Fantastic Fangirls: Comics and Culture

Posted by Caroline

Now that I’ve gotten through it okay, I feel like I can admit this: I’ve spent the last few months in a state of serious fannish malaise. I was as psyched as I’ve ever been to talk about comics when Watchmen came out in March — it may not have been a great movie but it was an awesome conversation piece — but since then my interest has been in the doldrums.

It’s not comics’ fault; there’s been plenty to talk about, including some amazing discussions about gender and fandom that are just the kind of thing we started this blog to address. I’ve started a lot of articles recently (I even made a delicious.com page for the labels “comics” “feminism” and “fail”, which was depressingly easy to fill up), but I’ve hardly followed through on any. I couldn’t figure out why; there was obviously plenty of fodder for criticism, so why wasn’t I critiquing? Deep down, though, I probably knew the answer. You need to really love something to go to the trouble of taking it to task (well, maybe everybody doesn’t, but I’m fairly certain that I do), and after half a year of blogging about comics, I just wasn’t sure I cared. Before I could release my inner critic, I had to get back in touch with my inner fangirl.

Then, out of nowhere, Heroes Con 2009 swooped in to save the day. Well, all right, it wasn’t out of nowhere — I’d been planning it for almost a year — and the regional comic convention didn’t fly in to pick me up in its arms — I had to drive to Charlotte, North Carolina, on a really hot day. Other than the lack of a teleportation option, though (and I hear the brain trust at Marvel Comics is working on one of those), Heroes was pretty much the perfect shot in the arm.

Gabriel Hardman drew this gorgeous Question -- hat first!

My first twenty minutes on the con floor were a good indication of how it was going to go. Within that time, I bought a Young Avengers sketch from Dean Trippe of Project: Rooftop, then chatted with Heathentown creators Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Sara Bechko. I bought a Renee Montoya/Question sketch from Hardman — whose work on Agents of Atlas has been one of my favorite things even when I have the fannish blahs.

While Hardman was drawing the Question for me, I struck up a conversation with his tablemate Ken Marcus. It turns out Ken buys his weekly comics in the same place I do, and I ended up buying all the issues of Super Human Resources. This is basically what an Avengers book would be like if it was told from a Stark Industries peon’s point of view, and every time Iron Man traveled to the future, he came back to yell at HR because his 401(k) was underperforming. Exactly the kind of thing that makes me laugh, in other words. Good sell!

My whole weekend was full of moments like that. I got to talk with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who I first met at New York Comic-Con earlier this year, about her work on the amazing Comic Book Tattoo anthology. We also talked about imaginary friends, netbooks, rambunctious toddlers, and thrift-store shopping. At this point I’m confident in Kelly Sue’s ability to start a conversation about anything, sometimes while holding a rambunctious toddler.

Con weekends often end up developing an accidental theme, and this one’s might have been fashion. Along with my Project Rooftop sketch, and the Kelly Sue thrift-store chat, I also ended up talking about the challenges of drawing women’s fashions with Thom Zahler (the uber-talented, and recently Harvey-nominated, writer/cartoonist behind Love and Capes) and with Buffy Season 8 artist Georges Jeanty. (Fun fact: Buffy shops at Anthropologie.) Also, I kept asking people for Question and Rorschach sketches, and it’s true: everybody draws the hat first.

The reason that I started collecting Question sketches was because I wanted to get one from Cully Hamner, the artist on the new Greg Rucka-written Question co-feature in Detective Comics. I sort of forgot to do that, though I did end up fangirling Cully in a conversation with Jen Van Meter, which led to my fangirling Jen’s writing on the Black Lightning: Year One series she did with him, which led to both of us fangirling Greg Rucka (who was present only in spirit). Now, I’ve loved Jen’s work since I first heard the concept of Hopeless Savages, so I didn’t want to spend the whole time talking about her husband’s comics. But then — everybody’s talking about Greg Rucka these days — including this faceless (and poorly-scanned) elephant Matt Fraction drew for me*:

Matt Fraction does these to raise money for the Hero Initiative. He is a scholar and a gentleman and one of my favorite writers and the scanning is totally my fault.

My Question enthusiasm also led me to some of the weekend’s more educational programming — and, by educational, I mean “comics history”, and by “comics history,” I mean “I love this stuff.” First there was a panel on the history of Charlton Comics, a topic I was already pretty nerdy about before I saw this panel. Since the con, I have to restrain myself from dropping anecdotes about Steve Ditko’s political arguments with Denny O’Neil into conversation with people who don’t know who either of those guys is. The stories came courtesy of Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano; Denny, sadly, was not present. Neither, needless to say, was Ditko. If the famously reclusive (sorry, Stan, I’m just gonna say it) co-creator of Spider-Man had showed up at Heroes Con, it would have been on the news. I did get to see a screening of the impressive Jonathan Ross documentary In Search of Steve Ditko. This is an excellent documentary and it really needs to be released on DVD in the States so I can stop reciting bits of it to people who have never heard of Steve Ditko.

As much as I love panel discussions about the history of comics, there are always panel discussions about the future of comics, and I ought to say a few words about the Marvel panels. There were DC panels that I didn’t go to. There was also an apparently awesome announcement about the Longbox Project for digital comics that I totally failed to notice until I got home and read about it on the Internet. But I was a Marvel girl looking for my joy, so I went to the Marvel panels.

Let me tell you — I found some joy. I saw Brian Bendis last fall at Baltimore Comic-Con, where he had to field a million questions about the Secret Invasion crossover with “I can’t tell you that.” I saw Matt Fraction at Heroes last year where he had to spend a lot of time talking about an Uncanny X-Men book that hadn’t come out yet. This summer, right now, Bendis is in the full swing of Dark Reign — for my money, easily his best Marvel work in years — while Fraction has gone through the first year of setup on the X-books and is launching a major crossover of his own.

As for Captain America writer Ed Brubaker — I’ve never met the guy before, so I can’t compare, but he was unmistakably gleeful when discussing the news of Steve Rogers’ impending resurrection. He claims he had Steve’s return planned all along, and it strikes me that it must have been nice not to have to pretend that he didn’t. I’m just speculating, of course, but it feels like this year’s Heroes fell in a sweet spot when all these guys are having a great time with the stories they’re telling. By the end of the first Marvel panel, we were hearing questions like, “How are you all so funny?” and “Is it cool working with other people you like so much?” Out of context, that might sound like sucking up, but I can tell you it felt like an honest reaction to the energy in those rooms.

Xylon Otterburn is like, I dunno, fifteen? He drew this for me. Remember the name!

Ultimately, of course, the medium isn’t just about creators having fun and telling jokes with fans. The work ought to stand on its own. Luckily, when I got home from Heroes Con, I had a big new comics Wednesday waiting, and the books were really damn good. Detective Comics 854 was the Batwoman and Question book I’d been waiting for, and it was every bit as wonderful as I wanted it to be. Matt Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men/Dark Avengers: Utopia really does feel the beginning of the complex, ambitious, politically-charged storyline I’ve wanted to read since I got into the X-Men. I’m not just saying that because I flipped through it for the first time at Heroes, while I was talking to Fraction about our favorite Michael Chabon novels, and a teenage artist named who calls himself Xylon Otterburn was drawing a picture of Deadpool in my sketchbook.

I won’t lie, though. It didn’t hurt. Part of my enthusiasm for comics has always been a reflected enthusiasm from the people who make them, inhabiting this weird, wonderful corner of popular entertainment that occasionally flirts with art. Reminding myself why I love comics reminds me they’re worth thinking about, worth caring about, and worth writing about. And that’s the kind of thinking that saves the day, every time.

By Caroline
E-mail: Caroline@fantasticfangirls.org
Twitter: madmarvelgirl