The latest in NBM's re-packaging of Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim's various Donjon fantasy series combines two 2004 books from the stand-alone Monstres line. If I'm keeping all of my Donjon series straight, Monstres is the one for stand-alone story with a range of guest artists to be placed at any point in the wider Donjon timeline. These are placed in the Zenith era, the one in the far future as relative to the main series. Luckily, the books also comment upon one another, with overlapping plotlines told from different perspectives, and having them together make for an enjoyable reading experience in and of itself.
We follow two characters as they come to immediate terms with Terra Amata becoming a mini-universe of floating island: the foolish and aggressively violent Herbert the Red, and the fiendish, somewhat reluctantly but effectively violent Grand Khan. Unlike the Dungeon stories in their original series, these stories take place in a mish-mash of post-apocalyptical literature and fantasy stories that fail to provide the easy avenues for satire available to the authors in the more staid, traditional settings. There's an appealing but somewhat disorienting anything goes quality. It's hard not to appreciate the lack of sentimentality here: many fantasy stories are conservative in that they posit an idealized form of the present as the long-term status quo by story's end. The constant threat of personal and widespread destruction makes for a lot of uniquely funny moments among survivors whose peccadilloes and desires have taken on extinction-level drama. At the same time, comedy that arises from manic situations can be wearying after a while, and I think that's the case here. I find these stories super-entertaining, but I can see why people might not extend to them their heart. Heck, I'm having a hard time judging their quality beyond that immediate reaction.
I should also mention the thing I enjoyed most about this particular volume as compared to others: Stephane Blanquet drawing monsters. Blanquet has an almost intimidating clarity to his line here. If most comics are chalklines on a wall, Blanquet's looks smooth in the way that only applying finisher might be able to manage. His creatures look hostile to the touch, like they might sting in the way certain frogs do when you pick them up. They don't bleed, they emit blod that curdles like so much red slough. I find myself reading the story and then going back to start at it a bit, the way I usually do with Blanquet. While a few of the art choices Sfar and Trondheim have made haven't been all that inspired, this one was, and makes a solid reading experience -- these are almost always dense comics, that encourage your grappling with them -- that much more involved.
I'm not exactly sure how it escaped my attention, but Nate Beeler of the Washington Examinerhas won 2009 Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons from the National Press Foundation. Beeler is 28 years old, and has been with with the Examiner since 2005. His work has a classic contemporary feel, meaning that it has the same general "look" of a lot of the best and most successful editorial cartoonists of the last three decades.
Past winners include Steve Breen, Stuart Carlson, Jim Morin, David Horsey, Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson -- a fairly powerful line-up of recent Pulitzer Prize winners -- and it wouldn't be surprising for Beeler to move into their company in the next few years.
Longtime comics writer, comic book editor and all-around booster of the medium Stan Lee was among the 2008 winners for the 2008 National Medal of the Arts earlier this week. Here's a great and probably well-traveled photo of Lee receiving the honor. A transcript of the event can be found here. Here's the NEA profile on Lee. And here's a page with another photo. He's positively beaming.
The Association des Critiques et Journalists de Bande Dessinee has announced its 15 finalists for its Prix de la Critique 2008. Unless you're completely hopeless at the roots of language, you probably figured out -- or maybe you already knew -- that the ACBD is the French-language market's major writers about comics group. It looks like they narrowed down the list below from this pre-selection list of 95 books. Among the titles available in the states represented here are Alan's War, Tamara Drewe and Castle Waiting. That may be all of them, in fact.
* La guerre d'Alan T3, Emmanuel Guibert (L'Association)
* Chateau l'Attente, Linda Medley (ca et la)
* Le gout du chlore, Bastien Vives (Casterman)
* R97: les hommes a terre, Christian Cailleaux and Bernard Giraudeau (Casterman)
* Shutter Island, Christian de Metter after Dennis Lehane (Casterman)
* De Gaulle a la plage, Jean-Yves Ferri (Dargaud)
* L'heritage du colonel, Lucas Varela and Carlos Trillo (Delcourt)
* Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds (Denoel Graphic)
* Le roi des mouches T2, Mezzo and Michel Pirus (Drugstore)
* Spirou, le journal d'un ingenu, Emile Bravo (Dupuis)
* Martha Jane Cannary T1, Matthieu Blanchin and Christian Perrissin (Futuropolis)
* Matteo T1, Jean-Pierre Gibrat (Futuropolis)
* Il etait une fois en France T2, Sylvain Vallee and Fabien Nury (Glenat)
* Le reve de Meteor Slim, Frantz Duchazeau (Sarbacane)
* Tout seul, Christophe Chaboute (Vents d'Ouest)
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* in continued Watchmen holy shit that word sells a lot of books news, there was apparently a 100,000 print run on Watching the Watchmen and they're going back to press again. Is anyone not happy for Dave Gibbons?
* the always-interesting Frank Santoro writes on one of the top ten comics efforts of all time, E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre.
* it's not the headline, but the interesting thing about this Hayao Miyazaki piece that discusses the Prime Minister's love of manga is that it doesn't take much to read this as the great director being somewhat conflicted about the commercialization of children's entertainment.
* finally, I'm not one to post about guest signings by major comics conventions, but I'm pleased to note that Richard Thompson has been added to the guest list at next year's Comic-Con International. With Thompson and apparently Stephan Pastis schedule to be on-hand, that's shaping up to be a pretty good year for the comic strip contingent, and increasingly vital attraction at that show. Hopefully, Thompson will bring some of his stunning originals. Just in case you think I cover Thompson too closely, I'll freely admit even I found this to be a stretch.
Creators: Jock (cover), Adam Freeman, Marc Bernardin, Bruno Redondo, Sergio Arino Publishing Information: DC/WildStorm, comic book, 32 pages, November 2008, $3.50 Ordering Numbers:
Man, what the hell happened to the WildStorm imprint? There was a time I think about five years ago that between the efforts of writers like Joe Casey and Alan Moore it looked like Jim Lee's company had become a decent little publishing duplex. Renting out one side you had a handful of high-end creator-owned projects. Living in the other half you had the shared superhero universe that by emphasizing its interstellar war elements had seemingly sidestepped the problem that universes not ground in Jack Kirby's imagination seem to have of cycling through all potentially interesting plotlines and wider sagas within a few short years. Most of what I see from them these days is videogame adaptations, low-level movie cross-overs and comics that draw on such generic ideas and plotlines they read like role-playing game manuals from 1986 or so.
I'm told Push falls under category #2, it certainly reads like something from #3, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a game at some point as well. I hate saying this, because creating is hard, and people almost always work on things with the best of intentions and with as much integrity as they can muster, but this is almost a parody of a certain kind of adventure story, where the entire world presented bends itself to an inauthentic plot line and demands of the genre as if they were the Holy Scripture made real at a wild-eyed camp meeting.
Take out the proper names and the generic nature of the plot shimmies to the surface. The government has an agency of psychic beings with special powers, which we see displayed on a mission that involves taking out a facility populated solely by husky, armed guards. There is tension at the agency over the use of these beings, and we meet a few of them in a way that fills us in on the first line or two on the casting call sheet. On a subsequent mission our lead -- loyal to the agency for personal reasons, of course -- finds out that there may be more to the eye in terms of the missions than we might expect.
It's like something a machine might create cutting and pasting from old Caliber comics and grocery store serial adventure novels. I guess it could work as a film because it's certainly a blank slate of comfortable plot elements that someone could make come to life. The empty backgrounds of the comic book version will likely become standard low-grade Hollywood sets, which tends to be a step up. But as a comic, particularly a comic for anyone who's read any type of similar work at any time in their lives and doesn't have a bottomless appetite for seeing one more thing working that same tired ground, Push #1 doesn't say a whole lot and what it does it says in a very, very tired voice.
Your Thoughts On Why OK-Selling Superhero Comics Have Stand-Alone Series In Addition To Regular Ones
Here are a few of the fuller responses to my wondering out loud yesterday as to why a series like Kevin Smith's Batman: Cacophony #1 is a stand-alone series instead of streamed into the regular title.
Gardner Linn:
This is a response to your recent post on Batman: Cacophony, and the general phenomenon of character-specific miniseries. Please note I am not a comics historian, nor an economics expert, nor someone with special knowledge of the inner workings of DC (or any other company), merely a reader with opinions (and, as this response might show, more of a fanboy than I care to admit).
In the case of Cacophony, I think the stock answers are, to a large degree, the answers. The two main Batman series -- Batman and Detective -- are both in the middle of extended runs by (relatively) popular writers, and are both currently in the middle of a semi-major storyline ("Batman R.I.P.") that is itself leading to another major storyline(s). I haven't read Cacophony, but from what I understand it literally doesn't fit in the current continuity, and may even contradict certain elements of current Batman continuity. It would seem, then, that if DC wants to have a Kevin Smith Batman book on the stands sooner rather than later, it makes sense to shunt the story off to its own miniseries. (And while I think it's possible that Cacophony would sell more if it was part of the regular Batman series, I think it's doubtful that it's going to cannibalize much of the regular Batman audience, so DC is probably making more money off the character by running the story as a mini. Again, not an economics expert, so anybody with actual figures is welcome to prove me wrong. And of course if you publish too many of these minis over the course of a year, you probably will start to lose exhausted readers.)
Also, Kevin Smith is a draw (though perhaps not as much as he was five or ten years ago), and DC probably feels that his name will lure readers over to a miniseries. And for casual readers who may only be interested in Kevin Smith books, a three-issue miniseries with a big obvious #1 might be less intimidating or confusing than Batman #682-684 or whatever.
Like I said, I'm no historian, but I wouldn't be surprised if The Dark Knight Returns was the beginning of these sorts of things. It's worth noting that while Year One ran in Batman, DKR did not -- it was a separate series. And I think the reason for the difference--and a large part of the reason for the continued preponderance of separate miniseries -- is continuity and canon.
As a flashback, Year One may have literally been out of continuity, but in a larger sense it was in continuity -- it was intended to be the actual canon origin of Batman (please someone who wasn't 8 years old in 1987 correct me if I'm wrong about that being the intent). In contrast, DKR was more of an "imaginary," proto-Elseworlds story, though over time I think it has become, for many readers, an official piece of the Batman canon.
I think for characters or franchises like Batman, there are three levels of stories. There are the "regular" stories, ranging from forgettable one-issue inventory stories to multi-year Grant Morrison runs, that go in the main book. Then there are "special" stories -- special because of the creators involved, or the unique nature of the story told--that run as miniseries (or, occasionally, graphic novels). Then there are the "really special" stories -- the stories that have that unique thing about them, but are also intended to be official canon -- that run in the main book. These are your Year Ones, or the upcoming Neil Gaiman-written "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" which is running in Batman and Detective when it could easily stand as its own thing. Running a story as a miniseries instead of in the main book creates a different set of expectations for the reader; stories in the main book "matter" in a way that miniseries don't. (Though of course publishers want you to think miniseries matter too, in that they want you to spend money on them, but they matter in different ways.)
(The big exceptions to this are in-continuity, crossover-related miniseries like Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four or Final Crisis: Rogue's Revenge, which seem to operate under different rules. Fantastic Four and Spider-Man got their own Secret Invasion minis because they were tied up in their own special creator/continuity situations [Millar/Hitch and "Brand New Day," respectively], whereas, say, Black Panther's SI tie-ins ran in that character's main book. I'd also imagine that Marvel thought FF or Spider-Man could support two books in a way that Black Panther couldn't. As for Rogue's Revenge and other Final Crisis tie-ins, I think it's likely that DC thought giving Rogue's Revenge the Final Crisis imprimatur would draw more readers than running it in the moribund regular Flash book.)
As shared-universe superhero comics have trended toward tight continuity and long-form storytelling and away from "done in one"s and the "every issue is somebody's first" philosophy, I think miniseries like Cacophony have become more popular because they provide a home for stories that don't fit into the grand plan (as we acknowledge that those plans are shaky at best) but may nevertheless garner an audience, or at the very least keep somebody within the company happy. I think it's also possible to make the argument that the publication of such miniseries is a short-sighted attempt to wring as much money as possible out of completists.
I don't think the TV analogy holds up too well, however. For one thing, TV doesn't have a situation analogous to Batman/Detective or Superman/Action, where two different simultaneous series feature the same characters. The CSI and Law & Order franchises are more akin to the various titles in the X-Men franchise, each sharing a similar premise but with largely different casts. More importantly, it's much more cost-effective for DC to publish a couple of simultaneous Batman series than it is for NBC to air, say, two ER series every week. You don't have to pay Batman any extra money to appear in another series, and there are no limits on his time. You do, however, have to pay Maura Tierney more money to play her ER character on another show, and she is bound by the laws of time and space. If a network has a hit show, it's going to squeeze as much money as it can out of it -- so if NBC thought it could get higher ratings for less money by creating ER Tuesdays, they would. In fact, they did, with the recent Thursday editions of Saturday Night Live, which I believe have been NBC's highest-rated scripted shows this season. And they were going to do it with Heroes: Origins, until the writers strike scuttled it. (And then of course there are the occasional show-related TV-movies, like last year's Battlestar Galactica: Razor, or the upcoming 24: Redemption, which serve much the same function as Batman miniseries, except both of those examples aired/will air between seasons of the parent show.) I think the only thing keeping networks from exploiting their hits the way DC exploits Batman is not that they think it's a stupid idea, but that it's financially and logistically nearly impossible to produce two different shows with the same cast every week.
Jeez. If you made it this far, sorry for rambling. I think my main point is that a greater reliance on/adherence to continuity has given rise to more and more miniseries like Cacophony.
Tom Bondurant:
Just a few thoughts on the above-referenced post....
-- This is admittedly a nitpick, but Batman: Year One was actually in-continuity. It was the equivalent of John Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries or George Perez's revamped Wonder Woman origin, but the thinking was that Batman didn't need as radical a makeover. It resulted basically in minor changes to supporting characters: Barbara Gordon had to become Jim Gordon's adopted daughter (because the Gordons' first child being born was a "B:Y1" plot point) and Alfred was the Wayne Family's butler, as opposed to being someone who showed up (in both the Golden and Silver Ages) after Dick Grayson moved in. Accordingly, it was appropriate subject matter for the Batman title, just as "Year Two" (in Detective) and "Year Three" (back in Batman) were.
-- That said, for years I have wondered why DC has a specific Batman anthology like Legends of the Dark Knight or the current Confidential, and still thinks it necessary to publish separate Batman miniseries. JLA Classified was publishing upwards of eighteen issues a year just to burn off its inventory. If the Kevin Smith thing (which I am passing on, since I heard how bad it was) is designed to reach a particular audience, why on earth isn't DC trying to sucker that audience into buying a regular Batman title? (Maybe I answered my own question with the JLA Classified example....)
-- I agree completely with the TV comparison. I would extend it further to supporting-character ongoing series like Robin and Nightwing. Not every supporting character can stand on his own. (However, I think Lois Lane is an exception, especially these days.)
-- The increasing ratio of miniseries to regular series bugged me so much over the summer that I did a series of Grumpy Old Fan posts on it:
Admittedly, it's more of an overview than anything else, but basically I think DC is pinning its hopes for expansion on miniseries. They're arguably better suited to being collected, and there's not as much commitment as with an ongoing series.
-- As for your specific question, though, I don't know precisely when DC started to go so miniseries-happy. Certainly the numbers have shot up during the DiDio years, but I haven't looked back much farther than 2001.
Nat Gertler:
I'm going to have to try to send in comments more when I agree with things, so it doesn't just sound like I'm disagreeing with things. But here I am, disagreeing with things.
The switch to add-on miniseries is not some growth of the last 20 years. When Batman: Year One ran, it surprised people that it was not a separate miniseries, and some saw it as an aggressive move on DC's part to build the audience for the regular series. DC had done stand-alone Batman limited runs before, not only with the different format of The Dark Knight Returns, but in standard comics format like The Untold Legend of the Batman, or the Batman Special one-shot. At around the same time that they were doing their Batman reboot within the series, John Byrne was doing his Superman reboot as the Man Of Steel miniseries.
As for why TV doesn't do such things: You're asking that the same week that A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All! will air, featuring the same character from The Colbert Report but run with a separate time and title. Now we could have a discussion of whether Battlestar Galactica: Razor was more like Batman: Son of the Demon than it was like Untold Legend of the Batman, and whether Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: How'd They Do That? was really more Detective Comics, but then I think the varsity jocks would be legally required to beat us up and take our lunch money.
My Response: Thanks, guys. I was more looking for information than staking out a position, so I don't think it's necessary for me to argue against anything that's just been said, but I did want to clarify a few things.
I do understand that television utilizes stand-alone mini-series and holidays specials and bridge mini-series with divergent content featuring popular shows. What I'm talking about is more specifically stand-alone mini-series that could with only superficial changes be woven into a regular series on titles that aren't big hits -- or even run as an event within that title. And while I understand the ability to make money or to capture market share is an achievable goal under these conditions with that strategy, I'm questioning whether or not it points out something that's broken in the market. Also, by continuity I meant the more general sense of it continuing a storyline, not whether or not it was canonical, which is my bad. Overlapping series is a different issue, although I'm not sure that's not also ultimately a dysfunctional aspect of the market as forged by the big mainstream companies.
In general I worry about the mainstream companies reducing their investment in a Direct Market based on an appraisal of that market's health that comes while they're doing things that help make it, over the long term, slightly sick. It seems crazy to me that our best established and most well-funded industry members are frequently among the least thoughtful and engaged with the long-term health of certain markets, and equally crazy that comics actors will treat every market except the homegrown one with deference and delicacy.
* the always-interesting Frank Santoro 
