When publishers reprint comics, they sometimes get new cover art for them. Often, the cover art has to be re-worked to some degree anyway, to accommodate a different logo or publisher format changes, so it's sometimes easier and cheaper to get a new artist to create a new cover image rather than try to adjust the old one. Sometimes, editors feel, too, that getting a different artist to draw a new cover might make it fall more in line than whatever new stories are being contemporaneously published. If you got whoever's drawing Amazing Spider-Man this month, their artwork on a reprint cover might attract some readers who would gloss over or ignore a Steve Ditko cover. Whatever the case, there certainly are solid justifications for getting a new cover drawn up for a reprint issue.

Of course, it's also sometimes the case that there's not enough budget to hire a new artist, but the original cover art still needs to be re-worked for new format considerations. In these case, it usually then falls to someone on the production team to try to make whatever modifications are necessary. That might be simply re-cropping the original, or it might involve moving around individual components. These days, all of that is done digitally, of course, but before computers became a staple of the industry, someone would have to photostat the image (basically, a high-quality photocopy), cut it up with an X-acto, and paste everything back down in the new format. Depending on the number of changes needed -- particularly if they involved having to resize only certain portions -- this could be quite tedious.

Check out the huge number of changes that had to be made when reprinting Fantastic Four #97 as Marvel's Greatest Comics #78. Take a look at these two covers... Most obviously, the creature figure and the story title have been swapped. The Human Torch figure has been shrunk and placed higher on the page, and the entire shoreline has been re-drawn. Almost an inch of additional art has been added on the right side to show the Thing's left leg, and the radio from above his head has been moved down to the side. There's also a beach blanket drawn in for him to lay on, and the Human Torch is given a can of soda (with two straws for some reason). The ground texture has been entirely re-done from waves of sand to somewhat more rocky texture.

That's a fair amount of re-work to achieve, essentially, nothing. It's still Jack Kirby artwork, and the adjustments don't change the impact of the visual. The FF are relaxing on the beach, with the Torch moping off to the side, and they're all oblivious to the monster sneaking up behind them. The elements are moved around a bit, but the visual impact is more or less unchanged. I was really puzzled by this for a while. The whole logo/corner box area is formatted a little differently, but doesn't take up appreciably any more room on the page. So why go through all the time to re-work everything?

Then, I noticed a new element to the layout -- the UPC symbol. In the eight years between the release of Fantastic Four #97 and Marvel's Greatest Comics #78, Marvel had begun adding UPCs to their covers. That effectively kills that bottom corner of the page from an art perspective since any art drawn in that corner would get covered by the bar code. The layout changes then begin to make sense... the Human Torch was moved up so he wasn't getting cut off by the bar code; he was shrunk a bit to keep the figure perspective; moving the Torch would have interfered with the monster figure, so that was moved to the right; the story title was then shrunk slightly and was used to fill the space left by the creature; other elements were drawn in to fill in the now-empty spaces. That all kind of makes sense.

Except...

Except pretty much none of that was really needed. Here's what it looks like when I took the Marvel's Greatest Comics masthead and UPC, and drop them on top of Fantastic Four #97 with no other adjustments...

The Human Torch figure remains almost entirely visible, and everything else fits pretty well as is. The monster's head breaks into the "R" of the title a bit more than would be ideal, I suppose, but not so much that it's no longer legible. The new copyright notice does overlap with the monster's shoulder, but there's plenty of space under the masthead Torch figure where the old corner box used to be.

So I'm ultimately still a little confused by all the changes. The modifications they did make were pretty significant, and I'm sure took someone in the production department a great deal of time and effort. The end result isn't bad, certainly, but it seems like a heck of a lot of work when they could've left it almost unchanged and gotten the same effect.

For the past two or three decades, Terminator has seemingly been the go-to reference when people talk about the dangers of AI. I think most people have heard references to and understand "SkyNet" even if they haven't seen any of the Terminator movies. The James Cameron movies were hardly the first to discuss some of the possible negative outcomes of letting computers run everything; even within pop culture, there's more than a few of the original Star Trek episodes that focus on this theme. But Cameron and lead actor Arnold Schwarzenegger did capture many of the key elements of the idea with some very memorable, in many cases downright iconic, moments. And all of the ideas it presents are packaged within a very enjoyable action movie. But again, it's hardly treading any new ground.

I've been nominally aware that the word "robot" dates back about a century to a Czechoslovakian piece. On the handful of times I've tried to look more into it, I would basically only find short summaries about Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. and perhaps some notes about how it was popular for a time in the 1920s, but seemingly fell out of public favor and consciousness. There was always something of an unsaid implication that, beyond the contributing the word "robot" to modern language, there wasn't much note-worthy about the work. Particularly since the the robots of the play are entirely organic creatures, and bear little resemblance to what we think of as robots today.

Which brings us to 2020, the hundredth anniversary of the original play. Kateřina Čupová created a lauded graphic novel adpatation of the work in Czechoslovakia and, now in 2014, it's been translated into English and been published by Rosarium Publishing.

The story starts with Helena looking to gain more information about the Rossum's Universal Robots factory for The League of Humanity. They are concerned about the treatment of the robots and feel they should not be treated as slaves. Director Domin gives her a full tour of the facilities and repeatedly assures her that the robots have no real self-awareness or consciousness as we know it. That they are indeed soulless automotons, no different than a vacuum cleaner or a blender. He goes on to note that any number of visitors -- from missionaries to anarchists -- have tried to convince the robots to rebel, but to no avail. She is unconvinced, but Domin offers to let her stay at the facility and try as long as she likes. Sher ultimately winds up staying ten years, marrying Domin in the process, but seems unable to sway any of the robots.

Eventually, though, one of the robots does "break his programming" so to speak and is able to cause the robots -- all of them -- to rebel. The factory itself has hundreds of thousands of robot workers with less than a dozen actual humans, so the rebellion takes little time and results in the deaths of everyone except Alquist, who offered no resistance. He was largely kept alive because Helena had previously burned all of the notes regarding the robots' construction and they therefore did not have enough details to create more. Without creating new robots, the existing ones will fail within twenty years. While Alquist resists, he notes a spark of real humanity in two robots that are in love and he coerces them to go freely into the world to become the next Adam and Eve.

Quite unlike the previous impression I had been given, Čapek has a LOT to say about life in the 21st century. About robot work, certainly, but also about business, capitalism, humanity, art, technology, society... virtually every aspect of human life. And while there are certainly some elements that are rooted in their time (the blatant sexism against Helena goes as far as her essentially not even having a choice whether or not she wants to marry Domin) there's a lot that directly speaks to 2024. While characters tout various reasons why robots are good -- and some of those reasons even seem sincerely altruistic -- the hubris of the various R.U.R. human employees is what directly leads to their deaths. Alquist is the only one to survive until the end, in part, because he's the only character to have enough perspective to still want to "touch grass" as it were.

I have not seen the original production, so I can't compare Čupová's version against that. But I thought she created a very powerful and moving depiction of the work. It conveys, I think, precisely what Čapek wanted to convey and it does so in a compelling manner. Even with whatever crude costuming and makeup would've been available back in 1920, I expect audiences were blown away by the story even if it were only presented half as well as what is here. From what research I've done for this, many of the interpretations and adapations have retroactively given the robots of R.U.R. a more robotic appearance. But the story clearly does not identify them as mechanical men, but creatures of flesh and blood, and Čupová does indeed emphasize that here, both with her basic character designs but also by use of watercolors and a relatively loose, expressive line. Her art style very much serves to underline the story's entire point, and I commend her for leaning into that.

Čupová's storytelling is solid as well. While there were a couple parts that seemed a little discordant at first glance, the color palettes she uses quickly help identify them as happening somewhat apart from the main narrative. Some of her illustrations, too, are expressly metaphorical, but here again the coloring helps the reader to readily identify these. The only complaint I can really make is the book's production itself -- I found that two separate pages towards the end had been duplicated; a minor production error, but one that did take me out of the story momentarily.

If you are unfamiliar with R.U.R. , as I suspect many of you are, I would highly recommend picking this version up. As far as I'm aware, it's the only comic book version that's been published and it makes for an excellent introduction to this story. The book debuted last month and should be available from all major book sellers. The hardcover retails for $32.99 US.

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

Jack Kirby Collector: Incidental Iconography
https://ift.tt/wfkYDha

Kleefeld on Comics: Obeying in Advance
https://ift.tt/4DkWLTe

Kleefeld on Comics: Swapped World-Builds
https://ift.tt/M2Yu3vo

Kleefeld on Comics: The City Review
https://ift.tt/nYmtLzH

Kleefeld on Comics: Junior Citizens Review
https://ift.tt/hPltRHz

Kleefeld on Comics: We Need an Emergency Preparedness Webcomic
https://ift.tt/1A8C6Rf

A few years ago, I noticed a couple of things. First, there was an increasing number of natural disasters that were causing larger and larger amounts of damage. Natural disasters, of course, have been around since literally the beginning of the planet, but climate change has had enough of an impact at this point that both their frequency and intensities are impossible to ignore regardless where you live. Second, the federal government is decreasingly able (or even willing!) to assist people who have been impacted by these disasters. Hurricane Katrina is kind of the poster child for this type of thing, but we're seeing it more and more. Worse still, we're also seeing clearly man-made disasters happening more and more as well. This means that you're more likely to get hit by a disaster, it will likely cause more damage than it the past, and you'll get less assistance.

So despite not living in an area prone to earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, or any other natural disasters, I began putting together an emergency preparedness kit. A crate of supplies that we could rely on in case we're cut off from... well, anything. Matches, first aid kit, flashlight, radio, multitool, etc. After I pulled some basics together, I expanded to include bottled water, MREs, camping supplies. My wife and I each put together a bag with spare clothes we could grab if we needed to race out the door. Extra food for the pets. A waterproof/fireproof lockbox with a handle for important papers. Rain barrels for non-potable water. A small generator. Everything we can think of (and afford!) to prepare ourselves for any sort of emergency.

Some of the basics here are spelled out on variety of websites of folks like the Red Cross and the ASPCA. But I found a lot of that to be dated. I mean, they are keeping up to date by mentioning things like extra phone chargers, but the thinking behind these sites still assumes the government will come to assist you in a few hours, maybe a day at most. So to get more/better information, you almost have to start looking at prepper culture.

Preppers are the folks who take the idea that you'll be on your own to the extremes. They're also sometimes known as survivalists and are preparing for what they often call a SHTF scenario. Like, full-on Mad Max types of situations. Society is gone, and you are completely on your own. There's a lot of overlap here with gun culture. There's an entire industry built up just around building underground bunkers/fall-out shelters that caters to this community. There are some sane, pragmatic folks out there advocating prepping, but there's also a lot of deep conspiracy theorists that are genuinely fearful of a for-real zombie apocalypse.

So, for me, trying to do more than the Red Cross suggests, but who's not so paranoid as to buy and retrofit an old missile silo as a bunker (yup, that's totally a thing), there was a LOT of crap to wade through in order to get to some practical and useful information.

Which leads to my notion that someone needs to make an emergency preparedness webcomic. As far as I can tell, there's nothing out there like this currently. There have been a few emergency preparedness comics that run a basic story about preparing for an emergency and make some high level recommendations, but they tend to be light on specifics. Which I suppose is good enough to get people thinking about it, but it doesn't do much beyond that. I've also seen a few comics that try to show a prepper or some survivalists actually in a SHTF setting, but the focus there seems to be on the story of survival after the event, not on the preparations beforehand.

So what I think we need is an instructables-type webcomic that shows how to go about getting prepared for emergency situations. I'm thinking it would need to be a webcomic versus a printed one because while individual portions would be linearly narrative, the overall piece would not be; so if you had it as a webcomic, people could check out the specific portions they felt were most important and/or they were most ignorant of without having to wade through everything else. There might be some sections that just talk about some of the supplies you'd need under different emergency scenarios, or for different geographies. Another section might look at administering first aid. Another might be packing a Go-Bag versus a Bug-Out-Bag, and why you might need one over the other. Maybe something about what you think you need versus what you most likely will need. What about legal emergencies? Do you have a will, power of attorney documents? Are they secure? Financial emergencies? How much should be in your emergency fund? Digital emergencies? Is all your data backed up?

The basic point of the whole thing would be how to implement the old Boy Scout motto of "be prepared." Obviously, not everybody was in Boy Scouts in the first place, and I'm sure many who were haven't thought about some of those ideas since before they had a spouse and kids and day-to-day job responsibilities and whatever. But, like I said, in a day and age where disasters are getting deadlier and more damaging, with less likelihood of any help from the government, I think something along these lines would prove incredibly beneficial if it were done with practical steps in mind. I think there's a lot of far-out-there people in the prepper community that give them all a bad name, and turn off others from even entertaining the notion of emergency preparedness -- you wind up sorting through bizarre conspiracy theories just to see a list of items to include in a Go-Bag! There are some decent folks out there with YouTube channels and such, which is great, but a webcomic would stand out since there simply isn't anything like it out there right now. People just starting out could check it out without getting scared by the crazy tinfoil hat types.

Somebody get on this!

Today, I'm spotlighting yet another book that came out in 2020 but I totally missed because 2020 was just bonkers. Junior Citizens is a story by Ian Herring and Daniel Macintyre that they originally ran as a webcomic begining, I think, in 2015. They finished in early 2020 and published a collected edition soon after.

The story follows two citizens of in the galactic dominion whose lives seredipidiously intersect on occasion, and how their actions impact each other, usually inadvertently. Citizen Natasha is technician assigned to repair a fault on one of the remote agriculture platforms. When she gets there, she finds it abandoned except for Citizen Bosley and a service droid named Murphy who is himself not exactly working optimally. It turns out that the platform had been decommissioned but no one ever bothered to tell anyone. In the decomissioning process, Bosley screws up in a the-whole-place-blows-up way and promptly blames Natasha. There's no proof of who did actually caused the problem, and in the subsequent he said/she said contest, Natasha ultimately takes the fall for everything.

The story then follows their two separate lives. Natasha is demoted to janitorial duties and Bosley continues to fail upwards to eventually become Supreme Minister of Defense. Both he and his countpart at a rival planet invent (i.e. they both buy the same plans from a shady salesman) a "solar snuffer" which is a doomsday style weapon that's supposed to literally extinguish a star. And because both Bosley and his counterpart are prime examples of the Dunning–Kruger effect, they both push the other to the brink of war because they think they're outsmarting each other. Fortunately, the plans they bought were actually for an automatic wheat thresher (with both of these guys so inpet, they had no clue what they were actually looking at despite Natasha explictly telling them what they actually built) so no stars are snuffed when the machines are turned on. But Bosley, in his priviledged childish rage, launched all of his conventional missiles at whatever they happened to be aimed at, which fortunately happened to be a satellite where that shady salesman was using. Bosley is then arrested and found guilty of a large number of crimes while Natasha opens her own repair shop with some of the friends she made along the way.

I'm leaving out quite a bit there. Deliberately. Because while the story is well told and flows smoothly, the real focus is the character moments. There are a number of extended sections with minimal dialogue and just one of the characters getting on with their day. We follow Natasha, for example, for six pages before she says her first words and that's just small talk with the pilots of the shuttle she's on. Despite that, we learn a decent amount about not only Natasha but the world she inhabits. There's a surpisingly lot that goes on just by showing someone lining up in a queue just to get a paper with her day's workload on it. Herring and Mcintyre (they're both credited as writers) know when to let the story just speak for itself and use dialogue in a very natural-sounding manner.

Herring's art has a definite charm to it as well. It's definitely cartoonish and the figures are simplified in many ways, but he makes effective use of his lines to convey a lot of nuance of emotion. Again, letting a raised eyebrow or ever-so-slight grin say what isn't being said out loud. The printed version has the colors muted somehwat compared to what's online, and I think it gives the art an additional warmth, which further adds to the charm. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not but the impact is a positive one, I think.

What I find most interesting is how, despite being a very sci-fi story, it has a lot of elements of today's society in the culture being shown. It's not precisely dystopian, but it doesn't exactly look like a society anyone today would willingly choose to live in. Watching Bosley fail his way into promotions while Natasha is penalized, essentially, for being a woman... well, the parallels with today aren't hard to miss. It was rather an interesting look at many of those elements and it really only diverges from what we see today at the very end when Bosley actually has to face the consequences of his ineptness.

Despite the narrative going to the very edge of intergalactic war, it's a surprisingly small story, focusing on the lives of a few people. Yes, there's a massive government and the inevitable corruption around that, and there's big business out to make money regardless of who it hurts or what laws might be broken, but it's ultimately how Natasha realizes that she wants something different than the vast majority of people and what she does to step out of the monotony of doing what you're "supposed" to do with your life.

Apparently, I haven't reviewed a Frans Masereel book here in over a decade! I recently picked up Masereel's The City, originally published in 1925. (The edition I got -- pictured -- is from Schocken Books circa 1988. The most recent American edition has been from Dover in 2006 and, I believe, is still in print.) Like Masereel's other wordless graphic novels, the entire thing was created using woodcuts. Unlike his other graphic novels, The City does not really have a story per se.

There's no linear narrative at all here. All one hundred panels are individual and don't really have any direction relation to any other panels, other than the people and events being depicted are taking place in the same city. There's enough distinction in some panels that you can tell they're not all taking place simultaneously -- some are clearly in the morning, some during the day, some in the evening -- but I think it's safe to assume they all take place around the same time. We don't see any different seasons or obvious passages of time beyond the vague morning/daytime/evening breakdown. I actually get the impression that Masereel's intent here is to show every day; that everything we see depicted is a more or less daily occurence.

Masereel is using the book to tell the story of a city. Not the specifics of how it was built or its history, not the unique nature and culture of any one city in particular, but rather the general character of cities in the early 1920s. Recall that in 1925, cities as we know them today were pretty rare. Skyscrapers as a concept had only been around a few decades and it really wasn't until the 1920s that they started getting built up regularly. The Empire State Building wasn't begun until 1930. So what Masereel was presenting with The City was what life in a 20th century city was like. This wasn't out in the country and this wasn't a city out of old Europe. This was a glimpse of the future for most people.

It's for this reason, I think, that Masereel opted to showcase the city as a series of one-panel vignettes. Each panel depcits a scene that is seemingly typical of daily life in the city. Hundreds of people rushing on their way to work. Weddings. Funerals. Street festivals. Shopping. Museums. Everything that you would recognize now as part of any city.

And I do mean everything.

A man is hit by a speeding car. A dead woman is fished out of the river. A wealthy man in expensive clothes obliviously strides past a homeless beggar. Some men get in a drunken fight. Domestic violence. Poverty. Blight. Pollution. Congestition. Masereel doesn't sugar coat any of it.

In fact, I daresay he almost takes an anti-city stance. I can't seem to find any summaries that explictly note his point of view on cities in general, only that he was heavily influenced by earlier parts of his life living in Paris and Berlin. He does depict the city's nicer points -- one of the later panels showcases a massive fireworks display and the final panel depicts a woman simply gazing in wonder at the night sky out of her window. There are plenty of crowds and loads of people, but there are plenty of quieter moments with a single individual. But even in those quieter moments, you can see pain and loss.

I can't recall seeing another comic that takes a completely non-narrative approach like this. You could argue that this isn't even a comic. (Scott McCloud's definition, you'll recall, requires the images to be in a "deliberate sequence" and while I'm sure Masereel did choose which images he wanted in which order, I don't think changing that order would have any impact to the overall "story.") There are certainly sequences in other comics that take a similar approach, but none that I can recall where they do that exclusively; they're framed within a more 'traditional' sequential narrative. Regardless of your how strict your definition of "comics" is, Masereel The City (which has been published numerous times -- since the book is wordless and black + white, you can pick up any copy, even foreign language editions, and get the same experience) is definitely worth checking out.

The BBC has recently begun uploading classic-era Doctor Who stories to YouTube under their Doctor Who: Classic channel. Despite being a Who fan going back to the 1980s*, I've only seen a smattering of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton stories so I've been going through to catch up on some of these stories that I was only nominally familiar with. While there are definitely some interesting stories here, I quickly noted that some of them stand out as being particularly... well, not "bad" exactly (or at least no worse than anything else from the same period) but not enjoyable for me. Mainly those in which the Doctor finds himself in situations that are effectively outside the scope of the show.

In any sort of fiction, and certainly in science fiction and fantasy, the creators have to establish the "rules" of the world they're introducing their audience to. Are dragons real? Does time travel exist? Has Earth made contact with aliens? That kind of thing. The creators can make up whatever rules they want, but as a general rule, they should remain consistent so the audience feels like there's some coherence to the story. If you establish that shape=shifting aliens are a thing but then turn around and say that intersteller space travel isn't possible, you're going to causing confusion and frustration among your audience who are trying to process your story. The characters established in the story work within the framework of how their universe is set up. So it doesn't make sense if you drop Spider-Man into a One Piece adventure because, despite One Piece having a range of characters with literal super powers, the notion of putting on a costume and saving people just to save them doesn't fit the mindset of anyone in that world.

This is why a lot of IP crossover stories don't really work. A character like Superman doesn't really work in a world-view like what you'd see in Marvel; there's top much inherent skepticism for a Marvel resident to fully accept someone like Superman. How does a group like Starfleet come up if you've got a galaxy that includes people who can wield the Force? What happens to Fred Flinstone's job at the quarry if you introduce someone like Devil Dinosaur to the story? The characters themselves might be interesting to play off one another, but the environments they come from are generally different enough that any sort of story beyond just that cursory interaction starts to break down quickly. That's why it can be fun to think about Judge Dredd versus Deadpool, but a full story with the two of them won't hold up well.

The reason why I introduced this piece with Doctor Who is because I watched "The Mind Robber" story for the first time. In the story, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his companions have an accident with the TARDIS and are transported into a world of fiction. They encounter Rapunzel and Gulliver and Captain Karkus, a fictional comic book superhero from one of the companions' time period. And I thought it was a lousy story. The "rules" of Doctor Who were thrown out the window and the protagonists were thrust into what was effectively a bunch of nonsense. All the world-building that had been going on for the previous five years' worth of stories were tossed aside for bizarre face-swap puzzles and giant wind-up soliders and Captain Karkus spontaneously showing up in a nick of time because the Doctor wished him to. "The Celestial Toymaker" story is similar, as is its much later sequel "The Giggle." Those don't occur in the Doctor's world, and therefore are not stories the Doctor should be used in.

Whether or not you watch or even are familiar with Doctor Who, the same idea applies to all stories, I feel. Sure, it makes sense for Alice to fall into Wonderland and deal with all sorts of whimsical nonsense, but that's because she was designed as a character specifically to deal with said nonsene. Shazam was not meant for that world. Nor Captain Carrot or Peter Pan or Santa Claus or any of a hundred other characters that have been thrust into it in one story or another.

I've pointed out before that I rather enjoy the "archeology" aspect of long-running stories as are often found in comics. This notion of world-building, while complimentary to it, is a little distinct. I want to see that not only what came before matters, but how the characters' entire world is sturctured matters. They act the way they do, in part, because of their environment and whether that includes dragons or aliens or whatever else helped to shape who they are. That strikes me as something many people don't think about when they say they want to see a team-up between John Wick and Deathstroke.

* The first story I saw was "The Masque of Mandragora" from the 1976-77 season, but that was likely not until 1987. Our local PBS station where I first discovered the show didn't begin airing Doctor Who at all until late 1980. Going through some old broadcast schedules, my guess is that I didn't start watching until 1987 even though the Mandragora story had already aired a few times before then. I know I never watched the show during the week, only on weekends, so I would've missed everything prior to 1984 and I certainly wouldn't have been allowed to stay up to watch the 11:30pm timeslot when it did run in '84. The only two other times they broadcast the Mandragora story was in 1987 and then again in 1991, but that latter date was after I left for college. Honestly, I could've sworn I'd been watching Who going back several years earlier, but I don't see how that's possible if these broadcast schedules I'm looking at are accurate. That would also explain how I missed seeing almost all of the first three Doctors, since the station didn't air any of the pre-Tom Baker episodes between 1986 and 1989.