AP: Portland home to thriving comics scene

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Read this in all three of our papers this week. Thought I would pass it along...

 

Portland home to thriving comics scene

 

By SARAH LINN

The Associated Press

 

The growing genre earned $100 million in 2002

 

PORTLAND — Budding comics author Craig Thompson got off to a difficult start when he moved to Portland six years ago.

 

His budget was so small, he said, that he'd wait outside fast-foot restaurants until people finished, then eat food off their trays.

 

"The first six months were harsh," said Thompson, author of the critically acclaimed, mostly autobiographical "Blankets," part of the growing library of graphic novels - extended, single-subject comics in book form.

 

To survive, the Marathon, Wis. native painted houses for a scam artist who left him with $6,000 worth of bad checks. His bike was stolen. He and another man were assaulted by four men in a grocery store parking lot.

 

But he stayed, and found a job as a designer with Dark Horse Comics, the nation's fourth largest publisher in a growing industry.

 

Now Thompson is part of a thriving Portland comics scene that includes journalist Joe Sacco and superhero comics writer Greg Rucka.

 

Portland and its suburbs are home to comics publishers Dark Horse, Oni Press and Top Shelf Publications. Artists and publishers say that Portland is a quieter scene than other comics hotspots, such as Seattle and New York.

 

"It's a place where you can daydream," said Sacco, who travels the world for his work. In peaceful Portland, he said, "You can step out of your house and think while you're out on the streets."

 

Comics have come a long way from the newspaper-print funnies once sold at drug stores and newsstands, said publisher Michael Richardson, who founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986.

 

Underground icons Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar broke new ground for comic book subjects in the 1960s, he said, and Art Spiegelman's nonfictional Holocaust tale, "Maus," brought a level of gravity to the form in 1986.

 

These days, readers are just as likely to find graphic novels, crowding bookshelves as pulpy superhero pamphlets, Richardson says.

 

And the genre is growing. Graphic novels earned $100 million in 2002, a 33 percent increase from the year before, when they accounted for 1 percent of American book sales, according to industry magazine Publishers Weekly.

 

The soft-spoken Thompson, 28, published his first graphic novel five years ago, "Goodbye, Chunky Rice," the seagoing adventures of a lovelorn young turtle.

 

"Blankets," a 2003 Top Shelf release, is Thompson's tour de force.

 

The 582-page graphic novel explores adolescent insecurities, faith, family and first loves with delicate images of snow and sleep. The coming-of-age tale deals with such thorny subjects as molestation and growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household.

 

"Stories I pursue I always want to be, at the risk of sounding pretentious, literary," says Thompson, whose favorite authors include Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

 

Thompson often meshes the fantastic with the factual. His current project is the story of a love between a eunuch and a courtesan in an "Arabian Nights" setting.

 

Thompson has filled notebooks with sketches, dreams and plot details, an approach that he says builds ties with readers.

 

"Comics you can linger over and look at each page," he said. "You see the author's lines as if you're looking at a handwritten letter from them."

 

Joe Sacco takes the approach of a war correspondent, filing gritty dispatches from the front lines of human suffering. His books, which include "Palestine" and the Bosnian civil war journal "Safe Area Gorazde," chronicle armed conflicts in a cartoonish, crosshatch-heavy style.

 

The stories have a dark, absurdist humor, said Sacco, 43, who studied journalism at the University of Oregon.

 

Sacco, from the Mediterranean island of Malta, travels from Portland to Europe and the Middle East, most recently to the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He documents his experiences with notes, photographs and tape recordings.

 

In the 2003 memoir "The Fixer," Sacco recalls Neven, the guide he encountered while covering wartime Sarajevo. The book follows Sacco in 2001 as he searches for traces of his former fixer.

 

Macho and morally ambiguous, Neven has no qualms about milking Sacco for money as he tells outrageous war stories and chaperones the younger man through a strife-torn country.

 

The former newspaperman scoffs at the journalistic ideal of objectivity, arguing that everyone has a background, prejudices and a point of view. "Why can't we go to a journalist and say, 'Tell us what you think?' "

 

Writer Greg Rucka has taken a more traditional approach to comics, simultaneously writing titles for DC Comics' Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman series — the first writer to tackle such a hat trick since 1974.

 

The task puts Rucka, 33, in a vulnerable position, given the decreasing appetite for serial, pamphlet-style comic books. Superhero comics have long attracted scorn from critics who see the genre as silly, even infantile.

 

Comics' growing narrative consciousness can be attributed to a changing customer base, said Richardson, the publisher. While fewer children are buying comics, high schoolers and middle-aged readers alike are turning to the medium, he said.

 

Comic books and graphic novels are also gaining respectability as serious art forms, thanks to such literary endeavors as Thompson's "Blankets," said Top Shelf publisher Brett Warnock. "It's the golden age right now."