2011 August
DC unveils FanExpo Canada-exclusive Flashpoint #1 variant
Flashpoint #1 FanExpo Canada variant cover
On the heels of its Comic-Con-exclusive Flashpoint #1 variant cover, DC Comics has announced it’s offering a similar — well, recolored — wraparound edition for attendees of FanExpo Canada, held Aug. 25-28 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The cover, by Andy Kubert, Sandra Hope and Alex Sinclair, will be available for $10 at the FanExpo Canada exclusives booth. Kubert is a featured guest at the convention, which means you could even get the variant signed, if you’re so inclined.
- August 19, 2011 @ 06:36 AM by Kevin Melrose
Grumpy Old Fan | Thankful for DC’s November 2011 solicitations
Letitia Lerner loses track of her charge
… Specifically, thank goodness this is the last batch of solicitations before the New-52 lineup. As with the previous two sets of solicits, these exist partly to advertise November’s books, but also to keep consumers excited about September’s. Paradoxically, however, that means I can’t really get excited about them until September’s books arrive, and with them some real context.
As always, though, there are more things in the solicits than the New-52, so at least we can discuss some things substantively.
* * *
Continue Reading »
- August 18, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
JManga shows us the manga
JManga
JManga, the manga portal created by a group of 39 Japanese publishers to sell digital manga directly to consumers, officially launched yesterday. The site uses a points system to sell books — a buck gets you 100 points, with each volume costing 899 points or more. You can also buy individual chapters if you prefer, which is probably a nice way to preview something you aren’t sure about, and along those same lines, they’ve got a whole lot of free chapters available as well.
Several folks who know a lot more about manga than I do have taken a look at the site and posted their thoughts. Johanna Draper Carlson, for instance, points out that you can only buy points in $5, $10 and $25 increments, which probably isn’t a big deal for eventual heavy users of the site, but if you’re looking to just pop in and buy one or two volumes, you’ll end up spending more than needed. And since the site already has “print-level pricing,” that means casual users could end up paying more than they would off Amazon or at a local store. Points also expire after a year, which kinda sucks.
- August 18, 2011 @ 03:12 PM by JK Parkin
Skottie Young’s finding the end
Apocalypse Bunny
Regular visitors of Skottie Young’s blog have had a treat lately. Young has announced that’s he’s working on his own graphic novel (in addition to his other, current commitments) and he’s updating his progress in a series of extremely honest, self-reflective posts. There are a couple of things that make this different from other production blogs, a big one being that Young is already a beloved artist with a strong career and plenty of fans who follow it. Most production blogs – and I don’t mean anything negative by this, I promise – are publicity tools as much as anything else. Not that Young’s necessarily above wanting publicity, but the tone of his posts aren’t hyperbolic promotion. They’re educational, as much for Young as for any of his readers. Probably more so.
In his first post, he talked about motivation: Why he wants to create his own graphic novel and why he’s failed in previous attempts. The second post – the one that really got my attention – was more process-related. He wrote about his experience at Trickster in San Diego this year and how it gave him an idea for his next attempt. It’s not just a process-post though, it’s a beautifully told story with a twist ending that made my heart skip a beat when I finished it. He left Trickster with an idea for a cute, very Skottie Young-esque story about an apocalyptic rabbit. I would have bought it for the art and the hopes of some chuckles, but after playing with it for a while Young found the story turning into something else – something deeper – that I can’t wait to read now.
His most recent post is about the writing process: a topic I find especially fascinating when discussed by people who are drawing their own material. Is it best to write a full script first? Just make it up as you go along? Or something in between? Young doesn’t suggest that there’s a one-size-fits-all answer for everyone, but the way he applies the question to himself – and particularly to his previous failures – is heart-warming and enlightening.
- August 18, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Michael May
Comic Industry Job Board – August 2011
In the wide world of comics there’s always a needed for talented people — and not just for creating the comics. The comics you read everyday are supported by an immense infrastructure of editors, publishers, designers, distributors and retailers that make American comics what it is today. And despite the frail economy, the comics industry is always looking for employees.
We’ve compiled a list of all the openings in the comics industry for non-creative office positions and put it all into one place. It’s a good resource if you’re looking to work in comics, and also for armchair speculators seeing what companies are looking to do by seeing what positions they’re hiring for. We accumulated these by looking on publisher websites and job boards — if you know of a job not listed here, let us know!
- August 18, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Supergirl and Batgirl fight magical robot in ‘World’s Finest’ mini-comic
World's Finest
Following the Green Lantern “fan comic” they wrote earlier this year, Dogs of Mars writers Johnny Zito and Tony Trov have created another fan comic, this one a “love letter” to Stephanie Brown and Kara Zor-El. It features art by Brazil’s Aluisio Cervelle Santos
“‘World’s Finest’ is a love letter to the ol’ DCU and two of our favorite characters,” they wrote in a press release. “Reboots happen, we’re OK with that, but Stephanie Brown and Kara Zor-El were pretty cool and we wish we had more time with them.”
The eight-page mini-comic can be viewed on Flickr.
- August 18, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
DeForge, Fake, Harkham lead the 2011 Ignatz Award nominations
The nominees for the 2011 Ignatz Awards have been announced on the website for the Small Press Expo. Awarded every year at SPX and named after the brick-throwing mouse from Krazy Kat, the Ignatzes are selected by an anonymous jury of five creators and voted on by attendees of the show. There’s nothing in comics quite like lugging around the actual, honest-to-god bricks awarded as trophies to the winners.
This year, cartoonists Michael DeForge, Edie Fake, and Sammy Harkham top the list of nominees with three nods apiece. DeForge’s Lose, the third issue of which was released this year by Koyama Press, earned him nominations for Outstanding Artist, Outstanding Series, and Outstanding Comic. Fake received an Outstanding Artist nomination for his Secret Acres graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix, which is also up for Outstanding Graphic Novel, while the the fifth issue of the series collected in the GN earned an Outstanding Mini-Comic nod. Harkham’s self-published Crickets is up for Outstanding Series thanks to its third issue, which is nominated for Outstanding Comic and contains “Blood of the Virgin,” nominated for Outstanding Story.
On the publishing side, Fantagraphics leads the pack with five nominations, split between Joe Daly (Outstanding Series, Dungeon Quest), Joyce Farmer (Outstanding Graphic Novel, Special Exits), Jaime Hernandez (Outstanding Story, “Browntown,” from Love and Rockets: New Stories #3), and Carol Tyler (Outstanding Artist and Outstanding Graphic Novel, You’ll Never Know, Vol. 2: Collateral Damage).
Secret Acres and Sparkplug tie for the silver with four nominations each. Secret Acres boasts the two nods for Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix graphic novel, plus another two for Joe Lambert’s I Will Bite You (Outstanding Artist and Outstanding Anthology or Collection). Sparkplug was tapped for editor Annie Murphy’s Gay Genius (Outstanding Anthology or Collection), Elijah Brubaker’s Reich (Outstanding Series), Dunja Jankovic’s Habitat #2 (Outstanding Comic), and Chris Cilla’s The Heavy Hand (Outstanding Graphic Novel).
Not to tip my own hand here, but as with the Harveys, it’s refreshing to see that Hernandez’s “Browntown” and Chris Ware’s Lint, arguably two of the best comics of all time, are nominated in the relevant categories for best comics of the year. You’d think you could take that for granted, but you’d be surprised! Moreover, DeForge, Fake, and Harkham’s books really are excellent, and Fantagraphics, Secret Acres, and Sparkplug are high-quality, gutsy publishers. Not a lot to be unhappy about with this list!
Hosted by cartoonist Dustin Harbin, the Ignatz Awards gala will take place on Saturday, September 10 at SPX in Bethesda, Maryland. See the entire slate of nominees after the jump.
- August 18, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Writer Del Connell passes away after winning Eisner
Disney artist Del Connell, who received the Bill Finger Excellence in Comic Book Writing Award during this year’s Eisner Award ceremonies just three weeks ago, has died at the age of 93. The Bakersfield Californian has a nice article about Connell, who could not attend the ceremony due to failing health, and Glen Weldon posts an appreciation at NPR’s Monkey See blog describing how Connell’s creation, Goofy’s alter ego Super Goof, changed his life. Mark Evanier, who worked down the hall from Connell for a while and was instrumental in getting him the award, adds his own memories of Connell.
Working at a time when artists and writers seldom signed their work, Connell wrote Disney, Dell, and Gold Key comics for 30 years but is still an unfamiliar name to most comics readers. “He did a three-panel gag for Mickey Mouse every day of his life, including Sundays, for 20 years,” his wife Ruth told the Californian. In addition to Super Goof, he came up with Space Family Robinson, which became the television series Lost in Space, as well as Wacky Witch. Yet few people (including the Eisner judges) knew his name, partly because his work was unsigned, and perhaps also because he was humble about it anyway—and when he retired from comics, he stepped away from the industry entirely.
- August 18, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
With acquisition of The Shadow, Dynamite becoming de facto pulp comics destination [UPDATED]
With the announcement this week that Dynamite Entertainment has acquired the rights to do comic books starring the Shadow, the New Jersey comics company has become the home for a majority of pulp heroes in comics. Although an argument could have been made that DC Comics held that title when it was publishing its now-canceled “First Wave” line, with this latest announcement the Shadow joins other proto-comic heroes like Zorro, the Phantom, Dracula, the Lone Ranger, Sherlock Holmes, Buck Rogers, the Green Hornet and others in Dynamite’s line.
While this isn’t the first time that multiple pulp icons have been under one comic publisher’s roof, it’s by far the most concentrated in some time. Although most weren’t created in comics, pulp characters have a long history bouncing around from numerous publishers over the years. The Shadow, for instance has been published by Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Archie and even a newspaper strip that’s run off and on through the years — and his pulp brethren can claim similar paths over time.
The notable absences to Dynamite’s de facto pulp line are tied up — or have been until recently — by other publishers. DC’s rights to Doc Savage, the Avenger and Rima The Jungle Girl are currently unknown, while Tarzan resides at Dark Horse, and Moonstone, another pulp-inspired comics publisher, publishes stories about the Spider and the Domino Lady.
But with the potency of Dynamite’s line-up so far, it casts a potentially long shadow (no pun intended) on the comics industry and what’s possible. Imagine a pulp line firing on all cylinders, perhaps even a crossover at some point or even a Justice Society-style team-up.
Update: And today Dynamite announced they’ll be making comics starring another pulp hero, The Spider.
- August 18, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Comics A.M. | ‘Pop artist’ accused of stealing art; CBG goes digital
Chad Love Lieberman
Copyright | After running a feature about “New York Multimedia Pop Artist” Chad Love-Lieberman, nephew of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the website Campus Socialite retracted its story upon finding out that Love-Lieberman “is a fraud, taking other people’s art from the web, touting it as his own, and worst of all – selling it for profit.”
Ursula Vernon, creator of the webcomic Digger, noted that one of the pieces in the article was actually hers. “Mad props to the staff at the Campus Socialite, who got back to me in under ten minutes and promised to pull everything and edit the article — they were just as outraged as you’d expect them to me. I’ve actually granted them permission to use the art with appropriate credit if it’ll help illustrate the issue (pun intended),” she posted on her LiveJournal. The domain for Love-Lieberman’s site, art4love.com, isn’t working, but the site is still up. Artist Deirdre Reynolds has a list going on DeviantArt of all the pieces on art4love that artists have identified as their own. Gary Tyrell, meanwhile, has reached out to both Love-Lieberman and his uncle for comment. [Campus Socialite]
Digital | Comics Buyer’s Guide has gone digital; issues of the long-running industry publication are now available on iVerse’s Comics+ application. Johanna Draper Carlson notes that only two CBG-related publications are currently available — the July 2011 issue and 1000 Comic Books You Must Read by Tony Isabella. [press release, Comics Worth Reading]
- August 18, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by JK Parkin
Your Wednesday Sequence SupaSpecTac DeluXXXury Edition #1
Watch this:
One of the most appealing things about the comics form is that no one’s ever been able to offer a satisfying definition of it, a telegraphing sentence-or-two that puts everything that is together into one continuum while simultaneously providing grounds to exclude everything that ain’t. What is comics? you ask. The best answer is that it’s complicated. Without a hard and fast verbal box to place it in, comics remains a fully living field, open to new claimants. There are plenty of kinds of comics that we’ve never seen before, that we won’t even know are comics until someone points it out. Mayan pictoglyphs, Mondrian canvases. The possibilities are endless.
With that said, I’d like to claim the movie trailer above for comics, if I may. Get over the fact that it’s a trailer for a bad movie: as always in this medium, there are more important things than the content going on here. And yes, I realize that the content isn’t the first impediment to a reading of a piece of film as comics. In our current era of genre comics that want nothing more dearly than to be big Hollywood blockbusters, the comparisons between comics and film are made over and over — to the detriment of both media, I believe. While both are ways of visual storytelling, that’s pretty much where the similarities begin and end. Film is all about the actual depiction of the world in motion, while comics’ raison d’etre is to strive against the impossibility of creating still images that also move. Comics, from Jack Kirby to Osamu Tezuka to Robert Crumb to Herge and on from there, are about the suggestion of motion more than its actual existence. Nailing down the pose that speaks of a whole gesture, finding separate planes within a single picture to pull the reader’s eye over it, organizing figures in space so that a read-through of a panel becomes an animation of a choreographed scene, these are the cartoonist’s tasks. To bring life to stillness; something from nothing.
- August 17, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Matt Seneca
Slip me some samosas, baby: Archie goes to Bollywood
It’s not too often that we get Archie Comics news from CNN’s Mumbai office, but this report on Archie’s venture into Bollywood is likely just the beginning. In the World of Archie Double Digest #9, out this week, Archie’s friend Raj gets to direct a Bollywood film and somehow the whole gang ends up in India:
In the “Archie” comic, notorious glutton Jughead replaces his pizzas with samosas and vindaloo; Veronica and Betty drape some saris and alternate these with lehengas; Archie remains fairly confused, but this time in a kurta.
They all absolutely love Bollywood. And find everything about Mumbai “amazing.”
Of course, it’s always strange to look at your culture through the eyes of another, and the CNN article is a bit critical of Archie for picking up on the superficial aspects of Bollywood. But hey, it’s Archie! And to give them their due, they aren’t stopping there—plans are in the works to have the Archie gang travel around the country, as well as to launch more comics in India and possibly to translate them into Hindi and Malayalam.
In fact, Archie comics have been popular in India for quite a while; when I interviewed Archie co-CEO Jon Goldwater for a Publishers Weekly article in January he noted that Archie had just opened an office in India and added, “Even though we are big in India, we should be bigger. We are big in Australia, but we should be bigger. We are not big in Europe, but we will be.” So maybe this is just the beginning.
- August 17, 2011 @ 11:21 AM by Brigid Alverson
Spoiler alert: Study finds spoilers may be a good thing
Comics fans, as a whole, despise spoilers, from the death of Captain America and the revelation of Angel as Twilight to the death of the Human Torch and the unmasking of Miles Morales as the new (Ultimate) Spider-Man. As publishers like Marvel and DC Comics turn more frequently to the mainstream press to generate publicity for major plot developments, spoilers naturally become much more common; national newspapers don’t usually hide their exclusives from the eyes of sensitive comics fans.
But after the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments subside, it turns out that spoilers may not be a bad thing. Really! A new study by the University of California, San Diego found that, “contrary to popular wisdom,” they seem to actually enhance the enjoyment of stories.
The study, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science, focused on three types of short stories — ironic-twist, mystery and literary — from such authors as John Updike, Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. Research subjects were presented with each story in three forms: as it originally appeared, with a spoiler paragraph before the story, and with that same paragraph incorporated into the text.
- August 17, 2011 @ 09:54 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | ‘Spider-Man’ vs. ‘black Spider-Man’; Daredevil audio edition
Miles Morales
Comics | David Brothers argues that the problem with Miles Morales is that he is being defined as “the black Spider-Man” rather than simply “Spider-Man”: “Miles Morales is notable for being the first black Spider-Man, particularly in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but it isn’t his blackness that makes him special. It’s the fact that he’s not Peter Parker. The fact that he’s half-black, half-Puerto Rican, (and how cool would it be if his dad was a dark skinned Puerto Rican and his mom was light skinned black?!), that it looks like he’s taking part in a lottery to get into a good school in the preview images, and that he’s thirteen years old is just sauce. It’s not the meal. It’s part of the meal, sure, but you do yourself and the character (or rather, the concept, what the character represents, or something, because we do not respect characters ’round these parts) a disservice by boiling him down to “black Spider-Man.” He’s so much more than that, judging by the press run Marvel just went on, that breaking him down to being the black Spider-Man is… it’s garbage, it’s lazy, it’s stupid.” [4thletter!]
- August 17, 2011 @ 08:25 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
A closer look at DC’s ‘New 52′ commercial
DC Comics last night debuted the 30-second trailer that will air on television and in theaters to promote the September relaunch of its superhero line. Hero Complex also has a two-minute cut that will appear, presumably later today, on the publisher’s website and Facebook page.
The trailer smartly focuses on DC’s marquee characters, the superheroes a general audience will recognize — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman and the combined Justice League. That said, it’s difficult to get past the promo’s shortcomings, which aren’t limited to the generic “metal” soundtrack, or the feeling that the teaser tumbled out of 2009, when countless independent creators and small publishers were using the same techniques to animate and market their own comics to existing readers.
No, the major problem is that there’s no substance, and no excitement, to the trailer, nothing to make the “average” film-goer sit up and think, “When I get home in three hours, I just have to check out that website!” (Now what was that website again?) “All-new” doesn’t tell a non-comics reader anything; neither do Star Trek-style lens flares and tilted, static shots of characters a mainstream audience has seen fully realized on film and television.
There’s the sense that DC desperately wants to target a new audience, but doesn’t quite know how. What the publisher does instead is fall back on the approach it uses for the readers it already has. For additional evidence, look no further than the extended version of the trailer: The only differences between that and the one airing in theaters is that it’s longer, and includes the tagline, “The World’s Greatest Super Heroes … The World’s Greatest Creators.”
“DC Comics: The New 52″ kicks off Aug. 31 with the release of Justice League #1.
- August 17, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose