December 2023/January 2024 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest
The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack Tenth Anniversary Edition by Nicholas Gurewitch
Hello, everyone! For the third year in a row, I brought a Vertigo book to the Comics Book Club White Elephant Gift Exchange. Lol I didn’t even realize it until I started explaining what Outlaw Nation was and who had originally published it! I hope the person who ended up with it enjoys it. I lucked out with a volume of Love and Rockets that I’ve already started reading. See you all in 2024!
I was honestly a bit surprised at how much everyone enjoyed this book. We may do more comic strip collections in the future as a result. I was worried that some of the more dated material would have soured the overall reading experience for some, but several people became nostalgic for the early days of webcomics. (Remember going to individual artists’ websites to read comics?) As with many discussions of comedic material, a large portion of our discussion was spent repeating some of our favorite jokes. We all admired the range of styles Nicholas Gurewitch had, both in loving homages to everyone from Edward Gorey to Robert Crumb and in the different settings of alien worlds, dinosaur times, and candy kingdoms. The development of that artistic style was on display, too, even in the depiction of humans that were little more than stick figures who were noticeably more expressive towards the end of the volume than at the beginning. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, January 17, 2024 to discuss Always Never.
What We're Reading
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
We’re getting down to the last few scheduled comics, so expect a poll soon, maybe after our next meeting. Feel free to leave suggestions below on what we should read after March 2024! Please remember that our selections must be available on hoopla and in the Chicago Public Library.
Shameless Self-Promotion
Now that the CyberSync campaign is over, all that’s left is to wait for the books to print. I’m so excited to have something with my name in it! I’ve also submitted the final artwork for the black and white four-page supernatural mystery I wrote for the SMASH 2 Anthology for Foreign Press Comics. I got to work with the same team as CyberSync. I can’t wait to share more!
The two one-shot comics I’m writing are also proceeding. The script for one is almost complete and I’ve been further developing the world of the other. I also have an exciting new animated project that I’ll hopefully have more to share about soon and convention news for 2024.
NEWS
The Perry Bible Fellowship has won several awards, including the Harvey, Ignatz, and Eisner. Everybody at the Comics Book Club was surprised that Nicholas Gurewitch created a Marvel comic, even if it was only a strip for the anthology series Strange Tales. You can read a retrospective of that series here and the full Perry Bible Fellowship here. You can even purchase art, prints, and zines of the strip here.
“Best Comics of 2023” lists are still being curated, and I’m going to do my best to gather up as many as I can find into their own post and send that out sometime in the middle of next month. Stay tuned!
This SKTCHD article is a little over a month old but I didn’t include it last month because I wanted to discuss it more in depth in the essay portion of this newsletter. It’s an intelligent, thoughtful response to a critique of the comics industry that popped up recently and caused a minor hullabaloo.
The news was a bit slow for me, what with the holidays and all, but I’ve got two pieces of good news and two pieces of bad news to share. First, a new comic book imprint has started. High Strangeness is going to be part of the already existing Oni Press and Elijah Wood’s film production company SpectreVision. This means it might survive a lot of the growing pains and financial constrictions that plague a lot of smaller or mid-sized imprints, but it might also be an IP farm for film and television projects. Only time will tell.
The Comics Advocacy Group has been around for a while, but started its online presence in earnest back in November. Their application for 30 mini-grants of $500 each will be open until January 15th. Spread the word if you know anyone who might benefit!
The bad news items are pretty bad. In a Massachusetts school, the police searched a classroom for copies of Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. I could probably write a whole newsletter about how fucked up this is. It’s wrong on several levels and completely unjustifiable.
Finally, artist Ian Gibson has died. He was largely known for his work in the British comics magazine 2000 AD with Alan Moore, John Wagner, and Alan Grant. He had a long career with a tremendous output, and he will be missed.
Some Thoughts on “the State of Comics”
It’s the end of the year, a time to reflect and consider the future. There’s a lot of that going around lately, especially with comics. Some of this has been motivated by creators announcing that they’re stepping away from comics, either for their mental health, financial reasons, or both. This is troubling and unfortunate, and to discuss it would involve several topics, including the value of art in our society, the need for a strong social safety net, and the role of social media and how to regulate it, among others. Maybe I’ll address it someday.
Instead, I’d like to focus on “the state of comics.” There were dire projections about all that’s wrong with comics and how to fix it recently, but they’ve been coming from many of the same people who have been lamenting the state of comics for a very long while now. Not necessarily the same individuals, mind you, but the same types of people who continuously complain that the thing they like isn’t the same as it was when they started liking it.
The inciting incident of this introspection (and more than a little projection) was an article written by a long-time and respected retailer early in November. His good points were overshadowed by his bad points, his hyperbolic language didn’t help, and his focus was largely on mainstream comics and comics retail. None of it was all that new, and the responses to it have largely fallen into two camps. The fact that there can’t be more of a discussion about this is indicative of several larger problems, including comics fandom, comics discourse, and, again, social media, but one example sticks out to me.
In his
newsletter, addressed this with humor and insight. The title (“Dying Since 1935”) says plenty, and he mentions previous panics. As someone who was around for Marvel’s bankruptcy and various other dire times for the comics medium, Mr. Brevoort is clearly someone who speaks from decades of firsthand experience and knowledge. Unfortunately, if not predictably, a YouTube video popped up in my recommendations not even a day later from a channel I have since blocked declaring, “Tom Brevoort WANTS comics to DIE!” It was phenomenally stupid.Mr. Brevoort’s newsletter includes a telling artifact in its Q&A portion that demonstrates how little has changed in another not-unrelated way: the letters page from The Cat #2. One letter writer (adopting the Latin pseudonym of “Cincinattus,” no less) complained that the previous issue of the series was “burdened down by Communistic phrases put out by Women’s Lib.” “Marvel is turning into a bunch of radicals,” the letter begins, and concludes that Marvel is “supporting [Communists] with these leftist stories.” Swap out Communism with “woke ideology” (and maybe “Women’s Lib” with “cancel culture”), and this would be barely distinguishable from something on Twitter today.
Diversity is sometimes given as a reason for why comics are “failing,” but it’s barely a coherent argument and almost never made in good faith. The men (and it is always men) making these arguments are also conflating “superhero stories” with “comics,” and usually “mainstream American Big Two superhero stories” at that. Even if we take that at face value, the way to “fix” things is not by pretending it’s the 1990s again.
That SKETCHD article mentioned above gets to the heart of the matter. Comics aren’t dying, they’re changing. This is a reasonable take on which most people should be able to agree. When the history of comics in the twenty-first century is written, the subtitle might as well be “Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Diversity” (or manga or crowdfunding or webcomics or any of the myriad reasons typically given for why we’re watching the Last Gasp of Comics). The predictions of comics coming to an end are as routine as they are premature.
There’s also an element of classism that I think is often overlooked in these discussions. It’s always the “popular” forms of entertainment that are dying, like television, movies, and comics. When was the last time anyone actively worried if people are going to the opera anymore? Or that people aren’t painting or sculpting as much as they used to? Yet I know far more people who read comics than attend operas (and I once had a philosophy professor who got into a fist fight at a Wagner production at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, but that’s a story for another time).
Are sales down? Yes, but that’s true for several media for a variety of reasons. Are comics retailers struggling? Yes, but many have been for a while through no fault of their own, not because “comics are bad now.” Honestly, comics have never been better. There’s a wider range of genres, styles, and storytelling modes out there than the medium has ever seen before. I feel like someone alive during the advent of impressionist painting or modernist music (both artistic innovations that were met with some outrage and rejection).
The Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) returned this year, and I read zines and mini-comics that expanded the definition of the form. My Instagram feed is full of projects I’ve supported on Kickstarter from talented people who should have bright futures in comics. New imprints, publishers, and platforms pop up all the time. I know anecdotal evidence is inherently weak and untrustworthy, but I’m excited for what’s to come.
Human beings invented painting before we invented paper. In fact, if we take Scott McCloud’s expansive definition and history of comics, which includes the Bayeux tapestry and some hieroglyphics, the Lascaux cave paintings can count as comics, too. Even if civilization completely collapses, there will be people singing songs, painting pictures, and, yes, putting some of those pictures into sequential order to create comics. But civilization isn’t going to collapse, as much as we may suspect it will any day now, and comics will continue to thrive.
I hope this has been enjoyable to read. I know it wasn’t exactly timely, but I wanted to weigh in on this, because it’s about an art form I love. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! What do you see as the future of comics? What comics are you excited to read in the future? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you next month/year for Always Never by Jordi Lafebre! Have a safe and happy New Year!
Well said. I hope everyone enjoys Always Never, I adored that!