New Derek Laufman Art Book is Almost Ready
By Dan BrownThere’s still time to contribute to the fundraising campaign for Derek Laufman’s latest art book.The 96-page volume is the third in what he calls his Creation Series, and features Laufman’s original characters, as opposed to other intellectual property he has worked on, like Marvel’s Spider-Man.“It’s me pouring my imagination onto the page, Whether it’s for one of my existing (projects) I’m working on or one of the many other stories bouncing around in my head,” he told me. “It’s a lot of world-building and exploring ideas.”The Byron comic creator has a knack for drawing characters that are cute but also fearsome. Featured on the cover is an armoured figure with a flaming skull for a head.Laufman is at an interesting stage in his career where he’s been able to branch out with characters he’s created on his own.This summer, I previewed one of those titles – Crimson Fall – in this space. Fans of the Lambs of God mini-comic will be pleased to know dungeon adventurer Sir Duncross looms large in the new art book, trusty broadsword in hand.Laufman estimates that as little as 15 per cent of what he sketches actually makes it into his final products, such as The Witch of Wickerson and RuinWorld. So a large portion of the images in the new collection, maybe 70 per cent, can’t be found anywhere else.“Sometimes I’m OK with a story idea living and dying in a design, if that makes sense,” Laufman says. “It’s like I have a desire to explore it and sometimes that’s enough.”Readers will also be treated to drawings of knife-wielding witches, dogs at attention, wrestlers grappling, giant piranhas that walk like men, a too-cute-for-words rattlesnake, and a one-eyed, six-winged demon that looks as though it could give a balrog a run for its money.“A lot of it is completely new to my audience,” he said. “I like having ideas and designers they can discover for the first time.”The unifying thread tying all these different images together is Laufman’s fertile imagination. “After doing six art books, these last three being 100 per cent original ideas, I feel proud to have created a definitive body of work since 2017. It’s satisfying to have a documented snapshot of my creative life during that time,” the illustrator/writer noted.You can check out the fundraiser for yourself by clicking here.And what’s next for Laufman? He hopes to have Crimson Fall: The Shore Tower ready in time for next May’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival and adds that Rats of Ironwood will follow, but fans might have to wait until 2025.Get drawing, Derek!Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
A Love Triangle Crumbles in a Single Rainy Night
By Dan BrownA short column this week reviewing a short graphic novel.Ivana Filipovich’s What’s Fear Got to do With It? is from East Coast publishing house Conundrum Press, which has been coming on strong the last few years.If you like graphic novels that feel and land like subtitled foreign movies, you will want to check this slender volume out. It runs 58 pages, but doesn’t suffer for its brevity.The setting – Vancouver’s Richmond Night Market – isn’t foreign, but the “feel” of the book is. This might have something to do with Filipovich being part of the Balkan Renaissance in graphic novels. “My main inspiration is (Anton) Chekhov,” the comic creator says in notes accompanying the book’s release last month.She goes on to say that growing up in the former Yugoslavia she was fed a diet of “the best of BBC, great Russian movies, Quebec TV series and, of course, the best world literature and comics from both sides of the ocean.” She also counts Ingmar Bergman among her influences, as well as Salman Rushdie.What does it all add up to? A moody tale that unfolds in a single night showing how a love triangle falls apart. The characters are the criminal Max, who may or may not be a crime kingpin, and his girlfriends Eva and Mia. “It’s a (triangle) in which all characters are faulty, despite some of them being more likeable than others,” Filipovich explains.Another way to put it would be, if you’re a guy and you ever thought having a harem of beautiful ladies would be fun, this story will make you reconsider. The saddest part is that love in this milieu has been degraded to the point where to show devotion, all one has to do is buy the beloved material objects. “You always got whatever stuff you wanted,” an unbelieving Max tells Eva when the triangle crumbles. The tragedy here is Max can’t understand why the unconventional relationship has failed – he spent a lot of money on his foxes, didn’t he? Isn’t that all there is to it? And don’t get me started on how a single question rules one of the girlfriend’s lives: How will this look to my followers on social media? “I was born online. That’s me,” Mia boasts at the outset of the evening.All of this is presented in a moody wrapper. Filipovich evokes another film, Blade Runner, with her scratchy lines. The cityscape is drenched in ever-falling rain, which means the one moment when the sun comes out lands with force.If you are looking for a departure from the same old, same old, I recommend What’s Fear Got to do With It? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Seth Remembers His Teen Years, or Does He?
By Dan BrownWith his latest release, Palookaville 24, Guelph cartoonist Seth has moved into full-on Alice Munro territory. And it’s delightful.What do I mean by comparing the graphic novelist to the best damn short-story writer on the planet?I mean, if it wasn’t before, it’s official now: The central preoccupation of Seth’s work is how his memory works, and doesn’t.It was already clear, in books like Clyde Fans and George Sprott, Seth was obsessed with the past. Much of the artist/writer’s work is set in a sort of 1950s Canada that we all recognize yet can’t remember distinctly. Nostalgia may or may not be the impediment. His main goal now appears to be pointing out the inadequacies of human memory as a stable platform for telling stories. So when I read the latest instalment of Nothing Lasts in the new Palookaville, I instantly thought of Nobel Prize winner Munro. Munro’s stories have been lauded for decades for their realism, but if you pay careful attention to the words she uses, you'll find Munro, a Wingham native and long-time Clinton resident, is often not describing what happens to her characters, but what could have happened. There’s a big difference. (Digression: Ajay Heble, my M.A. thesis advisor, wrote a whole book on this “reservoir of meaning,” as he calls it, in her work. And yeah, I did my thesis on Alice Munro. I’m a nerd.)So in the new book Seth will describe, in great detail, the daily routine of a summer job he had in the 1970s using the diction of uncertainty. He will lay out his memories for the reader and then say, “I think,” meaning he’s not sure how much to trust the vivid scene he has just described. “I’m not sure,” he’ll say in other passages. These seemingly fondly recalled moments could have happened the way he remembers. But did they?The comic creator then goes an additional step, and asks, “What DO I recall of those summers?” and revises his story. Nor can he explain why certain details stick out and others are a blank in his mind.For example, while detailing his summer job he reveals during that season he was reading a movie novelization. He never says which movie. “Was it really like this?” he writes at another point of his own narrative, probing his recollections of what seems like an eternal 1970s summer day.Seth goes even deeper, asking if a memory can die of neglect. The more he tries to nail down the images and feelings in his mind, the more they elude him. At one point he projects backwards, putting his adult self in a scene from his younger years. Then he projects forward to his future gravestone.All that, plus the chapter ends with a cliff hanger!Palookaville 24 also includes some sketchbook exercises Seth assigned himself and a film on DVD by Luc Chamberland of a suitcase theatre play that Seth performed using puppets.Chamberland is the same filmmaker behind Seth’s Dominion, the superlative National Film Board of Canada documentary about the cartoonist which animates passages from Seth’s previous work to great effect.(Bonus digression: Both Seth and Munro are products of Southwestern Ontario. I know everybody has to be from somewhere, but is there some kind of symmetry to that? Are people in this corner of Canada more obsessed with the images in their minds of the lives they have lived than other Canadians? It’s an honest question.) Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Unproductive Cartoonist Joe Matt Preferred not to be Prolific
By Dan BrownCartoonist Joe Matt died last month at age 60. He was at his drawing table when the (unconfirmed) heart attack took him, but Matt’s friend Seth pointed out in an online tribute he likely wasn’t creating comics.Which is Matt’s tragedy. He will go down in comics history as someone who could have done more, but chose not to. The truth is, after his 14-issue run on Peepshow ended in 2006, Matt found other things to do apart from publishing his highly personal comics.That’s why, in my mind, I classify Matt alongside Bob Burden, Paul Chadwick, Michael Golden and David Mazzuchelli. They are all comic creators who, for whatever reason, aren’t consistently productive. As much as I enjoy their work, which is a lot, none of them are cursed with the gift of being prolific.It doesn’t mean the comics Matt made in his brief life are of poor quality. It just means, like many other comic fans, I have an itch that will never be scratched because with his sudden passing, the hope that Matt would ever draw and write another story disappears(None of this applies and all bets are off if some publisher finds a treasure trove of material he worked on, but never got published during his lifetime. I can only hope.)Matt came to prominence alongside his cartoonist friends Seth and Chester Brown, who all hung out in Toronto in the 1990s. Matt, an American, was in Canada illegally and eventually ended up settling in Los Angeles. A rumoured HBO series based on his comics never materialized.Matt was known for autobiographical stories that were embarrassing in the extreme. He specialized in detailing his own quirks and obsessions, such as spending a good chunk of every day masturbating to pornographic videos. He was kind of like comedian Larry David in that the essence of his work was describing the price he paid for being himself.In the coverage of his death, there have been hints Matt had been dealing with some kind of creative block. (I don’t believe in writer’s block, but that’s a subject for another column.) There were also indications his perfectionism got in the way.One way to measure his output would be to compare him to Seth and Brown, also autobiographical creators. What jumps out when you look at their bibliographies is how Seth, for instance, balances the need to be creative with the need to be perfect, and has produced a long list of books and other projects. Or you could compare him to a comics legend like Jack Kirby, who enrolled in New York’s prestigious Pratt Institute for illustrators when he was 14 years old. He ended up dropping out.“I wasn’t the kind of student that Pratt was looking for. They wanted patient people who would work on something forever. I didn’t want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done,” Kirby would say later in his life.The consequence is that Kirby’s comics, all these decades later, are still being reprinted and sold to new generations of comic lovers. Meanwhile, Matt’s anthologies have already gone out of print.A modern example would be Southwestern Ontario’s own Jeff Lemire, who is always working on multiple books, never seeming to be at a loss for inspiration or motivation. He once credited his prolific nature to the work ethic he developed being raised on a farm.For whatever reason, Joe Matt wasn’t interested in living like that. The sad fact is, he will go down in comics history as a footnote. He will forever be “the other guy” of the Toronto Three.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Going inside the mind of Bruce Wayne
By Dan BrownBatman first appeared in 1939. Is it possible, all these decades later, there are still Batman stories left to tell?Featured in comics, big-screen serials, newspaper strips, radio dramas, live-action TV shows, animated programs, graphic novels and full-length motion pictures, the character has been through a lot.The Dark Knight has had his back broken. One of his wards has been killed in the line of duty. He’s retired, then changed his mind. His origin story has been re-told and revised and reiterated and rebooted so many times, we’ve all lost count.So what else could there possibly be?Well, there’s a crucial episode in the Caped Crusader’s life that hasn’t yet seen the light of day, and I’m going to give the idea away for free to any comic writer who wants to steal it.As we all know, unlike Superman and Wonder Woman, Batman has no special traits. Bruce Wayne is a mortal human, albeit a rich one.But according to one school of thought, he does have an ability that sets him apart from every other hero in the DC pantheon. What is Batman’s superpower? Being prepared.Combined with unlimited financial resources, the thing Wayne has going for him is he’s ready for any possibility. He has anticipated every scenario a superhero could face, and planned a solution.For example, it was in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns that readers learned he was able to synthesize a small amount of kryptonite in case he ever had to face Superman in mortal combat. It took him years to accomplish, and cost a fortune, but it’s this foresight that allows Batman to put his spiked boot on Superman’s throat – and not just in a symbolic sense.In order to be prepared, one has to have a rich imagination. It’s true experience plays a part, but Bruce Wayne had to have a creative mind in the first place. After all, it’s not everyone who sees a bat fly through a window, then thinks: I’ll dress up as one of those in order to terrorize criminals.I define imagination as the ability to construct in your mind what doesn’t yet exist in the real world. It’s not just an asset to superheroes, but is the key to success in a wide range of professions. I don’t believe it’s innate. I think it can be developed. If you want a real-world example of its importance, bear in mind how the 9/11 Commission in the United States concluded it was partly a “failure of imagination” on the part of security planners that allowed the deadly attacks of that day to happen.So where does Wayne get his wonderful inventiveness? We don’t really know.Perhaps he was exposed to a lot of creativity in his younger years. In Miller’s telling, for instance, the night Wayne’s parents were killed they had just seen The Mark of Zorro at a Gotham movie theatre. Perhaps Wayne had a childhood filled with such flights of fancy.Or maybe it was Alfred who passed down his experiences to a young Wayne, opening the future crime fighter’s mind. Or perhaps there’s a character readers haven’t met yet who sparked his flowering creativity – it could have even been an influential teacher. If you grant that Batman’s superpower is being prepared, you have to account for how he developed what must be the sharpest imagination in the DC universe. That’s why, whoever it was or however it happened, the origin story of Batman’s imagination needs to be told. If you have any ideas about what other Batman stories are yet to be unleashed on comic readers, let me know in the comment box below or on Facebook.And by the way, this is the 16th column I’ve written for the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games, but the first one I’ve written about Batman. What took me so long?Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Back to School for Gifted Children
By Dan BrownIt’s early September, the perfect time for a back-to-school column. And the subject of this one is schools for gifted children, a recurring trope in pop culture I first came across in the pages of Marvel Comics in the late 1970s.At these places of learning, the students can be mutants or sorcerers or vampires or weirdos. The private-school setting is the common thread that ties them all together, and it’s a plot device that’s been so widely used, it’s become a narrative crutch that deserves to be parodied.The most recent example I noticed comes from the Netflix series Wednesday, which dropped last November. Although I love the Addams Family characters, Wednesday wasn’t really my thing. But my wife convinced me to watch long enough for me realize, “Hey, Nevermore Academy is the latest in a long line of Gothic boarding schools where things aren’t as they seem and perhaps monsters roam the halls!”(Fun fact: The original Addams Family television show was inspired by a single-panel recurring cartoon in The New Yorker magazine.)The first one of these schools I ever encountered was Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Children. Maybe you can relate.I began reading The Uncanny X-Men in the early days of John Byrne’s run on the title as penciller, and I loved the characters so much I eventually worked my way backwards to the debut issue of the irregularly published title.Back in 1963, Jack Kirby was the first artist to depict this particular school, which was home to Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, Iceman and, of course, Professor Charles Xavier (you knew he had mind powers because he was bald).Over the years, the building in New York’s Westchester County has been known by many names, like the X-Mansion, the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning, and the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. It has been destroyed, become sentient, been transported to another dimension, and lately rendered irrelevant by the mass relocation of the Homo Superior race to Krakoa. I think that’s a shame. It was in the aptly named Danger Room that Xavier’s pupils honed their mutant powers, safe from the world that fears and hates them.The most well-known academy for gifted children is, of course, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, made famous by J.K. Rowling and first appearing in her 1997 novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.We’ve now arrived at the point where I admit I don’t have a fully fleshed-out theory of why this trope resonates so strongly with the members of so many different fandoms. My brightest idea is simply going to school is a common experience we all share. That might account for why schools for the gifted are so prevalent in pop culture. But beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. Is the trend being driven by a fascination on the part of those who attended public schools with how things work at boarding schools? A fetish for things British? Laziness on the part of writers?Other examples include the Salvatore School for the Young & Gifted from The Vampire Diaries, the Umbrella Academy, and the superhero school in the clouds from the underrated 2005 flick Sky High.But I’ve saved the best for last. I’m talking about Canadian comic creator Jilliam Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy, which is a place where immortals, shapeshifters, braniacs, closeted lesbians and a girl with the head of a lizard go to classes.The 2015 graphic novel takes the Hogwarts and Xavier School premise seriously: What if teenagers with powers actually had to go to high school together? How would they deal with the angst of being teens? How would they cope with boredom? Would they use their special abilities for good? The result is a funny and touching portrait of a group of students and teachers who are really no different from you or me. I give the book an A+.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
