I’m sure there’s no way this deal can end badly for anyone.
Um. In the good way. I mean that all the copies sold, not that Kevin went down the aisle plastered in endorsements.
If you haven’t been following it, Archie Comics has made a gigantic leap into relevance in the past year or so, and one step in that direction was introducing the company’s first gay character, Kevin Keller. Archie Comics also started publishing Life With Archie, the followup to the two “what if?” stories in which Archie finally gets married, presenting two different timelines that are both initially depressing as hell. You know what the kids want? Miss Grundy dying of renal failure weeks after marrying Mister Weatherbee. Screw your Ultimate Whatever, Archie Comics will show you grim and gritty.
Ahem. Anyway, this past week, Life With Archie featured Kevin Keller’s wedding (in, I think, Timeline-Betty, which is the least depressing of the two. This is also the timeline featuring Miss Grundy’s post-matrimonial death. These two sentences do not contradict). This has gotten a lot of press since its announcement a few months ago, not all of which was good. Astroturf hate-group and massively false advertiser One Million Moms has been protesting this issue, as well as Toys R Us, which is apparently the last retail chain to actually carry comic books. In what I can only hope is at least partial response to the boycott, Life With Archie #16 has completely sold out.
The point to all of this is that I need one of you to tell One Million Moms that I’ve got two gay dudes going out on a date right now. I could use the free publicity.
Yes, I did make this joke on Twitter the other day.
Seriously, though, Actually More Like A Thousand Moms, come at me. You’re 0-2 against Ellen DeGeneres and Archie Comics; maybe you should set your sights on a smaller target. I get some more traffic, and yet you can totally credit that small traffic to your protests instead of my total obscurity. Let’s make this happen!
The last blog post was pretty negative, wasn’t it? I don’t want to be one of those dudes who’s always talking about stuff he hates, so instead let’s talk about stuff I like. Specifically, let’s talk about Rich Burlew’s record-setting Kickstarter drive.
I assume you’re all familiar with Burlew’s Order of the Stick. If you’re not, that’s too bad, you should be. It’s a terrific comic that blends humor, adventure and D&D jokes (although less of the latter as it progresses). It also has very elegant artwork; despite being “just” a stick figure comic, OotS is very good at suggesting action and a wide range of body language and facial expression. It is, in short, one of the best comics available in any delivery mechanism and you should click that link, suckapants.
OotS is popular enough to sustain a line of books: four (for now) volumes of collected strips plus extras, two prequel books and a limited-run collection of odds and ends. Unfortunately, it’s also so popular that the majority of the books have been out of print for quite some time. Printing costs being what they are, Burlew just couldn’t afford to do four new print runs … until now! Or, more accurately, until February 21!
Burlew started a Kickstarter to get the third and largest book, War and XPs, back into print. Instead, he’s gathered enough funds to put all four out-of-print books back into print, as well as to cover print-runs for the other two books. In a little over a week! It’s already one of the top ten drives in Kickstarter’s history, and there’s about two and a half weeks to go. It’s crazy!
In response, Burlew has just gone all out with a Bag of Holding full of rewards for pledges. I’m not saying you should pledge just to get swag, but right now we’re looking at five exclusive new stories for everyone who pledges $10 or more, plus some other stuff. Not to mention, new copies of previously out-of-print books should you pledge enough.
It almost feels like gilding the lily to encourage people to continue pledging, but I’m-a do it anyway. Hey, he’ll be looking at publishing Volume 5 some time soon, right? Let’s see how high we can push this thing.
I’ve got a blog built into the site, I figure I might as well use it, right?
So DC has announced it’s new project, a set of mini-series exploring the characters of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal Watchmen. The reactions, as you can well imagine, have been mixed. Being a comic creator with a tiny yet discerning audience (whom I love dearly, each and every one of you, but especially you), I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Obviously I’m qualified.
Watchmen has often been compared to Citizen Kane in terms of its importance to its medium, and I feel that comparison is particularly apt today. If I read that someone was looking to produce a prequel to Citizen Kane, I’d wonder what the point was. What could someone possibly reveal about Charles Foster Kane that I haven’t already seen? The movie is complete, perfectly encapsulated in itself. The same applies to Watchmen.
I don’t think Watchmen should be left alone because it’s “sacred” or anything silly like that. I think it should be left alone because it’s complete. We’ve already read all the relevant history; the series is steeped in it. There’s nothing more to say. We know how Rorschach devolved from vigilante to sociopath, how Dr. Manhattan’s incarnate godhood deformed history and detached him from humanity, how the Comedian alone adapted to the changing century with ever-increasing brutality …
… uh, spoilers, I guess. You’ve all read Watchmen, right? If you haven’t, it’s a quarter of a century old. There’s a statue of limitations on these things.
So, “why?” I mean, obviously we know why, it’s to make money, and for a commercial publisher that’s a completely valid reason. Nonetheless, I’d much rather the creators involved (and it is an impressive array of talent for a project I’m indifferent-to-hostile toward) actually create something. Something new, the way Watchmen was in 1986, rather than retread old ground or try and fill in meaningless gaps, the way the majority of mainstream comics do.
But I could be wrong. Maybe I’m judging this project way too soon and way too harshly. After all, we know very little about it. It could be they’ve got something that will knock our socks off. Certainly they’re risking their reputations on this; no one wants to be the dude who “ruined Watchmen“. Maybe they’ll knock it out of the park.
Or maybe this is how JMS burns up the last bit of goodwill from Babylon 5.