This made the rounds on social media recently. Here's the last page of Amazing Spider-Man #122, "The Goblin's Last Stand," from 1973. It was written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Gil Kane.
This is the ending to one of the seminal Spider-Man stories, "The Night Gwen Stacy Died." After taking down the Green Goblin (who accidentally kills himself), Peter goes back to his apartment to see Mary Jane Watson. MJ at this point had been portrayed pretty one-dimensionally, always looking for a party and treating her friends as not much more than collateral to having a good time. I believe that up to this point, though I could be wrong, she had had all of one thought balloon throughout her appearances. So even Peter, her friend who's grieving, thinks she's this thoughtless, uncaring individual. That slight pause before she closes the door makes the final panel all the more powerful, used by Peter/MJ 'shippers as a moment that encapsulates their whole relationship. Certainly, it started a whole development of MJ's character that didn't stop, regardless of whether or not you believed said development was for better or worse.
Now, that's interesting. The first five panels would have been exactly the same, but instead of almost walking out the door and changing her mind, she goes to visibly hug Peter, with the final panel being the two of them hugging through his apartment window. It's completely different. This being a 70s comic, there probably would have been huge blocks of text as well explaining how she's wrong about him, that she's there for him, and all that whatnot. (That's another thing that makes the final published piece huge for its time — silent sequences were rare).
I agree with Karl Kesel when he says that the final published page added ambiguity to the mix:
Whoever made this choice made a GREAT choice. MUCH more powerful than in the original layout. Peter's anger, and MJ closing the door, staying with him yet keeping her distance, respecting his grief, added layers to both characters. Yet there's a hint of ambiguity: is MJ doing this to honestly help Peter, or simply to prove him wrong? (That's the question that went through my head at least, even when I read it all those many years ago.) But that's what makes the moment interesting...
It was a more effective transition into adding layers to the one-dimensional Mary Jane Watson than, I believe, the original layout would have been. Her defensive mechanisms go up, but she doesn't give into it, and yeah, maybe a part of it is just to prove Peter wrong. And maybe she doesn't hug him when she closes that door. Maybe she holds his hand. Maybe she sits beside him for hours. We don't know. Sometimes not showing us is better than showing us and telling us. Sometimes not showing us is what makes these things work.
Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Seconds puts you head first into the weirdly repetitive everyday life of Katie Clay. The book mainly takes place in Katie’s undoubtedly aesthetically beautiful restaurant called Seconds, where in which the idea of second takes and second chances are heavily emphasized. You can now probably see where the title came from. It’s a solid and quick read, but most importantly it’s a great experience for everyone.
O’Malley had big shoes to fill following his massive hit in Scott Pilgrim, and he delivered on that with Seconds. I would recommend Seconds to anyone who’s interested and to anyone who has an appreciation for good art and storytelling. It is a very charming and lighthearted book, and it will definitely be a good read for anyone who decides to pick the book up. I would give it a legitimate 9 stars out of 10 and here’s why.
The Story Seconds’ plot pretty much follows the plot of any other time travel-centered story, the Butterfly Effect and all that, but the catch here is that Katie doesn’t actually do any time-travelling. The book starts during Katie’s mid-life crisis. She’s unhappy and unsure of her place in the world, like most of us here in the real world, and she’s risking so much in starting a second restaurant to change her life. Little does she know that she’s a notebook, a mushroom, and a pen away from changing absolutely everything.
A mysteriously fashionable house spirit gives Katie the power to right her wrongs by way of eating a mushroom, rewriting and revising past events, and sleeping it out. Obviously any mushroom of this kind, if allowed to exist in the real world, would be banned in all states, cities, and countries in all continents, because after all, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and a time-bending mushroom is pretty much absolute power.
This in turn initiates the rollercoaster ride of Katie’s life, in which we as readers have a front seat. With each revision she makes, she jumps to a new reality where that revision was effected. She jumps from one alternate reality to another, constantly fixing mistakes, unknowingly making bigger holes while trying to mend the smaller ones. Ultimately, messing with the universe will catch up with anyone and everyone, including a person high on mushrooms, initiate crisis within a midlife crisis.
The story is interesting and entertaining until the end, with plot twists and turns that’ll keep you engaged. It’s a fluid tale told extremely well, as it reads more like a short film than an actual book mainly because of its great pacing of events that’s keep your eyes glued to the story. Seconds is fun—and that’s all it really needs to be —and it delivers.
The Charm What truly makes Seconds stand out among other works of fiction is its charm. Everything from the art to the characters and to the setting, Seconds has that charm which makes it special.
The art here is fantastic and adorable, and it fits with the story’s tone and characters perfectly. The colors are bright and lively when the scenes are lighthearted, and dark and devoid when the scenes are heavy; it actually feels as though the art is a character in the story all on its own. Bryan O’Malley manages to give motion to the book with his great use of panels. With his use of art, he actually makes the book feel alive.
The setting and characters of Seconds give the story its depth. The characters are likable, some even relatable, and they don’t feel like just some other background pieces even though they totally are. Katie’s relationships with the different people in her life like Max, Hazel, and Andrew are all given their times to shine, and that’s awesome. The setting is adorable and actually gets familiar after a while, yet another character of its own.
It’s the charm of Seconds that make it transcend from a good book to a beautiful one. It is its charm that even though it’s a quick one to two hour read, it sticks with you for days and weeks. The charm, brought by the art and the life it gives the comic, is what makes you go back to the book for a third or fourth read. I recommend anyone interested to go out of your house and buy Seconds now, because it really is worth the time.
My friend Rich Handley of Hasslein Books wrote a book that is basically the unauthorized chronology of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, looking not only at the original book, but all of the material to date that's been about them, including the Before Watchmen series and the RPG, the mobile game, and whatever else Rich managed to find.
The book is entitled Watching Time: The Unauthorized Watchmen Chronology. I wrote an essay in the book, which I believe is gonna go near the end and may or may not be entitled "Reflections." Watchmen is one of my favorite books, and I'm proud and honored to be part of this project. Brian Cronin of Comic Books Resources' Comics Should Be Good also wrote the foreword.
I'm rereading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen for a larger piece I'm working on, and I had some random thoughts while reading it that I thought I'd share with you here.
Naturally, spoilers for this 30-year-old story abound, so if you haven't read it, then, you know, don't read this yet.
No Thought Balloons Makes You Speculate on Certain Things For example, Ozymandias is totally thinking of removing the grappling hook and killing Rorschach here, isn't he?
Intentional Misreading I've never noticed this before, and it seems to be the kind of thing that's completely unintentional and reading too much into it, and it may be the Absolute Edition drawing my eye into different places or my overall ADD, but that shot of Rorschach's face in the top right panel of the left page just drew me to that shot of Hollis on the top left panel of the right page, so I ended up reading these two pages as one long page (entire top row first, then the second row, then the third).
And what ends up happening there is Rorschach goes "Hurm" and then Hollis goes "Watch the language." It's interesting and actually reads better that way. Whether or not it was intentional doesn't matter.
The Mysteries Are Really Very Obvious
Question for you guys who went into Watchmen cold. I knew who Rorschach was and who the "villain" was gonna be before I read the book the first time (Wizard spoiled it). But did you guys who didn't know that going in figure it out before they did the big reveals? I ask because rereading it now, it seems pretty obvious who they are with all the stuff Moore and Gibbons do, but I never had that experience of trying to figure it out, so I don't know how obvious it is if you go in cold.
Rorschach's seems like they're giving it away as early as here. This is the end of the first scene with Walter Kovacs.
And this is the start of the next page, the first scene with Rorschach.
If the last panel of the first scene and the first panel of the second were right beside each other, wouldn't the reader automatically think (not even think it's something to "figure out") that it's obvious?
And this is my favorite bit of foreshadowing involving Ozymandias.
Rorschach Would Have Been So Different Here's an early concept sketch.
Rorschach is weird in it.
Rorschach is a Really Bad Detective
I mean, really, he mentions that it's a shame Moloch is dead because he'd be a great suspect. This entire scene is literally nine panels of him blabbing on and on about Egyptian gods while Dan stumbles onto the solution. Much of what he says to Dan in the Owlship too, it's just false bravado. "We should be questioning people in the underworld." "Give me the littlest finger on a man's hand and I'll produce information." No, Walter, we saw you do all that earlier in the series, and you produced nothing. You are really bad at your job.
Is Rorschach Gay? Here's a scene where Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl, is unbearably awkward due to his attraction to Laurie Juspeczyk, Silk Spectre.
And a few issues later, here's Rorschach and Nite Owl.
I always thought this was just Rorschach being unbearably awkward in general, but so little in this book is unintentional and so much of it is reflective, so it got me thinking. And if it is intended to hint at his homosexuality, the face his mask makes is adorable.
Awwww.
I Don't Think A Lot of This Would Work If It Came Out Today
This whole comic really does look different given modern sensibilities. There's really no way this storyline flies if it came out today.
The general awareness of rape — even attempted rape — its effects on its victims, its psychological and physiological impact on not just the victims, but also the vortex and community around the victims, is so much higher now and changes the complexion of the story. Given that, the idea that Sally eventually forgave Eddie, that they would eventually have a child, and that Laurie, even if she is that child, would posthumously forgive Eddie, is a less plausible idea in 2016 than it was in 1986 (even though it has been known to happen). And Rorschach, whose mother was a sex worker and whose one real act of forgiveness/compromise in the book is to not reprimand his landlady, who is implied to be a sex worker, certainly would not, given the heightened awareness of rape and sexual assault, overlook Eddie's history of it and classify it simply as "a moral lapse," which he does in the first issue. (Moore has admitted that his intent was to portray Rorschach as a terrible and demented human being, and there are so many things throughout the book that leads to that point. But he's also the only one among all of them with as much moral integrity as he does, misguided though those morals are, whereas everyone else in the book is pretty wishy washy, detached, and all that, that Rorschach ends up looking like the most admirable person in the book, in terms of his integrity alone.)
In a way, that actually cements the need for the comic to stay rooted in the 1980s; the social climate makes it so complicated, and different, in the 2010s. The Eddie/Sally pairing is to make it so that Laurie's parentage is as unlikely and as improbable and as unreasonable a pairing as feasible in the story. A 2010s story involving such a device would most likely not use rape. (What would they use? I don't know.)
I've been a fan of Kerry Callen since we launched the Comics Cube, mainly because his blog is a hoot. Among the features on his blog that have gone viral, here are animated GIFs of classic comics:
So with all this, I've been particularly interested in his creator-owned series, Halo and Sprocket. Unfortunately, they're not easy to find, so it took me years and a bit of luck at the recent Komikon to find a copy of the first volume, Welcome to Humanity.
This series is quite clever, and if you've read enough of the Cube, you'll know I particularly like wit and cleverness, especially in shortform content. This story about an angel, Halo, and a robot, Sprocket, who live in a single woman's apartment (with the woman, Katie). Halo is put on Earth to help Sprocket adjust to humanity. It's not easy, because the two of them take everything so literally.
The stories vary in length, but there are no multi-parters. It's pretty much ruminations on various events and figures of speech that we encounter in our everyday lives. At one point, Katie takes Halo and Sprocket to an art show, and they don't understand art at all. Finally, Sprocket finds a piece that appeals to his sense of aesthetics. Kinda.
I can't really say much more without spoiling the stories because they're so short, but they're really quite fun and clever that it does provoke some thought about certain things we consider routine.
Also, at one point, Sprocket asks Halo, "Can I borrow your flaming sword of vengeance?" And you know, I thought that was pretty funny.
CANIFF'S LAST TERRY AND THE PIRATES, 12-29-46. If I could only own one Caniff original, it would be this— for my money, the single best self-contained comic ever produced. EVER. Two people with a long, affectionate relationship are about to part; one leaving to pursue their true love, with no guarantee on what they'll find. A last, passionate embrace and the two part, sadly, but not looking back. It describes both Jane AND Caniff's relationship with Terry, as Caniff was leaving the strip to start his creator-owned STEVE CANYON. Just beginning my own creator-owned project, I know exactly how Caiff felt, and can see how it infuses every figure and shadow on this piece. The last 8 panels are flawless. The kiss is stunning in its intensity. The last panel— "Ring Out The Old, Ring In the New"— heartbreakingly bittersweet. I actually prefer this in black and white— the white jackets don't work for me—and was hoping to post a scan of the original art, but couldn't find it on the web. Wonder where it is...
I've never read Terry and the Pirates, and it's unlikely I'll ever read more than whatever installment comes my way at any time. But I thought this strip was beautiful. For a comic made at a time when writers felt the need to describe everything or add dialogue, this mostly silent strip is a revelation. And for me, who has never read any of the strip, to feel the separation between Terry and Jane, is a testament to the craftsmanship of the strip.
A few days later, I saw this making the rounds:
See, newspaper strips didn't afford much in the way of experimentation in layouts. They had to be crafted in such a way that the newspapers could cut them up and rearrange them tro fit the paper's layout. So they worked mostly in grids and let the publishers cut them up and rearrange them.
Except, sometimes, if not most times, an artist takes the entire page into account when laying it out, so you can enjoy it as a singular piece of art. And in this case, Caniff almost certainly did. The middle two panels in the middle row being Terry and Jane looking at each other with the pain of a final goodbye makes the page for me.
However, I've also seen people say, of the second version, that the middle of the page being Jane running back is what makes the page for them.
It's an interesting piece about the nature of composition and what appeals to the eye, and the subjectivity of it all.
Still, all that just gave me an excuse to post about this, the final installment of a run on a comic strip that I've never read anything of, but which touched me anyway, and which I found beautiful.
Does the composition of the page make a difference to you? Which one do you prefer?
Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice is out here in the Philippines in two days, and as much as the buildup to it and the trailers haven't been to my tastes and as much as I've never liked anything that director has done, I do have to say Wonder Woman, as played by Gal Gadot, looks awesome. I'm rooting for her in this movie, in part to shut up a bunch of sexist dicks on the internet, but also because this is Wonder Woman's first time on the big screen. I went through, a while back, all the common reasons given as to why Diana didn't have a movie, and also went issue by issue on the Wonder Woman reinvention by my favorite creator ever, George Perez.
So now I'm just going to treat your eyes, because in the mid-90s, Wonder Woman's covers were drawn by maybe the greatest cover artist (meaning his covers outnumber his interiors) of all time in superhero comics, Brian Bolland. So I picked 10 Bolland covers from his run and am putting them here. Enjoy!
Wonder Woman #0: Let's start with Bolland's take on an iconic image: bullets and bracelets. Dynamic stuff.
Wonder Woman #91: The first time Diana loses her costume and Wonder Woman identity to Artemis of the Bana-Mighdall has a cover that shows them fighting. In the age of pin-up covers, a cover like this looks great and tells us what's in the comic.
Wonder Woman #97: On the other hand, here's a pinup cover that still shows you what's in the comic.
Wonder Woman #88: And sometimes all you need is a guest star, and the pinup cover can show him, even when he has a terrible mullet.
Wonder Woman #63: Here's a pinup cover that was Bolland's first. It still works in context because the title had been on hiatus for a few months.
Wonder Woman #94: I like this one because it shows Diana in her non-Amazon costume and she's fighting two awesome supervillains, Cheshire and Poison Ivy.
Wonder Woman #74: Not really sure why I like this, but I do.
Wonder Woman #99: Costume aside, I think it's a powerful image. Having said that, how the hell did her hair just change with her costume? The moment she goes back to her regular costume, her hair's all curly again.
Wonder Woman #78: Cover's eye-catching, and it has the Flash. What's not to love?
Wonder Woman #72: Probably the most famous of Bolland's covers, it's had statues molded after it and may have been the inspiration for those iconic Jim Lee Superman and Batman images, which I'm pretty sure if you Google "Jim Lee Batman and Superman," are the first results.
EXTRA: Here's a cool pinup from Wonder Woman #50.
So there. Go see Superman V Batman: Dawn of Justice and remember four things: Diana is awesome, Superman can toss Batman into outer space in the blink of an eye, Ben Affleck will be the best Batman since Adam West, and Frank Miller himself has admitted that he'd have never written Superman the way he did in Dark Knight Returns if it had been a Superman story. And Diana is awesome.
I've been thinking a lot lately about Archie Comics. Specifically, the thoughts revolve around the following:
I love Mark Waid and think Fiona Staples and Veronica Fish are great artists. I also strongly advocate any efforts to revitalize any brands that companies deem to need it. But this new look Archie isn't working for me. It's weird that of all the things I'd be a grumpy old fan about, it'd be Archie Comics, especially since the bulk of the Archie reading I do is works by Harry Lucey and Dan DeCarlo and Samm Schwartz. All of those guys have long since gone to the great Chok'lit Shoppe in the sky, so really, I shouldn't care. I'm not the target audience. But it doesn't work for me, and somehow, I care that it doesn't work for me. (I feel the same way about the new CW show, Riverdale. I'm glad it's happening. I just can't get excited for it.)
Of the three artists I mentioned above, DeCarlo is the best in terms of just drawing crisply and prettily, Lucey is the best at conveying motion and showing slapstick, and Schwartz is the cleverest. All three did their best works with Frank Doyle on script. And I should be doing a Harry Lucey column soon, looking at the stuff he did in and out of Archie. Soon. Hopefully. I'm lazy.
Archie pretty much has a monopoly on teen dating humor comics now, but that wasn't always the case. There was a whole load of them back in the old days, including Suzie and Ginger and Patsy Walker and Millie the Model and Wilbur and such. I'm sure Archie has endured the test of time due mainly to three things: to the dynamics of the Betty and Veronica love triangle, Jughead Jones, and easily accessible and affordable digests.
Really, the teen humor comic property that can provide Archie Comics with any sort of semblance of competition is itself an Archie property. And I'm talking about these girls:
Josie and the Pussycats, made up of Josie James, Valerie Smith, and Melody Jones, is a pretty well known property inside and outside of comics fandom, and is one of the greatest fictional bands of all time. But that wasn't always the case, nor was it even the original premise of the strip. A redhead had to decide between two love interests, one of whom was nice and simple and the other one rich and spoiled. The redhead had two friends, a sarcastic brunette and a well-meaning, fun-loving friend who lived in a world of their own. And if that sounds like Archie and friends to you, well, really, that's basically the core of what it was.
But Josie, or She's Josie, as the strip was then called, did deviate enough from that template to stand on its own. Josie and Archie were, for sure, both protagonist redheads who were average teenagers, but Archie continually chose rich and spoiled Veronica Lodge over simple and devoted (and kind of psychotic) Betty Cooper, while Josie eschewed rich and spoiled Alex Cabot for her simple and unassuming Albert.
It's a little too nerd-friendly for me to really buy into it — I'm not really a fan of stories where the nerdy guy gets the hot girl with no real believable explanation, since it's a little too much of a wish fulfillment thing for me and actually does hurt my suspension of disbelief more than the premise of a guy getting powers from a radioactive spider — but Albert wouldn't really last long.
The frustrating thing, for me, about Albert is that for all his dorkishness, he not only had Josie after him, but Midvale's answer to Veronica Lodge, Alexandra Cabot (Alexander's sister), as well.
I think it's safe to say I'm not a fan of Albert.
Another difference is that the brunette in the original strip wasn't Valerie, but a white girl with glasses named Pepper, who was sassy and sarcastic and every bit the kind of character that would thrive today.
Pepper was pegged as the brainy one, but aside from having glasses, I didn't really see her as brainier than Josie. She was more clever than booksmart, but I guess they wanted to go for a brains-and-brawn couple when they introduced her boyfriend, a musclebound guy named Sock, short for Socrates.
Rounding out the cast was Melody, the dumb blonde. And when I say the dumb blonde, I mean she's dumb, and she's blonde.
In fact, Melody's the kind of character who either gets crucified now because she was really just an excuse for Dan DeCarlo to draw a sexy woman in revealing clothing, or gets to be a fan favorite among all demographics because they handle it in such a tongue-in-cheek way, and she uses that sex appeal to her advantage. A running gag is Melody just walking around town and men getting into accidents because they're too distracted by her. In other words, she'd either be hated on Facebook/Twitter or loved on Tumblr. My money would be on the latter, kinda like Harley Quinn or Bruce Timm good girl art. I honestly think Dan DeCarlo would have been the kind of cheesecake artist that everyone loves.
This is what really gets me about Melody, though. The joke is that she's so much sexier than Josie and the rest of the girls, and in-story they would say it was because of her figure. But look. They have, if not the same, at least very similar figures.
Melody's sexiness and Pepper's sass and Josie's confidence all come from different poses and different configurations of body language. Josie has the same figure as Melody, but she would never be posed like this while walking down the street in a revealing outfit. She'd be shyer and trying to cover herself up.
She's Josie and, later, Josie, was a fun book, but sales must have been unimpressive, because they started resorting to frequent guest appearances and cameos by Archie and the gang. At one point they even brought in the star of Archie's Madhouse, Clyde Didit, and went trippy. (And yes, I know it was the 60s, so this is kinda tame by "trippy" standards.)
As fun as the book was, the thing was that at the end of the day, it didn't differentiate enough from your standard teen fare. Sure, the main characters were girls instead of guys, but Archie even at the time was already putting out Betty and Veronica. What was needed was a reinvention, and it started by giving the girls a gimmick and then introducing new characters as well as repackaging some old ones. The gimmick was simple: make the girls a band called The Pussycats, complete with matching costumes. It's a simple hook, and while the Archies at the time had a real band named after them with a legitimate album out (including the hit single "Sugar Sugar"), an all-girl band with themed (and obviously sexy) costumes was much less heard of. In other words, gender-switching the basic premise of Archie, not enough differentiation. Gender-switching the Archies and then giving them matching outfits, enough differentiation.
Alexandra Cabot also got a different gimmick. To match her new look, with a streak in her hair, she also got magic powers.
And Alexander Cabot III became the band's manager, also complete with a new look: shades and a jacket.
The visual reinvention of the Cabots says a lot to me about the importance of iconography. While they were, for sure, well drawn before the shades and white streaks, they didn't have distinguishing features, even ones as simple as Josie's short hair or Melody's white hair. It's such a simple change, giving them a visual cue, but it's enough. (A good example in superhero comics is Abby Arcane from Swamp Thing. There was really nothing special about Abby Arcane other than the black streak in her white hair, but that's enough to distinguish her and keep her in the book until Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben found stuff for her to do.)
Albert was gone, replaced by Alan M., who made so much more sense for someone like Josie (and Alexandra) to pine over. He's built, he's good-looking, he's talented, and he's a legitimately nice guy who doesn't spend his time creepily stalking Josie. There is a mutual attraction that is believable and feels genuine. And Albert was never seen again, because thank God, he sucked.
Sock vanished as well, maybe because Pepper also disappeared. The brunette in the trio became Valerie, who effectively replaced Pepper. But it's weird for me to say that she did replace Pepper, because aside from having black hair and being the clever one, they weren't replaceable with each other. Their brands of cleverness were different, and if anything, Valerie was a bit more headstrong and tomboyish, a little more like Betty Cooper than Pepper was, when Betty Cooper wasn't busy being a crazy Archie stalker.
Valerie is a genuine groundbreaker, too. GeekGirlCon says she's the first ever black character to ever show up in Archie, predating Chuck Clayton by a couple of years. Decades later, she would have a romance with Archie Andrews himself that is, if not the first, the first high-profile interracial romance in the comic.
And when Josie and the Pussycats got an animated series soon after, after a three-week argument between the network and the producer, Valerie Smith became the first ever regular character in a cartoon.
I think there's a sentiment that thinks Pepper should have been the bassist for the Pussycats, and while I like Pepper as a character a lot, I honestly don't see her being a Pussycat. Like I said, I don't see them as interchangeable, even though they clearly fill the same role in the dynamic. Their personalities are different enough that I do not see Pepper as one of the Pussycats, even in an alternate reality where she stuck around.
Josie and the Pussycats was cancelled in 1982, but the characters stuck around and permeated pop culture consciousness that they could never be kept down for too long. They had a movie in 2001 starring Rachael Leigh Cooke, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid, and they continually got new stories in the comics, including, as mentioned, the high-profile Archie/Valerie romance. They broke ground then, as all-girl groups were relatively rare, and if you believe some accounts, they helped inspire and, in a way, pave the road for real all-girl bands (they predated the Runaways, arguably the first truly famous all-girl rock band, by six years). These days, they continue to reflect reality further and break ground further by introducing more diversity. Aside from interracial romances with Archie, Josie has been cast in the new Riverdale TV show as Ashleigh Murray, who is black, and rumors swirl that the Pussycats in that universe will all be women of color, a casting choice that reflects how far we have come, as such a thing would have been unheard of outside of very specific genres of music back when the Pussycats were first created.
Really, there's a lot to be learned from the reinvention of She's Josie into Josie and the Pussycats, including the importance of visual iconography and the power of diversity. But perhaps the most important thing, at least in my eyes, is that taking a premise and then changing it a teeny tiny bit isn't enough. You can start there, but then you need the right gimmick and hook, and then the right dynamics and characters to go with it. Fortunately for the Pussycats, they have three of the legitimately most fun and dynamic characters, especially in humor comics, ever. And all three of them, as well as their complementary pieces, are a perfect fit. It ook them a while to get tot hat perfect fit, but they got there and that's what matters.
That was fun. To close this off, I'm going to give you this awesome Fiona Staples rendition of the Pussycats.
