Hope Larson surveys tween girl comics readers

Hope Larson, an excellent graphic novelist (most recently Mercury) currently working on a comics adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time[*], recently conducted an informal survey of female comics readers who read comics in their tweens and teens. Click here to see Hope’s full report of the responses she got.

The part I found most fun to read was Hope’s summary of responses to her final, open-ended question:

What can authors, publishers, retailers do to better serve teen/tween girls?

1) More and better female characters, especially protagonists. Girls want to see strong, in-control, kick-ass women calling the shots.

2) A welcoming atmosphere in local comic stores is key. Many respondents reported feeling uncomfortable in comic stores. They were stared at, talked down to, and generally treated without respect.

3) Pink, sparkly cutesy comics about boyfriends, ponies, cupcakes and shopping are widely reviled. Condescend to female readers at your peril, writers and comic publishers.

4) The hypersexualization/objectification of female superheroines makes female readers uncomfortable, and sexual violence as a plot point has got to stop.

5) Girls need good stories in a variety of genres.

6) Most girls don’t even know comics exist, or that they would enjoy them. Publishers need to advertise in mainstream media and comic shops need to reach out to girls.

7) Make comics for boys and girls. Comics with dual male and female protagonists. Comics with large casts that offer something for everyone.

8) Use licensed properties to lure new readers into comics.

9) Availability is a problem. Get more comics into schools. Get more comics into libraries—especially school libraries. Get more comics into bookstores, especially large chains.

10) There need to be more women creating comics and working in the industry as editors and publishers.

What do you think?

[*] I hope Hope gets to adapt A Wind In The Door, too — it’s arguably a better book, and it has tons of amazing imagery that I think would fit beautifully into Hope’s style. But I’m not certain I want to see the borders-on-racist A Swiftly Tilting Planet adapted.

Full wrap-around cover for Hereville

Click on the image to see a bigger version.

Comics I Like: A Page From Phoenix

Barry: Oh wow. (Looks around, sees Jake.) Hey, Jake, look at this layout.

Jake: Oh? (Picks up book, looks at page.) Wow.

This is from “Space,” the fourth volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix series, originally published in 1969. The layout device, which on this page emphasizes the group coming together as a team but eventually emphasizes each character’s separateness, is continued for many pages of the book.

It’s hard to describe Pheonix, which I’ve so far read the first five volumes of. Each volume is a story that stands entirely on its own, set thousands of years apart from the other stories, some of which take place in prehistory, others in a science-fiction future — but through reincarnation, the same characters appear as different people in multiple volumes. The ambition and scope of some of these stories is jaw-dropping. If you’re going to read just one, I’d recommend Karma, which is the best one I’ve read so far (and, some people say, the best manga ever created).

(A lot of Pheonix would be rated “R” if it were a movie, due to occasional nudity and also some extreme violence at times, so if you’re a kid you should check with your parents before reading it.)

Comics I Like: Lotus Root Children

One of the comics I picked up at Stumptown was Lotus Root Children, by Wei Li.

(SPOILERS below!)

Li told me that he was inspired by the documentary “China’s Stolen Children.” As you might expect, the approximately 50 page comic tells a sad story, but Li tells it very well. The main character is a child trafficker. She doesn’t personally steal the children; she takes care of the children between when they are kidnapped and when buyers for the children are found. During this time, she mothers the children, with genuine affection, and also brainwashes them to forget their prior lives. The character was believable and — despite what we learn about her in the course of the comic — likable, although I wanted to know more about her and her background. How did her life reach this point?

Li’s artwork is nice; he uses very lively brushstrokes both for the linework and for the coloring, which I enjoyed. The underlying drawing isn’t always assured — the anatomy seems a bit shaky sometimes – but it’s good, and I’m sure it’ll get better as Li goes on. (His new project, The Old Woman, looks great — you can see preview artwork for it here). The layout approach is also a little inconsistent; early on, Li plays around a little with breaking up a three-tiers-per-page layout, while in the last half of the book he hardly ever strays from it, and I don’t see any story-based reason for the change in approach.

But I’m nit-picking. The art is very well-done and shows potential to get a lot better, and the writing is ambitious and interesting. Li is definitely someone who believes comics can be more than fight scenes, and I’ll be looking for more of Li’s comics at future cons.

I do have one actual complaint, which is that the paper version of Lotus Root Children is in gray tones that are rather muddy. Later on, I checked it out online — and discovered that the art was drawn in color, with rich blues popping the characters out of greenish graywash backgrounds. It looks twice as good with the colors. So while I’d hate to deprive Li of sales, I’d recommend reading Lotus Root Children online instead of buying the comic.

Stumptown Comics Fest Today and Tomorrow

I’ll be appearing at the Stumptown Comics Fest today and tomorrow, sharing a table with Jenn Lee of the wonderful (but grown-up) science-fiction comic Dicebox. If you’re going to be there, please drop by and say hi.

I can’t wait until after November, when I’ll be able to bring the new book with me to cons!

Preview: Front Cover for the Hereville Graphic Novel

Here’s the front cover! It’s mostly the same drawing as the cover to the self-published comic from two years ago, but I think this version looks better. Major props to Chad Beckerman, the book designer at Abrams.

The cover is a wrap-around cover, by the way. I hope I’ll be able to show you the full cover sometime next week.

Hereville site redesigned

I am so not a fan of web design! I mean, I love good web design when other people do it, but I’d rather not do it myself. I just don’t have the right kind of mind to understand how CSS works (although at least I’ve gotten over calling it “RSS”).

But I did it anyway! The old site had a design which really only made sense for a webcomic; since Hereville is now more of a print comic book, and the updates here (for the forseeable future, anyway) are going to be blog posts instead of more webcomic pages, it made sense to change the design.

This new design is a wordpress blog (easiest thing for me to work with!), and is based on the Simple Round theme — although I’ve made a couple of changes, as you can see.

Let me know what you think, and if you see anything broken. 🙂

Tonight: The 6th Annual Stumptown Comics Fest Art Show

I’ll be at the 6th Annual Stumptown Comics Fest Art Show tonight. The exhibit is at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (1111 SW Broadway). I’ll have two pages from the upcoming Hereville graphic novel on display!

If you’re in downtown Portland tonight, drop in and say hi. 🙂

This is an art exhibit associated with the Stumptown Comics Fest. The Fest itself, a two-day comic book convention, takes place in a few weeks, April 24th and 25th. I’ll be there, too; for more info about the Stumptown Comics Fest, visit their site.

Some words (and pictures) in defense of thought balloons

Scott McCloud, bouncing off a post by Joe at Comics Comics, explains his preference for thought captions over thought balloons:

The question I find most interesting is why do traditional word balloons seem more patronizing by their very nature? […]

The important difference for me is that a thought caption—with or without borders—embodies each thought in a way that encourages us to assume ownership of it as we read. We literally bring each sentiment into existence as a thought, creating an instant bond with the character.

The thought balloon, regardless of shape or style, just by virtue of its pointer, brings a third party into the relationship: the author, gently putting his/her hand on our shoulder and pointing to the face of the thinker with the words “he thought.” Maybe thoughts are just too private for that kind of parental intrusion.

I don’t think Scott’s argument holds water, for four reasons:

1) Logically, shouldn’t Scott also find pointers on speech balloons condescending? If telling the reader who is thinking is spoon-feeding, telling the reader who is speaking must be as well. There’s no reason speech balloons can’t be dispensed with (see Why I Hate Saturn).

(Scott tries to handwave past this by saying maybe thoughts are too just too private, but that seems like a very hazy distinction.)

2) If someone did a comic with old-fashioned thought balloons, but without pointers (so only context told readers which character a thought balloon attached to), would that really resolve anyone’s dislike for the device?

3) No one thinks it’s condescending for a prose writer to specify which character thinks a thought (“Oh, drat, I’ve cut off my ear,” Vince thought.). So why is the visual equivalent of “Vince thought” unacceptable hand-holding?

4) Even if thought balloons “bring a third party into the relationship,” why is that a bad thing? Absolute authorial transparency is an aesthetic goal of some cartoonists (one that can be approached but never achieved), but it’s not better or worse than other aesthetic approaches.

Joe at Comics Comics, in contrast to Scott, argues that thought balloons are more intimate than thought captions:

…captions can be a likewise cool device, sharp-edged and—this is vital—aloof from the thinking character, hanging away from their head or drifting through entirely unrelated scenes, panels with no characters at all. In contrast, thought balloons have a ‘chain’ that latches them to the applicable thinker, a forced, perhaps confining intimacy, very revealing in looking so silly like fresh thoughts would seem if seen.

I agree with Joe, on this question. There’s a spectrum of integration of words (and their containers) into the comic’s images; the less integrated the words and images, the more aloof the words feel from the images (and the characters).

At one extreme, we have the cartoonists who keep words at arm’s length by placing the words entirely outside the panel — Why I Hate Saturn, Prince Valient.

In the middle is the standard rectangular caption box.

At the other extreme, words are seamlessly integrated into the picture and vice-versa.

In the hands of a good cartoonist, either captions or balloons work well. But I’d argue that the old-fashioned thought balloon has enormous advantages, because of its inherent integration into images. Check out this page from one of my favorite comics, Larry Marder’s Beanworld:

This is actually a very complex page. Beanish begins by thinking in words, switches to thinking in images, and then switches again to getting lost in memories that are a mix of words and image – memories from yesterday, as the non-Beanish narrative voice helpfully tells us. Then he switches again to spoken monologue interspersed with visual thoughts. That’s a hell of a lot to get across, but Larry’s expert use of thought balloons makes it all seem straightforward.

Could you do the same thing with captions? Maybe. But it wouldn’t be easy.

Here’s the amazing Kevin Huizenga, showing his character Glenn Ganges either traveling through time or just imagining traveling through time (click on the image to see it bigger):

I have two more examples of amazing uses of thought balloons — but they get into some mildly sexual images. If that offends you, or if you’re a minor and you think your parents would be offended if you saw some R-rated content, then pleased don’t click through to view these images.

First, check out this page by Howard Cruse, from his classic short story “Billy Goes Out,” which is available in this collection. Howard uses thought balloons brilliantly to show a parallel narrative; we see Billy’s day and we experience Billy’s thoughts with Billy. A separate narrative voice, not representing Billy’s thoughts, speaks to us through captions. (This page is mildly NSFW.)

Second, look at this page from Dave Sim’s Cerebus. I don’t think any cartoonist has done more experimenting with thought balloons than Sim; to look at one page barely scratches the surface. On this page, Sim uses thought balloons to not only show the back-and-forth between competing thought streams in Cerebus’ head, but also to show their relative volume, their relationship, their emotional content, and to suggest streams of simultaneous, overlapping thought. (This page is safe for work — there’s nothing there that couldn’t be in a PG movie — but Cerebus is kinda obsessed with boobs.)

So why are people so down on thought balloons? It’s not just Scott; as Joe at Comics Comics reports, some mainstream comic book editors are actively discouraging creators from using thought balloons at all.

For some folks (and here I’m definitely not talking about Scott or Joe), thought balloons seem too — well — comic book-y. The dislike of thought balloons is related to how insecure many comic book folks are about comics; we want comics to be acknowledged as a legitimate medium for art. (It’s amazing, and sad, how many comics fans and professionals believe movie adaptations legitimize comics.) Words in captions are closer to the way books do narrative, or perhaps closer to the way movies do voice-overs. Either way, comics seem more like these “legitimate” mediums if they avoid the use of tools that belong, uniquely, to comics.

Thought balloons are iconographic, which is why they can be used so wonderfully in the examples I’ve shared here. But they’re also cartoony, and that’s an approach many folks who want to make sophisticated, literary comics want to avoid.

The irony, of course, is that thought balloons — well used — can be an extremely sophisticated and subtle device. By arbitrarily cutting them out, editors may actually be making their comics less subtle and less sophisticated.

“Thundercats” and “Timespirits” Writer Needs Help

When I was a kid, the “Timespirits” comic book — which was published by Marvel (under the “Epic Comics” imprint) and only lasted nine issues — was very special to me. I read the too-few issues again and again, captivated by the rather trippy time-travel adventures and by Tom Yeates’ artwork.

Timespirits was probably the first comic book I read in which nearly all the important characters (including the ghost of Jimmi Hendrix, extremely well drawn by Tom Yeates), and both the protagonists, were people of color. That’s still damned rare nowadays, but it was virtually unknown in the 1980s.

I haven’t read Timespirits in years (it’s long out of print, alas, although apparently Image is working on a trade paperback reprint), and I don’t know how well they’d hold up. But I remember them fondly, so I was sad to find out that Steve Perry, the writer of Timespirits (and also a writer on the old “Thundercats” TV show), is having troubles he won’t recover from.

Ann Somerville reports:

I got a lovely thank you note from Steve Perry, but the contents break my heart:

I want you to know I am so very grateful to you for being so kind, generous and wonderful — my own fate is pretty iffy and I care most about my five year old. He has been with me 24/7 all his life, and even more so since his mother left a year ago because she could not deal with the discovery that I had cancer. Now that it has returned, the future is pretty raw, and while Leo and I face homelessness again, your kindness will be forever appreciated. Thank you so very, very much.

He also says he’s still trying to get his electricity back on. In case it wasn’t clear from my last post, Steve is dying of bladder cancer. And on top of that, he has no home and is trying to look after a young child. No one should have to go through all this in the last months of their life. So, again, I’m asking you to send a donation, however small, to his PayPal account (sandramaples48 @ yahoo.com). Some of you boosted the signal on this, and a lot of you went ‘eh, nothing to do with me’. Which is sad, really, because anyone can end up with cancer, and anyone could end up homeless too.

Well, if I can’t incentivise you any other way, I will give a free copy of any of my ebooks – self-published or not, including the one which I can’t officially give you – to anyone who sends me a receipt for their Paypal donation of at least $10 to Steve. Redact your real name, but I want to see proof. Forward it to me at logophilos@gmail.com and tell me the book you want.

Feel free to repost this message.

I’ll offer a similar deal: If you’re one of the first five people to email me a copy of their Paypal receipt, showing a donation of $40 or more to Steve Perry, I’ll mail you a hand-drawn sketch of the Hereville character of your choice — or even a Thundercat, if you prefer — on good-quality paper. (I’ll update this post once the offer is closed — so if you can read this, then the offer’s still open!).

Steve Bissette and Johnny Bacardi have both posted more about Steve Perry’s circumstances.