In the shadow of Southern California

March 13^th and 14^th saw the eighth annual Emerald City Comicon take place in Seattle.  Since moving to the Washington State Convention Center in 2007, it has rapidly gained critical mass with the hall feeling almost overcrowded this year — the legions of attendees had to be let in 15 minutes early on Saturday due to the fire risk they presented —and most exhibitors hosting more guests than previous years.  The list of creators in attendance was impressive with several top drawer names from the mainstream and independent scenes, many making their first trips to Emerald City.  The difference from previous years was palpable from the start, so much so that two words were on a lot of lips: San Diego.

“You can’t compare — this is a comic book convention,” said Jill Thompson, “San Diego is no longer a comic book convention, it’s a media convention.  Without knowing it, San Diego is going to revitalize a lot of smaller, regional conventions.”  Making her debut at ECCC, she delighted in the more intimate atmosphere and seeing fans carrying around stacks of comics.  Her sentiments were echoed by many of her peers, some of whom — like Tim Sale and Steven T. Seagle — refuse to go to San Diego now because of its focus on film and video game promotion.  “You feel like a second-class citizen,” Matt Fraction told us, even though he’s someone who, in the comics world, is seen as fairly high-profile and media-friendly with his work on the Iron Man franchise.

At Emerald City, it feels very much like a level playing field with indie and mainstream creators side-by-side, enjoying much the same foot traffic at their tables.  For popular creators, this is a welcome break from swarms of conventioneers, allowing them more time for fan interaction, without the pressures of promotion — given its place at the start of convention season, ECCC is relatively announcement-free — and for indie artists it exposes their work to a wider audience.  Jeff Lemire expressed surprise at how diverse the crowd was, seeing as much interest in Essex County as there was for his Vertigo project, Sweet Tooth.  The pervading feeling of the weekend was very that, big or small, it was a good time for comics.

…or most comics.  In light of a recent interview, it’s no secret that Image’s Phonogram series was hard-hit by poor sales.  Its writer, Kieron Gillen was jokingly modest about the fallout: “People have been very sweet. They’ve just come over to hold me and stroke me — but not in a sexual way.”  He was in attendance with one of the few new product launches of the weekend, the trade collection of The Singles Club, which had arrived from the printers just in time, “We’re used to a high-level disaster, that’s the way Phonogram operates.  What’ll happen now is they won’t sell…”

Northwest All Stars

“You can really stub your toe on people around here who are working in comics.”  That was Joelle Jones’ impression of the embarrassment of riches that the Northwest has in terms of comics talent.  One of the nice things about Emerald City is that it acts as a hub for these creators, bringing them together in an impressive way.  Almost every other artist or writer at the convention was based in Washington or Oregon, which certainly helps to give Emerald City its local identity.  “Once Dark Horse started, people began to gravitate toward the company they work for,” Jamie S. Rich explained, “and with Fantagraphics being based in Seattle, too, people just moved in that direction.  I think there’s also something in the fact that the weather is the way it is and it’s conducive to just having to stay indoors and draw.”  Greg Rucka, a fellow Portlander, was eager to concur: “It’s wet – we stay inside! And then the beer’s good and the coffee’s liberal and the cost of living’s not bad.  You’ve got a perfect storm for creators here – cheapskates who can get drunk and caffeinated and don’t have to go out and be social.”

In spite of Rucka’s fairly tongue-in-cheek remarks, there is a healthy sense of community between the writers and artists and even the fans, who seems to delight in the success of local creators.  Seattle’s Matthew Southworth spoke of the reaction to Stumptown, on which he is collaborating with Rucka: “My local comic shop have done a lot to promote the book, so I know a lot of people are aware of it because those guys like me.  In a way [Stumptown] feels like a local book about a local phenomenon by local people that just so happens to be nationally distributed. So I think there’s a feeling like, ‘Yay, one of our boys is doing something and people like it!’”  Buoyed by his success on the Oni-published title — the first issue sold out, as did his print for the convention — he’s keen to now work his way into the mainstream: “If you meet Jimmy Palmiotti at a show, tell him I wanna do Jonah Hex. I also really wanna draw Lobster Johnson for some reason…”

As well as the creators, the publishers were out in force, too: Top Shelf, Oni, as well as the aforementioned Dark Horse and Fantagraphics. The latter brought one of the biggest guests of the weekend, Gilbert Hernandez, who was launching his new Love and Rockets collection, The High Soft Lisp. He entertained a steady stream of fans with signing and sketching, ably assisted by daughter Natalia who showed signs of continuing the Hernandez legacy with her own mini-comic that she was selling.  Another Fantagraphics stalwart and Seattleite, Peter Bagge, was also there albeit as a guest as Vertigo who are set to publish his Other Lives graphic novel in April.

And the winner is…

For all the triumphs of Emerald City, the one that really seemed significant was that of the web cartoonists.  Alongside regulars like PvP and Girl Genius, e-commerce store Topatoco had an impressive presence with no less than 13 creators housed in its cardboard castle booth.  While it’s nothing new for web cartoonists to attend conventions, what was surprising was the line forming in front of Kate Beaton, creator of Hark! A Vagrant, which even rivaled the likes of Ed Brubaker and Mike Allred.  How did a small strip about history and literature manage to garner such a following? “Word of mouth is all.  Online it’s so easy to read someone’s comic – all it is is, ‘Check this out!’ in an email to your friend.  You don’t have to go anywhere – it just spreads that way.” Beaton’s humbleness belies the intelligence that permeates her work, an uncanny ability to draw the inherent humor out of historical figures, whether it be Poe and Verne’s bromance or Queen Elizabeth’s excessive ruffs: “I think almost everyone is interested in history, even if they read other types of comics, everybody likes a certain story or has a favorite character.  When people like something, it gets infectious.  I really like history so maybe that’s why it shines through.  I make comics about what I want to make comics about and I’m glad that everyone else likes them.”  The future looks bright for her, as The New Yorker are preparing to run a series of her cartoons, but whether she’ll ever make the move from the web to more traditional comics seems doubtful, “The problem with longform is that I don’t like putting up things that aren’t finished.  I like putting up comics that are self contained.”

Next year, Emerald City will expand to a three-day event, given the unprecedented success of this weekend’s event. Attendance was up nearly 50% on last year and several retailers were noting record sales for the event, a healthy sign of the endurance of printed matter in the comics medium — how would you sign an iPad anyway? — and economic recovery in general.

Oh yeah, and Stan Lee was there, too…

Top image: ©2010 Mike Allred
Middle image: ©2010 Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth
Bottom image: ©2010 Kate Beaton

PHOTO GALLERY:

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Notwithstanding the occasional and aberrant essay on the aesthetics of comics by a Gilbert Seldes or an e.e. cummings (or the occasional social or cultural critique by a Robert Warshow or Fredric Wertham), taking comics seriously began at the grass roots level when EC fans like Ted White, Bhob Stewart, and Frederick von Bernewitz published fanzines and wrote about EC comics. There were no institutions that could provide an hospitable forum for the discussion of comics as art —no universities, no magazines— and so fans had to create their own. Stewart, for example, published the E.C. Fan Addict in 1953; White published The Story of Superman in 1952 (in a run of perhaps 50 copies). EC was certainly the most editorially consistent and highest quality line of mainstream comics ever published, and when they were going great guns, the line as a whole attracted the attention of discerning pop-culture aficionados who approached them from the modest standpoint of intelligent fans who noticed the difference between EC and every other publisher and wanted to discuss the work among themselves — readers who were knowledgeable with and sympathetic to comics generally and EC particularly. This was criticism in its most rudimentary phase, and though I cannot say with any authority to what extent this was their primary impulse, EC fans were interested in debating artistic values and proceeded to do just that. The impulse to talk about comics progressed in fits and starts from that time to the present.

Bhob Stewart went on to co-edit with Dick and Pat Lupoff the science fiction fanzine Xero in the early ’60s, which ran essays about comics and cartoonists virtually unknown at the time, such as Carl Barks and George Carlson (these essay were later collected into a book, All in Color for a Dime); Jerry Bails founded Alter Ego in 1961, a fanzine predominantly devoted to DC and superhero comics; Roy Thomas took over Alter Ego in 1964; Don and Maggie Thompson started publishing the somewhat solecistically titled Comic Art in 1961 and Newfangles in 1967. Lupoff was primarily an SF fan who dabbled in comics; Bails was at bottom an historian and not a critic; Thomas became, after Stan Lee, the driving force behind Marvel Comics in the late ’60s and early ’70s as a writer and editor, but whose perennial fanboyishness largely precluded critical judgment; and in contrast to the untutored intellectual anarchy of the previously mentioned EC fans, the Thompsons fused a smug middlebrow sensibility onto fan triumphalism, which was, at least, a first for comics.

As I said, fits and starts.

When EC folded in 1954, it left something of an aesthetic gulf; there was no single generative force to rally around. There were good comics being produced —Barks and John Stanley were doing some of their best work, there was Kurtzman and Trump and Humbug— but there was a dispersal of creative energy in the post-EC/Comics Code era during which comics sales dwindled and creators left the field for what they hoped were greener pastures. (To give you some idea of how creatively impoverished the field was, Bails considered it a celebratory event when DC began publishing its rejuvenated superhero line in 1959!) Good criticism, at least at this stage it seems, required a critical mass of good art — and that there certainly wasn’t; the fanzines created in the early ’60s (and most of the fanzines through the early ’70s, in fact) reflected the stunted creativity of the comics themselves in their mindless enthusiasms and exuberant appraisals.

Which brings us to three figures who brought vision, analysis, and idealism to the idea of thinking critically about comics: Bill Spicer, Richard Kyle, and John Benson.

Spicer began publishing Fantasy Illustrated in the mid ’60s, changing its name to Graphic Story Magazine in 1967. (It’s interesting how even the more astute comics readers’ early frame of reference was so bounded by the science fiction and fantasy genres; there were few “realistic” comics published at the time and even those were ludicrous (i.e., crime); fantasy and science fiction, thin as they were, were actually more legitimate genres than most of what comics consisted of, and many fans discovered comics after submerging themselves in the SF and fantasy genres. By the late ’60s, Graphic Story Magazine evolved into the most literate “fanzine.” I remember thinking, at the time, that GSM looked like it was put together by grown-ups, whereas most fanzines, mine included, were cobbled together by my peers — precocious but essentially clueless high school kids. Spicer brought a rare maturity to fanzines that had been conspicuously absent. His editorial direction was less fanboyish and more professional; that is, he and his writers —among whom were John Benson and Richard Kyle— focused less on characters and more on individual cartoonists and in a far more searching way than most other “fan” writers of the time. GSM pioneered long, probing interviews (with such artists as Alex Toth and Will Gould) which was mostly a matter of asking intelligently conceived questions — or at least of avoiding the usual cretinous fanboy idolatry that wasted so many opportunities.

If there is a fourth name to add to this list of critical heroes, it would be Gil Kane. One cannot overstate how significant his 1969 interview in Alter Ego (conducted by Benson) was to those of us floundering around trying to make some critical sense of comics. I’ve spoken to literally dozens of people over the years who read that interview when it was originally published and they all had pretty much the same reaction:  Kane’s was a jaw-droppingly invigorating way of looking at comics. He took the only intelligent path a critical mind could given the comics he had to work with; he dismissed the scripting out of hand and focused on the distinctive but theretofore recondite visual virtues of specific artists. He articulated what many of us impressionistically loved about Jack Kirby and John Severin and Alex Toth but couldn’t put into words — or even into cohesive thought. He provided a ray of hope that comics could indeed be admired without abandoning one’s brains.

Kyle wrote a column called “Graphic Story Review” in GSM, and in 1971 began publishing a newsletter devoted to news and critical commentary of comics called Graphic Story World, which he somewhat inexplicably re-titled Wonderworld in 1973. This was a miraculous extension of Graphic Story Magazine (which had by then either ceased publication altogether or drastically slowed down its periodicity), full of literate reviews, news, essays, and discussions. It was also the first time a fan magazine devoted energy and space to covering international comics. Here was a handful of serious comics fans who focused on the better mainstream comics, underground comix, European (and even Japanese) comics, newspaper strips (past and, occasionally, present) — and saw the potential of a medium whose potential had barely been scratched. In an early issue of Wonderworld, Kyle summed up his evangelical editorial stance:

For as long as we have lived, there have been men and women who have tried to see beyond the commonplace. They have been called dreamers, and their visions have been labeled “fantasies.”

But the greatest fantasies of all are those accepted by the believers in the commonplace, where the sun circles about an earth as flat as a tabletop, travel to the moon is impossible — and nothing can live on dry land, out of the primal sea. The commonplace world is built of iron fantasies, a place where yesterday was always better.

In the commonplace world, all new arts are trash. In Elizabethan times, it was commonplace to say that Shakespeare’s theatre was trash. And then it was the novel’s turn: the novel, they said, was trash. And then the film came along. First it was the silent film, and the commonplace was that it was trash — until the sound film emerged. Then the silent film suddenly became an art, as the theatre and the novel had, and it was the sound movie that was trash. Today, all film is becoming art. What’s trash today, then? Comics, of course. But now that the newspaper strip is ailing, the commonplace is that it may be art. Those comic book stories, though, they’re surely trash…

But the limits of the wonderworld are reality, not the fantasy reality the commonplace world of every age creates for itself, but reality — the real universe in which we live, whose dimensions remain still unknown and virtually unexplored, vast beyond all but our imaginations. Like all the arts, the graphic story is a tool, a way of seeing into the real world, a deeper extension of our senses, and it has a destiny.