Broken Frontier

Well, here we are, a brand new year, a fresh start, and a time to reflect on what goals I have to accomplish this year. It’s actually intimidating.  To think about the previous year as a chapter closed and the new year as the chapter yet to come.  It’s also slightly unrealistic, especially in the comics business, where I’ve already finished all of my books that are coming out until at least July. But that’s neither here not there.  

This industry has a tremendous propensity for self-hatred and negativity.  It’s funny, because if you look at the comics from when I was a kid (and I’m talking the 80’s), even though comics were going through their gritty phase, there was still a certain zeal to them that’s gone out of them in recent years.  Even a book like Batman: A Death in the Family, which was about a Robin getting blown to smithereens, was still a fun read.  Was it hyper-realistic? No.  Was it still emotionally involving? I thought so, and still think so after having re-read it as an adult.  There’s just a sense of fun that’s greatly missing in those books. There’s been a host of young creators bringing that back to comics, the one who most pops to mind is Robert Kirkman’s Invincible, but Jay Faerber’s Noble Causes, Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways, and Peter Milligan’s Human Target are all books that manage to do the same thing.  Those books range in genre, publisher and content.  However, the tie that binds them all is a sense of fun and exploration that is missing in virtually all other comics.  That’s something that I’d really like to aspire to try to emulate this year.

Another symptom of being a young writer is over-extension. You’ve seen it plenty of times with various professionals throughout this industry and others. Once you have some heat, it’s like a deathly fear that you’ll miss that wave and be stuck back where you started.  When Western Tales of Terror launched, I got a ton of great press and suddenly was flooded with fabulously talented artists who were interested in doing projects with me.  Trust me, after having spent the better part of two years desperately searching for anybody to work with, it’s nigh-impossible to say “No” when some fabulous young talent anxious to work with you drops into your lap. But, the fact is, when you go in 10,000 directions and aren’t focused on the things that are actually already made and making money, everything suffers.  So, with that, I’m going to do my best to stay on the 4 or 5 projects I have right now until they’re done.

With Will Eisner’s passing this week, another big point of contention for me is just how mundane comics have become.  Eisner’s work NEVER bound itself to convention. When the world was doing superheroes, he was doing art comics about the war.  He’s always bucked convention, and that is what made him great.  When it comes down to it, we live in a time that’s very hard to do something “new.”  Add to that our pop cultures obsession with the idea that everything needs to be “Blank meets Blank,” and as a writer, you have a feeling of being trapped into the genres that are successful and the styles and formats that are dominating the industry.  Fact is, the truly great ones, the ones who break out of the mass of wannabes and aspiring amateurs, are the ones who go against the grain and do something very different. Brian Michael Bendis stands as a great example of this.  Nobody was reading dialogue heavy art-light books when he was doing Jinx, Torso and other projects during that period of his career.  But, he stuck by it as something viable and look at him now: he’s all but reworked the entire industry in his image.  It’s that sort of eye for something wholly original that defines the next era our industry will enter.  So, in honor of Mr. Eisner, that’s another, and probably the most challenging, of my resolutions.

Ultimately, resolutions all fall by the wayside.  It’s not about holding on to them for dear life, despite common sense and whatnot.  It’s about using this time of year to investigate who you are as a creator and where you are as a person. 

Best wishes in the New Year, and thank you for reading. I’ll see you back here next week.