I only had one small objection to your report: I am a male Courtney! But I forgives ya!

Oooops. Fixed now. And my apologies!

Thanks for all the Pfeiffer press. I am currently working on all sorts of leads to help unravel the mystery of him. I hope to have some really concrete info soon.

I purchased the Advise and Consent illustration and am very proud to have it! An orginal Pfeiffer in my possesion. how cool is that?

Again, thanks for the great Pfeiffer plug. I only had one small objection to your report: I am a male Courtney! But I forgives ya!

Keep up the great work.

Wildcats 3.0 & Automatic Kafka, maybe? It felt new, at least. (I was really just going to say Automatic Kafka, but added 3.0 to satisfy the 'major' qualification.)

I don't buy Boom studios stuff because it's 3.99. If they were 3.50 I'd be all over them, but I can't get over the hump to four dollars. It's mostly perception that I'm paying too much for a comic, but that's true for the 3 dollars for most other books. I may get over it at some point. Chip--were the #1 issues of Boom series $3, with subsequent issues back to 3.99, it would make a big difference in my becoming invested in your titles. I know this is a strech (and would be costly!), but it would be worth looking into as a loss leader.

What about the BOOM! trades do you like specifically? I have some ideas of what I think we are doing right with the trades, but certainly would like to hear from you!

Chip Mosher
Marketing and Sales Director
BOOM! Studios

My advice in terms of finding comics to read would depend on what types of fiction you read elsewhere. I would not really have you pursue superheroes, per se. So it would depend on what genres you enjoy in books and films before I could make any reasonable recommendations.

Gareth wrote:

"I’m not very familiar with the comics Whedon is referencing in his X-Men run - I didn’t know Colossus was supposed to be dead, for example. But I’m enjoying it on its own terms. I imagine someone with no knowledge of the X-Men, perhaps a Buffy fan brought in through name recognition, would be able to appreciate it too. So does it really matter that it’s a pastiche?"

The answer to that question is yes, Gareth.

Not so much that it is a pastiche, but that is recognizably so in that those who are knowledgeable see it for what it is. The trick in writing homages or pastiches is to do it well enough to be uniquely your own and not have it be obvious what your source materials are.

However, today's fandom is so vastly more knowledgeable than they were decades past that we recognize things much more quickly for what they are. We are also overexposed to the same writers constantly across the entertainment spectrum, which only serves to create even more familiarity with a given writer's work and makes it all that much easier to spot the 'inferior' effort.

As the saying goes, 'familiarity breeds contempt'. There's a lot of contempt in fandom today, and sadly it fuels much of the direction the industry is headed currently. Companies claim they don't have a clue what to do about it. Creators compromise themselves by producing tons of work for short term gains because they're fearful of becoming the next "has been" that fandom got bored with and now "hates" (yet by overexposing themselves they walk right into such status all that much more quickly...).

Is there a viable solution to this problem? Yes. And I and many other creators have told the publishers what said solution is. They don't want to do it, and retailers and fandom don't seem to want to support us when we attempt to implement the process on our own as self-publishers. So, fandom is stuck with what it has, for better or worse.

* When I say "pastiche," I mean it in the sense of derivative work meant to invoke the memory of a familiar original. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Alan Moore's Supreme and Morrison's All-Star Superman are Weisinger-era Superman pastiches. I'm talking about a conscious, deliberate homage that everyone is MEANT to see (as opposed to imitation or plagiarism, which an author hopes no one will notice.)

* When I say "fanfic," mostly I mean it in the sense of the stuff that is absolutely catering to fan obsessions -- who's hooking up with who, ramping up the violence to ridiculous levels, how the continuity is matching up, referencing favorite old stories. This isn't to say it can't be done WELL -- certainly Joss Whedon brings more craft to it than some guy running a slash webring -- but still, let's not kid ourselves about what he's doing there.

* Ian, I certainly will investigate that avenue, thanks. The mystery George Wilson painting is posted here. What makes it difficult is that it turns out there were TWO George Wilsons working in paperback illustration in the 50's and 60's -- the first is the fellow I wrote about who did all the work for Gold Key and Avon, and the second is a gentleman named George R. Wilson who did a lot of Spillane covers. A friend of George R's thinks this mystery cover is his, not Gold Key George's, and she was the one that put us in touch with his widow. But it's still unresolved, she couldn't say for sure. So the contest mentioned in that previous column is still on.

* Chip and the other marketing guys aren't actually showering us with free books -- though that would be awesome! -- rather, they send us password-protected links to PDF's of the books we're asked to look at. It's really very clever and cost-effective for them, and still timely for us. And it works, because if Boom! sends me one I think is really cool, I'll end up going out and buying it. I do sometimes print bits of the PDF out if I think it's something I can use for school, like the thumbnail pages in Talent.

* Is anyone going to answer the guy looking for starter books? Sir, are you interested in trade paperbacks or the standard monthly comics? For trades I might have some suggestions... monthly books, not really. Most superhero books are damnably hard to jump on to in that format, any more, and if you just want to sample things as opposed to jumping on the train for years to come, it gets harder. (One of my big complaints with superhero monthly books is the assumption that readers will blindly commit to six months or a year just to get one story. Decompression works with manga because that comes in digest size, people.)

It would be useful to think of a contrast - a recent major superhero title that was explicitly not a pastiche and went out of its way to break new ground.

It would, wouldn't it? The trouble is, I got as far as, "Morrison's X-Men," and then ran out of gas. And even that was a conscious effort to evoke the feel of the movies and return to the excitement of Claremont/Byrne -- he said so in his proposal. When you limit yourself to Marvel and DC superhero books and ask yourself, what are they trying, what's coming out new? -- well, there just isn't a lot going on that's not a revival, or an edgy new retelling of an old 60's story, or a "return to earlier glories." Welcome to Tranquility, maybe Blue Beetle -- that's about it. And the big sellers are the crossover event books. Innovation in comics is really not to be found in superheroes. You have to look elsewhere, and look HARD if you're in a comics shop and not a bookstore.

The reason I usually expect to get yelled at when I write these assessments is because everyone wants me to conclude with something like "Companies need to stop giving us crap!" and make the publishers the villains, when the real answer is, we need to stop demanding it. This is all market-driven, they do it because it sells. Apodaca and comb&razor, between them, nailed it. Yes, it's a self-imposed burden, but it's there because of what the sales figures are telling them -- that's what creates the fear that Comic Book Guys will shun them if they don't go that direction. Hence, Comic Book Guy is driving the industry. QED.

Is there more than one definition of “pastiche” going on here? I always understood it as a hodgepodge...it seems like you, Greg, and many commenters mean pastiche not so much as a medley of influences, but as an homage/rip-off of one particular source.

According to Wikipedia it means both. It says the hodgepodge definition came first, but I've always only heard it in the context of imitation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche

His site deals mainly with advertising artists from the 40s and 50s, but he may be able to shed some light on a few of the more mysterious artists you've spotlighted. Or, he may be able to point you in the direction of someone with more information.

I don't hear those comments about "lacking weight". I see lots of people talking about how refreshing it is to see done-in-ones. Maybe I've just been talking to the right people.

All it takes to not write stuff like that is to just not do it. There’s no law that any Batman story has to correlate with any other.

no, it's a burden imposed by Comic Book Guy, who is ready to scoff and dismiss it as crappy writing or fanfic if its correlation to previous Batman stories (or even concurrent stories running in the 42 other comics Batman appears in that month).

or you hear comments like "it's a nice little continuity-free/standalone story, but i feel like it lacked weight..."

when you’re dealing with longstanding, established properties, anyway… continuity and nostalgia are the Devil and the deep blue sea.

Unless they're not. All it takes to not write stuff like that is to just not do it. There's no law that any Batman story has to correlate with any other. That's a self-imposed burden.