So you saw the X-Men movie and think you're an expert on comics now? Even X-Men doesn't allow a way out for the oldest cinematic groin-kick to the mind--why watch the movie when you can read the book? Before your start you verbal diarrhea--"comic books are pulp for the illiterate"--here's The Defense: Comics seem to be the last outpost for a literary way of thinking. This may be a flimsy post-collector rationalization from a post-pubescent comics fan, for sure, but really--comics conjoin the visuals we love so much from movies, TV, and phone-call doodles, with that quaint Nineteenth Century experience often called "reading." You can justify spending $20 on X-Men number 282 (first appearance of Bishop, mutant hunter from the future) at age 15, and fifty bucks on Krazy Kat and Hellblazer at 21, if you don't call them "comics"--they're art books with a narrative.

If that aesthetic con-job works for you, then why read X-Men when there are so many comics not about Bishop-the-mutant-hunter-from-the-future, so many that don't plaster the letter 'X' in every promotional tie-in? Well, here's how to do it: four comics temporarily canonized for that most authoritative of reasons--we could only fit this many. We'll make some half-hearted gestures with excuses like timeliness ("So-and-so has a new issue out!"), but these comics are here mostly because I like them. 

Love and Rockets is one of the few comics that can ace that most popular yet grueling of tests--your girlfriend will like it. In fact, she'll steal if from you. Mine calls it "Archie, but real," and, really, this entire situation is one that could be in a Love and Rockets short--the mundane suddenly rendered sleek and artistic, oddly meaningful. Coolly constructed by "Los Bros Hernandez"--most importantly Gilbert and Jaime--Love and Rockets supposedly marks the beginning of a new renaissance of alternative comics. This having been said, though, Love and Rockets undulates with a warmth and accessibility absent in so many other independent comics--or really in so many comics in general. Utterly unpretentious, it's a comic not afraid to be a real, fun comic book in an era where Art Spiegelman's RAW and the X-Men propaganda wing seem to have turned comics into a dichotomy between the anal and the banal. We love Love and Rockets because we love the characters. Jaime's punk girls and Gilbert's village of Palomar are not just fully realized characters but fully realized casts, with whole groups onstage in ways thus unattempted except by Shakespeare and the writers of Just the Ten of Us. Readers usually note Love and Rocket's 'novelistic complexity,' but this ensemble plot and deceptively slick style (with the best jump cuts in comics) really offers a complexity that would be impossible in a novel. Love and Rockets offers what Carter Scholz calls a "habitable world." It is a world that seems to have no end. It is a world that knows how to reveal itself.

Dan Clowes is the high pope of the Bay Area hipsters (Cometbus and Adrian Tomine, presumably, being the cardinals). It's not hard to see why. Clowes's more poignant work, like Ghost World and Dan Boring, films a real world and characters who talk like real people through a stylish, grey-washed lens; we look at Clowes's characters and see ourselves. In his more satirical works, like Lout Rampage!, we, as readers, look at his characters, distorted totems of Americana, and can only feel ugly ourselves.

After a non-comics reading friend of mine read Preacher, he said: "There seems to be the right amount of violence, but not quite the sex and scantily clad women to go along with it." On the face of it, Preacher, written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon with Glenn Fabry covers, represent all that's bad and so often caricatured in comics: over the top violence congealing in a blood soup, guns and dirty talk, machismo and stereotypes (the French guy with the purple beret who says "This" as "Zees"). Then, there's the hokey, super-powered story and corresponding characters: Tulip, the blonde college girl turned hit man; Cassidy, the vampire with the rock star personality; a grunge pop star called "Arseface," because his face looks like a… well, you get the picture; and Jesse Custer, the title character, a born-again tough-talker turned born-again preacher, turned born-again tough-talker. His quest? To find God and give him a whooping he won't never forget. 
Underneath these clichés of bad comics--the revolvers and red Rorschach patterns, supposedly blood--Preacher starts seeming atypically popular, a catalogue of unpopular genres: It's a western; a Christian parable; a chronicle of the south and Midwest; a cowboy soap opera with romance and characterization for the superhero set; a very American story as only non-Americans could write it. When I first read "Gone to Texas," the first trade paperback, I felt my consciousness expand--I'd never been exposed to that much violence. Now, when I reread the entire run (the last issue comes out on August 30), Preacher exposes me to an American kind of wholesomeness (this, I know, amidst the pools of ripped-out intestines), where you do what you say you'll do, where you live up to your word. Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, Preacher is an instruction book on how to be a man--it is unfortunate that readers may be initially turned on (or off) by the guns and bullet wounds, the symptoms of the boy.

The work of Chris Ware in Acme Novelty Library may be the greatest contemporary artwork I've experienced in comics--or in the novel, poetry, design, art, or any genre for that matter. I am not usually one to effortlessly praise, especially not so directly, so blatantly. But it's true; Chris Ware is not just good, but great--definitely one of the greatest comic artists of all time--and his work elicits the kinds of reactions often associated with great art and literature. It bristles. It bristles in ways that make description seem paradoxical--Ware's comics seem understated yet highly emotional, delicate but often blatantly kitschy. Most of all they are sad. The indelible line of sorrow in Acme Novelty Library never deviates, seems indestructible, and, like T.S. Eliot's poems, the depth of Ware's pain always exhibits both a fine analytical intelligence and a keen formal sense. Experiments with form usually don't deliver tears, and every sappy summer family movie can attest to emotion's commonly allergic reaction to formalism, to intellectualism. Imagine Breaking the Waves (sans any sense of hope) as done by Rube Goldberg, and you might have Chris Ware, whose formal mastery relents as rarely as his despair. Though the panels seem fixed and geometric in their objectivity, as though they've died on the page, every panel of Acme Novelty Library vibrates with meaning. |||

||| DESIGN | WRITING | RESUME | MISC | KENCHEN.ORG

A NOTE OF EXPLANATION: I've removed the section about Grant Morrison, who is probably my favorite comics creator (and the reason for writing this article), because, as Thom Nosewicz has pointed out--Morrison wasn't retiring after all. I plan to write a longer article about him in any case. I have also fixed the mistakes mentioned in the Satellite Editor's Note 2.2 and in Thom's letter.   

From the Letters to the Editor page, issue 2.2:

MAN OF LETTERS: Mad Thomas Nosewicz has written a very long and thoughtful letter in reply to the comics article, pointing out mistakes (Thanks, Thom. See below), and delivering a perversely true quote about the Fantastic Four, Jung, and sex. In fact, it was too long and thoughtful for this page. You can check it out here. 

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Evan Dorkin

Won't Shut Up!

That of course is a good thing.

Ask two questions and you get back twenty minutes--a sign of ample creativity, no doubt. Dorkin is the creator of indie comic darlings like Milk and Cheese, about a riotous slab of cheese and carton of milk, Dork, and Murder Family. Dorkin also writes for Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the smart Cartoon Network series featuring fake interviews between cartoon icon Space Ghost and popular celebrities. In other words, a show much like this interview: take an old tape recorder, a cheap casette, a long speech, and ample editing, and you end up more with an Evan Dorkin quote book than an Evan Dorkin interview. 

On Space Ghost:

It's like an anti-celebrity show with celebrities.

It's like Burroughs cut-up without the heroine. You ask questions and you get back whatever you get back. And you're stuck with it and chop it into eleven minutes of stupidity.

On the guests

We make the ones we like look foolish.

Donnie Osmond really made himself look idiotic.

Dennis Leary really made himself look like an idiot.

Fran Drescher is just, you know, she just talks. She comes off as kind of dopey. She had her dog with her. There's really not much you can do. So once she opened her mouth, we'd have babies crying off screen. That voice is like all of Queens in one obnoxious voice.

William Shatner walked off the show because he said "I'm afraid what you're going to do to me" to the producers.

On the Dork action series:

No cursing, but lots of bad behavior. Nor morals. No lessons. We're doing a pilot and there's no guarantee it'll be a show.

I'm not quitting my day job. I'm still going to Arby's everyday, working the grill.

Pssh... These joke's are dying faster than Jim Shooter's start-up company, man.

On turning comics into animated series:

I don't want to option Milk and Cheese. 

I've had a lot of offers in the pot. A lot of Milk and Cheese. But I don't feel like I need to have them be someone else's project. i don't think they're allowing me to have creative input on it.

Milk and Cheese--I don't think would work very well as a cartoon unless it was like thirty seconds to two minutes.

You know, I love comics. I think they're a great medium. Stuff works in comics that doesn't work in animation. Not everything has to be a cartoon just because it is drawn.

Everybody feels that everybody is just looking for a deal.

Eugene Kim contributed to this interview. |||