I read several comics religously, lately, and all of them are on the web.  It’s interesting how the webcomics market has changed over the last six or seven years—and here I’m talking about the abstract attention market, not monetization or such.  Was a time, long past, when User Friendly was the shining example of success, the Internet’s answer to Dilbert, etc.  Now it’s a footnote, an oddity in a bustling economy of comics offerings.

For one thing, there are more and more of them, which to be fair includes more and more crap.  But there’s also a lot more good stuff, and notably there’s enough good stuff that reading webcomics is no longer an exercise of finding the most tolerable, but one of choosing from among all the quality stuff for the ones you like most.

There’s also the impressive growth, over time, in the quality of some of the comics.  A look at old and new strips from Penny Arcade (1999, 2006) or Questionable Content (2003, 2006) paint a clear picture of just how much these folks have developed their work—writing and art—over time. 

It’s also worth noting that a few folks are now actually making their livings off these independent web comics.  The few and the proud, no doubt, but it’s an exciting development.

My daily reading is a weird jumble: gag strips, indie art, niche humor, forced surreality, with the writing from one title to the next as varied as the art is (or vice versa).  The hit-list:  Cat and Girl, Wigu, Diesel Sweeties, White Ninja, Hate Song, Penny Arcade, Questionable Content, and Overcompensating.

Some of these I see as examples of what I could maybe pull off if I just think and plan and practice, practice, practice, and it’s inspiring to have the (potential) immediacy of access to the folks responsible for the output—the difference between a syndicated comic artist lurking on the far side of the daily comics page and some guy (or gal) on the other end of an email address or a post to their comic’s electronic forum.

While I didn’t really Read Comics growing up, I did read a few specific comic books and graphic novels.  Among them: Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.  This was (with the possible exception of the original Tim Burton film) my first direct exposure to Batman, and I loved it. 

Year One tells the story of the launching of Batman’s career, as it were—the transformation of a young, angry, obsessed Bruce Wayne from directionless seeker to directed, personified force.  It is, in parallel, a development of the character of future commissioner Jim Gordon, in the book a pushing-middle-age transplant to Gotham.  (The recent film Batman Begins is not based on, but does pay considerable homage to, this book.  Gary Oldman is, visually at least, a spitting image of Miller’s Gordon, and a few shots/moments, such as Gordon ascending the steps of a building while SWAT looks on, are clear references.) 

The writing is very good—this is the sort of book you can hand without embarassment to someone who doesn’t read comics—but the art is, as I see it, essential to the success of the book.

It doesn’t look like a superhero comic.

There’s a certain stylistic implausibility to superhero stories: these are people with catchy, cartoonish names who run around in tights.  They have superpowers and they have dating problems.  There’s a constant mix of world-shaking threats and interpersonal drama that doesn’t really make sense in the cold light of day.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that—they’re stories, and they’re operating in a tradition, an storytelling culture where these things are at least internally consistent.

But what Miller does in Year One is strip down as much of that as he can while still having an obsessed billionaire run around in a costume calling himself Batman.  The art is dirty and grim and unfantastic—Gotham isn’t a dystopia, it’s just a bad place to live, and the villains are corrupt politicians and crooked cops, not chortling fruitcakes with superweapons.  Batman himself is a fledgling vigilante, a lifeless, friendless, anti-social man who puts on a costume because, ultimately, he doesn’t know what else to do, because he can’t stand simply being himself.

And it’s all in dark lines, flat, broken faces, flickers of emotion in a heavy, pain-in-the-ass world.  No flashy stuff, no attention-getting flourishes, just stark, simple linework and wonderful muted colors that make you believe, if anything could, that there’s a good cop and a mad/sane costumed billionaire trying to make little things right in a city chock full of wrongness and badness.

Frank Miller’s other big Batman book, The Dark Knight Returns, covers the other bookend of the Batman saga—Bruce Wayne pushing sixty, retired and restless.  The art is still very Frank Miller, but the execution is more DC Comics, superheroes in classic form, than Year One.  It’s also very good, but where Year One has realist lines and an almost anti-comic feel, Dark Knight has larger-than-life characters in huge, dynamic superhero poses, and a whole cavalcade of men in tights.  Great art, but not the same sort: I don’t love it.  I don’t want to emulate it.

[Update!  Attentive reader layne points out that Year One was illustrated by David Mazzuchelli, with Miller writing, something I had half-forgotten and wholly failed to emphasize in the writeup.  It’s Frank’s Batman, but not his pen.]

I saw the movie Aliens (that’s the second one, with all the Space Marines and the big queen) for the first time when I was eight or nine years old.  My older older sister had rented it on VHS (she’d seen it a couple times before), and I watched it with her.  She tried to cover my eyes during a couple of scenes, with mixed results.

I was pretty hooked on the creature after that.  I looked up H. R. Giger (it’s pronounced “GEE-ger”, apparently) and fell in love with his stuff, too, though at the time I was pretty unprepared to deal with the more erotic/anatomical aspects of his art.  Vulva portals, nipples galore, what was clearly lady-on-machine hanky panky of the sort I only very dimly understood.  It occurs to me that even if Giger books weren’t damned expensive, my parents wouldn’t have gotten them for me anyway.

On the flip side of Giger’s airbrushed monstrosities, there were cheaply available comic books from Dark Horse featuring the Aliens IP, and I started snapping them up during a brief stint of comics-buying (I also purchased most of the second-generation run of Mister Miracle—I’d inherited the original Kirby series when I was younger). 

The Aliens books were all over the board, in art and writing.  Book One was a lovely, atmospheric thing, thick black-and-white ink, moody story, a real sense of faithfulness to the terranic doom threatened but never realized in the original film trilogy.  Book Two was a watercolored sequel, very pretty in its own right but with less meat to the story.  After that, it was a collection of discrete miniseries ventures, six or eight or twelve issues a piece, with only general continunity.

And different artists (and different art) each time.  One miniseries would have a bold-lined, almost cartoonish look, with bright colors; another would be sketchy, thin-lined crosshatching and weird pastels.  On the whole, very few of the comics seemed to capture the same sort of dark and shadowy terror of the films and especially of the first and the third—with the exception of Books One and Two and a couple of one-offs, the comics I bought during that period all seemed to have been executed by people who really liked James Cameron’s action movie but didn’t like how darn dim the pictures were.

But comic books and movies aside, I drew the things.  While my sister was graduating from horses to better looking horses, I was graduating from rocket ships and tanks to aliens.  Twenty-four seven, in little sketches and big drawings.  I drew them (and other things) on desks in middle school, in pencil, great big elaborate class-period-long drawings.

I drew a big 11×17 portrait of an Alien one year, to enter in the art competition at the county fair.  My mom still has it.  It’s a nasty, ugly thing, though much sleeker and less drippy than the fellows in the movies.  And it really is a sort of formal portrait—straight on, head and shoulders, one claw lifted as if to menace playfully at the artist, and teeth, teeth, teeth.  Real horrorshow.

Awful as the subject matter was, it was a much better drawing than the ones that won in my age group.  I got a disqualification/honorable mention.  The official story was that, as my middle school was not a compliant member of the correct PTA association, I was not eligible to win.  The secret story that I prefer is that some old biddies couldn’t stomach the idea of letting that awful, awful thing place, let alone win.  The County Fair didn’t really have that sort of marking message: “Cows, Fun, and Horrible Monsters”.

[For those not precisely nerdy enough to tell videogame console controllers apart: that’s a rendering of an NES controller, which more or less changed the world of controller design forever with it’s iconic cross-shaped directional “d-pad”.  Prior to the NES, up/down/left/right direction had been mostly handled by “joystick” type controllers—think of the classic one-orange-button Atari controller—or other questionable or idiosyncractic schemes.

For those nerdy enough to really know their console controllers, yes, it’s not a very faithful rendering.  I didn’t have one handy; my parents sold off my system one day when I was at college.  For forty dollars.]

The original Nintendo Entertainment System (often lovingly simplified to NES, pronounced “en ee ess” or simply “ness” by the faithful) was released in summer, 1985.  I was 6 at the time, but I suspect I wasn’t savvy to the machine right away.  Some time in the next couple of years, I became aware, and I was in lust thereafter.

We had some family friends who had a NES, and whenever we would go over there for a social event (poolside barbeque was a popular one in the summer, as they had a pool), I would sneak away as soon as possible to sit in my friend’s room and play Nintendo games until someone would come around to find me and haul me back out into the social sphere.  Wait, sneak, get caught, repeat.

It was a vexing situation: I knew it was a bad move, hiding and using someone else’s system, but I was enchanted by this machine, and I did not own one.  What to do?

I did get one, and though it seemed like forever at the time it was probably sooner rather than later.  I went in on it with my sister, with some help from our biological father.  And I played the unholy god out of it.  And I’ve been gaming ever since—I’ve always liked reading, and I’ve spent a lot of leisure time over the years curled up with a book, but I’d wager I’ve spent more time yet playing video games.

There are times when I feel guilty about that.  I could be educating myself!  I could be Making Something—recording music, writing, drawing—instead of sitting here at this videogame console, trying to kill some godforsaken made up villain with my made up sword for the umpteenth time, right?

But most of the time I’m pretty okay with it.  For one thing, I do spend a lot of time making things.  And for another, hell and damnation, games are fun.  I derive pleasure from the experience.  And games are getting better and better as the years pass—more social, more literary, more clever constructed.  The convergence between art and entertainment is approaching, in this neighborhood.  Playing is starting—in some cases, at least—to seem more and more like Making Stuff.

When I was growing up, I didn’t really read comic books. It just didn’t seem important—I split my time between juvenile fiction (I was a big Walt Morey fan), Stephen King, and Nintendo Power Magazine—and, besides, comics were expensive, man.

So what exposure I had to comic art was limited to comics in the daily paper, and the Garfield, Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes books I or my siblings would get as gifts on birthdays or Christmas. The books were constant companions, but the daily comics weren’t—we didn’t get the paper.

My grandmother did, though, and so whenever we would go out to her house (every week or two, probably), I’d dig through the tinder bin by her fireplace (which was mostly full of old papers and other burnable waste paper) and kill a half hour reading through the backlog of comics that way.

I don’t know what I made of the art, at the time. I think I looked with a lot of interest on the art in the soap comics—Rex Morgan, Mary Worth, Judge Parker—because they seemed so realistic and hence represented the manifestation of a then-vaguely-defined desire for artistic skill. The more cartoony comics—the comics comics—didn’t excite me in the same way. Anybody, I think I must have thought, can do that.

Now I find myself reversed. Increasingly, I’m taken by some of the simple art of cartoonists, while the drawings in the soap comics seems like the strange artistic purgatory of the half-measured comics inker—realist drawings good enough to get them a gig in a syndicated soap strip, but not good enough to get them anywhere else.

Which is a ridiculously negative way to put it, really. I’d kill to make my living doing something essentially creative. I think the soap snobbery is down to too much snarky enjoyment of the (fantastic) daily comics analysis over at The Comics Curmudgeon.

But, still: give me Bill Waterson, or R. Crumb, over whoever draws Chinbeard and the rest of the Mary Worth crew. The character of simplicity, the art of the line—that’s what I’m in love with these days, more and more.

Meet my younger older sister.  (I have an older older sister too, and a younger brother, but this isn’t a drawing of either of them.)  She’s a year and a half older than me, and has a bachelors in Fine Arts and a masters in Landscape Architecture/Design or something close to that.

I drew this from a photo where both of us were grinning like loons.  The drawing is wrong in every detail, but it’s definitely her if you stand back and squint.  About a hundred wrong lines do make a right, I guess.

She’ll probably be horrified when she sees this.  She truly is a very pretty girl when I’m not drawing her.

Growing up, I was the musical one and my sister was the artistic one.  I played piano and clarinet; she drew horses and princesses. 

She drew a lot of horses, honestly.  Had a real horse fixation.  Shocking, I know, in a young teenaged girl.

She’s a year and a half older than me; the way that school enrollment deadlines work where we grew up, she was two years ahead in school.  We went to the same elementary school, but when I hit the fourth grade she had graduated to the sixth grade: middle school.

That year, my fourth grade, there was a school-wide themed drawing competetion to celebrate the Year of the Horse.  I entered a drawing of a horse in mid-leap, drawn from a reference photo I found in the school library.  It wasn’t a great drawing—my sister later aptly (if a bit viciously) christened it the Weiner Horse—but it was pretty decent for a freehand drawing by an untrained nine-year-old.

And it won.  And that just killed my sister.  Killed her dead, not so much because my horse had too long of a body but because she would surely (and this is no doubt true) have won the contest hands-down if she hadn’t gone off to middle school.  That was kind of hard on her.

The second place winner was a large, impressionistic portrait of a horse head that would have been really goddam impressive if it weren’t a tracing of the large, impressionistic portrait of a horse head featured on the poster advertising the contest.  Talk about brass balls, kid.

The tablet was an out-of-nowhere xmas gift from my mother-in-law.  I’ve always kind of wanted one, but it’s the sort of thing that falls into that tricky territory of not sure I should buy myself this.  Having it now and playing with it for the last week, though, I’m pretty sure that I need it.  It’s great.  I’m drawing.