Lauren RabainoSo I was up in San Francisco a few days ago, as a final hoorah before the new quarter, with a couple dear friends of mine. On my visit I made it my goal to go to at least one of Frisco’s comic book shops. Now, before any of you Bay Area people flame me with hate e-mail about calling San Francisco “Frisco,” you would only be wasting your time. I’ll call that city anything I darn well please. Maybe even San Fran. How do you like that? Luckily, the place we were staying was a short hung-over walk to the rather great Comix Experience. Let me tell you, I could have spent days in that place, and I would have too. But my friends had to eat and get coffee, etc.
Anyway, while rummaging through their rather fine sale rack, I was wondering what the hell I was going to write about for my first article back from vacation. Then I thought to myself, “You know Jon, most people who read your articles are probably thinking that either comics are really lame or that you are a complete dork.” And you know, the latter may be true, but definitely not the former. So I think a bit of explanation is in order.
Most often, when you hear someone say comic book, you’re probably going to think of your classic Silver Age (roughly the mid-1950s to the late 1960s) kind of comic: the stereotypical super hero (Superman) kicking the crap out of super villains. And you know, a lot of the time, you might actually be right. I mean, hey, I love to see a villain get kicked in the face, but the difference between comics now and, say, 50 years ago, is incredible. For one thing, the printing of comics has vastly improved. That old rough and color deficient paper of yore has been replaced with crisp, shiny and beautiful paper that allows for such a greater potential for spectacular artists to showcase their work. But even so, what comics really needed was a great awakening in writing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work of Stan Lee, Gardner Fox and all those other legends, but writers like Geoff Johns are phenomenal in so many more ways by taking those original characters and actually making them interesting besides their super powers. I mean, if you compared the Flash to Green Lantern back in the ’60s, they were entirely interchangeable, save their powers.
And that’s just superhero comics. I’m pretty sure there is a comic book about pretty much anything imaginable. For example, do you like cats? You do!? Well, I just bought a rather adorable comic called “Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations” by Jeffrey Brown. Basically, Brown loves his cat and draws a cat getting into little shenanigans around the house. It sounds really dumb, but believe me, it’s great.
Anyway, I should probably get to the point here. What I really love and appreciate about comic books, as an art form, is the means by which writers and artists are able to tell a story that is at once visually stimulating, but also leaves much up the reader’s imagination. You know how everyone always says that the book was better than the movie? Well, that’s mostly because in the movie you only see the perspective of the director, unlike the book. But you know, books can be really dumb and entirely too long. So with comics you truly have the best of both worlds.
On a more personal note, for those of you who might be wondering: my favorite super hero is Green Lantern (Hal Jordan, though, of course – has been since I was a kid); my favorite comic book artist is probably Mike Mignola (I love his work, but it is rather specific to the whole horror/pulp genre) and my guilty pleasure is definitely old Aquaman comics from the ’50s/’60s (so good!). I also love drinking coffee, watching “The Office,” and in case any of you ladies out there were wondering, I don’t currently have a girlfriend.
Be sure to check in next week for my review of Hellboy – everyone’s favorite half-demon creature. thing.