Professional Development

So, the American Library Association 2013 Annual Conference is being held in Chicago this year.

Even though it's a hairsbreadth outside my domain as an English instructor, I may add it to my professional development activities this year. Why? Because of this:

Unbeknownst to me (and even to some of my library buddies), the track of sessions on graphic books at the ALA conference has grown so much that since last year they have been branding it as a mini-comicon within the conference. The purpose of the focus is to help ALA members "innovate and raise the profile of graphic novels and comics in their library or school." Yeah! While librarians, particularly public YA librarians, have been at the forefront of mainstreaming comics since the beginning, I had no idea that even the library establishment has embraced graphic books so strongly.

GraphiCon features an Artist Alley, with guests including Gene Yang, Chris Giarrusso, Faith Erin Hicks, Paul Pope, and many others; the Graphic Novel Stage for author talks and creator sessions; and a Graphic Novel Pavilion. The conference sessions look pretty cool, too; here's a sampling:

Busting the Comics Code: Comics, Censorship, and Librarians

Get Graphic in the Library: Celebrate timeless superheroes and villains of Graphic Novels and the art of ensuring their timelessness throughout the ages.

Krosoczka! TenNapel! Telgemeier! Graphic Novels Your Kids Love By Names You Can’t Pronounce.

Let's talk comics: A roundtable discussion with a line-up of comics creators and professionals, librarians and others

Comics Quickfire! A fast-paced game show where volunteers are paired off with professional cartoonists in a series of fun-filled drawing challenges!

Why do you make graphic novels? (And how can I do it too?)




Looks to me like the perfect intersection of professional development activities and personal avocation.


Postscript: Of course, if this is to be a permanent feature (which it looks to be), I can always look forward to the 2014 venue: Las Vegas. The story, according to a librarian pal, is that "they last had the conference in Vegas in the 80's and haven't been back because so many people didn't make it to their committee or even presentation commitments because they were partying too hard!" Librarians gone wild!

Scott Bakula Should Have Played The Spirit

So, Wonder Wife and I don't have any cable TV or satellite dish - all we get is what comes over the aerial (as my family always called it), and we don't watch much of that at all. We do have Netflix Streaming, and our usual wont is to watch one cancelled show from beginning to end. It usually winds up being science fiction or fantasy - we have watched Stargate: Atlantis, Farscape, and Legend of the Seeker, for example. Our current show is Star Trek: Enterprise.

Now I know this will possibly diminish my credibility as much as liking John Carter does, but we've enjoyed the show. I don't find it any cheesier than any incarnation of the ST franchise machine, and I have to say that it has displayed the tightest continuity I have ever seen on episodic television. Many have found Scott Bakula's Captain Archer wanting, but I find him the ST captain closest in affect and behavior (within the contraints of the genre) to real astronauts; he projects a bit of the same verisimilitude that Tom Hanks brought to Jim Lovell in Apollo 13.

Anyway, I have noticed that during the two-fisted space-opera action that is the hallmark of ST, Archer often gets the stuffing knocked out of him, sometimes for several minutes or more, before prevailing against his adversaries. Because of this, and the aforementioned tight continuity, he spends much of many episodes bloody and bruised from being smacked around or thrown across cargo bays.

The last time I noticed this, my mind connected it to a passage I recalled from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, in his section on The Spirit. I looked it up to make sure I got it right: "Much of The Spirit's charm lay in his response to intense physical punishment. Hoodlums could slug him, shoot him, bend pipes over his head. The Spirit merely stuck his tongue in his cheek and beat the crap out of them."

Given his performance across four seasons of Enterprise, I think Bakula could have captured that charm. He may not have been a typical action hero, but neither was The Spirit. Bakula's a little long in the tooth for the role now, a few years older than me, but I think it might have been a fine thing.

A battered Archer just before he beats the crap out of a Nazi.

Trying Thai

So, Wonder Wife has a sib and sib-in-law who are currently based in Singapore but who have connections in Thailand and spend a lot of time there. On their last trip, they picked up some Thai comics for me, to wit:

It is quite a colorful collection. The comics themselves are about five by seven inches, sort of old TV Guide size; each has 32 pages of story and blank inside covers. And that's about all I can give you in the way of context.

A long time ago in a blog far away, I took a look at some Indian comics that a colleague had given me. I was able to glean a lot of background on them, since the comics were in English and there was plenty of back matter, including a web address. For these, really all I can tell you is to call (02) 447-6280 and see what happens: that's all I can read of any issue.

Here are some close-ups of some of the covers:






The first three look to be in the horror genre; the fourth one is maybe about drug trafficking. Or ruby smuggling? I can't tell: I can't read the captions or even the titles.

Unfortunately, the interior art doesn't give us much help getting through the language barrier. In addition to being rather amateurish by most professional standards, I find it all but inaccessible. I mean, I thought I understood the language of comics, but I am all at sea here.

In this sequence, I can't tell if Plaid Shirt Guy has drowned in the well and is re-animated, has nearly drowned and gets revived, just happened to be sleeping in the well and came out, or is just a figment of Mustache Guy's imagination:



Trust me when I say the rest of the story doesn't help: the previous pages show Plaid Shirt in the well with a woman, and after this he and Mustache walk away to do chores together.

Maybe it's just that the conventions of body language and expression are so different. I have read  French comics, for example, and even manga, and have been able to follow along; even if I didn't know exactly what everyone was saying, I knew who was angry, who was excited, who was tired, and so on. These Thai comics just confound me.

Compounding the dilemma is that despite the promise of the covers, many pages are devoted to people just standing around talking. Without language facility, and with some hesitancy and doubt about interpreting the images, sequences like this one are incomprehensible:

Of course, not all of it is abstruse. Here's a guy putting the hurt on some zombies:

Now that doesn't take a whole lot of cross-cultural literacy to dig.

I'll take a longer look at some of these; if I think I can figure one out, maybe I'll post it with a guess-translation. And then the sib-in-law can read it and get a good laugh.

Another reason why none of my comics is in mint condition

So, I was rooting through one of the vertical files that hold my miscellaneous stuff and I came across this poster, which I had honestly forgotten I even owned:

The poster is four times as big as a comic; you can see the creases where it was folded to size. It showcases the crew from  Xenozoic Tales AKA Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. (I recognized Jack Tenrec and Hannah Dundee right away, but don't know the blond guy.) This was a series that I followed only intermittently; I think I liked it more for the concept than the execution. I always seat Mark Schultz at the same table as Dave Stevens - just as talented and idiosyncratic and always carrying just a sense of being a bit too self-contained. Schultz's series had a comparatively short history, like Stevens's Rocketeer - although it did break into the animated world, albeit with a pretty pedestrian show, at least from what I've seen.

The first thing I noticed about the poster itself was the composition. Okay, maybe that was the second or third thing, after the creepy EC-esque brain-monsters and Hannah's sexy-but-not-Escher-girl pose. Ah, for the innocent days when artists were content to show either busts or butts and didn't have to forsake all pretense at anatomy to show them both in one shot...

But anyway, to the composition: it looks like there's an awful lot of tree trunk and emptiness up there at the top. The answer is pretty obvious, and the overleaf explains it.

I recalled when I read this again that I got the poster not as an in-store giveaway but inside some reprint edition of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs; once I looked closely, I could find the staple holes. I'm not sure if it was the 1990 Marvel six-issue miniseries or one of the Kitchen Sink one-shots, and the Grand Comics Database wasn't helpful in tracking it down. I don't recall seeing the issues around; they may be in the Last Shortbox® but I'd have to check.

It strikes me as more than a little odd that this illustration contains neither Cadillacs nor dinosaurs, since that's the trope the series is associated with. Perhaps that's why the poster is not a big deal; even a Google Image Search doesn't turn it up. Hey, it's an actual rarity!

Too bad it's not in mint condition.

Free to be...

So, Saturday was a spectacularly sunny day here in the Queen City of the Pacific Northwest, and even though I hadn't specifically planned for it, I decided to head on down to a Free Comic Book Day event. I'm lucky enough to live in a town where I have four or five comics shops within in a couple of miles; I decided to walk to one particular shop which shall remain nameless because I really don't want to call it out.


Now, you can read about how a well-run store might do FCBD other places, like from Mike Sterling at Progressive Ruin,  but I am afraid that's not the story I have to tell. I chose to head down to a nearby store run by a kind and well-intentioned fellow who just can't seem to crack the nut of a good retail operation; this FCBD was no exception.

Normally, each time I go into the store, the experience is pretty much the same: there is a motley group of "customers" sitting around the gaming table, which is situated smack in the middle of the main space, right as you enter. The Regulars are arguing whether Thor could beat Superman in a fight or if Obscure Anime One was more or less awesome than Obscure Anime Two or if Bruce Campbell could beat Joss Wheadon in a fight, and they give me, the stranger in town, the same sidelong glances employed by the extras in Western movie saloon scenes. Often there are foodstuffs present; Subway or pizza or phad see-ew take-away scents the air. Some folks might be reading comics. The owner is scurrying about stocking shelves, participating in the discussion as he moves around the shop. I look around for the particular graphic novel or trade paperback I came in for, but can't find it on the shelves crammed with new releases, DC and Marvel collections, and RPG manuals. I catch the proprietor's attention and ask about the item; he is friendly, sympathetic, and willing, but totally unable to meet my request in any way that satisfies my needs, and he apologizes sincerely and wishes me a good day.

The fellow always strikes me as someone who has read a book on good customer service and memorized some of the suggested lines, but really hasn't internalized it yet - or contextualized it in the operation of his store. If my experience is even within a standard deviation of the mean value of customer satisfaction, I honestly don't know how the store stays open. But maybe I am just a bad match, and not in his customer base.

This being FCBD, I guess that hope which springs eternal in the human breast led me to believe that the store might actually ramp up its performance above the typical; I am sorely disappointed.

First of all, there is no Free Comic Book Day signage - no banner, not poster, no xeroxed flyer taped the door, no hand-scrawled note on an old grocery bag, nothing. Inside, the Regulars are at their stations; on the menu today are gooey garlic cheese sticks and a piquant red sauce, which are being shared across the table. The Regulars are having a robust discussion on D&D vs Magic. The owner is scurrying around; no other staff is present. No one greets me.

So wait, is FCBD even observed in this store? Well, it must be - otherwise what are these piles of comics, semi-neatly sloppily stacked on the gaming table for? I really can't tell - there are no labels or signs, the regulars seems to be leaning on/eating over the comics, and there is a guy to my right going through a longbox, pulling out back issues, and making similar stacks, so it's a little confusing. I don't recognize any of the titles on the table, and none of them clearly says "Free Comic Book Day Edition," so I am unsure about taking any.

The proprietor is busy so I decide to just leave. I feel sad, though. Not because I didn't get any comics; I clearly could have tried a little harder if that was really the objective. It is more that something that could be so much fun - whether it's Free Comic Book Day or just a regular visit to my Friendly Neighborhood Comic Shop - is so disappointing. As a business model and as a cultural value, I guess I expect some inclusion, or at least to be made to feel welcome.

But the sun is still shining on the walk home, so there is that.

Alfred, let's go shopping.

So, I am here in the Capital of the Inland Empire, The Lilac City, Spokane, Washington. Although I am attending an academic conference, I carved out a little time to re-visit some geeky haunts I discovered when I lived here for grad school:

First, we have Merlyn's:

Their cool A-frame elaborates on their trade.



They have a huge new comics wall as well as tons of back issues,



and a big gaming area, eerily quiet on a weekday.

The shelves are just one big D6 short of a full set of oversized Platonic solids.

And it has perhaps the coolest restroom in Washington:

I also managed to squeeze in a trip to Boo Radley's, an awesome gift and curiosity shop downtown:

It also sells graphic novels

as well as vintage genre paperbacks

and Steampunk gear.

Here was a great find: the D&D version of Clue. I kid you not, the back of the box asks "Was it Tordock in the Dragon's Lair with the Flaming Battle Axe? Or Mialee in the Dungeon with the Staff of Power?"

And here's a ST:OS action figure set - from the "Dilithium Collection."

If you are ever in Spoke-a-loo, check out these shops - they are worth a visit!

Line-up

So, on the way from Seattle to Spokane today, Wonder Wife and I ran into a Nail that changed our destiny: we had a two-hour delay while we waited for roadside assistance, and more while we got the tire replaced. Through the magic of wireless telephony, we had access to the internet while we waited for the wrecker to arrive, and I saw that a Google+ pal had re-posted an awesome deviantart poster/wallpaper illo featuring a metric boatload of geek heroes. Wonder Wife was looking over my shoulder at the image, and I got her to describe it for your edification.



Let's run some of those by one more time:

Flaming Boy!

The Rock Guy from That Movie! Where He Pounds Things!

Bruce Wayne! (He has a bow tie!)

American Guy!

Count Dracula! (He's got freaky things on!)

Jean-Luc Picard's son!

Vulcan Lady!

Anderson Cooper!

But you will notice she can pick J'onn J'onzz out of the crowd.