I found Wednesday Comics rather hard to read at first: not just because of the sometimes-murky coloring, or overly white word balloons (which completely pull focus from the art), or the sometimes too-tiny panels, but also because of a certain mind/body dissonance. It just felt wrong to fold it into quarters and read it in the same way I read alt-weeklies since that ruined many of the page layouts, such as the one-page, second Metamorpho installment (written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Michael Allred). I tried it out a few different ways, but the one that seemed to work best was to spread it open and read it sitting cross-legged, so that not only would I get the full effect of the page layout, I would get an optimal look at the double-page spread, two installments abutting one another. (In issue #2, the Deadman and Green Lantern strips played particularly well off each other visually with their palettes and retro art.) Since the issues are so brief, I read the first two back-to-back in this manner, and I think this is probably the best way to do it, for me. (The $4 price point, I think, is justified by not having to contend with jarring ads every two pages.)
When I was growing up, or at least, before I had Internet access, my much-braver friend would venture into the Big City and bring back wondrous things … zines (such as Lynn Peril's Mystery Date), books (such as V. Vale's and Andrea Juno's RE/Search series) and music (and make mix-tapes of songs by bands like Bikini Kill and the Magnetic Fields). (I considered it (a), "culture," because it seemed to be much more so than what I had access to at that time, such as Top 40 radio, and (b), "smuggling," I suppose, because I would sometimes get in trouble if I was found out to have had borrowed it). Are comics media (publishers, critics, bloggers, etc.) now engaged in culture smuggling on a much grander scope? I remember burning with envy 10 years ago when one of my friend's cousins had obtained a copy of Alan Moore's and Eddie Campbell's From Hell (How? HOW??!), and now Sunday Press' oversized Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz, which collects newspaper comics written by L. Frank Baum himself in addition to comics art by W. W. Denslow, Walt McDougall and John R. Neill, is only a few mouse clicks (and a few paychecks) away from my grasp. It's true the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher … but man, what signal. Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
