2011 October
Some highlights from 24-Hour Comics Day 2011
Lea Hernandez's 24-hour comic
This past Sunday was 24-Hour Comics Day, a grand old comics tradition that began in 1990 when Scott McCloud challenged his friend Steve Bissette to draw an entire 24-page comic in a single day. Scott has posted the whole story, including the first 24-hour comics, on his blog. The idea loped along for a while until 2004, when writer and publisher Nat Gertler came up with the idea of making it a Thing, with coordinated events and people posting on the internet and so forth. And now it even has its own Twitter hashtag. What a long way we have come!
I looked through a lot of blog posts while compiling this, and one thing I noticed was the number of people who felt their comics failed, or who didn’t complete the challenge. I think the value of 24-Hour Comics, especially for newcomers, is that it allows the creator to start something and bring it to a close within a defined period. Starting things is easy, but finishing them is hard, and even finishing a bad comic is better than starting a lot of good ones and never bringing them to a close.
Tom Spurgeon is compiling the definitive, exhaustive collection of links, and what I see from his list and the people linked at the official 24-Hour Comics Day site is that very few well-known creators took the challenge this year; the flip side of that is that there are a lot of ambitious newcomers who gave it a shot.
On the other hand, there were a few veteran creators, including Lea Hernandez, whose comic was super-cute and very colorful, although a bit lacking in storyline …
- October 5, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Coker and Freedman peel back the curtain on Undying Love
Reading a great comic is like enjoying a great meal, but at the end of both sometimes you want to know more about how it was made to get a larger sense of just how good it was. One of the things I like is seeing production work and behind-the-scenes notes on great comics. From the excellent Watching The Watchmen book by Dave Gibbons to collections with backmatter, they give you a larger appreciation of the work.
Later on this month, Image is set to publish a collection of the recently released Undying Love miniseries by Tomm Coker and Daniel Freedman. When CBR’s TJ Dietsch spoke with the duo earlier this year, Coker described it as a romance “filled with action and monsters,” like some modern-day pulp story soaked in blood and vampires. With this collection on its way, Coker and Freedman shared with Robot 6 some of the preliminary art and sketches that helped the series get off the ground.
- October 5, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Comic Industry Job Board – October 2011
In the wide world of comics there’s always a need for talented people — and not just for creating the comics. The comics you read every day 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 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!
- October 5, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Superman fan turns to surgery to become Man of Steel (well, Silicone)
Stories about people with body dysmorphic disorder who turn to excessive cosmetic surgeries to address perceived physical flaws kind of freak me out. I have to skip right past any articles that have to do with Jocelyn “the Cat Woman” Wildestein or those numerous “real-life Barbies.” Luckily, there’s rarely if ever any crossover into the world of comics — until now, that is.
RealSelf.com has caught wind of Herbert Chavez, a 35-year-old Filipino who’s gone under the knife repeatedly since 1995 to look like his hero Superman.
According to the website’s translation of this news report, the “pageant trainer” confirms he’s had chin augmentation to achieve the cleft, rhinoplasty for Christopher Reeve’s nose, silicone injections to his lips, and thigh implants. Looking at Chavez’s before and after photos, the RealSelf experts speculate he’s also had eye surgery, cheek augmentation and jaw augmentation.
Training beauty-pageant contestants must pay very, very well.
- October 5, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Haven Distributors closing? George defense rests
Haven Distributors
Distributors | Johanna Draper Carlson catches a couple of tweets from publishers indicating that independent-comics distributor Haven, formed in 2008 from the assets of Cold Cut Distribution, is shutting down at the end of the month. Calls for confirmation this morning to Haven’s Skokie, Illinois, offices went to voicemail. The company’s closing would leave Diamond without any significant competition for independent comics distribution — print comics, at least. As Johanna notes, the industry giant still has a rival in another quarter: digital distributor comiXology. [Comics Worth Reading]
Legal | The defense rested in the Michael George trial Tuesday after the comics retailer, who is accused in the 1990 murder of his first wife, chose not to take the stand. His lawyers argued that if he were to do so, his testimony would become the sole focus of the trial. George’s current wife Renee, who was kept out of the courtroom for most of the trial in case she was called as a witness, also did not testify. Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday, and then the case will be sent to the jury. [Detroit Free Press]
- October 5, 2011 @ 07:05 AM by Brigid Alverson
The Middle Ground #72 | Internet fail, apparently
I’ve written before about my frustration with Previews, the monthly catalog that’s roughly the size of what we used to call “a phone book” — just think, one day phone books won’t exist, and yet we’ll still say that things are “like a phone book,” because that’s how language works — but this weekend, I realized: Previews is still better than the Internet.
- October 4, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Graeme McMillan
Food or Comics? | Hark! A Snarked!
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop 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, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.
Hark! A Vagrant
Chris Arrant
If I had $15, I’d spend several musty dollars on Fear Agent #31 (Dark Horse, $3.50). This penultimate issue has been a long time coming, and I’m excited to see Remender and Moore enlist Mike Hawthorne to help get these final issues done – big fan of all three of them! Next up would be two of DC’s New 52; Action Comics #2 (DC, $3.99) and Swamp Thing (DC, $2.99); I admit that I feel weird not being more excited about Morrison’s run than I am, but somehow the first Action Comics wasn’t as gripping as the first All-Star Superman … and it’s not the art. For the last pick, I’d get X-Men: Schism #5 (Marvel, $3.99). It got off to a slow start, but Jason Aaron’s an expert at nailing his landings, and I’m intrigued to see how it all goes down.
If I had $30, I’d start off with a pair of number ones – Pilot Season: Test #1 (Image/Top Cow, $3.99) and Roger Langridge’s Snarked #1 (BOOM! Studios, $3.99). Pilot Season has always been a must-buy for me; sometimes the concepts don’t live up to the promise, but they still have a good track record. I just wish more ended up as ongoing series. Next up I’d get the long-running Invincible #83 (Image, $2.99); seriously, this hits all my itches harkening back to my younger comic-reading days. Last up I would get Animal Man #2 (DC, $2.99); I love what Lemire and Foreman started here; I just wish there were more of it!
If I found some extra cash, I would double-back for Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant (D+Q, $19.95). This reads like a literary nut’s comic strip, and I love every bit of it. For some reason it reminds me of Gary Larson’s The Far Side but in a very modern way.
- October 4, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Michael May
Batman: the hero that Gotham … desires?
By DrawAARGHHH
Although I risk reigniting the controversy over Catwoman #1, I couldn’t resist posting this reimagining of Guillem March’s cover by DrawAARGHHH — I couldn’t find a real name — that substitutes Bruce Wayne for Selina Kyle. I think it’s the caption that hooked me: “Batman. He’s not the hero Gotham needs, but he is the one that Gotham desires.” Or maybe it was that the bag of diamonds looks vaguely phallic.
See the full image below, along with March’s original. Catwoman #2, by March and writer Judd Winick, arrives Oct. 19.
- October 4, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Lisa Hanawalt draws up a review of Drive, or so I’ve been told
Look, I have a baby. The only movies I have a chance to watch air on Saturday afternoons on Lifetime. (Odd Girl Out is the best.) But Lisa Hanawalt has provided one of her patented “illustrated responses” to Drive, the instant cult-classic crime film starring Ryan Gosling as … I dunno, someone many people find attractive, I’ll bet. I haven’t seen the movie, and so I’m not reading the review, in hopes that I can eventually see it, perhaps if Lifetime acquires the broadcast rights. But don’t let that stop you.
- October 4, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Could some racist jungle comics have been subversively egalitarian?
It’s no secret that Golden Age comics were full of racist imagery, especially Golden Age jungle comics. But Steve Bennett at Super ITCH pointed out something today that I hadn’t noticed in the examples that I’ve read. Like most jungle girl comics from that time period, Rulah the Jungle Goddess is racist at its very concept: “a standard-issue bored thrill-junkie/society-girl aviatrix who crashed her plane in Africa. There she saved a tribe from a tyrant’s rule who were so grateful the natives dubbed her Rulah, Jungle Goddess and made her their ruler.” A couple of things differentiate Rulah from similar comics, though.
- October 4, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Michael May
Interview: Box Brown on Retrofit Comics
While the rest of the world is going digital, Box Brown is heading in the other direction: Last month he launched Retrofit Comics with plans to publish 17 print comics by new and independent creators in the next 17 months. He got the seed money for Retrofit with a Kickstarter drive, and the launch comic was James Kochalka’s Fungus. All the books are by different artists, and most are one-shots, although Brown said he is open to creators incorporating their Retrofit comics into their ongoing series. This month’s release is Drag Bandits, by Colleen Frakes and Betsy Swardlick, which Brown describes as “kind of like The Scarlet Pimpernel, a woman dressed as a man and a man dressed as a woman, and it’s really exciting.” Comics by Pat Aulisio and Josh Bayer round out this year’s offerings, and plans for the future include an anthology in the spirit of the Japanese underground-manga magazine Garo, a project that Brown says was the brainchild of Ian Harker, editor of the free alt-comic newspaper Secret Prison. The comics are sold both in selected retail stores and by subscription, and Brown estimates he has 150 subscribers to the four-month package and a handful with six-month or twelve-month subscriptions.
While he is handling all this, Brown, who recently won two Ignatz Awards, continues to self-publish his own work, and Blank Slate will publish his graphic novel The Survivalist in December. We talked to him this past weekend about the genesis of Retrofit Comics and what it’s like to run a really, really small press.
- October 4, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Xavier’s growing-up guide for preteen Homo Superiors
Are you just hitting your teen years and realizing that your body’s going through some weird changes? Then chances are…you’re a mutant!
Charles Xavier is here to help with The “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Mutants. The four-page pamphlet is full of useful advice, Frequently Asked Questions, and even helpful tips for parents who are dealing with a mutant child. Head over to College Humor to check it out. You don’t have to be alone anymore.
- October 4, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Michael May
Comics A.M. | Alibi witnesses testify in Michael George trial
Legal
Legal | Defense testimony began in the Michael George trial Monday after the judge denied a motion by the defense to order an acquittal. George’s daughter Tracie testified that she remembers her father sleeping on the couch in his mother’s house the night in 1990 when his first wife Barbara was shot and killed in their Clinton Township, Michigan, comic store. Another defense witness, Douglas Kenyon, told the jury he saw a “suspicious person” in the store that evening and that Barbara George, who waited on him, seemed nervous. [Detroit Free Press]
Conventions | Last weekend’s Alternative Press Expo inspired Deb Aoki to offer a burst of suggestions on Twitter as to how it could be made better. Heidi MacDonald collected the tweets into a single post, and the commenters add some worthwhile points (including not scheduling it opposite the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, which attracts much of the same audience and is free). [Deb Aoki's Twitter, The Beat]
Awards | Ian Culbard’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness won the British Fantasy Award for best comic/graphic novel, presented Saturday by the British Fantasy Society. [The British Fantasy Society]
- October 4, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
Talking Comics with Tim | Rick Veitch
The Big Lie
Less than a month ago (and just before the 10th anniversary of 9/11), Rick Veitch‘s latest project (published by Image), The Big Lie, was released. While the one-shot has already been released, it’s clear that Veitch hopes the comic can foster discussion. As a storyteller who began pursuit of his craft in the early 1970s, Veitch has a perspective and creative voice shaped by a wealth of experience that few active current creators possess. In that spirit, I interviewed Veitch via email about his latest collaboration with artist Gary Erskine. While it was a one-shot so far, Veitch clearly intends to do more with The Big Lie platform. Here’s Image’s official description of the story: “A lab tech travels back in time on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to try and get her husband out of the world trade center before it falls, but will the facts convince him before it’s too late?” For additional context on The Big Lie, be sure to also read CBR’s August interview with Veitch as well the preview we ran in late July.
Tim O’Shea: Do you bristle at the characterization by some that this is a Truther comic?
Rick Veitch: Only in the sense that the “Truther” name lumps together everyone who doubts the government’s version of what happened. I think there’s a huge difference between the architects and engineers who’ve put their professional careers on the line by speaking out and those who are claiming space aliens were responsible.
- October 3, 2011 @ 04:15 PM by Tim O'Shea
Zubkavich and Dogan do Mafia Wars 2 comic on Facebook
Jim Zubkavich is a busy guy these days. The Skullkickers writer has just relaunched his webcomic Makeshift Miracle with a new storyline and a new artist, and last week he announced a project with a very different tone: A comic based on the soon-to-be-released Mafia Wars 2 game, illustrated by Omar Dogan.
Mafia Wars 2 is a Facebook game, and here’s the rub: To read the comic you have to not only “Like” Mafia Wars 2 on Facebook but also allow MW2 to have access to your profile. Which, if you’re already involved with the game, shouldn’t be a problem, but it still skeeves me out a bit. So I didn’t take that last step.
Game comics are not usually my thing, but I enjoyed Zubkavich and Dogan’s previous collaboration, Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki, and I’d like to check this one out. I get the logic that the way to promote a Facebook game is on Facebook, but making the game accessible only from the app greatly reduces its effectiveness as a way to bring new people in. Still, if you’re already there, it’s probably worth checking out. As for me, I’m just going to check out the newest page of Makeshift Miracle, because even without Facebook apps, there’s plenty of Zub to go around.
- October 3, 2011 @ 03:15 PM by Brigid Alverson