2015. Ten years ago. Let me rattle off a few tidbits, with varying degrees of significance, about what we started 2015 with... 

•  At the beginning of the year, the only TV show related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was Agents of SHIELD 
• The only movie DC had produced in the wake of the MCU's success was Man of Steel
• While Amazon had recently purchased ComiXology, it was still a stand-alone app
• Ask Shagg, Dilbert, and Spider-Man were still ongoing newspaper strips
• The Nib was still part of Medium
• The CXC show in Columbus, OH hadn't been launched yet
• Diamond was the comics distributor in the US, full-stop; there was no other company even toying with the idea of competing 
• DC was still a year away from rebooting its entire line with "DC Rebirth"
• Marvel had just announced it was cancelling the Fantastic Four comic; it would not be restarted until 2018
• The Ringo Awards were not a thing yet
• The Eisner Awards had no Webcomics category; webcomics were lumped in with Digital Comics
• Neither Tom King nor any of his works had won an Eisner Award; same for Marjorie Liu 
• Olivia Jaimes had not yet worked on Nancy; R. K. Milholland had not touched either Popeye or Popeye's Cartoon Club; Dan Schkade had not started on Flash Gordon 
  
• Stan Lee, Joe Sinnott, Denny O'Neil, Gahan Wilson, Marie Severin, Steve Ditko, Ed Piskor, Flo Steinberg, Keith Giffen, Trina Robbins, R.C. Harvey, Carlos Pacheco, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Justin Green, Darwyn Cooke, Richard Thompson, and Tom Spurgeon were still with us
  

How many of those items do you discuss the same way now as you did in 2015? There's been recent discussion about that documentary about Stan Lee's final days. The Ringo Awards are just a regular part of awards season now. When planning which conventions to attend, how many different choices do you consider? With Fantastic Four: First Steps just a couple months from being released, can you imagine their NOT having a comic actively published? If a syndicate suddenly pivots into a wildly different direction for one of their legacy comics, does anyone bat an eye any more?

My point is that, in all likelihood, your thinking about the comics industry has changed pretty radically in the past ten years, whether you realize it or not. What you consider normal now was viewed by many with skepticism or even outright fear just a few years ago. More significantly, however, is that these changes in the overall industry mean that individual businesses need to change as well. You can't continue to operate in an environment that's changed without making changes yourself. Remember the old adage about being the town's best buggy whip manufacturer in an age of automobiles?

What's more, while people typically think of these shifts in terms of business, they not surprisingly apply to individual creators as well. When it comes down to it, most creators are operating as small businesses unto themselves, so that makes sense, right? But it also applies to readers/consumers. How you read comics is impacted by how they're created. How you buy comics is impacted by how they're distributed and sold. How you relate to comics is impacted by how they're marketed.

Ten years. It doesn't seem like it should be an especially long time, but things can alter pretty dramatically. (Even setting aside something like COVID throwing everyone for a loop in 2020.) You don't necessarily have to jump on board and embrace each and every change that comes along -- some will be short-lived failures, of course -- but be aware that things ARE changing, and you need to think about and react to them; you can't just assume that what worked five or ten years ago will continue to work today because the environment is constantly changing around you.

The show Documentary Now did an episode a few years back that was a spoof of the type of documentary where a film maker goes on a quest to find their hero, recording all of it in order to make the film. In this case, the fictional novice film maker was looking for Gary Larson. Larson was no doubt chosen as the subject in part for his relative reclusiveness. I can only find one photo of him more recent than the 1980s, and video interviews with him are even more scarce. The closest there is to a 'public' appearance by Larson in the 21st century seems to be a short cameo in a 2010 episode of The Simpsons where he's drawn pretty much exactly how he looked 20 years earlier... With that said, I thought I'd share the only video interview with Larson I can find. It's a piece done by 20/20 back in 1986. I'm posting here as a sort of time capsule of the period.

I've talked with comic creator Dwight MacPherson on a few occasions, and I recently came across some his thoughts I had saved about the goals of a comic book creator. He said...

I've met many aspiring comic writers who say their ultimate goal is to work for Marvel. When I ask what book, they generally pause and say, "Whatever they'll let me write." Seems like backward thinking to me. Concentrate on creating your own characters and world seems like an aimless goal. Like saying, "My goal is to be someone important." Yeah, well, lots of people are important in different ways... Work-for-hire gigs are fabulous experiences (most of the time). But no writer should set such a fleeting thing as their ultimate goal.

I don't know that I've talked to many comic creators (or future creators) about their goals, but I'll take MacPherson at his word it's a common refrain. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.

He's right, of course, that having your goal to be working as a creator for Marvel shouldn't be an ultimate goal. But you can hardly blame someone for thinking that it's totally valid. After all, we live in a society which is constantly telling us how success is defined in financial terms. Successful comics are the ones the ones that sell the most. Not infrequently, publishers tout the sales of their best-selling comic. The celebrations are not so much for the content being good or not, but just that it sold a lot. And it may well be fantastic, but that's not what people were cheering about.

Look at webcomics for a smaller scale version of the same argument. Webcomics' success is measured by financial measures. Can the creator earn enough money from their webcomic to make a living? It's a lower financial bar in that regard than what mainstream publishers are looking at, but it's a financial measure just the same. Even the visitor count or page impressions or whatever other technical stats you can find about a webcomic are seemingly irrelevant compared to the "bottom line."

But that's the United States in the 21st century. We are told since birth an infinite set of variations on "he who dies with the most toys wins." Life, according to what nearly everybody tells us, is a competition and the yard stick you're being measured against is your bank account. The "success stories" we hear about on the news are those people who fought a variety of hardships, but still went on to make a good amount of money. Granted, they're generally not considered in the same class as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, but the root of the story is always, "They worked hard and are making good money now." Occasionally, "They worked hard and stuck to their ethics... And are making money despite their ethics!"

Reflecting on that, it's little wonder many comic creators aspire to simply work for Marvel. Look at the sales charts during any given month, and the top-selling books are dominated by Marvel. ICv2 just had a piece about Marvel took 38% of the comic book market in the first quarter of 2025. Let me re-state that. Thirty-eight percent of all comic books sold in U.S. comic shops in January through March were published by Marvel. We're so used to numbers like that it probably isn't as staggering as it should be, but that is a HUGE domination of the market. Marvel sells the most comic books. Period.

So if you want buy into the accepted philosophy of the country -- that you can only be a success in your field by making a lot of money for someone doing whatever it is you do -- then an aspiring comic book writer will have a greater likelihood of "success" by working for the company that has the most success itself. That is, Marvel comic books sell better than any others, so writing for Marvel means you'd be writing one of the most successful comics on the market. Even the best selling non-Marvel/non-DC title last month sold worse than dozens of others. So even the worst-performing Marvel titles continue to outsell the vast majority of non-Marvel/non-DC work. Yeah, that's great that you sold 100 books at that convention last weekend, but even if you did that every weekend for a year, you'd still be selling less than anything Marvel does in a month. So it makes complete sense that, using the "success = sales" mindset, working for Marvel is the ultimate goal in comics.

If that's how you define "success", I'm not going to stand in your way. But, me? I think there are MUCH better measures of success in life. I don't think that they're as quantifiable as sales numbers, and I know I'm not measuring them against however the next guy is doing. I'm just saying that you should just take the time to really evaluate what "success" really means to you, and how you might try to measure it.

As you may know, I sometimes do a scan of the funnies on holidays and such to see how many cartoonists do something to denote the occasion. Religious holidays are a little iffy since, as a newspaper cartoonist, you wouldn't want to alienate the part of your audience that isn't of that faith, though Christmas and Easter are often seen as secular enough to get a pass. Theoretically, uniquely American holidays like US Independence Day would also be a bit off limits depending on the global reach of your audience, although I think most American comics don't get much traction outside the States to begin with. Earth Day, though, is a global, secular holiday and you'd think that would be an easy one to throw on the calendar and give creators a go-to topic for gag every year. Given how few cartoonists seem to reference it, though, that does not appear to be the case. Here's all I could find this morning...

There was something of a theme in movies from the late 1960s up through the mid-1970s in which the audience would follow a relatively normal person around in their day-to-day challenges and struggles, and the movie would end with something of a question mark. The protagonist would have their primary conflicts of the movie resolved, but the larger question of what would happen next was left open, with the character realizing that their previous actions led to where there are, and they have nowhere to go, no plan to speak, and they face a completely uncertain future. Do things turn out okay for them? Did they learn from their mistakes or will they ignore them and keep doing what they've been doing, ending up right back where they are again?

Think Midnight Cowboy. The Graduate. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver.

The Girl Who Flew Away starts with Greer Johnson being hurridedly shoved on to a plane headed for Key West. We soon glean that she was impregnated by her boss, Dick Watrous, and he's gotten some of his friends to look after her. It's 1976, after all, and Dick is married to someone else so having Greer around would be problematic for him. Dick's friends Kate and Donald do take her in, but Kate almost immediately tries controlling Greer's life in the most passive-aggressive manner possible, claiming that they know best.

The story continues for the next several months as Greer wrestles with her emotions and tries to get a better bearing on her life. She had difficulties growing up, in part being from a mixed race couple in the 1960s, and in part because her father left when she was maybe six or seven, leading her mother into a depression. Her adult relationships, as highlighted by her affair with Dick, were always problematic as well, so she spends her time examining her life choices. However, we mostly only see that indirectly through a child character she first dreams about and then begins drawing a comic about.

She eventually gets fed up with Kate and Donald's perpetually condescending attitudes, as well as the unrequited love she expresses towards her friend Christopher back home, and gets on a bus to Atlanta with Kate's gardener, with whom she'd become friends. She falls asleep on the bus dreaming about the little girl character she had created.

Obviously, the ending of the two of them riding away on a bus with a big question mark in front of them immediately brought to mind The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy references I noted earlier. I didn't really clock the comparisons before those last couple pages, since the characters all come from radically different backgrounds and go through wildly different story arcs. But the basic premise of trying to make a big life change that doesn't necessarily address the underlying issues and problems you have is similar. And like those movies, the ending is presented in a fairly open-ended fashion allowing the reader to intrepret it however they like. You want a happily ever after? Sure, that fits. You'd rather they face a lifetime of consequences that make things tragically worse for them? Knock yourself out. Something in between? Why not?

Lee Dean does an excellent job with his storytelling here. There are several complex characters, and we learn about them just through their everyday actions. There's no real exposition dump anywhere for anyone. There's an occasional line of dialogue here and there that is expositional in nature, but they all feel very organic to whatever conversation is happening. And since the characters are all complex and fleshed out (at least for Dean, even if the reader isn't privvy to their full backstories) their recipocral dialogue tracks very well too.

One potential concern with the story here is that it focuses on the life of a mixed-race, single, pregnant woman. And the author is very much none of those things. They acknowledge this in the Afterword and point to several other books that discuss some of these ideas with more first-hand perspective, but while I think some of the social aspects of this didn't quite 100% hit the mark for 1976, Dean clearly did their homework and made a good effort. And besides, I was never a mixed-race, pregnant woman in the 1970s, so it's not like I have first-hand experience either.

I suspect this story will be remembered in much the same way as The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy are. People look at those now and say how it's easy to see how Dustin Hoffman launched such an impressive career from those. A decade or two from now, we'll be saying the same about Lee Dean. The story was originally serialized online beginning in 2013, although I gather only about three-quarters of it and that all seems to have been removed anyway, likely because of its print publication via Iron Circus Comics. The book came out recently after a bit of a delay, but should be available now through all major book sellers. It retails for $28.00 US.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Organic Growth
https://ift.tt/KR1ngHZ

Kleefeld on Comics: A Return to Small
https://ift.tt/xh1is7M

Kleefeld on Comics: The Wizard of Op
https://ift.tt/ajdPKnw

Kleefeld on Comics: Cancelling a Book Tour Because Trump Is a Facist Asswipe
https://ift.tt/5dMJLSz

Kleefeld on Comics: Fantastic Four Movie Uniforms
https://ift.tt/1uGTIJM

A new trailer and promo image for the upcoming Fantastic Four: First Steps movie dropped earlier this week, and I am still not on board with the color choices of their uniforms. The basic design is fine, but I have never thought the bright blue with white trim color combination worked. I'm pretty sure I've remarked on it before.

The white trim on the costumes was introduced in the 1980s by creator John Byrne, when he made the costumes a "negative" version of their originals. There's even a comment in one issue (which I can't find offhand) where a waitress chides Johnny for getting the colors wrong on his cosplay, noting that "The Fantastic Four's uniform is blue, not black." To which Johnny, flaming on his finger, corrects her, "For the record, I did get the colors right." Later colorists, though, would shift the dark blue back to the original almost-straight-cyan and it always looked like garbage in my opinion. That was expressly not the intent of Byrne's color shift and I don't think the cyan/white combination simply does not work.

In light of the new promo image, clearly showing the costumes, I've tried to appease myself by digitally color-shifting the costumes to something more reasonable. I still like the dark blue/white combo, but I get how it doesn't fit the 1960s vibe they're trying to go with this movie. But I'm not sure they didn't opt for the cyan/black combination which I think is far superior to the cyan/white version. But, here, take a look for yourself and let me know which color combination you think works best...