Dave Cockrum himself cried as he watch Xmen finally fleshed out on the movie screen – coming to life, seemingly for real (as reported in an obit in USA Today – 11/29/06 – “Dave saw the movie and he cried — not because he was bitter,” (Cifford) Meth said. “He cried because his characters were on screen and they were living.”). There is a success that movie making achieves in bolstering the comix experience. The Xmen movies moved me in my appreciation of the Xmen series. It added gravity.

Then I read on Drawn.ca that comix creators themselves are growing weary of creating when it is easier to express a situation simply in a blog entry. Previously, they would have drawn it out as a comix one-pager.

Between the movie screen and the typed word, there is a space where creators strive to novelize comics and the reader strives to experience the aura of the story fully. It takes a lot of skill to hold an audience that must jump from words written to drawn pictures. I think it’s a physiological gap.

I must refer to Dr. Osamu Tezuka (the creator of Astro Boy). His Buddha graphic novel cycle is an example of fully adept picture story telling that is so smooth, it is easy to absorb. Chris Ware is another graphic novelist whose delivery is skilled and smooth. The American market will embrace the gravity of the graphic novel when the graphic novel embodies more gravity – by skills that are powered by long experience.

I read the graphic novel about the New York woman with breast cancer and I think it received attention in the press that surpassed the actual quality of the work itself. Best wishes to the author, but it is a sketchy styled work that would flesh out well as a Lifetime Channel movie.

Wordy MacWord.

I am also developing a theory about how the blossoming of the graphic story form in both content and general acceptance, and the blossoming of the blogosphere, are mutually reinforcing. But I don’t have a thought-out analysis and right now I need to go back to drawing.