2011 June
Chris Claremont on his first job, and life with the X-Men
X-Men writer Chris Claremont gets the Graphic NYC treatment this week: A stylish photograph by Seth Kushner and an in-depth interview with Christopher Irving. And this is just part one. Claremont starts out with an account of what might have been: His first foray into comics was thanks to a required internship while he was a student at Bard College. Not sure of what to do, he asked family friend Al Jaffee if he could do an internship at Mad Magazine.
“As it turned out, he went to my parents and said ‘There is no way in hell I’m going to recommend your son for an intern—Do you know what we do? Do you know what happens when we get together? You’d never forgive me!’
“He said ‘I’m friends with Stan Lee. Would you be willing to work for Marvel?’ and I said ‘Hell, yes.’”
“So, Al called Stan, Stan called me, and I told him I’d work for free. Stan, and Marvel, were never one to turn down a free lunch in those days, and he said ‘Come in and be a gopher for two months.’”
The rest, as they say, is history, and the interview that follows is a must for anyone interested in the inner workings of Marvel Comics back in the day.
- June 14, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Comics fall short of 100K mark; tribute to Kirby from his son
Flashpoint #1
Publishing | Despite the debut of DC Comics’ Flashpoint and the release of the second issue of Marvel’s Fear Itself — big summer events for both publishers — no comic sold more than 100,000 copies in the direct market in May. Fear Itself #2 led Diamond Comic Distributors’ list of Top 300 comics with an estimated 96,318 copies, a decline of some 32,000 copies from its first issue. But it’s the debut of Flashpoint in the No. 2 slot, with an estimated 86,981 copies, that ICv2 says “has to be considered disappointing.” However, the retail news and analysis website is quick to point out that several stores have indicated they sold out of their initial orders of the book, suggesting it may have been under-ordered by event-wary retailers. ICv2 also notes a 17.3 percent drop in the Top 300 comics before explaining the situation isn’t as grim as that figure may suggest. However, it cautions, the same can’t be said for the graphic novel category, which was down just 6.2 percent from May 2010 — a month in which no title sold more than 5,000 copies. John Jackson Miller has further analysis. [ICv2.com]
Jack Kirby
Creators | In a piece titled “Happy Father’s Day; Glad You’re Not Here,” Neal Kirby pays tribute to his father, the late Jack Kirby, in the process exposing some of the bitterness over the way the comics legend has been credited in recent movie adaptations: “If [you're] unfamiliar with the comics industry, and just enjoy super-hero movies, you will notice my fathers’ name on some screen credits, usually buried at the end of the movie; sometimes, as in the recent Thor release, coming third after someone who had no hand in the characters’ creation other than being the editor-in-chief’s brother. Unfortunately, for the past several years, some in the comics industry who have had the benefit of longevity have used the opportunity to claim to be the sole creator of all of Marvels’ characters. Must be great to be the last man standing. It would seem that being backed by the public relations department of a large corporation buys access into the 24/7 news cycle.” [CO2 Comics Blog]
- June 14, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Talking Comics with Tim | Mark Andrew Smith
Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors #2
It’s rare that a new ongoing comic book series launches and successfully sells out the first issue, but that’s exactly what Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors (Image) accomplished last month. This Wednesday, June 15, Gladstone’s will release the second issue. In anticipation of the next issue, I caught up with the series writer/co-creator Mark Andrew Smith to discuss the educational institution “for the children of the world’s greatest super villains to learn the trade“. Once you’ve read the interview, be sure to visit fellow Robot 6′s (and very busy multi-site pundit) Brigid Alverson’s preview of issue 2 at School Library Journal’s Good Comics for Kids. My thanks to Smith for the interview.
Tim O’Shea: Everyone hopes to sell out the first issue of a project, but you all actually did. How great did that feel?
Mark Andrew Smith: I felt fortunate, and happy for both [artist] Armand [Villavert] and myself. . There are so many factors that have to come together for a book to sell out. Yes, we put an enormous amount of work into it. But without the support of Image, the retailers, media, and most importantly, everyone who bought the book, it never would have happened.
- June 13, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tim O'Shea
The perfect publisher’s blog?
There are a lot of ways to run a blog promoting your publishing company. Dark Horse uses its blog primarily to remind readers of new product. DC breaks news about its comics and runs interviews with its creators. Top Shelf and First Second talk about their own product, but also make time to discuss books they’re enjoying from other publishers.
One of my favorite publisher’s blogs right now is Hermes Press‘ relatively new one. Since they publish a lot of reprints of classic. licensed material, they not only keep readers updated on their publishing schedule, but also link to news about what others are doing with those same licenses. For example, Hermes is reprinting old Dark Shadows comics, so they’re also following production on the Tim Burton Dark Shadows movie. They reprint Buck Rogers strips, so here’s some news about a Buck Rogers screening in New York. They reprint Roy Rogers, so here are some links to other bloggers who are talking about Roy. It’s a fun blog that doesn’t just promote product; it engages in the larger conversation about the things it’s interested in. Some of the other blogs are doing that too (First Second and Top Shelf in particular), but Hermes is going all out.
What makes a perfect publisher’s blog in your opinion?
- June 13, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Michael May
The next best thing to being there: The Comics Reporter’s guide to Comic-Con
It’s enormous, it’s equal parts entertaining and overwhelming, and it’s stuffed with references to Ferro Lad, Forbush Man, and Elfen Lied so nerdy that they’re actually inaudible to normal human ears. No, it’s not the San Diego Comic-Con…well, okay, it is the San Diego Comic-Con, but it’s also Tom Spurgeon’s annual guide to the San Diego Comic-Con for his site The Comics Reporter.
This year’s edition features fully 157 tips and tricks of the trade for getting the most out of nerddom’s Big Dance. From basic advice on hotels, transportation, and meals; to hard-earned wisdom on what kind of supplies to bring with you on the con floor and where to seek relief once you’ve used up either those supplies or your own sanity; to idiosyncratic recommendations like saving on vacation money by adding a trip to Vegas on either side of your San Diego stay, or “Tip #121: When In Doubt, Attend A Panel Featuring Sergio Aragones” — it’s a must-read for anyone planning on going to CCI2011. But it’s also a must-read for those of us who aren’t going, but wish they were.
I miss my San Diego years terribly, and Tom’s annual guide conjures up the sights, sounds, sensations, and smells of the show so perfectly in its borderline-insane sprawl and splendor that each time I read it it’s all I can do to stop myself from booking the flight and requesting days off from my day job for next year right then and there.
- June 13, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Tron: Legacy webcomic plunges you into a virtual world
When it first came out, Tron was a groundbreaking movie because of its use of computer animation, which up till then had only been seen in limited doses. Thirty years later, an online graphic novel based on the movie, Tron: Legacy, is breaking new ground again by using HTML5 to create a webcomic that is much more dynamic than your standard still-pictures-in-a-browser format.
This is not some cheesy “motion comic” where Hulk’s arm moves up and down while the rest of the picture stays static. Check out the demo video: The motion is not figures on a background but the backgrounds themselves, which rotate to give the reader the feeling of moving through deep space. (If you’re the type of person who gets seasick at iMAX movies, this may not be the comic for you.) Oddly, the fight scenes are more static than the setup, because those scenes don’t have the same three-dimensional motion effect. The plot itself seems to be rather elemental, and you don’t have to have seen the movie to follow the comic—everything is laid out for the reader.
The demo video is a bit of an ad for Internet Explorer 9, which is the browser this graphic novel was developed for. I was able to view it fine in Safari on my Mac, although it was a bit jerky. You scroll through the comic by dragging, so it’s not quite as smooth an experience as in the demo, and it’s a bit disorienting because there are no indicators to tell you how long the comic is or how far along you are. Still, it’s nicely done and worth looking at for the novelty value, if nothing else. Sort of like Tron itself was, back in the day.
- June 13, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
SpiderMonster: The Musical: ‘It is only our 17th opening night, sir’
In a perfectly timed parody, Sesame Street has released a preview of its upcoming spoof of the Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark a day before the long-troubled musical is finally set to open. The video features Grover as Spider-Man (or, perhaps, star Reeve Carney), along with a couple of felt-covered jabs at Bono. Sesame Street begins its 42nd season in September.
- June 13, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Quote of the day #2 | “We have to stop thinking of it as a quota thing and think of it as a common-sense thing”
Dan Harmon and the cast of Community (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images North America)
[AV Club]: You’ve employed a lot of female writers, in both seasons. That’s not true of a lot of other TV comedies. Was that a conscious decision?
Dan Harmon: It was conscious on the part of [former NBC programming head] Angela Bromstad, before she left NBC. Angela said, “Get more women on your staff. Make it half women.” I remember going, “Are you fucking kidding me?” to myself. “Okay, I got a sitcom, and this is as far as you go,” because I’ve just been told that half of my staff needs to be a quota hire. From the mouths of bureaucrats come the seeds of great things. I dug extra hard. You find somebody like Hilary Winston. You find people later like [Emily] Cutler and [Karey] Dornetto.
- June 13, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Dan DiDio: DC Comics has ‘decided to rest’ the Justice Society
Justice Society of America #26, by Alex Ross
One of the many questions surrounding DC Comics’ line-wide renumbering centered on the absence of Justice Society of America, a title that in recent years had undergone its own high-profile reboot and spawned two spinoff series. The Justice Society, with a sprawling membership that includes Golden Age characters (or their namesakes) like The Flash, Hawkman, Green Lantern and Hourman, reached deep into DC, and comic-book, history, forming the very first team of superheroes.
But Justice Society wasn’t among the 52 books rolled out by the publisher last week. Neither, for that matter, was Power Girl, whose title character has been closely associated with the JSA since her debut in 1976. And the solicitation for Mister Terrific #1, featuring a new take on “the world’s third-smartest man” — and two-time chairman of the team — makes no mention of the group. Then came the unveiling on Friday of Action Comics #1 which, as Robot 6′s J.K. Parkin pointed out, refers to “a world that doesn’t trust their first Super Hero.”
If all of that isn’t enough to signal the end, or non-existence, of the world’s first team of superheroes, official word came over the weekend from Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, who wrote on his Facebook page, “As for JSA, we have decided to rest this concept while we devote our attention on the launch of the three new Justice League series. As for other characters and series not part of the initial 52, there are plenty of stories to be told, and we’re just getting started.”
As with any demise in superhero comics, this one is probably only temporary (heck, the JSA itself has been put to “rest,” only to be resurrected, a handful of times over the past 60 years). However, when the publisher is pushing a “modern” and “contemporary” take on its superhero universe, grappling with graying characters so firmly rooted in World War II will undoubtedly prove problematic.
- June 13, 2011 @ 10:59 AM by Kevin Melrose
Ben Towle talks cartooning on film
Folktales and Airships from Peter Salomone on Vimeo.
Artist Ben Towle, whose credits include Midnight Sun and Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, is the subject of Folktales and Airships, a documentary by Peter Salomone, a filmmaker who is working toward an MFA in filmmaking at Wake Forest University. Towle confessed to having some misgivings about the project:
One of my big personal pet peeves with comics documentaries is how the actual comics artwork is filmed and shown on-screen. Filmmakers (because they’re used to moving images I assume) have a tendency to want to make the comics images move and this often works out really really badly. It also seems to me to imply that the original static comics images are somehow deficient and need to be “augmented” for use in film. A particularly egregious example of this is Tintin and Me, in which Hergé’s artwork is separated into foreground and background elements and then subjected to some sort of half-assed animation effect. On the other hand, I can certainly see some reasoning behind not wanting just a static image on-screen for long periods. There are a lot of ways to handle this problem in film, and I had some trepidations for sure about how it would be dealt with with my artwork.
Nonetheless, he was happy with the way Folktales and Airships turned out. It’s only 9 minutes long, but the film has a nice mix of Towle’s art and interviews with the artist himself.
- June 13, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Quote of the day | What superhero movies and superhero video games have in common
Honestly, most comic book movies feel like most tie-in-videogames do. Those things get made to service the trademark. They aren’t very good games. There’s nothing amazing going on in innovation or gameplay. They’re cool because you get to roleplay Batman kicking skulls in or the like. I’m sure they’re entertaining enough, but they’re not memorable above and beyond that.
–Strangeways writer (and Robot 6 veteran) Matt Maxwell, with a comparison that really clarified a lot of things for me about the pleasures and disappointments of superhero movies. Fatherhood has done to my movie-going time what I do to about 20 diapers a day and thrown it right in the garbage, but I’ve looked forward to and seen a lot of these flicks over the years, and on an alternate Earth I’d have seen two more already this summer in the form of Thor and X-Men: First Class, with another two, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger soon to join them. I’ve disliked many of them. I’ve liked some of them. I’ve liked a handful — the Marvel Studios suite of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2 — well enough to own them on DVD. But with the exception of the first Tim Burton Batman movie, I’ve never seen one that offers the never-seen-that-before sensation that superhero comics still regularly afford you, if you know where to look.
- June 13, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | Comic sales fall 11% in May; CBLDF joins fight over Utah law
Fear Itself #2
Publishing | May marked the worst month of the year for the direct market since January as sales of comic books and graphic novels fell 11.21 percent versus May 2010. Chart watcher John Jackson Miller chalks up the decline to a combination of retailers ordering more Free Comic Book Day titles than “for-profit” books and publishers’ summer events heating up a little later this year. Marvel led Diamond Comic Distributors’ list of top comics for the month with Fear Itself #2, followed by the first issue of DC’s Flashpoint. Avatar topped the graphic novel chart with Crossed 3D, Vol. 1. [The Comichron]
Legal | The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has joined a coalition that includes booksellers, media companies and the ACLU of Utah in seeking to permanently stop enforcement of a 2005 Utah statute that would regulate Internet speech that some consider “harmful to minors,” including works of art, graphic novels, information about sexual health and the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. The law has not gone into effect because Utah consented to a temporary injunction until the case can be decided. [press release]
Awards | A reminder: Online voting ends today for the 2011 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The winners will be announced July 22 during Comic-Con International in San Diego. [Eisner Awards]
- June 13, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
What Are You Reading?
Athos in America
Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading?, where every week we talk about the comics, books and other stuff we’ve been reading lately. Today our special guest is Kim Thompson, co-publisher, editor, translator and AutoChatter at Fantagraphics … and world traveler, as you’ll see below.
To see what Kim and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link …
- June 12, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Paolo Rivera’s vintage Captain America: The First Avenger poster
Captain America
Artist Paolo Rivera shares this lovely vintage Captain America: The First Avenger poster, which he created to be given as a gift to the cast and crew of the film that’s due out later this summer.
“I was given access to a vast collection of production stills—each emblazoned with a watermark pattern of my name—from which I selected my favorites,” he writes on his blog. “All of the lettering is hand-drawn, with the exception of the small credits at the top and bottom (I ran out of steam). While I did some post-production work in Photoshop, the original looks more or less like what you see here.”
- June 12, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
DC relaunch scorecard: DCnU or DC No?
Green Lantern #1, by Dave Johnson
Although it seems like DC’s big relaunch announcement came out an eternity ago, it actually took the publisher less than two weeks to roll out the 52 titles and their creative teams for the big relaunch/reboot/overhaul coming in September. Now that the cats are out of their respective bags, I thought I’d see where various creators and characters will land after the reboot.
So I went back through DC’s August solicitations to see who was writing or drawing what, and tried to map everyone to their post-relaunch project — if they had one. However, looking at DC’s August solicitations, there seem to be several fill-in issues, so where appropriate I tried to map the most recent ongoing creative teams to their new projects (for instance, I consider Gail Simone and Jesus Saiz the regular creative team for Birds of Prey, even if they aren’t doing the last two issues before September hits). Keep in mind that I just went through the ongoing series and skipped over all the miniseries … of which there are a lot, what with Flashpoint winding up in August.
It’s also worth noting that although several creators didn’t appear in the “big 52″ announcements, that doesn’t mean their tenure with DC is necessarily over — some, like Frazer Irving, have said they have future projects that haven’t been announced. So I tried to note where creators have talked publicly about their post-relaunch plans with DC (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The same could probably be said for some of DC’s characters as well. Or, as Gail Simone said on Twitter: “Again, September is NOT THE END. There’s still plans for characters that we haven’t seen yet.”
So let’s get to it ….
- June 12, 2011 @ 04:14 AM by JK Parkin