U.X.L - Graphic Novelists [vol 2] 1414404425

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U•X•L Graphic Novelists

U•X•L Graphic Novelists K-R Volume 2

Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast Sarah Hermsen, Project Editor

Masashi Kishimoto Born 1974 (Okayama Prefecture, Japan) Japanese author, illustrator

Masashi Kishimoto catapulted himself to fame with the publication of his first manga series, Naruto, which debuted in Japan in 1999. (In simple terms, manga are Japanese comics. Japanese manga and American comics both tell stories using a combination of drawings and words. However, Japanese manga read from right to left, just the opposite of American comics, and Japanese manga also tend to emphasize mood and characterization more than American comics.) Naruto follows the adventures of a young orphan named Naruto as he trains to become a ninja. Naruto hopes to become the greatest ninja of all time, but he has many obstacles in his way: he is excluded by his village, he has trouble in school, and a ferocious demon is trapped inside him. As Naruto and his classmates, Sasuke and Sakura, are tested by teachers and confronted by villains, they grow as ninjas and mature as people. Kishimoto balances Naruto’s action-packed adventures with endearing insight into his characters. More than simply a good story, Naruto is also noted for its art. Kishimoto created compelling compositions for his pages, altering perspectives and paying close attention to details. By the time Naruto was introduced to the United States in 2002, sales of the manga in Japan had topped forty million copies. Although the market in the United States remained a small fraction of that in Japan, Naruto quickly built a strong fan base in translation.

‘‘Creating manga isn’t just about drawing well, but writing a good story. Keep the art and the story real, and you can’t lose.’’

Drawn to details Masashi Kishimoto was born the oldest of twin boys in 1974 in the Okayama Prefecture, a region of Japan. Kishimoto quickly developed a fascination with the world around him and would stare for long periods with great concentration at anything that 231

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (With Jo Duffy) Naruto 1: The Tests of the Ninja (2003). Naruto 2: The Worst Client (2003). Naruto 3: Bridge of Courage (2004). (With Jo Duffy) Naruto 4: The Next Level (2004). Naruto 5 (2004). (With Nobuhiro Watsuki and Jo Duffy) Naruto 6 (2005). Naruto 7 (2005). Naruto 8 (2005).

interested him, including bugs, rivers, and television. As he stared, he absorbed the smallest details about how these things looked. He soon started translating what he saw into pictures, carrying sketchbooks with him and doodling whenever he had the chance. He even fit drawing into his childhood games, finding great hiding places while playing hide-and-seek so that he could sit and draw in the dirt while everyone else ran around, as he remembered in Naruto 7. He patterned his drawings after his favorite animated characters. Among his favorites were those on the popular anime, or animated manga, television shows Doraemon, Mobile Suit Gundam and Dr. Slump: Arale-Chan. Kishimoto remembered taking his drawings very seriously. With his keen eye for detail, he worked to perfect his pictures. The art of Akira Toriyama (1955–), the creator of Dr. Slump and later Dragonball and Dragonball Z, especially influenced Kishimoto. He strove to copy Toriyama’s unique artistic style. Kishimoto scrutinized his own work but was just as exacting when critiquing the artwork of his friends and classmates. He remembered getting into many fights over the ‘‘right’’ way to draw certain characters. When he noticed an error in the instructions for drawing Doraemon characters in a popular song (there was a Japanese song about drawing Doraemon characters), he grew angry and criticized anyone who drew characters according to the song’s lyrics. He did not, however, take criticism of his own work lightly. He remembered the first time he ever ‘‘completely lost [his] temper’’ in Naruto 7, 232

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describing when his mother looked at one of his drawings and said, ‘‘‘If this Arale-Chan is a girl, then you have to put lipstick on her,’ and just like that, she added red lipstick to my drawing.’’ In hindsight, Kishimoto admitted that he was an ‘‘annoying’’ child, as quoted on the Naruto Central Web site. Although Kishimoto’s love of art first developed from watching anime, he soon started reading manga in the weekly Shonen Jump magazine, Japan’s most popular manga magazine. Unable to afford the weekly, Kishimoto asked to read his friends’ copies. At first he just borrowed the magazine to read new issues of Dragonball, but he quickly started reading the magazine from cover to cover and began dreaming of becoming a manga creator.

Finds great inspiration In high school, Kishimoto spent a lot of time playing baseball and studying. He wondered if he had outgrown drawing. He described the day he saw a poster for Katsuhiro Ootomo’s Akira (1988) as the ‘‘turning point’’ that revived his determination to be an artist. ‘‘I don’t know why but seeing this poster had an intense emotional effect on me, for some reason I spent about an hour just staring at it,’’ Kishimoto remembered according to Naruto Central. ‘‘The poster has the main character Kaneda walking towards his bike, the angle was from above, it was a very difficult composition. ‘How can this person draw such a difficult composition? I’ve never seen a person who could do that.’’’ The poster ‘‘lit the fire to draw in me once again. Since then I have drawn continuously in hopes of getting close to that picture,’’ Kishimoto remarked. Ootomo’s style of art also marked a turning point in manga art, according to Kishimoto. He explained in Shonen Jump that ‘‘I consider Akira to be the first Japanese anime to use the ‘fresco’ style of art. Unlike the other works during that time, the character designs, lines, and sense were very realistic, as was the manga itself. Even the buildings were very detailed, and the sheer amount of information that the art conveyed was incredible. It was a very cool science fiction manga. I think it’s also the reason anime became so popular in the U.S. I got a bunch of storyboards for Akira when I was 14, and I remember constantly copying them,’’ as quoted on the Narutokun Web site. Inspired, Kishimoto dove into his artwork, experimenting with styles to create his own manga. Though he had finished one by the eleventh grade, Kishimoto was not pleased with his work. Neither his brother nor his father liked his manga. Nevertheless, Kishimoto Masashi Kishimoto

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kept trying, focusing on his manga more than his studies. He graduated second from the bottom of his high school class, so low that he had little hope of being accepted into college. But for all his efforts on his artwork, he seemed unable to create a manga that his family or friends liked. Undaunted about his future prospects, Kishimoto found an art college to attend and kept working toward becoming a manga creator, thinking simply, ‘‘Things will work out,’’ according to the Naruto Fan Web site. Things did work out. In 1995, Kishimoto submitted a manga called Karakuri about a World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan) squadron to Shonen Jump and won the ‘‘Hop Step’’ amateur manga artist award. Kishimoto quickly followed this with his first single version of Naruto in 1997 in the manga magazine Akamaru Jump, and by 1999 he had begun weekly publication of Naruto in Shonen Jump.

Creates Naruto The Naruto series is about the adolescence of an orphaned boy who aspires to become the greatest ninja. The boy, Uzumaki Naruto, lives in the small rural village of Konohagakure, a place once devastated by the ferocious fox demon Nine-Tails, a powerful supernatural being. Though Naruto does not know it, when he was an infant the spirit of the Nine-Tails was locked inside his body by the greatest ninja Hokage in order to save the village. Knowing the evil spirit dwells in Naruto, the villagers shun the boy, and he has grown up acting out in order to get attention. Training in the Ninja Academy, Naruto pursues his dream. He dives into his training with vigor, learning ninjutsu, the way of the ninja, including ninja hand signals, fighting techniques, and how to think like a ninja. But his obnoxious antics and lack of study skills threaten his advancement; he fails his tests numerous times. When he learns of the evil spirit trapped within him, Naruto comes to understand why he is treated differently. Nevertheless he remains committed to his dream of becoming a ninja master, and hopes to one day win the respect of his village and eventually find someone who can shed more light on the consequences of having the spirit within him. Teamed with classmates Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura and instructed by the master ninja, Hatake Kakashi, Naruto faces challenges that teach him about friendship, cooperation, and the difference between right and wrong. Naruto offers 234

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A New Look for Ninjas Naruto looks much different from other ninja mangas. Instead of the masked ninjas dressed in black, Kishimoto draws the Naruto characters in lively, colorful outfits. Naruto wears an orange outfit with a hooded jacket trimmed in white. Sasuke, the smartest boy in the academy, wears long shorts with straps tied around his calves. Sakura, a teenage girl ninja-intraining, wears a variety of simple, brightly colored robes with shorts and long, flowing tops. All three students wear a headband with a symbol called the black leaf, which stands for their village, Konohagakure. Other ninjas in the series wear headbands with symbols relating to their place of origin, status, or affiliated group, such as the musical note on the headband of the Sound ninja who attempt to destroy Sasuke in Naruto 7. The villains within the series stand out from the heroes with their elaborate outfits; the Sound ninja, for example, wear such elaborate items as boldly patterned shirts, fur capes, and even a mummy-like wrap on one ninja’s face. Other villains wear dark makeup to outline their eyes or to mark their faces with designs or symbols. The design elements and alternating perspectives that Kishimoto uses in the series also make it stand out among other manga.

stories that reflect the ideals of hard work and sincerity, for in the series victory is ultimately had by the virtuous. When Kishimoto began weekly publication of Naruto in 1999, the market for manga in Japan was truly enormous. Shonen Jump enjoyed a readership of nearly three million, according to Home Media Retailing, and manga made up almost 40 percent of the printed material in Japan by 2002, according to the Seattle Times, making it a $4 billion business. Within that time span, Naruto became Japan’s most popular manga. In 2003, Viz Communications began publishing Naruto in monthly installments in the English-language magazine Shonen Jump. The manga quickly gained fans, the first manga to do so without the support of a corresponding anime program, and began to be published in longer graphic novel form. Since 2003, Naruto graphic novels have consistently ranked among the most popular manga in the United States. Sales for the manga only Masashi Kishimoto

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increased when the anime version of Naruto began airing on the Cartoon Network in 2005. The international popularity of Naruto placed such pressure on Kishimoto to maintain a blistering pace of production that he had to hire a staff to help him publish Naruto. While early volumes were hand drawn and lettered, publication of Naruto 7 marked the full transition of Naruto to digital production. Kishimoto and his staff created characters and backgrounds entirely on computers. Special software enabled them to pose characters in different positions and manipulate the picture composition in almost any way imaginable. Kishimoto explained in Naruto 7 that ‘‘Our methods will probably continue to change as the technology evolves . . . but there’s one thing that won’t ever change: the need to invent good stories!’’ Kishimoto’s consistent focus on the detailing of both the visual and textual content of his stories boded well for the future of Naruto.

For More Information Periodicals De La Cruz, Edwin. Video Store Magazine (Duluth, MN) (February 27–March 5, 2005): p. 16. De La Cruz, Edwin. ‘‘Viz Media Launches Shonen Jump Label.’’ Home Media Retailing (Duluth, MN) (August 14–August 20, 2005): p. 14. ‘‘Ninja Master Kishimoto.’’ Shonen Jump, vol. 6 (June 2003): pp. 3–7. Rahner, Mark. ‘‘Manga Collectors, Get Ready to Do Some Back Flips.’’ Seattle Times (December 3, 2002): p. E1.

Web Sites ‘‘Interview with Masashi Kishimoto.’’ Naruto-kun (reprinted from Shonen Jump, vol. 6). http://www.naruto-kun.com/naruto+manga/masashi+ kishimoto.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘The Man Behind the Shadows.’’ Naruto Fan. http://www.narutofan.com/ index.php/content-masashi%20kishimoto,biography (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Naruto.’’ Viz. http://naruto.viz.com/site_1024.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘News and Content.’’ Naruto Central. http://www.narutocentral.com/index. php?page=content/info/childhistory.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Uzumaki Naruto Artbook: Kishimoto Masashi Interview, Translated by Pazuzu.’’ Redbrick: Dublin City University Network Society. http://www. redbrick.dcu.ie/%7Epazuzu/uzumaki.txt (accessed on May 3, 2006). 236

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Kazuo Koike Born May 8, 1936 (Akita Prefecture, Japan) Japanese author, illustrator

Kazuo Koike is regarded as one of the greatest manga writers in history. Lone Wolf and Cub, a portrayal of the life and times of samurai created by Koike and artist Goseki Kojima (1928– 2000), set the standard for the samurai genre, according to Frederik L. Schodt, author of Manga! Manga! The pair balanced the story of a samurai (an elite military or professional warrior) seeking revenge for political wrongdoing and the murder of his wife with the tender relationship between father and son. Throughout the saga, Ogami Itto, the masterless samurai, [a ronin, or warrior, who follows his own code after losing or gaining the disfavor of his master] travels with his son, Daigoro. While Itto’s stoic and single-minded quest to restore honor to his clan reveals his ferocious skill as a warrior, Itto’s relationship with his son offers a unique perspective on the samurai’s motivation and his moral center. As with most samurai stories, Lone Wolf and Cub is full of action-packed fighting sequences, some lasting dozens of pages. But ‘‘the contrast between human bonds and violence on the battlefield is a favorite theme of all samurai stories, and it is the glue that holds this one together,’’ according to Schodt. ‘‘Its authors took the time and space to tell their tale in its every moment, often devoting many pages to scenes that wouldn’t last three panels in a monthly American superhero comic book. We come to know the players, large and small, as we meet them, as they reveal themselves to us. Koike and Kojima tell their story masterfully and artfully, portraying a man, a boy, and a country on their journey into Hell,’’ as renowned graphic novelist Frank Miller (1957–; see entry) described the series on the Night Flight Comics Web site.

‘‘Comics are carried by characters. If a character is well created, the comic becomes a hit.’’

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Best-Known Works Graphic Novels in Translation (With Goseki Kojima) Lone Wolf and Cub 28 vols. (2000–02). (With Goseki Kojima) Samurai Executioner 10 vols. (2004).

Devoted to detail Koike set Lone Wolf and Cub in the Edo period (1603–1867), most specifically in the era of Tokugawa Ietsuna, who reigned from 1651 to 1680 as the fourth shogun [ruler of Japan] of the Tokugawa shogunate. At this time in Japan, feudal lords ruled over the countryside with samurai warriors to protect and defend them. Koike’s carefully researched stories take readers back to a time that epitomizes ‘‘traditional’’ Japanese culture. Each of the Lone Wolf and Cub volumes begins with a type of history lesson or factual account. Readers learn about such things as the steps of seppuku, an honorable suicide reserved for samurai; the fighting techniques of various schools of martial arts; the restrictions and responsibilities of men in society; the procedure of o-tameshi, in which a decapitated body is ritualistically cut into sections; and even the degrees of frostbite, among other things. Through these realistic examples of life during the Edo period, Koike highlights the role of the samurai in keeping order in society by following the bushido, or the way of the warrior. Bushido gave structure to society during the feudal period in which Koike set Lone Wolf and Cub; samurai provided strong, unselfish, and unwavering protection for their lords, placed little value in material possessions, and devoted their lives to their lords. Koike’s samurai warrior embodies the ethics of bushido. Although he has lost his clan and has been framed by corrupt men, Ogami remains faithful to his code of conduct as he works to restore his honor.

Becomes a giant in the industry Devoted as he became to manga, which takes up all the time of some manga creators, Kazuo Koike led a rich and varied life. Koike was born on May 8, 1936, in the Akita Prefecture of Japan. Little is known about his education or family life because Japanese typically keep these details of their lives private. Koike’s work, however, revealed that he had many interests; he worked for a time at 238

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The Way of the Warrior Kazuo Koike infused Lone Wolf and Cub with the tradition of bushido, the ‘‘Way of the Warrior.’’ This code of conduct traces its roots deep into Japanese history and includes religious elements from Buddhism and Confucianism. William Scott Wilson, who translated a biography of the most famous Japanese samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, noted that bushido developed in Japan with the emergence of a distinct class of ruling warriors in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These warriors developed a strict code of conduct that emphasized their role in both protecting and serving their society but also helped to fulfill them as human beings. Thus bushido incorporated mastery of the martial arts and teachings of self-sacrifice with appreciation of art, literature, and beauty in the everyday. Ruling Japan for more than six centuries, samurai warriors had a strong influence on the political, philosophical, and artistic aspects of Japanese society, as Wilson noted on the Kodansha International Web site. When the Japanese government incorporated restrictions on

sword-wearing and limited samurais’ power in the 1800s, samurai could no longer live as they once did. Samurai were effectively gone from power in Japan by 1868, when Japan came to rely solely on its constitution and parliament for governance. The underlying ethics of bushido, however, form the foundation on which Japanese culture continues to stand. It is an important part of what is known as the ‘‘spirit of Japan,’’ according to Frederik L. Schodt in Manga! Manga! Bushido permeates Japanese culture in a way very similar to the moral codes of the American cowboy in the United States. They continue to inform the ideal attributes of Japanese men. Koike related in an interview with Frank Miller that he ‘‘was born to a family steeped in Bushido tradition. So, it was natural for me to understand Hagakure Bushido, based on the idea of Buddhism and Confucianism.’’ Koike also practiced aspects of bushido, including the art of Kendo (samurai swordsmanship) and archery.

the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and as a professional Mahjong player. His recreational interests included the traditional aspects of bushido, as well as a lifelong love of golf (which culminated in his launching a golf magazine in 1987). Professional manga writing began for Koike in 1968 when he took a job creating scripts for Takao Saito’s Golgo 13 series. The Golgo 13 manga has been likened to a more violent and explicit version of the James Bond stories. But Koike soon created his own series. In 1970, Koike began publication of Goyoukiba with illustrator Takeshi Kanda. That same year, Koike teamed with Goseki Kojima and began publishing what would become their seminal Kazuo Koike

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A Japanese samurai warrior. Koike’s portrayal of samurai set the standard for the samurai genre. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

work, Lone Wolf and Cub. The weekly Manga Action magazine readership of between one and two million eagerly awaited each new episode. The story enjoyed such popularity that Koike and Kojima continued it for approximately eight thousand pages without losing the support of fans. Although the twenty-eight volumes comprising the story of Lone Wolf and Cub were completed by 1976, the volumes remained in print and had sold more than eight 240

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The Artist of Lone Wolf and Cub Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima came to be known as ‘‘The Golden Duo’’ for Lone Wolf and Cub. Koike’s text and Kojima’s art worked together to portray the poignant and gripping samurai story. And the two would go on to work on other successful manga series, including most notably Samurai Executioner. Born on November 3, 1928, Kojima developed his artistic skills without formal instruction. By the time Kojima graduated from junior high school, he was making his living as a painter of movie theater advertising posters, and he would not stop working until his death. Kojima broadened his opportunities for work by moving to Tokyo in the 1950s. There he started producing work for the manga industry. He began by making art for manga enjoyed by the huge population of lower-income people who were devastated by the disruption of World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan). He made art used by performers of kami-shibai, a practice of telling manga stories on the street. Driving around the city on his bicycle, Kojima even narrated stories of his own for about ten years. He also developed a large fan base for his manga in the kashibon market, a network of rental book-

stores that served people unable to buy personal copies of manga. He published his first manga series for the mainstream magazine market in 1967, and quickly became popular among fans who could purchase manga. Kojima began his collaboration with Kazuo Koike in 1970. Their work on Lone Wolf and Cub catapulted them to fame in Japan, and later around the world. Kojima and Koike related to Frank Miller in a 1987 interview that they were great friends and helped each other to produce their best work: Koike influenced the composition of some of Kojima’s pictures, and Kojima inserted some dialogue into Koike’s stories, especially the tension-breaking comments from Daigoro. Kojima told Miller in Comics Interview: ‘‘It’s worked, I think. He gave me freedom and I appreciated it. If Mr. Koike is the writer, I am the movie director and cast.’’ Kojima’s fame did not rest solely on his collaboration with Koike, however. He produced numbers of other manga and collaborated with other manga creators as well. He oversaw the launch of Manga Japan magazine in 1994. And he was working on graphic novels based on the films of Akira Kurosawa in the last years of his life. Kojima died on January 5, 2000.

million copies by the time U.S. publisher First Comics translated the first volume for publication in America in 1987. In the meantime, Koike had grown to be a giant in the Japanese manga industry at a time when the manga industry had eclipsed Kazuo Koike

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other forms of entertainment to become the most popular entertainment form in Japan. By 1972, Koike had begun to adapt Lone Wolf and Cub into six films. The pressure of producing weekly episodes of his manga and writing scripts of film adaptations of his series forced Koike to hire help. To keep up with his intensive production schedule, Koike opened Studioship, and by the 1980s the studio had more than forty full-time employees working on creating comics, running an art school, and publishing. Supported by Studioship, Koike continued producing various manga and adapting his stories for film and television into the 2000s. Educating manga creators ranked among Koike’s top priorities. Opened in 1977, Koike’s Gekiga Sonjuku school for manga became comparable to the national universities for its competitive enrollment process and rigorous coursework. The school’s alumni included such popular manga creators as Rumiko Takahashi (1957–), originator of Ranma 1/2; Yuji Horii (1954–), originator of Dragon Quest; and Keisuke Itagaki (1957–), originator of Grappler Baki. Koike felt so committed to helping young people develop their talents that he accepted a professorship at Osaka University of Arts in 2000. Even though he had to commute several hours to teach his course, Koike reported that he enjoyed it tremendously, and he continued to teach into 2005.

Works come to America Koike’s work was first introduced in English translation to American audiences in 1987 by First Comics, a Chicago publisher. Counting Lone Wolf and Cub among his influences, legendary American comic creator Frank Miller helped market the first volume by drawing the cover and writing the volume introduction. The issue met with great success and required multiple reprintings. Although First Comics went out of business in 1991 before printing all twenty-eight volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, the popularity of the series among American readers was evident and Dark Horse Comics took up publication of the series in 2000, issuing all twenty-eight volumes in a variety of formats from pocket-sized volumes to larger graphic novels. Dark Horse built on its success of marketing Lone Wolf and Cub by introducing English translations of other of Koike’s works, including The Samurai Executioner, Crying Freeman, and Lady Snowblood. Crying Freeman and Lady Snowblood, which Koike created with different illustrators, are marketed for mature readers in the United States because of the more explicit treatment of 242

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violence and sex in their volumes. The Samurai Executioner, which Koike created with Kojima, engages Lone Wolf and Cub fans with the background story of the one character described as Ogami Itto’s equal, Yamada Asaemon. Yamada Asaemon fell honorably to Itto’s sword in volume five of Lone Wolf and Cub, but since he was the only character ever described as an equal to Itto, his background seemed an interesting focus for another manga series. Koike and Kojima created Samurai Executioner to tell the story of Asaemon or, as he is also known, Kubriki Asa or Decapitator Asaemon, before his fatal duel with Ogami. Like Ogami Itto, Kubriki Asa is a stoic samurai. His life as the Shogun’s decapitator reveals the brutal justice of the Edo period and provides readers with more insight into the honor of bushido. The capture and punishment of criminals provides the basis for most of the series’ action. ‘‘It’s like a history lesson, art education, and pulp sensation, all wrapped up in one fantastic series,’’ according to the Dark Horse Comics Web site. Dark Horse published all ten volumes of Samurai Executioner starting in 2004.

Inspires others Koike and Kojima’s samurai stories inspired others. Mike Kennedy began Lone Wolf 2100 as a modern look at the samurai tale. He noted his debt to Lone Wolf and Cub in an interview on the Dark Horse Web site. ‘‘The original Lone Wolf and Cub is arguably the most influential and recognized comic book title in the world, and I followed it religiously when First Comics brought it to the States in the ‘80s. The muddied ethics, the strictly coded logic, the gray morality—it was fantastically gripping historical drama surrounded by amazingly visceral action sequences.’’ While reviewers applauded Kennedy’s attempts with Lone Wolf 2100, he failed to reach the quality of Koike’s storytelling. Silver Bullet Comics reviewer Michael Deely noted in his review of Lone Wolf 2100, that it is ‘‘no Lone Wolf book.’’ But he added that Koike’s shoes are hard to fill, Koike having created, with Ogami Itto, ‘‘one of the most magnetic and compelling characters in all of comicdom.’’ For Lone Wolf and Cub, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima won the 2001 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material and two 2002 Harvey Awards for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work and for Best Presentation of Foreign Material. Koike and Kojima were inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Hall of Fame in 2004. Kazuo Koike

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For More Information Books Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King, 2004. Schodt, Frederik L. Manga! Manga! Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983.

Web Sites Deely, Michael. ‘‘Lone Wolf 2100 # 1.’’ Silver Bullet Comics. http:// www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/reviews/102230023234089.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Interviews: Mike Kennedy.’’ Dark Horse. http://www.darkhorse.com/ news/interviews.php?id=759 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Kazuo Koike. http://www.koikekazuo.jp/english/profile_e.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘The Lone Samurai: An Interview with William Scott Wilson about Bushido.’’ Kodansha. http://www.kodansha-intl.com/books/html/en/ 477002942X.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Lone Wolf and Cub.’’ Night Flight Comics. http://www.night-flight.com/ lwac.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Samurai Executioner, Vol. 5.’’ Dark Horse Comics. http://www.darkhorse. com/profile/profile.php?sku=13-294 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Kazuhisa Kondo Born April 2, 1959 (Toyota City, Japan) Japanese author, illustrator

Japanese manga creator Kazuhisa Kondo rose to fame in the United States in the early 2000s after the publication of an English translation of the manga series Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, but his popularity came far earlier in Japan, where he first published the series in 1994 as an adaptation of the popular anime (animated cartoon) series that showed on Japanese television in 1979. Kondo’s works helped to introduce English-speaking audiences to the world of Gundam, a form of story about robots that differed a great deal from the earlier ‘‘super’’ robots that had dominated Japanese anime and manga since the end of World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan). Though little is known about Kondo in the United States, American manga fans have generated quite an appetite for various anime and manga forms of Gundam stories, especially his Mobile Suit Gundam 0079.

‘‘I’ve been influenced by all media: movies, TV dramas, novels, manga, and so on . . . but I’ve probably been influenced most by the Star Wars series and Blade Runner.’’

Kondo’s early works Kazuhisa Kondo was born on April 2, 1959, in Toyota City, an industrial city in the southern half of Japan, midway between Osaka and Tokyo. (Toyota City is the home of the Toyota car company.) As a child, Kondo was fascinated with science fiction robots and liked to draw pictures of Tetsujin 28 (also known as Gigantor), Tetsuwan Atom, and Godzilla. In an interview with Animerica he commented: ‘‘My parents used to scold me for doodling everywhere.’’ He liked to build plastic models of mechanized robots and, beginning when he was about fifteen or sixteen years old, he also began to draw manga related to his favorite mecha figures. (In simple terms, manga are Japanese comics. Japanese 245

Best-Known Works Manga Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 9 vols. (2001–02).

manga and American comics both tell stories using a combination of drawings and words. However, Japanese manga read from right to left, just the opposite of American comics, and Japanese manga also tend to emphasize mood and characterization more than American comics.) In Japan, mecha means anything mechanical, including robots, cars, computers, or guns; in America, the term mecha is used to refer to giant robots operated by humans. Though Kondo began drawing Japanese mecha, he would make his career drawing American mecha. It took Kondo some time to break into the competitive world of manga publishing. In Japan, manga are far more popular and respectable than their American counterparts, comic books and graphic novels. There are dozens of manga magazines that publish weekly and monthly. Japanese children and adults carry manga with them everywhere and can even buy them in vending machines. Kondo wanted to break into manga publishing, but it wasn’t easy. He trained as an artist, first under Morimi Jurano, then for several years with Shin Morimura. During this apprenticeship, he brought many drafts of his stories to publishers. Finally, after about seven years he caught the attention of an editor at Young magazine, owned by the publishing giant Kodansha. The editor helped place Kondo’s first story in a children’s magazine called Comic Bom Bom. Kondo told Animerica that the magazine has ‘‘a lower status compared to the more legitimate weekly magazines, so my feelings at that time were a little mixed.’’ Kondo’s first published story in Comic Bom Bom was ‘‘The Apartment that Drank Blood,’’ but it was a later story called ‘‘The Machine’’ that won an award from the magazine and helped him gain work with other magazines. In 1984, Kondo began writing in the genre (subject area) that would define his career in American when he worked on the MS Senki series from November 1984 through February 1985. MS Senki is a sideline from the Gundam stories that became a huge success in Japan beginning in 1979. 246

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An employee of Japan External Trade Organization’s (JETRO) displays authentic (top) and counterfeit (middle and bottom) DVDs of Japan’s popular animation ‘‘Gundam.’’ Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images.

The Mobile Suit Gundam story In 1979, Japanese animator Yoshiyuki Tomino (1941–) decided to breathe new life into the robot stories that had long dominated Japanese television by inventing a new kind of robot. At the time, super robots dominated anime and manga. Typically, these huge, invincible, mechanized beings battled on the side of good, against evil monsters or other robots. Tomino saw that the stories based on Kazuhisa Kondo

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super robots like Gigantor and Mazinger Z did not show much interest in human characters or the negative aspects of violence. He, along with others working at the Japanese animation studio Sunrise Inc., founded in 1972, invented a new story in which human characters fought against each other from inside robots, called mobile suits. Their first series, Mobile Suit Gundam, aired on Japanese television in 1979 for forty-three episodes. Though it was not popular at first, fans flocked to the new genre and bought the many robot toys that were sold. (The anime series was aired in the United States on the Cartoon Network in 2001.) The Mobile Suit Gundam saga takes place in an alternate world in which the expanding population of Earth moves off the planet into a variety of huge orbiting space colonies. These space colonies all develop independently, and in the original series one colony, Side 3, takes the name ‘‘Principality of Zeon’’ and wages a war of independence against the Earth Federation government. This war—and the story—begins in the year 0079 of the Universal Century, a fictional calendar that begins on the date that the first of Earth’s people form space colonies. (Fans have attempted to correlate that Universal Century calendar to the real calendar, but no argument for such a link has proven persuasive.) Most of the battles in the war are waged by humans operating a variety of mobile suits, fighting machines introduced by the Zeon forces but soon developed by both sides in the war. As the action in the story begins, a fifteen-year-old boy named Amuro Ray from the colony of Side 7 takes command of a powerful mobile suit called the Gundam, which was invented by his father. He leads others aboard a giant spaceship and mobile suit carrier called White Base as they battle against the forces of Zeon, led by Char Aznable and Garma Zabi. The original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series was an important innovation in robot stories. It featured a wide range of mobile suits, each with a variety of weapons and abilities. Amuro’s RX-78 Gundam, for example, carried both a beam rifle and beam sabers; other mobile suits have different powers. Fans thus had a constant supply of interesting robots to study and collect. The series also had a variety of characters, both male and female, and the competition and romance between these characters became an important part of the story. Because the series took viewers to many different space colonies and back to Earth itself, there were many opportunities to explore new settings and to explore science fiction scenarios. Most important, however, were the human aspects of 248

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Cross-marketing Mobile Suit Gundam American consumers are all too familiar with the saturation marketing that accompanies the release of new superhero movies, as with Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004): the movie was introduced alongside comic books, graphic novels, video games, action figures, and posters. But when it comes to the cross-marketing of characters from comic book series, the Japanese excel. Mobile Suit Gundam the animated series became Gundam the movie became Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 the manga series—but it hasn’t stopped there. In fact, Bandai—the Japanese company that is the world’s third-largest toy maker as well as the owner of the studio that created the original Mobile Suit Gundam—manufactures a complete line of Mobile Suit Gundam action figures, plastic models, card games, and video games. The Gundam War Collectible Card Game claimed more than one million players in Japan and was expected to be introduced in the United States sometime after 2005. With this range of activities surrounding the series, fans could read, watch, and play with Gundam-based characters to their heart’s content. Critics of such cross-marketing charge that toymakers and publishers are more interested in making money than in creating good stories for young people, but such complaints haven’t halted young consumers from buying multiple products to complete their Gundam experience.

the story: the victories and defeats in battle came as a result of human actions, not those of invincible robots, and it was human ingenuity and compassion that tipped the scales for one side or another, not just superior firepower. This human element kept the story compelling.

The Gundam craze The Mobile Suit Gundam anime story was so popular that it was edited together into three two-hour-long movies, called Gundam I, II, and III, released in Japan in 1981 and 1982. From that point, the entire Gundam story moved off into many different directions over the years. Anime remained the most popular form for the many Gundam stories, and there were numerous Mobile Suit Gundam Kazuhisa Kondo

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anime series, including ZZ, 0080, and others. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing and SEED series also became popular, and several of these crossed over the seas to U.S. television, especially on the Cartoon Network. But anime was not the only expression: many of the Gundam stories were told in manga form, either as a manga adaptation of the anime or as a side story, which is a departure from the anime series that goes in different directions. Toy companies—especially Bandai—marketed dozens of mobile suit robots and Gundam toys and models, and several video games were also based on the series. The Gundam universe was incredibly flexible: with the multiple space colonies circling Earth, storytellers could invent any number of variations on tales of conquest, revolt, and reconciliation. Soon, anime and manga creators devised entire alternate stories, based in different eras, universes, and even different calendars. By the mid1990s, the Gundam phenomenon had become a genre in itself, with multiple publishers, writers, illustrators, and game makers devising new ways to tell about humans and the robots they created. Kondo played an important part in encouraging the growing Gundam craze. He returned to the original television series as the basis for his adaptation, and his nine volumes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 were largely faithful to the first story.

Mobile Suit Gundam comes to America By the late 1990s, Japanese manga was beginning to get very popular in the United States. Several publishers began to translate Japanese stories into English and release—to great acclaim—in the world’s biggest market. In 2001, a relative newcomer to the American market, Viz, chose to release Kondo’s Mobile Suit Gundam 0079; by 2002, all nine volumes had been published. Kondo was in many ways a good choice for the American marketplace. He had grown up watching American movies and claimed that those that most influenced his work were the Star Wars movies and Blade Runner, two science-fiction classics. Unlike many Japanese authors, Kondo wrote his sound effect words in English, so the publisher did not have to struggle to redraw the pages to suit this new market, a big problem with translating many other manga works. Kondo’s works were a success in the United States, and they helped introduce the Gundam phenomenon to English-speaking audiences. At first, the complicated and quickly shifting story lines and multiple characters may have been confusing to American readers, but teens flocked to this and other manga titles in part 250

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Display of Gundam figurines. Albert L. Ortega/ WireImage.com.

because they were so different from the comic books and graphic novels produced in the United States. Kondo told Animerica: ‘‘I’m very happy to have my work appreciated overseas. I’m especially delighted to have my work read by people in a large country like America which has so much to offer on its own.’’ In Japan, Kondo has continued to publish a variety of Gundam stories in manga magazines, including an ongoing series called New MS Senki. He also worked on other Gundam stories such as Gundam 0080, Gundam F91, and Z Gundam as an artistic designer Kazuhisa Kondo

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and consultant. He told Animerica that he did not want to spend the rest of his career working on Gundam manga, however: ‘‘I would like to work in other genres, on works that would let me express myself more freely. I would love to work on something similar to [American author J. D.] Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye,’’ a classic coming-of-age story. As of 2005, however, none of Kondo’s other works had been translated into English, so English-speaking fans of his work must wait to see what will come next from one of the people who introduced Japan’s mobile suits into America.

For More Information Books Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King, 2004. Kondo, Kazuhisa. Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. Vols. 1–9. San Francisco, CA: Viz, 2001–02.

Periodicals ‘‘Kazuhisa Kondo.’’ Interview in Animerica vol. 7, no. 12 (1999); included in Kazuhisa Kondo. Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. Vol. 2. San Francisco, CA: Viz, 2001. Web Sites Gundam Official. http://www.gundamofficial.com/index.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Johnson, Mark L. ‘‘Mobile Suit Gundam 0079.’’ Ex:Manga: The Online World of Anime & Manga. http://www.ex.org/4.4/39-manga_gundam0079. html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Mobile Suit Gundam 0079.’’ VIZ Media. http://www.viz.com (accessed on May 3, 2006). Mobile Suit GUNDAM: High Frontier. http://www.dyarstraights.com/ msgundam/frontier.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Joe Kubert. Dark Horse Comics.

Joe Kubert Born October 12, 1926 (Yzerin, Poland) American author, illustrator

‘‘I’ve always felt that the job I have is not so much drawing as telling a story in a graphic form—in other words, drawing to communicate.’’

Joe Kubert is a legendary comic book artist: ‘‘One of the old masters of the comic book,’’ as New York Times contributor Dana Jennings wrote in 2003. Kubert established himself by drawing such comic book superheroes as Hawkman, Batman, and The Flash. But his most representative work—Sgt. Rock and, in particular, the graphic novels Fax from Sarajevo: A Story of Survival and Yossel: April 19, 1943— include vivid portrayals of how war impacts the individual. Kubert’s sixty-plusyear career spans the history and evolution of the comic book and the rise of the graphic novel. His work as an artist and illustrator, writer, director at DC Comics, and as a pioneering cartoon art instructor has, according to Jennings, ‘‘helped define American comic books.’’

From the Old World to the New Joe Kubert was born on October 12, 1926, in Yzerin, Poland. When he was two months old, his parents immigrated with him to 253

the United States. They settled in the East New York borough of Brooklyn, where Kubert’s father, Jacob, worked as a kosher butcher and his mother, Etta, managed a small restaurant. Captivated by comic strips at a young age, Kubert determined early in life that he would become an artist. ‘‘I never wanted to do anything else,’’ he recalled in an interview with Graphic Novelists. ‘‘The first time I saw Tarzan and Flash Gordon, that was it for me. I’d draw on the brown paper bags in my father’s store. People would buy me penny chalk, so that I could draw [on the street pavement]. Back then, when people saw you could draw, it was viewed as being like some kind of magic.’’ Kubert’s father was one of the budding artist’s most ardent supporters. On one occasion, Jacob Kubert purchased an art table for his son, even though he had little money and the eleven-dollar price tag seemed excessive. The table remained in Joe Kubert’s possession, many decades later.

Works from early age Kubert came of age during the Great Depression (1929–41; period of severe economic hardship in the United States), when young people were counted on to take jobs to help support their families. He combined this expectation with his fascination with comic books and illustrating. Kubert had not yet entered his teens when, in 1938, he secured a job as an apprentice inker at Harry ‘‘A’’ Chesler Comics, a comic book production house. (The ‘‘A’’ was claimed by Chesler to stand for ‘‘Anything.’’) It was an invaluable experience. In his early adolescence, he spent summer vacations apprenticing with the legendary Will Eisner (1917–2005; see entry), whom he considered a mentor. ‘‘It was a very happy, exciting time,’’ Kubert remembered. ‘‘The guys I met in the business were so friendly and accommodating.’’ But he was quick to add that, ‘‘The business is quite different today. It’s much more sophisticated, and it involves much more money. Back then, you could learn the job on the job. This does not exist today. Publishers can’t afford to hire young people who don’t know what they’re doing.’’ Kubert eventually enrolled in Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art. ‘‘Going there got me out of East New York,’’ he noted. ‘‘It gave me the ability to begin seeing the different publishers. Often, I’d play hooky from school or get out as early as I could, and then make the rounds of the publishers. Going to school in Manhattan allowed me to do this.’’ 254

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Best-Known Works Graphic Novels/Compilations Abraham Stone: Country Mouse, City Rat (1992).

The Enemy Ace Archives (with Robert Kanigher) (2002).

Fax from Sarajevo: A Story of Survival (1996).

Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place (with Brian Azzarello) (2003).

Superheroes: Joe Kubert’s Wonderful World of Comics (1999). The Hawkman Archives (with Gardner Fox and others) (2000). Enemy Ace: War in Heaven (with Garth Ennis) (2001). Tor, Vol. 1 (2001). Tor, Vol. 2 (2002). The Sgt. Rock Archives, Vol. 1 (with Robert Kanigher, Bob Haney) (2002). The Sgt. Rock Archives, Vol. 2 (with Robert Kanigher, Bob Haney) (2002).

Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2003).

Jew Gangster (2005). Tarzan: The Joe Kubert Years, Vol. 1 (2005). Other Joe Kubert’s Comic Book Studio (2002). Kubert has also written and illustrated numerous comics, including Hawkman, Batman, The Flash, Our Army at War (which eventually became Sgt. Rock), StarSpangled War Stories, Our Fighting Forces, GI Combat, Mighty Mouse, Tor, Tarzan, and the comic strips Tales of the Green Berets, Winnie Winkle, and Big Ben Bolt.

Builds a solid career In 1942, when Kubert was sixteen, Cat Comics agreed to publish Volton, his five-page comic creation. Through the end of the decade, he inked and drew for a variety of comic book houses. In 1945, he began drawing Hawkman for DC comics, a series he continued into the 1960s. Other of his early superhero credits include Batman and The Flash. During this period, Kubert primarily illustrated stories conjured up by other writers, but he also started penning his own narratives. At the time, Kubert explained, many of his colleagues ‘‘became cartoonists or drew comic strips because they could find no other jobs in the art profession. Being a comic book artist was considered to be kind of demeaning. So many artists who drew comic books referred to themselves as ‘commercial artists.’ Today, it’s very different. Today, it’s become a very respectable profession.’’

Soaks up military influence Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1950, Kubert’s two years of military service would strongly impact his career. Some of his service was Joe Kubert

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spent in Germany not long after its loss in World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan). After his discharge in 1952, he began drawing a series for DC 256

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Comics titled Our Army at War. Issue #81, published in 1959, saw the debut of the character with whom he is most strongly identified: U.S. Army sergeant Frank Rock, the leader of a band of soldiers who are attached to Easy Company and who battle the Nazis across Europe during World War II. In ‘‘Sgt. Rock,’’ Kubert and Robert Kanigher, who penned most of the stories, deemphasized battlefield glory. They instead examined the characters of Rock and his underlings, and how combat experiences impacted their lives. The popularity of the storyline resulted in its becoming a regular attraction in Our Army at War, the title of which was changed to Sgt. Rock in 1977. Kubert credited his time spent in the army with allowing him to understand the military way of life. ‘‘It gave me insight into how guys in the military relate to each other,’’ he explained. ‘‘It’s not only about the uniform and the details of the equipment; it’s important to accurately show how a soldier would wear a uniform and carry his equipment.’’ His deep knowledge of the life of soldiers enabled him to create compelling stories both in words and pictures. Kubert illustrated and occasionally authored Sgt. Rock stories for three decades. In addition, he drew stories and created characters for such war-oriented comics series as Star-Spangled War Stories, Our Fighting Forces, and GI Combat. Other popular Kubert characters were Hans von Hammer (AKA Enemy Ace), a strong World War I (1914–18; war in which Great Britain, France, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies) German fighter pilot, and Unknown Soldier, a disfigured World War II–era American GI.

Varies projects In 1952, Kubert and Norman Maurer introduced the innovative Three Dimension Comics series with the publication of Mighty Mouse, the first 3-D comic book. Two years later Kubert created Tor, a comic book series whose Tarzan-like title character existed in prehistoric times and battled dinosaurs. Both were issued by the St. John Publishing Company. Between 1965 and 1967, Kubert authored the comic strip Tales of the Green Berets, based on the book by Robin Moore and distributed by the Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate. Two other strips, Winnie Winkle and Big Ben Bolt, were distributed respectively by Chicago Tribune-New York News and King Features. From 1967 through 1976, Kubert was the director of publications Joe Kubert

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Passing On Knowledge

Joe Kubert talking at the school he founded, the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic Art in New Jersey. AP Images.

In 1976, Kubert and his wife, Muriel, opened the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. Initially it was located in the twenty-three-room Baker Mansion in Dover, New Jersey. Eventually, as the school expanded, it was relocated to a former public high school in Dover. Students embark on a rigorous three-year, ten-course core curriculum in which they learn the basics of cartoon art, studying everything from drawing, inking, layout, and design to the school’s signature course, narrative art (the manner in which art may be employed to tell a story). Students take approximately twenty-eight hours of classes per week. They are expected to draw for eight to ten hours per day, six and even seven days per week. During the school’s first year, 22 students were enrolled; by

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2004 the school had 125 students and was able to be selective, picking that year’s freshman class of 45 from a list of 300 candidates from across the globe. ‘‘I didn’t [establish the school] to open up a new career for myself,’’ Kubert noted. ‘‘I felt there was a need for such a school. There were no courses being given regarding the dos and don’ts of how to get into the business. I was lucky, with regard to how I broke in. But that opportunity for young people doesn’t exist anymore.’’ Kubert has reported that between 80 and 90 percent of the school’s graduates secure work in the cartoon/comic book/ graphic novel industry. In 1998, he established an offshoot venture: Joe Kubert’s World of Cartooning, a correspondence school.

for DC Comics. In the 1970s, he worked on DC Comics’ new Tarzan series, writing, drawing, and editing Tarzan of the Apes and other Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. And he continued to work as he began teaching students at his own school in 1976. In 1992, Kubert published his first graphic novel, Abraham Stone: Country Mouse City Rat. Kubert’s drawing style changed from project to project, depending on his subject. ‘‘If I’m drawing a story about the ocean, my approach would be different than if I’m drawing a story about people in caves,’’ he noted to Graphic Novelists. ‘‘If I’m drawing something humorous, or if I’m dealing with a work meant for kids, I will simplify my drawing and exaggerate the action. And there are different degrees of simplification. If I’m drawing a war story, it has to be darker, heavier. I’m going to want to show the emotional impact of the situation by the facial expressions, the body language.’’ He explained that ‘‘The drawing itself is not as important as the way in which it is used. I’m not a wallpaper designer. My main purpose is to use my drawings to tell a story clearly, effectively, and dramatically.’’

Depicts horrors of war In 1996, Kubert’s career took on a new dimension with the release of Fax from Sarajevo: A Story of Survival. Set between 1992 and 1994, during the Serbian-Croatian Civil War, the graphic novel depicts the Serbian takeover of the title city. The graphic novel was inspired by the hundreds of faxes Kubert received during the ordeal from Ervin Rustemagic, his Serbian-born friend. In 1992, Rustemagic, a literary agent, was living and working in Holland; he chose to resettle to Dobrinja, a Sarajevo suburb, because his wife and children were homesick and the political situation appeared to have eased. Instead, the hostilities escalated, Rustemagic’s home was destroyed by a bomb blast, and he and his family were trapped in the war zone. Eventually, Rustemagic’s media credentials allowed him to escape into neighboring Slovenia. His family was able to follow him. In his faxes, Rustemagic reported on life amid the exploding bombs and constant terror, charted the atrocities he witnessed, and expressed his fears regarding his and his family’s survival—all of which comprises Fax from Sarajevo: A Story of Survival. The novel unfolds in twelve chapters and includes a number of the actual faxes Rustemagic sent Kubert. ‘‘My motivation for this project was what happened to my friend,’’ Kubert explained to Graphic Joe Kubert

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Novelists. ‘‘I felt this should be noted somewhere; I did it because I felt I just wanted to tell this story. I did the entire book before contacting a publisher, and was surprised by the number of people who wanted to publish it. I also was very pleasantly surprised by [its] acceptance and recognition.’’ Kubert envisioned a different war in his next graphic novel, Yossel: April 19, 1943, published in 2003. Here, Kubert concocts a fiction about what might have been his plight and fate had his parents not settled in the United States. During the 1930s, after Adolph Hitler (1889–1945) came to power in Germany, the clouds of war hung over Europe. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, plunging Europe into the World War II. Had Kubert grown up as a Jew in Poland, he and his family likely would have ended up, and probably perished, in a concentration camp. In Yossel: April 19, 1943, Kubert envisions himself as the title character, a Jewish teenager coming of age in Poland during the war. Yossel and his family are stripped of their civil rights and possessions and relocated to the Warsaw ghetto, but his flair for art makes him a favorite among the Nazi hierarchy and renders him privileges not afforded other Jews. Yossel’s status allows him to avoid being dispatched to the Auschwitz concentration camp, along with the rest of his family. Eventually, he becomes an active member of the Jewish resistance that battles the Nazis in the historic 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Kubert’s story may be linked to his childhood memories of Polish Jews visiting his Brooklyn neighborhood and describing the horrors then unfolding in Europe. Decades later, after visiting the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., he realized that the time had arrived for him to create Yossel. ‘‘That wasn’t just a visit—it was an experience,’’ Kubert explained. ‘‘Walking through the museum was incredible. You got the feeling that you were actually there. There’s a wall that shows the towns in Poland that no longer exist, that were wiped out during the war. My own home town was one of them.’’ Yossel: April 19, 1943 offers an unsparingly graphic account of Nazi atrocities. Kubert’s uncolored pencil drawings are more like unfinished sketches. They are not polished, but rather rough and loose, which is appropriate to the nature of the material. The novel received excellent reviews, with the New York Times’s Dana Jennings observing that it ‘‘may be the capstone of Mr. Kubert’s career.’’ 260

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Does not abandon early work In 2003, Kubert returned to familiar territory with Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place, in which he and writer Brian Azzarello revisit the men of Easy Company. The time is November, 1944, the place is the German-Belgium border, and the sergeant and his men sneak behind enemy lines to nab a quartet of German SS officers. After the ensuing fighting, the sergeant discovers that all but one of the officers has been murdered. Rock must locate the survivor, as well as unearth the officers’ killer. Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place is not merely a combination murder mystery/ action-adventure tale; it also spotlights the manner in which Rock and his underlings respond to their situation, and the moral choices soldiers must make amid the high-intensity pressure of battle. It seemed that Kubert never tired of his work. As he neared his eightieth birthday, he published yet another graphic novel, Jew Gangster, in which he charts the plight of Ruby, a young man coming of age in Depression-era Brooklyn, who becomes involved in organized crime. Kubert told the Philadelphia Inquirer, ‘‘At this stage of the game, to still be in demand and still be having fun, it makes me count my blessings every day.’’

For More Information Periodicals Bewley, Joel. ‘‘Doodle in Class, Sure?’’ Philadelphia Inquirer (November 7, 2005). Jennings, Dana. ‘‘Paper, Pencil and a Dream.’’ New York Times (December 14, 2003).

Web Sites Joe Kubert’s World of Cartooning. http://www.kubertsworld.com (accessed on May 3, 2006). Other Additional information for this profile was obtained through an interview with Joe Kubert on September 28, 2005.

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Mike Kunkel. Photo by Danielle Kunkel.

Mike Kunkel

‘‘I think it’s a shame to think anything good is not for kids. What a silly notion to think that comics aren’t for kids.’’

Born September 30, 1969 (Canoga Park, California) American author, illustrator

Mike Kunkel is one of a new generation of comics creators who is equally adept as an animator. Having started his career in animation, Kunkel found his first fame as a graphic novelist with Herobear, a magical stuffed bear who comes to life as a superhero to accompany a young boy named Tyler on wonderful adventures. He grew up with comic books and cartoons on television, unlike most of the comics pioneers such as Will Eisner, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. This exposure to comics and cartoons helped to inspire his unique style, a style he called ‘‘the animation way’’ that brought the liveliness of animation to graphic novels.

Begins career in animation Mike Kunkel was born on September 30, 1969, in Canoga Park, California. When he was nine years old, he moved with his parents, 263

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Herobear and the Kid: The Inheritance (2003). (With Randy Heuser) Land of Sokmunster (2004).

Dennis and Carla Kunkel, to Thousand Oaks, California. Since he was very young, Kunkel has loved to draw and read comics. He told Graphic Novelists (GN) that by the age of ten he already knew that he wanted to work in cartoons. He stopped reading comics at around that time, but he rediscovered them when he found some old SpiderMan comics at age fifteen. He attended Hillcrest Christian School, where he started to create the concept of Herobear. In high school, Kunkel and his friend Jason Lethcoe (c. 1969–) created a comic strip for their school paper. Kunkel attended Moorpark College in Ventura County, from fall 1987 through spring 1989, earning a two-year degree in two-dimensional art. He married Danielle in 1991, and they had two children: Alec, in 1995, and Leigha, in 1999. Immediately after graduation from Moorpark College, Kunkel went to work as an in-betweener at ‘Magination studio; Lethcoe was working there and hired him. An in-betweener does all the drawings in between the starting and final frame of an action for the animators; Kunkel described it to GN as ‘‘grunt work,’’ the lowest of the low in animation. After about one year with ‘Magination studio, Kunkel took a job with Hanna Barbera/Turner Feature Productions to work on the animated feature Once Upon a Forest. Later, while working on the 1994 animated movie The Pagemaster, Kunkel was promoted to animator. He left Hanna Barbera/Turner Feature Productions in 1995 for Disney Studios, where he began work as a character animator on the animated feature Tarzan. An animated feature has a whole team of animators, each concentrating on different characters. At Disney, Kunkel benefited from working on a variety of animated films. Kunkel was responsible for animating Tantor the elephant and the baboons for Tarzan and Pegasus for Hercules. He began work in the late 1990s on an animated version of Pirates of the Caribbean, but that project was canceled when Disney decided instead to do a live-action motion picture. He also worked on the Tigger movie and The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, the 1998 sequel to The Lion King, which included an animated short called One on One, for which Kunkel did the storyboards. 264

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Throughout his time at Disney, Kunkel also worked on television commercials and did other freelance animation work for Warner Brothers and Cartoon Network. For Warner Brothers, he animated the characters Darla Dimple and Max for the 1997 animated feature Cats Don’t Dance. Kunkel directed episodes of the Dilbert animated television series for Sony in 1999. He also worked on an idea for a comic book that had been in his head since high school.

Shifts gears to focus on comics Kunkel’s comic book idea of Herobear developed in high school and continued to grow within Kunkel’s imagination throughout college and his years at the different studios. Kunkel told Adrienne Rappaport for Sequential Tart that his original idea was ‘‘Heroman,’’ a story about a little hero and his stuffed bear sidekick. Kunkel related to Rappaport that ‘‘as a kid, I had a stuffed bear that I used to carry around with me, and my son still has it in his room. And the name Herobear was coined by my wife’s little brother. He had a little bear that had surf pants on it and a handkerchief that he carried around. And we called it Herobear. And I just made the story up around it.’’ Inspired by his friend Scott Morse (1973–; see entry), who had started to publish his own comics, Kunkel started to work in earnest on his Herobear comic in the late 1990s. The result became Herobear and the Kid, a romp featuring the adventures of a young boy named Tyler and his stuffed bear that comes to life as a gigantic polar bear wearing a red cape. Kunkel designed the comic to appeal to all ages in the way that the old Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons did, where children laughed at all the action while the adults appreciated the jokes as well. Kunkel found inspiration for Tyler from the television series The Wonder Years and the movies Stand by Me and A Christmas Story, all of which had the internal voice narrating part of the story and captured the essence of being a kid. With encouragement from Morse and the support of his high school friend Lethcoe, Kunkel set up Astonish Comics to publish the first issue of Herobear and the Kid in 1999. Herobear and the Kid quickly attracted attention in the comics industry and won critical praise. Savant reviewer Alasdair Stuart commented: ‘‘The friendship between boy and bear is emphasized without ever becoming cloying [sickeningly sweet, overly sentimental]. Instead, there’s a genuine sense of wonder to many scenes, in particular where the two are flying, that makes them oddly moving. Along with Kunkel’s stunning art, this makes Herobear and the Kid a comic which stays with you long after it’s finished.’’ He advised Mike Kunkel

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people to ‘‘Go read it.’’ They did, and by 2001, Kunkel left Disney Studios to work full time on his own ideas at Astonish Comics. The comic not only rose in popularity in its first years of publication, it was also nominated for an Eisner Award. (The Eisner Awards are considered to be the Oscars of the comics industry; each year a panel of judges, made up of retailers, distributors, writers, reviewers, and other professionals, select the nominees and people who work in the comics industry.) Herobear and the Kid was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Publication for a Younger Audience in 1999, and won the award in 2000. In 2002 and 2003, Herobear and the Kid was honored with the Eisner Award for Best Title for All Ages. Kunkel received other awards as well. He was nominated for the Russ Manning Award for Most Promising Newcomer in 2000, and Ninth Art, an online magazine about the comics industry, named Kunkel to its 2001 Roll of Honour for the Under the Sonar Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition. In 2001, Kunkel received four nominations for the Ignatz Awards: Herobear and the Kid #2 was nominated for Outstanding Story and Outstanding Comic, the series was nominated for Outstanding Series, and Kunkel was nominated for Promising New Talent. The Ignatz is a festival prize awarded at the Small Press Expo each year; a panel of five judges (all cartoonists) select the nominees, and people who attend the Expo vote on the awards. Kunkel continued to develop Herobear, writing new issues and exploring new opportunities. In 2001, he wrote two issues of a comic that featured Herobear and Tyler alongside characters developed by comics creator Courtney Huddleston—Police Officer Luck and his super-powered alien sidekick named Decoy. The popularity of Herobear also attracted attention from the film industry. By 2002, Kunkel had begun developing Herobear into an animated feature for Universal Studios, but after eight months’ work on the project Universal decided against making the film. Nevertheless, Kunkel continued to publish the comic, and in 2003 he also put out a graphic novel called Herobear and the Kid: The Inheritance, which collected the five issues of the comic into a single volume. In September 2003, Kunkel merged Astonish Comics with Scott Christian Sava’s Blue Dream Studios to form Astonish Factory. The group published Sava’s graphic novel The Lab, the first issue of Sava’s comic The Dream Chronicles, the graphic novel Spooner by Ted Dawson, and other books. Kunkel and Sava’s partnership ended amicably in 2004, with Kunkel maintaining control over Astonish Factory. Kunkel diversified the Astonish Factory to 266

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include comics and book publishing, toy manufacturing, and animation studios. Kunkel began work on a new book in 2003, a collaboration with Randy Heuser titled Land of Sokmunster. The book relates the adventures of Sam, a boy who follows a loose sock that has stolen a valuable nickel through the dryer lint catcher, where Sam finds himself in the land of Sokmunster. After eight months of work, Astonish Factory published the book in 2004 to such critical praise that Kunkel and Heuser began work on adapting Land of Sokmunster into an illustrated chapter book. Kunkel told GN that he was inspired to try the longer format by his son, Alec, who was ten years old in 2005 and needed to read chapter books for school book reports. Kunkel saw that cartoonist Mark Crilley had successfully adapted his comic series, Akiko, into illustrated chapter books (published by Random House). Kunkel and Heuser were also Mike Kunkel

Scene from the 1994 animated movie The Pagemaster, which Kunkel worked on. 20th Century Fox/ Turner/The Kobal Collection.

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Animation and Cartoons Kunkel has comfortably switched from cartooning to animation and back again throughout his career. He told Rachel Gluckstern of Comic World News, ‘‘Animation has always influenced my comics. From the storytelling to the art. I think it really affects my storytelling, because I usually approach the stories from the point of view of how I’d treat a film, and how I’d storyboard it out.’’ He said that the comic book characters need to act, and that’s how he’d draw them, acting out the dialogue. To him, comics and cartoons are very closely related. ‘‘Both have the opportunity to entertain visually and that should be always first and foremost. Cartoons

and comics all start with scripts, but it is then the next step of taking that script and visually building on it and making it really come to life. For me, I love them both, and could spend time creating in both worlds forever.’’ His style of printing directly from his penciled drawings rather than inking them first (as most comics are done) also comes from his work as an animator. He told Adrienne Rappaport of Sequential Tart that he preferred his sketchy drawings to the hard, smooth lines of inked pictures because they gave his comic books a look that was not ‘‘overly done’’ and had ‘‘a lot of life to the drawings.’’

planning a sequel called Revenge of the Moth King, which they were planning to publish both in a graphic novel/picture book format and as an illustrated chapter book. In both Herobear and the Kid and Land of Sokmunster, Kunkel’s art shows the influence of his time as an animator. His art retains the sketchiness of his pencil work, which lends a sense of movement and dynamism; he called it The Animation Way. Herobear and the Kid was done in black and white, with only the bear’s red cape printed in color. Land of Sokmunster was published in color but retains a sketchy style. Kunkel explained his decision to print his sketchy drawings, instead of inking over them as traditional comics artists do, to Sequential Tart: ‘‘For me, there’s something to it that keeps it alive, and gives it a little more warmth maybe. I’m also a horrible inker. And working as an animator, I just went with what I knew. And have always liked animation drawings instead of finished cells. I like that look; I’ve always been more attracted to that. And I wanted it to look like a finished book, but not be overly done, and still have a lot of life to the drawings. It helped me capture the movement. It wasn’t a static image; it felt like if you looked at it, it was still moving.’’ Kunkel’s books look like a cross between a standard picture book and a movie storyboard. 268

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Animates Juniper Lee Although Kunkel spent most of his time working on his comics, he accepted an opportunity to work in animation again in 2004. In spring 2004, Judd Winick (1970–; see entry), the creator of such works as The Adventures of Barry Ween, Pedro and Me, Green Lantern, and The Outsiders, asked Kunkel to work with him on a new animated television series for Cartoon Network, The Life and Times of Juniper Lee. Juniper Lee is an eleven-year-old Chinese American girl who is the new Te Xuan Ze, the Protector of the world against monsters from the spirit world. She’s a cross between The Ghostbusters, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and has more than a touch of The Simpsons-style humor. Kunkel worked as the character designer along with Phil Mosness, and Astonish Factory did the opening credit sequence for the cartoon. Winick and Kunkel had been friends for years. Winick said in an interview with Fanboy Planet, ‘‘When I was developing the show, I actually thought it would be great if it looked like Mike Kunkel’s stuff. It was actually suggested to me, well, if you know him, why don’t you give him a call?’’ Kunkel, Mosness, and Winick worked together on the concepts, and Kunkel then designed all the characters, human, animal, and monster. The show premiered on the Cartoon Network on May 30, 2005; by fall 2005, the network had renewed it for three seasons. Kunkel said that he pitched a story idea for the third season that Winick liked, so he was planning to script an episode as well as handle the character design. By the end of 2005, Kunkel had myriad projects. He was working on a new Herobear graphic novel, Herobear and the Kid: Saving Time, which he was hoping to publish in 2006. Kunkel also worked on other animation projects, including serving as a storyboard artist for Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows, a direct-to-video animated feature starring the Lego [trademark] toys and with Scott Christian Sava on a new animated series for Nickelodeon. In addition to his own work, Kunkel took the time to teach others. The Fall 2005/Winter 2006 course schedule for the California Art Institute showed that Kunkel would teach a course on cartoon drawing during one of the terms. With less than a decade in the comics industry, Kunkel had risen to the top and he seemed poised to remain there, producing works for young and old. Kunkel’s enjoyment of his comics fans made him feel good. As Kunkel related to the Comic World News: ‘‘Everyone is so supportive and encouraging, it just makes you want to keep doing this forever.’’ Mike Kunkel

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For More Information Periodicals Kan, Kat. ‘‘Kat’s Bonus: An Interview with Mike Kunkel.’’ Voice of Youth Advocates, December 2004. Web Sites Barbagallo, Ron. ‘‘Herobear and the Kid.’’ Animation Art Conservation. http://www.animationartconservation.com/herobear.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Gluckstern, Rachel. ‘‘The Astonishing Mike Kunkel!’’ Comic World News. http://cwn.comicraft.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?column=interviews&page=104 (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘The Life and Times of Judd Winick: An Interview, Part 1.’’ Fanboy Planet. http://www.fanboyplanet.com/interviews/mc-juddwinick1.php (accessed on May 3, 2006). Rappaport, Adrienne. ‘‘The Un-Bear-Able Lightness of Being Mike Kunkel.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/june01/kunkel. shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Stuart, Alasdair. ‘‘Reviews: Herobear and The Kid.’’ Savant. http://www. savantmag.com/53/reviews.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Additional information for this entry was obtained through a telephone interview with Mike Kunkel conducted on September 20, 2005.

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Peter Kuper. Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Courtesy of Peter Kuper.

Peter Kuper

‘‘At this point in one way or another everything I work on seems to have some connection to social or political commentary.’’

Born September 22, 1958 (Cleveland, Ohio) American artist, author, illustrator

In his comic art, Peter Kuper combines his deeply felt humanism and passion for the underdog with a biting, ironic sense of humor. His career encompasses both the mainstream of the publishing world and the fringes of the comic book underground. Kuper’s work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and The New Yorker; he has drawn cover illustrations for Time and Newsweek; he contributes regularly to MAD magazine; and his comic strips appear in alternative weeklies. Kuper has created both lighthearted and serious fare, but he noted in an interview with Graphic Novelists (GN) that his future will likely include much more work inspired by politics and society. ‘‘It has become part of the DNA of what I’m interested in creating,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve spent enough of my career doing mindless illustrations and at this point I find it very difficult to wrap my mind around anything that doesn’t have something to do with responding to what I see going on in the world.’’ 271

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels/Compilations New York, New York (1987).

Eye of the Beholder: A Collection of Visual Puzzles (2000).

(With Seth Tobocman, others) World War 3 Illustrated: 1980–1988 (1989).

Mind’s Eye: An Eye of the Beholder Collection (2000).

It’s Only a Matter of Life and Death (1990).

Speechless (2001).

Peter Kuper’s Comics Trips: A Journal of Travels through Africa and Southeast Asia (1992).

(With Emily Russell) The Jungle (2004).

The Metamorphosis (2003).

Sticks and Stones (2004).

Give It Up!: And Other Short Stories (1995).

Other (Illustrator) The Last Cat Book (1984).

(With Seth Tobocman, others) World War 3 Illustrated: Confrontational Comics (1995).

(Illustrator) Why Be Different?: A Look Into Judaism (1986).

Stripped (1995).

Also the creator of several comic strips, including Eye of the Beholder, New York Minute, and Spy vs. Spy; and the creator of the comics Bleeding Heart, Richie Bush, and Wild Life.

The System (1997). Topsy Turvy: A Collection of Political Comic Strips (2000).

Kuper’s career was summed up in a 2005 profile published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, his hometown newspaper. ‘‘Peter Kuper is the kind of artist whose personality radiates from his work,’’ Tranberg observed. ‘‘Alternately brash, witty, cutting and just plain goofy, he has made a career out of creating incisive images for mass audiences.’’ Kuper’s keen eye for detail and strong design sense give his pictures such power that a number of his comics and graphic novels communicate clearly without dialogue. It is for these wordless stories that Kuper is noted among graphic novelists.

Aspires to be an artist Peter Kuper was born on September 22, 1958, in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in the suburb of Cleveland Heights. His father, Alan, worked as a professor of electrical engineering; his mother, Virginia, was a secretary. From his middle-class upbringing in the Midwest, Kuper found artistic inspiration in books. He traced his determination to pursue an art career to his reading of Harold and 272

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the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson’s classic children’s book in which the title character, a four-year-old boy, employs his imagination to draw a magical landscape. As he grew, he continued to explore new worlds through reading. ‘‘I discovered comics when I was seven,’’ he told GN, ‘‘and never stopped loving that medium.’’ When Kuper’s personal world was broadened, he developed an interest in politics and world issues. ‘‘An important influence was traveling,’’ he explained to GN. ‘‘I lived in Israel for a year when I was ten and have spent an accumulation of years traveling around the globe. All of this has given me a connection to the reality that the world is quite round.’’ Kuper’s sense of the world was also influenced by the times in which he came of age, during the Cold War (1945–91; a long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that forced nearly every country in the world to side with the capitalist, democratic United States or the Communist, state-run Soviet Union), when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. ‘‘I saw the movie Fail Safe when I was about eight years old,’’ he noted to GN. ‘‘In this movie, the U.S. accidentally bombs Russia and—as a result—Russia gets to counter-bomb one U.S. city to stop a third World War. They choose New York City, and as a result the city’s obliterated. Later, of course, I learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki [two cities in Japan that were devastated by a nuclear bomb by the United States during World War II], and this thing kind of went off in my brain and made me want to address life and death issues.’’ And his interest in these large social and political issues has never left him.

Notes varied artistic influences Kuper’s interest in the world around him enabled him to draw influence from different sources, and he just happened to live in the same city as comic artist Harvey Pekar (1939–; see entry). When he was thirteen, Kuper met fellow Clevelander Pekar, who in turn introduced him to R. Crumb (1943–). Pekar and Crumb are among the top comic artists of their time, and their artistic sensibilities greatly impacted on Kuper as he developed his own creative voice. ‘‘As far as (other) influences, there are about a million,’’ Kuper noted. They include artists (Norman Rockwell, Saul Steinberg, Lynd Ward, Jack Kirby, Ralph Steadman, and the makers of ‘‘the African masks on my wall’’); writers (J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck); artist-writers (Dr. Seuss); photographers (Diane Arbus); filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman); and rock musicians and groups (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, XTC, Naughty by Nature). Peter Kuper

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Upon graduating from high school in 1976, Kuper studied art for a year at Ohio’s Kent State University. Then he was offered employment as an illustrator in a New York City cartoon studio. After heading east, he learned that the job had fallen through, but he decided to remain in the city. He supported himself drawing caricatures as a street artist while taking evening classes at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute.

Establishes a career as an artist Kuper landed his first job in the comics industry in 1978, as the inker for the comic book Richie Rich, which charts the adventures of the world’s wealthiest boy. The quality of his work on the job won Kuper much more work, and by 1982 his illustrations appeared in such prestigious publications as the New York Times. Although his first job opened the door for him to enter his chosen profession, it was an ironic assignment for Kuper given his politics. In subsequent years, Kuper would turn down assignments, no matter how lucrative, if he opposed the point of view expressed in the article needing illustration. Through the 1980s, Kuper established himself as a comic strip artist, cartoonist, and illustrator while honing his approach to drawing. ‘‘The mediums I use,’’ he explained, ‘‘vary from scratchboard (a chalk-covered paper that can be inked and scratched away to approximate a woodcut) and stencil where I cut holes in paper and spray-paint, then add watercolor, colored pencil and . . . sometimes collage.’’ From his experimentation and constant work, Kuper developed a unique style for his illustrations that resembled woodcuts. He noted to GN that ‘‘working in my sketchbook while traveling had a big influence. My sketchbook became like a scrapbook with collages of maps and various mixed-media.’’ Using the clarity and power of his style, Kuper developed a wordless comic strip called Eye of the Beholder. Each Eye of the Beholder strip is a five-panel riddle; in the first four panels, the reader is challenged to determine the strip’s point of view, which is revealed in the fifth. ‘‘I figured if it had words there would be an editor breathing down my neck every week,’’ Kuper admitted, ‘‘so I decided to make it wordless.’’ Typically, much of the strip is pointedly political and humanistic in nature: Tarzan is portrayed as a helpless observer of the destruction of a woodland; a leftover chicken bone becomes a meal for a homeless man; and an African-American janitor scrutinizes Caucasians tanning themselves. The strip ran in the New York Times for six months in the mid-1980s and has the distinction of 274

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Politics into Art At age eleven, Kuper and Seth Tobocman—who had been friends since first grade—published Phanzine, their own magazine. ‘‘It included our first feeble attempts at cartooning and interviews with various cartoon-world professionals,’’ Kuper recalled. Years later, in 1979, they established World War 3 Illustrated, a comics publication with content reflecting their politics. Among the issues that they and their writers and artists have explored are life in America’s inner cities, duplicity in American politics, drug use and abuse, and homelessness. During the 1980s, World War 3 Illustrated examined the manner in which the policies of President Ronald Reagan, a Republican and a conservative, impacted American society. ‘‘At that time there were few outlets for nonsuperhero comics and, with Ronald Reagan heading towards the Oval Office, we were anxious to apply our art as a form of rebellion,’’ Kuper told GN. ‘‘We didn’t start WW3 with a manifesto; we just wanted to create an outlet for our political comix and have the opportunity as editors to publish work

by other artists who also were not being seen much beyond local lampposts.’’ ’’If we had written a manifesto, it might have said something about creating historical document(s) that let someone from the future know that guys like Ronald Reagan didn’t fool all of us. It also may have said, if you are going to make declarations about changing the world, a magazine is a decent place to start. In many ways WW3 represents a microcosm of the kind of society we’d like to see, a place where people from various backgrounds, genders, and abilities can pull together to the benefit of all. It also makes good bathroom reading.’’ World War 3 Illustrated was still being published in the mid-2000s. Richard Schauffler, writing in the Whole Earth Review, described its content as ‘‘powerful blackand-white graphic art and comic strips from the engaged and enraged pens of urban artists.’’ He also observed, ‘‘In a world in which fewer and fewer young people seem to read, books like this may be our best hope.’’

being the first comic strip ever published in the paper. Eventually, it was syndicated to alternative newspapers. In 2000, samples of the strip were reprinted in Eye of the Beholder: A Collection of Visual Puzzles and Mind’s Eye: An Eye of the Beholder Collection.

Creates personal stories Kuper explored many different approaches to comics. His work ranged from deeply personal stories to adaptations of noted authors. In 1992, Kuper published Peter Kuper’s Comics Trips: A Journal of Travels Through Africa and Southeast Asia, in which he employs comics, sketches, and photographs to document an eight-month-long Peter Kuper

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journey across the globe. Another personal story, called Stripped, was frankly revealing. In Stripped, Kuper visualizes memories of his life as a teenager, spotlighting his drug use, his efforts to lose his virginity, and his botched romances. For Stripped Kuper drew his adolescent alter-ego as a scared rabbit who is appalled by his sexual inexperience yet petrified by the idea of participating in an erotic encounter. Kuper explained his reasons for creating Stripped to GN, saying ‘‘I had a lot of stories I wanted to tell to both get them off my chest and because I thought people would find them entertaining. I also find I get bored doing any one type of thing too long and I wanted to explore the autobio area of writing.’’ In much of his work, Kuper examines the world around him. In The System, published in 1997, Kuper offers a dialogue-less odyssey across New York City, which he views as an unsightly, squalid American metropolis. At its core is his presentation of the New York subway system, and the range of individuals who employ it to traverse the city. Kuper based a number of his characters on reallife New York subway riders. Speechless, which Kuper published in 2001, is a coffee-table compilation of his illustrations, comics, and magazine cover art. He also includes previously unpublished work, most of which is of a political-satire nature, and reminiscences about his first-ever comic book purchase, his meeting Harvey Pekar, and his efforts to enter the comic book industry. In its entirety, however, Speechless underscores Kuper’s feelings about the catastrophe of homelessness in America, the importance of protecting the environment, and his outrage over attempts to curb artistic freedom. Regarding the artistic freedom issue, he offers a record of his testimony as an expert witness in a case involving Mike Diana, a Floridian and underground cartoonist who was prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity for the content of Boiled Angel, a selfpublished comic. Kuper was infuriated not just by the conviction, but by the severity of the penalty. Diana was fined $3,000 and sentenced to three years’ probation. He was ordered to submit to psychiatric assessment and perform more than one thousand hours of community service. He was directed not to create any more ‘‘obscene’’ art and informed that he and his residence would be exposed to impromptu police searches. ‘‘I didn’t care for most of the work in question,’’ Kuper explained, ‘‘but when the prosecutor called me in New York to take my deposition I found his notion of deciding what was and wasn’t art much more obscene than anything Mike had drawn.’’ 276

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Building on others’ work Although his personal stories were widely praised, Kuper garnered more critical attention for his adaptations of others’ work. In 1995, he came out with Give It Up!: And Other Short Stories, illustrated versions of nine stories written by famed Czech author Franz Kafka during the first decades of the twentieth century. Publishers Weekly noted that the stories ‘‘function perfectly within the comics format, allowing Kuper to pace the language of Kafka’s imposing visions easily against his own vibrant b&w drawings.’’ In 2003, Kuper revisited Kafka with an adaptation of his 1912 short story The Metamorphosis. The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s most celebrated work, is the nightmarish tale of a luckless, victimized man named Gregor Samsa, who finds himself transformed into a large cockroach. In 2004, Kuper published an adaptation (written with Emily Russell) of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle; he originally had drawn The Jungle more than a decade earlier, for a briefly revived Classics Illustrated comic book series. Regarding his choice to illustrate Kafka and Sinclair, Kuper explained, ‘‘I liked the idea of working with someone else’s text, but not have to get their approval on my choices, so dead writers are perfect!’’ Arguably, The Jungle is Kuper’s most ambitious project. The novel, first published in serial form in 1905, is Sinclair’s impassioned account of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who settles in Chicago. He and his family aspire to attain the American Dream, but instead he finds only corruption, racism, and poverty as he is used and abused while toiling in the city’s meatpacking industry. Without sacrificing the essence of Sinclair’s point of view, Kuper and Russell condense the original, 400-page story into a 48-page graphic novel. ‘‘. . . inevitably, much of the narrative is lost,’’ wrote Publishers Weekly. ‘‘Kuper replaces it, however, with unmatched pictorial drama. . . . (He) uses an innovative full-color stencil technique with the immediacy of graffiti to give Sinclair’s story new life.’’ The reviewer dubbed the adaptation ‘‘a classic in its own right.’’ In addition to adapting classic stories into graphic novels, Kuper worked on a different kind of adaptation. In 1997, he began drawing and writing Spy vs. Spy, the long-running MAD magazine comic strip. For this work, Kuper invented new stories for established characters. When first approached to take over the strip, he almost declined. ‘‘Doing someone else’s characters was not in my plans,’’ Kuper noted to GN. But he decided to give it a try. ‘‘As it has turned out, it has been great to connect with the MAD audience—it is also talking to the ten-year-old in me who grew up reading MAD.’’ Peter Kuper

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Kuper continued to create new Spy vs. Spy strips each month into the 2000s.

Politics continues to influence his work Kuper kept up his prolific output of his varied projects. In 2004, Kuper published Sticks and Stones, a graphic novel whose scenario is consistent with his politics. Sticks and Stones is the tale of a power-mad stone giant who coerces those around him into obeying his every command—including constructing a stone castle for his pleasure. Upon encountering a quiet community that is completely constructed in wood, he schemes to occupy it and pilfer its natural resources. A wooden boy and a stone woman unite to organize a rebellion against the giant. Kuper also created more directly satirical political comics. In contrast to his early-career job inking Richie Rich, Kuper created Richie Bush, a mini-comic takeoff in which he satirizes the administration of President George W. Bush (1946–). ‘‘Recently, my own 278

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Richie Bush was seized by customs for being piracy (of the character of Richie Rich) and . . . the CBLDF (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) came through with help and the books were released,’’ Kuper noted to GN. ‘‘I took their seizure as an attempt to squelch the content.’’ Regarding art, politics, and personal expression in the United States in the 2000s, Kuper observed, ‘‘There is definitely an atmosphere of our government wanting to muffle opposition and encourage the same from the private sector. A woman was recently expelled from her flight for wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt. The same thing happened at all Bush rallies pre-election. I am very concerned that this is the tip of the censorship iceberg that could expand to all areas of art and protest.’’ Kuper, long a resident of New York, lives in Manhattan with his wife, Betty Russell, a magazine publisher, and their daughter, Emily, born in 1996. Although very busy with his own creations, Kuper took the time to share his knowledge of the comics industry with students, teaching courses about alternative comics and illustration at New York’s School of Visual Arts and a course titled ‘‘Art and Activism’’ at New York’s Parsons School of Design.

For More Information Periodicals ‘‘Give It Up!: And Other Short Stories.’’ Publishers Weekly (June 5, 1995). ‘‘The Jungle.’’ Publishers Weekly (December 13, 2004). Schauffler, Richard. ‘‘World War 3 Illustrated.’’ Whole Earth Review (Summer 1990). Tranberg, Dan. ‘‘Art Matters: Kuper’s Rogue Wit Cuts to the Quick of Global Politics.’’ Cleveland Plain Dealer (January 7, 2005).

Web Sites Peter Kuper. http://www.peterkuper.com/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). Other Additional information for this profile was obtained through an interview with Peter Kuper on October 13, 2005.

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Harvey Kurtzman Born 1924 (Brooklyn, New York) Died February 21, 1993 (Mount Vernon, New York) American author, illustrator

The founder of MAD magazine, Harvey Kurtzman gave American comics a satirical streak that has lasted beyond his own career as well as beyond his magazine. MAD set a tone for American humor beyond the world of comics; Kurtzman’s influence resonated in the silly but socially and politically critical parodies (spoofs) that filled late-night television talk shows and in the stage routines of comedy troupes. After leaving MAD, Kurtzman displayed an eye for younger talent; he nurtured the careers of artists who went on to create what became known as underground comics, and later in life he taught cartooning formally. Kurtzman’s influence has continued to be recognized when the comic industry’s highest awards are passed out each year.

‘‘Kurtzman’s MAD held a mirror up to American society, exposing the hypocrisies and distortions of mass media with jazzy grace and elegance.’’ RENOWNED GRAPHIC NOVELIST AND AUTHOR ART SPIEGELMAN

Hones his drawing skills Born in 1924 in Brooklyn, New York, Harvey Kurtzman grew up in the New York City borough of the Bronx. He loved comic books as a child, and his stepfather, an artist, encouraged him to try his hand at drawing. It was not long before Kurtzman was entertaining neighborhood kids with a comic called Ikey and Mikey, drawn in chalk on the sidewalk. Taking art classes at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pratt Institute on the side, he graduated from the High School of Music and Art, an elite arts-oriented school that drew students from across the city. Cartoonist Will Elder (1921–), a fellow student, would later become one of Kurtzman’s favorite collaborators. Kurtzman’s first sale as a creator of comics art occurred in 1939, when he was paid one dollar for a drawing that won a contest and appeared in Tip Top Comics. He enrolled at Cooper Union, a top art 281

Best-Known Works The MAD Reader (1954; reprinted 2002).

Nuts! 2 vols. (1985).

Inside MAD (1955).

Betsy’s Buddies (1988).

The Bedside MAD (1959; reprinted 2003). The Son of MAD (1959; reprinted 2003).

(With Howard Zimmerman) My Life as a Cartoonist (1988).

The Organization MAD (1960; reprinted 2003).

Harvey Kurtzman’s Strange Adventures (1990).

Jungle Book (1959); reprinted as Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book 1986.

From Aargh! to Zap!: Harvey Kurtzman’s Visual History of the Comics (1991).

Harvey Kurtzman’s Fast-Acting Help (1961).

Hey Look: Cartoons by MAD Creator Harvey Kurtzman (1992).

The Illustrated Harvey Kurtzman Index (1976).

The MAD Archives, Vol. 1 (2002).

college in New York. But he was already making money as an artist, working for a production shop that did routine artwork for comics publishers. The eighteen-year-old Kurtzman worked on a comics version of the classic novel Moby Dick, and his studies at Cooper Union fizzled out. Opportunities to publish work of his own arose, and the cover of the January 1943 issue of SuperMystery Comics was a signed Kurtzman original. He created and drew stories for magazines of the day such as Lash Lightning and Bill the Magnificent. World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan) diverted but did not sideline Kurtzman’s growing career; he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and was able to keep honing his drawing skills by illustrating Army training manuals. He was also able to draw and publish comics on the side occasionally. Discharged in 1946, Kurtzman quickly found work in the growing American comics industry. Between 1946 and 1949, he wrote and drew a single-page comic called Hey Look! for comics legend Stan Lee (1922–), then an editor at Timely Comics (which later became Marvel). At the top of the comic he wrote his name as ‘‘Kurtz,’’ followed by a stick figure of a man (which varied slightly over the years). The little-known Hey Look! comics were collected in a 1992 book of the same title, published by Kitchen Sink Press. At Timely Comics, Kurtzman met his future wife, Adele Hasan. 282

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Joins EC Comics In 1950, Kurtzman moved to EC Comics after visiting publisher William M. Gaines (1922–1992) to propose a freelance project and found that Gaines appreciated his humorous work. Kurtzman was put to work not on EC’s popular gory and controversial horror comics, but on a pair of war comics called Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Between 1950 and 1954 Kurtzman broke new ground in the field of serious graphic storytelling by doing thorough research about his subjects and attempting to present plausible stories. Although he did not draw these works himself, he gave detailed layout instructions to artists such as John Severin (1921–). Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat depicted the horrors of war unsentimentally and sometimes critically, even as the United States was at war on the Korean Peninsula for much of the period when they were being published. (The Korean War was a war fought between North Korea, aided by Communist China, and South Korea, aided by United Nations forces consisting mainly of U.S. troops, lasting from 1950 to 1953.) Meanwhile, Kurtzman continued to work for Gaines on teenoriented comics, sometimes slipping bits of rebellious humor into otherwise innocent storylines. Gaines noticed this trend, and when Kurtzman asked him for a raise in 1952 he took the opportunity to tap his restless hire’s creativity by agreeing—on the condition that Kurtzman would create and edit a new graphic humor magazine. The development of what was originally called Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD had another motivation as well: as a magazine rather than a comic book, it would evade the restrictions of the new Comics Code that was on the way to congressional approval (the Comics Code placed restrictions on violence and sexuality in comics and was first implemented in 1954) and would thus help EC maintain its cutting-edge position in the industry. Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD made its debut in the fall of 1952 and caught on within a year. Kurtzman’s satirical thrusts, originally directed against other comics he found dull, were perfectly complemented by the detailed, involved artwork of Severin, Will Elder, Wally Wood, and other artists. MAD was visually and thematically distinctive, and its drawings crossed the boundaries of comic panels as often as Kurtzman’s ideas transgressed against conventional tastes. An early parody, ‘‘Superduperman,’’ was followed by issues that skewered other icons of American comics; clean-cut high-schooler Archie became Starchie, a drug-dealing juvenile delinquent. Harvey Kurtzman

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Cover of #8 Mad magazine shows a cartoon by Harvey Kurtzman in 1953. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Focuses satirical fire on television programs As MAD grew in popularity, Kurtzman expanded its subject matter beyond comics and animation. MAD’s durable series of television parodies began in the mid-1950s with ‘‘Dragged Net,’’ and the movie melodrama ‘‘From Here to Eternity’’ became ‘‘From Eternity Back to Here.’’ Another long-running MAD feature had its origins under Kurtzman’s editorship: he printed classic poems by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe unaltered, but he turned his stable of artists loose to poke visual fun at people depicted in the poems. 284

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MAD was still going strong more than fifty years after its founding, and through much of the 1960s and 1970s it retained many of the features and much of the personality Kurtzman had given it. The magazine’s durability was partly due to the distinctive artists and artwork Kurtzman brought to the magazine. He gave encouragement to cartoon artist Don Martin (1931–2000), whose flexible-jointed and wild-haired characters appeared in the magazine for years. Kurtzman was also responsible for making the image of Alfred E. Neumann—a big-eared, gap-toothed figure who often appeared on the cover—a symbol for the magazine and its attitude. Neumann was adapted by Kurtzman from a host of earlier pop-culture sources including an earlier comic character, the Yellow Kid. Kurtzman himself, however, departed the magazines in 1956 after a monetary dispute with the publisher; he insisted on being given a controlling stake in the magazine, which by that time was EC’s chief moneymaker, but the publisher rejected his demands (which had no legal basis).

Life after MAD After the split, Kurtzman tried to extend the satirical storytelling of MAD in a variety of new projects and publications. Playboy magazine publisher briefly bankrolled a magazine called Trump, a slicker, more upscale version of MAD, but it lasted only two issues. Kurtzman and many of the MAD artists banded together to create the comic book Humbug in 1957; it failed within a year. Perhaps these publications were unsuccessful because the bulk of Kurtzman’s creative energy was directed elsewhere; Ballantine Books published a small paperback volume of Kurtzman’s own comics called Jungle Book in 1959. Jungle Book, later reprinted by Wisconsin’s Kitchen Sink Press as Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, gained little renown at the time but became one of Kurtzman’s most eagerly sought-after volumes among comics collectors. The book comprised four long stories, each a satire based on a popular television series or another hot cultural item of the moment. All were drawn as well as written by Kurtzman himself. ‘‘Thelonius Violence’’ was a take-off on the jazz-themed detective TV show Peter Gunn. ‘‘Compulsion on the Range’’ was a spoof of the western show Gunsmoke, while ‘‘Decadence Degenerated’’ skewered the plays of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), including Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. ‘‘The Organization Man in the Grey Flannel Executive Suite’’ referred to a common idea in popular sociology of the late 1950s: the Organization Man, whose life was shaped by loyalty to a corporate hierarchy. Harvey Kurtzman

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Uses Fumetti technique ‘‘The Organization Man in the Grey Flannel Executive Suite’’ introduced the character of Goodman Beaver, a likable, yellowhaired young man struggling to overcome the corruption and chaos of American life. Goodman Beaver became the subject of a fulllength comic written by Kurtzman and drawn by Will Elder, and he frequently appeared in Kurtzman’s next magazine venture, Help!, which appeared between 1960 and 1966. Help! often featured a format called fumetti, the technique of using still photographs with comic-style captions or dialogue balloons. Help! attracted famous comedians and writers as contributors, including Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Dick Van Dyke, Woody Allen, Orson Bean, and even feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Equally important were the unknown artists and writers who went on to create the next generation of comics and graphic narrative art: Gahan Wilson, R. Crumb, Hank Hinton, Terry Gilliam, Gilbert Shelton, and many other key figures were published in Help! before they became famous. Help!, cuttingedge though it was, never became a strong moneymaker.

Contributes to underground comix In the 1970s, Kurtzman contributed occasionally to the underground comics (these adult-oriented comics, sometimes called comix, explored themes of sexuality and drug use in visual styles associated with the Hippie movement) he had helped to inspire, and he published one of his own, Kurtzman Comix, in 1976. He continued to guide the careers of younger artists as a cartooning instructor at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Collections of Kurtzman’s work began to appear; The Illustrated Harvey Kurtzman Index was followed in the 1980s and 1990s by reissues of individual Kurtzman books and series. He suffered from Parkinson’s Disease (a disease of the nervous system that becomes more severe over time) in the 1980s but continued to work, publishing some wordless comics (with artist Sarah Downs) in a French magazine, founding a new magazine, Nuts!, and working on his own history of the graphic medium, From Aargh! to Zap!: Harvey Kurtzman’s Visual History of the Comics, which was published by Prentice-Hall in 1991. Harvey Kurtzman’s Strange Adventures, published in 1990, featured an all-star roster of artists illustrating little pencil scenarios by Kurtzman, which were reproduced at the back of the book. After Kurtzman died of liver cancer in 1993, testimonies to the influence of his work, MAD especially, flowed freely. Maus creator Art Spiegelman (1948–; see entry) wrote about Kurtzman in the 286

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New Yorker magazine, and Zippy creator Bill Griffith (1944–) told Entertainment Weekly’s Ty Burr that ‘‘I would pick up a regular comic book or an imitation MAD, like Cracked, and it was dumber than I was. It might be funny, but it was stupid-funny. You picked up MAD and it was making you reach a little bit. You were a notch more sophisticated after you finished reading it.’’ Jeff Greenfield of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote simply that ‘‘Harvey Kurtzman changed the way America laughed.’’

For More Information Books Kurtzman, Harvey, with Howard Zimmerman. My Life as a Cartoonist. New York: Pocket Books, 1988. Periodicals Burr, Ty. ‘‘Harvey Kurtzman: ‘Mad’ genius.’’ Entertainment Weekly (March 5, 1993): p. 67. Greenfield, Jeff. ‘‘What? Us Recall Harvey Kurtzman?’’ Chicago Sun-Times (February 25, 1993): p. 33. ‘‘Harvey Kurtzman Is Dead at 68.’’ New York Times (February 23, 1993): p. B7. Smith, Peter. ‘‘Humor with Sharp Edges.’’ St. Petersburg Times (January 10, 1988): p. D6.

Web Sites ‘‘Profiles: Harvey Kurtzman.’’ Read Yourself RAW. http://www. readyourselfraw.com/profiles/kurtzman/profile_kurtzman.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). Vadeboncoeur, Jim. ‘‘Harvey Kurtzman Biography.’’ Bud Plant Illustrated Books. http://www.bpib.com/illustra2/kurtzman.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Jeph Loeb. Albert L. Ortega/ WireImage.com.

Jeph Loeb Born January 29, 1958 (Stamford, Connecticut) American author

‘‘These [superhero stories] are myths. Legends. They actually thrive BETTER when they are retold and retold and each time this part gets changed or that part gets changed.’’

In the world of superheroes, major characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and others have lived many lives. Most such heroes have had a first life, created by their inventor, and multiple other lives, invented for them by lone writers or teams of writers, each seeking to reinvent the character for a new generation. Since the late 1990s, one of the most consistently innovative and popular revisers of superhero stories has been Jeph Loeb. Working most often with artist Tim Sale (1956–), Loeb has offered loving recreations of Superman’s youth, Spider-Man’s romances, and Batman’s anguished quest to bring peace to Gotham City. He also revived the founding story for Supergirl and made it convincing all over again. Along the way, he has brought to his stories a rare sensitivity to the emotional demands of being a superhero. Though he began his career in films and has played a role in the creation of such television series as Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Loeb has said that writing comics is all he ever wanted to do. 289

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Challengers of the Unknown Must Die (1991; reprinted, 2004). Batman: Haunted Knight (1995). Batman: The Long Halloween (1998).

Spider-Man: Blue (2003). Hulk: Gray (2004). Catwoman: When in Rome (2005). Superman/Batman. 3 vols. (2005; includes Superman/Batman: Supergirl).

Superman for All Seasons (1999). Superman 4 vols. (2000–01). Batman: Dark Victory (2001). Superman: Our Worlds at War 2 vols. (2002). Daredevil: Yellow (2002). Batman: Hush 2 vols. (2003); collected in Absolute Batman: Hush.

Other Loeb has also written numerous stories for comic books, either in single issues or series, including Coven, Kaboom, Supergirl, Witching Hour, X-Force, and X-Men. He also wrote screenplays for the films Teen Wolf (1985) and Commando (1985) and the television series Smallville (2001–05).

From film to comics Joseph ‘‘Jeph’’ Loeb III was born on January 29, 1958, in Stamford, Connecticut. He told Superman Home Page interviewer Neal Bailey that his mother gave him the nickname ‘‘Jeph’’ on the way home from the hospital after his birth: ‘‘My legal name is Joseph Loeb III, and she didn’t want TWO Joes in the house, so she took the ‘o’ and ‘s’ out of Joseph and got Jeph.’’ He’s been Jeph ever since. Loeb’s parents did not remain married long after his birth, and he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when his mother married his stepfather, then a vice president at Brandeis University. It happened that both father and stepfather encouraged Loeb’s early fondness for comic books, which were undergoing one of their periodic revivals in the 1960s. When Loeb was twelve, his father bought his son a comic collection that included every Marvel Comic published between 1961 and 1970. This purchase jump-started a collection of comics that has grown so large over the years that Loeb frequently jokes that it has overrun one garage and is spreading to his home. While he was in his teens, Loeb’s stepfather also introduced the boy to Elliot Maggin (c. 1950–), a comics enthusiast who would later write many stories in the Superman series.

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Despite his love of comics, when it came time to attend college, Loeb chose to study film. He attended Columbia University in New York City, where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. From there, Loeb gravitated to Hollywood, the mecca of American filmmaking. In the early and mid-1980s, Loeb developed his skills as a screenwriter, someone who writes scripts for films. In 1985, Loeb made a splash with his efforts on two very different films: he wrote the script for Teen Wolf, a teen comedy starring Michael J. Fox (1961–), and for Commando, a high-powered action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947–). These hits helped land Loeb on a project that suited his youthful interests: a film about the DC Comics comic book character Flash, the fastest man alive. When it became apparent that the movie would not get made, DC Comics publisher Jeanette Kahn asked Loeb if he might like to write a comic book. ‘‘It was a little bit like Santa pulling up in front of the house and asking would I like to go for a ride on his sleigh on Christmas Eve,’’ Loeb told an interviewer on the BBC’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer Web site. The story of how Loeb got his first comics assignment sheds light on his personality and on the difficulty of getting started in the industry. Asked by DC Comics editor Dick Giordano which character he’d liked to write on, Loeb told him: Superman. ‘‘It never occurred to me that there was a regular team and that you couldn’t just have a kid come in and write one issue,’’ Loeb said in an interview for Comicology. Loeb worked his way down through the ranks of DC superheroes, down through the Creep and the Atom, before he landed on the Challengers of the Unknown, four adventurers who, after escaping a serious accident with their lives, dedicate themselves to daring adventures in the name of justice. It took Loeb a long time to write the script, and longer to find an artist, but eventually he discovered Tim Sale (see sidebar). The pair produced eight issues through 1991 under the title Challengers of the Unknown Must Die. It was the start of a successful comic book career for both writer and artist.

Loeb does Batman Though Challengers of the Unknown didn’t sell particularly well, it did gain them attention in the comics industry, and the duo was offered the opportunity to create some stories about one of DC’s most famous superheroes: Batman. They created a three-issue series for the Halloween season each year from 1993 to 1995; they were later collected as Batman: Haunted Knight. The first two Jeph Loeb

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Tim Sale: Artist Jeph Loeb’s success as a comics writer was, for a number of years, closely intertwined with that of artist and illustrator Tim Sale. Together the two created numerous stories of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and others. Tim Sale was born in Ithaca, New York, on May 1, 1956, but he grew up in Seattle, Washington. Though he was a huge comics fan as a child, it took him some time to break into the field. He bounced in and out of art studies in college, attending the University of Washington for two years before heading east to New York to briefly attend the John Buscema Workshop and the School of Visual Arts. It was later, while working at a taco stand in Seattle, that he realized that he wanted to make his career in comics.

Sale’s first job came on Myth Adventures in 1983, and in the late 1980s he worked on Thieves World. By 1991, however, Sale had hooked up with Jeph Loeb on Challengers of the Unknown, which soon led to their breakthrough work on Batman (later collected in Batman: Haunted Knight). In their working relationship, which continued into the 2000s, Loeb provides a full script, with detailed descriptions of the placement of characters, buildings, and other elements. Loeb and Sale work together to come up with the best possible combination of words and pictures before passing their work to a colorist—a needed role, since Sale is colorblind.

stories in the collection, ‘‘Fears’’ and ‘‘Madness,’’ brought new depths to the villains Scarecrow and the Mad Hatter, and in them Loeb experimented with psychological insights into the main character that would characterize his best work. Most reviews judged the collection to be only a moderate success, with the last story, ‘‘Ghosts,’’ widely considered to be one of the pair’s weakest works. Loeb and Sale built off of their initial Batman work with a thirteen-issue series that many felt was a breath of fresh air for the Caped Crusader. Batman: Long Halloween is a sustained mystery story built around the efforts of Batman, Catwoman, Commissioner Gordon, and District Attorney Harvey Dent to solve a string of killings, committed on major holidays, that threaten to ignite Gotham City’s already violent, mafia-dominated underworld. In this long story, Batman confronts a string of villains and is forced to explore his trust of Harvey Dent and his commitment to pursuing justice instead of just revenge. Reviewing the graphic novel in which the stories are collected, Yannick Belzil noted on the 11th Hour Web site that ‘‘Batman: The Long Halloween is certainly the prime example of how a storyline should treat Batman . . . by putting him in his natural element: a mystery.’’ ‘‘We’re not often 292

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treated to the emotional side of Batman, other than the personal tragedy that took his parents away,’’ continued Belzil, ‘‘but this story reveals his feelings about his city and the people that surround him.’’ Loeb has revisited the world of Batman several times since Long Halloween. In 2001, he and Sale teamed up on Batman: Dark Victory, and two years later Loeb joined artists Jim Lee and Scott Williams on two volumes of Batman: Hush. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised the book, claiming that ‘‘Loeb is especially talented at underwriting, not crowding the page full of long explanations and snappy patter.’’ Yet other reviewers felt that this Batman story, in which Batman fights against Killer Croc and Poison Ivy, among other villains, did not stand up to Loeb’s earlier treatments.

Back to the superhero’s roots Though Loeb had clearly shown his superhero storytelling skills in his several Batman books, it was Superman for All Seasons that revealed the real depths of his talent. Superman had long been one of Loeb’s favorite characters. ‘‘I just always loved the character,’’ Loeb told Golden Age Superman Web site interviewer Patrick M. Gerard. ‘‘He is so simple to identify with—you put on a cape and you fly around the house. Great stuff. All comics lead from that single point of creation. He’s important!’’ In Superman for All Seasons, Loeb and Sale take readers back to the very early days of the Superman legend, when Clark Kent is a farm boy discovering his remarkable powers and determining to use them for good. The story, which is largely without the epic battles so common in superhero stories, traces Clark’s dawning awareness of the difficulties and complexities of protecting the world. Told in four chapters from the perspectives of his mother, Lois Lane, his archenemy Lex Luthor, and his first love, Lana Lang, each of the stories is infused with the melancholy of those who try to understand Superman, and the result is a graphic novel with a powerful emotional pull. Loeb told Blitz and Lamken that he returned to Superman’s early days ‘‘because I’ve always found the mortal side more interesting than the superhuman side.’’ Yannick Belzil, in his review for The 11th Hour Web site, concluded that: ‘‘Ultimately, this is a great book. It’s a good story with beautiful, uncluttered art—very easy to read and accessible to someone who’s never read a Superman comic (or any comic, for that matter) and therefore can serve as a perfect introduction to the world of comics.’’ Jeph Loeb

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Loeb explored other origin superhero stories in a set of books he wrote for Marvel Comics in the early 2000s. In Daredevil: Yellow, Spider-Man: Blue, and Hulk: Gray—the colors evoke the early days of the character’s outfits or skin color—Loeb went back to some of 294

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the original storylines from these classic Marvel heroes, but infused them with new insight and emotion. For example, in Spider-Man: Blue, Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spider-Man) tells a story lamenting the death of his first love, Gwen Stacy, at the hands of the Green Goblin. PopMatters Web site reviewer Sam Gafford praised the story for offering ‘‘superhero slugfests,’’ but concluded that ‘‘if you want to read a story about mature characters dealing with youth, life, and love, check this series out and chalk up another home run for Loeb and Sale.’’ In Hulk: Gray, Loeb and Sale retell the tale of the forty-eight hours after Bruce Banner is first transformed into the Hulk. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that ‘‘Loeb raises questions about these characters’ motivations that, until now, haven’t been incisively investigated,’’ and reinterprets the story ‘‘to expose and illuminate its underlying psychological depths.’’ Through the 2000s, Loeb continued to work in the superhero genre. He penned a series of successful Superman stories, a number of which were collected in graphic novel form. He ventured into the Superman/Batman series in 2005. In one volume of the latter series, Loeb revisited the story of Supergirl, which had been told in several ways over the years. Loeb’s version returned to the original and, as usual, breathed new life into it. The story was so popular that Loeb followed it up with several single-issue comics in the Supergirl series. Loeb nurtured his love of superhero origins in another way as well: from 2001 to 2005, he served as a writer and producer on the Smallville television series, which was set in the small town of Clark Kent’s youth and told of Superman’s life before he ever put on tights. Grooming him to eventually write stories of his own, Loeb’s son, Sam, had joined his father in this work. Tragically, Sam Loeb died of cancer in 2005. His father told a Krypton Site interviewer that Sam ‘‘was a truly gifted writer—and a magical son.’’ The crew of Smallville dedicated the 2005 season to him. By 2005, Loeb had his hands in a number of projects. He was wrapping up his work on Supergirl for DC, and looking forward to rejoining Marvel to write stories about The Ultimates. He told Frederik Hautain of Broken Frontier that he anxiously anticipated the opportunity to try his hand at a new set of characters: ‘‘The challenge as a writer, as a creator, is to find new chances to hone your craft. And as a storyteller, to come to a place where maybe I’m not as well known and there is a new audience to read and hear my tales.’’ Loeb has no plans to invent characters of his own, he told the Dynamic Forces Web site: ‘‘For me, the fun of writing comics is Jeph Loeb

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working with the Icons.’’ One of those icons that Loeb was planning on working on was The Spirit, a revival of the classic series created by comic book legend Will Eisner (1917–2005; see entry). Fans of Jeph Loeb can look forward to a whole new set of stories that reveal his mastery of action and emotion.

For More Information Periodicals Radford, Bill. ‘‘Supergirl Is Back—and She’s the Real Deal.’’ Seattle Times (August 22, 2005): p. E2.

Web Sites Bailey, Neal. ‘‘Exclusive Interview with Jeph Loeb.’’ Superman Homepage. http://www.supermanhomepage.com/tv/tv.php?topic=interviews/ jeph-loeb2 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Belzil, Yannick. ‘‘Batman: The Long Halloween.’’ The 11th Hour. http:// www.the11thhour.com/archives/062000/comicreviews/batman.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Belzil, Yannick. ‘‘Superman for All Seasons.’’ The 11th Hour. http:// www.the11thhour.com/archives/022000/comicreviews/superman.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Blitz, Stefan, and Brian Saner Lamken. ‘‘Jeph Loeb and Superman.’’ Comicology no. 1 (Spring 2000). Reproduced at Superman Through the Ages. http://theages.superman.ws/Creators/loeb.php (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘DF Interview: Jeph Loeb.’’ Dynamic Forces. http://www.dynamicforces. com/htmlfiles/interviews.html?showinterview=IN10130554250 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Gafford, Sam. ‘‘Spider-Man: Blue.’’ PopMatters. http://www.popmatters. com/comics/spiderman-blue.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Hautain, Frederik. ‘‘Jeph Loeb: When at Marvel—Part I.’’ Broken Frontier. http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/details.php?id=246 (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Jeph Loeb Interview.’’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer/BBC. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/cult/buffy/interviews/loeb/index.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘KryptonSite Interview: Jeph Loeb Talks About His Smallville Departure.’’ KryptonSite. http://www.kryptonsite.com/loeb0805.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). Tim Sale Official Web site. http://www.timsale1.com/home.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). 296

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Scott McCloud. Courtesy of Scott McCloud.

Scott McCloud Born June 10, 1960 (Lexington, Massachusetts) American comics theorist, artist, illustrator

‘‘Comics’ place in society is worth fighting for. It’s a matter of dignity! We should aspire to a higher place in popular culture. . . .’’

Scott McCloud—author of two works that have dissected the ways that comics and the comics industry work—has been called a ‘‘cartoonist’s cartoonist’’ and ‘‘comic’s resident futurist.’’ As one of the few people ever to make a systematic study of the ways that comics tell stories, McCloud is widely considered to be the leading intellectual working in comics in the 1990s and 2000s. His two key works, Understanding Comics (1993) and Reinventing Comics (2000), advanced the idea that comics are a serious form of storytelling and ignited many discussions throughout the comics community about how comics and the comics industry work. McCloud’s work stirred controversy with his piercing criticisms of the existing comics industry and his suggestion that the future of comics was on the Internet. More than just a comics theorist, McCloud has also created several innovative comics stories of his own over the years. Zot!, 297

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Making Comics (2006).

Understanding Comics (1993). Zot! 3 vols. (1996–98, 2000). (Writer) Superman Adventures (1998). The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (1998).

Other Destroy!! (comic). (1985). My Obsession with Chess (Web comic). (1998–99).

Reinventing Comics (2000).

I Can’t Stop Thinking! (Web comic). (2000– 01).

(Editor) 24 Hour Comics (2004).

The Right Number (Web comic). (2004–05).

which appeared in serial form in the mid- and late 1980s, was collected in graphic novels in the mid-1990s, and was reborn in an online version in 2000, offered a nostalgic take on a superhero romance and allowed McCloud to experiment with the ideas he developed in his theoretical works. His comic book Destroy!! (1986) was an all-out parody of the superhero comic genre. He has also penned stories for the Superman series. In the 2000s, McCloud was actively exploring the potential of online comics in such stories as I Can’t Stop Thinking! and The Right Number, available with a micropayment from his personal Web site, www.scottmccloud.com.

Comics becomes an obsession From very early in Scott McCloud’s life, he showed an intensity of concentration and interest that bordered on obsession. He was born on June 10, 1960, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, and was one of four children. His parents provided an environment that was at once stimulating and nurturing. In his father, Willard, McCloud had a wonderful example of persevering through adversity: His father was born blind, yet he had an amazing career as a scientist and inventor. He worked for Raytheon Laboratories, a major supplier of weapons systems to the U.S. government, and he was involved with the invention of the guidance system for the Patriot missile. His mother, Patricia Beatrice McCloud, not only looked after her entire family, she also helped her husband with driving, reading, and finances. As a child, McCloud devoted his singular attention to a wide variety of interests. ‘‘My childhood was a series of obsessions; I’d 298

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move from one obsession to another,’’ he told Chris Knowles in an interview in Comic Book Artist magazine. ‘‘I began with astronomy, mineralogy—this was in elementary school, around fourth grade!— microbiology was a huge one.’’ By the time he was around thirteen years old, his major obsession was chess. Then a childhood friend, Kurt Busiek (1960–; see entry), wooed him from chess to the glories of comic books, introducing him to stories about Daredevil, the X-Men, and the Avengers. ‘‘Eventually,’’ McCloud told Knowles, ‘‘he broke through my prejudices, because I really thought I was too old for comics at the time.’’ Together, he and Busiek committed themselves to comics, both of them believing that the medium could do far more interesting and intelligent things than the typical superhero stories they read. McCloud, who had always loved to draw, decided early on in high school that he would make his career as a comics creator. (Busiek made the same decision; he became a writer of such comics as Marvels and Astro City.) McCloud and Busiek both attended Lexington High School, which McCloud described in an interview with Graphic Novelists (GN) as ‘‘a repository for a lot of impressive brains. Many of the students were the children of scientists, inventors, or professors.’’ There were so many ‘‘nerds’’ in the school, related McCloud, that they had their own cafeteria. ‘‘I was lucky. I didn’t have the horrific persecution that nerds get at some schools,’’ McCloud told GN. The two comics fans traded stories and encouraged each other’s interest in a career in comics. They worked as a team, with Busiek writing the text and McCloud providing the illustrations. When they were both sixteen, in fact, they penned a comic called Pow! Biff! Pops! for a fundraiser put together by the Boston Pops Orchestra. The comic featured DC and Marvel Comics heroes and sold, at the time, for $10 a copy. (Recently, McCloud related, someone paid $1,000 for one of the few remaining copies.) McCloud and Busiek both attended Syracuse University, where McCloud majored in illustration. They founded a comics fan club at the university and together created a sixty-page comic called ‘‘The Battle of Lexington.’’ McCloud graduated from college in 1982 and, thanks to the boom enjoyed then in the comics industry, he immediately went to work for DC Comics, one of the two biggest comic book publishers in the United States. McCloud worked in the production department, he told interviewer Erick Ferguson, ‘‘which involved random paste-ups, little editorial corrections, whiting out lines when they went over the panel border. . . .’’ It was perfect work for someone starting out in the comics business: not only did it expose McCloud to all the stages in comics Scott McCloud

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Caricature self-portrait by Scott McCloud. Courtesy of Scott McCloud.

production, but it also made him very aware of the difficulties facing independent-minded creators who wanted to push the boundaries of what might be covered in a comic book.

Creates Zot! Working at DC through 1982 and into 1983, McCloud felt himself begin to slip into the mindset that he would work at this nine-to-five job, slowly moving up the corporate ladder, until getting DC to publish one of his own comics. Then, he had a jolt. ‘‘My father died,’’ he told Knowles, ‘‘and I sort of had a change of heart . . . and I decided to go for it, to do my own comic, and see if I could sell it, rather than waiting to get approval to do my own comic.’’ That comic would be Zot!, a futuristic story about a teenage boy searching for the ‘‘Doorway at the Edge of the Universe.’’ McCloud poured all of his various interests into Zot!, from his study of Japanese manga to his love of the movie The Wizard of Oz to his desire to use comics to explore intellectual ideas, and he 300

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prepared an enormous package of materials to take to publishers. He finally decided on Eclipse, because that publisher offered him creative control over the series—something that was to become increasingly important to McCloud over the years, especially after he observed how even well-known comics creators often struggled to gain creative control and full rights to their works. With Eclipse’s purchase of Zot!, McCloud left DC and became a full-time freelance comic book creator. With its clean and artful full-color illustrations, engaging storyline and characters, and innovative method of storytelling, Zot! soon won accolades: the comic won the Jack Kirby Comics Industry Award for best new series of 1984, and also earned McCloud the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1985. Despite its success, both critically and in terms of sales (which started at around 28,000 copies, then slid to around 13,000 copies later in the series), Zot! did not earn its author a great deal of money. He was, McCloud told Knowles, ‘‘a mediumsized fish in a small pond.’’ McCloud worked at odd jobs, continued to publish Zot!, and penned another single-issue comic called Destroy!!, which parodied the superhero comic genre (McCloud described it to GN as ‘‘very large and very loud’’), and began to try his hand at journalism, using his intense interest in comics to offer criticisms of the industry that he was coming to know so well. In the mid- to late 1980s, McCloud once more became obsessed, this time with the potential that he saw in comics that were either self-published or published by a number of very small comics publishers. He continued to make money from his journalism, and from the black-and-white continuation of Zot!, but by the late 1980s he began to turn in a new direction. In 1987, he married Ivy Ratafia, a storyteller and children’s theater director, and at about the same time he put together a proposal for a new kind of work, a comic about comics. The man who finally bought the proposal for the book that would become Understanding Comics was Kevin Eastman (1962–), half of the pair that had created and then struck it rich with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Originally, Eastman just wanted to give McCloud money to finance his work, but McCloud insisted that he only be paid for work that he had done. They came to an agreement in which Eastman paid McCloud an advance on each page of the book that he completed, supplying McCloud with the money he needed to continue on his ambitious project to relate to readers how comics work—in comic book form. By 1993, the book was published by Kitchen Sink Press, then picked up and reprinted by the much larger publisher HarperPerennial in 1994. Scott McCloud

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Comics Creators’ Bill of Rights In the mid-1980s, Scott McCloud was one of many comics creators who had grown tired of allowing large comics publishers like DC Comics and Marvel to dictate the terms of the contracts they signed to create comics. Though contracts varied widely, it was generally felt to be the case that publishers, not creators, reaped the greatest financial rewards from a successful comics creation. In the fall of 1988, a number of creators convened in Massachusetts for a two-day summit to discuss creators’ rights. McCloud brought with him a draft version of ‘‘A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators.’’ The document contained twelve essential rights: 1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create. 2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own. 3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property. 4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed. 5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.

6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions. 7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time. 8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work. 9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work. 10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition. 11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property. 12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property. This Bill of Rights was widely discussed by those working in the comics industry, and numbers of creators were persuaded to seek—and publishers to grant—the rights listed. However, it is hardly the case that creators now have all the rights requested in this document. As McCloud put it on his Web site, ‘‘that creators already have the right to control their art if they want it; all they have to do is not sign it away.’’

Understanding Understanding Comics Understanding Comics was unlike anything ever published about comic books and is considered McCloud’s greatest work to date. Though it bore some similarities to Will Eisner’s (1917–2005; see entry) 302

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Comics and Sequential Art, published in 1985, McCloud’s work not only shows readers how comics work to tell a story, it is told via comics. Guiding readers through the book is a comic character named Scott McCloud, a blazer-wearing young man with huge round glasses that hid his eyes. The character McCloud offers readers a definition of comics—‘‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence’’—and then proceeds to demonstrate how comics have been used throughout history. McCloud spends the better part of the book showing readers how comics work, breaking down the devices by which comics creators signal emotions, ideas, and the passage of time. There is no element of storytelling that McCloud does not address, and to provide examples he draws liberally from the work of other comics from around the world. Understanding Comics does far more than show readers how comics work, however. In fact, what was most commented on about this book was McCloud’s sustained argument for the literary and cultural value (or rather, potential value) of comics. McCloud insisted in the book that comics could be more than ‘‘crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare’’; in fact, he argued, ‘‘the potential of comics is limitless and exciting!’’ He concluded his book by saying that ‘‘comics offers tremendous resources to all writers and artists: faithfulness, control, a chance to be heard far and wide without fear of compromise . . . . It offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word.’’ Reviewers and fellow comics creators heaped praise on Understanding Comics. Publishers Weekly called it a ‘‘rare and exciting work that ingeniously uses comics to examine the medium itself,’’ while fellow comic Garry Trudeau (1948–), of ‘‘Doonesbury’’ fame, wrote in the New York Times Book Review that McCloud ‘‘guides us through the elements of comics style, and shows us how the mind processes them through inferred transitions and how words combine with pictures to work their singular magic. Never has the didactic seemed so charming.’’ The back cover included words of support from some of the giants in the industry, including Will Eisner (who called it a ‘‘landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium’’) and Art Spiegelman (1948–; who said it was ‘‘the most intelligent comix I’ve seen in a long time’’). Understanding Comics won multiple awards in the United States and abroad, and earned McCloud the reputation as a leading intellectual in the comics world. Scott McCloud

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24-Hour Comics In the summer of 1990, Scott McCloud was visiting with fellow comics creator Steve Bissette, whom he knew to be terribly slow at producing his work. What if, McCloud wondered, both he and Bissette were faced with an impossible deadline? What if they were required to finish an entire 24-page comic, plus cover, within a 24-hour span? Thus was born the ‘‘24-Hour Comic.’’ McCloud and Bissette were the first to take the 24-Hour Comic dare, and the idea could have died there, but Bissette sent copies of their efforts to several other comics creators with the question: ‘‘What can you produce in 24 hours?’’ Soon creators around the world were taking the challenge, and succeeding (or not) in various ways: some, like Neil Gaiman (1960–; see entry) of Sandman fame, couldn’t finish 24 pages, but submitted what he could; others, like Kevin Eastman (1962–) of

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame, couldn’t stop once they had started, and worked more hours to produce more pages. But many others did turn out interesting work within the time constraints. In 2004, McCloud edited a collection of these quickly produced works in 24-Hour Comics, noting that those in the book represented just the tip of an iceberg that reached into the thousands. Soon, others took the 24-hour challenge: some Australians organized a group event in which forty creators came together in one place to produce the comics; in New York, a theater group came together to write a 24-hour play, and this in turn inspired the 48-Hour Film Project, begun in 2001 (see www. 48hourfilm.com). No matter the medium in which the dare takes place, the need for speed has spurred creativity and produced consistently interesting work.

Reinventing Comics Understanding Comics opened a number of doors for McCloud: he was invited to talk at comics conventions and to deliver lectures at universities. Perhaps most importantly, it opened the door to a sequel. Working on the first book had opened McCloud to thinking more carefully about a whole range of other issues associated with comics, and he took those on in Reinventing Comics, published in 2000. In the introduction, humorously titled ‘‘Understanding Sequels,’’ McCloud writes that while the first book was about ‘‘comics’ exciting internal life, I was equally fascinated with its external life—the story of what people have actually done with comics in the 20th century.’’ In the first half of Reinventing, he reports ‘‘on the many ongoing battles to reinvent the way comics are created and perceived in North America,’’ and his story—again narrated by the Scott McCloud figure—provides 304

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details on the workings of three generations of American comics creators. In the second half of the book, McCloud takes on a bigger challenge: he spells out a road map for how comics creators could—perhaps should—use digital technology, especially the computer and the Internet, to revolutionize the way they create and distribute comics. The first half of Reinventing Comics generated some praise and discussion in the comics industry, though nothing like his first book. In the print and online forums where comics are discussed, McCloud’s work inspired urgent conversations about ethnic and sexual diversity in comics, the need for greater creative control among artists and writers (see sidebar), and public perception of the worth of comics as a literary form. But it was the second half of the book that caused a real firestorm of controversy. McCloud argued that the wave of the future of comics is on the Internet, and he urged that creators figure out ways to sell their works through small payments, called micropayments, in which customers who want to view a ‘‘comic book’’ paid a small sum, perhaps a nickel, a dime, or a quarter, for viewing rights. He also proposed that the ‘‘infinite canvas’’ of new technologies could change the form of the comic book, allowing it to progress in different fashions that would enhance storytelling. There are many who love Reinventing Comics. In an oft-quoted remark, comic book creator Frank Miller (1957–; see entry), best known for Sin City, called McCloud ‘‘the smartest guy in comics.’’ A Library Journal reviewer called Reinventing Comics an ‘‘exceptional book’’ that ‘‘may just be the blueprint for the very future of the comics industry.’’ Yet it was McCloud’s detractors who earned the most attention. Writing in the Comics Journal, arguably the leading journal in the field, Gary Groth criticized McCloud for being too quick to embrace technology as a positive creative force in the comics world. Reinventing Comics, wrote Groth, ‘‘is for the most part visually grotesque and . . . a refutation of many of his grandiose claims about the superiority of computer technology over and against such antiquated techniques as applying ink to paper with pen or brush.’’ Groth called McCloud to task for his ‘‘wholly uncritical, indeed, breathless and drooling enthusiasms for technology irrespective of their grounding in reality or even common sense.’’ Such was the tone of much of the criticism that followed, mainly from people who felt that McCloud was too optimistic about the ability of the Internet to provide comics creators with a source of income. Scott McCloud

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Ventures into the digital beyond To his credit, McCloud did not shrink from the criticism that came his way as a result of his provocative assertions in Reinventing Comics. (In fact, he anticipated such criticism, acknowledging in the introduction to his book that his ideas were ‘‘under construction.’’) Instead, he became ever more engaged in responding to his critics, even reconsidering some of his earlier positions, and he became more involved in exploring the possibilities afforded to comics by technology. On his Web site, McCloud freely admits that his 1998 book The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, which he had created completely on his computer, was ‘‘clunky’’ (Groth had written that it ‘‘failed on every conceivable level’’). He also acknowledged that Reinventing had ‘‘genuine flaws’’ and that he had perhaps been overly optimistic about the speed with which the digital future would arrive. He told Graphic Novelists: ‘‘I wasn’t able to make that revolution happen all by myself. I’ve discovered that one man can’t move a mountain.’’ But, he wrote on his Web site: ‘‘After 8 years of intense investigation, I remain convinced that the digital delivery of comics has the potential to revolutionize the industry, and that the aesthetic opportunities of digital comics are enormous.’’ McCloud also set about to prove his assertions by creating digital comics of his own. In I Can’t Stop Thinking, linked from his Web site, McCloud basically continued Reinventing Comics on a Web page: instead of turning pages, readers scroll down the page, and are led from frame to frame by a variety of lines, links, or trails to the next part of the story. Other online strips, from as early as 1995, saw McCloud experimenting with different ways to tell stories on the Web. Clearly his most successful effort is The Right Number. In this oddly engaging and mature story, a man tries to discover some mathematical correlation between his ideal woman and her phone number. The series was available online in 2005 for a micropayment of 25 cents. Also in 2005, McCloud was working on the next installment in his ongoing series about comics. This one, to be titled Making Comics, is about ‘‘what goes on in that really fundamental level of storytelling in comics. That’s the stuff that interests me,’’ he told the Newsarama Web site. Unlike his first book, which was focused on helping people understand the complexities of how to read comics, this one would focus on how best to tell a story in comic form. Only time will tell what kind of reaction this work will evoke for one of the most provocative thinkers in comics. Once that book was completed, he told GN, he was ready to take on his next 306

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obsession, a ‘‘big fictional story that I’ve been thinking about for twenty-five years and that may take me three years to draw. It’s big, it’s audacious, it’s about life, the universe, and everything. And now that I’ve taught myself to draw, I think I’m finally ready to do it.’’

For More Information Books McCloud, Scott. Making Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York: Perennial, 2000. McCloud, Scott, ed. 24-Hour Comics. Thousand Oaks, CA: About Comics, 2004. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993; reprinted, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.

Periodicals Boxer, Sarah. ‘‘Comics Escape a Paper Box, and Electronic Questions Pop Out.’’ New York Times (August 17, 2005): p. E1. Library Journal (September 15, 2000): p. 68. Malchow, Aaron. ‘‘Each Morning Gives Rise to Improvisational Cartoons Online.’’ Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal (September 28, 2001): p. 51. Publishers Weekly (June 14, 1993): p. 66. Radford, Bill. ‘‘Heroes and Villians? No, It’s Abraham Lincoln.’’ Seattle Times (February 24, 1998): p. E5.

Web Sites Boime, Albert, and David Dodd. ‘‘Profile Interview: Scott McCloud.’’ PopImage. http://www.popimage.com/profile/082200mccloud1.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Ferguson, Erik. ‘‘An Interview with Scott McCloud.’’ Bookslut. http://www. bookslut.com/features/2003_10_000772.php (accessed on May 3, 2006). Harvey, R.C. ‘‘Scott McCloud’’ (interview). Comics Journal. http:// www.tcj.com/2_archives/i_mccloud.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Hatfield, Charles. ‘‘Scott McCloud, Still Thinking’’ (interview). Comics Journal. http://www.tcj.com/232/i_mccloud.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Knowles, Chris. ‘‘Zot! Inspection: Scott McCloud on his ’80s Comic Series’’ (interview originally published in Comic Book Artist, no. 8). TwoMorrows. http://www.twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/08mccloud.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Scott McCloud

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McCloud, Scott. ‘‘Zot! Online.’’ Comic Book Resources. http://www. comicbookresources.com/columns/zot/heartsandminds.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Robinson, Tasha. ‘‘Interview: Scott McCloud.’’ A.V. Club. http://avclub. com/content/node/22835 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Scott McCloud. http://www.scottmccloud.com (accessed on January 8, 2006). ‘‘Scott McCloud on Making Comics.’’ Newsarama. http://www.newsarama. com/pages/McCloud_Making.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). 24-Hour Comics. http://www.24hourcomics.com/ (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Additional information for this profile was obtained from a telephone interview with Scott McCloud in November 2005.

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Todd McFarlane. Evan Agostini/ImageDirect/ Getty Images.

Todd McFarlane

‘‘Kids like creepy stuff that scares Mommy. I’ve never grown out of that sensibility.’’

Born March 16, 1961 (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) Canadian author, illustrator, publisher, toy company founder, movie producer

To comic fans, Todd McFarlane is best known for Spawn, a character he introduced in 1992 through Image Comics, an imprint he co-founded with several ex-Marvel colleagues. Before quitting Marvel he was the industry’s highest-paid artist, making $2 million a year, and when it launched in May 1992 the first Spawn issue became the most successful independent launch in the history of comics with sales of 1.7 million copies. By 1997, McFarlane was estimated to be worth $100 million. McFarlane’s former boss at Marvel Comics and the creator of Amazing Spider-Man, Stan Lee (1922–) pinpointed the foundation of McFarlane’s success in People: ‘‘His artwork is very captivating. It just draws you to it.’’

Harbors dreams of sports stardom Born in Calgary, Canada, on March 16, 1961, McFarlane moved to southern California while he was still a baby and lived there 309

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (Illustrator with David Michelinie) Stan Lee Presents Spider-Man vs. Venom (1990). (With others) Batman: Year Two (1990).

(With Frank Miller) Spawn-Batman (1998). Todd McFarlane Presents: Kiss Psycho Circus (1998). Comics

Stan Lee Presents Spider-Man: Torment (1992).

(With Greg Capullo, Angel Medina, and Philip Tan) Spawn, issues 1–150. (1992–).

(With Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza) Stan Lee Presents X-Force and Spider-Man in Sabotage (1992).

Film and TV Spawn (live action movie). (1997).

(Illustrator with Sal Buscema, Gerry Conway, and David Michelinie) Spider-Man: The Cosmic Adventures (1993). (With Steve Ditko, John Romita, and Mark Bernardo) Spider-Man Unmasked (1997).

Spawn (animated TV series). (1997–99). Video Games Spawn the Eternal (1998). Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand (2000). Spawn: Armageddon (2003).

until he was fourteen years old, when his family moved back to Calgary. He discovered comic books while he was in high school and collected the work of comic book creators such as John Byrne, George Perez, Marshall Rogers, Michael Golden, Art Adams, and Walter Simonson. But McFarlane’s first love was baseball. He played in Little League, in high school, and in 1981 went to Eastern Washington University on a baseball scholarship with dreams of playing professionally. McFarlane graduated in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in general studies, having specialized in graphic arts and communications; he had worked at a comic book store to help fund his time at college, but he remained focused on baseball. When recruited by a Seattle Mariners scout to play for a semi-professional baseball team in British Columbia, he jumped at the chance. It was there that he befriended a man named Al Simmons, whose greatest (and perhaps only) claim to fame came when McFarlane later named the Spawn character after him. McFarlane’s baseball career was short-lived, however. His skills had been damaged after breaking his ankle during a college game, and he failed to attract interest from any major league teams while playing in British Columbia. 310

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Although he had always shown talent for drawing, McFarlane only began to think about doing it professionally when hopes of a baseball career began to fade. He approached the difficulty of breaking into comic book writing with determination and persistence. He sent off drawings to almost every publisher in North America, receiving almost seven hundred rejection letters over a period of fourteen months; his approach was to send a monthly package of drawings to editors with the idea that they would eventually hire him just to make him stop. Editors at Marvel Comics were the first to give in, and in March 1984 he was hired to work on a minor series called Scorpio Rose.

Begins working for Marvel Comics McFarlane’s opportunity at Marvel Comics began a career that saw him become one of the most recognized and highest paid comic book artists of all time. In 1987, he worked on one of Marvel’s biggest series, The Incredible Hulk, and was also doing freelance work for Marvel’s main competitor, DC Comics, including several issues of Batman: Year Two. By then he was one of Marvel’s top artists. His cover art and drawings had helped revive the declining Amazing Spider-Man series; he transformed the look of the character, giving him enlarged eyes to make him more spider-like and a more sticky-looking web. McFarlane was finally allowed to write and draw his own series in 1990 when Marvel gave him the Amazing Spider-Man series, which debuted in September that year. With eventual sales of 2.5 million copies, the first issue became the best-selling comic book in history. One of the peculiarities of comic book publishing is that artists and writers are paid for their work, but in most cases the publishing company retains the rights. Many artists feel that they are being exploited by companies like Marvel, and McFarlane was one of them. As he became more influential, earning almost $2 million per year by the early 1990s, his dissatisfaction with the arrangement began to grow. In 1991, he and several other writers and graphic artists at Marvel began to think about setting up their own company that would allow artists to retain rights to their work. In February 1992, he and six other Marvel artists walked out on the company, protesting that Marvel was denying them control over their own work. They created Image Comics.

Creates Spawn The first issue of Spawn appeared in May 1992 under the Image Comics imprint and sold 1.7 million copies, a record for an Todd McFarlane

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Todd McFarlane’s most famous character ‘‘Spawn,’’ (short for Hellspawn) is former CIA agent Al Simmons, who has been murdered by his boss and makes a pact with the devil in order to see his wife again. ª Todd McFarlane Productions.

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independent comic. The character of Spawn (short for Hellspawn) is former CIA agent Al Simmons, who has been murdered by his boss and makes a pact with the devil in order to see his wife again. Taken forward in time five years, Spawn finds that his wife, Wanda, has married his best friend and that they have a daughter, Cyan. McFarlane has said that there is a lot of himself in Spawn. He named Simmons’s wife and daughter after his own wife and daughter. Also, it is possible to see Spawn’s search for his family, and his attempts to shake off the demon who owns him, as a metaphor for McFarlane’s own attempt to break free from Marvel Comics and regain his personal and artistic independence. With its appeal aimed squarely at teenage boys, the Spawn series contains grotesque images of ripped flesh and extreme violence, but there are also elements of absurdity amidst the gore, such as severed limbs used for writing. Spawn has also been praised for being part of a trend away from the clean-cut white male superheroes of the past, since its lead character, underneath the rotting flesh, is clearly black. McFarlane told Rolling Stone in 1997 that he was tired of ‘‘everyone [in comics] being good looking white guys.’’ Whatever the motivations behind it, the series was a huge hit. It was translated into seventeen languages and sold in more than one hundred countries. Spawn quickly attracted the attention of toy manufacturers such as Hasbro and Mattel, which wanted to make action figures from the series. But McFarlane wanted more control over the figures than the companies were willing to give, so he set up his own business, McFarlane Toys. Having already become a competitor for Marvel and DC in the arena of comic book publishing, McFarlane now took on the toy industry with huge success. Within a few years, McFarlane Toys became the fifth-largest toy manufacturer in the United States, with a reputation for detail and the high quality of the likenesses of its action figures. By 2003, it had expanded to make action figures for rock bands such as KISS and AC/DC, movie tie-ins from Shrek to Austin Powers, and entertainment personalities such as Ozzy Osborne. In 2002, the company became the official manufacturer of sports action figures for the four major North American sports leagues: baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. In 2005, McFarlane Toys produced action figures for Tim Burton’s animated movie The Corpse Bride and for Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Diversifies career McFarlane’s publishing business thrived in the late 1990s, but by then he was more involved in other business and media ventures Todd McFarlane

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Image Comics Todd McFarlane, along with Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Valentino, left Marvel Comics in 1992, after they realized that they shared the same frustrations with the way Marvel Comics was run. In particular, they resented the management culture that saw writers and artists as replaceable and the titles and characters as the real assets. They set up Image Comics, an umbrella company for separate publishing ventures each owned and run by the individual artists themselves. The idea was to win back control and ownership of their creations. The

company had two founding rules: that Image would not own the artists’ work, and that no Image partner would interfere in the work of another. Over the years, the separate production companies diversified into publishing other artists, and, in McFarlane’s case, making action figures, TV series, and movies. Image grew quickly, but the partners lacked business experience and ran into difficulties. Nevertheless, by 2005 Image had become a direct competitor with Marvel, DC, and other major comics publishers; it ranked among the top four comic publishers in the United States.

than in drawing comics. As early as 1993, other artists were producing artwork and stories for the Spawn series, including Greg Capullo, who had made his name with the X-Force series of comics. McFarlane also diversified into movies, TV, computer games, CDROMs, trading cards, and other promotional material. TV and movie companies became interested in the Spawn series soon after it first appeared, and by the mid-1990s—after a bidding war that involved most of the major Hollywood studios—McFarlane had signed with New Line Cinema to make a Spawn movie. The movie appeared in August 1997, making more than $50 million in its first few weeks. The same year, McFarlane also worked as executive producer for an HBO series, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, which first aired in May 1997. The series went on to win an Emmy Award, and the DVD release of the movie won a Gold DiVi award. Further episodes appeared in 1998 and 1999. The video release of the HBO series was the channel’s biggest-selling release up to that point. McFarlane has also produced music videos, winning more than forty international awards and a Grammy nomination in 1999 for his animated video for Pearl Jam’s ‘‘Do the Evolution.’’ Further, he was producer of the Grammy- and MTV-Video-award-winning video ‘‘Freak on a Leash’’ for Korn’s Follow the Leader album. While his career in comics made him well known in that area and his business and movie success made him rich, McFarlane’s 314

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passion for sports memorabilia made him truly famous. In 1999, he paid $3 million for the baseball Mark McGwire hit for his recordbreaking seventieth home run in the 1998 season, beginning a collection of historic baseballs that has become known as The McFarlane Collection. It also includes McGwire’s home run balls numbers 1, 63, 64, 67, 68, and 69; Sammy Sosa’s 33, 61, and 66 home run balls; and memorabilia from other twentieth-century home run heroes. In 2003, McFarlane bought Barry Bonds’s 73rd home run ball from the 2001 season, for which he paid $450,000. The value of the latter was dented when Bonds became the subject of a steroid scandal in 2004. Since 1999, the traveling collection has toured major league stadiums and by 2001 had been seen by more than two million fans. Proceeds from the exhibit go toward research into Lou Gehrig’s disease (a rare progressive degenerative fatal disease affecting the spinal cord). McFarlane lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife and their three children. He is part owner of the Edmonton Oilers hockey team and remains an amateur baseball player. Despite complaints from purist fans that the Spawn series has suffered since McFarlane began hiring other artists to do the writing and drawing, the series continued to sell well into 2005. McFarlane explained to Underground Comics Online that his drawings now form the foundation on which his products are made. ‘‘I do lots of drawing still, but a lot of it is hidden drawing. When I was doing comics, whatever I drew got published and that’s not true anymore. I do a lot of concept sketches for toys and concept toys for movies and background drawings.’’ Perhaps that is why his products are so successful. Having contributed to transforming the comic book industry in the 1990s, McFarlane seemed set to have a similar influence on the toy and collectibles industry in the twenty-first century. McFarlane Toys set new standards of production and quality of likeness. On the Spawn Web site, which claims to receive 200 million hits monthly, he attributed his success to ‘‘a little talent, being in the right place at the right time, a lot of hard work and perseverance.’’

For More Information Periodicals Bernardin, Marc. ‘‘Spawn.’’ Entertainment Weekly (December 19, 1997): p. 81. Eichhorn, Paul. ‘‘Devil You Know: Inside the Mind of Todd McFarlane.’’ Take One (Fall 2000): pp. 34–36. Todd McFarlane

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Lipton, Michael A. ‘‘Spawn Meister: Todd McFarlane Draws a Superhero from Beyond the Grave.’’ People (August 18, 1997): p. 99. Wild, David. ‘‘Spawn.’’ Rolling Stone (June 12, 1997): p. 126.

Web Sites Epstein, Daniel Robert. ‘‘Todd McFarlane Interview.’’ Underground Online. http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/features/toddmcfarlane/default. asp (accessed on May 3, 2006). Spawn. http://www.spawn.com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Dave McKean. AP Images.

Dave McKean Born December 29, 1963 (Taplow, Berkshire, England) British author, illustrator, musician, filmmaker

‘‘I love the feeling of a book . . . . At its best, I think it’s sort of like a handwritten note, like music or something—it goes straight into you.’’

British artist Dave McKean has dramatically elevated the quality of graphic novel illustration since he began working with author Neil Gaiman (1960–; see entry) in the mid-1980s. His best-known works are collaborations with Gaiman on Violent Cases (1987), Black Orchid (1991), Mr. Punch (1995), and eleven volumes in The Sandman series (1991–2003). McKean also illustrated Grant Morrison’s (1960–; see entry) 1989 Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum, the best-selling graphic novel ever published in the United States. McKean acted as both author and illustrator on the award-winning graphic novel Cages (1998). McKean’s innovative, computer-enhanced multimedia artwork incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, digital art, and sculpture. In addition to his work in comics, McKean has illustrated, photographed, and designed more than 150 music CD covers for 317

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (With Neil Gaiman) Violent Cases (1987). (With Grant Morrison) Arkham Asylum (1989). (With Neil Gaiman) Black Orchid (1991). (With Neil Gaiman) The Sandman (cover artist). 11 Vols. (1991–96, 2003). (With Neil Gaiman) The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (1995).

(With Neil Gaiman) Coraline (2002). (With SF Said) Varjak Paw (2003). (With Neil Gaiman) The Wolves in the Walls (2003). Films (as art designer) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002).

Cages (1998).

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004).

Children’s Books (With Neil Gaiman) The Day I Swapped Two Goldfish for My Dad (1997).

(And writer and director) Mirror Mask (2005).

musicians such as Tori Amos, Alice Cooper, and the Counting Crows. He has created television ad campaigns for Kodak, Nike, and BMW Mini and production designs for the second and third Harry Potter films. Though his work is very popular among young adults, its content is often mature, with direct and sometimes explicit treatments of violence and sexuality.

Begins artistic partnership Born in Taplow, Berkshire, England, in 1963, Dave McKean attended Berkshire College of Art and Design from 1982 to 1986. It was there that he began working as an illustrator. In 1986, McKean met the comic book writer Neil Gaiman, and they quickly discovered that they shared a passion for comics. They began working on their own comics, a partnership that has endured for twenty years. In his article ‘‘Neil Gaiman on Dave McKean,’’ posted on the Neil Gaiman Web site, Gaiman recalled their first meeting: ‘‘I was twenty-six when I first met Dave McKean. I was a working journalist who wanted to write comics. He was twenty-three, in his last year at art college, and he wanted to draw comics . . . . I liked Dave, who was quiet and bearded and quite obviously the most artistically talented person I had ever encountered.’’ In 1986, an editor at Escape magazine offered them the opportunity to create a five-page strip for the magazine. McKean and Gaiman developed 318

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the project that would eventually become their first graphic novel, Violent Cases (1987). Their work caught the attention of Karen Berger, an editor at DC Comics who was eager to bring British talent to the United States. Karen Berger and Dick Giordano (the vice president of DC Comics) met with Gaiman and McKean to discuss working on projects for their company. Berger and Giordano proposed that McKean and Gaiman create a graphic novel to relaunch Black Orchid, a short-lived series from the early 1970s. Black Orchid was published as a four-issue miniseries, and this new version received great critical acclaim. In his introduction to the trade paperback edition, Mikal Gilmore noted: ‘‘Though the pair had collaborated on a couple of earlier projects (chiefly, a strange and haunting volume entitled Violent Cases), it is with Black Orchid that McKean arrived at the matchless blend of photolike realism and dreamlike expressionism that would characterize his later work on Arkham Asylum.’’ To help promote Black Orchid, Berger felt that the unknown McKean and Gaiman needed greater exposure with comic book readers and offered Gaiman the chance to write a regular monthly series, The Sandman. McKean was asked to do the covers for The Sandman and the illustrations for Grant Morrison’s graphic novel, Arkham Asylum.

Arkham Asylum McKean’s next project for DC Comics was to illustrate Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), a dark and disturbing tale about one evening when Batman is trapped alone in an insane asylum with a group of his enemies, led by the Joker. In an interview with Tasha Robinson on the A.V. Club Web site, McKean recalls working with Grant Morrison on Arkham Asylum: ‘‘Grant had written the script, and it had a lot of elements that I liked, and a lot that I didn’t . . . . So we talked about it, and he was really keen to rewrite it, to make it much more symbolic, much more like some strange Alice in Wonderland story. And that was just perfect timing for where his head was at. So that’s what we did.’’ The story opens with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which aptly sets the mood for this surrealistic horror story, ‘‘ ‘But I don’t want to be among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.’ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t be here.’ ’’ The original Dave McKean

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hardcover graphic novel sold more than 182,000 copies (and another 85,000 copies were sold in paperback), making this the best-selling American graphic novel to date.

The Sandman Originally published as a monthly comic book, The Sandman series debuted in 1989 and ran for seventy-five issues; it was collected into eleven volumes of graphic novels. Neil Gaiman’s scripts combined elements from literature, mythology, fantasy, family drama, metaphysics, and horror to create a unique blend of storytelling that had never been seen in comics before. Every issue of the series, as well as the graphic novel collections, featured McKean’s innovative collagestyle covers. In ‘‘Neil Gaiman on Dave McKean,’’ Gaiman describes McKean’s process for creating the covers for The Sandman: ‘‘When I wrote Sandman, Dave was my best and sharpest critic. He painted, built, or constructed every Sandman cover, and his was the face Sandman presented to the world.’’ The Sandman gained an international following and quickly became one of DC Comics’ most successful series, for which McKean was honored with a World Fantasy Award for his cover illustrations. In addition to The Sandman, McKean has also collaborated with Neil Gaiman on The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (1995). In Mr. Punch, McKean and Gaiman draw on the British tradition of the Punch and Judy puppet show to create an unsettling story about the cruelty of life as seen through the eyes of a young boy. McKean’s use of painting, photography, and multimedia collage created one of the most unique experiments in the world of graphic novels. In 1995, McKean was one of the winners exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum for the National Book Award for Mr. Punch. McKean’s ambitious graphic novel, Cages, is considered by many to be his masterpiece. This critically acclaimed graphic novel was originally released as a ten-part serial between 1990 and 1996. In Cages, McKean drops his trademark photorealism collages to focus on black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings, a style he would later use to illustrate Neil Gaiman’s children’s book, Coraline (2002). The story shifts back and forth as it tells about the lives of four people living in an apartment building, and McKean uses symbols and visual motifs to link the stories together. Time magazine comics critic Andrew Arnold claimed that ‘‘McKean, with remarkable talent and nerve, has succeeded in making a comic like no other. Cages has all the qualities of a real universe—sprawling 320

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Illustration by Dave McKean for The Day I Swapped Two Goldfish for My Dad, written by Neil Gaiman. Courtesy of Dave McKean.

yet contained, chaotic yet organized, mysterious yet discernable, comedic yet serious.’’ For his work, McKean was honored with the Harvey Award for Best New Series, the International Alph Art award, and Italy’s Pantera di Lucca Award.

Works on children’s books Sustained by his success in the world of comic books and graphic novels, McKean began to produce art in a variety of other areas. In 1997, he collaborated with Neil Gaiman on the humorous children’s picture book, The Day I Swapped Two Goldfish for My Dad. The success of this book led to further collaborations on Coraline (2002) and The Wolves in the Walls (2003), both New York Times bestsellers. McKean used black-and-white drawings to illustrate Coraline, a children’s horror novel about a young girl who discovers a dark and strange parallel world that exists on the other side of a door in her house. Neil Gaiman commented on McKean’s illustrations for Coraline: ‘‘I was amused, when Coraline Dave McKean

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McKean’s Influences In an interview with Joseph McCabe, McKean was asked to name the illustrator he most admired. McKean responded: ‘‘The one I still really love—and I just think is amazing—is Winsor McCay. I think he is really brilliant.’’ Born sometime around 1867 (some sources say 1869 or 1871), Winsor McCay was a pioneering American comic strip artist and animated filmmaker. He is best known for his influential comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland that ran in the Sunday New York Herald from 1905 to 1911. The strip focused on the bizarre and often frightening nighttime dreams of a six-year-old child, Little Nemo. Describing McCay’s technique on Little Nemo, art

historian Roger Sabin has suggested in Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art that ‘‘its use of perspective and colour (sic) were astounding, as was the way in which panels were structured in a cinematic fashion.’’ McCay used a full-page, color comic strip format to illustrate Little Nemo that developed new forms of layout, such as the use of stretching a horizontal frame to allow characters to break out of their own frames. A number of other artists have also cited McCay as an influence, including Art Spiegelman (1948–; see entry) and Maurice Sendak (1928–), whose In the Night Kitchen is an homage to McCay’s Little Nemo. McCay died in 1934.

came out recently, to find people who only knew Dave for his computer-enhanced multimedia work were astonished at the simple elegance of his pen-and-ink drawings. They didn’t know he could draw, or they’d forgotten.’’ He would return again to this black-and-white style to illustrate SF Said’s children’s fantasy novel Varjak Paw (2003), winner of the Smarties Gold Award, a British book award chosen by children. McKean returned to his trademark collage style to illustrate the atmospheric The Wolves in the Walls, about a young girl, Lucy, who must battle the wolves that have taken over her family home. In her article on McKean, Barbara Gibson describes his process for creating the illustrations for The Wolves in the Walls: ‘‘To create illustrations for Neil Gaiman’s text in The Wolves in the Walls, McKean built collages using everything from charcoal illustrations to photographs of bits of map . . . .’’ To build the illustrations, McKean begins with ‘‘endless drawings.’’ Then he paints the one he likes onto a backboard of color photographs and paper collages. ‘‘The basic canvas,’’ he explains, ‘‘has a life to it, with interesting textures, colors and shapes. Then I paint the characters into all of that.’’ The Wolves in the Walls was selected as the New York Times Book Review ‘‘Best Illustrated Book of the Year’’ and was short-listed for the Kate Greenaway Medal, 322

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the British equivalent of the American Caldecott Medal, awarded annually to the best American picture book for children.

Television and film work In the mid-1990s, McKean began working in television and film as an art designer and director. He directed the title sequence for Neil Gaiman’s first TV series, Neverwhere (1996). He also contributed promotional work for the films Alien Resurrection (1997), Blade (1998), and Sleepy Hollow (1999), as well as production designs for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). In an interview with The Onion, McKean described his work on the Harry Potter films: ‘‘Well, on Azkaban, I designed the, um . . . What were they called, the floaty screamy guys? The dementors. And I did a bit of work on the hippogriffs, trying to convince them to get the legs to bend a certain way. And then on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I did the spiders. But the dementors came out very, very close to my illustration.’’ McKean’s career continues to move in interesting directions, including producing covers for magazines and performing in musical productions. McKean contributed many illustrations to magazines, including The New Yorker. In 1996, he composed and performed the music for the BBC Radio adaptation of his graphic novel (with Neil Gaiman) Signal to Noise. His artwork has been exhibited in America and Europe, including solo shows at The Four Color Gallery in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. McKean’s first feature film as director and visual designer, Mirror Mask, is a children’s fantasy that combines live action and digital animation. The screenplay was written by Neil Gaiman and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005. In 2005, he began designing sets for the Broadway musical Lestat, a theatrical adaptation of Anne Rice’s (1941–) novel The Vampire Lestat. McKean lives on the Isle of Oxney, England, with his wife and studio manager, Clare, and their two children, Yolanda and Liam.

For More Information Books Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1999. Dave McKean

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Daniels, Les. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bulfinch Press, 1995. McCabe, Joseph. Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman and His Collaborators. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2004. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. New York: Phaidon, 2001.

Periodicals De Freitas, Leo John. ‘‘Dave McKean Interview.’’ The Comics Journal, no. 155 (January 1993). Web Sites Arnold, Andrew. ‘‘Life, the Universe and Sequential Art.’’ Time. http:// www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,344791,00.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Gibson, Barbara. ‘‘Dave McKean: Illustrating the Imagination.’’Apple Pro/ Design. http://www.apple.com/pro/design/mckean/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). Robinson, Tasha. ‘‘Interview: Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.’’ A.V. Club. http://www.avclub.com/content/node/41034/5/3 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Silverman, Jason. ‘‘Dave McKean Works Digital Magic.’’ Wired News. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69015,00.html?tw=rss. TOP (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Mike Mignola. ª Vaughn Youtz/Zuma/Corbis.

Mike Mignola

‘‘Hellboy is just some working-class kind of guy who just so happens to also be the beast of the apocalypse.’’

Born September 16, 1960 (Berkeley, California) American author, illustrator

When still a young man, Mike Mignola decided that his goal in life was to draw monsters. After years honing his skills in the comics industry, he realized his dream in 1994 when he created Hellboy, an ongoing series about a heavily muscled red demon who is brought forth from Hell and uses his strength and brains to investigate supernatural activities and fight against evil. Mignola’s distinctive artistic approach—relying on bold strips of color, especially black, and avoiding the detailed line drawings of many other comics—has brought a great deal of attention in the industry, leading to the 2003 creation of a coffee-table-sized book called The Art of Hellboy. Yet it is Mignola’s engaging characterization, both of Hellboy and his fellow paranormal investigators, that keeps readers attached to the stories. The popularity of the character led to the creation of a Hellboy movie and a spin-off comic book series, B.P.R.D., that follows the 325

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (With Roy Thomas and John Nyberg.) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993). (With John Byrne.) Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1995). Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August (1996). Hellboy: Wake the Devil (1997). (With others.) Hellboy: The Chained Coffin and Others (1998). Hellboy: Right Hand of Doom (2000). Hellboy: Conqueror Worm (2002). Mike Mignola’s B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth and Other Stories (2003). B.P.R.D.: A Plague of Frogs (2005).

(With John Arcudi.) B.P.R.D.: The Dead (2005). Hellboy: The Island. Forthcoming. (With John Arcudi.) B.P.R.D.: Black Flame. Forthcoming. Other (Illustrator.) Golden, Christopher. Hellboy: The Lost Army (novel). (1997). (Editor and illustrator.) Hellboy: Odd Jobs. (1999). (Illustrator.) Golden, Christopher. Hellboy: The Bones of Giants (novel). (2001). (Illustrator.) The Art of Hellboy (art book). (2003). (Screenplay, with others, and producer.) Hellboy (film). (2004).

adventures of Hellboy’s colleagues in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

A fascination with monsters Mike Mignola was born on September 16, 1960, in Berkeley, California, a college town in the San Francisco Bay area. Little is known about his early years, except for one thing: from a very early age he loved monsters. ‘‘It’s not just that I started liking monsters,’’ he told Comics Journal interviewer Christopher Brayshaw, ‘‘it’s that I started liking monsters to the exclusion of everything else.’’ Before he could read, he urged his mother to read monster stories to him, and once he could read, monster stories were his favorites. As he grew older, his love of monsters matured and broadened: by the sixth grade he had read the classic vampire story Dracula; in high school in the 1970s, he satisfied his thirst on reprints from Weird Tales magazine and stories by horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard; by the time he reached college, he was digging into mythology and folk tales. 326

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Mignola didn’t just love monsters, he loved to draw monsters, and that love helped direct his career choice. In an interview posted on the Dark Horse Web site, Mignola told Adam Gallardo, ‘‘All I could ever do is draw. And all I really wanted to do was draw monsters. And I knew enough to know that there weren’t a lot of jobs where you could draw monsters. I figured comics was the one place where I might get a shot at drawing monsters. It’s really stupid sounding and super simplistic, but that really has been my goal.’’ Mignola studied art at the California College of Arts and Crafts in nearby Oakland, graduating in 1982. Like so many practicing comics artists, Mignola first submitted work to fanzines (amateur magazines circulated among fans) and comics and science fiction conventions. A contact he made through this work helped him land his first comics job with Marvel Comics, one of the industry giants. He moved to New York and embarked on his career. Mignola’s first job for Marvel was as an inker—the person who fills in ink (usually black) and shading around the drawings of the penciller—and he failed miserably. But he kept at it and was soon hired to do more work on comic books like Master of Kung Fu and Kazar the Savage. By 1983, he had moved beyond inking to penciling for a Marvel series called Rocket Raccoon. After that, he told Gallardo, ‘‘I did a little bit of everything,’’ including work on a variety of superhero comics, such as Phantom Stranger and The World of Krypton for DC Comics. In an interview with Vasilis Sakkos on the ComicDom Web site, Mignola revealed the difficulties he had with this period in his career: ‘‘I’ll never forget the horrible feeling of having no idea what I was doing in those early Mike Mignola

Four characters designed by Mike Mignola for the Disney movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The Kobal Collection.

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years. My first book wasn’t so bad (Rocket Raccoon) but after that, the first real superhero stuff (Hulk and Alpha Flight) was like pulling teeth. I hated getting up in the morning. Things got better eventually but I would never want to go back to doing that kind of stuff again.’’ Soon, he wouldn’t have to.

Creates his own character By the early 1990s, Mignola had begun to develop his unique artistic style, which involved the use of bold shapes, simple scenic structure, and starkly contrasting colors. Yet he was somewhat bored and frustrated with drawing and inking comics based on characters and stories created by others. In 1993, he had a breakthrough. Asked to help plot a story in the Batman series with writer/editor Dan Raspler, Legends of the Dark Knight #54, Mignola set the story in a haunted graveyard. Not only did he get to help write a horror story, but he also got to draw monsters. Around the same time, Mignola was asked to provide art for a Dark Horse Comics adaptation of Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) classic horror thriller Dracula, issued to coincide with the release of the film Dracula. These experiences helped give Mignola the confidence to create his own character. ‘‘Most people come up with a character and then they write the stories,’’ Mignola said in an interview with Keith Giles on the Comic Book Resources Web site. ‘‘I had the stories and the setting first and then I had to find a character to live in it.’’ For years, Mignola had collected bits of stories and myths that he wanted to some day incorporate into a comic book. He knew that he was interested in stories that had to do with the occult or the supernatural, perhaps involving a detective, but he didn’t want to draw a regular man, because he thought he would get bored with that. ‘‘But if I make the main character a monster and he goes out and he runs into monsters, then I’m drawing monsters all the time, and I thought that might keep me interested,’’ he told Gallardo. The only thing left was to find the right monster. In early 1991, he had sketched a hulking demon for a convention program and had named him Hellboy. In 1993, he modified the character, giving him a massive steel block on his right arm and two distinctive round horns on his forehead. By the end of 1993, he had signed with Dark Horse to create his first comic, but he lacked one thing: the confidence to write the story himself. For the first Hellboy stories, contained in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Mignola drew up the plot and provided the art, but John Byrne (1950–) wrote the script. Mignola readily credits Byrne with giving him the help he needed to get his series off the ground. 328

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Scene from Mignola’s famous Hellboy comic, an ongoing series about a heavily muscled red demon who is brought forth from Hell and uses his strength and brains to investigate supernatural activities and fight against evil. Dark Horse Comics.

Early on in Hellboy: Seeds of Destruction, a mad monk with supernatural powers named Rasputin teams with German Nazi commandos to cast a spell to call for a demon from Hell. The spell works . . . sort of. The baby demon appears not to the Nazis, but to a team of British paranormal researchers, who take the creature they name Hellboy under their wing. Fast forward to the present, in which Hellboy is a heavily muscled paranormal investigator who Mike Mignola

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fights against the monsters brought to life by the same Rasputin who created him. Hellboy is joined in his adventures by Elizabeth ‘‘Liz’’ Sherman, a young lady with the pyrokinetic abilities (she can start fires with her mind) and Abe Sapien, an amphibious man with a mysterious past traced back to the nineteenth century and perhaps beyond. Thus Mignola set the scene for an ongoing series of Hellboy adventures that have taken the character around the world in his pursuit of the occult and the unusual. Hellboy is a curious character. Though spawned from Hell, and occasionally forced to grapple with the sense that his destiny is to bring on the apocalypse (end of the earth), he is nevertheless a force for good. Hellboy is not someone who overthinks a situation; he tends not to say much and is most effective when he is attacked and angered, which allows him to unleash his power. Mignola told an interviewer for the Tastes Like Chicken Web site that the character is partially based on his father: ‘‘My dad is a tough old buzzard. He’s a cabinet maker. He spent so much time around wood, that he kind of became wood. He’s always gashed and cut and scraped. He’s rough as an old cowboy boot, and that is the texture Hellboy has.’’ But, noted Mignola, the character is also very much based on his own personality: ‘‘He’s really the only character I know how to write because I know exactly what Hellboy would say. He would say what I would say.’’ Hellboy quickly developed a small but loyal fan base, but his popularity with both fans and critics grew through the 1990s. In 1999, Kat Kan, a Voice of Youth Advocates reviewer, wrote that in his first two graphic novels, Mignola ‘‘brings back horror as it used to be written by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch, not with mere shock after shock, but more literate and with a strong story line.’’ Bloch (1917–1994), author of the introduction to the first Hellboy graphic novel, wrote that ‘‘Hellboy is a brilliant example of how to elevate the comic of the future to a higher literary level while achieving a higher pitch of excitement . . . . The total effect of Hellboy is that of a true work of art—original and innovative and exciting.’’ Award juries agreed with the high praise offered to the series, and Mignola received several Eisner Awards and Harvey Awards, the comics industry’s highest honors. The element of Mignola’s work that was most striking was the vividness of his illustrations, especially the strong presence of the character Hellboy. Capitalizing on the strong visual statement of Hellboy, publisher Dark Horse soon offered Hellboy-based statues, action figures, T-shirts, calendars, and posters. In 2003, they paid Mignola 330

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Mignola Goes to Hollywood From the time that Mike Mignola first starting publishing work in his distinctive visual style—dark shadows, high contrast, bold figures—his work has attracted the attention of filmmakers. His first experience with Hollywood came when he was hired to cocreate a graphic novel to coincide with the release of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Over the course of production, he was asked to design a castle and to storyboard (draw out in panels) one of the opening scenes. He was called in as a character designer on Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), largely because the producers loved his work on Hellboy. He also worked as a designer with director Guillermo del Toro (1964–) on Blade II (2002). Mignola’s significant brush with Hollywood fame came when del Toro, a longtime Hellboy fan, bought the rights to make the film and lined up financial support. ‘‘Guillermo was in there fighting for five years to get this movie made,’’ Mignola told Dark Horse

interviewer Adam Gallardo. ‘‘And he loves it, and he understands it, and I can’t think of anybody who can do a better job with it. So, it’s in very good hands.’’ Released in 2004, Hellboy was one of the rare movies based on a comic book to be greeted with critical acclaim and appreciation from fans of the comic. New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell wrote that ‘‘the movie is lubricated with a fluid, slimy menace, and the director’s love of rotted, desiccated flesh and exposed, traumatized organs adds an engrossing grossness’’; it was, Mitchell concluded, a ‘‘dreamy mating of filmmaker, craft and material.’’ Though the movie, based on Hellboy: Seeds of Destruction, was a huge success, grossing nearly $100 million, Mignola told Gallardo that he has no plans to leave his comics work for the glitter of Hollywood: ‘‘Movies, you know, it’s a lot of people, and a lot of problems, and a lot of realities that have to be dealt with. So it’s fascinating, it’s interesting to watch, but it’s somebody else’s thing.’’

the ultimate compliment: production of a full-color, lavishly illustrated tribute to his art, called The Art of Hellboy.

Branches out With Hellboy, Mignola had come a long way from his early frustrations at Marvel and DC. He was called upon to contribute to several films (see sidebar), and beginning in 2002 he initiated a new comic book series, B.P.R.D., based upon the paranormal investigation division, the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, that he had created in Hellboy. B.P.R.D. focuses on and develops the characters first introduced in the original Hellboy, and it also adds the characters Johan Krauss, a medium without a physical body; Roger, a homunculus (a small man, or manikin) Mike Mignola

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made from human blood and herbs; and Dr. Kate Corrigan, a former professor who aids the team. Mignola has kept his hand in as an advisor and frequent writer for the series, but the illustration and coloring has been handed over to a variety of artists. B.P.R.D.: The Soul of Venice and Other Stories provides good evidence of how successful the series is, for it brings together four stories, each created by a different team of writers and artists, yet each bringing new depth to the overall story. Like the most famous comic creations, B.P.R.D. shows the depth and complexity that allow it to be adapted by a wide variety of different comics creators. Mignola’s true calling, however, lies with Hellboy. Mignola continues to develop his talents as a storyteller, and he hasn’t yet plumbed the depths of Hellboy’s personality. He has frequently said that he has hundreds more Hellboy stories that he wants to create, but he is insistent about quality and refuses to be hurried in his work. Though he has allowed other artists and writers to draw or develop stories—he worked with novelist Christopher Golden on two Hellboy novels, for example—he doesn’t yet see an end to his work with the character. ‘‘Hellboy . . . was created to serve all my creative needs and so much of my personality is in him. I cannot imagine ever creating another character like that,’’ he told Vasilis Sakkos on the ComicDom Web site.

For More Information Books Mignola, Mike. The Art of Hellboy, edited by Scott Allie. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003. Mignola, Mike, and John Byrne. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 1995.

Periodicals Kan, Kat. Review in Voice of Youth Advocates (June 1999): pp. 109–10. Mitchell, Elvis. ‘‘Horror Comic at the Core, with a Soulful Sweetness.’’ New York Times (April 2, 2004): p. E1.

Web Sites Adams, Fletch. ‘‘Devil in the Deep Blue Sea.’’ Broken Frontier. http:// www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/details.php?id=191 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Brayshaw, Christopher. ‘‘Mike Mignola: Breaking Away’’ (excerpted from Comics Journal, no. 189). Comics Journal. http://www.tcj.com/ 2_archives/i_mignola.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Ervin-Gore, Shawna. ‘‘Interviews: Mike Mignola.’’ Dark Horse. http:// www.darkhorse.com/zones/hellboy/interviews.php?id=763 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Gallardo, Adam. ‘‘Interviews: Mike Mignola.’’ Dark Horse. http://www. darkhorse.com/news/interviews.php?id=777 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Giles, Keith. ‘‘Mike Mignola Interview.’’ Comic Book Resources. http:// www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=47 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Hellboy.com: The Official Website for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. http:// www.hellboy.com/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Mike Mignola.’’ Tastes Like Chicken. http://www.tlchicken.com/view_ story.php?ARTid=17 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Sakkos, Vasilis. ‘‘Mike Mignola: Bottom of the Ocean.’’ ComicDom. http:// www.comicdom.gr/interviews_archive.php?id=10&lang=en (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Frank Miller. AP Images.

Frank Miller Born January 27, 1957 (Olney, Maryland) American author, illustrator

Frank Miller is one of the most influential comic book creators of all time, a winner of many awards, and one of the artists responsible for reviving the comics industry in the 1970s and 1980s after decades of decline. Not only did he help restore the credibility of superhero series such as The Spectacular Spider-Man, he also revitalized the flagging Daredevil series, creating stories that appealed to a wider and more adult audience than ever before. From its beginnings in 1964 Daredevil had always been too similar to the Spider-Man series to make much of an impact in terms of sales, though it maintained a steady audience. Miller introduced a much darker style. He made Daredevil a more tortured character, added love interests, and brought in new villains, in some cases borrowing them from other series. By the end of the 1980s Miller’s work on series such as Daredevil and in particular Batman: The Dark Knight Returns had transformed the comics industry, paving

‘‘[Frank] Miller’s stories are over-the-top, hightension pulp fiction, racheted up to farcical levels of frenzied violence and action. His drawings are spectacularly graphic . . . .’’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

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Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (With Lynn Varley and Klaus Janson) Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. (1986; 10th anniversary edition, 1996). (With Bill Sienkiewicz) Daredevil (1986). (With Lynn Varley) Ronin (1987). (With Bill Sienkiewicz) Elektra: Assassin (1987). (With Klaus Janson) Elektra–The Complete Saga (1989). (With Lynn Varley) Elektra Lives Again (1990). (With Dave Gibbons) Give Me Liberty: An American Dream (1991). Daredevil: Gang War (1992). (With John Romita) Daredevil: The Man without Fear (1992). (With Dave Gibbons) Martha Washington Goes to War (1995).

(With Geof Darrow) Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot (1996). Hard Boiled (1997). (With David Mazzuchelli) Batman: Year One (1997). (With Todd McFarlane) Spawn: Batman (1998). (With Dave Gibbons) Martha Washington Saves the World (1999). (With Lynn Varley) 300 (1999). Daredevil Visionaries, Vols. 1–3 (2001). The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002). Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder (2005). Other Frank Miller has also created more adultoriented comics and written screenplays for movies.

the way for popular, gritty series such as Spawn and Transmetropolitan in the 1990s. The majority of Miller’s work is aimed at the most mature readers.

Sets sights on comics industry career Born on January 27, 1957, in Olney, Maryland, Frank Miller was raised in Montpelier, Vermont, and taught himself to draw by copying the styles he found in comic books. He said in an interview with the G4 Web site that he began making his own comics at the age of six, folding over pieces of typing paper and stapling them together. In 1976, he moved to New York City to become a professional comic book artist. Through diligence and hard work, he found a series of jobs with major publishers such as Marvel, DC Comics, and Gold Key. He told the Los Angeles Times that he drew the attention of other comic book writers and artists by ‘‘bugging’’ 336

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them until they talked to him. After learning some tricks of the trade from comic book creator Neil Adams (1941–), he eventually persuaded an editor at Gold Key Comics to give him his first professional job drawing pages for the Twilight Zone series. He told G4 ‘‘I spent a week drawing every page. Usually that’s something you do within a day.’’ Miller emerged in a matter of months as an important talent, and by 1979 he was the principal artist for the Daredevil series; he eventually took over the writing as well. Daredevil was a series similar to Spider-Man in that it centered on a character who had been exposed to radioactive materials; Daredevil has been blinded by the exposure. An attorney named Matthew Murdock by day and a superhero at night, Daredevil is in many ways a conventional comic book hero (he is a good man fighting against evil) though his disability is unusual in a genre that celebrates physical perfection. In the early comics, Daredevil’s Frank Miller

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assignments make use of his martial arts expertise, his innate bravery, and the ‘‘sixth sense’’ (keen intuitive power) he gained after he lost his sight. When Miller first joined the series in 1979 it was only as an artist, and he introduced a darker, more sinister visual style. Within a year he became the writer as well, and he introduced new villains and explored more deeply the motivations of his characters. In Miller’s revised Daredevil series, most of the key characters from the early series were abandoned in favor of The Kingpin, a Spider-Man series villain who controls the city; Elektra Natchios, a former girlfriend who became a ninja assassin; and Stick, Daredevil’s sidekick. Out went the standard superhero adventure stories and in came plot lines revolving around citywide corruption and the hero’s tortured psyche. When Miller moved on to other things in 1981, Daredevil had been transformed from a traditional superhero story into an edgy, original, and popular series. Miller has since become well known as a creative genius who is involved in all aspects of the creative process.

Transforms Batman Miller’s dark drawings for Daredevil brought the series to a new, older audience and also drew critical acclaim, but what he did with Batman defined his early career. Miller returned the Batman character to his dark roots in Depression-era America. (The Great Depression [1929–41] was a period of severe economic hardship in the United States.) Miller’s miniseries (a limited-run series—4 to 12 issues, generally—that is often collected into a graphic novel) Batman: The Dark Knight Returns ran in 1986 and was followed in 1987 with Batman: Year 1. The Dark Knight Returns is set in the future, when police commissioner Jim Gordon is seventy years old and an aged Bruce Wayne must bring his Batman persona out of retirement to fight the forces of evil. Older, wiser, but still carrying the psychological flaws he acquired as a child from witnessing the deaths of his parents, Miller’s Batman is a frightening figure with a wide adult appeal. Somehow Miller managed to rid the series of its slightly campy style; though the mask remained, in Miller’s work it lost its likeness to just a costume and became a thing of real menace. Miller worked on several other comic book series in the 1980s, including Ronin (1987), which, like Batman, was partly illustrated by his wife and long-term collaborator, Lynn Varley. Ronin, published by DC, was the first of Miller’s creator-owned works; he has been a powerful voice in the struggle for comic book artists to take 338

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Influenced by Film Noir Frank Miller attributes his interest in dark cityscapes and psychological turmoil to an interest in film noir, a style of movies popular in the 1940s and 1950s in which darkness often threatens to overwhelm the screen and the lives of the characters. He told G4 that he gave up on reading comics when he became interested in girls, but that he loved old crime and gangster movies and spent many hours watching them when he first moved to New York. In Miller’s reworking of Batman, the dark streets of Gotham City, the gargoyles on the buildings, and Batman’s own Gothic poses are far removed from the wholesome image the character acquired in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller’s Batman directly inspired the look and feel of Tim Burton’s Batman movies in the 1990s as well as subsequent Batman comics. The Dark Knight Returns was not only a suc-

cess for the Batman franchise, but helped break comic books into mainstream bookstores. Miller’s interest—some might say obsession—with film noir is an even stronger influence on Sin City, the hugely popular adult comic book series and 2005 movie, which Miller codirected with Robert Rodriguez. Sin City draws together many of the urban settings and scenarios familiar to fans of hard-boiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). The comics are drawn and inked almost exclusively in Miller’s trademark black and white, with occasional, and very striking, flashes of color provided by Lynn Varley. But the brutality and graphic violence in the stories go far beyond anything written by Hammett or Chandler; Sin City is for mature audiences.

control of their own material. While Batman helped redefine mainstream comics and attract a new audience, Miller’s creator-owned works, such as Give Me Liberty (1992), Sin City (1993–), and the Eisner Award-winning Hard Boiled (1997) have made him an influential and important figure in the entertainment industry in general. By the 1990s, Miller was already one of the biggest names in comics and had gained a reputation for producing challenging, violent stories. In the 1980s, Miller had divided his time between working for the big publishers, Marvel and DC, and producing creator-owned work. But in 1990 he broke into movies, writing two scripts in the Robocop movie series (Robocop 2 and Robocop 3) in a period of two years when he claims to have done no drawing whatsoever. Miller’s early experience of writing in Hollywood was not a good one; he told G4 that he was ‘‘really kind of burned out from the way movies were made. I don’t have anything bad to say Frank Miller

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A variety of characters from Frank Miller’s renowned movie Sin City, based on his graphic novel. Dimension Films/The Kobal Collection.

about any of the people I worked with, but I couldn’t stand losing any control. So I sat down in my new home in Hollywood and I just decided I was going to start drawing again, and I was going to draw exactly what I wanted.’’ The result was the series Sin City, a collection of stories exploring the intense crime and violence found in the fictional American town of Basin City. Considered one of the most important comic book series of the 1990s, Sin City won him a Harvey Award for Best Continuing Series in 1996. Miller’s comic book output after 1993 was immense. He created several Sin City issues, but he also returned to Daredevil, produced 340

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more stories in the Dark Knight series, and picked up Eisner Awards for the Martha Washington series. He also created two series appropriate for younger readers, Give Me Liberty, about a young girl working to save the world for ‘‘fat boy burgers,’’ and Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, about robots protecting a city. In 1998, he collaborated with Spawn creator Todd McFarlane (1961–; see entry) to produce a combined Spawn/Batman comic. In 1999, Miller’s series 300, about the epic tale of 300 Greek warriors protecting their country from invading barbarians, received a number of major awards, including seven Eisner Awards. As of 2005, he has continued to develop and refine the Batman franchise, releasing Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, which explores Robin’s early experiences of dealing with the irritable superhero. Discussing the new series with G4, Miller explained: ‘‘You do Batman right, and he’s going to be popular. He’s a great character . . . you just can’t break Batman. There are ten ways to do him and they all work.’’ Despite his initial negative experience with screenwriting, Miller returned to films again in 2005 to write and direct the movie Sin City based on his 1990s comic series. The movie received huge critical acclaim as well as immense financial success, grossing more than $159 million worldwide. The sequel, Sin City 2, also written and directed by Miller is due out in 2007.

For More Information Books Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview, conducted by Charles Brownstein. New York: Dark Horse Comics, 2005. Schuster, Hal. Frank Miller. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1986.

Periodicals Atlantic Monthly (August 1986): p. 77–80. Entertainment Weekly (March 10, 2000): p. 66; (July 21, 2000): p. 16. Los Angeles Times (April 16, 1989): p. 6; (December 30, 1990): p. 86; (November 5, 1993): p. 6. New Statesman (London) (June 6, 2005): p. 46. Newsweek (January 18, 1988): pp. 70–71; (March 28, 2005) p. 52. New York Times (July 23, 2000): p. 3; (April 1, 2005). Frank Miller

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New York Times Book Review (May 3, 1987): p. 35. Publishers Weekly (October 20, 1997): p. 57; (December 24, 2001): p. 25. Rolling Stone (May 17, 1990): p. 57. Time (April 4, 2005): p. 68.

Web Sites Art of Frank Miller. http://artoffm.com/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Frank Miller: The Complete Works.’’ Moebius Graphix. http://www. moebiusgraphics.com/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Icons Interview: Frank Miller.’’ G4. http://www.g4tv.com/icons/ features/51443/Icons_Interview_Frank_Miller.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Interviews: Frank Miller.’’ Dark Horse Comics. http://www.darkhorse. com/news/interviews.php?id=623 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Hayao Miyazaki. ª Nicolas Guerin/Azimuts Production/ Corbis.

Hayao Miyazaki

‘‘I believe that children’s souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations.’’

Born January 5, 1941 (Tokyo, Japan) Japanese author, illustrator, filmmaker

Hayao Miyazaki has enjoyed fame in Japan as an animator and a manga creator, but in the United States only true fans of anime (Japanese animated films) knew who he was until 2002, when his anime Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In Japan, he is among the most popular and celebrated animators, and his animated films have become popular in library anime showings. His manga Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind brought him extraordinary popularity and was later made into an animated film; both works have been released in several editions in the United States. Miyazaki’s artistic style uses none of the stereotypical ‘‘big eyes, small mouth’’ look of most manga and anime, and he also avoids the sexual innuendo that many Westerners equate with Japanese animation and comics. His work appeals to all ages, from young children to mature adults. Since 2002, Miyazaki’s work has been published in graphic novel form in English translation. 343

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (in English translation) Spirited Away 5 vols. (2002). Castle in the Sky 4 vols. (2003). My Neighbor Totoro 4 vols. (2004). Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind 2nd ed. 7 vols. (2004). Howl’s Moving Castle 4 vols. (2005).

Miyazaki’s work is distinguished by its appeal to all ages. He told Steve Horn for IGN Filmforce, ‘‘A real dedicated children’s film is something that adults will also find rewarding whereas films made for adults which consist simply of a kind of adornment and decoration will leave children deeply dissatisfied. I oppose simplifying the world for children. The fact of the matter is that children know, somehow they intuit and deeply understand the complexity of the world we live in. So, I would suggest that you not underestimate children.’’ Indeed, Miyazaki did not and formed a solid fan base among young and old alike.

Early influences Hayao Miyazaki was born on January 5, 1941, in Tokyo, Japan, the second of four sons born to Katsuji Miyazaki and his wife. Katsuji was a director of the family-owned firm Miyazaki Airplane, which made parts for the famed Zero fighter planes. The influence of his parents would later resonate in Miyazaki’s work. His fascination with and realistic depictions of flying trace back to his father’s career. His mother was especially influential to Miyazaki. Bedridden for eight years with spinal tuberculosis, she proved a strong and resilient woman. Miyazaki infused parts of his mother’s personality in characters in Castle in the Sky and My Neighbor Totoro, among other works. Miyazaki was three years old when his family was evacuated to safer districts during World War II (1939–45), and he started school as an evacuee in 1947. His family was not able to move back to their home town until 1950. The wartime bombings and fires in Tokyo left Hayao with few pleasant childhood memories. ‘‘I’ve forgotten much,’’ he told Charles Whipple in his essay, The 344

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Power of Positive Inking. ‘‘I made up my mind to forget. There were too many things I don’t want to remember. For the longest time, they were like thorns in my consciousness. I kept asking myself what it all meant.’’ While Miyazaki was in high school, manga was growing in popularity throughout Japan, and it was during this time that Miyazaki decided he wanted to become a comic artist. Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) had published his manga New Treasure Island in 1947, and it caught the imagination of many readers. More and more manga were published and read throughout the 1950s. Animation was also making a comeback in the postwar years, and in 1958, Miyazaki saw Taiji Yabushita’s (1903–1986) Legend of the White Serpent, the first Japanese color animated feature, and he fell in love with film. After graduating from Toyotama High School in 1959, he entered Gakushuin University to study political science and economics. While at the university, Miyazaki joined a children’s literature research society, and through this group studied many European children’s books and comics; he read books by such authors as Rosemary Sutcliff, Phillipa Pearce, Eleanor Farjeon, and Antoine du Saint-Exupery. He graduated with a degree in political science and economics in 1963. Instead of entering the world of finance or politics upon graduation, he immediately went to work at Toei Cine, the animation studio of the Toei Company.

Begins work in animation Miyazaki worked as an entry-level in-betweener on two features, Watchdog Woof-Woof and Wolf Boy Ken for Toei. An in-betweener takes the most important first and final frames of an action movement drawn by an animator and creates the series of drawings in between the two frames to complete the movement. From this position, Miyazaki quickly navigated his way to more and more responsibility within the animation industry. His talent as an artist and his unending stream of story ideas propelled him. Miyazaki became active in the Toei labor union, rising in the union ranks as his career flourished. He became a key animator on the television series Wind Ninja Boy Fujimaru that ran from 1964 to 1965. He also formed lasting friendships with other animators. He befriended Isao Takahata (1935–), another animator with whom he continued to work into the 2000s, and dated another, Akemi Ota. He married Akemi in October 1965, and they had two sons. In 1965, Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka (1931–) started work on a new animated feature, The Great Adventure of Hols, Prince of the Hayao Miyazaki

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Sun, for Toei. When the lead producers broke with tradition and decided to open planning sessions for the film to the whole team (instead of just the producers), Miyazaki became one of the most active participants in its production. Released in 1968, the film is considered the introduction of Miyazaki’s anime style, which relies on realistic images rather than the distorted, otherworldly scenes of other Japanese animation. Over the next twenty years, Miyazaki would continue to rise in stature in the Japanese animation industry, working in both film and television. He directed his first television series, Future Boy Conan, in 1978, and his first animated film, The Castle of Cagliostro, in 1979. The Castle of Cagliostro, featuring the popular character Monkey Punch, Lupin III, remains a cult classic with what has been described as the best car chase on film.

Turns energy toward manga creation A workaholic, Miyazaki was drawing incessantly during this period. When he was unable to get animation work, he turned to creating manga, or Japanese comic books. Miyazaki published his first manga in 1969 (under the pseudonym Saburo Akitsu). Titled Sabaku no Tami (People of the Desert), the story was published in the children’s weekly paper Shonen Shojo Shinbun (Boys and Girls Newspaper). It appeared as a twenty-six-episode serial, from September 1969 to March 1970. Set in the eleventh century Central Asian steppes (grass-covered plains), the story depicts a war between two nomadic tribes and the effects of the war on the people. Themes include the devastation of war, betrayal, and human nature’s essential ugliness in desperate situations. Some Miyazaki fans see this as a prototype of his seminal work, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. No information is available that explains why Miyazaki used a pseudonym for this work. Besides his original manga, in 1969 and 1971 Miyazaki wrote manga adaptations for two Toei Animation Studio feature films for which he worked as a key animator. Nagagutsu wo Haita Neko (Puss in Boots) was based on Charles Perrault’s book; in the film and manga, Pero the cat helps a boy defeat an ogre and win the heart of a princess. The story was serialized in the Chuunichi Shimbun Nichiyo Ban (Chunichi Newspaper Sunday Version) in 1969, credited to Toei. Doubutsu Takarajima (Animal Treasure Island) was serialized in the Chuunichi Shimbun Nichiyo Ban in 1971 and also credited to Toei; this manga adapted the slapstick comedy adventure film based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. 346

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Enduring Themes in Miyazaki’s Works Miyazaki’s manga and films often depict common people struggling for justice and show a deep concern for the environment. Sabaku no Tami, one of Miyazaki’s earliest manga, included some of his ideas on humankind’s essential tendency to do evil in war, a pretty heavy theme for a children’s manga. It also included two young protagonists, a boy and a girl; many of Miyazaki’s later films featured young characters: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and My Neighbor Totoro. Nausicaa focuses on the environment, as young Nausicaa learns more about her world and humanity’s place in it. Shuna no Tabi features another young protagonist, Prince Shuna, who undertakes a difficult journey to find the seeds that will save his people from starvation. Politics doesn’t play a large role in most of Miyazaki’s films, but Howl’s Moving Castle does make a strong political statement about war. The story takes place against a background of impending war, and the royal wizard tries to force wizard Howl into using his magic as a weapon. Miyazaki started this movie around the time that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. He told Devin Gor-

don of Newsweek, ‘‘Actually, your country had just started the war against Iraq, and I had a great deal of rage about that . . . . In fact, I had just started to make Howl’s Moving Castle, so the film is profoundly affected by the war in Iraq.’’ Miyazaki’s films also feature characters who defy stereotypes of good and evil, as he refuses to make them fixed symbols. Some characters start out seemingly evil only to be helpful to the main protagonists; Ma Dola from Castle in the Sky is one such character, as is the Witch of the Wastes from Howl’s Moving Castle. Conversely, sometimes a seemingly benevolent character may turn out to be troublesome, as happens with No-Face in Spirited Away, who begins timid and helpful but blooms into an all-consuming carnivore who nearly destroys the bathhouse as he eats everything in sight, including people. Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke seems to be the villain of the movie, with her determination to conquer the forest with the technology in her enclave, but she cares deeply about the people who work for her and feels compassion for those who are castoffs from society.

Writes masterpiece In 1982, Miyazaki began an ambitious manga project: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Published in installments in Animage magazine, the manga was completed until March 1994; the work took so long because Miyazaki went on hiatus several times during the years to make films. Many fans consider Nausicaa Miyazaki’s masterpiece. It is set in a distant future world that had suffered almost total devastation a thousand years before. In the story, humans live in Hayao Miyazaki

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small pockets of inhabitable lands surrounded by the vast Sea of Corruption. Young Princess Nausicaa, who is able to speak with plants and animals, ventures into the Sea of Corruption in order to figure out how to help the ecosystem thrive once again. Miyazaki’s inspiration for the series came in part from the real-life ecological disaster in Japan’s Lake Minamata, where in 1956 mercury contamination was discovered to be causing debilitating disease among those who ate the poisoned fish from the lake. As Princess Nausicaa tries to solve the mystery of the Sea of Corruption, she also seeks peace with the hostile neighboring tribes and is even forced to command her people in war. Despite being written in spurts over thirteen years, Nausicaa is distinguished among epic manga for the coherence of its complicated story and the realism of the Miyazaki-created world. Most manga have a characteristic look. The characters are often drawn with large, glossy eyes while the backgrounds are simple, but realistic. Miyazaki eschewed most manga artistic conventions by drawing his human characters to look more realistic. He also filled his manga pages with lots of panels that are jammed with highly detailed art. Instead of dividing his pages among several panels, Miyazaki crammed up to a dozen complex panels on each page. After writing sixteen episodes of his manga, Miyazaki was persuaded to create an animated version in 1984. The resulting film enjoyed great success. The English translation of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was published in the United States by Viz Media beginning in 1988, two years after the first English version of the movie was released, in thick comic book-like issues. The company published the complete story in four trade paperback volumes from 1995 through 1997. In 2004, Viz released a second edition published in seven volumes that reverted back to the original page size and used the original right-to-left page order.

Nausicaa success leads to Studio Ghibli The financial and critical success of Nausicaa established Miyazaki as a formidable force in Japan. In order to gain more control over his work, Miyazaki formed a partnership with Takahata in 1984, and in 1985 they founded Studio Ghibli (though the Italian original word meaning hot desert wind is pronounced GIB-lee, Miyazaki and his fans pronounce it GEE-bu-ree). The studio would grow to become to the Japanese what Walt Disney Studios is to Americans. The studio’s first production was Castle in the Sky, which opened in 1986. That same year, a heavily edited English language version of Nausicaa, called Warriors of the Wind, was 348

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released in the United States. New World Pictures thought the movie was too slow-moving for children and cut at least twenty minutes of ‘‘slow stuff ’’ from the film; the studio also changed Nausicaa’s name to Princess Zanda, and the voice actors for the dub never knew what the story was about. The cuts so badly butchered the film that for the following ten years Miyazaki and Takahata refused to consider Western releases of their movies. Nevertheless, Studio Ghibli continued to churn out new work in Japan. In 1988, Takahata directed Grave of the Fireflies and Miyazaki directed My Neighbor Totoro. Studio Ghibli’s next venture was Kiki’s Delivery Service, based on a novel by Eiko Kadono. With the production of this animated feature, which opened in 1989, Miyazaki wanted a new studio. Tokuma Corporation helped finance new facilities, and construction finished about the time Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso premiered in 1992. This movie was based on Miyazaki’s manga Hikoutei Jidai (Age of the Flying Boat), which appeared as a three-part serial from March to May 1989 in Model Graphix, a Japanese modeling hobby magazine. It is a full-color story set in the 1920s on the shore of the Adriatic Sea. Air pirates in floatplanes plague shipping in the Sea, but they are hunted by valiant Porco Rosso, an expert floatplane pilot who happens to be a pig. The English translation, Crimson Pig: The Age of the Flying Boat, was serialized in the magazine Animerica from July to September 1993. Hayao Miyazaki

Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s original story based on Alice in Wonderland, was an especially huge hit. In 1997, it became the highest grossing Japanese film in the country’s history. ª Reuters/ Corbis.

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By the 1990s, Miyazaki’s focus on animation made him one of the most popular storytellers in Japan. Along with adaptations of a few others’ works, ‘‘the biggest-grossing original features by Hayao Miyazaki, often accounts for over half of the [Japanese] film business’s annual revenues,’’ according to Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s original story based on Alice in Wonderland, was an especially huge hit. In 1997, it became the highest grossing Japanese film in the country’s history. After Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki had planned to retire; his heir apparent, Yoshifumi Kondo (1950–1998), however, died of an aneurysm on January 21, 1998. Miyazaki returned to the studio and made Spirited Away, which premiered in 2001. The gross profits of Spirited Away surpassed the record set by Princess Mononoke, and the film won the 2001 Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture, the 2002 Golden Bear (first prize) at the Berlin Film Festival, and the 2002 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. For his most recent film at this writing, Miyazaki decided to adapt the young adult novel Howl’s Moving Castle by British writer Diana Wynne Jones. He premiered the film at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Osella Award for animation technology. In Japan, the film premiered on November 20, 2004, and grossed 1.4 billion yen (approximately $12 million) in the first two days. Seemingly possessed by his work ethic, Miyazaki showed no signs of retiring in 2005. He told New Yorker interviewer Margaret Talbot that ‘‘his idea of a vacation was a nap.’’ Throughout his career, sleep seemed to be the main reason Miyazaki would pause from his work. Talbot related in the New Yorker that Miyazaki’s coworker had noted that in the early years of Studio Ghibli ‘‘Miyazaki would work from 9 a.m. to 4:30 a.m.’’ However, a glimmer of Miyazaki’s aging began to show when the colleague added that ‘‘in recent years he has mellowed somewhat and goes home at midnight.’’ With only this slight dent in his workload, it seems that anime and manga fans can anticipate many more delights from the fertile mind of Hayao Miyazaki.

For More Information Books Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King, 2004. 350

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McCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation: Films, Themes, Artistry. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999.

Periodicals Gordon, Devin. ‘‘A ‘Positive Pessimist’: Japan’s Animation Titan Hayao Miyazaki Returns with Another Marvel, Howl’s Moving Castle. This Time He’s Ready to Talk.’’ Newsweek (June 20, 2005). Wright, Lucy, and Jerry Clode. ‘‘The Animated Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki: Filmic Representations of Shinto.’’ Metro Magazine no. 143 (2004): pp. 46–51.

Web Sites Brooks, Xan. ‘‘A God Among Animators.’’ The Guardian. http://film. guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1569689,00.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Horn, Steven. ‘‘Interview with Hayao Miyazaki’’ (September 20, 2002). IGN Filmforce. http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/371/371579p1.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Mes, Tom. ‘‘Midnight Eye Interview: Hayao Miyazaki’’ (July 1, 2002). Midnight Eye. http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/hayao_miyazaki. shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Nausicaa. http://www.nausicaa.net (accessed on May 3, 2006). Talbot, Margaret. ‘‘The Animated Life.’’ New Yorker Online. http:// www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/050117on_onlineonly01 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Whipple, Charles T. ‘‘The Power of Positive Inking.’’ Charles T. Whipple. http://www.charlest.whipple.net/mangamiyazaki.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Alan Moore Born November 18, 1953 (Northampton, England) British author, illustrator

‘‘Alan Moore is the best writer of comic books there has ever been,’’ writes Lance Parkin in the first sentence of his The Pocket Essential Alan Moore, an opinion that is echoed widely in the comics community. Moore’s 1987 work The Watchmen is often named as the best graphic novel ever written, and in 2005 it was named to the list of the Top 100 novels of all time by Time magazine. In The Watchmen, Moore uses a dazzling variety of storytelling techniques to demonstrate that graphic novels could be every bit as complex and multi-layered as the best serious fiction. Many comics enthusiasts hope that the success of Moore and his peers in the late 1980s, including graphic novelists Frank Miller (1957–; see entry) and Art Spiegelman (1948–; see entry), heralded a rise to respectability for an art form that had long been held in low repute. The hoped-for renaissance did not occur, yet Moore’s production of complex and highly respected graphic novels and comic books over the years—including Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and many others— makes a strong case for the narrative power of graphic novels.

‘‘The comic strip is one of the few art forms that engages both halves of the brain and sets them to the same task.’’

Rough beginnings Moore was born on November 18, 1953, in Northampton, England, a mid-size industrial town in central England. He came from a working-class family: his father, Ernest, worked in a local brewery, and his mother, Sylvia, worked for a printer. The surroundings in which he was raised were hardly up-to-date: the house in which he lived with his parents and grandmother had no indoor toilet, and another grandmother had no electricity in her home. ‘‘Looking back on it,’’ he told Sridhar Pappu in an interview for the Salon Web site, ‘‘it sounds like I’m describing something out 353

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Alan Moore’s Shocking Futures (1986). The Ballad of Halo Jones 3 vols. (1986; collected as The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones (2001).

Tom Strong 4 vols. (2001–04). Top Ten 2 vols. (2000–02). Promethea 5 vols. (2001–05). Supreme 2 vols. (2002–03).

Alan Moore’s Twisted Times (1987).

Tomorrow Stories 2 vols. (2002–04).

Swamp Thing 6 vols. (1987–2003).

America’s Best Comics (2004).

Watchmen (1987).

Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales 2 vols. (2004–05).

Batman: The Killing Joke (1988).

Other

Brought to Light (1989).

Voice of the Fire (novel). (1996; 2003).

V for Vendetta (1990).

The Alan Moore Songbook (comic adaptations of song lyrics). (1998).

Marvelman 3 vols. (1990–92); published in the United States as Miracleman (1990–92). From Hell (1991–96; collected, 1999). Violator 2 vols. (1994–95). WildC.A.T.S. 2 vols. (1996–97). The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 3 vols. (2000–05).

(With Eddie Campbell) The Birth Caul (spoken-word CD). (1999). (With Tim Perkins) Snakes and Ladders (music CD). (1999). Moore is also the author of countless comic books, comic strips, songs, essays, and short stories.

of [a nineteenth-century novel by English author Charles] Dickens. I mean, I’m talking 1955, but 1955 in England. I’ve seen ‘Happy Days’ on television. Maybe the American ‘50s were like that, but that wasn’t what the British ‘50s were like. It was all sort of monochrome, and it was all indoors.’’ Though his surroundings were dull and uninspiring, his reading interests were diverse and exciting. From early on, he read everything he could get his hands on and developed a love for mythology and legends. Moore first experienced comic books in black and white, the norm in England, but at some point in his youth the local stores began to carry scattered issues of the full-color American comics. Moore snatched up horror stories by EC Comics and superhero tales published by Charlton, but he was particularly 354

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attracted to the issues featuring Superman and Flash. Moore told Pappu that he got his moral sense from Superman stories, though his actions didn’t show it: he was kicked out of high school when he was seventeen after he was caught selling illegal drugs. The opportunities were few for an uneducated young man and, after a stretch in which he cleaned toilets at a local hotel and worked briefly at a sheep-skinning plant, Moore decided that he had to follow his passion. He began to submit articles and comic strips to local papers and magazines. In 1974, he married a local woman named Phyllis, took an office job at a pipe fitting company, and had his first child. Fearing that he might be stuck forever in his office job, Moore ‘‘went on the dole’’ (a British term for relying on public assistance or unemployment pay) and devoted himself to developing his talents as a writer and illustrator. Finally, in 1979, he was offered his first paying job to produce a comic strip called Roscoe Moscow for a music weekly titled Sounds. Soon after, he teamed with friend Steve Moore on another comic, The Sound of Degradation, for the same magazine. Within a few years he was earning enough to go off the dole and call himself a working author/illustrator.

A big fish in a small pond In 1977, a new British comic magazine called 2000AD began to rise in popularity. Though shabby compared to its full-color American counterparts, the weekly magazine provided an opening for a number of British comics creators. It collected a variety of stories each issue, most ranging in length from four to eight pages. In 1980, Moore was hired to submit stories for the magazine. He dropped the role of illustrator—others were more skilled anyway— and contributed such stories as ‘‘Tharg’s Future Shocks’’ and ‘‘Ro-Jaws Robo Tales.’’ In 1982, Moore was hired to write several ongoing series for a new British comic anthology, Warrior. Moore found that he could write all kinds of stories—comedies, science fiction, horror—but he returned again and again to the superhero . . . and it was with that kind of story that he made his real breakthrough. In two series that he wrote for Warrior, ‘‘V for Vendetta’’ and ‘‘Marvelman,’’ Moore truly began to explore the superhero stories that would make him famous. ‘‘V for Vendetta’’ (with illustrations by David Lloyd) tells the story of a future Britain that, in the wake of a nuclear war, is ruled by a fascist dictatorship similar to that of Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) rule in Germany in the 1930s and Alan Moore

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The British Invasion During the years that Alan Moore was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, British comic books had come to lag far behind their American counterparts. In the United States, American publishers Marvel and DC Comics ruled the comic book industry. They created full-color issues of multiple stories, paying the comics creators a decent wage and occasionally even luring adults into reading splashy stories about superheroes in tights. In Britain, however, small publishers put out cheaply produced black-and-white weeklies and monthlies. Believing that their audience consisted of younger children, they kept stories simple and refused to allow comics creators to explore complicated stories. Though the creation of 2000AD in 1977 allowed for more sophisticated narratives, pay for comics creators in Britain was notoriously low, and opportunities to gain creative control over a story were slim. Many British comics writers longed for the opportunity to write for the higher-paying American market.

In the early 1980s, American comic book publishers experienced a steady increase in sales. To keep up with demand, these publishers began looking around for new talent—and found it in Britain. The first British comics writer to have a big success in the United States was Alan Moore, first with Swamp Thing but more importantly with Watchmen. Soon, other Brits arrived: two of Moore’s fans, Neil Gaiman (1960–) and Dave McKean (1963–), had a huge hit with The Sandman series; Grant Morrison (1960–) took a new approach to superheroes with Animal Man; later, in the 1990s, writers such as Garth Ennis (1970–) and Warren Ellis (1968–), also had major hits. Comic book critics have likened this influx of British talent to the so-called ‘‘British Invasion’’ of the 1960s, in which the huge success enjoyed by the musical group The Beatles opened the door for the success of a string of British rock groups, including The Who, The Rolling Stones, Cream (with Eric Clapton), and others.

1940s. The government has killed off or imprisoned all of its enemies and ruthlessly crushes any public protests. Into this world steps V, a masked hero who promotes anarchy (complete freedom from governmental control) and uses terrorist acts to bring down the government. In ‘‘Marvelman’’ (later called ‘‘Miracleman’’ to avoid conflict with the powerful American publisher Marvel Comics), first published from 1954 to 1963, Moore revived a story about a British superhero—the counterpart to America’s Captain Marvel. Moore turned the simple heroic adventures on their head, showing Marvelman unravel the conspiracy that created his superpowers and eventually use his power to take control of the world. Both stories saw Moore challenge the simple morality of superheroes, asking whether it was appropriate for a hero to fight the 356

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government, as in ‘‘V for Vendetta,’’ or for a hero to become the government, as in ‘‘Marvelman.’’ Both works won Moore awards in Britain and attention in America. Both were later redone in full color, collected, and published as graphic novels. Moore’s other big British success in the mid-1980s was ‘‘The Ballad of Halo Jones,’’ told in thirty-seven episodes in 2000AD and illustrated by Ian Gibson. Moore described his motivations for creating the character in his introduction to The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones: ‘‘What I wanted was simply an ordinary woman such as you might find standing in front of you while queuing at the check-out at Tesco’s, but transposed to . . . a boy’s science fiction comic.’’ Eighteen-year-old Halo Jones became the first female comics heroine in Britain, and she became immensely popular. Moore’s success with these three series made him the best-known comics writer in Britain, but Britain still played a small role in the world of comics publishing. If Moore was to make it big, he would have to write for the large American publishers, Marvel or DC Comics. In 1983, he was invited to do just that.

Hits it big in the United States DC Comics liked what they saw in the work of Alan Moore—the intelligence of his storytelling and his willingness to explore complicated political themes—but they were not quite ready to offer this untested Brit one of their biggest heroes, like Superman or Batman (though he did write a Batman story, The Killing Joke [1988], which became a fan favorite). Instead, they asked Moore to write Swamp Thing, a story created in 1971 about a scientist who is thrown into a swamp by a bomb blast and emerges later as the muscular, vegetative being the Swamp Thing; the series was published intermittently through the 1970s and early 1980s, but never achieved much success. In an article from Comic Book Artist reproduced on the TwoMorrows Web site, Moore joked to interviewer Jon B. Cooke that ‘‘I think the reason they [DC] gave me Swamp Thing was probably because they might have been a little reticent to actually turn me loose upon one of their traditional characters.’’ His first issue was safe enough: Moore completed a story begun by an earlier author. But with the second issue, ‘‘The Anatomy Lesson,’’ Moore completely reinvented the character’s origins. Instead of a man who takes on the qualities of plants, Moore presented the Swamp Thing as the primary force of the swamp infused with the spirit of the dying Alec Holland. In his foreword to the first Swamp Thing graphic novel, Ramsey Campbell wrote ‘‘There surely can’t be Alan Moore

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many writers who, having taken over an established character, would begin by demonstrating (in the autopsy scene) that the character has never made sense as he was presented as is in fact something far less human than even he himself believed.’’ Under Moore’s control, with illustrations by various artists, Swamp Thing became a vehicle for exploring serious social and environmental issues. The popularity of the series soared: When Moore began in 1984, each issue sold about 17,000 copies; but by the end of his run in 1987, DC was selling more than 100,000 copies each month. The success of Swamp Thing opened the door for Moore to produce his best work yet: Watchmen. Watchmen was the culmination of all the work Moore had done up to that point. Moore re-imagined the history of the United States in the years after World War II (1939–45), proposing that the world’s great power had been aided in its quest for world dominance by Dr. Manhattan, a visionary superhero. In this alternative history, a band of ‘‘costumed heroes’’ who had once kept order in the United States had been forced into retirement in 1977 by order of the permanent president, Richard Nixon, after they had run amok, becoming lawbreakers themselves. At the time of the story, 1985, these aging former superheroes found themselves being killed off one by one by a mysterious enemy as the world appears ready to plunge into World War III. In solving the mystery of the murders, they come face to face with serious questions about the nature of the service superheroes offer to society and the psychological difficulties of being a masked hero. Almost from the moment it was released, Watchmen received the kind of praise that is rarely bestowed upon mere comic books. Critics hailed the work’s immense complexity, pointing to the multiple storylines that weave throughout the book; the comic stories interwoven with the straight text of one superhero’s memoirs; the many references to songs, literary works, and art; and the way that individual frames sometimes offer several storylines at once. There is a density of information and allusion (indirect references to matters inside and outside of the story itself) that most people associate with more exalted forms of literature. Characters are distinct, fully developed, and, most notably, troubled by the moral complexities of their action. Many believe that the art and story are perfectly connected. Reviewers in Time, The Nation, and Rolling Stone all called attention to the work, and it won the 358

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Hugo Award for science fiction (a first for a graphic novel) as well as numerous awards in the comics industry. Like so many graphic novels, Watchmen began as a twelve-issue monthly, published from September 1986 to October 1987. Unlike most, Watchmen was almost immediately collected and released as a graphic novel not only because it truly made sense collected in a novel-length format but also to take advantage of its huge popularity. Published within a short time of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Watchmen seemed to herald a new maturity and popularity for comic books. Yet, in interesting ways, the legacy of Watchmen has turned out very differently than was first predicted. Lesser talents mimicked the works of Moore and Miller, especially, giving rise to a series of stories that explored the ‘‘dark side’’ of fans’ favorite superheroes. In an interview with Tasha Robinson of the Onion Web site, Moore revealed that he regrets parts of the huge influence of Watchmen: ‘‘In the 15 years since Watchmen, an awful lot of the comics field [has been] devoted to these very grim, pessimistic, nasty, violent stories which kind of use Watchmen to validate what are, in effect, often just some very nasty stories that don’t have a lot to recommend them. And some of them are very pretentious, where they’ll try and grab some sort of intellectual gloss for what they’re doing by referring to a few song titles, or the odd book.’’ Alan Moore

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Produces independent works Watchmen made Moore a rich man—but not nearly as rich as it made DC Comics, who got all the proceeds from the T-shirts, posters, badges, and movie rights that came along with the Watchmen craze. But more than the inability to reap more profits from his work, Moore felt that his creativity was being restricted by DC, according to Lance Parkin. Moore had penned the Batman graphic novel and several Superman stories, and he had chafed at the restrictions placed on his stories. Now DC threatened to slap a ‘‘For Mature Readers’’ label on works that he produced. Sick of this ‘‘censorship’’ and eager to take complete control over the works he produced—and their profits—Moore broke with DC, spurned the offers of other publishers, and went out on his own. It was a decision that led to artistic freedom, though a smaller audience for his works. In his biography of Moore, Parkin calls the years after leaving DC Comics the ‘‘Wilderness Years,’’ and claims that ‘‘anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Alan Moore had vanished off the face of the earth.’’ Moore established his own comic book publisher, called Mad Love, and ventured off into a number of ambitious works far from the realm of superheroes. He began—but did not complete—work on Brought to Light, an account of covert operations by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and also on Big Numbers, a story set in modern-day Britain that attempts to incorporate the ideas of chaos theory, a scientific theory that tries to understand why orderly system sometimes appear chaotic or random. He completed work on From Hell, an ambitious historical narrative centering around the Jack the Ripper murders in nineteenth-century London. The story required extensive research; Moore continually made reference to places, people, and events from the period, all the while creating a complicated conspiracy theory around the identity of the murderer. In the course of working on these full-length works, and on numerous single issue comics and comic strips, Moore managed to squander virtually all of the money he had earned on Watchmen. And in the early 1990s his wife, Phyllis, divorced him. Despite these difficulties, Moore continued his intellectual explorations: he wrote a novel, Voice of the Fire, which was published in 1996; he issued some spoken-word recordings; and he dabbled in the occult and in magic. With his long, curly dark hair and beard, and his fingers covered in rings, Moore had become a symbol of the eccentric British outcast, and he might well have faded into obscurity. 360

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Reemerges with America’s Best Comics After a long period of mistakes and misfires, Moore reemerged in the mid-1990s. He signed on with Image Comics, a newly formed publisher that aimed to give comics creators full rights to and control over their work. Moore wrote issues of Spawn (1993–96) and WildC.A.T.S. (1995), and to those who charged him with selling out, he replied that the real purpose of superheroes was easy entertainment, not deep moralizing. Moore left Image to join Awesome Entertainment, another new comics publisher, where he took over the writing of a superhero comic called Supreme. Supreme allowed Moore to take an existing character, reinvent his origin story (as in Swamp Thing), and tell a straight-up superhero tale; Moore has commented that making a positive superhero story was his way of apologizing for the damage he did to the genre with Watchmen, which some critics complained dishonored the image of the superhero. The Supreme series, published through 1998, returned Moore to popular and critical success and helped revive his finances, but it did not save the failing publisher. Moore was enticed to return to Image Comics, where he was offered his own imprint (an independent branch of a publisher), to be called America’s Best Comics. Though America’s Best Comics was sold to DC Comics in 1999, Moore worked out a deal with the industry giant to retain full control. At America’s Best, Moore was extremely productive. The bestknown work to emerge from this stage of Moore’s career is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In this series of tales, Moore returns to England in the late nineteenth century and brings together a group of adventurers from the best fiction of the period, including Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde), the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Alan Quatermain, and Mina Harker (from Dracula), to fight for England. Moore told a straightforward tale—without the flashbacks and dense multiple narratives of Watchmen—that imagined these characters performing heroic feats within the context of nineteenth-century technology. At once old-fashioned and modern, the series was a huge success and was made into a popular Hollywood movie in 2003 (though Moore’s involvement with that movie, as well as with a filmed version of V for Vendetta in 2006, prompted the comics creator to swear off any future involvement with film). Moore had remarkable freedom and control at America’s Best Comics, and he used it to mastermind several distinct ongoing series of comics in the 2000s. Tom Strong is a straightforward Alan Moore

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superhero story, with a hero similar to Superman; Promethea is a female superhero, and the mythic stories about her exploits are best suited to mature readers; Top Ten imagines a world in which everyone has superpowers; and Tomorrow Stories is an anthology, with ongoing stories of varying length. Given full control over who he worked with, Moore spread the art work around, both to industry pros and to newcomers. Each in their own way, the stories had a kind of exuberance and youthful enthusiasm that was rare in the comic book industry and that drew many comparisons to the early days of comics. Moore told Comic Book Artist interviewer Jon B. Cooke: ‘‘With ABC, I want to do stories with a sense of exhilaration about them, a kind of freshness and effervescence, a feeling that the people doing them are loving it.’’ As of 2005, Moore seemed to be changing directions yet again. Disgusted with DC over their negotiations of the film rights for V for Vendetta and the release of a twentieth-anniversary edition of Watchmen, he broke with the company, taking League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with him (a new volume was planned with a different publisher). He was reported to be working on a novel set in his home town of Northampton, a longer graphic novel for Avatar, music CDs, and a variety of other works. Also in 2005, he was engaged to be married to a longtime girlfriend, Melinda Gebbie. What the future will bring for one of the industry’s most respected and most prolific comics creators is difficult to tell.

For More Information Books Khoury, George. The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows, 2003. Moore, Alan, and Ian Gibson. The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones. London: Titan Books, 2003. Parkin, Lance. The Pocket Essential Alan Moore. Herts, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2001. Smoky Man and Gary Spencer Millidge, ed. Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2003.

Periodicals Jensen, Jeff. ‘‘Watchmen, an Oral History.’’ Entertainment Weekly (October 28, 2005): p. 44. 362

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Locus Magazine (July 2003). Available online at Locus Online. http:// www.locusmag.com/2003/Issue07/Moore.html (accessed on November 16, 2005). ‘‘Moore Leaves DC for Top Shelf.’’ Publishers Weekly (May 30, 2005): p. 14.

Web Sites ‘‘Alan Moore.’’ Read Yourself Raw. http://www.readyourselfraw.com/ profiles/moore/profile_moore.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘All-Time 100 Novels.’’ Time. http://www.time.com/time/2005/ 100books/the_complete_list.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Cooke, Jon B. ‘‘Toasting Absent Heroes.’’ Comic Book Artist #9, posted at TwoMorrows. http://www.twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/ 09moore.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Johnston, Rick. ‘‘Lying in the Gutters.’’ Comic Book Resources. http:// www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg &article=2153 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Kavanagh, Barry. ‘‘The Alan Moore Interview.’’ http://www.blather.net/ articles/amoore/alanmoore.txt (accessed on May 3, 2006). Pappu, Sridhar. ‘‘We Need Another Hero.’’ Salon. http://www.salon.com/ people/feature/2000/10/18/moore/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). Robinson, Tasha. ‘‘Interview: Alan Moore.’’ Onion AV Club. http://avclub. com/content/node/24222 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Thill, Scott. ‘‘The Man Who Invented the Future.’’ Salon. http://www. salon.com/books/int/2004/07/22/moore/index.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Terry Moore Born 1954 (Texas) American author, illustrator

Terry Moore is one of the most respected creators of what have been dubbed ‘‘real world’’ comics, those that deal realistically with characters and circumstances. Beginning in the 1990s, Moore created what he referred to in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition as an ‘‘alternate reality’’ for himself. In this alternate reality live the artist Katchoo, whose difficult past wreaks havoc in her life; her good-natured friend and sometimes lover, Francine, who struggles with self-esteem and weight; and their mutual friend, David, whose love for Katchoo introduces complications in the relationships of all three. These main characters are joined by a huge cast of others in the somewhat fictionalized town of Houston, Texas. ‘What’s it about?’ Moore said to the CBR Web site, ‘‘I’ve never come up with a good answer for that. I’m open to suggestions. But that may be the reason it’s survived.’’ Interviewer Adrienne Rappaport summed up Moore’s Strangers in Paradise as, simply, ‘‘One of the most complex explorations of human nature, and relationships, in comics history.’’

‘‘My ambition has always been to get my own creative ideas out there to the public, then let the chips fall where they may.’’

Seeks outlet for creativity Terry Moore was born in Texas in 1954. The oldest of three children, Moore grew up playing sports, drawing cartoons, and playing in rock bands. Moore’s childhood, however, was also laced with more atypical experiences, thanks to having a father who was in the Air Force and—as Moore discovered later—working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In an interview for Jazma Online, Moore recalled that when he was ten years old his family had to leave the African country of Tanzania ‘‘in a hurry while there was rioting going on. Fun, huh?’’ Moore’s family moved a great deal, in fact: ‘‘By the time I was eleven I had lived in Texas, 365

Best-Known Works Strangers in Paradise Graphic Novels Book 1: The Collected Strangers in Paradise (1994). Book 2: I Dream of You (1996). Book 3: It’s a Good Life (1996). Book 4: Love Me Tender (1997). Book 5: Immortal Enemies (1998).

Book 13: Flower to Flame (2003). Book 14: David’s Story (2004). Book 15: Tomorrow Now (2004). Book 16: Viva Las Vegas (2005). Book 17: David & Katchoo (2005). Book 18: The Final Chapter (2006).

Book 6: High School (1999).

Other Graphic Novels

Book 7: Sanctuary (1999).

Paradise Too!, Drunk Ducks, Volume One. Abstract Studio (2002).

Book 8: My Other Life (2000). Book 9: Child of Rage (2001). Book 10: Tropic of Desire (2001). Book 11: Brave New World (2002). Book 12: Heart in Hand (2003).

Paradise Too! Checking for Weirdos, Volume Two. Abstract Studio (2003). Molly and Poo, a Collection of Moments: The Whole Bloody Story in One Bloody Book (2005).

Panama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Africa,’’ he was quoted on Jazma. Moore had little interest in school and instead focused on his extracurricular activities. From the age of sixteen, he played lead guitar in rock bands and thought that it might be his career. Music was such a huge part of Moore’s life that he dropped out of college to pursue it. ‘‘While my peers were getting medical degrees, I was playing Van Halen arpeggios [chords] in a smelly Texas bar. It seemed like a great choice at the time. Now I know better, but you can’t tell a 22-year-old boy anything,’’ he related to GN. He eventually started working as a television editor, and for about ten years he made commercials, documentaries, film trailers, and music videos—work that he came to detest.

Finds refuge in comics Wanting to get back to his own creative work, Moore turned to comics, which he described to Jazma Online as the ‘‘best thing that ever happened to me.’’ He traces his interest in comics to his youth. 366

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‘‘I drew a lot and had artist heroes by the time I was twelve or thirteen. Everybody from Marvel [Comics] guys to Mad magazine to editorial cartoonists. I loved it all,’’ he told GN. Though Moore had relegated these aspects of his life to occasional hobbies as he grew older, he never lost his love for comics or for being creative. ‘‘I was a married father of two with a good job, nice home and a daughter who wanted to go to college when I realized that I could spend the rest of my life never doing anything with my art,’’ Moore wrote in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. Horrified by his realization, Moore became more focused and began to draw comics in earnest, hoping to create a syndicated comic strip. His attempts to write a comic strip resulted in heaps of material—all rejected by the numerous publishers he had contacted. While browsing in a comic book store in the early 1990s, Moore noticed some self-published comic books that didn’t include superheroes; they were more realistic. These books looked like something he might be able to write, and he decided to try his hand at the longer form. ‘‘I wanted to work with more room on the page than comic strips. I wanted my characters to be able to talk in complete sentences and not the carefully crafted sound bites you are forced to create in the strips. Plus, with graphic novels you can develop a story for as long or short as you like. Coming from comic strips, the format felt like it was boundary-free,’’ Moore explained to GN. He pored over his pile of rejected comic strips to gather his best ideas. From the rubbish emerged two characters: ‘‘a sweetnatured girl and an acerbic one,’’ remembered Moore. ‘‘Seeing those two girls in all my work was like a wake-up call for me,’’ Moore wrote in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. He framed his ideas for an ongoing love story built around these two main characters: Katina Choovanski and Helen Francine Peters, known simply as Katchoo and Francine. Moore marked September 7, 1992, as the day he first drew the main cast for his comic book: Katchoo and Francine; a woman named Darcy Parker and her brother David Qin; and Freddie Femur, a man dating Francine. The moment struck Moore because in the picture he drew that day, ‘‘[I] didn’t see characters . . . . I saw people. And THAT made all the difference,’’ he recalled in Strangers in Paradise. ‘‘As I drew these people I thought about who they were, how they got along and where the friction was. A story began to come to me, and within hours I was drawing the first issue of Strangers in Paradise.’’ Terry Moore

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Begins Strangers in Paradise Moore drew the first issue of Strangers in Paradise on nights and weekends over a six-week period at his kitchen table. He sent photocopies of the finished story to various publishers and landed a meager contract for a three-part miniseries with Antarctic Press in San Antonio, Texas. Moore fine-tuned his story, redrawing parts and rewriting others, and on November 17, 1993, the first issue was published. Although sales were modest, ‘‘I had a comic book with my name on it and I was thrilled,’’ Moore wrote in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. The series started as a humorous look at the loves and relationships of a large cast of characters, but Katchoo, Francine, and David stood out by the time Moore finished the third part of the miniseries in 1994. At that time, he had built up a fan base and attracted enough attention in the comics industry to prompt the publisher to reprint the first issue and to collect the series into a trade paperback that remained in print as of 2006. More importantly perhaps, Moore could envision an ongoing future for the series, and a new career for himself. Antarctic Press offered him another contract, but Moore declined in favor of self-publishing. He started business under the name Abstract Studio in 1994 and returned to his drawing board. Within two years, Moore remembered in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition: ‘‘I was cranking out SiP stories as fast as I could draw them,’’ and the series ‘‘took over my life.’’

Adds depth to characters In 1994, Moore began publishing volume two of Strangers in Paradise. Volume two offers deeper insight into the characters and their pasts. As Moore explores the characters, he begins to alternate the storylines of the series between romance and friendship and darker tales of crime and intrigue. These alternating storylines, as they react to both the good and bad in life, give his characters a more realistic dimension. Readers learn much more about Katchoo, for example; she was the victim of child abuse, a teenage alcoholic, and a highly paid prostitute, none of which she has shared with her friends Francine and David. If this weren’t enough, Katchoo’s former boss, Darcy Parker, has tracked her down to figure out the reason for some missing money, taken the bewildered Francine hostage, and identified David as Darcy’s younger brother. The relationship between Katchoo, Francine, and David becomes even more complicated as 368

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Creating Realistic Female Characters Terry Moore created such realistic female characters in Strangers in Paradise that readers sometimes assume he is a woman himself. When asked by Sequential Tart interviewer Katherine Keller about why he decided to focus on female characters, Moore replied: ‘‘It’s because I’ve spent most of my life thinking about women instead of men. I knew that whoever I drew I would have to sit there day after day, hours and hours every day focusing on them, their elbow and their arm, and their thigh, and their shoulder, and how they look, and the nose, and the face, and I really didn’t want to get obsessed over a guy.’’ Moore’s focus on the details of his female characters has been widely praised. One reviewer dubbed him the best drawer of hair in comics. Critics and fans alike appreciate his realistic depictions of the female form, especially his sensitive depiction of Francine’s struggles with her weight. When asked by Keller why he doesn’t distort his characters to look like more typical overexaggerated comic book fare, he explained that he had no desire to do that, adding that he found the ‘‘different shapes and forms’’ of everyday women ‘‘absolutely perfect.’’ But Moore got more right about his female characters than their physical attributes. He created emotionally vulnerable, intelligent women who interact with their world in completely believable ways. Moore told GN that ‘‘I still say characters when I speak of them to others, but for me, alone in the studio, they are people. I write about people, not characters. That has made all the difference in my work.’’ Instead of focusing on their gender, Moore concentrated on the common human trait of his characters, their heart. ‘‘I began knowing what type of people they were and that their inner values would bring them to where they are now,’’ he explained to the Colorado Springs Independent.

they explore their feelings of friendship and love for one another. It is the relationships between these three characters that form the meat of the series, even as Moore introduces a variety of other Terry Moore

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characters over the years. And Moore, according to reviewer Sara Lipowitz of Seized by the Tale, has an ‘‘almost uncanny ability to understand and portray human interaction in all its grandeur and ugliness.’’ Joe Shea praised Moore on the Empty Bowl Web site for ‘‘how real his characters are, and his ability to make you care for them.’’ The comics industry agreed, and in 1996 Moore won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series. That same year, comic book publisher Jim Lee (1964–) contacted Moore, asking if he’d like to join Kurt Busiek (1960–; see entry) and James Robinson in publishing under a new imprint called Homage Comics. Moore gladly accepted—Lee being among comic book publishing’s elite—and started volume three of his series under the new imprint in 1996. Soon after, he saw his sales jump. In volume three, Moore introduces aging to his characters. Since starting the series, Moore kept the characters as young adults. He began the third volume with Francine and Katchoo in their middle ages, meeting after a ten-year separation. Doing so allowed Moore to offer glimpses of the characters at various stages in life. It also opened the series to new readers. While much of the series explores love and relationships from an adult perspective, in 1998 Moore wrote a three-part look at Francine and Katchoo in high school, where they first became friends. Moore, however, returned to self-publishing after eight issues with Homage. In 1999, he explained his decision to Katherine Keller of Sequential Tart: ‘‘It was difficult for me to—it was distracting to run it through so many hands, to do a company process . . . . [I]t was never as fun as working to the last minute here by myself and dashing it off to the printer by FedEx, and bam bam bam it’s out. The way I work right now is more like putting out a newspaper, and I found that I felt that was a lot more fun.’’ Moore has since continued to self-publish under his company’s name, Abstract Studio. By the early 2000s, Moore had written and drawn more than one hundred issues of Strangers in Paradise. The saga of his characters continued to unfold in new and unexpected ways. David’s past, for example, turns out to be filled with grim street violence. As his fame grew, Moore landed various other projects, including some books and artwork for Dark Horse, DC Comics, and Marvel. As Moore worked, however, he never lost his love of comic strips and, over the years, he has generated a sizable collection of his sketched cartoons, various comic strips, and doodled character ideas. Starting in the mid-1990s, he has published an occasional and unrelated horror story about a deadly love affair between the characters Molly 370

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and Poo in Strangers in Paradise, and later began publishing snippets in a new series. Called Paradise, Too!, the new work includes a strip about the adventures of the tiny, strawberry cake-loving fairy, Kixie, and stories about a polar bear named Plato, along with musings from a caricature of Terry Moore himself. The series was collected into trade paperbacks starting in 2002. Moore’s masterpiece, however, remains Strangers in Paradise. The series was honored with the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book in 2000, a 2002 YALSA/ ALA selection for Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, and an Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comic Arts in 2003.

For More Information Books Moore, Terry. Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. New York: Perennial Currents, 2004. Periodicals Luger, Kara. ‘‘Fine Print; Reality Bites: Comic Creator Terry Moore Gets Down and Dirty.’’ Colorado Springs Independent (May 19–May 25, 2005): p. 60. Web Sites Keller, Katherine. ‘‘A Quiet, Soft Spoken Man: 30 Minutes with Terry Moore.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/oct99/ moore.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). MacPherson, Don. ‘‘Paradise, Too!, # 3.’’ The Fourth Rail. http:// www.thefourthrail.com/reviews/critiques/091701/paradisetoo3.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Rappaport, Adrienne. ‘‘Strangers No More: Terry Moore.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/may01/moore_2.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Roberts, Paul Dale. ‘‘Interviews: Terry Moore, Creator of Strangers in Paradise.’’ Jazma Online. http://www.jazmaonline.com/interviews/ interviews.asp?intID=167 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Shea, Joe. ‘‘Terry Moore, Author and Artist of Strangers in Paradise.’’ Empty Bowl. http://www.emptybowl.com/modules.php?name=News &file=article&sid=76 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Additional information for this profile was obtained in an e-mail interview with Terry Moore in October and November 2005. Terry Moore

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Grant Morrison Born January 31, 1960 (Glasgow, Scotland) British author

Grant Morrison is among a vanguard of writers who raised literary standards in the comics industry. In 1997, he became the first comic book writer to be included on Entertainment Weekly’s list of the top 100 creative people in America. Although Morrison began writing comics at a time when many viewed comics as an inferior form of storytelling, he, along with writers Alan Moore, Peter Milligan, Jamie Delano, and Neil Gaiman, helped to change people’s perception about the medium by creating works of high literary quality. Though Morrison’s work is popular among young adults, its content is often very mature, with direct and sometimes explicit treatments of violence and sexuality.

‘‘Everything I write is aimed at a hypothetical intelligent 14-year-old, who becomes more and more hypothetical with every passing year.’’

Begins career as a teen Little is known about Grant Morrison’s youth. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 31, 1960, and ‘‘barely educated’’ at Mosspark Primary and Allan Glen’s School for Boys, according to the Grant Morrison Web site. ‘‘I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was six years old and I would have written children’s novels, plays or television dramas if the comics scene in the 1980s hadn’t been so vibrant and inspiring,’’ Morrison told Barb LienCooper of Sequential Tart. Before he turned twenty, Morrison had already written his first comic series. He gained attention in England during the late 1970s as a writer for the short-lived science fiction anthology series Near Myths, and his first series, Gideon Stargrave, started in 1978. Although the series folded after only five issues, it brought Morrison to the attention of the editors at 2000AD, a successful British science fiction comic book. In the 1980s, 2000AD featured serials such as Judge Dredd, a fastpaced, violent series set in a post-apocalyptic twenty-second century. 373

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Zenith Books 1–5. (1988–90).

Comics

JLA 5 vols. (1997–2000).

Much of Grant Morrison’s most influential work is for mature readers, including Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, The Filth, and The Invisibles.

New X-Men 5 vols. (2001–04). Fantastic Four 1234 (2002). Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005).

All-Star Superman (2005–).

Dredd portrayed a new form of law and order, upheld by the ‘Judges,’ a group of lawmakers who ruthlessly serve as society’s judge, jury, and executioner. 2000AD had built its popularity on the strength of such important writers and artists as Alan Moore, John Wagner, Alan Grant, Dave Gibbons, and Brian Bolland. But all of these creators would leave the series to work for American comic books companies like DC Comics, which offered better pay and working conditions. Upon their departure, 2000AD was in need of new talent. A new group of writers and illustrators was soon hired, including Morrison, Peter Milligan, Garth Ennis (see entry), Glen Fabry, and Brendon McCarthy. Morrison quickly helped make 2000AD even more popular. Roger Sabin wrote in Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, ‘‘2000AD took on more of the look and feel of an American product. Its first overtly superhero strip appeared in 1986, in the form of the very popular Zenith (by Grant Morrison and Steve Yowell), while in terms of presentation, the comic now became more of a magazine, with glossy paper and fully painted artwork.’’ Zenith is an adolescent superhero who uses his powers to help himself achieve pop star status, not to fight evil.

Establishes his mastery of comics writing The success of Zenith caught the attention of DC Comics, which offered Morrison a chance to revamp some of their lesser-known characters like the Doom Patrol and Animal Man. It was with these characters that Morrison would establish himself as a master among comic creators. In 1988, Morrison wrote his first work for DC Comics, a revamped version of Animal Man. Animal Man, who first appeared in the 1960s comic series Strange Adventures, was a minor character who had the ability to take on the characteristics of nearby animals. In his introduction to the first volume of the 374

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Animal Man graphic novel series, Morrison wrote: ‘‘Initially Animal Man was conceived as a four-issue mini-series. My intention was to radicalize and realign the character of Buddy Baker and then leave him for someone else to pick up and develop.’’ However, Morrison continued working on the series, producing twenty-six issues. He was especially praised for his post-modern approach—he explores the use of time in his stories—to storytelling. In one issue, for example, Morrison explores a character’s feelings about losing his family, and ends the story by reuniting him with his living family, as if the earlier part of the story had been a dream. Morrison also breaks what had been known as the ‘‘fourth wall’’ in comics; he enables his characters to ponder their existence as drawings on paper. He draws himself into the comic as well, speaking directly to Animal Man as well as to the reader. But more than exploring the technical aspects of comic book writing, Morrison ‘‘turned the book into an impassioned plea for animal rights,’’ as Les Daniels observed in DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. The success of Animal Man prompted DC Comics to offer Morrison the opportunity to work on more major characters, such as Batman. Morrison’s re-envisioning of the Batman character proved especially popular. In Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), Morrison presents a dark and disturbing tale about one April Fools evening when the Batman is trapped alone in an insane asylum with a group of his enemies led by the Joker. This lavishly produced graphic novel was illustrated with macabre photorealist paintings by Dave McKean (see entry). Les Daniels noted that ‘‘Since the story was intended to present the hero as a symbolic construct, Batman is a shadowy figure, defined only in relationship to the evil he encounters.’’ During Batman’s pursuit of his enemies into the depths of the asylum, Morrison forces him to deal with some of the enduring anger that impels him to avenge evil. Sales of the graphic novel skyrocketed. The original hardcover graphic novel, expensively priced at $24.95, sold more than 182,000 copies (and another 85,000 copies were sold in paperback), helping to establish the graphic novel as a commercially viable publishing format. According to the Grant Morrison Web site, the series ‘‘has sold 500,000 copies worldwide and won numerous awards, making it the most successful original graphic novel to be published in America.’’ During this period, Morrison also began writing one of his most memorable works, Doom Patrol, a comic book series from the Grant Morrison

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1950s that was in desperate need of retooling. In 1989, Morrison took over as writer of the series, creating a four-part story titled ‘‘Crawling from the Wreckage.’’ In his afterword to Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage, Morrison describes his approach to revamping the series: ‘‘When I sat down to work out what I wanted to do with this book, I decided straight away that I would attempt to restore the sense of the bizarre that made the original Doom Patrol so memorable. I wanted to reconnect with the fundamental, radical concept of the book—that here was a team composed of handi-capped (sic) people. These were no clean-limbed, wishfulfillment super-adolescents who could model Calvins [Calvin Klein jeans] in their spare time. This was a group of people with serious physical problems and, perhaps, one too many bats in the belfry.’’ Drawing on the original concept of the Doom Patrol as the world’s strangest heroes, Morrison injected the series with a heavy dose of surrealism that was complemented by Richard Case’s illustrations. Under Morrison’s direction, the new superhero team includes Rebis, a radioactive character who is part man, part woman; Crazy Jane, a young woman with sixty-four separate personalities; and others. Sabin described the series as ‘‘A self-consciously weird revamp of an early 1960s superhero team-up story that took its surreal elements to the hilt.’’ Indeed, Morrison drew inspiration from Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer (1934–; see sidebar), and the result was one of the strangest and most original comic book series ever created. The success of Doom Patrol led to Morrison writing a number of other series for DC Comics, and its more adult-oriented imprint, Vertigo.

Hones his craft In 1995, Morrsion began The Invisibles, considered by many to be his most important work to date. The lengthy storyline focuses on a secret, underground group of five guerrilla anarchists who travel through time combating the conspiracy forces in society that seek to control the masses and deny individuality. The series features many of Morrison’s trademarks: absurdity, hip cultural references, surrealism, and conspiracy theories. Although the density of Morrison’s text, noted for exploring a host of conspiracy theories, was difficult to read, The Invisibles developed a cult following of mature readers. While The Invisibles came to represent the outer limits of the comic book market with its surrealistic, time-traveling, disjointed stories, DC Comics’ Justice League of America (JLA), which Morrison 376

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The Influence of Jan Svankmajer ‘‘The movie-going world is split into two unequal camps,’’ Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker: ‘‘those who have never heard of Jan Svankmajer, and those who happen upon his work and know that they have come face-to-face with genius.’’ Grant Morrison falls into the latter category, noting the works Svankmajer as an important influence on his work, especially Doom Patrol. In his afterword to the graphic novel Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage, Morrison discusses Svankmajer and his influence on his work, noting, ‘‘The films are generally fairly short; they use a combination of live action and the animation of everyday objects; and they present a disturbing vision of a world set free from all logical constraints.’’ This is the same formula Morrison uses in his comics.

Born September 4, 1934, in Prague, Svankmajer has become the best-known surrealist in the Czech Republic. He is best known for his unique approach to stop-motion technique and the surreal, nightmarish worlds that populate his films. Svankmajer’s trademarks include the use of exaggerated sounds and spedup sequences. His best-known film, Alice, is a feature-length adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that is both disturbing and surreal. About his own work, Svankmajer told Time International that he and his wife/collaborator, Eva, ‘‘view what we do as a practical activity, just like sleep and food. We don’t do art, we explore imagination.’’

took on in 1997, was one of the comic book industry’s most iconic titles. Rechristening the series, Morrison and artist Howard Porter brought together the most powerful superheroes in the DC Universe—Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, and Superman—to create one of the most popular comic books of the late 1990s. The success of JLA led to an exclusive contract with Marvel Comics to re-vamp the X-Men. In an interview with The Pulse!, Morrison describes his approach: ‘‘New X-Men was my brave attempt to rein in my natural exuberance and do my own updating of the ‘80s-style books I knew would be in vogue during the early years of the 21st century. I found it an interesting and instructive exercise and I grew to love the characters like my own seed, but it’s not really my kind of storytelling in the end and I was desperate to get back to the head trip stuff I much prefer to write and read.’’ Regardless, his work on the X-Men series proved to be even more popular than his run on JLA. Fantastic Four 1234, of 2002, became one of Morrison’s most honored graphic novels. Each chapter of the story focuses on one Grant Morrison

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member of the quartet as Morrison explores the inner hopes, dreams, and fears of each teammate. The artwork by Jae Lee is stylized and features innovative page layouts that fully complement Morrison’s story. The original comic book mini-series was nominated for three Eisner Awards: Best Writer, Best Cover Artist, and Best Colorist. The series was also selected for the Society of Illustrators Annual Exhibition, the most prestigious mainstream illustration show and anthology. Morrison returned to DC Comics to work on a number of series that included The Filth, the story of a government agency covertly working to keep society’s troubles at bay. Published in 2004, The Filth marked a culmination of Morrison’s work in comics with its combination of science fiction, surrealism, conspiracy theories, and social commentary. The Comics Journal described The Filth as ‘‘ambitious in a way that only a truly gifted writer can pull off. Like Watchmen before it, it is also one of those rare pieces of art that seduces the reader with sheer virtuosity.’’ Publishers Weekly noted it for its ‘‘sheer audacity and density of ideas.’’

Writes a mega-series In 2005, Morrison took on his biggest project yet: Seven Soldiers of Victory, a thirty-issue ‘‘mega-series’’ consisting of seven interlinked, four-issue miniseries and two ‘‘bookend’’ issues that introduce and conclude the series. Seven Soldiers of Victory features new and updated versions of such DC Comics characters as Mister Miracle, Klarion the Witch Boy, Zatanna, and the Shining Knight. Morrison delighted to work with these characters because, as he told Entertainment Weekly, ‘‘You can do anything you want with characters nobody cares about.’’ And that, he did, writing a diverse blend of story styles from Arthurian legends to dark comedies. In a Newsarama interview, Morrison discusses Seven Soliders: ‘‘The characters I’ve done so far are all very different and come from different areas of the DCU [DC Comics Universe] so I’ve been moving from shiny scifi, to bloody crime, and from generational soap opera to robot action with little heed to commonality of theme or purpose . . . . I don’t like to stick to one genre and this gives me a chance to mix it up a little. The only thing I’m consciously trying to do with all of these recreations is to widen the ethnic spread of DC’s characters.’’ The series has proven popular with comic book readers. Additionally, in late 2005, DC Comics planned to release a new Superman series by Morrison, titled All-Star Superman. The series was not so much a revamping of Superman, but a presentation of 378

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an ‘‘iconic’’ Superman for new readers. As Morrison commented to Newsarama: ‘‘I don’t think we need to ‘make’ Superman relevant. We just have to tell stories which resonate with human experience. The best Superman stories are fables about love, pride, shame, fear, death, friendship, etc. We can all relate to those big issues. Superman stories should represent huge, basic human dramas and human emotions, played out on a larger than life canvas.’’ The series was eagerly anticipated and predicted to become his best-selling work. While continuing his work on comics, Morrison also dabbled in other media. He authored the stage plays Red King Rising and Depravity, which, together, have been awarded a Fringe First Award, the Evening Standard Award for new drama, and the Independent Theatre Award for 1989. In 1999, he released Lovely Biscuits, a retrospective collection of short stories and theatre scripts. Morrison also worked on video games and motion pictures. And since 1979, he has been a practicing Chaos magician, a unique practice in which magic is used to reveal alternate realities.

For More Information Books Daniels, Les. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bulfinch Press, 1995. Morrison, Grant. Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage. New York: DC Comics, 1992. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. New York: Phaidon, 2001.

Periodicals Entertainment Weekly (May 27, 2005): p. 144. Lane, Anthony. ‘‘Kafka’s Heir.’’ New Yorker (October 31, 1994): p. 48. Stojaspal, Jan. ‘‘Surreality Bites: Czech Provocateur Jan Svankmajer and His Wife Eva Plumb the Depths of Vision and Consciousness.’’ Time International (June 28, 2004): p. 72.

Web Sites Brady, Matt. ‘‘Interview with Grant Morrison.’’ Newsarama. http:// www.newsarama.com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Contino, Jennifer M. ‘‘Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers.’’ The Pulse! http:// www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=36;t=004150 (aaccessed on May 3, 2006). Contino, Jennifer M. ‘‘Totally Grant Morrison.’’ The Pulse! http://www. comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Darius, Julian. ‘‘Grant Morrison Chronology.’’ Sequart. http://www.sequart. com/grantmorrisonchronology.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘The Grant Morrison Experience.’’ DC Comics. http://www.dccomics.com/ features/grant_morrison (accessed on May 3, 2006). Lien-Cooper, Barb. ‘‘Punching Holes Through Time.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/aug02/gmorrison2.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Morrison, Grant. The Grant Morrison Homepage. http://www.grant-morrison. com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Scott Morse. Courtesy of Scott Morse.

Scott Morse Born December 4, 1973 (Mountain View, California) American author, illustrator

‘‘If you don’t have a strong story, some strong emotion or character moment to tell, you’re spinning your wheels. It’s in the telling that you get the magic.’’

Scott Morse is among the rising stars in the comics industry. His debut comic book, Soulwind, garnered some of the highest praise in the industry, and his follow-up books have continued to receive positive reviews. His work spans a variety of styles, from an epic about a powerful sword and the story of creation, Soulwind, to a battle between a tiger and a robot in Southpaw, to a tale of grief and recovery intertwined with a biography of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) in The Barefoot Serpent, to a modern-day Western bank robbery in Spaghetti Western. He has also worked as an animator for Chuck Jones (1912–; most well known for Looney Tunes cartoons), Cartoon Network, Disney, and Pixar.

Discovers early love of comics Born Christopher Scott Morse in Mountain View, California, on December 4, 1973, Morse was always called ‘‘Scott.’’ His father was 381

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Volcanic Revolver (1999). Ancient Joe: El Bizarron (2002). The Magic Pickle (2002). The Barefoot Serpent (2003). Southpaw (2003). Visitations (2003). The Complete Soulwind (2004). Spaghetti Western (2004).

a Ford mechanic whose family moved to California from New York. His grandfather was originally from Hawaii and was partHawaiian. Morse’s mother grew up in Tennessee, and both of her parents grew up in the South. The Morse family, which included younger sister Katie and many animals, lived in Santa Clara, California, for all of Morse’s young life. Morse began reading and collecting comics while in the fourth grade. He traded with a school buddy to build up his collection of the adventures of such action heroes as G. I. Joe (the Marvel run), X-Men, and Daredevil. Morse related to Graphic Novelists (GN) that Frank Miller (1957–; see entry) has had a strong influence on his work; Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns came out when Morse was in fifth grade. Attracted to Frank Miller’s cover of the English translation of Kazuo Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, which started publication in 1987, Morse soon counted Koike (1936–; see entry) among his great influences. Kevin Eastman (1962–) and Peter Laird’s (1954–) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also ranked among Morse’s favorites, along with the many works by independent comic creators he discovered in high school and college. While in high school, Morse started to think about doing his own comic. These early ruminations started with the bare essence of an idea, of a sword, and what it could do. He wrote several fourpage installments, which were published in a fanzine (an amateur magazine publication by and for fans of a particular medium, genre, or movie/television production) called Graphic Enterprises Presents, published in Ohio. These installments, which would later become Soulwind, Morse thought were simplistic and immature. 382

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After graduating high school in 1992, Morse attended the California Institute of the Arts (called CalArts) for two years. He focused his academic work on animation, even though his first interest was comics. He related to GN that working in animation would be a safer career choice, given his desire to make some money, to survive. At CalArts, he was quickly informed that everything he knew about drawing was wrong. He found the course on life drawing the most helpful, and he also learned a great deal about the technical aspects of filmmaking and animation. In 1994, Chuck Jones’s studio hired Morse to work under animation design legend Maurice Noble (1910–2001), who would become a major influence on Morse’s work. Noble worked at Disney studios, on such films as Bambi (1942), Dumbo (1941), Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), and Pinocchio (1940); he worked as Chuck Jones’s main designer during the 1950s and 1960s, and he also designed the backgrounds for the animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). Morse told Jim Mahfood of Tastes Like Chicken that ‘‘when Maurice would train people, it wasn’t a matter of sitting you down and putting you through art school. You would do work, show it to him, and he’d tell you what was working and what wasn’t working. He’d let you fly on your own.’’ Morse decided to write a book about Noble, called Noble Boy, which he published in April 2006; he was designing it to resemble a board book with rhyming text, but was hoping that teens would read it and realize how much of Noble’s work they already know. Morse said that Noble taught him that one should have fun, above all else, and it would show in your work. Disheartened by the violence and gore in most mainstream media, Noble concentrated on using charm and timing and boldness as the tools to convey whatever one needs to. Resorting to shock value was a cheat, an easy way out of doing the real work, Morse learned from Noble.

Begins prolific career Throughout his time at Cal Arts and while working as an animator, Morse continued to develop his comic story Soulwind. The saga weaves together space adventures, fairy tales, Celtic mythology (mythology from ancient Britain), Arthurian legend (tales of Britain’s legendary King Arthur and his court), and hard-boiled romance into a tale that is at once epic and intimate. Morse told Tim O’Shea of Silver Bullet Comics that: ‘‘It started out as a device to play with different genres and different types of storytelling in one place, and became a big riddle about existence. Scott Morse

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Morse wrote the book Noble Boy about his mentor and animation design legend Maurice Noble, who taught him that one should have fun, above all else, and it would show in your work. Courtesy of Scott Morse.

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I’m happy that I was able to produce something that I feel is truly unlike anything else on the comics market while still playing with conventions and tools that are familiar to every comics reader.’’ In 1996, Dark Horse Comics offered to publish Soulwind. Soulwind first came out as comic book issues, starting in 1997, and was later collected into five volumes; in 2004, it was compiled into a large graphic novel. Morse’s work on Soulwind brought him a nomination for an Ignatz Award in 1997, for Breakout Talent. The Ignatz Awards are given out at the Alternative Press Expo (APE) for independent comics. Soulwind was also nominated several times for an Eisner Award, considered by many as the highest honor in the comics industry, for Best Serialized Story in 1998 (for the first four-issue story arc ‘‘The Kid from Planet Earth’’) and for Best New Series. And in 1999, Morse was nominated for the Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition. During the time that Morse was creating Soulwind, he was simultaneously working on several other stories, including Visitations and Volcanic Revolver. For Visitations, which originally published in 1998, Morse took inspiration from films by Japanese filmmakers Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon and Dreams) and Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan). Morse tells the story of a young woman who U X L Graphic Novelists

has lost her belief in God and her encounter with a pastor who tries to convince her otherwise by using stories picked randomly from a newspaper. Volcanic Revolver, which was published in 1999, is Morse’s salute to the gangster stories of the 1930s. Morse has hopes of adapting Volcanic Revolver into a film and wrote a screenplay for it. In 2002, Morse published two very different works: The Magic Pickle and Ancient Joe. The Magic Pickle, which was first published as a four-issue miniseries, is a comic romp, a satirical take on superheroes featuring produce gone bad, a heroic pickle, and a middle school girl who wants to be a superhero sidekick. The story is fun for all ages, and Morse visited elementary schools to talk about the book and give drawing lessons to the children. He told Andrew Wheeler for Ninth Art, ‘‘They all get it, the boys, the girls, the teachers, the parents. It’s amazing to see such a silly character translate to so many people.’’ Ancient Joe had several distinct inspirations; Morse had been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac (1922–), the author of On the Road, and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), the author of such novels as The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He took some of their old legends and wove them into a Cuban story to create his tale of Ancient Joe, who once tricked El Diablo (the Devil) and now sets out to rescue his dead wife from the Devil’s clutches. Morse continued his prolific output, publishing The Barefoot Serpent in 2003. For this book, Morse went back to his family roots in Hawaii. The book is a triumphant mix of style and story. In it, he wrote a short biography of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (who had inspired his earlier book, Visitations), using the biography to frame the story of a grieving family who come to Hawaii for a vacation after the suicide of their son. The daughter sees the legendary Night Marchers and meets a young local boy who takes her with him in jaunts around the island; the mother takes off on her own and ends up at a local shave ice hut, where the storekeeper befriends her. Each adventure reflects on various films by Kurosawa. Morse also carefully contrasted the artwork in the book, using color for the Kurosawa biography and black and white for the inside story, different textures of paper, and a design that Morse hoped would remind people of the Golden Book picture books they read as children. In addition, he researched Hawaiian legends and observed family and friends on several trips to Hawaii, so that the places, people, and the unique cadence of local speech patterns would be authentic. Scott Morse

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Drawing Inspiration Morse credits animation and film for giving his work specific qualities. Much of the design and style choices in his books stem from his animation background, he told Tim O’Shea of Silver Bullet Comics: ‘‘My background in animation as an art director is all about color choices, so when it comes to my own work in literature, I do my best to art direct every aspect in regards to how it might help strengthen the story. Some things need to be in color to help contrast points, or to emphasize a specific point. Mood and atmosphere are key ingredients in these decisions, too.’’ Certainly his books reflect these qualities, and more. Morse told Sequential Tart interviewer Anna Jellinek: ‘‘I try to draw inspiration from

everywhere . . . real life, people I know, books . . . and films really do play a big part in my creative process. I think it’s the structure of how they feed images to an audience at a preset rate of speed that really enforces narrative and how an audience interprets a story. Match that with a unique style and you’ve got a memorable way to tell a story.’’ Soulwind is a good example of his intentional use of different artistic and storytelling techniques. For each story thread in the epic, Morse used a unique look to the artwork and a different pacing to the story. To show differences among the story threads, he infused his art with such things as the dark mood of film noir; the light, airy look of a children’s book; and the thick brushstrokes of Japanese art.

In Southpaw, also published in 2003, Morse used color and page tones to help tell the story of a tiger boxer who defeats a robot and has to go on the run. He used orange ink on paper that was lighter or darker depending on the time of day as the story progressed. He again used influences from Hemingway, as well as from John Steinbeck (1902–1968), to create Southpaw the tiger; he set the story in surroundings reminiscent of the 1930s and 1940s, when hoboes still caught rides on freight trains. The book brought him the Attilio Michelluzzi Gran Premio, a prestigious Italian comics industry award.

Animates and illustrates Though Morse’s entrance into the comics industry brought immediate success, he never stopped working in animation. He created animation for Disney, Universal, Fox, Hanna Barbera, and the Cartoon Network on such series as Hercules, Xena, Cow and Chicken, and I Am Weasel. He served as art director for the pilot of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and also storyboarded some episodes in 2005. He developed his own project at the Cartoon Network in 2001, a pilot for a show called Ferret and 386

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Parrot. Though the show wasn’t picked up by the network, the pilot continued to be aired occasionally in the early 2000s. In addition to his own work, Morse has worked as an illustrator for others, and he’s done some stories for major comics publishers on their superhero titles. He wrote and illustrated an Elektra story for Marvel Comics and wrote and illustrated a sixty-four-page selfcontained story, Batman: Room Full of Strangers, about Jim Gordon, a Batman mainstay, for DC Comics. It was nominated for a Harvey Award for Best Single Issue or Story in 2005. He’s been illustrating Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man for DC Comics since 2004; in 2005, Plastic Man won an Eisner Award for Best Work for Younger Readers (bringing Morse his first Eisner Award). He also illustrated Steve Niles’s Little Book of Horror: Frankenstein with full color paintings. Morse remains a multi-tasker, simultaneously working on a number of projects. He told GN that he was working on projects ranging from a story for Goosebumps; a revision of Southpaw titled Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!; the aforementioned Noble Boy; the graphic novel Lyrical Whales; a graphic novel format autobiography called Along These Fiery Paths; a suspense story titled They Cast Long Shadows; and a superhero book, As Big as Earth, with Dean Haspiel. ‘‘I switch off on projects as I go so that I don’t get bogged down and bored,’’ he explained. ‘‘They’re all very different in style and tone, so it keeps things interesting.’’ He juggles all this work while also spending time with his wife and son, whom he calls his main projects. Morse had high hopes for the future of the comics industry and was gratified to see more and more libraries adding graphic novels to their collections. He told GN: ‘‘I think it’s a great avenue to expose potential readers to the art form, to help widen their horizons, and to expand the public perception of how we’re affecting literature on the whole. It’s not about sales alone, it’s about further cementing the impact on literature, and libraries are an incredible place to make that progress.’’ With his prolific output, Morse was poised to become a strong influence on how graphic novels would impact literature in the future.

For More Information Web Sites Beckett, Christopher. ‘‘A Conversation with Scott Morse on The Barefoot Serpent.’’ http://www.allenspiegelfinearts.com/crazyfish/interview_beckett. html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Scott Morse

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Cook, Brad. ‘‘A Q & A with Scott Morse.’’ CC Productions. http:// www.geocities.com/hollywood/3362/scott.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). Jellinek, Anna. ‘‘Swimming with the Crazyfishes: Scott Morse.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb01/morse.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Mahfood, Jim. ‘‘Scott Morse.’’ Tastes Like Chicken. http://www.tlchicken. com/view_story.php?ARTid=1057 (accessed on May 3, 2006). O’Shea, Tim. ‘‘Scott Morse: Champion of Many Tales.’’ Silver Bullet Comics. http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/features/10687809281764.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Scott Morse Biography.’’ Mars Import. http://www.marsimport.com/ display_creator?ID=451 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Wheeler, Andrew. ‘‘C. Scott Run: An Interview with Scott Morse.’’ Ninth Art. http://www.ninthart.com/printdisplay.php?article=255 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Additional information for this profile was obtained in an e-mail interview with Scott Morse in late August and early September of 2005.

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Ted Naifeh Born June 20, 1971 (Houston, Texas) American author, illustrator

Ted Naifeh was barely a teenager when he began to ponder the question of fitting in. Around the same age, he discovered comic books, a medium often devoted to telling stories about society’s outcasts. It was no wonder that the imaginative, artistic young man should be drawn to express himself through comic art. In the years that followed, Naifeh began to create his own graphic stories, and in those stories he continued to explore the questions of who feels a part of social groups, who feels that they do not belong, and why. In the process, he has also created several memorable and original comic heroines, powerful female protagonists who learn that expressing who they truly are is more important than fitting in. Ted Naifeh was born in Houston, Texas, on June 20, 1971, and raised in the California town of San Mateo, in the San Francisco Bay area. His father, Sam, was a psychiatrist and his mother, Karen, was a psychologist. They worried a bit when their son did not enjoy school or seem to fit into the academic structure of classes, sports, and social groups. However, Naifeh did show an interest in art from an early age, and his parents supported his talent by arranging art lessons with a private tutor when he was six. Art continued to be an important form of expression throughout Naifeh’s childhood, and as a teenager he would return to his tutor for further lessons.

‘‘They say that every comic book artist produces at least one hundred and fifty bad pages before any good ones. I suspect I had about a thousand.’’

Lessons about fitting in Naifeh attended public school in San Mateo for his elementary education and for high school. However, when he was thirteen and fourteen, he spent his junior high school years twenty miles north in San Francisco at a small private school with an enrollment of only sixty students. In this intimate setting, Naifeh felt for the first 389

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels (With John Arcudi) Machine (1994).

Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things (2003).

(With Serena Valentino) Gloom Cookie: Volume I (2001).

Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics (2003).

(With Dan Brereton) The Gunwitch: Outskirts of Doom (2001).

Courtney Crumrin: In the Twilight Kingdom (2004).

(With Ron Marz) Star Wars: Zam Wesell (2002).

(With Elmer Damaso) Unearthly (2005). (With Gary Whitta) Death, Jr (2005).

time that he was a part of the school community. This wouldn’t last long, however; when high school began, Naifeh returned to public school where he once again felt like an outcast, an artistic boy who was not included or accepted into the other students’ social groups. This experience did not make Naifeh bitter or angry so much as curious and confused. He knew that he was the same person he had always been, and he wondered a great deal about why he fit in so easily in one place and not the other. Naifeh’s friends at the private school had introduced him to comic books. The mid-1980s, when Naifeh was a junior high school student, marked a new age of comic book art, one that comic historian Jamie Coville calls the ‘‘Grim and Gritty Age.’’ Comic artists began to show the human side of superheroes, creating characters who were flawed and often brooding or tortured. Teenage readers like Naifeh were drawn to the realism of these imperfect heroes who expressed an all too familiar pain at being separate from the society of ‘‘normal’’ people. As Naifeh became an avid reader of such comics as Matt Wagner’s Mage, and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Watchmen, he also began to draw in their darkly elegant comic style. Naifeh’s comic artistry was also heavily influenced by Japanese anime (animated manga). Even as a toddler, he loved to watch UltraMan, a 1960s-era Japanese live-action television program about a giant, robotic superhero. Later, he watched Starblazers, one of the first anime science fiction cartoons, which originally aired in the United States in the late 1970s. Around the age of thirteen, as more anime became available on American television, 390

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Ted Naifeh began to incorporate the graceful, expressive Japanese style into his own art.

Becomes an artist In 1987, when he was sixteen years old, Naifeh got permission from his parents to quit high school. He had never been comfortable within the school system, and he had begun to feel that he was wasting his time there. A quick and intelligent student, he easily passed the General Educational Development (GED) test, giving him the equivalent of a high school degree. Naifeh’s parents provided him with a home and meals, but did not give him money or a car. This decision provided their son with security, but also with motivation to earn money. He took a job at a comic book store and began to show his work at comic conventions, looking for work as a comic artist. By the time Naifeh was nineteen he had begun to support himself as a comic book illustrator. He got his first job at Innovation Comics, an independent comic publisher. Innovation hired Naifeh to draw the panels for Shadow of the Torturer, a comic book adaptation of a science fiction novel by Gene Wolfe. Though Innovation had planned the adaptation to run as a six-issue comic series, it did not sell as well as hoped and was cancelled after three issues. Over the next several years, Naifeh moved into his own apartment in San Francisco and continued to seek out comic art jobs. Some of his most notable publications were Nicki Shadow, a cyberpunk, or computer-based science fiction comic, written and selfpublished by Eric Burnham; The Machine, published by Dark Horse; and ‘‘The Grease Trap,’’ a short comic story written by Joe R. Lansdale and published in several comic anthologies.

Designs video games Though Naifeh’s work was becoming better known, it was hard to survive on the income of a freelance illustrator. In addition to this, the comic industry, which had enjoyed a boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, suffered a sharp decline during the late 1990s. In 1997, as work on comic books became harder to find, Naifeh took a job at Accolade, a video game company. He started out drawing illustrations for games, and then began learning to do both two-dimensional and three-dimensional computer graphics. He would bring these computer skills back to his later work in comics. Ted Naifeh

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Naifeh did the artwork for many games, including a fantasy role playing game, a motorcycle racing game, and a video game adaptation of the film Terminator. Many computer games are developed and yet never published and released, and of all the games Naifeh worked on, only one was published, Slave Zero, a futuristic science fiction game involving giant battling robots. Though Naifeh enjoyed his work at Accolade, he missed working in comics, and, after a year at the video game company, he once again set his sights on comic book art. He began to talk with friend and comic writer Serena Valentino about creating a book together. Valentino wrote a comic story that explored the eerie fantasy world of the Goth subculture, and Naifeh drew the illustrations. Goths, who take their name from the dark and mystical eighteenth-century gothic literature style, are rebellious youth who combine a strict, traditional romanticism with a modern alienation from the mainstream of society. Naifeh himself had a bit of the Goth fascination with the dark and mystical side of life, and his clear, expressive style was perfect for Valentino’s quirky characters. The resulting comic, Gloom Cookie, first published in 1998 by Slave Labor Graphics, surprised its creators by becoming an almost instant hit, selling especially well among young Goths who were pleased to see their world both satirized and honored in comic form. Sweet, funny, and a bit scary, Gloom Cookie (Goth slang for girl) tells the adventures of Goth girl Lex and her friends and monsters. After drawing six episodes and a collected volume of Gloom Cookie, Naifeh began to feel a strong desire to tell his own comic stories. Energized by the success of Gloom Cookie, he left the series after the first collected volume was published and devoted himself to creating his own comic series. He developed his ideas and created mini-comics to take to local comic conventions to try to find a publisher.

Writes ‘‘an EVIL children’s book’’ After several tries, he finally succeeded in 2002, when Oni Press agreed to publish Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, the story of an eleven-year-old social misfit who goes to live with her uncle Aloysius, a reserved old gentleman who happens to be a warlock, a type of demon. Under his stern but tender guidance, Courtney begins to learn about witchcraft, magic, and the creatures of the night. 392

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Goth: The Attitude Behind Lex and Courtney In 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was published, becoming the model for a type of literature called ‘‘gothic.’’ Gothic novels are filled with gloom, mystery, and a romantic fascination with the supernatural. During the 1980s, as rebellious young people tried to separate themselves from what they saw as the artificial and materialistic views of mainstream society, they began to take on the dark, brooding tone associated with nineteenth century gothic novels. Goths usually dress in black, often imitating Victorian or medieval styles. They may wear heavy eye makeup and dye their hair black in order to attain their antisocial look.

However, true Goth represents much more than a fashion to its followers. It is a subculture that values mysticism and promotes tolerance, creativity, and challenging traditional gender roles. Many Goths place great importance on artistic expression, and that expression often reflects an interest in the mystical and supernatural. Vampire stories and fairy stories are both part of Goth culture. This attraction to magic and the dark side of life has sometimes led those outside of the Goth world to label Goths as violent, weird, and obsessive. However, most Goths value gentleness and nonviolence far more than aggression and anger.

‘‘What you should know about Courtney Crumrin is that it’s a children’s book, but an EVIL children’s book,’’ Naifeh told Mia McHatton in an interview on the Sequential Tart Web site. Courtney is not a ‘‘good witch,’’ but a hostile outcast who is filled with rage at those who exclude her. As her story progresses through the three collected volumes, Courtney’s relationship with her uncle deepens and she begins to grow beyond her identity as an angry outcast to learn where and how she fits into the world. Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things was followed by Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics (2003) and Courtney Crumrin: In the Twilight Kingdom (2004), becoming more popular with each publication. Oni placed the comics in bookstores, where they were bought not only by the boys who usually buy comic books, but also by large numbers of girls, and even by teachers and parents. Girls have been drawn to Courtney because she is one of very few female comic heroes, and Naifeh chose to write about her for just that reason. Naifeh felt that one of the reasons that the comic industry did not grow was that most comic writers and publishers ignored their female audience. He believed that more girls would read comics if there were Ted Naifeh

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more interesting and realistic comic heroines. Traditionally, comics have been directed at a male audience, and the few female comic characters that were introduced were mainly drawn to emphasize their sexual nature. By making Courtney only eleven, Naifeh wished to create a strong female lead character that was not sexualized in any way. Male and female readers alike can identify with Courtney, and many have eagerly followed her adventures. In 2005, Fox 2000 bought the rights to make a film version of Courtney Crumrin. Naifeh continues to explore innovative ideas for comic series and graphic novels, always seeking a different angle from which to explore the role of the misfit in society. A flexible and skilled artist, he has illustrated for other writers, written and illustrated his own work, and, in a Seven Seas publication titled Unearthly, he has written the story to be drawn by another artist. In an asyet-unpublished new series, he tells the story of another girl hero, this time a well-adjusted adolescent who goes to bed in her conventional boarding school and wakes as the captain of a pirate ship. Polly and the Pirates tells of the voyages of this reluctant adventurer, who, unlike most of Naifeh’s heroes, must leave her comfortable life and learn how to be an outcast.

For More Information Periodicals ‘‘Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things: Review.’’ Publishers Weekly (October 20, 2003): p. 19. Web Sites Coville, Jamie. ‘‘The History of Comic Books.’’ TheComicBooks.com. http://www.collectortimes.com/~comichistory/frames.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Epstein, Daniel Robert. ‘‘Illustrator/Author Ted Naifeh.’’ Suicide Girls. http://suicidegirls.com/words/Ted+Naifeh/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). McHatton, Mia. ‘‘Things That Go Bump in the Night: Ted Naifeh.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/dec03/tnaifeh. shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Ted Naifeh Comics. http://www.tednaifeh.com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Information for this profile was also obtained through an interview with Ted Naifeh on September 30, 2005.

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Jim Ottaviani. ª Jim Ottaviani; courtesy of G.T. Labs.

Jim Ottaviani

‘‘We are living in the best times ever for good comics, all over the world.’’

Born November 16, 1963 (Burlingame, California) American author, librarian

Midway through Jim Ottaviani’s 2004 graphic novel/historical biography Suspended in Language: Neils Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped, Danish physicist Neils Bohr (1885–1962) takes a colleague named Le´on Rosenfeld (1904–1974) aside to explain to him some of the principles of quantum physics, a very complicated theory about the structure of atoms. As Rosenfeld sits at a table listening, Bohr walks in circles around him. Leland Purvis’s illustrations of Ottaviani’s words take the reader directly into the Rosenfeld’s experience of Bohr’s lecture: Rosenfeld spins in his seat, trying to follow Bohr, and the text narrating the scientist’s reaction spins around the page, forcing the reader to spin the book, round, round, then round again. Finally, the spinning stops and Bohr himself speaks: ‘‘Anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum physics without feeling dizzy hasn’t understood the first thing about it.’’ 395

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Two-Fisted Science (illustrated by Mark Badger, Donna Barr, Sean Bieri, Paul Chadwick, Gene Colan, Guy Davis, Colleen Doran, David Lasky, Steve Lieber, Lin Lucas, Bernie Mireault, Scott Roberts, Scott Saavedra, and Rob Walton) (1997). Dignifying Science (illustrated by Donna Barr, Mary Fleener, Ramona Fradon, Stephanie Gladden, Robert Gregory, Lea Hernandez, Carla Speed McNeil, Linda Medley, Marie Severin, Jen Sorensen, and Anne Timmons) (1999).

Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb (illustrated by Janine Johnston, Steve Lieber, Vince Locke, Bernie Mireault, and Jeff Parker) (2001). Suspended in Language: Neils Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped (illustrated by Leland Purvis, with additional illustrations by Jay Hosler, Roger Langridge, Steve Leialoha, Linda Medley, and Jeff Parker) (2003). Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards (illustrated by Big Time Attic) (2005).

Similarly, anyone who thinks that graphic novels about quantum physics can’t be gripping entertainment hasn’t encountered the work of Jim Ottaviani. Beginning in 1997 with Two-Fisted Science and continuing with works like Fallout, which explores the politics and science behind the creation of the atomic bomb, and Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards, a fictionalized account of the early days of paleontology (scientific study of fossils and ancient life), Ottaviani—aided by top-notch illustrators—has been turning stories of scientific discovery into fascinating, even dramatic, graphic novels that have helped to demonstrate the flexibility and intelligence of comics. Ottaviani’s works, some of which have been assigned reading in school science classes, provide proof that comics can do much more than recount the battles of superheroes.

Science comes first Jim Ottaviani took a long and winding path to becoming a graphic novelist. He was born on November 16, 1963, in Burlingame, California, a city just south of San Francisco. His dad was fresh out of the navy and working as a salesman, and his mom was a schoolteacher. By the time Jim was six years old, the family, which grew to include a younger sister and two younger brothers, 396

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left the West Coast and moved to Clarendon Hills, Illinois, a suburb southwest of Chicago. In an interview with Graphic Novelists (GN), Ottaviani acknowledged that he had a pretty terrific childhood: ‘‘It was all pretty carefree: I went to school, played in the band, played little league baseball, that kind of stuff. The only trouble I had was the usual stuff like my parents not letting me drive a car when I was eight years old . . . .’’ Though he spent a lot of time outdoors, as he grew into a teenager Ottaviani admitted that he was ‘‘sort of a geek, the kid who liked math and science and was reasonably good at it.’’ He was, even as a teen, developing some of the interests that would guide his future work. On the one hand, he was interested in comics; he loved the Peanuts comic strip with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, but it was Steve Ditko’s (1927–) Spider-Man stories that really got him hooked on comics. He recalled in an interview posted on the Sequential Tart Web site his reaction to getting a new copy of Spider-Man: ‘‘It was the dead of winter, and I started reading it in the back seat of the car on the way home [from the store] and stayed in that back seat long after we’d arrived. I sat on the cold vinyl huddled in my parka ’cuz the garage wasn’t heated (and my mom didn’t leave the engine running . . .) until I’d finished reading ‘The End of Spider-Man!’ ’’ On the other hand, he was also interested in science, and he recalls being fascinated by National Geographic stories about energy and nuclear fusion. As he finished high school in 1981, it was the National Geographic side of his childhood reading that won out in shaping his career. Inspired to study engineering in part by high school math teacher Paul Halac, Ottaviani entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1986, he went directly to the University of Michigan, where he received his master’s degree in nuclear engineering. He went to work as a nuclear engineer, but quickly grew to dislike it. He told Julie Hinds of the Detroit Free Press: ‘‘There were no new power plants to build . . . . All I was doing as an engineer was patching up plants to meet current safety standards.’’ This meant long stretches of travel to nuclear plants scattered across the northeast, and many nights in hotel rooms. By 1990, Ottaviani had enough of nuclear engineering. After finishing a second master’s degree in the Information and Library Science program at the University of Michigan in 1992, he embarked on his second career as a librarian. For a man who describes himself as someone who craves information of all sorts, Jim Ottaviani

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it was a dream job. He began as a librarian in the mechanical engineering department at his alma mater, rose to head of reference in the Engineering Library, and since 1996 he has been head of reference in the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library at the University of Michigan.

An explosive idea Ottaviani had liked comics as a kid; as an adult, he grew to love them. Beginning in the 1980s—when comics publishing began the resurgence that helped feed the graphic novel boom of the 1990s and beyond—he began reading the superhero works of Frank Miller (1957–; see entry) and Alan Moore (1953–; see entry). Later, he read the genre-busting works of artists like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Harvey Pekar (1939–), and Joe Sacco (1960–; see entries). He wrote reviews of new works for comics journals and talked about comics with his friends, including Steve Lieber, a comics illustrator who lived nearby. One night, he and Lieber were talking about a particularly dramatic discussion between two physicists in a book of history they had both read, called The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. Suddenly, they both had an idea, as he recalled in an interview on the Broken Frontier Web site. ‘‘[This dramatic moment] would be great as a book, a movie, a play, something,’’ he thought. Turning to Lieber, he asked: ‘‘What if I wrote this up as a comic strip? Would you illustrate it?’’ Lieber said yes, and a new career opened up for Jim Ottaviani. From the beginning, Ottaviani knew he wouldn’t be a comics artist who did the illustrations for his own stories. He just wasn’t that good at drawing. But he had a bunch of interesting stories about scientists and a growing love of writing. With Lieber’s advice, Ottaviani began to put some of these stories into words, in short condensed comic scripts that showed the drama of scientific discovery. He also began to locate illustrators for those stories, including renowned artists such as Paul Chadwick (1957–; creator of Concrete; see entry) and Colleen Doran (1963–; A Distant Soil; see entry). With the help of a grant from the Xeric Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle creator Peter A. Laird (1954–) to help people self-publish their comics, Ottaviani was able to produce his stories and publish them, in 1997, as Two-Fisted Science. In fact, he created his own company to publish his works, called G.T. Labs (a reference to General Techtronics Laboratories, where the comic character Peter Parker was bitten by a spider and transformed into Spider-Man). 398

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The Art of Collaboration Any graphic novelist who is not also an artist faces a key question: how to make sure that the ideas that he or she devised are communicated clearly by the art. For Jim Ottaviani, this question is essential, since he writes his text with a very clear idea of how he wants the pictures to look. His solution is to provide the artist with detailed visual direction: along with the written script, he provides photographs, drawings, scientific formulas, and his own stick-figure illustrations showing exactly how he wants his scenes to play out. In the scene from Suspended in Language that is intended to bring the reader to a point of dizziness, Ottaviani provided step-by-step directions to create the effect that he desired. In this sense, Ottaviani is the detail-minded director, ensuring that his creative vision is realized.

Ultimately, however, Ottaviani does not create the art, and the artist’s own vision and talent has a decisive influence on the final product. ‘‘One of the nice things about doing comics, and doing them collaboratively,’’ Ottaviani said in an interview with Broken Frontier, ‘‘is I don’t necessarily have to have a perfect handle on the characters, because the artist will bring things into the story that maybe I didn’t see.’’ In works like Fallout, in which different artists illustrated various sections of the book, the characters take on additional depth because of the multiple renderings. The result, Ottaviani relates, is often ‘‘a happy surprise,’’ as his collaborators allow him to see a side of the story he hadn’t even imagined.

Ottaviani’s first book was received by reviewers as an innovation—it was the first comic about scientists—but for Ottaviani, combining words and pictures was perfectly suited to science. ‘‘Science is very visual,’’ he told a Broken Frontier interviewer. ‘‘If you read any scientific journal . . . [there are] pictures in every single one of them. . . . So it’s actually a very natural fit. Scientists think and work visually, and comics, of course, is a very visual medium.’’ His second book was similar to the first in that it told biographical stories about scientists, but it had one important twist: Dignifying Science was all about female scientists. Reviewers were mixed in their opinions of the book. Discover magazine praised Ottaviani’s stories about Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958; a pioneer in DNA research) and Lise Meitner (1878–1968; who contributed to the understanding of nuclear fission), noting that ‘‘it’s a tribute to Ottaviani’s breezy style that one wants to dig into those references and learn a little nuclear physics.’’ Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, complained that ‘‘this collection almost Jim Ottaviani

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entirely misses the mark, failing to tell clear, interesting stories or to impart much useful information about the remarkable scientists it covers.’’ Ottaviani acknowledged that some of the early work was uneven. ‘‘In the first one,’’ he told GN, ‘‘there were experiments that didn’t work so well, and some that have really stood up.’’

Creates longer, more intricate works More impressive than his first two collections are Ottaviani’s more fully realized creations of Fallout, Suspended in Language, and Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards. Readers and reviewers noted the strain in adapting scientific ideas to the short stories of the earlier works, as some of the material was just too complicated to fit into such a small package. But Ottaviani told GN that it is not easy to convince an illustrator to take on a full-length graphic novel-type project: ‘‘You have to recognize that while writing 200 pages of script for a graphic novel is hard work, doing 200 pages of illustration is really hard work. The illustrator always does the heaviest lifting in this kind of a project.’’ Luckily, Ottaviani was able to turn his experience working with multiple illustrators into one of the most fascinating features of his book, called Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb (2001). Fallout tells the story of one of the most exciting scientific and technological accomplishments of the twentieth century: the construction of the atomic bomb. But Ottaviani’s script does not focus just on bomb-building. Instead, in four chapters and a series of prologues and interludes, Ottaviani explores the complicated motivations and thinking of those scientists who pushed the boundaries of physics in the years before World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan), engaged in bomb construction as part of the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project during the war, and endured the antiCommunist hysteria that pitted scientists and friends against each other in the years after the war. Ottaviani weaves his own reconstructions of historical events with actual historical documents to create a narrative that blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, and his ample notes at the end of the book point readers to the best sources for learning more about the period. Adding to the complexity and interest of the book, Ottaviani used seven different illustrators to draw the sections of the book (Janine Johnston, Chris Kemple, Steve Lieber, Vince Lock, Bernie Mireault, Eddy Newell, and Jeff Parker). Each of the illustrators 400

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Scene from Jim Ottaviani’s 2004 influential graphic novel/historical biography Suspended in Language, highlighting the work of Danish physicist Neils Bohr. ª Jim Ottaviani; courtesy of G.T. Labs.

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brought his or her own unique artistic style and interpretation of the central characters in the book, especially the lean, tall physicist Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), perhaps the most complicated figure in the book. These multiple perspectives served to advance Ottaviani’s story. ‘‘I wanted to use multiple points of view, setting, and mood,’’ he explained to GN. ‘‘In Fallout, each section of the book has a different mood and takes place in a different location and I wanted to heighten that awareness.’’ Taken together, the shifts in illustrator, setting, time, and even narrative voice all aid the reader in comprehending the political and scientific complexity of this period in time. According to Detroit Free Press reviewer Julie Hinds, ‘‘By combining words and pictures, the book gives a freshness to the ethical and technical problems faced by the scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. It’s as rip-roaring in its own way as Spider-Man battling Doc Ock.’’

Tackles quantum physics In Fallout, Ottaviani tackled a complex subject in the science and politics behind the making of the atomic bomb. Yet the topic of his next book, Suspended in Language, is even more complex. Not only did Ottaviani want to provide the life story of Neils Bohr, one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, he also wanted to offer an introduction on quantum physics, a branch of physics that attempts to correct and unify many earlier theories about the behavior of matter at the atomic and subatomic levels. Bohr is the ideal vehicle through which to tell this story, for he worked and argued with many of the most important scientists of his day, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and many others. Through their conversations—expertly illustrated by Leland Purvis, who captures human emotions and scientific formulas with equal skill—readers come to know both the men and the science. ‘‘The best thing about Purvis,’’ wrote Carol Fox on the Sequential Tart Web site, ‘‘is how he manages to convey a lifetime of relentless trial and error on each face he draws.’’ Reviewers of the book exulted in Ottaviani and Purvis’s triumph at portraying such a difficult topic. Writing for Time magazine, Andrew Arnold commented that ‘‘the pacing of the book is such that even if you don’t totally get, say, the importance of Planck’s Constant or even what it is, Ottaviani’s enthusiasm still makes you excited about it.’’ Ottaviani constantly pushes the reader’s capacity to understand the physics; then, just as that capacity is reached, he offers a helping hand. For example, after one particularly impressive stretch of 402

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physics, Ottaviani says directly to the reader: ‘‘So it’s OK if you didn’t get it. Nobody gets great truths. As Bohr would (and did) say: ‘When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry.’’’ For his part, Ottaviani says that mostly he does understand quantum physics, about as much as anybody can, anyway. But he recognizes that the demands of the graphic novel form call for meeting the reader halfway. ‘‘I’m not trying to write textbooks,’’ he told Hinds. ‘‘The primary goal is to entertain and tell a good story.’’ Ottaviani’s next work, Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards (released in October 2005), represented a real departure from the world of physics that had occupied him for several years previous. Ottaviani described the book to Broken Frontier: ‘‘It’s a story about . . . two scientists who, as we’re pushing out west as a country after the Civil War (1861–65; war in which the Union [the North, who were opposed to slavery] defeated the Confederacy [the South, who were in favor of slavery]), start to battle over who can get the most fossil bones and name the most species, and basically become the ‘most famoust-est’ of them all. They’re collectors in the worst sense of the word. They both want it all, and they both want it to the exclusion of everybody else, and they’re willing to do bad things, and hire bad people to do more bad things [to] get the most fossils, and that’s the story.’’ The book is illustrated by Big Time Attic, an illustrators’ cooperative formed by Zander Cannon, Shad Petosky, and Kevin Cannon. As this book prepared to print, Ottaviani was already at work on his next project, about the technology behind the levitation illusions (which made it appear that a person was being lifted by supernatural means) that were so popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Ottaviani loves to write, joking to GN that he gets so immersed in his work that his wife, Kat, will remind him that it’s 3:00 in the morning but he’s lost somewhere in the nineteenth century. He’s not ready to give up his full-time job at the university library, however. For now, he is able to finish a book in about a year and a half, and by running his publishing venture himself, he can concentrate on working directly with illustrators to get the combination of words and pictures just right. As for the future, there are still many science stories yet to be told. Ottaviani told Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon: ‘‘The capacity for science—done individually and in groups or expeditions . . . —is one of the things that makes us human, and has a great potential for changing our collective lot for the better.’’ With Ottaviani to tell the stories, fans can look forward to more engaging graphic novels of scientific discovery. Jim Ottaviani

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For More Information Periodicals Hunter, C. Bruce. ‘‘Review of Two-Fisted Science.’’ Science Activities vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 45. Powell, Corey S. ‘‘Review of Dignifying Science.’’ Discover (February 2000): 84; (April 2002): 72; (April 2005): 78. ‘‘Review of Dignifying Science.’’ Publishers Weekly (December 13, 1999): 76.

Web Sites Applewhite, Ashton. ‘‘The Hero Checks Her Oscilloscope: Jim Ottaviani’s Comic Books Tell True Tales of Scientists and Engineers.’’ IEEE Spectrum Online. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp? ArticleId=p020302 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Arnold, Andrew. ‘‘Unified Comix Theory.’’ Time. http://www.time.com/ time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,735726,00.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Atchison, Lee. ‘‘The Beauty of Science.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www. sequentialtart.com/archive/jan00/ottaviani.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Atchison, Lee. ‘‘Succumbing to Pheromones.’’ Sequential Tart. http:// www.sequentialtart.com/archive/oct01/ottaviani.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Figuracion, Neil. ‘‘A Look Inside the Lab—A Genre Bender Interview with Jim Ottaviani.’’ Broken Frontier. http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/ details.php?id=221 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Fox, Carol. ‘‘Review of Suspended in Language.’’ Sequential Tart. http:// www.sequentialtart.com/reports.php?ID=3455&issue=2004-09-01 (accessed on May 3, 2006). G.T. Labs. http://www.gt-labs.com (accessed on May 3, 2006). Ottaviani, Jim. ‘‘Comics, Art and Science: Telling Stories with Pictures (That Don’t Move).’’ Comicartville. http://www.comicartville.com/comics science.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). Tillusz, Dana. ‘‘Jim Ottaviani.’’ ComicReaders.com. http://www.comic readers.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=712 (accessed on May 3, 2006). Watson, Rich. ‘‘Droppin’ Science: The Jim Ottaviani Q&A Part 1.’’ Fresh. http://www.orcafresh.net/Watson/wt60402.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Additional information for this profile was obtained in an interview with Jim Ottaviani on August 22, 2005. 404

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Harvey Pekar. ª Fred Prouser/Reuters/Corbis.

Harvey Pekar

‘‘I always had a plan. The payoff was just learning and having that knowledge.’’

Born 1939 (Cleveland, Ohio) American author

Harvey Pekar pulls stories from his own seemingly ordinary existence, finding various graphic artists, some of them quite well known, to illustrate them. His works are extremely realistic, and many of them avoid a strong direction or storyline, and instead reproduce episodes from his own life or those of co-workers at the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital where Pekar worked for thirty-five years. Little known for decades except among comics fans who appreciated his unusual work, Pekar found a degree of fame with the 2003 release of American Splendor, a filmed version of Pekar’s annual comic book series. Pekar’s comics seem simple. But journalists and critics have hung various labels on Pekar over the years, and the assortment points to the originality and subtlety of his work. Eric Olsen of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called Pekar ‘‘the Curmudgeon of the 405

Best-Known Works American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (1986). More American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (1987). The New American Splendor Anthology (1991). (With Joyce Brabner) Our Cancer Year (1994). Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill (2003). The Quitter (2005).

Cuyahoga’’ (referring to the river that runs through the city), and ‘‘curmudgeonly’’—ill-tempered or negative—has been an adverb often applied to both the man and his publications. Heidi MacDonald noted on the Comicon Web site that these attributes offered qualities to his writing that added more than detracted from Pekar’s appeal. ‘‘Curmudgeonly, gloomy, and sometimes obsessive,’’ MacDonald wrote, ‘‘Pekar’s objectivity about his own shortcomings makes him a strangely sympathetic character, and his nonjudgmental observation of the ordinary people around him shows that he is, above all, a naturalist.’’ Whereas comic books before Pekar’s had been concerned with fantasy, Pekar became one of the first to write graphic novels that dealt with real life. Andrew D. Arnold of Time called Pekar a ‘‘working-class intellectual,’’ a term Pekar sometimes used himself. In addition to his graphic novels, Pekar wrote essays on jazz, studied world history, and delivered commentaries on a National Public Radio outlet.

Odd man out Pekar’s father was a Polish Jewish immigrant who spoke Yiddish (a Jewish language) and called his son ‘‘Herschel’’ rather than the more American name of Harvey. Pekar was born in Cleveland in 1939, and during the first part of his childhood his family lived in Cleveland’s rough Kinsman-Mount Pleasant area. They later moved to the suburb of Shaker Heights. He didn’t get along with local kids in either area. He told Carlo Wolff of the Denver Post, 406

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‘‘[I was] alienated from my neighborhood. Initially it was because I was a white kid in an all-black neighborhood, and I had trouble in the second one because these guys just wouldn’t accept me, wouldn’t speak to me all summer long. To this day I don’t know why.’’ Pekar’s book The Quitter looked back on this period of his life and its effect on his future thinking. Pekar acted out his frustrations, picking fights with other kids and often winning them. The Quitter did not gloss over his bullying side, and, in fact, all of Pekar’s works in which he writes about himself are straightforward treatments revealing a personality that could be disagreeable or worse. Pekar’s attitudes have roots in his unhappy childhood. ‘‘I wasn’t at ease with myself,’’ he recalled to Wolff. ‘‘At a pretty early stage in my life, I got to a point where I would wake up and the first thing that would hit me was, ‘What headaches will I have to deal with today?’ . . . It was always, what’s next? With my mother, I tell her I’m doing OK, she says, ‘That’s all right, the next Hitler is right around the corner.’’’

Turns love of jazz into writing gigs Never enthusiastic about school, Pekar nonetheless realized that he had writing ability and as a teenager began working on some short stories. His gift took many years to mature, however. In 1957, he joined the U.S. Navy but, as he recounted in The Quitter, was discharged after a strange episode in which he could not figure out how, or refused, to do laundry. He returned to Cleveland and worked in a variety of jobs that included janitor, elevator operator, and clerk. In the late 1950s, he attended Case Western Reserve University. Pekar began to immerse himself in modern jazz and hitchhiked to New York to hear more. Upon returning to Cleveland, Pekar began to make extra money by writing about jazz. His first paycheck as a writer came around 1959 for a jazz review, and he published many more over the next few decades. His music writing appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and in the Cleveland magazine Urban Dialect, but also in national publications such as Down Beat, Jazz Times, and the prestigious Evergreen Review. An essay he wrote for a journal called Coda on renowned trumpeter Miles Davis’s music of the 1960s was reprinted in 1997 in the book A Miles Davis Reader. Jazz enthusiasts know Pekar primarily as a music critic rather than as a writer of graphic novels. Harvey Pekar

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Mundane job helps bring fame Pekar’s success as a jazz critic did not bring in a living wage, and for most of his life he would struggle financially. He married and divorced twice before meeting his third wife, activist and graphic journalist Joyce Brabant, and adopting a daughter, Danielle. Around 1965, Pekar found stability if not prosperity when he landed a job as a file clerk at a Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland. The work might seem monotonous for a creatively oriented person, but it fit Pekar well. ‘‘It was a simple job, and I was good at it,’’ he told Michael Sangiacomo of the Plain Dealer. ‘‘I didn’t dislike the job. I became the guy doctors relied on when they wanted to find something. It felt good.’’ He felt little job stress and had plenty of energy left over for reading, writing, and continuing a lifelong process of self-education. ‘‘I would read about Western Europe. I would read about Britain in the eighteenth century, then I’d read about France in the eighteenth century,’’ he told Comicon. ‘‘I always had a plan. The payoff was just learning and having that knowledge.’’ But the VA job was more than a paycheck that allowed Pekar to pursue creative activities. MacDonald wrote that ‘‘in looking over Pekar’s life it becomes apparent that part of the reason for his fame and success is because of his having a mundane job, not in spite of it.’’ Indeed, the small struggles of his co-workers such as Mr. Boats, an older African American man whose speech was laced with poetry, often furnished material for his writing. The ordinary texture of working life showed up in Pekar’s tales. Underground artist R. Crumb (1943–) wrote, according to Los Angeles Times writer Robin V. Russin, that ‘‘Pekar has proven once and for all that even the most seemingly dreary and monotonous of lives is filled with poignancy and heroic struggle.’’

Illustrations enliven Pekar’s writing It was Crumb who led Pekar into the world of comics. The two met in the 1960s, at about the time that hippies and other dropouts from conventional society began to discover Crumb, and Pekar penned some essays about Crumb’s work. Crumb in turn did drawings for a Pekar short story in 1972, and the two discussed a comic book based on Pekar’s own life. The first American Splendor comics appeared soon after that, some of them with drawings by Crumb, and was published annually beginning in 1976. Pekar issued American Splendor himself for many years; finally, in the early 1990s, Dark Horse Comics picked it up. 408

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Scene from Harvey Pekar’s comic American Splendor displayed at the after party for the premiere of the film based on the comic. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images.

Other artists also worked on American Splendor in its early years, and one of the most distinctive features of the comic over time has been the variety of artists Pekar has chosen to illustrate his words. The effect was to put different lenses to the ordinary events on which Pekar focused. Nearly two dozen artists in addition to Crumb have worked with Pekar; the list includes Chester Brown, Greg Budgett, Sue Cavey, Gary Dumm (an especially frequent contributor), William Fogg, Drew Friedman, Dean Haspiel (who drew The Quitter), Rebecca Huntington, Paul Mavrides, Val Mayerik, Alan Moore (1953–; see entry), Spain Rodriguez, Gerry Shamray, Carole Sobocinski, Frank Stack, J. R. Stats, Colin Upton, Ed Wesolowski, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, and Mark Zingarelli. Harvey Pekar

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American Splendor got off to a slow start. ‘‘The early and middle seventies—what a lonely, awful time for me!’’ Pekar wrote in the 2001 issue of the comic, looking back at the early years. ‘‘It seems like it was always snowing and I was always looking out the window by myself.’’ But word spread, first among comics fans and then among observers of new trends in popular culture. From time to time, Pekar managed to attract national notice, even though the idea of graphic art as a vehicle for anything other than superhero or fantasy concepts was still a novelty for all but devoted readers. In 1987, American Splendor won an American Book Award. One of Pekar’s admirers was television host David Letterman, who had Pekar as a guest six times on his Late Night program in the 1980s. True to form, Pekar managed to aggravate Letterman by arguing with him vigorously on the air. He was eventually banned from the show after emphasizing the links between Letterman’s NBC network and its corporate parent General Electric; he even wore an ‘‘On Strike Against NBC’’ T-shirt to one appearance. All these incidents showed up in American Splendor.

Turns horror of cancer into poignant story Many American Splendor segments focus on mundane events such as Pekar family outings, but his 1994 book Our Cancer Year deals with a more serious episode: Pekar’s 1990 cancer (lymphoma) diagnosis and subsequent chemotherapy treatment. Co-written with Joyce Brabner and illustrated by Frank Stack, Our Cancer Year presents an unflinching look at the chemotherapy process and the resulting strains in Pekar’s family life. Part of the book leading up to Pekar’s diagnosis dealt with the tortured process by which Pekar and Brabner acquired their first house. ‘‘The book (and their marriage) is distinguished by Brabner’s great tenderness and determination in the middle of Pekar’s medical nightmare,’’ wrote Publishers Weekly, and Our Cancer Year was showered with rave reviews in leading publications. Pekar occasionally took a break from his own existence and wrote several biographical comics, such as Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill. McNeill was a Vietnam veteran, one of Pekar’s VA hospital co-workers. Pekar inspired younger artists to create comics based on their own lives, and he helped shape the everyday subject matter of alternative comics. In 2005, African American comics author Keith Knight, author of the syndicated K Chronicles, visited Pekar in Cleveland. Afterward Knight paid him homage in a comic that 410

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showed Pekar saying, ‘‘Yeah, the movie helped me sell some comics . . . so it worked out.’’ The movie to which Pekar referred was American Splendor (2003), which finally propelled Pekar to a rank among the most famous writers of graphic novels. American Splendor made an impact even on viewers who had never heard of Harvey Pekar. Actor Paul Giamatti (1967–) played Pekar. Pekar himself also appeared in the film, as an alter ego who converses with the Giamatti/Pekar character. Directed by Bob Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, the film had an experimental style that perhaps owed something to the innovations of Pekar’s successors in the world of graphic literature: documentary-style fact, fiction, interviews, and other media were all mixed together. Pekar liked the film, which was both a rendering of the American Splendor books and an introduction of sorts to Pekar himself. ‘‘WOW!’’ he told Eric Olsen of the Plain Dealer, ‘‘That was really innovative the way they mixed acted portions and documentary footage and animation and cartoons, and double casting some roles. Great.’’ He recounted his experiences with the film in a new book, Our Movie Year, and American Splendor earned awards at the prestigious Sundance and Cannes film festivals. Living with his family in the hip suburb of Cleveland Heights, Harvey Pekar was finally on a roll. He made frequent appearances on college campuses, and he began his work with public radio station WKSU. The Quitter gained wide attention, and major publishers contracted for new Pekar books. Typically pessimistic, however, Pekar looked toward new problems in the future. ‘‘Yeah, yeah,’’ he answered when asked by Don Kaplan of the New York Post whether the American Splendor film had made his books more popular. ‘‘But I’m wondering how long it’s going to last. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.’’

For More Information Periodicals Arnold, Andrew D. ‘‘Draw Your Life as a Comic.’’ Time (April 27, 2001). Olsen, Eric, ‘‘Film’s Success Hasn’t Spoiled This Everyman.’’ The Plain Dealer (December 15, 2004): p. E1. Russin, Robin V. Los Angeles Times Book Review (July 12, 1987): pp. 1, 11. Sangiacomo, Michael. ‘‘Curmudgeon’s Life a Blessing and a ‘Curse’ Everything Bothers Pekar Except Fame.’’ The Plain Dealer (October 5, 2005): p. E1. Harvey Pekar

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Wolff, Carlo. ‘‘A Life in Comic-Book Form: Quirky Harvey Pekar Suffered Early, Hard Twists.’’ Denver Post (October 9, 2005): p. F11.

Web Sites ‘‘About Harvey Pekar.’’ Harvey Pekar. http://www.harveypekar.com (accessed on May 3, 2006). Kaplan, Don. ‘‘Harvey Pekar.’’ New York Post Online. http://www.nypost. com/entertainment/53571.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). MacDonald, Heidi. ‘‘The Splendor of Harvey Pekar.’’ Comicon. http://www. comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=next_topic&f=36&t=003134& go=newer (accessed on May 3, 2006). Wolk, Douglas. ‘‘Notes from a Famous Nobody.’’ Salon. http://www. salon.com/books/review/2005/10/06/pekar (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Wendy and Richard Pini WENDY PINI Born June 4, 1951 (San Francisco, California) American author, illustrator RICHARD PINI Born July 19, 1950 (New Haven, Connecticut) American publisher, co-creator

Since their marriage in 1972, Wendy and Richard Pini have forged one of the most innovative and productive partnerships in the history of comic art. Their Elfquest series, which contains dozens of comics and graphic novels, was one of the first independently published comic series in the United States, and remains one of the most popular. Elfquest made comic book history for a variety of reasons. At the time of its first publication in 1978, it was one of very few comics written and drawn by a woman, and it created a world with a society and a history of exceptional complexity and depth. More, the Elfquest series created a bridge between the mostly male fans of science fiction comics and female fans who loved fantasy adventure stories and the complex plot development of Japanese manga. Many comic artists have started out by self-publishing their work, but the Pinis took that idea a step further and created their own independent publishing company. Warp Graphics and its imprint, Father Tree Press, mostly focused on publishing the Elfquest series in a variety of innovative formats, though Warp also published other creative comic artists, making an important contribution to the independent graphic novel industry.

‘‘The Elfquest world is a world we would all like to live in but a place we have to work to achieve.’’ RICHARD PINI

Meet through the mail Wendy Fletcher was born on June 4, 1951, in San Francisco and raised on a ranch in the northern California farming town of Gilroy. An isolated childhood motivated young Wendy to create 413

Best-Known Works Comic Books Elfquest (twenty-issue series). (1978–84).

Elfquest: Dark Hours (1993).

Elfquest (thirty-two-issue series). (1985– 88).

Elfquest: New Blood (1993).

Elfquest: Siege at Blue Mountain (eightissue series). (1986–88).

Elfquest: Rogue’s Challenge (1994).

Elfquest: The Hidden Years (1993).

Elfquest: Bedtime Stories (1994).

A Gift of Her Own: An Elfquest Story (1995). Graphic Novels and Collections

Legacy (1998).

Elfquest (four-volume comic collection). (1981–84).

Shards (1998).

Elfquest Gatherum (1981). Elfquest: Journey to Sorrow’s End (1984). Elfquest: The Blood of Ten Chiefs (1986). Elfquest: Wolfsong (1988). Law and Chaos: The Stormbringer Art of Wendy Pini (1987).

Mindcoil: Volume 14 (1999). Reunion: Volume 12 (1999). Huntress (1999). Jink!: Volume 13 (1999). Ascent (1999). The Cry from Beyond: Volume 7 (1999).

Elfquest: Fire and Flight (1988).

Kings of the Broken Wheel (1999).

Elfquest: The Forbidden Grove (1988).

Quest’s End: Volume 4 (1999).

Elfquest: Captives of Blue Mountain (1988).

The Secret of Two-Edge: Volume 6 (1999).

Elfquest: Quest’s End (1988).

Captives of Blue Mountain: Volume 3 (1999).

Elfquest: Siege at Blue Mountain (1988). Elfquest: The Secret of Two-Edge (1988). Elfquest Gatherum: Volume Two (1988). Elfquest: Winds of Change (1989). Beauty and the Beast: Portrait of Love (1989). Beauty and the Beast: Night of Beauty (1990).

Fire and Flight (1999). The Forbidden Grove (1999). Siege at Blue Mountain: Volume 5 (1999). Wolfrider! (1999). Forevergreen (1999). Shadowstalker (2000).

Elfquest: Against the Wind (1990).

Worldpool (2000).

Elfquest: The Cry from Beyond (1990).

Rogue’s Curse (2000).

Elfquest: Kings of the Broken Wheel (1992).

Wild Hunt (2000).

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her own entertainment, and she developed an active imagination and artistic skill at a young age. Her grandmother was a schoolteacher, and Wendy found a lifetime’s worth of inspiration in the books in her grandmother’s library. Writers like William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) taught her the elements of timeless romantic adventure stories, while Victorianera artists like Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) and Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) showed her how to express sensuality and emotion through line and shape. From the richly illustrated fairy tale books of Andrew Lang (1844–1917), she learned about the magical creatures that have long lived in people’s imaginations. Fletcher taught herself to draw and write stories, and she began to create an elaborate fantasy world peopled with elves, wizards, and aliens from other planets. These childhood stories would later evolve into the world of Elfquest. When she was a teenager, Wendy began to read both American and Japanese comics and to practice in both styles, drawing muscular superheroes in tight spandex as well as the soft-eyed, delicate figures of Japanese manga. During the 1960s, she began to attend science fiction and fantasy conventions, where she displayed her art. In 1970, Wendy entered Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where she studied for two years. Meanwhile, on the other coast of the United States, Richard Alan Pini had been born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 19, 1950. Richard was a bright student who developed a keen interest in both science and science fiction and began to collect science fiction comic books when he was a teenager. In 1969, when Richard Pini was a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, he answered a letter he had read in the mail column of a Marvel comic called The Silver Surfer. The letter was from a young woman on the West Coast named Wendy Fletcher. The two began to correspond, and within months they had met and formed a strong bond. In 1972, after Richard graduated from MIT with a degree in astrophysics, Richard Pini and Wendy Fletcher were married.

Start WaRP Graphics The Pinis began their married life in Boston. Richard worked as a lecturer, photographer, and special effects technician at the Hayden Planetarium, while Wendy began a freelance career drawing for such science-fiction comics as Galaxy, Galileo, and Worlds of If. In 1977, the two decided to work together to create and publish a comic series based on the fantasy world of elves and sorcerers that Wendy and Richard Pini

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Wendy had been creating since her childhood. In order to make sure that their work would be published just the way they wanted, they started their own publishing company, calling it WaRP Graphics, from the first letters of ‘‘Wendy and Richard Pini.’’ (During the late 1980s, the Pinis dropped the capitalized letters and began calling their company Warp Graphics.) The first Elfquest comic appeared in 1978, a time when public interest in fantasy and science fiction was high. The film Star Wars, with its unique mixture of medieval knights, new age spirituality, and futuristic technology, had just been released and was wildly popular. Many young people had also rediscovered J.R.R. Tolkien’s (1892–1973) fanciful Lord of the Rings trilogy, first published in 1955. In this atmosphere, the Elfquest stories were eagerly received and quickly became popular for their own sake. By 1981, Elfquest comics were selling in record numbers around the world. In 1979, the Pinis moved to the upstate New York town of Poughkeepsie, where Richard took a job with IBM, but in 1981, he quit to work for Warp full time. Working together, the Pinis partnership became strong and supportive. While Wendy did the writing and drawing for the series, Richard consulted closely about plot development and learned how to run a publishing business. This setup was an important part of Elfquest’s success. Many writers and artists have difficulty finding publishers to print and distribute their work. Even after a publisher accepts their books, writers and artists still often have to struggle to make sure that their ideas are not changed in the publishing process. Having a publisher who was also a trusted part of the creative process made Wendy Pini’s job of creating Elfquest much easier. ‘‘Richard learned publishing by the seat of his pants,’’ Wendy Pini noted on the Elfquest Web site. ‘‘Neither of us knew anything of publishing, but after being turned down by Marvel and DC, and after a runin with an unscrupulous Midwestern publisher, Richard figured it out. It is and was his business ingenuity and problem-solving ability which makes Elfquest the small press giant that it is.’’

Elfquest The Elfquest series turned out to be an enormous undertaking. Starting with comic books, the series grew to include dozens of graphic novels, all telling different stories about the history and culture of elfinkind on the World of Two Moons. Combining a science fiction tale with an adventure/fantasy saga, the roots of Elfquest lie in an advanced alien race who come to the 416

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double-mooned planet for exploration and crash on the surface during a Stone Age-like period. After thousands of years, these aliens have evolved into many tribes of elves who struggle to find each other and survive the dangers of their planet, not the least of which are humans, who hate and fear the elves. The series begins with ‘‘Fire and Flight,’’ which introduces the Wolfriders, a tribe of fierce hunter elves who have a deep spiritual bond with wolves, which they ride like horses. Humans destroy the Wolfriders’ forest home, forcing the elves to journey to find a new place to live. Led by their chief, Cutter, they face many dangers and adventures on their long trek, and they discover for the first time that there are other tribes of elves on the planet. Cutter’s dream then becomes to find all the scattered elfin tribes and join them together. The many other volumes of Elfquest expand on elfin history and culture in a wide variety of creative ways. Some tell the stories of elves that have small roles in the preceding volumes, some take place in ancient history, thousands of years before Cutter’s story, and others take place in the far future. A Gift of Her Own, published in 1995, is not a comic, but an illustrated children’s book about a human girl on the World of Two Moons, while Jink!, published in 1999, is the story of a descendant of the elves, centuries after Cutter’s time, who seeks to learn why there are no longer elves on the planet. Elfquest is not only the story of a complex alien culture; it is also a story with lessons to teach. Drawn with vibrant, ‘‘up-close’’ manga intensity, Elfquest points out the devastating destruction caused by human intolerance, and it also celebrates the virtues of the brave, loyal, and persistent elves. However, even among the elves are tribes like the ‘‘Go-backs,’’ who are rigid and prejudiced. Over and over again, the series explores one central theme: change is unavoidable in life, and if one is to survive, one must accept and adapt to change. This mature and complex theme is part of what made Elfquest unique among American comics at the time it was first published. There was great power in using an alien culture to explore these fundamental, human themes. On the Elfquest Web site, Richard Pini describes the reasons for using elves as the characters for the series: ‘‘I know that Wendy has always loved the mythical ‘little people,’ and there has got to be a reason why every culture in the world has their own ‘little people’ or ‘spirits’ . . . . They represent a very deep archetype—the spirit. They are more than human, yet less than angels. Wendy has always Wendy and Richard Pini

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Beyond Elfquest: Wendy Pini’s Other Works Wendy Pini is best known for her work on the Elfquest series, but she has produced several other respected works. The foundations for these works were laid early in her life. While still a teenager, Wendy fell in love with the work of novelist Michael Moorcock (1939–), an influential British fantasy and science fiction writer. She began a correspondence with Moorcock, who became a mentor in her own career as a fantasy writer. During her years at Pitzer College, Wendy centered her academic work around creating an animated film based on Moorcock’s work. Though the project was never completed, WaRP published the art and text in 1987 under its Father Tree Press imprint. The resulting book, Law and Chaos: The

Stormbringer Art of Wendy Pini, not only contains some of Wendy’s most creative and energetic artwork, but also offers revealing insights into her personal and artistic philosophy. During the late 1980s, a live-action television show based on the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast was produced by CBS. Pini loved the poignant romance of the story and thought that the television version showed exceptionally high quality. She wrote and drew two graphic novels based on that show, in hopes of boosting the show’s popularity. The series was cancelled, but Wendy Pini’s Beauty and the Beast novels remain popular with critics and fans.

been very much in tune with that. As to why we use elves in Elfquest, it’s that we want characters that are human enough and beautiful enough so readers can identify with them. But we also want characters that are alien enough so readers know that this is not happening down the street.’’ After the release of the first twenty-issue series, the Pinis took a break from the intense work of producing the comic. Those first issues were done in black and white and then re-worked in color and re-released several times, first by Marvel comics, then by Warp again, then by Donning Starblaze, who collected them into four volumes. During the mid- to late 1980s, the Pinis again began releasing new Elfquest anthologies. They kept their ideas fresh and original by beginning to work with other sci-fi and fantasy writers, such as C. J. Cherryh (1942–) and Piers Anthony (1934–). This brought new ideas and energy to the series, although the Pinis have always been careful to keep artistic control over any Elfquest material. Throughout the history of Warp Graphics, Richard Pini has made very creative use of various formats to showcase the Elfquest series to the best advantage. For example, during the 1980s, when 418

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comics were becoming a popular medium, he released hardcover versions of Elfquest that could be placed in libraries. These hardback Elfquest books would become the first graphic novels to be sold in major bookstores. During the 1990s, when comic popularity fell, Warp stopped production of the hardback books and re-released the Elfquest stories in inexpensive black-and-white comic versions to make them more accessible to young fans. Fans continue to eagerly await the release of new Elfquest books. Even school librarians and critics praise Wendy Pini’s rich and delicate artwork and the subtle complexity of her storylines. In March 2003, the Pinis sold publishing and licensing rights to Elfquest to comic publishing giant DC, while still retaining creative control over their work. For many years, the Pinis have also worked hard to create a film version of Elfquest, but production has been postponed several times.

For More Information Books Pini, Wendy. Law and Chaos: The Stormbringer Art of Wendy Pini. Poughkeepsie, NY: Father Tree Press, 1987. Sanderson, Peter. ‘‘Further Conversations with WaRP.’’ In Elfquest Gatherum: Volume Two. Poughkeepsie, NY: Father Tree Press, 1988, pp. 45–56.

Periodicals ‘‘Elfquest: Wolfrider Volume I: Review.’’ Publishers Weekly (December 15, 2003). Scordate, Julie. ‘‘Talking with Wendy and Richard Pini, the Team Behind Elfquest.’’ Library Media Connection, Volume 23, pp. 46–50.

Web Sites Elfquest. http://www.elfquest.com/ (accessed on May 3, 2006). ‘‘Elfquest.’’ LeufBookList, http://www.leuf.net/ww/wikibook?ElfQuest (accessed on May 3, 2006). Lambiek Comic Shop. http://www.lambiek.net/pini_wr.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Trina Robbins. ª Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis.

Trina Robbins Born August 17, 1938 (Brooklyn, New York) American author

‘‘I think communication is at the bottom of everything, and the ultimate method of communication is a combination of words and pictures. That’s what comics are.’’

Trina Robbins has been called the first female underground cartoonist for her experiments with content and style appealing to non-mainstream audiences. Robbins has worked in comics since 1965, and she helped to pave the way for other women to work in the field as well as to gain recognition for the pioneering women who toiled unknown in comics for almost a century. Her work as a historian has been a major contribution to the study of comics and comic books, and since 2000 her own comics writing has provided numerous fun books for girls to read.

An early rebel Trina Robbins was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 17, 1938. Her parents, Max and Elizabeth Robbins, moved the family to the New York borough of Queens when Trina was still a young 421

Best-Known Works Graphic Novels Catswalk: The Growing of Girl (1990). (With Anne Timmons) Go Girl! 6 vols. (2002–06). Nonfiction

From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (1999). The Great Women Cartoonists (2001). Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early Twentieth Century (2001).

A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993).

Eternally Bad: Goddesses with Attitude (2001).

The Great Women Superheroes (1996).

Tender Murderers: Women Who Kill (2003).

child. Elizabeth was a librarian who later became a second grade teacher, and she taught Robbins to read when she was just four years old. Robbins had one older sister, Harriet, who read teen comics such as Patsy Walker, Millie the Model, Katy Keene, and more; Robbins started reading those, along with Raggedy Ann, when she was around five years old. She told Bob Levin in The Comics Journal that when she was old enough, she would go to the store every week to buy comics. She loved Wonder Woman and Mary Marvel, and would read any of the numerous comics with a girl heroine on the cover. ‘‘When I was a kid, girls read comics because there were so many comics for them to read,’’ she told Katherine Keller for the Sequential Tart Web site. Robbins also drew, even before she could read. She was a loner, a misfit, through elementary school; she told Levin, ‘‘I was the bookworm. I didn’t know how to talk to other kids. I didn’t know how to relate to them.’’ By the age of ten, she was making her own comics by folding a piece of paper in half and filling the resulting four pages with stories. She wrote poetry, short stories, science fiction, adventure, romance, or almost anything else she came across. At John Adams High School in South Ozone Park she worked on the school magazine. She described the neighborhood as a conservative, reactionary Irish and Italian-Catholic community, where her politically radical Jewish family stood out. After graduating from high school, Robbins attended Queens College as an English major; she was expelled for playing around instead of studying. She then attended Cooper Union, one of the best art schools in New York, but she discovered the college 422

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wouldn’t teach her the basics, so except for life sketching she stopped attending classes; the school invited her to leave for nonattendance.

Slow road to publishing In the early 1960s, Robbins moved to Los Angeles and got married. She and her husband were involved in the civil rights movement there, and by 1964 they had gotten involved in the hippie movement (a cultural movement of the mid- to late 1960s that promoted peace, living in communal societies, dressing in unconventional ways, and wearing long hair). She started sewing clothes using velvet and lace for herself and her husband, who was writing a rock column for the L.A. Free Press, and soon she was designing clothes for rock stars, including David Crosby, Donovan, Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass, and Jim Morrison’s (of the band the Doors) girlfriend. In 1963, Marvel Comics started publishing a new line of superhero comics, including The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, and Robbins started reading them. She told GN, ‘‘All us hippies and college students started to notice comics and go, ‘Wow, man!’ And it suddenly occurred to me that those little drawings I did with pencil on paper were proto-comics, and I started to draw comics.’’ Her style looked more psychedelic (a style associated with the hippie movement that including bright colors and paisley patterns). In late 1965, a friend showed her The East Village Voice, a new underground newspaper that included a different type of comic strip; Robbins loved the style, and she started doing comics of her own using the loose, psychedelic style. She left her husband in 1966 and moved to the East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where she opened a boutique called Broccoli. She also started doing comics for The East Village Voice and became involved with the growing underground comics, or comix, movement. She said that she noticed she was the only woman doing comics, and that the men tended to ignore her. As she told Katherine Keller, ‘‘There was a big show of underground comic art in the East Village, and I was the only one not invited in.’’ In 1969, Robbins and many of the other artists, including Gilbert Shelton, Justin Green, Spain Rodriguez, and Bill Griffith, moved to San Francisco. Robbins stopped designing and sewing clothes so people would take her more seriously as a comics creator, but the men still ignored her while supporting each other. She said they were threatened by feminism (a movement that Trina Robbins

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A Comics Historian In the early 1990s, Robbins began devoting her time to researching and writing about the history of women in comics. In 1993, she published A Century of Women Cartoonists, which featured many women who had been ignored by most other comics historians. Robbins followed the book with The Great Women Superheroes in 1996, and in 1999 she published From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines. This book discusses the comics published from 1941 through the 1990s, featuring everything from Katy Keene and Archie to the ‘‘Riot Grrrl’’ comics styles of Jessica Abel, Julie Doucette, and Dame Darcy, which explore punk rock and feminism. In 2000, the work was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book. The following year, Robbins published three books: Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early Twentieth Century, a biography of the Victorian feminist illustrator; Eternally Bad: Goddesses with Attitude, a non-comics tribute to twenty-four mythological goddesses from around the world; and The Great Women Cartoonists, which updated her earlier work, A Century of Women Cartoonists. Katherine Keller of Sequential Tart asked Robbins about doing research for these books and what she did to keep herself motivated. Robbins replied, ‘‘I looooove

research! When writing all of my books I’ve discovered things I didn’t know before—things that nobody knew before! It’s like being an archeologist [scientist who studies the physical remains of past cultures] (which I’d be if I had enough lives for multiple careers).’’ In 1993, Robbins, Heidi MacDonald (a well-known comics editor who writes ‘‘The Beat,’’ a Web log for the comics news site The Pulse), and other women creators who were attending the San Diego Comic-Con, an annual convention, held a meeting to which every woman in the industry was invited. At the standing-room-only meeting, the Friends of Lulu was born. This national non-profit organization aims to provide the networking opportunities that women often miss out on in the general industry. Friends of Lulu, named after the famed comic book character Little Lulu, established several awards to promote women comics creators. Robbins won several Lulu Awards over the years: she was Lulu of the Year in 1997 for The Great Women Superheroes; Lulu of the Year in 1999 for From Girls to Grrlz; and in 2000 she won both Lulu of the Year (with cocreator and artist Anne Timmons) for Go Girl! and the Female Cartoonist Hall of Fame award.

called for rights for women) and didn’t care for her criticism of the gender bias she found in so many underground comics of the time, especially those by comix creator R. Crumb (1943–), then the best known of the underground comic book creators. 424

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Promoting women in comics In 1970, Robbins was creating comics for the women’s liberation newspaper It Ain’t Me, Babe, when she decided to put together a comic book by all women artists, produced by Ron Turner of the publisher Last Gasp. During the early 1970s, Robbins published a series of her own books—Trina’s Women, Scarlet Pilgrim, All Girl Thrills, and Girl Fight—most of them published by Ron Turner. In 1972, she started the ongoing anthology Wimmin’s Comics, which continued until 1992. Throughout the 1980s, Robbins created comics for publishers such as Marvel, Eclipse, DC Comics, and magazines such as High Times and Heavy Metal. Then, as companies downsized or simply closed down toward the end of the decade, the work dried up. When Wimmin’s Comics ceased publication, Robbins wasn’t doing any comics. She told Bob Levin, ‘‘I was forced out of comics. When you don’t have anywhere to publish, you’re forced out.’’ During this time, Robbins kept hearing men, professionals in the comics industry, say that women didn’t draw comics and never had, and that girls don’t read comics and never had, and she knew from her own experience that they were wrong. To show the world that such statements were false, she wrote (with Cat Yronwode [1947–]) Women and the Comics, which Eclipse published in 1985; in 1986, the Great Grueneville Flood destroyed all copies of the book in the Eclipse warehouse, so very few copies exist. The book was only the first of Robbins’s works on women’s importance in the history of comics.

Career revitalization with girls’ comics Trina and artist Anne Timmons met at a comics convention in the late 1990s, and they became ‘‘e-mail pals’’; one day, Anne suggested they work on a comic together. Robbins dug out one of her old comic book ideas and they worked on it; then Anne took it to Image Comics, which agreed to publish it in 2000. That comic was Go Girl!, an all-ages comic that young girls could enjoy. Go Girl! follows the life of teenager Lindsey Goldman, who discovers two amazing things: her mother was a superhero in the 1970s and she, like her mother, can fly. Mother and daughter work together to make Lindsey a superhero, and Lindsey and her friends find themselves in a variety of adventurous situations over the course of the series. Go Girl! was cancelled after five issues because comics shops wouldn’t carry girls’ comics, but in 2002 Dark Horse Comics decided that if they collected the issues into a trade paperback, Trina Robbins

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Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons created Go Girl!, an all-ages comic that young girls could enjoy. Dark Horse Comics.

they could market it to bookstores and libraries. Robbins and Timmons wrote Go Girl!: Time Team as an original graphic novel in 2004; backed by Dark Horse, the book did well, and they were working on another volume that they hoped to publish in 2006. From 1999 through 2002, Robbins worked for Scholastic, adapting classics into comic books for classroom use in their series Read 180. She 426

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wrote and illustrated adaptations for Emma by Jane Austen, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Macbeth by William Shakespeare, and The Odyssey by Homer. These books were not released to the general public. In 2005, Robbins was busy at work on a variety of ventures: she started writing some educational graphic novels for Capstone Press (including a book about actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr) and for Harcourt Achieve (about a Colonial girl in her teens who runs away from home disguised as a boy and winds up on a pirate ship), and she was also writing a graphic novel for Stone Arch about a teenage slave girl who escapes on the Underground Railroad (a system in the United States designed to move slaves from the South to the North where they were free). Robbins told GN, ‘‘I am soooo delighted to have a venue to write comics for girls after all those years of trying to sell stuff to the mainstream, only to be told, ‘This is very nice, but it’s for girls and girls don’t read comics, so we have to pass.’ ’’ Robbins has pointed to Japanese manga for girls (called shojo manga) that are selling well in bookstores and being purchased by libraries as proof that targeting comics to girls can be a good thing for publishers. In 2005, Robbins made presentations on shojo manga in Ohio for the Ohio Library Council, in Minneapolis for the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and in colleges in San Jose and Chico, California. She also started preparing English-language rewrites for four shojo manga series from Viz Media: BB Explosion, God Child, The Cain Saga, and From Far Away. She told GN, ‘‘I do believe shojo manga will eventually transform the American comics industry, now that mainstream publishers can no longer insist that girls don’t read comics.’’ Robbins is living proof that the market for graphic novels and comic books for girls was changing rapidly in the 2000s. She credits the increasing number of women doing comics to the growing number of small independent publishers and the ease with which people can self-publish their comics. She told GN, ‘‘Yes, bless the indies. Thanks to them, artists can publish—and self-publish—comics for girls and/or kids in general. They are the only place in the American comic industry for non-superhero stories and creators, and of course that’s where you’ll find most women in the business.’’

For More Information Periodicals ‘‘From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of [Female] Comics from Teens to Zines.’’ Whole Earth (Spring 2002): pp. 86–87. Trina Robbins

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Levin, Bob. ‘‘Trina Robbins: Not Being Emily Dickinson.’’ The Comics Journal no. 223 (May 2000).

Web Sites Keller, Katherine. ‘‘Comics’ Fiercest Amazon: Trina Robbins.’’ Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/june99/robbins.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006). Metzger, Darren. ‘‘Women in Comics: Trina Robbins from Hippy to Historian.’’ New York City Comic Book Museum. http://www. nyccomicbookmuseum.org/exhibits/women_Trina.htm (accessed on May 3, 2006). Salek, Rebecca. ‘‘The Godmother of Comixs: Trina Robbins’’ (June 2001). Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb01/ robbins.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Other Additional information for this entry was obtained through e-mail correspondence with Trina Robbins in October 2005.

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Alex Ross. AP Images.

Alex Ross Born January 22, 1970 (Portland, Oregon) American artist, illustrator

‘‘I just fell in love with the notion that there were colorful characters like this, performing good, sometimes fantastic deeds . . . . I wanted to bring these characters to life.’’

By most accounts, Alex Ross has been the single best artist working in comic books and graphic novels since his breakthrough in the mid-1990s on Marvels, written by Kurt Busiek (1960–; see entry). Publishers Weekly called him ‘‘the preeminent painter of superheroes of his generation,’’ and Booklist claimed that Ross was ‘‘arguably comic books’ only genuine superstar, whose artistic touch turns any title into a bestseller.’’ More than any other artist of his generation, Ross returned some of the grandeur and power to the classic superheroes of Marvel Comics and DC Comics. A great part of the undeniable allure in Ross’s work derives from his sheer skill as an illustrator and painter: he has consistently shown an uncanny ability to breathe life into his heroes with drawings done from living models, and his work in gouache (a kind of watercolor paint) shows a richness of color rarely seen in comics. Yet it is the intangible qualities in his work—the reverence with 429

Best-Known Works (Text by Ron Fortier) Terminator: The Burning Earth (1990). (Cover art; text by Louise Simonson) Superman: Doomsday & Beyond (1993). (Text by Kurt Busiek) Marvels (1994).

(With Paul Dini) Superman: Peace on Earth (1999); Batman: War on Crime (1999); Shazam!: Power of Hope (2000); Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth (2001). (With Jim Krueger) X Trilogy: Earth X, Universe X, and Paradise X (2000–02).

(With Mark Waid) Kingdom Come (1997). (With Steve Darnall) Uncle Sam (1997).

(Text by Paul Dini) JLA. 3 vols. (2002–05).

which Ross seems to view his heroic subjects, the bold command that they seem to exert over their world, the sense that some characters, especially Superman and Batman, exhibit the qualities of gods—that make Ross the most noted comic artist in many years.

‘‘The world is my oyster!’’ Ross was born Nelson Alexander Ross on January 22, 1970, in Portland, Oregon. His father, Clark, was a minister; his mother, Lynette, was a former commercial illustrator who had put down her paintbrush to devote herself to being a mother. From a very early age, Ross was drawn to art: his mother kept sketches of television characters he drew from the time he was three, and by the age of four, Ross told interviewer Ken Plume on the IGN Web site, ‘‘The idea of being a comics artist was pretty key in my mind.’’ By 1978, Ross’s parents had relocated to Lubbock, Texas, where his father was a minister at the United Church of Christ. With his older siblings now out of the house, Ross devoted ever more of his time and attention to drawing. Ross didn’t draw just anything—he specifically drew superheroes. In Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, a lavishly illustrated tribute to Ross’s work with DC Comics stories, noted author and graphic designer Chip Kidd resurrected numerous drawings and paper cutouts that Ross created when he was just a child. Ross explained to Kidd his early attraction to superheroes: 430

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‘‘They’re the ultimate people . . . . As an adolescent you need order in your world, and superheroes have that, a sense of ethics that would never change—they would never be less than perfect, fighting for their ideals.’’ Ross studied the artistic styles of comics creators like Neal Adams (1941–), George Pe´rez (1954–), and Bernie Wrightson (1948–), but he was also influenced by prominent magazine illustrators such as Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) and Andrew Loomis (1892–1959), from whom he adopted a love for realistic portrayal of human expressions and a fascination with the impact of low-angle lighting. On his Web site, Ross wrote: ‘‘I idealized people like Rockwell, who drew in that photorealistic style [drawings that looked like photographs.] When I was sixteen or so, I said to myself, ‘I want to see that in a comic book!’’’ Through high school, art was Ross’s fascination and his refuge. He didn’t go out on a lot of dates or engage in other school activities like sports. ‘‘Art,’’ Ross told Plume, ‘‘was the one thing I had that worked well for me . . . that would stand me out against my peers.’’ By the time he was nearing graduation from high school, Ross knew that he wanted to go to art school at the American Academy of Art in Chicago—the same school his mother had attended years before. At the American Academy of Art, Ross received excellent technical instruction in artistic methods. Working with live models for the first time, he realized that he had a talent for capturing the human body that was not shared by his fellow students. He told Plume how excited he was to think that perhaps he did have the skills to make a living through his art: ‘‘So it’s funny that I was basically realizing that I can be a human camera, and I can print out—through my hand—what my eyes are seeing, and I’m so impressed with myself and thinking, like, ‘My god, the world is my oyster!’’’

Realizes a dream Upon graduating from the academy in 1989, Ross was determined that he would make his living painting for comic books, but he took a realistic approach to realizing his dream. He didn’t expect to break in right away, especially with his distinctive approach (Ross was painting when most comic book artists were using ink). Instead, he counted on getting a normal job and perfecting his art until he could break into the business. He took a job as a storyboard artist for the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago, which meant that he drew illustrated versions of advertising pitches. But, he related to Plume, ‘‘I was never without Alex Ross

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my eye on the door,’’ because he really believed this job was ‘‘a stepping stone to getting work in comics.’’ By the end of 1989, his determination began to pay off, and he was hired to create the art for Terminator: The Burning Earth, with script by Ron Fortier. He finished his full day at work and returned home to work for hours on his comics job. Terminator wasn’t a big success: Its publisher, Now Comics, went out of business and Ross wasn’t paid for all his work. But it was a start, and it helped bring his art to the attention of others in the industry. By the early 1990s, one comics writer who especially liked Ross’s work was Kurt Busiek. Together, Busiek and Ross began work on a new series aimed at retelling the origins of the bestknown characters created by Marvel Comics over the years, including the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil, the Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men, and Spider-Man. The series, called Marvels, was issued first as comic books, then collected into a largeformat graphic novel in 1994. Busiek was heralded for bringing a new narrative approach to the comic book, for he viewed the superheroes from the vantage of a photographer seeing both the good and the bad in the characters. Ross was acclaimed for the new life that he breathed into the characters. The bodies of the heroes looked real, and real emotions washed across the faces of people; light and shadow played an important role, and were rendered realistically; and the art overall was rendered with rich color and real depth. Several of his Ross’s techniques are more common to fine artists than to his peers in the world of comics. Like most comic book artists, Ross’s art begins as a pencil sketch. But unlike most comic book artists, Ross bases his drawings on real models: he carefully selects models based on their resemblance to the superheroes and villains he wants to create. Ross poses his models and uses careful lighting to get just the effects he desires; he takes many photographs, and uses these photographs to guide his drawings. ‘‘The connection to a person grounds me to the work,’’ Ross related to Chip Kidd in Mythology. With his drawing complete, Ross next paints over the entire sketch in black and white, working carefully to get the right tones and shading. Then he paints atop this with gouache (pronounced gwash), a kind of watercolor paint that is much heavier and richer in color than regular watercolors. Finally, Ross uses an airbrush (which blows paint out a tube as a fine mist) to get his final effects. 432

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‘‘I get a softening from [the airbrushing] that you don’t perceive consciously, something you can’t do with a brush stroke.’’ He’s done, he told Kidd, ‘‘when I don’t see the answers anymore, when I don’t know what else to do with it.’’ Ross rejoined Busiek to produce cover art for Busiek’s acclaimed Astro City series, published intermittently from 1997 to 2005, but he also began a long-standing relationship with DC Comics in 1993 when he signed on to produce a cover for a new Superman novel. DC editor Charles Kochman told Kidd that he knew he wanted to sign Ross for the job after seeing his rendering of the Human Torch in Marvels: ‘‘I’d never seen comic book illustration that realistic. It was as if the man were really on fire. I thought, if the Human Torch were real, this is what he would look like. It was startling, especially in the context of the time—no one was painting superheroes then, at least not in the way Alex was.’’ Ross’s work on the Superman cover and Marvels, claims Kidd, catapulted Ross to stardom. He quit his job in advertising and devoted all his energies to painting superheroes.

Builds a varied career Ross’s long fascination with superheroes went beyond creating the art; since he was a teenager, he had been dreaming up a sweeping story that reexamined the entire world of DC Comics superheroes. Now that he had won industry acclaim, Ross got the green light to work on the project with writer Mark Waid (1962–), then best known for his stories about the Flash and Captain America. The story they created was called Kingdom Come, and it featured an epic confrontation between DC’s first generation of heroes—including Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—and a new generation of heroes turned to evil purposes and led by Captain Marvel. The entire story is seen through the eyes of Norman McCay, a minister who, along with the Spectre, provides moral commentary on the action of the story. (The character of McCay was based on Ross’s father, who also served as the model for Ross’s artwork.) Kingdom Come was greeted by positive reviews and won a series of awards, including Ross’s first Harvey Award for Best Artist (he had already won several other Harveys, a prominent comics industry award). Reviewers praised the story’s epic scale, but they especially drew attention to the luminous artwork and to Ross’s masterful treatment of Superman, the world’s best-known comic character.

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Following Kingdom Come, Ross turned in a completely different direction when he began to work with writer Steve Darnall on the series Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is a dark tale that forces its lead character—the very symbol of the United States, depicted as a 434

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crazed derelict—to confront the dark secrets and misdeeds often overlooked in the American past. Ross pictured Uncle Sam at various points in American history, and his art often echoed visual images from famous paintings. Ross told Kidd: ‘‘It was technically the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on because it required so much more research than the super hero stuff.’’ With its dark vision of the American past, Uncle Sam did not sell especially well in the United States, though reviewers as always applauded the artwork. The book was a real success in Europe, however, and British comic giant Alan Moore (1953–; see entry) called it ‘‘the most eloquent use of a superhuman archetype for a great many years . . . . As a portrait of a fond American dream at last waking to itself, Uncle Sam is genuinely inspiring and deserves to be read more than once,’’ as quoted in Mythology. With the successes he had in his other work for DC Comics, Ross became the natural choice for a series of graphic novels commemorating the 60th anniversaries of DC superheroes, starting, of course, with Superman. Written by Paul Dini (1957–), Superman: Peace on Earth tells of a mature Superman who decides to use his immense powers to try to battle world hunger, at least for one day, by delivering food to the hungry all over the world. Yet his goal proves impossible to reach, for the hungry riot to gain access to food and a bullying dictator doesn’t want to give up to Superman any control over his people. The book provided Ross with an opportunity to fully explore the visual and thematic elements of the character who had meant the very most to him over the years. ‘‘In this story,’’ he told Kidd, ‘‘Superman may be a standin for [Jesus] Christ, but he is also undoubtedly a metaphor for America . . . . We tried to show that the best of intentions cannot always be rewarded or even be the right thing to do in every case.’’ Ross put it slightly differently to interviewer Richard von Busack on the MetroActive Web site: ‘‘Superman can remind us of certain ethics and moral choices. A lot of my personal makeup, my belief systems, right and wrong, were based in Superman . . . . What I want to bring back is a sense of morality to comics.’’ Ross and Dini explored similar territory in Batman: War on Crime. Ross painted a Batman without the Batmobile and hightech gadgets of the movie, depicting him instead as the dark-clad avenger, swooping silently down to instill fear into the hearts of criminals. The story ends with Batman helping to direct a young boy, whose parents had been killed, away from a life of crime. Dini and Ross also teamed up on stories about Wonder Woman and Alex Ross

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Alex Ross’s Superman Alex Ross’s favorite character, and the one for which he is best known, is Superman. When offered a chance to take on the job of depicting Superman, Ross wanted to create a character who was timeless. ‘‘Superman should never reflect any fashionable trend or other affectation of a specific era— hairstyle, speech patterns, etcetera,’’ noted Ross in Mythology. ‘‘He is beyond that. He is out of time.’’ Though Ross studied images of Superman from the character’s beginnings in 1939 up to the mid-1990s, he ended up basing his depiction of the world’s most powerful man on Frank Kasy, a friend who is also an illustrator and artist. Ross’s Superman is mature, and the weight of his years and his experience is written in the lines on his face and the slight sag in his chin; he is muscular, though not puffed up like a modern bodybuilder. Perhaps most importantly, Ross depicts Superman as having a striking presence that is more than the sum of his physical attributes, and somehow a reflection of the moral weight carried by the ‘‘Man of Steel.’’

Shazam. The graphic novels were carefully written and painted to appeal to a broad audience, a point that was of real importance to Ross, who is convinced that superhero stories have important lessons to teach young people. ‘‘We’re trying to make [these stories] something that can be brought to your children without shame,’’ he told von Busack. After finishing the commemorative books for DC in 2001, Ross worked on a variety of other projects. He teamed up with Jim Krueger to create the X Trilogy, which includes Earth X, Universe X, and Paradise X. In these stories, Ross revisits Marvel Comics characters in a world where regular people have gained superpowers and the superheroes must try to keep order. While Ross thought up storylines and characters, and did some covers for this series, other artists were brought in to do the majority of the art. Into the mid-2000s, Ross also worked on the acclaimed JLA series, which offered him additional opportunities to explore the figures from DC Comics. By the mid-2000s, Ross was widely sought after as a cover artist for comic books and related books and graphic novels, and he had 436

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won nearly every award the comics industry had to offer. Yet his stardom had also spread beyond the world of comic books. His artwork graced posters, convention programs, magazines, T-shirts, and movies (notably, 2004s Spider-Man), and he has created action figures, statues, and toys based upon his artwork. The pen-and-ink sketches he uses to start his paintings were priced starting at $1,000, and his paintings sold for between $10,000 and $25,000. Yet for all his renown, Ross remains dedicated to his life dream of creating superhero comics, rendered with all the talent and dedication of one of the greatest artistic talents ever to paint men in capes.

For More Information Books Kidd, Chip; with art by Alex Ross. Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Periodicals Bernardin, Marc. ‘‘Kingdom Come—for Mythology.’’ Entertainment Weekly (October 31, 2003): p. 78. Flagg, Gordon. ‘‘Review of Mythology.’’ Booklist (November 1, 2003): p. 472. ‘‘Review of JLA: Secret Origins.’’ Publishers Weekly (June 9, 2003); p. 38. ‘‘Review of Mythology.’’ Publishers Weekly (November 24, 2003): p. 44.

Web Sites Alderman, Nathan. ‘‘Alex Ross Interview.’’ Nathanet. http://nathan.huah.net/ writing/alexross.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Alex Ross. http://www.alexrossart.com/index.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). Plume, Ken. ‘‘An Interview with Alex Ross.’’ IGN. http://filmforce.ign.com/ articles/571/571211p1.html (accessed on May 3, 2006). von Busack, Richard. ‘‘Square Is Beautiful.’’ MetroActive. http://www. metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.03.98/comics-9848.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

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Where To Learn More Books Baetens, Jan. The Graphic Novel. Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001. Crawford, Philip Charles. Graphic Novels 101: Selecting and Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy for Children and Young Adults. Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Publishing, 2003. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse, 1985. Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse, 1996. Goldsmith, Francisca. Graphic Novels Now: Building, Managing, and Marketing a Dynamic Collection. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2005. Gorman, Michele. Getting Graphic! Worthington, OH: Linworth, 2003. Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2004. Lent, John, ed. Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad and Sexy. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1999. Lyga, Allyson A.W., and Barry Lyga. Graphic Novels in Your Media Center: A Definitive Guide Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. McCloud, Scott. Making Comics. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2006. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York: Perennial, 2000. xxxvii

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993; reprinted, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Miller, Steve. Developing and Promoting Graphic Novel Collections. New York: Neal-Schuman, 2005. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1996. Schodt, Frederik L. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996. Schodt, Frederik L. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983. Weiner, Stephen. Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York: NBM, 2003. Weiner, Stephen. The 101 Best Graphic Novels. New York: NBM, 2005. Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Periodicals Amazing Heroes. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 1981–92. Back Issue Magazine. Raliegh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2003–. Comic Book Artist. Raliegh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 1998–. Comicology. Raliegh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2000–01. Comics International. Brighton, United Kingdom: Dez Skinn and Quality Communications, 1990–. Comics Journal. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 1976–. Comics Spotlight. Clifton, CO: Ground Zero, 2002–. Graphic Novel Scene: The Guide to Trade Paperbacks, Manga, and Original Graphic Novels. Florence, KY: Blue Line Pro, 2004, 2006–. Indy Magazine. Bellefonte, PA: Calliope Comics, 1993–. Time. Published regular feature called ‘‘Time.comix’’ by Andrew Arnold. 2001–. Wizard. Congers, NY: Wizard, 1991–. xxxviii

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Web Sites ArtBomb. http://www.artbomb.net/home.jsp (accessed on June 9, 2006). Broken Frontier. http://www.brokenfrontier.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). Bussert, Leslie. ‘‘Comic books and graphic novels: Digital resources for an evolving form of art and literature.’’ American Library Association (C&RL News). http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/ backissues2005/february05/comicbooks.htm (accessed on June 9, 2006). Comic Book Resources. http://www.comicbookresources.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). Comic World News. http://www.comicworldnews.com/cgi-bin/ index.cgi (accessed on June 9, 2006). Comicon.com. http://www.comicon.com/index.html (accessed on June 24, 2006). Comics International. http://www.qualitycommunications.co.uk/ci (accessed on June 9, 2006). The Comics Journal. http://www.tcj.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). Graphic Novel Review. http://www.graphicnovelreview.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). Graphic Novels. http://graphicnovels.info (accessed on June 9, 2006). Indy Magazine. http://www.indyworld.com/indy/index.html (accessed on June 9, 2006). The International Comic Arts Association. http://www.comicarts.org/ index.php (accessed on June 9, 2006). Movie Poop Shoot. http://www.moviepoopshoot.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). Ninth Art. http://www.ninthart.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). No Flying, No Tights: a website reviewing graphic novels for teens. http://www.noflyingnotights.com/index2.html (accessed on June 9, 2006). Pop Matters. http://www.popmatters.com (accessed on June 9, 2006). Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/home.php (accessed on June 9, 2006). Where To Learn More

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Sidekicks: a website reviewing graphic novels for kids. http://www. noflyingtights.com/sidekicks/index.html (accessed on June 24, 2006). Silver Bullet Comic Books. http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com (accessed on June 9, 2006).

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