2010 October
Talking comics marketing magnate Jeff Newelt, aka ‘Jah Furry’
photo by Seth Kushner from MOCCA 2010 Panel
There are more comics being produced now than ever before — from new releases to reprints and re-issues to comics coming in from outside the United States. And while the number of comics arriving weekly to your favorite store grows every year, the shelf space doesn’t. As comic books fight for your attention, some of the more entrepreneurial-minded creators are engaging their public directly. They do it with forums, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter and interviews with the comics press — but when does that leave time to … you know… create comics?
That’s where publicity person and uber-fan Jeff Newelt comes in. Newelt, who often goes by the moniker of “Jah Furry,” worked for years as a publicity director for major companies such as Samsung, but left it all to go solo and to take his love of comics — and the craft of making comics — to the people.
As the minister of hype for webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE and working with friends such as Paul Pope, Newelt has brought attention to their work by reaching out to journalists and by communicating directly with fans through Twitter and Facebook.
He’s also parlayed his skills into editing, as the comics editor for the online magazine SMITH and in gigs for Heeb and Royal Flush. He also headed up the recent grassroots Harvey Heads gallery, with artists from all over the world drawing a rendition of Harvey Pekar. Newelt also edited The Pekar Project, and is speaking at the “Remembering Harvey Pekar” panel next weekend at New York Comic Con.
Through it all, Newelt has become an indispensable part of the comics world, as well as a staple of the New York City comics scene. In many ways he’s a 21st-century Stan Lee — goodwill ambassador for comics to the outside world. He offers a unique perspective on the creators he works with, and the vibrant scene he lives in. Don’t expect any hard-hitting journalism — this is just me seeing what makes the man tick.
- October 3, 2010 @ 12:31 PM by Chris Arrant
Did Pet Avengers strike your cat fancy? Try Space Quint
Space Quint
The folks at Marvel have had fans going ga-ga over pet incarnations of classic Marvel heroes and an all-animal squad of Avengers in Pet Avengers. Animals taking on human characteristics have been a staple of comics — look at Mickey Mouse — and that tradition is going on strong not only at Marvel but also in independent comics. Take a look at the webcomic Space Quint.
Launched in May 2010, Space Quint is a webcomic by artist Jessica Hickman. Updated every Tuesday, it follows a feline Flash Gordon of sorts, venturing across space and fighting against both humans and aliens to make his way in the world. The character of Space Quint appeared for years in various sketchbooks Hickman would put out, and reader support pushed her to give him his own comic.
- October 3, 2010 @ 08:06 AM by Chris Arrant
Themed sketchbooks: Zack Smith’s Doctor Who
The weekend means nothing for the automatons at Robot 6 — my week of spotlighting themed sketchbooks continues with a look at the enigmatic enigma of the Doctor. Who? The Doctor. Star of television, some movies, and comics — on both sides of the ocean — these interpretations of Doctor Who show some lurking fans in notable comic creators, and also a wish list of who we’d like to see do a Doctor Who strip some day.
Comics journalist Zack Smith took on the challenge of collecting sketches of the (in)famous Doctor. And he’s just getting started! Here’s what Zack had to say about it:
10th Doctor, Weeping Angel & Sally Sparrow by Jeff Parker
There are lots of themed sketchbooks out there, and I’d recently seen ones that dealt with the likes of G.I. Joe and Star Wars. I’d noticed how many comic creators were fans of the Doctor, and how a number had posted fan art on their websites. I thought it would be fun to take advantage of this and get a book that covered the ENTIRE history of the series, dating back to 1963.
In total, I got a dozen pieces to start off the book. The biggest surprise I got, though, was finding out some great comic creators WEREN’T Who fans — including Paul Pope, Amanda Conner and Jonathan Hickman! If you read their work, you’d swear it was influenced by them!
I have a number of goals for future pieces. Mike Allred wasn’t doing sketches, but I’d love for him to do the Second Doctor, or maybe the early models of the Cybermen, which were essentially sock-masks with radio parts glued on. It might be fun to get Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba from Vertigo’s Daytripper and The Umbrella Academy to do Captain Jack’s late paramour Ianto Jones. And Kate Beaton would be perfect for the Seventh Doctor!
The long-term goal is to fill all 100 pages or so of this sketchbook, with no repeats. But with 11 Doctors, six incarnations of the Master (including Eric Roberts), and various Daleks, Cybermen, Companions, spinoffs and miscellaneous aliens, I think it’s possible!
You can see his growing collection in a Facebook album he set up. Here are a few favorites:
- October 2, 2010 @ 04:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Give Jim Lee some crayons and five minutes with a restaurant placemat …
Give Jim lee some crayons and five minutes with a restaurant placemat, and you get this.
Lee posted this earlier today on his Twitter feed, saying “Out w/@joke2far & 10 kids! We all colored on our placemats! http://twitpic.com/2u1xqc”
- October 2, 2010 @ 03:20 PM by Chris Arrant
The revolutionary Rafael Grampá: The Q&A
The artist Rafael Grampá first came to my attention through Gunned Down, a 2005 small-press anthology of Western stories done largely by South American creators. Joining him were then-unknowns Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. Although the book didn’t sell well, flipping through it I realized I was holding something special. Moon and Bá rose to fame pretty quickly with works at AiT-PlanetLar, their self-published projects, and comics at Dark Horse and Vertigo. But Grampá’s work was few and far between.
With the release of the anthology 5 in 2007 and his first solo work Mesmo Delivery in 2008, American comics audiences got their first real taste of what Grampá could do. Vertigo hired him to contribute to a milestone issue of Hellblazer; Marvel, with a milestone issue of Daredevil; Dark Horse reprinted the sold-out Mesmo Delivery, which goes for over $125 new at Amazon. Recently Marvel put him as the lead feature in the second volume of Strange Tales, and Dark Horse contracted him for his second standalone graphic novel.
His work evokes easy comparisons to Geoff Darrow, but deeper analysis shows an appreciation for detail, not for detail’s sake, but to add flavor and weight to the scene he depicts in a panel, a pin-up or a cover. Rather than just drawing to tell you where someone is and what they’re doing, Rafael’s illustrative line adds texture, tone, mood and atmosphere — and that’s before a colorist touches the page. Although well-known by some in the industry, by and large the mainstream comics public doesn’t know the full scope of what the artist is — or could be. Maybe this interview will help.
- October 1, 2010 @ 06:30 PM by Chris Arrant
The Fifth Color | Iron Man Expo’d
Director, Actor, Punching Bag
Iron Man 2 is still awesome.
It’s still a fun movie with all sorts of emotional beats and explosions and characters and lead-up and all those great things that, to be honest, make me read comics every week. If you pick up a monthly, you expect to see something of the character on the cover in the book, you expect to see him (or her) do something incredible and, by all rights, you should be interested in what the next issue is going to do. In a perfect world, I would be a millionaire with a unicorn and comics would always be recognizable, satisfying and leave you hungry for whatever is coming next.
Iron Man 2 worked almost as a film second, and a movie first because they devoted a lot of time to talk about the past and the future. Samuel L. Fury tries to get Tony Stark’s life back on track so they can use him for this “Avengers Initiative.” We go through an overwhelmingly Walt Disney-inspired piece for Howard Stark and the better future he saw when he put together the first Stark Expo. This is the continuation of something big, larger than life or even the life that the movie contained it in.
Settling down the the fanciest-schemanciest Blu-ray copy I could get my hands on, I wanted to see what it was like when you took this movie home. Did the lukewarm reception still come from the wide variety of audiences the movie tried to please? Or was it just not that great? Come with me and see.
- October 1, 2010 @ 04:30 PM by Carla Hoffman
Themed sketchbooks: Rico Renzi’s Mr. T sketchbook
Mr. T by Chris Sprouse
From Timely to Hepburn to Zatanna, Robot 6 now turns its gaze for its week-long themed sketchbook spotlight into the visage of star of screen, TV and sometimes even comics: Mr. T.
These sketches were accumulated by longtime comics fan Rico Renzi.
“I’ve been a comic convention-going-sketch-addict since I got my first Brian Stelfreeze Batgirl at Heroes Con in 1997,” Renzi says. “I started my Mr. T sketchbook at a local comic show, the Small Press Expo, in 2000, I think. While it’s cool to see independent comic artists’ take on your favorite superhero, at the time I was losing interest in those kinds of comics. Mr. T see seemed like someone who although he was a real person, was a cartoonish enough that he could be drawn quickly by pretty much anyone without reference.”
“It’s been a blast to see what people think of when they hear his name,” says Rico. “My first book is completely full, I’ve been thinking of starting a second volume. I miss getting Mr. T sketches!”
To see Renzi’s collection so far, he’s set up a blog at mrtsketchbook.tumblr.com.
- October 1, 2010 @ 03:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Because we all wanted to see Batman swing an axe: a review of Superman/Batman: Apocalypse
Superman/Batman: Apocalypse
Superman/Batman: Apocalypse isn’t a travesty, the way the previous Superman/Batman animated film, Public Enemies, was. It wasn’t an affront to my sensibilities or a 80-minute cringe-fest. But it’s not a particularly good film either, and bears a multitude of sins on its shoulders, including clunky exposition, poor to downright confusing characterization, inane dialogue and some surprisingly sloppy animation.
- October 1, 2010 @ 02:30 PM by Chris Mautner
Comics journalist Vaneta Rogers talks about the industy and her place in it
Vaneta Rogers and I have been longtime colleagues as comics journalists, specifically at Newsarama. We were both brought in under longtime site editor Matt Brady, and have each covered comics far and wide — and stepped on each other’s toes more than once. Like me, Vaneta juggles both a career writing about comics and doing design and marketing for local clients through her own company. As someone working beside her, I’ve been amazed by her ability to get a story and get interview subjects to be more candid than they might normally be. Several times a month I see a piece she did and say, “Damn, I wish I would have done that first.”
Through her work, she has a unique perspective on the superhero-centric world of America comics and the genre-based comics in and around it. She knows all the players, she’s seen the game being played for years, and has a healthy love for comics and a pull list any comics fan would die for.
Chris Arrant: When people ask about your work, what do you tell people you do for a living? And is it different for a comics person as opposed to someone not familiar with comics?
Vaneta Rogers: I tell them the truth — that I’m a freelance writer for the Internet, and that I write about comic books and comic-related media. My kids sometimes make my job sound more exciting by bragging to their friends about people I’ve gotten to interview, and that’s nice, ’cause my kids rarely think I’m cool. But for me, it’s just a job description, so there’s no reason to change it.
- October 1, 2010 @ 01:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Moon and Bá craft a new comic for convention season
Atelier by Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba
With the fall/winter convention season about to kick off, brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá (Daytripper, Casanova) have taken that opportunity to work up a new comic just for the occasion. Flush off the conclusion of their critically acclaimed Vertigo series Daytripper, Moon and Bá have a new one-shot comic called Atelier that will be available from at New York Comic Con, Rio de Janeiro’s Rio Comicon, and the Crack Bang Boom convention in Rosario, Argentina.
No word on the plot yet, but with successes like Daytripper and the recently re-released De:Tales under their belt, I’ll take their word for it. For more on the book, head on over to their website.
Related: Shaun Manning talks to Moon and Bá about De: Tales and more at Comic Book Resources.
- October 1, 2010 @ 12:30 PM by Chris Arrant
The lasting effects of banning books
A lot of us have been observing Banned Books Week with lists of banned and challenged graphic novels and notes about recent challenges in libraries and schools, but this video of manga creator Akira Maruyama speaks to a larger issue: When books are suppressed, they may simply disappear.
Maruyama is talking here about shoujo manga (manga written for young girls). Most histories of manga start with the Year 24 Group, a cohort of female manga creators born in or around 1949 that includes Moto Hagio (A Drunken Dream, The Heart of Thomas), Ryoko Ikeda (The Rose of Versailles) and Keiko Takemiya (To Terra). Maruyama, who edited a shoujo manga magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, says that we have lost the body of shoujo manga that was published during that time, because it was not only disparaged but actively suppressed. Parents looked down on manga, regarding it as cheap slapstick, and, Maruyama says, “Left-wing thinkers thought manga was bad for the intellectual development of children.” Children, on the other hand, preferred it to the “boring” storybooks of the day. The writers and leftists actually organized book-burnings in the summer of 1955, bringing manga its own Fredric Wertham moment. Manga was later rehabilitated, but the male critics (who didn’t read shoujo manga) and the Year 24 creators (who were busy reinventing it) simply ignored first-generation shoujo manga. Maruyama defends this early manga, which the Year 24 creators grew up reading, and calls for researchers to search for this manga, preserve it, and bring it back into the public eye, restoring a lost chapter in the history of the medium.
- October 1, 2010 @ 11:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Banned Books Week: Interview with the creators of Americus
Trying to keep a book out of a public library seems profoundly un-American, and yet it seems to be a great American pastime; as we have seen this week, challenges to graphic novels and prose works are all too common.
Americus, by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill, looks at the human side of that equation, telling the story of two 14-year-olds who are huge fans of a fantasy series, The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde, and the chain of events that is set in motion when the mother of one boy takes away his library copy and tears it up. It’s not a challenge, per se, as the library promptly gets a replacement copy; it’s really about the futility of trying to control another person’s thought process by restricting their reading. Americus is running as a webcomic (with a very interesting side blog) right now, and it will be published next year as a graphic novel by First Second Books. I e-mailed MK Reed and Jonathan Hill to discuss their story and their feelings about challenging books.
Robot 6: What was the book that carried you away as a child, the way Apathea does for the characters in this story?
- October 1, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Quote of the day | Dan Buckley on cover prices
Dan Buckley
“I think it’s the appropriate price point for the entertainment value and quality that we offer in the books. The $3.99 price point was already the price point for limited series and one-shots before we moved some of our regular series up, and we still have several regular series that are at $2.99. If we want to continue to have the talent and the quality that we offer in those books, it’s a price point that we had to explore. What we offer from an entertainment standpoint is pretty solid and I think we should be proud of that.”
– Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, discussing the company’s move toward $3.99 comics
- October 1, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
It’s like speed dating, but for comics creators
APE 2010 poster (art by Rich Koslowski)
Aspiring creators will get some help with an age-old question — how do you find a collaborator? — at the Alternative Press Expo, held Oct. 16-17 in San Francisco.
Organizers have announced a Comics Collaboration Connection which, in speed-dating fashion, will allow writers and artists to talk one-on-one in 15-minute rotations about their ideas and talents. Those interested in taking the creative relationship to the next step can place their contact information in an envelope supplied for each participant.
The initiative will be split into two sessions of two hours each: From 4 to 6 p.m. Oct. 16, writers will be stationed at large tables while the artists rotate; from 3 to 5 p.m. on Oct. 17, the roles will be reversed.
Those interested in participating may register in advance by emailing programs@comic-con.org with “APE Comics Collaboration Connection” in the subject line. You’re asked to indicate whether you’re a writer seeking an artist or an artist seeking a writer.
- October 1, 2010 @ 08:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Garfield creator Jim Davis resurrects U.S. Acres as a webcomic
U.S. Acres 2nd Volume (out of print)
Famed cartoonist Jim Davis, creator Garfield, announced Thursday in an interview with USA Today’s Whitney Matheson that he is bringing back his late-’80s comic strip U.S. Acres as a webcomic. Davis, who launched Garfield in 1978, debuted U.S. Acres in 1986 to a then-unprecedented 505 newspapers nationwide. The series, which ran for three years, was a barnyard slapstick comic strip that drew inspiration from Garfield’s own visits to the farm with John’s relatives, and started Orson the Pig. The strip also was adapted for television, appearing as a regular segment of the Saturday-morning cartoon Garfield and Friends.
According to Davis, U.S. Acres will relaunch today as a webcomic on the Garfield website. No word on a new print collection, but one seems mighty likely.
- October 1, 2010 @ 07:30 AM by Chris Arrant