More NonSense: Cartoon Diversity

CXC as an example on how to build a comics festival.

Marvel's diversity efforts graded by various industry professionals.

Classic Peanuts understood how people dealt with tragedy.

Gene Luen Yang profiled bt SFGate.

Dave Gibbons won't be reading Doomsday Clock. “I wasn’t told anything at all – I know just as much as anybody else.”

Fredric Wertham's 'Seduction of the Innocent examined by R.C. Baker.

Joe Quesada's art collection was stolen. He tells us how you can help.

Gail Simone and Fabian Nicieza demonstrate that even pros are just fans screaming at each other.

Heidi MacDonald reacts to the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

Becky Morton on the "boys club" of British political cartooning.

Liz Bourke on the popular objection used by straight white cisgender males, “But what about the quality?”

Video: (unofficial) History of the National Parks

Go to: Aeon, by Ryan Maxey

Cartoon: Women’s Mass at The Satanic Temple

Go to: The Nib, by Andrew Greenstone

She and Her Cat

Story: Makoto Shinkai
Art:Tsubasa Yamaguchi
Translation: Kumar Sivasubramanian
Original Story: She and Her Cat: Their Standing Points (1999) by Makoto Shinkai

She and Her Cat is one of many tales told around the world about pets showering their owners with unconditional love. Expanding on a five minute animation created by Makoto Shinkai, the manga goes a bit beyond the usual portrait of animal companions and their owners. The titular cat Chobi isn’t the main point of focus, but a POV character who provides a peek into the life of his owner, a young woman named Miyu. Because Chobi is just your average house cat, he doesn’t truly comprehend her behaviour. As a creature of habit, he simply notices when Miyu is becoming more anxious and slowly deviating from her daily routine. Then one day, she doesn’t come home. Unlike Chobi, we the readers have already surmised that Miyu is undergoing a bout of depression brought on by pressures from work and her personal life. Though the specifics will mostly elude us.

Shinkai isn’t really able to maintain the illusion of seeing events through Chobi’s limited perspective. There are a couple of scenes with Miyu were Chobi is entirely absent. And Chobi sometimes resorts to human concepts which should be beyond the understanding of any cat. But as a framing device, Chobi allows us to view Miyu’s life as a series of vignettes. The story begins in spring and takes place over the course of a single year. Chobi’s narrative voice makes the most sense when the cat is paying a high degree of attention to the tiny details, particularly those details pertaining to the changing seasons. His loving description of his own surroundings evinces an unexpected sensuality which is complimented by the atmospheric artwork of Tsubasa Yamaguchi, who’s particularly attuned to the varying quality of ambient light as it’s filtered and diffused by the environment. When matched with Shinkai’s quiet narrative, Miyu’s descent into depression synchronizes with the looming cold around her in a way that almost feels inexorable.

As Miyu gradually withdraws from all human contact, it would seem that the ingredients are being gathered for the making of a desolate winter. And this tracks with Shinkai’s penchant for bittersweet endings. But for once, this is a sunnier conclusion from him. He swerves away at the last minute, thanks to a timely intercession from Chobi. Shinkai charts a new course which renews his characters, thanks to the healing power of pets.

Video: Cathedrals

Go to: Aeon Video, by Konrad Kaestner

Cartoon: Rasmea Odeh

Go to: The Nib, by Marguerite Dabaie

A City Inside

By Tillie Walden

A City Inside Is a tone poem crafted with appreciable virtuosity. It begins with an unnamed young woman lying on a divan while conversing with an unseen individual. From the manner of their conversation, it becomes apparent that the woman is inside a therapist’s office and preparing to go through some form of regression therapy. She enters into the requisite dream state by being gently absorbed by the divan. The sequence works because of how it’s illustrated by Tillie Walden with beautiful minimalism. The divan’s sloping form and repeating patterns make it appear as if the woman is floating on the surface of a large body of water. And when she sinks into the divan with the assistance of the therapist, the sequence recalls the experience of baptism or of retreating into the innocence of one's childhood.

The central conflict which prompts this bout of self-examination is a personal struggle - at its most abstract it’s a choice between love and freedom. Or maybe it’s between stability and personal growth. Or reality or fantasy. The message is open to interpretation. Whatever the case, the struggle is viewed as a reverie composed of a series of phantasmagorical images. The therapist serves as the narrative voice which ties them together, since the woman remains silent once she goes under. But the overall impression of her life is of someone constantly seeking solitude. We first see the woman as a little girl growing up in a large house located in “the South.” The narrator claims that she was happy living with just her father to keep her company. But virtually every panel portrays her being alone with her thoughts, engulfed by the long shadows cast by the house and her rural environment. It doesn’t actually come as a surprise when the narrator says that she left her father when she was only 15, “trying to escape those southern ghosts.”

When we see the woman again, she’s already a young adult living contentedly in the sky. She spends her time writing stories about nonexistent places she wants to visit. Then one night, she meets another woman bicycling past her home. The two begin a romantic relationship, which brings them both back to earth. Only this earthbound existence doesn’t suit our protagonist, who begins to contemplate leaving her lover. But the uncomplicated narrative belies the artistic challenge of capturing its contrasting environments. Walden accomplishes this through her skillful use of black and white composition. Inky shadows and silhouette figures balance areas of bright white, and the resulting shapes generate a pleasing rhythm throughout the comic. Textures and patterns create subtle visual motifs which are better appreciated through repeated readings. On a more surface level, Walden’s quiet, dreamlike imagery evokes the surreal landscapes found in the work of classic cartoonists Winsor McCay and George Herriman.

The resolution to her conflict is as fantastic as it is ambiguous. As the therapist’s voice makes the woman consider her future, the surreal landscape she inhabits suddenly expands into an immense and beautiful city. Every object and structure within it embodies some part from her life. But as she wanders the empty metropolis as a much older figure, her final thoughts turn to the people she knew, cared for, and eventually left behind. It’s still a future the woman has yet to choose when she comes out of her reverie and leaves the office. And that tantalizing conclusion makes for a more appealing comic.

Video: 30 Days Timelapse at Sea

Go to: JeffHK, by Jeffrey Tsang (via Jason Kottke)

Webcomic: Pika's Peak

Go to: Pika's Peak, by Akire Bubar and Patrick Campbell

Wonder Woman #31

Story: James Robinson
Art: Carlo Pagulayan
Inks: Sean Parsons, Jason Paz, Scott Hanna
Colors: Romulo Fajardo Jr.
Letters: Saida Temofonte
Covers: Bryan Hitch, Alex Sinclair, Jenny Frison

Wonder Woman created by William Moulton Marston, H. G. Peter, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Olive Byrne.

The Wonder Woman run of writer Greg Rucka, with artists Liam Sharp and Nicola Scott, set a pretty high bar for future creators, reversing most of the controversial aspects of the New 52 version began by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, and restoring many classic elements. This new story arc by writer James Robinson (making his return to DC Comics) and artist Carlo Pagulayan is okay, I guess. But it definitely feels like a much more conventional take on the character. Moreover, the arc unfortunately dips into a bit of continuity porn. I thought the whole Rebirth initiative meant we didn’t have to worry about this any more. But here’s the the official summary of this issue from DC’s website:

Spinning out of the pages of DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH and JUSTICE LEAGUE: DARKSEID WAR, legendary writer James Robinson (JSA: THE GOLDEN AGE, STARMAN) comes on board to answer one of the biggest questions of the year: Who is Wonder Woman’s brother? Taken away from Themyscira in the dead of night, the mysterious Jason has been hidden somewhere far from the sight of gods and men…but his life and Wonder Woman’s are about to intersect in a terrifying way, bringing them face to face with a cosmic threat they never imagined!

I suppose it was too much to hope for Geoff Johns to forget about this last minute revelation from his run on the Justice League. It was simply put on the back burner while Rucka was allowed to tell a very different story. I really would have preferred that DC went back to Diana being sculpted from clay. I was even under the impression that Rucka’s run had erased the whole storyline of Diana being the love child of Zeus and Hippolyta. But I guess our Chief Creative Officer’s master plan for the DC Universe included biding his time until he could rope another writer into continuing this plot thread. And now we have Robinson.

Frankly, this development is jarring given the Wonder Woman comics that have been published in the last year. It obviously doesn’t fit with the existing material, or the direction being mapped out before Robinson took over the series. It’s very much an artifact of the New 52 era. And a noticeable effect of its insertion is that the comic moves away from Diana’s strong female cast to a more male-centered focus Johns seems to prefer. The resulting narrative where the villain plots his revenge and stages a comeback is a lot more formulaic. The cast now includes New God Darkseid, his daughter Grail, the yet unmentioned Jason and other sons of Zeus, named and unnamed. However, to anyone coming to the comic from the recent Wonder Woman film, the opening page spread is reminiscent of the climactic battle between Diana and Ares. Since her film counterpart acknowledged the god of war as her “brother,” this would appear to be a misdirection meant for them.

The comic contains a few more references aimed at the film audience. The capable Pagulayan draws a certain mysterious figure to resemble hobo Clark Kent as played by Henry Cavill from Man of Steel. That’s also another misdirection. And Diana herself is clearly meant to resemble Gal Gadot. So I’m glad he didn’t attempt to make Steve Trevor look more like Chris Pine. Otherwise, Pagulayan works in the idiom established by past Wonder Woman artists within the last twenty years.

Overall, this is a somewhat unsatisfying introduction to the new arc. Half the comic is taken up by an underwhelming fight between Grail and one of DC’s C-list characters. And there’s a lot of exposition to get through which slows down the pace. Maybe the arc will make more sense in future instalments, but so little happens in this comic past the fight. More immediately, this feels less like a Wonder Woman story than the setup for an event story which just happens to include her.

Cartoon: Eye of the Storm

Go to: The Nib, by Rosa Colón

More NonSense: SPX 2017 Edition

Go to: SPX

Heidi MacDonald on this year's SPX.

Rob Clough on this year's SPX.

Kat Overland on this year's Ignatz Awards.

Matthias Wivel on Jack Kirby’s late foray into autobiographical comics, Street Code.

Tom King and David Finch talk about their creative process when writing Batman.

Seth Simons on the current neglect of The New Yorker’s Cartoon Bank, which licensed cartoons for secondary use. Cartoon Bank was established by Editor Bob Mankoff in 1992, and bought by the New Yorker in 1997:

The Cartoon Bank was a windfall for cartoonists, who in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s witnessed the market for single-panel gag cartoons dwindle from a handful of publications to virtually only The New Yorker. “I remember one particular check early on, probably my second or third check from the Cartoon Bank, was close to $8,000,” said one longtime cartoonist who was involved in the Cartoon Bank’s earliest planning sessions, and who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “As time went on, the returns weren’t as great, but they were still good—they were still two or three thousand dollars a month.” Alex Gregory, a contributor since 1999, described similar numbers. “I would regularly get checks for one or two thousand dollars,” he said. Mankoff, who had a bird’s-eye view of the company’s financials, spoke of cartoonists receiving residual income to the tune of $30,000 to $40,000 annually. The 1998 Times report notes that one cartoonist, Peter Steiner, had by that point received more than $30,000 in royalties for a single cartoon. 

In 2008, Mankoff handed off leadership of the Cartoon Bank to Condé Nast, who, it quickly became apparent, planned to operate the business with a lighter touch. “I consulted with them for many years after I left, urging them to support this business and commit to this business,” Mankoff said. “For their own reasons they decided that they’re not supporting it. There aren’t really any employees left. And those people who used to do those things”—licensing, custom books, original art sales—“have been let go. The people there are absolutely well-meaning, but they have no real idea of what this business is, who the cartoonists are, how you might leverage and maximize it.” 

Over the following years, the well dried up. The cartoonist who described an $8,000 check he received early on said he now sees at most a few hundred a month. Gregory said the same, as did several other cartoonists who I spoke too.

Mimi Pond lists the top ten graphic memoirs.

Matt Furie takes legal action using the DMCA against various alt-right groups.

Steve Foxe explains why Marvel's latest initiative, Legacy, won't save the company from declining sales.

Chris Ware on writing characters who come from a different background from him.

Charles Pulliam-Moore points out that the X-Men and the Mutants are not an ideal analogy for race, something I've been saying for some time now.

David Lewis on Muslim representation in comics.

Hayao Miyazaki and his portrayal of the supernatural.

Kevin Smith profiled by Abraham Riesman. Smith's early films wedded the 90s slacker ethic with unapologetic geeky obsessiveness, foreshadowing our pop culture landscape. However, his particular brand of storytelling hasn't aged very well. But while Smith has fallen out of favour as a film auteur, he's successfully reinvented himself as an online presence.

The Big Bang Theory serves as a continual reminder that Hollywood is committed to perpetuating the geek stereotype. Unfortunately, this tends to highlight some of the more negative aspects of fandom to the television audience.

Anders Nilsen explains why senators should vote NO on "Graham-Cassidy, the latest Republican attempt to dismantle Obamacare and rob people of their health care."

Anyone who follows my work at all closely probably knows that I have published two books about a particular illness and death and its aftermath. In March of 2005 my girlfriend at the time, Cheryl Weaver, was diagnosed with cancer – Hodgkins Lymphoma. Despite an initially positive prognosis the disease failed to respond to treatment, and in November of that year the disease killed her. In my books I didn't delve too deeply into the details of our particular odyssey through the health care system, but one relevant fact is that Cheryl didn't have health insurance. For several months before her diagnosis she had been dealing with a variety of what felt like unrelated, inexplicable, minor health issues. She hadn't gone to see a doctor because, at the time we couldn't afford it. The simple fact is that had she had insurance she may well have had a chance. And her story is far from unique. Lack of health insurance literally kills people every single day in America. Wealth should not determine who gets care in this country any more than it should determine who has access to the justice system or the political process. It doesn't have to be this way.

Lynda Barry has an advice column.

Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered on September 28th, 1987. It bestowed upon our pop culture landscape the great Patrick Stewart, the finest actor to ever grace the hallowed franchise. He would immortalize "Make it so," "Tea Earl Grey," "Shut up Wesley," not to mention his patented "Picard Manoeuvre." TNG's first season was pretty rough. And by that I mean it was practically unwatchable. But even early TNG succeeded in expanding the franchise with ideas that would go on to become essential to its worldbuilding.

Inhumans sounds like a crappy show made 20 years ago.

RIP Len Wein (June 12, 1948 – September 10, 2017). The legendary comic book writer was the co-creator of popular characters such as Swamp Thing, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus. Bronze Age creators like Wein were among the first working professionals to rise from the ranks of organized fandom, and their work expressed sensibilities which placed them a lot closer to our modern fan-driven market.

TCJ posts an interview with Len from The Comics Journal #48, August 1979.

Sean T. Collins et al. lists the top ten film performances of the late Harry Dean Stanton (July 14, 1926 – September 15, 2017).

RIP Hugh Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017), founder of Playboy magazine, notorious for its glamour pinup pictorials. But at its height, Playboy also published notable cartoonists such as Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Jules Feiffer.

My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness

By Kabi Nagata
Translation: Jocelyne Allen
Letters: Karis Page
Cover Design: Nicky Lim

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness opens with mangaka Kabi Nagata attempting to have sex while inside a Love Hotel room with an escort she hired from a lesbian escort agency. She’s sitting on one end of the bed wearing a terrified expression on her face. Nagata is 28 years old, never been kissed, never been in a relationship, and has only recently come to the realization that she prefers women. She’s spent most of her youth suffering from bouts of depression, manifested in her life as eating disorders, acts of self harm, an inability to hold down a steady job, or form lasting friendships. So, off course she’s scared. The book’s opening (and its risque cover) initially produced an expectation that this would be a story of sexual hijinks, the stress of dating, and the difficulties of being single in the modern world. But I suspect that those thoughts were conditioned by the consumption of too much Hollywood entertainment. What actually follows is an extended and earnest bout of self-examination, gradually leading Nagata to the realization about how much she’s been suppressing her own sexuality in order to fulfill her own preconceptions about responsible adult behaviour.

Nagata’s focus is narrow. She talks about the toll depression took on her own health with great candor. By her own telling, the problems began when she dropped out of university. The resulting loss of a sense of direction would make her extremely anxious. But even securing a part-time job fails to deliver for Nagata the sense of belonging she desperately craves. On the contrary, her self-harm and eating disorders escalate to the point she has to be hospitalized. In one of the most harrowing moments in the manga, Nagata is overcome by an intense desire to eat while in the middle of her shift. She starts stuffing a bowl of uncooked instant ramen into her mouth, but is forced to stop when she notices how the hard noodles have torn into her gums and caused Nagata's mouth to bleed.

But this isn’t a tell-all book. Nagata’s increasing self-awareness forces her to confront how her emotionally stunted relationship with her parents has shamed her into feeling completely inadequate as a functioning adult. There’s a lot of ground to be covered here which Nagata declines to explore in greater detail. She also keeps her portrayal of other supporting characters similarly nebulous. They’re mainly described as either being disapproving or supportive towards her. Every act of kindness shown to her tends to overwhelm the inexperienced Nagata. This includes the escort from the book’s opening. As a mangaka, her primary source of information about sex are the doujinshi she’s read. And as a client, Nagata prefers to ignore the economic nature of the transaction she initiated and would rather project an artificial intimacy to their encounter. But it’s arguably an illusion she needs to maintain just to make it through what is to her a new experience.

The loosely drawn chibi style Nagata employs is both very conventional and a little unusual. Mangaka often use it for the bonus material included at the end of a manga volume, and it helps establish a tone of breezy intimacy between author and reader. But it’s not something typically employed for the long-form narrative. The most eye-catching part of the book's design is the pleasant tri-color scheme (black and white, plus pink) which belies the subject matter within. Otherwise, this aesthetic can sometimes appear a bit too generic.

But it’s not hard to feel for Nagata. Her vulnerability is genuine. And it’s painful to witness her toil so hard to achieve any sense of self-worth after a decade of feeling useless. Whatever Nagata’s particular circumstances, there’s something all-too familiar about the struggle to overcome loneliness.

Portfolio: Sandy Kim

Go to: Skimlines, by Sandy Kim (via Tom Spurgeon)

Cartoon: The Wall

Go to: The Nib, by Peter Kuper

Cartoon: Monuments

Go to: Sarah Glidden

First White President

Go to: GoComics, by Ruben Bolling

Cartoon: Who Owns The World?

Go to: The Nib, by Maurizio Boscarol

Sheena #0 & #1

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle #0
Story: Marguerite Bennett, Christina Trujillo
Art: Moritat
Colors: Andre Szymanowicz.
Letters: Thomas Napolitano
Covers: Emanuela Lupacchino, Fabio Mantovani, J. Scott Campbell, Sabine Rich, Moritat, Andre Szymanowicz, Ryan Sook

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle #1
Story: Marguerite Bennett, Christina Trujillo
Art: Moritat, Dimi Maheras
Colors: Moritat, Casey Silver
Letters: Thomas Napolitano
Covers: J. Scott Campbell, Sabine Rich, Ryan Sook, Moritat, Andre Szymanowicz, Carli Ihde, Michael Atiyeh, Cosplay Photo

Sheena created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger.

Despite being one of the more popular characters from comics Golden Age, Sheena has fallen into partial obscurity as the jungle queen archetype declined in popularity. I should note that I don’t really follow the character, which makes it difficult to trace her history. Sheena has bounced from one publisher to the next, with her continuity being adjusted along the way. Sheena was transplanted from Africa to South America during the 1980s, distancing her from her original but regressive “Darkest Africa” setting. Her last comics appearance was published by Moonstone Books. That series took its cue from a reboot written a decade earlier by Hollywood writer Steven E. de Souza for Devil’s Due Publishing. As was his habit, de Souza located Sheena in the banana republic of Val Verde (the same settings of the movies Commando and Predator). Her biological parents were changed to be an American man and a local woman. I presume this was done to avoid the equally regressive convention of a displaced white saviour living with the natives and becoming their leader/greatest warrior. This latest incarnation from Dynamite Entertainment follows in the steps of the de Souza reboot.

Sheena held one advantage over other jungle queens which has kept her from completely vanishing from our collective memory - her iconic appearance. Jungle queens have always catered to adolescent males. But Sheena popularized the fashionable leggy blonde who wore an impractical leopard-skin swimsuit, a choice which allowed for both the display of ample cleavage and maximum freedom of movement. It’s a  look that’s been shamelessly copied many times, with diminishing returns. And none of her imitators could claim to be the first female character to headline her own title, making Sheena a pioneering figure for the statuesque “Amazon” beauty as heroic lead. The prevalence of this body type in comics has since come under considerable criticism for promoting a pretty narrow view of women in general, and rightfully so. Not that the Dynamite comic makes any apologies for this piece of the character's legacy.

Hiring Moritat to be the series regular artist certainly doubles down on these qualities. But he’s still a bit of an unconventional choice. His anime-influenced aesthetic is a departure from the more familiar good girl art of past cartoonists. Moritat’s beautiful women are not what is often referred to as classically proportioned. They’re all voluptuous torsos and limbs that go on forever. His figures are elongated in a way that the anatomy doesn’t always seem to properly hold together. Sheena is drawn with juvenile facial features which imbue her with an unexpected and strangely elf-like bearing. This is further enhanced by the digital coloring which gives her darker skin tones than past versions. Moritat’s Sheena seems like a deliberate move away from the more traditional caucasian-looking portrayal of the character. But she also doesn’t resemble anyone hailing from any country in the real world.

This hazy exoticism extends to the rest of the story. The plot requires Sheena to enter an ancient ruin already covered up by jungle overgrowth. Despite its state of advanced decay, the structure’s various boobytraps are still in working condition because off course the are. Now I realize that Val Verde is a fictional nation, but seeing as how it’s also supposed to be located in South America, I found it odd that the ruin’s architectural details more closely resembled ancient South Asian art than anything found in pre-Columbian cultures. Later on, Sheena defends the tribal inhabitants of the jungle from the armed goons of a greedy multinational corporation bent on strip mining the place. The portrait of the natives are fairly generic: diminutive brown-skinned people who wear loincloths, carry primitive spears, and live in thatched houses. The attempt simply feels lazy. I could also point out the dissonance of seeing lemurs, which are native to Madagascar, included in the cover.

So at this point, there’s not a whole lot to recommend the comic if you’re not already a fan of Moritat’s brand of cheesecake. Or the alternative covers drawn by other artists. The most intriguing part of the story right now is that Sheena has experienced at least two separate encounters with flying drones being operated by an unidentified male university student or professor searching for something lost in the jungle. It’s kinda creepy that someone has the ability to spy on Sheena from the air, even though those encounters are purely accidental.

But for me, the most baffling sequence involves a camera. While prancing around the ancient ruins, Sheena finds an abandoned 35mm SLR camera which still contains a canister of exposed film. Despite her unfamiliarity with the device, Sheena instinctively pockets the canister. After she escapes and reaches the open air, Sheena unspools the film from inside the canister and examines a single frame of what is now a magically processed roll of color negatives. WTF! Just because virtually everyone takes pictures with digital equipment these days shouldn't be an excuse for this kind of slapdash storytelling.

Cartoon: Know Your Hate Groups

Go to: The Nib, by Charis JB