I stumbled across an old post of mine from 2010. It was the day after Dirk Deppey was let go from Fantagraphics and it signaled the end of ¡Journalista! It dawned on me that I hadn't heard/seen anything from Deppey in years, so I did a few quick searches to see if he had ever gotten back to doing something like ¡Journalista! elsewhere. It was a great resource for off-the-beaten-track comics news back in the day, and I don't feel I've had a good source for that for some time.

I couldn't find anything recent about Deppey, though. In fact, his entry in Wikipedia doesn't have anything more recent than 2010 either. Admittedly, I didn't do a ton of exhaustive research here, but I'd guess Deppey went on to get some other job -- we've all got bills to pay, after all -- and it unfortunately doesn't involve talking about comics online.

In that post where I talked about Deppey, I noted that comics 'news' was kind of bifurcating into broad, mass-appeal stuff talking about the latest Marvel movie or Scholastic's latest success with Raina Telgemeier or Dav Pilkey, or going the super-niche route where the site is pretty much entirely driven on the passion of a single individual. Essentially blogs like mine. Well, not unlike mine is probably more accurate. I went on to say that the danger of the latter is that...

...just as a guy like Deppey can lose his job, a guy like [Tom] Spurgeon can grow tired or disinterested. If his returns -- financial or emotional or creative -- drop too low, he can easily stop and walk away. And despite whatever sense of entitlement readers have, there's really no recourse but to search around to find others' voices that are interesting or insightful.

Spurgeon did not, as it turns out grow tired or disinterested, but he sadly passed away in 2019 so we no longer have his voice. But in that same post, I also referred to Jen Contino over at The Pulse, Ian Adams of Trade Reading Order, and Heidi MacDonald of The Beat. I also made reference to Wizard, CBG, Amazing Heroes, and Comics Feature. Of course, all of those print materials no longer exist. Contino was let go from The Pulse and had to get a "real job." (I used to follow her on Facebook before I closed my account there; she seemed to be doing well, and maintained an interest in comics, but she wasn't doing any real writing about them.) The Pulse got bought/absorbed by the broadly pop culture Comicon.com and no longer exists. I've no idea about Adams personally, but it doesn't look like Trade Reading Order has been updated since 2013. MacDonald and The Beat basically remain as The Last Woman Standing.

I don't hold it against anyone whose voice about comics is no longer heard. We're living in an aggressively capitalistic culture, and that means you've got to work your ass off, however you can, just to get by. Frequently, that means setting aside what you're actually passionate about so you can earn enough to not be forced into homelessness. For most of the voices you see/hear talking about comics, they're folks who are financially successful enough in non-comics venues that their comics work is effectively subsidized. That's certainly how/why I'm still writing this blog after two decades; I barely make enough writing about comics to go to Starbucks once a month. Rob Salkowitz's comics writing is at least partially subsidized by his teaching at the University of Washington. From Women Write About Comics, Nola Pfau has been working at a senior living facility for several years, and Jenna Ledford has spent most of the last decade working at the University of North Texas. My buddy Jed Keith from FreakSugar teaches high school social studies.

Again, the vast majority of comics "journalists" are writing about comics because they're passionate about the subject and feel emotionally and/or creatively rewarded. But because life in the 21st century is what it is, there's no real social safety net and "writing about comics effectively for free" isn't financially sustainable, that gets dropped when you suddenly find yourself having to take care of a family member or taking up a second job in order to make rent or just plain getting exhausted by the end of the day with the one job you do have. So we see writers and commentators flit in and out of the comics "news" cycle, and we -- as readers -- are left having to continually find new voices and sources of industry information. I believe only two of the comics related sites I visit these days were even around back in 2010 when I wrote that original post (and one was barely a year old); most of the sites where I got my news are gone. Or so radically changed as to be an entirely new site.

Cultural capital is definitely a strong driver of whose voices are heard these days, but financial capital has more than a little influence on that as well!

The earliest known depiction of the "traditional" form of an angel -- a beautiful young man with wings growing out of his back -- dates to the late fourth century. It's called the Prince's Sarcophagus and was discovered in the 1930s near Istanbul. Earlier known works of art showing angels depict them either as essentially just humans or doves, the human form often for when they were interacting with mortals and the doves for just when their presence was flying above. The angel figures on the Prince's Sarcophagus (there are four total carved on the sides of the sarcophagus) are depicted as a sort of middle ground between the two, clearly differentiating them from the human apostles also shown but still giving them a form in which they can physically carry the circular monogram of Christ. The fact that this depiction seems to be fully realized in and of itself would lead me to infer that, while this is the oldest depiction like this that we know of, the idea of depicting angels in this way had been circulating for some time previously. But even if this was indeed the very first time anyone made angels look liks this, that still gives the image several centuries of circulation before comic books started showing up in the 1900s!

So it should come as no surprise that comic books would appropriate such imagery. Superman made popular the notion of flying characters (yes, I know, technically he wasn't flying in his earliest apperances) but National Comics was extremely litiguous and put the kibosh on the original Wonder Man character designed by Will Eisner for being a rip-off. Subsequently, any comic character that was shown flying "needed" a visible means of doing so to avoid getting sued as well, so putting wings on a character as they'd been depicted for centuries already was an obvious solution. This often gave the added benefit of visually recalling angels very directly and making an association between the good works done by angels and the good works done by superheroes.

We've had no shortage of winged characters in comics. Just limiting ourselves to those with bird-like wings, there's Hawkman & Hawgirl, Angel, Nighthawk, Red Raven (originally, he had bat-like wings, but his adoptive parents had bird-wings and the character was retroactively given them as well), Winged Victory, Prince Vultan (who actually pre-dates that Wonder Man lawsuit by several years), and Airman to name just a very few. But something that just occurred to me is the specific types of bird wings used, and how that is reflective of the character. While I don't think artists are too often concerned about whether Hawkman's wings are actually modeled after a hawk's -- as opposed to any kind of general bird -- because, after all, you have to really invent anatomy here anyway. (If a human grew wings the way a bird does, they would not sprout from between the shoulder blades, but would basically just be their arms. You'd have a visual that's closer to a traditional harpy instead of a traditional angel.) But when the characters are designed, their wings' coloring becomes reflective of the type of bird they're meant to evoke.

To take some obvious examples, look at Pygar from Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella. He is literally meant to evoke the image of an angel -- the dialogue makes this quite explicit -- and he is thus shown with white wings. Same with Marvel's character Warren Worthing III. His superhero name is literally Angel. (The lack of subtly with these examples is astounding!) While heroic, he is historically shown more as swooping down to save people and doesn't use his flight as much in an aggressive/offensive way. Hence, the white wings.

Conversely, we have a character like Hawkman. Again, his name is very directly meant to invoke a specific bird, often thought of as a predator. So Hawkman's wings have a darker coloring to match his more direct approach to crime-fighting. He's more frequently shown to be diving in to attack aggressors, and not focused as much on removing innocents from harm's way. Prince Vultan, too, has the dark wings of his people -- the Hawkmen, no relation to Hawkman -- and is also frequently depicted in a more crass, aggressive manner. Brian Blessed famously picked up on this immediately when he was asked to portray the character in the Flash Gordon movie in 1980 and he specifically requested that his weaponry be a blunt cudgel type instrument instead of a sword to further emphasize the character's nature.

That's not to say, of course, that you couldn't have a character run counter to that notion -- Birdman, while an animated character not a comic book one, has white, angelic wings but was originally depicted in that more aggressive manner -- but I find it interesting that creators often fall back on the coloring of a character's wings specifically to relay personality.

So the big news in webcomics over the past month and change is that A) Disney and Webtoon announced a licensing agreement last month such that Webtoon would host comics from Marvel, Star Wars, and other Disney-owned properties, and B) Disney and Webtoon announced yesterday that this would be done via a new, as-yet-unnamed platform. (Though presumably, it would look similar to Webtoon's current one.) There was a fair amount of hoopla during both announcements, and Webtoon's stock price rose markedly in the wake of each announcement.

What has largely gotten omitted from the discussion, though, is those stock bumps -- while pretty nice from a percentage point of view -- amount to very little. Webtoon launched their initial public offering (IPO) in mid-2024 at around $21 US per share. It dropped to almost half of that within the first month and spent the rest of 2024 hovering between $10-$13 US and the first half of 2025 just below $10 US. So the "huge" stock price bump of ~90% from last August meant they got as high as $18 before dropping back to $14 the next day. Better than they had been doing, but we're talking about four, maybe five dollars difference. Yesterday's announcement also cited a "soaring" stock increase of 55%... except that 55% is based on a month-over-month comparison from just before the first announcment. The stock price went from $14.27 US to $15.98 US. And within an hour, it settled back down to around $14.90 making the actual increase from yesterday's announcement... four percent. Not nothing, but it's a far cry from 55%!

Webtoon's quarterly report from August -- literally days before the first Disney deal was announced -- showed they ran a net loss of $3.9 million US for the second quarter, after a net loss of $22 million US in the first quarter. Their third quarter outlook projected revenue growth about equal to what they did in the second quarter, suggesting they'll probably be operating at a loss of ~4 million US again unless they somehow found a way to cut a boatload of expenses. We won't know for sure until they release their Q3 report, probably in mid-November.

Back in 2021 -- before Webtoon went public and had to disclose their financials -- I noted that Naver, who wholly owned Webtoon before the IPO -- was ostensibly running that part of the business at a loss. Naver had wrapped their Webtoon operations up among other business segments for Naver's financial reporting, so we couldn't see any details, but that was the rumor going around. While Webtoon rightly notes in some of their more recent financial disclosures that launching an IPO is expensive and that explains many of their loss numbers from 2024, that's not an excuse they'll be able to fall back on for long.

Now, Disney owns two percent of Webtoon per yesterday's announcement. (Or at least it will once a bunch of paperwork gets formalized.) Theoretically, Disney has a lot of talented accountants and lawyers that think this is a good idea, so there must be something to this, right?

Well, maybe. My counter-argument to that is that when Disney sees something they have great confidence in, they will buy it outright. Marvel, for example. There was no "well, let's get a stake in the company and see how it goes before buying them." They saw Marvel had their shit together, had something of great value, and Disney just dropped a ton of cash to own it. They're very much NOT doing that with Webtoon. They easily could. A controlling portion of Webtoon -- before Disney announced any deals with them -- would've cost around $600 million US if they just bought the necessary number of shares on the open market. If they worked out an actual agreement, it probably would've been closer to $300 million US. Not chump change, but this is the same company that bought Marvel for $4 Billion US in 2009 (about $6 Billion US today).

So, in my mind, Disney getting a 2% stake in Webtoon is barely worth mentioning. Their bigger deal is whatever Webtoon is paying them to license Spider-Man and Darth Vader, and the 2% stake just means they get some extra profit if it suddenly becomes wildly successful.

Which is by no means a sure thing. In the first place, I'll refer to the news from back in May when Webtoon changed their primary platform by dropping their "Daily Pass" option and effectively charging more for less. Enshittification of the platform, which I had predicted several weeks earlier.

In the second place, if Webtoon is launching a SECOND platform for their Disney-related material, that means that they will have effectively zero crossover users. People who come to the platform to read Star Wars will not see or have access to any webtoons over on their 'main' platform. And any existing users likely won't bother trying to create a separate login with separate costs to read Disney material. Webtoon will be siloing their audiences. Granted, the two sets of audiences probably don't have a LOT of overlap, but by putting them in separate silos, there will be ZERO.

In the third place, my understanding is that this new platform will be hosting old material. Basically doing what Comixology did before Amazon bought it. You'll be able to read Amazing Fantasy #15 and Fantastic Four #256 and whatever else is in their back catalog. But none of that was created for the vertical scroll format. Yes, they can retroactively adjust the layouts and reconfigure things so they will work... but that's just another version of Comixology's "Guided View" option, which was okay for what it was but it still made for awkward reading since, again, none of those comics were designed to be read that way. Guided View made things less bad than just trying to sort through a whole page on a small screen, but "less bad" is not a great user experience.

I don't wish ill against Webtoons, and don't want to rain on their parade exactly, but I think it's worth keeping some perspective here too. The Disney deal is significant but not enough to fully bridge the gap between the lofty IPO expectations and the day-to-day realities of running a business about webcomics. I think what we're looking at here is a company trying very hard to make things work, and they've thrown a crudload of time and money at it. But given their current operations, I don't think there's anything to be particularly excited about. This Disney deal doesn't strike me as likely to bring in a ton of opertaing capital -- if the licensing costs themselves don't increase their quarterly losses -- and I would just urge any creators posting through Webtoon to make sure that that isn't their ONLY venue for posting/earning money from their webcomic. You should never rely on a single source to begin with, and this setup with Disney doesn't strike me as being able to change Webtoon's direction.

If you're familiar with Carol Tyler, there's a good chance it's through her memoir, Soldier's Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. It was originally published as three separate books between 2009-2012, and only collected into a single volume in 2015. Her upcoming book, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, might inititally seem like a sequel of sorts, as it covers her life from 2011-2017 but I think that would wildly misrepresent what this actually is.

The sales copy for the book reads, in part, "Drawing upon her own bereavement, renowned comics artist and writer Carol Tyler emerges from a decade long period of grief to create an allegorical masterpiece. During collisions between life and death, estrangement and loss, Carol Tyler turned to her pen to face facts and extract meaning from the oddly sacred experience." Because of that, I went into the book assuming she would mostly be discussing living with and then losing her husband Justin Green, a notable cartoonist in his own right who passed away in 2022. I thought it odd that Fantagraphics didn't name-drop Green anywhere in the promotional copy in order that they might pick up a few more sales, but I'm told Tyler had some strong opinions on that point and, given the particular nature of this work, I understand why everyone respected it. Because Green's passing is hardly mentioned at all here. You'll note that I said the book largely covers Tyler's life up to 2017; she has plans for a second half to this story to come out in 2027. This first volume is about all the other loss she experienced before that.

And that's not insubstantial. Early in the book, Tyler offers a simple list of those she lost in this short six year period: her mother, her father, her sister, her brother-in-law, a close cousin, her dog, the child of some friends, the "nice kid next door" and his father, one of her editors... in addition to a number of other friends both in and out of comics. It's a daunting list, frankly. I'm old enough to have seen many friends and relatives pass away -- some under very ugly circumstances -- but I can't say I could pull out any six year period that densely packed with funerals, much less so many significant ones.

The first part of the book discusses how Tyler looks at grief more broadly. It's definitely the more pensive part of the book, and offers some reflection on how people can process grief in different ways and how she herself processes it. If you're familiar with Tyler's work, it should come as no surprise that she relies heavily on metaphors. She receives a deed to a parcel of land in Griefville in which instead of a house, she finds her Grandma Theola's Mourning Bonnet. It is within the bonnet that she can work to process her grief -- or simply try to take a moment's comfort -- in whatever manner she needs. However, without a Guide Book, she's at a bit of a loss.

From there Tyler goes on to relay her life from 2011 onwards. Dealing with her ailing parents, trying to shield them from the ravages of cancer that are killing her sister, protecting her daughter from the repercussions of her daughter's boyfriend's dealings with some local low-level drug dealers... On top of the more day-to-day stressors like helping one neighbor to bury their dog, her own aging that's led to not only your run-of-the-mill creaky joints but also a bout of tinnitus, her husband's ongoing challenges with OCD, being forced to teach her college classes in a hallway, and -- perhaps most insidiously of all -- always having to say "fine, thanks" and pretend she really is every time someone asks, "how are you doing?"

It's a lot for anyone to deal with and she retreats to Griefville on more than a couple occassions. Hell, I had to put the book aside repeatedly because it was a lot just to read about! Tyler puts herself very much on open display for readers here, but it never feels like she's doing it to expressly gain sympathy. It's hard for me to pinpoint how, but it very much seems like Tyler was using the pages to process her grief as it continued to mount and drawing comics was the only way she knew how. Having it published seems like a "sure, fuck it -- whatever!" response to someone else's suggestion. And because of that, it's very raw and emotional. Tyler lays herself bare for the reader with an exhausted honesty and integrity that I suspect can only come from having to deal with so much death.

Look, I don't have to sell you on this book. It's Carol Tyler. If you're reading this blog, you at least are nominally familiar with her name and her reputation. There's a good chance you've read some of her work already, and there's even a half-decent chance you know her personally. This is everything you'd expect from Tyler and more; I'd certainly rank it as the best single piece from her that I've ever read. The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief is being published by Fantagraphics and should be available in your favorite bookstore next month. You can pre-order it now -- it retails in hardcover for $39.99 US. The publisher provided me with an advance copy for this review.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Check Your Assumptions
https://ift.tt/IwhHOoi

Kleefeld on Comics: The Man Who Dreamt the Impossible Review
https://ift.tt/Nx8pmIH

Kleefeld on Comics: Marvel All-On-One Review
https://ift.tt/4UQJRqz

Kleefeld on Comics: Action Comics #495
https://ift.tt/rT3Aeiq

Kleefeld on Comics: Graphic Comics
https://ift.tt/FQb6knU

One of the earliest comic covers that captured my interest at an intellectual level was West Coast Avengers #16 by Al Milgrom. (At right.) It stuck out because, as you can see, it has what might be considered a more graphic approach to depicting characters. If you examine the artwork, you'll see that most of the visuals are conveyed with colored shapes and NOT the black outlines we're so accustomed to seeing in comics. I thought this was wildly clever at the time (1987) and was pleased to see the idea repeated (albiet somewhat less successfully) about a year and half later on the cover of WCA #35.

This was, of course, before I studied graphic design at all, and just as I was beginning to study comic book history. At the time, I was still wholly unfamiliar with the work of Jim Steranko and Frank Miller had just begun experimenting with the idea of removing linework from his work.

I went to college not long after this to study graphic design, and I learned a great deal about color, line and form. The program was rather different than the fine arts program, although we still shared a studio in our foundation drawing classes. In fact, though, very little time was spent on drawing and illustration even compared to photography. We were taught how to depict objects with forms. Minimalism was often encouraged and I particularly enjoyed working on a project where I had to stylize/iconify images from Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr. Who, Flash Gordon, 2001, Alien, Metropolis, Forbidden Planet and War of the Worlds. They were all done entirely using shadows and provided an interesting (for me) examination of how to illustrate without lines.

It occurs to me though that now, dceades later, we're still seeing very little in the way of non-line-drawing comics. Even after Miller brought the idea to such high prominence -- with more than a little help from Robert Rodriguez -- in Sin City. It's not entirely absent, certainly, and you can see forms of it, to varying degrees, in the work of Mike Mignola, Time Sale, and Frank Espinosa but I would think Miller's work especially would have inspired more people by now. I should think that more comic book artists would be taking up the idea to stand out from the crowd of more intricately detailed art that covers just about every other book on the market.

C'mon! Cool graphics and decent marketing concept? Who wouldn't want that?

This is the first comic book I actually purchased with my own money. I recall seeing it on a spinner rack in a local drug store while Mom was picking up whatever it was that she picked up that day. I had been interested in comics for at least a few years at that point, but I had only recently started getting an allowance. I definitely remember being attracted to the cover, possibly because of the obvious Clark/Superman duality being expressly shown. (I know I liked the cover to Superman #268 for that reason.) I thus made the decision to make my first "major" purchase. I mean, forty whole cents! That required me to save up my allowance for two weeks!

The story was entertaining enough, if a bit far-fetched -- even in the context of a Superman comic. I do recall liking it, though, because it did have all the "classic" Superman elements I was aware of. The villain appeared to be from Krypton (Superman's home planet) but was in fact an alien from a world Superboy had saved years ago (continuity). It featured Clark and Lois as Planet reporters (key characters and traits) but occurred in Smallville (Clark's boyhood home). There was a brief discussion of the original S-logo Clark had toyed with (alluding to the historical elements of Superman's history in the real world) and the mandatory Clark-pretending-to-be-scared-so-Lois-won't-discover-his-dual-identity routine. Plus some out of this world logic (Superman throwing the villain's sword all the way around THE ENTIRE PLANET and catching it as it came back) and a decent fight sequence. And, oh yeah, the whole thing was drawn by Curt "Best Superman Artist Ever" Swan.

Apparently, from what I can tell right here and now, that story or the alien race depicted in it, has NEVER been referenced before or since that issue. So, c'mon! Who's with me in writing to new DC head honcho Diane Nelson to help back the Zoltams, Gnmod, or the Xaka sword? Let's get everybody on board this and make it a real grass-roots movement to honor the great legacy of DC stories! Who's with me? C'mon!

Anyone?

Anybody...?

Hello? Is this thing on?