I just ordered the first edition of D.C. comics' Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus. It's the first of several hardcover collections compiling all of Jack Kirby's original "Fourth World" stories, in order, and in color - the latter being something that hasn't been available since the original issues were released. I'm super-excited about this release, because the Fourth World stuff is killer; it's classic Space Opera with Kirby's inimitable multi-exclamation marked dialogue (never less than one ! at the end of a sentence, and often four or five stacked for effect like this!!!!!) and just killer characters and stories. In fact, if you haven't read those yet, you shouldn't even be reading this - go grab the first New Gods trade!

We're truly in a golden age of comics collections; there has never been this much stuff from the past made so accessible to the average fan. When I first got into comics in the mid-to-late eighties, things were completely different - sure, there were some trade paperbacks on the market, but you were pretty limited to major comics events like The Dark Phoenix Saga and Crisis on Infinite Earths. In a pre-internet age of fandom, these were pretty much the only way to fill in basic gaps in history and continuity, but they were inconsistent; I remember getting X:Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga and then a later X-men trade paperback that picked like 50 issues later - I didn't know who any of the characters were or what was going on!

Marvel were the first to make a legitimate effort at preserving the past with their "Marvel Masterworks" hardcover editions of classic storylines. They were expensive as hell (to a 10-year-old) at $30 each, but I remember feverishly saving up and purchasing the first Uncanny X-men Masterworks Edition because I had always wanted to read the origin of the classic Wolverine/Nightcrawler/Storm/Colossus/etc. team and quite simply had no way to do so. But between their prohibitive price tags and their limited availability, the Masterworks remained out of reach for average fans who just wanted to fill in the backstories on their favorite books.

A lot has happened in the industry since then, and collections have come a long way. Now that most comics fans are older and have more disposeable income, the publishers have flooded the market with collections and compilations of all of those old issues. Quite frankly, they've gone a little bit overboard in many ways. There are tons of collections out there vying for fans' pocketbooks, and there's a ton of stuff that's now available for posterity. Marvel's "Essentials" are absolutely brilliant in the way that they manage to pack years of issues into ridiculously cheap volumes - the vast majority of the entire run of X-men from 1963 to the present can be had for under $100 worth of Essentials. Amazing! I would have given my left nut for those when I was 11. Of course, they're in black and white and are printed on cheap newsprint, but the stories are intact and they're ridiculously affordable.

On the other end of the spectrum, Marvel has begin to release "Omnibus" collections of certain classic runs - $100, 800+ page hardcover editions that even include the original ads and letter columns. They're pretty amazing and lust-inducing to behold, though the size and price tag definitely keep them in the "collector" category rather than the "reader" one. And, if you take a peek at the current used price on Amazon, some of them have already become ridiculously overpriced collectors items in their own rights. Wait a second, I thought the whole point of collections like this was to get away from that?

DC has started to go a little crazy with their "Absolute" editions (basically their answer to Marvel's Omnibus editions). It made sense when classic, timeless works of literature like Watchmen got the royal treatment with oversized hardcover slipcase editions, but it seems like they've started to release everything in absolute editions. What's next, Absolute Reign of the Supermenr? Still, I guess it beats the hell out of the days when your only option was to buy smeary, overpriced back-issues moldering in a box.

Then there's the whole double-edged sword of how writers are "writing for the trades" (specifically only writing easily compiled 4- to 6-part stories) these days rather than letting comic series evolve and mutate naturally, but I guess that's a whole different conversation.

Either way, it's a great time to be into comics - it's so easy to get your hands on and explore the vast canon that informs the books you buy every Wednesday. Here's to Absolute Howard the Duck!

I tend to be motivated and driven by negativity; it's the things that get me fired up and pissed off that actually get me off of my ass to do things. I'm not sure if this is merely a temperament or a heinous character flaw, but it's something that I've become increasingly aware of in the past year. I say that because I don't want this to be just another spot where some fat, fussy nerd whines and bitches about pedantic bullshit that only he cares about.

I picked up the first two trade paperbacks of Douglas Rushkoff's new book Testament, out on DC's "adult" imprint Vertigo, and pretty much read them both back-to-back in one sitting. I was vaguely aware that Rushkoff was doing a new comic on DC, but the incredibly ugly cover art of the few issues I saw on the shelf turned me off.



I was a big fan of Rushkoff's nonfiction writing (Media Virus, Coercion)for quite a while; in the mid-nineties, he appeared as a sort of successor to that Naomi Klein school of pop culture hacking and awareness, but he's kind of fallen off of my radar over the past few years, his hip observations and insights having earned him the comfort of corporate speaking gigs and a teaching spot at NYU (in fact, his new book, Get back in the box, appears to be a neo-Seven habits of highly-effective people for the boho corporate set). But unlike the Malcolm Gladwells of the world, Rushkoff has always kept one foot in the whole Disinfo scene, consorting with the likes of Grant Morrisson and Robert Anton Wilson and making logical leaps from corporate propaganda to N.L.P., Chaos Magick, and so on.

Anyway, the second trade of Testament came out this past week and it was just enough to get me interested in looking it up online and reading about it. Turns out Vertigo has the first issue up as a PDF that you can read for free, so I checked it out - and then walked into the store the next day and bought both trades. Testament has quickly jumped to one of my favorite monthly books and one of the books I'm most interested in following over the next year.

The basic concept of Testament is that the Bible - or at least the Torah or Pentateuch, which is what we're dealing with so far - is a sort of archetype for human behavior and conflict throughout all of history - that the same stories, conflicts, and behaviors repeat themselves time and time again. Further, time - at least to the gods who are the true main characters of the book - the events of the bible and the events of the "modern day" protagonists of the book are happening at the same time, since the gods exist outside of time and thus outside of the comic book panels.

The major frame story that propels the book takes place in the near-future and involves Jake, a university student whose parents have been instrumental in developing a new microchip that everyone under a certain age gets implanted in their forearm, ostensibly for safety and security amid an unending foreign war. As the plot develops, it becomes clear the the government has other designs for the chip that involve control and coercion, and as the chips become linked to an emerging global economy driven by an artificial currency intelligence inadvertently developed by Jake's father, things get messy and Jake falls in with a resistance group who remove their chips and work against the government. It sounds techy and complicated, but it's an age-old story; resistance against authority in the name of liberty. At the same time that this story is occurring, the narrative switches back and forth to the Old Testament stories of Abraham taking Isaac up to the mountain for sacrifice, of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, and so on. The book uses the same "characters" between the two different timelines in a similar manner to the recent movie The Fountain - Jake "plays" Isaac in the Old Testament portion, Jake's parents play Adam and Eve in that particular segment, and later on Jake and His girlfriend are Lot and his wife during the destruction of Sodom. This is where the book does it totally right, by not making a 1:1 correspondence between the characters in the two different stories, but instead using them as it sees fit to "play" different characters as the different situations call for it. Forcing a 1:1 ratio (if Jake were always Isaac, if his mother were always Hagar, for example) would have led to a ton of forced connections between the two different timelines and would have gotten messy very quickly. Working with archetypes and "players" instead perfectly propels the story.

The different gods involved in the narratives are wonderfully incorporated; Rushkoff takes a cue from Grant Morrisson's more recent work (like issue 3 of The Filth), keeping the gods "out of the panels" - as they exist outside of the reality and outside the time that the characters live in, they exist outside of the panels and as they enter the panels and continuity of the characters, their forms and essences change into things that reflect the reality of the characters, such as when Moloch creates a fire on the mountain for sacrifice, his finger becoming a roaring flame as it enters the "reality" of the panel.



The book manages to pull off a lot of neat tricks like this without ever using it as a gimmick, which becomes increasingly admirable as more gods (Krishna, Atum-Ra, the prophet Elijah) enter the picture, take sides, and become increasingly involved in subtly influencing the narrative.

Things go awry as the two timelines diverge - while Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt for looking back as she and her family flee Sodom, Jake and the resistance are able to save Jake's girlfriend even though she turns back to help out during her timeline's analogue to that event, a student protest that turns into a massacre. The gods' reactions to this divergence and further plot twists that I won't reveal here keep the book going and have me insanely curious as to where they'll take things next.

I'm excited about the future of Testament, and I hope that the book lasts for a few years so that Rushkoff will get to do the things that he's hinted at (Jonathan and David, the Christ story) in interviews, but that will take quite a bit of time to get to.

It all started with rejection. Honestly, I should have known better than to make a genuine play for the comic writing gig - I knew exactly how they were going to react to my proposal, but I just couldn't help myself - I hoped that they'd be open-minded enough to go for it.

A couple months ago, an immensely popular Hip-Lit website - one that just happens to be incredibly local - announced that their comics person was leaving and that they were looking for a replacement. Now, I'm a loyal reader of this site, but I wasn't even aware that they had had a comics person, but as their content tends to gravitate toward the grad school literary hipster set it made perfect sense that they wanted to tap into the whole "comics thing" now that films like American Splendor and Sin City have made comics quasi-fashionable.

So I put together a basic pitch for the position, explaining that I was a lifelong comics aficionado who reads and understands everything from the most simplistic big-budget action books to the most esoteric xeroxed zines, and just about everything in between; I'm just as likely to pick up a book featuring big-titted ninja babes as I am to pick up the latest SPX sampler or $2 minicomic tucked in with the latest issues of Cometbus at Quimby's. I offered up a selection of immediate articles I'd love to write - everything from an explication of Chris Ware's Building Stories serial to an analysis of how speculation ruined the big publishers in the nineties, on to a piece on standout self-published post-feminist comics and one on the amazingly minimal, Ozu-esque presentation of the re-launched Wolverine solo book (a shocking and impressive direction given the incredibly mainstream and cash-hungry nature of the Wolverine franchise, akin to allowing David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky to direct the latest Pirates of the Caribbean entry!), and so on.

Of course, I never heard back from them, but all I know is that their eventual new comics person immediately went to work producing a stream of sub-Time Magazine-level "Comics aren't just 4 kids anymore!!!!!!!!!!!!!111" pieces and indiscriminately fellating the latest politically fashionable indie comics by writers like Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco while ignoring everything from the mainstream superhero comics world - a completely unsurprising turn given the segregated and strange world of the modern comics apartheid.

Here's the basic rift; on one side you have the greaseball superhero fanboys who continue to buy their favorite franchises years after they've ceased to be artistically, politically, and creatively relevant, and on the other side you have the hipster chicks in thick plastic frames who swoon over Blankets and Adrian Tomine but who wouldn't be caught dead reading an issue of Brian K. Vaughn's Runaways. There are a ton of other character classes, if you will, floating around the scene - the dilettantes on both sides drawn to the fringes by media exposure (the curious nerd picking up an Essential X-men trade paperback because he liked the movie, the hipster girl checking out David Boring because she saw Daniel Clowes' ad when she went to buy her new Macbook), the die-hards on both sides, the wallet-draining sickos like me, and we won't even get into the manga fans. But that general divide - between the mainstream and the indie, between the spandex and the emo glasses, between the stores that also sell action figures and the stores that also sell porn and bongs - endures.

I think that this is a problem. It's a problem because comics are a medium, not a genre, and if someone truly loves comics, they're going to find mainstream superhero books that they like as much as indie books that they like. They'll find 1940's horror comics that they love and 1950's romance books that they can dig into. They'll find weird porn comics that crack them up, and they'll find stuff that shakes them politically. They'll start to see that the same beauty they see in the curve of Jean Grey's breast also lies in the cowlick in Lloyd Llewellyn's hair. And so on.

I'm tired of having to go to different stores to buy different types of comics.

And yet, there has never been a greater moment for comics than right now; they're better than they've ever been at any other point in history. The greatest stories are being told right now, unique stories, stories that can only be communicated through the comics medium, that could not exist as traditional text or films or ballads.

I always come back to Grant Morrisson's quote, from a great, sprawling interview -

As I've been saying to the point of boredom for the last couple of years, our creative community owes it to the future to produce today the insane, logic-shattering, side-splitting day-glo stories which will be turned into all-immersive holographic magic theatre experiences in 40 years time. The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is. Let's see images which come directly from the minds of inspired artists, not from publicity stills. Superhero comics are way too expensive for the mass market and the brand of garish, violent pulp they were once the only source for is available these days in more attractive media. We should get real about this and stop dumbing down, stop stunting our artists' creativity and stop trying to attract a completely imaginary 'mainstream audience'. The best way to consolidate comics as a viable medium is to make them LESS like other media, not more. Let our artists go wild on imaginative page layouts. Let our writers find stories in their dreams and not in the newspaper pages, at least for a little while again.

We're getting there.