Deadpool, that churlish, craggy-faced Marvel anti-hero will be hitting the big screen some time in 2012—played by dreamboat Ryan Reynolds, no less—so like me, if you didn’t know, you’ll be hearing the name and bandwagoning very soon. His gender bender counterpart, Lady Deadpool—girly-churl, blonde and babely—demanded a writer who knows that this is funny, hyper-meta shit and ‘Pool-ies always spit real talk. Enter Mary HK Choi, via phone from Comic-Con in San Diego.

It’s no secret that we heart the TheAwl.com writer and Complex contributing editor around these parts, so when the opportunity to interview Choi for the National Post’s Arts blog, The Ampersand, came up, I belly-flopped to it like an overeager drunk at a fancy pool party. You can read the shorter, more newbie-friendly conversation over there, but the full text is here for the comics and writer geeks out there.

You’ve said your foray into comics happened after childhood. What was the first comic book you read?

I remember reading Arkham Asylum when I was really small, only because my brother had it. It was a really, really beautiful book; creepy and enigmatic and the cover was very beguiling. I remember being young enough to be completely spooked out by the whole thing. But then, as far as sort of a real entree, I sat down and read Preacher. That whole series had a good and substantial long run, so I sat with that and ate its brains out. I think at that point I was good and hooked.

Were you a Marvel fan before you began working with them?

Yeah, I guess that’s the irony. That I’m like “DC, and then Vertigo” and then I was like “and then MARVEL!” But I would say that my familiarity of the comics universe at this point, Marvel’s been pretty much more of what I’ve learned about. And I’m not trying to give you a very diplomatic answer, and my admiration for the “other camp” is not at all compromised. It’s just what I got into and what was around me at the time.

So given the fact that you were old enough to form opinions about these things, did you care about the portrayal of female characters in comics?

I did care. One of my favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite comic books to date is Zero Girl by Sam Kieth. To me, that was a very realistic, poignant, but not precious, depiction of a chick’s coming of age story. And after that, I read this series called Alias by Brian Michael Bendis to which a lot of people are like “J-GAR!” and I’m like, “No, it’s something else!” The character’s name is Jessica Jones—I love how pedestrian that is—an alcoholic private investigator who has a huge backsliding, fall-from-grace because she was previously a super heroine and had these great, altruistic motives and now she’s just cobbling and cajoling a living together and is a mess, and unceremoniously prancing into booty calls and stuff. It’s incredibly dark and her psyche is sort of wounded, but it wasn’t stereotypical or flat. It was very nuanced and studied. A lot of people just assume that it’s all these bulbous-glanded chicks with 18-inch waists, but I came into it so late that, blessedly, other more realistic avenues had already been explored and more complex aspects had been available to me.

And that approach is clearly something you applied to Lady Deadpool.
Totally. And these are two women I’ve mentioned who are not unorthodox in their appearance, in the sense that they’re not laced up or buttoned up. They’re just sort of figuring things out and in transition. But, if you look at it, there are other very statuesque, more ubiquitous-physique ladies who are totally badass and totally developed in their characters, too. Take someone like an Emma Frost—that’s a pretty actualized character, AND she’s a freaking bombshell. She looks amazing, and in white no less.

What does Lady Deadpool have that we haven’t seen before?
It’s just so weird because I can sit here and tout all these things that I’ve done that are (sarcasm) wholly original and never been done before! I think that’s kind of a slipper slope in the sense that I don’t know 100 per cent what’s out there. I will readily admit that I’ve skimmed merely the surface: it’s like small triangle versus iceberg. But the thing I enjoyed about writing Deadpool is that he is completely out of his tree. He’s a complete lunatic, he’ll say whatever and it will be totally linear vis-a-vis his own mania. So there’s that huge disconnect, and a disjointedness to his response to actual stimuli that the reader sees or that anyone who is interacting with him sees. Lady Deadpool is hot, badass, has a bodacious body, but I actually really like the fact that, the way I wrote her, she comes off like a total meathead. She’s very open and crass. I didn’t want the translation of Deadpool’s temperament to the female gender to be like, “Oh, you know, she’s dry!” and “Rapier wit!” I didn’t want it to be meta and ironic because she’s a chick and therefore more graceful in her humour. I wanted her to be exactly like Deadpool, but with female wants—when she sees a guy, or has an opportunity to binge eat, she would just be really into instant gratification. I like that she kind of talks like a dude which, if anyone meets me, they’ll see the parallels in how lazy I was in writing her dialogue because it’s the shit I would say.

Is she for guys or girls?
I think she’s for both. I can definitely see detractors in both genders; guys being like, “Who talks like this?” and girls being like, “Oh god, who talks like this?!” And then both genders thinking this is so déclassé, there’s no real goal here, what’s actually happening? I can totally see people saying that, and they would not be remiss.

So how did you hook up with Marvel in the first place?
They approached me. It’s no secret that my brother, Mike Choi, is a comic book artist and he’s been very well received and has been doing it for quite some time. They do have these boiler plate roles as to who they’ll let submit for them. There were definitely parameters that I massaged myself into because I am previously published and have written little fiction-based, almost fanfic, type things in the front of a magazine that I had launched several years ago. And I have done preorting and actual magazine stories, features and cover stories. I did fall within the scope of being previously published and I understand that it’s completely typical that I do have the background that I do.

But it’s like, you want things right? I launched my own magazine that died, and I was at a bunch of other magazines and those died, and I’ve launched several other magazines beyond that. I did a couple of vanity projects for different corporate clients like PepsiCo and Samsung and Nike. So I was doing a bunch of things, and figuring out what puzzles I wanted to get into. I got into blogging because I was like, “What is this WordPress, HTML thing that I need to know about?” and I was writing for The Awl for a while and I got to do a bunch of food reviews and movie reviews. And just because The Awl was so new, and because they’re so amazing, we had a lot of rapt eyeballs on us. So I know that a couple of reviews I had written were well-received—like I did something for V and 2012 and Avatar. It was weird because I had known the primaries at Marvel for a while, like CB Cebulski, who was like talent scout, writer, editor, and he just got a crazy VP promotion this week. I’d known him socially because he lives in New York too, and my brother lives in California, so we’d gone out for drinks and I’d seen him at events. But I don’t think it occurred to anyone that I’d write for them, and to this day I haven’t gotten everyone in a room and been like “Listen, how did this cross your mind?” But I think there was talk of a meeting where an editor I’d never even met mentioned my writing, as far as they had read it on The Awl blog, so my name started circulating. And when I found out I was ecstatic and being uncouth—spazzing out basically. So the ball started rolling from there.

What was the character development process like?
That’s the thing that’s so rad. I’m writing the first Lady Deadpool one-shot. So while Victor Gischler had explored that this person exists, there wasn’t a lot in terms of what her personality should be. I’m incredibly lucky and blessed that I surreptitiously waltzed into that nexus. It was totally footloose and fancy-free. All I knew was that it had to happen in the future in terms of continuity for other things that were going on. But in the nature of all these Deadpool offshoots existing is that there are also all these other simultaneous strands of parallel-running, and not-parallel-running universes. So I could have ostensibly put her not only in any timeline or timeframe, flux capacitor, or whatever, I could also put her geographically anywhere. So with that much of a loosey-goosey XY, I chose the setting as New York in a one-room apartment with the major crux of the incident being that she can’t get her TV to switch on. Because that’s just hilarious: to take it so myopic that they’re like, “You can do ANYTHING!” and you’re like “Alright, I’m going to do this.” With that in your crosshair though, you can really talk about her.

What was the biggest writing challenge when it comes to going from media to fiction?
Figuring out how much you can get away with saying in 22 pages. There wasn’t a set beginning and an end, so I got to do whatever I wanted. It was kind of like an out-of-body experience. I have no muscle memory or cerebral memory for what curtailing my story into 22 pages feels like. So you overshoot: you cast this impossibly wide net, with holes and tears and dredge up so much crap like toilet seat, old boot, all this crap you can’t use. The first thing I did was sit and write every personality quirk I would need for all the characters, and then I cobbled their interactions. With magazine writing, you sit there and put the LEGO pieces together as a house, and you have your green swatch so you know how many little divets you get and that’s your word count. I can do an interview and think, “that’s my pull quote, my intro.” With this, I couldn’t identify any of the markers, and not only that, there weren’t markers given to me. They were markers that I could conjure, which is just batshit. You can drive yourself crazy being like, “Is that good? Am I brilliant? Am I retarded?” It’s kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure, except it’s got a bajillion pages and you’re constantly flipping and you don’t know where you’re at.

What was the timing of the process?
It was sort of leisurely in the beginning, where I was able to wool-gather and be all precious and pretty about it. And then when something was due it was due. So I got my beats in, I got my script in, I did the edits and the edits beyond that, smoothing a couple things out, location captions. Due-date to due-date, those things were really fast.

What are you going to take away from this experience?
I want to do more fiction. I’m in a very lucky position where during Lady Deadpool I did another 11-page digital with Marvel for another property called Shanna the She-Devil. And that was only 11 pages, and after agonizing over 22, 11 went really quickly. So hopefully I’m getting faster at it. But I definitely want to write a feature-length script for a movie. I’ve tooled around with writing a sitcom pilot with a friend, and that took fucking forever—I couldn’t believe it. So hopefully I’ll just do this, while I do the other thing.

What’s been the most interesting thing about entering the comics world?
I, like, descended upon this whole industry, plucked from the sky—and I say ‘descend’ not like there’s a hierarchy, where I’m waving from an ivory tower but I just came out of nowhere. And with my brother being who he is, it’s like, I don’t know how dubious people are of my merits on a one-to-one basis because I am blessedly ignorant of all of that. But, I think the really nice thing is that—and I know I’m really new—but I don’t feel totally unwelcome. I think that that is surprising. Not that I was like “I thought these guys were assholes! They’re not assholes!” It’s not that, it’s just, you know, people are genuinely inquisitive about where I came from, and curious about my brain and my process because my brain used to do different stuff. And I think I’m really lucky that I know it’s a huge, huge leap from what I do to what I’m doing now. If writing a book for Marvel was the only thing I wanted in my whole life, from when I was a kid until whenever, and I thought about it every day, and there was a patron saint of sequential art that I prayed to and I had a medallion and an amulet…..I would probably, not be disappointed, I’d just have so much invested. Every negative word or disappointment, or every edit I’d have to do would feel like this huge concession, or disappointment or some huge chink in my armor. I’m just doing this from a vantage point that it’s the coolest freaking opportunity I’ve had in a long time, and that’s rad, and I’m really curious what becomes of it. And I really, really hope I get to do it again. And if I don’t I understand—(laughs) it’s not you, it’s me, and that’s fine. I’m glad I have a tougher skin and I’m not so new to the ways of the internet that I stalk message boards like, “No you’re wrong! My intention was this!” I’m in a bubble about that stuff, which is nice.

What has the reception been like?
It feels different. When I went in I started waving like the Queen and there’s a huge flotilla that I got to stand on—No! I’m kidding. Nothing’s changed at all. It’s exactly the same. In fact, I went to buy my comic and I was like, “I’ll have FIVE of those, please!” And he looked SO dubious. He was all eyebrows, and the intonation was like, “This piece of shit?” And my bottom lip was quivering, like, “Yes, I’ll take five,” gesturing with my hand. I’m here as a creator amongst a grip of real creators, so it’s much more of a fanfare at home where all my journalist friends and media people-friends are TwitPic-ing their comic book. And everybody’s like, “Hey nerd, I haven’t been to the comic book store in 20 years!” So that’s been really entertaining, they’ve been really supportive.

And the biggie question: why would you say comics are important?
That made my heart lurch. They’re important. I’m gonna go in here. Thinking about where we’re at with technology, how much has changed in our lifetime, how quickly information is processed and eaten, and how we’re all these great big minnow-eating whales that float with our mouths open and all this fucking shit comes rushing in and that’s how we get our sustenance…Everything is so ephemera. News happens really fast and we know every angle of it as soon as it happens. We read stories really fast and the story-writers are going even faster, and everyone is just disgustingly prolific and engorged with information, addicted to getting the information and addicted to putting the information out there. And then think about your RSS feed. Now think about someone having to sit there and draw that for you. The thing that blows me away about comics is that some person sits down, and hunches—they may or may not have lumbar support, I don’t know—and with their hands and brain, they draw an entire piece of art for every snippet of words you’ve committed. That’s, like, kind of beautiful, and it’s heroic and it’s romantic. We’re talking about paywalls, and how we’re gonna monetize news, and this seems like an unfathomably incongruent input-to-ouput to sales to supply and demand-analogy. At the end of it, it’s like opera dude. It’s important. It’s broke if you think about it in terms of money, but someone sits down and makes you a piece of art work, and does it over and over again for each page. And then does that over and over again to tell you a story—and that’s just sick to me. And the fact that it’s print, you know? I’m sure if I had a film background you could talk about it in terms of visual fodder or mis en scene, but I’m from a print background. I will try to make a magazine til the day I die, to cantankerous mocking and derision from all bean-counting people. But I fucking love that. Give me something I can hold—and that’s no detraction away from the comic book apps and the iPad. That’s beautiful. That’s really cool, it’s the future. It feels great. But this is an art form and it’s so noble and it’s important and it’s a wonderful unifier, and it’s a great way to get a story. Everything that you find engrossing on a page, someone has put there for you.

Cleveland Heights Police Capt. Michael Cannon says Pekar had been suffering from prostate cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and depression. The cause of death is not yet known.

Like, damn.

In his work, Pekar captured all of those ailments with a level of detail and openness hard to fathom in this day of online over-sharing. His work has only seemed more prescient with time, even as his method of comic-strip-diary storytelling has become more commonplace. American Splendor was adapted to film in 2003 with a larynx-shredded Paul Giamatti in the title lead role, with Pekar himself serving as narrator and commentator. It was typically meta for that period in film, appropriately navel-gazing given its source material, and, luckily for us, wonderfully executed.

Famously, Pekar spent 35 years as a lowly file clerk who never once asked for a promotion. (“You’ve never planned anything in your life,” Dave Letterman once jabbed him with. “What did you plan, your wardrobe?”) Though his work was highly renowned, financial success eluded him, and his struggles to get by remained one of his favourite topics to bitch about even in his less erratic later days.

It’s the early days though that most will remember. Pekar was a notorious repeat guest on early Letterman, and the two often sparred until Letterman eventually banned him from the program for listing grievances about General Electric — then owner of NBC. Check out the clips below — they are incredibly hilarious but painfully awkward, and watching Pekar bristle at good ol’ sardonic Letterman only hints at how much Pekar must have struggled with daily interactions. Put someone that confounded by social situations in an arena of that much artifice, and it’s no wonder it went down as it famously did.

It’s easy to call Pekar an asshole, but even easier to call him a lovable one. (And over time, we’ve come to realize Letterman was kind of the prick Pekar always said he was.) (Or maybe everyone knew this all along. Before my time.) (I love them both.) Anyway, if there is an upstairs, I hope Pekar’s there, giving ‘em hell.

Because she’s too bourgie to type herself, her colleague Michale Hurlbut helped write down her thoughts. Which makes this our first ghost-written post ever! Except for all that stuff I plagiarize on the reg, of course. -Jef)  

The main floor of the Toronto Reference Library

In 2003 The Beguiling became the ever-gracious, ever-accommodating host to Canada’s first ever Toronto Comic Arts Festival–wrangling a few hundred independent authors, artists and publishers. The humble modus-operandi of this free(!) event is to promote and celebrate the comic medium’s breadth, diversity and aesthetic vivacity as an art form. Needless to say, TCAF isn’t your average toy-shilling, corporation-spooning, masquerade-ball-of-the-damned style comic-con (Editor: Not that there’s anything wrong with that! *Smooths out cape*). It is, dare we say, a literary event. And this years event, held within the austere walls of the Toronto Reference Library, marked our second successful collaboration with the Toronto Public Library, corralling marquee names (and stratospheric talents) like Dan Clowes and Paul Pope, to rattle off a few.

My guests of note were: Charles Vess, Eric Kim (first on my dance card, if second on my guests-of-note list), Eric Wight and Kagan Mcleod. I was busy selling books, which fans could then get signed. Beside our bustling table was where Charles Vess held court. I had known Mr. Vess for Stardust (which was turned into a Major Motion Picture starring Michelle Pfieffer and a surpassingly oddball Robert De Niro), as well as his excellent work with Neil Gaiman. Besides being a terrific artist he is also a lovely man, and if he knew I called him Mr. Vess he’d likely emit a kind of half snort followed by, “Please… just Charles.” 

A fellow Beguiling staffer and myself. I designed, ordered and picked up this years t-shirts prior to the event, so I had time to modify mine a few days before.

Since my job brings me in contact with an array of neato kids books, I am also on a first name basis with Frankie Pickle. Thus, I was pickled tink to meet artist and author Eric Wight at the Official TCAF Saturday Night Party–which I organized or impresario’d, if you will–through a common friend (author of graphic memoir on dyslexia, Mirror Mind, Tory Woollcott) and, rest assured, I fan-girled a little. Frankie Pickle is about this kid with a wild imagination that gets into some hilarious and crazy adventures. Very cute.

The highlight of my weekend, naturally, was the Official TCAF Saturday Night Party, which was my pet project. The Martial Artistik DJ crew featuring DJ Dough Low and Cuzn Joe was spinning while Infinite Kung-Fu’s Kagan McLeod did ace drawing demos.  The place was packed. Fans got to rub elbows (among other things…) with their favourite artists and even Peter, my inscrutably po-faced boss and co-owner of The Beguiling said, “The music isn’t bad,” which is a big deal because he has very discerning tastes. 

Kagan Mcleod is known for his National Post illustrations, but also especially for his hip-hop work and the History of Rap Poster. It features portraits of every single hip-hop artist who ever performed (save one or two), from James Brown to Blondie to Inspectah Deck. The portraits are all incredible, but the back of the poster is a marvel: every artist is broken down into their respective crews with a blurb about their style.

What more can I say? It was a whirlwind few days. I can’t wait to do it all again… after a very long nap. 

Krystle Tabujara is a milliner, Beguiling staffer, international muse and artist model.
Michael Hurlbut is best known for his work as a writer, director and film artiste.

(Pics via and also)

Because Jughead — dude’s gay, right? Look how sad he is that Archie is getting married.

"Noooooo!"

I’m calling it: Kevin + Jughead will be the next headline grabbing storyline from the folks at Archie.

Just look at the body language in that second panel! I see what you’re doing there Archie, with your fancy page compositions. Hot.

(via)

For some reason I’ve always had this hate on for Dave Eggers. Well, I guess there is a reason, just as much as their is a reason to hate Bono’s face – it’s everywhere, or at least was for the most part of the aughts (for the record, that is the first time I have used that word, as well as the last). But unlike my hate for Bono, which is based on a combination of him and his music being annoying, I have read, listened to and watched very little of Egger’s vast multitude of projects – and the few that I have, I’ve liked. The San Francisco Panorama, the 300-some odd page one time newspaper put out by Egger’s publishing factory, McSweeney’s, is one of those.

Released in December with a limited initial run of 20,000 copies (which was also limited to the San Fran area), people are still writing things about Panorama for a few reasons: It’s taken them this long to find it, and it’s taken them this long to read it. I found mine about a month ago and have yet to crack the inner sections.

Generally I liked the newspaper but really didn’t see how it was reflecting the unused potential of the medium, except for the fact that the lay out was closer to a magazine’s. The content was really good (good enough that they had to print another 20,000 copies to meet demand), but they also had a few months to put this together; comparing it to a daily or weekly seems hardly fair. But then I got the comics section and all of Egger’s ubiquitous pretensions just disappeared. Here was 14 full-colour broadsheet pages of ink, speech bubbles and words like SPUK! spelled out in funny bubble letters. I don’t know a lot about comics, but even I recognized some of the artists: Seth, Chris Ware (who does the monthly cartoon in Maissonueve mag, which I subscribe to but can never spell the first time), and none other than the pulitzer prize winning New Yorker cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

I wish I wasn’t so lazy because I would gladly scan some of these great comics, like Adrian Tomine‘s Optic Nerve, which is hilarious and mature and sort of like the Watchmen if it didn’t take itself so seriously. But like I said, lazy. That is probably for the best though because Panorama isn’t online for a reason – you actually have to buy it and read it like an old school newspaper. At $20 in most independent bookstores, it’s some expensive newsprint too, but the well worth it for those interested (no I did not get reimbursed my $20 for saying that either). The first thing that struck me about the comics is that they were original, although that might be the wrong word. Ziggy, that depressed, introverted little weenie, was original, but he’s been syndicated so far and wide that the only face more annoying than his is, well, Bono’s (as mentioned before). Actually, if Bono, in between his philanthroping, counting to four in Spanish and singing cheese ball rock songs, started ruminating out loud on the funny little things in life, he could possibly be the most annoying individual in the history of Earth. Oh wait, he does do that too.

Anyways, enough about Ziggy and Bono, and more about good comics. The only actual real newspaper I have seen attempt to do this has been the National Post, and that was very short lived. A full page of original comics was in every weekend edition, and it seemed to last for a couple of months before being cutback significantly and spread out. Actually, the only regular comic from the short lived section seems to be Steve Murray’s Posties. Alongside his equally as funny Extremely Bad Advice weekly column, he could be the only Canadian cartoonist who is actually publishing fresh, original comics on a weekly basis. Kudos to the Post for doing this, as well as to the Panorama for trying to point out that if newspapers would just allow the space, there are a lot of talented local cartoonists out there whose characters haven’t been telling the same jokes for the last 40 years.

photo of Panorama via

UPDATE: In terms of working cartoonists, I somehow forgot about Gary Clement, also at the Post. I’m sure I’m missing more though.

In keeping with the atmosphere of progress following Kathryn Bigelow’s two big wins at the Academy Awards and the spotlight of  International Women’s Day, let’s take a look at two prescient Marvel comic books that came out last week: the first issue of the 3-part anthology series, Girl Comics and Valerie D’Orazio’s one-shot Punisher MAX: Butterfly, both of which show the scope of what can be achieved when we have more female voices in the creative industry.

Girl Comics collects a bunch of short stories by female writers and artists that range in tone and style. The intro pages by Colleen Coover are incredibly charming (no really, that’s the word to use, I’m not just trying to sound cultured!), featuring a bunch of different heroines in different poses with different facial expressions. It does a good job showing that although they are all collected here under a title that some might see as reductive, Marvel’s female characters exist across a wide spectrum — or at least they should. “It’s not because we are different…Yet we are all unique,” goes the dialogue.

This line of thinking follows throughout the anthology, where stories range from cutesy to gritty, whimsical to sad.

Not all of them work as well as others, but I’m a big fan of D’Orazio’s Punisher short, as well as Devin Grayson’s take on the Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine love triangle, which usually concentrates on Wolverine’s tragic longing but here offers up something more nuanced from Jean’s perspective. The story will ring true with anyone who has battled stray thoughts or felt the sting of jealousy while in a committed relationship.

In all, Girl Comics is a good read and I’m looking forward to the next two installments. The question remains though whether Marvel treats it as a quirky side-project, or if the series signals a genuine movement towards more female representation both behind the scenes and on the page. We’re seeing strides here and there. Grayson can now count herself as the first woman ever to hold down a regular writing duties on a monthly Batman book, but considering Ms. Marvel just got her series axed, I’m a little skeptical overall. Dollars do the talking, of course, so go out and buy the book.

Girl Comics for me just drives home the importance of diversity of voices. More voices = more and different stories and that’s something that’s always good for us as culture consumers, no matter what medium we’re talking about. To go back to the movie analogy, some have already started to backlash against Bigelow and The Hurt Locker saying that she won by directing a “guy’s” movie. I think the stupidity of that speaks for itself, but even if that statement is correct, the solution is STILL to start giving more opportunities to more women directors.

I mention Bigelow because of the next book, Punisher MAX: Butterfly, which in some ways is very much a “guy’s” comic book. The art is dark and moody, and the story centers around a woman who was sexually abused — something which a lot of people are tired of seeing in comic books. The difference is that while abused females are all too often used as narrative devices by male writers to make the lives of male characters seem more interesting, D’Orazio makes Butterfly strictly about the woman in question. This isn’t a story that abuses its female character. It’s a story about a female character that has been abused. The difference might be splitting hairs to some, but all I have to say is to read the book.

‘Nuff said.

It might not be a stretch to call Bill Watterson my favourite artist of all time. If pictures are worth a thousand words, Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes were tiny microcosmic epics — each three panel strip having the wit, imagination, verve and poignancy of any an English lit curriculum novel.

With Calvin & Hobbes commemorative stamps about to be launched by the U.S. Postal Service, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter John Campanelli took a total shot in the dark, emailing the reclusive cartoonist a series of questions with no expectations of a reply. Incredibly, Watterson did in fact send back answers, the first “interview” the local artist had done since roughly 1989. It isn’t without cause that Watterson was jokingly called “The J.D. Salinger of cartoonists,” but coincidentally this interview took place before Salinger’s recent death.

The transcription isn’t particularly insightful, but reveals a lot about Watterson’s artistic sensibilities about his work and his own (clearly private) personal life.

Read the full article here.

A year ago, Barack Obama became president of the United States. He also gave dap to the Savage Dragon, was saved by Spider-Man from an evil duplicate, personally chose the new Youngblood roster, answered the riddle of the sphinx, was outwitted on national television by the Bomb Queen, punched out a gang leader in post-apocalyptic Chicago, fought deadites from hell, and then made out with himself.

Here is Obama’s year in comic books:

“Barack Obama: The Road to the White House” & “The First 100 Days”

Let’s get the obligatory bio offerings out of the way. Publisher IDW is a licensing machine, having already done adaptations for CSI, Underworld, and Metal Gear Solid, so I guess it was natural for them to cash-grab the fuck out of the Obama craze. But even if they did for dollars, the result was incredibly overly-written, awkwardly drawn and overall painful. Look at this shit:

EXCITING. Now stop looking at it, before your eyes die.

RATING: “GAHH MY EYES” 0 BARRIES

“Savage Dragon” 137 & 145

The Savage Dragon, who had a mo-hawk when he was a human so of course grew a fin on his head when he mutated, once ran for office himself, so when the character threw his support behind Obama the endorsement actually meant something. Not to the real world, but to the world in the comic and to the Savage Dragon himself as a character. It had been 12 years since Dragon left the Chicago police force, and the comic works in real time so it really HAD been 12 freaking years. But in issue #45 Dragon reinstates himself, and his first assignment is a security detail for a home-visiting Obama. Maybe bringing the Dragon back to the fold with an Obama appearance was creator Erik Larsen’s way of saying he’d regained his faith in the establishment. Uniforms weren’t offensive anymore, they had meaning again. Maybe ordinary people with green skin and death biceps can affect change within the system. Maybe we’re going to be OK.

Or maybe we all fuck up and everything explodes in our faces.

“There’s only so much one man can do.” Obama should use this issue as a Power Point presentation during his state of the union speech.

RATING: “Stupid but fun and fits into the continuity!” 3 OUT OF 5 BARRIES!

“Amazing Spider-Man” #583

Obama’s inauguration is interrupted by a doppelganger and Spider-Man intervenes to determine who’s the real deal.  How? BASKETBALL TRIVIA. Remember when everyone was like, “Who is this “Obama” and what do we really know about him?” BASKETBALL. HE PLAYS BASKETBALL.

Now wait though — if it’s a question only Obama knows the answer to, how the fuck would you know who’s telling the truth? And if it’s a question YOU know the answer to, how would you expect the impostor NOT to?

Yeah, OK that works for me.

RATING: “Ridonkulous but why not?” 2 BARRIES

“Bomb Queen” volume 6, #1

This issue has one of the worst covers ever. “Bomb Queen” is a cheeky throwback to the 90s “bad girl” craze, which means half-naked, distorted female bodies. With attitude. Which is kinda like comics in general, but with nip slips. And while the whole thing is trashy and exploitative it is one of the rare Obama appearances that actually does something with him. When Obama tries to negotiate with super-villain despot Bomb Queen, it’s an exploration of the U.S. president’s staunch belief in dialogue and diplomacy. Does it work?

“As I just demonstrated, motherfucking words are meaningless.” Thank god, because otherwise words would be fucking my mother!

RATING: “Nice try but too bad Bomb Queen sucks!” 2 BARRIES

“Youngblood” volume 4, #8-9

FINALLY Obama isn’t just some dude behind a desk or giving a long-ass speech. No wait, he’s still behind a desk, but he’s choosing members for the elite government-sponsored superteam, Youngblood. It’s Obama as commander-in-chief, someone not afraid to flex his armed forces. It seemed like a reach back then, but two wars and a Nobel Peace Prize controversy later and yeah, OK.

In Rob Liefeld’s mind though, Obama isn’t just a potential hawk, he’s also a potential bigot.

Yo did he just call that android a “robot”??

By the way that image of Obama is repeated like a million times because ROB LIEFELD CAN’T DRAW. I know everyone knows this, but it can’t be said enough. But it does make for laughs later when Obama goes all Bruce Willis and Liefeld doesn’t have a photo to trace:

Check out that random black dude. With no eyes. Whose pants are also shoes.

RATING: “Bad, real bad, but Liefeld made me laugh!” 2 BARRIES

“Army of Darkness – Ash Saves Obama” #1-2 (will not read 3-4)

This comic is an asshole. Obama’s only drawn from the back, which is a complete waste of time. Even though the artist can clearly draw Obama, as he does when illustrating a picture of Obama, so why not draw the damn dude? Oh and then he’s not even IN issue #2. Is this supposed to mean something? Are you commenting on Obama’s cool and distanced demeanour? His celebrity status? I don’t care because it sucks.

Oh, shut up.

RATING: 1 IS THE LONELIEST BARRY

“Barack the Barbarian” #1-4

I feel bad trashing this book because I love writer Larry Hama for all he’s done on the page and behind the scenes for minorities in comics. With that legacy, an Obama riff on Conan the Barbarian should be something more than a couple of cheap jokes and puns but that’s all Hama has for us here. Characters are named “Hilaria” or “Boosh” or “Red Sarah” after their obvious real-life counterparts, and Obama visits sphinx statues that look like Letterman and Leno and whose riddles are talk-show questions. Monsters are called “snarks.” Get it?

One thing great though are the covers, ripe for deconstruction by cultural theory students:

This picture’s worth a couple thousand word essays. I would have loved it if the comic itself played with the signifiers of a strong black man with a sword who defeated a white woman to lead a country where he was branded an outsider. Instead we get this hot mess:

“Nyaaaa!” indeed.

RATING: “Hot on the outside!” 2 BARRIES

“Drafted: One Hundred Days”

The “Drafted” series is about aliens invading earth and conscripting us to fight in an inter-planetary war. “One Hundred Days” sticks Obama in this fictional universe, examing how his much-scrutinized first one hundred days in office would be different had the election never happened and Chicago blown the fuck up instead. He wouldn’t be in office, but would he still be a leader?

“One Hundred Days” is by far the most mature comic to feature Obama. It runs him through the ringer on a couple of issues that weighed on voters’ minds. Has no military experience? Let’s conscript him in the biggest war ever. All soaring rhetoric and no action? Let’s make him lose his voice. Elitist? Let’s blow up his hometown, kill his family and have him scrounge for canned goods. “One Hundred Days” goes further than rest, and seeing Obama deal with a frustrated population just trying to survive carries extra weight now as joblessness becomes his most pressing issue in the real world.

“One Hundred Days” doesn’t just play with the Obama’s caricature — overly calm, peaceful, BASKETBALL — it prods him as a real person and puts him in difficult situations. Even to the point where he loses his temper, something we haven’t seen yet in real life but feels right because the writing doesn’t suck.

RATING: “Look I’m a real comic character!” 4 OUT OF 5 BARRIES!

Miscellaneous

I also have to give it up to Laura Hudson of Comics Alliance who fills in some of my knowledge gaps in her own Obama run down. Apparently not only does he team up with Scooby-Doo, but he grows up adorable manga style, gets filthy in some manga porn (NSFW or SANItY!)  and kisses himself on the Internet.