“He’s doing it again,
More than once, again.
Something out of nothing,
Nothing in return.”

— “The Corner,” Lewsberg.

I’M A CREEPER, I’M A WEIRDO

Honestly, I was considering a bootleg zine about DC’s The Creeper as a follow up to the Union Jack zine I did (still your fault, Lonergan), but I don’t know that I know or care about the character enough, and that’s dulled my motivation.

I love the character design, though, so I’ll probably keep drawing him. For some reason, I love the mane. Why it hasn’t been made into its own character is beyond me. That thing’s crying out for a voice. (Not literally, more in the sense of Dr. Strange’s cloak in the MCU.)

PERFECT WEATHER TO FLY

I am preparing a return to the U.K., which is somewhat bittersweet as I’m not sure when I’ll be back after this. The last month has been an exhausting procession of work, family and life in general. I find solace in art, of course, and comics.

This will be my first trip back home since Dad died in July. The weighty anxious antimass that sits constantly at the center of my head vibrates in anticipation. Dad may be gone, but his ghost lives on in unanticipated ways. Soon, I’ll hold what remains of him and Mum in my hands. Literal ashes.

This is the new normal. I live in America. Stress is the new American Dream. When Aleister Crowley said, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” it was a warning, not an entreaty.

[Yes, I corrected the comma splice. Whatever Aiwass was, it was not grammatical.]

Ten days away — significantly less than the unplanned and unexpected 40 days and nights of last July-September — in which I hope to ease that black, seething void through good company and new, warm memories.

[I wonder if there’s an off-book Turkish clinic that specializes in amygdala surgery.]

I am buoyed however, through the simplicity of good friends and the potential to make more. The ever-legendary Tony “Riptide” Esmond, a man of raw and unfiltered passion, who leans into the world with abandon, will of course be my first stop. In complete synchronicity, the adjacently legendary Hal Weaver1 — actor, artist, zine and comic maker, occasional blogger, New Latvian, all-around creative, Esmond’s good friend — is joining us for dinner.

I’ve long wanted to meet Weaver. I think we have a lot in common, starting with our age. I’m also fascinated with people who seem to have a boundless capacity for creativity. They carry it and are made of it, and Weaver strikes me as that kind of bloke. He is, I think, the person I always wanted to be. Maybe he is me and slipped in from another timeline to point and laugh and show me where I went wrong.

[Excuse me as I refamiliarize myself with my native colloquialisms in preparation.]

COPRA-Phagy

Have you ever ached for something new, yet something familiar, too? Two contrapositional emotions — not quite orbiting the same space with the inconsistency of cognitive dissonance, but more thoughts in tension, two philosophical premises that can be satisfied with a singular conclusion?

[Sorry if I lost you there. Tap once if you grok2.]

I mention this, because it’s rare when both itches get concurrently scratched, especially in finding such comics outside of the back-issues bin.

I’ve been reading through Michel Fiffe’s 50 issue run on COPRA, a seminal work of the independent comics scene that’s been deeply influential on a number of creators. (I can see in it, for instance, where Jesse Lonergan derives his creative approach.) This massive run ended only last year. I’m about 14 or 15 issues deep.

Fiffe is a soup-to-nuts artist, in that he wrote, drew, colored and lettered the entire 12-year-long run, seemingly effortlessly in a way that implies the misleading notion that anyone could do this. (And yet, nobody had ...) Yes, COPRA’s about superheroes, but more than that, it’s an homage of sorts to The Suicide Squad, weaving in a more-understandable Grant Morrison-like surrealism a la The Doom Patrol.

For me, the eye-opening use of panel layout and lettering seem divinely inspired. I can see how the series became so widely respected among those who are themselves respected in this crazy industry. The energy on the page crackles and only highlights what’s missing in other mainstream publications outside of manga. (Not you, Daniel Warren-Johnson. Never you.) The design of that layout and the characters who inhabit the panels leaves me breathless.

THERE GOES SEVEN YEARS OF MY LIFE

The Boys concluded last month, closing out seven years and five seasons of the best super-hero story — or story, period — on TV. Drawn from the Garth Ennis/Darrick Robertson Image comic-book series of the same name, the show largely diverged from that arc into its own universe, and it was beautiful.

Now, I know some of you had a problem with the ending: there was what you wanted and there was what you got, and I, speaking for myself, got both. It was a flawlessly subtle, quick and emotionally brutal conclusion. Devastating, really, if you think too deeply about the ouroborian irony, the nihilistic ramifications.

Confused about what I mean? You need to catch up on your Camus, Sisyphusboi.

PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT OF THE DAY

Remember how shit AI is at getting things right and then remember how they’re trying to cram that shit into self-driving cars.

Treat each other kindly. We are all alone on a small blue speck of sand adrift in an indifferent universe. We are all we have. I miss before the Internet. I miss being bored.

PS: Cordelia says “hi.”

The media that “covers” — sort of — the news of comics has been on my mind lately and the subject of a few columns (in 72 Hours and here at The Longbox).

I wanted to create a directory of those outlets and categorize them (click on the Longbox link above to see the categories I developed, and scroll … OK, bit more. Just a bit more. OK, more. Keep going … there!)

So, I did. So, this is a column to bookmark if you’re so inclined to be informed.

(Oh, and industry reporting has it that Newsarama just died. #RIPBOOHOO. I mean, since the layoff of most of its staff by surprise across a Memorial Day weekend in 2023, it’s been a clickbait farm under corporate ownership. AI can aggregate, but it can’t create.)

The table is below. The table is not comprehensive.

I’ve also added these to a shared Google Sheet. Feel free to add your favorites. Make it comprehensive.

Look how they massacred my boy, Alan

In other news, while I was scanning the Popcerse headline, I saw the following headline about Marvel planning something for Capt. Britain’s 50th birthday: “Marvel is planning something for Captain Britain’s 50th anniversary this year.” How wonderful, I thought. Maybe they’ll unfuck his character. Could they, would they consider something like a DC Absolute reset?

I never should have allowed that spark of hope.

I clicked through and saw that Tom Breevort — “current captain of the X-Men titles and fan of the Braddock pair” — was the source, the implication being he’d have something to do with it; that, Betsy Braddock would “be part of that” and realized it’ll probably be another 50 year-long shitshow. (Tom, no one wanted Betsy as Capt. Britain. No one. That’s why her series was canceled at issue 5. Stop trying to make her a thing.1)

A little bit of my soul died.

If you love CB, read up to the end of Alan Davis’ run on Excalibur, then put the book down, walk away, and pretend that’s where it all ended.

I miss you Brian, you massive hunk of English manhood. I also miss this: staff, hard-to-draw chest lion and all.

Oh right — the table.

Note: I can’t vouch for the quality of any of these outlets. Yes, I have my favorites. You find yours; I’m not your dad2.

1

Look, not to pile on (but, yes, to pile on), the character is completely unrecognizable from the Betsy Braddock of the short-lived but eponymous UK Captain Britain magazine of the ‘80s. For Christ’s sake, you made her Japanese and a psychic ninja or some shit (I wasn’t really paying close attention).

You even had to call out this shit in the very first issue AND come up with some bullshit way of TELLING THE CORE FAN BASE OF BRITISH READERS ABOUT IT via dodgy exposition of a “podcast” outlet. You don’t have to read between the lines to see THAT YOU KNEW THE READERS WOULD HATE IT and tried and head it off in the first two pages of the comic. Nothing undermines a reader’s confidence more than detailing the very thing you knew fans would hate and then leaning into it. Great work, team. Great. Work.

The writing was awful. So was the art. No one bought it. Also, Tom Brevoort is a terrible editor who seems to hate the industry he’s part of, which, honestly, is somewhat concerning about his mental state.

I can’t wait for an Absolute-style reset of Marvel’s leadership. Or maybe just get rid of Marvel Comics altogether. Nevermind they don’t give a hoot about UK characters. No one there seems to care about comics anymore.

2

I’m your papi, and don’t you fucking forget it.

There’s a free comic by me below. But first …

I wanted to take a moment, before we get into comic matters, to say thank you to everyone who reacted or sent a comment or touched base and checked in after my last column where I detailed the down-then-up on my mum.

She died around 10:20 p.m. Thursday.

Looks like the rallying was a short blip in the downward slide of the past — what is it now? — three, four years? Listen, she had an all-around good life. The end was rough, yes, but it will be for all of us. Whatever the functional part of her ravaged hippocampus to which she retreated seemed to comprise the core memories of her girlhood, and she was, according to those on the outside, content.

Did I ever tell you how I ended up such a comics fan? My mum. She was the one who started buying me comics and enabled my habit because she knew they were helping me learn to read. That led me to a passion for art. And all that reading led me to become a journalist and a professional writer. Small acorns can grow into mighty oaks.

Her death was “peaceful,” according to the home duty manager. Whether or not that was a meaningless platitude, I choose to find comfort in it. I am deeply glad for the compassionate care she received from the home’s staff.

If it’s OK with you, I’d like to move on.

Union Jack, sort of but not quite but yeah, blame Lonergan

I’ve been noodling around this bootleg project for a while. Pushing out its five pages has seemed interminable; I overthought every step; shit happened (see the last column). I didn’t want it to take that long, honestly, but man plans and god laughs and here we are. But it’s finished.

I haven’t wrapped it up in covers and indicia and all that yet. I probably will so I can print off a few copies and force it into people’s hands at a convention like that guy in Family Guy showing off his kids’ pictures.

I’d like to shout out Jesse Lonergan here, the amazing artist behind Hedra, Drome, Panda Express Delivery Service and many other really excellent publications. His star is on the rise and I was lucky enough to completely coincidentally run into Lonergan at last year’s SPX. I gave him a copy of Tony Osmond II and he gave me his small zine-like ashcan, We Ride at Night1, a glorious, poetic take on Batman in a sort of 1950s fever dream. I wrote about it in this column after the event.)

Turns out that that simple gift was a doorway, a portal, a rabbit hole. “I could do something like this,” I thought, hubristically. No, no. I couldn’t do anything resembling Lonergan’s output. His innovatory approach is … it’s in another league entirely. But the spark was lit. Maybe, I argued to myself, I should take a character I love and give it the bootleg treatment.

I had the perfect candidate. My love for Union Jack has been long and abiding since John Byrne drew him in Captain America 253 and 254. And every appearance since then has been utterly shit (with the exception of a three-issue mini-series by Ben Raab and the impeccable, flawless art of John Cassaday). And, to be fair, he’s a shit character: He walks around in a Union Jack flag costume with a Webley revolver and a silver-coated dagger. He doesn’t have powers (sort of; it’s complicated). And yet … he holds a piece of my childhood’s heart, alongside 2000AD, Captain Britain, Night Raven and those wonderful short-lived attempts by Marvel to penetrate the U.K. market where I first saw him in glorious black and white Bryne art.

But he doesn’t have to be shit. No character needs be shit with good writing and good art. Neither of those are particularly evidenced by this bootleg. But this is a passion project, an itch I needed to scratch. I hope you will appreciate the enthusiasm and grade on a curve.

So, thank you, Jesse, for the inspiration. We Ride at Night helped tip me over the edge and put pen to paper.

Enjoy.

Let me know if you’d be interested in a print version and I’ll put you down for a copy.

I felt relieved and damned myself for feeling so. Finally.

“Let me know,” I told the case manager. Not much I could do from here in the U.S., anyhow. My mum has long-since collapsed into her dementia like a dying star, thin, bedridden and fetal, curled into herself, stretched out along some mental event horizon, past recognition. Her diagnosis was what tipped my father over from full-blown alcoholic into his own physical and mental death, unrecognized by his wife of seven decades, stripped of dignity and numbly, glass by glass, faltering through a pretence and what remained of his life.

Both of them just … stopped … existing.

On Thursday, an email pinged into my inbox as I awoke to the morning. The GP, or general practitioner — a doctor to you Yanks — removed her from that end-of-life status, declared that she was eating and drinking well and seemed content, and removed her from the medication used to ease the wrongly anticipated finality.

I felt rage. Bright, incandescent. I felt cheated. I felt guilty. Coupled with an intensely stressful day of work, I could not hold onto my normal level of self-control. I tell myself that this is not what she would have wanted but, in truth, I don’t know. I assume that no one wants this. We didn’t have those kind of conversations in my family. Intense emotions — any emotions — just weren’t something one talked about.

Honestly, and I feel deep honesty is warranted here, I wanted her to die. I wanted relief from this knot of dutiful anxiety, metastasizing like a tumor around a burr of responsibility over the past five or six years, and from this constant anger at the choices my dad made that led them here. From the uncertainty. From the overbearing meaninglessness.

Here we are then. Late rainy April. Little certainty exists in the world, except that uncertainty is the norm, and here’s my mum, doggedly hanging on — as if that noun, “mum,” has any meaning anymore. What lies on that bed is not her.

Yet, I am caught in her gravitational field. I wonder if there’s any point resisting. We’re all pulled in eventually1.

Emotional exhaustion makes creative work nearly impossible to maintain. What little remains has been sucked down by my job and the seemingly relentless, incomparable idiocy of certain colleagues, who are few, I am glad to say.

But there have been bright spots. I have been able to put pen to paper and stylus to screen, even fingers to keyboard in the case of my recent Long Box column in The Frederick News-Post’s arts and culture magazine, 72 Hours. (Yes, they still graciously allow me to stain their pages with my hot takes on comics.)

Quick plugs and shameless self-promotion

The lads at Green Archer Comics are in the midst of planning a Kickstarter (Allan Liska is one of the hardest working men in comics), taking on a reimagining of The Saint, novelist Leslie Charteris’ long-running pulp character and based on his first novel, “Meet the Tiger,” which was retitled “The Saint Meets the Tiger” due to its success.

Younger readers may be unfamiliar with Simon Templar, a rakish modern-day Robin Hood. I knew him from the TV series of the same name that featured Roger Moore, then, later, in Return of the Saint, Ian Ogilvy. Of course, there was also the excerable and forgettable 1997 movie with Val Kilmer, which bore almost no resemblance to anything that preceded it. (IIRC, the soundtrack was pretty good.)

Anyhow, Green Archer asked me if I’d be willing to provide a variant pulp-novel themed cover. Hell, yes I would. My enthusiasm was only slightly tempered by the main cover artist. Mike Grell. Fucking Mike Grell. Legend. Icon. Warlord, Green Arrow, Jon Sable Mike Grell.

On the one hand, what an honor to be asked. On the other, I feel a bit like one of the soldiers standing in the very front of very visibly red-clad soldiers somewhere in the Crimea. Grell is somewhere at the back, wearing a general’s hat.

(I hear he’s a lovely fellow from close friends who have met him.)

I can’t reveal my cover yet. I can, however, show you a glimpse of Grell’s, colored by the inimitable other most hard-working man in comics and co-host of the Awesome Comics Podcast, Dan “Guns” Butcher.

I’ve seen the full thing (a privilege of involvement) and, well, it’s Grell. ‘Nuff said.

Go sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter launches. The Liskas are good people, a pleasure to work for, my friends, and deserve all the success.

I promised you an overview of comics “media”

In that latest print column, “Fluff over facts,” I bemoan the attrition of journalism in general and specifically in comics. I don’t really hold out much hope of a return to any form of institutional, objective reporting as it’s hard enough for publishers to stay in business — in an ominous sign, Mad Cave, for example, just laid off five staff members, including two senior editors.

And no one in the legacy press seems to give a shit about the field, except for occasional sycophantic coverage of those few favored creators who seem to fit a fairly niche set of criteria — famous enough to merit column inches, just alternative enough to lend an air of credibility, but not so challenging they offend the pseudo-intellectual upper-middle-class subscribers.

(I’m looking at you, The Guardian, you bunch of mealy titwanks. Get your tongues out of de Campi’s ass. You know she’s at a minimum culpable of marshaling online harassment that led to a fellow creator’s death because he didn’t quite fit her liberal litmus test, right? How about asking her that question? Oh, but she’s OK with alleged human trafficker Amanda Palmer? Ugh. That article’s author, by the by, is The Guardian’s “books and comics” writer David Barnett, whose previous piece is a single-sourced retread of a Facebook post by accused perv/sex pest/rapist Neil Gaiman, claiming he’s innocent and it’s all a smear campaign. Hm. Yeah, sort of proves my point about modern journalism, doesn’t it?2)

I realized after I’d submitted the column that what I was longing for was not only proper factual reportage that asked, and received answers to, the hard questions, but also an adjacent level of sophisticated criticism. I don’t believe I adequately distinguished the two related and overlapping fields, which was a failure on my part akin to the very deficit I was complaining about.

We live; we learn.

At the end of that column, I mentioned I’d run down some of the sources I use for comics news. In an effort to partly remediate that deficit, I’ve put together a purely subjective list of the media around the field, categorized by their primary function. In a landscape defined by the “Memorial Day Massacre” of 20233 and the subsequent rise of AI-driven content, the following six categories represent the various ways the industry is documented — or exploited.

The Categories

Trade reporting and news: Outlets focused on daily mechanics of the industry, including publisher announcements, personnel changes and economics. The primary challenge here is “access journalism,” where the need for early information from a publisher creates a conflict of interest regarding objective reporting.

Critical analysis and review: Media that engages with comics as a viable art form. This category prioritizes qualitative assessment and the “why” behind the work. The risk here is “enthusiasm bias,” where a desire to support the medium results in a lack of rigorous critique.

Historical and archival research: Publications dedicated to preserving the history of the medium. These focus on primary source interviews, fact-checking and documenting the lives of creators.

Retail and market data: Media that focuses on the retail business side of comics, tracking the financial health of the direct market. This includes sales charts, retail trends and collector data.

The bypass (creator-led media): Direct-to-reader platforms like Substack or Patreon. While often high in content quality, these function as marketing and public relations channels with no external accountability.

Algorithmic content: Sites that prioritize search engine optimization and pageview volume over accuracy, expertise or original reporting. Aggregators. (Making them figuratively and literally worthless.)

As if that weren’t enough, you greedy, greedy scamp, this audit evaluates outlets on a 10 point scale based on their “hierarchy of obligation.” That means I’ve graded each based on serving the public interest versus industry or corporate interests. The higher the score, the more they keep the reader in mind.

1. The Vanguard (public service)

The Comics Journal (TCJ)

• Score: 9

  The industry standard for high-level critique and investigative reporting. It remains the most effective “watchdog” in the field.

  In late 2025, TCJ published an exhaustive investigation into the ethics of AI-generated variant covers. The report was so thoroughly researched that it forced three major publishers to revise their submission guidelines and issue public apologies.

SKTCHD

• Score: 9

  A subscription-based platform led by David Harper. It focuses on the business and data behind the direct market.

  Harper’s annual “Retailer Survey” provides the only factual counter-narrative to publisher shipping claims. In 2024, his data debunked a “market growth” narrative that was being used to mask a widespread retail slump.

The Comics Beat

• Score: 8

  Led by Heidi MacDonald, The Beat provides a balance of trade news, labor reporting and convention coverage. It acts as the industry’s “newspaper of record.” My only criticism is the publication folds in movie and TV coverage. I guess that more my own distaste for MCU and DCU movie fandom gurgling up there.

  During the distribution crisis of 2024, The Beat conducted direct interviews with more than 50 independent retailers to identify systemic failures that publishers were attempting to minimize. That’s good, solid grassroots journalism.

TwoMorrows Publishing

• Score: 8

  A print-first publisher of historical journals such as Alter Ego and Back Issue!. If you’re a comics history buff, these are the guys doing the very necessary hard work of charting it meaningfully and with depth.

  Research published in Jack Kirby Collector has been cited as primary evidence in landmark legal cases regarding creator rights and estate settlements.

2. The trade press (access and advocacy)

Solrad

• Score: 7

  A nonprofit digital magazine focusing on alternative comics and artistic experimentation. Solrad serves a niche audience but does so with fairly high critical standards.

Popverse

• Score: 6

  Owned by ReedPop, this site provides professional, clinical reporting. While factualish, it rarely challenges the corporate structures or conventions that provide its parent company with revenue. Comics make up only a sliver of its coverage of (ugh) “pop culture.” Movies take up the lion’s share. That said, it does occasionally report news, even if that news is built around the reporting of other legacy news outlets.

Bleeding Cool

• Score: 3

  An objectionable tabloid-style site that often breaks news but more often just uncritically regurgitates news releases, and is marred by intrusive advertising, a reliance on rumors and speculation that more often than not stirs the pot with editorializing. Way too focused on the big publishing houses. Tepid, stale, bland. I’m not even going to link to it.

3. Aggregate the day away

CBR/Newsarama

• Score: 2

  Once-great institutions now owned by Valnet and Future Publishing. Following the 2023 layoffs (see the second footnote below), these sites have largely abandoned original reporting in favor of AI-generated listicles and SEO-driven summaries. They are the primary source of recycled AI pap and clickbait. It pains me to mention them. More “pop culture.”

Life is too short and precious. Don’t be a de Campi. Go be happy and do joyous things.

Your friend,

I return to it and reread it fequently enough that, were we not in this surging age of anti-paper, I’d have it clipped and saved in my wallet. Poets — real poets in possession of filigree-detailed descriptive skills — have a knack for being able to step out of time and synthesize an analysis of the human condition that speaks eternally.

Now, I have to be honest with you that I have never read a Hill poem. I will be remedying this lack of cultural knowledge shortly. But I do enjoy how he is characterized in interviews and biographies as intense, sharp, humorous, widely learned and curious. He sounds like he’d have been a fun guy to grab a beer with.

This quote, the one that I love and provides insight into … all this … is from a lengthy interview with Hill in the spring 2000 edition of The Paris Review. The interviewer touches momentarily on the critical reaction to the recently-released The Triumph of Love.

“[O]ften the word difficult comes up,” the interviewer challenges. “People mention that it’s worth going through or it isn’t worth going through.”

“Like a Victorian wedding night, yes,” Hill responds with trademark humor. “Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right — not an obligation — to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.”

Art has a right to be difficult. I resonate with this statement, especially today, especially with … all this. I’d take it further —the artist has a right to produce work that is difficult. You, the consumer, have the right to not engage or engage as you wish.

Not always, of course, but sometimes. We’re in that delicate, web-strand-thin liminal space between art-for-the-masses and art-for-the-self. How do we define difficult? How do we define what’s difficult in an intellectual environment like art, where we can’t even adequately offer a definition of what Art is?

This is where we step into the realm of qualia, that frustrating phenomenology of mind that escapes purely linguistic definition. This is where we have an experience of something, perhaps even an experience that is shared by other human beings, that sits maddeningly in the realm of consensus, but outside any objective ability to describe.

I know that sounds kinda complicated, so let me simplify. You see the color red. You point at it. You identify this to me as red. “That is red.” I see it and, having experience of this color, agree. “Yes. That is red,” I concur.

Imagine I’m blind and you’re trying to describe red to me. Go ahead. Give it a go.

You can’t.

We have an experience of something, a wavelength of reflected light. We label that experience “red.” And that’s where our shared experience ends. Other than that word and variations of it, I am completely incapable of sharing with you directly that experience. No language can encapsulate the direct, subjective psychological experience of seeing the color red. All that is in my power is to point at red things so we can share some form of consunsus about the color that allows us to better navigate the world. Our agreement is the label — not the thing itself. I don’t and will never know what comprises your specific, subjective experience of red. Knowing you, that’s probably a blessing.

So, to sum up this slight philosophical excursion as simply as possible: “I’ll know it when I see it.”

How do we quantify “difficult”? Well, we sort of know, right? I believe here, Hill is refering to our ability to access the work, to understand it, to have the requisite cultural, historical and symbolic references at hand to engage with the piece on an equitable level. But it’s more than simple understanding of the topic. “Difficult” works can be about subjects outside of our experience, that make us uncomfortable, that challenge the self-confidence of our beliefs, that shake us, that make us question our moral grounding, that present a concept so alien, our minds skid around trying to integrate it into our logical ecosystem. Of course, lots of things can make us uncomfortable (the current administration *cough*), but for art, the process is more intentional and transactional. “Have you inquired,” it may inquire, “into the genesis of that icky feeling? Allow me to crack the door on that self-reflection. Whether you accept the invite is up to you.”

Really difficult works can destroy our belief structure, even our identity. To what degree is incumbent on the consumer’s willingness to walk through that cracked door.

And, can something be “difficult” and entertaining? What’s the viewer’s reward for their engagement? Does the audience even matter?

A few thousand years ago, I was priviledged to be in a literary analysis class, as part of my philosophy degree, thaugh by a wonderful Swill-born intellectual, Jacques Berthoud. As well as pondering if the literary analysis was even a relevant practice anymore (and this was back in 1997 or so), he once raised the question of James Joyce’s famously inaccessible Finnegan’s Wake. “One reads a page but what did I really get out of it other than a sense of feeling noble?” paraphrases what I recall him saying.

I am also reminded that being able to engage with difficult works is itself a form of privilege, as building the requisite skills for a satisfactory level of appreciation takes time, resources and dedication.

And we have precious little of any of that in the culture of today.

You’ve been very patient with me waffling on all philosophical and that.

Here’s a little bookmark I made myself.

See you next time I have to type out some random thoughts.

“I tried so hard and got so far.
But in the end, it doesn't even matter.”

— “In the End,” Linkin Park

I shit the bed. I fucked it.

I’ve been experimenting so much with my art lately that I completely derailed my process. I knew conceptually that it was possible to stray too far into the wilderness of technique, but I never really imagined I’d be here. This realization has been something of a shock. I am mired, bogged down, thinking about every tiny little mark.

For a lot of traditional visual arts — painting, sculpture and the like — the working method often allows for considerable leeway. A piece can sit, work can progress on multiple projects simultaneously and generally, there’s room to breathe. Experimentation is vital; this is how to discover new ground, innovate and evolve a uniquely personal practice. But painting tolerates wandering; comics do not.

“Kid, you’re one of the best. But put your work in galleries. Don’t do comics. Comics will break your heart.”

— Jack Kirby (allegedly)

While sequential art is a critical and important art form, what fundamentally drives the industry is creators who consistently churn out content under deadline. Time is a resource as vital as ink and paper.

Over the past few months, I’ve felt this intense drive to push boundaries. I’ve been messing with homemade screen tones, exploring new digital techniques and generally trying to turn every piece into a testing ground. And that’s when I started to shit in my sketchbook.

The problem wasn’t the desire to experiment; it was the lack of realization that I can’t treat every single page as a new frontier while also needing to fulfill promises and meet deadlines. The time, energy and resources required to constantly experiment simply ground my production to a trickle.

I found myself moving away from a traditional, comfortable process that works: pencil, ink and a simple gray ink wash — my creative safe lanes. By diving deep into new techniques, I began to analyze everything then analyze my analysis.

This intense focus on the how — “Should I use this fine hatching technique?” “What about scanning the page and printing it off to apply ink wash?” — led to a crippling degree of analysis paralysis. Too many possibilities, too many decisions and the noise of all these techniques completely derailed my speed and rhythm.

Experimentation is important, but a reliable, quick process in sequential art is non-negotiable. I’d foregone the fundamentals needed to build a system that reliably churns out good art more quickly. I reached for the sun. I singed my wings. O, woe! O, woe!

The realization has been a cold splash of water: I must return to the fundamentals. I’m pulling pages for my current project, reloading the ink-wash watercolor brush pen and settling back into the groove. It’s time to stop thinking so hard about the process and just do it. Art needs made and a solid, established work practice is what makes that happen.

Sometimes, the most revolutionary thing you can do is what you know best.

D.R. AND QUINCH DOODLE

How do you pronounce that? “Kwinch”? “Kinch”? Was Alan Moore aware that the British and American differ vastly on the pronunciation of their “U.” (“Dyune” versus “Doon” and “Pooma” versus “Pee-you-ma,” for instance.) Anyhow, I normally have various bits of random paper laying around on my desk. I drew this on one of them.

This iconic couple are two of my most favorite creations. Their genesis is with Alan Moore and Alan Davis, so of course they are. Note the simple wash. No tones; no experimenting. Pencil, ink, paper and wash. And what better analogy for being overwhelmed than a famous actor’s death under a pile of citrus fruit?

Until next time, mind the oranges, Marlon. 🍊

“I know you’re scared. I’m scared too.”

— “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” Black Country, New Road.

Included for no other reason than this song has hit the heavy rotation phase of my daily music playing, as did Lewsberg’s “Getting Closer,” Noah Yorke’s “Trying Too Hard (Lullaby),” Radiohead’s “Codex” and Saya Grey’s “AA BOUQUET FOR YOUR 180 FACE.” Somehow each has come to define a very specific sliver of my life. (Grey’s song will forever be tied to the Italian Gardens in London’s Hyde Park, where I napped on a bench while waiting for a train from Paddington to Cornwall.)

Take a deep breath, Keith, and say what you want to say

Being vulnerable and showing my emotions is a hard thing for me to do, which is why I had to pad out the top of this column with a cushion for this part of the column, which is where I reveal I finally took a look at those irritating analytics Substack provides — and saw 159 mad bastards have somehow found this little paean to the love of my life.

(No, , comics, not Trophy Wife. Put away the camera.)

See? Look, I’m so uncomfortable about the warm feeling I get and the validation, I’m still keeping you at arm’s length with jokes.

Honestly, what is wrong with me, eh?

Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s what I mean to say. Thank you for being my ride-or-die in this dusty little corner of the web. We all need a bulwark against the madness infecting the world, and comics — and my comics family — is mine. I hope this column proves a small distraction, maybe even a salve, against the … the everything for you.

Now I wish I’d bought you a gift. Oh, wait, I know. How would you like not one BUT TWO pages of pure crime? That’s right, the intellectual-property larceny continues with my little bootleg about a specific C-list, flag-wearing Marvel character mentioned ad nauseam in previous columns.

Right then. (No nipples in this one. I mean, they’re there, but covered up in clothing, so use your imagination, I guess?)

Old Jack finds he’s bitten off more than he can chew and now is being bitten and chewed. The irony.

I hope you’re enjoying the crime, erm, story so far. And if you are, please tell me. Who’s your favorite C-list character? I know every serious comic-book reader has one.

I hope you are safe and warm and ice free this winter. Until next time.

For me, that’s anyone who loves comics. The holiday season is always stressful and, as a result, my introverted tendency is to go on personal lockdown. The outdoors is the enemy. Other people are veiled threats. It’s cold. I can doomscroll from the depths of my couch. I’ve always been a loner.

That’s not healthy.

So, I finally made good on a pledge to give Allan Liska a call — that fine fellow who is one of the brains behind Green Archer Comics. I’ve known Allan and his brother Benn for a while as part of the Awesome Comics Podcast community. Ironically, although we only live a virtual stone’s throw away from each other, by American standards, we first met in London at the Awesome Comics Podcast’s 500th show.

Later, Allan and Benn reached out to me to draw a seven-page strip in the fourth ACP “Drawn Under the Influence” anthology. (Archers, Tarzan and King Kong, set on a distant Scottish isle — how could I refuse?)

(BTW, please buy a copy of DUI. Not only will you see some of the finest creators in the UK comics small-press scene, you’ll be contributing to the Cartoon Museum, an institution in London devoted to the history of cartooning.)

So, we had a rather enjoyable few hours.

First, to Roy Rogers, where I signed copies of DUI*, then a visit to a rather excellent comic shop in Leesburg, Virginia, that serves as Allan’s local. Shout out to Vince and Katie of Comics Logic, who I talked at quite a lot. Consider that a highly effective strategy if you’re trying to get into my pants.

*By signing, I mean I drew insufferable little cartoons in the margin of the pages.

Can you see the resemblance?

Final first thoughts on manga vs the West

Ah, as I’m lapse about self promotion (ugh), I forgot to mention the column that I referenced in an earlier post is now available in “72 Hours,” the arts and culture magazine that kindly allows me a few column inches each month to talk about my obsession.

Of course, I confused things by posting out of order because I have no guardrails in my endless quest for self-gratification.

Here’s the column (read this, or the images below if you’re a non-US resident — something you should be glad of in the current chaotic climate):

>>> “How American comics ruined itself and now Manga’s eating their lunch.”

Here’s the follow up:

>>> “The Tankōbon effect: Why Japan’s book-first model eclipses the American comic shop.”

Reference and other methods

Pro tip: The best reference you can find lives in a nearby museum. These all live in Baltimore at the Walters Art Museum. I have no idea how I’ll use them or if I ever will, but I love unusual shapes and beautifully crafted items. That silver snake is articulated, by the way. Those scales may later appear on armor, or a spaceship, or a dragon …

Yes, this is the comic-book world’s favorite punchbag, 501-Levi-jeans wearing “What were you doing when you were 20” Rob Liefeld.

I won’t get into how bad his art is, or continues to be, or what an absolute ass he seems to be when faced with fair critiques, or how unjust it is that he continues to make bank through his performative counter-outrage when so many who came before him can’t afford their medical bills. His is a career built on the privilege of good luck. He was in the right place at the right time.

Let me only say that I’ve been trying to work out these few frames as a sort of exercise for my own practice, and as a way to manage my own rage at the collectors who undeservingly and constantly prop Liefeld up.

Doing this has damaged my mental health, as the most profound insight I drew from this (pun intended) is that Liefeld’s construction is almost close enough, but not so close that it’s immediately obvious to nonartists. He could be better if he took like five minutes to check his work.

Have you heard of Bean Soup Theory?

I’m a collector of such odd logical concoctions — blame it on my philosophy degree — and I’d not heard of this until yesterday, and I think it is a rather neat explanation of the toxic culture of fandom that applies not only to comics, but media in general. Maybe politics, too, but it’s not my place to prosecute that here.

Sometime around 2024, maybe 2025, a TikTok creator posted a bean soup recipe that would be helpful for people with iron deficiency.

“What if I don’t like beans?” a hapless commenter replied.

Cue the savage mockery, screenshotting, duetting and reposting, then a gradual acceptance into the vast epistoleries of internet culture. Finally, we had a quippy, simple term to refine what we’d seen a million times in comment sections since the birth of the internet: people online inserting themselves into content not meant for them, then treating that mismatch as a problem with the content.

Academically, this is known as “egocentric bias,” the tendency to rely too much on our own perspective or, colloquially, to never step outside the assumption that we are the heroes of our own stories. Other related psychological phenomena are self-referential processing (filtering information through personal relevance) and entitlement cognition (the expectation that systems should adapt to our preferences).

Anyhow, the question about beans isn’t really a question, per se. It’s a refusal. It’s a person wandering into a conversation that is not for them and insisting the conversation bend itself around their preferences.

I supposed this would be called solipsism in a different age. In any case, I’m fairly certain — not to sound like a grumpy old man — that individuals who are chronically online lose the context-dependent etiquette that can only be learned through interpersonal interaction. Have you ever been told to “read the room”? Social engagement has, or had, rules that we shared through consensus, that lubricated group conduct.

Your grandma would have called it “bad manners.”

Comics is especially vulnerable to Bean Soupery. Fans have been trained, culturally, to treat the medium as a clubhouse. Not all comics fans, obviously. But enough that we all know the shape of the interaction.

A publisher launches a new book or a creator takes a character in a direction that doesn’t match the reader’s internal, laminated “canon” version, and the reaction isn’t simply dislike — it’s offense. It’s umbrage. It’s the insistence that the existence of the thing is a problem because the only legitimate measuring stick for legitimacy is one’s own.

In a healthy world, the response is boring: move the fuck on and read something else. Nothing was lost except five seconds.

“Comics aren’t made just for you. They never were.”

— Grant Morrison.

Online, the response is to challenge: “Why did you make this?” which really means, “Why didn’t you make it for me?” The same reflex, dressed up as “critique.” Or, worse, “just askin’ questions.”

What makes these reactions toxic is the entitlement underneath. Not liking a book is normal. Wanting every book to match our personal nostalgia is normal, too, if we’re honest. The part that curdles is when “I don’t like beans” becomes “bean soup shouldn’t exist,” or “bean soup is what’s wrong with cooking,” or “the people who like beans are ruining soup.”

That sounds absurd in soup form and just as absurd when applied to a superhero you’ve been reading since you were 12 and you’ve built your identity around knowing the “real” version of that character. The older we get, the less the world — fictional and not — behaves how it did.

But there’s a simple fact that fandom culture keeps trying to wriggle out of: comics is a medium, not a genre and not a private members’ club. A medium means range. Work is aimed at different ages, backgrounds, appetites and moods. A book can be exactly what someone needs while being completely irrelevant to you, and both of those things can be simultaneously true. Where bean soup becomes problematic is when the critic feels they have a right to move outside of their own preferred tropes into that of others in order to gatekeep or police other readers. So, we get Ethan Van Scivers and Alex di Campis perpetually at each others’ throats, collateral damage be damned as they seek the zero-sum outcome for their own limited expectations for what people should be reading.

The irony is, we’ve never lived in a time where comics were as broadly themed and accessible as they are now. I’m reading a manga about some dude wandering ‘round his neighborhood and it’s beautiful. Name an interest. I bet I can find a comic about it. Go on, dive into that kink bank. There’s something out there for you to read.

Of course, the toxic narrative around who owns the definition of comics and what they should and shouldn’t say mainly coalesces around the Big Two, Marvel and DC, which have become global media, with films, TV, games, toys. That level of saturation invites identity investment. People don’t just like Batman or Spider-Man; they build part of their self-concept around their version of Batman or Spider-Man.

Changes attack that core identity.

Old fandom had a useful phrase: don’t like, don’t read. This wasn’t a moral position. It was a practical one. The assumption is that you could curate your experience without trying to rearrange the whole world each time you encounter a thing you aren’t personally interested in.

But social media encourages performative correction,outrage, public flouncing and the loud announcement of non-membership. Taste becomes a referendum and preferences, personality.

You can feel how this escalates. The comment section stops being “here’s what I liked, here’s what didn’t work for me,” and becomes “this is illegitimate,” “this is an agenda,” “this is an attack on real fans,” “stop putting your politics in comics.” The bean soup comment is funny because it’s harmless; the same reflex in comics discourse becomes a tool for harassment, dogpiles and the slow, grinding pressure that makes creators decide the blowback isn’t worth sticking their heads over the trench wall.

So what do you do with this, other than despair and delete your apps?

Are you a reader? Notice the reflex urge to comment, “Who asked for this?” Instead, ask, “Am I the audience?” If the answer is no, congratulations, you’ve just saved yourself time. Move on. More comics are out there than you can ever read in your lifetime. Go find one you like.

Creator? You’re not obliged to litigate your work with people who arrive committed to misunderstanding you. You don’t owe them a debate. You do owe yourself the protection of your own energy.

Publishers, too. Stop treating loudness as representativeness. A large following on Twitter does not an audience for your comic build. Invest in some actual audience research and build your marketing around that. I mean, if you’d like to sell your comic, that is.

Some complaints are feedback. Some are just bean-haters yelling at soup.

CREATIVELY …

The Union Jack Bootleg project continues, only slower than I’d like. I realized I needed to add a second page in between what had originally been page 1 and 2.

I sketched out my thoughts:

Brain dump on the left, which I scanned and reconfigured into the draft on the right. I am still tinkering with Jack’s pose in that fourth panel. Excuse the slightly saucy third panel. It’s not absolutely necessary for continuity. Sorry. “There are benefits …”!

Every time Union Jack shows up in a Marvel comic these days, I want to like it more than I do. Each time I close the book, I feel mildly disappointed, though never surprised. He is, after all, in Marvel’s chronology, Britain’s first masked hero. On paper, from his stated origin, Union Jack should be one of Marvel’s most interesting characters. In reality, he’s an object lesson in how Marvel has historically mishandled and even squelched potential.

Let’s pause the analysis here so I can give unfamiliar readers a potted background of the character’s history and his iterations.

Union Jack first appeared in The Invaders No. 7, Marvel’s titular World War II team of Nazi-fighting marauders, alongside familiar faces such as Captain America, Namor the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, the android precursor to the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm, who are in the U.K. saving us all from being bombed in true Yankee style. (Wow. Thanks so much, lads.) Cue a coincidental, yet suspiciously convenient, encounter with the vampiric Baron Blood. More on him later.

Thus, in due course, we are introduced to Lord James Montgomery Falsworth, the first Union Jack. Cue a couple of pages of exposition where, given it’s wartime, the aging aristo carelessly dives into recounting his “secret” former life as the famous “masked spy-buster” of World War I. Yep, even the android Human Torch knows who he is thanks to coverage in American tabloids.

So, a spy who operates in a loud, flag-covered uniform behind enemy lines as a special operative of His Majesty’s government, whose work is public enough to make foreign newspapers. Ridiculous and contradictory, yes. This is a superhero comic from 1976, where logic takes a back seat to action.

Lest we misremember the period’s excesses, I should note that this was the year Stan Lee gave his blessing to the release of the cringeworthy album Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero (narrated by the Man himself). Just go with it.

Later in WWII, UJ#1 joins a team of masked heroes known as Freedom’s Five. You don’t need to remember this. We won’t be meeting them again.

Baron Blood, however, is the one Bosch nemesis they couldn’t defeat. And he’s back.

Big Bad set-up: achieved.

Story arc: employed.

The Invaders No. 8 has an absolutely smashing cover by Jack Kirby showing Union Jack standing like Nelson on his column, surrounded by his teammates-to-be, with a token background featuring Big Ben, presumably because nothing is more identifiably British. Cough.

At the end of it, having partially vanquished Baron Blood and despite acknowledging he’s a bit past his prime, Union Jack is accepted onto the team. Flag-waving patriots unite.

Look, I’m being a little sarcastic because you readers eat that up. Still, the art here by Frank Robbins, with Frank Springer on inks, is cracking, and the action, intrigue and interpersonal drama snap along thanks to Roy Thomas’ script.

Slight aside: did you know an android can be hypnotized?

And this is, in large part, my Union Jack. Effective, strategic, charismatic, efficient, right up until he gets his legs crushed when Blood slams a boulder down on them.

Oh, my man. They did you dirty. You were just a device to move the plot along. A glorious two-dimensional creation.

“I knew just what I wanted this WWI and WWII English hero to look like, a walking Union Jack flag, so I drew that costume on one of the hero layouts or stats that John Romita had designed for such purposes,” Thomas said about Union Jack’s creation. “Frank Robbins was the first person to draw the character on the actual page, from my sketch, and then I was lucky enough to get Jack Kirby to draw the cover. Wish I’d saved my original drawing.”

When the costume passes to Brian Falsworth and later to the working-class Joey Chapman, who is Union Jack still, what follows across decades of appearances is familiar. Vampires. Gothic inheritance. Old curses seeping out of the fog. These aren’t bad stories. They’re simply the wrong ones. Moribund. Stuck in a rut. Chapman just seems to happen into the role, leaving his art school student days behind.

Yes. Apparently, all the experience that’s needed is a pencil, ruler and paints. That may also have been Steve Rogers’ beginning. At least he got a dose of that there super-soldier serum.

(Blade, who you may be unaware was born in a Soho brothel and is as English as I am. Soho is in London. You’re welcome, American readers.)

Union Jack becomes a vampire hunter. The costume shifts somewhere around the ‘90s and the Pendragon era to something more militaristic, then returns for a couple of specials, then reappears during … erm … I dunno. Something to do with a recent Marvel cross-promotional event where vampires take over. I’ve lost track.

Each appearance feels like Marvel reacting to a fan outcry for a decent Union Jack story by handing the reins to the least capable creative teams available. “Look, just do something, anything, to keep them quiet for a while.”

The high point is perhaps Ben Raab and John Cassaday’s 1998 Union Jack three-issue miniseries. Baron Blood again. Vampires again.

Not even art-genius Cassaday can deliver us from the typecasting.

Here we arrive at one of Union Jack’s central problems, the creative teams behind his outings. For many writers, being handed a Union Jack assignment must feel like punishment.

As far as I’ve been able to research, all but two of the numerous teams who have worked on a Union Jack story come from somewhere other than the U.K. No wonder the work feels phoned in.

A nod here to Wolverhampton’s Mike Perkins and Paul Grist, who valiantly tried, really tried, with The Union to create a compelling superhero team helmed by UJ. I don’t know much of the history behind that run, though I do know Grist was hammered unfairly on social media before the book even came out. His storytelling, uncoupled from his unique art, was meh.

It hasn’t helped that Union Jack, a second- or third-tier hero, has had to compete with the superpowered bruiser who’s become the U.K.’s most well-known export, Captain Britain. That character was, essentially, as British-built as a Robin Reliant, and helped cement the brilliance of two of the finest British comics creators we exported to the world, Alan Moore and Alan Davis.

Because of that success, Cap, while created by Chris “Isn’t-Actually-English-Although-He-Thinks-So” Claremont and the legendary Herb Trimpe, received the lavish attention and truly brilliant world building from British creators that Union Jack never did.

Initially created as a flagship for the Marvel UK lineup, Captain Britain would later go on to become massively popular.

Captain Britain monthly’s 14 issues, published January 1985 to February 1986, have pride of place in my collection and were hugely influential on me as a young artist.

Union Jack doesn’t appear at all in that run. He turns up later in the eminently forgettable Knights of Pendragon (1990), reduced to a source of class rivalry between the aristocratic superhero and the working-class Joey Chapman incarnation. It’s an insipid foundation for tension unless handled with care.

Then the 1990s ruined comics. Marvel UK produced a burst of original characters that appealed to pretty much nobody. Only Death’s Head retained a degree of loyalty, until he was rebooted. Marvel UK sputtered and faded out.

By then, I’d long since stopped reading comics.

Somewhere in there, mainly around the era of “Cool Britannia,” I found myself perseverating on Union Jack and a storyline that could not only reboot him as a viable British character, but explore the missed opportunities of the Falsworth legacy.

Union Jack, the gentleman spy. A British wartime operative shaped by secrecy, institution and tradition. A hero whose power isn’t mysticism or brute force but access, memory and experience.

Strip away the costume and Union Jack’s DNA is clear. James Montgomery Falsworth is a product of the early 20th-century British state, World War I intelligence work, World War II alliances, aristocratic obligation and institutional loyalty. He understands secrecy not as mystique, but as policy. He operates inside systems rather than above them. He is driven by principle.

And what if he wasn’t the first?

I won’t bore you by laying out the arc in detail, as much of it lives only in my head and in small notations in my notebook.

Besides, I know full well that Marvel would never allocate the resources the idea would need to succeed. I’m just some jerk with a keyboard, warrioring and worrying away on some internet blog.

Still, I have to give it a try. A little bit. Using crime.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I appreciate you letting me blast on about one of my favorite mishandled characters.

As a reward, below is the first page of a bootleg Union Jack story, even though the words “Union” and “Jack” won’t be found in the pages to follow. (Because history.) This is an homage to the country that birthed me, warts and all, and to its culture and people.

Hopefully Marvel won’t get all legally pedantic about me using a version of one of their C-list heroes and shut this down.

I doubt he’s going to make it to the MCU anyhow.

I give you: No Place for a Gentleman.

When that column reached 1,000 words and was rapidly becoming too long to print, I clipped it off and filed it. But I wasn’t done. Consider what’s below a pre-appendix.

In my simple way — my degrees are in art and philosophy, not an MBA — I did my best to trace back the river to its source. Not surprisingly, the culprit is the direct market model of distribution.

I’ll let you read that column for yourself when it publishes Thursday in “72 Hours.” We can argue then.

Many episodes of “Manben” talk about the success creators they interview have in sheer publication numbers. (Normally, this is preceded by a discussion of each creator’s wilderness years before their best-selling breakthroughs.)

The most recent “Manben” I watched interviewed Shuzo Oshimi, who was closing in on completing his serialized book, “Blood on the Tracks.” And, I wondered, how did that stack up (pun intended) against some of the West’s most successful comic books ever?

[Apologies to Alan Moore for what comes next.]

“The Killing Joke” is one of the most famous superhero graphic novels ever, continuously in print since the late 1980s. Its lifetime sales are usually estimated in the 1.5 million to 2 million range. That figure was built slowly, across decades, through reprints, anniversaries, bookstore placement, animated adaptations and cultural reinforcement.

“Watchmen” sits in a category of its own, with lifetime sales estimated at north of 10 million copies over nearly 40 years. It’s taught, canonized, adapted, argued over and perpetually rediscovered. Nothing else in Western comics-as-books really compares.

The 17 volumes of “Blood on the Tracks” that were published from 2017 to 2023 had, as of May ‘23, 2.3 million copies in circulation.

“Blood on the Tracks,” by Shuzo Oshimi.

In raw numbers, that’s already in “Killing Joke” territory. In terms of annual sales velocity, it’s closer to “Watchmen” than most people would be comfortable admitting, and got there without a movie, a TV series or four decades of mythmaking.

I wondered how their circulation and sales numbers stacked up against their Western counterparts. Now, math is not my strong suit (see above), so take what’s below with a pinch of salt and, if you’re a numbers whiz or understand things like “circulation” and “sales,” please tell me if I’ve cocked up. (This is why I’ve failed to monetize my hobby.)

Comparisons in this area are difficult one-to-one because of the structural differences in publication practices, but not impossible.

Let’s take a look at the most successful Western comic in decades. “Absolute Batman” launched in 2024 and is still going strong today. It’s DC’s reboot of the Batman character (and if you don’t know who that is, you’re on the wrong Substack), recreated for the 21st century.

By American comic book sales standards, “Absolute Batman” is a massive success. As of December, the series has sold around 3 million copies through the direct market. Issue 1 sold close to 400,000 copies. In today’s market, that’s unheard of, blockbuster numbers.

Absolute unit, more like.

That’s not even a drop in the bucket of manga sales.

A hit manga series can sell 30 million to 50 million units in a year. “Weekly Shōnen Jump”? Hold its beer, Batman: more than a million sales a week. The average successful monthly U.S. comic sells 50,000 to 60,000 a month.

Oof.

I don’t want to step into a statistically invalid comparison here, and I understand that the comparison has limitations, but, to me, that’s stunning.

In short, and ignoring a whole lot of complexities, manga publishers treat their products like books while the U.S. market thinks in terms of periodicals. The weekly and monthly magazines, made as cheaply as possible, don’t make money and even lose it. But they test the waters with up to 20 serialized stories in their hundreds of pages. Successful stories are compiled into their own “tankōbon” — think trade paperbacks. Higher quality. Better paper. More collectible.

That’s where the money’s made. And it’s also what most American readers buy from bookshops.

Whether you like manga or not — and I concede I’m in the minority here in most cases — the Japanese publication model is something we should strongly consider in the U.S. The market here has felt like it’s been on the verge of collapse for far too long and is only a recession away from permanent erasure.

I see a lot of sense in creating a monthly magazine-style collection of strips, as cheaply as possible, that are affordable and act as an ongoing market test for collected editions of single stories. Think “2000AD” at scale, sold for a couple of bucks but packed with innovative stories across genres. A Marvel book with a selection of 20 different stories by diverse creators given the freedom to play in that sandbox? Even I might grab a sub to that.

This could supplement the direct sales market and provide it with the data it desperately needs to develop more consistent hits, and support the comic shops that have been valiantly defending — and dying — on the industry’s front line for the past 55 years.

…

Here’s a good primer on the manga industry.

The death of your father
The death of your mother
Is something you prepare for
All your life
All their lives

— “Broccoli,” Coil

This has been …

This has been a long year. I’ll leave it at that. So, let’s just skip the recap, shall we?

I’ve been a writer long enough to feel the end-of-year pressure to look back, to evaluate, assess, be retrospective and explain. Readers love the reassurance, something we are constantly in search of.

Sorry. I do not have a handle on life and, each year, my grip on even a semblance of understanding becomes increasingly more tenuous. If 2025 and the decade before have taught me anything, it’s that uncertainty is the state of play. Chaos hovers at the borders.

I’m confused. I don’t have the answers. I’m scared. I know you want me to project a false sense of security, but I’m tired, so tired, of trying to always be positive. I’d feel like I was lying to you.

Of course, you may respond. Your father died. What could be more ungrounding than that? No wonder you’re mired in self-reflection and nihilism.

Maybe.

This has been a year of self-reflection and grief. I’ve been changed profoundly. And yet, I am exactly the same. The confusion between those two poles you’ll see below.

So, instead of a 2025 wrap and false bravado, I’m just going to dump thoughts on the page. Feel free to sift through. Some of them even tackle comics. Hopefully, something resonates and we can share in that together.

1. There’s nothing “out there,” beyond us, from which to draw direction and meaning or to which we can outsource decision-making — no guiding, paternal force that loves us and wants the best for us. We only have each other. No glamorous reward. No glorious finality. No real purpose. No inherent meaning. Just us on a dingy blue marble, speeding through space, still using “god” for everything we don’t understand.

2. I’m at a point in life where I see change everywhere. What I believe is no more than quicksand. Everything I have can be swept away in an instant. That was less frightening when I was young and had more years ahead than behind, and it all seemed more black and white and less confusing. You need that unbridled confidence when you’re young. As you grow older and less physically capable, you crave consistency and certainty even as the understanding grows that neither reliably exists.

3. Regrets. I could have made it in comics if I’d stuck with it, but the trade-off would have been the wonderful, fulfilling life I’ve built. I had the potential, but the timing just wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. I wish I hadn’t given up after one rejection letter and consigned this to a part-time hobby. I wish I’d learned the lesson about commitment earlier in life. (I had it pretty easy as a kid, shielded as an only child from the learning experience of pressure, challenge and need.) And yet, I’d give up the pen and paper in a heartbeat for my kids or my wife.

4. Aging. I have so little time left to do something meaningful in the field, maybe 25 years if I’m lucky. These are the legacy years. I’d like to leave something behind that means something in this weird little industry that I love.

5. That I desperately, desperately need the validation comics bring. Somewhere in my childhood, I realized art brought me the attention I wanted: the praise, the affirmation, the recognition. And comics filled an emotional void that my parents couldn’t. They were my first babysitter and I’ve never recovered from that childhood crush.

6. I want to understand that hole in my psychology. How did that get there? What do I want from comics and its community? Do I really want to know and would knowing make that drive meaningless? (Look what happened to Munch when his mental illness was in remission.)

7. Ultimately, we want to be happy, yet happiness can be a state of creative stultification. We need a degree of discomfort to motivate us to act. Too much and we’ll give up. Too little and we don’t begin.

8. I want to do a “Drome,” an “Incal,” a defining work of sequential brilliance. I also want to be more artsy, for want of a better word, like with “Tangible.”

9. I want to complete several projects I have in mind:

The bootlegs: Union Jack; the Creeper.
“Tangible.”
“The Long Box” Substack.
A way to make some income. T-shirts? Graphics?

10. There is so much more to learn. I want to keep getting better. I need another 80 years or so to do everything I want. Maybe more.

“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
— “The Parlement of Foules,” Chaucer

11. I want to suddenly be comics famous. Nothing huge, but say at the level of a James Harren or José Ryp. Just enough to draw a line to my table. Just enough that bigger creators recognize me and we can go to dinner. So I get free invites to comic conventions. I’d like to see what that VIP room looks like. Then I’d be happy enough to fade out.

12. I’ve been bingeing the Japanese comics show “Manben.” I’d like to do something like that for Western comic creators, but I think the differences in cultural mindset might be too stark to get the depth that “Manben” has. I just don’t think Western comic creators think as philosophically or deeply as their Eastern counterparts. I find the show strangely fulfilling. Here are these giants in their industry, all enunciating the same feelings toward their art as I have. I want to buy a ticket and fly to Japan so I can impose myself on them and watch them create.

13. I want to be in the moment with long, unbroken periods of creation.

14. I want less drama. Less unease. I don’t want to have this daily nausea that I’m living in the U.S. equivalent of pre-1936 Germany.

15. I want a return to caring, to respect for debate and dialectic and science, to a freedom of ideas, to critical thought, to political compromise. I want a return to caring about art and progress, to understanding that we may not get exactly what we want, but we can make the world better for those who will come after us. I want a return to the fundamental understanding that no society can stand that doesn’t remain curious. We should hold in our hearts a question, accompanied by a deep suspicion of anyone claiming to have the answer. Even science admits to a skeptical core.

16. In that space of certainty, intellectual curiosity dies. When we tie ourselves to that absolute — that we know — and that certainty becomes part of our identity, we can be destroyed with a gentle tap of the hammer on our tail. (Google “Prince Rupert’s Drops.”)

17. I want the dissolution of capitalism as our motivating premise and a global understanding that there’s enough for all of us. What we make doesn’t have to be owned by a privileged handful. I want a society that works on the principle that everyone has something to contribute and provides the means to do so, because there’s room enough for all of us and whereas, yes, a few might take advantage, many, many more will benefit.

18. I want people to start giving more of a shit about others — more than they do themselves, if they’re one of the lucky ones. I want us all to stop connivingly vacuuming up resources then gatekeeping them selfishly, even though — once again — there’s enough for all of us.

19. I want social media, your Twitter, your Facebook, your Instagram and, yes, even my beloved TikTok, to die. It is a parasitical invasion of our humanity, weaponized by bad actors to tear us apart because it appeals to our worst, most divisive instincts. We are being cut down by our own outrage.

20. I want the things I love to stop being used as political weapons in this miserable culture war. I want people to stop defining their values and personalities through what they identify with and judging others for not sharing that identity or, unforgivably, making snap judgments about others who may not identify that way. Let’s stop using these ephemeral identities as excuses to attack each other. Our beliefs about ourselves are less tangible than the T-shirt we put on in the morning and more changeable than fashion. We need to learn to drop beliefs as easily as we adopt them. Beliefs are tools, nothing more and, likely as not, have no grounding in reality, or only cursorily reflect the “truth” when they do.

21. The antidote to this division is to assume ordinary people like us are doing the best they can. Very few people have evil intent (and we’ve elected them, surprisingly, or elevated them into billionaires). If nothing else, this small ethical shift will make you feel better about yourself.

22. We need to stop pretending that our imagination has import in the world. We need to stop magical thinking entirely. Thinking hard about something we want with no other action won’t make it magically happen. (And stop trying to use quantum pseudoscience to prove it does.) Stop citing invisible external sources as excuses for your terrible behavior. Stop pretending that the product of someone’s mental illness is somehow spiritually motivated. If it really were the voice of god, wouldn’t the philosophy be more cohesive?

23. Understand how deep your mind really goes; understand that all its influence ends inside your brain in its mysterious, poorly understood interaction of chemicals. Reality doesn’t bend to your will, however much your confirmation bias says it does. You’re just not that important. There is no mystical conduit to knowledge and certainty out there. Illumination comes from within.

24. We need to be more aware of the dangers of consensus belief. That’s when things actually happen, and not always for the better.

25. Consciousness, whatever its evolutionary cause and whatever it’s comprised of, is a design flaw. We don’t understand it and yet here we are, trying to impose it on our machines. I don’t feel like that’s a good idea. Because why should we be alone in the misery of our realization?

26. Man plans and god laughs. I’ve been using that phrase a lot this year. I enjoy the irony. You can prepare all you want. You can cultivate the soil and eat your greens (especially broccoli). Practicing the craft is the point.

27. Don’t underestimate what you’ll be capable of. You have deeper reserves than you know. Ask for help. Humans are terrible, absolutely awful at anticipating the future. You think you’ll know what’s coming, but you don’t. Often, the anticipation is worse.

28. It’s normal to feel a little broken. To be alive is to accrue injuries.

If you’ve made it this far without canceling your subscription, thank you. Life is a long haul. Aim for the joy but be OK with contentment.

Happy (almost) New Year.

SCREEN TONE UPDATE

You know you love it, you slag, he says to himself as another sheet comes rolling off the printer. Yes, I am that slag. Yes, I do love it. I’ve made my experiments and am ready to pass along the knowledge. Go forward. Save yourself some money. Be a slag. Homebrew.

This home method for creating screentone gets you surprisingly close to Deleter at a fraction of the cost.

What you will need:

• A toner-based laser printer or access to photocopies. Inkjet will not work for this.
• Con-Tact Brand clear matte shelf liner, sometimes listed as “transparent matte.”
• Wax paper, the standard kitchen kind.
• Cheap cardstock for backing.
• Extra-hold hairspray. Any strong hold works.
• Spray adhesive. Brand does not matter as long as it reliably bonds paper to paper.

Optional but useful:

• Frisket film. I have successfully printed on Grafix Frisket Film.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0065F1NT6

Software and files:

• Clip Studio Paint.
• Custom tones. I use a mix of my own and several from Halftone Hospital.

Instructions:

1. In Clip Studio Paint, create or select the screentone you want. Tailor density and dot size for the final reproduction, not for how it looks on screen.

2. Print a test sheet on regular paper to confirm density. If it looks right, keep that sheet. It can be used later for transfers if you want to go further down the homebrew screentone rabbit hole.

3. Cut a piece of Con-Tact sheet slightly smaller than A4.

4. Spray adhesive onto the back of the Con-Tact sheet and mount it to cardstock.
   The cardstock acts as a flexible carrier that allows the sheet to pass through the printer without buckling or jamming.

5. Trim the mounted sheet to full A4 size so it fits your printer cleanly.

6. Burnish the surface gently to remove bubbles or creases. Any raised area can distort the dot pattern or cause a feed issue.

7. Prepare to print.

8. In your printer settings, set the paper type to “thin.” This appears to help the printer regulate heat for toner transfer onto the plastic surface.

9. Load the sheet into the manual feed tray. The standard tray is more likely to jam with this setup.

10. Print.

11. Lightly spray the printed sheet with extra-hold hairspray. This helps fix the toner and gives the surface a more paper-like tooth. Let it dry for a few minutes.

12. Storage and use options:

• Option A: Use the sheet as is. You won’t be able to see through it in the same way you can with Deleter, but it works well on a lightbox for cutting and placement. This is where I usually stop.

• Option B: For greater transparency, peel the Con-Tact film and reapply it to a sheet of wax paper. Burnish carefully. Too much pressure will lift the toner, which is easier to do than you think.

Which is why it surprised me how much I was affected by a Japanese television show I stumbled across almost by accident.

A Show That Watches Artists Work

The show is Manben, more formally Urasawa Naoki no Manben, hosted by Naoki Urasawa, himself an extraordinary manga creator. I found it on the Internet Archive, in Japanese with subtitles, which makes it a slightly awkward thing to have on while trying to work and have to keep looking up to not miss what’s said. (What a first-world problem.)

Manben debuted in 2014 on Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, with a short special that evolved into a recurring series. Hosted by Urasawa himself, the show ran for two seasons before returning in 2017 under the title Manben Neo. That version has continued intermittently ever since, with new episodes still airing as recently as 2023. It’s not a constant presence, more like a series of quiet returns, but it has remained remarkably consistent in tone and structure over the years.

No Hype, No Gloss, Just Craft

The setup is deceptively simple and completely engrossing. The crew visits a manga artist’s studio and sets up cameras everywhere: overhead, side angles, close-ups, wide shots — and then leaves. The artist works as they normally would for a day. Weeks later, that footage is edited down and the artist sits with Urasawa to watch it back, stopping to talk through decisions, habits, composition choices, workflow and philosophy.

It’s not an interview show in the usual sense. There’s no promotional chatter. No brand-building. Just two people who understand the work talking seriously about how it gets done.

Why Don’t We Have This?

And watching it, I kept thinking: Why do we not have this?

Not on public television, not on YouTube, not anywhere, or not like this, at least. A show that treats comics as a serious craft, worthy of documentation and discussion, without irony or defensiveness. I mean, seeing Takao Saito painting out a line with white-out that he dries from the heat of his cigarette ember? That’s gold, almost as eccentric as when Joe Kubert shaves a layer off his Bristol board to get rid of an errant ink line. (Believe it or not, shaving paper is an artistic technique that’s more common than using cigarettes.)

How to Make Comics the Saito Way. Use white-out. Dry with ciggy.

It’s hard not to contrast Manben’s curatorial approach with the way comics are treated in North America, where appreciation for the medium has become increasingly thin and transactional. Comics here often feel less like an art form and more like a temporary delivery system for intellectual property, a thing to be strip-mined quickly before moving on.

Respect for Process, Not Celebrity

What Manben shows, again and again, is respect; not for celebrity, but for process.

The first series concludes by featuring the legendary Takao Saito, creator of Golgo 13, a series he’d been producing for nearly 50 years. When we join him, aged 79, he’s still at it. Saito died in 2021. Here, his studio has a full team. Assistants handling backgrounds, crowds, architecture, everything except the main character. It’s an old model, not one you’d see much today in the West, which echoes the work-intensive production-line studio systems of American comics from the mid- to late-20th century, when teams toiled together in the same physical space.

There’s a joke in the episode about a rumor that Saito doesn’t contribute to his books anymore. The show doesn’t aggressively refute it, but it does quietly demonstrate the reality of his role. He does draw (at least, he does for this episode). But he’s at the top as more of a stage director, really, managing, directing, drawing the main character, thinking constantly about composition and storytelling, and signing off on output.

Everything serves the story. That phrase comes up repeatedly: entertaining the reader. Not indulging yourself. Not showing off. Entertaining the reader.

A Culture That Still Cares

That focus runs throughout the series. Even as manga remains a mass-produced, disposable medium — pulp, in the most literal sense — the creators talk about it with seriousness and care. They know the demands are intense. Long hours. Relentless schedules. Expectations that many Western artists would not tolerate. The show doesn’t romanticize that, but it doesn’t shy away from it either.

Drawing Isn’t the Same as Storytelling

What struck me most was the distinction Saito makes between drawing skill and dramatic skill. That idea has been rattling around my head ever since. Technical proficiency doesn’t automatically make someone a good storyteller. And being a compelling storyteller doesn’t require virtuoso draftsmanship. Saito himself downplays his technical ability. What he has mastered is structure, pacing and clarity. His compositions are efficient. His art serves the narrative. Nothing is there to entertain the artist at the expense of the whole.

Another piece of advice from him stuck with me: Don’t entertain yourself too much while drawing or you’ll lose sight of the work as a whole. That applies to more than comics.

Worth Your Time, Even If You Don’t Read Manga

For anyone who makes comics, regardless of how you feel about manga as a style, Manben is worth your time. Not to fetishize Japanese creators or pretend their system is perfect, but to observe a culture that still treats sequential art as a serious, human endeavor. Something worth slowing down for. Something worth documenting.

There are techniques to pick up, tools to note, habits worth stealing. But more than that, there’s a philosophy on display — one grounded in care for the craft and respect for the reader. That alone makes it worth watching, however manga makes you feel.

If you’ve never used screentone: imagine a clear sheet covered in tiny dots. You lay it over your drawing, cut out the shape you want, then rub it down so the dots stick to the paper and give you areas of tone. Manga readers will know this instinctively. Mangaka still lean hard on digital screentones now, and Clip Studio Paint has a very robust way of adding halftone dots to your work with a few clicks. It’s brilliant.

But I miss the physical stuff.

Years ago, I was sitting on the floor at Heathrow with my best friend, Dean Leybourn, waiting to fly to Spain. We had our comic art gear spread out around us, because of course we did. Dean had somehow scored sheets of LetraTone the old transfer-style tones. Not the Japanese Deleter sheets I use now, but these beautiful plastic rub-down screens that LetraTone made before the company folded.

I still remember that feeling the first time I used them. I think it was a 25-line screen, rubbed down over a silly little one-page gag strip I’d drawn. As soon as those dots went on, the art felt… real. Professional. Like something that could sit in a comic next to people who actually knew what they were doing. That page is lost now, sacrificed in one of those parental purges where old art mysteriously disappears during a house move. But I can still recall the feeling of looking at it and thinking, for a second, that I belonged.

LetraTone is gone. You can still find sheets online if you’re willing to pay for the privilege, but they’re rare, expensive and not guaranteed to work after all these years unless someone has stored them like museum pieces. Deleter screentone , the modern Japanese stuff , is still available and it’s beautiful. Painfully beautiful. Also just painful. Single sheets can be ten dollars, and I have technical headaches getting them to stick to the toothy paper I like to draw on.

So that’s the setup: I love screentone, the good stuff is expensive or extinct, and I have a stubborn streak. Of course I decided to try to homebrew my own.

This is how I know something has crossed from “fun idea” to “full-blown obsession”: at first I try to solve it with whatever I already own. I analyze, I tinker, I try to be clever. Then there’s a point where I quietly start spending actual money on it. That’s when I know the problem has moved in and is renting space in my head.

Stage one was inkjet experiments. I tried:

* Clear vinyl printable sticker paper

* Clear matte contact masking film that isn’t meant to be printed on

* Random clear transparency film on a roll that I somehow own

None of this is designed for inkjet screentone work. Inkjet ink is water-based. Nonporous, glossy surfaces don’t give it anywhere to go, so the dots sit on top and never really dry. I bodged together a system by taping the films to semi-rigid cardboard so they wouldn’t jam in the printer, then running dot patterns from Clip Studio Paint onto them.

The results were … not great. Not a disaster, but inconsistent. Tiny dots sitting on the surface, ready to smear if you looked at them sideways. I tried a hair dryer. The airflow seemed to push the dots around, spreading them and making them less opaque. I tried putting the prints on one of the heating mats my wife bought for Thanksgiving food. That helped with drying, right up until I scorched the vinyl.

Physics, at this point: absolutely not helping. Fuck you, physics.

So I turned to fixatives. First pass: college classic hairspray, borrowed from my daughter’s stash. Let the dots dry as much as possible, put the sheet on newspaper, spray a light coat over the whole thing. It actually worked pretty well. Well enough that I thought, fine, I’ll buy proper fixative like a responsible adult.

The proper fixative did not work as well as the cheap hairspray.

Early results from the inkjet printer. Not awful … but not great. (FYI, for those Deleter enthusiasts, the one thing you can do well with these sheets is tonescraping with a scalpel blade.)

After a lot of trial and error, I also realized there’s a fundamental inkjet problem: even if you get something usable on plastic, the density is all over the place. On the cardboard backing, the ink sinks in and looks rich. On the plastic, it sits on top and looks weaker. There’s no one-to-one consistency, which is kind of the whole point of screentone.

That’s when I finally accepted what other people had already figured out: if you want reliable homebrew screentone, you need laser printing or photocopying. Toner plus heat, not ink plus wishful thinking.

So I bought a laser printer. Refurbished, monochrome, single-function, one of those workhorse models people use because it just prints and shuts up about it. Refurbished, it cost about $115 from Staples. I don’t need scanning, faxing or color — just dense black dots.

I also bought the thinnest clear film I could find that can survive a laser printer: translucent plastic sheets measured by mil thickness. Four mil was as thin as I could get. No adhesive backing, just bare film.

The plan is simple enough:

1. Run my dot patterns onto the thin translucent sheets with the laser printer.

2. Let the toner set properly. Maybe test whether it needs a light fixative.

3. Flip the sheet over and spray the back with 3M repositionable adhesive, a low-tack spray that should behave more like Deleter’s gentle glue than a permanent label.

4. Store the prepared sheets on something like wax paper so they don’t bond with whatever they’re sitting on before I’m ready to use them.

In theory, I’ll end up with custom screentone that I can cut, lift and burnish down onto my usual drawing papers without tearing the surface or fighting industrial-strength sticker glue.

That’s the theory.

In practice, as I type this, the refurbished printer has just arrived. Now the journey continues to fire this thing up and see if homegrown screentone is actually possible, or if this is just another charmingly expensive chapter in my long, complicated love story with dots.

You think I’d leave you hanging? Here’s my first test using a method called “solvent transfer,” which I’d heard works well for moving the tone from paper to paper. I can confirm. It’s a little tricky to use precisely, as you can see here. I experimented with “tone scraping” with a little white ink gel pen. This is certainly promising, as the tone lifted off almost magically with hard burnishing and laid down crisply and deeply.

Have you ever tried this experiment? How’d it go? Tell me in the comments.

CAN I TROUBLE YOU TO BUY A COMIC … ?

I hope so, given this column is all about comics. Drawn Under the Influence No. 4 is now available through all good digital retailers (such as Amazon) in all countries, not just the U.K.

Twenty-five of the most brilliant of the U.K. or U.K. adjacent’s small press and comics scene, and all done for charity — in this case, The Cartoon Museum in London, a charming, quirky and critical foundational stone for the industry that protects and advocates for the cartooning and comics community and its history.

Honestly, not sure how my name ended up next to the esteemed editor of the title, Simon Russell, on the contribs line there, but I like it.

DUI, as it’s known, was birthed out of virtual drink and draw events held by the Awesome Comics Podcast during COVID (they’re still going on and you are most welcome to attend and meet the gang).

As I mentioned before in The Long Box, I’ve contributed the art for a seven-page tale conceived and written by Allan and Benn Liska, the founders of Green Archer Comics. That strip features the titular arrow slinger meeting Tarz … I mean, Johnny Jungle … in a hunt for the world’s most famous kaiju gorilla. Rhymes with “dong.”

This was a blast to illustrate. Initially, I had a little anxiety around whether I had the chops to draw the old lad, as well as capturing the titular Tarzan actor Johnny Weismuller’s iconic features, but I think I managed it.

This is a particularly meaningful few pages for me for a number of reasons, not just that I’m privileged to be in a collection with some of the finest creators in the field. Secondly, this was where I pushed through some barriers with my digital art practice into a process that works for me in terms of speed and quality. And, finally, this project came at a particularly hard time, following my Dad’s death in late July. I was in England at his home for six weeks — 40 days total — working remotely, cleaning, dealing with the minutiae and bureaucracy that comes post-terminus, and the thankless task of sorting what’s important from what’s not. The discipline it took to sit down in the evenings and illustrate this story helped ground me and keep me sane — something that drawing has always done but was particularly critical at that point.

I give every project my absolute best effort. I hope you see that here.

Pro tip: Raasey voles don’t work well against a monster ape. Boink. (And my love of too much digital tone is very much on display.)

Russell, the editor, was the perfect man for the job, given his deep and broad experience in graphic design and his encyclopedic love and passion for comics. You can hear him on episode 543 of the Awesome Comics Podcast talking about DUI #4 and being enormously generous about my small corner of the mag.

“His work is like him, like the man,” Russell said. “It’s, it’s big, it’s generous, and it’s scurrilous.” (True. I am scurrilous.)

My good friend and co-host Tony Esmond also chimed in: ” ... and there’s a, yeah, there’s, there’s such an edge to it. There’s something that’s so different about it. Yeah, I keep telling him, and tell him his commissions are too cheap, the fucker. I keep telling him.”

Tony is also correct.

But please do pick up a copy. At 104 pages with 25 creators, the cover price is around $13 for the issue, which is about what you’d put down for three monthlies with fewer pages of story and 10 times the ads.

That’s a bargain.

It’s shiny smooth — what we call “hot press” in the trade — and a shade too small for Western postcard size at 10 by 14.8 centimeters. It’s also not super sturdy and lacks the comfortable thickness I like.

To be fair, I’m fussy about my paper2. I need that right kind of texture, something with a little tooth that catches the pencil lead, but not so much it’s distracting, and not so smooth that the ink lines spread out a bit before settling into the paper’s weave. In technical terms, “cold press.”

Comics artists mostly use what’s called “Bristol board,” a premium heavyweight card stock that can handle heavier use, so it can take an ink wash, alcohol markers and (to a degree) paint.

Bristol board is a perfect weight for the India ink-heavy art of comics. Some artists prefer the smooth, ice-rink-like surface of hot-press board. To me, it feels a little unnatural.

Back in the day, you could buy packs of hot-pressed Bristol board made especially for comic-book artists at your local comic store from a company called Blue Line. I still have a ream of sheets from a couple of decades ago gently yellowing on a shelf somewhere in the house. I drew on one sheet, hated it and then stored the rest away, thinking that maybe, one day, I’d get over this hobbling need to have just the right products at hand to be able to work. As far as I know, it’s still here, still taunting me.

I could dive down the rabbit hole of paper, its importance, the different types and uses, how it’s defined, how it’s made and its history. I don’t know an artist who doesn’t acquisitively wander the sketchbook aisle of their local art store and thumb pages and wonder about how it would take 2B lead or — gasp! — chinagraph marker.

Hm, I’ll throw some technical details below for the paper-curious crowd.

Artists share an odd intersection with stationary fiends. We’re always searching for that perfect tool, the one that clicks neatly into the space in our brains to create that feeling of rightness. As we age, this comfort with our tools expands, as does the collection of implements for making marks and on which we make marks. I have drawers of paper yet to be used; I have rolls of it.

I have drawers and glasses full of pencils, pens, markers, paper, paint — anything you can imagine, really. Most often, I buy these tools to fix a problem. The Deleter paper was an impulse. I rolled the dice and ... Well, maybe I’ll have better luck next time.

And now I’m stuck with it and this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I shouldn’t waste this paper.

So, I’m not. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve done a sketch a day on the Deleter paper, indulging my inner ‘90s kid with trading-card-like drawings of my favorite Marvel UK characters.

I planned on maybe 11 or 12 and ended up with 13 because I really wanted to do Axel Pressbutton. Revisiting these characters has been a lot of fun, and also a reminder of how much dreck Marvel pushed out during this period. My perennial favorites are Union Jack and Night Raven, who’ve never really been given star treatment by Marvel. Captain Britain is also on that list. (His story arc went in a weird direction, didn’t it?). I’ve always loved his original suit, which is classic, but a bear to redraw repeatedly.

The Fury; Night Raven; Union Jack; Slay Master; Hell’s Angel; Captain Britain; Motormouth; Axel Pressbutton; Misha from Warheads; Black Knight (I talk about the guy who created the character below); Miracle Man or Marvel Man, whatevs; Digitek; and Death’s Head.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with this art. Maybe collect it into a zine and add a little character history and stats? I feel I have a lot of little bits and pieces like that gathering dust in my portfolio — fun to do but with no ultimate purpose (like my life).

Anyhow, I may also try and do little doodles to send friends.

Who knows? Remember. Keep it fun.

...

PAPER PRIMER

1. Not all paper is the same.

Most start as plant fiber mixed with water, but the recipe changes wildly depending on its purpose. Comic interiors, printer paper and watercolor sheets all begin the same way and end up as totally different creatures.

2. Weight isn’t thickness.

That “gsm,” or grams per square meter, on the package isn’t telling you how thick the sheet is. It’s an industry weight measure, but in practice, it’s a quick indicator of sturdiness. Higher number = beefier feel and thicker paper. (Don’t go by “pound” or “lbs.” Grams per square meter is the reliable standard.)

In general, thin paper is 70 to 150 gsm, medium paper is 150 to 250 gsm, and heavy paper/cardstock is 250 gsm and up.

3. Texture matters more than you think.

Smooth paper is great for inkers and marker people. Toothier paper grabs pencil and charcoal. If you’ve ever wondered why your pen behaves differently from one notebook to another, that’s because of texture. As I mentioned above, these vary from the roughness of cold press to the mirror smoothness of hot press. Again, what paper you choose can depend on the medium you’re using.

4. Soak in the sizing.

Most average paper users won’t care about it. Watercolor artists obsess over it. Sizing — a part of the paper-making process — determines how fast the paper absorbs water. Too little and the page buckles. Enough, and colors sit on the surface long enough to blend or edge cleanly.

5. “White” comes in flavors.

Paper can be bright white, warm white, natural white or somewhere in between. That subtle tint can change the mood of art, the feel of a zine or the readability of printed text. Or you can get crazy and try colored paper. I’m not your dad.

...

THE GOLDEN AGE’S BIGGEST WHAT IF

In an alternative universe, we’d be looking back on comic-book history and arguing who was the better artist: Jack Kirby or Joe Maneely.

Had Maneely not been tragically killed when he fell between train cars in a tragic accident in 1958, Stan Lee felt Maneely would have been another Kirby: “He would have been the best you could imagine.”

Unless you’re into golden age deep lore, you may not have heard of Maneely. I hadn’t. I stumbled across him while watching interviews with John Buscema, then John Romita, who both namechecked him as the influence that made them the artists they were.

Lee didn’t say this lightly. In the 1950s, Maneely was his go-to illustrator at Marvel’s predecessor, Atlas, and prized for his almost superhuman speed and dependability. Colleagues recall that Maneely could pencil-and-ink up to seven pages in a day, a pace that earned him the bullpen nickname “Joe Money.” Lee considered Maneely his favorite artist of that era, even over Kirby, and marveled that Maneely “could draw anything.” Maneely had all the makings of a cornerstone artist for Marvel’s future.

Maneely, left, with a pre-Irish Lee.

Maneely’s versatility across genres was arguably unmatched – perhaps even more adaptable than Kirby’s. With equal dexterity, he tackled Westerns, war stories, horror, romance, crime, you name it.

He brought encyclopedic and detailed attention to cowboy comics like Ringo Kid (his gun-slinging outlaws sport “the right hats … the right model Colts” down to each screwhead), yet he could pivot seamlessly to space adventures (the sci-fi hero Speed Carter), macabre pre-code shockers (“The Raving Maniac” and “Your Name Is Frankenstein”), or even goofy cartoon parodies in books like Melvin the Monster.

Whatever the genre, Maneely’s storytelling was crisp and dynamic, his draftsmanship equally at home in realistic or stylized modes.

Tragically, Maneely’s story ended just before Marvel’s began. He died on June 7, 1958, aged 32, a mere three years before Lee and Kirby launched the Marvel Age with Fantastic Four No. 1. The missed opportunity is enormous in hindsight. Had Maneely made it to the ’60s, Kirby, there’s a chance Kirby might not have been the one to co-create Marvel’s flagship heroes.

We can only speculate how characters like the Avengers or Spider-Man might have looked under Maneely’s pen.

I try not to think too often on the what-ifs. That way madness lies. What ifs are what aren’ts in reality. But it’s easy to imagine that this chameleonic talent would have thrived in Marvel’s superhero renaissance, had fate allowed.

Fantagraphics, those ever-reliable publishers of the odd and obscure, among other things, has a phenomenal artist’s edition, if you want to know more.

What I couldn’t fit there is a long conversation I had on the con floor with José Villarrubia.

Now, you might only know his name if you’re steeped way too deeply in comics culture (or read my slightly embarrassing confession of fanboying when I met him completely by accident at the Small Press Expo).

It was one of those interviews that lingers afterward, not because of fireworks or pronouncements, but because of his quiet, thoughtful way of talking about the craft, his self-effacement and his generosity.

Villarrubia carries himself with the calm certainty of someone who doesn’t need a spotlight to feel the value of his work. He’s humble, focused and uninterested in theatrics, yet his influence radiates through the medium. He speaks gently and still carries his native accent. He often credits luck where most people would claim vision. He calls his career a string of accidents. And he insists, with absolute sincerity, that he does not think about legacy.

This tension — between Villarrubia’s self-effacement and his towering, understated influence — is what makes him so compelling. He is the rare artist whose presence is most deeply felt in the work of others.

He helped bring painted approaches into the mainstream at a pivotal moment. He shaped the look of American comics during the transition from traditional color to digital tools. He became a trusted collaborator to some of the most distinctive creators in the field. He has been, and is, a champion of legendary artist Richard Corben when Corben risked slipping into obscurity. And he has taught generations of young artists.

The irony is that Villarrubia has found relief in stepping out of the spotlight. He no longer wants to explain his identity through fine art or justify his ideas through critical theory. Coloring offered a different path, one where he could disappear into the work and elevate others.

But his influence remains. It accumulates in the artists he’s guided, in the pages he’s colored, in the careers he’s supported, and in the revival of work he considered too important to lose.

Moreover, the philosophy Villarrubia outlines in this interview is a refreshing contrast to everything today’s vox comics populi seem to believe is important: celebrity, self-branding, and brash personal artistic dominance. For Villarrubia, who found satisfaction in his secondary role, the greatest skill is the genius of integration, or being of service to the complete product.

In a world where creators often use social media to highlight their individual brilliance, his highest artistic ambition is to be the person behind the person who ensures the work, not the artist, is the star.

» The interview (edited for readability and clarity).

For some other views of the Baltimore con, here’s my good friend Tony Ez’s columns:

» Part 1 and part 2.

WHAT’S ON THE DRAWING BOARD?

It’s nearly Christmas, so I opened my commission list briefly. I pretty much only have two tiers, because I don’t often look for clients. One is the high-quality pieces into which I pour heart and soul. The other is the quicker, smaller pieces into which I pour my heart and soul.

One is fun, the other a huge, anxiety-and-impostor-syndrome-provoking monster. I’m not quite sure why I feel so much more stress on the more expensive pieces. I do want to give the client as much for their money as is possible for me to deliver, to give them something truly special — as special as my meager skills allow. That’s important to me. But I seem to do the same amount of work for the smaller pieces, sometimes.

I am presently sweating this sweat over an Etrigan the Demon piece for a really delightful member of the 11 O’Clock Comics podcast community.

Sneaky peek.

Tier Two is an equation less of existential stress than volume of output. For a laugh, I posted an ad to Instagram stories that I would draw anything, pretty much, as long as it was on a 6-by-9-inch piece of paper, for only $15 (plus postage).

I’m also sort of joking with a TikTok ad I created to try and shift some pretty niche original art. Because I have no shame. Because, despite what you just read above about Villarrubia’s self-effacing humbleness, I am a man who desperately needs your approval for my art. I have learned nothing and will not change.

Aren’t we all in the arms of an angel?

Seriously, though, I am doing postcards of my favorite Marvel UK characters (I am that fan I’m talking about in the video).

Progress so far.

If you’d like to buy one, let me know in the comments, which are, I suppose, the best way to contact me. I don’t know how much I’m selling these for, so make an offer.

I’m doing a couple a day. Hell, given I’m an inveterate tinkerer, I may even add some color (or “colour,” seeing as it’s Marvel UK). Here’s the full list.

TMNT VS. THE PREDATOR

What a remarkably enjoyable project to accident into. Zach Cahill, an amazing artist and writer, is putting some fun back into comics collaboration by crowdsourcing contributions for a bit of bootlegged brilliance he’s been publishing on his Patreon: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. Predator.

Nice bit of timing there with Predator: Badlands coming out. (Four out of five stars. I enjoyed it, but found the odd-couple humor a little out of place for the series. Very watchable, though. It would have made a good comic.)

Not to brag, but I got one of the most iconic pages of Cahill art to ink over, and I’m really pleased with how it came out. We’re talking about publishing this odd little bootleg, so stay tuned. Otherwise, sign up for Zach’s Patreon. He’s churning out stuff you’re going to want to read.

I should note here that I, too, have a Predator concept dancing around in the back of my mind, if only I can churn through all these other projects to get to it: Predator vs. Conan. That’s right. You heard me.

Hm, maybe I need to reach out to Zach and his buddies …

CUE THE TRUMPET AND BUZZ ME LIKE A BEE

Oh, Step Kato, help! I am stuck in the Hornetmobile.

Fun one for the Green Archer lads, who’ll be releasing this pin-up as part of their upcoming Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in The Gr33n H0rn3tz Matter. I’ve never drawn any of these characters before, but now kinda wanna do a Kato short story? (Not the step-Kato one.)

MORE FLAG-DRAPED BOOTLEGS (WITH ACTUAL BOOTS)

I’ve been inspired to do a bit of a Union Jack bootleg. I feel deja vu writing that. Have I mentioned it before? Anyhow, I’m only two pages or so in but am making plans.

The amazing Ian Ashcroft, my long-time art nemesis, the Mozart to my Salieri, the Seinfeld to my Newman, Wolverine to my Sabretooth, etc., etc., reached out on my $15 fire sale for an illustration of Hellbreaker. (Seriously, it’s a Pat Mills project you Need to Back on Kickstarter.) Unconvinced he was paying enough, Ian offered to draw me something in return.

This is something like Jack Kirby offering an art exchange with Rob Liefeld. Anyhow, here’s Ian’s beautiful sketch of a period Union Jack who may or may not be in a short little zine sometime in 2026.

Or maybe I’ll just pay Ian to draw it. FFS. How good is this?

Here’s the reference I gave him.

Go to hell, Ashcroft!

For Millsverse fans, the Awesome Comics Podcast has a great interview about the project with Pat and Ian. Ian’s one of the nicest guys you could meet, on top of his legendary skills, and I really hope this is a breakthrough project for this young man, because I’ll be there, in line where he’s a guest, waiting, waiting, waiting to hear him, and then he sees me, his recollection almost kicking in and he says, “You’re sweating all over my table; could you give me a little space?”

Until next time, Few Achievers!

Cliff “Keith” Cumber

I’ve rolled this idea around my head in a casual way over the past year, and it’s resonated with me, but I’m reassured to see professional comic illustrators mull the same worries.

During a conversation on how they generate their ideas, Tom Gauld asks the key question that prompts Huizenga to dig a little deeper into his sketchbook practices.

When we — and I mean the artists and illustrators reading — open up our creative spaces, say, sharing our process via social media, how does that impact us and our creativity?

Huizenga, left, and Gauld, with who I had dinner with that evening (and realized midway through who he is).

“My worry about sharing my sketchbook pages, which I enjoy doing from time to time, is they sort of stopped being my sketchbook pages and they’ve become another work.”

The phenomenon Gauld and Huizenga describe, where anticipation of publication affects the work, is somewhat explained by social psychology as “evaluation apprehension”: the fear that one’s raw, messy creative process will be judged, leading the artist to unconsciously self-censor and trade genuine discovery for a safer, public-ready performance.

“I’ve heard someone else talk about this recently, too, with Robert Crumb, where Robert Crumb started publishing his sketchbooks, is famous for his sketchbooks, and then at a certain point it became such a ... he was so self-conscious about it that then he had to start a secret sketchbook.”

With that realization, Huizenga notes, he too started a “secret” journal where he can process his ideas. “I’m like, ‘I’m not going to show anybody this,’” he said. “I think it’s healthy.”

I’ve noticed over the past few years that a wee voice in the recesses of my head has been pressuring me to share what I’m doodling in some social space (mostly TikTok or Instagram stories for me). And that voice is a still, slight pressure that distracts in subtle and insidious ways from what I should be using my sketchbook for. The validation an artist can receive when posting a camera-ready piece of art is intoxicating, especially to those of us — all of us — also trying to fend off that other creative demon — impostor syndrome. And it can blind us to our own innovative impulses.

“There’s a really bad thing that happens these days on Instagram and the internet where people make what they call ‘sketchbooks’ and they flip through them and each page is a finished work of art, like a perfectly drawn picture,” Gauld said. And you think, it’s almost like we need two different words.

“A sketchbook should have like phone numbers in it, you know?” Huizenga responds. “Like a little list.”

Instead, Gauld calls his secret sketchbook a “notebook” or “workbook” to avoid the Crumb paradox.

“I’m going to write shopping lists in here. I’m going to let my children draw in here if they want to,” Gauld said. “And I’m going to just make them for creation.”

Watch the entire discussion, “SPX 2025: Ideas: Tom Gauld and Kevin Huizenga In Conversation,” on YouTube. You can find me oversharing my sketchbook on Instagram and TikTok.

OK, MR. ‘I’M SO ARTSY-FARTSY, WHERE’S MY TANGIBLE?

Yeah, look, subscribers, I know it’s been a while since I’ve sent one out. And although this lengthy absence is covered under the Tangible EULA, I am somewhat disappointed in myself that I haven’t been able to get to the next issue yet. A lot has happened in the past few months. That said, it’s at the back of my mind and I hope to return to the irregularly regular schedule soon. Keep your eyes peeled on that mailbox.

SO, YOU SAY YOU’VE BEEN BUSY, HUH?

I have, I really, really have.

Here’s what’s on the boil.

DUI ... The Awesome Comics Podcast’s community-led anthology is in the works. I’ve drawn a seven-page strip for those good folks Allan and Benn Liska of Green Archer Comics that they’ll be submitting to the DUI editor. (Green Archer will be tabling at the Baltimore Comic-Con. Will I be there? Scroll down, blue retriever ... )

The King.

(DUI stands for Drawn Under the Influence, which is probably true in many cases. It evolved out of COVID-era online drink and draws, which gave it its name.)

Also for DUI, that self-same editor has asked me to continue what was originally a sketchbook exercise that asks, “Where are the Beano’s Bash Street Kids now?”

Here’s a #WIP (he said, ignoring completely everything he moaned about in the column’s opening paragraphs).

They called him “Fatty” ...

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE AND LET ME BURN FOREVER

The Small Press Expo was a banger and I detail names and faces in my upcoming column for 72 Hours, my local paper’s arts and culture magazine.

Honestly, one of the things that gives me the greatest joy is meeting other creators, especially ones whose work I admire. An even greater joy is meeting creators I didn’t know and immediately resonating with their work.

That happened in a couple of instances, and those interactions have resulted in an actual, real-world effect on Things Cliff Wants to Create.

Take Jesse Lonergan ... He gifted me his zine-like masterpiece, We Ride at Night, a sort of lyrically poetic Batman bootleg. In return, I gave him a copy of Tony Osmond II. Given how inspired I was by Ride, I feel I owe Lonergan a pint or two to even the scales. I don’t think I can adequately describe the genius present across Lonergan’s impressive output. I mean, just look at Drome. Look. At. It.

THE RESULT ... I now desperately want to do a bootleg of my own, and have even put (digital) pen to (digital) paper. I have no idea whether it’ll come to fruition, but the passion for this project is overwhelmingly strong to the point that I get vaguely irritated when real life interrupts me from doing it.

A secret look. What could vampires and flags have to do with each other?

Brilliance is a term that can be applied to two creators unfortunately fated to sit next to me at SPX, Ingrīda Pičukāne and Vivianna Maria Stanislavska.

From Latvia, Pičukāne and Stanislavska display a completely opposite cultural creative approach — at least, it felt so to me — that demonstrates the power and depth of the word+pictures medium. What they produce doesn’t completely fit the technical definition of “comics,” but also does, in terms of a narrative blending of text and art that tells compelling stories.

Stanislavska gifted me the last remaining copy of a work I will most definitely be pilfering ideas from at some future point. I’m limited in what I feel is appropriate to share, as the title is PORN/INTIMACY (translated from the Latvian), and deals with adult themes around porn, exoticism and its influence.

But the execution of it ... Wow.

Such a demur cover.

Printed in two colors of ink, the book also comes with a heart-shaped colored transparency that ... get this ... knocks out a color when you look through it at the illustrations.

Meta on meta on meta. This is art, folks — a message; an encryption; a zen koan that you unravel and leads to an epiphany. It’s so damn clever.

Stanislavska’s sophisticated mastery of the underlying “language” of art hit me right in my complete ignorance of that language and how it can be implemented both to enlighten and educate.

Also, tits ‘n’ dicks. Hur.

Clearly, I am way too vulgar to properly appreciate the book, but this should be winning awards. (It probably has. I’m too lazy to check.)

MARY ... LAND

A shoutout to the Maryland crew diligently manning (and womaning) at SPX, and keeping it real for the Blue Crab state (not actual name).

Dave Crispino, Mike Riley, Jordan Clark and Kata Kane were there. The ever-dapper Mike Riley gifted me Billions Served, a rather creepy and dystopian alternative history of one particular clown-fronted fast-food franchise. (You’re not right and I dig it, lads.)

Crispino and Riley will be at table B4 this weekend at the Baltimore Comic-Con. You should check them out.

SPEAKING OF WHICH ... I will be at the Baltimore Comic-Con for all three days, wandering around with that errant avatar of filth and depravity, and my close friend, Tony Esmond. If you’re there, look us up. We’ll likely be the ones being forcefully removed.

(BTW, if you scrolled down after the Green Archer-at-BCC mention, they’ll be at table J11. Now it’s time to scroll back up.)

Looks like Tony just landed. Next time, you tarty Terry Thomases.

And proving that the components of the visual arts aren’t a million miles apart in their DNA, I metaphorically did that Leo DiCaprio meme on my couch, the one from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where he’s pointing and whistling at the screen, in at least two episodes.

(Metaphorically, because to do so figuratively would have rudely interrupted the show for Trophy Wife.)

Because what I saw were brilliantly executed visual tools that comics consumers will recognize.

(Whether you enthusiastically whistle and point metaphorically is between you and the source material.)

And there it was in episode one, a beautiful rendering of the White House, front removed, showing the rooms inside. I’ve seen this technique before, but never in a way that so perfectly grounds the viewer with a sense of place.

In filmography, this is termed “the dollhouse effect.” Comics geeks will know it as a “cutaway,” a visual technique where part of a drawing or model is removed to reveal the internal structure or features, often used to show what’s happening inside a machine, a building, or even a character’s body.

Cutaways will be familiar to anyone who’s read British comics and kids’ encyclopedias and magazines of the ‘50s to the ‘80s (and maybe today). You almost couldn’t go an issue without one of those talented bastards perfectly rendering, say, Thunderbird 1 with the sides removed and her guts on display.

Nerd up, mother fuckers, and look at this ...

U.S. comics employ cutaways from time to time, but infrequently, given they’re complex and time-consuming to draw.

The Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building by the incomparable Jack Kirby.

Sometime late in the series, a sequence breaks down brilliantly into a panel format that mimics a comic-book page breakdown. Genius. I won’t tell you where because I’m too lazy to look it up. Just take it as an excuse to watch and, if you’re a comic creator like me, drink in that visual design and resolve to use it in your next book.

This is a not-infrequent litmus-test question in the field of comics, especially among nascent comics readers, as well as a certain self-styled hipster-influenced Bloomsbury-Group-like media cliques that have set themselves up as the medium’s intellectual gatekeepers.*

Watchmen is always high up on those top 100 lists of comics you “should read before you die!”, next to entries such as Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Akira.

And it should be. And you should, if you love comics, at least take a stab at reading these genre-defining classics.

Comics as Literature (and the Problem with That)

Watchmen is a truly stunning work that transformed the industry on publication in 1986. Finally, here was a book that — to use a culinary adjective — elevated the medium beyond anything that had come before. Pure umami.

This was comics all grown up, comics as literature, with the same depth and metatextual levels as any Shakespeare play. Its 12 issues formed a perfect, self-contained arc, deconstructing and rebuilding the format of sequential graphic narrative** from the inside out and defining a new culture for and appreciation of this idiosyncratic industry.

Much has been written about its influence, the waves of which can still be felt today. I don’t feel the need to bore you with my hot takes on the work as Watchmen has been dissected and analyzed and studied by many better brains than mine. Let’s just say that ‘86 was a hell of a time to be alive and reading comics.

But it wouldn’t be in any top 100 comics I’d recommend to new readers.

How We Actually Learn to Appreciate Art

Like any visual art form, a true appreciation of comics comes from understanding the language of comics. I don’t mean the speech and thought bubbles on the page — I’m talking about an informally codified set of defining principles that readers must be familiar with to be able to engage with the format.

You can’t do math without learning math. You can’t speak French without understanding French. It’s that simple. You can’t truly, deeply appreciate art without at least a basic understanding of the artistic principles that underlie the format. Context provides richness.

Now, can anyone go to a gallery, look at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and think, “Yeah, that’s pretty good, I like that”? Yes. This is the artistic equivalent of “I know what I like when I see it.”

A lot of art can be appreciated at that surface level. You don’t have to be a connoisseur to enjoy it.

But, at the same time, over and above the reaction of “this is pretty and makes me feel good,” you’ll be completely ignorant of the nuances: line, shape, color, form and texture; composition, balance, symmetry or the lack of, rhythm, contrast; history, artistic intent, influences.

Comics Are a Language Too

Scott McCloud’s “five choices” — moment, frame, image, word and flow — are just the beginning.

Like an inside joke, art appreciation at depth needs the viewer to be in on the conversation.

And once you are, the world opens up. The more fluent you become, well, my friend, you’ll be at risk of breaking down emotionally that next time you walk into a gallery.

This tension of understanding between the art and the viewer is why many galleries — the good ones, anyhow — are sometimes meticulous about providing “interpretation” with the art. As much as the experience of art is an emotional, subjectively intimate, experience, the interpretations are designed to give even casual viewers a framework to better grasp what they’re seeing.

The point I’m trying to make here is that art is a complex interlacing of elements on multiple levels. Appreciating capital A “Art” requires contemplation over time and a willingness to engage with that art with an open, receptive mind that perhaps reveals hitherto hidden facets of the work. It also comes with the caveat that we may never be able to fully reveal all the inherent meaning, nor can we entirely understand all the ingredients in that magical alchemy of engagement, that pre-intellectual perceptual exchange between us and the art we experience.

We need a similarly sophisticated semantic lexicon for pictures and words combined into a sequential narrative. For most comic book readers, that doesn’t just happen. Watchmen isn’t just a one-and-done book; understanding it fully requires knowledge and context. You have to have been steeped in the medium to an almost absurd degree (as many creators in the field are).

Why Watchmen Doesn’t Translate (and Wasn’t Meant To)

Perhaps this is why making a movie about Watchmen has proved so difficult. As powerful a medium as cinema is, it simply can’t mimic the book’s complexities. Watchmen is a comic that contains a commentary on comics.

This is not a book for comic novices in the same way that Finnegans Wake isn’t a book you crawl through because you enjoy reading. It’s a slog. I’m not convinced anyone has actually read it all the way through, although I’m sure it adorns some shelves as a status symbol of sorts (probably in the apartment of a guy who wants to appear “deep” to the girl he’s hoping to fuck. Right next to the acoustic guitar. You know these obvious red flags, ladies).

I’ve read through Watchmen several times and, on some basic levels, enjoyed it. I’ve never quite worked up the enthusiasm to really dive into those layers, content to peruse the musing of critics more intelligent than me.

Here’s my hot take. Watchmen proved a point: Comics, those funny books on dirty, disposable paper as a mass-produced medium for entertainment, can be as sophisticated as any other form of art — or even more so.

And that point has been made.

A Four-Decade Hangover

The industry has been trying to replicate that formula for the better part of the last 45 or so years. Yes, it was — keyword, “was” — a seminal work, but it, and the much more accessible Dark Knight Returns, also led to a creative stuttering in the industry’s cultural memory, scoring into it a notion that every book moving forward be “gritty” and “deep.” Comics now had to have a “message”; characters needed to exist in a congruous universe (“Is it canon?”) where they chewed deeply on their flaws.

It was a moment when both creators and their audiences lost their playfulness and sense of humor.

The culmination of this, for me, was director Zack Snyder’s desaturated movie, Man of Steel, which only highlighted the audiences’ burnout around the gritty-real-deep trope.

(Snyder, as you will remember, cut his teeth in the superhero movie genre by directing the 2009 Watchmen movie, which I actually quite enjoyed.)

And this has played a part in the cultural divide now raging around what is politically acceptable for the medium when we really should be celebrating its potential, which is as open and endless as human storytelling always has been.

Comics may have grown up back in ‘86, but its audience never did, and this circular insider squabbling proves that. It’s time to put Watchmen back on the historical shelf, alongside Maus and Dark Knight and all the other recommended comics, and drag this damned medium forward into its next evolution ... whatever that is.

[OK, now that’s out of my system, I’ll never mention Watchmen again.]

...

The Footnotes

* They are also an out-of-touch pompous bunch of gits, as many media critics are, this column included.

** Sorry for the oppressive pseudo-intellectual language.

*** I realize this renaissance didn’t last long and only four or five short years later, the Big Two and other comics books turned boom to bust in a cash grab that almost sank the industry by milking collectors for all they were worth with low-quality output and waaaayyyy too much hatching. (Gold foil variant cover, anyone?) But such was the intellectual heft of Watchmen, it introduced into the fraternity a pseudo-intellectual wing of “critics” and “thinkers” who saw the field as ripe for academic pillaging. So while Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and the boys were making money hand over fist with subpar product for the fanbois, a new academic vanguard was also seeded, one that eschewed the term “comics” and hijacked artsy sounding terms like “graphic novel” and “sequential narrative” in an attempt to drape their pseudo-intellectual musings in semi-formal academic jargon.

…

Speaking of Visual Language

Mort Walker may be a bit of a mystery to my U.K. readers, but in the U.S. he's well known, especially in cartoonists' circles, as the creator of the iconic comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. Walker is a foundational figure in American comic strips. What endears him to me is his advocacy for the comics medium, which he argued deserves serious appreciation and study.

He's also the author of a bit of comics lore I only just discovered (I seriously need to spend more time on the history of the craft): The Lexicon of Comicana.

It's a neat little book, first published in 1980, and (here's the best part), you can read it for free at the Internet Archive.

The Lexicon of Comicana decodes cartooning conventions we recognize instinctively but rarely name. If you're a cartoonist, it's an indispensable guide to the mechanics of visual humor.

In a U.K.-relevant tidbit, anyone old enough to remember the weekly funnies that were newsagent shelf stalwarts — Whizzer and Chips, the Beano, Cheeky, for example — will have been drenched in this pre-emoticon visual shorthand.

Walker's work underscores how deeply cartoons permeate popular culture, offering universal shorthand for complex emotions and actions. Even four decades later, Walker’s lexicon remains the ultimate resource for decoding the silent chatter of comics.

Here are a few of my personal favorites, in no particular order:

Plewds: related to "emenata," these are flying sweat droplets that appear around a character's head when working hard, stressed, etc.

Blurgits, swalloops: curved lines preceding or trailing after a character's moving limbs.

Agitrons: wiggly lines around a shaking object or character.

And, best of all ...

Grawlixes: typographical symbols used for profane utterances in dialogue balloons.

Walker was not only a top-gun cartoonist, he had a natural sense for fun words with cadence. Genius.