Issue #2 Introduction

While I don't know that an introduction from me will help the sales of this book, as I am not, and never was, a hot name in comics, I am very happy to talk for a moment about the only comic I read regularly - DARK RED - and more generally about photorealistic comics.

I worked only briefly in comics, or comix as we called them, for parts of four years in the early 1990's. Our company was called CDI, standing for Constant Developments Inc. The company was basically started by George Caragonne, a brilliant guy who died too young, and we essentially produced three comix magazines: Penthouse Comix, Men's Adventure Comix, and Omni Comix. These were anthology comix, with stories mostly running around 8 pages and amounting to a magazine of about 96 pages. Penthouse Comix and Men's Adventure Comix sold very well, better than similar magazines like HEAVY METAL. In terms of dollars, they were regularly in the top ten in terms of money makers since they were fairly expensive (around $10 American). Although it seems like we worked on these forever, at the end of the day we did a total of 13 magazines. We were forced out by elements of the company we were producing the mags for, General Media, and people in CDI who thought they could run the company and magazines better than we could, and within a short time the magazines all turned terrible and folded.

Basically I haven't worked in comix since.

However I am gratified to see precisely the kinds of comix we had hoped to do in the mainstream today, especially as personified by Lynn and her associates who have an amazing comic which I hope you will all read and enjoy as much as I.

Although I am not a comics historian per se, I did do some research into the subject working with George initially and later trying, unsuccessfully, to keep things going with some of our old associates after he died. Let me talk a little bit about American comics.

As many of you know, the first American comic appeared in the daily newspapers. The cheap tabloid newspapers of the time were printed on unbleached paper and were called the yellow press, and therefore the first American comic book hero was the Yellow Kid. He essentially commented on or enacted current events of the day, mostly political, and in one or two panel strips. From the beginning, American comics were influenced by European comics, and the Katzenjammers, Tin Tins, Prince Valiants and Krazy Kats always accompanied American comics in the newspapers.

From the beginning there were photorealistic 'comics', but they only appeared in limited distribution because they were more expensive to produce and only looked good when printed on slick paper.

Mostly the photographic comix consisted of pictures, staged or found, with funny captions or occasional word balloons, or the equivalent: gutters or side areas where you could write dialogue, words or doodle drawn characters, as Sergio Arragones did famously later in MAD. The pictures with word balloons - usually comic word balloons saying something rude or topical - appeared simultaneously in France and Italy and because they resembled the smoke clouds that appeared from a smoker's mouth they were called, among many other things, 'fumetti'.

I didn't see any European fumetti for years, but growing up National Lampoon, then doing unfunny humor magazines instead of unfunny movies, ran a page or two of their own fumetti in their 'comix' section (along with more conventional comix) which mostly consisted of bare-breasted women visiting the staffers of National Lampoon and doing something or other.

The photorealistic cartoons, drawn with tiny lines and to some extent traced from pictures, were again around from the beginning, as some illustrators and editorial cartoonists wanted to do this kind of work, but when printed on pulp paper the drawings often came out smeared or indistinct. Inking in those days was done by the printing department, and for the most part they were simply unable and or unwilling to carefully ink every pencil mark and so inked only the broad outlines.

Comics appeared in America predominately in the newspapers, and only occasionally in slick magazines which published mostly single panel cartoons such as THE NEW YORKER or a few multi page comix in the back of their books, and there were no real organized comics books until essentially the late 1940's. Artists did illustrations for books and magazines, particularly pulp magazines - which had stories very similar to comics and very similar covers, but with only occasional interior illustrations. More generic art was used over and over again, and sequential artists who wanted to make more money and have a slightly easier time of it - imagine turning out four to nine (some artists did comics for both a morning and afternoon edition and a color sunday edition) every week - worked in movies, doing Disney style animation or doing layouts for regular movies, mostly B-movie serials.

As the second world war ended, and with it paper rationing, the publishers of pulp magazines, finding their market basically gone to slick magazines (which could afford better paper due to many more advertisers, who insisted on having photo reproduction capability), agreed to make learning manuals similar to those that had instructed soldiers during the war for the soldiers' war brides and their families on citizenship and other hygiene matters in various languages. Characters, familiar and new, were employed to show people how to flush the toilet in 'clever' four and six page stories. Within a short time, the digest-size comic magazine became three quarters of the size of a slick four-color magazine, and the kinds of stories that had been done in pulps were soon appearing as illustrated stories or comics.

These early comic books were targeted mostly for adults and featured adult characters, covering everything from sports and romance to law and order stories. For reasons too long to get into, a bunch of American congressmen - urged on by a goofball psychiatrist who apparently didn't really believe this stuff - claimed that these comic magazines were harmful to the growth of children, although they were neither aimed toward children nor readily available to children, or, for that matter, anyone else. Comics had very small distribution zones: they fell apart if handled too roughly and they cost very little, so it didn't pay major distributors to handle them. With no real advertising to speak of, a five cent magazine brought retailers a profit of two and a half cents which was puny compared to slick magazines. If you didn't live in a metropolitan area you seldom saw comics and then only a handful of popular titles. An obscure comic called CRIME DOES NOT PAY, which luridly showed baddies being blown to bits (covers often featured bullet ridden corpses with holes so big they might have been caused by woodpeckers), was highlighted as upsetting kids, causing them not to do their homework, to masturbate, get pimples and perhaps flirt with communism, and so a comics code was established to restrict comics with sex, swearing or too much violence to be sent through the mail. The one distributor of comic books, CURTISS PUBLISHING, basically pledged to police its distribution of offending matter, forcing publishers to essentially stop producing magazines with realistic stories or realistic looking characters.

Somehow it was all right for people to be shot as long as it was soldiers shooting soldiers during WWII, so a bunch of army comics came out. It was all right for people to be torn limb from limb as long as it was by ghosts or monsters or aliens, so Eery comics were born. It was all right for superheroes to kill people (I remember Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen killing hundreds of people when he caused the Johnstown Flood) so the long underwear boys were resurrected from the 40s or created anew, and finally comics geared towards kids, featuring talking animals and adaptations of kids TV shows and movies, were started to do childish, innocuous stories on the Scooby Doo or Little Rascals level of humor and learning.

While the mainstream comics, the ones distributed by Curtiss, went further and further in the direction of unrealistically-drawn superhero nonsense, there were other comics, distributed differently, which continued the tradition of romance, western and other kinds of comics. In order to attract advertisers - since they couldn't survive on sheer sales - these went to slick paper. Slick paper allowed for more realistic looking depictions of people, and people who specialized in retouching photos or creating ad people - mostly with airbrushes - started 'drawing' comics. This took a lot longer than conventional comics, but the magazines usually had longer deadlines, appearing quarterly if that, and some really beautiful comics started to appear, mostly depicting alternative plots and preoccupations.

With the 60's there came a different style of character drawing: the Italians (Joe Orlando, Carmine Infantino, Joe Romita, etc), influenced by classical drawing techniques, started drawing characters, mostly superheroes, villains and their mates, who looked like fashion models, Greek gods and the like. In some ways it was disappointing because as with men's magazine pin ups these characters were impossibly beautiful with retouched bodies and faces: you could have Marilyn Monroe's large breasts but not her equally large hips, or Kirk Douglas's dimpled chin but not his hunched shoulders and so on. On the other hand, the characters became real people, not archetypes from serials or fairy stories as Stan Lee and others had depicted them, and because they all essentially looked alike, like so many Playboy Bunnies distinguished only by costumes and hair color, the writers had to give them something resembling personalities.

At the same time, Americans began getting a look at European and Asian comics, and with more slick magazines, more artists were emboldened to try their hands at comics even though they did not have comics backgrounds or sensibilities. They even began to teach comics making in regular universities instead of specialty art schools.

A regular monthly comic book has a team of people to put it out, although some can and do more than one task. As the popular and reliable artists often did more than one book, you would often get a lay out artist who would break down the writer's script into panels, showing in thumbnails the basic layouts of each panel, then a penciller who would essentially draw the comic from the layouts on thick art boards, including leaving a place for word balloons and caption boxes, then the letterer would fill in the words and sound effects, then the inker would go back over the pencils - in some cases simply inking what was there, in other cases expanding massively on fairly crude pencils the way the pencillers expanded on the crude layouts - then the colorist would add the color. As time went on, some artists would ink themselves, many pencillers would do their own layouts, and some would even do their own lettering and coloring, particularly artists whose method was painting. Still, each comic page went through this process with the pages constantly going back and forth between artists. When the crunch came and someone was needed to finish some aspect of the page, other artists - sometimes as many as 8-10 per book - were pulled from 'the bullpen' to make corrections or finish off the last panels so the comic could be sent off. There weren't as many late books as something or other came out every month at more or less the same time, even though, as the joke went, the secret to putting out a four week comic was that it took five weeks.

Students would learn all of these arts - the way theater students would learn not only how to act wildly different kinds of parts, but also to be directors and playwrights - and as they came out of school they would have their own creation: books they put out with one or two friends or all by themselves (although it took forever). As they got into classical comics they used the popularity they achieved doing superheroes or Archie to create a small market (mostly through comics conventions) for their own stuff.

Counter culture magazines about rock and roll and drugs and other good stuff started running psychedelic comics and other alternative comics. Headshops started featuring not only adult comics involving sex, drugs and rock and roll, but just adult comics period, like Harvey Pekar's comic about life as an ordinary person living in Cleveland. As some comic book stores went more and more to children, young or old - featuring comics with adolescent themes and associated merchandise, t-shirts, action figures, toys etc - other comic stores featured magazines oriented towards college students and young adults, with similar merchandising.

Traditional comics and traditional publishers often had all kinds of complicated deals in place that didn't really allow them to fully merchandise their own comics. Often those putting out merchandise had exclusive rights to certain characters and, for the most part, didn't do much with them. Alternative comics creators could do their own merchandise or allow, even encourage, other small entrepeneurs to go wild, merchandising as much as they could, mostly to stoners and college students from characters who appeared in only a small number of comics.

Ralph Bakshi was one of those who saw the potential in widespread marketing. He, of course, became one of the most prolific and high profile roto-scopers: using found or posed photos of real people and tracing them or drawing on the film itself as a way of putting out comics (which didn't look that hot) or animated films (which, while crude, were very effective).

In our day, although we had a pretty good number of artists with the skills to draw realistic-looking people, air brush artists, and painters who used photographs in their work, this stuff was still considered esoteric or rare, because computers were still barely used. We had some of the first artists to use computer coloring, not as a shortcut (as it took half again as long), but to get real photoquality color. Instead of a vague wash of purple across the inks, as often happened during action panels to save time, a pair of blue pants in a SCION (one of our strips) might actually have eight or nine different pantone colors, with highlights and shadings. We didn't use computer lettering, but for the kind of effects we asked for, sending letterers copies of the type face fonts we wanted could have been far more easily carried out. Further, as the quality was such that you could essentially shoot pencils without them being inked, the artist could spend more time fully drawing the script, so, as with Lynn's comics, every panel would have been full and completely drawn instead of a few 'money' shots and a lot of crude tweener panels often drawn by the main artists' helpers.

Perhaps because I am primarily a writer, I feel that the main thing that makes a comic work is the story. No matter how well drawn, a badly written tale quickly pales while a very crudely drawn story can still entertain. What Lynn does here is what we tried to do in panels like GENERATION SEX, which was to take a group of somewhat ordinary people and add an element or two that makes the story special, above the level of a soap opera. Lynn generously added two levels to DARK RED, the supernatural element which allows for interesting spectacles, villains and challenges, and the challenge of having a blind protagonist, so we can 'see' what the world looks like to someone without our vision. I love the strip and admire the work and dedication that comes with taking real people and making them real comics. I hope they'll go on forever and that you will read them all.

Tom Thornton

New York,
8th of March 2008