Heresy at the comics shop

I'm starting to feel more at home when I visit comics stores these days, by which I mean that I can comfortably swap artists' and writers' last names with the proprietors and clerks, and I often know who we're talking about.

But I committed a heresy today when checking out with my purchases of the two hardcover collections you see here. One thing I like about these two books, I said to the woman working the cash register, is that they're nothing but story: no extra crap.

I understand that extra material in hardcover comics collections and trade paperbacks may interest hardcore comicheads, but, as I wrote after reading the "definitive edition" of the fine Queen and Country espionage/soap opera comic, the third omnibus of which collects four fewer issues than do the first two omnibuses:

"The modern comic-book industry sells and resells the same stories, publishing `special editions' and bundling books into collections and collections into mega-collections, adding scripts, sketches and other extras at each step to flesh out the page count and entice potential buyers who have already read the stories elsewhere."

But that didn't matter because the clerk still gave me the sort of frozen smile I'd have got if I'd broken wind at a formal dinner. I got a kick out of her discomfort, but maybe you should be careful about what you say when buying comics.

Back to the books I bought before I farted in the temple: If You Steal by the one-named Norwegian cartoonist Jason, whose Left Bank Gang, which I read a few years ago, brings Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce together in Paris as anthropomorphic animals who plan a bank heist (I dare to try to resist that premise), and the first volume of Jacques Tardi 's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Crime fiction readers may know Tardi for his graphic-novel adaptations of Jean-Patrick Manchette's noir classics. I'll report back when I've read them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

What do comics do better than, er, non-comics?

I read a few comics last week, which got me thinking about how comics tell stories. Here's an old post that asks a similar question.

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I recently read a crime novel whose one distracting quirk was an occasional paragraph of dialogue or exposition that read like an editorial comment or an information dump.

I've also been reading Greg Rucka's Queen & Country, a comic set in the contemporary world of British intelligence, and it occurred to me that comics can sometimes convey information more efficiently than non-graphic books — verbal information, I mean.

Say an author decides the contents of a report about complex, high-level, multinational drug, arms and financial transactions are essential to his or her story. How is the author to convey that information without dragging the story to halt?

Queen & Country's characters spend good chunks of their time at their desks discussing intelligence and other data, but the discussion is never boring. One reason is that we can see their reactions.

A spy chief might slap a report on his desk in disgust or grit his teeth as a superior shoots down his plans. It's a lot easier on a reader to see a skilled graphic rendering of such reactions than it is to read: "He slapped the report on his desk in disgust, grinding his teeth as his superior shot down his plans."

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What else can comics do better or more efficiently than traditional novels and stories? What can traditional stories do better? Have you ever read a scene in one medium that you thought would work better in another?

Rucka himself provides an opportunity to test these questions. He has written several novels based on the graphic-novel series. Read excerpts here and here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The comic with something extra

The Golden Age of comics ended in the 1940s or early 1950s, but the High Tang dynasty of comic-book packaging is in full flower now.

I've just finished Volume 3 of Queen and Country: The Definitive Edition, not to be confused with the Queen and Country collected editions or plain old Queen and Country. The modern comic-book industry sells and resells the same stories, publishing "special editions" and bundling books into collections and collections into mega-collections, adding scripts, sketches and other extras at each step to flesh out the page count and entice potential buyers who have already read the stories elsewhere.

Each of the first two volumes of QAC:TDE collects twelve issues of the original comic, leaving just eight for Volume 3. The publishers filled out the space with a lengthy script, notes on the characters, and sketches. I'd rather have more story, because these dramas of adventure on the front lines and behind the scenes of British intelligence are damn good, and I may post about them one day.

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For now, how do you feel about extras, whether sketches of a super sidekick, commentary tracks on a movie DVD, or new tracks on a greatest-hits album? Are they desirable enhancements, or marketing schlock? What are your favorite and least favorite extras?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010