STERN kills comics

It´s that time of the year again. No, it´s not what you are thinking. I´m not talking about springtime or pre-Erlangen time ( the two / three months before Erlangen when you stop buying comics except the ones on your pull list). It´s that time of the year again when some " expert " proclaims the death of comics. This time it was the wellknown german magazine STERN with an article titled " Computer kills Comics " that butchered an Interview with german comiclegend Andreas C. Knigge and made it appear that Comics are lying in their death throes.


The best part of it was that the main argumentation of the article was that comics have now been replaced by......Mangas. Which are comics - just a different kind of. And of course the other reason for people not reading comics are video games. Whoever wrote the article obviously never read an issue of the RESIDENT EVIL comic or DEVIL MAY CRY or SONIC or STREET FIGHTER or any of the other comics based on computer games. What was also ridiculous was the statement that computer games are much more interactive then comics. More interactive than comics ? That´s just wrong. I mean what´s so interactive about computer games ? You plug it in. Okay. But that´s it. I don´t want to dis the PSP and other consoles because they have really fabulous graphics and I´m a huge fan of SILENT HILL ( although I had to stop playing for a few days to sleep without nightmares ) and TEKKEN ( Paul is the only one for me - all others just SUCK ) but it´s nor really THAT interactive. It´s more like watching a movie where you can choose at certain scenes. Aside from that you get pictures, sound, stories and all the other stuff without having to work that hard. In comics the real action isn´t even on the page. It happens in the place between panels : the gutter. The story unfolds directly in the brain of the reader without him....there is no story. That´s not the case with a playstation as anyone who had to take a dump and forgot to pause the game can attest.

So apart from the question how relevant the STERN really is and the fact that if you know a little about comics their article doesn´t make ANY sense ( I have my own title for the article : " STERN kills Brain " but that´s another thing ) it really doesn´t shock me as much to read that comics are dead. It really gets boring after the fourth or fifth time. I have been reading comics since the 70s and started really getting interested in collecting comics in 1984 - and guess what ? When I started a lot of people told me it was a waste of time because comics are dead. Five maybe ten years tops and that would be the end of it. Now it´s 22 ( in words : twentytwo !!! ) years later and it is still the same propaganda that´s going around. Comics are dead ! Nobody reads them ! Stop wasting your time.

Well, guess what ? Comics are not going to die anytime soon. They survived the tremendous drop in sales after the second world war, they survived the crash of the speculator boom in the 90s and they even didn´t die when Marvel had to declare bancruptcy and almost went out of business dragging the rest of the comic industry with it. Comics survived the Imaginasation of comics when stories became secondary and splashy art was the new hype and they survived the VERTIGO counterwave when stories climbed to new levels but art became secondary. They survived the internet that was sure to turn everything into a digitalisized and much better version and even the new Millenium which was supposed to be the end of all technology and comics would be used to fan the fires of this new post apocalyptic world. Comics survived the end of VALIANT, ACCLAIM and CROSSGEN. And they probably will be here long after you and me are gone from this world, my friend.

What´s so reassuring about people declaring the death of comics is that it´s nothing new. I´ve read a lot of Interviews and there is one common theme : comics are dying. When Will Eisner was starting in comics everybody thought that comics were just a momentary fad that would die out soon, when Neal Adams was starting with his comic career the were no new comic artists breaking into the industry because everybody knew that comics were dying and even Gene Colan was never sure how long he would be able to make comics....because comics were dying !

Now I ask you : If comics are dying....is that really such a bad thing ? Comics have been dying since their beginning ( like man who starts to die from the moment of his birth ) and they are doing it with the utmost grace producing such stellar work as MAUS, WATCHMEN or BLANKETS to name just a few. And is it not also true that many comic series have risen to unknown heights of quality while standing with one foot in the grave ? Writers and astist often have the most creative freedom and creative success when a title is two issues away from cancellation and the only editorial mandate is : do whatever you want it can´t get any worse. It was the case with Frank Miller on DAREDEVIL, it was the case when Alan Moore started on SWAMP THING and it happened with Denny O Neill and Neal Adams on GREEN ARROW / GREEN LANTERN.

It is a little strange for me to really believe that comics are dead. When I started collecting comics there were no trades for most of the series. Of the good series only one or two were translated to german and there were no comic speciality shops. Now there are truckloads of trade paperbacks, yes you can even buy whole series like SANDMANN, INVINCIBLE or PREACHER in the trade paperback form. There are a lot of comics translated to german and not only are there comic speciality shops you can buy comics in bookstores. And what about the internet ?

There are comicshops on the web, sites with reviews or previews or articles or even podcasts about comics. There are even webcomics and there is probably at least one website about any comiccharacter. There are a phletora of comicforums where hundreds and thousand of comicbook fans praise, curse or analyze comics. And let´s not forget the blogs about comics or comiccharacters like this one you´re reading right now. There are news on television about comics and there are more and more movie adaptions in the movie theatres. If comics are really dying they do it on a very high level. There was never a time where not only such a mass of quality titles are produced storywise and artwise but where there is also such a huge library of past series available in various forms. There are the hardcover archive editions, there are Marvel´s Essentials and DC´s Showcase editions. And in Spain and Italy there are the Bibliotheca Marvel editions and various reprint series ( two in Spain alone about Spider-Man ).


So take a heart my friend. Comics are dead. It can only get better.

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SUBZERO doesn´t go to the movies

So, on Friday I went to Stuttgart to see V FOR VENDETTA. Yes, that´s right, I wrote " I went to see it " instead of " I saw V for Vendetta " because I did not get to see it. I don´t know if it is just me but every time I go to Stuttgart and have a little time to go window shopping there are two movie theatres less then the last time.


Normally when I go to Stuttgart I have only time to go to the comicshop and maybe grab somethimg at Mc Donalds or Burger King so I don´t have to cook. So every few months when I have the time to stroll through Stuttgart there are some new shops and some old ones are closed. Last time the HEINZELMAENCHEN one of the comicshops I used to go to had gone out of business. And this time two cinemas have closed their doors while two new coffe shops and a mall have opened business. The new mall is part of the SATURN company and they have a lot of WWE wrestling DVDs - in fact I think they have every main event since 2004. So while I was going up the Koenigsstrasse searching for a movie theatre showing V for Vendetta I checked out the new mall and got the new pink album ( which has an extra track for the foreign edition coming out here in Germany ) and a DVD with the Divas of the WWE. So I got some entertainment out of my visit to Stuttgart even if the only cinema showed it only on Fridays and Saturdays at 23.00 hours and I prefer to go at 14.00 or 15.00 hours.


It seems that there are more and more movie theatres going out of business which could be because of audiences getting smaller and smaller. I think that´s because going to the movies is not as much fun as it used to be. It is very expensive and since the movie theatres have decided to go for the younger audience you can´t see a movie without a cell phone going off at the most unfortunate moment. So the older audience stays away and the younger audience doesn´t seem to be as lucrative as thought. And they always leave behind a mess to clean up. And as I said there is the fact of the cell phones. I swear you can teach any monkey to use a box to reach his bananas but it is impossible for the kids of this new generation to switch off their phones. At least in France they have now installed jamming devices to keep the cell phones from functioning in theatres. So at the moment going to the movies is very expensive and you can´t even see them undisturbed by some idiots. And since it is not that difficult to get even brandnew movies from the net more and more people watch them in the privacy of their own home. Of course the movie industry is more interested in criminalizing their audience instead of thinking why they stay away and what they could do to make it more attractive for them.


I mean, I love to go to see a movie at the theatre but the last one I went to was SIN CITY because you can´t see that movie on a small screen for the first time. And before that I went to a matinee showing which is a totally different audience. Because it is not a new movie and all the people at the theatre are there to see the movie and not to call somebody or to talk with someone on their cell phones or because they want to hang out and talk shit to show how cool they are the whole time. So unless there are some changes made all cinemas but the big cineplexes are going to go out of business I´m afraid.

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A case presents itself

Yesterday there was no post because my older brother occupied the computer the whole night till I went to sleep ( after taping Jake 2.0 which has been moved because of some stupid reason to six o´clock in the morning without the usual bombardement of commercial we get for all the shows we DON´T want to see ). I waited a few hours to get a chance to write something and post it watching the episodes of CASE CLOSED that aired this week.


If you don´t know it Case Closed is a manga I first discovered when my little brother brought a video with four hours worth of episodes from his vacation in Spain. On my next vacation in Spain I started reading the manga and changed to the german translations when it arrived here years later. It took also a while till the anime hit Germany and although I find the spanish version much better I have all episodes that aired so far. I have my VCR programmed to tape the episodes and because the stories are mostly two- or three-part stories ( and I usually don´t have the time to watch them every day ) I usually watch them at the weekend. Case Closed is a crime story manga presenting mostly who-dunnit type of stories and many murders in closed rooms.

The main character is Shinishi Kudo whose name was changed to Jimmy in the american translation like most of the other names ( probably to make them easier to remember for the american audience ). The master detective Kogoro Mori is Richard Moore, Ran Mori is Rachel Moore and the Detective boys names got changed from Genta, Ayumi and Mitsuhiko to George, Amy and Mitch. Shinichi ( or Jimmy ) Kudo is a 17 years old student at the Taitan school in Tokyo who has become famous as a master detective helping the local police to solve the more difficult crimes. On one of his cases he stumbles into the mysterious machinations of the secret criminal organisation only known as the " Men in Black " ( who always are dressed in black and who have codenames of alcoholic drinks like Wodka or Gin ) when he becomes the witness of a murder committed by two members of the " Men in Black ". They try to kill Shinichi by giving him an experimental poison which is supposed to kill him without leaving traces. Instead it transforms him to childhood size and Shinichi tries to dismantle the organization of the " Men in Black " and regain his normal size.


Therefore he takes on the name Conan Edogawa ( Conan after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the writer of his big idol Sherlock Holmes and Edogawa after a famous japanese writer of crime novels ) and gets kind of adopted by his girlfriend Ran Mori whose father Kogoro Mori is a P.I. Shinichi´s plan is to get more high profile cases and to stumble onto the plot of the " Men in Black " but since Kogoro is an experienced detective who sadly always seems to be missing the piece of the puzzle he has to take matters in his own hands. So Shinichi always gives him a nudge in the right direction and mostly has to solve the crimes for him. When he presents the solution Shinichi knocks out Kogoro with a tranquilizer dart and imitates his voice with a special electronic device and since Kogoro seems to be sleeping he soon becomes famous as the " sleeping Kogoro " the master detective who solves his cases in his sleep. Since he has the body of a child he has to go to kids school again where he befriends Ayumi, Genta and Mitzuhiko who make up the Detective Boys a crime school club who solve some crimes together with Shinichi. The only one who knows that Shinichi is now Conan is Professor Agasa a friend of the family and inventor who supplies Shinichi with the tranquilizer dart, his voice modifier, power boots and a lot of other gadgets throughout the series.


What really hooked me into this manga is that the cases are always presented in a fashion that challenges the reader to solve the crime himself. The main characters are always commenting on the clues that are discovered and their theories about what happened. Before the final solution is presented all the clues are reviewed one more time giving the reader a last chance the solve the crime before Conan presents the solution. And of course the humor of the series which mostly comes from Kogoro who is despite his fame as a master detective still a normal down to earth guy whose main interests are drinking and hot women ( especially the famous popstar Yoko Okino whom he even gets to meet on a few cases ).

the official case closed website

the case closed forum

Case Closed is at the moment one of the only two mangas I read, the other being Naruto. I´ve been looking to add more mangas to my pull list after LONE WOLF AND CUB and KENSHIN / SAMURAI X ended but with the fllod of mangas coming to Germany it is difficult to find one that is up to those high standards. Most of the known mangas like RANMA 1 / 2 or BATTLE ANGEL ALITA are on my brother´s collection since he´s the big manga reader in the family.


Wow, that´s more than I intended to write about the series that almost deserves a post in itself. Next up we will get to what I originally wanted to write.

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My X-Men story

This week it´s X-Men week over at Dave´s Longbox and reading the commentaries I got the impression that apparently every comic reader has a X-Men story to tell. About how he first discovered the X-Men, what excited him the most, who his favorite hero was and what was the best creative team.


And I thought : if everybody´s doing it I can too. And since it would have been too long to post it as a commentary on Dave´s Longbox I decided to post it here. Not that my story is much more interesting than any other.....I´m sure I´m not the only one who´s beginning in X-Men spans three countries. But I already told a little bit about my beginnings reading comics and how I ended up with 20 to 25 series on my pull list. Now reading that today it sounds like a big pull list and you all must think how expensive that was. Well, you have to remember comics were priced at 0,75 dollars at that time and it took a few months into my reading of american comics that they made the jump to one dollar. So I read 25 series for 25 bucks which nowadays would translate to 8 or 9 comics.


Now back to the X-Men comic that really made an X-Men fan out of me. Growing up in Germany meant reading the comics that were published here which in the beginning meant reading comics published by the WILLIAMS VERLAG which included the early years of Marvel comics. There had been another publisher before called HIT COMICS but they just began in the middle of the series, jumping back and forth over the issues and leaving out some pages or whole issues as they went along. I don´t remember much of it because it was mostly before my time but from all I´ve read it must have been a collector´s nightmare. But then the Williams Verlag started publishing Marvel comics and they did it chronological order. They even managed to translate a bit of the excitement of the originals with the MMT which was the MÄCHTIGE MARVEL TEAM. So I started reading Marvel comics with DIE SPINNE, DIE FANTASTISCHEN VIER and DIE RUHMREICHEN RÄCHER and my first X-Men comics were the german translations of the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby issues as X-TEAM second story in DER GEWALTIGE HULK. The Williams comics were printed with the cover not being of different paper stock but with the same paper as the interiors and eversince I always found it somehow strange to have a different paper for the cover. Before discovering the Marvel comics I had only read superhero comics by DC and boy were the Marvel comics different. Here the hero had flaws or were the monsters from the old monster heroes. It was like reading superhero comics on another level.


At that time the comics had 32 pages and since most of the Marvel Comics at that time had only 16 pages of story there always was a second series in the comics. Mostly the comics that could not support their own magazine so Daredevil appeared in Fantastic Four, Namor appeared in Spider-Man, Silver Surfer appeared in Thor and X-Men appeared in Hulk. But the X-Men comics that appeared were all the Lee / Kirby issues which didn´t impress me all that much when I read them as a kid. My first comic collection didn´t last very long because my mother threw them all away and when I started collecting Willimas comics again I was much more geared toward the Avengers by John Buscema and Tom Palmer. Especially the later issues which I only read when I was rebuilding my collection and then mostly through collections that were published in Germany and which had issues of various titles glued together with a glossy paperstock cover on top.


I really got hooked on X-Men on one of our family vacations in Spain. Since my parents came from Spain it was obligatory that in the big summer vacation we visited the old home country to see all the cousins and aunts and uncles. And Spain had everything that Germany was missing : good warm weather, hot beaches, good ice cream, fabulous toys, Dragonball cartoons ( which came to Germany ten years later ) and.....better comics. Especially good comics during that dark period in Germany between the end of Williams and the beginning of Condor. After all this years I still feel like I left a third world country and have now returned to civilization whenever I come back to Spain. So it must have been between 1979 and 1983 ( the copyright indicia is from 1979 but since it says LINEA 83 on the cover I guess it was more in 1983 ) on the usual vacation I stumbled upon PATRULLA X number 4 from Linea Surco. And it quite frankly blew my mind.

I had never seen the all new, all different X-Men before and this comic was just amazing. It was by John Byrne and Chris Claremont and this freaky looking guy LOBEZNO ( who became my number one hero ) started the issue by killing those strange guys who looked like puppets. There were members like RONDADOR NOCTURNO or TORMENTA who I never heard of but also guys I remembered like Cyclops. The team went up against the hellfire club and at the end of the issue the dark phoenix was about to kill them all. I read this issue over and over and the next day I went looking for the next issue. The only one I found was Patrulla X number 1 which had the team fighting against some evil dude called Proteus. But the story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne had already sucked me in. Especially the art because all the comics of Linea Surco were printed in a magazine size format.


I didn´t get the rest of the story until my next summer vacation but there were other comics to read like Powerman & Iron Fist, Moon Knight, Shang-Chi or Iron Man. So my X-Men collecting days started with the spanish versions and continued many years later with the german version in the pocket books of Condor that had almost no text. Much later I would get the original american comics and eventually discover the CLASSIC X-MEN series and the trades of THE DARK PHOENIX SAGA and DAYS OF FUTURE PASTS that encapsulate everything the X-Men are. Which was a real stroke of luck because most of the Chris Claremont / Marc Silvestri run with such pivotal storylines like MUTANT MASSACER, FALL OF THE MUTANTS or INFERNO never were printed in Germany. By the way : I still have all the Patrulla X issues from Linea Surco I bought and most of the others. One of my most prized possesion is a collection of Linea Surco comics reprinting the Fu Manchu storyline from THE DEADLY HANDS OF SHANG-CHI MASTER OF KUNG FU which turned me on to the art of Mike Zeck. Everytime I reread it it is like I´m travelling back in time and I can almost feel the burning spanish sun while we were doing the siesta and reading comics for hours while eating melon and ice cream.


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