2010 April
ATM skimming scheme discovered at Calgary Comic Expo site
Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo
If you used an ATM while at last weekend’s Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, it may be a good idea to change your card’s personal identification number.
Calgary’s Metro reports police were alerted to a possible skimming scheme at the BMO Round Up Centre on Sunday after a man discovered double-sided tape on the ATM — presumably securing the faceplate — indicating someone had tampered with the machine.
When you slide your card into the ATM, a skimming device reads the account information stored electronically on the magnetic stripe. Depending on the device’s sophistication, it may be able to read your PIN as you punch it on the ATM keypad.
“A guy who was on the ball and noticed something odd with the machine when double-sided tape came off alerted police this weekend, and I believe an arrest has been made,” a police spokesman told the newspaper.
In addition to the comic convention, the BMO Centre played host last weekend to the Calgary Women’s Show and a Hitmen hockey game.
- April 27, 2010 @ 06:58 AM by Kevin Melrose
Talking Comics with Tim: Thom Zahler
Love and Capes 13
No matter how long I cover the comic book industry, there are always one or two moments in the year when I am reminded how incredibly hard it is to be an independent creator. My email interview with Love and Capes creator Thom Zahler is the latest reminder. As tough as it is, Zahler’s hard work is paying off. This week he’s doubling up his participation in Free Comic Book Day with both Love and Capes #13 (Maerkle Press) and Captains Comics: Baseball Beyond The Stars (1,000 copies to be distributed at a Lake County Captains baseball game [as detailed by Robot 6 a couple of weeks back]). But in even better news, as revealed exclusively in this interview, Love and Capes is moving to IDW at the end of 2010. Read the interview to find out the details. My thanks to Zahler for his time and congrats to the move to IDW.
- April 26, 2010 @ 02:10 PM by Tim O'Shea
Clash of the autobio titans: Harvey Pekar & Alison Bechdel at UCLA
Alison Bechdel by Alison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar by R. Crumb
Fun Home‘s Alison Bechdel and American Splendor‘s Harvey Pekar can be ranked alongside Persepolis‘s Marjane Satrapi and Maus‘s Art Spiegelman (to the extent Maus is autobiographical) as the cartoonists whose autobiographical comics have made the biggest splash in the larger pop-cultural pond. So it must have been a real treat to hear the pair talk about their comics, their lives, and the intersection of the two at UCLA last Friday. Fortunately, CBR’s Tom Gastall was there to tell us all about it today. In addition to talking about process and success, Bechdel and Pekar tease their next projects — Bechdel’s working on a memoir about the making of Fun Home, while Pekar’s got a political work called “How I Lost My Faith in Israel” on the horizon. Should be plenty of grist for discussion. Go read!
- April 26, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Winners of the 2010 Stumptown Comics Fest Trophy Awards
Bear Fight!
Stumptown Comics Fest‘s fourth annual Trophy Awards were presented Saturday at a ceremony at Cosmic Monkey Comics in Portland, Oregon.
Nominees for the awards, which honor independent comics, were selected from the list of exhibitors at this year’s festival. Attendees voted using ballots collected on the first day of the event.
The winners of this year’s Trophy Awards are:
• Outstanding Small Press — Bearfight!, BT Livermore
• Outstanding Debut — The Complete Ouija Interviews, Sarah Becan
• Outstanding D.I.Y. — Bearfight!, BT Livermore
• Outstanding Writing — Boilerplate, Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett
• Outstanding Art — Boilerplate, Paul Guinan
• Outstanding Publication Design — Panorama, Stephenny Godfrey
• Outstanding Webcomic — Wondermark, David Malki!
- April 26, 2010 @ 12:30 PM by Kevin Melrose
Comics Cavalcade | Breaking Bad, nymphomaniacs and Billy Joel
100 Planets by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
- April 26, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Straight for the art | Jamie S. Rich’s Audrey Hepburn sketchbook
by Chynna Clugston
March winds and April showers bring convention season, and with that, the opportunity to fill your convention sketchbook with some nice, new stuff. You’ve already seen Sean’s David Bowie sketchbook, and now Spell Checkers writer Jamie S. Rich talks about how he started his Audrey Hepburn one. You can find more of his sketch collection here.
- April 26, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Everyone’s a Critic | A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
Blackest Night #8
Capes and tights: Wow, here are two posts in one weekend about what’s wrong with superhero comics! Charles Hatfield picks up Blackest Night but just gets tired thinking of all that continuity, while PC Weenies creator Krishna Sadasivam picks up three new comics and finds none of them is accessible to new readers.
Meta: Jeet Heer gives his candidate for worst comics criticism of the 21st century. It’s short so go, read, laugh.
- April 26, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Straight for the art | Jeff Lemire’s Emerald City ComiCon commissions
Spider Jerusalem by Jeff Lemire
If you’ve ever had the good fortune of getting a convention sketch from Sweet Tooth and Essex County writer/artist Jeff Lemire, you’ve learned two things: 1) He can draw pretty much any character, from Doctor Octopus to David Bowie; 2) He goes all out on those suckers. If you haven’t gotten a Lemire sketch of your own, let this gallery of commissions Lemire drew at the Emerald City Con (courtesy of Top Shelf’s Brett Warnock) school you on what you’re missing. Pictured are Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan (above), Robin, Doctor Doom, Nightcrawler, the Golden Age Sandman, the Sweet Tooth cast, and even a character from Lemire’s upcoming Top Shelf graphic novel Underwater Welder. Feast your eyes, folks.
- April 26, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Telltale teases a new game by Graham Annable
Telltale Games, the company behind the Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit and Bone games for various gaming platforms, has a teaser up that features artwork by The Book of Grickle‘s Graham Annable … who has also been teasing it on Twitter for the past few weeks.
Considering Annable also does a comic strip on the Telltale site called Dunk, it isn’t surprising to see them take the relationship further, as his art style and comics fit with the sort of properties they’ve become known for. The site promises more details on May 4.
- April 26, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by JK Parkin
Get grim ‘n’ gritty with a homemade ‘Street Level’ superhero RPG
Shadowland art by Billy Tan
With Kick-Ass in theaters and Marvel’s Daredevil-driven Shadowland event on the horizon, it’s a good time to be a street-level vigilante hero. Now you can be one in the privacy of your own home, thanks to blogger Jon Hasting’s DIY RPG Street Level.
Hastings says he drew inspiration for designing his homemade game in large part from the ’70s & ’80s Marvel characters who will be throwing down in Shadowland — Moon Knight, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Punisher, Ghost Rider, Iron Fist and so on — as well as indie takes on the concept from Mike Baron’s Badger to Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass. Now, what I don’t know about role-playing games could almost fit into the Grand Canyon, but it looks to me like Hastings captured the spirit of what makes these characters fun: The skills your character can develop include “finding shit out,” “taking a beating,” “doing violence,” “telling people what’s what,” and “keeping your shit together” (for those interested in doing a Daredevil: Born Again-style campaign, I guess), while the amount of “Heat” you’ve drawn to yourself from either traditional law enforcement or the criminal underworld is a major factor in your success or failure. Actual superpowers are optional; if you want your character to be able to light his fists on fire thanks to some experimental drug/martial-arts mojo, that’s fine, but it’s also fine to just have him roll out of bed, put on a jumpsuit, and beat up some muggers.
Hastings is concerned that he may have overdesigned the game, but he needs to have it playtested to be sure. Why not give it a spin yourself?
- April 26, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Manga mojo slips in Madison
Can you find this manga in a store near you?
ICv2 is mainly a newsletter for retailers, but numbers guy Milton Greipp does a great service to the industry as a whole by tracking the sales numbers and trends for comics and graphic novels. His most recent set of results, revealed in a White Paper at C2E2, shows that manga sales were down 20% in 2009, after sliding 16% the year before, with the most recent drop coming mostly in the bookstore channel.
This weekend, a crack ICv2 team went out to document this trend by counting the number of volumes of Naruto stocked in the major chain bookstores in Madison, Wisconsin (where ICv2 is headquartered). Amazon, which carries all 47 volumes of the top-rated series, gets a score of 100%, which of course is hard for the bricks-and-mortar stores to match. Indeed, although Borders used to carry every volume of every series, the Madison store only had 29 volumes, or 62% of the series. Barnes and Noble did a bit better, with 39 volumes, or 83%. The article is worth reading in full because it puts these numbers in context.
Any statistician can tell you that a small sample size doesn’t give a reliable result, but I believe these counts because they match my own experience as well as reported trends: Borders, in particular, has shrunk its graphic novel inventory. Using just one series has another limitation, though: In my experience, Borders has a wider range of titles available than B&N, which seems to carry a narrower range of manga overall.
In his White Paper presentation at C2E2, Greipp discussed a number of factors affecting bookstore sales of manga, including his own hypothesis that the shoujo manga fans have moved over to Twilight, and that shoujo readers tend to drop comics as they get older. It’s also true that books like Naruto and Bleach no longer get the boost they once did from having the anime broadcast on Cartoon Network. With the anime version of Kekkaishi set to debut on Cartoon Network on May 29, it will be interesting to see if manga—and the bookstores—get their mojo working again.
- April 26, 2010 @ 08:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Comic-Con International
Conventions | Everyone who has been waiting months to learn whether Comic-Con International will remain in San Diego past 2012 will have to wait a little longer, as no decision was reached Sunday during the meeting of the board of directors. Marketing Director David Glanzer said he expects an answer within the next three weeks.
The brief article in The San Diego Union-Tribune notes a new — or least not previously reported — concession being made to convention organizers: Hotel owners have agreed that no rooms in the dedicated Comic-Con block will exceed $300 a night. [Union-Tribune]
Retailing | Amazon’s total revenue for the first quarter jumped 46 percent to $7.13 billion; net income rose 68 percent to $299 million. [Publishers Weekly]
Awards | Political cartoonist Bill Day, who was laid off last year by the Memphis Commercial Appeal, is among the winners of the 42nd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. [Comic Riffs]
- April 26, 2010 @ 08:04 AM by Kevin Melrose
The return of the Smurfs
New edition of The Purple Smurf
The Smurfs are back! What, you didn’t know they ever left? Apparently the little blue guys have been out of print, at least in the U.S., for years, but NBM/Papercutz is bringing them back, with the first volume, The Purple Smurf, set to debut in August. (Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary has two definitions of “The Purple Smurf,” and neither of them is obscene. Go figure.)
Most people experienced the Smurfs as animated cartoons, rather than as comics, but that’s the origin — they first made their appearance in a Belgian kids’ comic in 1958. Jog, who broke the news (on a tip from Pedro Bouça), has more commentary, including the note that the purple Smurfs were actually black in the original comic; apparently the symbolism was too heavy-handed for the folks at Hanna-Barbera, who re-colored them in the animated cartoon.
NBM/Papercutz does a nice job when they bring European comics over here, except for a tendency to shrink them too much. At first glance, these look like full-size albums (like Tintin), but the type makes me think they are going to be smaller. The Amazon listings don’t give a trim size.
- April 26, 2010 @ 05:02 AM by Brigid Alverson
What are you reading?
Power Girl #11
Welcome once again to What are you reading? Our special guest this week is Esther Inglis-Arkell, who you can find blogging about DC Comics over at the 4thletter! and about science and related stuff at io9. To see what Esther and the rest of the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click the link below …
- April 25, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Webcomics.com partners with printer
When Webcomics.com went to a subscription model in January, one of the possible benefits editor Brad Guigar mentioned was that subscribers might get special deals on products and services. Indeed, when we checked in with Brad at C2E2 last week, he was surrounded by subscribers who had gotten a $60 discount on their booths.
This morning he announced another partnership, with Transcontinental printers, which will offer Webcomics.com members a 10% discount on their printing costs. Transcontinental is an offset printer, so it does large print runs of hundreds of books, as opposed to print-on-demand outfits that do one copy at a time. Offset printers generally offer better quality and lower unit costs, so this could push a cartoonist on the edge from one model to the other.
Beyond that, it’s an example of what it takes to make a subscription website work. At this point, Webcomics.com is looking a bit like a professional association, as opposed to simply a place where you go to read articles. It’s a move that makes sense, given the tightly targeted audience.
- April 24, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Brigid Alverson