2010 September
David Gallaher talks werewolves, Westerns, Winter Guard and webcomics
Writer David Gallaher has been at the forefront of digital comics. For years he worked on the fringes of American comics, only to become an overnight success of sorts by winning the inaugural Zuda Comics competition with High Moon (with collaborator Steve Ellis), and then being hand-picked to launch the app from digital comics distributor comiXology with an ongoing series, Box 13. Both titles have seen multiple volumes online and opened the door for Gallaher to come full circle back to print comics with the first volumes of each in print and new work commissioned by Marvel.
Gallaher occupies a unique role as a creator whose popularity is based primarily on his online comics output, with his print work coming to catch up. The writer has a long history with the online work, going back to interning at Marvel’s interactive department in the late 1990s and being a advertising copywriter for several years. While his comics come out on the bleeding edge of comics formats, his instincts owe more to comics’ pulpy roots.
Chris Arrant: Let’s do an easy one, first – what are you working on today?
David Gallaher: This morning, I’m laying out the rest of Box 13: The Pandora Process, which is being illustrated by Steve Ellis and is being published digitally by comiXology. Steve and I also have another project we’re working on that we’re really excited about. It’s got what I refer to as the “new project smell.” Like High Moon, it plays to our pulp roots – and I think it’ll be equally as vast.
And at some point this week, we’ll start our preparation for the New York Comic Con and discuss what’s next for High Moon.
- September 30, 2010 @ 06:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Grumpy Old Fan | Try to remember a slew of Septembers
Detective Comics #557
As many of you know, for almost all of my life I’ve read superhero comic books. However, a few days ago I realized I’d been reading one particular title — Detective Comics — continuously for the past twenty-five years. When I got back into comics in 1984-85, I started slowly, with only a handful of titles. Picking up ’Tec #557 all those years ago — how could I resist that Gene Colan cover? — put me on the slippery slope of what we now call “DC Universe” books.
Regardless, I don’t think my experience is that uncommon. Probably many of you can claim to have read one particular title for that long, or even longer. Still, twenty-five years is twenty-five years, especially when you’re talking about keeping up with one particular thing. In fact, in 2011 I’ll be able to mark all kinds of quarter-century anniversaries with the superhero comics I started getting in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Accordingly, because nostalgia implies a certain distance from its object, this is why I don’t think of myself as particularly nostalgic for certain aspects of superhero comics. When I first started going to my local comics shop (almost twenty-six years ago), I had all kinds of revelatory experiences hunting for back issues, discovering independent and alternative comics, and generally being introduced to the still-evolving direct-market culture. By definition, I’ll never have those kinds of experiences again; and by and large, those things — including having the time to spend a whole day with a big stack of books — aren’t related to the comics themselves.
Nevertheless, aided by data from the always-helpful DCIndexes.com, I wanted to see how my habits had changed over the past two-and-a-half decades. I looked at seven Septembers — 1985, 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 — to see what I bought and for how much. (For simplicity’s sake I kept this confined to DC and its imprints. I’ve always bought a handful of Marvel books, but they haven’t dented my wallet like DC has.) The results surprised me, and I wonder if they’ll surprise you too.
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- September 30, 2010 @ 04:30 PM by Tom Bondurant
Cartoonist Steve Murray running for mayor of Toronto (sort of)
Longtime comicker and my vote for comics’ great modern humorist Steve Murray has announced his candidacy for mayor of Toronto. Murray, a prominent writer and cartoonist for the city’s National Post, entered the race despite having missed the deadline to register for the election.
I grew up with an actor as president, saw Arnold Schwarznegger become governor of California and an Icelandic comedian win the mayoral post in Reykjavik, Iceland. Maybe Murray has what it takes.
If Murray wins, I hope Chip Zdarsky has a place in his administration.
- September 30, 2010 @ 04:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Stuart Immonen on being a top Marvel artist while nurturing his own pursuits
Stuart Immonen
Stuart Immonen is a comic artist’s comic artist.
Although he might argue with me there, his name has cropped up numerous times in years of conversations with comic creators as a highwater mark for artists working on superheroes, with his yeoman-like work ethic and ability to get to the top of the charts without compromising himself or his work. Immonen’s art blazes a trail between realism and exaggeration, and the cartoonist really hit his stride in the public eye with the 2006 series Nextwave. Immonen had been on some top-sellers before, including the Red/Blue Superman, the alt-realty Superman: Secret Identity and earlier stints on both Avengers and Fantastic Four, but it was his work on Nextwave and the genre-bending style that allowed him to show a more diverse skillset. Marvel and its star writer Brian Michael Bendis took notice, bringing him on-board for Ultimate Spider-Man, New Avengers and, well, New Avengers again with the series’ recent relaunch.
But one of the things that gets me is Immonen’s devotion to his own creations with wife and fellow comicker Kathryn. They got their start in the world of cartooning with their own self-published series, and jumped back into it a few years back with several webcomics and printed books. Last year, Top Shelf released their webcomic strip Moving Pictures, and the duo has plans for a new creator-owned original graphic novel for next year.
- September 30, 2010 @ 03:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Kurt Busiek, artcomix aficionado
from Seth's pencils for the Coober Skeber 2 cover
The other day we linked you to the saga of Coober Skeber 2, the Marvel-spoofing, copyright-defying anthology put together by influential alternative comics publisher Tom Devlin and a small galaxy of future alternative-comics stars in the late 1990s. Well, now it’s time for genuine superhero-comics superstar Kurt Busiek to weigh in on the book. On his blog, the Buse shares his memories of getting a copy at Comic-Con International in 1997 and digging it so much he helped get one participant hired by Marvel:
I liked the Hulk story so much that when I got home, I photocopied the story and faxed it to Tom Brevoort at Marvel (this was in those halcyon days before scanners were common), and urged him to get someone to buy it from Kochalka and have it colored and run it as a backup somewhere. It was too cool not to show to Hulk fans everywhere.
Tom wasn’t editing Hulk at the time, but he took over the book a little later, and eventually did try to buy the story. Kochalka wanted to re-do it, so Tom hired him to re-do the story, in color, and it ran in Hulk 2001, that year’s Annual.
Click the link to read the whole story — and to get a look at the full pencils for Seth’s cover, which Busiek bought. This makes me wonder: Does Astro City have a hipster enclave full of superheroes that look like Fort Thunder drawings?
- September 30, 2010 @ 02:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Themed sketchbooks: Lan Pitts’ Zatanna sketchbook
Zatanna by Phil Noto
In our first two installments of our spotlight on themed sketchbooks we’ve had classic heroes and classic actresses; in today’s installment, we mix those together and sprinkle a little bit of magic on it. Comics blogger Lan Pitts has traveled to various conventions and collected an all-star assortment of talents in the effort of illustrating DC’s magician, Zatanna.
“My first job was as a magician’s assistant,” Pitts tells Robot 6. “I’ve always been fascinated by magic and it’s history. I had a few Zatanna sketches in my other sketchbooks and realized I loved to see what an artist would do for her than any other character. So she became my “totem” character, if you will, and I just wanted her to have her own sketchbook.”
Pitts has accumulated over fifteen renditions of Zatanns in his themed sketchbook, but has plenty of room for more. He collected a few new additions at DragonCon earlier this year, and hopes to attend New York ComicCon in October for more.
Whether you’re an artist who wants to sketch in this unique book or just a fan who wants to see more, visit Pitt’s blog for more information.
- September 30, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Upcoming project takes comics ‘All Over The Map’
Page from 'All Over The Map' by St. Germain & Worsley
Road trips are a unique experience and your first is often a rite of passage in many ways. It’s popular in fiction as well, from movies, comics, prose and even classic texts like The Canterbury Tales. At California’s annual APE convention in October, two cartoonists are partnering together for a unique multimedia project.
All Over The Map is described by co-creator Star St. Germain as a “multimedia project based around the idea of a cross-country road trip.” A collaboration with artist John C Worsley, the project documents the trip between Oregon and Massachusetts, with each page representing a state on the way there. One of its more unique aspects is that the book can be read in either direction – the pages will be divided by the path of the road, with Germain going from Massachusetts to Oregon and Worsley traveling the opposite direction. The multimedia project lives up to its name by doing not just comics but accompanying music. Both Germain and Worsley have made an album, recording a song for each state they traverse.
Look for more on this project at APE Oct. 16-17 in San Francisco.
UPDATE: The creators have emailed us to inform them that they have a website for this project, along with a custom player previewing tracks from these soundtracks. Goto http://wearegivingup.com/
- September 30, 2010 @ 01:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Straight talk for cartoonists from Daryl Cagle
Daryl Cagle
Editorial cartoonists seem to be going the way of buggy-whip makers; the past few years have brought a litany of layoffs and, at least from the outside, it looks like staff cartoonists are becoming a thing of the past.
Cartoonist Daryl Cagle posted some surprisingly frank advice for editorial cartoonists on his blog this week. Depending on how you look at it, this is shrewd business advice or an enticement to dumb down and sell out.
Some of this is good nuts-and-bolts advice for freelancers: Think of what your editors want (not what you want to draw), plan ahead for holiday and seasonal cartoons, sell your archived cartoons on a per-use basis, and avoid local papers — there’s no money in that market. Learn to draw — words alone can’t carry a cartoon.
But it is also rather disturbing. Let’s return to that first point, about pleasing editors:
- September 30, 2010 @ 12:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Tom Spurgeon speaks on the state of comics and comics journalism
Portrait by Michael Netzer
Tom Spurgeon has been covering comics and the comics industry since the early ’90s, but really emerged as a prominent voice about comics in 2004 with the launch of his website The Comics Reporter. After years of steadily growing into online journalism, in 2010 Spurgeon won the Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism. He’s authored, or co-authored, several books about comics, including Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book and the overlooked Romita Legacy. He also wrote a a syndicated comic strip from 1999 to 2002 called Wildwood.
I turned to Tom for this interview as a chance for readers to get another side of someone who’s seen and covered a lot in comics, and frankly to ask him from one journalist to another what I should pay attention to more. So whether you’re reader, reporter, creator or suit, I recommend you read on for Spurgeon’s take on where we stand, where we fall, and how we can pick ourselves up again.
Chris Arrant: When you meet people, what do you tell them you do for a living?
Tom Spurgeon: Astronaut!
I tell them I’m a writer. Is that a dumb answer? Everybody’s got to do something. The comics part only comes up if people ask me what I write about, at which point I tell them one of my areas of interest is comics. It was a lot harder in the mid-’90s trying to describe what I did for a living in that people were much less familiar with comics beyond newspaper strips and superhero books. We used to get calls at The Comics Journal from people pitching us stand-up comedian articles. My friends back home have an easier time wrapping their mind around what I do now, with multiple entry points and greater coverage of the field.
- September 30, 2010 @ 11:30 AM by Chris Arrant
BOOM! relaunches kids imprint in 2011
BOOM! Studios has sent out a straight-to-the-point graphic exclaiming a new day for the California-based comic publisher’s kids imprint. It looks like the publisher’s BOOM Kids! imprint will be turning over a new leaf in 2011.
Originally announced in 2007 at Comic-Con International, BOOM Kids! didn’t hit shelves until 2009 but did so with a bang with a stellar line-up of comics based on various Disney/Pixar properties including The Incredibles, The Muppet Show, Darkwing Duck and Mickey Mouse & Friends. Combining reprintings of foreign-produced comics and out-of-print classics with new works, BOOM Kids! made a real mark.
There’s no word on the exact shape of BOOM Kids! 2011 plans are, but one could easily picture an expansion of its Disney/Pixar line-up and perhaps some new original projects.
- September 30, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Banned Books Week: Challenged graphic novels
The Huffington Post has a list of the 10 most popular graphic novels that have been challenged in libraries. The list purports to be from the American Library Association, but I can’t find it on their site; I suspect they pulled the graphic novels off several lists of challenged books. Here they are:
• Absolute Sandman, by Neil Gaiman and others
• Blankets, by Craig Thompson
• Bone, by Jeff Smith
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
• Maus, by Art Spiegelman
• Pride of Baghdad, by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
• Tank Girl, by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin
• The Dark Knight Strikes Again, by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Notably absent from the list is any mention of manga, which has been challenged in several libraries recently.
- September 30, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Wimpy Kid joins the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade lineup
Author Jeff Kinney inspects a model of the Wimpy Kid balloon
There’s a new giant helium balloon in town: Greg Heffley, the main character from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, will be one of two new characters represented in this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Greg’s Fifth Avenue debut celebrates the publication of the latest addition to Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, which hits the streets on Nov. 9 with an initial printing of 5 million copies. Greg’s effigy will be one of 13 giant balloons in the parade. (Oddly, the press release announcing this touts the series and its popularity but never mentions Greg by name.)
To promote the event, Abrams, which publishes the Wimpy Kid books under its Amulet imprint, is giving away four trips to the parade as grand prizes in a sweepstakes that starts today.
The parade will take place on Thursday, Nov. 25, from 9 a.m. to noon EST.
- September 30, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Penny Arcade leaps, Liefeld-style, into the game Comic Jumper
The people behind the hit webcomic Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, are lending their skills and comic timing toward the promotion of the upcoming video game Comic Jumper. In this game, players can jump through different comic-book genres on a path to complete their quests — each time they land in a new comic, the style of the artwork changes to reflect that.
YES.
The game’s publisher, Twisted Pixel Games, enlisted the comickers to work up a comic strip as a companion piece to the video game, and apparently they went all out. For this unique project, Holkins and Krahulik picked the infamous style that Rob Liefeld made famous during his run on ’90s classics New Mutants, X-Force and Youngblood.
“Obviously you can look back on that stuff now and it’s pretty silly but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being heavily inspired by it at the time,” Krahulik wrote in a post on the Penny Arcade site. “Rob may not have had the best grasp of anatomy, storytelling, perspective, or composition but his shit was fucking dynamic and as a young man I ate it up.”
In addition to the comic itself, the pair is also giving away an XBOX 360 decorated with art from this project. The contest is unique, but I won’t spoil it, so check out the website.
- September 30, 2010 @ 08:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Move over gramps, and hand me that copy of The Dark Knight Returns
Donald Sofretti's cartoon of Wonder Woman in her golden years
In some families, every child is given a Bible. In my family, every child got a copy of How to Lie with Statistics, which has given me an ingrained skepticism toward surveys of any kind.
So I didn’t fall out of my rocking chair when I read that someone has written a report stating that comics readers are an aging demographic and one out of four comics fans is over 65. At Comics Alliance, which has an interesting deconstruction of the contents of the report, commenter Robert Saggers sums up my thoughts:
Do I think 1 in 4 comic readers is over 65? No
Do I think 1 in 4 people who actually stop and bother to answer marketing research questions is over 65? Yes!
Surveys like this are fraught with peril. I started reading comics when I was 4 years old, but I doubt my mother would have let me talk to some guy on the telephone about it. And what, exactly, do they mean by “comics”? If you’re talking about superhero periodical comics sold in comics stores, then that number sounds a little more plausible, but not very — I think of the average direct market customer as being closer to 40 than 65, although that’s strictly anecdotal. But look at the numbers for Diary of a Wimpy Kid (the next book will have a first printing of 5 million copies) or Twilight: The Graphic Novel (first printing: 350,000 copies). Those don’t have a lot of senior appeal (other than as gifts for the grandchildren), but they outsell a lot of floppies. Someone at Comics Alliance speculated that the people surveyed interpreted “comics” to mean “newspaper comic strips,” which traditionally do appeal to older readers.
- September 30, 2010 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs | The monster-hunting pets of Burden Hill
Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites
Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites
Written by Evan Dorkin; Illustrated by Jill Thompson
Dark Horse; $19.99
I know we’ve been talking a lot about comics for kids lately, so I’m going to give that a rest for a bit (except to point you to Nate Cosboom and Skottie Young’s latest thoughts on the subject). Fun and awesome comics don’t always have to be kid-appropriate. Beasts of Burden is an excellent example of that. Monster-hunting dogs and cats sounds particularly good for children, but not when the monsters are this scary. Your kids may be different from mine and more power to them if they are, but my eight-year-old would have nightmares if this was his bedtime reading. Doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the hell out of it though.
As you may know, Beasts of Burden began as a recurring feature in the Dark Horse Book of… anthologies. There were four volumes – Book of Hauntings, Book of Witchcraft, Book of the Dead, and Book of Monsters – and one of the highlights of each was always Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s story about five dogs and a stray cat who get pulled deeper and deeper into the supernatural.
The Animal Rites collection includes those four stories as well as the four-issue Beasts of Burden mini-series. In the spirit of anthology tales, each of the eight stories stands by itself. There are no cliffhangers; no To Be Continueds. But there’s a larger story taking shape as the pets learn more and more about the paranormal and begin to figure out that the recent weirdness in their quiet, little, wooded community is being orchestrated by a single intelligence. What that intelligence is remains to be discovered by the end of Animal Rites, which is fine by me. There’s a slow build moving towards that revelation and I don’t want Dorkin and Thompson to rush it. Besides, I want more of these stories and it’s comforting to know that there are plans for that.
Continue Reading »
- September 29, 2010 @ 03:00 PM by Michael May