January 17, 2004

I am a comic book collector. I love super-heroes. I own over 7000 comic books, all carefully bagged and tagged and indexed. It's my "thing." I have accrued some of these books since I was in junior high school. Think of me what you will, but I do enjoy it.

I quit actively collecting comics back in the early 90's. There were three reasons really. The first was that I felt I needed to grow up a little and buy a house. I had a $50-$75/week comic habit and that could go a long way towards a mortgage payment. I could never bring myself to throw a comic away, so storage was and still is a problem. (Yes, I still have all my comics.) The third issue was that the early 90's was what is now known in the industry as the "collector's glut." People who did not love comics were buying them as investments, in huge quantities. Subsequently, publishers were publishing an enormous number of titles, often bad. The talent was getting diluted and even I found myself buying books not because I wanted to read them, but because I need to keep my sets complete.

Despite my ceasing to actively acquire comics, my love for them has never faded. The recent spat of Marvel® character based big-budget movies has been a boon for me. In some ways it has reignited my passion. This Christmas just past, my passion was fed by numerous gifts of books about the comics. You know the kind; they try to list all the characters in a "universe" and a synopsis of each character's "history." One of them also talks a little about the publishing history as well. There was also a special on The History Channel covering much of the same territory during the holidays.

I have noted one thing in all of these source media - they talk about the stories, but they do not talk about the art. I think that is just wrong. In the last few years there have been some novelizations of some of the comic book story lines, "The Death of Superman" being one very good selling example. I have read some of them. I enjoyed them, but throughout reading, my mind was filled with the rich images of the characters I have seen over the years. When the writer attempted to describe a character's mood, I almost automatically pictured an image of the character by the artist that had best portrayed that mood in the comics. The artist with a few pencil strokes said what the writer may take paragraphs to describe. Comic stories, without comic art, just don't cut it. They are simplistic in plot, lack character development, and seem to fall flat. The movies are currently successful because technology now allows them to look right.

And so, we find ourselves with a new topic for this space -- comic book art. I will continue to write about the kinds of things I have been, as it seems appropriate, but I want to write about this too. I shall, from time-to-time, reproduce some of my favorite comic book images here. This may get me in trouble since I do not have permission to do such, but no one reads this anyway, so I am not too worried. Today, I want to talk about three things that are recent in my life that have driven home to me just how important comic book images are to comic book stories, and why it is an art form we should appreciate.

As comic book sales have plummeted in recent years, those that own the licenses to the characters have sought new ways to capitalize on those properties. One of those ways has been the production of statues of the characters suitable for display. I stumbled across them on Ebay and was immediately taken. I tried very hard not to indulge my passion by buying them, after all, I have successfully weaned myself from the books. However, I did show them to my wife, who gave me one for Christmas and the floodgates were opened. I have quite a few now. In fact, when we redecorated my office, they became the centerpieces around which the office was designed. Well, them and some wallpaper specially printed with images from the comics. I have found in my quest to acquire these statues that the images are so important to me. I love just to look at them. I don't even tell their stories in my mind when I look, I just like to look. They are beautiful.

The second thing that has really driven home the importance of the comic art is some of the animation of comic storied that is currently occurring. Justice League and Teen Titans are both appearing regularly on Cartoon Network. Because of the sheer number of images required to produce animation, there is an effort to minimize the number of lines it takes to drawn any given character. In motion, I do not mind the animated characters too much, but when rendered as stills, they are unappealing. Along with the statues I just discussed, one can buy maquettes that are three-dimensional models of the characters that hang around the animation studios so everyone draws the characters the same. I do not care for the maquettes; they just don't look good.

In the 60's, Marvel's first attempt at animation consisted of narrated stories from the books where art from the books was used and still images of the characters were sort of moved around the screen, but the characters themselves barely moved - joints did not bend, things like that. Obviously bad animation, but it contained a richness that current animated characters cannot match. Many of the newest comic book artists use this minimalist style. I have noticed it prevalently in the Marvel Ultimates line. Yuck! The same story drawn richly and drawn in this current style can have an entirely different effect. The current style simply lacks the impact and drama. The art matters.

But the thing that really drove the importance of comic art home to me was a couple of years ago when my brother-in-law found some of his comics books from his childhood and sent them to me to add to my collection. I read them all, voraciously. These books all dated from the late 60's and early 70's. As I read, I came across the panel you see here. Suddenly I was a child again. I had read the same book when I was a kid and this image brought the entire experience flooding back. I remembered the store where I bought the book, the room I was in when I read it, and where I kept it for years. Now this image is at the end of the story - I had read most of the story, not realizing I had read it before, until I came upon the image. The story was in fact typical of the childish tripe that was produced at the time. But that image was locked in my brain with an unbelievable force.

Why have comic books had such am impact on our culture. It's not the stories, they are all the same for crying out loud. It's the images. I am no artist, nor am I any sort of formal historian when it comes to comics. I am however a fan - a big one. And so, in this space as I feel moved and can I am going to write about comics, and specifically about comic images. I hope you will enjoy it.