2009 October
Your Steve Oliff update of the month
Color separation page from 'Akira'
Looking over the new Kodansha version of Vol. 1 of Akira (which, I’m sorry to say, is little more than the Dark Horse version on cheaper paper and the word Kodansha on the spine), I realized how much I appreciated colorist Steve Oliff’s work on the series when it was initially serialized by Epic, Marvel Comics’ fancy-shmancy line, back in the late ’80s and early 90s. I think it’s one of the few instances where an already great body of work was actually improved upon in translation.
I’m not the only one, as Ryan Sands at Same Hat! is a big fan of Oliff’s work as well. Apparently, Oliff was at APE last weekend selling the color reproduction pages to interested parties, and Sands shares a few pages on his blog.
If you want to know more about Oliff and his work, by the way, check out this interview with Frank Santoro, and this interview by Oliff about his experiences coloring Akira.
Oliff also was featured recently in his local newspaper, the Independent Coast Observer, in a non-comics, rather tragic fashion. According to the story, Oliff came upon a deadly car accident in Manchester, near San Francisco, and attempted to pull the driver from the crash but was unable to do so before the man died.
- October 23, 2009 @ 11:37 AM by Chris Mautner
xkcd: The Movie!
Well, kinda. Animator Noam Raby and musician Olga Nunes have teamed up to create “I Love xkcd,” an animated musical version of webcomic god Randall Munroe’s xkcd strip “xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel.” (Which itself was a riff on the aforementioned basic cable network’s jingle-based ad campaign.)
Raby’s actually done this before, previously taking a crack at Munroe’s look at when computer love goes bad, “Letting Go.” Look for both movies to make their IMAX 3-D debut this holiday season.*
(Via Ezra Klein.)
* Do not actually do this
- October 23, 2009 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
This weekend, it’s Boston Comic Con
Weekly Dig
Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener’s Atomic Robo graces the cover of Boston’s Weekly Dig just in time for Boston Comic Con, which kicks off Saturday at the Back Bay Events Center.
In addition to Wegener, guests will include Louise Simonson, Walt Simonson, Tim Sale, Bill Sienkiewicz, Herb Trimpe, Geof Darrow, Cliff Chiang, David Mack, Khoi Pham, Mike McKone, Stephane Roux, Craig Rousseau, Eric Canete and Jim Calafiore.
- October 23, 2009 @ 10:20 AM by Kevin Melrose
Robot reviews: Stitches & Monsters
Stitches: A Memoir
Stitches: A Memoir
by David Small
WW Norton, 336 pages, $24.95.
Monsters
by Ken Dahl
Secret Acres, 208 pages, $18.
I sometimes suspect that part of the reason some critics (if I can use that term) are hostile towards the recent spate of comic book (sorry, graphic novel) memoirs is due to a mistrust of the genre itself. There’s a tendency when someone is chronicling a dramatic, personal event, to exult praise merely for inherent drama of the story, particularly if it’s a traumatic one, than the skill in the telling. Some folks, in other words, get swept up in the idea of the story itself and the bravery of the person in coming forward to tell it, and ignore whether or not the work succeeds as art.
Certainly the success of books like Fun Home and Persepolis has resulted in publishers unleashing a number of bad or mediocre memoirs on the public. So perhaps it’s not surprising some folks are wary when a buzz-heavy memoir gets released.
Two such books hit the stands recently, David Small’s National Book Award-nominated (but kids only!) Stitches and the Ken Dahl’s Monsters. The good news is that both books deserve at least some, if not all, of the positive attention they’ve been getting.
- October 23, 2009 @ 09:45 AM by Chris Mautner
Straight for the art | Matt Wiegle’s 1984 video
Even if you haven’t read George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, you’re undoubtedly familiar with its ominous mantra-like totalitarian slogan, “Big Brother Is Watching You.” Now you can watch Big Brother right back, courtesy of Ignatz Award nominated comics creator Matt Wiegle. Wiegle’s illustrated a summary video of Orwell’s novel for Sparknotes.com, Barnes & Noble’s study-guide site. You can check out sketches, pencils, and inks for many of the scenes in the July and August archives of PartykaUSA.com, the website of Wiegle’s comics collective — as well as a few full-color finished versions at my other blog.
This isn’t the first time Wiegle’s worked with Sparknotes: He helped adapt Romeo & Juliet into graphic-novel form for their No Fear Shakespeare series. (To see him work with a vastly less talented creator, you can read three comics he and I did together at Top Shelf 2.0 if you’re so inclined.)
- October 23, 2009 @ 08:55 AM by Sean T. Collins
Straight for the art | Scott Morse shares his APE commissions
Hellboy
Artist Scott Morse shares on his blog several commissions he did at APE last weekend, including this one of Hellboy.
- October 23, 2009 @ 08:25 AM by JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Libraries | Two library employees in Nicholasville, Kentucky, were fired last month after they refused to allow an 11-year-old girl to check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which they dubbed pornographic. However, the policy of the Jessamine County Library states it’s the responsibility of parents to decide what’s appropriate for their child to read.
The fired employees, Beth Bovaire and Sharon Cook, stand behind their decision, asserting that the award-winning comic by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill contains lewd pictures that are inappropriate for children.
“If you give children pornography, a child, a 12 year old, can not understand and process the same way a 30 year old can,” Cook told a local television news station. [WTVQ, WTVQ]
Tokyo International Manga Library
Libraries | A private university in Tokyo hopes to promote the serious study of manga by opening a library stocked with 2 million comics, anime drawings, video games and other artifacts. If everything goes as planned, the Tokyo International Manga Library would open on the campus of Meiji University in 2015. [AFP]
Publishing | Even after the closing last year of Virgin Comics, upbeat profiles of the Indian comics industry continue to appear regularly. But here Gaurav Jain, head of the Mumbai-based Illusion Interactive Animation, offers a more dismal assessment of the scene in India: “While competition has arrived, the local industry continues to live in its shell, churning out visually unappealing and terribly written local content with little or no film and television possibilities. One of the most widely read labels offers sanitized, vanilla retellings of Indian mythology and historical figures with visuals inspired from the works of Raja Ravi Verma. Derivative art work and bland writing, leads to visual fatigue.” [The Wall Street Journal]
- October 23, 2009 @ 07:48 AM by Kevin Melrose
No Blackest Night in the darkest month: DC Entertainment comic-book solicitations for January, 2010
Grumpy Old Fan
Time once again for the monthly ritual of parsing DC’s solicitations. This batch is special, not because it’s the first of a new year. (That would require the calendar to mean something to superhero comics, like it does at least superficially to TV and movies.) No, January ’10 finds DC’s superhero books taking a break from Blackest Night to … pretty much continue the same amount of Blackest Night coverage.
Anyway, grab your wallet and fire up your spreadsheet, because it’s a decent month regardless.
Continue Reading »
- October 22, 2009 @ 02:30 PM by Tom Bondurant
Straight for the art | George Perez draws the Wildstorm Universe
WildCats #19 and The Authority #18 covers
Here’s another item George Perez can check off his list of “comic book universes I need to draw” — the artist of New Teen Titans, Crisis on Infinite Earths and JLA/Avengers provides two interlocking covers for WildCats #19 and The Authority #18.
- October 22, 2009 @ 02:00 PM by JK Parkin
Kramers Ergot 7: the minicomic?
Hall Hassi's "ke7 zine"
Standing nearly two feet tall, boasting over 50 contributors (including Matt Groening, Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, and Adrian Tomine), and costing $125, Kramers Ergot 7 — the latest installment of the avant-garde anthology series from editor Sammy Harkham and publisher Alvin Buenaventura — was a famously, even infamously, grand production. And now…it’s a minicomic?
Artist Hall Hassi has created what she calls a “ke7 zine“ — a 96-page, 8.5″ x 5.5″, black-and-white xeroxed version of the massive full-color hardcover. Pictures of the finished product can be found at the blog of artist Blaise Larmee, who notes that “sometimes the text is entirely legible. sometimes not at all.” God only knows what kind of Kinko’s kung fu had to be applied to even get the book to fit on a photocopier, so not being able to read some of it seems like a small price to pay.
Email Hassi if you’re interested in purchasing one — unless you’re Sammy Harkham himself, who’s still waiting to find out when he can expect a contributor copy.
(Via Kramers contributor James McShane.)
- October 22, 2009 @ 01:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Strangeways: The Thirsty – Page 096
We’ve substituted the post day for everyone’s favorite ongoing horror/western serial. Let’s see if they notice…
Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Gervasio and Jok.
That’s just this week, folks. Should be back on schedule for Halloween week. Geez, Halloween already.
- October 22, 2009 @ 01:00 PM by Matt Maxwell
Frank Miller, conservative comment-thread commentator
Frank Miller and Eva Mendes (photo by UGO.com's Dr. Know)
He’s one of the most influential comics creators of all time (and my personal favorite, might I add), but Frank Miller has kept a pretty low profile since the critical and box-office failure of his adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit last Christmas. He’s reportedly continued to work on scripts for his Jim Lee collaboration All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder and the sequel to the Sin City film adaptation he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez; and of course there’s his long-gestating graphic novel that may or may not be about Batman fighting al Qaeda and may or may not be called Holy Terror, Batman! But whatever he’s been up to, he’s been up to it incommunicado, turning down requests for interviews.
- October 22, 2009 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Straight for the art | Yokai diagrams
Can't translate the Japanese, sorry
Yokai are types of traditional Japanese folk monsters that many manga-ka like Shigeru Mizunki incorporate into their stories. Few provide as many awesome cut-away diagrams of their monsters as Mizunki does in his book Yōkai Daizukai, which the site Pink Tentacle offers some amazing samples from.
- October 22, 2009 @ 11:30 AM by Chris Mautner
Crime, punishment and Tezuka
From Tezuka's 'Crime and Punishment'
The Kurkutta blog posted a few sample pages from one of Osamu Tezuka’s early works, namely his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The scans are from a long-out-of-print English version that Frederick Schodt translated back when nobody knew what shojo meant. Look at the way he sets mood in these simple panels (remember: read right to left). Even in his early days, he was testing the boundaries of the medium. (found via Matthew Brady)
- October 22, 2009 @ 11:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Finally, you no longer need feel ashamed for being round-headed
If that ice sculpture story yesterday didn’t grab you, perhaps this will: In honor of Peanuts’ upcoming 60th anniversary, the powers that be are holding a lookalike photo contest, with the winners receiving a trip for four to Cedar Point, home of the Planet Snoopy amusement park. Other prizes include DVDs and other Peanuts related merchandise. Daily Cartoonist has the press release:
Peanuts
Peanuts fans of all ages are invited to submit photos of themselves or their children looking like one of these Peanuts characters: Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Schroeder, Franklin, Peppermint Patty, Marcie or Pigpen, or one of Snoopy’s classic alter-egos, Joe Cool or the World War I Flying Ace. Submissions will be accepted through November 3.
Finalists, selected by a panel of celebrity judges, will be posted on November 11. The public will then be able to vote for their favorite finalist through November 30. The winners will be announced in December.
The celebrity judges include Jill Schulz, daughter of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz; country music legends Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood; “Supernanny” Jo Frost; “America’s Next Top Model” judge and fashion photographer Nigel Barker; and Victoria Reca~no, co-anchor of KTLA 5 News at 6 and KTLA 5 News at 10.
Proceeds from the contest will benefit the Boys and Girls Club of America. Winners will be announced on Dec. 5. The press release also suggests some celebrity lookalikes which … Michael Cera as Linus I can see, but Whoopi Goldberg as Woodstock? I …. guess ….
- October 22, 2009 @ 10:30 AM by Chris Mautner