A recent dust up between the two shows that making comics more adult was all they had in common.  In response to Miller’s recent characterization of the Occupy Wall Street movement as “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness,” Moore countered that the protesters represented a “completely justified howl of moral outrage” and have behaved “in a very intelligent, nonviolent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it.”

Not content with attacking Miller the citizen, Moore went on to attack his works as well.  Surveying Miller’s twenty-plus years of output, Moore stated that these comic efforts showcased, “a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time.”

The comic fan community has been shocked that these two giants are disagreeing, but they shouldn’t be.

From the start, Miller and Moore expressed divergent sensibilities in their work, which foretold their differences on the War On Terror (which the former supports, the latter opposes) and The Occupy Movement (which Miller opposes, Moore supports).

Moore’s sensibilities have always been on the side of revolutionary destruction. In “Watchmen,” he has a character establish a lasting peace by destroying half of New York. In “V For Vendetta,” whose mask the Occupy Movement wears, his terrorist blows up Parliament. All of this violence waged for a progressive purpose is supported by Moore.

Although not supporting the 9-11 attacks, Moore acted as if he didn’t know what all the fuss was about in the US.

“We’ve (Europe) been getting bombed since Guernica,” Moore told an interviewer (forgetting to note the fallacy of this analogy since no one in 1937 sought to understand why the Nazis hated them).

Miller, by turns, has always expressed a dislike of sixties liberalism. In his seminal “Dark Knight Returns,” he portrays the leftist response to the vigilante’s war on crime as supportive of the criminals while attacking the Batman as a “fascist.” This is not so far off the mark today when one witnesses the feverish efforts by the left on behalf of the cop-killer Mumia abu-Jamal. Miller doesn’t let the establishment off the hook – corrupt cops prowl Gotham – but like a true critic, he attacks everyone.

In Moore’s world, only the mass murderers are the heroes. In Miller’s, the good guy is the one who fights the mass murderers. Thus, he takes on the violent fantasizers behind the V masks. Moore supports that, not in spite of their violent wishes, but because of them. Moore sees revolutionary violence as something to praise. Miller sees revolutionary violence as something for his heroes to suit up and stop.

Small wonder, then, the way political events have been viewed through the prism of how Miller and Moore do comics.

Via Comic Book Resources:

Rick Veitch wants you to think about things. Specifically, the writer/artist wants readers to think about the events of 9/11. Set to debut nearly 10 years after the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, “The Big Lie” from Image Comics features a physicist named Sandra who goes back in time to save her husband from perishing in the World Trade Center buildings. Veitch teamed with longtime collaborator Gary Erskine on inks as well as editors Thomas Yeates and Brian Romanoff who got the ball rolling on the project and saw it through to completion. CBR News spoke with Veitch about what he wants readers to come away thinking after reading the miniseries, how Uncle Sam comes into play and the problems Sandra encounters in her quest to save her husband. …

“If you are an American of my age, 9/11 was a major event; emotionally and politically” Veitch said. “How can an artist not want to explore it? ‘Can’t Get No’ was a flutterball about the emotional side of 9/11. ‘The Big Lie’ is a fastball aimed straight at the politics.”

Composing the story — which features not only several theories on what actually happened during 9/11 and after, but also the Large Hadron Collider — was no small task, but Veitch was up for the challenge.

“Man, there’s so much disinformation, much of it highly charged politically, that it’s no easy job wading through,” Veitch said. “The debate has turned into a decade long troll fest, with polarized and entrenched groups insulting and debunking each other. Fortunately, in the middle of that are guys like Brian, who work diligently to separate fact from fiction.”

Full story here.

Superheroes were no longer the perfect ubermen of the DC universe, they now struggled with real human foibles as they tried to do the right thing and use their powers for good. The other main change that Marvel introduced was heroes growing and aging. Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man, went from high school to college and then moved into the real world, eventually marrying.

Under the covers though, there was an alternative comic industry. One aimed not at the kids of Middle America, but rebelling against the Comics Code and  unable to be sold in most stores. This underground comic scene grew out of the counterculture movement of the 60s. Many revolved around drugs and sex, but others addressed hot button social issues and music. Robert Crumb became the poster boy for this movement, along with his  Zap comics, joined by Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

The major advent of the 70s was the start of specialty comic stores. Until then, the majority of comic books were sold in convenience stores and off magazine racks in super markets. Many alternative type characters joined the cannon of superheroes including anti-heroes like The Swamp Thing and the new Ghost Rider. Social issues were addressed openly in mainstream comics, including drug use and inner city tensions.  The other major arrival was the graphic novel. While there were certainly book length comics as far back as the turn of the century, it wasn’t until the mid-seventies that they started referring to themselves as such and the term entered the lexicon. Will Eisner’s “A Contract With God and other Tenement Stories” is credited with popularizing the term.

As the 80s dawned, some major changes were brewing in the world of comics. Two seminal series’ changed the face of the industry, both coming out of the cotton candy world of DC. 1986 saw the publication of Alan Moore’s Watchman and Frank Miller’s take on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Both were heavy, dark, and gritty. The superheroes were not nice. They lived dark lives in a dark world. Other Anti-Heroes came to the forefront in the Marvel Universe; a short Canadian killer who went by the name Wolverine fought the Hulk then went on to join the X-Men. Unlike many of his predecessors, he had no qualms about ending the life of his antagonists, something that would have made  Batman’s (and all of Gotham City’s) life much easier.  Marvel also riffed off the popular Mack Bolan books and created the Punisher, a regular Joe who, upon returning from Vietnam, finds his family dead at the hands of the mob, and goes off killing criminals. It also saw the brutal death of Batman’s sidekick Robin at the hands of the Joker.

The other sea change came in the guise of independent publisher. Marvel and DC had ruled the roost since the late 50s/early 60s but, more and more, small publishers were beginning to get their books into specialty stores.  This charge was started a bit earlier by Aardvark-Vanaheim  comics and their flagship Cerebus the Aardvark, a loose parody of the Conan Sword and Sorcery genre. Cerebrus went through 300 issues well into the 21^st century, and was the longest running series done by the same creative team. Other independent properties eventually made it heavily into the mainstream consciousness. In 1984, struggling team Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird self published a black and white comic book about a group of mutated amphibians who learned martial arts from a giant talking rat and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were born. First Comics was busy publishing Grimjack, Jack Sable and American Flagg! Marvel heavyweights Jim Shooter and Bob Layton went off to found Valiant comics in 1989.

The biggest change in modern comics came in 1992 when a group of creators became frustrated with Marvel’s running the business and treatment the characters they created and built. They were only getting paid for the artwork itself, but all the merchandising profits were taken by corporate owners. They broke off to form Image Comics, which was based on the premise that the characters would be wholly owned by their creators and the publisher would only facilitate the sales.

Today the comic industry is a multi-billion dollar juggernaut. The last vestiges of the Comic Code died in January 2011, when it was discontinued by the last publisher still using it, Archie Comics . The industry has its own award ceremony, named for Will Eisner, with 50 categories. The San Diego Comic Con regularly sees more than 100,000 people converge to welcome the latest happenings in the world of sequential art.

I hope you to will see the beauty of this medium and join me in appreciating all its wonders.

Coming next: The 10 top stories told in comics

Cross Posted at JooFood

I will come right out and admit it. I am a geek. I am a hardcore geek. I revel in many different realms of geekdom. Amongst the fields where I am most comfortable with my geekdom is in comic books. I’ve been reading comics books since, well, I could read. During my early childhood, comic books were just entertainment, something to do when waiting at the supermarket whilst my mother shopped or to pass the time in line at the barber. There were the piles of Archie and Richie Rich comics that my grandparents stocked up on for the times a dozen grandkids would descend upon their house for summer vacation. In the end, I didn’t really care about comics themselves, just the ten minutes it would take me to read through whichever one was at hand. There was no appreciation of story arcs or pacing, art work and coloring, dialogue and continuity, all of these things were foreign concepts.

It wasn’t until I was about thirteen that a classmate of mine showed me that comic books were a world of their own. He had boxes and boxes of carefully stored books, each one in an individual bag with a cardboard backing to keep the spines straight. He was able to tell me about which stories were worth following, why Marvel characters were better than DC, and showed me where to go to get the best deals. I was hooked. From then on, I spent every spare penny of pocket money and any other money I earned on comic books. Throughout my high school years, I bought thousands of books, all still in their individual bags with cardboard backs, alphabetized, and organized by publisher.

The genre has changed dramatically since I started following it back in the 80s. It is, to some extent, still dominated by the two major players, Marvel and DC, each of which has its own diehard adherents, but there is now a plethora of thriving independent publishers, each one pushing the envelope in both art and with storytelling. More importantly the consumers have evolved. The geeks who grew up in the 80s, downtrodden and ridiculed by the jocks are the engine that drove the technological revolution of the 90s. They now find themselves hitting middle age flush with success at being the new arbiters of cool and that cool is the geekdom that they grew up loving; comics.

Over the next while, I would like to introduce the readers to this medium and to some of what I see as the more interesting and exciting offerings on the market today. Keep in mind, comic books are no longer reserved for kids. Many books are squarely aimed at the adult market. While there have always been those that were of a more prurient nature, today’s mature comics actually try to tell stories that evoke the same emotions and thoughts as other mediums have been doing for years. I want to share that love with you.

I will start with a brief history of what is referred to as Sequential Art.

Comics began in the late 1800s with single frames, in black and white as part of the Sunday editions of newspapers. The Katzenjammer Kids, first published in 1897 by Randolph Hearst was the first comic to be recognizable as such, a sequence of panels with balloon speech. As it happens, it’s still running today.

It would be another 30 years until the next major advance in comics would hit the scene. Following the rise of Science Fiction and Fantasy stories, pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1929 saw the serialization of Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century as well as the adaptation of Burroughs’ Tarzan. As the Great Depression took hold of America, many people turned to movies to escape their daily troubles, others went to comic strips. 1931 saw the genesis of the most popular comic strip character of all times, Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio. 3 years later, Flash Gordon came onto the scene.

Around the same time, 1933, the first comic book was published; a collection of comic strips put together in a folded multiple page format. The first book of all new content came out in 1935, put out by National Periodicals. The industry was starting to grow and experiment, and it was in 1938 that a strange visitor from another planet became the first in a pantheon of heroes with powers beyond the ken of normal man. Based on a series of stories they had written six years earlier, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster sold the rights to Superman to Detective Comics (later DC) for a whopping $130. With the advent of the Superhero genre, the industry moved from the serialized strip wholeheartedly into the comic book era. Comics were outselling even the most popular news weeklies, some moving two million copies per issue, a huge amount even by today’s standards. The era saw Will Eisner’s creation The Spirit published. As World War II began, the comic book industry joined the fight, Captain America burst onto the scene, famously punching Hitler in the face in 1941. A year later he was joined by Wonder Woman, whose alter ego Diana Prince was in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps.

Also in the early 40s, another comic genre started to show up, one that wouldn’t really be noticed until after the war. True Crime comics, pioneered by Crime Does Not Pay, became the new rage. Lurid covers and graphic stories supposedly taken from the most violent police dispatches began to draw the largest audiences. True Crime was soon joined by Horror comics, both using drawings of scantily clad women on the cover to help move the product. As the fifties brought more and more horror comics into the market, each trying to outdo the next with their racy and macabre content, a backlash was building in Washington.

1953 saw the creation of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by Robert Hendrickson (R-New Jersey). It was founded to investigate the problems of, of course, juvenile Delinquency. Its 1954 hearings concentrated on the popular Horror and Crime genres. The committee released their findings , which were very critical of the industry. The direct result of this was the publication later that year by psychologist Frederic Wertham, of Seduction of the Innocent; a book that is the poster child for the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc logical fallacy. Wertham argued that, since all delinquents read comic books, comic books cause delinquency. This caused a huge backlash against the comic community. Sales fell, books were burned and publishers went out of business. The industry, in a move aimed at salvaging what they could, instituted the Comics Code. Based on Hollywood’s Production Code, it was a self-censoring move to limit the graphic depictions of violence and sexual innuendo in comic books.

One of the results of the Code was that many of the smaller independent publishers went out of business. DC was one of the few companies to survive mostly unscathed with their stable of tame superhero books. Marvel, then called Atlas, barely survived and the only remnant of the house that brought forth the most graphic horror comics was MAD magazine. The late 50s and early 60s brought us many of the most iconic DC heroes. The Flash, The Green Lantern and The Martian Manhunter showed up, forming the Justice League along with veterans Wonder Woman and Aquaman.

The superhero genre was back, and it was back in a big way. In 1961, Jack Kirby joined Stan Lee and began publishing Marvel’s new brand of Super Hero starting with the Fantastic Four. The Marvel Age of comics was underway. The Fantastic Four was followed by the Hulk and Spider-Man a year later.

Next: Comics Move into the 70s and beyond

Cross-posted at JooFood

During the 1930s and early 40s, the likes of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain America where on the comic pages defending honest working stiffs against common crime in the streets, corporate crime in the suites and crimes of political corruption.

Superman even foiled a plot by greedy Wall Streeters and cash-craved Capital Hillers to crash the stock market a second time to cast America into a another depression they could exploit.

And when Americans were fighting the racist plot between Imperial Japan’s ‘master race’ of the East and Nazi Germany’s ‘master race’ of the West to take over the world, Captain America was there to punch Hitler in the face as other superheroes battled Tojo and Mussolini in ways those at home wished they could.

By the 1950s, Superman was on TV and new superheroes like Green Lantern and Captain Marvel joined the original stalwarts to fight hegemonic communism and the ever present specter of nuclear war.

The cultural 60s brought Batman and Robin to TV (BAM!!) along with more superhero characters whose alter identity problems were reflections of our over-therapied, neurotic selves that were now out of the closet.  Even the Incredible Hulk had a case of multiple personality disorder.

Iron Man wrestled with alcoholism.

The Mighty Thor had major arrogance and father defiance issues.

This was a different world.

Superman’s Clark Kent in both comic, TV and movie incarnations may have been gainfully employed as a mild-mannered newspaper reporter and Batman’s Bruce Wayne may have been the tuxedoed scion of a gazillionaire industrialist, but Spiderman’s geeky Peter Parker had to struggle to support his aunt and pay his own school tuition like lots others did.

Even so, they and other superheros managed to snap out of their problems long enough to challenge unjust authority, racism, alienation, and traditional roles.

Black Panther mirrored the 60s Black Panther Party self -efense edict and battled appropriate villains like the Ku Klux Klan. X-Men reflected contemporary issues about diversity, ethnicity and the treatment of minorities. Wonder Woman was a TV star and filled the cover of the first Ms. Magazine in 1972.

Soon after, she got a women’s lib makeover.

30 years later, liberated gay women got their own superhero when  Bat Woman became a lesbian.

From there, vengeance and vigilantism became a hallmark of new super characters. Punisher, for instance was (his character has been dropped for the moment) a former police officer obsessed with bloody retribution against bad guys whose viciousness is off the map, that being a reflection of the real life murderous depravity of drug dealers, gang bangers and Islamic terrorism that would get far worse than it was. That willingness to kill did recognize a reality long ignored.

How often has Batman allowed the Joker to live and murder again and again over the years? His body count may be in the millions by now.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Black Knight to just terminate Joker once and for all with extreme prejudice?

But a Batman that took care of a deadly public menace once and for all would not only have his writers working overtime to create new villains, the power trip of so much killing could corrupt his moral compass as power tends to do. As Tommy Lee Jones’ character tells the men he’s trained to kill in “The Hunted”:  “Killing’s easy once you start.  Stopping is the hard part.”

Superheroes are generally not allowed to step outside the guide rails that define those traditional American principles of fair play, common sense and proportionality when protecting the public by enforcing its norms and laws. Within those boundaries he may make his own decisions and live by his own rules, but at the end of the day,  superheros tend to be Schizophrenics in a freak costume with conflictions that are  not all that different from those of our real life law enforcers.

Attorney general Eric Holder says terrorists are to be Mirandized one day, but not the next? He says their trials are to be in civilian courts one day and in military courts the next? He says Arizona’s new immigration law is unconstitutional, but then  says he hasn’t read it?

It’s enough to really piss-off HellBoy.

As the greenies would say, that’s unsustainable. Comic books used to be common. If you went in any kids house in the 50s or early 60s you would probably find some. Not so much anymore. Comics once sold everywhere magazines were sold. You could buy them in drug stores, supermarkets, seven-elevens, newsstands, even some liquor stores. But the so called “newsstand market” was a hostile place to comics publishers, and a shrinking one.

These days, it’s hard to find comics anywhere outside of the comic book store. That means that comics have become a “destination product.” It’s something you need to know where it’s sold, you have to physically go there and if you’re lucky, they might have what you’re looking for. However, most comics retailers order to sell out. So the odds are, you may be unlucky if you don’t come on “comics day,” the day the books come in from the distributor.

And that’s another problem with comics these days. There is only one distributor. When I got in the business in the mid 80s, there were around ten distributors. But over the years they all went under leaving Diamond Comics as the sole place publishers can distribute through to the “Direct Market,” as we call it. It’s like government run health care, if there’s only one place to go for your needs, you have to like their terms.

To complicate matters, the stresses of running a comics distributor in this economy has hurt the last remaining company. They have had their share of layoffs and warehouse closings. If that wasn’t scary enough for comics pros, Marvel just got bought by Disney, DC just reorganized under Warner Brothers, and long time publisher Paul Levitz was moved out. There is now a Hollywood person running DC. The future of the direct market may be uncertain at this point.

Marvel and DC are what we call the “Big Two.” They are the largest and oldest publishers in the business. They drive the industry. If they decided to pull out of the direct market for some reason, they would effectively be turning out the lights on the rest of the publishers. There are many other comics publishers, but they can’t live on the book store market alone.

This situation is reminiscent of the industry in the late 70s. Newsstand distribution for comics was dying off and Marvel and DC were on the ropes. DC was looking to go to reprint material. No new stories. But a couple things happened that saved comics at that point, the birth of the “direct market” and the success of “Superman: The Movie,” and a few years later, the movie “Batman.” These re-energized the business in a big way which lead to a new boom in the early 90s.

Besides distribution, the other problem with comics now is the cost. You used to easily be able to sample new comics because they were so cheap. Now, if you can find them, they cost so much it’s hard for the average person to give a new book a try. That makes it extremely hard for new books to make it. And the industry needs to ideas. It can’t rely purely on old characters to keep going.

Enter the digital age. When music downloading became popular, fans started scanning comic book pages and uploading whole comics series online to torrent sites. In Japan, they started making comics (aka manga) available for download on your cell phone. And many comics started to run exclusively on the Internet. Marvel even started making their books available on the web by subscription to the service.

Print is dying, not just for newspapers and magazines. The cost of printing and paper, the problems with accounting for sales and waste in the newsstand business is what made it unviable for comics. Newspapers, magazines and books have been feeling the pinch for years. But the digital age is showing them a new path to future growth.

Digital book readers like Amazon’s Kindle started to grow in popularity. Sony’s Reader looked to be a threat, but now Apple’s rumored tablet PC may become the iPod for readable media.

Tablet PCs will be the future of the personal computer, being lighter than laptops, having touch screen interfaces, it will be like having a notepad you can take anywhere and work on. Except it will have Internet access, it’ll be a computer and you’ll be able to use it to read any book or comic. You can read in bed, on the beach, the toilet, everywhere you can take a book or magazine.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, major publishers may even be working with a software company to bring comics to that medium. And this can be a game changer.

Like iTunes was to music, electronic publishing on a tablet PC will be much more appealing than reading a comic on a computer monitor. With a tablet PC, you aren’t stuck to your desk or a heavy laptop. The tablet PCs will be as light as a book. Lighter even.

But even better, the two strikes against current comics will be removed. They will no longer be “destination products.” You will be able to get them anywhere, download them from the net right onto your tablet. And they will no longer be cost prohibitive. You might even see the return of the 25 cent comic. Imagine that.

Books, magazines and newspapers will more than likely follow suit.

And the tablet won’t be the only place you can get your comics. Marvel has just signed a deal with a company called Panelfly to bring comics to the iPhone. Expect to see the software or a competitor migrate to Google’s Android, as that open source platform will become more ubiquitous than Apple’s.

So if the “big two” decide to bail on the direct market (which we all hope they don’t), there are still plenty of places comics can go to survive. If anything, the future of comics looks bright if they can escape the shackles of print media.

For traditionalists who like the old printed form, there will always be collected trades. Those are increasingly available in book stores which is the other place comics have migrated to.

The 1970s showed the once-invincible comic book super-heroes to be losers, in attitude and sales. Watergate had disillusioned the super-patriot Captain America with a storyline implying Nixon was the head of a terrorist group. The Captain trashes his outfit and becomes Nomad, The Man without a Country. My 11-year-old mind thought this was ridiculous, as Cap was originally a Depression-era 98-pound weakling until given a Super Soldier serum to bulk up and fight Nazis. It was unlikely that one of the “Greatest Generation” would bail on his country so readily. Even then I realized that this development merely mirrored a hippie writer’s attitude more than staying true to a character’s origins. 

Super-heroes became bleaker and even homicidal in the 1980s. The Punisher, a murderous vigilante, has become a top Marvel character. The Dark Knight Returns, a re-imagining of Batman, introduced an elderly caped crusader fighting the corrupt U.S. government represented by a stoogish Superman. Watchmen was set in a dystopic alternate reality where Nixon is still president and the super-group is made up of, among other miscreants, a rapist and mass murderer. It was a transmutation of established super-heroes from the 60s with Steve Ditko’s Objectivist hero The Question recast as the psychotic Rorschach. 

Ironically, while super-heroes have become leaders in the Hollywood box office, these films don’t help comics’ diminishing sales. In the 1940s, if a comic didn’t sell over a million copies it was cancelled. By the 80s, the cut-off point was 100,000 copies. Now companies are extremely happy selling 10,000 copies. The only time sales increase is when the publishers appeal to diehard collectors by releasing a title with multiple variant covers, and they gotta have ‘em all, or a new first issue of a popular character. Comic sales are at an all-time low and basically kept alive as merchandise-generators for film and other products. Time-Warner recently moved DC Comics from their publishing stable to the film division. Disney has bought Marvel Comics and it wasn’t for the stellar sales of their publications. 

One reason comic sales in general have dropped is because it is a one-genre medium (though there’s still Archie!). It’s as if the movie industry only made westerns and not comedies, science fiction, romance or other types of films. The industry has also ghettoized itself with the advent of the direct sales system. As sales withered on the newsstand (along with newsstands themselves), comic stores popped up with a new distribution paradigm. Copies that weren’t sold on the newsstand were sent back to the distributor for credit. With direct sales the books are non-returnable. They sell a lot less but they’re guaranteed sales. At first a supplement to newsstand distribution, like subscriptions, they are now the main source of revenue. 

Lower print runs have been blamed on the usual suspects; television, video games and the Internet. In fact publishers are marketing to the hard-core fanboy, an increasingly shrinking demographic. Stan Lee had introduced on-going storylines and continuity throughout his books. Earlier stories rarely continued and various super-heroes almost never interacted. Anyone could pick up a comic and read a self-contained story with a beginning and end. Now Stan’s continuity has mutated into ridiculous proportions with plot lines crossing over multiple issues and titles. The casual reader cannot pick up a singular issue and enjoy it, let alone understand it. One has to know the convoluted backgrounds of hundreds of characters or it won’t make any sense. There are obviously more people who might want to read comics than just comic geeks, but they can’t begin to unravel the catechism of modern super-heroes. Still more can’t find comics outside of comic book specialty shops and may not dare enter a place festooned with images of veiny, muscled goons lugging weapons and dripping blood. 

Super hero movies are popular for the same reason comics used to be attractive. They take you to a world of stunning visuals, exciting situations and heroic characters… unfortunately, the films are now beginning to fall in the same trap as comics. The most recent Batman and Spider-Man films featured the characters as darker, borderline evil, individuals and Marvel plans to introduce continuity to their movies. They will release new films with Captain America, Thor, Ant Man and others and then mush them all together with Iron Man and Hulk in an Avengers film. People who may have missed an earlier episode may not bother to see a later one where you’re expected to know all the characters’ baggage. 

Most disappointing in the superhero film trend was Superman Returns. The quintessential American super-hero becomes a metrosexual who ditches his baby mama Lois Lane for an outer space road trip to find himself and it tanked at the box office. The film pointedly refers to him fighting for truth and justice, but it’s not cool to mention the American way. Even the fabled Justice League of America is now termed the Justice League in a nod to one-worldness. 

It’s nearly impossible to find a comic that doesn’t star an angst-ridden anti-hero. The end of exceptional American super-heroes is here.

The last ten or so years has seen a deliberate migration of Hollywood into what used to be a convention to celebrate just comics. A general sense of grumbling can be heard from the true comic fans who resent the beautiful rich crowd carpet-bagging onto Will Eisner’s turf. But what many don’t realize is that this has contributed to the mainstreaming of comics into the rest of culture. With entertainment’s money comes stability of the comics medium, a broadening of a market, more books sold, artists, writers, publishers and bookstores able to stay alive a little longer this is good for our tribe.

But getting back to Voltron and Gumby, why does a convention that celebrates comics also have hundreds of video game consoles, movie stars, even classic 70’s cereal boxes for sale? It’s the overlap. I don’t care who are, if you loved the limited run 1980’s anime television series “Voltron” you read comics. Period. If had to roll my 20 sided dice I’d also bet my last saving throw that you also played video games.

There’s probably a real good chance that you have a throw-back t-shirt of some ancient classic like “Star Wars” and you probably owned a “Planet of the Apes” lunch box. We were raised on the peak of cheap plastic manufacturing that figured out how to get a free toy in a box of cereal while we were figuring out how to put a man on the moon.

Let’s go back to Comic-con 2005 where Dreamworks executive and marketing genius Michael Vollman rolled out a giant diesel truck on the show floor. It was covered in a giant black tarp so that one could only see the wheels of the vehicle but the logo silkscreened on the side said it all…the “Transformers” logo. Ever hear of “Transformers?” Well, at least now you do. And the word of mouth started with a potent, core audience because some savvy marketing folks knew where to find the highest concentration of “Transformer” nuts in the world. Two years later the movie comes out, two years later the sequel.

No matter if you love anime, Dungeons and Dragons, Iron Man or just dress like a Klingon, this is orchestration of those forces converging on America’s Finest City. Oh, and if you don’t have tickets you can’t come because they sold out three months ago. Scalpers are getting 400 bucks and up for passes but you can come back here each day where I’ll bring you the sights (woman wearing that Princess Leia slave outfit who should not be wearing the Princess Leia slave outfit), sounds (of money dumping on my lap by the truck-loads) and smells (mostly pungent B.O.) of the convention floor for free.

In many respects, Comic Con International (aka the San Diego Comic Con to us attendees), is America’s Cannes Film Festival. But it’s much, much more.

Cannes is basically for film industry people only and the press. Comic Con is for everyone, and it’s becoming more relevant to the entertainment business as the years go by.

When I went to my first convention, I was in high school. I lived in San Diego at the time. I attended Point Loma High, so it was local for me. Only a couple thousand people attended. It was held at the El Cortez hotel which once dominated the San Diego skyline downtown. Now the El Cortez is a converted condo complex, dwarfed by the surrounding super condos.

When I was a teenager, I used to wonder what a futuristic San Diego would look like. Now I know.

At the ‘75 Con, I remember seeing Chuck Norris and his brother Aaron at the start of their careers. I got to meet Jack Kirby for the first time (co-creator of half the Marvel Comics line) and Jim Steranko, whose pop art style was very influential on late 60s, early 70s comics. It was a small, but very exciting show for a teen-aged fan like me.

Up until sometime in the late 80s, the Con was very affordable. The hotels were rarely over $150 and you could take your pick. Now the reservations sell out in an hour after the Con opens the bookings window, thanks to the legions of Hollywood and Game company fiends who suck up all the rooms for their people. The fans often have to schlep from hotels far and wide. The “Con Hotels” used to lower their rates for the Con, now they raise them.

The city of San Diego used to look down on the convention, too. The Con used to rent the old convention center a block north of Broadway, and when they outgrew it in the mid 80s, they started using the newly built convention center by the bay. But they only took up a third of the space. Back then, the massive convention center was half the size it is today. The following year they took up half. But the city wouldn’t give them their usual date in August. They would let a boat show take the dates and often the con would have to share the hall with another convention, like an auto show.

This in spite of the fact that the Con brought in lots of visitors and filled the hotels downtown, the city didn’t give it the respect it deserved until the early 90s when comic sales briefly exploded and the media started to give the industry a lot of attention. The convention building was filled to capacity by then. The city had to double its size. The Con is outgrowing it again, so they are planning to expand it even further. They don’t want to lose the con. It’s a huge cash cow for the city. Now they take it seriously.

Comic Con isn’t just about comics anymore. The film and gaming industries descend on the town to hawk their latest products and promote their future videos, games and films. Movie stars attend in packs. Some of the biggest in the business have been there. TV stars attend, too. So do veterans of classic shows, to sign autographs. But this is nothing new. Back in the day the likes of Mark Hamill, a comic book fan, would wander the Con, often unrecognized. Other celebs who loved comics would attend as fans. They still do. But it’s becoming crazy now.

The attendance has exploded over the years. Every year they boast a new record. Now they sell out months before the show. You used to be able to buy tickets at the door. Not anymore. They get over 160,000 attendees.

The crowds are insane. I don’t write that many comics anymore, except for personal projects. So my main focus is seeing old friends. But the press of humanity in those halls makes it hard to find anyone, let alone walk across the room in a reasonable amount of time. I have to find people by their booths, if they have one, or their friend’s booths, because people tend to hang out. If you want to find me I often like to hang around Daniel Brereton’s Nocturnals Booth or David Mack’s table or Greg Horn’s, when he comes to the Con. These are all fine artists I’ve worked with over the years who have since gone on to great success in the field.

And yes, there are plenty of people running around in costumes. The term for that is “cosplay.” Many fans like to show up as something they like. But they have contests for it. The press loves to shoot those people so they can tell Middle America what a bunch of freaks Con attendees are. But the truth is, cosplay is a colorful minority.

SDCCI is likely to become a national institution at the rate it’s growing. And one of the reasons for its success is the wonderful location. San Diego is a beautiful town with a fantastic climate and an exciting downtown. The gas lamp quarter, which is next to the convention, is a swinging hot spot with a wide array of restaurants, clubs, bars and shops to cater to the attendees when they’re not chasing their geek obsessions. I recommend checking it out sometime even if you miss the con. Lots of wonderful places to eat and have a good time.

The whole thing starts this Wednesday. I’ll try to posts some updates from the Con all week.

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I’m told that it would be considered ‘controversial’ for such a pop icon to take on today’s jihadists, but the controversy to me is that the most patriotic superhero of all time is still MIA against Jihad. For a time after 9/11, I was naive enough to believe I could write and draw a Captain America story where the jihadist’s get what’s coming to them, with no apology and with full fury. I stopped cold when I realized there’d be no chance in hell of Marvel Comics allowing Cap to say and do what had to be said and done against this enemy. I wised up and created the perfect enemy against Jihad. For more on that, please visit my blog.

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