The latest pillaging of fond childhood memories made its broadcast debut this past week (broadcast in Canada at least). I managed to avoid the big screen production of the new Clone Wars animated series, primarily because I’d taken a half-oath to not spend any more money on Star Wars again, but also because I couldn’t bring myself to watch it.
As my wife will tell you (with a shake of her head), I’m a Prequel apologist (although the the latter half of Attack of the Clones is still a crime against cinema) which puts me well above pedophiles and Nazi sympathizers, but below fans of boy bands and watchers of sitcoms starring Jim Belushi on the list of reasons to dislike people. So it’s not that I’m completely disillusioned by George Lucas’ monstrous cash cow, but I’m also just worn out. My fandom was stretched to its limit in 1999 and ultimately broke in 2002, and has never fully recovered.
But the main reason I didn’t want to watch the animated feature was that it didn’t seem true. Star Wars movies take place with big spans of time between them, not just in terms of release dates, but story time as well. Clone Wars is all about filling in some gaps, gaps that can be filled entertainingly but ultimately don’t mean a lot because the end result is what’s been deemed important.
The premier episode of the series was entertaining enough, but reaffirmed my decision to not see the film. The CGI animation, based off the maquettes built for Genndy Tartakovski’s traditionally animated Clone Wars cartoons from a few years back, aren’t very attractive on a TV, nevermind a 40-foot screen. There are a lot of hard lines, which with Trtakovski’s 2-D cel-animation comes off as stylistic, but in 3-D animation, it looks blocky and stiff… faces don’t move well and hair is wedged shaped, as if carved from wood or stone.
This episode, Yoda arrives on Toydaria (Watto from Episode 1’s home planet )with a small fleet of clone troopers to negotiate a deal with the Toydarian king, but the Sith have arrived and proposed a wager with the Toydarian king: if the jedi can make it through their gauntlet, they can proceed with negotiations. If they fail, the Toydarians switch allegiances. A trait of the species, the King can’t resist a wager and thus ensues some Yoda versus robots action, the odds seemingly overwhelming.
Despite the look of the characters and somewhat clunky design of the show, the action and movement is fluid, and quite entertaining. There’s not a tremendous amount of drama, or intrigue, and it seems that the intent is for the show to be younger-audience accessible with minimal amount of plot to bog it down.
Each episode is intended to be stand alone, a mini-movie, but the first winds up being more of half an act of a movie, notably the climactic action sequence. Character development is even more non-existent than the plot but with a projected slate of 100+ episodes it’s not inconceivable that there’d be an overarching story.
Generally amusing and entertaining, it’s not mandatory viewing or enough to whip up a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, but it’s enjoyable viewing when you can catch it.
A little over a month ago, I popped open an email received from Marcus Moore through our contact from over at Rack Raids, stating boldly, “After 25 years, Hoverboy is returning to comics thanks to Ty Templeton and Mr. Comics. I’d like to submit the first issue for review.”
Huh? Hoverboy. Who the heck is Hoverboy, I thought to myself. I copied and pasted the name into the Google search bar and immediately came across the Hoverboy website (which has changed greatly in the time since) where there was a blog-like front page detailing all the great goings on at Hoverboy central, with entries dating back a few years. Man, this comic really was many years in the making, but still, how come I’ve never heard of Hoverboy, I thought, and began to troll through the site, starting first at the history pages, which seemed to breathe authenticity, except that there was something’s just not right about it all.
It was a solid 20 minutes before I clued in on the joke, that the website was a farce, unfolding a near-70-year history - through animated shorts, a live-action documentary, photographs of manufactured paraphernalia, scans of doctored old pulp magazines and comic book covers and more - of comic-book character whose publishing history, at this stage, spans only a few weeks. I received a digital copy of the final comic book product after letting Moore know I was interested. The book was half superhero spoof and half pop-culture satire, and utterly ingenious. I gave the book a rare 5 Viking review and had to know more about this project, which seemed, obviously, more than just a comic book. So I went to the source.
After a flurry of last-minute coordinating emails, I found myself chatting with Moore in his car on the way to a music studio in Scarborough (a Toronto suburb). While we negotiated police detours and city buses, multi-talented comic book creator Ty Templeton Batman and Robin Adventures, Simpsons Comics>, Bigg Time) and singer/songwriter Glenn Reid were putting together the “Hoverboy Theme Song” in the studio.
“We’re in a huge expansion-growth mode right now,” said Moore. “For a long time I was working on Hoverboy basically on my lonesome. I think if I was a better self-promoter I might have come along a lot further a lot faster. But because I was working a corporate job during the day, and having my head down, making my money, well, that’s the danger of a steady paycheck is you’re not hungry.”
It was at a release party for the Robocop: Prime Directives TV mini-series where Moore was first introduced to Templeton, and where Templeton was first introduced to Hoverboy. A few years later, when Templeton was brought on as the Editor In Chief of Mr. Comics (best known for the recent Planet of the Apes mini-series) he was looking for properties, and approached Moore about making a comic book out of not just the character but his reality-bending concept. Then, through Templeton, Canadian TV icon Rick Green (The Red Green Show / Prisoners of Gravity) became involved and now Hoverboy is being shopped around as a TV series.
But Hoverboy wasn’t just concept when the comic book started coming together. Moore had originated the character in his waning high-school years, the concept not fully solidified but certainly a seed that refused to go undeveloped.
“I did a live action [film] during my years at Ryerson,” Moore said, with slight embarrassed giggle upon bringing it up, “very cheaply done. It’s the kind of thing you don’t want anyone else to see because it’s pretty lame [laughs]. But it started way back, and it’s something I always clung onto, it was something I was always drawing in class at film school, and then once I went out into the work force, I dropped it for a couple years until I started going nuts doing corporate video, and decided to resurrect it to try and do an animated short film.”
The film, Robot Rampage, - which can be viewed on the Hoverboy website - marked Hoverboy’s debut in 2000. Moore developed the cartoon for the National Film Board of Canada (”NFB”), resulting in a smoothly animated homage/spoof of the 1960’s Spider-man, Rocket Robin Hood and Hercules style of animation and storytelling, hilariously riddled with absurd action and dialogue, utilizing era-specific, politically-driven stereotypes of the Red Menace and cartoon mad scientists as “villains”.
“[Robot Rampage] was done to keep myself sane doing corporate work ten hours a day. I did that basically myself… I had a couple of producer friends, Brad Abraham and Joseph O’Brien, who kept cracking the whip on me and got me the NFB money. But it’s sort of funny, for 12 minutes of animation - well, animation quote/unquote - I did it mostly on my own with a friend, Bob Orlic, helping me out on backgrounds, and it took me a year and a half to do.
“Nearly every dime of that [NFB] money went to the music because I realized how important that was to setting the mood and everything, and I didn’t want to use stock. So there I am in a Hamilton church with a 30-piece orchestra doing music for this thing. You hear guys like Spielberg and Lucas talk about it all the time, but that’s it, you just sit back and go ‘this is cool’ [laughs]. Especially when you’ve been working on something and it’s just you beating your head against the wall and you lose all perspective on something. That’s the great thing about having Ty and Rick [Green] on board now is that they’re so full of energy for it that it boggles my mind.”
Moore’s obviously proud of his earlier animated work, but there’s some distance in his voice as he talks about it. Things have started to move so far beyond what Hoverboy was, now with Templeton and Green aboard, but Moore admits it’s only gotten better.
“We’re basically in a partnership at this point to try and get something put forward. Ty is an experienced writer on a lot of fronts, and he brings a lot to the table, not only in terms of history, but also he pumps out however many scripts each year for comic books. And then you have Rick who’s been a part of three or four fairly successful TV shows, and in Canada that’s a very short list. So it’s pretty exciting to be able to bounce ideas off of people, it’s the type of interactivity you want in a scenario like this. Even though I came up with the idea, every Hoverboy idea is made better when eight people have kicked it about the room. I’ll do up a comic book cover and Ty will say ‘you know what, it would take it over the top in terms of believability if you use this font’ and then Rick will say ‘you know what would be really funny is if you put this caption here’ which will be a mixture of off-beat humour and historical fact. Ultimately, it’s just a much better product. My dream is to have the whole ‘writers’ room’ idea where you’re just throwing ideas around the room, and coming up with the most crazy, but thought provoking ideas you can.”
When we arrive at the studio, we find Templeton and Reid building a bombastic chorus in a sound-proof studio, belting out “HOVERBOY, A-WAY” atop their previously recorded vocals. After a few minutes of the pair finishing up their recordings, hearing snippets of the catchy marching tune along the way, Templeton enters the mixing room and he and Moore are like giddy schoolchildren reuniting. Templeton passes along a mock-up cereal-box image “Hoverboy’s Crispy Fists and Sugar Bucket”, which Templeton then proceeds to explain through giggles how, due to certain issues, the cereal had to be quickly repurposed as “Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s Hoops and Balls”.
The proverbial kid in the candy store, Templeton speaks with unbridled enthusiasm for the Hoverboy project in all the various forms it’s taking on.
Hoverboy - Strange Adventures
“Instantly, the thing that made me laugh the most was the idea that he was a superhero who clearly was going to disappoint, that at some level was going to fuck up in the middle of the story. All the covers promise stories in which he’s not that impressive. His power to hover is - who cares - it’s a useless power. What I loved is the idea that - this is what really attracted me to all the stuff [Moore] had done - even though this character clearly wasn’t succeeding, and had a crappy power, and kids probably didn’t like it, he also was a soup, and a play, and a movie, and a comic book, and a breakfast cereal, and a coffee travel mug sticker… and it made me laugh that so many licensors and so many people believed in this character enough to spend money to license it. But, it always failed, and that there was never a time when it was going to succeed, but, by God, someone else was going to try and do a Hoverboy product, ‘aw crap I just lost $20,000 on that’. It just killed me that there was so many iterations of it, and I just went “Can I join in, can I do one, can I do Hoverboy ping-pong balls or Hoverboy bowling shoes” because that’s the most fun of it, that there’s so many stupid Hoverboy products that just couldn’t have sold.”
Trolling through the website - or the online Hoverboy museum, as it were - you will currently find over a dozen comic covers inspired by styles from decades past, paraphernalia like the Hoverboy decoder ring and war bonds poster, two animated shorts, and more. And it continues to grow, not just on-line but out into the world.
“I think the first thing I did was a comic cover,” Templeton said, looking at Moore for confirmation, “and pretty well within two or three weeks of doing this comic cover I thought it would be really cool to make a little documentary about this character… a pop culture movie - I think my favourite movie in the past 25 years was Spinal Tap, and so much I saw this as a comic book version of Spinal Tap - so we talked about it off and on but nothing came of it until I said ‘I wanna make this real, I’m so in love with the idea of Hoverboy that I wanna make it real.’ As the editor in chief of a small comic company I can make this real, I can make a real comic book. Then as we started thinking about doing the comic we started thinking about making a little film to promote the comic and when we made the film, we filmed it with ten to fifteen different people pretending to be fans, one of whom was Glen, one of whom was Rick Green, and when we put the film together we showed it to Rick and Glen and they said ‘We need to do more,’ and Glen said ‘I’ve got to write new songs,’ and Rick said ‘We’ve got to turn this into a television show’, and we were just mostly doing it to promote the <strong>Hoverboy</strong> comic. And that was like the next level, they were the next people to see some different Hoverboy products. But they were like ‘I don’t want to just be over there, I want to be part of it,’ so they jumped in.”
“People who see it just want to do something with it,” Moore offered. “Everyone just seems to want to join in and be part this,” Templeton confirmed.
Both Templeton and Moore tell of Hoverboy’s infectiousness, of attending comic book and sci-fi conventions, talking up their product to friends and fellow comic artists and days, if not hours later, finding submissions and contributions in the form of fake covers or mock ads before them. Even people from the unlikeliest of places, like Rob Goodwin, publisher for NASA Mission Reports, clamour to get involved.
“We were at Polaris [a Toronto sci-fi convention] a couple weeks ago,” Templeton said, “and Rick met this guy who was gaming designer of the year or something and we showed him Hoverboy, and he said ‘I’m going to make you a Hoverboy game, free, I just want to do this.’ So we’ll have that coming up. And we met dozens of people who want to play characters in the documentary.”
A trailer for the documentary can also be found on the Hoverboy website. The most adventurous facet of the ever-growing Hoverboy project to date, Green is shopping doc around as an hour-format TV documentary and perhaps as series pilot, with both Moore and Templeton explaining the various ways in which the concept could extend itself as an ongoing series. In fact, with obvious vision in mind, Moore refers to Hoverboy as “the show” more often than “the character” or “the book”.
“It’s such a weird property and concept,” Moore said, “the situation I always find myself running into is people love it, but it’s a difficult sell.” Part of the solution is to approach the Hoverboy from multiple angles.
Moore still holds out hope for an animated series, taking looking at South Park in admiration for the freedom that creator’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone have achieved in the past decade, while Templeton mentions a spin-off sit-com from the documentary of the feuding families of the Hoverboy creators, or potentially an ongoing mocumentary series. Then Moore shocks Templeton, excitedly explaining his idea for “a series of timeless holiday specials. Stuff that parents will laugh at, getting the inspiration, but kids will think is just neat, like the classic Charlie Brown or Frosty the Snowman shows that air year after year after year.”
But the documentary, more than the comic or the website remains the focus for, though a second issue of the series is in gestation phase. “It’s all part of it,” Templeton said. “The comic, the fake covers, the animated trailer, the song we’re recording, we need all of it for the documentary.”
We were treated to the complete “Hoverboy Theme Song”, a booming, 1940’s army drum corps spoof, full of patriotic ballyhoo and a big, manly, chest-thumping chant, “DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOMYDEEDOOM DOOM DOOM. HOVERBOY, A-WAY.” There’s gleeful applause as the song closes, some patting of backs and plenty of smiling faces. Templeton makes a few notes about adding explosions to the end and for a minute or two more ideas are lobbied around the room.
The enthusiasm, creativity and talent behind Hoverboy makes it, in all its facets, fascinating and endlessly entertaining. A property that can go anywhere, the anti-Seinfeld, Hoverboy can be a show, a comic, a website about anything. Though he may never achieve the ranks of Superman as iconoclast, the character and concept have already entered the pop-culture pantheon, both earnestly and meta-textually. More than 8 years on, it’s quite apparent this is still just the beginning for Hoverboy.
[Hoverboy: The Republican Superhero #1 is available now from your local comic book store or online via Mr. Comics. Hoverboy and the touring "Hoverboy Museum" will be at Toronto's Fan Expo August 22 - 24.]
The following is my interview with Josh Wagner and Joiton, the team behind the extremely quirky and original comic miniseries, Fiction Clemens. I gave the book a five-Viking rating when the first issue came out back in May, comparing it to a bizarre but entertaining cross between a LucasArts game and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The third issue is on the stands now, and the series has definitely maintained its quality right up until the end.
I sat down with Wagner and Joiton in the comfort of their spacious castle in the Swiss Alps, by which I mean I emailed them some questions and they wrote back to me.
According to your site, you created Fiction Clemens as a dare. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Josh Wagner: Sure! It all started about 10 years ago. My friend Christian came up with the name “Fiction Clemens”. He just liked how it sounded, so he told me I should write a story about someone with that name. I took up the challenge and the long road to the Graphic Novel began.
Fiction Clemens first appeared in your novel, right? Tell us a little about that.
JW: Yep. “The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe”. Fic takes on more of a Chewbacca role to Trixie’s “Han Solo”, as they transport the novel’s main character from the physical world to the world of the Mind. The novel is somewhat stranger than Fiction Clemens in many respects…Fiction and Trixie actually help to bring the story a bit “down to earth”, if you can believe that.
What’s the idea behind the weird SF/western world of the comic?
JW: I tend to default to sci-fi elements in my writing. Probably because of my childhood reading list. But I’ve never been very good at hard sci-fi. I’ve never been very good at any sort of genre writing, actually. The writing beast inside me is easily bored. He’s a sensationalist and a change junkie. So I have to keep adding elements into a plot just to keep him satisfied. Fiction’s story started out as a poetic western, then I added an alien element, a dash of steam-punk, psychadelia, space ships, conspiracies, some pulp noir, humor, subplots, Shakespeare, romance! It’s almost a race with myself. If I can get to the end of the script before I run out of new ideas and bore myself, then I’ve got something that’s a pretty wild ride, and a far cry from anything I intended when I started out.
Joiton: Well, steampunk is one of my favourite things to draw. I love to come up with weird machines and gadgets, and mix that with characters and landscapes. So it was not a hard thing to get into Josh crazy written world. For me, some of the most fun is playing with expressions. Josh’s characters had very diverse personalities, that made it easy for the playing. Also the landscapes and stuff all around was so diverse, that I was able to work on their mood and expressions too. I think that was the main feeling under which I worked on the project, trying to breathe some crazy life into every object.
What are your influences?
JW: It’s not your typical list. Although I was rabid about comics as a kid, movies and novels have been far more of an influence to my storytelling. Particularly Terry Gilliam flicks and Dostoevsky novels. I listen to a lot of music when I write. Godspeed You Black Emperor, Stravinsky, Bach, Strauss on shuffle. Artists and philosophers, mystics and crackpots have been strong influences as well. And the world: trees, insects, rivers… I couldn’t tell a story without them.
J: Influences I have a lot of, but the biggest ones of all-time forever (maybe) are: Carlos Nine, an Argentinian illustrator and comic artist. I’m also strongly influenced by old game art such as Earthworm Jim and Monkey island, and not-so-old game art like Oddworld. There are many more but they would fit more in the “world creating” influences.
I was thinking about Eric Powell’s comic, The Goon, and how he describes it as taking place in an overtly comic-book setting–that is, a world that overtly exists within a comic book, almost (but not quite) to the point of breaking the fourth wall, and that setting meant he could basically throw in any element he wanted from the existing medium without needing to explain it. It seems to me that Fiction Clemens could be said to be in a similar setting, kind of a Platonic comic-book idea-space…am I describing your intentions correctly, or am I just nuts?
JW: I wouldn’t go so far as to say those were my intentions, but you’re certainly onto something. One of my original plans for Fiction Clemens (the character) was to make him a universe-spanning traveler to whom boundaries don’t apply. I wanted to have him pop-up cameo-style in as many projects as possible, and cross-over with other people’s worlds, whether comics, novels, film, or music. I’m sure this master plan had a lot to do with Fiction Clemens (the graphic novel) winding up so unapologetically inclusive.
For Joiton: your art has a very European feel to it, not just the style but the storytelling as well. Is that a coincidence? Do you enjoy European comics?
J: I do enjoy them, and and usually prefer them. Of course, I am also into Argentinian comics, which have a lot in common with European ones (the culture down here is pretty much European as it is). I think European comic artists tend to explore more of the “artistic” part of comics, going beyond entertaining only.
The story is subtitled “the adventures of a Zen space cowboy” and there does seem to be a certain amount of philosophy to it, Zen or otherwise. Do what degree did these ideas impact the story?
JW: The underlying theme in Fic is the reconciliation between fate and chance. This argument is as old as dirt. Is the universe mechanical or chaotic? I don’t claim to solve the puzzle, but I’ve tried to cook up a little food for thought. Fic’s personal philosophy toward life owes itself to a mix of Zen and existentialism, particularly certain parts of Albert Camus’ existentialism. Ever since reading Camus’ book “the Stranger” I’ve tried to draw connections between existentialism and the “lone Cowboy” types. Sometimes we forget that the “Old West” was going on in the late 19th century, when, half a world away the roots of post-modernism were being born out of minds like Nietzsche, Kierkeggard, Dostoevsky. It’s one of my favorite juxtapositions in history.
Now Fic’s concept (swiped from Camus) is that life itself is all that matters; the form or quality that life takes on is just window dressing. Even if you’re experiencing a wretched, painful life, you’ve still got life–that’s the stuff–and you’ll still fight tooth and nail to hang onto it. No matter how much it seems to suck, it’s possible to find joy in suffering, beauty in boredom, etc. Of course, Trixie is counterpoint to Fic in almost every way, and she takes a whole different stance on what it takes to be happy.
And then there’s some hindu philosophy floating around in there, too. Particularly in book three.
Big thanks to both of you, and I hope you keep making comics for years to come. Fiction Clemens is available on shelves now and should be in trade format soon.
My earliest recollections of the Peanuts gang was a green felt wall hanging with Linus on it, the slogan “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere” sagely written above Schulz’s deceptively simplistic character drawing. It hung in my room for some time as a wee lad, I recall, but don’t know where it came from or when or why it was removed (but my folks still have it stashed in a junk box). From my grandmother’s house I had claimed my uncle’s old Snoopy toy as my own. You could pop his limbs off easily, I remember frequent pullings-apart, but he always went back together. I watched various”…Charlie Brown” specials on tv featuring Great Pumpkins and Christmas pageantry, and I read Peanuts in the Sunday color comics, but not as frequently the dailies. I’m sure most of us born a few years before Charles Schulz’s retirement from comics have (or will have) similar recollections from our youth, scarcely a life in North America — and millions more globally — that hasn’t had some exposure to Snoopy, Charlie Brown and company.
If you were a child of the 50’s or 60’s, you probably remember a much different Peanuts than what the rest of us grew up with, the commercialized property with seeming omnipresence, inescapable, unavoidable. Perhaps, like me, you never cared as much for Peanuts as what came after it: Garfield; For Better Or Worse; Calvin and Hobbes; Doonesbury; The Boondocks…. Virtually every newspaper comic strip since Peanuts came on the owes a debt to its creator, and whether you truly appreciate the man’s craft or not, you can’t deny Charles “Sparky” Schulz’ influence on the field of cartooning.
I never “got” Peanuts. I saw the simple line and the bizarre, macrocephalic characters and, like most children, were drawn to them visually, but the words (so regularly full of lament, chastising, self-deflation, introspection, etc) often didn’t carry much meaning to a six or nine or twelve year old, and the overwhelming lack of elation in the panels made it somewhat unattractive when paired next to the sardonic punch-lines of Mother Goose and Grimm or the rather spectacular imagination of Calvin and his stuffed friend come to life. I’m sure I’m not alone, but what I didn’t know was that, thanks to Schulz, comics no longer had to have jokes or ongoing stories (but they still could), that they could reflect any mood and be insightful into human nature, not just “set-up + beat = gag”. Comic strips didn’t have to always be entertaining, they could be comforting, thought provoking, insightful, and relatable. I guess I just never took the time to see what Peanuts was really about outside of it’s more commercial endeavors. I also didn’t realize how much of Peanuts was a reflection of Schulz himself. I never thought that all those words had to come from somewhere, and until you seriously ponder his achievement, you don’t realize the full scope of what Schulz had actually accomplished.
Schulz and Peanuts is an immeasurably well-researched, insightful and engrossing biography of the man behind Charlie Brown by David Michaelis. The author conducted dozens of interviews, read thousands of press clippings, sifted through hours of audio and video footage, gained access to private records and journals and thoroughly examined Schulz’s 17,897 Peanuts comic strips (not to mention Schulz’s less recognizable prior work) all coming together to paint a startlingly real portrait of the cartoonist.
Ask most any comedian and they will tell you the best, most innovative comedy comes from dark, dark places. Comedians, for all their humor, are not generally the happiest of people. The same goes for the bulk of history and the world’s greatest artists, writers, creators… it’s the channeling of this darkness into something constructive that often (but not always) leads to some of our culture’s most formidable accomplishments. Schulz was a tormented man, haunted by phobias and feelings he couldn’t let go of. He was not a depressive and he was not unlikeable, but he was not a happy man. Armed with even that little bit of knowledge, one’s view of Peanuts changes considerably. But through Michaelis’ exploration much of the matter and meaning of the strip comes into light, giving a lot of Schulz’ work a dual or triple-nature.
The traumas of his youth are subtle, but had an effect on Sparky lasting his entire life. His mother’s lack of affectionate display left Sparky craving love and adoration but never knowing truly how to appreciate it when he received it. His father, a barber dedicated to his profession, gave Sparky a real fear of leaving his workspace or home for too long, Agoraphobia he would consider late in life. What sparky did have, though, was drive, a determination to be a cartoonist. Deciding at the age of six that it was his chosen profession, he never wavered at the idea, even when his mother or family members would ridicule the idea that it was a worthwhile career. His mother’s opinions and attitudes are presented as starkly negative, or at best indifferent, and the fact that she passed away from cervical cancer before he could achieve any notoriety, to prove to her his talent and win her love and admiration, left his triumphs unsatisfying even at his death.
Throughout Michaelis’ narrative — filled with quotes from family, friends, contemporaries, celebrities and Schulz himself — the gestation of Schulz’s career and the characters he’s made famous are reflected back onto Sparky’s personality. Most of the characters represent some aspect of Sparky, but some reflect family members sometimes amalgamating his mother, his wives and his children. To understand where these characters have their origins, where their habits, personalities, nuances are derived from gives the sense of Peanuts being more than just a cartoon, but a therapy for Sparky, a daily, public catharsis, discreetly letting the public in on his private thoughts and relationships.
Schulz’s career brought newspaper cartoons into the big-time, making a billion-dollar empire out of his characters. Sparky pioneered a new sensibility and maturity to the daily funny pages, transformed the art and intelligence level that could be portrayed, and revolutionized the appeal of comics and their potential (also quietly revolutionizing creator’s rights by getting his syndicate to return the copyrights to him). Sparky’s heart — despite all the deviations into storybooks, film, musicals, television, advertising, toys, gift ware, jewelry, tchochkes and an uncountable number of other realizations — always remained dedicated to the comics. When the Ford licensed the characters the cries of “sell-out” could be heard, but until Peanuts, no comic strip had warranted the attention and Sparky forged a new path in character licensing, and every subsequent comic came with a decision virtually pre-made to either be a consumer property (Garfield) or keep the focus of the strip undiluted (Calvin and Hobbes).
Michaelis explores deeply Sparky’s family ties, his marriages, his friendships, his working relationships, and his parental role, all while remaining focused on it’s impact to the comic. The core of the book always maintains the Sparky saw himself a cartoonist above all, and all that he was really worth to anyone, and the book never loses sight of that. He was a dichotomous character, full of self-doubt at nearly every turn, occasionally riddled with bitterness, regularly crippled (not physically but sometimes socially or mentally) by uncomfortable memories, and yet he was utterly committed to being the best at what he did and competitively proving it as often as he could, and even still undercutting his achievements. Michaelis never goes as far to call Schulz the unhappy clown, because that’s a little too simplistic. While he could never actually get into Sparky’s mind, he so thoroughly allows us to travel along with Schulz on his journey from infancy to his passing that, through this book’s 560-some pages (the final 100 pages are filled with the bibliography), you feel you knew the man as he was, human, flawed, but never the awkward, dull, plain-faced, nobody he saw himself being. You feel him a friend, someone more comfortable to call “Sparky” than “Charles”.
It’s impossible not to have a newfound respect for the man and his work after reading Schulz and Peanuts, just as it’s impossible not to see the medium in an new light, even if you already adore it. Michaelis uses Schulz’s story as much to show the changing face of the comics. These days, with the internet pulping the newspaper business, comics have a new challenge ahead of them, and are now without both Sparky’s guidance and his shadow. This is an unexpectedly powerful book, with much more going on in it than just simply a comparison between Schulz and his cartoons. Like Sparky’s comics, there’s many ways to look at his life, and much to think about, lessons to learn (personally, I see so much of it being about the psychological influence of parents on their children). I’m still not an affirmed Peanuts fan, but I understand it a lot better than I ever did, and I’m curious to explore the work of the world’s friend Sparky, currently available in the glorious Complete Peanuts volumes from Fantagraphics.
Hello, and welcome. We’re glad to have you here, for this day is a special day, in that it’s just like any other day, except for the fact that each day is uniquely its own, even though one day may appear to be very similar to another day, it’s for certain different and uniquely its own. Today is one such day like that. (Pay me no mind, I may still be drunk).
We at the Rack Raids are taking today, special as it is, to reflect upon the year that it no longer is… looking back, as it were, instead of forward, for we are old, and looking upon past glories is what old people do. True, we are a young site, having only just been expunged from the loins of CHUD.com’s Thor’s Comic Column in late 2006, but we’re a young site full of old people. Not that we’re that old, mind you. We’re still hip, and cool, and rad, and mod… and we’re still into what all the cool kids are into, but we’re also holding down jobs or getting degrees, building families and tearing down the walls of ignorance (when we have the time).
“The Raid”, as we call ourselves for short (rarely, but still occasionally), pride ourselves on being a review-only comic blog/site (perhaps the only review-only comic blog/site). If we have a comment to make on the comics industry, we do it through our reviews, but, to bring you back to the start of this preamble, today is a special day… no reviews, but instead just review. Most of our stable of Raiders have prepared (in homage to High Fidelity) a Top 5 tangent regarding the year in comics 2007.
Drop us a comment, tell us how you feel. We do so enjoy hearing from you. And now, a very special episode of Rack Raids:
Let’s face it, comics are the red-headed stepchild of the entertainment industry in North America. Sports, movies, music, television, video games, books, theatre… these are the beloved children of the masses, paraded and praised while comics are scuttled into their rooms and hidden from view. Porn gets more respect… well, at the very least it makes more money. Although grown up, comics are still maturing, and occasionally it has take out a loan from half-brother cinema or half-sister television in order to get that makeover or build that new house. But comics can make it on its own, it just needs to try a little harder.
We’ve all heard this refrain: the audience for comics has dwindled and the industry is dying. Well, yeah, but no. Yes, long gone are the glory days of multi-million selling comics, in part because there’s so much more entertainment to compete with, and in part because of pricing, and still in part because of the perceived “invalidity” of comics that still remains in much of the public consciousness (there are about a dozen or more “in parts” that can be inserted here). Having survived the speculator/bad girl/grim’n'gritty crash of the 90’s, and completed the awkward rehab period that followed, with the help of half-brother cinema (primarily) comics have found their legs again, and they’re walking, stable, if not yet confident in their stride. No, comics are not dying, and all these quacks who keep issuing it that prognosis need to be shut down.
Comics are struggling for independence at the moment, needing to get away from the crutch of other mediums and focus instead forging ahead by itself, proving what most reading this already know: comics are awesome. But for comics to be strong and independent, they need to prove to the masses they’re just as worthy of money and attention as “X-Men 3″, “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” and “Justice League Unlimited”. The way this happens in modern society is not quality product (although that does help, a lot) but public acceptance. Virtually everyone in North America watches TV, most go to the movies or will at least buy or rent videos. Professional sports enthusiasts tend to be more invested in their team than a comics fan is their favorite book, and yet the sports fan isn’t looked down upon (or even looked at curiously, excepting the most extreme cases, naturally) mainly because he or she has acceptance of the the masses. Even theater, which is routinely accessed by a much smaller percentage of the population, still is held in much higher esteem (despite the fact that the bulk of popular theater is now derived from cinema or popular music). So, for comics to gain wider acceptance, they need higher numbers, the audience needs to grow. It doesn’t matter what comics they’re reading, as long as they are reading.
Back in the 1940’s there were some comics that were selling nearly (or over) 10 million copies each month, but comics were cheap, pulpy, disposable and a needed distraction in the internet-less, TV-less, video game-less world where a major war was throttling the world’s attention. If those are the conditions needed to get back to million-selling comics, do we really want to go there again? The last time we had million-selling comics, it was the 1990’s and the speculator boom, fueled by excitable newscasts about the “Death of Superman” and hype rags (like Wizard), had a hefty group of non-readers and readers alike flooding comic shops for two or ten copies of a single issue of “X-Title” or “Image-Book”. The books were mostly awful reading, and the investments turned out to be dud penny stocks, so we definitely don’t want that again.
So, if not false hype and if not primitive technological and war-time conditions, then what?
You know where this is going.
Digital downloads.
There’s resistance from many fronts, namely the big two, and it’s pretty much the same thing that happened with the recording industry in North America. Where major labels were crying foul at Napster and other file-sharing facilitators, as well as, for a time, the music blogs, the independent artist and smaller labels were celebrating. Side-stepping Rolling Stone and Spin who wouldn’t give them half a listen, ignoring the incongruous point of advertising an auditory product on billboards and sides of buses, avoiding having to sell a store chain on your product, the world of independent music found a means to gain exposure and legitimate distribution, and it wasn’t long before they figured out how to exploit that for their own financial benefit. Bands that would have 15 years ago moved a few hundred units of their home-made cassette can now push thousands if not tens of thousands of CDs and more digital downloads to a much wider, international even, audience. Suddenly the little guys had a way of competing, and it took a long time for the big boys to figure out how to play in this new sandbox. Even still there’s much tentativeness and a resistance from the major labels to deviate their promotional and operational strategies from the traditional to this new realm where anyone can compete, the availability of most releases on iTunes and other digital stores is certainly telling how viable it is.
Comics have had an equally difficult time dealing with the digital revolution. At first, digital comics thought they had to be all flashy and moving and more than just comics. While using the advantages of the web to tinker with graphical storytelling is a natural pursuit for an artist, digital comics didn’t have to mean baffling interactivity and unnecessary animation. Scott McCloud has, for years, used the web to restructure and toy with such things, but it’s other independent artists that started pushing the concept of digital distribution forward. I think it was when Carla Speed-McNeil moved Finder from print to web that I first started really hearing about the advantages of web-based distribution versus floppy production, and namely it was cost-based decision but also an exposure thing. Phil Foglio’s Girl Genius and Jackie Estrada and Batton Lash’s Supernatural Law were also pretty stagnant in sales on the floppy front and now perform better in trade as a result of digital comics. Much like how indie music artist will send a popular website a few tracks to promote a new album, these artists are putting their product on-line for free in hopes that the on-line audience will support them by buying a collected edition when released.
While it’s easier for a self-published artist to make this kind of decision, especially when financially it makes sense, it’s a whole different story for the bigger publishing houses. From DC and Dark Horse to Image and Oni, it’s a huge shift to move their distribution focus to a completely untested sector where the audience is unknown, the demand equally unknown, and the threat of eating into their existing publishing business. What is known is that there are illegal downloads available on torrent websites of practically every comic the major labels release within days of their release, and the illegal back catalog of both DC and Marvel continues to grow. If they’re afraid of losing market by offering digital downloads, well, newsflash: they already are losing market by not. The fact that these illegal on-line versions exist is enough to prove there’s a market for them… and that market, until there’s official on-line retailers of their products, will remain virtually untapped (commercially) and unknown.
While DC, Marvel and others have been using the web effectively for a few years now to promote new comics by offering sample pages or free first issues on-line, they have yet to actually take the plunge into the new frontier. While Pullbox Online is offering wares from IDW, Devils Due and more, it’s the indie label SLG Publishing (with Eyemelt) that is the first publishing company to venturing forth and offering all their new releases (and eventually, their back catalog) up for downloadable sale: $0.89 for an on-line exclusive comic, $0.69 for a previously published book.
Paper isn’t cheap. Ink isn’t cheap. Producing floppy comics isn’t cheap, and generally the return on investment isn’t very high, unless you’re pushing big Marvel or DC numbers. By skipping the entire printing process artists and companies can save a lot of money, and perhaps avoid taking a loss on many books. What’s more in this exchange is that comics, for the first time in decades, can be disposable again.
I’ll say it again. Comics can be disposable again.
It’s hard to even think of them this way for those of us that have spent 5/10/20 or more years buying, reading and then stuffing our bagged and boarded comics into long boxes, occasionally looking at with disdain that box (or three) of “tester” books that you bought one or two issues of and completely hated and didn’t want intermingling with your collection. Spending less than a dollar for a book you’re not entirely sure about, rather than having to invest $2.50 or $3.99, is so much easier to digest. Spending $3 on a mediocre book every month isn’t exactly something we all want to do, but we do it anyway because we’re devotees to a specific character or group. Or what if you drop a title, a new creative team comes aboard, and you wonder whether quality has been restored, well, spending $0.99 is much better than $2.99 to find out. Or if you’ve read about some new indie title on a blog, digital download stores not only allow you to find it (whereas your store might not be carrying it), but give it a shot for cheap. If you don’t like it, no harm done. If you love it, chances are a trade will be made available so you can hold it in your hands some day. Your bookshelves will be cleaner, your collections much more streamlined and your pocketbook less taxed.
It always hurts to say it, but the observation that the audience that ventures into the comics shop is getting older is true, and teens and pre-teens are no longer much of a representative demographic there. Although I spend much of my life in front of the computer, I can’t stand reading comics books or books on the screen… something the younger reader, today’s teen especially, has no problem with. They are equally, if not more comfortable “flipping” pdf pages than the pages of a book. I think that making digital comics available - and especially affordable - is what will build that college/adult readership that continues to patronizes brick-and-mortar shops.
The barrier to get past is digital rights management (DRM). Marvel has toyed with it, as have others, providing comics in a specific format that requires specific software to access them. This is done as a means of controlling spread and limiting redistribution, but at the same time, it’s a bigger barrier to those thinking of venturing into digital downloads. SLG president Dan Vado, in an interview with Newsarama discussing Eyemelt and digital downloads said this about DRM:
Basically what it comes down to is if you put some kind of heavy handed DRM on your downloads you wind up making the download more expensive, making it less usable by the end user and ultimately end up sending that customer back to the torrent sites to get this stuff for free.
One has to believe that the inherent nature of people is to do good. Torrents are illegal, and people know that, but it won’t stop them from using them until there’s a legal alternative. Even then, some will always keep using them, but I’m sure the majority will turn to the legal source. I still download mp3s off blogs, but if I like something enough I’m going to the store to buy a copy on CD, and if I want more from a similar artist I’m going to go to an on-line retailer and see if I can’t buy some sample songs from other albums. I’ll probably share a few of the mp3s with friends, and they’ll likely step out to a store or head to an on-line shop to pick it up if they like it. If I could have forwarded a PDF of Nextwave or Phonogram or Local to a few friends, you probably would have found them at an on-line download shop looking for the next issue. Realistically, though, the publishers shouldn’t worry about protecting their materials, as at this stage, with the average mainstream title broaching about 20,000 units, any exposure should be good exposure.
But there’s something else: some people just aren’t going to venture into a comics shop. Ever. I’ve been feeding a friend of mine trades of Sandman, Y:The Last Man, and Fables for the past few years. She loves them, and yet she’s never going to venture into a comics shop on her own to buy more. Outsiders can feel uncomfortable by the shop atmosphere or staff, intimidated by the set-up or the selection, and in general find the experience awkward or frustrating. Moreover, there are many shops that don’t stock a diverse selection of material, or enough copies of certain titles, meaning something the customer is looking for is unavailable. Then there are those customers living in cities and towns across North America that don’t even have a local comic shop to go to. The digital solution solves those problems as well, especially for those that want their books timely instead of days or weeks after their release.
As comics learns once again to move forward without crutches, as it finds itself able to gain some momentum, a digital solution for an untapped market is needed to do so. While comics are more visible then ever before, thanks to regular mainstream media coverage, exposure through other entertainment sources and a wider diversity of publications, the current method of distribution isn’t working very well at growing the audience. Penetration into the bookstores via trades is great, but the monthly format has long since been pulled from newsstands, long absent from being readily available. The digital solution is the first option in a long while that make sense. It’s not quite like rolling a comic up and putting it in your back pocket, but the idea is still the same…
If you keep track of comics you may wonder why you didn’t catch this title at your local comics shop. Simply because it wasn’t sold in comic shops.
An esoteric area of comic publishing and collecting is the “give-away” or “premium.” Almost from the beginning, comic books have been created as accompaniments to items normally sold without a connection. Soap, cereal, shoes, newspapers, candy, insurance, government services, and goods and services across the spectrum have, on occasion, used a comic as either a bonus or as an educational tool. Some have been full sized but others have been reduced both in dimension and page numbers. Many, especially if they were not of an educational category, were simply reprints of comics or newspaper strips assembled into comic book form. Today they seem to be smaller in both categories and come with toys or DVD’s, and the educational aspect is declining with extreme rapidity.
This recent addition to this category can be found in the Iron Man animated DVD when purchased at WalMart. It appears to be original in content and advertises, naturally, an upcoming Doctor Strange animated disc. With a so-so story of 22 pages, scary doglike creatures are turned loose on our world for impenetrable purposes. The Doctor, has a hairdo that appears to belong to Rogue, Wong his manservant, who has put on 50 pounds and grown a lush head of hair and Clea, who has lost 10 years in age and become a tyro in the mystic arts. It becomes quickly evident that much has changed in an attempt to move this title from the comic to the animated genre. A charitable viewpoint is one that understands such a shift requires alterations, and in the upcoming DVD we should all be willing to wait and see. In this book the story seems perfunctory and the artwork overly simplified. The four page backup, which declares itself to be a prequel to Doctor Strange: The Oath, satisfies more as it is clearly reminiscent of Ditko’s Doctor, and as we all know, any but Ditko’s Doctor is a lesser Doctor. Still, as a return by the master is unlikely in the extreme, everyone must be satisfied with what they get. If you intend to get this DVD you may as well go to WalMart.
In 1947, Raymond Queneau, a well known French writer took a simple one page story and demonstrated the versatility of language by telling that same story in 99 different ways. Insightful, it is still used today in creative writing classes to demonstrate how stories can be approached. Matt Madden, a professor and alternative comic artist, took this same title and idea and adapted it to the comics. A man stands up from his drawing table and walks toward the kitchen. A voice from upstairs asks the time, he answers, proceeds to the refrigerator and he looks inside. This little vignette is repeated
from differing viewpoints 99 times. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
(Yale University Press)In the mid 1960s, the Pop Art movement, heavily dependent on imagery from everyday popular and commercial artwork, brought about a reassessment of comic art. The first major museum exhibition in the history of comic strips and books took place in the Musee des Arts Decoratif in Paris. Yes comic fans, the Louvre! Originals, gigantic enlargements of panels, and paintings by modern painters influenced by comics, such as Roy Lichtenstein, hung in the same facility that held the Mona Lisa. Along with this exhibition came the first serious modern analysis of the comic strip, which also served as a catalogue for the exhibit, entitled A History Of The Comic Strip by Pierre Couperie and Maurice Horn. This is a difficult book to find today but a diligent fan can hunt one up on-line, eventually. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
The 2 sidebars have been placed within an element so that you can enter information here at the bottom or up at the top that exists outside the 2 sidebars.
According to your site, you created Fiction Clemens as a dare. Can you tell us a little more about that? 
What are your influences?
The story is subtitled “the adventures of a Zen space cowboy” and there does seem to be a certain amount of philosophy to it, Zen or otherwise. Do what degree did these ideas impact the story? 
