Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008
Who are... Park and Barb?
Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.
Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.
Keep The Old, Try The New
By Park Cooper
The old. The New. What's cool. It's the New Coolth.
Marvel Comics’ bullpen section used to have this thing in the early 1990s, the Coolometer, pronounced, as I recall, "cool-ometer" as opposed to "cool-o-meter" …one of the last things to be uncool according to the coolometer was the coolometer itself, proving that while they knew the thing had gotten old, it wasn't inaccurate. The problem with the coolometer was it was too topical – it changed every month.
Some things, however, stand the test of time.
I was in a Hastings store the other day… Hastings fills an important ecological niche by feeling like a real chain store but only inserting itself in out-of-the-way places – I think there might be one in Paris, Texas – and they have comics, too. More manga than ever, of course, but I'm noticing that Western graphic novels are really trying to have a strong presence in the bookstores this Christmas… So after I'm done looking at the manga, I look at the Western flimsies… there's about 10 columns of flimsies, and a couple of columns of old comics that have been bundled into 3-for-a-dollar shrink-wrapped packs (or maybe they were 3-for-3, or even 3-for-5 for all I noticed)… stuff like, say, DC's old ARAK, SON OF THUNDER.
I first discovered ARAK in a cousin's closet. I had a couple of sets of male cousins older than myself on my father's side… Aunt Mary's sons, who were big on Marvel – even later in life, after college – mostly Spider-Man, but also Marvel Team-Up, even Darkhawk when that silly thing was around… and Uncle Bob's sons, who seemed more the DC type. I’ve talked before about my cousins’ comics (http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/pb/96165720049511.htm), but man… ARAK, SON OF THUNDER was the story of Arak, who believed himself to be the son of the thunder god… When his village is wiped out, a 10-year-old Native American boy escapes the attack by setting out into the open sea in a canoe. He's rescued by Vikings off their normal course, who name him Eric, which he pronounces Arak. After his Viking associates, greedy for plunder, are wiped out in the second issue, Arak meets up with a magician and a female knight, Valda, the Iron Maiden, who as I recall was the daughter of Roland, and he starts working, as they do, for Charlemagne, who in those days was named Carolus Magnus. It was a very historical, mythological trip from Roy Thomas, with good art from Ernie Colón and later from inker Tony DeZuñiga.
An issue of Arak was going to give me a story which, albeit part of a larger storyline, would be self-contained in and of the adventure of the moment. It'd be good sword-and-sorcery in the Conanesque style, only with a foundation in history and Earthy mythology, instead of Robert E. Howard's is-it-prehistory-or-is-it-fantasy-or-is-it-Memorex settings.
Roy Thomas, the kid who decided to name the X-Men's vampiric were-pterodactyl Sauron, that's the sort of fetish the lad had for Tolkein in the day…
Barb's been reading TURN OFF YOUR MIND from them there Disinformation people… the writer talks about how, back in the day, he was seeing "Frodo Lives" in wall-graffiti in Marvel comics before he ever heard of Tolkein… "He talks magic magic magic magic magic magic magic magic magic and then suddenly he'll drop a Marvel Comics reference all over the place, especially the beloved muties," says Barb…
So Arak fires me up because Arak leads to Conan which means Robert E. Howard which leads to Lovecraft which means supernatural horror which leads to all this Disinformation Turn Off Your Mind 1960s magical and cultural stuff that Barb and I are talking about right now. I'm reading Dylan's CHRONICLES – what a prose style! Of course, just the idea, now that I'm pretty much done with school for school's sake (as opposed to dealing with school stuff to get a better job), of reading what I want to read, for pleasure, without guilt, is pretty mind-blowing.
And of course Arak is DC. I thought of myself as a Marvel follower, really, until I discovered Sandman. Spider-Man and Claremont's X-Men drew me in, with a little bit of things like Captain America and, yes, even things like Power Pack. Before Barbara and I could really, REALLY communicate, I had to teach her who the X-Men were, and she had to teach me who Patti Smith and Marianne Faithfull were. We all have our own mythologies.
Barb slightly preferred the stories in the back of the comparatively short-lived reprint series Classic X-Men, where Claremont and sometimes Ann Nocenti focused on fill-in stories that sometimes hardly used superpowers at all – mostly just characterization. She was suckered in by Mojo's X-Babies and then caught up in Magneto's WWII origins and Nightcrawler's love of Errol Flynn movies.
Barb and I make our own comics now – Half Dead, Gun Street Girl, half-a-dozen other things we're working on…
http://www.halfdeadcomic.com/About
http://www.panel2panel.com/gsg-archives.html
Barb points out that even though we now make our own comics, I still read comics as much as ever, but just don't buy them all. Whenever new graphic novels come into the city library system… I've read a lot of JSA and ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN that way, just for example, as well as a bit of indie stuff.
But yeah, I also have a lot of older comics I haven't sold or gotten rid of. As the Bronze Age (see previous installments of The 'Show) sort of wound down, comics in the 1980s tried some really fun things. CRISIS, and a couple of other things that went down in 1986, paved the way for some really tight storytelling, and Vertigo hadn't yet enhanced the self-consciousness of what we now might call old-school superheroics. If I had to give it a name I'd call it the Experimental Age. It was quite a time, as regular old churn-em-out flimsies tried keeping up with things like what Alan did to Batgirl in THE KILLING JOKE, like her slow evolution into Oracle as partially shown in things like The Hacker Files.
"What's this stack," Barb recently asked me.
"SUICIDE SQUAD, 1987 to 1992. Slated for sale on Ebay," I replied.
"Aaaaannnnnnnnnd when's that scheduled for again?" she asked.
"I dunno," I said picking up one at random and flipping through it. "…Probably never. I love these."
Characterization is cool. Continuity matters less than it used to, since keeping character concepts for (in the case of Batman and Superman) as much as six or seven decades means rebooting or reworking them from time to time. But characterization is always cool.
Change can also be cool. We bought the second volume of our friend Queenie Chan's Tokyopop book THE DREAMING today. It's categorized on the back as being manga, and then "drama/horror", which was the best way to explain it – not GORE horror, but DRAMA horror. Sure, horror and manga go together like ghosts love mirrors, but this is Original English Manga. We're proud of Queenie.
Soon, Barb's probably going to write a column about the work she's done for Tokyopop doing the post-translation rewrite on the new import series Atelier Marie, so that's cool… the confluence of manga and anime with American pop culture can only be healthy. Naruto on Cartoon Network just keeps getting better, with a recent episode featuring Gaara truly succeeding because of the way they infused it with the power of J-Horror…
I go into my most local library at home, and there's the Sandman catalog. The fans who were reading Vertigo when it first came out have read it all now. What must new readers think of Sandman now, the readers who are just getting into it post-Hellboy and post-Constantine? I wonder. We read today that there's going to be a sequel to the Constantine movie, which didn't do that well here at home but apparently did well in the foreign markets. The sequel is reportedly set somewhere in Latin America, which makes me think about when the first film came out – my Catholic Latino high school senior students were more interested in it than most of the viewing public seemed to be. The influence of Garth Ennis's Catholic issues seemed to resonate. I'd forgotten it, but Barb reminded me of how I came home one day and mentioned to her how one of my students was very awed by the movie's depiction of Hell. "I don't wanna end up there!" he commented. I feel confident that the new setting is to please the film's fans that must have noticeably responded to these elements…
But again, this is DC stuff. I guess thinking about Batgirl and Arak and Old Vertigo got me going down that road. But it’s hard to get my head around the fact that Wicker Man Studios’ Half Dead is going to be at Marvel. Y’know, MY Marvel. Damage Control, Namor, "Excelsior" Marvel. Not a part of the Marvel Universe, and that’s fine; it’s something new. But still, the same company. Daredevil. I’ve just been musing about my career path, about how I just finished my Ph.D. dissertation and had an article in the Works Cited (not just the works consulted!) dealing with Frank Miller and the “Born Again” storyline in Daredevil… I’m proud to be a part of a tradition of scholarly study that can raise awareness of comics and sequential storytelling. All reading of comics raises awareness of comics. You saw our friend the librarian a few weeks ago talking about how librarians are perfectly aware of how popular manga and sequential stories are…
I’d like now to make the time to write about the stories that I love in sequential storytelling, like the Daredevil-related article that I found in the Journal of Popular Culture that dealt with the comparisons between “Born Again” and the story of Oedipus (another blind protagonist).
Barb says I should take my ideas about metanarratives and local narratives and apply them to things like say Supes or Ben Grimm or mutants? I’ve dealt before in this column with John Stuart (Jon Stewart?), the Guardians of the Galaxy, and racial issues…
Of course, Barb wrote Half Dead, too… but I’m also proud of Barb for her work on Tokyopop’s Atelier Marie… I mean, Keith Giffen, Marv Wolfman, and Jo Duffy are doing this same sort of post-translation rewrite work, making sure that things aren’t lost in translation… as indeed Keith discussed in his interview a few months ago…
This column is getting long, and it’s a bit overdue. Next time, more on manga, comics, retailers, libraries, and rebellion…
http://www.wickermanstudios.com/