Charlaine Harris

Publishing | Charlaine Harris, author of the “Sookie Stackhouse” novels on which HBO’s True Blood is based, says that after she finishes the last two “Sookie” books, she plans to work on a graphic novel with Christopher Golden. “I’m very excited about that. It’s called Cemetery Girl with Christopher Golden, and it’s a very exciting opportunity.” Harris had mentioned wanting to do a novel called Cemetery Girl back in 2009, about “a girl raised by ghosts in a cemetery,” but put it on hold when she found out the plot was similar to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

Based on the description in the news report, it sounds like the story has been tweaked, as it says the graphic novel “centers on a woman who finds herself living in a cemetery with no memory of her past but a clear sense of a mysterious threat hanging over her.” This isn’t the first time Harris’ characters have found their way into comics, as IDW publishes comics based on HBO’s True Blood, and an adaptation of her Grave Sight novels has been published by Dynamite. [NBC San Diego]

Publishing | Former Marvel Comics editor and Transformers writer John Barber has joined IDW Publishing as a senior editor. IDW also announced the promotion of Tom Waltz to the company’s first senior staff writer position, in addition to his duties as editor, and the expansion of the company’s book department with longtime IDW employee Alonzo Simon becoming an assistant editor. [press release]

Publishing | Jim Shooter shares how Marvel’s Epic imprint, which published mostly creator-owned books like Groo and Dreadstar, came into existence. [Jim Shooter]

Creators | Back in the 1970s, long before there was Womanthology, Sharon Rudahl was editing the underground Wimmen’s Comix anthology. Robin McConnell talks to her about those pioneer days, and her more recent graphic novel Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman, in an hour-long podcast. [Inkstuds]

Creators | Matt Wayne posts the Dwayne McDuffie tribute that Comic-Con wouldn’t print: “I’m worried that Dwayne is going to be the industry’s ‘proof’ that we’re all post-racial and chummy, now that they can’t be embarrassed into hiring him anymore, and I don’t want to contribute to that absurd but inevitable narrative.” [Dwayne McDuffie Forums]

Batman: The Dark Knight #2

Creators | Rich Johnston talks to writer Paul Jenkins about joining David Finch as co-writer of Batman: The Dark Knight #2. [Bleeding Cool]

Reviews | Matthew J. Brady takes a look at Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden: “… the imagery that Yokoyama has managed to pull from the ether and finely explicate on the page is, for the most part, gorgeously bizarre. There’s the occasional object or action that doesn’t quite read like it is supposed to, but most everything makes sense, from the houses on wheels to the giant wave of photographs, and they provide plenty of opportunities for meticulously detailed scenes, even within the uniform line weights and expansive white space that Yokoyama favors.” [Warren Peace Sings the Blues]

Reviews | Robot 6 contributor Matt Seneca examines Seth’s Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World. [Death to the Universe]

Reviews | John Parker looks at the comics of Joe Casey, “the most dangerous man in comics.” [ComicsAlliance]

Over the past week or so, DC Comics has been parceling out logos for some the titles in its line-wide relaunch, a process goosed along by a little enterprising URL farming by Bleeding Cool and others, and the release of the cover for the July issue of Previews.

So far we’ve seen logos for Demon Knights, The Fury of Firestorm, Justice League, Justice League Dark, OMAC, Resurrection Man, Stormwatch and Suicide Squad. But what we’ve yet to glimpse is a designer credit.

Demon Knights, Resurrection Man and Suicide Squad, in particular, look like the handiwork of talented artist Rian Hughes, the designer of such comic-book logos as Batman and Robin, Wednesday Comics, Captain Britain and MI13, Strange Tales and NYC Mech. I emailed Hughes last night to see whether any of the new DC logos are indeed his, but he’s yet to respond.

The Justice League logo bears a passing resemblance to Chip Kidd’s somewhat divisive designs for All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder and All-Star Superman, but that probably owes to the tilt on the Previews cover. It seems unlikely that Kidd, who created the cover treatments for Final Crisis and the logos for Trinity, handled Justice League.

Check out the released, and leaked, logos after the break. And please contribute any designer credits if you know them.

In its younger days, Tom Batiuk’s newspaper comic strip Funky Winkerbean was lighthearted and occasionally even funny, with, if I recall correctly, lots of jokes about selling band candy. In recent years, however, it has become notorious as the daily newspaper reader’s pit stop of despair, as disease, bankruptcy, dysfunction, and loneliness stalk the saddest cast of characters ever to grace the funny pages; the best that can be said of them is that they smirk in the face of death.

This has not gone unnoticed by the internet. Josh Fruhlinger mocks the strip (along with a good dozen others) on a regular basis at The Comics Curmudgeon, and at Comics Alliance, Chris Sims actually has a monthly roundup of the most depressing Funky Winkerbean strips. And until earlier this week, there were two blogs devoted to commenting on each day’s comic, Stuck Funky and Son of Stuck Funky (although Stuck Funky was no longer updated).

Then WordPress.com, which hosted both strips, got a cease and desist letter from Batiuk’s lawyers, demanding that both blogs be taken down because they were infringing copyright. WordPress complied, apparently without notifying the site’s owner. What is a bit more disturbing is that the C&D letter demanded that WordPress turn over the blogger’s name and address “so that we may take action to prevent the further unauthorized copying and distribution of this content,” which sounds kind of threatening.

There’s a lively discussion up at The Daily Cartoonist, in which the general thinking is that Batiuk went after these two blogs because they posted the strip every day (and then mocked it), while Fruhlinger and Sims go after a number of targets. Regardless of the reason, Son of Stuck Funky is back, albeit without images, dishing out that delicious Funky snark once more.

UPDATE: Batiuk responds at The Daily Cartoonist

"Expressive Markings" by Justin Green

Great catch by Jeet Heer of Comics Comics: Underground comics legend Justin Green has launched a blog, with three comics up so far and counting. Green is credited with more or less inventing the autobiographical comic — a staple of alternative comics ever since — with Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, his exceptionally and hilariously frank 1972 comic chronicling his adolescent battles with sexuality, Catholicism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I first saw his work back in the ’90s, when his Justin Green’s Musical Legends strips graced the pages of Tower Records’ late, lamented Pulse! magazine. (You might also know him as cartoonist Carol Tyler’s on-again, off-again husband from her own autobiographical comic series, You’ll Never Know.) Whatever he’s selling on this thing, I’m buying.

(via our own Chris Mautner)

Crisis on Infinite Earths #12

Creators | Artist Alan Kupperberg shares word that colorist Tom Ziuko has been hospitalized as he fights acute kidney failure and other health conditions. “The good news is that the doctors seem to have finally stumbled on a series of treatments and therapies that have Tom seeing some light at the end of the tunnel,” Kupperberg said in a message to Daniel Best. “The bad news is that Tom, uninsured and unable to work since the beginning of December, is in a tough financial bind.” Kupperberg is accepting donations via his PayPal account — kupperberg@earthlink.net — and adds, “I will pass 100% (plus) along to Tom.”

Ziuko worked in DC Comics’ production department before going freelance, and colored comics like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Batman, Action Comics and History of the DC Universe, to name a few. Todd Klein remembers their time together at DC. [20th Century Danny Boy]

Creators | Artist Paolo Rivera suffered a broken cheekbone after intervening in a domestic dispute. “The good news is I’m all right and—most importantly—my vision is intact,” he wrote on his blog. “… I had surgery on Monday and have been taking it very, very easy since. All things considered, I was very lucky. My eye looks horrendous—the white of the eye is blood red—but I can still see (thank goodness) and should make a full recovery. I also have a pretty rad haircut right now due to surgery… it kinda looks like the one I had circa 1995.” [The Self-Absorbing Man]

Grant Morrison

Comic books | USA Today’s Brian Truitt puts the spotlight on Grant Morrison’s Batman Inc. and writer Nick Spencer. [USA Today]

Conventions | Comic-Con International has announced several more special guests for its show in San Diego this summer, including Ed Benes, Joëlle Jones, Cameron Stewart and many more. [Comic-Con International]

Blogosphere | Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interview series continued this past weekend, as he spoke with Wilson creator Daniel Clowes and someone near and dear to our hearts, our own Brigid Alverson. [The Comics Reporter]

Publishers | Brooks Barnes spotlights Radical Publishing and their film deals. [New York Times]

Organizations | ComicsPro has announced its 2011 nominees for its Industry Appreciation Award, which include Steve Geppi, Denis Kitchen, Stan Lee, Bill Schanes and Bob Wayne. They also announced nominees for their Memorial Award, which include Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Julius Schwartz and Phil Seuling. [ComicsPro]

Mercury

Awards | The Cybils, the children’s and young adult bloggers’ literary awards, named their finalists for 2010. Their list includes two separate graphic novel categories — young adult and middle grade, and finalists include George O’Connor’s Athena, Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile and Hope Larson’s Mercury. [Cybils]

Awards | The “social cataloging” site Goodreads has posted the winners of the 2010 Goodreads Choice Awards, as voted on by their users. In the graphic novel category, Twilight: The Graphic Novel beat out volumes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scott Pilgrim and The Walking Dead, among others, to win the graphic novel category. [Goodreads.com]

Fandom | Molly McIsaac counts down the best cosplayers pf 2010. [iFanboy]

Brian Michael Bendis

and quite a few writers complained to me today that they would write better but they aren’t getting paid to do it.

having lived the first 10 years of my career making no money and having lived with artists and writers who have done the same… I don’t care about that.

you either work really hard and really try to make something worthwhile or you don’t. money has nothing to do with it. if you find a way to make money doing it fantastic. that I lived for many years under the impression that I was never ever ever going to make a dime. and so did a great many of my peers. money and the quality of your work should have nothing to do with each other. it just an excuse to fail.

–Brian Michael Bendis on his message board today (echoing comments he made on Twitter earlier on), elaborating on his call yesterday for more in-depth comics criticism and journalism.

This isn’t quite what he’s talking about, but I did want to say a few words about this aspect of Bendis’s critique specifically. True, many artists in every art form toil primarily for love of the game, out of an innate need to create rather than out of hope for monetary reward. But journalism about and criticism of comics of the sort Bendis is calling for makes making comics, never the world’s most lucrative profession for the vast majority of people who participate in it, look like the California Gold Rush of 1848 by comparison. In a way, it stands to reason: Given the comparatively small number of paying gigs in comics, and the comparatively small audience for the product of those gigs, the number of paying gigs for comics criticism and journalism of any kind — including copy-and-paste and pseudo-hip snark, let alone in-depth investigative reporting and pages-long close reading of creators’ work — is going to be vanishingly low.

Certainly this work, at least the opinion-based criticism apart of it, can be done for free. I do the vast majority of my writing-about-comics for free on my personal blog, for example, and the majority of that is indeed criticism rather than just linkblogging. (And I’m proud of what I do there, and here for that matter; for whatever it’s worth, this post doesn’t stem from any perceived need to defend myself or Robot 6.) Indeed, because I’m doing it for free and don’t expect or require advertising revenue, I’m free to go negative when warranted. However, as many commenters have pointed out, the bigger news outlets are not as lucky — they have complex, intimate relationships with the companies they cover, who provide them with a combination of advertising revenue and access that can be next to impossible to do without. And yes, big-name companies and creators absolutely retaliate against perceived negative reviews or commentary by those sites. Not all of them, and not all the time, but they do. That’s something they think about.

And that’s a big reason why, contrary to what Bendis is arguing, money is much more important to the journalism equation. If you’re going to dig into the industry, you’re going to require financial stability as a buffer against potential repercussions for what you dig up; if you’re going to critique it, you need to be able to stand by that critique when the people you’re critiquing are demanding you be punished for it. And on an even more basic level, true investigative journalism requires time and resources that you can’t generate simply because you really love writing about comics. The reason why the Huffington Post is now duking it out with the venerable New York Times for news supremacy isn’t because Ariana Huffington assembled a crack squad of volunteers, it’s because she’s rich and she threw a ton of money at it, to the point where she’s now wooing columnists and reporters away from Newsweek and such. (The bikini candids help too, admittedly.) For that matter, that’s the same reason why the Times can do the job it does: It pays talented people well, so they can afford to use those talents at length. Even in my case, last year I wrote an oral history of Marvel Comics for Maxim magazine that involved a 15,000-word first draft and interviews with everyone from Joe Simon and Stan Lee to Joe Quesada and Grant Morrison. The reason I could do that was because I could afford to since I was being well paid — the months I spent working on that, the hours I spent on the phone with sources or doing transcripts or editing, was not at the expense of other, paying work I’d need to do to stay afloat.

It’s a very tough row to hoe. In the end, good work requires investment. And in general, this isn’t an investment this industry — its practitioners and its observers alike — seem willing or able to make, many exceptions, and Bendis’s wishes, notwithstanding.

comics as an art form is in fantastic shape. the only things missing? thoughtful longform investigative journalism and critique. all we get nowadays are knee-jerk reviews and cut and paste blogging. which I have no problem with but it’s ALL we get. on a slow news week like this one I would love to see some of our better reporters rolling up her sleeves and helping the medium thrive. even reviews of trade paperbacks and graphic novels have seemed to have fallen by the wayside even though the sales are crazy large.

you’ll forgive me but I think that a snarky pseudo-hip attitude towards mainstream comics is uninteresting. if you’re a cut-and-paste blogger or comics journalist and I just annoyed the shit out of you… prove me wrong.

I am enjoying the e-mails from professionals agreeing with me but not wanting to stir the pot Cut and paste blogging is cut and pastes from an article from another source… then adding a line of comment & signing their name to it.

I’m sorry I got on my high horse, I just do love this medium and I know a lot of you out there do as well. I miss amazing heroes and for clarification I go to almost every cut-and-paste comics blog

–Brian Michael Bendis, the industry’s most popular writer, taking aim at a lot of people who write about the industry, on Twitter today. Shots fired! Shots fired!

(And now, by cutting-and-pasting his tweets, adding a line of comment, and signing my name to it, I’ve become part of the problem. Dammit!)

Gary Groth

“I had an anus-clenching moment when I read Ken [Parille]’s parodic ‘Where are your standards?’ paragraph without knowing it was parody and thought, ‘My God, [Parille and Comics Journal contributor Noah Berlatsky are] both idiots!’ You can imagine my relief when Ken revealed that it was a joke! I thought I’d created some sort of critical purgatory that I would wander around in forever in an intellectual torpor, and the only way out would be to extinguish the site. My only solace was that I might bump into Harold Bloom and we’d sit down and commiserate.”

—Comics Journal editor and Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth, expressing his dismay that he can no longer tell actual posts on the Journal’s website from parodies thereof.

from Final Crisis by Doug Mahnke

Last week, Tom Spurgeon took a page from Monty Python and said he’d like to have an argument: “What are all these superhero comics really saying?” Given the genre’s domination of both the Direct Market and the comics internet, Spurgeon said he wanted to see a more in-depth discussion of what the heck is going on in these weird and wild comics, particularly regarding their heroes’ behavior and any potential larger message beyond “superheroes are awesome.”

In response, I proposed an argument of my own: “Why do superheroes dominate the online conversation the way they do?” In light of how many comics commentators and critics clearly read a wide variety of comics, or at least have been known to from time to time, I’m perplexed by why The Rise of Arsenal gets so much more airtime than Art in Time or 20th Century Boys.

This weekend, Marc-Oliver Frisch managed to thread the needle of these two overlapping questions. On his personal blog, Frisch, best known as the DC number-cruncher for The Beat, posted a list of “10 Things Superhero Comics Do Better Than Any Other Genre in Any Other Storytelling Form”…and then announced he wouldn’t talk about superhero comics on his blog at all for an entire year.

Both ends of the post strike me as pretty provocative. Some of Frisch’s contentions are a little flimsy, I’d say — anyone who thinks superhero comics “Let Creators Explore the Limits of Their Imagination Without Being Hampered by Logic or Plausibility” or depict “Brightly Colored Folks Punching and Throwing Lightning Bolts at Each Other” better than anything else on the planet hasn’t played Super Mario Galaxy 2, for example.

But if you tone down the superlatives just a bit, you’re left with some sterling analysis. Check out these bits, arguing in favor of the superhero universes’ never-ending storylines and patchwork construction:

You can call the fact that nothing ever truly fades away in superhero comics tiresome, or creatively bankrupt, or kind of creepy psychologically, or you can sit back and enjoy them as a narrative perpetual-motion machine that can at times be entirely self-sufficient and feed on nothing but its own history to keep going.

[...]

I tend to groan and throw a coin into the piggy bank whenever the cliché of “playing in the sandbox” comes up in a creator interview, but if we’re honest for a moment, it’s absolutely true: The Marvel Universe and the DC Universe and the characters who populate them are fictional constructs thought up and realized in collaboration, passed on, left behind, inherited and remade, time and again.

And that’s a huge part of their appeal. It tends to make even the least among those constructs fascinating by association, and it tends to make the Marvel and DC worlds more than the sum of their parts.

I actually think these aspects of superhero comics make them far more interesting on a formal level, even if they’re occasionally, even frequently, stifling in the context of a single issue or storyline.

Then there’s Frisch’s farewell to superhero blogging. I know there are other critics out there with a hands-off approach to the genre — The Comics Journal’s Rob Clough comes to mind — and in the past I’ve always found that sort of self-limitation, well, limiting. If I find I have something to say about, f’rex, The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange, shouldn’t I say it?

But sometimes imposing parameters on your writing, paradoxically, helps it blossom. By cutting his personal blog off from the easy go-to topic of the superhero serials, Frisch frees himself up to discuss…everything else. And there’s a whole lot of “everything else,” much of it worth discussing more often.

What do you make of Frisch’s post? Do you agree with his ten arguments in favor of the strength of superhero comics? And do you agree with his subsequent decision to ignore the genre entirely to explore the rest of the medium instead?

Hulk vs. Superman by Mike Deodato Jr.

When you think about it, it only makes sense: Because the comics conversation is so dominated by old arguments, it can be tough to make room for new ones. That’s the thesis of a new post by The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon listing “Three Arguments We Could Be Having.” After we here at Robot 6 pivoted off Spurgeon’s interview with Noah Berlatsky to list the comics arguments we’d prefer never to hear again, Spurge is returning the favor by suggesting three he thinks we’d be better off having in their place: “1) Does reprinting archival comics have a moral component?; 2) Why are so many Direct Market shops still female unfriendly?; 3) What are all these superhero comics really saying?”

In other words, while the current golden age of reprints is a boon to all fans of the medium, what do its practitioners owe the creators of the comics they’re reprinting in terms of not just royalties, but also the best possible packaging and analysis of the material? Everyone’s got horror stories about some creepy store where the wares or employees make it a “shop at your own risk” situation for women and girls — why has that not translated to industry-wide action on those affronted consumers’ behalf? Should superhero comics be expected to have more of a message than “superheroes are awesome,” and if that is the message you go with, shouldn’t that be reflected across the board instead of occasionally having them indulge in really nasty behavior or suffer jarringly grim setbacks to get across the importance of a particular storyline?

I’ll tell you what my big question is: Why do superheroes dominate the online conversation the way they do? Last week saw the release of Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius, two gorgeous and weird books that truly make use of the stuff of comics and contain the kind of material you can mentally gnaw on for days on end, but I guarantee you that no matter which comics blogs you read, you read more about Paul Levitz’s return to the Legion of Superheroes. And chances are good that if you’ve read about Daniel Clowes’s Wilson, what you read prominently featured that page where the character makes fun of The Dark Knight. What gives? If you want to make the argument that sheer numbers justify the choice of what bloggers and comics sites cover, I suppose that’s your prerogative. And don’t get me wrong — I read and enjoy multiple superhero comics every single week, and have lots to say about a lot of them. I also understand the need to make a living, which in Internet terms means unique pageviews.

But so much of the comics Internet consists of individual or group blogs where, presumably, there’s no editorial mandate to maximize hits. Indeed, the major selling point of the blogosphere is its lack of the traditional gatekeepers and incentive structures that bedevil mainstream journalism. Meanwhile, even the big group blogs owned by major communications corporations tend to be personality-driven, reflecting the interests and styles of their writers to a refreshing degree — and those writers tend to be interested in all sorts of comics, in their spare time at least. So yes, the nature of the coverage is often idiosyncratic, which is great. But why is that the comics being covered differ so little from what you’d read about on Marvel.com or The Source? Should those of us in the position to do so make an effort to broaden the scope of what we’re presenting to our readers as the comics worth buying, reading, and talking about?

So that’s my argument I’d like to be having. What are yours? Tell us in the comments — maybe we can start having them right away!

"Lost" Brave and the Bold issue

With all the talk lately of reinterpreted classic covers and Fringe “other side” covers, it seems like the perfect time to direct your attention to The Brave and the Bold: The Lost Issues,.

The blog features mock-ups of The Brave and the Bold covers, teaming series star Batman with everyone from James Bond and Jonny Quest to Kitty Pryde and the members of KISS. Because who wouldn’t want to learn more about Alfred’s affair with Aunt May?

Via ComicsAlliance

[Berlatsky:] …there’s a default stance in certain regions of lit comics land which is basically: “life sucks and people are awful.” Which I think is glib and overdone and tedious, a, and which, b, can be made even more irritating by the fact that the people promulgating it are, you know, fairly successful, and (what with various autobiographical elements thrown in) the result often looks like a lot of self-pity over not very much.

So…I’m wondering how strongly you would push back against that characterization of lit comics in general…and also whether you feel it is or is not ever appropriate to think about a creator’s biography in relation to his or her work in that way.

[Spurgeon:] At this point I wouldn’t push back at all against the stance that says the default mode in lit comics land is basically “life sucks and people are awful” because it’s no longer an argument I take seriously. I don’t think it’s true by any reasonable measure and I’m done with entertaining the notion until someone presents the argument in a much more effective or compelling fashion than what always sounds to me like some angry, lonely, re-written Usenet post from 1997.

First of all, amen. If anything, I feel sorry for people who write off an entire swathe of comics, including the gorgeously crafted and emotionally devastating work of guys like Clowes and Chris Ware (to name the two best-known and most frequently lambasted creators) as woe-is-me whining. What I don’t feel is the need to seriously engage those people.

But this got me to thinking about how there are a small handful of similar arguments about comics I could happily go my whole life without ever encountering again. “Superhero comics are just quasi-fascist male adolescent power fantasies” and “Manga isn’t real comics, it’s just big-eyed panty-flashing speed-lined nonsense for people who fetishize Japan” round out my Unholy Trinity of lame arguments that ignorantly pooh-pooh whole segments of the industry. But the list could go on: People who treat the DC/Marvel rivalry like a titanic clash of good vs. evil, webcomics triumphalism, manga triumphalism, superheroes as modern myths, and “the New Mainstream” can all go jump in a lake.

Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve discussed comics enough to repeatedly run into opinions that make you want to chew your own foot off. Go ahead and share them in the comments. We can’t promise we won’t use them ourselves, but we’ll at least know you won’t be listening when we do.

from Blue Spring by Taiyo Matsumoto

A great comic review can make you feel like you’ve read the book without showing you so much as a panel…but, y’know, showing a panel really can’t hurt. And three recent reviews — Tucker Stone on Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring, Charles Hatfield on Blaise Larmee’s Young Lions, and Noah Berlatsky on Junji Ito’s Uzumaki — really struck me with their well-selected spot art. A glance at each review’s illustrations — dynamic, sexy, and horrific respectively — can probably tell you whether these books are the kind of thing you wanna check out, which is great, because each review is a solid examination of what makes them worth checking out in the first place. Click the links, feast your eyes, and see what you think.

from Young Lions by Blaise Larmee

from Uzumaki by Junji Ito

Is the superhero genre a cinematic dead-end? Since Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz made the case last week, the topic has been much on the minds of the comics commentariat. Recently, Tom Spurgeon, Tim O’Neil, Charles Hatfield and yours truly have all weighed in on the matter, focusing on aspects like the power of individual moments or performances vs. that of the story as a whole, the storytelling techniques mandated by Hollywood’s need to get a return on the massive investments required for the genre, the question of why fans get so worked up for the movies when they have any number of (usually superior) comics about the same characters to read, and personal film-by-film rundowns of the genre’s high and low points.

Of course, this was all before I saw Black20′s magnificent made-up mash-up trailer for Iron Man IV. Now, it’s possible that this is a parody of super-sequels’ tendency to over-stuff themselves with new characters, extra villains and half a dozen subplots. On the other hand, when you’re presented with an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr., Fred Gwynne, Jim Carrey, James Brown, Vanilla Ice, Carl Weathers, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barack Obama, M. Bison, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, David Arquette, Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Johnny 5, who’s gonna complain? If you can make it through the 2:19 mark without laughing out loud, maybe you’re a superhero.

(Via Topless Robot)

Blackest Night by Ivan Reis and Herogasm by Darick Robertson

Green Lantern and Garth Ennis are responsible for very different comics; bloggers Tom Spurgeon and Tim O’Neil are two very different writers. Yet in recent days, both have posted about how they’ve reached their limit with comics about/by the aforementioned individuals — for very different reasons. And they’ve written some thought-provoking things about that tipping point where you decide “You know what? This comic isn’t for me anymore” in the process.

First up is Spurgeon, who in linking to Charles Hatfield’s negative review of Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern-starring opus Blackest Night said he hasn’t even read the series yet, simply because he has no interest in ever reading a comic about Green Lantern again. Says Spurgeon:

I firmly believe I’ve read my lifetime’s allotment of Green Lantern stories the same way I’ve seen my lifetime’s allotment of Becker and sat through more than enough South Pacific and never again should have to listen to anything by Bon Jovi.

I’ve heard Spurge talk about other superhero characters in similar terms before. If I’m reading him correctly, it’s not that he read anything particularly noxious or stupid or off-putting, any more than he had a traumatic Becker experience — it’s just that he feels he reached the point where he’s gotten whatever there is he’s going to get out of the Green Lantern character and concept and feels no need to go back to the well for diminishing returns.

Tim O’Neil, on the other hand, hasn’t simply had his fill of Garth Ennis comics — he’s recently read one that filled him with such loathing for the writer’s approach that it’s made him question his enjoyment of nearly every Ennis book he’s ever read. The comic in question is Herogasm, the sequence that did the trick (which is reprinted at the link) involves a talkative prostitute who spills her life story only to have it thrown back in her face when the man with whom she’s chatting threatens to murder her, and O’Neil’s take on it is this:

I don’t know if I can put my finger on exactly why this one scene was the tipping point for me, all I can say is that as soon as I finished this comic I felt a strong urge to never read another Ennis comic again. It seemed gratuitous – more than merely, say, a villain being villainous to prove his villainy, it seemed like just one more example of really horrible people saying really horrible things to each other, humiliating other people for no reason other than to allow us, the paying audience, to watch the fireworks….His comics just seem mean to me now, and its the kind of petty, unjustified meanness that makes me want to rethink my engagement with all his work, not just the rapidly diminishing returns of his last few years.

So you ask why I don’t like Ennis? Ultimately, I’m not really looking for an engagement or critical discussion: I no longer believe his work merits serious thought. If you add up everything he’s done since around 2000 it doesn’t add up to one tiny fraction of the worth of his 90s work. It’s grotesque and hysterical and frankly repulsive.

It’s not a question of having read his lifetime allotment of Ennis’s mordant superhero parodies, it’s a question of having become so disgusted with them that what once seemed like strengths have become weaknesses in his eyes.

Whether through an outraged falling-out like O’Neil’s or a simple realization that we’re kinda tired of something like Spurgeon’s, we’ve probably all permanently dropped a comic, a character, or a creator we once got something out of. My question for you is, What was it, and what did it? Did you outgrow a superhero you once loved? Did you see an ugly side to a writer you once admired? Or on the flipside, did you read a story so good about a particular character or topic that you feel a definitive statement has been made and you need read no further? Hit the comments and let us know!

from Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days by Al Columbia

You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a horror comic in this post-30 Days of Night, post-The Walking Dead age. Meanwhile, there’s a bustling alt-horror … well, “scene” and “movement” probably aren’t the right words, but there are plenty of those comics and cartoonists out there.

But are any of them, y’know, actually scary?

Blogger Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age of Horror has endeavored to answer that question — long a topic of debate among comics readers, many of whom are skeptical that comics really can hang with movies or prose for their sheer power to frighten — by rounding up thoughts on the topic from a variety of horror and comics creators and commentators. These include cartoonists Richard Sala (Peculia) and Josh Simmons (House); CRwM of the provocative horror blog And Now the Screaming Starts; Kimberly Lindbergs of the movie-focused Cinebeats; Karswell of the pre-Comics Code horror-comics blog The Horrors of It All; and (ahem) yours truly. The roundtable was inspired by a post from Richard Cook at The Hooded Utilitarian, so be sure to check that out, too.

Where do you stand on scarybooks?

The Hard Goodbye

Although his Twitter and blog haven’t been updated since March, that doesn’t mean Frank Miller has been idle or forgotten. Witness, a few Miller-related items from the past few days …

• ComicsAlliance reports that Miller was at the MoCCA Festival this past weekend, where he confirmed that he is no longer working on Holy Terror, Batman! So I guess we won’t get to a Batman/Al-Qaeda showdown, at least not one drawn by Miller.
• David Brothers, Chad Nevett, Tim Callahan and Tim O’Neil have teamed up for a series of blog posts called “Booze, Broads, & Bullets,” where they are collectively writing about Miller’s body of work. Nevett, for instance, is hitting the Sin City books, while Brothers has hit stuff like Ronin and Man Without Fear. Check out the entire index over at the 4thletter!
• And speaking of Sin City, Miller tweeted in January about new covers he was doing for the Sin City line of books, and now they’ve popped up officially in the latest Dark Horse solicits.

Footnotes in Gaza

I’d say “better late than never,” but in my experience, like Gandalf, The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon is never late, nor is he early — he posts his Best Comics of 2009 list precisely when he means to. And it’s a good one, divided into sections on reprints, overlooked gems, books about comics, and your basic best books of the year. Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated, and Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days comprise his top three.

I come away from the list thinking two things. First, from about his #7 choice up to Number One, that’s a pretty brain-crushing line-up of major works; it’s not difficult to picture a stretch of five years not yielding that kind of harvest. I mean, Josh Cotter’s astonishing Driven by Lemons ranks only at #15 — I ranked that book a lot higher on my own list, but that you can make reasonable arguments for that kind of placement given what else is out there speaks to the richness of the field right now.

Second and relatedly, Spurge wraps things up with a few paragraphs on books that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason, one of them being simply not remembering them all. “It’s a fantastic time for an art form when you can just forget about some of its quality works,” he says, and I would agree.

Darkness and light: Final Crisis hardcover by J.G. Jones; Blackest Night #8 variant by Doug Mahnke

Yesterday the eighth and final issue of Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis’s hit event comic Blackest Night came out, and DC has been celebrating its successful conclusion (how about that fold-out spread, huh???) in grand fashion. On Tuesday, DC’s official blog, The Source, hosted an open thread for fans to share their favorite Blackest Night moments and memories. Source blogger and PR guru Alex Segura posted a heartfelt encomium to the series, its spinoffs, and its creators once it wrapped on Wednesday. Today, editor Eddie Berganza contributed a eulogy of his own.

All well-deserved, as far as I’m concerned: Blackest Night clearly worked for its intended audience, myself included. A hook everyone could understand, a huge (and fun!) expansion of the Green Lantern mythos that convincingly roped in characters from the Flash to Lex Luthor to Hawk and Dove, rock-solid art from Ivan Reis, perhaps the most t-shirt-friendly concept in comics history…I had a hoot with this book and its parallel Green Lantern tie-ins as well, and judging from the uniformly positive fan feedback in the comments for Segura’s tribute, I’m far from alone.

But those same comments raise an interesting question: Do you recall seeing this kind of effusive praise and PR from the company when its last event comic, Final Crisis wrapped?

In a way, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison: The Source didn’t exist when Final Crisis #7 came out in January 2009, so there really wasn’t an official channel for the company to utilize. Then there are the differences, quantitative and qualitative, between the series themselves. On a numbers level, though Final Crisis was DC’s biggest title at the time, it didn’t put up Blackest Night sales. Nor did its mostly indirect tie-ins thrive the way BN‘s more clearly linked spin-offs did. And even Final Crisis‘s biggest fans — you’ll find none bigger than me, by the way — admit that it’s an acquired taste, containing some of writer Grant Morrison’s most challenging and experimental superhero-comics work. Of course, for the book’s detractors — and again, check the comments for that Blackest Night tribute for more than a few — you can substitute “challenging” for “confusing” and “experimental” for “incoherent.”

All that being said, I think there’s still an observable difference in how the series were handled by the publisher. The clearest example is the way then-VP – Executive Editor Dan DiDio poked fun at Final Crisis during the 2009 New York Comic Con, DC’s first convention appearance after the series wrapped. Moreover, his promotion of the series in its waning weeks, during his last couple of Newsarama interviews prior to the final issue’s release, was minimal at best. And of course there was no Brightest Day-style linewide plan designed to capitalize on story threads from FC once it concluded — the closest DC came was the Final Crisis Aftermath minis, which launched months later. Linkrot makes searching the archives for the weekly DC Nation column that far back difficult, but a look at the January 2009 installments, including the DC Nation for the week Final Crisis #7 came out, reveals nary a mention of the book; indeed, the image in the January 28th, 2009 column is a teaser for…Blackest Night.

Again, you can chalk this up to many things — heck, I’d imagine some fans who thought Final Crisis wasn’t as good as Blackest Night would praise DC’s relative quiet about FC‘s conclusion as just a lack of BS. But as a person who enjoyed both events and a big fan of both their architects, Morrison and Johns, I just wanna see both series get the props they deserve.

Sara Ryan has advice for you

Attention, aspiring comics writers and weary comics artists: Sara Ryan and friends are about to make your lives much easier. On her blog, Ryan and a few of her comics-making chums are offering advice for writers on what not to do when writing comics scripts for others to draw.

Ryan — who’s currently wrapping up the script for her upcoming DC/Vertigo graphic novel Bad Houses — kicked things off by reminding us that it’s awfully hard to have a character do more than one thing per panel, even though it comes naturally to us to rattle off several actions in the course of a sentence.

Next up is Supergirl artist Ron Randall, who among other things notes that telling an artist to “impress me” with a particularly memorable scene or sequence is a roundabout way of insinuating that he or she otherwise isn’t all that impressive. And finally (for now), Family Man‘s Dylan Meconis offers seven tips, warning against everything from the overuse of film jargon to telling rather than showing to the dreaded words “Have fun with this!”

Given Ryan’s links to the seemingly ever-growing Periscope Studio, this could end up being quite a long-running recurring feature, so check back often!

(Via Hope Larson)