Jim Shooter's Blog, page 2

SEVEN, Issue 1

JayJay here. I finally have all of the pages to the first issue together. To make it easier to read I've put the full size images on a web page so you can just scroll down. Click the cover below to go to the page:

Untold Tales

SEVEN – Tomorrow

I wrote what's below and I can't take any more time today….

First, Untold Tales
A few stories I promised to tell:
An Ad-venture and an "Expensive" Lesson
I lived in Pittsburgh in the early 1970's, and sometimes I worked freelance for Pittsburgh-based Lando-Bishopric Advertising, usually on the U.S. Steel account. At various times, I served as a concept creator, copywriter, designer and illustrator. Yes, illustrator. I'm not as practiced, fast and facile as most good comic book artists, but give me lots of reference and all week to make one illo and I do okay.
Once, I was asked to serve as a freelance art director. Grey Advertising in New York shared the U.S. Steel account with Lando-Bishopric. They were doing a project for the "U.S. Steel: We're Involved" campaign, for which L-B had primary responsibility. I was hired to represent L-B at a creative meeting at Grey's offices, to coordinate what Grey was doing with what L-B was doing, offer input and provide art direction.
So, I flew to New York as I so often did when I was working for DC Comics and made my way to Grey. Their offices, as I recall, were on Lexington, near Grand Central Terminal. In the Graybar building, I think. I could be wrong.
Anyway, I spent a day working with the Grey people. It was fun. If any of them wondered why a kid right out of high school was Lando-Bishopric's sole representative, no one let on. They treated me as if I were for real, and cheerfully accepted my contributions. I think I did okay.
I stayed that night in the hotel I used to use on trips to New York when DC wasn't picking up the tab. It was an older hotel, nice enough, but not as expensive as the snazzy, newer places. It was on Eighth Avenue in the Times Square area. I think it was eventually refurbished and became the Milford Plaza. Not sure. I flew home the next morning.
Here's the funny part. A few days later, I turned in my invoice and my expense report to the V.P./creative director. As he looked over my expense report, line by line, he got increasingly upset! He said, words to the effect, "Are you crazy?! This is ridiculous!"
I'd flown student standby. Round trip airfare, $28.50 (regular coach fare was more than $100). I took the bus into the city from Newark Airport and back, 55 cents each way. The hotel was around $20. The meals I'd paid for totaled around $10.
No way, he said, could he submit an expense report like that. What, did I want to ruin travel and entertainment for everyone? What if the client says, hey, this is great! From now on no more fancy hotels and chauffeured cars! We want all of you agency people to be as frugal as this guy!
He tore up my expense report and added a few hours to my invoice instead. (Oh, by the way, that didn't cost the agency anything—they billed my time to the client at triple the fat hourly rate they were paying me.)
The V.P. said he'd tell the client that I'd had other business for the agency in New York and, therefore, Lando-Bishopric picked up my expenses. And he warned me that, if I ever traveled on business for L-B again, I'd damn well better fly first or business class, take a black car or at least a cab, stay in a nice place and eat very well.
Okay. Yes, sir.
I guess that's why advertising is so expensive.

Sex Education
Marvel did this custom comic book for the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse: Marvel donated its services. That was rare. Also a little out of character for the greedy suits upstairs, I thought. Could it be that they were inspired to do something selfless?
Nah.
Marvel ate the costs and got nothing for the book domestically, but the suits planned to sell the bejeezus out of the book rights for publication in foreign markets, starting with Europe.
Marvel held a meeting of its European publishing licensees at the Frankfurt Book Fair to pitch the book. I wasn't in attendance, but I got a full report from Dominique Boniface. Dom was a director of international licensing for Marvel and handled most of our European business. Great guy. Good friend. I believe he faithfully reported the gist of the meeting.
Marvel President Jim Galton himself, with great fanfare, pitched the book.
The reaction from the European publishers was "ho-hum. What else do you have?"
Galton couldn't believe that no one was interested. He was sure Marvel was going to make a killing on the book.
According to Dom, dumbfounded Galton asked, words to the effect, "Don't you have a child abuse problem here (in Europe)?"
One publisher, I won't say which one or which country, said, "Over here we call it 'sex education.'"
That was a long time ago. I don't know how much attitudes may have changed. But, initially, Marvel had no takers in Europe for the Spider-Man and Power Pack anti-child abuse book.
Dom, by the way, was one of the few Marvel licensing/business people I respected. There were a few good ones.
Last I heard, Dom was living back in his native Paris, doing what these days, I don't know, but whatever it is, I'll bet he does it well. He's an amazing photographer, by the way. I believe he still does photography for Arts et Lettres Verso.

Bomb Scare Aftermath
The bomb threat Marvel received after publishing an issue of Web of Spider-Man set in Northern Ireland was just the first wave of fallout. There was no bomb, as it turned out, but the building had to be evacuated. All that was lost was work time and peace of mind.
The second wave of fallout was outrage against Marvel in some of the many Irish publications on the newsstands, seen all over New York, and I assume elsewhere around the country.
The Irish Echo sent a reporter, an Irish (of course) woman, to interview me, basically to find out why Marvel had chosen to take sides regarding the troubles in Northern Ireland.
PR Director Pam Rutt set up a lunch with the reporter. Pam sorted through our staff until she found someone Irish-looking enough, an assistant editor named Rosemary…McCormick, I think, a smart, charming, red-haired young woman. She didn't have anything to do with the book, Pam just wanted to have her come along, as evidence that Marvel employed some Irish people, I suppose. Pam made us a reservation at Caliban's, a restaurant in the neighborhood, on Third Avenue, I believe.
Caliban's. I wouldn't have done that. Caliban's was sort of a very upscale Irish pub. Why an Irish place, full of Irish people if you plan to talk about an Irish tinderbox topic?
Anyway, the four of us had lunch. The reporter made a few notes, but mostly seemed content with our repeated denials that Marvel meant to take sides. We weren't aware that we had made any intimation that could be taken that way until the bomb threat.
The reporter said she's write a brief piece saying just that.
As the lunch ended, Pam asked the reporter if she had any copies of her paper with her. The reporter reached into her large bag and pulled out several copies of the Irish Echo.
Whereupon, our waitress, a tall, robust red-haired young woman strode up to our table and belligerently demanded to know what the hell we were doing with copies of the despicable Irish Echo.
The waitress and reporter quickly launched into a shouting match. The waitress tried to grab the offending papers. The reporter got up spitting fire. The waitress clenched her fists. Each of them was eager to pound the other.
So, I jumped up, glad to be scary big for once. I stepped between the would-be combatants, pointed a finger at the reporter and roared, "YOU SIT DOWN!" She almost fell back into her seat, freaked out by the giant, looming ogre. I turned to the waitress. "YOU GO AWAY!"
She backed off, then turned and scurried into the kitchen. To get a knife, maybe? I don't know. By then, we'd attracted enough attention so the manager took over peacekeeping duties.
I paid the check. The Irish Echo reporter packed up her bag and we got ready to leave—rather hastily. I was still worried about a knife attack.
I said to the reporter, "You know, now I think I'm beginning to understand…."
P.S. At this point, I don't remember which sides the Irish Echo reporter and waitress were on. What I remember is that they were really intense about it.

NEXT: SEVEN, the Kabbalah Kustom Komic

Made to Order – Part 2

A Miracle

In terms of unit cost, this must be one of the most expensive comic books ever printed:
Broadway Comics was funded by Broadway Video Entertainment, which was a division (or subsidiary, I forget) of parent Broadway Video. Broadway Video is the co-producer of Saturday Night Live and also a world-class video production house. Each year they give a snazzy holiday gift to their most important video-editing clients. In 1995, BV management asked us at Broadway Comics to create a special, collector's item comic book as part of a holiday gift package.
They had a number of requirements—a holiday theme, of course, some activity pages for the kiddies…. They insisted that we use all of our characters, even those that were still in the development stage and hadn't yet seen the light of day.
And of course, they came to us at the last minute, so it was a dead sprint all the way to get the book done. A few things suffered, mostly the coloring.
The print run was 1,100.
The art, editorial, art production and printing costs totaled a little over $30,000. Each book, therefore, cost nearly $30 to produce.
Miracle on Broadway was printed digitally on heavy, bright white stock with a card stock cover.
Copies were packed in a gift box along with a box of crayons, I believe, and some other gift items provided by BV. We comics people packed the gift boxes. It takes a while to carefully pack up almost 1,100 gifts.
BV permitted us to have a very small number of copies, so that each of the principal creators could have one. Being the Big Cheese, I got several.
I gave one to my mother for Christmas.
Here's the book: BV paid us for our work, but we gave them the friends and family discount, so we didn't make much. It was the first and only custom comic book Broadway Comics ever produced.

Illustrated Media
Sometime around the beginning of 2003, a man named Joe Lauria called me to ask if I'd be interested in working with him on a custom comics project for the State Department.
That sounded interesting.
Joe is a lawyer and businessman. Among the things he's done are business roll-ups, for instance, taking a bunch of small tugboat companies and making them into one big tugboat company. Benefitting from economies of scale, the whole was much more valuable than the sum of the parts.
Joe became interested in comics because his brother Frank, a retired Navy SEAL and long-time comics aficionado, was interested in creating a comic book about SEALS. Joe helped Frank publish a series called SPECWAR.
Here's one of the issues. It's pretty exciting high-action stuff and very, very authentic.
Joe looked into the possibility of doing a roll-up of small comic book companies, but there didn't seem to be much advantage to be gained. In fact, the sorry state of the industry discouraged him from any involvement. The difficulty of keeping SPECWAR going was a testament to that. Eventually, publication had to be suspended.
However, Joe thought there might be an opportunity in the custom comics area. Custom comics seemed to be a reasonably active business. The turn up inserted in the newspaper, in the doctor's office, and you see comics format ads frequently.
Meanwhile….
The Bush Administration appointed advertising and media expert Charlotte Beers as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Part of her brief was to upgrade the State Department's PR effort. Improve the United States' image in the world. That's oversimplifying things, yes, but you get the drift.
One thing Beers attempted was getting Hollywood on board. She wanted filmmakers to make an effort to portray the United States more positively.
Hollywood ignored her.
But Beers' highly publicized attempts caught Joe's attention.
Joe wrote to the State Department. Soon thereafter, he got a call from Karl Rove's office. The administration was interested. Joe was invited to meet with Beers' number two, Peggy England.
Joe thought he ought to have someone who'd been in the industry a while on his side of the table at that meeting. He asked around and several people suggested me.
The idea was to do sort of "Voice of America"-type comics. Joe called the project "Reflections of America." His plan was to concentrate on Arab and Muslim markets in the Mideast and around the world.
I did a lot of research. My Egyptian friend George called his relatives back in Cairo and they sent me two shopping bags full of comics and kids' books from all over the Mideast! I read books on Arab and Muslim culture. When time came for the meeting, I was loaded for bear.
I proposed that we create comics and storybooks with all Arab and Muslim characters, themes, settings. They would be entertainment first. No preaching. Very subtle positive values messages, tolerance and the like. Often no message at all, just a great story. Above all, no suggestion ever that any proselytizing about America was going on. The words "Reflections of America" could certainly never be used anywhere.
And, by the way, no super heroes. If you have a super hero character, the very first thing an Arab or Muslim reader asks is why isn't he or she liberating Palestine?
Peggy England loved the pitch. She said they, the State Department, had a "pot" of money. It would have to be done as a commercial venture, that is, not directly under State Department control, but they could fund us to the tune of millions of dollars and put us in business.
The next step was creating the business plan and developing properties.
I developed five of them. I consulted at length with State Department Mideast experts while doing so.
Things were progressing nicely.
Then the Second Gulf War started and we got back-burnered. So far back, we eventually fell off of the stove.
But, heartened by our brush with success, Joe started Illustrated Media Group LLC to explore custom comics opportunities. I work freelance for IM, but I'm the go-to guy.
Illustrated Media has done a number of small jobs and a few big ones, a few more brushes with success and a lot of hard work pay-the-bills stuff. Our biggest gig was with Dark Horse. IM packaged the writing for the Gold Key/Dell Dark Horse books. There were two writers, myself and J.C. Vaughn involved, and we planned to bring in a third, Ms. Janet Claire Jackson, better known around here as JayJay the Blog Elf. She was going to write Spektor, a new take on the old Doctor Spektor series.
But, sadly, the market was just too weak. When Dark Horse boss Mike Richardson reluctantly (he said) cancelled the line, the best-selling book in the industry that month sold only 75,000 or so copies.
Here's another big project we did:
I'll tell you about it next post. And show you the insides. And make the plot and some back-story available for download.

NEXT: SEVEN

Made to Order

First This

JayJay wrote a short story that I really like. She tells me that she now has it available online for small change. She also told me she gave me credit as editor because I made a few nuts and bolts suggestions, like "try this sentence again in English," and "spell 'its,' the possessive, right." (JayJay here. Jim is too humble as usual. He pointed out such a major storytelling flaw in my first draft that I still can't believe I made a mistake like that and didn't see it.)

: )

Being associated with that story is good for my rep.

Here's the cover:

Here's the blurb I wrote for JayJay:

I hope they don't make this story into a movie. I'd have to see it because I know the author. The movie would be very difficult to sit through. I don't deal well with horror stories that pry their way into my id and set up shop manufacturing nightmares. Reading this story, superbly written by a woman who should be locked away somewhere and prevented from doing any more was hard enough. I don't need to see it on the big screen. Avoid this. Do not read this story. It will upset you. It's a romance, by the way.

I meant every word.

This story, though complete, is just the first episode of a series, by the way. The tale continues.

Here's where to get it if you're interested:
They Always Come Back on Amazon for the Kindle
They Always Come Back PDF Edition

I don't often plug things here. I wouldn't do it even for JayJay if I didn't think I was doing my fellow travelers on this blog a favor by pointing out something cool.


Custom Comics, Made to Order

Custom comics are created to a client's specifications. They're used for advertising, marketing, premiums, promotion, education or any kind of communication, really. Propaganda, anyone? : )

The first time I left the mainstream comic book business, around 1970 at age 18, I found myself creating comics again almost right away, working freelance for an advertising agency in Pittsburgh called Lando-Bishopric.

Funny how that happened. While I was writing for DC, occasionally, on a slow news day, a reporter or news crew would do an interview with "the kid who did comics." I was on TV, on the radio and in the papers many dozens of times while I was in high school. Anyway, the copy chief of L-B called my parents' home one day. I happened to be there. He asked me if I was the kid who did comics. I guess he saw me on TV. They had a gig for me.

I met with the copy chief and an art director, Jack Beale and Jack Dillon, respectively. They actually had several gigs for me. One of them was a series of comics-style projects for U.S. Steel.

Lando-Bishopric handled, among many other things, half of the U.S. Steel account. The other half was in the hands of Grey Advertising in New York City.
L-B and Grey were working together on a campaign for U.S. Steel called "Where's Joe?" It was meant to raise awareness about American steel industry jobs being lost to Germany and Japan. They wanted some comics-format ads. I put together a pitch piece and sample pages. The Jacks liked them and I was called to a meeting.

There were more than a dozen L-B execs gathered in the conference room to review the proposed project. I didn't know who any of them were except the Jacks. One of the Jacks presented my work.

Some loud, cranky guy at the end of the table started criticizing the sample pages. He actually had only one significant complaint, and it was only one balloon, which he read aloud. He read it wrong! Dyslexic? I don't know. He was making noises about killing the project because that panel didn't work for him. And no one was debating the point! The Jacks sat there in meek silence.
So I piped up. I said, "You're not reading that correctly." Then I read it to him—the actual words that were there.
He seemed pleased. He said, words to the effect, "I like your attitude, young man." And he went on about believing in your work and sticking up for it…clearly a message intended for the rest of the creative in the room more than me. He apologized for misreading the words. He approved the project.It was a McHale's Navy moment. Just when you thought McHale was in trouble, the Admiral would admire his initiative or boldness, and McHale would skate.

Later, I found out that the loud guy, whose name I unfortunately can't remember, was the account rep who landed the U.S. Steel account. He was easily the most powerful man in the agency. Even the President kissed his ring. Everyone feared that if Mr. Loud wasn't suitably worshipped he would leave and take U.S. Steel with him.

Everyone at the agency was afraid to work on any project for Mr. Loud's accounts because if he didn't like what they came up with, he just might have them fired. So they were all always "too busy." They farmed work for his accounts out to freelancers like, oh, say, me.

Maybe if I would have known who he was and known that I was supposed to be afraid of him, I would have kept my mouth shut in that meeting.

Nah. Not me. I'm not good at keeping my mouth shut.

I continued to get work. A lot of work. Once I had stood up to Mr. Loud and therefore, somehow, became his favorite creator, a lot of Loud projects came my way. I think, I hope that I kept getting work because I was good, as well as because Loud liked me.

I continued to tell Mr. Loud what I thought. He had ideas occasionally that I politely told him were lame, and/or offered a spin to them that made them less lame. He continued liking my attitude.
The only example of my U.S. Steel work that I could easily lay hands upon was this poster: It's been rolled up for 42 years, sorry, but Patience, Fortitude, a coaster and a couple of my fellow dumbbells held it down for its photo.

By the time I created the above, the name of the ad campaign had been changed to "U.S. Steel: We're Involved." Same message, but a spin that took it away from seeming so focused on the company's negotiations with the union regarding a no-strike contract and higher performance standards.

Those cartoons, done in the Jimmy Hatlo They'll Do It Every Time style, were used in many ways. One of them was made into a national TV commercial. It showed a flatbed tractor-trailer arriving to pick up a ten-pound box of specialty steel and suggested that a motorcycle and sidecar would be arriving later to pick up the 20-ton order.

They were all about inefficiency, waste and stupidity on the part of management as well as labor.

That was just a tiny bit of the overall We're Involved campaign, of course.

I have a great story about representing L-B to the execs at Grey, but this is already running long. I'll tell you tomorrow.

Years later, at Marvel, I had some involvement with Marvel's custom comics business. Usually, I just pontificated. Other people did everything and usually, I just passed my hand over the results and blessed them.

Here's a notable custom comic that Marvel did for the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse. This was important enough so that I was a little more involved, but the brilliant Jim Salicrup did all the heavy lifting.
There's a stupefying story that goes with that book, too. I'll tell you tomorrow.
Marvel created a host of custom comics. Clients included Campbell's Soup, Kool-Aid, GlaxoWellcome (for an asthma medicine), and, of course, Hostess Brands, for whom we did the the ubiquitous Hostess ads in the comics. It was a sideline.
At VALIANT, desperate to make money to keep the lights burning, we sought custom comics business. This was our first custom job, for a telecom company called PHH: It's a cute little eight panel story. PHH LDN Man can't defeat "Mr. Sincerity" from the phone company, whose answer to everything is "reach out and touch someone," but PHH LDN Man clues in the CFO that all she needs to do is kick the bum out and sign up with PHH.

My partner at VALIANT, Steve Massarsky was fond of making deals that personally benefitted him. He was supposed to give up his law practice when we started VALIANT, but since he was sleeping with a woman who happened to be a principal of the venture capital firm that funded us, controlled the board, stipulations of his contract were not enforced. Therefore, as a lawyer, he represented Nintendo for entertainment, represented us, of course, and, being previously involved in the music business, had connections at MCA. With a couple of record producers, dealing mostly with himself, he put together a deal to produce for MCA a licensed Super Mario Bros. album. If that sounds strange to you, well, you have no idea how hot Super Mario Bros. was at that time. To me, even at that time, though, it sounded unlikely to succeed. I couldn't imagine video gamers buying a music CD just because the Super Mario Bros. were on the cover.

But, we did it, VALIANT made a few bucks and Massarsky made a ton of money, personally.

The pencils were by Art Nichols who did a magnificent job. I think Vince Colletta inked it, correct me if I'm wrong, Artie. I wrote the story. I had to work the songs into it, and they wanted a literacy theme. Ay-yi-yi!
We didn't do the CD cover art, but we did everything else. I'm proud of this work. Here it is:







P.S. There's some good music on this album, including the great Roy Orbison's last recording, "I Drove All Night." Dire Straits, Sheena Easton…it didn't suck. But it failed in the marketplace, as I figured it would.

The most impressive custom job we ever did at VALIANT was for Nintendo of Japan for their F-ZERO game. We did an in-pack custom comic book for the game. Here are a couple of pages:


We also did the box cover art:

Why is this impressive? Because this work was done for a product to be sold only in Japan.

The Japanese were and are very proud of their comics industry. As a rule, at least at that time, they didn't think American comics were anywhere near as good as theirs. The consensus opinion was that they were the pros and we were quirky, amateurish second-stringers.
But, on the basis of our licensed Nintendo comics for America, Nintendo of Japan picked us, Americans, to do their custom comic in-pack and box cover art. An honor.
I wrote it, Art Nichols penciled it and Bob Layton inked it.
We did several other custom comics jobs, including one for Kraft General Foods and on for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Cheesasaurus Rex book had a print run of two million copies and the KFC book had a one million copy run.

Penciled by Wanderlei Silva, inked by Bob Layton and "Knob Row," our artists in training, I think. Penciled and inked by the great comics art production guru and brilliant kids' stuff illustrator Ron Zalme.

We took cipher characters invented by nitwit ad agency people, gave them personality and had them star in real stories.

We got rave reviews about the KFC book from the client. The Cheesasaurus Rex book went over so well that Kraft wanted a sequel, and intended to make the comic book a regular series.

I wrote the script for the Cheesasaurus sequel. Kraft loooved it.

The scripts for "Piracy on the High Cheese" and "The Sharp, Tangy Revenge of Cheesefinger" are available for download.
(In the Downloads section of the sidebar - J.)

About that time, MetLife came to us and wanted a custom comic series to reach the inner city, lower income and Hispanic markets. I pitched a concept. They loooved it.

Then I got forced out of VALIANT.

None of the pending projects went forward. The MetLife people later told me that the VALIANT people they dealt with after I was gone were "idiots." That's a quote. They pulled the plug. Kraft cancelled the proposed Cheesasaurus Rex series for similar reasons.

The scum who succeeded me as the "creative" heads of VALIANT were not competent to do the custom work. In truth, they probably didn't care and weren't trying that hard, because, at that point, they were making so much money from the regular comic book line I'd built that the lucrative custom work didn't seem that important.

TOMORROW: A Miracle and Illustrated Media

The $10 Million Comic Book

Marc Miyake left comment on "DC's First Editorial Standards, Marvel Profanity":

Dear Jim,

Will Wonder Woman be in your upcoming post on the essential natures of classic characters? If she isn't, that's okay, because you've spent over a week on her.

I haven't commented lately because I felt completely lost in Aisle WW. An Azzupermarket isn't my kind of place to shop. Items arranged in a cryptic -- or chaotic? -- manner. Signs long on wordplay and short on help. A handful of customers in the store who sneer on simpletons like me who spend an hour looking for juice and leaving empty-handed. Yeah, I really want to go back there again.

Seriously, the last two posts lost me. I thought #1-3 would elucidate #4, but I ended up even more bewildered at Azzmart. I don't feel too bad since your non-comics friends were in the same boat. I've only read one WW comic since John Byrne's run in the 90s. And that issue didn't make much sense either.
What I don't understand is ... DC is part of a mass market entertainment company. Why can't its comics be as accessible as its movies? What if editors treated the New 52 like 52 movies on paper? Why keep producing niche products for the cognoscenti?

I keep hearing the argument that comics can't compete with movies, video games, whatever. So how was Shueisha able to sell over 230 million volumes of One Piece manga so far [as of 2010]; volume 61 set a new record for the highest initial print run of any book in Japan in history with 3.8 million copies (the previous record belonging to volume 60 with 3.4 million copies). Volume 60 is the first book to sell over two million copies in its opening week on Japan's Oricon book rankings. One Piece is currently ranked as the best-selling series of all time in manga history.

It's not as if the Japanese are lacking in entertainment options. Millions are choosing to read black and white manga without all the full-color bells and whistles that are standard in the US. Why? What are they doing right? Or even wrong, in your opinion?

What impresses me about the Japanese is how they manage to keep on coming up with new properties in new genres that are hard to pigeonhole. Calling One Piece a pirate comic makes one think of Pirates of the Caribbean or EC's New Trend Piracy. That label doesn't do One Piece justice. It's set in its own universe. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Piece#Setting>

I saw DEFIANT and Broadway as being in the Japanese genre-bending tradition. Those lines would have become even more diverse over time. If I had to pick one unreleased property to read, it'd be Spire. I'm listening to Ukrainian music at the moment. Fitting.

Why does diversity in comics work over there but not here? Yes, I know there are lots of nonsuperhero comics. I don't think comics will ever die because there will always be Alison Bechdels and the like who will express themselves through the medium. But the core of the industry remains a set of decades-old properties. Very different from the Japanese scene where series come and go and end. One Piece was planned to last five years -- it's lasted almost fifteen so far -- and "the author states, as of July 2007, that the ending will still be the one he had decided on from the beginning and he is committed to seeing it through to the end, no matter how many years it takes."

I've never read One Piece. But I respect creators who think things through. Who have structure in mind. Who know where they're going. That makes me want to invest in an epic. I don't want to deal with improv, with whatever stimuli the creators toss around to distract me while they figure out their next move.

Language and violence are stimuli. They really stir up some part of the audience. Anyone here remember a certain word in the Transformers movie from 1986? Shocking then, nothing now.

As we become accustomed to one level of stimuli, the creators feel they have to amp 'em up. More extreme! Push that button harder! Faster! Brute force is easy. Inspiring thoughts is hard.

But surely somebody among 300 million Americans can do that in comics.
As I read about Wonder Woman #1-4, I kept thinking, is this the best DC can do? Don't Diana and her audience deserve better?


Posted by Marc Miyake to Jim Shooter <http://www.jimshooter.com/> at January 27, 2012 1:45 PM 

ANSWER:

I won't be including Wonder Woman in my post about the essential natures of classic characters because I don't feel I have any special qualifications regarding her. The Marvel characters, yes, Superman, Superboy and the Legion, yes. Magnus, Solar, Turok and Samson, yes.

I have limited experience reading manga, but every manga story I have ever read was readable and had solid entertainment value. Even if the story wasn't about something of particular interest to me, I could see how it would be to the target audience. When the management of the big two and the creators realize what business they're actually in (the entertainment business, in case some of the aforementioned are reading this and wondering) then, maybe the American comics industry will have a chance to survive and thrive.

When Marv and Len used to say "female heros don't sell," or "westerns don't sell," or SF doesn't sell," or whatever, I'd always say "show me a good one."

Ahem....

Briefly, in shorthand....

The American comic book industry started out as a way to reprint syndicated strips and milk extra cash out of existing material. That worked, but comic book publishers quickly used up all the strips available. To keep the ball rolling, publishers commissioned new material, but they didn't want to pay more than they did for reprint rights, so new material was made for low pay under confiscatory rights conditions. No artist or writer wanted to be a comic book creator -- everyone wanted a syndicated strip, where the big money was. Therefore, comic books wound up with second-rate creators who couldn't make it in the big leagues, hacks, the rare significant talent who passed through on his or her way to greater things (Jules Feiffer comes to mind) and the occasional solid craftsman or even genius who arrived in the comic book biz for whatever reason and stuck with it.

Back in the early, big circulation days, publishers got lucky a few times with great properties created despite the lousy compensation and working conditions, creations that struck a chord -- Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and others.  Mostly super heroes. Comic books had a great advantage with super heroes back when film special effects were limited, and low-res, limited budget TV was best suited to talking heads.

Later, a few more successes came along, also created under adverse conditions for the talent. Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine...you know.

The comic book industry, by and large, from its beginnings has had a schlock mentality, a quick buck mentality. Most publishers thought comic books were a fad that would run its course (Martin Goodman comes to mind). Many were surprised to find themselves still in business years later.

The quickest, easiest way to make a buck in this business since the early days has pretty much always been to stick with the heaviest hitters of the past. But decades of schlock thinking at the top, decades of unguided, misguided or just plain bad creative work has desecrated and distorted some of those characters almost to the point that they are unrecognizable (the current Wonder Woman comes to mind. And did someone say the new Superboy is a robot? What?). Their equity has eroded.

At Marvel, I used to joke about making a comic book with the same budget as a low-budget movie. The $10 million Comic Book, I called it. With the budget to do it right, with the best talent actually doing the job rather than being self-indulgent, actually creating something brilliantly entertaining for millions rather than pandering to the few hard-cores left, I know we could create the next thing to strike a chord. Of course, it wouldn't really take $10 million.  It wouldn't even take a million. The point was that with the budget of a small film we'd have a shot (in truth, many shots) to come up with something that would blow people's minds and sweep the country. The world. 230 million copies sold is not out of reach.

Black and white or not, manga is relatively high budget compared to American comics. Top creators make money like rock stars. The money American top creators make, or ever made in comics does not begin to compare. Even the Image guys at their peak. Monkey Punch once came to visit Marvel. When I told him what we paid artists he was appalled.

So, to me, the answer is intelligent management and serious commitment by a major publisher. The $10 million comic book(s) need not be super hero. They need to be good ones.

Don't hold your breath.

Sounds like the author of One Piece has integrity, something in short supply in the comic book industry here.

DC's First Editorial Standards, Marvel Profanity

Not Who Are These Guys 
Sorry. It's taking longer than I thought to put the reference together for that post, which is about the essential natures of classic characters.
Coming soon.

Clean Up on Aisle WW
In my review of New 52 Wonder Woman #1-4, I complained about Wonder Woman head butting a centaur. Seemed to me that would hurt her as much as the centaur. Several commenters insisted that the head butt is a legitimate hand-to-hand (head-to-head?) combat tactic.
I suppose that if you slammed the hardest part of your head into the squishier, more breakable parts of someone else's, the nose and mouth, for instance, they will be hurt worse than you so I concede the point. But, don't you just hate it when you get those nasty tooth shards stuck in your forehead?
Anonymous/TKay pointed out that the first page of #3 was in medias res, that is, it was actually the last page. He's almost right. The second page is the last page, and when I checked it out again, the meaning of Hippolyta's words, mysterious to me on my readings, became clear.
I am familiar with the technique. I've seen movies that used it, though I'm having trouble calling any to mind. I think Angels and Insects did, and if I remember right, I had no trouble with that. TKay said it took him three readings of WW #3 to suss it out. He said that a clue was that Aleka, who had been punched by Wonder Woman, was leaning on another Amazon's shoulder. WW 3, Page 1Honestly, I took that as camaraderie.
Near the end of the book, Wonder Woman hit Aleka hard enough to send blood spewing, but there was no sign of damage to Aleka on page 1, presumably moments later. WW 3, Page 17Moreover, the last page shows Wonder Woman, tossing down the torch and striding away from the pyres. Panels before, she vowed she was leaving never to return, and started walking away. On the last page, she's well on her way—pyres behind her. The final panel shows her a substantial distance away from the pyres and the crowd. Hermes, Zola and Strife are trailing after her, also some distance from the pyres and the crowd.
But on the first page, Hermes, Zola and Strife are in front of the crowd, standing, facing the pyres. Near Aleka, in fact, in what seemed to be the center of the crowd. What did they do, decide to circle back, find a good viewing spot and watch the flames for a while?
The creators do not make it easy to follow along at home.
Most of all, I was so taken aback by Strife, who caused all the deaths, standing there among the mourners, her presence being tolerated by the Amazons, their Queen and Wonder Woman, that I was, what's a good word…? Distracted.
Still, I probably should have figured out that the scene was in medias res. Sorry.
Other than that, I stand by what I said.
Everyone else is entitled to his or her opinion, too. You like what you like for whatever reasons. If something works for you, it works. Let freedom ring.
However, one other comment does merit a reply: Stuart Moore thought he'd better clue me in that "stories can be told all different ways…"
When have I ever said otherwise?
But whichever way you pick, you have to make it work. I take 'em one at a time and I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

DC's First Editorial Standards, Marvel Profanity
This comment came in:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Wonder Woman #1 – 4, More":

I'd be curious to know Jim's opinion on profanity and so forth in comics. Frank Miller was openly critical of Garth Ennis' Preacher when it came out.

Posted by Anonymous to Jim Shooter at January 24, 2012 11:47 AM 

I replied:

Depends on the comic. When I was at Marvel and our newsstand comics were on spinner racks that touted them as wholesome entertainment for kids, I wouldn't allow profanity. In EPIC Comics, sure. In comics not limited by a commitment to the Comics Code or otherwise, then any non-actionable material is okay by me. Boiled Angel was okay by me, though not the sort of thing I particularly cared to read. Penthouse Comix were okay by me. Freedom of expression is okay by me. I am a supporter of CBLDF. The debate gets a little muddy with characters like Superman and Batman. Their comics were made for and sold to kids for a long time. Does the lingering perception that stories featuring them appeal to children limit them? That has been debated on and off here. I don't know. DC owns those particular characters and will make whatever judgment they see fit. If it were up to me, if I were managing the careers of those characters, I would probably keep them at the prime time broadcast TV level of mature content, and no more. If I were managing the career of Mickey Mouse, I'd keep him squeaky clean.  : )

Apropos of that, these are some things I came across recently:

Here's the first anti-profanity memo I wrote at Marvel. I sent several more such memos along the way after that. Some were a little more elaborate, but the drift was the same: no profanity in newsstand books and I wanted to be in the loop if someone planned to use hells or damns in, say, an all-direct book.
I never wrote a "guidelines" memo for Marvel Creators. I didn't have to. The editors knew my feelings about staying within the same limits as broadcast, prime time TV in all our color comics, and unlike today's editors, they actually exerted some governance over the books in their care. (As little as possible, mind you. My goal, and most of them agreed, was to encourage creators who had vision and some chops to do their thing and provide training and help those who needed it. But, I digress….)
My memos and directives about content weren't meant for EPIC material. Archie knew what he was doing and didn't need me honking at him. I think Archie drew the line at anything that would cause his books to be pulled off the stands and sold from behind the counter.

NEXT:  Made to Order

Wonder Woman #1 – 4, More

Later, on the beach, the Amazons burn their dead, or the first batch, anyway. It's night. Many surviving Amazons look on. So does Zola. Hermes. Wonder Woman.

And Strife!

Strife?!

She's human size now—she was gigantic, before, during the massacre—and she's hangin' out with the crowd to watch the funeral pyres burn.
What?!
She caused all these deaths!
Is it me? Or is it friggin' inexplicable why she's standing right there and no one who is watching the flames consume the body of their sister, mother, daughter, friend or comrade is doing anything?! Not any of the mighty Amazon warriors, not Queen Hippolyta…
…and not Wonder Woman! You might say what can they do? She's a god!
Well, seems to me I just saw a single arrow do some serious damage to her fellow-god Hermes.

Maybe that was a special, magical arrow, pooped by Hera herself. But, if so, nobody let me know. There is so much the creators of this thing don't let you know. But, it doesn't matter. If one of those burning corpses was my sister, I sure as hell would plant an arrow or two in that Strife bitch, consequences be damned.
And I'm not a mighty warrior. I'm a peaceful guy. But I'd be an enraged berserker right about then.

And I cannot believe that Wonder Woman, the Wonder Woman I know, who is noble and surpassingly courageous, would be deterred from action by any odds.
This is someone wearing a costume somewhat reminiscent of Wonder Woman's. This cannot be Wonder Woman.
The real Wonder Woman kicks Strife's heinous ass and brings her to justice. Or dies in the attempt. And don't bet on her dying.
But, this impostor and her fellow Amazons seem to have a pretty laid back attitude about the massacre.

Dialogue for the Amazons I wish to contribute:
"Boy, Strife sure fooled us!"
"Yep, we were killing each other!"
"Because of her. But technically, she didn't actually kill anyone."
"Nope, it was all our fault. Silly us."

"The gods are always pranking us, those scamps! But, that's the way it goes."

"You're right. I'm a little miffed, but…hey, do you think her dress is made of electrical tape?"

Alone, on her knees in the city square, Hippolyta laments: "Diana…my child…I will spend a lifetime…to take back this day."
What? She's sad, I get that, but…what the hell does that mean? I don't know.
The next day. More funeral pyres are being built.
Aleka blames WW-impostor for the many Amazon dead. She's the one who brought the "musk," Hermes, and the mortal, Zola, to Paradise Island.
What exactly do the musk and the mortal have to do with the massacre? And how is it WW-impostor's fault?

Hmm….
Well, I suppose WW-impostor thought that Paradise Island would be a good place to hide Zola from Hera, and a good place for Hermes to recuperate. So…I guess…if it wasn't for the musk and the mortal, WW-impostor wouldn't have come home, and therefore, Strife might have gone to London for her stated purpose: "…to embrace my little sister." Therefore, Strife's explosive arrival and the ensuing massacre are little sister WW-impostor's fault. Sort of. You think that's what dimbulb Aleka meant?
I think Aleka is just annoyed by the fact that WW-impostor bested her with effortless ease three times by my count.
Aleka calls WW-impostor "Clay."

Strife, who is gigantic again, is lounging on the beach where more funeral pyres are being built and bunches more bodies are being gathered for burning. Being gigantic is apparently a thing Strife can do, and Wikipedia confirms that Eris/Strife "…is only a little thing at first, but thereafter strides on the earth with her head striking heaven." Strife laughs at WW-impostor being called Clay.
Aleka and other Amazons whine a little to Strife about causing the slaughter and now, mocking them. They whine. That's all. Looming Strife, quick with the quips, laughs at them and makes a snarky reply.
Pause.
I keep wondering about Paradise Island. Per Hera: "That cockless coop, improperly named…." Good line! Paradise Island is populated only by women, the Amazons. The Amazons live as if in ancient Greek times. They practice combat a lot. They are in constant preparation for war. With swords, bows, spears, axes, etc.
War against whom?!
Couldn't one B-2 erase Paradise Island easily? Couldn't a SEAL team with a Marine amphibious assault force behind them wipe out these classical age woman warriors without breaking a sweat? Who are they training to fight? Jason and the Argonauts?
Another thing: WW-impostor's alleged creation from clay seems to be a one-off, so presumably they need male input in one way or another to make more Amazons….
…but males are "musk," which is despised.
Okay. Can't wait to find out how making new little Amazons works. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for the info.
We are expected to simply accept whatever we are shown about Paradise Island. I guess anything we're not shown is none of our business.
Anyway….
Later, in Amazon Town, WW-impostor chats with still-giant Strife. It's all cool. Polite. Friendly enough.
At first. Then, WW-impostor, Hermes, Zola and Strife get into some strife about how people can be cruel. Like, oh, say, Strife.
Strife reveals that daddy Zeus, when drunk once, let her in on the fact that he was WW-impostor's father.
Hippolyta and entourage show up. Hippolyta admits that she had a tryst with Zeus, got pregnant and bore WW-impostor. She made up a story about WW-impostor being made from clay and animated by the gods as part of a cover up to keep Hera from finding out. WW-impostor is shocked and angry. I'm not quite sure why. Her thought process, I suppose, goes like this: "Let's see…my father was the king of the gods, I was conceived and born in the normal way, and I'm not actually a glob of clay brought to life. My mother and some co-conspirators lied to me about the whole deal. Made from clay. That seemed reasonable. I bought it. But it's a lie! I'm so upset."
Anyway….
WW-impostor is angry and storms away. She smashes a lot of trees and stuff on the way to the beach. Comic book characters who are angry or upset usually smash stuff. Crushing bricks is popular. It was cool the first time Stan and Steve's Spider-Man did it.
It's dark by now.
On the beach, Aleka and a horde of Amazons who have, one would guess, spent the day building pyres and stacking corpses on them see WW-impostor arriving.
Why is she going to the beach? Is she going to swim to London?
Aleka accuses WW-impostor of bringing shame to their island. WW-impostor slugs her. Fourth time she's humbled Aleka, the big, stupid, punching-bag chump who never learns.
WW-impostor ignites the funeral pyres by blowing flames from a torch to all the pyres with super-breath like Superman of the 1960's.
She says, "The only shame on this island is mine." She's leaving and never coming back, taking the shame with her, as it were. And she is no longer "Diana," the oddly Roman name Hippolyta gave her, nor is she "Clay," because she wasn't/isn't—she is Wonder Woman, she says. There is significance to this pronouncement that escapes me.
At some unspecified time, Bright-eyes strides through a stupidly unlikely firefight in Darfur, unconcerned, apparently unnoticed by the combatants. He enters a stupidly unlikely bar. The only living being there is an elderly guy called "War." At some point earlier, I forget where, Ares was mentioned, and in the same balloon, called War. So, it's Ares, or War. A god.
Makes sense, I suppose, that Bright-eyes would find War hanging around in Darfur. Drinking heavily. I guess presiding over humans slaughtering each other troubles even War. Bright-eyes and War talk. Cut to a nightclub in London. WW-impostor is there, in civvies, listening to the band with a seltzer and grapefruit juice in hand. She looks, grim, serious.

Hermes and Zola are there, too. Oh, my gods, Strife is also there! Why not? On Paradise Island, this pithless pretender, WW-impostor, was willing to hang around and chat with Strife, who was responsible for the deaths of many Amazons. Why not go clubbing with her?
No one notices that Hermes is blue, or has bird feet. No one in this comic book would notice winged monkeys flying out of his butt. Strife is flesh-colored in the first panel of this sequence, thereafter, for a while, she's blue. No one notices. No one would notice flaming hippos leaping out of her nose.

WW-impostor is cold and snotty to Strife. Well, that's a step in the right direction. Strife is unctuously snide. WW-impostor is annoyed. Cut to Paradise Island. There's a nasty storm going on. Hippolyta knows what it means. Hera has come.
Pause.
Let me get this straight. Hippolyta knew that Hera was somehow aware—nobody told me how—that Zola and the embryo she carries were on Paradise Island. She didn't think it was worth mentioning to WW-impostor or anyone except Dessa, Hippolyta's assistant. She didn't say, "Hey, you know, Diana, it really isn't safe here, why don't you give your buddy Batman a ring and see if you can hang out in the Batcave for a while. Maybe that nice Green Lantern fellow will whip up a cloaking thingamadoodle to keep you from being scryed upon."
No one wondered why Strife, Hera's legitimate daughter, just happened to turn up when she did. And wouldn't it at least occur to someone that she might have her mother's interests at heart?
Nah.
Momma Hera heard Strife's revelation about WW-impostor being Zeus's bastard child over the scryer! I wonder if Hera is pissed that Strife had been withholding that tidbit of information from her?

If so, it's not mentioned.
Strife is aware that Hera is tuned in, but either confident that mommy won't spank her or willing to risk it for some reason.
And why did Strife bring it up when she did? She likes to cause trouble, yes, got it. But, presumably she'd known this info for a while. Why then, at that particular moment? Maybe there's a reason.
There's probably a reason.

There are very few reasons set forth for anything in this book.
We readers will probably never know why Strife felt that was just the right time to play that card. It came at a good time for the creators to stir their little stew pot, though. That's the reason, I bet.
Again, I marvel at the fact that scryer-equipped Hera knows only what the creators need her to know. She found out about Zola. But not WW-impostor. Surely she knew of Hippolyta and her daughter. Did she buy the made-of-clay story? Did it ever occur to her to wonder just which gods animated the clay baby? Can they even do that?
Everyone in this book knows only what the creators need them to know. WW-impostor and even Hermes apparently don't know Hera can scry. Or else they'd be in the Batcave under a glowing, green cloaking thingamadoodle.
They know Hera has ways of finding things out, like about Zeus knocking up some skinny girl in rural Virginia. How do they suppose Hera did that?
They don't suppose. Nobody in this book thinks. They just dance when the creators pull their strings.
Anyway….
Hera takes a big axe and goes out in the rain to confront Hera. Hera is wearing only her peacock feather cape again. Uh-oh.
Back to the nightclub in London.
WW-impostor continues being cold to Strife. The subject of Hera comes up. Strife puts her hand on Zola's tummy and makes a remark about extracting "it," the child in the making. She's kidding, I think. Maybe.
WW-impostor takes it seriously enough to pin Strife's offending hand to a table using a jagged, broken champagne flute.
Looks like I was right that arrows could have done her some damage. Strife leaves bleeding and in a snit. Back to Paradise Island. Hera is furious with Hippolyta. Hippolyta gives Hera the axe. She brought it for Hera to use to cut her, Hippolyta's head off.
The Amazons come to the defense of their Queen. Oh, so now they're ready to try firing some arrows at a god.
Hera relents a little. She decides not to cut Hippolyta's head off. But…. Back to London, in WW-impostor's home, Zola and WW-impostor talk about their troubles. Zola can't go home again. WW-impostor can't let her. Because of Hera? I guess WW-impostor thinks it's safer here in London, out clubbing with gods, including Hera's legitimate daughter who she has just royally pissed off. Then again, WW-impostor thought Paradise Island would be safe. Not so much, as it turns out, but WW-impostor doesn't know that yet.
Talk of home and family makes WW-impostor decide to go back to Paradise Island. Right now.Remember, the big, emotional exit, taking with her "the shame?"

Guess it wasn't that big a deal after all.
False drama. Never mind.

She trades Hermes her sword and shield for his kerykeion, the staff with the snakes thing. He didn't have it with him when we first saw him, he didn't have it when he was brought to the Paradise Island, but later, there it was, conveniently serving as a crutch. Oh, these gods are tricky.

The kerykeion works like the key Hermes gave Zola. It teleports WW-impostor back to Paradise Island.
Hera has, apparently, turned Hippolyta to stone and all the Amazons to snakes. WW-impostor apologizes to her stone mother for leaving in a huff. No reaction whatsoever to the Amazons' being snaked or Mom's being stoned.
In Darfur, Bright-eyes and War finish their chat. Either it was a looong chat or the creators arbitrarily broke it in two and stuck it at either end of the rest of the stuff.
Despite his ad hoc oracles' warning that there is trouble ahead that will not end "good" for him, Bright-eyes is apparently interested in trying to usurp his father's throne. War doesn't want to be a player. He'll "sit this one out."
That's it for #1 – 4.


Conclusions
Well, I made it through all four and didn't throw any of them away in disgust, so there's that.
I think I nailed it yesterday. I said,"…the creators are going for "moments" rather than story, sound and fury rather than substance…and some puerile titillation."
They succeed pretty well at those things. Nice moments and clever bits happen along regularly. The occasional good line is said. Intense emotions, battles, and drama abound. Then there's the T&A. It's not too over the top, though.
The art is appealing and usually conveys information well, including subtleties. When it doesn't show something clearly, it seems to be unwisely on purpose.
However….
This collection of events makes no sense. The behavior of the characters makes no sense. Very little justification of anything is offered, not that the events and the behavior of the characters could be justified.
And it's not Wonder Woman. Carol A. Strickland likened it to Xena. Not a bad call, but Xena: Warrior Princess makes a lot more sense.
I don't like New 52 Wonder Woman, the comic book. The moments and such aren't enough to overcome the irrationality and occasional stupidity of the characters and the ill-conceived, logic-free situations they muddle through.
And of course, creators Azzarello and Chiang make not the slightest nod to the fact that this collection of events is being published in a periodical format. Issues just start right into the latest batch of events.I tried that myself today. Anybody notice? I just picked up the review from where I left it and pressed on.

If anyone tunes in to this blog for the first time today, I wonder if they'll be confused. Think they'll have the patience to check out previous posts?

NEXT: Who Are These Guys?

No, not Azzarello and Chiang

WONDER WOMAN #1 - 4

Here I sit, drinking seltzer and grapefruit juice out of my classic Wonder Woman Toon Tumbler. How perfect.

An Interesting Analysis 

This comment came in, thank you, Ms. Carol A. Strickland.  She has interesting things to say. I recommend checking out her views on the New 52 WonderWoman.

Carol A. Strickland has left a new comment on your post "WONDER WOMAN #4 – A Review":

I didn't look at the book as an individual work. I've been following Wonder Woman for about as long as I can remember. I've been looking for her since issue #600, but she hasn't shown her face except in a 90s RetroActive issue.

This is not Wonder Woman; nor is it an engaging story. From what I've been able to gather, DC is publishing "(Xena and) THE NEW OLYMPIANS." Certainly in the past couple years DC has done its darnedest to strip any of the specialness from its number-one heroine, the lady whose licensing makes them so much money.

I discussed the reboot on my blog: http://carolastrickland.blogspot.com/2012/01/illusory-wonder-woman.html

Posted by Carol A. Strickland to Jim Shooter at January 19, 2012 11:37 AM 

I did not read her analysis until after I completed my own.



Start at the Beginning

Jeremy had this to say:

Jeremy has left a new comment on your post "WONDER WOMAN #4 – A Review":

I disagree vehemently with "Every issue should be an entry point". I would never recommend jumping into a story in the middle of its tenure. Its like watching a random new episode of The Wire, and then whining about being confused about the plot and the characters. Well no shit, buddy! Those episodes and these issues are all part of the same story. You want to properly enjoy it, you start at the beginning.

Personally, I'm sick of the constant need for "jumping on points". You start at the beginning of the story, whether it be a new #1 or issue #678 like today's Amazing Spider-Man. That's it. I don't want to go back to the Shooter era where EVERY SINGLE ISSUE the characters have to re-introduce themselves through captions, thought bubbles, and clumsy expositional dialog. Every damn issue of Claremont's X-men he has to introduce the characters AGAIN, explain their powers AGAIN, etc. It's tiring.

Marvel has a "Previously on..." page in the beginning, and that's about as far as I want it to go.

Posted by Jeremy to Jim Shooter at January 18, 2012 5:31 PM 

Regarding "It's tiring," my answer was "I never told anyone to do it badly."
But, okay, fair enough. The story has only been running for four issues. Nine more bucks bought me #1-3, and now I have the entire run to date—as of the day I got the books, anyway. I understand that #5 came out Wednesday. So, from the beginning….
The story starts in Singapore, at night, with a long shot of the city. Green captions seem to have someone's dialogue in them. A reply comes in a black caption.
Three beautiful young women are on a high terrace of what is probably a hotel. With them is a man in a three-piece suit. His skin is black, really black, with grayish purple areas I take to be highlights. No eyeballs has he, but a glow comes from where they ought to be. His mouth glows too. The young women apparently do not notice anything unusual about the guy. By the way, much later, we will see that he isn't wearing shoes or socks with his three-piece, an interesting sartorial choice. The women apparently didn't notice that either, or were cool with it.
What?
So…there'll be some payoff, some aha! revelation later of why three women find the black-black, glowing eyes, glowing mouth, barefoot guy unremarkable, right?
Nah.
Anyway….
The conversation begun in the green and black captions continues, so anyone paying reasonable attention might possibly guess that the green captions belonged to one of the young women and the black caption belonged to Bright-eyes.
Bright-eyes says he's the "…sun of a king."
A commenter clued me in to the fact that Bright-eyes is Apollo, the sun god, which I did not gather from reading issue #4 earlier.
That being the case, I forgive the pun. It's the kind of lame-o, little private drollery to amuse oneself that someone might actually say if one happened to be a sun god, child of god-king Zeus. Come on, how many failed witticisms, bad jokes and lame puns a day do you make?
I do my best to pretend I don't know Bright-eyes is Apollo and focus on only what's here, what's presented.
Bright-eyes talks a little about the family, his philandering father, his father's jealous wife (who obviously is not his mother). His dad is "missing," by the way.
Glowing eyes and mouth, sun-pun, Lothario-like father, jealous wife-of-father, the fact that the book is about an Amazon, therefore linked to Greek mythology—pretty much everybody knows Wonder Woman is an Amazon, right?—and, well, maybe I would have figured out that Bright-eyes is Apollo. Maybe. The black-black skin seems un-sunny. Puzzling.
The whole thing is puzzling. How does this weird-looking guy get the three beautiful young women up to his hotel room? My wanting to know that has nothing to do with the fact that I am a weird-looking guy.
Comic book readers have been conditioned to accept the damndest things. It's just easier to shrug and get on with the show than it is to ponder such madness. So many of us cheerfully accept so many things that are absurd on the face of them that writers don't even bother to give logic-seekers a hook to hang their hats on.
Am I the only one who cares about such things?
Bright-eyes lays hands upon the young women, whose eyes roll up. They float into the air, apparently, or he picks them up somehow, evidenced by their feet being off the deck, their chic pumps—at least one pair of intriguing sandal toes, for interested parties—gracefully falling away.The young women's champagne glasses are dropped over the railing. Look out below. Cut to a barn in Virginia.
Wait a minute! What happened to the women with the groovy shoes?
Dunno. I wade on.
A mysterious figure, apparently female, wearing a peacock-feather cloak and hood, enters the barn. Glowy-lines might indicate that she just teleported in. Whatever.
There are two horses in the barn (that are shown).
I'm guessing here, but apparently a bunch of weapons that were hidden under the female figure's cloak fall out, or she poops them. I'm ready to believe anything at this point.
She does something I take to be magical to a scythe she finds in the barn. Why she didn't just use one of the bladed instruments that came from under her cape rather than doctor up a rusty old one that happened to be there, I don't know. She kills both of the horses seen. Chops their horsey heads off.
Don't know what happens to feather-cape woman. But from one of the headless horse's necks, human hands and arms push up out of the bloody mangled horseflesh. Then, what might be a human head pushes out. What? There's a person inside the dead horse? I am completely at sea, here. I have no idea what's going on.
Cut to an exterior shot of a house. Is that the barn from the previous scene in the background? Looks like it might be.
Inside the house (apparently) a guy who is flesh-colored in the first panel then blue thereafter, with a WWI U.S. Army helmet, bird feet, little wings on his bird-ankles and bizarre, inhuman eyes is facing off with a young woman holding a pump-action, 16-gauge (I'm guessing) shotgun. Three rounds, assuming a magazine plug, probably five if not. But, I digress….
Bird-foot is warning her—her name is Zola—that someone is coming to kill her. She demands that he leave. She has no discernible reaction to his bird-feet, etc.
Sigh. Centaurs (!) attack. A white horse-body one and a black or grey horse-body one.
Hmm, two centaurs, two horses butchered in the barn…. I flip back to the barn sequence and note that one of the murdered horses is white and one is black or grey. It takes me a minute—maybe I'm dense, but I finally put it together that these are those horses and the human head and arms pushing out from one of their necks was supposed to an indication that the murdered horses were transforming into centaurs. Chopping a horse's head off, the horse growing a human upper body and becoming a centaur is a new one to me, sorry. Hey, I'm still struggling with the concept of Comet the Super Horse. And I wrote dialogue for him.
It seems that the centaurs took time to clean up a little before attacking. There's no sign of any blood or gore. They wouldn't want to be tracking that stuff in the house, I suppose.
The centaurs bear the weapons that feather cape woman pooped.
Bird-foot is impaled by an arrow fired by a centaur.
He flips Zola a key that teleports her away just before a blade swung by a centaur would have killed her.
She winds up in some woman's bedroom in London. The woman is in bed, asleep.
Snoozy-Q wakes up in the last panel of page ten. On page eleven she bolts up and grabs Zola by the neck and hoists her off the floor, demonstrating considerable strength. Snoozy-Q quickly determines that this intruder is no threat and lets go.
Snoozy-Q apparently recognizes the key and apparently knows what it does.
Pause.
So, the key, one would think, would lend some credibility to Zola's babbled tale of monsters trying to kill her. One would think Snoozy-Q would want to hear more, right now about the danger so great that the "man," Zola mentions "threw" her the key to get her the Hades out of wherever she was (and send her directly to Snoozy-Q). One would think that Zola might mention that the man took an arrow in the gut. One would think that one of them, at least, would be worried about the man who, one might reasonably suspect, is still trapped back there with the monsters.
Nah.
Snoozy-Q gets dressed. She takes her time. One would think there'd be some urgency.
Nah.
We get two relatively mild tease-y, cheesecake-y panels. Ultimately, Snoozy-Q is revealed as, ta-da!—WONDER WOMAN…!
…though she insists her name is Diana.
So the title character makes her first appearance on page ten, asleep, unclothed, or mostly so. On page thirteen (!) she's finally dressed as the title character.
WW asks for the key. We don't know what her plan is. But it's moot. Zola somehow, suddenly knows how to work the teleportation key and transports herself and Wonder Woman back to her home in rural Virginia. Near Culpeper, I hope. I like Culpeper.
The centaurs attack Wonder Woman and chase Zola, intent upon killing her. Wonder Woman, with both arms free, chooses to slam her head into one of the centaur's heads. The centaur is disabled, at least for a while. WW is fine. Go ahead, try this at home. Find someone stupid and bang heads with them. See how you both feel. That trick only works on TV, in the movies, and in this logic-challenged comic book. Is WW so impervious to harm that she would be unaffected by a wicked head impact? Maybe. But, only a moment earlier, she was desperately (judging from her expression) dodging the horsey-man's hooves. So, she can't be all that damage-proof.
Maybe WW has a new power I don't know about—super-hard-headedness.
Anyway….
Wonder Woman saves Zola from the centaurs. They flee, one missing an arm.
Pause.
Now there are two centaurs roaming around Culpeper County, one frantically seeking a veterinarian. It's okay. No veterinarian in this comic book will find centaurs at all unusual.
During the course of the battle, Wonder Woman proves that she is fast, agile, able to block incoming arrows with her bracelets, extremely hard-headed and strong enough/skilled enough to throw a sword a great distance to slice off a centaur's arm.
And she carries a lasso! My, God, if she were wearing sandal toe pumps, I'd be in love!
Ahem.
Just kidding.
But, honestly, I can't help thinking that the creators are going for "moments" rather than story, sound and fury rather than substance…and some puerile titillation.
Why is Zola running around in panties, a teddy and a plaid shirt?
My quick calculations say that if it's just before dawn in Singapore (which it turns out to be), it's 5-6 PM in Culpeper, and, oh, by the way, 10-11 PM in London (though if you look closely at Big Ben it's either 12:05 AM or 1:00 AM). Wonder Woman goes to bed early, I guess. Probably some Amazon custom.
But, Zola is rather underdressed for late afternoon, don't you think?
Anyway….
As the battle unfolds, green captions with someone's dialogue in them and black captions with someone else's appear. If you remember the green and black captions from page one and the first panel of page two, you might say, aha! It's the young women and Bright-eyes talking in these captions! Right here in Culpeper County, all the way from Singapore!
I didn't remember right away, but I sussed it out halfway through. Then I went back and reread all of the captions. The young women, apparently, have become oracles. I guess that happened when their eyes rolled up and they lost their pumps.
The oracles' captions say a lot of cryptic stuff. "There is a storm gathering." Uh-huh. It's so vague that it doesn't really serve as much of a tease, for me at least. The only intriguing thing the oracles have to say is that whatever trouble's coming won't end "good" for Bright-eyes.
Cutting back to Singapore for a panel or two at the beginning of this captions-over bit, showing the beginning of the oracles' prophesying live, and then playing out the rest in captions over the battle scene would have avoided some confusion. But, avoiding confusion seems pretty low on the creators' priority list.
Anyway….
Zola has run some distance away. Wonder Woman retrieves her by lassoing her and yanking her back. Zola flies an estimated 40 feet, reaching an estimated maximum altitude of 10-12 feet, landing hard on the ground in front of WW. Do not try this at home.
But Zola is fine. Not so much as an "ouch." No crying she makes.
Bird-foot staggers out of the badly battered house. He calls Wonder Woman "Amazon." He says, "Take the girl and run to the ends of the Earth. Protect her… Or the Queen will see her dead."
All righty, then. Feather cape woman must be the Queen, or her agent. Queeny is out to get Zola for some reason. Bird-foot wants to help Zola and presumes Wonder Woman will too. And she did, albeit largely in self-defense.
Wonder Woman calls Bird-foot "Hermes." Hermes? With bird feet? Anyway, she knows the guy.
We saw Hermes take an arrow to the gut, but now his right bird-foot is damaged as well. Injury inflicted by the centaurs while Wonder Woman was languorously dressing? We'll never know.
Hermes pulls the arrow out, its point trailing strands of tissue, covered with blood and red lumpy stuff. God guts. Yuck.
The following exchange occurs:
Hermes: "What did they do to me?"
Wonder Woman: "The impossible."
Hermes: "Heh… That must have gone the way of the pantheon."
I have no idea what that means. Do you?
There are a number of exchanges every once in a while in this story that baffle me….
Turns out that Zola is pregnant by Zeus, who was (presumably) previously alluded to by Bright-eyes on page two: "My father…gets around. Pisses his wife off to no end."
If there was any doubt about who Hermes meant by "the Queen," for sure, now, it's Hera. Hera, famously jealous and vengeful. The attack on Zola was obviously motivated by Hera's being pissed off at her and Hera's hatred for the embryo Zola carries that is the product of her husband's loins.
Hmmm….
What is it about this girl Zola that inspired the King of the Gods to have a fling with her? Am I wrong, or isn't Zeus generally depicted pursuing only the most beautiful of mortal women, when he stooped to slumming among mortals? Zola doesn't seem to me to fit the profile. She's no Halle Berry.
So…there'll be some payoff, some aha! revelation later of why Zeus chose Zola, right?
Not gonna hold my breath waiting….
Cut back to Singapore.
More unfathomable, cryptic prophecy from the floating, now sadly bereft-of-footwear young women. It makes a little more sense now that we're clued in for sure that Bright-eye's dad is Zeus. It's still abstruse.
The sun is rising.
Bright-eyes incinerates the young women—no reason offered—and their blazing bones tumble down from the terrace. Look out below.
We meet Hera, the peacock feather-caped woman. Looks like my type, except for the slaughtering horses, murdering people thing. I mean, she's obviously a little more mature than the standard comic book woman, but what a nice figure. I wonder if she has a lasso?! Or sandal toe pumps?!
She does a dressing scene reminiscent of Wonder Woman's dressing scene. I guess nude with a cape is only for when she's really out for blood. We also meet a blue-ish purple woman who calls Hera "mother," and, in her conversation with Hera it is revealed that Hera's husband, Zeus, is her father. A legitimate child. Hera has a scrying pool. She knows that Wonder Woman has taken Zola and Hermes to Paradise Island, home of the Amazons.
The Amazons aren't happy about a male being, Hermes, being on their all-women island, but, they accept it because Wonder Woman is their Princess, daughter of their Queen, Hippolyta.
So, Wonder Woman and mom hang out watching, along with many of Hippolyta's subjects, a couple of Amazons wrestling. Well, they're Amazons. I didn't expect a sewing bee.
Wonder Woman has decided to protect Zola. She's not siding with the philandering Zeus, she just feels bad for poor Zola, caught in the middle between Zeus and murderously jealous Hera.
Zola and the convalescing Hermes hang out in quarters overlooking the outdoor arena where the wrestling is going on. Zola tells Hermes that Zeus came to her as a truck driver…or a pool hustler…or a guy in a band…. Zola, like Zeus, gets around. Hermes tells Zola the legend of Wonder Woman's birth. Barren Hippolyta made a girl baby (of course) out of clay and "the gods" brought the clay-baby to life.
Meanwhile, a huge Amazon, Aleka, challenges Wonder Woman to a sporting combat. Aleka is armed with a sword and seems to be going for maiming or the kill. WW is armed with a staff and wins, fairly easily, it seems.
Meanwhile, an Amazon named Dessa asks Hippolyta why she seems troubled. Hippolyta tells her that she's feeling fear. She knows that Hera knows (apparently she's heard about that scrying pool) that Zola (and Zeus's bastard in her womb) are on Paradise Island. Uh-oh.
That's a cue. I hate cutesy cues.
Booom!
The bluish-purple woman who was talking with Hera earlier has arrived with a booom. As before, she is wearing what appears to be electrical tape.
The Amazons rush to defend their island from whatever caused the booom.
Bluish-electrical-tape woman makes the Amazons see each other as enemies. They ignore her and slaughter each other. Wonder Woman is immune to, or sees through Bluish-electrical tape's ploy. She stops the slaughter, easily handling Aleka again.
Wonder Woman identifies Bluish-electrical-tape woman as the goddess "Strife." Somebody clued me in to the fact that "Strife" was Greek goddess Eris, and I looked her up. "Strife" is a reasonably accurate presentation of Eris. But, forget that, let me just deal with what's in front of me. Strife informs WW that she's come to Paris Island to embrace her "sister," i.e., another daughter of Zeus's, Wonder Woman.
Huh?
Hera, watching in her scrying pool notes this revelation.
What?
If I were a jealous spouse, if I had a scrying pool, wouldn't I pretty well know all the dirt?
Hmmph.
MORE TOMORROW

WONDER WOMAN #4 – A Review

My Review Procedure

First, I read the issue like anyone who buys it off the rack. I don't make any notes, I don't try to analyze on the fly. I just try to read it. Easier said than done, often. Some comic books these days are unreadable.

Some are such infuriating garbage that after a few pages I throw them in the trash to lie in disgrace amid the crumpled junk mail and wads of cat hair scraped off of the lint brush.

Some are so abstruse, incoherent or unfathomable that I bog down partway through. I check my e-mail. I heed the siren call of Solitaire. Checking the Weather Channel seems like fun. I never quite get through them. My attention drifts away and never comes back.

Assuming that my first attempt to read the issue in question succeeds and I make it to the end of the story, then I give it an editor's reading, slowly and carefully. I do this several times, and do a lot of flipping back and forth, analyzing, comparing things, making notes and diagramming the story.

(ASIDE: If I were proofreading the thing, I'd read it one more time forcing myself to take a micro-pause after each word, and after each sentence to focus on those elements. Then I'd read it once backward. I only do that on my own manuscripts these days.)

Anyway….

This one did not end up in the bin with the Shoprite flyers and the fur wads. I made it all the way through, first try. That's remarkable, considering.


The Cover

The logo pops. Bold, blocky white letters on red.

The cover is divided roughly 60/40, top and bottom. The top part bears the logo, so the top image and bottom image are fairly balanced. The images are pretty graphically stylized. The large female figure in the top half wearing what I assume is a feathered cape has a bloody sword. There are many figures silhouetted in the background, some apparently with weapons, doing what, I don't know. Thrashing around. A battle maybe. There are black and red spatters everywhere, even on the logo.

The bottom half features Wonder Woman's face as if reflected in a puddle, a little distorted. I suppose Wonder Woman's Q-Score is high enough, at this point, that pretty much everyone likely to see this image knows it's her. She's shouting or screaming. The puddle seems to be trickling down from the red background of the top half of the cover, suggesting, perhaps, that it's a pool of blood. Blood spilled by the bloody sword, feather-caped woman?

Whatever. I'd buy this book off of the rack just because the cover is groovy, graphic and intriguing, albeit mysterious. A lot of thinking, a lot of skill and talent went into the creation of this cover. Being in the design/supervising designers biz myself, I am more susceptible to groovy graphics than most.

JayJay the Blog Elf, a superb graphic designer, may wish to make a comment here, or if she doesn't, this is the sort of comment she might make: "Well, duh."  (JayJay here. How could I improve on such eloquence?)

Cover by Cliff Chiang.



The Interior

Brian Azzarello wrote this thing. It's not a story. It's a bunch of Lego blocks that form nothing yet, but, who knows, we may be on our way to a little Lego rowboat. Or, maybe a Lego aircraft carrier. Miscellaneous pieces. It's not a story.

It's not all bad, either.

This thing starts in Darfur. Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang did insufficient research. What is represented here doesn't even rise to the level of glib shorthand. It's bogus. It's lame.

In the midst of a nonsensical, badly imagined Darfur firefight, with many bodies strewn around, two unusual beings, apparently unconcerned by the violence all around, meet in a very improbable bar. One being is black—not African, mind you, really black. He looks young and robust. His mouth and eyes glow. He wears no shoes—and the creators make a point of showing us that—but otherwise dresses in normal-ish clothes. The other being is an old, thin, bearded, bald guy, also barefoot, also dressed in normal-ish clothes, though his are blood-spattered.
Old guy: "Hello, brother."

Black guy: "Hell low, indeed."

Good grief.
That is a prime example of Azzarello's favorite trick. He has characters play off of, pun off of things said by other characters. This is not a distinctive trait of one particular character. They all do it.

A character called Strife: "Can't you see I'm trying to be nice?"

Tall woman: "Trying. Yes, you are."
Good grief.

His other trick is bridging from one scene to another by using quoted captions—either a pithy line from the preceding scene that applies to the next, or a pithy line from the next scene applicable to the ending circumstances of its predecessor.

The aforementioned tall woman might be Wonder Woman—she's in civvies. Aha, on the third page she's seen, she's called "Diana." That's a clue for comics-savvy me (actually, I knew from the get-go), but wouldn't some civilians still not know?

Strife, Diana and others are in a club in London.

So…even in new reader mode, I'm starting to get it. There are these supernatural beings—War, the black guy, Strife, maybe Diana, maybe a young woman referred to as Zola—walking around among human beings on Earth. There's another guy, colored blue, who keeps himself mostly covered up, referred to as Hermes. P.S., Strife is blue the first time we see her, and thereafter is a more human color. What?

Okay. Even some civilians know, I think, that Wonder Woman has something to do with Greek mythology—Amazons and whatnot.  Hermes, I guess, makes sense. But…War? If we have Hermes, why not Ares? And who the Hell is Strife?

I also wonder about this: people didn't seem to be aware of War and the black guy, but it would appear, from the fact that they have been served beverages, waiters or waitresses, at least, are aware of Strife, Hermes and Co.

Diana has some tense chitchat with Strife and we cutesy quoted-caption segue to somewhere else.

We eventually find out it's Paradise Island. Hera, the Hera, Queen of the Greek Gods, one would assume has come to confront Hippolyta, the Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons! Okay, now it's all Greek to me.

Cutesy quoted caption segue back to the club.

Things are said that are meaningless to my friend Andrew the set designer, Herb the financial wizard and Joe the lawyer, all smart people, all non-comics readers, who couldn't make heads or tails out of this gobbledygook. They can watch any TV show and get the drift. They can see virtually any movie or read virtually any novel and follow it, but this comic book was unfathomable to them.

Comics-savvy me figures out that whoever the @#&% Strife is, she caused some problems between Diana, now referred to as "the Amazon," and her mother. Hippolyta, I guess. There is no basis presented for such a guess, but I've been reading comics for 56 years. I didn't read a lot of Wonder Woman along the way, but…I have developed good guessing instincts.

"…split happens," says Strife. Good line.
There is strife between Diana and Strife. We gather that Diana is protective of Zola, and there is a suggestion that Zola is pregnant. Strife leaves the club with a wounded hand and there is another cutesy quoted caption segue back to Hippolyta and Hera.

Hippolyta has done something to piss Hera off.

With some wonderful dialogue, Azzarello gets the gist across, assuming one has the most rudimentary knowledge of Greek mythology. Zeus, Hera's husband, impregnated Hippolyta, who bore a daughter. Diana? Maybe? Hera is mad-jealous and vengeful. I guess she just found out about it. Diana appears to be in her twenties, at least.

Hippolyta is actually properly contrite. She brought a giant axe with her when she approached Hera. She gives the axe to Hera! She kneels! The axe was for Hera's convenience in cutting off her, Hippolyta's head! Nice twist.

Hippolyta's Amazons, all of them, against orders, rush to protect their Queen. They stand, bows drawn, to fire at Hera. No evidence of missing right breasts, if anybody was curious.

Hera, by the way, is inexplicably naked, except for her feathered cloak. It's okay. Something, shadows, the cloak or the axe (it's a biiig axe) always obscures her naughty bits.
Cutesy quoted caption segue back to Diana and Zola, home from the club, apparently living together. They have a conversation that is unfathomable. New readers, if they hadn't already pitched this thing into the junk mail/cat hair receptacle do so here.

Even comics savvy people not current with WW, like, oh, say, me, are baffled. Zola talks about her lost home, father in jail, undisclosed mistakes her mother made. And there's another suggestion that she's pregnant. Diana says "…the fact that I was created from clay." Zola responds, "But that's not a fact anymore."

Check, please. Taxi.

Later, Diana, wearing what appears enough like the Wonder Woman costume I know so that I'm pretty sure she's the title character, approaches Hermes, who apparently also lives in the same apartment (or whatever dwelling) as Diana and Zola. WW bears a sword and shield. She trades them for Hermes' staff.
Now I'm guessing, but I think they're reasonable guesses that even many new readers might make….

Hermes' staff enables WW to teleport to Paradise Island.

What motivated that move? Beats me.

There she finds empty Amazon armor and hordes of snakes. If one, even a new reader, were sufficiently engaged at this point to give it a bit of thought, one might guess that all-powerful Hera turned the Amazon warriors threatening her into snakes.

WW says some things we don't have enough information to understand to her mother, Hippolyta, who is off panel.

Then it is revealed that Hippolyta has been turned (apparently) to stone. By Hera, one would assume.

The end.

The art is stylized. I'm okay with that. Chiang, though a little artsy-fartsy, tells the story well enough and the acting is good. I wish more of the artists I've had got that much done.

Azzarello is glib and too clever by half. Brian, stop it with the gimmicks, already. Stop trying to be a Writer and start being a writer.

There is no discernible nod to the fact that this thing was published in a serial format.

OPEN MESSAGE TO AZZARELLO AND DC COMICS:

EVERY ISSUE SHOULD BE AN ENTRY POINT!

This one isn't.

Azzarello, don't you understand that you're excluding people? Lots of people?

I know that your editors and their bosses don't understand that or give a damn. They're lazy and/or stupid. But you seem like a clever fellow, bright enough. Don't you want to reach more people? Don't you want to entertain more people? Don't you want more of an audience than however many read your previous issues (assuming that those issues explain what the Hell is going on) plus the few remaining steeped-in-comics-lore people who might be able to pick it up on the fly?

Or are you really screwing over the periodicals buyers and writing for the trade paperback buyers. Hey, it worked for Moore on Watchmen. He gave barely a nod to the initial, serialized presentation, and it didn't sell all that well. But it has done wonderfully well as a collection in various trade formats. Is that what you're going for?

Really?
Here's the good news. The art is pretty groovy. The writing, despite its various self-indulgent riffs is actually clever in a good way most of the time. There do seem to be some things going on that might bear looking into. How much is this going to cost me? Three previous issues…nine bucks.

Sigh.

Okay.

NEXT: Wonder Woman #1-4

RE: Action Comics

Questions

I received these questions from Twitless:

Twitless has left a new comment on your post "Action Comics":

Jim, I love your thoughts on the comics industry as well as the history. I have learned so much that I feel like your blog is akin to an academic class.

A couple of minor questions though:

1) The impression I got from Gail Simone at a convention I attended was that DC comics ran things in more of a full script than Marvel did, which in my mind would make your Legion script more par for the course. Is there more to it than that? What are your thoughts about full script versus more general story working. I'd imagine your style would fit the former and discourage the latter.

2) I am interested in knowing more about why these two examples you offer in the blog entry are poor storytelling. I see where the artist deviated from your script (and conversely, where it was followed, more or less), but I would like to learn more about why these particular sequences are failures.

Posted by Twitless to Jim Shooter at January 13, 2012 1:42 PM

Answers

1) Long ago, before the mid-1970's, everything at DC was done full script and nearly everything at Marvel was done Marvel-style, that is, plot-art-copy. DC drifted somewhat toward Marvel-style as some ex-Marvel writers filtered in. I don't know how much full script is done by either company these days. Gail's undoubtably right.
I write full scripts because I want my story told my way. Unfortunately, these days, many artists high-handedly ignore the script (that was approved by the editor) and draw whatever they please—adding panels, leaving out panels, changing events. Not only that, they make no allowance for the copy, which often makes for tortuous balloon pointers and/or rewrites to accommodate the pictures, because there's never time for them to be redrawn.
In ancient days, artists working from full scripts were obliged to place the copy and usually rough-lettered it in. Worst of all, many artists these days have no storytelling skills at all, so even if they vaguely follow your instructions, they don't do all the storytelling things that Kirby, Ditko, Ayers, Curt, Woody, Gil and almost all the elders knew to do to make the story clear at a glance. They did these things without being asked and without endless explanations (that today's guys skip over).

Some newer artists do have a clue. Not enough.

I worked Marvel-style while at Marvel. It's okay if you're working with a good storyteller and a horror show when you're working with an artist who, for example, has the climax happen between panels. No kidding. I've seen every kind of storytelling nightmare there is, even that. Artists totally missing the point.

2)  Some specific examples on the LSH story in question:
PAGE FIVE: Panel 6:  (the first shot of Invisible Kid.) I call for a full figure of Invisible Kid. I get a cropped figure. I ask for the setting to be made very clear. I get no background except sky. I say that some Ikonns may be seen in the background, but none close to Invisible Kid, close enough to strike him.  I get two armed Ikonns right behind him. I ask for Invisible Kid to have the bark-and-rope device in his non-ring hand, and provide a sketch of him about to slip it onto his ring hand, plus sketches so that it is absolutely clear to the artist what the device is. I get the device already on his ring hand at an angle that makes the device hard to understand. Not to mention that Invisible Kid, who is a short, slightly built guy, the youngest Legionnaire, is drawn like a ripped athlete.
PAGE SIXTEEN: Panel 3: Here's the scribble I gave the artist to demonstrate the angle I was suggesting:
Here's what he drew: Similar, yes, but in the scene description I said:
"Remember also all the stuff on the Terrace—bound prisoners, various wreckage, Ikonns, Slaves, party stuff and, of course, the Central Temple. You don't have to draw all of that, but remember that it's there, and include whatever would logically be seen in the shot you choose."

Looks pretty sparse to me.

PAGE SIXTEEN: Panel 4: The artist drew Ikilles talking with the wrong character. "Sadistic Ikonn" is male. He drew "Nasty Ikonn 2," who was intended to be male, also, BTW, but he screwed that up.

The acting is terrible. Nothing about the body language suggests a "sotto voce" conspiratorial exchange. Their expressions also, are nothing like those described. And Ikilles looks very little like what Francis Manapul established in #43, by the way. Panel 5: No snipers hinted at, the bark-and-rope device is not shown, as requested.  Cropped figures with indecipherable body language make the action mysterious.
Sigh.

HERE'S THE REAL TEST: IMAGINE TAKING THIS PANEL (OR ALMOST ANY OF THESE PANELS, ANY PANEL IN THE BOOK) OUT OF CONTEXT AND SHOWING IT, BY ITSELF, TO SOMEONE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE STORY.  IF THEY CAN'T GUESS THE GENERAL DRIFT OF WHAT'S HAPPENING, THE ARTIST FAILED!

NO ONE LOOKS AT THIS PANEL AND GUESSES THAT THE RED GUY IS MENACINGLY STALKING TOWARD THE SMALL AND WIMPY LOOKING KID. THE RED GUY IS SUPPOSED TO BE MUCH BIGGER THAN THE KID AND BODYBUILDER-MUSCULAR, BUT YOU CAN'T TELL THAT HERE. NO ONE WOULD GUESS.

Ahem.

Now, imagine taking a panel out of context from an early-1960's Jack Kirby book and showing it to someone. Complex action, clear as a bell.

Doesn't have to be Kirby.  Any good artist will do.  Look at this acting:
Mazzuchelli, I believe.

How about this:
The right foot tells you he's walking, not just standing. Gene Colan.

No matter how odd this one might seem to an uninitiated viewer, the acting is great, the expressions are perfect and clearly, the weird guy is juggling or levitating the fruit. Steve Rude.
Anything Russ Heath did works.

Will:
Toth:

Manning:
At worst with good artists, you need a panel or two of context to fully appreciate the event depicted. That is not to say each individual panel isn't clear at a glance, and that a reader would easily discern what is presented therein, rather that greater meaning or increased significance is revealed by surrounding panels.

Enough of this. Regarding Legion of Super-Heroes #44, check the art carefully against the script and you'll see how many mistakes were made, how many things were left out or misrepresented, how many things were arbitrarily or stupidly changed and how much of a train wreck the art is.  

You still might not notice some things, such as the fact that the young woman seen in Panel 4 of Page Seventeen is supposed to be Light Lass. Note that the hair is wrong, her hand is mysteriously free of the ropes, the rope across her chest has become a fringe for her top and that she's colored like an Ikonn. Which begs the question, why is her fellow Ikonn holding a gun on her? I think the alleged artist roughed in the panel, forgot what it was supposed to be, didn't bother checking the script and finished Light Lass as somebody else.

And you wonder why I get annoyed….

After comparing the script and art, then give it THE REAL TEST. It's perfectly okay to cut that issue up in order to isolate panels to show people, it's a worthless piece of crap anyway.

You may like the story or not (assuming you have access to the entire script and can discover what the story actually is), but the storytelling, especially in the action sequences, is amateurish garbage. Sorry to say so, Sanford. But not much.  

P.S. Where were the editor and his assistant while my script was being butchered? Good question. Probably out cashing the paychecks they received for the jobs they weren't doing.

NEXT: Wonder Woman - A Review