My Graphic Novel Shelf, A to Z: #8 of 27: G

On the shelf:

Garden Dreams by Fumi Yoshinaga: Gently melancholy stories about lost love set in a vaguely Medieval-Europe-like setting. Looks like it's going to swerve into BL territory at a couple of points but never actually goes there. Mostly worth it to me because I adore Yoshinaga's art; the story is decent enough but not spectacular, and fizzles out in the end rather than coming to a resolution.

The Complete Geisha by Andi Watson: The bulk of this volume is early Watson, with some later short stories included at the end; it's interesting to compare the styles. Watson's art has grown looser and sketchier, more open, with the passing of time. I prefer the later style; it's more distinctive. In any case, Geisha is about a robot who wants to be an artist in a society that doesn't recognise robots' capacity for original thought. It's thoughtful and sensitive, the characters well-drawn and sympathetic, and if the story doesn't quite hang together as well as it might, it doesn't bother me as much as it would with another creator.

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds: There is only one word for Gemma Bovery and that word is masterly. Simmonds mercilessly cuts to the heart of the banal selfishness of everyday life, the illusions we use to shield ourselves from reality and the harm those illusions cause when they're torn away.

Gerard & Jacques volume 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga: I haven't been able to find Volume 1 in brick & mortar shops; it's terribly frustrating. Though, probably not as frustrating as having Volume 1 and not being able to find Volume 2. This is a BL book, and it gets highly explicit... eventually. It was my first encounter with Fumi Yoshinaga, and it made me eager for more. Oh, the plot? Well, we're in Revolutionary France, Gerard is a nobleman who makes a living writing erotic novels, Jacques is his manservant who became his manservant after Gerard bought him from a brothel, and in between fleeing the Jacobins and negotiating the difficulties inherent in a master-servant romance begun in such unpromising circumstances, they find time to fall in love and have sex. And they do it beautifully.

Get Your War On II by David Rees: A collection of Rees' satirical clipart comics, which are also available on his website (along with such modern gems as My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable and Adventures of Confessions of St Augustine Bear).

Gods & Undergrads by Monica Gallagher: Apparently this was a webcomic first? If I hadn't learned that fact from the blurb, I probably would have figured it out halfway through, because Gods & Undergrads suffers the typical flaws of long-form webcomics: the plot meanders like crazy and the art's not quite at professional level. The story (a contemporary fantasy about Greek deities bursting through into the mundane world) is promising, and in a few years Monica Gallagher will be worth watching, but she's not there yet.

Good As Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm: One of the first-wave Minx titles. While it's not the best-constructed of the lot, it's the one that had the most emotional impact on me. Kim captures the pains and difficulties of Grace's situation perfectly; I cried while reading it. Multiple times.

Gorgeous Carat volume 1 by You Higiri: I don't remember anything about this except that it's a BL title about a jewel thief. I think I wanted to like it because the art was good, but it just didn't grab me.

Gothic Sports volume 1 by Anike Hage: Apparently comics creators in Germany who draw in a manga-influenced style draw from right to left. This enrages me beyond the telling of it. However, that's not what killed my interest in Gothic Sports: a reasonably good premise for a teen comedy-drama is ruined by having too little story stretched out over too many pages, making the whole thing flat and lifeless.

Go With Grace by George Alexopoulos: A melancholy ghost story which I thoroughly enjoyed, except for the ending; it seemed to romanticise teenage suicide in a way that I found distasteful.

Gravitation volumes 1-2 by Maki Murakami: Bouncy, funny, sometimes ludicrous, sometimes romantic; this is a series that I never completely warmed to. It was always just a little bit too silly for me. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it held on to enough of a semblance of attachment to reality that its departures into wackiness didn't quite work for me. Apparently it changes direction a few volumes in, but I could never be bothered getting that far.

Gray Horses by Hope Larson: I had a dream about this after I read it. It was bilingual in English and French, just like the dreams in the book. There is a dream-like quality to Larson's art, and a gentle wisdom to her writing, that makes her unlike any other comics creator around. It's rare for someone so young to produce work so smooth or so assured. I can't wait to see where her muse takes her in the future.


Unshelved:

Gakuen Heaven by You Higiri: Good Lord, this is dreadful. I mean, really dreadful, why-the-bloody-hell-did-I-spend-money-on-this dreadful. I'd be the first to admit that I don't read BL for the plot, but if there is a plot, I expect it to be a bit less nonsensical and a bit more substantial than this. The story is based on a dating sim, which probably explains why the main character is so bland. The awful thing is, the terrible story is wedded to really gorgeous art. If I had read this in the original Japanese (Japanese being a language I do not speak), I'd probably have really enjoyed it.

Gyakushu! volumes 1-2 by Dan Hipp: I've talked at some length about why I think Gyakushu! is both excellent and more complex than it at first appears.

Tips for new comics publishers

Over the years, I've seen a lot of new comics publishers float onto the scene like dandelion seeds; some of them put down roots and become part of the landscape, but most of them get blown away on the wind. They make the same mistakes over and over again, as if they knew nothing about what their predecessors had done -- and maybe they don't; maybe that's the problem. Maybe we don't talk enough about failures, or about the reasons why publishers fail. Maybe it would be useful to have a list of do's and don'ts for aspiring publishers to refer to. Here are my observations, for what they're worth.

First, the don'ts:

1. Don't run before you can walk.

It seems to me that the #1 biggest cause of failure among new comics publishers is a mismatch of ambition and capacity. Either they're undercapitalised and can't follow through on their initial plans, or they start well and then expand too quickly, becoming victims of their own success. For example: Archaia Studios Press did a terrific job with David Petersen's Mouse Guard, among others, but it's been running into problems lately: its publishing schedule got so big that the people running the company couldn't handle it any more, which resulted in delays. It's too soon to say whether ASP will be able to recover from this setback, but more judicious planning would have saved them from it in the first place.


2. Don't try to compete with the big boys on their own ground.

It's probably not a good idea to try to break into superhero comics publishing. It's definitely not a good idea to try to create an overarching "universe" from a blank slate. DC and Marvel fill that niche so thoroughly that there isn't as much as a millimetre of wiggle room. If you can manage to snag an artist, or (better yet) a writer who's known for their Big Two work, maybe you might be able to make some headway (Boom! Studios did reasonably well with Hero Squared by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis), but otherwise, try something else. Horror, or autobiography, or spy fiction, or children's comics; anything that doesn't belong (lock, stock and barrel) to competitors with more money, more experience, and infinitely more reader loyalty than you have at your disposal.


3. Don't screw the talent.

I would put this in blinking sparkly 72-point type if I could do that without breaking my layout. Don't screw the talent. Do NOT screw the talent. DO NOT SCREW THE TALENT!

Do not offer work-for-hire contracts to new creators who don't know any better. Do not offer contracts that look like creator-ownership contracts but are so hedged around with conditions that they're effectively work-for-hire. Do not tie up subsidiary rights that you're probably never going to have the time or resources to exploit on your creators' behalf. Do not hide nasty surprises in the small print. Do not make promises about marketing and promotion that you have no intention of fulfilling. Do not cap royalties. Do not delay payments. Do not refuse payments. Above all, do not lie.

You may be tempted -- after all, screwing the talent is almost a tradition in American comics. DON'T DO IT. Firstly, although you may be able to bamboozle creators who are new to the industry and haven't heard the horror stories (or have heard them and are naive enough to think "well, that's not going to happen to me"), if your contracts are bad, the more experienced creators will run a country mile to get away from you, and they will tell their friends. Secondly, nobody stays naive forever. Even the apple-cheeked youngsters who willingly sign away their firstborn creative children will figure out how restrictive your contracts are as soon as they start being restricted by them -- and you can bet your ass they'll never sign another one. Do you think Ross Campbell's ever going to work for Tokyopop again?

You may want to make some objection here, based on the way [famous creator] got treated badly by DC or Marvel and then made nice with them a few years later. And it's not really fair that the Big Two get to act like bastards and then still hoover up the big name talents they were screwing last year, but, well, life isn't fair. The Big Two are The Big Two: they have money, they have prestige, they have history, they have reader loyalty, and they have an unassailably dominant position in the Direct Market. They can get away with stuff you should never even think about trying. As a new publisher, you need to be able to attract talent, and you won't do that if the talent gets a whiff of exploitative intentions.


4. Don't overestimate your audience.

I don't mean that you should assume that your audience are idiots; I mean that firstly, you should have a realistic assessment of how many people are potentially interested in what you're selling; secondly, you shouldn't bank on your initial audience remaining loyal if you screw up; and thirdly, you shouldn't assume that your audience will be flexible enough to accommodate shifts in the nature of what you publish. If you decide to change directions, you'll need to find an entirely new audience, because the chances are the old audience won't come along with you.

It is probably safe to assume that your audience is small, fickle, and easily distracted, with annoyingly precise desires that are constantly changing in unpredictable ways. Welcome to publishing: we never said it was going to be easy.


5. Don't rely on verbal contracts or expect anyone you deal with to accept verbal contracts from you.

If you are in a position of power, a "verbal contract" is a wonderful thing -- for you, that is. Because, if you're in a position of power, your verbal contracts say whatever the hell you want them to say. You're like Big Julie from Guys and Dolls, who always wins when he plays dice because the dice he plays with are blank, and nobody is going to tell Big Julie that that's not how the game's supposed to work.

You may have already detected a theme in this list, which should give you a hint as to why I don't think this applies to you. Yup, you guessed it: the reason why you shouldn't act like Big Julie is because you're not Big Julie. As a new publisher, you do not have the kind of leverage that can make verbal contracts work for you. And that's only considering the situation from a pragmatic point of view; from an ethical perspective, verbal contracts are highly dubious. It's just wrong to expect people to work with you or for you without giving them a concrete and legally binding guarantee that you'll hold up your end of the bargain. It's not fair, and it's probably going to harm you in the long run (see #3).


And the do's:

1. Do put as much effort and thought as possible into marketing.

See this guy?



You don't want to be this guy. Granted, if you don't have the right personality for it, marketing is tedious and irritating and exhausting. Sometimes it can be like asking ten thousand people out on dates and getting replies from ten of them. Unless you're one of those miraculous people who enjoys marketing, you are going to have to force yourself to do it, but you must do it. Too many comics publishers attended the Field of Dreams school of marketing -- "if you build it, they will come". There's a grain of truth in that phrase, in that good quality work doesn't need to be elaborately hyped in order to attract an audience -- but people still need to know that it exists, and they won't unless you market it to them.

You have to be intelligent about it, though. Johanna Draper Carlson has a list of stupid publisher tricks, most of them marketing-related: spelling the name of the book wrong in the press release, sending out press releases to report events that are not newsworthy, attempting to guilt-trip reviewers into reviewing your book, maintaining a website which does not include the most pertinent information, et cetera. It's not enough to throw hype out into the void and hope some of it sticks. You need to be professional about it, or else your efforts may end up doing more harm than good.


2. Do take risks on work that looks good, even if it doesn't look like anything else on the market.

Nobody knows what the next big thing is going to look like. Nobody. Not even the readers know what's going to capture their imaginations; it's a question with an unfathomable answer. A lot of the time, readers are conservative and happy with something that's very like what they got yesterday; but the really lasting works are often the ones that break new ground. As such, it's often worth going out on a limb for a work that looks odd or even freakish, provided it's good enough. There's no way to be sure that it is "good enough", of course. That's what your judgement is for. You need to be able to trust your judgement, otherwise you have no business being in publishing.


3. Do get distribution outside the Direct Market if you possibly can.

Non-DM distribution is riskier for a publisher because unlike in the DM, products sold through bookstores are returnable. All the same, the DM is so small by comparison that the odds are the risk will be worth it. The potential returns are much greater, and if you're publishing anything other than superheroes or superhero-slipstream titles (and you should be; see Don't #2 above), the DM is not only much smaller than the bookstore market, it is more conservative and less flexible.


4. Do be in it for the comics.

You may be thinking: "wow, there's a lot of money in licensing comics properties to make movies/T-shirts/TV series/miscellaneous merchandise. I should set up a publishing company to handle comics so that I can use them as a springboard to get into Hollywood!" If you think you're the first person to have this idea, you're wrong. If you think you have a snowball's chance in hell of making it work, you're also wrong. One of the most frequent warning signs that a new (or new-ish) comics company is about to go down the tubes is the declaration that they're shifting attention to focus on licensing, or getting investment from a media development company. There are a couple of reasons why this is bad: firstly, until a publishing company has been around for a good while, they typically don't have many products to license, which limits the amount of money they can make from licenses to "less than they need to stay afloat". Secondly, if you're in comics to get into movies, your attention won't be firmly on the books you're publishing. Your passion will be elsewhere, and that will be reflected in the way you run your business.

Speaking as a reader, a critic, a fan, a person for whom comics are her primary passion: if you're not in it for the comics, we don't need you. The comics market does not need indifferent publishers who don't care about comics as comics. The comics market needs publishers who love comics for themselves, not as a stepping stone. There's nothing wrong with being in it for the money, and licensing properties is certainly a legitimate way to make money, but if you're the kind of publisher the market needs, you won't look at the licensing money as an end in itself, but rather as a means to keep your business going so that you can support your creators and keep publishing comics.


5. Do seek out advice and assistance from people with skills and experience you lack.

Anything you don't know can harm you. It is highly likely that there's somebody out there who knows the stuff you don't know and need to know. Ask questions, take notes, do frequent Google searches for things that other publishers are saying -- comics publishers are strangely willing to give advice on how to become better at competing with them -- and above all, pay attention to the histories of companies that failed. Watch out for the warning signs, figure out what they mean in terms of what's happening behind the scenes, and try to avoid falling into the same traps.

Francophile Friday: Purgatoire, Sorcières

Bandes dessinées

Purgatoire and Sorcières are both by an artist named Chabouté; I read Purgatoire first, although Sorcières is the earlier work.

Purgatoire is a kind of moral drama, with a supernatural element that may or may not be real. The young Benjamin Tartouche loses everything he has in a fire, and is further impoverished by the machinations of his insurer, an evil, greedy man; Benjamin dies and finds himself in a black void, populated by people in old-fashioned clothes, with two lifts: one going up, one going down. A clerk informs him that he is in what might as well be called Purgatory, and that he cannot take the lift up without serving out a sentence: he can return to earth and function as a conscience for human beings, the little voice that they hear in their heads that tells them the right thing to do. They won't see him, or even hear him (at least not consciously), and while he will be able to see and be seen by the other lost souls serving as consciences, they cannot speak to each other. He has been assigned one particular person who needs to be set back on the right path, but he hasn't been told who that person is, and he won't know who it is until he does his duty and finds himself back in the void, in front of the lift that goes up.

Purgatoire has a loose, spacious feel that's relatively rare in French comics. The "Purgatory" concept doesn't even appear until the second volume. I'd hesitate to say this comes from a manga influence, since Purgatoire is not very manga-esque in other ways, but the word that kept coming to mind was "decompressed". It's an effective way of telling the story: for all that it moves slowly in terms of events-per-page, it's utterly gripping to read, and the emotional arc is both satisfying and unexpected. I found it very moving, especially when Benjamin was acting as the conscience to random passers-by; Chabouté focuses on small changes of direction, like not exploding in anger because your car's broken down, or making an effort to be nice to your spouse so that your relationship doesn't just founder in indifference; above all, he dwells on the importance of holding on to life and appreciating the joys it can bring.

On the strength of Purgatoire, I checked out Chabouté's earlier work Sorcières. Sorcières is a collection of linked short stories (some only four pages long) about witches. And not your hippy-dippy neo-pagan in-touch-with-the-earth witches, either; no, these are crones and hags straight out of the Brothers Grimm, dealers in curses and voodoo dolls and love potions. Some of the stories are about real magic working in a grimly ironic way; others are about charlatans exploiting the superstitious. (In "Cartomancie", for example, a man is having his fortune told by a Tarot reader. He picks a card: Death! Er... perhaps I misdealt! says the fortune teller; I'll deal again. She deals again. He picks a card. Death! This happens three or four times, with both the fortune teller and the client becoming increasingly agitated, until the client is so spooked that he flees the house. Once he's gone, we see the fortune teller calmly flipping over all the cards -- every one of them a Death card...) They're all vivid and a little grotesque. Chabouté's black-and-white art for Sorcières has a looser, sketchier feel than the colour work in Purgatoire, and I like it better; it has more character. His wrinkled old crones and saggy old men are bristling with individuality.

The DFC: the verdict

A while back, I reviewed the first issue of the brand new British kids' comic The DFC for the Forbidden Planet blog, Now that I've received four copies in total, I need to make a decision: do I cancel my subscription, or do I keep reading?

I'm going to keep reading. I had mixed feelings about the first issue, and I'm still not able to give it a 100% positive rating ("New at the Zoo" is excruciatingly unfunny, and I'm 20 years too old for the puzzles and the Doodlit feature), but overall it's really impressive. "The Spider Moon" continues to be the high point of every issue -- Kate Brown's delicately gorgeous artwork and enchanting storytelling lift my heart every time. The other stories are much improved from their first instalments: "John Blake", written by Philip Pullman, is showing signs of having a plot, which you wouldn't have guessed from the first chapter; "The Boss" is good old-fashioned "they fight crime!"-type fun; "Monkey Nuts" is funny; "Super Animal Adventure Squad" is really funny; "Mo-Bot High" has the kind of high-concept hook that it would be very hard to mess up (and they don't); "Good Dog, Bad Dog" is both funny and clever; and while "Vern and Lettuce" never actually makes me laugh, it has a whimsical charm and a soothing visual style that always pleases me.

I'm not the target market. I'm not even close to the target market. The DFC is meant to be for kids: I'm not a kid, and I don't have any kids of my own. The fact that one 29-year-old single comics critic loves The DFC is not necessarily indicative of... well, anything in particular. I think it's great; I think I would have loved it even more if I'd been able to read it when I was a kid. I think it's head and shoulders above anything comparable on the British market -- not just what's on the market now, but anything that's ever been on the market. Yeah, you heard me: I think The DFC now is better than Bunty and The Beano were when I was five. You'd better believe that's high praise.

Francophile Friday: The Last Mitterand, The City of Lost Children

Bandes Dessinées

This week I tried, and failed, to read the first volume of Bourgeon's Les Passagers du Vent. I don't know why it was so hard. Perhaps the language is a little old-fashioned. I couldn't handle it, which is a shame, because it looks like fun: an adventure story set in the Age of Sail. Another time.

Films

The Last Mitterand would be rather boring if not for the performance of Michel Bouquet as Mitterand. Bouquet has such charisma that there were moments when I forgot that I was watching an actor play Mitterand: when he said "I am the last of the great presidents, the presidents of the line of de Gaulle", I believed him completely. I'm sure I was missing a lot of nuances that someone who knew more than I do about the last thirty years of French history would have picked up on, and whenever the camera looked away from Bouquet it dragged, but it was worth watching.

I'm a little surprised that it's taken me this long to watch The City of Lost Children. In concept, it's right up my street: whimsical steampunk-like science fiction with a fairytale air. And yet, it didn't quite grab me as much I was hoping it would. I'm not sure why; it didn't help that I was watching it with one eye on the clock so I wouldn't end up being late for the gig I was going to that evening, but that wasn't really it. Was it Ron Perlman's accent? Was it the slight stageyness of the setting? Was it that there were too many moments when I couldn't quite figure out where the story was going or what, exactly, was going on? I'm not sure, and it's a disappointment, because there's an awful lot to love in The City of Lost Children. It just didn't quite come together for me.