Brigid Alverson
Boston Comic Con | Highlights of the Creator-Owned Comics Panel
From left: Brian LeTendre, Ben Templesmith, Becky Cloonan, Joe Benitez, Geof Darrow, Jeremy Bastian
The Creator-Owned Comics panel at Boston Comic-Con drew together five creators with a range of experiences to discuss the fine points of making and marketing their own comics. The panelists were Ben Templesmith (Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse), Becky Cloonan (Wolves), Joe Benitez (Lady Mechanika), Geof Darrow (Shaolin Cowboy), and Jeremy Bastian (Cursed Pirate Girl). The moderator was Brian LeTendre of the Secret Identity podcast.
The panel began with a discussion of how the comics landscape has changed over the years. “It’s changed completely,” said Ben Templesmith. “Every small publisher in the comics media, they have all now pretty much been swallowed up by bigger fish. Everyone in the main media is getting involved in comics and buying up small publishers.”
Cloonan, on the other hand, doesn’t see much difference in the way she sells her self-published comics. ” When I first started doing mini-comics, it was almost exactly the way I do them now,” she said. “I go to conventions and I bring my suitcase filled with comics; I just sell more. It’s funny how much social media and the industry has changed, but I still handle it and approach it much the same way I did in college.”
- May 4, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Check out the trailer for the Art of War graphic novel
Feel like getting creeped out a bit? Check out this stylish, mostly black-and-white trailer for The Art of War: The Graphic Novel, by Kelly Roman and Michael DeWeese. Due out July 31, the book takes Sun-Tzu’s classic text and adds a storyline. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but the press release explains that the setting is “a violent near-future when financial markets are militarized and China is the dominant economy.” The trailer is definitely more about ambience than story, but it’s intriguing to watch.
- May 4, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | The Walking Dead continues bookstore domination
The Walking Dead, Compendium One
Publishing | Continuing its domination of the graphic novel sales in bookstores, The Walking Dead laid claim to seven of the Top 10 spots on BookScan’s April chart. The series, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, took the first four positions. What’s more, 12 of the Top 20 graphic novels were volumes of The Walking Dead. [ICv2.com]
Publishing | Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson talks to Right Stuf director of marketing and communications Alison Roberts about that company’s announcement earlier this week that it will be publishing the first three volumes Hetalia: Axis Powers as a print-on-demand books. The series was originally licensed by Tokyopop, which is co-branding the books with Right Stuf. [MTV Geek]
- May 4, 2012 @ 07:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
Valiant goes exclusive with comiXology for digital comics
ComiXology announced this morning it will be the exclusive digital distributor for Valiant Entertainment‘s comics, both the relaunched titles and the 1990s originals.
Valiant will release its comics digitally the same day as print, beginning today with X-O Manowar #1, written by Robert Venditti and illustrated by Cary Nord. (Here’s a preview.) The other relaunch titles are Harbinger #1, due out on June 6; Bloodshot #1, on July 11; and Archer & Armstrong #1, on Aug. 8.
ComiXology will also carry digital editions of three classic storylines:
- X-O Manowar (1992) #0-6, by Jim Shooter, Bob Layton, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Joe Quesada
- Harbinger (1992) #0-6, by Jim Shooter and David Lapham
- Bloodshot (1993) #0-4, by Kevin VanHook and Don Perlin
The Valiant relaunch has been one of the most-hyped comics events of the season, and with good reason. Founded by former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, Valiant was the No. 3 comics publisher in the United States in the 1990s. Its line featured a strong set of characters in an interconnected universe, all fleshed out by a creative team headed by Shooter and former Marvel hands Barry Windsor-Smith and Bob Layton. Valiant Entertainment, which purchased the rights to the Valiant comics in 2007, is relaunching four of the original titles with updated characters and story lines, and plans are in the works for at least two more.
Venditti and the Valiant staff outlined their plans for the four relaunch titles at the Valiant panel at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, and at that time, Publisher Fred Pierce said the 1990s comics would be available in digital format and eventually in print as well. More digital editions of the older titles, including Archer & Armstrong, Rai, Ninjak, Shadowman, Eternal Warrior and Quantum & Woody, are in the works.
- May 2, 2012 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Across the Pond | A roundup of U.K. comics news
First, a heads-up on the British Invasion of Toronto: This weekend, Toronto Comics Art Festival will host a number of creators from the United Kingdom, including Sean Azzopardi (Necessary Monsters), Darryl Cunningham (Psychiatric Tales), Joe Decie (Accidental Salad), Tom Gauld (Goliath), Lizz Lunney (Depressed Cat: Nine Miserable Lives) and Luke Pearson (Hilda and the Midnight Giant). Publishers Blank Slate, Nobrow Press and SelfMadeHero will also be in attendance. I ran into some other British creators at MoCCA this weekend; you’ll be hearing about that shortly.
Comics | Gary Northfield shows off some of the art from his comic Gary’s Garden, which runs in the weekly children’s comic The Phoenix:
Part autobiography, part made-up nonsense (well, mainly completely made-up nonsense to be fair), Gary’s Garden delves into my favourite thing ever – me spying on the comings and goings of all the little dudes and dudettes who dwell in my garden.
This makes me wish more fervently than ever that The Phoenix would get an app or somehow make itself available outside the UK, digitally or on paper. Adding to my pain: Jim Medway offers a peek at his new comic Chip Charlton & Mr. Woofles of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
- May 1, 2012 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Monday comics break: The whimsy of Stephen Collins
I’m not sure who turned me on to Stephen Collins, but I just spent a half-hour enjoying his short comics when I should have been working. Collins is British, and he has that wry sense of humor that blends incongruity and wit to make you look at something ordinary in a new way. The comics collected on his website Colillo span a number of topics, from sentient hand dryers to Martian invaders who are Tom Cruise fans to Thomas Pynchon’s dark secret. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be possible to link to individual comics, but just head to that left navbar and start clicking — there isn’t a clunker in the bunch.
- April 30, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Sam Costello on the end of Split Lip
Sam Costello’s Split Lip horror comic has been popular with reviewers and readers alike for a couple of years, so it was a surprise when Costello announced earlier this week that he is ending the comic, which is written by him and illustrated by different artists. We checked in to see what happened—and what will happen next.
Robot 6: When you first started Split Lip, what were you hoping to accomplish?
Sam Costello: There’s a big answer and a small one. The small one is that I just wanted to make comics, to write stories that would let me express some of the things inside me and demonstrate that perhaps I could be a writer of good comics. That’s not the interesting answer, though. The interesting answer is the big one: I wanted to make a different kind of horror comics.
This may seem like an odd thing to say about a comics market crowded full of titles filed under horror, but I think there are actually vanishingly few true horror comics. There are lots of comics with horror elements or themes, but many of them are actually something else: action with horror in them, romance with horror in them, adventure with horror in them. In my analysis, there are relatively few true horror comics, comics that peel away the social niceties and shared delusions we use to make the basic horror of existence (that we live in an indifferent universe, that’s there’s no meaning to life other than what we instill it with, how fraught and confused and misunderstood our relationships with others can be) bearable.
- April 27, 2012 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Jillian Lerner on the strange world of Barnum and Brady
Historian Jillian Lerner, working with artist Marc Olivent, has come up with a debut graphic novel set in a time of rapidly developing technology, pervasive hucksterism, and barely checked ambition. No, not New York in the 1980s—New York in the 1850s, when showman P.T. Barnum was amazing the crowds with his museum of oddities, photographer Matthew Brady was turning out the predecessors of baseball cards, and an obscure German professor had just invented the first voice synthesizer—which he concealed behind the mask of a woman’s face.
Lerner is self-publishing the graphic novel The Peerless Prodigies of P.T. Barnum via Amazon, and she has an amazing website that shows off the book as well as her sources for imagery and story elements. I asked her to talk about why she is fascinated by this era, and what went into creating her first graphic novel.
Robot 6: I want to start out by talking about the world of this book. It’s the mid-nineteenth century, yet there are some very modern aspects to it. Can you explain what interests you about this period?
Jillian Lerner: The mid-19th century is like an archaeological site loaded with the fossilized ruins and living roots of our own culture. Think capitalist frontier: constant innovation, uprooting and outmoding, social mobility, ubiquitous publicity, the birth of mass consumerism and commercial spectacles for the masses. This is also the era in which invention was invented, when advancements in art, science, and technology were pursued with an eye to establishing lucrative patents and products.
- April 27, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Seven Seas: DRM-free all along
This week’s announcement that all Tor books will be DRM-free by July made me wonder about what that meant for graphic novels. Tor publishes the Seven Seas line of manga, some of which have been available in digital formats for quite a while, so I checked in with managing editor Adam Arnold to see what the deal is. His answer surprised me: “I’m happy to say that all of Seven Seas’ ebooks have been DRM free from the very beginning.”
Most of what’s available at the moment is original English language (OEL) manga such as Amazing Agent Luna and Aoi House, so I took the opportunity to ask whether Seven Seas would be publishing digital editions of licensed books as well.
“We have the majority of our OEL titles available and are working towards making our Korean licenses available as ebooks as they come out in print, Arnold replied. “My Boyfriend is a Vampire is already available, and we’ll have Witch Hunter, Jack the Ripper: Hell Blade, and Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries available this summer.
“For Japanese manga, it’s a bit harder to make them available digitally. The biggest hurdle is that a lot of Japanese licenses simply don’t have digital rights as an option, and if they do, there’s no real guarantee of a certain amount of ebook sales a month so that you can break even. We are interested in expanding our ebook line-up to include Japanese titles in the future, though. So…stay tuned!”
- April 26, 2012 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Faith Erin Hicks shows her love for Airbender—and Korra
With The Legend of Korra, the new sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender, hitting screens last week, the folks at Tor.com asked Faith Erin Hicks to draw a comic about her feelings toward both series. She obliged, with the combination of professionalism and fangirlishness that we have come to expect from her. Go, read, laugh.
- April 24, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
New section highlights price drops at comiXology
If you’re like many Robot 6 commenters—heck, like me—and you don’t like paying full print price for a digital comic, here’s some good news: ComiXology has just made tracking price reductions easier with its Recently Reduced Issues section. We all know that Marvel, DC, and the other publishers sell their comics for top dollar when they first come out and then drop the price, but who can be bothered keeping track? Now you don’t have to. This week’s newly sanely priced comics include some of DC’s New 52 #7s, Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine #1, Peanuts and Steed & Peel from BOOM! Studios, and the first ish of Oni’s oddball The Secret History of D.B. Cooper.
The topic of price drops came up when I talked to comiXology CEO David Steinberger last January, and he told me that DC routinely reduces prices of their new books a month after they go on sale. When I asked if sales go up that day, he answered, “Not as much as much as you might expect, but sure.” Highlighting the the price reductions is a smart idea; it may help bump sales from more frugal readers, while those who are paying top dollar to get their new comics on release day are unlikely to start holding off just because the discounts are easier to find.
- April 24, 2012 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | The state of the French comics tradition, post-Moebius
Froom "The Celestial Bibendum," by Nicolas de Crecy
Creators | Daniel Kalder looks at the state of French comics tradition following the death last month of Jean Giraud, the influential artist widely known as Moebius, and finds it’s in the capable hands of David B (“one of the most sophisticated cartoonists in the world”) and Nicolas de Crecy (“the ‘mad genius’ of French comics”). [The Guardian]
Creators | Tom Spurgeon talks to Michael Cho about what sounds like a really interesting project, his book Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes: “Because I don’t have an affinity for drawing a pastoral landscape. [laughs] You know what I mean? I’ve never lived in that environment, so I can’t draw that thing with confidence. When I close my eyes I don’t visualize that with any confidence. But a city is something I’m surrounded with constantly. With alleyways and lane ways and how light poles connect up to transformer towers which have extra leads leading down to the basement apartment. I can see that when I close my eyes, you know?” [The Comics Reporter]
- April 23, 2012 @ 08:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
Valiant Entertainment unveils new logo and trade dress
Valiant Entertainment continues the march toward its relaunch of four classic Valiant comics later this summer with the release today of its new logo and trade dress, designed by graphic designer (and former 2000AD artist) Rian Hughes.
At their panel last week at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, Valiant staffers and writer Robert Venditti discussed how they’re going to update X-O Manowar, Harbinger, Bloodshot and Archer & Armstrong — all of which originally ran in the 1990s — for modern audiences. The logo redesign is of a piece with that, keeping the traditional Valiant look (and the compass that was part of the original logo) and giving it a more modern look.
“The Valiant characters have a strong fanbase and heritage, and so the new logos are fresh and modern as befits a forward-looking publisher while still paying tribute to the originals, just as has been done with the characters themselves,” Hughes said in the press release.
Valiant also released the cover and variant covers of the first release, X-O Manowar, with the new trade dress:
- April 23, 2012 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
It’s a comic! It’s a game! It’s a duck!
One of the pleasanter surprises of C2E2 was meeting Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, the creator of one of my favorite webcomics, All Knowledge Is Strange. Goodbrey is a past winner of the Isotope Mini-Comic Award, and he was at C2E2 to promote First Comics’ print edition of his Necessary Monsters (co-created with Sean Azzopardi). But he had something else to show me: A Duck Has an Adventure, his Android game, which uses comics elements in a choose-your-own-adventure type of format.
The game unfolds as a series of panels, and occasionally the reader is given a choice–go to college? date the girl? It’s a bit like the Game of Life reduced to its iconic form (and with a significant infusion of wit–Goodbrey is a very funny guy, in that dry, British sort of way).
“I tried to simplify the language of comics so you consume each panel really quickly,” Goodbrey said, and indeed, he does strip the images down to their basic components. The story gets more complex as you go, though, and eventually [SPOILER!] the duck meets an alternate version of itself and the two have to decide whether to work together or fight. “The more you play, the more it becomes like a puzzle experience—you figure out how to get more parts of the story to unlock,” Goodbrey said.
Although Goodbrey allows the reader to collect achievements and hats, there isn’t a lot of shooting or other skill involved; A Duck Has an Adventure reminded me of a digital version of Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile. It’s a good example of one of the many new directions digital comics can go in, with a single story having multiple branches. While the duck will set you back 99 cents, Goodbrey has another comic with a similar structure, Jack’s Abstraction, that is available for free.
- April 20, 2012 @ 03:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
This weekend, it’s Boston Comic Con
This weekend’s Boston Comic Con has all the virtues of a small show and most of the virtues of a large one as well. The headliners of this year’s show, which takes place Saturday and Sunday at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, are Mad Magazine artists Al Feldstein, Al Jaffee, and Paul Coker. That alone would get me onto the T, but there’s plenty of talent for all tastes: Peter Bagge, Simon Bisley, Becky Cloonan, Greg Horn, Jamal Igle, David Petersen, Jill Thompson, and Skottie Young are among the featured guests, while the Artists Alley will be graced by, among others Ming Doyle, Jarrett Krosoczka (creator of the all-ages Lunch Lady books), Adventure Time team Braden Lamb and Shelli Paroline, and local favorites the Boston Comics Roundtable. There’s a solid lineup of panels, and Marvel Comics will be doing portfolio reviews.
The nice thing about a small con like this is that it’s more relaxed than a big con. It’s easier to talk to artists at their tables and to browse the work of new creators if you don’t have the crowd at your back. If you’re in the area, it’s well worth checking out. I highly recommend taking public transit if you can–street parking is difficult and the garages are expensive–but I wouldn’t let that stop me from coming in if a car was my only option. The Pru garage offers significant discounts if you spend ten bucks in the restaurants or shops there. The upside is that unlike a lot of convention centers, the Hynes is located in an actual urban neighborhood with lots of interesting restaurants and shops, so you’re not stuck eating $9 turkey sandwiches for lunch.
See you at the con!
- April 20, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson