2011 April
Stuart Immonen branches out into stock image availability
He’s drawing Marvel’s big event series of 2011 Fear Itself. He’s coming out with the second edition of his artbook series Centifolia. And now he’s getting into the clip art business.
Well, maybe “clip art” isn’t the right word but rather stock images. As mentioned on his blog earlier this week, several illustrations of his are now available for licensing on the website of stock photo agency Getty Images. If you’re not familiar with stock imagery, it’s an archive of photography and artwork available to publishers and designers of any stripe to pay for and use on websites, magazines, newspapers, or virtually anything else you can put an image on.
The style he uses in these images is far different from what readers of his Marvel or DC work know of him, and is quite eye-opening. Immonen has long been fascinated with magazine illustrations (as seen in his first volume of Centifolia), and this new venture by the artist is an interesting expansion of his career. Although it’s not likely to pull him away from comics, anything he can do to make more money, have fun and get to do more comics is fine by me!
- April 20, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Jeremy Bastian teases Cursed Pirate Girl #4
It’ll be a while before Cursed Pirate Girl #4 is done and printed, but Jeremy Bastian wants us to know that he’s hard at work on it. To prove it, he’s shared page two above, including photos of the page in various stages of the process.
- April 20, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Michael May
Your video of the day | Meet SamDroid, mayor of Portland
As if Portland, Ore. needed any more help in becoming comic-friendly, apparently their mayor is also a superhero. Mayor Sam Adams appeared at the recent Stumptown Comics Fest in full cosplay, dressed as SamDroid, a character designed by Manny McIvor as part of a competition held by the Alter Egos Society. The above video, courtesy of Things From Another World, includes interviews with the mayor, McIvor and Alter Egos Society founder Benja Barker.
- April 20, 2011 @ 12:30 PM by JK Parkin
Icarus on Robot 6 pages 10 & 11
Icarus is a comic by Ryan Cody and is serialized here on Robot 6, with new pages every Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
- April 20, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Ryan Cody
Alterna Comics to publish revised and improved Plastic Farm
Alterna Comics is publishing a new edition of Rafer Roberts’ Plastic Farm: Sowing Seeds on Fertile Soil, an underground comic that he has been working on since 2000; you can read it online at his Plastic Farm website.
Roberts has been busy lately. He just did a guest strip for Danielle Corsetto’s Girls with Slingshots, which brought an influx of new readers to his site, and his Plastic Farm minicomics (issues 15-17) were nominated for a SPACE prize. In addition, he went back and cleaned up and relettered his old pages for the new book, and he put up a before-and-after set at his site to show what a difference that made. Plastic Farm: Sowing Seeds on Fertile Soil is in the April Previews for a July 1 release.
- April 20, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Quote of the day II | Roger Langridge on R-rated superheroes
I really don’t think Marvel and DC are helping things by having gritty, R-rated versions of their superheroes in their main comics – what they sell as the “real” versions – while simultaneously selling those exact same characters in kids’ comics and plastering them all over lunchboxes and animated cartoons… Casual readership by kids, or by parents for their kids, is effectively impossible the way things are currently structured. And I think the waters are muddied too far now to claw that ground back. I think it’s insane that DC have spent 70 years making Superman as big as Mickey Mouse, and branding him to be understood by parents as being pretty much as kid-friendly as Mickey Mouse, only to piss that brand away in a decade. Nothing wrong with doing mature content in comics – in fact, it should be encouraged as often as possible – but doing it with characters who are on your kids’ lunchboxes is kind of moronic. Take a lesson from Watchmen and come up with new characters for that stuff. And then go back to Superman and Batman and put the same kind of love and effort and craft and intelligence you’ve been putting into all those rape scenes and body mutilations into something kids can read, and adults can also be proud to read because of all the love and effort and craft and intelligence you’ve put into it, and make those the “real” versions.
—Roger Langridge, writer of the kid-friendly Thor: Mighty Avenger, which recently fell victim to just the attitude he is decrying. While he is perhaps best known for his work on BOOM! Studios’ Muppet Show comics, Langridge does plenty of more mature comics, too, but he always keeps his brands separate. The whole interview is well worth a read, as it covers Langridge’s career from his early days in New Zealand through his current work, from Knuckles, the Malevolent Nun to a new kid-friendly title for BOOM!
- April 20, 2011 @ 10:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Quote of the day | When is a comic not a comic?
"Secret Romance" by Geoff Grogan
“Comics? Not comics? It only matters in so far as it means someone will (or won’t) pick up the book and take it home.”
–Geoff Grogan, co-editor of the newsprint anthology pood and creator of the multimedia comics (hey, I’ll say it if he won’t) Look Out!! Monsters and Fandancer, on the only definition of “comics” worth a damn. Whether it’s Prince Valiant or Kramers Ergot 4, I’ve gotten a lot less concerned with using definitions to define a given work right out of the comics discussion. The best way I know how to put it is this: Comics is any art you can read.
- April 20, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
The comics that changed the world
In the days since Tokyopop announced it would stop publishing manga, a few pundits have responded what struck me as a disturbing note of glee, a sort of satisfaction that that manga thing is finally over with. Doug Wolk has a piece at Time Magazine with the headline Manga Revolution Apparently Over: Tokyopop to Shut Down. And here’s Tim Hodler at The Comics Journal:
Tokyopop is closing down its manga line. Not long ago, this company and others like it were sometimes pointed to as the future of comics publishing. I suppose they still might be.
I’m a little mystified by that last bit. Is he saying that the future of comics publishing is that everyone will go out of business? Well, everyone dies. But Tim and Doug seem to have missed an important point, which is that Tokyopop (and the other manga publishers) did in fact change comics publishing; Tokyopop may be no more, but ten years ago, it was the future. Graphic novel sales quadrupled between 2001 and 2007, and at the ICv2 graphic novel conference in February 2007, ICv2 editor in chief Milton Greipp singled out manga as the reason for that increase:
I think the biggest factor was Tokyopop’s expansion of their authentic manga line and bringing in original material for girls. Suddenly there was huge growth in a business that was usually flat, and it opened up new opportunities for other categories as well.
- April 20, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Lithuanian publisher fined over The Simpsons comics
Duffman
Legal | The Lithuanian publisher of The Simpsons comic has been fined for breaching laws banning the advertising of alcohol with its depiction of Duff Beer, the fictional brand consumed by Homer and other residents of Springfield.
Although Simpsons creator Matt Groening has never licensed the Duff trademark out of concern that it might encourage children to drink, companies in several countries have released beer using the Duff name (Fox and Groening sued an Australian brewery for doing so in 1995, forcing the product to be pulled from shelves and destroyed). The existence of unlicensed Duff beers apparently was enough for a government watchdog, who handed down the more than $4,000 fine. The publisher said it has stopped publication of The Simpsons while it tries to address the Duff matter — a major issue, considering that Bongo Comics reportedly doesn’t permit content changes to licensed titles. [The Australian]
- April 20, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Bid on Brandon Graham art, hard-to-find comics to benefit the CBLDF
Escalator
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is getting some help from one of our favorites, Brandon Graham, who provided them not only a piece of King City original art to auction off, but also seven copies of Escalator, a collection of his early short stories. Each volume carries a CBLDF signature plate that Graham tagged with a custom full-color sketch and signature.
You can find all these items and more — including some sweet signed Amanda Conner prints — on the CBLDF’s eBay page.
- April 20, 2011 @ 06:00 AM by JK Parkin
The Middle Ground #49: When Is A Tease Not A Tease?
The teaser image is a hard thing to get right. Case in point: I praised, awhile back, Image’s teaser campaign for what turned out to be Butcher Baker, The Righteous Maker, because it seemed to do exactly what I think a teaser campaign should do: Offer visually attractive images that allow for a taste of what the project is about without giving so much away that you have no desire to find out anymore. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, “Between this and Robert Kirkman’s fake Guardians of The Globe teases, Image really know how to make this kind of thing work!”
And then I saw the tease for Mysterious Ways. Continue Reading »
- April 19, 2011 @ 04:30 PM by Graeme McMillan
Read Afrodisiac online for free
Afrodisiac, by Jim Rugg
Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s Afrodisiac took the comics world by storm last year and recently received an Eisner Award nomination. Only thing is, the book is currently between printings.
“To ensure that every possible Eisner Award voter has all of the necessary information to cast their ballot in a responsible and educated manner, we have decided to put the entire book online for FREE,” the team posted on AdHouse’s site. You can check it out for yourself over at the Issuu website.
- April 19, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by JK Parkin
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Dark Horse Presents #1
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy on Wednesday based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on what we call our “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList if you’d like to play along in our comments section.
Chris Arrant
If I had $15, the first pick this week would be the relaunched Dark Horse Presents #1 (Dark Horse, $7.99). As a reader of the title in all its previous incarnations, I have a love for the format but also a desire to see them improve on it; editor Mike Richardson seems to have the right mix of big names and up-and-comers to make this work. Second up would be DMZ #64 (DC/Vertigo, $2.99), and this issue is the final issue in the “Free States Rising” arc and the first real sit-down between Matty and Zee in ages. Third would be Rick Remender’s covert ops squad Uncanny X-Force #8 (Marvel, $3.99). At first glance I question why I like this so much, but when I think about it, it becomes easy: I enjoy Remender’s storytelling, the artists they’ve had and the fearless nature to dig up some classic concepts from early 90s X-Men comics and general Marvel U stuff.
If I found $30 in my pocket instead of $15, I’d double back and pick up a pair of Invincibles: Invincible #79 (Image, $2.99) and Invincible Iron Man #503 (Marvel, $3.99). I really enjoy what these two teams are doing: carving out long expanding story-arcs that can only happen with long-term teams like these two have been fortunate enough to have. Third would be Jason Aaron and Daniel Acuna’s Wolverine #8 (Marvel, $3.99); although Daniel Acuna is known as a more glossy artist akin to Ed McGuinness meets Alex Ross, I think he really bucks that with the story arc he’s working on here. Lastly would be Avengers #12 (Marvel, $3.99) -– it really blows my mind that Bendis and Romita can do such a throw-back classic Avengers story and still keep the high sales going. I’m not complaining -– I love these stories as much as I love Avengers comics of lore, but they never sold this well.
- April 19, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
Pascal Girard draws MoCCA
One of the regular features of the new Comics Journal website is a diary comic by a different creator each week. They started off with Brandon Graham, and as this week’s diarist, Pascal Girard, notes, that’s a tough act to follow. Girard is off to a strong start though; his first comic chronicles the doings of Night Animals creator Brecht Evens, who is already becoming a bit of a MoCCA legend (see Peggy Burns’ epic MoCCA post at the Drawn and Quarterly blog for more). Stay tuned!
- April 19, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson