A Life Lived in Comics Day 7: My Place in All This

April 21, 2012 by

The cast of NBC’s Community as the Avengers. Art by Chris Schweizer.

As semi-predicted, I did miss posting last night. Left straight from work with assistant editor Daniel to buy tickets to Marc Maron at the Helium Club. I’m actually a little tapped out after last weekend’s Bridgetown Comedy Fest, where at the Sunday show editor Philip Simon, his wife Kait, and I saw Todd Barry, Janeane Garofalo, several newer comics, and a surprising funny host from Seattle named Solomon Georgio, as well as a surprise drop-in by Doug Benson, but it was Maron, so I had to go.

It was a great show, Maron planted on a stool, describing the usual mix of maladjustment and pain that he explains, “doesn’t break out into funny until it passes the third row.” A few people in the front do become combative, but while he’s previously described rooms turning against him as he went after unruly audience members, tonight he seemed to have everyone else in the palm of his hand. The act ends with a suspenseful but hilarious brush with death on a plane and the euphoric hotel room celebration afterward. The opening act was local comedian Ian Karmel, whom I’ve never met but nonetheless felt a little proud of, since I’ve seen him perform as host and at open mics, and so was pleased to see graduate to feature act for a respected comic like Maron. Overall, a more satisfying show than last week’s, which ended in a Garofalo performance that was uncharacteristically lacking in confidence, nearly collapsed when she transitioned to political material, and ended with her fleeing the stage early in a bit when she learned she’d gone ten minutes over.

Next we moved on to a nearby klatch of trendy food carts and experienced what Portland does to poutine. Not entirely ready to go the full cheese curd, I got my fries piled high with pulled pork and spicy BBQ sauce, while Daniel got the PB&J version, which is slathered in satay sauce and a spicy raspberry sauce. We will die young. The last stop of the night was the New Old Lompoc brewery on NW 23rd, which is entering its final week before closing down for two years while some condos are built in its place. We toasted the place and chatted with a few people at the bar, something I’ll have to fit in at least once more before it’s gone.

Anyway, I’m glad to get to write a bit about spending time with friends from work, because it ties in to what I was planning to write for Friday’s entry anyway, essentially the fact that for so long I didn’t do it. I’m sure a lot of professions are like this, but comics as a job is intensely tied into comics as a social scene. At least, the jobs I’ve had before haven’t had an entire outside of work social aspect attached to them. Certainly you make friends everywhere you go, but in Portland in particular you can easily spend weeks on end going to book releases, art openings, readings, conventions, the local comics shop, etc., and bump into someone you work with, either a freelancer or someone from the office, every night.

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A LIfe Lived in Comics Day 6: No Lunch! No Lunch!

April 19, 2012 by

Seems like all my projects are finishing or beginning. I’m in the middle of a few things, but not as many as are either ramping up or winding down. As such it’s been among the quieter weeks I’ve had in a while, though still busy with research and planning.

There’s still a lot of the regular stuff going on—today involved looking over a book that’s at the printer (The Guild vol. 2) and some about to go the printer (collections of our Dragon Age and Prototype II digital series), proofing the lettering for Conan the Barbarian #5 that came in from Comicraft overnight, finalizing the designs for Archie Archives vol. 6 (in which I controversially—within the office at least—changed up a few of the design elements that have been identical over the last five volumes, to keep them in line with the changing art style within the book. My thinking is that we’ll change them every five volumes, but most of it is subtle enough that I don’t expect readers to notice too much), and putting in some workorders to get solicitation covers made for a pair of upcoming archives. You may notice in Previews that Dark Horse comics run with just the cover art, but that our books have logos and other design elements. This is true of many other publishers, too. So the covers are the first things designed, as they need to be ready a few months before the catalog is released. More on solicitation tomorrow.

In other developments, Dave Marshall (who skims the blog for mentions of his name—hi, Dave!) is back from business, so we have our Thursday morning production meeting, a short but encouraging one, as we’re able to cross off a surprising number of deadlines on both his list and mine. Afterward we spend some time catching up on developments while he was gone—one book came down to the wire for getting finalized, but it was mostly uneventful—and split up tasks for the day. On the Creepy front, a script comes in, as well as pencil pages for one story and inks for another. I compile all the material we have for the new feature we’re debuting next issue, and send it on to the newly hired artist who gets to make sense of it all.

Tarzan is increasingly the theme of my life, so I spend a lot of time with that today, meeting briefly with Mike Richardson about the format of one of the projects I’m developing, and we nailed down the plan so that it can go to the print buyers and accountants for budgeting. I also put in a request with assistant editor Jemiah Jefferson to purchase a few Tarzan comics for a potential project. Each assistant has, in addition to the books they work on, a specialty within the office that has been assigned to them, and Jemiah is in charge of backlists (a large and very involved responsibility, as I learned when I filled in for her recently while she was out of the office for a couple months) and buying comics for archival projects on eBay and other sources. Previous assistant specialties I’ve held have been curating the editorial library—which with a few gaps holds two copies of every DH comic and one copy of every DH book—and submissions editor, and my current role is spearheading our Eisner submissions, a responsibility I’ve held the last two years (a publisher can submit up to five books in each category, and I coordinate the program of voting and tallying that creates our list).

The planning stage of the Tarzan books will be done soon and everything will go before the higher-ups to determine which we should publish and for what cost, so now it’s just waiting to hear back from our production department and a few other publishers whether digital files or film or neither exist for a few books, then we get to get started. It’s slightly repetitive to look at so many Tarzan comics, as before long you’ve skimmed four or five adaptations of the same stories, but it is educational, seeing how different generations of artists across different publishers and formats tackled the exact same source material and produced work that is easily identifiable as within the eras and house styles that produced them. I expect to have learned a lot about several different eras and artists by the time this is done. Published by Dell, Charlton, DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Dynamite, not to mention newspaper strips, is Tarzan maybe the most widely and diversely published character is American comics?

All of this is to say that, while the stage of projects I’m at produces a bit less tangible work product than I’d like, I’ve nonetheless been glued to my desk. Tomorrow when I’m writing lots of solicitation copy I’ll no doubt be up and about frequently, as traveling the circuit around the editorial office seems to help shake loose the selling points, taglines, and turns of phrase that make up a Previews entry, but today the things I was working on largely required that my nose be in old comics, the Overstreet Price Guide, or old-timey comics websites. I ended up far enough down the rabbit hole that forgot to eat, and found myself, like a schizophrenic in a Frank Miller comic, shouting, “No lunch!” at people (I feel like there are more, but off the top of my head, at least Batman: Year One and Give Me Liberty display this calling card. Maybe Ronin?). By the end of the day I was likely an insane, whimpering version of myself, but this is entirely the fault of a person who can’t even manage to feed himself. Fortunately I’d already made food for tomorrow before I sat down to type.

Tomorrow: Previews isn’t going to write itself! Hopefully it’s a bit more eventful than today, or I’ll have to pull out a reserve topic. Unless the Friday nightness of it all causes me to miss a day. I’ll try.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A LIfe Lived in Comics Day 5: The Wednesday Crowd

April 18, 2012 by

Today was mostly a head down, in the weeds day, so not a lot of specific stuff to report. One very exciting thing from early in the day was the arrival of advance copies of Andi Watson’s Skeleton Key Color Special, a one-shot reprinting the SK stories I edited for Dark Horse Presents.

In three and a half years at Dark Horse, I’ve edited several archival books and a bunch of short stories (one’s an Eisner nominee this year—more later!), as well as gotten some graphic novels off the ground, but this is actually the first stapled comic ever printed that says “Editor: Brendan Wright.” I’ve graduated on a few of the series I’ve assisted on to coeditor, and in fact Matt Kindt’s 3 Story: Secret Files of the Giant Man was released today with me and Diana Schutz sharing billing as editors, but there is a different feeling to holding a comic that I personally shepherded from beginning to end.

Don’t get me wrong. Andi is an enormous talent, and once we got started there was very little I needed to contribute. I gave pretty minor notes on the three stories, and when the one-shot came around I gave a small amount of direction on the cover and put together the sketch section, but this was Andi’s show. An editor is basically a helper monkey, but monkeys with the great fortune in many cases to get to choose who we help. My greatest contribution to Skeleton Key was my very first one, when I advocated for a favorite cartoonist to get a slot in DHP (Andi and I had previously worked together when he wrote and drew a two-page story for MySpace DHP featuring his character Hen). After that I contracted Andi and trafficked the art and gave the barest guidance on stories, but the beauty of the job is that at the end I get to claim undeserved credit for a comic with my name in it.

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 4: Pages Filled with Red

April 17, 2012 by

It takes a while to get to this point in Portland, but it’s actually light in the morning these days. I’m up before my alarm clock and in the office at 8:11. Our trafficker is in at a really astonishing hour to get business started, but otherwise the editorial department is pretty quiet early in the morning. Most editorial staff get in between 8:30 and 9, but several arrive at 10 or later, and the latest come in around noon and stay until 7 and beyond. When I’m in around 8, only one or two others are already there.

I start with more emails to Archie Comics, a few messages regarding a recent contest winner, contacting an artist about a new feature we want to add to the next issue of Creepy, routing the last minute adjustments to the final digital Dragon Age issue, and sending up Stan Sakai’s cover to the first issue of 47 Ronin (though not without stopping to stare at it a bit first—I was a fan of Stan’s for years even before working with him, and so far the only piece of original comics art I’ve bought and framed is a cover of his, which hangs in my apartment), before joining Scott Allie and Sierra Hahn’s 10 o’clock production meeting.

Either every week or every other week, each editor has a meeting with the editorial director and the director of scheduling to go over deadlines, which are printed on lists for each attendee. Late items and those about to be due are red, deadlines further out are blue. We go down the list item by item, crossing off those that are done and giving updates on the others. Scott’s meeting is epic, as his editorial office produces the largest number of books and so has the largest number of assistants. Because he and Sierra coedit all the Buffy-related books and share some assistants, their meetings are combined, making the proceedings even bigger. I don’t attend Scott’s portion of the meeting, as I don’t currently work on any of his projects (the Guild Free Comic Book Day issue and second trade are the last remaining books I worked on with him still to come out; I also contributed to the Guild: Fawkes one-shot, but it was handed off to assistant Daniel Chabon midstream), but I am called in for Sierra’s portion at around 10:30, as she and I coedit Creepy and Eerie and she has an oversight role on Bucko. I go through my list every other Thursday, when Dave and I have our meeting.

The rest of the day runs pretty much like yesterday, mostly approvals for Dave Marshall’s projects, Tarzan-related research and putting out requests for film to other publishers, brief chats with Randy Stradley and Mike Richardson about a pitch that’s come in to me, getting word that an artist’s estate agrees to our plans for a reprint project and that the artist I contacted about Creepy is game, and reading Brian Wood’s latest Conan the Barbarian script. The Tarzan program is becoming coherent, though there’s still a lot to do, and it occurs to me that there’s a degree to which being tasked with something this vague and sprawling is a benevolent test, hopefully one I’m passing. Still working on how to delegate some of the work, though the junior assistant to whom I’m throwing some of it expresses mild skepticism that I’m actually allowed to pass tasks on to her.

The plan is to leave promptly at 5, as I’m visiting my parents to catch Sunday’s Mad Men OnDemand; I don’t have cable. When the show’s on, I see them once a week for dinner, a pleasant, if by the end of the season, slightly stifling arrangement. I never really planned to continue to live so close to where I grew up, but Portland is where the comics scene is, and thank God for that. While I work with a lot of people who moved out here without any promise of a job simply because this was where Dark Horse and a few other publishers were, I just don’t see that I could have done the same. I think I’ve been able to make a few bold decisions for work projects and in other areas, but for better or worse when it comes to my personal life I’m not much of a risk taker.

(We also caught the premiere of Girls, the new show created by Lena Dunham, the preposterously young writer/director/actor whose film Tiny Furniture I can’t recommend enough. The Girls ep is available on HBO’s YouTube channel.)

Daniel and I carpool the short trip back to Portland—he lives a few blocks from me—talking about the stuff above. Before meeting up with the folks, I stop at the Central library, where I return Planet of the Apes and a few non-comics items and pick up volume 2 of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key. Every now and again a particular series captures the imagination of several of the editorial staff at once and it seems like everyone’s reading or at least talking about it. Richard Starkings’s Elephantmen is a past example, and currently Locke & Key holds the spot. I didn’t know what to expect going into volume 1, but the mix of strong characterization, a compelling mystery and some genuinely unsettling images had me placing a hold on volumes 2 and 3 right away.

So now that it’s some hours later, figure I should put this away and actually read the book. Good plan.

Yesterday: I said something about how I started reading comics. Gonna actually save that for later; I can’t really write 2,000 words a night, and today did turn out to have a few things yesterday didn’t.

Tomorrow: It’s Wednesday, which in comics tends to generate plenty to talk about.

Why’m I doing this, again?

Images of Locke & Key © Joe Hill and Idea and Design Works, LLC.

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A LIfe Lived in Comics Day 3: When I Was a Cartoon

April 16, 2012 by

The advantage of making this a monthlong thing is that I don’t have to figure out know how to write a proper “day in the life” post. I see them when other people do them, and I’m always awed. They seem to be so organized, having a time of day when they do things. I get that it’s just that day and not everyday, but their reporting just always makes so much sense. Noting the exact time of day at which you goof off makes even that look like a productive use of time.

My day to day existence at Dark Horse is pretty different depending on which of the editors I work with is in or out of the office, whether it’s the time of the week when most of the meetings are, the time of the month when solicitation copy needs writing, which projects have deadlines coming up, etc. Today, editor Dave Marshall is out of the office on business, so I’m on call to handle approvals to our various licensors and process artwork that’s come in by ftp (almost none of the books I work on involve actual art boards coming in the mail—I think currently Stan Sakai and Gilbert Hernandez are the only artists I’m working with whose art we have in-house). Normally I’m in between 8:30 and 9, but this morning I get in at 8 to get a jump on the e-mails that came in over the weekend and while I was out Friday. I have about 75, which isn’t terrible.

Some Conan pencils and layouts have come in. The pencils go to the licensor for approval, and I make notes on the layouts to send back to the artist. We’re rushing to finalize the last digital issue of Dragon Age, so I send the lettered and colored pages to the licensor and convey some notes from them to colorist Michael Atiyeh. I also submit some character designs for approval. A few pages of pencils have come in for another video game tie-in (one I can’t remember if we’ve announced, so for our purposes it doesn’t have a name), and I submit those as well. I also voucher for all the pages that have come in. This is the freelancers I work with’s favorite part of my job.

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 2: Bridgetown vs. Stumptown

April 15, 2012 by

All told, I’ve had some kind of job in comics for about five years. Before that, comics was the hobby that I didn’t want to screw up by making it a job. I wouldn’t say that I’ve done a great job of replacing it with a new hobby, but I have a few other interests that keep almost breaking the hobby ceiling.

Standup comedy comes close, aided by a summer job I had in 2004 that allowed me to listen to the radio all day, which is how I came to discover Marc Maron. He and reporter Mark Riley cohosted Morning Sedition, in retrospect the only program on Air America that transcended the station’s format. At once unafraid to call out the network’s other shows when they hewed too close to a party line and rude enough to be the only one that didn’t forget that President Reagan was a monster when covering his death, Morning Sedition was also the rare example on a supposedly funny network of a genuine comedy show. Its comedy bits, both political and absurdist, made me a fan who followed Maron to The Marc Maron Show, broadcast out of LA, where I was living at the time, and later to the WTF interview podcast, a burgeoning comedy nerd’s best friend.

People like Serenity, so maybe including this image and using it on the Facebook link will make people click. Besides, it’s kinda relavent, as this issue was written by a standup.

The worlds of standup and comics (or comics and comics, terms that I am dumb enough to have occasionally confused) turn out to have not-insubstantial crossover (see, for instance, Patton Oswalt), and WTF has featured cartoonists Peter Bagge and Bob Fingerman. Those interviews, both in early 2010, prompted me to send Maron a box of Dark Horse comics, earning the company a plug on the show. I noticed that a few other publishers caught on to the venue afterward, as the Dark Horse plug was soon followed by others.

Another more unfortunate overlap has been the scheduling of the Stumptown Comics Fest and the Bridgetown Comedy Fest (Portland has like three words it uses when naming things), which have been on the same weekend in recent years. This means I’ve missed most of Bridgetown the last few years, outside of the odd set at Bar of the Gods (sitting atop the cigarette machine with a buddy for a standing-room only performance by, naturally, Maron, the stage covered with umbrellas as the roof leaked water dangerously close to the amp setup). This year the fests are separated by two weeks, and it was my pleasure last night to catch a lineup of Canadian comics at the Mt. Tabor Theater, where Katie Crown did laps before starting her set and Lachlan Patterson implored the crowd to give him a standing ovation as his transition between each bit.

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One Month of a Life Lived in Comics

April 14, 2012 by

Day 1: What the Hell am I doing?

Took the day off from work yesterday after a couple of long weeks, what with a big chunk of the editorial department in Chicago for C2E2 and me pretty much caught up on work and even ahead in a few places. The designer of Bucko has most of the material she’ll need to turn Jeff Parker and Erika Moen’s webcomic into a book, the Skeleton Key one-shot has gone to the printer, Matt Kindt is plugging away at a special project connected to the debut next month of his new ongoing series MIND MGMT, and the various video game tie-ins I assist on are racing to final files next week, but there’s not much that needs to happen on them until then. Why not take in some sun?

Of course, simply not being in the office isn’t the same as being away from comics. So much of the life I lead ties into this funny, weird medium that I work with that I never actually get all the way away from it. Every day I think about, talk about, read, write about, or in some other way interact with comics, and this day off was no exception.

I’ve been keeping this blog on and off for years, since a time when my life was almost completely different than it is now; it was even named by someone who hasn’t been in my life for a long time. In those years it’s been where I put reviews, interviews, event writeups, essays, and for a six-month period, a weekly magazine-style collection of what I was reading and thinking about that week. But it’s never really been a diary or talked much about what I do in comics, because frankly I’m probably not that interesting. Over the next month we’ll find out together!

So, here’s what I’m talking about, as a writing exercise as much as anything else. I haven’t posted to the Wright Opinion since October, in large part because writing about comics in a broad sense feels pretty depressing lately, between DC’s treatment of the Siegels and Shusters, the existence of Before Watchmen, and basically everything Marvel is doing. Those two aren’t the entire industry, but they do set the tone of the conversation we all have everyday, and it hasn’t been one I’m happy to follow for a while. I enjoy my job at Dark Horse, but I’ve never felt very comfortable writing about it, so that’s another thing that has kept it quiet in this space. So to change things up a bit, I’m going to try to spend a month going micro, writing about what I do at work and in other parts of comics, getting into a little personal history with the medium, and including whatever peripheral details will enrich the story.

Quick reminder: I’m an assistant editor at Dark Horse Comics, a large independent publisher of stapled comics and graphic novels situated in Milwaukie, Oregon, but commonly thought of as being in Portland because it’s so close, an easy commute by bus for someone like me living in downtown Portland. In my three and a half years at the company, I have assisted Scott Allie on The Guild, The Goon, Buffy Season 8, Serenity, The Occultist, and Billy the Kid’s Old-Timey Oddities and Sierra Hahn on Terminator, Green River Killer, and Kull. I have assisted Diana Schutz and Dave Marshall the entire time I’ve been at DH, currently working with Diana on Usagi Yojimbo, The Manara Library, Fatima: The Bloodspinners, and Blacksad and Dave on Conan the Barbarian, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Mister X, and a variety of video game tie-ins such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Prototype II, and Darksiders II. Sierra and I co-edit Creepy and Eerie. My own books include MIND MGMT, Skeleton Key, Bucko, Archie Archives, an assortment of Tarzan reprint projects, a handful of Dark Horse Presents stories, and a few as-yet unannounced projects further in the future. My job is a 9–5 Monday through Friday, with occasional overtime, usually performed at a tea shop in my neighborhood. I have posters and toys in my office, but in many ways it is what you imagine when you hear “office job.” I’ll get into more detail on what being an assistant editor entails and what I do on the books I edit solo in later installments.

Before Dark Horse, I interned at Top Shelf, worked for the Stumptown Comics Fest, taught comics at my old high school, and did this blog. I’m sure they’ll all get mentions in the coming month. I know at best 1/10 about comics as many of the people I work with and probably only half of what I should at this point in my career. I learn more everyday, and some of the things I learn will show up here.

It’s going to be an interesting month, because I honestly don’t really like writing about myself (notice how much of this entry has been avoiding doing precisely that), and I don’t think I’ve ever included a photo of myself on this blog. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way not to. For example, I attended the 2008 New York Comic Con (writeup here) and while there briefly met Jim Lee. I asked him if I could snap a photo for the piece I was writing on it, but he insisted that it was weird for me to just take a picture of him without me in it, so he asked someone else to take a picture of both of us. Since I don’t include pictures of me on the blog, I left it out. Here it is now, I think the first time a picture of me has run on the blog:


NYCC 2008. I probably don’t look much like this anymore. Not sure if Jim Lee does.

This is a medium that we all come to for personal reasons, and the experiences we have within the field are unique. It also never hurts to do a little self-promotion, something I had to get good at to get the job I have now, but haven’t done any of since. If I wrote a little about who I am and why I’m here and what I do every day, what would happen? Assuming it isn’t boring, let’s find out.

Tomorrow: How I spent that day off, and how comics follow me everywhere.

Also, for the five people who used to read this blog, probably down to one or two who will notice that it’s back: ask me about stuff, and I’ll try to work it in, presuming that neither decorum nor my NDA prevent it.

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Morrison Beyond Supergods

October 23, 2011 by

The Invisibles‘ Sir Miles makes for a convincing Number 2.

Seems that half the pleasure of my recent reading has been the unplanned parallels between consecutive books, a side effect of getting most of them from the library, where I have limited control over the order in which they become available. This is currently manifesting in the shared theme of memory loss between the novel I’ve just finished, Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind, and the one I’m about to begin, Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks Into Room. Right before that it was the similar perspectives of Grant Morrison in Supergods and Simon Pegg in Nerd Do Well, each writing about the influence of primarily American popular culture on their own work and their entry in turn into the American cultural consciousness from the UK.

Thinking about both books and their different scopes—Morrison’s is focused, laser-like, on superhero comics, mainly American, and by the time he reaches the 2000s, mainly Marvel and DC, while Pegg’s broadly surveys “geek” culture generally—around the same time I finished watching the 1960s British TV show The Prisoner made me realize how odd Morrison’s emphasis on superhero books is.

True, superheroes have few, if any, more ardent or more articulate defenders than Morrison, so it’s no surprise that he would write a book seriously engaging the genre. However, the more I think about it, the stranger it seems that Morrison, arguably the superhero writer of his popularity level who most reaches outside of the superhero genre for inspiration, would write a book that so thoroughly wraps up his own autobiography with the history of superheroes. Finishing The Prisoner contributed to this sense, as I began to recognize references to it in so much of the other fiction I’ve enjoyed, including several places in Morrison’s work.

Among the many odd contortions that Supergods makes in order to present Morrison’s own history while limiting the fiction discussed almost exclusively to superhero comics is its inclusion of Morrison’s The Invisibles into the superhero tradition without addressing many of the other cultural influences that shaped it. Entire books have been written on the connections between The Invisibles and other works of fiction, but what’s fresh in my mind is The Prisoner, which can be seen throughout the series’ tone, themes, and even specific visuals.

Another place that visuals from The Prisoner are explicitly referenced is in Morrison’s wonderful Seaguy, where the first two minor characters we encounter are dressed as members of the Village.


Is Seaguy set in the Disney version of the Village?

Of course, the visual of playing chess with Death simultaneously recalls one of the most enduring images of age-old struggle between man and the universe/gods, famously the central motif of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Here, Death’s ineptitude at the game and his complaint that the rules seem so “arbitrary” tip us off that a reversal of the natural order is at play here. In the funhouse world Seaguy lives in, everything is artificial and the natural world is out of place. Death has no meaning or power in the realm of Mickey Eye (nor in comics or other corporately owned fictions, in which characters and ideas are never truly allowed to die). That he is dressed as an extra from The Prisoner places the locale in the tradition of the Village, but we quickly learn that its modern iteration is a mindless theme park rather than a quiet resort.

This panoply of diverse influences is common in Morrison’s writing, and I discovered recently that this diversity can be felt even when a reader doesn’t catch the specific references. For a long time I was perplexed by my enjoyment of Morrison’s run on the series of Batman titles he shepherded up until DC’s recent relaunch. After all, it seemed so insular, really only concerning Batman himself in its resurrection of old continuity, its efforts to reconcile the character’s entire publishing history, and yet another plot involving a new enemy using that history against Batman. On the surface, it’s exactly the kind of comics-about-comics that I usually have no patience for. And yet, I found myself continually thrilled by Morrison’s take.

I can’t say for certain that I’ve solved the mystery, but a big clue fell into my lap when I got the hardcover edition of Batman & Robin vol. 3: Batman & Robin Must Die!, which includes a section of notes on the genesis of many of the new villains introduced in Batman & Robin (for all the dot connecting Morrison has done with old stories, his Batman run was also deeply generous with character creation). The section references the behavioral science experiments of Drs. Harry Harlow and John B. Calhoun, the classical demons of the Goetia of the Lemegeton, and even the history of the banana peel pratfall. The point being that even where I didn’t recognize the specific references, they still introduced a different flavor than would have come from so many superhero comics that are primarily influenced by other superhero comics, which have an inbred, stale quality to them. Morrison’s promiscuous use of cultural and sociological touchstones bring a freshness to his work, even when the story itself concerns a possible ancestor of Bruce Wayne posing as Wayne’s father and using knowledge of his history against him.

So while it comes as no surprise that Morrison wrote a book about superheroes, this is more because the genre is currently his preferred subject, not that it is his sole influence. If Morrison’s been bitten by the nonfiction bug, here’s hoping his next book has more to do with comics’ interaction with other media and the world, coupled with a more thorough look at his outside interests. He’s a great defender of superheroes, but his own work can’t be understood solely through that lens.

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Simon Pegg writes about spinning childhood obsessions into nerd gold

October 17, 2011 by
Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to
Becoming a Big Kid
Gotham Books – hardcover, $27.50
By Simon Pegg

This was an interesting read immediately after Grant Morrison’s Supergods, as both examine largely American popular culture from a UK point of view and delve into its influence beyond American shores and on the authors specifically. Of course, whereas Morrison limits his discussion to superhero comic books, Pegg’s interest is in popular culture broadly, though with a focus on those types of films, television, books, and even comics (a little) that engender in a certain type of viewer/reader a desire to obsessively re-watch or endlessly discuss nuances with others of the faithful. In other words, the popular culture that appeals to nerds. The importance of these works to Pegg’s biography is hard to overstate, as his career as actor and writer from the television show Spaced to movies like Hot Fuzz and Paul is built on extended riffs on such material.

Nerd Do Well is, on one level, Pegg’s memoir of growing up and developing his comic voice, spanning his childhood and young adulthood, up through the filming and release of Shaun of the Dead, the film that brought him to semi-prominence to American audiences. However, with the exception of a few passages describing the formulation of early jokes and an acknowledgment of his creative debt to writing partners Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright, Pegg delves very little into the process of writing or shooting the television and movies that he’s been involved in. Indeed, while the book is a work of autobiography, Pegg repeatedly expresses reservations about discussing his life, and outside of a few comic anecdotes, he plays the book’s biographical elements close to the vest.

That’s fine, as the real purpose and value of Nerd Do Well is as a book-length answer to the question, “What are your influences?” Where the story of Pegg’s early childhood is amusing but largely unremarkable and disjointed (another quality the book shares with Supergods is a tendency to reveal details out of order, following a narrative thread across a few years, moving onto a new topic, and then finally returning to where he left off a few chapters later), he brings enormous passion to the discovery and discussion of the films and television that formed his artistic sensibility.

Here Pegg is generous and eloquent, and the book comes to life when he describes the experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time. Having studied film in college, Pegg is fluent in critical theory and expounds at entertaining length on his theories as to the resonance of popular franchises with audiences. Star Wars, he speculates, came out at a moment when America was ready to guiltily reevaluate its position as global empire, and he notes similarities between the United States and the Galactic Empire, which peaks when the Empire is defeated in a jungle environment by a vastly outgunned militia of local inhabitants in Return of the Jedi. Of course, he never loses sight of the surface elements that attract young viewers and is an equally astute observer of the less macro emotional levels that these films work on, mentioning on more than one occasion that E.T. brought him to tears as a child.

Later, Pegg turns the same critical lens on his own work, bringing a refreshing self-awareness to a description of the Oedipal issues at play in Shaun of the Dead, an analysis of the consequences of two possible interpretations of the film’s ending and the male wish-fulfillment aspect of the female lead implied by one of them. The feeling is not unlike that of watching a film with audio commentary more concerned with emotional honesty than on-set hijinx.

The tone will be familiar and welcome to many readers in its down-to-earth perspective and genuine humbled excitement at the accomplishments and opportunities Pegg has had. The book’s structuring element is the ESTB—electro-static time ball—which Pegg imagines using to visit a younger self who has just fallen in love with a particular film or television show to announce that his grown-up self has just gotten to contribute to the genre in question or work with the director in question. It’s a disarming technique, although it becomes overused toward the end, when the book devolves into a a series of encounters with famous actors and directors and the ESTB metaphor seems to get pulled out on every page. The enthusiasm for meeting these people feels genuine—it doesn’t seem like namedropping in the sense of trying to impress the reader—but Pegg’s pleasure at meeting yet another beloved filmmaker becomes tryingly repetitive.

One more device that overstays its welcome is the fictional story that opens each chapter, depicting a superheroic version of Pegg on a mission to save the world. Early on it plays a counterpoint to Pegg’s discomfort with sharing the details of his life by giving him something else to write about, and the beginning is amusing, particularly in how the over-the-top description of Pegg’s prowess, both crime-fighting and sexual, makes Pegg himself the butt of the joke without resorting to self-depricatoin. But as the main narrative becomes more pleasurable, the superhero story becomes an unwelcome interruption, though individual installments remain brief. It’s a minor issue, but the inclusion of this element feels distracting.

Nerd Do Well is not the greatest work of pop culture critical analysis you’ll read this year, but it is a clear-eyed and enjoyabe look at how a nerd-culture figure like Pegg has transformed the fictions of is childhood and young adulthood into nostalgic yet fresh-feeling stories today. He includes a wide range of influences from Raiders of the Lost Ark to 2000AD and presents a clear path from experiencing the work to absorbing it to synthesizing it with his comedic style and a few autobiographical touches (though very few of those are explored, the primary one being the influence of a recent breakup with a pseudonymed woman on Spaced. Channeling his heartbreak over the terribleness of The Phantom Menace falls into a weird middle ground) to create his comedy and film writing. Though a flawed and incomplete portrait of Pegg’s creative process, for most of its pages Nerd Do Well is a fun and genial tour through the pop culture of the 1980s through the 2000s and how much they mean to one of their more eloquent admirers, like a long, funny chat over drinks with one of your smarter, nerdier friends.

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APE 2011

October 9, 2011 by

I’ve been told for years that I need to do the Alternative Press Expo, but it’s never worked out in previous years. However, between exhaustion with the goings on of the major publishers, a simple need to get out of town for a few days, and some leftover vacation days I had to use before they rolled over, this year turned out to be the ideal time to go. Dark Horse also has no institutional presence at the show (as far as I know I was the only person from DH there), so it was my first opportunity since interning at Top Shelf four years ago to spend a weekend steeped in comics without it being job related. I made a few connections and exchanged a few business cards, but most of the time I was just another fan.

The thing everyone told me about APE is that it’s like Portland’s Stumptown Comics Fest, which is both true and not. The energy is similar, with enthusiastic, friendly exhibitors and a strong DIY ethic. The mix of publishers, artists and academic exhibitors is a lot like Stumptown, though APE hasn’t gone in the “curation” direction that Stumptown has, so there’s a broader, more democratic range of people behind the tables.

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