graphic novels
The Five Fists of Science inspires amazing, working Tesla Gun
Rob Flickenger with his Tesla Gun
Inspired by The Five Fists of Science, the 2006 steampunk graphic novel by Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders, author Rob Flickenger did what any aspiring mad scientist would do: He constructed his own working Tesla Gun, powered by an 18-volt drill battery.
“You pull the trigger, and lightning comes out the front,” Flickenger writes on his blog, where he breaks down the process, complete with photos. “It is functionally inferior to that of Tesla’s design in the Five Fists in a few important respects. Notably, it is a bit longer and heavier than Tesla’s own. It also cannot (yet) create an ion wind strong enough to cushion the user when leaping from a four story building. On the other hand, my design is an improvement in two important respects: 1) It is battery powered, and 2) It actually exists.”
- May 15, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Graphic novel sales actually stronger than they look?
Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery Deluxe Edition
Retailing | The retail news and analysis site ICv2 contends sales of graphic novels in the direct market may be better than recent numbers indicate because of the way Diamond Comic Distributors reports those figures. While the distributor’s calculations are based on the wholesale value of shipments, ICv2 based its estimates on the retail value, and found graphic novel sales rose 24.4 percent in March, rather than declined 5.7 percent (versus a year ago), and climbed 27.7 percent in April, rather than just 12.6 percent: “The big differences between the wholesale and retail rates of change in recent months appear to be caused by big increases in the number of graphic novels liquidated through Diamond in March and April. So retail dollars were up, while wholesale dollars lagged. ” [ICv2]
Conventions | Audrey Gillan previews this weekend’s Kapow! in London by casting a spotlight on organizers Lucy and Sarah Unwin — they’re partnered with Mark Millar — and their efforts to create a female-inclusive comic convention. “We ourselves as women organising the show have been accused of misogyny because of the obviously male guest list, but there is just this lack of female creators and it’s the nature of the industry,” Lucy Unwin said. “There’s no point in taking it to heart because I don’t employ the creators. I would love there to be more women at the show in terms of guests.” [The Guardian]
- May 15, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Jeff Lemire previews pages from The Underwater Welder
Jeff Lemire, the creator of the Essex County trilogy and Sweet Tooth and the writer of Animal Man, has released new art from his upcoming Top Shelf graphic novel The Underwater Welder. Announced in early 2010, the 224-page book is set to arrive in August. Here’s the official description:
As an underwater welder on an oil rig off the coast of Nova Scotia, Jack Joseph is used to the immense pressures of deep-sea work. Nothing, however, could prepare him for the pressures of impending fatherhood. As Jack dives deeper and deeper, he seems to pull further and further away from his young wife and their unborn son. Then one night, deep in the icy solitude of the ocean floor, something unexplainable happens. Jack has a mysterious and supernatural encounter that will change the course of his life forever.
Equal parts blue-collar character study and mind-bending mystery, The Underwater Welder is a graphic novel about fathers and sons, birth and death, memory and reality, and the treasures we all bury deep below the surface.
Check out the pages below, and don’t miss Comic Book Resources’ interview with Lemire about the end of Sweet Tooth.
- May 10, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Nominees announced for 2012 Joe Shuster Awards
The nominees were announced today for the eighth annual Joe Shuster Awards, which recognize the achievements of Canadian comics creators. Jeff Lemire leads this year’s list, with nominations in four categories.
The awards are named in honor of Toronto-born artist Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman. The winners will be presented Sept. 15 during a ceremony held in conjunction with Montreal Comic Con. The nominees are:
Artist/art team
• Chris Bachalo — Age of X: Alpha #1, Avengers #13, #15, Wolverine and the X-Men 1-3, X-Men 7-10 (Marvel Comics)
• Marc Delafontaine — Les Nombrils, Tome 5: Un Couple D’enfer (Delcourt)
• Stuart Immonen — Fear Itself #1-7, “Queen, King, Off-Suit“/X-Men: To Serve and Protect #4 (Marvel Comics), “Say You’re Dead“/Outlaw Territory, Vol. 2 (Image)
• Fred Jourdain — Le Dragon Bleu / The Blue Dragon (Éditions Alto/Ex Machina/House of Anansi Press)
• Jeff Lemire — Jonah Hex #69 (DC Comics), “A Coffin for Mrs. Bishell”/ Outlaw Territory, Vol. 2 (Image)
• Yanick Paquette and Nathan Fairbairn (with Michel Lacombe) — Swamp Thing #1-3, Batman Incorporated #3, #5 (DC Comics)
• Cameron Stewart — “Chapter 1: The School of Night“/Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! #1 (DC Comics), Suicide Girls #1-4 (IDW Publishing)
- May 9, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Tunisian broadcaster fined for airing Persepolis
Persepolis
Legal | A Tunisian court last week convicted Nessma TV President Nebil Karoui of “disturbing public order” and “threatening public morals” by broadcasting the animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which features a scene that briefly shows an image of God. The Oct. 7 airing resulted in an attempted arson attack on the network’s offices and the arrest of some 50 protesters. Karoui was fined $1,600 by the five-judge panel; two members of his staff were fined $800 each. Prosecutors and attorneys representing Islamist groups pushed for Karoui to be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Others argued for the death penalty. [The Washington Post]
Business | Target will stop selling Amazon’s Kindle devices in its stores over a dispute regarding “showrooming,” where consumers check out a product at Target stores and then go home to buy it on Amazon for a cheaper price. Around Christmas, Amazon’s Price Check app gave shoppers a 5 percent discount on any item scanned at a retail store. “What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices,” Target executives wrote in a letter to vendors. Target will continue to carry Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and the Aluratek Libre. [The New York Times]
- May 7, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | The Walking Dead continues bookstore domination
The Walking Dead, Compendium One
Publishing | Continuing its domination of the graphic novel sales in bookstores, The Walking Dead laid claim to seven of the Top 10 spots on BookScan’s April chart. The series, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, took the first four positions. What’s more, 12 of the Top 20 graphic novels were volumes of The Walking Dead. [ICv2.com]
Publishing | Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson talks to Right Stuf director of marketing and communications Alison Roberts about that company’s announcement earlier this week that it will be publishing the first three volumes Hetalia: Axis Powers as a print-on-demand books. The series was originally licensed by Tokyopop, which is co-branding the books with Right Stuf. [MTV Geek]
- May 4, 2012 @ 07:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | A call for Disney to remember its roots
Oswald the Rabbit, by Walt Disney
Creators’ rights | Gerry Giovinco points out that the mega-studio that is Walt Disney got its start because Walt signed a bad contract and lost the rights to his creation Oswald the Rabbit. Giovinco calls on Disney, as the parent company of Marvel, to acknowledge and perhaps actually compensate the creators of the products it is marketing: “I can’t believe that a company as wealthy Disney cannot find a way to see the value of the good will that would be generated by establishing some sort of compensation or, at the very least, acknowledgement to the efforts put forth by these creators.” [CO2 Comics Blog]
Digital comics | John Rogers discusses working with Mark Waid on his Thrillbent digital comics initiative. “There are people who are selling enough books to make a living on Amazon, whom you’ve never heard of. Because Amazon made digital delivery cheap and easy. That is what you must do with comics. It’s not hard. The music business already solved this problem. Amazon already solved this problem. It’s not like we’re trying to build a rocketship to the moon out of cardboard boxes. Webcomics guys — and this is kind of the great heresy — solved this problem like ten years ago, using digital distribution then doing print collections and also doing advertising and stuff.” [ComicBook.com]
- May 1, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Thousands turned away from Calgary comic expo
Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo
Conventions | Thousands of fans were locked out of the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo after the local fire marshal declared that the building had reached capacity. The big draw was not actually comics but a reunion of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. [Calgary Herald]
Awards | The Thrill Electric, an online comic created by Leah Moore and John Reppion, Emma Vieceli, Windflower Studio and LittleLoud for the U.K.’s Channel 4, has been nominated for best website in the 2012 Broadcast Digital Awards. [Broadcast]
Creators | Jay Faerber talks about his early ambitions, his current comic Near Death, and what is so special about being published by Image: “The thing about Image is you have absolute creative freedom. Once Near Death was approved, I just wrote it. There were no notes from Eric or anyone else at Image telling me what they think I should do, which is awesome. But it can also be a burden, because if a book sucks, I can’t say, ‘Well, if I had been able to do it my way…’ – because I did do it my way. So working at Image has made me become my own editor. The buck stops here, you know?” [Broken Frontier]
- April 30, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Jillian Lerner on the strange world of Barnum and Brady
Historian Jillian Lerner, working with artist Marc Olivent, has come up with a debut graphic novel set in a time of rapidly developing technology, pervasive hucksterism, and barely checked ambition. No, not New York in the 1980s—New York in the 1850s, when showman P.T. Barnum was amazing the crowds with his museum of oddities, photographer Matthew Brady was turning out the predecessors of baseball cards, and an obscure German professor had just invented the first voice synthesizer—which he concealed behind the mask of a woman’s face.
Lerner is self-publishing the graphic novel The Peerless Prodigies of P.T. Barnum via Amazon, and she has an amazing website that shows off the book as well as her sources for imagery and story elements. I asked her to talk about why she is fascinated by this era, and what went into creating her first graphic novel.
Robot 6: I want to start out by talking about the world of this book. It’s the mid-nineteenth century, yet there are some very modern aspects to it. Can you explain what interests you about this period?
Jillian Lerner: The mid-19th century is like an archaeological site loaded with the fossilized ruins and living roots of our own culture. Think capitalist frontier: constant innovation, uprooting and outmoding, social mobility, ubiquitous publicity, the birth of mass consumerism and commercial spectacles for the masses. This is also the era in which invention was invented, when advancements in art, science, and technology were pursued with an eye to establishing lucrative patents and products.
- April 27, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Stan Lee talks comics and The Stan Lee Story
Stan Lee
Creators | Ahead of the premiere of the documentary With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, the 89-year-old Lee discusses the big-screen success of his co-creations, the fairy-tale appeal of superheroes, his favorite character (he doesn’t have one), and a time when he was embarrassed to admit he wrote comic books: “Oh well, in the beginning, comics were the lowest rung on the cultural totem pole. I’d go to a party and people would say ‘What do you do?’ ‘Um, uh, I’m a writer’ and I’d try to walk away. And the guy would follow. ‘What do you write?’ ‘Oh, er, stories for kids.’ Well finally he’d pin me down and I’d say, ‘Okay, I write comic books’ — and boy, he couldn’t get away fast enough. Now, though, I walk into a party and someone sees me and they say, ‘Sorry, excuse me a minute, President Obama, I have to go over and say hello to Stan Lee.’ Well, okay. Slight exaggeration on my part.” [The Star-Ledger]
Conventions | The Calgary Sun previews this weekend’s Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. [Calgary Sun]
Conventions | Jimmy Jay wonders whether Comic-Con International in San Diego could expand to two weekends, like the Coachella Music Fest. [ComicConMen]
- April 27, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Archie launches web store; Footnotes in Gaza honored
Archie & Friends: Spring Has Sprung!
Digital comics | Archie Comics becomes the latest comics publisher to get a web-based store, allowing readers to purchase digital comics on basically any device that runs HTML5. While Marvel and DC have web stores built on the comiXology platform, this is the first time their competitor iVerse has gone outside the iOS. [Comics Alliance]
Awards | Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza is the winner of this year’s Oregon Book Award in the Graphic Literature category. [OregonLive.com]
Digital comics | Scott Kurtz, who knows a thing or two about digital comics, ponders the implications of Mark Waid’s aggressive move toward the digital realm: “This is something I’ve been warning my friends in webcomics about for a while now. That eventually, someone famous from the comic book industry would figure out that they should try what we’ve been doing for the last fifteen years or so, and would follow suit. All it would take is one or two high-profile creators succeeding at being ‘webcomicers’ and suddenly everyone would jump over. And the term ‘webcomic’ will finally die and just become ‘comic.’” [PvP]
- April 25, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | The state of the French comics tradition, post-Moebius
Froom "The Celestial Bibendum," by Nicolas de Crecy
Creators | Daniel Kalder looks at the state of French comics tradition following the death last month of Jean Giraud, the influential artist widely known as Moebius, and finds it’s in the capable hands of David B (“one of the most sophisticated cartoonists in the world”) and Nicolas de Crecy (“the ‘mad genius’ of French comics”). [The Guardian]
Creators | Tom Spurgeon talks to Michael Cho about what sounds like a really interesting project, his book Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes: “Because I don’t have an affinity for drawing a pastoral landscape. [laughs] You know what I mean? I’ve never lived in that environment, so I can’t draw that thing with confidence. When I close my eyes I don’t visualize that with any confidence. But a city is something I’m surrounded with constantly. With alleyways and lane ways and how light poles connect up to transformer towers which have extra leads leading down to the basement apartment. I can see that when I close my eyes, you know?” [The Comics Reporter]
- April 23, 2012 @ 08:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Voice wins LA Times Book Prize
From "Finder: Voice," by Carla Speed McNeil
Finder: Voice, the latest volume of Carla Speed McNeil‘s celebrated science fiction series, has won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize, edging out such contenders in the graphic novel category as Jim Woodring’s Congress of the Animals and Dave McKean’s Celluloid.
The 32nd annual awards were presented Friday on the eve of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This is only the third year for the graphic novel category; previous winners are David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp and Adam Hines’ Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One.
Published in February 2011 by Dark Horse, Voice collects the Eisner Award-winning 2008 arc of Finder, McNeil’s long-running print comic turned webcomic, described by her as “aboriginal science fiction.”
- April 21, 2012 @ 07:15 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Ali Ferzat named one of Time’s Most Influential People
Matt Wuerker's cartoon in support of Ali Ferzat
Creators | Ali Ferzat, the Syrian cartoonist who was abducted and beaten last year because of his criticisms of the government, was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” “Tyrants often don’t get the jokes, but their people do,” Pulitzer Prize-winning Politico cartoonist Matt Wuerker writes in his tribute to Ferzat. “So when the iron fist comes down, it often comes down on cartoonists.” [Time]
Publishing | In one of its wide-ranging interviews with comics publishers, the retail news and analysis site ICv2 talks with Dark Horse CEO Mike Richardson about the state of the market, the loss of Borders, his company’s 2011 layoffs, webcomics, and some early missteps with its digital program: “Quite honestly we’ve run into a few issues because the programs that we’ve done haven’t worked as well as we wished. We created some exclusive material and got less participation than we had hoped for. [...] We gave codes out to retail stores to drive customers into their stores. They could pick up the exclusive content by going to their participating comic shop. Evidently we didn’t do a good enough job getting the word out, so we’re retooling that.” [ICv2.com]
- April 19, 2012 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Tony DeZuniga hospitalized; record 3.5M FCBD comics ordered
Tony DeZuniga
Creators | Legendary comic artist Tony DeZuniga, the co-creator of Jonah Hex, has been hospitalized in the Philippines after suffering from a stroke and pneumonia. The 70-year-old DeZuniga is reportedly in the intensive care unit as friends and family rally to help with his medical expenses. [GMA News]
Retailing | Diamond Comic Distributors announced that retailers have ordered more than 3.5 million comics for Free Comic Book Day, up 23 percent from last year. Diamond also confirmed a second event centered on Halloween. [ICv2]
Graphic novels | The Irish Education Minister, Ruairí Quinn, has given his blessing to a manga-style graphic novel intended to help teenagers develop “emotional intelligence.” [TheJournal.ie]
- April 18, 2012 @ 06:06 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin