VOULEZ-VOUS LIRE AVEC MOI CE SOIR?

In Monday's Shipping Forecast we mentioned that an English language edition of BLACKSAD is finally available. I've had my French edition for a couple of years now, but I've been longing to see it translated into English even longer than that, and not just because I can barely remember the French for 'excuse me, how do I get to the train station please'.

Rather, it's because I want Juanjo Guarnido's art to be appreciated in the English-speaking world, and there's a limit to how many of us are going to buy a book we can't read. That said, Guarnido is so accomplished a visual storyteller that one doesn't really need to read a word of the dialogue in order to understand the story, and besides, the story - a by-the-numbers detective thriller - isn't what sells the book. This is a book for art lovers, and Guarnido is one of the most exceptional talents you're likely to discover this year.

But Europe discovered him first, of course, and it discovered a lot more besides. In fact, there are so many great creators working outside of the English language market that we at Ninth Art even called upon the services of Spanish writer Marcos Castrillón to highlight a few of them in his Beyond Borders series - and he'll be discussing Guarnido himself in a forthcoming column, so I'll say no more on him myself. The hope that I think Marcos and I both share is that the books he's discussed - or at least their creators - will eventually break in to the Anglophone market, not for the creators' sakes, but for the readers'.

'It seems too much to hope that a third audience could spring up in bookstores.' In the last few years, that's seemed increasingly likely, with the catalogue of available English language reprints of European and South American comic albums steadily growing thanks to publishers like NBM, IBooks, Strip Art Features, Chaland, and, of course, Humanoids.

Humanoids has been in the news this week because of the impressive news that it's signed a deal with DC to have the American publisher add 36 of its titles per year to its own catalogue. This means Humanoids, which boasts a stable of creators that includes Enki Bilal, Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius, instantly leapfrogs above its peers in terms of accessibility and profile. (DC, meanwhile, has the benefit of looking suave and allowing its editors to wear berets and smoke unfiltered Gauloise. The editors will also be drinking a bottle of red wine at lunch every day, but that's nothing new.)

This is all tres bon, as they say in Essex, but a question remains; will anyone want to read them?

The last few years have seen a whole new audience emerge in parallel to the direct market comics reading audience, by which I mean the much talked about bookstore manga market. Just as your average BATMAN fan doesn't seem too interested in reading OH MY GODDESS, neither does either one of them seem the natural audience for a book like TECHNOPRIESTS. In fact, Euro albums are as stylistically alien in terms of storytelling, art and format to manga as manga is to American comics. It seems too much to hope that a substantial third audience could spring up in bookstores to support the album market, though that surely is the hope. It seems more likely that the audience will come from existing readers with changing tastes.

'Humanoids instantly leapfrogs above its peers in terms of accessibility and profile.' The audience for Milo Manara may in fact be the same as the audience for, for example, P Craig Russell's opera adaptations, but the audience for comic book opera adaptations isn't huge. Indeed, it consists mostly of that breed of comics reader who got over his fixation with superheroes but never lost his love of the comics format. I'm talking about that rare fringe creature, the evolved comics reader. The connoisseurs. The aficionados. As we would have it here at Ninth Art, the discerning readers.

Maybe DC can build up that audience. Maybe it can spread a little rain on the struggling seed of artistic appreciation planted in the potentially fertile minds of its fanboy readers. It's certainly possible, because that's more or less the course my reading habits took. I started out reading comics for the characters, grew to appreciate the writers, but nowadays, first and foremost, I'm in it for the art. I do still read superheroes, and I still love the mainstream like the dear, decrepit old pervert that it is, but I also love my copy of MANHATTAN BEACH 1957, and will hug my great big Trondheims warmly to my chest, because this is the work of real substance.

Manga has its strengths, and I don't deny that American comics have theirs too, and each appeals to a different set of tastes. It would be snooty of me to suggest that the European palate is more refined, so let's say that it's merely different, and that there are those for whom the arts/lit aspirations that are so common among album-format bande dessinée works will seem more appealing than what they're used to. I only hope those readers realise it, and thanks to DC, their odds are improving.

ARE YOU HOT OR NOT?

I have waxed lyrical about those Europeans and those South Americans, both here and in previous columns, but of course, North America has its share of talented creators too. Such as Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis and Neil Gaiman.

Oh, but you'll have spotted the deliberate mistake, there, I'm sure.

Yes, that's right. Those fellas only write.

Like I said, these days, my appreciation for comics is very much tied to an appreciation of the artform. The consequence of this is that I'm no longer satisfied by snappy dialogue and a strong plot.

'It doesn't take much to work out how one gets on to Wizard's top ten list.' Now, I admit, I'm being desperately unfair to Messrs Morrison, Ennis, Gaiman, and their ilk when I disregard them as mere writers, because I know that in comics, being a good writer is like conducting an orchestra. The art you appreciate may be in the music you hear, but that little man flapping his arms down in the front, he's required to know the craft as well as anyone in the room, and he can't be discounted from the equation.

Even so, the art is what makes or breaks a comic for me. It doesn't matter how good Grant Morrison's script is if Howard Porter is providing the pencils. Whereas Duncan Fegredo can make a page sing even if he's being forced to filter a Ron Zimmerman monologue.

Fegredo belongs on that short list of artists whom I will gladly follow onto a Ron Zimmerman comic. It's therefore no surprise that he doesn't feature on that great arbiter of mainstream comics taste, the Wizard list of the ten 'hottest' artists.

Actually, it doesn't take much analysis to work out how one does get on to Wizard's perennial chequerboard of alternating bald and beardy men. The compilers basically randomise a list of current Spider-Man artists and throw in someone from a Superman comic and a couple of X-Men artists. It's all about heat. Art is only a factor insofar as no artist will ever get on the list if they can't draw a moody Wolverine or a stacked Mary Jane. Otherwise, the list only reflects whether or not an artist is on a book that would sell in the same numbers regardless of whether or not they were the one on the book.

Now, I have no real issue with Wizard. It does what it does, and it never fails to stoop to its mark. But it is clear that the comics mainstream is so focused on what's hot that the language does not exist to allow for a more complex critical response.

If you look at the top ten writers in the same February 2004 edition of Wizard, it reads like a 'whatever happened to' list of guys who were clever and inventive five or ten years ago. The Vertigo pack, the post-modernists, the retro revivalists. Only, the answer to the question 'whatever happened to them' is that they're all writing the market-leading titles for Marvel and DC.

And the next question is, whatever happened to their talent?

Now, I'm not one of those people who likes to wail and moan about how great creators waste their talents on work-for-hire superhero comics, because I have absolutely no ideological problem with either work-for-hire or superheroes. I think creators can and absolutely should do brilliant work on work-for-hire jobs, and I think a couple of the names on that list actually do. But that's exactly the problem. The rest of them don't. And that's because they're hot, and they have no reason to try. All their potential remains untapped, because the criteria by which we judge achievement is not art, but heat. (This is nothing new. This is how Rob Liefeld got so popular.)

And if comics' best creators aren't going to try, who will? There's no-one coming up behind them.

Andrew Wheeler is a London-based entertainment journalist.

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