2009 March
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Nickelodeon Magazine Comic Awards
Awards | Nickelodeon Magazine has announced the winners of its first Comics Awards, as chosen by more than 17,000 readers. Big winners: Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Simpsons Comics, Bone and Garfield. [Nickelodeon Magazine]
Creators | Benny and Penny creator Geoffrey Hayes chats about his process, school visits and his influences. [Seven Impossible Things]
Creators | Kiel Phegley interviews writer Andy Diggle about his upcoming turn on Marvel’s Daredevil. [Marvel.com]
Creators | Bernard Chang is featured in a brief profile. [Journal and Courier]
Manga | The “OEL vs. Global Manga vs. Comics” debate emerges once again. Pray that it doesn’t see its shadow. [Tiamat's Reviews]
Publishing | DC Comics’ 1993 “Death of Superman” event as an example of a successful marketing stunt. [Alibaba.com]
Creators | Sci Fi Wire gets in on the Twitter-feeds-you-should-follow act. [Sci Fi Wire]
Pop culture | Hand-painted briefs by cartoonist Steve Bell featuring the portrait of former British prime minister John Major have received a bid of about $286 in an auction to benefit a charity that supports destitute asylum seekers. [CHARTattack]
- March 27, 2009 @ 10:13 AM by Kevin Melrose
Download some free ‘Slaughter’
Panel from 'Some Kind of Slaughter'
A. David Lewis and MP Mann have made their four-issue series on diluvian or flood myths, Some Kind of Slaughter, available for free download in the hopes of garnering a Harvey Awards nomination. Go check it out. (via)
- March 27, 2009 @ 10:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Strangeways – Behind the Scenes – 03
BEST WESTERNS
Oh, like you could have possibly resisted the temptation of such a pun. You couldn’t, so stop whining. And I really wanted to embed YouTube videos to this, but just can’t get it working, so click on the titles and check out the trailers (or scenes as the case may be.)
So yeah, without Western movies, there wouldn’t have been a STRANGEWAYS. I never took to the books at all. Barely flipped through a Zane Grey or a Louis L’Amour or any of the LONESOME DOVE offerings. I remember reading SHANE once when I was an older young kid, but it didn’t stick. For me, Westerns are primarily visual in their appeal. Maybe I haven’t read the right prose, that’s entirely possible. You could fill rooms with the books that I haven’t read.
Okay, sure, you’ve got to have a great story to really make it sing. And you’ve got to play by the rules as it were with the plot and action, the primacy of the gunfight and six-shooter making everyone pretty much the same size. There’s law and lawlessness, though good and evil don’t always happen to take those same sides.
And there’s the setting. The west is the last land to be tamed, shrugging off the trappings of civilization until bound with barbed wire and girdled by railroads carting in Easterners with their laws and fancy hats and buffalo rifles that felled gazelle and bison alike. Sure, that’s a myth, but it’s a compelling myth. Or at least you can make it such if you present it right. Go wrong and it’s dull as dishwater, cliché-ridden to its very core. Black and white hats shooting each other up on that same dusty street in the town where all the clocks are stuck on high noon and the same breathless maid waits for The Right Guy to win.
- March 27, 2009 @ 09:55 AM by Matt Maxwell
Alan Moore continues to have his way with New York Times list
The Jungle Book
Alan Moore continues to work his magic on The New York Times Graphic Book Best Seller List, as four of his titles appear this week. And only two of them are named Watchmen.
Moore’s famed collaboration with Dave Gibbons holds onto the top spots on the hardcover and paperback charts, followed at No. 2 by Batman: The Killing Joke on the former and Light of Thy Countenance — adapted by Antony Johnston and Felipe Massafera — on the latter.
Should I feel bad that I’ve never heard of Light of Thy Countenance?
The 22nd volume of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket finally knocks Naruto off his perch atop the manga list. Don’t feel bad for Masashi Kishimoto, though: His insanely popular series still lays claim to spots two through six and No. 9.
It’s also worth noting that the second volume of James Robinson and Tony Harris’ Starman Omnibus climbs back up the hardcover list, landing at No. 3, and IDW Publishing’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book debuts at No. 6.
And two new collections of Marvel’s Squadron Supreme enter the softcover category at Nos. 3 and 4.
The Times lists are compiled using an arcane formula that includes sales data from hundreds of retail outlets, including independent booksellers, book chains, online stores and direct-market shops.
- March 27, 2009 @ 08:18 AM by Kevin Melrose
Mom protests sexy Spider-Man comic
ick
A Millard, Nebraska, mother is seeking to remove a Spider-Man comic from her son’s elementary school library for being “sexually explicit”:
The comic is part of a popular new series about Spider-Man and the head librarian of the Millard School District said it’s been in high demand.
“My son looked at this and goes, ‘Ohhhh!’” said Physha Svendsen.She said the book that her 6-year-old son brought home is not age-appropriate for Norris Elementary School students and wants it removed from the library.
“It has a lot of sexual undertones in here, as far as sexuality goes,” she said. “They can learn this through any other place, but it’s not something I allow them to learn, in my house at least.”
The story never names which Spider-Man comic is causing the kerfluffle, though it does note that library officials are evaluating the complaint and will determine whether or not to keep the comic on its shelves in 30 days. Still, it would be nice to know what exactly was the problem. Did she come across that issue where Norman Osborn gets it on with Gwen Stacy? (via Dirk)
- March 27, 2009 @ 08:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Is this Pat Oliphant cartoon anti-Semitic?
Pat Oliphant cartoon
It’s certainly raised the ire of the Anti-Defamation League:
Pat Oliphant’s outlandish and offensive use of the Star of David in combination with Nazi-like imagery is hideously anti-Semitic. It employs Nazi imagery by portraying Israel as a jack-booted, goose-stepping headless apparition. The implication is of an Israeli policy without a head or a heart.
Israel’s defensive military operation to protect the lives of its men, women and children who are being continuously bombarded by Hamas rocket attacks has been turned on its head to show the victims as heartless, headless aggressors.
The Interwebs are already abuzz with the story, and you can find reactions to the cartoon here, here, here, here and here, to name just a few. Oliphant has yet to comment on the matter.
Hold onto your seats, folks, this could get way uglier than that dead chimp cartoon.
- March 27, 2009 @ 07:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Food or Comics | A roundup of money-related news
Comics Now! #3
• Comics Now!, a quarterly magazine launched early last year, has ceased publication. Issue 3, released in September, was the last. (via Johanna Draper Carlson)
• Amazon.com will close three distribution centers in Munster, Indiana, Red Rock, Nevada, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, reportedly as part of a reorganization of the company’s fulfillment network. The warehouses employ about 215 people.
This is the first closing of a warehouse by the online-retail giant since 2006.
• Lisa Lopacinski of Neptune Comics questions DC Comics’ order requirement for retailers to receive the sketch variant edition of Batman and Robin #1: one variant for every 250 copies ordered of the standard edition.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” she writes. “I’m sure this will be a popular comic. Especially the first issue. But 250 copies?!? This promotion is clearly going to benefit about 10-15 of Diamond’s largest customers in the U.S. who have a need to order that large of a quantity.”
• Operation Comix Relief organizer Chris Tarbassian worries that higher shipping costs could cripple efforts to send comic books to U.S. soldiers serving overseas.
• The final issue of the U.K. comics anthology The DFC rolls out today. Richard Bruton pens a eulogy, and points out that some of the magazine’s creators have launched a blog called Super Comics Adventure Squad.
• Comic-strip journalist Brenda Starr learned today she has lost her job because of staff cuts in the fictional newsroom of B. Babbitt Bottomline. The strip’s writer, Mary Schmich, says Starr’s life “is a fantasy with nuggets of reality tossed in. But even fantasies need some grounding in reality, and right now, economic crisis is the reality that colors everything else at pretty much every newspaper.”
• At io9.com, Charlie Jane Anders wonders how the recession has affected the sales of science-fiction books.
- March 27, 2009 @ 06:06 AM by Kevin Melrose
IDW brings GrimJack, other ComicMix titles back to print
GrimJack
The webcomics/news site ComicMix and IDW Publishing announced a deal where IDW will publish several ComicMix properties as monthly comics and trade paperbacks. The deal will start with two properties IDW has published before — Mike Grell’s Jon Sable, Freelance, and John Ostrander and Tim Truman’s GrimJack, as well as Hammer of the Gods by Mark Wheatley and Mike Avon Oeming.
Per the press release, available after the jump, the deal will also allow IDW to publish the titles on handheld devices.
Both GrimJack and Jon Sable were published by First Comics back in the 1980s. IDW has collected both comics in a series of trade paperbacks, while ComicMix began publishing new stories online in 2007.
- March 27, 2009 @ 05:46 AM by JK Parkin
Auction winner shares unpublished Big Numbers #3
from Big Numbers #3
If Chris Mautner’s “Collect This Now!” series was called “Finish This Now!” then he probably would have already covered writer Alan Moore and artist Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers. Two issues saw publication in 1990, with the other ten issues never seeing the light of day (as detailed on the book’s Wikipedia page).
Well, now lettered artwork of the third issue has surfaced thanks to the magic of the internet and eBay. Pádraig O Méalóid, aka LiveJournal user glycon, details how he came to possess Xeroxed copies of the third issue, which were listed on the auction site earlier this year. Glycon checked with Alan Moore before publishing the pages on the web:
In any case, everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn’t believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn’t have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.
I know I have the first two issues somewhere in my collection … time to start digging!
via Kevin Church and The Beat
Related: Eddie Campbell talks about Big Numbers
- March 26, 2009 @ 03:17 PM by JK Parkin
Wizard shuts down Anime Insider
Anime Insider
The ax continues to fall at Wizard Entertainment as word comes of the closing of Anime Insider magazine.
Issue 67, pictured at right, will be the last.
According to former editor Rob Bricken, the entire staff was fired. He names just two — Summer Mullins and Angela Hanson — so it’s unclear how many employees are affected.
Launched in 2001 as a series of quarterly specials called Anime Invasion, the magazine shifted to a bi-monthly schedule in 2002 before being renamed the following year.
The magazine’s closing is the latest in a series of cutbacks at the company, which just last month laid off seven employees, including all three staff writers from Wizard magazine.
- March 26, 2009 @ 12:56 PM by Kevin Melrose
Annotations for Trinity issue #43
Trinity #43
This week’s issue struck me as similar to last week’s. The Trinity is still putting the Earth back together, the villains are still regrouping, and everyone else is trying to figure out what to do. The overall plot did advance a little, but that had more to do with gathering all the players than showing them in action.
Still, the problems I had with this issue seemed also to be the point of the issue itself … so without further ado:
SPOILERS FOLLOW
* * *
LEAD STORY
“Shiny Face Pitch A Fit” was written by Kurt Busiek, pencilled by Mark Bagley, inked by Art Thibert, colored by Pete Pantazis, and lettered by Pat Brosseau; Rachel Gluckstern, associate editor; Mike Carlin, editor.
Continue Reading »
- March 26, 2009 @ 12:48 PM by Tom Bondurant
Loverman, oh where can you be?
Pope's 'Loverman'
I was looking for an excuse to post this Paul Pope page for a story he’s doing for the French magazine Pilote. And then I remembered: It’s Paul Pope, man. No excuse is needed.
- March 26, 2009 @ 11:00 AM by Chris Mautner
What’s more awesome than awesome? Awesome 2: Awesomer
Awesome 2: Awesomer
A couple of years ago the guys who do the Indie Spinner Rack podcast worked with several of their past guests to create an anthology simply called Awesome. This Spring brings the sequel, Awesome 2: Awesomer, which features a nice cover by Jeff Smith and contributions by Alex Robinson, Fred Van Lente, Dave Roman, Jim Rugg, Kevin Colden, Fred Chao, Jeff Lemire, Salgood Sam, Julia Wertz and many more. Check out the full list here.
And while the list of folks involved is impressive enough, there are two elements to the project that I thought really put the “er” in “Awesomer.” First, half the proceeds for the book will go toward scholarships at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Second, the book includes a mini-comic that collects stories by some of the students at the school … so not only does the main book include comics by some of the current greats in independent comics, but the mini-comic features creators we’ll likely be talking about in the future.
And just to put the icing on the cake … Jason Lutes is doing the cover for the mini-comic, while Jon Adams of Truth Serum fame is designing the book.
The book is due to hit stores in May and will be published by Top Shelf Productions.
- March 26, 2009 @ 10:23 AM by JK Parkin
Enjoy a taste of Mahler’s ‘Spam’
Illustration from Mahler's 'Spam'
Cartoonist Nicolas Mahler (Lone Racer) has a new book out entitled Spam, where in he illustrated … well, I’ll let him explain it:
hello. i collected 15.000 spam-mails. i illustrated some of them. you may buy the collection in book form. or just follow this blog. if you`ve got a small dic`k, don`t blame your parents.
- March 26, 2009 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Project: Rooftop reveals ‘Batman 2.0′ contest winners
Anjin Anhut's winning entry for the "Batman 2.0" contest
Superhero costume-redesign website Project: Rooftop has announced the winners of its “Batman 2.0: The Dynamic Do-Over” contest, as selected by its usual crew of reviewers plus artists Dustin Nguyen and J.H. Williams III.
The grand prize went to the above entry, by Anjin Anhut.
To see the other finalists, and to read the judges’ comments, visit the P:R website.
- March 26, 2009 @ 08:32 AM by Kevin Melrose