Do you like Seth Peagler, our Warehouse Manager and taciturn Hero? Sure we do!! Do you like to rock out for totally free? You know that’s right!! Are you a fan of musical genres including “Americana,” “Jazz,” “Rock,” “Blues,” and “More?” What are you kidding those are my top 5 musical genres in exactly that order!!Well, you are going to be pleased as punch when you enjoy Seth’s band American Motel, which is playing tonight at the Borders Morrocroft location, next to the “Taj Ma-Teeter” palatial Harris Teeter over by Southpark Mall. What? You don’t live in Charlotte and aren’t familiar with all these landmarks? You should already be in your car making the road trip, not reading blogs!!

Most of us will be there, if you like hanging out with us. And if you don’t, I believe there is enough seating for you to comfortably avoid us! Especially Shawn, who is on this new broccoli diet. Gross, Shawn! Okay see you there!

By the time Sammy Harkham‘s Poor Sailor book came out, he had already produced at least 4 volumes of his now-essential Kramer’s Ergot anthology, been featured in Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, and was about 25 years old. Whew! Humbling, no?

Poor Sailor reprints the story of the same name from the classic Kramer’s Ergot Volume Four; except, instead of printing on big pages, with multiple panels per page (or were they? I don’t have mine in front of me, and now can’t remember), the Poor Sailor hardcover is not even 6″ square, printing a single panel on each page. The little orange book was the first work by Harkham I’d seen, something I ordered for the store on a whim out of Previews, then bought on impulse once it showed up.

I don’t want to oversell this book–it’s a good book, even a great book, but I like to think Harkham has and will do better. But it’s hard to overstate what happened in my brain when I first read it, then immediately reread it, then left it by my bed for weeks, picking it up often and flipping through its strange silent pages. Poor Sailor was one of the books that made me want to start making my own comics–not that I hadn’t before, but something about Poor Sailor made me want to IMMEDIATELY START making comics. I suspect this would be similar to how a budding writer might read a certain short story and feel compelled to pick up their pen, or a painter with Picasso, or whatever… I have always been drawn to the kind of art that provokes a creative response.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Poor Sailor is the aforementioned format, which has two clear effects (for me). The first is to completely compartmentalize the passage of time, which is no different from “regular” comics, but since there is a single panel per page, each page is one “moment”, rather than a collection of them. The story follows the fortunes of a husband smitten with wanderlust, who leaves his wife and home for adventure on the high seas. The early pages are a scattered portrait of the man’s life, chopping wood, building his house, his wife hanging clothes in the wind. The strange meta-space between pages–a page turn can propel the story forward by months or seconds, you never know–adds a dreamlike, haiku quality to the storytelling. It’s almost like a folk tale, a cautionary tale–it’s at once mundane and terrible.

The second effect of the single panel format is harder to explain, especially since I’m only now realizing it, years later: without exception, each page is bounded by a thick black panel border. Yes I know that’s very normal, BUT: by containing each image in that big chunky border, Harkham delineates the space within that panel–in effect, he CREATES the space by placing it inside the box, each image static, a little portrait of time. When you flip through the book, there is often more SPACE than there is image, with a character’s head just popping into view at the bottom of the frame, or a tiny boat floating in an immense ocean. The characters in Poor Sailor are grappling with SPACE, often drowning in it: the space they live in, the space between them and where they’d like to be, the space between them and what they’ve left, and most of all the limitless SPACE that time and circumstance create, and into which any evil thing may insinuate itself.

It helps that Harkham’s style is a weird amalgam of the European ligne claire (“clear line”) style and that of old newspaper strip artists like E.C. Segar (Popeye) and Frank King (Gasoline Alley). His figures are lumpy and worn-in, regular schmoes who are trying to figure out what’s what. His steady line creates systems of forms on the page, just shapes and occasional dollops of black floating in all that SPACE. Oh, and speaking of space, the end of the story kills it, the last little coda emerging from 4 blank pages, each still with its panel border, containing just… SPACE!

For more Sammy Harkham, I heartily suggest Drawn & Quarterly Showcase volume 3, which he has a long story in, as well as any volume of Kramer’s Ergot, especially 4 and 5. Also Crickets, which is amazing and which is also now cancelled. Bummmmmmmer. You can check Sammy out (sort of) online at his store’s site (he runs a store in LA called “Family”), or just Google “sammy harkham” and start the fun! Below is an image I found via this aformentioned fun Googling, some more clear line magic courtesy of the Comic Art Collective.

Guys don’t forget this one–signs point to it being one of our most amazingest discussions yet! We expect a larger turnout that normal, so (as we did for the Watchmen discussion group) we will be meeting here at the store and then trooping across the street to one of the area restaurants. Discussionmaster General Andy Mansell will be large and in charge at the head of the table, and he has been eagerly anticipating this so I’m sure he’ll be loaded for bear!

THINGS YOU SHOULD BRING:

1) a copy of the book (if you have one). It’s a very visual book, and I bet there will be a lot of discussion of the way author David Mazzucchelli uses color in it, which means a lot of page turning.

2) some questions. I know I have some–Asterios Polyp is a book crammed–CRAMMED, I say–with layers, and I’m pretty certain I don’t understand everything. Hopefully together we can all figure this badboy out.

3) a good attitude. We welcome all comers to our discussions, and are very friendly with each other. We want–nay, DEMAND–a vigorous discussion, but we all like each other too. So remember everyone’s feelings, what say?

4) a little money (only if you’re planning on eating or drinking at the restaurant). (oh, and if you want to buy anything at the store, that’s cool too).

5) high fives. Because, why not?

Okay quickly–I don’t want this to be a big scholarly dissertation or anything, BUT–

Last night I (finally) watched the Iron Man movie. I’ll grant that that’s kinda weird, as I work in a comics shop, WITH a bunch of people who saw it right away and pretty much all loved it. But here’s the thing–when you work in a comics shop, and have for years and years and years, you start hearing about these movies years, sometimes decades, before they’re actually released. We were hearing about the Spider-Man movie when James Cameron was supposedly doing it. Every time a new actor is attached or there’s drama on the set, we hear about that too. The budget, who’s handling the special effects, behind-the-scenes romance… by the time the movie comes out, it’s pretty hard to think of it as a fun piece of escapist adventure.

I would even suggest that, to some curmudgeons (me), it’s easier to think of it as work. Getting off work to go see (or even rent) a movie you’ve had to hear about for a bajillion years, not to mention directed by Jon Favreau (?!)… well, there’s plenty of other stuff to watch is all I’m saying.

So enough about why I took so long to see it. Who cares? I have now seen it. And guess what? It was good–maybe great, at least in terms of loud action movies. Maybe not Die Hard good, but pretty darn good all the same. And I liked it despite NOT being a fan of Iron Man, which I think is part of what made this such a big mainstream (read: not comics-world) hit.

I think most people can agree that the lion’s share of superhero comics movies are terrible. Or, if not all the way terrible, then at least deeply flawed. To be fair, besides the regular factors that afflict bad movies (including bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, bad story, etc.), a comics movie has another potentially crippling factor to deal with–

A comics movie has to deal with the whole adaptation issue as well. Most of them screw it up, tying themselves too closely to the original work, not allowing the NEW work to have a life of its own, to breathe as its own piece of art. It sounds like this was the Achilles’ heel of Watchmen, although I haven’t seen it. But you don’t have to be a genius to read that incredibly dense book–which is very much a COMIC BOOK, and depends on that form for much of its punch–and know that there’s no way to do that faithfully in a 2-3 hour movie. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t adapt Watchmen–but just chuck the idea of “filming the movie” out the window and make something new and exciting, something worth all that time and money you’re spending.

Because here’s the deal: most people out in the world who watch a comics movie have probably not read the comic book, and have no loyalty to that story, don’t care about that story, in many cases are not even aware of that story’s existence. Let’s face it, the percentage of people who went and saw Spider-Man who buy Spidey comics every Wednesday is probably in the single digits. If you target that small but rabid fanbase and cater to them, you lose the other 90% of people who just want to see a good movie, who are on a date or had a hard week at work, and just want to do something fun on Saturday night.

Am I right?

So. What Iron Man did RIGHT was to use the original Iron Man story as a kind of loose framework, and then build something on top of that with a life of its own. There are enough “core” elements there to satisfy story enthusiasts–Tony Stark is a tipsy millionaire who creates this wacky suit in a prison camp to save his life and escape. I’m not really into Iron Man as a comic, so I’m not sure if a lot of the Obadiah Stane stuff exists in the original story or not, but who cares? The story moves too quick to sit down and start wondering about stuff like this. Jon Favreau made a movie that honors the source material somewhat, but is really just about telling a fast and exciting story. Compressing 40 years of Iron Man evolution into a half hour of hilarious testing pratfalls was great (not to mention skipping all the boring 80’s alcoholic stuff), and more importantly, was told to the WIDE audience, and not just those of us (somewhat) familiar with the material already.

I have to say, while I’m certainly snobby about a lot of things, I’m not a person who cares AT ALL about fidelity to source material in adaptations. It almost always makes for crappy adaptations. The reverse is true as well–are there any comic adaptations of movies that are good comics in and of themselves? As in, can stand on their own rather than just being promotional tchotches designed to cash in on a film’s (usually brief) popularity? These things make me die inside a little, although there are exceptions. But a bunch of lightboxed stills from the movie with dialogue pasted on top DO NOT a compelling story make.

Am I right?

Anyway, I liked Iron Man, a lot, way more than I thought I would. That’s the point. Okay, now to get back to work on the order form for October comics!

While we all would think of books like Maus, Dark Knight Returns, or Watchmen as comics “canon,” there are a growing number of books that I am coming to think of as, if not canonical in and of themselves, then at least “must-read” books.  Maybe they’re still too new, or their influence has not grown enough to be considered part of a comics canon–but in an age with more high-quality literary comics than ever, it follows that the canon will eventually grow and adjust to this new influx. So, for now: The Beta Canon, or at least my version of it.

(NOTE: I’m having a hard time getting WordPress to let me post these images below in a way so when you click on them, they expand to a readable size, BUT if you right-click and choose “Open In New Window” or something like that, that should work.)

Gus And His Gang, by Christophe Blain, came out in 2008 here in America, although I think it was published first in France in 2006 or 2007, and possibly (probably?) in a different form.  When the book came out I was already a fan of Blain’s work, having read his two volumes of Isaac the Pirate and his (even-better) graphic album The Speed Abater.  I say “liked,” which is correct–they are enjoyable books, good but not really earth-shattering.  So when Gus came out, with its garish safety-orange cover, and its Wild-West subject matter, I looked forward to reading it but wasn’t really peeing myself or anything.  This seems to be the opposite of a lot of people more connected to European comics than I am–some people were let down by it after all the hype it received, and a lot of people didn’t notice it at all.

But when I grabbed it one day on the way out the door for lunch, needing something quick to read… well, by the end of the first story I was in love with it, and by the end it had become one of my favorite comics EVER. 

It’s hard to pin down exactly why, which is the strength of Gus, and maybe its weakness for others.  Some books just resonate with some readers; there’s something ineffable there that hits just the right combination of notes to form that perfect chord.  You know what I mean?  Like you can feel it happen and then hear that vibration for the rest of the reading experience.  Most of my favorite books do this, and Gus for sure caught me off guard. 

Moreso than Blain’s other books, Gus And His Gang employs a really gestural, expressive art style–similar to the kind of high-energy, fast style of fellow Frenchmen Joann Sfar and Manu Larcenet.  What looks at first to be rushed or even sloppy, reveals itself to be well-planned, well-executed storytelling, without a lot of  the fussiness that often gets in the way with lesser storytellers.  You can almost FEEL the artist making his brush strokes and pen lines on the paper, you imagine him bent across his drawing board, making decisions, deciding when a panel is done, how much nuance is enough…

It’s organic, I guess.  It’s like the book has just grown right up in your hands, that if you were to mash your nose into it you’d smell the rich loamy earth of France itself.  It’s constructed in the same way–the overall story (so far) seems less like a linear a-to-b progression, and more like an aggregation of story, like a herd of cattle stretched across some plain.  Ditto for the way the action can skip from action to humor to death to sex, at once silly and and serious enough to keep you worrying about the characters from moment to moment.

In fact, while the titular star of the book is Gus himself, most of my favorite stories center around the more taciturn Clem, he of the red broccoli hair. Where Gus will say and do anything to achieve his ends, be they love or money, Clem is more complex, has some scruples (though often violated scruples, even so).  Clem is no less a philanderer than Gus, but Clem is haunted by his own guilt, in the form of a towering one-eyed version of himself that haunts his spiciest moments.  Through Clem we meet Isabella, whose appearances are SO spicy, I had a hard time finding a page I could even show on our blog that wouldn’t set off alarm bells. 

Which makes writing about it even more challenging–Blain uses the cartooning form brilliantly to show the various moods and inner thoughts of the characters, not only through body language but the use of what cartoonist Mort Walker called “emanata”–the various stars, sweat beads, squiggly lines of frustration, and other abstract marks that tell the reader what’s going on without using boring old words. 

It’s the CONFIDENCE of Blain: his drawings seem effortlessly made, almost gestural.  Instead of fussing with getting this line or that just so, he concentrates on the subtleties of posture and the “acting” his figures are doing on the page.  In the page above, Blain takes a simple moment and stretches it into 8 mostly-silent panels.  Look at all the information you get there: though there’s no establishing shot or other reference to location on the preceding page, it’s easy to imagine where Clem and Isabella are. Even more impressively, Blain indicates the blocking of the scene itself without hardly moving his “camera” at all. 

Isabella comes in, moving to the right (the way the eye is moving as well, left to right, as it reads), then looks back (against the “flow” of the reading) towards Clem.  This has the double effect of telling us where the two are in relation to each other, again without any single shot containing both of them; AND it increases the importance of her look because the speed of our reading is interrupted by the reversal of the regular left-to-right flow by her look back. 

From there it’s perfect: beat, beat, then boom! Clems’s eyes open up and he’s in love.  Isabella continues moving with the flow of the eye and our special moment is ended.  I love it!

But I think maybe my favorite thing about Gus & His Gang, or at least the thing I find myself thinking about the most, is the colors.  The palette the colorist uses is just crazy, all these bright colors from all over the spectrum.  He goes from super bright, almost magenta shades to electric blues, but it’s never noisy, everything always makes sense.  And the pages are so BRIGHT.  He’s also not afraid to just leave a background totally white–the pages seem to breathe, everything seems so airy.  It might even undermine the overall sense of danger that most “Wild West” stories have, but I guess I don’t mind much.  I’ve definitely tried as hard as I can to appropriate this palette for myself in my own humble efforts, but so far without the grace and panache of the colorist, whose identity was kind of hard to figure out for awhile.  But Gina Gagliano over at First Second informs me it is “Clémence”, and worked closely with Blain himself on the palette. Thanks to Gina and especially Colleen AF Venable for helping me get all these images together real easy.  The best!

I’m not sure if this is the first volume of a continuing series or not.  Jeez, I sure hope so; I love it so much.  It is hard to imagine a book that’s come out over the last couple of years (a time RIFE with incredibly good comics) that has influenced me more that this one.  Although I will try in the coming months, as I write further on my choices for this “Beta Canon.” 

Have you read Gus or any of Blain’s works?  I’d love to hear what you think in the comments section.  Let’s hear it!

Lots of stuff going on this weekend in the comic book world!  Tomorrow (Saturday, August 22) will be the Greenville Sports Card & Comic Book Show, going on at the Greenville Elks Lodge #858, 7700 Pelham Rd, from 10am to 4pm!  Admission is just $2–if you keeps your eyes peeled you may espy our store manager Shawn Reynolds, who’ll most likely be making moon eyes at the guys from the Dollar Bin podcast and/or J. Chris Campbell, who did that zippy graphic up above there.  Sounds like a bargain for $2!

And if that weren’t enough, you can continue on down I-85 to Atlanta for Sunday’s Atlanta Comic Convention, happening at the Marriott Atlanta Century Center from 11am to 5pm.  Our boss Shelton Drum will be down there selling his sweet new stock of Silver and Golden Age books, plus regular back issues and probably some surprises.  He and Seth have been pulling out all the stops getting a really primo stock together, so if you’re anywhere near Atlanta on Sunday, be sure to stop by and check it out, or just say hi!  More info at the convention’s website.

Oh man this is going to be a good one. On Saturday, August 29th at 3pm, the next meeting of the Heroes Discussion Group will occur, and this time we will be rapping about one of the most talked-about graphic novels of the last several years, if not the decade: Asterios Polyp. The first long-form comic from creator David Mazzucchelli since City of Glass, Asterios Polyp is a ground-breaking graphic novel from the man who drew my favorite ever comic, Batman Year One. Not to mention his short but influential anthology Rubber Blanket, Daredevil: Born Again, etc. Dude is crazy good.

If you haven’t read this book yet, WHOA NELLIE you need to. Even if you don’t love it as much as I did, Mazzucchelli brings his A-game and creates something both playful and serious, inventive and satisfying. This will be a talked-about book for years and years: let’s start talking about it now!

NOTE: this is a grown-up book, and we will be having a grown-up discussion. To that end, we’ll meet here at the store and then troop across the street to one of our fine restauranting neighbors. All that we ask is that you bring an open mind and your brain. We’ll handle everything else (except the tab). This is going to be one to remember!

Now, we announced last Friday that we’d be having a 9pm Marvels Project #1 pre-sale tonight–that is still true. But in true Shelton Drum fashion, our boss has decided to super-size his party at the last minute.

SO tonight we will not only be staying up late to sell the new book by our buddies Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting (starting at 9pm), but Shelton and Seth will be rolling out their recently organized stock of Silver Age books, in celebration of the auspicious 70-year anniversary Marvel is celebrating throughout the year! These guys have really been working this stock, so there will be a lot of OOOOOLLLLLD books you probably haven’t seen before, in all sorts of grades!

OH BUT ALSO we’ll be having a surprise sale on back issues: all back issues in our regular back issue section will be half off all night! You heard right! Half off tonight only!

But leave us not forget The Marvels Project #1 itself–in true Marvel style, there will be a number of variants for this blockbuster event, including several you can ONLY get from retailers participating in tonights’ nationwide party event! Those include:

2 regular covers

A “party exclusive” blank cover, perfect for getting sketched on later by a luminary

Another “party exclusive”, this one a Phil Jimenez “virgin” cover (that means no logo, price, etc.–I know, these guys are nuts with these variants)

A Steve McNiven variant that’s highly limited

AND a 1:25 and 1:70 cover as well. Holy Cow that’s a lot of Marvel Project! But even if variant covers aren’t your bag, the story itself is pretty interesting so far, perfect if you haven’t been keeping up with Marvel continuity lately (like me). I dug it.

OH, I almost forgot–we’ll ALSO have the new Marvel Comics #1 70th Anniversary Edition, a reprint of the original first-ever Marvel comic, from (I think) 1939. AND a second cover you can only get–wait for it–at participating “party” locations!

We’ll start the back issue sale at 6pm tonight, and the Marvels Project #1 will be available for sale promptly at 9 o’clock. If you can’t make it, we SHOULD have some left for the regular release tomorrow… HOPEFULLY….

UPDATE–It looks like we’ll be joined tonight by some local artists, who you can probably trick into sketching on that blank cover for you. I know that both Andy Smith and Jason Latour will be dropping by, and I’ll bet there’ll be some more surprise guests as well. PARTAY!

Yoyoyo! This Tuesday night we’ll be staying open late to participate in Marvel’s nationwide prerelease of The Marvels Project #1! Starting at 9pm sharp, you’ll be able to purchase the book before everyone else, except of course for all the other people who are buying the book after 9pm. Oh, unless you’re in the front of the line.

If you got to meet series creators Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting at this year’s HeroesCon, or saw any of the panels Ed was a part of, you probably heard them talk about this new book, which ties together the origin of the Marvel Universe, which turns 70 years old this year! Don’t miss this opportunity to pick up one of the summer’s hottest books before its release date–you can only get it at participating retailers!

Our new fancy blog is nearing completion, thanks in part to the timely assistance of Phillip Duncan over at Superheroes-R-Us, who apparently is a CSS master among his other skills. We’ll be getting that live pretty soon, possibly even as soon as tomorrow. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you–

Over the last few weeks we’ve been moving our site from one service to another, fancier one–one that we will hopefully be reaping some sweet functionality rewards from in the coming months. So far the biggest reward has been like 500% more junkmail, but as rewards go it’s kinda lame, honestly. BUT that’s surely just a speedbump.

But, check it out, two big changes for right now:

1) SITE NAVIGATION HAS CHANGED

The site still looks the same more or less, but now the New Releases page has moved from “http://www.heroesonline.com/new-releases.html” to just plain old “…new-releases”. Ditto across the site; for instance, the HeroesCon Guest List is now at “http://www.heroesonline.com/heroescon/guests”. A small thing, but a change I’ve been wanting to make for awhile, and I thought I might as well get it done while stuff was shifting around anyway. Makes for cleaner navigation and easier to describe links to things.

SO: update your bookmarks accordingly. I’ve created a fancy error message page that you’ll get if you type in a file that doesn’t exist any longer, and all the new links are there for reference. The main site navigation is still more or less the same, so you can use the existing navbars to navigate to pages you’re looking for as well. If you have any problems or find any glaring errors, feel free to email me at dharbin[at]heroesonline[dot]com

2) While our e-mail addresses have not changed, some webmail-based addresses you may have been using will change before too long. So if you’ve been using an email like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]” or pretty much anything that doesn’t end in “…heroesonline.com”, now is the time to update your address books. Those emails will still find their way to us eventually for a little while, but better safe than sorry, right?

Okay so new blog soon, plus more new stuff to come. ONWARD TO ADVENTURE!