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Express. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express.
Confusion reigns at Elland Road
Brian McDermott's future as Leeds manager remains unresolved after an astounding 24 hours at Elland Road.
McDermott was told on Friday night he had been removed from his position by someone acting on behalf of the club's prospective new owner, Massimo Cellino, who also owns Serie A club Cagliari.
Club sponsors said they would review their backing in protest and it appeared that Gianluca Festa, the former Middlesbrough defender and a long-term friend of Cellino, would take over the team, especially after Leeds' owners confirmed they had agreed a sale to the 57-year-old agricultural entrepreneur.
Within the day, though, a side managed by McDermott's assistant Nigel Gibbs had beaten Huddersfield 5-1 and Leeds released a statement saying McDermott had not been sacked after all.
Those were the headline incidents to run alongside a number of farcical and often comedic ones which were hard to keep abreast of, including McDermott declining a request to attend the match.
"The club would like to make it clear that Brian McDermott remains our first team manager," a statement said.
"He has not been dismissed from his post as has been suggested and we look forward to him continuing in his role with us in taking Leeds United forwards."
The statement caught everyone by surprise but should not have done after a crazy chain of events.
Earlier, the League Manager's Association said it was waiting for clarification of the situation, with Cellino's takeover still subject to Football League approval.
An LMA statement said: "Brian received a call last night from a solicitor informing him that Leeds United were terminating his contract as manager.
"This morning Brian received a further phone call from a director of the football club stating the company on whose behalf the solicitor had contacted Brian are not the owners of Leeds United.
"In the circumstances, Brian was asked by the directors of the club not to take the match today and we are awaiting clarification of the situation over the weekend."
Gibbs, McDermott's long-standing number two, answered the call to lead the team against Huddersfield in his place before facing the media afterwards.
"I was coming to the game anyway because I had not heard from the club," Gibbs said.
"I was asked at 12.15pm. (Managing director) David Haigh asked me to take the team and I told the players.
"The team was prepared by Brian. It's his team, his performance and his victory. It's been unusual to say the least."
Gibbs added that McDermott had called him to wish him luck before the game, but admitted he did not know what his boss would make of the club's apparent olive branch.
At one stage it had looked as if Festa and not Gibbs would take the team but he chose to watch from an executive box instead.
Current owners Gulf Finance House Capital (GFH Capital) confirmed the news of Cellino's offer in a statement ahead of the Huddersfield game, although Cellino had already made his presence felt before then by attempting to remove McDermott on Friday night.
McDermott had refused to allow Festa to sit with him in the dugout during the midweek draw with Ipswich, and also refused to take a number of Italian players given to him by Cellino.
The mayhem continued as two of the club's main sponsors, Enterprise Insurance and Flamingo Land, said they would be withdrawing their backing.
And police were called to Elland Road on Friday as fans did their best to barricade Cellino inside the ground after some late-night talks. Those protests continued outside the ground ahead of kick-off.
None of that has stopped GFH Capital from choosing Cellino's bid over one from rival consortium Together Leeds, though.
A statement read: "Following recent media reports and speculation, GFH Capital would like to confirm that it has agreed to sell a 75 per cent stake in the club to Eleonora Sport Ltd, a company owned by the Cellino family who have many years' experience in football and who plan to invest substantially in the club including the re-acquisition of Elland Road.
"Eleonora will be working on completing the required Football League approval."
Cellino became the number one bidder on Thursday when a consortium of club managing director David Haigh and Enterprise Insurance boss Andrew Flowers collapsed after two months of exclusivity to buy the club under the guise of Sport Capital.
Cellino could still face opposition from the Football League - he has a previous conviction for fraud - while a consortium headed up by former Manchester United director Mike Farnan says it is refusing to go away despite the statement.
The Italian influence at Elland Road continues to grow, though, with Cagliari confirming that Leeds had signed midfielder Andrea Tabanelli on loan from them, with Leeds later adding him to the squad list on their website. He was not named to face Huddersfield, though.


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The National Atheist Party is an excited sponsor of the Reason Rally. In addition to having a booth with information and our leaders open for question the National Atheist Party is also celebrating it 1st Birthday.
The National Atheist Party is cordially inviting you for our 1ST ANNIVERSARY PARTY and Reason Rally Meet and Greet. The event will be on the Saturday evening after the REASON RALLY for all those who are interested in learning more about the party, meeting other members, leadership or just to meet other like-minded people who are ready to start making a difference in the future of this amazing country. We would love to hear your voice, your ideas and make them become part of our platform! This is your night!
We will meet at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill
400 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
We need to collect $20.00 per person to help with the costs of food. If you are a privileged person and can make an additional donation, you will be helping us offset other costs. We really appreciate your contribution!
There will be a cash bar and maybe a DJ (if you have DJ skills or know someone who does and would like to volunteer, please contact us).
Views: 233
Wish I could make the rally...it is great of you guys to put this on!
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The 70,000-member, $1.7 billion Technology Credit Union of San Jose, Calif., has broken new ground in its attempt to convert to a mutual bank charter.
The credit union has downplayed more frequently heard arguments for why its members should vote to discard the credit union charter in favor of a set of unusual contentions that cite Debbie Matz and raise the possibility that the credit union tax exemption may be repealed.
The credit union's board of directors notified members in October 2011 that it was considering proposing the credit union convert to a mutual savings bank. Technology Credit Union's arguments in favor of the move came in the packet of disclosures that the NCUA mandates the credit union send to members in advance of voting on whether or not to make the change.
In broad strokes, Technology advanced familiar arguments. Becoming a bank will enable it to offer more products and services than it can as a credit union, Technology wrote. Becoming a bank would enable it to serve a greater number of people without a field of membership restrictions, it added. But the newer parts of the arguments made their appearance in the details.
For example, when advancing the position about member business lending, Technology took the approach of citing Matz to bolster its contentions.
The credit union said its board found it "prudent" to address the need to make more business loans before it approached the MBL cap of 12.25% of assets. It quoted Matz's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on June 16, 2011.
"As noted by NCUA Chairman Debbie Matz in her statement….regarding the member business lending cap, 'With the [member business lending] cap, it is difficult to achieve the necessary economies of scale in terms of personnel and systems to make this type of program cost effective,'" the credit union wrote.
Technology also cited Matz from the same hearing saying the member business lending cap "limits credit unions' abilities to diversify their loan portfolios."
As of the end of March, the credit union reported $88 million. or between 5% and 6% of assets, in member business loans.
In addition, in an appendix, the credit union also advanced the argument that the likelihood that credit unions faced taxation meant that its members should consider becoming a bank now. Technology noted that a subcommittee of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board had listed eliminating the federal tax exemption for large credit unions as a possible way of raising federal revenues.
"While we cannot predict whether credit unions will lose their federal tax-exempt status, the Tech CU Board and management believe….that the repeal of the tax exemption, particularly for large credit unions such as Tech CU, has in recent years become a possibility to be considered and, as a result, consider this as one of many factors in evaluating the charter change," the credit union wrote.
However, in other ways, Technology Credit Union continued to use strategies adopted by other credit union seeking charter change, including offering cash and other prizes to encourage members to vote in the conversion balloting.
In a brochure accompanying the conversion disclosures, Technology offered members a chance to win $15,000 in cash and four Apple iPads as an inducement to vote.
The brochure said changing the charter would allow the credit union to "offer a full range of innovative products and services" as well as "maintain our competitive pricing on deposit products and low loan rates and fees" and "provide the financial resources to help you achieve both your personal and financial goals."
The brochure also said that participation in CO-OP Financial Services fee-free ATM network would continue, though it acknowledged that shared branching would end.
Member reaction to the disclosures has been largely quiet, but a few members have begun to speak up in opposition.
Retired quality control manager Robert Marinace, a member of Technology since 1978, expressed skepticism that member business lending was enough of a reason to stop being a credit union. The 84-year-old member said he suspected the desire among credit union insiders to reap a windfall from issuing stock as a bank was largely responsible for the credit union's enthusiasm for the charter change, even though the credit union has said it does not plan, as of now, to issue stock as a bank. "There is an awful lot of money, millions of dollars, which can be made from this," he said.
Carlos Rodriguez, an entrepreneur and former credit union employee, objected to the proposed conversion on a number of grounds. He said he believes credit unions provide a more socially responsible and effective approach to financial services.
He also said he severely questioned some of the credit union management's assertions, such as the notion that it could necessarily serve more people as a bank than as a credit union.
Rodriguez, who acknowledged being a strong supporter of credit unions, pointed to the credit union's March 2012 Call Report in which Technology reported that the population of possible members in its four-county field of membership stood at 1 million, which the credit union has only managed to draw just over 69,000 members.
Rodriguez belongs to Technology as well as other California credit unions, and he has launched a Facebook page called Please Don't Go to convince the credit union and its members not to leave the charter.
"Tech CU, you say it's you not me," Rodriguez wrote in the introduction to linked video he posted from Willie Nelson. "It's hard to hear that you think you'll be happier as a mutual savings BANK instead of a credit union. Was it something I said?"
Rodriguez said he has been a member of Technology Credit Union since April of this year and that he joined because he wanted to establish a tie with a credit union in the San Jose community where he is starting up a new firm. He said he found out about the attempted charter change when he went into the credit union to open a business account.
"I explained to the representative that I really wanted to bring my business account to a credit union, and the representative was kind enough to say, 'Oh, well, you should know that we are moving to become a mutual bank,'" Rodriquez recounted, adding, "needless to say I didn't open my account at Tech CU."
"I know it will sound corny," Rodriquez said, "but I believe in credit unions because, when they do things correctly, they can be among the single most powerful weapons against poverty."


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BOCA RATON, FL -- Florida Atlantic University plans to have its new $11 million recreation and fitness center open for business when students return to campus next month, according to a local media report.
The 38,100-square-foot facility was originally projected to open Jan. 5, but it is still awaiting inspector approval. The new center includes a 6,600-square-foot fitness center, two fitness studios for aerobics, yoga, Pilates and spinning, as well as a multipurpose gymnasium for group sports. The fitness center will include 40 pieces of cardio equipment, two circuit training units, a free weight area and a stretching area.
The center will be free for students, while employees can pay for annual memberships. Borelli + Partners Inc. of Miami, FL, is the architect on the project.


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text:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Videogame publisher Electronic Arts has begun laying off staff at its Montreal game studio in its latest round of jobs cuts, less than a month after former Chief Executive John Riccitiello abruptly resigned.
The company, known for its "FIFA" and "Sims" games, declined to divulge the number of jobs affected, or how many employees it has in Montreal, where it has developed console games like "Army of Two".
"EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile. In some cases, this involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organization," the Redwood City, California-based company said in a statement.
The Montreal studio, which includes a team that makes mobile games, is not closing, a spokesman said. He declined to say which teams within the studio had been affected by the job cuts.
The layoffs come shortly after John Riccitiello stepped down as CEO on March 30, after taking responsibility for missed operational targets.
Former CEO and Chairman Larry Probst has been appointed executive chairman as the company begins its search for the next CEO.
EA and rivals like Activision Blizzard Inc. have seen growth fall off sharply as more gamers flock to free games on social networks or on mobile devices. The biggest traditional games publishers have tried to buy startups, reorganize existing studios and invest in mobile platforms but face intense competition from entrenched players like Rovio or Zynga Inc.
EA has been reorganizing studios to embrace new game platforms and adapt to consumer behavior. Last year, EA's PopCap unit, which makes social and mobile games, laid off 50 of about 380 staff members in its Seattle and Vancouver studios to focus on free-to-play social and mobile games.


text:
My Recent Searches
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To view specimen requirements and codes please Select a regional laboratory.Not sure which laboratory serves your office? Call us 866-MYQUEST (866-697-8378)
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The CPT codes provided are based on AMA guidelines and are for informational purposes only. CPT coding is the sole responsibility of the billing party. Please direct any questions regarding coding to the payer being billed.
* The tests listed by specialist are a select group of tests offered. For a complete list of Quest Diagnostics tests, please refer to our Directory of Services.


text:
Oceanside vs. Farmingdale
Oceanside defeated Farmingdale, 2-1, in a Nassau baseball matchup on Monday.
We're revamping our Comments section. Learn more and share your input.
Suffolk Class AA quarterfinal: West Islip vs. Bellport Nassau Class AA semifinals: East Meadow vs. Massapequa Nassau Class A track and field championships Nassau Class AA semi: Oceanside vs. Massapequa Suffolk boys and girls badminton finals Suffolk boys track and field division championships Nassau Class AA track and field championships Nassau Class AAA track and field championships Nassau Class A semifinal: Syosset vs. Farmingdale Nassau Class A semifinals: Massapequa vs. Port Washington Suffolk girls track and field division championships LI boys tennis team final: Port Washington vs. Hills East Nassau boys golf individual championships CHSAA girls lacrosse final: St. Anthony's vs. Sacred Heart CHSAA softball final: St. Anthony's vs. Kellenberg Suffolk badminton individual championships Suffolk Class AA baseball playoffs: Floyd vs. Connetquot Suffolk girls golf individual championships Nassau girls golf individual championships CHSAA boys volleyball final: St. John the Baptist vs. Chaminade Nassau Class AA playoffs: Oceanside vs. Farmingdale CHSAA girls golf state championship Nassau boys tennis team final: Port Washington vs. Syosset Suffolk boys tennis team final: Hills East vs. Commack


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USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
This publication is issued by the Oklahoma Conservation Commission, in cooperation with the USDA Natural
Resources Conservation Service, as authorized by Mike Thralls, executive director. Copies have not been
printed but are available through the agency website, http://conservation.ok.gov. October 2011
Caston Mountain Creek
Watershed Project
The Caston Mountain Creek Watershed is located in the eastern part of LeFlore County. The town of Wister is in the lower reaches of the 47,000 acre watershed.
The watershed project consists of five flood control dams and the installation of conservation practices. The project was planned in 1965 and implemented by the LeFlore County Conservation District with the assistance of the Oklahoma Conservation Commission and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Program.
The five dams were constructed between 1972 and 1975. Flooding was a common occurrence before the dams were built with major floods occurring on an average of every five years (floods that cover more than one half of the floodplain) and smaller floods occurring annually. Annual storms destroyed crops, damaged pasture land, washed out roads, bridges, and fences, and deposited silt.
A 15-year frequency storm would cause flooding in the town of Wister. A storm in May 1961 flooded 104 acres of Wister and closed Highways 270 and 271. This storm caused $405,000 in damages.
The dams now protect Wister and agricultural land from flooding and has reduced erosion and sedimentation in the watershed.
The Caston Mountain Creek Watershed Project is one of 129* projects in Oklahoma that have been planned and implemented by local people with assistance from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Oklahoma Conservation Commission.
2,107 NRCS-assisted flood control dams have been constructed in 61 Oklahoma counties. These watershed projects, that also include thousands of conservation practices, provide over $81 million in average annual benefits.
For additional information about watershed projects in the state visit the Oklahoma Conservation Commission website at: http://conservation.ok.gov or visit your local conservation district and NRCS office.
This is one of 129* examples of how local, state and federal government agencies have worked together to utilize the Natural Resources Conservation Service Watershed Program to address natural resource needs and improve the quality of life for thousands of Oklahomans.
Caston Mountain Creek Watershed Project Benefits
Provides $845,000 in average annual benefits from reduced flood damages
Provides flood protection for the City of Wister
Provides flood protection for 1,700 acres of floodplain
Provides flood protection for bridges and county roads
Provides flood protection for 219 farms and ranches
Impounded water has created fish and wildlife habitat, waterfowl nesting areas and livestock water
Sedimentation is reduced by 35,000 tons of soil annually
150 acres of wetlands have been created or enhanced
Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.


text:
Urology Tyler, PA – Questions?
Urology Tyler, PA provides quality urological care for patients in East Texas.
Urology Tyler, PA Can Answer Questions Relating to:
1. What do I need to know about Prostate Cancer?
2. What are the different types of incontinence?
3. What are the most common Urologic problems in women?
4. What are the most common Urologic problems in men?
5. What are the causes of Kidney Stones?
6. How do you treat low Testosterone?
For a list of Urology Terms defined, go here.


text:
Lai iemācītos lidot, vajag mesties uz galvas zemē… un netrāpīt.
Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.
Believe you can and you're halfway there.
Continuous efforts – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.
Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.


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This is a look at two businesses. One financial the other legal. Both deal with sensitive information, rules and regulations. Both have training programs to give the tools needed to stay within accepted standards and compliance. Both are radically different.
With these two examples ask yourself who is better trained to handle difficult situations?
1. Training consists of 8 weeks of in class study during which the process, rules and regulations are learned. There is some applied training where the students are able to study situations as a means to gain experience. Students are tested at certain points. This allows for the trainers to verify at least a minimal understanding to perform the job. There are also group discussions which at times involve people who have experience. These veterans able to give real life experience as to what the new trainees can expect. There is some role playing between seasoned professionals and the new trainees.
After 8 weeks of in class training the new trainees are able to put what has been learned to practical use. While in a real environment there are seasoned people available to answer questions. There is also several weeks of quality control to make sure the new trainees are doing the work properly and to correct any issues right away. This type of mentoring and internship tapers off over time depending on how quickly the new trainee learns.
Throughout this training there is constant feedback to the new trainees. In the working environment that feedback is even more important as a mistake made could cost the company financially. Handling other people's money can become highly charged especially when something is perceived as going wrong. There are layers upon layers of company as well as legal rules and regulations involved to make sure those handling financial transactions are within compliance. Support from seasoned employees assures and reinforces the understanding that is needed to help customers while staying within compliance.
2. Training consists of 16 hours of in class study during which theory is learned. There may be some applied training where students are able to study situations as a means to gain experience. There is no testing during the 16 hours of training nor at the end.
After 16 hours of training there is no feedback to the new trainee. There is no mentoring or internship for the new trainee. Experience is gained at the expense of the consumer. There is no means of testing whether the new trainee is within compliance or whether or not there is a basic understanding of the rules that govern the way he/ she is to operate.
While dealing with a person's finances is a world apart from dealing with the complexities of a divorcing family there are similarities. Both can become highly charged when something is perceived as going wrong. Both can have a huge impact on the individual(s) involved both currently and into the future. It is the training though that defines how well one does the job in question.
With the training examples given we see the training one receives for handling people's money and for handling people's lives. We see that with one – the process given to train people is extremely careful in its approach. That there are tools and systems to give support so that errors may be caught before they become major issues and hurt a person or family. There are safeguards in place to help the trainee to continue to refine what has been learned and gain experience and to do so not at the expense of the consumer. With the other we see a training process that has been developed to handle people – children and families – who are in crisis and need help. The actions of these trainees have the very real possibility of scaring the people they are supposed to help. There are no tools to help the trainees at any time. Experience comes at the expense of the families and children. There are no safeguards in place to prevent this damage from happening. There are no systems to catch errors before they become issues.
The first is an example of a training process that is used by businesses. The second is used by the Judicial Branch in training Guardians ad litem. Would you rather have a Guardian ad litem who has gone through a training process that has clearly defined goals, offers some means to measure understanding and offers support through mentoring and internship programs? Or would you rather have someone who has gone through the current training process of sitting in a room and warming a seat for several hours?
The answer is obvious. The Judicial Branch has a training process for Guardians ad litem that in a business environment would fail to meet the needs of consumers. Under the current model the Judicial Branch would be overwhelmed with problems and it would either go out of business because of competition from businesses that have better training programs or it would change to meet the needs of those it is supposed to serve. But…. The Judicial Branch is not a business but a monopoly that is accountable to no one. It also has lost sight who it is supposed to serve – being more concerned with how the stakeholders will react than consumers. As a result sub-standard training is allowed and even encouraged. Where those that come up with the training (the stakeholders) curriculum do so based on their own experience. To say (or post on ones "Professional Trainings" page) that one has experience in developing training does not mean one has the necessary tools or experience to do so. Currently there is no cohesiveness in the goal of Guardian ad litem training.
The training for Guardians ad litem should be removed from the control of the Judicial Branch and the stakeholders that are enmeshed in deciding what is acceptable training. Training should be done by professionals who know and understand the goals that are to be achieved and have experience in developing curriculum.
Family Court and Guardian ad litem reform on Facebook or email us at firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Tom Spurgeon's Web site of comics news, reviews, interviews and commentary
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> CR Interviews
A Short Interview With Sean T. Collins
posted January 26, 2008
It's been a long year in North American mainstream comics, as
continue to do battle for the largest portion of the Direct Market revenue pie, the market for books and trades of that work continues to grow in significant fashion and have a greater say on how comics are published (although most of that success fails to match the heights reached by popular manga), and event book after event book primes an audience that is beginning to show signs of Armageddon Exhaustion. Having started as one of the prime forces behind the comics interested articles in the
Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly
, having most recently worked for
before being let go this year, and being an adult superhero comics reader who came to them with almost no experience with them as a child and therefore maybe the only writer-about-comics out there lacking the nostalgia gene, the writer and one-time anchor of the on-line comics commentary world
Sean Collins
offers what I think is a unique perspective on events in the costumed corner of the comics world. -- Tom Spurgeon
Sean, I don't know a whole lot about you before you showed up on-line.
Ha, I like the way you phrased that. Sort of like how one fine day a ship arrived at the
Grey Havens
and off hopped
, and
those two blue wizards
who would be my lead characters if I ever wrote Tolkien fanfic.
Bonus points, then, if it involves being sent East to combat
, but is there a cocktail party version of how you went from reading comics to writing about them at
Abercrombie & Fitch
? How did comics gain a foothold there in the first place?
Actually, before I worked at A&F I was barely reading comics at all. I'd only started reading them in high school and mostly stopped in college, except for anything by
Frank Miller
and the occasional thing by
Alan Moore
and eventually, thanks to a roommate's donations,
ACME Novelty Library
Savage Dragon
. Then one day I flipped through a copy of
that was on the desk of my boss at A&F, Savas Abadsidis, a fanboy through and through. I forget which issue it was but there was a piece on the upcoming
Grant Morrison
Frank Quitely
Joe Casey
Ian Churchill
relaunch of
. I remembered Morrison's name from
Arkham Asylum
and decided to swing by the store, which was
Jim Hanley's
a couple blocks from Penn Station into which I commuted every day, to pick up his and Casey's first issues. The rest was history. Being in Hanley's on a regular basis exposed me to the whole panoply of alternative comics, and since I was spending Abercrombie's money I vowed to buy one book a week by someone I'd never even heard of before. That's how I picked up
The Last Lonely Saturday
Jordan Crane
, which led me to
, which led me to
, and blammo, comics nerd.
So comics got a foothold at A&F simply through Savas and I being readers. He'd already been running reviews of graphic novels pretty much one per issue when I got there, and I just brought another voice saying things like, "Hey, let's interview
Brian Michael Bendis
Art Spiegelman
" to the table. He and I also liked to use comics artists as illustrators, which led to guys like Jordan and
Nick Bertozzi
working for us.
As you can tell, I am for shit at cocktail parties.
Why did you end up leaving A&F and how did you end up with the gig at
came under regular fire from Christian conservatives for its, oh, let's say relaxed attitude toward sex, as evidenced by both
Bruce Weber
's racy photos of naked collegiate types and by the editorial content, which was my bailiwick. Right around the time that
Joe Scarborough
did a segment echoing the Catholic League/Concerned Women for America line that the
constituted "porn for kids" or whatever the fuck, I believe the company's bottom line was taking an unrelated and ultimately short-lived downturn, and the
was canceled, I think mostly as an effort to show the shareholders, "Hey, we're doing something." To quote
Shogun Assassin
, it was a bad time for the empire.
While I was at the
I made the acquaintance of
Tom DeSanto
. He had a relationship with
for obvious reasons and put in a good word for me there. They liked the freelance assignment I did for them, an interview with
Geoff Johns
Green Lantern: Rebirth
, and brought me aboard to work in their Special Projects department.
How would you describe your specific interest in comics? What core elements drive your interest in the art form?
Wow. You know, those are hard questions! It's like asking me what drives my interest in rock and roll or movies. I honestly couldn't tell you why I'm so focused on comics as opposed to, like, prose fiction. I guess it's the sense that comics is the last Wild West medium. You can pretty much do whatever the hell you want, be as weird as you want, and still be published and find a passionate audience for it. That makes me feel passionate. The feeling I get when I crack open a comic is pretty close to that feeling I get when the lights go down in a movie theater or the opening notes of a really great record come on, only if anything I think I get it more often and more viscerally from comics than I do from movies. Comics are fun, even or especially when they're really just brutal and dark and awful.
Lately there are two sort of vibes that get me going in terms of comics. In genre comics, it's what I've come to call "the art of enthusiasm" -- a creator taking all sorts of stuff that they find awesome about the art they enjoy and presenting it for your enjoyment as filtered and expanded through their own imaginations. Things like
Ed Brubaker
Matt Fraction
Immortal Iron Fist
, Geoff Johns's
Green Lantern
Bryan Lee O'Malley's
Scott Pilgrim
In art comics, I find the way I interact with them getting closer and closer to the way I interact with music. So I like the short story format because it's like listening to one good song. I get fired up by the tension and rhythm of repetition. I like the elements to sort of jangle against each other at angles, almost in abstract fashion, so that the impact is primarily emotional rather than intellectual, which is how I listen to music -- I mean, I can really really love a song and not be able to tell you what it's "about" at all, maybe not even be able to sing more than a lyric or two, but I really really love that song. I'm thinking of
Anders Nilsen
's comics in
The End
, and
Monologues for the Coming Plague
Kevin Huizenga
stuff like "Sunset" or "Untitled,"
John Hankiewicz
. I can't even tell you how much all of those excited me this past year. And yet I also loved finding out that there's a whole rainbow of Lantern Corps floating around the
. It's still rock 'n' roll to me.
How have your comics reading habits changed by the kind of work writing about comics that you do? How has writing about comics changed the way you read comics?
My reading habits I'm not really sure about, but my buying habits definitely have, because I've been fortunate enough and successful enough in writing about comics to be granted free access, in one way or another, to around 75 percent of anything I'd want to read. This has decreased somewhat since
let me go, but I'm still better off than most. So I tend to only buy alternative comics at cons like
where I'm coming across books I didn't have access to before, and I never buy pamphlets at all if it can be helped. I buy trades from the big superhero and manga companies at
I don't know if writing about comics have changed what comics I read or how I read them. I think it's like
Jog told Chris Mautner
-- when I write about comics, or anything else, I'm basically just jotting down thoughts I'd have had anyway. I do feel like the more I read comics the more I understand what I like and don't like about them. And there are a handful of critics who've unlocked pathways in my brain toward understanding such things better than I did before.
I've never talked to anyone who worked at
before. What was the atmosphere like at
? What was the office culture like? Was there anything that linked all of the employees there -- say a certain age, or a love for a certain kind of comic -- or drove employees into various camps?
The thing that linked every person I knew there on the creative end of things -- editorial, design, and research -- is that they loved comics. I think there's one exception and he knows who he is and probably wouldn't mind if you knew who he was either, but he dug the pop culture stuff we covered just as much as the rest of us dig funnybooks. No one on the creative end was there for a paycheck. Heh, to a fault.
That said, definitions of "comics" varied wildly. There were and are certainly people there who fit the stereotypical
-fan mold in terms of viewing Vertigo as "indie comics" and not reading anything black and white, who love
Identity Crisis
and early-'80s Marvel but think
Jack Kirby's Fourth World
books suck because
Granny Goodness
is a silly-sounding name. Then there are the people who you've probably heard about because they'd write things that'd get linked to by yourself and Dirk Deppey -- the Brian Warmoths and Kiel Phegleys and David Paggis and Rickey Purdins of the world -- who like independent comics, alternative comics, and webcomics and fought to cover them. And then in between you have people who are predominantly superhero readers but tackle them the way a normal critic would tackle art, rather than the weird insular approach where they're only ever judged against other superhero comics and by some standard of "accuracy" in terms of whether or not Wolverine would actually say that or what have you.
Those are the creative types. Then there was the business end, advertising and conventions and the online store and production and finance and marketing and the head honchos, or what we referred to amongst ourselves as "upstairs" because they occupied the second floor of
's two-story office building in semi-upstate New York. Discretion is the better part of valor here, methinks. It is safe to say that upstairs is a culture unto itself.
I think in terms of the way
's internal culture affects its coverage, the biggest problem is an unwillingness to look or fear of looking beyond the direct market comics buyer for potential
buyers and readers. That leads to a self-fulfilling mandate in terms of what kind of books are covered and what isn't, even when the folks making the call would just as soon cover something that they're saying no to. It's not just non-superhero comics that are affected by this, by the way. This mindset kept the magazine from really covering broader non-superhero nerd-culture phenomena like
until a couple years ago, too.
But it's obviously changed in that regard, and it's possible it'll change further under
Scott Gramling
, who's a bright and talented guy. I always defended
Wizard's coverage
by saying it's basically just a mirror to the
with, if anything, more coverage of non-Big Two stuff than sales merit, but I'd obviously love to see the magazine and website set a new agenda. In part it depends on whether there'll be a new crop of alt-comix people to take the place of guys like me and Brian Warmoth and Rick Marshall so that there's a critical mass of voices speaking in favor of that material.
Now that you've had a few months to reflect, how do you think you're going to look back on your time at
I will mostly focus on the friends I met there. I've never ever worked with a better class of people. I could rattle off a dozen names easy of co-workers who are among my favorite people on earth.
Did you enjoy the immersion into American mainstream comics culture that you received at
Oh, yes and no. So much of it is garbage, obviously, just soul-deadening crap that makes me angry and hateful inside. My big catchphrase while I was working there was putting down some terrible comic in a huff and gritting my teeth and screeching the word "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE!" But then there's a lot of great stuff that I'd never have read if it weren't for having an enormous pile of weekly comics from the big companies to go through every week.
Did you notice things about those kinds of comics that you may not have noticed before, simply by virtue of having so many pass through the offices?
Definitely. I think it helped me figure out what superhero comics do well, and then note how to do them well. So for example, everyone knows that superhero comics are full of fights, but I really grokked how important it is to root combat in a described physical space, and give each stage of that combat palpable physical consequences. It's the difference between the big throw down with Bullseye at the end of Bendis and
Alex Maleev
run and any given
comic from the '90s where a bunch of squinty-eyed people with poorly defined energy powers in purple and blue costumes shoot lasers out of their bodies in random directions. Example number two: Superhero comics use costumes and powers as an exciting metaphor for the liberation of your secret self, so having costumes and powers that make a visual and mental impact on the reader aren't just gravy, they're part of why a character works or doesn't work, and there's no shame in that game. To use Bendis as an example again, his work on
Ultimate Spider-Man
suffered once he'd cycled through the major
bad guys plus
, all of whom are really marvels of concept and design, and then tried to build story arcs around the likes of
Silver Sable
. And I'm more sure than I ever was that superhero comics are like operas where the fighting takes the place of the singing -- an ecstatic, spectacular representation of dangerously powerful emotions. Most of the dreary superhero comics that the internet makes fun of these days have superheroes shouting or crying where they should be punching, and that's where they go wrong.
Reading a double-digit number of superhero comics every week for three years also exposed me to some specific things I wouldn't have seen otherwise. For example, I reappraised Geoff Johns. He's obviously the online whipping boy for modern superhero excess -- I think
Alan David Doane
has threatened to stab him with the arctic shit-knife. Now, not everything he's done is to my taste, but I think he's doing some really wonderful, fun work on
Action Comics
Green Lantern
these days. He's turned those books into a sort of greatest-hits tour of the Superman and GL mythoses -- Is that a word? I really should know by now. You'd be surprised how often the plural of "mythos" comes up when you write about superhero comics for three years. Anyway, it's a labor of love for those characters' buoyant, childlike pasts worthy of Morrison or
Mark Waid
, but written in the language of the contemporary aged superhero fan, and the result is as fun as the genre-y elements of Lost are fun. Not that he's at Waid's level of craft, let alone Morrison's, but his writing has a gut-punch quality that Waid's more studied trips down memory lane lack. And for God's sake, he brought back Superman's ability to shoot rainbow beams.
Has your critical voice changed since stopping writing about comics on-line and starting up again? How so?
Yes it has. I try to be a lot less snarky and sarcastic, because I find that annoying. To use the cliche, it sheds more heat than light. And it's easy, too. Cheap. When I recently wrote about the
event "One More Day," for example, I started just tearing into it with sarcasm and invective, a lot of "oh yeah, that's a brilliant idea!", that kind of thing, then stopped myself and tried to go through it point by point in a straightforward tone. It was harder and better that way.
I'm also less interested in writing about what such-and-such means for the industry, because I usually don't know, or what such-and-such means for the art form, because I usually don't care. I just want to read good comics and write about them, or write about why a bad comic isn't good.
As a subset of all of the above I try to stay away from commenting on the latest dopey or controversial release from the big companies, "Mister Mask curbstomps someone" or "Mighty Maid gets an on-panel clit piercing" or whatever. All these bloggers who give themselves hernias kicking this stuff around -- why are they reading it at all? I was
to read it. What's their excuse? I'm just going to quote myself from
the post I wrote
when I saw those panels from
Super-Copyright-Lawsuit-Prime tortured Mr. Mxyzptlk so bad that he vomited
: "Normally I steer clear of dogpiling on stuff like this, because the material is so self-evidently, almost self-parodically bad, and because I think that since most intelligent readers have already made an informed decision as to whether or not such comics are worth their time and money, the people who stick around to complain about it have similarly made their own decision, for whatever reasons, and living with it is their problem and not mine." I'll make exceptions if I feel like I have something different or interesting to say about it, like how Superboyman-Prime was a stand-in for certain fanboys I've known as he Abu Ghraib'd the silly Silver Age character or the specific problems with "One More Day," but just to yell "This stupid piece of stupidity is stupid"? I don't want to do that anymore.
You did these
Thursday Morning Quarterback sessions
with some other
staffers, which makes me think that you must have had a really great perspective on a certain, large segment of American comics reader. Both doing that column and in general, how did your tastes clash with the average Wizard staffer? What was true about the stereotype of that kind of reader? What wasn't true?
There wasn't as much clashing as you think. In part this was because the fellas I can think of whose tastes differed most dramatically from mine usually couldn't participate, either because their other duties precluded them or because they liked to pretend that they did. But most of the people at Wizard did have insight into what they were reading that went beyond "Holy shit, look what
just did!" I'm trying to think of the right metaphor here...We were all firing in the same direction, only I like to think that those of us whose tastes went beyond stories about extraordinary individuals solving problems through violence were using more accurate, higher-caliber weapons and hitting narrower, more rewarding targets. In the TMQBs I took part in that I felt really worked, like
this one
for example, I feel like we all hit the same bullseye no matter what guns and ammo we brought to the firing range.
The other stereotype is that we loved everything, or pretended to when we were writing, which wasn't true and was more demonstrably untrue in Quarterback than pretty much anyplace else at
. For whatever reason, we had much freer rein to criticize in QB than we did in the print magazine, which in my experience was always looked at as the "real" Wizard. So a lot of pretty big titles got the business in that column. I know that in QB, I never censored myself or anyone else beyond removing attacks on the creator rather than the book or statements equivalent to a simplistic "this sucks."
Who in comics do you suppose is the most happy to see 2007 go away and who is the most sad? Why?
I would guess
's pretty glad to see the other side of '07. It's a "line-wide" market these days, and the books that clicked the most with readers and critics at DC tended to be the ones where creators just kind of went off into a corner and did their own thing -- books with
All Star
in the title,
, Paul Dini's
Batman: The Animated Series
Goes to the DCU book
Detective Comics
, Johns's stuff -- he really wasn't involved in the big events anymore, "Sinestro Corps War" doesn't count because it was basically a two-book thing. Meanwhile the big top-down affairs and scheduling make-goods were a bust.
The saddest? I dunno,
? It was her year! All right, I will go out on a limb and say the saddest are people who look at the across-the-board era of good feelings that comics is having right now and anticipate a backlash of some kind in 2008 or 2009, be it market-driven or media-driven.
So is DC really replacing Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman with
General Zod
's kid,
Dick Grayson
Donna Troy
and re-launching all of the original characters and concepts in an "
"-style universe?
I've heard that they are and I've heard that they aren't, and never through official channels in either case. A friend of mine pointed out to me that doing that would probably be a mistake, because DC fans are fanatically loyal to the idea of The DC Universe, and creating some new start-from-scratch versions of Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, and Princess Diana won't cut any ice with people who still want them rooted in 70 years of continuity, and that's your average DC fan. Keep in mind that when Marvel started its Ultimate line, it didn't kill off Peter Parker.
And if that's not where they're doing, where do you see the "DC Universe" titles one and three and five years from now? I can't see a future past of all this Infinite hot-shot stuff and events. Where is DC heading? Is there ever a new status quo?
I think what they need to do is dissect "
The Sinestro Corps War
" like it contains the cure for cancer. It's an event that felt like an event, opened up major new lines of exploration for the character and concept involved, was fun, stuck the landing, sold like the dickens, and turned anything it touched to gold. They should have some sort of editorial or writers' retreat where they do an issue-by-issue apples-to-apples comparison with
Amazons Attack!
and just think about what's different between them. And they should reexamine
, for that matter. The appeal wasn't "weekly book about DCU minutiae," it was "DC supergroup takes obscure characters they like and uses them as vehicles for exploring what they like about DC in particular and superheroes in general." "More killings," whether of Z-listers or superstars, does not appear to be the answer to anything. Nor does "crossover" have an inherently positive value.
As for the future, I'll be honest, I'm not sure there is a future beyond events. But I don't mean that there's no future -- I mean events are the future. I think that's the new way superhero comics are going to be done from now on: The ongoing series keep on going, but there are these storytelling waves that push along the entire line-up, cresting with an event miniseries. Marvel has been better about this, though it was really only with
Civil War
that they developed the can't-miss business model. But you honestly can look at the whole post-Bill Jemas era of main-line Marvel Comics as telling one ongoing story that you can explain to your kids and give them a handful of books to follow, starting with
Avengers Disassembled
New Avengers
House of M
Planet Hulk
Civil War
to "
The Initiative
" and
World War Hulk
Messiah Complex
and eventually into
whatever they've got cooking with the Skrulls
, with plenty of side roads off into
Astonishing X-Men
Silent War
or wherever else you want to go. I dislike most of those comics as a reader, but as a nerd, I'm fascinated. I don't see any reason they can't keep one event setting the stage for the next for years.
How do you generally see DC's non-DCU lines right now? What works and what doesn't?
I'm as baffled as everyone else about what to do regarding things like
. I think they had the right idea when they let Grant Morrison spearhead a relaunch of the whole WildStorm line, but that crashed and burned after a grand total of three Morrison-penned issues split between two series managed to come out over the course of a full year, and interested evaporated in everything else along with it. I don't know if you get a second shot at something like that. Vertigo's even more puzzling because I'm not sure even what the problem really is. I don't know how different what they're doing now really is from what they've always done in terms of either quality or brand identity. Maybe they're relying too heavily on the same batch of regular writers? My grand theory, if I were forced at arctic shit-knife point to give one, would be that easier access to bonafide independent, mature comics is siphoning away the traditional Vertigo readership. I am pretty much making that up, mind you.
In terms of
, I feel like it's impossible to comment on them aesthetically without also looking at sales data, which I don't have.
How do you generally see Marvel's overall creative effort right now? What works and what doesn't?
Other than what I've already talked about, the big secret to Marvel's events is that they tend to be about something, meaning they involve conflicting emotions and ideas and worldviews among the characters rather than simple plot mechanics or basic "evil guy is evil, good guy is good, fight" motivations. For example,
Civil War
was as successful as it was both because it was about superheroes fighting each other, which has that "inner-eight-year-old" appeal that all good superhero comics have, and because they weren't fighting because of a mix-up or mind control, but because they genuinely disagreed about something. By contrast,
is about whether or not there should be a
. As someone put it and I wish I could remember who, it's a comic about being a DC editor.
So that's what works -- Marvel's events are about ideas. What doesn't work is that often those ideas are really bad.
Civil War
involved transforming
Iron Man
, a superhero so badass that fucking
Ghostface Killah
molded his persona around him -- and who by the way is the next high-profile Marvel movie franchise-in-waiting -- into a walking warrantless wiretap, while
Captain America
bravely fought for the right for him and his godlike friends to throw buses at
Doctor Octopus
with less government oversight than a nail salon. Over in the X-verse,
Charles Xavier
, Marvel's Martin Luther King, has been revealed as a slave owner -- he forced the sentient Danger Room into servitude -- not to mention the fact that
he covered up the multiple murder of a whole X-Men team
The Illuminati
, the group of superheroes who secretly make decisions about the big threats facing the Earth so that the hoi polloi don't have to, combine all the moral ickiness of big conspiracies -- war crimes, secret prisons, brainwashing -- with none of the efficacy -- the Skrulls still invade, the Hulk is still a menace,
Secret Wars 2
is still in continuity, and so on. There are no signs that any of this will ever come back to haunt Marvel in terms of losing their audience -- that would have happened already -- but I just want good comics and that kind of thing makes for bad comics.
The recent
One More Day
seems massively bizarre for a lot of us on the outside looking in, and your review of why such a story was fundamentally wrong was pretty brutal. Can you reiterate your objection?
There's a bunch of things wrong with it. For starters, I just think it's a fundamentally bad idea to have your flagship superhero, your most famous emblem of morality and valor, the guy who gave us the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility," literally make a deal with the devil. I think it's a bad idea for him to do so in order to get rid of the romantic relationship at the heart of his fan-adored, critically acclaimed, mass-appealing, bajillion-grossing movie franchise.
I think it's a bad idea to continue to involve Spidey in magic and mysticism, which has been a hallmark of writer
J. Michael Straczynski
's run dating back to when he ret-conned the character's practically perfect origin story to change the source of his powers from radiation to some Spider-God -- now the spider that bit him is supposed to have already had powers he was sent to transfer to Peter Parker, and the radiation was just an accident! It's a bad idea because Spidey's roots are in science fiction, his vibe is as everyday real-world as a Marvel superhero's vibe can get, and the whole point of his character -- like most Marvel characters -- isn't that he's some Chosen One selected by the Gods and tempted by devils, he's just some teenage loser who at a couple of key moments was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had to make a choice of how to live his life after those moments. Again, replacing Lee/Ditko chance with destiny is a JMS calling card --
witness his
y revamp of Doctor Strange's origin
. I think it misses the point of Marvel Comics.
But my biggest objection is in terms of the deal's emotional or psychological believability. Simply put, if you asked any happily married couple to trade away their entire marriage -- past, present, and future -- in exchange for the life of an elderly mother figure who, however beloved she might be, only has a few years left to her regardless, the answer would be no. And as someone pointed out to me, it's moreover the last thing Aunt May would want them to do anyway!
And oh yeah, only a moron makes a deal with Mephisto.
What's your sense of why they're doing something like this? Is it really as asserted just the desire of certain individual to see that marriage undone?
Joe Quesada's been pretty clear on that point -- they think Spidey being married ages the character and makes him harder to relate to. I'm sympathetic there because the young, unmarried Spidey of the Stan Lee years and
Ultimate Spider-Man
is much better than what's going on right now, although that's at least as much due to the creators involved as to Peter Parker's age and marital status. I think it doesn't have much to do with "relating" to him, I just think the character works better younger and with more freedom in terms of the soap operatics of his love life. I've had it pointed out to me time and time again that most people reading the character now have
read an unmarried Spider-Man in the main Marvel Universe, so I don't think there's a clamor to break Peter and Mary Jane up anywhere outside Marvel HQ.
How do you think these plotlines that people pick apart in about 15 seconds become editorially mandated?
Well, I've heard from creators and editors over and over again that Joe Quesada's roots as an artist make Marvel a cool place to work, enough times that I believe it. I'd imagine the flip side to that is he brings an artist's temperament and self-confidence even to things like this, where a more dispassionate observer could probably point to it and say "Maybe it's a bad idea for Spider-Man to make a deal with Satan."
Does any of this stuff really have an impact on a character as ultimately durable as Spider-Man?
I don't think it'll have any effect on the character's fortunes in the long run, any more than his amazing disappearing baby did or the clone saga ultimately did. The follow-up plans for this
Brand New Day
thing sound a lot more in tune with what makes the character fun. The question is whether they can put
One More Day
behind them fast enough to get people who were burned by it to buy the new thing. And superhero fans are nothing if not forgiving.
What happened to the
books that they kind of slipped a bit down the charts a bit so quietly the last few years?
They just didn't have any plans in place for following up
Grant Morrison
, who as far as I can tell departed a bit more abruptly than planned. This was before a lot of franchise-wide or line-wide planning went on, so there was an awkward transition to the post-Jemas, post-
era of Nu-Marvel. I mean, they put
Chuck Austen
on that book. The next big coup was
Joss Whedon
, but he wisely opted to do his own thing rather than spearhead the line, and the other books were left searching for an identity and a reason to exist.
I was briefly tempted to say, "Maybe the X-Men's time has just passed," like how apparently the Vision was once the coolest character at Marvel, like the Wolverine figure, but now he's just some dopey old Avenger. But I don't think that's true. As long as there are teenage outcasts who grow up to be either adult nerds or gay, there'll be an audience for the X-Men.
I never quite understood why that wasn't a bigger story.
Well, I guess there was a lot of other stuff to talk about. Or maybe people were still sick of the X-Men from their '90s reign of terror, and it was a good-riddance deal. Or maybe the movies filled people's X-jones.
Are they on their way to being restored, creatively and sales-wise?
It looks like it. What they now have in
Ed Brubaker
is a great writer and marquee name who's also a team player, which wasn't a role Morrison or Whedon signed up for. You've also got a market that's primed for crossovers and events, and is driven at least in part by nostalgia for the early '90s, which is the era of the big X-crossover. Add those three elements together and voila, success. I will say, though, that Brubaker's
stuff has been my least favorite of all his Marvel work. The team seems to get away from him, and it's really the flipside of his usual formula, which is extraordinary character placed in relatively realistic milieu. The milieu for the X-Men is the
Shi'ar Empire
and a mansion filled with freaks and surrounded by giant robots. Even though he's still working his "you can't escape the sins and mistakes of your past or the pasts of your friends and family" sweet spot, it just feels really out of place in that environment, like when Elle Woods shows up at the swanky Hahvahd pahhhty in a Playboy Bunny costume in
Legally Blonde: The Musical
, which I watched off my TiVo the other night. Only in this case it's everyone else in the costumes. I feel like Bru would kill on
, though.
How is it that Marvel is still on top without the X-Men being on top, and is that healthier for the company?
They focused their energies elsewhere, successfully -- the Ultimate line,
Marvel Knights
, events like
Civil War
World War Hulk
, and
House of M
, and most astonishingly to me, the Avengers. Something had to give. This is a truism, but the healthiest thing for the company would be for them to be able to
their balls in the air at once, and it looks like they're going to be giving it the old college try over the next year.
Have we reached the point that the length of times these characters have been around and the number of stories in which they've been involves is more a detriment in terms of the characters and their stories being exhausted than an advantage in terms of depth and meaning and context? It just seems to me like these characters are at the end of their conceptual rope in a lot of ways.
Oh, I dunno. I've heard you say that before and I've thought about it some, and I'd say no. Granted I have a much higher tolerance for superheroes than you do, but I think the success of the movies proves they're still appealing. The difference between the movies and comics, though, is huge. With the movies, it's an audience that mostly
lived with these characters for years, it's a blank slate continuity-wise. But that's the solution if things ever get really dire, so no, I don't think the passage of time has drowned them or exhausted them. A guy who dresses up as a bat to fight crime is always going to be an awesome idea, even as stories involving that guy getting lobotomized by a woman superhero who dresses like a stage magician because he walked in her lobotomizing a costumed rapist with nebulously defined light-bulb powers will come and go. Hopefully they'll mostly go.
In a way that's explainable to a fan that knows the characters and concepts but maybe doesn't follow them anymore, why did
World War Hulk
seems to work with its target fans?
Heck, it worked for me! Basically, it's that irresistible combination I talked about before: It's about something -- grief driving you to do things you normally wouldn't, what constitutes the greater good and whether acting in its name justifies the means, and also residual conflicts from Civil War -- and it's also the Hulk kicking the crap out of the whole Marvel Universe, which is inner-eight-year-old gold.
I'd also add that this is no accident.
Greg Pak
is a good, conscientious writer. The run-up to
had Hulk becoming a Spartacus figure on a faraway planet, and he really put in the effort of developing the different societies and races there while many writers would have just said "draw some crazy aliens." That carried over into his pacing of
, who fought who and how, the way the characters entered and exited the series and interacted with each other when they were there, and so on. And
is a totally mint artist who was born for projects like this.
Why has DC's
not worked as well as
with most devoted fans? What's your take on that title?
I read a few issues here and there, and something like three months deep I still couldn't tell you what it was about. Like,
was about each of those character's quests to find something they'd lost --
Renee Montoya
wanted a reason for living,
wanted the love of his niece and to find whether there's a place for his old-school personal ethics in the modern world,
Ralph Dibny
wanted his wife back,
Animal Man
Adam Strange
wanted to go home,
Black Adam
wanted to be happy again, and so on. They're stories that make sense on an emotional level, written by four talented guys with another talented guy providing unified layouts and another talented guy providing a unified look with the covers.
's a series of teases for and conclusions of storylines from other books, most of which are about insular continuity questions, sort of dictated Marvel Method-style from the top down and carried out by a too-wide array of talent. Too many cooks, too many crossovers, not enough visceral oomph.
Why didn't DC's
One Year Later effort
hit harder in terms of sales and interest?
It's funny -- I thought that from "OYL" on, the
books were as good on the whole as they'd been in my lifetime. This really baffles me. I think DC was really just a victim of its own success.
Identity Crisis
, the
Countdown to Infinite Crisis
minis, and
Infinite Crisis
itself were so huge with your basic fanboy. It was a marvel, seriously no pun intended, to be working at Wizard and watch the Direct Market fan culture, conditioned to view DC as an also-ran, suddenly turn on a dime and believe it could do no wrong. All those storylines were planned out so far in advance, and just knowing that was thrilling, like that bit in the beginning of every
Battlestar Galactica
episode where they say "And they have a plan."
Then toward the tail end of
Infinite Crisis
they hit delays and art hiccups, and the final issue felt rushed and smushed and kind of unsatisfactory, even though it's pretty hilarious that they're openly using Superboy-Prime as a satire of fanboys and Internet complainers. And in the canniest scheduling move ever, Marvel released
Civil War
#1 the very same day as Infinite Crisis #7, and I swear you could feel the balance shift under your feet. That first issue was just non-stop big beat after big beat,
Steve McNiven's art was lovely
, and a market DC had diddled into tumescence had a new place to plunge in. "One Year Later" wasn't the droids they were looking for.
After that, aside from
, DC's events had this "tapdancing as fast as we can" feel. Things like
, where it's alternate-reality versions of Batman and Superman fighting each other like gladiators, and
Salvation Run
, where it's
Secret Wars
for villains, are all inner-eight-year-old sizzle and no big-idea steak. I haven't read them so this is probably completely unfair, but it feels less like "hey, wouldn't that be awesome?" and more like pandering.
We're about to get a big nostalgia comic with
, we just got away from one in the
Brad Meltzer
Justice League of America
, and some of the critical favorites like
The Brave and the Bold
evoke older modes of storytelling. In fact, there's at least an element of nostalgia that's almost in ever single big project, some sort of tip of the hat to a previous reading experience. Why do you think such projects continue to work even though so many people dismiss them? Is it just the value of the kind of storytelling be reclaimed, or do comics act as such powerful nostalgia objects that they have an extra oomph that way?
This is a hard question for me because I don't have any comics nostalgia at all. I didn't read them as a kid the way most people did. If I behaved myself in church while I was in nursery school my mom would take me across the street to the cigarette shop and buy me a Spidey comic off the spinner rack, because I liked him from
The Electric Company
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends
. But I didn't read comics in elementary school. The first comic I can remember reading is
The Dark Knight Returns
in 6th grade, a copy that the one kid in my class who was listening to the
Sex Pistols
and getting blowjobs from 8th graders already stole from his older brother and gave to me because he knew how much I loved the first Tim Burton
movie, which had just come out the previous summer. Around that time I also collected Marvel trading cards, so I learned all the big important superheroes, like Nomad, Foolkiller, and Shatterstar. When a shop opened up nearby, I started reading comics consistently, in either 8th or 9th grade. I had my share of
, "X-Cutioner's Song," "Death of Superman," "Maximum Carnage," "Knightfall" -- that one was really good -- and so on. But by the end of high school I'd cut it all down to pretty much just
The Maxx
Sin City
and a copy of
Arkham Asylum
. Then I went to Yale and basically stopped, though I'd pop into that shop on Chapel Street occasionally or flip through what my roommate was reading. Point is, I have no fond memories of the comics I read as a kid because there weren't any, and I have no fond memories of the comics I read as a teenager because 90 percent of them sucked. I still consider
Dark Knight
the best superhero comic I've ever read, and it was my first, so I got spoiled.
So I'm really only guessing here, but I think you're right and superhero comics are indeed nostalgia objects, as inherently nostalgic as Christmas carols. I don't know why that is. I think it's bad for the readers and bad for the art form, just as it's bad for someone who loves Christmastime as much as I do that bland pop stars can make money releasing hideous renditions of Christmas carols where they're basically just mouthing syllables without thinking at all of the meaning of the words they're singing, like kids singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," just because people are like "oooh hey Christmas carols!"
Brad Meltzer's work is a big-time offender in this regard. Nobody needed a tribute to the
Detroit Justice League
, nobody needs a comic where you have to be on a first-name basis with fucking
to understand who they're even talking about.
So to the extent that these things aren't about recontextualizing the past but recapturing it, I don't want it. I run from it. I don't think that answers your question, but I guess I can't answer it. I don't know why they work. I wish they didn't.
What should we take away from all the death in mainstream comics, the cruelty and inhumanity that drives a lot of the major titles and storylines? Is it possible to muster a defense of superhero comics that their makers compare to snuff films?
It's funny, because even as the mania for bloodshed has reached a new level, death is more impermanent than ever. Over the past year or two, they brought back
Jason Todd
Captain Mar-Vell
, even Bucky, three characters more famous for dying than living. I think you have to examine one phenomenon in light of the other. I mean, partly the killcraziness is a result of a generation of writers who didn't know anything before [Frank] Miller and [Alan] Moore, so you're seeing the insular offspring of those mid-'80s comics, the same way you could see the insular offspring of Stan & Jack material in the Marvel house style of the '70s. But another part of it is the desire or need to keep doing something
, and deaths and rebirths are as big as they come in superhero comics. But they'll get small if they're overused, and they're overused right now.
As for comparing them to snuff films, maybe a defense is that that's hilarious.
Are the
Joss Whedon TV-extension comics
good comics?
They're competent comics, at least. I'm not at all the target audience because I haven't watched a single episode of a single Joss Whedon show and think
Astonishing X-Men
is dull, but I know they're appealing to all my friends who are into those things. Although, a lot of my friends felt that the first arc of that
comic, written by Whedon, felt too much like a teleplay and not enough like a comic -- like he was relying on the actors to give the lines verve and unique personality, but instead
he had wonky likenesses from Georges Jeanty
. The one issue of
Brian K. Vaughan's story arc
I read seemed like a big improvement -- even I could follow and enjoy it.
What about the
Dark Tower
It was only after I forced myself to read the entire
Dark Tower
series of novels that I realized what a bait and switch that comic is -- it's all stuff from the existing books! It's been billed as a prequel, I think, but it's just flashback material from the youth of the main character that King himself wrote in the novels, only arranged in chronological order. But
Jae Lee's art is striking
, the kind of thing that really impresses people whose only previous frame of reference for comic books is old superhero comics and the funny pages. And
Peter David
kind of ambitiously created a whole new narrative voice for the material, shifting from King's omniscient "Uncle Steve" schtick to this sort of in-world storyteller vibe.
Do they even need to be good comics?
I think they need to be recognizably an effort of the original creators. Which is weird, because that's not what
The Dark Tower
is. But somehow they pulled it off. I guess they need to be recognizably of a piece with the work of the original creators, and not just glorified fanfic, which is what most licensed comics are.
Who do you read on comics -- if you do -- and why? What do you look for in terms of commentary on industry and art form issues?
I read a lot of blogs, actually. I do what nearly everyone does and read you,
Heidi MacDonald
, and the
guys every day, a grouping that drives each member insane for being lumped in with the other ones I'm sure. I feel that keeps me up to date with the industry; I don't read the main-page news sites.
I try and keep up with all the creator blogs around for the artists I really like; they always seem to go on in a vacuum for months before
Tom Devlin
Eric Reynolds
discovers them and posts about them. I think the best of those are
Paul Pope
's for writing -- I find
Eddie Campbell
too dry for words, sorry -- and
Kevin Huizenga
for art.
For criticism or reviews or whatever -- the distinction eludes me and I'm tempted to just say it's bullshit -- there isn't a lot I'll read unless I've read or am interested in the book being discussed. You, actually, are literally the only person who I'll read absolutely anything and everything by. Part of that is because I love your approach to comics, just trying to crack open what they're doing and how they're doing it, what effect they have and whether it's a good or bad effect. It gives you more of an in to something you haven't read than writing based on comparison or shared experience, which you usually avoid.
But part of it is also that your reviews tend to be short. I love
Joe McCulloch
the way I've loved
The Comics Journal
-- just the existence of both has excited me -- but in both cases it's tough to feel like I'm spending my time wisely if I'm reading a long review of a book I don't know. Of course, pretty much all my blog is is long posts on stuff that only I care about, but it's my blog and I'm writing it for me, goddamn you.
But anyway, Jog's tough to beat if he's talking about something you've read or want to read. One of my new faves is
Comics Comics
blog with Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro
. You just feel like they approach criticism the way I like to pretend that artists approach art -- they have a viewpoint and they go about articulating it through the prism of the project at hand. I could read them on almost anything. I think
Gary Groth
could be a great critic again in that mold if he decided he was going to be the change he always says he wants to see in comics criticism. Let's see...
Doug Wolk
is another guy with a compelling prose style who can come at a wide variety of comics but you still feel like he's grappling with the same set of issues, which gives you a point of reference that makes his criticism useful. I wish
Chris Mautner
published more comics crit online. I admire the cut of his jib. Ditto
, a thinkblogger trapped in a linkblogger's body.
As for weekly-comics capsule reviews, I think you can get a pretty good feel for things if you read Graeme McMillan, Brian Hibbs, and Jeff Lester at
Savage Critic
. My tastes don't line up with any of theirs, but between them it's like the blind men describing the elephant -- I can understand the book they're talking about even if I don't grok their individual viewpoints. Their positions are always well articulated based on the tastes they're bringing to the table.
On the opposite end of the spectrum there are guys like
Noah Berlatsky
Abhay Khosla
, who say the occasional insightful thing but just bury it under meaningless contrarianism or sub-sub-sub-Cristagu performance-art jive. I also try to avoid reading criticism by people whose primary mode of interaction with comics is fury, or an attitude they developed at or copped from any of
Warren Ellis
' online clubhouses. And I hate to say it, but if you say you don't like
Chris Ware
or refuse to read
Gilbert Hernandez
, I pretty much find your taste ridiculous and won't listen to anything you say.
2008 will mark the 10th anniversary of the modern comic book film (
). It's almost impossible to succinctly define the impact of movie opportunities and actual A-list movies being made on comics because the effects are everywhere, but how do you feel comics has changed most in the last ten years since they started spending so much money on such movies?
With big money comes big respect from the kinds of people who respect things that involve big amounts of money, which means the gates to the mainstream entertainment and information media were thrown wide for comics. That's the main thing: The opportunity to get the message "comics exist!" beyond the usual audience is now out there. Do I think that the presence of blockbuster
movies makes it easier to get your pitch for a review of
James Sturm's America
approved? Yes I do.
Then there are a lot of smaller trends. Comics aping the storytelling, dialogue, and visuals of action films. Comics that are just out-and-out movie pitches first and foremost. More people who are primarily filmmakers or television creative types writing comics, and more comics fans becoming filmmakers or television creative types. People getting into comics because they want to make money, like mercenary undergrads who join the
Harvard Lampoon
because writing for
The Simpsons
is like a fun version of i-banking or litigation. Big sales boosts for comics of finite length with a demonstrable link to their film incarnations --
Ghost World
Sin City
, and so on. Negligible sales boosts for comics of indefinite length with little demonstrable link to their film incarnations beyond the presence of characters that everyone already knows come from comics and have long since made up their minds whether they're interested in buying such things -- any of the superhero movies, basically. And in terms of the movies themselves, a lot of self-serious twaddle from superhero fans whose dignity is too wrapped up in treating the material like
to realize how cheesy what they're doing is --
Batman Begins
Superman Returns
, the first two
movies. I like some of the ones that everyone else likes, like the Bryan Singer
, but my favorite superhero movies of the recent wave are
, and
, because they're all so gleefully overblown, using the fights as opera, and that's exactly as it should be. Give me Emo Peter Parker's evil jazz dance over post-Doc Ock-fight crucifixion imagery any day.
Do you mourn the slow decline in alternative comic books as a format of choice?
Yes, definitely. I try to avoid buying pamphlet-format comics whenever possible because I just find trade paperbacks more pleasant to read, but so many alternative comic books actually make the format worthwhile. They lend themselves to short stories, which is my favorite form of comic these days, they're attractively designed, they're a more affordable way for publishers and readers alike to take a chance on new or outré talent. And I feel like there's so many good ones even now!
Skyscrapers of the Midwest
Big Questions
Or Else
, all of
the Ignatz books
Cold Heat
was astonishing,
Angry Youth Comix
Love & Rockets
announcing that changeover seems like the end of an era. Although I know
Top Shelf
is going to start publishing a comic book series by
Jeffrey Brown
, so I guess there's some juice in it yet.
Will the mainstream comic book suffer that same fate?
I doubt it, at least not for years and years barring an unforeseen collapse of the direct market. It's an enormously conservative segment of the industry, one that fears change like
Tyra Banks fears dolphins
. For example,
stuck with a comic-book-sized format for years even though it meant not being stacked in a lot of real-world newsstands because direct-market retailers wouldn't be able to fit them in longboxes anymore. With attitudes like that, the superhero comic book is not going away. That said, it has a lot less to recommend it than alternative comics using that format -- it's a utilitarian design that isn't very useful, you're paying for a tiny snippet of story at an unjustifiably high price point. I can count the big comics that use the format well on one hand --
All Star Superman
The Walking Dead
... that's all I got.
This is also the point in the interview where I say that years of participation in the comics blogosphere have made me really squeamish about referring to the mostly superhero-in-nature comics published by the companies in the front of the
catalog as "mainstream." Some of them are, but Dan Clowes is in the
New York Times
right now.
What do you think will be the status quo in terms of on-line offerings five years from now? Will I be able to get that year's equivalent to the
Death of Captain America
as a 99-cent download or will the major companies continue to negotiate this field in the same slow, awkward way that seems to define today's status quo?
Five years from now might be enough time for the companies to have figured out they'd make a lot of money that way, and maybe just enough time to have figured out how to square that with the concerns of retailers. If the music industry and movie industry, which are worth billions more than comics, managed to navigate these waters, there's no reason comics can't other than the business conservatism on the part of all involved parties that I mentioned earlier.
For that matter, will Captain America still be dead?
No. I could see a guy like Ed Brubaker wanting to kill him and mean it, but in this day and age, never happen.
If not, how will they bring him back?
I mean, people come back to life in superhero comics if Doctor Strange gets indigestion. Skrulls, spells, science, the Infinity Gauntlet -- they'll figure something out. I'll bet you $5,000 that it will involve a variant cover.
Can you name five titles or comics authors that you read that you think are being under-read and would urge people to try?
First I'll make my plea for Geoff Johns again. Not that he needs it -- calling him "under-read" is a stretch, and that's putting it mildly. But he's under-read by the smart set, let's put it that way. I'd advise people to try his
Action Comics
Green Lantern
stuff; those are really the only things of his I've liked, but I like them a lot.
Second is another person I mentioned before,
John Hankiewicz
. It's just a completely different way of using comics. They're almost the first ones I've ever read where I feel like calling them "surreal" or "poetic" isn't the stupidest thing to say ever. And they're so clinical at the same time, like
The Atrocity Exhibition
should be on everyone's year-end best list, but I feel like it's not getting a lot of attention because not a lot of people have seen it or bought it.
Third is
Josh Cotter and
Skyscrapers of the Midwest
. I think that's a really commanding book, with very deft and sensual cartooning and a kind of vicious clarity about bullying, self-pity, and the relationship between vulnerable humans and vulnerable animals, a message I find powerful and disturbing. The sequence at the end of the second issue that uses insects to represent a migraine by having giant bugs literally blot out the afflicted's head, in this cosmic act of revenge against him beating his girlfriend -- that's one of my favorite comics sequences of all time, something I remember alongside the end of the World's Fair issue of
ACME Novelty Library
or the scene in
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
where they go to the beach and Minnie watches her mom's boyfriend and her friend make out.
Fourth is someone I say anytime this topic comes up,
Hans Rickheit
. I believe he's said on his website that real-life issues have kept him from working on comics for a couple years now, but I stumbled upon his creepy, gruesome, erotic graphic novel
at Jim Hanley's way back when and bought up all his
Chrome Fetus
issues spread across a few MoCCA festivals and just pray to find new stuff by him any time I go to a show. Here's a guy who's just off on his own, doesn't give a fuck, drawing what he pleases, exactly what comics does so well. It's reminiscent of
David Lynch
Renee French
Jim Woodring
and such, but not at all derivative -- there's a visual vocabulary of gas masks, sphincters, Victoriana, tubes, and so on that's quite singular and fully formed.
Fifth is cheating a bit because I know these folks from college and have worked with a couple of them, but
. I know that this past year was sort of their breakout year, between the reviews you ran of their minis and their Ignatz and Maisie Kukoc nominations, but they're clearly still under-read by publishers, because clearly that's the only explanation as to why they don't have collections out from someone. Publisher or no, I recommend any of their sumptuously constructed minis. They've got a unique, harsh aesthetic and a rewarding fixation on monsters and myths and the way they both spring from and inform human psychology. They're also really funny, something I've known ever since I first read this awesome Archie parody that
Matt Wiegle
did in the
Yale Herald
called "Good Kids Gone Bad."
If you and I were to meet at a comic shop five years from now, what will you be there to buy?
A chapter of
Rusty Brown
that still isn't the final one.
Charles Burns
' follow-up to
Black Hole
, if there's a God.
Phoebe Gloeckner
's second graphic novel in as many years, again, if there's a God. A Grant Morrison graphic novel from a major New York publishing house that isn't DC. Paul Pope's masterpiece. An event series about all the Kirby monsters -- still in continuity! -- attacking the Marvel Universe, led by
Fin Fang Foom
(idea copyright 2007 Sean T. Collins). Something awesome by
Junji Ito
Makoto Yukimura
The Walking Dead
. Maybe there's a little collection of my own little comics about guilt and murder that I wanted to see on the shelves.
All of that is under the assumption that I've tried and failed to snag free copies first, of course.
What will you be doing?
Hopefully still both writing for a living and writing for fun, with more overlap between the two.
* cover to the concluding chapter of Marvel's
Civil War
* photo of Mr. Collins suggested by Mr. Collins and ganked from his Facebook profile
* Nick Bertozzi draws for A&F
* panel from Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker's odd
Iron Fist
* from one of Jack Kirby's Fourth World series
* cover art to a Geoff Johns
Action Comics
* cover from the Superman Prime tortures Mr. Mxyzptlk issue of
* cover to
Sinestro Corps
* skrulls, skrulls everywhere!
* one of Marvel's comics starring a strange, super-powered Star Chamber
* kick-off to the
One More Day
Spider-Man plot
* cover from that JMS Dr. Strange mini-series mentioned
* a piece of cover art from the slightly resurgent X-Men event, "Messiah Complex"
* cover from the current X-Men series, written by Mike Carey
World War Hulk
* art from
Justice League of America
run featuring writer Brad Meltzer
* The Maxx
* Buffy the Vampire Slayer art from Georges Jeanty
* Kevin Huizenga art
* from Sala's Ignatz book
* from Marvel's
Captain America
* image from
Skyscrapers of the Midwest
* image by Matt Wiegle of Partyka
* Collins and Wiegle collaborate on a one-pager
Sean T. Collins
the CR Holiday interview series continues through Monday with two interviews scheduled for each day. Tuesday, January 8 marks a return to this blog's full array of regular features. We thank you for your patience.
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