Ron Randall
Food or Comics? | Fear of a Bad Island
Fear Itself #5
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
It’s a week where I’m happily embracing the superhero of it all. If I had $15, I’d go for the fifth issue of Marvel’s Fear Itself ($3.99), mostly because I’m this far in and I’ll probably keep going just to see how it turns out instead of actually enjoying it, as well as the first issue of “Spider Island” in Amazing Spider-Man #667 (Marvel, $3.99) to continue my love/hate relationship with Dan Slott’s Spider-Man run. But when it comes to full-on nostalgia, DC has me in the palm of its hand with DC Retroactive: Justice League of America – The ’80s #1 (DC, $4.99). No joke: The Justice League Detroit era is one of those guilty pleasures that I not only can’t explain, but also can’t resist – Gerry Conway revisiting that failed team for a new one-shot (especially with art by Ron Randall) is something that I literally can’t help myself but pick up.
Comic artists belt out toons for Portland Opera
by Barry Deutsch
The Portland Opera is currently putting on performances of Turandot, and for a dress rehearsal on Jan. 31 they invited several local comic artists to watch the performance and “draw whatever struck our fancy,” according to artist Mike Russell.
Russell not only drew some artwork you can find on the Portland Opera’s website, but also created a “live comic adaptation” you can find on his site. Other artists who participated include Barry Deutsch, Aaron McConnell, Ron Randall and Joëlle Jones, among others.
You can check out all the images on the Portland Opera’s website.
How NOT to write comics
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)