RE: Comics! #41 [Year One pt. 2]

Before we finish up waxxing poetic about our inaugural year that was and get to work talking about new material, I want to take a second to thank Gregg for doing this with me. In all seriousness, he's a very busy guy living in the most exciting city in the world, but that doesn't stop him from talking comics with me every week no matter how late he's gotta stay up to do it. I cherish our talks and mulling things over with him does more to form my opinions of the industry I'm in than any message board could. So thanks, Gregg! 

Gregg Schigiel: “…the internet!”

Have things gotten “worse” now with Twitter and formspring and everything else? Has the behind-the-scenes and personalities of the creators trumped the content of the comics themselves?

One thing I’ll say about this one was I’m pretty sure I had a lot more fire and venom and piss and vinegar in me about the internet but, much like the Diamond skip week talk, I found myself curbing my desire to call people out. But like I’ve said, there’s a line where you say too much and open yourself up to the same kind of muck I’m so not a fan of…so yeah, I think I tempered myself on this one. My apologies. 

Stephen Mayer: No worries.

Since you mentioned Twitter and you didn't really get to talking about that, some of my favorite Tweeters are Mike Choi (@mikechoirants) and Chris Samnee (@ChrisSamnee) as well as our pal Smitty (@yourpalsmitty) and Chris G. (@GiarrussoChris). 

Gregg: I still feel like issue 2 of X-Babies is the weak link in the chain. I know you love the Alpha-Bot, and I do too, but I think, as a single issue, I dropped the ball in terms of content vis-à-vis the overall plot and themes of the mini. I’m just saying I could’ve done better…especially the cliffhanger which was kind of a rehash of the cliffhanger to issue 1.

Stephen: Yeah, this was the issue that I first saw sitting in your Greensboro hotel room in October and I fell in love with it instantly. It was my favorite of the bunch, not just because of Alpha-Bot, but as a whole package, so there! Maybe it was seeing how brilliant the pencils were, maybe it was a just another great part of an already amazing weekend, but that's when I really started to believe that EVERYONE should be reading the series.

Gregg: I won’t argue with you; I’ll simply thank you.

Stephen: This had my favorite header image, the variant cover to THOR #601 with him listening to an iPod. It worked so well for the topic and it was even sized perfectly because another site had used it as a preview for the article they wrote on the actual comic. My great design regret for this one was that I didn't find the sketch you did of Batman listening to an iPod. It would have been the perfect capper.

Gregg: Then it’s my fault for not mentioning that sketch sooner, because how else were you to know?! That said, how about some props to you for the actual “publishing” of these columns and the adding of the images, etc. It’s always a nice treat to actually see the column up to see where you put art, what art you chose, etc.

Meanwhile, I find myself listening to far fewer comics podcasts these days. I think, at a certain point, it all became a mush of a lot of the same conversations and topics. The one podcast I really dug, Out of Continuity, hasn’t had a new episode in forever. 

Stephen: I think you had shown me the sketch and I lost the file somewhere between the two work computers, my desktop and my laptop.

Thanks for the kudos. Sometimes I'm really happy with the way they turn out and sometimes I feel like I'm just throwing stuff together to meet my "deadline" (when the e-mail goes out on Tuesday night). I could try and push us back to Monday like when we started, but I think some of our best ideas come in the 11th hour.

Gregg: Oh brother…more of me talking about me and what me did…I’m sick of myself reflecting on myself talking about myself…it’s like a snake throwing up its own tail.

That said, X-Babies #3, as a comic book, was my favorite of the series and I hope, with out without my commentary, people dug it. But, I think by that point in the run people were either on board or not. I definitely tried to get the word out…sent copies for review to all the sites, etc. It was pretty much us two and “G-Man” over at comicvine.com who had anything to say about it.

Gregg: This was a good shop-talk one…I liked that we just sort of blew it out at a certain point and started talking costumes and about the characters beyond specific stories. It was the fun kind of comics conversation…no real stakes and mostly positivity, expressing the things we like. Because not for nothing, I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say, of the two of us, I might be the scratched side of Two-Face’s coin, right? (Two-Face, who’s one of my favorite Batman villains)

Stephen: If only you heard me two or three years ago. For 2010 I've really been trying not to sweat the small stuff, and that goes for comics, too. Could Kitty's return have gone a little better in Uncanny? Probably. Could the issue of Fables starring Rose Red have been on time? Sure. But I'm really just trying to enjoy everything a little bit more for what it is...even if it is tough on some of the titles further down in my weekly stack. But I love the banter and if we were a coin toss I would hope folks would call for you to land up every time.

That was weird... 

Gregg: No weirder than me initiating the metaphor of Two-Face’s coin.

Stephen: The first fill-in that I did with our pal Chris G. during your hiatus. It was a lot of fun schooling someone new in the way we do things, both in the "live" Google chats and the traditional e-mail templates. Chris did an awesome jump both weeks and I need to take a second again and thank him once more.

I don't know if I ever got your thoughts on these... 

Gregg: You know…I hand the column over to Chris and he…like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, just does everything I told him not to do. It was unbelievable. I told him not to break anything…I told him no parties…but nooo…he had to go and wreck everything. I’m telling you, I read this first one and thought, “oh, oh no…it’s ruined…I’ll never write another one of these again”.

Gregg: And THEN I read the G-Man commentary and realized, oh, wait…I have nothing to worry about. Feh…Chris ain’t got nothing on me. Sure, he’s a funny guy and people love his drawings, and why shouldn’t they, they’re great…but when it comes to conversational column writing, he knew he was out of his league. I mean, come on!

Actually, I thought they were great. If anything, Chris showed a humility and directness that I don’t think I’m capable of, especially if I was talking about a comic I wrote and drew (because with X-Babies I could throw credit and such to Jacob, etc, so I didn’t feel like it was all me, me, me).

Stephen: I felt kind of embarrassed doing them because I felt that I had hung out with Chris well enough to have a pretty accurate timeline of the strips and his work and it turned out I was having to be corrected quite a bit. I know Chris doesn't usually let stuff like that get to him though, so onward and upward!

Gregg: This was fascinating to me because I still find your entry point into comics so alien to me. It’s hard to conceive. I think it’s great though, because it really make the columns, overall, a discussion and not a “yes-fest”, if you will. It will be very interesting, I think, to see how our different starting points come into play as we enter “The Heroic Age” and “Brightest Day”…

Stephen: Carly says that I often talk about stuff that happened before my time or at a time I was still too young to remember, comics included, as if I was there for the whole thing. For example, when Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 came out this week I was telling a customer that I had read every Legion comic since 1992. He was completely stunned, under the assumption that I was dealing with re-launches and multiple continuities when I was 8 years old, but Jermaine cleared up that I had read it all within the last 2 years. I'm not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, I just often devour whatever I'm into at a given time.

At the same time some of the stuff you were saying really threw me for a loop also. Even just seeing Batman in the theater the week after it came out in '89 when I just saw it for the first time in 2010. I'm not trying to make you feel old, just getting to be there for what was really a moment in history makes me kind of jealous.

Gregg: How do you feel these commentaries went? Worth it or an exercise in self-congratulations?

Stephen: I thought they were really great, even better than what you see for a lot of the event books. They're typically really guarded to prevent spoilers or canned because they're answering the same questions multiple times for different sites, but ours felt a lot more natural. I'm a big fan of the director's commentaries on DVDs, and ours were right up there with the best of them in my opinion.

And as I mentioned above, I think Jermaine and I both get a kick out of any time we do an exclusive on the site.

My only regret would be that we never brought Jacob directly into the mix. The second week with Chris G. was supposed to be with Mr. Chabot and I just went on and did G-Man with Chris.

Gregg: This kind of turned into a females and comics talk, which was a fascinating and interesting turn and one of those topics, mostly because of pure lack of actual insight, we could have circled the drain on forever. Thankfully you brought in the lady-brain that is Carly to put us dudes in our place.

Did any of the other “girls of Acme” read or have any thoughts on you and I going on an on about this stuff?

Stephen: Not that I know of. I believe you got a chance to meet Lex, who is e biggest proponent of getting more female readers involved in the Acme community (especially on the board). Like Carly, she's very in touch with the female character's role in the industry. She'll recommend the SWORD to anyone, though from what I hear of the violence and gore in that book I don't know how romantic it is. And even as I typed that I thought of the climatic scene in issue...5? of Rick Spears and Vasilis Lolos's PIRATES OF CONEY ISLAND and how the juxtaposition of sex and violence in that last scene was one of the rawest, most passionate sequences I'd read in comics. There was also a scene in issue #6 (?) of Brandon Graham's KING CITY that started with smelling sweaty feet that I thought was really touching.

Gregg: Another instance where I was reminded and it was shown just how terrible my knowledge of comics history and issue numbers is. I just have no real sense or retention of it. I remember scenes and bits of characterization, but the when of it…poof, like smoke. Maybe that’s why things like Batman R.I.P. just end up baffling me, because I just don’t have that library in my noggin. And unlike you, I don’t have the energy/patience or make the time to go back and read the stuff that is often cited as being definitive.

Stephen: I think my retention comes more from my occupation than my actual interest in a particular title. Seeing a storyline collected in a trade with a number on the spine and the issue numbers listed on the back and being the person that shepherds that book from invoice to shipment to shelf really helps keep everything straight in my head. When someone asks a la Clerks, "Do you have that one with that guy that did that thing once," I've gotta be able to show them exactly what they want.

Gregg: The jury’s still out on this one…we all wait with bated breath! I did think publishers wouldn’t have been more “on it” than it appears they’ve been. Even with Marvel’s app on the iPad, not all their books come out digitally yet, right?

Stephen: To my knowledge you still can't use your Marvel digital subscription service on the iPad or iPhone app. I dropped a couple of PDFs onto the iPad and downloaded some of the free books on the Marvel and Comixology apps, but I've yet to finish a single issue.

Gregg: These are fun to do. Not sure if anyone else enjoys them, but I like ‘em.

Do you ever think, though, oh…man, I had a good answer for my own question…but alas, that’s not how it works.

Stephen: OK, go back to this one and answer one of your own.

For me: If I could attend a major comic convention in a city anywhere in the world that doesn't currently host one and assuming that all of my travel costs and meals would be covered, but there was no guarantee that the show will be well-attended my patrons (or in my case, guests) even though all of he exhibitor space has sold out, I would like to go to a show in either VANCOUVER or VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA! I went to both cities the summer between by junior and senior year of high school and I was a pain to my entire family the first time because I could see the fantastic views and beautiful weather, so heartsick was I being away from my girlfriend for a week and horrified by the rates of international calls. Both towns were awesome and I think everyone would have a lot of fun renting bikes to get around and checking out all the great book stores. And all of the Petro Canada gas stations have like 8 different slushies to choose from.

Now you! 

Gregg: Oh boy…I gotta remind myself of my questions…

I’ll go way back and use this one: On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being “not at all silly, in fact I’m 100% on board with that” and 10 being “that’s the biggest load of horse crap”, where does the sentiment offered by many creative types of “I like to treat the city/environment like a major character” fall?

In your original answer I think you misunderstood the question and literally meant backgrounds in terms of the drawings on the page. I was thinking more along the lines as when writers (mostly) and artists say something like, “I treat Gotham City itself as a character when I’m writing Batman”. To that I go with a pretty hard 9…maybe not the biggest load of horse crap, but a load just the same. I just don’t buy it. A locale can add texture and mood and give someone room to explore…but a character? Come on! To me a character needs to DO something. A setting is inactive. Characters play off it. So yeah, I’m not feelin’ that premise.

Also, I’d choose Samantha Brown as my Travel Channell Host travel companion. She’s a pip! (second place to Andrew Zimern, though I’d worry he’d get too factoid-y)

Gregg: Are these letters columns cheating and/or me being too much of a diva and not getting all up in the message boards?

Gregg: This is one of those columns where I thought, if this were a more widely read thing, it might’ve stirred up some bigger conversation, with pencillers and inkers talking about what they do and why they’re also cartoonists, you know, in contention with my claims/definitions (which are clearly just my take on the distinction).

I definitely wonder, sometimes, if there’s a way, without being super self-promotional and self-serving, to get a wider spotlight/audience on these things. And then I wonder if it matters.

Stephen: I was thinking the same stuff about this column last week when I was re-reading the Rocketeer.

Gregg: One day, Stephen, one day…and on that day we’ll REALLY get self-conscious.

Gregg: It really seems like the initial fever for the flavor of the iPad has fizzled, right? It just doesn’t seem to have taken the public by storm the way the iPhone did or iPod did before it. Granted, it’s only been a couple of months, but like I said earlier, with SO MUCH hype and anticipation, I thought there might be a real revolution going on. But it looks more to be one of those slow revolutions.

So far even the people I know with iPads aren’t buying comics for iPad reading. At least not yet.

Stephen: I haven't bought any comics yet, but I am shelling out top dollar (meaning $10) for some premium apps that I feel have made my life easier in some ways and opened up my creativity in others. If you check out the first look you might have seen some of the "paintings" I've done in Brushes and you've read the columns I type in Pages and you've seen some of the tables and forms that I've made in Numbers. I finally get why they say people with design oriented professions prefer Mac. Rather than making me feel like it's made any of my other technological devices obsolete or the iPad itself is redundant, I feel like it's encouraging me to make everything work better together.

Gregg: At this point I’m less opinionated about the iPad and more, as stated above, kind of surprised at how despite all the pre-launch hype and prep, comics as a whole haven’t really shown any real showing outside the Marvel App, which, again, doesn’t seem nearly as “complete” as it could/should be.

Gregg: It’s not until you really break ‘em down like this that you realize just how many awards there are…and how many comics you haven’t read and sometimes, haven’t heard of, even!

Meanwhile, it looks like the voting has opened for the Eisner Awards, which is open to all professionals…not sure the criteria that defines a professional (though retailer SHOULD count, right?). So get out there and vote…maybe…if you want and/or care to?

Stephen: We vote every year. The store gets one form delivered to us through our regular Diamond shipment (I think that's where it come from). Then we spend an entire afternoon doing the same thing you and I did, but with the extra step of ordering or re-ordering certain nominated items that deserve renewed interest. This year I can use our column as a cheat sheet for my arguments!

Gregg: It wasn’t on the list of categories, but a round of applause for Acme Comics’ nomination for the Spirit of Comics award…for the second consecutive year! I know I’LL be rooting for you guys to take the prize. Maybe THAT will be the thing that brings a larger audience to our mostly-weekly ramblings.

But then does that mean we’ll have to, gulp, become more informed about the stuff we talk about?

Stephen: No way! We'll keep running our race!

Gregg: This was just last week…much too soon for me to wax nostalgic.

Stephen: I won't get nostalgic, but I will re-iterate that it was incredibly cathartic for me. Looking ahead to a future that feels as wide open as a flashing cursor on an as-yet-unstarted Living Wednesday to Wednesday is much more daunting that chatting with a friend about how the weekend went.

Gregg: Oh, absolutely…always better to have someone to shoot the stuff with, for sure. For example, if I’ve read a comic I very much liked or disliked, it’s not long before I’m asking, say, Chris or Jacob if they read it, just to compare notes/impressions/reactions…it’s particularly more fun when we’re all in agreement that something stunk.

And speaking of which…next week we get current, like REAL current and talk about The Heroic Age and Brightest Day, right (barring any incidents). I’ve been doing a little bit more “research” than I normally might…actually reading some of these books. Should be a fun discussion…maybe even heated.

You ready…?

Stephen: Sure am! Ready to go to bat for...

 

Gregg Schigiel is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. He's worked as a penciller, writer and editor for Marvel Comics and an illustrator and cartoonist at Nickelodeon. In addition, he’s in various stages of cooking up new comics-related works…unless he’s too preoccupied actually cooking. Check out his website at Hatter Entertainment.com. 

Stephen Mayer makes his mama proud by borrowing his girlfriend's design degree to get some work done, and makes her sad by leaving his english and history degrees on a shelf collecting dust.