I made a joke on Twitter the other day that went something like “The trick to getting me to write about comics is to either make me mad, discover great art, or for me to come up with a dumb idea I think is funny.” The third one is why I wrote three thousand words about Quitely & Millar’s Jupiter’s Legacy (“I wonder if I could write about every page of this comic…”) and the first one is pretty much the only reason I write about industry-related things or news, as opposed to the actually interesting part of comics: the comics themselves. The middle one is why I clicked on a random link on Tumblr and saw this:

Drawn by Jamie McKelvie, background inks by Mike Norton, script by Kieron Gillen, colors by Matt Wilson, and letters by Clayton Cowles. McKelvie talks it out here.

It’s good, right? I like this a whole lot. Bleeding Cool has a bigger version, but I think the small is good enough to wow.

Here’s a secret: whenever I write about comics, I’m not trying to show you why something is good so much as figure out how to express why it clicks for me. I don’t draw comics. I don’t write them. I read them. I don’t know from pens and quills, but I do know my taste. And I’m drawn to things that are either immediately understandable — a Frank Miller or Masamune Shirow action scene, some Katsuhiro Otomo rubble, a pretty girl drawn by Inio Asano, an Amanda Conner face — or so striking that it makes me look twice.

Let’s be real: you don’t study every panel in a comic, even in the good ones. I love several dozen panels in Frank Miller & Lynn Varley’s Dark Knight Strikes Again, but I’ve never looked at the panel of the weird mutant orphans escaping from jail and rubbed my chin, you know? It’s not that it’s not important. It’s just that it’s normal. Sometimes you just take things in stride until something appears that forces you to pause.

That pause is one of the reasons why I love comics. I want to be challenged and surprised when I read, and the best way to do that is to throw something at me that I either haven’t seen before (Masamune Shirow cranking up the panel count in Appleseed) or that’s familiar, but perfected or done in a new way (Frank Quitely’s work on We3 is a new spin on the same tactics Shirow was working with).

(I get the same thing out of rap, here and there. I want to hear bars that make me go “unh!” by accident like I was an old black lady in church and the preacher just said something wild profound.)

This McKelvie spread puts me in mind of Bill Keane’s Family Circus more than anything else, and it’s exactly what I want out of comics. There’s also this from McKelvie’s explanation:

Kieron mentions in the AR segment for the book that when you make comics as a team you’re really trying to pretend to be one person making the whole thing. That’s why we believe the best comics come out of close collaboration, and not just a production line.

You can tell when an artist and writer are in sync, I think. Or at least, I’d like to think. Who knows if I’m right, But either way, we need more stuff like this.Similar Posts:

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• LISTEN TO WITZKE

Your work spans several distinct, but overlapping areas of discourse. We could start by talking through design, animation, glitch art, code, game play or the interface. I want to start right from the bottom though, and ask you about inputs and outputs. A recent work you collaborated on with Jeff Thompson, You Have Been Blinded - “a non-visual adventure game” -  takes me back to my childhood when playing a videogame often meant referring to badly sketched dungeon maps, before typing N S E or W on a clunky keyboard. Nostalgia certainly plays a part in You Have Been Blinded, but what else drives you to strip things back to their elements?

I’ve always been interested in how things are built. From computers to houses to rocks to software. What makes these things stand up? What makes them work? Naturally I’ve shifted to exploring how we construct experiences. How do we know? Each one of us has a wholly unique experience of… experience, of life.. When I was a kid I was always wondering what it was like to be any of the other kids at school. Or a kid in another country. What was it like to be my cat or any of the non-people things I came across each day? These sorts of questions have driven me to peel back experience and ask it some pointed questions. I don’t know that I’m really interested in the answers. I don’t think we could really know those answers, but I think it’s enough to ask the questions.

Stripping these things down to their elements shows you that no matter how hard you try, nothing you make will ever be perfect. There are always flaws and the evidence of failure to be found, no matter how small. I relish these failures.

Your ongoing artgame project, Writing Things We Can No Longer Read, revels in the state of apophenia, “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”. [1] The title invokes Walter Benjamin for me, who argued that before we read writing we “read what was never written” [2] in star constellations, communal dances, or the entrails of sacrificed animals. From a player’s point of view the surrealistic landscapes and disfigured interactions within your (not)(art)games certainly ask, even beg, to be interpreted. But, what role does apophenia have to play in the making of your work?

When I make stuff, I surround myself with lots of disparate media. Music, movies, TV shows, comics, books, games. All sorts of stuff gets thrown into the pot of my head and stews until it comes out. It might not actually come out in a recognizable form, but the associations are there.

A specific example can be found in a lot of the models I use. I get most of them, or at least the seed of them, from open source models I find on 3D Warehouse. Because of the way that website works, it’s constantly showing you models it thinks are similar for whatever reason. Often I’ll follow those links and it will take me down symbolic paths that I never would have consciously decided to pursue. This allows a completely associative and emergent composition to take form.

I’d like to paraphrase and link up your last two answers, if I may. How do “relishing failures” and “allowing things to take form” overlap for you? I know you have connections with the GLI.TC/H community, for instance. But your notgames Me&You, Down&Up, and your recent work/proposition Make Me Something seem to invoke experiments, slips and disasters from a more oblique angle.

All are a means of encouraging surprise. In each piece it’s not about the skill involved, but about the thrill of the unknown. In all of my projects I try to construct a situation where I have very little control over the outcome. Glitch does this. But within the glitch community there’s a definite aesthetic involved. You can look at something and know that it’s glitch art. That’s not true for everything, but there is a baseline. For my notgames work I embrace the practice, not necessarily the look. I want irregularity. I want things to break. I want to be surprised.

Your work in progress, the Remeshed series, appears to be toying with another irregular logic,  one you hinted at in your comments about “associative and emergent composition”; a logic that begins with the objects and works out. I hear an Object Oriented echo again in your work Make Me Something, where you align yourself more with the 3D objects produced than with the people who requested them. What can we learn from things, from objects? Has Remeshed pushed/allowed you to think beyond tools?

That’s a tricky question and I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer. Both projects owe their existence to a human curatorial eye. But in both I relinquish a lot of control over the final object or experience. I do this in the spirit of ready-to-hand things. By making experiences and objects that break expectations our attention is focused upon them. They slam into the foreground and demand our attention. Remeshed, and to an extent, Make Me Something, allows me to focus less on the craft of modeling and animation and more on pushing what those two terms mean.

As Assistant Professor and Program Director of the Game Studies BSc atBellevue University you inevitably inhabit a position of authority for your students. Are there contradictions inherent in this status, especially when aiming to break design conventions, to glitch for creative and practical ends, and promote those same acts in your students? Yourecently modified Roland Barthes’ 1967 text ‘The Death of the Author’ to fit into a game criticism context. It makes me wonder whether “The Player-God” is something you are always looking to kill in yourself?

Absolutely. When teaching I try break down the relationship of authority as much as possible. I prefer to think of myself as a mentor, or guide, to the students. Helping them find the right path for themselves. Doing this from within a traditional pedagogical structure is difficult, but worthwhile. Or so I tell myself.

In terms of the Player-God, I think yes, I’m always trying to kill it. But at the same time, I’m trying to kill the Maker-God. There is no one place or source for a work. There’s no Truth. I reject the Platonic Ideal. Both maker and player are complicit in the act of the experience. Without either, the other wouldn’t exist.

Age: Somewhere in my third decade.

Location: The Land of Wind and Grass / The Void Between Chicago and Denver

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

Oof, for as long as I can remember. When I was 13 I killed my first computer about 4 days after getting it. I was trying to change the textures in DOOM. I had no idea what I was doing.

Later, in college I was in a fairly traditional arts program learning to blow glass. At some point someone gave me a cheap Sony 8mm digital camcorder and I started filming weird things and incorporating the (terrible) video art into my glass sculptures.

After that I started making overly ambitious text adventures and playing around with generative text and speech synthesizers.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I use Unity and Blender primarily right now. They’re the natural evolution of what I was trying to do way back when I was using Hammer and Maya.

I did my MFA in Interactive Media and Environments at The Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, NL. I started working in Hammer around this time making Gun-Game maps for Counter-Strike: Source. During the start of my second semester of grad school I suffered a horrible hard drive failure and lost all of my work. In a fit of depression I did pretty much nothing but play CS:S and drink beer for three months. At the end of that I made WINNING.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I’m not sure how to answer this. About the most traditional thing I do anymore is make prints from the results of my digital tinkering. Object art doesn’t interest me much these days, but it definitely influenced how I first approached Non-Object art.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I’m involved with a lot of local game developer and non-profit digital arts organizations.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I’m an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at Bellevue University. The job and my work are inexorably bound together. I enjoy teaching in a non-arts environment because I feel it affords me freedom and resources I wouldn’t otherwise have. I actually hate the idea of walled-disciplines in education. Everyone should learn from and collaborate with everyone else.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Mostly people I know: Jeff Thompson, Darius Kazemi, Rosa Menkman, THERON JACOBS

and some people I don’t know: Joseph Cornell, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, most of Vimeo.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Yes. Definitely.

Most recently I’ve been working with Jeff Thompson. We made You Have Been Blinded and Thrown into a Dungeon, a non-visual, haptic dungeon adventure. We’ve also been curating Games++ for the last two years.

Do you actively study art history?

Yep. I’m constantly looking at and referencing new and old art. I don’t limit it to art, though. I’m sick of art that references other art in a never ending strange loop. I try to cast my net further afield.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Definitely. In no particular order: Dr. Seuss, Alastair Reynolds, Alan Sondheim, Dan Abnett, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Mother Goose, Jacques Lacan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Jung, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Hickman, Brandon Graham, John Dewey, Umberto Eco... the list goes on and on.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

I think we’ve partially reached an era of the ascendant non-object. That is, an art form, distinct from performance and theatre, that places an emphasis wholly on the experience and not on the uniqueness of the object. Because of this move away from a distinct singular form, there’s no place for it in the art market. Most artists that work this way live by other means. I teach. Others move freely between the worlds of art and design. Still others do other things.

The couple of times I’ve had solo exhibitions in Europe, I’ve almost always been offered a livable exhibition fee. Here in the States that’s never been the case. When I have shows stateside, I always take a loss. The organizer may cover my material costs, but there’s no way I could ever live off of it. Nor would I want to. I think the pressures of survival would limit my artistic output. I’m happier with a separation between survival and art.

By Arturo R. García

Alex Summers, a.k.a. aka Havoc, delivers his team’s mission statement in Marvel Comics’ Uncanny Avengers. “Uncanny Avengers.” Image via ComicsAlliance.com

As a fan of both the X-Men franchise and some of his past work, I’d like to believe the best from writer Rick Remender’s online apology over his mishandling of the recent criticism surrounding his latest issue of Uncanny Avengers.

Unfortunately, regardless of intentions, “sorry” needs to be the first word in these discussions, not the last. And his statements both before and after apologizing don’t engender any more trust in his ability to properly explore the theme his story introduced. Which is a shame.

The issue began with a problematic speech given by former X-Man Alex Summers — aka Havok Havoc — at the conclusion of last week’s issue, in which he decries the use of the term Mutant, calling it “divisive,” and “old thinking that serves to further separate us from our fellow man.”

Now, the speech is problematic, but not strictly out of character for Havoc, especially not in his current position. His appointment as head of the Avengers’ “Unity Division,” a squad made up of both mutants and “regular” superheroes, marks his second turn working under federal auspices; years ago he was the leader of a government-sponsored version of X-Factor. And you can argue that as a character, he hasn’t shined any brighter than during that era or the period of time he was written as the leader of the intergalactic adventuring team the Starjammers, which took him away from the fights the other X-Men had to navigate in a “world that fears and hates them.”

Which makes this slam his brother Scott (aka Cyclops) actually ring with a harsh bit of truth:

A more precise way of describing Alex’s journey might be to say that he hasn’t been as invested as his brother or many of the other X-Men in the mutant rights struggle. And that is in part because he has the privilege of being able to pass for a non-metahuman. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. In fact, in the static rhetorical world Marvel has cultivated around the franchise, it represents an opportunity to explore authentically new ground, as Cheryl Lynn Eaton explained.

“Alex’s speech is ridiculous and naïve, but I was impressed at first because it represents a real-life view,” Eaton offered on Twitter. “After all, you could have wandered through CPAC and found a woman or POC giving a similar speech.”

Alex Summers, Mutant Conservative? That’s an interesting story. But that’s not how Remender chose to defend it on Twitter, in a series of statements that have since been deleted, including this exchange with Comics Alliance editor-in-chief Joe Hughes:

Or this one:

And the one that seems to have directly prompted his apology:

Here’s how Remender described the back-and-forth to Newsarama:

When I made those Tweets, I wasn’t aware there was greater larger debate on the internet, I had no idea there were honest and thoughtful people taking issue with the story; I was just aware of a few people calling me names, or accusing me of being a racist, on Twitter. And because the language I used was so broad, the response was written like a general, “Anyone who opposes this POV is wrong” and “eat ####.” It was a moment of low impulse control, a careless mistake made in response to hurt feelings. I meant the comment to be sort of goofy, but that’s clearly not how it came across.

Of course, this tweet, also deleted, was not accounted for in the interview:

Even if @GlassJaw02 was one of “those people” telling Remender to “eat ####,” the critiques shown above, as well as this one from Ladies Making Comics, were not inflammatory:

This was Remender’s response:

Remender’s declaration that he didn’t agree with any of the arguments being presented, as well as his dismissal of the analogy presented to him, also butts up against this statement to Newsarama:

Alex represents just one opinion on what it means to be a mutant in today’s world. His speech doesn’t 100 percent reflect my own POV any more than any character I’ve written — Punisher, Archangel, Heath Huston. A writer learns a character over time — you slowly define their POV, you try and get in their head, but they are not you.

So according to Remender, Havok isn’t him, but he didn’t agree with any of the proposed reasons why some readers may have had an issue with that scene. And even while reiterating to interviewer Albert Ching that he “owns and regrets” the “hobo piss” tweet, which this reader very much appreciates, his tone regarding criticism doesn’t jibe with this sentiment:

I love debate and wish I had more time to engage in it, without it we stagnate and become complacent. I appreciate criticism, and I appreciate being shown when I am wrong in order to learn and get better at what I do and the way I think about the world I live it. My intent was not to shut down debate but was instead a poorly executed emotional reaction to some ugly labels being applied to me by strangers.

Not exactly mission accomplished:

As for that “larger conversation,” let’s look at some of the long-form criticism directed at Remender:

• ComicsBeat:“The idea that ‘mutant’ is an ‘m-word’ is comprehensively wrong. The idea that equality is reached via erasing differences is wrong. And the message this scene puts across is that minorities – for, of course, mutancy in the Marvel Universe is used as a metaphor for the struggles of persecuted minorities round the world, be they of a different sexual orientation, gender, race, religion – should want to become invisible and fit into their surroundings. It’s a message that minorities should feel ashamed of who they are, and seek to become, quote ‘normalised’.”
• Joshy207:“Imagine if a single gay man or woman who barely anyone has heard of takes to a podium after being appointed spokesperson of the LGBTQ community by a group of people with a track record of being 99% heterosexual (in this case, the Avengers) and declares: “stop calling us gay, or homosexual”? Yes, people in the LGBTQ community are human, and yes people outside of the community are human too, and yes we are equal: but to deny that the community exists comes across as an attempt at assimilation, not equality.”
• Comics Alliance:”There is an implication in Havok’s speech that ‘mutant’ is a slur, ‘the “m” word,’ — which, whether the writer intended for it to or not, very obviously draws parallels to the n-word — but it’s the word mutants use to describe themselves. It can be used pejoratively — as can ‘gay,’ ‘girl,’ ‘black,’ ‘Jew’ — but it’s still the definitive linguistic presentation of a minority identity. Even if ‘mutant’ were a slur beyond reclamation, Havok presents no alternative language. The movement away from the terms ‘negro’ and ‘colored’ to identifiers like ‘African-American’ wasn’t about rejecting labels. It was about rejecting the labels forced upon you and choosing your own. But when a reporter asks Havok what he wants to be called, he says, ‘How about Alex?’ The speech leaves us to believe that Havok doesn’t want there to be any word that describes his minority identity. He’s not saying that he’s not just a mutant, but that ‘mutant’ is not among the things he wants to admit to being. That’s not a message of inclusion. That’s a message of assimilation. That’s a message of erasure.”

None of these critiques have been addressed by Remender, by Marvel — editor-in-chief Axel Alonzo has seemingly said nothing regarding the issue, at least on Twitter — and not by Wolverine & The X-Men writer Jason Aaron:

“Mutant and Proud” shirt sold by Marvel. Image via superherostuff.com

This position would be easier to explain if the company hadn’t spent literally decades mining and appropriating rhetoric surrounding a multitude of communities. A few examples: the references to Charles Xavier’s “dream” of mutants and humans co-existing; the forced dichotomy between cooperation and militancy as the only two viewpoints aired related to mutant rights, first with Xavier and Magneto, and later with Wolverine and Cyclops as the respective spokesmen; the team’s 2008 move to San Francisco as a “sanctuary city;” the company’s decision to sell shirts that literally say, Mutant and Proud.

And it’s interesting to hear Aaron denying any link to the LGBT community less than a year afterthis statement from Alonzo regarding the wedding of Northstar:

When gay marriage became legal in New York State, it raised obvious questions since most of our heroes reside in New York State. Northstar is the first openly gay character in comics and he’s been in a long-term relationship with his partner Kyle so the big question was – how would this change his relationship? … Our comics are always best when they respond to and reflect developments in the real world. We’ve been doing that for decades, and this is just the latest expression of that.

It’s also worth mentioning that none of this is an indictment of Aaron’s and Remender’s writing ability; on the contrary, Remender’s work on Uncanny X-Force, particularly “The Dark Angel Saga,” will be properly regarded as recommended reading years from now. But that is a different kind of story than the one he’s presenting in Uncanny. And while he does seem to get that, he hasn’t expressed any hints that he’s done the research to help that along. The contrast between these two paragraphs from the Newsarama interview are particularly striking:

The beauty of the mutant metaphor is that it’s so inclusive — there are so many ways a person can relate to it. The mistake, I think, is to apply your own personal metaphor onto it and assume everyone else sees it the same way or that your version applies more than someone else’s. Everyone sees the mutants as themselves.Everyone.

I was an awkward punker kid raised in the city. At age 13, I moved to a very small town in Arizona, where I spent years being picked on, beaten up and made fun of, before finally running away from home at 16 and moving back to the city. I related to mutants because they were always up against the wall with no friends and they took no crap. I was this quiet kid no one liked because I dressed weird, wasn’t into the same stuff and proudly read comic books, I took endless shit for being who I was. So I identified with the mutants on that level.

Remender had previously discussed the latter point in an interview with Comic Book Queers (NSFW – language, slurs) in which he talked about being the victim of homophobic slurs because of his appearance. That experience is horrible, and Remender should be commended for the empathy this has given him.

But, it is not beyond the pale to suggest that, if he were a cis-hetero 13-year-old in Arizona today, he would be less susceptible to being asked to provide his “papers” by suspicious police; he would not be directly affected if the state enacts legislature that is openly transphobic; and as a U.S.-born citizen, he would have less of a problem getting a drivers’ license than the children of undocumented immigrants, even if they currently have a two-year federal visa.So while Remender is asking people to remember others’ interpretations of the X-Men, he seemingly isn’t taking anybody else’s experiences into account while writing them. That doesn’t make him prejudiced, and it doesn’t make him an optimist. It places limits on his perspective.It marks him as privileged, instead of Alex Summers.

And, while I personally want him to continue asUncanny’s writer — let’s be clear; nobody, anywhere, has called for his ouster — the current approach doesn’t bode well for his story, regardless of his intentions. Worse yet, it’s a wasted opportunity in the making for himself and the other creative teams working on the franchise: Now more than ever, there are resources that can be called upon, online and off, to make Alex’s journey back to relevance resonate. Because his viewpoint isn’t just one that happens to conflict with his brother’s. It’s one that actual people hold because of things that have actually happened to them. To not even attempt to learn about those makes this, indeed, “just another comic book.” And empty platitudes don’t lend themselves to a monthly $2.99 investment, let alone the promise of acting as a beacon of empathy for readers looking for it.