Some of it’s newer, some a bit less new, with an oddly common occurrence of the letter F.

• From Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, a reminder that the folks behind the French take on the venerable insane fight tournament manga series, Last Man, have been working on a prequel animated series. Then funding promises went away, and to finish their work they’re Kickstartering. So this would be a French version of an anime adaptation of an insane fight tournament manga, which sounds awesome on its face before I remind you that Last Man is really good. Campaign page in English, French, and even a little Japanese, so check ‘er out in the next … fourteen days.

  (Also from FSFCPL, word that Boulet has been filling his Instagram with Pokemon shots, starting here; these are the disturbing Pokemon, something that Katuhiro Otomo and Satoshi Kon might dream up after a long night drinking with Cthulhu, the least threatening of which is doing something unspeakable to your cat, the more typical of which needs to be met with giant robots, plural.)

• From Andrew Farago at the Cartoon Art Museum, news of the last CAM public program: Cartooning Boot Camp at the American Bookbinders Museum, 35 Clementina Street in San Francisco. The free (!) program runs both Thursday the 18th (5:30pm – 8:00pm) and Saturday the 20th 11:00am – 3:00pm), offering a showing of the work done by aspiring cartoonists, ages 10 – 16, this summer. The first event is part of the Third Thursdays series for arts institutions in the Yerba Buena Alliance, and sponsors are providing refreshments at both.
• Want to check out the work of an absolute master? Kate Feirtag at the Society of Illustrators wants you to know that they’re putting on major retrospective of Ralph Steadman, chronicler of the great and the low, the everyday and the bat-country insane over his storied 50 year career. The show runs 6 September to 22 October, with an opening reception on Friday, 9 September at 6:30pm (suggested donation: US$15, beer provided plus cash bar) with a variety of events during the six week run. It all happens at the SoI building, 128 East 63rd in Manhattan.
• It’s time for the monthly TopatoCo Drink ‘n’ Draw, with deets at the Facebook page (okay, that one was a stretch). The special guest this month is Danielle Corsetto, who will meet you at Eastworks from 7:00pm – 10:00pm (it’s probably gonna rain, so bring your umbrella) for food, fun, fdrinking, and fdrawing.

Spam of the day:

Do not worry, all your efforts will be rewarded.

That’s reassuring, except for the part where the bulk of this message is in Russian and I’m pretty sure I now owe their mafia a favor.

It may have been mentioned by somebody in the past forty or so years that one of the great ironies of San Diego Comic Con is you don’t get to read many comics. Thanks to travel before and after, I missed two weeks at the local comic shop, and thanks to the owner having to take a sick day, today will be the first day I’ll get caught up on books since the middle of July. I’m really looking forward to reading Hope Larson’s take on Batgirl (issue #1 released on 27 July), but I’m not been Larsonless in that time.

Because I finally went and picked up a copy of her newest graphic novel (art by Rebecca Mock), Compass South. We spoke about it during our interview in San Diego, where I was particularly struck by the generosity she shows towards her collaborators (which is a recurring theme with Larson; cf: her Twitterfeed today). Unusually for me, this review is mostly spoiler free, as I find myself wanting to talk about some overarching structural choices more than the particulars of the story.

The first book (of two) in the Four Points series (we’ll get Knife’s Edge next June) is a quick, engaging read that left me with a nagging feeling as I read it. Twins — Alex and Cleo — get chased out of 1860 New York, heading for San Francisco; there’s criminal gangs, child-sellers, pirates, tall ships a’sailing, an overland crossing in Panama, a perilous trip ’round the Horn, and a goal of the mythic city of San Francisco. There’s mistaken identities and assumed names and impersonations. There’s blackhearts chasing treasure, evil-minded small men chasing a girl disguised as a boy, and a missing father full of mysteries.

And there was something there at the back of my mind saying You’ve seen this before, but where?

Then it hit me. It’s not that Larson took from any particular story, or any particular genre even (the idea of mid-19th century boys adventure magazines get namechecked, which is particularly frustrating if you’re a girl that doesn’t want to be constrained by gender expectations); it’s that she has tapped into the same themes and tropes that Shakespeare used.

Two sets of twins? Check. Ships in peril and pirates? Check. Missing parents and missing children? Check. Mistaken identities? Check. Everybody meeting up and working out where they were and how they got there? Check. Girls disguised as boys? Check. Shakespeare built his most popular plays — on story cores that had been part of song and myth for millennia. They’ve persisted for so long because they each capture our imagination in particularly strong ways; old Will knew that grabbing one trope was good, but piling on two or three was better, and Larson’s gone further by grabbing four or five.

It’s perhaps inevitable that Compass South would leave me with echoes of The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and more. In lesser hands, it would come off as derivative or gilding the lily. Here, it’s almost subconscious and makes for a compulsively readable story.

Much has been made of the similarity of comics and movies, but Compass South makes me think that the stage is a better comparison. The stock characters of comics — mysterious playboy/nighttime hero, the youthful ward, the alien with powers beyond those of mortal men, the angsty teen thrust into responsibility — are just as recognizable as the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte — the doomed lovers, the evil prince, the hidden twins, the unscrupulous businessman, the unrepentant villain, and the jolly comic relief — that Shakespeare appropriated and made central to the theatrical world. Larson’s combined the two traditions, and it makes for a cracking story that enriches both¹.

Spam of the day:

New roof! Get work done cheap!

Sorry, just put one in. Had a dumpster in my driveway for two weeks and every damn thing. Also, of all the things to cheap out on, the part of the house that keeps the weather out is probably not the best candidate.

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¹ Or perhaps three traditions — in addition to comics and theater, there’s the literature of the time. More than one character in Compass South is more than a little Dickensian, including a guy who’s very possible Fagin’s second cousin twice removed (in temperament, if not not actual relation). I’m now thinking that maybe why I never cottoned much to Dickens is that he drew from the same tropes as Shakespeare, but trying to express everything solely in words instead of visuals, he becomes bogged down and overly verbose. Now I really want to see what an original graphic novel by Dickens would look like.

Several brief items for you today, as I am observing the first really nice day in forever and that’s pulling on me more than webcomics at the moment. You know how it is.

• KC Green seems to finally be hitting the long tail portion of the This Is Fine plush campagin but I’ll note that so far today even though new support is but a trickle of the past two days, it’s still more than US$18K and 500 people. I wonder if we’ll see a bump from outside his usual audience when tomorrow’s New York Times — which has an arts section story about Green, This Is Fine, This Is Not Fine, and the plush — hits widely.
• Speaking of Green¹, he was the first to point me to another Kickstarter, that for the first print collection of The Meek by Der-shing Helmer. Three chapters of the longrunning (abeit with sometimes lengthy interruptions) adventure quest, with fancy upgrades to the book and bonus material on deck (Helmer’s working with Taneka Stotts — who’s done a number of successful projects — on the production end). Given the sometimes sporadic update schedule on The Meek, a book is probably the best way for new readers to get on board, so get to pledgin’.
• Latest news on the TV adaptation of Kris Straub’s Candle Cove: Deadline Hollywood reports that SyFy will premiere the series on Tuesday, 27 September. Set your TiVo now for maximum scares.

Spam of the day:

Looking for HOT

Great, more fake Russian dating site spam.

Laptops Deals? Check out the Latest Deals & Special Offers

… nevermind. Alhtough they are using the same picture as the Russian dating site spam was using.

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¹ Fans of The Meek now believe me to be in full Dad Joke mode. They’re not wrong.

Some very cool things going on these days.

Item! So KC Green has apparently tapped a vein of discomfort and unease in the popular consciousness, the depths of which were only hinted at previously. In other words, the This Is Fine plush cleared two hundred thousand dollars in its first 24 hours,and if the FFF Mk2 is to be believed, is headed for approximately US$700K to a million damn dollars. Honestly, though, this one is going to be an outlier in terms of predicatability but I think we can all agree it’s about time Green made some money off it.

Item! I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t. The absolutely invaluable Gina Gagliano at :01 Books got home from SDCC and promptly went to work shipping out review copies. I received copies of fall releases Demon (volume 1) by Jason Shiga, Tetris by Box Brown, and Last Man: The Rescue (volume 6) by Balak, Sanlaville, and Vivès. Initial impressions:

• Demon is a lot of fun and sets up the remaining 65-70% of the story nicely; ironically, it’s just finished up as a serialized webcomic, with only the first (of 22!) chapters still online. The first collection will be one of four books, to be released over the next while.
• Tetris is about more than the terribly addictive casual game; it’s about the history and politics of the game industry, the wheeling-dealing that characterized fights between companies at the time (including a fair number that no longer exist), and topics as far afield as the Ziegarnik Effect.
• Last Man: The Rescue barrels along and throws us a last-minute switchup that is even bigger than the one at the end of volume 2. Never — and remember this well, children — never suspect that things are going well when they appear to be going well, and you know there are two more books to go in the series. This one is going to go down in the history of punctured false conclusions and is a gut-punch of Whedonian proportions.

Look for proper reviews closer to release time (October, October, and November, respectively).

Item! Speaking of books due in the fall, I’ve read and re-read my ARC of Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier obsessively, and I’m still thinking hard on it. I’ve said more than once on this page that Kazu Kibuishi would be the reincarnation of Hayao Miyazaki, except for the fact that Miyazaki’s still alive. I refer to Kibuishi’s own take on of one of Miyazaki’s key tropes: fantastical flying machines and an emphasis on the hugeness of the sky.

But there’s another side to Miyazaki, the side where young (usually) girls (usually) find themselves in a world that casually admits the existence of magic. It’s not remarked on, it’s perfectly ordinary in its treatment — and to be honest, that’s the Miyazaki I love best.

Telgemeier is fixin’ to dethrone Kibuishi. Ghosts is nothing less than her Totoro. I’ll have much more to say on this, but I’ll need another five or ten readings first.

Spam of the day:
Multiple spams, actually. They all come in different languages (Russian and Portuguese most commonly), all translate to roughly the same message, all have an untranslatable burst of Cyrillic characters near the end. All purport to be from a 37 year old woman named (variously) Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela, who assures me

I am aware that the so-called MILF you relate positively. I have normal breasts, long legs, fuckable state. Without commitment, nothing. We are in conditional place, having sex

Indeed, Beatrice/Dora/Tania/Marisela: without commitment, we are nothing.

… but it all goes back to The Nib.

Today was gonna be easy; I was going to point you to the first strip Rich Stevens has done (so far!) for the recently-revived, back-from-the-conventions The Nib. Then the subject of said strip went and one-upped things. The was only one possible response, and then the horde of people who don’t get humor descended and Stevens mined the funny, even managing to drop in a link to his store. It was beautiful.

And this Best Use Of The Internet lasted mere hours until KC Green provided the definitive, final refutation of his most famous strip (and all the mutated, meme-y variations on it) today, also at The Nib. This Is Not Fine is a brilliant encapsulation of the times and all the feelings we have about This Year¹. And then, again, the new summit was topped, because there’s only one place you can go from This Is Not Fine — plushes.

In the roughly hour and a half since the Kickstarter went live, the campaign has exceeded goal by more than five grand. Make that seven, since I started typing this post. Annnd work interrupted and it’s now three hours in, and we’re at more than double the US$35,000 goal². Buy two — one for yourself, and one for the human trashfire you know that’s insisting all is fine when things are not fine.

And if we’re all very good, maybe Green will do a stretch goal, or a second campaign to make a variant Question Hound, one that looks downtrodden or has a fire extinguisher like we saw today.

Spam of the day:

[Russian characters –> Google Translate –> You deserve to get married to a reliable, successful man. All in your hands!

Gay marriage became mandatory so gradually, I never really noticed.

______________
¹ Seriously, 2016, what exactly is your deal?

² Specifically, as I update this line immediately before hitting publish, US$87,934 from 2461 backers. The Fleen Funding Formula (Mark II) may well prove useless, as it appears that most everybody who wants one of these bad boys is getting it in the opening hours.

A’course, in San Diego Kel McDonald said that in her experience the first three days = 1/3 your total funding, which will put Green well over a quarter-million, and we’re not even a quarter of a day in yet. Yikes!

Please note the photo of the very handsome, very large Ryan North above, taken from the Instagram of his fellow comic book writer, Marguerite Bennett. Unless I miss my guess, this photo was taken during SDCC, while North was involved in the creation of something very cool that required

1. A significant amount of legal, adult-type intoxicating beverages
2. Tangentially, the efforts of Isaiah Mustafa, aka The Old Spice Guy

The latter item should surprise approximately nobody, given the propensity that both North and Mustafa have for casual shirtlessness. In any event, I can’t tell you yet exactly what North was involved in the creation of, but suffice it to say that it is awesome and hilarious, and when you get to learn about it for reals in possibly two to four weeks, you will wonder why you didn’t guess it on your own because it will make perfect sense. For now, just enjoy the raw, sensuous sophistication fairly dripping from The Toronto Man-Mountain there. Enjoy it, damn you!

• Either Spike was late or I just missed it on Friday, but the latest announcement for what th’heck Iron Circus is publishing in the next year, year and a half is up:
  

  Iris & Angel isn’t exactly new; the first chapter’s already been written by myself, drawn by @littlefroggies, and posted on Slipshine, the subscription adult comics site. But Slipshine came with certain restrictions; monthly quotas, length limits, and the expectation of sex every fifteen pages, to name a few. And while that works for a lot of comics, it wasn’t working for I&A.

  So, Amanda and I are trying something new.

  Iris & Angel is restarting from scratch, and will be released chapter-by-chapter on ComiXology and in the Iron Circus Comics online store!

  This is a new approach for us, and we’re excited to see where it might lead. We’re test-driving a smaller, cheaper, more incremental approach to our comics; inexpensive “issues” of I&A with a nice, low bar for entry for the curious and the freedom to tell the story as we like.

  Serialized smut, y’all. And what smut!

  Iris Moore is a victim of her own success; her small soap-making business has taken off like a shot, but she’s found herself floundering with the financials. With April 15th approaching and her paperwork more hopelessly scrambled than ever, she finally accepts the inevitable: she needs professional help. But where to start?

  A fetish message-board on the internet, of course.

  Iris’ pervy roommate Tate talks her into answering the weirdest personal ad ever posted; a cross-dressing accountant offering tax prep.

  I think I lost count of the fetishes there. This is gonna be great.

• Attention, anybody that’s ever had the self-awareness to ask Am I interacting with a creator in an acceptable way? The fact that you’re asking what correct (that is, most likely to be acceptable/least likely to cause distress) behavior is means that you’re almost certainly good. For everybody else, please see Something*Positive today, wherein Randy Milholland shares yet another story of people having no fucking clue what acceptable observation of boundaries looks like.

  I don’t get it — Milholland is maybe the sweetest person I know and yet he has a bottomless well of stories detailing the most batshit crazy interactions with fans and “fans”. I don’t know how he’s managed to not snap and kill us all, but then again I wonder that about most of the women that have any degree of visibility on social media. It is a legit wonder that the majority of serial killers aren’t righteously pissed-off women.

  Regardless, the lesson remains the same — if you can see even a tiny bit of yourself in Milholland’s comic today (directed at Milholland or literally any other human being ever), then it’s mathematically provable that you suck¹, and you need to stop sucking as quickly as possible. We are trying to have a civilization here people, and you can either be a goddamned grownup or you can please absent yourself from the rest of us.

Spam of the day:

71 Contaminants in your water…are you safe?

On the off chance that I’m not, I’ma guess that I won’t be made safe by your magic drinking straw.

______________
¹ I’ll be generous and say that perhaps it was the case that you used to suck and have gotten better. In that case, you kind of owe it to yourself to be honest about it, and pay it forward by letting other people know both when they suck, and that it’s possible to improve yourself to the point where you stop sucking.

You know what today is going to be about? Not SDCC! Not even a little! We are free of that particular 362.874kg gorilla for another year.

Steve Hamaker is many things — longtime Jeff Smith collaborator, colorist extraordinaire, husband of comics historian/archivist Jenny Robb, and oh yeah, webcomicker.

From 2013 to 2015, Hamaker filled his copious free time with PLOX, a look at people who game, how they game, and how much they get under each other’s skin. You don’t have to be a gamer to understand PLOX, since the same type of people occupy many geeky pursuits and fall into the same behavior patterns wherever you find the intersection of hobby and obsession. Just about a year ago, Hamaker wrapped up the story and Kickstarted a print volume (subtitled Hell Is Other Players), the fulfillment of which was completed this past Spring.

But stories never end, do they? Despite wrapping up that print volume with a definite THE END, it was described as the first print edition, which left open the door for more. Enter PLOX Book 2 (subtitled Don’t Play Games), which launched on Thursday. Two years after his characters found their separate peaces, they intersect again and the old frictions arise again.

Here’s where I make a confession, which should double as an endorsement — I never read PLOX on its regular Tuesday/Thursday update schedule. Mostly this is because it’s one of those plot-driven comics that I have to read in big chunks. But partly it’s because the characters in PLOX are so sharply drawn (in the descriptive and behavioral senses, not purely a visual sense) that it’s difficult material for me — they are so real, so three-dimensional, that it’s actually uncomfortable for me to watch them behave in ways that counter their own interests. Stubbornness, egotism, petty behavior from them feels like you’re watching actual, breathing people screw up their lives.

I can get emotionally invested in wombats, cyborgs, hipsters, magical-realist boarding school students, post-hipster reluctant grownups, Spinozan werewolves, nonhuman imperial subjects and subjugators, amnesiac townspeople, space mercenaries, and Second Spanish Empire space explorers and enjoy the stories for what they are. When the characters are dumb, or in conflict they could avoid, in danger or even dying, I can feel along with them and then go about my day.

But PLOX, man. PLOX. When they screw up their lives, that one hurts. Every other story I mentioned that I get emotionally invested in, there’s at least some element of the fantastical that provides a safe remove; PLOX is so grounded in mundanity, so ordinary in its problems, I’m in some Uncanny Valley analogue of emotional non-distance. Hamaker has created characters so real, my brain trips all over itself to say Okay empathy’s good and all but maybe you should let those people live their lives over there and not get too involved because damn. They may be only lines and washes of color, but they’re almost too real for me to handle as entertainment.

And if that’s not the hallmark of a damn good storyteller, I don’t know what is.

Spam of the day:

Increase Sex Drive-A Shocking Boost For Men 50+

Dammit people, I may be old but I am not yet over 50. Stop it.

I has never failed to both impress and terrify me what the webs of personal interconnection can bring about. I was talking with Marian Call and Pat Race after the Space Time show about how we’re in a unique era, where somebody that’s accomplished in one field (say, comics and cartooning) winds up being a mutual fan of somebody in a completely different field (say, landing robotic laboratories on a different friggin’ planet) and they end up finding a space where they can collaborate. It’s like if the Algonquin Round Table had perhaps slightly fewer snarky New Yorker contributors and added in a barnstorming aviatrix, a jazz pioneer, and an engineer or two.

Case in point: outside Kate Beaton’s spotlight panel¹, I made the acquaintance of a woman whose Twitter handle I recognized; our circles of friends (and friends-of-friends) overlap at several points. Her name is Cathy Leamy and she’s making comics in Boston that provide healthcare education². A bit later I was talking with a woman named Lisa Johnson (who sported an ad astra per aspera tattoo³ and had nice things to say about my Figure 1 notebook) and makes satellites in Scotland (where she is far more female, far more brown, far more female, and far more not-Scottish) and then Rich Stevens introduced me to Matt Fraction and then she and Matt hugged and he got her on the FaceTime call to his daughter because they know each other because of course they do. Does Boston Cathy know originally-from-Boston Jen the Satellite Lady? I haven’t had the chance to determine it yet but it wouldn’t surprise me.

The six degrees of separation thing may not ever have been true, but it’s truer than it’s ever been. All of these disciplines intersecting, cross-pollinating, informing each other in a web of smart, accomplished, skilled people who are using the things we love to teach us about other things — things we didn’t know about, and things that we didn’t know that we would love — I truly believe that this is what’s going to hold our culture together in the face of regressive forces that want us all back in distinct boxes with clear labels and hierarchical roles.

Screw labels. Screw roles. I want comics people and music people and writer people and dance people and maker people and doctor people and actor people and human rights people and lawmaker people and food making people and drinks making people and just generally smart, interesting people bouncing the hell off each other in ways we’ve never seen before. The more the merrier.

Except for moustache people. That spot’s taken and I will brook no challengers.

______________
¹ And if by chance anybody knows the Furiosa I met outside Kate’s panel, she looks like this and her initials are CM, I’ve been trying to email the photo I promised and her Gmail account says it’s over quota. Hey, we’re talking about connections today, somebody here probably knows her.

² Attention, Dante Shepherd: you may want to look her up to compare notes on STEM education via comics.

³ Also one of Newton’s cannonball thought experiment.

You got 10,431 words out of me last week; today I’m getting over a red-eye flight and tomorrow I’ll be driving for most of the day (with an overnight EMT shift in between), so maybe come back in a couple of days? Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin has been gathering info, and that’s always good. Try to keep everything together for another day or so.

It’s been a full three days since Gene Yang graciously allowed me some time in his schedule to talk to him; for the record, I almost begged off because I could see that I would be causing him to delay a much-needed meal, but he was insistent. As such, I kept things as brief as I could and remain grateful for his generosity; his reputation as one of the nicest people on the planet is well-deserved. Also, one of the smartest — he’s got a point of view of his work (particularly his recent work with DC) that he wants to convey, and he knows how to reinforce his point while remaining unfailingly polite. This came up fairly early on in our talk as I asked him for his thoughts …

On Superman vs New Super-Man
A disclaimer to start: I never read a Superman monthly until I heard that Yang would be taking over the flagship title¹, so I had little idea what had been going on with the character in The New 52 continuity.

I read Yang’s run faithfully, but I don’t think it was successful; it seemed to me that Yang wanted his story to go in an interesting direction (he’d been handed a Superman who was fairly depowered and on the verge of having his secret identity outed; Yang placed him in a community of mostly-forgotten gods from around the world, re-enacting their great mythic battles as MMA to sustain a portion of their worship), but was hamstrung by story dictates to tie into what was happening in other books.

Speaking purely for myself, the parts of Superman that seemed most Yangian to me were interesting and entertaining; the rest was confusing and haphazard. I asked Yang if he had felt constrained by editorial restrictions on Superman.

I love being part of Rebirth, he told me. Rebirth is the name of the current DC continuity, now that they’ve blown up The New 52; he had no desire to share any frustration he may have felt with the prior work, he only wants to focus on what’s next, what’s positive, where he thinks he can do good work². New Super-Man, he said, was very satisfying because my talks [with DC] started from building a character.

In case you hadn’t heard, this new character is a superhero built up by a faction of the Chinese government, taking as their subject a teenager who’s a bit of bully and only accidentally heroic (I’ve heard him compared to Spider-Man, in that a teen suddenly has his life changed by superpowers and his first instinct is to exploit it; my reading on the character is he’s more of a Flash Thompson).

The character distinctly isn’t American, or even Chinese-American (the book takes place in Shanghai), and comes from a completely different perspective. What do powered individuals mean to nominally-communist, authoritarian government of China? Yang let on that the antagonists of the series (they haven’t shown up yet in issue #1) will super-powered pro-democracy activists; it’s a far more complex story than just the three (somewhat simplistic) poles of Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

And it’s one that almost didn’t happen. Yang said no when he was first approached to do the book, and wasn’t sure if it would have been done without him. I asked about the possibility of cultural pitfalls if a non-Chinese writer had been assigned the gig (specifically, I wondered how many characters might become inadvertent Cousin Chin-Kees), and he was entirely positive. There are plenty of talented writers that could have done it well, he told me, but allowed that a non-Chinese writer might not have thought to explore the very different nature of Chinese society with the story. He was grateful that DC was giving him reign to explore all the contradictions in that society, the things that most fascinate and scare me. He’ll have some time to explore those ideas, as he’s signed for twelve issues, with a full story contained in the first six.

On other occurrences of the number six
Yang confirmed that there will be six books in the Secret Coders series from :01 Books and was really thrilled to be working with artist Mike Holmes (he can draw in any style, it’s amazing). He’s also working on a nonfiction graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, for :01 now; it’s about basketball team from the high school where he used to teach.

On the differences in scripting styles
Like Hope Larson, Yang is doing a lot of writing for other artists now, but he’s had experience with that in past (I’m recalling at least four or five :01 books where he was partnered with an artist) and like Larson he’s still working on writing for superheroics. His work on The Shadow Hero helped prepare him for the conventions and tropes of supers, but the writing for monthly floppies means that he still has to tighten up the story presentation, and it’s been a transition.

On the future
Yang’s done a lot of work a lot of places — DC, Dark Horse — and had a lot of fun doing it, but he gestured toward the stacks of books at the :01 booth and made a simple declaration that revealed both his career plan and the nature of comics he really loves to make in five words: First Second is my home.

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¹ Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I have, of course, read All-Star Superman multiple times because I’m not a monster. I consider it to be the definitive representation of the character.

² Which reminds me more than a little of Superman himself.