"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Most iconic? Yes, what character could possibly be more iconic than a renamed character based on a character who was a thinly-veiled counterfeit version of Fawcett's Captain Marvel character created solely to continue publishing Captain Marvel comics in the UK after Fawcett discontinued publication of their Captain Marvel comics as part of a legal action taken by DC Comics contending that Captain Marvel was too derivative of Superman...?

What character could possibly be more iconic than a renamed derivation of a derivation of a derivation of Superman, a character best known for a relatively short run of comics that no reader younger than Those of a Certain Age have been able to read, due to complicated legal issues just now being untangled, some 30 years after those comics were originally produced...?

And as for "and popular"...? I have no idea what metric they might have used to determine that Miracleman/Marvelman was the most popular superhero that comic book fans have ever read, but I generally consider comic book sales, licensing revenue and "being a superhero that people might have actually heard of in their entire fucking lives" to be pretty good indicators of a character's popularity.

UPDATE: Please read the comments, where it is revealed whether it was IGN who said something dumb, or Marvel who misquoted IGN.

Also, if what I heard from the reeds is true, Tom Brevoort has ass's ears.

I would like to draw your attention This is probably the best blurb I've found on the back cover of a comic book in quite a while, the second one down:

"Geoff Johns and King Midas of ancient Greek myth both have a similar trait in common: whatever they touch, no matter how lackluster or trivial, is turned into radiant gold and worthy of attention."

—PopMatters

I like everything about that blurb.

I like how overly-complicated the structure of it is. If one wanted to make an everything-Geoff Johns-touches-turns-to-gold observation, it doesn't take quite so many words: "Like King Midas, everything Geoff Johns touches turns to gold." Period. Also acceptable, "Geoff Johns has the Midas touch."

But the writer, whose name isn't given in the blurb and whose name I am not giving here because I don't really want to make fun of him or her as much as I want to point out the out-of-context blurb as something that amused me personally, specifies where the metaphor of the Midas touch comes from ("ancient Greek myth") and then seems to work against the use of that metaphor. Johns doesn't just have the Midas touch, he has "a similar trait in common," a phrase I have trouble processing, with Midas. And here neither Johns nor Midas turn what they touch into mere gold, but to "radiant gold" that is "worthy of attention." Not normal gold, or the sort of gold you can ignore.  The blurb kind of makes me wonder if the writer actually knows the story of Midas.

I also like the fact that the comic book the blurb appears on in a collection of Justice League of America  Vol. 1: World's Most Dangerous, written by Johns, Matt Kindt and Jeff Lemire, and featuring artwork by David Finch (who draws  only parts of three of the eight issues collected, and is merely the first of 16 artists involved, despite the series being sold as a Johns/Finch one). The blurb itself is taken from a review of JLoA #2, one of the issues Finch drew.

I find it amusing that this is the comic that the writer deploys the Midas touch metaphor on because, even allowing for variations in the tastes of different critics, it seems to me that reasonable people who have read more than just DC super-comics of the past three years can agree that it is not a very good comic book. It's not even a very good Geoff Johns comic book. It's not even a very good Geoff Johns comic book about the Justice League.

I think it more accurate to say that with this comic, Johns has taken the original, the perfectly golden concept of the Justice League of America—the world's most popular superheroes and Martian Manhunter team up to fight giant starfish and other threats to big for any of them to handle alone—and turned it into, I don't know, nickel. And then Finch touched it and turned it into lead. (Wait, is lead less valuable than nickel? Because if not, reverse them. I'm just assuming lead is of no real value, as that's what alchemists used to try to turn into gold, another popular, valuable metal-based metaphor. But maybe nickel's actually worth even less. I don't know. I'm a comics critic, not a metallurgist).

But mostly I like that blurb because of the story it conjures in my head. I imagine Geoff Johns waking up and getting dressed one morning, grabbing his favorite Green Lantern logo T shirt and slipping it on, only to find that it turned to solid gold as it fell over this torso. He pulled on his jeans and socks, and each of these became gold as soon as he had them on as well. Now frightened, he reached for his baseball cap, and it too became gold upon his head.

I imagine him walking awkwardly to his desk, weighed down by his heavy, metal outfit, and as his fingers touched his computer keyboard, it too became solid gold. In horror, he realized that he wouldn't be able to write comic books anymore, so long as he suffered from this terrible affliction! He tries to call for help, but as soon as he picks up his cellphone, it's a non-functional golden objet d'art in his hand!

So he rushes into the office to tell Co-Publisher Dan DiDio of what has befallen him, and as he bursts into DiDio's office, the comics executive jumps up to greet him, reaching to shake his star writer's hand before Johns can stop him, and in an instant, Dan DiDio is no more, replaced instead by a solid gold statue of himself!

Aghast at the site of his long-time co-worker and friend rendered lifeless at his touch, Johns' mind reels, and he turns to flee the building. But he hears the voice of Co-Publisher Jim Lee in his ear, "What have you done to Dan?" and feels Lee's fingers closing around his wrist, and before he can even turn around, Lee too is a statue of gold!

Johns stumbles out of DC's offices, probably bumping into one DC editor after another, and runs down the streets of New York, screaming and crying tears that turn whatever the fall upon to gold as well. He runs to the temple of Zeus—surely there's a temple to Zeus in New York City; they've got everything there, right?—falls on his knees, throws his hands wide and looks to the heavens. "Please Zeus, remove this curse from me! It wasn't I who wished for it, but someone from PopMatters! Please, I'll do anything you ask!"

And the head of the giant marble statue of Zeus creaks as it turns to look down upon Geoff Johns, and a voice like thunder rings out, echoing against the temple walls: "Anything?" And as Johns ugently nods, Zeus' voice booms out,  "Very well, but only if you promise to change Captain Marvel's magic word to 'Zasham'...!

"Oh, and also, you must promise to read my pitch for a 12-part maxi-series to do away with the New 52 continuity! You don't have to publish it or anything, I just ask that you read it! I think you'll like it! It involves the Fifth Dimensional Thunderbolt rescuing and rallying continuity casualties like Oracle and the Batgirls and Wally West and Donna Troy, and joining forces with disaffected youth from the New 52 like Anarky and Spoiler who know that something about their universe just isn't right, and ultimately they convince many of the heroes of the New 52 to join them in battle with Pandora, who re-wove continuity to form the New 52, I guess, but you never really explained how or why you know, and then re-set history once more, this time collapsing the New 52 into the post-Crisis DCU, kinda like they did COIE with the various Earths, so you can keep the good stuff from the last few years but get rid of all the dumb stuff, of which there has been so much!

"Oh! And for God's sake, have Azzarello put me back in Wonder Woman! He's got every Greek God except me in it! It's pretty annoying!'

And Johns knows he's not supposed to accept unsolicited pitches because he could end up getting into legal trouble, but he also knows that anyone who could possibly object have already been turned to golden statues, so he ascents, and Zeus lifts the curse and Johns is promoted to publisher, since anyone more experienced than him was turned into a pure gold statue, and while he isn't able to to change Shazam's name to Zasham, publisher and deity compromise and make him Captain Marvel again, and while Zeus' maxi-series pitch is eventually rejected, he and Johns do collaborate on an event comic getting rid of the New 52, but Zeus uses a pseudonym, Z. Alan Smithee.

I do not care for this blurb.

It's white on light blue, so it may be a little hard to make out, but it says, "Fun like watching The Venture Brothers or listening to The Ramones," and is attributed to "Kelly Sue DeConnick, Captain Marvel" (the former being a professional comics writer, the latter being the title of one of her current comics, the probably-not-long-for-this-world series for Marvel comics.

The blurb appeared on the cover of It Girl! and The Atomics #2, and thus must be referring to It Girl! and The Atomics.

I don't like it.

I've watched The Venture Bros. I've listened to The Ramones. And I've now read both issues of It Girl!, and I'm afraid I can't find anything the three have in common.

In what way is the cartoon series The Venture Bros like It Girl...? They both have bearded, red-headed scientist characters. And...that's all I can really think of.

In what way are The Ramones like It Girl...? I got nothing. I think an argument could be made of similarities between Madman and some of character creator Mike Allred's comics with the work of the Ramones, but I don't see anything in these 40-50 comics pages that seem at all like the Ramones.

Now, it's possible DeConnick was simply grabbing two random things that she also enjoyed and using them as signifiers by which to gauge her enjoyment of the comic book—she did say it was fun like "watching" and "listening" to those two examples, rather than saying it was fun like those two examples themselves, but, if that's the case, it's a pretty poor blurb for Image to put on the cover (Why not go with "Fun" and leave it at that?), and it requires a little too much rhetorical reach.

Not to mention how subjective "I liked reading this comic book as I like listening to this band or watching this TV show" is as a measure of the quality of a book, or even the endorsers endorsement of that book.

It would be a little like me saying, I don't know, "Faith Erin Hicks' artwork is charming, like an old-fashioned doughnut shop with a horseshoe-shaped bar lined with stools built into the floor or a crayon-drawing of a pony that actually looks more like a cat taped on the office refrigerator," or "She was wearing a really pretty dress, like Vince Locke's ink line or a church bell ringing nine o'clock in the evening in December."

In addition to writing great comics, short stories, novels, picture books and blog posts...

...Neil Gaiman also writes pretty great blurbs.

That's from the back cover of That Is All, the recently-released new prose book by John Hodgman, who pictured wearing a mustache and ascot, below Gaiman's blurb.

My new favorite blurb:

That's from a little girl in response to Wanda Gág's book Snippy and Snappy, and it was reprinted (along with similar blurbs from little kids referring to various other books of hers) on the back cover of Nothing At All.

Come on, Snicket! You call that a blurb?

Seriously Snicket, what sort of nonsense is this? It's supposedly a blurb extolling the virtues of his one-time collaborator Richard Sala's latest work, Cat Burglar Black. But Lemony Snicket—if that is his real name—instead just rattles off about 30 almost completely random exclamations that could be referring to just about anything.

I say almost completely random, because, as you read those, you'll notice they're in alphabetical order. See, rather than saying something about the book he's supposedly providing a back-cover blurb for, Snicket instead makes it all about him and shows off how clever he is.

For shame, Lemony Snicket, for shame.

Couldn't you have just followed that nice Dan Clowes boy's example and said something nice and simple about the book, like, "A deranged masterwork, jet-propelled from start to finish with spooky thrills?"

Aw, maybe I'm just being so hard on Snicket because I'm jealous. Not because his Series of Unfortunate Events books have no doubt made him a scroogeillionaire, or because Lemony is cooler name than Caleb (although, come to think of it, those are probably also pretty good reasons to be jealous of him), but because he thought of a way to say something clever in praise of Sala's latest book, while I found myself completely stumped when I sat down to try and write a formal review of it.

Part of the problem is that I guess I'm just a little too found of Sala at this point, making it hard to talk about how good his work is. In my mind, "Richard Sala" has long since become synonymous with "great art," so reviewing new works of his fill me with a sort of "Aw, what's the point?"-ism. It's Richard Sala, what else do people need to know, really?

Cat Burglar Black, an original graphic novel from First Second, opens with a typically shapely Sala heroine (I wholeheartedly agree with Snicket's V-word, "Va va va voom!"), dressed in a leotard and mask, running through a dark forest and leaping to safety in the twisty, curlicue-esque branches of a typical Sala tree, as her pursuer, a whild boar snorts and "rawnk"s at her heels.

It then flashes back to introduce us to the imperiled heroine, white-haired K., who has just arrived at a mysterious private school for beautiful teenage girls with interesting names who, she's surprise to learn, are all being trained as super-thieves. K. has plenty of experience with thievery, given that her late father was apparently an accomplished thief, and the headmistress of her orphanage was a villanous Fagin-type that forced her charges to serve in a kiddie crime gang.

As expected, it's quite good, and full of the things one comes to expect from Sala—beautiful girls, creepy, kooky character designs, old houses, a degree of timelessness in the setting that makes it seem as if the story could be taking place any time between the Victorian Era and tomorrow, Sala's signature lettering style, etc.

There were a few surprising aspects of the book (other than Snicket's terrible blurb, of course) though, which I could call attention to.

First, the title on the cover is shiny. Like, see the box in the lower right corner that says "Cat Burglar Black by Richard Sala?" That's all in a special ink with a slicker texture than the rest of cover, a special ink that reflects light and looks super-cool. I know, I know it's a sort of cover enhancement on a comic book and I'm supposed to reflexively hate such things, but damn it this one is cool! And it's on a comic book with a spine and doesn't seem to have had any impact on the cover price, so it's okay in this instance.

Second, it doesn't really wrap up all of the loose ends introduced. K and some of the other characters are involved in a much bigger story than the one between these covers, and the ending seems somewhat abrupt, given all of the unanswered questions yet resolved by the final page, on which our heroine determines to find out exactly what happened to some of the cast-members who disappeared throughout the course of the book. I would imagine it is purposely written this way to set-up future installments (or potential future installments), but because of the lack of a "Volume One" or "Book One" anywhere on the cover or spine, I just assumed this would be a complete story without any plot elements saved up for sequels.

And thirdly and finally, I was a little surprised at the tone of the book. Specifically, how much it read like a young adult novel. I shouldn't have been, of course, as that's how it was marketed, but I guess that when I think of Sala I think of Peculia waking up half-naked in bed, or the zombies ripping that poor gal's top off before eating her in Evil Eye #6 or Judy Drood swearing and beating up douche-bag teenagers.

I was reminded of Cat Burglar Black's tone an audience this past week as I was reading through the most recent crop of First Second releases. This book was released in the direct market on September 1, while on September 29 First Second released Ball Peen Hammer, Refresh, Refresh and Tiny Tyrant Vol. 2: The Lucky Winner.

Tiny Tyrant is an all-ages/kids comic, it's style, humor and format all perfectly suited towards grade-school aged kids. Cat Burglar Black is an all-ages book, probably geared toward readers 10-16 or so. Refresh, Refresh is a mature, adult graphic novel, but one that is probably also well-suited for older teens. Ball Peen Hammer is a dark, dark comic for adults that readers under 18 probably shouldn't read (and they probably wouldn't like it if they did anyway).

That's a pretty wide range of demographics covered by a single comics publisher in a single month's worth of releases, isn't it?

"The Most Reviled Comic of The Year!"

According to Diamond's latest shipping information, this Wednesday will bring the release of a second printing of Ultimates 3 #1, which apparently sold out of its first printing because Marvel underestimated the demand for the book (necessitating the second printing).

I wonder if it will have a blurb on the new cover or not? Let's see what Marvel has to work with, in terms of what the critics are saying, for future blurbing purposes...



"I can't imagine—do not want to imagine—the hypothetical audience who would actually want to read this."

—Tim O’Neill, The Hurting



"This is the ugliest comic I've read in some time.”

—Dick Hyacinth, Dick Hates Your Blog



“Weird and desperate even by Jeph Loeb's current storytelling standards…True CRAP, and an embarrassment to everyone involved.”

—Jeff Lester, The Savage Critics



"It’s terrible stuff, so bad that it makes Mark Millar’s first 24 issues seem like the second coming of Christ the Comics Writer. The art is just as hideous as possible, and in some cases, Madureira even stretches the boundary of that description."

—Tucker Stone, "Comics of the Weak" at The Factual Opinion



"It’s like a worst of the ‘90s tour."

—Troy Brownfield, "Best Shots" at Newsarama.com



“Ultimates Volume 3. Let’s all pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe we can wish it out of existence.”

—Richard Bruton, Propaganda at Forbidden Planet International



"Ultimates 3 is bad, very bad. I'd go so far as to say it's shockingly incompetent...I read this thing, and then I sat there in silent disbelief. "

—Paul O'Brien, The X-Axis



“Blah.”

—Hannibal Tatu, “The Buy Pile” at Comicbookresources.com



4/10

—Zak Edwards, The Comic Book Bin



3/10

—Don MacPherson, Eye on Comics

The blurbs of Jonathan Lethem: A long, vague, meandering post about talking about comics

There's been plenty written about Jonathan Lethem's comics writing so far, the first issue of his Omega The Unknown remake/reimagining for Marvel. And there's been much more written about his prose fiction writing over the years. But today, I'd like to focus on another, very specific type of writing that Jonathan Lethem does, one that doesn’t get nearly as much attention—his blurb writing for the backs of other people's comics.

Here’s what Lethem wrote of Adrian Tomine, the Optic Nerve cartoonist currently being written about everywhere for his brilliant graphic novel Shortcomings:



Tomine's genius is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the result is that life itself floods in. His mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer's in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro. Shortcomings, as near as he'd get to a grand statement, is as deceptively relaxed and perfect as a comic book gets.

—Jonathan Lethem



I’m not sure I entirely agree with the first two sentences.

What I found most remarkable about Tomine’s Shortcomings work wasn’t how it was filled by real life reacting to a vacuum of filigree, but that it so thoroughly simulated real life in its realism, both in the art and the writing (I’m not quite sure how Tomine could strip the entire medium either; is Lethem saying that comics/comix/sequential art is predisposed towards grandiosity or indulgence?)

And as for the second sentence, well, it’s been a while since I’ve sat down and paid attention to the mise-en-scene of any French New Wave directors, and I freely admit to never having read a single Alice Munro story (That I know of. Do they teach her in school? If so, I might have read her and forgot her name—I was forced to read a lot of things I don’t remember in school).

So I can’t really agree or disagree, but I know when I was reading Shortcomings, I wasn’t thinking, “Day-umn, check out that mis-en-scene!” or “Oh snap! This guy’s mastery of narrative time is the bomb!” And noticeably strong mise-en-scene and mastery of narrative time seems to contradict the statement that Tomine’s comic is stripped down to an indulgence-free negative space which real life may more easily occupy.

But “deceptively relaxed?” Yeah, I’ll second that. And “as…perfect as a comic book gets?” I’d second that too, as long as Lethem means it literally, as in “this is as good as it gets” and not “this is as good a comic book gets.”

But whatever, my intent here isn’t to argue with what Lethem said or the way he said it (Because he’d win easy; I mean, his job is to say things well, and his business is good). Rather, what interested me was this brief piece on The Quill blog, the blog supplement to Canada’s Quill & Quire, which uses Lethem’s blurb as a starting point for what may be a completely imaginary conflict between Tomine and Lethem.

Under the heading “Tomine to Lethem: butt out, smartypants,” the blog entry refers to an interview in The Believer in which the introduction mentions the praise Tomine has gotten from Lethem and Charles McGrath, and runs this quote from Tomine:



I also am trying to think —and I hope other people will start to see it this way —that sometimes a comic can be a great thing because it’s a comic, not because it’s almost as good as a movie, or as good as a prose novel, which I think is the way a lot of people are now trying to process it …. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.



The blog post also says that Tomine “raises doubts that long-form graphic novels are the ne plus ultra*of comics art, and says that comparisons to masterworks in other mediums are implicitly degrading” and that the extended quote from Tomine “could be a veiled reference to the immodest praise of Jonathan Lethem.”

Yeah, it could be, but the post kinda makes it sound like it is doesn’t it? (I first noticed this article after Tom Spurgeon pointed it out on his blog, with the smart-ass link “Maybe He Simply Meant What He Said.” Reading the Believer interview Tomine’s statement isn’t prompted by anything…what the ellipsis in the quote cuts out is the part where he says he wishes people would equate comics to other visual arts as much as movies or prose, because the time it takes to produce a graphic novel is so much longer than it takes to read it. That is, paintings we can go back and look at over and over and see new things in, whereas novels are something we think of as to be plowed through, with each page a part of a whole rather than a work to be regarded on its own (I am, by the way, super-generalizing).

But what Tomine says and what Lethem said, whether the former was responding to the latter or not, is interesting in any case, because I think it speaks to the way people think and talk about comics and, since I spend so much time thinking and talking about comics, well, that sort of thing interests me.

If you boil criticism, comics or otherwise, down to its base essence, it amounts to little more than a series of comparisons—this is good (defined only when compared to bad), this is bad (defined only when compared to good), this is better than that, this is worse than that, here's why.

So comparisons are absolutely necessary in comics criticism. Whether comparisons to other media are necessary depends on large part to who is writing the criticism, and who they are writing it for.

There's definitely a great deal of freedom that comes in knowing your audience as completely as you can. When I review a comic book for Newsarama.com, or here on EDILW, I know this much about just about everyone reading—they also reads comics regularly, and will know the terms and lingo used in discussing comics, as well as just about all of the names or works I could possibly cite when making a comparison.

In that regard, I think a place that hosts writing about comics exclusively, by someone who knows a lot about comics, for an audience of people interested in comics, is probably going to give a review that matters most to someone like Tomine, one that won’t ever need to think too hard about works in other media in order to discuss his comics.

To use an example of someone I read about 400 reviews by today, if Tom Spurgeon were to review Shortcomings at The Comics Reporter, for example, he's free to compare it exclusively to Tomine's past work, cartoonists whose work it resembles and/or other Drawn and Quarterly publications, knowing (or at least feeling fairly certain) that his audience will be familiar with Optic Nerve, Summer Blonde, Los Hernandez Brothers, James Sturm or Rutu Modan and whatever else might come up in the review. Spurgeon can write about Tomine's work without having to compare it to other media because of his depth of experience with the comics medium, and the assurance that most of the people reading his site share a certain degree of interest and experience with the field.

But when you're writing about comics for a more general audience, a phenomenon that’s been ever increasing ever since publishers who aren't exclusively comics publishers have started publishing graphic novels, you can't always assume that the reader knows all the terms. Thankfully we're past a point where we need to explain the word "graphic novel" or "manga" or point out that comics, in fact, aren't just for kids anymore (At least, I like to think we are, and all those local newspapers still writing a "Bam! Pow! Holy Voltron Batman, Manga Is Kinda Popular, Isn't It?" articles are simply way behind the times), but a writer for a venue outside the comics press can’t as easily assume everyone of their readers is an afficianado.

It's in those instances when comparisons to other media are invaluable. When I write comics reviews for Las Vegas Weekly, for example, I write them for a more general audience then I write for here or at Newsarama, and I don’t assume that everyone reading it is exactly like me (as I do when I write about comics here or for Newsarama.com...where, increasingly, I find not everybody is exactly like me...or even all that much like me at all). But the more I think about it, wherever I’m writing about comics, I constantly compare them to works in other media.

Brad Meltzer writes JLoA like it's a novel. DC has a tendency to treat its superhero properties like they were 10 p.m. cop dramas. Marvel's Max line is basically R-rated versions of their formerly PG characters. The characters in Black Metal are designed like those in a Cartoon Network original series. Scott Pilgrim and Sharknife read like video games play. And on and on.

Now, Tomine's certainly right about value judgments—in assessing his work, we're better off comparing it to the comic book canon and what's currently on the shelves now than against works, good or bad, in other media to figure out or communicate how good or bad it is. Because if you start saying things, like "this is so good it's practically a movie," then that's ranking the media, and I would like to think we're well past that point as a society, although comics history itself is littered with stories of that prejudice, of the grand masters of the Golden Age being ashamed of what they were doing, and hoping they could get into something more respectable, like newspaper strips or advertising. Even today, there seem to be a lot of (or, at least, too many, with one being "too many") creators who look at comics as something that movies are adapted from, and I know I've read far too many comics that read like someone's screen play broken up into four or six issues for a miniseries. So perhaps that sentiment is still present in comics to a certain extent, but hopefully confined to a handful of creators, and doesn't exist at all among comics critics.

But there's nothing wrong with comparing a particular comic to a particular work in another media, as long as we're not weighing the media against one another**, and in fact not ever comparing works of one media to works from another would likely make criticism kind of hard to do, not to mention less effective. Consider the influence the works of non-comics media may have on comics writers and artists, for example. I can't imagine talking about Kelley Jones work as a writer/artist without mentioning Hammer films, discussing the art work of Osamu Tezuka without mentioning Disney films (Just to pick two wildly divergent examples, based on my current To Read piles).

While thinking about all that stuff, prompted by the Lethem quote on Tomine and where that lead, I saw this on the back of a copy of James Sturm's America, which I was preparing to review:



Sturm's America is the one glimpsed through the holes in the flag: rooted, grim and enduring. The line of his drawings has a pure grain like that of the voice in William Carlos Williams' epic poem
Paterson, or the singers on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Fables like these are an antidote to
cultural amnesia."

—Jonathan Lethem



Oh, Jonathan, what are we going to do with you! So, here's another three-sentence blurb from Lethem on a D+Q book, one that also compares a comic book to two different works of other media. It sounds like a very nice quote, but again, if I stop to think too much about it, it ultimately sounds meaningless to me.

The first sentence, as gripping a visual image as looking through the holes in a flag might be, is really just nonsense—having read the three tales in Sturm's book now, I suppose you could say it presents a country that is rooted, grim and enduring, but what does that have to do with the visual image Lethem starts that statement off with?

Then it just gets crazy, as he extends metaphors to their breaking points. He compares Sturm's line work to the voice in a William Carlos Williams poem and the sound of the voice of singers I've never heard of…? But regardless, what does it even mean? A case could be made for the ways in which linework evokes sound, or the same feelings that the sounds might evoke, but Lethem doesn't really go into it here, so it just seems like namedropping, and it's namedropping to the same effect as his Shortcomings quote…which the Quill & Quire blogger interpreted as something that Tomine didn’t like…which sent me on the weird, rambling tangent that comprises most of this interminably long post.

As for that last sentence in the America blurb, I don't agree with it. If you use a broad definition of fable, broad to the point where it doesn’t strictly mean “fable” but could be applied to other literary terms just as easily, like “a fictional narrative used to enforce a useful truth,” then it could certainly apply to these stories to a certain extent, but Strum doesn't bluntly lay out "useful truths" in the manner of a fable. Maybe Lethem's reading just varied greatly from mine, but it seems to me that Sturm suggests vague truths and leaves it to the reader to contextualize them, rather than making straightforward pronouncements along the lines of "Racism is bad, but inherent to the American spirit," or "Faith is for crazy people" or "killing Chinese people for gold is bad."

Nor do they really do much in the way of addressing cultural amnesia, since they're fictional stories. Based on and inspired by history, yes, but they're not reminding us of things we've forgotten so much as introducing us to stories that haven't yet been added to our cultural memory.

So, Jonathan Lethem—Reportedly a great prose fiction writer, seemingly a pretty good comic book writer, but not so hot at blurb writing.






*Is there a superhero called Ne Plus Ultraman yet? If not, I’m calling it right now.

**And I don't know that anyone actually does that, but apparently Tomine's heard enough of it to make the statement he did to The Believer; given the circles he runs in, he'd be much more likely to hear that sort of thing than I ever would.

More on blurbs, a last word on Superman: Doomsday

Remember a couple of weeks back when we discussed the unblurbable Wonder Woman story arc Jodi Picoult wrote, the one which DC opted to promote by using a completely neutral blurb that only drew attention to the fact that apparently nobody anywhere said anything remotely positive about it?

Well, it appears that Jeff Smith's recent reimagining of the Captain Marvel franchise didn't have that problem at all. Here's the house ad for that trade of Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil that DC's been running:



They've got not one but two different blurbs, which is always a good sign, as it means more than one person/venue liked the work, and gives the impression of consensus opinion.

And these are two very good sources for blurbs, each at least as prestigious as Wonder Woman: Love and War's USA Today. I'm not sure what the circulation numbers of the three venues are, or which is the most widely read, but I know Entertainment Weekly and The Onion are both pretty mainstream, and, even if they are less widely read, they're known for their criticism (Or, at least, are known for devoting a great deal of space and resources to criticism).

EW's been doing comics coverage for years now, but the fact that they cover all forms of popular entertainment makes them very much a part of the mainstream media, so to hear them raving about any comic book always has the impression that it's something of a rarity (Just compare the real estate of the magazine devoted to comics versus that devoted to movies, television or music).

And as for The Onion, they're known for being a tough audience, so a good grade from Onion critics carries a little more weight than it might from elsewhere.

As to the content of those blurbs, both make fairly strong arguments that Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil is a book that ad-readers should seek out.

EW says that it can be be "savored" and "admired," like it was part delicious meal and part Founding Father, and the all-ages nature of the work is incorporated into the line in such a way as to sound positive rather than negative (which is how I feel "all-ages" is too often interpreted by too many comics readers). It's not just kids or prudes who will like it, but "everyone" from kids "to the most sophisticated graphic-novel devotee." The most sophisticated graphic-novel devotee? Hey guys, that's us!

The Onion or, in actuality, The Onion's non-parody AV Club list a string of positives—"slick, bright, emotional and witty"—before calling it "everything superhero comics should be." You don't get much more positive than that.

As for the rest of the ad, it points out that the book is "critically acclaimed" (it is) and that its author is "award-winning" (correct) and the creator of another graphic novel success story that anyone who knows anything about comics has likely heard of, and heard great thngs about.

The only downside of the ad I see is that it goes ahead and spoils the appearance of Mr. Mind, but then, I guess if you haven't read it yet, you wouldn't know that, so maybe it doesn't really spoil it (And the appearance of Mr. Mind wasn't played up so dramatically in Smith's version of the "Monster Society" story as it was in the original anyway).

Moving on to another DC house ad in last week's comics, you may have noticed this:


What a weird, weird ad.

The film having been created as a direct-to-DVD release marketed at hardcore fans, I wouldn't be surprised if DC hadn't sent many or even any copies of it to critics (I haven't seen reviews of it run in any non-comics press places, but then, perhaps I'm just not reading the right newspapers/magazines/websites), so perhaps there weren't any reviews available at the time of the release to pull quotes from to run as blurbs in the ad.

But still, why pull a quote from Lex Luthor?

Now, running a non-blurb quote in an ad for something isn't all that unheard of—remember the Oscar Wilde quote that ran in the house ads for Starman, for example?—but quoting a line of dialogue from the work being advertised, and then attributing it to that fictional character? That just seems all kinds of weird to me, and I honestly can't figure out what the fuck it's doing there, or what message it's intended to convey to someone coming across this ad.

I mean, if they thought it was a cool line that totally encapsulates what the story is all about, they could have always just put that phrase on the top of the ad, without the quotes and the attribution. It's not like Lex Luthor is going to sue them for stealing his quote and failing to properly attribute it or anything.

Also, below the image, in randomly capitalized lettering, appear the words "A New Movie inspired by the The Best-selling Graphic Novel of all time THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN." The TV ad made the same claim (only it left out the double "the").

I don't know for a fact that The Death of Superman isn't the best-selling graphic novel of all time, and while I suppose I could poke around the Internet or send some emails in an attempt to find out, I don't have that much interest in the question (or motivation to answer it). But I would just like to point out that the claim seems pretty damn fishy.

Is this really the best-selling graphic novel of all time? Better than Watchmen? And V For Vendetta? And The Dark Knight Returns? And The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes? What about, like, Naruto Vol. 1 or Persepolis or the more popular Tintin and Asterix books? I don't know, I'm asking. But if so, I find that pretty damn shocking. Particularly since that material is now available in various larger collections and omnibuses. It seems like its shelf-life is constantly being cut into by different "cuts" of the story, and it would therefore have long ago been eclipsed, whereas people wanting to read Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns are going to keep buying those same versions of the graphic novels.

We could quibble over whether or not The Death of Superman even is a graphic novel* too, I guess, but me, I'm just surprised that that particular collection of that story is really the best-selling gn ever. Certainly if I wanted to read the story for the first time, I'd gravitate toward something like this.

But I guess as far as Western trades go, DC also publishes the most likely contenders** for the top spot, so they'd know if it really was or not.

Of course, they should also know how goofy it is to quote Lex Luthor in an ad, and that someone should really copy-edit the hell out of the ad copy before going to press, too.






*There is a distinction to be made between a trade paperback collection of a serially published comic book story taken from an ongoing—or several ongoings, in this case—and an actual graphic novel intended to be a graphic novel, but the term "graphic novel" is used so indescriminately between the two that arguing about the distinction seems pointless.

**I'm guessing. I don't think Maus, lauded as it is, moves as many books as Dark Knight Returns, and those Jim Lee X-Men were partially driven by the speculation on the value of the singles, and thus I'm assuming the trade collections containing those issues don't do such astronomical numbers. But again, this is just a series of guesses and assumptions

Picoult's Wonder Woman: Unblurbable?

The above half-page house ad ran in last week’s batch of DC Comics, and I couldn't help but notice the blurb running with the ad, from USA Today: “Not only does this make Picoult one of the first female Wonder Woman writers, this adds her to a growing list of novelists-turned-comics scribes.”

What is striking about the blurb is how neutral it is. It doesn’t say anything at all positive about the book, but merely recites a couple of facts. Picoult’s only the second woman to write Wonder Woman, and there sure are a lot of novelists writing comics these days.

Um, yeah. So?

If the point of such blurbing is to sell your comic/book/movie/whatever, using a more objective third-party whose opinion won’t be as suspect as, say, a blurb form Jodi Picoult, Terry Dodson or Paul Levitz saying what a great story this is, then you generally want to get something positive to put in that blurb.

I’m always amused by the blurbs used in TV commercials or newspaper ads for terrible movies, where they have to try really hard to find someone, anyone, to say something, anything, positive about the movie they can use, and occasionally you’ll get a positive statement coming from some tiny local media outlet you’ve never heard of.

But it’s still preferable to have John “The Movie Guy” Gerrety from The Rural Bumblefuck Examiner raving “Catwoman the purr-fect summer action movie” in your ad than Roger Ebert observing “Catwoman is yet another example of Hollywood’s love affair with comics” or something.

Certainly the outlet from which the blurb comes is to be considered. USA Today saying anything about a Wonder Woman comic is good news from DC’s perspective, I’m sure, even if they don’t have anything particularly nice to say (I may be misremembering, but this wasn’t actually from a review anyway, was it? I seem to recall linkage pointing to a USA Today profile on Picoult regarding her Wonder Woman story).

But this is such a bland statement, that I’m surprised DC even bothered with it. Did no one in the mainstream media say anything nicer about Picoult’s Wonder Woman? Did no one in the comics press? (And since this ad is running in DC Comics, you can go ahead and quote Wizard or Newsarama anyway; the comics “press” saying “This book rules!” is going to carry more weight with the audience for this ad then a dry factoid from USA Today that they already knew anyway).

Even if there were no rave reviews, couldn’t the ad designers resort to the old clip quotes up to make them sound more positive trick? Sticking with our Catwoman example, say Rober Ebert said, “a perfect storm of bad filmmaking decisions, resulting in a movie that isn’t just bad, but is likely bad for you; you will probably lose I.Q. points sitting through this travesty.”

Well, it can always be clipped to this:


“[P]erfect…”

—Roger Ebert


Okay, maybe that’s an extreme example, but the idea remains the same in less extreme instances. By carefully choosing the words you quote, where you start and end a blurb, and what you chop out to replace with an ellipses, even a less-than-glowing review can be made to sound positive.

But could it be that not only did no one in the mainstream media say anything nicer about this book than USA Today’s factual observations, but no one in the comics press had anything nice to say either? Did they all unanimously pan it, and pan it so bad and so hard that no positive blurb was even salvageable?

Just for fun, I looked to see what some of my favorite comics critics (whose stuff I could easily find online during ten minutes or so of googling) had to say about the high profile launch of the series (most critics and commentators seemed to stop reading after Picoult’s first issue anyway) to see if I could find anything positive about the book, or at least something that could be massaged into a positive blurb.

I couldn’t.

My favorite comics critic of them all, the extremely handsome gentleman who writes the comics review column for Las Vegas Weekly, covered WW #6 when it came out, and this was the most positive portion of his review: “Picoult fans will likely find it more charming than Wonder Woman fans will.”

The rest was split between factual observations a la USA Today and negative comments. The best we could get out of that would be


“Charming…”
—Las Vegas Weekly


That same witty, kind-hearted and virie critic (who is also a great dancer) maintains a comics blog, and the nicest part of his review of the book there was, “Wow, I wasn’t expecting this at all—Very Popular Novelist Jodi Picoult’s first issue of her brief run on Wonder Woman? Not very good.”

An enterprising, and perhaps soulless ad person could easily turn that into


“Wow…very good.”
—Every Day Is Like Wednesday



But not without running the risk of being called on their bullshit. And Every Day Is Like Wednesday isn’t exactly the household name USA Today is, so it’s not really worth messing with.

Another of my favorite sources of comics criticism is the Best Shots column at Newsarama.com, where a half-dozen or so attractive, witty and kindhearted comics critics weigh in on the previous Wednesday’s releases, and then people with pseudonyms chime in about how much they hate that Firestorm’s a black guy or who the best Green Lantern is, and why you’re an idiot for disagreeing.

Back in March, Best Shots crewmember O.J. Flow tackled WW #6, and here’s what he had to say: “On its own merits, Wonder Woman #6 is respectable stuff, thanks mostly to some gorgeously clean and expressive art from Drew Johnson and Ray Snyder.”

And, a bit later, “Picoult does good dialogue, and she strikes the right balance of drama, humor and action.”

Those are genuine positives, but even if you whittle them down to accentuate the positive, the best you can get is



“Respectable stuff…good dialogue…balance of drama, humor and action.”
—Newsarama.com


Not exactly glowing, is it?

I next turned to Chris Sims’ blog, The Invincible Super-Blog, because I imagine sources that have the words “invincible” and “super” right there in their title are automatically more authoritative then those that don’t, and would thus be sought after for blurbing. For example, if the quote DC did end up using was from The Invincible Super-USA Today, it would be a bit more impressive, wouldn’t it?

Also, Sims has some experience being blurbed by careful blurb-crafters. He’s brutally savaged Marvel’s Anita Blake comics in his ongoing The Annotated Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter features (Which I do believe makes the ISB the number one source for Anita Blake comics coverage, just in terms of amount of attention paid to them). And proving they have a great sense of humor (and/or were hard up for positive quotes), when it came time to find blurbs, they included a “Grab a copy and follow along” from Sims, which is how he kicked off a typical post ridiculing an issue.

Well, he didn’t care for WW #6 either, and had this to say: “Granted, it's not the worst comic I've read all week, but, well, Tarot came out, and it was still a pretty heavy contender…Simply put, it's a mess.”

And that’s pretty much the most positive part of it. I guess we could snip out “Not the worst comic I’ve read” and blurb that, but, well, maybe USA Today’s not-an-endorsement-of-any-kind blurb is preferable than “Better than Tarot!”

On to the savagecritic.com, where Brian Hibbs began his review with, “Oh. Ouch. Lots of problms, not sure where to begin," and ended it with, “Fairly AWFUL.” In between we’ve got, let’s see, “vain,” “empty-headed”…Yeah, there isn’t even anything to work with here.

Oh, I know! Lisa Fortuner, that lady who’s always yelling at people about Green Lanterns! She’s a big Wonder Woman fan, and even buys, read and defends DC/Wonder Woman related works she strongly dislikes, like Amazons Attack. Surely she had something to say about WW #6 that can be snipped into blurb-able shape.

Here’s her review: “Yes, every bad review you’ve read is true… I've read a lot of stuff that I've been iffy about on the first reading. I've read stuff that was entertaining but not particularly good on the second reading. I've read stuff that was mediocre but still had charm. I've read stuff that was decently plotted and timed but relied on cliched characterization and stereotypes, and therefore ruined my experience. This issue was just plain bad, and I don't say that about a lot of things.”

Hmmm, I don’t think there’s anything to work with in there, either.

Now, I’m sure whoever put that house ad together for DC spent longer than my ten minutes looking for a perfect combination of high profile source and a positive statement about the books, but they must not have ever found it, hence the “This is a comic book by a woman who is a novelist” blurb from USA Today. I sure couldn’t find anything more positive than that, and now I kinda feel sorry for whoever it was who had to look in the first place. Spending a whole work day or two reading horrible reviews of a book you’re trying to promote can’t possibly be pleasant.