Chris Gavaler's Blog, page 7

The World’s First 4-Page Spread?

Jim Steranko is a deservedly praised comics innovator. He is (almost) single-handedly responsible for transforming the layout norms that defined 1970s superhero comics (as I argue in “Layout Wars! Kirby vs. Steranko!“). I also thought Steranko created the first four-page foldout in his “Nick Fury” episode from Strange Tales #167 (April 1968). Blogger David Hime calls it “The World’s First 4-Page Spread.”

Here it is scanned and digitally pasted together:

Later reprints correct the coloring error for the ground in the bottom of the second page, making the division seem less obvious:

Each full-page panel is framed, so there’s no bleed along the connecting edges. That means getting the pages fully (or at least more nearly) continuous requires the gutters:

The pages also don’t fold out as I had incorrectly assumed. My mistake was probably from a cultural awareness of the three-page foldout “centerfolds” made famous by Playboy beginning March 1956:

Joe Sacco’s The Great War might have influenced my impression too.

Steranko’s artwork is not a foldout. The text in the caption box at the top of the fourth page calls it a “four-page spread.” It is certainly a four-page image, but “spread” is murkier since the term refers to the physical object of the comic, implying that the “spread” is continuous, as it is for the two-page spread joined physically at any publication’s centerfold. Only Steranko’s image content is continuous.

I have no criticism of Steranko, or of folks like David Hime who, like me, accepted the common comics history assumption that his Nick Fury art was “the first” of its kind.

Then I started viewing scans of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

Here’s a four-page spread from May 11, 1867:

The four-page image, “General View of the Champ de Mars and its Environ[s at th]e Opening of the Great Paris Exhibition, April 1, 1867,” may also be a foldout — or at least a continuously printed image across one or more folds.

Maybe.

I’m having trouble solving the physical puzzle. Though I wildly applaud the Internet Archive‘s massive collection of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the scans of the individual pages are sometimes ambiguous about what is a material edge of the original paper and what is an effect of the scanning process. There’s also sadly a portion missing from the left edge of the third page, made obvious by the gap in the bottom title and in the top header: “Frank Leslie’s I—–ted Newspaper.”

The issue consists of 16 pages and so is physically four separate sheets of paper, each double-wide and printed back and front with two (typically nonconsecutive) pages. That means two of the four pages could be printed continuously with no physical break at all. I suspect the two middle pages are continuous in that sense and were also the middle spread of the issue. The placement of the first and fourth pages are less clear to me. I cut and pasted the pages digitally, increasing the continuous effect created by the top line running across all four pages. But the fourth page may have a distinct left border edge, which I could have obscured digitally, but since there seems to be unprinted paper along that outer edge, I preserved it.

However it was arranged, the four-page spread predates Steranko’s by a century.

After drafting this post, I found another from two years earlier, published May 6, 1865: “Funeral of President Lincoln, at Washington D.C, April 19”:

I digitally combined the four scans. Based on the top and bottom text, the middle two pages appear physically continuous, though the other two seem continuous too. Could it be an actual four-page foldout?

And then I found “Attack of the Iron-Clads” from May 2, 1863:

Is the middle gap produced by the digital scan or are these just two two-page spreads like Steranko’s?

And I’m still trying to decipher this one from July 18, 1863:

It’s two two-page-wide images printed across two pages. The scans were especially confusing because the images were printed vertically, requiring the reader to rotate the page 90 degrees. The title is missing, but I think it’s a before/after battleground that you need to rotate again 180 degrees:

19th-century illustrated newspapers are not comics, but they do contain comics, so these Frank Leslie’s four-pagers sit on an ambiguous shelf in the history of the medium — which I’ll keep exploring.

How to Draw (one of my) Comics

That’s page one of the two-page spread “Unhinged” and also page nine of a ten-page work-in-progress sequence tentatively titled “Magic of Comics,” which is a sequel to my “Metacomics” sequence published in INKS last spring.

The new page doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context (the character on the right was accidentally doubled during a saw-a-person-in-half magic trick gone entertainingly wrong), but it is a good page to illustrate my step-by-step creative process.

Step one is about as humble as it gets. Sloppy stick figures:

That rudimentary sketch followed (or at least accompanied since I’m not sure which came first) a three-panel script:

1

(wide panel frame)

(one is standing in the box with door open, head and feet sticking out; the other beside him, she’s on other side of box)

H & H: Please don’t cut me in half again.

2

(wide panel frame)

(box is headless now, other angles head)

S: Duck your head.

H in box: Like this?

H outside: (identical pose) No, like this.

3

(wide panel frame)

(box is now footless, other is crouching as though a foot off the ground)

S: Now lift your feet.

H outside: Like this?

H in box: (identical pose) No, like this.

Since I knew the magician’s box was the central element, I drew it first (and added the hinges later):

Then came the photo research. Even though my cartoon style is rudimentary, the results are better if I’m looking at something. For each figure below I probably copied and pasted a half dozen others into a file, before selecting favorites and arranging them in a page mock-up:

It helps to have already visually designed the characters (which I detailed last year in the posts Six Cartoons in Search of an Author and What Race Are My Cartoons?). I just had to relearn how to draw them, using the above photos one pose at a time:

After I drew each, I copied and pasted the figure onto the page, which slowly grew into this:

I created my own alphabet for the first sequence, meticulously copying and pasting each letter to form words. This time I’m using a digital stylus pad and drew each word uniquely:

It took me a while to get the sizing almost right (I ended up shrinking the words more later), before I added speech balloons for the figure on the right (each character has their own distinctive balloon style):

The color stage isn’t about color — I just need literally any color to block out shapes to superimpose patterns later. Except for the gray of her (connotatively brown) skin and his (actually) gray shoes and tie (the conceptual weirdness of that combination deserves its own future blog post).

To restore the details (most especially faces and words blotted out by the gray areas), I copy and paste the original art over top again:

Then I open my “suit texture” file to overlay the blue:

I’d made a different texture for the first sequence, which I happily misplaced and chanced onto this better one from an earlier project. I like how the texture is not consistent:

For the dress, I use a column of text taken from the Moby Dick chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The words are always illegible, but I still enjoy my own inside joke.

The orange bits along the bottom are the same only rotated 90 degrees to represent the inside of the fabric:

Final step, draw and select patterns within the words to make wrinkles, which gets back to the finished image at the top of the page:

Oh, and as always, this is done in the antique software Microsoft Paint.

But I did use pen and paper when I was in elementary school — as I discovered last week while clearing out boxes from our attic.

Here’s my first comic book, drawn almost a half-century ago (and which does not deserve its own future blog post, but will probably receive one anyway):

Did Photo Journalism Invent the Comics Gutter?

This is the third of three posts focused on the 1891 weekly run of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (here are links to the first and second). I’ve been intrigued by how much the multi-image full-page artwork prefigures twentieth-century comics norms:

But I’ve been holding back on one major fact, which, for me, changes my understanding of comics history.

I’ve not (yet) done any detailed, quantitative analysis, but I’m going to say that as much as half of the newspaper’s 1891 “illustrations” are photographs. That means that instead of the above full-page drawing, many of the pages look like this:

Leslie’s is a big fan of the two-page spread, where photographs were possibly more common in 1891:

The most defining layout quality of the photo-based pages is the rectangular shape of the images (many cropped to suit page proportions) and the resulting white gutters produced by the negative spaces between them. Even when a photograph receives an oval frame, the rectangular outer frame edge remains:

Of course drawn images can have rectangular frames too. Note the bottom right drawing on this page:

But unlike photographs, drawings can be unframed. Note on the next page how the small drawn figure in the third row is visually accented because it’s the only image without a uniform gutter:

The effect is more subtle for the bottom corner drawings on this page, because the drawn content includes backgrounds, creating a nearly rectangular image shape:

This next two-page spread includes four drawings, mostly shaped by the surrounding rectangular photos. The bottom right drawing, however, has far more open white space, producing a hazier sense of image edges. Also, the middle image is one of the only oval-cropped photographs I found in the 1891 run:

The effects of combining drawings and photos shift when the two kinds of images are separated into distinct page areas.

Note how the two unframed drawings in the upper right side produce no gutter, but the top center drawing’s frame produces a full gutter with the photograph beneath it:

Here the two approaches occur in separate rows:

Note the multiple contrasts: The top row features two full vertical gutters dividing the three rectangular photos. The bottom row instead features seven (or eight?) images divided by irregularly shaped and spaced white areas. The elbow of the far right figure is drawn nearly touching the back of the figure to the left, even though the two images are diegetically distinct. At the other extreme, the white areas dividing the three heads on the left side of the row are multiple times wider than the vertical gutter directly above.

Drawn images also regularly overlap, where photo layouts are always consistently spaced:

Drawn frames of course aren’t actual frames. They’re drawings of frames. In some cases, artists make that fiction explicit:

Note the division between the two images in the second row. The second is surrounded by an ornately drawn frame:

The photographs directly above and below instead provide sharp horizontal lines of partial horizontal gutters.

In all of the 1891 run, I could only find one instance of a photograph tilted out of alignment with the paper edges. It’s also the only example of photographs overlapping:

Leslie’s layout usually creates overlap effects by cutting out portions of photos and extending the gutters:

The arrangement style is common in 20th-century comics. This 1937 Alley Oop includes five examples, including all of its interior borders:

Leslie’s sometimes uses both border approaches on the same page:

Note how the two unframed drawings are divided by imprecisely edged white space, and the two photos are spaced by multiple right-angled gutter shapes that prevent overlap:

Leslie’s often places the two kinds of pages, photo layout and drawn, side-by-side:

And even when no or few photos are involved, the images on a page can be arranged in an actual layout of individual physical images combined by a layout artist on a newspaper’s layout board or images can be integral parts of a single unified drawing involving no actual layout:

That juxtaposition makes explicit something that now seems obvious to me but that I never considered before.

What we call a “layout” in comics isn’t layout. It’s a drawing of a layout.

Actual layout is “the process of setting out material on a page.” The key word is “material.” A drawing doesn’t arrange discrete materials. When a Leslie’s page includes a photo or a discrete drawing, layout is involved and often results in creating gutters between those rectangular materials. When a page is entirely drawn, the only layout is the rudimentary act of placing the one-page piece of artwork on the printer board with a page number and title in the header. That’s obvious when the page looks like this:

But it’s equally true for a page that looks like this:

Or this:

Or this:

A comics layout isn’t a kind of layout. It’s a representation of a fictional layout. And what we call a “gutter” is usually a representation of a gutter, since no two material objects (prototypically rectangular photos) are actually placed next to each other during any actual layout process. It’s all just a drawing.

This leads to a historical question:

Why did comics artists start drawing representations of gutters that look like the gutters produced by laying out photographs in late 19th-century illustrated newspapers?

I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because those artists were aware of those (actual) layouts and were imitating them. I also suspect that at some point the fact of that historical influence was lost as the drawing approach became a comics norm and “layout” came to refer to a drawn quality of the artwork itself.

Those are my hypotheses.

Lots more research required.

Misdirecting 1891 Comics

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper isn’t a common topic of comics studies, but as I discussed in my previous post, maybe it should be. I’m continuing to explore a batch of issues from 1891 — when the comics medium was presumably in its earliest stages of development. I looked at a range of layout qualities last week, and now I’m focusing on viewing paths: how artists guide viewers through their sequenced images.

Many of the 1891 full-page drawings follow contemporary comics norms. This three-image drawing, for example, begins in the top left area of the page and directs the eye through the central image and down to the final bottom right area:

Five images are more complex, but, like the majority of works in the comics medium, this page follows a standard z-path:

It’s hard to see in these scans, but the images are also numbered — a norm of early comics that faded in the late 30s. Joe Shuster, for example, was still numbering his Superman panels in Action Comics #13 (June 1939), but stopped when adding new material for the Superman (June 1939) reprint edition. The z-path viewing order of Shuster’s panels was rarely in question, making the numbers redundant. The Leslie’s page’s viewing order is unambiguous too:

But the numbering in Leslie’s serves a further function. They’re footnotes. Each number links to a phrase at the bottom of the page that names or otherwise explains the image. When numbers are absent, the image titles are included within the interior of the artwork, either in mechanical font or handwritten:

The interior titles invite variable viewing paths, but the numbers establish a single intended path, sometimes violating z-path norms.

Here’s an example:

The large central image is numbered “1” and so is meant to be viewed first. The last number, “4,” concludes the sequence in the bottom left corner. Though effectively non-existent in contemporary comics, that z-path disruption is common in late 30s and early 40s comic books, including in Jack Kirby’s early works.

For the above Leslie’s page, the size of the first image likely also results in its right half being viewed later, leaving the order partially ambiguous:

Other 1891 variations prefigure Matt Baker’s misdirecting layouts in his late 1940s Phantom Lady, which Monalesia Earle and I analyze in Desegregating Comics. We term one of Baker’s techniques a “misdirecting appendage,” defining it as “a portion of an image drawn as though extending beyond its frame and into another panel that is not next in the viewing path.”

They occur in Leslie’s too:

The numbered viewing order produces a standard z-path, but note the space between panels 2 and 4:

Because the panels are both unframed, their edges are ambiguous. The artist exploits that with a pair of misdirecting appendages. One is a ship mast projecting up into panel 2 from panel 4, and the other is a pair of legs (also a Baker favorite) from panel 2 drawn in the implied area of panel 4:

Here’s a more extreme example:

Though the layout otherwise looks like a two-row z-path, the second panel in the first row extends into the third panel of the second row, and vice-versa. Even stranger, the image content merges; the base of the statue and the top of the curtain become an incoherent black smear in the middle gutter:

Though not misdirecting, the artist adds some other flourishes. Note the hat on a branch breaking frame:

And the police officer staring across the gutter at the chickens of the next panel which appear to be staring back:

Again, these are the kinds of “high baroque” elements I associate with Baker and other late 40s artists, who were breaking conventional layout norms. Leslie’s artists beat them by a half-century.

Monalesia and I also identify Baker’s “reversed path” technique, which we define as “a path that moves from a right image to the next contiguous left image.”

Here’s an example from another Leslie’s page:

Contemporary viewing norms would likely guide a viewer’s eye down from the first panel, but the footnote numbers direct to the right instead, producing a reversed path between panels 2 and 3.

Baker also liked using a “parallel saccade,” which Monalesia and I define as “a backward but nondiagonal leap over a middle image that has not yet been viewed to reach the beginning of a next row or column.”

Here’s one from Leslie’s:

You probably don’t see it without the numbers, because the viewing order doesn’t begin with the furthest left panel:

As a result, the saccade between panels 2 and 3 requires leaping over panel 1 — which, since it’s already been viewed, isn’t identical to Baker’s approach, but the core technique is the same.

This last example includes both a reversed path and a parallel saccade:

Though you probably need the numbers to see them:

When I first opened an issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, I wasn’t expecting to find anything with more than a rudimentary resemblance to twentieth-century comics. Instead I found both fundamental comics qualities and techniques that I’d thought were innovated decades later.

I’m planning one more Leslie’s installment, but I’m already starting to question some core assumptions about the evolution of comics techniques.

What Did Comics Page Layout Look Like in 1891?

First answer: it didn’t.

Comics page layout couldn’t look like anything in 1891 because comics page layout didn’t exist yet. The term “comics” was coined in the early 1890s, as a truncation of “comic strips,” which were printed in rows or columns or some other subunit of a larger newspaper or magazine page. Whatever the layout of that larger page, it was separate from any comic strip appearing on it.

Because I think it adds clarity to analysis, I’m a proponent of differentiating between works in the comics form and works in the comics medium. The form may be any sequence of images, but the medium includes the physical publication and its historical context. Though there are many exceptions, that’s often what folks mean when they say “comics.” For example, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica, “The terms comics and comic strip became established about 1900 in the United States, when all strips were indeed comic.” Brittanica means the comics medium, which at that time produced only comics in the humor genre.

Unless it didn’t.

Nonfiction has been recognized as a genre of comics for at least a century. Ida M. Tarbell and Nicholas Afonsky’s biography comic strip In the Footsteps of Abraham Lincoln was syndicated daily in 1927. Joe Sacco coined the term “comics journalism” in the 1990s, but recognized precedents include the single-image lithographs published by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives for most of the 19th century.

I’m new to this nonfiction subarea, but I haven’t noticed the genre of illustrated newspapers receiving very much attention in comics scholarship. As Thierry Smolderen observes: this “genre of the journalistic picture stories … for some reason has, until recently, completely escaped the scrutiny of historians” (79). Illustrated newspapers not only challenge the encyclopedic claim that all early works in the comics medium were in the humor genre, but they reveal a sophistication of drawn page design that precedes later innovations by decades (particularly what Benoit Peeters calls “decorative” and identifies as primarily post-1968, or what Joseph Witek calls “high baroque” and identifies as primarily 1940s).

I’ve been looking at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which ran weekly from 1855 to 1922. The Internet Archive has an immense collection, and as a starting point, I reviewed the 32 issues published from April 11 to November 28, 1891. The specific dates are fairly random (there’s a gap in the collection after November), but the year is key since it’s just within a common historically defined scope of the comics medium. Since Leslie’s is a printed weekly newspaper, it’s in the medium’s production-defined scope too. Leslie’s even included a single-image “comic” every week. This one appears in the April 11, 1891 issue:

That, according to most medium-focused definitions, is a “comic” — and probably also a “cartoon,” even though it is drawn in a naturalistic style and so is not a cartoon in the simplified and exaggerated stylistic sense. It appears on a page otherwise dedicated to advertisements:

While any newspaper page is an example of layout in the broad sense, this one is not an example of comics layout. Many of Leslie’s other pages aren’t either. They vary radically, some consisting almost entirely of text, with minimal other graphic elements:

At the other extreme, one two-page spread is a single centerfold-crossing image that has to be turned sideways:

Single-image pages are fairly common, and Leslie’s is surprisingly indifferent to vertical design, regularly arranging horizontal layouts that require viewers to rotate the newspaper 90 degrees:

Though single images are often in the comics medium, they are never in the comics form (if defined as sequenced images). It’s when form and medium combine that Leslie’s gets most interesting, and where comics layout comes into play.

Though uncommon in the issues I reviewed, some include two-image pages:

That above one features a standard gutter between two rectangular images drawn independently of each other.

The next example instead incorporates two images within a single drawing, with an inset separated by a partial wavy-lined frame and white space in the top left corner of the page (which again must be rotated 90 degrees):

While those examples are interesting enough, it’s Leslie’s three-image pages that start to intrigue me as comics layouts:

Those two follow roughly the same design: two half-page images with a smaller off-center inset drawn as if it were a physically separate image placed on top of the others. Note the right edge of the inset in the first example is drawn as though it extends slightly beyond the edge of the images that appear to be underneath it. The second example is more extreme, with the edges of the inset drawn as though its corners are bent and folding up. Content from the underlying image is also drawn as though paradoxically encroaching onto the surface of the inset.

These drawn qualities are why I have termed comics layout a “secondary diegesis.” The primary diegesis is the story content of the images, which is distinct from the metafictional conceit of the drawn page as an actually layered or otherwise arranged set of physically distinct images.

Both examples also include a middle left space where the edges of the first and last images are visually ambiguous. The effect occurs again for another three-image drawing:

Here the artist draws a frame edge between the first and second images — except along the left area where the white of the first image’s ground either becomes the white of the second image’s sky or is diegetically ambiguous. The third image is drawn as if it obscures the bottom right corner of the middle image and with frame lines along its top and right edges but not its margin edges.

While I already consider these examples of comics pages, the parallels to the later medium intensify with the addition of more images per page. Here’s a four-image drawing:

Note the continuing conceit of layering, now with the third circular panel drawn as though placed over both the second panel and the initial underlying image. A corner of the second panel is also drawn with a bent corner, making the secondary diegesis explicit. The fourth panel is instead drawn with a partial gutter, defined by the sharp frame lines of the first image and the hazier edges of the fourth image’s content. Alternatively, that ambiguous white area could be interpreted as though it’s part of a physical panel also placed “on” the larger image.

Things get even more interesting with five images:

The layering conceit now includes the corner of the fourth image drawn as if placed “over” the final fifth image, which are both “on” the larger third image. The effect occurs only within the interior area of the page though, since neither panel has frame lines defining their edges along the bottom or side margins. The second image also appears to overlap, but the first instead seems to be cut into a shared drawing space, with no frame line drawn between the third image and the ambiguous white areas at the hazier edges of the first image’s content. More paradoxically, the artist draws content from both the first and second images breaking the circular frame line of the second image:

The playfulness increases in another five-image drawing:

The layering effect expands, with the last image overlapping the fourth, and the middle image overlapping the first which overlaps the second, and with multiple ambiguous and frame-breaking image edges throughout. Only the middle panel is drawn as if fully contained by a frame that includes a white border as part of the illusion that it sits atop the other images. More playfully, a branch from the primary diegesis is drawn as if overlapping the bottom two images, metafictionally merging with the secondary diegesis.

Another five-image drawing instead avoids all frames, leaving ambiguous white space between unframed content:

Expanding to six images, a drawn layout frames only its third panel, leaving the others unframed:

This next six-image layout begins with drawn frames overlapping, before transitioning to ambiguous white between unframed panels in the bottom half of the page:

Probably my favorite from the Leslie’s I’ve reviewed, this next six-image page includes two frames drawn to resemble physical objects, the first overlapping the middle panel, which overlaps the circular panel in the bottom row, both of which appear to be layered over the background image of the train, plus the top left and right buildings and the materials of the title crest drawn as if arranged on top of the middle frame:

This eight-image page features more drawn frame edges until the bottom unframed image:

I think this page includes eleven images, all but two unframed:

Another eleven-image page, with a complex combination of overlapping and ambiguously divided framed and unframed panels:

Here is a more orderly row-based page of twelve images, with only the fourth unframed:

The most images I found on a single page is thirteen, all unframed:

These are all examples of comics page layout from 1891 — unless you feel the one-panel humor piece “Marry Him Off” is the only “comic” here.

Edinburgh Woodcuts

I grew up on Edinburgh Drive, which runs perpendicular to MacBeth, in a subdivision called Jefferson Highlands in a suburb of Pittsburgh. I’ve now recently left the city of Edinburgh (which, unlike my childhood street, ends “bra,” not “urg”) and am touring around the Scottish Highlands on vacation with my family. During off hours in our city air BnB, I developed my digital woodcut technique a step or two further. As always, these are done in MS Paint:

At some point I’m really hoping to fall in love with a narrative enough to apply the style in a comic. In the meantime though, here’s a fairly random selection of what I’ll call apprentice images I’ve made over the past year or so.

I think the Edinburgh Diptych might be about a first date?

Glitching White Supremacy

I’m delighted to be presenting in the Comics Studies Society 2024 conference during the last week of July. Because the conference is online this year, I’m also delighted to be presenting from Scotland. The conference is on California time, so I’ll have to zoom into my 9:00 AM panel at four o’clock.

I submitted my paper proposal as soon as I saw the Call-for-papers — which weirdly matched one of my current research projects. Citing Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, the conference topic “reconceives glitches as a form of refusal and a means by which to challenge the status quo.” I was especially taken by this question: “What can errors in production processes of print comics reveal about systems of racialization?”

My proposal begins:

“Stan Lee introduced a fictional counterpart of the KKK, called the Sons of the Serpent, in 1966, and later Marvel creators have reprised the organization roughly a dozen times since. While any comic is open to racial analysis, those featuring the white supremacist supervillains require it. The contributions of color artists are also especially significant during a period when skin color in comics was understood to denote absolute racial distinctions. Errors in skin coloring then undermine not only narrative continuity but racial thinking generally. I focus on five Sons of the Serpent episodes, four with distinct skin-coloring incongruities, and one with the greatest overall visual/narrative incoherence I have ever seen in a mainstream comic.”

Some readers of this blog might recall that I’ve been hunting down and analyzing Sons of the Serpent stories on-and-off for the past couple of years.

The project began as a chapter for my book manuscript “The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium,” but when it hit 30,000 words and still wasn’t done I realized it wasn’t a chapter. I pretended for a while that it was instead a “section,” but I have since reluctantly accepted that it’s not a part of the book at all. I’m now thinking of repotting it and growing it into its own book, very tentatively titled “Coloring White Supremacy: Marvel Comics and the KKK.” In addition to the Sons of the Serpent, which started out as Marvel’s version of the KKK, I might expand my scope to include appearances of the KKK too.

For now though, the conference topic narrowed my focus, which (coincidentally?) coincides with the supervillains’ earlier appearances:

The Avengers #32-33 (September-October 1966) by Stan Lee and Don Heck: The Avengers #73-74 (February-March 1970) by Roy Thomas, Frank Giacoia, and John Buscema: The Defenders #22-25 (April-July 1975) by Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema: The Avengers #341-342 (November-December 1991) by Fabian Nicieza and Steve Epting: Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #8-9 (April-May 1999) by Mark Waid, Cully Hamner, and Doug Braithwaite

I won’t condense the whole paper, but here are some favorite moments, each a deeply layered kind of error.

Three white supremacist leaders aren’t white:

Black people with gray skin:

A white character (based on Batman’s butler Alfred) turns Black:

A Black and Asian woman changes color:

And a Black woman changes in just about every way possible:

Lots more on this topic later.

Shenandoah Comics, Spring 2024

The new issue of Shenandoah is live, and it includes three new comics by three wonderfully different artists whose visual approaches both contrast each other and draw rich connections.

Here’s a brief preview of each.

“Again Boy” by Helena Pantsis is the most pleasantly disturbing. It’s a surreal childbirth story that may belong in a genre by itself. Rather than plot summary, let me give you a bit of formal analysis — which is relevant because it interacts with the story content so well.

If you like the comfort of traditional panels and gutters and reading paths, “Again Boy” tosses those norms aside, leaving every image and caption unframed and each page a boundary-less open space. No two pages are quite alike either, except that the clusters of words always lead your eye between and through the images clustered aroung them.

Here are two pages to give you a taste:

Comics theorist Thierry Groensten coined the comics term “braiding” for visual motifs that repeat some drawn quality. Pantsis might be a textbook example. She repeats a pattern of concentric circles, it’s meaning changing with each rendering: birth canal, scream, black hole, some not-quite-physical portal of identity. The comic never defines the image in words, so its repetition weaves around the plot at a level of meaning outside of language.

Here’s a sampling:

“Beach Soliloquy” by MCK couldn’t be more different. The five pages are plotless (though in a weirdly good way), and no figure appears more than once.

There are no panels or gutter but the open spaces between lines represents mostly sand — a reason for yellow paper. There’s no narration either because all the text is tidbits of overheard speech. I snipped three examples:

A soliloquy is usually performed by a single character speaking their thoughts aloud on stage as if alone. Here the performance is a choral piece of fragmented dialogues that in combination stages a portrait of a place — or several places? I’m not sure if each page is a different beach or sections of the same beach. It seems significant that the difference doesn’t matter.

I also like the lack of speech balloons, allowing just the nearness of words to figures to indicate who is speaking. And if it’s not always clear, that’s even better because it’s all free-floating voices.

That freeness infuses the reading approach too. There’s no set order, or even preferable order. Like a stroll on a beach, roaming is the point. roam. And that produces all kinds of variable viewing paths:

“Hands” by Nick Mullins is an oddly touching war romance of sorts, or perhaps coming-of-age is a nearer description. Like “Again Boy” and “Beach Soliloquy,” it deserves it’s own genre.

The panels and gutter approach are closer to traditional comics, though not entirely. The Italian term for comics is fumetti, which also names the speech “clouds” or “smoke.” I admire how the comic braids various kinds of white clouds: the talk ballons, the steam from a cup of coffee (which also encloses the unspoken words that the narrator thinks), and the smoke from the train engine.

When the coffee steam repeats the last time, the change in style creates two kinds of white interiors too — which seems right for narrated memory. The title’s hand motif braids too, but while quietly experimenting with style changes that suggest increasingly interior mental experiences.

And that interiority style expands beyond hands to encompass a range of thoughts and emotinal experiences.

I love all three of these comics and feel lucky to be able to publish them in Shenandoah.

What Are Your Mandatory Character Traits?

In 1984, audiences watched as Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddemore—a.k.a. the Ghostbusters—protected New York from supernatural perils. They did it again in 1989 in Ghostbusters II, the movie’s sequel. And they did it in an animated TV series in 1986 and another in 1997, sequels to the first and second movie, respectively, as well as in a 2009 videogame, also a sequel to the second.

In 2016, significantly smaller audiences watched as Abby Yates, Erin Gilbert, and Jillian Holtzmann—a.k.a. the Ghostbusters—likewise protected New York from supernatural perils. This Ghostbusters movie didn’t lead to sequel movies, TV series, or videogames. It was the target of misogynist and racist vitriol, which, though spewing from a small minority, spread far and wide over social media. Even before the movie was released, Answer the Call’s trailer had become the most disliked on YouTube at the time, and the movie’s IMDb page was the subject of a coordinated, and ultimately successful, effort to lower its pre-screening rating. Ghostbusters: Answer the Call never recovered.

Why couldn’t Ghostbusters be women?

Leslie Jones, who played Patty Tolan, was attacked on social media with vicious slurs and stereotypes. In Tolan’s case, misogyny intersected with racism. Twitter ultimately suspended then-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos for his part of it, but he was only one bad apple of a whole rotten barrel.

The misogyny and racism directed at Answer the Call caught a lot of people off guard. Everyone understood the movie wasn’t a sequel, the next chapter of the story started by the previous movies. They also understood it wasn’t a retcon, revealing something new or correcting something about them. While the previous two movies and their spinoffs all occurred in the same fictional world, Answer the Call occurred in a separate one. It was self-contained. Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston still did—and still could continue to do—their ghostbusting independent of the ghostbusting that Abby, Erin, and Jillian did.

Though Answer the Call takes place in a different world, it necessarily privileges that world. While Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston were patrolling New York in their version of events, the moviemakers focused on Abby, Erin, and Jillian’s doing so in theirs. Rejects cancel new installments—sequels, retcons, or remakes—by also placing the new installments in a different world. While Abby, Erin, and Jillian were now patrolling New York in their version of events, those who rejected that version focused on Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston doing so in theirs.

We’ve got a theory as to why so much hatred could be directed at a rejected world. Ignoring wasn’t enough. Misogynists and racists, even if they ignored Answer the Call, at some level still recognized a connection between the all-male and all-female versions of the Ghostbusters. Each protects New York from the paranormal. Each faces skeptical scientists who scoff at their name and mission. Using high-tech gadgets and creative tactics, each are ultimately vindicated and celebrated as heroes.

Each of us thinks of ourselves in particular ways, and our sense of individual identity is particularly strong. So strong, in fact, that we become uncomfortable when other people’s identities get called into question. That, we think, is why there’s so much prejudice against trans people asserting their identities, and why issues of race can be so triggering. Remakes like Answer the Call hold a mirror up to its audience—fictionally but also in real time—to make us imagine what if we were different from the identities that we—factually but also currently—inhabit.

That’s why just asking those questions can make misogynists and racists squirm. If Ghostbusters can switch gender and race and still be Ghostbusters—even if only possible ones—then maybe actual people could switch gender or race and still be who they are in other possible worlds too. Even though Answer the Call merely remade Ghostbusters—and even though the remake could be rejected—it still raised the possibility that gender and race aren’t fixed. These central parts of everyone’s identity are possibly up for grabs. And even only hinting at that possibility, and even then only implicitly, may have been enough to trigger people already insecure.

When in 2012 DC remade—or, as the preferred term in comics, “rebooted”—their World War II-era superhero Alan Scott, a.k.a. Green Lantern, The Christian Post reported a pastor’s tweet: “Thanks to our depraved society, the Green Lantern will now be known as the Pink Nightlight.” “Nightlight,” presumably, because nightlights are used by kids scared of the dark. “Pink” because this Alan Scott was gay.

IHateTheMedia.com responded similarly: “Remember when comic books were just comic books? When a boy could read his comic and dream about being a hero? And a girl could decide whether she wanted to be Betty or Veronica? No political agenda being shoved down your throat? Those days are gone.”

Why couldn’t superheroes be gay?

Setting aside the not-insignificant gender politics of Archie comics—and IHateTheMedia’s implication that Betties and Veronicas couldn’t be heroes—the anti-gay hatred was about more than nostalgia. Yes, some older fans had fond memories of the original Green Lantern, which they didn’t want altered. But those memories weren’t being altered. DC wasn’t revealing that Alan Scott of the 1940s had always been a closeted gay man who was now coming out. Though writers a decade later would retcon exactly that, in 2012 DC was instead creating a new Alan Scott, one who had always been openly gay and existed in a different universe from the original. Even though this new Alan Scott did now exist, the old Alan Scott continued to exist too—in the same imaginary world where he always had.

Surely the infinite range of the merely possible was big enough for both?

As we’ve seen, revision backlash isn’t always only about changing something old. Sometimes it’s about adding something new to the category of the possible. That’s why rejects are sometimes insufficient, since they do just that. According to internet trolls who attacked Ghostbusters: Answer the Call’s trailer on YouTube and the movie’s IMDb page, no Ghostbusters in any possible universe are female. According to these anti-gay protests, no Green Lantern in any possible universe is gay. Though both groups of people were wrong—the movie and the comic are proof of that—their worldview requires metaphysical unpacking. That leads to another possibility question.

Could Peter Parker, the secret identity of Spider-Man, be anything other than a straight, white man?

A 2011 agreement between Sony Pictures and Marvel (hacked and leaked online in 2015) stipulated that the “Mandatory Spider-Man Character Traits” must include “Male” and “Not a homosexual,” with the caveat “unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as homosexual.” That last part is important since “Spider-Man” is a kind of job title that different people could hold at different time—or at least different males could. The primary male, however, is Peter Parker, who also has a list of required Character Traits, including: “He is Caucasian and heterosexual.” Apparently that’s mandatory, required of writers and essential of the character. According to Sony and Marvel, every possible Peter Parker is male, white, and straight.

Except that’s demonstrably false. The 2018 animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, as well as its two-part 2023 and 2024 sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, include multiple female and non-white versions of Peter Parker. Other traits on the “mandatory” list are equally questionable. In time, they’ll likely be invalidated too.

Regardless, the agreement still reveals something about the character—or rather, about the 2011 fans of the character whom Sony very much wanted to please. Spider-Man was introduced in 1962, and during the character’s six-decade history the majority of fans have been male, white, and straight. Spider-Man didn’t acquire those traits by chance.

The character’s current audience is not as male, white, and straight as it once was, but many fans still are. And some of those male, white, and straight fans have expressed a range of misogynistic, racist, and homophobic reactions to similar changes. While the focus of their reactions has explicitly been on remade characters, their implicit focus has been on themselves and whether they have Mandatory Character Traits. Perhaps they are worried about the metaphysics of their own identities.

Few things, if any, are nearer or dearer to each of us than how we view ourselves. “Identity politics” might (or might not) get derisive cackles from certain political quarters, but the metaphysics of personal identity is inescapable. And anything that challenges it can become uncomfortable really fast. If some merely possible character is female, non-white, or gay, and still Peter Parker, then some possible version of themselves is too. As with Ghostbusters and Green Lantern, the concern isn’t about remaking fictional characters. It’s about the essential characteristics, or in the terms of the Sony-Marvel legal agreement “Mandatory Character Traits,” of actual people.

Especially themselves.

[excerpted from Chapter 1: “Rejecting Possibilities” of Nat Goldberg’s and my Revising Reality]

Retconning the Church of America

In 1819, ten years after his second term as president, Thomas Jefferson finished The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. He had completed The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth in 1804, toward the end of his first term. Both works are constructed out of the New Testament. Jefferson cut and pasted portions of a physical copy to create a new document. Cuts that he pasted concerned Jesus’s (human) biography and, more importantly, his moral message. Those that he discarded had to do with miracles, including Jesus’s resurrection and divinity. Though revising religion wasn’t a plank of Jefferson’s election campaigns, his opponents called him a “howling atheist,” declaring: “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion.”

And yet two hundred years after Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS Church) declared in 1976: “The success of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War came about through men who were raised up by God for this special purpose,” and “The Constitution was and is a miracle. It was an inspired document, written under the divine guidance of the Lord.”

Joseph Smith, who founded the LDS Church in 1830, said as much: “The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner.” Brigham Young, the LDS leader who led its early converts west, founded Salt Lake City, and became the first governor of Utah, added that the Constitution “was dictated by the invisible operations of the Almighty.” While Jefferson rejected the divine out of the New Testament, the LDS Church retconned acts of the divine into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The LDS Church’ views are hardly unique. The Pew Research Center found in 2020 that 32 percent of Americans believed that God chooses U.S. presidents, though most believed so in the broad sense of elections being part of God’s plan rather than as an endorsement of specific candidates.

Others believed in direct and divine endorsements.

If Americans who retcon the United States’ founding documents as being divinely inspired are categorized into a group, a major new religion may be said to have emerged over the past two hundred years with a current following of millions. At least, that’s one way of understanding people like those Frank Bruni reported on in the July 2022 New York Times, above whose house “fluttered several flags, including one each for two saviors: Jesus Christ and Donald Trump.”

When Trump was arraigned in New York in April 2023 on thirty-four felony counts, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Georgia, said during an interview, “Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government!” The implication being that Trump was going to be arrested and murdered by the American government. Responding to Greene, Michelle Cottle in the New York Times called Trump a “Messiah” to a not insignificant part of the U.S. electorate, comparing them to a religious following.

Trump has leaned in to it. When in January 2024 a conservative group created a video called “God Made Trump,” Trump posted it online. “On June 14, 1946,” the video explains, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

Members of this apparent religion, who see a through line from the divinely inspired Founders to the divinely inspired (and martyred) Trump, seem to refer to it as simply “Christianity.” To differentiate it from other uses of the term we descriptively call it the “Church of America.”. Despite their comments about the founding documents, the LDS Church officially includes only two holy works, the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and with it its own latter-day saints. The Church of America has three: the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Like the LDS Church, the Church of America has its latter-day saints too, including (ironically) Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington—and now perhaps Donald Trump.

Like the LDS Church, the Church of America believes that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are divinely inspired. Yet unlike the LDS Church, which counts the Declaration and Constitution as divinely inspired without also being official scriptures, the Church of America acts as if these founding documents are scriptures. It even acts as if their authors were saints—infallible beacons of morality and tradition, people we’re supposed to defer to for their teachings. They are called “Founding Fathers,” in double capitals. That’s similar to Christians calling figures from the Bible and important figures in Church history “Patriarchs,” from Greek and Latin for “father,” as well as, simply, “Church Fathers.”

Like the LDS Church, the Church of America also thinks that the Bible has a sequel. Unlike the LDS Church, which thinks that the Book of Mormon is it, the Church of America instead thinks that the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution are. The later documents don’t reinterpret the earlier ones. Rather, the Declaration and Constitution  expand the Bible in a sequential manner, providing guidance to Americans in ways similar to how the Bible did before and continues to do so today.

That would explain why so many of members of the Church of America are, or at least claim to be, literalists about the Declaration and Constitution. Those are holy documents, just as the Bible is. Or, if not literally literalists, extremely reverential, regarding their authors as wise beyond the normal man (or woman or other). The idea that Thomas Jefferson or George Washington committed immoral acts is as blasphemous to some of them as the idea that the Apostles did. The idea that they were both immoral people—say, for owning slaves, including, in the case of Jefferson, some of whom were his own children—is rejected as outright contradictory.

One of us (Chris) founded a Facebook page where conservatives and progressives (sometimes) try to talk across the ideological divide. A Friend commented there: “America was founded when we were inspired by God to recognize liberation from the King.” Another member expanded in detail:

“I do believe that the founding fathers were inspired by God in developing the founding ethos in our Declaration and the Constitution later made to ensure government is in line with that ethos. This perspective would be commonly held among Christian Conservatives who would draw from the more modern rhetoric of Reagan and Coolidge, along with ideas from Lincoln and statements by the founding fathers in their writings… That being said, many in the religious right probably have not studied the rhetoric of Reagan, Coolidge, Lincoln, and the Founding Fathers in depth, but this conception of America’s founding is culturally recognized in the household and I would say a majority of politically active republicans likely view the founding in a manner like this.”

The belief explains why, when other Page members pointed out the historically incontrovertible fact that the founders were racists (they believed African people were innately inferior to European people), they were accused of “demonization,” literally the process of making someone into a demon, which on certain readings of the Bible is what happens when angels morally fall. People who point out the Founders’ faults, however, don’t demonize them, because they never sanctified them. Acknowledging their human flaws (there is no sense in which they were not racists) seems like demonization only to those who regarded them as saints or at least saint-like. Though not a Founding Father, Trump’s own moral failings are often ignored, denied, or explained away too.

Some U.S. Christian conservatives prioritize securing the border over aiding impoverished people attempting to cross it. If they are not Christians but members of the Church of America, then the apparent failure to obey the New Testament (and its repeated directive to aid the poor) may be explained by the stronger belief in the sacredness of the United States, including its borders.

The Church of America seems to privilege the U.S. and its founding documents over the Bible. Christians who aren’t members of the Church likely aren’t the ones running up sales of what Amazon.com describes as “Jesus is My Savior Trump is My President Flag 3x5ft MAGA Flag.” The Bible’s First Commandment is to worship none but God, and for Christians that includes Jesus. True, the flag doesn’t call Trump a “savior.” But Amazon’s list of occasions on which to fly the flag include Easter and Christmas.

After Donald Trump lost reelection in 2020, many of his supporters believed (and continue to believe) without evidence—and so instead on faith—that the election was stolen. In 2022, The Washington Post quoted Couy Griffin, a Trump organizer and county commissioner in New Mexico who refused to certify Biden’s win, explaining why: “It’s not based on any facts. It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.” Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator and later the state’s Republican nominee for governor, used explicitly religious language: “We’re appealing to God. We’re speaking life over the state; we’re speaking truth.”

Whether this set of Americans constitutes a distinct religion is debatable. Not all follow Margaret Taylor Greene in comparing Trump to Jesus, though, arguably, they do all retcon the founding documents as manifestations of’ God’s will. Perhaps Bradley Onishi, author of the 2023 Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next, summarized many Christian conservatives’ beliefs best: “This is a Christian country, it was built for and by Christians,” understanding themselves “as playing a special role in history, as outlined by the Creator.”

Accusations aimed at America’s Founding Thomas went from being an atheist and infidel to being part of a divinely inspired prophetic line including Trump. That retcon is currently a work in progress, rejected by many but championed by others.

[excerpted from Chapter 2: “Rewriting History” of Nat Goldberg’s and my Revising Reality]