BeaucoupKevin has me thinking about painted comics. I usually don’t like them very much.

That strikes me as kind of odd, given my early tastes in comic art. I was crazy about the realistic stuff… Neal Adams, George Perez, folks like that (and I still am). I remember some photo-realistic covers from issues of The Flash that were just the living end. I hated… hated Joe Staton’s cartoon-y style. It was the bane of my existence, as he seemed to draw everything at one point or another.

At that point in my life I probably would have formed a cult for Alex Ross, I think because I badly needed comics to be taken seriously. Painted comics would have been just the evidence I needed that this was an art form, not just an entertainment. Faced with the derisive assessment of comics as immature or stupid or whatever other dismissal, I could have whipped out a painted comic. Their criticisms of detractors would have frozen in their throats when faced with the seriousness, the Importance connoted by someone taking the time not just to draw the Scarlet Witch… but to paint her.

Yeah, I was pretty stupid. And weird. Don’t forget weird. (I may still be both, but that’s for you to decide.)

Now, I’m at a point in my life as a comics fan when I need them to be fun. And, as Kevin points out, painted comics are kind of the anti-fun. It’s probably unfair, but I always associate them with an excessive weightiness (or at least an intended weightiness, even if they don’t pull it off). They’re Serious. They’re Important. And worst of all, they announce it before I get a chance to decide for myself.

The cartoon-y (for lack of a better term… I really mean it as a compliment) style that I rejected as a kid is now a very handy predictor of a comic I’ll like very, very much. At the very least, I’ll appreciate the visual craft required to communicate complex, varied emotions and situations with a deceptively minimalist style. I’d much rather look at a black-and-white comic drawn by Andi Watson or Bryan Lee O’Malley than some painted thing by Alex Ross. I vastly prefer the clear, kinetic, sexy work Cameron Stewart did on Catwoman than Paul Gulacy’s. I think there’s probably more eye candy on any single page of Carnet de Voyage than there is in, say, Secret War.

This would normally be the point where I express my continued bafflement over a certain Eisner nomination for best cover artist, but I’ve talked about that. So I’ll just wrap things up by saying that I’m glad this is a Wednesday that promises a lot of fun comics. Hope my copy of Lost At Sea shows up.

(Edited to eliminate a terrifyingly familiar and unnecessary use of quote marks. Shudder.)

So the white smoke went up, and now I’ve got a Meryn Cadell song stuck in my head.

“The pope, pope, pope, pope, pope.
we all here to see the pope, pope, pope, pope, pope.
Well, you got your pope pennants, buttons, your pope clothes,
You got your pope binoculars to see him up close
and I cried when I saw that man in white.
I cried, much to my surrounders’ delight.
I cried, ’cause I couldn’t breathe anymore; I cried
’cause people were stepping on my feet.
Hey, hey Mr. Holiness way over there,
Maybe we love you, but we’re sadly lacking air.”

I don’t even know if I have that cassette any more. This is going to make me crazy.

Before getting to this week’s arrivals, I wanted to point to something Dorian posted at Postmodern Barney:

“The size of this week’s comics shipments, combined with the Free Comic Book Day books, not to mention the unfortunately close to the end of tax season timing in the United States, means it’s very likely that your local comic shop could experience a cash crunch this week. Buying an extra trade, or back issue, or sampling a comic you don’t normally buy isn’t much, but every little bit helps.”

The shipping list does seem particularly voluminous this week, so there are plenty of opportunities to expand horizons with an extra title. I’m still trying to catch up on Maison Ikkoku and a bunch of other manga titles, so that’s probably where my bonus buys will go.

As for tomorrow, some favorites are on the way, like Marvel’s Runaways 3, Livewires 3, and Young Avengers 3. (Way to drop all the teen titles in a slurry, by the way.) DC has JLA Classified 6, Manhunter 9, and Birds of Prey 81. I loved the Free Comic Book Day preview of PS238 from last year, and I’ve been meaning to catch up on the trades. The 11th issue of that series comes from Dork Storm.

Oni brings out the second issue of Andi Watson’s Little Star. The re-release of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Little Star OGN makes its delayed arrival, too. And I’ve heard good things about Sharknife. Hm… maybe I won’t need to bulk up on extra manga after all.

But, hey, if you can’t make it through the week without bringing home some manga, you could stop by Love Manga, where David Taylor has handily extracted all of the week’s offerings for your convenience.

JennyN, one of the intrepid posters over at the Flipped Forum, has found an interesting scholarly piece on yaoi manga. Author Sueen Noh interviews a group of devoted yaoi fans and explores their perspectives on the work and why it speaks to them. Noh also provides some useful insights on the genre and its origins and yaoi’s rather gauzy take on same-sex romance.

Reading it helped me understand some of the reasons I’m a bit ambivalent about yaoi titles. While I’ve always been aware of the fact that I’m not the target audience for these stories, Noh’s piece went farther in articulating why that is and what some of the genre’s underlying intents are.

But ambivalence doesn’t keep me from being curious about yaoi, and I’m looking forward to some of Digital Manga’s upcoming releases.

Another weekend, another big block of time spent thinking about things other than comics. (Actually, I did plunk down with several volumes of Negima! for this week’s column, which should go up at Comic World News sometime today.)

The highlight of the weekend was an early anniversary gift from the hubby: behold, the splendor of Birdzebo! That’s not the exact model, and we actually mounted ours on a post, partly because we can’t resist a project that requires the mixing of cement. Birdzebo isn’t quite as popular yet as the one it replaced, but the birds in our neighborhood are fairly shameless, so I’m guessing it’s just a matter of time.

Maybe it’s the insidious influence of Andy Runton’s Owly, but my gardening efforts this year seem to have shifted entirely in the direction of encouraging birds and other wildlife into the yard. (Not deer, mind you. Those hooved vermin don’t need any additional encouragement.) Part of the weekend was spent prepping the bed that’s going to host nothing but plants hummingbirds love. (I’m too lazy to maintain a hummingbird feeder, but I will spend hours dragging bags of compost across the yard. Go figure.)

Now I want to read manga about bird-watching. I don’t know if such a title exists, but one should. It would be a logical sequel to Imadoki!

Shawn Fumo at Worlds Within Worlds finds a discussion of bookstores that shelve CMX and Marvel digests with the rest of the DC and Marvel books instead of with the manga.

I’ve noticed this with the Marvel titles at some bookstores, and it’s too bad. I think titles like Runaways and Inhumans might click with manga readers. (I also wonder if titles like Livewires and Spellbinders will get the digest-sized treatment.)

I haven’t seen CMX books mixed in with the DC trades, though I’ve noticed something else. Very often, the CMX books will all be shelved with the manga under “CMX” as opposed to alphabetically by title. So Land of the Blindfolded and From Eroica With Love and whatever else will be clumped together in the Cs as opposed to with their appropriate alphabetical neighbors.

Part of that has to track back to the uninspired trade dress of the CMX books, particularly on the spines. There’s a huge CMX logo, so bland that it looks like it was created with Microsoft Word, and much smaller and equally boring title typeset lower on the spine. Basically it looks like a book called CMX that runs its chapter titles on the spine, so it isn’t too much of a surprise that bookstore employees clump it.

Just more evidence (in my opinion) that DC hasn’t done nearly enough to brand its CMX titles.

For me, a big part of the fun of awards programs like the Eisners is getting the first draft of a shopping list of books I’d like to pick up at some point. Tom Spurgeon has the list of nominees at The Comics Reporter, plus some entertainingly pungent commentary. Ed Cunard makes some fearless predictions at The Low Road.

After looking through the list (via The Beat), here are some knee-jerk reactions:

• The Red Bull will certainly be flowing at DC’s corporate stronghold, won’t it?
• Much as I like Brian K. Vaughan and Ex Machina, I do wish the nominating committee had shared the wealth a little bit. It’s kind of like the Grammy Awards.
• Surely if a very competent cover-band title like Astonishing X-Men can get nominated for best new series, She-Hulk or Street Angel could have gotten a nod.
• Best publication for a younger audience is going to be a bloodbath… a bloodbath, I say!
• Not that it has anything to do with the relative merits of the nominees for best U.S. edition of foreign material, but Vertical’s packaging of Buddha is simply spectacular.
• I’m disappointed that Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life) didn’t get a nomination for best writer/artist – humor. (Okay, he’s probably more disappointed than I am.)
• Why do painted comics annoy me so much?
• Wait… I must be reading this wrong. Michael Turner got nominated for his covers for Identity Crisis? And Andi Watson didn’t get nominated for Love Fights?
• Nice to see Sean McKeever get a nod for talent deserving of wider recognition.
• I’m trying to remember precisely when Paul Gravett’s magnificent Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics was published. Because if it was during the last year, there’s really no excuse for it not to be nominated for best comics-related book.

While I’m not really interested in many of the books tied into the run-up to DC’s Infinite Crisis, I did read the interview with Greg Rucka in this week’s Comic Shop News. I’m still not interested in the event or whatever its consequences are for the tone of DC’s books (and nothing, but nothing makes me less enthusiastic about a comic than the knowledge that Dan DiDio is excited about it). But one thing Rucka said did get me thinking:

“The point all along, and we said this in that early interview — for God’s sake, let yourself be surprised. Enjoy the fact that on Wednesday a new issue of the story comes out. You don’t have to know how it’s all going to end to enjoy it. Not everybody needs a spoiler.”

Maybe it’s a little odd that this sentiment emerges in a fairly lengthy preview of an upcoming comic, but it’s still worth considering. It’s one of those subjects that raise more questions for me than conclusions of any sort, so I’ll just throw some of the questions out (and for the sake of discussion, “spoilers” can also be read as “detailed plot descriptions”):

Can surprise actually improve a comic? Does a lack of advanced knowledge about its contents increase the likelihood that you’ll enjoy it, just because you have fewer preconceptions (positive or negative) about what your response will be?

Is my fondness for manga at least partly due to the fact that I very rarely know precisely what I’m going to get from a given title, aside from maybe a short solicit in Previews or the teaser on the back cover? Is the un-distilled quality of the reading experience part of the pleasure?

If spoilers can constitute an obstacle to actually enjoying the work, why do so many creators give out so many of them? (You know those movie comic attractions that make you feel like you’ve already seen it? A lot of “preview interviews” give me that same feeling about comics.)

As a follow-up, why do those same creators who trade spoilers for promotional noise turn around and moan about someone else airing rumors or spoilers about upcoming plot developments? Is that just because these leaks – which often aren’t any more informative than what the publisher has provided – aren’t part of the official hype cycle?

How ingrained are spoilers in marketing strategies? Is it a given that a certain amount of plot material is going to have to be revealed to entice readers to buy it?

If it is, how did it get to that point? Which is the chicken and which is the egg, publishers feeling compelled to provide spoilers to lure readers, or readers becoming conditioned to expect them as part of the pitch?

How can a creator effectively straddle the line between teasing their work, giving away just enough information to make it enticing, and undermining at least part of the sense of discovery and surprise they wanted readers to have? Who’s particularly good at this sort of promotional chat?

Factoring in the potentially detrimental effect of spoilers, how can a reader balance that in the risk-return equation of comic fandom? With high comics prices and the often laborious process of tracking them down to buy them, how sensible is it to go in blind?

As I said, no answers, but sometimes when a number of questions swirl around my brain, it helps me to put them down on paper. Or blog.

Comic Book Resources has pieces on two of my favorite books.

Dave Richards chats with writer Marc Andreyko about Manhunter, one of DC’s more interesting (and sales-challenged) titles. Andreyko always gives good interview, and there are some nice sound bites in this one. There’s also this mildly provocative notion:

“‘Kate is a character who fills a void in the comics world, she is a flawed, intricate character who goes beyond the typical women in superhero comics,’ he said. ‘A lot of the things that people say make her ‘unlikable’ are traits that, if in a male character would be trumpeted. So, it has been fun to take the female archetype and toss it on its ear.'”

In the latest Calling Manga Island, Tony Salvaggio discovers that it’s never too late to fall in love with Planetes, which is probably the closest thing to a crossover hit manga has. Just more evidence that if you like comics and think you don’t like manga, there’s at least one title you might want to try.

So DC is dropping its Humanoids and 2000 AD lines of graphic novels. Those of you who respond to that announcement with “Huma-who?” and “2000 A-What?” can be excused, because DC hasn’t exactly piled on the hype for these books. Like Tom Spurgeon, I can’t actually recall seeing a copy a book from either line anywhere, ever.

But, sorry… moving back to “Huma-who” and “2000 A-What.” I would link to their sections on DC’s web site, but they’ve already been removed from the banner. I guess that can be considered “confirmation,” following up on the complete absence of solicitations for July. The housecleaning isn’t exactly complete, so here’s the old page on 2000 AD, and here’s the Humanoids entry.

Retailer and Savage Critic Brian Hibbs has weighed in on the lines’ failure, citing a deluge of perennial product sluiced onto shop owners who have to be very selective about how they’ll assign their shelf space.

As far as the marketing of these lines goes, it’s kind of hard to scrutinize something that existed in such small quantities, really. I find it difficult to believe that DC’s publicity machine, which is fully capable of convincing legitimate media outlets that their big event comics are actually anything out of the ordinary and are indicative of a new maturity and depth on comics storytelling, couldn’t get any traction. Half the newspapers in the world were talking about the surge of comics from Japan; couldn’t anyone convince one or two of them to do a sidebar on comics from Europe? I’ll even give you a hook, ripe for overuse: “Not just Tintin!”

I find myself very interested in Johanna Draper Carlson’s question, “what does this mean, if anything, for the CMX manga line?”

My initial response is that it’s an apples and oranges kind of situation. The two dropped lines focused on product that would probably be very rewarding for a niche audience and might have made a bit of a dent in the bookstore market with more of a concentrated effort in that area. CMX has set out after the manga audience, which is much larger than the comics audience, gets its fix in a much wider range of venues, and seems more inclined to try titles on a whim (perhaps partly because of the lower price point).

But it does lead one to wonder what exactly DC is doing to put CMX on the map. In the ongoing slurry of manga coverage in mainstream media outlets, DC’s efforts rarely if ever make even a blip on the radar. The only attention the titles have received at all certainly wasn’t because of any promotional efforts on DC’s part. In fact, I have yet to see any response from the publisher on the Tenjho Tenge situation.

That’s probably smart on DC’s part, because outrage over those publishing choices was niche outrage. That isn’t a comment on the legitimacy of anyone’s objections; it’s just an observation that internet fandom is only a very small piece of the pie. A dedicated, extremely well-informed piece of the pie, but small all the same. If that segment was indicative of the whole picture, Countdown would be screaming towards the quarter bins instead of going for a marked-up second printing.

The question remains, though, as to what exactly DC is doing to distinguish CMX as a brand? Because it seems like they’re basically throwing the titles out there with the presumption that they’re manga, so they’ll sell, because manga sells. While manga is a lucrative market, it’s obviously still a competitive one, and publishers like Viz, Tokyopop, Del Rey, and others all market themselves fairly rigorously. They aren’t acting like publishing manga is like printing money.

So it’s good to wonder if DC’s half-hearted efforts with Humanoids and 2000 AD are reflected in their approach to CMX. I would theorize, but the CMX line has never really clicked for me. While I think they’ve assembled a reasonable enough cross-section of genres and styles, the quality of the individual titles hasn’t exactly grabbed me to the degree that I care one way or another if they sink or swim. And that’s a problem in and of itself.