By Shaenon K. Garrity
I enjoyed
The Eternal Smile, the new short-story collection written by Gene Yang and drawn by Derek Kirk Kim, because how can you not, really? It's Gene and Derek. Also, the title sounds like porn. One interesting thing about the book is that it includes a lovely early Yang/Kim collaboration ("Yang/Kim Collaboration" also sounds like porn, or maybe it's that I just got done writing a 6,000-word treatise on yaoi and everything sounds like porn to me) from the early '90s called "Duncan's Kingdom." "Duncan's Kingdom" was published briefly by Image before being assumed into longbox heaven like 99% of the small-press comics of the day. ("Longbox Heaven" does not sound like porn, or indeed like a place where anyone ever has sex. It would, however, be an excellent title for a Comixology column.)
Kim and Yang aren't the only cartoonists reviving work from ten to fifteen years ago for a new audience. Hell, they aren't even the only West Coast Asian-American cartoonists with glasses doing it. Now that he's a big-shot
New Yorker cover artist, Adrian Tomine has reprinted his early
Optic Nerve minicomics in a fancy-pants boxed set, just as they first appeared in all their hand-stapled glory but in a nice box this time. Which is good, because I've been keeping mine with my other minicomics in the box where I got my Internet router, and it's got little bugs in it.
Now that we live in the glorious Age of Reprints, I'd love to see more publishers pick up forgotten indie and small-press comics from the late '80s and early '90s. Thanks to the combined market forces of the TMNT-driven 1980s indie boom and the hideous-nightmare-crap-driven 1990s speculator rush, the comic-book industry got flooded during this period with quirky black-and-white indie comics and oddball small-press projects. Some, like
Bone, survived and flourished. Most perished or disappeared once the boom went bust, which is a shame, because some of them were great and deserve a second look.
Admittedly, many
have gotten a second look, in some form or another. Although big-press reprints of small-press comics like the new edition of "Duncan's Kingdom" are regrettably uncommon, many indie cartoonists have managed to self-publish trade collections of their old floppies. You can, for example, order all volumes of Mark Oakley's
Thieves and Kings from his own imprint, iBox Publishing. Oakley's delicate fantasy about Rubel the boy thief and Heath the sorceress-in-training was one of my favorite comics when I became a hardcord comic-book geek in high school. It's also one of the few indie comics I managed to follow from the very beginning. Well, Issue 2, anyway, but at least I didn't have to play catch-up for twenty issues like I did with
Bone. I've always been a little surprised that
Thieves and Kings has never gotten more widespread recognition. The story gets overly dense at times (especially given Oakley's fondness for interspersing the comics sections with pages of illustrated prose), but the art is elegant and charming, combining detailed fantasy backgrounds with cute, simple characters in the style of Miyazaki's
Nausicaa.
If print publishing isn't feasible, indie artists can always move to the Web. That's the most recent home of
Xeno's Arrow, by Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Miller, another of my formative reads, which I had the pleasure of running on Modern Tales (
http://www.moderntales.com/comics/xeno.php) a while back. An unusually clever sci-fi comic,
Xeno's Arrow is set at an intergalactic zoo run by space lizards, who imprison all other intelligent life forms there until they can prove themselves worthy of joining galactic civilization. Several of the inmates realize that the setup is a mug's game and break out. And speaking of smart '90s sci-fi comics now under the Modern Tales umbrella (you'd think it'd be a more exclusive category), Tara Tallan's lovely, funny space saga
Galaxion, one of the early examples of manga-influenced American indie comics, has been running weekly on Girlamatic.com for ages now (
http://www.girlamatic.com/comics/galaxion.php), and everybody should be keeping up on that.
Trudy Cooper's and Danny Murphy's
Platinum Grit, one of my all-time favorite comics, moved online ages ago to
www.platinumgrit.com. Which is good, because I wouldn't be able to live without the still-ongoing adventures of Jeremy the nebbishy repressed mad scientist, the toweringly sexy and transcendently foul Nils (at one point a gay man comments, "I was her on a float in Sydney"), and poor relatively normal Kate, who all live together in a Scottish castle in Australia and fight things. I can understand why publishers might balk at picking up the series, as it's pretty long at this point and the early art is unpolished (although eventually it becomes fantastic, with Cooper drawing some of the sexiest women in comics—and that's saying a lot). But it's also brilliant, so the Image imprint Shadowline has made me very happy by picking up
Platinum Grit and reprinting the early volumes. Nice work, Shadowline.
The Web can be a mixed blessing for reprints. On one hand, it does provide a place for old print comics to find new readers. On the other hand, it's so enormous that stuff gets lost more often than it gets found. I didn't even realize that
Strange Attractors, by Michael Cohen and Mark Sherman, was available in its entirety online (
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/mcohen). Man, I loved
Strange Attractors. It was basically like
Love and Rockets if it had gone on being a pulp sci-fi pastiche for longer than the first few issues. Since the story involves a vast galactic archive where weird, wonderful, misfit things get forgotten, maybe it's appropriate that it's ended up drifting in the depths of the Internet.
And so it is with this column, my own self-indulgent Museum of Lost Things. Rifling through my longboxes, I'm struck by two things: the sheer number of copies of
The Big O that fellow Viz editor Eric Searleman managed to unload on me without my knowledge or consent, and all the 1990s floppies that get me soliloquizing. How about a collection of the comics from the Sarah Dyer-edited anthology
Action Girl (especially Elizabeth Watasin's stuff, which was top-notch)? How about all those weird, short-lived Vertigo miniseries, which at one point DC was publishing by the truckload? Why do I own the Marvel adaptation of the movie
Labyrinth? That last question has nothing to do with reprinting 1990s indie comics, but I'd still like to know.
Looking at the comics over which I've chosen to wax nostalgic, I seem to have had a weakness for genre fiction—mostly fantasy and science fiction—with an indie sensibility. I can't deny it. But I can't be the only one, right?
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
