2010 April
Everyone’s A Critic | A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
Dan Dare
Paul Gravett looks at the influence of the British boys’ comic Eagle, home of Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, which was favorite childhood reading for John Byrne, Chris Claremont, and Bryan Talbot, among others.
Casey Brienza isn’t just a manga reviewer, she’s a grad student studying paratext, the trappings of manga that make it manga. That’s more interesting than it sounds—check out her slideshow and brief writeup of the importance of trim size to American manga, and the way it was not only standardized but was used to define non-Japanese books as manga.
Faith Erin Hicks contemplates the uses of drawing as she compares Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto with Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and throws in some thoughts on Kate Beaton for good measure.
Richard Bruton, who is not in the target audience by any means, picks up Twilight: The Graphic Novel and finds it… not terrible. Sean Kleefeld, meanwhile, finds some interesting parallels to a vintage comic (mainly, both seem to be incoherent).
Tintin dissenter Noah Berlatsky remains unmoved by The Castafiore Emerald, although his son loves it.
Chris Sims and Mike Sterling deliver their monthly beatdowns of Previews.
Kent Worcester reviews Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980, which is the sort of book that would make me stay up nights.
Johanna Draper Carlson reviews two print editions of webcomics, The Night Owls and Louis Trondheim’s Little Nothings: Uneasy Happiness.
- April 6, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
For the Wolverine fan who has everything (including a motorcycle)
"X2" Wolverine Motorcycle Suit
Motorcycle-riding comics fans, and cosplayers, take note: UD Replicas has unveiled its official X2 Wolverine Motorcycle Suit.
The leather suit which, as you may have guessed, is a replica of the one worn by Hugh Jackman in X2: X-Men United, includes the jacket, gloves and pants. According to the manufacturer, the suit incorporates removable CE-approved body armor, gloves with anti-skid Kevlar in the lining of the palms, and “an interior, form-molded muscle suit sandwiched into the jacket’s torso section.”
And it can all be yours … for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 (the price hasn’t been finalized yet). UD Replicas will take orders through its website beginning later this month, so start saving your pennies.
What’s that, you’re more of an Iron Man, um, man? Well, you’re in luck: UD is also developing a leather replica of Tony Stark’s Mark V Suitcase Suit from Iron Man 2.
That one sounds kind of cool, actually. Just not for me (or my bank account).
- April 6, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Exclusive Preview: Dark Horse’s Hellcyon #1
Hellcyon #1
Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics, we’re pleased to present an exclusive look at three pages from the upcoming Hellcyon #1 by Lucas Marangon, due in stores April 14. Shaun Manning spoke with Marangon about the book back in January .
‘Hellcyon’ is about people fighting for their right to identity and a destiny of their own,” Marangon told CBR. “On one hand we have Nika Raguza, the protagonist, who is an adopted child who finds out his true origins were hidden from him and decides to get them back; and on the other, we have this off-world society of settlers that one day realizes they’ve become a nation.”
Check out the preview after the jump.
- April 6, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
The Avengers/X-Men comics/movie conspiracy theory
Three magic words
It’s like some kind of comics-industry What If: After decades of dominance, the X-Men franchise relinquishes its flagship status to a different Marvel team, perpetual also-rans the Avengers.
Older fans still shake their heads in disbelief, but that’s pretty much exactly what happened during the ’00s. Despite starting strong with Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, Marvel’s merry mutants stumbled when the writer abruptly departed; Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men may have been a hit, but its self-contained story was never intended to spearhead the line in the traditional sense. Meanwhile, Brian Michael Bendis disassembled the old Avengers and rang in the New, featuring cross-platform pop-culture superstars Spider-Man and Wolverine. He and writers like Mark Millar placed the Avengers characters front and center in a series of line-spanning event comics that became the go-to business and storytelling model for Marvel, cementing the place of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes at the head of the character class. In a way, Bendis’s House of M event — in which the New Avengers and Astonishing X-Men join forces to put an end to an alternate Magneto-ruled timeline, only for the Scarlet Witch to nearly eradicate the mutant population — can be seen as a ceremonial passing of the torch.
But there was a parallel development as well: Marvel’s new in-house movie wing Marvel Studios announced plans to make a series of films starring traditional Avengers characters Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, even Ant-Man — and then bring them together for the first live-action superhero crossover, an Avengers film. 20th Century Fox, meanwhile, controls the rights to the X-Men’s teeming mutant multitudes.
This gave rise to one of the more interesting conspiracy theories I’ve seen floating around fandom: Was Marvel deliberately beefing up the Avengers franchise and cutting down the X-Men to better suit their film slate?
- April 6, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Sean T. Collins
Thin wallets, fat bookshelves | A publishing news roundup
Batman and Robin by Jim Lee
This is a special “WonderCon + more” edition of Thin Wallets, as we round up publishing news from last weekend’s con, plus a few other items of note …
- DC Comics announced that they are replacing the long-delayed All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder with Dark Knight: Boy Wonder. The book will still be by the creative team of Frank Miller and Jim Lee, and is due in February 2011.
- IDW has picked up the license to make comics based on HBO’s southern vampire show True Blood. The show’s creator, Alan Ball, is helping to develop the stories.
- IDW will also release another version of their Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer collection — Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer: Artist Edition. The oversized hardcover will be printed as the same size as Stevens’ original art, approximately 11 by 16 inches. “You’ll be able to see his beautiful blue pencil work, you’ll be able to see the stats, all of it,” Special Projects Editor Scott Dunbier said. “It’ll be the closest thing you ever get to Dave Stevens original art.”
- Judd Winick announced that he is writing a new Barry Ween book. “Thankfully, after, like, an eight-year hiatus, I’m actually – swear to God – I’m actually doing more ‘Barry Ween.’ I’m writing it now,” he said at his spotlight panel. Barry Ween is heading into space in the new story.
- Image Comics is collecting The Crusades, by Steven T. Seagle and Kelley Jones, into a hardcover. The series was originally published by Vertigo. Seagle is also teaming up with artist Marco Cinello for a children’s book called Frankie Stein.
- April 6, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by JK Parkin
Slash Print | The OMG it’s the iPad edition
From the Apple.com video of the Marvel Comics App
• Apple reports that it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, when the media slate was released nationwide. That same day, iPad owners downloaded more than 1 million applications from the App Store, and more than 250,000 digital books.
• The Marvel Comics App is one of only 11 for the iPad showcased on Apple.com — that’s out of more than 1,000 available on the App Store. The spotlight comes complete with a video of someone browsing The Invincible Iron Man #1, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca.
• At CNET, Seth Rosenblatt reviews the Marvel app.
• Jeffery Simpson considers the differences in the digital paths taken by the music and comic-book industries: “The major applicable lesson from the music industry is not to wait too long before moving toward digital. Record labels grossly misjudged where music sales were going to be going, and spent more time fighting illegal downloads from Napster than they did in finding a way to sell music on-line. It took Apple and iTunes to finally drag the major labels into the digital age, and the record labels continue to manage to cripple new music services and potential revenue streams by forcing draconian digital-rights management software into services that don’t have the clout of an Apple or Amazon.com behind them. Eventually though, the comic industry needs to decide whether or not it’s in the business of selling paper, or selling illustrated sequential stories.”
• And on Twitter, writer Andy Diggle cuts to the chase: “The elephant in the room: will creators get royalties on iPad comic purchases?”
- April 6, 2010 @ 08:18 AM by Kevin Melrose
Send us your MoCCA plans!
MoCCA Art Festival 2010
The ninth annual MoCCA Art Festival will take place this weekend at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan, featuring special guests Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Paul Pope, Dash Shaw, Jaime Hernandez, Gabrielle Bell, Hope Larson, Alex Robinson, Gahan Wilson and more … and the “and more” is where you come in.
Are you a creator, publisher, or area retailer with big MoCCA plans? Are there book debuts, signings, panels, special guests, parties, tie-in events you want the readers of Robot 6 to hear about? If so, let us know! Just email brigid@mangablog.net and we’ll take care of the rest.
See you at the show!
- April 6, 2010 @ 07:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Anime Boston | Convention report
Hetalia: Coming soon?
Anime Boston is a fan con, not a big industry con, so it has a great cosplay scene but not a lot of manga news. While I don’t follow anime, I am reliably informed that a lot of the costumes this year were based on Hetalia: Axis Powers, so that may be the Next Big Thing; coincidentally, Amazon is listing the manga as a September Tokyopop release (Amazon is not 100% accurate, so I’m waiting for confirmation on that). Also: Someone was cosplaying as Flo from the Progressive Insurance commercials. And Jesus was there; since it was the day before Easter, maybe he had some time off. (There’s a Catholic chapel next to the entrance to the Hynes Convention Center, and the mingling of churchgoers and cosplayers is always amusing; I wonder if any of the priests were startled to see their boss heading toward the doors.)
People were certainly lining up enthusiastically for the anime screenings and there were plenty of panels on cultural topics, including Japanamerica author Roland Kelts, who spoke about the cross-fertilization of Japanese and American culture. I didn’t have time for any other panels, but I did spend some time in the Artists Alley, which always seems to feature some interesting cartoonists, not necessarily of the manga variety. This year was no exception.
Dirk Tiede was there, and by Saturday evening he had already sold out of the third volume of Paradigm Shift. Dirk recently wrapped up a story arc and is taking a bit of a break while he tours the Midwest — the next time I see him will probably be at C2E2 — but he hopes to launch the new arc in the late spring.
- April 6, 2010 @ 06:01 AM by Brigid Alverson
Talking Comics with Tim: David Malki !
Wondermark Volume 3: Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters HC
It’s damn hard to make me laugh, but I did laugh last month when I looked at Robot 6′s exclusive preview of David Malki !’s (yep there’s an exclamation point in his name) Wondermark Volume 3: Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters. It happened most when I got to the ambitious talking baby in a stroller in the In Which It’s What Month Already? strip, where the baby lamented: “Still poopin’ where I freakin’ sleep!” In fact I still laugh when I look at that panel, no matter how many times. I had to get a perspective on Malki !’s creative mentality, so fortunately he agreed to an email interview. Here’s part of Dark Horse’s official summary of the project: “It’s Wondermark time again! Come along for the ride as Dark Horse returns to David Malki’s silly, bizarre, and hilarious world that’s not quite present day, not quite the Victorian era, and not like anything else you’ve seen before. (Unless you’ve read the previous Wondermark books, of course!) This newest volume of the Eisner-nominated series contains over one hundred comic strips originally published in The Onion and on wondermark.com, plus many pages of additional material by creator David Malki. More than just webcomic collections, the Wondermark books have been praised for their magnificent design and loads of extra content for casual readers and superfans alike.” My thanks to Malki ! for his time and for Dark Horse’s Jim Gibbons for facilitating the interview.
Tim O’Shea: Okay, before getting into Wondermark, what led you to pursuits such as being a volunteer search & rescue pilot, or a freelance firearm specialist for film and television?
David Malki !: As a licensed pilot, I was a member of the Civil Air Patrol for a while, which is a volunteer organization whose main mission is to conduct aerial searches for downed planes after a crash is reported. A lot of times, when a small plane crashes in a remote area, there’s no way to know exactly where it went down (all we have is a radio signal), and if the pilot or passengers are injured, it’s important to find them right away. CAP pilots fly search missions in the area where the plane was last reported, and try to locate the site of the crash as quickly as possible.
- April 5, 2010 @ 02:07 PM by Tim O'Shea
Strangeways: The Thirsty – Page 129
Art by Gervasio and Jok. Written by Matt Maxwell.
- April 5, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by Matt Maxwell
Straight for the art | Don’t go into the woods …
Don't go into the woods ...
Freelance artist “kizer180” on DeviantART shares what might be the real reason we never see Calvin & Hobbes anymore … they wandered down the wrong path.
“Looks like Christopher Robins just ordered the guys to sneak attack and kill some kid and his imaginary friend,” the artist writes. “I guess that’s what happens when you travel to far into the damn woods. Wonder if Walt knew about this shitty behavior.”
- April 5, 2010 @ 12:03 PM by JK Parkin
Publishers Weekly bought by former executive
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly has been purchased by one of its former publishers, continuing Reed Business Information’s sell-off of its trade publications.
The magazine, which covers the book industry, releases the PW Comics Week e-newsletter and, until recently, played host to The Beat. PW was bought by PWxyz, a company formed by George Slowik, who served as the magazine’s publisher in the 1980s and 1990s.
According to PW, the new owner will retain all employees and remain headquartered in New York City. Cevin Bryerman will continue as publisher, with Jim Milliot and Michael Coffey serving as co-editors.
Reed’s parent company, global-publishing giant Reed Elsevier, attempted to sell its entire magazine division in February 2008, but withdrew its plans when it couldn’t get its asking price. It tried again in July 2009 to unload the publications as a group, but eventually had to resort to selling them separately.
Just last month Reed sold Library Journal and School Library Journal to Ohio-based Media Source Inc. (the School Library Journal website plays host to the Good Comics for Kids blog). Reed still owns Variety, MarketCast, Tradeshow Week and numerous other trade magazines.
Reed Elsevier also owns Reed Exhibitions, which produces New York Comic Con, the New York Anime Expo, BookExpo America and the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo.
- April 5, 2010 @ 11:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Slash Print | Following the digital evolution
Penny Arcade
Creators: Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, creators of Penny Arcade, are currently number 9 in the voting for Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Before you make too much of this, note that Lady GaGa is number one. (Via ComixTalk.)
Webcomics: Top Shelf is publishing War Wounds, a new webcomic by Adrian English, at their Top Shelf 2.0 webcomics site. English, who is doing 20 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, writes about prison life from the inside. It’s raw and naive but strangely fascinating as well.
Japan: Canadian Business Magazine explains how Harlequin (yes, the romance people) took the reins themselves and developed the cell phone romance manga market in Japan. (Via Icarus Comics, which may be NSFW.)
Webcomics: Electric Sheep Comix is back on the web, which means, just in time for Easter, we can once more read Apocamon, the extremely awesome (no, really!) manga version of the Apocalypse.
Devices: Donald Burr discusses the many possibilities the iPad holds for anime and manga fans.
Devices: Anime writer Helen McCarthy catches word of technology that would allow display of 3D movies on handheld devices—without the need for glasses.
- April 5, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
The last Best of 2009 list?
Footnotes in Gaza
I’d say “better late than never,” but in my experience, like Gandalf, The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon is never late, nor is he early — he posts his Best Comics of 2009 list precisely when he means to. And it’s a good one, divided into sections on reprints, overlooked gems, books about comics, and your basic best books of the year. Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated, and Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days comprise his top three.
I come away from the list thinking two things. First, from about his #7 choice up to Number One, that’s a pretty brain-crushing line-up of major works; it’s not difficult to picture a stretch of five years not yielding that kind of harvest. I mean, Josh Cotter’s astonishing Driven by Lemons ranks only at #15 — I ranked that book a lot higher on my own list, but that you can make reasonable arguments for that kind of placement given what else is out there speaks to the richness of the field right now.
Second and relatedly, Spurge wraps things up with a few paragraphs on books that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason, one of them being simply not remembering them all. “It’s a fantastic time for an art form when you can just forget about some of its quality works,” he says, and I would agree.
- April 5, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Sean T. Collins
Anime Boston | Vertical panel
Peepo Choo, Vol. 1
Like Drawn and Quarterly, Vertical Inc., publishes manga for people who think they don’t like manga. Its best-selling titles include the Osamu Tezuka classics Black Jack and Buddha, and it also publishes a variety of series that go beyond the standard shonen/battle and shoujo/romance genres; upcoming titles include the all-ages cat manga Chi’s Sweet Home and the action-packed Peepo Choo, a series created by American creator Felipe Smith for a Japanese publisher.
Vertical’s marketing director, Ed Chavez, showed up at Anime Boston over the weekend with an aggressive schedule to announce. Although it’s a small company, Vertical plans to release a volume of its manga series every two months. Chavez took the opportunity to promote the company’s previously announced series and also tease the audience about some potential new licenses. Noting that Black Jack will end next summer, Chavez said, “We will be working with Tezuka productions to see if we can add another Tezuka series next year. … I want to get an actual series that is provocative and hopefully not too lengthy. If we can find something around the Buddha range, six, seven, eight volumes, that will please many of you Tezuka fans out there.”
Chavez also flashed a slide for a mysterious “Manga Series R,” by a creator whose work was once published by Viz Media. That’s all he would say, but the book will be a 320-page hardcover volume, which looks like a prestige format.
- April 5, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson