Hannah-Barbera: Beyond Thunderdome

A Post-Apocalyptic Hannah-Barbera sees what classic characters do now that they're being written to think and act like adults.

Marvel and DC comics have been restructuring their universes by putting new characters in old costumes, changing continuity, re-imagining origins and undoing everything for a long time now. This might be why DC thought they were good enough to do it with someone else's universe, the Hannah-Barbera universe. With Scooby-Doo, Johnny Quest, The Flintstones, and Wacky Races, DC have potentially eased up on irritating super-heroes fans to see how cartoon fans react when their beloved characters are taken out of their familiar context.

With a short run on television, Wacky Races brought a technicolor group of characters together to drive to the finish line in a series of races full of slapstick comedy, pop culture references and cars with funky designs. In Wacky Raceland, the same characters now live in a post-apocalyptic world where the narrator now approaches them at a moment of need to give them a fresh racing suit to wear and make their car sentient. Instead of gags to make the audience laugh, the characters now have back stories and problems.

Beginning outside the Armageddon Bar, parked cars flirt with one another and complain about their drivers while a man vomits. This sets the tone for the type of comic that goes on to introduce us to its characters, a groups that argues with one another on and off the race track. It's in the bar where the audience learns about the group dynamic of Dick Dastardly, Penelope Pitstop, Peter Perfect, Lazy Luke and the rest of the gang, as they start a bar fight. That is the present.

The rest of the story is told with flashbacks. Going back to the race from earlier in the day, Penelope Pitstop's charterer takes a lot of focus in the first issue. She's shown to be a strong character with the ability to think on her feet. After saving a fellow driver from sandtipedes (giant worm-like beasts that come from underground), she uses one to bring her and her car across the finish line, like Paul riding a sandworm in Dune.

It's another flashback focusing on Penelope that gives readers the first idea of what kind of world this story takes place in. Escaping from an island while it begins to flood, Pitstop and her car get saved by an unidentified narrator that confesses, “I've been watching you both for a while.” She's given a new suit and her car is given the ability to talk. The driver/car team have also been given the opportunity to be let into Utopia, “a heaven away from the hell” in a world entering its unexplained end times.

Telling the story in flashbacks that cut in and out, the story takes on a mysterious quality that is only emphasized by Leonardo Manco's art work. The pages are drawn in a way that balance action with information. Drawing scenes that takes place on a race track, it's important that the artist can take the action and pacing of the track and finesse panels that momentarily slow things down to get a look into the characters and the details of their cars. Manco does this with ease and takes on bigger pages that need the audience to be shown and not told, as with the back story to Luke and Blubber bear. Manco also shows off his ability to build pages with details that guide the eyes across the page fluidly.

The story goes back and forth between the race on the Überpass and the fight at the Armegeddon Bar to introduce who the drivers are. This helps give a little insight to who Dick Dastardly is. He drives dirty on the course and talks dirty off it (to Penelope), but there isn't much else told about him, other than he still has Muttley. But these traits and the as-of-yet lack of a back story make him the kind of character some will love to hate and secretly want to see win, even if just for a minute.

If there's a true villain in this story, it's uncertain. It's uncertain who any of these characters are now that Ken Pontac has written them into a Mad Max world. Dick still has tricks up his sleeves, but Penelope has some depth to her character and Lazy Luke and Blubber Bear are given a back story that begins to unravel when they're offered the same deal that saved Penelope from drowning. If the narrator is the villain, if Utopia is real, if this is just another parallel universe for DC to tie into its continuity, and if anyone but the readers are watching these races, no one knows.

This isn't the first time Hannah-Barbera characters have been used outside their milieu. Cartoon Network aired fresh creative visions of Hannah-Barbera characters with Adult Swim shows Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Harvey Bird, Attorney at Law. However bizarre and violent this story gets, it's done with the kind of comic timing, character development and pacing that makes it compelling enough to return to for answers. And if you ever got to watch the original cartoon, there's the added element of satisfaction in seeing what these classic characters will do now that they're being written to think and act like adults.

Advertising Comics: Grunge Rock, Flannel, Whatever

Part One: An Introduction To Dizzy Virtues

From a time where I can remember little more than flashes of fantastic and enticing images printed on a pulpy stock of paper that would smear when wet and absorb light, comics have been a part of my life. It wasn't long before superheroes got old to me. At that time, DC's Vertigo imprint brought a perspective and aesthetic that mirrored the tone of the new alternative grunge culture, even though most of the writers were from across the pond. Today, the paper has changed along with the talent. Karen Berger, the person responsible for cultivating the talent that would change the face of comics, is no longer the editor for Vertigo. Today, Vertigo still prints stories that don't belong in the same continuity as most of DC's other properties. The only difference today is that Dark Horse, Image, IDW, and many other publishers that knew Vertigo was on to something, have started publishing stories with a Vertigo feel. When Vertigo started out, it wasn't a completely new style. While it's hard to say where it officially began, Heavy Metal did something that caused Marvel to respond in turn with the Epic imprint which would publish two great stories that Vertigo would reprint: J. M. DeMatteis' Blood: A Tale and Moonshadow. A little spooky, a little sexy and a little "other,"one thing I loved so much about the Vertigo line from the 90's to the early 2000's, which I affectionately refer to as the Berger books, is that it seemed like anything could happen. There was something about the titles that was undefined and almost improvisational. But when you look back at the books that were coming out together, it's obvious they were all meticulously cultivated in the same lab. There was something about reading those titles that felt dangerous and I don't think it had anything to do with the presence of profanity or the occasional nude figures. It was the overall tone of the time, the cultural shift of the 90's where teen angst didn't only bond high school friends, it had a fierce presence in the beats of pop culture, fueling the movies, music, television and comics of the time.

The faces of Vertigo moving into your local comic store

At some point in the 90's, cynicism, greasy hair, Seattle, torn jeans, flannel, black and white photographs, Kurt Cobain and the term "alternative rock" coalesced in an orgiastic marketing strategy that birthed the term "heroin chic" live on MTV to be discussed on daytime television by men with slicked back hair and women in pant suits. This was the culture of the 90's. This was the world Vertigo spoke to and of.

Calvin Klein Models: "Nothing gets between me and my needle."

It's impossible to know how much of the general aesthetic of Generation X came from Seattle before being co-opted by marketers. Would acid-washed jeans and mismatched clothes have lasted and been as popular if the visually hypnotic media of television, film and magazines weren't as common? Would "extreme" have been such a ubiquitous adjective? It's not important to find an answer. What's important is to identify the markers that created the aesthetic, the attitude behind the generation. Or is the attitude something the generation was shown and then imitated? It's a slippery slope with a chicken/egg dilemma. Disregarding the answer, if there actually is one, the look and feel of the extreme/grunge culture was everywhere in the 90's. Two teenage characters from Rosanne, Darleen and David, not only dressed in the style of the 90's, but cover the walls in the 90's aesthetic found in posters of two comics that are benchmarks in 90's comics: Neil Gaiman's Sandman and James Robinson's The Golden Age.

With The Golden Age, James Robinson brought superheroes into environments where moral ambiguity take the place of justice and absolute authority to examine characters with human flaws dealing with drug abuse, guilt and power-hunger, similar to how Alan Moore used Charlton/DC characters in Watchman. The Golden Age is a book that looks at the aftermath of WWII on the superheroes of its era. While the story doesn't take place in the 90's, it's a perspective on classic heroes and the possible lives they lived after WWII that became popular in the 90's. After all, how better to appeal to a cynical teenager, frustrated with recycled superhero stories, than to show him an alternate history where heroes are just as crooked as the people on color television, with cops that are caught beating unarmed men on the news and voyeuristic real-life scandals on Hard Copy? The book also launched Robinson's version of

Starman which casted an actual member of Generation X in the lead role. After taking a look at the characters of the past through a present tense perspective, Robinson had Jack Knight inherit his father's Starman mantle to recreate the superhero in a modern and very 90's fashion. With a leather jacket, blue jeans, tattoo and bad attitude that stemmed from the resentment of having to take on the role of Starman, Jack has to pick up the pieces from the mess his father left behind. While not a Vertigo titles, the new Starman (along with titles like Hitman), gave readers a taste of the time by using characters that live in, look like and act like the 90's. Similar to the flagship Vertigo titles filled with offbeat characters, Starman and Hitman (a character in an interracial relationship that virtually lives in a bar and kills people for a living) don't play well with the rest of the toys in the chest.

Maybe Starman and Hitman don't play so well with the other characters in the DCU because they were new characters without 40 years of backstory to draw from. Maybe it's because they were Americans created by men from the United Kingdom. While both titles are very different than the other superhero books being published in the 90's, they couldn't really fit in with Vertigo either. Starman and Hitman may have been the bad boys of the DCU, but Tommy Monaghan and Jack Knight only pushed the boundaries.

Are you ready for Vertigo?

Vertigo, on the other hand, is the place boundaries would be beaten, broken and forgotten. While there's a lot to say about what Vertigo did to comics, the point here is not to break down Sandman, The Invisibles, Shade, The Changing Man, or any other title. Instead, the purpose here is to look at the general aesthetic, the visual and narrative tone, to show the ways they mirror and are an extension of the 90's culture they reflect and capture, to look at the way the books were publicized, with their covers and advertisements.

Making comics that weren't intended for children was not a product of the 90's. R. Crumb and the rest of the Haight/Ashbury scene made that clear in the 60's. But when Zap came out, it was mostly found in head shops, not comic shops, and certainly not published by DC. The challenge Vertigo faced was in talking to a mature audience while the kids are still awake, grabbing the attention of readers that may be ready for something new and keeping readers that may be outgrowing super heroes by offering them something they hadn't seen before they walked away from comics for good.

The cover for Preacher #1

For the most part, if a burning church was seen in a comic book, it would likely be there to give a superhero the opportunity to save someone, to right a wrong and (no pun intended) play god by saving the lives of those in danger by putting out the fire with super powers before throwing the perpetrator into a courthouse or prison cell. It was a new sensation to see the image of a burning church on the cover of a comic, where someone dressed like a priest is smiling in the background with hands clasped in villainous intent, all painted with realistic details stressing the believability. For this cover, the caricature-like images of superheroes are distant. When Glenn Fabry painted a cover for Preacher, it was clear the story behind the cover would be something you don't see in superhero books. A main theme Garth Ennis wrote about in Preacher was the role of certain elements in pop culture as artifacts of an American religion, but another thing Ennis did was uncover the horrors in American culture by digging under the surface. Those horrors are made perfectly clear in the first cover of Preacher, which is destructive, blasphemous, scary and begs the question of what kind of bizarre story and characters await. Not only would such a book and cover not exist on your average DC book, it wouldn't look like this without the 90's changing the cultural attitude towards censorship and what made for audience appropriate material. In the early 90's, shows like N.Y.P.D. Blues pushed the boundaries of what could air on television with its notorious reputation for broadcasting scenes with nudity and realistic violence. Ellen Degeneres made headlines and caused controversy when her character came out as gay. My So Called Life challenged how people viewed teenagers with a cast of high school misfits that questioned the motives and actions of their parents as easily as parents questioned their children. This was a family drama unimaginable to the audience of Father Knows Best. While the shape of television was changing into something more similar to a movie, comics that were more like books started to fill comic shops with the Vertigo imprint. More importantly, these covers lacked the approval of the Comics Code Authority.

Cover for Sandman #1

With the term "graphic novel," comics were given a makeover that tried to make them get the public to think of them more as literary books with pictures in them. Still, comics are the books that beg you to judge them by their cover. The cover of a comic is the first point in advertising. If the cover doesn't give a potential reader a good idea of the story that will be found under it, then it has failed. The cover of a 400 page novel does not work the same, it's supposed to provide an image that generates a tone that reflects the story of the book in some way, while the blurbs on the back do the job of giving a reader a description of the story within. With Vertigo, an interesting phenomenon in comics happened, the covers didn't always act like comic covers, at least not the way comic covers usually acted. With Sandman #1, Dave McKean hints at what will be within. In a multimedia style that blended digital photography with original paintings and illustrations to form beautiful, rich imagery, Mckean asked readers to dream about what could be in the pages of Sandman. This is a technique and style that Mckean would repeat every issue of Sandman, adding to the mystery, allure and general tone of the book.

Vertigo ad from 1993

It would be this tone that gave Vertigo comics a distinct style, feel and general attitude. And those are the elements that Vertigo would use to advertise itself. Like the Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground albums in an older sibling's record collection, Vertigo wanted to give readers stories they didn't know comics could tell. Vertigo's goal was to make its audience question how the horror genre worked while it casted a shadow of question on what comics were and could be. Looking at the advertisement (left) featured in DC comics the month before "Vertigo" would be printed on the cover of Sandman, Shade, The Changing Man, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Hellblazer, the flagship titles are given the element of danger with a black, white and red splash page that dares readers to take a look by asking the subconscious to fill in the hidden face with a mental image of itself.


Part Two: Rebelling Without A Cause

Using alcohol, cigarettes, mysterious masks, John Lennon's sunglasses and an ankh, Vertigo caught the eyes of people in comic shops. Partially because of the newness of their titles, but mostly because the intrigue that Vertigo wrapped their books in, titles like Hellblazer, Sandman, Mystery Theatre, and House of Secrets would attract a young adult audience with an artistic approach that was different from what they were used to.

By taking on characters and titles from DC's history, Vertigo reworked the mythology to appeal to a new group of people that most likely never heard of those titles, or couldn't afford to read them. The comics boom of the 90's created collectors out of fans when comics from the 1950's to 1970's started selling for five or more figures. Though the fade of looking at comics as investments would end as soon as the people buying three issues of the new number one figured out the golden and silver age books sold  for such high prices because of their scarcity, the surviving copies of original titles Vertigo was bringing back were expensive and trade paperback collections weren't as popular.

With the new House of Secrets and Prez offering different looks at old characters and titles, and Sandman Mystery Theatre taking a much darker look at the classic character fans were familiar with, Vertigo made it clear that it was publishing books that had never been seen before, comics that gave a reader with predictions "a good hard kick in the assumptions."

Originally the title of a horror anthology that debuted in the 1950's, House of Secrets titled a book for the first time in almost twenty years when Karen Bergen decided Vertigo comics would let Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen reinvent it for a new generation in 1996. House of Secrets advertised itself with the question, "Can you keep a secret?," warning readers that their "unspoken truths" would "become dread realities in a court of supernatural horror." The image that accompanies this text shows a teenage girl with a sharp knife in her hand and grungy clothes on her back. Standing at the top of a crooked staircase with a scowl on her face, her and her background are drawn in the jagged, sketchy style Teddy Kristiansen would use to keep readers uneasy with an advertisement that is as unsettling as it is compelling. The ad also hints at the story of a female protagonist. Since comics were mostly advertised to a male audience, it was a gamble to make your lead character a teenage girl. But this was Vertigo and the aesthetic of the ad would capture a tone that worked perfectly for a horror comic. With the new faces Vertigo was giving to comics, and the success of The Sandman, the number of female readers was increasing. With Sandman's little sister Death personified in a female form, The Sandman was not only attracting new readers, many female, because Tori Amos mentioned the book and its writer in her songs. New readers were coming because comics were showing different worlds than the familiar ones where women mostly wore bikini-like costumes. Instead, comics started showing people fictions based in the world they lived in, setting that reminded them of their own.

House of Secrets wasn't the only title that sought to update characters from the past. Twenty years after Prez Rikardson became the first teenage president, Ed Brubaker wrote Prez: Smells Like Teen President. Taking from the title of a Nirvana song that was one of the most well recognized on the time, Prez is shown on his cover standing on a car filled with bumperstickers. If generation X wasn't excited to read a story about politics, they might be interested in a character that likes the same bands, as made clear with stickers that say Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana, the bands that were royalty of the alternative airwaves. With its cover alone, the new Prez could have excited kids to go out and rock the vote, just as MTV told them to.

While changing up the past to suit the present is a creative approach that was successful for the books mentioned above, as well as Peter Milligan's  Shade, The Changing Man (which lasted for 70 issues), nothing would speak to a generation that tried so badly to separate itself from the previous generations like a brand new cast of characters that would speak their language while trying to create a new one.

With an advertisement for the first Invisible collection, a series of silhouettes build a layer of mystery around the characters with text that promises "the ultimate conspiracy," in a time where The X-Files used the same topic to much fanfare. With a neon hand grenade acting as a period on the corner of the ad, it's hard to know exactly what The Invisibles will be about. Even after reading and rereading it, it could be hard to figure out exactly what The Invisible is about. Still, it's the mod style of the characters, the idea of what exists in the shadows and the grenade painted in explosive colors that suggest this is a different kind of story about a new type of team.


Part Three: Tunnel Vision

The new wave of commercial comic books on shelves in the 1990's brought superheroes that were younger and acted like it (Starman, Hitman). Spider-Man may never hit his 30's, but he'll also never hit a rebellious chord, and Vertigo titles aimed to change the atmosphere of comics altogether. But the aesthetic and tone that vertigo used was so well defined that the Vertigo feel would become easily identifiable and imitated like any other successful brand. More than something that would be found and discussed between the walls of comic shops, titles like The Invisibles and Sandman would get written about and reviewed in popular youth culture magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone.

Even something as mainstream as the Washington Inquirer couldn't help but get on the bandwagon to discuss Vertigo when it said "Vertigo Comics is by far the HBO of the comic-book world." While fans and comics journals had been talking about the dream project of turning Sandman into an HBO series ever since HBO adapted Spawn for tv in 1997, making it even more gritty, violent and dark than the original comic was, it's no less true when the Washington Inquirer says it and Vertigo uses it in an ad printed in a 2007 issue of Hellblazer.

Like HBO, Vertigo created a style that was identifiable and imitated. It's hard to imagine cable tv putting out shows like Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy if not for The Sopranos. And, when Vertigo became popular, other publishers were paying attention. The variant cover for the first issue of Gen 13 (right), is as much an homage to  Dave Mckean, and the style he used on all of the covers of Sandman and The Dreaming as it is a way to get readers to give the book a second look and wonder what story rests behind the cover. Mixing photographs with painted and drawn images, cover artist Joe Dunn imitates Mckean's style with precision while also making it eerily reminiscent of Twin Peaks. This cover may have been a way to attract the same audience as Vertigo readers, but Gen 13 was trying to cast a wide net when advertising its superhero team of generation X characters. With 13 variant covers, the artwork parodied images of the 90's, including a famous cover of a recent issue of Spider-Man, a poster of the movie Pulp Fiction and the Janet Jackson cover of Rolling Stone. If nothing else, when Gen 13 ripped off of Vertigo, it was obvious that the imprint had made something recognizable, big and popular enough to steal. Reinventing comics for an American audience, it was clear Vertigo wasn't just publishing comics, it had officially turned into its own brand.

Vertigo's resident journalist Spider Jerusalem

Too Many Pens On The Drawing Board: The Rise and Fall of The Comic Book Anthology

The Strand was the original
home for works by Kipling,
Christie, Doyle and Wells 

Many great works of fiction before the the 21st century were first published serialized in anthologies with short stories in magazines and journals. When literacy wasn't as ubiquitous as it is is now, the serial format was a way to appeal to as many members of the reading market. By containing a mix of genres, these publications could hold the attention and interest of a wide market before demographics became as defined and catered to as they are today.

For some reason, it's hard to find current comics anthologies that thrive with the support of an audience. Consumers may not want to take the killer with the filler. Even still, that doesn't explain how anthologies that more than held their own, that broke the mold to introduce talent that was new or unjustly ignored couldn't be maintained. The editors aren't to blame. With titles like Flinch and Solo, DC Comics editors managed to fill pages with great stories that just couldn't support the sales needed to maintain publication.

Not for capes alone!

Are people not interested in anthologies any more? Most Marvel and DC characters that have lock down on the shelves of comics stores today came from serial anthologies. These are the same characters that are projected on movie screens and dominate television ratings. Characters from the Golden and Silver Age of comics, like Batman, Spider-Man, Thor, and many other characters debuted in titles that were designed to function as a testing ground. DC comics took it's name from the anthology Detective Comics. Once known as National Comics, DC changed its name after Batman became so popular in the pages of Detective Comics and title was soon given to him alone. The story of Batman and National Comics is testimony to the one time power, influence and popularity of anthologies in comics, much like the story of Sherlock Holmes and Strand before him.

But something happened. Something happened to the public and the perception of the serial to make it step into the shadows to let the dawn shed light on individual titles that would succeed or be buried in the sands of time. 

I can't help but wonder what change happened that makes it nearly impossible for an anthology comic to maintain publication. While Heavy Metal and 2000 A.D. have bucked the trend to stay in publication for decades, it seems nearly impossible to maintain an anthology comic, especially when long running Dark Horse Presents called it quits after a 14 year run (though they did move to a digital format and return to paper in 2014). Is it something about the American audience? Heavy Metal and 2000 A.D. are both European books. Though they get brought into american comic shops, the states is hardly their target audience. In the case of Heavy Metal, they publish a brand of science fiction and fantasy that is often lush and stylized (and sexy!) in a way so rarely seen in american comics that readers looking for that type of story had no where else to go.

A view of 2000 A.D. and  Heavy Metal covers throughout the years.

Still, when U.S. publishers try to tackle the anthology, it's either a special event with a finite amount of issue planned, like Marvel's Strange Tales, or a title that doesn't last much longer than a year, like D.C.'s Flinch and Solo. D.C.'s Wednesday Comics is an amazing throw-back to newspaper comics, with over sized pages and a wealth of the best talent in comics (Azzarello, Rizzo, Gaiman, Busiek, Allred, Baker, Pope, Villarrubia). Giving a generation of readers the feel of reading comics in a way they weren't alive to experience (that of sunday edition newspaper comics), and offering a reminder of the way it was for older readers, Wednesday Comics took on the anthology to bring together magnificent stories to resurrect the classic shape and look they originally came from. Even though it was planned to only last for 12 issues, Wednesday Comics proved an anthology could sell well when, in 2009, 7 issues hit the top 100 and 3 other issues placed in the top 300 --in the month of August alone!

Wednesday Comics went on to be collected, as did Strange Tales, which took talent from alternative comics (Vazques, Pekar, Shaw, Jason) to give fresh takes on Marvel properties for two mini-series. Both titles had a previously set amount of issues planned, and were well marketed. Other anthologies, that were just as good as Wednesday Comics and Strange Tales, just couldn't be kept alive like Solo and Flinch. Both published by D.C., these titles did something that hadn't been done in a while by the big two.

While comic book horror anthologies had never gone away, being kept alive by  independent publishers, most horror came from books based on properties such as Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason, Evil Dead and other movies, while original horror stories seemed to only exist in character driven books like Hellblazer and Hellboy before The Walking Dead created a phenomenon that would span mediums. Still, D.C. took a chance with Flinch, when Vertigo decided to welcome the possibility of bringing its own brand of horror to mature audiences. For my money, Flinch was one of the best books being published at the time. Aside from Taboo, which was published by Spiderbaby Graphix, horror anthologies had never been so violent, literary and frightening. While it had some yarns I didn't care for, the majority were top notch stories coming from talents like Ted McKeever, Azzarello/Rizzo, Mike Carey, Bill Willingham and Greg Rucka, which earned the title an Eisner nomination and won a Bram Stokers Award for Joe R. Lansdale's "Red Romance" in issue #11. Even though there was no other comic out there at the time doing what Flinch did, it couldn't be kept alive for more than 16 issues. 

While Flinch was an unsuccessful attempt at bringing back the horror anthology, Solo did something virtually new. Similar to the Golden and Silver Age Showcase, which offered different creators one to three issue to introduced new characters to discover fan favorites that could support their own title, D.C. debuted Solo in 2004 to give 48 pages to popular talents like Mike Allred, Darwyn Cooke, Howard Chaykin and Teddy Kristiansen to publish original stories or play with stock characters in their own well-developed styles. Published bimonthly, Solo only lasted for 12 issues before being canceled. Perhaps one of the problems was the $4.99 price tag for a comic with no ads. Fans may have decided to use their funds in a more economical way. Maybe readers preferred an ongoing story. Whatever the reason, poor sales numbers halted production on the title even though it won all three Eisner awards it was nominated for (two for stories and one for editing).

The various styles of solo

Barring few exceptions, like 200 A.D. and Heavy Metal, it seems anthology comics just can't stick around, despite them being a wonderful way to get exciting new stories and offer exposure to talents that are up and coming. Still, there is hope! Soon, Image Comics will be publishing Island, a 72 page anthology curated by Brandon Graham and Emma Rios. I can't remember being as excited for a new comic as I am for Island. While I have never heard the names on the list of writers and artists attached to the line-up, it's my unfamiliarity with them that gives me this anticipation. It's the newness and hope of discovering writers and artists that can show readers worlds and ideas they never thought of that makes me so excited over this anthology. I am feeling the same level of excitement for Islands that I felt for titles like Wednesday Comics, Flinch and Solo. I can only hope the ad-free issue #1, with a $7.99 price tag, doesn't put the book on a path that will give it the same fate as Solo.

The cover for an upcoming issue of Island

The Art of War Comics

War sells. It has been bought, sold and commodified since the preservation of history. War is in the production of weapons people use and collect, governmental motives, the tickets to movies and sporting events people attend, and in the pages of the books we read. War can even be found in our comic books. Even today, most people think of the spandex stereotype when hearing “comic books.” It’s not very surprising that this is the case. Despite the proliferation and growing popularity of the genius marketing term, “graphic novel,” which has aided the public relations campaign to legitimize the comic book (to the chagrin of some creators and fans alike), it is superheroes that come to mind when comics are brought up.

"My father conceived the idea of taking

the Sunday pages, folding them over,

and folding them once again, and ending

up with something roughly the size of

todays comic book"

-William M. Gaines

With Superhero stories flooding today’s theatres and making their way to television screens, it’s no surprise that people associate comics with superheroes. Though, comics have since moved from originally being refolded inserts of Our Gang, Krazy Kat and Popeye to be found in the pages of newspapers, marketed to get the pennies from young pockets after relieving the nickels from their parents' pockets. Soon after the basic shape and tone of the medium was formed, the war story became one of the biggest sellers. Along with romance and funny animal stories, there was a time when comics that focused on war occupied the same number of hands that superhero stories originally did. This was a time when war was commonly found in the newspaper and on the radio waves. War served as topic for discussion and was shown in a glamorous light through posters and propaganda scattered around the small towns and big cities of early America. For its time, it only made sense that the genre of war stories would be a popular one before the blood and gore found in the horror genre took focus and before the superhero came to the rescue. This is a time where the heroes and roles of make-believe for children were policemen, fire fighters, cowboys and soldiers.

In the later 20th century, most American comic books were mostly free of war. Taking a look into comics with science fiction elements, readers certainly observe the presence of war. Alien races the Fantastic Four encounter are often at war. The Kree / Skrull war is something the Marvel universe may forever keep in the stars to serve as a potential plot device for future stories. Though, with many superhero books, war is nothing more than a plot device. With the exception of a one-shot here and a mini-series there to bring back The Unknown Soldier or Enemy Ace for a look into the history of comics and the role war stories played in it (meta stories), war stories did not serve much of a role in comic shops past the 70's. There are exceptions to be found with titles like Real War Stories (2 issue by Eclipse Comics, one published in '87 and one in '91), which brought together some of comics most refined talent to tell moving and true stories that may not have been given an audience elsewhere. But these stories moved beyond the more common war stories of soldiers staying alive while working a path through enemy lines. These stories attempted to show another side of war by giving accounts of the post war lives of soldiers.

Now in the the 21st Century, which can also be referred to as a post 9/11 culture, the war story is something much more present in comics. More than the war story, the focus is now on war itself. After the attack, Marvel, DC and many other publishers began to print books with covers that acknowledged the events. Some titles told stories that focused on the actual event with one-shots and larger anthologies printed to raise funds for workers and families. With The Amazing Spider-Man, a character with a movie about to be released, Marvel printed issue  #36 with a cover that was all black except for it’s title , number, and company logo. The story turned the New York City that was ravaged and covered in the clouds of dust and cement of the real world into the NYC Spider-Man fights the Vulture and takes pictures as a photographer, the same NYC that houses a large portion of Marvel characters. The issue had Spider-Man take a look at the damage of his city and wonder how this could happen. Careful not to make a political statement, the story focused on one man trying to wrap his mind around the events and regret not being able help, a sentiment shared by many readers.

Five years after 9/11, Marvel decided to print Civil War.  To call Marvel’s Civil War event a war story would not be completely accurate. At best, it’s an allegory that has one super villain using his powers to cause a destructive and violent act towards civilians. The super villain attack is a way to examine the current role of the superhero (namely Captain America) in relation to the role they played in the 1940’s. In this story, the U.S. government forces superheroes to register themselves as weapons of mass destructions by using their real identities. When certain heroes refuse, they flee or get taken to detention camps. The story reflects the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, both very serious issues to be sure. Still, this is not a war story, it’s a story that uses war, and the real life events that come about because of it, as a vehicle to tell a different story, a story that questions the role of the superhero in a world where super villains still exist and do evil, a story that questions why evil is still active 70 years after the superhero put on a mask. Even then, that’s a question Alan Moore has examined twice with Watchman and Miracleman.

So where else is war found in the pages of comics in the post 9/11 world? Marvel didn't own patriotism, even though they owned Captain America, the personification of American Patriotism. Also, Marvel wasn't the only publisher of war comics in the height of its popularity, not even close. They have Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos and The ‘Nam. Aside from those titles, war stories could commonly be found in anthology books published by Dell and EC. As far as recurring titles are concerned, many war comics were published by Charlton and continued by DC when they bought and incorporated those Charlton properties. Giving Garth Ennis and other talent the go ahead, DC did bring back the genre of war stories to comics for a brief period in the form of the mini-series, but they didn't stay around long. While Ennis is a big name in the world of comics, he would be able to keep the classic war story alive moving to publishers like Dynamite (Battle Fields), that work with hot and historically proven franchise properties and give well known creative talent a lot  of creative freedom.

By and large, the war story genre wasn't around in comics after the late 80’s. With Marvel’s Civil War, it was a domestic act that unsettled the state of operations superheroes faced, and to a point, a story that exploited real life events. The story was not a war story, it was about superheroes struggling with their role in society. Still, it wasn't since Captain America and Superman took to the battlefield to punch Hitler and his allied forces that superheroes had a role in war comics (Marvel knocked him in '41, DC smacked him '42). To get war stories in comics after the 70's, you had to abandoned Marvel, DC and superheroes, you had to walk away from fiction altogether. To get war stories in comics, you had to look towards the independently published work of Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. In those titles, comics began to reshape the war story.

In the early 80’s Spigelman began to tell his own war story. There is no muscular hero with a gun, ripped fatigues and unstoppable attitude propelling Maus. It’s a war story that doesn't tell itself through the people fighting or waging the war, but the victims, the people caught in the middle, trying to survive and make sense of their situation. Spanning the time between WWII and the late 70’s, Maus is a literary comic. The story is framed and on the surface focuses on the author interviewing his father to get the story of  a survivor of Germany's concentration camps. The story proves Spiegelman to be a master or comics narrative techniques in the ways he seamlessly flows between his father's story and his own. Maus is a modern war story that doesn't aim to show battles of violence, but the internal struggles that follow war. Maus is a tale of how the author deals with the history of his family, his role as both a father and a son, and how the war he didn’t experience first hand haunts him in adulthood. Maus started a trend in reforming not only what stories comics could tell, but how comics took on the war story. Showing wasn't enough for the new school of creators. It was now time to take a deeper look at war, going past the battles by looking at them directly, then taking a look around them.

The war story changed its face in the 80’s. Spiegelman’s Maus may be the reason for this, but it wasn't the only book to take the nonfiction approach of telling war stories.  A journalist by trade, Joe Sacco would make comics from the interviews and experiences he had while in and around Bosnia and Iraq. Spiegelman played with the idea of the biography and created a comics work that is something very different than a biography. Maus became a very unique story and document about history, family and self aware art. Sacco, on the other hand, isn't interested in creating a biography with his war stories. What Joe Sacco does, and does very well, is work with the concepts and form of journalism. As with Maus, it’s not always the war itself that plays a character, it’s the post war reality and anxiety-fueled moments of rest that play as silent and loud character that emphasize motivations of characters, whether he’s a war profiteer (The Fixer), or she’s an orphaned refugee (Palestine), making sense of her new environment. War and its aftermath is ever present and forcing people to make the decisions they make, and the stories of the people that live through it is at the heart of what Joe Sacco writes about.

In her own books, Satrapi does not play with genre. Persepolis is an autobiography that focuses on the life of its author. The book takes the real life setting and atmosphere of Iran during the time of the Islamic Revolution. While the story isn't about Iran and Iraq fighting one another, the book focuses on first hand experiences of war similar to Sacco and Spiegelman. The reader is shown the life of a girl living in a culture under a time of change, where her setting forces values and behavior onto her before she leaves her home and moves to Paris to start living a new life. Persepolis is the story of how war can affect the development of a girl and the displacement it puts her though in order  to find her own path. It’s a story of how to navigate through and around war, where the role of war in the story is less graphic and unsettling to the reader than both a classic war story and books like Maus and Palestine. Like Sacco and Spiegelman, the work is built on serious topics that just happen to be in comics form.

Private Pyle is not made for war

With those works, it's evident the war story didn't completely leave American comics, it just changed its face. This face lift may have come from the tastes of comic book readers, it may have come from a cultural shift. Taking a step back from comics to look at movies that handle the war story, there’s Apocalypse Now and  Full Metal Jacket that exit the 70’s and head to the 80’s to show horrific sides of war. While there is combat in the movies, the most troubling parts of the movies, the scenes with the most character development and attention to detail, show soldiers that can't handle the realities of war, people that break down and turn to drugs and experience mental decay instead of kill the bad guy, with the seriousness of John Wayne, before coming back home to be greeted by the wives they left behind. These are the creations of people that lived through war and combat footage being broadcast on nightly news. These were the war stories of people that had no interest in making movies without a message. Perhaps the same can be said of the new wave of war stories looked at above. And perhaps this is the reason for the new wave of war comics being put out now.

While Saga, one of today’s most popular comics*, doesn't focus on a war and the people fighting in the trenches, like the classic war story, it revolves around a war and it exists because of one, focusing on characters living in the middle of one as they are ricocheted around the solar system because of it. Like the new war stories mentioned above, Saga wears more hats than war story. In many ways, It borrows from the titles mentioned above. 

Unlike the other new war stories mentioned, Saga is a work of fiction. The humanoid characters that have fallen in love are not real, the war being waged by their separate species did not happen, and the narrator a reader watches grow up was never really be born. Like the other comics and movies mentioned, Saga does not only tell a story of war, but of a family, the love between two people unlikely to share such a relationship, culture clashes, and self discovery all done with an interesting narrative technique. Like Civil War, Brian K. Vaughan is writing an allegory, an allegory of war, but one that isn't limited to the superhero genre, one that is afforded the opportunity and broad movements of a story that can take its genre in whatever direction it wants. If assigned a genre, Saga would be a Science Fiction / Fantasy story. But where Civil War used its allegorical aspects to tell a superhero story, Saga uses it’s SciFi / Fantasy genre to tell a story about lives and how they are affected by war to fully form its allegory. 

Though it’s current tone and pacing suggest this story has every intention of having a solid set of acts, complete with a planned ending, it’s unknown how long Saga will go. When it begins, there are plot points forming very fast in order to catch-up the reader on the world the story takes place. There are two characters from opposite species (Alana and Marko) birthing their love child. They are on the run. Both have dissent from their military posts and are different species. And the person narrating is their mixed species child. If this story came out in a different time, it may just be another science fiction story that deals with issues that a reader can relate to, but it didn’t. This is a story being written while several neighboring countries in the middle east continue to fight wars that have gone on for a very long time, while ruling governments and their motivations and tactics may not always seem so obvious. Also, this story is an American comic, directed to an adult audience (there’s cursing, sex and graphic violence) being presented to a post 9/11 culture aware of, if not terrible well versed in, world events.

If the story was set on Earth, which it could be, and the two main characters were human instead of humanoids, say Alana was Indian and Marko a Pakastani (or one was Israeli while the other Palestinian, China/Japan, N. Korea/S. Korea, etc.) and the story starts off in Kashmir before the characters take their child away to parts of China, or another land neutral in the dispute, the story would start to resemble one Sacco may cover, a displaced family Spiegelman may write about, or a little girl Satrapi may want to guide to self discovery. And if this story was set on earth, all three of them could do a great job of telling their story, but it doesn’t. This story never happened, the people never existed and the war never took place. But it could have. This story could be happening right now, but not without the war moving it from chapter to chapter.

*Saga does not sell as well as other titles by Marvel and DC. Though, the numbers don’t always account for the digital sales and, this being a book that is drawn digitally, I don’t think most would have a problem reading it on a screen. Which is to say, I bet there's a lot of readers not tallied in Diamonds estimation.  Also, with collected volumes, single issues are not as popular as they used to be. While Saga #24 didn’t place in the top 100 comics sold in January, there’s an alternative way to look at it. With four collections available, the title sold  22,233 units, with volumes 1, 2 and 3 placing in the top 8 for sales of trades.