No one can say that comic book fans aren’t a passionate bunch. There has been so much commentary on DC Entertainment’s announcement of a new series of stories featuring the characters of the beloved Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon‘s classic Watchmen, that I can’t even begin to link to them. Here’s a story on it that made CNN. Much of it is outrage over messing with such an icon part of comic book history as Watchmen.

My take: calm down. They are just comics.

I actually don’t understand the venom. There is no “messing” going on with the original Watchmen. Not one single word, panel or page in that incredible piece of work is going to be changed, altered or otherwise manipulated. If so much as a single line was going to be altered in a “new” edition that would tie it in with any of the new stories, I’d be grabbing my pitchfork and torch.

But, it’s not. Watchmen remains Watchmen.

These are simply a series of new stories featuring these characters by different creative teams. That is hardly a new thing in comics. In fact, every 10 years or so everything gets a “reboot”, and new creative teams come and go in the meantime. Sometimes they do things I don’t like with the characters I love. My reaction is to stop buying those comics. Batman’s newest incarnation doesn’t change a word or page or panel of the Denny O’Neal/Neal Adams era Batman that I grew up with and consider the definitive version of the character. Before Watchmen are just new stories, and if you find they are great then enjoy them. If you think they are terrible, don’t buy them. It’s not like DC is redoing the last Watchmen book and making sure Ozymandias fired first.

What I find most ironic about the criticism leveled at DC for what some amount as sacrilege toward someone else’s creations is that Watchmen was based on a series of old and silly comic book characters in the first place… so Moore was “messing” with some else’s creations from the beginning. In fact, the best known of Moore’s work is mostly revamping and reinventing existing characters: Swamp Thing, Marvelman/Miracleman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell. Great work, all of it, but not his characters.

Anyway, I intend to give Before Watchmen a chance. Just like any other comics I get, if they tell me an engaging story and stay true to the complex characters Moore wrote, I’ll enjoy them.

In the meantime, MAD has posted their parody of the original Watchmen comic on The Idiotical. Great stuff from Des Devlin, Glean Fabry and John Higgins, with an exclusive cover from Dave Gibbons. Well worth the read:

I came across this recently posted unsolicited YouTube review of my book today by Brooklyn caricaturist Elgin “Subway Surfer” Bolling. He has some nice things to say about it. It’s one thing to get positive reviews from general readers, but it’s particularly gratifying to hear from well-established professional caricaturists that, despite long experience doing caricature, they got something from the book as well. Thanks, Elgin!

As always, you can order a copy of The Mad Art of Caricature! here.

MAD debuted 60 years ago in 1952. It’s success, first as a comic book and then as a magazine (or “slick” as the vernacular of the day went) caused the spawning of imitators… MANY imitators. The longest running of them all was Cracked magazine, which lasted almost 50 years (1958-2007), but the list of less long-lived MAD clones was much longer. Here’s a few off the top of my head:

• Sick
• Crazy
• Plop!
• Nuts!
• Not Brand Eccch!
• Eh!
• Madhouse
• From Here to Insanity

An upcoming book (to be released in April) from Fantagraphics, The Sincerest Form of Parody, reprints some of the material from the early imitators of the MAD comic book (as opposed to the magazine format). Written by John Benson with an intro by Jay Lynch.

From the book’s desription:

When MAD became a surprise hit as a comic book in 1953 (after the early issues lost money!) other comics publishers were quick to jump onto the bandwagon, eventually bringing out a dozen imitations with titles like FLIP, WHACK, NUTS, CRAZY, WILD, RIOT, EH, UNSANE, BUGHOUSE, and GET LOST. The Sincerest Form of Parody collects the best and the funniest material from these comics, including parodies of movies (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, From Here To Eternity), TV shows (What’s My Line, The Late Show), comic strips (Little Orphan Annie, Rex Morgan), novels (I, the Jury), plays (Come Back, Little Sheba), advertisements (Rheingold Beer, Charles Atlas), classic literature (“The Lady or the Tiger”), and history (Pancho Villa). Some didn’t even try for parody, but instead published odd, goofy, off-the-wall stories.

These earnest copiers of MAD realized that Will Elder’s cluttered “chicken fat” art was a good part of MAD’s success, and these pages are densely packed with all sorts of outlandish and bizarre gags that make for hours of amusing reading. The “parody comics” are uniquely “’50s,” catching the popular culture zeitgeist through a dual lens: not only reflecting fifties culture through parody but also being themselves typical examples of that culture (in a way that Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD was not).

This unprecedented volume collects over 30 of the best of these crazy, undisciplined stories, all reprinted from the original comics in full color. Editor John Benson (who wrote the annotations for the first complete MAD reprints, and interviewed MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman in depth several times over the years) also provides expert, profusely illustrated commentary and background, including comparisons of how different companies parodied the same subject.

Artists represented include Jack Davis, Will Elder, Norman Maurer, Carl Hubbell, William Overgard, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bill Everett, Al Hartley, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, Hy Fleischman, Jay Disbrow, Howard Nostrand, and Bob Powell.

Casual comics readers are probably familiar with the later satirical magazines that continued to be published in the ’60s and ’70s, such as Cracked and Sick, but the comics collected in this volume were imitations of the MAD comic book, not the magazine, and virtually unknown among all but the most die-hard collectors. For the first time, Fantagraphics is collecting the best of these comics in a single, outrageously funny volume. 208 full-color illustrations

I obviously haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t comment on the book itself. However, as these 1950′s comics are extremely rare this is likely one of the only places one can find this content. I’m especially interested in John Benson’s commentary about the comics.

Damn… gotta find another space on the bookshelf.

I had the pleasure of being a guest on the excellent comics podcast Tall Tale Radio with Tom Racine. The show is up on the TTR website now. Tom and I talk about the NCS, the new online comics divisional award, the MAD, MAD, SCAD weekend I attended back in November, my book and a few other stories. Check it out here!

My signed/numbered limited edition print “Secret Agent Man” has sold out completely, so that’s that. I have deleted the high resolution color file, and the original inked artwork was sold months ago, so the 250 numbered prints out there in the hands of the rubes lucky folks who purchased them are all that there will ever be. Thanks to everybody who bought one, and to those who helped spread the word about it!

This worked out pretty well, although I think I may do a smaller number or prints next time. There definitely will be a next time. For San Diego Comic Con 2012 I will have another limited edition print in a similar vein but with different subject matter, which while there I will sell for cheap with the purchase of a copy of The Mad Art of Caricature!, and separately as well for an inflated, outrageous price. Likely I will have some left over again and they will get offered for sale here. Some of you who are not my mom might even buy one!