SPECTATORS - Part 132
Plus, BKV chats with Y: THE LAST MAN co-creator PIA GUERRA!
Greetings from the halcyon era of last Monday, November 4th.
Brian here, and whatever happens/happened tomorrow/your last Tuesday, I suspect I’m going to want to spend a healthy amount of time away from the internet, so I’m banking today’s installment in your not-too-distant past, writing it right after I sent out last Monday’s missive.
Terminator timeline!
I hope all is relatively okay in your present/my future, and please stay tuned for an awesome chat with Y: The Last Man co-creator Pia Guerra, as well as a few undoubtedly magnificent new NSFW pages of Spectators, which artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon and letterer Fonografiks will hopefully be inserting below next week/right now…
Um… hi?
To be continued.
(And if you’re just joining us, you can still catch up on our entire surreal story so far right here, thanks.)
Last week, I promised to give away a few signed copies of Saga #70, whose ominously beautiful cover image of Squire by co-creator Fiona Staples you can also purchase as a limited edition shirt, high-quality print, and now (thanks to Merch Maestro Ben Rankel and a commenter’s wise request) even a HOODY over at The Official Saga Threadless Shop.
I literally just ordered one for myself, even though my family thinks it’s pretty “cringe” of me to wear something from a comic that I helped make… but those ding-dongs can pound sand, because this thing rules.
Regardless, our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe randomly selected a few lucky winners from last week’s conversation with you generous paid subscribers in The Tower about great comics we’ve recently discovered, starting with these picks from none other than SKTCHD’s own David Harper:
It’s not very often that comics completely slip by me, but I was delighted by Local Man Vol. 1 after hearing Tim Seeley and Tony Fleecs discuss it on Matthew Rosenberg’s Ideas Don’t Bleed podcast. On the flipside, manga slips by me constantly, and I couldn’t have enjoyed the completely indescribable Marriage Toxin any more than I did. A bonkers blast of a comic!
Next up, Tyl0r recommended:
Tongues by Anders Nilsen is some stunningly beautiful Sc-Fi. I bought a couple of the issues the first day I was at Small Press Expo, and the next day I went back and bought the rest. These books are not only well drawn and written by a single obsessed creator, they are also terrifically designed artifacts. And the story, which reveals pieces and parts that come together to make a whole, is not a afraid to take its time. With scenes that are rendered in innovative ways along the page, that keep even simple dialogues entertaining, I am so excited to see the rest!
Thayer P. suggested:
It’s on hiatus right now, but Love Everlasting by Tom King and Elsa Charretier completely blew me away. When I read it, I was feeling trapped in a traditional housewife role, and their depiction of that situation, and the romantic tropes that keep women living small lives that limit their potential struck me in a ridiculously powerful way (and helped motivate me to change my situation).
Oh right, format - I mostly read comics digitally these days. The one exception is DSTLRY books (another great discovery!), which I get from my local shop.
Thom D. added:
I occasionally write about books, so I got a pitch in my inbox for Mary Tyler Moorehawk that described it as “Johnny Quest by way of Infinite Jest.” That almost felt like pandering to me. So I skeptically opened the PDF on my iPad…then immediately went out and pre-ordered the hardcover because the book was too lush and beautiful and *experiential* that I knew that a digital reading would not do it justice.
And last but not least, Cat F. said simply…
Tart! It's my favorite indie comic series! (Well, besides Saga) 😸
Much appreciated, Cat, and all of you tasteful readers who contributed such excellent selections, many of which I’ve now added to my pile.
There are many, many more must-read recs in last week’s chat thread, so join your fellow Tower members to see them all AND unlock the full Exploding Giraffe experience (at least for our remaining six or so weeks together):
Here’s a fun opportunity next Tuesday, November 19th if you happen to be in the Ferndale, Michigan area.
Join our Graphic Novel Book Club! We’ll be meeting at DRIFTER COFFEE on Tuesday, NOVEMBER 19 at 6:30 pm to discuss Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang.
This book club, for ages 18+, will now be hosted at Drifter Coffee at 770 Woodward Hts. This is an after-hours event for Drifter, and their beverage bar will be open for Book Club attendees, but REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. Sign up here.
More about the book: In the early hours after Halloween of 1988, four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls uncover the most important story of all time. Suburban drama and otherworldly mysteries collide in this smash-hit series about nostalgia, first jobs, and the last days of childhood.
Sounds like a blast, please let us know if you end up attending!
Finally this week, I wanted to let you (and any of my fellow obsessive collectors of original art) know about a very cool opportunity to inspect—and maybe even OWN—some pieces of modern comic-book history… if that’s not too obnoxious a way to describe a series I was once a part of.
As a recent article at IGN about the return of DC’s Vertigo Comics was nice enough to say:
It’s hard to overstate just how important Y was for growing the Vertigo brand. The comic was and still is one of the most highly regarded DC books ever published. It’s a clear example of how instrumental Vertigo was in providing a platform for up-and-coming creators and allowing creator-owned books to flourish on their own terms.
After more than 20 years of holding onto the first four pages of original art to Y: The Last Man #1 (including the very first appearance of Yorick Brown) in her personal collection, artist/co-creator/dear friend Pia Guerra has consigned these pages to Heritage Auctions for the upcoming 2024 November 21 - 24 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction.
You can see all four pages below (with links to place a bid, if you’re so inclined), each inked by the astounding Jose Marzan Jr. and hand-lettered by superstar Clem Robins, from an issue edited by original editor/current overlord of The Beat Heidi MacDonald:
In honor of these turn-of-the-century artifacts finally seeing the light of day, you know what it’s time for, right…?
BKV SABOTAGES PIA GUERRA WITH TEN AWKWARD QUESTIONS
1) Hey, Pia! I miss you! How the hell are you?
I miss you too! I don’t think we’ve had a chance to hang since before the pandemic! It’s been so long since the dinners at random comic cons and European comics festivals where we get these brief pockets of catching up over amazing food. Now that I think of it, I think our last meet up was after the Y set visit in Brooklyn in 2019. We went to this steak house and had our minds absolutely destroyed by how good it was. We need to do that again (I know a good sushi place here in Vancouver).
As for life, still going, we were lucky to get some animation work through the pandemic, I worked on season two of Birdgirl for the Cartoon Network, and a Google web series where I learned a whole new set of skills and techniques. Loved it.
On the side, I have taken up painting ducks.
2) I’m writing this on November 4th, so I have no idea how this week will play out. But you’ve become one of the sharpest political cartoonists around, so I was wondering: Are you sick of people asking if you secretly want the U.S. election to go terribly, because it will give you more interesting things to draw? (Note: this is my sly way of asking you that exact annoying question.)
Ha! Very sly. So right now it feels like that slasher movie where you thought the monster was dead but nope, he rose back up and he’s coming for everyone... until the Final Girl does him in. Come on Final Girl, you can do it!
No really, I just want this over. There’s nothing left to draw about him, it’s all been drawn to death. Tiny hands, orange skin, those lightless eyes, his neck labia... ugh, done with it. Maybe it’s the ADHD talking (no, not officially diagnosed but TikTok assures me that’s what all of this must be), there’s just no dopamine in it anymore. I’m looking forward to making fun of other things... also, this “anchor baby” is not into worrying about losing my US citizenship every goddamn morning for the next 4 years.
3) I remember being in my tiny Brooklyn apartment back in 2001, and seeing your iconic image of an upside-down Yorick in his straitjacket slowly come through my fax machine, and instantly feeling that my life had changed forever. Your gorgeous linework, instantly relatable characters, grounded environments, and crystal clear, cinematic storytelling was so unlike most comics of the era, and I knew readers were going to respond to it as viscerally as I did. Anyway, this isn’t really a question. I just wanted to thank you again for being such an awesome artist, collaborator and human being.
Duuude. I can’t tell you how many times I opened up my email and got so excited to see the next script from you. It was like getting an advanced preview screening of my favourite movie. I’d sit there in my mind theatre with my popcorn, enjoy the hell out of the story and then go to my desk and try to draw down what I saw there in the dark. You made it so visually clear. I don’t think I was ever confused by anything you wrote, just, “yep, I see what he wants, let’s go.” The only hard part of the work was trying to get the art to live up to the words. Also, it really helped to have such a brilliant inker like Jose Marzan Jr. to make it pop. He’s brilliant.
4) I love these pages you finally consigned and—full disclosure—will probably be bidding on one or two myself, even though I’m already lucky enough to own plenty of Y treasures, including some you generously gifted me. But I was curious, is there a page or pages from your personal collection that you’ll never part with?
Yes. I can’t part with those two big death scenes. I cried so much while drawing those. Also, the reunion at the Arc de Triomphe, and the moment in the catacombs with Yorick and the skull (I drew so many bones!). Ian gets to keep the pages with Ampersand in a tux, he loves those so much.
5) I know you have multiple creative hobbies/passions, but do you collect anything?
I acquire interesting things but I don’t think I’m a very good collector. There was a period while working on Y where I had a few hundred dollars every month extra after all the bills and necessities. I spent so much of my life being broke that I decided that I’d use this little bit to buy fun, random stuff. One year I got into building dollhouses and just bought all this tiny furniture and building supplies. That was fun. Another year I got into props auctions and bought a few crazy things: a BPRD backpack from the movie Hellboy (if you pry back some of the seams you’ll see artificial snow jammed in there from the cemetery scene), a pocket watch from a Jackie Chan film, a broken surfboard from Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (I don’t know what I was thinking with that one), a pair of Pumas from a Jet Li movie, some rubber knives from XXX... and my favourite, and probably the last prop I picked up, a piece of screen used Doc Ock tentacle from Spider-Man 2. It’s foam, it’s gorgeous. It sits there on my shelf, in a cloche.
There are lots of comics and books and toys, but I’m not overly precious about them, many end up with friends or their kids. Okay, except maybe the Marvel Movies art books. Those are beautiful, we’d pick one up after every new Marvel movie and the one from Into the Spider-Verse is just a classic. Never letting go of that one.
6) Own any artwork by other comic creators? Is there a “grail” you’d kill to have on your wall?
When I was 17, I won a page of Todd McFarlane Spider-Man art at a local comic show raffle. It wasn’t a very fancy page, a street scene and some characters, but my best friend at the time just loved it so I gave it to him. It meant more to him than me. I kicked myself over it later, not because of the monetary value but because of everything I could have learned about working on pages that size, something I was still oblivious about when I started working on Y a few years later, much to our editor’s dismay when she saw my pages going riiiiiight out to the bleeds.
I have this really beautiful cover art from Moritat, it was a film noir detective themed piece he did for a local Seattle paper. He gave it to us as a wedding present (our reception was a noir themed dress up party) and I still need to frame it. Adore it.
I have a few sketchbooks full of autograph sketches from the early days of going to SDCC that I kinda want to frame but also don’t want to cut out. It’s a Sophie’s Choice all right.
Personally, I would go absolutely gaga for some Barry Windsor-Smith or Paul Smith X-Men pages. They were so influential when I was a kid. Like even one page from the Wolverine/Lady Deathstrike fight, or the Wolverine/Silver Samurai fight... good lord, could you imagine?
7) Sadly, the global pandemic didn’t seem to make audiences eager to seek out FX’s lovely adaptation of our own plague story... but we live in a world where Spider-Man has been reinvented about a dozen times in my life, so do you think some other version of Y: The Last Man might eventually see the light of day? Or are you content with our comic remaining in its original form forever?
Oh, you know me so well, Brian! For years I have nudged and winked about a clause in our option contract that says we retain the right to do Y as a puppet show. I can just see it, it needs to happen. But as sad as I was to see the show not getting the traction it needed, even after the book demonstrated so well that a story about recovering from a global catastrophe was exactly what people wanted to read after 9/11, I’m still convinced there’s a place for this story in other areas.
Last year, Ian got an Audible subscription and I just loved the serialized, full cast dramas in their catalogue like Locke and Key, or the comedies like White Hot Heist featuring SNL cast members. I loved listening to similar shows on BBC 4 Radio years back while working into the wee hours on the book and I’m happy to see it becoming a thing in North America. I can totally see listening to the series as a well cast drama.
Either that or Y adapted into a K-drama? Holy crap that would be awesome.
8) Can you hint at anything else you might be cooking up at the moment? Please???
Right now, I’m halfway through a graphic novel for Scholastic, written by my darling partner, Ian Boothby and myself. I can’t say too much about it but... snow vampires!
After that, hopefully a collab with a certain writer I haven’t worked with in ages...
9) You have the best taste in pop fiction. What should I be watching right now?
Agatha All Along, obviously. Lower Decks is so much fun, Ian didn’t watch a lot of Star Trek growing up whereas I watched a little too much so he gets a kick out of me explaining all the Easter eggs. Ian is really digging Evil, but I just don’t have the fortitude for horror like I used to. One day, maybe when the world feels a little more stable.
I don’t know if I’m much on the cutting edge of the zeitgeist these days however, after the Knives Out films, I’ve found myself drifting to a genre I used to avoid, Agatha Christie mysteries, and now I can’t seem to get enough of them. Never read or watched a Poirot story in my life and now I’m just eating them up. It’s deeply concerning. The other day I was looking up rates for the Burgh Island hotel. Save me.
10) Finally, and most importantly, is Superman American or Canadian?
He’s both! He has two dads, one American, one Canadian, so he’s a de facto dual citizen.
Isn’t Pia the goddamn greatest?
Comic artists haven’t always profited from the record-breaking sales of their original artwork, but the auctioning of these pages will directly support a legendary creator, so please bid with confidence and gusto!
Here’s hoping Pia’s classic pieces of narrative art end up in some loving homes.
Sorry I’ll still be in internet hiding for another week, but Niko, Fonografiks and I will return “live” next Monday with our regular chat thread and more free Spectators.
Peace,
BKV