“Alan Moore has earned his frustration, his suspicions and his occasional flashes of anger. He should be listened to and learned from, not dismissed and certainly never mocked.” — Tom Spurgeon

When the comic book industry first coalesced in the late 1930s, it adopted a business model that, to put it lightly, did not put an emphasis on ethical behavior. These were publishing companies run by greedy, exploitive people who had questionable connections to gangsters or had been indicted for mail fraud. They cared little about the quality of their product, the well-being of their workers–sorry, freelancers–or seeing that anyone who contributed to their success was fairly and duly compensated.

Here we are, roughly 80 years later, and everything has changed. Whoops, I’m sorry. I mean nothing has changed. It’s still an ugly, cutthroat industry where publishers are all too happy to grab as many rights as they can to artists’ hard-won work whenever said artists are willing to take those sucker bets. It’s an industry dominated by cynical publishing ventures and easy cash grabs rather than an interest in creating long range, sustainable business models. Perhaps the worst thing about our current era is that those who have legitimate reason to complain about their mistreatment are the ones most frequently shouted down by a certain cross-section of their fans, a mercenary bunch who seem to care more for ensuring that they never, ever lose the chance to get more of the same in a timely fashion than if the people producing that same are treated with a certain amount of decency and respect.

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be that way. The comics boom of the 1980s that gave rise to the indie, b&w movement also gave rise to a vigorous interest in creators rights. People like Alan Moore, Dave Sim, Steve Bissette, Scott McCloud, Neal Adams and Frank Miller saw what had happened to industry veterans like Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber, and were justifiably outraged. They spoke out against these perceived injustices and continually pushed for better compensation and to have a greater stake in the comics they produced, whether on their own or with a major publisher. The creator-owned works we see from companies like Dark Horse and Vertigo, the royalties that current artists and writers receive on work-for-hire projects — that’s all a direct result of these efforts.

Watchmen was supposed to be a part of that movement. As Moore states in a 2005 interview with Heidi MacDonald, the idea was that by creating characters out of whole cloth rather than relying on the Charlton bunch, Moore and Gibbons would be given the rights to Watchmen (and also V for Vendetta, which Moore handed over to DC in order to finish the project) one year after they went out of print, which they expected to happen as soon as the series was completed. To my knowledge, DC has never disputed Moore’s description of events.

Of course, we know how that turned out. Watchmen caught the rising winds of the burgeoning graphic novel movement and ended up never going out of print. Moore and Gibbons found themselves to be victims of their own success as the book continued to rise in popularity and acclaim, and readers found they preferred reading it in collected trade form to hunting down back issues. It was, as Eric Stephenson, notes, a “dirty deal,” and if it was a turn of events DC didn’t necessarily expect, well, it’s not like they’ve done much to create a more equitable situation in the years since.

You see, whether or not Before Watchmen dilutes the charm of the original comic is irrelevant — creators are just as capable of destroying the goodwill their initial work establishes as easily as corporations are. And the fact that Moore has frequently drawn upon classic literary material in works like Lost Girls and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is also irrelevant (although let me make an aside here to say that there’s a big difference between building a pastiche using familiar characters and motifs to create something new and original, and rehashing familiar material to make a quick and cynical cash grab). The basic issue here is one of fairness, of creators rights and how this industry operates. It’s about how a work that should have been a shining example of how much had changed in the comics world instead became an example of how everything has stayed the same.

Now, I am a full-time reporter for a daily newspaper. Everything I write for that newspaper is work-for-hire, including the comics column I did for them for a few years. I was not compensated, for example, when an interview I did with Alan Moore was reprinted in the book Alan Moore: Conversations, nor did I expect to receive any compensation, financial or otherwise. On the other hand, I get a weekly salary for my efforts. I get sick days and vacation. I get health care and a 401k plan. I get treated like a valued employee. Moore doesn’t get and never has received any of those things. Yes, his work has been financially successful enough to make some of those compensations moot, but there are very few creators working in this industry that can make similar claims.

If we care at all about the comics industry, if we care about comics as an art form, if we want it to be taken seriously, if we want to see talented people produce quality material, then we need to start caring about the way those people are treated in this industry. We need to start valuing creators rights over our own greedy need for more third-rate pulp. We need to stop making shameless, defensive rationalizations and questioning people’s motives when the basic motive underlying those outbursts is “me wanty.” We need to stop acting like petulant, entitled children. And we need to speak out when creators whose work we claim to value and enjoy are given short shrift in the name of the Almighty dollar.

The writer, who’s penning Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl for the sprawling prequel to the acclaimed 1986 miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, drew some criticism yesterday when he told Comic Book Resources, “A lot of folks feel that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan, and while that’s absolutely understandable on an emotional level, it’s deeply flawed on a logical level. Based on durability and recognition, one could make the argument that Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But neither Alan nor anyone else has ever suggested that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should ever be allowed to write Superman. Alan didn’t pass on being brought on to write Swamp Thing, a seminal comics character created by Len Wein, and he did a terrific job. He didn’t say ‘No, no, I can’t, that’s Len’s character.’ Nor should he have.”

That of course led more than a few people to ask how Straczynski, who created the 1990s space opera Babylon 5, would feel if someone else were to develop a sequel, or prequel — “Babylon 4″? — to the television series (a revival has been long hoped for by fans, but the writer denied rumors as recently as August that he’s in negotiations with Warner Bros.). To answer the question, which he characterizes as “How would you feel if Babylon 5 was being done without your permission?,” Straczynski took to his Facebook page last night, writing, “It’s a fair question, and it needs to be fairly answered … but it has to be an honest comparison, apples to apples, not apples to pomegranates.”

“First, we have to take the word ‘permission’ off the table. Warner Bros. owns Babylon 5 lock, stock and phased-plasma guns, just as DC owns the Watchmen characters. [...] But I get that we’re talking about the emotional aspect of all this, not the legal stuff, which is pretty cut and dry,” he wrote. “So again: apples to apples. How would I feel if Babylon 5 were being made and I were shut out of anything to do with it, despite my desire to be involved? I’d feel pretty crummy about it. But as it happens, that has absolutely nothing to do with this situation in any way, manner, shape or form.”

Referring to repeated unsuccessful attempts by DC to convince Moore to revisit Watchmen — the most recent was in 2010, when the publisher offered to relinquish the rights to the comic if the writer “would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels” — Straczynski said, “He declined at every point. Fair enough. It’s his choice, and it’s his right to make it.”

“So now – apples to apples – let’s make the B5 comparison,” he continued. “Let’s say Warner Bros. came to me and said, ‘we want to do more Babylon 5, and we want you to run the whole thing. We’ll pay you anything you want, give you a proper budget, and you will have complete creative freedom.’ [...] So let’s say that Warners makes that offer, and I said, ‘No, I don’t want it, take your accursed money, your big budget and your complete creative freedom and begone, get thee behind me Satan!’ Let’s say they came back and said ‘Okay, then how about we pay you vast sums of money just to consult? How about that?’ [...] ‘What if we sweeten the deal? What if we offer to give you full ownership of Babylon 5, legally and contractually, so you own it? How about that?’

“If Warners offered me creative freedom, money and a budget to do the show the way I wanted, up to and including my completely owning the show, and I said no to that deal, and if after Warners waited TWENTY FIVE YEARS for me to change my mind they finally decided to go ahead and make B5 without me … then I would have absolutely zero right to complain about it,” Straczynski wrote. “Because it was my choice to remove myself from the process, it wasn’t something foisted upon me by anybody else.”

He went on to address other related topics, such as the supposed “sacredness” and one-off nature of the characters, before concluding this morning in a separate post that, “At this point, quite honestly the work needs to stand on its own. So with equal appreciation for both the kind words and the hard questions, and having said pretty much everything I can think of to say on the subject, I think it’s appropriate for me to recede a bit now into the shadows. As the books come out I hope that everyone who spoke out here, pro and con, will reconvene to continue the conversation and express their thoughts with the same clarity and precision they have demonstrated today.”

One of the most consistently interesting aspects of Eddie Campbell’s comics art — whether it’s drawn in paint or ink, with pens or brushes, in color or black and white or hazed in screen tones — is the push and pull between chaos and control it always carries.  Campbell sticks to the grid as much as anyone.  His stories progress in an almost uniformly metronomic, evenly measured, deliberate fashion, more concerned with catching clear pictures of as many moments as possible and letting readers come upon the important ones naturally than thrusting anything into the audience’s face.  But there is always a strong element of wildness present in Campbell too.  No matter the tools or the approach he’s using, there are always lines or brush strokes or tone dots that wriggle away from whatever figurative content his panels hold and out toward the edges, seeking the place in the frame where they can best exist as nothing but media on paper, set free from the picture’s meaning in search of their own.  It’s the way these two truths of Campbell’s work interact, now in harmony, now struggling for control, that brings the comics to beating, vibrant life.

Few Campbell comics are more controlled than his legendary collaboration with Alan Moore, From Hell.  Moore, widely known as one of comics’ most exacting scriptwriters, boxes Campbell in tightly over the book’s 500-plus pages: though the scratchy marks seethe wildly within the panels, the grid remains as fixed as a windowpane throughout, leaving each frame to boil with a life lightly separate from what surrounds it.  It makes sense, then, that when Campbell is allowed to go wild within the book’s confines, he produces some of his career’s most striking work, careening from the strict formality that characterizes the Victorian period piece into the white-hot image making of the visionary.

The sequence above is probably the most savagely avant-garde page of From Hell; certainly the only one that demands an explanation of its basic content when viewed by itself.  Well, if I must.  What we’re looking at is an extreme close-up of a knife blade planing through human flesh, specifically the stomach cavity.  To spread a single act — one cut, one gesture — out over seven panels requires a precision and flare for choreography that’s simply beyond most cartoonists’ grasp, but Campbell pulls it off with a flourish.  In the first panel, we see the shiny surface of the blade planing through a membrane, placed right in the middle so as to neatly bisect the panel itself into equal pieces.  The next shot is filled entirely with the metal’s glare, a spray of black fluid rising up from the bottom to bathe it.  Panel three focuses in of the spray itself as the knife passes out of sight.  The second tier zooms us into the tunnel of an opened vein, and finally we arrive inside, feet panted on the floors of the body’s passageways.

Making such queasy subject matter so visually appealing is no easy task, and making it appear elegant is even more difficult.  But this page is an incredibly beautiful bit of near-abstract art , taking readers from the splashing, dirty-lined visual chaos of the top three panels into the sublimely peaceful, hauntingly still and silent chapel of the final frame, a world somehow both recognizable and completely alien.  In context, it’s a test of even the most experienced comics reader’s comprehension; taken as a single page, separated out from story and meaning, it’s simply seven beautiful pictures, each image both arresting and dynamic, moving you on to the next, until the full stop of the devastating last shot.  Campbell’s in-panel compositions ensure that this page works as comics, with lines and black spaces leading the eye neatly from one picture into the next, but the whole time the reader is assaulted with gorgeous imagery that demands a second to be drunk in fully.

It’s in that deep analysis of these pictures that perhaps the most impressive thing about this page emerges: unlike just about every other comics sequence out there, Campbell’s page gives absolutely no clue as to its manufacture.  Are the ragged lines edging the veins dip pen?  Are the splatters ink blots, or dry brush, or wite-out?  Are we looking at photos, and if so, how adulterated are they?  The same flat, basic black-and-white printing that allows Campbell to treat slashed-open innards with such elegance of effect ensures that these images remain mysterious, communicating nothing concrete about their origin.  They’re there to be looked at, not questioned; accepted, not analyzed.  Campbell forces even the most curious reader into passive reception of his pictures here, and in the process reminds us why we come to comics in the first place.  It’s to see things we haven’t before.

Here’s a selection of some of the more interesting quotes:

J. Michael Straczynski, who’s working with Adam Hughes on Dr. Manhattan, and Andy and Joe Kubert on Nite Owl: “Ever since Dan DiDio was handed the reins (along with Jim Lee) over at DC, he’s been making bold, innovative moves that might have scared the hell out of anyone else. At a time in the industry when big events tend to be ‘Okay, we had Team A fight Team B last year, so this year we’re gonna have Team B fight team C!’ Dan has chosen to revitalize lines, reinvent worlds and come at Watchmen head-on. It was, I think, about two years ago that he first mentioned that he was considering the idea, and he’s to be commended for fighting to make this happen.”

Brian Azzarello, who’s collaborating with Lee Bermejo on Rorschach, and J.G. Jones on Comedian: “I think the gut reaction is going to be, ‘Why?’  But then when the actual books come out, the answer will be, ‘Oh, that’s why.’ ”

Darwyn Cooke, who’s writing and drawing Minutemen and collaborating with Amanda Conner on Silk Spectre: “The nature of the undertaking is going to polarize a lot of the readership. I think a lot of people will be excited about this and there are a lot of people that will be dead against it. [...] I said no out of hand because I couldn’t think of a story that would measure up to the original — and let’s face it, this material is going to be measured that way — and the other thing is, I frankly didn’t want the attention. This is going to generate a lot of a particular type of attention that’s really not my bag. But what happened is, months after I said no, the story elements all just came into my head one day; it was so exciting to me that, at that exact moment, I started seriously thinking about doing the book.”

Straczynski, again: “A lot of folks feel that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan, and while that’s absolutely understandable on an emotional level, it’s deeply flawed on a logical level. Based on durability and recognition, one could make the argument that Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But neither Alan nor anyone else has ever suggested that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should ever be allowed to write Superman. Alan didn’t pass on being brought on to write Swamp Thing, a seminal comics character created by Len Wein, and he did a terrific job. He didn’t say ‘No, no, I can’t, that’s Len’s character.’ Nor should he have.”

Cooke, again: “I’d consider it a masterpiece if it had been able to have found what I would refer to as a hopeful note. … Again, it’s not hard to understand [where Alan was coming from], and that sort of storytelling does have an allure for young people. [But] I think the older you get, the more you look for hope or positive things. Maybe I’m just getting old.”

Original Watchmen editor Len Wein, who’s tackling Ozymandias with Jae Lee, and “Curse of the Crimson Corsair” with John Higgins: “As far as I know there are no plans for more books after this, but 25 years ago there were no plans for these books, so who truly knows? I think reboots are almost mandatory in an industry that has existed for over three-fourths of a century now. The need to inject new blood, new ideas, new approaches, is the only thing that keeps our readers coming back for more.”

“Curse of the Crimson Corsair” artist John Higgins: “The challenge is to make the stories modern and relevant to 2012 and to show what can be done with respect and consideration for the source material that has inspired so many people over the years. By adding to the mythos and not to detract from it. The Watchmen had such an influence on graphic storytelling since it first appeared and is a timeless classic. If we can create a new set of stories that can be enjoyed 25 years on, that would be an achievement and a reward in itself.”

“The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell,” the artist said in a statement. “However, I appreciate DC’s reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire.”

Moore, however, isn’t as generous, describing the prequels as “completely shameless.” “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago,” he told The New York Times.

The writer, who stopped working for DC in 1989 following disputes about Watchmen royalties and a proposed age-rating system, revealed in July 2010 that the publisher had at last offered to return the rights to his most famous creation, if he “would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels.”

“So I just told them that if they said that 10 years ago, when I asked them for that, then yeah it might have worked,” he said at the time. “But these days I don’t want Watchmen back. Certainly, I don’t want it back under those kinds of terms.”

Moore echoed those sentiments to The Times, insisting he likely won’t try to block Before Watchmen or face DC’s “infinite battery of lawyers” in a legal battle. “I don’t want money,” he said. “What I want is for this not to happen.”

J. Michael Straczynski, who’s teaming with Adam Hughes on the Dr. Manhattan miniseries, shrugged off the notion that only Moore should write the Watchmen characters.

“A lot of folks feel that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan, and while that’s absolutely understandable on an emotional level, it’s deeply flawed on a logical level,” he said in an exclusive interview with Comic Book Resources. “Based on durability and recognition, one could make the argument that Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But neither Alan nor anyone else has ever suggested that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should ever be allowed to write Superman. Alan didn’t pass on being brought on to write Swamp Thing, a seminal comics character created by Len Wein, and he did a terrific job. He didn’t say ‘No, no, I can’t, that’s Len’s character.’ Nor should he have.”

With so much being reported about Alan Moore’s connections to the Occupy movement — through his endorsement of its ideals, his contribution to Occupy Comics, and protesters’ co-opting of the David Lloyd-designed Guy Fawkes masks — U.K.’s Channel 4 News coaxed the V for Vendetta writer from his home in Northampton to London to meet some of the demonstrators for the first time.

“It’s a bit surprising when some of the characters you thought you made up suddenly seem to escape into ordinary reality,” Moore told some disguised protesters. “I mean, what is it about the mask — is it just useful, or what?”

The report also delves into Frank Miller’s criticism of the Occupy movement, Moore’s displeasure with film adaptations of his works and, yes, the irony that each Guy Fawkes mask that protesters buy puts more money into the coffers of Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates.

Bandai Entertainment

Publishing | The anime and manga company Bandai Entertainment will stop distributing new products in February, although its existing catalog will continue to be available until the licenses expire. The company will shift its focus to licensing its properties for digital distribution and merchandising. President and CEO Ken Iyadomi said the decision to shut down new-product operations was made by the Japanese parent company without his input, and he strongly implied the underlying problem was that the corporate parent wanted to charge more for its anime than the current market will bear. Bandai published the Lucky Star, Kannagi and Eureka Seven manga, among others; all new manga volumes have been canceled, which means Kannagi will be left incomplete, at least for now. [Anime News Network]

Awards | The finalists for the Cybils, the blogger’s literary awards for children’s and YA books, have been posted, and they include five nominations each in the children’s and YA graphic novel categories. [Cybils Awards]

Fatale #1

Creators | Frequent collaborators Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips discuss their new horror-noir series Fatale, which debuts today. “You can scare people with a movie because you’re in control a lot more,” Brubaker says. “In a book, you’re making them imagine pictures, and it’s a different amount of control. With a comic book, it’s very hard to write something that puts people on edge. That’s an important thing: Let people know they have no idea what’s coming in this story and no idea what anything is going to be.” [USA Today]

Creators | Paul Grist digs into his new Image Comics series Mudman, whose fictional setting is inspired by his own town on the southwest coast of England. [USA Today]

Creators | King City writer and artist Brandon Graham talks about getting published, and names his favorite comics creators in an interview with David Harper. [Multiversity Comics]

Jerusalem

Creators | A Lebanese newspaper profiles cartoonist Guy Delisle, creator of Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. [The Daily Star]

Comics | Larry Cruz takes an affectionate look at Golden Age vamp Phantom Lady, a creation of the Eisner-Iger studio. [The Webcomic Overlook]

Commentary | Alan David Doane argues that Alan Moore’s veto of a reprint of 1963 is an argument for, not against, creator-owned comics. “But Moore, as an individual and as a comics creator, has more than earned the right to associate with, both personally and professionally, only those he chooses to associate with. He should not be forced into business contracts or personal relationships he does not wish to be a part of, and we should respect that.” [Trouble With Comics]

Critique | Domingos Isabelinho discusses the decision to re-color Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes, as well as some of the tropes that were left untouched. [The Hooded Utilitarian]

Any doubts regarding the accuracy of reports about DC Comics’ long-rumored plans for Watchmen prequels may have eroded over the weekend with the emergence of character art by J.G. Jones and Joe Kubert and Andy Kubert.

Bleeding Cool characterizes the illustrations of Nite Owl and The Comedian as cover art for the projects, purportedly being assembled under the code name “Panic Room,” but considering the characters’ names are written on the pages, it seems more likely they’re concept designs.

The four prequels to the seminal 1986 miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are said to also involve Darwyn Cooke, J. Michael Straczynski, John Higgins and even Gibbons himself. Cooke, however, seemed to dismiss reports he was working on one of the miniseries, telling CBR News recently, “Ah, get out, man. That’s like three years old.”

Hell Yeah

I’ve been friendly with Joe Keatinge dating back to his days managing PR & marketing for Image Comics. When it was revealed back in October that Extreme Studios was relaunching the line–with Keatinge writing Glory (with Ross Campbell on art), I started generating questions for an interview. In addition to discussing Glory (which relaunches with Glory #23 on February 15, 2012), Keatinge opens up about Hell Yeah (Image), his creator-owned collaboration with artist/co-creator Andre Szymanowicz that premieres on March 7, 2012, as well as another upcoming 2012 project, Brutal, in collaboration with artist Frank Cho. My thanks to Keatinge for this email interview. After reading this piece, be sure to check out CBR’s Joe Keatinge coverage for more insight into the busy writer’s upcoming work.

Tim O’Shea: Did Rob Liefeld approach you to work on the Glory relaunch? Was Ross Campbell already committed to the project when you joined?

Joe Keatinge: While Rob was certainly involved with the process, I was actually approached by Image Comics Publisher and Extreme Editor, Eric Stephenson, almost a year ago now. At the time they had nailed down the idea of the line and I believe a couple of the other books may have had writers, but it was still in the very early stages. After that was the process of giving a quick pitch, which was virtually instantaneous to Eric asking if I wanted to do it, to developing a longer pitch, to Eric and I bringing Brandon Graham on board for Prophet, to discussing Glory with Brandon, to Brandon suggesting Ross Campbell, to seeing Ross’ amazing work and me asking him if he wanted to come on board. He did a few samples which blew away both Eric and Rob. We’ve been working on it ever since.

O’Shea: When writing do you try to play to Campbell’s strengths in his art, and if so, what would you say are some of his strengths?

Keatinge: As a general rule, I prefer to specifically write with the artist in mind. Meaning, I wouldn’t write the same Glory script I do for Ross for anyone else. I think it’s a fault of the writer not to take the artist’s strengths and interests into account. We’re a team, you know? It’s important we’re both having a good time. While I had an outline before Ross came on board, I certainly adjusted it to suit his strengths and interests. As far as what his strengths are – they’re pretty numerous. I’m extremely impressed with how versatile he is an artist. I highly admire how much enthusiasm he puts into a page. His design work alone amazes me. However, I think my favorite aspect are the power he brings to the characters. Look at Glory. She looks like she could legitimately break you in half. A lot of superheroes – both male and female – look like super models. You don’t buy they could devastate a tank. He really makes you believe it with Glory.

I don’t know if this necessarily counts as a general strength, but I do love the ease there is in working with Ross. While we have very different backgrounds in comics on a professional level, we gel together very well. He’s an ideal collaborator in every way. I’m extremely thankful for when that happens and have been lucky enough to have it happen on three concurrent books between him, Andre Szymanowicz on Hell Yeah and Frank Cho on Brutal.

O’Shea: Speaking of Campbell, the opening to the Glory preview has a cinematic vibe to it, in terms of framing. Was that something you detailed in the script, or was that an angle he brought to the mix?

Keatinge: I actually try to stay away from anything ‘cinematic’ in any comics I work on. While I think a lot of the early experimentation such as in Miller’s Daredevil or later on with ‘widescreen’ comics like Ellis & Hitch’s Authority and Millar & Hitch’s Ultimates was incredible, I also believe comics have gone too far down that rabbit hole more often than not. Frank Miller himself has even said he got into comics to make them more cinematic, yet has stayed in to make them less so. I’m with the latter. I think comics are a much stronger medium than film in many ways. I think there’s also much more potential left as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge movie fan. I go to the theater pretty much at least once a week. That said, comics are way better in general.

What I am trying to do with Glory is create a huge level of scope. I really want to take a fantasy epic and filter it through superheroes. My ideal situation is to stay on this book for a very, very long time. Hopefully Ross will be there with me the whole way. The first three issue spans centuries – well over a thousand years in total. It’s a big, big book with big, big plans. I know everyone says this about everything, but it’s my hope to achieve it here. The idea with Glory is she’s a weapon so destructive people confuse her with a god. That’s quite the impression. Superman doesn’t have that. People just think he’s a dude who can fly.

O’Shea: What was the overall appeal to working on the Extreme relaunch?

Keatinge: I grew up with the Extreme books. I was only in fifth grade when Image Comics launched. Youngblood had an especially massive impact on me. Every single interview with Rob psyched me up beyond belief. Youngblood #6 remains one of my favorite single issues ever. Then when Platt came on Prophet? The best. Bloodwulf’s debut in Darker Image? Blew my mind. As I got older my tastes changed a little, but the Extreme books did as well once Alan Moore was brought into the fold. His work on Supreme and even smaller tenures on Youngblood and Glory excited me even more.

Glory 23

It used to be that Marvel and DC were the big universes people wanted to grow up to work in and while I absolutely have a huge desire to do that, I think you’re going to be seeing more and more people coming into comics who grew up with that sort of passion for the Image Comics characters. I was able to work on Savage Dragon, I would be insanely stoked to get my hands on Spawn or The Darkness someday. Working in the Extreme universe is incredibly exciting for me. There’s a couple of cameos of other Extreme characters in our first issue of Glory and when I realized these stories ‘counted’, that they weren’t fan fic or whatever, I felt like a major life goal had been fulfilled. Now I just need to get married and have kids. I’ll be set.

O’Shea: Are you getting a chance to build Glory from the ground-up, or are you going to be capitalizing on past runs of the character to some extent?

Keatinge: They’re giving us an astounding level of freedom, but I feel it’s a little ridiculous to jump on an established character or series and not acknowledge their past. Otherwise you should just be making creator-owned comics. Furthermore, I think it’s lazy and disrespectful to the fans who loved the previous comics to go in and say, “hey, all that stuff you loved? DIDN’T HAPPEN.”

My approach to continuity in general is to try it like Rashomon. How Ross and I interpret past events may be different than another creative team, but it still happened whether it’s the original Duffy/Deodato run or Moore/Peterson. So, we definitely build on the past, but with an eye toward the future. I want to create a new audience just as much as I don’t want to alienate the old audience. My first issue is written with that kind of person in mind. If you have absolutely never read Glory - or, heck, a comic book at all – in your life you should be able to fully understand everything you need to jump on board.

O’Shea: In terms of collaborating with Frank Cho, do you think you would have been more intimidated to work with him had you not become friends with him prior to contemplating collaboration?

Keatinge: Probably. Going in I just viewed it as making comics with a buddy, but every once in a while I’m reminded he’s FRANK CHO, one of the most respected and admired artists in mainstream comics. That said, I am really grateful to be collaborating with him. While he’s a fantastic artist, having him as a co-writer has been basically a crash course in writing comics. Whenever he has changes to my stuff I initially want to argue, but I’m pretty sure virtually every time I’ve thought, ‘oh, hey, never mind. You are totally right.’ I hope between this, Guns & Dinos and a few other projects he has the general comics industry respects him even more as a writer than they do for his award-winning run on Liberty Meadows. He’s the real deal when it comes to writing.

O’Shea: I love how when you discuss this project at your Tumblr site, you wrote in part ” to have a superhero book I’m writing with a massively popular artist be announced to come out on [Image's] 20th anniversary feels like the culmination of my own 20th anniversary of my first having the dream of writing comics means everything to me.” Which are you enjoying more, writing superhero comics, or getting to launch such a major project at such an auspicious time in Image’s history?

Keatinge: Writing comics at all, really. I’m always more into the craft and the work than I am the hype of it, but it’s hard to resist on the 20th anniversary. That said, again, I try to keep my eye on the prize. Gotta focus on the writing.

O’Shea: In general, what is the biggest benefit to you, as a writer, to get to explore the superhero genre?

Keatinge: You can do ANYTHING. You can make any genre work within it. You can bend or otherwise completely devastate any law of science. There are no budget limitations. Anything goes.

It’s due to this I think there’s a lot of potential in the genre. Furthermore, I think what’s traditionally discussed, promoted and marketed as superhero comics is really just one gigantic sub-genre of something much larger. A lot of people scoff at the notion that superheroes being something adults would want to read. I think they’re nuts. They’re defining a genre by their most popular works, whereas I try to think more of potential than execution. Should X-Men be for all-ages? Yeah, probably, but if Image showed me anything it’s that I can create anything under any genre the way I want to do it. They went with superheroes at first, because that was what they were passionate about. Same goes for Andre and I with Hell Yeah.

O’Shea: Will you concede that when you say lines like “Hell Yeah is the direct result of almost thirty years of comics passion put into one book.”  that you may be putting some pressure on yourself?

Keatinge: Absolutely not.

I’ve been reading comics in many different forms in many different genres my whole life. Every life experience I’ve ever had somehow informs the work I’m doing today. It’s not hype, it’s fact.

Besides, I think pressure’s a good thing. Poor work comes out when you’re comfortable. I am extremely hard on myself with everything I do. A small part of it is psychological condition. Most of it is never wanting to be boring.

O’Shea: You were first introduced to Andre Szymanowicz while working on PopGun. But when did you realize he’d be a good fit for Hell Yeah?

Keatinge: Mark Andrew Smith and I were discussing different projects we wanted to do together. I believe I suggested James Stokoe for what became Sullivan’s Sluggers. He suggested Andre Szymanowicz. So, that’s what got us talking. However, what convinced me was hanging out with him one on one at a San Diego Comic Con a couple of years ago. Like I was saying with Ross and Frank, Andre and I just completely clicked. The show ended with us at the Hyatt bar, shaking hands to make this book happen. Sometimes you just know.

O’Shea: Branding-wise, how did you arrive on the name Hell Yeah?

Keatinge: It sure helps that I say the phrase all the time. The universe of Hell Yeah has been percolating in my head for a while. One of the first thing I thought of was superheroes being treated and named more like bands than typical super-teams. The first team name I thought was ‘The All-New All-Differents’, the second was ‘Hell Yeah For Justice.’ It struck me then that the name was the perfect embodiment of the book, especially since Hell Yeah For Justice is the group the series’ main character, Ben Day, will be hanging out with. So it was more organic, less market strategy. However, I will admit it makes for a pretty rad logo.

Eddie Campbell announced on his blog that his early graphic novel Dapper John in the Days of the Ace Rock ‘n’ Roll Club is available as a standalone iPad app. The comics, a series of interlocking seven-page stories, were drawn in 1978-79. Campbell self-published them in the 1980s, and Fantagraphics did a collected edition in 1993. The app, which was produced by a Tokyo company called Panel Nine, includes not just the original run of comics but also the original small press covers, Alan Moore’s review of the comic (which started the ball rolling), and sundry other extras, some of which have not been seen in years. So it’s sort of a digital collector’s edition.

Batton Lash’s Supernatural Law is another vintage comic (well, from the 1990s) that is getting a new life in digital form. In this case, the comic is not its own app but is available via the Comics + and Graphicly platforms at a reasonable digital price: Wolff & Byrd #1 is free, and subsequent issues are 99 cents.

Finally, the Japanese publisher Ohzora, the parent company of the now-defunct U.S. publisher Aurora, has not given up on the English-language market, apparently: Its English site makes clear that it has lots of manga available for licensing, and in a few cases, it’s skipping the middleman and going straight to digital. And that means: Project X Cup Noodle, possibly the greatest manga ever published in English, is now available as an iPad app. This was one of the great oddball manga of the U.S. manga boom: The story of the development of instant noodles in a cup, presented as a series of heroic struggles. It was originally licensed by Digital Manga but published only in print; the license must have lapsed, because Ohzora’s app uses Digital’s cover dress, now strangely appropriate, for the iPad app.

“It’s fair to say that Alan Moore and David Lloyd are unofficial godfathers of the current protest movement,”  Occupy Comics organizer Matt Pizzolo told Wired.com. “It’s really amazing to see two creatives whose work was inspiring to street protesters join a creative project that is inspired by the street protesters. It’s a pretty virtuous cycle.”

Moore will contribute a long-form prose piece, possibly with illustrations, exploring the movement’s principles, “corporate control of the comics industry and the superhero paradigm itself.”

The project, being funded through Kickstarter, is described as “a time capsule of the passions and emotions driving the movement.” It will begin as single-issue comics, followed by a hardcover collection; a making-of documentary is also being produced by Patrick Meaney, director of Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods and Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts. With three days left in its fundraising campaign, Occupy Comics has raised $15,892, surpassing its $10,000 goal.

The famously left-wing Moore recently responded to Frank Miller’s scathing criticism of the Occupy movement, saying, “As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”

In addition to Moore and Lloyd, the Occupy Comics participants include Michael Allred, Darick Robertson, Douglas Rushkoff, Ben Templesmith, Si Spurrier, Dean Haspiel, Amanda Palmer, J.M. DeMatteis, Steve Niles, Dan Goldman, Charlie Adlard, Susie Cagle, Shannon Wheeler, Molly Crabapple, Ryan Ottley, Joshua Dysart, Joseph Michael Linsner, Joe Keatinge, B. Clay Moore and Joshua Hale Fialkov.

From "Watchmen"

For a while now, Bleeding Cool has repeatedly linked Eisner Award winner Darwyn Cooke with the hotly rumored Watchmen 2 from DC Comics, driving the world’s Twitterati into a Walter Kovacs-like frenzy.

But if that’s the case, Mr. Cooke is unaware of his connection.

When I spoke with the Canadian cartoonist in a recent interview about his artwork for an upcoming issue of James Robinson’s The Shade, I asked Cooke point blank if he would be working on Watchmen 2.

Cooke responded, succinctly, “Ah, get out, man. That’s like three years old.”

Now if DC Comics was planning Watchmen 2, the publisher would not want the sure-fire hit to be announced as a throwaway line during an interview for an unrelated series, so Cooke easily could have been smoking out CBR News with a red herring.

And his answer did lean toward the question being “old” news and not “no” news, so DC Comics may very well be prepping a sequel to the groundbreaking maxi-series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It just doesn’t appear that Cooke will be playing a role.

Which is too bad, because Cooke writing, drawing or even thinking about the characters from Watchmen, especially The Comedian, would qualify as about as pitch-perfect as you could get in terms of a creator getting on board a project that would certainly come with equal parts praise and ire, if and when it is ever announced.

Alan Moore

Creators | Watchmen writer Alan Moore responds to recent comments made by The Dark Knight Returns creator Frank Miller: “I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”  [Honest Publishing]

Conventions | Tom Spurgeon files a lengthy report from the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, held Saturday in New York City. [The Comics Reporter]

Ashes

Creators | Uncanny X-Men writer Kieron Gillen comments on the use of sites like Kickstarter to fund comics projects through the lens of Alex de Campi and Jimmy Broxton’s Ashes: “I think that Kickstarter or – if you’re not a yank – Indie Go Go is the single biggest new thing to be considered by a working creative this year. And not just comic creatives. Digital is something people have been chewing over for years now – and I suspect it’s going to be next year when we see some more movement there – but this has surprised a lot of people, and lead to a cheerily wild-west vibe to it all. People running Kickstarters are still trying to work out how to do this thing, and balance all sorts of questions of personal moral integrity. And this is important to do, just because when you don’t, things go bad quickly and you’re risking tarring the very concept of kickstarter-esque funded projects.” [Kieron Gillen]

Creators | CNN profiles legendary MAD cartoonist Al Jaffee. [CNN]

Creators | Gerry Alanguilan talks about his graphic novel Elmer. [Philippine Daily Inquirer]

The Last Dragon

Creators | Rebecca Guay discusses her Dark Horse adaptation of Jane Yolen’s short story “The Last Dragon.” [Sequential Tart]

Creators | Box Brown discusses his career and approach to making comics, among other topics. [The Comics Reporter]

Comics | Deb Aoki previews some of the manga we can expect to see in the coming year. [About.com]

Marketing | Johanna Draper Carlson, always quick to call out bad marketing tactics, takes a Kickstarter creator to task for not responding well to criticism. The creator responds in the comments; you be the judge. [Comics Worth Reading]

Commentary | Chris Murphy looks back at “four incredible years” with Marvel’s Hercules. [ComicsAlliance]

Commentary | David Anderson looks at the first issue of John Byrne’s Cold War. [Spandexless]

Bleeding Cool contends it’s been “informed quite conclusively from a reliable source” at the publisher that the artist is among the A-list talent involved in the secretive project, which reportedly will use key characters from the seminal 1986 miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Other previously mentioned creators include Darwyn Cooke, J. Michael Straczynski, J.G. Jones, John Higgins and even Gibbons himself.

Murmurs of DC’s desire for a Watchmen follow-up gained steam in 2010 after the departure of President Paul Levitz, believed to be the last in-house obstacle to using the Moore-Gibbons characters. The writer seemed to confirm as much last year when he revealed the publisher finally had offered to return the rights to the property — copyright and royalty issues form the roots of his legendary feud with DC — in exchange for a concession: that Moore “agree to some dopey prequels and sequels.” He refused.

Then-newly minted Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee said at the time that DC “would only revisit these iconic characters if the creative vision of any proposed new stories matched the quality set by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 25 years ago, and our first discussion on any of this would naturally be with the creators themselves.”

As recently as August, Gibbons addressed perennial rumors of a sequel and the possibility of the characters being transplanted into the DC Universe, telling Comic Book Resources, “It’s not something that I’d personally like to see happen. [...] What I would say is, intrinsic to the whole idea of Watchmen is that they existed in a world that was the way it was because of their existence. And I think to transplant them into another world actually removes a huge part of what is the essence of Watchmen.”

Angel & Faith

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.

Graeme McMillan

I have to say, this is an amazingly slow week for me in terms of new releases. If I had $15, I’d pick up the fourth issue of Dark Horse’s Angel & Faith series ($3.50), which has surprised me by turning out to be my favorite by far of the new Buffy series (due, in large part, to Rebekah Isaacs’ artwork, which is superb). I’d also grab the third issue of IDW’s Star Trek monthly ($3.99), in the hope that it’ll be as good as the first two issues; hardcore Trek fans, you should really be looking at this book, if you’re not already. Also on the list to grab: Thunderbolts #166 (Marvel, $2.99), continuing a great storyline from what might be one of the most underrated books from either of the big two publishers. One of the few nice things about Marvel’s recent Cancelpocalypse was seeing so many people speak up about how much they love Thunderbolts, and I’m right there with them; Jeff Parker’s done great things with this book.

If I had $30, chances are I’d put one of the above books – Angel & Faith, perhaps? – back for the week (or try and sweet-talk an extra 50 cents from the invisible budgeting gods who rule this column) and grab Rebellion’s Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks collection ($19.99), which collects all manner of (very) short stories from the Bearded One’s early days in 2000AD, with art by equally young masters like Dave Gibbons, Alan David, Steve Dillon and Brendan McCarthy, amongst others. Borag Thungg indeed, Earthlets.

When it comes to splurging, I’m taking that to mean double-dipping as opposed to buying insanely outrageously expensive items. I’ve already read Mark Waid’s wonderful Captain America: Man Out of Time, but now that it’s available in paperback (Marvel, $16.99), I might be tempted to buy it a second time.

Chris Arrant

Spaceman

If I had $15, I’d be all over the board but would start with the new Joe Casey/Nathan Fox joint Haunt #19 (Image/TMP, $2.99). I admit I didn’t jump onto the Haunt bandwagon when it first started, and despite seeing Greg Capullo on the book I never found the time to catch up. Seeing Casey and Fox jump on this gives me just the chance to do that. Next up would be Spaceman #2 ($2.99); I applaud DC for keeping the price point at $2.99, and seeing this dramatic divergence from 100 Bullets from Azz & Risso is something I eat up. Last up would be a pair of Marvel picks: Daredevil #6 ($2.99, Marvel) and Wolverine #19 ($3.99, Marvel).

If I had $30, I’d add to my stack starting with the new Thunder Agents Vol. 2 #1 ($2.99, DC). I enjoyed Nick Spencer’s first run on the title, and I’m a big proponent of artist Wes Craig and I’m excited to see what the two of them can do. Next up would be Uncanny X-Men #2 ($3.99, Marvel); stepping past my ambivalence to Greg Land and my appreciation of Kieron Gillen, I’m interested to see this team expand beyond the classic X-Men dynamic and turn into mutant ambassadors/enforcers in a political way. After that I’d get FF #12 (Marvel, $2.99). I love the transition of this book from being “The team formerly known as the FF” to being Marvel’s version of the Goonies, and seeing artist Juan Bobillo join it is invigorating as well as surprising. Lastly, I’d get Thunderbolts #166 ($2.99).

If I was to splurge like I did last Thursday at the dinner table, I would dig into The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks ($19.99, 2000AD). I’ve read a majority of Alan Moore’s work post­-Swamp Thing, but his early British career is woefully underrepresented in my memory. I’m interested to see these stories from a younger Alan Moore, and I’d endorse more publishers to do more creator-centric collections like this in the future (hint hint, DC Comics, Alex Toth).

Brigid Alverson

Ernest and Rebecca: My Best Friend Is a Germ

If I had $15…

I would start with a graphic novel from Papercutz, Ernest and Rebecca: My Best Friend Is a Germ ($11.99), which Jim Salicrup pitched hard to me at NYCC. It’s an all-ages story of a girl who makes friends with a microbe, which helps her cope with her parents’ separation and various other problems. Since that’s likely to give me the sniffles, I’ll cheer myself up afterwards with Archie #627 ($2.99), the first issue of the Archie-meets-KISS arc.

If I had $30…

I’d toss the Archie comic and add in B.P.R.D.: Being Human ($17.99). I like the B.P.R.D. comics but I haven’t really read enough of them; this is billed as a stand-alone volume, so it looks like a good investment.

Splurge…

There’s a new book out from Archaia that caught my eye: Rust, an all-ages superhero story set on a farm during the Great Depression. At $24.95 for a hardcover copy, that’s a splurge, but it’s a manageable one. My other splurge would be Tintin: The Complete Companion ($35), a reissue of a book that came out a few years ago. And since I seem to be going for the Euro-comics this week, I’ll add in the fifth volume of the French fantasy story The Elsewhere Chronicles ($6.95), because I really like this series–it has more of an edge than most kids-in-a-strange-land stories.

Chris Mautner

Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks

If I had $15:

I’ve been reading the series as its been coming out in pamphlet form but if I wasn’t I might likely spend my $15 on the third RASL collection. Not many have said much about Jeff Smith’s current work lately, but it remains a slam-bang, captivating noir/sci-fi saga.

If I had $30:

I’d definitely pick up the Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks collection from 2000AD. I haven’t read much of Moore’s early work apart from Miracleman and really would like to become better acquainted with those stories, if for nothing else than for when I get around to doing a Comics College piece on Moore.

Splurge:

The new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Cabin Fever, would make a perfect stocking stuffer for my daughter …

Amazing Fantasy #15

Comics | While going through a box in his attic, a Grange Park, Illinois, man discovered a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man, that he had bought as a kid. While other copies of the comic have fetched as much as $1.2 million, Chimera’s Comics is selling it for $12,000 due to its condition. [LaGrange Patch]

Comics | Brian Truitt profiles Marvel’s Fantastic Four, talking to Mark Waid, Tom Brevoort and Tom DeFalco about the long-running comic. [USA Today]

Publishing | Janna Morishima, formerly of Scholastic and Diamond Comic Distributors, has joined Papercutz as its first marketing director. [Papercutz]

Creators | Alan Moore discusses his friendship with Harvey Pekar: “We developed a friendship, because of a mutual love — an obsession, really — of old books. Harvey loved looking around the old tomes in my library, and Joyce told me I only enabled Harvey. They hadn’t got a spare inch of space, and Joyce would blow a fuse if he brought home a slim volume of poetry. He would smuggle them into the house by stealth. He’d slip them in among the old dusty books, and leave them there for about six weeks, then one day, walk over to the shelf and open them like they were cherished artifacts. The fact that this would take weeks showed his level commitment to great literature. He did everything short of wrapping them in plastic and hiding them in the lavatory.” Moore wrote the introduction for the forthcoming Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, a posthumous graphic novel due in March. [Fast Company]

Art by Cameron Stewart

Creators | Andy Khouri talks to writer and artist Cameron Stewart about his work on B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Exorcism, part of a flurry of upcoming B.P.R.D. comics due out next year. [ComicsAlliance]

Creators | Author Marc Singer discusses his book Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. [Mindless Ones]

Creators | Just a few months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, Mike Keefe has accepted a buyout offer from the Denver Post. Keefe plans to “semi-retire” and will continue to draw cartoons for the Cagle Syndicate. [Comic Riffs]

Commentary | Alex Woodward looks at Steve Duin and Shannon Wheeler’s Oil and Water. [Gambit]

Review | Manga newbie Jeff Jackson Ian Johnson reads Breathe Deeply, a new indy manga from small publisher One Peace Books that mixes medical ethics, suspense, and wistful romance. [Comic Attack]

Analysis | Kristy Valenti looks at Osamu Tezuka’s use of theatrical techniques and motifs in two very different books, Princess Knight and The Book of Human Insects. [comiXology]

Action Comics

Publishing | DC Comics joins the Kia Soul, Goldfish, My Little Pony and several others on Advertising Age’s annual list of America’s Hottest Brands: “With decades of stories under their capes and utility belts, Superman — and other DC characters, including Aquaman and the Flash — had ossified. Though relaunching its entire cast and making their adventures available to print and electronic audiences might alienate some hard-core DC fans, it might also gain plenty of new ones. Making DC characters more popular is crucial for its parent company. While the comic-book business is way down from its heyday, its characters fuel big-ticket Hollywood movies that can generate millions of dollars in revenue and licensing. The pressure may be on DC because rival Marvel, now owned by Disney, has churned out superhero film properties on a regular basis for years.” [Advertising Age]

Broadway | Producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark have changed their tune on the $75 million musical; previously they predicted they wouldn’t make back the money invested in the show without franchising it in other cities and countries, but now they predict they’ll make it back entirely from the Broadway run. They also are considering adding in new scenes and a new musical number to the production every year, “making it akin to a new comic book edition, and then urging the show’s fans to buy tickets again.” [The New York Times]

V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask

Creators | V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore comments on the use of the book’s notorious Guy Fawkes masks by various protest groups, including the Occupy movement. “I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.” [The Guardian]

Creators | Tony Millionaire comments on 10 of the musician portraits that are included in his upcoming 500 Portraits book from Fantagraphics: “I’ve always loved David Byrne. When the Talking Heads started, that’s when music totally changed for me. I had been lost with music. I was cutting my hair shorter and shorter. I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a hippie anymore.’ Music was just getting prettier and more refined – Crosby, Stills and Nash, and all that – and suddenly, it was wild again. And then the girls in the bars had big hair, and leather jackets and fishnet stockings. And I was like, ‘Wow!’ So then the Talking Heads came around and there was not only punk rock, but there was also art music – which, I felt like I could some how get more involved with it. The punk rock bouncing around and smashing in to each other thing wasn’t my idea of a good time. But art music, forget about it, I loved it.” [Rolling Stone]

Creators | ICE writer Doug Wagner discusses writing one of the Justice League comics available in various General Mills cereal boxes. [Park Record]

Chew, Vol. 3

Creators | Marc Oliver-Frisch posts an interview with Chew artist Rob Guillory conducted last year that will appear in a German collection of the popular Image series. [Comiks Debris]

Creators | Former Captain America artist Alan Bellman still gets fan mail—and still draws on commission—at the age of 87. [The Miami Herald]

Retailers | In a story on Small Business Saturday, Christopher Brady, owner of 4 Color Fantasies in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., discusses how his shop took advantage of the American Express-sponsored event. [Contra Costa Times]

Commentary | Lauren Davis looks at one of Robot 6′s perennial favorite webcomics Max Overacts, by Caanan Grall. [ComicsAlliance]

Awards | The Quebec Writers Federation’s young adult novel prize went to a graphic novel, Alan Silberberg’s Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze. [CBC News]

Fandom | IndyStar.com profiles Kevin Silva, a Batman collector who has nearly 1,600 pieces of Batman memorabilia, including a Gotham City phone book used in the 1960s television show and a Batman lunchbox he took to school as a kid. [IndyStar.com]

History | J.L. Bell chronicles the evolution of the Tin Woodman’s head. [Oz and Ends]

Cosplay | Toy enthusiasts in Jakarta, Indonesia are using the city’s many malls to host Nerf gun battles. Participants dress as movie, comic book and other pop culture characters and battle amongst the shops and food courts, with some malls even setting up designated areas for these “Mall Wars.” [Jakarta Globe]

X-23 #20

Sales charts | Responding to an iFanboy article that speculates on what titles Marvel might cancel next, Men of War and Viking writer Ivan Brandon makes the case against sales charts and the subsequent analysis of them each month: “There’s an ongoing debate, for a bunch of years now. There are numbers that circulate every month, inaccurate numbers, people track them, people use that flawed ‘data’ to comment on what they see as the progress or decline on the list. A lot of comics professionals are against this, for a lot of reasons. In my case, for my books, the books I personally share copyright on … my reason is, and no offense to anyone out there: My income is none of your business. Just as your income is none of mine.”

Tom Spurgeon offers a counterpoint: “Sales information seems to me an obvious positive, not because it reveals the bank accounts of creators, but because what sells and to what extent is basic information about a marketplace, and the shape and potency of a marketplace seems to me a primary item of interest for anyone covering that marketplace. It’s foundational to our understanding of how things work and why. Certainly this information is already manipulated to brazen effect by companies with something to put over on customers; I have to imagine this would become worse under a system of no information at all being released.” [Ivan Brandon, The Comics Reporter]

Habibi

Awards | Craig Thompson’s Habibi is one of five finalists for the French comics organization L’Association Des Critiques De Bandes Dessinées’ annual Prix De La Critique. The winner will be announced Dec. 5. [The Comics Reporter]

Creators | Mike Mignola, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walt Simonson and several other creators are selling illustrations of classic Universal Monsters on eBay to raise money for 6-year-old Aidan Reed, who was diagnosed last year with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. [Newsarama]

Creators | Laura Sneddon profiles Watchmen and V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore, who talks about creating The Ballad of Halo Jones, one of the first non-superhero women to headline her own series: “There wasn’t a single – I mean, I was annoyed – there wasn’t a single girls’ comic in Britain … I thought, well if you do more stories that are aimed at women, you’ll get more women reading the comics. It would seem fairly simple and straightforward, but there was a lot of resistance.” [The Independent]

Eduardo Risso

Creators | Artist Eduardo Risso discusses his career and craft in along interview conducted by Michal Chudolinski at the International Festival of Comics and Games in Lodz, Poland. [Comics Bulletin]

Creators | Mike Costa talks about his work on Blackhawks and G.I. Joe: Cobra. [USA Today]

Manga | Shaenon Garrity explains Chobits, the CLAMP series about a world in which humans can own robots with personalities — persocoms: “Chobits is the strangest of beasts: a difficult, complex, thought-provoking T&A manga. Ultimately it chooses to have its cheesecake and eat it too, raising a host of challenging questions only to leave them unanswered so as not to spoil the romance.” [Anime News Network]

Digital | Remember when your mom threw out all your comics? Digital comics saved the day for one reader who accidentally destroyed her cousin’s comics collection. [Teleread]

Commentary | Rich Clabaugh looks at Fantagraphics’ first Carl Barks collection, “Lost in the Andes.” [Christian Science Monitor]

Comics | Bob Temuka looks at some forgotten superhero titles from the 1980s and 1990s. [The Tearoom of Despair]

Blogosphere | The Panelists, a blog devoted to analyzing individual comics panels, is disbanding. The writers, all of them well regarded in the comics community, are simply too busy doing other things. [The Panelists]

Mystery Incorporated

You knew we were going to get to this series sooner or later, right?

Horus

After Big Numbers, Alan Moore’s other big uncompleted work (yes, there’s more than one) is arguably 1963, a six-issue homage/parody/pastiche of classic Silver Age Marvel Comics he did under the Image Comics umbrella back in 1993 with Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette.

As you’d expect, the superheroes that graced these covers and stories bore arch similarities to those created by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. Mystery Incorporated, for example, is the Fantastic Four with slightly different powers. The Fury serves as an analogue for Spider-Man, right down to ever-present angst. U.S.A. is Captain America, Horus is Thor, and so forth and so on.

But Moore and company were not content to merely ape the characters; 1963 mimics the tone and style of early Marvel comics with an almost unerring accuracy at times, from the soap opera romantic subplots, to the fretting over the red menace of communism to the Irish cop stereotypes. The creators even produced phony letters page and ads. Moore even mimicked Lee’s hucksterism, urging readers at one point to go out and buy his book, How I Created Everything All By Myself and Why I Am Great.

As the title of that book might suggest, 1963 was full of sly humor and winking nods to not only Marvel but the comics industry and American culture in general. The Doctor Strange character, for example, is flummoxed by a woman from the future’s PC doublespeak. The Tomorrow Syndicate’s voyage into hyperspace has loads of references to indie comics characters. Moore even breaks the fourth wall as the mysterious villain in the Hypernaut’s adventure is able to literally turning the panel in order to gain the upper hand.

From Tales of the Uncanny

The series is also notable for the number of talented folks that helped produce it. In addition to Moore, Bissette and Veitch, it featured the work of Don Simpson, John Totleben, Dave Gibbons, Jim Valentino and, yes, even Chester Brown himself (on the Hypernaut tale).

1963 was supposed to culminate in an “Annual” issue that would feature a showdown between the Image characters and the 1963 group, providing a sort of compare/contrast commentary on the superhero comics of yesteryear and those of the then “modern” 1990s. Jim Lee was supposed to draw the issue, but decided to take a sabbatical instead. By the time he came back, Rob Liefield was out, and things were starting to fall apart. Moore found himself drawn to working on other Image comics like WildCats and what would eventually become his ABC line.

The final panel from Tomorrow Syndicate

Things got more acrimonious in 1996 when Moore cut off all contact with Bissette, apparently regarding something the Swamp Thing artist said or revealed during a lengthy interview in the Comics Journal. In 1998 Moore, Veitch and Bissette split up the rights to the various cast members, with Bissette walking away with the Hypernaut and a few other characters.

Even then, attempts were made to collect and finish 1963. In a big two-part interview for CBR, Bissette discussed a number of attempts by the three parties, even with Bissette and Moore avoiding any direct contact ,only for things to fall apart time and again. At this point it seems like there’s little to no chance the original series will ever be collected, although Bisette has announced plans to spin off his characters into their own adventures, to be published by About Comics. It seems a shame. Although certainly one of the minor works for all three creators, 1963 remains a bonafide hoot and could easily be appreciated by a new batch of readers.

Action Comics #1

Comics | ICv2′s latest report on the comics market shows a mixed picture for monthly comics and graphic novels. While DC’s New 52 reboot has helped push comics sales, the graphic-novel versions of those comics won’t be out for months — and Amazon is gobbling up a larger and larger share of graphic novel sales, especially at the high end. And this is interesting: “Digital sales are growing as a percentage of the market, but apparently not at the expense of print sales. Retailers interviewed by ICv2 do not feel they’re losing sales to digital competition on DC’s day and date titles.” That seems to be more anecdote than data, but you would think retailers would be the first to notice a drop in sales. The report also includes lists of the top 10 properties in various categories. [ICv2]

Creators | Writer Kieron Gillen reflects on his year’s worth of stories in Marvel’s Generation Hope: “I always suspected I’d leave Generation Hope at the end of the first year, and so planned it as a coherent statement that would establish the book. I saw it as my job to properly delineate the lights and define Hope’s post-Cable existence as a somewhat desperate Messiah. Like all work, I’ve got some things I regret and some things I’m enormously pleased with. I think to start with I was a note too overconfident and obtuse, and immediately following that went too far the other way into being a little nervous and crass before swiftly (and thankfully) finding its balance. Taken as a whole, I can only view it as a success. I’d taken six kids, shown how each one ticks, and took them from meeting, to bonding, to an initial success, to heartbreak and then near destruction, and both showed who they were and how the experience changed them, while setting the stage for whatever comes next. Obviously being deep in the X-Office, with Hope on my team, means that I’ve got more than a few fingers in the assorted mutant-pie (which is a disturbing, Disir-esque quasi-cannibalistic metaphor I’m going to abandon immediately), but it’s still more than a little sad saying goodbye to the kids.” [Kieron Gillen's Workblog]

The Activity #1

Creators | Nathan Edmondson and artist Mitch Gerads discuss their new Image title The Activity. [MTV Geek]

Creators | Writer Tim Daniel walks through the process he used to pitch his new Image series Enormous: “While there are scores of excellent columns, creator blogs, and publisher’s submission guidelines to help steer a creative team, there is only one truth to this entire crazy process – there is no definitive manner for successfully presenting your book. Follow the submission guidelines for a publisher, knowing full well that just because you dutifully adhere to the rules does not in any way guarantee success. When pitching Enormous, we were lucky, fortunate and foolish; lucky to have discovered artist Mehdi Cheggour on Facebook, fortunate to have built a relationship with Shadowline publisher Jim Valentino through dedication and hard work, and foolish enough to assume our story would stun him with its creative genius – guaranteeing the immediate green-light.” [Multiversity Comics]

Creators | Art Asylum, the company creating Minimates based on the mid-1980s Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man storyline “The Death of Jean DeWolff,” interviews the story’s writer Peter David. [Art Asylum]

A Flight of Angels

Creators | Rebecca Guay discusses her work on the new graphic novel A Flight of Angels, due out next week from Vertigo. Guay handles the art and a number of writers, including Bill Willingham, contribute loosely related stories that are all knit together by a single framing tale. [USA Today]

Process | In his regular “Wacky Reference Wednesdays” post, artist Paolo Rivera shares how he used photos from the Tenement Museum as reference for his Mythos: Captain America work. [Self-Absorbing Man]

Process | In two posts, comics writer/editor Jim Shooter gives a “how to” lesson on continued stories and next-issue “teases.” [Part 1, Part 2]

Comics | David Brothers makes several spot-on points about Marvel’s now-canceled Iron Man 2.0 series, not the least of which is that it never really felt like James Rhodey, aka War Machine, was the star of the book: “I was actually sort of annoyed when Rhodey slipped further and further into the background. I hit one issue where Rhodey wasn’t in it at all, or on one page or something ridiculous like that. And then Fear Itself hit and the book turned into Cast-Off Iron Fist Characters Monthly (sometimes featuring War Machine).” He also talks in general about the current slate of black characters starring in Marvel’s comics. [4thletter]

From Daredevil #5

Comics | Christine at the Other Murdock Papers shares something I’d never noticed, that Daredevil has rarely featured a computer in its pages. She notes that issue #5 of the current series brings Matt Murdock into this century, giving him both an iMac and an iPhone. [The Other Murdock Papers]

Commentary | Tim Callahan shares plans to reread and talk about the major works of Alan Moore over the next year. [Tor.com]

Commentary | Chad Nevett and Alec Berry have started a series, “Direct Messages,” in which they discuss DC’s New 52 releases. [GraphiContent, Alec Reads Comics]

Cosplay | Frederico Garza of Cleburne, Texas, owns a hot dog shop that’s underneath a plaza infested with bats. Instead of having them exterminated, Garza has taken to wearing a Batman costume and has added a “Cleburne Bat Dog” to his menu. He’s also taking donations so students at the local high school can build bat boxes for the animals to move into. [KVUE]

Conventions | LaToya Peterson takes us inside the speed-dating event at New York Comic Con; while her writing is intelligent, she leans a bit hard on the device of setting up stereotypes so she can debunk them. But she’s right to describe the lower level of the Javits Center as “a deeply unsexy underground bunker” — and the speed dating was in one of the nicer rooms. [Slate]