Four-Colour Commentary

Warren Ellis, "Night Signals"

I'm not sure how to start this, because I don't want to come off like I'm spoiling for a fight, but I think perhaps I've become a little fed up with Mr. Ellis' rhetoric and attitude. He just posted a message to Bad Signal which, from context, I can only assume is in reaction to a paper he heard or an article he read. He doesn't actually provide the source, which is ironic, because the original text is about copyright, but Ellis' response has more to do with citation.

Attn: Orson Scott Card

Re: Ultimate Iron-Man

Please stop packing every issue with puerile gay jokes. Most of the world has grown out of that crap. I suggest you join us.

Show and Tell

I originally presented a shortened version of this paper at the International Comics Arts Forum in Washington DC in October of 2007. It has since been reprinted, with additions, in the International Journal of Comic Art (Vol. 10, No.1, Spring 2008). I reprint it here because the IJoCA is not available on-line.

Citations of comics appear as issue.page.panel. So, (24.12.6-9) is the 24th issue, page 12, and panels 6 to 9. Single slash marks indicate a transition across word balloons, double slashes indicate a transition across panels, and triple-slashes indicate a transition across pages. 

Comics and "History"

There's a conversation going on over the Comix Scholars listserv about comics as representations of history, either old history or present history. It started with Spider-man #36, in which Spidey witnesses and comments on 9/11 and expresses his frustration that the supposed superheroes couldn't prevent it, despite having prevented many such disasters and attacks in the past. This was quickly compared to Speigelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, an autobiographical account of Spiegelman's experience as, essentially, just another New Yorker, trying to survive and sort out what the hell was going on. I, in my way, tossed a couple of monkey wrenches into the conversation in response to two assertions: first, that in history, as soon as there is a narrative, there is also a narrator, and second, that the two comics are obviously different, and of different levels of quality.