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John Ostrander: A Return To Those Thrilling Days…

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I came late to the western. Oh, I saw many of them when I was a kid growing up in the 50s and early 60s but they were Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and others of that ilk. Saturday morning horse fodder. Later the westerns got more sophisticated with Gunsmoke, The Rifleman (a personal fave), Wanted: Dead or Alive, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide and more but I wound up cowboyed out for a long time.

My late wife Kim Yale was a big Westerns fan and it was she who got me hooked on them. She taught me the difference between the different directors – primarily John Ford, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and Howard Hawks – and the brilliance of some of the films, chief among them The Searchers, Winchester 73, Shane, Red River and others.

And then came the guy who broke the western mold: Sergio Leone. He may be best known for the Dollars trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. They also made a star of Clint Eastwood. The other night was I came upon my DVD of Once Upon A Time In The West and sat down to watch it again.

There are some who believe Once Upon A Time is Leone’s best film, his masterpiece. There are some who find it to be overly long, confusing, and his most stylistically excessive film. I’ve seen it described as epic and operatic. Some others find it slow and mannered. In Europe, where the film was released in its original length of 166 minutes, it was an economic success. In America, where distributor Paramount cut the film to 145 minutes, it was a flop.

For me, Once Upon A Time in the West may be my favorite “spaghetti” western and one of my fave of all westerns. It has a superb cast with some actors cast way against type. Jason Robards Jr plays Cheyenne, a bandit and very tough guy. The real revelation in the movie, however, is Henry Fonda who plays Frank, a really evil sadistic killer. Fonda’s startling electric blue eyes are cold and hard. The first time we meet him, he shoots and kills a boy of about 10 with a slight sadistic smile as he does so. It’s incredibly chilling. Fonda was known for playing good guys and heroic types, with the exception of Fort Apache where he plays an arrogant son of a bitch. But even there, it’s nothing compared to the character of Frank who is just one of the coldest and evilest villains I’ve seen in film.

My Mary has suggested that Robards’ Cheyenne is a Coyote type character, a trickster in Native American folklore. I think that’s accurate. He brings a slight bit of humor to the film. There’s a gag involving a gun in a boot that’s one of my favorite moments in this or any film.

A character known only as Harmonica is played by Charles Bronson. I find Bronson most effective when he has only a handful of lines as he does here (as well as in Hard Times). There’s a scarcity of dialogue in the film as it is and Bronson has the least of all but he makes the most of them. He’s perfect as the man seeking vengeance. I read somewhere that Clint Eastwood was originally offered the part but turned it down. That’s probably just as well; I can’t see him doing it better than Bronson.

Rounding out our foursome for this film is Claudia Cardinale. I don’t know if she was ever more beautiful than she was in this film. Her part, Jill McBain, is pivotal to the story. She’s a survivor, one with her own secrets and backstory and the story flows around her and her choices.

As far as I’m concerned there’s another major character in the film: Ennio Morricone and his score. Morricone provided the music to Leone’s other Westerns and here he creates his best one. Cheyenne, Harmonca, Frank and Jill all have their own specific themes. The music was actually written from the screenplay before it was filmed and was played during the filming. Leone let the music dictate the tempo of the scenes. Days after I watched it, the music is still echoing in my mind.

It’s the music and the very deliberate pacing and editing of the movie that gives the film its operatic feel. I don’t know if Leone could have gotten away with it today when everything is intense and quick cuts. He didn’t completely get away with it back then since the movie’s length panicked the Paramount executives who ordered cuts. I’m not sure that the generation today would sit for it; obviously, not everyone in my generation stood for it.

Once Upon A Time In the West demands that you meet it on its own terms, that you surrender to its pace and style. It is at the same time a very cynical and realistic look at the Old West while also being the telling of a myth, as the “Once Upon A Time. . .” of the title suggests. For me, the film is a masterpiece, Sergio Leone’s finest film, and one I will continue to watch again and again.

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Making Comics Make Cents

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What’s the Life of a Comic Artist Like is an interesting read should you have the time. It’s a fantastic bit of analytics built to depress even the most chipper amongst the Internet. After surveying 186 anonymous artists, the folks at SKTCHD assembled their results to share with all of us nerf-herders. They were clear to note that not every artist surveyed answered every question, and that 186 surveys does not equate to statistical significance given the amount of folks in and around the comic-making-universe. That being said, I think their results pretty much capture the essence of the industry – as I personally view it from my little suburban basement studio.

The first stand-out factoid: 48% of the responders earn less than $12,000 a year making comic book art. This is doubled down by the fact that 59.3% said they don’t earn enough making comics to have it be their sole occupation. Now, is this really that big a surprise, given that I myself have been making books during my nights, weekends, and holidays for the better part of seven years and barely have a dime to my name made in the name of comics? No, it’s not a surprise. As it stands today, only the cream of the crop are really afforded the luxury of working 16 hours a day for a living wage in comics. Does anyone here remember in the long-long ago when Brian Bendis wrote five books a month? I doubt he did it because he was making five small fortunes.

If we dive into those numbers, many respondents themselves are young, new to making comics, and/or work on the web. And unless you’re one of very few web comic creators with enough oomph to earn a decent wage solely from their web-based work, you’re very much in the same boat as those of us just chasing windmills in hopes for a life spent creating. This pairs well with the respondents’ fees per page. With an average that spikes roughly between $50 to $200, you can do the math with ease. At the top end of that rate, an average 24-page comic book story will net the artist a sizeable $4,800. Now, factor in that over half of respondents worked well over 40 hours per week – with 26.3% over 60 hours – and they are essentially making $20-$30 an hour to draw. This is all of course pre-tax and with no benefits.

Beyond the basic dollars and cents though, comes the colder, harder facts. I am a graphic designer during the day. I earn a good wage doing what I do. But when I come home and random freelance requests fill my inbox I’m less than elated to receive $25 an hour to continue my day job at home. In short, after 8-10 hours doing something, I’m less inclined to want to continue to do it after that allotted time. As a friend of mine recently told me “Working on a book 16 hours a day all month long, and then have to do it all over again the next month burnt me out. Even if I loved the material, it’s still a job, and there’s parts of it I don’t like.”

That fact shines through the data as well: 40% of respondents take no days off. It’s something I myself admit to you fine folks. About three years ago I downloaded a “to-do” list program. In it, I can schedule tasks monthly (pay bills!), weekly (write this column!), or daily. The only thing I list out as a daily task: work on the book. Even if it’s drawing a face on a figure in one panel out of nine on a page? I work seven days a week. And I work slow. I know I work slow. How do I know? Unshaven Comics releases one single 36-page comic each year. Of which I’m only responsible for 18 pages of interior art and writing. I’m a busy boy, and I’m only an outsider. Someone in the industry, deeper? Is doing much the same, for not much more than lunch money.

The last bit of data that hit close to home? 82.5% of respondents said that artists do not get fair and equal representation in comics today. What does that mean? To the surveyed at SKTCHD, it was a matter of how the industry treats the pencil-pushers. Many commented on feeling like “cogs in the machine,” and who can blame them? DC and Marvel are on a schedule. If you meet their house style, and can meet a deadline, they’ll load you up and put you on the rack. But if their schedule is rushed (I’ve rarely heard from an artist they had loads of time to do their best work), and they fall behind or get burned out – well, the line is still around the block to step in and take their place. It’s a snake eating it’s own tail. And in the day and age of crowdfunding, there will never be another massive walk-out-ala-Image. There will only be shooting stars riding their wave of fame (small as it may be) to an embittered end.

The data was sobering. As a creator myself, I’ve long given-way to the notion that what I do, I do for the love of the medium and not the paycheck. Seven years into it and that mantra remains unscathed. The best I can muster in terms of hope – is hard to determine. I draw and write to see the smiling face of a stranger light up when they see my work. I yearn for a day where I’ll have made enough output to perhaps see even the slightest payday wherein I could pay myself for the hundreds (if not thousands) of hours I’ve put in to build those wares. Perhaps our industry is simply built on the yearning and the hope… while the ones with the money just let those feelings do the work for them.

 

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Happy 100th Birthday, Julius Schwartz!

We miss him every day here at ComicMix. Comics Alliance has a great retrospective of the man at

http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-julius-schwartz/.

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Julius “Julie” Schwartz was born on this day in 1915. Schwartz was an agent and con organizer, and as an editor at DC he was a midwife of comics’ Silver Age.

The Point Radio: Stephanie Miller Makes Filth Work

From radio talk show host to stand up comic to being the author of Amazon’s #1 most pre-ordered book, Stephanie Miller is many things. She talks with us about the current political scene (duh), why radio died and how the most important tool in her arsenal is (as she puts it) “filth”. Plus Grant Bowler gives us great detail on the new season of DEFIANCE and where his character is headed this season on the SyFy series.

 We’re back in a couple of days that visit to the set of TYRANT and a look at SyFy’s new series, KILLJOYS. Follow us on Twitter now here.

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #361: JERK ASSHAT WORLD

Spoiler Warnings are for sissies!

That’s why I’m not going to give you any, even though I’m going to write all about Jurassic World. First, the movie broke both the United States and the global records for opening weekend box office, so there’s a good chance that you’ve already seen it and don’t need no stinkin’ spoilers. Second, everything I’m about to tell you has already appeared in the trailers, which have been appearing before every movie being shown for the past several months. So even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve seen what I’m about to tell you. Third, even if you haven’t seen the trailers, it’s fourth installment in the Jurassic Park series; telling you there’s this amusement park with dinosaurs and some of the dinosaurs break out of their cages and run around eating people isn’t telling you something you don’t already know. That’s pretty much a given in a Jurassic Park movie, because it’s pretty much all the Jurassic Park movies have given.

Twenty years after the events of the first movie, John Hammond’s dream of a dinosaur theme park has been realized. According to Simon Masrani, the current CEO of Jurassic World’s parent corporation InGen, when John Hammond, the original head of InGen and the originator of Jurassic Park, was on his death bed, Hammond made Masrani promise to fulfil the dream of Jurassic Park.

Bunk! The last line of dialog from the original Jurassic Park, after the T-Rex and the raptors chased Hammond’s grandchildren all around Isla Nublar, was John Hammond saying even he no longer endorsed his own park. I doubt he had a change of heart on his death bed.

The movie may want us to believe it was Hammond’s last wish, but I think there was some other reason that Masrani wanted to make his corporation the little InGen that could. Greed. Greed and the fact that Masrani, InGen’s scientists, and Jurassic World’s management were a bunch of jerk asshats. “Hey, let’s recreate the amusement park that failed and almost bankrupted our company once and then failed again when we tried to set it in San Diego and almost bankrupted our company again. I mean, third time’s the charm, right?” Listen up, it’s comedy that works in threes.

Anyway, now appearing on Isla Nublar is the full-blown theme park Jurassic World. (InGen called it Jurassic World, because it decided after what happened on Isla Nublar the first time, calling the place Jurassic Park would be tacky. So InGen did learn something from the first movie, just not the right something.) Jurassic World had been up and running for ten years. Which means attendance was down, because jaded park goers always want some new attraction. Every time Jurassic World introduced a new attraction, attendance spiked. Masrani ordered the genetic engineers of Jurassic World to create a new attraction. Something with a “Wow!” factor. Something bigger, faster, stronger. The Six-Million Dollar Dinosaur.

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The geneticists complied and created Indominus rex, a hybrid dinosaur that was part … Well, that would be telling. Exactly what species comprised Indominus is one of the few things the trailers didn’t tell you about Jurassic World and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. I can say – because the pre-movie publicity already said – that Indominus is part T-Rex, part cuttlefish, and part tree frog. Oh, and part hubris. No, make that all hubris. It’s a veritable hubris hybrid.

Indominus is big, strong, fast. And very intelligent. So intelligent that, despite the fact that it would have no way of knowing exactly what technology is or how it works, it devised a plan to escape its compound by using the park’s own technology against it.

Now Indominus was running around loose on Isla Nublar injuring people. The people it didn’t outright kill, that is. And it managed to free a bunch of pterosaurs from their locked aviary. So soon, there was an Idominus running around injuring and killing people and pterosaurs flying around injuring and killing people. (Honest, none of this is spoilers, everything that I’ve described was shown in the movie’s trailers. Hell, you didn’t even have to watch the trailers, they showed the pterosaur attacks in a Jurassic Smash Blizzard . )

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But this is where I stop relating the plot. We’ve finally moved into the part of the movie that the trailers didn’t show us beforehand and the part of the column where I start analyzing some law.

There’s a scene in the movie that occurs after “all the dinosaurs are running wild” where Vincent D’Onofrio’s character said to B. D. Wong’s character something like, “By Monday morning this park will be in Chapter 11.” Meaning that the park is going to have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to try to survive all of the lawsuits that will be coming from either all the people who survived the attacks or the families of all the people killed in the attacks.

That’s when I thought to myself – a silly phrase, we’re not comic books, when we think little bumpy balloons containing our thoughts don’t appear above our heads so that other people can read them, so who else could we be thinking to but ourselves – I thought, “More than just the park’s going to be in Chapter 11.”

Jurassic World’s scientists didn’t just build the Indominus on a whim. They built it on a budget. A budget approved because of the specific instructions of InGen’s CEO to make an new attraction that was bigger, stronger, scarier and wowier. In other words, they used InGen’s money to follow the specific orders of InGen’s CEO to build a new dinosaur that proved to be beyond their control. A new dinosaur that was highly dangerous, that escaped, that released other highly dangerous prehistoric creatures, and that caused massive amounts of big-budget, special effect-laden death and destruction.

The lawyers representing the injured parties should sue more than just Jurassic World. They should also sue InGen, which is more than a little bit responsible for Indominus and all the death and destruction she caused either. “More than a little bit” being lawyerly weasel words for “directly.”

In law school we were always taught to sue the deepest pockets. Why? Because when you sue for damages you’re looking for monetary compensation from the people you’re suing. If you’re looking for money, you go after the deepest pockets, because that’s where the most money is. If we use a real-world analogy, who has deeper pockets, Disneyland or the Walt Disney Company? Considering The Walt Disney Company is the world’s second largest broadcasting and cable company after Comcast and owns ABC, ESPN, Marvel Comics, Walt Disney Studios. Disneyland just owns Disneyland, which also happens to be owned by the Walt Disney Company. So, I’m going with the company not the park, itself.

Which means any lawyer worth his assault suits would sue not only Jurassic World but the parent corporation InGen, which funded Jurassic World, funded its research, and ordered the park to create the big bad dinosaur in the first place. Given the evidence the lawyers would have against InGen, the lawyers could be worth less than actual salt and still be good enough to sue the jerk asshats Jurassic assets off.

Martha Thomases: Comics Read Women?

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Sunday is the longest day of the year. If the rain holds off, we will enjoy the most sunlight possible.

I was thinking about this when I read a few recent news stories about our beloved comic book industry. The most amazing was a group of articles in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. From the front-page placement in the section to the double-spread jump (including this profile of D&Q’s greatest and most promising creators, it was the most attention to the graphic story-telling medium I can remember in the so-called “newspaper of record.”

The reason the Times thought the publisher had survived and thrived? By publishing works that appeal to women readers, including books by women.

In other news …

Comixology is using San Diego Comic-Con exclusives to promote comics to women readers.

And because subscription boxes are apparently a thing (I have one for my cat) another company is using SDCC to draw in female customers.

When I started to work in comics, I would never have been able to imagine a time when women would make up so much of the comics industry, nor could I imagine we would be courted to become more. Twenty years ago, when we started Friends of Lulu, I don’t think any of us thought this day would come. Both Marvel and DC trumpet their still tentative attempts at inclusion.

At this rate, any day now we’ll see panels on conventions on the topic of “Men in Comics.” Audience members will ask panelists how they juggle work with home life, and panelists will complain that others presume their success comes from the way they strut around in revealing outfits, or because the women editors they’re sleeping with give them work..

Because I’m a Jewish New Yorker, I find myself unable to completely enjoy this moment. I worry it can’t last. I’m afraid that any dip in the market will be blamed on the new female audience. Already, among the more paranoid fanboys, there is the suggestion that women are only getting work because of some feminist mafia that controls American capitalism.

The way we’re going to get more books that appeal to women is to buy more books that appeal to women. Fortunately, that isn’t just one kind of book. Women have as many different favorite books as men do. Sometimes they are even the same.

Next week, it will start to get dark again. Be sure to start storing comics for the later. Winter is coming.

 

Tweeks: ComicMix’s Challenged Comics Summer Reading Challenge

It is officially summer for us! Yay!  So, we thought this would be the perfect time to tell you about our summer reading plans.  In this week’s episode, we tell you about the CBLDF and announce our Challenged Graphic Novel Reading Challenge.  Our hope is that kids and parents (and everyone else) will read along with us.  Because you seriously can’t question that book be suitable for library shelves if you haven’t read it, right?

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This summer we will be reading 8 graphic novels that have been challenged or banned in school libraries and then every week we will discuss one of the titles.  We’ll talk about why it was challenged, how to best talk about the questioned topics or themes in the book with your kids.  We’ll also tell you from a kid’s perspective how we viewed the appropriateness of the books for us, because sometimes adults forget what they could handle and understand when they were our age.

We also hope that you will support everyone’s right to choose what they want to read by doing some sleuthing in your local or school library.  Take a look at our reading list and see which of the books are available for you to check out.  You can post your findings in Social Media like Facebook and Twitter (@ComicMix and @The_Tweeks) with #InTheStacks and/or #ComicMixChallengedChallenge, hopefully generating further discussion. We also think you should check out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s site.  We talk more about them in the episode.

So, get to reading!  Our discussion schedule is:

7/13 Bone, Vol 1: Out From Boneville by Jeff Smith
7/20 Drama by Raina Telgemeier
7/27 This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki
8/3 The Graveyard Book Vol 1 (the graphic novel) by Neil Gaiman & P. Craig Russell
8/10 The Color of Earth Book 1 by Kim Dong Hwa
8/17 Sidescrollers by Matthew Loux
8/24 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
8/31 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman

Dennis O’Neil: Crisis On Infinite Superheroes

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Cozy down on your couch and wait for it: A Supergirl series coming soon – well, in the fall – to a television set near you. And a new superhero on The Flash and what looks like some supering up of already existing character or characters on Arrow and and and…

I’ll bet the corridors of the media giants in Hollywood and New York (and Chicago? London?) are absolutely buzz with plans and proposals for more stories about that congregation who wear peculiar costumes and bash. I think they call it extending the franchise, and it is nothing new. My current favorite example from antiquity is the King Arthur saga which was kind of inspired by rales of a fifth or sixth century British ruler who fought Saxon invaders. (Did he really exist? Was he compounded of several rulers? Let us shrug and get on with it.)

Anyway, it wasn’t until the twelfth century that Arthur’s tales began to be written down and circulated, though some stuff may have been forever lost in the long gap between inspiration and dissemination. There have been adaptations and additions and redaction ever since. Almost certainly, somewhere on this green planet, someone is even now working on an Arthur piece.

That’s my current favorite example of franchise fattening in Days of Yore, but there are others, including the Tom Sawyer books – Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective – that your English teacher neglected to mention. Heck, even what is by many considered to be the best American novel ever, Huckleberry Finn, could be considered to be an early extension of the Sawyer franchise.

And here we jump over the rest of the Nineteenth Century and a big chunk of the Twentieth and look at comic books, which were in the franchise extending dodge from their earliest days. Like Tom and Huck, Superman and Batman were quite different, but in some ways similar. Superman is a big success and about a year later, voila – along comes Batman. Then the deluge. Dozens – hundreds? – of different-but-similars dotting the newsstands. And witch hunts followed by an implosion. Then, a revival, and here we are, watching superhero franchises being extended – not on cheap paper, but on highly sophisticated electronic delivery systems.

It’s about money, of course. I don’t know if the early King Arthur chroniclers were in it for the coins, but Mark Twain, hassled by money worries for much of his life, certainly had some financial motivation, and so has every professional storyteller since. There are downsides to this propagation of the superhero meme; attraction of creators who have no genuine liking for the material and hence to it badly and hence give others a bad rep; audience difficulty in telling one hero from the other; a dilution of what makes a character unique and interesting; and old-fashioned weariness with the genre.

But I’m of a mind to believe that none of the above guarantees inferior story quality. It’s the recipe, not the ingredients, that’s crucial.

After all, Huckleberry Finn is a pretty good read.

 

Comics Reviews (June 17th, 2015)

Old Man Logan #2

Well this went off the rails fast. After a first issue long on potential, this is a chain of scenes, all of them interrupted before anything interesting is allowed to happen so that Logan can be dragged to some new potentially interesting scene that won’t play out. Sorrentino’s art is very pretty, but it’s unclear as all hell, and Bendis is in his “let the artist do most of the storytelling” mode, a mode he puzzlingly only ever takes when working with abstract and hard to follow artists, as opposed to when he’s working with Bagley or someone who draws pages so that you can tell what’s going on.

Blackcross #4

A rarity: a Warren Ellis book I’m just not digging at all. None of the characters stand out to me, I don’t know the superheroes being referenced, and this is mostly vague implications in search of a plot for me. Not only do I not remember what’s going on month to month, in the three hours between reading it and writing this review I’ve already forgotten most of this book.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #13

The plot advances, and there are some very good Eleventh Doctor monologues, but this is a resolutely average issue of this comic. Still, we’re into the “I actually enjoyed reading this” segment of the list.

Stumptown #6

The start of a new arc. I’m not entirely sold – the start was awkward as we have to sit through an explanation of civet coffee, which is on the one hand something that probably does need exposition and on the other feels a bit cliche and overdone. Still, Stumptown is a PI book, not a mystery book, so the setup isn’t the interesting part, and this has enough funny bits to be an entertaining way to spend five minutes, albeit a bit steep at $3.99. But what comics aren’t these days.

Thors #1

A Thor cop book. Aaron proves good at writing this, which is nice – he’s hit and miss for me, to say the least. But the procedural suits him, apparently, and the sheer absurdity of it wrings out a smile at least one every few pages. Throg, in particular, is a delight to see. And with the last page, it even gives a sense that this will matter when we get back to the main Thor book. The only pity is having to go back to that book eventually, really.

Ms. Marvel #16

Wilson makes the smart decision to keep this focused on Kamala and on her plots, picking up heavily from the last arc. The final page is promising. It is in places predictable, but this book always has been – its charm is its ability to find new spins and perspectives on things. Such as a school/refugee center defended by weird turquoise monster things created by Loki. (“To be pwned by Loki is a great honor,” one says, in the week’s best line.) As I said, I have low hopes for these Last Days books, but this is quite good.

Lazarus #17

Rucka returns to his strengths in many ways here: political intrigue, well-done female characters, and a general sense of things kicking off. Not a jumping on point, I suspect, only because there’s a lot of worldbuilding already done and this doesn’t necessarily sell its own stakes well. But it’s exactly what one wants out of a creator-owned Rucka book.

Trees #10

The indiscipline of this book remains considerable. In one plot, it’s utterly unclear what the main character is doing. In the other, nothing seems to happen. The cliffhanger is not one. But at this point these are all clear stylistic choices, and despite long since having lost the plot on this series this issue picked up and read well. Love the bits about the NYPD in the first half. This remains one of the most daring books on the market, and I’m glad that Ellis is content to use the magnitude and guaranteed sales of his name to recklessly fuck with people.

Originally published on PhilipSandifer.com.

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