November/December 2023 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest
Ironheart, Volume 1: Those With Courage by Eve L. Ewing, Luciano Vecchio, and Kevin Libranda
Hello, everyone! We’re back to our normal schedule, with me posting these the week after our official meetings on the third Wednesday of every month. I hope you’re all having a good holiday season, whatever and however you do or don’t celebrate! I did not hijack the meeting with vacation photos, but we did end up talking a bit about what television shows we were watching. :)
Our requisite Big Two books can sometimes be a hard sell to some of our official Comics Book Club members, especially older runs that haven’t aged as well as we thought, but everyone loved the character of Riri Williams! She was smart and resourceful, had a good supporting cast, and if her age felt a bit fuzzy, that was easy to overlook. There was some concern about the technobabble/pseudo science dialogue overwhelming the art, but it was seen to have served the story in terms of problem solving and character development. The sixth issue of this volume felt tacked on as a way to tie everything to the wider Marvel Universe (as one person put it, “Marvel can’t help themselves.”). Our resident academic felt Riri’s pain when dealing with the MIT dean, and I wondered if Riri’s concerns over her scientific advancements being the property of MIT was a meta nod at how often character creation at Marvel is work for hire. This led to a small discussion about royalties in comics that kinda depressed everybody. Sorry about that! Our next meeting will be Wednesday, December 20 to discuss The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack 10th Anniversary Edition.
What We're Reading
December 20 - The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack 10th Anniversary Edition by Nicholas Gurewitch
January 17 - Always Never by Jordi Lafebre
February 21 - Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley
March 20 - Come Home, Indio by Jim Terry
Next month’s selection has limited physical copies in the Chicago Public Library, but it’s on hoopla! Make sure to borrow the 10th Anniversary Edition from 2020, as that’s the one in the library. This book had such a strong showing in the recommendations and the “feel good crowdpleaser” survey that I decided to include it in our schedule. If anyone needs help getting a copy, let me know!
Also, we’ll be having our third annual Comics Book Club White Elephant Gift Exchange! I’m gonna have to check my bookshelves to see what I can offer.
Shameless Self-Promotion
The CyberSync anthology was a huge success! It was fully funded less than a day after launching and ended at almost 500%!! Woohoo! My story, “What Happened at St. Isidore’s,” will be the second-to-last one, which feels like it comes with its own unique pressures. Lol If there were other contributors in Chicago or my story was more than one page, I’d organize a signing when the book is printed. A friend of mine was kind enough to say he wants my autograph when he gets his copy. XD
My appearance on Keeping It Geekly was a lot of fun, and we were joined by the editor of CyberSync,
! You can read his newsletter, Alex’s Archives, here on Substack as well. This whole experience has been everything I’ve always hoped it would be. If you contributed to the campaign, I can’t thank you enough. Not only am I finally going to have a published comic, but it will be in an anthology with so many other talented artists and writers whom I greatly admire. This really is a dream come true!I also recorded an episode of Superhero Cinephiles, where I’ll be discussing the movie Samaritan (2022), starring Sylvester Stallone, with host Perry Constantine. I’ll be sure to link the episode here when it goes live!
NEWS
We discussed the creation of Riri “Ironheart” Williams for a bit, which was surprisingly controversial at the time. Before she appeared in the MCU, the character was the star of this promotional film for MIT made by students and alumni back in 2017.
Comics Beat had stories from Europe that I found interesting. For the first time in its history, the Nordic Council Literature Prize went to a graphic novel. Joanna Rubin Dranger’s Swedish memoir, Ihågkom oss till liv, translated as Remember Us to Life, is about “an exploration of the Jewish author’s family history as she seeks to learn about those members of her family lost in the Holocaust, never spoken of and seemingly forgotten.” It’s not available in English, but hopefully that changes soon.
French translations of American comics have made some positive impressions with critics, as two books made the French Association of Comics Critics longlist for the 2024 Grand Critic’s Prize and a whopping thirteen were included in the Angoulême Official Selection for 2024. The French Association of Comics Critics will announce their Prize winner on December 5.
I’ve made my feelings on generative AI “art” pretty clear in this space, but I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t share this excellent comic from Angie Wang for The New Yorker, “Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?”
DC had two noteworthy announcements recently. First, they’re reviving their Elseworlds imprint, which explored stories that wouldn’t fit into their mainstream continuity (What if Superman had landed in the Soviet Union? What if Batman, but Victorian?). They were a lot of fun and I have fond memories of some of them. The initial slate is a little Batman-heavy for my taste, but hopefully they expand it in the future. Second, they’ll be starting the DC Compact Comics line in June 2024. The Compact line will be a smaller format and more affordable, which is a good way to bring in new readers.
The ShortBox Comics Fair, a digital comics exhibit for international artists, took place last month and proved to be one of the biggest comics festivals in the world. This is incredibly encouraging, and helpful to people who find large, in-person conventions inaccessible for one reason or another.
The biggest controversy recently was arguably about the Scholastic Book Fair and their decision to separate certain books that might be deemed offensive or fall under the purview of book bans in some states. This drew the ire of several authors and free speech advocates, and inspired public statements from Molly Knox Ostertag and Raina Telgemeier, two comics creators who publish through Scholastic. It didn’t take long for them to reverse their decision, but it’s disheartening that they made it in the first place.
I understand wanting to help teachers and librarians navigate dangerous waters. As Celeste Ng told Lyz Lenz at
, “I think they got themselves between a rock and a hard place. But if you give up in advance, you’re doing the work of fascists for them.” There is no appeasing the people who want to ban books.Finally, there was sad news this month as Amazon announced it was killing the ComiXology app to fold it into Kindle, which a lot of people saw coming. Amazon may have purchased ComiXology for the purpose of dismantling it, but their egregious mishandling of the platform has already negatively impacted many creators, particularly those from marginalized communities who struggle to get a foothold in publishing, comics, or both.
Some Thoughts on Superheroes in Chicago
In what is surely a ritual for all middle school children who read nothing but superhero comics, a friend and I set out to create our own superhero universe shortly after he’d introduced them to me in fifth grade. We took out a map of the United States and pondered what kind of superheroes would exist in different parts of the country. Neither of us had spent any significant amount of time outside of our New Jersey suburb, but that didn’t stop us. What sort of powers would someone defending Denver have? How would the culture and history of New Orleans inform that city’s superhero?
When I made my home in Chicago almost twenty years later, I couldn’t help but think about superheroes. Asking for ideas on what kind of defender Chicago would have usually results in jokes about food, but there are lots of ideas floating around the Windy City. I was so happy when I started attending C2E2, and was even more delighted to discover CAKE. There’s a thriving indie comics scene here that provides a breadth of genres and talent way beyond the usual comic book power fantasies.
Chicago’s depiction in mainstream superhero comics can be a mixed bag. One of the great joys we had reading Ironheart this month was seeing The Picasso and The Bean represented in the pages of a Marvel comic, even if we had to give Eve Ewing a pass for using the word councilman to describe a member of city council. (They’re called aldermen in Chicago. We assumed Marvel intervened out of concerns of confusing non-Chicago readers. Lol)
An even better example of a Chicago-based Marvel superhero is Nighthawk from Nighthawk: Hate Makes Hate by David F. Walker and Ramon Villalobos. I highly recommend this book! It has a depth and real-world relevancy this genre desperately needs, punctuated by shocking violence that underscores its themes rather than undermines them. I was as surprised that Marvel published it as I was disappointed to learn it only lasted six issues.
Everyone from Nightwing to the Hulk has visited Chicago from the Big Two, with varying results. Despite the above examples, Chicago has never felt fully integrated into the Marvel Universe; fictional locations like Wakanda and Genosha have had a greater sense of place. As for DC, I personally think they’re at their best when avoiding the real world altogether. Gotham, Metropolis, and Central City are all iconic locations that reflect their resident superheroes; it’s jarring when they’re suddenly in New York or Los Angeles.
Astro City is a series that has deconstructed and reconstructed superheroes to great success. It’s one of my favorites. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson clearly took part in that ritual I mentioned at the beginning with an atlas and a sketchbook. Boston has the Silversmith and the Brahmin, New Orleans has the Black Rapier, Brazil has the Birds of Paradise, and on and on. Whither Chicago? Apparently in the Astro City universe, we’re protected by the Untouchable, which sounds like a Chicago superhero created by someone who’s seen too many movies about Chicago. (No offense to Mr. Busiek or Mr. Anderson.)
The gold standard for superheroes in Chicago is most likely C.O.W.L. by Kyle Higgins, Alex Siegel, and Rod Reis, published by Image in 2014 and folded into Higgins’ Massive-Verse years later. There was no way I could avoid bringing this book up, as it takes place in 1962 Chicago and features recognizable locations like Comiskey Park (now U.S. Cellular Field—don’t yell at me!) and famous historical figures, like former Mayor Richard J. Daley. Nothing about the superheroes in this book make them identifiable as Chicagoans, though.
What sets them apart is how they identify with their city and their place in it, which is probably the secret to such depictions. Much like Marvel superheroes and New York City, who can exist anywhere but always call the Big Apple home. Daredevil has lived in San Francisco and other locations, but is almost synonymous with Hell’s Kitchen; Spider-Man is a resident of Queens; and Captain America has traveled all over the country and the multiverse, but is a Brooklyn kid at heart. Similarly, the characters of C.O.W.L. talk baseball teams, aldermen, and neighborhoods like natives. Also, I’m not counting Radiant Black. That guy’s from Lockport.
I hope I wasn’t too scattershot this month. Sometimes I have a story to tell or a theme to develop and other times I ramble until I run out of steam. Lol Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Do you have a favorite Chicago superhero? If you’re not in Chicago, what would your local superhero look like? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you next month for The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack 10th Anniversary Edition by Nicholas Gurewitch!
I need to read that Ironheart run, sounds like fun, great newsletter as always!