• Following in the footsteps of DC Comics: The New 52, most of Vertigo’s titles will be available digitally the same day as print.

• Geoff Johns announced that work is about to get under way on a Robot Chicken DC Comics special that will skewer the company’s superheroes in the same way that the show tackled Star Wars. The episode, written by Johns and MAD‘s Kevin Shinick, is set to air next summer.

• Confirming last-minute speculation, Ed Brubaker announced that he and frequent collaborator Sean Phillips (Sleeper, Criminal, Incognito) will release their next project through Image Comics. Called Fatale, the series blends noir elements with the supernatural world. “I’ve been wanting for a while to do something with a more supernatural element to it,” Brubaker told Comic Book Resources. “So Fatale mixes what we do and all the ways we’ve poked fun at the noir genre. If Incognito was us doing ‘What if Doc Savage, Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler had all existed in the same universe?’ then this is a weird combo of James M. Cain and Lovecraft. It’s got a real horror element to it — the first time I’ve really tried to do anything with horror — but it’s also got this really epic story to it.”

• Dark Horse confirmed that Demo creators Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan will reunite in February for an adaptation of the Robert E. Howard Conan short story “Queen of the Black Coast.” Wood, whose upcoming Dark Horse project The Massive has been extended to an ongoing series, told Comic Book Resources that he’s signed on for 25 issues of Conan the Barbarian, “to start.”

• Vertigo announced Saucer Country, a new ongoing series from Paul Cornell (Stormwatch, Demon Knights) and Ryan Kelly (Local, New York Five) that the writer describes as “The West Wing does The X-Files.”

• Beginning in April, Return of the Dapper Men writer Jim McCann will team with Morning Glories cover artist Rodin Esquejo and colorist Sonia Oback for Mind The Gap, an ongoing series from Image Comics that combines elements of science fiction, thrillers and police procedurals. “This book is my X-Files meets Twin Peaks whodunit,” McCann told Comic Book Resources, “where everyone is suspect, and no one is innocent!”

• During its Amazing Spider-Man panel, Marvel announced a Scarlet Spider ongoing series will debut in January from writer Christopher Yost and artist Ryan Stegman.

• Ape Entertainment revealed it’s in talks with Sesame Workshop to publish comics featuring the beloved characters from Sesame Street.

• IDW Publishing will release a graphic-novel adaptation of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, by Ben McCool and Mario Guevara.

• Expanding their partnership, Stan Lee and 1821 Comics announced they’ll launch a line of children’s comics called Stan Lee’s Kids Universe.

Here’s a preview of Zita the Spacegirl, which is kid-friendly but fun for adult readers as well.

Udon Entertainment, which has published several Mega Man manga, is putting out an artbook paying tribute to the venerable video game-cartoon-comics franchise, and they are inviting everyone to participate:

UDON is sending out a call to comic artists, video game artists, freelance illustrators, and fan artists all around the world to show us your artistic tribute to Mega Man! Give us your best artwork featuring the cast of Mega Man®, Mega Man® X, Mega Man® Zero, Mega Man® ZX, and Mega Man® Legends. All styles are welcome – anime, western comic style, cartoon, pixel-based, sculptures – whatever you can come up with as your tribute to the blue bomber!

The fine print includes some fairly specific legal stipulations. Characters from the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force series are not allowed, and crossovers are also verboten. And the characters have to be from the games only, not comics or animation. “For example, the green Mega Man from the Captain N animated series is not allowed.” Got that? And no fan-created characters: “You may not, for example, create your own Zebra-themed Robot Master named ‘Zebra Man’.” Damn! Plus no drinking, smoking, or nudity, although now that I think about it, those elements probably be hard to integrate into a Mega Man comic anyway. (Not impossible, but difficult.)

On the other hand, the editors are open to a variety of different styles. The top 300 entries will be published and the creators will get a copy of the book.

The action at NEWW (photo by Mike Peterson)

Mike Peterson went to the New England Webcomics Weekend, and if you are curious how it went but not familiar with all the names involved, his is the account to read, as he gives a good general overview of the event. plus a few conversations with individuals. I liked this in particular, from part two of his account:

There was a lot of laughter and a lot of conversation, but it was basically a mass book-signing event, with this important difference:

What makes webcomic fans so loyal is the sense of community that springs up around a successful webcomic. This doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of emailing back-and-forth with individual fans, but it does mean creating place online where they can feel their input and their presence is of value to you and perhaps has some effect on the cartoon itself. “Success” and “community” are inseparable, and it’s a major reason why, as mentioned yesterday, you can’t hide in your garret churning out amazing art and expect to succeed in this medium.

(His hiding-in-a-garret point is from part one.) A lot of the successful webcomics that I see have blogs or comment areas, which helps promote the feeling of community, and of course everyone is on Facebook and Twitter nowadays. The result is that while the Stan Lee of my childhood was a distant figure sitting at a desk in a skyscraper in New York (itself an abstract concept to a Midwestern kid like me), todays comics creators are all over the place, and their readers can interact with them on more than one level—read the comic, buy the T-shirt, follow them on Twitter, chat with them at cons. Of course, print comics creators have gotten a lot more accessible as well, but it seems to be more fundamental to the webcomics model.

Dorothy Gambrell, creator of the webcomic Cat and Girl, tracks her income via some nicely designed bar graphs that make interesting reading for anyone curious about the webcomics model. The graphs show not only how much she makes but what she makes it on as well as big expenditures (trip to MoCCA, printing books). In one way, Gambrell is living the stereotype: Her biggest source of income in most months is T-shirt sales, although she sold a lot of books in August. Freelance work also gives her a boost. The bottom line: So far this year, she has taken in $10,087.56 from her comic, a respectable second income but not enough to live on. And that isn’t her net—she has yet to deduct taxes, PayPal fees, and other expenses. One encouraging sign is that the overall trend is up; she had a dip in July, but August was her best month yet. Sean Kleefeld analyzed the numbers a bit and figures she’ll end the year with a gross income of about $20,000.

Sam is the writer of Split Lip, a horror anthology comic that he describes as “along the lines of the Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt.” He hires artists to draw the comic, and he pays them up front; it starts as a webcomic, then he collects the stories into print editions, which he self-publishes. How’s that working out for him? Sam figures he lost $7,863.32 between July 2009 and June 2010. Publishing is hard, especially when you pay your artists up front (unlike, say, Bluewater Comics, which does everything on spec).

Sam spends a bit of time debating whether he should simply regard the comics thing as an expensive hobby, but he decides in the end that it’s more of an investment.

Maybe it’s better to look at that number as being part of the expenses required to ramp up a new business. Most businesses lose a good deal of money in their first five years; in fact, most businesses don’t survive to see their fifth birthday (Split Lip turns four in October).

And maybe with a few more years’ hindsight, that’s how I’ll see this. An investment in the future. Maybe.

That’s a tough leap of faith, but Sam does have a good job and an understanding girlfriend, so he’s well placed to take the risk. Also, his comics are really good, although the audience for horror is somewhat limited.

Anyway, it’s worth reading the article to see how real numbers break out for one creator. Sam gives his website traffic as well, although that’s more a lesson in the unreliability of any one set of statistics.

A Drunken Dream

As manga fans well know, manga creators (manga-ka) are very reticent about talking about anything interesting. The chat sections of manga are filled with accounts of their favorite pastries or sketches of their cats, and interviews seldom go beyond “I am trying very hard to make a manga that my fans will enjoy.” So Shaenon Garrity’s interview with Moto Hagio (and her translator, Matt Thorn), is a bracing blast of fresh air. Hagio is one of the most respected manga-ka both inside and outside Japan, but her work is hard to find in English; that’s about to change with Fantagraphics’ release of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories.

In the interview, Hagio discussed her influences, including American science fiction writers Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, as well as manga-ka Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, and Leiji Matsumoto. And she gets into some issues as well:

SG: Your work also shows the influence of psychological theories. How did you get interested in psychology, and how has it affected your writing?

MH: I had always been interested in psychology, but when I was in my late twenties my relationship with my parents, which had never been very good, got worse and worse. To try to understand them, I started to read more about psychology. Unfortunately, most of the books at the time talked about people with clearly defined mental illnesses and where they could go for treatment. There wasn’t as much about people who were just ornery.

Finally I turned to a book on astrology and compared my parents’ birthdates with my own. According to the book, we were just incompatible.

Later on, Hagio discusses how that factors into her use of fantasy to describe real-life situations:

You can analyze it in different ways, and there’s a cause somewhere in there, but it’s not a cause you can explain rationally. I try to capture that feeling through fantasy.

There’s plenty more there, and at one point Hagio turns the tables and starts quizzing Garrity about why boys love manga is popular in the U.S. Good times!

Manga Town

Legacy comics, which continue on long after their creator’s death, are common in the U.S. but less so in Japan. However, Crayon Shin-chan, the story of a mischievous little boy who drives his mother crazy with his smart talk and childish pranks, will continue despite the fact that creator Yoshito Usui died last September, presumably from a fall from a cliff while hiking. He had built up a big enough backlog that the series continued to run until March in the monthly magazine Manga Town, and then it stopped. But now, the Mainichi Daily News reports, thanks to popular demand, Usui’s assistants are reviving the comic starting with the September issue.

Crayon Shin-chan was first published in the U.S. by Comics One and then, after that company became defunct, it was picked up with a new translation by CMX Manga—now also defunct. One begins to wonder if it isn’t cursed, except that the anime is still going strong.

A Game of Thrones

Here’s the quote heard ’round the internet today, from comics writer/novelist Neil Gaiman. Specifically, he was responding to a fan of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, but just substitute Martin’s name with John Cassaday or J.G. Jones and Song of Ice and Fire with Planetary or Final Crisis, and you’ll see where I’m going with this.

The fan wanted to know if it was unrealistic “to think that by not writing the next chapter Martin is letting me down, even though if and when the book gets written is completely up to him?”

Gaiman sums it up pretty succinctly: “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch,” The Sandman creator said. “This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now.”

This reminded me of a post I did last year — it was a post about an upcoming comics convention, and one of the guests was Final Crisis artist J.G. Jones. One of the fine folks in the comments section pointed out that Final Crisis was late, and they were shocked Jones would take a weekend off to go to a convention instead of staying home to work on the book. Never mind that Jones going to a convention isn’t exactly him blowing off and screwing around; in his case, it’s actually work, and second, it’s the weekend, two days that many, many other people in the country don’t actually work.

Anyway, go check out Gaiman’s full post; sometimes it’s good to be reminded that comics, books and other forms of entertainment we all enjoy aren’t being created by machines.

Love and Capes Valentine

Since 2006 Thom Zahler has been chronicling the romance of Mark and Abby, a.k.a. The Crusader and, um, Abby in the self-published book Love and Capes. As a part of Robot Love week here at Robot 6, Zahler shares a little bit about the couple, romance, the future of the book and a special promotion for fans that ties into the couple’s big day.

JK: What I love about Love and Capes is that the relationship between Abby and Mark is the kind everyone wants, the kind to root for. What kind of relationship advice do you think Mark and Abby would offer somebody less lucky at love than they’ve been?

Thom: Abby would say that you have to kiss a lot of frogs. She was a little unsure of dating Mark when they first met. She took a chance on him after a lot of bad dates with other guys, and wound up being surprised with this quiet guy. We’ll see how, too, because in an upcoming issue, we’ll see their first date.

She’d tell you to be confident, too. Your vision of yourself and how you really are don’t always mesh. Abby dating a superhero is very much like a grade-school teacher dating a rock star. You do kind of look and say “What does the rock star see in that little common person when they hang out with supermodels and actors all the time.” What the other person is looking for is something only they know, so don’t be surprised when they find it in you.

Abby’s very much Mark’s rock in a way Amazonia never could be. Some people think, “Oh, she’d NEVER go for me” or “I’m not good enough for her.” You’ve got to trust that the other person knows what they want.

And she’d also say, “Watch out for the ex.”

Mark would say, “Understand that people are scared.” He had to start his relationship with Abby off on a lie. He couldn’t tell her exactly who he was when they first went out, and that lying always bothered him. It’s the thing he had to fight through when he did reveal the secret. He knew Abby might be upset that he’d kept it, because anytime you say “Now I know I can trust you” the other person is always going to have a bout of “What do you mean NOW? I trusted you a while ago.”

Likewise, Mark would tell you to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. When he dropped the secret identity bomb, he knew Abby would be upset, but he also knew she’d stick around and listen to his “why.” Mark ascribes to the theory that you should assume the other person isn’t trying to tick you off, so find out why before you get mad.
Oh, and he’d say “watch out for the ex,” too.

Love and Capes

JK: How much from your real life relationships makes it into the book?

Thom: As little as possible. I’ve learned that it’s is much safer for me not to pull things too directly from my relationships, past and present, lest I offend someone I’d rather not offend. “Hey, is that supposed to be me?” accompanied by a scowl is not a question you want to field.

But, in generalities, a lot of the concepts and miscommunication come in from my real life. I’ve always been obsessed with becoming a cartoonist. I’m an inveterate workaholic. That’s similar to the Crusader being on call 24-7, although I don’t have the trump card of saving lives.

And there’s stuff inspired by, too. I drive a convertible, and I’ve had girlfriends who don’t like taking the top down. (Was that a double entendre? I don’t know.) So, when Abby complains about Mark’s super-speed flying messing up her hair, that’s gleaned from that. A lot of the little things do make it through.

The best part of Mark and Abby’s relationship comes from the best parts of the ones I’ve had. I like the way they tease each other and give each other nicknames. I like how supportive they are of each other. For as much as they rib each other, they also know when the other needs loving support. That comes from people I’ve known.

There are two relationships, though, that are unabashedly templated on ones in my life. Mark’s Mom and Dad are very much mine. My Mom is less a woman, more a force of nature. She’s a Steelers fan in Browns Town (which is where Mrs. Spencer rooting for the wrong team in #5 came from). And my Dad is my reservoir of calm and wisdom. They’ve both been insanely supportive of their son who decided to pursue a pretty difficult career.

JK: Let’s talk about influences. Obviously superhero comics are referenced throughout the book, but are there any sitcoms that you’d say are influences? I’ve heard Love and Capes described as a sitcom adapted into comics form. The pacing, with a punch line of sorts coming every fourth panel, seems to be different from other comics.

Thom: The pacing structure of a beat every fourth panel actually comes from comic strips. I was a huge Bloom County fan, and that one-two-three-HAH! format is ingrained in me from that.

It’s also a nice metronome. I wrote a sitcom spec years ago and one of the reactions I got was, “There aren’t enough jokes, per page.” Having that four-panel format helps you keep time. Something needs to happen on that fourth panel that’s funny, or a payoff or a serious beat or something. I play with that more and more, doing a half-page panel or a three-tier panel or whatever, but never deviating too far from that initial structure.

Now, as far as sitcoms, the biggest is without doubt Mad About You. I always thought Paul and Jamie had the perfect relationship, and that show, at its peak, was one of the funniest things out there. I’m TiVo’ing some of the reruns now, and it still holds up pretty well, fashions and huge cell phones aside.

Love and Capes

The show also taught me that you have to make all the characters good. In a superhero-based book, there’s a temptation to make the girlfriend “The Girlfriend.” Her role is to be the hero’s significant other. I worked hard to make sure that if I did a page of Abby and Charlotte (who, by the way, is unabashedly inspired by Jamie’s sister Lisa) just talking about non-super things, they would still be interesting and funny.

Sports Night is another influence. It wasn’t quite a sitcom, I think it’s considered a “dramedy” now. But that was a show that showed you could be funny and be serious. Friends did that too. The characters were very funny, but you’d still have a moment where Chandler is worried that his soulless job will be his life, or Ross is lamenting his relationship with his ex-wife.

There’s usually one of two scenes in Love and Capes that turn on the serious moment, and while it’s a balancing act, it gives the book a lot of heart. Issue #1 has the scene where Abby is watching the Crusader in a battle, and thinks he might be dead. That’s kind of a daring thing to do in a comedy, but it works well.

Oh, and with that in mind, be ready for #10. Heh heh.

JK: You’re doing pretty much everything on the book. What’s the process like? Do you write scripts and then draw them? How much of the production do you do on the computer?

Thom: When I sit down to start an issue, I’ve always got the beginning and the end clear in my head, as well as a vague road map for the story. I knew that issue #1 would start with them having breakfast and later revealing his identity, and end with the mid-air kiss and Abby’s line “–sweep me off my feet.” The places I hit in the middle came up along the way. Amazonia was created as I was working on the issue. And I never thought she’d be as popular as she became. Fortunately, once I saw the reaction, I was able to add her to more of the future stories, and man, has that paid off.

Artwise, I work on a page at a time. There’s a nice feeling to actually seeing a completed page at so many points in the process, rather than all the pencils then all the inks. It also lets the specifics of the story percolate in my head nicely so that I can figure out exactly what to do. And, it lets me send it out to my Secret Society of Super Reviewers, those trusted friends and colleagues who read the book in pieces and let me know if I’m doing okay or not.

I do the roughs, often scrawled on my shower wall in bath crayon, and do pencils on tracing paper over and over until I get things the way I want them. I then lightbox them onto a sheet of layout paper, inking in brush for the most part, and some Micron penwork. This way I don’t have to do any erasing. I scan everything in and color it. I work in Photoshop mostly, although I like some of the painterly effects I can get on the backgrounds when I use Painter.

I’ve adopted kind of an animation workflow, where I have characters on the foreground and a painted background beneath them. It’s helped the speed of my process because I don’t have to redraw the bookstore every time, or draw Mark’s apartment over and over.

Then I drop it into Illustrator and letter it. I never work full script, although I will jot down notes on the roughs if I figure out exactly how a line should be written. I’ll often have the punchline, but that might change slightly after I work everything out. I’m a nut for dialogue and cadence, so I like being able to tweak it until it’s just perfect.

There’s only one joke in the run where I drew it before I had the punchline. In #2, Mark and Abby are in the park. I needed one more four-panel moment before I switched to another scene. So I wrote a scene where Mark and Abby were talking about Christmas and were happy. Abby says something and Mark’s face clouds. Then they have a lighter moment reacting to it. That became the “Is your brother going to be there?” bit and it’s how Abby’s brother Quincy was created. That paid off well, too.

It takes between 2-3 months to do an issue. Love and Capes is never the only thing on my plate, so I have to deal with clients and their projects as I’m doing the book. Love and Capes does okay, but most of my income comes from other frellance work so I need to keep those clients happy. If LNC was the only thing on my table, I might be able to a full book a month, though I am afraid I’d burn out writing it. Either way, using those repeated background “sets” certainly makes it possible to keep up the pace.

Issue #10 was done in two months, because the Free Comic Book Day issue had to be done early for Diamond’s FCBD deadlines. That’s the fastest I’ve done an issue, and it’s got an extra two pages of story in it to boot.

Love and Capes TPB

JK: How has the book been doing? Have the new Diamond benchmarks caused you to rethink anything about self-publishing the book?

Thom: The book’s been doing well. Almost every issue seems to do better than the last, Free Comic Book Day excepted. The FCBD issue sells way more than the regular run, but that’s do be expected.

As for the Diamond benchmarks, well… They’re of great concern. The book has been brushing the old benchmarks, sometimes falling below it. Diamond has been supportive of the project, and I’m sure being a participant in the FCBD promotion doesn’t hurt.

That said, the new numbers are probably going to be a problem. And they have caused me to think about some things differently.

Love and Capes has always been designed to be three six-issue arcs: The courtship, the engagement, and the marriage. That’s also why, once the “season” starts, it’s a quarterly pace, and then after that sixth issue I take a longer break. Kind of like TV seasons. So issue #12 was always intended to be the last issue of the second arc.

As it stands now, I believe that Diamond will carry the last two issues. Issue #11 will come out in August, and then issue #12 will be a double-sized wedding issue. The double-size will raise the price point and make it easier to clear that benchmark, and the readers will get a satisfying bang for their buck. One thing the new minimums did was clarify that. I’d been thinking of ending #12 right before the wedding and doing a LNC Wedding Special. That’s probably not feasible now, so I’m doing the double-size issue to make sure I can end exactly the way I want to.

Then, after that, I’ll take some time to reassess my options. I still intend to do the third arc, but it might be a little while before I can get there. There are also some other comics jobs that I can’t talk about yet that, if and when they happen, will demand some of my time. And hopefully they’ll be a big splash and make doing the third “season” that much easier.

All that said, here’s the good news: I promise that I will finish this story. Comics that end prematurely are never satisfying and I’ve always take it as a commitment that once I decide to do a six-issue arc, I finish it.

In the event that Diamond does drop me after issue #11, I will continue the story in a second trade. IDW is happy with the book, and while we haven’t spoken in any concrete terms about a second trade, I think it’s safe to say that it’s likely. IDW has been a dream to work with. And, in the unlikely event that California and the IDW offices fall into the ocean and I can’t get a second trade out, I’ll post it online. This story will end the way it’s meant to. (Best read with the same passion as Daniel Day-Lewis telling Madeleine Stowe “Stay alive, no matter what occurs; I WILL FIND YOU!”)

I don’t begrudge Diamond making a profit, and they need to do what they need to do for their business. And I’ll I’ve ever asked is a level playing field. They’re being up front about what they’re doing and I appreciate that.

I do think that they should have a program where a publisher could pay the difference off their minimum. Right now they’ve got some “For $1,000 we guarantee to carry your book,” and that’s fine. But if Love and Capes sells $2,000 of their $2,500 minimum, I’d like to be able to cut them a check for the $500 difference to keep the book in. In such a case, I would have personally made more than $500 off the sales, so I wouldn’t be losing money, just cutting into my profit. (Not factoring in production costs, obviously.) And, as an entrepreneur, that’s a decision that I may make believing that it will pay off in the long run.

In my case, I think finishing the series will help the trade and the brand. As it stands now, if #11 under-performs, there’s nothing I can do about it. Now if I could find a way to make things right after the fact, even if I was limited to going to that well only once a year, that’d still help me out more than betting against myself and spending $1,000 to guarantee my inclusion and distribution.

It’s a difficult thing, but as long as the rules are clear and apply fairly, that’s all I can ask. Then it’s my job as a creator to play the best I can in that environment. And I think I’ve got a plan.

JK: One of the areas where you’ve been really active is merchandising. On your site, you offer bookplates, T-shirts, tumblers … how important has merchandising been to your bottom line?

Thom: I’ve tried to make the merchandising gravy to my bottom line. Back when I still worked for The Man, I was an art director and graphic artist. I learned a lot about production and made some great contacts with vendors doing that. When I do a product, I try to make it as cost effective as possible, so that if never sell an item (since, gauging what will sell is always such a crap shoot) I’m not hurt too badly. And sometimes I consider it advertising. I did that with the first Love and Capes shirt that was part of a Hero Initiative promotion.

I managed to do the LNC Toon Tumblers because I do the design work on the regular DC and Marvel Toon Tumblers for PopFun Merchandising. Similarly, the trading pin set has been made possible through working with Pop Culture Trading Pins. Even the current Amazonia t-shirts were made possible by doing the design for the Mid-Ohio Con T-shirts and overprinting some so I could have product to sell.

I think it’s important to always have more. If someone has all the books, it’s good to have something additional, and of good quality, to sell them. I have a lot of great fans who want to support the book, so it’s good to have an outlet for the completists.

Between those and the sketchbooks I’ve done, the merchandise has definitely been a support. The books hit with a bang and then drop in terms of sales, which is natural. The merchandise rarely starts out as strong, but it’s more of a constant sales point, too.

My next product is as much a promotion as an item. I think I can say without too much of a spoiler warning that the happy couple will be getting married (or, at least going to the church) in issue #12. I can also further say that Delta Burke will not be invited. Stupid Wedding Destroyer Lois and Clark plot…

Anyway, I’m offering fans the chance to attend the wedding. The cover will be similar to the famous Jack Kirby marriage of Reed and Sue, with the Marvel Universe behind them. For $25 for singles, or $40 for couples, you can send in your photo and appear in the congregation. You’ll also receive a print of the cover.

If sales go crazy gangbusters, I’ll do an alternate version with Mark in a tux, as opposed to his Crusader uniform, and fill in that crowd with the overflow. It should be a lot of fun.
I did a “soft” announcement of it at the New York Comic Con, and some people have asked if they can have their character appear in it, too. The answer is yes. So, for example, John Gallagher’s Buzzboy and Rich Faber’s Roboy Red will be attending the wedding as well.

For more information on that, go to www.loveandcapes.com/rsvp

I think I may have to draw/invite President Obama to the wedding, too. I hear having him on a cover can really help sales.

Love and Capes #10

JK: And finally, tell us about your plans for Valentine’s Day and for Free Comic Book Day.

Thom: Valentine’s Day I’m cooking dinner for my girlfriend. Simple and low-key.

As far as the big FCBD, I’ll be in Austin, Texas at Randy Lander’s Rogues Gallery Comics signing and drawing. I’ve got friends in Texas (including Randy, I’m pleased to say) and I’ve been to Dallas and Houston, but never to Austin, so I’m looking forward to that. Randy’s always been supportive of the book, and he’s met most of the riders on my appearance. He’s not flying in a Ghirardelli sundae from San Francisco, but hopefully I’ll be on his Comics Pants podcast that weekend.

I can only be in one place for FCBD, but if any retailers are reading this and need some flyers or maybe a T-shirt or some signed books or something, give me a shout through the website and I’ll see what I can make happen, too.

Agents of Atlas

Editor’s Note: With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we’ve declared this the week of Robot Love and resurrected I ♥ Comics. In one of our favorite features, various comics creators, bloggers, retailers and fans discuss the things they love about the medium.

Today we welcome our guest Jeff Parker, creator of The Interman, co-creator of Mysterius: The Unfathomable and writer of a lot of Marvel’s comics — Agents of Atlas, Age of the Sentry, X-Men First Class: Finals and Exiles.

by Jeff Parker

These comics we read can make us smart. Or at least, able to kill Seat 28D during the InFlight Trivia Challenge.

Comics have an inordinately facile ability to get information into the reader’s head. A few years ago I was in Washington, D.C. running around looking at monuments and the like, and I took the once-a-week tour of the Federal Reserve building. It’s surprisingly cool, do it when you’re there on a Thursday sometime. At the end of the tour they gave out a COMIC BOOK that attempted to explain how the Fed works. It was badly drawn, weakly colored, and yet- it actually got across to me some understanding of the mysterious process by which the Fed sets interest rates and influences economic growth or tries to thwart inflation. I was impressed that they took the steps to make a comics giveaway, and it made me happy to retrace the steps they must have gone through. As the guide of the day had explained, one of the big hurdles the people in the Federal Reserve have is trying to explain to the public how they do what they do. The job description requires some understanding of economic theory and process to even get to the nuts and bolts. They obviously spent a lot of time trying to figure out what delivery system could get the curious up to speed, and they arrived at a flimsy newsprint comic with no coated stock cover. And I still have it. They also showed a film about the Fed, but the comic still did a better job distilling the information.

There’s really no reason comics can’t be a major force in education, they can engage a student and slip knowledge into their skulls through any number of paths and convey the most complex lessons (Naturally I also like the idea of inculcating youth with the habit of reading comics). But back to the love, what I’m talking about is not really the overt teaching that comics can be used for. I’m talking about the way knowledge of the writers and artists ends up in their comics and subsequently in my own noggin. I remember as a kid an old ’50s reprint where Superboy generated a massive amount of static electricity by fashioning a gargantuan glass rod and rubbing a similarly huge silk cloth against it. Many of those stories read as if the writers kept a stack of Popular Science close at hand, and it’s noteworthy that I can’t remember the plot but still remember how Superboy made the electricity he needed. Any young Superman reader would also have a vague understanding of the process that turns carbon into diamond- any time Clark Kent was running low on cash he’d scope around for some charcoal briquets at a cookout and squeeze/heat vision himself up some stones to impress the ladies. The science would usually be fast and loose, but a key connection was still made, and I would have some bit of insight into the physical world.

Don’t worry, I’m working my way up in sophistication, I’m not actually advocating shoehorning experiments into comics. The breadth of what can be put across is much greater. Later in college, I started getting the Terry and the Pirates reprints (which now exist in superior form from IDW). Besides Milton Caniff’s skill at roping the newspaper readers in day after day, he also was a king of research. He had to be- unlike Alex Raymond who couldn’t be challenged on his knowledge of the planet Mongo, Caniff was setting his adventures in current China, and as the U.S. entered World War 2, the strip followed suit. Caniff wasn’t about to fake military dress, nomenclature, protocol and a thousand other details that his readership now hung onto- and if he did miss something, letters would flood in by the crate to correct him. As a result, you can read Terry and come away with a strong sense of wartime life as it connected to the Pacific Theater, though you may think everyone talked a lot more hep than they did.

Terry and the Pirates

Similarly, you could read Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and come away with a strong sense of the period of the stories. He’d bother to have Val on the right kind of horses, and drawn in armor as close as he could find appropriate to the period. In these strips, familiarity with the subject is used organically to build the world the characters inhabit. Speaking of the world, you could take in big chunks of it by reading Carl Bark’s Duck adventures or following Tintin and Snowy all over it. It’s easy to imagine the studios of Barks and Herge lined with not only National Geographic, but the yearly indexes of the magazine. I realize I keep citing works of near antiquity, but smartypants comics writing is far from extinct.

Xenozoic Tales

Mark Schultz is a modern cartoonist who clearly loves his research. Xenozoic Tales, while taking wild liberties to create a dinosaur-filled world full of righteous hotrods driven by women in hot clothes, would also shore up a lot of the fantasy with real down-to-earth science. In one issue, the heroes disrupt a waterspout by firing a gun up into it. Here, you know you like to break up a vortex. And in one of the last Xenozoics, we see an arachnid creature based on a Daddy Longlegs (or Harvestman) that breaks off a leg to get away from danger like its real-life counterpart. I’ve talked to Mark about how he uses his research, and he’s careful to not force it on people. In many of his stories, even in his Superman work of the ’90s, there is an implicit ecological theme; but always well-handled and not used to batter the audience into his position on the subject. Not surprisingly he’s ended up with the writing duties on the current Prince Valiant strip.

All of this makes Schultz well-armed to write overtly when it’s called for, as it is in the recently published book The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon (who despite their claims of non-relation, are brothers and always will be). And if you’re looking into overt delivery systems, Jim Ottaviani’s books from GT Labs are waiting for you, ready to walk you right into the greater world of the sciences. You’d also not want to miss anything Jay Hosler chooses to cartoon.

Comics that impart knowledge are indicative of the creative process pulling in the greater world and converting it into fiction, and I have a lot of time for that particular energy transfer. Conversely, I have no time for stories that don’t. Lots of stories use only facts typical of their genre, they smack of action movies that can only reference things done in other action movies and at best scale up the stunt. This reeks of a closed system where writers seem to only have the world of comic books as a primary source, the snake eating its tail. Whoop — I digressed into Hate during Love month, sorry.

I’ll bet valentine candy that you also have a fair amount of knowledge you were first exposed to by a comic book. What was it?

Let’s see what will be going on …

• Marvel’s been absent from WonderCon for the past couple of years, and while they don’t appear to have a booth, they do have a presence this year. Both Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction are guests of honor, and it looks like Jeph Loeb, Mark Paniccia and Axel Alonso, among others, will also be there. Of note is a discussion between Fraction and author Michael Chabon on Saturday that will likely be worth the price of admission alone.

• Speaking of special guests, Brian Azzarello and Dave Johnson are also attending and will host a panel on 100 Bullets on Saturday … followed by a night at Isotope Comics. And although Dan DiDio won’t be at the con this year, DC’s got Jim Lee, Will Dennis, Ian Sattler, James Robinson and Aaron Lopresti, among others.

• Oni Press, IDW, Dark Horse, BOOM!, SLG, Aspen and Top Cow will also be on hand, both on the floor and at various panels to talk about their latest projects.

• And rounding out the special guest list are Sergio Aragonés, Mark Evanier, Gary Friedrich, Wendy Pini, Trina Robbins, Alex Robinson, Stan Sakai, Jill Thompson and Roy Thomas, all of whom will have a spotlight panel. San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum will kick off a Stan Sakai art exhibit that weekend as well, so if you’re in town, be sure to check it out.

• In the “other media” area, or to answer the question “So what’s happening in the big room?” … it looks there will be panels on Watchmen, Star Trek, Chuck, Terminators Sarah Connor Chronicles and Salvation, Pixar’s UP, a showing of the Wonder Woman animated DVD and the Black Panther animated show.

• Our own Matt Maxwell, creator of Strangeways, has a booth this year, so be sure to drop by and say hi if you’re going.