This post is the conclusion of my coverage of the MSU Comics Forum 2009, which began in this post.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:56 PM

It appears I’m missing the “comics in the (university) classroom” panel. Unfortunate, but the name sounds as though it would have some overlap with the previous discussion anyway.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 2:27 PM

I hear clapping coming from within the rinky-dink Spartan room, signaling the end of the discussion that I missed. It was probably scintillating, so pretend I wrote several pages about it.

The next panel begins at 3:00, and will focus on comics creators. While I find the subject of comics framed in a scholarly context to be deliriously interesting, I’ll admit it’s worn a little thin for today, so it’ll be nice to dig into something that’s purely about comics in itself. The discussion will take place among four Michigan comics creators: Gary Scott Beatty (DC’s “Ultimate Guide” series), Ryan Claytor (And Then One Day), Jason Howard (The Astounding Wolf-Man), and David Peterson (Mouse Guard, obviously).

I will sit here with my thumb up my ass until then.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:02 PM

The last panel of the day begins, to “a round of silence,” as Gary Scott Beatty quips.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:08 PM

Petersen, to Beatty’s prompting, discusses achieving the success of Mouse Guard through word-of-mouth and online buzz. He stresses the importance of posting on forums, keeping a current website, and having a healthy amount of luck. Howard (again, to Beatty’s prompting) turns out one issue of Wolf-Man per month. That’s the round of opening subjects.

Ryan Claytor joins the table at this point. Not only is he a Michigan comics artist, but he’s also a teacher here at MSU.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:16 PM

Howard discusses developing artwork from a script. He finds it takes more inspiration to do the quiet, reflective pages than the action-packed “robot fighting a tank” pages. Understandable. The author he works with, Robert Kirkman, sounds like a strong collaborator, though I have no personal experience with The Astounding Wolf-Man.

Petersen, just as much as Claytor in his autobiographical work, mines his life to inform his stories. His characters in Mouse Guard are based, to some extent, on people he knows. It isn’t a process of writing his friends into the story, but lifting certain personality traits that are interesting, have chemistry, and are useful for developing the story.

Apparently, he took almost 10 years to publish Mouse Guard, partially due to his discovery of Redwall. It’s not hard to imagine why, since anybody who knows what Redwall is probably thinks of it when they find out about Mouse Guard.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:27 PM

Beatty is the author of a self-contained series called Jazz: Cool Birth. He makes the point that it’s important to have an artist who’s competent and has an appropriate style, but also has a personality that’s compatible with the material. He has to have a three-dimensional understanding of what the author is trying to say.

Claytor takes the floor to discuss developing art style. He discusses style as the sum of influences, which is a good, if predictable, point that applies universally. He cites the tiny comics in the margins of Mad Magazine as a primary influence. Claytor, incidentally, drew the poster for the Forum this year.

Howard discusses liking certain artists as a kid without knowing why, then figuring it out later as he delved into art himself. He found that he was drawn to very stylistic artists—in other words, artists whose strong sense of identity appeared very directly in their work. The obvious con is that it might not lend itself to marketability (DC and Marvel both always had a “house style” that they preferred their artists to work in), but I doubt that bothers the artists who choose not to work in that fashion.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:49 PM

The next question is on character development and world building. Claytor has the luxury of running his work by the people who appear in it, being an autobiographer. His rule is to be as true to the characters, through action, dialogue, and situational interaction as he possibly can. It’s more about “personality, rather than a cool-looking robot.”

Howard, being an artist, is concerned first and foremost with “What do I want to draw over and over?” He is, of course, being slightly facetious, but it is a very real concern. He has to do the work, and if he loses interest in it, the work will suffer. It also produces an interaction with the author: if he designs something the author finds visually appealing, the author will incorporate it into future scripts.

Petersen has the unique problem of making mice that look convincingly like mice but act convincingly like humans. He has to differentiate them and ensure that their visual differences are significant and reflect their personalities. He also details the interesting process of giving a mouse a beard—a unique challenge, for obvious reasons.

Beatty believes in doing enough thinking about the character and their world that the voice just comes through him, which is fair enough. It’s not so much a conscious process for him as it is an intuitive one. By putting himself at the point of history he’s writing about, he channels the characters and the writing comes out. He doesn’t create worlds, so much as he uses “the world that’s already there.”

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:54 PM

A question from the audience: “What’s the hardest part of making a comic book?” Claytor responds that the writing is the hardest part. He finds it easy to sit down at the drawing board, but the process of creating the characters, revising the stories, and so on and so forth, is the trying part.

Howard quips, “For me, it’s waiting for writing.” In all seriousness, he finds it challenging to get through the work, regardless of whether inspiration is flowing or not. Petersen agrees, and adds that figuring out the layouts and the drawings is a process when he doesn’t already have a good idea on tap.

Beatty’s most difficult part is finding the audience. His books “don’t have spandex, explosions, large breasts…” It’s finding an audience of adult readers who like to read, will accept something different, and so on. He’ll find plenty of sympathy from me.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 4:05 PM

Another audience question: “What do you do to get yourself through [the business process]?” and what happens when art and business collide. Beatty stresses the importance of patience and loving the work, because it isn’t exactly a get-rich-quick scheme. He also details the long process of submissions and rejections, which becomes routine at some point.

Petersen cautions on being smart during that period, so “you don’t lose your shirt.” He finds himself fortunate that he can make money doing this full time, and prefers breaking even doing this than making money doing something he doesn’t love as much. To him, self-promotion is a careful process of providing stuff at multiple price points (ranging from free to rare items at hundreds of dollars) in order to maximize his access to his potential audience.

For Howard, it’s about being able to look at his own work clinically, analyzing it for its professionalism. If he were the big cheese of a company, would he hire himself as an artist, based on this work? He understands that it’s a competitive world, and that he must strive for the best in order to be marketable. It takes a certain level of honesty towards oneself, but also a sense of balance between business acumen and passion.

Claytor seconds everyone else’s answers, and adds that it’s important to keep himself excited about what he’s doing. He discusses setting up tours for himself, to do in-store signings—first regionally, then across the country (plus a couple of Canadian provinces). This was during a summer break after grad school and took place over the course of three months. He also stresses that it’s important to acknowledge his own limitations. He knows his flaws (forgetfulness being an operative example) and compensates for them (keeping extensive documentation for the details of his various engagements). Basically: “Think about what excites you, know your limitations, and work around them.”

Beatty runs a site called Comic Artists Direct, which keeps him in touch with the community of up-and-coming people in comics. He cautions that professional comic book artists have to be able to do everything, making it one of the hardest art jobs in the world.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 4:09 PM

Next comes the announcement of the winner of the amateur comics submissions contest. I’ve said nothing about it so far, and it would be absolutely irrelevant to anybody who isn’t actually here, so I’ll forgo covering this particular part of the event.

That brings this panel, and my participation in the MSU Comics Forum, to a close. Hopefully I’ll make it again next year, and hopefully I’ll have a personal submission for the contest I just mentioned. That ought to give me more reason to talk about it. At any rate, things have been interesting, and I’m glad this opportunity sort of dropped into my lap at the last minute.

This post is a continuation of my coverage of the MSU Comics Forum 2009, which began in my previous post.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:12 AM

I arrive as the artists in the “Artists Alley” are setting up their wares. The panel appears to be taking place in the food court, rather than in the rinky-dink “Spartan rooms,” which live down to their name. The bulk of the nerds have yet to wander in. One of the photographers on hand is the father of one of my school friends. I might say hello, if I manage to struggle out of my shell of curmudgeonity that I’ve carefully constructed over the years.

I would consult an online dictionary in order to find out whether or not “curmudgeonity” is actually a word, but I can’t get an Internet connection for some reason. This campus has a wireless router in every closet, so this is mildly disturbing.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:26 AM

No such luck. We are in one of the rinky-dink Spartan rooms.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:31 AM

I coax my retardedly uncooperative computer to restart itself in the nick of time. The same unintroduced introductory speaker is back for another engagement, plugging the American Studies major that sponsors this event.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:39 AM

This panel is on trends in scholarly comic book studies. One of the panelists is Dr. Randy Scott, curator of the MSU library’s comic book collection—apparently the largest in the world. Dr. Scott appears to share lineage with Jerry Garcia and James Randi. The gentleman currently speaking, Dr. Gary Hoppenstand, reminds me of Steven Spielberg but looks more like George Lucas. In his graduate days, his educators torpedoed his attempt to study comics as an academic subject, leading him in through the side door: pulp heroes and comic strips. Comic books themselves were a verboten subject, surprisingly among fans as much as stodgy academics. And the panel moderator is Joseph Darowski.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:45 AM

Superheroes: the Evolution of a Genre is the first graduate dissertation (that these guys know of) related directly to the comic book form, and it is in publication. This bears looking into. On a side note, the broad sitting next to me keeps creaking her chair and loudly chewing her nails. I hope the sound of my typing is sufficiently irritating to her.

Dr. Hoppenstand perceives a sense of conflict between “fan writers” and “scholarly writers.” Fans perceive scholars as being impermissive to their interests, and scholars view fans as having no critical sense. I’d say this is an accurate observation.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:48 AM

The broad next to me has been on her Blackberry for several minutes. She is fidgeting. I’m sure she’s here strictly as a class assignment, and I’m pretty sure I want to rip her jittering legs out of their sockets.

Hoppenstand has name-dropped Understanding Comics. We’re going to be hearing a lot about this book today. He also name-drops Will Eisner, for the first time in this event and hopefully not the last.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:58 AM

Other areas covered in academics are biographies of important figures in the comics field and studies of comics as a social history. The latter is particularly interesting, as comics were interwoven within 20th century culture in a less obvious but no less important way as films were. Summarizing everything this guy has to say would be an exercise in tedium, so perhaps I’ll write more about it at a later date.

The next category, and one that Dr. Hoppenstand feels is underrepresented, is on character-specific studies. I would personally not be interested in seeing spend too many sleepless nights dissecting the finer points of the X-Men, but to each their own. The reason these books either don’t exist or are underwhelmingly superficial might be because there isn’t enough depth to most superheroes to provide a rigorous study. Feel free to challenge me on this.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 12:07 PM

I have moved to a different seat, leaving the babies to their bottles. The current subject is cultural studies of comics (a euphemism at this point for the cultural theory of superheroes). Hoppenstand is mercifully critical of the “___ and Philosophy” book series, which exists on the dubious merit of providing superficial criticism of pop culture in the major bookstores, by way of lucrative marketing tie-ins.

Randy Scott takes the floor. His personal history of academia and popular culture goes back about a decade further. Scott went from a modest typist to a curator in the library’s special collections department, and is majorly responsible for making MSU an early adopter of comics as a legitimate medium of art and entertainment. He’s certainly responsible for making it the largest collection of comics from around the world, in the world. Bigger than the Library of Congress, even, which keeps only American comics.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 12:16 PM

Scott returns to the subject of fan suspicion, characterizing himself as more of a fan early on than a scholar. It is of possible interest that this was occurring very close to the time of Eisner’s return to comics with A Contract with God. Scott contends that fan scholarship was the only kind of scholarship that existed at the time. Fan scholarship ironically begat the academic scholarship that soon provided its opposition.

His goal, simply put, is to “get everything. Good, bad, bring it all in.” But, he says, there must be a limit, and he’s appealing to his audience to help him decide where to go from here. My personal answer is to find titles that encourage people to believe in the immense artistic potential of comics, to get them to see that talents equivalent to Dickens, O. Henry, or Clarke can be—and, in some cases, have been—applied to the comics medium. I’m not so concerned with getting people to take the Flash seriously as a subject of historical and cultural significance, because that’s such a specialized area of interest. Get them to treat comics as a leading form of art and entertainment that affects the world at large, like film did in the 20th century.

I haven’t fully collected my thoughts on this yet, so I may email him rather than bend his ear now. I’m sure he’s dying to hear from me.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 12:30 PM

According to Dr. Hoppenstand, we’re in the midst of a golden age of comics scholarship. He states, with optimism, that while the field is currently dominated by superheroes, serious scholarship about the minority of literary comics is on the rise, and that the field is wide open. I hope he’s right. Perhaps we’ll see where things are at the MSU Comics Forum, 2019. It does rankle me that there is a an academic course on superhero comics, but not on the so-called independents (i.e. anything not from the tights ‘n’ flights publishers).

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 12:40 PM

An interesting contention from Darowski: literary titles like Maus have encouraged superheroes as an academic subject. I’m not sure how I feel about that. He may be right, but I’m at a loss as to whether or not it’s ultimately a good thing. It may reinforce comics as being forever the territory of superheroes, which is restrictive at best and harmful at worst.

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:00 PM

The current panel is over. Ironically, although the food court is right outside, only Subway is open. Never mind that the food is disgusting; it’s currently overrun by people here for whatever, so it looks like I’ll have to skip the next panel and go find some food.

Held every year on the beautiful campus of Michigan State University, home of the largest public collection of comic books, The Michigan State University Comics Forum is a 2 day event that brings together scholars, creators, and fans in order to explore celebrate the medium of comics, graphic storytelling, and sequential art.

That’s from the MSU Comics Forum website. I’m taking it upon myself to attend both days and record my impressions. Friday evening is the keynote speech, and the panels and meet ‘n’ greet with artists take place during the day on Saturday.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 6:58 PM

The keynote speech begins in two minutes. The scheduled speaker is David Petersen, Eisner-winning artist of Mousegard and native Michigander.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:00 PM

The unintroduced introductory speaker informs us that this is the second annual Comics Forum. I don’t know where I was for the first one, but that explains where I was for the rest of them.

The lecture hall is sparsely populated this evening. Surprisingly, there are a number of females in the room. The second introductory speaker appears to have taken his speech notes verbatim from the website.

Petersen takes the stage, sans microphone. If anybody talks over him, I will kill them. Petersen runs partway through a photographic slideshow of his youth before someone bothers to solve the mic problem. He pointedly restarts with a chuckle. Nerds and technology are an inconsistent mixture.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:09 PM

Children’s books, anthropomorphic animal stories, and Jim Lee are the connective tissue of his influences, hence, Mousegard. I actually don’t have prior knowledge of Mousegard, other than that it exists, but it looks neat. Artwork looks strong, and his summary of its inspiration sounds interesting. I’ll check it out once I’ve gotten through the laundry list of other things I’ve promised myself I’d read.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:15 PM

Ah, the good stuff. He gets through Mouse Guard (the correct spelling this time, I promise) and gets to a slide called “comics as a medium.” This subject matter is my bread and butter, but it’s nice to hear anyway. He runs through several genres and mentions his favorite examples from each, thankfully avoiding tights and flights. I’ve only read a few of these titles.

He singles out nonfiction as a particularly underreported genre, which is interesting. I disagree with the inclusion of Maus, which has a thick enough layer of fictionalization to disqualify it. He points out that it won a Pulitzer, up against “real books,” which I guess is justification enough to get Maus into just about any club.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:21 PM

The next subject is the mythology of comics (and sci-fi/fantasy, and assorted other geekery). Again, nothing new, but it’s fun stuff. Let’s never get tired of the fact that much of modern comics is informed by mythological heroes and story forms of the past. Name your favorite superhero or space opera character. He mentions Star Wars as a childhood influence that informed Mouse Guard, moreso than any ancient myth.

He moves onto comics in education, now. He makes fun of the nerdy smell of 21st Century Comics, the local specialty shop here on campus. I can’t disagree.

Teachers have removed word balloons and captions from Mouse Guard and used single panels as teaching aids. Using this method, kids can learn about the context of a single moment within a narrative, and creatively imagine what happens before and next. A fascinating abandonment of the stigma of comics, and apparently a very effective way of helping kids who are reluctant or unable to read to comprehend the stories.

On a related subject, Petersen has apparently been involved in a program encouraging elementary school boys to read, using adult male mentors. It is an underreported but documented phenomenon that modern public education favors girls over boys, so this is a very prescient response to a major problem.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:39 PM

New slide: “Comics… unique to books and movies.” I like this guy more and more. Category number one is Words & Pictures, which he argues are balanced in comics (as opposed to film, which is mostly picture, and books, which are mostly text). He likens this to ancient pictographs, which predate fully developed textual language.

The next slide is an image from McCloud’s superb “Understanding Comics”—specifically from the section about how comics deal with time. Perhaps I’ll discuss this in detail later; for now, it suffices that this book is fantastic and everybody interested in comics, art, deconstructionism, or any of the other myriad subjects it deals with should read it.

He uses an image from Watchmen to illustrate—what else?—non-linear time, which film cannot accomplish to nearly the same degree of effectiveness. The high-dollar Watchmen movie, currently in theaters, probably provides ironic illustration of this point. Petersen quotes Alan Moore several times, because, let’s face it, Moore has repeated these points so many times that he has them down to a hard science. (Folks: a big beard and a self-righteous attitude do not make you wrong. Just preempting the vocal minority of armchair comic book philosophers who talk more than they think.)

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:42 PM

Comics in the modern day: a topic that necessarily involves comics being used by Hollywood and the video game industry. Petersen points out that comics are basically in ready-to-pitch form, which is a factor of their Hollywood appeal that I hadn’t thought of. He also points out that comics take much less money and manpower to make, which is something that everybody has thought of. More middlemen increase the chances of studio interference, he says. No challenges from me. Collaboration can be a good thing, but not when the people involved are big on money and low on artistic creativity.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:46 PM

Petersen argues that major bookstores and online vendors are restoring accessibility to comics that was lost with the advent of the direct market. I would argue that this might be happening on a modest scale, but it isn’t going to take off unless the major houses reconfigure to a format more suited for bookstore sales. Grinding out floppy monthly issues isn’t going to cut it in a market more suited towards trade paperbacks and honest-to-gosh graphic novels (in other words, self-contained stories that aren’t piled onto month after month of continuity, aren’t serialized with ads for video games and action figures, and so on).

Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:50 PM

He’s onto the ins and outs of self-publishing and small publishing now, which is as good a time as any to mention that one of the features of the Comics Forum is that budding artists can submit their own 10 page comics for consideration by the Forumgoers. I found this out too late, or I’d have submitted an entry of my own. Oh well; there’s (hopefully) always next year.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 8:00 PM

The speech comes to an end. Not too bad. I’m part of a narrow subset of the geek culture that has probably thought of these topics to death already, but he managed to slip in some points that I hadn’t thought of, and related his own experiences with publishing a creator-owned title. Hopefully he’s managed to open the minds of the people in the room who showed up thinking they were in for a point-by-point analysis of Spider-Man’s political biases.

The first Q&A centers on his not-entirely useful experiences with higher education, which brings back the subject of comics in education. His earlier points are reason for optimism in this area, although his personal understanding is, charitably, ambivalent.

Friday, March 27, 2009, 8:14 PM

Another interesting question, which doesn’t necessarily apply to Petersen himself, is about the likelihood of a writer being favorably matched with an artist. It’s an apparently tricky thing to pull off. Perhaps making a name for yourself (a name like Alan Moore) is a good way of earning the ability to choose artists that will suit your material.

The event resumes tomorrow at 11:00 AM. There is a series of panels I’ll be attending, which unfortunately runs concurrently with a meet ‘n’ greet with artists, which I’ll not be attending.

Being a kid is funny. You accept the things told to you by people who are older. You do things because you’re told that it’s good to do them, and you fear certain things because you’re told they’re bad for you. Some of what you’re told is common sense. Some of it’s based in urban myth. Some of it’s downright bizarre.

When I was a kid, I was hanging out at the house of a school friend. I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but he said to me, “You know how sumo wrestlers get so fat?” “No,” I responded.” He revealed, “They eat and then they go right to sleep. They’re not doing anything physical, so the food all gets stored as fat.” On another occasion, I heard his dad caution him against eating right before bed, so that his body wouldn’t be digesting while he slept.

It seemed reasonable enough, especially for a kid. The theory was that eating right before going to sleep will make you fat. Undergoing the digestive process without engaging in fat-burning activities was the proposed physical mechanism. There was an endorsement from an authority figure—my friend’s father, in this case. It was so airtight, so utterly convincing, that I believed it for years.

In fact, I never stopped believing it, never even considered that it might be wrong, until somewhat recently. I was reading an article published by the British Medical Journal, which had done an inquiry into the subject. The findings were quite surprising: this very plausible-sounding morsel of conventional wisdom has no basis in fact. There is no empirical evidence to support that eating right before going to sleep will make you any fatter than eating at any other time.

So, if there’s nothing factual to back it up, how did it become so entrenched as an urban myth? In our modern world, with so much information available at our fingertips, it seems shocking that such misinformation could endure to this day. The answer is simple. It’s one thing to have the information. It’s quite another to interpret the information correctly.

The BMJ arrived at its conclusion by examining various scientific studies that did, in fact, show a correlation between obesity and eating right before bed. But, as the old adage goes, correlation does not imply causation. What we have evidence of is a link between eating at night and obesity. The evidence does not demonstrate a causal connection. A causal connection that has been demonstrated, again and again, is that eating more tends to cause obesity. People who eat more at night likely eat more in general, hence the connection.

(As near as I can figure, the journalists who originally covered those studies probably did what journalists usually do. They eschewed the straight truth and went for the sensational angle: “DOES EATING AT NIGHT CAUSE OBESITY? MAYBE, SAYS NEW STUDY.” You know how it is.)

We sometimes hold things to be true without really thinking about them. For adults, the usefulness of a belief is often more immediately important than its truth. For kids, utility and truth both take a backseat to the say-so of adults. Natural selection has favored these heuristic processes, because it’s safer to not eat the colorful berries at all than to systematically test which ones are poisonous and which ones aren’t. It’s better to stay away from beehives altogether, rather than hit them with a stick to see how long it’ll take to piss off the bees. It’s better not to throw rocks at the bear at all, rather than… you see the point.

Critical thinking is obviously not a top priority when you’ve got nothing but a loincloth and a spear to keep you alive. However, in modern life, we rarely run into bears, and the people who are stupid enough to piss off the bees can always run inside and slam the screen door. Couple that with the complexities of an increasingly globalized society, plus the ever-expanding scope of our knowledge of the universe around us, and you see the rising importance of rationality and reason. Eating at night is a relatively harmless example, but what of other beliefs? The bullshit we take for granted can be eventually embarrassing in hindsight, but also directly harmful to our well being.

The article from the BMJ can be found here. Incidentally, it also nukes the myth that sugar makes kids hyperactive. Screwy, ain’t it?