Transfer of Power

I just transferd my blog over to my new webcomic site: Radiant Comics. Check over there for posts from now on.

Censored Again

Last week I wrote about a new collection of pre-comics code Steve Ditko comic that I had been reading. "Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1" was it's name and it got me thinking about how censorship had effected the U.S. comics industry. I've been pondering that a bit more this week.

Less is more. Or is it? I have always heard, mostly in the also censored world of movies, that not showing something can be a more effective storytelling device than showing it. You know, first a gun is shown, than a shot is heard, and then a person falls to the ground. We never actually see a person shot. Or stabbed, punched, kicked, or whatever.

The viewer's imagination is supposed to fill in the blanks with its own horrible vision of the violent act that is somehow more effective than anything the filmmaker could come up with. I always, sort off, bought into this idea because I'm not much of a gore hound so, I guess, it played to my taste.

Now I see that idea is a total crock. First off is the fact that not everyone's imagination is particularly good. Half the audience may wince at the unshown act while it doesn't affect the other half at all because their imaginations don't scare them. Not showing something can't be relied on as an effective technique because it depends on the individual viewer.

Then there the basic fact is that we are visual animals. When we see things they can affect us and stick with us. When something horrible happens we tell children to look away. Often times people exclaim, "I wish I didn't see that". Our eyes are our main reality.

When the Allies in WW2 liberated the death camps they marched all the Germans they could find through them so they could see what they'd done. They didn't throw a curtain in front of the camps and describe what happened in them. They made people look. No one in their right mind would think not showing them was a more effective method.

I came to the conclusion that the "Not showing" method of story telling is purely because of a censorship. That idea is not invented except in a censored world. It's exists to help creators make the best of a censored creative environment.

I can see this in the Ditko book. He was doing things that would be censored a couple of years later but now they were just nonchalant ideas. They weren't exploitive or sensational; they just were. If a guy got stabbed then he ended up with a knife in him. If demons ate people than they might be seen eating people parts.

The violence was all "matter of fact" though. It was done with whatever emphasis the story demanded of it. They bloody, gory special effect of today, are partially at least, a response to being censored and not being able to show that stuff in the past. A lot of people find it fun to show what shouldn't be shown. But that also only exists in a censored environment.

I write all this because I wonder how many more ways of doing things, both in comics and movies, would have been invented without such censorship. Books which for the most part haven't been censored in this country have a million ways to deal with all sorts of story elements. It's no wonder books are usually respected more than movies or comics. They're not just stuck with gore or no gore.

Comics I Bought This Week: December 7, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics plus two hard cover collections:

Echo - 17

The Walking Dead - 68

Sergio Argonés: Groo - The Hogs of Horder -2

Tomb of Dracula Omnibus Volume 2

Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil (Not the original story but the Jeff Smith one)

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Fables: The Deluxe Edition Book One" by Bill Willingham, Lan Medina, Mark Buckingham, and Steve Leialoha

"Fables" is one of those comics that I have never read because I have a general prejudice against Vertigo Comics books as they usually aren't to my taste and I've always thought the "High Concept" premise of "Fables" was dumb. But I have some friends who like it and I actually enjoy the work of most of the creators involved so when this oversized hardcover came out I decided to buy it and give it a go.

I'm glad I did because "Fables" is a nice read. Not the greatest thing in the world but a solid, enjoyable, comic. I had heard that the first five issues of "Fables" were meant to be a mini series but it sold so well that the decision was made to continue it as an ongoing series. I found it interesting how that appeared to be played out by the storytelling styles of the two story arcs collected in this volume.

"Fables" is about a whole bunch of fictional characters from stories, fables, and fairy tales who were driven from their magical lands by "The Adversary" and now make their home in our human world. We humans know nothing of them and they aim to keep it that way. The first story arc is a murder mystery tale that takes place amongst the Fables who live in their own Manhattan housing community and the second story arc is a tale of Fable on Fable rebellion in upstate New York.

I found the storytelling style of the first story arc interesting. I wrote a piece some time ago about a lost comic book story telling style that I noticed when reading the 1954 comedy comic "Get Lost". Basically it's this: modern comic book story telling is all about what is going to happen next and this other (I have no name for it) style is all about what's happening right now.

The first "Fables" story arc is done in this "Lost" style. You're supposed to spend time with each panel. There are things going on in the moment that you will miss if you're only concerned about what is going to happen. The penciller, Lan Medina, draws all sorts of things happening at once in a single panel. It's all designed to slow you down and keep you in the moment. The plot holds less meaning than spending time in the moment of that world. I found it interesting as I hardly ever see this type of storytelling anymore.

With the second story arc we're back to a more conventional, plot driven, move you along story telling style. It was still well done but a departure from the first story. I enjoyed this second arc but I think I liked the first one better because it was unusual.

Overall I did find the whole fairy tale characters thing a little distracting. I think the story would work just as well with original characters but I understand the nature of the marketplace and how things get done. It's easier to pitch, "Staring all the fairy tale characters you already know who are alive and well and living in our world" than to try and explain who twenty new characters are to a tired editor and the public.

The bottom line is that this "Fables" book was good. Give it a read.

The Key to Grey

For the last couple of days I've been reading a book I bought this week, "Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1". It's a collection of Ditko's early comic book work from 1953 to 1955. It's a collection of "Pre-Code" comics.

For those who don't know, the term "Pre-Code" means before the implementation of, in the late 1950's, the "The Comics Code Authority". The CCA was the industry's way of self-censoring before the government put them out of business.

Just like today when do-gooders crusade against video games, television, music, or movies that they think are ruining the children of America in the 50's the crusade was against comic books. And it was a very powerful and successful crusade that went all the way to congressional hearings. It nearly killed American comics.

A book I read this year, "Ten Cent Plague", chronicles the history of the war on comics and lays out it's human toll. People lost their jobs and never worked in the industry again. It's not a happy tale.

I bring this all up because I've never had a chance to read many of the pre-code horror and crime comics that lead to people being up in arms. I've read many EC Comics which are the most famous pre-code horror and crime offerings but they are actually well done, generally tasteful, and mainstream. They stick to the same general rules as any mainstream horror novel of the time. I never quite saw how people could be so against them. But it was a different era and there were plenty of other comics to be against.

I can see how these "Strange Suspense" stories could get people riled up. These comics aren't made for kids and there is some real grown up physically and psychologically scary stuff in there. It can be as simple as an innocent person trying to do right but suffering a horrible fate anyway to a guy getting stabbed and ending up laying there with a knife sticking out of him.

It's interesting to read these Ditko stories because everyone involved was making up their own rules on the fly. People had been reading comics since the late Thirties and comics had started growing up as kids grew into adults. New things were starting to happen. You can tell that the creators expected adults to be reading these stories. Or at least eighteen year olds. The CCA put an end to that.

The Comics Code basically said that good must always triumph and in a bloodless way. And that's how comics were made for decades. Those were the rules that everyone had to play by and though some good comics, even for grown-ups, can be made within those rules they narrow the scope of story telling and squelch creativity and growth.

That's what censorship does. Stifles things. In reading these comics I can see pre-censorship minds at work. They are using stuff to scare us that wasn't done post-censorship. Simple stuff but not kids stuff; ideas of hell, suffering, and monsters outside of any notion of human justice. Imagine how comics books could have grown, as the have in other parts of the world, if this censorship never happened.

Even today when the Comic's Code isn't much paid attention to it's effect lingers. Not in what isn't allowed but in the fact that creators may have rebelled against the code but they are not beyond it yet.

What I mean is that most of today's comics that are aimed at adults don't explore pre-code themes that were developing, as seen in these Ditko stories, but are still directly rebelling against what was not allowed for decades.

"Good must always triumph and in a bloodless way" has become "Good doesn't always triumph and it's bloody out there". That is how I'd describe most of the adult aimed superhero/adventure comics I read today. They can be bloody and sometimes the bad guys win. I never realized how much the comics code influenced even today's non-code books before reading this Ditko book. There was another sensibility starting to develop in the early Fifties that I didn't know existed. It made me see the sensibilities of today's creators in a new light.

It's not that today's comic books are on the wrong or bad path it's just that the path is a lot more narrow than it could have been. That's the effect of censorship even when it's less than what it used to be. It defined good and bad and those definitions are still with us. Even those who like "bad" are still basically using the same definition as the Comics Code. Comics would do well to get off that narrow path. If only others were allowed of it back in the 1950's.

Comics I Bought This Week: December 3, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and it was a big haul. I got seven new comics, a trade paperback collection, plus two hard cover collections:

G-Man: Cape Crisis - 2-4

Savage Dragon - 155

North 40 - 6

Glamourpuss - 10

GrimJack: The Manx Cat - 5

Elextropolis TPB

Marvel Masterworks: Deathlok

Strange Suspence: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Planetary" Numbers 1-27 plus two specials by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday

X-Files syndrome. That's what I call something that ends in such a bad way that you forget how good it once was. I've been reading "Planetary" since issue one and I really enjoyed it back then but have recently thought of it as suffering from X-Files Syndrome. Since the last issue of the series is finally out I figured I would give the whole series a read to see how it stands up.

I'm happy to report that it stands up very well. To summarize for those who don't know, "Planetary" is the story of a group of "Archeologists of the Unknown". The three main characters are all super-powered, have a vast organization behind them, and go out to figure out the secret history of our planet.

It's well done fun stuff that tries to link together popular fiction characters from the last hundred years or so. There are ghost stories, giant monster stories, crime stories, plus thinly veiled versions of Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage, The Shadow, Tarzan, Dracula, and many others popping up now and again.

Also the story involves Planetary's struggle against "The Four". A thinly veiled version of the Fantastic Four who are evil and have been behind a lot of atrocities and crimes against humanity for forty years. They are massively powerful and everyone if the super secret world of Planetary is afraid of them. With good reason.

This is A list material. Good writing, good plots, good storytelling, good artwork, and good all around. So why did I think it suffered from X-Files Syndrome? One word. Late.

It took ten years to get out twenty seven issues. To get from issue twenty two to issue twenty seven took from March 2005 until October 2009. No story, no matter how good, can sustain any kind of quality with that schedule if you read them as they come out. The individual issues are paced pretty quickly and don't take long to read so reading one every few months or years is very unsatisfying. I found it hard to follow the story that way.

My friend John had the perfect description of what that type of schedule leads to. He asked me if I had read the last issue yet (since it just came out) and I said no. He then told me his critique of it which was, "I read it but I just couldn't seem to care". That totally summed up my feeling about "Planetary" the last few years. How can you care about a story when it is a year between issues? I'll accept that from my small press comics where everyone involved is struggling to make a go of things but this from some of comic's heavy hitters.

Anyway, I'm glad I read them all together because "Planetary" really is good. Sure I thought the resolution to the plot point with "The Four" was as dumb as dirt and the final issue had annoying time travel stuff in it but neither quibble was enough to ruin the overall story for me.

So if you've never read "Planetary" or have had it ruined for you by the infrequent schedule dig out your issues or wait for the new Absolute Editions and give it a read. It really is good from start to finish.