The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar

I picked up this book on Sunday at Big Planet Comics in Georgetown in a big stack of other books. I knew Joann Sfar from his work with Lewis Trondheim on the Dungeon series and I was absolutely willing to take a chance on this book entirely due to that content. To be honest, this was one of the last things I threw on the pile, but I’m very happy at the impulse buy.

As you would guess from the title, the entire book is about a rabbi and his cat. What is less obvious is that the entire book is told from the point of view of the cat, who does many cat-type things through the course of the book. He also gains the ability to talk, which is far less cat-like (in my experience).

The book is told with six panels to a page without exception and most of those panels contain a caption at the top edge and some occasional dialog. The art is fairly straightforward line art, beautifully colored. Sfar does a fantastic job of knowing what level to draw the various scenes at. Most are rough thumbnails, although he does occasionally knuckle down and produce some amazing panels like the one below. Other times, he pulls back and produces a more impressionistic style – whatever is most appropriate for the panel at hand.

The story itself is set in the 1930s in French Algeria, where Arabs and Jews are living together under the oppression of the French. There are some very nice set pieces describing the casual bigotry of the French and the relative lack of enmity between the Arabs and the Jews (even pointing out that they often share the same last names). The majority of the story, though, is about the rabbi and his students, friends and family.

This story takes the rabbi and his daughter to Paris, where the rabbi (and his cat) learn about how Algerian Jews fit into the larger, more cosmopolitan culture. Above it all, however, is a very simple understanding that life can be very good if you let it be. Sometimes all it takes is music to make the characters happy. Sometimes it just takes food. But for a deceptively simple conceit, the book produces some seriously profound ideas that are both entertaining and endearing.

If you like stories about family, cats or just want to read something that will make you smile repeatedly, I would highly recommend this book. But don’t take my word for it – the back cover tells me that it won the Jury Prize at the Angouleme. There’s even a sequel – which I’ll probably get around to buying one of these days.

Oceanus Procellarum News

Did you know that there are only eight more installments left in Book 1 of Oceanus Procellarum? The last installment will run on May 29, 2009.

What then?

Book 2 of Oceanus Procellarum will start weekly installments in January of 2010. But if you don’t want to wait that long, you can buy the whole graphic novel right now, right here – only $20 (plus shipping and handling.)

But if you don’t feel like paying for shipping and handling, I will be at the following conventions in the upcoming months:
- The DC Conspiracy Counter Cultural Festival (Vienna, VA) on May 24
- Heroes Con (Charlotte, NC) on June 19-21
- Small Press Expo (Bethesda, MD) on September 26-27

Just look for the man in the purple suit!

The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad

I swear that I picked up The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad at Gosh Comics in 2002, but the book has an American pricetag on it. It was an odd find, but I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever stumbled upon.

According to the introduction, these were originally released in the Independent on Sunday, a London newspaper. I find this odd because – although Leviathan is a “gag-a-day” strip – it doesn’t feel like a comic that one finds in the newspaper. By that, I mean that Leviathan is more clever than funny, which makes calling it a “gag-a-day” strip seem like a serious misnomer. Here, try one of the strips and see what I mean.

The majority of the strips in the book are just like that. With only a few rare exceptions, they each stand on their own – defendant only the reader’s ability to know that the baby in green is Leviathan. There are obvious comparisons to Walt Kelly, Gary Larson, Berke Breathed, Garry Trudeau and Bill Waterson to be made, but the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes are probably the closest in tone. The pages are filled with play of all kinds – wordplay, playing with the format of the page, playing with the reader’s expectations. There is a kind of delight that comes from turning the page and not knowing what’s next.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, the book itself is very nice. The pages have a nice red on the edges and the design is very tactile and immediate. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t understand the question “why would you buy a hardback book,” then you might enjoy the Book of Leviathan. Readers who enjoy something fun and clever as a mental snack would absolutely enjoy this. Unless you don’t.

Tangents by Migelanxo Prado

I want to say that I found my copy of Migelanxo Prado’s Tangents in a second hand shop somewhere, but it is equally likely that I purchased it from a vendor at a club or directly from the NBM table at Small Press Expo. Either way, I do know that my copy came with a tear in the front cover, which is why I got it for a reduced price. I’ve seen Prado’s work around (most notably in A Streak of Chalk), but this was new to me so I picked it up.

Prado is a Spanish artist who you may know from the Dream story in Endless Nights. Tangents was originally written in Spanish and the translated edition that I have was published by NBM, who had a nice line of translated European comics a few years ago. If you are dilligent, you can find their stuff in better comic shops.

Tangents is an anthology of eight short stories and each was drawn with crayons, chalk and ink – but the use of each varies from story to story and they are visually distinct. His use of color is fantastic throughout. I like the autumnal, sunset look of this story.

The common thread linking all of these stories is that they depict a scene in the sex lives of the characters. In most cases, this scene is a turning point in those lives, giving the story a degree of depth and meaning. In some cases, though, the writing is not the best; I’m not sure if this is due to the translation or if the artist just wasn’t good at writing dialogue. Also, there is a distinct lack of word balloons under the dialogue itself to provide contrast, which makes reading the words more cumbersome than it needs to be.

That doesn’t matter all that much, though. The art does a very good job of telling the story through body language and the like. There is enough information gleaned from the the captions and dialogue to provide context to the sad faces and dejected people. This is helped by the fact that entire pages of each story are done entirely without captions or dialogue. And Prado is very good at facial expressions.

One of the interesting things about the book is the nudity. This is to be expected due to the subject matter, but it should be noted that this is not a book for children. All manner of secondary and primary sexual characteristics are depicted, without modesty – which suits the tone of stories told about two people at their most intimate.

What I found most interesting was the fact that Prado chose to depict foreplay right up to the point of intercourse and then suddenly gets shy at the last minute and flash to a panel of discarded clothes. If intercourse is shown, it is usually from a distance. Maybe there is something to be said for the last minute shift in context to provide juxtaposition.

This is not an uplifting book by any stretch of the imagination, but the art is fantastic and it’s a perfect example of how to do sequential art about normal people. Stories about sad naked people work really well in comics form. Go figure.

Watch for patterns

For some reason, I’ve always seen post-modernism, slipstream and metafiction as different facets of a single premise. There’s also a distinct Dadaist/collage thing going on there, too. An echo of the “modernism” bit, perhaps?

Warren Ellis once described Iain banks as being a man “who writes across genre boundaries as if they did not exist.” (Letters column for Transmetropolitan, issue #10 – in a response to my letter.)

To be honest, at a certain point they don’t, really. The thing about genre is that it shares a root word with generic. Which is appropriate, because genre fiction is about the generic elements that we would expect to find in a given… well, genre. And once you start picking and choosing your generic elements from all over the place, you get something that is appropriately patchwork.

I compare and contrast two concepts when I’m not feeling particularly challenged. First, the idea that you can only break the rules after you has mastered the rules. Second, the idea that there is such a thing as outsider art – produced entirely without regard for whether rules exist, never mind what they are.

Now, I don’t believe that it is entirely possible to learn to just be a brilliant crazy obsessive artist who pays no attention to commercial concerns whatsoever but be simultaneously perfectly marketable. I think that it’s just one of those things that happens. Either you are or you aren’t. And if you are, you already are. If you aren’t, you are probably not going to get there from here.

Still, there is a lesson to learn there – that it is entirely possible to make up your own rules. I hate to say it, but rules are important. Rules create structure – and any creation that wants to stand entirely on its own needs a structure. Even something extremely rudimentary. The nice thing is that the rules (and thus, the structure) don’t have to be generic unless you want them to be.

An interview

The interview I did with Indy Comic News was posted this morning.

On audience

Several months ago, I was asked “what is your audience?” and I didn’t have a ready answer.

The other day, I was asked “what are you trying to tell your audience [with your cover design]?” which I felt begged the question of what my audience is. Again.

This time, I had my marketing specialist at hand, who pointed out that my audience is people who don’t ordinarily read comics.

Mind you, this is a tough sell because it means that I am automatically restricting myself to speaking only to people who are willing to check their expectations at the door and try something new and different. Which is okay, because what I do is conspicuously Avant Garde and non-commercial.

The key insight comes from the understanding that there is a difference between getting eyeballs and keeping eyeballs. In a traditional bookstore setting, the cover is the mechanism for getting eyeballs and the content is the mechanism for keeping eyeballs. On the web, the relationship between cover and content is less consistent. In fact, I would say that the brand, logo and name are of greatest importance for gaining new eyeballs.

To a certain extent, this frees the cover from explicitly commercial concerns. Obviously, it should be focused on its point – communicating to the reader what they can expect to find inside. But the effectiveness of communication can be more relaxed.

In my case, I am attempting to communicate to the reader by managing their expectations. If they cannot tell what to expect from the cover, I have done my job successfully because the visual style of the story can change drastically from page to page. And that dynamic art is my mechanism for keeping eyeballs. Not coincidentally, it also serves double duty to catch eyeballs as well – especially in the web environment.

Are you here to make money or are you here to make comics?

I would say that one of the good things about the new Diamond policy is that it removes the necessity of having to worry if my product is commercial or not because it will now start from a default state of non-commercial. If I want to make something commercial, I have to work very hard and meet certain formulaic benchmarks – strong suggestions that tend to include the word “should.” And, if I want to measure my success by a financial metric, these benchmarks are damn near necessary.

A central tenet of business planning is that the person who takes on the most risk stands to gain the most reward. The trick, then, is to identify the risk in the equation, because the reward will be directly keyed to the risk. It may not always be obvious, but it will be there. And, if there is no obvious reward, there probably isn’t a reason to take the risk.

In comics publishing (and publishing in general), the risk comes from printing – literally, creating a hard copy that can be sold and consumed in the most convenient fashion. So printing costs are the risk, sales are the reward and convenience is the hook. Notice that content doesn’t factor into the equation.

The truth is that content is free. I can (and do) publish the content for nothing. It’s easy to do and there is absolutely no risk associated with it. And, by any realistic financial scale, there is no measurable reward. Fair enough. But if my criteria for success is “to have people read my material,” then free content is not an obstacle to overcome – but a measurable means to an end.

The reward comes from the convenience of having the story continue. For example, book one will run until May. Book two will not start as a webcomic until January of 2010. But, if you get to the end of book one and do not want to wait seven months, you can buy the next book immediately.

A review

Kier over at Durosia.com gave Oceanus Procellarum a very nice review.

Thinking out loud about the attention economy

For those that have not been paying attention (which would be most of you, because it really doesn’t affect you directly), diamond comics distributor has raised the sales limits on the books that it will allow in their catalogs. This is huge, because diamond is the only distributor for comic books in North America, period. The new rule is that if a book does not get $2,500 worth of sales, the solicitation will get pulled.

what this does, in all practicality, is destroy direct marketing to comics shops as an avenue for small print-run publishers (like myself). As it turns out, I really wasn’t counting on diamond distributors as a sales avenue in the first place. But even if I was, the door has closed.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that if people like me want to get noticed, we have to get creative. Which is where the attention economy comes into play? I was struck by this yesterday, when I went to the webcomic list and saw how much noise there was on the page – how many different kinds of comics there were competing for my eyeballs and my attention.

My first thought was that in this environment, advertising revenue becomes a kind of closed loop, where the money gets passed from people seeking to advertise to people who want to keep their visibility up. Getting into that ecosystem is worthwhile to a point, but what point?

I have this refrain running through my head – “abandon all hope of profit, ye who enter here.” essentially; this refers to the fact that small print publishing is not an inherently profitable enterprise. For this reason, the people who do it have to work for the love of the medium without regard for eventual reward. It’s a crazy thing to do, but the whole point is that if you are not compelled to do this, you probably shouldn’t.

Another phrase that this brings to mind comes from the Tao of Steve – “be without desire.” in this case, I modify that slightly into “be without concern for profit.” in the attention economy, money is not just a distant concern; it is almost an unachievable goal. Once you realize that it’s not attainable, it becomes easy to be unconcerned with it. And by disregarding money as the goal, commercial concerns go out the window as well. All of which can become enormously liberating, from a content point of view.

Going back to the Tao of Steve, I wonder if the rest of the tenets from that philosophy have any relevance in the attention economy. Number two is “be excellent.” as it turns out, Scott McCloud’s four tenets for up-and-coming comics artists (learn from everyone, follow no one, watch for patterns and work like hell) dovetail perfectly here. So, yes. Do good things and produce good content.

On to number three, which is where the Tao of Steve becomes problematic. “Retreat, for as Heidegger says, ‘we pursue that which retreats from us.’” it would not be wrong to point out that I’m still parsing this one, because it is so massively counter-intuitive. I want people to notice what I have produced and, ideally, to read it as well.

Obviously, one of my favorite approaches to problem solving is to find other viewpoints and match them up to the problem at hand in the hopes that someone else’s answers might inform my own. To this end, Kevin Kelly’s concept of intangible generatives that cannot be reproduced at no cost come in very handy. Of these, the concept of findability – where “being found is valuable” – is the most relevant. And retreating, in this context, seems like a very bad idea. It is absolutely the worst thing to do in this situation.

But this is the Tao we’re talking about. The inherent paradox is what makes it worth considering. And, in an age where broadcast becomes synonymous with spam, I’m starting to wonder if the idea of exclusivity – content that is only available to those “in the know” becomes more attractive.

I don’t know. But I’m thinking really hard.