comic books

Aside from the occasional, scratchy spider ring that a guy might wear around Halloween every year, we have a tendency to, well, NOT collect toy rings. At no point in my development was I compelled to collect little 25-cent gold rings with plastic jewels glued to them. I’m a little surprised myself – I’ve collected just about everything.

DC Comics, however, is trying very hard to change this. Men wearing rings has always been something of a staple in DC Comics – The Flash kept his costume miraculously stored in his ring, Lex Luthor has been known to surprise Superman with a ring that secretly housed Kryptonite, and of course, we have Green Lantern, whose sole power is the fact that he can channel the energy of his ring into constructs based on his willpower.

If Green Lantern wants to create a giant dinosaur to chomp his robot enemies to death, all he needs to do is think really hard about it, and a glowing, translucent green dinosaur appears. It’s been this way since 1940, with Green Lantern wearing a green ring. Really, the ability to just make things with your mind would be enough to get any guy to wear a huge, gaudy green ring, but the original Green Lantern totally rocked poofy purple pants also.

Then, the Yellow Lanterns came along. Well, Sinestro came back from from Qward after being banished for being a jerk and stripped of his Green Lantern powers. When he returned, was wearing a Yellow Ring. It wasn’t until 2006 that more wielders of Yellow Rings, The Sinestro Corps, appeared, whose rings are powered by generating fear. And then things got crazy.

The Red Lanterns appeared, fueled by rage. The Blue Lanterns appeared, fueled by hope. The Black Lanterns appeared, powered by death – and the same occurred with every color of the visible and ‘emotional’ spectrum. It’s comics, and this means that we get a Zombie Batman action figure, so I’m not complaining. What this also all means is that DC Comics is not producing one, but THREE different formats to collect all eight rings in.

Right now, a set of eight plastic rings is available to represent all of these Lanterns, which were packaged with comic books released between September and November that related to the ‘Blackest Night‘ storyline. A full set, with comics, will run about $25, and they’re fairly nice for rubber rings. They’re quite large, but wearable, and inexpensive. I’ve already taken a few stupid Facebook photos wearing them. Who needs girlfriends? I have Power Rings.

DC Direct also just released the JLA Trophy Room Green Lantern Rings Replica set, which again features all metal-plated eight rings set in a round, illuminated base with a removable glass dome. It’s made very clear that these high-end prop replicas are not meant to be worn as costume pieces, but for $250, who isn’t going to try? This item is also out right now.

Finally, DC Direct just announced a set of eight wearable Blackest Night Power Ring Spectrum Set made of PVC. These will be adjustable, come in a fancy display box, and best of all, they’ll light up when you put them on. While not officially available until July of 2010, the price tag of $60 is pretty convincing.

There have been a few official, wearable metal prop replica Lantern rings that have come out in the past, which were packaged with mini-busts. There have also been GL rings packed in with action figures, and even a Flash ring with a spring-loaded cap. It’s hard to resist the lure of the plastic, toy ring.

Last Thursday, a comic collector parted with one of his most valuable, favorite comics.  He had collected Archie Comics for years, and had issue #1 in his collection.  The comic was put up at auction, and got over $38,000 for it.   Was he sad, regretful, disappointed?   No: owner Dave Luebke was glad to get rid of it.   This spring’s announcement that Archie was going ask Veronica’s hand in marriage was the final straw.   Luebke’s love for Archie had reached its limit, because, well, everybody knows Archie should be with Betty.

Sure, there’s probably a bit of grandstanding on both sides of the story: Luebke got more attention with his denouncement of Archie than he would have with an otherwise low-key auction, but the general sentiment on Archie message boards is that the marriage storyline will turn out to be a dream, in that oft-annoying trope used by trapped storylines to go a bit out of the box they’ve built.  This marriage announcement comes on the heels of an equally poorly-received “New Look” redesign two years ago, so fans are worried that these attention-grabbing upheavals could be a sign of a failing title.

Twists have always been a big part of comic books: Spiderman gets a new costume, Robins die left and right, backs are broken and miraculously healed for Batman and Iron Man.  It takes a big event to get the public to notice though, to register to people who aren’t already hoping for the next Big Thing in comics to arrive.    In the case of Superman, a year of planning and development went into one of the biggest comic twists of recent history.   Nobody was ignorant of  the fact that Superman died – it was all over television, newspapers, and the burgeoning internet – so when Superman’s “final” issue hit stands, people lined up at comic shops to get their copy, and collectors interested in an heirloom picked up the Special Edition, in a black bag and packaged with a black armband.

Of course, when you kill off an essentially indestructible character, and the mainstay of your comic book publishing catalog, there’s going to be talk of bringing him back.   It doesn’t appear the writers ever intended for Superman to stay dead, and fans began to grumble about it all being a publicity stunt.   The Death of Superman resulted in negative responses on both ends: DC first got bags of mail criticizing their decision to kill of the most unkillable character in comic book history, but when they brought Supes back to life with nary a change, they were scolded for not leaving things the way they were, erasing a rather significant event in the DC universe.   And, of course, collectors who were so certain that their bagged, Special Edition comic would be worth a lot of money as Superman’s last performance in ink, well, were disappointed that they were one of several hundred thousand people who all thought the same way, and those Death of Superman issues haven’t gone up significantly in price.  As a publicity stunt goes, however, the Superman franchise did see an upsurge in interest, and it gave the flagging 1990s comic book market a boost.

A few years later, the same fate befell Captain America – the media jumped all over Cap’s demise, brought down by a handgun, but the circumstances of his death were the more media-friendly part of his story.   Marvel have been undergoing an arc storyline in which mutants and other superheroes had to register, to verify their secret identities to the government, so that they may be monitored.  In the post-9/11 world, the symbolism of the Superhuman Registration Act wasn’t lost on the public, and killing off Captain America only encouraged its use as a symbolic reference to American democracy as a whole.  Like Superman, however, Cap’n didn’t stay dead for long: it turned out he wasn’t shot by a normal gun, but one that eventually allowed him return to his former status as a superhero.   Again, non-comic-book collectors queued up to get their Death of Captain America issue, many in hopes of it becoming a collector’s edition.

When the Archie Comic’s issue finally comes out in September, and we all find out Archie was just daydreaming, or time travelling, or living out curses while being banished to Limbo, that particular issue won’t necessarily be the collector’s item – the intention is to sell far, far more copies than the average comic, so the anticipated issue is unlikely to become rare, aside from errors.  Luebke was on the right track: when public interest in a comic book begins to bleed into the general pop culture consciousness, the value of the older, genuine collectible issues will go up.   Even if you’re in the disillusioned group who thinks having the Fantastic Four becoming an team of supervillians (whoops, spoiler?)  is a sacrilege and a publicity stunt,  the media attention might be making those Shogun Warriors cross-over comics worth something.   It’s not a guarantee, so don’t make a big investment in anticipation of guaranteed returns, but do strike while the iron’s hot, and if you’ve got something you’re willing to part with, doing the sale while public attention is high will be to your advantage.  While the death of a main character seems to be a big mover, the Archie stunts show it doesn’t need to be tragic: just enough to get the public riled up over what’s happening in the funny pages.

Okay, so you’re all just back from San Diego Comic Con and you’re thinking, “Man, those guys who draw those punchy dudes and the boob-women are pretty nifty. I want to be them.”

Hold your sweaty little horses, creative geekonerds.

Let me rein you in for a moment and save you a few bucks. It’s likely that you’re going to want to start out with some kind of ‘how to draw comics’ book, and there are literally hundreds out there. I have a pretty fair collection myself, but here’s the dead honest truth : most of them suck. Most of them are a blatant attempt to ignorantly capitalize on the boom of the comic niche and are created by people with absolutely no practical experience, other than reading other ‘how to draw comic’ books and copying them over in a mediocre fashion. As a semi-professional comic artist, and one-time teacher specializing in comic art, allow me to guide you through the garbage, save some money, and build a solid collection while you’re at it.

I started out drawing comic characters when I was in junior high, and like most people, I’d find a comic panel that I really liked and copy it to the best of my ability. It’s a fine place to start, but copying things from panels doesn’t give you any insight into why things are the way they are. It’s like sitting down at a computer, but having absolutely no idea how to control it or fix it when it goes wrong. Here’s some of the best, and some of the worst offenders.

1. If you buy one ‘how to’ book ever, get ‘How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way‘. Sure, it was written back in the 70s and hasn’t changed in 40 years, but it’s a freakin’ bible. My adulation for this book cannot be overexpressed. Written by Stan Lee and drawn by the amazing John Buscema, ‘The Marvel Way’ describes the process of drawing basic anatomy from the inside out, as well as creating dynamic panel layouts – and while it doesn’t address any aspects of story, the book delivers such an astute view of comic theory in very few words that it’s the best possible entryway into the world of drawing comics.

Of course, this is just a starting point, and an open invitation to improve on the methods and ideas that are presented. It might seem antiquated, but this is the very heart of comics.

2. If you buy a second book about creating comics, you should get a copy of Scott McCloud’s ‘Making Comics‘ (a sequel to the equally important ‘Understanding Comics’).

Scott McCloud takes the language of comics that we inherently understand from simply seeing the comic pages in front of us and explains to us why we understand them, guiding us through far, far more complex methods and ideas than ‘Marvel Way’ presents. There’s less focus on anatomy and more focus on technique and flow, and because it was written in the era of indie comics, it spreads itself out through a wider variety of genres.

By understanding the language of comics, we’re empowered to speak it back to your readers, visually and textually. It’s a lot more difficult than you might expect. The use of actual examples from beautiful comics is incredibly helpful, also.

3. Your third essential book? One that helped me out a lot when I started taking comics seriously was ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel‘. I picked this up after I completed a dozen or so full comic pages and realized that they were horribly done. It was a harsh realization, but I did some serious study and forgot everything I thought I knew.

This falls somewhere between the previous two books, addressing all manner of issues that comic artists will eventually face. It helpfully follows a spread of a few pages from conception to full execution, with all of the steps along the way visually depicted, and it even hands out small assignments along the way. It’s smart, which is a lot more than most of the ‘how to’ books I’ve come across.

So, what should you avoid? As a very general statement (which I’m sure has examples to disprove me), avoid the large, thin paperback books from fly-by-night publishers with flashy covers. They’re cheap garbage. And if there’s something obviously wrong with the art inside, like there so often is, you really won’t learn from it. If your teacher can’t draw, their examples will not help you. In fact, they serve to harm your understanding and set you into bad habits more than anything else.

Seriously. I want to punch some of these guys in the knees. You know, without hurting anyone’s feelings.

1. ‘How To Draw Your Own Supercharacters‘ is probably the most embarrassing drawing book I’ve ever seen. It’s entirely self published, so I can’t knock it too badly, but I’m genuinely amazed that I found it in my own library system without some kind of ‘dangerous to the future of mankind’ label on it.

For 32 pages, the author awkwardly draws superheroes on a 7th grade level, creating ’step by step’ instructions that are nothing more than a series of three unrelated drawings, mimicking the steps of fleshing out the anatomy of a character, but providing no practical, or even accurate, knowledge whatsoever. It’s very reminiscent of a guy who copies the drawings that he sees in comics. In fact, the entire volume mimics the structure and examples that ‘The Marvel Way’ describes. Go to the source.

2. ‘How To Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains‘ from Watson-Guptill press. While it’s not an inherently bad book, it suffers from all of the sins that the mid-90s committed upon comics. First rule of teaching comics : never, ever use Rob Liefeld as an example of anything except for what happens to your perceptions of women and men if you spend most of your time in a basement and are sexually repressed beyond all natural human endurance. Women do not have waists narrower than their heads, and legs are not four times the length of the human torso.

Okay, so Liefeld is a pretty stunning cultural example of the hyper-everything that comics represent, but it’s a lousy starting point.

The book employs some good examples, but the few bad examples are so heinous that the entire book should just be tossed. No one should have to see them and be potentially influenced by them.

3. ‘Superhero Madness‘ from Impact Books. Unfortunately, this book just demonstrates a horrible understanding of foreshortening throughout, which only makes the stiff, awkward characters even more useless as positive examples to learn from. Even the examples within the comic are nearly impossible to understand as far as action and sequence is concerned. The jumbled garbage, uneven eyes and all, cannot possibly help you.

Dear Universe : you can’t sit down and create a ‘how to’ book without first having a certain degree of expertise at your disposal. Please, stop trying. You’re diluting the comicpool with your deformed bastard children, and they’re breeding. There’s definitely a solid library of excellent ‘how to’ comic drawing books out there. Take some time to find the right ones.

Anyone who’s spent any toy-hunting time on the internet knows the saga of Shocker Toys’ Indie Spotlight action figures. For the toy collector, they’re the collectible that never arrived, either because of production disasters, or resculpts, or a meticulous process of perfecting the figures before they were ready for the public. So, they never arrived and never arrived  – that is, until now.

Shocker Toys’ very first series of action figures is a landmark, and deals with those comic characters that don’t belong to Marvel or DC and so often get forgotten, despite being characters in compelling and influential stories. Smaller comic studios don’t have the capital to produce action figures, and most major retailers won’t make figures of things that don’t have instant recognizability. Even toy powerhouse ToyBiz attempted a line of indie comic characters before they folded a few years ago, producing a few notable characters but more often than not only making action figures that were spawned from the very worst part of the 1990s Comic Book Dark Ages. If comics had a Silver Age and a Modern Age, they most definitely had a Dark Age, too. If you want to know when it was, just go hunt down a triple-variant signed holofoil polybagged 3-D cover.

Shocker Toys secured the license rights to five characters that are instantly recognizable to almost any slighty-more-than-casual comic reader : Sam Kieth’s The Maxx (a comic which completely shaped me as a teenager), Rob Schrab’s Scud : The Disposable Assassin, Strangers in Paradise’s Katchoo, David Mack’s Kabuki, and Image Comics’ Shadowhawk. In addition to these figure figures, there are two variants : Shadowhawk in an alternate costume, and Scud’s similar-but-evil enemy, Sol. All of these characters but Katchoo, Scud and Sol have had figures at some point. Shocker Toys was generous enough to send along this Sol guy, so let’s take a look.

For a first foray into action figures, Sol hits all of the nitpicky toy-bases perfectly – including really easy-to-open packaging and no twist ties, which is awesome. I don’t know anything about the character, but on a purely formal basis. the sculpt and the articulation of the figure combine to emulate creator Rob Schrab’s kinetic, cartoonish drawing style excellently. Despite all of the joints being very thin (based appropriately on the character design), every one of the 21+ points are solid and holds a pose perfectly. The joints are very cleverly engineered to move smoothly and remain hidden, or at the very least, undistracting. In the event that one of the tiny ball-joints pops out, it’s easy to simply pop back in.

Sol (and Scud) comes with alternate hands : one pair holding guns and one pair empty. This is a far superior option to having loose guns that rarely stay in the hands of any given figure. These pop in and out at the wrists using these tiny ball joints.

Decals and paint, although minimal on this particular figure, are very clean. Many followers of Shocker Toys’ endless troubles might share this sentiment with me, but I can’t help thinking, ‘Wow, this is a real toy! And it’s finally here! And it’s a really, really good toy!’ Toy collectors are stuck in this world where lines are collapsing left and right because of the economy, and where we once had a wide choice of well-articulated, well-sculpted figures, we’ve been stuck with only Mattel’s (admittedly beautiful) DC Universe Classics for the past few years. If the other action figures in this Indie Spotlight line are anything like Sol, this is a breath of fresh air.

Sol, like the other six figures in the line, comes with a collectible creature from The Maxx comic. In Sol’s case, it’s a black Isz (while Scud comes with a white Isz). Other figures come with Pink Fairies, and Maxx himself comes with all three varieties. If you’re read The Maxx, you know that you pretty much want to collect 50,000 Isz before they start to match what the comics looked like. I’m still pushing for Shocker to release giant sacks full of loose Isz. They’re great interpretations, too!

Collect barcodes from all seven figures, variants and all, and you can mail away for another Maxx figure : the villainous Mr. Gone. We haven’t seen anything more than a head prototype yet, but I consider him to be one of the all-time greatest, most unusual villains in all of fiction. So, yeah, I’m excited – even through the fact that I’ve cut back my action figure buying severely.

The verdict on Sol is an A+. Now, give me a basic Scud and a Maxx and we’re totally in business – even though at the time of this writing, they’re completely sold out. You’d think that after waiting three years, I’d know better.

Frank Miller’s ‘All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder‘ comic has been regarded as a creative disaster since the inaugural issue. The backlash against the title has been strong enough to prevent me from spending any foldin’ money on an issue, but I’ve seen enough review material to confirm these suspicions of disaster. I’m all for changing up Batman and placing him in alternate situations and persona, but I just can’t seem to get behind this title.

(On the flipside, Grant Morrison’s ‘All Star Superman‘ is a masterstroke of epic proportions and a wonderful read for anyone with a soul.)

While there have been plenty of re-envisionings of the classic Batman character, Miller’s most recent take is so laced with profanity, extreme violence, anger and ridiculous hyperbole that many comic readers can’t comfortably accept it as an artistic expression. Wonder Woman is a man-hating caricature of a woman who can’t control her emotions or her libido, and Batman is a criminally insane vigilante who prefers to giggle as he punches evil-doers in the face, rather than embody the stoic silence that defines Batman. This might all sound potentially awesome in theory, but even with Jim Lee’s exceptional artwork to back it all up, ‘All Star Batman’ is usually seen as a failure of a comic. It’s the equivalent of re-imagining Superman as a leopard man with a magical staff and a sailboat made of radishes.

Regardless of the negative reception to ‘All Star Batman’, we’ve made it to issue #10. It’s with this issue that the creative disaster that is ‘All Star Batman’ has made headlines – for a tremendously egregious printing error.

See, Frank Miller’s idea of profanity isn’t for lightweights. Take all of the worst words you know, make up at least five worse words, and imagine a world where they drip liberally from the lips of everyone around you, and then you’ll have Frank Miller’s idea of profanity. He writes it all out (sweat dripping from his meaty forehead, glistening in the blue glow of his computer monitor), the weak dialogue is printed into the comic, and then the astute editors at DC Comics place big ol’ black censor boxes over the offending epithets. Unfortunately, issue #10’s black boxes were printed just a shade too lightly, and as a result, Frank Miller’s disgusting profanity is visible on many of the comic’s pages. I’m no profanity prude, but this is some bad stuff.

DC immediately recalled the misprinted comics, but this was only after a good handful had been sold this past Tuesday. By Thursday, copies of the misprinted comic had already reached up to $250 on eBay, marking the most recent flash-in-the-pan comic collectible. With over 200 completed auctions and 150 active auctions on eBay (at the time of this writing), and an average price of roughly $60, the value of the comic will likely decline in the near future. As more and more copies surface, and scarcity is diminished, and the novelty of seeing vulgarity within the pages of a DC comic wears off, it’s not a comic that I’d recommend investing too much in. Sure, invest something – but within reason.

I remain a bit boggled that DC Comics would even print the offending words and then actually take the time to block them out instead of simply printing black boxes to begin with, but what do I know? I’ve never created a national scandal. Give me a little more time.

At least with Superman, the most you have to worry about is an occasional ‘gosh’.