2011 April
Your video of the day | Paul Levitz speaks at Google
While in the Bay Area a few weeks ago for WonderCon, Paul Levitz, former DC president and publisher and current Legion of Super-Heroes writer, headed down the peninsula to speak at Google’s offices in Mountain View as a part of their Authors@Google speaker series. It’s a lengthy video, but well worth the time to check it out.
(Hat tip: Tom Galloway)
- April 22, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by JK Parkin
Mash-up to end all mash-ups: “Angry Birds of Prey”
Mash-ups have become a staple of modern culture. From the mash-ups of music albums to movies and virtually anything else. But I think this here might be the best comic mash-up yet.
Created by Ryan Sohmer and Tyler Walpole for Sohmer’s The Gutters webcomic series, it’s a great idea in theory but Walpole’s expert art here really shoots it over the top.
If you’ve not reading The Gutters, you’re missing out — it’s the closest thing the comics industry has gotten to editorial cartoons focused on our medium.
- April 22, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Comics A.M. | Spider-Man musical producers ‘stepped in dog poo’
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
Broadway | Michael Cohl and Jeremiah Harris, producers of the troubled Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, talk candidly about the $70-million musical — or “$65 plus plus,” as Cohl says — as it shuts down for more than three weeks for a sweeping overhaul. Will the production, plagued by delays, technical mishaps, injuries and negative reviews, hurt their reputation? “It might,” Cohl concedes. “It’s a matter of the respect of those whose opinions I care about. Most will recognize that Jere and I stepped in dog poo and are trying to clean it up and pull off a miracle. We might not.”
In related news, Christopher Tierney, the actor who was seriously injured on Dec. 20 after plummeting 30 feet during a performance, will rejoin rehearsals on Monday. [Bloomberg, The Hollywood Reporter]
- April 22, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Grumpy Old Fan | Who wants a piece of Mr. Action?
From "Jimmy Olsen's Big Week"
Jimmy Olsen spent much of the Silver Age bouncing from one misadventure to another: traveling through time, uncontrollably growing facial hair, transforming into strange creatures, blah blah blah. In fairness to Jimmy, many times these consequences were somewhat undeserved (although he was kinda asking for trouble drinking that beard tonic).
Therefore, it’s not surprising that once again, our Mr. Olsen is a victim of circumstance. Follow the bouncing ball….
The good: Last year, starting in Action Comics #493, Jimmy got a great new co-feature by the very talented team of writer Nick Spencer, penciller R.B. Silva, and inker DYM.*
The bad: The feature was yanked after four installments when DC decided to discontinue all the co-features.
The good: Spencer, Silva, and DYM got to finish “Jimmy Olsen’s Big Week” in the pages of the probably-still-on-sale Jimmy Olsen Special, which runs 58 pages (including parts 1-4) and is well worth your $5.99. Really, this story couldn’t be more fun if it were called Superman’s Pal Scott Pilgrim.
So where’s the “victim” part come in?
- April 21, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
Lee, Deodato, Marz, Palmiotti, Conner and more contribute to Japan Needs Heroes
Japan Needs Heroes
Red Giant Entertainment has recruited several top names in the comics industry to contribute to Japan Needs Heroes, a graphic novel that aims to raise money for the Japan Society, a non-profit organization that has created a special disaster relief fund to aid victims of the Tohoku earthquake in Japan.
A press release that went out today from comiXology, which will distribute the book digitally when it is released, listed Stan Lee (who will provide the forward), Peter David, Ron Marz, Mike Deodato, Larry Hama, Jimmy Palmiotti, Elaine Lee, Amanda Conner, Howard Mackie and Brandon Peterson as contributors. You can find a list of additional creators on the book’s Kickstarter page, which Red Giant is using to fund the printing.
“My wife is from Japan,” said Benny R. Powell, CEO of Red Giant, “and her family still lives there. We hear daily reports of the fear and uncertainty they face. I realized we had to do something. Comics have a power to reach massive audiences and that’s a powerful thing. As more and more creators join our cause I believe we can raise a lot of money to help. This transcends any genre, medium, or publisher. This need is bigger than anything our world has ever faced, and we truly believe that together we can make a difference.”
- April 21, 2011 @ 01:59 PM by JK Parkin
Your video of the day | Little Thor spoofs Little Vader Volkswagon ad
Kevin already posted this at our sister blog, Spinoff, but I figure it’s worth sharing in case anyone missed it there:
Marvel spoofs the Darth Vader Volkswagon ad from this year’s Super Bowl, sharing several little Easter Eggs with fans in the ad — see if you can find them all.
- April 21, 2011 @ 01:10 PM by JK Parkin
Genius at work: Ben Katchor
The Atlantic magazine has a “special report” in their May issue titled How Genius Works, which focuses on how various creative types go from vague idea to first draft, and one of their chosen geniuses is Ben Katchor, who was the first cartoonist to win a McArthur Fellowship (which I guess makes him a certified genius). Katchor presents a three-picture slideshow with a bit of commentary about what inspires him and how he works, which is more of an insight into his particular working process than a blueprint for the rest of us—but still makes interesting reading.
- April 21, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Talking Comics with Tim | Mark Sable & Paul Azaceta
Graveyard of Empire 1
I rarely get a chance to interview two collaborators for a project, but welcome to my latest fortunate rarity. Writer Mark Sable is back at Image Comics, collaborating with Grounded co-creator and Amazing Spider-Man artist Paul Azaceta. The two creators were kind enough to contact me for a joint email interview. As noted when this project was first announced: “In Graveyard of Empires, when a young lieutenant arrives at Combat Outpost Alamo, a remote outpost in Afghanistan, he learns a new kind of insurgent math. It’s said that in war, when you kill one insurgent, you create ten more by angering his family and friends. In this story, when you kill one, he comes back from the dead to infect ten of your fellow Marines . . . Graveyard of Empires #1 (APR110400), a 32-page full color horror/survival comic that will appeal to fans of The Hurt Locker and THE WALKING DEAD, will be available for sale in a comic shop near you on June 15, 2011.” Sable and Azaceta also provided Robot 6 with a six-page preview from the first installment of the three-issue miniseries. Frequent readers of Talking Comics with Tim may notice that as of late, I have given the interview subjects a chance to ask Robot 6 readers a question. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Sable took this opportunity to invite folks to ask him questions in the comments section. He has committed to answering any and all questions, as his schedule permits, so by all means ask him all that you want.
Tim O’Shea: You two clearly went with an eye-catching, iconic first issue cover. Care to discuss how you arrived at that cover?
Paul Azaceta: Thanks. I knew right off the bat that I didn’t want a complicated cover. I wanted something that stood out and going with something simple and graphic was the way to go. I can’t say where exactly I got the idea for the skull with the poppy flower but when it hit me I knew I had it. I drew a quick little sketch for Mark and he suggested adding the helmet. Actually, the harder part was carrying that idea on with the other covers. But that was my inspiration, simple graphic covers.
- April 21, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Tim O'Shea
Kodansha Comics finally gets a website
Kodansha Comics has been a bit slow to get off the ground, but now they are off and running. After irritating fans last fall by keeping mum about titles, they have announced a stellar summer and fall lineup that includes the classic Sailor Moon, the revival of older but popular series like Love Hina and Tokyo Mew Mew, and some interesting new manga like Mardock Scramble and Animal Land. If only there were a place on the internet where you could go to get information about those books…
And now there is! After months of representing themselves with a plain black-and-white web page with a single press release and nothing to click on, Kodansha launched their new website this week. It has an attractive front page that is heavy on their former Del Rey titles; you have to go to the “Titles” link to see anything else, and they don’t have cover images up for the new books yet. Clicking on a link brings you to the Random House catalog page for the book, which is a bit annoying; it would be nicer to see the books integrated into the site itself. Perhaps that will come? However, it is nice to see the books listed by release date—a lot of manga publishers are very vague about that sort of thing, but their predecessor Del Rey always did it.
Speaking of Sailor Moon, Deb Aoki of About.com sent Kodansha some questions about their new edition and they answered them, apparently anonymously. So things are moving forward, and it should be an interesting summer.
- April 21, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Zander Cannon and the Mysterious Skeleton
This is a couple of years old, but chances are it’s new to you. It’s new to me thanks to Sarah Morean at The Daily Cross Hatch.
What it is is Zander Cannon’s 12-Hour Comic from 2009 about a group of junior detectives who have to solve a case about a water-stealing skeleton with a death-gong. Cannon created plot points for himself by drawing a random Pictionary card from a pile and getting the following words:
Skeleton
Gong
Fingerprint
Drought
Black Eye
He drew another card for his characters’ names:
Centipede
Earmuff
Amputate
Reporter
Pothole
Click the link above to learn more about how he did it or go straight here to read the comic.
- April 21, 2011 @ 09:30 AM by Michael May
Sequential Artists Workshop host Easter fundraiser in NYC
The soon-to-be-launched cartooning school Sequential Artists Workshop has announced a special night of readings and theatre by a host of comic artists this weekend in New York City.
Scheduled for this Sunday at 7 p.m., SAW’s Easter Fundraiser at the KGB Bar will have cartoonists such as Dean Haspiel, Sam Henderson, John Keerschbaum and others reading from their works for the live audience. The festivities will be hosted by SAW co-founder Tom Hart.
If you haven’t heard of Sequential Artists Workshop, it’s a new school for cartooning scheduled to open this year in Gainesville, Fla. The proceeds from SAW’s Easter Fundraiser will go toward filing fees, space rental and marketing. They’re also looking for the donation of books, art supplies and virtually anything else you think a cartooning school would need. More more information, visit SAW’s website.
- April 21, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Comics A.M. | Kindle to offer library lending; familiar faces at DC Entertainment
Amazon Kindle
E-books | Amazon announced it will allow Kindle users to read e-books from more than 11,000 libraries, marking a reversal of the company’s policy. Previously library users who borrowed e-books could read them on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader and other devices, but not the Kindle. “We’re excited that millions of Kindle customers will be able to borrow Kindle books from their local libraries,” Jay Marine, Amazon’s director of Kindle, said in a statement. The Kindle Library Lending will debut later this year. [The New York Times, press release]
Publishing | Several DC Comics staff members laid off as part of the sweeping corporate restructuring — among them, editors Mike Carlin and Pornsak Pichetshote — have been hired by DC Entertainment’s newly formed Burbank-based Creative Affairs division, which operates alongside Creative Services. [Bleeding Cool]
Legal | Japanese police have arrested a 25-year-old man suspected of using Share file-sharing software to upload about 28,000 manga and anime files without the copyright holders’ permission. [Anime News Network]
- April 21, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Avatar Press hires James Kuhoric as managing editor, VP of publishing
Mentioned briefly at WonderCon, Avatar Press officially announced that they hired comics writer and Diamond employee James Kuhoric as ivice president of publishing and managing editor. This comes just as Avatar is beginning a planned expansion of their line with new licensed titles as well as works by Warren Ellis and Kieron Gillen. According to the press release, Kuhoric will launch new projects and keeping the publisher’s titles on schedule.
Although Kuhoric may not be a household name for comics fans, he’s worked in and around the comics industry for the past 16 years. Since 1994, he’s worked for Diamond Comic Distributors, where most recently he was director of purchasing. He’s also been actively writing comics, with assignments on licensed titles like Battlestar Galactica, Army of Darkness and Freddy Vs. Jason vs. Ash, as well as his recent creator-owned series Dead Irons and The Legendary Talespinners at Dynamite.
IDW Publishing CEO Ted Adams is quoted on Kuhoric’s LinkedIn profile saying that Avatar’s new hire was an integral part of his company’s growth within the direct market, and Dark Horse’s VP of marketing Lou Banks says “he knows how to get the books into the hands of buyers.”
- April 21, 2011 @ 06:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Digital and the Direct Market: Retailers chime in
Digital comics were a major theme at C2E2 this year. I don’t suppose I was surprised by that exactly, but it did kind of sneak up on me. Much the way I suppose digital comics have been sneaking up on publishers and fans for the last couple of years. They’ve been around; we’ve all noticed them; we’ve even been talking about them quite a bit, but the industry’s observation of the digital format has seemed sort of detached and possibly even bemused. Sort of, “Yep. We see that there’s this other way of reading comics and it’s a nice option for some people, but print’s not going anywhere and we’ll still focus mostly on that.” It’s only been recently that we seem to have realized that – oh, shit! – print could be in danger and we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do to survive!
In fact, listening to people more savvy than I am talk about it, “digital” really isn’t just a format at all. It’s a whole new medium. So you’ve got guys like Mark Waid really looking hard at it and figuring out what digital comics can do that print comics can’t. It’s not the difference between CDs and iTunes. It’s the difference between radio and television. And it’s here. Think about that. Print comics are radio. Digital comics are TV.
As Direct Market sales continue to slip, this has worried me. Not because I’m particularly invested in going to the comics shop every Wednesday and picking up a big stack of this week’s periodicals. I still go to the comics shop, but it’s on Thursday and I’m buying graphic novels and collected editions of my favorite serials. If my comics shop went away, I could still buy that stuff, so that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is the very idea of my comics shop’s going away. I love my comics shop. I love the people who own it and work there, the excitement and knowledge about comics that they have, and the community they’ve built for their customers around this shared passion.
That’s one of the reasons I was interested in talking with ComiXology’s David Steinberger at C2E2, particularly about his company’s Website in a Box and their other Retailer Tools that allow comics shops to connect with the digital marketplace. Steinberger offered to connect me with a couple of store-owners who are already using various aspects of the system, so I spoke to James Sime of San Francisco’s Isotope Comic Book Lounge and Chris Niles of Legacy Comics in Laredo, Texas. I asked not only about ComiXology’s programs, but also about Sime and Niles’ observations on the current state of the Direct Market and the importance of digital comics to their continued success.
And just because I was curious, I also contacted the co-owner of my local comics shop, Source Comics & Games in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. Dominic Postiglione is one of the funniest, most helpful people I know in any aspect of the comics industry, but he’s also a very smart, on-the-ball retailer. I wanted to get his perspective too as someone who hasn’t at present signed up with ComiXology, but is seriously thinking about these issues and how to manage them.
- April 20, 2011 @ 07:48 PM by Michael May
Your Wednesday Sequence 7 | Brendan McCarthy
“Pop!” one-page strip in Solo #12 (2006). Brendan McCarthy.
At times the things that can be achieved by comics’ usual mode of sequencing — strings of single panels after single panels — can seem almost limitless. Looking at it from the inside out, as a comics-literate reader who can see the vast differences in approach to sequence that distinguish a Ware from a Kirby from an Eisner, it’s easy to get lost in just how diverse the pages can get. But take a step back and look at comics as one visual medium among many, a vehicle for creating information to be absorbed through the eyes, and the methods of sequencing used by its artists begin to look surprisingly limited.
Think about it — or better yet, get out a bunch of your comics, all genres, all drawing styles, as diverse and differentiated a selection as you can find, and give them all a flip-though. While comics have no shortage of different colors on their pages and different methods of mark-making swimming through their panels, a ridiculously large majority of them stick to that one typical mode of sequencing — boxed panels following boxed panels, groups of them fit more or less perfectly together like puzzle pieces, jammed snugly into the rectangle of the page. The grid, as wonderful and variable a sequencing tool as it is, possesses a downright tyrannical stranglehold on the comics form.
Now I don’t know about you, but personally I like reading comics better than I like reading prose chiefly because their pages don’t all look the same. And it’s frustrating to see how many comics lock themselves into prose’s side-scrolling, line-above-line sequencing pattern to put their information across. Try to think about a page of comics as a painter or a sculptor would and it’s almost laughable. Why does everyone stay in those safe little boxes all the time? A page of comics is a canvas, a big pure space that can contain anything, and yet for over a century now, its artists have jailed their pictures in panel borders rather than exploring the possibilities of setting them free on the page, leading readers’ eyes along lines that aren’t straight and short and easy.
- April 20, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Matt Seneca