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I have only the slightest notion who this person is. :\

Raina Telgemeier: The Comics Industry Person of the Decade
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Raina Telgemeier: The Comics Industry Person of the Decade - The Beat

archived 7 Jan 2020 19:48:55 UTC
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We’ve reached the end of the year and the decade, and the Beat has wrapped up the comics, the TV and the movies, and the Comics Industry People of the Year for 2019.

But there is one last honor left to bestow. And that is the Comics Industry Person of the Decade. We weren’t necessarily intending to give this out, but reading all the comments from our creator survey, it was clear that one person rose above the rest and symbolized the immense changes in the industry over the last 10 years – and drove much of its success all by herself.

It is, of course, Raina Telgemeier.
As one of our respondents put it:

— For comic of the decade, Raina Telgemeier’s Smile was released in February 2010, and it’s hard to picture what the industry would look like today without the new wave of comics for kids it ushered in.

Raina is one of those magic talents – the right person at the right time, with the right publisher, yes – but there is no denying how her work connects with her audience. Starting with Smile – a heartfelt story the mixed the confession of autobiographical comics with the warmth of family comic strips like For Better or Worse – she’s spun a web of stories that speak to the hopes of fears of not only middle grade readers, but anyone who remembers being that middle grader who is trying to figure things out.

I told Raina she was being named Person of the Decade, and she sent me this response:

What an honor. I accept this on behalf of every creator who toils away quietly, hoping to reach people with their art. For all the kids reading their first comics, falling in love with the medium, and who might be inspired to pick up a pencil or stylus themselves. And with gratitude all the booksellers, librarians, teachers, journalists, and parents who have advocated for comics for the past decade. You’ve all made a difference, and I’m overjoyed to have you along on this journey!
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I first met Raina many years ago at some kind of industry event. She was the apprentice for my former art assistant (Jason Little) at the time. She was doing mini comics, and she gave me a story about her beginnings as a cartoonist – and the impact that reading Barefoot Gen had on her as a kid. (You can see a page from the story here.) It was charming and insightful, with sure storytelling, but more than that, it connected. It put together her love of comics with the power they held to tell the story of a boy who was caught in the blast of an atom bomb. The emotions were personal – but she found the universal in them.

Raina’s talent was obvious as she serialized Smile – the story of how she knocked out her front teeth and dealt with self-consciousness and other early adolescent issues – as a webcomic on LiveJournal. As someone with bad teeth, I could certainly relate to the dental drama, but it was the family life, and her portrayal of early adolescence, that caught people’s eye. A gig adapting The Baby-Sitter’s Club for Scholastic’s then-fledgling comics line followed – part of a goldrush for kids comics that was just a little ahead of its time.
Smile

But the books succeeded, and Scholastic signed her up for a new, colorized and tightened up version of Smile.

The rest, as they say, is history. I see kids everywhere reading Smile and Raina’s other books – one time a girl on a skateboard whizzed past me clutching a copy. Drama, Sisters, Ghosts, Guts…every book gets bigger and bigger. (And if you read her comments in our creator survey, she’s workin on a seeeeecret new project!) Guts was in the top 20 bestselling books of any kind for 2019, selling nearly half a million copies on Bookscan alone. What a journey! We’ve watched her grow from an aspiring cartoonist at SVA to a powerful speaker who talks in front of thousands of people. She did it one signing, one workshop at a time. Raina isn’t the first cartoonist to be a household name, but she’s the first of a new kind of superstar, the homegrown children’s book author, as beloved in libraries as on a child’s personal bookshelf.

And the comics have come right along with her. Kids graphic novels are a huge part of the publishing world now, and there are many who have contributed – Jeff Smith, Dav Pilkey, Lincoln Pierce, Jennifer Holm and Matthew Holm. These stories were always waiting to bust out. As a former kids comics editor myself, I know that for decades, creators would sit around racking their brains to find some way to have some super team fight some villain for the 20th time, and make it fresh. But if you asked what they really wanted to do they’d pull out a notebook with an idea for an all-ages comic, but they’d shake their head and say, wistfully, that no one would ever publish it.

All that has changed.

But it took a creator who had the vision and the skill to put it together, and a publisher who knew there was an audience, to lead the way. Most of all, it took someone with a real, true, emotional story to tell.

That person was and is Raina Telgemeier, the Comics Industry Person of the Decade.
Guts
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Is it even worth the money to buy omnibuses? I want to buy Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Omnibus but they're like 100 bucks on Amazon.

Meanwhile books 1, 2, and 3 are like 20 bucks and I could easily save a lot more money by just buying them instead.

How do you guys do your comic book collections? Are omnibuses worth it most of the time?
 
InStockTrades has it for $87.

Usually it depends on what if it collects something an era or a writer's run that I want. If it's available in both an omnibus and multiple trades I'll usually go with the former, even if it is a bit more expensive, since they look better on my shelves, have larger and higher quality pages, usually come with extra stuff (interviews, unused art, stuff like that), and having fewer books makes my collection easier to manage. For Marvel I mostly omnibuses. I own nearly every pre-New Chapter era Spider-Man omnibus (only one I'm missing is Untold Tales; it went out of print before I started collecting them and now it's expensive).

I don't really bother with collecting trades of currently on-going stuff. Most of them only contain a few issues; I'd rather wait until the event or writer's run ends and collect the larger sized trades or even the omnibus of it. Marvel's recently gotten a lot better at collecting eras and runs with their Ultimate/Complete/Epic Collection lines, which usually have 15 or so issues each.

DC seems like they're also getting along that same track. For Batman they've started releasing two trades that collect his post-crisis stories in chronological order called The Caped Crusader and The Dark Knight Detective, both of which have been pretty great. That late '80s - '90s era has always been my favorite.
 
Zaragoza said:
Is it even worth the money to buy omnibuses? I want to buy Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Omnibus but they're like 100 bucks on Amazon.

Meanwhile books 1, 2, and 3 are like 20 bucks and I could easily save a lot more money by just buying them instead.

How do you guys do your comic book collections? Are omnibuses worth it most of the time?
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Depends on how you like to read comics. I find Omnibuses too large and heavy for casual reading, and because of the price tag I'm self-conscious about damaging them. I prefer floppies or trades that I can pull out, toss around, bend and generally paw through without washing my hands first.
 
Stab You in the Back said:
Depends on how you like to read comics. I find Omnibuses too large and heavy for casual reading, and because of the price tag I'm self-conscious about damaging them. I prefer floppies or trades that I can pull out, toss around, bend and generally paw through without washing my hands first.
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This. I enjoy a good quality hardcover, but I’m always super aware of how clean my hands are. I don’t mind using and abusing an easily replaced paperback.

Omnibuses in particular feel like I’m opening a bible with how delicate I feel I need to be and how large they are. That said, if it’s something I can get in one volume or isn’t collected in an otherwise more convenient way (I have the Stan Lee Just Imagine Omnibus) I’ll go for it.
 
There've been plenty of heavy handed and clumsy attempts at shoehorning political messages into comics, especially capebooks, like that one moment in the 1970s where Green Lantern is shamed for not doing enough for the downtrodden Black People of Earth, because he was only busy saving the galaxy and all. A moment parodied later as such:

1523870139145.png
 
Commander X said:
There've been plenty of heavy handed and clumsy attempts at shoehorning political messages into comics, especially capebooks, like that one moment in the 1970s where Green Lantern is shamed for not doing enough for the downtrodden Black People of Earth, because he was only busy saving the galaxy and all. A moment parodied later as such:

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yeah, but in this day and age it’s like every issue and the heroes of today would have been villians in the 70’s and 80’s. Especially Captain Marvel with her setting up a concentration camp for people who do wrongthink and getting off scott free with killing Thor and Iron Man.
 
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TrunksFromDragonballGT said:
yeah, but in this day and age it’s like every issue and the heroes of today would have been villians in the 70’s and 80’s. Especially Captain Marvel with her setting up a concentration camp for people who do wrongthink and getting off scott free with killing Thor and Iron Man.
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Wait a minute, what the fuck am I reading? I'm not a big comic book nerd, but you've gotta give a citation for that shit, it sounds fucking hilarious.
 
Dr W said:
Wait a minute, what the fuck am I reading? I'm not a big comic book nerd, but you've gotta give a citation for that shit, it sounds fucking hilarious.
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Civil War 2 #1.
The prison camps happened during the Civil War 2 storyline where Captian Marvel and Tony Stark are at odds because of a mutant named Ulysses who can predict the future. Captian Marvel uses Ulysses to find out which people are going to do crimes and locks them up before they can do it. Tony Stark fights her on this because technically she is locking up innocent people.


Captain Marvel #12
This is the issue she kills Thor.

Tony Stark: Iron Man #19

it is revealed that current Iron Man is a machine copy and that Captian Marvel killed the real Tony Stark during Civil War 2.
 
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TrunksFromDragonballGT said:
Civil War 2 #1.
The prison camps happened during the Civil War 2 storyline where Captian Marvel and Tony Stark are at odds because of a mutant named Ulysses who can predict the future. Captian Marvel uses Ulysses to find out which people are going to do crimes and locks them up before they can do it. Tony Stark fights her on this because technically she locking up innocent people.


Captain Marvel #12
This is the issue she kills Thor.

Tony Stark: Iron Man #19

it is revealed that current Iron Man is a machine copy and that Captian Marvel killed the real Tony Stark during Civil War 2.
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:story:

How are Marvel still in fucking business? The MCU is the only thing that they've been doing right, and every time I saw Craptain Marvel onscreen I wanted to tear my eyes out in Endgame.
 
Dr W said:
:story:

How are Marvel still in fucking business? The MCU is the only thing that they've been doing right, and every time I saw Craptain Marvel onscreen I wanted to tear my eyes out in Endgame.
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they are only in business because of Disney and since Disney shares their views, they are going to be around for a very long while.
 
Speaking of Civil War, Marvel is gearing up to do Civil War 3.0. I can't recall what the event is called off the top of my head, but the basic premise is something bad happens which sparks the government to outlaw/force registration on heroes under the age of 18/some rando's over the age of 18 for reasons only vaguely defined in the promo stuff I've seen. Kamala, the current Ms. Marvel is at the forefront, with the act being called Kamala's law. Since it bears her actual name and not her superhero identity, it seems likely that she gets unmasked at some point to kick things off.

On paper, the concept isn't the worst thing Marvel has come up with, but I think it fails for several reasons. The first is it doesn't work as an event comic. There's only a small handful of notable kid heroes running around these days. I'm sure they could reach out for a few obscure d-listers and it sounds like the law is vague enough to apply to "younger" heroes in general which opens up the door a little more, but for a lot of the main heroes, I don't see it personally affecting them. Sure, they can still be involved, but I imagine it'll be more about them opposing the idea of registration as a whole as opposed to focusing on the age issue. I think it would be much better as a personal comic arc instead of a big event.

Which goes to the other reason I don't think it works, it is way too similar to the first Civil War, down to it being caused by the heroes failing to stop some horrible event committed by a villain resulting in a national tragedy and people claiming it was due to the heroes being inexperienced. Unlike the movie of the same name, the actual comic event was considered pretty poor quality as far as event comics go, with several characters acting notably out of character and just coming off as bad/unlikable.

The last big reason I don't have a lot of faith is Kamala. I admit I've fallen behind on her comics, but I actually like her solo series. I'm not sure if I'd call it good, but I'd classify it as fun, in no small part because it tends to be light-hearted/goofier than the other Marvel stuff out there without going too over the top like some of their other "fun" series. But, whenever she's taken outside of her main series, her writing is usually at worst, atrociously out of character, or at best, forgettable. She's a bad choice for a super serious event style plotline, which I'm guessing this will be given the way the previous Civil War comics went.
 
I reread The Batman Who Laughs since someone got me the hardcover collection of it for Christmas. Scott Snyder is a good writer and I’ve enjoyed a lot of things he’s worked on. TBWL reads better in one continuous go as opposed to picking it up monthly. That said, I still have no fucking clue what TBWL’s motive is. He just seems to be evil Batman who also wants to make Batman evil. He’s not even especially similar to the Joker even though that’s kind of his whole thing. The Grim Knight, who’s basically just TBWL’s buddy, was much more interesting as a character.
 
Interesting. So in X-Men 5 Hickman has brought back the Children of Tomorrow that he created in his Ultimates run. (They're called the Children of the Vault instead but the basic idea is the same as the Children of Tomorrow and the Vault AI looks exactly like the City of Tomorrow's AI.) Unclear whether they're from the Ultimate U or just a 616 equivalent and whether Ultimate Reed (ie the Maker) is involved. I thought they were a neat idea and while I'm a bit chary of how Ultimate Reed could be integrated into this X-Men run I love him as a character so I'm interested to see where Hickman goes with this.

Edit: Oh. Children of the Vault are something from Mike Carey's run.
 
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Anyone know what's happening with Warren Ellis' WildCATs? Back in August he was moaning in a moribund fashion saying it was cancelled, then shortly thereafter Jim Lee said no it's still on, just delayed, and there were solicits for early 2020. Now I can't find anything - although the title being a pretty common word makes it particularly hard to google anything... I'd be super disappointed if the full Wild Storm plan didn't go through. The Wild Storm was great - Ellis managed to recreate the themes of the original Wildstorm despite some very major changes to the world. (I felt a bit of tension between the Authority and the other, espionage and conspiracy-driven parts of the story - but that's hardly new; the Authority always sat a bit oddly in the overall milieu.)

Please don't let this be newUniversal all over again. I at least wanted to see what the new versions of Spartan and Majestic, who were probably my two favourite Wildstorm characters - well, if we focus on WildCATs 3.0 Hadrian, at least - were going to be.

Edit: looks like the August grumbling was after the announcement things had been pushed back. So it is cancelled for now. Fuck me, Warren.
 
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