• Actress Mia Kirshner talks with Laura Hudson about I LIVE HERE.
• Van Jensen learns more of IDW’s G.I. Joe plans.
• AFRO SAMURAI makes is manga debut, Kai-Ming Cha reports.
• Peter Sanderson looks at Wacky Packages, Gary Gianni’s Prince Valiant and more.
• Brian Wood talks about his very busy 2008 with Wil Moss.
• An EXCLUSIVE 13-page excerpt from NOTHING NICE TO SAY.
If you’re not receiving PW’s free comics newsletter every week — you should be!
It’s vewy, vewy quiet out there.
Eddie Campbell is back blogging and first he takes on superhero movie tropes:
Watching the Iron Man movie on the plane coming home, I was charmed into recalling how I marvelled at the character when i was wee, in the marvellous scene where he’s flying between the two jet planes. But then it descends into that boneheaded formula in which the hero must do battle with the evil version of himself. The shiny red and gold Iron Man fights the grey Iron Man, The Banner Hulk fights the Tim Roth Hulk, Spiderman fights the living Spiderman costume with another bloke inside it. Anything that was special and unique about the character is somewhat diluted when he’s got a duplicate walking about. Even as a kid I recognized this late variation on the supervillain as a sign that invention was seriously flagging. Seems odd to me that it is now de rigeur in all of these movies. But then, I find myself even more at odds with the world of movies these days.
And then, the fate of the artist once more:
It’s all well and sweet for the librarians to rejoice at getting the kids back reading actual books, but if you read my recent exercise in High Sarcasm, the Publisher’s Weekly interview of June 17, which my pal White thought my funniest moment in print, you will have noticed I accidentally dropped my guard at the end and confessed I’ve been having great difficulty selling my latest book (a problem lately solved so do not weep for me). This work is described as “The Playwright, a book about about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man.” In the same period I’ve been pitching that around the place, two of the publishers who turned it down then said they’d still love to work with me and offered me the jobs of illustrating to the scripts of named ‘young readers’ authors.
If you are like us, you are very, very sick of San Diego. We’ll have some thoughts, some photos and this link roundup, but unless something of bold and shocking content suddenly appears, that’s it. We’re moving forward!
§ Hip flask photo set with lots of us and FMB!
We’re sitting through the CHUCK panel right now. These TV casts are so funny and banter-y. Someone just asked if the two male leads would demonstrate a position between 68 and 70. They declined. We have never watched CHUCK and this panel will not persuade us to do so, but the actors all seem quite personable. They keep referring to the Nerd Herd…is that what we are?
Coming up next JJ Abrams will show some FRINGE footage…and maybe answer some “Star Trek” questions.
Luckily, we were able to amble right into Ballroom H on this occasion, but we’ve been hearing complaints from reporters at outlets such as Variety, the LA Times, and TV Guide about not being able to get into panels they were assigned to cover. We thought it was just us, but as we were told, “If there’s a secret password, I’d know it.”
The press list for the show numbers some 5000 outlets, so managing them is definitely no picnic, but the studios and networks that control access to their presentations may need to get a little more inclusive about certain things. Granted, press whining happens each and every year, but since it’s so clear that the entire show is now just a means to get publicity for every show on TV, with the increasing hubbub of the press scrum, perhaps it is time for a reevaluation.
In the meantime, although Tom told us not to live blog about how big the show is, with all the security and access issues, not to mention 100k people…this is bigger than the Super Bowl.
Anne Thompson covers the Webmasters panel:
When asked how Latinoreview got its hands on so many early scripts six months before they go into production, Kellvin Chavez said: “We clean your offices.”
Today, these once unassuming fanboys are courted by studio flacks and granted early access to set visits, star interviews and marketing materials. “Studios are paying attention to sites and fans as part of the online community,” said Sanchez.
“To be honest it sort of makes me jaded a little,” said Brad Miska of Bloody-Disgusting.
Well, here we are live blogging from Hall H. Although we never received our fabled pass to the hall, there also wasn’t any line to get in, either. So we’re stuck here for an hour listening to fans behind us quoting lines from Venture Bros.
The Warner Bros. booth and its bag giveaways continues to be the biggest logjam on the floor. When they give out bags, there is a feeding frenzy reminiscent of the fire ant scene from the last Indiana Jones movie. When the bags are gone, people continue to mill around waiting…waiting…
Whatever the mayor says, it’s clear the con has engulfed the city. At least one of the elevators at the Marriott is tricked up like a cloud to promote some Disney movie. Cardboard Spirits peep from hotel cornices around town. The plaza in front of the Gaslamp Hilton has been filled with ceramic Chinese warriors. Nearly every bar and restaurant has a sign welcoming the Con, proving the nerd dollar is still strong in this place.
Continuing actual comics creator news from San Diego, Vertigo vets Jason Aaron (Scalped), Brian Wood (DMZ), Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets), Cliff Chiang (Human Target), David Lapham (Young Liars), Jock (Faker, Hellblazer), and G. Willow Wilson (Air, Cairo) formally announce the formation of a group blog and forum at www.standardattrition.com.
The Vertigo septet also plan on live-blogging from the San Diego Comic-Con, from panels and signings, after hours events and while on booth duty. “We all have access to post from our phones and laptops”, Brian Wood said. “Not sure exactly how that will play out, but it’ll be fun for us at the very least. I also can’t get the phrase “slow motion train wreck’ out of my head.”
Standard Attrition was the brainchild of Scalped creator Jason Aaron, who decided to expand his own message board to include space for like-minded creators. “We were already friends and already had tremendous respect for one another’s work,” Aaron said. “Now with us live-blogging all next week from the con, we may learn more about each other than we ever wanted to know.”
The group blog is currently live with content to be added every day.
Visit the Standard Attrition blog at www.standardattrition.com and the forum at www.standardattrition.org
Finally, some Hollywood studio put their money where it matters and got FREE GODDAM WI-FI for the entire convention center. Everyone go see EAGLE EYE~!
She’s also officially a “superstar” now.
Saturday: 2:00-3:00 Comics: Across Every Medium— Paul Feig (creator of Freaks & Geeks), David Goyer (Batman Begins), Chip Kidd (The Learners), Whitney Matheson (USA Today’s Pop Candy blog), and Brad Meltzer (The Book of Lies) are five superstars who make headlines in television, film, the graphic arts, journalism, and novels. But they all have comics in common. This isn’t just a trend. Join them for a discussion on the influence comics play in their work. It’ll be like a 21st century Breakfast Club—but with better references. Moderated by audiobook master Scott Brick (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant). Room 6A
Us? We just want a nap.
Subscribe to Graeme McMillan’s posts and comments on I09, including Five Superhero Movies We’re Glad Didn’t Get Made:
Green Lantern: One of the greatest near-misses in cinema history is the fact that fan outcry halting pre-production of Jack Black’s comedy movie version of DC’s space cop superhero a few years ago. Hearing Jack talk about what we could’ve seen in an alternate world is enough reason to be grateful:
I was going to be making all kinds of stuff… I was going to be capturing bad guys with green, giant prophylactics. Some funny stuff.
Must reading: Don MacPherson looks at some recent comics stories and why “no comment” may not always be the best answer. He also depressed us with an example of how things work in the real world:
My day job is a courts/crime reporter. I’ve developed strong and valuable rapports with police officers, lawyers, even judges; I’ve even developed friendships. Nevertheless, access and amiability sometimes get trumped by a story. There are times when I’ve written stories that have angered the police and prosecutors, judges and defence lawyers. I still have access. I still have friends. Eventually, people let go of the anger or realize that the story had to be told, that there was nothing personal about it.
The whole piece sheds a much light on all the issues we’ve been talking about here lately.
Steven Grant looks at the crazy goings on of the past week, specifically the “Dan DiDio is getting the Willie Randolph treatment!” rumor and how it becomes morphed into fanthink:
Fanthink is an interesting beast. It starts with the premise, which perhaps not coincidentally is what the DC comics universe has been based on for the last 20-some odd years, that reality is whatever you want it to be. Which is perfectly fine for a fictional world controlled from on high where any unpleasant complications can be explained away, rebooted or ignored as desired, as long as you’re aware that anything done will have fans unwilling to accept your explanations, reboots or willful ignorance. In the real world? Mmmmm… doesn’t work so well at all, like when you invade a country while figuring all you’ll have to do in the aftermath is dropping a malleable new government into place and sweeping up the flowers its grateful citizens strew in your armies’ path. Nonetheless, it has become a popular game among Internet comics fans especially to decide on the outcome they’d prefer to see, act as though it’s already reality, and extrapolate their arguments backwards.
Steven nails a very important part of today’s internet culture, and one that’s very difficult to deal with for a site like this. For instance, there are a couple of assumptions Steven makes in his column that I could refine based on well-sourced information that I have heard. But is it worth it? Every time bits of actual inside information are posted on the web, the fans go ape-shit spinning-off all sorts of totally bogus claims and reverberations about that information.
So is it even worth it? Usually not.
Fanthink is bad enough with popular movies and TV shows, But in the comics industry where everyone knows everyone else, it’s downright deadly.
Frequent PWCW contributor and Beat pal Laurel Maury has been named the new official comics reviewer for NPR. Congratulations to Laurel! Her first piece covers THE RABBI’S CAT:
If you’re used to comics smacking you over the head with superheroes and fantasy, prepare to be seduced and charmed. Joann Sfar’s series about the rabbi and his talking cat draws on the Franco-Belgian artist’s roots to recreate the sights, smells and vibrancy of early 20th century Algeria.
Dollar Bin has the audio of the infamous Covering Comics panel from Heroes Con up, so you can judge for yourselves how pathetic we sound.
God, this is depressing. How can intelligent people say this stuff and not acknowledge what’s coming out of their mouths? This isn’t journalism, or criticism, this is public relations. Promotion. It’s disgusting.
Participant Johanna has her own comments:
At this point, I said, “I’m glad I have a day job” because it gives me a certain amount of independence from corporate pressure; I don’t care if I piss someone off, because I don’t answer to anyone but myself. (Later, several people asked me if I was a librarian — apparently, I have that air. No, I’m not. I work in a corporate communications department for a real estate-related financial services company, where I write, proofread, copy edit, manage projects, and maintain websites.) Heidi and Matt both acknowledged altering their coverage to keep publishers happy to maintain the possibility of future stories.
I wouldn’t say that I’d “alter” a story to keep a publisher “happy”, but I may have used that word, so I’ll take my lumps. I have certainly run corrections from publishers. As I’ve said many times, here and on the panel, I have too many personal connections in this industry to begin to be objective or have the kind of independence a real journalist needs.
The panel also provides my best friend Dirk Deppey with a new opportunity to give us all a schoolin’:
[Ironically, this post was supposed to go up yesterday but got eaten by Ecto — I’ve had to recreate it from scratch and may have lost some of my momentum along the way.]
If you’ve been reading this blog or other lately you may have noticed that there’s quite a bit of news going on on the comics biz, what with various companies in various stages of reorganization, and DC and Marvel locked in mortal combat over the Summer Crossover Derby. However at one point yesterday, this is what the “#1 comics news site” news feed looked like on our RSS reader:
It seems a little sad but perhaps it’s just a sign of the times that the winners of a fairly prestigious award are “relegated” to a blog post, while an AP news story on an aging movie star being cast in a Fox TV show is considered a headline on the main site.
Covering breaking news seems to be a work in progress at the new ‘Rama. While l’Affaire de Chuck Dixon was all over the blogosphere last week, it was absent from Newsarama’s front page, something that did not escape Valerie’s notice. Matt Brady came back the next day with a solid story that was mostly background and no comment but at least it was something.
§ Douglas Wolk, bless him, is using the brains the good lord gave him for a new Final Crisis Annotations blog. It’s in-depth.
Title: It’s worth unpacking this a little. DC is, of course, the publisher of this comic and the corporate owner of its intellectual property; DC stands for DETECTIVE COMICS, one of the first series it published, beginning in 1937. The “DC Universe”–DCU for short–is the shared setting for most of the superhero comics DC publishes, a setting that extends beyond Earth to the entirety of existence. (In fact, the DC Universe is a “multiverse,” a set of parallel universes–52 of them at the moment.) And “zero” implies that this story happens “before the beginning” of the forthcoming FINAL CRISIS story. “Zero” also has two other connotations in the context of the DCU. One is that this issue was originally more or less intended to be the final issue of COUNTDOWN, a.k.a. COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS, a weekly series that began with issue 51 and counted down to issue 1–instead of its original plan of ending with issue 0. (Despite its title, COUNTDOWN actually appears to have had few direct ties to FINAL CRISIS; where they’re relevant, they’ll be described here.) The other is an allusion to ZERO HOUR, a 1994 five-issue miniseries about the destruction and re-creation of the DCU; the month after it ended, all DCU titles published issues numbered 0.
§ If all convention reports were as incisive and wide-ranging as presents Kristy Valenti’s piece on the Emerald City Comicon we’d live in a better world.
This is especially admirable considering that, by swapping the Qwest Field Event Center for the Convention Center as this year’s venue, ECCC had more space to play with. This was a definite boon in terms of panels (at the Qwest Field Event Center, panels were held in an open, second level directly over the exhibitors, which was distracting and made it difficult to hear) and overall comfort. Post-show, con organizer Jim Demonakos enthused that, in regards to the venue, there were “no real cons, which is nice and one of the reasons we made the move, we wanted to make sure that we had all the space we needed to do all the cool stuff we wanted to accomplish at the show and that, in the end, was what we were able to do. I’m very happy with the new venue.”
§ Beaucoup Kevin presents The Many Freakouts of Dave Cockrum’s X-Men: A Retrospective
Where’s the blogosphere? What happened to everyone? Is it just the warm weather? We know *we* have problems, but what’s everyone else story.
Maybe it’s time for a poll:
What are the best message boards about comics? We used to hang out on Delphi, The V, and The Engine but now we hardly ever stop by anywhere, even such worthy places as Panel and Pixel. Where does everyone else hang out?
David Lapham (STRAY BULLETS, YOUNG LIARS) joins the ranks of the bloggerati:
One of the main reasons I decided to start a blog was to refute some of the rumors swirling around certain circles about myself and what happened before. By that I mean before I was a cartoonist, before I was married, before I had two beautiful daughters. Before all that I lived a life of dreams and nightmares. I traveled all over during my competitive playing days and once saw a man disemboweled in an alley in Vienna. I saw my best friend have his head split open, climbed to the summit of Mt. McForester, and lied to save myself from frostbite. I have on numerous occasions worn disguises for personal gain. I ran for my life so fast my flesh was ripped from my body. I met a hobo, mugged a mugger, and held a gun in my hand with the power to do the most monstrous things. I have learned from all this that the truth will not set you free. The truth will usually get you slapped, punched, chased, beaten, kicked, stabbed, and or murdered or hobbled, and I choose not to practice it whenever possible. The next “Early Life” post will be a proper beginning as I tell you about something horrible that happened when I was six that changed my life forever and just might change yours.
§ Hope Larson has a new website up for her more adult art: Personal Ho. (left)
§ We totally forgot that the Pittsburgh Comicon was held this weekend, but it is now apparently dubbed “Murder con.” Someone wrote about it to the Comics Reporter and from the sound of it, it was pretty desolate.
§ Laura Hudson suggests that the comics industry’s press relations in general could use a review:
Before I really get into this, it’s important to keep in mind here that approaching a publisher as a member of the press who wants to give them coverage or reviews is very different from poking around for stories and quotes that don’t necessarily point towards a positive angle on their product. Unsurprisingly, the latter is going to get fewer welcoming responses.
To a certain degree, that’s just how it works, and I don’t see anything particularly insidious in it. I would add, though, that because the comics press is less established (or respected) than press is in certain other fields, I think a lot of people in the industry are not as accustomed to the poking and prodding Tom describes, and consequently can get touchier in the course of journalistic inquiries. But really, I don’t see this as the primary problem. While it may not be optimal, I’m not surprised by this unresponsiveness to certain lines of inquiry.
What I don’t understand–what really blows my mind is that some companies can be just as unresponsive and unhelpful to people who want to give their books positive coverage, review them, or generally make them more visible. That’s what really resonated with me about Tom’s post, because I’ve seen it happen more than a few times and it never ceases to amaze me with its pointlessness.
§ Mark Evanier went to the LA Times Book fest.
§ Shaenon on The Boys of Shojo Manga :
The Tortured Genius
The heroine’s parents approve of this one. He’s a high-IQ achiever on the fast track to Tokyo University, and is often a Wealthy Playboy to boot. But his heart is as tiny as his brain is huge. An arrogant smartass, he delights in making the heroine feel stupid and insignificant. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to date her, of course; his strategy is to belittle, manipulate, and intellectually bulldoze her into falling in love with him. And it works, especially once the heroine realizes that he’s hurting inside and Just Needs Someone To Love Him. Extremely common in the works of Miki Aihara.
Signature Romantic Gestures: Intellectually abusing the heroine; emotionally abusing the heroine; physically abusing the heroine; helping her study.
In Real Life He’d Be: Exactly the same, but in his forties.
§ Catch-up 1: Indie Jones blogs the ICv2 conference.
§ Catch-up 2: Jeff Trexler on “How Siegel and Shuster created our world”:
This tension between past and present is equally evident in the Siegel case. On the one hand, for many within the comics community the ruling was a symbolic victory in the struggle for creators rights, vindicating not just Siegel and Shuster, but legions of comic book artists and writers whose genius was exploited by corporate greed.
Yet much to the surprise of longtime industry watchers, the judgment also provoked a strong negative response. Some critics focused on the fact that the winner was not Siegel himself but his heirs, who were said to have gained an unearned windfall. Other observers went a step further, questioning the wisdom of a law that voids otherwise valid contracts, and accusing the Siegels themselves of exploiting Superman for their own financial gain.
§ When we saw the headline “Comic Genius” in our RSS feed, we wondered “Who could it be this time???”
Surprise! It’s artist John Cassaday:
These days, Cassaday finds himself in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose which assignments he takes. “I’ve got specific goals in mind and don’t want to deviate just for a few bucks if I’m not interested,” he says. “The story must come first.” Though he won’t reveal what he makes, his page rate—the amount an artist charges per page drawn—is among the highest in the business. Given that an elite illustrator can command up to $1,000 a page for a 22-page comic book and that most popular titles are monthlies, a top talent like Cassaday can comfortably clear six figures annually. And that’s not counting potential back-end royalties for merchandise, trade paperbacks, and spin-offs, which are negotiated separately.
Big BIG report over at The Comics Reporter as Bart Beaty lays smack down on David Hajdu’s THE TEN CENT PLAGUE:
I read The Ten-Cent Plague with great avidity. Hajdu is a compelling storyteller, and his interviews with some of the key players at the time add important shadings to our understanding of the period. There are places where the book really excels, not the least of which is in the important research on the comic book burnings that began in the 1940s, an area that is often mentioned but seldom dealt with in the depth that Hajdu brings to the issue.
At the same time, however, the book has certain shortcomings, and I’d like to address these over a few posts.
Few posts indeed. Beaty is only up to number two, with more promised!
Related: Eddie Campbell comments, and Steve Bissette comments in the comments.
This particular showdown has become one of the great myths of the comic book (I’m using myth correctly to mean ’sacred story’ rather than ‘falsehood,’ the usual debased meaning given to the word these days). I saw the same thing in Eisner/Miller (Dark Horse 2005)
§ MEANWHILE, Noah Berlatsky responds to some comments by ADD in the new Comics Journal about the state of the direct market:
I think Gary Groth has made a similar argument, and I thought it was silly then as well. The problem with super-hero comics isn’t that the quality is bad. I mean, there’s *lots* of dreadful stuff that have a huge fan base (things like, oh, Scooby-Doo cartoons…or Rolling Stone concerts….or Alicia Keys albums….) Quality isn’t objective, of course, but using any aesthetic criteria, you’re going to find that sometimes quality and popularity are directly related, sometimes they’re inversely related, and sometimes they don’t seem to have any relationship at all. The problem with super-hero comics isn’t that they’re “bad” (though I agree that many of them are bad); it’s that, bad or good, they’re aimed at an audience which is increasingly insular, and that, as a result, the genre doesn’t really look sustainable in the long, or even medium, term.
Tom Brevoort approaches the same thing from a different angle:
Here’s one of the things I’ve realized about this business: it’s all cyclic. The same patterns repeat themselves again and again, from generation to generation–not the specific instances, but the overall shape of people’ reactions.
I’m still reacting in part to some of the people I spoke to at the New York Comic Convention, as well as the e-mails that we’ve been getting. But it’s really driven home this idea of cycling.
For example: it’s not great secret that there are still people upset about the changes to Spider-Man. Fair enough, But in the space of a day or two, I got five-or-so comments lamenting the elimination of Spidey’s organic webbing, and the fact that there’s been no mention of the additional powers he gained during “The Other.”
Which comes as a bit of a shock, frankly, because the overwhelming majority of the reactions we saw at the time those two stories came out were decidedly negative! Nobody seemed to like the organic webbing, and people wrote long treatises about how Peter creating mechanical web-shooters was better, because this showcased his science skills. But just a couple short years later, we go back to the mechanical web-shooters, and it’s like we fire-bombed something.
Finally, Brian Hibbs sums up DC’s current output and it doesn’t look good:
The first real signs, for me, was “One Year Later”, which was about as unmanaged and poorly fitting of an idea as anything I can think of. Virtually every DCU book took a sharp downwards spike in the wake of OYL, as the readership didn’t understand what was going on in the books they followed, and given no real incentive to pick up new ones.
That could have been managed had it not been for COUNTDOWN, “the spine of the DC Universe” — a spine that virtually no one enjoyed, and that had what seemed to be a billion-jillion awful tie ins and crossovers and “spin outs” all predicated on branding and ideas that no one (not even, it seems) the creators were especially enthused by.
Word Balloons is a new blog which aims to be the daily morning read for kids comics. Tt’s edited by Brigid Alverson, so that’s a good start. She’s aided by Katherine Dacey, Lori Henderson, Esther Keller, Eva Volin and Snow Wildsmith, a merry band of writers and librarians whom we intend to read avidly. The blog kicks off with an interview with Jerzy Drozd of Sugary Serials.
“In Saturday morning cartoons, as well as in the ’60s comics, you had very limited space to tell the full story,” he says. “How are you going to communicate characters in an economical fashion while avoiding simplifying? You want them to feel like rich characters, but you don’t have much time. So you turn up the volume on the characters to 11.” That means making every word count. “You can’t write whimsical dialogue,” he says. “You have to ask yourself ‘How is it servicing the story and the character?’”
Book mark now!
§ Via the Scienteers: Zuda — ouchie.
Instead of forcing us to choke down the overly complex controls and key-strokes in order to get the comic to even be readable in the first place, why not do a fixed size version with the typical page-by-page navigation 99.9% of other webcomic sites offer? Once again, arrogance comes into play. Why would DC need to change their ways for webcomic readers who were around before they decided to toss their corporate-hat in? DC is sadly viewing webcomics as a new market, and a new market alone. While business is typically about innovation, Webcomics are not. Why do you think we have so many similar comics out there? Webcomics don’t reward innovation just yet, and are a poor thing to try and apply a business model to (this will be another rant for another time, I’m sure). DC’s attempt at doing so clashes so damn hard with the current environment, it’s putting people off. Not only from it being a disruptive and out of the norm technique, but from how cumbersome this new method is.
§ Dick Hyacinth discovers the secret message of Secret Invasion.
§ Blake Petit remembers Valiant.
§ This fake Stan Lee blog is quite the meta:
That’s quite a complicated question, Danster, but I won’t let that stop me from takin’ an ever lovin’ swing at it. It’s hard to talk about Vince “Crow Quill” Colletta without stirring up some kind of fuss, flak or fracas. Comic collectors, co-workers and even cannoli-consumers have always been clearly cleft on what to make of the Sicilian Scribbler. They either loved him or they hated him.
Two newish review sites offering solid crticisms: Occasional comics writer John Mitchell, who works with wife Jana, has some lengthy reviews at Shuffleboil such as this one, on INCOGNEGRO:
Though not sold as part of this genre, Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s “Incognegro” is very ingrained in it. Essentially, this tale of 1930s newspaper reporter — a black man who passes for white in undercover stories — is a throwback to pulp fiction heroes like The Shadow and newspaper sleuth heroes like The Spirit. Icognegro is his secret identity, white skin is his mask and he fights crime via his journalistic crusade. Icognegro is no different from so many old style heroes, except that his adventures are steep in history and politics in a meaningful and powerful way.
AND a new group review blog: Mindless Ones, e.g. KICK-ASS:
I was uncertain after reading the first instalment, but this confirms it. There’s a very bad smell around this comic. The smell of unwashed boy. The smell of socks encrusted with… well, let’s just say “encrusted” and leave it at that, shall we? Sure, Mark Millar’s wannabe superhero (a kid from the really real world who loves to talk about the things you the reader love to talk about) had the shit kicked out of him last issue, but this time - tres excite! - he’s back and KICKING the bad guys ASSES.
With his truncheon.
Jeet Heer explains why Francoise Mouly is Underappreciated and Essential. We agree. Strongly.
Is there anyone in the cartooning world who is more underrated than Francoise Mouly? She has strong claims to be the most important comics editor of the last 30 years, but I suspect that if you asked your average comics fan or even cartoonists to name influential editors, Mouly wouldn’t come trippingly off their tongues. Part of the problem is that she’s done some of her most important work alongside her husband Art Spiegelman. Mouly is very much her own woman and not one to hide in the shadow of her famous mate; nor is her husband the type to keep his wife away from the limelight; still, it is all too easy for journalists, a habitually lazy lot, to do quick profiles of Spiegelman’s life, touch on his editorship of Raw, and ignore Mouly’s contribution. (God knows, I myself have been guilty of doing that).
Meanwhile, Dick Hyacinth lays the snark down on Paul Fridays at Blogorama
However, my worship, I do have some grave concerns about the venue you have chosen for this interrogative feature. I am but a lowly wretch in your magisterial presence, and I do not mean to question your decisions. But I cannot help but notice your majesty bristled at the thought that Vertigo-brand periodicals are published on paper fit for protecting a bird’s cage from its occupant’s leavings. This is a most unseemly way of asking a question, most unfit for the solemn occasion of a question and answer session with the overlord of DC Comics! If I had been present, my grace, I surely would have beaten the impudent whelp within an inch of his life for daring to suggest that any DC-published title should rest anywhere other than a snug mylar bag, nestled safely in an acid-free box, in the most secure part of one’s parents’ basement.
Excellent Wormtongue imitation, Dick.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Blogosphere category.
