I don’t know much about business, but I know what I like.

The changes in Diamond Comics Distributor’s policies pertaining to the minimums of solicited material is going to change the way some publishers do business, and I’m afraid that is going to affect some of the things I like.

I don’t know enough about the publishing industry, running a comic book company or a comic book store, or this strange beast known as “the Direct Market” to talk in any great detail about how Diamond’s changes (a story Matt Brady has been following closely) will impact any of the above, beyond what the publishers themselves have been saying in public this past week. And what AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer has been saying has me wondering about the future of comics storytelling, at least in a very few specific cases.

Long, rambling essay leading up to a discussion of Johnny Hiro, after the jump.

Tuesday Pitzer wrote the short and sweet version of what the changes mean: “Comics are dead, long live OGNs.” He went on to talk about “the first casualty,” a planned issue of AdHouse’s occasional superheroes-by-artists-who-you-don’t-think-of-as-superhero-artists anthology Superior Showcase, which would have been the fourth. Pitzer also wrote that about 99% of what he had planned was good, and, in speaking with Tom Spurgeon of Comicsreporter.com on Wednesday, clarified some future publishing plans a bit.

Now Pitzer pronouncing comics dead and original graphic novels the future, jokingly or not, is hardly a shock. Conventional wisdom seems to be that comic books have been slowly dying since the mid-90s (if not the 1950s), and it’s only a matter of time before the individual comic book gives way to an all graphic novel model or some form of electronic version (Heck, within the last ten years, we’ve seen the direct market move from a comic book and some trade model to a comic book-and-then-trade-model).

Comic books are probably already vinyl records, and they’re only going to become more and more like them in the future. A band can print will still release music on vinyl, because it looks cool, it feels cool and it sounds cool, but it’s basically something they do for fun; if there’s money to be made on music sales, it will be on CD or electronically.

Pitzer made it sound a little like that’s sort of how he regarded Superior Showcase anyway; “[T]hat series never really made money,” he told Spurgeon. “It was just fun to do.”

They’re also fun to read.

AdHouse is a great little publisher. They’re either small enough, or consistent enough (or some combination of the two) that there’s something of an aesthetic uniformity to their books. Not that they all look the same or read the same or are somehow redundant, of course, just that they all tend to be really well-designed books with an art-first sensibility and an open-ended, optimistic point-of-view that celebrates the medium and its makers while including the reader in the experience.

Or let me put it this way: I’ve read almost everything they’ve published, and while I haven’t loved each and every book, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that wasn’t really great looking, really well-illustrated and, in the cases of the two or three I wouldn’t call great books, they were still pretty damn good ones.

Comparing and contrasting their catalog of “books” with their catalog of “comics”, they seem like a more book-centric publisher, and if they become an all-book publisher, it doesn’t seem like it will change the nature of their output too greatly.

Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest was published first as a series of comic books and then as a very well-received trade; I’ve read it in both formats now, and I don’t think being collected transformed the story drastically. Zig Zag, a one-man humor anthology about robots and bugs by J. Chris Campbell is fun in small doses, but I imagine it would be just as fun in big doses—certainly trade collections or original graphic novels of other single-creator anthology comics work well in the bigger dosage.

I wonder if Superior Showcase or Johnny Hiro will survive though. The former is a kinda sorta spin-off of Project: Superior, a superhero anthology that contained work from Nick Abadzis, Graham Annable, Jeffrey Brown, Ronnie del Carmen, J. W. Cotter, Mike Dawson, Doug Fraser, Dean Haspiel, James Jean, R. Kikuo Johnson, Scott Morse, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Brian Wood and others. There wasn’t any great, the-world-needs-this-book sort of point to it, beyond presenting a bunch of really great stories by a bunch of really great artists (which made it a nice introduction to a lot of artists’ work, by the way).

Superior Showcase continued the idea, collecting a trio of superhero stories in each issues (Nick Bertozzi, Mike Dawson, Dean Trippe, Maris Wicks, Farel Dalrymple, Joey Weiser, Brian Maruca, Jim Rugg, Dustin Harbin and Laura Park in the first three). Such stories would work just as well in a trade format, of course, but given the fact that Pitzer and AdHouse have already released a trade collecting such stories, it may seem less appealing to them to keep doing new ones. The comics format was an ideal way to continue to present those kinds of stories from new creators, without the commitment of hundreds of pages of them simultaneously, and it certainly made for a nice sampler for readers.

And then there’s Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro. This was the book I first thought of when I read Pitzer mentioning the death of the comic book, because when I reached the second issue of Chao’s (so far) three-issue long series, it struck me that the cartoonist was really committed to telling a story specifically meant to be told in a serial comic book.

I had some reservations about the first issue: The pun in the title is kinda lame, and Johnny’s Japanese girlfriend Mayumi speaks in dialogue that clearly indicates English is her second language, something that made me a little uncomfortable (It’s not old-school Chris Claremont X-Men phonetic accents bad, but it would have annoyed my Japanese girl friend).

But I was pretty quickly won over. The production was top-notch (quality paper stock on the cover and interior pages at a $2.99 price point), Chao’s art was light, white and airy, with occasional splashes of black and what looked like ink washes providing some grays here and there, and the story was a pleasant mix of unironic emotional content, character-based romance, magical realism/dream logic plotting and organic comedy.

Johnny and Mayumi share an apartment in Brooklyn, and are sleeping peacefully, when the Godzilla-like monster “Gozadilla” snatches Mayumi out of her bed and stomps off with her. We learn why he wants revenge on her: It turns out she’s the daughter of a woman who piloted the left arm of Super A-OK Robot, a Voltron-like monster-fighting Tokyo protector.

Johnny, whom the cover tells us is “Half Asian, All Hero” gives chase, haplessly trying to rescue his girlfriend, but mostly just falling down and running into things. Eventually, the time change between Tokyo and New York fells the monster, and it sets Mayumi down and falls asleep.

That’s when the real hero of the piece shows up:

He tells Johnny that the city is in his debt, and he’ll do whatever he can to help, but when Johnny asks if he can repair his apartment wall, Bloomberg demurs: “No, I’m sorry. Since this is all city funded, we really should focus on public property.”

It ends with the young lovers in the rubble of their apartment, starting out through the hole in the wall as the dozing Gozadilla is airlifted out of the city, and they declare their love for one another.

It was fun, funny and sweet, it was really well drawn and it accomplished a real sense of place, of the sort you don’t really see in enough comic books; in a way, it reminded me of Marvel 1970’s comic books, where heroes lived in their own neighborhoods and each seemed like a real part of real New York.

So, all in all, a pretty good comic book.

And then Johnny Hiro #2 came out, and pretty much completely transformed the previous story into not only a pretty good comic book, but a pretty good comic book that is also part of a better comic book made out of individual comic books (Not unlike Voltron is a super-cool robot made out of individual cool robot lions).

I guess that sounds really obvious, that a good serial comic book will not only have individual good stories, but that they will compliment one another and build into a greater narrative. I mean, that’s kind of the whole point of comic books, right?

So I’m not sure why exactly the thought hit me so hard here, or why it made such an impression. I suppose it may be how jaded and cynical one gets with most serial comics—this, Rasl, Special Forces and the new Blue Monday may be all of the non-superhero/genre narrative comics I’m reading for pleasure at the moment in singles instead of trades—and how rare brand-new, all-original, cut-from-whole cloth series are, let alone really good ones.

In this second issue, Johnny and Mayumi try to put their life back together after the Gozadilla attack, finding a place to stay while they figure out what to do with their apartment. A giant gorilla is apparently sneaking around, looking at Mayumi while she’s at work. And then there’s another weird conflict: Johnny works at a Japanese restaurant, and an influential food critic comes in and orders the lobster—which they’ve just run out of!

So Johnny is sent to a rival restaurant to steal a lobster, which he does, and is then chased up and down buildings by blade wielding employees, a chase that climaxes in a cooking utensil battle in the kitchen. Once again Johnny kinda sorta succeeds, but not entirely…he tries, and things work out okay if not perfectly, but he doesn’t triumph.

But equal time is spent on Johnny and Mayumi’s relationship, and how difficult it is to make a life together work: Both work so much and so hard, it seems like they never see each other, and, though they love one another, they’re not as happy as they want to be or make each other.

Either story worked just fine alone, but together…

And then that was followed by a third issue, in which Johnny and Mayumi go to the opera, meet a friend from Japan and are attacked by 47 Ronin Businessmen. These three issues will be collected in a trade currently slated for a June release, along with two other issues, and while I’m sure it will read fine in a trade, I can’t imagine they’ll read any better in a trade than they did as three individual comic books/would have as five individual comic books.

At the risk of sounding overly wistful about that particular format, there’s something kinda special about serial comic book storytelling, especially when the storyteller is creating for that type of storytelling, rather than making a graphic novel, chopping it up into six chapters, and selling them to you individually.

I’m not sure how long Chao intends his Johnny Hiro story to run, and perhaps it will end at five issues anyway (Pitzer told Spurgeon “When/if we get around to issue #6, Fred and I will have to make a decision”) but it seems that the knowledge of a different format would somehow impact the process of creating future chapters, just as reading them in a different format will affect the experience on our end.

So to summarize: It will be interesting to see what happens to the direct market in the near future (and by “interesting” I mean “terrifying”), reading comic books is sometimes preferable to reading trades, Johnny Hiro is the bee’s knees and you should pre-order the trade and while you’re at it go to adhousebooks.com and buy everything they sell, the end.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under Caleb's reviews, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.