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Welcome back! Yes, of course, I’ve not really been gone all that long since my hiatus was very nearly cut short two weeks early, but even so, it feels to me like I’ve been gone for a good, long time. And I needed the break. I needed not only to sit down and do some different kinds of writing, I also needed a chance to get away from comics for a while and recharge my batteries and my attitude towards the medium as a whole.

I’ve lately come to realize that my goals have changed. This probably won’t come as much of a shock to you, but right now it seems strange to me that there was a time in my life – not so long ago – when I cared deeply about getting a real shot at breaking into the business of comic books. I even started my own company and took some pretty fucking grandiose steps towards making my dreams come true. And now, nearly a year removed from the collapse of that dream, I’ve been finding myself less and less interested in comics. Not just superhero comics but comics in general, comics as a storytelling medium. There are a variety of reasons for that, but I think that the two most pertinent ones are these:

1) As a writer and storyteller, I find it frustrating to need collaborators to tell my own stories, particularly since I’ve had dreams of drawing stuff myself. I hate to draw.

and

2) Since it takes a hell of a long time to draw a comic page – and even longer to draw one that really looks good – comic stories tend to be short when compared to stories told in other media. As a consumer, I enjoy longer stories. And I like it when they come out faster and more regularly than is the norm for American comics.

So I’ve been drifting back into prose – both as a writer and as a consumer – and even back into my real roots as an historian. None of that really has much bearing on this column, however, except that it explains why I needed a break and also why I decided to change this column’s name. I didn’t feel right calling it Comics You Should Be Reading, given that I had been finding any and every excuse in the book to write about anything BUT comics lately. So rather than write a column that I didn’t want to write, I decided to change the column itself. The beauty of writing for PBR – as opposed to say Slate.Com or the Wall Street Journal – is that I have the freedom to do that.

It’s not that I don’t like comics. I do like them. But I place a real premium on imaginative, well-executed stories, and lately it seems like relatively few of those have come across my desk, even from my Pull List. Of late, the adventures of whatever hero-du-jour you want to name just hasn’t held my interest the way that the real history of the Chinese Opium Wars has. Even Y-The Last Man, as good as it is, honestly isn’t as entertaining to me as the Jardine-Matheson Company’s byzantine plotting to make opium smugglers the British poster boys of international free trade in Asia in the early 19^th century. But then again, BKV is hampered – as all fiction writers are hampered – by the fact that fiction has to make more sense than reality. Or to put it another way, in reality people do things for reasons that we don’t always understand. But in fiction, readers relate to characters at least as much for WHY they do the things they do as for WHAT the things they do actually are. A fictional character can do something unexpected, but it can’t do something unintelligible. Unlike a real person, a fictional character can’t do something that’s, well, out of character.

For example, if the Battle of Gettysburg were a fictional story, the third day could never have happened. A fictional Robert E. Lee could NEVER have attacked a fixed Union position by frontal assault across an open field that’s nearly ¾ of a mile long. In fiction, that action doesn’t pass the “Huh?” test[1]. It’s out of character. It’s one of those things that historians argue about today because, let’s face it, it makes NO sense. We can’t understand it. It was probably the one and only truly stupid thing Lee ever did on a battlefield. I’d personally speculate that Lee was probably desperate to end the war and at the same time having a bad day, and that the combination of those factors made him decide to try something he should have seen would end in disaster. But as story logic, “I’m having a bad day” is the kind of thing that readers just won’t buy.

At any rate, lately I’ve been reading some history, and I’ve been reading some prose fiction, and I’ve been trying to write some prose fiction as well. And it has made me appreciate the really intelligent comics in my life all the more. Perhaps – hopefully – that’s also one of the reasons why I was so happy and excited this week to see my first ever reviewer quote on the back of somebody’s full-on hardcover book. It appears on the inside dust cover (back side) of Mark Smylie’s beautiful new edition of Artesia Afield, on sale at your local comic shop right now:

"Operational planning seeks to string battles together to form a cohesive campaign to achieve limited and specific military objectives above division level. I dare say that Artesia Afield is probably the only comic in history that has attempted to deal with war at this level; the study and planning required to pull it off must have been prodigious... This is a great book! If you’re a fan of military history or of epic fantasy, Artesia Afield is definitely for you... This story is one of the uniquely great stories in independent comics."

Okko #1

Written and illustrated by Hub

Colors by Hub and Stephan Pecayo

Translated by Edward Gauvin

Published in America by Archaia Studios Press

It was with great excitement that I got this week’s Book of the Week, ASP’s new Okko: The Cycle of Water #1. Though the book’s plot isn’t completely clear at the end of issue 1, we do at least learn that Okko is a samurai fantasy set in an Asiatic Tolkenesque universe. Our hero is Okko, a ronin-for-hire. He and the rest of his band hunt demons for fun and profit. Issue 1 finds Okko’s band at play in a geisha house while the hero himself is away concluding a business deal with a wealthy patron when pirates attack and seize the geishas, destroying the house and pissing off Okko’s companions. And man is it fun!

Okko #1 is a beautiful book. It’s a stylized masterpiece that is at once sensual and panoramic, and I have the feeling that the original must have been published on larger pages. The pages are just too chock full of richly detailed medium and medium long shots for an American-sized comic. I really wish we could see them a little better. Not that what we can see isn’t good. It is. In fact, it’s amazing. But the details are complex enough to warrant a fuller exploration.

As with ASP’s other new offering, The Killer, this is another French import, this time originally published by Delcourt. And I have to say this: regardless of how you feel about France, the French people, or French culture, on the whole, they make better comics than we in America do. America may well be the world’s cultural leader in mainstream media, but if we think of comics as the mainstream’s experimental component, then it’s a safe bet that French culture will continue to be internationally relevant long after most Americans stop understanding why.

One thing I will say about Okko is that it made me want to get a bit more into the history of feudal Japan. There are places here that I think mix Japanese and Chinese history, but I’m honestly not familiar enough to KNOW that the things being shown aren’t also a part of Japanese traditions. For example, we meet Okko in what I can only assume is a rich man’s opium den, and yet though such things were VERY common during a certain part of Chinese history, I was not aware that opium ever made significant inroads into Japan. Then too, I’d have described Okko’s boat as a Chinese junk, but he calls it a “sampan.” And I don’t know enough about Japanese naval architecture to know if I’ve just learned something or caught a visual anachronism. I want to believe the former, but I’ll have to do some research to be sure. Either way, I suppose it says more about where I am as a reader than anything else.

At any rate, the bottom line is that Okko is almost certainly one of those books you’d really like. When folks find out about it and start talking about it, you’ll wish you’d followed it from the beginning. So take my advice and save yourself some exasperation. Just start buying it now. It’s a magnificent piece of storytelling of the type that very few Americans are doing right now. As such, you should soak it up and savor the difference.

Or, to put it another way, I loved it! It’s definitely a Comic You Should Be Reading.

Stray Voltage

New Year’s Resolutionaries

Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year? If you did, how long do you think it’ll be before you break it?

The reason I ask is that there are suddenly a ton of new people at my gym, and I want them to go away. They’re always on all the treadmills.

Speaking of treadmills, for those of you who know about it and care, my knee is doing a lot better lately. After doing a bit of research on the subject, it seems that the ligament on the right side of my left kneecap must be a bit stretched out, with the result being that the kneecap itself moves around too much when I run. It hurts like Hell when I get to about the one-mile mark. Fortunately, they make a small brace to compensate just this problem. It wraps around the ligament at the bottom, effectively tightening it and in my case keeping my kneecap moving along the correct track as well. Part of the problem also seems to have been my shoes, which were too old and not supportive enough. I’ve switched shoes and started with the brace, and I’m feeling better. Here’s hoping. I really want to make the half-marathon this year, but I don’t want to wind up needing surgery after I do it.

Remember the Titans

I learned something really interesting this week about professional football statistics. Allegedly via an application of the Pythagorean Theorem – though one I can’t seem to derive on my own – one can use the following formula to estimate the talent of an NFL football team in terms of the number of wins the team could have been expected to earn had they played in a perfect universe unaffected by random chance and bad officiating[2].

I should point out that although this was new to me, it’s apparently not new to sports bookies the world over[3]. Anyway, using an application of this theory (multiplying the results by 16) yields the following approximately normalized results for this year’s playoff teams.

[4]

It’s worth noting that although these rankings were mostly born out by last week’s Wild Card Round playoff results, there’s no strength of schedule (SOS) modifier built into the formula. In most years I’d argue that the relative parity of NFL teams would negate the need to include an SOS modifier, but this year the NFC has been demonstrably weaker than the AFC, meaning that Chicago’s P-Win’s score in particular does not provide a fair basis of comparison against the top teams in the AFC. It’d also be a worthwhile exercise to do all 32 teams and calculate a standard deviation such that we could get a feel for what the margin of error is in these results. From there, it can’t possibly be more than a few simple steps to reach a simple approximation of the formulas used to rank college’s BCS teams. If I can make some progress on that during the off-season, I’ll run my own Power Rankings next fall instead of doing a regular stock segment. Perhaps non-mathematical-type folks will like that better.

But anyway, none of that speaks to the real question, which is this: What if the Titans had made it to the playoffs? Unfortunately, the results there aren’t as surprising as I might have hoped.

In a rational universe, the Titans appear to have been a 6-10 team. I buy that. I watched the game they played against the Giants, and I can assure you beyond doubt that the finish in that game absolutely COULD NOT have occurred in a rational universe. QB Vince Young was dead in the water on a 4^th and 15 play that should have ended the game. But then a miracle happened. VY escaped through nothing but stupidity on the part of the defender who was bringing him down. And the Titans went on to win the game.

The other miracle was, of course, the game against Jacksonville, in which the Titans scored three times on defense. How do you rationally account for that? Especially in a game where the Titans offense was dead in the water from start to finish? You can’t. At least one of those three defensive touchdowns must be accounted a miracle.

But the really interesting thing here is the way it allows us to break down the different parts of the team’s season. Most observers feel that Vince Young’s elevation to starting quarterback was THE key to the team’s success. It wasn’t. On his own, VY adds a game. Perhaps we may argue that VY’s emotions helped the play of the team as a whole – that his leadership helped bring the team UP to a 6-10 level from God-alone knows what depths – but statistically, the evidence suggests that his direct influence only accounts for one extra win. What’s more telling is the difference between the team’s performance before and after the Dallas game – the last one in which the Titans were blown out and embarrassed. It was only after that game that the Titans became a nearly .500-caliber ball club.

We can perhaps explain the change by understanding the Titans as the second-youngest team in the NFL. It took five games for an immature team to become competitive, but once they were, they were. That includes Vince Young. The evidence suggests he’s a part of the effect of solid coaching rather than the cause of a dramatic turnaround. In that, one should also consider the contributions of some other youngsters, namely CB Adam “Pacman” Jones and nickel CB Cortland Finnegan in the reversal of the team’s fortunes. Both began to make real, measurable contributions only after the Dallas game. Certainly Dallas was the low water mark of Pacman’s season.

Bottom line: prior to Dallas, some veterans were making plays. Many were not. Very few younger players were. But after the end of the fifth game, many of the newer players also began to make plays. It is these additional contributions that were decisive in the reversal of the team’s fortunes.

Have you had enough? I hope so because I’m done. I’d thought to do a piece on the War, but it’s too damn depressing. So I’m gonna close it up here.

I’ll see you next week. Until then, stay safe.

***

Dan Head is a utilities analyst and occasional freelance writer. He’s a fan of the Titans and the San Diego Chargers. And he’ll watch the Jets when they’re the only ones on TV.

To get your comic reviewed here, email Dan, or visit him on his hosted forum, DannoE’s Den of Dastardly Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap).