APOKALIPSIS

Today I’m profiled on The Beat @ Publisher’s Weekly, a comics industry blog that I do a bit of work for. Check it out if you want to see stumbling answers to questions about my favorite comics and a horrid picture of me imitating a camel. One of the questions was about the first comic I ever read, which I’m pretty sure was Rescue Ranger #9. It features a cowboy dinosaur on the cover which, in retrospect, explains a lot.

Those of you who are visiting from The Beat, welcome! If you want to check out what I’ve recently written, here’s a brief run-down of last week’s posts:

*A report on a strange Pokemon arcade game, the kind of weird and wonderful thing only found in Japan.

*Musings and photos from a recent hike in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

*Some snark about the Spider-Man/Obama team-up

*A guide to comic book stores in Portland, Oregon.

*A look back at the webcomic I did with wunderkind Peter Brandt back in 2006.

*Some thoughts on Sonic Youth and Marylin Monroe.

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If you want to take a look around, the archives here go back to 2001 and cover my adventures in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Borneo, Australia, Spain, Italy, Canada and everywhere in between.

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I also gained a bit of web notoriety earlier this year for creating a Furious White Boy Mask which surprised me by propagated both near and far, even showing up on a site mostly centered on, well something that rhymes with … hornography.

And perhaps “hornography” is not a good note to end on, but I’m all out of self-promotion. Thanks for stopping by!

I know he looks like a generic comic book black guy, but that is Barak Obama teaming up with Peter Parker in the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. There’s a lot to like about this panel, but my favorite element has to be the way Spidey sort of awkwardly excuses himself from the conversation.

Who hasn’t hasn’t been in a similar situation? There’s no etiquette guide for trying to make small talk with the president-elect shortly after saving him from the forces of evil, so Spider-Man’s kind of on his own. He doesn’t want to seem like a hanger-on, and doesn’t want to draw unneeded attention from the press or super-villains. Plus he’s got to change back into civilian garb to photograph the inauguration. So even though he might want to banter with Obama (who certainly seems to want to banter with Spidey), he beats a hasty, awkward retreat. “Ah yeah … well, I’d better get going, then …”

I just realized that this scene could lead to bizarre Spider-Man/Barak Obama fan-fiction, where they keep trying to hang out and banter and … express their true feelings for each other. But of course, they are from opposite worlds, and society is always coming between them, stopping their relationship from deepening. Until one night when …

No! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Last weekend I took a mini-tour of the comic book shops in Portland, Oregon, which is one of the Comic Book Capitals of America. As a road map, I my copy of The Zinester’s Guide to Portland and this article by Steve Duin of The Oregonian. I made up a list of seven stores I wanted to visit, and made it to six.

Comic book stores are specialty shops, operating in a bit of a niche market. True, there’s a lot of variety within that market, and comics reach a wider audience every year, but sales on the top-selling comics books have declined over the past decade, and hardly any of my friends go to comic shops unless I drag them with me. Also: a lot of comic book stores are not very good. In six years of living in Orange County, I only found one that was actually pleasant to visit.

But not only were each of the stores I visited in Portland completely unique from each other, most of them were also excellent. Most cities would be lucky to have one great comics shop, but PDX has at least five, and they all serve different audiences.

Steven Duin looks at four stores in his article:
* Floating World Comics, which is like a hip indie record store, but with comics!
* Excalibur Books and Comics, an old-school store with hundreds of feet of long boxes full of back issues all organized neatly in alphabetical order.
* Cosmic Monkey, a huge, well-stocked store where you can find just about anything. They also have nice couches.
* Bridge City Comics, which I’ll have to hit up next time because I got lost navigating Portland’s crisscrossing bridges. Duin says it’s Portland’s “best-looking comics shop.”

The other stores I visited were all equally worthy of a good write-up:
*Guapo Comics and Coffee mashes together a cafe and a comics shop and seems like an excellent place to hang out. All the furniture is papered over with old comic book pages, which is not nearly as tacky as it sounds. I can’t speak to the quality of their coffee, but the chai tea was great, and the staff was remarkably friendly. The cafe has lots of places to sit and study — not to mention free wi-fi. But what really surprised me was their selection of zines and mini-comics, which is among the best in an already zine-friendly town.

*Things From Another World is a small chain of stores, owned by Dark Horse Comics, Portland’s biggest comic book publisher, sprinkled throughout Oregon and California. I visited the Sandy Blvd. location, which was the slickest and most corporate-feeling store I visited in Portland. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but compared to the DIY aesthetic of most PDX shops, this was quite the contrast. It felt like it was designed by someone with money and an industrial interior designer. They had a lot of funky Star Wars toys, and there were a couple of dudes playing some sort of role playing game in the center of the room. I’m not sure I’d be a regular visitor, but they were the only place that had the Love & Rockets collection I was looking for.

*Future Dreams is one of the oddest stores, of any kind, that I have ever visited. To get there, you wander through a half-empty warehouse until you find yourself in front of two doors. One goes upstairs to a Jazercise studio. The other leads downstairs to a cramped and disorganized comic book store in the basement that does not seem to have any kind of a business plan. There are huge racks of recent comics which are discounted to $1 to save the staff the trouble of actually filing them with the back issues, which the store is stuffed to the gills with. Frustratingly, most of the trade paperback collections are behind the counter, like cigarettes or expensive firearms. I don’t know if this is to prevent theft or simply because there was no where else to put them. A few DVDs are locked up in a small glass case like pawn shop jewelry, but that could just be to keep them separate from the back issues of Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD that are lying around. This is not a great shop, but it is a fascinating experience, and there are probably lots of bargains to find here — when I visited there was a winter sale going on, with almost everything discounted at least 30%, with bigger discounts for customers who spent $50 or more. Worth seeing before they go out of business.

Visiting all these stores, it seemed clear that each of them served a different sort of customer. I think it’s a great that Portland can support each of these unique stores, as well as many different definitions of what “comics” means.

Regular Apokalipsis readers will remember the late and occasionally lamented webcomic True Tales of Bravery and Honor, which was drawn by Peter Brandt and written by yours truly. We kept to a regular schedule for a year and a half until it became clear that the latest story we were telling was getting out of control and needed to be re-thought from the ground up as something closer to a graphic novel. Hopefully that book will come out sometime this year.

However, the Bravery and Honor website was still hanging around online looking woefully out of date, and since I had to renew the domain registration this week I thought I’d give it a bit of a dusting up so that it at least works as a functional website again.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have built the thing completely differently, because the site has a 2006 design that looks like it’s from 2003, but at least it runs. Kind of like my Great Aunt’s old ’63 Dodge Dart still runs, even though it can’t really top 40 MPH. Think of it as a classic beater of a website, and check it out for comics about ninjas, Air Bud and George Washington.

There is one new comic on there, from when Peter and I were kicking around the idea of starting the comic up again, which I present for you now, faithful blog readers:

TRUE TALES OF ACCOUNTANTS!

(click to see it big)

If you do check out the comic, let me know what you think. This morning I read an article about the carbon cost of Google searches, which made me realize that it costs energy to have anything online, even silly webcomics. Hopefully having Bravery and Honor online is worth the tiny increase in my carbon footprint!

When I am older, I will probably be just as grumpy about consumerism as Calvin’s dad is, and my children will spite me for it.

The final exchange in this strip is eerily prescient considering how well it summarizes what Bush was telling Americans circa 2002. I’m sure it was funnier in 1992 before that bit of hyperbole became a central part of the national dialogue.

Of course, with the economy tanking these days, mocking consumerism seems like a bit of a low blow. This comic is arguably the product of the bullish Clinton era, but as our economy staggers to recover its footing it’s worth considering whether the “manufactured desires” of this strip are what we’re rebuilding toward.

Isn’t there a better way? Well, shouldn’t there be?

This is Doraemon

I was first introduced to Doraemon in Spain, where he appeared as a tiny KinderSurprise toy inside of my friend’s chocolate egg. The toy was just a little figurine that didn’t do much of anything, so the instructions simply explained who Doraemon was.

“Doraemon es el amable gato robotico del siglo XXIV. Tiene un caja extradimensional en su pachuco por ayudar su amigos.

I remember reading that in Spanish and having to ask a friend if I was translating it correctly because it just seemed bizarre. But no, I had understood the description correctly: “Doraemon is the friendly robot cat from the 24th Century. He has an extra-dimensional box in his stomach to help his friends.”

Wow. They had me from robot cat, but the box in his stomach really clinched the deal. That is how you create a compelling cartoon character. I didn’t have to watch a Doraemon cartoon show or read a Doraemon comic to understand the guy, and since he hasn’t made it to the shores of the USA yet, I couldn’t if I wanted to.
On the other hand, he’s big ubiquitous in Japan, where he simultaneously starred in six monthly comic series, each for a different age of children, plus a weekly anime series which produced well over 1,000 episodes from 1979 to 2005, only to be replaced by a new Doreamon anime in 2005 on the occasion of the show’s 25th anniversary. There are upwards of 30 Doraemon feature films, more if you include spin-offs, dozens of video games, and probably gazillions of toys and stationary items. Time Asia magazine named him an Asian Hero in 2002.

Here’s Doraemon’s first appearance, in which he arrives from the future … in a desk?

Unlike fellow superstar Hello Kitty, who is simply a girl kitty-cat with no mouth and a bow, there appears to be an actual story behind Doraemon. He has been sent back in time from the future to make sure that an inept fourth-grader passes his classes and doesn’t screw things up for his descendants. That’s right: it’s like a grade-school version of The Terminator. However, Doraemon assists his young charge not by blowing up everything in their path, but by using that extra-dimensional pocket on his tummy to pull out helpful items from the future when the going gets tough. Who wants a friend like that? I do.

Now, if I were confronted with images of the bubbly blue robo-cat every day of my life, I would probably not find him quite so appealing. But he has successfully crossed over into many other countries, from Algeria and Argentina to Vietnam and Qatar. Doraemon is broadcast around the world, in Italian, in Tagalog, in Hindi, you name it, but Singapore is currently the only place you can watch Doraemon cartoons in English. So unlike a huge percentage of the world’s population, Doraemon is still a novelty to me. After that Kindersurprise wrapper in Spain, I didn’t really encounter him again for years, until I was in Borneo with my sister.

On our first day there, Elizabeth needed to buy a watch before we set out for the jungle, so we risked our lives crossing the main highway into town to go to the shopping mall. We found a little cart there where all sorts of watches were on display at about three US dollars a pop. As the three pre-teen girls who ran the cart helped Elizabeth pick out the perfect watch, I perused the selection to see if there was anything I might like to get. And that’s when I met Doraemon again.

My Doraemon watch was something I was very proud of, because it gave me a reason to talk about a robot cat. People I talked to either had fond childhood memories of the helpful mechanical feline, or they had never heard of him at all. I wore it every day I was in Borneo, along with a bracelet of prayer beads I had bought in Taiwan. I liked to think that the prayer beads signified my quest for spirituality while the Doraemon watch epitomized my thirst for pop culture; on one wrist the sacred, on the other the profane. In reality, I probably just looked a bit silly.

Among my traveling companions however, my watch quickly became notorious for another reason: it broke almost immediately. It continued to tick and to tell time, but the clear plastic cover fell off on the first day I got the watch, which meant there was nothing protecting the hands from being jostled. As a result, my watch told reasonably correct time unless it brushed against something the wrong way. Whenever someone asked me for the time, I had to give them the time “according to Doraemon,” which was something you just had to take on faith.

Having a Doraemon watch, particularly one that couldn’t tell proper time, was a bit absurd. But Doraemon himself is absurd. I suppose for me that’s part of the appeal — he is happy not making any sense at all. If you do a Google image search for “Doraemon” you’ll get a lot of crummy, cutesy pictures that don’t do justice to the idea of a robot cat on a mission from the future, which suggests that a huge part of his global appeal is not that he is absurd, but that he is cute and happy. Fair enough.

I don’t really know that much about the global empire of Doraemon, so I don’t know what drives the franchise. But I did pick up a Doraemon comic while in Borneo, which is reprinted in Chinese on crummy paper, and it is certainly more absurd than it is cute.

On the cover, Doraemon looks blissfully happy (and possibly on drugs), but on the inside, he spends most of his time either frustrated, confused or in a blind rage. For example:

(Doraemon is furious!)

(Doraemon is melancholy [and flying sideways].)

(Doraemon is simply doing all he can!)

These images are all taken from the same two page scan. I don’t really know what’s going on, but it seems to have something to do with magic straws? On the next two pages, part of the exact same story, they decide to build a rocket ship. A rocket ship made of paper and propelled by straws:

Then they go to a jungle planet, get their space ship stolen, and return to earth thanks to propellers which grow out of their heads. I’m not sure if being able to read Chinese would make this comic better or worse.

In just this one poorly printed, pocket-sized comic book, there are more amazing things than I can possibly count or scan for my blog. However, I will post the one panel which convinced me I had to buy this book. Please prepare yourselves, because it is actually horrifying.

Taken on its own, I believe it is a portrait of existential terror, the conflict and overlap between the idealized machine and the deficiencies of the human flesh:

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OH NO, DORAEMON!
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It’s like something from a David Croenberg movie. It’s even greater because of the page that immediately follows it:

Stay strange, robot cat. You’re adored by millions and you have a human crawling out of your chest.

This is an old strip, but I’m working on writing more in the same style. It’s an interesting format to work with — four panels, each with action and narration from the perspective of a single character. Having a set structure I think helps me reign in ideas and keep things simple. I’ve condensed a couple of stories that had previously been sprawling narratives into just this sort of set-up and it seems to work a lot better. You’ll be able to judge for yourself when True Tales of Bravery and Honor relaunches, probably in the winter.

It is apparently impossible for me to go to a comic book store and not spend extravagantly more than whatever my projected budget is. If I plan on spending six dollars, I will spent fifteen; if I plan on spending one thousand dollars, I will spend a million. It’s deeply exponential like that.
I once went into a store with vague intentions of sampling a couple of new books and wound up buying most of Walt Simonson’s run on The Fantastic Four from the late ’80s, a year and a half of Usagi Yojimbo issues and goodness knows whatelse. When the clerk rang up my order, he actually did a doubletake and said, “Whoa, I must have rung that up wrong.” Except that he did not ring it up wrong.
You would think that spending such an unreasonable amount of money would qualify me for some kind of sympathy discount, but no. Comic book shop proprietors do not cut bargains — they need all the cash they can get so that they can support their vinyl action figure habits.
I kid! Kind of.
Irregardless, I got a lot of great stuff tonight when Ed and Nicole and I stopped in to pick up the new Scott Pilgrim book. You probably don’t care, but because I want to go read rather than write up a proper entry, here is what I purchased:

*Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together

*I Killed Adolf Hitler

*The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense: A Plague of Frogs

*Hey, Wait

*World War Hulk #5

*Zombies Calling

*The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier

*Omega The Unknown #1 & #2

The thing is, I am just really glad to live in a world where it is possible to buy books with titles like that.

LATE-BREAKING NEWS: Money is Just Paper and Symbols!
For some reason gambling websites like to link to my pinball stories. This is very curious. Do people gamble on pinball?? I’m going to delete the trackbacks, since they are basically spam, but I have to admit that I did leave them up for a while in the hopes that someone would read my fiction instead of feeding their online poker addiction. Oh well.

PULSE-POUNDING NEWS: I’ve Liked You for a Thousand Years! A Thousand Years!
The new Scott Pilgrim book comes out on Wednesday! I was in Spain when the first book came out, but I did get it for Christmas. My mom said “This looks like something an eight-year-old would read,” but I don’t know anyone in their 20s who has read Scott Pilgrim and not wanted to read more of it.

Now that the series seems to have settled into a groove, I’m not expecting to be blown away like I was by the first two volumes, but book four should be solidly entertaining, and it is the longest one yet! Scott Pilgrim is our Harry Potter.

EARTH-SHAKING NEWS: You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Will I travel with my sister to Borneo?
Will I see a platypus in Australia?
Will I teach tiny Asian children how to say “hello?”
Will I be in China for the Olympics?
The answers must be found! 2008 is the year of the globe!

TOP SECRET NEWS: Mail-Carriers Preform a Valuable Service!

PostSecret is a website where people send in anonymous secrets on postcards, which are then put up for the entire Internet to see. If you are even a little bit hip to the web, you probably know about this. But I didn’t know the shocking origin story behind the site! I just figured some dude was like “hey, you know what would be cool?” but the truth actually involves prophetic dreams, The Little Prince, and secret messages sealed in 47 bottles. Worth reading about.

SPORTING NEWS: Everyone Loves Sports!
At the start of the season I won six straight games of fantasy football, but if things keep going this way, I’m going to blow it and lose the next six. Having a .500 record basically cancels everything out, and leaves you in a neutral space between winning and losing, which is kind of the same as NEVER PLAYING AT ALL. Strange.

THAT IS THE NEWS! Don’t worry, there will always be more news tomorrow.

What if instead of rambling entries about unrelated subjects, I wrote this weblog as a series of short regular columns? It would probably look something like this…

Return of “You Know You’re a Bachelor When“:

You know you’re a bachelor when your dinner of leftover Rice-A-Roni is accompanied by a rum and coke — not because you’re particularly in the mood for drinking, but because your roommate is having an open-bar party and you have run out of soy milk and OJ.

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Return of “Why Oh Why Am I Still Living in Orange County?” (it never actually left!):
Do you know what is happening in Portland, Oregon these days? According to these two articles from The Oregonian, this is what is happening…

* Young men and women are getting together to drink whiskey and make pies for free to give away to whoever wants them. —> “In Pie We Crust”

* Everyone is making comic books. —> A nerdy DIY crowd in town? It’s comics

These are amazing goings-on! My mom sent both of these links to me — do you think she is trying to convince me to move to PDX? My bags are half-packed already!

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Debut of “Aaron Knows The Hottest Fashions In Town!“:

Headbands! Why aren’t more people wearing these?? A girl in a headband looks sharp and put-together! A dude in a headband looks like he’s got things going on that you do not want to mess with!

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Further adventures of “Useless, One Sentence Music Reviews“:

The Smiths — A lot of people really love this band, which I guess is warranted because their music is pretty good, but it is hard for me to believe that you can simultaneously really love The Smiths AND also enjoy being happy.

The Wallflowers — If you took every radiorock band from the ’90s and made a composite of them which negated all their individual characteristics, it would probably sound like The Wallflowers.

Belle and Sebastian — Have recorded some terrificly bouncy pop songs, but seem to be more interested in knitting sweaters and staying indoors.

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Behold the conundrum of “The Etymology Corner“:

Today’s word is: Weblog!
While it has no problem with “blog,” Firefox’s spellchecker doesn’t think “weblog” is a word. And apparently it doesn’t think “spellchecker” is a word, either. I personally think that “weblog” (or “web log” is you must) is a more useful term, as it’s a clearer term. “Blog” has been used as a big buzzword in the last five years, but I think it’s important to remember where the term came from — a blog is just log of something that is kept on the web. People have been keeping chronological records, news posts and diaries on the Internet for over a decade now, but the idea of a “blog” still has this mystique around it. Perhaps that’s because the word sounds funny and strange. “Web log” sounds pretty specific and boring, but “blogging” sounds like it could be anything — from a military maneuver (“We blogged those suckers into oblivion!”) to a medical condition (“Bad news, honey — the doctor says my kidneys are blogging again.”) to an ethusiastic endorsement (“This quiche is blogging incredible!”) or the name of a cyclops (“Fear the wrath of Blog!”).

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Thrill to another installment of “The 1940s Were A Terrific Time For Comic Books!“

From Captain Marvel Storybook #4 (1949)

New Exciting Different!

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From Miss America vol. 2 #6 (1945)

Buckets of Woe!

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From Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #41 (1944)

I am DOOM itself!

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And finally, The Mystery Question Of The Day
Q: Aaron, shouldn’t you probably be doing something else?
A: Yes!