2011 September
Quote of the day | Solving the Johnny Ryan mystery
There is nothing he will not joke about and sometimes this is his only way of coping. When our baby was stillborn last October and I was lying in the hospital bed, he said he hoped our next baby wouldn’t be such a fucking wimp. It sounds horrible but at the time I needed to hear something like that a lot more than I needed the greeting cards people kept sending that said our baby was a fucking angel looking down on us. I think he has trouble getting close to people because of this kind of thing, but I’m a bit like that too so I found it reassuring. Of course he did cry too but only for a bit.
— Author and craft artist Jenny Ryan on her husband Johnny Ryan, as quoted in Jesse Pearson’s incredible interview with Mr. Ryan for The Comics Journal. In the course of the wide-ranging and often hilarious interview, Ryan also reveals (I think; I certainly had never heard it before) that his father was an abusive alcoholic.
I’ve spent years enjoying Ryan’s scabrously offensive humor comics like Angry Youth Comix and Blecky Yuckerella, as well as his extravagantly vicious action comic Prison Pit, and I’ve often wondered where his search-and-destroy ethos originated. My wife and I have also suffered three miscarriages, and maybe it’s bizarre to say this, but Ryan’s comics involving the gory slaughter of crying babies are one of the few works of art that really spoke to me about how this experience felt. Thanks to Pearson and Ryan’s jawdroppingly candid conversation, I finally feel like I understand both of these things, at least a little.
- September 26, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
‘Self-confident’ Roy Harper and Jason Todd strut their stuff
While this response by “monkeyscandance” (aka Boa) to last week’s controversy about the depiction of Starfire in Red Hood and the Outlaws #1 certainly won’t be the final word on the subject, it probably should be — because the cartoon’s terrific. The artist zeroes in on the original request for Starfire to be clad in a semi-transparent bikini, to hilarious results.
See the full cartoon below, and check out more of the artist’s work on DeviantArt.
- September 26, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Judge bans note-taking in Michael George trial
Legal
Legal | The judge in the trial of former retailer Michael George banned note-taking in the courtroom on Friday out of concern that two women were sharing information with George’s wife Renee. George is on trial for the 1990 murder of his first wife Barbara, and Renee George has been barred from hearing the testimony of other witnesses because she may be called to the stand herself. Also, on Friday a witness testified he had called George’s store at around 5:30 on the day of the murder to ask why an Amazing Spider-Man comic had jumped in value from $5 to $40. Michael Renaud said he spoke to George for about five minutes and that George seemed to be in a hurry to get off the phone; the testimony places him at the crime scene rather than at his mother’s house, where he claimed to be at the time of Barbara’s murder. [The Detroit Free Press]
Conventions | Nearly 5,000 people turned out over the weekend for the second annual Detroit Fanfare, held at the Cobb Center. That’s slightly more than the number who attended the first event at the Dearborn Hyatt Regency, but half what organizer Dennis Barger Jr. had hoped for this year. [The Detroit News]
- September 26, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
What are you reading? with Andrew Foley
Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is Andrew Foley, the author of the new vampire graphic novel from IDW, Done to Death.
To find out what Andrew and the rest of the Robot 6 crew are reading this week, click below …
- September 25, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
The Fifth Color | X-Men history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes
X-Men: Schism - it's kind of like this
The sad truth is that comics aren’t real. While mankind may have actual mutations (and some of them are super cool), none of them really warrants a special school or a uniform. Fighting for acceptance and tolerance thankfully doesn’t come by fighting giant robots designed to kill you. And, I hate to say it, but declaring yourself a sovereign nation off the coast of San Fransisco takes more than just an OK from the mayor’s office. So there is no way for the X-Men to be real, and therefore we can’t hold them to a truly “realistic” point of view.
At the same time, however, we do need to be able to relate to these guys, and that’s something the X-Men do nicely with a theme of social justice, teenage angst and the ever-vigilant battle of acceptance. Recently, these basic concepts have been taken in much more broad of a sense than, say, when they first started. Characters have grown up, loved and lost, tried to sustain families, and had their numbers physically shrink and dwindle. And then Apocalypse drove a giant floating sphinx over their house. In ever-escalating stories, the base concept of the X-Men was devoured for bigger and more dramatic concepts. In today’s comic market, it’s hard to keep our interests, and some days you have to try something new on top of something else new to keep things fresh and exciting.
Then again, going back to basics doesn’t hurt either, and X-Men: Schism seems to be on its way into familiar territory. A clear example of how the world hates and fears mutants, Sentinel proliferation as a nice metaphor for our own nuclear-weapons issues, old villains returning with new faces and a clear motivation that is nothing but evil — this is starting to feel like the comics I used to read, just revved up with a new engine and a new coat of paint. Hope and her crew are a great way to keep close to heart the “youth against the world” sentiment of the X-Men as they fight for the future.
Everything seems to be right on track … so why is Wolverine out of his canucklehead mind?!
(WARNING: Spoilers ahead for X-Men: Schism #4, so grab your copy and read along!)
Continue Reading »
- September 23, 2011 @ 05:00 PM by Carla Hoffman
Eric Canete responds to Catwoman sex scene with post-coital comic
Some fans and comics pundits have been up in arms over the past few days about the sexual depictions of two of DC’s characters in the New 52. In this week’s Catwoman #1, we saw some heated foreplay between Batman and Catwoman that’s raised eyebrows and, perhaps, the profile of the relaunched title. Artist Eric Canete has responded to the fervor with a comic. Instead of trying to explain it further, just read:
This brings up a lot of questions that I’ll leave to the comments section below. But mine is this: When do we get to see Eric Canete do some more comics?
- September 23, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Creating Maus: Spiegelman’s sketches revealed
A page of sketches for Maus
Art Spiegelman’s Maus has a straightforwardness to it that makes it look easy, but the book MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic is testimony to the years of preparation that went into the book. MetaMaus includes a lengthy interview with Spiegelman on his sources, his process, and the research he put into Maus, as well as illustration of primary source material and lots of sketches. The book is accompanied by a DVD that includes both volumes of Maus and audio recordings of Spiegelman’s father Vladek, who narrates the story to his son.
Suvudu has posted a 24-page excerpt from the MetaMaus DVD that shows the preliminary sketches and finished pages of two pages of Maus, and it’s well worth a look to see how Spiegelman developed his story on paper. The book complements this nicely with Spiegelman’s descriptions of the work, and it’s well worth checking out when it is released on Oct. 4.
- September 23, 2011 @ 03:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Mike Hawthorne should be writing Catwoman
Just sayin. Check out Comic Twart for the rest of the er … strip.
- September 23, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Michael May
UK archive features political cartoons, naughty postcards
One of the tamer postcards, still stapled to its official record
Thank you, Teleread, for turning me on to the British Cartoon Archive, and just in time for the weekend, too. The physical archive has over 150,000 comic strips, cartoons, and other interesting bits of ephemera, and they are putting a number of their holdings online. The website is searchable, and there’s also a nice little tag cloud that can hook you up with vintage Andy Capp comics, caricatures by David Low, and, of course, Hitler cartoons.
The most intriguing section of the site (so far) is the collection of double-entendre postcards that were sold at popular seaside resorts in Britain but became the focus of an anti-obscenity crusade after World War II. The site includes a fascinating account of the police tactics used to seize the offending postcards:
“We have our own method of dealing with obscene postcards”, one Blackpool police officer noted in 1951: “Upon receiving a complaint from a member of the public, a plain clothes man is sent to buy a copy of the offending card. When the stationer says that he can see nothing wrong in the card, he is asked: ‘Would you send that card to your daughter?’ If the answer is ‘No’ – as it usually is – a prosecution may follow”.
The whole story is worth reading, and as a special treat, a number of the offending postcards are presented in full color, along with their prosecution records. The collection itself is a bit of an oddity: It was created by the Director of Public Prosecutions in order to try to impose some consistency on the postcard prosecutions. As always obscenity proved to be more difficult to define than to recognize, and the whole effort was ultimately abandoned, but the collection serves as a nice little time capsule of what passed for racy humor in the 1950s.
- September 23, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Ongoings vs miniseries: Is one better?
30 Days of Night ongoing
I’ve been pretty down on ongoing series for the last few years. I sort of touched on it some months ago when I expressed frustration about ongoing series having to make things up as they go along. It’s hard to tell a satisfying story when you’re not building toward an end. My biggest issue with Marvel and DC’s events over the last few years hasn’t been that they want me to buy a bunch of peripheral comics; it’s that so rarely have I been satisfied at an event’s conclusion. Events don’t end; they just lead to the next in a never-ending series of more events. On a smaller scale, ongoing series are the same way. Unless I’m a completest collector, there’s no reward for reading every issue of The Amazing Spider-Man or any other long-running series. They’re stories without end and many of their parts over time are horrible.
So why do I get a thrill when I hear, for instance, that IDW is turning Star Trek and 30 Days of Night into ongoing series? I love the series-of-mini-series approach that those titles and books like Hellboy have followed for years, so what is it that gets me excited about their becoming open-ended? Part of it is the vote of confidence by the publisher when it commits to an ongoing series. Of course it’s not really a commitment, because even ongoings can be canceled at any time, but it says something that a publisher believes there’s enough life in a character or concept to support a series indefinitely.
More than that though is the statement that there are limitless possibilities with these characters or this world. That’s a thrilling idea, even though not every story is going to be a winner. I prefer the term “mini-series” to “limited series” precisely because even though “limited” doesn’t refer to imagination or scope in that phrase, I instinctively rebel at the thought that stories have limits. It’s a silly thing to get hung up on and of course stories do have limits of various kinds, but I want storytellers to fool me into thinking that they don’t. Ongoing series help to foster that willing deception.
- September 23, 2011 @ 12:30 PM by Michael May
Comics College | Adrian Tomine
Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
After a brief one-month vacation, Comics College is back with a look at the bibliography of one of the brighter stars indie comics sky, Adrian Tomine.
- September 23, 2011 @ 11:30 AM by Chris Mautner
DC’s push for the New 52: ‘This is a Catwoman for 2011′
From Catwoman #1, by Judd Winick and Guillem March
In a week in which the debuts of Batman and Wonder Woman fired on all cylinders, you have to think DC Comics didn’t expect the spotlight to be stolen by the first issues of Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws. Alas, online discussion over the past 48 hours hasn’t been focused on the accessibility of the former or the potential of the latter (if indeed either demonstrates accessibility or potential). Instead, it’s centered on a bra-flashing Selina Kyle engaging in aggressive costumed sex with Batman, and a semi-amnesiac Starfire who’s become little more than an emotionless sex mannequin.
I feel as if I should be worked up by the depictions but, to be honest, I’m just deflated by the whole thing. The best I can muster is, “Sigh … again?” and maybe, “This is the kind of storytelling and characterization you relaunched your entire line for?” But here are some of the highlights of what others are saying on the subject:
• Winick’s statement to Newsarama about the response to Catwoman #1: “This is a Catwoman for 2011, and my approach to her character and actions reflect someone who lives in our times. And wears a cat suit. And steals. It’s a tale that is part crime story, part mystery and part romance. In that, you will find action, suspense and passion. Each of those qualities, at times, play to their extremes. Catwoman is a character with a rich comic book history, and my hope is that readers will continue to join us as the adventure continues.”
- September 23, 2011 @ 10:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Trevor Hairsine returns to indies with German war comic [Updated]
BOOM! Studios sent out word this morning that it’s publishing a new series titled Operation: Broken Wings, 1936. The series has major buzz around it for the artist drawing it — former Marvel Young Gun Trevor Hairsine, who’s joined by writer Herik Hanna. The duo tells a story taking place in pre-World War II Germany, where an intelligence officer is tortured by his superiors for his apparent insubordination.
Hairsine is an eye-opening artist, both for his skills on the comic page and for his unique career path. First coming into comics carrying a heavy Bryan Hitch influence, he bounced around 2000AD before landing his star-making gig on Com.X’s Cla$$war in 2002. The book was plagued with problems, leaving an invite from Marvel to jump ship an easy choice for the artist.
Hairsine was soon enlisted to follow John Cassaday on Captain America and anointed one of Marvel’s then-new Young Guns. Hairsine bounced around on some Ultimate Universe miniseries and the disjointed X-Men: Deadly Genesis, but after getting lower-tier titles as compared to his Young Gun compatriots, he jumped over to DC before dropping off the map except for the occasional cover. In 2009 he did a six-issue series for Wildstorm called Killapalooza and then a licensed title earlier this year based on the video game Deus Ex. However, he’s yet to match up to the heights of his work or the buzz surrounding him earlier in his career. Seeing him working outside the fold — and the big page rates — of Marvel and DC is intriguing, but that’s probably a story we’ll never hear.
Regardless, Hairsine remains an artist to watch, and seeing him tackle German soldier in-fighting sounds full of win for me.
UPDATE: Our Robot 6 readers have informed us that this series isn’t in-fact “new” as the BOOM! press release states, but part of a franchise put out in France’s Delcourt called Le Casse (translated as “The Damage”), with each volume illustrated by different artists. Trevor’s installment that BOOM! is publishing was originally subtitled “L’Heritage du Kaiser.” This isn’t the first import BOOM! has done released; in 2010 the publisher imported another Delcourt series, 7 Assassins, illustrated by Sean Phillips.
- September 23, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Arrant
BOOM! Studios offers late artist’s work for free
As JK noted a few days ago, Dutch artist Mick Oosterveer died last weekend in a motorcycle accident at the age of 50. Oosterveer was well known in Europe for his daily strip Nicky Saxx, but he had also collaborated with Mark Waid on a number of comics for the U.S. market, including two four-issue series, The Unknown and The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh, about a detective who has a brain tumor and only six months to live.
In honor of Oosterveer, BOOM! Studios has made both collected editions available for free via comiXology (click the links above to go to the download pages). If this is your first time on comiXology, you will have to create an account, but it’s painless, and once you download the comics, you can read them on pretty much any device you own. Both comics also are available via the iPad app. There’s no mention of how long they will be available for free.
BOOM! Editor-in-Chief Matt Gagnon has also penned a nice appreciation of Oosterveer.
(Via Johanna Draper Carlson, who gave The Unknown a good review when it first came out.)
Update: BOOM! sent out a notice this morning noting that the comics are also available for free on iVerse, Graphicly and mydigitalcomics.
- September 23, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Stan Lee honor draws fire; Seth wins Harbourfront prize
Stan Lee
Creators | Some military personnel are upset that comics legend Stan Lee received the Honorable Order of St. Barbara award in July during the week of Comic-Con International, as the award is “traditionally reserved for career cannon cockers in the Army and Marine Corps who have made their mark on the field artillery or air defense communities.” While the award credited Lee, who served stateside in the Army during World War II, with writing “several training manuals and films for the artillery and all other branches of the service,” the co-creator of the Fantastic Four and other Marvel properties said he didn’t recall ever doing so. A spokesman for Maj. Gen. David Halverson, commander of the Army Field Artillery Center at Fort Sill, Okla., who signed off on the award, said it “was given to a former soldier and WWII veteran whose contributions, both in the Army and beyond, are in keeping with and representative of all the high standards of achievement and selfless service associated with the Honorary Order of Saint Barbara.” Lee actually missed receiving the award, as at the ceremony he also received an Army Certificate of Achievement and left before the second award could be given. [Air Force Times]
- September 23, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin