2010 August
Nathan Cosby and the fine art of the recap page
From Thor: The Mighty Avenger #4
Fans of Marvel comics, and the creation process, would do well to follow the Tumblr blog of editor Nathan Cosby, which, in addition to dog photos, boasts brief interviews with the likes of Fred Van Lente, Brian Clevinger and Kurt Busiek, and this: a look at Cosby’s approach to crafting a recap page, using Thor: the Mighty Avenger #4 as a sterling example.
“I like giving a new reader a sporting chance at understanding what they’re about to read,” he writes. “Lil’ context & a few character names never hurt nobody. But I hate. Hate. HATE dry, text-heavy recaps with no art. When your recap’s so boring that a reader would rather skip it than know what’s happened previously, then your recap has no purpose. Might as well have an ad to start the book.”
- August 20, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Is there such a thing as an ethical pirate?
At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson makes the argument that it is ethical to download “pirate” comics if you have already bought the hard copy, but you want a digital copy for the sake of convenience.
My husband, an old-school comic fan, is a fanatic for keeping the periodical comics in near-perfect shape. Me, I’m not quite so careful with them (since for me, they’re to be read and probably forgotten before the next chapter comes out). My graphic novels are sturdier and hold up better to sloppy handling. So to keep the peace, and avoid having an unhappy husband, I’m contemplating downloading versions of the comics we have already bought. That way, KC has the paper objects, and I have versions to read without worrying about what condition they’re in or if I’m stacking them too high or piling things on top of them. Plus, I can take comic books with me while traveling, something I’d otherwise never do with individual issues. (I read them too quickly to justify the space in packing them.)
This argument has the endorsement of Randy Cohen, the Ethicist columnist for the New York Times, who wrote:
- August 20, 2010 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Ignatz nominations are out
Julia Gfrörer's Flesh and Bone
Nominations for the Ignatz Awards, which go to outstanding independent comics, were released today at the Small Press Expo site; the awards will be presented at SPX on Sept. 11. Here’s the list:
Outstanding Artist
Eddie Campbell, Alec: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Sized Omnibus) (Top Shelf Productions)
Al Columbia, Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days (Fantagraphics Books)
Mike Dawson, Troop 142 (self-published)
John Pham, Sublife #2 (Fantagraphics Books)
Sully, The Hipless Boy (Conundrum Press)
Outstanding Anthology or Collection
The Hipless Boy, Sully (Conundrum Press)
Lemon Styles, David King (Sparkplug Comic Books)
Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak (Drawn & Quarterly)
Red Snow, Susumu Katsumata (Drawn & Quarterly)
Ten Thousand Things to Do, Jesse Reklaw (self-published)
Outstanding Graphic Novel
The Complete Jack Survives, Jerry Moriarty (Buentaventura Press)
Market Day, James Sturm (Drawn & Quarterly)
Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia (Fantagraphics Books)
Summit of the Gods Vol. 1, Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
Years of the Elephant, Willy Linthout (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
- August 19, 2010 @ 07:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Publishers confirm that Angel will return to Dark Horse
Angel #12 (from 2000)
Following yesterday’s announcement, Dark Horse and IDW Publishing now have confirmed that Angel will return to Dark Horse beginning late next year. IDW has held the comics rights to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television spin-off since 2005.
Under the direction of Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon, all parties are working together for as seamless a transition as possible,” IDW said in a statement posted today on the company’s website. “The companies have been coordinating storylines in both Dark Horse’s Buffy and IDW’s Angel, creating a greater sense of cohesion and cooperation to ensure that this transition is true to both ongoing storylines and to the faithful fans of both series.”
News of the move broke yesterday in Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Riley one-shot, “without coordination with IDW,” the company notes.
In the IDW statement, Dark Horse senior managing editor Scott Allie apologized for the way the news was released: “Behind the scenes, we’d been working closely with IDW to ensure that the hand-off went smoothly. It was never our intent to catch Angel or IDW readers unaware.”
IDW’s final six-issue arc begins in November with Angel #39.
Dark Horse published Angel from 2000 to 2002, first as an ongoing series and then, briefly, as a miniseries. The company also published Buffy comics from 1998 to 2004 before launching the highly successful Season 8 in 2007. Season 9 begins late next year.
“I’ve always regretted letting Angel go in the first place,” senior managing editor Scott Allie said in a separate press release. “So we’re really excited about getting him back, as well as all his supporting cast. It’s necessary for how Joss wants to handle season nine, details of which will start spilling out in the months to come. Right now, we’ve got to wrap up season eight, and IDW still has a good long run of books before season nine starts.”
- August 19, 2010 @ 06:04 PM by Kevin Melrose
Grumpy Old Fan | I approve these messages: DC Comics Solicitations for November 2010
Batman #119
Careful readers may have noticed that in past months I have been a little lukewarm towards DC’s solicitations.
Well, not this time.
Although we’ve already heard about many of these new titles, the fact that they all hit in the same month helps make the November solicits pretty eventful. So let’s see how DC’s loaded the pre-holiday season, shall we?
* * *
INFINITELY INCORPORATED
The biggest new title is Batman, Inc., Grant Morrison’s new standardbearer for the Batman line. Essentially Morrison is transferring his flag from Batman and Robin to this book, and thereby shifting focus from a Dynamic Duo to a caped CEO.
- August 19, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
‘When I come back, verily, I’m comin’ straight outta Asgard …”
Kenny Keil, creator of Tales to Suffice and artist of the new webcomic Apple Bit Newton, sends word that he’s dropped more bombs in his Superhero Remix Project — “A mash up of classic hip hop album covers and various comic book characters.” Head over to Flickr to see Dr. Doom channel Kool Moe Dee and “Fear of a Green Planet,” among others.
- August 19, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
The artist/writer division of labor
Jim Munroe, writer of the graphic novel Sword of My Mouth, kept track of the time he and artist Shannon Gerard put into the project. Not surprisingly, the scales don’t balance:
Sword of My Mouth
So here’s a breakdown of how much time we each spent working on the book.
Jim’s hours: 283.8 (writing: 23%, revisions and editing: 16%, publicity: 20%, publishing business: 38%)
Shannon’s hours: 1000+ (drawing)
So basically, Shannon put in 80% of the time even considering I took on publicity and publishing roles. (If I was just doing the writing, it would have been closer to a 90/10% split.)
We’re dividing the money we make 80/20%, but it still feels weird. I mean, I knew it took a long time to draw, but it really takes a long time to draw. This wonky division of labour is something to keep in mind when if you’re ever approaching someone to draw a comic. Even if you’re a slow writer and they’re a fast drawer, you’re still asking them to spend much more time realizing something than you spent creating it. What are you bringing to the project beyond amazing ideas and sparkling prose?
- August 19, 2010 @ 12:30 PM by JK Parkin
Buffy co-star Nicholas Brendon is launching a webcomic
Very Bad Koalas
It’s not surprising to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-star Nicholas Brendon among the featured guests at this weekend’s Wizard World Chicago Comic Con. After all, the convention is heavy on genre TV and film actors, from William Shatner and Adam West to James Marsters and Linda Hamilton. But Brendon, who played Xander Harris in the cult-hit series, won’t just be signing autographs; it turns out he’ll also be promoting his upcoming webcomic.
Very Bad Koalas, a collaboration between Brendon, animation director/producer Steve Loter and illustrator/filmmaker Rafael Santiago, is set to debut on Sept. 29, and update weekly. The comic follows two sheltered koalas on the run from the law in their 1958 Cadillac El Dorado, evading capture, encountering bizarre characters (including vampire turtles and a religious cult of highway-flattened animals), and even battling addiction.
“… If you follow the news at all you probably — it’s not really a secret — I have a little addiction problem that I get arrested for time to time,” Brendon tells Chicago Now. “God bless sobriety! But I think Avery is going to have a problem with his eucalyptus intake. Because the whole thing about koalas is that they’re fierce creatures, and what keeps them mellow is the eucalyptus, that acts like a catnip for them.”
- August 19, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
‘Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. You’ve eaten Gotham’s gorditas.’
Not even the late-night drive-thru of the Gotham City Taco Bell is beyond the reach of … The Batman.
(via The Awl)
- August 19, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Gekiga Spider-Man?
Ryoichi Ikegami's Japanese Spider-Man
What happens if you hire a manga artist who really wants to be drawing gekiga (underground) manga to draw Spider-Man? Jason Thompson shows us in his latest House of 1000 Manga column at ANN: The Japanese version of Spider-Man started off close to its American roots, although re-imagined with Japanese characters, but eventually veered off into a darker, more agsty comic that was apparently years ahead of its time:
But Yu [the Japanese Peter Parker] doesn’t get to even enjoy the manly pleasures of being a superpowered badass. Instead, he remains a tragic and lonely figure, tormented by his superpowers, unable to be happy no matter what. In a typical scene, Yu bumps into some yakuza in a train station, then allows himself to get beaten up rather than use his Spider-Man powers and risk injuring them with his super-strength. Realistic violence intrudes on escapist fantasy: in a relatively early chapter, Yu and his friends are driving motorbikes down the road, exchanging wisecracks (“Decided to play, huh, Komori? I always thought you were a bookworm!”). Suddenly, two of his friends are nailed by a car going full speed, sending their motorbike flying and leaving them lying on the grass covered in blood. (“A hit and run! That guy blew through the light and just kept going!”) The bad guys turn from supervillains into pathetic, miserable everyday criminals: sleazy hippies; a group of kendo students who gang up and attempt to rape a girl; a troubled young man who gets super-strength and takes revenge on his tormentors.
All this is rendered in Ikegami’s dark, gekiga-style art, and all done as work for hire for Marvel, which is kind of amazing, actually. Because Japanese audiences weren’t very familiar with the character, Ikegami had a lot of freedom to reinvent him, and when he got bored with the original, he pushed it in a more interesting direction, creating an entirely new story from a few scraps of the old.
- August 19, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Asterix grabs a Big Mac
McDonald’s established a beachhead in France long ago, so I’m not exactly sure why this is news, except that August is a slow news month in France because everyone is on vacation: The handful of writers who are left to mind the store have apparently whipped themselves into a lather of indignation over the use of an Asterix cartoon to advertise McDonald’s.
“After resisting the Romans, have the Americans finally scalped the invincible little Gaul?” thundered Le Figaro, according to the UK paper The Telegraph. Having eaten pizzas shaped like Smurfs and ice cream from a plastic Pingu head when I lived over there, I’m not sure what the fuss is about. The French aren’t usually adverse to using licensed characters to sell crap, and this isn’t even the first time Asterix has been used to plug the Golden Arches; he subbed for Ronald McDonald briefly in 2001. Nonetheless, a spokesman for Asterix’s publisher, Albert René, had to rise to the Gauls’ defense: “Asterix remains a rebel,” he said. “He doesn’t work for (McDonald’s) but with (McDonald’s). The Gauls ‘come as they are’, as the slogan says. We are not defenders of ‘malbouffe’ (bad food)”. And, he pointed out, they declined to use Obelix in a Diet Coke ad because it did not “correspond to the values of the character.”
Asterix co-creator Albert Uderzo OK’d the ad campaign, and his studio did the art.
(Via ICv2.)
- August 19, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
X-Men #1
Publishing | Direct-market comics sales fell 12 percent in July versus the previous year, with only Marvel’s X-Men #1 breaking the 100,000-copy mark, thanks to incentive covers and heavy marketing behind a series relaunch. The sixth issue of DC Comics’ summer crossover, Brightest Day, came in at No. 2 with about 94,600 copies.
The news is better in the graphic novel category, where sales climbed 3 percent, buoyed by strong performances by all six volumes of Scott Pilgrim — the final book in the series debuted with sales of more than 21,000 — and the 12th volume of The Walking Dead. Overall sales declined 9 percent in July. [ICv2.com]
Conventions | Wizard World Chicago Comic Con kicks off Friday in Rosemont, Illinois. Guests include Brian Azzarello, Art Baltazar, J. Scott Campbell, Gary Friedrich, Michael Golden, Mike Grell, Greg Horn, Joe Madureira, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jill Thompson and Ethan Van Sciver. [Daily Herald]
- August 19, 2010 @ 08:04 AM by Kevin Melrose
Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs | Clunky Robots: An Interview with Zeroids writer Aaron Shaps
Zeroids #1
When I attended C2E2 earlier this year, I attended Moonstone’s panel and was especially excited about the announcement of their Zeroids comics. I never had those toys as a kid and knew nothing about them, but all writer Aaron Shaps had to say was “clunky robots” and I was interested. Then he explained how they’d be fighting space invaders and how the series would include all the ‘50s sci-fi movie tropes he could squeeze into it. I was hooked.
Now that the first issue is almost here (it should hit stores in a couple of weeks), Aaron and I got together to talk a bit more about the series, the toy line it’s based on, and all the other inspirations that have gone into it.
Michael May (MM): Let’s start off by talking about the Zeroids toy line. What can you tell me about that?
Aaron Shaps (AS): The Zeroids were a line of robot toys produced by Ideal in the late ‘60s. Originally there were only three: Zintar, Zerak, and Zobor. Later on they added Zogg, the Zeroids’ leader, and Zemo, the “lost Zeroid”. The line was extremely popular for the better part of a decade, and then in the late ‘70s the line was re-imagined as “STAR Team”, to help cash in on the sci-fi craze that kicked into high gear in the wake of Star Wars.
There were a few new characters as part of the STAR Team line: Major Kent, a human astronaut; Zem 21, a humanoid robot; generic “alien” Zeroids that looked conspicuously like R2-D2; and a villain, the Knight of Darkness, leader of the evil Shadow Raiders of the Black Nebula, who bore more than a slight resemblance to Darth Vader.
Zombies, space invaders, sorority girls, buddy movies, and other influences after the break.
- August 18, 2010 @ 04:31 PM by Michael May
Send Us Your Shelf Porn!
Welcome once again to Send Us Your Shelf Porn!, the feature where you send us pictures of your collection to share with comic fans everywhere. Today’s shelves come from Stephen Yarish, who runs theincrediblehulkonline.com website. This is only a portion of the pictures Steve sent; I’m holding on to some others just in case I don’t get any more before next week.
Which leads me to my next point — I need more Shelf Porn! Our supply is running low, so it’s time to fill up the reserves … please send me your write-up and pictures at jkparkin@yahoo.com, if you’re interested in sharing your comic space with our readers.
Now let’s hear from Steve …
- August 18, 2010 @ 03:20 PM by JK Parkin
Angel returning to Dark Horse late next year
Angel #39
An announcement in Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Riley one-shot has fans wondering, and worrying, about the future of IDW Publishing’s Angel series.
In a column at the end of the issue, in stores today, Dark Horse Senior Managing Editor Scott Allie teased “the return of the Angel series to Dark Horse in late 2011, in tandem with our Buffy Season 9 relaunch.” (You can read the full column after the break.)
Angel, based on the Buffy television spin-off created by Joss Whedon, was published by Dark Horse from 2000 to 2002, first as an ongoing series and then, briefly, as a miniseries. However, IDW acquired the rights to the property in 2005, and since has released numerous miniseries and an ongoing series. Angel #36 was released this week; a Spike series debuts in October. Dark Horse published Buffy comics from 1998 to 2004 before launching the highly successful Season 8 in 2007.
Word of Allie’s brief announcement quickly spread online, both on the Whedonesque fan community and on the IDW message board. Reaction has been decidedly mixed, with fans looking for clarification on the future of Angel, and how the move might affect the rest of the “Buffyverse.”
Chris Ryall, IDW’s publisher and editor-in-chief, posted on his company’s forum earlier today, telling concerned Angel readers that, “We’ll be addressing this soon, so please bear with us. Thanks, for your patience and your support.”
A conflict emerged in January when it was revealed that Twilight, the villain lurking behind the scenes for much of Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, was actually Angel. Although Allie assured fans that the surprise twist wouldn’t conflict with the continuity of the IDW series, and would be “made to work,” new Angel writer Bill Willingham was quick to point out that he was never informed of the plot development.
But as recently as Friday, Allie tweeted about brainstorming with Ryall, Spike writer Brian Lynch and IDW editor Mariah Huehner, suggesting that the two companies had overcome any coordination glitches.
- August 18, 2010 @ 03:15 PM by Kevin Melrose