Thursday, October 30, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover story: Unmasked

The real heroes of the Las Vegas Comic Con won't be wearing capes and tights

By F. Andrew Taylor

Comic Con International in San Diego had barely started and already the place was awash with freaks, exhibitionists and hardcore collectors with the glaze of four-color lust in their eyes.

We'd already seen people dressed as the entire cast of the '60s "Batman" show, with Indiana Jones thrown in for extra credit. The day before, we saw a woman who had painted all of her considerable exposed flesh blue, Buddy Christ, a delightful Mud Faerie and a cadre of the Emperor's finest led by ol' wheezy himself, Darth Vader. Rumor had it they were fixing for a rumble with the squad of chunky Klingons who'd been stomping around, bellowing in their barbaric gargling manatee/orangutan language all day.

Then, wonder of wonders, one of the finest specimens of womanhood I've ever seen strode past, clad in satin pants and two strategically placed strips of black gaffer's tape--pursued, of course, by a ever-growing phalanx of squat, bearded men in Hawaiian shirts. Tragically, squat, bearded men with questionable grooming habits and blinding shirts made up the lion's share of the gathering.

Is it any wonder comics are still having a hard time getting people to take them seriously?

Not that this sort of spectacle, which took place in July, is guaranteed for the inaugural Las Vegas Comic Convention. It's a new beast, and may not have its groove settled yet (besides, what I've described could be any Saturday at Club Rio). In the past decade or so, as comics have become increasingly more literate and challenging, the big conventions have become multimedia spectacles with big-name actors, giant props and 30-foot plasma screens hanging from the ceiling.

The connection between film, TV and comics is, of course, strong once again. Comics are being heavily mined for film scripts, and Hollywood has discovered the books that don't conform to the spandex standard. Recent films from comics have included From Hell, Ghost World, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Bulletproof Monk, The Road to Perdition and American Splendor.

The conventions still retain some of their sweaty charm, like the guy selling photocopied zines for a buck at a card table in the back and the ubiquitous autograph queues. Nothing says career move like standing at the end of a cattle chute desperately waiting for some zit-encrusted teen to buy your John Hancocked 8 x 10 glossy. "Please! Somebody buy a goddamn picture! I used to be a major player on 'Battlestar Galactica!'" Lost somewhere in the middle of all this are the comics and their creators, a disturbing number of whom are just hoping to sell enough so they can eat lunch.

Around 15 years ago--just about the time the first Batman movie was drawing a lot of attention to comics--the papers were flooded with articles pointing out that comics finally seemed to coming of age. Unfortunately, far too many of these bore the headline, "POW! BANG! COMICS! They're not just for kids any more," followed by a description of some cub writer's foray into a comic shop, a paragraph about Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and a brief mention of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer for Maus. I'm half-convinced it was all the same article with a few paragraphs changed for local color.

While it's true that comics aren't just for kids anymore--in fact, hardly any are for kids any more--they've been slow to truly mature. The art has become more daring and refined, the writing has gotten past the "Gosh golly gee, thanks for saving me from the giant robot, Captain Muscle Skull," but too many comics remain, by and large, adolescent power fantasies. Blame Sturgeon's Law.

Writer Theodore Sturgeon said, "Ninety percent of science fiction is crap. That's because 90 percent of everything is crap." Though some would argue the percentage is lower or higher for comics, the sad fact is that the crap is so damned obvious and in your face in comics because it is such a visual medium. Step into any comic store and you will be bombarded with a rainbow cacophony of glaring colors and visual clutter, a veritable assault on the senses and the sensibilities. It's difficult for the casual reader to sort out the brilliant and stimulating literature from the cleavage and toy tie-ins.

Fortunately, there seems to be more and more quality work to be found out there, in part because of the widespread popularity of graphic novels. Since graphic novels are marketed more as traditional books rather than as periodicals, it allows the better works, or at least the more marketable ones, to remain in stock, slowly tilting the percentage away from the crap. There is some speculation that the periodical nature of comics is fading fast, but this isn't altogether great news for the creative life of the medium. A 200-page graphic novel is a much larger financial investment than a 20-page magazine. In the end, the monetary risks for creators and publishers would prove too great for all but the tried and true, and diversity would suffer. On the plus side, we'd see fewer poorly drawn, angst-ridden works by Harvey Pekar wanna-bes, but we'd also miss out on the next Bone, Optic Nerve, Prison Funnies or for that matter, Harvey Pekar.

The graphic novel, by most accounts, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. I'll leave the arguments over the assorted pre-1978 graphic novels for the pages of The Comics Journal and The Comics Buyers Guide. For our purposes, that seminal book is Will Eisner's A Contract With God. The book is actually four stories featuring ordinary people doing relatively ordinary things. At the time it was published, when virtually all comics were superhero comics, it was a breath of fresh air. It remains so a quarter-century later. It's no surprise that the top awards in the field were named The Eisner Awards. He has been creating comics for over 60 years now and was one of the first to suggest the medium could be something greater, a new form of art and literature. He also proved that comics, with their easy-to-digest, yet information-packed combination of words and pictures, could be a powerful educational tool. During World War II he created training manuals in comic book form.

A select few are creating some brilliant and informative educational comics today. Larry Gonnick has published three volumes of The Cartoon History of the Universe. Most of us would understand and retain more knowledge from a night with those books than from a semester of world civ at UNLV. Jay Hosler put out Clan Apis, which follows the entire life cycle of a honeybee. I've tried and failed on several occasions to explain how informative and poignant this book is, but it's hard for people to get past how dull a 150-page bee biography sounds. It only gets worse when I try to explain his later work, Sandwalk, which is mostly a dialogue about Charles Darwin's life and theories between Darwin and a follicle mite living in his eyebrow.

Then there's Judd Winick's Pedro and Me, winner and nominee for several awards, including the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book; if the universe were just and sane, Pedro and Me would be required reading in junior high. The book tells the story of AIDs activist and MTV's "The Real World" cast member Pedro Zamora and how fellow cast members Pam Ling and Winick dealt with his death and carried on his work. Arguably, Winick's intense television exposure makes him the most well-known writer/artist at the Las Vegas Comic Con. Fortunately, he has also worked on a wide array of projects in his relatively short career and represents the medium well. He started his professional career with the syndicated weekly comic strip, Nuts and Bolts, which segued into a daily strip called Frumpy the Clown. After two years, he killed the strip in part because he found the format too limiting.

"Also," says Winick, "I was getting a smidgen of flack from editors who wanted it simplified, who wanted me to tell one-shot jokes. They wanted me to avoid weekly themes and continued storylines." They were concerned that people would pick up the strip midweek and be confused, an argument which holds little water as each individual strip stood on its own as well as telling the weekly story arc. "Shouldn't we push people to pick up the paper every day?" says Winick, "Isn't my way selling more papers?"

The syndicate's loss became comics' gain as Winick has thrown himself wholeheartedly into comics in the last five years, creating comics for Marvel and DC (the traditional big two of comics) as well as Dark Horse, Image and Oni Press. Along the way, he picked up another honking gob of national exposure when he wrote a Green Lantern story about hate crimes against gays. On the other end of the spectrum, he's created a dozen issues of The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius, one of the funniest comics on the market today. Currently he's finishing up a 12-issue crime fiction series for DC called Caper. The first issue hits the stands this week. Oddly enough, it was the lurid crime and horror comics of the '50s that almost destroyed comics then. Now both genres are returning with a vengeance. Once again, crime does pay.

But that's not the main appeal for Winick. When he grew dissatisfied with comic strips, he did the rough draft for Pedro and Me. "I decided this is the medium I want to be in, this is how I want to tell stories," says Winick.

"Comics have an intimate relationship that nothing else has. It's a visual medium where one is able to control the movement, information and story. Reading prose is an intimate experience; most people read it in a quiet place, maybe even in bed. Comics offer that same sort of liberty, that you read it at your leisure, at your own pace and timing. You control how the story comes to you. It's the only visual medium that does that."