State of the Union

I know a remarkable man named Ben:  one of the most genuinely considerate people I’ve ever been blessed to meet, He wasn't one for meditation or chanting and, as far as I know, he never had visions of the future:  His nature was rooted in his simple, honest humanity.  And he once said—I’m totally paraphrasing here, so if I mangle it blame me, not Ben—what van, and by what river.  

I understand it.  There are times in life when the the universe really does open itself to us, when life-changing revelations flood our very being and transform our perceptions of ourselves and our world.  When that happens, when we’ve been so irrevocably altered by our encounter with the Ineffable, the impulse is to run through the streets screaming, “This is IT!  This is IT!  This is IT!”  Now Ben is a reader, gravitates toward the fantasy and more importantly the graphic novels.  Whenever I go to lift something heavy, I'm still reminded of moving his book collection one afternoon.  Now back many years, and I did go online recently to see if this was still around, Ben belonged to a book club, and it is still around.  The Science Fiction Book Club as it were, I said, really?  Well I was always big on reading, and this little book club had a very small section of graphic novels available to club members.  I do remember browsing the selections available, but alas, couldn't come up with the required commitment of the initial book order to become a member, but there was something that I did want, and waylaid Ben into buying it on is next order, at his discounted member price.  Now up to this time in my life, the only crossover event I had followed was The Death of Superman, although honestly, I didn't get all the issues that tied into it.  That story was shit anyway, and forever ruined comics, in a very general way, and taught us, that even in comics, no one stays dead forever.  Now I have no idea what else Ben ordered with that book, or if he is even a member of that book club anymore, but the book was Crisis on Infinite Earths.  So it begins, now there are plenty of reviews of that crossover, and it's far reaching influences on other major events, so I won't bore you with that.  Simply, I liked it.  I liked it a lot, written well before I was able to decide what comics I wanted to read, it was always referenced in about every comic store you walked into in the mid 90's.   And in that time, working retail jobs, earning about 80 bucks a week, if I really pushed the hours, I wasn't going to spend the 10 or so bucks on a single issue, knowing that a 12 issue commitment would cost me probably close to that 80 bucks.  But it was always something I wanted to read, the posters that hung on comic shop walls fascinated me.  In fact, even to this day, that cover art on the book still fascinates me.  

Valiant Comics 1988-2004

I was sixteen or seventeen when I first read Magnus Robot Fighter.  The book had been sitting on my shelf for weeks—on the pull list for that month, I don’t recall who’d recommended it, but I believe it was issue 25 that I started with, due to the collectible cover of that issue:  a page or two in and my mind went white. From the first word I was hooked by Ostrander’s rich characters, his flowing language, his extraordinary ear for dialogue, his effortless ability as a storyteller.  His compassion most of all.  Those two interlocking tales of the Magnus and Rai settled into my cells, into my soul, and left an imprint that remains just as deep, just as true, more than fifteen years later.  Magnus Robot Fighter instantly became one of my Favorite Books of All Time—and it remains so to this day.

CrossGen Comics 1998-2004

Wait.

Characters trapped in limbo?

What a fantastic idea for a story!

That concept should grab you by the throat and drag you out of your bed and into your favorite reading spot.

For a few hours, anyway.

CrossGen comics. The result was magical. The kind of creative combustion I’d only seen happen a handful of times in my life, Valiant and Vertigo, also had similar experiences for me. Today I found myself going through some folders filled with amazing art from the Crux series. For those of you who never journeyed to Atlantis, this was a story that began life as a CrossGen comic book which—after CG's collapse—was forgotten. Now the bankruptcy of CrossGen, has been heavily scrutinized since it happened, and hopefully one day, there will be a tell all novel published. As with most bankrupt companies, it happened so fast, and could not have been avoided. I still miss Capricia and Galvan, Tug, Gammid, and all the rest and I never gave up hope that someday they will be rescued from the limbo they're trapped in and start the stories anew.

Issue 3

A few hours ago I was reading a review of an upcoming issue of Fables 100, written by Bill Willingham when, something wonderful happened. I thought about all the pinnacle issues in Vertigo's storied history, and with what Fables has come to represent, this should be mentioned along with the great issues in Hellblazer, Preacher, Swamp Thing, and Sandman canons. Now if you're not reading this Fables story, I will go over that in a later post, but a simple explanation is, it revolves around characters from fairy tales, who have been cast out of their homelands, and have settled into New York City present day. The ones that are able to blend into society walk around in the general public, while the more fairy tale like, reside away from society, in what they call "The Farm" in upstate New York. This all reminded me of an issue of Wizard from years ago, I am still looking online to see if a copy still exists, I may have this in storage someplace. The issue had a list of the top 100 single issue comics since you were born.

These are the moments that I live for. Moments when it becomes clear that, almost without help, forces us to focus on something bigger.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you read, or who told you to read it, just keep reading. Nothing beats a good story, whether it is instant or unfolds slowly, it’s the opening up that’s so magical. That moment of realizing that you’re connected to something so much bigger than yourself. I remember, years ago, when I was just beginning to read Planetary, sitting there, on my couch, reading issue 4. I had to go back and pay out the ass for the earlier issues, this being one of those comics that collectors wanted to have, not for the story, but because there weren't many issues around. That truth hit me with even more impact a few months later, when I was able to read what had been written before. The first few issues of Planetary were, at that point in my life, the best writing I’d ever seen; they were so good, in fact, that I was hounding my local comic shop owner, to order everything from this author. Warren Ellis.

I gave in.

Not willingly, not happily, maybe not even consciously; but however it happened, I spent the next year reading all of Ellis' work, and as any faithful reader knows, you will be get pissed off, if you read a serial comic book. I started way back in the early 90's with my reading, and here we are 20 years later, and the problems still exist, late books, either by writer delays or publisher delays. With Ellis, The Authority and Transmetropolitan soon followed. That was when I understood, in a way I never had before, as the years have passed—and this is something that deserves a lengthy post of its own—I’ve come to believe that the writers we love—not the ones we merely like, but the ones whose stories set our souls on fire and settle into our very cells—become intimate parts of our lives; dearest of friends who we visit with time and again over the years. It doesn’t matter how much time passes between visits: when something draws us to the library shelf, when we pull one of those old, familiar books down, we pick up exactly where we left off.

Issue 2

I’ve been playing this game long enough to know a good comic from a bad one. It's much more than a publisher backing, so what if DC or Marvel stamps the cover, what about all the others. Those that know me know that nothing in comics is higher for me, than Valiant comics in the 90's. I'll have more on that later, I plan to spend time on the individual publishers that hooked me, when I first got into comics, namely Dark Horse, CrossGen, Malibu, Image, Epic, Eclipse, and Humanoids. What could be more rewarding than the rich unfolding epic of the very soil in which we live? The writer/artist chemistry can’t be created or forced: it’s either there or it’s not. With Gaiman and McKean, it was there...and then some. If any other artist had drawn those stories—even if every single plot point, every single word, had been exactly the same—it wouldn’t have touched people in the same way or garnered the enthusiastic response that it’s still getting, more than twenty years after its creation. It wouldn't be Sandman, it just wouldn't.

There’s something about comics—the deliciously slower pace, the opportunity to escape the structure of everyday life and melt into in a new environment—that makes reading an even more pleasurable experience. During the upcoming—and for me, life will be defined by what I will choose to read. Oh, I certainly will read—fiction, non-fiction, comics, magazines, endless articles on the internet—but, in some ways, I won’t just be reading: meaning, which each story will be expertly chosen, whether by artist, author, or content. It’s often difficult to find the pocket of stillness—inner and outer—that allows me to utterly lose myself in the pages of a good book. It honestly hasn't happened since the days of Sandman and similar Vertigo works, the last time I was truly moved by a book was Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell.

This next year's reading blitz will get off to a great start with the opportunity—detailed in a upcoming post—to reacquaint myself with Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Warren Ellis' Planetary, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and Garth Ennis' run on Hellblazer. The books are hard to find individually, but I hope to change all that soon.

But for now a list of what are the "Top 100 Comics of the Century" from issue #210 of The Comics Journal purports to list the best work of the past 100 years -- that is to say, the most valuable for their artistic merits, not simply the 100 most enjoyable comics of the 20th century.

Issue 1

Going back in time to middle 90's, comics began with me the introduction of Spawn. I bought an issue at a grocery store, it was number one, and the reason for buying was for the cover. That was it, nothing more than a cover, I won't comment much on the writing for that issue, but all stories have a beginning and this is mine.

The energy and enthusiasm of the years following and, in some ways these books that opened new doors, set new standards, did things that comics had never dared to do before. Sandman and Spider, Constantine and Swamp Thing, Preacher, Sin City, Tim Hunter, Astro City and, perhaps the greatest story in the history of comic books, Cerebus: these were ideas that I, as a reader, cared passionately about. I enjoyed their company—and looked forward to their evolution. Unfortunately, for reasons that I have never been able to remember, I strayed from the serialized superhero genre, and started to look forward to the finite miniseries, later collected into what has been coined The Graphic Novel. Marvels, The Golden Age, Earth X, Stardust, The Long Halloween, Whiteout, and Kingdom Come hardly need explanations.

Over the past few months, I have spent many hours recreating my collection digitally, easier to move and share that way. I have also been able to complete collections now digitally, that I wasn't financially able to do so earlier in my life. This all began rather simply in the middle of 2010. A trip to a Barnes and Noble, and I was changed, I picked up, but didn't buy it, a rather informative book on 500 Essential Graphic Novels, and it's a paperback and offers short reviews and submissions of this genre of literature. The book was sectioned off into chapters detailing a sub genre of this literature, the best fantasy related, the best crime related, the best science fiction related, and so on. I spent a little while skimming the book and this renewed my interest in comics, which has been lacking for the past few years. So the next step is to share what I learned. This could be fun.