The cosmic axe-wielding hero created by the writers specifically to work in the team got a TON of love for a complete unknown including several guest spots in Marvel Comics Presents and his own one-shot, and if I'm reading between the lines right, DnA had plans for Century to not just romance team leader the Scarlet Witch but to have a crazy space battler with her darker half on down the line.

Backstory building like this became more and more relevant as the book went along in a way that reminds me a lot of how Brian Michael Bendis essentially used New Avengers as a backdoor Luke Cage solo series here and there or how Dwayne McDuffie's entire Justice League run where seldom seen minority characters like Vixen, Bronze Tiger and Doctor Light earned more page time and development than anyone even when Superman and Batman were still on the team. In fact, the only time Iron Man – the supposed draw of the book – had a major impact on Force Works was when he was threatening to pull funding like a dad killing your garage band's practice or in one of two crossovers he anchored at the time whose plot threads were resolved in other, more important titles. Which brings me to my final comparison...


4. Ultimately, The Book's Big Plan Got Scuttled Thanks To An Event

Probably the biggest reason why Force Works left so little an impact on the Marvel Universe even for die-hard fans is because the series end dovetailed into an event called "The Crossing." If you've never heard of this story, the basic premise is that Tony Stark is driven insane by Kang (or Immortus? I honestly can't tell the fucking difference) and forced to kill a nanny who lives at Avengers mansion or some shit. In an effort to save the day, the other Avengers pull an alternate reality teen Tony from out of the past to kill the original Iron Man, and that was that. The story was so poorly received it helped convince Marvel to hire two of their biggest competitors to take over the entire Avengers franchise from scratch. So yeah...not good.

"The Crossing" pulled Iron Man out of his own team book for the better part of its second year, meaning that the "proactive heroes" high concept was largely scuttled AND that there was no big name character to help keep fan interest in the title much longer. DnA wrapped the run in the middle of a number of subplots with a story that both tied up threads from "The Crossing" probably no one wanted to have wrapped up and pulled a pretty solid "resurrection of Wonder Man" fakeout (I have no proof, but I'd like to think they did that last one just to stick it to the crybabies).

Once again, it may just be me, but this is a pattern I see repeated a lot in this era of Mobius Strip event comics which leap frog one off the back of the other again and again. From the reality TV reboot of New Warriors made cannon fodder for Civil War to half a dozen (surprisingly successful) attempts to tie Agents of Atlas to Marvel U shakeups via new #1 issues to that other New Warriors book that went from some kind of street-level teen rebellion thing to a mashup of leftover Generation X characters to a part of the Initiative and ultimately to a quiet death, the modern event era is littered with high-concept relaunches of old properties whose shelf life is somewhere between 12 months and whenever the next red sky shows up.

Ultimately, I don't think all these trends hold a lot of baring on whether or not any individual comic series is any good or not. The best creators can find ways to make cool core concepts sing no matter what the circumstances surrounding them. But I do wonder some days how many people are starting to see the reboots, redesigns and retcons of books like Force Works more as clichés rather than as creative realignment. Hell, I'm wondering if I myself can really tell the difference anymore.

Brooklyn Comic Party!

Wanna know where I'll be this Friday? The Desert Island Comics shopw in Brooklyn! And you should get your asses there, too. Here's why:


The I Know Joe Kimpel guys are having a signing party in celebration of their two fun new books, so come hang out with these exciting young comic-making buffoons! Plus, I hear Desert Island is a pretty dope comic shop...