Case in point… I pointed out to Brian, my friendly neighborhood comic shop owner, thata I wasn’t buying any Marvel comics. I’d heard some good things about Nova and asked about it. I really like the comics stories. Everything from the old Jack Kirby Thor books to Jim Starlin’s Warrlock series so I thought this would be a great way to get back into Marvel’s lineup. Spoilers after the jump.

So I bought the first trade paperback and was disappointed when the story didn’t complete in that book. Between them, I also got a brief recap of what happened during Civil War. This was good. I have no interest whatsoever in trying to come to grips with that whole mess, but the first trade of Nova gave me the gist of it.

Thing is, most comics now use a five or six issue story arc that can be collected into a single trade and give the reader some sense of closure at the end of each book. Not so in this case. So, I bought the second trade. Overall good read, though I didn’t see the purpose of introducing a new Nova just to kill her off. The whole Phalanx/Kree Empire storyline was well handled overall and I was looking forward to seeing the climax in the third trade (once again, the story didn’t complete in that volume).

So I picked up the third volume. Guess what, nothing. The next issues jumps right straight past the wrap up of the Kree storyline to an encounter with Galactus. Apparently, the Kree/Phalanx storyline wrapped up in another series during yet another clusterfuck crossover. There’s nothing in the third volume to indicate which clusterfuck crossover, just a brief wrap-up of what happened. Good triumphed, the Kree Empire was restored… yadda, yadda. We had a nice Galactus story, a brief encounter with the Silver Surfer, and then jumped back to earth for… wait for it… That’s right, Secret Invasion. Yet another crossover and yet again, no closure in the third volume.

Craptastic.

My route to Valiant was a somewhat circuitous one. I’d just sold Starchilde Publications, the company through which I’d been publishing my role playing game, Justifiers RPG. Though the new company had kept me on, along with my friend and collaborator James Perham, they were struggling and paychecks were not what you’d call regular.

James and I had a mutual friend, by the name of Kevin Van Hook. We’d know each other for a few years at this point. In fact Kevin, who had inked my work on one of the Justifiers books, had introduced me to James. Kevin had a few struggles of his own, even though he’d already had some success in comics including writing and drawing a creator owned title of his own, Frost (later to become a feature film, but that’s a different story). I lent him a hand when he first moved to Detroit to work for Caliber Comics as their production manager.

So in an effort to help Kevin, and since I had a bit of coin in my pocket at this time, I paid to have his phone turned on. He used it to make a call to Valiant following up on some pencil samples he’d sent in ended up with an interview to be their new Production Manager. He got the job and moved his family from Indiana to New York City within a few weeks.

Kevin was there when Jim Shooter, one of the company’s founders) left and Bob Layton (another founder) took charge. Since Kevn’s responsibilities had already expanded to include writing Eternal Warrior and Solar, he was asked to step in and help complete some of Shooter’s work as well. With his expanded duties and the ramp up to Unity, the company’s first big cross-over event, it was clear they’d need another production person. At about the same time, my position became untenable at Dark Tower, the company that had bought Justifiers and the other Starchilde games. Kevin had me flown to New York for an interview, and I got the job working in production just as Unity was starting to hit. Later our friend James would joins us there and end up the last man standing, staying on with what was left of the company right up till Acclaim’s bankruptcy.

For me, the highlight of that opriginal interview was getting a portfolio review from Barry Windsor-Smith (or as he was sometimes referred, “Black with Stars”) and Bob Layton. Barry looked at some of the mecha work I’d done work on Battletech for FASA games and various magazines, and said, “This is what the Magnus robots should look like.”

Over the next couple of years I went from production artist, to Special Projects Manager. My staff and I worked up lay outs for trading cards, t-shirts, trade paperbacks… basically everything that wasn’t a regular monthly comic book. Too slow to work on a regular book, I also worked as a designer for Magnus Robot Fighter and X-O Manowar, did some writing, fill in penciling, learned a lot about the craft of comics.

One of the ways that Valiant was unique, was that experienced professionals like Bob Layton, Barry Smith, John Dixon, Bob Hall and Don Perlin were working directly with talented newcomers like Yvel Guichet, Sean Chen, Bernard Chang, Tom Ryder, Paul Autio, Maria Beccarri, Maurice Fontenot, Mike Cavallero, Jorgé Gonzales, Stu Sutchit, Jen Marrus, and a host of others (including a couple of guys named Quesada and Palmiotti). Most of these newcomers were part of “Knob Row”, and worked in house interacting much more directly with other artists that what you’d usually see. We learned a lot about our craft and about professionalism by being in that environment.

Bob, now Editor-in-Chief, had nicknames for a lot of us. Some flattering, some less so. My knob name was, “Mr. Wizard”, because I have a head for scientific information and trivia. I was also the original “keeper of the continuity”, and our resident network and computer guy.

I made some good friends, a few enemies (frenemies?) and generally had the time of my life. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be interviewing some of those folks in a series I call Valiant Vets. Quite a few of the old gang are already on tap, keep an eye out for new posts.

Really? The Harry Potter lady? This is the best you can come up with for revamping your corporate structure?

I shouldn’t be surprised though. The last time DC felt threatened by Marvel was when Marvel decided to become their own distributors. Then. DC’s knee-jerk reaction to a stupidly corporate move was to help destroy the direct distribution system by jumping on the “exclusive” distributor bandwagon.

And how’d that work out for ya’ guys?

Here’s a couple of suggestions from me on how “restructuring” might help.

1. Listen to some of the people who actually know the characters and be, if not faithful, at least respectful of their built in fanbase (Never again with the Joel Schuachers!).
2. Be creative. Don’t just follow along doing whatever Marvel does — copying their 10th big multi-book clusterfuck crossover this year for example.
3. Don’t just recycle stuff that worked in the past cause it was novel (Crisis on Infinite Earths). It worked cause it was novel.
4. Be a leader in the industry. Don’t just build market share, build market.

That last one is critical. When I was at Valiant before the bubble burst, the being a comics publisher was like having a license to print money. Instead of taking those profits and investing them in the long term growth of the market, the publishers behaved as if that kind of cash flow was a never ending stream. So don’t keep fighting over who gets the biggest slice of the same old pie… focus on making a bigger pie. Do the un-American thing for a corporation… think beyond the end of the next quarter.

This struck me, since I’ve started working on scripts for a webcomic, Orion the Hunter. Without realizing it, I’ve been using Moore’s method of wrapping an idea in a story. In this case, the core idea is, “Honor knows no circumstance.” I’ve known this since I was a Marine. The USMC is a force built on the concept of honor, and for me at least, it crystallized the difference between honor and simple morality. Now if that last sentence made it seem that I think morality is somehow the lesser of the two, you are correct in that assertion. You see, morality is situational. It can be bent to justify almost any atrocity. Honor is always the same, unchanging and unyielding.

Here’s an example. As a Marine Corps Military Policeman it was my moral duty to use deadly force when lawfully ordered to do so. In defense of my country, my unit or in the defense of military property. Yet as a civilian, it is considered immoral (though not necessarily unlawful) to use deadly force in those same ways. The rules of morality change according to the situation. Another example is the torture of terror suspects. This act was sanctioned and lawful, and was considered moral by many of those who ordered it and perhaps many of those who carried it out. Yet, I haven’t heard even the prince of darkness Dick Cheney himself argue that these actions were remotely honorable.

In my story, the central character is driven by two conflicting oaths. He is not a particularly moral individual, but he does subscribe to the higher standard of being an honorable man. He has taken an oath as a lawman to uphold the law, but he has also taken an oath to avenge the killings of his family. The central conflict of the story then, becomes watching how he does that while not violating his honor.

I wonder what I’l get from Chapter 2?

Why is Marvel animation almost universally crap, while DC (ostensibly the same people who are Warner Brothers Pictures) can’t produce a live action film worth a damn?

Okay watch some good stuff, then read on to get my take on it.

I know that’s a generalization. But really, name a DC property other than Batman that wasn’t just drek… and don’t say Watchmen. Watchmen’s got nothing to do with DC Comics. It might have been, it could have been, if the editors had been courageous enough to let Moore go with the Charlton characters as he’d originally envisioned.

And let’s be honest, Marvel animation (for the most part) is the equivalent of the Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie. Their best stuff was the Ralph Bakshi Spiderman work from the ‘60 and its been downhill ever since. Meanwhile they’ve given us Spiderman, Ironman, and the X-Men movies. While DC has given us the most recent Superman.

Sure Marvel has had a few misses (cough– Fantastic Four — cough), and DC has the Batman movies (wow… two hits in a row) which, as I’ve heard it, made more money that the entire comics industry last year. But what about the decade they lost with even that property when they let Joel Schumacher, whose only exposure to Batman was apparently the campy (crappy?) ‘60 TV series, crush the life out of the franchise.

So come… weight in. What is it with these people? Is DC’s success simply predicated on the genius of Bruce Timm? How will Disney’s acquisition of Marvel going to change the dynamic?

Without being too agrestic, let’s just say that when you reach a certain age bathroom breaks become a kind of expedition. You take a book, maybe pack a lunch. Its all about the preparation. Choosing the right book or the right type of book is critical to the success of such an endeavor.

My latest choice is the Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate. Perfect for that special alone time. Once you are past the introduction, there are short snippets to read and ponder as you wander the fertile plains of the English language. Something I find far preferable to sitting and staring at my boney knees or contemplating the light fixture.

Admittedly, I have a love of words (and some would say the sound of my own voice), and consider myself to have a fairly expansive vocabulary, with a tendency toward being sesquipedalian. I particularly enjoy archaic words, the ones you hardly hear anymore, the endangered words.

Take, for example, “agrestic”. I picked that one up on my latest… er… expedition. A fine little word, with a more specific meaning that its counterparts, “crude” or “unsophisticated”. When was the last time you heard that one?

Frankly I found the introduction nearly as illuminating (though I’m only in the A’s at this point) as the dictionary itself. Thousands and thousands of word in English, more than any other language, but we use so few of them, or use them badly. The author Eugene Ehrlich also makes a point to single out those words, the ones we misuse or misinterpret.
So if you’ve got a few minutes to spare, I’d say pick this one up. Its good reading for smart people.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Way too much time was devoted to the cheerleader. Sure she’s cute, but if I wanted to see the whole college mystery thing, I’d boot up my Veronica Mars DVDs and watch it done right. Everybody has already guessed that the creepy stalker chick offed the roommate so she could move in with Clare in preparation for the whole “Lesbian” kiss thing later in the season.

Matt having Sylar in his head is interesting, but as Matt has the least personality of the Heroes characters, almost anything would be an improvement. The fact that he has yet to figure out that strange vocal outbursts don”t exactly inspire confidence from your co-workers, particularly if you carry a gun to the office, is frankly kinda’ silly.

The time-travel stuff with Hiro is getting kinda’ old. Time changes, paradoxes, anti-paradoxes, etc. The whole thing was handled much more creatively by Journeyman, and the great unwashed TV audience couldn’t wrap their heads around it then. I can’t see how it will help the show win (or keep) many fans.

In all, I mourn for Heroes. I had high hopes for it originally, but if they don’t pull out something a little more original than what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t expect it to last past this season.

Chew focuses on Detective Tony Chu, a man with a singular and unique ability. He psychically reads food. Anything he eats, other than beets, he gets impressions off pf. After a serial killer chef, accidentally cuts his finger and bleeds in Tony’s soup, Tony’s powers kick in. Pursuing the killer, he seems thwarted by the killers suicide. Not our intrepid Tony, he just dives in and gnaws on the guys face for a while, till he has the locations and names of all the victims.

They had me from face gnawing.

Add to that the rich, alternative history that writer John Layman (Thundercats, Army of Darkness) has created, and that alone would be enough to keep me coming back.

But wait, there’s more. Rob Guillory’s inventive, energetic, cartoony artwork makes the perfect compliment. Its the cartoony-ness that takes the edge off and lends its own spin to this cannibal cop story.

So if you get the chance, pick up Chew. Go ahead, give it a try. Its not like it’ll bite your hand off.

My comics were my textbooks. From them I learned readin’ and writin’, drawin’ and in latter years a bit o’ cussin’ as well. The physical manifestation wasn’t important, only the things it could show me, the places it could transport me to. The stories, the characters, the images, these were burned into my brain as I devoured those books again and again. Jim Starlin’s Warlock series, the Epic stories of the Alien Legion, the Batman books, Jack Kirby’s New Gods series. More recently The Astounding Wolf-man, Jae Lee and Peter David bringing their take to Stephen King’s Dark Tower, Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics, and of course Watchmen.

What’s important is to not loose sight of the real value of the art form. Comics are a kind of alchemy that transforms the lead of everyday life into the gold of imagination. So take’em out of those baggies, boys and girls. Pass’em around, relive the experience.

Tihs is one of the msot anamzig tighs I hvae eevr raed. It is a ture ttaemsnet to how icnedbrile the hmuan mnid is.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.