2011 May
Why Thor the movie is better than Thor the comic
Updated: Though many of the comments about this article (below and elsewhere) indicate that people read the entire thing and understood my point, enough didn’t that I now realize that the tile of this post is unintentionally misleading. This is not a post about how the story presented in the movie is better than the best stories presented in the comics. It’s about how Marvel’s trade program is impenetrable enough and how the quality of stories over a series’ 50-year history varies enough that people who enjoy Marvel movies and would enjoy reading some similar comics often end up just throwing their hands in the air and deciding to watch the movie again instead. Sincere apologies to those for whom this was not clear.
In his response to the news that Marvel’s putting a lot of their cartoons on Netflix, Tom Spurgeon noted that “the Marvel cartoons are probably a bigger factor than we realize in building a core audience for many of their properties, but I haven’t seen anyone seriously engage that subject since the first X-Men movie came out.”
I don’t expect that this article constitutes “serious engagement,” but Spurgeon did remind me of my own reaction to last weekend’s Thor movie. My dominant thought as I watched it (and one that lingered into the parking lot and beyond) was that I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed a Thor comic in a long, long time. Since I was a kid really. The same is true of the Iron Man films – even the second one – only replace “in a long, long time” with “ever.”
Take into consideration that I’ve yet to read Walt Simonson’s Thor or any of Matt Fraction’s stuff with either character, so I realize that my viewpoint is extremely limited. But that’s not the point. I’m not trying to claim that the story presented in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is objectively better than every comic ever written about the same character. I do suspect however that the experience of watching it is – for most people – a more satisfying thing than the experience of trying to read the books on which it’s based. As a life-long comics fan, my surprise is that I’m not only sympathetic to that perspective, but have adopted it myself.
- May 11, 2011 @ 03:10 PM by Michael May
Exclusive rough pages from Who Is Jake Ellis?
Writer Nathan Edmondson and artist Tonci Zonjic seem to be knocking it out of the part with their Image series Who Is Jake Ellis? With the first issue selling out and two subsequent issues hitting the stands like clockwork, Who Is Jake Ellis? is turning into a star-maker for the both of them. With #4 in the can and scheduled for release on June 1, we asked the duo if they could share anything special with us here at Robot 6 and they happily obliged.
Below are three pages from Who Is Jake Ellis? in the raw penciled stage from Zonjic’s drawing board.
The duo are hard at work on the fifth and final installment of the first series, USA Today recently revealed that the duo are already planning both a sequel and a third series in the franchise. Nice!
- May 11, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Chris Arrant
Your Wednesday Sequence 10 | Steve Bissette
Saga of the Swamp Thing #34 (1985), page 17. Steve Bissette.
The grid, in one form or another, is such a ubiquity in comics art that it’s hard to think of logic to apply or standard rules to serve as guidelines for breaking out of it. Even when panels of the strangest shapes are used, even when the lines they follow are counter-intuitive and asymmetrical, the basic look of the comics page is a rectangle filled up with smaller pictures that have been neatly arranged to fit inside it like puzzle pieces. Pulling the grid off the page is like pulling the cloth off a table — the space is large, and bare, and it can be daunting to figure out how to go about setting it. The great comics artists have worked in grids, period. One has to go far afield, typically to the medium’s forgotten psychedelicists, names like Greg Irons or Philippe Druillet or Alex Nino, before encountering comics art that attempts to make grid-less pages work as anything more than cheap novelty. Without a grid, the artist is truly alone — no automatic compositional axis to base the page around, no storytelling rhythm in place, and few canonical works to draw inspiration from.
Steve Bissette went “off the grid” at an almost feverish rate in his mid-’80s work with Alan Moore on Swamp Thing. Though Moore’s scripts have drawn (at least) hundreds of times as many praise, Bissette’s artwork isn’t just the aspect of the comics that’s aged best — it’s what makes them work at all. This page is a prime example of why: Moore’s captions are poesy rather than narration, verse and not prose. They swirl around in blatant disregard of the idea that an artist must put direct action of some sort or other on the page, calling up flashes of color and shadowy half-forms instead. Gridding a sequence in which “clusters of insect eggs burn like nebulae, suspended in their unique and vine-wrought cosmos,” and things only go on like that too, would border on the ridiculous. These words are not intended to produce an exact counterpoint in the art. They’re flights of fancy. Bissette understands this, and does the same thing: this page is anything but literal, vague in its depiction of both progression through time and movement through space. Instead, it gives us multiple, somewhat interconnected views into one scene, leaving plenty of space for Moore’s image-rich writing. Rather than simply act as an echo to the words, Bissette finds their purpose and creates a complementary piece of art.
- May 11, 2011 @ 01:20 PM by Matt Seneca
Icarus on Robot 6 pg 19
Icarus is a comic by Ryan Cody and is serialized here on Robot 6, with new pages every Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Comments welcome.
Hopefully this is the twist that will hook the reader and get them interested in the rest of the series. Friday we will run all the back-matter to issue #1 and on Monday we dive into issue #2 with ALL NEW, NEVER BEFORE SEEN pages. Comments welcome.
Ryan Cody is the creator, artist, writer, & colorist of ICARUS, a bi-monthly super-powered adventure/espionage book published through Super 75 Comics. Ryan’s past projects include illustrating the graphic novel VILLAINS forViper
Comics as well as contributing to the Eisner-Award winning anthology, Popgun Vol.3, from Image comics.ICARUS #1 is currently available as both a .99 digital download and in print. For more information or to order a print copy of ICARUS, please visit www.super75comics.com
- May 11, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Ryan Cody
It’s still Free Comic Book Day somewhere
Elric: The Balance Lost
If you didn’t have a chance to make it to your local comics retailer this past Saturday, never fear — it’s always Free Comic Book Day on the web. Here are a few places you can find digital editions of the FCBD comics released on Saturday, plus a few more freebies because, hey, free comics:
- Both of Dark Horse’s FCBD books, Criminal Macabre/Baltimore and Avatar: The Last Airbender/Star Wars: The Clone Wars, will be available for download from Dark Horse Digital starting today through the end of the month.
- Image’s offering, the Super Dinosaur Origin Special, can be downloaded for free from comiXology.
- BOOM!’s Elric book can be read in full on Comic Book Resources, along with Th3rd World Studios’ The Intrepid Escapegoat.
- Jay Hosler has posted an eight-page story he did for Evolution of Adventure, a minicomic given away at The Comic Swap in State College, Penn.
- Dr Pepper is serializing a Thor and Sif comic on their website. It’s titled “Rescue,” I wonder if it’ll end with Thor’s thirst being rescued by the cool taste of Dr Pepper? Joking aside, it’s by Jeff Parker and Kev Sharpe, which definitely makes it worth checking out.
- Paul Maybury has made an eight page comic called “Clock” available for free.
- Eisner nominee Frank Stockton has posted his nominated short story, “Hamburgers for One,” on his blog.
- Finally, ACT-I-VATE today posted a one-shot comic called “Hurricane Wilma” by Omar Angulo.
Enjoy!
- May 11, 2011 @ 11:32 AM by JK Parkin
Beasts of Burden, Macabre, Steranko coming to Dark Horse Presents
Dark Horse Presents #3
Dark Horse has posted several updates on their blog about upcoming content for the relaunched Dark Horse Presents anthology. As you can see on the cover above, the third issue will include a 13-page preview of Red Tide, “Jim Steranko’s crime-noir masterpiece.”
Issues #4, #6 and #8, meanwhile, will include Beasts of Burden stories by writer Evan Dorkin and artist Jill Thompson. “These new stories take place shortly after the events of the Hellboy crossover from last year, are self-contained, and can be easily followed by folks who haven’t read the previous comics,” Dorkin said. “I hope our regular readers will enjoy these stories—Jill’s painted artwork is as amazing as always, and there are character and background details dropped throughout the episodes that add to the overall story line we’ve been building.”
And finally, issue #4 will also include a new Criminal Macabre story by writer Steve Niles, artist Chris Mitten and colorist Michelle Madsen. “I can’t give away too much, but there are some major shocks coming for Cal fans,” Niles said. “Everything about Cal and his life is about to be whipped into a Hellish frenzy that would have the Devil himself on his heels. Plus it’s gonna be funny and I can’t say enough about Chris and Michelle’s work together. It’s perfect.”
- May 11, 2011 @ 10:34 AM by JK Parkin
Kindle update: The return of Delivery Cupid
Pet on Duty is back!
Ever since the news broke last week that Amazon had removed some yaoi manga from the Kindle store, people, myself included, have been bombarding them with questions. No answers have been forthcoming, however. Amazon is like a huge black box with a screen in the side that sells books. What goes on inside it is anybody’s guess; their PR people don’t return emails or calls, and their customer service department spits out bland, automated responses like
“Occasionally books are removed from the Kindle Store for various reasons. We do not have any specific details about why this particular book may have been removed. The book’s publishers decide if a book is to be made available for the Kindle, and they can change this status at any time.”
In the Case of the Missing Manga, Amazon fails the Turing Test. It is obviously a robot.
- May 11, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
DC Comics sues manufacturer of replica Batmobiles
1989 Batmobile, by Mark Towles
DC Comics has sued a California manufacturer of replica vehicles, accusing him of infringing on the company’s copyrights and trademarks by selling custom-made Batmobiles.
Hollywood, Esq., reports that DC filed the lawsuit last week in federal court against Mark Towles, whose business Gotham Garage specializes in the creation and sale of television and movie replica vehicles, from the 1989 movie Batmobile to the 1966 TV Batmobile and Batboat to Speed Racer’s Mach 5. Presumably none of those replicas is licensed, as the indicia on Towles’ website states that “Neither Gotham Garage nor Mark Towle are directly affiliated with Warner Brothers Inc., DC Comics., 20th Century Fox Inc., Walt Disney Inc., nor The Munsters Official Organizations.”
The publisher accuses Towles of copyright and trademark infringement, trademark counterfeiting and unfair competition, and seeks a permanent injunction, the destruction of all infringing products and damages of no less than $750,000 for each infringement.
- May 11, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
The Watchmen-My Little Pony mashup no one knew they wanted
Really, it was always just a matter of time before these two great products of the 1980s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and Hasbro’s My Little Pony, met. Even if it is The Hub’s strange new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cartoon — seriously, that’s the name — mashed up with Zack Snyder’s 2009 comic-book adaptation. “From the visionary director of 300 Ponies,” it’s … Ponymen. Stay gold, Ponymen. Stay gold.
(via Colleen Doran)
- May 11, 2011 @ 06:15 AM by Kevin Melrose
The Middle Ground #52 | Mystery machine
It seems that, when I wasn’t paying attention, Oni Press slowly cornered the market on female detective comics. I’m sure I’ve talking about my love of Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s amazing Stumptown before (And in case I haven’t: It’s an impressive book, and all the better as a collection, where the threads and plots come together more gracefully, without the break in reading that single issues impose. If you haven’t bought it, but like crime fiction? You really, really should fix that as soon as possible), but it took a library visit of all things to discover the publisher’s Amy Devlin mysteries. Continue Reading »
- May 10, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Graeme McMillan
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Flashpoint #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 a “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList if you’d like to play along in our comments section.
Graeme McMillan
If I had $15 this week, I’d immediately go for Flashpoint #1 (DC Comics, $3.99) – I am very, very unsure about the number of tie-ins DC are pushing out for the new crossover event, but with Geoff Johns in charge, I’m suspecting that the main book will be worth a look at least. I’d also grab the relaunched GI Joe #1 (IDW, $3.99), if only to follow up on the “Cobra Civil War” storyline that I admit has completely caught my attention unexpectedly. Curiosity would also get me to pick up both Moriarty #1 (Image, $2.99) and Total Recall #1 (Dynamite, $1.99), two new launches that will hopefully take familiar ideas and characters in directions I wouldn’t expect…
- May 10, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin
Victor Santos vs. el Lagarto Gigante
Victor Santos is showing off his Godzilla samples that got him the gig following Phil Hester on IDW’s Kingdom of Monsters series. Santos takes over in issue #5.
That’s only part of the drawing above; click through to see the whole thing, with and without inks.
- May 10, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Michael May
Robot Bakery: Wonder Woman cookies!
While “Robot Bakery” isn’t officially a new feature on this blog, maybe it should be. Bridget from Bake at 350 has made Wonder Woman cookies and she’s sharing! (The recipe anyway.)
- May 10, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Michael May
Comic Couture | Stussy debuts second wave of Marvel shirts
Eternity
Stussy showed us the first wave of Marvel shirts they’re doing back in April, which used “classic” Marvel artwork. I have nothing against a John Romita Jr. Wolverine shirt, not in the least, but throwing a Stussy logo behind Logan and charging me $36 for it doesn’t get me excited.
More tempting, though, is the second wave, which features new artwork by Will Sweeney (whose Eternity shirt is seen above), David Shrigley, Bill Plympton, Gary Panter, John K., James Jarvis, Todd James, Mister Cartoon and Noah Butkus. Check them out for yourself on the Stussy site.
- May 10, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Lucy Knisley pays attention to Harry Potter
Lucy Knisley (Stop Paying Attention) has created a series of posters, each abridging one of the Harry Potter books. You can see the first four on her LiveJournal and the first three are available as prints.
- May 10, 2011 @ 11:30 AM by Michael May