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Alternative Comics

"Move over Arnold Schwarzenegger, the new super heroes aren't coming from the minds of Hollywood executives."

Listen to this Commentary!

By Victor Vazquez (with additional reporting by Margarita Rossi)

With Spiderman swinging into theatres this summer and a young Clark Kent saving the day on TV's Smallville, it looks like comic books are having yet another renaissance. So it may not be a big surprise that one film that was just nominated for an Academy Award is based on a comic book. What probably will surprise you is that it doesn't involve characters who bend steel and wear spandex tights. The creator is Daniel Clowes, and the film is Ghost World — he's just one comic book celebrity that Youth Radio's Victor Vazquez ran into at the Alternative Press Expo, a convention for alternative comics and magazines, in San Francisco.

You never know just who you'll run into at the Alternative Press Expo where guys who publish their work at the local Kinko's rub shoulders with creators of cartoon series and Academy Award nominees. Here you'll find the sharper, hipper nerds. The nerds that front punk bands and wear glasses with thick rectangular frames, not your average pale chubby Trekkie. You'll also find network and movie executives trolling for material.

Daniel Clowes turned his story Ghost World, about the lives of two disaffected teenage girls, into a film with Terry Zwigoff. The movie is nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. But Clowes' nights aren't spent at the Playboy mansion just yet.

Daniel Clowes: Ghost World did a lot better than any comic would do, but it was hardly a mainstream hit y'know. It was a very small thing to most of America. But it did get out to people who would never read my comics. They saw the movie and it was really interesting to see the response.

An underground comic series like Ghost World is a lot less expensive to bring to the screen than mainstream superhero comics. Characters like Batman and the X-Men need a lot of expensive special effects. On top of that, they're often owned by big corporations or the rights are tied up in long standing deals. So it's no wonder that here at the Expo, some artists are jokingly putting up signs that read: Willing to Talk about TV rights.

But getting rights is just half the battle. Shannon Wheeler's character Too Much Coffee Man, an over-caffeinated anti-hero, has already gone through the often tedious TV development process.

Shannon Wheeler: Yeah, I went through the Hollywood ringer for sure. I'd hooked up with an animation company and they paired me with a writer, and the scripts that were beginning to be turned out I was not very happy with. Right now it's in limbo… They were edging me out of the process slowly but surely they were saying less and less that they were telling me more and more that I could not be involved in this thing that I was creating it was very weird, very Hollywood.

Being thrown through the "Hollywood ringer" is not an uncommon experience for many comic artists. Invader Zim, from the creator of the comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, only lasted one season before being canned. And the political satire K Chronicles didn't even get past the drawing board.

But, Matt Groening, creator of the hit prime-time animated series The Simpsons, has found a winning formula. He says giving up some creative control is just the price to pay for reaching the mainstream audience.

Matt Groening: It's a TV show that I don't own; 20th century fox does, and what I've tried to do… here I am at APE, Alternative Press Expo 2002. This is where I started… doing alternative comic zines and I wanted to invade the mainstream and in order to invade the mainstream there are some compromises you have to make and that's the nature of commercial television.

And commercial television is hungry for another Simpsons. That's part of the vibe here at the Alternative Press Expo where everyone is looking for the Next Big Thing. It's hard to say what will be slept on and what will become the critics' new darling. For Ghost World's Clowes, the most satisfying part of becoming an independent success is making his comic book personalities into stars.

Clowes: A lot of the response was, y'know, like, "These characters are so weird," y'know, "I'd never see anybody like this," and I thought that these were all very natural characters. These are all based on people I know and they're not at all outlandish whereas like a guy like Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie is extremely outlandish, nobody knows anybody like him and yet that's not thought of as weird at all. So it was odd for me.

Move over Arnold Schwarzenegger, the new super heroes aren't coming from the minds of Hollywood executives, but out of the backpacks of nerd-noveau zinesters, with stories that cater to the cerebrum, challenging the belief that comics are strictly low-brow.

For NPR News, I'm Victor Vazquez in San Francisco.

Back Announce: That report was produced by Youth Radio.