A big huzzah to Comicraft, who just celebrated their 15th Anniversary. We talked to Richard Starkings a few years ago for our first book BREAKING THE PANELS and he may have given the most thoughtful and non-comics-related answers out of all the people interviewed.

To commemorate the occassion, Comicraft has unveiled a new font, convenientally called COMICRAFT.

Starkings has this to say in the anniversary presser released by Comicraft.

“JG and I feel very fortunate to have worked with so many top talents in the industry during the last fifteen years,” said Starkings, “and we feel really honored to have been able to contribute to so many great books. We’re very proud of our track record and we’re continuing to invest the same level of quality and commitment into our own titles and websites, and the fonts we make available at comicbookfonts.com.”

Congratulations to Richard, JG and all the other folks involved with the company.

Posted by Mark Coale

Via Mark Evanier. Shot by Lee Hester.

Mark Evanier reports the death of Paul Norris, the co-creator of Aquaman.

Ohio-born Norris studied art before ending up at DC in 1940:

A year later, he was at DC Comics where his most memorable assignment was Aquaman, which he and editor-writer Mort Weisinger created. (DC now puts a “created by Paul Norris” credit on all Aquaman comics. The absence of Weisinger’s name is apparently a legal problem on DC’s end, not a case of Norris squeezing out his former collaborator.) Paul also worked on, among others, the Sandman in Adventure Comics. He was the artist who revamped the character from his old costume — a business suit and a device that looked like a gas mask — and turned him, at editorial insistence, into a Batman knock-off. When Norris left the strip, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby took it over. During this period, Paul also worked on the Vic Jordan newspaper strip for the New York Daily PM.

Tom Spurgeon has more here.

This Sunday, one of the last living Golden Age cartoonists, Creig Flessel will be presented with the Sparky Award at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, 142 Throckmorton Avenue. Andrew Farrago writes:

On Sunday, October 28, Creig Flessel is receiving the Cartoon Art Museum’s Sparky Award at a ceremony in Mill Valley, CA. The Northern California branch of the National Cartoonists Society should be pretty well-represented there, and Jeannie Schulz plans to attend, as well. I’ll be conducting a brief interview session with Creig before the award ceremony.

Flessel is 95, and has a long career as a cartoonist and illustrator behind him. How far back does he go? He drew the covers of DETECTIVE before there was a Batman.

More info in the jump.
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Exciting yet offensive, like so much in life, About Comics is bringing back the legendary CAPTIAN BILLY’S WHIZ BANG:

Its naughty nature and popularity made it the South Park of its day. Its legend has been kept alive by the musical The Music Man, which points to it as a corruptor of youth. Racy by the standards of its day (and politically incorrect by the standards of ours), few folks today have actually read an issue, but now they’ll get a chance. About Comics is bringing back Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang with a reprint of the February, 1922 issue of this classic magazine.

Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang styled itself as “America’s Magazine of Wit, Humor, and Filosophy.”Published and edited by Captain Billy Fawcett, a veteran of World War I and the Spanish-American War, the digest-sized magazine features lots of jokes, poems, and Captain Billy’s own commentary on the world and his travels therein. From the moment the issue opens by referring to Cuba as “the land of liberty,”you know you’ve opened a time capsule. The editorial railing against Prohibition, the movie gossip pages filled with names like Arbuckle, Pickford, Fairbanks and Von Stroheim, and the casual racism of the humor all paint a picture of a different time.

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Oh man, we can just imagine the internet chatter about this lengthy profile of Rob Liefeld in the OC Weekly:

To this day, Liefeld is described as “controversial”—it’s one of the first things you’ll see on his Wikipedia page—but he isn’t quite sure why. “I ask people, but no one really has a good answer,” he says. “It’s just one of those things, like, ‘I’m controversial!’ I’ve never gotten out of a limousine without my underwear on. I haven’t been pulled over for any DUIs. . . . I think the success that I had when I was young ticked a lot of people off because they eventually told me so.”

Pages and pages more. Fun for everyone, and the author’s email is at the end!

Apparently there is a show of Basil Wolverton art going on in SoCal right now, as the LA Times reports:

CARTOONIST Basil Wolverton’s biomorphic caricatures are anything but pretty. But that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the most influential cartoonists of the 1960s underground comix movement — a movement that included Robert Williams, Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. In recognition of that influence, the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana is hosting a retrospective featuring more than 100 Wolverton originals.

In addition to numerous self-explanatory caricatures like “Triangle Head” and “Chicklets Teeth,” the exhibition also includes examples of his early comic-book work from the 1930s; his “Powerhouse Pepper” humor feature, published in Timely, Marvel and Humorama comics; as well as an assortment of rejected and commissioned pieces.

Details:
The Original Art of Basil Wolverton
From the collection of Glenn Bray
Where: Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana

When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; closed Mondays. Through Nov. 11.

Price: Free

Contact: (714) 567-7233, www.grandcentralartcenter.com

§ We’d be completely remiss if we didn’t point out Tom Spurgeon’s comprehensive post on the great cartoonist Bill Mauldin in advance of Fantagraphics’ release of Willie & Joe: The WWII Years.

§ Joey Manley posts a series of very pertinent Merchandise Questions for those looking to self leverage their properties:

Here is a set of questions for those of you who sell, or who would like to sell, merchandise — self-published books, t-shirts, fluffy toys, PVC figures, bumper stickers, posters, prints, etc.

§ Occasional Superheroine write up Monday’s New Voices panel at MoCCA:

I was going to title this post “New Voices: The Next Generation of Female Comics Creators, but if I took anything with me from yesterday’s panel discussion sponsored by the Friends of Lulu and held at The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in NYC, it was that gender wasn’t the point. These artists are expanding the boundaries and potential of the medium, period.

Beat pal Pepo has one of the finest Spanish-language comics blogs out there, CON C DE ARTE, and today he has a long analysis of the 1983 mini-series SWORD OF THE ATOM by Jan Strnad and Gil Kane, entitled, more or less, “Husbands and Women.” Fire up your Spanish or Google’s to read the rest:

Ayer me llegó el TPB que recopila SWORD OF THE ATOM, una miniserie de cuatro episodios publicada por DC en 1983 (anterior, por tanto, a WATCHMEN y DARK KNIGHT) con guión de Jan Strnad, dibujos de Gil Kane y color de Tom Ziuko, continuada al año siguiente por los mismos autores con tres episodios más. No he podido resistirme a escanear algunas páginas de la memorable escena inicial, con una discusión matrimonial motivada porque el héroe, Ray Palmer alias Atom, descubre a su mujer besándose con otro en el coche. Algo antes de sorprenderla, Ray espera en casa a su mujer, extrañado por su tardanza, mira por la ventana y piensa: “Qué raro, juraría que vi dos luces, y luego… simplemente desaparecieron!”

We could just listen to this all day: Doug Pratt writes to say that he has remastered what seems to be the only extant internet version of the Mighty Marvel Marching society record from the 60s.

Having scoured the Web and YouTube, it seems that my MP3 files from five years ago of the two Marvel Comics records from the 60’s are perhaps the sole sources that everybody has used. It would be great if somehow the original master tapes turned up, or somebody had copies in better shape, but I’ve done what I think is the best possible job of remastering my copies. “The Voices Of Marvel” is noticeably improved.

First part of the JOnathan Ross BBC special above; links to the next five parts:
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six

Technically, it’s already aired, but bear with us.

Tonight on BBC4, the Jonathan Ross documentary about Steve Ditko finally debuts. (It’s on again at 12.50 AM, which is about 45 minutes from when this is being written).

* BBC4 Homepage for documentary

* Guardian article about the show

By the time many of you read this Monday morning, the special will probably be …. “available” … for viewing outside of Britain, if you know where to look. We’re a little surprised that it’s not up on YouTube already.

posted by Mark Coale

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive presents a treasure trove of old magazine articles on Caniff and Rockwell. Marvelous stuff, just marvelous.

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Bengt Arnetz and colleagues of Wayne State University and Uppsala University, and Foundation IT’IS, USA, and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, funded by business small government loan for Manufacturers Forum and published in “Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium (PIERS) Online” reported higher incidence of headache and also disturbance of normal sleep patterns following business small government loan for use.

§ If only we could be as funny as Tim O’Neil.

§ The Forbidden Planet Blog Log interviews the guy behind the Comics Britannia mini series up, Alastair Laurence. Until you see the three-hour special on the history of British comics, this post will just have to do — it’s very educational.

§ Larry Young posts his side of an interview that never ran:

On old-money New York publishing houses starting to publish graphic novels: “Well, I guess there is a little bit of ‘it’s the early bird who gets the worm, but the *second* mouse who gets the cheese’ kind of thing going on there, but one of the things AiT offers the audience that no other publisher can is the strength of our high-quality brand. You know what you’re getting when you order an AiT book: a high-quality, entertaining read. I suppose I stopped worrying when three consecutive books, SMOKE AND GUNS, FULL MOON FEVER, and SUNSET CITY, three wildly different books from three very different creative teams, all had initial orders within *eight* copies of each other. That told me we’d reached a good level for entertaining our audience; that, as a rule, if you didn’t like one of our books, maybe next month’s offering will be more to your liking.”

§ Canadian TV spotlights AD: After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld
§ Evan Dorkin is still trying to make a living being Evan Dorkin when by all rights we should just take up a collection becuase he’s THAT GREAT:

I get work at places like Mad and Nickelodeon. I get calls from people who must’ve read my stuff when I was prolific, doing a lot of issues of Milk & Cheese and Dork, and doing a lot of stuff in anthologies, back when they were more…I guess “mainstream” alternative anthologies that I was involved in. Now it’s usually a collective of people and they’re all friends, and kind of exclusionary, kind of like Mome—or however you pronounce it. I’m not qualified to be in those kinds of things. There are a few things I’d like to do, but I tend to go where the wind blows me in my career, which has not been working so great recently. With a child you have certain responsibilities, and now we have to buy our own health insurance, for the first time—well, before we didn’t have insurance. So it’s tough to do fun comics that make $142.

The Engine, Warren Ellis’s two year old forum for comics creators and aspiring comics creators, closes up shop today. So far, the replacement message board of choice seems to be Rantz Hoseley’s Panel and Pixel. Frankly we haven’t had time to spend on any message board of late, but P&P seems to be bustling along so far, with 500 members. Once we get back in the swing of things, we hope to settle in a bit more.

From where we sit, The Engine was a mixed success. While there was much useful information and intelligent discussion, it was constantly competing with threads full of Ellis-ites posting silly pictures of themselves, such as the above, and the number of exhibitionistic young women who professed themselves surprised at the level of interest in naked pictures of themselves quickly became cloying, then annoying.

Frankly, while we admire Warren for his imagination and writing skills, his twin obsessions — TV shows and BME Goth girls posing topless — were often twin distractions from the real business at hands — COMICS! (Plus, those girls who were talking theoretical physics in one post and posing in their underwear in the next, clearly haven’t learned the fundamental law of human nature that when a woman is in her underwear, a man isn’t going to actually hear a word she has to say.)

Anyway, message boards themselves are not what they used to be. #1, everyone is terrified to say anything interesting for fear that someone like the Beat will post it for all the internets to see. #2, everyone has their own message board and blog and MySpace and Facebook and Twitter to see to, now and no one has time to participate in someone else’s game. We really miss the “village square” message boards of old, but Panel and Pixel seems a bit friendlier than the heavily enforced* Engine, so who knows if it will go anywhere.

But there were good times. The art threads were always awesome. Tom vs Dirk was entertaining. Some noobs learned a lot and will go on to the next stage for sure. If nothing else, Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen learned how to be genuine “interwub personalities.” And there were pictures of cats, lots and lots of cats. And that is good.

* Despite this, our motto remains, the more moderation the better the board.

** Photo ©2007 Vanessa Yaremchuk

Superheroes WORKED OUT to stay fit! Stan Kleefeldposts excerpts from the 80s Marvel Strength & Fitness Book:

[Via Val]

Prolix Steve Bissette has a very very long review of STARDUST and observations on the role of illustrators in film and great links and why Charles Vess getting his name on the movie is a good thing and tons of obscure history, like this:

In fact, the exile of mere “illustrators” to this limbo of no screen credit is sadly emblematic of the ‘creator rights’ era of comics publishing, save for those key works that were wholly creator-owned and comics-creator originated (e.g., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, Fish Police, The Tick, etc.). Things are better than they were pre-1980, but the illusion that the creator rights battles have been fought and won is a pervasive and destructive one. When, in 1986, cartoonist Bill Wray adapted to comics the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson (aka Radell “Ray” Faraday Nelson), published twenty years earlier in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for the short-lived Eclipse Comics anthology Alien Encounters under the title “Nada,” he arguably created something new: a collaborative work with new, unique elements. It was Bill Wray’s adaptation, not the original F & SF pulp publication of the story, that brought Nelson’s story to the attention of filmmaker John Carpenter, who loved it. Carpenter contacted both the writer’s agent and Eclipse Comics to buy the rights to both and adapt them himself (scripting under the screen pseudoname “Frank Armitage”) into the film They Live (1988).

Daily Cross Hatch sits down with Paul Gravett and special guest Nick Bertozzi:

A lot of people have asked me this question, so I’m sure you get it fairly often, yourself: have you ever had any ambition to create your own comics?

No, I haven’t. the world of comics isn’t just writing and drawing—there’s another side to it. Bringing people together is important, and also just being able to read people’s stuff in its gestating stages, and tell them what could be improved—I’m not actually a hands-on editor, as I was with Peter Stanbury on Escape. The fact is, I’m still in touch with a lot of people who show me things and ask for feedback. I like to help in that way. It’s also things like running a festival, and putting people together who haven’t met before, internationally. People don’t realize how much they have in common with someone, over from France, with, say, someone like Nick from America. That sort of thing can spark off so much.

Photo ©2007 Alan Light

Everyone always complains about how big Comic-Con has gotten. Now thanks to a recently unearthed series of photos by former CBG publishers Alan Light we can relive the 1982 San Diego Comic Con. Light gives permission on Flickr to show the photos — we’ve picked a handful just to give you a taste, but you MUST go to the website to see them all and bigger! IT IS A MUST!

Above: yes this is really what it looked like walking in. (We first went to San Diego only two years later and it hadn’t changed very much.)

Photo ©2007 Alan Light
A classic “Women in Comics” panel of yore. We can spot Carol Kalish, Trina Robbins, Cat Yronwode and Carol Lay.

Photo ©2007 Alan Light

While there weren’t that many “pros” in these photos, what there was was cherce and you could see them eating banquet food if you were lucky. Above, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby and Roz Kirby at what must almost surely have been the old Inkpot ceremony.

Link via Mark Evanier, who has this to say:

Boy, are some of you going to love this. Alan Light was the founder of what is now the Comics Buyer’s Guide and he used to be all over every comic book convention with his camera. He recently came across a huge stash of photos that he took at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con, back in the days before it was called the Comic-Con International. I’ve helped him identify a number of people in the photos and there are still more whose names escape us at the moment. If you can identify anyone who is presently anonymous, drop Alan a note at this address.

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Comics hero and boy’s love video star Jonathan Ross will soon be seen searching for Steve Ditko, and BBC4 is producing a 3-part documentary about the comics, from Beano to Judge Dredd, according to an article in The Guardian

BBC4 is to explore the world of British comics in a new season of programmes that includes a history of the genre and a documentary in which Jonathan Ross goes in search of his hero. The three-part Comics Britannia will look at classic comic strips from the past 70 years from the Beano to Bunty, Commando to Viz and Eagle to 2000AD.

Narrated by The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci, the series will feature those who wrote and illustrated the strips, comic experts and a range of celebrity fans who will relive their favourite moments and characters.

The Bash Street Kids, Dennis the Menace, Roy of The Rovers, the Fat Slags, Watchmen and V for Vendetta will all be brought to life.

Comics podcast Inkstuds has a mammoth three part interview with Kim Deitch.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

We haven’t listened to it yet. But you should.

Well the battle lines are very clearly divided this time. On one side are the girls and the queers. On the other are the old time fanboys. The subject? The cover to the BATGIRL showcase edition. Yes, yes, yes, we KNOW she was not and never was a butt kicking superhero. We have never read a Batgirl comic in our lives, but apparently the whole joke was that while Batman and Robin did all the work, this silly chick was standing around putting on make-up and breaking nails and making a nuisance of herself. (Note to social historians: this interpretation does not make Batman and Robin any less gay.)

I stand by my original comment: if this was not a deliberate tweak for the entitled fangirls, it was an act of Jughead-like cluelessness. Kalinara actually had to sit down for a while and wait for her heart to stop pounding:

I was furious when I saw it. I’m not ashamed to admit. I’ve calmed down a bit since. Now it just makes me a bit tired. I think it’s a bit more obviously meant as a parody than say the Heroes for Hire cover, which I also think was meant tongue-in-cheek, but… Call me a humorless bitch if you want, for me, this joke fell flat.

Against the girls are arrayed the boys. Their weapons? Historical accuracy and the classic cry “Honey, you’re getting all worked up over nothing!”

Take Manly Beau Smith:

The internet seems to be making things a “shoot first and ask questions later” kind of landscape. When I saw the published cover I totally got what DC Comics was going for. They were representing the lay of the land in pop culture at that time. If you watched the Batman TV show or even read the comics during that time then you got it too. Does this mean we should now start reinventing history and doctor real photos of the past to represent the current slant of this all too politically correct world?

Beat commenter Robby Read has an even more succinct statement.

Do you people know ANY comic history? What’s the big deal? This is NOT an invented cover! It’s a modern redo of “BATGIRL’S COSTUME CUT-UPS!” a story in this volume. It’s not sexist — or if it is, it’s a sexism reflected in the stories inside.

Well, “you people” do know a little about comics history. And we’re often amazed by how often people don’t really think about this at all. Does anyone remember this?

From a historical perspective the images are from the period where McCay became a professional cartoonist. It was my decision to approve a cover which promoted the presence of that material within the book. In hindsight, Checker Book Publishing regrets the size and prominence on our cover of an image with potential to inflame racial sensitivity, and also the exclusion of other images from McCay’s work which may have served to dilute and lend context to his stereotypical depiction of Africans. Subsequent volumes of Winsor McCay: Early Works, of which twelve volumes are planned, will not contain such images on their covers, nor will a second printing of this volume in the event that one should become necessary.

That said, we never considered leaving the Jungle Imps material out of the book, nor will we hesitate to publish other McCay work containing stereotypical imagery (which it often does) in future volumes. We equate dilemma for those putting out a Gone with the Wind DVD…do you remove the Oscar winning performances from the film…due to their negative depictions, or do you assume that every reasonable person understands that this was pre-1960’s. It was the times. Fast forward to 2003- much more racially offensive material is easily found by just turning on MTV. The mistake was not made with the same malice and forethought of say; a Jack Chick comic. Future volumes will pay special attention to avoid being racially insensitive while maintaining the artistic integrity of the original work.

The Batgirl cover is a win-win for the entitled fanboy: they get to say “Yes, yes, we all know it was sexist! That was then and this is now!” while dismissing any objections with “What are you getting so worked up about, honey?” Personally, I don’t think it was any more than DC’s concern that the cover HAD TO BE a depiction of the splash page — it’s likely no one ever stepped back and said “You know we are trying to launch a line of comics to get more girls reading comics, maybe we should put a less offensive cover on this historically accurate reprint book.”

No one is asking for Batgirl to be retconned into the kind of grim and gritty avenger — with giant boobs and torn costumes — that she is in the No-Fun era. But people who don’t see the larger pattern here of how DC presents its female characters is engaging in a little retconning of their own.

Whenever we link to Tom Brevoort’s blog, we always say we wish we had more time to read it, but Tom is such a natural storyteller, we usually wait until we have time to really enjoy it, which seems to come around only once a week or so. Anyhoo, Tom is posting a series of tales of big editing boo boos he made, and at least this one returns to some of the most well raked ground of recent comics history: the writing career of Chuck Austin, specifically what went wrong on the NEW INVADERS launch.

At around that same time, Joe Quesada had gone to a convention, where somebody had asked him why Marvel didn’t have a book like DC’s JSA, using the golden age characters. Joe thought about this on the plane ride home, and decided it might be a good idea for us to do a new INVADERS series. And he thought that Chuck’s storyline would be the perfect place to spin them out of AVENGERS for maximum launch potential.

Now, Chuck wasn’t all that interested in writing INVADERS, I don’t think–but he had a friend, Allan Jacobson, whom he’d worked with on KING OF THE HILL. And Allan was gung-ho about doing an INVADERS series. So the deal was that Chuck and Allan would co-write the series, and we made plans to spin the book out of a crossover set to begin in AVENGERS #500 (what would have been #85–we planned to return to the classic numbering at that point.) And Chuck’s new team of characters were transitioned to the New Invaders cast.

And it goes on from there. What is the statute of limitations on this stuff anyway? There are a few more recent comics where we’d REALLY like to know what went wrong!