all time comics: crime destroyer #1

If Hot Topic were to make a commercial in the style of Robert Rodriguez, you’d have something like the live-action trailer for All Time Comics, the new superhero line of floppies from Fantagraphics. Vapid enough to make any Marvel movie seem like masterful storytelling, the trailer is wildly successful in setting the tone for your reading experience. Much like Crime Destroyer #1, the trailer is a pointless waste of money—the difference being that, with the comic, the money will be your own.

Fantagraphics has built its brand on championing sophisticated artists, original ideas, and strong points of view. Given its stable of cartoonists, who are almost all auteurs, many onlookers were surprised when Fanta announced it would publish work that involved such a high degree of collaboration, much less for a genre it has historically regarded with disdain. What surprises me is that Gary Groth took one look at this material and staked “Fanta does superheroes” on a badly regurgitated DC Universe. Gary, baby, I’ve got an idea for a series starring not-Wolverine that’s gonna blow your freaking mind. Action!! Muscles! Big. Ole. Titties. Call me.

Despite All Time Comics’ profound lack of originality, Josh Bayer, the writer who created the series with his brother Sam, likes to describe himself as an innovator. “Every Velvet Underground needs an Andy Warhol behind it,” he said in an interview, humbly characterizing his role as a creator and his brother’s role as the project’s initial financier. It’s an interesting analogy. On one hand, we have the most fiercely original band in rock history, whose avant-garde sensibility shaped the likes of Bowie and Sonic Youth. On the other, we have Josh Bayer pulling a bunch of comics clichés out of his hat without the wherewithal to deploy them in an interesting, entertaining, or even marginally self-aware way. Note how some of Crime Destroyer’s lines (below, left) seem ripped from the journals of Alan Moore’s Rorschach (at right).

The difference of course is that Rorschach was supposed to sound ridiculous. Riddle me this: if Fantagraphics is such a meritocracy, how did this lorem ipsum-grade script, which never should have made it past the first edit, earn the approval of all those discerning eyes? All Time Comics is not a love letter to the comics of old, as some have described it, nor is it parody; it is the comics equivalent of off-brand cereal. 

In assembling a team, Bayer shows some facility, if zero interest in working with anyone who’s not a man. (Not that there are all that many women associated with Fanta, but off the top of my head, Trina Robbins, Anya Davidson, and Katie Skelly all have aesthetics that would have made sense for this project.) Jim Rugg’s cover is a lot of fun even if the characters, from left to right, move inexplicably from more realistic and detailed to cartoonish and abstract. What happened to that purple lump at the bottom? Did our heroes stomp all of the drawing out of him?

Predictably, Herb Trimpe’s pencils are well done (if too busy for my taste). While I like the idea of an intergenerational team, I wonder how much opportunity there was for meaningful collaboration. The disparate styles on the cover echo lightly through the rest of the book. Trimpe’s detailed drawings and Alessandro Echievarria’s oversaturated color palette, for example, sometimes feel at odds with one another. Just a few tweaks would’ve mitigated the problem by a lot; you can see that those big colors are most successful in the panels and spreads where they have room to breathe, and my guess is that a more tightly edited palette would’ve better served the art.

I’m at a loss for how inker Ben Marra fits into all of this—I don’t read superhero comics, so all this teamwork confuses me a little—but there are a few depth-of-field problems I take to be his, that were then perhaps exacerbated by the colorist? Listen, I’m out of my wheelhouse, but there are places where something went wrong.

This fight falls flat...and also looks flat.

I can say with more confidence that the writing is weak. In Issue #1: “Woke Fukitor” “Human Sacrifice,” our hero battles a gang of Satanic white supremacist gutter punk lizard people who dress like pilgrims for some reason. As mixed-up as that may sound, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth: the pilgrim hats are by far my favorite part.

Ah yes, every mother's worst nightmare...finding the dread pilgrim hat. My second favorite part is when Crime Destroyer says he knows the sewers "as well as his own face."

Haha, that's just too good. I know these streets like I know my own FACE. I'm totally going to start saying that.

So that's one thing: I only laughed at this comic, never with it. I think the stuff that's meant to be whacky and fun just comes across as formulaic, and that's at best. At the other end of the spectrum we have its attempt at political commentary, which is just unfortunate. It’s plain that the racially charged plot, which invokes slavery, lynching, and Black Lives Matter, is meant to echo real-world tensions—though to what end, I cannot say. There’s a whole thread about how black people are complicit in their own misery—Crime Destroyer burns down his own store and Anji, a half-black(?) white supremacist, wants to sacrifice herself to Wotan, whoever the fuck that is—but you know what? I’m not even gonna go there. It’s not worth my time, much less yours. Bayer’s heavy reliance on chunky exposition manages to explain nothing, and how could it be otherwise? This is irredeemable nonsense, which I might have been able to forgive had it managed to be the least bit entertaining. A word of advice to the creators as the series moves forward: more pilgrim hats.

Below, on one of the worst pages of cartooning I’ve ever seen in my life, we learn Crime Destroyer’s backstory, such as it is. Once upon a time, Crime Destroyer was a war hero whose family was killed by looters. (I think??) Like...he returns from "the war" to his small town...which is overrun by criminals...doing crimes...who then murder his family, who lived in the store for some reason(?)...so Crime Destroyer murders the criminals, burns down his house-store, and moves to Optic City to fight the Satanic white supremacist gutter punk lizard pilgrim people. That's the best I can do. The vague, stilted second-person narration is brought to life in six awkwardly arranged bubbles that float hideously over a screensaver featuring Crime Destroyer's disembodied head. It’s as though each person on the ATC team was in competition with whoever went before him to make this page more ugly and confusing as it went through production. The counterintuitive layout, the arrows, the background, those colors, the story itself—there’s just no conceivable explanation for this series of choices other than “hold my beer.”

I’ve compared All Time Comics unfavorably to COPRA (here and here), and character construction is just one more area in which this observation holds up. Despite knowing little about old superhero comics, I immediately recognized the antecedents of Crime Destroyer, whose lack of superpowers, reliance on gadgets, and war against urban blight point straight to Batman; of Atlas, a flying goody-two-shoes with alien powers who’s always blathering about antimatter a la Superman; and of Bullwhip, who is a blatant Wonder Woman knockoff in both character design and her affinity for S&M. Crime Destroyer, with his ridiculous fist-of-solidarity shoulderpads, isn’t the kind of ripoff that’s going to inspire the empty chatter about copyright infringement that surrounds Michel Fiffe, so let’s put it this way: what is an artist’s ethical obligation when he co-opts someone else’s ideas? My own feeling is that if the Bayers are going to model their creations so heavily on seminal characters, they should have something—anything—to say.

That’s a little different than insisting that the work should have a coherent message or be politically correct. I like to joke around about the Fantagraphics guys I call the Post-Dumbs (artists like Marra and Johnny Ryan, who also works on ATC), and the Bayers, with all their heavily stylized stereotypes, seem to fit right in. So far as I can tell the Post-Dumb hustle is in taking loaded imagery, emptying it of meaning, and then decorating its husk with an aesthetic strong enough that people will mistake it for an idea. I don’t know how else to say it: there’s nothing there. Contrast the “satire” of Johnny Ryan with Joan Cornellà, another Fanta artist who makes nonsensical comics that traffic heavily in scatological sex and violence. Cornellà’s strengths are so plain that anyone on the street could tell you what he’s got--arresting images, perfect color palettes, a sense of timing, a surreal sensibility—elements that come together in a way where not quite making sense becomes part of its perverse social commentary. The fuck do those other guys got, apart from a well-respected indie publisher? “Irony”?

Cause that’s the real selling point with All Time Comics, is it not? The sheer novelty of Fantagraphics doing cape comics. That the publisher thinks “are superhero comics art” is even a question says one thing. That it seeks to answer it with this weak, retrogressive claptrap says another. I genuinely wonder who this gimmick is even geared toward. Not to women. Not to superhero comic fandom, surely. Not to the average Fantagraphics reader (meaning folks reading Dan Clowes and Charlie Brown), who is accustomed to buying comics as graphic novels or collections. Anecdotally, my local shop, a regular comics store with a large selection of action figurines and an indie section comprised mostly of books, had never heard of ATC. They had to order it. I imagine I’d have to go to a specialty shop like Quimby’s to find it on the shelf.

And, you know, maybe people are doing that, or ordering it themselves from Fantagraphics. But so far as I can tell, the best way for most people to buy All Time Comics is Comixology. That wouldn’t even be worth mentioning were it not for the author’s note on the inside cover, where Josh Bayer crows about how he’s single-handedly bringing back the pleasures of a bygone era by making a comic book that you can hold in your hands:

The ALL TIME COMICS revolution is just beginning, so tell your friends to switch off “Nyech-flix” and unplug the Galaga console and start paying attention to the real ink, paper, and stapled beauty of ALL TIME COMICS. Paper and ink is the true lifeblood of comics, don’t ya know? And it’s never gone away!

Funny you should say that, Josh, given that literally every other Fanta comic I own has better production values than this thing. (Like…who is he talking to, even? Fanta only entered the digital marketplace for real a year or two back, and it’s hardly their focus. All of my own Fanta comics are on paper. Even over on the corporate comics side, floppies still outsell trade paperbacks and digital by, like, a lot.) This is not to say that ATC looks bad. Clearly a lot of care went into printing this comic, even though it looks and feels disposable. The colors look quite nice. But you know where they look even better? On a backlit screen, where they’re a little less muddy. 

It's just one more example of how everything about the concept and execution of All Time Comics seem deeply confused. Production decisions that were, with old superhero comics, engineered to maximize speed and profit—in-house collaborations, floppy format, variant covers, different titles set in a shared universe—have here been rendered cumbersome, slow, and expensive. Crime Destroyer #1 came out in early March; the next release in the All Time Comics line, Bullwhip #1, is showing a ship date of May 31. At this rate, it seems uncertain that the first four characters will have been introduced by the end of the year—that is, assuming the series lasts that long.

My guess is that it won’t, but who knows? The combination of nostalgia and mediocrity is one that often proves irresistible in today's marketplace, and there's no telling how many of these things are already in production (or what the contracts look like). I hope to see at least a few more issues, anyway, just because I enjoy hate-reading it to an almost unwholesome degree. Josh Bayer has talked about how the series has "a greater significance beyond itself" and how "it stands for all comics," and I agree; for me, it epitomizes everything I dislike about Fantagraphics, alpha bro mall punks, and sexist male comics culture. All Time Comics offers no perspective on the past, and little pleasure in the moment. But it gives me a warm feeling about the future, thinking it will fail.

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precious things

I came to comics via Tori Amos fandom, which probably says it all. Sandman was the synthesis of all the things in life I cared about during a certain stretch of being a teenager—reading, listening to the Cure, and sleeping—and I think, had the Internet been more of a thing back then, I would’ve gotten into comics way sooner. I don’t have some big story about what put me off at first. There were two shops in my little town, and the first one, the crummy one, was run by a guy who was really friendly; I remember talking with him about Charles Vess, who was a regular there. But his shop was just these tables full of dusty old boxes that I didn’t really want to touch, much less rummage through. (And for what? Where do you even start in a place like that?) The other shop was staffed by a handful of condescending deviants and the two most sullen boys from my high school, and that place was Classic Comics: big dark room with cardboard boobs everywhere. The vague sense that someone was masturbating in the back.

"The Cipher"

tfw your entire backstory could be printed

on your vagina thong (All images in this post

are from All-Time Comics, coming in 2017.)

Years later, my college boyfriend gave me some graphic novels (the Dark Phoenix Saga, Watchmen, stuff like that) and I liked them. I liked them a lot, actually, Watchmen especially. But at the same time there was something sort of off-putting about that situation that’s hard to articulate—this sense in which they were offered as a project for my betterment. That’s a feeling that has persisted through the years, and so over time I’ve compiled this large, diffuse category of boring things that men have tried to talk me into caring about--Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, jazz music, all of history, sports. Marvel Comics.

At some point I moved to Chicago and started reading Chris Ware. Man, I really loved Jimmy Corrigan. I still do. By then of course there was the blessed Internet, but for whatever reason moving past Ware didn't happen for a while. Eventually I gravitated towards indie for a lot of reasons, one being the toxic culture stuff that I had first sensed in that dimly lit circle-jerk shop of my youth. As it turns out there’s some of that in indie too, but with superhero stuff there’s also this thing where a lot of the talk surrounding those comics in particular is boring to me. I rarely know what anyone is talking about, and nothing I ever hear makes me want to learn more. So much trivia, so many people who seem a little too caught up in the historicity of comics. Knowledge often used in service of scoring points by people with something to prove. That's not everyone, of course, but first impressions are hard to shake.

"The 'Urban' One"

where to start...I like that his alias is pretty much "the 

black one." I like that he's a disgruntled criminal vs the 

white Captain America guy's Mr. Perfect. (V transgressive.) 

Finally I really really like that his origin story is being 

"overwhelmed by pervasive despair of his urban surroundings" 

where everyone's in jail or using heroin. Is one of the All-Time 

Comics villains the Mexican Rapist, because this straight-up 

sounds like Trump to me.

I think that COPRA has changed my mind. I came to it late, in spring 2016, but my timing was good. Just a few weeks after I read Round One this thing by Abhay Khosla came out. That piece talked about the merits of the comic in a way I’d found lacking in a lot of the stuff I’d just read through online, but more than that, it was speaking my language—talking about movies in a way that I used to think about poetry and painting. Around that same time (it might have been the same week, even) I heard some of the story of Bergen Street Comics. Comics being Comics, I think there’s a good chance you knew that place, if you’re reading this. I did not, but I liked hearing about it. There was a way in which that shop—its wares, its philosophy, its look and feel, the whole deal—sounded like the antithesis of that circle-jerk shop in my hometown. I could hear in the story of that place the same democratic type of vibe I perceived in reading COPRA…a form of inclusion that isn’t about Inclusion, with the capital letter, as a promotions tactic or an end in itself, but as an implicit assumption that this is just the way that things should be. I don't need to read a press release about how they're for everyone; I can sense for myself that there's no one masturbating in the back, if you will. Consider the title of this interview that Chris Mautner did with Michel Fiffe, “My Aim Is to Be as Appealing as Possible,” and in a nutshell that describes an attitude I find to be sorely lacking in comics. (In fact it sometimes seems to me that comics tries to be as unappealing as possible.) To be clear, being as appealing as possible isn’t about pitching to the lowest common denominator or crafting an effective elevator pitch. It’s about creating a world—whether it’s on the page or on the Internet or IRL—that different kinds of people want to spend time in. That’s what Fiffe does. That’s what my favorite comics writers do. That’s what comics shops should strive for, and often don’t. Or so I’m told. I don't exactly seek them out.

So anyway these three things—Fiffe’s comic, that Savage Critic essay, the Bergen St milieu—kind of came together like pieces of a puzzle for me to form this expression of superhero fandom that was not repulsive or arrogant or pathological or boring. Here it was actually about sharing the love of a thing. Which is a little sad, because that's what fandom should always be about, right? But that's not a type of fandom that I perceive in comics very often, anyway (even on the indie side). Instead a lot of times fandom is about the ownership of a thing, or the worship of a thing, or mounting a defense for a thing, or explaining a thing. The eminence of some fucking thing. For the first time this whole swath of comics that had just seemed gross to me was suddenly…appealing? I didn’t just want to read that stuff—I felt excited to read that stuff in a way I hadn’t felt excited about reading in a while. Those people showed me what they love about those comics without litigating their importance or perfection, and I could see for myself why they're worth reading. Though of course it’s still hard to know where to start.

"The Perfect One"

Just super impressed by this perfect white man. 

Legit lol @ one of his superpowers being "to absorb 

tremendous trauma." 

Around the same time as all of the above I was watching Jessica Jones, thinking about it in terms of Marvel’s own attempt to be “as appealing as possible”—what that entailed, and why, and who it seemed to be appealing to. All sorts of people liked Jessica Jones, I’m sure, but the many, many takes I was reading at the time were almost exclusively written by men. There’s a certain indignity in sitting down to write about your messed-up feelings about some dumb show to see that Arthur Fucking Chu has deemed it “a huge feminist achievement,” or that Vulture's resident fanboy used the occasion of its saddest sex scene to write about his horny level. (Spoiler alert: horny level = high.) I was keeping this long list of idiotic quotes about Jessica Jones from these men who seemed to me distinctly unqualified to talk about feminism, or maybe anything. I hated the discussion around that show. I hated the show itself. I hated the writing, the acting, just all of it.

In lieu of unpacking all that, I’ll just tell you about a scene in Episode 6 where Luke Cage—upon learning that Jessica was raped, tortured, and forced to murder his wife—says, and I quote, “You let me be inside of you.” You know, referring to the fact that they had fucked. That isn't an appropriate thing to say to anyone you’re fucking, particularly if you just found out that they were raped and forced to murder someone. And yeah, okay, that someone was Luke’s wife, but he knew even as he said "You let me be inside you" that Jessica didn’t really kill her; Kilgrave did. Why that was portrayed as a trauma that Jessica inflicted on Luke, rather than a trauma that had been inflicted on Jessica, is one of many questions I have about that show.

“You let me be inside of you.” Yeah, no, I cannot. But I’ll tell you who can: men, who universally sympathized with Luke in that scene in their reviews. Just as a sampling, let’s take a look at what some of the boys of comics had to say:

“He had a right to be furious, especially because Jessica doesn’t have any defense.” –Oliver Sava, at AV Club

(Oh, I don’t know, maybe Jessica’s defense was that she was raped and forced to murder someone and now she’s all fucked up. Just spitballin’ here, Oliver.)

“Declaring her a piece of shit, with ample justification, he walks off.” –Sean T. Collins, at Decider

(Feels like I should acknowledge that the parts I read of Collins’ take on that show seemed better than a lot of what's out there? But...)

When Zainab asked me to do Critical Chips, I told her I was going to write about Jessica Jones or COPRA, and ended up writing about both. Sometimes you just have to go with your own weird shit. I found it interesting, hating this show that was clearly meant to appeal to me, and being really into this comic that seemed mostly to appeal to people who aren’t like me at all. (I mean, I'm sure plenty of different people read COPRA. But mostly men write about it, and their comics backgrounds are more or less the opposite of my own.) My essay ended up being about a lot of things. Too many things. And the problem with trying to say a lot is that you don’t really have enough time to say any of it especially well, so it was arguably a mistake to spend so much space making a point that the Savage Critic piece had already made quite ably: that for all the things COPRA has to say about fandom, it’s wrongheaded to think of it as a work of glorified fan fiction. But it’s just crazy to me how much emphasis that gets. Because for all its referents and nods to its forebears, COPRA’s most salient feature is that it’s fiercely special.

Ah yes, another article praising Fantagraphics for its irony...

that old chestnut. But seriously I find All-Time Comics writer 

Josh Bayer's assertion that he wants to "diversify superhero

fandom with his vagina thong comic...fascinating?

That piece indirectly discussed another place where a lot of considerations of COPRA go wrong, which is in talking about the story as a weakness or an afterthought. The consensus seems to be that Fiffe is more of a visual artist than a writer, right? The TCJ review of Round One (which epitomizes everything under discussion here) says, “Perhaps it does not matter that the storytelling falters, because there is no real story being told, no point to get across”--a sentiment I've read in a lot of different places. To me the story seems quite consciously postmodern: meta, skeptical, and probing. Postmodern stuff has a tendency to skew cold and technical, which is why the story works so well with the warmth and enthusiasm conveyed by the art. (It's a work of checks and balances in other ways, too, where Fiffe's palpably insane work ethic is tempered by his forward momentum, heavy violence is cut with aesthetic distance, etc.) Fiffe wisely skirts irony, though I think he pokes fun at himself a little. (There’s something about the way in which the details are so super specific, yet don’t matter at all. Also I'd point to the way in which the super recognizable, hyper-masculine tone of the text doesn't drip with derision like the hardboiled cliches of, say, Alan Moore's Rorschach.) Anyway it’s curious to me that so many people who plainly love superhero comics fail to see the story’s cleverness and humor. Maybe that’s even more of a testament to the stereotypes of genre than whatever derision superhero comics still receive from more literary types. Comics in general seems to lag behind every other area of culture in its insistence on harping about "high" and "low," and the inability to let go of these outdated binaries is the reason we have this absurd situation wherein Fantagraphics, an art comics publisher, is about to put out an "ironic" superhero comic that will almost certainly wind up perpetuating the same old shit it purports to rail against. Lord, even Marvel seems to have figured out that vacant ladies with big titties and vagina thongs being "mysterious" around some white hero who's overcome so...very...much is not a storyline that plays to a diverse audience in what will soon be the year of our lord 2017. Literally the last thing I want or need from a comic is for a man to explain to me why vagina thongs are "art." That is not appealing to me--or, I will wager, people like me--at all. Had Fantagraphics thought to include a single woman on the large team of people collaborating to produce All-Time Comics, they might have learned this lesson the easy way. Contrast the high-concept inclusion projects of Fanta (like its Pepe bs and All-Time Comics) and, to a lesser degree, the PR tactics of Drawn & Quarterly with the output of a smaller publisher like 2dCloud, and there is a whole separate essay to be written about the landscape of art comics publishing today.

I guess the thought I’d like to leave you with here at the end of the year is how there’s this way in which a whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. That's such a platitude, but for me it holds true across a lot of things. Especially comics. Especially COPRA. I think about all those reviews that center Suicide Squad, and I don't doubt that decrypting those references would deepen my understanding of Fiffe's series. Reading any artist who's coming to grips with their influences or is remotely interested in interrogating their own preoccupations, that is going to be the case. As an analogy, I mentioned T.S. Eliot's footnotes for The Waste Land in that Critical Chips thing, and it's true that reading those helped me understand that poem. But in another way I found that process limiting and limited—limiting because of the way in which that homework distracts from the poem’s greatness as its own thing. Limited because an explanation can only say so much. That’s a thing people often don’t get about T.S. Eliot, which is partly his own fault; like so many men, he was very fond of explanation. But he also knew its limits. In Eliot’s final footnote on the last words of The Waste Land:

Shantih, shantih, shantih

he explains, in that wry, poignant tone of his, how the line is untranslatable:

Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is a feeble translation of the content of this word.

I think about that a lot, because commenting on art, whether you love it or hate it or something in between, the challenge becomes saying something that transcends "feeble translation." People love to talk about the ~Magic of Comics~ in technical terms, breaking down the anatomy of a page or panel to demonstrate its ability to shoulder so many different meanings at once. Such explanations have their place, but mostly I find them to be the ShamWow! commercials of comics writing. Real magic--that feeling you get reading the stuff that's the best of the best, in comics and in all art--is not a thing you can dissect. That is not to say it's inscrutable. Whichever parts won't fit in the footnotes...those are the ones I really want to talk about.


-----------

This was a companion post to my essay on COPRA and Jessica Jones, which was printed in Critical Chips, a zine of comics criticism put together by Zainab Akthar. That piece has been posted here because there was a production snafu with mine, in print and digital. I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that I’m a fussy nightmare person—not in some evolved way that means I’m organized or anything useful like that, but in a pathological way that makes very small things that no one else will ever notice matter to me. Do me a solid and read it as it was written...unless you’ve read it already, in which case I'll live. Somehow. Some way.

It’s a strange coincidence, but a good one I think, to close out 2016 with three posts that talked about one comic I really like, even if two of them were a dumb link and an anal reprint. I wonder if this is a just a website about COPRA now? I should almost certainly write at least 10 more posts on it before I finish that draft about how much I hated Fun Home the musical. Still, the beat goes on, and there's little doubt I'll go back to hating everything in 2017. I'm nearly faint with anticipation for how hard I'm gonna hate All-Time Comics this Spring...unless it's good, which it won't be. Because seriously, that comic looks like shit.

A real fun fact about me that maybe doesn't always come across is that I’m intensely cynical and absurdly emo at the same time. (“The worst of both worlds”--this is the O’Connor promise. I don't think we have a crest or anything but my ancestors carved it into all their potatoes.) As someone who has, for reasons I can neither defend nor explain, taken an interest in some of the more dispiriting facets of comics culture, I rarely do emo these days, but I’ll tell you what: it’s a pleasure to find something nice to say once in a while. I should do it more often. 

Happy holidays? xx

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comics links!

I'd like to thank art comics for being as ridiculous as possible lately so I have this outlet for all my weird holiday/US dystopia shit. Let's do some links...

1. Fantagraphics launches COPRA for Dummies
Holy hell, can you even believe it? Gary Groth is doing superheroes?!?

Well, yeah, actually, I totally believe that, because COPRA has been literally the best thing going for years and Gary Groth is nothing if not the Ghost of Christmas Past, except 1000% more white and sexist.

I'd like to share with you my fantasy: Gary Groth is on the phone in the Fantagraphics basement, gripping a big old-fashioned handset. It is made of red plastic, and it is not connected to a phone line, nor even the base of a phone. NO MATTER: This is the conference call that will decide which white dudes will be on the Fanta All Time Comics team.

GARY: Listen, fella. Gotta put the Fantagraphics stamp on this. Who's our biggest piece of shit satire guy? 

GARY (in a different pair of sunglasses): Well, we already got the clown who does the rap comics. But listen, we gotta get Johnny, Gar.  

GARY: Who? Keep in mind this guy should be somewhat shitty at drawing.  

GARY (in a third pair of sunglasses): I'm telling you Johnny Ryan's our guy. 

GARY: Does he hate women tho? The idea is that this should be as status quo as possible, yet "punk"

GARY: No one knows, Gar Bear. Johnny's our finest Post-Dumb. 

GARY: Perfect. Hey, is Comics Sufjan available? This thing is going to need some sort of credibility.

~fin~

(NB: Noah VS...wat? why?)

Look...COPRA is a comic that borrows, so I'm not going to go in on All Time Comics too hard for being a ripoff. Ripping off COPRA is fair, and anyway this project has been in the works for a while, so who knows what happened when. Also? I actually want it to be good. (I mean...it won't be good. But if it is, I'll be the first to admit it. I'm certainly going to read it with interest.) I think the cover has some good stuff going on, though I will note that even the color palette strongly echoes COPRA #1.

 

Bottom line, I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. I will say this: I read an interview with All Time Comics creator/head writer Josh Bayer over at CBR, and I felt pretty confused reading all that without ever once seeing the words "Michel Fiffe."

Me being me, you can just about guess how much I laughed about the one-dimensional the Fanta*stic™ lady superhero, Bullwhip, who appears on the cover in one of those S&M leotards from American Apparel, is. Says Bayer:

Bullwhip is really interesting because she’s like Cher or Madonna. She doesn’t have a backstory or a secret identity, she just is Bullwhip. This lack of history actually makes her more exciting to write about because her personality as Bullwhip just seems to glow brighter, knowing she’s not concealing one personality behind another.

FYI, Bullwhip's nemesis is called "The Misogynist."

GARY (urgently, to GARY): The Misogynist is calling from inside the house. 

2. God bless Colin Spacetwinks for explaining the direct market to me
I'm really very fond of twitter user Colin Spacetwinks, the author of what may well be my second favorite tweet of all time:

Until yesterday, it probably would've been my favorite tweet of all time, but then this happened:

I should quit twitter now, and maybe the internet altogether, because i will never see anything funnier than Kurt Eichenwald bragging about his large sons. My god, one of them does kung fu. It's definitely all downhill from here.

Anyway, Colin's epic explainer was quite helpful to me personally, as a comics ignoramus. I've always assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that all Big Comics fans carry this level of knowledge in their hearts, so I'm not 100% sure who the intended audience is here. That said: this is good. I fell asleep in the middle where the numbers got real granular, but at least 75% of comics people love that type of shit, right?

I was born to love a novella-length rant titled "The Problem with Comics," but also I learned some stuff. I recommend it.

3. J.A. Micheline on bias
Based on the totally unscientific sample of the few times a day I scroll through Twitter, I've been surprised to see (polite) pushback on this piece on bias by J.A. Micheline. 100% cosigned, J.A. Micheline. IMO "bias" in comics is usually gendered or racist or both. Mostly a useless construct.

There is no such thing as objective criticism. People who act like they're neutral scientists of comics? Those are the ones you have to watch.

4. Roman Muradov Alert
NEW ROMAN MURADOV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Roman Muradov is too good and pure for this nightmare world, so there's no way in hell he's going to tell you that his new book is out early on Amazon dot com. Luckily ya girl is a dirtbag whose copy is scheduled to arrive on Sunday--fucking Sunday, because I'm not going to read this comic unless it's delivered by an orphan piloting an Uber drone that drops this book in my actual bed.

If I were a better person I'd pre-order it from Uncivilized, though. Uncivilized is great.