It’s not just 11-11-11, it’s Veteran’s Day.  GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES’ research and reception afforded me to interact with a many veterans, and as a result the day has added meaning for me.  Spend any time with someone that’s served, hear the stories of what they and their loved ones have sacrificed and you can’t help but want to do something.  I did.  You can too, and it doesn’t have to cost you anything.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably amassed a huge collection of comic books.  You may not have room for them, and it’s unlikely you’re going to re-read most of them.  The secondary market for comics has collapsed to the point where you not only can’t make money by selling old books, you can’t even get most comic stores to take them off your hands for free.

But there are men and women who could use the diversion that comics provide.  War has been described as “long periods of boredom punctuated by punctuated by moments of sheer terror”.  There’s not much you can do about the sheer terror short of enlisting, but there is something you can do to help alleviate the boredom.

Donate your comics to Operation Gratitude.

Here’s how they describe what they do:

“Operation Gratitude annually sends 100,000 care packages filled with snacks, entertainment items and personal letters of appreciation addressed to individually named U.S. Service Members deployed in hostile regions, to their children left behind and to Wounded Warriors recuperating in Transition Units. Our mission is to lift morale, bring a smile to a service member’s face and express to our Armed Forces the appreciation and support of the American people. Each package contains donated product valued at ~$125 and costs the organization $15 to assemble and ship.  For safety and security, assembling of packages occurs at the Army National Guard armory in Van Nuys, California. Since its inception in 2003, Operation Gratitude volunteers have shipped more than 660,000 packages to American Military deployed overseas.”

I’ve driven hundreds of comics, graphic novels, books, dvds and videogames over to their HQ and the Van Nuys, CA National Guard Armory.  I’m not saying that to brag, but rather to give you an idea how easy it is.

My poorly taken photo doesn’t convey the massive volunteer operation they have going, but I felt uncomfortable taking pictures at a military installation, even with permission.

But everything you see here, and more, gets sent directly overseas to the troops:

(Those are Marines standing by a Cobra gunship like the ones in GRAVEYARD)

You don’t need to drive to Van Nuys, you can mail your comics there.  They don’t need to be comics…You can donate candy, cellphones, cars, even cash (here’s a more complete list of things you can do, including volunteering your time).  But do something.

Trust me…I’m lazy, self-involved and practically a shut-in, and I did.

At the very least, please re-blog, re-tweet and re-post the hell out of this on Facebook so others can.

If you’re not familiar with comics journalist Tom Spurgeon, you should be.  He’s one of, if not the premiere comics journalist working today.  I’m not just saying that because I was the subject of his Sunday Interview this week. 

Among other things, Tom wrote “All These Things That Have Made Us”, a profoundly moving essay about not just comics, but illness and mortality.  The fact that he was able to write about such things despite a life threatening condition is remarkable.  That he was able to do so without being maudlin was northing short of amazing.

His interview with me is the longest I’ve ever done.  It was two hours over the phone, and I think the EDITED transcript totaled something like 23 pages in Microsoft Word (he was kind enough to let me clean it up a bit before it saw print). 

It’s in depth, wide ranging and highly personal.  Yes, I talk about GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES and DECOY, but we also delve into:

-The origins of almost everything I’ve written in comics.

-How my views on women have changes since writing HAZED.

-My revelation that Marvel Comics were the theme of my Bar Mitzvah.

There’s much more, but it wouldn’t be fair to Tom to give anything else away.  While we both tried to bring some levity into the proceedings, it was flattering for someone of Tom’s stature to take me and my work this seriously after such a short time in this industry.

Thanks to Tom for his patience and hard work crafting my rambling into something readable and interesting to someone other than myself.

I hope you’ll check it out. Here’s the link again: The Comics Reporter Sunday Interview with Mark Sable.

Also…it’s been a while since I’ve blogged - I apologize for that.  This blog post was initially going to be an explanation of what I’ve been up to since I last posted on tumblr, but I thought that should wait so that Tom’s interview could be given it’s due.

I will also be at New York Comic Con, in Artist’s Alley table S16 along with artist Paul Azaceta and creator Sam Humphries.  Please stop by if you’re there this weekend.

The second round of CREATOR VS. CRITIC, my online “battle” with comics critic Abhay Khosla is up on The Savage Critic.  He’s a friend, but he’s also one of the most brilliant, vicious, and brilliantly vicious critics around.  When we saw Captain America in the theaters, he laughed when Bucky died.  Thankfully, this is not about him commenting on the artistic merit of my work.  I don’t think I could handle it.

The point of these interview/debates is not so much to plug my work, but to see if a comics creator can engage in critical discussion about comic books.  That might sound like an easy thing to do, but as a pro it’s really hard for me to comment on comics in any way that can be perceived negatively.  It’s a small industry made up of thin skinned creators (of which I’m not exception), and it’s not difficult to alienate colleagues, collaborators and/or employers.

Which is why we picked Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce for this months’ column.

Never heard of it before?  Neither have I.  That’s not something I’m proud of, my ignorance.  It’s an “art comic”, and is so far removed from what I do that we figured there’s never going to be any overlap between myself and Mr. Brinkman.

These battles are really less about the actual work we’re commenting on than comics in general.  In the back and forth, we spend most of the time debatin questions such as:  What is art?  What is an art comic?  Does authorial intent matter?  Multiforce is just a jumping off point.

That’s not to say I didn’t say something will get me in trouble.  It’s been suggested that I don’t do this.  But I feel like, just as with my figure drawing engaging with them on a critical level is something that’s necessary for my development as a creator.

Multiforce is as close as I’ve seen to a non-narrative comic.  It’s much more rooted in the visual arts tradition than literature or drama, which is my background.

It’s not a spoiler to say that I actually enjoyed Multiforce.  That’s despite - or perhaps before I have no frame of reference for it.

Here’s some of the interior art:

It may look a bit like something you’d doodle in high school, but there’s an energy and intricacy to it that’s astounding.

Mat Brinkman was part of an art collective called Fort Thunder.  It was a studio/living space in Rhode Island that became the epicenter of a capital A Art movement encompassing comics, music and art installations that were shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002.

Here’s what their place looked like:

In other words…not all that different from my cluttered working/living space.

Multiforce is almost impossible to find, but you can evidently purchase it at Picture Box.  Just as long as you’ve already picked up the first two issues of GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES, and pre-ordered FEARLESS and DECOY this week first.

Let me know what you think of the column and of Multiforce.  It should be a nice palette cleanser before you gorge yourself on DC’s 52 “new” super-hero comics.

Newsarama is running an exclusive 6 page preview of some pages of GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES Issue #2, which is in stores TOMORROW, Wednesday, August 24 2011.

Notice I said 6 page preview rather than the usual “5 page preview” or even “the first 6 pages”.

That’s in part because there’s 25 pages of story (still for the low price of $2.99).  At least 3 more pages of story than you’d get from most books that charge more.

It’s also because I decided not to show the 1st 5 pages in sequence.  Why?

We open issue 2 by cutting back and forth between Marines fighting zombies in the present, and flashbacks that give an “origin story” for some of the Taliban who will start to take more of a role in the comics.

I thought it made more sense to present the Taliban sequence without interruption. 

That means there’s still plenty of this to see:

(For you enterprising comic book journalists, bloggers etc…that means that there are 5 pages of Marines on Zombie action we are willing to give you an exclusive on - just contact me here or dm me at twitter - I’m @marksable).

To get back to the Taliban, there were a lot of thorny issues to deal with.

The first was - most coalition troops in Afghanistan never see the enemy they are fighting up close.  Fighting is done at greater distances than in videogames like say, Call of Duty: Black Ops.  Much of that fighting is done at night, and the Taliban blend into the civilian populace.

So, despite the fact our Marines come under sustained assault by the Taliban twice in the first issue, Paul and I made a conscious (and I think, risky decision) not to show the enemy on panel. 

(Although those of you who re-read the first issue after reading the second might notice that the Taliban we “introduce” in the Issue 2 are amongst the civilians the Marines deal with in Issue 1)

The bigger challenge was - how do we depict of The Taliban? As a writer, I needed to make them, if not likable, at least somewhat relatable.  Meaning human beings whose motives a reader can understand, if not root for.  After all, I’ve teased that they may be teaming up with the Marines to take on the real enemy, the undead.

Make no mistake, despite what some right wing comics bloggers (there’s a niche if there has ever been one) have said - I don’t like the Taliban.  They’ve hurt countless innocents, badly wounded veterans I’ve had the privilege of getting to know, and harbored and/or acted in concert with terrorists who have killed people I’ve cared deeply about.

But the Taliban don’t fit neatly into our perceived notions of them as mindless religious fanatics.  Their tribal culture - Pashtunwali - often plays more of a role than Islam.  The drug trade often plays a bigger role than either.  They are a hybrid of a terror organization, an insurgent movement and a drug cartel.

You may ask, how do I know all this?  Researching the Taliban was the hardest part of making this comic.  The Taliban are more likely to behead journalists than speak to them.

I’ve mentioned before that the late photo journalist and war correspondent Tim Hetherington helped point me in the right direction in this area. He was the Academy Award nominated director of the documentary Restrepo, the best film I’ve seen on Afghanistan in particular and on modern warfare in general.

I’ve been thinking about Tim a lot this week.  Not just because of this issue, which directly benefited from his help and his life’s work.  But also because he was killed covering the conflict in Libya.  As I write this Gadafhi’s government is falling, and I wish Tim were alive to bring that to us in a way no one else could.

Without revealing sources and methods, Tim wasn’t the only person who helped Paul and I in researching the Taliban.  The best thing I was pointed to was a series of interviews with actual Taliban fighters.  The only way the Canadian journalist Graeme Smith was able to safely do so was by having his Afghan researcher go out and ask a series of very basic questions to them with a handheld camera.

He couldn’t touch on things like Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden without the natives getting restless.  But you get the idea that ideology is not their primary motivation. Don’t just take my word for it, the interviews are fascinating. 

The goal of spending countless hours researching the hell out of the Taliban was to create as accurate a portrayal of the Taliban as we’ve seen in comics.  That, and to tell an entertaining story.

I hope all the work Paul and I put into bringing the Taliban to life (and un-life) om Issue 2 has paid off.  I’m looking forward to hearing whether you think we’ve pulled it off.

H.P. Lovecraft and Tin Tin writer Herge have a lot in common.  Like racism, for instance.

(Okay, the panel is from Tin Tin in the Congo.  The a page from Warren Ellis’ Planetary/Authority crossover where H.P. Lovecraft talks about “Negro Eggs”.  Lovecraft really was racist, it’s just hard to find images that convey it).

But they also happen to be two talented artists (actually, I can only vouch for Lovecraft, whose stories I love.  I own Tin Tin in the Land of The Soviets but I haven’t read it).

What I love even more than Lovecraft is mash-ups.  Marvel editor Rachel Pinnelas found a pretty cool one.  Here’s artist Murray Groat’s mixing Tin Tin withthree of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories:

There’s more on his site.

But Rachel, I call your Lovecraft/Tin Tin and raise you Lovecraft plus LEGO.

That’s such a more powerful nerd combo.  (And I imagine a less racist, one.  Unless you are Asian and object to all the yellow Lego faces).

Seriously, ‘Cthulego” beats rock, paper and stone.

I’ve been following Phil Noto’s work for a while now.  In promoting GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES, you’ve probably heard me bemoan the lack of war comics, particularly modern war comics.  We’re in two wars, but very few people have the balls to write/draw/publish books about them.  But one of the major exceptions to this is “Infinite Horizon”, written by Gerry Duggan, drawn by Phil and published by Image.  It’s the first time I was consciously aware of Phil’s distinctive style. 

Infinite Horizon the Odyssey set during the Iraq war, and is positively brilliant.  It was never finished, but that will change with the publication of the final issue and the trade this fall.

More recently, I enjoyed his run on the underrated Wolverine and Jubilee (by underrated writer Kathryn Immonen.  Publishers who are having trouble finding women writers - if you’ve read her or Kelly Sue DeConnick’s work, you have no excuse.  Of course, you should hire them because they are good writers, not because they are women, but I digress).  That book was also edited by my Two-Face: Year One editor Jeanine Schaeffer, who gave me the chance to break out of the “teen superhero gehetto I found myself in.

But what has blown me the fuck away has been Phil’s work on tumblr.  Chances are, if you are following me, you are probably following him.  In case you haven’t, here’s just a sample of the fucking tear he’s been on:

First up, a movie poster for X-Men First Class.  It’s done in a style that’s right out of the early 1960s time period the movie is set.  More on Marvel and the 1960s in a minute.

Next we have two images done in the style of pulp books:

A fictional Han Solo adventure…and an ad for a show by comedian/comic-book fan Patton Oswalt:

Speaking of Patton, here’s some pretty cool Batman pitches of his that were rejected by DC.

Lest you think he’s all 1960’s retro…

Here’s my favorite American cartoon from the 80s (or god, was it the 70s) show, Thundarr the Barbarian.  Two things about Thundarr:

1) How crazy as it that there was a post-apocalyptic Saturday morning cartoon?  I’m not sure if there are Saturday morning cartoons any more, but having done some writing for animation I can’t imagine the networks going for something like this now.

2) This was from that weird time when cartoons weren’t allowed to sell toys.  I think it was great for creativity, but I felt deprived as a kid that I didn’t have Thundarr toys.

There are some now:

…but even for a man child like myself, it’s too late.

Back to Phil, if Thundarr is still too retro for you, how about Daenerys from Game of Thrones:

True, it’s not quite the potent geek male fantasy that this image of Emilia Clarke is:

But it’s more suitable for work.

But my favorite images he’s been doing have involved Marvel characters in the 60s.  Here we have the Inhumans being introduced to New York society in 1968:

Why is that my favorite?  I’ve had two dream projects involving characters that are not my own in the past decade.

The first I mentioned in Image’s “iword column.”  I’d love to do to the James Bond novels what Darwyn Cooke did to Richard Stark’s “Parker” novels.  To faithfully adapt them as Cold-War period pieces, keeping them as politically incorrect as possible.  (To some extent, this is what Tarantino wanted to do with Casino Royale.)  Given the rights mess that MGM is dealing with, I’m not sure that will happen.

What is perhaps more likely is something I’ve been pitching to Marvel on and off for a while.  Without getting into too many details, it would be to set the Marvel Universe in the period in which it was conceived.  To have characters debut when they were published, interacting with real world political events, figures and social themes…with the benefit of hindsight that we have. 

Nick Fury, smarting from the The Bay of Bigs, would be asking for a group of heroes to avenge the loss of his Howling Commandos.  Reed Richards would be beating Alan Shepherd and the rest of the Apollo astronauts into space, ushering in a new era of super-humans and ratcheting up the Cold War a notch.  The primary focus would be on the Avengers, with each hero having a secret:

If there’s a theme to the 60s that resonates with me, it’s that it started out with hope and optimism because of JFK came along with that generation’s “best and the brightest”.  Yet by the end of the decade, while we managed to put a man on the moon and end segregation, we were hopelessly mired in Vietnam, asssasinations and massive social upheaval.

If there’s a theme to Marvel’s work, it’s that in order for heroes to work they don’t just need new costumes and identities, but flaws.  Feet of clay.  Humanity.

The theme to my pitch, is that the heroes learn that the more they intervene directly in the real world of the 1960s, the more they manage to escalate and exacerbate the situation.  For every Iron Man there’s a Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo, for every Martin Luther King and Charles Xavier there’s a Malcolm X and Magneto.  Ultimately, they can’t solve humanity’s problems, but, like the Moonshot, or Woodstock, they CAN be potent symbols of hope.  Just like Marvel’s comics themselves.

Marvel doesn’t do many “elseworlds type books, but I supposed it would be something like Marvel’s version of Darwyn Cooke’s the New Frontier.  And I don’t usually put my ideas online.  So why am I doing that here?

When Patton put his Batman pitches up, he mentioned that he wanted them on the Internet just to “claim” them.  I’m not sure things work that way.  I like giving readers a little insight into where my head is at, and maybe to get Phil’s attention.  It’s hard to think of someone that would be a better fit.  As the title of this blog post suggests, I’d love to work with him, whether it’s on one of the above dream projects or well, anything.

But really, I just wanted to share what amazing, inspiring work Phil’s doing.  Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Vertigo Editor Mark Doyle came up to me at San Diego Comic-Con wearing a Corto Maltese shirt.  When I pointed it out he said, “You just passed a test.”  Not many people go the reference.

I told him how I had a nod to Corto Maltese in Two-Face: Year One (Vicki Vale mentions reporting from the conlift there.  Which is actually a reference to both Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Tim Burton’s Batman movie).

After geeking out for a bit, we then both confessed that we’d never actually READ Corto Maltese.  Hugo Pratt’s work has been out of print in English for a while and old editions are super-expensive (there are new English editions out in early 2012). 

Anyway, that’s a long way winded way of me introducing Joe Keatinge’s blog entry about seeing Hugo Pratt’s work in Paris, which is worth taking a gander at:

joekeatinge:

I went down to the Hugo Pratt exposition at La Pinacothèque de Paris. Corto Maltese is one of the greatest comic books ever produced, a massive influence on how I write comics, and who I want to be when I grow up, so I was dying to go. I knew I would love it, but I didn’t expect it to be so damn…

…sort of.  This one’s for the ladies, and anyone else who likes penis.

Last week, I went to a public figure drawing session in Los Feliz that’s open to anyone.  Last night, I went to a private one conducted by Jay Stuckey, my art teacher earlier in the year.  There’s a much better vibe,  most of us in attendance know each other, we can make requests of the models etc.

Some nights it feels the process is better than the product.  This was one of them:

Proportions are off.  His right side is bigger, even though it’s further away.  This guy - a former Broadway dancer and now Pilates instructor - actually held this pose for like 20 minutes.  Not easy to hold a standing pose for that long, and I don’t feel I did it justice.

It was done with medium charcoal pencil.

I like that one better.  Vine charcoal, since I felt looser.

Actually, I was much happier with the 1 minute gesture drawings I did, where the model did “action” poses that would have fit will in a comic.   I didn’t photograph the gestures or I would have posted them.  I guess I didn’t because I felt like they weren’t complete drawings.  But the short time limit, and the knowledge I wouldn’t be able to possibly complete something in that amount of time I think led me to do better work.

The above link is to the facebook invite for my appearance with artist GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES artist Paul Azaceta on Comic Book Club Live! tonight, Tuesday June 14th at 8PM in NYC.

Comic Book Club is a live weekly talk show about comic books, featuring the best creators and comedians around.  Here’s the info:

The location for that is: The Peoples Improv Theater
123 east 24th st. (btw Park and Lex)
New York, New York
Tickets: $5
Online: ThePIT-NYC.com
Phone: 1-800-838-3006
Questions? 212-563-7488

If you can’t make it tonight, or you want to see us two nights in a row, we’re also doing a signing at Jim Hanley’s Universe tomorrow, Wednesday June 15th from 6-8PM.

Paul and I should be hanging around after both events, and we’d love to see you.

And oh yeah…no matter where you are, hope you’ll check out GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES, out Wednesday June 15th in comic book stores anywhere.

I’ve talked a lot about the extensive research that Paul Azaceta and I have done for GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES.  How it wasn’t just books, or watching films, but speaking to real people - veterans of Afghanistan and other conflicts, intelligence officers and journalists who can give you an insight to war and Afghanistan that no one else can.

I haven’t mentioned peoples names for, well, security reasons.  Nobody broke any laws for me, but war is a serious business and as seriously as I take comics…there’s no comparison.

Today I lost one of those sources, and the world lost an amazing photojournalist in Tim Hetherington.  Tim was best known for shooting the Sebastian Junger film “Restrepo”.  That movie, along with Junger’s War, chronicled the lives - and deaths - of soldiers in a remote combat outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.  Together with Tim’s book of photos “Infidel”, Restrepo and War were some of the most influential works of Graveyard of Empires.

(The above picture, depicting at an exhausted soldier in combat outpost Restrepo won the World Photo Press Photo of the Year award.  If one picture could sum up the war in Afghanistan…that would be it).

After seeing the film with Paul, I reached out to Tim over the internet to tell him how moved I was by the film, and ask him to recommend books on The Taliban.  He was generous enough to take time from his job of covering wars from Liberia to Libya to give me some suggestions. One of them was Captive, by Jere Van Dyke.  Another was, “The Photographer” by Emmanuel Guibert, a graphic novel. 

I’d like to think the fact we both liked comics (or even A comic) was a small bond we shared.  It may be the only thing I have in common with a courageous war correspondent.

The Taliban (or more correctly, the “neo-Taliban”) are one of the hardest things in the world to research. They don’t talk to journalists so much as the kidnap and murder them. 

Tim’s help was invaluable to fleshing out the book.  To the extend we got either side of the conflict in Afghanistan “right”, it’s in large part due to his work and help. 

I had hoped to show Tim the comic when it was done, perhaps do an interview and some mutually beneficial press for both our books.  To say this isn’t the kind of press I wanted is an understatement.

The title of his book, Infidel comes from the tattoo worn ironically by a soldier in this photo:

We gave a character (The Sniper, below) in the GRAVEYARD an “infidel” tattoo as a kind of shout out to the book and film that helped us so much.

It will be impossible for me to look at that character without thinking of Tim now.

My condolences Tim’s family, friends and colleagues, particularly Sebastian Junger.  I know Tim’s work will live on in the books, films and photographs he gave his life to share with us.  I hope, in some small way, through his generous contribution to GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES, that his legacy will extend to our little nerdy slice of pop culture as well.

Rest in Peace, Tim.