August/September 2023 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

The Good Asian, Volume 1 by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi

Hello, everyone! And a special welcome to all the new subscribers from the last couple of days. If you’d like to learn more about me and how this newsletter came about, feel free to visit the About page! The Comics Book Club had a special guest this month as my friend Dr. Mark Martell, who was on a panel with the writer of this month’s selection at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, stopped by. Our venue was a little louder and more crowded than usual, but we made it work!

Everyone appreciated the historical notes that were included in the back of the volume, and I think I might hunt down the individual issues to get more of them. The main character, Edison Hark, was seen as unique and fully realized. We’re definitely going to read something else by writer Pornsak Pichetshote in the future. Alexandre Tefenkgi’s art was efficient and simple and did a great job conveying important information. Lee Loughridge’s colors were praised, particularly a double-page splash that depicted the inside of a nightclub. One of our members expressed concern over a lack of female representation, which was partly seen as a casualty of the noir genre, and those of us who had read Volume 2 coyly encouraged her to finish the story. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, September 20 to discuss Heartstopper, Volume 1.

What We're Reading

September 20 - Heartstopper, Volume 1 by Alice Oseman

October 18 - Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook

November 15 - Ironheart, Volume 1: Those With Courage by Eve L. Ewing and Kevin Libranda

December 20 - The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch

January 17 - Always Never by Jordi Lafebre

It looks like we’re going to have to make a new rule for our selection process: no more collections from Webtoon. Heartstopper, Volume 1 was available on hoopla when we were planning ahead, but has been removed. I apologized to our members and to anyone here following along! Heartstopper, Volume 1 is still available in physical form from the Chicago Public Library, my favorite local comic book store, and can be read digitally in its original format on Webtoon and Tapas. If you do read next month’s book digitally, Volume 1 collects Chapters 1 and 2 (roughly the first 32 comics).

Shameless Self-Promotion

I don’t have much news to share on most my forthcoming projects, but the cyberpunk anthology I’ll be appearing in has started its pre-launch! I’m going to be one of more than 25 creators involved and my story will be one of sixteen in more than 80 pages of comics! I’m already setting up podcast appearances to promote it, so watch this space for a lot more to come.

The one-page comic I’ve been talking about sharing in this space has been colored and lettered. I know I’ve been saying that I want to post it by the end of summer, but I didn’t realize how soon that was. I’m scheduling it to be posted in this space two weeks from now! “DEAD DREAMS,” a one-page comic about work, premieres here Friday, September 8, 2023! I’m excited for you all to check it out.

NEWS

PanelxPanel magazine, one of the best sources of comics criticism, devoted a whole issue to The Good Asian. CrimeReads published an interview with writer Pornsak Pichetshote written by

Alex Segura

. Also, The Good Asian won Book of the Year at last year’s Harvey Awards.

This year’s Harvey Award nominees have been announced, as have the Ignatz nominees. There’s some overlap, as there usually is, but it looks like a lot of quality comics will be recognized.

I was a bit too late last month to post much about San Diego Comic-Con beyond who won the Eisners, but now I can share some reflections on the whole weekend.

Dean Haspiel

provided his thoughts here on Substack and was quoted by Keith Knight.

Matt Bors

wrote about The Nib winning an Eisner.

James Tynion IV

also won an Eisner and his publisher filmed his acceptance speech, which was very nice. Tiffany Babb, co-editor of the aforementioned PanelxPanel magazine, wrote about the convention for Popverse.

In distribution news, Image Comics has left Diamond distributors entirely. I mentioned in an earlier newsletter that they had switched to Lunar distribution, but that was only for single issues. Now, their collections and graphic novels will be handled by Simon & Schuster.

Cracked interviewed three Black comic artists whose strips replaced Dilbert in newspaper comic strip pages. I’ve met Steenz at cons before, and they deserve all the recognition they get.

Finally, artist Bill Messner-Loebs has a gofundme page that I wanted to highlight. Sadly, there are so many artists in similar circumstances, from seasoned pros to struggling up-and-comers, that it would be impossible for me to present them all. The Hero Initiative does great work in this regard. There are systemic issues at play that need to be addressed, but for now, please help whoever you can however you can. Thanks.

Some Thoughts on Representation in Noir

My first exposure to certain ethnic slurs was not the racist rambling of an older relative, but the perfunctory prose of James Ellroy. I was in high school at the time, which was probably the worst age to enjoy Ellroy without a sense of irony, but it made me want to go deeper into his influences and that’s how I discovered the works of undisputed masters of noir like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. But they were (rich, white, male) products of their time, and Ellroy’s commitment to “historical authenticity” (a dubious excuse at best) meant the work of all three is marred by casual racism, homophobia, ableism, and misogyny.

Gay male characters are either weak or deceptive. Women are damsels in distress or femme fatales. Disabled people are to be pitied or distrusted. The depictions of Black and brown characters, if any exist at all, are enough to require content warnings at the start of most collections.

The foundations of noir were exclusionary. In his defining essay on the genre, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler wrote: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.”

Replacing “mean'“ with “white,” “man” with “person” or “woman,” and/or making a concession that going [walking] down the street is difficult or impossible makes the story possibilities not only more expansive but subversive. Supposedly “clean” streets are already hostile to such people, but the most celebrated (white) authors of the genre leave no room to consider such perspectives.

These authors and attitudes are only part of the story, of course. There’s a common misconception that marginalized voices simply didn’t exist before modern times, but if we scratch beneath the surface of the “classics,” we can find plenty of work that deserves equal celebration. Dr. Rudolph Fisher and Hughes Allison were Black contemporaries of Chandler and Hammett, for example; the former’s short story “City of Refuge” appeared in the same magazine as Chandler’s essay nearly twenty years earlier.

When my friends and I read Ellroy nearly thirty years ago, we thankfully didn’t absorb any of the more toxic characteristics on display. We read books like The Black Dahlia and White Jazz and moved on to The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely for the descriptive prose and plot twists. It’s in these elements that we can find what makes noir appealing beyond the tough-guy posturing and regressive personal politics.

Chandler continued in his essay: “[The detective] must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” This sentiment is much more expansive, if still exclusionary because of its pronouns. What does this sense of honor look like? What does it mean to be “the best man” in a world that hates you?

These questions were certainly addressed in the books written by Fisher and Allison and in The Good Asian. Contemporary scholarship and authorship are both working to fill out the representational deficit in the genre. Patricia Highsmith is recognized as a Great American Author. Walter Moseley has arguably done more for the genre than any writer living today and is likewise an American treasure. There is much more to uncover and more to be written, and there’s never a shortage of mean streets to explore.

Anyway, I brought up a lot of points and I kinda sort of addressed most of them. I tend to view these short-form essays more as long-form conversation starters. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Do you have a favorite noir story? Would you like to read about my failed anthology submission from many years ago about a gay hard-boiled detective? Please share this newsletter if you think others would enjoy it. Thanks for reading. See you in a month for Heartstopper, Volume 1 by Alice Oseman!