Tagged: NBM

R.I.P. ‘Confessions of a Cereal Eater’ Writer Rob Maisch

  • News
  • April 10, 2008

Illustrator and ComicMix pal Bo Hampton recently passed along the following thoughts on this week’s death of Rob Maisch, the celebrated author of Confessions of a Cereal Eater:

Rob Maisch, the extraordinary raconteur who wrote 1995’s Harvey and Eisner nominated "Confessions of a Cereal Eater," published by NBM and illustrated by Rob’s friends, Bo Hampton and Scott Hampton, Rand Holmes and Sandy Plunkett, died this week unexpectedly of cardiac problems in Copley, Ohio.

According to his long-time friends, the Hamptons, his hilarious stories, energetic teasing, and love of life will keep him vividly alive for them forever.

 

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Some Greasy Kids Stuff

 

 

dinos-6479331Today I’ve got three books that either are for kids or look like they should be, so, if any of you are allergic to greasy kids stuff, just move on to the next post.

[[[Dinosaurs Across America]]] is the new book by Phil Yeh, who has spent the last two decades promoting literacy and art across the world in various ways, including lots of comics. In fact, this book was originally a black-and-white comic that was sold at various Yeh events. It’s a quick look at all fifty states in the US, with a concentration on quick facts and learning all of the capitals. One of Yeh’s recurring characters, Patrick Rabbit, has been suckered, and a group of dinosaurs (also recurring Yeh characters) set him straight on the real facts. There’s no real story here, but it’s a great book for kids interested in state capitals or geography in general. (Or even for kids who aren’t interested in that, but need to learn some of it.)

 

korgi-2421365

 

[[[Korgi]]], Book 1 is the first in what’s planned to be a series of all-ages wordless comics stories. It’s by Christian Slade, and seems to be his first major comics work. It’s cute and fun and adventurous by turns, though the wordlessness doesn’t always help with a fantasy story like this. (The dogs, such as Korgi, are obvious Special somehow, but it’s hard to convey the specifics of something like that without words.) This is perhaps pitched a bit older than Andy Runton’s [[[Owly]]] books – also wordless comics stories from Top Shelf for all ages – simply because there’s more action and suspense in Korgi. (There’s certainly nothing here I’d worry about giving to my six-year-old.) Slade uses a lot of scribbly lines for shading and tones, and – especially after reading James Sturm’s America recently – that looks a bit amateur to me. Slade is very good at it, but it does leave an impression of lots and lots of little lines all over the page; it would be interesting to see him use other ways of showing tone and shading, and concentrate on drawing just a few, bolder, stronger lines. Or maybe not; he gets some great effects with his many lines, creating clouds and rocks and monsters that come to vivid life on the page.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Gotta Serve Somebody

  • News
  • June 30, 2007

martha100-6378567This past month has been a very busy one for me. I’ve been out of town three times, twice on business, and I’ve attended two trade shows and three comics conventions. It’s a lot of time to be thrust into crowds of people, whether waiting at an airport, a synagogue, a taxi line or a display booth.

This past month has exposed me to a variety of interpretations to the phrase, “customer service.”

I first started to think about this nearly 20 years ago, when I saw a presentation by Peter Glen, the author of It’s Not My Department: How to Get the Service You Want, Exactly the Way You Want It. At the time, I was working in the special events department for a large retailer, and we were just starting to feel the first effects of Wal-Mart and other discount stores. According to Glen, the way to compete was not by cutting prices, but by offering more service.

He doesn’t just mean stores need to hire more sales assistants. He means the customer must be treated with respect, as if her time has value, and her needs are important. Customer service includes displays that feature all available sizes, quality merchandise that doesn’t break, and efficient check-out. This shows the customer that the merchant understands her, and provides the best value.

“Value?” you say. “How can you say value is important when you first said stores shouldn’t compete on price alone?” Well, I’m glad you asked. Would you rather shop at Wal-Mart, where costs are kept so low that they won’t hire a security guard to patrol their notoriously dangerous parking lots, or at another store where the management demonstrates a concern for your safety? Would you rather by a cheap coffee-maker (or other small appliance) that you need to replace every year, or a good one that lasts a decade or more?

As a comics reader, would you rather buy a comic that has a cover that’s teasing or unclear, or would prefer one that clearly represents the story inside?

When I worked at DC Comics, I was astounded at how obscure some of the covers for the trade paperback collections could be. “Where’s the title?” I’d ask. “How can I tell who wrote and drew the story?” Often, this information would be on the back of the books, invisible to the customer looking at the display. “It doesn’t matter,” I was told. “By the time the book is racked, we’ve already been paid for it.”

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MARTHA THOMASES: Daddy’s Home

  • News
  • June 16, 2007

martha100-3974448My husband really liked the column I did on Mothers’ Day (Brilliant Disguise #4). My stepmother also liked it. As a result, I feel a huge amount of pressure this week, as Fathers’ Day approaches.

Perhaps this is as it should be. Fathers, at least in literature, exert pressure. So do mothers, but fathers are much more stern about it, and send out much more of a mixed message. Zeus’ father ate him, for crying out loud. Jesus’ father sent him to die for our sins. Lear punished the only daughter who dared to tell him the truth. Jor-El proved his love by sending his son a universe away.

Fathers are stern. Fathers are cruel but fair. Fathers are distant. Tony Soprano? Please. Even today, on television, the best father, on Everybody Hates Chris, proves his love by working so many jobs he’s only home long enough to sleep and offer a bit of advice, if he’s lucky. In comics, the kindly fathers (or father figures) of Ben Parker and Thomas Wayne are all dead, inspiration only or motive for revenge. Jonathan Kent is the exception that proves the rule, depending on which continuity you’re in.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Gangster of Love

martha100-8677944This may come as something of a shock, but tomorrow night is the last episode of The Sopranos.

Now, I’m not the world’s most dedicated fan. I came late to the party, not tuning in regularly until the second season. I tend to be suspicious of critical darlings, afraid they might be uplifting and good for me, or depressing and bleak. However, in this case, my husband and my son were both enthusiastic, I recognized the name of creator David Chase from The Rockford Files, and so, one night, I didn’t get out of my chair when the distinctive theme song came on.

It would be nice if I could say that I was hooked on the brilliant acting, the profound scripts, even the incredibly realistic portrait of middle-class values in New Jersey. That would be a lie. I tuned in to watch Michael Imperioli, because I thought he was really cute.

Over the years, though, I got sucked in. Watching these characters week in and week out (not counting the breaks that lasted over a year) helped me to identify with them. No, I’m not part of organized crime, but I, too, tend to offer my loved ones food when they come to tell me about their problems. I’m not a hired killer, but I’ve been angry enough to want to take someone out to the woods and leave them there.

Serial fiction, like soap opera, comics and Harry Potter books, are especially good at enmeshing the audience with the cast of characters. What The Sopranos has done so well with the form is to take people who are evil, who kill and steal, and make them so mundanely human.

When I read a Superman comic every week, I feel like I’m spending time with a friend I’ve known since I was five years old. He’s in the media in a major media market, probably knows a bunch of the same people I know. Bruce Wayne has a penthouse in midtown, and is a big part of the city’s party circuit, a beat I’ve covered. The Legion of Super-Heroes is like a big dorm, and I lived in dormitories through high school and college.

So, even extremely unrealistic comic book characters present no challenge to me. I can bond with them no matter how inane nor how two-dimensional the writing. Even though they have super-powers (or at least super-human self-discipline), I can find things in common that make it possible for me to relate to them.

But Tony Soprano? He lives in (gasp!) New Jersey! He works in a strip club. Both of those things put me off, even before we get to the guns and the beatings. Carmella wears a lot of make-up, has lunch with her lady friends a lot, and seems to care about jewelry. These are not qualities common to my friends or me. How do I relate?

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MARTHA THOMASES: Last Man Standing

martha100-5988441When I was a teenager, the environment of my hometown became poisonous. To save me, my parents sent me to an alien environment that seemed to be a universe away, filled with people so different from me they might have been a different species altogether. No one knew anything about my home, nor about my people’s civilization and customs. Instead, I had to hide my true self until I understood how I fit in and what I had to offer the strangers with whom I lived.

No, I’m not Supergirl. I understand how you could be confused, because the resemblance is striking. However, I did find myself in a similar situation to Kara Zor-El. Instead of being a Kryptonian from Argo City sent in a rocket ship to Earth, I was a Jew from Ohio sent to an Episcopalian boarding school in Connecticut. Instead of being part of the majority as I was at my public school in Youngstown (there were so few kids in class during the High Holy Days that they could bring comics to school!), I had to go to chapel five times a week while the priest swung incense.

Many of my classmates had never seen a Jew before. Others, more worldly, would say things to me like, “You’re from Ohio? I have a friend in Wyoming. Do you know her?” For the first time in my life, I wasn’t part of the majority culture. I learned what it was like to be a minority.

There’s a lot to be learned from the majority culture.  Not the least of it is learning where you, as a minority, fit in. You learn your place. You learn how to get by. You learn another point of view, that of the majority.  That’s what taught in school. That’s what you see on television and in movies.

If you’re lucky, you take your experience as a minority and use it to understand how other minorities feel. You know what it’s like to be on the outside, looking in. In my case, as a Midwestern Jew, I could imagine how it would feel to be African-American, or gay, or Asian. I could take my own experience as a minority to imagine the experience of people who were other kinds of minorities.

Fiction helps. For example, when I read Amy Tan’s The Joy-Luck Club, I read about a society where, no matter what you did for your parents, it wasn’t enough, and that it was more important in a marriage to find a husband with money than with imagination. I was convinced that being Chinese felt just like being Jewish.

Comics help even more, if only because they are produced more quickly than novels. In The Legion of Super-Heroes, we can see how Chameleon can shape change to fit in – but chooses not to. Princess Projectra tried to hide her snake form at first, but learned to exult in it. The theme of three X-Men movies has been a metaphor for the dangers of the closet, of hiding your true self to pass for straight or, in this case, non-mutant.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Hey, Kids! Comics!

martha100-9148764Once a week, I volunteer in the pediatric department of a local hospital. I teach knitting to kids and caregivers. I’d like to say I do this because I’m a spiritual person, more evolved than you – better, in fact – but that’s not true. I do it because it’s the best part of my week, and whatever problems I might have in my adult life disappear when I spend a few hours with these kids. It gives me a chance to talk about color and texture and sheep instead of war and money and politics.

Because I go to the hospital on Wednesdays, I stop on the way at the local comic book near the subway for my weekly fix. The subway ride is long enough to read at least one book, and sometimes I get uptown early enough to sit in a playground and read more, weather permitting.

For the past few months, when I’ve bought a Simpsons comic or the Jonny DC Legion series, I’ve given them away at the hospital. Again, this isn’t altruism, but efficiency. There are enough comics in my apartment without adding any extras.

I’d give them all away, but most comics are too serialized to give away at random, and it is not my wish to see these kids in the hospital every week. It would be better for them to get better and go home. And I’m not giving a kid Garth’s Wormwood, no matter what.

This may surprise you, but children are excited to get comics. They like them. Even in a room filled with computers and video games and flat screen televisions (and flowers and get well cards and relatives), kids put down what they’re doing and start leafing through the pages, looking at the colorful pictures.

For more than twenty years, those of us who love comics have insisted that the medium is one that can support great literature and complex ideas. We’re right. We’ve said “Comics aren’t just for kids,” and that’s true. Just as prose can be written for different audiences, graphic storytelling can reach many different audiences and tastes.

And yet, for some reason, a lot of people think that comics shouldn’t be for kids. I’m not just talking about the arts police, the ones who think every kind of entertainment needs a rating and a warning sticker. When I worked at a major comics publisher, my boss (who was a vice-president of marketing) once explained to me how the company would make plenty of money if no kid ever bought another comic, and our audience was exclusively males in the prized 18-to-25 demographic.

Even those who aren’t in it for the money often think that comics for kids aren’t necessary. In the early days of the direct market, when there were suddenly all kinds of comics for all kinds of niche tastes (“The Good Old Days”), I would often go to a local store with my toddler son. I’d buy a variety of comics, including a fair number of independents, but the emphasis for me has always been super-heroes. The clerk would sneer at me as he added up the prices on the colorful covers. “I don’t read this crap,” he would say. “I prefer the more challenging literature. Like Love and Rockets.”

No disrespect meant to Los Bros Hernandez, whose work I admire greatly, but I don’t find them to be the ultimate literary expression available to humanity (nor do they, I suspect). And why should I feel defensive about my purchases? It’s no surprise to me that this store is no longer in business. The stores that survive in the competitive Manhattan market are the ones that understand that all kinds of customers enjoy all kinds of comics.

Even these good comic book stores have relatively few comics for kids. American publishers aren’t publishing them. Manga is great, but there’s an awful lot of it, with lots of extended stories, and it’s hard for a newbie to jump in without a guide.

Comics may not be just for kids anymore, but do we have to shut them out?

Writer and creator of Marvel Comics’ Dakota North and contributor to their Epic Illustrated, Martha Thomases also has toiled for such publishers as DC Comics and NBM before becoming Media Queen of ComicMix.com.

MARTHA THOMASES: Child is father to the man

  • News
  • April 28, 2007

There is hardly anything more annoying than listening to a bunch of us Baby Boomers talking about the good old days: the music, the sex, the drugs, the sit-ins and be-ins and love-ins, even the comics. We act like we invented rebellion, and we don’t think anyone else will ever care about the world as much as we did, and certainly no one else will make changes as important as the ones we made.

We’re wrong.

A recent article in USA Today describes “Generation Y”, those born since the early 1980s, as one that has endured a lifetime of public tragedies. My generation lived through the Kennedy assassinations and the murder of Martin Luther King, the Kent State shootings, the Viet Nam War and Watergate, and these things were horrible. However, kids today witnessed the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle explosion, the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack on the Atlanta Olympics, school attacks on Columbine, the Amish school in Pennsylvania, and the recent Virginia Tech massacre. They’ve seen a tsunami devastate Southeast Asia, and Hurricane Katrina destroy New Orleans. In my day, we watched a half-hour evening news broadcast, while today there is a 24-hour news cycle. They say that Viet Nam was the first war fought on our living room television, but the “Shock and Awe” attacks on Baghdad four years ago had so much advance hype and so many on-the-scene embedded journalists, they practically had official sponsors.

The horrific moments that changed my personal world occurred when my best friend’s brother died in Viet Nam, followed shortly by the Kent State slaughter which was just a few miles from my house. Before that, my feelings, although sincere, were based more on ideas than on events. My son saw the World Trade Center collapse outside his classroom in lower Manhattan, but not before he saw burning bodies falling from the windows.

Just as the Sixties didn’t turn everyone into a protesting hippie peacenik, these events have not shaped a single personality type among today’s twenty-somethings. Most of the mass media would have us believe that the values of this generation establish a new low of shallowness, exalting the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. But their taste and values go far beyond American Idol or the Pussycat Dolls.

The USA Today article quotes social historian William Strauss: “the Millennials’ baby-boomer parents were anxious about political assassinations because that’s what they witnessed growing up. But their children’s fears are different – because they witnessed mass killings of children by peers whose motives nobody can seem to understand.”

He continues, “The fact that this sort of thing can happen calls into question the super-achieving, high-stress life some of them lead.” He says that Generation Y will be less concerned with “having it all” than with having a balance. Unlike many in my generation, who traded in their values for SUVs, private schools and second houses and the long commute to jobs that paid for everything, there is hope that this generation will enjoy every day with their families as well as meaningful work. (more…)

MARTHA THOMASES: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

  • News
  • April 21, 2007

3178_2_001-7722403The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”

Except that’s not how it works. If the media were that effective, we would all be effective code crackers, physically fit from our active lifestyles, enjoying out fabulously large New York apartments. That’s what the non-violent media teaches.

I’ve been a non-violent activist since high school, where I regularly risked expulsion by distributing an anti-war magazine. I dropped out of college for 18 months to work with the War Resisters League, and I now serve on the Board of Directors for the A. J. Muste Institute (http://www.ajmuste.org). Doing this work, I’ve met a lot of people who are deeply and thoughtfully concerned about popular culture, and think it degrades people. After decades of rational and reasonable conversation, I need to disagree.

In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, author (and sometimes comic book writer) Gerard Jones examines why children enjoy playing at violence, and why it can be a good thing for them. If I may grossly over-simplify an entire book into a few sentences, he says that children play to work out their feelings, including anger, frustration and helplessness. It’s far better to pretend to kill the monsters with rayguns or laser beams than to hit another kid because he’s got better stuff in his lunchbox than you do.

Kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. As a human being and a New Yorker, I face frustration dozens of times a day. The traffic lights are slow, the tourists don’t know how to walk down a city sidewalk so other people can pass them, my neighbors don’t clean up after their dogs. I think about killing them all the time. Because I’m an adult, and because I understand that actions have consequences, I don’t do these things. Instead, I watch Kill Bill or read Punisher.

I also understand that other people have feelings. This understanding did as much to shape my politics as anything else – I saw people on television, dying in Viet Nam, realized I didn’t want to die, and the people I saw, even the Communists, probably didn’t want to die, either. From there, I could see that the people making the decisions to go to war weren’t the ones fighting, but they and their friends were getting rich. (more…)

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